Speaking and Facilitation
I help organizations build more human-centered approaches to leadership, learning, artificial intelligence, creativity, and change through keynote presentations, interactive workshops, executive learning sessions, and strategic facilitation.
My work is grounded in one central belief:
Learning should not simply increase knowledge.
It should increase agency.
Whether I am speaking about AI, leadership, organizational learning, or creative practice, the larger question is the same:
How do we create systems that make us more human rather than less?
Signature Talks
What the Hell Are We Doing with AI?
Technology is not destiny. Implementation is a leadership decision.
The Battlefield Is Not Where You Win the War
Leadership begins after the dramatic moments are over.
The Difference Between Practice and Performance
Why confusing the two makes it harder to create, learn, or lead.
You Cannot Train Your Way Out of a Broken System
Why learning fails when organizations refuse to change.
Signature talks can be adapted to fit the audience, event theme, and organizational context.
Additional topics include:
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Learning ecosystem design
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Leadership development
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Human-centered organizational design
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AI literacy and responsible adoption
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AI and the future of work
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Creativity and innovation
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Psychological and psychosocial safety
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Neuro-inclusive leadership
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Storytelling for leadership
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Organizational learning
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Facilitation and meeting design
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Systems thinking
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Leading through change
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Learning experience design
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Communities of practice
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Building adaptive organizations
Ways We Can Work Together
Keynote Presentations
Thought-provoking presentations designed to help audiences see familiar challenges differently, ask better questions, and connect larger ideas to practical choices.
Interactive Workshops
Participatory sessions that allow people to explore ideas, apply frameworks, work through real challenges, and practice new approaches together.
Executive Learning Sessions
Focused conversations for senior leaders navigating complexity, organizational change, AI adoption, learning strategy, or leadership development.
Leadership Retreats
Custom-designed sessions that help teams step away from daily urgency, reflect on how they work, clarify priorities, and make thoughtful decisions about what comes next.
Strategic Facilitation
Structured conversations designed to help groups navigate difficult questions, surface multiple perspectives, build shared understanding, and move toward meaningful action.
Custom Professional Development
Tailored learning experiences developed around an organization’s specific goals, audience, context, and challenges.
Programs are available virtually or in person.
What the Hell Are We Doing with AI?
Technology is not destiny. Implementation is a leadership decision.
Artificial intelligence is neither inherently liberating nor inherently destructive.
What matters is what we ask it to do, how we choose to use it, and whose interests we prioritize in the process.
AI can expand access to information, strengthen research, support creativity, improve accessibility, and give individuals and small organizations capabilities once reserved for institutions with enormous budgets.
It can also eliminate expertise, exploit creative labor, intensify surveillance, avoid accountability, and replace human judgment precisely where it is most needed.
This candid and practical talk moves beyond simplistic arguments about whether AI is good or bad. Instead, it asks leaders, educators, and organizations to examine the human choices embedded in adoption.
Questions We Explore
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What are we actually asking AI to accomplish?
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When does AI support human expertise, and when does it undermine it?
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Which decisions should remain human, even when automation is possible?
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How do we protect creativity, intellectual property, privacy, and human agency?
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How do we account for the environmental and social costs of AI?
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What does responsible, human-centered implementation look like in practice?
Participants Leave With
A more thoughtful framework for evaluating AI tools, identifying risks, and making implementation decisions grounded in purpose, accountability, human well-being, and long-term impact.
Best Suited For
Leadership conferences, government agencies, higher education, learning and development teams, professional associations, small businesses, creative organizations, and teams exploring AI adoption.
The Battlefield Is Not Where You Win the War
Leadership begins after the dramatic moments are over.
We often tell stories about leadership through moments of crisis, courage, conflict, and visible victory.
But the battlefield is rarely where the future is actually secured.
The deeper work begins afterward.
It happens when someone must feed people, rebuild institutions, distribute resources, provide care, repair trust, share power, and make thousands of unglamorous decisions whose consequences may not be visible for generations.
Drawing from leadership research, systems thinking, organizational experience, and the fictional world of The Storykeeper’s Daughter, this talk explores leadership as stewardship rather than performance.
It challenges the mythology of the heroic individual and examines the patient, often invisible work required to create systems that can remain healthy beyond one leader, one crisis, or one moment of inspiration.
Questions We Explore
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What happens after the visible crisis has passed?
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What is the difference between maintaining a system and sustaining one?
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Can an organization remain healthy if it depends on one heroic individual?
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How do leaders balance immediate demands with long-term consequences?
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What responsibilities do we have to people and communities we may never meet?
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How do care, succession, shared power, and stewardship become operational practices?
Participants Leave With
A deeper understanding of leadership as the work of creating conditions in which people, organizations, and communities can thrive over time.
Best Suited For
Leadership conferences, executive teams, public-sector organizations, nonprofit leaders, educators, community organizations, strategic planning retreats, and organizations navigating succession or long-term change.
The Difference Between Practice and Performance
Why confusing the two makes it harder to create, learn, or lead.
Most of us spend more time thinking about how something will be received than practicing the thing itself.
We jump ahead to the outcome.
We imagine the audience, the evaluation, the launch, the publication, the review, or the polished final product.
In doing so, we often skip the uncertain, repetitive, unfinished, and occasionally embarrassing process through which meaningful work is actually created.
Practice requires room for experimentation, failure, revision, play, uncertainty, and discovery.
Performance asks us to present something as complete.
Both have value. But when every act of learning or creativity is treated like a performance, people stop taking the risks required for growth.
Rooted in learning science and the working life of the Studio Above the Clouds, this talk explores creativity not as a rare talent, but as a sustained human practice.
It also asks leaders and educators to examine the environments they create.
Are we asking people to learn, or are we asking them to look as though they already know?
Questions We Explore
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What is lost when practice is treated as performance?
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Why is failure essential to creativity, learning, and growth?
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How do evaluation and visibility affect experimentation?
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What conditions support psychological and psychosocial safety?
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Can people admit uncertainty without losing credibility?
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How can leaders make room for unfinished thinking?
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How do we build a creative practice without waiting for confidence or inspiration?
Participants Leave With
Practical ways to create healthier conditions for experimentation, reflection, feedback, failure, creative courage, and meaningful learning.
Best Suited For
Leadership teams, educators, artists, writers, learning professionals, innovation teams, emerging leaders, creative organizations, and people navigating personal or professional transitions.
You Cannot Train Your Way Out of a Broken System
Why learning fails when organizations refuse to change.
When an organizational problem appears, training is often the first proposed solution.
Employees are not following the process?
Train them.
Managers are not communicating effectively?
Train them.
A new initiative is struggling?
Build another course.
But training cannot repair contradictory incentives, unusable processes, inadequate resources, destructive leadership, inaccessible technology, unclear expectations, or a culture that punishes the very behavior an organization claims to want.
Organizations are living systems.
People learn and behave within an interconnected environment of policies, tools, relationships, power structures, expectations, resources, and consequences.
When those conditions remain unchanged, even excellent training has limited power.
This talk challenges leaders and learning professionals to pause before prescribing another course and ask a more important question:
What are we really trying to accomplish?
Is there a genuine knowledge or skill gap?
Or is this a systems, process, leadership, resource, communication, or cultural problem wearing the convenient label of a training issue?
Questions We Explore
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What outcome is the organization actually trying to create?
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Is there a genuine knowledge or skill gap?
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What happens when people attempt to apply what they learned?
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Do organizational systems reinforce or punish the desired behavior?
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Are processes, incentives, expectations, tools, and resources aligned?
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When is training appropriate?
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When is training an expensive distraction from a more difficult problem?
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How can learning professionals become strategic partners rather than order takers?
Participants Leave With
A practical framework for diagnosing performance and organizational problems before prescribing training, along with stronger questions for identifying root causes and designing solutions that address the wider system.
Best Suited For
Learning and development conferences, government agencies, human resources teams, workforce development organizations, higher education, organizational development professionals, executive teams, and managers responsible for implementing change.
Planning a conference, retreat, workshop, or organizational conversation? Send me an email and tell me a little about your audience, what you’re hoping to accomplish, and the kind of experience you’re considering.
Email is the best way to reach me:
hello@serendipitysellers.com
You may also call (706) 963-0778 and leave a detailed voicemail. I do not answer unscheduled calls, but I review messages and respond within two business days.
Want the Longer Story?
My work is shaped by more than twenty years across federal workforce development, state government, education, organizational consulting, and the arts.
For more about the organizations I’ve supported, the learning systems and leadership initiatives I’ve led, my education and professional background, and how my creative practice informs my work, visit my About page.