Sophie Hall

I grew up in the UK noticing who systems protected and who they used up, long before I had words for it. I studied art and design because it was the first place my mind made sense, and that training still shapes how I see everything.

The next twenty years were a long apprenticeship in how systems get built. I started in brand and advertising, moved to Melbourne, and studied web development for several years alongside full-time work. From there I moved into UX and then product, designing and leading many different products and tools for a communications platform used across many sectors, such as health, transport and government. These ranged from workflow automation and brand and code systems to machine learning and AI generated communications intelligence tools and features. During the pandemic I led the development of contact tracing and crisis communication tools that 22 Australian government departments and agencies adopted within just three months.

That project taught me what I’ve built my work around since. Technology is never neutral. It encodes a belief about people, and scale amplifies whatever is already there, the care and the control alike. The platform was reaching over a million people across the country while I was quietly burning out building it, under the urgency the pandemic placed on everyone inside the organisation I was working for. The gap between what a system can see and what it costs the people inside it has stayed with me.

In 2023 I co-founded SIX, an ethical investing platform built to give everyday investors real shareholder power over Australia’s largest companies. By then I had worked across enough sectors to know how integral design research, product thinking and data analysis are to defining a problem properly and proving the value of a solution, and I had learned to think through every part of a business, from its processes and functions to the people working inside it and the people it serves. SIX was a chance to bring all of that together, and to use design, data and systems thinking for empowerment rather than control. It also showed me, from the inside, why changing a system from within is so hard. Purpose-driven organisations still run on the incentives of the economy around them. The most committed people carry the most cost, because their values become the lever. And a system rarely changes its operating model while it’s still being led by that model.

That is the work I do now. I’m a systems change practitioner working where the psyche meets the system, on the conditions that let people stay whole inside organisations and economies that were never designed for it. My framework, the Wholeness Ledger, looks at how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them. My research study, The Incentives Are Working, documents what purpose-driven work costs the people who do it, and the Oracle Deck gives anyone a way to start noticing the stories they were handed. Graduating from the Mastery of Systems Leadership programme in July 2026 gave twenty years of practice a rigorous frame and a shared language.

It sits where three fields meet without quite belonging to any of them. The work on the body and trauma shows where a system’s conditions land in a person, yet it is mostly aimed at healing the individual. Systems change work redesigns the conditions and tends to leave the body and the inner life out. Shadow work goes deep into what we suppress and rarely asks who benefits from it staying hidden. I work at the point where those meet, with evidence from people who have lived the cost.

SIX, the Sustainable Investment Exchange, is Australia’s first share trading platform to bring ethical investing and shareholder activism together. As co-founder and chief product officer I’ve led the product from its first concept, grounding it in user research and data, and in a close look at how every part of the business, its processes, its people and its partners, needed to work together for the people using it.

The idea at its heart is that owning shares can be a way to be heard. People can follow campaigns on issues like climate and inequality, back them by buying shares in the companies involved, and see an ethical profile of Australia’s largest listed companies before they invest. We designed it to inform people without lecturing or shaming them, and to make shareholder power something ordinary investors could actually use.

Part of what drew me to building it was who investing has always left out. For decades it has been a space that didn’t feel made for women, or for anyone outside the traditional finance crowd: dense with jargon, designed to feel like a game of chance, and almost silent on values. As few as one in ten women feel they fully understand investing, according to BNY Mellon’s Pathway to Inclusive Investment, a 2022 study of 8,000 people across 16 markets, and that gap has very little to do with capability and a great deal to do with platforms that were never designed with them in mind. When women do invest, they tend to take the longer view and to invest in line with what they care about.

Campaigns work as a way in. People often arrive because they care about a cause and stay to build a portfolio, and many of them are women. SIX doesn’t close that gap on its own, but it offers a clearer path, built on transparency and values, for women, marginalised groups and anyone who has ever felt that finance, activism or investing wasn’t built for them.