What is Pattern and Flow?
Pattern and Flow works with practitioners and organizations operating at the limits of what planning can accomplish.
We don't sell certainty. We sell epistemological honesty.
If you need a five-year roadmap, hire a strategy firm. If you need to understand why your roadmaps keep failing despite competent execution, and you're ready to question whether roadmaps are the right tool for your problem, we should talk.
Complexity consulting for organizations that have outgrown planning.
Sense-making and facilitation for sustained organizational uncertainty.
Discover our services
Single Engagement Model
Pre-work: Stakeholder interviews, problem framing assessment
2-day intensive facilitation using warm data protocols
Post-work: Documentation and sense-making synthesis
Optional: Follow-up sessions at 30/60/90 days
Multi-Engagement Model
Monthly facilitation sessions
Between-session support for emerging dynamics
Capacity building for internal facilitators
Documentation of patterns and insights
Is integration destroying what made your acquisition valuable? Transformation initiatives dying after translation into portfolio items? Performance systems that can't recognize the work that matters?
We help you see what your current systems prevent you from seeing.
What we offer:
Cynefin-based diagnostic: Which problems are you treating as ordered when they're complex?
Warm data labs with leadership teams to surface relational context erased by reporting requirements
System design that enables distributed decision-making without prescribing outcomes
Engagement: 2-4 week diagnostic or 3-6 month facilitated inquiry Investment: $15K-100K depending on scope
Core Talk: "When Planning Becomes Violence"
Organizational synchronization as power move
How optimization eliminates emergence
Alternative approaches for complex domains
60-90 minute keynote format
Workshop: "Complexity Methods for Practitioners"
Cynefin framework application
Warm data practice introduction
Wicked problem recognition
Half-day or full-day format
Training: "Designing Systems for Emergence"
Governance frameworks enabling distributed decision-making
Information architecture preserving context
Decision protocols for uncertainty
2-day intensive format
Bi-weekly 90-minute sessions
Pattern recognition for where interventions have become constraints
Epistemological supervision (borrowed from clinical supervision model)
Support for holding uncertainty without premature resolution
Access to between-session support for acute decision points
Focus Areas:
Recognizing when you can't see the system because you're trying to control it
Navigating gap between theoretical understanding and enacted practice
Working with emergence when organizational structures demand prediction
Maintaining epistemological honesty under pressure for certainty
What makes Pattern & Flow different?
Most consultants sell certainty. We acknowledge we're caught inside the systems we're trying to help you see.
Our positioning:
15+ years delivering transformation outcomes ($650K documented cost savings, successful merger navigation)
Certified in warm data facilitation, Cynefin sense-making, wicked problem solving
Currently pursuing advanced study in systems science—not because we lack methods, but because practicing them revealed questions certification alone can't answer
What this means for you: You get someone who bridges academic theory and delivered results. Who won't pretend to stand outside the complexity. Who models what it looks like to practice systems thinking while caught inside systems.
We work with:
Organizations post-merger/acquisition experiencing emergence loss
Transformation leaders whose methods suddenly stopped working
Mission-driven organizations facing fundamental strategic uncertainty
Technology companies where rapid scaling is breaking informal coordination
Erika Sajdak brings 15 years of transformation practice across education, insurance, legal technology, and real estate. As Director of Strategic Initiatives at NWEA, she guided program management through a major acquisition while delivering $650K in cost savings through process optimization.
Her complexity consulting practice emerged from recognizing limits of conventional transformation methods—first in organizations that eliminated emergence through synchronization pressure, then in her own practice when expertise in structuring for outcomes prevented seeing what wanted to emerge.
Certifications:
Nora Bateson Warm Data Lab Facilitator
Cynefin Sense-Making Practitioner
Wicked Problem Solving (2021)
PMP, CSM, Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt
The work: Pattern and Flow helps practitioners and organizations recognize when planning has become violence, when optimization has eliminated resilience, when methods designed to reveal complexity have themselves become reductionist.
Contact Us
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