How to Have Good Ideas

I love trying to solve hard problems. More or less that’s how I’ve spent my career. But my success rate has been frustratingly low. Maybe one out of ten projects succeeds. That’s where my guest today, Sarah Stein Greenberg comes in. She’s the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, commonly known as the d.school. Her job is to teach people like you and me how to solve real-world problems.

STEIN GREENBERG: Part of what we’re trying to teach is that you don’t know what you’re going to find and you have to be responsive. And actually leaving room for serendipity and openness is hugely beneficial in a creative process.

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

To be honest, I don’t really know what they do in design schools. So to start our conversation, I asked her to help me understand what people mean when they use the word design.

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STEIN GREENBERG: The word design can be a noun, it could be like the thing you make, or it could be how you make something. And at the d.school we actually mean both. Let me start with an example. A number of years ago we had four incredible students who were coming from very different disciplinary backgrounds. There were two medical students, a civil engineer, and a policy student. And their names were Edith, Shahed, Jesse, and Katy. They had never met before, but they were put together on a team in one of our classes at the d.school called “Design for Extreme Affordability.” And they were given a challenge, which was to design something useful for a hospital in southern India called the Narayana Health hospital chain. And this hospital was really concerned with providing high quality care at a low cost, but at a large scale. And those three things don’t always fit that well together.   So, the students went into this project thinking, “Oh, you know, we’re going to maybe work on some kind of process redesign, we’re going to help this hospital be more efficient, or work with the clinicians, maybe take some cost out of the process somewhere.” But in the way that we practice design at the d.school, we always start by immersing ourselves and just really trying to understand what are the human needs in this system, what are the stakeholder needs more broadly, trying to really just understand and bring a fresh lens to what may be the underlying issues are, the underlying challenges and opportunities.

LEVITT: You do that by, in this case, flying to India? Or you do that by sitting around a room and talking to each other?

STEIN GREENBERG: I think you know the answer to that in this case. You can’t really think your way out of creative problems. You actually need to go and get some new data and new stimulus. And in this case, we sent some of the students over to India. And, funny story, there was a miscommunication with the hospital about when they were supposed to arrive, so they arrived a couple of days ahead of schedule. And as a result, they had to completely improvise how they used their time. And the hospital was really welcoming. So they said, “You can go anywhere. Just don’t go into the O.R. and get in anybody’s way.” And one of the things that the students did is they just spent time hanging out in the hospitals, hanging out in the waiting rooms. And they started to notice that there were a lot of people who were waiting over long periods of time. And they realized, oh, these are the extended family members of patients in this hospital. Our students noticed that they were exhibiting a high degree of stress and anxiety. And they realized people are really concerned about the health of their loved one; they’re not getting a lot of information about what’s going on; they’re not sure what the prognosis might be or how to be part of the picture when that person is going to be released from the hospital and then return home.

LEVITT: They got there a few days early. If they had gotten there on time, do you think this is how they would have spent their time? Or would they have spent their time talking to the doctors and the hospital executives trying to understand the details of the process?

STEIN GREENBERG: I think they would have prioritized the schedule that they had, and that maybe would have been a little bit more structured. And they might have come back with some ideas that were more about the clinician point of view or the hospital administrator point of view. 

LEVITT: Okay, so they see these families — they’re waiting, they’re stressed. And they come up with a design solution then?

STEIN GREENBERG: Not right away. So they did go do their whole research plan. They talked to families, they talked to clinicians, they talked to everybody. As a result, when they came back to campus at Stanford, they had so many different ideas for what the different needs might be. And that’s a moment in design work where we ask students to really take a step back and think about: what are the signals that you’re getting out of all of this noisy data? And a lot of the data is subjective, right? You’ve had a really compelling interview and you’ve heard a personal story about someone’s healthcare experience and you’re trying to make sense of: how do these things fit together? So they had tons of ideas. But the thing that kept coming back to this particular team was how stressed and anxious those family members were. And so they made a kind of bold decision to focus on: how could we help these waiting family members feel less afraid with a little bit of information that they seem to be missing about what’s going on with their loved one? And that’s a moment that we call a reframe. You thought maybe the problem was over here, it was about efficiency, but actually there’s a pretty compelling opportunity that was kind of waiting in plain sight, but most people hadn’t noticed it yet. So the students came up with the idea of doing some small training videos to think about: well, how could we equip these family members who really are the stakeholder who cares the most about the healthcare outcomes, but aren’t usually treated as a important part of the picture in healthcare — how can we provide a little bit of training that would ensure that they know exactly what to do once their loved one is released from the hospital? So that could mean hand washing. That could mean how to take a pulse. That could mean recognizing signs of distress that means you should go right back to the hospital with your loved one. They made some short videos that were almost Bollywood style. They were dramatic. And I remember that the students felt a little embarrassed about how playful and fun these videos were. But it turned out when they sent those videos back to their partners at the hospital, that was actually part of what was compelling about them — that it allowed people to engage in these little stories and to learn the skills that they needed as a result. So the students went back to India the following summer, and they started piloting this idea of this training for family members. And the day after they started, when they came back in the morning, there was a line around the corner for family members waiting to get in. And Edith recalls — she said, “This was the moment that we realized this isn’t a class project anymore. We have found a need that no one else is addressing. And actually we have a pretty cost effective intervention that we think might help.” And they followed that pilot up with some more rigorous assessment. They partnered with some folks at Stanford Medical School to see, like, is this actually making a difference? And what they learned is that there was a substantial decrease in hospital readmission rates. There was a substantial decrease in the stress and anxiety rate of those families who they had set out to serve. And I’ll just say that the four students all decided to work on this full time after graduating. They have launched this incredible organization called Noora Health. They’ve really equipped this population with the skills to make sure that their family member can return home with somebody who’s really invested in their aftercare and skilled.

LEVITT: There are a lot of cases where academic economists have done research studies, found really big impacts, but the incentives within academic economics are to publish a paper and to move on to the next thing. Almost never do these good ideas turn into functioning organizations that bring things to real people, which has been one of my big disappointments about being an academic.

STEIN GREENBERG: Yeah, I think we’re in a very fortunate position in that when we are working with students who are early in their design journey, they are looking for meaningful work to do with their lives. In this case, those four students had the flexibility to turn down other jobs and take a risk in launching this new venture. It’s a very interesting conundrum that you’re describing in that the primary incentives in the formal academic system around research in particular encourage you to assess and analyze and come up with some ideas, but then not to make them real in the world. I have a lot of faculty colleagues who are interested in figuring out how to close that gap. And I think design can be a important part of that.

LEVITT: I think a lot of people, when we started talking about design, would have expected your first example to be about a really comfortable, functional chair that increased the productivity or reduced the back strain of people. Does design no longer relate to that or it’s just a really expansive field?

STEIN GREENBERG: It’s expansive and continuing to expand. Do you remember what it was like when you were a kid to open a can, like to use a can opener?

LEVITT: Yeah.

STEIN GREENBERG: So those can openers were little skinny metal fidgety, finicky devices. And the guy who founded OXO Good Grips, the company that makes all of those kitchen implements — his inspiration was that his wife was having really difficult arthritis and she just couldn’t use those old tools. And so he came up with all of these new amazing designs that were about extra padding and ergonomics and really actually changed that whole category of kitchenware. So, one, inspiration can come from anywhere. Two, design absolutely can and is still being used to design more functional or more beautiful or more elegant things all around us. But something interesting happened that I think was related to the moment at which many companies started building websites. As the digital age started, all of a sudden, many different units across organizations were in much better touch with their customers and the people who were using their services. And design became something that a lot of folks started looking to because it offers you a way to figure out, okay, what are the human needs? What are the underlying needs that are actually below the surface? And to figure out how to design for them. And it also offers a way that people who don’t automatically have a common disciplinary language can figure out how to talk to each other.

LEVITT: I love those two successful examples you just presented, but my own experience is that there’s often a lot more to be learned from failures than successes. Do any examples come to mind of striking design failures?

STEIN GREENBERG: Failure is such an important part of design and actually any kind of creative work. You are going to have a lot of bad ideas before you have good ideas. You are going to make a lot of prototypes that don’t resonate with people that you’re testing with them before you get to the ones that are really starting to work. Often we think that first solution that comes to mind, we get really excited about it. We get invested in it. We want to make that work. Often that is not the best idea out there. So we figure out systematically, how do you get better at responding to moments of failure in your work? So one example was, we had a design fellow a number of years ago named Jill Vialet who was an incredible educator. She had founded an organization called Playworks, which provides trained coaches who support schools by basically programming recess. So all kinds of structured, fun play for the kids that actually teaches leadership and conflict resolution skills and all kinds of good stuff. So Jill was working on a new project. She was inspired to think about: how do we improve the system around substitute teaching in schools? Because actually in a lot of schools, subs can be the person in the front of the room for almost 10 percent of a student’s academic career.

LEVITT: Wow.

STEIN GREENBERG: It’s a pretty significant amount of instructional time. And while she was running Playworks, she kept having this question posed to her by principals, which was like, “Oh, can I borrow your amazing recess coach to come and be a sub because somebody called in sick or we didn’t get one.” So Jill and her colleague, Amanda von Moos, started out by trying to figure out, “Well, clearly there’s not enough substitute teachers in the system. We need to figure out how to bring more in.” And they tried a whole bunch of prototypes, like they did a little social media sizzle reel about the local school and they put up flyers and they did a bunch of things to try to attract new subs. And every single one of those prototypes flopped. They had zero uptake. And what they realized from that experience was actually that they had not really framed the right part of the system to be working on. And that there were examples in the set of schools that they were working with where there were enough subs, but they were having a really bad experience the first time they would come to that school and then they would never return. And so they shifted their focus to thinking much more about: What is the experience of someone who’s subbing for the first time at a school when they arrive and they don’t know where to park their car? Or they arrive and everybody in the office is too busy to direct them to the classroom? Or they don’t get the right lesson plans from the regular classroom teacher? And by thinking about that end-to-end experience for the subs, they started to recognize, okay, actually we want to work on retention. And they would not have gotten there without those early failures and trying some of those more obvious ideas. 

LEVITT: So I’ve had so many design failures, personally. Let me talk about one of them, which was interesting because we failed in various different ways. It was actually a project indirectly with IDEO. I was working with another academic and IDEO wanted to do an engineering design challenge for India. And they asked my colleague and former student whether he could come up with a couple really good problems that they could put out in the world for crowdsourcing good design solutions. I actually jumped at the opportunity and I even went so far as to bring my two teenage daughters with me to India as we went around and tried to meet the parties and see what kind of needs were there. And it was an amazing experience. And one thing that we stumbled on through serendipity was, as we drove past a construction site, I just asked our host a little bit about that. And he brought up a sad reality, which is that, in many ways, the people in India who work in the construction industry are the worst off because they’re itinerant. So they go from place to place. Their families live with them on site in the most ramshackle kind of accommodations and they don’t have the same kind of community and network that the people living in even the slums in Mumbai had. It became clear to us that some kind of a housing solution, some kind of a Lego house or something, that could allow these folks to live better, would be a great problem for design people to work on. So we brought this to the foundation that was sponsoring the project, and they said, “Oh, that’s not a good problem.” And we said, “Why not?” They said, “Well, because many of our biggest funders come from the construction industry. We don’t want to antagonize anyone in the construction industry.” That was incredibly shocking, but also extremely telling about making change in the real world — there are so many obstacles to actually changing things, and it’s often something you’d never imagine is the thing that brings you down.

STEIN GREENBERG: That is a really sad story. And I lived in New Delhi for two years and observed that same situation that you’re describing. It sounds like that was really a failure on the part of the foundation to have the bravery to disrupt the current ecosystem around funding. And I think that’s probably not the only time that’s happened. There’s a challenge in some cases with: how do you fund work that is going to disrupt the status quo? I do think design as a practice is an incredibly powerful tool for disrupting the status quo. And if the stakeholders in the situation are not aligned with that, you either have to figure out how to create that alignment, or you need to figure out how to fund the work separately. I hope that project happens at some point because those folks who are working in the construction industry deserve to have livable conditions that they’re working under. Can I also just say, we’ve talked about a couple of examples that involve Westerners or folks from the U.S. traveling to a different country and working in partnership with some folks locally. There are some real pitfalls in that. And there’s a frame for this, which is called “drop-in development,” where you parachute in with your training and your academic lens or your design lens. And increasingly there’s a movement within the field of design to really think about: how do you do real co-design? How do you truly collaborate with the communities and the stakeholders who are going to be most affected? I think that model of co-design is a really important development in how we think about, when you’re designing across power differentials — which is the situation that you exactly experienced. People really needed the thing that you had identified, but the powerful people in that situation, the funder, were not interested in creating room for that to happen. That’s one example of what can happen when the power dynamics in a situation like that are not addressed.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Sarah Stein Greenberg after this short break.

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LEVITT: I think of academic disciplines as being toolkits for making sense of the world. So, I know economics best, and I describe the economics worldview as essentially applied common sense, but added to that the requirement that the ideas have to be able to be expressed mathematically, which requires that everything is very simple. And so, we’re really allowed in economics, without being punished by our peers, to throw out a lot of nuance and context and human traits like emotions in order to be able to solve the equations. I think as I’ve become older, I’ve become more and more sensitized to the limitations that come with all the omissions in economics. I wonder if you carry around a mental model of what the design worldview is. What aspects of the world are actively incorporated into design thinking? And then what aspects of the world are left behind or ignored because you can’t take on everything at once?

STEIN GREENBERG: Part of my particular affinity for the kind of ecosystem that we have at Stanford around design is this interdisciplinary collaboration that happens in our classes. And that’s because I recognize those limitations that you’re describing, and they’re embedded in everyone’s field and discipline. This is actually why more designers and economists should work together — is we love that nuance. We love that messiness. In particular, in that phase when you’re trying to think about: What is that strong signal in all my very messy data? You’re not dismissing or simplifying the messiness, but you are trying to figure out: How do I take this very complex world and yet figure out how to move forward? And so one of the practical ways that we do that is called parallel prototyping. Instead of just pursuing one idea to move forward, you pursue multiple ideas. And at some point you’re going to converge. You’re going to figure out, okay, this is the thing that I want to actually build out or develop further into the solution. But having that disposition to see that wider range of opportunities, I think really helps you not just at that initial phase when you’re just trying to get that first thing out the door, but actually as you’re going to continue to build out and refine and develop the solution over time.

LEVITT: Is a blind spot of design that you necessarily tackle a relatively small problem because you’re so embedded in the complexity that you can’t take on an enormous system? Would you call that a weakness of design?

STEIN GREENBERG: That is an area that is really developing in design. So coming from the place of specializing in more concrete or tangible outputs, that does predispose you to work on very particular concrete solutions. But actually, one of the core abilities that we are working to strengthen in our curriculum is thinking about: how do you bridge between the very, very concrete and the very abstract? And so incorporating many more of the tools from systems thinking in order to be able to tackle challenges that operate on a systems level is an increasing part of what I see unfolding in design. So we had a couple of students named Adam Selzer and Lena Selzer and Michael Brennan. And they together formed an organization called Civilla. And Civilla is a social impact design studio and they’re based in Detroit. And they got really interested in working with the state of Michigan on redesigning the process for applying for public benefits. The state of Michigan had, I think, the country’s longest form that you had to fill out to apply for public benefits. And it created an enormous administrative burden on the operational side as well for the state. What the team was able to do is they mapped the entire process that someone has to go through of applying for public benefits. And they also mapped the whole process on the back end of all the different administrative tasks. And they put that into what they called a hundred-foot journey map. And they literally rolled it out over the entire floor of their studio. And they walked all of these state officials through that process. And because they were so effective at building alignment around the need for change and the possibility for change of just the application, that’s how they were able to start to really gain the partnership and the trust of the state to start to work on many different parts of that broader system.

LEVITT: When I was doing a Ph.D. in economics, I spent a lot of time back then reading books on creativity and design. And I was struck by the fact that there was a certain attitude that was pervasive in the creativity space. It was an optimistic, extroverted, childlike enthusiasm. And that was 30 years ago. And it’s the exact same attitude that pervades the d.school’s webpage and your book, Creative Acts for Curious People. It feels so categorically different from any other academic discipline that I know. I mean, academics tend to be humorless and hypercritical. Are you aware, as you live in this design world, just how different you are from other people?

STEIN GREENBERG: I think we are very aware. Now, I would definitely never describe my faculty colleagues in other departments as humorless. But that is also probably some selection bias because I get to hang out with faculty from the school of sustainability or the business school or the law school who share that optimism or at least curiosity about what is possible. There is a really deep belief that you can make things better. You can make things different.

LEVITT: The d.school website lists eight core abilities that a skilled designer should possess. So let me just name a few of them and I’d love to have you explain how you teach those skills to budding designers.

STEIN GREENBERG: Yeah, that sounds great.

LEVITT: Okay. So the first one is navigating ambiguity.

STEIN GREENBERG: This is my favorite. Ambiguity is a part of operating in the real world, but it’s actually not usually a part of what you learn about in school. If you are working on a problem set in engineering, in econ, in math, you know that someone out there knows the answer.

LEVITT: Oh, I know, I hate that.

STEIN GREENBERG: What do you hate about that?

LEVITT: I hate it because it is so different than problems you face in the real world. The other thing I hate about typical problem sets is that you provide the students with exactly the set of information they need to solve the problem, not too little and not too much. But in the real world, so much of the skill that’s required is to try to figure out what information is relevant and what information is irrelevant. And another incredibly important skill in the real world is, when you ask a question, knowing whether it has an answer.

STEIN GREENBERG: Yeah. I just think we do our students a disservice when we don’t give them opportunities to grapple with the real ambiguity that they’re going to face. And so our stance at the d.school is to build in increasingly ambiguous challenges into their classes. We do this in two main ways, I would say. So one way is that we might start students out on a very short project that is more self contained, but as students progress and do longer and more complicated projects, we are partnering them with organizations who have much more complicated challenges. We are asking them to interview lots of different stakeholders. We’re asking them to understand perhaps the policy context or the funding context. So part of it is leaving enough room in the projects that we’re asking students to tackle so that they actually encounter at least a facsimile of the level of ambiguity you’re going to deal with in the real world. And then the second way that we help students deal with the challenge of ambiguity is through a set of reflection tools. So I have one I particularly like, which is asking students to reflect retrospectively on a project that they have done. And you often see that there are moments where they report that they learned a lot and it felt difficult or it felt bad. It’s like, “Oh, I recognize now that’s when I was stretching the most and learning the most.” And it’s often happening when there’s the most ambiguity that you’re dealing with. But it was hard. And building your sense of the value of ambiguity is a part of how we’re supporting students to get better and better at working with ambiguity and not being scared of it and not rushing to closure and trying to figure out the easiest solution quickly.

LEVITT: In 30 years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever asked my students to reflect on the process at all. That’s probably a really sad omission on my part, now that you mentioned something so completely obvious.

STEIN GREENBERG: There’s a really wonderful body of research into how valuable reflection can be for learning. It helps you consolidate what you learned. It helps you think about how you could apply it to different scenarios. It just equips you as the student or the learner with a lot of self-knowledge.

LEVITT: Closely related, another of the eight core abilities is the ability to learn from other people and other contexts. Can you explain that?

STEIN GREENBERG: We often react to challenges by trying to think our way out of them, but it’s unlikely to be a solution that is really equipped to either deal with the complexity of the environment or to serve the needs of other people. So we start out from the premise that you are not doing what we call “me finding.” You need to do some “need finding.” And you really want to put your own biases and your own ideas aside, at least at the start, and orient towards learning about other people’s life experience and the broader situation that they’re in.

LEVITT: Brainstorming sessions have historically been the bread and butter for idea generation, at least in corporate environments. But I’ve been really underwhelmed by the output of brainstorming sessions that I’ve been part of. Often, no really good ideas emerge. And sometimes a person will come with a great idea that they already have and they’ll put that out on the table, but very rarely do I see great ideas come together as a result of a brainstorm. As we’ve been talking today, I don’t think you’ve used the word brainstorm, and so much of what you’ve been talking about is people out in the field, learning from other people, not sitting around a room. I’m curious, what’s the current view on brainstorming? And would you say that the repeated failures that I’ve observed in brainstorming sessions  — is that part of the nature of brainstorming? Or do you think we’re just not doing brainstorming right or not having the right people in the room?

STEIN GREENBERG: You are not alone in that experience of having been a part of underwhelming brainstorms. That tool is just one tool in the broader category of what we would call ideation. I’m not actually sure why that particular tool got so popular, as opposed to a broader set. You exactly described what so many people complain about, is that a brainstorm is called when somebody really has an idea that they want to advance and they kind of want to leverage the agreement of the group to make that happen. When we teach brainstorming, it’s a very structured experience in which you do bring lots of that insight that you’ve gathered out in the field in as your starting point. Before you get into a brainstorm, we often do a step that’s about framing different prompts that will help make that brainstorm much more effective. We often call those “how might we” statements. And you want to be really playful. You want to have “how might we” statements that are about improving things. You might want to have a “how might we” statement that’s about making it worse. The other thing about a really good brainstorm is that you need the group to buy into a certain set of conventions. And one of those conventions is you’re deferring judgment. Another convention is you are going for volume. People really underestimate the number of ideas that you need to come up with to get to a good idea. And then the third part is that the brainstorm is not the beginning and end of the design process. From the brainstorm, you might have the seeds of some interesting ideas, and you need someone to actually take those further and build those out, and then you have to go and test them. So you’re constantly in a state of — you’re creating something, and then you’re getting more input and insight about it from real stakeholders or from people who can give you feedback, and then you’re going back and you’re making that idea better, and then you’re going out again. And it’s really that toggling between the interior work and the external work that makes design work successful.

LEVITT: As I reflect more on brainstorms, in particular the ones that I’ve done as part of this little center that I run at the University of Chicago, which is called the RISC Center, is that our brainstorms tend to bring together people who are really accomplished and knowledgeable on some topic, but they’re not experts in the subject of the brainstorm. And what we have really struggled with is providing those experts with enough of the institutional detail for them to be able to actually come up with breakthrough ideas. As I thought about talking to you, I’ve reflected on the most powerful ideas we’ve had at my center over the last five years. And I would say almost every single one of them comes from a very different source, which is we have a single individual who is deeply embedded into the institutional details of a system and then just through serendipity notes something about that system that’s really crazy and broken, which we can begin to tackle. It’s interesting that we haven’t found a way to move to collective idea generation away from individual idea generation.

STEIN GREENBERG: I think it’s really hard when people don’t have a shared data set. I see this in our student teams sometimes where they’re having trouble agreeing on which ideas to pursue. And almost always I can diagnose that the reason is that they went off and did their interviewing or their observations separately, and they have not taken the time to build a shared understanding of each other’s data set and perspective on the problem. And if you don’t do that, then you’re already moving in separate directions. Your brain is already starting to get into generating solutions based off of your own perspective on what the challenges are and the opportunities are. And so in those cases, I try to get our students to back up, really sit in the storytelling and the examples that they heard and the interviews that they did, and try to then form the unit that they can to go into more idea generation together. But I also hear you describing the situation in which a really careful observation is what identifies the opportunity space or the problem space. Often we go into a generative mode before we’re really clear about what is the problem that we’re trying to solve. And spending time in that framing, in that synthesis, in that process of connecting the dots, and then naming the challenge that you’re going to solve, is really what’s important before you start to go into an idea-generation mode.

LEVITT: We’ve learned that lesson five or six or ten times. We don’t always keep it front of mind as we should.

STEIN GREENBERG: The parts of design work that are more visibly creative, that kind of fit what people might expect creativity to look like or feel like, are the kind of, like, group brainstorm, “Let’s get active. Let’s have fun. Let’s be positive and optimistic.” And the parts of design work that are more invisible and behind the scenes are sitting in the data and synthesizing and imagining what could be possible if you started to try to solve a particular part of the problem. And so maybe that’s where there’s a gap in terms of what you might expect to come out of a brainstorm and what actually can come out.

LEVITT: It’s especially interesting for me to be talking to you right now because I’m in the middle of a big design project, trying to create and launch a radical new high school in partnership with Arizona State University. One of the things we’re most focused on is school culture. And the school culture that we’re trying to create feels an awful lot like what you’ve helped to build at the d.school — one that’s fun, and cooperative, and creative, and problem focused.” Do you have any tips for me on how you create something like that?

STEIN GREENBERG: Tell me what you mean when you say radical. What is going to be radically different?

LEVITT: When I say radical, I mean we really are turning upside down almost every accepted piece of how we do high school right now. There’ll be relatively limited synchronous learning, essentially no cases where there’s a teacher up in front of 30 students lecturing. The students will have a lot more autonomy in deciding what they study and when they study. We’re moving towards a mastery model and away from a traditional grading model. Most of what we do in high school today is — we do it because we did the same thing 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. And so, what would high school look like if you started over? That’s really the premise we’re coming from.

STEIN GREENBERG: First of all, that sounds incredibly exciting, and I hope you come out and visit us at some point and get perhaps a little inspiration. 

LEVITT: Yes, definitely!

STEIN GREENBERG: But I have a couple of pieces of specific advice. So, one is: start small and prototype. Actually build small experiments that allow you to test — whether it’s about culture or about curriculum or about the schedule of the day or about the ways in which you want your students to have more agency or autonomy — figure out a way to build small prototypes of those experiences and test them out and learn from them. The second piece that I’ll share actually comes from a learning that I had when we tackled a project around reimagining the future of the Stanford undergraduate education. What I learned through that process was that people in education — we are very attached to our own educational history and our own sense of what works is deeply tied to that. It’s actually the hardest space I’ve ever worked in — to help people who are doing the design work have distance from their own personal histories. I would strongly encourage you to figure out: how can you design some learning experiences for the faculty and also for the parents of the students who are going to be in the school to actually experience — not just to know about or to think about, but to experience — the shifts and the radical new ideas that you’re going to try? Because there will be a level of skepticism because people will get concerned about their kids’ future success on the SATs or getting into college or whatever the goals are from deviating from the norm. 

LEVITT: I love those ideas and I will take them to heart. My own experience watching my kids go through high school and teaching college kids at the University of Chicago is that the extreme emphasis on letter grades poses a real obstacle to having a fun, collaborative, problem-focused culture. Grades are just so important to kids that the pursuit of the good grade crowds out everything else. How do you work around that in the d.school?

STEIN GREENBERG: We do have that problem, and I would say it’s gotten more pronounced over the years. So first of all, grades are just not the only way that people are getting feedback, although I do know they operate in the back of our students’ minds pretty constantly. But one of the main ways that we will evaluate student work is in a design review format. So you’re presenting your work, you’re getting feedback from experts in the space or people in industry or professional designers. And that creates at least a little bit of a broader canvas for how students want to show up and how they know that they’re being evaluated. There’s an opportunity there in any one of those design reviews for someone to make a real connection with someone who could be important in their future career or could provide meaningful input on the project. The other thing that is really the only thing that I have found to be successful is really direct coaching around that and explicit permission giving about striving, for example, for working on the harder problem, knowing you will be forgiven if you don’t fully get to the solution. So a very concrete example of that happened to me early in my teaching career. I was working with the team of students that ultimately designed the infant warmer that they launched under the company name Embrace. This was a team of students who were very smart and capable and grade oriented. And they had identified an opportunity to work on this problem that was about keeping infants in rural areas warm if they couldn’t reach a hospital to be in an incubator. And they were really worried that that challenge was too hard. They didn’t have an idea for the solution yet. And just as the teaching fellow in that class, I was able to say, “Look, this problem, no one else is working on this. You have an opportunity here. You could do great work. And frankly, we’re going to be more excited as a teaching team if we see you reach. And even if you fall a little bit short, this is really what we want you to learn.” And they took that opportunity and they did a much more ambitious project as a result and came up with something that was much more novel and genuinely useful in the world. 

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with Sarah Stein Greenberg. After this short break, they’ll return to talk about Sarah’s underwater photography.

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In addition to her work at the Stanford d.school, Sarah is a board member for a nonprofit called Rare, which has one of the most concise mission statements that I’ve ever seen. That mission statement is: Rare inspires change so people and nature thrive. I asked her to explain how Rare carries out that mission.

STEIN GREENBERG: The reality is there are so many environments in which human beings and nature need to work together to either protect or steward key resources that are important both from an ecological perspective and from a human perspective. So for example, Rare’s biggest program is around coastal fisheries. There are small-scale fisheries all over the world in countries like the Philippines or Indonesia or Mozambique or Honduras. Many people who live in small coastal villages, almost their entire protein intake is from fishing. And what that means as populations grow, and as environmental pressures like climate change or acidification accelerate, the fish stocks in many parts of the world are declining, and that leads to more overfishing, and that leads to faster fisheries collapse. And what Rare does is work closely with those communities to figure out how to build an ethos of stewardship and of collaboration, and what will result is the designation of a small section of the fishery that’s called a no-take zone that allows the fishery to rebound a little bit. And then a broader section that’s called the managed access zone, where only people in that village who have become registered fishers are able to fish there. The community sets up new norms and governance around that. Then there’s a number of additional aspects where people need other livelihoods. They need some financial resilience tools. Those solutions come together to help that community build a more sustainable relationship with their local fishery. So that’s a really interesting combination of behavioral science, design, ecological science, and that is what Rare specializes in — in figuring out: how do you motivate people and give them the tools to make really good stewardship decisions over their local resources?

LEVITT: That sounds great. And maybe I’m just jaded from too many failures and doing things poorly, but I have found behavior change to be an extremely difficult nut to crack. And even — I had two of the legends who shaped behavioral economics, Danny Kahneman and Richard Thaler — I had them on this podcast, and I was surprised that they both admitted that they thought that the power of behavior change had really gotten exaggerated in the popular science press. Does Rare have a particular method for doing this that is effective? Or they just are willing to grind away with the kind of patience that most interventionists don’t have?

STEIN GREENBERG: Rare is working on multiple levels of these systems, so it works at the community level to establish these scientifically based managed-access and no-take zones. It works to figure out the new behavior norms. It’s also working at the local and regional governance level to create policy commitments. And it’s working at the level of financial systems to create really innovative financing mechanisms to help these regional governments actually invest in the kinds of support that these communities need to make sure that the behavior change can be sustained. When you isolate the kind of nudge methods, what we would call in design “point solutions,” and you stop there, you might get some small shift in behavior, but you haven’t really tackled the full system. And I do think that’s what makes Rare really special is trying to work on all of those levers.

LEVITT: One of your hobbies is wildlife photography. And when my producer told me that I should take a look at your pictures, I was totally dismissive. I mean, everybody thinks they’re a photographer. But oh my God, your pictures are truly amazing. Your underwater pictures are so incredibly bright and crisp. How much time do you spend diving per picture if you had to do some kind of accounting for how hard it is to get a great picture?

STEIN GREENBERG: This is such a great example of where it’s so helpful to have been working in design because I am predisposed to know how many of my pictures are going to be terrible failures and to spend the amount of time that I need to take good photos. I remember talking to an old dive buddy of mine who was really patiently waiting at basically the den of a particular shrimp and fish that live symbiotically together. This is a very cool symbiosis where the shrimp doesn’t have very good eyesight and its job is to keep the den clean. It’s like a little hole in the ground, so it’s constantly taking rocks out and putting them outside. And the job of the fish is to be the lookout. And they actually stay in contact through a fin or an antenna of the fish. It’s really cool. But the shrimp is very shy. So if you approach it, the fish will warn the shrimp to go back down into the hole. If you’re very patient, you wait, and it will come back out, and you can take a picture of the two of them together. So my dive buddy was waiting for like 10 or 15 minutes one time on a dive, and I was circling anxiously around. So I have learned over the years to slow down, and to spend five minutes or even 10 minutes if I’m trying to figure out exactly how do I want to light the scene, if I want to wait for a particular behavior that’s going to happen. You know, there’s a very important principle, which is: you never interfere with the wildlife. And they’re wild. So if you need to wait for the fish to turn around and look at you, you got to wait.

LEVITT: Why do you take the pictures?

STEIN GREENBERG: I’m so inspired by the extraordinary color and detail that’s down there. I want to share that. That’s a part of it. I also think there’s just something about being able to create these images and then to see people’s reaction that is just incredibly rewarding. And then there’s a third thing, which is that the focus and the patience and the attention that I have when I’m photographing, it feels very meditative. It just feels really special to be engaged in that process. And you produce something beautiful, if you’re lucky.

LEVITT: If money were no object, would you quit the d.school and be a full-time wildlife photographer?

STEIN GREENBERG: I think maybe 50-50. It’d be hard to leave the d.school, but I have a real sense that for me to continue to improve the photography, and I’m so flattered by your compliments, but I can see all the ways in which I want to get better and I want to improve, I need to spend more time doing it.

We talked a lot today about the skills that the Stanford d.school tries to foster, but not so much about the actual exercises they do with their students to build those skills. If you’re interested in boosting your own creativity and problem solving skills, I would strongly recommend checking out Sarah Stein Greenberg’s book, Creative Acts for Curious People. It walks you through dozens of time tested exercises that they used with the students at the d.school.

​​LEVITT: Now it’s the point in the show where I welcome my producer Morgan on, and usually we take a listener question, but today we will instead do a year in review. Hey, Morgan.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. How are you?

LEVITT: I’m doing great. How about you?

LEVEY: I’m good.  

LEVITT: So, tell me, what were your favorite episodes this year?

LEVEY: So I have a few. One was Richard Reeves. He’s in charge of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Another one was Richard Prum, he’s an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist. And I also really loved the Suleika Jaouad episode. Richard Reeves — the conversation was very data heavy and I love when a guest can bring a lot of data to the conversation and then you and the guest can really reflect on it in real time. Richard Prum just has a lot of wild theories and is taking evolutionary biology in a really interesting direction. And then I really liked the Suleika Jaouad episode just because you two had a great connection and she’s a joy to listen to.

LEVITT: So I love the Suleika episode and the Richard Reeves episode as well. And another favorite of mine was the Eagleman episode. But my very, very favorite of the year, and I’m surprised you didn’t mention that one, was the Duhigg episode on super communicators. I went into that one with very low expectations, but he was such a super communicator that he completely won me over. And I ended up really loving that episode.

LEVEY: It’s nice when instead of a conversation about an academic study or a book that the guest has written, you kind of use the lessons from the academic study or the book in your conversation. And I feel like that’s what happened. You both talked about your pitfalls as conversationalists and how you got better and how you improve something like that. The insights were great. Do our favorite episodes overlap with the most downloaded episodes?

LEVITT: Well, the Duhigg episode actually was our single most downloaded episode. It’s your own theory. You were the first one to point out that anything self-help related crushes everything else. And so our three highest downloaded episodes were Duhigg, Ellen Langer, and Richard Reeves, which is kind of a self help episode. Not exactly, but it’s about how boys and men are doing badly and how to make them do better. On the other hand, some of our least downloaded episodes were some of our favorites. Suleika did not have a lot of downloads and neither did Richard Prum.  

LEVEY: The thing I liked about Richard Prum also is that we published it just before Richard Dawkins. And Richard Dawkins is also an evolutionary biologist, but Prum and Dawkins take very different views on the same topics. I liked having these two very different scientists right next to each other in our feed. What was the hardest guest to prepare for this year? And actually, can I take a guess?

LEVITT: Sure.

LEVEY: I think it was Richard Dawkins. And that’s just because, when you have a scientist who has such a body of work like Dawkins, it’s hard to know where to start.

LEVITT: Oh, God. Well, he’s so famous, too, and he’s kind of persnickety. And he’s controversial. I, honestly, had not read a single one of his books prior to the episode, and so I had a lot of catching up to do. So that was a huge amount of preparation, although the actual interview was really, really easy. I’d say there were two interviews that were hardest for me this year. The first one was Schwarzenegger because he really was on his script and I couldn’t shake him, and so I felt a lot of frustration during the interview. Although I think he’s such an interesting character that it turned out well anyway. And then the other one was Ingrid Newkirk. She’s the founder of PETA. Just because it was such a different kind of guest, and so different from the things that I know about, and it took a lot of creativity on my part to come up with some angles that could get us to have what eventually turned out to be really, I thought, an excellent conversation.

LEVEY: I agree. And I would say that was the most surprising interview for me because I made a lot of assumptions about her based on PETA’s reputation. I thought she was going to be radical and very dismissive of any view that wasn’t hers. I don’t know if I would ever use the word sensible to describe PETA, but Ingrid Newkirk’s view of the world seemed very sensible to me. 

LEVITT: Yeah. I think we had a lot more in common than maybe either one of us would have expected going into that conversation.

LEVEY: Do you have any regrets from the past year, Steve?

LEVITT: I was surprised when I looked back over the guests that I had only interviewed three economists the entire year: Daron Acemoglu, Joe Stiglitz and David Autor. I love interviewing economists and I think I should be doing more of that.

LEVEY: If you’re only going to interview three economists, though, that’s a pretty good group. Two of the three are Nobel Prize winners, and dare I say that David Autor could win the Nobel Prize one day?

LEVITT: I think he’s quite likely to win it. And if you remember, Daron didn’t actually have a Nobel Prize when we interviewed him. He won it after we talked to him.  

LEVEY: I think coming on PIMA is a good precursor to winning the Nobel Prize. Claudia Goldin, Carolyn Bertozzi, and Daron Acemoglu all came on the show before they won the Nobel Prize.

LEVITT: It’s the opposite of the Madden Jinx in football.

LEVEY: The what?

LEVITT: If you’re on the cover of the EA Sports Madden NFL football video game, then the next year you’re likely to have a bad year or be injured. Morgan, you’re not keeping up with video games? What’s going on?

LEVEY: I’m not. Everybody, thank you for listening to People I (Mostly) Admire this past year. If you have a question or a comment for us, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. It’s an acronym for the title of our show. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

Next week, we’ve got an encore presentation that combines the highlights of my two conversations with mathematician Sara Hart. And in two weeks, I’ll be talking with my old friend Jonathan Levin. He’s a pathbreaking economist who’s now the president of Stanford University.

LEVIN:  Sometimes in a leadership role of an organization you can be a little bit like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You have very small hands in terms of getting things done, but when you sort of turn in one direction, your tail can wipe out the time of a lot of people.

As always, thanks for listening and we’ll see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey with help from Lyric Bowditch, and mixed by Jason Gambrell.  We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima@freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

STEIN GREENBERG:  An insight from a clinician.  An insight from a clinician.