Brianna Sylver, President, Sylver Consulting
May 21, 2026
At this year’s ID Graduate Celebration, ID alum Brianna Sylver (MDes 2003), addressed the graduating class. Brianna has spent the past two decades building Sylver Consulting into a global innovation research and strategy firm.
Since graduating, Brianna has worked at the intersection of market research, user experience, and business strategy. With over 20 years of experience helping city governments and Fortune 1000 companies unlock growth and navigate complexity, she’s been recognized by PDMA, QRCA, and HSM Management for her contributions to innovation. She also serves on ID’s Advisory Board—in many ways, as Dean Anijo Mathew jokingly noted as he introduced her, “she just refuses to leave ID.”
Brianna has authored Leading Through Free Fall: How Innovators Turn Turbulence into Trust, a timely playbook for leading with resilience when the path forward is anything but certain. In September 2025, Forbes championed the book as one of five books to elevate leadership and drive change, calling it “a much-needed blueprint for leaders seeking to turn chaos into competitive advantage.”
Her message to graduates centered on a powerful metaphor: expansion versus contraction.
Alumni Speaker Brianna Sylver
Brianna Sylver (MDes 2003) addresses ID graduates on May 15, 2026.
The Roller Coaster Begins
Brianna began by acknowledging she’d been where the graduates were—23 years ago, to be exact. In 2003, she was one of the youngest people to ever graduate from ID, sitting in the same seats at 23 years old.
“I was super exhausted having just pushed through finals just like all of you,” she said. “And all while trying to secure a job in that process—and the job market, just like now, was pretty terrible.”
The nation was still recovering from the dot-com bust. Brianna had an internship lined up, but the kicker? It would cost her more money to accept the job than she’d earn, because it required moving to Madison, Wisconsin.
“Talk about a hit to the ego, right?” she said. “I just finished a graduate degree and I basically had to go pay to work for somebody else.”
Sitting in that graduation seat nearly 23 years ago, she admitted, “I was scared more than I was excited. And I was afraid that I had just shackled myself with so much debt that I wasn’t sure that I could ever pay it back.”
The question looming large: Were people going to want to invest in me?
“I’m standing here to tell you those fears were all unfounded. Not a single one of them was true,” Brianna said. “Attending ID was a life-changing decision for me. It literally changed every trajectory of my life.”
She met her husband on registration day (also an ID grad). Professionally, she became what she is today because of everything she learned at ID. “23 years later, I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had I not followed the call back then to come to the Institute of Design.”
But those first few years out of school? A roller coaster.
June 2003: The Job That Disappeared
A week or two after graduation, Brianna moved to Madison for the internship at Datex-Ohmeda, which made anesthesia machines and ventilators. Her team was responsible for thinking about new product verticals for intensive care units across the world.
“The work was strategic, important, and frankly, it was just downright thrilling for me,” she said.
Then July 2003 hit. Datex was bought by GE Medical, and the full-time job she’d been promised was gone.
She was given an option: move to Waukesha, Wisconsin for a usability specialist role within a month, or no job at all.
“But the idea of becoming a usability specialist felt super suffocating,” Brianna explained. “It was a tactical job that they were offering me, and I personally lean very strategic and systems-oriented in how I approach my work.”
So she made what many considered a bold—or potentially weird—decision: she turned down the job and returned to Chicago. “To many other people in my life, that just looked pure dumb.”
August 2003: Three Months to Figure It Out
Back in Chicago, Brianna had three months left on her apartment lease, $200 to her name, and essentially three months to figure her life out.
“I did what I do best and I just started talking to people,” she said. “The thing is, I had my back up against the wall. I could not fail because doing so meant that I had to move back to the farm country of northern New York. And there aren’t many innovation jobs where there’s more cows than there are people.”
By September 2003, she landed a contract position at ABN AMRO LaSalle Bank, leading a team helping them infuse human-centered design into their new product development process.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I was 24 years old at that point leading this team. I felt like an impostor if there ever was one,” she admitted. “But by the grace of God, that door had opened. And oh, thank goodness it did because I could not pay rent.”
The Body as Compass
From September 2003 to April 2004, Brianna kept looking for a full-time job. She went on multiple interviews. But in every single one, she knew at the core of her being that the job was not for her.
“The funny thing—funny, right—is that I couldn’t even articulate what my goals were, but the energy in my body could,” she said.
Her body became a compass, telling her where to lean in and where to lean out. Opportunities she was meant to say yes to came with a sensation of expansion—that was her green light to move forward. Opportunities she was meant to say no to felt constricting and heavy.
Interestingly, every single full-time job opportunity she interviewed for triggered that same heavy, closed, constricted feeling.
“They were clearly not the right fit for me and I knew it,” Brianna said. “And so I was bold in each of those conversations. And I would say right then and there in the middle of the interview, ‘I really appreciate the opportunity to have come in and spoken with you today, but I really don’t think I’m the right candidate for this job because of X, Y, and Z.'”
That candor was surprising for folks. They agreed she might not be right for the role, but they also saw and valued her ability to honestly and accurately appraise the situation.
“What ended up happening is that almost every single organization that I had that conversation with, they started to call me back about four to six weeks later and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a project. Would you be interested in doing this project?'” she said. “Literally, I just got contract role after contract role after contract role that way.”
May 2004: Turning Down the Big Job
Then came May 2004. Brianna finally found the big job she’d been looking for—a company in the northern suburbs of Chicago with a staffing and innovation center. Everything she thought she wanted was in this position.
She went to a morning of interviews super excited. Expanded in energy when she walked through the door. Everything went great. The position was everything she thought it would be.
“And then I went home and I got those body signals again. And the idea of taking that job when I was really sitting with it felt completely suffocating.”
As she sat with those conflicting and frankly super surprising feelings, the organization called.
“‘We want to hire you, Brianna, but we’re not sure that you want to be hired,'” they said.
In that moment, she got real honest with herself.
“What came out of my mouth with no pre-thought was: ‘When I walked through the doors this morning, I really thought I did, but now I don’t.'”
She hung up the phone, sat on her couch, and thought, “What in the world did you just do?”
It made no sense. And yet, in the next breath, it made all the sense in the world.
“Because the fact was in the eight months that it had taken me to find this job, I had been building a business—my business, Sylver Consulting,” Brianna said. “And in doing that I was growing exponentially. I felt a sense of expansion every single day. It was almost addictive. And anything else just felt suffocating.”
That was the day she truly committed to having a business—the business she’d already been building for eight months.
Twenty-Two Years Later
For the last 22 years, Brianna and her partner Adriano Galvao have been leading Sylver Consulting, growing it into a global partner for the Fortune 500.
“But more importantly, those 22 years have become a laboratory where I have learned how to move when everything feels stuck,” she said.
In the last year, she codified that learning and published Leading Through Free Fall: How Innovators Turn Turbulence into Trust. Her work has been featured in Inc. magazine, where she’s shared insights on dealing with resource constraints strategically. As she explained:
“When a founder is forced to choose between two ‘equally important’ priorities, the real enemy isn’t a lack of resources—it’s fragmentation. In 2026, too many firms are still treating marketing, sales, and delivery as separate islands. This creates a ‘frictional drag’ where the team works harder, but the business fails to gain compounded momentum.”
Three Lessons for the Class of 2026
Lesson 1: Success Will Likely Not Look the Way You Imagine It Will
“I am a walking testimony of this,” she said. “I had found my career path eight full months before I was even willing to admit it. But I almost missed it because it didn’t look the way that I had thought it would look and it didn’t look the way that my mentors told me it should be.”
She urged graduates to pay attention to the doors and things that open up effortlessly for them. “It’s often in those places where your pathway to success lies. But it may not look the way it looks like for your colleague next to you or what you had imagined when you entered ID.”
Lesson 2: Use Your Intuition as Your Compass
For Brianna, intuition expresses itself in her body, and she’s learned to listen to it. She uses the feelings of expansion and contraction as her personal yes or no.
“If a choice feels tight or heavy, it’s a pass. If it feels energizing, it’s a green light,” she said. “This has made me very intentional about the decisions that I make, ensuring that they’re my decisions and not just a response to what I feel like I should be doing or what somebody else feels that I should be doing.”
She urged graduates to find the way they can tune into their intuition—it may not be through the body, but find the way to really hone in to what you need as you go through.
Lesson 3: You Are More Than Your Degree
“Each of you sitting here, you more or less have the exact same degree. Yet you’re not all equal in your skills,” Brianna said. “I really want you to get clear on what your unique superpower is. And that is your core value offer.”
This is the thing you effortlessly do that other people don’t do or find difficult. It’s the layer on top of your degree that makes you attractive and appealing as a candidate.
“My superpower is clarity,” she shared. “And once I defined this for myself, a whole new world opened up for me from a confidence point of view.”
(Brianna offered graduates a step-by-step assessment from chapter nine of her book to help them identify their own superpower—available by scanning a QR code at the event.)
Find Expansion
In closing, Brianna congratulated the Class of 2026 and shared her wishes for them:
“My wish for each of you isn’t that you find a great job. My wish is that you find expansion.
“I hope that you find the courage to say no to the roles that make you feel small, even when the world tells you that you should be grateful for a paycheck.
“I hope that you trust that your superpowers are not just lines on a resume, but gifts meant to change the teams that you choose to join.
“And most of all, I hope you realize that the most important design project that you will ever work on is the life that you’re building starting Monday morning.
“Go into the world and make us proud. Congratulations, class of 2026.”
This post is adapted from Brianna’s remarks at the 2026 ID Graduate Celebration on May 15, 2026, at the Institute of Design.
The full transcript of her talk is available below.
TRANSCRIPT
At this time, I want to introduce our alumna speaker, Brianna Sylver, an alumna of ID. She holds an MDes from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. Since graduating, Brianna has founded Sylver Consulting, an international innovation research and strategy firm, working at the intersection of market research, user experience, and business strategy. With over 20 years of experience helping city governments and Fortune 1000 companies unlock growth and navigate complexity, she’s been recognized by PDMA, QRCA, and HSM Management for her contributions to innovation. Brianna also serves on ID’s Advisory Board, so in many ways she just refuses to leave ID.
Most recently, she authored Leading Through Free Fall: How Innovators Turn Turbulence into Trust: A Timely Playbook for Leading with Resilience When the Path Forward is Anything But Certain.
It’s my great pleasure to welcome Brianna to the stage. Please give her a round of applause.
Video Transcript
It is such a pleasure to be with all of you tonight. So as Anijo set up, I’ve been where you are in 2003 to be exact.
And like you, I was excited to be graduating from ID. And at that time, I was one of the youngest people to have ever gone through ID. I was 23 years old when I sat where each of you are tonight.
But I’ll also tell you I was super exhausted having just pushed through finals just like all of you. And all while trying to secure a job in that process and the job market just like now was pretty terrible. The nation was still struggling to recover from the dotcom bust at that moment in time. And despite that, I did have an internship that I was starting soon after graduation. But the kicker of all of that was that it was going to cost me more money to accept that job than I was going to earn at it because it required me to move to Madison, Wisconsin.
So, talk about a hit to the ego, right?
I just finished a graduate degree and I basically had to go pay to work for somebody else.
And so the truth was sitting in your seat nearly 23 years ago now, I was scared more than I was excited. And I was afraid that I had just shackled myself with so much debt that I wasn’t sure that I could ever pay it back. And so a question really loomed large in my mind at that moment. And it was, were people going to want to invest in me? And I’m standing here to tell you those fears were all unfounded. Not a single one of them was true.
And so what the truth is is that attending ID was a life-changing decision for me.
It literally changed every trajectory of my life. Personally, I met my husband who’s right over here. On registration day, to be precise, he also is an ID grad. And professionally, I am what I am today all because of everything that I learned here.
So 23 years later, I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had I not followed the call back then to really come to the Institute of Design.
But the truth is, as I’ve already started to set up, those first few years out of school were a bit of a roller coaster. And so we’re going to pull down the safety harness for a minute and I’m going to take you on what that roller coaster ride was for me in the hopes that it ultimately informs how you might think about your own journey come Monday morning.
So it’s going to start June 2003.
So more or less a week or two after graduation, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin for that internship that I mentioned. So, I chose to do that despite the fact that it was going to cost me money because it had a promise of a full-time job on the other side of it. The company was Datex-Ohmeda. They made anesthesia machines and ventilators. My team was responsible for thinking about what new product verticals they could go into for intensive care units across the world. The work was strategic, important, and frankly, it was just downright thrilling for me.
And so I entered into that with lots of excitement. Then July 2003 hit and Datex was bought by GE Medical and the job that I thought that I was going to have post-internship was gone, was no longer on the table.
And so I was given the option by the organization to move to Waukesha, Wisconsin for a usability specialist role within a month or I wouldn’t have a job with them. But the idea of becoming a usability specialist felt super suffocating to me. It was a tactical job that they were offering me and I personally lean very strategic and systems-oriented in how I approach my work. And so I made the very bold and potentially weird decision for some to turn down that job and return to Chicago. And to many other people in my life that just looked pure dumb.
So then August 2003 hit and I come back to Chicago.
I had three months left on my apartment lease, $200 to my name, and essentially three months to figure my life out.
And so I did what I do best and I just started talking to people.
The thing is is I had my back up against the wall. I could not fail because doing so meant that I had to move back to the farm country of northern New York. And I don’t know about you, but there aren’t many innovation jobs where there’s more cows than there are people.
And so came back to Chicago. September 2003, I landed a contract position at ABN AMRO LaSalle Bank. I would be leading a team helping them to infuse human-centered design into their new product development process. I had no idea what I was doing. I was 24 years old at that point leading this team. I felt like an impostor if there ever was one.
But by the grace of God, that door had opened. And oh, thank goodness it did because I could not pay rent. And so now I could pay rent. And I could pay rent for a couple months.
And so from September 2003 to April 2004, I kept looking for that full-time job. I went on multiple interviews. Yet in every single one, I knew at the core of my being that job was not for me. If I took that job, I was going to move away from my goals. Now, the funny thing, funny, right, is that I couldn’t even articulate what my goals were, but the energy in my body could. And so, as I explored new opportunities, my body became a compass, telling me where to lean in and also telling me where to lean out. And so as I explored new opportunities, I was meant to say yes when something came with a sensation of expansion with it.
That was my green light to say move forward. It’s exactly where you’re meant to go. And when that ABN AMRO LaSalle job came up, that’s exactly how I felt inside my body. On the flip side, the opportunities I was meant to say no to felt constricting and they felt heavy. And interestingly, every single full-time job opportunity I interviewed for triggered that same heavy closed constricted feeling. They were clearly not the right fit for me and I knew it. And so I was bold in each of those conversations. And I would say right then and there in the middle of the interview, I really appreciate the opportunity to have come in and spoken with you today, but I really don’t think I’m the right candidate for this job because of X, Y, and Z.
Now, that candor was pretty surprising for folks, you know, and they agreed I might not be right for the role, but they also saw and valued my ability to honestly and accurately appraise the situation.
And so what ended up happening is that almost every single organization that I had that conversation with, they started to call me back about four to six weeks later and say, “Hey, we’ve got a project. Would you be interested in doing this project?” And so literally, I just got contract role after contract role after contract role that way.
Then comes May 2004 and I finally found the big job that I had been looking for.
A company in the northern suburbs of Chicago with a staffing and innovation center. Everything I thought I wanted in this position was in this position. I went to a morning of interviews super excited to walk through the door. Expanded in energy when I did walk through that door. Everything went great in the interviews. The position was everything I thought it would be.
And then I went home and I got those body signals again. And the idea of taking that job when I was really sitting with it felt completely suffocating.
And so as I was sitting there with those conflicting and frankly super surprising feelings to me in that moment, the organization called and said, ‘We want to hire you, Brianna, but we’re not sure that you want to be hired.’
And in that moment, this is the same day, by the way. So in that moment, I got real honest with myself. And what came out of my mouth like with no pre-thought was when I walked through the doors this morning, I really thought I did, but now I don’t.
And so here it was now turning down the big job.
And I remember hanging up the phone and sitting on my couch and thinking, “What in the world did you just do?” It made no sense. And yet, in the next breath, it made all the sense because the fact was in the eight months that it had taken me to find this job, I had been building a business, my business, Sylver Consulting.
And in doing that I was growing exponentially. I felt a sense of expansion every single day. It was it was addictive almost. And yet and anything else just felt suffocating.
And so that was the day that I truly committed to having a business, the business that I had already been building for eight months.
And so for the last 22 years with my partner Adriano Galvao, we have been leading Sylver Consulting and we have grown that company to be a global partner for the Fortune 500.
But more importantly, those 22 years have become a laboratory where I have learned how to move when everything feels stuck.
And so in the last year, I codified that learning and published Leading Through Free Fall, How Innovators Turn Turbulence into Trust.
And then in September of 2025, that book was championed by Forbes as one of five books to elevate your leadership and drive change. It’s been defined as a much-needed blueprint for leaders seeking to turn chaos into competitive advantage.
And so my life today doesn’t look anything like I had imagined when I was sitting in your seat 23 years ago. Far from it.
But it’s better than I had imagined when I sat in your seat. And it’s more perfectly fitting for me.
And so my hope for each of you is that you find a career path that perfectly fits you in the coming months.
So let’s underscore a couple of lessons that I hope you’ve taken from my story and will carry forward with you.
The first lesson is that success will likely not look the way that you imagine it will. I am a walking testimony of this. I had found my career path eight full months before I was even willing to admit it.
But I almost missed it because it didn’t look the way that I had thought it would look and it didn’t look the way that my mentors told me it should be.
And so I had this very rigid vision of how success should arrive. And because it didn’t match that mold, I almost didn’t give it the credit that it deserved in that process.
And so I’m really urging every single one of you as you step into the next few months, really pay attention to the doors and the things that open up effortlessly for you because it’s often in those places where your pathway to success lies. But it may not look the way it looks like for your colleague next to you or what you had imagined when you entered ID or as you sit here today.
The second lesson is use your intuition as your compass. For me, I’ve learned that my intuition expresses itself in my body and I’ve really learned to listen to that in the way that you heard that in my story. I use the feelings of expansion and contraction as my personal yes or no.
If a choice feels tight or heavy, it’s a pass. If it feels energizing, it’s a green light.
And this has made me very intentional about the decisions that I make, ensuring that they’re my decisions and not just a response to what I feel like I should be doing or what somebody else feels that I should be doing.
And so I really urge each and every one of you to find the way that you can tune into your intuition. It may not be through your body. It may be through something else, but find the way that you can really hone in to what you need as you go through.
And lastly, lesson three, you are more than your degree.
So each of you sitting here, you more or less have the exact same degree. Yet you’re not all equal in your skills.
So I really want you to get clear on what your unique superpower is. And that is your core value offer.
And so this is the thing that you effortlessly do that other people don’t do or they find difficult. And it’s the layer on top of your degree that is going to make you attractive and appealing as a candidate over the other person that you might be competing with.
And so I’ve got a step-by-step assessment to help you to do this. It’s covered in chapter nine in my book, Leading Through Free Fall. I’m gifting you each this chapter. All you’ve got to do is scan the QR code, fill it out, and you’ll get it downloaded into your phone. My superpower is clarity.
And once I defined this for myself, a whole new world opened up for me from a confidence point of view. And so I want that exact same energizing strength to come to each of you just as it did with me. And this assessment will help you to do that.
And so lastly, in closing, I just want to say congratulations to each and every one of you.
Come tomorrow, you’re going to be a grad of the Institute of Design. And that’s a big deal, right? That’s a big deal. And my wish for each of you isn’t that you find a great job. My wish is that you find expansion.
And I hope that you find the courage to say no to the roles that make you feel small even when the world tells you that you should be grateful for a paycheck.
And I hope that you trust that your superpowers are not just lines on a resume, but gifts meant to change the teams that you choose to join.
And most of all, I hope you realize that the most important design project that you will ever work on is the life that you’re building starting Monday morning.
And so I urge you, go into the world and make us proud. Congratulations, class of 2026.