About Us
Who we are = how we work
About October Systems
October Systems is a consultancy based in the east end of Toronto, Canada, anchored by Spencer Beacock, an expert service designer with 15 years of experience in driving better experiences and outcomes for people and organizations.
We keep things small because it lets us meet you where you’re at, rather than trying to sell you more than you need. Need a forward-operating expert practitioner who can slot into an existing project and shepherd it to success? Great. Want a broader team to drive end-to-end project delivery? We can do that. Keen to meet for an hour once a month to get an outside perspective? Perfect.
In order to make this work, we’ve built an extended roster of expert practitioners who we can call on when we need to work a bit bigger, including designers, researchers, data wizards, and storytellers.
How We Work
It’s a big tent, not a black box
We work in a spirit of warm inclusivity, inviting stakeholders to ride along with us wherever they have capacity and interest. Our position is that momentum around good outcomes doesn’t start when we hand over the final deliverable, but instead is built by creating true believers along the way.
It’s sleeves up, not buttoned down
We’re not afraid to joyfully roll up our sleeves and dig into the messy muck of whatever problem you find yourself in, regardless of whether it falls neatly within our disciplinary boundaries. Need us to read a 100-page manual for an end-of-life software platform in order to imagine a radical new future? Sure. Want us to hand out pamphlets to patients as part of a pilot, while observing their reactions? We’re there. We’re here to drive impact, not just deliverables.
It’s curiosity first, not frameworks
Folks ask us to share our templates and frameworks all the time, and our answer is always “sure, but we rebuild from scratch every time.” This might not be optimally efficient for a consulting firm, but it’s the best way we know of simultaneously bringing to bear our deep toolbox and also ensuring that we’re led by curiosity, not the 2x2 we’ve used 1000 times. It’s like jazz: we know the rules super well, and this lets us improvise our way towards the brilliantly unexpected.
It’s systems+people, not systems>people
Our approach is firmly grounded in both human centred design and systems thinking. It’s easy to fall into the trap of prioritizing one over the other, but great services balance both. You can expect to hear us share rich insights about a customer’s inner life in one breath before talking gritty details of your system architecture diagram in the next… and then tying them together in the third.
About Spencer
Spencer Beacock has been working as a designer, researcher, and strategist for 15 years.
He’s worked in boutique consultancies, academia, and government agencies to reduce social isolation for older adults, improve mental wellbeing for students, make it easier for Canadians to access healthcare and financial services, prototype new ways of interacting through voice and chatbots, develop system-sensitive policy for energy transition, and more. He was part of the team that won the 2017 Global Service Design Award for “Best Commercial Project” for his work on mobile plan renewal journeys.
He has a degree in Sociology from the University of Toronto, and has lived in Toronto ever since (except for a year in Edmonton) with his partner, two kids, and a rascally dog.