The situation
In the performance review work I was doing, the same problem kept coming up. Staff noticing things that mattered. Leaders realising things too late. A gap between the moment someone sensed a problem and the moment anyone could act on it.
Existing tools forced a trade-off between depth, speed, and scale. Annual surveys gave you scale but not speed. One-to-one reviews gave you depth but not scale. By the time insight reached the people who could act on it, it was usually history.
I wanted something that let people act at the point of need, not three months after escalation.
The work
I co-own Clarity Insights Group. We built two products on the same underlying system.
Reflection Journal puts it in the hands of the individual. It's a way to notice patterns in your own work and decisions over time. Wayvora aggregates that signal upward so organisations can see the patterns forming across teams before they harden into problems.
Same tech behind both: network analysis, sentiment and thematic analysis run at the point of entry rather than in a quarterly batch.
Reflection Journal came first. Wayvora emerged from what users told us afterwards. They could see what the tool was doing for them individually, and they started asking what the aggregated picture would look like for a team.
The turning point came from a user who was sure the output was wrong. He told me the tech was broken, that the patterns it was surfacing didn't match his situation. I asked him to run it for another three weeks and we'd talk again.
When we met, he apologised. The output had been right the whole time. It had been surfacing something he'd been ignoring. He wasn't being present enough with his young children. The tool hadn't misread his work. He'd been misreading himself.
That shaped what we were building. The product's job was to surface what was actually there, including the parts people had stopped letting themselves see.
What changed
Two products now in pilot. One with a governing body, one with an education provider.
For users, the shift is from end-of-year reflection to same-week adjustment. Patterns that used to take a review cycle to surface appear within weeks of the first entries.
For organisations, the old trade-off between depth, speed, and scale is gone. Leaders see the signal forming while there's still time to respond. Data isn't out of date by the time it's analysed.
The gap between insight and action gets shorter. People act on things while they're still small.