When “listening design” generates “impressed identities.”
There’s a note on my old iPhoneX, dated June 5, 2014, that says: “Let’s teach elephants to peel bananas.”
I remember it was a DANGEROUSLY “DISRUPTIVE” phrase: it hid the threat of OMNIPOTENCE, the arrogance of THOSE WHO THOUGHT THEY KNEW EVERYTHING HAVING DONE (AND SEEN) LITTLE or NOTHING. A “banana peel” I absolutely had to AVOID.
Today, that phrase, today, describes with surgical precision what I see every day in my work: Companies, people, brands trying to “teach elephants to peel bananas.”
In other words: they try to change the nature of things, instead of understanding it.
They strive to educate instead of listen, to correct instead of cultivate, to build identity instead of reveal it.
They force behaviors, languages, and identities instead of listening to what already lives within them.
They train, standardize and instead of evolving… they suffocate.
The error of training.
Every time a Company insists on “teaching” something to those already inside a vital process (employees, Clients, Suppliers, Partners), it makes a profound mistake: it confuses training with evolution.
The elephant doesn’t need to learn how to peel the banana.
It needs someone to understand how it eats it, why it eats it that way, and what we can learn from that gesture.
In the business world, the same thing happens: how many times do we impose procedures, languages, brand manuals, communication campaigns, and value systems “from above,” forgetting that true identity is not born from a marketing plan but from a shared daily gesture?
“Listening design.”
An approach that doesn’t start (only) from a blank page but from the sound people already make in doing what they do.
It’s a design that observes, listens, interprets, and then translates into visible form what already exists.
It’s not imposition but emergence.
It’s not control but recognition.
It’s a process of immersion and resonance.
It’s the moment when the designer, coach, or consultant stops designing and starts observing.
It’s the point where strategy meets empathy, where graphics meet culture, where form bends to meaning (and not to taste), where experience becomes a moment and the story finds its “ripening times.”
Listening design doesn’t “create identities” but reveals and makes them tangible: through a tone of voice, a visual symbolic system, a brand promise or a coherent business experience: every line, every color, every word, every silence, every pause, every question, every layout choice becomes an act of awareness
A logo, a brochure, a communication campaign or storytelling are already traces of an identity, the visual and verbal representation of what a Company is when no one is watching.
At the same time, a Corporate Coaching session is the exact moment (intimate and reserved, protected and defined) when we decide to work on the soul (compressed, repressed or unexpressed) of the Organization (and the people who are part of it).
The problem is that most Companies work the other way around: they start from the visual (or idealized, hoped-for) result and not from strategic listening, they focus on image and aesthetics… forgetting the substance.
When a Company listens to itself – to its own voices and inner lives, repeated gestures, recurring words, silences in the corridors – then design stops being artistic/decorative and becomes identity, a living imprint.
Impressed identities that are not invented but discovered are the result of a culture that recognizes human value within daily work, of a process of deep listening, of recognition, of alignment between what a company says it is and what it really is.
They are living identities because they are founded on the people who make the Company possible every day.
Gestures. Dialogues. Decisions. Emotions.
They are not values hung on the wall. They are behaviors.
And those behaviors, over time, impress culture.
A culture that becomes “acted out” in design.
A design that becomes language.
A language that becomes reputation (and responsibility).
It’s people at work who make Companies function, not out of obedience but out of adherence.
Not because they “have to” but because they “believe in it.”
Not because it’s written in the mission statement but because they breathe it every morning entering the Company.
The impressed identity is the one that remains even when the logo changes, when roles transform, when the market imposes new languages. It’s what remains recognizable despite everything.
It’s a life cycle, not an operating manual.
Because an identity cannot be controlled: it must be safeguarded.
Like the slow but determined step of an elephant that doesn’t need to learn anything new to be itself.
The future has a long memory.
Maybe, in 2014, that note was just a provocation.
Or maybe it was already a vision.
We have entered the era of mutual recognition.
People no longer look for brands to follow but Companies to “feel.”
And Companies, if they want to survive, must go back to listening to themselves.
Let’s stop teaching “elephants to peel bananas” and instead learn to listen to how they eat.
