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.

Businesses and organisations use these insights 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!

Dylan: Belonging as an experience

With our focus on belonging this month, I’ve been thinking about what actually makes people feel like they’re part of something.

We often associate belonging with big things like shared values, identity or community. But sometimes for me it’s the smaller, everyday interactions that matter most. Being recognised, feeling included in a conversation, or simply knowing that your presence is valued.

For brands, workplaces and communities, it’s a good reminder that belonging isn’t something that you can just communicate; it needs to be something experienced, often through the smallest of interactions.

Mahalia: The cost of loneliness

In my chat with Rachel from Uniting Communities this week, I was struck by the correlation between loneliness and your financial position. One of the key figures to come out of our rolling study with Uniting Communities, is that ‘people on lower incomes continue to experience higher
rates of feeling lonely ‘often.’’ In numbers, that looks like 19% of people with an income less than $40,000 ‘often’ feeling lonely compared
to 6% of people with an income above $80,000.

It’s not surprising that money affords you better access to community and support, but it is alarming given the newly released unemployment stats of 4.7% (a 5-year high), in an ongoing cost of living crisis.

Jason: Tick Tock, failure 

I had one of those tough days yesterday. Those that come with running a business, even 22 years in.

The thing is, I wasn’t even in the office, but at a roundtable event with other business leaders. There was a challenge that just kept ticking in my head, like The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Just one of those complexities where there is no immediate fix, and even when your logic knows everything will be OK, or nothing much can be done now.

What added to it was that the room was full of leaders who had better financially performing businesses, doing what seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, far simpler things than we do. All good businesses, with clear roles and financial performance to match. All this made the tick-tock louder. Am I the failure in the room?

It was opening night of the Adelaide Film Festival last night, and the film *Wild Horse Nine* was a great movie that also stirred up reflections on life, success and endings. And the ticking got louder.

I started writing in my head, thinking the theme of my newsletter this week should be failure, not in the sense of despair, but in the realisation that time doesn’t have a linear path to success. Often, a single day can feel like failure.

At the after-party, which went well into the night with drinking and dancing, and much chatting with interesting people, one of our business’s very first clients, from about a month or two in, noticed me. She came over for a chat and genuinely spoke of how pleased she was to see my success, even proud of what the business had become.

I said that I’d been reflecting on success and failure.

It was a big day. The combination of bubbles, loud music, dancing and chatting quieted the tick-tocks, but they were still there.

As in many of our projects of late, from education to the arts, success isn’t what was anticipated at the start. It is about surviving, sticking around and moving forward with the tick-tocks and failure.

Tick, tock.

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 >