SenseMaker™ engagement design

We work with SenseMaker™, a tool developed by the Cynefin Company for letting organisations see themselves through stories. After an initial scoping conversation, we design a study tailored to your situation and guide the rollout alongside your team.

Setup

• Study design. Building the instrument itself: the prompt that gets people telling a real story, and the way they tag their own story so the meaning comes from them, not from my interpretation of it.
• Access. Working out how people actually contribute (QR codes in your offices, stores, on personal phones, at a kiosk) so participation fits into the working day.
• Champions. Finding the handful of people close to the work who’ll advocate for the study and keep participation alive.

Capturing

• Week 2. The live study opens to all your stakeholders, so you can watch stories land as they come in rather than waiting on a final report.
• Week 8. A workshop with 3–10 of your people, using the captured narratives as the raw material to make sense of together.

Observation

• Month 4. A stakeholder workshop that turns the patterns in the narratives into a clear “more like this, less like this” management directive: not a prescriptive fix, but a direction of travel your team can actually act on.
• Month 5.5. A meta retrospective where we step back, look at what the study surfaced and what shifted over the six months, and decide next steps together.