UXA2023 Ben Pecotich - Regenerative Design & Innovation… for Happier Communities.

Regenerative design. What’s that mean and why should I care? How do I design for regeneration in my own life and design practice? Let's explore practical ways we can design regenerative business, product, and service ideas that customers love - and increase our wellbeing while we do it.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Thursday, 24 August 2023 Captioned by: Bernadette McGoldrick & Kasey Allen
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 138 Alright. Fun fact! (LAUGHTER) Our last speaker for the day, to close us out, Ben Pecotich, who's gonna be talking about regenerative design for happier communities. Ben, welcome to the stage. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 139 BEN PECOTICH: Thank you. Thanks, mate. G'day. I'm Ben. I'm a designer coach and a founder of Dynamic4. We're a social enterprise and B Corps. And I'm lucky to live, work and play on Gadigal Country, right here. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past, present and future as well. I'm gonna be talking about one of my favourite things, which is regenerative design and innovation for happier communities. So, every day, we're faced with these messages around the climate crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, modern slavery, deforestation, water and air pollution, loss of species and biodiversity - and these are really important messages and it's important to know what's going on and have a sense of urgency about it as well. But if this is all that we focus on, then we tend to end up feeling pretty fatigued and burnt out. So, that then leaves us feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and then over time people start disengaging, and that's not what we need. What we do need is a really clear and compelling vision for the future. And we need specific ways that we can take action as well. So, I'm gonna cover three questions: What is this compelling vision for the future? How do we go from those aspirations and then make them real? And then what next? So, kicking off with, what is the vision for the future? I hope you're not looking to me for the answer, 'cause I'm looking to you. I'm keen to hear what you think and I'd love you to think about - maybe take a couple of deep breaths - and think about the future that you actually want. What do you really care about? Cast forward a few years, what are you doing? Who are you doing it with? Imagine if all the other life on our planet was healthy and thriving, what would the air be like? What would the water be like, the food, the soil? Now, imagine that you're doing work that you absolutely love, that energises you, and it's valued not just by you but also by your team and the organisation and by society more
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 140 broadly. If you're spending your time that way, what are you doing? How are you spending your time? So, what's the future that you want for your community and for society more broadly? And what would the economy look like to be able to support that? Hopefully, you've got a bit of a picture building up. If you can make it real, really bring it to life, even better if you can actually feel it in your body and see where in your body you're feeling it, talking about embodied experiences and embodied carbon. So, see if you can really make that real and hold onto that vision. So, if you've got that vision - hopefully, an aspiration of this beautiful future, where people, all life on our planet, is thriving - how do we go from that aspiration down to reality and actually make it real? How do we design for regeneration in our own life, in our own design practice? So, the very first thing is I think we keep being human-centred designers. I think Erin really summed it up great this morning, and I can pretty much say ditto to most of the things Erin said, because one of the things we're really good at is listening and building empathy with people, understanding and making sense of complexity. We are really good and experienced at working one context broader than the thing that we're focused on, which is really important. And we've got the tools. We've got our beautiful Double Diamond, we've got our three lenses, those three perspectives of what's desirable, viable and feasible, being able to bring those together when we're designing solutions. We've got our journey maps and blueprints. And over the years, we've also started heading more into systems thinking. Thinking about the different way the system hangs together, the different interactions, the incentives in the system, and things like system maps to be able to bring that to life. So, hopefully, we're evolving, we're shifting out into those systems and thinking beyond just the human life and the humans in the system, but all of life, and so heading into that life-centred design as well. And so we've progressively
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 141 been designing for these larger scales. We've been evolving as a practice. So, if we can embed more purpose and impact into the things that we design, then we're starting to get closer to that future that hopefully we want to see. And one of the tools I find really useful for this is Theory of Change. Who's familiar with Theory of Change? Any hands? A few hands - awesome. More hands than I thought. That's great. So, hopefully, knowing that vision, where we're trying to get to and the purpose, when we've got clarity around that, everything else is a lot easier. It makes it a lot easier to filter the options, make better decisions. And then when we're really clear on the "why", working out the how and the what becomes a lot easier. And that's really, the Theory of Change, expressed as a logic model. Starting on the right-hand side, looking at that vision - where we're trying to get to. What are the impacts and the outcomes that we're working towards to be able to make that vision real? And then switching to the other end, the problem. So, that vision, why is that not today's reality? What are the barriers? What are the problems? And with the problems, who experiences those problems? What's the context they experience them in? And what do we know about the systemic causes for those problems? So, we can start getting a picture of where we're trying to get to, the current reality, and then we can start getting that clearer before we start getting into designing solutions. So, to bring it to life a little - Dynamic4. The vision, the thing that we're aiming for, is that leaders and organisations solve problems that matter, do that in more empathic and innovative ways, and then measure success not just in profit but also creating great outcomes for people and the planet. And that's so that people and communities can have increasing quality of life, they're happier and healthier, and our planet is healthier and cleaner as well. So, that's where we're trying to get to, and that's the change we're trying to contribute to. But why is that not today's
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 142 reality? So, over the last 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution, businesses transformed our societies, our economy, and our planet. And businesses have actually done a lot of really positive things during that time. So, our life expectancy has more than doubled, quality of life has dramatically increased for many, but not all. Because the way businesses have also operated is actually created or worsened a lot of the problems that we experience today. So, that profit motive has centralised power and wealth, it has a tragic track record of exploiting people, polluting the planet to maximise that profit. So, that's the problem that we're focused on. And then, as a way to bridge that, looking at how can we help leaders and organisations create great outcomes for people, communities, and our planet - while also being financially successful? So, that becomes a bit of the design challenge, and that's when we start looking at the middle of the Theory of Change. So, the inputs, the activities, what we do with them, the things we create as outputs - that then becomes where we're taking action. And that's where we take action then to try and get us closer to those impacts and that vision that we want to see. And it's really in this area where regenerative design and innovation come in. So, you might be wondering, "What's that?" So, I've tried to come up with a definition, and it's sort of synthesised from a few different sources. But it's an approach that actively works to restore and transform social, environmental and economic systems, and that's so that we've got more resilience and wellbeing for people, places, and life on our planet to thrive. So, that's really the focus of it, that's what we're trying to get towards. And you might also be wondering, "I thought we were doing sustainability? Where did this regen thing come from? Why are you shifting the goalposts on us?" And the reality is we're coming from the far left of this little diagram. So, the conventional way of doing business, as
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 143 was just described, it's been actively degenerating living systems. In a lot of cases, it's been causing negative social and environmental impacts. So, that's on the left-hand side. We heard some stuff around greening, which is a positive step forward and part of the journey. Heading to sustainable. But sustainable is actually the point where we're not adding additional harm. And the reality is, we can't sustain the way we currently live, or our planet can't. So, we need to keep sort of nudging towards the right here. We need to do things more restoratively. We need to take a living systems approach to really guide the way we design. We need collaboration. And then it's an approach where we're creating the conditions for living systems to thrive. And that's really getting out into those regenerating the system, so we're actually having a positive impact rather than a negative impact. And so when it comes to sustainability, this is why we can't do it. We can't sustain - the Earth can't sustain the way we currently consume. So, the Earth Overshoot Day is an organisation that calculates the day in the year that, as humans on the planet, we consume more than the planet can regenerate in that year. Unfortunately, again, a couple of weeks ago we passed that day of the year, on 2 August. So, this year, we've already consumed more than the planet can regenerate. And in Australia, we're way worse. We passed that date in March. So, if everybody on the planet consumed as we do in Australia, then we would exceed that in March. So, at the moment, we need about 1.7 Earths to be able to sustain the current consumption. So, it's really not an option to just sustain. We need to rapidly transition to regenerative ways of doing business and living. So, what's good business mean now? Over the years, there's been a positive trend, I think, where operating ethically and sustainably has become pretty much the minimum baseline, especially when you bring a new product or service to market. There's a lot more protection around
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 144 some of the incumbents in certain industries, but that's increasing the expectation. So that means designing our business models, our products and services to actually be regenerative. And there's some really powerful drivers there. Customers want to buy from businesses that are doing good things. Talented people - like the room here - want to work with companies doing good things and do meaningful work. And investors also know that it's actually lower risk and better returns by investing in these types of products, services and businesses. And there's a massive reallocation of capital that's under way. So, we've got this awesome opportunity to use the power of design and business to actually contribute to creating a positive impact, and hopefully that's part of what everyone here wants to be part of that future. And so that really comes down to changing the way we think about, and measure, success. So, when we value and measure outcomes for people and the planet, alongside profit, and profit doesn't supersede them, then that's triple bottom line. So, that's actually bringing those perspectives together of how do we do those three things at once? And to be able to do that, we need adaptive leadership. We can't do this on our own and we need collective action to be able to make it happen. As designers and leaders, we make decisions every day, with our design decisions, on our products and services, "Are we going to get us closer to that vision that we want or not?" So, we're actually deciding this in action, in real time. And then with action learning as a key way to be able to approach this, there are some principles I really love. The first one is - pardon me - learning starts with not knowing. And that pairs nicely with "when we know better, we can do better". And then another one is that there's no experts in complex challenges. And everything that we've been talking about so far, they're definitely complex challenges. So, there's no experts. But a third one I really love is that the people who
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 145 decide to take action and take responsibility in a challenging situation, they're actually the people that have the highest chance of success in making a positive impact. So, if you clump those together, hopefully we can find ourselves in a much better place. And so the great news is people are working on it, and have been for a long time, and the movement is actually gaining traction. There are some interesting scales at play. Paul Hawkins, a couple of books. One was The Drawdown. The second one more recently on regeneration. A couple of awesome books. And then also the Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Wall. Both of these are at the very planetary scale. So, we're starting all the way out. And then we look at the economic scale. So, Kate Raworth's work, I'm a big fan of this book and her work which, we'll talk about more in a moment. But now we're looking at how do we actually design for the economy and economies across different scales to be more regenerative? And then we've got this one, recognised as one of the earliest leaders in this movement. And that's looking at the business level, but also the people and leadership that make that up. Then we get down into the design level. Hopefully, you've seen the Life-Centred Design Guide. So, it's starting to look at a bunch of these frameworks and then how they might apply to these specific design practices. And then coming out later this year, Martin and our own Steve Baty, Designing Tomorrow. I can't say what's in that because I haven't seen it yet! How do we use design and that sort of design scale that goes down the scales? Something that's left out of these conversations is the individual, the humans doing the work. And that's why I really love this book on mindset, because that's where everything starts. And also Flow, which is legendary. And then I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Solve Problems That Matter, which is really how to take and integrate all of
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 146 these different ways of doing things at all of those different scales into actually taking action. And how do we take a human-centred approach to design, build, and launch regenerative ideas? The other good thing is we've got frameworks, so we're not starting at zero. There's been plenty of frameworks today and you'll have a few more. But I'm not gonna deep-dive on them. A lot of this is just some threads to pull later. So, again at the planetary scale, we've got the UN sustainable development goals, the SDGs. But I really love the way that the Stockholm Resilience Centre visualised it with the doughnut - well, it's actually a wedding cake, they call it. So, it's then looking at the biosphere, society, and the economy, and how all 17 of the SDGs are completely connected and interrelated, and in this specific context they were actually looking at how food is a thread that pulls all of those together. And then also Stockholm Resilience Centre, they did some awesome work on the planetary boundaries. So, some of those things in terms of what are our finite resources on the planet and how are we going in terms of their consumption? Then we've got the national level. So, last month, in Australia, we had our very first Wellbeing Budget released. Which is, to me, a pretty awesome thing. So, measuring what matters. And so rather than just looking at GDP and some of the traditional economic measures, actually looking at what it looks like for Australia, and Australians, to be healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive and prosperous. So, more dimensions than just the straight prosperous or economic measures, and I think that's a huge step forward. And then the circular economy movement, which has been around forever but made huge momentum over the last few years. And then coming back to the doughnut. Kate Raworth's doughnut, looking at social foundations we need in place for all living things to thrive, especially people, and then that planetary boundary, and then how do we design for experiences that
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 147 actually live within those constraints? And that's at a planetary level. But the great thing here is it's then been designed to downscale. So, rather than just leaving it up here at the world's to-do list, how do we look at our more localised version of things? So, both Sydney regen and Melbourne regen, a couple of organisations I recommend checking out and getting involved with, they've spent some time over the last few years mapping the doughnut, specifically within the Sydney and Melbourne context. So, definitely worth checking out. And also the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which is in this space as well. So, hopefully you're getting the thread of scales in design. And just to keep pushing that, hopefully everyone recognises the very old-school Jesse James Garrett five Elements of User Experience. This is an illustrated version. But showing the different scales, and we don't necessarily just design up here, we also design at different scales and they all hang together and they all interrelate. And then, funnily enough, similar timing - it was actually a systems thinking version of the iceberg as well. So, looking at, again, those different layers involved. And so without tumbling down an integral theory rabbit hole, which we can do at drinks, the concept is really important that, with these scales, that every hole is actually made of up other holes and is part of other holes. So, they're all nested. And so when we're thinking about the scales and levels of design, that as each new hole emerges, it transcends but also includes everything that came before. We're not talking about scrapping all of our design practices that we have been doing forever. It's how do we use all of those things, evolve, include them, and start consciously designing for the larger scale? But we also still need to execute the detail. And that's gonna be hard to see from there. But this is a scales of regenerative design, so showing kind of that nesting. So, on the sort of
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 148 middle-left, we've got the products and services that many of us in the room spend our days designing. It then also shows how they then interact with the broader system and the ecosystem and scale out. So, that question of, "How do I design for regeneration in my own life and design practice?" So, going to try and get practical. So, the very first thing is I want you to be happy. Everyone happy? Won't be too much longer before drinks! So, when it comes to being happy and happiness habits, we've been conditioned to constantly think that, "We'll just achieve this one thing and then I'll be happy. I'll achieve this other thing and then I'll be happy." So, Shawn Achor talks about, individually and collectively, we keep moving the cognitive, the happiness goalposts over the cognitive horizon. We keep putting it out of reach. Whereas from all the happiness research that he's done, it's actually the other way around. When we're happy, we're in a positive state, we're smarter, more motivated, and more successful. And so happiness is actually at the centre, and success revolves around it. And we're not talking, like, a few one per cents uplift here. From that research, across a range of professions, there was actually a 30%-plus uplift in efficiency and productivity and just being better at whatever you're doing when you're in a positive state. So, if you can only do one thing and only get one thing from this talk, work on your happiness habits! And he does talk about it as a work ethic. So, the practical actions to take to help build those happiness habits. And there's a really great resource called Great Good In Action from Berkeley University, which helps out in practical ways. Another awesome framework which has emerged over the last couple of years, still pretty emergent, is the inner development goals. We talked about the to-do list with SDGs, we actually need to do the inner work so that we're in a good state to be able to make that happen. It's a framework with five dimensions and 23 skills and qualities. You probably
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 149 won't be able to read it but you'll be able to see them later. Some of them I really love is the openness and learning mindset, over the on the left-hand side. Critical thinking - we definitely need to build that. The humility and empathy. And then coming all the way to the right, acting. If we don't act, then nothing changes. And to act, it means that we need courage, we need our creativity, optimism, and it's a word that's been used a few times today - we need to be able to persevere. And we can't persevere if we don't have all of these other things going on, so it's really important work. That's why I encourage people to actually actively put together a wellbeing plan. So, before things go a bit sideways ideally, actually think about what are the things you already do or have done in your life that actually help you feel happy and healthy, and literally write them down across these different dimensions. Because when we're doing this work, it's easy for it to become all-consuming. That means we can lose balance and perspective. So, I encourage you to do that. But then we need a backup plan. Because there will be rough days. So, thinking about, you know, what are the patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, where that's a lead indicator that we're not heading in a healthy direction? And over what time period? That will be different for different people. Who are you gonna talk to? What's the action plan for when it happens, not if it happens, it's when it happens. So, happiness - happiness habits. Absolutely critical. Then into some design principles, which I created this set of design principles back in 2010 for Dynamic4, which I wanted to be able to encapsulate everything that we're about, and they actively guide everything from our strategic decisions down to operations and specific design decisions. So, people first, positive impact, perspective and context. And then finally, dynamic and adaptable. Because we're living and playing in dynamic, complex, adapting systems. Nothing is static, as was mentioned earlier.
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 150 So, I'm not going to read all these questions, but I've laid out a few questions to then be able to help think about what are each of these design principles and how to bring them to life in your specific context. So, people first, designing with and for people to deliver great experiences. And a key one there is, "Whose voice is missing from the conversation?" When we're doing design, whose voice is missing and how do we actively do something to help bring them in? Something I want to be very clear on with this one as well is please don't see people as problems to fix. Deficit thinking is really dangerous and it's harmful to the people involved and it doesn't actually get to the underlying cause and issue. So, please don't see people as problems to fix. It's not nice. Positive impact. So, how to be positive, reliable, trustworthy, working with positive people, being regenerative. And then a bunch of questions, which you can hopefully reflect on, and especially sort of the two halves here of your personal purpose and value system and then the values and the purpose of the organisation that you're working with. If they're out of sync, you're gonna be exhausted and it will more likely lead to burnout. So, treat it as a design challenge of how do you get those more in alignment? And that doesn't mean necessarily finding a different job. Treat it as a design challenge. Perspective and context. So, again, looking at, "How am I going to look after my own wellbeing?" Keep that perspective. Thinking about those different scales. And what else have we got there? What are those different ecosystems involved? And a few, sort of, prompts underneath. And finally, dynamic and adaptable. So, always be learning. I think that's the key to everything. Identify and respond positively to change. So, what are those big trends emerging? We've got the intergeneration report with that 40-year crystal ball. How do we make that something better than is currently forecast? That's another design challenge I think we all need to
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 151 take on. So, what next? I've just raced through a whole bunch of different models and frameworks, and I've definitely treated it more as a series of threads and things that might sort of pique your interest. If you hit that QR code, it will take you to a blog post I've written, which has a link to a whole bunch of those resources and a longer version of this talk, if you want that! And I'll upload my slides there as well. But that's a way to then capture some of the things and maybe pull on some of the threads that I've just talked about briefly. And then the other thing is that this is a team sport. We actually need to do it together, we need that collective action. So, here's a whole bunch of organisations that are very much working on these in this space, in the regen space, and in social and environmental impact. Happy to talk about any of them. And then a quick shout-out for IxDA. February next year, in six months tomorrow to the day, is Interaction Week 2024, and we're lucky to be hosting it in Sydney for the first time that it's gonna be outside of North America or Europe. So, if you hit that QR code, you'll be able to get the last of the early bird tickets, and also put forward a proposal to be able to speak. So, you get the opportunity. And it's very much on topic. So, the theme that we've got is "revisit, reframe, regenerate". So, we're very much on theme here. So, in terms of what's next, the main thing is that I hope you'll share your vision. And then do the work to make it real. And I'd love to hear what your vision is, when you hopefully were getting that picture earlier, I would love to actually hear what it was. So, if we can think about that bigger picture and get really clear about the "why" that we're designing for, then that will drive how we design and what we design. Because our world view does actually shape our design. Let's collaborate to solve problems that matter. And those are problems that matter for our teams, for our customers, and all life on our planet. And if we do that
16. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 152 with regenerative business models, products and services that are financially successful, and then we also look after our wellbeing while we're doing it. And most of all, I hope you have fun solving problems that matter. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: Alright. Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of Day One. How awesome! (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) Yeah, thank you to all of our speakers today. That has been a really, really wonderful spread of talks. (End of transcript)