Workshops + Facilitation
Over the past 20 years, I have enabled organizational transformation, facilitated stakeholder engagements, workshops, training, and built and managed teams for organizations such as MAYA Design, Advocate Children’s Hospital, University of Chicago Lab School, Gold Peak Holdings Hong Kong, the Anti-Defamation League, Office of the Provost at Illinois Tech, The Institute of Design at IIT, Stanford Upward Bound/Haas Center for Public Service, Northwestern University Department of Student Affairs, Oberlin College Residential Education, Young Women's Resource Center, Community Mediation Services of Ohio, and others.
Clear structure and purpose are critical for successful outcomes. This high-level sketch of an engagement allowed leadership to align on a workshop plan.
Planning
With an MDes in Design Research and Strategy and a MAT in foreign language teaching I bring deep knowledge and experience to the planning phase of an engagement, resulting in structures and processes that are clear, efficient, effective, and engaging.
Illinois Institute of Technology: design and lead facilitation of a human-centered design workshop for 120 participants through the Office of the Provost.
Execution
Time is valuable in any group engagement, and the ability to both execute with precision and improvise in realtime is critical. Nothing helped to hone these skills more than 4 years in the classroom as a K-12 Spanish teacher, as you might imagine!
Institute of Design: Students and Alumni came together to co-create a vision of the future of the institution and design education, generating criterion the leadership needed to accomplish those goals.
Bringing Forth Knowledge
Often our best resources are underutilized or unknown. Knowledge brokering spends time on the front end getting to know people individually, to understand and map key players in an organization using frameworks that go far beyond the org chart. Mapping the knowledge space of an organization helps uncover the value hidden in tacit knowledge–the key to powerful insights that revolutionize organizational productivity.
Gold Peak: Marketing and Design departments of a Hong Kong multinational corporation came together to generate shared criteria and align on a joint initiative.
Alignment and Ownership
Large organizations are often segmented into silos. Knowledge brokering builds bridges between key stakeholders and creates spaces for collaboration so that everyone can see their contribution in the outcome and feels a sense of shared ownership in the result. This alignment of purpose and support is crucial for projects to move forward in any context, most especially those which are highly segregated or political in nature.
Feeding America: Highly focused activities alternating between individual work, pairs, and collaboration ensured all participants had a voice in a shared vision for the future of food security for seniors.
Accelerated Innovation
In just two hours, high-level representatives of our client Feeding America and partner organizations met their end users (food insecure seniors) through empathy exercises and, using their new understandings of seniors and existing professional knowledge, were able to generate a high volume of deep insights and translate them into powerful design principles to guide prototyping.