About KOZMO
The observation
Across organisations, industries and leadership teams, the same thing kept happening, in the same shape.
Something would get fixed, everyone would relax, and a few months later the same problem was back, because the understanding had left with the person who held it.
Companies measured finance to the cent and operations to the minute. Behaviour, the thing quietly shaping every one of those numbers, was left to instinct.
What if behaviour could be understood with the same rigour as every other organisational system?
That question became Behaviour Intelligence. Once you have seen the pattern, meetings get a lot more interesting.
The people
Neither of us set out to start a company. What we had in common was an observation: years of watching organisations invest enormous care in their systems while the behavioural layer between the people inside them stayed invisible.
He kept watching the same repair fail. A team would be diagnosed, something would get fixed, and then the person who understood why it worked would leave. A few months later the same dysfunction was back. So he started drawing the patterns instead, trying to find a language for them that would still be there after everyone went home.
Hers looked like a measurement problem and turned out to be a definition problem. Organisations were measuring sentiment, satisfaction and engagement, then wondering why nothing improved. If you are not measuring the right thing, you cannot know what to change. And if you do not understand why people fall into a pattern, the fix you choose quietly creates the next one.
KOZMO was founded by Michael Huynh, who comes from technology and is based in Australia, and Masha Omeragic, a cognitive psychologist based in the Netherlands.
It's a working name while trademark checks finish. KOZMO is not related to Kozmo.com, the US delivery company that closed in 2001.
Two routes to the same sentence. We don't think that's a coincidence. We think it's what happens when something important stays invisible for long enough.
The work
A shared language for behaviour, defined tightly enough that two people using it mean the same thing.
Where the framework stops being a document and becomes something a person or an organisation can actually use.
Which grows every time an organisation shows us something the framework did not anticipate.
Methods that have to survive a real Monday morning, not only a literature review.
Helping an organisation understand itself more clearly than it can from the inside, which is the hardest place to see from.
Principles
When the research and our instincts disagree, the research gets to be right.
We measure what people do, not what we imagine they're like underneath.
Intuition is a good way to find a question. It's a poor way to answer one.
An insight nobody can act on by Tuesday hasn't finished being an insight.
We'd rather hold a question open another year than close it early and be quietly wrong.
Honest and unfinished, published and argued with, beats flawless and never shipped.
Healthy organisations aren't built on good intentions. They're built on changes you can see happen.
We don't label anyone. A profile is a starting point, never a verdict.
How we'll know
If that happens, it will matter very little whether it was us who built it.
Commitments
A promise is a statement about intention. A commitment is something you're entitled to hold us to.
Building it together
We'd rather hear where we're wrong than not hear from you.