Your hardest problems aren't problems — they're your model of work, left unexamined.
We help organizations recognize when their inherited models of work are the source of their most persistent problems — and help them imagine, and begin building, something better.
An organization making big decisions about work — without a coherent theory of work.
It rarely shows up named as such. It shows up as the symptoms that won't resolve:
- A new office, designed for a way of working no one has actually agreed on.
- Engagement initiatives that treat the readings, not the underlying condition.
- Strategy decks about the future written entirely in the grammar of the past.
- Reorgs that move the boxes but leave the inherited model untouched.
When the symptoms keep returning, the problem usually isn't the symptom. That's where this work begins.
Five ways the work takes shape.
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Rigorous inquiry into where work is heading — grounded in evidence and long-range signal rather than trend-spotting. The foundation that keeps every other decision honest.
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Vivid, inhabitable futures an organization can step into, pressure-test, and decide against — turning abstract foresight into something a team can actually feel and choose.
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Surfacing the inherited model beneath the symptoms — and the patient work of moving past it. Where persistent problems get re-read as the model showing its age.
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Space, place, and real-estate decisions anchored to an actual theory of work — so the building expresses how the organization intends to operate, not just how it used to.
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Sessions that help leaders think together about change they can't yet name — building the shared language a team needs before it can act.
Clients & collaborators.
Sysoma.Work is the enterprise consulting arm of Sysoma Partners.
We work with large organizations at the point where strategy, culture, and the physical and operational realities of work collide — helping them recognize when an inherited model is the source of their most persistent problems, and begin building something better. The practice draws on a standing body of research into the crisis of work, organizational evolution, and workplace design as a form of pedagogy.
Founded by Joel Fariss — formerly a Strategy Director at Gensler — Sysoma.Work brings research, foresight, and facilitation to the question most enterprises are quietly avoiding: whether the model of work they inherited still fits the work they actually do.