Podcasts about creative acts

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Tom Vander Ark is joined by, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, a professor at North Carolina State University. Lesley-Ann is also author of Design Social Change, a new book from Stanford's d.School run featuring past guests Sam Seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin on Creative Hustle and Sarah Stein Greenberg on Creative Acts for Curious People. Just the other day we ran an episode we recorded live at SXSW EDU 2024 with some of her colleagues.

Laura Schellhardt is a Chicago based playwright and adapter. Her original works include Air Guitar High, Auctioning the Ainsleys, The Apothecary's Daughter, The K of D, Courting Vampires, and Shapeshifters, among many others. Adaptations include The Phantom Tollbooth, The Outfit, and Creole Folktales. She is also the author of Screenwriting for Dummies. She's a two-time Jeff Award nominee and recipient of the AATE Distinguished Play Award, the New Play Frontier's residency, the TCG National Playwriting Residency, the Jerome Fellowship, the New Play Award from ACT in Seattle, and a Dramatist Guild Playwriting Fellowship. She has participated in the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women Playwrights Festival at SRC, the Kennedy Center's New Voices/New Visions Festival, the Bonderman TYA Symposium, the Ojai New Play Conference, the Denver Center New Play Summit, the Bay Area Theatre Festival, and the O'Neill National Playwright's Festival, among others. She received her graduate degree from Brown University, under Paula Vogel. She's a former Victory Gardens Resident Playwright and current member of Walkabout Playwrights Collective and she oversees the undergraduate play Schellhardt oversees the undergraduate playwriting program in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University.   Key Takeaways We all hold many identities and their salience changes with time and context Privilege can be an obstacle when you're not aware of it but it can be a tool to empower others What you practice grows stronger, especially with how you talk to yourself and others What and how you give your attention is one of your most powerful tools  Effort > outcome and process > product There's a difference between safety and comfort and it is important to learn and grow in discomfort Authenticity is a series of choices based on your values and intentions Take yourself seriously but hold yourself lightly Make connections not impressions Guest's Media Recommendations: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez (book) Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg (book) __ Find Guest's work: https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/laura-schellhardt.html __ For more of Michael's work, visit our website www.incognitotheplay.com or follow us on Instagram @incognitotheplay __ Thanks to Ned Doheny for providing our podcast music! You can find him and his music on Spotify. Editing and co-production of this podcast by Emma Yarger. Email info@incognitotheplay.com with questions or comments about the show!

Stevie Roy 3rd December 2023 – Three Creative Acts by Whitburn Pentecostal

The @lexie Podcast x TMV collab you've all been asking for! Our dear friend and podcast host, Lexie Lombard, joins us today to dive deep into grief's never-ending story, being upset with her therapist, the nuances of art, and of course, Rick Rubin. We ask the hard-hitting questions like, “what if aliens are hot?” and get into the art and money connection. Make sure to check out her incredible, one-woman show the @lexie podcast anywhere you get your podcasts!0:00 Intro 3:24 M & Lexie's grief related meet-cute 7:34 Lexie's story about Sandy in the airport 12:04 What if the aliens are hot? And is “alien” a slur? 14:40 Lexie's mad at her therapist19:23 The art of storytelling 24:36 Art, inspiration, and collecting experiences 34:41 Money isn't the motivation 46:46 Of course, Rick Rubin 50:19 Lexie's self-care routineALL THINGS LEXIE:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lexie/id1540856979https://www.youtube.com/@LexieLombardhttp://instagram.com/lexieDon't forget to DM us on IG or submit a question on thoughtsmayvary.com to have your question or theme unpacked on a future episode! SHOP “CO-CREATE” TMV'S MANIFESTATION JOURNAL: https://www.thoughtsmayvary.com/the-tmv-shopDiscount codes, extra unpackings, journal prompts, vlogging (+more!) all happening with our familia over on Patreon. Come hang out — https://www.patreon.com/thoughtsmayvary

Small creative acts can have a big impact on people.

In this season Kathryn and Laura are inspired to learn and inspired to share. Each week they discuss the ongoing story of their learning as they engage in reflective practice to connect their ideas and continuously grow. This week's inspiration is shared from Laura as she discusses Creative Acts for Curious People. Transcript  Inspired to Learn site | Reflection Form Resources: The Educator Collective Creative Acts for Curious People — Stanford d.school 

Today's guest painstakingly curated this collection from some of the world's most inventive minds, including d.school and IDEO founder David Kelley amongst others. She is with us today to share some of those assignments to spark our creativity because a common characteristic of our audience is - without a doubt - curiosity. It is a pleasure to welcome the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school and the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways, Sarah Stein Greenberg. Find Sarah here: http://www.sarahsteingreenberg.com Find d School here: https://dschool.stanford.edu/books

Want more book recommendations? Get the bookmark newsletter in your inbox. It's time for the wrap that's not quite as good as the Spotify wrap, but still one of my favourite bits of the year; looking back at the books I've spent my year reading. This year I read 52 books, 29% were ebooks, 42% were physical books, and 29% were audiobooks. I use the StoryGraph app to track my reading. Here's some of the books that get a mention... The Top 3 Imaginable by Jane McGonigal (Listen to the three big ideas here) Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Listen to the three big ideas here) Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (Listen to the three big ideas here) Honourable Mentions Big Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy (Listen to the three big ideas here) Creative Acts for Curious People by Stanford dSchool Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker Will by Will Smith I Didn't do the Thing Today by Madeleine Dore (Listen to the three big ideas here) This Working Life by Lisa Leong & Monique Ross (Listen to the three big ideas here) What were your reading highlights this year? Let me know by connecting on Instagram or LinkedIn.  Support my book habit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stephsbookshelfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 158 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week's show includes: 00:00 Does automation still have a role to play in dealing with your LinkedIn 08:30 Why a 'buyer persona' needs to be central to your MSP's marketing 15:52 A recruitment expert explains how to find the best new people for your team 35:18 A great book recommendation about coming up with creative solutions Featured guest: Thank you to Lori-Ann Duguay 'the people person' for joining me to talk about how to find the best new people for your team. After working 21 years in government, Lori-Ann Duguay decided to take a leap and launch her own consulting venture helping organisations with a growth mindset. She helps them build the culture, experience and leadership required to attract and retain the talent that they need to thrive in the new world of work. Connect with Lori-Ann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loriannduguay/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ https://www.paulgreensmspmarketing.com/about/ For loads of MSP marketing and business growth advice and resources, check out my free learning hub: https://www.paulgreensmspmarketing.com/learning-hub/ Thank you to Colt Briner from Scrappy AF Marketing for recommending the book Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Acts-Curious-People-Unconventional/dp/1984858165 https://www.linkedin.com/in/colt-briner Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/s

How does design unlock your creative abilities? Why is it so hard for us to tolerate ambiguity? Can the fundamentals of design help us to learn more quickly? Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Sarah speaks regularly at universities and global conferences on design, business, and education. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in history from Oberlin College. Sarah also serves as a trustee for Rare, a global conservation organization. Among other creative pursuits, she spends her free time as an underwater and wildlife photographer. She lives in San Francisco. Episode Mentions: Books from the d.school Book: Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg Book: Make Space (awesome book about designing creative spaces) Article: Recipe for a Tasty d.school Resource: Teaching and Learning Studio faculty workshops Follow Sarah: Twitter | Insta | LinkedIn Episode Website: https://mailchi.mp/designlabpod/sarahsteingreenberg More episode sources & links Sign-up for Design Lab Podcast's Newsletter Newsletter Archive Follow @DesignLabPod on Twitter Instagram and LinkedIn Follow @BonKu on Twitter & Instagram Check out the Health Design Lab Production by Robert Pugliese Cover Design by Eden Lew Theme song by Emmanuel Houston

As individuals, as teams, as societies and as a human race, we must become much faster, better and more efficient at solving problems. We must find a new way to learn how to learn, collaborate, and create. It is our only way to keep pace with change. The essential question is, are we willing to abandon the status quo? My guest this week is a brilliant individual working hard to create a path forward for all. Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of Stanford Universities D.School. Sarah leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who work on a wide range of problems and create tools you can apply to your own. Sarah has also written a masterful book titled Creative Acts for Curious People...how to think, create and lead in unconventional ways.  Sarah packs so much into this interview that I encourage you to listen with pen and paper and a finger on the pause button. You will be a better parent, friend, innovator, marketer, problem solver, entrepreneur and leader for it.   As a bonus and tying in with the theme, I invite Georgia Balinsky, the Senior Director of Brand Strategy for RBC, back to the show. Georgia talks about why Ideas matter and their new branding platform, Ideas Happen Here.    

 Learn how to resonate with your audience to make long-lasting impact that will turn them from prospects to long-term clients Find out what channels you should focus more on instead of playing the game against the big competitors Understand why creativity plays an important role in your place against competitors in the market Resources/Links: To get more FREE money-making marketing advice, click here: Scrappyafsolutions.com/resources Summary Have you been trying to compete for your place in the market but end up being pushed down by those big companies? What should you really work out on– is it increasing your ads, trying out new strategies or, something just as simple as, igniting your creativity? Are you ready to learn how you capture more market shares without the stress, struggle and worry? Colton Briner has spent his entire career where the rubber meets the road between product development and branding on the one side and marketing and sales on the other side. This experience has enabled him to combine strong strategies with creative execution to help companies grow fast while spending less. In this episode, Colton talks about the hidden gems when competing with the top companies in your market– from analyzing these companies at a micro perspective to what should you be focusing instead to outshine them and resonate with your clients. Check out these episode highlights: 02:30 – Colton's ideal client: I work generally with early-to-mid stage B2B companies in complex enterprise selling contexts, right, that typically have high ticket items. Their solutions, cost, or average contract value is five figures and above. 03:10 – The problem he helps solve: Small players struggle to capture market share from the deep-pocketed industry incumbents, right? Those guys have big budgets because those companies have a lot of revenues. 04:02 – The symptoms of the problem: Well, you're certainly getting like the “Who are you? Who are you guys? We've never heard of you.” You don't find that people are immediately resonating. They're not connecting with you on an emotional basis. 04:56 – Clients' common mistakes before consulting Colton: Well, number one, and first and foremost, right, they are playing the same game as the big competitors are. They have let the big competitors basically set the rules. They're not creating their own path, right? 06:47 – Colton's Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, I think you actually set it in summary for the last answer, which is created is going to win, right? No B2B sector on the planet is 1/10 as creatively competitive as any B2C sector that exists on the planet, right? 08:02 – Colton's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): To get more FREE money-making marketing advice, click here: Scrappyafsolutions.com/resources 08:36 – Q: What does it look like to look different and be creative? A: Like if you're going to, for example, a conference and everybody else is in business suits? Well dress your team up as the Game of Thrones characters, right? Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “A thimble of creativity is basically all it takes to just blow away the competition in a B2B market.” -Colton BrinerClick To TweetTranscript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Welcome, everyone, to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. I'm Tom Poland beaming out to you from the Sunshine Coast in Australia, joined today by Colton Briner. Colton, good day from Down Under. Sir, a very warm welcome. Where are you hanging out? Colton Briner 00:21 Oh, good day to you as well. I'm in Northern California, wine country. Tom Poland 00:26 Oh, a little birdie told me you're off to wine country in the south of Australia, and Adelaide, later in the year. Colton Briner 00:34 Yeah, that's right! Heading there in September. Looking forward to it! Tom Poland 00:36 Bring lots of those nice fat US dollars, please. Because we can use a boost our wine economy here in Australia! Colton Briner 00:44 Happy to do it. Yes. Tom Poland 00:46 Check in extra baggage on the way back because you'll be taking back some beautiful bottles of Australian red wine. I'm sure. Colton Briner 00:52 I look forward to it! Tom Poland 00:54 So, in addition to being the son of a vineyard owner, Colton is- he spent his entire career in between the sampling wine, really, where the rubber? This is not on his bio, by the way. But where the rubber meets the road between product development and branding on the one side and marketing and sales on the other side. Now, folks, if you don't know, there's normally a solid brick wall between the two. You got the folks doing product development, maybe branding, etc. Then you got the people to try to sell the stuff and they're often going, “It's your fault. We're not selling!” No, no, it's your fault. So that combination of experience is, if it's not unique, it's certainly very rare. And it's really enabled him to combine strong strategies, which is missing in so many different businesses trying to grow their business– strong strategies with creative execution, which is what gets you the cuts through. So, one without the other is almost impotent. But Colton has this ability to match the two together. So, this is, as we say in Australia, fair dinkum, and it's effective. So, you can use that when you come down here, Colton, fair dinkum Colton Briner 02:07 You've already given me a totally revised version of my bio, Tom. Thank you! Tom Poland 02:12 You're very welcome! Royalties checks will be in the mail, I'm sure. So, our title here is, “How to Capture More Market Share for Less Money”. And don't we all want that? So, Colton, our seven minutes is going to start now. Sir, question number one, who is your ideal client? Colton Briner 02:30 I work generally with early-to-mid stage B2B companies in complex enterprise selling contexts, right, that typically have high ticket items. Their solutions, cost, or average contract value is five figures and above. They have long sales cycles that they're dealing with. And they really aim for engagement-based, like, relationship selling is where they're at. Tom Poland 02:53 And this is a complex sales or marketing challenge, isn't it? Where you've got low leads, high costs, and potentially multiple decision-makers. Colton Briner 03:00 And the client journey is substantial. Tom Poland 03:03 The client journey is substantial. Thank you for that! Six and a half minutes left. Question number two, tell us more about the problem you solve? Colton Briner 03:10 Well, this is really common, right? Small players struggle to capture market share from the deep-pocketed industry incumbents, right? Those guys have big budgets because those companies have a lot of revenues. And larger competitors are basically just using the brute force of dollars to create their own brand visibility. And they're out there buying perceived trust, right? So that's really the challenge that young companies are dealing with– how do you penetrate that kind of brute force? Tom Poland 03:39 Absolutely. How do you? It's not just an incumbent, it's a Goliath of an incumbent. So, question three, five and a half minutes left. How would you describe the typical symptoms that someone listening to this, if they were potentially an ideal client of yours, what's happening in their business right now? What's going on where they go, “That's a heads up that I need to find out more about what Colton does”? Colton Briner 04:02 Well, you're certainly getting like the “Who are you? Who are you guys? We've never heard of you.” You don't find that people are immediately resonating. They're not connecting with you on an emotional basis. They're not connecting with you on a trust basis. You're not standing out. If you market at conferences, you just are off in the corner so people don't notice you. If you're in the major advertising channels, again, you're just being totally crushed and dominated. You know, if that's your sense of how your marketing is going, then those symptoms are signs that that's exactly the problem I can solve for you. Tom Poland 04:31 I guess they're going to feel some frustration with being confident. They've probably got a product or service which is going to knock the socks off their competitor. They're the world's best-kept secret. Question number four, we've got four and a half minutes left, so a bucketload of time. What are some of the common mistakes you hear about that your ideal clients made before they find your solution? Colton Briner 04:56 Sure. Well, number one, and first and foremost, right, they are playing the same game as the big competitors are. They have let the big competitors basically set the rules. They're not creating their own path, right? So, I would say you really want to figure out, rather than, “How do I do the low budget version of the same game that everyone else is playing? How do I use strategy and creativity to do something different in a more meaningful way than what everybody else is doing?” Because if you let the big boys set the rules of the game, you're going to lose until you bootstrap your way to the same kind of budgets that they have, which is, you know, it's a huge problem. So, I mean, let's pay attention to what channels they're not in, and what ways they're not leveraging personality. And again, you know, the big companies have a challenge in expressing meaningfully significant personality, even controversial views, because they're very risk-averse. And that creates- it actually gives the little guys who can take advantage of that opportunity, a clear path to outflanking, out navigating, and out marketing those same competitors with much less money. Tom Poland 06:02 Right! Then, so instead of just spending a bucketload of money, which is easy to do, if you've got it- Colton Briner 06:08 Yep! Tom Poland 06:09 A creative idea could actually circumnavigate the opposition. Thank you for that. There's a heck of a lot of wisdom in that, folks! To unpack that would possibly take a one-week seminar. But, you know, I would really encourage you to rewind and listen to that because that's a strategic insight into how the big competitors, not at their own game, but by playing the game the way they can't play it. Colton Briner 06:36 That's right! Tom Poland 06:37 So, let's go, two and a half minutes left, number five, a top tip, please. A valuable free action someone listening to this could take. Not going to solve the whole problem, but it might take them a step in the right direction? Colton Briner 06:47 Well, I think you actually set it in summary for the last answer, which is creativity is going to win, right? No B2B sector on the planet is 1/10 as creatively competitive as any B2C sector that exists on the planet, right? A thimble of creativity is basically all it takes to just blow away the competition in a B2B market. So, I'm going to do suggest building the creative capacities of your teams. There are tons of books out there, if you want to bring in somebody who can do like a creativity-building seminar, I know a guy. Or there are two books that I highly recommend. This one is called, A Technique for Producing Ideas. It's a 70-year-old book that you can read, not even on a flight, you can read this while taxiing for a flight. And then another book from Stanford's D School. This one is called, Creative Acts for Curious People. If you want to build the creative capacities of your teams, including your marketing team, check out those two resources. Tom Poland 07:42 Thanks for that! I'll add a third one, Thinking for a Living. If you can get it, it's by Joey Reiman. Thinking for a Living is one of my all-time favorite books. Thanks for that, sir! And question number six, we've got 75 seconds left, one valuable free resource, where can people go to find out more about your work? Colton Briner 08:02 Well, I have many and you can find them all in the same place. Scrappyafsolutions.com/resources. Scrappyafsolutions.com. And the Resources page, I think, only one or two of them actually require you know, any kind of email entry. The rest of them are there for you to download and use as you like. Tom Poland 08:19 Thank you, sir! Dare I ask what AF stands for? Colton Briner 08:23 I don't know. Well, if this is a family show, maybe we can't explain that. But it is, as you may suspect. Tom Poland 08:29 Scrappy as? All right. Thank you! 30 seconds left. What's the one question I should have asked you but didn't? Colton Briner 08:36 Maybe what does it look like to look different and be creative? Like if you're going to, for example, a conference and everybody else is in business suits? Well dress your team up as the Game of Thrones characters, right? Everybody's- Yeah, everybody's throwing big expensive parties. Take your clients to a wagyu steak tasting. I mean, these are the things that really create a different experience that helps you to capture market share from incumbents. Tom Poland 09:01 Colton, thanks so much for your time. Colton Briner 09:04 A delight! Thank you. Tom Poland 09:06 Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we're doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It's very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.

Today's special guest is Jessica Tudos, who helps fellow high-achieving multi-passionates organize and declutter physically - and mentally - in order to be more focused, productive, and creative at home and at work. As an Olympian turned edupreneur, life design coach, and organizer, Jessica helps creative portfolioists bring their ideas, projects, and passions to life.If you've ever found yourself struggling to find your “one right path”, if you feel like you're always  “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole” or you just have way too many interests and a fear of being "flaky", this episode is just for you!Jessica and I talk about:How the myth of the “one path” can keep you from discovering the joys of being a multi-passionate creative or entrepreneurHow to create a “portfolio” life where you can enjoy your many interests while feeding your curiosity and your need for varietyAn approach to stability and financial security that doesn't hamper your creativity How to stop feeling ashamed of your curiosity and many interests and how to embrace your identity as multi-passionate creativeJessica is grounded by lifelong learning, creative expression, and lots of juggling. Her adventures include having 65+ jobs (and counting), traveling to 40+ countries, becoming a single mom by choice, and getting married at 50. Not a conventional path, nor possible if she had continued to pursue the “one thing” in my career or “settling down” in her personal life.Breaking free from societal expectations, trusting her gut, and taking creative risks allowed her to find Something Even Better! You definitely don't want to miss this episode!You can connect with Jessica by joining her Thrive with 5 email list, where each month she sends multi-passionate portfolioists items to reflect on, read, watch, listen and do!Jessica is also hosting a 10-day Group Decluttering Challenge from June 10 – 20, 2022, and you can sign up here!Mentioned on the episode: Jessica's Curated List of Her 100 Most Inspiring BooksWhat she's reading now: Creative Acts for Curious Peopleby Sarah Stein GreenbergCheck out Jessica's children's book "Kika the Upside-Down Girl" right here!

The pandemic has changed the way we view time, making planning for the future feel daunting. But Amy Shearn has found creative inspiration in the uncertainty of lengthy commitments — from writing a novel to constructing the 10,000-year Clock. And Reverend Paula Hollingsworth, Chaplain at London's St. Paul's Cathedral, is the author of The Spirituality of Jane Austen. She outlines the evolution of faith in Jane Austen's novels and her personal life , and discusses what we can garner about Jane's stance on the abolitionist movement from Mansfield Park.

“Very often, you are not designing for yourself. And you kind of have to get out of your own way to effectively design with others' needs in mind.”In this podcast episode, lecturer Matt Abrahams is joined by Sarah Stein Greenberg, Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the Stanford d.school, and author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways.Together, Greenberg and Abrahams discuss how design and communication require seeing things from more than just our own point of view, and the tools we can use to broaden our perspectives.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Independent Shakespeare Co.'s Community Action Update podcast series returns on the Ides of March in a revamped format that will now be released quarterly! This episode features interviews with Sabra Williams and Major Bunton of Creative Acts and Inglewood Wrapping Arms Around the Community, Miry Whitehill of Miry's List, and a special Shakespeare reading by our very own David Melville. For the full episode and ways to passport these incredible organizations, head to iscla.org/justice.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Creative Acts for Curious People Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. She speaks regularly at universities and global conferences on design, business, and education. Sarah holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and also serves as a trustee for global conservation organization Rare. She is the author of the book Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways*. In this conversation, Sarah and I discuss the reality that all of us face with real learning: uncomfortable struggle. We detail some of the typical pattens that occur with struggle and how we can almost predict it at certain points. Plus, we discuss what Sarah and her colleagues have discovered on what we can all do to make the most of the struggles we regularly face. Key Points Part of the process of creativity almost always feels terrible. The “trough of despair” is hard, but also essential. Struggle helps us learn better. There's a sweet spot between what you already know well and what seems impossible. That middle zone is productive struggle. It's helpful to set expectations in advance when innovating or creating that discomfort is an indicator that you're moving forward. When people are in the midst of struggle, shifting the focus from thinking and talking to actually doing can often illuminate the best, next step. Productive struggle often comes at predictable moments. When it does, scaffolding and models can help move us along to get to where we need to go. Resources Mentioned Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways* by Sarah Stein Greenberg Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes Growth Mindset Helps You Rise From the Ashes, with Jeff Hittenberger (episode 326) Help People Learn Through Powerful Teaching, with Pooja Agarwal (episode 421) The Value of Being Uncomfortable, with Neil Pasricha (episode 448) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.

Most of the problems we face today are messy, complex, and have no correct answer. Further, we have no precedence of how to solve them. Kevin chats with Sarah Stein Greenberg, who shares practical and maybe unusual ways to help you tackle the challenges you face. It is critical to have a curious mind and be intentional with your actions. Key Points Sarah shares her thoughts about design and risk. She discusses how to extend our curiosity. She shares examples of paths to creativity including: Come up with ideas. Locate your own voice. Tell a compelling story. Slow down and focus. Meet Sarah Name: Sarah Stein Greenberg Her Story: Sarah is the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. She is also the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Worth Mentioning: Sarah holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a BA in history from Oberlin College. She also serves as a trustee for the global conservation organization Rare. This episode is brought to you by… Unleashing Your Remarkable Potential, Kevin's free weekly e-newsletter. It's full of articles and resources to help you become a more confident and successful leader. Book Recommendations Creative Acts for Curious People: : How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways by Sarah Stein Greenberg System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein Related Podcast Episodes Innovation is Everybody's Business with Tamara Ghandour. Making Creativity an Everyday Habit with Scott Anthony.

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of Stanford D.school. Sarah leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people uncover their creative potential and apply them to the world. She is also the author of Creative Acts for Curious People. In the conversation, Sarah Stein Greenberg shares ideas from the book and exercises that can bring out the creativity in any individual or team. Sarah also shares how design can help while leading through uncertainty.  Some highlights:- Leading with creativity in a world of uncertainty- Navigating ambiguity: A whole new area of skill development- Bridging creativity with curiosity- The what, why, and how of Parallel Prototyping- How leaders can become more aware of the world around them- Forging connections with team members to nurture curiosity and creativity- How to be more empathetic by understanding the different forms of empathy- The role design can play in ensuring equityAlso mentioned in this episode:Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways by Sarah Stein Greenberg-Peter Senge, author of “The Fifth Discipline”-Carissa Carter, director of teaching and learning at Stanford D School-Leah Siebert, designer-Chanel Miller, illustrator-Michael Barry & Michelle JIA-Omayeli Arenyeka, Senior Software Engineer, wrote about the creative savior complex-Juliet Funt, CEO of White Space at Work, author of “A minute to think”-Malia Rothchild Kita, researcher -Michael “Mike” Hirshon, Illustrator, Web Designer- Azeem Azhar, author of The Exponential Age (Listen to Azeem's episode on Partnering Leadership here)Connect with Sarah Stein Greenberg:Sarah Stein Greenberg on LinkedInSarah Stein Greenberg on InstagramStanford D School Official WebsiteD School BooksConnect with Mahan Tavakoli:https://mahantavakoli.com/More information and resources available at the Partnering Leadership Podcast website: https://www.partneringleadership.com/

Becoming more mindful and training our subconscious to work for us is vital to successfully achieving our goals, but what are some practical exercises that we can do to in order to do so? What if there were some games that we can play as adults, that will reveal to us our inner most creativity? Well there are! And we will delve into some of those with today's guest: Sarah Stein Greenberg. Welcome once again Dreamers, to the Do it with Dan Podcast! The place to truly dream with your eyes open. It's time to expand our experience with some more great discussion on the power of the mind in all things. Whether you want to manifest more wealth, emotional abundance or love in your life; this is the podcast for you. For over a decade, Executive Director Sarah Stein Greenberg has helped lead the d.school, an interdisciplinary institute at Stanford that nurtures creative thinkers and doers and helps spread the methods of design. Today the d.school reaches undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at universities around the world, social sector & corporate leaders, and K12 educators. Sarah is the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways (September 2021, Ten Speed Press). Please share your stories with me over at dreamwithdan.com. Connect with Sarah & her work here: Website: https://dschool.stanford.edu/books To subscribe to my YouTube channel, please go here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMdAvGk6xa5fptmdULliJrg Want to manifest money now? Play the 'Money Game' to harness the power of micro-shifting to attract abundance immediately. Get your Ebook for $1. Buy NOW. Do you want inevitable & sustainable financial abundance, based on your own unique 'Money DNA'? Watch our brand new webinar Interested in working with Dan 1-2-1? In collaboration with other highly successful experts, he will help you reach financial freedom in 6 months or less: Apply Here *PLEASE RATE US AND SHARE* Join me on: Facebook Instagram Twitter Music Credit: "The Dreamer", Common Timestamps of interest: 01:14 - Welcome Sarah 05:27 - Working to change the establishment by being a part of it 08:24 - How to view life through a different lens 14:18 - Distribution prototyping 16:45 - Sarah's favourite exercise that she didn't put in the book 20:22 - Adults deserve to play more! 25:53 - Testing titles 28:48 - Making a contribution to the new narratives #wellness #health #fitness #healthylifestyle #selfcare #love #motivation #mentalhealth #healthy #lifestyle #yoga #beauty #healing #mindfulness #selflove #nutrition #healthyliving #meditation #wellbeing #workout #skincare #gym #relax #life #weightloss #fitnessmotivation #inspiration #fit #instagood #bhfyp

This week's conversation is with Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (the “d.school”).For over a decade, she has helped lead the d.school to nurture creative thinkers and doers and help spread the methods of design.Sarah teaches at the intersection of design and social impact - she likes to tinker with old educational formats and adapt them to today's learners.She has taught the d.school's foundational class Design Thinking Bootcamp, an experimental course called Design Thinking for Public Policy Innovators, and the long-running, high impact Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, whose students have gone on to design products and services that have helped over 100 million people worldwide.Sarah is also the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Uncoventional Ways.It's a timely, highly visual resource for people who seek to choose curiosity in the face of uncertainty, filled with ideas and 80 innovative exercises around the art of learning and discovery.So, this is a conversation about learning how to better define the problem before you try solving it and I think you're going to love it …----Please support our partners!We're able to keep growing and creating content for YOU because of their support. We believe in their mission and would appreciate you supporting them in return!!To take advantage of deals from our partners, head to http://www.findingmastery.net/partners where you'll find all discount links and codes mentioned in the podcast. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're joined by Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of Stanford d.school, to discuss her book, “Creative Acts for Curious People.” We dive into how to bring creativity to all the obstacles in our lives. Follow Sarah:https://dschool.stanford.edu/book-collections/creative-acts-for-curious-peoplehttps://twitter.com/steingreenberg Follow Us:Instagram: www.instagram.com/candicekayla/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/CandiceKayla Website: www.candicekayla.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week Sarah talks to Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford Design School and author of Creative Acts for Curious People. Together Sarah and Sarah explore lots of practical exercises and techniques that will help everyone to think, create and lead in unconventional ways. You can order Sarah's book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Acts-Curious-People-Unconventional/dp/0241552834/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=creative+acts+for+curious+people&qid=1639399808&sr=8-1To download the PodSheet for this episode, head to https://www.amazingif.com/listen/To sign-up for PodMail, a weekly summary of squiggly career tools and catch-up on PodPlus head to https://mailchi.mp/squigglycareers/podmailFor questions, feedback or just to say hello, you can email us at helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“You can never hide the traces of yourself and your way of being: they always show up in your work,” Sarah Stein Greenberg writes in Creative Acts for Curious People. Executive Director of the Stanford d.school, encouraging students to feel is core to Sarah's mission and her team's design thinking philosophy. How do they achieve it when creativity is often a rollercoaster of emotions? By expanding our ability to see what is, imagine what can be, and navigate ambiguity as we create it. Sarah shares exercises to thrive in each stage of the creative process, from incorporating more play into our work to “setting the conditions” to do our best thinking. We quickly learn that design thinking doesn't solely amplify our creativity. It offers a dynamic lens to navigate our lives. 

Get ready to start thinking more creatively and be more curious! Listen in to Guy Kawasaki interview Sarah Stein Greenberg on this week's Remarkable People podcast where they dig into design thinking and creativity. Sarah Stein Greenberg is the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways and the Executive Director of Stanford's d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Sarah speaks regularly at universities and global conferences on design, business, and education. She holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a BA in history from Oberlin College. Sarah also serves as a trustee for global conservation organization Rare.

One of the influences on my life is a man called Simon Bailey. He was a visualiser; he'd show up with his box of coloured pens and paper, and as I tried to describe the ideas and solutions bubbling in my brain, he'd draw them. That would spark new ideas for me, which I'd try to build on, and we would do this dance of imagination and creativity together. I'm only realising this now, but he's one of the ways I came to understand that one of the most powerful ways to show up in the world is to stay curious, just a little bit longer.  Sarah Stein Greenberg is the Executive Director of d.school in Stanford, and the author of a wonderful new book: Creative Acts for Curious People. Her job, though, really is a paradox; to both unleash and contain creativity. But maybe that's the nature of design, because in some ways, design is how creativity learns how to dance. Get‌ ‌book‌ ‌links‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌at‌ https://www.mbs.works/2-pages-podcast/  Sarah reads two pages from ‘The Sixth Extinction' by Elizabeth Kolbert. [reading begins at 18:35] Hear us discuss:  Resisting closure; sustaining a long hunch: “The ability to resist premature closure is one of the core skills you acquire with strong creative practice.” [26:09] | Productive struggle and uncertainty: “If you're not having those moments of struggle, then you're probably not working on something that is likely to result in something new, innovative, or meaningful.” [29:05] | Sitting with your feelings. [34:18]

There are more ways to approach any challenge than you can imagine. Sarah Stein Greenberg gives us an entirely new paradigm that, with a little curiosity, could open the door to a more creative and fun-filled world where ideas become action. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ronald Beghetto has a conversation with Sarah Stein Greenberg about how important it is to shift students' mindsets from one based on a structured idea of what school and learning is, to one that is open, creative, iterative, adaptive, and able to improvise as they keep learning. Stein Greenberg also talks about her book “Creative Acts for Curious People,” which she wrote with the goal of bringing skills and methods used at the d school to a much wider audience. Stein Greenberg sees this book as a handbook for people to realize the creative power they already possess, emphasizing that everyone is and can be creative. Stein Greenberg imagines a future where people are able to unleash their creative abilities to the fullest with an education system that supports that pathway. You can learn more about Sarah Stein Greenberg's work by visiting the Stanford d.school, you can follow her on twitter @steingreenberg. For more information on Sarah's book: Creative Acts for Curious People-----The Learning Futures Podcast is produced at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Executive Producers are Dr. Sean Leahy and Claire Gilbert. The show is produced by Dr. Clarin Collins and Karina Muñoz Baltazar. Audio production provided by Claire Gilbert.

Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford University's world-renowned “d.school,” and author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways joins host Laura Zarrow to discuss how design intersects with process and allows for creative approaches to solving problems in any domain. Learn more about Sarah and the book at https://dschool.stanford.edu/book-collections/creative-acts-for-curious-people. Originally aired with Host Laura Zarrow on October 21, 2021 on SiriusXM's Business Radio, Channel 132. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Self-evidently, design and creativity are everywhere -- literally in every man-made thing we make, use, or celebrate.  According to today's guest, the act of design and creativity can benefit everyone, whether they see themselves as creative or not. Sarah Stein Greenberg is Executive Director of the d.school at Stanford (aka the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), which explores what great design can bring to global industries.  She's the author of the book Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Sarah cites the freedom of Lego construction, and her father's carpentry, as twin inspirations for her own creativity.  We talked about design as a language and creativity extending beyond the narrow realms of “art”. Among the highlights: How navigating uncertainty requires an open attitude to creativity. The importance of “meta-learning.” The value of recognizing one's own bias. Strategies for exploring serendipitous discovery. The difference between divergent and convergent ideation. How to solicit and use constructive criticism. Struggle as a sign that productive learning is occurring. How to overcome creative blockages. Enjoy! Have a question? Text me 1-206-309-5177
 Tweet me @chasejarvis --- Today's episode is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world's largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world's top experts -- Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.

The great creatives throughout history have been those who can ignite their own fire of innovation and ambition, but what is the flint that brings these sparks of creativity to life? And in a time of great uncertainty, why does creativity matter more than ever? As executive director of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (commonly referred to as the d.school), Sarah Stein Greenberg is an accomplice to dazzling ingenuity. In her debut book, Creative Acts for Curious People, Stein Greenberg taps into her close ties with bold thinkers and confident doers, providing readers with the ultimate mechanisms to get creative juices flowing. Straight from the cognitive toolkits of Google's chief evangelist or renowned choreographers, Stein Greenberg lays out practices for mindful observation, intuitive connecting and much much more. The more than 80 exercises, while lighthearted, require a thoughtfulness and intentionality meant to give readers their very own eureka moment. At INFORUM, Sarah Stein Greenberg will piece together the puzzle that is design. She shares not only tools but anecdotes and personal experiences in which she illustrates the roadmap that shows how to revitalize curiosity and in turn putting that curiosity into action. This conversation will be moderated by Laura Holson of The New York Times. SPEAKERS Sarah Stein Greenberg Executive Director, Stanford d.school; Author, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Way Laura Holson Writer, The New York Times In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 6th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The great creatives throughout history have been those who can ignite their own fire of innovation and ambition, but what is the flint that brings these sparks of creativity to life? And in a time of great uncertainty, why does creativity matter more than ever? As executive director of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (commonly referred to as the d.school), Sarah Stein Greenberg is an accomplice to dazzling ingenuity. In her debut book, Creative Acts for Curious People, Stein Greenberg taps into her close ties with bold thinkers and confident doers, providing readers with the ultimate mechanisms to get creative juices flowing. Straight from the cognitive toolkits of Google's chief evangelist or renowned choreographers, Stein Greenberg lays out practices for mindful observation, intuitive connecting and much much more. The more than 80 exercises, while lighthearted, require a thoughtfulness and intentionality meant to give readers their very own eureka moment. At INFORUM, Sarah Stein Greenberg will piece together the puzzle that is design. She shares not only tools but anecdotes and personal experiences in which she illustrates the roadmap that shows how to revitalize curiosity and in turn putting that curiosity into action. This conversation will be moderated by Laura Holson of The New York Times. SPEAKERS Sarah Stein Greenberg Executive Director, Stanford d.school; Author, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Way Laura Holson Writer, The New York Times In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 6th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

S6 E70: In this episode, meet leadership coach Carey Nieuwhof, executive director of the Stanford d.school Sarah Stein Greenberg, and entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz. Each of these authors bring formidable experience to the subjects of work, leadership, and innovative thinking. Hear Carey Nieuwhof address the prevalence of burnout and what to do about it, Sarah Stein Greenberg on using creativity to solve problems, and Mike Michalowicz on marketing your business in ways that can't be ignored. At Your Best by Carey Nieuwhof: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/565670/at-your-best/ Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg and Stanford d.school: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/623528/creative-acts-for-curious-people/ Get Different by Mike Michalowicz: https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/670011/get-different/

Sarah Stein Greenberg is the author of a new book called “Creative Acts for Curious People. How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways''. A quote from the book sums it up: “In an era of ambiguous, messy problems, as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change, it's vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. This book is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence”. Sarah is the Executive Director of Stanford University's d School or Design School. The tools and exercises in the book are a gift to the rest of us who've not yet had the opportunity to go through their programs designed to spark creativity, foster connection, and solve problems.

My guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the executive director of the Stanford d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. The topic is her book Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: What is design? Design Inspiration The Impact of Pandemic on Students Today Creative Collaboration What's In The Fridge? Creative Acts for Curious People Design Problems Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

In an era of ambiguous, messy problems—as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change—it's vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Sarah Stein Greenberg is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence. At Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; Greenberg gives the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it's a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. To bring fresh approaches to any challenge–world changing or close to home–you can draw on exercises such as Expert Eyes to hone observation skills, How to Talk to Strangers to foster understanding, and Designing Tools for Teams to build creative leadership. The activities are at once lighthearted, surprising, tough, and impactful–and reveal how the hidden dynamics of design can drive more vibrant ways of making, feeling, exploring, experimenting, and collaborating at work and in life. Greenberg will help you develop the behaviors and deepen the mindsets that can turn your curiosity into ideas, and your ideas into action. Bio: Sarah Stein Greenberg is the executive director of the Stanford d.school. She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: What is design? Design Inspiration The Impact of Pandemic on Students Today Creative Collaboration What's In The Fridge? Creative Acts for Curious People Design Problems

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom is joined by Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school and the recent author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Sarah has spent the last decade leading d.school and her new book is a masterclass in design activities, design process and creativity. Throughout the episode Sarah and Tom mention "Sam", they are referring to Sam Seidel K12 Lab Director of Strategy + Research. Let's listen as Sarah and Tom discuss design thinking, a design toolkit, problem solving, community involvement and much more.  

What are design principles and tools for innovation? How can they help government executives transform how government does business? What strategies can leaders employ to achieve a design mindset? Join host Michael Keegan as he explores these questions and more with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways.

What are design principles and tools for innovation? How can they help government executives transform how government does business? What strategies can leaders employ to achieve a design mindset? Join host Michael Keegan as he explores these questions and more with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, […]

Sarah Stein Greenberg from Standford University discusses "Creative Acts for Curious People" and how to think, create and lead in unconventional ways. Sarah is the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. (aka Standford d.school). She leads a community of designers, faculty, and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Listen for three action items you can use today. Host, Kevin Craine Do you want to be a guest?

Christopher Lockhead's Follow Your Different Podcast Notes Key Takeaways “Curiosity embodies what is exciting about creativity. No matter what you make, you get to learn something new.”– Sarah Stein GreenbergSociety needs to accept more unconventional approaches to success, more roads to act on curiosity“There is a whole new era of what it looks like to think into the future about the implications of your creative work, design choices, or business decisions”– Sarah Stein GreenbergThe transition from a physical to a digital world, companies bear responsibility for transparency and foresight when it comes to product design and business decisionsThe implications of building a wooden chair are pretty straightforward. Facebook, not so much (for example).We must attempt to fully understand and empathize with our business/consumer value trade-offsUseful reflection framework:What -> So what -> Now what“Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking”– Christopher LochheadUnderstanding how you learn is important for continuous learningRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgIn this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk about all things creativity, innovation, and design. Our guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of Stanford's Design School, aka the d.school. She has a new book out called Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. They have taken years of learning and ideas from Stanford's Design school and put it in this awesome new book, and we get to dive in to all of it. Sarah shares why reflections matter so much, and also tells why metacognition is important. We dig into what it's like running one of the most well-known design schools in the world, and how design students are different today than they were in the not-so-distant past. Also, pay special attention to Sarah's ideas on weird and the role of curiosity in creativity and design. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Reflections and Creativity Sarah talks about finally being back in the physical space of Stanford campus. She describes the space that she has a space for reflection, full of writing space to record her thoughts as they come. When asked if reflection is really important in design, Sara shares that it plays a part in it. That it is something that should go hand-in-hand with action. “I think reflection is kind of the underappreciated partner of action. In a lot of cases, when people think about creativity, they think about brainstorming and exuberance, and that that spark of inspiration. But reflection, I think about it as it's like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those two things are, inextricably linked action and reflection. So yeah, I'm a big proponent of those quiet moments, where you're trying to make sense or really think about what might be the implications of your creative work.” = Sarah Stein Greenberg What? So What? Now What? Sarah shares about the difference between thinking and reflection. Thinking might include everything from coming up with new ideas, charting the vision, or even some parts of analysis / research. Reflection focuses more on thinking about your own process or practice, or looking back at your data more critically. Sarah goes on to say that reflection in particular benefits from specific scaffolding and practices, and brings up one of her favorite one: the What? / So What? / Now What?, which a few of her colleagues have originated. “The scaffold is called What? So what? Now What? You can kind of have a scaffolded reflection and think about, what did I just learn in that particular class or that particular project? How do I want to improve my own work? But if you use a scaffold like What, So What, and Now What, you really get into the details. You might write down everything that happened, then you might think about what did all of that mean? Why is that important? Why did that feel like what I wanted to capture? And then Now What is the opportunity to think for each of those. So what for each of those implications? What do I want to do about that? Is that something I want to practice? Is that something I want to improve?” = Sarah Stein Greenberg For Sarah, the quality of reflections changes dramatically if you have a detailed flow on how to approach and assess what you currently have. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Metacognition The conversation then steers into how a lot of people nowadays aren't really thinking, or thinking about thinking. Most content or “new things” in the market are just variations of the same things that we already have, just rebranded or given a new “spin”. Sarah agrees with this sentiment, and also talks about metacognition, which is the technical term for “thinking about thinking”. For her, it's a skill that should be embedded in the heart of our education. “(Metacognition) is one of those kinds of secret skills that I firmly believe should be embedded in the heart of our education. What goes along with that is the idea of learning how you learn, is actually the key to like being able to then con...

*Crowd-sponsor us and get rewards on Patreon* Sarah Stein Greenberg is the executive director of Stanford d. School and the author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People.  In this mind meld, we muse about sense-making through creativity, bringing order to chaos through art, the "transcendent aesthetic," and more. Support Third Eye Drops! Crowd-sponsor us and get rewards on Patreon This mind meld is sponsored by Sheath. Get 20% off here Review and sub on Apple Podcasts Follow the show on Spotify Visit Thirdeyedrops.com

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator. Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious PeopleBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors. Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self. These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you. Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets. I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that? And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way. It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way. Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators. What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows is that the patient then goes home with a trained caregiver who actually has the largest stake in the outcome, the health outcomes.And they've trained over a million people. They work in over 150 hospitals across South Asia. It's a really unconventional solution. It's so powerful because they just took this completely ignored opportunity and created a very low cost, very effective solution that helps reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. It reduces complications following surgery. Those students would not have been able to get to that outcome if they didn't have the permission to really do the problem finding work, right. And not take the problem as given but find a new opportunity. Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because when you work with corporate teams, a lot of times they think they understand the problem because they've worked with that customer before, they understand a lot of the dynamics versus like a startup. Maybe that's working in a green space idea. What kind of advice can you give for a team that's working in an existing environment to give them permission, to think about things differently and tackle the problem side first. Sarah Stein Greenberg: I'm going to give two examples of assignments in the book that I think are incredibly relevant for the scenario that you just depicted. And neither of them are a huge investment of time. So, when people are always worried about like, hey, we just got to jump right into problem solving mode, taking one day or even just a couple of hours to check whether or not there might be solution space is it's such a good investment of time. The first one that I'll mention is an activity called Experts Assumptions. And it's based on the practice of Assumption Storming. Everybody knows about brainstorming, but there's a really cool practice created by a guy named Craig Lauchner called Assumption Storming, where you list all the assumptions that you have about what your customer needs, or what the market opportunity looks like.I really list all of them. And then you start categorizing them based on whether they're fact or opinions or guesses. And actually, what you discover is there's a lot more opinions and guesses, behind most of our assumptions, than you would think. Anything that's a fact you just disregard for the sake of the exercise, but anything that's an opinion or a guess, you challenge that.So, you flip it and you say, well what if this opinion were not true, what could we design them? What could we make then? And oftentimes it just reveals that like our assumptions are built on this foundation of a lot of guesswork and it gives you the opportunity to do that right up front when you're starting something.The other practice that I would advise in this case is called shadowing. And shadowing is just the practice of following in the footsteps of whoever you're trying to design for for a full day. We have a lot of experience running this with educators who follow a student for the entire day, from the bus stop to the drop off at the end of the day.And they come back with the most interesting and unexpected insights, right? So those are people who are in the school context all day. They think they really understand what's going on, but until you put yourself in the shoes or you walk in the shoes of someone else, you don't realize how much of the experience might be altered from having that different perspective. And again, it helps you challenge those assumptions, and it helps you spot all of these opportunities for creative work or innovation that you haven't noticed yet. Brian Ardinger: So, you've worked with a lot of teams, and they'd gone through a lot of these types of exercises and that. What are some of the biggest aha moments or obstacles and where do people get stuck and how do they overcome it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: I love it when people get stuck, because that means it's a challenge worthy of their creative abilities. I think getting stuck has a bad rap, but actually it means you're doing important work and you're stretching and you're learning. One place where we often see students in our classrooms get stuck is during the phase when you're trying to light on the direction for your project, kind of synthesis phase, establishing a point of view.I also see our teams get stuck when everybody's gone off and done the exploration research separately. And nobody has actually like gone to interview users together and had the aha that comes from having two different people interpret, oh, is that what that person was saying? There's a real missed opportunity there.And then there was a wonderful moment of feeling the pressure of the final deadline that often causes a lot of angst and tension within a team. And what those moments often are is what's called productive struggle. So, there's research from mathematics education that says that when you struggle, when you're first trying to learn a new skill in math, you actually wind up learning it more deeply. And you're more likely to be able to transfer that knowledge to other kinds of problems. And so people who kind of get things right away the first time, that doesn't mean they're deeply learning. So again, I welcome the struggle. I think the struggle can be a sign that the task is worthy of your attention and that you're going to have to stretch and grow while you're conquering it.Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've seen working with teams, a lot of times that keeping the momentum and the consistency is difficult. A lot of times they go and get excited, and they go out and do customer discovery and then they think they can check it off the list and then be done with it. Do you have any hints or tips for, how do you keep that momentum and consistency not get pulled away to the executing and optimizing mode, that too many people get pulled?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Really establishing upfront that you're going to go back to customers multiple times is critical. When you first interpret whatever you learned during that exploration and research, you can kind of be like, oh, I'm onto it. Like I've got this new idea. It's new to me. It's exciting. But if you don't actually go back and test your assumptions by exposing those early prototypes to real people, then you're not really closing the loop.So, treating those first insights as a hypothesis, but then continuing to test and make sure that you're getting real feedback from the market or from colleagues or from anyone who has an external perspective to the work, I think that's what really helps you avoid that pitfall that you're describing.And a lot of people, you know, it is easy to get into that like solution optimization mindset. And a lot of that comes from this sense of, I need to work fast. In my opinion, and I think the experience with, you know, a lot of innovators would bear this out, if you take the time to do those tests, you really save yourself risk. Right.You really help get the right product to market or the right innovation going rather than some kind of more arbitrary internal deadline. It's so easy to like lose sight of that fact in the pursuit of, you know, getting to the preexisting timeline rather than actually thinking about what is right here, how am I solving the right problem? How am I going to come up with something that's truly meaningful to some customer somewhere? Brian Ardinger: The key is accelerating the learning, not necessarily the outcome itself. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the learning also is useful to a company or a team, not just in this particular project, but then going forward. So, if you think about, am I optimizing for learning, what am I really doing to make sure we come out of this project, having a great outcome, but also like setting the team up for success in the future. That's the exact right mindset. That's the learning mindset that you want to cultivate. Brian Ardinger: So, as you're out in Silicon Valley at Stanford. So, technology is obviously a core component of the whole region. How do you see technology changing the way we design and some of the new trends that you're seeing out there? Sarah Stein Greenberg: One thing we've all gone through in the past 18 months is much more remote collaboration, particularly for many people in the world of design than we have experienced before. And I think that that's been certainly a challenge, but it's also provided a lot of new opportunities to design new types of interactions, new types of practices. So, there are increasingly ways to be testing at scale through online platforms that we maybe haven't used in the past. Personally, still think that has to be complemented by the kind of depth human, you know, more individual, small qualitative research approaches. I think a blend is really useful. It's challenged all of our teams in terms of how do you build trust? How do you build resilience? How do you build the kind of collaboration that we're talking about be necessary when you're not, it's easy to have less empathy for your team members when you're not seeing them every day? And you know, not maybe scheduling in time to have those more human conversations that kind of coffee chat just happens in a in-person office environment. I think you can design for that remotely in a distributed culture, but you have to be conscious that that's an important thing that you value. Brian Ardinger: Like I said, there's, I think over 80 types of activities or exercises that you have in this book. Are there particular ones that you like or want to talk about?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Sure. I mean, one example that I'll give, and I feel like this is the epitome of what we talk about when we say these are unconventional approaches. So, one of my favorites is an activity that I lead every year with students called Distribution Prototyping. So, this is like phenomenal for small businesses or large businesses. Too often in design or in engineering we like think about the thing that we want to make or the service we want to deliver, but we don't think about how it's actually going to reach the customer. That's such a miss because there is so much innovation and creativity that can happen in the distribution and the marketing and the sales experience and all of that.So, thinking more broadly about where innovation can show up, that's a favorite idea of mine. And in this particular assignment, I have people stretch a string across the biggest room they have, or the longest hallway that they have. And then imagine the thing that they're trying to deliver to the customer at one end and the place where it's either being the person being trained to deliver the service, or you know, where it's being manufactured at the other end.And then systematically you hang cards using paperclips or whatever you have at hand to represent all of the different steps along the channel. And there's something very powerful about the embodiment of that, right? Like you can get your head around it. You can build a model. You can put it on a spreadsheet.It doesn't do as much for you as if you physically do what's called body storming and make that physical representation. So, you will have kinds of insights about, oh, we could cut some costs here. Ooh, this could be a really nonsense traditional agent in my channel who might really change how people are experiencing the delivery of the service. Or you might think differently about the economic arrangements or some way to incentivize retailers that you haven't thought about before. So that's one of my favorites. That's really what I'm taking a string and putting it... That is the kind of embrace of the more playful unconventional approaches that can really work. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that literal mapping of a customer journey gives you so many different dimensions to look at. It's almost like the whole business model canvas versus a running of a business plan. It gives you a visualization of things that you can move around and change. I really like that. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. And I would say like the visualization is a huge part of it. And then that one step further into the physicalization is like, there is a reason that when you walk into any design studio, it is usually cluttered with so many different objects. It's because designers think with things and there is some really magical part of your brain that gets lit up. When you do that. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk a little bit about the book it's called Creative Acts for Curious People. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: They can reach us at dschoolbooks.Stanford.edu. We are going to be delighted to get this into people's hands as soon as possible. Brian Ardinger: Go and grab it at Amazon or wherever books are sold. And we're excited to have you on the show and thanks very much for being a part of it.Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator. Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious PeopleBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors. Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self. These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you. Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets. I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that? And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way. It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way. Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators. What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows is that the patient then goes home with a trained caregiver who actually has the largest stake in the outcome, the health outcomes.And they've trained over a million people. They work in over 150 hospitals across South Asia. It's a really unconventional solution. It's so powerful because they just took this completely ignored opportunity and created a very low cost, very effective solution that helps reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. It reduces complications following surgery. Those students would not have been able to get to that outcome if they didn't have the permission to really do the problem finding work, right. And not take the problem as given but find a new opportunity. Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because when you work with corporate teams, a lot of times they think they understand the problem because they've worked with that customer before, they understand a lot of the dynamics versus like a startup. Maybe that's working in a green space idea. What kind of advice can you give for a team that's working in an existing environment to give them permission, to think about things differently and tackle the problem side first. Sarah Stein Greenberg: I'm going to give two examples of assignments in the book that I think are incredibly relevant for the scenario that you just depicted. And neither of them are a huge investment of time. So, when people are always worried about like, hey, we just got to jump right into problem solving mode, taking one day or even just a couple of hours to check whether or not there might be solution space is it's such a good investment of time. The first one that I'll mention is an activity called Experts Assumptions. And it's based on the practice of Assumption Storming. Everybody knows about brainstorming, but there's a really cool practice created by a guy named Craig Lauchner called Assumption Storming, where you list all the assumptions that you have about what your customer needs, or what the market opportunity looks like.I really list all of them. And then you start categorizing them based on whether they're fact or opinions or guesses. And actually, what you discover is there's a lot more opinions and guesses, behind most of our assumptions, than you would think. Anything that's a fact you just disregard for the sake of the exercise, but anything that's an opinion or a guess, you challenge that.So, you flip it and you say, well what if this opinion were not true, what could we design them? What could we make then? And oftentimes it just reveals that like our assumptions are built on this foundation of a lot of guesswork and it gives you the opportunity to do that right up front when you're starting something.The other practice that I would advise in this case is called shadowing. And shadowing is just the practice of following in the footsteps of whoever you're trying to design for for a full day. We have a lot of experience running this with educators who follow a student for the entire day, from the bus stop to the drop off at the end of the day.And they come back with the most interesting and unexpected insights, right? So those are people who are in the school context all day. They think they really understand what's going on, but until you put yourself in the shoes or you walk in the shoes of someone else, you don't realize how much of the experience might be altered from having that different perspective. And again, it helps you challenge those assumptions, and it helps you spot all of these opportunities for creative work or innovation that you haven't noticed yet. Brian Ardinger: So, you've worked with a lot of teams, and they'd gone through a lot of these types of exercises and that. What are some of the biggest aha moments or obstacles and where do people get stuck and how do they overcome it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: I love it when people get stuck, because that means it's a challenge worthy of their creative abilities. I think getting stuck has a bad rap, but actually it means you're doing important work and you're stretching and you're learning. One place where we often see students in our classrooms get stuck is during the phase when you're trying to light on the direction for your project, kind of synthesis phase, establishing a point of view.I also see our teams get stuck when everybody's gone off and done the exploration research separately. And nobody has actually like gone to interview users together and had the aha that comes from having two different people interpret, oh, is that what that person was saying? There's a real missed opportunity there.And then there was a wonderful moment of feeling the pressure of the final deadline that often causes a lot of angst and tension within a team. And what those moments often are is what's called productive struggle. So, there's research from mathematics education that says that when you struggle, when you're first trying to learn a new skill in math, you actually wind up learning it more deeply. And you're more likely to be able to transfer that knowledge to other kinds of problems. And so people who kind of get things right away the first time, that doesn't mean they're deeply learning. So again, I welcome the struggle. I think the struggle can be a sign that the task is worthy of your attention and that you're going to have to stretch and grow while you're conquering it.Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've seen working with teams, a lot of times that keeping the momentum and the consistency is difficult. A lot of times they go and get excited, and they go out and do customer discovery and then they think they can check it off the list and then be done with it. Do you have any hints or tips for, how do you keep that momentum and consistency not get pulled away to the executing and optimizing mode, that too many people get pulled?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Really establishing upfront that you're going to go back to customers multiple times is critical. When you first interpret whatever you learned during that exploration and research, you can kind of be like, oh, I'm onto it. Like I've got this new idea. It's new to me. It's exciting. But if you don't actually go back and test your assumptions by exposing those early prototypes to real people, then you're not really closing the loop.So, treating those first insights as a hypothesis, but then continuing to test and make sure that you're getting real feedback from the market or from colleagues or from anyone who has an external perspective to the work, I think that's what really helps you avoid that pitfall that you're describing.And a lot of people, you know, it is easy to get into that like solution optimization mindset. And a lot of that comes from this sense of, I need to work fast. In my opinion, and I think the experience with, you know, a lot of innovators would bear this out, if you take the time to do those tests, you really save yourself risk. Right.You really help get the right product to market or the right innovation going rather than some kind of more arbitrary internal deadline. It's so easy to like lose sight of that fact in the pursuit of, you know, getting to the preexisting timeline rather than actually thinking about what is right here, how am I solving the right problem? How am I going to come up with something that's truly meaningful to some customer somewhere? Brian Ardinger: The key is accelerating the learning, not necessarily the outcome itself. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the learning also is useful to a company or a team, not just in this particular project, but then going forward. So, if you think about, am I optimizing for learning, what am I really doing to make sure we come out of this project, having a great outcome, but also like setting the team up for success in the future. That's the exact right mindset. That's the learning mindset that you want to cultivate. Brian Ardinger: So, as you're out in Silicon Valley at Stanford. So, technology is obviously a core component of the whole region. How do you see technology changing the way we design and some of the new trends that you're seeing out there? Sarah Stein Greenberg: One thing we've all gone through in the past 18 months is much more remote collaboration, particularly for many people in the world of design than we have experienced before. And I think that that's been certainly a challenge, but it's also provided a lot of new opportunities to design new types of interactions, new types of practices. So, there are increasingly ways to be testing at scale through online platforms that we maybe haven't used in the past. Personally, still think that has to be complemented by the kind of depth human, you know, more individual, small qualitative research approaches. I think a blend is really useful. It's challenged all of our teams in terms of how do you build trust? How do you build resilience? How do you build the kind of collaboration that we're talking about be necessary when you're not, it's easy to have less empathy for your team members when you're not seeing them every day? And you know, not maybe scheduling in time to have those more human conversations that kind of coffee chat just happens in a in-person office environment. I think you can design for that remotely in a distributed culture, but you have to be conscious that that's an important thing that you value. Brian Ardinger: Like I said, there's, I think over 80 types of activities or exercises that you have in this book. Are there particular ones that you like or want to talk about?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Sure. I mean, one example that I'll give, and I feel like this is the epitome of what we talk about when we say these are unconventional approaches. So, one of my favorites is an activity that I lead every year with students called Distribution Prototyping. So, this is like phenomenal for small businesses or large businesses. Too often in design or in engineering we like think about the thing that we want to make or the service we want to deliver, but we don't think about how it's actually going to reach the customer. That's such a miss because there is so much innovation and creativity that can happen in the distribution and the marketing and the sales experience and all of that.So, thinking more broadly about where innovation can show up, that's a favorite idea of mine. And in this particular assignment, I have people stretch a string across the biggest room they have, or the longest hallway that they have. And then imagine the thing that they're trying to deliver to the customer at one end and the place where it's either being the person being trained to deliver the service, or you know, where it's being manufactured at the other end.And then systematically you hang cards using paperclips or whatever you have at hand to represent all of the different steps along the channel. And there's something very powerful about the embodiment of that, right? Like you can get your head around it. You can build a model. You can put it on a spreadsheet.It doesn't do as much for you as if you physically do what's called body storming and make that physical representation. So, you will have kinds of insights about, oh, we could cut some costs here. Ooh, this could be a really nonsense traditional agent in my channel who might really change how people are experiencing the delivery of the service. Or you might think differently about the economic arrangements or some way to incentivize retailers that you haven't thought about before. So that's one of my favorites. That's really what I'm taking a string and putting it... That is the kind of embrace of the more playful unconventional approaches that can really work. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that literal mapping of a customer journey gives you so many different dimensions to look at. It's almost like the whole business model canvas versus a running of a business plan. It gives you a visualization of things that you can move around and change. I really like that. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. And I would say like the visualization is a huge part of it. And then that one step further into the physicalization is like, there is a reason that when you walk into any design studio, it is usually cluttered with so many different objects. It's because designers think with things and there is some really magical part of your brain that gets lit up. When you do that. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk a little bit about the book it's called Creative Acts for Curious People. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: They can reach us at dschoolbooks.Stanford.edu. We are going to be delighted to get this into people's hands as soon as possible. Brian Ardinger: Go and grab it at Amazon or wherever books are sold. And we're excited to have you on the show and thanks very much for being a part of it.Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of the Stanford d.school, spent her childhood in Philly running bases, reading books, and getting lost in her vivid imagination. After getting an undergraduate degree in History, she embarked on an MBA at Stanford, which resulted in her introduction to the d.school and into the dynamic and fascinating world of design. As a lover of complexity and intersections, she found her tribe. Now she's authored Creative Acts for Curious People, a rich and visual resource filled with innovative exercises aimed at helping everyone unlock their own creative potential.Many thanks to this episode's sponsors:Yellow ImagesYellow Images is a marketplace of over 70,000 high-quality premium mockups, creative fonts, PNG Images, and a creative store full of amazing graphic assets like lettering, icons, presets, brushes, and more. With Yellow Images, you can finish your projects faster without wasting time on unnecessary revisions so you can get back to doing what you love. Use promo code CLEVER20 to get a 20% discount on your purchase right here. Don't miss out! These coupons are limited, so first come - first served.Adobe MAXJoin us at Adobe MAX—The Creativity Conference Oct 26–28, 2021. Recharge your inspiration, retool your skills, and reconnect with other passionate creatives from around the world. Be a part of this amazing creative community. Register for free here!Clever is a proud member of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows.Please say Hi on social! Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @CleverPodcast, @amydevers, @designmilkIf you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!Clever is hosted by Amy Devers and produced by 2VDE Media, with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/clever. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk about all things creativity, innovation, and design. Our guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of Stanford's Design School, aka the d.school. She has a new book out called Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. They have taken years of learning and ideas from Stanford's Design school and put it in this awesome new book, and we get to dive in to all of it. Sarah shares why reflections matter so much, and also tells why metacognition is important. We dig into what it's like running one of the most well-known design schools in the world, and how design students are different today than they were in the not-so-distant past. Also, pay special attention to Sarah's ideas on weird and the role of curiosity in creativity and design. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Reflections and Creativity Sarah talks about finally being back in the physical space of Stanford campus. She describes the space that she has a space for reflection, full of writing space to record her thoughts as they come. When asked if reflection is really important in design, Sara shares that it plays a part in it. That it is something that should go hand-in-hand with action. “I think reflection is kind of the underappreciated partner of action. In a lot of cases, when people think about creativity, they think about brainstorming and exuberance, and that that spark of inspiration. But reflection, I think about it as it's like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those two things are, inextricably linked action and reflection. So yeah, I'm a big proponent of those quiet moments, where you're trying to make sense or really think about what might be the implications of your creative work.” = Sarah Stein Greenberg What? So What? Now What? Sarah shares about the difference between thinking and reflection. Thinking might include everything from coming up with new ideas, charting the vision, or even some parts of analysis / research. Reflection focuses more on thinking about your own process or practice, or looking back at your data more critically. Sarah goes on to say that reflection in particular benefits from specific scaffolding and practices, and brings up one of her favorite one: the What? / So What? / Now What?, which a few of her colleagues have originated. “The scaffold is called What? So what? Now What? You can kind of have a scaffolded reflection and think about, what did I just learn in that particular class or that particular project? How do I want to improve my own work? But if you use a scaffold like What, So What, and Now What, you really get into the details. You might write down everything that happened, then you might think about what did all of that mean? Why is that important? Why did that feel like what I wanted to capture? And then Now What is the opportunity to think for each of those. So what for each of those implications? What do I want to do about that? Is that something I want to practice? Is that something I want to improve?” = Sarah Stein Greenberg For Sarah, the quality of reflections changes dramatically if you have a detailed flow on how to approach and assess what you currently have. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Metacognition The conversation then steers into how a lot of people nowadays aren't really thinking, or thinking about thinking. Most content or “new things” in the market are just variations of the same things that we already have, just rebranded or given a new “spin”. Sarah agrees with this sentiment, and also talks about metacognition, which is the technical term for “thinking about thinking”. For her, it's a skill that should be embedded in the heart of our education. “(Metacognition) is one of those kinds of secret skills that I firmly believe should be embedded in the heart of our education. What goes along with that is the idea of learning how you learn, is actually the key to like being able to then con...

In this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk about all things creativity, innovation, and design. Our guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of Stanford's Design School, aka the d.school. She has a new book out called Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. They have taken years of learning and ideas from Stanford's Design school and put it in this awesome new book, and we get to dive in to all of it. Sarah shares why reflections matter so much, and also tells why metacognition is important. We dig into what it's like running one of the most well-known design schools in the world, and how design students are different today than they were in the not-so-distant past. Also, pay special attention to Sarah's ideas on weird and the role of curiosity in creativity and design. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Reflections and Creativity Sarah talks about finally being back in the physical space of Stanford campus. She describes the space that she has a space for reflection, full of writing space to record her thoughts as they come. When asked if reflection is really important in design, Sara shares that it plays a part in it. That it is something that should go hand-in-hand with action. “I think reflection is kind of the underappreciated partner of action. In a lot of cases, when people think about creativity, they think about brainstorming and exuberance, and that that spark of inspiration. But reflection, I think about it as it's like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those two things are, inextricably linked action and reflection. So yeah, I'm a big proponent of those quiet moments, where you're trying to make sense or really think about what might be the implications of your creative work.” = Sarah Stein Greenberg What? So What? Now What? Sarah shares about the difference between thinking and reflection. Thinking might include everything from coming up with new ideas, charting the vision, or even some parts of analysis / research. Reflection focuses more on thinking about your own process or practice, or looking back at your data more critically. Sarah goes on to say that reflection in particular benefits from specific scaffolding and practices, and brings up one of her favorite one: the What? / So What? / Now What?, which a few of her colleagues have originated. “The scaffold is called What? So what? Now What? You can kind of have a scaffolded reflection and think about, what did I just learn in that particular class or that particular project? How do I want to improve my own work? But if you use a scaffold like What, So What, and Now What, you really get into the details. You might write down everything that happened, then you might think about what did all of that mean? Why is that important? Why did that feel like what I wanted to capture? And then Now What is the opportunity to think for each of those. So what for each of those implications? What do I want to do about that? Is that something I want to practice? Is that something I want to improve?” = Sarah Stein Greenberg For Sarah, the quality of reflections changes dramatically if you have a detailed flow on how to approach and assess what you currently have. Sarah Stein Greenberg on Metacognition The conversation then steers into how a lot of people nowadays aren't really thinking, or thinking about thinking. Most content or “new things” in the market are just variations of the same things that we already have, just rebranded or given a new “spin”. Sarah agrees with this sentiment, and also talks about metacognition, which is the technical term for “thinking about thinking”. For her, it's a skill that should be embedded in the heart of our education. “(Metacognition) is one of those kinds of secret skills that I firmly believe should be embedded in the heart of our education. What goes along with that is the idea of learning how you learn, is actually the key to like being able to then con...

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Sarah Stein Greenberg. Sarah is the Executive Director of Stanford's d.School & Author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways.

A paradigm shift describes a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events. Can the simple act of changing your route home or wearing odd socks when your normal practise is that they should always match lead to the paradigm shift we need now on the planet as we deal with climate and environmental change? I would argue that yes it can and its why creativity, in any subject is more important now than ever. By taking you through the steps it took to create pollution absorbing sculptures in London from simple sketches and creations using everyday objects, I hope to show you the power that ‘thinking with hands' has and how it won't simply help the planet and Her inhabitants but also make each of us future proof in a technological Brave new World. Session lead: Jasmine Pradissitto, Artist and Visiting Lecturer, School of Engineering, LSBU.

Reverend Paula Hollingsworth outlines the evolution of faith in Jane Austen’s novels and her personal life. And writer Amy Shearn, is on a quest to better understand why we take on long-term projects and what keeps us going through the process.

Take an Art Break and learn more about ways you can mobilize for advocacy in the arts! Activist, actor and ISC Ensemble member Sabra Williams is in conversation with ISC’s Artistic Associate for Social Justice, Carene Mekertichyan about her social justice work with organizations like the Actor’s Gang and Creative Acts, creating a National Truth Commission, the importance of the arts, and the many layers of dismantling systemic white supremacy. Sabra is a person of action as evidenced by her work in the prison systems using the arts to transform lives. Her current work also includes contributing to the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort spearheaded by The Kellogg Foundation, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Senator Cory Booker to set up a national Truth Commission. You can learn more about Sabra’s social justice work as Co-Founder & Executive Director of Creative Acts: https://www.creativeacts.us/ The Actor's Gang: https://theactorsgang.com/ Learn how you can be an advocate for the arts and social justice at ISC's Justice page: http://www.iscla.org/justice Follow us! Website: www.iscla.org Instagram & Twitter: @indyshakes Facebook: Independent Shakespeare Co.

In this episode:  conversations about the Little Big House build that took place at Uvic in the Fall of 2019, gender neutral rites of passage camps, and music as a political act. 

Are the little things in life - the errands and chores - burning you out? How can we make the everyday stresses of "adulting" a creative act? During this episode, I speak with creativity-focused life coach Helen McLaughlin about ways to bring more self-care and joy into the seemingly never-ending to-do list of being a responsible adult.    In our conversation, we discuss our views on this recent article about the "burnout generation", ways to bring more creativity into a 40 hour work week, and why it's so important create joy out of the monotonous acts of parenting.    To learn more about Helen's work, visit helenmclaughlin.com and sign up for her weekly newsletter: helenmclaughlin.com/theinsiders. Also, she's on Instagram at @wonderinghelen  On the second Friday of every month, Helen hosts a free co-working event called Get It Done Day. They've been going strong since November 2017! Folks need only to register (at that link above) and then show up with a handful of their most dreaded tasks, or those things they've just avoided doing for too long. Together, we get our stuff done...and have some fun in the process.