Make thinking visible.
There is a limit to what you can hold in your head. Put the work, its people and its assumptions in one picture, then give yourself room to think.
Put it in front of you.
A sketch, a list or a map gives a thought somewhere to live. You can look again, move a part, and notice something you missed. Working with what is in front of you can change the effort a task requires.1
Ursa Major brings that idea to management: make the work visible enough to inspect, rearrange and question. The canvas supports your judgement.
Keep the whole.
Open the detail.
“Make a gate” is one useful idea. Cutting, welding, finishing and shipping are useful details. Which view you need depends on the question in front of you.
A process can open into a canvas of its own. Start broad, go deeper where something needs explaining, and return to the larger picture. Meaningful groups help us handle complex information; how we group it still matters.2
Connect the work
to the decision.
More sales mean work for somebody. A recurring meeting uses time. An improvement needs a place in the plan. Looking at these commitments together gives a decision something concrete to rest on.
Keep people, time and estimates close to the processes they describe. Examine the assumptions before accepting the result. A model is a way to ask better questions about a system; it is never the whole business.3
Notes and sources.
These ideas inform the design. The studies below do not evaluate or endorse Ursa Major, and we do not claim measured improvements in business decisions or profitability.
- Thinking with external representations: Kirsh (1995), The Intelligent Use of Space; Risko & Gilbert (2016), Cognitive Offloading. More recent work examines memory-task benefits and their conditions: Burnett & Richmond (online 2025; volume 2026), and trade-offs in a computational model: Gilbert (2024). These findings are task-dependent, not a guarantee that a visual interface helps everyone. Back to text.
- Meaningful groups and expertise: Chase & Simon (1973), Perception in chess. Applying the idea to levels of detail is our design interpretation; a group can also hide information that matters. Back to text.
- Learning with models: Sterman (1994), Learning in and about complex systems. Ursa Major does not infer causation or predict feedback dynamics; its current calculations are not a general system-dynamics simulator. Back to text.
A closer look: evidence brief
30 October 2026. For prospective users, partners and funding reviewers. Ursa Major combines visual process mapping, nested levels of detail and planning estimates attached to work. This is a product proposition, not a claim to have invented these concepts.
What is demonstrated. The public examples use invented data and existing product cards. The feature pages distinguish current capabilities from planned tools. They are demonstrations, not customer case studies.
What remains to be tested. Can managers map a real process without coaching, explain the assumptions behind an estimate, resolve differences in a team conversation, and return to improve the model? An evaluation should compare equivalent tasks with their existing methods and record errors, assistance, time and perceived effort.
This brief reports no measured decision, productivity or profit improvement, and no adoption or willingness-to-pay results. Commercial validation needs its own evidence. These research references are a selected foundation, not a systematic literature review.
Start with one canvas.
Bring a question about your business. Make the work visible.
In testing, by invitation.