Farai Madzima Brings Meeting Sabotage to CanUX 2025

Another Canadian design leader joins our 2025 lineup.

 Workshop W1: How to Sabotage Your 1:1 Meetings
} Wed, Oct 1, 2025   9:00AM – 12:30PM

You are sabotaging your career by having mediocre 1:1 meetings and conversations. You assume 1:1s are easy, or that they are a waste of time. Stop.
Shift from mediocre 1:1s to having high impact conversations to advance your career and improve the quality of your work-life, and gain real tools to improve your 1:1 meetings and conversations.

WHY THIS WORKSHOP?
 – Dual Perspectives: Experience both sides of the 1:1 to build empathy.
 – Engaging Satire: Fun framing makes it easier to engage with hard things

FORMAT:
 – Teaching: I share all the insights.
 – Reflecting: Guided introspection on current 1:1 practices.
 – Doing: Role-play and group activities for practical learning.

WORKSHOP BREAKDOWN:

Sabotaging Ourselves
 – Identify career-limiting behaviors and attitudes.

Sabotaging the 1:1 Relationship
 – Recognize trust-damaging dynamics.

Sabotaging the 1:1 Meeting
 – Learn pitfalls and how to make meetings impactful.

Sabotaging 1:1 Conversations
 – Practice “difficult conversation” strategies.
 

 Speaker Bio: Farai Madzima
 Career Design

An interaction designer originally from Zimbabwe, Farai didn’t get the grades to became a doctor. So he decided to help heal conversation gaps instead.
As a coach and leader, Farai supports managers and teams who struggle to have effective 1:1 conversations. With evidence-based, doable tactics, fun, and empathy, he shows how to Say the Thing, unlock career progress and happier work-lives.

In the last 20 years, he’s led teams in the UK, South Africa, and Canada, including building next-generation ecommerce tools as a UX Manager at Shopify and leading Standard Bank South Africa’s team of designers and researchers in Johannesburg where he designed banking apps used by many across the continent.

Farai also organized the Pixel Up! meetups and conferences, events that connect African designers and developers with their peers in the rest of the world.

He loves words, nerdy hip-hop, township jazz, and the number 127. Although we still have no idea what is so special about that number.

For more info, you can follow Farai on LinkedIn

Prior Presentations:

THE ONLY ONE OF YOUR KIND IN THE ROOM (PERILS AND OPPORTUNITIES) (CanUX 2022)
Nov 5, 2022 2:30pm / 40 min

CULTURAL BIAS IN DESIGN(ERS) (CanUX 2019)
Nov 3, 2019 2:00pm / 40 min / Slides

*Image credit: Farai Madzima