About

Identifying and creatively resolving public policy and organizational challenges using data analysis, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics to help us understand why the data are behaving the way they are, and the lessons of long hard experience.

Seeing Systems

We’re about helping people and organizations develop deeper and broader understandings of what’s going on and why – and thus better cope with today’s challenges. We do this by transforming data into information and into working knowledge and by creating system maps and problem, organizational, and process simulators to generate insights cheaply and safely.

Seeing System Signals

We assist clients to identify, gather and transform data into useful information and working knowledge, especially in governmental policy and operations and healthcare. Our best moments arrive with the development of insights.

As our name implies, our working assumption is that governmental data and information should be immediately available to the public, that is, posted to the web and preferably in machine-readable form. But we also help clients determine data and information priorities.

Aiding clients usually includes analysis of existing data, both internal and external. And, it often includes developing “pre-analytic” tools to make it easier, faster, and more efficient for clients to do their own.

We’re especially imaginative at mixing data from different sources to provide different perspectives.

Seeing System Structures – and How Those Structures Cause System Behaviors

All too often we know something’s going on, but we don’t have an in-depth sense of why? And our ability to test our assumptions or to project system behaviors into the future in a low cost, low risk manner is limited. We aid clients to create working simulations of their problems. We’ve found that useful in identifying which data should be gathered but are not and for thinking about the implications of different interventions.