What It Takes to Build with Care: The Process Behind Every Project

In this kind of work, every single day can look a bit different.

Some days, I’m holding focus groups or one-on-one conversations. Other days, I’m designing learning journeys, exploring modalities for self-discovery, renewal, and health, or coaching leaders through exhaustion, uncertainty, or growth.

On paper, these might sound like very different pursuits. But underneath it all, the process is the same, a rhythm I return to again and again: Define, Discover, Design, Explore, Evolve.

It’s not a rigid framework. It’s a flow, one that centers curiosity, relationship, collaboration, and care. One that’s rooted in the belief that those most impacted by a system must guide its redesign, to ensure our efforts heal rather than harm. One that reminds me (and my clients) that meaningful change happens when we slow down enough to listen, design with, not for, and stay open to what we learn along the way.

Define

Before we start any journey, we need to name our destination — or as much as we know about it.

This phase is about making the implicit explicit: helping define the vision for the future - what it looks like, feels like, who it impacts and how, and then surfacing our assumptions around learner or stakeholder, clarifying what we think we know and what we’re here to learn. It’s where we outline the initial questions guiding our work, identify who we’re designing for, and name the biases, gaps in our understanding, unseen influences, and anticipated challenges that we want to stay aware of along the way. It’s therefore also where we ask whose experience must guide the work, and commit to centering those most impacted from the very start. This step helps prevent well-intentioned design from replicating the very harms it seeks to address and invites honest reflection on power: who holds it, and how it can be shared.

In other words, it’s where we start with self-awareness, so discovery can start with openness.

This aligns with reflective practices in trauma-informed care and equity-centered design, which emphasize awareness of power, privilege, and positionality as essential to ethical partnership.

Discover

We then move into listening.

This is where we pause and ask: What’s really going on here? What’s being said and what isn’t? What do those most impacted actually need? We’re not guessing or studying. We’re working in partnership. We’re recognizing people for their expertise in their own lived experience and compensating them for their time. Rooting the process here ensures that insights come from those most affected, reducing the risk of replicating inequity or harm. Because you can’t know what you don’t know and we need to move at the speed of trust.

Sometimes, this phase surfaces tension or uncertainty. Other times, it reveals incredible clarity that was already there, just waiting to be named. Either way, discovery is where we make sure we’re building on truth, not assumption.

When we start by listening, everything that follows becomes more grounded, more relevant, more human.

This approach draws from participatory action research and human-centered design principles, methods that begin with deep listening and empathy to ensure solutions emerge from those most affected. (For example, IDEO.org’s Design Kit calls this “empathize.”)

Design

And once we’ve grounded in what’s true, we can begin to re-imagine what could be.

Design is where ideas take tentative shape. It’s not about the perfect plan. It’s about sketching the contours of possibility. Together, we map what support might look like, what resources could help, what systems need to shift, all informed by our earlier research.

I love this phase because it’s both creative and clarifying. It’s where we start to see the throughline between intention and action, and make sure what we’re designing actually honors the people at the center of the work. Their needs. Their schedules. Their hopes and dreams. Their realities. I like to describe this phase as “strong opinions, loosely held” as they’ll later be further informed through actual feedback.

Rooted in co-creation, this phase mirrors practices used in equity-centered design and systems thinking, where ideas are shaped collaboratively rather than prescribed. It’s about weaving strategy and imagination, much like the Stanford d.school’s “define and ideate” phases, but slower, more relational.

Explore

This is the part where we roll up our sleeves.

We put things out into the world, experiment, and learn. We try things that might work, and we pay attention when they don’t. We do this with, not for or on, communities, sharing back what we learn, seeking consent for next steps, and adapting in response.

In my experience, this is where the real growth happens. It’s also where we practice humility. We don’t have to know everything at the start; we just have to keep showing up, adjusting, and learning from what emerges.

A commitment to experimentation and exploration reminds us that change isn’t a straight line. It’s a series of small, courageous steps, and every insight along the way is part of the outcome.

This phase parallels what implementation science calls “rapid-cycle learning”: testing small changes, reflecting, and iterating with community input. The aim isn’t perfection, but responsiveness, something the Equity-Centered Community Design model (Creative Reaction Lab) also emphasizes.

Evolve

Finally, we integrate what we’ve learned.

Evolving means looking honestly at what’s working, what needs care, and what should be left behind. It means creating systems and habits that sustain the work, not just in theory, but in practice, over time.

This phase often looks quiet from the outside, but it’s where transformation settles in. It’s where a new way of working starts to feel natural, not new.

The evolve phase aligns with adaptive learning and systems-change methodologies that treat feedback as fuel for growth. Michael Quinn Patton’s Developmental Evaluation work, for instance, reinforces that lasting change depends on learning as you go, not waiting for post-hoc evaluation.

How You Can Play With This Process

Whether you’re building a new initiative, navigating challenges, or trying to expand your organization, a few lessons have stayed true across every project I’ve ever been a part of:

1. Start with participation.
The people closest to the issue always hold the most valuable insight. Make space for their voices, not just once, but throughout. Let the process be shaped by those who live the work every day, and recognize them for this wisdom.

2. Clarify your true outcomes.
Ask yourself: What is our “why”? Too often, we design around what’s easy to measure or what we’re asked to measure instead of what actually matters. The metrics should be in service of your actual hopes and dreams (if they’re not, your design won’t meet your actual goals).

3. Stay flexible and iterative.
If the process feels too straight forward, it probably isn’t real. Build in space for feedback, reflection, and adaptation. Rigidity protects comfort, not equity or humanity.

4. Anticipate challenges early.
Every effort that centers people over systems will surface complexity. Planning for that reality, and not resisting it, makes your work more resilient and your team more grounded.

How This Process Creates Lasting Change

I come back to this rhythm - define, discover, design, explore, evolve - because it mirrors how meaningful change actually happens: slowly, in relationship with others, and evolving in response to real-time feedback.

Whether we’re trying to heal burnout, reimagine leadership, or redesign social systems, the work that we’re doing is complex. If it were easy, it would already have been done.

When we approach it with care, curiosity, and trust, we give ourselves permission not just to build something better, but to become something better in the process. Because ultimately, listening and learning aren’t the soft parts of strategy; they’re what make change last.