Harvard × Superfriendly

Harvard × Superfriendly — designing a practice, not a workshop.

The Harvard Business School Digital Initiative didn't want a workshop. They wanted a durable way of working that would keep inclusive design alive after the engagement ended — when no outside facilitator was in the room.

Role

Lead Facilitator, Designer & Coach

Client

Harvard Business School Digital Initiative × Superfriendly

Year

2023

Disciplines

Facilitation · Curriculum Design · Inclusive Design · Service Design

A different design problem than a workshop

The output isn't slides. It's a team that knows how to do something they didn't know how to do before — and a set of tools they can actually use on their own.

That's a different design problem than delivering knowledge. It's not about what you teach; it's about what capability you leave behind. The engagement brief required designing not for the moment of delivery but for the months after it, when the HBS Digital Initiative team would apply what they learned to real projects without external support.

I joined as Lead Facilitator, Designer and Coach through Superfriendly, collaborating with David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias.

Workshop vs. practice

A workshop ends. A practice continues. Designing for a practice means designing for the moments when no facilitator is present — when a team member needs to explain why a metric is biased, run a power mapping exercise, or push back on an assumption in a sprint review. The curriculum had to create that capability, not just the memory of having learned something.

Six sessions, each building on the last

The facilitation architecture was a sequence of six interconnected sessions — less a workshop series and more a practice being developed in stages. Each session assumed the vocabulary and instincts developed in the one before it.

Cognitive Bias Foundations

David Dylan Thomas led the opening sessions, grounding the group in a shared vocabulary — not textbook psychology but the specific ways bias surfaces in content decisions, metric choices, and design assumptions.

Goals-Setting & Commitment

Pushed the team to articulate what inclusive design actually meant for their work — not "we value diversity" but specific, measurable commitments tied to real projects and real decisions.

Community, Power & Pod Mapping

Made abstract power dynamics visible and diagrammable: who does this team currently center? Who is most affected by their decisions but has the least voice? Where does the gap between intention and impact live?

Problem Framing

Trained the team in a specific discipline: staying with the uncertain, messy work of understanding before moving to solution. Jobs-to-Be-Done framing built the reflex of interrogating the problem before designing for it.

Applied Practice — DI People Page

Applied everything to a real project — the DI "People Page" — using user journey mapping, values-based prioritization, and lo-fi wireframes as thinking tools rather than deliverables. The wireframes weren't the point. The point was practicing inclusive decision-making on something that actually mattered.

Synthesis & Playbook Development

Consolidated the team's shared language, exercises, and decision frameworks into a living document they could reference, teach from, and evolve independently. Designed to feel owned by the team, not handed down to them.

The Inclusive Design Playbook

Designing the playbook was its own design problem. It had to be specific enough to be useful, structured well enough to function without a facilitator, and feel owned by the team rather than handed down to them.

The primary designed output of the engagement was a custom Inclusive Design Playbook: a living document capturing the team's principles, the exercises, and the decision frameworks in a form they could reference, teach from, and evolve.

Not generic inclusive design theory — the language and frameworks this particular team arrived at through this particular process. A curriculum as much as a reference.

Bias-informed design principles

The cognitive bias vocabulary from sessions 1–2, translated into actionable principles for the team's specific design context.

Ethical research methods

Research frameworks that center affected communities — not as subjects, but as active participants in the design process.

Participatory frameworks

The power mapping and community mapping exercises from session 3, documented with facilitation notes so the team could run them independently.

Budgeting & resourcing pathways

Practical guidance for making the case for inclusive design investment — including how to frame it for stakeholders who think in terms of timelines and budget, not values.

Practicing in the open

A commitment framework for keeping inclusive design visible in day-to-day work — in standups, sprint reviews, and stakeholder presentations — not just dedicated sessions.

A living document

Designed to be returned to as the team's practice matures, not shelved after the engagement ends. The test was whether someone who wasn't in the sessions could pick it up and use it.

What's different here

Most of the work in this portfolio lives in screens. This one lives in how a team makes decisions.

The facilitation design required the same skills as any complex UX problem: understanding what the user actually needs (capability, not just knowledge), sequencing the experience so difficulty builds appropriately, designing exercises that translate theory into embodied practice, and creating artifacts that outlast the engagement.

The difference is that the "interface" is a room of people, and the "product" is a changed way of working. There's no Figma file for that. There's no launch date. There's only: six months later, does the team still use what they learned?

The principle I apply to all facilitation work

Never design an exercise that produces an output the room won't own. If it comes from outside, it doesn't stick. If it comes from them — if the principle was already in their best instincts and you just made it explicit — it does.