scenarioDNA

In times of constant change, understanding culture is essential. Culture shapes how people interpret meaning, influences behavior, and drives both belief systems and markets. Organizations that succeed are those that can identify cultural signals early and respond with clarity and relevance. We bring deep experience across categories including food and beverage, technology, fashion, finance, healthcare, and public policy. Our work spans global markets, with projects conducted throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. This broad perspective allows us to recognize shared themes while respecting regional nuance. Our approach combines semiotic analysis, structured analytic techniques, and generative AI to make sense of complex cultural data. These tools help clients uncover emerging narratives, guide innovation, and move forward with confidence in uncertain conditions.

Cultural intelligence becomes valuable when it leads to results. We help clients turn insight into strategy, innovation, and communication that resonate with real people.

Organizations use our work to:
• Detect emerging behavior and values before they scale
• Build stories that reflect deeper cultural meaning
• Align internal culture with external change
• Design systems and experiences that carry symbolic value
• Make confident decisions during uncertainty and transformation

Emerging from years of cultural systems analysis, our Living Foresight Model operates as a dynamic ecosystem—one that evolves through feedback, adaptation, and exchange. Like any living system, it grows by engaging with its environment, refining insights as new signals appear. This model reveals how shifts in one domain ripple across others. The global pandemic, for instance, transformed health, economies, supply chains, and social behavior simultaneously. By mapping these interdependencies, the Living Foresight Model enables organizations to anticipate change and act with precision.

Culture Mapping is our patented method for decoding meaning across systems of language, image, and behavior as context changes. It blends semiotics, systems thinking, and computational linguistics to uncover how people form values and make decisions. The process draws from a wide range of inputs, including social media, interviews, consumer research, and ethnographic fieldwork. Our method weaves together internal and external signals to identify meaningful patterns that reduce uncertainty and illuminate new pathways for growth and understanding. This structured approach invites clients to engage with the deeper cultural narratives shaping their industries, enabling more thoughtful and resonant decision-making.

Patent: US9002755B2

We apply Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs) to reduce bias, test assumptions, and navigate complexity. These tools support critical thinking in situations where traditional methods fall short.

Some techniques include:
Pattern Recognition to trace meaning across language, behavior, and symbolism. Alternative Futures Analysis to explore different cultural trajectories. Competing Hypotheses Analysis to evaluate multiple explanations side by side. Cross-Impact Matrices to understand how signals influence one another.

These tools support practical decisions in areas such as product design, organizational change, public policy, and creative development.

We work across both qualitative and quantitative inputs to surface patterns of meaning. Our analysis draws from interviews, transcripts, cultural texts, social platforms, and client datasets. Generative AI allows us to manage large volumes of content and extract patterns at scale. We structure this output using cultural frameworks such as semiotic codes and archetypes. The result is insight that remains grounded in human context while being enhanced by computational tools. This approach fosters more informed and deliberate decision-making by surfacing the nuanced forces at play beneath the surface.

Since our founding in 2001, we have worked with language models to advance cultural intelligence. Over time, this has become an essential part of our proprietary Culture Mapping method. Today, Generative AI is fully integrated into our practice in a secure and responsible way.

We combine tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity with custom GPTs built for specific client needs. These models are not static dashboards that quickly become outdated. Instead, they adapt as culture evolves, serving as flexible extensions of our research process.

Most importantly, we apply AI within a structured analytic framework. This ensures that insights are grounded in evidence, tested against alternative hypotheses, and contextualized by human interpretation. In this way, AI strengthens our analysis without replacing it. It enhances our ability to connect linguistic signals, cultural codes, and foresight across global markets while maintaining accountability and transparency in the research process.