Christina Blacken

Christina Blacken’s work explores the question: how do our relationships with ourselves and others radically evolve when we change the stories we believe about power, self-worth, and leadership?

She’s a public speaker, podcast host of unconventional leadership podcast Sway Them in Color, performer, and founder of The New Quo. The New Quo is a leadership development and equity consultancy, helping people adopt self-narratives and practices about leadership and power that creates deeper trust, belonging, equity, and innovation in their relationships inside and outside of the workplace.

She uses a unique methodology called narrative intelligence that helps emerging and current leaders to identify the impact of historical, cultural, and personal narratives on beliefs and behaviors so they can improve their bias recognition. She also provides tools for better communication, goal setting, decision making, and relationship building skills so they can reach status quo breaking goals that expresses their values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in action. She’s applied this methodology to a variety of equity problems, from social media content moderation, to creating equity goals and practices that infuses DEI into every area of their business, to helping companies create more inclusive language in their content and services. She’s trained 11,500 leaders across 9 industries, and offers live training, online courses, facilitated conversations and strategic consulting for leadership and DEI challenges.

Education:

B.S., Cornell University—Policy Analysis and Management

Fun Fact:

When I’m not traveling to facilitate and train aspiring leaders who want to break the status quo, you can catch me gathering people for e-bike rides and game nights and performing true stories with jokes and songs on stage!