Blog

Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

Take time to rest

Rest is a subversive, radical act of self-care. Cultivate mental stillness through restful activity.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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).

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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Kimberly Zahler Kimberly Zahler

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.

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