Kara DeFrias
Kara served as Director of Experience Design in the Obama White House, working on the Cancer Moonshot. Her background is a mix of private and public sector leadership experience, including TurboTax and the inaugural class of White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. In the latter she served as entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between the government and people from a technology perspective. She does pro-bono for orgs like Team Rubicon; taught human centered design to micro-entrepreneur women in rural India; and guest lectures at UC San Diego and Stanford. She currently champions the self-employed and small businesses on the Intuit QuickBooks Online Platform team as Chief of Staff.
For more, keep up with Kara at karadefrias.com or on Twitter as @karadefrias.
Presentations
Leadership By Design 2018
The Leaders Guide to the Care & Feeding of Humans
Health and wellness of an organization’s or project’s performance can be relatively simple. In a snapshot we can know a lot–dashboards and metrics tell us lots about how well our work is progressing, what mile stones we’re reaching, and what color-coded alert state of panic we should be in. And we can optimize our way into just about any green-colored diagram we choose.
Teams, and the humans that comprise them, are fascinatingly complex and complicated. In a snapshot, we can fool ourselves into believing all kinds of things about them. And yet, we can’t really know for sure unless we dive in deeper and learn about their health, their needs, and try to help them optimize for their individual successes. In this presentation, Kara shares her approach to the care and feeding of humans, sharing lessons gleaned from working at the highest echelons of sports, entertainment, government, and technology.
