Designed for Difference: An Experiential Introduction to Relational Intelligence
ATD NYC x L&D Shakers
About The Session
Two people get the same brief, the same goal, the same deadline. One starts building immediately. The other starts asking questions. Neither is wrong and by Thursday they're quietly irritated with each other.
We usually file that under "people problems." Communication styles. Personality clash. Someone being difficult.
It's more often a design problem. What looks like resistance or misalignment is frequently a mismatch between how someone naturally operates and the environment we built for them.
This session is hands-on, not a lecture. In 90 minutes you'll:
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Spot when a "people problem" is actually a design problem
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See how different decision-making styles quietly reshape learning and collaboration
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Build environments where differences compound instead of collide
Who Should Attend
L&D Shakers is hosting! Come if you design learning, run teams, facilitate rooms, or have ever watched a perfectly good process fall apart on perfectly good people.
About the Facilitator
Marlee Whetten is leading this session. She's a culture compatibility scientist who came to workplace friction by way of evolutionary biology, which is exactly the kind of perspective that makes for an interesting session.
Founder of Relationality, Marlee is a little obsessed with what's actually going on beneath the surface. Her training in evolutionary biology and physiology taught her to look past the obvious symptoms, find the underlying pattern, and understand the system producing it.
She started wondering whether the same applied to human systems: if workplace friction is the symptom, what's the system underneath? That question became Relationality - a system grounded in compatibility research that maps decision-making styles through time, attention, and purpose.
Today Marlee helps organizations use those predictable differences to improve leadership, hiring, team design, and culture. Her mission is simple: make compatibility at work a baseline, not a bonus.
Venue Information
Optimizely
119 5th Ave 7th floor, New York, NY 10003, USA
