

Growing plants and people
Growing plants isn’t all that different to growing people. It all starts with listening, understanding their unique strengths and finding or shaping the environments in which they’ll thrive.
Growing plants isn’t all that different to growing people. It all starts with listening, understanding their unique strengths and finding or shaping the environments in which they’ll thrive.
At Cogent, we’ve helped businesses grow from pre-seed to scale-up and beyond. We’ve partnered with founders, and even founded businesses ourselves. We know what it takes to grow a business at each of those critical early stages. And, instead of keeping that to ourselves, we’ve done what Cogent does best, created something so scaling business can benefit.
It’s been interesting to watch the ways in which software companies are trying to bridge the conceptual and language gaps of designers and developers. There are frameworks, design systems, collaboration tools and so on that are ‘trying to connect designers and developers in a better way’. And, whilst I use these tools regularly, none of them come close to doing the actual work of listening and understanding the needs of ‘the other’.
Back in March, as the Covid-19 pandemic was just getting a foothold around the globe, Cogent embarked on a months-long consultancy project with Square’s Cash App.
It’s pretty obvious but I’ll say it out loud – the more we understand about a problem, the more likely it is we’ll make better decisions about how to solve it.
Supposed “soft skills” are now rightly being branded “core skills” and are proving invaluable in life and at work
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which our offices stand and we pay our respects to elders past and present. We acknowledge the sorrow of the stolen generations and the impacts of colonisation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We also recognise the resilience, strength and pride of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
We are inspired by Aboriginal and Torres Strait entrepreneurs, past and present.
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