Testimonials
Kai is a truly compassionate, warm and caring person. As a mindset coach, she has a talent for assessing things in a non-judgmental way, that makes you feel at ease and comfortable to open up to her. I would recommend her to anyone who feels stuck and need support with making big life decisions relating to career and relationships. She asked me thought-provoking questions, which helped to shift my perspective of a situation, to look at it in a different way than I normally would. Many times she empowered me to come up with solutions on my own by establishing trust in my own intuition. After working with her, I feel more positive and hopeful about how I see my future moving forward. The best thing about having Kai as a coach is how she inspires you to overcome past trauma or fears that hold you back and she gives you the confidence to know that you can live a happy and fulfilling life. Thank you, Kai!
Kai has tremendous skills in creativity, strategy, production management, and unlocking the potential and improving performance of others, but really she is a change maker. Having known her for may years, and collaborated on complex projects in the past, I’ve seen up close how Kai fearlessly dives into challenging situations, finds the superior path forward, and helps teams manage complexity.
During the COVID-19 crisis, Kai volunteered to develop and manage a citizen action response initiative that went from idea to active fundraiser and communications campaign in about one week.
For anyone seeking support for improving their operations, services, culture, or creative projects, you need look no further. I enthusiastically recommend Kaishin Chu.
I engaged Kai for multiple coaching sessions on both professional and personal topics at a challenging time for me, in both realms. We conducted sessions over Zoom, and via preparatory emails, and follow up emails. I selected her due to her focus on individual empowerment and ability to unlock existing potential, in a nurturing fashion. Kai’s timely, well structured, accessible coaching helped me think more creatively about ways to improve my professional life and duties in a tailored, personalized fashion. Her gentle and open style made me feel incredibly comfortable to share and open up, and explore/accept my own ideas. I now have new strategies to approach problems, and new ways to approach thinking about future contexts. My career has progressed positively as I implemented my learnings towards leadership and on project initiatives, and my personal life has seen a marked growth in confidence. I thoroughly recommend her services and broad ranging skillset to individuals and companies, as well as her warmth and terrific energy. Thank you Kai!
I had the pleasure of having Kai as a coach last year, and it was a wonderful experience. Kai is a competent, well-prepared, and well-skilled professional, as well as a kind and amazing human being. Professional coaching is an in-depth process, and she has the experience, training, and tools to guide us through it as a client.
Through her guidance, I was able to ask Kai important questions about my career, which opened my mind and heart to my skills, opportunities, and goals. I was able to build my career path and next steps not only to achieve success but also to lead a happier life.
Kai [designed and] facilitated two Overdose Prevention workshops in 2018. This gathering brought community, frontline responders, friends, family and drug-users together to discuss perceived and actual barriers between all groups. She created a safe space where everyone’s voice was heard, lived experiences were shared and the stories of lost loved ones were honoured. Intentional conversations were facilitated while using her service design process for building and improving overdose prevention technology. Brave Technology Cooperative is extremely grateful for Kai’s flexibility and expertise in providing these workshops. She is an expert in empathy building for engagement, design-thinking and the service design framework, and we look forward to working with her again soon.
Kai is a dedicated, talented and generous service designer and facilitator. I had the pleasure of learning from her during the 2019 Global Service Design Jam in Vancouver, which she organized and led. Her warmth and infectious energy made the design sprint fun and engaging. She approaches any subject with curiosity and establishes a genuine connection with anyone she encounters. I look forward to implementing what I’ve learned from Kai in my own practice and look forward to collaborating with her again in the future.
I’m a HCI student and I stumble upon the Service Design Jam on Eventbrite while looking for a design thinking workshop. The Service Design Jam is an intensive, two and a half day workshop in which the participants will solve a real-world problem using the service design process. We started with a simple theme, which later materialized into problem statement by using various methodologies and tools. Throughout the weekend, we got our hands dirty with user research on the field, defining the problem, ideas generation, rapid prototyping, business model formulation, and testing. Ultimately, we showed our prototype in front of everybody and gave constructive critique feedback to each group’s design. My experience with the host, Kaishin has been life-changing. Kai is the main facilitator of the workshop. She along with other volunteers have created a fun, non-judgemental, informative yet inspiring environment for us to fully emerge into a weeklong design jam. Kai is resourceful in the area of Service Design and Design Thinking process. She and her team constantly stimulate us into thinking deeper and wider, as well as providing constructive feedback. On top of that, her material is well crafted and intuitive, enabling a seamless learning experience. I have taken away so much from the workshop thanks to Kai and her team. The experience enabled me to be a better Design Thinking practitioner and provided with heaps of new tools to utilize in my personal project. I would highly recommend Kai to anybody who is looking for Service Designer, mentor, workshop facilitator or collaborative leadership instigator. Her expertise and quick wit will transform your organization, and better yet your life definitely!
Deacon Poon
Recruiter, Consultant – 2019
I got to know Kaishin as an outstanding mentor and workshop facilitator when she was teaching Design Thinking as part of the Innovating for Employment Success program at MOSAIC. She is very creative, innovative and inspirational. I learned a lot from her – not only the Design Thinking methodology itself but how to implement it and find innovative solutions for real life problems using a business case provided by a sponsor company. Her patience and tremendous support helped my team to complete our project successfully in a very short amount of time while learning by doing. I would recommend Kaishin to anyone who is interested in Design Thinking and innovation.
Olga Mikova
Business Intelligence Data Analyst | Report Developer
I have partnered with Kai on a number of multi-dimensional projects for apparel product development. She understands her clients design needs and has business savvy. She is a forward thinker and original.
My name is Joe Bickson. I’ve been working withmajor corporations, institutions, non-profit organizations and individuals throughout the world. I bring a track-record of accelerating significant measurable change across large, complex projects.
I’ve known Kai Chu for two years, over which time I have worked with her on three separate occasions – participating and co-leading design-thinking learning experiences with 48-hour deadlines to produce high quality prototypes and user-tested services.
Kai is a thought-leader in the world of service design thinking. Her work has contributed to me in several ways – specifically:
1. Giving me a greater sense of myself as a leader in the world of design-thinking and business model generation
2. Creating a community and network of people who support one another in our creativity and leadership – of which I am a part.
3. Teaching me valuable frameworks, tools, skills to build my ability to better serve my clients.
Kai brings the expertise and leadership to harness the collective creativity of groups, in an unbelievable timeline, producing significant, powerful answers to the wicked problems and challenges of our 21st century society. Most of all – Kai is out to make a difference. She is a purpose-led, high integrity individual, creating a world in which design thinking is available to those who most need it, and use it, to make the world work for everyone.
Earlier this year I was lucky to attend Vancouver Service Jam, leading by Ms. Kai. Being a lawyer and policy maker in some sense, I really appreciated this experience, because it opened my eyes to how transform talking (in what all lawyers and politicians are good enough) into real doings. I was so impressed that even wrote an article in my blog.
Galyna Paliychuk
Business & Human Rights, Social Business & Sustainable Development Specialist
The series of templates/worksheets demonstrated Kai had a depth of knowledge about service design that was really just being touched upon during the Jam. I was impressed by them…
I was also impressed with how Kai had certain time markers she was aiming for, but would adjust and shift the activities and schedule to meet the needs of the group – effectively ‘dancing with time.’
Nacho Monzon
User Experience Consultant
Kai helped design and facilitate a 2-week workshop for MOSAIC’s IWERC program (a co-op experience using real-world company concerns solved by the participants through Kai’s guidance). Having worked with Kai while she facilitated, I would recommend her as a facilitator. Participants were taught to use Design Thinking within a Service Design framework. Her hands on approach helped students grasp the complex concepts easier. Her ability to identify key roadblocks in her students perspectives enabled her to adjust her workshops, making them more meaningful and tailored to her students. The results of her workshops and as a facilitator can be seen in the comments a number of students have given, which is that, they felt more confident in their ability to not only land their first Canadian job, but they’ve also improved their ability to think critically about problem solving.
Kai is an amazing instructor who helped me get my head in and around service design at IWERC. She is passionate, creative and super reliable. Her understanding and experience made the course easy as she made the classes fun while providing all the practicality we required to tackle the project at hand. I really appreciated Kai's professional and supportive guidance while she educated our group on Service Design. She was very knowledgeable, approachable and was ever so graceful to go above and beyond and answer all our questions in an easy to understand manner. She has provided me and every member of the group with the right tools, knowledge and confidence to build our experience.
I was lucky to be participant of the Design Thinking Workshop Program by Kai Chu. This 2 week course gave me a lot of new insights as big part of this course is related to searching new solutions, new ideas, thinking outside of the box. What I liked most is that the course is not theoretical, we had real business cases and visited real businesses and as consultants we had to design the process of overcoming current challenges that business have. During this case we practiced not only to gather the information correctly, dive in the company’s daily work to be able to discover its real “pains” with empathy, but also used innovative approaches to bring the best solutions. I remember one of the biggest insights for me, when we were discussing our “client” in a group and tried to practice interviewing managers in order to get more information and at some point of time we just stuck and couldn’t find a path with proper questions for reaching our target (we needed them to openly tell us about true concerns). We tried different formal questions and it seemed it is not working at all. Kai came to our group and it took her couple minutes to give us a new perspective to modify our questions in order to address to manager with a bigger empathy and that worked perfectly afterwards. I am using new methods of design thinking in my everyday work now and I strongly recommend this course to everyone who wants to think and live OUTSIDE OF THE BOX.
Anna Zavalishyna
HR Professional
