Hannah Kreiswirth

Organizations that get people right perform better. I help you design for that.

I'm an executive organizational designer and business leader. I work with leadership teams navigating AI transformation, rapid growth, and operating model redesign—building the systems, structures, and cultures where people and business performance genuinely thrive together.

My work is grounded in Life-Life Harmony—a framework and practice built on a simple belief: when organizations invest in the full human experience of work, they unlock performance and growth that wasn't possible before.

Areas of Expertise
  • Operating design for the human and AI organization
  • Organizational design and business innovation
  • Executive leadership, advisory and coaching
  • Change management and operational transformation
  • Cultural strategy, team design and growth, and DEIB

Working at the intersection of people, performance, and technology

Operating design for the AI era

Workshops, webinars and trainings

Offering:
  • Ongoing free webinars
  • Diagnostic workshop: a half-day workshop to identify where your organization is most underdesigned
  • Workshop series: moving from diagnosis to actual operating design
  • Keynotes and leadership sessions for offsites, all-hands, and board meetings

AI is reshaping how work gets done — faster than most operating models were built to absorb. The gap between what the technology promises and what organizations are actually experiencing isn't a tools problem. It's a design problem.

That's the gap this work addresses. The Five Cs — Communication, Care, Contribution, Community, Compensation — are a diagnostic framework for identifying exactly where your organization is most underdesigned, and a design brief for fixing it.

Chief Operating / People / Innovation Officer

Fractional and advisory leadership

Specialty areas include:
  • Operating model and organizational redesign
  • Team design, hiring strategy, and career frameworks
  • Performance reviews, OKRs, and goal architecture
  • Budget planning and financial governance
  • People systems, culture, and leadership development
  • Positioning, brand strategy, and organizational narrative

You're moving fast — growing, pivoting, or rebuilding — and you need someone who can hold the operating strategy together while you do. Someone who's been inside organizations like yours and knows where the leverage points are.

Let me extend your leadership capacity, free you to focus on what only you can do, and help you build an organization that performs and lasts. Whether that's a few months of focused advisory or an ongoing fractional engagement — I work at the pace and depth the moment requires.

I'm open to considering full-time roles as well.

Where my work has lived

A systems designer at heart and an entrepreneur by instinct—I've built teams, companies, and creative ventures with one consistent thread: making other people's work better, more purposeful, and more human, in a way that elevates contribution, cultivates authentic culture, and increases organizational revenue and profit.

My executive leadership has been grounded in genuine commitment to the organizations, people, and missions I've joined. See below and view LinkedIn for more.

AREA 17
Partner & COO · 2016–2025 · New York & Paris · area17.com ↗

Building an organization with the conditions for craft, impact and soul

As one of three partners, I led operations, people, and business strategy across a nine-year arc of transformation—building the infrastructure, brand, culture, and operating systems that allowed AREA 17 to grow from a respected boutique into a globally distributed strategic agency. I held the business and human sides of the organization in tension—always together.

As one of three partners, I led operations, people, and business strategy across a nine-year arc of transformation—building the infrastructure, brand, culture, and operating systems that allowed AREA 17 to grow from a respected boutique into a globally distributed strategic agency.

My purview spanned the full operating model: business strategy, workforce design, leadership development, financial governance, cross-border people systems, and AI tooling and technology integration. I translated the founders' vision into organizational reality, and held the business and human sides of the organization in tension—always together.

Under that operational leadership, AREA 17 became trusted by some of the world's most influential institutions—The New York Times, Harvard University, the Getty, OpenAI, the Aspen Institute, the IEA—across arts, culture, and society. The agency scaled significantly while deepening its culture and sustaining the distributed New York–Paris team that actually worked. We built something genuinely good to be inside—and the work, the clients, and the people reflected it.

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Purpose
Head of Creative · 2012–2016 · New York · purpose.com ↗

Building the infrastructure behind campaigns and movements that matter

Purpose was built around a belief that movements need infrastructure just as much as they need urgency. I came in early to help build the team, the creative model, and the organizational conditions that made both rapid-response campaigning and long-term institution-building possible simultaneously.

Purpose was built around a belief that movements and change need infrastructure just as much as they need urgency. I came in early to help build the team, the creative model, and the organizational conditions that made both rapid-response campaigning and long-term institution-building possible at the same time. What grew from that was a specialized creative agency with a vibrant culture, mission-driven foundations, artist collaborators, and the capacity to work at the speed and stakes that social change actually demands.

My focus spanned executive producing and creative directing content and campaigns, building the team and capabilities, P&L management and resourcing, and business development and pitching. Leading a team and alongside fellow leadership, I established the infrastructure for real-world creative potential, new business lines, and helped rebrand Purpose itself.

The work we did was intense, timely, and visible. We partnered with organizations like the ACLU, Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, SEIU, and the UN across climate, LGBTQ+, social and civic causes. A signal project was taking Everytown for Gun Safety from concept to organizational strategy and brand to national presence in partnership with Mayor Bloomberg. This collective work was early proof for me that when people feel seen and supported, this turns into value, impact, and power.

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Advisory Boards
Global Board Member · 2018–present · sodaspeaks.com ↗

Supporting the direction and operations for a global membership of founders and leaders in digital agencies—connecting on business strategy, organizational health, and the future of creative work.

Growth Board Member · 2025–present · youandthem.com ↗

Supporting a veteran, boutique talent consultancy as they grow and stay at the leading edge of people operations and organizational best practice as the future of work continues to evolve.

Featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, 4A's, Communication Arts, Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards, Fast Company, SXSW, Awwwards, Webby Awards, and Anthem Awards.
Say hello.

I'm always glad to hear from people doing interesting work—whether that's a potential engagement, a conversation about the future of work, an invitation to speak or write, or just a good idea worth sharing.

hello​@wirth.works
A different starting point

Moving Beyond
Work-Life
Balance

"Work and life aren't opposing forces. They're intertwined realities—and it's time we designed for that."

I've always struggled with the phrase work-life balance. Something has always felt off: we spend one-third of our lives working—if work isn't part of life, what is it? For most of my career I didn't have better language for it, just a growing sense that the way we talk about, experience, and design work is inadequate. And then reality made the truth a bit louder. Leading a global team through the pandemic, the line between life and work didn't blur—it effectively dissolved. When I became a parent of two soon after, the interconnectedness of it all became undeniable. That's when the words Life-Life Harmony found me.

Life-Life Harmony is a framework—and a commitment—for building organizations around how humans actually function, behave, and dream. Not utopian. Practical, operational, and built to last. Organizations that get this right don't just become better places to work. They perform better, retain more, and build something that lasts.

Read on Substack →

We are in a rare period of global transition

We exist in a rare moment where thinking in terms of the long-accepted "work-life balance" paradigm no longer reflects—or supports—today's world of work.

Post-pandemic realities, geopolitical instability, accelerating climate and social pressures, and the rapid advance of AI have fundamentally reshaped how we live, work, and relate. Organizational systems designed for a simpler era are breaking under the weight of complexity.

Organizations are operating under mounting pressure: economic volatility, global competition, technological acceleration, and rising expectations for speed, transparency, and accountability. At the same time, people are no longer willing to organize their lives around work alone. They expect meaning, flexibility, autonomy, and humanity—not as perks, but as baseline conditions.

AI is reshaping not just how work gets done, but what human contribution means. Plural careers, caregiving responsibilities, community commitments—the social reality layered onto all of this is more complex than any system we've built to manage it.

"My job is to make other people's jobs great."

That's always been my craft—designing the environments, structures, and systems that help people do their best work while living their best lives. Not in a fluffy, utopian way, but in a deeply practical, operational way. The rails matter. The rhythms matter. Intention with follow-through matters.

This is not a moment for incremental fixes. It is an opportunity to redesign the role of work as part of life before this window of possibility closes.

Both a philosophy and a practical operating model

Life-Life Harmony helps leaders redesign people-systems for sustained performance and human flourishing. At its core, it's a body of practical beliefs where business performance and human sustainability are not competing priorities—but interdependent design outcomes.

This begins with a simple but often ignored truth: we are still designing work around a "single-life assumption"—one role, one employer, one identity—despite the fact that people are already managing multiple roles, identities, and responsibilities, both in and out of the workplace.

Most of our systems are built as an opposition, as if work must be protected from the human, rather than designed for the human.

For people, it offers real support for lived experience—not in theory, but through the systems they interact with every day. People bring their full lives to work, and those lives deserve clarity, dignity, and sustainable support.

For organizations, it creates conditions where people and performance reinforce one another. Study after study shows that when people feel supported, connected, and purpose-driven, performance rises, innovation flourishes, and retention increases.

Life-Life Harmony is not simply a values stance, but a strategic business imperative.

The Five Cs

Five essential conditions that shape how people experience work—and how organizations perform over time. Most organizations approach these in isolation. Life-Life Harmony designs them as an integrated system, because weakness in one destabilizes the whole.

01
People need to feel heard and understood
Communication

Treating communication as a core operating system—not an individual skill—with shared language, decision-making frameworks, and feedback loops that clarify expectations, reduce friction, and build trust at every level of the organization.

02
People need to know their wellbeing genuinely matters
Care

A shift from offering benefits to designing legitimate care—systems that reduce burnout, support mental and physical health, and account for the full realities of people's lives, including caregiving, health, and the unexpected.

03
People need purpose, progress, and meaningful work
Contribution

Aligning organizational purpose with individual growth—designing systems where people can see, feel, and measure their impact on something larger than themselves, with real autonomy and evolving mastery built into the work itself.

04
People want to belong to something real
Community

Shifting from control to connection—designing physical, digital, and cultural environments that support shared context, authentic belonging, and the kind of voluntary participation that can't be mandated but can absolutely be cultivated.

05
People need to feel valued fairly and holistically
Compensation

Shifting from pay as a transaction to compensation as a reciprocal and transparent value system—aligning pay, benefits, and recognition with market realities and real human needs, regardless of whose life they reflect and how governments contribute to them.

What shifts when this work lands

Instead of burnout
People stop leaving

When people feel genuinely supported—not managed—they stay, grow, and bring others with them. Retention stops being a metric and starts being a signal.

Instead of compliance
Culture becomes something you can feel

Values stop living in handbooks and start showing up in how decisions get made, how feedback moves, how people treat each other under pressure.

Instead of friction
Work stops feeling like a cost

When the systems are well-designed, people don't have to fight the organization to do their jobs. Energy goes toward the work instead of around it.

Instead of pressure
Performance comes from alignment

Clarity, trust, and shared purpose make better work possible—and sustainable. People don't need to be pushed harder. They need cleaner conditions to do what they're capable of.

Instead of false trade-offs
Human investment compounds business value

Organizations that design for the whole person don't sacrifice margin to do it—they grow it. Reduced attrition, higher engagement, stronger output, and better client relationships are all measurable returns. Taking care of people is the business strategy.

This is a living, open body of work

Life-Life Harmony isn't a finished product—it's a framework I'm actively developing through research, real-world application, and genuine exchange with people who care about these questions. Some posts are structured and researched. Some are loose, inquisitive, and very simply me. All of it is rooted in the belief that when work and society honor the whole person, everything gets better.

If this resonates, I'd love to have you along.

Say hello.

Whether you want to invite me to speak, have me on a podcast, collaborate on something, make an introduction, or just to say hello—I'd love to hear from you.

hello​@wirth.works