Sprowt
Helping businesses understand what's really going on and what it means for what they do next.
Carly Osman
Founder of Sprowt | Host of Why Aren't We Talking About This? | Award-winning strategist
People. Behaviour. And what's really going on underneath.
The point of view
I've spent my career trying to understand people.
What they do. Why they do it. What they say. What they don't say. What changes before anyone has really noticed it's changing.
Increasingly, I'm most interested in the bit we can't see.
The conversations happening privately. The contradictions in how we behave. The things people feel but don't have language for yet. The assumptions that become so accepted nobody remembers to question them.
That's the thread running through pretty much everything I do.
The Underneath
Researching the conversations and behavioural shifts happening underneath people's lives.
Why Aren't We Talking About This?
Having the conversations we're often very good at avoiding altogether.
Talks that get underneath things.
Keynotes
My talks combine original research, human stories, cultural observation and more than two decades spent trying to understand why people and businesses behave the way they do.
No neat list of five trends everyone has already heard.
The point is to make a room question something it walked in believing.
What we're missing about people.
What businesses think they know.
What happens to the way we behave as organisations grow.
01 / People + behaviour
The Underneath
What happens when the things your business knows stop being true.
Businesses accumulate knowledge.
We know our customer. We know why they choose us. We know our competitors. We know how our category works. We know where the opportunity is.
Except markets move. Customers change. Categories get rewritten. And somewhere along the way, things that were once true can quietly become assumptions nobody thinks to question.
That's when businesses can become incredibly good at solving a problem without stopping to ask whether it's still the right problem.
This talk is about getting outside the business and looking back in.
What has actually changed? What's still true? What isn't? What are your customers doing that doesn't quite fit the story you've been telling yourselves? And what might you discover if you went looking for what you don't already know?
For leadership teams navigating growth, transformation, changing customers or the slightly uncomfortable feeling that what got you here might not get you there.
What is really going on here?
02 / Business + behaviour
Think like a start-up
What established businesses can learn from the behaviours they had before they knew all the answers.
There are lots of things established businesses have that start-ups would kill for.
Customers. Money. Experience. Data. People. Processes. Reputation.
But somewhere along the way, they can also lose some of the behaviours that helped them grow in the first place.
Curiosity gets replaced by certainty. Experimentation becomes a business case. Decisions acquire more meetings, more layers and more people who need to agree. Being wrong gets riskier. Getting close to customers becomes somebody's department.
Start-ups don't have the luxury of certainty.
They have to ask questions. Test things. Get close to people. Make decisions without having every answer. Notice when something isn't working and change it.
Thinking like a start-up isn't about pretending you're still one.
It's about asking which of those behaviours are worth getting back.
What have you stopped questioning? Where has process replaced curiosity? What takes six months now that once took six days? When did avoiding being wrong become more important than finding out what's right?
And what could happen if you combined everything you've learned from growing up with some of the behaviours you had before you did?
Experience is incredibly valuable. Until it stops you being curious.
For established businesses and leadership teams navigating growth, transformation, innovation or the creeping realisation that getting bigger has also made some things harder.
Then there are the things we probably need to talk about.
The conversations that make people shuffle slightly in their seats.
The ones we have with our closest friends but rarely on a conference stage.
The questions everyone is thinking but nobody has been quite brave enough to put on the agenda.
Those might be the most interesting ones of all.
Live on stage
Why Aren't We Talking About This?
Some conversations are too interesting to leave to the podcast studio.
Sex. Money. Ageing. Ambition. Bodies. Relationships. Failure. Identity. Power.
The things we're frightened to admit we want. The things we're all experiencing but somehow still not talking about.
Why Aren't We Talking About This? Live takes my podcast onto the stage.
Every conversation starts with something people already feel but haven't quite been able to name — and then goes underneath it.
No polished answers, no carefully rehearsed talking points and most of all, no pretending everyone has it figured out.
Just a properly human conversation about the thing everyone in the room is suddenly relieved somebody else brought up.
The subject can be built around the event, the audience or the uncomfortable conversation sitting underneath its theme.
It can be provocative, it can be funny and it will most likely get a bit uncomfortable.
Looking for a podcast guest?
I'm always up for a conversation that goes somewhere interesting.
I join podcasts to talk about human behaviour, what's changing underneath people's lives, what businesses think they know about their customers, what established organisations can learn from start-ups, and the uncomfortable things we're often much better at thinking than saying out loud.
I'm particularly interested in conversations where nobody quite knows where they'll end up.
Some places we could start
- The Underneath — what we're missing when we only look at what people do, and what happens when the things businesses think they know stop being true.
- Think like a start-up — what established businesses lose as they grow, and which behaviours are worth getting back.
- The things we don't say out loud — the human conversations and behavioural shifts hiding in plain sight.
Professionally nosy
About
I'm Carly.
I'm the founder of Sprowt. I work with businesses at an inflection point — when what got them here won't necessarily get them where they want to go next.
I'm also the host of Why Aren't We Talking About This?, a podcast about people, behaviour and the things we don't say out loud, and creator of The Underneath, an ongoing research project exploring what's really going on underneath people's lives.
Whether I'm looking at a business or a person, I'm interested in essentially the same thing:
What's really going on here?
I was named Creative Marketer of the Year 2025 by Global Women in Marketing and have spent more than two decades working with businesses and brands trying to better understand people.
But mostly, I'm nosy.
I ask a lot of questions.
Particularly the ones we're apparently not supposed to ask.
A few reasons to trust me with a microphone.
Award
Creative Marketer of the Year 2025
Global Women in Marketing
Seen / heard at
Ideas Fest
Department for Business and Trade
Want Carly on your stage?
Whether you want to understand what's changing underneath people's lives, challenge what your business thinks it knows, rethink how your organisation behaves as it grows or have the conversation everybody else has been avoiding, let's talk.
carly@sprowt.ukWant to bring Why Aren't We Talking About This? Live to your event?
Tell me what nobody at your event is talking about.