NCOMMON

In this episode, Alison is joined by director and cinematographer Soraya Sélène to talk about Who in the Hell Is Regina Jones? — a documentary about the founder of Soul newspaper, a nationally distributed publication that predated Rolling Stone, launched out of a dining room in 1966 by a woman with five children whose name most people still don't know.

In this episode, Alison is joined by Corina Ocanto, a workplace strategist who has spent her career translating human needs into environments where people can thrive. Their conversation traces the quiet power of leading from the middle—those moments when influence comes not from authority, but from attention, empathy, and the courage to ask better questions.

In this episode, Alison sits with her lifelong friends — Norma, Delia, and Vanessa — women who have known her through every version of herself. Together, they trace the arc of friendship that began in the streets of 1980s and ’90s New York City and has carried them through love, loss, and reinvention.

This episode explores the edges of uncertainty with Jessie Shefrin — a conversation about wandering, testing, stumbling, and ultimately emerging into new clarity. Jessie reflects on the sparks that shape us, those fleeting moments of sensation that accumulate into transformation. Together, the dialogue traces how luck, timing, and openness weave into leadership and design, offering listeners a meditative space to consider their own turning points and the practices that help us stay open to what might emerge.

Episode 11 is part two of the conversation about Design Operations and where we are heading. In this episode, Jacqui and Alison go broad and extensive (and somewhat meandering ) about future opportunity areas for Design Operations and how we, as design leaders, can lead the charge in laying the groundwork for that future. We charge forward into the unknown with the responsibility to consider society, ethics, customer experience, and the employee experience. Discuss.

We have a special guest this week! Matt Abrahams, Principal and Co-Founder Company of Bold Echo Communication Solutions, Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and host of the podcast Think Fast Talk Smart. Matt chats with us about how to be more mindful of how we communicate and bring intention to our daily interactions. We also ask him how we, as hosts, could talk a Lil less and land subject matter a Lil more.

Businesses are trying to implement Design Thinking & Human-Centered Design – the struggle is real. In this episode, Jacqui and Alison talk about that struggle as well as why it's not just about a great design org or methods that will get you there, and why transformation (led by human-centered operations) needs to take shape in order for organizations to truly understand why good design is good business.

In this episode, Jacqui and Alison share some real talk about failures and learnings. Falling down and getting back up — because we’re gonna fall down a lot. Especially as the trailblazers in the nascent discipline of DesignOps (in a relatively nascent field), we are going at it alone, which makes that failure feels so much more acute.

In the third episode of our inaugural season, we welcome our first guest and who better than Alexis Loyd, VP of Design at Medium, Co-Founder of Ethical Futures Lab, and third in line to the throne after Oprah and Beyonce. Listen to us talk about the unintended consequences of user-centered design, Society-Centered Design, and our greater responsibility before, during, and after this time of COVID-19.

In this first episode of ncommon, Alison talks to Jacqui about the successes and failures of scaling design through DesignOps. Amongst other things, Jacqui shares how she learned that true scale is social work and requires the power of the community. Enjoy!