Unlike programs that focus on a single framework, DESIGN systematically integrates three powerful approaches—Emotional Intelligence, Red Team Thinking, and CliftonStrengths—addressing what each lacks when used alone.
Through six transformational phases, your leaders develop the strategic rigor to challenge status quo thinking, the emotional intelligence to navigate complex organizational dynamics and systemic barriers, and the strengths awareness to leverage their unique capabilities authentically.
DESIGN's Six Phases stand for:
● D - Disrupt the Autopilot
● E - Expand What's Possible
● S - Stress-Test the Strategy
● I - Implement with Intentionality
● G - Generate Psychological Safety
● N - Navigate Influence
The ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions and to recognize, understand and influence others’ emotions.
According to Daniel Goleman, "Emotional Intelligence refers to a different way of being smart. EI is a key to high performance, particularly outstanding leadership. It's not your IQ, but rather it's how you manage yourself and your relationship with others."
12 competencies across four domains:
● Self-awareness (Emotional Self-awareness)
● Self-management (Emotional Self-control, Adaptability, Achievement Orientation, and Positive Outlook)
● Social Awareness (Empathy and Organizational Awareness)
● Relationship Management (Influence, Coach and Mentor, Conflict Management, Teamwork, and Inspirational Leadership)
Read up on the domains and competencies of EI and how they are defined.
An approach developed by military and intelligence agencies to help individuals and organizations navigate risks and opportunities in today's complex world. It enables better, faster decisions; identifies resilient alternatives; and encourages critical thinking, diversity of thought, and distributed decision-making.
Develops "The Three Cs":
● Clarity—Gaining a clear, unbiased view of the situation, identifying hidden risks, missed opportunities, and challenging internal narratives or "organizational lies"
● Capability—Developing practical, battle-tested skills (critical thinking, problem-solving) so individuals and teams can think for themselves and make better, faster decisions
● Culture—Creating an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed, assumptions are constantly challenged, and continuous learning and adaptation become the norm, not the exception
Read a fuller description on What Is Red Teaming?
This is Gallup's complete talent profile. It helps you recognize your greatest strengths, understand your weaknesses, and what makes you unique.
According to Gallup, "By using your strengths, you are six times as likely to be engaged in your job and three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life." They also define weakness as, "Anything that gets in the way of your success."
Personalized results are generated across four domains:
● Executing—Focuses on making things happen and turning ideas into action
● Influencing—Helps teams be heard by a broader audience and take charge
● Relationship building—Focuses on creating a strong, cohesive team by building bonds and making others feel included
● Strategic thinking—Centers on ideas, innovation, and planning, and helps the team think through complex issues
Read more on CliftonStrengths 34.
Action: Leaders intentionally break automatic patterns rather than continuing to lead on autopilot, playing it safe, or leading everyone based on their own preferences for being led.
Outcome: Leaders disrupt autopilot and begin leading consciously with comprehensive awareness of patterns.
Action: Leaders break free from limiting beliefs and challenge assumptions about what's possible for them and their organization to move beyond surviving to thriving.
Outcome: Leaders have a clear vision that breaks free from status quo thinking and limiting assumptions. What may have seemed impossible now feels achievable.
Action: Leaders create rigorous, resilient strategies that account for complexity, challenge assumptions, and prepare them for multiple scenarios instead of comfortable plans that fall apart under pressure.
Outcome: Leaders have robust strategies that are resilient to disruption and uniquely suited to their talents. When conditions shift, their plans adapt.
Action: Leaders execute deliberately by breaking old patterns and embedding new ones through sustained, purposeful practice—not just good intentions, but acting with discipline.
Outcome: New patterns become automatic. Leaders lead adaptively across situations and execute with their unique strengths—even under pressure.
Action: Leaders create environments where people feel safe to challenge assumptions, bring diverse perspectives, and address systemic barriers—combining kindness with high expectations to create conditions where everyone can excel without conforming to outdated norms or lowering standards.
Outcome: Leaders create cultures where people feel safe to challenge assumptions, address subtle acts of exclusion, and grow—leading to innovation and high performance through genuine inclusion.
Action: Leaders build strategic coalitions and drive transformation that continues beyond individual leaders by creating sustainable change through developing others.
Outcome: Leaders build deep relationships that amplify their impact. They create sustainable transformation and establish a legacy that continues through the people and culture they've nurtured.
Most leadership programs teach leaders one approach and hope they figure out the rest. DESIGN is different because it systematically integrates three frameworks by addressing what each lacks:
● Emotional Intelligence alone? Leaders understand emotions but lack strategic rigor to challenge assumptions, generate and stress-test alternatives, and leverage their distinctive capabilities.
● Red Team Thinking alone? Leaders think critically but miss key emotional dynamics and signature talent application.
● CliftonStrengths alone? Leaders know their talents but apply them on autopilot without rigorously challenging systemic barriers or questioning how existing power structures might limit their effectiveness.
DESIGN integrates all three from day one—so leaders develop emotional intelligence AND strategic rigor to challenge status quo thinking AND intentional strengths application simultaneously, creating leaders who transform systems rather than just navigate them.
Most leadership development programs:
● Tell your leaders what to add to their leadership toolkit
● Focus on strengths without addressing limitations
● Provide comfortable strategies that don't survive real pressure
● Leave your leaders to figure out how to integrate what they've learned
DESIGN is different because it:
● Helps your leaders overcome limiting patterns before adding new capabilities
● Integrates three powerful frameworks (EI, RTT, CliftonStrengths) throughout
● Stress-tests strategies to ensure they work under real pressure
● Builds automaticity so new patterns stick even in challenging situations
● Develops leaders who can transform organizational systems, not just navigate them
● Creates sustainable culture change through leaders who embed new approaches into their teams and departments
Resilience helps leaders cope and bounce back from adversity, but transilience provides them with the capacity to endure, flexibly adapt, and positively transform.
Leaders can do more than just survive—they can thrive. Surviving is a reactive way of being whereas thriving is proactive. Resilience is primarily about survival. Transilience takes leaders further—beyond resilience.
Leaders increase their capacity to embrace change in the forms of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and hyperconnectivity (VUCAH). How might a serendipity mindset help a leader see opportunity in the unexpected or bisociative thinking help them connect seemingly unrelated facts or events? For leaders and their organizations, consider how they might challenge assumptions, stress-test ideas, and strategize to discover feasible alternatives to be ready for whatever the future could hold.
Leaders develop their ability to be antifragile—when exposure to chaos and uncertainty, stressors, or risk results in making something better and stronger than before. How might embracing discomfort help leaders develop their antifragility?
Hustle culture and 996 aren't ambition, but exploitation dressed up as virtue. High work demands, inadequate resources, and unrealistic expectations don't just create long hours, but a grinding spiral from overwork into burnout. When unhealthy workplaces reward people for overworking, that implies they treat people as resources to be consumed rather than humans to be developed. Burnout isn't a personal failing. Instead, it's an organizational design flaw. The best workplaces prove this daily: high standards, real accountability, and genuine compassion aren't competing values, but rather the foundation of cultures where both people and performance thrive.
Sustainable excellence beats burnout brilliance. How can your leaders work effectively, protect their personal lives, and cultivate well-being in ways that enhance both their performance and their team's approach to work?
Maximize utility to prevent burnout. Work should nurture the other parts of leaders' lives, not diminish them. What matters to your leaders beyond work? What good is an "A" at work if they get an "F" in life?
Leaders can "have it all" over the course of a lifetime, but it's unrealistic to have it all at once and be able to keep it up. Recognize the seasons of life and what matters most for each point in time.
Imposter syndrome is a systemic scam that exacerbates normal feelings of self-doubt and fails to recognize the impact of systemic bias and exclusion on women in workplaces. It's more pronounced for marginalized identities—the more intersectional, the more compounded the marginalization will be. If your organization hasn't yet addressed imposter syndrome, your leaders can still improve their ability to navigate it at work.
Leaders can recognize that they don't need to be fixed because there's nothing wrong with them. Your leaders can question the role of workplace culture in imposter syndrome and challenge the assumption that it's an individual problem (because it's not). A leader's level of confidence and outcomes aren't commensurate with their competence as a professional. They may not believe it yet, but they are more than good enough.
It's important for leaders to develop genuine confidence for their own well-being and avoid fake confidence and overconfidence. "Fake it 'til you make it" is bad advice. Instead, face it 'til you ace it. Self-confidence results from leaders not betraying themselves, consistently honoring their own needs, and keeping commitments to themselves.
Leaders can take calculated risks and practice self-compassion to support themselves whether they succeed, fail, or something in between. Your leaders can help others in your organization by validating their experiences, reinforcing their capabilities, and helping them to adjust inaccuracies in how they see themselves.
Effective leadership requires innovative thinking and doing. Most leaders tend to default to one or more of the following:
1) An ingrained way of doing things (like being on autopilot),
2) A tendency to stick to what's comfortable and familiar (like playing it safe), or
3) Leading everyone based on their own preferences for being led (as if everyone were like them).
To level up their leadership, leaders can choose to lead by design by adapting different styles of leading to best suit the situation and stakeholders involved.
Leaders can find new or unusual ways to leverage strengths effectively. A leader can't get the most out of their strengths and reach their potential if they just stick to using them the way they always have.
Leaders can discover their typical leadership markers first. Then they can challenge themselves to move out of their comfort zones to choose different combinations of leadership markers for certain situations that allow for authenticity, adaptability, and help strengthen how they want to be perceived.
Leaders can strategically analyze their stakeholder network to engineer how they can build their influence by considering stakeholders' levels of influence and where they fall on the spectrum between support and opposition relative to them.
"I used to avoid difficult conversations at all costs. When I couldn't, I'd spend days anxious beforehand, get flustered in the moment, then replay every word afterward convinced I'd failed.
Now I can walk into conflict with confidence. I learned to manage my own emotional reactions first, which gave me the capacity to genuinely hear what others were experiencing. Instead of bracing for confrontation, I approach these moments as opportunities for understanding.
The shift wasn't about becoming tougher or more assertive. It was about building emotional intelligence by staying grounded in my own emotions while showing up with real empathy for others. Hard conversations are still hard, but I no longer dread them or doubt my ability to navigate them well."
—A.B., New York, NY
—Dr. Jacqueline Ashley