Over the last 21 months, we've gone from 'deciding' and sometimes mandating how and when to go back to the office, to having an ongoing openness towards different kinds of workplaces. What is still missing is a widespread use of Design Thinking to understand the problems people need to solve - both individually and in teams - and then using those insights to co-create new ways of working.

In the weeks and months ahead, with new contagious variants, we will have to be even more flexible to people's needs, while designing better ways to provide the social and other critical connections we seek. Having a Human Experience-centric Listening Strategy will be key for 2022. Service Design and Design Thinking both offer a wide variety of methods and tools. Qualitative listening will be more important than ever. We will share examples of these over the coming weeks.

Over 5 years of research and working with companies, my team and I have developed the Human Experience Playbook, which incorporates Design Thinking, Agile and Analytics as a framework for discovering how and where we do our best work, while driving higher engagement, productivity and business impact. This comes on top of 25 previous years in Talent Management and OD experience.

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