EXAMPLE 002 / CASE STUDY
From surveying sentiment to sensing experience.
Instead of asking how to make a periodic survey better, we asked whether periodic measurement was the right model at all.
The Mess
What looked like the problem.
Organizations want to know how employees are doing, so the default answer is often another survey: ask a set of questions, wait for responses, aggregate the data, then interpret what happened.
The Reframe
What if employee experience wasn't something we periodically measured, but something we could continuously sense?
The Work
Make the new frame tangible.
The question moved the work beyond survey mechanics and toward a broader experience-sensing model: looking for signals closer to when experience happens, considering multiple sources of evidence, and treating insight as something that could support earlier learning rather than retrospective reporting alone.
What Changed
A different conversation became possible.
The conversation changed from “How do we improve the survey?” to “How might we understand experience as it unfolds?” That opened a much larger design space for employee listening.
The Bigger Learning
A familiar tool can quietly define the problem for us. Reframing often begins by separating the outcome we need from the mechanism we've become accustomed to using.