Polly LaBarre
Authority on Leading Organizational Change
Co-founder, Management Lab
Founding Team, Fast Company
Co-author, Mavericks at Work
Speaks About
- Leading Organizational Change
- Culture
- Innovation
- Talent Retention/Attraction
- The People-Centered Organization
- Creating an Adaptive Organization
- Banishing Bureaucracy
- New Architectures for Collaboration
- New Ways to Develop Talent
- Building a Better Workplace
- Creating Nimble Organizations
Polly in Brief
Polly LaBarre works at the frontier of one of the defining challenges of our time: how do we build organizations capable of changing as fast as change itself?
For more than two decades, Polly has helped leaders rethink how their organizations innovate, evolve, and unleash human potential. She consults, writes, and speaks about how to build a crucial capacity stack – the organizational capacity, collaborative capacity, leadership capacity, and inner capacities required to flourish amid constant disruption.
A globally recognized expert on leadership, change, and innovation, Polly brings a rare blend of intellectual rigor, real-world experimentation, and compelling storytelling to her work. She is the bestselling coauthor (with Bill Taylor) of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, and a founding member of the original team at Fast Company.
As cofounder of the Management Lab, she spent a decade developing and deploying pioneering methodologies and practical tools for accelerating large-scale organizational change. She has worked with progressive organizations and a global community of management innovators, to conduct hands-on experiments in “hacking management” and reimagine the organization as a perpetual innovation engine.
Polly’s insights have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and more, and she has served as a business and innovation correspondent for CNN.
A sought-after keynote speaker, moderator, and interviewer, Polly has delivered hundreds of keynotes and designed and hosted high-impact events for leaders navigating transformation. Her talks are known for combining bold ideas, practical frameworks, and compelling case studies that challenge leaders to rethink what’s possible—and how change really happens.
Polly is passionate about human (and planetary) flourishing in all of its forms. She lives in New Haven, CT where serves on the board of CitySeed, a nonprofit advancing a just and healthy food system. She finds her own form of flourishing in the garden, the kitchen, and the great outdoors.
Books and Media
What kinds of organizations would we design if we started with the assumption that every person is fundamentally good, capable, and creative?
Polly LaBarre
Speech Descriptions
Built To Change — Creating Capacity For Renewal And Reinvention
(Focus: Building organizational change capacity. Can be interactive)
Transforming at speed has never been more important. Every organization – and every leader – is under pressure to renew, reinvent, and evolve continuously. It’s time to wake up your organization’s inner insurgent—to experiment more boldly, adapt faster, and perform more powerfully. Become rugged, respond-able, and regenerative enough to change ahead of change. Drawing on her research and her work inside some of the world’s most innovative and progressive organizations, Polly LaBarre lays out a set of actionable strategies for building organizational and leadership capacity when everything is changing, everything is challenging, and nothing is certain.
Key Takeaways:
• Grow a culture of creativity, initiative, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better.
• Expand leadership capacity across your organization to make it more responsive and adaptable.
• Effective leaders today are social architects – how to build robust structures for collaboration and contribution.
• Create powerful on-ramps to innovation, engagement and adaptability by embedding the mindset and methods of experimentation.
The Work Before The Work — Grow Yourself First
(Focus: Expanding individual leadership capacity. Can be interactive)
You can’t create in the world what you haven’t created in yourself. And in a world of relentless change, challenge and uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to proactively develop those inner capacities that allow you to respond, adapt, evolve, and create. When you develop your agency, your emotional dexterity, your intellectual flexibility, and your creativity, you make yourself durable, rugged, buoyant, and capable enough to handle anything. Organizations that deliberately develop those capacities in every individual shore up their own resilience. In other words, “adult development” doesn’t just promote individual growth, it’s a cornerstone of organizational flourishing. This is an inspiring and powerfully practical session where Polly LaBarre offers up a short course in the work before the work: how to stoke the grown-up capacities that sustain creativity, resilience, and growth.
Key Takeaways:
• Accelerate your growth and strengthen your respond-ability with self-experiments.
• Learn to change your mind— cognitive capacities and practices to uplevel your creativity, collegiality, and adaptability.
• Think for yourself— how to tune into and trust your inner knowing.
• Learn, as fast as the world is changing, where to find the future, and how to generate a whole new map of possibility.
• Train like an artist, a monk, and an athlete
Human Organizations — Hardcore Results
(Focus: Strengthening human capacity - performance without sacrificing people)
As once-core programs, roles, norms, and certainties are shredded, leaders scramble to rethink, redraw the lines, and adjust the approach, again and again. Yet, for all the upheaval and uncertainty, the fundamental truth is inescapable: the most human organizations— those most committed to promoting individual development, freedom, community, and all-around flourishing— are also the most capable, productive, and resilient. IOW, the most human organizations are also the most hardcore. Drawing on decades of experience researching and working with organizations actively transcending the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between freedom and control, creativity and discipline, compassion and capability to produce sustainable success, Polly LaBarre shares what it takes to make work work for everybody.
Key Takeaways:
• Migrate from brittle control to robust trust-based governance.
• Equip and involve every person in the organization as a creator, a leader, and an entrepreneur.
• Rewrite the social compact to amplify belonging and voice, while maximizing initiative and accountability.
• Re-think the work of leadership to cultivate a community of connected peers energized to change things for the better.
Workshops: Start Building Your Change, Creative, and Leadership Capacity
Workshops designed to take one key capacity (e.g. Innovation, Adaptability, Experimentation, Collaboration, Self-Leadership) explored in the keynote into the practical realm— offering frameworks, on-ramps, hands-on practice, and powerful takeaways.
Topics can be framed to focus on individual skill building (e.g. Make Creativity a Habit, Build Your Leadership Capacity, Future Proof Yourself) or organizational capacity building (Everyday, Everywhere Innovation; A Short Course in Experimentation; Architecture of Collaboration).
Format is highly customizable
• Timing: from 20-75 minute post-keynote session to 2.5 hour, half-, whole-day immersive workshops
• Highly structured and scripted experience – individual and group work; moderated discussion
• Materials include: diagnostics for self-scoring where you are on each vector of change; cheat sheets framing up big themes, leading questions, takeaways; templated worksheets designed to generate deep work and tangible outcomes in compressed timeframes
Outcomes:
• Shared definitions (of innovation, creativity, collaboration, leadership, experimentation, etc.) and understanding of where the organization/team is along desired vector of change, what barriers exist, and how to make progress individually and collectively;
• A set of tractable methods, mindsets, and practices that support creativity, adaptability, collaboration, and agency;
• A portfolio of takeaways (dependent upon workshop focus), including: a portfolio of innovative ideas; a portfolio of experimental designs; a set of limiting assumptions and potential opportunities; a collection of agenda-setting questions; replicable templates and processes; capability diagnostics
Examples:
• A Short Course in Experimentation: A deep dive into the mindsets and methods that rapidly and cheaply generate options and deepen insight; a short course in experimental design; a portfolio of experimental designs your team can implement tomorrow
• Future-Proof Yourself: Powerfully practical strategies for learning as fast as the world is changing— Challenge Defaults, Explore the Edge, Run your Growth Loops; a set of models, methods, and self-experiments
• Scaffold Up Your Architecture of Collaboration: Learn the design principles for collaborative community; take the first steps in building an architecture of contribution and collaboration; portfolio of gateway experiments for promoting collaboration
• Expand Your Change Capacity: explore multiple modes and pathways for scouting the future, generating new ideas, developing and testing ideas, re-imaging organizational process and structures to expand change capacity. Produce a portfolio of experimental designs for capacity-building organizational innovation