Go beyond sustainability.
Design the future, now.
Audiences
Edible Landscapes.
Resilient Organizations.
Sustainable Futures.
Now.
You’re working hard. Not just to make the world better, but to truly help it thrive. You’ve got a powerful mission. But your team is hurting. They’re burnt out. Turnover is through the roof. What’s going on?
Without intentional design, business-as-usual takes over in the ways we work. And when it comes to changing the world, business-as-usual is the exact opposite of what we want!
So get ready to re-design your internal practices to match your mission - with our help. Through team workshops, group design sessions, individual and small-group coaching, and custom consulting, we support you as you re-imagine and re-design your ways of working. Soon, you’ll have a vibrant workplace that embodies that thriving world you work so hard to create.
Specialties
Needs & Values-Based Design
Our twist on the design-thinking process, Needs & Values-Based Design work uses creative design and narrative tools, grounded in your needs and values, to help you design a more mission-aligned project or team.
The whole design cycle - needs-mapping, ideation, design, implementation, and feedback - is available here for your project, planning session, or professional development day. Includes needs-and-values-mapping, ideation and brainstorming, and either a design deliverable (created by me with your feedback along the way) or a design workshop (in which I join you and your team to facilitate the creation of a working design all together). For more on what “design” means, and to get a deeper sense of the design process steps, check out my post describing it in more detail. Let’s get designing!
The problem it solves: “how do I move from here to here” “how do I/we” questions, with a focus on designing for actions that meet needs and match values. In terms of my own facilitation, this offering holds the important place of being one I've prototyped multiple times with different clients. I'm therefore familiar with it enough that even in my foggiest state, I feel grounded in facilitating the steps. It's also a core offering of my practice, and has helped me focus my offerings and clarify what's unique about my facilitation and design work: that I focus on needs and values, and the creativity and interconnected systems that arise out of them in design.
Ecological Thinking for Successful Teams
Complex, interdependent systems arise out of apparently simple relationships in nature. The same holds true for organizations. Ecological Thinking for Successful Teams provides a novel, cross-field set of frameworks from the world of ecological design to professionals seeking a well-functioning, resilient workplace. Designed to support progressive companies that want to re-examine their organizational design and team (or cross-team!) working practices, this series teaches clients / participants actionable tools to help reduce burnout, increase retention, and foster a better design of workplace systems. Ultimately, ecological thinking in the workplace leads to more effective, and more enjoyable, processes and outcomes for you and your team.
Narrative Futures Design
Have you ever gotten stuck in the “problem scope” phase of a planning process with your team? Narrative Futures tools allow us to do backwards design, working from “inside a future” in which the problem is already solved. Connect with your team and bring their visions and offerings into the group ecosystem. Access wild and unexpected innovation. Make the futures you imagine possible tomorrow, starting with design and action today.
Next World Design Masterclass Package
Everything you & your team need to jumpstart your creative innovation towards better mission-practice alignment. What you do every day should feel as good as the future you’re fighting for. Now it can.
Individual Coaching
Coaching with a design lens helps bridge that (often painful) disconnect between desire and action, using creative empathy-based exercises and a facilitated design-thinking process to help you move from desire, to design, to testing it out, to implementation, so that you can actually do that thing that brings your longings to life. Whether it’s your morning routine or your next big leap, design-thinking coaching brings you new tools to realize the world you need.
About Next World Design & Facilitation
Next World Design & Facilitation is a creative facilitation consultancy founded and run by Rachel Economy. We provide group facilitation, professional development training, & design-process coaching for progressive leaders, teams, and organizations. We particularly love working with change-makers who want to better align their working practices with their mission and values, at any scale.
Rachel Economy is a design-thinking coach, facilitator, poet, farmer, artist, and ecological designer. With over a decade of experience in a myriad of design-thinking and group facilitation methodologies, and a Master’s in Social Innovation and Sustainability, Rachel helps people who are longing for change to imagine and grow just and thriving worlds - at home, at work, at large, and on the land.
After many years working in organizations that followed inspiring missions, but in the day-to-day were filled with bedraggled, burnt out teams with increasing turnover, Rachel founded Next World Design & Facilitation to help bridge that painful mismatch between values and action, all while up-skilling employees in innovation and design-thinking. Here at Next World Design & Facilitation, we believe that, with strong systems design and creative collaboration skills, groups of people can model, embody, and enact, in the present, the worlds they’re working to build in the future. We’re here to help you do just that.