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The Sensemaking Studio
Our Point of View
What We Do
How We Help Organizations
We don't facilitate meetings.
We design conversations that function as learning engines and decision platforms.
The result isn't better meetings.
It's decisions in days, not months—
with confidence when action begins.
The Challenge
Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack capable leaders.
They struggle because insight is distributed across roles and perspectives.
Decisions are often made without a shared view of the system.
What Happens Next
As complexity rises, familiar planning and alignment mechanisms begin to fail.
Effort fragments at the moment unity matters most.
Our work is grounded in Clay Thinking™, a proprietary approach to collaboration—designed for moments when decisions are consequential, complexity is high, and clarity must be earned.
The Person Behind the Work
Deirdre Conner
Founder
That conviction didn't come from theory.
It came from three decades inside leadership rooms—watching capable leaders struggle not because they lacked expertise, but because they lacked a way to think together when complexity rose.
For more than 30 years, Deirdre has advised nonprofit and for-profit organizations on strategy, emerging technology, and organizational transformation. Her experience spans management consulting, enterprise strategy, and senior leadership roles supporting growth, innovation, and capital strategy within complex organizations, including GOJO Industries and PNC Financial Group.
Her clients have included organizations such as Corning, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, Health Action Council, and Case Western Reserve University. Across these engagements, she is known for helping leaders surface assumptions, integrate diverse perspectives, and build shared understanding strong enough to hold through execution.
Deirdre developed Clay Thinking, a proprietary approach to collective sensemaking that treats early ideas as provisional rather than fixed, and disagreement as a source of learning rather than friction. The approach is designed for moments when clarity must be earned—when leaders cannot rely on standard playbooks and alignment alone is not enough.
She holds an MBA, is a CPA, and is trained in human systems thinking, organizational change leadership, and human-centered design.
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