SURROUND Podcast Network

🎙️See you in the studio! The NeoCon Podcast Lounge is back again this year, now on the 11th floor. Hear live conversations with guests including Michael Ford, Cheryl Durst, Nick Foster, and more. Plus: A live Design Nerds Anonymous event with special giveaways (hint: 🧢 & 📚) and a fun activation brought to life by ThinkLab with Momentum Custom Digital Wallpaper.

Big thank you to the Lounge sponsor, Unika Vaev, and our partners: B+N, Momentum, Framery, and UpSpring.

Visit neocon.com for the full schedule of recordings.

NeoConversations is back with a new episode, find it wherever you get podcasts!

What if innovation isn’t a moment of breakthrough but a practice shaped by community, lived experience, and responsibility?

In this episode of NeoConversations, Jessica O. Matthews offers a powerful reframing of innovation not as an individual act, but as a collective one.

Drawing from her experience building ideas into real-world impact, Jessica introduces her approach to innovation through a pattern-based framework, one that challenges how we identify opportunity, assess risk, and move from concept to ex*****on.

Rather than offering a formula, she invites listeners into a way of thinking, one grounded in discipline, context, and the belief that the most meaningful ideas are shaped in relationship to the communities they serve.

She closes with a clear call to action, urging designers and leaders to rethink not just what they build but how and for whom they build it.

What really drives performance and belonging inside organizations? Workplace culture expert Khalil Smith breaks it down on the latest episode of the Work Better podcast from . Five major insights:

1. Meetings expose real culture.
Watch who speaks, how decisions get made, and how conflict is handled. The truth shows up in the room, not the handbook.

2. Fairness makes inclusion work.
Framing inclusion around fairness for everyone reduces resistance and helps people see how removing barriers benefits the whole system.

3. Productive tension beats comfort.
Great teams embrace healthy friction, or the “Goldilocks zone” where diverse perspectives challenge each other enough to grow, not break.

4. Culture sticks when systems align.
Awareness, Behaviors, Community, and Systems must reinforce one another; otherwise, culture remains aspirational rather than operational.

5. The future belongs to human‑centered tech adopters.
Organizations that pair AI innovation with deep investment in people will create workplaces where employees feel valued and thrive.

🎧Listen now on surroundpodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts!