Lisa Leit, Founder, Happy Whole Human

Happy Whole Human is building a proprietary human systems intelligence and intervention platform that connects validated assessment, personalized coaching methodology, practitioner capability, and longitudinal measurement across individuals, relationships, teams, and organizations. It’s an ecosystem for human development from a systems perspective.

Basically, we want to look at the systems within us, and the systems we as humans are embedded in, with curiosity and diagnostics in the form of assessment, to understand what’s happening inside us and around us — in our relationships, our teams, our communities, and so forth. The goal is for people to feel empowered to intentionally design systems that work strategically and intelligently for them and others: bringing the tools to diagnose what’s going on, then making interventions and changes in a strategic way — putting people more in the seat of designing their human systems, within and without.

We’ve seen a lot of different things. We’re really just getting started, as I mentioned — we’re building our app now, and it’s going to launch in the next three months. So we don’t yet have the whole human systems architecture in place to apply to teams. We’re starting a pilot, and we’ve had pilots in the past with Fortune 500 companies, but only in bits and pieces.

What we have seen is people having tremendous insights and making changes, and we’re really excited about this new capacity with the app. I can’t point to evidence for the app itself yet, but there’s clear evidence that bringing this awareness into systems is incredibly powerful — it gives leaders a mechanism to listen to what their people are actually saying.

For example, I did a leadership group session where the team thought everyone was struggling financially, and that not earning enough money was their problem. But when they took the Holistogram assessment, one of our seven assessments, the group’s results showed everyone was 75% or above in financial wellness. So that wasn’t actually the problem the data was surfacing.

They were surprised that every one of them, in their self-report, said they were earning enough to retire comfortably. What was actually surfacing was disempowerment — not knowing where to go for help — and that they were siloed and not talking to each other.

So we were able to give leaders a real-time read on what was really happening with their people, share it with the team, and get them working with it — challenging their own assumptions and thinking together about creating something that would work better based on what was actually going on. That was amazing.

I think it’s a lot of disjointed efforts — well-meaning ones: individual coaching over here, assessments over there, HR doing something else, maybe some different development initiatives and trainings. They’re all good in their own right, and there’s nothing wrong with them, but they’re not working together. They’re not improving actionable intelligence. They’re not starting by looking at the whole, then targeting interventions strategically, and then measuring the whole again to see what’s going on together. So it’s not a holistic, whole-system model.

That’s what we want to equip people with: a way to look at how an individual is doing, certainly, but also a couple, a team, a leader — how everyone is doing on all these different levels and how they’re working together. And if there’s a problem on any level, we want to have the levers to improve things across the system and measure the improvements.

Oh, five years — wow, everything’s changing so fast. That’s a great question.

I see us working in exciting ways with organizations and coaches. Here’s the thing: coaches operate in a variety of ways. Most of us have our own private practices, working with clients — individuals, teams, organizations, couples, whatever it might be — while also picking up jobs on platforms, one here, another there. There are so many moving pieces.

Alongside that, I see us empowering coaches to build very robust private practices on our platform — giving them the tools to supercharge and scale that practice, so they feel less chaotic about how they’re spending their time and can lean on our support. They can serve organizations in a far more organized way, while also having an organized home base of their own, even as they continue working across other platforms. We want to give them a better way to run their own practice.

We can cover the basics so they don’t have to worry — because let’s face facts: almost every business that’s going to be successful in five years has to think of itself as a software business. It has to be enabled by technology, and most coaches don’t feel themselves to be tech people. That’s not what they want to be doing — they want to be coaching. So we provide the tech and the platform so they can be part of this future, where it’s woven into everything.

One of the main things is making sure they don’t fear it — because if they’re afraid, they won’t be open to learning the tech. Without that fear, they’ll be open to everything new, and things will go much better.

And we’re very lucky — our co-founder is my husband, Dean Pritchard. He’s an actual physicist and mathematician, a former rocket scientist, and he’s our AI security CTO, so he’s got that covered, which is such a blessing. That’s how we’re able to keep our clients’ data secure.

Over the next five years, we’re also going to be building a very robust data set, because I’m a researcher at heart — that’s my background, as a research professor in psychology. I really love the idea of being able to use anonymized data to learn about humans and what works for them, and to share that in meaningful ways so we can all grow and learn more about what works for everyone.

Well, okay — let me unpack that for a second. That’s a very beautiful, thought-provoking question.

But here’s the thing: I don’t actually wish I’d followed a particular piece of advice — there’s plenty I’ve been given. I keep coming back to one: keep it simple, stupid. Keep it simple, that’s the best of it. I don’t tend to start there; I have so many ideas, big ideas. But keeping it simple is a really elegant, important thing, and it’s something I need to focus on much more.