How’s things? I hope you’re having a fun week!
Tomorrow night (12 June) is our Sydney Design Thinking (SydDT) 10th birthday meetup… come join the fun!
We’ve got five awesome speakers sharing their insights on leveraging transdisciplinary approaches to innovate living space technology in the era of AI-driven experiences to create human-centered, future-ready products.
In my last newsletter I reflected on creating the conditions, mindset, and approach to successfully lead innovation and solve problems that matter.
When it comes to doing innovation, one of the questions we need to answer is… what are the external forces, patterns, and trends impacting our ideas?
A solution and business model are designed to create value and operate within a specific context. But what is that context?
Before diving in to explore potential solutions and business models, I find a lot of value in doing a couple of critical things.
The first is to zoom out to see the system. Pausing to zoom out to see the whole system we’re working in gives us a better perspective, which often results in us seeing things in new ways.
The next is to zoom in on your organisational context. This applies equally to doing innovation in established organisations as a startup.
We do this to understand how external forces are likely to impact us directly, the constraints, and where things are trending. These insights help us design and iterate our solution and business model.
There are a few tools that are useful for this, like Porter’s 5 Forces, PESTLE, and DEEPLIST – but my favourite is the Business Model Environment tool from Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Co.
This tool was designed to use with the Business Model Canvas, but I’ve found it works just as well with the Lean Canvas.
A business model is designed and operates within a specific context. The Business Model Environment tool helps us identify and map the context we’re operating in. This model looks at four types of external forces.
Check out my full post where l outline the four forces and the elements that make them up. I also share some tips on how I use genAI for this research and some key things I’ve learnt.
What are the external forces, patterns, and trends impacting your ideas?
Ideas
A couple of events and a blog post for you…
SydDT #114: 10th Birthday & Designing Spatial Interactions in Living Spaces
On 12 June, we’re lucky to have Steven Bai, Rianna Mo, Dr Ian McArthur, Jessie Wen, and Jason Ho speaking. These leaders from business, academia, and creative industries will explore how to future-proof design in the era of AI-driven experiences.
We’ll also be celebrating a couple of milestones. SydDT’s 10th birthday… and 10,000 members! Grab your ticket. There might even be cake 😃
The Evolution of Australia Design Thinking
A massive welcome to Byron Design Thinking and Brisbane Design Thinking who officially joined our Australia Design Thinking (AusDT) collective last week!
AusDT is a collective of local design communities across Australia taking a design thinking and living systems approach to innovation and solving complex problems – to help create great outcomes for people, our planet, and business.
We have in-person events in Sydney, Adelaide, Byron, and Brisbane with Melbourne coming soon – and the Australia Design Thinking Linkedin group as an online place to share events, news, articles, and other inspiration… and continue conversations. Join the fun!
SydDT #115: Celebrating Indigenous Entrepreneurship & NAIDOC Week
To celebrate NAIDOC Week, on 10 July we’re collaborating with Stephen Rutter from First Nations Finance to bring together a group of awesome Indigenous changemakers who are designing better ways to protect Country, use technology for culture, and back the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Join us for a night of connection, insight, and celebration. We’re lucky to be hearing directly from Stephen Rutter, Lisa Sarago, Scott Allen, Tshinta Morris-Fernando, and Tim Moriarty who are pushing boundaries and creating impact by designing a better future, grounded in culture.
Let’s Collaborate
At Dynamic4, we specialise in regenerative 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.
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 & advice, innovation sprints, and designing & delivering leadership, design thinking & innovation programs. My book Solve Problems That Matter is a good way to get started.
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
