Polly LaBarre

A monster wave of change has set off a vast reckoning with our taken-for-granted beliefs about every aspect of how and where work gets done.

Every leader today must grapple with the inescapable imperative to create and embrace a comprehensive agenda for meaningful change on the design of work and the interconnected urgent challenges of our time—deep inequities, structural dehumanization, environmental calamity.

Polly LaBarre takes leaders on a journey across this new landscape—inspiring them with fresh thinking on the work of leadership and equipping them with powerful new approaches for this new work order, including:

How to transcend the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between performance imperatives and responsibility for people and planet
How to cultivate an “audacity of imagination” and galvanize people around a shared sense of purpose
How to “leader-proof” your organization
How to design platforms for involving, equipping, and connecting people
How to build organizational respond-ability by enlarging individual responsibility
How to grow your own resilience in the face of daunting uncertainty

Recipes For Reinvention & Resilience

Who hasn’t been rocked by change in the last few years? While we’ve all been forced to rethink, adjust, and adjust again, the gravitational pull of the status quo remains a stealthy enemy of innovation.

What does it take to wake up an organization’s inner insurgent to change ahead of change?

These times demand every organization dramatically amp up its agility, inventiveness, and adaptability. Drawing on her research and work inside some of the world’s most innovative and progressive organizations, Polly LaBarre lays out actionable strategies for building a perpetual innovation engine:

What mindsets, practices and behaviors allow you to see the world differently and subvert the status quo
Where to look for the future—and how to generate a whole new map of possibility
How to embed innovation as a social process
What it takes to create a robust architecture of collaboration for a distributed, ever-evolving cohort of innovation peers and partners
How to build a resilient organizational microbiome by embedding the mindset and methods of experimentation into everything you do

Designing Work To Create A Cultural Advantage
Today’s whirlwind of challenges—pandemic, social turbulence, economic uncertainty, looming climate catastrophe—has revealed just how inhospitable our organizations are to the human beings who work inside them. It’s not enough to ask which is the right hybrid work policy. I

t’s past time to ask: what kinds of organizations would we design if we genuinely believed in the inherent value, fundamental goodness, and unlimited potential of every person?

Short answer: they’d be very different. In this talk, Polly LaBarre unpacks design rules for unleashing your organization’s full human and creative capacity and lays out a path for humanizing work, including:

How to unleash, mobilize and amplify the often unruly, but essential human qualities—imagination, energy, resourcefulness, curiosity, intuition, empathy, artistry, eccentricity, passion, and more—without losing control
How to cultivate a culture of agency, activism, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better
How to equip and involve every person in the organization as a creator, strategist, and entrepreneur
How to build a community of peers that amplifies belonging, contribution, and voice
How to maximize engagement by investing in wellbeing and widening the circle of care