WHOLE is a strategic design and innovation company.

We partner with visionary leaders to navigate change, shape new opportunities, and drive meaningful outcomes.

PARTNERS WE'VE WORKED WITH

HOW WE WORK

Our experience ranges from social innovation to SaaS, with partners including Fortune 500s, city and federal agencies, startups, foundations and nonprofits. We focus this breadth of expertise on three verticals and their strategic interplay.

Climate & Sustainability

Health & Wellbeing

Economies & Exchange

PRACTICE AREAS

We see strategy and innovation as living processes refined through feedback loops. Our three practice areas equip your organization to see clearly, act intentionally, and test your processes and offerings to ensure they increase the value transfer between thinking and doing, allowing for good ideas to surface anywhere and ensuring that strategy is always grounded in reality.

WHOLE Industries

Illuminate opportunity and trace where change is flowing. Map emerging signals, clarify opportunity spaces, and explore long-view possibilities to not just react to change, but shape it.

What future are we creating?
How do we stay oriented in the face of uncertainty?
What is the context in which our work will happen?

WHOLE Services

Frame the opportunity, then operationalize the vision through human-centered design research and service innovation to improve how people experience your organization, inside and out.

Where should we focus?
What are our opportunities and which ones do we prioritize?
What methods and processes best suit the opportunity?
What does meaningful innovation look like for the people we serve?

WHOLE Labs

Experimentation and feedback loops grounded in the people and reality of your offerings. Test the tools, methodologies and practices to uncover unmet needs, break down challenges, and test bold ideas in practical, measurable ways.

Do our actions and strategies align and run towards the same goals?
Are our strategies taking us where we want to go?
What does human centered implementation look like?

CAPABILITIES

Strategic Design & Innovation

Break out of silos, gain new perspective, reimagine whats possible, form new playing fields and spaces.

Service design and mapping
Digital transformation
Scenario design
Vision and mission design
Concepting and prototyping
Strategic foresight
Systems thinking
Co-design

Workshops & Facilitation

Co-create a vision, identify priorities, build modern capabilities, de silo organizational knowledge and practices, and build alignment across the organization and stakeholders

Design thinking
Design sprints
Process mapping
Journey mapping
Vision & mission workshop
Futures mapping

Research & Insights

Identify opportunities, understand context, map landscapes, and reduce risk.

Discovery
Human centered design and customer/employee experience research
Strategic positioning research
Field studies

Coaching & Advisory

Support and advisory to get perspective and maintain clarity amid complexity and change.

Personal and leadership coaching and advisory services
Individual, one-on-one
Group structures, facilitated

TESTIMONIALS

Your deliverables have become immediately useful, with the Advisory Board this morning deciding we have to take a focused approach (as opposed to a full scale approach) based on your research and conversations… Your work did a nice job of distilling the main things to be thinking about and giving the next thinking shape.

Angie McPhaul

Program Director, Gary Community Ventures

I was continuously impressed by Lauren’s ability to quickly and deeply understand the user problems at hand using both quant and qual methods, to effectively communicate her findings, and make data-informed strategic recommendations to a wide variety of stakeholders… As a product person, it’s like finding gold to have a creative partner who understands the broader business and technology at hand.

Samantha Smith

Head of Product, Bellese Technologies

Lauren is a thoughtful listener, and she pairs it with broad business acumen and a native sense of how to reframe your thinking to productive ends… She’s helped me think through my leadership style, where I find excitement and where I find frustration, and how to improve. This has had a measurable impact on my business, my happiness, and my life.

Mike Smith

CEO, Aclymate

Lauren is an accomplished leader skilled at using user research to create clarity and translate that clarity into actionable organizational strategy. While design strategy and innovation sometimes seems amorphous, Lauren possesses the ability to drive concrete changes and business results.

Jeremiah Fellows

Service Design Lead, Bank of America

WHAT DRIVES US

At WHOLE Innovation and Design, “whole” is an ethos that underscores all we do, as a principle for our ways of working, and the quality of outcome and experience we seek to create.

New possibilities emerge when working toward wholeness. It’s an act of imagination and of integration. To be whole is to hold complexity and to acknowledge the parts of a system. To create with those that are impacted by the problem and the solution. It’s to be values- and value-driven. We build a more whole future in context, in relationship and through practice.

Founded by Lauren Sinreich, WHOLE is a network of designers, artists, strategists, and technologists seeking to create more whole futures in this era of change, uncertainty and opportunity. Drawing on more than two decades of experience working across social innovation, technology, systems change, and human-centered design, Lauren has guided Fortune 500s, foundations, government agencies, and cross-sector coalitions through moments of transformation.

GET IN TOUCH

hello [at] wearewhole [dot] com

Send us your information and what you’re interested in, and we’ll be in touch within two business days.

DESIGNERS, RESEARCHERS, STRATEGISTS, TECHNOLOGISTS, GENERALISTS: Are you interested in becoming a contributor in the WHOLE network? Share your work and interests with us here.