5 Insights from the 52nd Floor

On Monday and Tuesday we ran a Design Thinking workshop on the 52nd floor of One Liberty Plaza. We invited our clients, senior Talent Acquisition professionals from large Fortune 500 organizations in North America. I want to discuss some of my personal learnings from that session, and some wider thoughts.

1. Every connection needs to be personal. Businesspeople tend to think in 1’s and 0’s sometimes and the fact is that people make up businesses. While automation is the on-coming storm that promises to shake up the status-quo, business will ultimately always be done between people.
2. Corporate challenges run the gambit in terms of difficulty and impact. The size of the org really makes a huge difference, with small shops struggling to get noticed and big players struggling to deal with the sheer amount of attention they receive. Both are legitimate challenges and technology providers claim to have solved these challenges in the past. As we unpacked those claims it became evident that some technologies inadvertently actually contributed to those challenges.
3. Design Thinking is new, but it’s not really. The principles have been around for years and years, essentially think about the problem from the person who has the problems’ perspective and solve from there. At least, that’s what I had understood it to be prior to this session. After going through one of these workshops its clear that there is much more to it than meets the eye. It’s essentially a really well choreographed dance with changes in pitch and tempo dictated by the dance master. More on this in a separate blog.
4. People like being involved in creating the solution. It’s not enough to say “hey guys, I have a solution for you to use, now use it and shut up.” There is an emotional and psychological connection to a certain solution if people are invited to co-create that solution together. With enough foresight and practice, you should be able to guide them to the solution that you wanted in the first place, but with much more buy-in from those involved.
5. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what you were signing yourself up to before you actually signed up to it. We have this with restaurants (yelp) and transactional purchases like cars or hotels, and with experiences to a certain extent (trip advisor) and yet everyday people come out of secondary and tertiary education and stumble headfirst into a job. The incentives are misaligned, jobseekers need a job immediately while employers generally have the luxury of time to pick and choose. I think one outcome of this is wealthier people feeling more freedom to take their time to find their passion which results in them ultimately succeeding and becoming wealthier while those who are more cash-strapped rush to get some job to pay the bills and end up in a cycle of mediocrity. A little pessimistic perhaps but more and more I see this as a human and societal problem.