Human Centered Leadership · Design · Change & Transitions
Leadership is a
design challenge.
We develop leaders, unlock the creativity already inside your organization, and guide people through organizational change and transitions — keeping people at the center of every tough challenge we tackle.
Human centered leadership is inspiring and mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and do things that matter.
Ours. We wrote it, and we have spent more than twenty years putting it to work.
Where we help
Developing leaders who can hold empathy and accountability at the same time.
Finding the creative capacity already in your organization and removing what blocks it.
Guiding organizations and the people in them through endings, ambiguity, and new beginnings.
Research, framing, and prototyping that keeps real people at the center of the solution.
What We Do
However you need us in the room
Some projects run for a year. Some are a single morning. We shape the work to the challenge, not to a package.
Every engagement runs on human-centered design, the method we learned at IDEO: inspiration (listen first), ideation (frame the real challenge) and implementation (prototype, test, refine).
Advisory & projects
Long-form partnership on an adaptive challenge — research, strategy, and execution with you rather than handed to you.
Keynotes
Conference keynotes and general sessions on leadership, creativity, and leading people through change.
Hands-on sessions
Teams practice the methods on a real challenge of their own. They leave having done the work, not watched it.
Leadership retreats
Multi-day offsites for leadership groups that need room to think, reset, and decide together.
Hard rooms, held well
Strategy sessions, design sprints, and the conversations a team cannot easily have on its own.
Individual & team
One-on-one and small-group coaching for leaders stepping into something bigger than their last role.
Take the assessment
How human centered are you as a leader?
Ten questions, about three minutes. You get a profile across the five practices we look for, an honest read on where you are strongest, and the one place worth your attention next.
Start the assessment
About
Small in size, mighty in creativity
Between us: thirty-five years building brands and leading marketing and media organizations, and thirty-five years teaching, researching and leading inside a top business school. You get the two of us, not an account team.
Jules Morris, Ph.D.
Partner
Thirty years of award-winning marketing, branding, and design — including as Director of Marketing and Community Relations and Executive Producer at WBIR, Knoxville's NBC affiliate, where she was executive producer of the Heartland Series. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in creativity and leadership, teaches marketing, human-centered design, and leadership at the Haslam College of Business, and is credentialed in human-centered design by IDEO.
Michael (Lane) Morris, Ph.D.
Partner
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Student Affairs and the Fisher Professor of Innovation at the Haslam College of Business, where he has spent thirty-five years teaching and leading. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, human-centered design credentials from IDEO, and executive coursework on Adaptive Leadership from the Harvard Kennedy School.
The name
- Awesomeness in its purest form.
- Incredible, beyond anything you could imagine.
- Complete awesomeness to its fullest extent.
This work asks people to let go of something, sit in ambiguity, and try things that might not work. That goes better when the room is warm.
Insights
Writing on the work
Psychological Safety Isn’t a Perk. It’s the Leader’s Job.
What psychological safety is, what Google and Amy Edmondson's research found, and the four conditions leaders build, with practical steps and an FAQ.
The Creative Alliance: The Operating System Behind High-Performing Teams
What the Creative Alliance is, how Bonds, Creative Tasks and Goals work together in high-performing teams, and a quick check to use with your own team.
Leadership is a Verb, Not a Title
Leadership is something you do, not a title you hold. The definition of Human Centered Leadership, its three dimensions, and why the work starts inside.
Browse the full archive Ten earlier posts, 2020–2023.
Start a conversation
What are you in the middle of?
Tell us the challenge you are facing and who it lands on. We will tell you honestly whether this is work we are right for.