Polly LaBarre

Transforming at speed has never been more important. Every organization – and every leader – is under pressure to renew, reinvent, and evolve continuously. It’s time to wake up your organization’s inner insurgent—to experiment more boldly, adapt faster, and perform more powerfully. Become rugged, respond-able, and regenerative enough to change ahead of change. Drawing on her research and her work inside some of the world’s most innovative and progressive organizations, Polly LaBarre lays out a set of actionable strategies for building organizational and leadership capacity when everything is changing, everything is challenging, and nothing is certain.

Key Takeaways:
• Grow a culture of creativity, initiative, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better.
• Expand leadership capacity across your organization to make it more responsive and adaptable.
• Effective leaders today are social architects – how to build robust structures for collaboration and contribution.
• Create powerful on-ramps to innovation, engagement and adaptability by embedding the mindset and methods of experimentation.

You can’t create in the world what you haven’t created in yourself. And in a world of relentless change, challenge and uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to proactively develop those inner capacities that allow you to respond, adapt, evolve, and create. When you develop your agency, your emotional dexterity, your intellectual flexibility, and your creativity, you make yourself durable, rugged, buoyant, and capable enough to handle anything. Organizations that deliberately develop those capacities in every individual shore up their own resilience. In other words, “adult development” doesn’t just promote individual growth, it’s a cornerstone of organizational flourishing. This is an inspiring and powerfully practical session where Polly LaBarre offers up a short course in the work before the work: how to stoke the grown-up capacities that sustain creativity, resilience, and growth.

Key Takeaways:
• Accelerate your growth and strengthen your respond-ability with self-experiments.
• Learn to change your mind— cognitive capacities and practices to uplevel your creativity, collegiality, and adaptability.
• Think for yourself— how to tune into and trust your inner knowing.
• Learn, as fast as the world is changing, where to find the future, and how to generate a whole new map of possibility.
• Train like an artist, a monk, and an athlete

As once-core programs, roles, norms, and certainties are shredded, leaders scramble to rethink, redraw the lines, and adjust the approach, again and again. Yet, for all the upheaval and uncertainty, the fundamental truth is inescapable: the most human organizations— those most committed to promoting individual development, freedom, community, and all-around flourishing— are also the most capable, productive, and resilient. IOW, the most human organizations are also the most hardcore. Drawing on decades of experience researching and working with organizations actively transcending the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between freedom and control, creativity and discipline, compassion and capability to produce sustainable success, Polly LaBarre shares what it takes to make work work for everybody.

Key Takeaways:
• Migrate from brittle control to robust trust-based governance.
• Equip and involve every person in the organization as a creator, a leader, and an entrepreneur.
• Rewrite the social compact to amplify belonging and voice, while maximizing initiative and accountability.
• Re-think the work of leadership to cultivate a community of connected peers energized to change things for the better.

Workshops designed to take one key capacity (e.g. Innovation, Adaptability, Experimentation, Collaboration, Self-Leadership) explored in the keynote into the practical realm— offering frameworks, on-ramps, hands-on practice, and powerful takeaways.

Topics can be framed to focus on individual skill building (e.g. Make Creativity a Habit, Build Your Leadership Capacity, Future Proof Yourself) or organizational capacity building (Everyday, Everywhere Innovation; A Short Course in Experimentation; Architecture of Collaboration).

Format is highly customizable
• Timing: from 20-75 minute post-keynote session to 2.5 hour, half-, whole-day immersive workshops
• Highly structured and scripted experience – individual and group work; moderated discussion
• Materials include: diagnostics for self-scoring where you are on each vector of change; cheat sheets framing up big themes, leading questions, takeaways; templated worksheets designed to generate deep work and tangible outcomes in compressed timeframes

Outcomes:
• Shared definitions (of innovation, creativity, collaboration, leadership, experimentation, etc.) and understanding of where the organization/team is along desired vector of change, what barriers exist, and how to make progress individually and collectively;
• A set of tractable methods, mindsets, and practices that support creativity, adaptability, collaboration, and agency;
• A portfolio of takeaways (dependent upon workshop focus), including: a portfolio of innovative ideas; a portfolio of experimental designs; a set of limiting assumptions and potential opportunities; a collection of agenda-setting questions; replicable templates and processes; capability diagnostics

Examples:
• A Short Course in Experimentation: A deep dive into the mindsets and methods that rapidly and cheaply generate options and deepen insight; a short course in experimental design; a portfolio of experimental designs your team can implement tomorrow
• Future-Proof Yourself: Powerfully practical strategies for learning as fast as the world is changing— Challenge Defaults, Explore the Edge, Run your Growth Loops; a set of models, methods, and self-experiments
• Scaffold Up Your Architecture of Collaboration: Learn the design principles for collaborative community; take the first steps in building an architecture of contribution and collaboration; portfolio of gateway experiments for promoting collaboration
• Expand Your Change Capacity: explore multiple modes and pathways for scouting the future, generating new ideas, developing and testing ideas, re-imaging organizational process and structures to expand change capacity. Produce a portfolio of experimental designs for capacity-building organizational innovation