Public Speaking

I help leaders see what's actually happening beneath the surface of their organizations during transitions — and intervene before it costs them their best people, their momentum, and their credibility.

Nobody Asked Us

What leaders miss when they
force teams together
and what to do about it

A professional profile slide of Indra Klavins, an organizational strategist, speaker, and certified mediator, with her photo in a circle on a dark background. The slide includes her name, titles, a quote, and her Instagram handle.

Most restructurings don't fail loudly. They fail quietly — in the silences after the announcement, in the meetings where everyone agrees and nothing moves, in the chat rooms leadership doesn't know exist. By the time the damage shows up on a dashboard, it's already expensive.

Indra Klavins has spent almost twenty years walking into organizations in the middle of their hardest moments — mergers, restructures, rapid growth, forced team integrations — and doing the thing most leaders don't know how to do: reading what's actually happening beneath the surface. She's not an academic. She's someone who has lived these dynamics from the inside at companies like Verizon, WeWork, and TD Ameritrade, and has developed the language to name them — early enough to do something about them.

In this keynote, your audience will walk away with:

  • Silence signals problems, not progress.

  • Most resistance is actually unacknowledged uncertainty.

  • If the behavior looks irrational, the system probably isn't.

  • Unacknowledged loss becomes organizational friction.

  • Work people can't see becomes work they don't trust.

This talk is built for corporate leadership teams, HR and People Ops leaders, and anyone navigating the human side of organizational change. If your organization is restructuring, integrating, or scaling — and you want your leaders to stop misreading the signals and start intervening before the damage compounds — this is the talk for the room.

A woman in a red dress giving a presentation on stage at a conference, with a large audience seated in front of her and a big screen displaying the event behind her. There are banners on either side of the stage that read "DesignOps Summit."
A woman giving a presentation at a conference, standing behind a green podium with the text 'HS Events Design Operations New York May 25, 2023' and a hashtag #DesignOpsNY. She is wearing glasses, a denim jacket, and gold hoop earrings, and is gesturing with her hand.
A woman with red hair and glasses pointing to her upper lip, wearing a black shirt with white text, in a living room with a fireplace, plants, and curtains.
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Indra On Stage

Select Past Talks

Creating Equity & Cross-Organizational Connection Through Talent Calibration

Title slide for a presentation titled "Creating Equity & Cross-Organizational Connection Through Talent Calibration" by Indra Klavins.

Strong design organizations have well-defined career ladders that help team members understand what success looks like for their role. The best design organizations operationalize their ladders to help people navigate their careers and ensure that leaders evaluate their talent equitably and consistently across the entire organization, not just within a specific team.

In this talk, we will learn how blind calibration sessions conducted semi-annually can break down geographic and organizational siloes for the betterment of individuals, teams, and the organization. 

Recap on Substack

Expensive Routers Create Connections: A DesignOps Girl in a DevOps World

Slide with title 'Expensive Routers Create Connections' in brown and yellow text.

DevOps has spent a decade focused on tooling that allows developers to code, deploy, monitor, and optimize quickly and efficiently. Along the way, many within that community forget that the people within that community and the developers that they serve are, first and foremost, people. Hear what happens when a Design Ops professional finds herself embedded in a DevOps team, helps them see each other as people, and applies a bit of design thinking, tools and techniques to help them learn the skills necessary as the people they serve move from the information age to the conceptual age.

Watch the Full Talk

Select Past Panel Discussions

Slide from a presentation titled "Stepping Into the Void" at the DesignOps Summit 2020. Features photos and names of four speakers, including Indra Klavins, Markus Hohl, and Jose Coronado, with their titles and affiliations
A panel discussion titled "Design Systems in the Enterprise" featuring five speakers sitting on stools on a stage, with a large digital screen behind them displaying their names and social media handles.
Presentation slide titled "Design Systems in the Enterprise" featuring headshots of five speakers: Adekunle Oduye, Talia Fisher, Chris Fahey, Indra Klavins, and Jose Coronado. The slide includes details about the event, and logos for Lions and ADP against a black background with a city skyline at night.