Designing Better Ways to Work

This will be an in-person only event (will be recorded).

December 1, 2026 | 8:30 am - 11:30 am ET

Free In-Person events (will be recorded), open to DPI affiliates
Rogers Centre Ottawa, Room 206/208, Second Floor

Love your work, lose the burnout!

How do you continue to do work you LOVE, without feeling overwhelmed, dysregulated, pre-irritated and stretched thin? Burnout in North America is at record levels: 39% of Canadian workers experienced burnout in 2025 - we can’t do our best work this way. In this experiential keynote, Trish introduces simple, quick, and science-backed tools to build resilience and reduce stress — without quitting your job, adding 30 minutes to your busy day, or retreating to a mountain cave. You’ll explore your relationship with stress, challenge the success-at-all-costs mindset, and learn low-maintenance mindfulness strategies to use even in the middle of a busy shift or high-stakes meeting. This session is ideal for high-stress, service-driven teams — educators, healthcare workers, nonprofit professionals, and anyone who’s great at helping others but struggles to help themselves.

Trish Tutton | Mindfulness Teacher Trish Tutton spent years working in cultures where stress and burnout were seemingly the only way to success. After suffering a shocking loss, she realized: stress is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to dictate our lives. Trish has spent over 15+ years studying with world class teachers, practicing mindfulness and learning about the science of well-being. As a speaker and mindfulness teacher, Trish has taught the skills to love your work and lose the burnout amidst change to 17,000+ people across North America. She is passionate about helping folks become more resilient and less stressed with simple but impactful mindfulness techniques. She’s a teacher on the #1 free meditation app in the world, Insight Timer, and the author of Mindful Mornings.  www.trishtutton.com

Service Design: Designing the Rules Behind Automation

Digital transformation is often treated as a technology challenge. But introducing new technology into an old service model rarely creates transformation. It can simply digitize the complexity that was already there. Service Design offers another way. By looking at the service as a whole, Service Design helps organizations understand how the way government works behind the scenes shapes the experience people have with it. This makes it possible to see where complexity, fragmentation, and inefficiency are created, and redesign the service before technology locks them in. Drawing on Urooj’s experience working with the Department of National Defence, Service Canada, and public sector organizations across multiple levels of government since 2019, this session will explore how Service Design can strengthen AI adoption and digital transformation by creating greater alignment within government and between how services are designed and how people experience them.

Urooj Qureshi | Design Centered Co Urooj Qureshi has spent more than 25 years designing, building, and transforming things, from arcade games and enterprise technology to public services used by Canadians. Today, he is Managing Partner at Design Centered Co., where he works at the intersection of design, technology, strategy, and organizational change. His career spans private-sector enterprise environments and the public service, including senior contributions to two GC Innovation Award-winning solutions and major modernization initiatives across government. Urooj is also the author of Impact Centered Design, a TEDx and Disrupt speaker, and an invited speaker on stages in Canada and internationally. He is especially interested in what happens when ambitious ideas meet real organizations, real constraints, and real people. Whether the topic is AI, service enablement, digital transformation, or leadership, his work comes back to the same question: how do we make change genuinely useful, human, and meaningful?