Benedicte Hennebo

I built my career on ‘unemployable’ skills. Or so I thought.“In this company, you need to be a woman to get a promotion.” This is what I got straight into my face from a male colleague a few years ago. Maybe it wasn’t intentionally directed to me but gosh it felt like a punch in the stomach. I had just been appointed as a global offering leader in a large tech company and in the space of a few seconds, my well-curated aplomb crumbled. I was caught off guard and didn’t have the right, witty and spirited answer to his statement. Instead, I started playing in my head “What if I got the role because they had a gender balance KPI to reach”? “What if I don’t belong here”?

From Studying Socrates to selling fuel pumps

According to Pearson Business School, 54% of college graduates don’t work in their original field of study. With my Master in Philology and a career in tech, I certainly was a living proof of this datapoint. Over the last 25 years, I spent at least 10 hours a day with all types of techies: IT engineers, telecom engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers, you name it. And for a big part of my professional journey, I put myself in an imposter position because I kept on trying to blend and “fit in”.

Here are four “Aha” learning moments that shaped my career

Aha Moment #1 Offering another perspective in agile offering development:

The year was 2020. The world has come to a stillstand. All my value propositions “more aircraft throughput, smoother passenger flows” suddenly became irrelevant. We put a cross functional team of sales, product, marketing, R&D together. What should we do? How could we help our customers? We all fell for it. We knew the answer and started fast and furious to pitch our new solutions. And then something happened. As we tested our MVPs something felt wrong. We couldn’t  put a name on it but we didn’t feel the traction. And so I suggested to look at the problem from another angle. Not from our customer’s angle but from our customer’s customers angle. By including another perspective, we changed the narrative, improved innovation and created an opportunity to re-open the conversations with our clients.

Aha Moment #2 Connecting the dots, lateral thinking and strategy deployment:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” says the African proverb. I think I never experienced this as much as when developing 3 year plans and policy deployments. Whilst I have used for more than ten years growth models split into three categories (optimization, growth and breakthroughs), I have also experienced first-hand misappropriation of this model leading to risky and poorly deployed growth strategies. One included a regional growth plan where the MD wanted to expand through geographic, vertical and portfolio diversification. All in one. I love thinking laterally and connecting the dots. But that time the three dots where not aligned: they represented one major hole that needed rapid change. It is not risk aversion, it is about intelligent risk taking and engagement with the wider team from commercial to delivery to cash.

Aha Moment #3 Simplify. At one point your strength becomes your weakness:

At the start of my career, I grew professionally because of my ability to think laterally and “see the big picture” whilst my techie colleagues were trapped in a siloed view. That competency helped me for a while. But one day I received an important word of advice. My newly appointed boss had called me in his office and without even looking at me said: “You are too complex. You think too fast. People cannot follow you. You have to feed the rest of the team with smaller, bitesize pieces of information” Feedback is a gift, right? This is when I realized that I had reached a seniority in my job that required me to simplify complexity instead of trying to solve the origins of the cosmos. I started using helpful tools: 80/20 Pareto approach to problem solving, 5 whys to demystify complexity and identify the root causes to an issue, yesterday/today/tomorrow agile progression and the three bullet points rule. To quote Saint-Exupery: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” And it is the same principle that guides great designers.

Aha Moment #4 People don’t see you the way to see yourself:

A few years ago, I reached out to the President of Continuous Improvement of my organization and asked him to be my mentor. My main motivation was, beyond the access to a wider network, to gain more insights and hands on use cases of lean and optimized growth initiatives. In my head, since I was not an engineer, I was disorganised and hence messy. In our onboarding videocall, the first thing he told me was “You are very thorough and organized”. I almost fell off my chair. This was a great illustration of all the noise that me, myself and I were doing in my head. Since then, I have continued to use systems and routines and tried to lower down the volume of the discussion in my brain. Actually I have slightly changed the approach. It is not me, myself and I fighting any longer, it is me and Simone. Simone is the name I gave to my anxiety.

What happens when there is a lack of diverse backgrounds in the room?

Monika Schnitzer, Professor of Economics  at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich believes that the 2015 Volkswagen Dieselgate wouldn’t have happened if more women have had a say in the top level management of the organization. Whilst there is no scientific way to prove this statement, it is considered as “mostly true” that with more diversity and a more participative decision making style and a more cautious approach this unethical decision of frauding federal emission tests might have been avoided. Another example is the backlash that Levi’s faced when using AI generated models to introduce more diversity in their collection. Again one could ask whether this oversight wasn’t due to a lack of heterogeneity in the decision process.

Embracing Cognitive Diversity in an AI era  

In the age of AI, avoiding biases goes well beyond gender or racial inclusion. It requires the involvement of  individuals with diverse academic backgrounds and thinking framework to keep the real human touch.  According to the 2025 WEF Future of jobs report, 39% employees fundamental skills will shirt by 2030. Skills like creative thinking, agility, curiosity and leadership will become more and more important.  Companies must embrace cross-disciplinary thinking to enable the convergence of technology and humane judgement and innovate.

Call to Action for Women Leaders in Technology 

 As women leaders in technology, it is essential to champion cognitive diversity and advocate for the inclusion of individuals with unconventional academic backgrounds. By doing so, we can drive innovation, improve decision-making, and create more inclusive corporate cultures. Let us recognize the value of diversity in all its forms and work towards building systems that leverage the strengths of diverse teams. Together, we can create a tech industry that is not only innovative but also inclusive and equitable for all.