Designing the operating model and digital experience vision for a human-first organisation.

Chorus delivers aged care, disability and mental health services through more than 20 locally rooted teams across Western Australia. Its radical, decentralised model is built around relationships rather than transactions. Chorus people live that difference, and customers feel it.

The challenge was not to redesign what already makes Chorus distinctive. It was to create the organisational and digital infrastructure that would allow its relational model to grow without increasing the distance between Chorus, its people and its customers.

Anthologie partnered with Chorus across two connected phases: a deep discovery into the organisation’s current state and readiness, followed by a digital experience vision identifying where technology investment would have the greatest impact bringing their unique vision to life.

The work was grounded in Chorus “zero distance” principle: transformation should not be done to an organisation. It should be shaped with the people who understand the work, experience its friction and live its purpose every day.

Together, Chorus and Anthologie built a people-informed, evidence-based foundation for growth – one designed to strengthen, rather than dilute, the relational quality that sets Chorus apart.

Staying close to what was really at stake

Many digital transformations begin with systems and solutions. This engagement began with people, their roles and the jobs they are trying to do.

Working side by side with people across operational functions, local teams known as Locals, and Chorus’s social enterprises, we explored how work moved through the organisation and how it felt to the people doing it.

Together, we mapped the health of five critical organisational systems: information flow, resource allocation, feedback loops, decision-making and conflict. This created a shared view of where Chorus’s operating infrastructure needed to evolve to support its ambitions.

Just as importantly, it revealed how administrative complexity was affecting people’s working lives. The opportunity was not simply to make processes more efficient. It was to reduce the burden of coordination, uncertainty and duplicated effort so people could give more of their time and attention to connecting with customers, colleagues and community.

From this work, we co-developed experience archetypes representing the roles at the heart of service delivery and relationship-building. These archetypes made the organisation’s strategic choices tangible by showing where friction was greatest, what people needed to do their jobs well and where investment could have the most meaningful impact.

Turning human insight into shared decisions

The digital experience vision, archetypes, experience maps and service blueprint were developed in close collaboration with Chorus’s solution architecture stream.

Insights were not handed from one team to another at the end of discovery. Human experience was translated collaboratively into platform priorities, design principles and delivery decisions as the work progressed.

That zero-distance approach formed more than a set of recommendations. It created shared language, shared evidence and a shared understanding of what the platform needed to make the Chorus possible.

Chorus enters the platform build with something most organisations don’t have: a clear purpose, people deeply invested in what makes the organisation distinctive, customers who value that distinctive experience and a detailed understanding of the infrastructure required to support them.

The opportunity is not simply to implement new technology. It’s to create more capacity for what matters most: local decision-making, human connection and relational care.

Designing technology around the work

The discovery did not lead to a predetermined technology solution. It created a practical digital experience vision grounded in how Chorus works, what its people need and the kind of customer experience it wants to protect.

The platform was asked to fit the work and Chorus’s purpose – not the other way around.

Several priority initiatives emerged from the shared evidence base.

  • Scheduling was identified as the single highest-impact opportunity. An intelligent, real-time scheduling capability could accommodate change, notify everyone affected and reduce dependency on individual people holding critical coordination knowledge. This would unlock capacity across the organisation while giving customers greater certainty and continuity.
  • A unified, AI enabled knowledge system – consolidated, searchable with natural language and proactively maintained – would provide the foundation for confident, consistent practice across more than 20 Locals with diverse needs, without diminishing local autonomy.
  • A local coordinator dashboard was defined as a pivotal investment for local coordination and sustainable growth. Local leads wear many hats and at Chorus the role is called ‘Local Hat’. By bringing customer plans, service needs and staff schedules into a single view, alongside business health metrics, it could make the information needed for good decisions visible at the point where those decisions are made.

For customers, the guiding design principle was restraint. The aim was not to digitise every interaction for efficiency for its own sake. It was to create greater certainty, continuity, clarity and connection, with easy access to a human always within reach.

Across every priority was a commitment to digital confidence as a design outcome in its own right. Technology would need to be introduced with care, supported through learning and evolved in genuine partnership with the people using it.

Turning human insight into shared decisions

The digital experience vision, archetypes, experience maps and service blueprint were developed in close collaboration with Chorus’s solution architecture stream.

Insights were not handed from one team to another at the end of discovery. Human experience was translated collaboratively into platform priorities, design principles and delivery decisions as the work progressed.

That zero-distance approach formed more than a set of recommendations. It created shared language, shared evidence and a shared understanding of what the platform needed to make the Chorus possible.

Chorus enters the platform build with something most organisations don’t have: a clear purpose, people deeply invested in what makes the organisation distinctive, customers who value that distinctive experience and a detailed understanding of the infrastructure required to support them.

The opportunity is not simply to implement new technology. It’s to create more capacity for what matters most: local decision-making, human connection and relational care.

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