Benji Wiedemann, co-founder and executive creative director of Wiedemann Lampe, joins Radim to unpack a career that's grown from graphic design into something closer to nation-building — cultural strategy for governments, museums, and city-scale projects that won't be finished for another 25 years. ~

Benji traces his path from a German-Jewish family shaped by displacement, through a childhood spent convinced he'd end up homeless, to co-founding an agency with Alex Lampe that now works on cities not yet built. 

This is a conversation about listening as a discipline, self-doubt as a tool, and designing for a timescale far longer than any one career.

Takeaways

• Family history can become a working philosophy — Benji's grandfather's "if you can't fit it in your pocket, you can't have it" now shapes how his agency thinks about value beyond ownership
• Struggling academically doesn't predict creative capability — some minds simply need different conditions, not different expectations
• Cultural strategy work runs on immersion, not assumption — arriving with "no bias" and extracting meaning rather than imposing ideas
• Real listening isn't passive — showing people how they've been heard is what turns input into trust
• Self-doubt and fear aren't obstacles to creative clarity — treated right, they're what sharpens a point of view
• Sustainable business leadership means building systems and making yourself replaceable, not staying indispensable
• Long-term thinking is a genuine competitive advantage — projects designed to outlive their creators tend to be the ones that matter
• Curiosity, empathy, and self-doubt together form a more durable creative foundation than confidence alone

Daring Forever. Podcast with Radim Malinic

daringcreativity.com |  desk@daringcreativity.com

Books by Radim Malinic Paperback and Kindle > https://amzn.to/4biTwFc
Free audiobook (with Audible trial) > https://geni.us/free-audiobook
Book bundles  https://novemberuniverse.co.uk

Lux Coffee Co. https://luxcoffee.co.uk/  (Use: PODCAST for 15% off)
November Universe https://novemberuniverse.co.uk (Use: PODCAST for 10% off)

Benji Wiedemann: So from its cultural equity, what can we learn and build from? 

 so often we talk about place shaping, that you take the cultural mass and you shape that into something that is understood locally, regionally, and internationally while they're all connecting. And I think one of the greatest quotes that we got from a client is, "You don't only listen, you show us how we've been heard."

What we mean by we don't go in and do this immersion and listening as abox-ticking exercise.

Speaker: Welcome to Daring Forever, a podcast about being human, wired for wonder, capable of courage, perpetually becoming. It's about the waves that knock us under and the strange, stubborn grace with which we surface. My name is Rado Malinovic. I'm an author, creative, and an eternally curious human being on a mission to speak to incredible people whom I call Forever Daring Humans, those in pursuit of an extraordinary life.

Every week, I share an interview that is packed with amazing stories, value, and I can only ask you, how will you dare forever? . This podcast is inspired by my upcoming book titled Daring Forever, which is now available for pre-order out in October 

My guest today has spent over two decades turning brand thinking into something far bigger. Cities don't exist yet. Museums and cultural strategies built to outlast a single lifetime. Benji Wiedemann is a co-founder and executive creative director of Weidemann Lamb, the consultancy he built with his partner, Alex Lamb.

In this conversation, we trace the line from a boy who couldn't read in a German classroom to a designer shaping city-scale culture from Riyadh to the Mediterranean. We talk about family history, self-doubt as a sharpening tool, and why the only strategy an audience ever sees is the one they experience.

This is a conversation about listening, legacy, and daring to build for generations you will never meet

Radim Malinic: Benji, so great to see you today. Welcome to Daring Forever. How are you doing?

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah, I'm, really well. Slightly hot. It's the hottest day, I think, on record in the UK today,

Radim Malinic: until tomorrow, yeah, it'll be hot today and then we're gonna-- we'll get, by the end of the 

summer 

Benji Wiedemann: So

I'm in our office right now with hardly anybody 'cause everybody's working from their, blow-up pools, in the garden.

Radim Malinic: That's the curse of a business owner, isn't it? Benji, I want to introduce you to my audience. I think what you do with your partner Alex and with your agency, I think is remarkable. Big fan of what you guys do, and I think we should put a lot more focus and more color into what you do and how you do it.

But if someone hasn't heard of Benji Wideman, how would you introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do?

Benji Wiedemann: yeah, man. just to really, say thank you so much for having me. Big fan of what you do and, having met you a couple of times, so I'm really excited to do this. But, yeah, my name's Benji Wiedemann, and I am co-founder and executive creative director of Wiedemann Lampe, which I set up around next year, 20 years ago, with my business partner Alex Lam.

And yeah, it's a brand and business consultancy. 

 we work on cultural strategies, and I think this is quite important to explain. So we work on really two levels: cultural strategies for governments and how they get embedded into the cultural anchors. So for example, museums and educational bodies, et cetera. so all those kind of like points where you encounter direct culture.

And I always like to see it, it's like mycelia, the cultural strategy that runs through the whole, forest, and then you get these reproductive organs, which are the mushrooms that you can come like then engage with, And, I think what fascinates me about culture the most is also what makes it really difficult to deal with.

 its total intangibility and complexity 'cause you're really dealing in the abstract, and many organizations really struggle and often fail to articulate this shared purpose and their positioning. So our aim is to support organizations like that in bringing them together to articulate the singularity in their shared purpose.

And often what we find is quite, incredible is when you ask organizations what success looks like, and you ask 10 people, you get 30 different answers. And I think a lot of the work that we do is bringing that focus into what does actually success look like for you internally

and

externally.

So, we start with the internal structure, the organizational culture, and only then through the experience itself can you seep it out. And, Why we do this is really, we always talk about a cultural impact at scale and, I think it's worth then also unpacking what the word culture means for us because again, everybody has different ideas.

Because I think it's an interesting word. everybody uses it a lot. But if you're asking, well, what is culture? That clear articulation, I think it has to be clear to oneself, needs defining. And how we define it, it's the handing over of beliefs, values, and identity for the next generation.

 and when we talk about cultural impact at scale, it's really not only from a physical scale, but actually time is a massive part of the work that we do. So it's that intergenerational thinking that we're really keen on. But yeah, that's it in a nutshell.

Radim Malinic: Let me trace it back, and this is what I normally do, and I'm still predictable with this. Let me trace it back on how did you get into all of this? Because we will get to questions like what is success and what is culture, because as you said, we can have zillions of different answers. But I wanna know more about you.

How did you get into this position to be doing this type of work? Because

I

don't know many people like you. there might be a lot of people who do something similar, but I don't know anyone who's as passionate at the forefront of this sort of cultural impact and this type of work. So I wanna know, where did Benji come from?

How did you get into creativity, and what drives you forward right now?

Benji Wiedemann: Amazing.

So I think I can take that into two sections. One is, how did I end up as a designer at the forefront graphic designer, and how do I work in culture, right? And, I was born in Germany to a German father and a British mother. So my mom comes, from Richmond, and she was here in the '60s, and she was the stylist, for Michael Joseph and David Bailey, and she, did the styling for, Beggars Banquet, a Rolling Stones cover and stuff like that.

So, she was working with the photographer. And my dad is a, art director. He was creative director of, McCann Erickson back in Germany, and, he commissioned, Michael Joseph for one of these big shoots that he does. Lots of people, and my mom was a stylist, and that's where they met.

And she then moved to, Germany, and that's where they had me. And,I'm very happy to say that I'm almost proud of it. I was extremely bad at school. It's not because I'm disruptive or anything, it's just there's something slightly different in the wiring. and I see it with my kids now, that linear educational systems don't fully fit.

so I spent a considerable amount of time in my dad's advertising agency because he had his own advertising agency, and for me, this is like the world that I live in, right? and I said, "Well, this is what I have to do." And my dad said, "If you wanna do it correctly, you go to London." And this is now a key part.

So as I'm a German Jew, and this is a really important part of the narrative, my mom's parents are actually German Jews who fled Germany. And I'll,get back to that in, due course, 'cause it's very important to the kind of,my second part of the story around the culture.

Benji Wiedemann: but yeah, so I followed that strand, and then I went to the UK and in '98. So I was just turned, I think 18 or 19. I didn't have to do national or civil service because of my Jewish roots. and all of a sudden I'm in London, '98 in an advertising agency in Soho, and I was like, "This is it." And because I never fitted into Germany and I was thinking I'm the oddball, I was like, no, Germany is possibly the oddball.

maybe don't belong here. Maybe I belong into London. And from that point my life completely changed and it turned, and I got really excited about creativity. And then I did the company was called Evans Hunt Scott, and I stayed longer I had a month internship, but they took me on and I stayed longer and longer.

 And then I decided to study and everybody says, "Go to Bournemouth." And that's when I like fully fell in love with graphic design. So I came from advertising, studied graphic design, and then I was like, "This is now my world." And how I divide it is the, advertising points at the thing. It says advertises the thing, whereas design and branding is the thing itself.

And I quite like I don't wanna say the extrovert and introvert side, but there's something more, more intimate, I think, in design advertising is a little bit louder and I gravitated to that. But then, I did that and, I graduated. I then got a job at Lewis Moberly, for Mary Lewis.

I don't know if you know her. She's absolute legend. She was the first female president of D&AD, and that's where I met my business partner, Alex. And Alex I read and heard about the year before I graduated, 'cause he graduated the year before me because he's this total wunderkind, because you need to capture and study him, 'cause he is an incredible designer but also an incredible programmer.

He was always like, "How does this work? How do you write the code for this?" And what you think about this is like in early 2000, 2001 when he graduated. And so he was working for Lewis Moberly, which is a brand packaging agency, and we started working there together, became kind of like we used to hang out, then I got a freelance gig, then he did the website for that, and that got traction.

And then That eventually, when we were 27, we then set up the business. and we had, three months of work, like just freelance bits and pieces, and six months of salary in the bank, and that was then, going forward. Now that's how I got into graphic design. the other side is the culture side, is how we use the design thinking to really amplify culture.

And now I mentioned that my, grandfather was a German Jew, and he was quite young when he left, and he had a lot of family there that weren't so young, and so they had houses and families there and all of them, ended up in Auschwitz and stuff like that. So we've got a big kind of like gap in the family tree on that side.

And so he just packed his bag, ran off, and he said to me once and to my mum,

" If

you can't fit it into your pocket, you can't have it because at any given time you have to

uproot

and get going." And what was really fascinating that they built their life here in London and he had a rag business and did blouses, and they never owned anything, no buildings, nothing, because of this, this fundamental thing.

and as I'm growing up and I think about it, the thing that fascinated me the most is if you have nothing, what is it you actually have? So you're separating the physical embodiment of your life, which we project ourselves Into the deductive sense of embodiment. These are the values, these are the actions.

This is how I conduct my life. And all of a sudden, this whole path of separating out The physical embodiment, but what is it you are then? Has completely fascinated me and totally driven the business into working solely in culture, where our clients don't tend to have monetary transactions. It is the exchange of value and belief systems, and it is just a completely different game

Radim Malinic: This is interesting, Baxi, because I often get to this situation in, m-many episodes where I don't know the person too well or enough on purpose because I want to find the breadcrumbs looking backwards. And what you just described and the reason why you do what you do with the background and the family, values just makes bloody good sense right now.

It's just like, oh, that's why you do this. Because I wanna stay with the sentence where if you can't fit it in your pocket, you can't have it.

I'm really enjoying how we unraveling this because sometimes I feel like people just fall into something by accident. But I think you were kind of always destined to create this,to become who you are. So what I wanna know, we talked about your mom and dad,creative director at McCann.

Your mom was a stylist working with The Rolling Stones. What was the feeling of creativity when you were surrounded by it at a younger age, before you came to England? Because, coming to England and London in 1998 is remarkable. I came two years later, and it was still incredible and still is an incredible city.

But what was the impact of creativity from your parents? Did you see it as something extraordinary or did you see that as a norm of what they did?

Benji Wiedemann: in our lives, creativity was a very available practice. And it's the same thing,with my kids now. It's like, everywhere you look there's drawing stuff and it's just everything's just there to facilitate, creativity. And I remember really fondly-- So my dad used to like having his own agency.

it's sometimes very, difficult running your own agency, as we can maybe both agree on, at times. And so I didn't see him that often because he was always up really early or came home very late. But there were these moments I would have with him that we'd have breakfast together before I had to go to kindergarten or school, 

'Cause he's incredibly gifted painter and drawer. And so he would say, "Hey, let's draw a scene underwater." So he'd draw sharks, then he'd say, "What do you want?" "I want an octopus," or, "I want a, a mantis," or something like that. So he'd draw all these things. So I have this beautiful A4 page with these black key line drawings that I would always take into nursery and school, and when we have a moment I'd just color them in.

And for me, the pride of saying, "Hey, my dad did this," and the kids, they're like, "Whoa, that's cool." And so for me, this was always an incredible skill to have creativity as form of expression. Now, that doesn't mean that I can draw. I can't draw anything. It's really bad. And even, if I say, "Hey, I've got it.

 And so there's a big block between,my ability to draw and my thoughts, and people always say that the hand is the extension of your thoughts. it's the same way as vocabulary being the limit to your ideas, right? If you can't express them, there's certain limits to it.

 So my dad took me then to a Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition when I was, I think, 10. she's a, for people who don't know, a French sculptor who did these beautiful female shapes called Nanas. And it was chicken wire and papier-mâché. And so my dad straight after that went to,

Builder Base. where you get all your hardware stuff. And we bought chicken wire, we bought, papier-mâché, and I just started making all these sculptures. So our house is full of, birds and this ambitious dinosaur that we once did and stuff. So going back to your question, creativity was always in our lives because we are, as a family, not gifted in academia. That's the side. I still can't read to this day. I can chew through sentences But man, if you put me in front of a brief that I have to read,it's insane, man. it's really hard

Radim Malinic: is that a form of dyslexia or is it

Benji Wiedemann: look, back in Germany there wasn't such thing. There was just a dumb kid, smart kid, right? And I'd, fall into the dumb kid thing. and that's what you grew up with. and I was always-- and this is a bit sad maybe, but as a kid I was always convinced I would be homeless.

That was always like, "'Cause you're not good at school, this is your path," and if you're not, if you're not good at this, you won't get employment, you won't get money. The result is you're gonna live on the streets. that was always one of my biggest worries

Radim Malinic: it's very black and white 1980s upbringing, isn't it? it's the, the love and care and the nuances in what people needed didn't exist. as you said, there was a cookie cutter for, pass and won't pass. AndI grew up in Czech Republic, so across the border from where you were at around the same time, and the empathy, compassion, understanding, the multi-identity in certain way didn't exist because I always say no one really wanted you to be anything specific.

They just wanted you to be good enough so they don't look bad for, teaching you. You're thinking like, how do you get that uniqueness in expression? Because you mentioned some of the traits of yourself are sort of running in your family.

Obviously, we pass on our DNA, our genes onto our kids, and they follow our, in our footsteps, and obviously they wrap it up in different information with different skill set. I think we are in a remarkable time where the information is so much more widely available. We understand more people more widely, but still there's so much work to do to help everyone to almost be their unique flavor in a world that still prefers the dumb kids and the wise kids.

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah. it's really interesting because I'm going through the whole thing again now watching my kids grow up. So I've got a 10 and an 8-year-old boy. both of them are pretty energetic, to say and going back to the educational system, so we had this choice between head and heart, 

There was the school that they got the Rachel Whiteread room and all those things. It was very creative. And then there's a school which I would say the, regime has been imported from North Korea. And we're looking at this and we're like, "Oh, which one do we go with?" And our heart always said we have to go to where they celebrate art and stuff.

But our mind went like, "Hang on, they get all of that stuff at home. What happens if we actually put them into a school that is super structured, really clear on the rules, what is on, what isn't on? What happens if we put them there?" So we put them into that school, and this is the crazy thing. my son, and my older son, I'm sure there's lots of neurospice going on, didn't wanna read all this stuff, and somehow they managed him, and he's 10 years old.

He's chewed through, the whole, Hunger Games books. He's now started Dune, which I think he's struggling a little bit. but I don't know how they managed to get him there. And my question is to myself, if I was to have gone to school there now, would I be able to read?

Radim Malinic: It's an interesting observation, Benji, because I'm gonna borrow a quote from, the fantastic Sir Ken Robinson, who said, "The role of the gardener isn't to make the flower grow. The role of the gardener is to create the optimal conditions for the flower to grow." So your boy has found himself in that situation.

What they did, they may have created ideal conditions for him to see that, is he reflecting to other kids? Is he seeing something that inspired him? Because you can't make anyone read if they don't want to read. You can't make anyone do anything if they don't want to do it. And I was thinking when you were talking about the options, creative or North Korea, I was thinking, which one would he go?

Because you're thinking of surely they would want to, have creativity 24/7. But your answer surprised me, and your outcome surprised me even more. But it has the positive connotation to it because what you've created to a certain ND mind, neurodivergent mind or whatever you wanna think what, I'm not gonna be guessing here.

But some of the structure is helpful because you need to know how to operate within the realms of reality let's call it a black and white world, Like you want to know how the rest of the world exists because the rest of the world is not looking for magic 24/7.

So it's good to know how to navigate the world with the guardrails and then to know, okay, let him go off. let the guardrails off. I can actually do whatever I wanna do because I have managed to tap into the norm, if that makes sense. And I think understanding the norm is not a problem.

It's a question of actually having a reality check, going, "Okay, this is what the regular people do," and then there's the space above it, which you can do anything with it. So that was a really interesting answer.

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah, just really quickly, because that school, 'cause we knew we were gonna stay local, but it's a little bit further away. And when we talk further away, it's 10 minutes cycle down the canal. and we just went to look at it and we heard all these horror stories and we're like, "Oh, sounds absolutely nightmarish.

We have to go and visit." And everyone who told us these horror stories hadn't actually visited. So we went to the parents' evening and they said they've got crazy stuff. Like one of their motto is no excuses. We're like, "Oh, I gotta see that. I gotta hear that." And I say, "Is it true?" And they say, "100% because there is no excuse from no matter what background you come from to not excel in academia."

And all of a sudden I was like, "Yeah, man, sign me up." Because, what they teach is to learn, and that's the key.

Not maths, 

Radim Malinic: Yeah. when you think about it like a great designer is a person who learns how to solve a problem. the, the application, the, tools you can learn, but if you don't know how to learn to solve a problem, then that's the first struggle that you can have

there.

So that's interesting. I remember being, actually speaking of school experiences, we, we-- I remember looking at schools years ago, and we went to a school which was meant to be okay, and then all the parents were, like, having an argument at the, the, the Q, Q&A. they already had some kids in the school, and you were like, "This is toxic."

"This is not a nice place to be." Because you wanna create the ideal conditions, and I think if you have some, if you have that guiding philosophy that it's there to learn, teach you how to learn,

you've

got nothing else to lose. I think everything else, ev-everything else comes from it, right?

Benji Wiedemann: But I think there's what you're addressing, and maybe this is something that rings true with you 'cause you've got a daughter

Radim Malinic: Yeah, a daughter and a son, 

Benji Wiedemann: A

daughter and a son, I remember we spoke about that. nothing's good enough for your kids, right? And I think you go into school and there's, "Oh, nothing's ever gonna..." I'm on the WhatsApp group and there's so much complaining going on. I say, "Look, this is a good school.

You're

not paying for it." there's give and take, that's why I'm always grateful for the work that they do. and I don't join in the pile-ons, you know.

Radim Malinic: I can tell you that there's WhatsApp groups for schools that we pay for and the people are still not happy. You know, they're slightly more, how to say it, more cryptic about what they like and what they dislike because, it's a certain expectations that you have from the education system and you're thinking...

there's something really interesting. Now, what I did, because obviously I like to talk to anyone and everyone, I spoke to our headmaster and I made him to watch my TEDx talk. And what I really enjoyed from the school, they were like teaching the kids for future, right?

They were not saying, "Okay, this is what we taught five years ago, we're gonna teach it again." They're like, "Okay, we want these kids to be ready for what's coming," right? And then one day he really surprised me. He said, these kids, they have really wild ideas, but they're not always rooted in reality."

He's like, "Do you think that's right or wrong?" And I'm like, "This is the only time they can be unfiltered and fucking wild.

That's what you want. you don't want kids to be filtered because you can't make it if you don't want to. 'cause it might be technically impossible. Let them run wild." So I was like, "Wait a minute."

I thought, like sometimes you have the expectation of someone. not that he was, wrong or anything. It was clearly like his mind was going live and unfiltered. And you're like, "No, just let them run riot," because we can shoehorn this boring stuff into reality if we need to.

Because, yes, sometimes the tools and technology don't provide it, but how amazing is to be a kid and just come up with utter, utter craziness going, "Yep, that's what I believe in." And we're like, "Cool. Do 

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah. Un-until

Radim Malinic: it gets stamped out of you, Yeah, but this is interesting one. Is it-- who stamps it out of you? Because I always believe if we all go through the same system, how come we have artists and how come we have accountants and doctors? Because the stamping out, I think it's personal. I'm beginning to question like how much is the system and how much is the lack of accountability or direction.

Benji Wiedemann: Yep.

Yeah. it's a difficult one because what you're looking at is nature and nurture, right? and the whole idea that if people say, "Oh, we're a creative family, we're not good at,educational,like at academia and things like that." from my understanding, there's a lot of evidence that whole theory has been debunked because you get Children growing up all over the world, all sorts of conditions, whether it's in the desert or it's in the Arctic, their brains are so adaptable to the surrounding that they're not like up there living in snow and ice and they're like, "Ooh, I'm more of a beach kind of kid," 

so there's like a lot of kind of research that the nurture side is a incredibly large part that then overrides the nature. Now,I don't wanna sound like I'm an expert in that, but I get like these-- my dad sends me things. "Isn't this amazing?

Isn't this interesting?" And then you pick up the snippets and you start building your picture of the world that's constantly evolving and constantly changing, I don't know how far you can follow that strand to find this piece of truth. This is what it is, because I think there's so much interpretive layers and so many individual experiences and differences and stuff.

Radim Malinic: yeah, I think it's, individuality because when you think ancient hardwiring from, the times we used to worry about saber-toothed tiger eating us for lunch, we were very much designed and evolved for pursuit. Now we search in pleasure, you know.

I think things have changed. We've got more comfort, we've got more convenience, we got different lives. But I think takes us back to the beginning of where you talked about culture and we talked about success because I would like you to define to me your definition of success.

I always believe that any word has got a dictionary meaning, societal meaning, and a personal meaning. How would you d- define culture?

Benji Wiedemann: So It took me a while to get there because you've got such a clear understanding of what culture is, but when you start to articulate it, it becomes really difficult, the language that you use around it. Because, Bratsummer is culture, But when we talk about culture, we talk about slow culture, intergenerational culture.

We always go back to it's the shared beliefs and identity and values we cultivate, we choose to hand on to a next generation. The cultivation of these, that's what we want to see live on. Not the toxic stuff, but the good stuff. you want to cultivate the good bacteria. And that for us became this whole to define it in that way just really unlocked the way we understand, this work that we do, and

especially

when we start to extrapolate this over timeline.

So everything that you look at is to

gain

your attention, push some ideas onto you, and everything's about the pace. And we've come to this place where TikTok reels, Instagram, all this stuff, it's just so much stuff. And when it used to say content is king, no, content is slop now, And especially with the AI being compounded into this mess. So Alex and I, we realized that the work that we do, this is across generations. We're working on city scale projects that won't be fully developed and delivered until 2050.

Radim Malinic: So if you're looking at that, so the one thing that we often say is that we can solve this in our lifetime, we're not thinking long and deep enough.

Benji Wiedemann: And it's really interesting to build these cultural foundational pieces that allow for so much interpretation and evolution and cultivation and across time whilst still being true to its original framework. And that's a real kind of like sensitive push and pull, and that fascinates us, and that's how we identify culture.

Radim Malinic: I always say for those looking around the room going, "What's a city scale project? what is it that you deliver?" So we need to zoom in a little bit on what is it that the work that you do. Because I like when you said, "If we can solve it now, it's potentially not a good solution because it will take time for it to work."

So what is it that you do and deliver, and what 

problems do you solve?

Benji Wiedemann: Okay, so let's start with the scale, like a musical scale. We started off designing exhibitions for museums. Then we started designing positionings and identities for museums. Then we started designing for public realm. Then we started designing districts for districts, and now we're designing city scale projects.

So we work closely with governments and master planners. And the thing is like, and there's some, wild statistics that would've been in the talk that we did for Off, et cetera. and I'm gonna not quote them because I know I'm gonna misquote them, but 70% of the population lives in cities and only 30% of that structure like exists.

 There is immense pressure on cities to grow and develop, and there's also opportunities to build entirely new cities. and that comes, I think in three forms that we're working on projects, for example. One project is a past city that was the birthplace of the Saudi kingdom.

It's called Diriyah. it was made entirely of mud, because it was at the bend of a river called Wadi Hanifa, so it slowed the water down, brought fertile ground, fertile mud, so it was the first settlement. And that whole city got flattened by the Ottoman Empire, and that's when Riyadh got built, et cetera.

Now, what we're doing with them is working on rebuilding the city, not physically, so that's one of these giga projects, but it's rerouting it to the core principles of the Saudi national values, which is super interesting. So we work on that city strategy level into how do all these architectural pieces fit together from a brand point of view because again, you need enough

pointedness to

to have a real sense of identity for a city, whereas enough organic sprawl, and then we're into designing lots of assets, et cetera.

So then there's another city that is expanding rapidly. So we are, developing the positioning of these new bigger parts of the city, and I think that's about 200,000, 250,000 people by 2040, I think. and then there's cities that do not exist, and one of them is at the south coast of the Mediterranean, and that city will be the size of Barcelona.

So that's gotta be two million people there. And they haven't broken ground yet.

Radim Malinic: Wow. I've got questions you can expect. let's stay with the Saudi place for an hour, because I always believe that behind ideas you've got impact, influence, and inspiration, right? You've got someone else's impact, someone else's influence, and an inspiration, and you put together and you do that.

What do you do? Your ideas produce impact, influence, and inspiration for the city to grow or develop, obviously to have identity, impact on culture. What I want to know, obviously, culture is sometimes very local and very specific to a local place. How much of the learning and immersion do you have to do to understand the nuances?

Because I can imagine that being a London-based studio, you get a lot of sort of gravitas and obviously a lot of credit for understanding multiculturalism. But how do you go and make impact? How do you influence, and how do you inspire? and how 

do you manage to learn?

learn?

Benji Wiedemann: The cultural nuance is really important and,it's the big question is what do we know? We're in London, what do you know about our culture? And I think the key thing is going in there with nothing. There's no bias, there's nothing. and shedding yourself from bias is the first part, is just the purge, getting rid of all the preconceptions that you think you have and going in there with a total open mind.

And I think one of the key differences, and I'm actually quite sad to say that working in the industry, is to go in not with the idea of what we're going to push onto the project, but what we can extract and grow out of it,  So from its cultural equity, what can we learn and build from? 

 so often we talk about place shaping, that you take the cultural mass and you shape that into something that is understood locally, regionally, and internationally while they're all connecting. And we I think one of the greatest quotes that we got as a, from a client is, "You don't only listen, you show us how we've been heard."

What we mean by we don't go in and do this immersion and listening as abox-ticking exercise.

It's

very clearly being able to reflect back to this is what we heard, and these are the patterns that we're detecting. And once you understand these aspects, you can then extrapolate that into something really succinct.

And it's that immersion phase that I often say, I say it in jest, but I think effort-wise and things like that,it's 70% of the work we do is listening. And why we have such great relationships with our, I don't wanna call them clients, it's too transactional, but, with our partners because we listen in- with intent,

and

we are able to really reflect that back to them into a structure that really understands.

And when you talk about the cultural nuance, we've, developed our own, it sounds again really technical, but workshops and mechanisms to find out what's the vernacular of a place, what are the dos and the don'ts, what is the good, the bad, the ugly. So you're creating this kinda cultural dashboard, and we did that for San Francisco when we worked over there.

We did that for Diriyah. But it's a really effective way of like finding out super funny stuff like in, San Francisco, there's the Spandex Mafia and the Granolas. And so there are all these little tribes that you have, and it's a wonderful way of kind of like immersing yourself, 

and I think there's a really important part of not being from there because everything is new. Whereas when you're from there, you might not see these things because they're just part of your world and you often don't understand, oh, that is actually something really special and very specific to you, But then saying that, we are currently working on the, whole brand for,Haringey, London Borough of Culture, and this is London-based. But it's the same immersion that you do for a borough here in London as you would for a city in Diriyah and for a city that doesn't exist yet.

Radim Malinic: That's incredible because you talk about obviously being really good at listening and making sure that people got heard. How do you make sure that you've heard enough voices,to get the full picture of what you need to create? Obviously you can't hear every single voice, but how do you know that you've got far enough?

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah, that's a very good point. How far is far enough, so there's multiple different ways. there'squalitative and quantitative, and so at the beginning of every project, we create a stakeholder engagement map and saying how far can, draw the circle. And there are different layers that or levels that inform that, which are, for example, How

much time do we have?

How much willingness is there? And also how much finances, because the more voices you incorporate, the more work it is to process all of that. it's for example, if you do a podcast that takes seven days, you've got a lot more to work through than something that takes seven minutes, 

so who do you involve? Who do you inform, and who do you have to inspire at the end of this process? It was really interesting. it was more through, the pandemic that we won a couple of projects, one in Abu Dhabi, one in New York, one in Peru, and one in Tottenham. So but it didn't matter where we were because nobody was allowed to travel.

So Alex, the big brain that he is, developed a workshop platform or a platform where we can have all these different workshops in that we now can do remote with people. And all of a sudden, we found a way of really succinctly getting interesting and clean data around these different themes and subjects you're discussing.

And post-pandemic, we realized, these are the digital backbone to all the projects that we do, and we found that out when we went to work on a project in AlUla with, it's just being discussed, so I can talk about it, with James Turrell. So on Nowness and things like that, you'll find information about it.

It's an outdoor museum that's this eighteen square miles. So it's the size of, of, yeah, Greater London. And,we traveled two days to get to AlUla, and then we were there to physically meet everybody. It was just after pandemic. And from the seven people, four of them arrived, three were remote, but they were down the road, and we were like, "Well, we're gonna run this digital platform, Lemonade that we call it, anyway."

And all of a sudden we're like, "Oh, this works perfect because it works remote," and how often do you kind of do these things remote? And now we've built up. Now we've got over forty different workshops there that we do in person. We can do hybrid. We can do it fully remote. But the great thing is, to the question that you asked, we can now gear this up to large scale engagement.

So we completely design end-to-end the what do we need from them and how are we gonna get it and how is this going to inform the decision, and then we blast it out to all the people who want to be engaged. It can be a hundred, it can be a hundred thousand, 'cause the data comes in the same way. And that's how we engage on larger scale.

So they are the people who are involved, and then everybody who gets involved also will have follow-on information to say, "This is where it led us." And I think what's important when one talks about all these voices that you hear, it's not necessarily co-creation, but it's co-inciting. Together we gain the insights.

Radim Malinic: The creation happens based on the insights

I wanted to ask you about how do you happen to win projects from Peru, Tottenham, and other places all at the same time, especially during a pandemic? what is the attraction to getting new work? Because obviously you are in quite a niche world. obviously I don't know any other studio that does what you do, but, to my knowledge, obviously, I'm sure there's other studios doing the same thing.

But how do you go after the work and obviously after all these years, there must be quite a pattern that obviously you know where to look and what to do, obviously. and how much of it is proactive and how much of it is actually reactive? How much of it comes to you?

Benji Wiedemann: So

I

have to say that we are in an incredibly fortunate position that all our work is inbound. and you then have these chemistry meetings and you get on and Alex and I and the whole team are incredibly inquisitive and more interested in hearing about people than telling about ourselves. And I know it's rich me just yabbing on here on the podcast for the last hour now.

But, it's just one of those things that we listen very clearly, relay it, and so people feel heard and they feel that they are in good hands with us. And I think we have reached a point where we are now 30 people, that Alex and I can be as much over all the projects as we possibly can.

So we've got contact with all the projects. and that's really important to us and it's really important to the people who work with us that the people whose name's at the door are actually the people who show up on calls, are the people who you can get involved with.

And there is also a point where we say, "This is now safe with someone else," and that's because we don't want to micromanage the team. Alex and I, we see the whole business more like a fruit bowl. So we are like the fruit bowl, and then you've got all the different fruits in it. So we're more of a supportive structure, helping everybody achieve what they want to achieve out of their professional lives as good as we can, without saying, "Hey, we're here," to the client.

We're always involved and then, "Sorry, we got the job, now we're off." Now, this is a careful balance that we have because we don't want to undermine the total skill set of everybody in the office. It's an incredibly brilliant team, and if the question arises that you ask me is, "Where do you find the time?"

And I think it's somewhere along the way as a person running a business, you need to make yourself redundant. That's super important. So on one side, you build the business to understand, because, something that also links to what you said earlier is oh, because the path seems so clear when I spoke about how I got to graphic design and into culture.

 But it's experience going forward and it's understood going backward, 

Radim Malinic: ம் 

Benji Wiedemann: and it's the same thing with running a business. you have to go forward to understand what you're about, and then you look backwards and saying, "Okay,now I know what it is," or, "I understand it," and this is the thing that we can now perpetuate into the team and these are the values of the business.

Radim Malinic: This is how we produce work. you mentioned something which I read. it's an echo of a quote by Derek Sivers in his book,called Anything Possible? He was a guy who started a website called CD Baby. And if you were buying imports from America, you wouldn't have encountered the website, right? It was like a, platform for artists selling their music to a global audience.

Anyway, he sold the company. He built it up really big, sold it, and one of his motto in the book, he said, "If you micromanage every single decision, you will not get anywhere." So he said, "I just gave people the freedom to make their decisions. I didn't need to sign off everything. I didn't need to do..." Because you mentioned you need to make yourself redundant from the business.

So what I'm getting from you, what's really interesting, and I think it's the right blend of you want to be visible. Obviously, with Alex, you're the face and the name of the business. You're there, but also you got a trusted team of people who can actually deliver the work, which is when you give them the freedom, people can work with much more ease and a lot less fear.

I think that's really important. Where I'm heading with this is the question of how do you metabolize all of this? Because you are multifaceted, multi-busy person. Obviously, you're looking at some, some things that literally, as you calledit's a place shape. So basically you talk about project which are city scale, right?

They are not just necessarily a business card and a logo. So there's a lot in your, I would say, in your view every day that, there's a lot of information that goes through you all day, every day. How do you deal with it? Like, how do you process it? And what are the secrets, if any?

Benji Wiedemann: there are no secret. It's very quite simple and straightforward, and a business are two things. It's people and process. Have brilliant people and a really clearly defined process, and I don't mean a process that shackles and squelches nuance out, but it helps to contain it.

And so Alex and I have been very interested in developing these ways we approach projects. But it's very important to say that it's not the one size fits all. But building these mechanisms through how we harness all this information, what happens with it, how do the, does that then go into insights, how the insights then get informed about positioning, how the positioning then informs a visual world, and how the visual world then gets, just experienced.

and, having, looping back to where we started is the experience side, is designing exhibition, Natural History Museum. We did Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the fiftieth anniversary, where we introduced this digital layer into it. We do, help set up the Riga International Biennial for Contemporary Art, how do you deliver information, navigation, and interpretation seamlessly?

and so we've come from there. We built it into this, super abstract, like, developing cultural strategies for cities. And then understanding how you take it all the way from abstraction all the way to the experience. And, one thing that always guides us is that the only strategy your audience sees is in the execution.

So no matter what's discussed at the absolute top line

of

governmental level, if it's not experienced through the different channels, it's-- no one cares. It doesn't exist

Radim Malinic: What I wanna ask you is that you guys talk about a pursuit of challenges that can't be solved within a single lifetime.

 When I asked you about the input from people, you said, it depends on time and money and a willingness, or time, budget, and a willingness to do it. As a designer, as a creative that might be listening to this, they'll be like: "I'd like to see the start and finish of what I'm doing," Obviously, I need that closure. I need that, serotonin I ne- I need a happy chemical to say I've achieved something. With the work that you're doing, it's a constant work in progress. How do you process it? Obviously, as, as you talk about the processes of your own, obviously you are already accustomed to it.

You know what to do. But how do you see the time element in all of this? Because it's as long as the, the stretch of time.

Benji Wiedemann: Yeah.

I think it's everything that's about system building. You build a system, you don't wanna watch the system do its thing, very much what it is, and I don't want it to sound too technical, but you build a structure into it. Okay, so you build the garden, let's stay with, Sir Ken Robinson.

you build the garden trellis, you're not gonna watch the plants grow through it. Occasionally you go back and you, "Ah, okay. I didn't expect it to grow like this, but that's interesting." Or, "Maybe we need to be clearer here where the, the plant grows into," but what we do is the garden trellis.

So... And I think

we

as society are more and more wired into immediacy of endorphins and, "Look what I did. I did this on Instagram, I did this on LinkedIn, and I've got this to show you." there is some of that going on in our business most certainly, 'cause that's, we've got like case studies and projects that are like of smaller scale.

But you get your reward from somewhere else. You don't have to have it like you can go away knowing that you've done an amazing project with your clients and your partners, and you are still, like continue work together, you do new stuff together and things like that, and that's the reward that we're looking for, this ongoing-ness.

And going back to like the whole where does the business come from, Al and I always this strong belief to plow as much energy as we can into the projects themselves, that once we leave, we're excited about it. We've learned as people, our partners are super excited, and it's a successful project.

What more can you ask for, And I think this is more of a societal question about what do we value? Like the question, what is success? As a designer, what does success look like? How many likes have I actually gotten on my Instagram post? If that's the measurement of success, then maybe thinking about intergenerational and designing for intergenerational change in projects might not be for you.

Radim Malinic: This is a good question because I wanna understand, I've got some breadcrumbs and some dots that I've joined here already. But what goes into a designer who ultimately designs for people? this is not a surface level. This is not a, designing for Instagram posts or carousels. This is designing for a lot of people that will interact with your work.

What is the making of a human like Benji? Did you have to find different layers in yourself? Did you find some sort of levels of self-acceptance or levels of curiosity that will help you to connect with all of this stuff? Because as you said, you guys show up with no bias. You show up blank, and you want to listen and make sure that people get heard.

But how did you get to it to have the right skill set as the right human skill sets to do this?

Benji Wiedemann: It's Curiosity, empathy, and self-doubt. I think they are like my, not that I've ever articulated, but I think they would be my kinda like trinity. Like first of all, curiosity that you are not just sitting there ticking a box by interviewing these people. You are genuinely fascinating of how this thing fits together.

what makes this shared place in place A different to the shared place B? and this is manifested through people's daily interactions, how they go about their things, and to trace that path, to find something tangible and saying, "Wow, this is something that's very unique to this place."

And then you'll even find, oh, and this is where it would've originated from. So you can trace it to the source why these are different to these people, and it's many different layers of complexity in it. But there's this first part which is all about, curiosity. Then empathy, is just feeling for whatpeople can feel, And I think that's something that I'm, blessed and cursed with, empathy, and I'm sure you can grow it, but I've always been an incredible empathetic person, and I became a vegetarian back in Germany when I was 12 just for the pure unbearable feeling for animals going through so much hardship, 

so that I can come, have salami on my Butterbrot, all that stuff, and then the other one, self-doubt, is not going in with, "Hey, I know it." And I think self-doubt and one thing,if there's one thing that I ever said to myself that I think is interesting and maybe unique is, that I see self-doubt and fear as the blade in my pencil sharpener, 

And I was walking to work and I was like, "Oh, that's how it fits together," 'cause this fear and this self-doubt constantly helps you sharpen your point, To being clearer where you stand and not to go, "Ah, this is another one of these projects," and that every project that comes in gets treated with absolute utmost respect and not just, "Yeah, we'll kill it and bill it," what's the saying that I heard recently? cashing checks, snapping necks. It's that kind of stuff, Just like processing it. But actually we are, as a team for the work that we do, quite small, so you have to make sure the work that you do is as good as it can be and we all benefit from it, 

Radim Malinic: Benji, I think you've rounded up this conversation really well because curiosity, empathy, and self-doubt are beautiful elements of how to stay human and how to look after other humans. Because the work that you've described to me, the work I've seen you guys do, it requires endurance, it requires empathy, it requires the elements of seeing something far, far, far ahead in a distance and say, "We're gonna go after it, and we're gonna deliver it in the best possible way."

So thank you for sharing your story with me. And yeah, I'm really excited to see what you produce and what you produce for your studio, because you are one of those humans that is looking around the corners. Now I know a little bit why, and I never want you to stop.

So thank you. Thank you for being here.

Benji Wiedemann: Man, it's been my absolute privilege. Thank you for having me, and thanks for listening

Radim: Hey, thank you for joining me on this episode of Daring Forever Podcast. As always, I'd love to know your thoughts, questions, and even suggestions, so please get in touch via the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me, Radim Malinic. 

 thank you for being here, and I hope to catch you on the next episode 

​