Stories of personal transformation and revelation are the ones that touch and move us. They might even spark transformation in ourselves. Kristina has a powerful story of transition to share: she started her career as an architect, seeking to give shape to ideas; to find ways how our human imagination can manifest in space. Then however, a couple of years into the world of working for companies, she suddenly found herself walking an archetypical career path: she was filling a KPI-driven management role.

Kristina was working for an international fashion brand and was responsible for rolling out the shop design, which made her cross the globe back and forth. In this role and also when she later moved to a big German organic food supermarket chain, she began to feel tensions with the prevailing dominance- and hierarchy-driven leadership culture. Kristina became more and more aware that not only employees were suffering under the doctrine of ego-centric thinking and hierarchy but also the quality of decisions the companies took.

And she also noticed how she had started to run her life by the same KPI’s like the ones she focused on in her work — improving numbers, those financial ones especially. Noticing where she had gotten herself to shook Kristina up to her core. And it equipped her with the strength to go full circle: to reverse engineer her professional identity. Therefore she reconnected with the origin of her design understanding: Shaping what is around us to make it more suitable for us humans, not less so.

Kristina and her story will guide us into a conversation on how we can become less of a machine and more of a human. We will discuss what cultures of productivity we want to see in the world and how we can work on designing them.