Resilience by Design: An AI Toolbox Talk for High-Impact Collaboration
Sustainability is a team sport, but most teams are playing without a playbook.
Across impact, sustainability, and innovation work, many teams are experiencing collaboration fatigue. They are navigating fast-changing policy landscapes, an overabundance of digital tools, and the persistent gap between good intentions and scalable action. At a time when the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges demand joined-up thinking, more meetings alone are not the answer.
What teams need is a more resilient way to work together.
That is the focus of Resilience by Design: An AI Toolbox Talk for High-Impact Collaboration, an upcoming 45-minute session hosted by Laura McDermott of Colectivo and Marco van Hout of Metodic.io.
This conversation is designed for people working across sustainability, social innovation, education, design, and systems change who want to strengthen the way multidisciplinary teams collaborate under pressure. Moving beyond what Laura and Marco call “sticky-note theatre,” the session will explore how a unified, AI-enabled approach can help teams build resilience and achieve meaningful real-world results.
Why this conversation matters
For many organisations and teams, collaboration has become more complicated, not less. New tools promise efficiency but often create noise. Good ideas struggle to move beyond workshops and into action. Teams committed to positive impact can find themselves stuck between ambition and execution.
Resilience by Design asks a practical question: how can we equip teams not just to generate ideas, but to work in ways that are adaptable, aligned, and capable of delivering change?
Rather than treating innovation as novelty for its own sake, this session reframes it as the ability to respond well under pressure, work effectively across disciplines, and move from fragmented workflows to unified action.
What the Toolbox Talk will explore
During the session, Laura and Marco will unpack several key themes shaping the future of high-impact collaboration.
The mindset shift: The talk will explore why resilience is becoming such an important concept, particularly in the context of this year’s Global Goals Jam. Resilience is not simply about endurance. It is about designing processes, relationships, and systems that can adapt to complexity and continue moving forward.
The facilitator’s mindset: Laura and Marco will also reflect on the balance between big-picture design thinking and the practical engineering of a strong session. That means thinking not only about inspiration and creativity, but also about the structure, flow, and frameworks that help teams do their best work together.
The toolbox deep dive: A live demo using the Metodic.io platform will show how AI can support facilitation by taking on some of the content heavy-lifting. Instead of getting bogged down in the process, teams can spend more of their time focusing on what matters most: the people in the room, the story they are building, and the outcomes they want to create.
The goal
Ultimately, this session is about equipping participants with a practical library of tools and approaches they can use to facilitate change from within their own organisations, teams, and communities.
Meet the speakers
Laura McDermott: Educator, Strategic Designer and CEO of Colectivo
Laura McDermott is the founder of Colectivo and a multi-award-winning faculty member in Design and Innovation for Sustainability at IE Business School. Recognized by Euclid as one of the Top 100 Women in Social Innovation, she has held director-level roles in people engagement and experience design.
Laura specializes in designing sustainable innovations, impactful educational programmes, and experience-led transformations. Her work spans Europe and Latin America, and she is passionate about leveraging social innovation and design to create meaningful, sustainable change in organisational cultures.
Marco van Hout: Transformation Designer and Founder of Metodic.io
Marco van Hout is a Dutch transformation designer, builder, and co-founder of Digital Society School and the Global Goals Jam, a global platform for local SDG-focused design events organized year-round in more than 60 countries.
Co-created with UNDP in 2016, the Global Goals Jam has helped make complex global challenges more actionable through local design-led collaboration. Marco recently founded Metodic.io, an AI-powered session-building platform used by professionals worldwide. His work connects design methodology, technology, and sustainability to support more effective responses to complex challenges.
Join us
If you are exploring how to make collaboration more resilient, more focused, and more actionable, this Toolbox Talk will offer fresh ideas and practical takeaways.
Resilience by Design: An AI Toolbox Talk for High-Impact Collaboration brings together experience from design, facilitation, sustainability, and AI to help teams work better on the challenges that matter most.
📅 Wed, Apr 29 at 3:00 PM CEST I 2:00 PM GMT
