Kaomi Joy Taylor
Museum of Names Founder | Leadership Consultant | Name Fluency™ Strategist
Burlington, Vermont, United States
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Kaomi Joy Taylor, MPA is the founder of the Museum of Names and creator of Name Fluency™, a practical framework for understanding how names shape trust, belonging, connection, and the customer experience. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard Kennedy School and a Certificate in Adaptive Leadership and speaks on names, trust, belonging, and personalization in business. She is the former Executive Director of two nonprofit organizations, most recently the Governor's Institutes of Vermont, and served as a gubernatorial appointee on the Vermont Workforce Development Council. She has also been an adjunct professor of business ethics and strategy, musician, and freelance writer, and continues to consult and provide professional leadership training through the University of Vermont.
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Topics
Your Data is Clean, Consistent, and Technically Correct. Is That Enough?
Data systems are designed to make information consistent, searchable, and usable. So you structure fields, enforce rules, standardize formats, and clean records. But what happens when a system follows its rules perfectly and still gets something important wrong?
Names offer a revealing case study. They look simple in a database, yet the assumptions built into their collection, storage, transformation, and use can affect how people are identified, contacted, and represented across systems - causing downstream friction and undermining organizational goals.
We'll use names as a lens to examine the tensions, tradeoffs, and gaps inherent in data system design. Participants will learn to:
>Spot assumptions embedded in data collection, validation, and transformation.
>Recognize when data-cleaning practices can remove useful information.
>Predict downstream consequences of seemingly small design decisions.
>Ask better questions about what systems may preserve, alter, or omit when representing people.
Keywords: Data Quality, Data Governance, Names and Technology, Human-Centered Technology
Before You Build the Fix, Are You Solving the Right Problem?
Teams are often asked to solve a problem before they have fully discerned what is causing it, whose needs matter, or what success would look like. A technically correct solution can still fail when the real challenge involves conflicting priorities, habits, expectations, or assumptions.
Adaptive Leadership offers a practical framework for diagnosing challenges, implementing change, and anticipating problems before they escalate. Drawing on graduate training in Adaptive Leadership from Harvard Kennedy School and extensive experience as a nonprofit executive, business professor, leadership trainer, and consultant , Kaomi Joy Taylor equips participants with practical tools for seeing challenges differently, identifying underlying dynamics, and crafting highly effective responses.
Participants will learn to:
> Separate the visible problem from the assumptions beneath it.
> Distinguish technical challenges from adaptive ones.
> Surface competing priorities and perspectives before choosing an intervention.
> Frame better questions to guide decisions and next steps.
> Anticipate emerging problems and intervene before they escalate into crises.
Keywords: Adaptive Leadership, Problem-Solving, Decision-Making, Systems Thinking, Risk Management, Crisis Prevention
Personalize This! The Surprising Power of Names at Work
Whatever you build, manage, analyze, or support, you work with people—and every one of them has a name. Your colleagues, bosses, direct reports, contractors, clients, and customers all bring their own names and stories to the interaction. Have you ever stopped to think about the power and potential those names bring to your everyday role?
Names are social building blocks. Used thoughtfully, they can signal attention, build rapport, and make everyday interactions more memorable. Used carelessly, they can create awkwardness, reinforce assumptions, or undermine a relationship before it has a chance to develop. And in an age of stored data and automated personalization, the need to use names appropriately is more pressing than ever.
In this lively, practical session, Kaomi Joy Taylor, MPA, founder of the Museum of Names and creator of Name Fluency™, explores the surprising, sometimes funny, and often overlooked role names play in our working lives. Drawing on research, real-world stories, psychology, neuroscience, and humor, she reveals the often unexpected ways that names shape our interactions and how using them thoughtfully can strengthen relationships and help achieve workplace goals.
Together, the group will:
> Rediscover names as carriers of identity, trust, history, culture and belonging
> Explore power dynamics inherent in names and name usage
> Learn how to memorize and use unfamiliar names comfortably, and recover gracefully from inevitable name errors.
> Learn to recognize organizational name-handling and data storage habits that may create unseen friction
Participants will leave with practical strategies they can apply right away to turn everyday interactions into better communication, stronger relationships, and more effective collaboration.
Keywords: Names, Trust, Relationship-Building, Team-Building, Communication, Personalization, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Loyalty, Leadership, Workplace Culture, Organizational Culture, Diversity and Equity, Hiring & Recruitment, Systems, Human-Centered Innovation, Name Fluency™
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