Our Approach
We specialize in strategic design for health-serving, networked organizations. Whether you’re a public health unit, a research or primary care network, or an organization who’s success is as reliant on its partners as it is its own talent, Cense is here to work with you to succeed.
We work with our clients to craft an interactive process that connects values, vision, existing infrastructure, their history and resources to a compelling strategic plan and engagement process that is complete with guidance on how to implement and evaluate it.
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 you in practice — designed for networked organizations.
Our methodology integrates strategic design, systems thinking, foresight, and evaluation to help organizations navigate uncertainty and drive meaningful change.
This is strategy making 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 project teams are fit for purpose: bringing the right skills to help build the systems you need.
Strategic Design for Living Systems
Strategy in living systems means paying attention to the work and the way we work.
We work iteratively with our clients and their teams or members to create purpose-built strategies and plans for your networked organization. This is strategic design for use and impact, blending research, facilitation, and advisory to 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. We also build in evaluation to every plan.
What Makes Us Different
We come from the health sector and have experience leading networked and member-based professional organizations. We understand the unique challenges and conditions that shape what you do.
And because we’re designers as well as strategists, we don’t stop at recommendations. Our design-driven process builds understanding and alignment engages your network to create lasting value beyond the strategic plan to help it succeed.
Most plans view evaluation as something as separate, that happens afterward, or ignore it altogether. 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. See our cases for more examples. 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.
