Natural gifts

Delivering meaningful generative research requires a special skill for attunement to people and situations. Our natural gifts are our ability to talk to anyone, put people at ease, and to listen and observe. Then, we faithfully translate what we see and hear.

We combine business acumen, systems thinking, and an ethnographic lens to illuminate opportunities for clients and align stakeholders around a shared understanding of the people they serve.


  • Partner

    Meg Kinney is an executive marketing veteran and agency intrapreneur who came from the heartland of America and subsequently worked on the ‘insight and strategy’ frontiers of just about every kind of specialization: design, branding, digital, experiential, shopper.

    Meg has a Masters in Natural Resources, a Certificate in Systems Leadership, and is a Board Member of EPIC - a global community dedicated to advancing the Value of Ethnography in business. She is most proud of her reputation for care, shifting mindsets toward creative holistic solutions that positively impact people and profits.

Earned trust

We’ve been helping clients navigate the complexity, ambiguity, and messiness of understanding people in systems since 2008. Our clients span Fortune 500 to startups, emerging categories and legacy businesses, and the occasional social impact enterprise. 

We’ve conducted thousands of interviews, across geographies and socioeconomic strata, finding bespoke ways to engage with consumers and stakeholders. We go wherever your people are. We enroll them in the process, earn their trust, and co-create how best to tell the data story through all kinds of artifacts like audio, video, and photography.


  • Partner

    Hal Phillips is a storyteller at heart who passionately believes in multimedia as a means to foster human connection, reaction, and participation in the world around us. Hal studied Philosophy and started his career at CNN International putting together news packages for international audiences, before moving to China and embedding in a culture diametrically opposed to our own.

    During the first dotcom boom, he moved to San Francisco where he worked on the frontier of digital media for CNX Media. From there, he ran the public access TV studio in Berkeley, CA that facilitated the efforts of local citizens to create and broadcast stories and programming that mattered to them, in their own voices. This experience of fostering a community for storytelling and activism led him to video ethnography. Hal finds tremendous joy hanging out with people who are not like him.