Workshop: Journeys and Systems | Arun Joseph and Tom Connole
Workshop: Working in journeys & systems
Overview
A hands-on evening for CX Strategists, Journey Management practitioners and leaders, Product Leads, Managers and Directors, Service Designers (Seniors and above).
We'll practice switching between two lenses: unpacking complex journeys and stepping back to see the system that produces their experience.
Key audience outcomes
Distinguish between complex journeys and systems and explain why that distinction matters when solving customer experience problems.
Know which lens to reach for when a problem calls for following a person's experience step by step, and for stepping back to see how the whole system produces that experience.
Facilitators: Arun Joseph (Senior Service Designer, Sun Life) and Tom Connole (Customer Journey Manager and Builder), hosted by Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).
Agenda
5:15 pm - Doors open
5:30 pm - Welcome and overview of Human-Centered Design at WSIB | Reshmi Bisessar - 10 minutes
Overview of workshop activity (Systems Thinking) | Arun Joseph - 10 minutes
Overview of workshop activity (Journey Management) | Tom Connole - 10 minutes
Workshop activity 1 - 25 minutes
Workshop activity 2 - 25 minutes
Reflections - 10 minutes
(Optional) Networking - 30 minutes
Event details
Date: Tuesday, July 21
Time: 5.30 pm to 8 pm
Location: WSIB Office, 200, Front Street West (Near Union Station), Toronto
Note: Light refreshments will be served. Unfortunately, tickets cannot be refunded.
About the facilitators and co-facilitators
Arun Joseph is a Senior Service Designer with Sun Life, a leading Canadian financial services company. Earlier, Arun had worked at global organizations such as IBM and Ernst & Young (E&Y).
Tom Connole is a CX Designer and a Builder of Journey Management tools. He previously consulted on innovation and customer experience at Fusion Labs (now Deloitte) and for organisations including News Corp Australia, TAL Australia, and NSW Government (Australia).
Reshmi Bisessar is an Experience Design leader focused on improving how people experience complex systems. Her work combines service design, research, and strategic foresight to help organizations move from insight to impact. She specializes in designing for equity and inclusion, particularly in public-sector environments serving diverse communities. Over the years, she has led teams and initiatives that bridge the gap between policy, delivery, and lived experience. She believes better services start with truly understanding the people they’re built for.
Amit Kiran is a Principal Journey Management Coach at TheyDo - an Experience Context platform that is helping organizations make faster, aligned, and actionable decisions based on a single, trusted understanding of the customer journey. Amit graduated from the Rotman School of Management and has spent the past 13 years as a Service Designer, working with organizations such as Apple, Pfizer, and The Home Depot.
Geneviève Metropolis RGD is a Director, User Experience and Foundations at Canada Post. Geneviève is a strategic design leader with hands-on product and service design expertise and 10+ years of experience empowering creative teams in fast-paced tech environments. She helps companies thrive by understanding their service ecosystem and identifying growth opportunities that balance value to people and deliver on business intent. From robotic automation to healthcare, consumer services, and B2B SaaS, Genevieve has been entrusted with the digital experiences of some of the most recognized brands in Canada.
Jenn Lau is a Journey Manager and Service Designer at TELUS. With her experience in health technology and telecommunications, she has helped organizations better understand and improve complex customer and employee experiences. Her expertise spans journey mapping, human-centred research, and facilitation, bringing cross-functional stakeholders together to build shared understanding, identify opportunities, and drive meaningful improvements across end-to-end journeys.
Khayyam Lasi is a Math grad turned customer experience and service design leader, with a career focused on simplifying complexity inside organizations through a human-first approach to design. After starting in insurance and discovering a passion for people in a call center role, he spent 8 years scaling CX operations at a fast-growing e-commerce startup. Since then, he has led journey management initiatives in banking and now helping scale Journey Management at Autodesk.
Nate Archer is Director of Service Design at CIBC and has over 15 years experience helping organizations design and transform services across consulting, government, finance, and technology. He is excited to explore how journey management can extend the impact of service design across organizations.
Prashant Matta is a product designer and researcher based in Toronto, working across service design, strategy, and systems thinking. His work often starts with unclear problems, messy workflows, and multiple actors who see the same situation differently. He uses journey mapping, systems thinking, and research synthesis to make constraints, handoffs, and trade-offs easier to see and discuss. His practice focuses on turning complexity into shared clarity, helping teams understand what is happening, why it matters, and what can be acted on next.
Ragesh M Ramachandran is a UX designer based in Toronto with over 15 years of experience in UX design, UX research, and service design. He focuses on transforming complex problems into clear, usable digital experiences. He has worked on UX research, usability testing, and interaction design for complex, data‑heavy, enterprise applications across industries such as insurance, banking, retail, manufacturing, and logistics. Across his career, Ragesh has combined research, design, and close collaboration with cross‑functional teams to improve how people interact with digital services.
Ryan Dias is a CX and AI Transformation leader at Tech Mahindra, where he co-founded their Center of AI Practice and leads experience transformation for Fortune 50 clients, including work that shaped AI-enabled customer experiences for over 100 million subscribers. A published researcher and global keynote speaker at the Service Design Global Conference (SDGC '25), and strategic advisor to a leading enterprise AI platform, Ryan brings both enterprise scale and practitioner depth to the journeys and systems conversation.
Silvana Sari is a service designer and design researcher with a background in visual communication and UX design. Her work focuses on bringing a decolonization lens in her work and creating services grounded in community values, spatial justice, and equity. She has worked with public and community partners on projects in cultural data, healthcare, and social impact. In her spare time, she enjoys running, taking care of her plant babies, and discovering new local trails.
Silvia Hernández has over 17 years of experience helping organizations untangle complex challenges across a wide range of sectors, from education and fintech to cleantech, working everywhere from large corporations and government to startups. She currently works at Thoughtworks, helping organizations level up their design capabilities. She believes one of the designer’s great strengths is facilitation: making the invisible visible and helping teams move through ambiguity together, always balancing the big picture with the details that make experiences actually work for real people.
Tomoya Boehm is a Senior Journey & Service Designer at Sun Life, where he focuses on conversational and end-to-end service experiences. With a background in Social Anthropology, he brings an ethnographic lens to understanding how people navigate complex systems. Previously at CIBC, he led research to guide the digital sales strategy.
Vanessa Namseang is a Product Designer based in Toronto, Canada, currently working in product at Duo by Amplemarket, a San Francisco-based SaaS company. She thrives at the intersection of qualitative and quantitative research, service design, and human + AI experience. With a Master's in Digital Experience Innovation from the University of Waterloo and a background spanning Canada's financial sector, she brings a systems-level lens to design that's both rigorous and human-centered. Her work draws on storytelling and speculative thinking, often exploring how design can support more resilient and equitable systems, from organizations to ecosystems. Vanessa designs for the messy, in-between spaces where people, systems, and emerging technology meet.
Vivian Zhao is a Toronto-based UX researcher who’s passionate about telling meaningful stories through human insights. She loves talking to people, understanding their experiences, and turning those moments into clear, actionable narratives that shape better products and services. Her work spans across organizations like the Government of Ontario, theScore, and the University of Toronto, where she’s led research that brings the user’s voice into real decision-making. Vivian is especially drawn to collaborative, co-creation spaces where diverse perspectives come together to build something impactful.
If you have any questions before our meet-up, please feel free to send them to [email protected].
We value your attendance!