Blog
Crafting Vision, Purpose, and Value Statements
Write compelling vision, purpose, and value statements for your organization that people actually want to lean into. More than catchy slogans for your website, these are powerful tools for strategy development and cultural change.
Enter the Idea Compass
The Idea Compass is a set of prompts to get you thinking critically about an idea from a number of angles—whether it’s from your own imagination, or examining someone else’s brainchild.
What good learning experience design looks like
We learn from the fullness of our lived experience, not just from consuming content pushed at us. Learning Experience Design provides a framework for centering the learners, ensuring that training courses and content will hit the mark—helping learners accomplish what they need and want.
To build enduring expertise, take it slowly
In a world that gets faster by the hour, slowing down can seem like a luxury we don’t have. Instead, I argue that developing skills and expertise can only be accomplished slowly and deliberately.
Take time to rest
Rest is a subversive, radical act of self-care. Cultivate mental stillness through restful activity.
What does practicing have to do with anything?
Isolating skills and then bundling them into compound activities increases the odds of achieving a goal when it’s critical for the whole performance to come together. How music practice can provide a structure for developing proficiency in any skill.
Building compound skills through études, studies, and prototypes
The process of learning something new follows a predictable path from acquiring individual skills, to combining them into more powerful compound skills, to then applying them to novel situations. In this post, I explore techniques for building compound skills, drawn from music (étude), art (study), and design (prototype).
Create alignment between your org chart and cross-functional teamwork
Team members scratching their heads, wondering what they’re expected to work on? Make cross-functional project efforts clear using OKRs and Project Charters.
A business design competency model
Business Design has emerged as a critical set of practices and mindsets for organizations to quickly adapt to changing market conditions. While there is a shared need for these skills, there wasn’t an agreed-upon definition for Business Design. This is further complicated by the overlapping disciplines that converge in a Business Designer’s toolkit. So we set out to craft a definition.
Break a new topic into components for better skill development
When learning a new topic, technique or concept, practice is paramount for acquiring and solidifying the new set of skills. Follow a simple framework for developing skills deliberately.
A simple work logbook
Keep track of accomplishments and plans in minutes! Use a simple logbook to capture highlights from your work that add up to a bigger story over time.
So many books, so little time
Favorites from my library that I come back to again and again.
Redefining Classical Music Literacy
To complete my graduate program at the University of Denver and earn a Master of Arts in Digital Media Studies (now Emergent Media), I brought together my previous life as a classical musician with my new trajectory in design. This work set me on the path I am still traveling—expanding my ability to study and participate in cultures large and small, while calibrating design interventions to be ethical and human-centered.