About

We help people and organizations unlock their potential and achieve amazing things.

We believe that design can help teams reimagine the patient and customer experience.

Marlies (she/her) is a change consultant and lead of the Pivot Group. The Pivot Group is a consultancy group that helps healthcare organizations across Canada to tackle complex problems and design new services models. Marlies previously founded and led the Design Lab at Alberta Health Services. She has led large scale change initiatives at both a provincial and national level since 2005. One of her proudest accomplishments is when she led the BC Surgical Quality Action Network to reduce surgical site infections across 25 surgical programs. Marlies is a nonconformist and calls herself a positive rebel. She is a huge proponent of using social movement theory, crowdsourcing and liberating structures to guide her work. Her current challenge, using system design thinking to solve complex problems in healthcare.

Josh (he/him) is a change consultant with the Pivot Group and the Design Lab at Alberta Health Services. Josh is a registered nurse with a Bachelor of Nursing and has worked across the health care system in various clinical positions. He was drawn to improving the health system and worked as a quality improvement consultant until he fell in love with human centred design. He has since embraced using his creative mind to help health and care teams use design thinking to change the way they look at problems.
Over the last 5 years, Josh has been using different tools to create new ways of knowing as teams shift the way they think about; food service delivery, indigenous patient concerns, and team culture. A self-proclaimed liberating structure guru, Josh helps unleash team creativity, and curate safe spaces as we shift the most difficult challenges in health and care.

Debbie (she/her) is a change consultant with the Pivot group who specializes in leadership development. Debbie started her career as a nurse and has worked internationally at Emory Healthcare (USA), Health Sciences North (Ontario), Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (UAE) and recently Joint Commission International. She has recently started the Diamond Cut Leadership Network to use her connections and talents. She is a dynamic speaker and has unique approach to help clients execute their business strategy to achieve transformative change. Debbie has been in and around various aspects of healthcare for 20+ years and has a wonderful way of nudging and bringing leaders along to look at complex problems with a new lens.

Richard (he/him) is a change consultant with the Pivot Group specializing in digital transformation and behaviour-informed policy. He is a digital product manager with diverse public and private-sector experience in finding and delivering solutions built on human-centered insights. He’s secured funding for a startup, facilitated policy development for regulating private health clinics and guided development for two of Canada’s fastest-growing scale-up companies. His diverse experience is built on his ability to unite and inspire teams, helping them grow their empathy for the people they serve and challenging them to think of new approaches to old problems.

Tyler (he/him) is a change consultant with the Pivot Group. He is a Brand Psychologist and Information Designer.
He has 15 years professional and academic experience and supports clients across a variety of industries in the development of marketing strategies and brand storytelling. Tyler has geek-level passion for design and knows that brand livelihood is best accomplished through exposure, variety, and repetition of a consistent and focused belief system (the principles of human-centred design).
Within the framework of design thinking and through the lens of brand archetyping, Tyler ensures that every strategic decision is intentional and aligned, giving business owners and decision makers the confidence, they need to chart forward through ever-evolving markets.

Kathryn (she/they) has the superpower of making the complex easy to understand. Her specialties in user experience, marketing, digital design, and data visualization allow her to communicate complex problems that assist innovative solution development.
With her passion for accessibility and systems improvement, she creates digital products within the nonprofit, energy, environment, and healthcare sectors.

Melani (she/her) is an Information Designer, currently finishing her last semester at Mount Royal University. After spending a year working as a technical content developer for Calgary Counselling Centre, Melani decided to pursue a more creative path. In addition to working with The Pivot Group, Melani is currently a freelancer and a Communications Consultant/Social Media lead at the Silver Linings Foundation. Within her design process, Melani strives to produce accurate and captivating visualisations that arrange data into a coherent narrative or a story, intending to make complex information more accessible and understandable for everyone.