DORIS Research

09/16/2026

If someone from DORIS ever asks you for 30 minutes, here's what actually happens.

We ask about your day. Where you go, what gets in your way, what you've stopped bothering to report because nothing came of it last time. There's no right answer, and there's no test. You can say the thing you'd never put in a survey.

Most people are surprised by how ordinary it feels, and by how fast it goes.

Then comes the part you don't see. We sit with dozens of those conversations and look for what keeps repeating. One person's frustration is a story. Forty people describing the same workaround is something leadership can act on.

If you've ever been interviewed for a research project — ours or anyone else's — did anything change afterward?

09/08/2026

Fourteen years ago, DORIS was a desk in another company's building in downtown Indianapolis. Now we have a beautiful space with big windows and natural light.

Fourteen years later, we sit with people in schools, city offices, plants, parishes, and clinics, and we ask what their day is actually like. Sometimes that's a question about their space. Increasingly it's a question about how people want to engage with each other. Then we help the people in charge see it clearly enough to decide something.

The rest of the photos are the shorthand version: post-it ideation, prototyping, reports, and the eight of us as we look now.

Thank you to the organizations that trusted us with the complicated stuff.

P.S. Thursday's Brain Candy for Business is about the small physical things that hold a team's culture, including our post-it quote wall. Worth a read if these photos made you look around your own office in a new way.

09/02/2026

The debate continues over where people should work. Remote, in-office, hybrid, back-to-the-office-because-a-CEO-said-so.

In Indianapolis and beyond, we've watched organizations try every version of this. What we keep finding is that the location question is usually a distraction from the real one.

Do your people feel like they belong where they are?

That's harder to mandate. It's also what actually determines whether the work gets done and the team stays together.

What's your organization doing to build belonging — not just put bodies in seats?

08/27/2026

Someone on our team recently drop-kicked a stuffed dinosaur across the office. It was safer than kicking the printer.

We were up against a deadline, days of gathering and analyzing data behind us, and the last thing standing between the work and the client was a machine that decides on its own whether cardstock counts as food.

It is funny in the retelling, and it is also data. When we study how people experience their workplaces, the thing they bring up is rarely the big strategic problem. It is the printer, the badge reader that works for everybody else, and the conference room where the audio drops every single time. Small, constant, and never on anyone's project list because no one item is big enough to own.

Add them up, and you get how people feel about working somewhere.

08/20/2026

Nobody takes a first-day-of-work photo in the fall.

Which is a shame, because a lot of us come back from summer carrying the same things a seventh grader does: a slightly different sense of who we are, opinions about where we want to sit, and a quiet hope that this year goes better than last.

Back to School(ish) is the topic of our latest Brain Candy for Business. It’s about what the fall reset does to people at work, and why the version organizations design usually doesn’t stick.

Link in comments if you want the whole thing.

What’s the one thing you’d change about your work setup this fall?

08/20/2026

The meeting ended at 2:00. Nobody stood up.

You've seen this. Everybody's agenda item is done, and the chairs stop rolling, and two people are already deep in a side conversation. Someone leans back with a snack to see who else stays. The person who said the least all hour finally leans forward: "I've been thinking about…"

Our operations manager Tab called it grown-up recess, and once she named it we couldn't stop noticing it. Ideas hop between projects because nobody's worried about staying on topic. The quiet person talks. The one who seemed checked out comes alive the second there's no agenda.

Nobody schedules that, which is why calendars keep squeezing it out.

Does your workday have enough recess? Tab wrote the whole thing up in Brain Candy for Business. Let us know if you want the link!

08/13/2026

The 21st IndyFringe Festival opens this week, and two of our people are in it.

Maria Meschi is on stage, sharpening the storytelling skills that help her translate findings into a-ha moments. Katie Angel is doing what she does at DORIS, just in a theater: making sure the whole thing runs.

We've noticed over the years that the people who are good at this work tend to be good at something else too. Actors are trained listeners. Stage managers hold forty moving parts in their head without dropping one. Those are the skills the work actually runs on.

If you're in Indy over the next two weeks, go see something. Fringe is at its best when the room is full.

What are you seeing this year? Tell us what to put on the list.

The 2026 IndyFringe Festival is BackAugust 13 - 23 | Presented by Everwise Credit Union The IndyFringe Festival is Indiana's largest performing arts festival! A 12 day celebration of theatre, comedy, music, magic and more, featuring 63 acts from across the country and nearly 300 performances where p...

08/05/2026

A stack of survey numbers can say one thing, and a room full of interviews can say something else. Someone has to reconcile both to see what's really going on.
At DORIS, that's part of Sam Theising's job.

As a Research Associate, Sam:
— Reads the numbers for the pattern, then checks it against what people are telling us directly
— Works with our qualitative researchers to see where the survey data and the interviews line up
— Helps weave the two together into one story, instead of a numbers report and a stories report that live in separate folders

That's what makes DORIS's research whole, and it's Sam's job to keep it that way.

07/31/2026

Would you use a gym membership if it were free? Most of us say yes without thinking twice.

Are you using the one you're already paying for?

That's the gap we watch for in our work. People are genuinely not very good at predicting what they'll do in the future — we say yes to good intentions, and then life happens. So when we're trying to understand how people really experience a workplace, a service, or a community space, we don't ask what they think they'd do. We ask what they're actually doing today.

What people do right now tells us more than what they hope they'll do later.
What's something you meant to start, or stop, doing that never quite stuck? We won't judge. We've got a junk drawer full of good intentions too.

07/23/2026

Just got back from a working session with a client, and we’re still buzzing from it.

Here's a thing that happens more often than you'd think: we present findings from a research project, and the room goes quiet in the best way. People start processing out loud. One leader kept saying, "Wait, I don't understand why this is…" — and before I could even finish a sentence, it clicked. "Oh. Oh, that makes so much sense." Over and over.

At one point, a leader said, almost in disbelief, "I can't believe you got all of this just from what you did."

Which is a lovely compliment. It's also, well…that's the job. That's what good research is supposed to do—take the messy, complicated reality people are living every day and hand it back to them in a way that finally makes sense.

The best moment came near the end, when one of them said, “I think you're going to guide us where we need to go."

That's the whole thing right there. Not that we have all the answers, but that we can help a team see their own situation clearly enough to find them.

Has a fresh set of eyes ever helped you finally see something about your own team or organization that was hiding in plain sight?