Dabney Hailey is a Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, a course director at Harvard Medical School, and Founder & Principal of her innovative consultancy, Hailey Group, which integrates arts-based learning into professional development. She yields tangible improvements in how leaders and teams observe, listen, think, communicate, and drive insights.
Dabney is particularly recognized for her pioneering, transformational work in adapting a robust art education methodology, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), for the business context. Her trainings have helped thousands of professionals globally in the technology, health, finance, retail, and design sectors, from start-ups to Fortune 100s.
At Harvard Medical School, she is cofounder and codirector of "Training Our Eyes, Minds, and Hearts: Visual Thinking Strategies for Healthcare Professionals," a continuing medical education course built upon Hailey Group's groundbreaking VTS@Work® training program. She also codirects the HMS course, “Training the Eye: Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis.” She is a regular contributor to leadership programs within the Institute for Real Growth focused on leadership development for global CMO’s, and courses in human-centered design at “The Hive” (the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity at the Claremont Colleges.
Dabney is a dynamic public speaker and has given dozens of keynotes and talks. She believes in experiential learning, always activating her audience through rich, engaging discussions about works of art and business materials. She and her team meet every learner where they are, showing rather than telling professionals how to slow down and be deeply attentive to themselves and others in order to speed up strategic thinking, innovation, belonging, and human-centeredness in their work.
Before establishing Hailey Group, she was the Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curator at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and the Director of Academic Programs at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, where she worked with faculty and students across disciplines. These rich experiences provided her with a profound understanding of how the skills cultivated through close engagement with art—keen observation, nuanced interpretation, and open yet rigorous dialogue about deeply ambiguous materials—can be powerfully translated into practical frameworks for the business and healthcare sectors. She holds a BA from Hendrix College and an MA from Northwestern University.
