Talks

Selected conference talks and workshops. Interested in having me speak? Get in touch.

• Introducing PeopleWork

  South Dakota Advertising Federation — Sioux Falls, SD — April 2024

  A return visit to introduce PeopleWork — touching on feedback culture, with a reminder that you are not your work.

• Feedback: The Gift You Keep on Giving and Receiving

  OmnichannelX — Amsterdam, Netherlands — June 2020

  Session on feedback culture, part of a four-city workshop series.

• 11 Lessons from 25 Years

  FH Johanneum — Graz, Austria — January 2020 (approximate)

  The final class lecture of FH Johanneum's Content Strategy graduate seminar.

• IBM Digital Growth & Commerce

  IBM Digital Growth & Commerce — January 2020 (approximate)

  Workshop & talk.

• RGD’s Design Thinkers

  Design Thinkers Toronto — Toronto, Canada — October 2019

  Talk and workshop at RGD’s Design Thinkers conference.

• Adobe Live — World Interaction Design Day

  Adobe Live / Interaction Design Day — Live-streamed — September 2019

  Talk on how this year’s theme, trust & responsibility, shows up in critique and CritKit.

• Feedback: The Gift You Keep on Giving (and Receiving)

  RGD’s In-House Conference — Ottawa, Canada — September 2019

  Workshop on how to ask for, provide, and integrate feedback into your work.

• Brand is Product is Marketing is Operations (version 2)

  Joint Futures — Helsinki, Finland — September 2019

  Advising and helping shape the experience of this conference, alongside presenting — bringing craft, operations, and strategy together.

• Brand is Product is Marketing is Operations (version 1)

  South Dakota Advertising Federation — Sioux Falls, SD — March 2019

  On why holistic, X-shaped teams outperform siloed ones — and why there’s more in common than you might think across brand, product, marketing, and operations.

• In/Visible Talks

  Feedback: the gift you keep on giving (and receiving) — San Francisco, CA — January 2019

  Lecture and workshop on feedback

• People Persist

  Global Innovation Forum (GIF) London — London, UK — November 2018

  15 lenses on the theme of this year's Forum, Be More Human -- continuing the People Layer journey.

• Then, Now, Next: The Evolution of the Design Business

  Bucharest Tech Week — Bucharest, Romania — May 2018

  Three distinct eras of the practice of design -- how teams have organized (and reorganized) in each.

• What Persists: People, Process, and Performance

  HOW Design Live — Boston, MA — April 2018

  An updated People Layer framework, why 'process' gets resisted at startups, and resources for optimizing individual, team, and org performance.

• Get Shit Done Club

  Designers + Geeks — San Francisco, CA — April 2018

  On shipping without the shit -- proven methods for getting things out the door without sacrificing quality.

• Google Sprint Conference

  Google Sprint Conference — San Francisco, CA — January 2018 (approximate)

  Workshop.

• The People Layer 1.0

  Clarity: A Design Systems Conference — San Francisco, CA — November 2017

  A design systems conference is a great place to talk about the o.g. atomic units of the design practice: people.

• 14 Lessons x 22 Years

  Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts — Phoenix, AZ — October 2017

  Keynote presentation for Arizona State University's Herberger Institute, plus a faculty session the following morning.

• The People Layer (beta)

  Hopscotch Design Festival — Raleigh, NC — September 2017

  The deepest, most complex layer of any organization — and the one that persists beyond changes in aesthetics, code, UX, UI, tools, and trends.