our Manifesto
Stop Experience Leak
Your people function is quietly losing value. Not from broken systems, bad leadership, or lack of investment. From Experience Leak. The silent drain of retention, performance, and trust that happens when you design for engagement scores instead of what people actually feel.
Experience Leak is Revenue Leak
The same employee shows up in radically different situations. Most organisations only design for one version of them.
Friction Markets
The growth others miss
These frictions are markets, Opportunities that have yet to be claimed by your business. We call them Friction Markets the growth hiding in gaps your competitors can't see. Every unserved situation is unclaimed revenue waiting for someone brave enough to design for it.
Six value drains
Six forces draining your revenue and experience
Experience Leak: Value escaping as meaning, emotion, and trust leak at every handoff and unidentified situation shift.
Service Saturation: Commoditisation kills margins. Everything works, nothing is memorable a race to the bottom doing more for less.
Immersion Fracture: The experience doesn't hold. Customers drift, employees disengage all quietly unsubscribing from your brand.
Best Practice Blindness: Copying competition erodes differentiation, pricing power, and value proposition. Play your game, not theirs.
Fragmentation Loops: Teams working in silos, solving their fragment of the experience driving duplication, cost, and failure demand.
Hidden Deficit of Experience: The gap between promise and delivery that bleeds trust, repeat business, and brand reputation.
Three areas of Leak
These show up quietly at first, drip by drip they compound across the business.
Strategy Leak: Where Best Practice Blindness and Service Saturation create sameness missing untapped Friction Markets and Opportunity Platforms, leaking growth.
System Leak: Where Fragmentation Loops and the Hidden Deficit of Experience multiply tension in your people and across your function.
Signal Leak: Where Immersion Fracture erodes trust and Emotional Residue fades. These silent signals give you a glimpse into the future before the dashboards turn red.
These leaks appear at every level. Often felt first, before they show up in the numbers.
You know something is broken. This is for leaders who know something is wrong but can’t see where
CPOs and CHROs who've invested in people transformation but still see the function stuck in process rather than product and experience. Watching talent walk out to somewhere that feels different.
You can’t unsee it
The leak is everywhere
Workplaces that deliver output but bleed talent and institutional knowledge.
Onboarding programmes that tick every box but leave new starters feeling like a number.
People strategies built on assumptions that nobody tested against lived reality. All leaking the same way.
All leaking the same way. Stopping the leak starts with rejecting the broken logic behind it.
WHAT WE REJECT
The broken logic behind the leak
Best practice Blindness: Copying what works elsewhere turns you into a generic version of someone else's strategy. Best practices don't make you better they make you invisible.
Designing for personas instead of situations and states: A persona is a fiction. A situation is reality. Design for who someone is on paper, and the competitors who understand the shift claim the value you left on the table.
Fragmented ownership: When EX, operations, and marketing each solve their own slice, employees do the stitching themselves. That friction is a revenue leak you're paying for twice.
Dashboards that look green while trust erodes: The numbers you measure aren't the numbers that matter. The Hidden Deficit of Experience the gap between what leaders think they're delivering and what people actually feel is invisible until the brand collapses.
Theatre: The Backstage Engine carries every promise you make. When it's aligned, the experience feels magical. When it's misaligned backstage rot, siloed teams, broken incentives, and operational debt.
Closing the Leak
We identify which Friction Markets you're missing and where the revenue is escaping.
We view the employee experience as a subscription service. We design the Services, Products, Interactions, and Experiences that your people want to 'subscribe' to daily, fixing Internal Leaks and moving HR from policy enforcement to product and experience architects.
We immerse ourselves in the Situational Shifts your customers and employees are actually experiencing not the ones you think they are.
We bring the right people together to see the same problem at the same time, align around a single outcome, and close the leak at the strategy, system, or signal level.
For CPOs and CHROs: We fix the transformation programmes that look good on paper but don't change how work actually feels. We find the friction markets your function is missing and build the people products and experiences your team can't see yet.
Signed & CLAIMED
This isn't a framework. It's not a methodology. It's a line in the sand. Experience Leak is real.
Friction Markets are real. The gap between what you think you're delivering and what people actually feel, that's real too.
You can keep optimising touchpoints, copying competitors, and watching dashboards that tell you everything's fine while trust bleeds out the back door. Or you can stop the leak.
We know which side we're on. — Knot, December 2025
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