Research
For more than 25 years we have run our own studies and taken on commissioned research for companies and universities — worldwide. Not to decorate a decision that was already made, but to earn it.
Why we do it
To build our own methods
Nobody pays us for this. We do it because the instruments we need rarely exist yet. Every model, format and simulation we work with was built on evidence we gathered ourselves — and is revised the moment better evidence turns up.
For companies and universities
Market and brand questions, organisational and cultural questions, strategy and scenario questions — designed as a proper study, with a method that holds up to scrutiny and a result you can act on the same quarter.
Both, worldwide. From Düsseldorf and Paris across markets in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas — in the field, in the archive, and in the room where the decision gets made.
How we work
We take a question apart, choose the instrument that can actually answer it, and go into the field ourselves. Then we stay with the data until it says something you can act on.
End to end
Sharpen the question, choose the method, and decide in advance what would count as an answer — and what would refute it.
Recruit, interview, survey, observe, dig. We run the fieldwork ourselves rather than outsourcing the part that decides the quality.
Code, model and cross-check. Statistics where numbers help, close reading where they don't.
Separate signal from noise, name what holds and what doesn't — and say what it means for the decision at hand.
Report, visualise, present. And where it helps, build the finding into a workshop or simulation so it gets used, not filed.
Instruments we use
Questionnaire design, sampling, fielding and statistics — from a quick pulse check to a representative study.
In depth and one to one: executives, employees, customers, experts. Semi-structured, recorded, systematically coded.
Focus groups, workshops and moderated sessions — where a group shows what no one would say alone.
Watching work as it is actually done, not as it is described in a process diagram.
Literature, studies, market and competitor data — searched systematically, sourced properly, weighed critically.
Company archives, records and historical sources: reading an organisation's own past first-hand.
Internal data, texts and documents, analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Testing a mechanism under controlled conditions — or playing a decision through before it is taken.
What we research
How do organisations decide, change and move — and what makes them do it well? Every study we run is a version of that question, asked at a different depth.
Decision-grade evidence about your market, your brand and your people. Fast enough to use, rigorous enough to defend.
Market structure, demand, segments and the shifts moving underneath them — quantitative and qualitative, primary and desk.
What people actually believe about a brand, how stable that belief is under pressure, and what would make them believe more.
Motivation, commitment and friction inside the organisation: why people stay, why they leave, and why they hold back.
How the informal culture of an organisation forms, holds and changes — the unwritten rules that outrank the written ones.
Where identity, message and lived reality drift apart, how much that drift costs, and what closes the gap.
Whether an offering rings true to the people it is meant for — before the launch budget is committed.
The slow layer. Where our concepts come from, why they hold, and where they stop being valid.
What counts as evidence, how paradigms shift (Kuhn, Lakatos), how claims are falsified (Popper) — and how not to fool ourselves.
Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics: the ground under every model we build, and the limits we accept.
Reading an organisation's own history as data — with Dr. Matthias Georgi and Neumann & Kamp, and in our own archives-and-interviews work.
The structures, roles and rules that quietly govern behaviour — with Patrick Mathieu Singularité, and in our own field studies.
How decisions, change and transformation actually get translated into motivation and action — the step where most programmes fail.
Organisations as self-referential social systems (Luhmann, Parsons): what they can observe about themselves, and what they structurally cannot.
How people actually move — as individuals, in groups, and under the conditions a design puts them in.
Intrinsic and extrinsic drivers: autonomy, mastery, purpose and relatedness above status, access, power and stuff.
Behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, connectivism — which model explains which kind of capability, and when transfer really happens.
Roles, status, coalitions and norms: what a group does to the people in it, and what it makes them capable of.
Mechanics–dynamics–aesthetics, flow and balancing, gameful versus playful design — and honest measurement of whether it worked.
Wanting versus liking in the dopaminergic system, synaptic plasticity, prefrontal control: the biological floor under motivation.
Making complexity playable, so that a decision can be rehearsed and its consequences felt before it is taken for real.
The outside world, made legible enough to decide against — and to keep deciding against as it changes.
Regulation, capital, labour and markets — the forces that set the room you actually have to manoeuvre in.
Blocs, supply chains, security and sovereignty treated as business variables, not as background noise.
Building a small number of rigorous, genuinely different futures — then testing your strategy inside each one.
Weak signals, drivers and wildcards: separating noise from the shifts that will still matter in five years.
How rational actors move when they know the others are moving too — and where the equilibrium leaves value on the table.
How it all fits together
Human behaviour in organisations is biological, psychological, cultural and social at the same time. No single discipline explains it. So we work in strata — from the visible surface of what people do, down to the assumptions that make knowledge about it possible at all. Each layer is a real research tradition; together they are a map for interdisciplinary work.
Deliberately incomplete — it keeps growing.
Surface — what people do
The demanding end of motivation: agency, mastery, purpose and relatedness; flow, the knowledge gap, curiosity and the drive to complete a set. Learning here is cognitivist, constructivist, connectivist — behaviour of rising emotional and cognitive complexity.
Motivation Psychology · Learning Theory · Flow Research · Curiosity ResearchThe simple end, and it never stops working: status, access, power and stuff; points, badges and leaderboards. Instrumental and operant conditioning — repeat the pleasant, avoid the unpleasant.
Behaviourism · Reinforcement Learning · Incentive DesignWhere insight becomes an intervention. Design research and design thinking, game design, gamification: mechanics–dynamics–aesthetics, player experience and balancing, narrative world-building — and evaluation of engagement, transfer and behaviour change.
Design Science · Game Design · Gamification · Dramaturgy & NarratologyThe hardware. Dopaminergic reward and the difference between wanting and liking; the limbic system in emotion and memory; synaptic plasticity and neurogenesis; prefrontal control, executive function and attention — bottom-up and top-down.
Neurobiology · Cognitive Psychology · Motivation PsychologyOrganisations as social systems. Sociology and systems theory, organisational sociology, political theory, the sociology of violence and the military, class and status. Competitive strategy, resource- and capability-based views, foresight. Media and communication theory.
Sociology · Systems Theory · Political Theory · Strategy & Game Theory · Communication ScienceSigns, structures and stories. Saussure, Peirce and Eco on the sign; Lévi-Strauss on mythemes and binary oppositions; Barthes on the myths of everyday life; Propp on narrative function; comparative mythology and trifunctionality; ritual, gift and sacrality.
Semiotics · Structuralism · Narratology · Comparative Mythology · AnthropologyBedrock. Paradigms and research programmes, critical rationalism and falsification, the social construction of knowledge; ontological categories, epistemic scepticism, the intentionality of consciousness, and applied ethics — including the ethics of our own interventions.
Philosophy of Science · Ontology · Epistemology · Phenomenology · EthicsBedrock — what makes knowing possible
Motivation, learning, design, organisation and culture can only be understood together. That is why the map is this wide — and why we keep redrawing it.
Never alone
Some questions need a discipline we do not own. For those we work with people who have spent their careers inside it — and we build the study, the fieldwork and the conclusions together.
Research Partner
Professor at ESSCA School of Management, Paris
Academic rigour in marketing and brand research: study design, measurement and analysis that would survive peer review — applied to a live business question.
Business History & Economic Research
Managing Director, Neumann & Kamp Historische Projekte
Historical research on companies and industries: the decisions, ruptures and founding myths that still shape how an organisation behaves today.
Research, Capability & Delivery Partner
Managing Director, Patrick Mathieu Singularité
Sociological organisation research: reading the structure and the singularity of an organisation — what makes it itself, and what it can therefore never fake.
Alongside universities, institutes and the clients who commission us directly. And alongside our own standing programme: reading the history of organisations, reading their structures, and turning both into something usable.
Open questions
Research is only interesting where it isn't finished. These are live questions in our own programme — unfunded, unhurried, and taken seriously.
What makes trust inside an organisation survive a bad year?
Which parts of a culture can be designed — and which can only be cultivated?
How much of an organisation's future is already written in its history?
When does gamification build real capability, and when does it only buy attention?
What does a strategy need in order to stay valid across several plausible futures?
How do you measure originality — the part of an organisation that cannot be copied?
If one of these is your question too, it is probably worth a conversation — whether or not it ever becomes a mandate.
