You lead where the stakes are real. Your success isn’t measured in reports or metrics — it’s reflected in function restored, illness healed, dignity preserved, and in people who leave your care and employ with more hope than they arrived with.
Caring isn’t the problem; the problem itself is. These problems don’t respond to simple solutions — they’re shaped by complexity, competing priorities, and systems that weren’t built for what you’re asking of them.
I work with health and human services leaders to build strategies that handle complexity and deliver impact beyond the plan and KPIs. If that’s where you are, keep reading.
I’m Cameron Norman, the founder of Cense. I’ve spent over two decades working at the intersection of health, design, and complexity — as a researcher, practitioner, and educator drawn to the problems that confuse or stall most organizations.
I trained as an organizational and community psychologist, which gives me a grounding in human behaviour, systems change, measurement, and evaluation. I’m also a professional designer — which means I don’t just diagnose problems, I build things to solve them. That blend has produced tools like the Design-Driven Evaluation model and the eHealth Literacy Scale, an instrument now used worldwide and translated into over 40 languages. It’s enabled me to help public health, clinical leaders, foundations, and health service organizations to innovate, learn, create and demonstrate health impact for more than 25 years.
Most strategy work produces a plan. Strategic design produces an organization that can act on one and adapt when the plan meets reality, which, in health and human services, it has to. It draws on relationships with people, acknowledges (and designs for) complexity, and uses evidence beyond what the standard metrics were built to capture.
Strategy Built for Complexity
Most strategic plans don’t fail because of bad ideas — they fail because they weren’t built for the organizations and systems that have to carry them. Our approach is different: we design strategies around the people who use them, the complexity they’re navigating, and the impact that actually matters. The result is a plan you can act on — and adapt as things change.
Evidence You Can Act On
Most evaluations produce reports. Few produce change. The difference is whether the evidence was designed for the people who need to use it — and whether the systems around it support learning rather than just compliance.
We design evaluations, measurement frameworks, and learning systems that help your organization understand what’s working, why, and what to do next. Our Credentialed Evaluation services connect evidence to design.
Where Strategy Becomes Service
Strategy and evidence only matter when someone can act on them. Health by design is about making that happen — turning insights, intentions, and plans into services, programs, and systems that actually work for the people who use them and the teams who deliver them.
We bring service design to health and human services: designing with the people at the centre, building things that hold together under real conditions.
How We Help Our Clients
Explore Our Services
Explore our services to learn how we can support your work, and subscribe to our learning resources to stay inspired. Visit our blog and Censemaking for insights on strategic design for innovation and impact.
Our office is located on the ancestral and traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. We pay our respects to the Elders, past and present, and to future generations who continue to care for this land. We’re committed to supporting Truth and Reconciliation through our actions, advocacy, listening, and understanding.