The Bramble Compass
Gauge and grow your ability to forge a better world.
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Assessment
Complete a Bramble Compass assessment to gauge and grow your Awareness, Hope and Agency with respect to the change you are pursuing.
Participants report that the experience of completing this evidence-based but unorthodox psychometric is itself powerful.Upon completion you receive a report which reveals hidden patterns in your responses, including the strengths and shadow sides of how you perceive your context and your role in it.
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Coaching
A one hour coaching debrief with one of our team will help you get the most from your Compass report.
We will support and challenge you to draw out the implications so that you go back into your context with renewed energy and clarity.
This can be done as an individual or as part of a systemic team coaching session. -
Activation
We can support and sustain Compass participants as they take action to pursue their goals.
This can happen through short intensive interventions such as team innovation sprints, and/or slower cadence activities such as action learning.We always undertake monitoring and evaluation to gauge and strengthen the value of our interventions.
Origins and impact.
Our work on the three elements of the Compass started from the desire to ensure we could both evidence and enhance the impact of our work. We want to avoid making claims we can’t substantiate and hold ourselves accountable for fulfilling the trust placed in us by our clients.
The Assessment element, in the form of the Bramble Compass was the foundation. Over the course of 6 months in the second half of 2025 we set about researching, devising and prototyping a psychometric that could gauge and develop our clients’ capacities to deal with the systemic challenges they were addressing. Drawing on a range of literature from disciplines including Occupational Psychology, Sustainability and Futures, the result is the Compass v1.0.
It is the only one of its kind in its existence, combining deep qualitative inquiry with structured quantitative items. We have tested and iterated it with pilot participants from a variety of life experiences, from corporate leaders and public policymakers to grassroots activists, and from professional psychologists to changemakers working in the field.
Having developed the Profile, we developed the reporting function, which is semi-automated and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis tools (e.g. Discourse Analysis), and blended Artificial and Human Intelligence. Next came the Coaching debrief, which draws on elements of systemic and existential coaching.
Finally, we connected these Assessment and Coaching elements to our suite of existing Activation interventions to ensure that transfer insight and intention into tangible behaviour change.
We’re still in the early stages of developing this combination, but our pilot participants have reported some significant benefits from the Assessment and Coaching so far.
The Compass provided rich and thought-provoking insight, with lots of ‘food for thought’ to digest over the coming weeks and months. The survey was excellent, getting me to think creatively and deeply – something I’m not always able to make space for! The prompts and visual examples really brought the concepts to life, and I felt I’d already made some discovery moments before receiving the report (e.g. current zero values alignment in my workplace). The report was extensive, playing back in fresh ways the reflections I’d made. It gave me lots of lenses to reflect on current challenges, and ideas for making micro steps forward. Finally, the de-brief with Julian was really brilliant – he helped me deepen my thinking on some of the insights, and really met me where I am re. weighing up next steps. He supported me in designing a forward plan, and suggested other resources and inputs that I might find useful. Overall, I am so impressed with the richness of the assessment – with relatively low effort/time from myself, I feel I’ve now got a rich treasure trove of resources and ideas to work through in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you!
