Using Design to Solve Your Problems with Sarah Stein Greenberg

My guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg. Sarah is the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, better known as d.school. And she's built her career on helping companies unlock innovation and creativity. She's also the author of a new book, Creative Acts for Curious People. In this episode, we talk about how boredom helps you to be creative, the questions to ask instead of making small talk, how design can help you reframe your problems, way to develop empathy, and much more. It's a book chock full of takeaways, and the conversation is to this is Sarah Stein Greenberg.

So I'm with Sarah Stein Greenberg. How are you?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 1:30

I'm great, Graham, it's so nice to be here.

Graham Allcott 1:32

So I have book envy, right? Because your book is so beautiful, like just the thank you side of it. So I'm just holding this up for the video, if you're watching this on the YouTube version of beyond busy, and the book is creative apps for curious people how to think creating lead, in unconventional ways. I've been really enjoying it. So just wanted to start by saying congrats on the book. And we were just talking before we started here, you've been doing a whole bunch of podcast talking to people about the book. So I'm going to try and bring in some stuff that you've not talked about before and make this interesting for you. So let's talk about the book and your job. So your day job is you're the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which is sort of more commonly I guess, known as D school at Stanford University. So Johnny stop just by telling us about that, like so. So what is the school and and what is it that you

Sarah Stein Greenberg 2:31

do, the D school got started about 15 years ago, and we were kind of this unconventional experiment on the edge of campus. The only space available at the time was a little trailer that the faculty kind of went in and pulled up the carpet and you know, put in some, some tables and chairs, it was like really rough and ready. And it was it was based on the idea that if we could get students and faculty from all different parts of the university collaborating together, and thinking about creative problem solving with the the needs of the people they were designing for in mind, they might produce some really interesting and unusual kind of new solutions, new innovations. And actually that that is what has happened. So now we routinely offer between 30 and 50 classes a year, we have students from all over the campus who study together. And you know, there, there are a lot of classes where you could be sitting next to somebody from a different department. But it is a little bit more unusual to as a student have the opportunity to figure out what's it like to really work closely with somebody who thinks very, very differently. So you might have a team of students that's like a business student and a medical student and a policy student. And those three people are going to think about the opportunities and the needs of the people they're designing for in a really new way. So we need of course, then a common language for them to work through an open ended messy real world problem. And that's what we teach. We teach design as a way for people from all these different disciplinary perspectives to come together and tackle these kinds of ambiguous challenges.

Graham Allcott 4:08

I guess when some people think of design, they think of, you know, graphic design or architecture. And designs are much bigger and wider space than that, right? So give us your definition of design.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 4:20

I mean, I think of design as a creative problem solving approach. And it can be used to build buildings, or to create logos, as you know, in the examples that you just mentioned. But we're seeing all kinds of new uses in the past, I would say 2025 years design has started migrating into all kinds of different spaces. So for example, one of the projects that I talked about in the book was done by an amazing woman named Joe violet, who's an education specialist, and she was really looking at the challenges around substitute teaching in the US. And it turns out that in the US 10% of a child's instructional time in most public schools is spent with a substitute like When the main teacher is sick or you know, can't can't come to work, for some reason, that's a lot of time. And there are all kinds of broken aspects of that system, whether people are trained whether people come back and are retained within schools really fragmented, messy system. So she really took a fresh look at what that system might need to produce better educational results for students. So she came up with all kinds of ideas using design. And that's one of those examples of like, you wouldn't think like, oh, substitute teaching is a great opportunity for innovation. But actually, it's just the kind of situation where there are a lot of competing needs, perhaps in a very resource constrained environment in many school districts. And yet, there are people who are well intentioned, who really want to make a difference. And if you can figure out ways to better connect and align all of those different stakeholders and design, in this case, a technology platform, a training approach that could be implemented at low cost in many places, you could actually significantly improve the situation. And that's the kind of thing that we see design being used for these days. That's, and that's a newer phenomenon.

Graham Allcott 6:05

Yeah. And I guess that's where curiosity comes in. Right. So, I mean, my girlfriend's always sort of bemoaning me for the fact that as we're walking around, like, in my head, I'm sort of fixing things and thinking about stuff. And, you know, I think sometimes if you've got a very curious brain, then which I feel like I do, then you're always trying to spot those opportunities, or to spot what the problems are, and define problems and that kind of thing. What would you say, say to someone who maybe doesn't think like that? I'm quite jealous of the people that don't think like that, because I think they could just be more peace peaceful in their minds. It's not working with all this stuff. But if you don't think in that very curious way, what would you say to someone like that? You know, in terms of how could they change that? What, what could they do to think in a, in a more design lead way?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 6:59

Well, in the book, there are a whole set of practices and assignments that we teach all the time at, at Stanford in our classes. And there's a set of those that are about really cultivating your ability to notice in new ways and to spot opportunities that are kind of hiding in plain sight. So one of my favourite ones in that, in that kind of genre is called the Dérive. And the Dérive is like, if you are stuck on a problem, or you just feel like you're kind of you're lacking curiosity, you're kind of you know, sort of stuck in a routine. The dream is just a fantastic approach. So it involves taking 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and taking a walk in a familiar neighbourhood or part of the place, the city that you live in. And instead of planning your route in advance, you let your route be dictated by what you notice along the way. So you might choose to follow things that are just the colour yellow, and you might walk up to that first thing that you spot that's yellow, and investigate it and maybe make some notes about what you're seeing. And then you look around and find that next thing that's yellow, and on and on like that. And it sounds really simple. But something shifts subtly in how your brain takes in detail and notices things that you may have been walking by for years, and never noticed. And there's something about that experience that then leads you into a more reflective space. So I've been, you know, having people do that often as part of talking about the book. And people will come back and say I had this epiphany about the thing that I'm working on that I just it was like a breakthrough moment, or thinking about a deeper set of values. So I had somebody who decided to follow lines, like straight lines around around her area, and then really came back and was thinking about like, constraints in her life and ways in which she wanted to challenge boundaries that like she doesn't really want to think of as as fixed boundaries. So you get a wide range of observations and Aha, and just something as simple as a 30 or 60 minute investment in that ability to shift what your brain is taking in and what your brain is filtering out can lead to all kinds of other benefits.

Graham Allcott 9:05

And I guess if someone's listening to this and thinking, Well, I'm already just chock full, my diary is full, how do I make the time for that? I mean, you can combine this with your lunchtime or walking the dog or all kinds of other things, right? Like it's, it's walking around, it's just doing conventional things, but just in a really different way.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 9:23

That's exactly right. Another set of my favourite ones that are kind of in the same vein that you can do while you are, you know, waiting in line are called micro mindfulness exercises. So that involves like the discipline to instead of taking out your phone while you're waiting in line to get your coffee or you know, pick up your dry cleaning, keep your phone in your pocket, and commit to doing that for the whole morning. Every time you're waiting for something. Just don't take out your phone and see what happens in your brain and actually do a little tiny little piece of reflection about that at the end. And that's paired with a couple of other exercises. There's one called mindfulness of doors so it just noting the expression Your answer right before you leave one space and enter a new space, just taking that, you know, five seconds to tune your attention in a new way. And those are the kinds of practices that can help you see what you're missing around you and just lead you into a more calm and generative space.

Graham Allcott 10:15

Yeah, I remember, as you're talking about that, I just remember a few years ago, I did this year of, I did this thing called Extreme Productivity experiments. And the idea was to, so I did things like eating the optimum diet for productivity I did a month where every hour, I meditated for the first 10 minutes of the hour, and then work the rest, I did a thing called flipping the nine to five, where instead of working nine to five, work five to nine. And I did that in the morning. And then for a couple weeks, I did it in the evening. And so all these different experiments, and one of the ones that really struck, you know, really struck me and kind of stuck with me for a long time was, I did this one called the dice, man. So every time I was stuck, or every time, I didn't know the answer to something, I had to get out the dice. And then I had to come up with the options and just make the decision by dice. So just by doing that, I had to come up with either an odds and evens, you know, two options, but usually what I was doing was coming up with, let's say, like three different options, or six different options. And it's amazing, isn't it, how the brain often thinks in this very binary way of like, it's either this or that. And when you've got to do six options, like a lot of those ideas, you know, were just hiding in plain plain sight, they were just there. But like, I wasn't usually thinking of them. And just having that ability to, to just say the framework is there, I'm now going to put stuff in, it just helps the brain to kind of do something else.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 11:37

I love that example. I mean, that is just a perfect example of this tiny little bit of creative prompting. And it's almost like you're, you're creating a little game for yourself. And then you have to just respond and work within those rules. And that's just a brilliant example of like, your creativity responds to having a little bit of a constraint. And, and a little bit of that rule set that you've devised. And there is just so many wonderful ways that you can apply that. So another another example that you're making me think about is this just really, really fun kind of game that one of our designers and teachers Molly Bilson invented called proto bot. So proto bot is like, a, it's a, it's a little robot, you can access it online. And it just gives you a little prompt of something to make something to build. And it's a great way to kind of like unlock, you know, use that little bit of randomness to unlock, you know, your ability to come up with new ideas, or to build prototypes, or to experiment with, you know, five or 10 minutes, just to come up with some some quick ideas and responses to those prompts. Yeah,

Graham Allcott 12:42

and the book is just full of these tools. There's a few I wanted to talk to you about. We mentioned you mentioned there, the micro mindfulness stuff. And the idea of, you know, in many ways, rather than taking the easy option of taking your phone out of your pocket and scrolling through Instagram, whatever, just giving yourself that space to be a little a little bit more, I guess, a little bit more bored. And there's an exercise in the book called tethering. Do you want to explain tethering because that just really struck me as something that felt quite uncomfortable, but probably something that'd be really productive in terms of the creativity and the problem solving that might come

Sarah Stein Greenberg 13:20

from it. Yeah, you went right for one of the probably one of the most challenging ones in the book, which I appreciate. Yeah, so tether is this idea that exactly as you just said, you route yourself to one space, and you let yourself get bored, like get beyond the normal things that you might notice about the environment that you're in. So you might pick a museum, you might pick a town square, any place that's comfortable to sit for a few hours, you bring a notebook, and you just challenge yourself to continue to observe and to document what you're seeing. And you're going to run out of things to note down in maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, and then you're going to start to look in a new way. So you might start to think about, well, what was here before this current Townsquare was built, like I'm going to I'm going to notice what was you know, happening? And what's going to be here 1000 years from now, right? Or you might think about instead of just the objects, you might think about the interactions that you're seeing, and then the behaviours and then maybe you can start to think about or speculate about the motivations of the people who are interacting in the ways that you're observing. And so you can you can investigate the human dimension you can investigate the time dimension and all of these are just ways of seeing the systems around the the concrete things you're able to observe and to enter manifest and or is that manifest in plain sight. So the reality is like there is so much more complexity to any environment that we might be designing for, to the company that you're working in there all of those layers of rules and policies and behaviours and wishes. and goals and motivations, right? How do you actually start to unpack and to see into those? How can you see those opportunities in the education system or in in the business environment, whatever it is that you're designing for. So tether is also one of those real provocations toward noticing in a new way. And it just involves a little bit of time and a little bit of discipline to let yourself get into that space where you get into those deeper layers.

Graham Allcott 15:28

Why do you think we have to go through the boredom together?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 15:31

You know, I think we carry a lot of kind of biases, right about what we initially notice. And those come from good places like your brain is wired to basically quickly discern things like am I in danger is this a is this a place where I feel safe and comfortable. And you start to get into patterns of noticing that are based on those routines. But if you want to see opportunities that are you know, other people are not noticing that you are not noticing, you actually have to get into that space where you've already gone through all of those obvious observations. And the same thing is true when you're coming up with new ideas. And when you're in a generative space, right, you often this is why we talk about, like in a brainstorm, you want to go for quantity, you want to come up with more ideas than you think are possibly going to be useful. Because the first 50 or 100 Ideas are the obvious ones that are kind of floating around in the culture. There's something you read in a magazine, there's something you saw on YouTube, and they're kind of already out there. That's why they're coming to you quickly. And if you can push yourself to get beyond that horizon, you might get something more novel, you might get something more useful. And then in design, we believe strongly that you have to actually test those ideas. So even all of those more interesting ideas you might be coming up with, after you've gotten rid of the obvious ones. Those are still you know, we kind of question, are they interesting enough? And we and we then start to think about how do we build those? How do we test them quickly? That's how we start to move through a design process.

Graham Allcott 17:01

Yeah, and that idea of testing might be a good way to just drop in the whole, the story that you start the book with around it's called neuro health, neuro health.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 17:11

That's right. Yeah.

Graham Allcott 17:12

So one of the courses that you've got is entrepreneurial design for Extreme Affordability. So taking some of the ideas, and how can you apply this to developing economies? You know, to make really big change, do you want to just tell the story of how how neuro health came about and what it is?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 17:31

Yeah, so this was a group of students just as I described at the beginning, where in this case, there were two medical students and a public policy student and a civil engineer. And so they were partnered with an organisation working in Southern India, called the Narayana health hospital chain, the Narayana health hospitals, their mission is to deliver extremely high quality care at a large scale, but at a very low cost. And that is, of course, easier said than done. And so our students were really thinking from the perspective of, you know, we're going to go, we're going to, you know, observe what's happening, we've gotten kind of a wish list of, of changes from the project partner, and we're thinking about efficiency, we're thinking about taking costs out of some process. And then we're really thinking, you know, our objective is to design something that will help the clinician something that will help the hospital administrator achieve this mission. And they saw a lot of opportunities in that thing. But they also saw something that they hadn't expected when they were in the hospital environment and interacting with patients and families and others. And what they noticed is that there were lots of people who are waiting in the hospital. And they were waiting in the waiting room, just like in any hospital in any part of the world. But they were also waiting in the hallways and outdoors. And what they learned is that these were family members of patients, some of whom had travelled for a long, a long distance and had been waiting for a long time. And they were not well informed about the prognosis of their loved one, about how to take care of them when they came home. And they were experiencing a very high degree of stress and anxiety as a result. And so the students were were really affected quite deeply by the difficult experience that these family members were going through, when they came back home to Stanford. After reflecting on it and doing a bunch of analysis of all their findings, they decided that's the need that we're going to try to solve for, we are going to try to kind of close the information gap that we're seeing and design something that actually could alleviate the suffering and distress of these family members. So really different than what they had originally been given as the design brief. And they started by coming up with ideas around how to dramatise the and create some educational experiences for these family members around basic health care skills, hygiene relating to taking care of somebody who's just been through surgery to you know, making sure that somebody breathing well, so they designed these kind of quick videos that were like little, almost like little soap operas that showed family members taking care of their loved ones, their partner started testing these videos. And they were actually very surprised that that the family members responded incredibly positively. And so they went back to India, they started piloting and testing this idea further. And they, one of the students described to me later on that the second day that they were doing this pilot, the there was a line around the block. People, it's like the kind of word had spread by really, within the hospital, people were craving exactly this kind of information to better equip them to take care of their loved ones. And the students really felt, okay, we've discovered something, this is a low cost intervention, we think that some new organisation is needed to start to make this rigorous to make sure that it works, and then to scale it throughout the country. And that's exactly what they've done. So all four students kind of put other career plans on hold, they started this new organisation called new health. And they've now trained well over a million family members across South Asia, they're working with over 150 hospital partners. And it is an amazing story of the kind of impact that you can have, when you are open to seeing something seeing some need or opportunity that's adjacent to what you originally thought the problem was. So we talk about that as a as a moment of reframing the problem. And that's why when we set students on the kinds of design challenges that we give, the faculty really take a step back and say, You're going to go and observe and you're going to see things that we don't even know about. And that that mindset of when you are trying to solve a problem creatively, if you're not leaving yourself open to that kind of discovery moment, right to the observation of something that you couldn't have expected to see, then you're really editing out, you're really constraining a lot of the opportunity for innovation. So there's, there's kind of a couple lessons there from that story, right? One, what it looks like to actually develop a really impactful solution, bring it you know, take it all the way from observation to implementation, but also this idea that that curiosity mindset, that ability to explore, and then the skills to test your ideas in an ongoing and iterative way. That's what can lead you into an entirely new space of innovation.

Graham Allcott 22:25

I love the thing that about just, you know, sending back the one video and just testing it quickly. And just you can you can take that assumption, and you could spend months developing something fancy but actually just get one home a video, test it see what happens and get that feedback. And this year on the blockchain.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 22:42

They thought like, have we gone? Like, is this too silly? It's too simple, right? Does this mean we saw real suffering? Is this going to meet the need? And what actually turned out to be the case is that because they had dramatise it in a way that had some emotion in it, it struck a chord, right, it actually hit this hit the spot in a way that they couldn't have anticipated. So again, they were they were willing to test something that was you know, they were going to learn something new about how it landed. And their original prediction was not right in terms of how people actually responded. And that is a lesson we all could use, right? Like our idea of what the thing is, and what the solution is, it's all bound up in our own preferences, our own experiences. And when you are designing for others, getting out of your own way, can sometimes involve putting something out there and testing something that you're really not sure what's going to happen, but you're doing it because you want to learn more about the situation and more about the needs of the people that you're designing for.

Graham Allcott 23:39

If we just segue on from that then to just to think about understanding people in the environment more. There's a there's a exercise you do in the book around stakeholder mapping. And this exercise has been used with like kindergartens to, to increase enrollment from immigrant families and stuff like this. So like, this feels like one of those ones that anybody can do, like anybody listen to this can do this within your business within your team within you know, the stuff that you're working on. So just give us the flavour of stakeholder mapping and what does that look like? So

Sarah Stein Greenberg 24:17

this was a exercise designed by Terrell Coleman and his team. He's a Doral is an alum from from the D school. And he or his team developed this, this way of thinking very creatively about who in the community might be in support of the solutions or the needs that they're designing for and actually, who also might be an antagonist is really gonna have to work around. So the idea behind stakeholder mapping is you draw three concentric circles. And in the middle you put the you know, the description of the people that you're designing for who you're trying to help. In this case, the the project that you mentioned, it was around, trying to figure out how to enrol more students who are coming from a variety of backgrounds into early education programmes. And then you put like all the people in the next circle who you think are for that we're trying to help who might be friendly to that different players in education system that parents, then you actually put like who might be against it right? There might be some people from the cost perspective who would be concerned, or there might be some outright political opposition to certain kinds of approaches in this space. And finally, outside of all the circles, you put all the people who are in the community, but who are disengaged. And that is often where Terrell says an insight will lie of who you might tap, but it but then it requires that you actually go and do the process of like getting more insight and interviewing and trying to bring them into the the frame of the problem. So in this particular case, they realised that there was a very important church that many families in this community were attending, but the church was not playing any kind of role in the educational needs of the students. So they held a fair around enrolling people, you know, more and more families in this programme. So that's just one, one sort of little example of how you might use that tool to recognise where opportunities might lie. And again, it's in that same theme that we think about and design of shifting the frame. Right, not assuming that the way that the problem has been defined, which is like this is an education problem. Well, no, this is a community problem. So who else might be tapped in this case to get involved? And in that, in that particular example? It was it was that local church?

Graham Allcott 26:27

And that's a lovely thing. It's a lovely question to ponder in all of our work, isn't it is who could be useful in helping us make the change? Who's a conduit and useful but also currently disengaged? Feels like that's the question that we just don't ask often enough. That's

Sarah Stein Greenberg 26:45

right. And I think that gets back to your point about often thinking in to binary away, it's like, well, you know, who's for and against? Well, that's not the only way to, you know, think about and to map the landscape of the environment that you're in. But again, you need that little creative prompting, right, you need that extra circle that you have to fill out to push yourself to come up with that, that next layer, that less obvious layer of insight, Hmm,

Graham Allcott 27:09

and you talked a minute ago about getting out of your own way. There's also an element of sort of using what you have. So tell us about the banana challenge.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 27:19

The banana Challenge is a really fun challenge that's actually about really thinking critically about your own personal point of view as a designer or as a creative person. So the banana Challenge is a little activity in which you think about yourself as if you're going to make an advertisement for selling more bananas. And you, this is a great activity to do with a team or with a group for either just a change of pace, or to unlock a little bit of creative thinking. So you each need a banana. And everybody gets a physical banana, you think about your own passions in life, what you're really obsessed with. So in my case, I'm really obsessed with scuba diving. That's why the illustration on this particular page, my illustrator was kind enough to feature my own obsession. And you think about, like, in my case, like how could i How could I create a scene involving a banana that also relates to scuba diving, and then you make a little, you know, advertisement mock up of that and come up with a slogan and come up with an image. And there's a couple of things that are happening in this particular activity. So one is you get a chance to explore what's the connection between the thing that I am a uniquely obsessed with, like the thing that I know more about than almost anything else, and use that as a way to bring some deeper level of, of idea generation to life in in general and you know, specifically as applied to this banana challenge. But the other interesting thing that's happening is because you're using a physical banana, and you're taking a real picture, you are forced to work in a in the physical medium, and an analogue medium. And often right now, because we're all have these just incredibly easy to use digital tools, people default to making things in a PowerPoint, or in a keynote, or in some kind of, you know, just just doing things on your phone. And there's kind of a flattening effect, right? Like, my ideas are going to look more similar to yours than they would otherwise if we're just using the exact same tool, right? But if we're using if we're, like, you know, taking a picture with the actual light in the room and the actual texture of the things around the objects, even though we might then ultimately, like digitise something if we want to if we want to distribute it, having that spark happen in the analogue media just gives it more rich texture. So in that particular challenge Thomas both who who came up with that assignment he's trying to push students to get past their you know, comfort and familiarity with digital mediums of making and actually push into something that you know, for those of us who are old, like we're used to starting with a physical scatter starting with a physical prototype but actually it's becoming more and more common that people are so quick on all the on all the screens and all the apps people have sort of start there. And and getting beyond that pushing beyond that, again, it helps you get into that more personal, more textured, more rich design space.

Graham Allcott 30:08

Love it. I'm going to ask you about one more, and then we'll talk about some other stuff. This one really struck me. So there's the one with the girl on the chair on YouTube, we'll put this up on the screen. Well, maybe the way to do it in commercial audio podcast is, can you just describe, really briefly the image of the girl in the chair? And then like, tell us about the what really struck me was the reframe of language around trying to solve that problem?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 30:31

Absolutely. So what I want you to picture if you're listening to this is that there is a girl who's standing on a chair. And she's, she seems to be in kind of a home in a domestic environment. She's she's not wearing shoes, and she's reaching as hard as high as she can. She's in front of a really cluttered shelf, there. Everything you can imagine is on the shelves. And you can see a lot of books, you can see some plants, you can see some art supplies, just tonnes of stuff. And the question to then ask yourself, is what does this girl need? And often what happens is that when people first see this image, and then ask themselves, this question is they come up with things like, well, she needs a book, well, she needs that plan, she needs a ladder, right? She needs a longer arm. She's a, you know, a parent to help her. And you challenge yourself to come up with as many things but what you'll start to notice is the first set of things usually think about are nouns, they're objects. And it's, it's actually a kind of a trap for your brain. Because if you think about that, then you're kind of stuck. You've already defined what the solution is, she needs a book, she needs a ladder. Well, if you reframe that, and say she needs to reach, she needs to learn, she needs more knowledge, even she needs help. Those are in the direction of verbs, right? And we often think about that language flip as a way to create a much wider solution space, a noun often just translates into a pretty obvious solution, a verb translate into a deeper need to accomplish something, then you can actually push yourself to say, Well, why why did they just speculate like, look at this picture of the girl? Why does she want that book? Why does she want to reach? Why does she want to learn, and you can kind of start to come up with the kinds of things that if you were, you know, like interviewing this person to find out more about what you might design for them, you might ask these kinds of questions. And it's just that simple idea of the flip from the noun to the verb that many people find so helpful in thinking about, am I outlining a solution space where basically the solutions already known and already obvious for? Am I actually creating a real creative prompt, that I can then go much more broadly into create that reframing language a way to help her reach? Well, that could be 100 things, right? And that's the kind of skill in recognising that when you're working on a problem, you are, you're, you're too constrained, and you need a way to open it up. So your example with the dice is exactly that. Right? You're recognising like, it's the way I'm thinking about is too constrained, I need a way a way to prompt myself to open it up. This is this is a great example of another way to open up that solution space,

Graham Allcott 33:21

I guess it shifts you from trying to design an object or think about it as a how to solve the problem that we already know how to solve through to actually just connecting more with the empathy of the need, right? Like, like, it feels like it's much more about how to just how to get underneath the skin of what what could solutions be? And what's the human need in terms of getting that

Sarah Stein Greenberg 33:51

exactly right. And that's important, because you might still end up designing a product or a physical, physical object. But if you don't have insight about why that's special, why that will help somebody accomplish an underlying goal. Like it's just another thing in a store on a shelf. And it's unlikely to have the kind of insight behind it, that's meeting an unmet need, right? So, you know, it's like, if you want to get into designing a ladder, that might be this might be a great space, right? But if you want to actually create something that's that's differentiated, that is anticipating a need that the market might be coming upon in the future, or that might be increasing in the future. You need these practices to get beneath exactly what you're saying, getting to meet that surface, and get into that layer of what's motivating people, what's important to people. What are the goals that people have, that these these things you might design might help them achieve? And that's what we mean when we say human centred design, right? We're really trying to anticipate and to understand and to empathise to get at that root set of needs.

Graham Allcott 34:55

So do you see design as a like a route to me empathy.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 35:00

I think design benefits from empathy. I think design can be a way to practice empathy. And I also think there are other ways to gain empathy as well. But we, we have these learning experiences where perhaps for the first time, students are really talking to somebody who has a very different set of needs than themselves. So if you know a student who's you know, 22, might be interviewing someone about the ageing experience, right, and they're going to start to have a conversation that, you know, perhaps hopefully will generate some kind of empathy, some kind of depth in terms of really being able to see yourself in that other person's experience. And that can often lead to that kind of commitment that we saw with the new health team, right, those four students didn't start out, you know, really understanding much about that particular problem space, but they did actually connect those very human needs, in some cases with experiences that that one of the students had had prior around having a relative in the hospital, the medical students certainly had been sort of like dancing around some of those issues. But it just came into focus when their emotions got involved. And that is it helped them recognise the depth of this need might lead to a really long term impactful solution.

Graham Allcott 36:22

I'm curious to know. So you've been the executive director of D school for a little while, I'm curious to know, what what does it look like working inside D school? So I guess, part of my part, my brain imagines this group of people who are all so curious and open and like there's, you know, there's all this stuff happening? Like, like, is there ever a downside to that? Is there ever like a lack of structure is there Do you sometimes do sit around really craving boredom, uncertainty and structure? And, you know, the, the opposite of the design process?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 37:04

I guess? Well, I like to think that we have ways to get ourselves unstuck that we sometimes have to, you know, remember to practice just like with our students, right, so actually testing ideas, actually, you know, experimenting with different with different models. You know, we are definitely a group of kind of unconventional iconoclastic people. And so you see lots of folks, you know, trying things in all different directions. And that kind of within the container of the D school, like, that's how, how we've organised ourselves right to be able to explore lots of new spaces. So in the past couple of years, you know, we've seen more and more teaching teams propose classes around themes of racial justice, for example, which is a huge topic in in the US and around the world. And that, that our ability to continue to provide a space where we can be really responsive from an educational standpoint, and and help students then work on the challenging issues that they care most about, that's really part of our DNA. But of course, then the flip side of that is like, we can't necessarily plan for them, what we can, what we can plan for is like this is a creative environment, we try to unlock that we try to set the conditions where people are going to be able to recognise those new needs and those new opportunities as they're coming up. And then operationally, we have to be able to accommodate that kind of agility. So that's, that's, you know, those are some of the design considerations I think about from an organisational design standpoint, from a process design standpoint, and thinking about the balance within leadership of saying like, Hey, here's what here's our mission, here's what we care about, here's our direction. Our here are our values, articulating that from time to time, but also having the flexibility to have all of the incredibly insightful people who are doing the teaching or doing the creative work to figure out the next set of ideas around curriculum to have that really kind of take take the lead when those great new ideas spring up. And I'll give you just one example. There is a whole new set of mediums that people are designing in, right, so we were talking about the difference between like starting in an analogue material versus in a digital one. Well, people are designing using machine learning, right? They're creating products and services that are based on synthetic biology and blockchain and all of these new emerging technologies that actually are still not that widely known in terms of the fundamentals. How do you work with them? How do you build them? So we have a set of people in our teaching community who are really interested in figuring out how do we create learning experiences where people who might have no tech background can nonetheless be an effective participant on a team where somebody is designing like a conversation bot, right, which is based on AI and really understand what are the considerations of designing that that new service around who are all the different people who are going to experience it around all the biases that can creep into the datasets that you might not be aware of, you might actually have some some blind spots, you have to figure out how are we going to how are we going to eliminate that from our product. So we have this incredibly creative group of instructors who are constantly thinking about what's the next challenge in design gonna be. And that's a whole set of new, totally like brand new curriculum that's being developed. One of those assignments is in the book, it's called the build a bot, actually, and it's about designing conversational bots and starting to wrestle with some of these new mediums. But you don't have to know how to code to be a part of the team that is designing with these kinds of emerging technologies. And that's really the experience that area mogotes, who designed that particular assignment is trying to impart to sounds

Graham Allcott 40:50

like such a, such a fascinating place to be in a, just a thing to be to be part of and to be leading. I wonder if there's anything in particular that you are most proud of, or find most interesting about the culture of working there?

Sarah Stein Greenberg 41:08

I think for me, one of the ways that it just always feels like home, is that it is a very playful group of people. And so on the one hand, we're teaching classes in, you know, like, for example, a very serious topic, like how do you design financial products and services for folks who have experienced a natural disaster, right, think about insurance, thinking about what happens when your your whole community experiences a wildfire. That's a very serious topic, right? At the same time, we want to use those kinds of prompts and experiences like you're describing with the dice or like, you know, the banana challenge to spark that kind of the part of the way that things you can access in your brain when you're in a more playful state. And so being able as an instructor to actually hold that space between a very serious topic and getting into the the playfulness, that can accompany real creativity, that balance is very challenging. And that is one of those things that I'm incredibly proud of, in my colleagues is that that ability to have both of those operate within our culture, at the same time, that commitment to impact through design, as well as that playful spirit that helps people actually get into a more creative space.

Graham Allcott 42:24

And is there anything I mean, there's loads in the book, but is there anything just as a simple tool that you can leave people with that can just, you know, help somebody who's sat with their team and you know, got team meeting coming up on Monday morning or whatever? Like, how can how can they make that more playful,

Sarah Stein Greenberg 42:41

I mean, that one thing that comes to mind immediately is the Rock Paper, Scissors tournament. This is one of those activities that actually is so widely used at the D school, nobody can remember who started like who brought it. And of course, we all played rock, paper, scissors or roshambo as kids. But the way that this works is tournament style, where everybody pairs up, you play, you play a couple of rounds, you declare a winner, and then the person who is the loser becomes the winners biggest fan, and audibly loudly cheering, enthusiastically cheering. And then that winner goes and finds another winner and they do a face off and then etc. So especially in a group of like, you know, if you're in a big workshop, or you're at a conference, like a group of 50, or 100, people, it gets very raucous and very loud. And all of a sudden, you see a roomful of like very serious adults, you know, like running around cheering for each other and playing this childhood game. And it's kind of an amazing way just to like, bring a little bit of energy back to the group bring a little bit of fun. So that's one of my favourites just for like sheer energy. And then there are a lot of exercises that are more about setting the conditions at the beginning of a collaboration, to build trust between people, right to actually just like, have that one human moment of contact right at the beginning, or, you know, as a refresher, to actually create what's called psychological safety, right? The, you know, my feeling that if I come up with a weird or crazy idea, you're not going to judge me for it, you're gonna, you're gonna say like, cool idea. Let's put it up on the board and keep going. You know, it's like there's a way to actually navigate, treading on uncertain space, right? Where there's not a clear right answer. We're reframing the problem. We're introducing ambiguity and uncertainty. And that requires us to actually have some trust in each other, that we're going to take care of how you know, each other feels in that. So there's a lot of exercises that are really, really geared toward building that kind of trust and safety. And there's

Graham Allcott 44:43

some really lovely warm ups like the one about everyone tells the story of their name. And everyone talks about what they would bring to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. So just similar things where it just feels that psychological safety and it's about talking about something other than the work of it. Beginning as you say, like with this kind of moment of human contact, which maybe leads on to the last thing I wanted to ask you is also very linked to psychological safety actually, which is about kindness. And what I'm currently working on with my new book is, is to say that kindness and empathy can lead you towards trust and psychological safety to kindness as another one of those conduits that would would end up fueling, you know, creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, all of the all of these other things. I just I'd love to know your thoughts on on kindness and leadership. And what do you see as as as being kind of leadership? I

Sarah Stein Greenberg 45:40

mean, one thing that immediately springs to mind that's very present in our culture is this idea of benevolent critique. So we want to be hard on the work but soft on the people. And that is one place where kindness really manifests in our environment, right? It's like when you are critiquing student's work, or the work of your colleagues, or even your own, you want to separate the person from the what the work that they have produced, and you want to ask questions like, what's the goal of this work? Not like, you know what, I really didn't like it when you decided to make it purple and right, it's like, well, what are the goals of this work? And does being purple actually help it meet its goal, right, and almost by talking about it in the third person, rather than personalising it that that is, again, it's a really nice language approach, to be able to say, we're focused on the quality of the work and whether it's serving it's goal, not whether you are a good designer, and of course, that allows just enough distance to help you become a better designer, because you're taking the feedback, and you're able to just slightly de personalise it and make sure you can hear the critique, you can hear the feedback. And that, of course, then really makes that work more likely to succeed. So that's a great example of where, I mean, it's kind, right, we're definitely kind hearted people. But there's also a really under like, an underlying, almost business reason for that kind of distinction. And why we think benevolent critique works much better than, you know, sort of like just critique being critical for the sake of like the critique or looking smart, or being able to kind of like achieve some kind of status that way.

Graham Allcott 47:18

That's a lovely phrase benevolent critique, you know, hold on to that one. Do you have any memories of either very kind, or very unkind leaders that you've worked with yourself,

Sarah Stein Greenberg 47:30

I'm sure all of us have worked with both kind and unkind leaders. I had a, I had a boss early on in my career, who I had a difficult time with. And I actually don't think she was trying to be unkind. But she really had a hard time, I think I'm still on the theme of critique, she actually had a hard time expressing what the goal was that she wanted me to achieve with a particular project until she saw initial work for me. So I would often have the experience where I would like not get a lot of good, you know, sort of direction, and then make something that I thought was maybe meeting the need, and then she would look at and say, that wasn't what I had in mind. And I would feel extremely deflated. Because I've, you know, felt like there has to be some way to set me up better, you know, at the beginning, like, how can we get better aligned in the beginning of this project, so that I'm not wasting all my time, right. And I think I experienced that as a little bit of like, a lack of respect for my time, I don't know that that's how she meant it. Like, I think it was probably a lack of skill rather than a mal intent. But I remember this was, again, it was one of my very first jobs out of college, that was really, I really, really struggled with that type of leadership. And I think, you know, one of the one of the things that I value in a leader is where there is consideration for the time and the effort of all of the people in the organisation and people don't feel like they are doing a lot of busy work, or doing things for no purpose like that. That purpose is clear. I think that is actually an act of kindness as a leader, one that I resonate with and perform better under and then one that I try to instil as well, in my own practice as a leader.

Graham Allcott 49:15

Yeah, it's like the kindest, the kind of thing that you can do is give people this, like, the sense that their work has some purpose, that they're not just engaged with batting emails back and forward, that you're working towards some, you know, some kind of big a goal. And that in itself brings a dignity. Like there's a real kind of kindness to that, right.

Sarah Stein Greenberg 49:36

That's right. I like that idea of dignity related to work. And I think that that is related to feeling like you have a purpose and feeling like there's meaning you know, the things that you're doing, even when you are batting emails back and forth. There's a there's a bigger goal. And I think that especially in a moment where, you know, many folks are separated from their teams or their clients or their customers and we all feel like a little bit, maybe more You know, isolated from the the work or the the impact that we might be having. I think that that is even more important for leaders to articulate what is the inspiration? What is the impact that we're having? How do we actually see the effect of our work and stay motivated, even though we're going through this really challenging period where the you know, all of the norms in the ways that we're used to interacting with each other and being able to see and feel the impact of our work that might be that might be shifting, or that might have really changed

Graham Allcott 50:31

those to be honest, feel like perfect questions to wrap us up. So the book is creative acts for curious people. And I'm certainly buying a couple of copies of these to put on people's desks who I work with. So Sarah, it's just been such a pleasure having you on beyond busy. Is there anything you want to share as we finished? Like, how can people connect with you learn more about your work anything else like that,

Sarah Stein Greenberg 50:54

where you can find easy access to the book at D School books.com. And there's actually a whole series of books coming out from the D school, the next set is gonna come out in April 2022. And they touch on a range of topics. So if you kind of are interested in these kinds of design practices, there's a book about making maps and visualising storytelling with data. There's one about designing for belonging and creating a more inclusive culture within your organisation. There's one about courage and how hard it is sometimes to get your ideas out in the world. But some some practical advice for how to do that. So those are all at d.school books calm, and then I'm on LinkedIn and on Instagram, and I'd love to be in touch. Thanks so much for being here. My pleasure, Graham, great to talk to you.

Graham Allcott 52:15

So there you go Sarah Stein Greenberg. And I said this right at the beginning of the episode, but I'm going to say it again. At the end. The book is beautiful. The illustrations are incredible. And actually emailed the editor of my next book and said, Hey, can we make a book like Sarah's because it's so nice. And they said, it's, it's really expensive to make books like that, and we can't so yeah, very jealous of just how good Sara's book looks. And I guess if it's a d.school book from Stanford kind of has to have a kind of visual appeal. But it's beautifully designed. And that really kind of adds to the appeal. The other thing with her book is because of how it's designed, and I don't know whether this is deliberate, and I didn't get a chance to ask, but it feels like it's sort of designed to be a book that you just hop in and out of, rather than a book that you kind of go from start to finish. And that's definitely how I consumed it, which is really unusual for me a methodical beginning to end sort of really usually, but I really just had this instinct to jump around quite a lot. So yeah, just a really great book and one that I guess Kindle just will not do do this book justice. This is like a real advert for printed paper based books. So go and get Creative Acts for Curious People, I'm certainly going to be using this as a bit of a textbook and coming back to it and spending some time with it. So really, really nice. Just love talking to Sarah, really interesting conversation. Hope you enjoyed it too.

Just want to say thank you to Pavel and Emilie, my podcast super team. And also thank you to Think Productive, our sponsors for the show. If you're interested in helping your team with productivity, helping your team to make space for matters, then drop us a line you can find out more at www.thinkproductive.com find your nearest office from there and find out how we can help you to increase productivity, have a better work life balance and ultimately, do your best work. So that's www.thinkproductive.com If you want to find out more. And as I said a couple weeks ago, I'm just beavering away on the book and then doing some speaking gigs and stuff in around that got a couple of really nice ones coming up. So if you're interested in getting me in to speak at your company, then that is something that I do. And I realised the other day that I just don't really tell people that I do that. And like it was quite funny. And then the last year someone had said to me, Oh, can you come in and talk? Do you do talks? It's like yeah, I mean, that's the main way that I make a living, you know, did you know podcasting is not lucrative?

Yeah, my main source of income, you know, because also, by the way, books are not that lucrative either. So my main source of income is speaking within companies and then running the various programmes that I do like Six Weeks to Ninja, which we'll be doing later on this year. You can find out more about all that stuff, by the way at grahamallcott.com. And if you want to inquire about me coming into your company to speak then you can email emilie(@)grahamallcott.com. And Emilie will be able to look after you and work out if your dates work and talk to you about pricing and all that stuff.

And the final thing I want to say is I have this weekly email, it's called Rev Up for the Week. And if you're not signed up, then basically what I do is just every Sunday night four or 5pm, UK time four or five, just like just plucked a time out of the air, I send out a positive or productive idea for the week ahead. So if you want to be in on that, then just go to grahamallcott.com. And you can see all the little boxes that you can fill in on every page of that site. And she's got one of these boxes to fill in forever for the week. So yeah, sign up there. And I send an email out every week. And then what's lovely is lots of you reply. And you know, it's so nice on a Monday, having just sent this thing out, you know, usually I kind of schedule it towards the end of the week. And then usually Fridays, I'm quite offline, I kind of forget about what I've written. And then it goes out Sunday or not, I'm not really checking emails. And then Monday morning, I'm in there, looking at the email inbox. And there's just like reactions to the thing that I did last week. And it's just a really nice sort of feedback loop in a way. So thank you, if you're one of the people that that regularly responds to the rev up for the week emails. And if you're not, then this is your invitation. I do try and reply to every single one. So if someone sort of takes the time to send me what they thought of email, I'll try and take the time to reply doesn't always happen if I've got a busy week. But yeah, generally my default is that I reply to all of them. So if you want to get in touch with me, then actually just being on the email, and waiting for topics that really resonate with you is a really good way to do that. So just go to Graham allcott.com, you can find out more there.

As always, we have the podcast in audio form, but it's also on YouTube. So if you're a person that watches stuff on YouTube, I'd really appreciate you just going and subscribing to the YouTube channel. If you just put in my name or put in beyond busy, you will find the YouTube channel there. Yeah, I'd really love your help in just spreading the word about that YouTube channel. We're pretty new on the YouTube and it'd be really great to get some more views on some of those videos and just kind of spread the beyond busy message a bit further. So please do go and subscribe on YouTube. And that's about what I've got to say I'm just beavering away on the book and just locked away in the shed trying to keep warm waiting for the spring to calm and yeah watching a bit of football hoping that there's going to be a baseball season because the players are on strike and do my usual you know sort of touring through all the new stuff on Spotify and listening to some amazing new music as ever. So that's that's me, that's my life. That's what I'm up to. And I hope you're well and you know, enjoying life wherever you are. And I'll see you in two weeks time. Until then take care bye for now.