When I first began designing my coaching courses, I didn’t have any particular concept in mind. I was working from my own experience, applying what worked for me, and staying curious about whether it might help other people too.
As I kept designing and refining the courses, I began to realize that the structure I was creating was mirroring the relationship between systems thinking and design thinking.
Systems Thinking is about the big picture. It focuses on the whole. On how things connect, how patterns repeat, and how feedback loops shape what happens over time. It takes a top-down view to understand how a change in one place affects the rest. In organizations, wrong changes break systems and burn people out.
Design Thinking works in the opposite direction. The focus is on the person. The process starts with empathy and collaboration. The approach is bottom-up, iterative, and experimental. It’s creative and full of possibilities. Poor design emerges when we ignore the human experience.
At first glance, these two ways of working can feel like opposites. One is system-centered. The other is human-centered. But they’re not competing. They’re in fact complementing each other.
That’s the relationship and structure that emerged as I built my courses.
The four-week course is a zoom-out experience. Each week, participants work through guided worksheets on their own. They’re not fixing one issue or chasing a breakthrough. They’re stepping back to look at the whole system they’re living in.
We’re zooming out to understand our system.
The group sessions are the bridge between the two. They help us see shared patterns through each other’s experiences, while making room for individual insight and reflection.
The 1:1 sessions are where design thinking comes alive. We zoom in with empathy to listen, brainstorm, and clarify what truly matters. It’s a creative process where goals around work and life start to take shape.
We’re zooming in to design change that fits within our system.
If this sounds like something you’d like to experience, you can find my courses here.