OUR WORK
Complex challenges. Meaningful progress.
We help organizations move from uncertainty and complexity toward clarity, alignment, and action.
Explore selected work across government, health, research, education, and community systems.
SELECTED ENGAGEMENTS
What the work looks like in practice.
Our work takes different forms depending on the challenge, but the goal is consistent: understand what matters, expand what is possible, and help organizations move forward.
STRATEGIC FORESIGHT · NASA
Exploring what could come next - and what it could mean today.
THE CHALLENGE
Technical innovation does not happen in isolation. Emerging technologies can create second- and third-order effects across people, systems, industries, communities, and society.
EMPACT GLOBAL’S ROLE
Supported futures-focused exploration with multidisciplinary teams, helping participants challenge assumptions, examine interconnected implications, and expand the range of possibilities considered.
WHAT THE WORK ENABLED
A broader view of potential futures and their implications—giving teams new perspectives to inform research, innovation, and present-day decision-making.
SELECTED FUTURES WORK
SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION · HEAL GREENSBORO
Understanding what sits beneath persistent health disparities.
THE CHALLENGE
Persistent disparities in maternal and infant outcomes cannot be explained by a single intervention, organization, or point of care. Structural conditions, community environments, healthcare systems, lived experience, and clinical pathways interact over time.
EMPACT GLOBAL’S ROLE
Facilitated systems-level exploration with cross-sector partners to surface interconnected drivers, build a shared understanding of the challenge, and identify areas requiring deeper investigation and action.
WHAT THE WORK ENABLED
A more integrated picture of the system behind the outcomes—helping partners move from individual explanations toward shared priorities and opportunities for coordinated action.
PUBLIC TRUST & SYSTEMS CHANGE · CITY OF LONG BEACH
In partnership with Embers & Oak Storyworks, prime contractor
Understanding the system behind public distrust before trying to change the story.
THE CHALLENGE
The City sought to strengthen trust with residents through storytelling. But meaningful storytelling could not begin with messaging alone. First, the underlying experiences, systemic barriers, and conditions contributing to distrust had to be understood.
EMPACT GLOBAL’S ROLE
Led systems-focused discovery to uncover the factors shaping residents’ trust in the City—examining how people experienced services, where systems created frustration or disconnection, and how those experiences influenced perceptions of government. Working in partnership, Embers & Oak Storyworks translated those insights into the broader storytelling strategy and created films designed to strengthen trust between the City and the communities it serves.
WHAT THE WORK ENABLED
A deeper understanding of the systemic drivers of distrust, giving the broader team a more credible basis for developing stories that reflected residents’ realities and could help strengthen connection between the City and the communities it serves.
ACROSS THE WORK
Different challenges. A consistent way of working.
See the system
Surface what matters
Explore what could be
Move insight into action
Have a challenge that deserves a different approach?
Let’s explore the possibilities.
Tell us what you’re trying to change. We’ll help determine the right way to understand it, approach it, and move it forward.