Chief Operating Officer at Talentful. 🪐✨ Helping the world’s most admired companies build world-class teams. Author of 📚 Built for People and 📚 Purpose and Work

G'day. Before connecting: I love getting to know new people (and a connection request without us having previously met is fine) but please write a short note on 'the why' you'd like to connect. I get quite a lot of invitations without comment or context, and I am sorry to say they are likely to be overlooked. I’m Jessica Zwaan, and I organise my thoughts by thinking and then writing down the bits that feel helpful - to me, and hopefully to you reading this. One of my favourite things to write about is how humans organise themselves into “work”: the mess, the meaning, and all the strange systems we build to make sense of it. Outside of writing, I help companies notice what they’re doing (not the aspirational version, the real one) and redesign it so people can move with more meaning and less friction. It’s part anthropology, part product thinking, part structured nosiness. Sometimes the work becomes a book. Sometimes it becomes a new way to design work. Sometimes it becomes a tool, a ritual, a way of seeing things differently. I also write poems for fun, blogs, non-fiction, and occasionally stand on stages to talk about it all. Mostly, I’m just looking for ways to make life make more sense for myself (and, if I can, for anyone else I meet along the way).