What Gets Measured Gets Changed
Designing a More Sustainable Future
The world’s biggest challenges aren’t always the hardest: they’re the hardest to understand. In this engaging keynote, Michelle Li makes complex topics simple, relatable, and actionable. Using carbon as a case study, she shows how better understanding leads to better decisions: for individuals, organizations, and industries.
Book Michelle for your next eventApparel & Fashion, right now
Consumers, investors, and regulators increasingly expect transparency throughout the fashion value chain. Sustainability is becoming central to brand trust, innovation, and competitive advantage.
Translating complexity into clarity
Michelle Li has built her career translating complexity into clarity.
She began in the world of science, earning a Bachelor’s in Biology and Chemistry and a Master’s in Cancer Genetics, where she helped advance research on one of medicine’s most complex challenges. She then spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley with Salesforce and DocuSign, helping organizations understand sophisticated technologies and translate technical capabilities into real business value.
Today, as Founder of Clever Carbon, Michelle applies that same gift to one of the world’s most important, and often misunderstood, topics: climate change.
Whether explaining cancer genetics, enterprise software, or carbon emissions, Michelle has a unique ability to make complex ideas simple, relatable, and actionable. Her engaging style has inspired audiences around the world, helping Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organizations, governments, and global brands build understanding, spark curiosity, and turn knowledge into meaningful action.
Michelle is known for making the invisible visible. Through storytelling, pop culture, and unexpected connections, she turns complex topics into memorable “aha” moments. From Taylor Swift to coffee to everyday products, Michelle connects familiar experiences to hidden systems, making ideas easy to understand and impossible to forget.
Organizations Michelle has worked with
What Gets Measured Gets Changed: Designing a More Sustainable Future
Fashion moves fast, but behind every garment sits a long, largely invisible chain of materials, water, energy, and transportation. Consumers and regulators increasingly want transparency, yet some of the most important data, like carbon, remains invisible to most of the industry.
In this engaging keynote, Michelle Li uses her signature blend of creative storytelling, pop culture, interactive learning, and unexpected connections to break down complex topics and make them understandable, memorable, and actionable.
What do Taylor Swift concerts, Beatles records, your favorite t-shirt, and the jeans you’re wearing right now have in common? They all reveal hidden systems (materials, water, energy, and carbon) in ways that people instantly understand.
The keynote concludes by exploring how apparel brands can use data to uncover sustainability opportunities across the value chain: from materials and textile sourcing to manufacturing, packaging, logistics, product longevity, circular fashion, and consumer education. Audiences leave seeing transparency not as a compliance burden, but as the foundation of brand trust, innovation, and competitive advantage.
The opportunity map
What participants leave with
Rated the best by attendees
“What truly set her presentation apart was its fun, light, and unexpectedly different approach, making a complex topic engaging and memorable.”
“Her unwavering professionalism, dedication, and inventive ideas have significantly elevated the quality of our conferences. We consider ourselves fortunate to have crossed paths with Michelle.”
“Michelle is a master of group engagement! As one student said "who knew that learning about something so dire could be so fun."”
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Michelle customizes What Gets Measured Gets Changed for conferences, leadership events, and teams.
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