Newsletter: What’s your story?

How’s things? I hope you’re having a fun week… I am but also can’t believe it’s November on Friday 😲

Time to accelerate before taking a break. I’m in the process of testing an idea at the moment. I’ve been asking myself…

What’s your story?

Sharing your story is an important part of any change journey. A good story will resonate with your audience, engage their curiosity, and generate conversation.

There’s a lot of focus on “pitching” in the startup world, and a couple of the tools I’m about to mention have “pitch” in the name.

I find it more helpful to think of it as sharing your story.

The goal of sharing your story in this context is generally to start a real conversation. A clear and compelling story will help attract customers, team members, and supporters.

The people you’re talking with or to – preferably not talking at – need just enough information to understand what you’re talking about, and not so much that they get overloaded and switch off.

This can be a tricky balance to find. There are normally so many points that we feel are really important to share, but if we share them all at once, we can lose the opportunity to continue the conversation.

I know I often get this wrong. Experimentation and practice are the keys to getting better at it.

So how do we craft an engaging and compelling story?

Start With Who

What we’re talking about is communication design. Good design and good communication always start with the people. The who.

Who are we talking with? What do we know about them? What do they care about? How do they see the world? What’s on their mind right now?

The more we know about our audience and the more empathy we can build, the better our chances of crafting a message that matters to our audience.

What’s next in crafting your story?

Check out my blog post where I cover more on your audience, your message, the when and how, and continuing the conversation.

I also guide you through creating your Gaddie Pitch and pitch deck – and you can download the free simple pitch deck template I use for purpose-driven ideas.

Solve Problems That Matter

This is an excerpt from my book Solve Problems That Matter. It’s a playbook with actions and worksheets to help you take a human-centred design and living systems approach to design, build, and launch your idea.

Ideas that teams and customers love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet while increasing wellbeing.

What question do you wish I’d asked… and what’s your response to it?

This is the final question I ask in the leadership research I’m doing. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Get involved!

I’m curious to learn more about how you’re adapting to meet the rapidly increasing expectations of your teams, customers, investors, and regulators. I’ll present the findings from my research in a report. It might even evolve into my next book.

Join the waitlist for the report now to be the first to get it. When you join the waitlist, you’re also invited to complete the survey that takes ~5 minutes, and you can express interest in being interviewed.

There’s been a great response… a huge thanks to the 100+ people who’ve already shared their experience and insights. I’m doing more interviews at the moment too. More soon…

Ideas

An event and a blog post for you…

SydDT #106/Design Connection #3: State of the Design Nation with Ben Crothers & Nila Rezaei

For our 6 November Sydney Design Thinking meetup, we’re lucky to have Ben Crothers and Nila Rezaei sharing their reflections as a couple of the judges for the 2024 Good Design Awards. Since 2018, this has become an annual SydDT tradition and a time to reflect on the state of the design nation… full of interesting observations, insights, and trends.

This event is brought to you by Macquarie Group, Sh8peshifters, and Dynamic4. Grab your ticket before it sells out. New members are welcome!

What’s SydDT? Find out all about it with write-ups, photos, and recordings of our past meetups.

Reflecting on SXSW Sydney 2024

This month was another fun SXSW Sydney and the theme this year was The Future Belongs to the Curious. I couldn’t agree more. A packed week of tech & innovation, music, screen, and games. My highlights were catching up with loads of people… and Johann Hari’s stolen focus keynote.

Let’s Collaborate

At Dynamic4, we specialise in coaching, training, and working alongside leaders to solve problems that matter. With 30+ years in financial services, this is one of my happy places.

A key way we do this is by designing and delivering action learning experiences with masterclasses, workshops, innovation sprints, and leadership, design thinking & innovation programs.

We bring together design thinking, regenerative innovation, wellbeing, and purpose into an integrated practice.

These sessions build personal, team, and organisational capability to lead with confidence, clarity, and purpose:

🌿 Confidence to navigate complexity and solve problems that matter for your teams, customers, shareholders – and build momentum with more certainty and less risk while increasing your wellbeing

❤️ Clarity to empathically engage your stakeholders, make better decisions, and collaborate to create solutions that your teams and customers love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet

🎯 Purpose that drives progress on your goals and creates meaningful value that you’re proud of for all stakeholders – and build the relationships, workflows, rhythms, and habits for success

Keen to chat about how we can have fun collaborating to solve problems that matter? Book a free 15-minute discovery call.

Have fun!

Ben