Creating a Healthy Digital Culture: How empathy can transform our organizations

Talk on using digital/content strategy/product development for culture change, at the NowWhat? conference 2015

Presented at the Now What Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, April 2015.

Deane Barker of Blend Interactive is a low-key legend in the space of CMS strategy. He himself wrote the book on web content management, and over the years, their creative, human-centered team at Blend curated an insanely relevant conference through their Now What? series. As Deane says,

"I believe we had one of the best conference speaker lineups in the content strategy space, second only to perhaps Confab."

The conference featured Jared Spool (legendary UX leader innovating behind the scenes of the US Digital Service/18F), Margot Bloomstein, Ahava Liebtag, Eileen Webb. Here's where I met Sarah Rhea Werner, who created the incredible podcast, Girl in Space. Future versions would feature Karen McGrane and Kristina Halvorson (the Amy Poheler and Tina Fey of content strategy).

But anyway, that's the conference. Legendary.

My talk was one where I choose to incorporate hand-drawn, scanned visuals for the presentation, and scoped out the locations of the multiple cameras to choose my places to stand and look, to create a solid web asset. The talk covers Curious George, Six Thinking Hats, and is a precursor to what would become a career obsession: the interplay between digital-creating and culture-creating.

It made a really big impact on folks:

“Words can’t describe how proud I am of that talk you gave. You had Leah in tears like five times and although I didn’t cry, you sure made me feel. I feel that you put so many of my thoughts into actual cohesive and flowing dialogue."

and

“Loved the content, but your delivery blew me away! Fantastic job!"