Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Can thinking itself actually be trained, the way we train muscles at the gym? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Raphael and Sabine explore “as-if” questions, fast restaurant-menu decisions as decision-training reps, why thinking training takes conscious effort because our brains would rather coast on autopilot, and how habituation quietly drains the motivational power of workplace perks and praise.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Good morning, everyone. Let’s start slowly — I’ll see if the room fills up in parallel. It’s Saturday today, of course, so some of you might need a few extra minutes of sleep. Today we’re continuing with thinking training — how can our thinking actually be trained, that’s the question we want to explore. And I’m curious, because this isn’t about specific fixed methods, but really all sorts of different aspects that come to mind on this topic — how can I actually train my thinking, what comes to mind here. One example that’s maybe a bit unusual, something you wouldn’t immediately think of, is something like traveling, which we touched on in recent days — that kind of thing is very welcome too. So really, feel free to be creative and think about everything that could work for this thinking training, drawing from your own experience, what you might already use, what you’ve heard of but maybe haven’t tried yet — let’s just gather it all and see what emerges from the exchange, and what further thoughts come to us through that. So you’re all very warmly invited to join today too, and open up the reflection space together with me. We have a recording running in the background, so the whole thing gets recorded and published, meaning anyone who joins automatically agrees to that. Then we have three small room rules: a profile photo where you’re recognizable, your first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. And if you don’t want that for whatever reason, or can’t speak right now because it’s too loud in the background or whatever, you can of course also use the chat to share your thoughts. With that, I’ll mute myself for now and see who’d like to open the round with me this morning.
Maybe just a quick reminder, I’ll repeat it — we’ll wait a few more minutes at most. If nobody joins, I’ll have to close the room again today. I just saw Sonja writing in the chat, which I find very sweet, but as long as we don’t have at least one person actually exchanging with me — not just via chat, but also on stage — it’s going to be difficult. So, today’s question is thinking training, how can our thinking be trained. And these don’t have to be fixed methods we use — it can also be a bit unconventional. In recent days we touched on things like traveling, for example. So what experiences have you had? What can we include here? Sonja wrote in the chat, since she can’t come up, that from her experience she likes to consciously explore — take new paths within her immediate surroundings, to form new neurons. That’s a kind of thinking training too — at least the physical basis for new connections, since exploring new places creates new neurons in the brain, neurogenesis.
Exactly, and with that I’d like to give a quick reminder that we’re recording the room and will publish it later. So whoever joins — and I hope someone will, so we can actually open the reflection space together as usual — automatically agrees that the whole thing will be published. And then we have three small room rules: a profile photo where you’re recognizable, your last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. I’ll wait a few more minutes at most, and if only chat messages come in but nobody’s on stage, I’ll close the room again this morning. Let’s just see if someone can still join who not only agrees to the publishing, but also actually has the chance to step into exchange with me right now.
Well, you’ve been here for about a quarter of an hour now, and if nobody joins, or maybe can’t join, we’ll have no choice but to close the room today. I find that a shame, especially with such a nice topic, but that’s how it is sometimes — we just have to keep observing. I think Clubhouse hasn’t done us any favors with this, so to speak — the classic Main Hall doesn’t exist anymore in that sense, and you notice that in the overall participant numbers right now. And that of course presents us with a challenge, because, as you know, our reflection space works on togetherness, not in the sense of me being the expert just dropping impulses in. So it gets difficult when nobody joins.
Now Raphael is joining to jump in — good morning, dear Raphael! What do you have to say about the topic, thinking training?
Yes, wow. Is there such a thing as circuit training for thinking? You’re the expert in the field of the mind — are there training instructions for thinking?
You’ve turned that around nicely — you shouldn’t ask me, dear Raphael, just tell us what you think about the topic. What are your first impulses?
I’ll come back to that later, please. No, but I actually saw this topic, and nothing works without thinking. So the first thing that came to mind was a phase where things really weren’t going well in my business or something. I went to a pub one evening, ordered a beer, and thought about what else could be done, or how things could go differently, and what I needed to do to get things running again, so the account balances would show different colors again. That was really intense, admittedly involving two, three, five beers, but it was successful and really led to a nice turnaround — and of course you have to think that through. One of the most powerful thinking methods I know, for myself, is this “as-if” question — let’s pretend it’s already the case, and how do we get there. For me that’s a nice tool to use in all sorts of areas.
Wonderful, thank you so much. That connects a bit to scenario thinking too, maybe you could compare it — opening up different options on one hand and looking at possible scenarios. You can also do that with this “let’s pretend” approach. And Raphael, feel free to mute yourself while I’m speaking, otherwise it’s a bit distracting with the background noise. Thank you. So, “let’s pretend” — there are so many different aspects to that. You can really do it quite freely, or you can take something like, imagine the coffee machine could talk, how would it judge the situation, or something like that. There are so many different possibilities you can use methodically.
And with this circuit training for thinking, what I find really exciting, to pick that back up, is that we’d first need to talk about what circuit training even is, and then we can look at how that might translate to thinking. So, Raphael, maybe you could first say something about circuit training in general, independent of thinking, and then let’s see together if we can translate that.
Sure. Athletic circuit training was always in a gym, with different stations, each tailored to the respective sport — pulling, throwing balls, balancing, sprinting on soft surfaces, and basically everything that builds the fitness you need for a sport. For me back then it was handball, and it was about building and optimizing that. And, well, I always found it one of the most effective methods — I looked forward to it the most, twenty minutes of circuit training, going full throttle. It was very effective. And thinking about applying that same structure to different “stations” for thinking would be interesting too — how could you build something like that, how could you increase it, and then apply different stations to different problems?
Yes, that’s definitely an exciting question. What might be important here, in this context, is to look at what the actual goal of such circuit training is. On one hand it’s about different stations, and the goal of the whole thing is to build endurance, flexibility, speed, and so on. The challenge we naturally have with thinking is that we can’t necessarily make the individual stations visible the way we can in sports. But if we look at the goal of thinking itself — in the sense of, how could you do a kind of “brain sport,” so to speak, with the goal of, say, increasing the speed of thinking, maybe as a foundation for what we talked about yesterday, decision-making, to gain a certain speed in those processes, a certain flexibility, agility, thinking in that direction — it would be interesting to see what impulses come up, just from these first approaches. Would anything come to mind for you there, dear Raphael? And everyone else is very warmly invited to join too and share their thoughts — it’s not about right or wrong, just about looking at it together in exchange. This is a reflection space, to generate insights together. So I’d find that wonderful, this question, Raphael.
What immediately came to mind, when you mentioned decisions from yesterday and how one thinks about decisions — in my field it’s about forethought and afterthought. And as always, different personalities came to mind. Especially a friend of mine who’s an executive and really has trouble making quick decisions — he makes good decisions, but sometimes takes a very long time to get there. And that’s just, I’d say, a personality thing — how you’re wired, how courageous or proactive you are, that’s always the question.
Exciting topic. Yes, that’s something you can definitely train — decision-making is actually a great example of this. You could, I don’t know, choose different contexts — a long time ago, when we still had four moderators together with Mona, Jennifer, and Jan Marc, we talked about something like, when I go to a restaurant, practicing not reading the menu forever and starting over again, but actually deciding relatively quickly, like this five-four-three-two-one countdown, and then making a decision. Because especially in this context of decision-making, what often holds us back from making a decision is, on one hand, the feeling that we want to make the “right” decision, even though, as we’ve discussed, we never actually know in advance what the right decision is looking forward — we can only really evaluate it in hindsight. The second important aspect is what we discussed too — that we usually make decisions emotionally anyway, meaning we’re really just looking for arguments afterward to support the decision we’ve essentially already made, or to justify why we decided against something. If we know that, we can make decisions relatively quickly — accepting that I can’t know everything, so to speak, that I’m fallible, that it’s okay, and that I can revise a decision afterward if needed. That might help me handle it differently. And for that, I can pick out certain contexts that don’t feel so elemental to me — like at a restaurant, choosing something from the menu relatively quickly, and maybe even deliberately choosing not to pick something I already know and feel safe with, where I know I can’t go wrong, but instead deliberately trying something new. Raphael, what do you think?
Yes, restaurants are such an exciting thing. Say six women go to a restaurant, or six men go to a restaurant — the men just say, bring us six beers, six schnitzels, six orders of fries. The women say, I’d like this to drink, white wine, but can I have it with ice? I don’t know. Then the main course without parsley but with a little onion. That’s always the charming part — making these decisions, maybe reflecting a bit of individuality you can bring into it. But seriously, quick decisions really are important. And it’s also a question of how you grew up, how curious you are, how flexible you are with food. How familiar are you with different foods? That affects your choice too — what can you even order in a restaurant, and what risks are you willing to take? That plays a role too.
Yes, absolutely. And especially in the evaluation, you can look at it very differently. On one hand you could say, well, the women clearly know exactly what they want, and they’re quite precise in how they phrase it. But you could also say the men are simpler in their approach, it doesn’t bother them as much, they’re content with the “standard” beer, so to speak. So that’s ultimately a matter of evaluation too. But if we don’t just take the restaurant example, what other possibilities might there be where you could apply something similar? Maybe we have other examples we can bring up, where this could be practiced as a kind of thinking training. Does anything else come to mind, Raphael?
Oh, absolutely. The whole area of change management, or the HR department, which is facing massive challenges right now — they have to go through so many thinking processes. How do we get people, and how do we get sustainably functional teams? That’s really a challenge right now, having to look for other paths and take other approaches, which of course comes with certain risks. And it remains to be seen whether there will eventually be a new, exciting, convincing, sustainable system in the hiring space.
Yes, and especially in areas like this it’s very, very exciting, because you could argue, for example, about selecting people — do we do it faster, or do we take a lot of time, because ultimately that costs a lot of money too. And if we make a wrong decision, it might not be so easy to deal with. Or does this also have to do with attitude, ultimately? That is, to what extent are we actually allowed to rethink things in many places, and what kind of culture — and here we’re back at change management — needs to be in place to make it possible to make quick decisions, for example, and to keep acting against that backdrop? Error avoidance is such a topic — that’s often why things take so long in many places. Decisions are actually a great example of where thinking processes sometimes take forever to translate into action, against the backdrop of trying to avoid mistakes. And that ultimately has to do with the culture that promotes one direction or the other. On the other hand, this can also bring disadvantages, so maybe we should open up that side too. Maybe there are also differences regarding decision-making — where it makes sense to say, here it makes sense to train quick thinking to the point where it leads to fast decisions, while other aspects, depending on context, it makes sense to take your time. So it’s not always just about making fast decisions, is it? How do you see that, Raphael?
No, no. Of course there’s an advantage to being able to make fast decisions, but decisions also need to be well thought through and considered, especially to move forward successfully in a company context. The exciting thing I’m currently discussing with several companies is the whole discussion around benefits — why do people come, why don’t people come? Everyone offers their fruit baskets, their water, their company bikes, and does that even interest people anymore? What do they actually want? And then we’re at the topic of jobs. Today, many, many people, especially from the coming generations, try to work in a purpose-driven way. What does that mean for individual job descriptions? Do they need to be kept more flexible? What’s happening there? There are so many, many challenges in that area. And error culture is of course also a powerful topic. What I’ve noticed nowadays is that in the newer generations, there’s no admission of mistakes — meaning, simply standing by your mistakes or the mistakes made, using them, and continuing to work optimally. What I’ve experienced right now is that instead of an error culture, we sometimes have more of a better excuse culture. Maybe you can say something about that.
What exactly do you mean?
What’s your sense, since you’re also dealing with many generations — what’s happening there? Is there more of an error culture, or is there a growing excuse culture that’s actually always existed? Because surely nobody wants to expose their weakness, but real strength is actually standing by your mistakes.
Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is simply that we often find a culture where mistakes can’t be admitted because otherwise someone gets “taken down a notch,” so to speak. That means there’s often a search for a scapegoat, which leads to a lack of willingness to say, I made the mistake, or to adopt the mindset that we can learn from mistakes. That has a lot to do with our culture at this point — that an error culture isn’t actually allowed. Many companies talk about it, but it’s not actually the lived practice. The moment a mistake happens, it’s a drama, and the search for who’s to blame begins. I mean, you could even apply this to raising children — when it comes to figuring out who ate the last piece of cake or the last piece of chocolate, it was never anyone, if there’s already an expectation of a sanction or reprimand or whatever. Whereas if you dealt with it humorously, so to speak, or looked at it as, can we maybe draw “lessons learned” from this, people would handle it differently too. So this isn’t necessarily a generational issue, it has a lot to do with the lived culture in a company. And in many places we’re still very “traditional,” even though, purely cognitively, the insight is often already there — people talk about needing more of an error culture, but in practice, in the actual doing, it’s not lived out. That means you have to make it experienceable, so it can spread, so to speak.
And since you brought up different generations regarding thinking training, it would be interesting to think in the direction of, how can I quickly switch perspectives, looking through someone else’s lens, so to speak. That makes a lot of sense, whether as an executive or in an HR selection process, for example. Depending on who I’m facing, and you mentioned an aspect too, like what people actually really want, or how do we get people and how can we keep them — keep not in the sense of holding on, but in the sense of them staying voluntarily, not switching to another company after a few weeks or months because they’re promised more there than with us. And it makes a lot of sense to think in that direction for thinking training too — how can I quickly, context-dependently and personally, switch perspective depending on who I’m facing. That would be helpful for thinking training too. Raphael, what do you think?
Right, but for that we need to look at the executives, to foster your willingness to actually switch perspective and be willing to really look into it. In a recent discussion I floated the idea that leadership positions in these HR departments are simply clogged up by old white men, so to speak, and that the lower levels can’t really assert themselves. And another weak point, where there’s still far too little knowledge, is really talking with the different generations, or generally going into feedback more often — how are they coping with their job, how are they coping with job descriptions, so you can react and figure out how to get the optimal result. And that’s certainly not the after-work barbecue or party, but really about how do we get performance across generations so they’re willing to actually do something. I think that’s still a really important topic to properly capture, document, and publish within the HR department.
Yes, and above all you’re raising a really important topic there. It becomes clear that there can’t really be thinking training in the sense of me just prescribing it and it happening — willingness ultimately plays a huge role too, regardless of whether it’s about a new perspective, switching between perspectives, or making decisions and similar things. That means the person concerned also needs openness, or willingness, on one hand. And then we’re of course back at the aspect of motivation, not just regarding new staff, younger staff, new generations, but also regarding the existing team — how can we bring in motivation, so to speak, so that this willingness — you just mentioned this — especially at certain leadership levels or in certain departments, where there might be a bit of “dusty thinking,” so to speak, so that the willingness even to embrace this thinking training for oneself exists in the first place. So the whole thing already starts before we even implement the thinking training itself. Raphael, what do you say to that?
That’s actually exactly what needs to be done. That means motivation — where do the dopamine hits still happen, where does that work? For that I think it’s important to simply listen to the generations, what actually motivates them, what sharpens them, what’s effective. For example, the handling of new media happens massively differently across generations. I already know some companies that do everything over WhatsApp, with no email traffic at all — a total data protection disaster. Lists with names, birth dates, all sorts of things get distributed over WhatsApp. Many companies ban the use of WhatsApp entirely because it’s the biggest data leak there is. And that’s exciting — to look at, okay, what sharpens the new generations, where are they really willing to work and do something, and what can they even manage alongside that to keep developing themselves. That’s an exciting topic too.
Yes, and I think one of the important aspects here is actually designing the spaces for that. We tend to hold lots of meetings, prepare agendas, work through to-dos, very often factually oriented, while there’s hardly any room for, say, just an exchange. Especially when it comes to cultural topics, it’s important to open up these meeting places, I’ll call them, where different generations, cultures, and so on get the chance to get to know each other better and discover each other’s perspectives, without just talking about business or only working through tasks. These social encounters still find far too little room, structurally or as something implemented. Maybe once or twice a year there’s some team-building activity or similar, but ultimately that’s far too little, so to speak. On the other hand, people then try to improve this culture with foosball tables or fruit baskets or whatever, but forget that once that becomes a habit, so to speak, once it becomes a given that there are fruit baskets or foosball tables, it no longer has any effect, because humans are creatures of habit. In that moment it might be great for the first few weeks, maybe even great for someone starting a new job who sees it as a bonus because they didn’t have it at their previous employer. But once it’s been there for a few weeks, it becomes a given and no longer has any effect. Quite the opposite — if you were to take it away after it had already become established, you’d often see quite a big outcry, because people already look at it with a sense of entitlement, so to speak. And then the anger is huge on the other side, along the lines of, how is it that people assume this is just a given? So we have a lot of perspectives we can open up here. Raphael, can you say more about that?
Yes, the big topic of habituation, meaning getting used to things. Getting used to the small benefits, getting used to bonuses, getting used to the nice things we experience, and then when it stops working, entitlement kicks in, which very often leads to anger — when 13th-month salaries are no longer paid, or Christmas bonuses that nobody actually had a legal claim to in the first place, and so on, and all of that then has to be discussed. And the question is, is it possible to get used to work in a way that’s still surprising enough to remain motivating? That’s the challenge that exists alongside all these other habituations to the nice things people get presented with when they perform well. Something else comes to mind — there’s apparently a discussion now that results shouldn’t be shown anymore in lower youth soccer leagues, and I’m looking forward to the generation that eventually applies somewhere and says, yes, I played soccer, but I never won, or I always played to a draw, but I’m a great player. I find it exciting to see what happens then.
Yes, and another aspect we can pick up on here, when we talk about habituation or entitlement and things like that — this also shows up in connection with thinking training. Thinking training isn’t something our brain inherently wants, so to speak; we actually prefer to expend as little energy as possible, operating within our old structures, whether in thinking or in acting. That means it takes both motivation and a conscious application of thinking training, to keep stepping a bit out of the comfort zone, which isn’t a given per se — it actually requires a conscious approach, or a conscious decision to do exactly that, because we can recognize a benefit behind it for ourselves. And there can be all sorts of aspects to that, whether health-related — like, because my neurons get activated, I might stay healthy longer, or dementia might set in later, or something — or that it leads to a better togetherness in a situation, or whatever. There can be so many different aspects that the individual personally sees as added value. But thinking training itself, given that we want to expend as little energy as possible and generally seek orientation and security, isn’t something we do voluntarily right away — it’s something that requires conscious steering, up to and including a certain amount of effort. I think that shouldn’t be underestimated in this context. Raphael, how do you see that?
Yes, absolutely, I see it the same way. Take the effort involved, for example from sales — you should know BATNA if you’re in sales, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. How do you handle that? What do you know about existing things? How do you think ahead about conversations, negotiations? What could happen? Where are your limits, and so on? And thinking that through in advance, writing it down, is always tiring work, but of course also, for anyone who enjoys it, a great challenge when you go into a first-time negotiation and come out successful. And the other thing you said is, is it pain or is it positive, what do we respond to, what do we avoid? We’re wired to work with as little thinking as possible, to just wave a lot of things through. That’s exciting. And something else that came to mind earlier is, what do I even use thinking for, or thinking training for? What do I actually think about? Factual topics? Or do I think about other people? Or do I think about possible scenarios I might not be able to reach? Or do I think about my future, who I’ll be in five years, and open that up for myself?
Or negotiations, again not just in sales, but negotiations with yourself too. You talk to yourself, you have your inner dialogues, and then, as you said, you talk about health, about changing patterns, how do I manage that, and so on. Applying that consciously is of course important too.
Wonderful, thank you so much. I’ll bring Sabine in now for a moment — we’re almost at the full 60 minutes, so I’d like to bring Sabine in briefly and then, after making some quick connections, move into the closing round for today. Sabine, good morning! What are your thoughts on the topic?
Sorry, I overslept, so I missed a lot of it, but I actually wanted to jump in on the last point. You’ve looked at this whole thing very much from the technical side — I’d like to look at it from the human side. I was at a conference this week for medium and small business owners, and there was a lot of discussion about why we even do what we do, and of course whether we can even do it, bureaucracy and so on. And this solo-self-employed versus employed comparison came up quite often. Very often people said, well, we want what we want because we have a lot of advantages — we suffer for our freedom, we get our own things done, we want to combine family and career. And on the other hand, we often see a type of person who says, we don’t actually want that at all, we’re happy if we have money in our account on the 15th, and of course we want to make the best of it, as seen from that perspective. I even talked to a friend yesterday and said her husband isn’t so motivated anymore either, but they leave him alone because he still delivers his results. I find this really significant — do people in these processes even think about stepping out of their comfort zone? Or are they actually caught in this whirlpool where it’s actually quite nice to be, and it’ll just keep going that way, and maybe the ten years they have left, they’ll just hold out and not even want to get out of the comfort zone at all. And with that, maybe thinking itself doesn’t move forward much further in that respect.
Yes, there are various factors that play a role in this. For one, it depends to some extent on what kind of position we’re talking about. There are definitely positions where it’s not necessarily about always more, always further, and constantly striving for more motivation, so to speak — which isn’t necessarily negative either. We do have positions in companies where it can actually be quite helpful that people are chosen, sometimes quite deliberately, in the selection process, who don’t necessarily strive for more or have higher ambitions, because otherwise companies face the opposite challenge, always hiring the “best” when they could have hired someone with average performance instead, and then after a short time these top performers strive for more, and the position has to be filled again. So that’s not necessarily productive either. That means we need to differentiate on one hand, what kind of positions are we talking about, and what does this actually concern? Is it about implementing new software that’s just part of the toolkit, or is it about ambitions to actually advance further, to reach the next higher position or similar? Are we talking about an executive, where completely different aspects are expected from an entrepreneurial perspective, so to speak? Or is it a position with customer contact or not? Are these departments that need to harmonize with each other? There are so many factors here, and you quickly realize how complex this ultimately is.
And then the question also arises, especially when we look at motivation and things like that in this context, and surprise effects play a role — how can we approach this from a place of joy, not just along the lines of, action only happens once the suffering is great enough, but rather in the sense that joy is also allowed to be great enough. On one hand, looking at what incentive systems can even be set that don’t become habitual, so to speak, but also take into account this surprise effect, or this individual aspect regarding each employee. And on the other hand, we’re at aspects like what people like to call the company’s “north star” — having a shared vision in a certain direction, working together, and maybe certain questions don’t even come up because identification with the company and its vision is already there from the start. What do you two think, Raphael, Sabine?
Go ahead, Sabine.
Yes, but then it’s very, very difficult for me to find these many people. Because if I think back to how job postings sometimes look — actually I need someone who thinks creatively “inside the box,” so to speak. A solo self-employed person is supposed to know IT, marketing, social media, everything under the sun. But that’s not actually wanted from that side — what’s wanted is, go your own way, and along that way you should of course get ahead as much as possible and also be creative. But I’m a bit overwhelmed here on how you find the right people, because I mean, if you told someone, you should be able to work more “inside the box” in the future, I don’t know if they’d even get there, because it’s not that they get there because that’s just how it is, I think it’s more that it develops that way over time. I think if someone goes somewhere after their studies today, they don’t want to be boxed in somewhere, they want more from somewhere. That only happens over time, or am I completely wrong there?
Well, but now you’re already assuming someone who goes there after their studies. I was talking quite specifically — that’s usually already a high performer, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have studied at all. We’re also talking about positions like regular apprenticeship or entry-level positions, for example, where today HR people — let’s say theoretically a basic school-leaving certificate would be enough to fill this position, with average performance or average results. And HR people tend to still take the very best candidate when several apply and the interviews have taken place. And it can very well happen that someone who even got their high school diploma, or even studied, ends up sitting in such a position. And that this person won’t stay in this position for very long — that’s basically foreseeable already. So HR people aren’t doing themselves any favors with that; you’d actually have to look, maybe there’s another option, maybe this is a great applicant, that doesn’t mean you have to reject them — maybe you can offer this applicant something else, and still, for the position where a basic school-leaving certificate with average performance would suffice, take someone who would actually be satisfied sitting exactly in that role.
Sabine.
Yes, thanks for putting me back on track. Yes, that’s exactly right. I even have an example about our neighbor — he has a technical apprenticeship, worked in the technical field for a long time, in the plant, and said, this isn’t it. So he got a business qualification on top, managed everything, and now there’s an HR admin position opening up at his company, a big corporation. He knows the company and says, this is perfect. And he didn’t get the position because two people with bachelor’s degrees applied, and one of the two got the job. So that’s how it still is in reality, where we actually have a skilled-worker shortage. Actually the company should have said, hello, you two bachelor’s graduates, you don’t really fit here, because this position will eventually become too small for you, I’d assume. Maybe they said, a degree is enough and I’m done with school now, but it turned out differently again.
Yes, absolutely. And that makes clear there’s a really massive complexity behind this too, and it requires a certain foresight in this respect, and in many places a rethink. That means it’s not always just about finding the “best” person for a position, but always looking at, what kind of position is this, and who do I actually need for this position? And that brings us back to the point Raphael raised at the start, namely the job posting. The whole thing already starts with the posting — both the way it’s written and the terminology used in it, for example. There are many analyses on this too, and insights showing that job postings, depending on the field — you notice this especially in male-dominated fields — tend to use language that appeals more to men, without anyone noticing. So unconscious bias kicks in here too. And in tendentially more “female” professions — whatever “female” professions even means, you know what I mean, fields where more women work, there’s no classic female profession as such — you automatically choose completely different terminology without noticing. And that’s ultimately where the whole thing already begins — it’s a whole process that needs to be looked at.
And regarding, especially when employees are already sitting in positions, to pick that back up — companies often ask, what can we do to motivate our employees even more? I think one of the essential, high-quality questions in this context is that we generally assume, when an employee applies to a company and gets hired, they’re usually not, at first, an employee who says, I don’t actually feel like doing this job. And the HR person isn’t exactly “born yesterday” either — if there had been any signs already in the selection process, they wouldn’t have hired this person, of course in coordination with the relevant department. That means we more often have the situation where something happens within the company that causes a motivated employee to suddenly become demotivated — meaning they eventually decide to mentally “quit,” or say, I’ll just do my job by the book from now on, however you want to phrase it. That means, at the latest here, we’re back at the culture, checking what actually drives employees down that path in a specific company. And that means not just treating the symptoms, but also looking at the causes, and I have to look at that more closely of course. There are many tools for this, like employee surveys and similar. The question is just what actually happens with the results afterward, and to what extent is it actually followed up on? Or is that also just some kind of directive from above that gets fulfilled but nothing much is done with it afterward? So we have so many, many different possibilities here, different avenues we can connect to. Let’s move into the closing round here. Raphael, Sabine, what are the highlights for you from the room today?
I wanted to briefly follow up on what was said before — the deficits in HR departments are of course also that the meta-programs are often not known, meaning what kind of people do I actually need to hire, who fits which job, and job ads aren’t formulated accordingly or searched for specifically. That’s of course the first thing where a lot of money gets lost. And on the other hand, I found it really exciting, wanting to train thinking and having to think about what I actually contradict, because I haven’t done that in a long time — that’s always nice too. So thank you for the nice round, thank you for moderating, Yasemin, and I wish you all a wonderful weekend.
Yes, thank you so much, and thank you Raphael for joining too, because I was actually already about to say goodbye since nobody had joined. So thank you for that too. Sabine?
Well, unfortunately I didn’t get to train my thinking today since I came too late. Still, I found this a very exciting topic from what I did catch. And I think you can see in practice — well, of course theory is in there too, but we talk about this very often and see that many people aren’t entirely happy, when you look at today’s numbers, the skilled-worker shortage, there really shouldn’t be any unemployed people left, everyone should be able to find their job. And yet reality is so different. Thank you for the room, Yasemin. I wish you all a great Saturday. Bye.
Wonderful, thank you so much. And yes, I can only agree that we often have a discrepancy between theory and practice, so to speak. And that’s why it’s always important to reflect and make corrections, and to offer the opportunity, in whatever rooms, to rethink one thing or another. And I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s author breakfast with Katrin Leinweber, because it’s about her book “High Performance,” and I’m curious about that too — it’ll be about various hacks, among other things, again with the thought that we naturally want to expend as little energy as possible, so what might be simple means to get into that first step, so to speak, moving toward implementation. We often tend, whether it’s a New Year’s resolution or at the end of the year, the start of the year, or whenever, to take on far too much and then start off with a sprint, and then it becomes too exhausting and we fall back into old patterns. Whereas if we take small steps, simple steps, like little nuggets, little hacks to implement, maybe it even starts with realizing, yes, I can actually imagine doing that, because it’s not that complicated, it doesn’t seem that complicated to me — and that way you might actually achieve much, much more. And that’s exactly what we want to talk about with her tomorrow. So you’re all very warmly invited to join again tomorrow morning at 8, and let’s just see what insights we can generate from that room. With that, I wish you a wonderful Saturday, and I’m looking forward to our author breakfast together tomorrow. Until then.
