Splatter Your Organization!

Splatter your organization!

Leonardo da Vinci, a personal inspiration, nothing less but a warrior of the mind with an extensive arsenal of creative tactics. One of which was quite strange: soaking a sponge in paint and throwing it at a wall. What made such a mess useful to him, was getting to study the random splatter of paint. He believed that in the chaos, he might catch glimpses of patterns, shapes, and ideas that his conscious mind wasn’t looking for. This would serve as a method to spark new ideas. One of those splatters, according to his notebooks, beared resemblance to a horse's head on top of a wheel. Splattering paint led DaVinci to imagine a design eerily close to the modern bicycle, hundreds of years before it was invented.

It might seem like it was all about randomness, but actually it had a lot more to do with attention. Da Vinci was deliberately removing the limits imposed by his own expectations through creating a mess, followed up by training his eye to notice what others might ignore. In the end, the idea of the bicycle was a figment of his imagination, not a message whispered to him by the paint gods.

One of my latest developments is inspired by this method. I call it "splattering", for obvious reasons.

The basic idea is simple. People inside a group or organization record short voice memos about their experience. They speak freely and informally, without a script or agenda. They reflect on their day, what they’re working on, what feels stuck or exciting, what they’ve been thinking about. The recordings are private and anonymous. No one listens to them, except for an AI.

Once enough of these voice memos have been gathered, the AI transcribes them and passively reviews the content, looking for nothing but patterns. Repeated concerns. Unspoken tensions. Emerging ideas. Contradictions. Outliers. Signals hiding in plain sight.

What comes out isn’t a judgement or a recommendation. It’s a snapshot of the mental and emotional undercurrents inside the system. A way to see what’s really going on beneath what people typically say out loud. The daily interactions taking place within your organization makes for the splattered mess, these recordings are capturing what people were left seeing within it. What actually emerged from the wall once the paint had hit.

It’s a method for collective sense-making, using consistent raw, unstructured and personal input as the source material.

Some might ask why this is needed when we already have meetings, surveys, and Slack threads. The answer is that most of our systems for feedback and communication are structured, time-constrained, and often shaped by social expectations. People curate what they share. They edit themselves. They present what they think will be useful or acceptable, and leave out the rest.

Splattering invites the opposite. It asks people to speak without editing. To externalize half-formed thoughts and shifting emotions. To let go of the idea that they have to make a point, or be correct.

What about all the stuff we should be talking about, but don't?

The things we have in common, but keep to ourselves due to thinking we are the only ones?

It’s in this mess that the most meaningful patterns often appear.

What the AI does is not interpret or judge. It doesn’t diagnose individuals or produce performance evaluations. Instead, it listens across the whole dataset, drawing attention to recurring themes or surprising anomalies. Over time, these patterns can be surfaced as collective insights. They can also be explored interactively, through a chatbot that allows people to ask, for example: what ideas are people excited about this week? What’s making them anxious? What changed compared to last month?

In that sense, splattering is three things at once.

It’s a creative process, because it allows individuals to think out loud, discover what they didn’t know they were thinking, and possibly spark new ideas in the act of speaking.

It’s a diagnostic tool, because it reveals dynamics and developments inside a team or organization that would otherwise remain invisible or delayed.

And it’s a relational infrastructure, because it helps people feel heard even when no one is listening directly, and gives the wider group a more textured, human view of itself.

When people are invited to speak freely, they often reveal their real motivations, doubts, and moments of clarity. These are rarely captured in those monthly 1-10 scale polls that nobody puts any effort into. Splattering is all about what isn't being asked about or said out loud, that just might still matter a whole lot.

There’s something wicked smart about building a shared understanding out of scattered reflections. Like Da Vinci with his wall, it’s not about the shape of the splatter. It’s about what wants to be seen when we take a closer look.

"Why didn't I know this until now??"

"Cause you never asked..."

The Observatory