In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Dr. Bruce Pereira, Global Learning Design Lead at a Large Professional Services Organization.
Bruce describes himself as a “narrative and systemic archeologist” - someone who uncovers hidden meaning through the power of storytelling. Bruce’s superpower is helping people unearth their unique stories and exploring the systemic impact these stories have on teams and organizations.
In this Talent Tales episode I had the honor to interview Robert Ritchie, Head of Organizational Development at the University of Salford. Robert’s creative superpower is being a “shape shifter” – he can adapt to different situations in order to get things done. Sounds like a regular superhero to me!
The University of Salford has an entrepreneurial culture which lends itself to experiments in innovation and design thinking. The team recently defined ten core behaviors (incl. to be “daring”). This gave employees permission to be creative about the things that they can accomplish and enabled managers to lead towards creating an innovative, modern university.
When it comes to design thinking, Robert and his team have especially embraced empathy to connect with employees as “real humans” and to find out what is important to them. The university also embraces a “prototyping” mindset in that it’s ok to try something and to learn from mistakes, to be curious.
In this Talent Tales episode I had the honor to interview Soumee De, Head of HR for Consumer Banking Technology (EMEA/APAC) at Citi. Soumee is a self-described creative “artiste”, human professional, and technophile. Her creative superpower is bridging gaps - between technologists and those who are not that inclined, between business and HR, between the world of art and science.
In our conversation, Soumee describes how she discovered design thinking a few years ago through a workshop her company offered. To her surprise, she experienced herself struggling with applying the concept of empathy to our work. As HR professionals we get paid to pass judgement on people – when we interview them for a role, evaluate their performance, or assess their potential. Her personal takeaway was to unlearn some of the behaviors she’s honed in HR and apply more of an ethnographic research lens when trying to solve a people-related challenge.
Over the last three years I've discussed with hundreds of HR professionals how we might make our work places more human-centered by leveraging the power of design thinking.
From those conversations there was a theme emerging: Those who hadn’t used design thinking yet wanted to learn from those who'd already done it. And those who are steeped in the method wanted to share their experience to help advance our profession.
A quote from Brené Brown popped into my head:
Maybe stories are just data with a soul.
Et voilà - Talent Tales was born!
I hope you will find this experiment valuable and will join us for the ride. As with everything in design thinking I am very open to iterating on the concept and content so please share your experience along the way.
