Torres has spent years analyzing what makes a great leader. What she’s found is that companies are investing more resources than ever in leadership training, but are failing to produce effective leaders.
That’s possibly because they’re ignoring three fundamental questions, which she summarizes in her talk:
1) Are you anticipating new trends that will affect you and your team?
2) Is your network diverse, made up of people who are very different from you?
3) Are you brave enough to change your strategy, even though it’s made you successful in the past?
The idea, she says, is to prepare yourself “not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow.”

According to Wujec, the solution to any business problem starts with a piece of bread. In his talk, Wujec says that drawing out the process of making toast is a simple but useful example of how organizations can deal with tough situations.
You take a bunch of sticky notes, use them to draw the different steps of the toast-making process, and have a group of people come together to rearrange the sticky notes in a particular order. The same strategy applies to any goal you’re trying to achieve.
“There’s a visual revolution that’s taking place as more organizations are addressing their wicked problems by collaboratively drawing them out,” he says. “And I’m convinced that those who see their world as movable nodes [steps in the process] and links [connections between the steps] really have an edge.”
You don’t have to be an artist to benefit from visualizing your problems and solutions — the idea is to make the concepts tangible.
“It’s simple, it’s fun, it’s powerful,” Wujec says.