Designing for Impact, Not Just for Humans / Ben Rennie / Ep. #235

Welcome to the service design show I'm Ben and this is episode 235. Here's a thought. What is 80% of the world's biggest challenges? From the climate crisis to the things that frustrate us daily, we're actually created at a design phase. And if design contributed to the problem, it means design also holds the power to fix it. But that requires a level of accountability we rarely talk about. But we're changing that in today's episode. Hi and welcome back to the service design show where we invite the brightest minds in our field and explore what is truly needed to design great services that resonate with people, push businesses forward and honor our planet. Our guest today believes one of the most pivotal moments in his career was failing really badly at a company he built himself. It's a surprising starting point, but it's core to who he is. As you'll hear, Ben Rani is someone who takes pride in his ability to start over and who understands that creative confidence isn't found on the peaks of success, but is forged in the valleys of our lowest moments. This perspective comes from a life of diverse experiences, from playing sports at a competitive level to accidentally becoming a designer and from building a values driven business, to most importantly for him raising a family in a small ghost town south of Sydney. Ben brings a unique perspective on the mindset and discipline required to challenge the status quo, whether that's on the sports field or in a corporate boardroom. So in today's conversation you are going to learn about how shifting focus to systemic design can amplify the impact of your work. Why creative confidence is built from failure not a talent you are born with, how to be accountable and push for change even inside a large corporation. Why chasing curiosity is more valuable than trying to be an expert and how to find the courage to walk away from a success you no longer want. For me, maybe the most compelling part of Ben's story is what happened after his big, scary decision to walk away from his company. When I asked him what his wife said, her surprising and immediate response completely changed the narrative of what I thought was a story about risk. It's a powerful insight into the importance of your support systems. This is a conversation full of honest stories like that and I can't wait for you to hear it. I'll be back at the end to share some of my closing thoughts. My name is Mark Vontijn and you are listening to the service design show. Then welcome to the show. Thanks Mark, how are you? I'm good. I'm excited. This might become a very challenging conversation for me because I think you and I will agree on a lot of items. So I'll do my best to sort of play the devil's advocate and ask the tough questions while nodding yes, mostly. We'll see how this goes. Today's conversation is about regaining confidence and reconnecting with our creativity. That is I think the thing that you're currently passionate about and before we start unpacking all of this and how to do it and why you got to sort of pursuing this mission, I think it's good to set the stage for us listeners and understand what you mean with the loaded word creativity. Yeah, it is a loaded word. You know, I, there's two parts of creativity for me. One is creative confidence. This idea about how we, how we understand creativity and curiosity, which I think is really connected to it. And you know, it's sort of funny. I never really gave creativity much of a thought until about four years ago. I started writing my book and my book was not called Lessons in Creativity. It was called something very different. And at the end of it, the publisher didn't like the name and they asked me to go back and revisit the idea of what, what it could be called. And when I read through the book, I actually sort of thought this through line through the book, through my life was creativity. And so I actually downed tools on the book and started to go and do some more research on what it meant and what, and what that meant to me and how creativity brought me to here, to this place. So doing that and going back and drawing the dots, you started to understand how you came to be in this conversation with you, how you found me, how I found you. You know, and that to me links back to creativity, but ultimately curiosity. And I think what we've done over time is we've misunderstood creativity. I think we think it's arts, design, it's making things, but what I've come to sort of understand and we can go into this way in more detail if we need to is creativity is simply problem-solving. Or, you know, I've got this line that I love, it's inheritance. It's inheritance, right? So, inheritance, which sense? Yeah, I think we're sort of made up of all of the places and experience that we go to and the people that we connect with and that we love. And they either build us up or tear us down, right? Or the places that we do well in, build us up, the places that we fail in, tear us down. I think we inherit all of this stuff into our life and I think it becomes a part of us. And it's either going to steal something from us or give something to us. And that's a choice for us. We either choose to inherit that as confidence and go into the next chapter with excitement. But I think people think that it's creativity is bravado or it's, or it's, or it's, or it's fearlessness. And I actually think it's a lot simpler than that. I just think it's chasing curiosity and seeing where that takes us. Which is also, which is fearless in a way. It's a lot more of a race and curiosity. I don't think I've heard that definition of creativity very often. So that's, that's good. I will unpack that more as we go along. But before we do that, like, okay, so apparently there is a need to talk about regaining creative confidence, embracing our curiosity again. What do you feel is the cost or like what is the price that we are currently paying by not tapping into our creative DNA, our creative skills? What is the price that we're paying for that? Yeah. Well, I think the opportunities that exist that are in front of us, I think what happens when we're, you know, there's, there's two options, right, that are presented to us. One is possibility and one is fear. So this idea of, I can give you an example, but like when I went back and started to understand the rooms that I found myself in and how I found myself in them, there was a direct connection back to this idea of leaning into something or stepping back from it. And I could ask this a lot now around creativity. Excuse me. I was in, I could invite it to the launch of the Dolce Angebina Nightclub in Milan, right, which I just, I was 34 years old. I was working for Luxorica Rower at the time. And one of their brands was Dolce Angebina. So I find myself in Milan at a trade show. I can invite it to the nightclub of this, the launch of this nightclub. And you know, you turn up and there's a red carpet, there's flashing lights. And I'm from a very small town in Western Sydney and I'm terrified for my life, you know, I'm scared and I walk in and I'm wearing an $80 suit, a really cheap pair of shoes and I'm at a Dolce Angebina event with famous soccer players and all kinds of people. And you know, in Posthus Syndrome is saying to me, what are you doing here? Don't deserve to be here. These are famous people. Why are you here? And I think this is interesting because you know, I was terrified in that moment. Now as a 50 year old person, I don't fear those moments. I look forward to them. And I feel like that the reason we're in the rooms are in is because of the choices we made prior to be invited or to find our way there. And you know, if I go back to that story, you know, being from a small town in Sydney, Western Sydney, I never told my mates that I went to that event. You know, I never told my mates that I sat in a conference with Kyle Lagerfeld and listened to him talk because you know, I came from a small town in Western Sydney and we listened to rock music and drunk beer, you know. We didn't talk about Kyle Lagerfeld. So I just felt like I had these two lives and one life was, and I was really proud of it, but one I was a little bit embarrassed about because of the different from my roots, you know, and it felt like I needed to try and understand how that, writing the book helped me understand how I found myself in these places. And there's two choices and I've done both. One is we lean into the curiosity and we chase it. We see where it takes us and that sometimes is simply walking into the meeting, turning up to the event or we choose not to. And what we get from that is what we've always got. Wow. That sounds like an interesting position to be in as a 34 year old person. So it's interesting that you mentioned that you had these two lives. Can you take us? on the journey, how you eventually were able to marry those two. Maybe there's an assumption there that you were, but let's assume that's the case. What happened? You know, I think there was, like I said, we're chatting offline, and I remember I was talking about some failures, stories that just really hit me hard. And you know, I had this business that I'd worked really hard to build. And there's a couple of things that happened in my life. One is, I'd set up this company, which was an advisory business, so a design advisory. And a little bit like a McKinsey or an idea, but a very, very small version. And we found ourselves with this great plan to fight for the small business, to go in and to, you know, take all the knowledge we'd built through building companies, my partner and I, and apply that to small companies. And really quickly, we found ourselves working for very big companies. So banks, the Australia Post Company, governments, the posting company. So I found myself in these really weird places that I never expected to be in. And you know, there was this really interesting moment for me where I was in Adelaide at the McLaren-Balvinian, and I was working for a bank. And I was in a boardroom with eight bankers, executives from the bank, and I'm running, you know, design thinking workshops. And I was sort of wondering, how did I get here? Well, I was either one in the room. If I wasn't there, where else would I be? And if it wasn't me, who else would it be giving this work? And I kept having this thing in my head that they didn't need my advice. These guys were going to be okay. The bank was going to be fine whether I was there or not. So it was this really weird position of if I'm going to give my energy, is this the right thing to give it to? And the reason there was triggering that day was I was in McLaren-Balvinian and I had all these, it's a beautiful vineyard. You can see the ocean. And I just wanted to be outside. I wanted to be in nature. I didn't want to be in the boardroom. And this is, I know I sound like a sports child because I was in a very good job that I'd built. But that's the point, I'd built this company myself. I'd got to this point where I've got these great clients and I'd design this for myself. But I just hated it. I didn't want to be there. Like I remember feeling this anxiety. And the anxiety that meeting was so bad that I actually left to go to the bathroom, washed my face three times with the water because I remember hearing Jerry Seinfeld, the famous actor, when he was on set, if you ever got stuck in washes face three times of water and his mood would change. And my mood didn't change. I still didn't want to be there. So I actually that day, that night, I left that meeting, got on a plane back to Sydney and I resigned from my own company that night. And this was a really pivotal moment because it changed sort of everything for me. But it also meant that, you know, I worked hard on building this thing, but it wasn't the thing I wanted to build. So it needed a big dose of bravery to sort of change direction. So you were resigned that night. I'm curious what your family said. I'm also like, what is that you mentioned that you've built this company yourself. So you made a lot of decisions along the way to get it to the place that it was. Now if you look back when you look back in hindsight, what were some of the decisions that maybe you don't regret but that you wish you had taken a different turn? Yeah, that's all. God, that's really good. You know, what I haven't actually done that work to be honest, get going back and understand that, like how I found myself in a border room with banks. Well, I always put it down to the idea that we called our business an innovation lab. You know, it was in, and I think that in Australia, we're one of the early ones actually used the term innovation lab. It was, we talked about an innovation, but we created this innovation lab for businesses to go and join our lab and to get all our great thinking. I think that gave us real advantage. You know, we were, you know, we were embracing design thinking, human-centered design. So I think there was a lot of words that were getting scale and growth, and there was a lot of people who needed to get access to that. And I think we were in a good timing at the right time, and all of a sudden our clients just grew as a result of good marketing. Whether we were solving problems, I'm not sure. So I'm really proud of the business I built, but it was never, the one we built was never the one we wanted to build. And what is it that you wanted to build? Like, what were you missing? Yeah, we wanted to, we wanted to execute them. That's a really question too. So we wanted to be more connected to this idea of like, I didn't want to have clients, I wasn't interested in banks. I wasn't interested in golf oil, or I wasn't interested in like Caltech's fuel. And these were our clients. And we never questioned them. We never once said, maybe this is the wrong journey for us. And when we started that business, we were really clear. We wanted to be like my background is lifestyle brands, it's nature, it's all these things. And I couldn't have got further away from it. So the idea was how do we reconnect with the things that I love, skateboarding, surfing, the mountains, the ocean. So when we resigned from that business, we said, let's take some time out. We took our life savings and we spent three months in Lake Tahoe, in California. And so my wife, when your question was, what did your wife say? She was like, well, let's go to Lake Tahoe. So that's basically, so the problem solved. And that three months became four years. We did that for four years, where we resigned from my company. We went to Lake Tahoe, and we tried to rebuild the business based on the principles of the things that we loved, which was the mountains, the ocean, sport, lifestyle. And that's when we discovered Beacol, and we then decided to bring the Beacol values into our business. So I think the thing that was missing was the connection to something that I cared about. The connection to something that was really personal to me that was connected to my upbringing in my youth, which was sport. And I'd sort of built this business that was everything, but the things that I wanted or understood. And I found myself on this sort of snowball or this rollercoaster of boardrooms and executives. And I actually didn't have the answers for them, like I really didn't. And the worst part about that is I actually don't think they care it anyway. You know what I mean? It was really sometimes just, we need to run the workshop. Let's get out the post at notes. Can you see it? It's the theater. Right. The theater. Yeah. We're not in love this. Yeah. What are you doing differently this time that makes you confident that you won't eventually end up in the same boardrooms again? Because I'm sure that the first time you started the company, like you didn't intend to be there as well. And you still had the heritage that you talk about. So what's different this time? The manifesto values, a set of values that are the type of values that you had them as well. I'm assuming in the first company. Not really. Not really. I don't think we built a very good company. I think we sort of we flew by the city of our parents with an idea that that caught fire. You know, and I think when you have momentum without boundaries or without a set of values that are aligned to who it is that you want to be what's the business do you want to face out as? Then I think it's a dangerous trajectory because you know, it's a little bit like we're going somewhere but we're not sure where we're going. It's sort of being dictated by the market or the demand. So one of the things that we understood when we started again, and this is when I say where it's my wife and I saying how do we survive first of all? How do we then build something off the back of it? And I want to be really clear none of this was easy. This was all hard. You know, financially hard. Which says hard? Like physically hard, mentally hard, financially hard. Financially hard. Yeah. Which is mentally right? So if this financial pressure on a relationship then there's mental pressure, there's stress and anxiety. So I don't, I'm not sort of having this conversation from a, oh, just go and leave your job and do something different. It's really easy. I think it's hard, but I think it should be hard because what it forced us to do was to try and understand what values are they that we missed from the last time around and what can we bring? And that was nature, climate, community, health. The other things we wrote down. And so when we rebuilt the business, we built the business around there, the clients we want to work with. Because I love Seth Goden. I remember reading it quite by Seth Goden is when you pick your customers, you inherently pick your market, you know, or your customers pick your market for you. So where you play is based on who you choose to engage with. And I think about that all the time because, you know, when golf oil or uni gas or all gas ring us and go, can you help us with this? And we just go, of course, we can, whether we could or not. Then you're saying a lot to the market about what sort of business you are, what sort of business you want to be, and what problems you want to solve. So when you say no to that, you're also saying a lot. So the new version of this business, and there's a funny story in the middle of this, which I'll share with you. When we set up the new company, we did it based on what does B-Corp mean to us. We discovered design declares later, which was really interesting as well. And for those who aren't familiar with B-Corp, that is. So B-Corp say, it's a certification. It took us two years to become a B-Corp. So that's basically talking about your climate and your, so your environmental and your impact on humanity. So what's the business you want to be? There's a set of values that they measure you on. So we have an impact assessment, which talks about our staff, where we employ them, how we pay them, what's our transparency like. Yeah, it's an interesting model. So I think becoming a B-Corp was a long journey, and an important one, but we actually behave like a B-Corp. The minute we decided we wanted to become one. That new journey for us was by making the switch, all of a sudden our clients went from Elgast to Patagonia. I'm going to assume that it wasn't all of a sudden. Exactly. So what happened? Like, how did Patagonia eventually become a client? Yeah, well, they're a very small client. of ours, but a very important one. Yeah, so that was through, I think they align with, similarly, in the way that we're saying yes to anyone, I think they say yes to people who align with their values, right? So when we look at our manifesto, which is new, or the kind of business we want to be, and our values that we wrote, we looked at businesses like that, we copied that business. We went, "Okay, that's a great business. How can a design agency be Patagonia?" And that's a great model. And we copied it, and we copied it really without any sort of pretending we weren't. We were like, "Let's just take every word they've said and let's apply that to our business, and then bring our own language to what that means." That was a really fun journey, and it didn't take five days in the boardroom with post-it notes. It took 15 minutes with a piece of paper. And when it's right, it's right. And you can go, "Okay, we're going to move forward with this." And when you talk about what's the clients that we want to work with, we said, "Climate, community, health, with the main three, and what they all equal is they equal impact." And impact became this conversation. So at the early stage of the latest iteration of our business, we said, "Well, what if our business was based on impact? What if that was the thing we wanted to do?" And then we thought, "Well, that's hard to make money, just off impact." So we had this 60/40 split. It's a commercial 40 impact, but if you're fast forward now five years later, we're about 65% impact. That's just what happens now at clients in that space. So high foundation, cancer, cancer, or they come to us and find us to solve problems. And just to be back to that. When you say impact on what kind of impact are you referring to? A little bit like systemic design. So because of if we do this, then this changes here. So we like to think that we work with the Sofrata Foundation. They came to us and said their role is to clean the oceans and protect the coastlines of Australia and California in the world. So when they came to us and seeking a partner with us, we need digital solutions. We're like, "Okay, great. This is going to have an impact. We can build, elevate, design that." I think we undervalue, and I'm not saying you do, Mark, I think in general society under values design and the importance of it and what it can do. And how critical it is that the things that we make right now have an impact on the future somewhere. And I bring that back to language, design language, the things we say the way we present them out. So when we get the chance to redesign Sofrata, what are the things we need to project through a screen that will engage people to understand that business at a different level. And that's the thing that we can bring that can elevate that organization's impact. It's super interesting to learn about your journey and see how that has evolved. I'm trying to connect this back to what you said about creativity and curiosity and fear and confidence. Which role does creativity play for you in the work that you do at this moment? This episode of The Served Design Show is brought to you by Dado. 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So you will never have to deal with the frustration of an AI black box. If you're ready to move from journey mapping to journey management, Dado has a generous free tier that gets you started. And here's the kicker. When you sign up at ServedDesignShow.com/Dado, you will enter a quarterly contest to win an exclusive virtual workshop with one of Dado's founders. A chance to dive deep into journey management with your team. So go to ServedDesignShow.com/Dado and create your account today. We'll also find a link in the show notes of this episode. Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, I think creativity is confidence not talent. So if you think of it in a sense of how to define myself in the rooms, I was in. It wasn't just luck and it wasn't talent. It was the confidence to choose to take a leap, right, to move forward. So I use that, I call that creative confidence. So I use that for me as a guide. Hopefully I can build that into my business and the culture of our business to sort of understand, you know, creativity isn't just art or what we make. It goes deeper than that. It's the ability to sort of, and I said this to, I was working, I was saying this to you earlier, Mark, I was working with some kids today at a school that I do some work with and I go and run a design class there. And one of the kids said, oh, I was going to do that, but it was really hard and it's really tricky and so we didn't do it. And I sort of pause and I said, what if you did? What if hard is the signal to dive in? What if tricky is the, is the cordal action to just find a little reason why you should? And he sort of pauses and he's only poor kids only 14. So we looked at me and like, what? What are you talking about? But I created a really good discussion for the next 10 minutes. We've got, you know, 15 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 talking about hard being a catalyst to dive in, to go to, to change, to go and get change. And when I sort of framed it as maybe that's where the opportunities are because no one's there, no one's going in because it's hard. So there's less people there. And so I think for me creativity gives me that. It gives me a little bit of confidence to think that I can go to LA and find clients. I can go to New York and find clients. There's people there, but they're not us. So what if we were there to what we find? So that's how creativity plays a role in that. It's also writing a book without any guarantee of ever having that published. That's creativity. It's not, it's not doing it because there's a commercial upside. It's doing it because there's an emotional connection and a powerful, must be, impact on my life around what I can learn about myself through the process, you know. The way you describe this, I'm thinking all the time about what you said about your background in sports. To which extent do you feel that plays role here? Because when you're playing sports, you're always taking some sort of calculated risk and you're always trying to find new solutions, you need to improvise. Do you think sports has played a role in shaping your creative confidence? Yeah, completely. I think sport is critical for everyone. I think it's critical for community connection. So I don't think sport is like I know we always talk about winning and losing and of course I love to win things. Like it's great. I don't win much anymore because I'm getting too old and the body doesn't move the way it used to. But I think, you know, for me, I grew up playing cricket and I was a good, good junior cricketer. And if we talk about this, this is actually really interesting. I suppose example is my brother and I, my mom and dad owned an indoor cricket center, right? Now, that's probably like having a soccer pitch in your backyard in the Netherlands, right? So that would be a massive advantage to you, Mark, if you had that with a net and your own goalie. So my brother and I had a batting machine that would feed balls to us all day every day. And so whilst we were in the net, batting against balls at high velocities out of a machine, our peas were at home in the nets with their dads bowling to them for 15 minutes before dads arm got tired. So by the nature of our environment, my brother and I still hold every record in Western Sydney for cricket, not because we were talented, but because we had an environment that nurtured performance, high performance at a very early age. But something happened like we were, we both represented, you know, our countries at certain things and junior cricket at an elite level. But there was a thing when you become an adult and all of a sudden there's maturity, there's mental strength, there's resilience, there's all these things that a bowling machine doesn't teach you, right? So I think, you know, for me, I learned a lot about that. But I also think that we're not naturally born talented. There's a lot of ingredients. And it's like, where do I learn these skills from? And when I was playing cricket at 21, I actually resigned from cricket really early because I just didn't like cricketers, a bit a bit boring. I hope no one's listening as a crick. - We'll see the comments now. - That's right. And I remember going in saying, "If I'm not enjoying this, where can I go?" And that's where I found snowboarding. And I found snowboarding brave and ambitious and the opposite of cricket. Cricket was confinement and teamwork and coaches shouting at you to do it their way. Snowboarding was the opposite. It was like, give it a crack, try. So I think a lot of my creative confidence came from that discovery of new sports and nature. And that was really important to me. - When we look at most of our educational system, most of the companies out there, they don't resemble anything that looks remotely like snowboarding or feels like snowboarding. - How are we going to bring more creativity into those environments again? - Oh my God, that's a really good question. It comes out to their values and what they believe and what they want to do. I wrote this, one of my favorite businesses is a company called Belroy. Did I belroy wallets? - Hmm, vaguely. - It's a beautiful business. So I wrote an article about bottled water, the journey of a bottle of water. And I wrote this probably, God, what am I 15 years ago? And it was basically about a brand called Fiji water. And I remember walking into a shopping city and picking up a bottle of Fiji water and wondering, what was it here? What was it in city? And I said to the guy, is this DSL this? He's like, I sell it all the time. Now it's $6.80 for a bottle, back then it was $2.50. So I got really interested in this. I wrote this article about the journey of a bottle of water and where it went. And I've got numbers on my wall, just behind me that I've had forever. And if you look at what happens to Fiji water, it comes from an aquifer in Fiji. It gets bottled in plastic, it gets a plastic production. And if you look at all of these steps, there's carbon that gets extracted from every single step. So I've got numbers on my, I'm gonna read these to you 'cause they're on my pinboard. So extract from the aquifer, there's 10 grams of carbon. You put it into a plastic bottle, there's 150 grams of carbon. You then package it in a diesel powered plant. It cap it, you label it your box, so there's 60 grams of carbon. You then ship it to Australia, that's 4,000 kilometers on a freight container, on a diesel ship, that's 100 grams of carbon. This is per bottle. And then you truck it to city retailers. It's distributed by road, that's another 30 grams. It's in refrigeration, there's another 20. And then at the end of it, it's disposed of after you drink it, right? And when you dispose it, it's going into recycling or landfill. If it's landfill, it takes 400 years to disappear. If it's recycling, it's low impact. But again, just the process of that alone is 30 grams of carbon. So you've got this sort of total of 400 odd grams of carbon per bottle. So that's 400 times more than a glass of water out of your tap, right? So my glass of water out of tap is one gram of carbon. But the interesting thing about this is that is also one bottle of veggie water, six dollars 80, whereas a glass of water out of my tap is one to two cents. So how does this happen? How does businesses build products? And how do we convince ourselves that we need these things? Sydney has very healthy water. It's easy to drink. If you compare that 400 grams of carbon, right, over to leaders, you're going to have 400 liters of city tap water, right? We'll give you the equivalent of carbon out of that, right? So 400 liters of veggie water is $5,400 or $5,600. 400 liters of city water is $1. So we're in this sort of challenge. But the carbon emissions from the veggie water is 40,000 charges of a mobile phone. So my question is somehow somewhere, we started-- and this is a problem with human centered design. And I know we can talk about this all day. Someone somewhere thought this was a good idea for humans. Someone thought putting water in a plastic bottle is a good idea for all of us. And I get there's an aid requirement. So people in need-- need bottled water and fresh water in countries where they don't have it. I love the idea that it's available to them. But it doesn't-- we don't need veggie water in Sydney, but we buy it all the time. And it's convenience, or we're lazy, or whatever it might be. So the challenge is if we're designing for humans, we're not designing for the systems in the places in which we live. And we're not considering the impact of the choices that the purchases we're making. So for me, the way to change these organizations is to change the way we design and the way and their cannability of design. So I know this is the service design. I think it's one of the most critical design practices on the planet. But I think we need to question the process in which we design and how we design for. I would maybe push back a little bit on that. I don't know if this is actually designed for humans. I think it's probably mostly designed for businesses and therefore stakeholders, rather than people like us needing it. I think true human-- like a preferred call it humanity centered design. There is no humanity. There is no human without a planet. So those two always go hand in hand. But I'm curious to your perspective on when you say, OK, we need to change the way we design. What needs to change? Yeah, I think capitalism is a massive problem for this because without capitalism, all of a sudden, we don't need VG water. We can just live on tap water or filters on our taps. So I like this idea. I mean, I started out as a designer that just designed things that look beautiful. But I stumbled into design late, like really late. And it came from a place of working with brands that I loved as in a commercial aspect, sales marketing. And then one night, when the internet started to emerge, I was really fascinated by technology. So I started to learn how to build websites. And then I discovered user experience design and then I discovered how to make products and things. So I came into design really late. But the thing that sat through the middle for me was behavioral design. I tried to understand what are the things that-- what are the ingredients to create the things that we needed or all. And for a long time, I never questioned any of it. In the same way, I never questioned my relationship with fossil fuel companies. There's this sort of trigger that goes off of me way too late where I go, oh my god, this is what I want to do or this is what I don't want to do. But the idea of designing for humans versus designing for systems-- so a lot of the work that we do now is systemic design foundations is what we call it. I don't think there's an official name for that. It's just a title that we made up. The name that we gave that was orbital design. So if we're looking at systemic design foundations, there's this circle. And we're moving at different places all the time. And we're engaging with things at different rates and the world's changing so fast that the idea of design thinking being left to right, which is critically important. And enough people are doing it. I just thought maybe if I just looked at something a little bit different to that, how would that look for me. And so we started playing around with a process called orbital design. And the idea was if we're designing for systems, not staff, what does the process look like? And that was a big catalyst for me. So giving a problem statement, for example, would be designers focus on creating isolated products instead of holistic solutions. That's a problem. So I'm not saying we don't need products. But if we build interconnected systems that transform how people interact with their environment, then that's a better outcome. It's almost the solution to the problem. So that's it. That's it being our approach for wall. I would love to dig more into orbital design. The position that you're in is that you've decided to do work on your terms, or at least to find challenges that align with your values. A lot of us are not yet in those positions, or at least it doesn't feel like we have that agency, that we are working in a capitalist system that limits our control and ability to impact things. Should we all quit, start our own B-Corp companies, or do you have our advice? Let's pause for a brief moment. As an in-house service design professional, do you ever feel like you're operating within a bubble? It's very easy to get siloed in our own organizational context. But the most innovative ideas, often sparkle we connect with thinking from far beyond our usual orbit. Where do you find these diverse insights? The answer is simple. In the circle. It's our community specifically designed to connect you with new perspectives from a global network of in-house service design peers. Imagine tapping into the experiences of practitioners from different countries, diverse industries, and unique company cultures, all navigating similar challenges, but often with refreshingly different approaches. I'm not talking about the massive impersonal select channel. In the circle, we foster this through small, interactive group discussions, Where members get. together to share the lived experiences, valuing not just what we have in common, but the power of our differences. You'll hear how a professional in a completely different industry tackled a stakeholder problem you're facing or how someone from another country approached user research in a way you'd never consider. These aren't just interesting chats. They are catalysts for seeing our own work through a new lens. Connecting dots you didn't know existed and uncovering innovative pathways you hadn't imagined. Our members often find these global perspectives, I would help them to stop just solving problems and start creating entirely new opportunities. So if you are ready to expand your horizons and enrich your practice with a world of new possibilities, I invite you to explore the circle, head over to ServedDesignShow.com/circle. You can see if it's the right fit for you and learn how to apply. That's ServedDesignShow.com/circle and the link is also right there in the show notes. We'd love for you to join our global conversation. Alright, now let's get back to our guest. No, I don't think anyone should quit. I think we just need to be better. So I love the fact that we're all using our intentions, why are we designing and who we're designing for. So, we still work with John Holland, one of the biggest construction companies in the world. But when we go and work with them, we work on things that align with our values set. So if they say can you go and do X that doesn't align with that, we can't do it. But maybe we can bring our education and knowledge of how they could maybe approach it differently. So we'll pitch that and I'll give you a really good example. So one of the Australia's most iconic landmarks, iconic landmarks. It's beautiful. Came to us with a brief and they said we need you to go and rebuild our platform, our digital environment, website, hosting, booking, really beautiful project, really critically important for one of my favorite architecturally designed buildings that I've never been to. So this is like a dream and they come to me and they say here's the criteria for the selection of the tender. We're going to pick a company that will look at budget, experience, platform, all the things right. But get great. And we look at it and in Australia there's a big connection to land and country through our indigenous heritage. Very important. So that was in the tender. You know, are you of this indigenous descent? But the one thing that didn't look out was climate. There was actually no reference to climate in the tender. So you're looking at one of Sydney's most iconic buildings on one of the most important pieces of land in Australia. And this is a platform that we're going to build for the next 10 to 15 years, not for two years or three years, and this the last is a modular. So I read the tender and that we're invited to and I read it and I thought, I think it's a really important part. We can't apply for this because one of our measurements of success is climate. So I go back to them and say, hey, you've missed off climate. That's really critical. That should be a high measure of success because you haven't made reference to green energy, green hosting, you haven't made reference to image use, like the weight of your website, the weight of your pages, where's your data being hosted? There's none of this is referenced from a climate perspective. Is the water that we're generating from the energy of the website being reused, circular, or is it just dirty water that can never be used again? And they come back and say, well, the tender's out. We can't do anything about it. And I said, well, you have to do something about it. You've got to go back and revisit it. So it's not about the agency changing, it's the agency being accountable and going to them and saying, you wrote a brief and you wrote the wrong brief, you need to write a better one. And collectively, that's my responsibility. And unless they change it, we can't help, right? Because we're not building the thing that would protect the part of the future that we think we're responsible for. So they come back and say, well, it's too late now to out. We've already got our tenders in. You want to submit a tender, you can do it. And I said, no, and this is the reason why. So I think that doesn't mean I didn't want to work with them. It just means that we need to be accountable for the things that we're putting out into the world and what that looks like. And I think, you know, that's why I love design to clairs. Have you seen design to clairs? No, I haven't. So design to clairs is basically gone out to, they've got 1,000 members around the world, design agencies. And they're not saying, don't do the work. They're saying, sign the aid acts of emergency. And the aid acts of emergency are, first of all, recognize there's a problem and then recognize the power of design in changing that. Right? So we don't need to go up and become a climate or environmental activist, but we need to be accountable for what work should we be doing and how can we do it differently? Well, what can we bring to people who don't know how to change? And that's the power of design, you know, like there's this great statistic. There's 80% of the world's climate challenges where it started at the design phase. So the role of design is so important. And to which you mentioned, we need to be accountable for the work that we do. How far does it stretch? To which extent do you feel accountable for the things you put into the world? Everything has an impact. You know, we do commercial work for the sake of commercial work. We absolutely do that. So we're not perfect. So there is absolutely things that we do that go out into the world that are just for the use of someone for a short period of time. But hopefully we've chosen to do that work because it's a community impact, a health impact or a climate impact. Sometimes it's never climate, sometimes it's never health, but it might be community. And you know, like I think the, what is it end? You know, it comes back to being proud of the work and understanding the systems in which we operate. If we start to as designers look at systemic design as a foundation, as well as making things beautiful, of course, agencies make things beautiful. They're all good at it. You know, of course people can build better services and environments and fix way finding. But I like this idea of improving him in life. You know, what is the upside of it? And if a client comes to us with a project that is from A to Z that doesn't have any impact on any of those things. I wonder what we can bring that they might not have thought of. And what would you say again to, to us listeners who are maybe part of, part of one of the organizations that you mentioned that don't have these, or aren't explicitly acting upon these values like climate health or environment. How do we still push forward in those organizations and advocate without being becoming annoying or sort of exiting the system? Have you seen successful examples of that? Yeah. I think I love this idea of transition design. Have you had a transition design? No. Yeah. I find this is sort of interesting because, you know, where I live, one of the, there's a climate problem in Australia where we've got, you know, we're very fossil fuel heavy country. You know, we're burning energy all the time. We're digging up the earth all the time. And, you know, someone proposes to put a wind farm, but I live on 400 meters from a window as a beach and someone's put a wind farm. I don't think they call them wind farms anymore, but they've proposed to put a wind farm out there. And of course, the community says no. The community says no. Because it's not the end solution. Why would we do it when it's not, it's, it's only a temporary fix. We don't know what the end solution is. So the, and again, I don't want wind farms in motion, but at the same time, I don't want to run out of energy. You know, there needs to be a transition into a fuel. And I think the reality is we don't know what the fuel is yet, that we want to be powering the board within the future. So the idea of transition, and I'm not expert in transition design, so I'm going to talk about it loosely, is this idea, it's an easier conversation to have to talk about transitioning to the end. Now, then it is to find, discover what the end looks like. You know, so if we think that the end is, you know, windmills, that's sea, or in our gardens, and that's it, that's, you know, but when we know it's not, it's like what does it look like? How do we build them in a way that's, you know, leads us to better fuels, better energies over time. Yeah, yeah, but stepping stones, yeah. Yeah, so I like this conversation and transition, you know, nothing, nothing, this idea of everything that was built was sort of built to someone else's end point, you know, like this chair, this microphone, this computer, that's the end of someone else's design. I like the accountability of saying, I'm going to take that endpoint and I'm going to take it from there and build the next version of it, you know, instead of thinking everything needs to be original on you. So that's interesting because like that way of thinking makes it easier to gauge success and think about whether or not you're moving in the right direction without having the responsibility or to fix that quote unquote, which you, you'll never be able to, but am I contributing to moving in the right direction? That's a much easier conversation to have, right? Yeah, totally. And that's important to note that when we're talking about those three values, climate, health and community, we're not trying to fix it or solve it. We're just trying to be part of a better environment in transition to whatever that looks like in the future that is positive, right? So I think that's, yeah, it's an easier conversation. I do like this idea that, you know, and the amount of people that come to me and say, I've got this idea for a business and I wanted to do this, but I didn't because it's been done before. I think that's the reason to do it because just because it's been done doesn't mean people do it well. And I also think it means there's an opportunity, there's a market, there's a need, there's a demand. And I always think, you know, we don't need more gene company. but we need better ones. We don't need more T-shirt companies, but we need better ones because the old ones, if we keep buying them and they don't change to make a more sustainable planet, then we just got to stop buying them. Then we got to look for companies who do care about it. I went Newtie Jeans from your hometown, right? I think they're from us. We don't know if I'm not mistaken. I went on as well. My zipper broke and I walked in the store and said, "Me and the guy grabs them and 10 days later they post them to my house and they're arrived and I said, "I'll come pick them up." He said, "No, no, I'll put them in the post because the post guys are already going that way. You don't need to do another trip. I'll send them to you." They arrive in a post bag and the zipper is fixed. I don't need to buy another pair of jeans. They've replaced it. I love this idea that they're accountable for the thing that they made three years ago. I'm like, "What a broke. Don't check them out." For anyone who doesn't know Newtie Jeans, it's a jeans brand from Sweden, which offers I think lifetime repairs on their lifetime repairs. They walk into a store and they fix it for you as long as possible. It's amazing. I actually bought the book of the founder and I'm reading the book at the moment. It's really cool. The other thing that they did, which I thought was amazing, he said, "Do you want to trade them in? Do you want to trade the jeans now? Give you $80 for them for a new pair of $300 jeans." I'm like, "No, I'd rather just fix them." It was a really cool experience. I think they're the guys that I want to buy from. They're the guys that I want to give my money to. It's critical. It's such a connection now that I think that it just matters so much. I think we're underestimating how much people would be willing to use their money to vote for better options, better choices. It doesn't always have to be cheaper. People are willing to spend and invest money in things that are better. Totally. It's a beautiful brand-oist of work four years ago called CP Company in Stone Island. Those guys. CP Company is just stunning. I remember when I started working for them, the jackets were all $1,500 euro a jacket. I'm never going to buy that. I was in my 30s. I'm never going to buy a jacket for that much money. It's interesting having followed that brand and written about that brand a lot. People buy the jacket and they never ever let it go. They never chuck it out. They keep it in the family forever. They maintain it. They hand it down to someone. It's a for life jacket. What a beautiful thing to have in people by watchers for life. I do like this idea of analog things that matter to someone that have purpose and time. It's really important. This isn't just about a call to reconnect with our creativity. It's a call to design for better. Better isn't cheaper, faster. It's actually contributing to a more sustainable, more connected communities. Completely. It's got to be, I think better is just such a lovely word. I think good isn't overused word, but I love the word good as well. I also love the word impact. I think these words give us a feeling of community and connection. I think they're important. I think we live in the world. It's gone mad at the moment. It's gone crazy. We looked at our governments with anger and dread and we're angry at them. I'm not angry at my government because I feel accountable for what I can do within my community, irrespective of what they do. This came back to me. This is not my whole life. It was a period in my life where I was angry at the government no matter what they did. I've met our Prime Minister in Australia. I've met the opposition leaders in Australia. I've met them. I've had personal conversations with them. I've met past Prime Ministers. I met a very lucky position where I've had these meetings and these engagements. They're just people trying to make a very big, slow system of silos work and trying to place a lot of people. I love the idea of redesigning government. I've had days where I've actually sat down and penned it out. I think all we can control is what we can control, which is our vote and our behaviour. For you, what you mentioned, a critical point was a manifesto thinking about what better looks like for you. If after this conversation we are inspired to also think about what better looks to us. What's a good starting point? It's such a ambiguous question. I suppose the people listening to this don't always have their own companies like we've done. What you're doing is the ultimate creative act. You're starting conversations and connecting with people around new thinking. There's nothing more creative than that. There's nothing more powerful in terms of seeding ideas in the world to them go away. That to me is wildly powerful. I always think right at the end. When I first wrote my book, it was called How to Save the World from the Shower. You're in the shower and you've got all these crazy ideas that happened yesterday and you're like, I'm going to fix that. I didn't like that. You're driving in the car at the lights. The light turns red. You're sitting there thinking about all the things that happen. You can fix them all and they're like, go green and we just get on with our day or we get out of the shower and we just get on with our day. To combat that years ago, I used to take a marker into the shower and I'd ride on the wall. The ideas that came to me. Now I don't do that anymore. I have a marker with me all the time and a pen and I ride them down and they form the things that form my values. The other thing too, if it's pushing your company to rewrite their manifesto, I think we're all accountable for that. If you work there, you're accountable for it. They're behaviour. If it's redesigning your own manifesto for your own business, I think come back to something that's really personal to you. Family, connection, your kids, sport, all the things that just matter to you and just write it down and there's no bad version. I'm thinking about what you just mentioned and maybe regardless of whether or not you have kids, what's the thing that you'd like to pass on to the next generation? It's again a loaded and a big question, but I think that might be a very helpful starting point to get you thinking about what's important. I've never thought about that, to be honest. One of the things that was, I worked with a business coach called Vashti Whitfield. She'll hate me calling her a coach because she used to call me a mentor and therapist and all kinds of things but never a coach. She was so great, but she used to talk about legacy a lot. She used to get me to think about it and I got to just terrified me, the idea of that. When she realised the anxiety that had brought up for me, she said maybe the legacy is just being present and being comfortable in the idea that all we can control is now and doing the thing now. I sort of love that. I think what it did for me was try to, again, I need to be really clear, this business is hard. Our company is not just out there just picking up clients no matter what. It's battle all the time. When we fight for work or fight for clients, we're doing it from a point of this is the work I want to do now and then when we execute the client, we're trying to understand the impact of that work in the future, which is systemic design. That to me, in terms of legacy, I'm not sure. I don't know. Hopefully conversation like this, if someone rang me and said they decided to start a business because they had them, they heard this conversation that had been amazing. That would be huge. I guess like living or getting a book out there or even a blog post is already living part of you out there, your book is called Lessons in Creativity. I'm sure that if you would write a second book, it could also be called Questions about Creativity. As we sort of head towards the end of our conversation today, what were some of the questions that maybe came up or that you rediscovered by writing the book? That's a really good question too. I think trying to understand about how to create space for creativity, how to create space for the things that we want, how do we make space for it. When I started to look back, I love this Steve Jobs quote, the Connected dots looking forward, you can connect the dots looking back. I wrote that five times in the book because it was so important to me to go back and have confidence to go back. I found going back really hard and confronting. I think one of the things that writing a book in itself is it's a creative act, but it's also really hard to do. I had to try and find out what are the ways to make space for this, to make it easy to do, not hard to do. I got into the habit of leaving my laptop open on a blank page at six in the morning. That's what I got up. I could just write. I found my rhythms as to when I liked to write, when I didn't like to write. Excuse me. When I could be in research mode or when I was in creative writing mode. I think some insights that I pulled out of this journey about writing a book or going back through the creative process, trying to understand that was being really confident in the idea of making play part of your process. Don't take things to serious. I've been speaking very seriously about this because I think it's a serious conversation. I think it's kind of fun. Also to redesign your inputs. Do you know what I mean by that? So, redesign your inputs. What you read. What you read, who you follow, what you consume, shapes, what you create. That's really important. I think that was a big part of this too, was trying to redesign what was going into my mind. And it's easy, I can get really easily swept up in a TikTok feed with Donald Trump's speeches and just my mind is once I explode. So how do I fix that? You just change your redesigning feed. You know, your redesigning reports. Yeah, and this is the example of what you eat is what you've eventually become and you have to be, well, you don't have to, but it's smart to curate what you consume both with your food, but also in terms of information and the fact that you're listening right now to this podcast is already a sign that you're doing some good curation. Yeah, so good. Yeah, then one final thing we'd like to ask you is you've got so much experience and you're sharing a lot, a lot of questions that also come up. What we would like to do is to leverage those shower moments or those moments where we're walking the dog to reflect and think about a question that you think would be meaningful and useful. Is there anything that comes to mind? Is there anything that you'd like us to reflect on? Yeah, I just think that the world needs fewer experts, you know, and more curiosity. I think we just need to be open to the idea of change, open to the idea of possibility and just because that's the path around doesn't mean it's right, you know, I think they're all accountable for that. So this idea of, you know, the curse of the expert is what I call it. I think sometimes we need to sort of understand that we're always on a journey and we're always learning all of us. So that's my biggest takeaway from this conversation. My last four years of trying to rebuild this business, you know, and write a book, I think it comes back to, I'm not here as an expert, I'm here trying to share stories and experiences that are mine and hopefully you can see yourself in those stories if you're listening or hopefully there's something in here that triggers an experience that you've had the mind of a thought of it that way. So I'm just trying to get brave in my storytelling, brave in sharing the highs and the lows, you know, with as much pride. So the fail stories, you know, I wrote this line at the book and it's one of my favourite lines and I don't know if I stole it from somewhere or not, which was, you know, sometimes victory isn't just conquering the mountain, it's also conquering valleys too, you know, those parts when we're at our lowest and we don't think of a lot of that. We always think about, you know, the ween or the peak and I think sometimes, you know, we're just at rock bottom and it's like, how do I get through that and that's a victory, you know. So to summarize a question that you'd like us to think about, what are we taking under the shower? A question to think about. I actually, you know, you're asking to write down a question, I wrote down a couple of good ones and I don't know where I've put it. A question for me would be, you know, what is your intention tomorrow? What is your intention? What is your turning up to do? Is it just to make something look pretty or is it to change something? That's a very useful question and important one to think about and reflect upon. Man, when we want to connect with you, read the book or see all the other work that you are doing, what's the best place to go to? Yeah, you can go to benerene.com just my website. The book is on there. The book is available. Well, I was really lucky. The book's got really good distribution in the US, in the UK. I had one of our developers in the Philippines bought a copy yesterday. So it's it's fighting itself with all kinds of strange places. But yeah, benerene.com and you can get all my social media there. Yeah, that's the best place. We'll make sure to add the links down below because your the spelling of your last nine can be quite finicky if you don't know how to spell ready. That's right. The links will be over there. For now, all I can say is thanks for coming on. Thanks for joining. Thanks for spending an hour with us, sharing your stories. Yeah, and sharing your journey, I think that's the most interesting and thing you could do. So thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks, Mark. Yeah, and thanks to everyone for listening. As I reflect on this conversation, I keep coming back to Ben's story of feeling like he had two separate lives. The person from a small town and the person in the fancy boardroom. I think many of us can relate to that feeling of being misaligned. What I take from Ben is that the real work isn't just about redesigning services for others, but about consciously redesigning our own lives so that the two worlds become one. It's a reminder that making hard decisions is part of the process of creating a career we can truly be proud of. A heartfelt thank you to Ben for being so open and sharing that journey with all of us. And as you step back into your day, think about the energy that comes from looking beyond your usual horizon. Remember how connecting with new and different perspectives from a global community can spark new ideas and make your work even more interesting. Our circle community is designed to be that gateway for you. It's where you can tap into a world of experience from in-house service design professionals across countries and industries. It's about exploring those diverse viewpoints and discovering how others with different approaches are tackling similar challenges like you. This is how you start seeing your own work through a new lens, connecting dots in unexpected ways and ultimately creating better solutions. So if you are ready to expand your horizon and enrich your work with new perspectives, the circle is ready for you. Head over to ServedDesignShow.com/circle to learn more and see how you can apply to become a member. That's ServedDesignShow.com/circle and the link is right there in the show notes. How to see it there so we can explore those new horizons together. Finally, before we part ways, please take a moment to reflect and celebrate. And by joining us today, you have directed your attention towards learning and growing as a professional. So from everyone who you are going to impact through your work, thank you for taking the time and making the commitment. My name is Mark von Time and I look forward to having you with us again for a new conversation on the ServedDesignShow. Take care and see you soon. Bye.