Who We Are
ReD is a highly specialised strategy consulting company. Our work uses deep insights to make actionable recommendations for our clients. We call our approach Sensemaking. This unique approach marries methods from the social sciences and rigorous synthesis with traditional business techniques.
The anthropologists, sociologists, economists, journalists, and designers who make up ReD employ the methods of social science to study human behaviour and help our clients develop a new perspective on their business.
An international staff with a diversity of perspectives enables us to ask the most culturally relevant questions and to explore the world in open-ended ways.
Making better bets on human behaviour
ReD has led a quiet revolution in business thinking over the past fifteen years. In a world characterised by increasing change, traditional strategy tools are no longer as relevant as they used to be. Traditional tools are useful when tomorrow can reasonably be expected to look like yesterday; when you have an assumption or hypothesis that you can feel reasonably confident about. But when change is happening at a faster rate, conventional models often fail. ReD’s non-linear, human-science approach to strategic problem-solving has proven successful with C-suite executives in some of the world’s largest and most admired companies.
Tools from the social sciences help us understand and describe the world as it is experienced, without the commercial assumptions that often misrepresent what is real and important to people. Instead of minimising complexity, the tools we use help us to tackle and make sense of it.
Working closely with the client to create impact
Helping the client team execute on our insights and recommendations is essential to our practice. We work with our clients to ensure that our advice and strategic recommendations are anchored with practical considerations for the company’s specific needs.
We emphasize long-term problem solving over quick fixes. We commit to working with our clients on a long-term basis which is why 80 percent of our projects are repeat business and many clients have been working with us since the beginning. We enjoy working with clients who are ready to embrace bold ideas and are looking for a radically new way of thinking.
In many cases our work has led to sharp turns in strategy or dramatic internal reorganizations.
Industries
Clients come to us with business problems that are big and fundamental in nature and characterised by a high degree of uncertainty. Most of our work centers on helping our clients get an outside view of their business, answering the essential question ‘What business are we in?’
TECHNOLOGY
media
industrials
consumer goods
healthcare
financial services
social impact
Offerings
We have conducted projects in different business categories and business units. We work with:
BUSINESS DIRECTION & STRATEGY
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES
MARKETING & SALES
COMPLEXITY REDUCTION
“The two main reasons for LEGO’s significant financial recovery are the fact that we now have the right size and that we now understand children's play and know how to reconnect with kids”
former CEO Jørgen Viig Knudstorp
How we work
A HOLISTIC APPROACH
Studying consumers on their own isn’t enough. We look at all the data we can—technology, marginal practices, client and industry data—and speak to many experts with knowledge on the topic. We analyze the assumptions underlying what we observe happening and identify the gaps (e.g. between the client’s assumptions about their customers and what we observe in the real world, or between the industry’s assumptions about the future and consumers’ marginal practices). Analyzing these gaps helps us see white spaces that have impact in the market, which allows us to advise our clients on where the market is likely to be years out and ensure that our recommendations are actionable.
PHENOMENON-BASED
The philosophy behind our approach to researching and yielding insights is phenomenology, the science of how things are experienced. We start by working with our clients to identify a human phenomenon that is at the heart of their business—a task that is simple in concept but often hard to execute. For example, to develop a strategy for retirement-planning products, we start with the experience of aging and the life events that trigger concerns about money; to build a product roadmap for a toy company, we start with the phenomenon of childhood play to understand what motivates kids to play and how they go about it. Using the idea of a phenomenon as a framing tool places the business interest in the realm of social science—and in doing this, we unlock the use of techniques developed by anthropologists and sociologists over hundreds of years to get at the truth of the matter.
WORKING WITHOUT HYPOTHESES
We believe that in any search for new knowledge, you have to abide ignorance for a while. This is why each project is designed without hypotheses. The approach is helpful for avoiding confirmation bias and uncovering new insights about why people think and behave as they do.
These techniques are as old as academia itself, but their application in business strategy is novel. In using these methods, we swap outdated models that are no longer competitive for new hypotheses about what will move the market and the business.
our books
Sensemaking
What happens when number crunching fails to solve a company's problems? In Sensemaking, Christian Madsbjerg argues that many of today's biggest success stories stem not from "quant" thinking but from deep, nuanced engagement with the culture, language, and history of customers. In a time when liberal arts graduates fear for their prospects, Sensemaking is a welcome, transformative vision for success in the twenty-first century.
The Moment of Clarity
In The Moment of Clarity, Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen examine the business world’s assumptions about human behavior and show how these assumptions can lead businesses off track. But the authors chart a way forward. Using theories and tools from the human sciences—anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology—The Moment of Clarity introduces a practical framework that gives executives a better way to understand business challenges involving shifts in human behavior.
latest perspectives
Perspectives
