About Jennifer
I think I’ve always been curious about people.
Why do two people experience the same situation completely differently?
Why does one person embrace an idea while another rejects it?
Why do we sometimes say one thing — and do another?
Those questions have followed me through more than 35 years of professional work — and through life as a mother, grandmother, coach, volunteer and community leader.
Eventually, they became the foundation for Design Your Direction.
People
Insights
Brighter
Choices ♡
A career built around understanding people.
For more than 35 years, I’ve helped organizations solve real-world problems by understanding the people at the center of them.
Much of my career was spent at Procter & Gamble, where I served as a Director of Human Insights, helping teams better understand the people they served and use those insights to make better business decisions.
Later, as an independent consultant, I had the opportunity to bring that same way of thinking to businesses and nonprofit organizations facing very different kinds of challenges.
The organizations changed. The questions changed.
But one thing remained remarkably consistent: the better we understood people, the clearer the path forward became.
My education in people didn’t happen only in conference rooms.
I’m a mother of three and a grandmother of two.
I’ve led nonprofit and church programs, volunteered in my community and coached youth sports.
And I’ve spent decades sitting across tables from consumers, business leaders, employees, community members, donors and people trying to solve difficult problems.
Those experiences may look very different.
But all of them have reinforced the same lesson:
People are complicated.
We bring our experiences, circumstances, beliefs, emotions, relationships and priorities into the decisions we make.
That’s why labels such as customer, employee, donor, consumer or community member can only tell us so much.
There’s always a person underneath the label.
Different stages.
Same curiosity about people. ♡
A few things I’ve learned along the way.
What people do is only part of the story.
Understanding why they do it is often where the opportunity begins.
Assumptions are not insights.
The things we’re most certain about are sometimes the things most worth questioning.
People don’t fit neatly into boxes.
Two people can need the same thing for completely different reasons.
Insight only matters if it helps us move forward.
Understanding people isn’t the end goal. Using that understanding to make better choices is.
Why Design Your Direction?
After spending decades doing this work, I began thinking about who typically gets access to it.
Large organizations can hire research teams, insights professionals and consultants to help them understand people and make more informed decisions.
But what about everyone else?
The small-business owner. The nonprofit leader. The entrepreneur. The community leader. Or simply someone with an idea they believe could make something better.
They deserve access to good ways of thinking, too.
That’s why I created Design Your Direction — to make practical human-centered thinking more attainable, affordable and useful to people and organizations that may never have had access to it before.
When I’m not asking “Why?”
You’ll likely find me enjoying time outdoors, reading, volunteering in my community, or finding a good cup of coffee and a new place to explore.
I’m a mom, a grandmother, a community and church volunteer, a nonprofit leader and a longtime youth sports coach.
And I’m still endlessly fascinated by people.
Enough about me.
What are you trying to figure out?
Maybe you’re trying to grow a business.
Create greater impact through a nonprofit.
Understand your customers, employees, community or supporters differently.
Or move an idea that’s been sitting in your head into the world.
I’d love to hear about it.
Understand people better. Make better choices. Move forward. ♡