Human Centered Leadership & Design
Organizational 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.
inspire and mobilize people to tackle tough challenges and do things that matter?
Every challenge we take on starts here — framed as a question before anyone reaches for an answer.
Our definition
- Inspiring and mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and do things that matter.
Jules & Lane MorrisOurs. We wrote it, and we have spent more than twenty years putting it to work.
Every challenge we take on comes back to that sentence. Design is how we get there — research, framing, prototyping, and testing with real people rather than about them.
Where we work — and the questions we start from
Developing leaders who can hold empathy and accountability at the same time.
How might wegrow leaders people choose to follow, not just report to?Finding the creative capacity already in your organization and removing what blocks it.
How might wefree the creativity that is already in this building?Guiding organizations and the people in them through endings, ambiguity, and new beginnings.
How might wehelp people move through this, and not merely past it?Research, framing, and prototyping that keeps real people at the center of the solution.
How might wedesign this with the people who will live with it, not just for them?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.
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.
The Process
Human-centered design, start to finish
The engine under everything we do. We learned it at IDEO, we teach it, and we run it on every challenge that comes through the door.
Inspiration
We go and find out. Interviews, observation, and the casual learning conversations that surface what people will not put in a survey.
How might weunderstand this from the inside, before we decide anything?Ideation
We make sense of what we heard, frame the real challenge, and generate far more possibilities than feel comfortable.
How might weturn what we learned into something worth trying?Implementation
We build small, test with real people, and refine until the new way holds without us standing behind it.
How might wemake this real, and make it last?Approach
Organizations change. People transition.
One of the frameworks we bring. Every movement opens with a question rather than an answer, because in human-centered design you frame before you solve. Tap any movement, swipe the circle, or step through them in order.
The question it asks
Sustainability is the ring around the whole thing, not a tenth step. Every new beginning becomes the ending that the next transition starts from — which is why the ninth movement returns you to the first.
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.
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
Insights
Writing on the work
We’ve Moved to a Feeling Economy — Has Your Leadership Caught Up?
Decisions run on feeling long before logic catches up. Most leadership models still assume the opposite, and that gap is where teams quietly disengage.
The Leadership Crisis No One Is Talking About — The Case for a New Kind of Leadership
When did you last feel genuinely inspired by the leader above you? Not managed, not directed. Inspired. The case for a different kind of leadership.
Bridges & Barriers to Creativity
How to spot the systems that quietly kill creativity in an organization, and the ones that let it flourish. Starting with mission statements.
The Quiet Advantage
How creative confidence becomes a leadership edge for women leading in rooms that were never built with them in mind.
Creativity is Not a Department
The most valuable creative work in your company is happening in roles without "creative" anywhere in the title. Why that miscategorization is expensive.
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.