Successful innovation demands that we understand people and their cultures in new ways. This means going to where they live, observing their behaviors and asking questions that reveal their needs, motivations and aspirations. 

Asking the right questions, the ones that lead to insight, is always challenging. We refer to this process of discovery as “seeing the water.”

Our Approach

Cultural Quotient
We start by asking the right questions. 

Isolated facts and consumer self-reporting rarely leads to innovation. The foundation of what we do is true in-depth ethnographic fieldwork: concrete contextual observations, conversations and interactions with real people. Good ethnographic research provides the opportunity to understand how products or services are used, and how, in the context of use, benefits are derived. We seek to understand why people act as they do, and how they make sense of what they do for themselves and for others. We elicit and listen for stories, particularly stories that involve contradictions or workarounds, successes, failures and both spoken and unspoken norms (especially those norms that must be met to ensure the success of an innovation). To elicit these stories, we search for the right questions, and strive to understand why.

Research Quotient
We develop cohesive internal programs that define latent problems and clearly point to the solutions landscape.

Our synthesis process straddles the line between the concrete and abstract. We find clarity among the complex, discover unmet needs and frame problems in generative ways. We do all this in collaboration with our clients, in workshops and creative sessions where, together, we lay the foundation for innovation.

Design Quotient
We craft honest stories that turn customers into heroes and transform organizations.


We help our clients reframe their internal blueprints into products, experiences and messages that celebrate and inspire users' perspectives, motives and lives. These stories are not only inspirational to users, they are also significant for their role in infusing human-centered design as an embedded practice within organizations, often guiding the redesign of the company's internal process and culture.