Our Approach
We specialize in strategic design for complex health contexts, putting people at the centre.
This means working with our clients to shape a vision that moves people, a plan that provides focus, and an implementation strategy that works for the real world, not just a planning document or mission statement.
This is designed to account for complexity and human behaviour, and we connect the two to create a strategy that has a positive impact on your organization and those in your care.
The gap between the document and the doing is where most plans fail — not because of bad intentions, but because the process wasn’t designed for the complexity of the environment the plan has to live in.
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
Cense is led and founded by Cameron Norman, who works with a team of associates with backgrounds in nursing, public health, graphic and service design, non-profit leadership, evaluation, and policy innovation. Our team of experts and technical specialists work with Dr. Norman to support each project. Our project teams are fit for purpose: bringing the right skills to help build the systems you need.
Strategic Design for Living Systems
A strategy is only as good as the organization that has to carry it. That means the process of building it matters as much as the plan itself.
We work iteratively and alongside your team—not handing down a framework, but building one with the people who will use it. This is strategic design for use and impact, blending research, facilitation, and advisory to surface patterns, assess strengths and barriers, and connect the best of what you have to the challenges you face.
We design strategies that are complexity-aware — built to adapt as conditions change rather than become obsolete the moment something unexpected happens. And we connect strategy to evidence from the start, so that learning and measurement aren’t added on as accountability mechanisms, but are built in as tools for decision-making.
What Makes Us Different
Most strategy consultants come from business or organizational development. We come from health, so we understand the sector’s constraints, culture, and complexity from the inside, not just by analogy.
And because we’re designers as well as strategists, we don’t stop at recommendations. Our design-driven process builds understanding and alignment that outlasts the engagement — so that when we’re gone, your team isn’t starting from scratch.
Most plans also treat evaluation as something that happens after. We treat it as something that shapes the strategy from the beginning — so you know what you’re building toward and how you’ll know when you’re getting there. We build the evidence into the design, by design.
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 allow us to share ours with them. To illustrate one example:
Over 80,000 Canadians live with spinal cord injury (SCI), cared for by a dispersed community of researchers, clinicians, advocates, and community organizations operating largely within provincial silos. Despite world-class expertise, Canada had no shared national strategy — and a 20-year history of consultations that produced recommendations without sustained action. Praxis Spinal Cord Institute needed more than another report. They needed a process that could build genuine alignment across a sometimes-disjointed, diverse field, motivating people to work together toward a common vision. They just needed a means to do it.
Cense led a national consultation and strategic design process that engaged stakeholders across regions, sectors, and roles — from frontline clinicians to researchers to people with lived experience of SCI. The result was a foundational strategic framework and a communications and engagement strategy designed to move from document to action. For the first time, Canada’s SCI community had a coherent, shared vision, a common set of goals, and a roadmap to bring the whole system together. The result was the Being Bold initiative and framework, which included learning circles with key experts across research, policy, practice, and advocates and leaders with lived experience. Cense worked with Praxis to develop this process from start to finish, creating a design that could be presented to the community and implemented over the coming years.
If this is the kind of strategy work your organization needs, let’s talk.
