Human Systems is a network for consultants with a niche topic area (social design) and unconventional incentives and sales tactics (the meaning game). We call these consultants "Social Design Advisors".
Incentives in the consulting industry are shit, and don't match the rhetoric.
Currently there is a class of workplace consultants who use rhetoric about making work more meaningful or creative, and giving workers more agency. And there are design consultants who talk about meeting customer needs better. Yet, most often the secret aim of these consultants is a cosmetic change or "concept car", which allows the business to seem innovative for a few more years, and makes its eventual disruption a bit less obvious to shareholders and employees.
We want to create a network where consultants don't work for optics, or even for business goals. We want our consultants to rework organizations and institutions so as to better support meaningful work, meaningful lives, and personal agency for employees and users.
<aside> 💰 We are raising seed capital (~$300k) to try this out, using a convertible note (see below).
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👇Contents 👇
Social Design Assessment
A social design advisor is someone who can see consequences of a social design that others might miss: especially negative consequences for individuals or societies. We train these advisors, and we find work for them. Social design advisors are designers of social systems: ****systems made of people, where there are codified and mutually understood roles and responsibilities.
Group practices party formats, bars, clubs, debate structures, group therapy or support practices, church meetings, improv scores
Family & shared living family dinner, chores, partnership expectations, parent-child time
Rituals daily practices, weddings, funerals, coming of age, new team members, trials
Organizational policies promotions reviews, project planning meetings, budget allocation, stand-ups, reporting structures
Workplaces team checkins, lunches, group physical activities
Schools grading, classroom exercises, teamwork structures, credentialing practices
Political institutions voting, unemployment centers, court procedures, legislative decision-making, licensing practices, prisons and rehabilitation centers, city volunteering, online governance
Social apps news feeds, matchmaking apps, online social spaces, chatrooms, onboarding flows, community reviews, work tracking, asynchronous sharing, scheduling, marketplaces
The Meaning Game
We want to create a network where social design advisors don't work for optics, or even directly for the business goals of organizations that hire them. We want our advisors to rework organizations and institutions so as to better support meaningful work, meaningful lives, and personal agency.
We want to give them a tool to measure their impact: the Meaning Game. It's a richly interactive, social, gamified survey. It collects data on whether workplaces (or other social environments) are: meaningful/meaningless, high-agency/frustrating, and whether they support/suppress the values of those inside.
Just fill in details about your social environment that you want to evaluate. We give you a link you can drop into your workplace slack, meetup group, or whatever. And a separate link gives you a dashboard where you can see the results. Use it to check for problems of meaningfulness and agency in workplaces, social networks, public institutions, online communities. Suggestions for improving common problems included for free.
The idea is that our advisors will be accountable to workplace and social network improvements that register on the meaning game (or through other follow-up interviews if necessary).
Our goal is that players of the meaning game have an interactive, animated, expressive, contemplative experience, and feel they can make a difference by reporting how a social environment is for them. They learn about the group they are part of, what the rest of their team finds meaningful, difficult, and can interact with each other around topics that are usually not part of their conversations.
The game is free to play, but up-sells into team plans & dashboards, team trainings, and consulting gigs.
