About
I am a researcher, strategist, and documentarian. A considered listener and creative thinker. These days I'm also Head of Research at DEPT® in Amsterdam.
Heart-felt perspective
My disciplines centre around an innate need for perspective, a sensitivity to the world, and a desire to be kind to myself and others. I seek the heart-felt perspective.
“He's one of our favourites! We love working with him and looking forward to a continued collaboration!”
This Memento - Amsterdam
Research
Discussion Guides
Design a dialogue that flows, opens people up, and keeps you on track and free to explore.
Interviews
Talk to people in a way where they reveal truths they didn't even know they had.
Deep Dive Immersions
Go out into the world and experience the life of the people you serve or dedicate time to.
Film & Photography
Capture visual artefacts from time spent doing research in the field.
Desk Research
Complement your efforts "out there" with smart investigation online and elsewhere.
Reporting
Play back what you did and discovered, and do it in a way that moves people.
Strategy
Creative Briefs
Make a jump on where to go next, who with, and in what manner.
People Profiling
Peel back and reveal your audience, user, customer, or consumer. People.
Brand Positionings
Establish strongly justified and creative ways forward for your brand.
Manifestos
Lay down some poetry to rally your peoples.
Naming & Taglines
Reinvent or start from zero, decide on what you are called, and how you call upon others.
Brand Books
Put all the rules together in one wonderful place for you and your team to live by.
Cultural Alignment
Make sure everyone is on board, invested personally, and working towards the same goal.
Presentations
Pitch or play back everything that really matters.
Visual Strategic Stories
Tell stories that travel with words, photography, and film.
Field Notes
- Ask the question, then take a breath. If nothing comes, take another. The truest things arrive in the second silence.
- Walk into every room assuming you know nothing. The obvious question is usually the brave one.
- I'm not a systems person. I build systems so I can stay a people person.
- If no one was moved, it isn't finished. That goes for the research, the strategy, and the team.
My Frontiers
I lead a research team now, with machines in the toolkit. My conviction hasn't moved. In a world ever more weighted towards data, we have to keep grounding ourselves in the real. Data meets reality. People first, always.
Teams
Building a Practice
Shape a team of researchers around a shared craft and a point of view worth defending.
Coaching
Help researchers find their own voice, give them room to run, and stand close enough to catch them.
A Place to Belong
Make a team feel like home. Somewhere people are taken care of, safe to put up a hand and ask for help, and just as safe to jump straight in.
Rituals & Rhythms
Build the systems, rituals, and rhythms that keep a team honest, curious, and generative, always building on each other's ideas. I don't love saying no, so I build systems that say it kindly for me.
Technology
AI-Augmented Research
Hand the heavy lifting to the machines so there is more time for the parts that matter: the head and the heart.
Tooling the Craft
Build tools, personal and team-wide, that hold on to what matters, so we can be fully present for the moment in front of us.
Synthesis at Scale
Help a whole team move through mountains of data, transcripts, dashboards, field notes, without losing the goose-bump moments buried inside them.
Human Judgement
Know where the machine stops and the human begins. Taste, empathy, and the room still belong to us. For now.
Does the spirit move you?
Write me at benculpin@gmail.com
Find me on LinkedIn.