A sought-after speaker, moderator, and interviewer, Polly has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses around the world and hosted numerous events. On top of moderating or hosting, she also delivers keynotes on the following topics:
Leading in the New Work Order
A monster wave of change has set off a vast reckoning with our 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 in the design of work and the interconnected urgent challenges of our time – deep inequities, structural dehumanization, and environmental calamity.
In this keynote, Polly LaBarre takes leaders on a journey across this new landscape. During her speech, she will inspire the audience with fresh thoughts on leadership and equip them with powerful new approaches for this new work order.
Key Takeaways
- How to transcend the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between performance imperatives and responsibility for people and planet.
- How to “leader-proof” your organization.
- Methods to cultivate an “audacity of imagination” and galvanize people around a shared sense of purpose.
- How to design platforms for involving, equipping, and connecting people.
- How to grow your resilience in the face of daunting uncertainty.
Roll With Change
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.
Key Takeaways
- The mindsets, practices, and behaviors that allow you to see the world differently and subvert the status quo.
- How to engage in innovation as a practice – and where to look for future developments.
- 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 of experimentation into everything you do.
The Human Edge
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. It’s time to ask: what 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 reveals the rules for designing an organization that accesses its full creative and human potential.
Key Takeaways
- 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.
- Ways to cultivate a culture of agency, activism, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better.
- How to build a community of peers that amplifies belonging, contribution, and voice and involve every person in the organization as a creator, strategist, and entrepreneur.
- How to maximize engagement by investing in wellbeing and widening the circle of care.
Designed to Flourish
Develop People, Defeat Disruption
Change is an inside-out job. It’s not about reacting to external events or chasing trends, so much as it’s about developing your adaptability – your elasticity, maturity, plasticity, openness, emotional dexterity, regulatory power, and more.
Organizations that deliberately develop that capacity in every individual shore up their resilience. In other words, when individuals in an organization thrive, the organization thrives. But how can organizations foster an environment conducive to human growth?
Polly LaBarre guides the audience through the ways top organizations invest in human flourishing and offers up a short course in “adult development.”
Key Takeaways
- How to change your mind – cultivating consciousness, mediating mindsets, biases, blinders.
- The means to develop intuition – learning to tune into your inner knowing.
- How to design and run self-experiments to accelerate your growth loops.
- Principles for adult capacity building.
