Make Critical Paths Guidance Your Secret Weapon
At Critical Paths, we’re not your typical consultants with cookie-cutter playbooks. We know the best solutions come from understanding people. Founded by an applied anthropologist, we help businesses, organizations, and communities create strategies that actually work in real life, not just on paper. We get it—real-life is messy. Applied anthropologists are uniquely trained to understand real human behavior and dig deep into all its creative, wonderful chaos to find solutions that actually work.
The Critical Paths Advantage: Guidance for Every Journey
We don’t just observe people—we partner with businesses, organizations, and communities to create real-world solutions that are as practical as they are people-focused. No guesswork. No off-the-shelf fixes. Just deep insights, co-designed strategies, and outcomes that actually work in everyday environments.
Need to boost your cybersecurity training? We’ll find the hidden habits, confusion points, and workarounds your team actually uses—then build training they’ll remember and apply.
Launching a new app or platform? We’ll help design it with real users in mind, so it feels intuitive, not frustrating.
Rolling out new workplace policies? We’ll dig into your organizational culture to make sure the rollout fits your people, not just some LinkedIn playbook.
By focusing on actual human behavior, cultural dynamics, and collaborative design, we’ll uncover insights that lead to smarter, more effective, and more sustainable outcomes.
Why Are Critical Paths Applied Anthropologists So Effective?
We Watch for What People Do, Not What They Say They Do
We get it - people are complicated. Sometimes even they aren’t concious of their habits or ways of thinking. We learn how people actually think, work, and mess up along the way. We look for the real-world behaviors behind the policy screens—because seeing is understanding.
Example: A company thinks everyone is following security protocol… but we observe someone’s password on a Post-it that’s stuck to their monitor. Understandable solution for losing passwords? Absolutely. An active risk to organizational security? Yup. Let us help you find a way people can actually use and keep your risk low.
We Decode Human Culture
Every company, team, or community has its own rules or subculture which determine the way that things are done-or not done-in those groups. We study those rules (spoken and unspoken) and incorporate them into our recommendations so that our strategies actually make sense for you.
Example: Trying to apply the same training in both a laid-back startup and a high-pressure healthcare org? It’s simply not going to work. We tailor the experience to your unique culture to meet the needs of your people. Because when the individual’s needs are met, the company prospers.
We Make Recommendations You Can Actually Use
We’re not here to deliver boring reports with a list of recommendations that don’t suit your needs. We turn our findings into useful recommendations for next steps that help people understand what’s going on and how to improve it.
Example: Instead of simply telling you, “The market is saturated for this type of app,” we’ll say:
“Right now we’re seeing a lot of sucessful apps who also provide the services that you’d like to offer. However, when talking with prospective users, we heard that they would love to be able to X and Y. We suggest that a pivot to X would not only fulfill user needs, but also fit within your budget and other current resources.”
We don’t swoop in, drop some jargon, and disappear. We work alongside your team to co-create solutions that are grounded in your actual needs*.
Example: Designing a new workflow? We prototype, test with your team, fix what doesn’t work, and level up together until it feels just right.
Critical Paths is Committed to Positive, Ethical Impact
Critical Paths strives to foster a climate of purposeful inclusion of all people. We value the diversity of racial and cultural identity and background, nationality, sexual and affectional orientation, gender identity and its expression, religious background and belief, marital status, family structure, age, mental and physical health and ability, political perspective, and educational and class status. Because of this, we never disclose this information to anyone you have not explicitly approved in writing. We are dedicated to making a positive impact through our work by adhering to the highest ethical standards and best practices established by the Society for Applied Anthropology Statement of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities.