Kimberly Goes to Business School #4: The Invisible Infrastructure
Kimberly Goes to Business School is a numbered series within my Business Different column. It chronicles Biscochito’s field study with Harvard Business School and Tulane University.
Last week, Big Business School came to Santa Fe.
Well, not exactly. Dr. Dennis Campbell from Harvard Business School, Dr. Jasmijn Bol from Tulane’s Freeman School of Business, and Harvard case writer Kerry Herman came to spend several days with us in the City of Holy Faith. They are studying our transition to collaborative scheduling and whether AI can support that shift. We had completed months of remote interviews, but this was their first time with the team, in the room, seeing how we actually work.
We started with a 90-minute empathy clarity workshop, not a typical business school activity.
Five working caregivers joined the academics in our office living room, where we hold our caregiver support meetings. We opened with introductions, moved into physiological sighs, a guided body scan meditation, and an introduction to empathy clarity, the practice of being present with another person’s emotional experience without it becoming your own. Then everyone created a circle of love for themselves, mapping the people, places, and communities that sustain them.
Then our guests interviewed the caregivers for an hour. The caregivers impressed the room; their intelligence, dedication, and depth of understanding of their work were clear. Then they met with Nadia Brackett, who spent 18 months working with us in-house to develop the core of our non-hierarchical, relational operating model. Lunch. More interviews. Dinner.
What stayed with me most happened that evening.
Two of the academics remarked, more than once, that they had felt something during the exercises. Not a conclusion or an idea. A physical sensation sparked by a memory of connection, much the way your chest may feel warm behind your sternum when you imagine holding a child’s hand. For caregivers, this awareness is the beginning of our work. Caregiving is emotional labor and relational work. If we cannot recognize those experiences in ourselves, it is much harder to remain present with them in others.
The professors arrived to study collaborative scheduling. That is exactly what they are studying.
But collaborative scheduling is only the easily visible part of the system.
People see the coordination tools, the scheduling process, the AI we are testing. What they do not immediately see is the infrastructure underneath, the trust required to ask for help, accountability to peers, the ability to tolerate discomfort, the practice of repairing relationships when things go wrong.
We organize our work around three questions: why, how, and what. The academics came for the what, and a bit of the how. The workshop gave them a glimpse of something deeper. Holding onto loving kindness as our why is what made the how possible, the actual work of building authentic relationships as a daily workplace practice. Laying the groundwork for this model took years, and much of it was rough and painful. Some caregivers don’t arrive with the skill or desire for this kind of relational work. Most adjust quickly and joyfully once they feel what it makes possible.
I’m watching to see if the workshop opens enough curiosity that our guests become interested in what sits beneath the scheduling structure, because the most durable thing we are building won’t be the collaborative schedule. It will be the trust from our disciplined, kind relational practice that makes genuine collaboration possible in the first place.
That is my work, to make what we have built together clear enough that no one has to take it on faith.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on June 16, 2026, under Business Different.
