How do you have a meaningful conversation with 1,000 people?
Organisations spend a lot of time trying to understand what their people think.
Surveys can reach everyone, but often limit what people can say. Conversations give people room to explain themselves, but they're difficult to conduct at scale.
Engage+ brings those two things together.
An AI-powered conversation for each participant, with tools to help organisations understand what emerges across them.
Listening to everyone is harder than asking everyone.
Strategy Connect has spent years helping organisations develop and manage strategy.
Aidan Nuttall and his team work with organisations to understand where they are, where they want to go and how to get there.
An important part of that work is listening.
Leadership teams have workshops. Stakeholders are interviewed. Employees complete surveys.
But there is a trade-off.
Surveys give you scale. Conversations give you depth.
We wanted to find out whether AI could help us have both.
What if everyone could have their say?
Engage+ gives participants a familiar conversational interface.
The AI asks a question, listens to the response and can follow up when there's something worth exploring.
People can explain what they think in their own words rather than choosing from a predefined list of answers.
One conversation might be short. Another might uncover something nobody thought to ask about.
The conversation follows the person, not just the questionnaire.
A thousand conversations create a thousand perspectives.
Having the conversations is only the first challenge.
Now imagine hundreds or thousands of people have participated.
You've collected a substantial amount of information, but understanding it is another problem entirely.
What are people agreeing on?
Where do their views differ?
Which ideas keep appearing?
What are the unusual perspectives that might otherwise be missed?
Collecting the conversations isn't enough. You need to understand them.
Making sense of what people are saying.
Engage+ uses semantic analysis to explore relationships between responses.
Contributions with similar meanings can be grouped into clusters, making it easier to identify common themes and different perspectives.
The visualisation lets people explore those relationships and return to the underlying contributions.
It's a way to move between the bigger picture and the individual voices that created it.
The patterns matter. So do the people behind them.
Real conversations don't follow a script.
One of the biggest lessons came when Engage+ was used with real participants.
An unexpected, serious response required escalation.
It was a reminder that a conversational interface creates responsibilities that a conventional survey doesn't necessarily have in the same way.
People can say anything.
They can raise sensitive issues, misunderstand a question, go off-topic or disclose something that needs attention.
That means thinking carefully about how the system handles unexpected responses, when it should stop, and when a person needs to become involved.
The conversation might be powered by AI. The responsibility doesn't disappear.
What if strategy could hear from the whole organisation?
Traditional strategy development often begins with leadership teams, workshops and selected stakeholders.
Engage+ creates the possibility of including a much broader range of perspectives.
Not to replace the people responsible for developing strategy, but to give them a better understanding of the organisation they're making decisions for.
That's where Engage+ and Strategy Connect begin to connect.
The original platform helps organisations develop and manage strategy.
Engage+ helps them listen more broadly.
Aidan is exploring how those capabilities might come together.
Better strategy starts with understanding the people it affects.
A different way to listen.
Engage+ began with a question about whether AI could make meaningful conversations possible at a scale that would otherwise be difficult.
The result brings together conversational AI, semantic analysis and interactive visualisation.
The interesting part isn't any one of those technologies.
It's what they make possible together.
Give people room to speak.
Find the patterns across what they say.
Keep the individual voices visible.
That's the product we're continuing to explore.
The people behind it
Aidan Nuttall / Strategy Connect
Product vision, strategy expertise and domain knowledge.
Paul Kerr / Product Architecture
Technical architecture and development.