The Curious People Solutions Pte Ltd

01/06/2026

You don’t force your brain to think like a genius;
You just let yourself be curious like a child

24/05/2026

The AI Job Apocalypse Is the Wrong Conversation. Work Itself Is Evolving.

The headline everyone is debating

On 22 May 2026, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon published a guest essay in The New York Times — picked up the same day by Forbes — arguing that fears of AI-driven mass unemployment are “overblown”. He pointed to a century of U.S. labour absorbing electrification, computing, and the internet, and noted that data-centre construction alone has added more than 200,000 jobs since 2022.

He is not wrong. But he is answering the wrong question.

The debate is stuck on a binary: will AI destroy jobs, or will it create them? That framing is comfortable for CEOs, terrifying for employees, and useless for leaders who actually have to make decisions in the next 24 months.

The real question is sharper: What does a “job” even mean inside your organisation a year from now?
What Solomon’s own example actually reveals
Read his essay closely. Solomon says Goldman will need fewer people for regulatory reporting, client onboarding, and document review — but more client-facing bankers, traders, and asset managers. Elsewhere, Goldman’s COO has openly described deploying AI “robots” on the firm’s internal “human assembly line” while pledging no mass layoffs.

That is not job preservation. That is work recomposition. The role title on the business card may stay the same. The tasks inside it will not.

Goldman’s own economists make the friction visible: they estimate AI could displace 1–4 million U.S. jobs annually, and warned earlier this year that AI-related layoffs could push U.S. unemployment toward 4.5% by end-2026. Both things are simultaneously true: net job creation continues, and individual careers are being rewired underneath the headline numbers. Stanford research cited in Solomon’s own essay shows entry-level roles in highly automatable fields have already fallen 16% versus less-exposed roles.

The apocalypse isn’t coming. The recomposition already arrived.

Why “evolution of work” is the right frame
At TCPS, we have spent 13 years and 70+ enterprise engagements studying what actually happens inside organisations when the ground shifts. Three patterns are now unmistakable:

• The unit of work is shrinking from “role” to “task.” AI doesn’t replace accountants; it replaces reconciliation. It doesn’t replace researchers; it replaces literature scans. Leaders who plan headcount instead of task portfolios are solving last decade’s problem.

• Human intelligence is being repriced, not removed. Judgment, sense-making, relationship trust, cultural fluency, and ethical reasoning are now the scarce inputs. Goldman keeps client-facing bankers because clients still buy trust, not throughput.

• Culture is the bottleneck, not technology. AI adoption stalls not because models are weak but because organisations cannot redesign workflows, incentives, and identity fast enough to absorb them. This is a culture problem dressed up as a tech problem.

What this means for Singapore leaders specifically?

Singapore’s workforce is highly white-collar, highly exposed, and highly trainable — exactly the profile Solomon flags as facing the heaviest task automation in accounting, banking, and law. The national instinct will be to retrain into new roles. That instinct is half-right.

The other half: organisations must redesign the role itself before sending anyone to be retrained. Otherwise we will produce highly upskilled workers stepping back into job descriptions written for 2019.

Our position

We believe the next 24 months will separate two kinds of organisations:

1. Those that treat AI as a headcount question — and end up with demoralised teams, hollowed-out career ladders, and a culture that quietly stops trying.

2. Those that treat AI as a human intelligence question — and rebuild work around what humans uniquely contribute when machines handle the rest.

This is the category we have been building toward since 2013. Our HEARyou qualitative research suite was designed to surface what employees actually think, feel, and fear — the signals that dashboards miss. Our CULT framework was built to translate those signals into culture-based redesign of how work gets done. Together, they answer the question Solomon’s essay sidesteps: how do you re-author work itself, not just retrain the worker?

The one sentence to take away

The AI apocalypse is overblown. The AI recomposition is underway. Leaders who confuse the two will spend 2026 defending headcount; leaders who understand the difference will spend 2026 redesigning what their people are actually for.

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Curious to see what recomposition looks like inside your organisation?

TCPS runs structured HEARyou diagnostics and CULT redesign engagements with enterprise and government clients across Singapore. Contact us to start a conversation.

David Solomon acknowledged advancements in artificial intelligence have eliminated jobs in some industries but “may lead to job growth in others.”

05/05/2026

Hunger. Skill. Education.
None of these are the real answer.

A recruiter recently said Singaporeans are losing out because foreign talent is “hungrier.” The internet ran with it. Employers nodded. Graduates panicked.
But the whole debate is pointing at the wrong thing.

Hunger explains effort.

Skill explains capability.

Education explains knowledge — not what you’ll do with it.

None of them explain whether a person will stay, perform, and grow inside your organisation — or quietly disappear inside it.

That variable has a name: values alignment.
Here is the uncomfortable truth.

Every organisation has a culture — whether it declares one or not.

If you have no stated values, your culture is being written without you — by power habits, fear, politics, and whoever shouts loudest. And if your values are just artworks on your hallowed walls — Integrity. Innovation. Teamwork. — while your people experience silos, blame, and fear of speaking up, then you are not running a culture. You are overrun by an unknown one. Isn’t that scary?

MIT Sloan’s research is blunt: toxic culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting whether people leave. Not pay. Not perks. Culture.

So when leaders obsess over P&L, sales targets, and growth numbers — a fair question:

Who exactly produces those numbers?

Not spreadsheets. Not AI. People. Operating inside a cultural environment you either designed with intention — or surrendered to accident. And culture formed by accident is the real danger.

Here is what we have come to believe, plainly:
- We cannot align people to objectives we ourselves have no clarity on.
- We cannot detox a culture we have never diagnosed.
- We cannot lead people whose motivations we have never bothered to understand.

An organisation is entitled to save itself — but first it must be willing to see itself.
And for those who are not willing? That’s fine. Our job is to serve the ones who are ready to look in the mirror.

So here is the honest position we hold:
- We do not promise transformation. We promise clarity.
- Toxic culture already exists — whether you see it or not.
- Seeing it clearly can never harm you. It can only make you better.

That is the conversation Singapore — and the world — needs to have in 2026.
Not hungry vs skilled.
Not locals vs foreigners.
Not degree vs diploma.

Aligned vs detached.

Hungrier.

25/04/2026

Here is another reason why qualitative exploratory research is the focus now — and well into the future. For public policies to be truly effective, it cannot be absent.

This is a well-reported but intellectually flat article. It gathers facts, quotes officials, and presents a plausible-sounding hypothesis — tray stations = more crow food = population surge — without ever stress-testing it. A reader walks away thinking the tray return scheme may have made things worse. That is a takeaway that is neither proven nor particularly useful, and at worst, paints an unwarranted failure on a policy that was never the problem.

If we accept the hypothesis that 1) access to dirty trays could be one reason the crow population has surged, and 2) biscuit crumbs on the floor may be another — then we are perpetuating the bad habit of mistaking symptoms for root causes.

First things first — are we simply being overly fastidious about achieving a laboratory-grade environment in a setting never designed for one?
Hawker centres are open-air environments. No walls. No doors. No barriers between food and nature. That is not a policy failure — that is their fundamental design. By that infrastructure alone, there is nothing we can do to prevent crows from accessing leftover food. The root cause is not the trays. It is an environment open to nature’s mischief — and even in the complete absence of uncollected trays, nature will still find its way in.

We cry when a species goes extinct. We cry when another surges. So what exactly do we want?

The tray return scheme did not create the crow. The city did.

How many of our public policies are solving the visible symptom while the root cause goes quietly unnamed?

Amid rising numbers of complaints and attacks, Talking Point looks into waste management issues and control strategies for crows, with a conservationist saying that easy access to food waste is helping fuel their population growth.

14/02/2026

Yeah — that CNA article basically shows millennials are stressed, tired, and constantly comparing themselves, so they’re extra careful with money and don’t want “regret purchases.” That’s exactly why our empathy study matters: it’s not about age or income, it’s about what’s going on in their heads—what they value, what scares them, and what they’re trying to become. Surveys won’t dig that out properly, but our AI empathy chat tool can, because people reveal the real stuff in conversation: why they hesitate, what makes them feel safe to buy, and what kind of clothes actually fit their life now. Once we understand that, we can redesign the products, the store experience, and the online content to match their real needs—so when the market picks up again, we’re not guessing, we’re ready.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/today/ground-up/millennial-mid-life-crisis-young-adult-mental-health-emotional-turmoil-social-media-age-5922521?cid=FBcna&fbclid=IwZnRzaAP8vhZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEe0qfHBxBiKvCHW_YDWSfBw0OnxVLBmoO-eKzFTpTPcOrxQliWrXCeNcI9zns_aem_bhjbvrn9ih9dj4vttZHs4g

Every generation has its own version of the midlife crisis, but millennials and experts tell CNA TODAY that the scale and complexity of the angst that adults now in their 30s and early 40s are experiencing sets them apart from their predecessors.

19/01/2026

Most companies don’t “build culture.” They decorate it—mission posters, town halls, a few nice words on a careers page—then they keep hiring people who don’t actually live any of it. That’s why I’m obsessed with The Ritz-Carlton: not because it’s luxury, but because it exposes the lie. When values are real, they show up under pressure, with strangers, on bad days—and they show up consistently, across countries and teams. That kind of consistency isn’t vibes. It’s governance.

And that’s the point most leaders miss when they hear “Brand Guardian.” It’s not logos, campaigns, or PR. In Amanda Joiner’s C-suite playbook, “Be a Brand Guardian” means something far more unforgiving: embody the mission, vision, and values — and use them as non-negotiable guideposts for decisions. The brutal truth is this: culture becomes the repeated behavior of the people you let in.

So if you want to guard the brand in the only way that matters, you start where culture is actually created: values-aligned hiring reinforced throughout the employees' journey in the company - onboarding, performance management, talent development.

Read our blog enlivening the above:

How Culture Unity Leading Transformation (CULT) turns your vision, mission and values into a measurable, AI-powered talent selection system — without the baggage of conventional “culture-fit”.Every executive says culture matters. Most still treat hiring like a skills-only transaction and then ...

14/01/2026

AI is triggering a fork in the road for every organisation: treat it as a labour substitute and you get fear, displacement, and weaker trust; treat it as an organisational capability and you get resilience. The difference isn’t who has the best model. It’s who can integrate AI into the human operating system—culture, leadership, performance, and growth—so people become stronger, not sidelined.

That’s exactly what we should build. A Values-aligned driven talent ecosystem that codes corporate culture into observable behaviours, captures real experience safely (not just survey numbers), turns feedback into coaching-grade insight, and drives continuous leadership growth. If you’re tired of AI theatre and want the practical “how” that actually works, this is for you.

Read the full post below:

Ever since ChatGPT landed in late 2022, the global workforce has lived under one loud headline: AI is coming for your job. That fear isn’t completely wrong. But it’s incomplete—and it distracts leaders from the only question that matters:Will AI become a blunt instrument of displacement… or ...

23/12/2025

09/12/2025

Jamie Dimon travels the world to “meet people, learn a lot, and get a pulse of what’s going on.”

He’s not “doing design thinking” — but he is.

Empathy, when done right, drives clarity, sparks ideas, and motivates action — all in one fell swoop.

At The Curious People Solutions, empathy is our engine. People aren’t just part of the process — they are the lynchpin of everything we do.

👉 Discover how empathy transcends frameworks and why design thinking is a mindset for everyone: [Read more on our blog and the original Business Time interview at: https://wix.to/xuWAD9Z ]

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When we read the recent interview with Jamie Dimon — where he describes travelling the world to “visit different countries, meet people, learn a lot, and get a pulse of what’s going on” — something stood out to us. Dimon wasn’t talking about design thinking. He wasn’t discussing worksh...

20/11/2025

The race for top talent has moved online, and the rules have completely changed. While many are still sifting through endless resumes and relying on outdated interview tactics, a handful of forward-thinking companies have already cracked the code.

They're not just hiring remotely; they're building unstoppable, cohesive, and fiercely loyal distributed teams. They've solved the puzzles of assessing true skill through a screen, fostering authentic connection across time zones, and creating a culture that people never want to leave.

This isn't a glimpse into the future—this is the competitive advantage of today. If you are considering remote hiring or your remote hiring process feels more like a gamble than a strategy, you're already falling behind.

Ready to close the gap? Our latest blog post breaks down the exact framework used by companies winning the remote talent war. Stop losing your top candidates and start building the team you need to dominate.

Learn their secrets and transform your approach:
https://www.thecuriouspeoplesolutions.com/post/challenges-of-remote-hiring-and-distributed-teams-how-to-overcome-it

Singapore is strategically pivoting to become a hub for global talent, with its government and companies actively hiring overseas professionals who don't need to relocate. This bold move to build borderless teams makes a deliberately strong, behaviour-based culture the new non-negotiable for success...