Jen O’Ryan, PhD
PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT
Dr. Jen O’Ryan is an Organizational Change strategist specializing in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB).
She combines a PhD in Human Behavior with 15 years of experience leading organizational change, designing new experiences for customers, and transforming enterprise-wide workflows.
Jen brings people along on the journey—meeting them where they are and showing them a way forward. She is passionate about making real and sustainable change possible for organizations of all sizes.
Areas of specialization
- Facilitation services for leadership retreats, planning sessions, and strategy development (reorganizations, layoffs, leading through uncertainty)
- Workshops and interactive learning sessions
- Reviews for bias, stereotypes, inequities, ableism, erasure, stigma, appropriation, and similar issues.
- Approaches that break the cycle of underperforming DEIB initiatives, change fatigue, and employee overwhelm.
Review messaging, content, and interaction points
- Spot patterns across language and images that create a negative connotation
- Placement and design that create barriers to your message
- Word choice and expressions that are exclusionary, offensive, or have negative origins
Workshops and sessions (example topics)
- Leading Inclusion and Diversity as an “Accidental” Expert
- DEIB in Communications: Change The Words = Change The Impact
- Transforming Your Organization from Optimized to Humanized
- LGBTQ+ 101 – Understanding Gender and Orientation
- Reclaiming Toxic Teams: Cultivating Insight, Respect, and Belonging
Experience/Selected Projects
- Smoothed out and standardized employee onboarding process. Introduced key elements of DEIB across the end-to-end employee lifecycle. Converted documents, systems, and processes to include plain language. Reviewed and edited to remove bias, inequities, erasure, and similar issues.
- Led small group learning sessions on gender identity with executive leadership team. Provided a safe, trusted environment for individuals to learn and develop skills necessary for leading more inclusively.
- DEIB consulting for math textbook publisher. Successfully advocated and introduced designs that were more inclusive, representative, and consumable by students. Removed barriers like overwhelming visuals, competing focal points, and text-dense formatting.
- Speaker on DEIB and organizational transformation at national conferences (NGLCC, PFLAG, ChickTech, ACT-W, Gender Odyssey, as examples).
- Designed, serviced, and analyzed user experience data. Evaluated workflow interaction points for exclusion and negative experiences. Introduced changes that directly resulted 63% higher rates of active participant engagement than those sourced from previous methods. Developed and implemented an expansion strategy that increased capacity for internal testing by 58%. This approach also resulted in improved quality and frequency of user data received.
- Discovered a workflow use case that contributed to negative customer outcomes and dissatisfaction. Designed a solution and released a feature that resulted in an immediate 7% decrease of related customer contacts. 60 days post-launch showed zero customer contacts related to this issue.
Credentials
- Author of two books on the subject:
- PhD – Human Behavior, Capella University
- MBA – University of Phoenix (Bellevue)
- BA – University of Washington (Bothell)
Selected Clients
- Jennifer Brown (Jennifer Brown Consulting)
- Puget Sound Pilots
- Larson Textbooks (Math, K-12)
- WellSpring EAP
- Multiple SRHM Chapters (DEIB workshop)