How design drives successful companies, with Sarah Stein Greenberg

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1:30Design is actually a very powerful way to prepare yourself to be really good at learning new things quickly. 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. 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.

2:19and AI I am finding is incredibly useful.

2:49heaven-made just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. 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.

3:41Sarah, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks, Jeff. 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. That's right. So will you tell us what the Stanford D School is? I'm happy to. I think that's a first for me. Oh, really? 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.

4:11It 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. What does design mean in this context? So we specialize in a type of design called human-centered design and it is a really flexible creative solving approach.

4:54It incorporates some elements of other kinds of design like graphic design and we're even intentional in thinking about like how might we construct the space in which, you know, these kinds of classes might be happening so we have some other things in common. But, you know, design is a really big field. Like everything around us is designed. 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.

5:33How did you end up there? 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 as obsessed with how do people actually collaborate particularly under conditions in which there isn't a right answer?

6:21And how do you actually produce useful creative ideas from that? And so what is your work there focus on now? 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. What do you personally focus on? I mean, I have so many interests. And as the executive director, you know, some days I'm like cleaning the floors and some days I'm, you know, 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?

6:58What are the potential unintended consequences that they could create? And to be able to have a really rigorous conversation about that. Will you tell us about the book? 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. Which is an epic title. It's a great title. Thank you. I think curiosity is kind of a necessary ingredient for creative work. And I wanted to really highlight that.

7:32And 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 like, how am I going to change some of the patterns or redesign how my family is operating? There are useful, practical tools in there. 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 and all of it. And that's a form of a design challenge.

8:11Are 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? 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.

8:50And 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. So it's asynchronous and it follows a schedule over the course of a day so that there's an arc to the conversation. That's right. And then he then Glenn will have his students actually take those individual photos and create a short video that they then do as like a little mini film festival. And it's just a creative and playful way to try to bridge some of those connections.

9:24What do you see from teams that do an exercise like that? How does it make them better? 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 like may not automatically make sense to you. It strikes me also just in these remote work environments, we've lost the sort of interstitial time, right?

9:59The ability to say, Nikki, from our team who's here today, like, let's go take a walk and get a coffee and just catch up or even notice body language changes and be like, hey, like everything OK, right? So is part of the idea here also this just a way of building more human connection? 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're 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.

10:34Even 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. What does that look like for a company that is not building physical objects? So instead of just wireframing 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, right? 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.

11:12We actually, we call that building to think. And I love to see how magical it is for people who are really right now kind of 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 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 like very clarifying to work in those kinds of mediums. Yeah. Are you tracking data on these companies to see how do they perform better? Is this more anecdotal? Like, how do we know that this actually works?

11:50I 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 design thinking training versus a 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.

12:31HTV. Yes, exactly. It rolls off the tongue. And that is a team that is facing new challenges all the time, right, 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, like 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.

13:12Yeah. You know, 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 sort of mid-stage and then when you're larger, what changes that we should be thinking about? 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.

13:49The second you have two rooms or three or four or, you know, 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.

14:29That 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.

15:03Does that work in a remote work environment? Well, I mean, it could work even more easily in a remote work environment because you can literally shadow somebody in a Zoom room. I just read Amanda Lipman, 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 are doing, are you seeing generational differences and how people respond to the exercises, activities, design theories that you are promulgating?

15:47I 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 like 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.

16:26And 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 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 like really going to change education in particular.

17:10Right. And it's already influencing, you know, 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, like, what is actually going to come next. Still ahead, more with Sarah Stein-Greenberg on how design tools can help entrepreneurs find and solve worthy problems.

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19:14So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free.

19:27Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. What does AI transformation look like for the d.school and for design more broadly? I wish I could give you a short answer, right? Everybody wants that. It's a podcast. We have time. You can give us a longer answer if you have one. Yeah. I mean, here's what I'll say. One of my colleagues, Scott Dorley, 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 like you constantly feel like you're not up to speed.

20:01And if you think about it, not up to speed also spells nuts, right? And like that is the feeling, right? That's the feeling in the air, right? And feeling behind is a real challenge. So one of the things that I think we just all have to be doing is like 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.

20:43And 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 like details and characters and plot twists, like think what you might be able to learn. So imagine this is a kind of a generative case study tool. Imagine that you, 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.

21:28So 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 challenges about sea level rise or maybe the scenarios like on an exoplanet or something that you are not familiar with. So you're LARPing for work scenarios. Exactly. Exactly. And you can imagine how, you know, thinking about like, 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?

22:02Like 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. 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.

22:40Two 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. Like even for my freshman in high school, like 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 like, he's going to be in immersive environments that feel real, that are dynamic. And learning is going to change dramatically. I thought less about the use case for how to take teams through future scenarios and game them out.

23:16So I'm just curious, like, where are you all in that process? Like, have you seen anything that's already pretty good on that front? Like, is there something that we could be playing with now? Well, you can play with this tool now. 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.

23:51Like, 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? 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, like break a stalemate on their team by just building the thing very quickly. Just using like a vibe coding platform. Exactly. Yeah, 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. 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.

24:28So another example is a tool that my colleague Leticia Britos-Cabinaro created, which is a tool that helps you reflect on your own progress as a learner. And reflection is one of those like 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. Is that an allusion to the learning journey maps? Is that or is that different? Learning journey maps are one of my personal favorite tools for reflection.

25:06And 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 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 like negative to positive and then think about the kind of big milestones of the experience over time that's the x-axis and you draw one line that reflects your journey in terms of how much you learned so like when were you learning a lot when were you learning a little and another line that reflects how you were feeling at the moment These are not straight lines.