Built to Carry™
For mission-driven, service-centered, healthcare, education, public-sector, and nonprofit environments where carrying more can become intertwined with commitment and identity.
Malaika Simmons
Experience Designer | Human-Centered Design Strategist | International Speaker | TEDx Speaker
Flagship Keynote
Stop Carrying the System
The Hidden Cost of High Performance and the Design of Sustainable Success
High performance should not depend on people holding together what the system was designed to support. Malaika helps leaders and organizations recognize where performance has become dependent on overextension, then redesign the conditions that make sustainable success possible.
Experience Across Organizations and Audiences
The Question Underneath the Work
How do I stop carrying so much without everything falling apart?
What looks like an individual capacity problem may actually be a system-design problem. Sustainable performance begins by seeing the difference.
The system was never built to be carried by one person.
Signature Message
Stop Carrying the System™
A keynote about performance, responsibility, capacity, and the systems beneath them.
Extraction Fatigue™
Malaika's term for the chronic energy imbalance that develops when performance repeatedly depends on persistent overextension.
Organizations celebrate the people who step up, solve problems, fill gaps, and make things happen. But when performance repeatedly depends on those same people compensating for unclear expectations, misaligned capacity, broken processes, or systemic gaps, high performance can become hidden dependency.
In this provocative and practical keynote, Malaika challenges audiences to stop treating overextension as evidence of commitment and start examining the conditions that make it necessary. Through stories, human-centered design, and the Momentology™ Method, participants learn to recognize what they are carrying, understand why they are carrying it, distinguish individual responsibility from systemic dependency, and redesign how success happens.
Because if the system only works when someone is chronically over-functioning, the system isn't working.
RECOGNIZEwhat you're carrying
IDENTIFYwhy you're carrying it
DISTINGUISHresponsibility from dependency
REALIGNcapacity, expectations, and systems
REDESIGNhow success happens
Additional Talks & Experiences
One body of work. Multiple ways into the conversation.
Stop Carrying the System™ is Malaika's flagship message. These additional experiences bring the same human-centered systems lens into distinct organizational needs and audience contexts.
Alignment as a Competitive Advantage
For leadership, culture, strategy, change, and organizational-performance audiences navigating the relationship among people, priorities, capacity, and systems.
Sustainable Success by Design
For innovation, transformation, leadership, and future-of-work audiences ready to move from reactive performance to intentional human-centered systems.
See Malaika Speak
Ideas are only part of the experience.
Malaika combines research, storytelling, audience connection, and practical insight to create experiences that help people see familiar problems differently and leave ready to act.
About Malaika
Designing the conditions where people and performance can thrive together.
Malaika Simmons is an Experience Designer, human-centered design strategist, international speaker, and TEDx speaker who helps leaders and organizations build high performance without making people the system's safety net.
As Founder and CEO of Momentology Media, she works at the intersection of human experience, leadership, and organizational systems. Her work explores what happens when organizations succeed on paper while the people responsible for creating those results are carrying more than the system was designed to support.
Drawing on experience across corporate, government, nonprofit, healthcare, higher education, and entrepreneurial environments, Malaika combines human-centered design, organizational systems thinking, research, and executive leadership experience to help organizations intentionally design the conditions in which people and performance can thrive together.
Founder & CEO, Momentology Media | Creator, Momentology™ Method | Creator, Extraction Fatigue™ |
Doctoral Researcher, International Psychology, Organizations & Systems
What Audiences Are Saying
Credibility matters. Connection makes it memorable.
“
Malaika Simmons is a dynamo. Her diverse background working in corporate, government agencies,
and as an entrepreneur gives her an edge on understanding how the world of careers works.
L. Grossman
Director, Center for Excellence in Public Leadership
George Washington University
George Washington University
“
Malaika's insights and stories were inspirational and engaging. She adapted her message to resonate
with our audience while providing practical takeaways that attendees could immediately apply.
Her authenticity and ability to connect with people made a lasting impression.
S. Ray
Federal Program Manager
“
Malaika is one of the best facilitators I've experienced. She skillfully guides groups through both quiet and difficult moments, drawing people into meaningful conversation.
C. Padilla
Nonprofit Executive | Health Equity Champion
Speaking Formats
Designed for the room you're creating.
Every engagement is shaped around the audience, the context, and the change you want participants to experience.
KeynotesHigh-impact signature experiences designed to shift how audiences see the problem.
WorkshopsInteractive sessions that move from insight into practical application.
Firesides & PanelsThoughtful, candid conversations grounded in lived experience and systems thinking.
Virtual ExperiencesEngaging remote sessions designed for participation, not passive viewing.
For Event Planners & Decision Makers
Need something you can share with your team?
Download Malaika's Speaker Brief for a concise overview of her flagship keynote, additional speaking experiences, organizational experience, and audience feedback.
Bring Malaika to Your Next Event
What if high performance didn't require someone to carry the system?
If your audience is ready to rethink the relationship between performance, capacity, responsibility, and organizational design, this is the conversation.
Book Malaika
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