Moments in Time: Perkins&Will's Global Director of Learning and Development Heather Currier Hunt on Feedback, Connection, and Resilience

By Julia Gamolina

Heather Currier Hunt joined global design firm Perkins&Will as Global Director of Learning & Development and Associate Principal, bringing two decades of experience in fostering creativity and innovation. At the heart of Heather’s work is the belief that there is a present, emerging, or future leader within everyone. Based in New York City, her firmwide role at Perkins&Will spans career journeys, learning & development, performance management, talent brand communication and diversity, equity and inclusion.

As a designer, she has spent considerable time in the hands-on work of systemic change, where the rubber of pedagogy meets the road of people and business. As the former Executive Talent Director and Global Head of Learning & Development at IDEO, Heather created impact at the individual, team and organizational level. She spearheaded IDEO’s first-ever global leadership development programs and partnered with an external consultancy to assess people data to foster a more diverse and inclusive organization. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Heather talks about developing resilient organizations and communities, and introducing new things into our lives, advising those just starting their careers to be serious about growing their networks and soliciting feedback.

JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?

HC: Like many people who end up in New York City, I grew up in a town I was desperate to leave. This one was in Massachusetts. I was fortunate to realize early that education would be the only way to propel myself into different circumstances, so I focused all my young energy on that, and it brought me here. It was a life domino, one action that triggered a series of events leading to being in this role, at this company, doing work I would not have previously imagined for myself even though I knew as a little girl that there was something else out there for me, I needed to go find.

As someone looking to escape, childhood was a cauldron of narrative play, all elaborate stories with baroque set pieces. I was constantly imagining myself in other realities. No surprise then that I was also a scribbler, writing stories, keeping a mortifying diary, and reading constantly. I was bookish, to say the least.

All this focus on stories developed a lifelong curiosity I have for the motivations of others. I wanted to understand what drives people and that comes from a childhood where the motivations of the adults around me completely shaped my options. Only by expanding my universe would I discover other ways of being that felt more fitting.

Confidential. Photo courtesy of © Halkin Mason Photography.

Billerica Memorial High School. Photo courtesy of © Chuck Choi.

Center for Novel Therapeutics. Photography by Nick Merrick © Hall+Merrick.

I can’t tell you how much I relate to all of this Heather! I feel as though you’re describing my life. How did you get your start in working in the field of design?

I had always had jobs that allowed me to be around creative people. I worked in publishing for a time, then in the admissions office of Parsons, then as a florist. Always jobs that subsidized my own creative life and fueled something else in me I came to recognize as empathy.

Designers seemed an exotic breed, something apart. It wasn’t until I joined IDEO that I was able to really embrace design and see that it was available to me as a methodology, a way of thinking, a set of values that deeply resonated with me. That start at IDEO was completely by chance, an accident of fate that changed the trajectory of my life. Another moment entirely as consequential as coming to New York.

You had a significant tenure at IDEO. Tell me about this — how you evolved, how your role evolved, all of it.

It’s so wonderful to have the opportunity to spend a decade anywhere, in a relationship, in a city, in a singular organization. It’s enough time to know it thoroughly, to have had highs and lows, to see the other side of choices you made or bets you placed later on when the impact of those decisions is clear, and the lessons are well defined.

I had never heard of IDEO before taking the job there. A friend connected me to a friend who hooked me up with a role as an executive assistant, supporting two of the global partners. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. The role, the people, the organization, this thing everyone was talking about called Design Thinking and human-centricity. A light went on and then started to burn brighter when I discovered Talent, and Learning and Development in particular.

In all the jobs I had ever had, the things I excelled at were consistent. It was always about helping people navigate moments of incredible vulnerability, helping people tap their own wisdom in order to make consequential decisions, helping people see more for themselves than they may have otherwise. All found this powerful new expression at IDEO in Learning & Development. I threw myself into the discipline in a way that overwhelmed me. I throw myself into it still. This work is bottomless, perpetual, constantly evolving which suits me just fine since I feel like I’m just getting started.

“Everything is a moment in time. There will be life after. So, every setback, every disappointment, every delay or failure, even a devastating event is a moment along a trajectory. You can either learn from it, allow it to inform what comes next, get smarter from the experience of it, or you can let it bury you.”

— Heather Currier Hunt

Tell me about the transition to Perkins&Will! And with this, I must say I am so happy to see a role like yours created—I don't know if it's a post-pandemic theme, but so many women have approached me recently asking for recommendations for career coaches, and I feel like that's exactly what you are, but internally for a company! Tell me about the role, what you've done so far with it, and what is to come.

My dedication to Learning and Development is not role based, its values based. While IDEO was such a wonderful place to expand my knowledge of design and designers, I needed to learn more. I wanted to explore new challenges, be scared more, be unsure more about how things would pan out. Perkins&Will offered an extraordinary opportunity to learn about a pretty particular industry, as AEC is, and to apply my expertise to a new organizational scale. Most importantly it offered certain conditions I find impossible to walk away from, namely: a storied organization in real transition, a bastion for creativity and innovation needing to expand its expertise, and a workforce that genuinely wants its intentions to match its impact.

At Perkins&Will I am accountable for designing and delivering all our programming when it comes to building the skillsets and mindsets that will catalyze our ambitions, iterating the tools that will support these efforts as well as our performance management processes, and initiating partnerships that will enrich our curriculum content but also expands the formats through which we help our people grow like with executive coaching, somatics, or action learning.

L&D as a function is at a watershed moment where we can either be the vending machine or the engine. Just being the folx who will spit out a training when requested offers little value to an organization in moments of real transformation. Instead, I want to create an engine that propels us into the opportunity gaps that await us by closing the performance gaps we might have today.

Perkins&Will does not strike me as a firm content to rest on its laurels. At our scale, we have a responsibility to be on the vanguard when it comes to our culture, our methods, our orientation to learning and growth. This is particularly true when it comes to sustainability and regenerative design, social justice, and technology. Even more importantly, this rarified profession must be more open, collaborative and inclusive. Our partners in design, clients and communities alike, are critical to shared success for how we experience the built world and whose needs are met.

University of Massachusetts Lowell University Crossing. Photography by Paul Warchol.

University of Cincinnati Health Sciences Building. Photo courtesy of Connor Steinkamp Photography.

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

Over time I have developed a pretty singular worldview. Everything is a moment in time. There will be life after. So, every setback, every disappointment, every delay or failure, even a devastating event is a moment along a trajectory. You can either learn from it, allow it to inform what comes next, get smarter from the experience of it, or you can let it bury you. I’m not one for getting buried. Mainly because paired with this perspective I just have so many things to be grateful for.

My daughter died when she was two-and-a-half from cancer. She did not have health in her life and still, she smiled through things and laughed through things most humans would have been destroyed by. We have all experienced, or will experience, incandescent loss and grief in our lives. It is an inevitability. So, I manage these inescapable moments by accepting them, incorporating them, letting them teach me and still allow myself to move forward in service of others with a little bit of grace for myself.

Heather, I’m deeply sorry. Thank you for sharing this with me and our readers, and your advice on how to move forward is invaluable. In this vein, with all the changes that are happening currently with return to work and more, what have you also learned in the last six months?

That hard is hard so we better buckle up. We think we know this but often organizations come to questions as if there are ready answers. We are all grappling with the future of work and hybrid or how to design for inclusion and psychological safety, or how to prepare for a looming recession. These things are hard, complex, demanding challenges with component parts that change daily. It will take more, ask more, demand more.

This is where, as a designer, you deploy the prototype, you learn as you go, make adjustments with the new information you are gleaning. Above all, we need to take care of ourselves and each other because if hard is hard we are all feeling it and remembering to check in on the people who are the recipients of these decisions is an everyday behavior I wish I saw more people embracing.

“Tell people what you are working on and get feedback against that thing so that you can calibrate your impact. Get specific. It will wildly accelerate your growth, it will build trust with others, it will make visible your blind spots that are getting in your way.”

— Heather Currier Hunt

Who are you admiring now and why?

It’s funny I immediately thought of my niece Aki, who is seven. We had a family dinner recently where she made a passing comment about her favorite color being blue. Her grandmother asked, “I thought pink was your favorite color, what happened to pink?” Aki looked her square in the face and said, “Pink is still there.”

I so admire her. This knowing yourself and your preferences and the ability to allow yourself to evolve and bring in new things ‘cause, hey, pink is still there. We lose nothing by allowing new things into our lives. Brilliant.

Joining Aki are some other women whose work I just cannot get enough of like Professor Linda Hill at HBS or Professor Loretta Ross and all she has to teach us about Calling In. They inspire my work daily when it comes to the mindsets we will need to nourish to do the work the world will ask of us.

What are you most excited about right now?

Exactly because everything is shifting beneath our feet, we get to develop new ways of moving through space! Some will swim, some will run, some will shimmy. It’s going to take all manner of approaches, and then new ones will pop up out of nowhere. I am thrilled by the potential of all this. Our industry is evolving, as are all others, and we will need to be more adept at change than ever before. Not a novel perspective I know, but how this shows up, what this literally means, what skill sets and mindsets are going to make the difference, all this is fertile ground for design, and I am so here for it.

American Express, Sunrise Corporate Center. Photography by Steve Hall of Hedrich Blessing Photographers.

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And what does success in that look like to you?

To build resilient organizational cultures where people are emboldened to contribute, grow and embrace the tensions inherent in innovation. A place where people can change their minds and build confidence at scale for the value of discomfort. Discomfort is a key organizational condition to cultivate. Controversial I know!

We tend to favor harmony and consensus. We shouldn’t. It’s a trap wherein ideas wither on the vine and people’s creativity is stunted or stymied. If we hope to unlock the value of diversity, we must personally undertake sitting in the discomfort of having our beliefs and mental models challenged by the lived experiences and perspectives of others. If we don’t, we will never have cultures where people can manifest their potential and focus it on the most gnarly challenges we face. That’s why I’m at Perkins&Will.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

Be serious about building your network through authentic, human, reciprocal relationships. You don’t have to adhere to any model that doesn’t work for you, but you do have to put yourself out there to connect with others in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s through shared interests or service, maybe that’s through activism or organizing, maybe it’s through social media platforms or alumni networks, or conferences. Do it your way but do it because networks are connected people and those connected people are going to bring you the professional challenges you don’t yet have access to, the mentors who will guide you, the access to information you need to make an informed decision, the professional whose services you are desperate for. Make it fun for yourself and make sure it aligns with your values but make time for it. It will be the current upon which you flow for many years to come.

Also, relentlessly solicit feedback. Embrace the ouch of radical candor and ask for it over and over and over again. Just gave a presentation? Ask for feedback. Just finished a project? Ask for feedback. Just tried something new? Ask for feedback. Heard feedback and are trying to incorporate it? Ask for feedback on how that’s going. I’m not saying to be asking for people’s opinions or advice though of course those are helpful too. I’m saying tell people what you are working on and get feedback against that thing so that you can calibrate your impact. Get specific. It will wildly accelerate your growth, it will build trust with others, it will make visible your blind spots that are getting in your way. Soliciting feedback is a superpower and when you model it, it lets others know they can ask too. So, it truly is a gift.

For women these activities are especially important. All the research demonstrates that women, and particularly women of color, are disadvantaged when it comes to getting the feedback we need to improve our performance or get support in our careers. While it’s unfair that we should be additionally burdened in having to go get it, it’s nevertheless true. Don’t sit on your hands and wait for others to offer help, ask for help. Not everyone will be able to give it, some you will discover you should have never asked, but that’s ok. If you do not go looking for meaningful relationships and feedback, you will always be under fueled.

Thank you so much for sharing with us, Heather.