Transformation by Design

Catalyz helps organizations leverage human-centered design (design thinking) to develop customer and employee-centric products, services and experiences.  With over 13 years of experience teaching, practicing, and scaling design thinking in organizations ranging from the Fortune 500 to non-profits and schools, we have learned what works and what doesn’t the hard way and specialize in introducing these tools in a way that leverages your existing culture and ways of working.  

Clients engage us to improve customer delight, employee engagement and organizational creativity.  We do this through our core services of workshops, facilitating design sprints, and embedding with teams as player/coaches to help them practice and apply the methods and mindsets of design thinking.  We have also worked with numerous organizations to help them scale design thinking and create lasting capability in their teams. 

Beyond design thinking, we also offer development workshops and training for teams on the topics of 21st century Leadership and Effective Teaming- we’ll introduce shared vocabulary, mental models and tools to help your team develop their capacity for communication, collaboration, curiosity, critical thinking and creativity 

Our goal is to help your teams respond to the accelerating challenges and opportunities of the 21st century by designing new experiences that delight your customers, retain and grow your employees, and  design a brighter future for all.  

Our Offerings

Help leaders build and scale a culture and practice of human-centered design in their team

We’ve worked with teams ranging from Kaiser, Wiley, Delta Dental, Amazon and Starbucks to help test and identify repeatable models for incorporating design thinking methods and mindsets into project and delivery processes. We often facilitate leader “Spacemaker” trainings to help leaders understand their role in supporting innovation efforts and to foster a culture that supports creativity, collaboration, and curiosity.

 Provide teams with on-call design strategist support 

For product leads or teams that want support doing customer discovery, synthesis, and product ideation/experimentation. We bring our network of seasoned design strategists who can pair with a product lead to help them create discussion guides for empathy interviews, moderate those interviews, and work together to synthesize the learnings into design principles or recommendations for product features, based on real customer feedback.

When appropriate, this can also include facilitating thoughtful and structured ideation sessions to help a working team “think bigger”, identifying key concept territories or hypotheses from those sessions and testing them through rapid, low fidelity experiments.

Strategic Facilitation

We have designed and facilitated strategic off-sites, team kickoffs, and executive level ideation sessions at the C-suite and board level. We practice what we preach when designing these and lead with curiosity, start by understanding the key outcomes the group wants to walk away with, then design and prototype creative and engaging activities or prompts. If you are looking for an external facilitator to guide your leadership team through an upcoming conversation, we’d love to help!  

21st Century Leadership Development +  Team Effectiveness Coaching

Whether you are looking for 1:1 coaching or a series of development sessions for your team, we bring our unique, evidence based perspective on 21st century leadership and highly effective teams. Through experiential exercises and debrief discussions (in-person or virtual) we’ll help your teams develop a shared language and approach to leading through ambiguity while fostering the 5Cs of 21st century teams- Curiosity, Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking and Creativity!

Our Work

We have been fortunate to work with clients in a diverse set of industries, including healthcare, retail, finance, consulting, and nonprofits.

At Catalyz, we strive to partner with clients and co-create programs and materials that honor your existing culture, language, and industry expertise. We combine our expertise with yours to create something extraordinary and impactful together.

News & Ideas

2018 Economic Forecast Conference

2018 Economic Forecast Conference

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 28, 2018 | Seattle, WA Catalyz CEO, Ben Grossman-Kahn will be moderating a panel discussion at the 46th Annual Economic Forecast Conference entitled Cultivating a 21st Century Workforce and Workplace. Panelists will include Dr. Vikram...

Design Thinking Seattle 2018!

Design Thinking Seattle 2018!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 18, 2018 | Seattle, WA Join Catalyz on Thursday, January 25th 2018 for a special new year community Design Thinking workshop called Designing for Personal Change. From the event description: Welcome to 2018! As has become our tradition,...

#GratitudeFridays

#GratitudeFridays

Fostering a culture of informal recognition and gratitude   As we enter an era in which organizations are facing transformational shifts across the technologies and platforms they use, customer expectations, and their workforce, a growing number of HR leaders and...

Connect

Curious in learning more? Please send a note to hello@catalyz.io to set up a time to talk!