I help people and organizations meet challenges with creative courage and curiosity, navigate change with purpose while empowering them to cultivate meaningful solutions for

Transformation.

Hello and welcome. Thanks so much for visiting!

My name is Kaishin Chu, Kai (rhymes with Hi) in short. Though I may be short, I am small but mighty.

A few of my favorite things: solving problems, creating meaningful experiences both in my personal life and with the work I do, being outdoors with my rescued dog Fen, listening to jazz oldies with a dram of scotch on a rainy day, sharing good food and conversation, being serious yet silly, culturally immersive travels, documenting wildlife, empowering others ready for growth and doing good, conscious harmonious living, and serendipitous experiences.

I look forward to meeting you one day to share our life passions and stories. Here’s to us all cultivating more meaningful and impactful experiences for our betterment!

Core Values

Lead with Deep Empathy

Affective, Cognitive, Compassionate Empathy, required for collaborative leadership.

Do with Integrity

Lead by example, steadfast with values and purpose.

Always Be Curious

Question assumptions, biases, always seek to understand fuller context

Co-Create as Allies

Do Together as a community. Collaborate to create inclusiveness and belonging. Have fun in our work.

Embrace Our Humanness

Acceptance that we are all Human and embracing it within and of others.

Equitable Innovation

Do no harm, positive Intent, systemic thinking of impact for self and others.

Work + Life Harmony

Embodiment of values and purposes both in personal life and at work creating harmony for sustainable experiences.

Growth Mindset

Never stop learning, iterative growth through reflection, dialogue, new experiences.

Design and Development Specialist

I began my career focused on technical performance apparel while assisting in the broader needs of the companies I’ve worked for. I enjoyed the challenge of strategic problem solving and engineering products to benefit the user’s needs. Over the 20+ years I developed a broad set of skills and interests and so it was a natural transition into becoming a design and development specialist, helping companies strategize and plan in-house information, organizational culture, experiences and product lifecycle systems related to manufacturing.

After a 20+ year career as a design specialist in various fields, I’m still truly an intrapreneur who loves strategic creative problem solving and creating with purpose while advocating to align business needs and objectives with people needs and attuning to people experiences.

Service Design + Systems Thinker

My process, in short, is that of a service design thinker, which I also teach and coach professionals to cultivate their Service Design Thinking mindset. It involves gathering multifaceted input, analyzing the information, exploration, collaborating to strategize a plan, then facilitating the production of a product or service that fully satisfies the original goals all while engaging the end user by providing them with a personally relevant experience.

A well-designed product or service should address the product and service’s past, present and future. What worked or didn’t work, what is its current state of usefulness, and what are our objectives and the end-user’s immediate and potential future needs? I take pleasure in working with people and organizations in tandem to create alignment through Service Design where we begin the focus on 5 main stakeholder groups to make sure the right people are all at the table to collaborate and contribute and work to align and attune the outcomes for both business and stakeholder groups.

These days I work remotely from Metro Vancouver area, working with clients and vendors globally more efficiently and with flexibility for all. I’ve developed processes and skills using digital tools to help collaborations and communications in order to work virtually from anywhere.

Farmer's Daughter + Food Lover

It is always lovely to gather friends and colleagues to share good food and drink, to unwind, and to make more intimate connections. This is one of my great pleasures in life. Another is photography. I combine the two shared through, OneLushLife. My family grew our own produce and raised our own poultry in rural Ontario when I was a child, and then again in my teens, in the Greater Vancouver area’s farmlands.

I have a deep passion for eating locally and creating in the kitchen with market-fresh ingredients. Dash of Food is where I share all things food-related such as personal culinary creations, found recipes, farmers’ market locations, and other tasty inspiration in hopes of inspiring readers to add more variety to their daily gastronomic lives. My dream is for each of us to get more personal with our food, to eat locally and to eat well, which I believe, will in turn build our communities and enrich all our lives.

It has been a long time since my father ran a farm… He has since passed on. Between the years of 2010 – 2013 I was his primary guardian — he had early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s. I was there for him as much as I could, offering a constant watchful eye and ear and advocating for better care for him.

From Designing to Coaching

The experience has taught me a great deal about being human, about what feeds each of us on a deep, essential level, and about what validates us in our everyday lives. Whatever our exterior expressions, our innate values always come through, though not easy to hear or see when one has Alzheimer’s and dementia. It’s a matter of learning to be a better listener, being able reframe perspectives, and being more vigilant in observations, in order to see to their emotional needs in order to help give them a better quality of life.

As a result of this part of my life, I have become a better active listener and am able to facilitate people and cultivate their abilities to see situations from more proactive perspectives. I feel that this ongoing learning experience has and will continually make me a better person, a better colleague, a better designer and coach for organizations.