Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
Summary
Details to come.
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
"Healthy debate is key, and we should be biased toward a successful outcome, not our own ideas."
Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
December 6, 2022
"Prioritizing research questions is key because we can’t validate every single detail."
Anna AvrekhUser Research, Design, and Product - A Love Story
March 11, 2021
"Innovators need a tribe to recharge their batteries because you get no from every direction."
Kristen Honey"Let’s Talk About Data and Crisis”: Public Digital Service Delivery = Open Data + Human Centered Design
November 18, 2021
"Being nimble means sometimes you have to throw out academic rigor and just do what’s practical at the moment."
Renee BouwensLanding Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products
December 15, 2023
"It wasn’t just about process changes, it was about changing how people think about their work and each other."
Husani OakleyBias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
June 14, 2018
"Most people will make the right decisions with data if they know the appropriate guidelines."
David ConradThe Feeling of Data
September 14, 2023
"Augmenting our sensors through AI becomes possible with increasingly egocentric perspectives on the user’s context."
Lukas Moro“Feels Like Paper!”: Interfacing AI through Paper
June 11, 2025
"Triangulation is your friend when managing people from different cultures and reserved personalities."
Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan WorthmanDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"We have four themes over two days: systems thinking, information architecture and knowledge management, AI and machine learning, and designing the data."
Louis RosenfeldWelcome / Housekeeping
June 7, 2023
