Design Therapy: Aligning Internally to Amplify Impact

Enterprises and organizations at SOCAP are passionate about creating meaningful community impact, but something holds them back. Often the root of the problem is internal alignment, clarity of purpose, and open communication.

Complex factors such as societal and strategic organizational shifts become perfect moments for greater clarity and re-alignment within an organization. But too often, leaders do not know how – or are unwilling – to address these complexities out of fear of facing hard truths, capacity to manage it, or skillset.

In this interactive and hands-on workshop, we’ll introduce a strategic approach that organizations can use to create powerful opportunities for internal reflection, alignment, and clarity where all people within its ecosystem are heard and brought along in the work of realignment. The core idea is to use self-defining and introspective projects (such as branding, website redesigns, campaign, or communications plans) to bring team members, leadership, and even community stakeholders through crucial, sensitive conversations that address tensions and misalignment under the surface to help them to engage in strategic thinking about identity and audience. Over a decade of creating and testing this approach has proven that it can have a transformative, healing impact both internally at the organization and externally with community.

Participants will walk away with an understanding of how communications projects like this act as trojan horses to initiate deeper conversations about organizational identity, purpose, impact, and stakeholder engagement, ultimately strengthening their capacity for external justice-oriented outcomes.