The reason your operation is slow is written down in your team's heads, not your org chart.
We get it on paper in 1 to 3 weeks. AI-led interviews with the people closest to the work, synthesized into a process map and a written report where every claim traces to a named quote or a specific system event.
Calls are consented, recorded with permission, and never shared outside the report. Your team's names stay inside your four walls.
Every claim in the report traces to a named quote or a specific system event.
Not consultants' intuition. Not a survey average. A sentence someone on your team actually said, or a movement the system actually logged. If we cannot trace it, it does not go in the report.
11 interviews surfaced 3 undocumented workarounds the org chart never showed.
“I keep a second spreadsheet because the system rounds wrong.”Billing, named participant. One of three quotes that explained a month-end delay leadership had blamed on headcount.
This block is an illustration of the kind of finding a Polanyi engagement produces. It is not a real client result. We do not publish client names, quotes, or data without written permission, and we will show you a redacted sample report on request.
The questions leadership can't answer from the org chart.
Talk to your team for you
AI conducts roughly fifteen-minute phone interviews with the operators, nurses, schedulers, billing staff, and engineers closest to the problem. No surveys, no group meetings, no calendar Tetris.
Extract the patterns
From the transcripts: the workarounds, the double-work, the undocumented rules, the systems running in parallel that nobody told leadership about. Tacit knowledge made legible.
Deliver an answer
A process map of how work actually runs, plus a written report ranking root causes and recommendations. Every finding traces back to its source quote or system event.
So the bottleneck stays invisible. The workaround your best person invented to survive a broken queue quietly hardens into how we do things here. And the fix you greenlight next quarter, built from the org chart instead of the work, solves a problem your team stopped having two years ago. The knowledge to prevent all of it already exists. It just lives in someone's head, unwritten.
Five steps. One to three weeks.
Scope the question
We work with leadership to define one primary question worth answering, and identify the six to fifteen people whose perspectives, taken together, will surface the answer.
AI-led interviews
Polanyi places a phone call to each interviewee, conducts a structured but conversational interview, records the transcript, and ends the call. Typically delivered over one to two weeks at the interviewees' convenience.
Real-time workflow analysis
Where leadership grants access, Polanyi observes the live workflow: system event streams, ticket and queue movement, handoffs across tools. The report then combines what people say happens with what the systems show happening. The discrepancies between the two are usually the most valuable findings.
Synthesize
We extract findings from each transcript, cross-reference them against the workflow data, and build a process map of how the work actually runs: friction points, bottlenecks, undocumented protocols, and the workarounds the team invented to compensate.
Deliver
A written report goes back to leadership with every claim grounded in a direct quote from a named participant or a specific event in the workflow data. Optional live debrief with the team that commissioned it.
We don't just hand you a diagnosis. We build the fix.
The report ranks root causes. For the ones AI can take off your team's plate (the double-work, the manual handoffs, the undocumented rules), we design and build AI automation that fits how the work actually runs: custom AI solutions validated against the same interviews and workflow data that surfaced the problem.
A two-person team building the tool we wanted to use.
Polanyi is named after Michael Polanyi, the philosopher who showed that the most important knowledge inside an organization is the kind nobody writes down. We know more than we can tell. Our work is to make that knowledge visible.
See what your operation is hiding in plain sight.
Start with a redacted sample report, or have us show you the first five questions we'd ask your team. No call required to begin.
Calls are consented, recorded with permission, and never shared outside the report.