Helping founder-led, values-driven organisations become more effective without losing their humanity.
Consciously Designed translates ideas from organisational design, psychology, and human-centred design into concrete insights and practical tools for leaders. The goal is simple: to help you build something you'll still be proud of in ten years, for yourself and the people who work in it
Every couple of weeks, I write up what I'm learning about building organisations that are effective and let people thrive - you can expect research summaries, real-life examples, and even actual tools and resources you can use on Monday morning. Subscribers get exclusive discounts for our digital products, too.
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Consciously
Designed
The thing is, those things tend to treat the symptoms, not the cause. The real problem is that the organisation was never consciously designed in the first place. It grew, and the design got left on default settings.
That's the whole idea behind Consciously Designed.
Your organisation and the people in it are really the same design problem at two different zoom levels. Get the conditions right and people can do their best work. Get them wrong, and it doesn't matter how talented or hardworking they are - they'll spend their time pushing against the design instead of being supported by it.
Most organisations aren't designed. They just sort of happen.
Nearly every organisation starts the same way: a clear purpose and a handful of people who care about what they're building.
Then it grows. And somewhere along the way, processes start appearing out of nowhere, decisions get slower, communication gets weirdly hard, and the whole thing starts running on a few heroes holding it together with willpower. Nobody decided for this to happen. It just piled up while everyone was busy.
The usual fix is more process, more tools, more meetings, and, of course, more rules. As if another meeting or rule has ever solved an organisational design problem.
Organisational Health Diagnostic
Most organisational problems aren't what they look like. Ask five people in your organisation what's actually wrong and you'll get five different answers. This diagnostic can't give you the outside view - it's a self-assessment, so it only knows what you tell it. But it maps five dimensions of how you see your organisation running, and that's usually enough to finally put a name to the thing you've been feeling but couldn't quite pin down.
⬡ 20 questions ◷ ~10 minutes ◈ Instant results ✦ Free
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Recent free resources
The Human-Centred Organisation
30+ research-backed ways to design a company people actually want to work for.
Role Diagnostic & Crafting Guide
Help your employees evaluate their roles and identify opportunities for job crafting.
Organisational Health Diagnostic
Check the current health of your organisation via online self-assessment.
Practical tools for thoughtful organisations.
Discover frameworks, templates, quizzes, and guides designed to help you improve how work gets done and how people experience it.
Philosophy
I've spent the last 12+ years inside startups and small companies, including joining one as employee number three and spending the next eight years growing alongside it. I've worked across pretty much every function. You start noticing patterns after a while.
Here's one pattern that got me particularly hooked, and the one the research keeps backing up too: people trying to figure out how to thrive and organisations trying to help people thrive are really solving the same puzzle. Design the conditions badly and people pull back, whether that's an entire workforce or one person deciding how much of themselves to bring to work each day. I've experienced that myself. I know exactly how it feels when you have a lot to give, but the environment you're in isn't ready to receive it.
Over the years, I've become convinced that human-centred and built-to-last point in the same direction. The organisations that treat people like actual human beings aren't succeeding despite that, I think they're more likely to succeed because of it.
This isn't some feel-good add-on for when everything else is already working. It's the work. It's what I care about, and what I want to bring back to the centre of the conversation. In fact, I think this is one of the most important conversations we should be having.
That's why my thinking, writing, and work borrow from organisational design, psychology, systems thinking, philosophy, storytelling, and human-centred design. The best ideas rarely stay in one discipline, so neither do I.
Doughnut Economics
Teal Organisations
Systems Thinking
Human-Centred Design
Conscious Business
Self-Determination Theory
Thinking inspired by
Recent articles
About me
I've spent the last 12+ years in startups and small businesses, and by now I've had a hand in nearly every function there is. I joined one company as employee number three and spent the next eight years helping it grow, wearing more hats than I can count along the way. You end up with a front-row seat to how organisations actually work.
That also meant experiencing both sides of work firsthand. Sometimes I got to make things better. Other times, I knew I had more to give but found myself stuck in structures, cultures, and ways of working that made good work unnecessarily hard.
That's what pulled me into organisational design and psychology in the first place. I got all nerdy about what makes organisations effective and what makes them good places to work.
These days you'll usually find me researching, writing, or building practical tools that help organisations become more effective without forgetting they're made up of actual people. I don't think effectiveness and humanity are in tension. At least, I don't think they should be. They need each other. And yes, I'll argue that point if I need to.
Consciously
Designed
© 2026 Consciously Designed
Helping founder-led organisations become more effective without losing their humanity.