JA GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE 2023

TALK TOPICS

What Will You + AI Do With Thirty Extra Years?

Scientists believe the first person to live to 150 may already have been born.

AI is both an enabler and an enhancer of this longer life — helping detect disease earlier, personalize medicine, reclaim our time, and give small teams the ability to solve big problems. And yet, most of us are still designing our lives, careers, and organizations around yesterday's assumptions.

In this thought-provoking, interactive keynote, Ayse Birsel reveals longevity and AI as a powerful new innovation partnership, drawing on her research with Americans 50+ and three decades of helping leaders and organizations imagine what's next.

She explores iterative careers made up of multiple chapters, short immersive roles, purpose-driven ventures, and new ways for experienced leaders to step away, reinvent themselves, and return with renewed value.

For organizations, the implications are equally profound. How might companies rethink leadership, careers, team structures, and customer needs when human capability and healthy lifespan are both expanding?

What future will you + AI create for this emerging long life? What's next is far more expansive than we predict.

AI is an EQ Mirror. It Shows You What You Can't See.

AI is a mirror — a reflective tool that reveals what leaders can't see about themselves: blind spots, stakeholder perceptions, misaligned values. Korn Ferry finds that organizations hire for technical skills but let people go for failures of soft skills such as adaptability and collaboration. And almost no one around a leader is positioned to name those failures before they cost them.

Ayse Birsel shows practical demos of life and work design briefs, and connects the outputs to leadership development: how better self-awareness via AI maps to improved soft skills, team culture, and decision-making.

One executive wrote their first design brief and realized they had asked for a career, not a life. The mirror had shown them how easily we define ourselves by what we do instead of who we are, and that the two need to become one.

This talk equips leaders to use AI to prototype different futures and to sharpen their emotional intelligence, communication, and culture-building. All capabilities that AI won't replace.

Don't Let Yesterday Predict Tomorrow. Think Like a Designer Instead.

Balancing short-term performance with long-term vision is one of the hardest dilemmas leaders face. And most are losing it — not because they lack discipline or strategy, but because of how the mind works.

The human mind is a prediction machine. It builds tomorrow out of yesterday. So when leaders try to imagine the future, what they get back is today, slightly improved. Meanwhile the world is changing faster than prediction can keep up with.

Design is the work of moving from the Real to the Ideal — from what we know to what we can imagine. In thirty years of designing what doesn't exist yet for Amazon, Herman Miller, and Toyota, Ayse Birsel uncovered something designers do instinctively but rarely name: to reach an original idea, you have to approach it sideways. Head-on, your biases and limiting beliefs get there first.

In this interactive keynote, she teaches the techniques that make that possible — practical ways to get past your own assumptions and imagine what you haven't seen yet. Leaders practice them in the room and leave with tools they can use again with their teams.

We can all learn a proven approach for imagining a bold future and making it real, step by step, regardless of our role.

DESIGN THE WORK YOU LOVE

Doing a job you love can fundamentally accelerate your success. Ayse Birsel—a Fast Company Most Creative person and inc.com contributor—will build on her book, Design the Life You Love, a Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Meaningful Future to give you agency to imagine your best work and radically transform your professional performance by doing more of what you love. 

DESIGN THE TEAM YOU LOVE

Today’s problems are too difficult for one person to solve alone. Great teams and strong collaborations are the secret sauce of leading, innovative corporations. In this talk, award-winning designer/collaborator extra-ordinaire and a Fast Company Most Creative person, Ayse Birsel will discuss strategies for leading and participating in highly collaborative teams that believe in the power of a shared purpose. 

DESIGN THE LIFE YOU LOVE

Our life and work are a continuous loop. If you design your life, you will also design your work. Ayse Birsel has worked with thousands of people of all disciplines who have transformed their life and work, through her book, Design the Life You Love, a Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Meaningful Future and her corporate sessions. In this moving talk Ayse will talk about her own transformation, why the old roadmaps don’t work anymore and how to use optimism, an open mind and empathy to create your own roadmap to design, prototype and live your best life.