Cense is a full-service strategic design and innovation partner for health leaders seeking to innovate, adapt, create, and sustain the best in their teams, organizations, and themselves.
Our specialty is complexity in human systems for health.
We connect strategy, service design, evaluation, and leadership support together to help leaders achieve health impact in complex conditions.
We recognize that the stakes when you work in the health sector. The demands are high, the constraints are many, and the pace is relentless. At the same time, there are also a few areas of professional and personal commitment where you can make a bigger positive difference to people’s lives. That’s probably one reason you and your leadership show up to work each day. It’s also why protecting them and looking after those people in your care matters so much.
We are here to help you find your way through complexity, tell the story of your program, measure impact, and achieve more than you thought possible, while maintaining your health as a leadership team.
Who We Are
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 consultant-pracitioner, educator, and researcher.
I trained as an organizational and community psychologist and have studied applied systems and design thinking throughout my career, giving me a grounding in human behaviour, systems change, service design, and evaluation.
At Cense, I work with a team of associates and colleagues who share a passion for protecting and serving those who lead in the health sector, enabling them to provide the care and service that ensures our communities can thrive.
We take a strategic design approach with our clients as partners. Most strategy work produces a plan. Strategic design produces an organization that can act on one and adapt when the plan meets reality. When you work with me, I ensure that you leave our project with far more skills and insight than you came in with, beyond the strategic plan, evaluation, or service.
Strategy (and Plans) Built for Complexity
Most strategic plans that fail do so because they weren’t built for the organizations and systems they were intended to work in. Our approach is different.
We design strategies around the people who use them, the complexity they navigate, and the impact that actually matters, with built-in evaluation and feedback from the start.
The result is strategic plans (and planning processes) that focus, engage, and inspire your teams while providing a pathway to implementation.
Evidence You Can Act On
Most evaluations produce reports. Few produce change. What makes our approach different is that we design evidence for the people who use it.
Our Design-Driven Evaluation approach is unique and grounded in the science of systems and complexity, world-class evidence generation, with strategic design.
This approach embeds the use case for evidence in our evaluations, which are tailored to the contexts in which our clients work. This goes far beyond accountability to helping you innovate, learn, and adapt more quickly, wisely, and effectively.
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 the plans and knowledge generation. Health by design is about making that happen — turning insights, intentions, and plans into services, programs, and systems that 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 work under real conditions, and are sustainable over time.
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.