The Method
That's where we work. We look at four things. Where you are now. Where you want to get to. What the gap between them is. And how to close it. Any one of these may be in question. All of them might be. We identify which, and build the solution to fit. From the inside out.
What It Is
Inside Out is how we work. A program, a strategy, a product, a story. The method stays the same. What we build changes. We pull from whatever fields the problem needs, not just the obvious one, and that mix is where the answers come from.
It has been applied and proven across organizational strategy, technology, community health, and creative development. It is the underlying process across all of the work, whether or not it was named as such at the time.
People come to us because something isn't working and they can't see why. The gaps persist.
The Seven Phases
Seven steps. Each one a plain action, with the depth carried by what we set in the first. We ground in the lenses, name the gap, see what's really there, connect the answer, create the thing, test it with the people inside it, and hold it so it lasts.
Ground
Set the lenses
Before we look at your situation, we choose how to look at it. The lens decides what you can see, so we pick ours on purpose, to get past the surface to what is actually going on. The ones we use most: connection and disconnection, where things have come apart, between a product and its people, a person and what they care about, an organization and its purpose. Wholeness, whether we are seeing the whole person and system or only a slice. Love, where it is present, where it is missing, what changes if people love this and not just use it. Activation, whether this hands people their own power or manages them. Oneness, treating the parts as connected rather than separate. These are examples, not a checklist, and not all apply every time. Alongside them we use one story structure to map the journey: someone wants something, something blocks them, and the right change moves them to where they want to go.
Name
Find the gaps
We identify where you are now, where you want to go, and the gap between them. Sometimes the gap is one you can name. Sometimes it's the distance between where you think you are and where you actually are, or between where you say you're going and where you'd be better headed. We find which gaps are in play, and name them. That's the work.
See
A deeper dive inside the gaps
We go inside through the lenses from Ground and any others the situation needs. We go beyond the superficial, to the whole of the problem.
Connect
Find the answer
We design the answer through the same lenses. If the gap is a disconnection, we build connection. We ask what it looks like if people love this, not just use it. This is where the options get generated, drawing widely and connecting things that have not been put together.
Create
Build the solutions
We build the chosen answer into something real you can step into. A program, a strategy, an experience, a world, a functioning team.
Iterate
Test, refine, run it again
We run it with the people inside it as co-designers, and measure for aliveness and activation, not only whether it works. Then we test, refine, and run it again, until it's true.
Hold
Make it last
We build what keeps it alive after we leave: funding, documentation, partnerships, the people trained to carry it. Most good work dies here. Scale, if it comes, comes only after the work is held.
Where Inside Out Starts
Inside Out is one way to practice transformational design. The methodology has a specific starting point: it starts inside. Inside the viewer's experience. Inside the audience. Inside what the participant is carrying.
And underneath that: it starts from a recognition. That who we actually are, at our ground, is whole. That recognition shapes every design choice. The hero's journey is the receiver's journey, because the receiver was always the hero. The audience is treated as whole. The participant is treated as already carrying what they need. The work activates what's there.
This is not just spiritual posture. It produces measurable transformation in the world. In community mental health, where transformation is hardest to produce and easiest to measure, the methodology works.
Step-by-Step - Peer-reviewed, BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2015
The numbers are one thing. Here's what they looked like in a life.
The Premise
The interior of the experience - what is actually being lived, felt, intended, or carried - determines what the outside should be. In every domain. People. Programs. Organizations. Creative work.
We start from inside what's being carried. That's what makes the design fit the actual problem, not a template.
Inside Out synthesizes across established bodies of knowledge: Human-Centered Design. Theory U. Patient Activation Theory. Community-Based Participatory Research. Exercise science and mental health evidence. Systems thinking. Appreciative Inquiry. Narrative theory and mythic structure: Joseph Campbell and the deep structure of human meaning-making through story.
What's Underneath
These are some of the lenses we work with, the key ones, not the only ones. They aren't always named, but they are always present.
We are one. Not metaphorically. Ontologically. The separation between self and other, between human and nature, between practitioner and client - these are constructs. The work starts from this truth even when it doesn't name it.
Disconnection is the root pathology. Depression, isolation, chronic disease, organizational drift, creative paralysis. These are downstream symptoms of a deeper severance - from self, from others, from what matters. Every intervention, at its deepest level, is a reconnection intervention.
People are whole. Not patients. Not consumers. Not users. Not employees. Not audiences. Whole human beings carrying the full complexity of a life. Any design that starts from a partial view of the person produces a partial intervention.
Love is functional. Beauty, connection, meaning, joy. These are not decorative. They are the mechanism by which transformation happens. How teams find traction. How creative work resonates. How a brand becomes a thing people love rather than tolerate.
People own it, or they comply. In healthcare this has a name: patient activation. People who own their care, rather than receive it, do better and stay with it. The same principle holds in every field, under different names. People who own their work, their strategy, their story go further than people handed one. We design for ownership, not compliance.
"We talk with people through the shadows until they discover the light within themselves."
The Synthesis Claim
Inside Out doesn't own any of the disciplines it draws on. The claim is the capacity to synthesize across them under real conditions and produce outcomes that no single discipline produces alone.
That capacity produced two novel successes - Step-by-Step and Jump Step - in community health. It grew a napkin concept into a 300-strong provincial research ecosystem of partners, volunteers, and participants. It pivoted a stalled analytics platform into a national pandemic initiative in five weeks. It shapes every creative engagement taken on now.
Transformational Design
Transformational design transforms lives, relationships, the moments that matter. It operates at the deepest levels of who we are as human beings - meaning, love, beauty.
You've encountered it. Many times. Es Devlin designs stages and installations that transform what the audience walks into. Alejandro Jodorowsky has spent fifty years calling art a form of psychomagic - direct intervention into the psyche of the receiver. Arundhati Roy, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ben Okri - writers whose work does something to the reader. The reader is not the same after.
Avatar transformed a generation's relationship to story. The concerts where people leave knowing something they can't name: Beyonce. Taylor Swift's Eras tour. Peter Gabriel. The Grateful Dead. The Sphere. Concerts designed as ritual, where the audience leaves transformed.
The pattern: someone has thought carefully about what happens inside the receiver. That's the design. It is a real discipline. Many practitioners. Many practices. Inside Out is one of them.
Stage and Installation
Es Devlin
Transforms what the audience walks into. The design begins inside the experience of the receiver.
Film and Psychomagic
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Fifty years calling art a form of direct intervention into the psyche. The work does something to the receiver. They are not the same after.
Community Health
David J. Adams
Two novel programs - Step-by-Step and Jump Step - designed from inside the lived experience of severe depression. 93% completion. Anxiety -50%. Depression -38%. Sustained at three-month follow-up. Peer-reviewed, published, recommendations submitted to the provincial ministry.
Let's solve what's in the way.
Let's Close the Gap.
