As large, once-in-a-generation investments, building projects often become a testing ground for organizations’ expressed values and strategic commitments. When these conversations happen at the wrong time or without the right people in the room, they can lead to costly delays or buildings that don’t support their organizations’ full potential. At Lens, we move these conversations upstream of the design process, helping teams to explore what their values and strategic commitments mean on a practical level and building their individual and collective capacities to support change. Leveraging our team’s backgrounds in organizational development and living-systems frameworks, we use a broad toolkit including participatory workshops, educational sessions, and data collection and analysis to support change. We also partner with trained professional coaches and adult educators to deepen learning where warranted. These engagements help organizations become more effective by strengthening alignments between individual mindsets, culture, strategy, and physical environment. Whether you’re building a new team, initiating a strategic planning cycle, or need to address a targeted question that has arisen on a project, our team can help.

By working in regenerative paradigms instead of fragmented and siloed approaches, we create more vitality, innovation, and the conditions necessary for meaningful growth. Lens is an experienced resource who leads regenerative design and development for teams and projects seeking transformation. We start with open minds and hearts, curious to understand your culture or essence, and ask: What makes your organization, project, or place unique?

Rooted in essence and focused on potential, we guide project teams through an experiential, effective stakeholder engagement process that includes visioning, alignment, and prioritization, leading to a customized project roadmap. At Lens, we meaningfully engage and empower our clients’ organizations, teams, or projects to reach their highest potential, resulting in transformative, long-lasting outcomes.

At any level, change can be difficult for an organization. It is, however, the key to successfully refining, advancing, and evolving initiatives. At Lens, we help teams navigate change through awareness, education, engagement, and action. We prepare organizations for planned changes, guide them through the transition, and ensure that the stakeholders successfully implement, adopt, and champion these changes. We involve key individuals early on and throughout the process. Doing so allows us to understand what an anticipated change will look on a practical level, empower individuals to communicate their needs and concerns, identify and reconcile constraints, and highlight opportunities to extend the initiative’s impact. Approaching this work from a development perspective, we help individuals understand how their unique roles contribute and grow capacity where needed. The next phase involves engagement to plan and design change initiatives that purposefully support teams, clients, and communities. Through this transformation process, we aim to minimize resistance, and maximize the benefits of the project or initiative.

Leveraging internal and external collaborations, our teams collect information across our market sectors, project teams, and all project phases to support evidence-based design practices, processes, and documentation. Our research efforts collect qualitative and quantitative information on design, delivery, and systems to better serve our designs, teams, and clients on future projects. Through academic partnerships or internal studies, we strive to better understand design outcomes, industry trends, and the built environment. Pre- and post-occupancy evaluations are one of many leveraged research tools. In these evaluations, we are particularly interested in learning about how buildings — and the process by which they are planned and designed — fuel our collective sense of purpose and generate positive impacts in areas of strategic importance, including health and well-being, sustainability and resilience, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.