The One You Feed - Sarah Stein Greenberg on Creative Thinking and Action Through Design

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.  Sarah helps lead the d. school, an interdisciplinary institute at Stanford that nurtures innovators and spreads design thinking.   In this episode, Eric and Sarah Stein Greenberg discuss her book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Get Text Messages from Eric that will remind and encourage you to help stay on track with what you’re learning from the week’s episodes released on Tuesdays and Fridays.  To sign up for these FREE text message reminders, go to oneyoufeed.net/text. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Sarah Stein Greenberg and I Discuss Creative Thinking and Action Through Design and… Her book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. How design includes systems and experiences in both personal and professional realms The importance of tuning in to the emotional needs and signals when addressing problems or issues The curse of knowledge or expertise Keeping an open mind and not jumping to the first solution  Being open to feedback as opposed to seeking validation An important tool in design is seeking feedback early and often Starting with a “beginner’s mind” is critical in design Learning to see things in a new and different way How reflecting on our experiences can unlock new insights  The exercise:  “What?, So What?, Now What?” The practice of blind contour portrait to locate and turn off the inner critic Learning to suspend judgment in the generative process How creative work involves trying new ideas knowing they’re not good “I Like, I Wish” practice allows us to reflect and reframe an experience The “tether” practice includes sitting for 3 hours to observe and record what you’re seeing Sarah Stein Greenberg links: Sarah’s Website Twitter When you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed.  Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Stein Greenberg, you might also enjoy these other episodes: How to Stay Creative with Austin Kleon Creativity as a Cure with Jacob NordbySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Of all that we offer as part of the Spiritual Habits Program, there's one thing we do that, time and time again, we get feedback saying it was one of people's very favorite parts of the whole experience. It's the daily text message reminders. It's super simple, but super impactful when it comes to reminding and encouraging people to incorporate the things they're learning into their life. So now we've decided to offer this to all of you. During each week, I will be texting brief reminders to help you stay on track with what you're learning from the episodes that we release on Tuesdays and Fridays. and mindful to pull you out of autopilot and encourage you to engage with the week's podcast topics in a bite-sized, short, and simple manner. And maybe most of all, they will be reminders that you're part of this listener community and that there are like-minded people all over this world receiving the same text message, working on feeding their good wolf in the same way as you are.

Reminders that I'm right there with you doing the same. So if you'd like to sign up for these free text message reminders and bits of encouragement from me, go to oneyoufeed.net slash text. What is that voice in your head telling you that is so sure that you need to do something right the first time that it's going to interrupt that process of just creating something. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Stein-Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Sarah helps lead the d.school, an interdisciplinary institute

at Stanford that nurtures innovators and spreads design thinking. Today, Eric and Sarah discuss her book, Creative Acts for Curious People, How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, Creative Acts for Curious People, How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild and they say,

in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I'm very drawn to this parable, and I also have some mixed reactions to it. Part of it that's really compelling is it actually really conjures for me very deep memories of my grandfather putting me to bed as a kid when he and my grandmother would visit and singing me songs from the 20s and 30s from

his childhood. And there's something about just thinking about the way in which wisdom is conveyed in different ways and passed down through generations that is really beautifully encapsulated even in this very short parable. The mixed part of my reaction is the essence of this idea of, you know, good versus evil. It seems so neat to me. And that's part of what's compelling, right? It's so neatly packaged. But in life, I feel like sometimes things just don't present as one thing or the other thing. And the way in which this really comes up in my work is that oftentimes when you're trying to address some kind of creative challenge, it's not clear what the answer is, right? There's not an obvious path.

It's not an obvious choice between the right way or the wrong way. And we talk about that a lot with our students around, you know, how do you navigate ambiguous, uncertain challenges in a really creative and resilient way? navigate ambiguous, uncertain challenges in a really creative and resilient way. That is, for me, one of the dilemmas that this parable presents, right? Is that we actually, as humans, we want things to be so crystal clear, and yet often they don't present that way. And we have to actually find a third way or a fourth way or a fifth way to navigate through some kind of tricky challenge. And that's particularly true if you're trying to come up with something new, right? If you're trying to be innovative and creative. So again, on the one hand, I really love the sort of optimism of this parable that it should be so easy to tell the difference. And then I'm reminded that oftentimes life just does not make it that

easy. Yeah. Life certainly does not make it easy. What you're saying makes me think of another famous piece of wisdom, which is the serenity prayer, right? You should accept the things you can't change and change the things you can. That sounds great. But the problem is, boy, is it hard to know, right? That gray area in the middle is where the wisdom is. That's right. That's right. And navigating that space and understanding your disposition to that gray area and what that does to you emotionally, that's actually a really important part of learning how to kind of master your own creative abilities. Yeah. And I want to get to the role of emotion in design because you talk a lot about it,

but let's start off by talking about what design is because design is sort of at the heart of this book. It's at the heart of your work. And people may have a very limited understanding of design. Like I design a web page, I design a chair. But you and your students, you do way, way more than that. Can you share a little bit about what design means to you and how far it stretches? Yeah, design is one of those things that, you know, as so many things are changing and evolving in our world, design really is a practice and a field that is changing quite rapidly at the moment. And, you know, for many, many years, I think most of us would have said, like, design is about a chair or it's about how the space in your room feels once you design all your furniture. But increasingly, it still means those things.

But it also means thinking about the design of the experience that you might have at your local grocery store or thinking about the design of the system that is underpinning how we call up substitute teachers, which is one of the examples that I talk about in the book. And those are places where creativity and design practices can actually really make a customer's experience better, a teacher's or a kid's experience better in a school. how do we actually bring those into more complex social sector challenges or larger scale business challenges and even into the personal realm, thinking about how your family might decide to design your vacation? Yeah, I was impressed in the book about the scope of the sort of projects that your students were working on. Do you want to pick one that might be a favorite of yours to talk about a little bit just to frame this up? Yeah, that sounds great. Let me talk a little bit more about substitute teaching because that's one of the stories that I share in the book. So we had a wonderful fellow a few years ago named Jill Violet.

And Jill is best known for starting an organization called Playworks. And so she has been in that kind of education entrepreneur space for a long time. And Playworks is a really cool operation where when kids experience very structured play, well-run play and games, they learn all kinds of leadership skills. They learn about conflict resolution, but oftentimes recess is like the thing that teachers don't want to deal with. It's like the extra part of the job. So Playworks provides trained coaches who can really show up and run recess in a way that really benefits kids and it really benefits the schools and the teachers. And Jill noticed the way she describes it is that a certain problem was following her

around for many years. And that problem was she would sometimes get asked by principals, oh my gosh, we had a substitute who didn't show up today or a teacher who got sick at the last minute. Can I borrow one of your coaches to be a sub? And so first she thought it's about the pipeline, right? There aren't enough qualified people who are coming into substitute teaching. Then she realized like, well, there's a piece of it that's really about the training that maybe in some places there are lots of folks who want to sub, but they don't know how to run a classroom, right? They have other skills. And one of the areas that she uncovered was that there wasn't a reliable way in most schools for the teacher to hand off his or her lesson plans for the day to the sub.

And then the sub would arrive in the morning and be like totally disoriented and nobody knew where the plans were and nobody knew what they were supposed to do. And that is not a good experience, right, to feel very underprepared when you're showing up for a day of work. And so the problem in some ways was less about recruitment of subs and more about retention. And so by thinking carefully about how do we improve the experience of the subs getting the right information they need, knowing where to park, like really being welcomed into the school, that could lead to higher retention rates for those substitutes and a better experience for everyone. And what's interesting about this is like sometimes when you start to poke at a problem, you find out like, oh, it's really quite significant. So kids in the U.S. spend up to

10% of their time with a substitute teacher. That's just kind of a normal statistic. And so there's a very significant role that subs play. And Jill really felt like this is a very worthwhile challenge to be working on that you wouldn't normally think about from a design perspective, from an experience perspective. But by applying some of these same tools that are in the book, she came up with all of these interesting ideas and has been testing and piloting better ways to train subs, better ways to recruit and retain subs, and actually launched an organization called Substantial to do just that. You sort of mentioned emotion there a little bit, and you tell a story.

It's not a story. Well, I guess it's a story about something that really happens. About a group that was doing, I don't know how to pronounce, is it Nura? That's exactly right. Nura Health. Nura Health. And I'll let you tell that in a minute. But you say in that neuro journey,

like most design and most learning experiences has emotion running right through it. It's the electrical current that changed the insights and powered the supportive team dynamic and sparked the hope lit by the initial positive feedback to the early ideas. And it was really interesting to me how emotion allowed them to reframe the problem statement. Yeah, that's right. And reframing is one of those key ways to think about that gray area that we were talking about earlier, right? It's like, oftentimes, the way that a problem gets handed to you doesn't turn out to be really the problem that is worth solving. And you are the one as a designer who often has to uncover that and figure that out. So in the case of the Neura Health team, we had a group of four

students who were working in partnership with a hospital in Southern India. And this hospital has an amazing mission, which is about delivering very high quality care, but at low cost and a broad scale. So the students went in thinking with the original problems were going to be about efficiency or reducing cost or changing some process to be both efficient and cost effective. And one of the things that they noticed when they arrived to do interviews and observations and really connect with the people who were at the heart of the situation there is that there were lots of folks who were waiting. And like in all hospitals everywhere in the world, people were waiting in waiting rooms, but they were also waiting in the

hallways and outside. And the students got very curious about what was happening here. And they learned that a lot of the folks who were waiting were extended family members of the patients. And this was a cardiac care hospital. So the patients had really gone through something quite serious, usually heart surgery. And there was a lot of anxiety and fear that the students really started picking up from the interviews that they did and the conversations they were having. And they realized that the family members just didn't have enough information. They didn't know what was going on. And they were really worried about, hey, what's going to happen to my, you know, beloved father or aunt or sister once we take them home from the hospital. And so the students came back from this research trip and they had a whole bunch of ideas for all the challenges that they could solve, but they just couldn't let go of this really emotional experience that they'd had

connecting with people who were right in the midst of, you know, like maybe the worst experience that they'd had connecting with people who were right in the midst of, you know, like maybe the worst experience that they had had so far in their lives, like really painful, you know, challenging emotions and dealing with healthcare is often one of the most stressful experiences you can have. So the students really resolved, like, that's the problem we want to address, right? We want to actually figure out what could we design that could alleviate the suffering that we're seeing that maybe could actually be addressed with just a small amount of information. And so they started experimenting and creating these ideas for training videos that would better inform the family members how to take care of a loved one who had just had

surgery once you return home, things like, you know like all of the things you have to do to make sure that a wound stays clean or that you're understanding what are symptoms that might cause you to have to return to the hospital. And really the idea was if we can equip folks with some basic understanding of how to be part of the care process once someone comes home, they will be much more empowered to actually make a difference and to reduce some of that anxiety that they were feeling. So that was the hypothesis. So the students designed these training programs. They went back. They really worked closely in partnership with some of the nurses within the hospital. And they started piloting. And they did rigorously analyze, you know, is this actually working? And what they

found is that not only was the anxiety substantially reduced for the family members, but they were actually reducing the rate of hospital readmissions and of post-surgical complications through this training. And so all of a sudden they had, you know, really stumbled on this very low cost, but very effective way of bringing the family members into the process of being part of the care team. And that's a really different approach than what they had thought they were there to maybe address, but they found this tremendous need that was worth working on. And that happened because they tuned in to that strong signal of the emotional need that was being expressed. And that is often what we find

that we want to direct our students to pay attention to. Students can be very logical, very intellectual, very smart. But the thing that you're often needing to pay attention to in design is like, well, what feels weird or wrong or good or exciting. And paying attention to that stream of data, that emotional data is so, so critical in design. Yeah, that's such a great story. And I wish that the hospitals here in the US, at least the one in Columbus, I wish they did that because I've had to take my mom home from the hospital several times and pour through page. I'm like, what am I supposed to do? Like what this is? Could this be any more cryptic? It's a global problem, right? And it's really a shift in thinking about, wow, you know, family members have the biggest stake in the healthcare outcomes,

right? And yet we're often not actually seen as part of that care team that is going to get to, you know, positive outcomes for our loved ones. Yeah. You talk about your approach to design. You say, our approach to design brings productive, creative tensions, an emphasis on humanness in a time of technological prowess, an embrace of naive, unprejudiced questions in a sector that specializes in expert answers, and a jostling of hierarchy and status to break down barriers across fields and amplify collaboration between unexpected allies. And so much of that and what you've said so far speaks

to me about a principle that is fundamental in my spiritual practice of Zen, which is beginner's mind. How do I approach this from an open and beginner's mind? And a lot of the practices in the book, I felt like also helped to do that, right? They're a couple of places. One is it comes from your own sense of your lived experience and the ways in which you've seen certain challenges addressed or needs that you might have. So when you're working in what we call human-centered design, really trying to help people design for others, right? So you kind of have to get your own experiences, your own biases, your own needs out of the way to clear that way. So you're really tuning in and listening to other people's experiences. That doesn't mean you're negating your own experiences, but you're really making sure that you're other focused as well.

And then the second piece is that, you know, we've all just like accumulated ideas about like either what the problem is. Right. So it's like the problem is efficiency in the hospital. Well, that is maybe a challenge, but there might also be other problems. And so staying open to what you might notice that has been overlooked or what you might see if you have those fresh eyes, if you have that beginner's mind, that can be a source of tremendous opportunity. And then also thinking about how do we not jump to the first solution that comes to mind, right? That first solution is usually like a thing you've already seen, right? Or it's the conventional wisdom. And so making sure that you have practices that push you

to explore the second and third and, you know, 200th idea that you might come up with, that's often where you find yourself into much more novel territory. But what we have this desire as human beings to get there quickly, right? And to get to closure, right? To actually get to the solution. And so a lot of what we do with our students and our teams is, you know, one, going into the problem space with the open mind, and then two, preparing ourselves to not, you know, leap into that solution mindset with the first thing that we see. And then there's just the very real pressures of time, you know, pressures of time of like, get this thing done. Something I noticed recently, because I design online programs and online workshops, and I realized recently, I love to get feedback from my partner in the business and life, am very unreceptive to feedback. I'm more attached to my ideas. And B, I think I'm almost done. And once I think I'm almost done, I have no desire to undo. And so a realization for me was, if I really want her feedback, I need to bring her in much earlier in the process. And then it's much more of a co-design.

That is stunning self-awareness, I have to say. I mean, really, you've just put your finger on something that we see over and over in terms of that dynamic of when are you open and when are you actually closed? Even if you're asking for feedback towards the end of a process, you're really seeking validation. Yes, it's exactly it. Right? Like you actually don't want to hear something that's like going to challenge the fact that you might have proceeded in a direction that like, isn't the same vision that someone else would have. It doesn't mean that the thing that you created isn't good or isn't going to work,

but it also might not be the most extraordinary thing you could have designed. And it's very hard to take that in if you have already mentally shifted into the like, I'm done. Isn't it great? Doesn't everybody agree? So really thinking about preparing yourself for how do you be open when you're seeking feedback? And actually we have some like very practical ways of doing that in design. So one of the just core practices that we talk about is, you know, show your work early and often, the just core practices that we talk about is, you know, show your work early and often, right? So don't wait until the end. And really to do that, what you often have to do is to figure out even before you're ready, how do you put your idea into a form that might be shareable?

Yeah. So it's like, if you are designing a website, instead of designing the website and then getting feedback, and maybe you're still like, you haven't settled on the final font, but it's like kind of done. Make three different sketches of what that front page could look like and show those to someone very early on in the process. And that will both signal to the person, I haven't invested too much time in this. I really want your feedback. But then also by having multiple directions that you're showing, you yourself have the opportunity to receive both positive and negative feedback about each one. And then it's not like thumbs up, thumbs down.

I'm a good person or a bad person. I'm a good designer or a bad designer. You're actually giving yourself an opportunity to learn. And then of course, you could recombine some of those best ideas into something new, or you could really get clarity about the direction that you want to pursue from that. But being able to translate your early ideas into a form that's shareable is that key skill. So we talk about that as low resolution prototyping, which is kind of the wonky way to think about that. Keeping things at a very rough and ready stage, and you can build your idea into

Legos. You could do it with a quick sketch. You can do it with a little skit. These are all ways to keep the resolution, the fidelity very low. And that makes people more likely to give you honest feedback. And it helps you to be ready to receive that. Yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it. I think that's the challenge I have is I haven't quite figured out where is the right point to show my work where there's enough there to show, but not so much that I've moved into getting attached. I'm still learning that. It's a definite skill. I ordered another copy of the book because the exercises are so great. And I want to get to them in a second. But there's just a couple other things that I wanted to hit before we get there. And one is, I don't think this is a new statement. People are hearing this more and more, but I don't think we can say it enough, which is knowing how to learn is the fundamental ability we need to cultivate in order to thrive

in the 21st century. So how does design help us learn better? Well, I think it really starts with that beginner's mind that you described, right? It is going into a space where you want to be an expert. You want to come out with something innovative, but you're really going into a space where you want to be an expert, you want to come out with something innovative, but you're really starting with a learning posture. And that's quite hard to do, as we've talked about, for reasons of ego, for reasons of, you know, wanting to be accepted within your team. But it is critically important, because if you don't have

that openness and that learning posture, you are very likely to just replicate something else that's out there to kind of see things in the same way that they've been seen. It's challenging emotional practice, but that is that core underpinning. I think the other thing that design is so helpful for is that despite the fact that you're saying at the outset, I don't know the answer, you have a way, you have a process, you have a set of practices to start to get closer and closer to that answer. And so I think the binary framing is like, well, either you know, because you're the expert or you don't know. And what design says is like, well, together we can uncover that knowledge. We can build something new. We can learn alongside

each other and find a new way to do that thing that we're all hopeful for. So that idea of a collaborative process or an individual process where you can know what to do when you don't know the answer, right? And for us, a lot of times it's like, well, you go observe the situation, right? Like our students did in that hospital. You learn as much about the context, but then you treat that as information, but not truth, right? Because you want to be able to uncover maybe what about that is assumptions and conventional wisdom versus the constraints that you're going to accept. And through those processes, connecting with people, learning about the context,

you start to make your way towards the moment when you're going to say, okay, now I know enough about this that I'm going to frame that problem that I want to solve. Now I understand that with substitute teaching, it's about retention, not just about recruitment. Okay, that's where I'm going to focus. And that clarity then is where you jump off into coming up with the ideas, testing them out and getting feedback early, and then continuing to refine them. And something about having the knowledge of that process and those practices is what then can give you the confidence to say, I don't know the answer. We're starting out without knowing, right? And that's what you need as a team to be able to navigate those foggy, uncertain problems. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say somewhere that the journey from not knowing to knowing is every design project in a nutshell. That's right. We're starting over here. We don't know, and we eventually do, and there's a process by which we get there.

Yeah, and I have to say, one of my colleagues, Leticia Britos-Cavagnaro, said, you know, you're never going to get to knowing at the end. And I was like, yeah, you're totally right. It's a, you're going to get, you're going to know more, right? At some juncture, you got to design something. That's exactly right. And actually one of the questions I get asked the most is, well, you know, you're talking about design as this iterative process where you come up with an idea and then you test it and then you improve it. And then you go back and you test it again, then you improve it. How do you know when you're done? And of course, the real answer is you never actually know, right? You might have some constraint. You might have some deadline that you need to hit.

And so you say, well, this is where our stopping point is. But if you think about even that thing that you release as just a later stage prototype, you're going to keep learning about it once you send it out into the world. And in some ways, actually, it's your responsibility to keep learning about it. Is it actually hitting the mark? Is it serving people the way that I thought it would? Is it creating some kind of weird unintended consequence that I didn't mean, right? So that question about like, when are you done? When is it perfect? Again, like it's a journey even after you have released something into the world. Yeah. Yeah. Constraint is usually what causes done in my life. It's just like,

well, okay. It has to be. Yeah. And those deadlines can be so helpful too, right? Because they can kind of force you to stop being the perfectionist and seeking that sort of ultimate validation or that quote final piece of information and just actually get something out in the world that then you can continue to learn from. Right. And constraint is often just a helpful tool in general and in design. You know, some constraints can be very helpful. Exactly. So another thing that you said, this speaks a little bit to what we've talked about, but I love this line, a tool or a practice by itself is just a way to start. It can eventually be overused, misused, or forgotten. Say a little bit more about that. So I think one of the things that I've seen really happen

as design has become more popular and stretched and used in all different places is that, you know, people want that roadmap, the sort of like, well, what's that process that I'm just going to use over and over? Because, you know, I've used it over here in this challenge, and now I want to tackle it over here in that challenge. And often the tendency is like, well, let me just repeat the exact same steps that I did before. But that doesn't work, right? Because those steps are based on some more fundamental idea. So you might have figured out, okay, I know how to create a really open-ended interview, and I'm great at interviewing and I can come up with all kinds of really interesting insights along with the person that I'm

interviewing and that's how I'm getting all the new knowledge and ideas about what we might design. But actually in some cases, what you really need to do is both interview, but you also need to do an immersion and you also need to understand the whole system. And maybe you also need to really collaborate in a different way with folks who've been experiencing those same problems for many years. And so you need to be able to think about, well, what's the underlying goal of a such and such a tool? Like the goal of getting new insights, understanding from other people's perspective, same goal, but the actual tools or the practices might need to vary. And so that's actually one of the reasons that in this particular book, I don't offer sort of a

like step-by-step process, right? But I try to help people see, well, the fundamental idea behind this whole set of practices is about tuning up your collaboration or about how you learn from other people and the context that they're in. And you may need to vary the particular tool that you're using in any given case, and even the sequence in which you're approaching your design challenge. And that's where you start to get to this level of fluency of being able to transfer, you know, how you're working creatively from one place to another, from one part of your life to another. And, you know, I have this hope that like, nobody uses the particular activities that are in this book exactly as they've been written, right? Like people should, and I hope they do adapt them and

think about the ways in which they need to be stretched or, you know, iterated to really work in their own context. That's a win. Yeah, it's so interesting. The same holds true in sort of the coaching and personal development and contemplative practice world is that things change. You know, we find a tool that works for us for a little while, and then it doesn't anymore, which can be incredibly frustrating. And we just keep doing it. Or this tool works for this person, but not this person, you know, or I tried this thing once before three years ago, it didn't work for me. But now for some reason, I'm open to it and it works. So it is this experimentation of, you know, that a tool is just a way to start. I think that's a great way of saying it. That's right. You know, it's like you get that feedback to the tool itself,

right? And that's a part of that journey. So we sometimes talk about that as like designing your design work, which is kind of like meta, but thinking about, you know, not only am I going to design the service or the product or the experience at the other end, but I'm even thinking about what's the right process? What are the right set of tools? How do I adapt those tools for this particular challenge that I'm working on? And that's kind of an advanced skill, right? So I do offer one of those examples towards the end of the book around, how do you frame and scope a challenge? We were talking about constraints. And one of the things you need to learn is like bringing in constraints, right? It's actually, it's kind of antithetical

to working creatively to just be like, we could do absolutely anything, right? Well, no, you kind of need to know like, who am I designing for? What's the context? Is this meant to be a short term fix or a long term solution? And all of those are going to give you the constraints that then help you be more creative. That's kind of an advanced skill, right? That's when you're starting to get into that you're designing your own design work area. But that's where you're thinking like a tool maker, not just a tool user, right? And that's, again, where you start to get that fluency and that mastery of the process. Let's move into some of the exercises. You have quite an index of things in here. You know,

there's, I don't know, I didn't count, but let's say 20 different broad topics that index the exercises. And so one exercise might show up under multiple different topics. But let's start with the first one, which is see things in a new way, because I am a big believer in this. And I'm going to in our spiritual habits program that I'll teach this weekend, our topic is called no ordinary moments. And it's about how do I see more of what's actually in front of me? So will you pick an exercise from that section that you particularly like and describe it to us? Yes, I'm happy to. There are so many powerful ones in seeing things in a new way. And, you know,

we talk about often great designers kind of see things that are invisible, right? Like everyone else is like looking past this thing. And then someone like Jill, for example, is like, whoa, substitute teaching. That's an area for creative work, right? That's kind of had been overlooked. And I would say like the benefits of being able to see things in a new way are both that it can help you frame those non-obvious challenges and those opportunities to make a difference that others are overlooking. And it also is a good feeling in your brain, right? Like it actually makes you feel more expansive, even if you're, you know, kind of like, as we all have been stuck in your house or kind of having a much more limited set of exposures. One that I just really love is called shadowing. And shadowing is the

practice of where you set out to see and to experience an environment that you are very familiar with already, but you're really trying to see it through someone else's experience and eyes. So we do this activity a lot, actually, with educators who are, you know, the experts in schools, right? Like literally and figuratively. And we'll have them shadow a student for a whole day. And that means you meet the student at the bus stop in the morning, you go to afterschool, you go to study hall, like every part of the day, you are traveling with them and doing what they're doing. And one of the things that, you know, we often hear is sort of like that kind of top level reaction is like,

whoa, it's really uncomfortable to sit all day. Like just this realization of like, oh, we're physically having our students do this thing that I would find uncomfortable, right? And actually is maybe, you know, suppressing their own ability to learn. So I've heard that insight come out. We've also had insights, you know, from a realization of like, oh, the student doesn't see themselves reflected in this school, right? We haven't designed a way for them to actually feel a real sense of belonging. And, you know, that led in one case for a teacher to have the idea to do like a student gallery of work in her school.

So all kinds of creative ideas can come out, but it starts with having that empathy for the experience that someone else is having. Even if you've been in the same place for 20 years, you think you know everything. Taking a different point of view can make you realize like, oh, there are so many opportunities here for design and improvement, even in this situation that I'm so familiar with. Are there any pointers in that exercise about how to shadow effectively or take someone else's perspective effectively? Because it's one thing to just follow somebody around, right? Okay, I walk where you walk, I sit where you sit, and you're going to get some insight from that. But as you mentioned,

I think the deeper stuff comes from actually sort of seeing through their eyes. Yeah, so there are a couple of practical pieces of advice in that activity. So one is like thinking carefully about who you want to shadow. So if you are someone who had a really easy time in math class when you were a kid, like think about shadowing a student who's really struggling, right? Who has a very different academic profile than you did. Think about studying somebody not of your own gender or race and actually making sure that you're, of course, that you've asked that student's permission, that they know why you're there, what you're doing. But be candid about saying like, hey, I had a really different experience when I was a

student and I want to really find out what you're going through. And that sort of selection of choosing to try to learn from somebody whose experience is unlikely to be similar to your own. That's one of those pieces of advice. And then another is making sure that you have saved some time for reflection, right? Like actually making sure you're documenting and capturing throughout the day. And then that you're going back and you're actually saying like, what did I see? What did I learn? What actually has stayed with me? And that's another one of those pieces that, you know, we're all busy. We're all, you know, trying to do a million things, but reflecting back on those pieces that you know we're all busy we're all you know trying to

do a million things but reflecting back on an experience that you've had can unlock so much more insight than just the ideas and the reactions that you were having in the moment that last piece showed up to me in a lot of the exercises which was you've got to do the exercise but then there's also that sort of reflecting upon what's happened piece. And I agree with you that I think that is one of the fundamental things that we miss in getting more out of things. I mean, you could even just take this podcast as an example, like people are going to listen to the podcast, they're going to be done with it. And that's going to be that, right? It was entertaining. They might've gotten an idea or two. But 15 minutes of reflection about what did I hear that matters to me that might change my life would amplify it from being sort of valuable to hugely valuable. Well, I mean, I'm over speaking the value there, perhaps. what happens when you take the time for reflection is that then you as the individual get to do some of the sensemaking. Yes. Right. You figure out like, how do you actually really kind of co-construct

the meaning for yourself and not just sort of passively absorb what someone else might have thought was valuable. I mean, part of it is just like the reiteration and remembering and recalling what you've heard or what you've learned. But then there's a piece where you're reinterpreting, you're synthesizing, you're adding new layers of meaning. And I think that's what you're connecting with other parts of your life. And I think that's the piece that is so valuable. It's funny, like you put me in a very generative space now where I'm thinking about like, I don't think I've ever heard a podcast where at the end of the episode, there was like a guided reflection, you know, at 15 minutes of like the host saying like, okay, think about what did you

hear that stayed with you? What's, you know, what stood out? What did you really like? What did you, you know, I could imagine that could be an interesting experiment to try to see if it would make things more valuable or what that would offer to people. Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned

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or wherever you get your podcasts. You just opened something in my brain because we've been working on the idea of giving like worksheets out with interviews, which would be part of that. But what you just said, which is a guided review is something I hadn't even contemplated, which is a brilliant idea. Well, it'd be neat to try a couple of those things again in low resolution and get some feedback about it. But I think, you know, one of the things that I've learned, actually, from that same colleague I mentioned before, Leticia, who is working on her own book about reflection, which is like, when you have a structured approach to reflection, you can get even more out of it. So lots of folks have a wonderful like journaling practice,

you kind of, you know, writing your thoughts at the end of the day or maybe in the morning, but having a structured way to think about what you've been experiencing and what you've been taking from it and what that suggests for what you might do differently in the future, that can be even more powerful. So she has an assignment in this book called What, So What, Now What, which is one of those simple tools that you can use as a starting point where you think about what did I just experience? And you try to really describe it in rich detail. What was I smelling at the time? What was I feeling? What was I hearing? What happened? And then so what? What does that mean? What does that mean to me? What did I go through? What emotions did that trigger? And then now what? What does that make me think about what I might want to do in the future? And it would be interesting. I'll be curious. Maybe some of the listeners here would try that, you know, at the end of this conversation. What, so what, now what? Jot down a few ideas in each of those categories. You know, I'd be very curious to hear kind of how people would respond to that. Yeah. There's a listener challenge and you can just send them to me when you're done. And I would love to know, and I can pass them on to Sarah if we get some.

So what, so what, and now what? Yeah, that's great. Okay. Let's pick an exercise. I want to talk about one that may have shown up in this section, but it's about turning off your inner critic, which is certainly critical for creative work and just a good thing to do, broadly speaking. I think it's called blind contour drawing. That's such a favorite that actually it's the very first one in the book. It's a practice that some folks might even be familiar with. Like if you ever took an art class, you might have done that. And blind contour portraits are a portrait that you draw of someone else, usually under some time pressure.

So we'll usually do like a 60-minute portrait. You're looking at someone else intently. And the rule is that you cannot look down at your paper and you can't lift your pen from the paper. That's the contour part of blind contour drawing. And the idea is that when you're first starting out and you try that, you will not draw an accurate representation of somebody else's face, right? And then you're going to look down and you might be embarrassed or you might have that temptation to look down right during the middle. That often happens to people. And what's going on there is that you're fighting the urge to do it right, to do it well, to meet some kind of invisible standard

that you have for yourself about what good drawing looks like. And so the whole point of that is not to draw a good picture of someone else. It's to locate that inner critic. It's to hear what is that voice in your head telling you that is so sure that you need to do something right the first time that it's going to interrupt that process of just creating something. So it's a very helpful exercise to go through just to be like, oh, what is the version of that voice in my head say? And people's inner critics sound all different. That was actually something I personally wrestled with as I was writing this book. Like I heard that critic, you know, over and over and now I know what she really cares about. And I can kind of say like, okay, not right now. I'll take care of you later. But the point is that it's really critical when

you're starting to produce creative work that you can be in a period of time when you're just generating, you're just creating, and then you can be in a period of time where you're criticizing and you're judging and you're selecting. And often our tendency is to do those things simultaneously. And that's where you get like everyone's been in a bad brainstorm, right? And a lot of what's happening in a bad brainstorm is someone saying like, well, I have this idea and someone else is like, that won't work. Right? And then nobody else is going to offer a great idea because the judgment is very present, right? Yeah. And if you can suspend that judgment just for 20 minutes or 30 minutes and say, we are going to be really critical. We're only going to pick the right ideas, but we're going to wait until we've finished being generative to do that.

You're going to get so many more ideas out on the table to then choose from. And that same thing is going on internally when you're doing the blind contour portrait just on your own. Your internal critic is self-censoring your ability to just be in a production mode. So that is the purpose, that underlying goal of that activity is that it helps you locate your inner critic. Over time, if you do that again, and the reason we talk about it as a bookend is in one of our classes called Creative Gym, that's both the very first and the very last exercise that students do. And what they've learned in the intervening time is how to stop that self-censoring, right? Or at least mitigate it and know how to quiet that inner critic long enough to dwell in

that space of just pure generation. It is really important to go back and then be judgmental and be critical and say, like, is this the right idea? Would this really help? How do we make it better? But that ability to separate those two modes is so, so important. Yeah, I love that idea of it being a way to learn to isolate the inner critic, hear it, and sort of put it on hold. Now, I know whether I look at the piece of paper, whether I don't look at the piece of paper, my drawing skills are broadly speaking abysmal, but the exercise of it, I think is so interesting because it is so hard to do. If there's anything that I feel like age has given me, I'm a whole lot more comfortable with just not being good at things than I used to be. I am way more comfortable with like, yeah, I am terrible at that. And that

being okay. And realizing like that says nothing about me or my value just means I'm not good at that thing or I'm not good at that thing yet. And that's been a real liberating gift as I've gotten older. What has provoked that shift, do you think? Or how did you get to that place? Well, it's interesting. I often say I can't tell like what changes in me are the result of decades of quote unquote, working on myself or spiritual practice or all the things I've done. And how much of it just comes as I get older. I think age certainly gives us the opportunity to become more wise time just helps. We know not everybody who gets old gets wise. But, you know, it certainly gives you the time. I think for me, it has been broadly speaking, a lessening of ego and feeling like less concerned

about the picture of me that I'm presenting to the world. As I've become less concerned with that, it's just become easier to be like, well, yeah, I went roller skating a couple months ago. I am so bad at it. I am all bundled up with knee pads, elbow pads, and now they have these things. I don't know if you've been roller skating in years. They basically have taken, like they create them out of PVC. They basically look like a walker on wheels. So they are for people who really can't roller skate. So I'm toddling around on that thing. I am so glad someone took a video and it never made it to the light of the day because I look so ridiculous, but I just was more comfortable doing that. So I think it's a lessening of ego primarily. And how to do that is a whole other thing. But I do think a lot of it has been

spiritual practices that question more deeply who I am at my core. I think that's really beautiful. And I wish for more of our students to have that ability to suspend that ego. I think if you're a kid and you've gone through school and you're constantly being tested and you're constantly being measured, it's actually quite hard to break that habit of feeling like you always have to be right in a very structured sort of clear way. So I think a lot of the work that we wind up doing with young adults as they're in college, as they're in graduate school, it's like, we're trying to undo some of that. Right. And it is, it's like a lifelong

journey towards being able to be like, huh, I don't know. Right. I don't know. And I'm going to kind of like flail around and look a little silly as I'm trying something new and not letting that sort of too deeply wound your sense of self-worth. Or even in the example that you gave before of showing that more finished piece of work to someone and then being like, okay, well, now it's too baked, right? Like my ego is invested in this thing. I think that's a really beautiful thing to aim for. And it's really important in creative work to be able to have that vulnerability to both try new things. That gets right back to that learning mindset, right? It's like, well, I'm going to go immerse in this environment that I'm not expert in.

I don't really know much about it. And then having those tools like that low resolution prototyping to basically try out your ideas when you know they're not good yet. I think some of it too is an orientation of what we value. So if we value beginner's mind, if we value being good at not knowing, like if we go, that's what I want, or we value being willing to try new things,

that's what we value. That's what we think is important. If we start to prioritize those as the things that we think make us good, then I think it's easier to do that than if what we value is being those as the things that we think make us good, then I think it's easier to do that than if what we value is being seen as being competent. Yeah, I think that's right. And one of my absolute favorite quotes comes from a philosopher named Eric Hoffer, who

wrote, you know, we need a learning, not a learned people. Yeah. The learned usually inherit an earth that, you know, is like changing so fast that their knowledge is no longer relevant. That's a paraphrase, a poor paraphrase at that. But that idea, you know, in times of great change, we have to have that learning mindset, right? We can't just rest on the kind of expertise that we've already accrued because the world just keeps changing. Yeah. So how about a practice from slow down and focus about cultivating patience and spaciousness so you can do your best work? Well, the ultimate one in here that I'll talk about in a second is called tether, which is a very challenging one.

I want to get to that, but let's do a quick warm up to that. So we talked about a little bit about reflection. We have many, many types of reflective exercises. And one of my absolute favorites is called I Like I Wish. And this is about taking the time at the end of either a learning experience or a project or, you know, a particular milestone that you've hit and really just sitting down with everyone else who's experienced that and thinking about what did you like and what did you not like so much? And the way that

we phrase that in terms of everyone starts their comments with either I like or I wish, it helps us acknowledge that not everything is perfect, right? But you're still framing it in a way where you're expecting that improvement is possible. And that's the I wish part, right? So it's a productive way of framing critique. And in that practice, you're opening that space to be reflective, to be critical, to think about how things might improve, and also to celebrate what has gone well. And it's a really wonderful kind of protocol for groups making sense of an experience that they've just had. You could do it at the end of Thanksgiving dinner if you wanted to, or a family vacation that had challenging moments and that had really good moments.

But we use it a ton in design projects as well. But let me talk about Tether because Tether is probably, for some, it might be the most intimidating exercise in the book. So Tether comes from my colleague, Carissa Carter, and she has students sit rooted in one place for three hours and observe everything around them. And the practice involves making sure that you're documenting, you're writing, you're really recording what you're observing and what you're noticing for that full time. And what's interesting is that, you know, we do not spend that type of dedicated, long periods of time immersed in a situation very often. And a lot of that same stuff that you might even have come up in blind contour portrait comes up where you're just like, am I doing it right? What's going on? What, you know, am I right? But you have long enough period of time to kind of dispense with that. So the first thing you

might notice is like, you might notice all the superficial kind of surface details. And maybe you're in a museum, or maybe you're in a mall, maybe you're sitting in your town square, then you might notice things that are like what's been left behind by people, right? So like you might notice like the impressions of footsteps, you might notice trash, you might notice things that happened before but left a mark. Then maybe you're going to think about like the ways in which the shadows and the light are playing. And you might have some like realizations about something environmental or contextual. The longer you do this, the kind of deeper you go into thinking about

both the specifics of the interactions and the context that you're in, but also about that much broader context. And you're just giving your brain that space to ruminate and to play and to expand and to notice things on a deeper level than you might normally notice. So it's a real challenge. Don't use your phone. You're not listening to music. You're really focused on being present in that space that you're in. But the reason that that's an important skill in design is because we are trying to help people notice the things that aren't obvious. And to know what your brain feels like when you're getting into the zone where you're noticing really powerful insights that maybe have gone unnoticed, we need practice to do that. And that's what tether is all about.

Yeah, that's a difficult exercise. It's a lot like meditation or certain types of meditation. difficult exercise. It's a lot like meditation or certain types of meditation. Your anchor is broader. It's the space. But I'm sure that a big part of that work is your mind's wandered off and you're thinking about, you know, what you're doing next Tuesday and sort of coming back. All right, let me look. Let me look again. Let me look again. I think that's exactly right. It has some very similar qualities of just gently redirecting your focus to the task at hand. And, you know, it's so interesting. It's like we have so many ways to observe the world, but like just often use our eyes. And sometimes in this exercise, people will be like,

now I'm just going to record all the sounds or all the smells. And you realize like, oh, I'm getting so much information all the time about the world. And I'm filtering out most of it. It can provoke just all of these really interesting insights about how you relate to the world around you and what you're missing and what you have the opportunity to see and to notice if you take that time and that create that spaciousness. Yeah, I love that. I think that's a great exercise of just being somewhere and allowing it to unfold over time, which you're right, we just don't give ourselves time to do. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people, when I talk about this particular assignment are like, I don't have three hours to do anything.

Like there's no way. Okay, fine. Start with half an hour. Yep. Right. Like think about it as like, it's just a tool. It's just a way to get started. Think about the right version of it for you. But push maybe, oh, you think you can only do 30, try 40, right? Like actually try to create a little bit of a stretch in there and you'll surprise yourself in terms of what you come up with. Yep. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on. I really loved the book. I think you've done such a great job of cultivating so many exercises from so many different people. I was really impressed by just how many people's ideas are caught in this book and how well you've organized them. And I've

really enjoyed this conversation also. I have as well. Thanks so much for having me. And I hope your listeners try our little challenge and see what happens when they take a few moments to reflect on this conversation. I've really enjoyed it. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community,

go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

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