Ben Pecotich On Human Centred Design Unlocking Opportunities For Enhanced Social Impact

Ben Pecotich is a designer, innovation coach, and the founder of Dynamic4 - a social enterprise and certified B Corp focused on design and innovation for happier communities.

Since 1993 he's been focused on designing and leading strategic change in Australia, NZ, the UK, and Europe - combining strategy, design, technology, consulting, and program management. He co-founded his first startup in 1994, and has been working on startups and social enterprises since. He spends his time coaching leaders to solve problems that matter and deliver great outcomes for people and our planet while being financially successful. Over the years, he’s coached thousands of founders, leaders, designers, and university students.

He’s the author of Solve Problems That Matter - a 90-day program helping people take a human-centred approach to design, build, and launch their social enterprise idea. He's also co-founder of the Sydney Design Thinking Meetup and a founding board member of SECNA.

Ben discusses why entrepreneurs should adopt design thinking as a core practice and how Dynamic4 is helping leaders create social change across diverse sectors and communities empathetically.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your interest and work in social enterprise?

[Ben Pecotich] - The one-word description I usually give to people is that I'm a designer. Human centred design has been the thread that has run through everything I've done throughout my background, which is pretty mixed and varied. I started in financial services back in 1993 at the fresh age of 17. I started at pretty much the lowest part of a bank you could, and the following year in 1994 I started my first start-up. I had this parallel life of designing, leading and delivering strategic change in really large complex organisations. This included lots of people with their own agendas and an interesting system view, whether the system boundary was basically the organisation and the customers. But within that, I was trying to lead and design strategic change. It was a lot of fun working at that lab Scale, and then in parallel working on trying to get start-ups off the ground.

I began cross-pollinating those two different ways of seeing and experiencing the world, one with significant resources and lots of complexity, and then the other in a smaller space with start-ups that had effectively zero resources and were trying to find a pathway and get things done from the ground up.

This is a very different way of being, but I learnt lots of lessons cross-pollinating between the two contexts. I did that for a long time, and then I founded Dynamic4 in 2001 (we just had our 20th birthday not long ago). I was living in London at the time, and there wasn't much going on in terms of the job market, so I thought I'd do my own thing and that's how Dynamic4 was born. In terms of interest in social enterprise, that has really evolved and emerged over these 20 years. We always had a negative screening process in terms of types of projects or clients that we would work with. It would be a pretty clear screen of, "we won't do this type of work," and we would screen organisations out.

Over time that became a positive screening process, where we would only actually do work with people and organisations on projects that completely align with our purpose and our theory of change. We also ensured that we were the right people to do it as well. What social enterprise has meant has evolved during it, and obviously social enterprise has been emerging and growing in popularity over that same 20-year time horizon as well. Then in terms of my [experiences], a key thing that I'm driven by is fairness. Whenever I see or experience injustice and when things aren't fair it hits me pretty hard, and I really feel motivated to try and help make things fairer for people. That's all part of that bigger picture of wanting people to be happy and to have an increased quality of life. It's been a long journey since 1993, and I’m coming up to 30 years of doing these things, but all of those pieces, different ways of thinking and working have then culminated into what we do now.

Can you tell us more about Dynamic4's approach to social impact?

Starting with why is always good, but the whole vision that we have and our theory of change is ultimately that people and communities should have an increasing quality of life. For that to happen, we also need a planet that is nice, clean and healthy, so we've got some work to do to make it cleaner and healthier. That is our big vision and the larger impact that we want to contribute to, in terms of where we can actually play an active role in our theory of change, in terms of how to help progress that is [around business]. Business has done a lot of good things over the last couple of hundred years and has lifted a lot of people out of poverty and created many positive outcomes for people, but not for everyone. It's actually done a huge amount of damage to the planet, exploited people and increased poverty for certain groups of people as well. Business and organisations are powerful, they hold a lot of resources and capital. What a business does and how it operates is very significant to how people get to live their lives.

The theory of change that we're working towards is if we can help organisations and leaders solve problems that matter and do that in more empathic and innovative ways (and not just measure success traditionally with profit only and the financial bottom line), we can actively work towards great outcomes for people and create economic growth and prosperity.

That's when great things are more likely to happen, and off the back of that, people in communities will be happier and have a better quality of life and the planet will be healthier. That's the overarching goal and where we are trying to help get us to as humanity. Then in terms of what we actually do, it is a mix of a few things, but a lot of it is about taking a human centred design approach to innovation. Over the years, what has evolved is more focused on helping others with their impact and being able to grow their capability and capacity to be able to deliver great social and environmental changes, especially that hearts, minds and hands approach. We help people think about what's important, to really engage at that ‘why’ level and then take practical action, and coach and guide them through that journey. A lot of the work we do involves working with early-stage social enterprise founders or people with a social enterprise idea to work out what their idea truly is and take a human centred approach to working out who the people are involved, how to test their thinking, and really bringing empathy to that whole journey. This is much more rather than just a consulting model of coming in, taking it away, doing some work on it and bringing it back. Over the years, we've moved much more towards a coaching, working alongside and building mental capabilities type model. For over 20 years, we have been working pretty deeply in digital technology, it wasn't called ‘digital’ 20 years ago. Being able to use digital means as a way to be able to leverage, scale and deliver positive impacts is also another big focus of ours. Then, we do a lot of work around helping build ecosystems and collaborating.

Can you explore the term 'design thinking' and what it entails?

I will use the terms design thinking and human centred design relatively interchangeably in most contexts. But design thinking is really just a human centred approach to solving complex problems, and it really thrives in that complex wicked problem space. Despite it not being in the name, it's as much about doing as it is about thinking. When people hear 'design thinking', some people get the picture of chin stroking and strategising, but not much action.

Design thinking is very much about taking a proactive role in understanding people, doing things with them and alongside them, building empathy, testing ideas, thinking with those people, prototyping ideas, and then delivering and having a constant cycle of iterations.

It is very much about doing, despite it not being in the name, and a key principle with any good design is you always start with the people. This involves understanding who the people are, how they see the world, experience the world, their lived experience, what matters to them, how they think, feel, behave and what motivates them. These are the key things that we really seek to understand through taking a human centred approach or a design thinking approach. We always start with the people, we build that empathy, and then we tend to be looking at quite big picture with strategic design and change as well. Understanding the systems at play, how those systems hang together, where the different feedback loops, incentives and the system boundary is, all of these types of systems thinking play pretty heavily into taking the approach as well. Some of that might not traditionally sit in a standard design thinking model, but it's very much that approach to things. In a social enterprise context, a big part of it is starting with ourselves. When we're out there looking to build empathy and create and contribute to positive change, we have actually got to start with ourselves.

A big focus that I work with people on is taking time to build positive happiness habits, being clear on your own personal why, the vision statement that you're working towards and then that theory of change of how these things actually stack up to get there? Design thinking sits underneath and throughout all of that, because the whole process is about iteration and time to explore possibilities and then selecting and narrowing those choices to get sharp clarity on what the real problem to solve is before we jump into solution mode. A lot of us tend to skip understanding the problem. We hear about something, or we see a problem and say, "I know the solution." We tend to jump straight into solution mode. What I love about taking a design thinking approach is we actually immerse ourselves in the problem and really understand the people and the problem that they're experiencing as they experience it, with deep empathy and the context that they experience it in. This includes the systems views of things before we start saying, "I've got an idea for a platform." That is a high-level snapshot of how we apply that human centred design thinking approach to innovation.

You're the author of the book, Solve Problems That Matter: Design Build and Launch Your Social Enterprise. When we're talking about design thinking and all of those strategies involved, what advice would you give to an aspiring innovator or an entrepreneur looking to create change in their own community?

There are so many things, and I'm also hesitant to jump into advice without understanding people in their context. In terms of general advice and ways of approaching things, the very first one is to be happy. This is not happiness in the sense of, "in this moment and as of this mood I feel happy", but happiness in the sense of something that we create for ourselves.

It's happiness and purpose for the things that we create as opposed to things that are bestowed. We need to take charge our own happiness and our own personal wellbeing.

We need to look after our own personal sustainability on our journey of exploring a social enterprise idea, because it's very easy and common (unfortunately) for people on this journey to feel overwhelmed and burnout. Literally the first chapter in my book is called Mindset, and we talk about happiness habits because without that foundation of being able to build some happiness habits and basic ways of looking after our own personal sustainability, then it's far too easy and far too common that we become another casualty on that journey that is actually needing more help than being in a position to provide others help. Be happy, proactively build those happiness habits, understand your own mindset and build that self-awareness through simple things like breathing and even meditation. Also, acquire a basic understanding of neuroscience, especially in terms of really simple practices that can literally change our brain chemistry that put us in a better head space.

Some of the research shows that when we're in a positive head space, we are at least 30% better and more productive in anything that we want to do. It sounds like a bit of a trite thing of saying ‘be happy’, but it has very tangible outcomes. Shawn Achor, who is a happiness researcher, part of his research was with surgeons, and they found that surgeons are 30% better at doing their surgery when they're in a positive head space. Another piece of advice I have is if you need surgery, find a happy surgeon, because they're going to be 30% better!

I can't overstate the importance of looking after ourselves on this journey. It's really important and it's one that we often brush past, or we think we've got handled until we don't. It's much harder to get back to a positive space then to maintain it through happiness habits.

In terms of other advice, of course I strongly recommend taking a human centred approach and building that empathy. We need to come to this type of work with a lot of humility.

It's about working with people and doing things with people, not to people. We don't need more colonial approaches of, “you're broken, I'm going to fix you”. That mindset has caused more damage than positive outcomes.

We need to follow simple principles like nothing about me without me. You don't get to do anything to me unless I'm involved, and I say it's okay. That inclusive design and collaborative change is all part of a human centred design thinking approach. That way of doing design and approaching problem solving I think is really positive and fits very well with social enterprise ideas because that's the reason we're doing it. We're doing it to have a positive impact on people and community. A big issue that comes up often in social enterprise is we tend to fall in love with our idea really early on and we'll just go off and start building the solution, whatever the solution might be. Then we tend to over invest in that solution, and when people aren't using it or paying for it or both, we then try and solve that by adding another fix. But the actual problem potentially wasn't the product or the solution, it was actually the underlying business model and the need. We weren't solving a real problem that matters to people, and we didn't have the right solution to match up against that.

Unfortunately, sometimes we're looking at problems that people just aren't ready to do anything about. You need to do all the things to be able to test that thinking early, see that there is actually demand and that people do want to use the idea for the solution before over investing a lot of time and money into building something that you can't even give away for free and sometimes you can't even pay people to use. That's an unhappy place to be, I have been there a few times with different social enterprise start-ups. Then the final piece of advice which I think is really important is to find a community. It can be a long, lonely journey, and so being able to find a community of other people who are values aligned and doing the same or similar things to you is really important. We're lucky in Australia to have loads of those, and something I talk about as well is if you look locally and you can't find your community, there's plenty of global communities to be a part of. Sometimes you might just need to put in the work to build your local community and bring people together.

Also, all of these things aren't static points in time. They're ongoing, so it's not something you do once, job done and then you don’t need to think about it. They all require nudging along, but when we build momentum on any of these things, it's much easier to maintain.

Keeping that flow and building momentum makes everything in life much easier.

In the next five years, are there any opportunities that you see for social enterprises to reach a broader audience and gain more exposure to a global community?

There's so much activity happening in Australia and globally. It's amazing to be able to connect very easily in a global context now as well. We've got loads to do, there's plenty of social and environmental challenges that we need to take on, and we can't do them alone, we need to collaborate. Finding community and being able to reach these audiences is really important together, not as one. We need that concentration of efforts and collaboration. In Australia, we're really lucky to have the recently formed ASENA, which is the alliance of the social enterprise bodies at the state and territory level. At the national level we've got the Social Enterprise National Strategy into the next phase which is awesome. Then obviously there are all the state and territory bodies. In Australia there is so much potential and so much activity happening. The Social Enterprise World Forum with Brisbane hosting in 2022 has been a really powerful catalyst and focal point to create some urgency and bring all of this activity together in a slightly more organised and cohesive way, which I think is great. In terms of going a bit broader, there's also within Australia (and they technically overlap with social enterprise, but they're not the same thing), the B Corp community. There's always plenty of activity going on with the B Corp community and they are a great way to find other leaders and people that work within organisations that are using business as a force for good. Another organisation and community that I love being part of is Catalyst 2030. It's a global network of people into social enterprise ideas and social innovation to be able to collaborate on a global scale to work towards progressing the SDGs. That community has come together over the last year, and it's amazing seeing how that's growing at a global level and facilitating conversations with people all over the world. We get to hear a bit about what they're doing and then collaborate on different SDGs and topic areas as well. [There are] so many opportunities, there's no shortage of opportunities. One thing that I find challenging, because I like to be in everything, is you have to do a little bit of prioritisation and try not to do everything at once.

I think probably the bigger challenge is which of all these awesome opportunities do I focus on and contribute to meaningfully and without it becoming a full-time job of all this collaboration?

Luckily there's a lot of intersects happening between them as well, and there's plenty of people myself included who are a member of multiple of these organisations building bridges and connections in between this bigger ecosystem that's building around being able to solve problems that matter and do that in really meaningful ways. It's awesome, I love it.

What other organisations have you seen that are creating a strong social impact and improving communities?

I think those organisations and communities are really good focal points. If you're looking to find a community, go have a look there. If you're looking for examples of organisations doing awesome things, it's also a good place to look because that's where collaboration is happening and the density is. The other thing I’ll mention is that you should follow all of the state and territory social enterprise bodies that have stood up in the last couple of years. This is including QSEC and SENVIC earlier than that. You will be able to see all of that activity happening, so if you need examples of people doing great things those peak bodies are great. Historically it's been very fragmented, it was actually hard to go and find these different organisations. But through their activities they are really centralising and bringing communities together, which I think is really powerful.

In terms of other direct organisations, I will shout out a couple of my favourite people that I love working with. Collaboration For Impact, so Kerry Graham and Liz Skelton from CFI do amazing work and get invited into the community to do a lot to work on really challenging complex systems change and take a collaborative and collective impact approach quite often as well. Their work and what they've been doing for seven-eight years now is really impressive and they do it in a really beautiful way as well. YCA or the Young Change Agents including Margaret O'Brien and the team I will mention since we're on the topic of design thinking and social enterprise. They go mostly into schools but work with the twelve to late teens age group and run social enterprise design thinking programs. This is where the students and teachers as well actually work on their own social enterprise ideas and take a design thinking approach to that. They're learning some of these skills and practices but are also learning about social impact and connecting to them why at the same time. It's great to see they've been on the Eastern seaboard for quite a while now but are expanding up into Darwin in Australia and hopefully globally. Remarkable, the disability technology accelerator with Pete Horsley and the team have been doing awesome work for years and have gone global. In terms of their design thinking principles and ways of doing things through inclusive design they have been amazing.

When we design with and for people who have a disability, there is so much evidence to show that creates far better products and services for everyone, because we're designing with more empathy and looking at more usability amongst other aspects.

The work that Remarkable has been doing over the last few years is awesome, and one of the organisations that I met on Remarkable was Wheel Easy. Their quick catch phrase is normally, “the TripAdvisor for mobility and access needs.” Being able to bring together a whole bunch of information in terms of different venues, places and experiences for people who might have mobility challenges, so they know what that venue has is invaluable. People can find out if a place actually has an accessible bathroom, or if you're using a chair can you actually get into the venue? Simple things like that are answered, and one of the key things again is in that inclusive design principle of it's not just for the person who might be a wheelchair user, it's also all their friends and family.

By having this information, it opens up a lot more inclusion for all of those people, and then the universal and inclusive design of it also applies equally to people who might be parents with a pram or somebody who has just injured themselves and is on crutches temporarily. All of these organisations take this inclusive design approach of, “we don't just benefit the target people that we're designing with, but our product or service has far reaching and wider benefits as well. They're just a couple of people and organisations that come to mind, but there are people doing awesome work in Australia and globally. They are a few the work with regularly and I think they do great stuff.

To finish off Ben, are there any books or resources that you would recommend for our audience?

In my book Solve Problems That Matter, I actually refer to a lot of other books. One of the key things with the book is I didn't want to be duplicating or competing with the other great work that's out there, so rather than just repeating great work that's been done, I refer to it, especially when there's additional resources and other tools/ methods that people might want to use. One book I'd recommend, since we have been talking a little bit about design (and design research is a key part of that), is a nice little free eBook IDEO's Little Book of Design Research Ethics. Especially in a social impact context, it's a very simple, easy read for free. Just go to IDEO's website and download it, it has some really basic reminders around the ethics of when we're doing design research and treating people with respect, empathy and some of the ethics involved, which hopefully we all know and do. But it's a powerful little reminder in a simple to digest format. Since we're talking design, there's a great book of methods called Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat., which is very much the design thinking lifestyle. Martin Tomitsch is the lead author on that book and there is a collective of people at the University of Sydney that have put that together, but Martin's the lead.

It's a great book of detailed design methods and techniques that are easy to understand, well laid out and their website has a bunch of resources which you can just go and get for free as well.

It is worth buying the book however, and they've just released a new revision actually. I'm a big fan of Running Lean by Ash Maurya, which is his more famous book, and obviously he is the creator of the remix of the Business Model Canvas, The Lean Canvas, but his books and blogs are really great. He takes a very human centred design approach to the startup world, which sometimes isn't quite there. His work is really good, and he applies his own way of doing the same principles to his work as well. It's very transparent when he's iterating and refining things, and he publishes a lot of that in his blog which is really awesome. A couple of other ones that I noted down include Mindset by Carol Dweck, it's awesome and I encourage everyone to understand more about how mindset works and the idea of a growth mindset and where we might get triggered into our fixed mindset, but it is really easy to read. The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor I mentioned earlier, some of those basic, really practical happiness habits he covers in that book. Then other books more in that social impact space include Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth and Drawdown by Paul Hawken which are great. There are so many great books you could spend all your time reading!