“Water Cooler Logic gave us an opposable thumb”

“Water Cooler Logic helped us see the jigsaw puzzle from the top, not just from the side, where we’re usually positioned.”

— Chief of Staff for clinical matters at a large Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, reflecting on our work with them on bed- control and discharge planning.

The WCL approach and process are about helping you and your staff do the looking, listening, and designing of solutions together with us social scientists. WCL is not about outside consultants coming into your organization to hand you a canned solution. We engage you and your staff in an innovative process — using ethnographic fieldwork methods (from cultural anthropology) and participatory design — to help you do important work you’ve got to do in any event. Only, with WCL, you’ll do it much better.

WCL is especially useful in large-scale, complex organizations. In these organizations the work is often highly distributed across functional and professional units, and yet must be coordinated often and carefully.

Most organizations rely on conventional management strategies and processes to coordinate and integrate work. As the underlying processes change over time, the coordinating mechanisms tend to lose their grip and need to be readjusted to the new reality. Virtually all operations thus reach a point where, even with the best of staff, business-as-usual is not making things happen well or fast enough.

Our WCL projects focus on particularly critical functional areas of an organization and reestablish the alignment of processes and people across the related units. Much of our work is project-based. We believe that most organizations could use the Water Cooler Logic process sometimes. They do not need it all of the time.