Over thirty years watching organizations struggle to get a grip on innovation.
Zenshin Kaishi measures innovation culture from more than one role. Leaders, managers and employees answer their own questions, and the report shows where their pictures of the same organization differ. That gap is the pattern.
Zenshin Kaishi was built by Camiel Kessels, who has spent over thirty years in innovation, in different positions and organizations, across a wide range of markets.
The pattern repeated in nearly all of them. A leadership team describes an organization that welcomes ideas. The people in it describe one that does not. Both are answering honestly. Neither is lying. They are answering from different places in the same organization and seeing different things, and no ordinary conversation puts the two side by side, because the person with least power is the one with the most to lose by speaking.
That is what this is for. The people with the most to lose by speaking are the ones it most needs to hear from, so it never asks them to say it out loud in the room.
The research it draws on
five bodies of work sit behind the questions:
- Göran Ekvall on creative climate — what an environment has to have before ideas survive it
- Amy Edmondson on psychological safety — why people stop speaking, and what it costs
- Cohen and Levinthal on absorptive capacity — an organization's ability to take in what is outside it and actually use it
- Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen on innovator behaviour — what the people who generate ideas do differently
- Three Horizons — reading short, medium and long-range work as separate problems
It draws on that work. It is not validated by it. The questions, the scoring and the thresholds are ours. We say “draws on” everywhere on this site and we mean the weaker word.
What the software does, and what it does not
- Scoring is deterministic. The same answers always produce the same scores.
- Every score, threshold and pattern is written before anyone answers.
- Your answers are stored encrypted. A database query returns ciphertext. No AI model and no person reads them to interpret or score them. No AI model decides what a pattern means or how to word it.
- The privacy floor is built into the software and tested on every change, not left to a setting an administrator could reach.
The company
Zenshin Kaishi is a product of AIConcepts.Studio, a trading name of Plakboom B.V., a Netherlands-based organization registered in Heemstede under KVK 34130965. Answers are stored and processed in the EU.