Mervyn Dinnen 0:09 The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly sponsored by Workhuman. The workplace is changing fast—and the leaders who understand what's coming will have the advantage. Workhuman's annual Trends Webinar returns January 29th with research-backed insights on the hottest trends shaping 2026. Discover how top organizations are navigating AI, psychological safety, performance, and equity to outperform their competition—plus exclusive findings from McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2026 report. Featuring an expert panel from McKinsey and Workhuman, you'll get the intelligence you need to lead with confidence this year. Join the Trends Webinar live January 29th at noon Eastern, or catch the replay on demand. Register for free @Workhuman.com. Mervyn Dinnen 1:08 Welcome to the HR Means Business podcast, which is part of the HR Happy Hour Network. I'm your host Mervyn Dinnen. Today's episode, I'm going to be talking about something that I think is very much at the heart of the future of work. How should we build and use technology in a way that strengthens rather than replaces the human experience at work. With HR and workplace technology evolving at an extraordinary pace. We've seen AI move from experimental to every day almost overnight, organizations adopting new tools that promise efficiency, insight and scale. But there is a growing tension, I believe, as technology becomes more powerful, how can we ensure it remains people centered? To explore this further, I'm delighted to be joined today by Martin Jackson, the future experiences and innovation manager at Insights. Insights are probably well known to be at the forefront of people's science and behavior. Their color based personality model has been around, obviously, for a number of years. I've done it myself, and they are now bringing that behavioral intelligence into the digital world through the their insights discovery API. So Martin, welcome to the HR Means Business podcast. Would you like to add anything to my introduction? Martin Jackson 2:24 No, it's very generous. I'm looking forward to talking today. Mervyn Dinnen 2:27 Mervyn, thanks very much. Okay, so AI digital workplace tools are evolving very quickly. We know that, but it not always in a people centered way. From your perspective, how is this shift reshaping what HR leaders need technology now? Martin Jackson 2:45 So for years and years, the goal for any kind of tech was all about efficiency. We wanted to streamline things, or we wanted to speed stuff up. We wanted to get a really fast answer in your hands as quickly as possible. But now we're seeing that value and the expectation starting to change. We're seeing technology that help people really explore a problem. It helps them understand the problem. It helps them communicate with each other. It helps them communicate better whilst they're at work. And you can see why there's this shift in thinking and why it matters. When you look at the data, tech satisfaction in general, and tech satisfaction in HR, tech specifically is dropping, and it's dropping fast. Teams don't really feel like they're actually getting the impact that they're paying for from the products they're buying. So if the tools that they're using don't match up with the way that people think, or they don't match up with the way that people communicate or how they make their decisions, they'll never ever land. They'll be seen as a hindrance. They won't be seen as an enabler. But I genuinely believe that there's an opportunity now, and in this space, people could use AI to support the most human side of work. They're not looking to abdicate judgment or take judgment away. We're looking sharpen it up. We're not We're not automating interactions. We're trying to enhance them. And we're starting to see personalization and personal preferences become part of people's workflows where it can actually make a real difference. So some really big names are thinking about this. Anthropic are talking about it with Claude, their character training and their personal style adaptions work really, really interesting that space metro are working on a personalized assistant. So are Google, and they were working on it with Deep Mind. The really, really big guns are taking this really, really seriously. So there's a shift in HR, and we need to understand this. The win isn't going to be faster, harder, more productive tech anymore. It's going to be tech that makes people, that makes people better at the parts of work that only humans can really do. There's the connection, there's the awareness, there's the communication. If we get that right, the tools stop feeling like they're in the way. They start feeling like they're an actual support. And that's the direction that I think, and that's the direction that I hope that we're headed or now. Mervyn Dinnen 4:43 So where do you think the some workplace tech still struggles to understand or support human elements, and that things like your behavior, communication, nuance, things like that? Martin Jackson 4:57 Yeah, those kind of things are commonplace. But the place where. I think there's huge potential is in things about matching. So mentor and mentee matching, coach and coaching matching, so knowing who you're communicating with, how they prefer to be communicated with, what they're striving for, and understanding how they're reaching for those things, if you can have an insight into the way that they're thinking about that you can adapt and connect in a more efficient manner. Well, efficient is probably not right, the word, but more effective manner. Mervyn Dinnen 5:26 Okay, your business Insights, has been known for decades for, as I mentioned the beginning, it's color based personality model. I suppose, actually, I should have started with this. But I mean, for listeners who maybe aren't familiar, can you talk about some of the foundations of the model and why it's it's continues to be relevant in today's workplaces. Martin Jackson 5:45 So Insights is a proudly Scottish company. They've been around for the best part of 30 years, and they've delivered over 11 million personality preference profiles. Try saying that three times quickly in just every country in the world, Madagascar to Malta, Mauritius to Monaco, they've done everywhere. And the flagship product in the flagship product at Insights is called Discovery. As you mentioned at the start, it's a personality model, and it's based on Jungian psychology and philosophy. It uses a four color model description, so red, yellow, green, blue is the lead core colors, and it helps people understand how they prefer to think, communicate, and how they like to make decisions. So one of my team described discovery back to me just like this, actually. "Know thyself. It is the beginning of wisdom, " I thought it was a brilliant quote, and I've probably paraphrased it really badly, so I'm relying my team's marketing expert to have got them on, for me. But in short, Discovery offers a really simple shared language so people can really explain what they might need or how they could try and adapt to another person with less friction. And by leaning into those triggers and descriptions, they get a deeper insight into the way that they act and the people around them are acting too. But Insights, Discovery, for me, has a real superpower. It's really powerful way of making communication really easy. It gives people a shared language that can explain really fast. It's really simple. You get the concept really quickly. And I first used these during my MBA. So on the first day of my MBA, we got put in this high pressure sales simulator environment. It's really fraught. But then we got put through a battery of these preference and personality tactics, and it suddenly became so much easier. The communication was smoother. Everyone had an idea of what people were reaching for. It was honestly one of the reasons that I wanted to come and work at Insights in the first place, because the tool helps people communicate with a bit more patience and a bit more understanding. And that's where the understanding and value really is to me. You can use it when a project stuck. You can use it when people just can't get each other, that adaption connection. That's Insight's superpower, and that's why I work here. Mervyn Dinnen 7:57 Okay, and now you're you've digitized the model through the, as I mentioned earlier, Insights' Discovery API. Talk me through the process; why is now the right time to open this model up? Martin Jackson 8:11 Yeah, sure. I mean, so an API is just a delivery mechanism. For us, It's a mechanism by which we can deliver discovery in a new place. So I suppose I might help by explaining what API is, in case some people might want to understand a little bit more clearly. This is how I think about an API. I think about an API as a waiter for data. So when you go to a restaurant, you sit down at a table, you see a menu. The waiter comes over to you, you tell the waiter what thing you might want from the menu, the waiter takes that, goes to the kitchen, finds the food that you've ordered and brings it back to your table. You say thank you to the waiter, and you enjoy your tasty meal. An API does very much that same thing, but it does it just with data. So imagine again, the scenario repeats it, but instead of being in a table in a restaurant, you sat at your table at work and you're looking at a website, and you're reading a news report, and you want to find out some more detail about an event, you click on the event link. When you click that link, you're triggering the API. You're triggering that waiter to fetch you the data and bring it back and serve it up in a way that's most impactful for you. And in this case, it's a news report. That's exactly what an API does. What we've done is turn the entirety of the discovery experience into digital data points, and the API lets you pull those data points and plug them in in new places. It's taken the team a year or so to get fully up to speed, but now that's available, we can start to put the information that Discovery reveals about you and your preferences and your personality type and put it into play and put into action in a digital experience. So we've worked with a lot of platforms. We've done a lot of test cases, we've done a lot of prototyping. We've done change management, we've worked in coaching, we've worked in resilience, one of my all time favorites, we've worked on seating plans. We've tailored chat bots. We've done enumerate proof of concept pieces of work. One really interesting one is about tailoring communication tools to match the reader's preferences. So you would write in your email what you believed was the message you're trying to communicate with, and it would adapt that message to be better landed for the person receiving. It some really clever, really fun use cases, and it's all about that application of the personality and flow... and why now? So, so the API came about when Kev Dodwell and Ross Esplin, they're the director and the head of innovation at insights here, they were trying to understand what the future would be for Insights. They wanted to understand where Insights would be in 10, 15, years time, what the business would need to compete in a world beyond today. They knew that future was going to be digital, and they knew that they had to be scalable. They knew that they had that connectivity. And Ross had a finance background, and he was inspired by the idea of open banking, so letting third parties use your information, your experiences, your tech, to build a truly wonderful experience around the institution. And that triggered the thinking around the API. They wanted to know if Insights could go beyond that initial workshop that you went to and attended and a live experience, to go beyond that workshop and move towards a workflow. They thought there would be companies we could work with that would use the API that would come up with use cases. We would never begin to imagine. Think seating plans. We would never thought about that as a possibility. But other people are thinking about how that might be useful. My team had been working to make Ross and Kev's vision real. We spent all that time making every line, every statement, every chapter, any element of discovery accessible through the API. And you can put that to task in a digital world, the APIs themselves have been spoken about. They're invisible. They're just a tiny little piece of code. So all intents and says, You'd never know they were there, but the impact of what you can do with the API and discovery and flow that's really plain to see. Mervyn Dinnen 11:57 And thinking of the employee experience itself, can you give me a couple of examples of how this changes the employee experience in practice? Martin Jackson 12:08 Yeah, so Discovery API can inject preferences and personality into the systems people rely on every day. So one of the great examples that I always think about all the time, because I think it's because I think is personally helpful to me, I've used it, is a digital coaching platform that we partner with. They use our API to deliver discovery contextualized nudges. Sounds like complicated, but really it's just flavoring those nudges so they have the most impact of the reader and the person using them. And they use those inside the tools we use all day long. So that coaching experience lives in Slack. It lives in Workday. It lives in your email. It links to your calendar, any kind of situation where you would need a prompt to support you, before a meeting, before a feedback session, before you connect with a mentor for the first time, that little nudge, that little element that can help you communicate or take on information that can be mission critical. It's like having a tiny personal coach that lives in your pocket is incredibly helpful. Another one that's been really interesting is around onboarding. When you're onboarding a new starter into company, a platform can pull through the discovery insights around that person and around the persons and the preferences of the people that you work around to. You can see a simple picture of your overarching teams working style and tips on how you can approach and work with each kind of each kind of person. So before they send that message, that first email they're sending to the head of department, before they're getting into that first bit of contact with the CTO, they can take a moment and see how they would best communicate with that person how they would make that message to land with most impact. They can change the experience they have from being a generic, one off experience to something where it's contextual, honest and therefore more impactful and more relevant. Yeah, that's that's where I see there huge value there. Mervyn Dinnen 13:54 I was thinking about kind of the possibilities this opens up for how organizations can understand, I suppose, and support the workforce better. Martin Jackson 14:04 Oh yeah. I mean, the ability to overarchingly, see like your team, or to understand how your teams works together. I mean, we've built apps in house that we use in that way as well, where people are willing to consent and share their data with other people. It can be hugely impactful. So if you understand how different teams prefer to work where you have similar styles clustered together, where you can inject a diversity of thinking, for example, a diversity of thinking for innovation, or for any kind of customer facing work that can help support decision making and change. It could change how you structure a change program, or you can take into account the people that are being involved and how you'd put them together in different ways to try and spark creativity or spark change or disrupt in some way. For me, though, it gives HR another data set alongside the operational data you already have. So instead of looking at engagement scores and instead of looking at attrition rates, you can ask a more nuanced question, what is the behavioral profile of this team? Why is this team thriving? What is the behavioral profile of this team. Why is this team struggling? One important thing to bear in mind though there it's not about labeling people. It's about using those insights around those people to help design better experiences for them. That's something that's really important. People shouldn't feel categorized by an experience. They should feel supported, not just managed by it. Mervyn Dinnen 15:20 Yeah, and I suppose challenges for HR leaders at the moment. I mean, we're talking obviously about how technology is moving forward a pace, things like engagement, employee engagement, communication, retention, and this concept of change fatigue, which I think is something that I hear more and more when I'm having my conversations about, you know, so much changing, and particularly over the last year or two, I suppose, with AI and things, it's kind of, it's a constant change. How, how, kind of, I suppose, how can Personality Insights, because we were, I suppose, talking about, you know, bringing the the human into it. So how can they help address all of these issues for leaders? Martin Jackson 16:04 Yeah, it's a really interesting question for me this one. I've been thinking about this one a lot because I've been thinking about engagement specifically. So when people talk about engagement underneath framing, they're talking about whether or not people feel seen and heard, so being understood or being spoken to and in a way that makes sense, makes sense to the makes sense to them or to us, and this is where embedding that personality intelligence could be really powerful. If you know how someone prefers to take on information, or how they prefer to make their decisions, you can build that into their workflow or into the tools that they're using to try and support them, like we've spoken about with the coaching and managing. Can get a coaching nudge before every difficult conversation, something that says the person you're working with needs time to reflect, take that on board, be aware of that before you have the conversation, or if the person will respond best to a clear action or a headline to take, take action, to do, to unthink. You can get that prompt and you can get it in flow, a prompt that helps people reframe the message, and just before they really need to do it, that just in time moment to really think about the recipient who you're talking to with the right kind of language and the right kind of tone, you can make a huge difference to the outcomes of that conversation or that piece of communication, even in tiny little ways. If something's tailored to the person, people pay more attention. We've seen this in tests. So we've tailored messages to the preferences of the recipient, and you get higher open rates. You get greater activities that are taken from the basis of those notes or messages you might send, greater actions and responses from the way you communicate are just one of the byproducts of working in this kind of way. So if a message feels relevant to somebody, you will see that gain in engagement. You'll have fewer misunderstandings, less of those. That's not for me. I don't get it moments, and that constant build of accurate, meaningful, resonant communication, it has a compounding effect, and that has a big impact on the issues you've called out. Mervyn Dinnen 18:04 I suppose the big as we touched on a few times, obviously, the big rush now is AI and organizations I speak to. Most conversations I have people about how to implement it, how to kind of, you know, to get to maximize it. And I think what's interesting, obviously, with the kind of work you do, is, you know, to what extent are, do you see human factors being considered with the implementation of AI and and kind of, how does, how would bringing some behavioral intelligence, understanding, into AI powered tools help to change the quality or impact? Martin Jackson 18:48 Oh, yeah, sure. I completely agree. I think it's a risk with a lot of AI now, the way that people talk about it, the way that people use it, is incredibly powerful for productivity. That's where it's got, like its foothold. People have fallen in love with AI because the productivity gains, it enables but emotionally it's really clumsy. I've mentioned this before, and I've spoken to people about it. I think almost all of the llms that I've, I've played with, they've got really low EQ, and that, in of itself, can feel pretty disengaging, injecting some behavioral preferences into that, it can make a change. It can give the AI itself a lens on how real people actually think about how they decide and about how they communicate. That injection can really matter, and the preference and personally, tools that Insights have been working with for years, they can enable that, but it really has to sit in a place where people are already active and using it, and it has to be like I've spoken before about that, just in time. Just in time, that just in time intervention. So this is where things like the API can actually make a real difference. You can build in those nudges that we've spoken about. You can build in the prompts, in the onboarding, any of those kind of spaces. You can preload that kind of information, and in that instances where the AI feels. Something where it's supporting you. It goes from being something where it's mysterious black box to something more of like a thought partner or support someone that works with you. And when you've got something working with you that that engenders confidence, I find that AI helps me think harder and better. None of it's theoretical, all of it's completely practical. It's about putting it to practice, into flow. So I, um, I always ask the AI to challenge me, like, is this the best answer I could give? Is this the best way of thinking about this? Is this best way of framing the problem? Those are kind of prompts that I use to make it a truly two way experience. Mervyn Dinnen 20:40 Okay, so what advice would you give an HR leader who's worried that kind of you know that how I suppose the new tech AI might erode the human elements that make their organizational culture unique? Martin Jackson 20:58 So if you're thinking about these kind of things, you're probably the exactly right kind of person that your organization needs right now. It's a really important framing to have in place. So I did a lot of work on culture back when I was studying at uni, and culture only sticks to practice it, especially if there's some kind of shiny, fast, super efficient piece of tech that can make it really easy to forget about it. So yeah, it's important to bear this kind of cultural element very much at the forefront and in mind, especially when you're exploring new tech. So where I work at Insights, we test drive Tech with pilots, one team at a time, one problem at a time, one measure of success. And what's really powerful is we openly share what we learned from experiments, not just what we gained, where we messed up to we put that out into the world. It's okay for something not to work we learned from that. But it's really important you don't cover up. You want to share the wins and you want to share the losses. I tell people what we're trying to do and why I'm trying to do it, and what it might change, and make clear what it won't, those really important as well. I always had this phrase in the forefront of mind, and my old man sold this video when as a kid, "if in doubt, even if only because it's the easiest thing to remember, just tell the truth." It always counts. It counts for absolutely everybody. It's a really smart way to think about these kind of experiments, especially like, Oh no. I was just gonna say sorry. Mervyn is really sensitive. So in those kind of spaces, that trust element is it's really key. Mervyn Dinnen 22:27 Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, it's fascinating conversation, and there's obviously so much for people to consider, particularly HR leaders to consider, with the impact, I suppose, employee experience and everything as we rush to implement all these new kind of shiny tools, I mean looking ahead, because obviously behavioral Insights is kind of your specialization. What how do you see that shaping the next generation, I suppose, of workplace tech, which is going to be a primarily AI enabled, from what we can see at the moment. And what should HR leaders and HR technology business leaders be be preparing for? Martin Jackson 23:12 Yeah, much smarter people than me have tried to answer this question. There's a guy called Mike Krieger. He's one of the founders at Instagram. Now. He's like CTO, I think at Anthropic, he's ridiculously smart guy. And a while ago, there was a Y Combinator dinner, and at this he was openly asked, How does Claude The AI, Anthropic, the LLN there? How will Claude be open, AI? And what he said changed the way that I think about the future of technology, like throw away lines for him, but for me, hugely impactful. He didn't talk about the large language models. He didn't talk about their features. He didn't talk about their network effects. All of that could be copied, anyone else can do that same thing. He talked around personalization. So any future tech really, it's not about being the fastest or smartest anymore. It's not about your price point. It's not about your marketing. It's about how engaging you are, how engaging and accessible and that resonates with what you were talking about earlier on. The AI that gets you best will be the winner. The AI that you can work with most effectively, the AI you're excited to join a session, to join and work with through the day, that's the hour it's going to win, and that's why I believe this kind of behavioral intelligence offers an incredible advantage to builders in the tech space. It strengthens that human engagement. Tech leaders are designing for that engagement, but the users are desperately reaching for it, and with the API that we built here at Insights, you can personalize the experience for any use like no one else can. So I'm reassured that really smart people are thinking in the same sort of way as me. I think that the personality and personality intelligence and the application of personalization is going to be the killer app for tech going forward. Definitely a killer app for AI. I think that's the future of tech. Mervyn Dinnen 25:02 Been a fascinating conversation, Martin. If people want to connect with you after this, what's, what's the best way? Martin Jackson 25:10 Sure, you can always get in touch via www.insights.com, go straight to our core website. You'll find those under the product pages. There. You can reach out directly to the API team, api@insights.com, you can look us up on LinkedIn. We're available on all socials. I'm sure you'll be able to find us, and I'm sure we can give you some details to put a connect in for us to come straight to us. Mervyn Dinnen 25:34 Martin, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for your time. Martin Jackson 25:38 Absolute pleasure, Mervyn. I nervously enjoyed it. Mervyn Dinnen 25:42 It didn't show. It didn't show. Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai