Case Studies
Intelligence That Changed Decisions
Five organizations that used distributed human sensing to surface what their formal systems could not see, and what they did with what they found.
From Unwinnable Games to Unlocked Performance
How sensing the frontline reversed a cultural crisis and drove measurable shareholder return
The Challenge
A large national retailer was struggling with a deeply embedded cultural problem that conventional tools could not see clearly. Engagement surveys were returning scores, but not stories. Leadership knew something was wrong, but the filtered reporting flowing up through management was too sanitized to act on. The real intelligence was trapped in the lived experience of district managers, store associates, and frontline teams who had largely stopped believing that what they noticed would ever reach anyone who could change it.
What Sensing Revealed
TGN deployed SenseMaker-based narrative capture across the store operations workforce, asking frontline employees and district managers to share short stories about their daily experience and then self-index those stories along dimensions that mattered strategically. The result was not a survey score. It was a pattern map of how thousands of people were actually experiencing the organization. What emerged was a dominant narrative the leadership team had not fully named: employees were playing what they described as an unwinnable game. Expectations were escalating, support was inconsistent, and the sense of agency and opportunity that motivates frontline performance had eroded. The data also revealed something the surveys had missed entirely: a significant subset of employees who were deeply committed and hungry for advancement, but had no visible pathway to act on that commitment.
What Was Done
- Executive and SVP team development to mobilize the store operations strategy and create a continuous feedback loop between leadership levels
- A 'New Era' cultural transformation initiative built directly from the frontline narrative data, reframing leadership as a vehicle for opportunity and service rather than compliance and control
- An 18-month leadership development roadmap for district managers, grounded in the specific patterns surfaced by the sensing work
Key Insight
The most important finding was not in the aggregate data. It was in the pattern of outliers. The employees who were most committed and most capable were also the ones most likely to leave if nothing changed. Sensing found them before they left, and the organization built a pathway for them before the problem became a retention crisis.