Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Starting meetings or classes with a simple warm-up increases attentiveness and presence.
-
•
Remote teaching often results in students keeping cameras off, impacting engagement, but this can be navigated with inclusive strategies.
-
•
Peloton taught the speaker practical leadership lessons including compassion, collaboration, and community support.
-
•
Consistency is critical in leadership and personal growth, exemplified by the speaker's 73-week exercise streak.
-
•
Inclusive leadership requires acknowledging where people are physically and emotionally, offering alternatives accordingly.
-
•
Organizations must consistently provide education and enforce policies addressing discrimination, considering intersectional identities.
-
•
Leadership must listen actively and avoid placing the burden of diversity work solely on marginalized groups.
-
•
Recognizing external stressors such as global events is essential to empathetic leadership and inclusive workplaces.
-
•
Language matters; everyday expressions can unintentionally exclude or offend marginalized communities.
-
•
Inclusion and accessibility should be embedded into every designer's responsibilities, not isolated to specialists.
Notable Quotes
"I had you all do a warm-up before we started to help everyone be present and calm."
"Sometimes working with a bunch of boxes and letters on Zoom was the reality of remote classes."
"Be compassionate with yourself and others. Not everyone likes high fives, and that's okay."
"Collaboration is key. I'm never alone in a Peloton class, even at 4:30 in the morning."
"Consistency is key. I'm on a 73-week streak right now, and that's pretty badass."
"Identity is not monolithic; policies should address layered experiences."
"It is not the responsibility of marginalized groups to do all the educating about their experiences."
"Listen is a skill that is not emphasized enough in leadership."
"Watch your language; terms like 'that's so lame' can be exclusionary or offensive."
"Inclusion and accessibility need to be part of every designer's role, even if today it is one person's job."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"A design system helped us connect developers and designers together in community."
Nick CochranGrowing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections
June 20, 2019
"You have to socialize service design within organizations considering their dominant logic — whether engineering, clinical, or commercial."
Lavrans Løvlie Ben ReasonAsk me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
November 19, 2025
"Most screen reader users prefer robotic voices so they can speed up the speech and read much faster than typical people."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
September 29, 2021
"As researchers, our job is to explore behaviors which are driven by knowledge and make insights that can alter what our users learn and do."
Zen RenTaking Inspiration from Instructional Design for Research
March 10, 2022
"Don’t read canned questions during interviews; make it conversational and human."
Corey LongHiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
September 23, 2024
"AI is actually a pretty good productivity hack as a starting point for accessibility reviews."
Kate KalcevichDesigning inclusively with AI
June 5, 2024
"AI is the new electricity, transforming multiple industries much like electricity powered the industrial revolution."
Dr. Jamika BurgeEmbracing change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency
March 11, 2025
"If you’re in tech, you are in social change, whether you realize it or not."
Sandra CamachoCreating More Bias-Proof Designs
January 22, 2025
"We think with things; our brain is part of us but we extend our cognition into our environments and tools."
Jorge ArangoThe Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)
April 5, 2024