A couple of weeks ago we changed the name of our newsletter, The Culture Edit, to just NICH Studio. We said we’d explain later, so here we go.
Why the change
For more than a decade, we’ve been focused on helping organizations discover, design, and promote their workplace culture, both internally to employees and externally to the world. Interviews, focus groups, our Employee Experience Framework, and lots and lots of unique and compelling creative brought all of the work to life. That work is NICH +Culture, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Over the past two years, how we work shifted. We started building, and we transitioned to an entirely AI framework. First, we built agents to assist us in how we worked, essentially project managers behind the scenes keeping us organized and on track. Then we started using entirely new tools to help us execute work, and things started speeding up rapidly.
Then came the realization that eventually the old way in which we worked and the service that we provided would be gone one day if we did not evolve. So we started focusing on how to code and build our own products that scale our services. This, we realized, is the future.
What Does That Mean?
Okay, since the dawn of the modern era, building software meant being a developer or having the budget to hire a team of them (private equity essentially). Let’s lump these two groups into “technologists” for now. So most of the software tools that medium to large organizations use were built by technologists who learned the problem second. Some of them are fine, but let’s be real - most are not. But when there are only a few real options, clients end up locked into tools that only sort of fit their needs, because there’s no great alternative to move to. We know that all of our HR leaders out there can relate.
AI coding has changed that. The people who’ve spent their careers inside a problem can now build the solutions themselves, without waiting for permission from anyone. A nurse who knows exactly where the scheduling system breaks down. Or workplace culture experts building for the future of work. (That’s us.) Nobody has to explain the problem to them, and most of them aren’t in it just to get rich. They want work to be better because they’ve seen what it looks like when it isn’t and they care about the customers and employees it affects.
It’s still real and very hard work. It takes a lot of time and a LOT of creative expertise. Getting something to function is quick now. Getting it right takes months of developing and testing with real people and learning skills we didn’t have a year ago. But it can be done, and we think the next wave of better, more useful products comes from exactly these people: experts building for clients they already understand.
Emersen came out of that, and once we started building, we didn’t really want to stop.
Emersen has a real conversation with everyone in an organization, by voice, and shows leaders where their people actually are. It’s a decade of interviews and focus groups, built to work at a scale we could never reach by hand. We think it’s a pretty good look at where software is headed. Now we are building the next suite of tools inside Emersen that will help organizations understand the talent they have and how it can be developed and redeployed to the jobs of the future.
How we’re organized now
NICH Studio is the home, where we build solutions. Here’s what lives under it.
NICH +Culture is our culture and creative work with clients, the same work we’ve been doing for more than a decade.
Emersen is our AI-powered workforce intelligence platform. Optimize people, not workflows.
Ease Atelier a fashion wardrobe tool.
SpeedStudio, our endurance-sports creative agency with a pro cycling team and a membership club, has already been spun off as its own separate company.
Ease Atelier is the same story as Emersen in a different field. One of Nikki’s many passions is fashion, in particular vintage. She knew the problem as a shopper, and AI meant she could build the answer herself. Within days, we already have hundreds using it.
So that’s the name. Every week here you’ll still get what you’ve always gotten from us on culture, work, and performance, plus what we’re learning as we build for people with AI.
For ten years we helped organizations understand their people. Now we get to build for them too.
If you’re an expert sitting on an idea like this, we’d love to hear about it. Just reply.
Nikki + Chad