TURN LEADING-EDGE THINKING INTO YOUR NEXT MOVE
Bring an AI or transformation challenge. See what matters—and what could move it forward.
Bring something you are personally working through, a challenge affecting your team or organisation, or an ambition that is proving difficult to turn into progress.
Sense Makers draws on the patterns and frames identified by recognised thought leaders, rigorous evidence from respected research institutions and business schools, and current field insight from experienced practitioners learning what works inside real organisations.
We curate and attribute these contributions, map them to the challenges and ambitions they can help address, and bring forward what appears to fit your situation—so you leave with a working diagnosis, the evidence behind it and a practical route forward.
In about five minutes:
No preparation required · Take it forward yourself or explore human help if useful
Sense Makers diagnosticSensei
Hi, I’m Sensei, your guide through the Sense Makers diagnostic. Start with what is happening. I’ll ask focused questions, bring relevant evidence and experience into the conversation, and help you identify a practical way forward.
Please do not share confidential, personal or commercially sensitive information you are not authorised to disclose. See how Sense Makers handles your data.
CLARITY ON WHAT MATTERS · CURRENT INSIGHT FROM TRUSTED SOURCES · APPROACHES WORKING IN PRACTICE · REAL PEOPLE WHO CAN HELP YOU ACT
Not sure what to bring? Start with what feels stuck.
You don't need to know the underlying cause. Tell Sense Makers what you are seeing, what is proving difficult or where progress appears to have stalled.
For example:
- People aren't adopting the AI tools we have introduced.
- We have plenty of pilots, but nothing is scaling.
- Our leadership team cannot agree on the direction.
- A senior stakeholder keeps blocking progress.
- Politics or unclear ownership is slowing everything down.
- We are investing in AI but cannot demonstrate meaningful value.
- We know AI matters, but we don't know where to focus.
- There are too many tools, opinions and possible approaches.
Choose an example or describe the situation in your own words.
What you'll take away
In about five minutes, Sense Makers turns the context you provide into a practical piece of work you can understand, use and share.
A challenge you can explain clearly
Bring something you are personally working through, an organisational challenge or an ambition that is proving difficult to turn into progress.
Sensei helps you clarify what you are trying to achieve, what is happening now and where progress appears to be breaking down. You leave with a concise articulation that you can use with colleagues, leadership teams or other stakeholders.
A working diagnosis of what may be underneath it
Sense Makers does not simply restate the presenting problem. It tests plausible root causes and competing explanations against the context you provide.
This helps distinguish symptoms from underlying causes and brings overlooked assumptions, dependencies or points of friction into view before you commit to a solution.
Evidence and experience selected for your situation
The working diagnosis is mapped to relevant research, established methods, emerging patterns and the current experience of practitioners addressing similar challenges inside real organisations.
Each contribution should be clearly attributed and accompanied by an explanation of why it may matter in this particular situation. The benefit is not more information. It is credible knowledge brought to bear at the point of need.
A practical route from insight to action
Receive questions to test, conversations to have, options to consider and a practical next step.
Depending on what the diagnostic uncovers, you may be able to act independently, use an appropriate method or structured workshop, or involve an experienced practitioner when facilitation, challenge or specialist delivery would help.
You leave with a written, evidence-backed summary that brings together the challenge, the working diagnosis, the knowledge that applies and the options for moving forward. It is yours to keep, use in a leadership conversation or share with a colleague.
A summary you can take into the room
Sense Makers turns the conversation into a structured summary designed to travel beyond the person who completed it. It gives colleagues a clear account of the challenge, the reasoning behind the working diagnosis and the options worth considering next.
The situation and what you are trying to achieve
A concise articulation of the challenge
The working diagnosis
Plausible underlying causes
Relevant evidence and practitioner experience
Important assumptions and questions to test
Practical options and recommended next step
Relevant methods or human support, where useful
What you can do with it
- 1Explain the challenge clearly to colleagues
- 2Brief people before a meeting or workshop
- 3Structure a leadership conversation
- 4Show the evidence behind the working diagnosis
- 5Test assumptions before committing resources
- 6Build agreement around what should happen next
The summary gives other people something concrete to respond to, rather than asking them to reconstruct the original conversation.
HOW SENSE MAKERS WORKS
Situation → Context → Judgement → Action
Sense Makers compares the context you provide with a mapped body of recurring AI and transformation challenges, plausible root causes and approaches that have worked in practice. It then brings forward carefully curated evidence, established methods and the latest thinking from credible researchers, pioneers and practitioners to judge what appears to fit your situation and why. The result is a working diagnosis and a practical route forward.
Situation
Bring what you are working through
What is happening and what you are trying to achieve
Context
Build the fuller picture
Sensei clarifies the goals, constraints, stakeholders and points of friction
Judgement
Test what fits
Sense Makers tests plausible explanations and matches the evidence and experience most relevant to the situation
Action
Find a route forward
Receive a working diagnosis, relevant evidence, a practical next step and a written summary
What Sense Makers draws on
Mapped challenge patterns · Plausible root causes · Research and evidence · Emerging patterns · Methods and frameworks · Practitioner experience
Choose how to move forward
Situation
Bring what you are working through
What is happening and what you are trying to achieve
Context
Build the fuller picture
Sensei clarifies the goals, constraints, stakeholders and points of friction
Judgement
Test what fits
Sense Makers tests plausible explanations and matches the evidence and experience most relevant to the situation
What Sense Makers draws on
Mapped challenge patterns · Plausible root causes · Research and evidence · Emerging patterns · Methods and frameworks · Practitioner experience
Action
Find a route forward
Receive a working diagnosis, relevant evidence, a practical next step and a written summary
Choose how to move forward
THE INTELLIGENCE BEHIND SENSE MAKERS
The best of human intelligence, organised by AI and applied to your situation.
Much of the relevant knowledge already exists across research, established methods and practitioner experience. But it is scattered, expressed in different language and rarely organised around the situation confronting you now. Access alone does not establish which explanation fits, which evidence deserves trust or how an approach should be adapted to a particular organisation.
Sense Makers uses AI to organise, retrieve and match that knowledge to your situation. It then brings together three forms of human intelligence: insight from people closest to change, the tacit knowledge held inside your organisation, and the experience required to turn both into action.
Human insight at the edge
Recognised thought leaders, researchers and experienced practitioners are identifying emerging patterns, testing what works and explaining what change means. Sense Makers curates and attributes their contributions, then brings what appears most relevant into your situation.
Human knowledge inside your organisation
Your people understand how work really happens, where value is created and what customers need. Much of this knowledge is tacit. The diagnostic starts with the context you provide; further work can bring the relevant people together to surface what else matters.
Human capability to make it work
Experienced practitioners bring the judgement, methods, communication and facilitation skills needed to connect external insight with internal knowledge. They help your people challenge assumptions, build trust, make decisions and translate informed judgement into action.
Sense Makers brings together the people making sense of what is changing, the people who understand your organisation and the people skilled in helping them do their best thinking together.
The diagnostic and evidence-backed brief are yours to use. Experienced human support is available to help your organisation take the work forward.
FROM INSIGHT TO EXECUTION
Close the knowing-doing gap and turn insight into business impact.
Knowing what should change is not the same as making change happen. Progress often depends on people challenging assumptions, aligning around a shared view, making difficult decisions, redesigning how work gets done and taking ownership of what happens next.
Where progress often gets stuck
These challenges are rarely resolved by giving one person more information. They often require the right people to develop a shared understanding and work through the decisions together.
AI adoption is stalling
The tools are available, but people are not adopting them consistently or confidently.
AI pilots are not becoming business value
Experimentation is growing, but there is no shared discipline for deciding what to scale, reshape or stop.
Leadership is not aligned on the choices
Ambition exists, but priorities, trade-offs, ownership and what winning looks like remain unresolved.
AI is being added to broken workflows
New technology is being placed inside old ways of working without redesigning how the work should operate.
Politics, silos or unclear ownership are blocking progress
Different parts of the organisation hold different pieces of the problem, but nobody can turn them into a shared decision.
The business model needs reinvention
Technology and market change are shifting where value is created, but the organisation has not agreed how to respond.
When the challenge needs people in the room
Where the diagnosis shows that progress depends on people working through the issue together, Sense Makers can identify an appropriate process and an experienced practitioner to guide it.
These are experienced practitioners with the communication and facilitation skills to help your own people dig deeper and do their best thinking together. They guide a structured process that brings the right people together, challenges established thinking, facilitates difficult decisions and turns informed judgement into action.
From judgement to action
Apply the right method
Use a structured approach suited to the challenge and the outcome required.
Work through it together
Bring the relevant people together to challenge assumptions, align and make decisions.
Change what happens in practice
Turn decisions into new priorities, behaviours, workflows, experiments and measurable progress.
Bring the challenge you're working on.
In about five minutes, draw on leading-edge thinking and practical experience, understand what may be holding progress back and leave with an evidence-backed route forward.
About five minutes · Written summary included · Any further support is optional