Coming together to design more inclusive systems and communities
Brooklyn Butler, BLC’s Senior Manager of Business Systems, Strategy, and Design, honed her skills over a decade of experience in a range of industries and roles nationwide. She’s worked as a human resources analyst, a recruiter, and a corporate trainer, and spent the last five years in the consumer goods industry managing logistics, operations, and supply chains. Most recently, she accelerated operational efficiency at Misty Artesian Water while overseeing supply chain planning, procurement, administrative processes, and product development— responsibilities that required her to strategically coordinate systems and develop strong relationships across senior leadership, company stakeholders, and diverse teams.
Brooklyn’s professional and personal pursuits converge around a deep interest in how systems behave and how humans affect and are affected by the systems we participate in and create. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she has lived in seven states, the different topographies of which sparked her interest in food infrastructure and the human-plant relationship. She is now pursuing her statement of accomplishment in Human-Centered Design, is independently studying herbalism, and she actively promotes diversity and inclusion through memberships with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Foodboro.
We talked to Brooklyn about how her role at BLC inspired her to explore new ways of thinking about how, and for whom, business systems are designed, and how human-centered systems can support not only the business but the communities it engages with.
Human-centered design puts people at the center of developing processes. At BLC that means focusing on our team and the communities we work within.
Q: Hi Brooklyn! How do you describe your role at BLC?
I'm still in the midst of figuring that out! It was a new role we collaborated on in my interview process, so it’s a work in progress, you might say. But it’s easier to define now. My role is leading the organization through the process of reorganizing and designing our systems—our built systems, but also our human systems— to frame ourselves for the future by collecting those next steps. So, in essence, taking the abstract and making it tangible.
Q: You’re leading a philosophical shift in how we think about systems at BLC. How did you first learn about the concept of “human-centered design”?
I started learning more when I was in the process of trying to discover and understand my role. A lot of what my role entails is designing systems for a company—BLC—that wants to be philosophically different than who we were in the past. BLC wants systems that are more about people than about strategy or fiscal benchmarks. So I have been working to design more creative and empathetic human-centered systems. However, in a company evolution like the one BLC is going through, the abstract can burden the tangible so there was a need to find a philosophy or philosophies that we could lean into that spoke to our core values and our inclusion work. And in that process, I have continued to ask myself, How do you design for that? And who else needs a seat at the table to continue that work?
For the most part, companies are very traditional, very corporate. Or they perceive themselves as trying to create a new culture, but in actuality it's not that far from traditional practices. So I started researching different ways to frame systems design, and I came across human-centered design. I started learning about it and took a free course with Acumen Academy hosted with IDEO.org, which is one of the organizations that helped build the concept. I was collaborating with different people from different organizations to understand what human-centered design was.
Q: What aspect of human-centered design got you the most excited?
Making people the center of our solutions and having them provide the solutions for the questions we're asking. Sometimes in organizations like ours, we sit at our desks for so long, or we sit in academia for so long, that we think we have solutions because we read every perspective. But what you read doesn't always translate to what happens in real life. So figuring out a way to continue to put people into the solution building, as opposed to us providing a solution that we think fits them—it seems very common sense, but it's not always practiced.
Q: That resonates—there is a difference between intellectually understanding how something works and actually doing that thing.
And when you put it into the perspective of the food system, it becomes alarming how disconnected we are from letting farmers and other food industry workers build their own solutions, as opposed to us telling them to do things they can't do economically or that don’t make sense for them. No one's asking them, What problems do you want to solve? Or we make people feel like they're not going to be heard. So continuing to make ourselves uncomfortable to get to the right solution—that's been a very interesting thing to call out and put a name to, and also define.
Q: Why do you think companies tend to focus on intellectual concept building and avoid having some of these basic conversations?
I think it’s just the most human part about us—our ego. We put a lot of ego in our work because we want to feel validated in building something or coming up with a solution. Solutions are built because we work as a community, but we can get so caught up in our ego that we think, I have the right answer. This is the answer we'll go with. Especially as leaders, or as people who are trying to be innovative, we forget the human part of it.
Q: Is there sometimes a fear of confrontation too? Or a fear of other people's opinions?
Exactly. When you start to ask people about the solutions you are trying to provide and they find holes, it feels hard. To do that process and get the feedback and then reiterate and restrategize and try to deliver something better—that's hard.
Q: How are you thinking about using human-centered design at BLC?
From a cultural standpoint, there are all these different layers of where we're trying to go. But layering doesn't get you to the result you want if it's not ingrained in the fabric of who you are. We can layer on JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), we can layer on more robust health benefits, but it's superficial if it's not what we practice, not deeply embedded in the way we work. So it's strategizing for the different human aspects of the way we work—how these layers become who we are as opposed to what we're doing.
Q: What sort of the timeframe are you thinking, from inception of the idea to seeing it in practice?
There are steps in the journey that for at least five years will be hard, like changing some of our traditional, un-inclusive financial practices, adopting new approaches to how we train and develop employees, and changing how we hire and recruit. Even our marketing communications, and changing our mission and vision and values—all these things will be steps in the journey to being more inclusive in the way we think and centering our company around human beings.
Q: Is human-centered design easier to do with smaller or bigger teams? How manageable does it feel for you at a company the size of BLC?
I recently read that IBM adopted human-centered design as well; I think they started in 2013. That's a huge organization. And they were able to put metrics to the way they used it to develop their products and services—how their customers use their products and how their employees have better morale at work. If an organization as big as IBM can do it, an organization like ours can. But having a small organization is also a challenge because changes are going to be felt more, in terms of how we adopt practices and move through the process. But it allows us to come together as a team around the way we want to work. So it’ll be different, but it is truly scalable.
Q: You're rethinking the whole blueprint of an organization. It’s exciting. It’s also a lot!
It's very exciting! And also a lot. But this role was created to make space for that. One of the things that's even more exciting, and also scary, is bringing the team in. It's a very communal way of thinking, but we don't live in a society that thinks about the community often.
We're asking people to not think about climbing a corporate ladder, but to think about everyone. How do you recenter yourself to not just think about how you grow at the company, but how everyone grows at the company? Things like: How does making HR changes affect the group? How does our work in Vermont affect the community there knowing we are based in Colorado? Your decision-making must include other people.
Q: That's especially true for a company like BLC that’s constantly going into other communities, right?
As a company that advises people on the way they should work but doesn't live and breathe in that community, often we've tried to provide a solution but had a hard time implementing that solution because we didn't know every part of how people in the community work. So we’re trying to take a step back from that and ask, What other capabilities or team members or people do we need in this process to collect the community’s feedback? And how do we take that experiential learning and do better as we continue to go into communities that we don't all live in?
Q: Do you think working on human-centered design at BLC will have ripple effects for the projects we work on?
I think so. The more we can become an organization that is led by the community, by the people we're working for, as opposed to just our own ideas, the better we’ll be. And that will be seen by our projects and trickle down. We'll inevitably change the way they work because of the way we build our systems to make them more inclusive, the way we show up. We’ll lead by example.
Q: What do you see as the greatest challenges of human-centered design?
The greatest challenge is that it’s adopting a new philosophy, and I can't hold that by myself. But what human-centered design does is put names to things and allow for you as an organization to say: These are the steps, and if we follow these steps—yeah, we'll pivot or things won’t happen exactly the way they’re laid out, but—we can get there. It doesn't mean it will be easy for the individual. And collectively it'll be a hard process. But it puts a name to the things we want to do; it lays a path to where we want to go.