Gayle Karen Young Whyte: Minding the Invisible and Working the Mythic and the Mundane

Emerging Future Podcast

Gayle Karen Young Whyte is a technologist, human rights advocate, leadership, adult and organizational development expert, and the former chief Talent and Culture Officer at Wikimedia. She consults senior leaders on personal development, organizational culture, and helps them be able for complexity. Gayle was in the process of becoming a monk when she became an executive, taking on the challenging role of Chief Talent and Culture Officer with Wikimedia, a global movement with a mission to bring free educational content to the world. Wikimedia’s most well known project, Wikipedia, which we all know as the free online encyclopedia and use frequently, grew to 100k volunteer contributors and 500m visitors/mo while she was in leadership. This endeavor and the business world became her spiritual practice ground. Gayle says, ”Working with culture is like understanding the role of dark matter in the universe—it’s everywhere, it’s influential, yet impossible to detect with the naked eye. If you want to understand the universe or want to deliver on a mission, you must mind this invisible force.” Gayle is the wife of the globally renowned poet, David Whyte, who is also a master conversationalist, so Gayle is well practiced in the art of conversation and brings elegance, humor, heart, and soul to this exchange.