Square Peg's tools are deliberately easy to pick up. Underneath them is original research into how people and organisations actually change — and how the value they create can be measured and moved.
Everything Square Peg does rests on two original research programmes that meet at a single idea: fit. The first is a science of change — how individuals, teams and organisations read their world, get stuck, and revise. The second is a science of measurement — how the human conditions inside an organisation become the value it creates outside, and how that whole chain can be measured rather than guessed at. One tells you where the leverage is. The other tells you how to move it without forcing it.
A mechanism-based, multilevel theory of how we read and revise our world. Behaviour is mediated by an interpretation — a story — that stands between what happens and what we do. That story is built fast and largely unseen, is inseparable from emotion, and rests on assumptions we defend without noticing. Change happens through the balance between forcing the fit (bending reality to protect the model) and changing the fit (revising the model to meet reality). The same architecture runs, unchanged in shape, from a single person to a whole culture.
Underpins: The Lens, Culture · Emotion · Thinking Science Cards, and Leadership Odyssey.
Organisations have never measured more of their people and understood them less — because they measure in fragments. This research assembles four decades of evidence into one connected, measurable system running from climate and culture, through engagement, across the employee–customer boundary, into realised performance. Measured as a chain rather than a set of gauges, it lets an organisation find where value is created and where it leaks — and fine-tune the few levers that actually move the outcome, instead of chasing every low score.
Underpins: the bespoke survey tools and the measure-then-solve engagement model.
Most vendors show you only the evidence that sells. Our papers do the opposite: they give the critique of each idea the same weight as the support for it, because a framework that can't survive its own critique isn't worth building. We'll tell you what the science can't do — which is exactly why you can trust what it can.
Success lifts engagement as surely as engagement lifts success. We claim predominant forward causation within a reciprocal system — not a one-way conveyor belt.
Many links sit in the 0.2–0.5 range. A link need not explain most of the variance to be the most actionable variance you have.
eNPS is psychometrically weak. So we use it for trend, never as a headline, and never let it carry weight it can't bear.
Over-investing in satisfaction can destroy value. The logic is leverage and balance — the shape that fits your strategy, not all-green.
The full body of work, in plain sight. Accessible summaries live on the Thinking page; the complete papers are available on request.
A multilevel, integrative theory of how individuals, teams and organisations read and revise their world — the framework beneath "the science of fit." Integrates a dozen traditions, from Piaget to Kahneman to Schein, into one mechanism and derives testable propositions from it.
How organisational climate, culture, engagement, employee and customer advocacy, and performance form a single measurable system — and why measuring the whole chain lets a business fine-tune the way it creates value. Built on four decades of evidence, illustrated for dispersed and field-based workforces.
How the chain becomes a live measurement system — the mobile-first instrument, the confidentiality architecture, the key-driver and linkage analytics, and the delivery cycle that turns measurement into a measured improvement. The engine behind the bespoke survey tools.
Seven shorter, readable pieces that take the chain one link at a time — from climate, to engagement, to eNPS used honestly, to measuring a workforce that isn't at a desk. Written for the boardroom, not the journal.
The research is why the tools work. The tools are how you never have to read it. See what the science becomes in practice.