We use design thinking & learning science
to build business solutions for schools
& learning solutions for business.
We learn what it’s like for the people you’re aiming to reach, build solutions that work in the realities they face, and swiftly test them in prototypes and pilots that reduce risk and accelerate innovation.
Services
Communications
We help organizations find just the right words for the distinctive value they offer the world—and tell the story that will make that value real to the world outside and inside.
Design Strategy.
We use design thinking to understand the customers you’re solving for, uncover key insights, develop transformative solutions and test them out in prototypes and pilots.
Innovation Culture
We help non-profits and for-profits develop the human capacities, the team processes, and the organizational structures they need to make innovation part of their everyday work.
Strategic Planning
We work with your team to design radically innovative solutions to the challenges you face, through a build-test-learn process that
Coaching
We help the people who make decisions, make them better. By stepping back to frame the problems they’re facing as design challenges, our clients distill down to their essential principles and identify the “sliders” within their power to adjust.
An immersion in—not an introduction to—design thinking
Story Mapping. Use stories to build a company-wide understanding of the experience you’re aiming to create for your customers (and other stakeholders). Help your team:
Prioritize what they need to build
Keep the forest in mind as they focus on the trees
Work together to solve the right problem--and get out of their silos
Identify pain-points, opportunities, and system requirements
Rebranding with Taylor & Hart.
User Understanding. Through interviews, observations, and other qualitative techniques, we work with your team to explore what your customers need and value; figure out what drives them to do what they do; and map out the jobs they need to get done. These insights shape high-level strategy—and all the ways in which it’s implemented: experience design, marketing, organizational structure, etc.
Design Thinking Courses & Coaching. Whether half-day workshops or semester-long seminars, our courses immerse people in real design challenges. Our coaching sessions help you and your team apply general innovation methods to the day-to-day work you need to get done—the skills, mindsets, and practical tools to actually start innovating.
Designing the future of learning spaces with architects and educators at Harvard’s Learning Environments for Tomorrow.
High-stakes Storytelling. Whether you’re pitching to funders, selling to customers, or inspiring your teammates, we can help you build a story that’s crisp, clear, and compelling. We help you catch the flash of silver that threads through your ideas, the passion that pulses underneath them—the words and images that let your audience feel the force of what you really mean.
Blue Sky Sessions. We partner with founders looking to step back from the spin, and teams hoping to get unstuck; start-ups figuring out who they want to be, and mature orgs figuring out who they want to be next. No matter what their stage or size, our clients are looking for that place where Why should the world care? meets Why do you?—to put their finger on the intersection between what their work means to them, and why it might matter to their customers.
Problem-solving with Keystone Strategy.
Strategic Planning. We help organizations build clarity and consensus on where they need to go and how they want to get there. Along the way, we often help them figure out better ways of working together—so they can more effectively deliver on their strategy, and make their aspirations real in the world.
Get in touch to set up a complimentary consultation.
Partners
“Dan is our secret weapon for storytelling—a spellcaster who helps CEOs boil down their stories from maple sap into sweet maple sugar. Techstars has dozens of talented mentors, but none are better than Dan at helping CEOs craft a narrative that gets straight to the heart of what makes their company unique—that captures the impact only they can make on the world. And the proof isn’t just in what the CEOs say about Dan; every team he worked with increased their customer-base and were oversubscribed in subsequent funding rounds.”
“Dan really is a coach: for 5 months he partnered with our team on a human-centered design project—interviewing users, understanding their needs and values, turning these insights into a sharp-edged set of design principles that we can build toward. But we also got an unexpected bonus: a deep infusion of organizational capacity. The project is over, but we’re still feeling the impact: we’ve got a disciplined, simple process for ongoing user research; a way to learn from our customers what makes them happy and what makes them hurt; and the tools to course-correct as we go. I couldn’t recommend Dan more highly. ”
“We’re a literary organization full of great writers, but we’ve struggled for years to get our brand right. It felt impossible to find a single message that captured all the different parts of who we are, why we matter, and why our stakeholders should care. Along came Dan! Dan led us through a thoughtful, rigorous process that took us deep. He asked tough questions and pushed back when we weren’t being clear or going far enough. He helped us peel back the layers to get to what we really mean. The whole team is thrilled with our new branding: it’s honest, authentic, and aspirational.”
“Dan’s our compass. He keeps us clear on the core value we’re offering—what our clients really want and what we really care about. He keeps us focused on the problem we solve better than anybody else out there, and plugged in to our reasons for doing what we do…so when we put ourselves out there—through the service we offer, or how we talk to prospects—we’re saying something true and authentic.”
“Dan has an uncanny ability to ask the right question. When he’s coaching me or the teams I lead, Dan helps us see the situation we’re in more clearly, identify the obstacles that are getting in our way, and recognize the opportunities we could take advantage of. I leave our conversations feeling like I’m focused on the goals that can make the greatest impact, right now. Because he understands how teaching and learning really work, Dan doesn’t give advice: he helps us discover what we really want to do, and figure out the best way to get it done. And he’s so happy when we do!”
“Dan has a gift for finding the image that’ll make an idea clear to all the different kinds of people in the room. His design thinking workshop brought home for us the importance of knowing your users in order to create a system that works for them. ”
“Dan led our team through a re-branding process that helped us see why our customers should care about what we have to offer—and reminded us why we do. As we built new brand guidelines, Dan made sure we communicate our value proposition in a way that’s compelling to our customers and meaningful to us.
Working with Dan has helped us think about ourselves and our company in a way that until now we have never been able to. ”
“Dan’s human-centered approach to problem-solving has been crucial in helping us work through important challenges we’ve faced as a startup, like better articulating the value proposition of our product, improving our client on-boarding experience, and finding better ways to support and communicate with each other as a team. The inquiry process he takes us through helps us reframe our challenges—and generate new and original solutions to seemingly intractable problems.”
“Dan took a room full of HR execs who’d never tried design thinking and enabled them to suspend judgment long enough to discover connections you would’ve thought could only be unearthed by seasoned design thinking professionals with high-flung titles and years of experience.”
