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Interview with Jack Downs

Writer's picture: Dorenda BrittenDorenda Britten

Updated: Nov 18, 2024




In this interview, Dorenda speaks with Jack Downs. Jack is a distinguished marketing professional, previously named one of Reseller News NZ's 30 Under 30 in Tech for Marketing. He has extensive experience in the startup industry and multinational e-commerce businesses, both on the agency and client side. If that wasn't enough for "Under 30", he also helps to organise the NZ Hi-Tech Awards!

Dorenda and Jack explore the impact of dyslexia on Jack’s journey in the tech industry. Dorenda challenges the view of dyslexia as a disability and highlights how Jack's early diagnosis and family support helped him turn perceived challenges into strengths. Jack shares his experience, emphasising how working with his unique cognitive style fueled his creativity.


The transcript has been edited for clarity.


Transcript


Dorenda: I'm here today with Jack Downs. We're at the spark Arena in Auckland, where Jack is preparing helping to prepare for the big Hi-Tech Awards this evening, and I've taken a moment of Jack's time just to connect with him, because I know from hearsay that Jack is dyslexic. 


Jack: Yes, hello. 


D: So Jack, I started hearing about your dyslexia, not as a problem, but as a "oh, by the way, Jack is dyslexic." quite a few years ago now. No one seemed to think of it as a disability in your case. I know that your father has worked with the Hi-Tech community for some years (David Downs); how did you yourself become involved in the high-tech community?


J: I've been involved since I came out of high school, actually. In my last year of high school, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I had a scholarship for Massey university to do business. I had a few offers for jobs. I ended up doing both. I had an offer from the Instillery with Mike Jenkins, and he brought me on board as a developer and a graphic designer, and I did a bunch of stuff there while also studying at Massey doing business. I failed all my papers on purpose. I couldn't be bothered writing essays. I hated every moment of it, but it was free so I gave it a go. I decided it wasn't for me, and 6 months into all of that, I quit university and went full-time with Instillery, spent four or five years there, and then came into Swaytech and wanted a bit of an agency work so I can work with multiple businesses and provide creativity solutions for lots of businesses at once, and then a year into that, Bob got me involved in the Hi-Tech Awards, and I've just kind of gone from there. Now I'm living in Sydney with a completely different job, but I love to hop back over every so often and attend the Hi-Tech Awards.

D:Obviously, you're very valuable. So, I'm curious about you, Jack, because being dyslexic has seemingly never held you back. You've never faced, in my experience, that kind of "oh, Jack is dyslexic, therefore he can't do anything" attitude. So, what do you think it is about you?


J: I think I'm lucky because I had an early diagnosis. I was in primary school when my first when my parents started thinking, "oh, maybe Jack could be dyslexic." I had some family friends, including my best friend at the time (still a best friend of mine), diagnosed with dyslexia. My parents kind of recognised that and went, "oh, maybe we should get Jack tested too," because I was struggling at school a lot. So I've had a very early diagnosis from probably intermediate, if not primary school, which allowed me a lot of time to not necessarily "deal with it," but to come up with creative ways to do things differently and think differently. I see a lot of things a lot differently than others. For example, I can remember the whole room and all the tables around here, and that's quite helpful for doing something like this. Just little things like that. 


D: Absolutely. They're not little things, by the way. They're things that a lot of people can't do. Now, I need to declare, myself, that I've been involved with the Hi-Tech Awards for quite a few years now as a judge. I also come from a design background, and so I started to realise that, in practising design, we're not considering who's at the table at the beginning of the work, the "design investigation," if you like. And so I started looking at diversity as was then explained. It was explained purely and simply as gender or culture. And I know, from my own experience and my family, that dyslexia was missing. There were other neurodiversities, of course, but dyslexia as I researched it more and more, I started to understand how enormous it is, and it's now thought to be one in five globally. In New Zealand that means well over a million people. So what I'm doing, and and the company I've started up with a couple of Partners, is called Unlock Innovation and what we're looking at is bringing more understanding of dyslexia and support for dyslexic people into the tech sector. So I'm enormously interested in in in what your experience and your experience. I really want to know from you, and I want you to tell our audience about, what your strengths are first. 

J: Oh, and I haven't really thought about it properly until you came to me about exactly what those strengths might be. They just come naturally to me. Not to brag, but I feel like I'd come up with a lot of creative solutions to people's problems. Not to name names, but when it comes to seating plans, I've done a lot around that and how we can make it quicker and less risky, and all that kind of stuff. And when it comes to business problems as well, if I'm sitting in a room in a meeting, I'm not afraid to put up my hand and come up with a crazy idea, or ask the question that might be needed, whereas others might not want to ask that question, or might not have thought about this different, creative way of thinking about something. I also have a very logical brain, which is fantastic, because I can help mix the logic and the creativity all in one. I think that's quite a unique way to do things. 


D: It is a marvelous mixture. Now, it's time for me to also declare that, last year, at the great age of mid-70s, I discovered I was dyslexic, Which explains a lot about my life, but I had already embarked on this journey before I myself knew. I think I intuit a lot about how dyslexics have been able to survive in this world, because it seems to me that as I go further and further into the research, that we're all neurodiverse. We're all on a continuum. So, why was it, that the left-brainers took all the power? In the world in the last, however long, it's been the left-brainers, those people who like to take one step at a time, and fancy that they're logical, who have been the winners. Us crazy creatives have been locked up, and brought out occasionally. We're trollied out occasionally. So, for me, if we're going to face the big challenges of the 21st century, we need both sets of skills. So why do you think your skills, or dyslexic skills, might be so valuable in the 21st century? I'll preface this by saying that the World Economic Forum has identified the skills of the 21st century as being, for me, almost a perfect match of many dyslexic people. Big picture thinkers, contextual thinkers, have a high-risk profile, and are creative, and have good people skills. So there we are. So, why do you think it's this is valuable? 


J: I think, like you say, it's the neurodiversity factor. Everyone has a different outlook on life, everyone has a different approach to the way that they do things. And having a holistic approach to everything, and seeing the full picture, is a fantastic thing that helps someone to be able to lead, and to be able to provide creative solutions or logical solutions. But you do need those detail-oriented people as well, because, otherwise, we're gonna miss things, and I'm just gonna do it the way that I see it, and I think that applies to absolutely everyone, not just dyslexics. It's having a mix of everyone in the room together to come up with these fantastic companies or products or solutions to the world's problems.


D: So, equal respect. 


J: Yeah. Absolutely. 


D: So, last year, Unlock Innovation won a small Callaghan Ārohia Seed Grant. It was thrilling for me, because for our work to be recognised as innovative is really important. Because what we're talking about here is promoting more innovation in New Zealand by bringing disparate minds together. And, if you like, engaging with the tension of that. So, that's what we're doing, and it's not that easy, but I'm coming across people like you on a pretty much on a regular basis now. People have been hiding Not you, but I've been hiding dyslexia. Because you couldn't get diagnosed when I was a kid unless you were a boy or you came from wealthy family. Because it was expensive, and it wasn't thought to be a "woman" thing. But dyslexia runs right across every gender, every culture, everywhere, no matter what. So we have this capacity. I'm talking about New Zealand. You're probably talking about New Zealand and Australia (I don't know where your loyalty lies!), but we can't afford to miss out on the skill set. 


J: Yeah, I agree.


D: What would you hope for the future, Jack?


J: I hope that more people can talk about it openly. It did surprise me when you said that you heard that I was dyslexic, because I've only ever told people when needed. I've only just mentioned it to bosses or managers or someone like that, because I feel like it's nice for them to know that I might struggle with writing something long or doing a presentation or something like that, and I luckily never have come across any problem with that. But I think being able to be open about it, and say, "hey, I have a different way of looking at this, I am dyslexic," or anything like that, is just a great conversation to start having.

D: I think we should remove the prefix; just "lexic."


J: I'm lexic.


D: Yeah, you're lexic!

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