Sarah Brooks is a design leader and intrapreneur who uses strategic design and mixed-methods research to help teams and organizations reach better outcomes. She has worked in enterprise, federal, non-profit, start-up, and hybrid organizations. If you’re one of millions of US military veterans, her work at the Veterans Administration has touched your life. We are pleased to welcome Sarah as a member of the Civic Design conference (https://rosenfeldmedia.com/civic-design-2021/) and community curation team! In this Rosenfeld Review episode, she shares her experience at the VA, digging into specific challenges when working within a large org, learning what ‘patriotism’ means from people who are in the service, and how soft-skills (people skills, really) are needed at the systems level.

Sarah recommends: Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Strategy-Shaping-Change-Changing/dp/1849352607

Tickets to Civic Design 2021 are now available; register now! https://rosenfeldmedia.com/civic-design-2021/

More about Sarah:

Sarah Brooks is a design leader and intrapreneur working at the intersection of foresight, service design, and mixed-methods research approaches to help teams and organizations reach better outcomes. She has worked across the enterprise, federal, non-profit, start-up, and hybrid organizations.

Currently, Sarah is the Executive design leader responsible for the development and diffusion of standards and practices that create experience excellence across IBM's product and service teams. She is an active mentor, author, educator, and speaker on the art & craft of seamless experiences and living systems approached to complex challenges.

Sarah is the author of System Shifting, in the book Strategic Design Thinking: Innovation in Products, Services and Beyond, and the essay Collective Strength and Greater Understanding Through Co-Design in the book Leap Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation.

Sarah served as a 2014-2015 U.S. Presidential Innovation Fellow at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs continuing on as a political appointee until the end of the Obama-Biden Administration, working as Chief Design Officer leading a team that worked on strategic transformation priorities.

Prior to government service, Sarah lived in San Francisco and worked in the social impact ecosystem and currently lives in Montauk, New York.