We’re here to help.
We’re here to help.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
Designing and facilitating a collaborative and effective process that makes your direction clear and aligns with your core values.
Mission, Vision,
Values
Collaborative
Strategy Design
Strategy
Visualization
Stakeholder and Community Engagement
Client:
Monterey Bay Aquarium
What We Did:
With a new vision for the future of their organization, the leadership team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium needed to reimagine their traditional approach to annual planning. The Future Work Design team designed and facilitated a collaborative workshop to envision an innovative and more productive approach to planning. Together, we co-developed what their future process could look like, as well as built one-of-a-kind tools, templates, and guidelines to bring it to life.
Planning transformed from departmental to cross-functional and highly collaborative. Together we piloted and tested our new process, with Future Work Design leading the facilitation and change management over a one-year planning cycle. With key learnings identified we were then able to iterate and finalize the process based on varying needs of different departments. In the second year, we were able to step back into a coaching role where we focused on building capacity for our client partner to successfully run and manage the process autonomously moving forward. This engagement resulted in a collaborative annual planning process driven by a visual process map, playbook, digital tool adoption, and two annual plans.
LEADERSHIP
Empowering leaders to lead equitable organizations with backbone and heart.
Executive Team
Coaching
Essential Training
for Managers
Leadership Retreat
Facilitation
Succession
Planning
Client:
BRIC Architecture
What We Did:
From Shared Values to Strategic Leadership
A founder-led architecture firm, five years into rapid growth, brought us in to support their equity and inclusion efforts. It quickly became clear that they also needed to grow in their leadership maturity to scale successfully and build a strong employee experience. We conducted a team assessment, facilitated several working sessions and a two-day retreat, and supported the team through three months of follow-up coaching. Together, they identified strategic priorities, clarified internal promotion pathways, created mentorship plans, and restructured how they use meeting time for more effective day-to-day and strategic collaboration. Most importantly, they built the muscle for more direct, honest communication—critical for shared leadership and faster decision-making. The team has continued to work with Nina for several years to improve their team performance through relationships, strategy, and by developing clear processes.
MARCELLA WENTZ
VP of Operations at MADFISH
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE & BELONGING
Creating policies and practices that align with your culture and values and create more meaningful and inclusive experiences for your employees.
Listening
and Research
Performance
Management
and Policy Audit
Compensation
Strategy
Equity and
Inclusion Training
Client:
Relay Resources
What We Did:
Relay Resources partnered with Future Work Design, to enhance leadership’s understanding of foundational equity principles and strengthen the employee experience. During comprehensive listening sessions, it became clear that while Relay Resources had done a lot of work to achieve pay equity, there was a significant need to clarify and improve transparency in compensation decisions.
FWD worked with Relay leaders to develop a visual roadmap that simplified the complex compensation process, ensuring clarity for all employees. Additionally, tools and aids were created to assist leaders in effectively communicating pay ranges, midpoints, compa-ratio, and market data, thereby enhancing understanding across the organization, regardless of language barriers or familiarity with the subject.
These initiatives not only enhanced transparency in compensation decisions but also empowered leaders to confidently communicate complex information to their teams.
DESIGN & COMMUNICATIONS
Building branded communication tools and experiences that educate, inspire, and align across an organization.
Brand
Identity
Information
Design
Toolkits
and Training
Experiences
Reports
and Publications
Client:
Cambia Health Solutions
What We Did:
One of Portland’s leading healthcare organizations, Cambia, approached FWD to help their staff align around a clear and customer-focused way of working. They wanted to define a simple and unified framework that could succinctly bring together their human-centered design approach, lean process improvement methods, and healthcare-specific methodologies in their day-to-day practice.
To begin, we worked closely with their team to deeply understand their customers through key insights from 5+ years of consumer research and market trends. We helped the Cambia team internalize the research, and document it in a compelling set of stories, tools, and frameworks that could be leveraged in their products, services, and experiences. This included a State of the Consumer Book and a Solve for the Consumer Toolkit which we prototyped, tested, and validated with multiple internal groups across the organization. In the end, the team was equipped with tools that guided, inspired, and engaged their staff and showed them clearly how to apply customer centricity to their unique roles.
MELANIE WILLINGHAM-JAGGERS
Executive Director at GLSEN
ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION
Aligning org design with strategy and values by designing the tangible things (structures, processes, and experiences) that drive the intangible things (culture, performance, belonging).
Organizational
Assessments
Collaborative
Organizational
Design
Operating Model
Visualization
Prototyping, Testing,
and Adaptive
Implementation
Client:
Georgetown University Beeck Center for Innovation and Impact
What We Did:
Future Work Design partnered with the Beeck Center, first to develop their ambitious Vision 2030 (to connect government and the civic tech ecosystem to tackle problems that no one can solve alone), and then to translate it into a practical operating model fit for the future.
We began by assessing what was working well, what could improve, and what would need to shift to unlock Beeck’s full potential. Through a collaborative design process, we explored the tradeoffs between organizing by function versus by policy topic and ultimately co-developed a hybrid model tailored to Beeck’s unique capabilities and goals. We restructured teams around clear capabilities and visualized the new model in a way that helped staff imagine—and step into—a future way of working. This was not just an org chart exercise: we supported Beeck’s leadership team with the tools and mindsets needed to lead the change, including developing a custom strategy screen for empowered decision-making.
Today, Beeck is rapidly evolving from a project-based portfolio to a unified, strategic leader of the civic tech ecosystem. The new structure has helped attract and retain top talent, clarify decision-making, and increase impact—proving that with the right design, a small team can lead big change.
