DSIL Virtual Classrooms
The DSIL Virtual Classroom is composed of 10 live, interactive, 60 minutes sessions with thought leaders, practitioners and innovative problem solvers from every hemisphere. The speakers have been carefully selected to expedite high-level understanding by exploring critical issues, case-studies and emerging learnings that come from the DSIL Course.
All sessions are moderated by the DSIL team and each speaker engages with participants during their presentation or interactive workshops. On the Zoom platform, you will also have time to exchange ideas with the other participants in break-out sessions. Bring your curiosity and questions! The more the better.
Fun Fact: Once a part of DSIL always a part of DSIL. Join us for years to come on future classrooms for free.
Every year, after the Executive Course finishes, we open our best classrooms to the world.
Check out a few of our favorites from the last 5 years here!
2019 Speaker Series
Theme: The Power of the Collective.
SESSION 1 | How the power of community can transform your business
August 29, 3 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Susan Basterfield & Anthony Cabraal
Enspiral
In this Workshop: The 'Better Work Together' book is out and some of the authors are with us this year. Regardless of what work we are doing, what sector you are in, or the make-up of your team or organization... how we coordinate is getting more complex. How do we work together to look after ourselves and each other? How do we contribute our best gifts and highest impact work? In this session, we will explore and reflect on learnings from the development of the Enspiral community over the past 8 years. Expect to cover collective decision-making, governance, connection building, culture, community, self-management, livelihood building, and personal development. Its a FULL session!
SESSION 2 | Designing the future we want to live in
September 5, 12 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speaker: Priscilla Chaves, Costa Rica
Executive Director and Co-Founder, Impact Consulting
In this Workshop: Humans of the future, ambitious challenges and the exponentials that allow for radical solutions: In this workshop we will tap into the possibilities of a future where humans have evolved and the technology is now available to solve the world's grandest challenges. We will explore how AI, robotics, bioengineering, among others, can be used to solve day-to-day problems for the "human of the future", by following design principles and a lot of imagination. As one of our first DSIL alumni's years ago, Pri will share her journey from IBM to now owning a company focused on the future.
SESSION 3 | Systemic Constellations: an embodied technique for personal reflection
September 24th, 5:30 am Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Hermes Huang, Thailand
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, InsightPact
In this Workshop: We can work with what we can't see. We can understand things not only by thinking through it! This workshop will begin with DSIL's co-founder leading us through a quick conceptualization of various forms of knowledge. We will then focus on one form, embodied knowledge, using the systemic constellations technique. Systemic constellations are similar to stakeholder maps, but take on a much more mindful and personal character. Strongly guided- each participant will work individually, to construct and observe their own constellations. Participants will depart the workshop being able to practice and experiment further with the technique.
SESSION 4 | Decolonizing social innovation
October 4, 7 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Nai Kalema, USA
Social Innovation Fellow, StartingBloc, Harvard Grad
In this workshop: We will look at how uncritical approaches we collectively take to social innovation support the maintenance of power imbalances linked to coloniality. These actions fail to address the persistent inequities and biases that sustain many of the most intractable challenges we see in the world (and in SI processes) today. This session explores where such challenges continue to exist and what some are doing to diminish them through SI processes and systems. How might we decolonize social innovation to advance global social justice?
SESSION 5 | Generating Wisdom through Process Design
October 15, 12 am Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Ahmed Buasallay
Ecological Designer, Community Facilitator, Systems Thinker, Schumacher College
In this workshop: In this interactive dialogue, we will explore what it means within the design processes to enable the continuous (re)generation of wisdom within communities (and organisations). Questions we may come to together: How can we design processes that enable the individual to find their own expression within another’s (community or individual) dream? How can we design processes that transmute with the people that hold them? Why is generative wisdom important for our planetary and individual health?
SESSION 6 | What 100 Coffees Taught Me About Connection
October 24, Time TBA
Featured Speaker: Chris Hope, Australia
Strategy Office, RMIT University
In this workshop: Over two years, Chris met 100 new people for coffee, once week. In this session, he will bring his TED talk to us and speak to the power of community connection in fueling change and understanding. What are the wellness benefits of meeting people? How we are losing connection as a society and how we can align our personal values to out who we are as one? Join Chris to take the lessons home to your communities!
SESSION 7 | StartX and Lab of Labs: Collective Intelligence for Shared Missions
November 6, 8 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Tony Lai & Conor Colwell
StartX + Lab of Labs
In this workshop: Over 8 years, StartX has grown into a community of over 1300 Stanford-affiliated founders who relentlessly support one another in achieving their company goals. Today, the Lab of Labs is doing the same for a global community of researchers, founders, and funders of projects solving Global Goals. With shared learnings from building these non-profit initiatives, this interactive session will guide you through a set of frameworks, processes and tools for nurturing collective intelligence in service of common goals.
SESSION 8 | The Aesthetics of Power
November 14, 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speaker: Fisher Qua & Anna Jackson, USA
In this workshop: In this session, we will use the lenses of aesthetics & power to explore the ways we are each indulging in some kind of personal expression even as we try to create interactions that invite others to do the same. How do we make choices about time, space, and other structures that shape our interactions? What configurations are productive? Which are oppressive? How do the structures that are successful migrate across contexts, cultures, and communities?
SESSION 9 | Intersections of human centered processes and voice amplification in design processes
November 21, Time TBA
Featured Speakers: Anu Sachdev & Pallavi Jain, India
The Change Designers LLP
In this workshop:This workshop will bring real life stories, experiences, processes and impact data from the rural development and marketing sphere in India where social behavior change has found a niche to be used. In this workshop, we will interact about how working differently with communities (rural, low resource, remote) in different parts of India have yielded unthought of solutions through stories. These narratives are made by the communities themselves through a facilitated process that allows voices to be amplified, and gives program developers create platforms for rightful amplification. Using torytelling methods, positive deviance and liberating structures to solve the most complex social issues of our time. Things you will learn on the course!
SESSION 10 | Co-design with Indigenous Groups in Guatemala
December 3, 10 am Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speaker: Omar Crespo & Mona Mijthab
Link4 + Mosan
In this workshop: We are diverse, creative beings with vast imagination and creative energy. We believe we can all be designers and that especially vulnerable groups can benefit immensely from the approaches and mindsets of creative problem solving. Join us as we share about our journey towards sustainability through local innovation and co-design in a Guatemalan indigenous village. We will talk about some of our projects, from locally designed cooking systems to circular sanitation systems. Learn about our methodology and get to try one of the physical generative tools we’ve developed for co-design.
SESSION 11 I The truth about how collectives work well together
December 11, 8 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Featured Speakers: Katy Grennier
DSIL Team
In this workshop: This workshop will bring you through a real-life example of a mad collaboration between some of the most daring design firms in the world. We will share our #realtalk story of how different cultures, companies, brands, ways of thinking got us stuck and what exactly we did to build cohesion and a successful project by the end. The world is generating new energy that draws us to mad collaborations! Learn from us and help your next one go much smoother!
2019 Moderator and Community Activator
Kelsey Lotus Wong
Lotus is a Creative Facilitator, Experience Designer, and Culture Coach|sultant. With a passionate curiosity for transformation, Kelsey has committed to co-creating the conditions for people to come into wholeness, expand their capacities, and bring their wildest visions to life. In practice, Kelsey works East to West with culture coach|sulting™ Delivering Happiness and social innovation company DSIL Global to expand individual and organizational capacity. When she’s not deep-diving into meaningful work, Kelsey is creating, exploring, and floating in the sea. Follow Kelsey’s journey on her blog.
2018 Speaker Series
SESSION 1 | Designing For Social Innovation and Leadership
SESSION 2 | Modern day wellness: Emotional Intelligence, Meditation + role vs soul conflict
SESSION 5 | Beyond Stickies and Sharpies: Authentic Organizational Transformation
SESSION 6 | Leadership Reflections-Years of Undocumented Advocacy and Changemaking
Featured Speaker: Victoria Matey Mendoza, USA
IDEA Institute Changemaker fellow, founder of the Blue Group
SESSION 8 | Do More Good: The Future of Business
SESSION 9 | Online learning sucks until it doesn’t.
SESSION 10 I Technology, the future and our journey
Featured Speakers: Michell Zappa, Netherlands
Technology futurist, information designer and founder of Envisioning, a technology foresight institute.
SESSION 11 | Moving Towards Ecosystems and Systems Led Leadership - Designing Your Impact by Mapping the Gaps
Featured Speakers: Courtney Savie Laurence, Thailand
Co-founder of two social enterprises and has worked in and among large-scale organizations like Ashoka and the United Nations.
2017 Speaker Series
SESSION 1 | Appreciative Inquiry: A Dynamic Paradigm for Managing Change
Featured Speakers:
Mohit Mukherjee and DSIL Global Team
Centre for Executive Education at UPEACE, Watson U
Ciudad Colon, COSTA RICA; Bangkok, THAILAND
SESSION 2 | Workshop: Building Business + Ideas for Risk and Resiliency
Featured Speaker: Jona Repishti
International Development Innovation Network (IDIN) at D-Lab MIT
Washington, DC, UNITED STATES
SESSION 3 | Workshop: Innovation and the Five Lenses
SESSION 4 | Fireside Chat: The Power of Art for Inclusive Development
SESSION 5 | Design Thinking in Real Life
Featured Speaker: Emi Kolawole
Dexign, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)
Washington, DC, UNITED STATES
SESSION 6 | The Benefit Mindset: Wellbeing of the Self and the Whole
Featured Speakers: Ash Buchanan and Jack Greig
The Benefit Mindset and Teach for Australia
Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
SESSION 7 | Working with Paradox and Complexity
SESSION 8 | Harnessing the Restorative Power of Anger for Innovation and Social Change
Featured Speaker: Margaret Rose
Procurement Innovation and Leadership Lab, University of Bath
Bath, UNITED KINGDOM, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
SESSION 9 | Transforming Business, Society, and Self
SESSION 10 | Fireside Chat: Leveraging Maker, Hacker and Digital Blacksmithing Spaces for Development
Featured Speakers: Karl Heinz AND Thabiso Mashaba
Founder at AB3D and ArtisanHive // Co-founder and CEO These Hands GSSE
Nairobi, KENYA // Gaborone, BOTSWANA
SESSION 11 | Workshop: Liberating Every Voice with Micro-Structures
Featured Speaker: Keith McCandless
Social Invention Group & Liberating Structures
Seattle, Washington, UNITED STATES
SESSION 12 | Radical Inclusion for an Entrepreneurship and Innovation Revolution
Featured Speaker: Art Sherwood
Western Washington University, College of Business and Economics
Bellingham, Washington, UNITED STATES
SESSION 13 | Being Bold with Authentic Leadership
Featured Speakers: Doy Charnsupharindr
Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute
Berkeley, California, UNITED STATES
SESSION 14 | The Surprising Effects of Design Thinking
2016 Speaker Series
Design Thinking in Action.
Featured Speakers:
Adam and Lena Selzer of Stanford d.school/Civilla; Detroit, UNITED STATES
Peace and Conflict Studies Frameworks for Social Change
Featured Speaker:
Craig Zelizer, Founder, Peace and Collaborative Development Network; Washington, DC, UNITED STATES
Design thinking 3.0 - Applications & Lessons Learned in the Field
Featured Speaker:
Chioma Ume, OpenIdeo; San Francisco, UNITED STATES
Workshop: ‘Brandthinking’ for Changemakers
See example of Get Ready for the Session Here!
Featured Speaker: Anne Miltenburg, Founder, The Brandling; Nairobi, KENYA
Futures of Social Innovation & Lean Data
See an example of Get Ready for the Session Here
Featured Speaker: Sasha Dichter, Chief Social Innovation Officer, Acumen Fund; New York, UNITED STATES
Critical Considerations for the Future of Development
Featured Speaker: Mirian Vilela, Earth Charter; San Jose, COSTA RICA
Conscious Leadership
Featured Speaker: Pilar Rueda García Yakar, PCC Certified Professional Coactive Coach, Integral Associate Coach; SPAIN
Co-Creation in Action
Featured Speaker: Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, MIT D-Lab, International Development and Design Summit, C-Innova; Bogotá, COLOMBIA and Cambridge, UNITED STATES
The Art of Storytelling & Media Literacy for Driving Impact
Featured Speakers: Julien Leyre and Rosebell Kagumire, WEF Global Shaper; Melbourne, AUSTRALIA and Kampala, UGANDA
Workshop: Understanding Self in Leadership
Featured Speaker: Grace Clapham, Co-founder, The Change School Singapore; SINGAPORE
Business Model Innovation and the Triple Bottom Line
Featured Speaker: Business Model Innovation and the Triple Bottom Line; Saskia Rotshuizen, BOP Inc; the NETHERLANDS
Navigating Impact and the Journey to Investment
Featured Speaker: Nicholas Glicher, Director, TrustLaw service and Head of African Programmes at the Thomas Reuters Foundation; Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA
Workshop: A Behavioural Approach to Inclusive Development
Featured Speaker: Vanezza Zabert, Director for Academic Partnerships, Gawad Kalinga Europe; London School of Economics Behavioural Science Fellow, Social Impact and Behavioural Insights Programme Designer. London, ENGLAND and Manila, PHILIPPINES
