Authority on Leading Organizational Change; Co-founder, Management Lab;
Founding Team, Fast Company; and Co-author, Mavericks at Work
“What kinds of organizations would we design if we started with the assumption that every person is fundamentally good, capable, and creative?”
Key Speech Themes
Learn to Adapt as Fast as the World Changes
Leading Successful Change • Experimentation & Innovation
The New Leadership Mindset • Making Organizations More Human
The Resilient Organization • Maverick Agenda: Invent the Future
Be the Disruptor: Not the Disrupted • Demolish Stifling Bureaucracy
Engage, Empower, and Unleash Your People • Moderator/Interviewer
Polly’s Story
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.
Polly LaBarre’s Videos
Becoming Rugged and Durable Amid Relentless Change
Generating Ideas More Quickly Isn’t Hard
Questions Help You Find the Future
Hosting Sample
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.
Read More >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.
Read More >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.
Read More >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).
Read More >What People Say About Polly
