If asked, the real-life versions of the three, B-Ark Heroes in this video would all absolutely see their success as the result of their edgy, daring, non-conformity.
The other thing I know beyond doubt is that the designer will be driven into an early grave if he tries to figure our what they really want by asking them simple, direct questions.
Simple, direct questions are terrifying because they usually demand clear answers. And if that sort of dangerous dynamic is allowed out of the box, well there's no telling how far it could go. It could spiral out of control into a vicious cycle of actual decisions being made, deliverables being agreed to, time-lines being set and -- shudder! -- accountability being allocated.
Which is never going to be allowed to happen, because these people have no idea what they want...beyond the approval of their peers.
Six-to-one that two of them -- in real life -- would have a brace of tats (fierce ones!), and at least one of them would have at least one piercing below the neckline (Yeah!) but at the end of the day they keep their jobs and rise within the power structure only because they have all completely internalized the faux-rebel patois of that power structure.
It is a level of conformity so Dunning-Kruger thorough that those who practice it soon lose the metacognative ability to realize it.
They don't want to challenge the established order in any meaningful way -- Hell, they would run like vampires from a holy water tsunami at the prospect of a genuine revolution -- but they desperately want to be thought of as desperadoes: it is what our corporate culture now has in place of genuineness. And thus are the natural, rebellious impulses of democracy artfully channeled into safe, soft rhetorical play-pens where, instead of smashing idols or gutting sacred cows, we stipulate our rage against the machine with a carefully rehearsed renegade's swagger, or by showing up at a team meeting in dominatrix boots, or by deploying the breathless vocabulary of heresy and iconoclasm using only Establish-approved cadences and at only Establish-approved targets.
Yes, we have
an app for that.
Make no mistake, there are real rebels among us. They are of every age, race, faith and gender. Few of them would survive the first five minutes of a job interview at the lightly-fictionalized workplace in this video. Most of them would make the nice people in this video horribly uncomfortable. A handful of them get to be proven famously right...usually 40 years after dying in obscurity.
And once in a great, long while we nail one to a tree for telling us we should love each other.
So beware of people in middle-management conference rooms speaking excitedly of "guerrilla" this and "innovate" that.
Six times out of seven, they are not the Change you were waiting for.
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