Lecyca Curiel
Most leadership teams are running organisations where Gen Z is now the largest cohort entering the workforce, and the assumptions baked into their culture, policies, and management norms were written for a different generation. The data they have on this group is filtered through marketing research, not lived experience, and it shows up as turnover, disengagement, and a widening gap between what executives think young employees want and what those employees actually do. Closing that gap is no longer an HR project; it is a retention and credibility problem at the top of the house.
Lecyca Curiel is a Generation Z researcher and strategic foresight specialist with WHETSTON who helps leadership teams replace generational stereotype with practical intergenerational collaboration.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel
- A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data.
- Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking.
- Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway.
- Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up.
- Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration.
Biography highlights
- Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong.
- Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019.
- Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam.
- 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance.
- Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future.
- Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory.
Biography
Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter.
She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019.
Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion.
The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into.
Key speaking topics
- Generation Z in the workforce
- Intergenerational collaboration
- Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective
- Mental health across generations
- Future of work and talent retention
- Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce.
- Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees.
- DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change.
- Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort.
- Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations.
- A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype.
- A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.
Talks
A working session on what global change has actually done to the expectations younger employees bring to work, told from inside the cohort.
Key takeaways:
- A field-research read on Gen Z employees that goes beyond marketing survey data.
- Where common executive assumptions about this group are wrong, and what that costs in turnover.
- Practical entry points for integrating younger talent into existing teams.
On why younger employees expect DEI commitments to translate into operational decisions, and what happens to engagement when they do not.
Key takeaways:
- Why awareness-only DEI programmes lose credibility fast with this cohort.
- What “action” looks like in hiring, promotion, and policy from a Gen Z viewpoint.
- How to read the gap between stated values and lived experience inside the organisation.
On the different ways mental health shows up across generations at work, and where the friction sits between cohorts.
Key takeaways:
- How mental health expectations differ between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers in the same workforce.
- Where managers most often misread distress and disengagement across generational lines.
- A frame for intergenerational conversations about wellbeing that does not default to either stigma or performance.