Bill Burnett

The question “What do I want to be when I grow up?” is one that never truly goes away. Whether you are a college grad entering the workforce, a forty year-old shifting careers, or a sixty-eight year-old trying to define an encore career, the search for a fulfilling life never stops. In this riveting keynote that can also be combined with an interactive workshop, award-winning product designer Bill Burnett teaches audiences how to look at career and life planning through the lens of design. Participants are given the tools to build their way forward and to develop various life scenarios just like a designer tests multiple prototypes. This approach fosters creativity and adaptability and allows audiences to accept that there is never just one right path.

Life-altering disruptions can be personal, regional or global and are increasingly part of modern life—the rapid expansion of A.I. being a prime example. We all need to know how to design our way through them. When a disruption arrives, it ends the way things were and throws life into a confusing latent zone before the new world begins. The only way out of the waiting room is through generative acceptance. Bill Burnett teaches how to turn the ambiguity of disruption into design freedom by generatively engaging the new reality and staying ahead of the unpredictable. Disruption Design is a new core competency for modern life that can not only help us learn to survive disruption, but to find new opportunities within the uncertainty.

Traditional, hierarchical relationships between employers and employees are shifting rapidly, and the future of talent retention across generations lies in keeping employees engaged. Bill Burnett helps organizations adopt design thinking strategies, integrating managers’ personal development conversations with employees’ life design goals so that each employee can actively co-create his or her experience within the company. Burnett demonstrates how this change in relationships offers the potential to make work a more human experience for all of us and warns against the danger for business leaders who ignore this shift in the culture.

In today’s fast-paced markets, every organization needs to master the Art of Innovation. Stanford’s Design Group has been teaching and researching this topic for over 50 years. Executive Director Bill Burnett can help your team understand how to organize for innovation and teach you how to create a Culture of Creativity. His talks include some neuroscience, some theory, and some very practical ideas for how to shift your thinking to make innovation a regular part of your portfolio.