Every organisation has a structure beneath the
structure on paper.
Decisions collect around certain people. Information travels through unofficial routes. Values appear in everyday trade-offs. Over time, these patterns become the organisation people actually inhabit. Shikumi helps founders and leadership teams see that underlying system, and redesign what no longer serves the work.
The diary opens for new engagements in August
You may recognise the surface
- Decisions repeatedly return to the founder
- Growth has made work less coherent
- Responsibility exists without enough authority
- Meetings multiply while important questions remain unresolved
- Stated values and daily incentives have drifted apart
- A new tool, structure, or senior hire hasn't changed the underlying pattern
These may appear to be separate problems. Often, they're expressions of the same underlying system.
An organisational seeing and design practice
Shikumi (仕組み) is a Japanese word for the underlying structure: the mechanism, the architecture beneath the architecture. Ethnographic observation is part of how Shikumi reads that structure. It isn't the whole of what the practice does.
How it actually works
Not the org chart version. How decisions, roles, and information actually move day to day.
What's underneath
The pattern or constraint sitting beneath the visible problem, the one the symptoms keep pointing back to.
What restores coherence
Structures built to fit what the organisation is becoming, then tended as they take root.
Before artificial intelligence, organisational intelligence
AI can accelerate work, but speed is not the same as progress. When goals are unclear, knowledge is fragmented, and decision rights are unresolved, AI often reproduces the confusion more efficiently.
Shikumi helps organisations strengthen the foundations AI depends on: clear processes, usable knowledge, thoughtful governance, defined accountability and reliable feedback loops. And most importantly, ask a lot of questions before putting on the AI lens.
Not sure which of these is right for you, or whether Shikumi's a fit at all? Take the two-minute fit check first.
Take the fit checkThree ways to work together
Shikumi works with organisations at moments when their existing way of operating no longer fits what they're becoming: beginnings, growth, leadership transition, strategic change, or recurring operational friction.
The Field Study
See what is actually happening before deciding what to change.
An embedded organisational enquiry examining decisions, roles, workflows, meetings, information, and informal patterns. Concludes with a clear account of the underlying system, its central constraints, and the choices now facing the organisation.
Useful when: growth has created complexity, the same problem keeps returning, or an important intervention needs to be designed well.
Start a conversationSeeing Sessions
Think through one consequential question.
A focused advisory engagement for a founder or leader facing a decision that would benefit from an independent, systems-oriented view.
Useful when: the question is bounded, the stakes are meaningful, and a full organisational study isn't necessary.
Start a conversationThe Long View
Help a change take root.
Continuing advisory support after a diagnosis, redesign, or leadership transition: observing how change lands, identifying unintended effects, and adjusting the supporting systems over time.
Useful when: founders steering sustained change over months, not weeks.
Start a conversationThe question beneath the question
Organisations rarely arrive with the wrong question. They usually arrive with one part of a larger pattern.
Shikumi works beneath the immediate brief—examining how strategy, structures, behaviours and relationships interact. This deeper view often changes both the question and the work that follows.
The challenge was not simply a product launch. The venture required a different operating model, new customer behaviours and coordination across the existing business.
Designed the venture strategy, operating roadmap and helped launch Knox India.
Capital was only one condition. The larger question was whether the organisation had the capabilities, governance and operating model needed to become a venture builder.
Conducted the research and developed the investment thesis.
The positioning problem reflected a wider disconnect between growth ambitions, organisational capabilities, customer definition and routes to market.
Developed the positioning and go-to-market strategy.
The transition affected more than the role at the top. Authority, institutional knowledge, relationships and decision-making all needed to move without creating a vacuum.
Provided ongoing strategic and operational advice throughout the transition.
We look for relationships rather than isolated problems: where strategy and execution have separated, where formal structures differ from how work really happens, and where recurring friction points to a deeper pattern.
The aim is to understand the system deeply enough to make the response simpler, more precise and more human.
The Practice of Attention
Attention is not passive observation. It's a disciplined movement between distance and proximity, between what people say and what structures repeatedly produce. Four moves, carried over from the studio, describe how it works.
See the shape, not the detail
Step back until the specifics blur and the underlying structure appears. The method works by moving between distance and proximity, not choosing one.
Read what's absent
The role that's unstaffed, the meeting that never happens, the question nobody asks. Absence carries as much information as presence.
Find the edges
Truth tends to sit where two things rub against each other: old process against new tool, stated value against actual incentive.
Find the sketch beneath
Every organisation still carries the original intent it was built on, faintly visible under everything drawn on top of it since.
Read the patterns underneath how things actually move.
One short, honest reading, from two possible angles: your organisation, or you as a leader. No score. No diagnosis. Just language for the shape you're already inside.
Organization
Discover the operating pattern shaping your organisation.
Take the reading →Leader
Discover the pattern you're running, and how it shapes what's around you.
Take the reading →Ireene J Karthik
Twenty years spent watching how organisations actually behave, before Shikumi ever had a name for it.
That includes P&L leadership across multiple geographies at Infosys BPM, delivering operations for insurance and reinsurance clients including Chubb, Gen Re, Royal & Sun Alliance, and Aon, and earlier roles at Deloitte, alongside Stanford Ignite and an executive programme at IIM Ahmedabad.
ireene is also a visual artist, with studio access at Wimbledon Art Studios. The studio moves at the centre of the Practice of Attention (squinting, negative space, contrast, underdrawing) aren't decorative metaphors. They're part of how she's learned to see.
Both practices begin with the same question: what is really here?