We love people in all their messy, contradictory glory. We study them relentlessly - from the Inside Out.
Because the quality of what we build depends on how well we understand the people we're building for.
The real question in innovation isn't "how do we move faster?" It's "how do we know we're solving the right problem?" And that's where we come in. We ask the right questions to design intentionally – at the intersection of technology, culture and impact.
Designing for human impact, social responsibility and commercial success takes a different kind of thinking. We go deep into the human experience, distilling complexity into a new way of seeing an old problem. And help you build from there.
ETHOS & SERVICES
Every project starts with a good conversation. From there, we usually move through three phases.
Frame
We map the assumptions at play, the forces shaping behaviour, the pertinent questions hidden in a brief.
Investigate
We design the approach to fit the right question; drawing on the right mix of methods, disciplines and minds for the brief.
Translate
We turn what we've found into action: A report, an article, a set of design principles, or a working session your team can keep building from.
Inside Out works as a collective. Bringing in the people whose skills suit the brief. More minds are better than one.
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Question Audit
For when you suspect you're solving the wrong problem. A focused conversation to pressure-test your brief, reframe the challenge, and find the sharper question underneath.
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Practice Audit
For when you have data, insight and strategy — but they're not connecting. A structured review of what you already know, and a clear view of where to go from here.
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Strategic Foresight
For the hard question you're turning over but can't yet see clearly. Deep anthropological and strategic thinking on a single challenge — AI, cultural change, systemic shifts.
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Bespoke Projects
For complex challenges that need depth, not shortcuts. Research, transformation, design — shaped entirely around the question, not a pre-set methodology.
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InsideOut Partnership
For organisations in it for the long game. An ongoing thinking partnership — embedding better practice, navigating cultural change, holding the bigger picture as things evolve.
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Speaking & Conversations
Keynotes, panels, podcasts.
On technology, human behaviour and culture. Open to collaborations.
CASE STUDIES
CONFIDENTIAL CLIENT:
MAJOR CHALLENGER BANK
From MVP Chaos
to AI-Ready Operations
AI & OPS TRANSFORMATION | FINTECH
A decade of MVP-speed growth had left the bank’s operations tangled — agents juggling five systems per call, no visibility for leadership, with growth absorbed by headcount. The real barrier wasn't procedural but systemic: a team wired to move fast needed permission to slow down first. Working directly with agents, we mapped services from the ground up and co-designed the shared services architecture before building it, giving the bank the foundations to move from reactive growth to AI-first operations.
Beyond the Bot: Not Just Another
EdTech Tool
AI PRODUCT DESIGN | EDTECT
DeepMind commissioned research to refine a chatbot for Experience AI, their classroom AI-literacy platform. But, fieldwork revealed teachers wanted more than a working tool, they wanted something that could transform their practice. The work delivered immediate refinements alongside a clear MVP vision: real-time classroom support, resource generation, a sandbox for student AI use. A focused brief that opened into a longer-term platform direction.
Making Sense of Forces Reshaping Business
STRATEGIC FORESIGHT | DIGITAL & TECH INNOVATION
Senior leaders don't need more trend reports. They need specific and intelligent analysis that helps them act. Working with Future Strategy Club, we developed a series of strategic foresight reports combining philosophical rigour with commercial insight, diagnosing not just what's shifting but why, and what to do about it. Published work includes The Power of Social: Influence and ROI in the Attention Economy and CX in the Age of AI: Agents, AR and the Coming Revolution, launched alongside keynote speeches and now being adopted by brand leaders navigating unprecedented change.
CONFIDENTIAL CLIENT:
MAJOR TECHNOLOGY BRAND
Research That Changed How We Talk About
Social Media
YOUTH & SOCIAL MEDIA | POLICY & PRODUCT DESIGN
A major tech brand needed to understand the texture of young people's lives, and where the dominant narrative was anti-tech parent panic, our immersive, youth-centric research told a more honest story — a relationship with technology that was sophisticated, ambivalent, and nothing like public discourse suggested. Findings shaped the company's policy, product and comms work, and later fed into national policy conversations in the US and UK.
Building The Capability to Learn
CAPABILITY BUILDING | CHARITY & SOCIAL IMPACT
The Royal Countryside Fund needed more than a research project, they needed to become an organisation that learns. Embedding user-centred design into how they design services, evaluate impact and improve. A long-term thinking and practical partnership developed their Theory of Change and impact evaluation framework, and now supports ongoing transformation — upskilling staff, building shared service frameworks, and embedding human-centred design and evaluation across the organisation.
When Burnout Isn’t the
Whole Story
SYSTEM CHANGE | INDUSTRY TRANSFORMATION
The veterinary profession's mental health crisis had been framed as a personal resilience problem, but our EU-wide research — I led, as part of a Future Strategy Club project — told a different story: an interconnected web of workplace culture, educational pipelines, regulatory burden and economic precarity that individual interventions alone couldn't touch. The widely shared white paper ‘Transforming Veterinary Practice for the 21st Century’ sparked industry-wide dialogue, was taken to conferences across the sector and helped shift the conversation from burnout as a personal failing to a structural condition.
ABOUT ME
Connie Flude
Mother. Cyclist. Podcast listener. Lover of ideas and the people who carry them. And Founder of Inside Out.
I’m a systems thinker, drawn to the hard questions that resist easy answers. An award-winning researcher and strategist with roots in anthropology —with an MPhil from Cambridge, and fifteen years' experience across tech, government and the charitable sectors. I’m now an inaugural Better Futures Foundation fellow, developing a philosophical lens on how technology can be intentionally designed for human flourishing and commercial success.
My work centres on what it means to be human in the age of AI — how technology is reshaping how we understand ourselves, relate to each other and behave in the world around us. The everyday decisions that feel small, but add up to civilisational change at scale.
I work with organisations to navigate these shifts and design intentionally —holding multiple registers at once: micro and macro, philosophical and commercial, lived experience and structural critique.
Read what I'm thinking now in my newsletter: Being Human in the Age of AI — on Substack and LinkedIn.
