Category: The Human Element

The Human Element

Dale Smith, Creative Director, Bridge

As Bridge’s Creative Director and a behaviouralist, in this series of articles I am on a quest to discover the magic formula that allows humans and brands to coexist to create an amazing company culture. In this ever-changing environment, I endeavour to find commonality that will translate into a strategy of ‘must-haves’ and a list of ‘must-dos’ that will ensure a seamless transformation of your Living Brands. My aim is to study the human element and the constants in organisational change. So, for 30 days, I drastically altered my diet and introduced a new exercise regime to track daily what it felt like to be immersed in a transformation as part of the ‘Living Brand Project’.

“Companies are driven by humans, so therefore they behave like humans.”

The parallels between an individual’s life experience and that of the collective in a company are everywhere. The first 30-day challenge was a real-time experiment.Each day of the 30-day ‘Human Element’ experiment brought new challenges and opportunities to better understand how a company can feel as it moves through an engagement programme. This next phase will break into four parts; exploring the parallels found between a week in the experiment and a quarter in an organisational culture transformation. Change does not happen overnight, and by identifying the human face of change we can better understand how to create change programmes that not only motivate our people, but also offer long term, sustainable solutions. The magic formula starts with identifying the key trends that can offer positive change and the pitfalls that can move us off track from our desired outcomes. The human element is being able to correlate every day human behaviours with that of the company collective.