The transitions that matter most, like those in energy, AI, healthcare, and civic infrastructure, demand as much from the people and institutions navigating them as from the technology itself. WHOLE Innovation & Design helps organizations connect what they're building to the outcomes that matter for customers, for operations, and for the business.
Ongoing advisory for founders, transformation leaders, or public sector leaders working on complex change.
Examples:
Working sessions designed to drive alignment, navigate change, and forge new directions.
Project-based consulting for organizations translating emerging technology into services and systems that deliver measurable value
Delivering AI successfully requires understanding the strengths and opportunities it brings as contexts shift. For a Fortune 500 enterprise platform seeking to support their customer’s journey across its offerings, the value AI could bring evolved with the customer. Developed a framework to help delivery teams approach AI integration from a value perspective, driven by user context and confidence, particularly as the company rethought fragmented user profiles into persistent identities that could drive customized experiences the whole enterprise could build on.
When modernizing legacy systems, the conversation usually heavily centers technology, but what unlocks the way forward for that new tech stack are the teams and people that the technology will enable, especially in clinical systems with no margin for risk. On a modernization contract for the country’s largest healthcare system, led design strategy to bring clinicians, leadership, and delivery teams onto the same page, then translated it into program-wide guidance delivery teams could use to drive clinically rigorous software delivery. This work was presented at HIMSS 2023.
When a Colorado statewide children's initiative headed to the ballot, the organization sought strategic guidance on ensuring it would roll out in a way that served to the stakeholders and communities it sought meant to serve. Mapped the landscape of interests, risks, and unspoken tensions, and developed the strategic pillars that gave leadership a way to move forward that reflected the needs of their communities.
An early venture developing AI for trusted communities is building a model for how AI can support and augment individual and community outcomes. At the pioneering edge of a new technology, the question is which design approaches interventions that set the foundation for new ways of being and doing with it. Grounded this work in scene and technology studies and social design traditions to build novel product direction on rigorous foundations. Ongoing work to build the venture’s continuous discovery and engagement research capability, and the data and research practices that reflect the philosophy and the new ways of working with this technology.
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.
Service Design Lead, Bank of America
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.
CEO, Aclymate
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.
Head of Product, Bellese Technologies
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.
Program Director, Gary Community Ventures
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 draws on more than two decades of experience at the intersection of strategy, research, and design across federal modernization, enterprise technology, climate and energy, and place-based civic innovation. Lauren has guided Fortune 500s, government agencies, foundations, and emerging ventures to turn complex transitions into clear direction and outcomes.
hello [@] wearewhole [dot] co