Happy new year! I hope the first few weeks of 2025 have been treating you well. Today I fly home to Sydney after a fun couple of weeks holiday in Bali with my family.
What are your resolutions for 2025?
Research shows 88% of people give up on their resolutions within the first couple of weeks.
Are new year resolutions worth it? Some feel they’re worthless because statistically, they rarely work… others find them valuable… and many feel they “should” be making them.
Temporal landmarks are psychologically powerful, and while the start of a new year is pretty arbitrary, it gives us the beautiful opportunity to turn the page and start fresh. With optimism.
I love temporal landmarks, but I have a complicated relationship with goal setting.
Intent, Direction & Habits
For me, and many people I work with, the value is in the process of setting intent and direction… and building positive habits – more than the specific goals that might come from it.
I do find there’s a lot of value in creating a vision of the future and the change I want to see in the world – and in myself. Creating purpose and a direction to head with intent… with some goals and targets as a way to track progress.
Research shows new year resolutions – and goals in general – fail when they’re overly ambitious, don’t have a meaningful way to be tracked, and aren’t specific enough.
Overall, I agree with what James Clear says in Atomic Habits: “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress”.
We have a lot more success when we build the habits for momentum and embed them in our workflow… with a focus on who we want to become.
I’m also very mindful of the level of control and influence I have in being able to make progress to achieve goals.
Individually and collectively, we seem to like to think we’ve got more control than we actually do. It can be easy to feel torn between being ambitious and believing we just need to work hard to make things happen… and feeling helpless and that our effort doesn’t matter.
How do we approach this in a regenerative way that increases our wellbeing, helps us make progress, and doesn’t lead to burnout?
Check out my full blog post which guides you through the system I’ve created over the years. It takes a strength-based approach focused on building happiness habits and creating your purpose.
I hope you have an awesome 2025. Game on 😃
Ideas
A blog post and a couple of events for you…
Happy International Day of Education 2025!
Today is the International Day of Education! The theme this year is “AI and education: preserving human agency in a world of automation”. It calls for us to reflect on the power of education to equip people and communities to navigate, understand, and influence tech advancement.
In this blog post, I share a bit of my lifelong learning journey over the past 30+ years, especially as it relates to bringing together strategy, design, and tech – and taking a human-centred design and living systems approach aligned with this year’s theme.
SydDT #108: Visual Thinking with Alan Chen & Diana Ayoub from Sh8peshifters
We’re lucky to have Alan Chen and Diana Ayoub from Sh8peshifters kicking off SydDT for 2025 with a visual thinking workshop on 13 February!
Visual thinking is a powerful tool for reflecting, problem solving, and mapping out ideas. In this interactive session, you’ll get started with sketchnoting, a visual note-taking process that uses hand-drawn images and text to convey information.
No drawing skills needed. Just come along and explore how you can make visual thinking your superpower. Grab your ticket now!
SydDT #109/Adelaide Design Thinking #1: What Does Design Mean in Adelaide?
We’re excited to be launching Adelaide Design Thinking (AdlDT) on 20 February! The community grew to 100+ members in the first three weeks – and our first meetup on 20 February is already sold out with a bunch of people on the waitlist. You can still join the community and waitlist for free… more spots might open up.
I’m stoked to be collaborating with Natasha Ballantyne, Maria Raymond, John Robinson, and Monique Moushis who are Adelaide locals to help convene AdlDT.
The focus of our first meetup will be to explore the vital role of design in South Australia, and co-design what the community wants from this meetup.
Natasha Ballantyne and Maria Raymond will be our MCs… and I’ll be hosting a panel with a bunch of awesome Adelaide local designers: Bek Kennedy from Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA), Simon Woods from Employment Hero, and Claire Webber from Intopia.
This will set the scene and flow into open space as an interactive and participatory experience to co-design AdlDT.
Let’s Collaborate
At Dynamic4, we specialise in leadership, design, and innovation with a focus on purpose and wellbeing. We do that by working alongside leaders and their teams to navigate complexity and solve problems that matter.
We love helping our clients design, build, and launch ideas that customers and teams love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet while increasing wellbeing. My book Solve Problems That Matter is a good way to get started.
This draws on my 30+ years of bringing together strategy, design, and tech to lead, design, and deliver strategic change in financial services, digital & tech, health & fitness, and building startups/social enterprises.
What do we actually do? Key ways we help is through coaching and advice, workshops, innovation sprints, and designing and delivering leadership, design thinking & innovation programs.
Our approach builds personal, team, and organisational capability to solve problems that matter with more:
🌿 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
