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Working at Social Design
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About
Social Design's argument is that organisations stall by protecting the status quo: they tweak campaigns, adjust funnels, shuffle headcount or buy another tool bolted onto an old system, starting with answers instead of questions. Its counter-position is that growth, stall and upheaval are predictable cycles, and that events usually treated as crises — a new technology rollout, a policy or funding change, a demographic shift, a leadership transition — are the openings to realign how work actually gets done. The practice works across organisational development, organisational design and strategy consulting on the grounds that none can be fixed without touching the others, and describes itself as management consulting with a systems lens: nothing pre-packaged, co-designed against the client's own culture. Its stated invitation, and the line the site is built around, is to say "maybe" before saying "no" — pausing the rush to a fix long enough to ask what is actually happening in the system. Schulman Dupuis also runs a project called Women Disrupted, and was a board member of Hive Waterloo Region when she took the TechWaterloo stage.
Backers
Not applicable — an independent consultancy, not a funded company.
Quick answers
What does Social Design do?
Business design: redesigning the internal systems, decision structures and leadership practices that determine whether an organisation can execute through change. It works across organisational development, organisational design and strategy together rather than separately.
Who runs it?
Karen Schulman Dupuis, a business designer and consultant in southwestern Ontario. She was a board member at Hive Waterloo Region, the Mozilla learning community teaching digital literacy, when she spoke at TechWaterloo.
What does "say maybe before you say no" mean?
The practice's own framing for its method — pausing before reaching for a fix long enough to ask what is actually happening in the system, and whether the current way of working still fits where the organisation is going.