Philosophy

Our philosophy is distilled from decades of practical experience working on products, services, and complex societal challenges with organizations across industries, sectors, and nations around the world.

We believe in an outside-in approach to innovation. This means centering the process around the people you want to serve and those who serve them. It extends beyond user or human-centered design to involve and integrate all stakeholders. We call this Community-Led Innovation. 

We believe Community-Led innovation gets to viable, culturally aligned solutions more efficiently than linear non-integrated approaches. This requires a deep understanding of the drivers of human behavior to skillfully navigate diverse mindsets, beliefs, motivations, and capabilities within the community through problem definition and solution development.

We believe it’s essential to frame a challenge from the holistic community perspective before trying to solve it. Without grounding in the community perspective, organizations jump to solutions, increase churn, and have poor outcomes.

We believe the act of changing or defining new products, services, and experiences fundamentally differs from the act of changing or defining new organizations, systems, and industries. The research inputs need to be different. The role of human-centered design needs to be different. The outputs & deliverables need to be different.

We believe changing what you currently do is the greatest challenge you will face. It requires cross-functional and cross-silo alignment that emerges from demonstration and evidence. Operational prototyping is as important as solution prototyping to drive change within organizations and ecosystems.

We believe challenges are best solved Upstream of where they manifest. This means zooming out to see the broader context and dynamics that result in the symptoms we observe or want to observe. Distilling the bigger picture into tangible levers that can be adjusted to achieve desired outcomes is why we exist.

We love talking philosophy and would be happy to go further down the rabbit hole with you! Just reach out to us.