Nicole Dessain

Nicole Dessain is the Founder and Chief Employee Experience Designer at talent.imperative inc, an employee experience design consultancy, and the Co-Founder of DisruptHR Chicago. Over the course of her 19-year Human Resources career, Nicole has worked with companies like Accenture, Cisco, Comcast, Mercedes-Benz, BASF, UNIQLO and Walgreens. After she discovered design thinking while collaborating on a client project, Nicole became a student of the method and got certified by IDEO U and LUMA Institute. She is a SESP Lecturer at Northwestern University’s Master’s in Learning and Organizational Change Program which explores how design thinking might be applied to innovation in organizational effectiveness.  Nicole's creative superpower is "connecting the dots" which she applies to her passion for bringing design thinking to the world of Human Resources through the HR.Hackathon Alliance.  Nicole has been quoted in the Chicago Tribune, HR Magazine, Training Industry Magazine, Workforce Magazine, and Talent Management Magazine. She has presented to live and virtual audiences at SourceCon, DisruptHR, SHRM, ERE, TLNT, SIOP, and ISPI.