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 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. Over a million people across the country were using tools I’d designed while I was quietly burning out building them, 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 Coherence Framework looks at how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them. My 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.

SIX, the Sustainable Investment Exchange, is Australia’s first 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.