Welcome to Connection Labs!
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Hello!
We’re Lisa and Kristin, longtime friends who believe that meaningful connection is a skill you can strengthen with time and intention. In a world that’s more wired than ever but somehow lonelier than before, we’re here to treat connection as essential to health—like sleep, exercise, and food—and as a practice we can all develop.
ConnectionLabs is our shared space to slow down, pay attention, and rethink what connection really requires in a distracted, polarized culture. We’re not interested in abstract advice or performative vulnerability. Instead, we share small, real stories that offer simple, doable ways to feel closer to yourself, the people you love, and more rooted in the places you live.
What You’ll Find Here
This Substack is our shared notebook of small, real‑world examples and experiments in connection — with self, with others, and with place. They touch on things like how our attention is shaped, how design choices influence behavior, and how tiny rituals can change relationships.
If you read along, you can expect:
Concrete, low‑lift experiments you can try in your own life to feel closer to the people you care about (and less drained by the ones you don’t).
Language and questions you can borrow for hard conversations, awkward meetings, or moments when things feel flat but you don’t know what to change.
Stories that make you feel less alone in the struggle to build depth in a fast, surface‑level culture.
Examples from around the world that widen your sense of what’s possible in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities.
A steady reminder that connection is not a personality trait you either have or don’t; it’s a set of skills, choices, and designs you can learn and adapt.
We will run our own experiments, like soup on Sundays with neighbors, trying different ways of starting meetings, or daily check‑ins with a patch of nature at our doorstep, and we will report honestly on what worked and what fell flat. We are as interested in the flops as the wins, because that’s where a lot of the learning (and the humor!) lives.
We will also spotlight the work of bold, innovative groups, organizations, and individuals who are daring to make connection a central tenet to their lives. Neighbors re-inventing ways to care for each other, organizations re-designing how people gather, projects that deepen connection with land and water, and people courageously reshaping their inner lives.
Our hope is that their stories spark something in you, a desire for a life that feels juicier, more adventurous, more meaningful and creative, with joy sprinkled generously throughout. A life with connection at the center!
Who We Are (and why connection)
We met as neighbors and colleagues at the World Bank in Washington, DC, working on how big systems shape real people’s lives. Years later we found ourselves on the same street again in Silicon Valley, this time inside the intensity of the tech world. We’ve spent our lives moving between different worlds: global development and evaluation, leadership and learning inside large organizations, creative practice, travel, cities, nature, and long stretches in unconventional systems.
Lisa is a global people and culture leader who has spent more than two decades at the intersection of learning, leadership, and organizational change. She led leadership and talent development for Google’s Research and Artificial Intelligence organization and founded an internal incubator for the next generation of tech leaders. Since then, she’s gone on to advise executives and teams who want to build cultures that are more humane, creative, and genuinely learning‑oriented. Her interest in connection is both personal and professional: she’s seen how much real leadership is about connection skills like perspective‑taking, active listening, trust-building, and staying honest with yourself.
Kristin’s work has focused on bringing diverse stakeholders together to tackle complex, system‑level problems in more human‑centered ways. Having trained as an architect and urban planner, Kristin spent 15 years at the World Bank, where she led multi‑country evaluations and designed multi‑sector studies to help shape new policies. Beyond the Bank, she has come together with leaders and experts to spark international conversations and alliances on issues such as the ethical use of technologies through initiatives like the People‑Centered Internet’s Digital Cooperation and Diplomacy program, the Designing Governance Forum, and IEEE. Earlier, she worked with groups like MIT’s Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement helping bridge technical innovation, community needs, and policy discussions. A once‑extremely shy kid who turned “learning how to connect” into a lifelong project, she now uses photography, narrative, and creatively designed conversations to help people and organizations slow down, really see one another, and connect more deeply with themselves, their communities, and the living world.
