How design drives successful companies

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: When you have a team of people who are confronting uncertainty and ambiguity which, let’s face it, that is what is happening right now in the world.

Jeff Berman: Yep.

GREENBERG: Design is actually a very powerful way to prepare yourself to be really good at learning new things quickly.

BERMAN: Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of Stanford’s d.school. The “d” stands for design, and not just the visual work you may be thinking about when you hear that word. Sarah’s expertise is in human-centered design. It’s about how we organize teams, serve customers, and create the best possible outcomes. Now, as artificial intelligence disrupts our world, she’s eager to use AI to find new solutions to design challenges.

GREENBERG: So in design, we talk a lot about flaring and focusing. There are moments where you want to broaden your aperture, and then there are moments where you want to converge around a particular idea or a particular prototype. And AI, I am finding, is incredibly useful.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host.

[THEME MUSIC]

This week on the show, Sarah Stein Greenberg, author of the book, “Creative Acts For Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways.” As students head back to school and employment rates for recent college graduates remain sluggish, there’s a big question facing us all. What do we need to learn to succeed in our AI-fueled future? Fortunately, for the students at Stanford’s d.school and for all of us, Sarah is not shying away from that question.

Sarah, welcome to Masters of Scale.

GREENBERG: Thanks, Jeff.

Copy LinkWhat is Stanford’s d.school?

BERMAN: I was on my way over here to chat with you and I was talking with a friend of mine who asked me who I was meeting with today. And I said I was sitting with you and that you’re from the Stanford d.school and he goes, “Oh, why are you meeting with someone from the divinity school?” It’s like, right, not the divinity school.

GREENBERG: That’s right.

BERMAN: So will you tell us what the Stanford d.school is?

GREENBERG: I’m happy to. I think that’s a first for me.

BERMAN: Oh, really?

GREENBERG: That someone would think the D was divinity, so I appreciate that. Okay, so what is the d.school? The d.school is an institute at Stanford. It is a kind of unconventional place where people from all over campus, all different backgrounds, all different fields of study come together, and the goal is to develop creative problem solving and to apply that to a whole range of different kinds of opportunities and challenges. And we do that because we want to advance the spread of design. We think design is one of the most useful ways to create new possibilities, and it feels like a really important moment when human beings are doing that and equipped to do that, and that’s what we’re all about.

BERMAN: What does design mean in this context?

GREENBERG: So, we specialize in a type of design called human-centered design, and it is a really flexible, creative solving approach. It incorporates some elements of other kinds of design, like graphic design, and we’re even intentional in thinking about how might we construct the space in which these kinds of classes might be happening, so we have some other things in common. But design is a really big field, everything around us is design. Everything not found in nature has some kind of human influence in terms of how it came to be. And we really focus on, how do you tune in to what human beings need, think about the context around them that might be the natural context, that might be the social context. And then try to figure out, what are some solutions or some new opportunities that you could bring to bear?

BERMAN: How did you end up there?

GREENBERG: A combination of a lifelong passion and a ton of luck. I have always been really interested in how human beings come together and organize themselves in different ways to produce specific results. And the luck part is that I happened to be a grad student at the business school at Stanford right when the d.school was getting started. So I took some of the very early classes, it was totally experimental. It was in a trailer on the edge of campus, that was the only space available. And immediately I felt like, oh, here are my people, that was part of it. And part of it was just that it was a group that was obsessed with, how do people actually collaborate, particularly under conditions in which there isn’t a right answer, and how do you actually produce useful creative ideas from that?

BERMAN: So what does your work there focus on now?

GREENBERG: So we now offer two design degrees, an undergrad and a master’s degree, and we offer a lot of classes for professionals as well.

BERMAN: What do you personally focus on?

GREENBERG: I mean, I have so many interests. And as the executive director, some days I’m cleaning the floors, and some days I’m thinking about the strategy for the future. It’s just increasingly important that we equip our students with the ability to think critically about not just the near term effects of what they’re doing and the potential for it to be successful, but what’s the second order or third order effects? What are the potential unintended consequences that they could create? And to be able to have a really rigorous conversation about that.

Copy LinkSarah Stein Greenberg on “Creative Acts for Curious People”

BERMAN: Will you tell us about the book?

GREENBERG: So a few years ago, we started a big project at the d.school to try to actually share more of what was going on, more of the work that we do with a broader audience, and so we have actually released a series of 12 books. My book is a part of that series, it’s called “Creative Acts for Curious People.” It contains-

BERMAN: Which is an epic title. It’s a great title.

GREENBERG: Thank you, thank you. I think curiosity is a necessary ingredient for creative work, and I wanted to really highlight that. And it contains 80 of my favorite assignments that we teach, and I think those assignments are not only useful if you’re in school, if you’re in a design program, but if you are in a business, if you’re in a community, if you’re trying to figure out, how am I going to change some of the patterns or redesign how my family is operating? There are useful, practical tools in there.

Copy LinkAn activity to build empathy

BERMAN: One of the most frequent subjects of conversation in our audience and community is the challenge of leading a largely hybrid or remote workforce, how you create and maintain culture and connection in all of it, and that’s a form of a design challenge. Are there creative acts for curious people that are particularly helpful for teams that are working this way and leaders who are leading teams this way?

GREENBERG: Yeah, one of the activities that’s in the book is actually inspired exactly by the context that you’re describing. So Glenn Fajardo, who’s been teaching at the d.school for a long time, created this amazing assignment called the Wordless Conversation, in which the goal is to have a rich, empathy-building interaction with a colleague or someone else in your class without using words. And so in this process, you set a timer and on the hour, every hour you send a photo to your partner, and then that person responds and maybe it’s a photo exactly from their environment at that moment, or maybe it’s a conversation, and we start to build interaction and a connection through something that doesn’t require us to already have met or to be on the same page or to have even a language in common.

BERMAN: So it’s asynchronous and it follows a schedule over the course of a day, so there’s an arc to the conversation.

GREENBERG: That’s right, and then Glenn will have his students actually take those individual photos and create a short video that they then do as a little mini film festival. And it’s just a creative and playful way to try to bridge some of those connections.

BERMAN: What do you see from teams that do an exercise like that? How does it make them better?

GREENBERG: So, there’s a lot in the literature around creativity and psychological safety. Right? You have to have a real sense of connection and belonging and safety to get your best ideas out into the room. And so when you take the time to build those relationships, it helps people appreciate where other people are coming from. It helps you be more open-minded to hearing ideas that may not automatically make sense to you.

Copy LinkBuild in three dimensions

BERMAN: It strikes me also just in these remote work environments, we’ve lost the sort of interstitial time, right? The ability to say, “Nicki from our team who’s here today, let’s go take a walk and get a coffee and just catch up,” or to even notice body language changes and be like, “Hey, everything okay?” So, is part of the idea here also this is just a way of building more human connection?

GREENBERG: I mean, that is so fundamental to how the d.school operates. I think one of the most important things is to remember that even if we are interacting with each other only online, we’re still embodied human beings. And so, some of the things you could do there are to insist if you’re having a brainstorm or you’re doing some kind of prototyping session, have people build in three dimensions. Even if that’s happening, I’m in my living room and you’re in your home office, we can still have a similar experience, maybe we have the same set of materials in front of us. And that also helps you build those bonds even though you’re physically separated.

BERMAN: What does that look like for a company that is not building physical objects?

GREENBERG: So instead of just wire-framing in a digital environment, for example, you might actually physically draw something out. You might use a big whiteboard, you might put it on construction paper, you might cut it up and collage something. It creates a different sensitivity in your brain and helps you think of things creatively in different ways. We actually, we call that building to think. And I love to see how magical it is for people who are really right now constrained to thinking on a screen, to get out of that mode and actually start to work in some kind of physical medium.

I think another thing that helps with is that when you’re building in analog materials, it leaves more open to interpretation. People can have misunderstandings with each other, but it’s very clarifying to work in those kinds of mediums.

Copy LinkHow design thinking helps companies

BERMAN: Yeah. Are you tracking data on these companies to see, do they perform better? Is this more anecdotal? How do we know that this actually works?

GREENBERG: I mean, there are a number of studies that look at different ways that these behaviors manifest. So, I just read a paper that was studying a large company in China. It’s a very interesting controlled study in which they were looking at the effects of a design thinking training versus an after action review training, versus other kinds of team building trainings. And they found that both the after action review and the design thinking outperformed the control, but that the design thinking training had a disproportionately positive benefit for teams that had what’s called high task variability. Sorry to get so technical.

Yes, exactly, it rolls off the tongue.

BERMAN: Yep.

GREENBERG: And that is a team that is facing new challenges all the time or is having to pivot or having to adapt very rapidly. And that is actually very consistent with what we see anecdotally, which is that design is actually a very powerful way to prepare yourself to be really good at learning new things quickly. And in particular, when you have a team of people who are confronting uncertainty and ambiguity, which let’s face it, that is what is happening right now in the world. To be able to actually respond and to be prepared to respond and to be prepared to respond creatively, this is one of those things that design does really well.

BERMAN: Yeah. There’s a theory of organizational growth and factors of one and three. You’re one company at one person, at three, at 10, at 30, and so on. What should we know about organizational design when we’re, maybe the better way to frame it is dirt and gravel and paved, but early and mid-stage, and then when you’re larger, what changes that we should be thinking about?

GREENBERG: So I think there is something that often happens early on in companies where you’re all sitting together in the same room, and the sensitivity that you have for your colleagues and what their jobs are and their roles and the challenges that they’re facing is very, very high. The second you have two rooms or three or four or offices where you’re not all together, it is easy to lose a sense of empathy and caring and just even insight for your colleagues and what they’re doing day to day. So, I think knowing that that horizon is coming is really important.

If they’re having a lot of conflict about which direction to go, it is often because they have all gone out and talked to different people and they haven’t found a way to really share their insights in a meaningful way. So, one of the things you can do is to create some moments where you’re making sure that your teams from across the organization are looking at the same raw data and trying to make sense of it and figure out what to do. That is a very just practical approach, making sure you’re designing those connections in.

And then I think as you get bigger and bigger, you could even create a situation where you use some of the same practices you would use to understand your customers with your colleagues. So one of those is shadowing, right? Beginning of the day to the end of the day, you sit with the person you’re shadowing, you try to understand what their work is, you try to understand from their perspective. And that’s going to help you bring insights back into your own work, both about how they approach their task, but also about as human beings, how they’re functioning in the particular part of the system that they’re in.

BERMAN: Does that work in a remote work environment?

GREENBERG: Well, I mean, it could work even more easily in a remote work environment because you can literally shadow somebody in a Zoom room.

Copy LinkGenerational shifts in the workplace

BERMAN: I just read Amanda Litman, who’s the founder of an organization called Run for Something, just published a book called “When We’re In Charge,” which is really written for millennial and Gen Z managers and leaders. And I was struck by how acutely she nails some of the stereotypical generational differences, going from boomers on down to Gen Z, or maybe Gen Z on up to boomers, I should say. In the design work that you were doing, are you seeing generational differences in how people respond to the exercises, activities, design theories that you are promulgating?

GREENBERG: I think we’re seeing some really interesting changes. One of them is that 20, 25 years ago, more students wanted to make things, and now students really want to make change. So their appetite for what kind of impact they want to leave is bigger. And also, the kinds of challenges they want to work on are bigger and broader in scope and scale. You can’t just be good at one part of product design and get to the scale of impact that we’re talking about.

So, we have seen a need to build more tools and methods and thinking around systems, as well as around ethics and thinking about broader consequences into our curriculum. And that’s really in part because the students want to work on those kinds of challenges.

I will also say that the effects of the pandemic were really, really significant. It feels like a lot has been repaired, but not entirely. There have been just some massive shifts that have happened. Those first couple of classes coming out of the pandemic were just really struggling in lots of very material ways. And so I would say on the other side of that, we have kind of an interesting mix of both some of those habits that were acquired during that period of time, like maybe shorter attention spans. And then we also have this massive oncoming wave of how AI is really going to change education in particular, right? And it’s already influencing, certainly our students now are so facile with certain tools, and they also spend so much of their time in digital environments. And we’re all trying to figure out, what is actually going to come next?

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Sarah Stein Greenberg on how design tools can help entrepreneurs find and solve worthy problems.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkHow the d.school approaches AI

What does AI transformation look like for the d.school and for design more broadly?

GREENBERG: I wish I could give you a short answer, right? Everybody wants that. Everybody wants it.

BERMAN: I mean, it’s a podcast, we have time. You can give us a longer answer if you have one.

GREENBERG: Yeah, I mean, here’s what I’ll say. One of my colleagues, Scott Doorley, who’s our Creative Director, has this great phrase where he is describing how I think a lot of us feel around all of the tech change that’s happening, which is, “You constantly feel like you’re not up to speed.” And if you think about it, “Not Up To Speed” also spells nuts, right? And that is the feeling, right? That’s the feeling in the air, right?

BERMAN: Uh-huh.

GREENBERG: And feeling behind is a real challenge. So, one of the things that I think we just all have to be doing is actually all experimenting with the technology, and so a lot of us at the d.school are doing that. And I’ll give you one example of where I do think that for all of the uncertainty that AI is creating, there are some things that it’s going to help us do better than we ever could before. And for us, one of the things that’s really hard to do is to help human beings imagine the future in really vivid ways and really creative ways. And it’s also hard to retain your ability to be creative when things are changing so fast and then they keep changing and then they keep changing some more.

So, we’re working on a tool that is kind of like if a textbook were more like a movie that you were starring in with details and characters and plot twists, think what you might be able to learn. So imagine, this is kind of a generative case study tool. Imagine that maybe you and your team are using this tool and you’re placed in some kind of future scenario that’s very alien to you. And the only way to find out about that world is to interact with the people who are there. So through this interface, you’re interviewing people, you’re asking them about their lives, what’s going on, and then you’re coming up with ideas that might help them solve some of their challenges. Maybe the challenge is about sea level rise, or maybe the scenarios on an exoplanet or something that you are not familiar with.

BERMAN: So you’re LARP-ing for work scenarios.

GREENBERG: Exactly, exactly. And you can imagine how thinking about, what could this be if you’re trying to figure out the future of FinTech, right? It’s like, what scenario might you design? And then of course at some point you’re coming up with your ideas and then there’s a big tilt, right? Something goes wrong, one of your ideas fails spectacularly, and then you have to keep figuring out what you’re going to do.

And the thing that we’re trying to figure out is, how can you help people prepare and rehearse being creative under those kinds of uncertain circumstances? Because when you’re in the moment, you’re under lots of stress. And so if you haven’t actually built that capacity and those skills, you’re less likely to be able to really respond in that kind of resilient way.

BERMAN: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I mean, I hadn’t thought about that use case as much. I have three kids who are as of the time we’re talking, senior, junior, freshman in high school, one heading off to college. Two of my kids are dyslexic and part of the conversation with them about where AI is taking us is like, “You’re the last generation that’s going to have traditional textbooks.” Even for my freshman in high school, my assumption is that probably by next year, certainly by the time he’s a junior, he’s going to be in conversation with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and he’s going to be in immersive environments that feel real, that are dynamic, and learning is going to change dramatically. I’d thought less about the use case for how to take teams through future scenarios and game them out. So I’m just curious, where are you all in that process? Have you seen anything that’s already pretty good on that front? Is there something that we could be playing with now?

GREENBERG: Well, you can play with this tool now.

BERMAN: Okay.

GREENBERG: I mean, we’re actually looking to test it with teams and different kinds of companies, so that would help us, that would be exciting to partner on. I think what we’re most excited about are the ways in which AI can help augment what we do. Right? And there will be certain things that get much easier and much quicker. And I think some of that is going to be really beneficial in design. For example, if you think about building quick prototypes to be able to test your ideas, now you can build quick prototypes that actually work, right?

BERMAN: Yeah.

GREENBERG: It’s not just like a fiction. So we’re seeing that in classes where students are just much more likely to, in a very positive way, break a stalemate on their team by just building the thing very quickly.

BERMAN: Just using a vibe coding platform.

GREENBERG: Exactly, and then to be able to test it and get real feedback. So that is hugely beneficial, it’s going to speed up that time.

Copy LinkEncouraging reflection in learning

But then there’s another category of things where it’s hard to do in a classroom because they’re labor-intensive, they’re time-intensive, but they’re really, really crucial for learning. So another example is a tool that my colleague, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro created, which is a tool that helps you reflect on your own progress as a learner. And reflection is one of those unbelievably helpful but critically underutilized approaches in education, and it’s actually not just education. It’s like, we should be doing this after every team project, for every quarterly review that you have, instead of being only evaluative if it could also be a tool that is actually helping you learn better.

BERMAN: Is that an allusion to the learning journey maps, or is that different?

GREENBERG: Learning journey maps are one of my personal favorite tools for reflection, and that falls into this kind of big, broad category of reflection. So a learning journey map is a visual tool in which you think about a particular learning experience that you’ve had or a project that you’ve worked on, for example. So, I use it in my classes but you could use it in a team at the midway point or the end of a big project. And you use an axis that basically is negative to positive, and then think about the kind of big milestones of the experience over time, and that’s the x-axis. And you draw one line that reflects your journey, in terms of how much you learned. So, when were you learning a lot, when were you learning little? And another line that reflects how you were feeling at the moment.

BERMAN: These are not straight lines.

GREENBERG: These should not be straight lines. If they are straight lines, it would be a very weird human being that was filling this out. And what’s really interesting is when you see where those lines intersect, and the thing that happens that’s quite interesting is where you see a student who said, “Wow, this was a moment in the project when I was learning a lot, but it was really hard. I was struggling. I was mad at my team. I was uncertain about my own skills.” And that gap between when learning is high and feeling or affect is low, I think is reflective of a concept I’m really interested in and have written about, which is productive struggle. Right?So productive struggle is like, it’s actually more beneficial to us when we’re trying to learn how to do something new to have to struggle a little bit. If it comes really easily, it’s not as likely to make that big of an impact for us.

And when you see that gap where someone’s like, “Oh, this was hard, but actually, I was learning the most,” that’s what you want to see as an educator. Right? You want to create those moments deliberately where that can happen. And that’s because design is hard and creativity is hard, and innovation, there are going to be real low moments, and you want to make sure that there are experiences that students are having that don’t edit that out, because those are often the most fruitful learning experiences that we have.

BERMAN: How should leaders of organizations or teams think about using learning journey maps with their teams?

GREENBERG: I really think it is a useful tool. I mean, it’s a kind of lightweight after action report with a little bit more of a personal and human dimension, because you want both the team learning and the individual learning, and you want to be having a dialogue about that. I think there’s also something very powerful about framing those moments as not just, what do we do wrong, what do we do right? But actually, how can we learn from the things that didn’t go as well as we wanted to? And so, creating the vocabulary around a learning journey I think can help open up a little bit more of the vulnerability that you need when you’re really trying to get people to be open and reflective, as opposed to it just being an evaluation in which somebody might feel penalized for having done something wrong.

Copy LinkThe power of “assumption storming”

BERMAN: Yeah. Will you tell us about the experts and assumptions exercise?

GREENBERG: Yeah, this is a really fun one. So everybody’s heard of brainstorming, but there’s a lesser known practice called Assumption Storming, which was developed by a guy named Craig Lauchner. And I mean, it’s important to talk to experts when you’re trying to design something new, but-

BERMAN: Experts still have value in the world.

GREENBERG: They do still have value in the world.

BERMAN: Yes.

GREENBERG: In my opinion, and in many people’s. And it’s also tricky because they will give you a kind of filtered view of the world and part of your job when you’re trying to figure out a new design space is to go broad, is to make unexpected connections. So, you want to engage with experts but you also want to treat that lightly, at least to begin.

So the practice of Assumption Storming is, you might’ve collected a whole bunch of expert opinions, you’re getting smart about the space, then you list out all of the assumptions that you’ve heard about that particular space. And you categorize those assumptions as some of them are facts, a lot of them are opinions, and some just might be guesses. And you pick some that are in the opinion or guess realm, and you challenge those. You just say, “Okay, if that were not true, what would we design?” And that allows you to, one, it allows you to check your assumptions, which especially if you’ve been talking to a lot of experts or even if you’re kind of getting close to the launch of a product or service, you have a lot of assumptions about what might happen. So, some people use this practice to de-risk that launch phase, but it also can just invite more creativity and open thinking. It’s like, okay, if we didn’t hold onto this assumption, what could we create? Is a very powerful way to challenge orthodoxies and to kind of get beyond mental models that might be outdated.

Copy LinkExpanding creative thinking with AI

BERMAN: Do you imagine that AI is going to make this a heck of a lot easier and more efficient to do?

GREENBERG: I mean, that is my favorite use of AI, is to help extend my own expansiveness and coming up with ideas.

BERMAN: What’s an example of a prompt that you’ve given to expand your thinking and also check your assumptions?

GREENBERG: So I was designing a session in partnership with a nonprofit called Commonwealth, which works on financial inclusion, and they were really interested in thinking about the future of actually financial inclusion and the work that they do with the coming wave of AI, because often people who are not well-served by our current financial structures are left out of the kinds of tools that are going to benefit customers of all kinds of financial services. So, they wanted to get smarter about it.

And so we used AI to help me design different future scenarios in which they could then do a mini design sprint with experts. And part of the reason that we did that is because if you get a room full of experts all together, you often have people just kind of pitching each other current ideas. And so putting that group of people into these kinds of future scenarios, but I never could have come up with those scenarios on my own because one, just time constraints, but also, that’s a space that’s new to me. And so, I was able to prompt the tool I was using to really, really push the edges of my own thinking and come up with far more divergent scenarios than I would’ve been able to on my own.

BERMAN: And are you asking the AI to play the role of?

GREENBERG: I asked it to think like a futurist, and to then go deeper on particular use cases. So, I gave it a user profile that the organization had created and then said, “For a person like this, help me think about what is the future of flood insurance going to look like? What are multiple scenarios? What are people going to be thinking about?” And every time, I’m asking it to come back with five different ideas, come back with 10 different ideas or more, and then I can pick and choose and decide which ones I want to go deeper on.

So in design, we talk a lot about flaring and focusing, right? There are moments where you want to broaden your aperture, and then there are moments where you want to converge around a particular idea or a particular prototype. And AI, I am finding is incredibly useful in fast flaring, and then I still think it’s on the human to really think about, what does that mean? Right? How do I connect that with the human needs that I’ve been uncovering? And how do I use my human intelligence to make sure that I’m using all of these new ideas in a way that’s going to benefit the core needs that I’ve uncovered?

Copy LinkFocus on the right problem to create meaningful impact

BERMAN: What have I not asked you about that we should know about when it comes to design and scaling organizations?

GREENBERG: Well, one story I want to share with you is a story about a recent grad named Haley King, who is an awesome entrepreneur. And I think her gets at something that is really at the heart of design, which is about the difference between problem-finding and problem-solving. And human beings are great at problem-solving, we’re all wired to do that, but we pay a lot of attention in design to, what is the actual problem that we’re trying to solve? What is the pain point for our customer? What is the opportunity space?

And so, Haley has started a company with two other co-founders called Paxos Appeals, and they are trying to help more people who get denied a claim with their health insurance company to actually appeal that denial and then be successful in getting covered. And this is a huge problem, something like 10 to 20% of claims are denied, and only 1% of those people appeal. But what her team has learned is that 40% of the people who do appeal are ultimately successful. So they’re trying to increase the number of people who do appeal, because if you think you’re getting covered for surgery and then you get hit with a $40,000 bill and 80, that is a life-changing financial event for most people.

BERMAN: And the systems are designed for you to fail.

GREENBERG: That’s right, that’s right.

BERMAN: Right? You just get frustrated and be like, oh, the paperwork. And I mean, it’s just not worth it at some point.

GREENBERG: That’s right.

BERMAN: Yeah.

GREENBERG: So, Haley and her co-founders, they came in with this kind of broad premise, and one of the things that they had to do in the class was write down who they thought their user was and what they thought the pain point was. And that process of really focusing, one, it helped surface a bunch of assumptions, but two, what they realized is the most important pain point is for people to write the appeal and to get support while they’re writing the appeal.

And so they refocused their startup around that particular moment in the process, and they have now built some proprietary software that helps compare what your insurance policy looks like, what your medical forms say you actually need, and then actually do the writing with a human in the loop to make sure that it comes out well. And the reason that that was so important is it also led them to some of the more human insights. Right? It turns out, it’s not just about the monetary value that you might recoup, although that financial piece is important. It’s that the feeling for people of having someone on your side and knowing that even if you get denied, you put your best foot forward, you did everything that you could, actually turns out to be a part of the value of this service. And that all happened because they focused and focused and focused.

And then also, as a very early stage start-up, you can’t spread your resources too thin. And so it helped them realize that’s the point of leverage. Now, of course, they want to move upstream in the whole process because a lot of these denials should never happen in the first place, but they, I think, really have been successful at using design to find the right problem to start with that’s really going to matter to people, and that is critically important, especially if you’re in some kind of entrepreneurial context.

BERMAN: I love it. Thank you so much for being with us.

GREENBERG: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

BERMAN: It’s really no surprise that Sarah Stein Greenberg and her team at Stanford’s d.school are well suited to thrive in this uncertain moment. I’m so glad she joined us to share some of the design tools we can use to build more a creative and empathetic future. If you’d like to learn more, her book, and it is a remarkable book, is “Creative Acts For Curious People.” We’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.