We are thrilled to announce that Manageritalia – the Italian Federation of Executives, Professionals, and Managers – has chosen to be media partner of our upcoming Design Your Life women’s retreat, taking place from September 27th to 29th in the beautiful city of Matera, Italy.
The Design Your Life Women’s Retreat is an international event that empowers women to intentionally design their lives and careers using the innovative Design Your Life (DYL) methodology developed at Stanford University, which integrates Design Thinking into Life Design. This 2-day immersive experience features interactive workshops where participants will ideate new possible futures, redesign their current roles for greater satisfaction, and enhance their well-being in every aspects of life. Joining our Design Your Life retreat also means connecting with a global community of inspiring women and discovering Matera’s unique beauty and history.
🔗 Design Your Life women’s retreat in Matera: register now!
We are truly excited and honored to have Susan Burnett, Co-CEO of Designing Your Life Consulting, as the lead instructor for our retreat. In the meantime, together with Manageritalia, we had the opportunity to interview her, where she shared invaluable insights on how Design Your Life workshops can significantly benefit organizations by enhancing human capital and fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion.
🇺🇸 Susan Burnett
CO-Founder and CEO of Designing Your Life Consulting, Chair, Board of Directors, Rising International, Start-Up Advisor. She has dedicated the last 35 years of her corporate career to designing for individual and organizational transformation and growth. Susan Burnett co-founded DYL Consulting with the belief that empowering people with the life design process, tools and mindsets can lead to new and healthier ways to work and live in a chaotic, unpredictable, and ever-changing world. She is a regular speaker, consultant and author on these subjects.
1. How can organizations integrate Design Your Life principles into their employee welfare programs to enhance overall job satisfaction and well-being?
The companies we have worked with have used Designing Your Life (DYL) workshops in many ways, depending on their people goals and priorities. Many companies have a career development strategy requiring employees to “own their careers”. Best-in-class companies want to give their employees a process and tools to do that, and DYL is a great match. The design process helps employees ideate possible futures and design a prototype to test out those possibilities in real ways. In a work world that’s constantly changing, where jobs come and go based on technology advancements, having a toolbox to continually build your way forward into new career opportunities is key to employee and company success.
Another goal companies have is to help employees find more satisfaction in the work they are doing today. Since upward mobility or job openings are not always available, they want employees to find ways to make their current role more satisfying. We offer DYL workshops that help employees redesign their current work for increased growth, engagement and satisfaction and then help them design an “ask“ in ways that benefit both organization and employee. When we have followed up to see if employees have had their “ask” conversation, over 80% have had the conversation and either got what they asked for or, with new information from their manager, got something even better!
The third goal companies have is to provide tools to increase their employees’ well-being, a key need and driver of engagement. Our DYL Balance and Energy workshop will help employees target the areas they want to improve and design a prototype to try the following week that will increase their ability to flourish in work and life. We love reports back that these changes have made a positive difference, and maybe more importantly that they are still designing, iterating, learning and trying more prototypes.
Lastly, companies want to help employees solve the work-life problems that are getting in the way of their job satisfaction and productivity. This is the heart of the design thinking process and where problem framing, reframing and ideation are practiced and mastered. Using these tools and mindsets, employees can make progress on problems that have been keeping them stuck for a while. Prototypes take the fear out of trying something new as we frame it as “just an experiment to learn from”. This helps people get into action and just try stuff!
2. In what ways can Design Your Life promote diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging within the workplace?
In every organization we’ve worked in, we ask the leaders to give us diverse groups of people – different genders, ethnicity, experience, functions, geographies – and to think about the people who have to work across organizational boundaries. We do this because we engage in “radical collaboration” that takes advantage of different perspectives in ways that promote ideation and reaching solutions.
In every organization, employees report they have a deeper relationship with current colleagues having listened to them talk about what drives them at work and what difference they want to make in the world. They also report they have new relationships with people they have never met or only met in meetings, and that will help them work with them in the future. In a work world where loneliness is on the rise, bringing people together to work on work and life challenges increases inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
3. How can the principles of Design Your Life facilitate intergenerational collaboration and understanding in professional settings?
The previous answer addresses this. As we require as much diversity as possible, making it intergenerational is another way to achieve it. An example could help here. We worked with a large agricultural organization that had very experienced employees in their late 50s and new hires with agricultural degrees meeting each other and working together in our workshop for the first time. After listing to each other’s work and lifeviews in mixed groups, an elderly gentleman said, “I just met this kid, and the amazing thing is how much we have in common. We both want to deliver high quality work, make a difference in the world producing healthy, safe food, and we want to have fun doing it! Who knew?” The DYL process is firmly rotted in the fact that it is through diverse perspectives and experience that we achieve breakthrough ideas.
4. How can the Design Your Life approach be tailored to address the unique challenges and opportunities faced by women executives?
What we have discovered is that when you get a group of women executives in the room, the conversation changes and revolves around the challenges facing women leaders in today’s work world. We still work in a predominantly male hierarchy, and the role of an executive has been defined predominantly by men in the 1950s who had a woman supporting them at home. The paradigm has to change, and women executives are struggling to redefine what it means to be woman leader. DYL tools can be used to design the executive roles of the future. They can also be used to design time and energy, the two biggest assets of any executive. Intentionally designing the way you want to lead and work as a woman in a community of other executive women is a breakthrough every woman executive needs.
5. With your current understanding of the Design Your Life methodology, what advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?
I would tell my 30-year-old self that no problem is unsolvable. I would ask her not to be so afraid of change and disruptions – they are a normal part of nature, life and work. I would let her know she has design tools to navigate this tumultuous world, and I would remind her to always rely on her compass (workview plus lifeview) to find her way.
🇮🇹 Click here to read the Italian version of the interview published by Manageritalia.
🔗 Design Your Life women’s retreat in Matera: register now!
