Designing Your Success
Research-Based Leadership Development
Designing Your Success is an intensive, research-based leadership development program that helps mission-driven organizations build a growth mindset, improve career resilience, and unlock leadership potential within their teams and communities. Through evidence-based strategies and practical tools grounded in design thinking, this proven program empowers individuals, teams, and organizations to reach their full potential and find increased career and life fulfillment.
Designing Your Success reflects a distinctive pedagogy developed in collaboration with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and educators from Stanford's d.school, Graduate School of Business, and Graduate School of Education, in partnership with Stanford Life Design Lab Co-Founder and Co-Author of New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, Dave Evans.
Funded by Accenture, the program applies a world-class, research-based curriculum that uses design-thinking strategies to create meaningful change across five key areas: career management, career resilience, mindsets, skills, and work experience.
Our approach to Designing Your Success
The modular format allows organizations to seamlessly embed DYS into existing leadership development programming, meeting participants where they are.
To learn how Designing Your Success can help your organization, get in touch
program components
Core Curriculum: Participants engage in thoughtfully designed activities and a co-creative learning environment that develops practical skills enhancing marketability and resilience while fundamentally shifting how they view work's role in their life journey. The program balances high expectations with grace, modeling self-care while driving growth.
Career Navigation & Transition Support: In today's rapidly evolving work environment, DYS equips participants with the mindset, tools, and resilience needed to navigate career transitions with confidence. Through design thinking exercises, participants learn to reframe uncertainty as opportunity, identify transferable skills, explore new possibilities, and move from reactive job searching to proactive career design aligned with their values and goals.
Train-the-Trainer Model: We train and certify facilitators to adapt and deliver the modular curriculum to serve diverse, context-specific leadership development needs, extending the program's reach and impact while building capacity within organizations and communities.
Designing your success in action
Since 2019, Designing Your Success has partnered with over fifteen social impact organizations to scale the program nationwide, reaching dozens of communities across the U.S. We've trained dozens of certified facilitators and connected 5,458 participants to DYS programming, substantively improving the career resilience and leadership capacity of over 2,727 participants. Participants emerge not just with a plan for their next role, but with a durable framework and renewed sense of agency in shaping their professional path and leadership identity—transforming career disruption from a crisis into a catalyst for meaningful growth and reinvention.
