The name comes from Walt Disney Imagineering, which I adore. Walt took hard, technical engineering and put it in a room with artists and storytellers, and together they built experiences people still queue for. Imagineering is imagination meeting engineering. Communigage is communication meeting engagement, and we do exactly what Walt's team did, swapping the engineering for psychology.

Walt matters for another reason too. He understood how people's brains respond to a story long before anyone had the research to explain it, and a great deal of what we now back up with peer-reviewed papers, he was doing by instinct in the 1950s.

I recognise that, because I spent the first chunk of my career doing it by instinct too.

I started in theatre as a production manager. The job is all about taking something that only exists on a page, a plan or a drawing, and making it real enough to move an audience sitting in the dark.

Then, when I had to grow up and get a proper job, I was living in Bristol, where recruitment and headhunting were everywhere, and the only qualification it asked for was a degree. Mine is in music, which is about as useful in the business world as you'd imagine, but it counted!

From there I went in-house, which put me inside an HR team despite being the least HR-ish person you're ever likely to meet. That grew into running the whole people experience: attracting the right people, assessment, onboarding and induction, then keeping them happy once they'd arrived, which brought internal comms and EDI along with it.

The real turning point came at a business with two workforces, one employed and one self-employed. You can't tell self-employed people what to do, as a string of court cases involving Uber and friends will confirm. You have to make them want to do it. That's a marketing challenge, and it sent me deep into the psychology of why brains respond the way they do. I'm slightly neurosparkly and have always been very tuned in to people's moods and reactions, so I'd picked up a lot of it by feel. Reading the research and finding out why it worked was enormously satisfying, and made me only slightly smug.

Communigage arrived in 2023, courtesy of a voluntary redundancy and some fairly clear-eyed maths. My daughter was a year away from her first school summer holiday, and I'd sat in enough offices listening to other mums dreading the summer and the cost of paying someone else to spend it with their children. I wanted to be with her in the holidays and still do work that mattered, and starting that year gave me twelve months to make it work.

The gap I saw was in how businesses explain themselves. Whether they're selling to customers, recruiting candidates or pitching to investors, most are handed the usual marketing and sales techniques and asked to take them on faith. I wanted to show them why things work: this is how brains build trust, here's the research, and here's what happened when other businesses did it. Living just outside Cambridge, I'm surrounded by spin-outs full of brilliant people who can invent extraordinary things and would rather do almost anything than stand on a stage and talk about them. People who appreciate rigour deserve an approach built on it, whether we do the talking for them, do it alongside them or teach them how.

That's still what we do. We use the science of how people think to build stories that get businesses chosen, and we always show our working ;-)

Here are the people who make it happen.