Emily Best

Every single workplace on the planet has been through a re-org some time (or, several times) in the last three years. The move to all or partially remote workforce? Suddenly finding you have five generations of people with extremely different working styles and expectations side by side in the same company? Being able to metabolize and respond to major social uprisings? To tackle any of these is to re-organize the operating agreements, values and behaviors of your organization. What about if you have to tackle all three by Friday, like most people leaders are asked to do?

Emily Best, founder and CEO of Seed&Spark and Film Forward, is about how to recognize the demand for innovation, and how perspective-taking and storytelling can crack open pathways to new ways of working inside organizations at any stage of growth. Emily shares her own experience of how she learned to recognize the demand for innovation, what she discovered interviewing hundreds of HR professionals on their biggest challenges, and what she has uncovered about workplace innovation in the last two years of growing her new venture, Film Forward. Film Forward is an experiential learning platform driving workplace performance, engagement and inclusion with learning journeys built around the world’s best short cinema.

To put the keynote into action, Best will share an award-winning short film and lead the group in a reflection exercise – demonstrating the possibilities of bringing creative solutions if you’re willing to invite in new perspectives.

Innovation is not magic. It’s driven by a set of conditions that any organization has the power to create. From years of working across a wide range of corporate clients, Emily and her team have clear examples of how shifting and clarifying simple organizational agreements in small ways and large can create brand new conditions for innovating with inclusion.

After over a decade of supporting community driven creators to tell stories that support and uplift their communities, Seed&Spark has become a central repository of how storytelling can gather and galvanize groups to move the culture forward. We’ll watch a short film and clips and build excitement around story-powered community building.

“Community building” has been a trendy way to rename many conventional marketing tactics and leave the communities feeling talked at, ignored or worse, exploited. Sharing the story of the unconventional tactics Best and her team use in building and growing Seed&Spark’s vibrant creator community, this talk explores what it means to really be in community in a rapidly changing world.

In this talk, Emily Best paints a portrait of media’s role in programming our society’s bias, not just through the films Hollywood has been churning out over the years but the very business model built to produce them. Through the arc of her experience building Seed&Spark, she demonstrates film’s untapped potential to undo some of the damage that has been done with equitable storytelling.

Across industries the role of “Chief Diversity Officer” (or some similar moniker) is on the rise. This group of people is tasked with the herculean task of building equity in workplaces that exist within a wider society that is not equitable. Through hundreds of hours of research and interviews, Best and her team discovered common challenges and opportunities for visionary leaders (and also hopefully everyone) to cultivate workplace culture not just to build a more profitable company but also a more just and equitable society.

This is a talk Best has given several times about how Seed&Spark monetized social capital. The internet can be a powerful tool for building and monetizing social capital, but it can’t be the only tool used to succeed. Through a series of learnings building Seed&Spark from an underfunded underdog to the number one crowdfunding platform in the world for movies and shows, Best can walk audiences through how the company leveraged both off-line and on-line tactics for growing social capital that became the foundations of its business growth.