The Future Is Human

There is a strange comfort in a famous company name on a CV.

But as Maddy Cross points out in this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, the biggest companies don’t hire from within. They look outwards and hire for aptitude, skill, motivation, and potential.

In this episode of The Future is Human, Naomi Trickey sits down with Maddy Cross, Partner for Europe at Riviera Partners, to unpack what modern executive hiring actually requires. This conversation frames hiring as a deeply human act. Because the future of work may be automated in many places, but choosing people still asks something more of us: curiosity, judgment, empathy, and the humility to look beyond what appears obvious on paper.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why breadth of experience can become a competitive advantage 
• How Maddy spots the “light behind the eyes” that no hiring scorecard can capture
• Why the best companies hire for diversity of experience, not uniform pedigree
• How stakeholder misalignment quietly ruins senior searches before candidates even enter the room
• Why the perfect “bleeding edge” technical leader with decades of boardroom maturity may not exist
• What leadership readiness looks like when someone has to set direction
• Why AI can make search faster, but cannot create more qualified candidates
• How the smallest personal detail can become the thing that makes or breaks an offer
• Why hiring for logos alone misses the potential that built the logo in the first place
  
  

Tune in for a conversation about the parts of hiring that still require a human voice, a human read and a willingness to see more than the CV.


The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

 AI has made it easier to do more, and that’s the part everyone talks about. But the season finale of The Future is Human asks a quieter question: what happens to us when work speeds up that much?
Naomi Trickey and Ella McCann-Tomlin return to two conversations from season one that, at first glance, seem to come from very different worlds.
Debora Gallo, VP of Talent Development at Mews, talks about the emotional reality of AI. She reflects on the moment she felt heard by a machine, the unsettling experience of seeing her own expertise become available to everyone and the grief that comes with gaining capability while losing some of the connection that once made work meaningful.
Melanie Yencken, Senior Director of Product Design for Growth and Premium at LinkedIn, brings the design lens. For her, AI is not making human judgment less important. It is making it more important. If anyone can build anything, the real differentiator becomes knowing what should be built, why it matters, whether it solves a real problem and whether it actually helps a human being.
Across both conversations, the same thread keeps appearing: AI does not remove the need for human work. It changes where that work lives.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why AI can feel emotionally powerful, even when we know it is not human
• How AI is changing people’s relationship with their own expertise and identity
• Why creativity matters more, not less, when execution becomes faster
• How design earns influence by translating customer understanding into business impact
• Why judgment, taste, empathy and soft skills are becoming harder to ignore
• How leaders can help teams move through AI change without shame, panic or burnout
• Why individual AI productivity can quietly create isolation if teams are not careful
• How deep thinking, strong context and human understanding make AI outputs better
• Why the real power may be in the middle ground between resistance and blind adoption
• What leaders owe their people when work is changing this quickly

Tune in for a conversation about how AI is reshaping work and why human judgment, creativity, empathy, and connection matter more than ever.

 The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

There is a lot of pressure wrapped up in a first job.
Not just because it is your first proper step into work, but because it can feel like it’s deciding who you are going to become in the background. The strange thing is, most people are asked to make that decision before they have enough experience to know what they want. In this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, host Ella McCann-Tomlin speaks with Alex Costa de Wit and Nina Gualdi about choosing a first role when the obvious path does not quite fit.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why the obvious career path is not always the right one to follow
• How to choose your first job when you are still figuring out what you want
• Why “what will I learn here?” can be a more useful question than “what will I be doing?”
• What a degree gives you when your career does not follow the field you studied
• Why first jobs feel so heavy, and how to think about them with more room and less panic
• How graduate programmes can help people grow horizontally, not just climb vertically
• Why AI in hiring can help candidates explain the story behind their CV when it is used thoughtfully
• How landing somewhere unexpected can still feel right when the learning opportunity is clear

Tune in for a conversation about early-career choice, unexpected paths and why the “right” first job might not be the most obvious one.
 The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

The thing you’ve been asked to minimise at work might be your greatest source of leadership intelligence. Rooms have rules. People put you in boxes. And most organisations still treat identity as a sensitivity to manage rather than a capability to unlock.

In this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, host Naomi Trickey is joined by Ingrid Tappin, creator of Identity Intelligence™, author of Exceptionals and founder of Diverse Leaders in Tech, to discuss what happens when we stop managing identity and start recognising it as a strategic asset.

Ingrid grew up moving between Barbados, Seattle and the Netherlands, learning from childhood that the answer to “where are you from?” decided which box people placed her in. That experience became the foundation for a career spent helping leaders and organisations see what they have been missing: the instincts people develop navigating systems not built for them are not coping mechanisms. They are leadership capabilities.


What You’ll Learn:

• The real cost of asking people to shrink to fit
• Why “professionalism” often just means designing for sameness
• How vulnerability without equal safety becomes a trap rather than an invitation
• What AI is revealing about the irreplaceable value of lived human experience
• The four Origin Stories: Outsider, Patchwork, Underdog and Unseen
• Why identity is a map for growth, not a label
  
  

Tune in to hear why the instincts you built to survive the room may be the ones that let you lead it.

 The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

 Modern workplaces may be suffering from a creativity crisis. But like with most things in life, there’s a solution for this too. In this episode of The Future is Human, host Naomi Trickey sits down with Preben Arentoft, Agile Coach at the LEGO Group, to explore how organisations can bring colour back into the workplaces.  

What You’ll Learn:

• How to use questions as a coaching tool to spark imagination and shift team perspective
• Why fostering psychological safety through humor and playfulness directly accelerates problem-solving and business delivery
• The "integrity of collaboration" framework for building accountability without adding pressure
• How to recognise and eliminate anti-patterns that silently drain team performance 
• Why deep listening and noticing effort transforms team motivation and retention 
• The role of tangible, material experiences in grounding teams and unlocking creativity in a digital-first world
• How to balance urgency and quality by maintaining situational awareness and contextual leadership 
• Why continuous learning mindset matters more than any framework as AI reshapes work

Tune in to discover why creativity, exploration and serendipity are the one thing no machine can replicate.
 The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

To many, AI seems like the gift that keeps on giving. But the truth is, with AI in our lives, we stand to grieve just as much as we stand to gain, if not more. In this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, host Ella McCann-Tomlin speaks with Debora Gallo, VP of Talent Development at Mews, about what it means to lead through this strange tension of fast work vs. human work, without pretending the emotional cost is not real.
She reflects candidly on the first time AI felt personal, not because of what it could do, but because of what it made her feel, the fear of losing mastery, the risk of becoming too self-reliant and the quiet grief that comes when parts of your expertise become suddenly available to everyone.
What You’ll Learn:

• Why reinvention is becoming one of the most important skills for the future of work
• How leaders can help people move towards agency without ignoring what is being lost in the process 
• Why AI can feel emotionally powerful even when we know it is not human
• How to protect your voice, judgment and mastery when using AI tools
• Why the pressure to be “all in” on AI can make people feel ashamed of asking hard questions
• How remote-first work and AI-enabled self-reliance can increase isolation if leaders are not intentional
• Why the best leaders in this moment will offer more than task direction - they will offer honesty, presence and human connection

Tune in for a conversation about staying human when the ground is shifting and why the organisations that keep their heart through this moment may be the most successful ones. 
 The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

The promise of AI is speed - faster builds, faster decisions and faster execution. But just because something is done fast, doesn’t mean it’s done right - we’ve learnt at least this by now. So, what happens to the role of the designer? How must it change to ensure that solutions aren’t just built fast, but built to solve the right problems? In this episode of The Future is Human by Mews, host Naomi Trickey and Melanie Yencken, Senior Director of Product Design for Growth and Premium at LinkedIn, discuss. 
What You’ll Learn:

• Why design earns a seat at the table by translating customer obsession into business impact
• How leaders can move teams from AI anxiety to AI agency through safe experimentation
• Why speed without deep thinking creates products that look the same, feel the same and solve very little
• How psychological safety, rest and boundaries help teams stay creative in a high-pressure AI era
• Why empathy, taste, judgment, conflict resolution and influence are becoming even more valuable
• How AI can lower barriers to entry for underrepresented builders IF leaders intentionally create access

The need for speed has driven some of the greatest human inventions. But with AI, it turns out, speed can be the very thing getting in the way of true progress. Tune in to find out how design teams can navigate this complex moment. The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

 What does inclusion in the workplace REALLY look like? For Noemi Varhelyi, Customer Support Analyst at Mews, it means giving people the space to truly be themselves instead of just accommodating differences. In this eye-opening episode of The Future is Human podcast, host  Ella McCann-Tomlin sits down with Noemi to explore how organizations can build genuinely inclusive cultures.
What You’ll Learn:

• Are we missing a hidden gender bias that keeps professional women undiagnosed?
• Why calling their skills “superpowers” is the most damaging thing you can do for neurodivergent employees.
• The 3-word mantra (“Ask, Don’t Assume”) that builds instant psychological safety.
• The simple solution (Remote Work) that solves the sensory barriers most leaders miss.
• The dangerous thing we’re outsourcing to AI: Critical thinking and human judgment.
• How a simple “User Manual” template instantly eliminates friction between neurodivergent and neurotypical teams.

As the world gets more AI-driven, we ironically can't afford to get less human. The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Can intentional leadership be the missing piece that boosts employee performance? In this episode of The Future Is Human podcast, host Naomi Trickey sits down with Pat Phelan, Chief Revenue Officer at GoCardless for an eye-opening conversation about what’s REALLY required from leaders today.
What You’ll Learn:

• The universal truth that drives all workplace behavior
• Why treating employee development as a privilege transforms team performance
• The three metrics that prove development drives business results
• How to maintain human connection in automated, transactional environments
• Why "brutal transparency" requires consistency in how you receive feedback
• How to build your leadership philosophy from negative experiences
• How to preserve organizational soul while scaling

In today’s day and age, it can be a real struggle to balance growth with values, but ironically, it’s a non-negotiable to do so. Tune in to find out how you, as a leader, can make it a reality. The Future Is Human is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so