Session type: Main Conference Talk

This talk explores the power of long-form narratives as a way to improve organizational velocity and avoid the trap of business-as-usual. As companies struggle to effectively address their future, narratives serve as a way to explore change and support resilience. While a chaotic present can rob us of clear vision, long-form narratives can help increase organizational velocity while avoiding the traps of business-as-usual. Amazon had famously banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of longform narratives and were able transform from an online bookstore to an invention machine. Beyond Amazon, more companies are starting to leverage narratives to improve their business outcomes.
This session combines deep research in the areas of communication, design, and sensemaking, with over twenty-five years of professional experience to provide attendees with tools they can use to drive positive change and increased resilience within their organization. This talk will provide attendees with:

• An understanding of narrative culture and why it is critical today's organization
• Tips to create and evaluate narratives
• Ways to improve organizational velocity
• An approach to improve diversity and inclusion to improve innovation outcomes
• A framework to avoid the traps of business as usual

We no longer need to be in-person to have great workshops. Over the past few years, we learned how to navigate remote workshops. While in-person and remote workshops had level playing fields in their own right, we're faced with a new challenge. Many teams are hybrid, and hybrid workshops don't always create a level playing field for participants But that doesn't have to be the case! In this talk, you'll learn how to facilitate and participate in hybrid, inclusive workshops. You'll learn a new framework for determining what methods and activities work best for your team. We'll try a few examples of these activities so that you can incorporate them into your next workshop!

Information is not a thing. It's a resource. Information is somewhat useful when we consume it. That's reading a book, scanning social media, or listening to a podcast. But information is vastly more useful when we break it down, mix it together, and transform it into something else. That's how patterns are revealed. That's how problems get solved. That's how understanding develops.

It's also how we generate insights—that revelatory moment when the unclear and uncertain and out-of-reach suddenly collapses into clarity. Aha! Eureka!

This talk explores the way our modern information ecosystem—where information is pervasive, everything is connected, and the world is bristling with computation—can unlock new approaches to generating insight. How might we harness this to construct an epiphany engine? And what does it mean for information architects in a world where everyone is doing IA for themselves?