Humans Aren't Robots

In this episode, Sam chats with founder and educator Nicole Dyson. We always really enjoy chatting to Nicole and hearing about the ways she is challenging education systems, inspiring young people and building a new way of learning and adapting for kids in a world that is rapidly changing. We are now in a world where the average 12 year old will have 17 jobs in their career and 50% of jobs won't even exist at the point that young people leave school. Nicole is providing new ways for students to learn, to experiment and explore. Links: Nicole Dyson Future Anything The Art Of Gathering book by Priya Parker

This week Sam chats with entrepreneur, journalist and creator of Young Blood Men's Mental Health, Callum MacPherson. Young Blood is an amazing podcast all about men's mental health, challenging stigmas and striving for a world with less suicide. They chat about Callum's past in the media, how he is building his company, meeting amazing people and sharing life-changing stories. People's attitudes towards mental health has changed a lot over the past few years, Sam and Callum chat about what this means for workplaces, teams and how to create spaces where people can be open about issues. Links: Callum MacPherson Young Blood Mens Mental Health

Lauren is a Social Impact Specialist. She works for the Atlassian Foundation and was here in Adelaide to run a session at Southstart. Lauren works with dynamic, creative and purpose-driven teams and leaders. She had some great insight into companies that really live their values and encourage their teams, building aligned teams of people.

In this episode I chat with Ben Colley who works for Teamgage and founded the GOOD Product community here in Adelaide. I've been keen to have Ben on the podcast for a while, he has a really interesting background and has some great experience working with startups and building diverse teams - something I was really keen to chat about.

Purpose is a bit of a buzz word at the moment but it's something that is really important to people, and more and more it is essential to think about for customers. It's something I have been going back and fourth on for for a while, often it is assumed that to make an impact, your purpose needs to be huge - something that will change the world. I am trying to reframe this, I think we can approach it more simply with smaller goals that actually still create a big impact - to do meaningful work with your team, choosing partners who align with your goals and working in a way that can help our communities. Everything we do these days says something about us, where we buy our clothes, what food we eat and especially where we work. People want to be a part of something they believe in.

At Digital Noir, we work in a creative environment and industry so creativity is kind of a given but creativity is in everyone, and in all industries. Creativity is how we approach problems, how we look at things, how we work with different skillsets to get to a common goal. So many business practices can really stifle creativity - we need to allow the time and the space for new ideas, creativity and ambiguity.

Fear is something that affects people in all walks of life. In all jobs and industries. It's an extremely strong emotion and something that can really affect our ability to perform at our best. We discuss Fear with our guests and interestingly hear it described in so many ways - all of our guests had a different take on how it can manifest in situations and ways of confronting it.

This season, each episode is a mash up of different conversations centred around a theme. This week's subject is Diversity. It's something we've been thinking about and discussing on the podcast for a while. Not just integrating diversity at a "high" level in a company, but actually looking at practicalities and some real issues faced by current and new staff. All these conversations were recorded live at SouthStart. In this episode I speak with Sally-Ann Williams - CEO at Cicada Innovations, Lauren Capelin - Principal at Starmate, Katrina Dunn - Global MD Impact Capital - Catalize, Sarah Nolet - General Partner at Tenacious Ventures

A series of chats with some amazing speakers from SouthStart last year. This episode's theme is the Future of Work.

Craig described Southstart as a gathering of curious, creative chaotic individuals stumbling through the world trying to change the future somehow. I love that. Our chat focused on fostering that spirit and, more broadly, how we continue to do this outside of events like this. Some key areas of the conversation were: Southstart 2021 Community building How to have better (more meaningful) conversation Decentralisation and the future (and what it means) Blockchain technology The importance of hospitality and much more! Thanks so much to Craig for taking the time to speak, and we look forward to Southstart 2021 - GET YOUR TICKETS HERE.

I really enjoyed my chat with Nick. He is best known as the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Linktree. If you have not heard of them I am not sure what rock you have been under! Linktree is a tech platform that connects audiences to the online ecosystems of brands, celebrities, creators and causes. I am sure many of you have it on your Instagram account as we speak. Nick is a fellow designer and has lead a really interesting career.

It was a pleasure chatting with Cormac. He was speaking at Pause Fest last year and we sat down and had a wide-ranging conversation. Storytelling is at the heart of everything Cormac does and in our chat, I discoed it has been a constant thread in his life and career, starting from, his Punk Rock roots in Ireland and taking him around the world in a variety of roles.

Alastair Simpson is a leader and mentor, serving as VP of Design at Dropbox. He loves working with multi-disciplinary teams to solve complex business and interaction design challenges. When we spoke to him, he was head of design at Atlassian, leading a cross-geo design team across a portfolio of their cloud Products and Platforms; Trello, Confluence, Platform, Design System, Ecosystem and Growth. He hails from the UK but has spent time living and working in Australia and Sydney and is a passionate advocate for design becoming more central to modern business. We spoke to him at Pausefest about design in the modern world, leadership, and finding a mentor. Enjoy!

On this weeks episode, we sat down with Trent Clews-de Castella - Co-founder of Phoria. PHORIA is a world-leading immersive tech studio that specialises in cutting-edge Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR/XR) technology. Trent started the business with some friends from school and they have grown to a team of over 30 people in Melbourne. We met Trent as they were demoing some of their interactive experiences live from Pause fest earlier in the year. We discussed the real-world use cases of VR and AR and what the future of the space looks like. What it is like growing a business with three mates and some insights into fast growth.

This week on Humans Aren't Robots we present a fantastic conversation with the world's leading authority on sextech, Bryony Cole. Sex Tech you say? What is that? Oh, just a 30 30 dollar industry and valued at 130 billion over the next 5 years. A perfect guest for our podcast. I started the chat by asking Bryony what one of the most defining moments in her life has been and from there we tackle a number of topics including changing the narrative around sex, sex tech and what it means to be a male in 2020! A fascinating conversation, thanks Bryony!

I had such a fun time talking with Miles Orkin. Miles is a UX lead at Google and spends a lot of his time thinking about how he can empower teams. Miles started his career writing to Thrasher magazine. Which basically makes him my hero! Miles had some fantastic insights into how to create an environment in your workplace that is geared towards maximum happiness and success from teams.

I was really excited to sit down with Dom Pym who is the Co-Founder of Up Bank and software development company Ferocia. I have heard Dom speak a few times and have been a fan of Up since it launched a few years ago. If you have not come across Up, it is at the forefront of changing the way we think about bank and banking. I fell in love with their customer-centric approach and attention to small detail. Things that I love in any product, especially ones as integral to everyday life as banking. Dom has had an interesting career covering many roles and I took this opportunity to dive int his mind and uncover some gems for all of you.

It was an absolute pleasure to meet and chat with Kate earlier this year at Pausefest. Kate has followed her curiosity and passion and found herself the director of design at NEST which is now a Google company. She studied industrial design here in Australia and had dreams of designing more human connections with computers. She started her career at Emu design in Brisbane at a time when there were only a handful of serious product agencies here in Aus. Her career has taken her to Finland working with Nokia and to the heart of silicon valley with Twitter and Amazon. We spoke about some of the differences in culture across these companies and how they let their employees flourish at work. I am really interested in the bridge between industrial design and interface design. I think back to 2000 in my final year of high school, in my design class we worked on designing mobile phones, looking at new form factors (mine looked like a slightly slimmer 5210 🙂 I can't help but wish we had focussed on the interface design at that point in time. An industrial design ethos lends itself very well to UX / UI and Kate and I discuss these parallels and how they have helped shape her career across both hardware and software design. If you would like to find Kate you can on LinkedIn or Twitter and also check out Google Nest

Welcome to Season 2 of Human's Aren't Robots. In this series of conversations we dive into the realm of creative leadership with humans from some of the worlds most successful companies. We have guests from Google, Atlassian, Nest, Phoria, The future of Sex, Up Bank and more - We touch on a wide range of topics with Creative leadership and Design as the central theme - but get into punk rock, skateboarding, sex toys and much much more. We were podcasting live from Pause Fest 2020 - just prior to COVID and the end of travelling podcasts as we knew it! We hope you enjoy this season.

Following another week of rapidly changing new stories, government updates and more uncertainty, I reached out to Jim Antonopoulos, a fellow designer and friend who's thoughts on leadership and teams I find extremely interesting and thought-provoking. Jim runs Tank, a strategic design & innovation consultancy - if you aren't already subscribed to his weekly newsletter I'd definitely recommend signing up here at marchfirst.com.au