Pakt

we are sensemakers. pakt is a holistic sensemaking agency.

We assist our clients in making sense of their complex problems by providing cultural insight and creative sensemaking. We assist our clients make sense of their target market's culture, how concepts and ideas are facing the future by providing cultural insight and creative strategy. We use approaches and disciplines such as semiotics, foresight studies, trend analysis, scenario planning, critical design, consumer psychology and cultural anthropology.

22/09/2026

AI can analyse a culture faster than any team by processing its language, images, and feeds to provide a fluent account of its apparent values. However, this account often omits crucial elements.

Cultural meaning systems are shaped as much by what is unspoken as by what is expressed—by codes so ingrained that insiders never write them down, and by those kept off-record. Especially in non-Western cultures, these missing parts are precisely what the training data lacks. The model doesn’t recognise their absence and fills the gaps based on the culture it was trained on, presenting its findings with the same confidence as other outputs.

This overconfidence poses a risk, as misinterpretations can appear polished and convincing early on, influencing decisions before dissenting views emerge. While AI can identify what a culture explicitly communicates, it still can’t discern what it leaves unsaid—often the critical factor behind many failures.

28/08/2026

BCF Keşif programında, Bozcaada’da gerçekleşecek yarım günlük özel bir keşif çalışmasına davetlisiniz. “Duyusal Zekâ: Duyusal Kodlar ve Tasarım Çalışması” buluşmasında; iki eşsiz coğrafi işaretli ürün olan Bodrum mandalini ve Bozcaada Çavuşu’nun dokularını, kokularını, tatlarını ve taşıdıkları kültürel kodları birlikte çözeceğiz.

Miksoloji, gastronomi ve tasarım dünyasından isimlerle ortak bir üretim sürecine girerek bu duyusal kodları yenilikçi fikirlere ve tasarıma dönüştürmenin ilk adımlarını atacağız. Duyusal zekânın bir ürüne, bir markaya ve bir adaya neler katabileceğini hep birlikte tecrübe edeceğiz.

Gastronomi, miksoloji, tarım ve ürün geliştirme alanında üreten, tasarlayan ve duyularına meraklı herkesi bu deneyime bekliyoruz! 🍊

Atölye Yürütücüsü : Serdar Paktin
180 dk
30 Katılımcı
Ücretsiz / Kayıtlı

🔗 Kayıt formu ve detaylar profilimizdeki bağlantıda !

14/07/2026

43% of Premier League players are Black, and 4% of managers are. The gap is not about performance. It is about the language through which performance gets read.

Researchers studying over 1,100 Premier League match highlights found a consistent pattern: darker-skinned players are praised for physical attributes — pace, power, strength. Lighter-skinned players for cognitive ones — composure, intelligence, leadership. The praise is genuine. It is also a ceiling. The words that describe a player determine which roles they are seen as natural candidates for, which development paths open, and which close.

The same mechanism runs inside strategy documents.

When a brand enters a market it does not yet understand, it reaches for the available code: high-growth, price-sensitive, digital-first. These feel like insights. They are category frames imported from elsewhere, applied before anyone has read what the market actually means — how the category functions locally, what it signals, who the real aspirational consumer is.

The frame determines what questions get formed. The questions determine what gets commissioned. By the time the misread is visible, it is already embedded in the brief and the strategy above it.

This is what interpretive risk looks like before it becomes a problem. Not bad data. Not bad intent. A frame applied with confidence to something it was never built to read.

Link to the research video in the comments. Research is done by Alex Doyle from LIS: The London Interdisciplinary School London Interdisciplinary School .

29/06/2026

OATSIDE posted a real CMO job listing in Vietnam. Over a hundred people applied with real CVs, in a hiring market that does not forgive being toyed with.

The role didn’t exist. It was a stunt to unveil a four-year-old “Chief Milk Officer.” The applicants found out when the brand did.

The backlash wasn’t about the joke. It was about what the joke cost people who took it seriously, in a market that does not separate marketing from the rest of professional life.

Oatside apologised, deleted the applicant data, and introduced a new internal rule: every regional campaign now goes through a market sensitivity review by someone outside marketing before it launches.

That review is the right idea. It also arrived in the wrong order. It exists now because the brand paid full price to learn it should have existed before the brief was approved.
Marketing cannot repair a decision already made. It can only manage how visible the damage is.

The fix wasn’t a better campaign. It was a function that should have sat upstream of the one that failed.

09/06/2026

From Rolls-Royce to Chanel, from Microsoft to NVIDIA — global companies are making a new kind of leadership appointment. The pattern is consistent across sectors: leaders selected for cross-cultural formation, the capacity to read environments, and the ability to make decisions under interpretive uncertainty.

The market is recognising something. The question is how organisations respond to it.

Most responses carry significant risk. The first is the premature appointment — the right leader, the wrong infrastructure. The organisation has not built the capacity to support what they bring, and the pressure to transform quickly falls entirely on one person. The second is expecting current leadership to acquire those competencies at pace. That is a slower failure with the same outcome.

The path that holds is different: building interpretive capacity into the organisation while transitioning leadership toward it. That requires outside intelligence — advisers who can read the environment the organisation is operating in while it builds the internal architecture to sustain that reading permanently.

This is where Pakt operates.

04/06/2026

On 18 May, Starbucks Korea launched a campaign, “Tank Day.”
Yet, somehow they missed that 18 May is the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising — the day South Korea’s military government deployed tanks against pro-democracy protesters in 1980. Hundreds were killed.

The campaign slogan “Thwack it on the table” activated a second code: the phrase associated with a 1987 police claim that a tortured student activist had merely died of shock when investigators hit the desk.

Neither of these is obscure knowledge. 18 May is South Korea’s most significant commemorative date. The language is forty years of political vocabulary. Starbucks has operated in Korea since 1999. Its local operator is a Korean conglomerate.

The question being asked is whether this was intentional. That is the wrong question.

The right question is: what function in the decision architecture was responsible for reading the environment the campaign would enter? Who, before the product was named, the date was set, and the slogan was written, was responsible for asking what those choices would mean in the system they were entering?

The answer, in most organisations, is no one. Not because the knowledge doesn’t exist. Because the mechanism doesn’t.

That is what failed here. Not sensitivity. Architecture.

DecisionArchitecture InterpretiveRisk

28/05/2026

The Directors & Boards piece calls cultural intelligence a board imperative.
That is the right call. It is also an incomplete one.

Calling something a board imperative creates pressure. It does not create mechanism. The standard board architecture still has no function for cultural intelligence — no committee mandate, no measurement system. There is no role at the table before capital is committed.

Pressure without mechanism produces the wrong kind of conversations. The risk gets discussed. It does not get assessed.

That is not a governance problem. It is a design problem. And the design can be changed.

[directorsandboards.com/board-issues/cultural-intelligence-a-strategic-board-imperative/]

19/05/2026

Most organisations describe the primary obstacle to AI adoption as a cultural challenge. Not a technology problem. Not a budget constraint. Cultural.

The word is correct. The diagnosis is not yet complete.
What is being called a cultural challenge is a breakdown of the meaning system at the most senior level of organisations. Boards are reading urgency. CEOs are reading instability. Two interpretive frames are operating on the same situation, and no function in the room is equipped to read the distance between them.

The consulting firms growing right now are those that can still do this work: direct engagement with the interpretive dimensions of a decision. The firms contracting — shedding advisory headcount at pace — are those that systematised interpretive judgment out of their delivery models to scale. That layer is now being automated. The capacity for interpretive work was removed long before the automation arrived.

The market has arrived at a problem it does not yet have a category for.

Sources: 2026 AI & Data Leadership Survey; McKinsey/KPMG/BCG restructuring data, May 2026

14/05/2026

reports that 40% of international assignments end prematurely and that cultural intelligence is the differentiator between those that succeed and those that don’t.

One expert quoted puts it precisely: “The issue behind a failed assignment may not be the people being sent, but the predictors being used in deciding who to send.”
True. And there is a question before the selection question.

Before deciding who to send, someone decided what to send them to do — which market to enter, what position to take within it, what the organisation’s strategy in that environment should be. That decision was built on assumptions about what the market is, what the category means there, how legitimacy is produced and how authority is understood.

Whether those assumptions were right or wrong had nothing to do with who was selected.

Cultural intelligence applied to individual selection improves the ex*****on of the strategy. Cultural intelligence applied upstream — before the strategy is set — determines whether the strategy was worth executing.

The article is right: most support happens downstream, often too late. The same is true of most strategic decisions. By the time someone culturally intelligent is selected to execute them, the interpretive frame has long since been locked.

12/05/2026

No procurement category. No budget line. No question in the RFP.

Not because the need doesn’t exist, but because the need has never been named at the category level.

The advisory landscape covers strategy, brand, and research. None of them sits at the moment before a decision is committed, when the interpretive assumptions that determine whether it holds can still be examined and corrected.

The absence of the category is not a market gap. It is the shape of the problem.

Read our latest article here 👉 https://paktsystems.substack.com/p/the-category-that-doesnt-exist-yet

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