The accident that became
the credential

No home, no job, twenty-seven days left on the visa, and a breakup fresh enough to still have a pulse.

Sleeping on the floor of my Italian friend Claudio's apartment, in the hottest city in Spain, in a desert, no air conditioning. I say that to paint the picture, not to be felt sorry for. Life was making me its pretty little boyfriend and I was thoroughly not enjoying it.

A hundred and five CVs. Four countries. Two callbacks. (I would find out later why.)

Callback one: write about yachts in Valencia, travel to Monaco, document the glory and the wealth. A legitimate, paying job. But I have never been farther from a coast than boogie-boarding in north Florida, and rich things make me uncomfortable (possibly envious). So I put everything into Big Blue.

One email. Then a game of tag — calls, emails, whatever it took — in July and August, which I did not yet know are the unofficial official NO ONE WORKS months of the Spanish calendar. And luck, in the form of Maite Iniesta: Murciana, young enough to think different was good, patient enough not to get mad when I called her while she was sunbathing on vacation.

She's the one who eventually told me why my CV survived the pile. One: a photo in the corner of me biting an apple, which HR found weird — and in a stack of hundreds with identical beginnings, middles and ends, weird was the only thing legible. Two: professional athlete to vodka salesman is a strange list of jobs, but underneath it was real design thinking with real clients. Three: I would not go away, without ever quite becoming pesado.

Then the tests. Logic: passed, magically. Math, word problems, in Spanish: passed? (I assume a curve.) English: crushed it, still mad about the two I missed.

Then the group dynamic. Twenty chairs around one square table, ringed by managers and HR. Everyone taller than me. Everyone Spanish. Everyone holding a degree in engineering or telecommunications. Cool — I studied journalism and can draw alright. Maite herded us in like cattle to what she called the Room of Destiny, and like that, the Hunger Games began.

Introductions first. IN. ENGLISH. I nearly cried at my luck.

They set the room a problem and the loudest people immediately started fighting over the microphone, which is what a group dynamic actually is. Halfway through, the realization: this is a design thinking workshop.

I don't have to win this. I can run it.

So I framed the problem instead of competing for it, and when we had a solution and nothing to show for it, I drew it — a genuinely bad pen sketch of an augmented-reality chair on a webpage. Instinct. Luck. That was my entire contribution. Why didn't you learn Spanish better, idiot, I said to myself on the way out.

Then, because Spain, the whole group went straight to the nearest bar. Two beers on a stomach that had had nothing in it all day — one for the nerves, one for the breakup, and mostly because I was dying of thirst. My phone rang. Maite. She'd been hunting for my number for an hour, because I had printed it wrong on a hundred and five CVs. Good one, John John.

My interview was in five minutes. I did it slightly drunk and answered everything honestly, which is not a technique I recommend but is the one I used. Have you ever designed a website? No. An app? Concepts, never the screens. What have you designed? Brands, campaigns, a lot of juice, packaging, a clothing line. Would you learn to program? I learned to speak Spanish like this in six months. It's just another language.

Maybe that awful drawing wasn't so awful. They called. I took the job without owning a computer.

It turned into two hundred and fifty workshops, an automation-opportunity series that got used across IBM Europe, and client work in the tens of millions.

I expected big companies to have big-company problems. They don't. Two hundred and fifty rooms — banks, telcos, energy, retail, three countries — and it's the same six problems every single time, wearing a badge and a budget. People are people. The logo changes. The problem is the problem.