Highlighting Business Designer Benedicte Lysaker
Let us reimagine the mindset of progress and growth. Today we have economies that grow by taking away our future. What we need are economies that grow by adding to our future.
Benedicte Lysaker is a business designer at NoA Ignite, a digital design agency in Oslo, Norway. Her work involves designing sustainable businesses and helping them spark innovation.
What has motivated you to make the planet a stakeholder to your work?
I love our planet and i see no way out of not including it as a stakeholder to our work. As David Attenborough put it so nicely, “Our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence. We are ultimately bound by and reliant upon the finite and natural world about us.” I am very motivated to design solutions that prevent us from reaching that edge.
Being a business designer motivates me to help our customers understand and explore new ways to create value and circular design solutions that will strengthen the productive, natural and social capital in the world and hopefully make the companies even more resilient.
People, planet, profit — It really is a beautiful ecosystem that, designed properly, can create growth beyond our imagination.
How do you feel companies will be affected by climate change in the coming years?
I believe they will realize that they do not have a choice to ignore it any more. More pressure from stakeholders will force companies to take more action. Up until now most companies’ primary climate response has focused on measures that have a short-term, cost-saving effect. I believe we will see a shift from this to longer-term measures that will generate revenue and resilient growth through the development of climate-friendly products and services.
Climate change will also create a series of new business risks. Besides the most obvious physical risks (such as the impact from extreme weather events and sea level rise), companies will be exposed to transition risks which arise from society’s response to climate change. For example, changes in technologies, markets or regulation that will increase business costs, undermine the viability of existing products or services, or affect asset values.
However, climate change also offers new business opportunities. Companies can aim to improve their resource productivity (for example by increasing energy efficiency and replacing fossil energy), which would thereby reduce their costs. Climate change can spur innovation — inspiring new products and services that are less carbon intensive or that enable carbon reduction.
Companies can enhance the resilience of their supply chains by reducing reliance on price-volatile fossil fuels and shifting towards renewable energy. These are some actions that can foster competitiveness and unlock new market opportunities.
Companies must step up their pace of implementation as we enter a decisive decade for people and the planet. We must strive to connect the dots across all that we do — as individuals, civic groups, corporations and municipalities and truly embrace the principles of inclusion and sustainability to make the world thrive in the future.
How might design help companies in the green shift?
The role of design has never been more important than now and I believe design will help companies reframe the thinking around how businesses, products, services, experiences and objects are being designed. Design has always been about exploring the ambiguous and learning by doing. I believe design can help companies overcome many obstacles, apathy and enable a mindset of “bias towards action.”
The scale of what we’re designing has shifted from products, to companies, and now to economic systems. Design has shifted from a linear approach to a circular approach, which is all about designing for users, stakeholders, and the systems they’re part of. Design can also help through employing highly iterative processes, like prototyping and testing–not just in a late stage but continuously throughout a project. Which is really good because then it can be leveraged in all areas of the business ecosystem.
The global economy is stuttering and disruptive technologies will challenge established business models. We need to look at the how these systems are built with new, circular, creative eyes, and this is where the designer will play a key role.
Designers are working with systems all the time. Good design is being able to step backwards and forwards, to step away from an object and look at the system, to step even closer to understand how the details work. Designers are used to moving backwards and forwards through the different levels of complexity. What has changed now is that the designer is being asked to step back a bit further to look at the object or the experience they may be designing, and to think about the system those objects or experiences may be a part of, and think about how they might influence the design of the whole system through the idea of circularity.
Design and creativity has never been more important. Regenerative and distributive design create extraordinary opportunities for the 21st-century economy. By including design in the process, I believe a designer can help reframe mindsets, ask the right questions, and start exploring the extraordinary possibilities.
Illustration by Zhi Wang
How might companies adapt their mindsets to bring the planet into their operations?
We need to look at our economic systems through a new lens. To step away from the traditional grey-growth way of thinking and adapt a mindset of healthy growth that includes going from a linear to a circular mindset. To move away from limitations and move towards infinite thinking and more value–and purpose driven–operations. To see growth and progress as something bigger than just financial outcomes.
Let us reimagine the mindset of progress and growth. Today we have economies that grow by taking away our future. What we need are economies that grow by adding to our future. This is a profound shift in mindset, but I believe this is the shift we need to make if we, humanity, and the planet, are going to thrive in the future.
My hope is that companies choose a much higher ambition when it comes to bringing the planet into their operations, because humanity’s 21st century challenge is clear: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.
What is your advice to someone wanting to start bringing the planet into their work?
Just get started, and start small so that you don’t get overwhelmed. Everyone has a role to play in creating new solutions. Start small, break it down, be curious about the process and the objective when you embark on this new adventure of making the business you work for more sustainable.
Form a small group of people that has the same dedication as yourself and start by mapping out what your organization’s challenges are and take it from there.
What would you like to see happen in the coming years- what is your wish list for climate action?
Better and more realistic communication and storytelling. Talking more about what has actually been accomplished than just talking about “sustainability.” We need to hear more about actual solutions. This will spark more optimism and hope in the work towards mitigating climate change. It is important that we inspire and motivate each other in this work and good, realistic stories can be an enabler of inspiration and motivation.
As I mentioned, I’d love to see more value and purpose driven strategies — and concrete goals that specifically say something about the objectives the companies are working towards rather then just being “more sustainable.” We should talk about climate, environment, diversity, gender equality, justice, and social responsibility in addition to solutions.
And finally, I’d love to see more collaboration–both cross-disciplinary and across established businesses and start-ups–bolder ideas and solutions and a mindset with bias-towards-action mentality. Let’s redesign the world, ecosystems and business so that our planet can prosper for many generations to come. Now is definitely the most exhilarating time to be an innovator, let’s take advantage of that!
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Benedicte Lysaker is the founder of Epoke, an innovation consultancy and has recently reviewed Per Espen Stoknes’ Grønn Vekst for the Hive Initiative. She can be found at LinkedIn.
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This article was first published on the Hive Initiative Medium account.