Human-Centered Design: The New OS for People-Powered Innovation
As AI and automation transform workflows, L&D and HR professionals face a pivotal moment: will we merely manage the technological transition, or will we spearhead a renaissance of uniquely human capabilities?
This session explores how L&D can evolve from being a training provider to a strategic enabler by embedding human-centred design (HCD) as the operating system for innovation across organisations. Human-centred design is not just a methodology; it is a framework that cultivates the uniquely human traits that technology cannot replicate: creativity, empathy, and constructive dissent.
We’ll explore how forward-thinking organisations are reimagining talent development to leverage the time saved by technological efficiencies. As AI takes on routine tasks, humans are freed to concentrate on what we excel at—transforming curiosity into empathy, empathy into insights, and insights into groundbreaking innovations that generate meaningful value.
The digital era does not diminish the need for human talent; instead, it amplifies it. However, this necessitates a fundamental shift in how we develop individuals. Traditional skill-building is essential but insufficient. The future belongs to organisations that nurture people’s ability to challenge assumptions, connect disparate ideas, and envision new possibilities.
Join this session to explore how L&D can catalyse this transformation, enabling your organisation to harness human ingenuity as its most sustainable competitive advantage.
Three Tangible Learnings
1. Cultivate Creativity as an Organisational Discipline
Discover practical strategies to develop creativity as a systematic practice rather than a rare talent, enabling teams to generate innovative solutions to complex challenges. “The organisations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
2. Build Empathy as a Strategic Asset
Learn how to cultivate deep empathy, which translates into valuable customer insights and market opportunities that algorithms alone cannot uncover. According to research from PwC, empathy-driven design thinking results in a quicker time to market by up to 85% and elevates customer satisfaction by 75%.
3. Foster Productive Dissent
Explore frameworks for encouraging the constructive challenging of ideas—creating psychological safety while avoiding groupthink—to drive genuine innovation that sets us apart. As Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School has demonstrated, teams that effectively balance psychological safety with accountability consistently outperform their peers in innovation metrics.
