Project Design: The Good, The Bad and the Wild

What does film pre-production have in common with international development, software engineering, or urban design? More than you'd think! In this episode, Danielle sits down with Kelsey Wilkins - screen writer, script supervisor, and sister extraordinaire - to talk about how pre-production, by any other name, would still be project design. The two get into why the film industry's planning process...

What happens when everyone agrees something needs to change, but the software you rolled out to fix it isn't actually fixing anything? In Part 2, Emma Marks and Audrey Damman get real about what happened after they got consensus to roll out Asana to their team at WRI. Spoiler: getting everyone to agree was just the beginning. This is where they learned that culture eats software for breakfast—and...

What is happening when your whole team agrees on what's broken, but at the end of the day, nothing changes? In this episode I sit down with Emma Marks and Audrey Damman to talk about what they learned rolling out a new work management system to their team. We get into some of their findings about how just because everyone agrees that something is a problem, it doesn't mean that solving that proble...

In this final part of the conversation with Sebastian Varela, we get into something that might be the most important piece of the puzzle: how do you build organizational structures that create coherence without crushing the diversity of perspectives that actually makes your work valuable? Sebastian is the Director of Strategy and Institutional Alignment for the Cities Program at the World Resource...

Welcome back to Part 2 of my conversation with Sebastian Varela! If you haven't listened to Part 1, I recommend starting there — we set up the core tension between clear, top-down alignment and the flexibility that local teams need to actually get things done. In Part 2, we dig into the "how." If too much rigidity backfires, how do you know how much flexibility to give? Sebastian's thinking on thi...

In this episode, I sit down with Sebastian Varela to dig into one of the trickiest parts of project design: alignment. Not the "check the box and move on" kind. The kind where you're trying to balance clear communication across stakeholders with the flexibility teams need to actually get things done on the ground. Sebastian is the Director of Strategy and Institutional Alignment for the Cities Pro...

In most organizations, you plan first, then build, but what if we plan to build first and design later? Welcome back to Part 2 of the conversation with Ken Wilkins. In Part 1, we heard how Ken's software team navigated FDA regulations and the tension of needing approval without getting timely feedback. But Part 2 digs into something even more fundamental: what makes a design process actually work?...

What happens when the people closest to the technical work can't make the final design decisions- but also can't get the feedback they need to make good recommendations? In this episode Ken Wilkins takes us inside the world of FDA-regulated medical device development, where design decisions involve life-or-death stakes, regulatory gatekeepers, and technical constraints most of us never think about...

Almost every guide or resource on Project Design I've ever read tells you to 'consult your stakeholders', almost none of them tell you how to actually do that -- how to functionally engage people when not everyone can be a decision-maker, and how to keep people engaged when realistically you can't do what they want. In Part 2 Matt and I get into how to navigate these real-world situations. He shar...

In the second episode of Project Design: The Good, The Bad and The Wild, host Danielle Wilkins sits down with Matt Kessler-Cleary to talk about project design from his unique perspective as his team's 'fixer of broken things'. With 10+ years of experience as a wearer of many hats AND jack of all trades for the strategy team of one of the largest divisions in a busy global NGO, Matt brings both an...

"Organizations think they're answering the question, but they're not really answering the question." This episode explores why- and what to do about it! In this inaugural episode of Project Design: The Good, The Bad and The Wild, host Danielle Wilkins sits down with guest Kavita Desai to discuss what she has learned over her 18 years leading business development and proposal design for organizatio...