When I was just doing design work and branding, no conference was better than the Aspen Design Conference as we got to hear from and meet with inspirational leaders, and influencers such as, Maya Angelou, Steve Jobs, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and an international mix of innovators and designers, in very real, casual settings. The one on one time with all was both personal and inspiring. As designers in attendance, most of us left fueled up to add fresh vigor to our work over the next six months to a year. Designers know the value of continuous learning, open dialog, diverse influences, finding value in new places but today the need for those skills affects all or most work categories that had seemed immune to business creativity. Especially as AI threatens to replace jobs with high task repetition. 

What I observed, even after people attended expert conferences, is they are motivated that day, maybe even that week but it dilutes quickly when knowledge transfer falls short of skills in evidence, application and recognition. People in organizations that just expect employees to learn and burn rubber in terms of high performance, in greater reality witness employee burn of a lesser nature as Gallup reports only 15% of global employees are emotionally connected to work.

These insights and others gained over the last twenty years show a growing gap between leaders, employees and markets. I invested a full year to study key research, talk with authors, CEO's, and more to amalgamate their hopes and wishes, with their indirect and direct resistance to change with perhaps the first conscious designed solution so what you learn is tuned to what you need and part of a system that encourages, enables, recognizes, and rewards progress, inclusion and diversity as just a few. I have proven and found that such environments create a near contagious involvement by all employees, markets and market influencers. Two years ago - after waiting since 1990 to share how I was able to guide success for several Fortune 50 companies - when I used words like Ecosystem Mapping to show that internal culture and market values determine your success - many wrote that off as buzzwords. Today, you see many people beginning to use the language yet without the comprehension of application vital. So we created an alliance to help more people to realize their lives and work can matter and they can shape that value through  our system and then as a sustained advantage on their own.

Open minds fuel possibility thinking and systems thinking fuels greater ecosystem relevance, trust and credibility. It's a new age yet people have been starving for the things this reveals for decades. Good luck with your efforts Adrienne.