Designing Thriving

Organizations

Inspiring leaders to foster meaningful change, co-create thriving workplaces, and build brave spaces where people are valued, heard, and able to contribute their best selves.

An image of the site owner and author Amy J. Wilson with her hands on her hips and smiling

Our world is getting increasingly more complex, volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous.

We’ve changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves, leaving many of us burnt out, disconnected, and lonely.

We must evolve to meet the moment.

What makes a healthy organization?

I’ve asked myself this question for most of my career. I’ve thought about who is in it, what they are doing, what challenges they face, how and where they work. Most recently I’ve been thinking about how do people feel.

Our workplaces have been designed—intentionally or not. And we’re finding it’s no longer working for us. Many of us are questioning the role of work in our lives and our relationship to it.

I design ways organizations can meet the moment we’re in, and workers to grow the power within themselves to know and ask for what they want, and unpack what we have inherited from our past and present.

I co-create cultures and systems built on

Emotional Intelligence and Innovation

These domains involve two things:

  1. Change: they both require personal and organizational change.

  2. Context: context gives meaning to everything we think and do, and every culture is different. We must understand culture so we can evolve it.

This work is complex yet challenging.

Change and Context Requires Emotional Intelligence

Almost all successful leaders today do these things well, which requires emotional intelligence:

Understands Challenges

Understands challenges and commits to meeting the needs of employees and customers

Designs and Leads without Ego

Develops and co-creates excellent products, programs, or services that meet an audience’s needs

Delivers Excellence

Delivers top notch and equitable services, programs, and products

Organizational change requires a movement,

not just a mandate.

MY BOOK

Empathy for Change:

How to Create a More Understanding World

Leading change is not about moving fast and breaking things—it’s about using empathy to make our world better.

Cover of Empathy for Change

Empathy in Action Framework & Guide

(Formerly called the Heart, Head, and Hand Framework)

This Framework focuses on sustainable change to build the right culture, structure, and systems to support the change over time. It centers the design on the worker voice, and emphasizes co-creation over outdated systems that no longer work for our modern world. This Framework and guide helps build community and trust, by participating and building out approaches over time. 

This Framework and Guide allows you to build a movement of change with your organization’s most innovative and forward-thinking leaders to fundamentally shift your culture and system for the better.

JUMP IN!

Choose Your Own Adventure

My Services

  • I work with you to define and discover the focus of our work. I add clarity and context of the people we’re engaging with, opportunities for growth, and our shared language.

    During this work, we’ll appreciate what is: what gives us life and what is the best of what is now?

  • I assist you in dreaming and designing the future you want to create. We co-construct our reality to uncover our ideal state and culture.

    Along with your team’s innovators and early adopters, I help you incubate the strategy and structure and co-create our community design. I train and coach your team while we all learn and grow.

    I also help you craft a compelling narrative that we’ll use to help us win hearts and minds towards the change we seek.

  • I co-create strategy and structures to launch, scale, and sustain your evolution. I help you to design experiments to validate our assumptions, make and test prototypes, and launch what works.

    I empower those leading the movement, build their capacity, adjust what is working or not working, and improvise with emergent needs of the community. I’ll help you to measure the impact and include continuous learning.

  • Modern organizations require us to evolve, but few do it well. I help people and organizations elevate themselves and evolve. Here are a list on all the consulting services I offer:

    • Co-Creation & Facilitation

    • Design: Human-Centered, Participatory, Service, User Experience (UX)

    • Empathy in the Workplace

    • Equity Design & Justice

    • Future of Work

    • Innovation & Product Strategy

    • Lean Startup & Agile Development

    • Meeting and Retreat Facilitation

    • Movement Design

    • Product Management

    • Storytelling & Documentary Filmmaking

    • Strategy Development

    • Training Development and Execution

    I am guided by my Empathy in Action Framework (see below) to pave a pathway to launch modern change. Along the way, I can help you decode workplace mental health and well-being.

  • I’m a Certified Workshop Facilitation Master . What does that mean?

    I’m skilled at guiding groups through collecting relevant information, identifying underlying challenges, ideating possible solutions, and ultimately helping the team define and commit to the next steps.

    In other words, I have mastered making team collaboration easy, effective and enjoyable for everyone.

    I guide groups to do efficient, meaningful work. My process allows everyone in the room feel seen and heard, and develop actionable outcomes every time they gather.

  • I help evolve humans to working and interacting with other people. My approach helps you to develop your personal capabilities, interpersonal skills and capacity to understand and empathize with others. Here’s a few forms of coaching I offer:

    • Individual: I will work with you 1:1 to become a more empathetic change leader and hold change

    • Group: I gather people in community to working through their burnout and setting up sustainable practices that will help them be more present in their work and home lives

    • Executive: I work with and coach executives on topics like empathy, design, the Future of Work & innovation

    My coaching puts into practice strategies proven to foster deeper connection to ourselves, build better relationships with colleagues, and to create deep resiliency within ourselves.

I'VE WORKED WITH |

I'VE WORKED WITH |

Client Testimonials

  • Workshop Facilitation

    “I have been part of many programs and never have I felt so deeply connected with a group of colleagues so quickly.

    You have paved the way for dozens of amazing friendships to develop over the next several years, and we are all incredibly grateful!”

    - Trey, Federal Government Partner

  • Transformation + Community Design

    “I could not be more excited about our results. Thank you for being our compass to achieve great things together.”

    Hind, DEI Partner

  • Transformation Management

    “Amy is a jack of all trades who somehow manages to be organized, knowledgeable, poised, perceptive, dedicated, action-oriented, adaptable and highly ambitious, all at the same time.

    She is an inspiration and undisputed natural leader to all. I have full confidence in Amy's ability to excel at any challenge thrown her way.”

    Kaylee Schwitzer-Yarrow, Former Collaborator