Each and every week the Square Holes team are deep in the bowels of a number of projects, working to mine all of the insights that we can to help grow businesses and support thriving cities.

These insights are used by businesses and organisations to innovate their offerings, move into new markets, track their impact and hone their products and output. Each week we will be sharing a broad insight that we have learnt for you to use in your own work.

Let us know what you find valuable!

Mahalia: Automating humanity

Currently, I have a lot of pals looking for work, and one thing they all keep coming up against is AI. Before even getting their foot in the door, they are being screened and rejected. I understand the lure of automating frustrating tasks, but hasn’t history proven time and time again that the best person for the job isn’t always the one who looks best on paper? When we leave human jobs up to machines, what are we potentially missing?

Ewa: Does choice still matter?

A stat that stood out this week: delivery hit $1 billion in sales for McDonald’s Australia in 2025.

Despite ongoing cost-of-living pressures, Australians are still spending heavily on delivery. Platforms like Uber Eats keep growing, and for big brands like McDonald’s, delivery is now a core part of the business.

“Fast food” is starting to be less about speed and more about what’s convenient and easy.

At face value, it looks like a simple story – people choose convenience.

What I find more interesting is how much of that behaviour is actually a choice.

The easier something becomes, the less we really choose it. We rely more on habit, defaults and heuristics than active evaluation. We follow the path in front of us: open the app, reorder the usual, done. No real pause, no consideration of alternatives.

From a research perspective, “choice” and “preference” become more difficult to interpret. Did someone actively want that option – or was it simply the quickest, lowest-effort route? In a world designed to make things quick and easy, behaviour increasingly reflects the system as much as individual preference. Small design choices – default options or app layout – quietly influence what people do.

What does that mean for us as market and social researchers?

It’s a reminder to pay attention to the systems shaping decisions – both social (norms, habits, context, culture) and physical (the design of the apps people use to “choose”).

And maybe to shift the focus slightly: From “why did you choose that?” to “how easy was it not to?”

Jason: Change is constant

Change is constant, and the most important personal trait for survival historically and into the future is resilience.

When looking at strategic thinking around ‘how to change behaviour,’ whether for health measures or changes for the benefit of the community, the simple lesson from our pandemic and post-pandemic world is that everything can be turned upside-down, and our normal safe behaviours can shift quickly. Sometimes for the good and other times not.

Be it a fuel crisis, cost of living crisis or pandemic, when shit hits the fan, seismic events have an impact. Government steps in, everyone panics, and everyone shifts. Culture shifts, behaviours shift. In a short period, what was normal evolves into a new normal.

Fear, disruption and inevitability have become increasingly common tools of behavioural and cultural change.

I can recall working for the government a few years ago, looking to finalise a purpose statement from the government leader at the time. While the statement focused on the critical role of government and the teams within it was largely supported, there was a sense of change fatigue across the staff workshops, and an acceptance that uncertainty was reality. This is mirrored in businesses and the general community.

The frustration in change, even if inevitable, is that it often doesn’t make things better, or better for everyone. So, a level of change fatigue and frustration creeps in. People start to compliantly change their behaviour because they have given up on pushing back. Resistance is learned to be futile. New norms, even if worse, are just accepted. New fines, new fees, and bills, bills, bills.

Prices keep going up. Often, customer service gets worse, or leaders in business and government make stupid decisions with limited accountability. Behaviour change is more imposed than any sense of empowerment.

Does this make culture as a whole more pliable to change?

When progress is worse, people and culture hopefully feel that they still have the power to push back, not just comply with the plethora of enforced changes. From AI to new ways of working and manipulating consumers for the worse, to customer service that has almost no service, to other shifts that are not changing for the better but for the worse.

Square Holes is a cultural insight studio.

We design mixed method explorations of people and culture beyond the category,  uncovering the patterns, tensions and shifts shaping behaviour to inform strategy, inspire innovation and enable confident decisions. Our studio model brings together the right mix of thinkers, researchers and specialists for each exploration. If you’re navigating change, entering a new market, or seeking deeper understanding of people and culture, let’s start a conversation >