We could tell you we’re different. We’d rather show you.
Five stories from the intersection of strategy, technology and people. Details anonymised where they must be; methods shown because that’s the point.
7 years
→ 3 months.
A nation’s character, mapped.
“We condensed seven years of research into three months, to help a client understand the character of their nation.”
A client needed to understand what an entire population values — how a nation thinks of itself. The academic route would have taken most of a decade. We didn’t have a decade.
So we built a novel psychometric framework from scratch, combining statistics, machine learning, computer science, analytics and psychology. Digital data gathering and automated linguistic analysis were used in personality mapping in ways that hadn’t been done before — turning years of fieldwork into months of engineering, without sacrificing the science.
Why it’s the centre of our Venn: a strategic question, answered with new technology, about the deepest human subject there is.
40,000 voices,
50 countries.
The world’s cultures, on one map.
“We asked almost 40,000 people, across 50 countries and 21 languages, what their culture looks like from the inside.”
Culture is usually described from the outside — in stereotypes, by strangers. Our client needed the opposite: a single, rigorous picture of culture worldwide, seen through the eyes of the people actually living it.
So we built a global culture index — a statistically robust framework spanning 50 countries, shaped with academic researchers and independently validated, delivered as a living, interactive instrument rather than a report. Then we went a layer deeper and measured how well countries actually understand one another: the bridges people never knew they shared, and the misperceptions quietly keeping them apart. Nobody had mapped the world this way before.
Why it matters: misunderstanding between cultures is expensive. Measuring it is the first step towards closing it.
An economy,
on radar.
Brexit’s impact, tracked in real time.
“We worked with local government to measure Brexit’s county-wide impact — in real time.”
While the country argued about what Brexit would mean, a local government organisation needed to know what it actually meant — for their county, as it happened.
Using operational research and decision science, we translated stakeholder concerns into measurable indicators and built an interactive tracking tool around them. When an indicator moved against the county, the tool raised the alarm in real time — evidence-based insight in a debate drowning in political noise.
Why it matters: decisions this contested deserve instruments, not anecdotes.
Hotspots,
seen early.
Seeing COVID-19 coming.
“We helped the NHS develop a COVID-19 Early Warning System — by bringing together existing, visible datasets.”
In the middle of a pandemic, the scarcest resource isn’t data. It’s time. The NHS needed to know where the virus was heading next — from information that already existed.
We built a predictive system on infection rates across English and Welsh local authorities, benchmarking every local trend against the national picture. Emerging hotspots surfaced in real time, as simple, decision-ready insight — because nobody in a crisis has time for a complicated dashboard.
Why it matters: 90% of recorded data isn’t utilised. Used properly, it can see around corners.
The gap,
made visible.
Culture, brought into the light.
“We design innovations and deliver surveys which gather the data to enable rich insight.”
Every leadership team believes it knows its culture. Very few have measured the distance between the organisation they have and the one they want.
We design bespoke instruments — grounded in psychometrics and behavioural science — that make culture and values measurable without flattening them. The result is a map of the gap: where you are, where you want to be, and which behaviours move the needle. Then we help you close it, including open-innovation approaches that break teams out of siloed thinking.
Why it matters: culture isn’t soft. It’s just hard to measure. That’s our favourite kind of problem.
Your problem won’t look like these.
That’s rather the point.
No cookie-cutter frameworks, no recycled decks. Every project is built bespoke from your data, your constraints and your people.