About Work Wise Studio
meet Kathy Conley
Kathy Conley is the founder of Work Wise Studio — a space where leaders and teams pause, reflect, and reimagine how they work together. With an MBA from Claremont Graduate University, she draws inspiration from Peter Drucker’s view of management as a liberal art — a practice that blends analysis, creativity, ethics, and human insight.
Kathy doesn’t just study organizations — she’s lived them. In retail, she held senior roles in training, HR, and operations, overseeing multimillion-dollar performance and leading teams through rapid growth and complex change. At the Getty Center, she played a key leadership role in planning, launching, and operationalizing the new campus — a transformative chapter for one of the nation’s most influential cultural institutions.
With the right alignment, complexity, ambiguity, and disruption become the raw materials that ignite insight, spark innovation, and shape new ways of working.
For the past decade, Kathy has brought that lived wisdom into her consulting practice — blending systems thinking with the creative mindset of a studio. She draws on tools like Clifton Strengths and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, always in service of a larger goal: helping clients surface what’s working, explore what’s possible, and craft what comes next.
Her work centers on creating spaces of trust, clarity, and co-creation where leaders can see themselves more clearly, act with greater intention, and build the capacity of their teams and organizations to thrive.
A Place for Wisdom - Informed Action
Work Wise Studio helps leaders and organizations strengthen performance, adapt to change, and create workplaces where people thrive.
Our name reflects our approach. A "studio" is a place for exploration, refinement, and creativity. It invites curiosity. It holds complexity.
And it’s where, together, we do our best thinking.
Why We Exist
From staff insights to stakeholder perspectives, organizations are full of wisdom. Too often, that wisdom goes unheard. When strategy, people, and systems drift apart, good ideas stall and energy is wasted. By drawing out the wisdom within your organization and focusing it where it matters most, we help you close those gaps and regain momentum.
Why “Studio”?
Creativity + Systems Thinking
A studio is a place for exploration and refinement — where creativity meets discipline. At Work Wise Studio, we bring both systems thinking and human insight to the way organizations change, designing approaches that are intentional, adaptive, and built to last.
Iteration + Refinement
In a studio, work evolves through cycles of exploration and refinement. We bring the same spirit to organizations, helping leaders and teams surface insights, test possibilities, and adapt in real time. Each iteration builds clarity and resilience, turning ideas into effective practices.
What We Do
We utilize best practices in organizational development to help leaders and teams move from insight to aligned action:
● Executive and leadership coaching
● Organizational discovery and diagnostics
● Strategic planning
● Systems and structures design/redesign
● Stakeholder interviews and facilitated focus groups
● Strategic advisement
The Studio Practice Framework
Every organization is a web of strategy, people, and systems. Strategy shapes not only the product or service you offer, but also how people and systems come together to deliver it. When these elements reinforce one another, progress accelerates. When they drift apart, momentum stalls.
At the heart of our work is the Studio Practice — the ALIGN Framework. This is our organizational alignment approach designed to help leaders continually connect strategy, culture, and execution. It provides the structure to surface opportunities and challenges, the focus to align around what matters most, and the tools to move forward with clarity and momentum.
To help you reflect on where your organization is today, we’ve created a short self-assessment.
Methods We Draw From
We integrate thoughtful tools to deepen insight and accelerate alignment:
The Studio Practice (ALIGN Framework)
our core method for organizational alignment
CliftonStrengths
to help individuals and teams discover and leverage their innate talents
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®
to unlock creativity and surface complexity through tactile exploration
Systems mapping
to make hidden dynamics visible
These tools aren’t plug-and-play. They’re selected and adapted based on the challenge, the context, and what will serve your people best.
Who We Work With
We’ve worked with energetic startups, complex healthcare systems, hands-on construction firms, pioneering education institutions, and dynamic cultural organizations. And here’s what we’ve learned: while every sector is unique, the deeper challenges often look remarkably similar.
Each engagement begins with curiosity. We take time to understand your language, priorities, and culture. But what we’re really listening for are the tensions beneath the surface — the places where strategy, operations, and lived experience don’t quite align. That’s where meaningful change begins.
Whether you’re managing complexity, navigating growth, or looking to rebuild trust across teams, we help you move forward with clarity, integrity, and momentum.
Let’s Work Wise
Let’s explore the wisdom waiting inside your organization — and bring it to life.