The best way to understand Gen Z? Become the intern.

20something- the agency was built around a simple reversal

When I created 20something, the idea was not to build another agency that occasionally invited young people into a meeting. Young people had their own agency inside ours.

They had their own CEO. They made decisions. They worked on real briefs. They organized themselves, managed frustrations, and developed their own ways of communicating and collaborating. They were not there to decorate a presentation about youth. They had a central role.

Officially, they were doing internships with us. In reality, we were doing an internship with them. That distinction became fundamental to the way I understand generations today. At any given time, around a dozen young people could spend three to six months inside the agency. Over time, that gave us something research alone could never provide: continuous exposure to how a generation actually behaved when nobody was conducting a focus group. We not only heard what they thought. We saw how they worked.

Discover the agency through our RAP song video

Some of our best ideas came from listening differently

One example was a recruitment concept we called Hi My Best Friend. Traditional recruitment begins with the candidate. We started with their best friend.

Why?

Because we had observed something simple. When many of the young people around us considered a job, made an important decision, or had a difficult experience, the first person they called was often not a parent. It was their best friend.

So we invited that person into the recruitment process. Before meeting the candidate, we wanted to understand their world. We asked the best friend what kind of environment suited them, what frustrated them, and whether they genuinely thought this job would be right for them. It sounds unconventional. But the logic behind it was serious. A CV shows what someone can do. It tells us about education, experience, and skills. Their Unique Selling Proposition, if you like. But people arrive at work with much more than their CV.

They bring an emotional universe shaped by friendships, family, culture, values, fears, ambitions and expectations. We started calling this the Emotional Selling Proposition. Understanding that ESP often taught us more about a young employee than another interview question ever could.

Young people changed the way I led

The experience did not only help me understand Millennials. It changed me. Early in my career, I probably had a rather traditional idea of leadership. Working in communication, I thought a successful leader needed a little more Anna Wintour than a friendly coach. Authority meant knowing. Leadership meant deciding. Status came with privileges. Young employees challenged that model constantly.

At 20something, even my company car stopped being particularly “my” company car. If someone needed it, they used it. That experience eventually became the basis of one of my first talks: I’ve Been Replaced by an Intern. The title was deliberately provocative, but the lesson was simple. Leadership was becoming less about protecting your position and more about understanding what other people could bring to it. The youngest person in the room did not have my experience. But they often saw things I no longer saw. That was valuable.

Then COVID broke the model

Covid changed the way organisations worked almost overnight. Remote work became normal. Internships became more fragmented. Young employees were no longer necessarily sitting together in an office for months. For 20something, something important disappeared. Not the ability to talk to young people. The ability to observe them continuously.

That matters more than it sounds. You can interview a 23-year-old on Teams. You can conduct a survey. You can invite ten young people to a workshop. All of those methods are useful. But they do not reproduce what happens when people spend months in the same environment. A surprising amount of insight comes from conversations nobody planned. And I realized that I had lost part of my classroom.

Barcelona became the next one

For almost five years now, I have been living part-time in Barcelona. There were practical reasons for choosing the city. It is easy to travel between Brussels and Barcelona, and the city attracts a steady stream of young people from across Europe and beyond, including Erasmus students, international professionals, and people staying for a few months before moving elsewhere.

I started living in a co-living environment. Five rooms. Private bedrooms and bathrooms. Shared kitchen, terrace, and daily life. Over those years, I have lived alongside roughly 60 younger people. That number does not make this scientific research. It does, however, create exposure. People come home from work.  They talk about managers. They change jobs. They discuss salaries, relationships, travel, housing, communication, and ambition. They get frustrated. And what interests me is often not the frustration itself.  It is what causes it.

The details often explain the data

Research might tell us that younger workers value flexibility. A conversation at home can reveal what flexibility actually means. Sometimes the frustration is not that a company asks someone to come to the office. It is that the company talks constantly about trust and flexibility, then asks them to commute for a meeting that could easily have happened online.

Research might tell us Gen Z values authenticity. That word can become meaningless very quickly. But listen to young employees talk about companies, and another picture appears. What often irritates them is inconsistency. The company says one thing and does another. The manager talks about autonomy but controls every detail. The employer brand talks about openness, while criticism remains uncomfortable. Suddenly, a vague research concept becomes concrete.

This is why I still need both worlds. Data helps me understand whether an observation is widespread. Living close to young people helps me understand what the data might actually mean.

Observation is not representation

There is an important limitation. The sixty or so young people I have lived with in Barcelona do not represent Gen Z. They are disproportionately international, mobile, and urban. Their reality is very different from that of someone living with their parents in a Belgian suburb, working in rural Poland, or studying in a smaller Spanish city. That matters.

Anecdotes become dangerous when we turn them into generational truths. So I use these experiences differently. They give me questions. Then I go back to the research. If I repeatedly hear a particular frustration, behavior, or expectation, I look for evidence. Sometimes the wider data supports what I observed. Sometimes it does not. That distinction is essential. My kitchen is not a research institute. But it is a remarkably useful place to discover what I should be researching next.

Leaders need more proximity, not another Gen Z presentation

There is also a lesson here for organizations. Many leaders understand their youngest employees through intermediaries. They receive engagement scores. They read HR reports. They attend a presentation about Gen Z, but they spend surprisingly little time listening to the youngest people in the organization without an agenda. That creates distance.

The newest employee does not understand the company as deeply as the CEO. But they see something the CEO can no longer see. They experience the organization for the first time. They notice the onboarding that nobody else questions anymore. They encounter the senior leadership that junior managers rarely experience. They see the difference between the employer’s promise and the employee’s reality before they have learned to accept it. Fresh eyes have value precisely because they have not yet adapted.

Become the intern again

There is one principle connecting my old agency and my life in Barcelona. If you want to understand another generation, sometimes you have to give up your position as the expert. Listen first. Watch. Ask. Be willing to discover that the explanation you arrived at is wrong. Young people do not automatically understand the future. But they are experiencing parts of it before many leaders are. New communication habits. Different relationships with work. New technologies. Changing expectations around relationships, identity, and authority. That makes proximity valuable. Not because young people have all the answers. Because they can show us questions we have stopped asking.