Our Approach
The best laid plans…are those that lead to demonstrable impact. That impact means that you’ve aligned your aspirations with your resources and a means to demonstrate it to you and others. Imagine having a plan that activated and focused your people and engaged their talents, while achieving more than you thought possible in ways that excited others — your patients, customers, board members, and stakeholders?
Imagine having a plan that is fit for the complexity of the work we do in health and human services?
Our methodology integrates strategic design, systems thinking, foresight, and evaluation to help leaders navigate uncertainty and drive meaningful change. We do this through the lens of health, to ensure that you, your patients, and your organization are healthy and thriving.
This is strategy making, not just planning, and built for complexity.
How We Work
Strategic Design for Living Systems
We start with the recognition that people, teams, organizations, and communities are dynamic. Why design a static plan that’s obsolete by the time you implement it (if you implement it at all)?
We’ll design something that is achieveable, sustainable, and evolves with the changing situations you face, while keeping the focus on the greater goals and your ultimate impact. This is what strategic design for complexity does. It’s not the standard off-the-shelf planning; it’s designing with purpose and fit. It’s a strategy that is fit for purpose.
Cense’s strategic planning involves:
Participatory Development
- Sprint Methodology: Micro-consultations build frameworks in iterations to allow you to test and refine over time.
- Progressive Approach: We work within your team’s workflows, skill-building, focus, and products over time.
- Multi-stakeholder Engagement: Weave together perspectives from leadership, frontline workers, and partners
- Aspiration Meets Action: Develop visionary plans that excite people and connect resources to possibilities
Complexity-Informed Lens
- Adaptive Planning: Provide the means to adapt, learn, and act wisely in the face of disruption and change.
- Systems Orientation: Design for systems, interconnections, relationships, and complexity.
- Resilience Building: Strengthening capacity to navigate uncertainty and thrive within changing conditions.
Evaluation Throughout
- Learning Systems: Establish feedback mechanisms and systems that enable continuous adaptation and growth.
- Measurable Success: Connect actions to outcomes using data to show progress, impact, and innovation.
- Evidence Generation: Use data wisely to make timely decisions and track progress.
What Makes Us Different
Dual Focus: We create plans that are both aspirational and immediately actionable.
“Telling the Story While Writing It”: Our design process itself builds engagement and capacity that carries on throughout the life of your plan long after its development.
Implementation Pathways: We provide concrete guidance beyond recommendations so your plan is useful and implemented.
Structure + Flexibility: We create a structure that guides action while enabling leaders to adapt, pivot, and respond to changing conditions without losing core focus.
Impact in Action
Our methodology has proven effective in contexts facing significant transformation—helping public health departments transition from pandemic emergency operations to fostering strategic renewal in professional health associations — in ways that recognize the experience of our clients and allows for us to share ours with them.
Ready to create impact by design? Connect with us to explore how strategic design can transform your organization’s approach to planning, creating meaningful, sustainable change in your organization and communities.
