Strategic plans can become abstract. Tracking can feel like busywork. And the gap between "we're doing things" and "we're making progress" can be surprisingly wide.

The problem might be a lack metrics, or it might be too many, losing signal in noise. You might be confusing outputs with outcomes, or relying on confirmation when you need prediction. 

Big Waves helps you build visibility into whether your work is creating the conditions you're after, using progressive frameworks that serve multiple organizational contexts.

Whether you're helping individual contributors find their leverage points and build personal progress gauges, or refining organizational dashboards to serve boards and leadership teams, we design support for your specific measurement challenge.

With Big Waves:

  • Move from tracking activity (events held, reports published) to tracking actual change (trust increased, capacity strengthened).

  • Select predictive and confirmatory measures, giving you visibility into future trajectory and past results.

  • Create a system that tells you when something needs attention, not one that drowns you in data.

  • Leverage map the places where effort creates disproportionate impact.

  • Adopt a method for keeping indicators realistically scoped.

Value for

  • Leadership teams refining organizational dashboards for boards, funders, and internal decision-making

  • Strategy and operations leaders building measurement systems from scratch or rescuing ones that have become unwieldy

  • Individual contributors and mid-level leaders who want to know their work is creating impact, not just activity

  • Anyone who suspects there's a better way to know if things are working than drowning in spreadsheets or relying on gut feel

This support can look like a workshop, a conversation, a change project, or other custom engagements.

Joanne Kerrigan

Having led transformational change from the inside, Joanne Kerrigan brings deep understanding of organizational complexity to her work. She loves to "find the thing underneath the thing": the conditions beneath the symptoms, and the moments an organization begins to see itself more clearly. She has also guided learning across classrooms and online cohorts, and loves what she calls learning magic.