the power to Design for Delight.
Whether you’re creating change in your own life, at work, or in your business, I’m here to help you to make choices that lead to more delight for yourself and others.
What do I mean by design? the rendering of intent.
“Design means choosing an intent, and then making that intent real in the world.”
This is my favourite definition of design, from Jared Spool.
The results of the design process might be a chair, a phone, a website or a healthcare service. Whichever it is, we can design these things so that they delight or frustrate the people who use them. This is the designer’s choice.
Jared Spool’s definition of design applies to your smartphone, a supermarket’s shopping app, and the health service I use. It turns out that we can choose to design our lives so that they delight us or frustrate us, too. And we can also use design in our organisations, to the same end. Which would you choose? Delight or frustration?
making intent real. got it. sounds, er simple…?
Intent is one design concept we can easily borrow from design to apply to ourselves and our work. However, that single line from Spool, presented on its own, implies that ‘making that intent real in the world’ is a simple next step. It’s not. It’s complicated, messy, confusing. And there’s another concept we can borrow from design to help us here. Design practitioners have given these messy first steps a name.
introducing: the fuzzy front end.
The term for the first part of the process is the fuzzy front end. You can see it at work in the illustration below. That tangle that unfolds to a wobbly line and ends in the light bulb? That tangle represents this fuzzy stage. It begins with a catalyst: That first seed of an idea. The sense that something new is coming, or that something has to change. In the very early stages of a project, a lot is unclear and uncertain. Luckily, design has a whole host of tools and frameworks to help with this stage, and I’m here to bring them to you.
Use design to create more delight and less frustration – in your life, work, or organisation.
Come meet me at an event, work with me in one of my “Design For” programmes, or join group coaching with Work Your Own Way.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ME.
WORK WITH ME ONE TO ONE.
Get to know yourself better than ever before.
Apply what you learn to your life, work, and business.
BUDGET: FROM £1300 UPFRONT. PAYMENT PLANS AVAILABLE.
DESIGN FOR LIFE.
Get to know yourself better through assessments, simple exercises, and creative self-exploration tools. All with me by your side as your guide.
Use what you learn to make changes in your day to day life and make a roadmap that sets your course for the next few years.
DESIGN FOR WORK.
Get to know yourself and untangle which bits you want to bring to work (and which bits you don’t). I’ll bring the questions, assessments, and planning tools.
Use what you learn about yourself to make changes in your current role or to shape your strategy for finding a new one.
DESIGN FOR BUSINESS.
When you work for yourself, it can be hard to tell where your business ends and the rest of you begins. Design for Business gives you that space.
Use what you learn to refine your offer (and develop new ones). All starting with getting to know yourself better and who you serve.
“clarity drives action.”
WORK WITH ME IN MY GROUP PROGRAMME.
FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO WORK YOUR OWN WAY.
JOIN OUR SUPPORTIVE MONTHLY COMMUNITY CALLS, AND TAKE PART IN OUR BOOK CLUB.
BUDGET: £200 FOR 12 MONTHS, OR £20 PER MONTH.
JOIN WORK YOUR OWN WAY.
A supportive, neurodivergent-friendly group coaching programme.
Space for you to reshape your current work role – or discover a new one – in a way that feels aligned with who you are and what matters most.
Join us for monthly community calls, action-focused book club, and simple activities to guide your thinking and doing.
Delivered on substack.
Partnership with The You Can Hub.
WANT HELP WITH A SPECIFIC PROJECT? hire me as your second brain.
When you need some extra oomph on your project or a piece of client work, you can now make use of my design facilitation skills on a hourly basis. You bring your fuzzy brain, I bring clarity, helpful frameworks, and virtual whiteboard tools.
You get to:
- Bounce project work off me, to help you move it forwards.
- Feel part of a team without doing a full partnership or full collaboration on a project.
- Have access to design facilitation with someone who has experience of service design, org design and user research.
- Work with a turbo-charged virtual whiteboard facilitator. I type while you talk. We organise and refine together.
- Access an injection of new energy at regular points across a project.
A current client is also leaning on my illustration and visual thinking skills to better community their project to prospective stakeholders.
HEAR FROM ME: LET’S FIGURE IT OUT TOGETHER.
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COMING TO YOU BY EMAIL OR IN THE SUBSTACK APP.
In February 2024, I started to define and explore the key concepts that underlie my approach. It’s a written guide to what I use in my work, in progress. It comes complete with my own doodles and illustrations, as drawing is one of the main ways I make sense of things.
For a long time I’ve shared illustrations on instagram to attempt to make sense of concepts that come up in my work with others and in my own self development work. It was time to make more space to write. Figure It Out is a newsletter and blog hosted on Substack. With my take on book reviews, break downs of the messy stuff of life, and illustrated essays unpicking the key concepts at the heart of my work.
It covers the messy stuff that life throws at us. I review books that inform how I do things. And unpack topics like:
- How does self love work? What is it, really?
- Is visualisation just wishful thinking? Or built on a fundamental way your brain works?
- The difference between the changes that happen in the external world (out there) and in your internal world (in here, in my mind), thanks to this exploration of a book by William Bridges.