Linda Yaven is a Certified Coach and Licensed Purpose Coach and Founder, Designful Leadership. She coaches groups and individuals on asset based assessment playing to individual strengths in teams. Not your usual business coach she integrates design thinking, creative self-direction and future casting.

She is Associate Professor in Design Strategy MBA and The Executive Certificate Leading by Design Fellows Program at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. 

In partnership with Oren Slozberg, Executive Director, Visual Thinking Strategies, she provides VTS programs for business teams to deepen cohesive collaborations. The training is based in Harvard Medical School's successful adaptation of Visual Thinking Strategies for surgeons, nurses and med students.

In 1999, on a Hearst Foundation Grant, she first visited Reggio Emilia, Italy, a school system for infants and toddlers based in visual languages. Inspired, she has designed and leads professional development programs here in the States using visual documentation.

Linda has served as an Advisor/Documenter for Making Learning Visible Institute at Harvard and consulted to the education branch of The Department of Defense in 2003 - 2004 on asset based assessment and creative thinking.

Linda is a speaker on creativity, collaboration and asset based assessment who has presented at Harvard, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, AIGA, Museum of Children's Art, Mills College, The Home Schooling Network, Arizona State University and Innovation Immersion for Fortune 500 among others.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay area where it is perfectly okay to call yourself a Design Thinking Catalyst.