Meet Alicia
Alicia A. Walters.
I’ve always been interested in how things work. And, probably more importantly, why they don’t.
01
Section 01
My route into the work I do today hasn’t been a straight line. It has moved through business, healthcare, women’s wellness, design, methodology development and Business Innovation & Service Design.
On paper, some of those things might look unrelated. To me, they never really were. Wellness was always the thread.
02
I’ve spent a long time noticing the gap between how something is supposed to work and how it actually works for the people experiencing it.
Wellness has shaped many of the choices I've made about what to study and where to look next. I studied business because I wanted to understand the business around wellness, not only the practice of it. More than 25 years of working at different points within healthcare also gave me experience of how services and systems operate in practice, alongside developing my own work and working directly with clients.
When I studied Interior Design, that was rooted in wellness too. I wanted to understand the environments in which wellness happens: the space, flow, aesthetics and servicescape, and how those things can affect the experience of the person using a service.
Today, those perspectives inform my Business Innovation & Service Design work, where I look across services, experiences, environments and business systems, question the assumptions underneath them, and develop and test what they could become.
03
Some questions need more than an existing framework.
Working directly with women made me increasingly aware of how easily an individual experience can be separated from the circumstances surrounding it. What someone is experiencing rarely exists in isolation from the rest of her life.
That observation became part of a wider interest in how we make sense of complexity without rushing to simplify it. It led me to develop my own approaches and methodologies, including PCM™ (Precision Context Model™), a woman-centred, context-led wellness methodology that continues to develop through research, practice and testing.
Methodology development is now a distinct part of my work. I’m interested in creating practical ways of thinking, questioning and making sense of what is happening, while leaving enough room for context, individuality and new information to change the picture.
04
I still work directly with women, and that matters to me.
As my work has expanded into methodology development, Business Innovation and Service Design, I haven't wanted to lose that direct connection with women. There is something very different about sitting with a woman, listening properly and understanding what is happening in the context of her life.
My background in women’s wellness has developed over many years through practice, study and continued learning. But the more I’ve learned, the less interested I’ve become in assuming that one answer, approach or way of looking at something will fit every woman.
My practice today is deliberately small and depth-led. I work with only two women at a time. Partly because I want to give that work the attention it deserves, and partly because direct practice is one part of a much wider body of work that I’m developing.
I think that balance is important. Working directly with women keeps me close to the human experience behind the methodologies, services and systems I’m designing elsewhere.
05 · An interdisciplinary approach to wellness
I don’t look at wellness through one lens.
Over time, the way I work has become increasingly interdisciplinary. I’m interested in what becomes visible when you look at a question from more than one direction: the individual and her context, the service she experiences, the environment around her, the business delivering it and the wider system in which it all sits.
That matters because the most useful place to look isn't always where you first expect to find it. Sometimes it is the individual experience. Sometimes it is the service, the environment, the business model, an opportunity that hasn't yet been developed, or an assumption sitting underneath all of it.
And when your work involves innovation, standing still doesn't make much sense. I expect to keep researching, questioning, testing and looking beyond what I already know, because wellness will keep changing. Businesses will keep changing. The way people live will keep changing. My job is to keep asking better questions and bring what is useful back to the work.