Full transcript:
Chris: Wow the last episode, Deke Sharon. Take a listen to Deke and the world he absolutely transformed which is acapella. He did an amazing job just breaking down singing and voice and talent. His blend of education and perseverance has taken him to such an interesting place. We had a great time talking to Deke. My last experience on a flight I hopped on my United flight and there was Deke Sharon on the in-flight entertainment doing what he does best. Hats off to Deke and the people he's had a chance to work with. Today, we have Ela Ben Ur. Ela is very interesting. She's got a design thinking background using research synthesis and inspiration to help industries and individuals really catalyze themselves. So today she brings us 15 years of experience into a tool she calls The Compass. It's a very practical and actionable tool that she's built. It's really helping people move forward and just blast obstacles out of the way. Take a listen to this episode. Tracy and I really enjoyed talking to Ela Ben Ur and without further ado, here we go.
Ela: I'm Ela Ben Ur. I live in Boston, Massachusetts with my two wonderful daughters and my husband. My background is I grew up in the midwest of the US and had been here in Boston for quite a while. Most of that time, 13 years of that time I was with IDEO, a company that folks have been hearing a lot about mostly here in the Boston office, also some in Shanghai, and have been away from IDEO for three years now and on my own.
Tracy: What role did you have and what did you do when you worked at IDEO?
Ela: Well, it evolved a lot over the course of 13 years and that's the kind of nature in a place like that. My studies were at MIT. I learned Mechanical Engineering and Design there and I had gotten excited about I do an intern there between undergrad and grad school and then came back to IDEO after as a Designer, as a Mechanical Designer, and then kind of started pretty early on doing more of the now called Design Research, understanding more about people at the front end of the design process and what they need and who they are and how to help and then kind of grew into kind of the space in between, which is Design Strategy, really kind of taking a point of view on what products and product portfolios need to be. And then having kind of span the whole realm from the very beginning of the process to the very end of making things pretty early on also got asked to lead projects. So kind of thinking about how to enable a group of very different designers to really shine and do great work.
Tracy: Any specific projects that you worked on that stand out to you as your favorite?
Ela: Oh, yeah, quite a range. And you never know, it will surprise and delight you. From doing international food projects, which are, of course lovely, because you do fieldwork around the world, and you eat a lot of delicious food but you also learn a lot about people, to their culture, and their culture of food and their points of view on it. Maybe the flip side of that is doing kind of also a worldwide project about diabetes and the experience of diabetes around the world. And maybe the last one, totally unexpected, but really great was on dentures.
Tracy: What was that one about?
Ela: It was about how much folks know about the denture experience, but it's actually a lot of people who have the interest, many of the services for doing that, or, you know, kind of sort of not a high sense of service. And also the product isn't great. And if it's not great, it turns out, you can't smile, you can't really eat well, you know, physically and socially, your life kind of sucks. And so it's actually they're really, really important. And there's a lot of potentials to make the sort of denture process better, both technically to make better dentures. And also, as an experience, that is worthy of the importance of it in people's lives.
Tracy: That's amazing. I've never thought that deeply about dentures.
Chris: Why was that a favorite project? I can speculate, but I'd love to hear it from you.
Ela: I think because, for the people who were involved in the project, they're actually it's kind of a longitudinal kind of thing, where we work with the same sort of older people who were kind of part of this project and experiencing, like, new ways of having dentures, that could be a whole lot better. It was so powerfully meaningful to them, that that was really inspirational for me. And frankly, that's a little geeky, but you know, I came from an engineering background. And there's like, an interesting kind of the technical side to it, too. So it really was passionate people work and really interesting technical work all blended together.
Chris: Would you mind while we're on this subject, a lot of our listeners are new to design thinking and to their credit, you know, just starting to get their arms around design thinking we haven't talked about it that much. So why are we talking about dentures? Would you mind describing briefly the process that you went through to get to denture breakthroughs?
Ela: That is a little different than a typical one. But generally speaking, we were working with a client that was sort of already experimenting and learning about new approaches. But actually, we spent the most time with people who were getting service at a real sort of high-end denture maker who makes custom, wonderful dentures and observing that both technically, just from an experience standpoint, what made that different from the average experience, what they were experiencing and what he was doing differently both in service and how that affected them and kind of trying to zoom out and if all these things that this expert is doing, what are the most important things so technically, and experientially, like framing, like, what are the most important things about this? And then trying to imagine, okay, so what could that be in a more scalable format?
Tracy: I was just gonna jump in. I wondered, you mentioned that you went to sort of a high-end denture manufacturer. And I think that's an important point because a lot of people would say, oh, well, if you want to redesign the denture experience, you should go to your target market, the middle of the road, everybody who's the average? And so can you talk a little bit about why it was important just to talk to somebody outside of that sphere?
Ela: Yeah, I mean, a lot of design is really about inspiration and, and learning from sort of the extremes. And a lot of these folks kind of had already experienced, let us say, the other extreme of denture making. And so kind of going to this kind of high-end extreme, really helped us sort of see the full range of what dentures could be, and, and what denture service could be and you're taking inspiration from that. And of course, you can't necessarily and maybe not want to fully duplicate what you see there. But you can take inspiration from it. And I think that's one of the most essential things about designers and design. And frankly, a lot of creative people in the world is just looking in creative places for inspiration and not taking it entirely literally, but knowing how to sort of frame what's really important about that for them, and taking it forward.
Chris: Alright, now that we've got dentures covered, that's a good start. I bet of all the things we could have started with I bet you didn't expect that. And this is often talked about, as you know, Tracy had this hunch that design thinking could be applied to individuals. And obviously, we're not the first ones to think that I think we might be one of the newer groups that create a podcast about it. But I'm so curious to hear about your process of designing products and things and projects for IDEO and then ultimately evolving into something you're calling The Compass. Can you share a little bit about that journey that you've been on personally and what it was that drove you to The Compass?
Ela: Yeah, sure. So I started to kind of describe sort of the litany of the list of all the roles I had at IDEO and I think it kind of got through a lot of them, you know, kind of growing in terms of responsibility, and really stretching all the time to answer these new questions. Okay, how do we make a great product? How do we empower a team? How do we help organizations really see what its strategy should be? And then just doing a lot of coaching more and more coaching of teams and okay, how do I help these people really quickly find their own next steps and really powerful ones, and figure out how they can really stretch the first envelope of what they're doing and when they need to just stop and recognize when they actually need to break? Sort of having to answer all those really different questions. I think, while I was at IDEO, and realizing along the way, for myself, you know, the question of how long do I want to be here, what's going on with me as well, like to all of that independence, David Kelley was talking about noticing that it was the coaching part that I really love and taking a step away from IDEO, realizing that that was kind of I was really loving and going independent. And now having a bunch more roles that stretch me even more, because I'm working with all these people who have no exposure to design thinking. And their goal isn't to learn it deeply, but rather, to do their great work better, whatever it is sort of empowered by design thinking and, I work with the school district, in a network of schools, and I worked with the Department of Education in Rhode Island, and completely different things like an arts thunder, and in New York, who wanted to get a lot of organizations doing creative work together, and a department store chain and athletic school shoe manufacturer, like lots of different folks and trying to really help them do great things and finding that, you know, whatever big thing it is they're trying to do is actually a million little challenges, right? Whenever you want to do something big in your organization, in your life, and your community, whatever, it's actually not just that one goal, but you know, all these things that come up that are technical or organizational or interpersonal or even personal, right, like, it's just hard, and people are like having breakdowns. So having to answer all those things and do it in a way that isn't like a one-off conversation all the time. Like I wanted to help people in a way that was much more sustainable. That kind of got me down to like, what is just a much more essential, powerful way of communicating design thinking that people can really quickly own and quickly run with and apply to anything like start to recognize, anytime something doesn't feel right, or something starting to like get stuck, whether it's in their work, or in their life, that this is a chance to pull it out. It was really important. And the final thing that really pushed me there was being a mom. So I've got two kids two and four now and realizing, you know, almost a sense of integrity like I spend all my time teaching about empathy, and experimenting, and all this stuff. And you know, sometimes I'm with my kids, and it's just not feeling like that, like, nothing isn't that big, or, and creative and experimental that could be, and also not really teaching that to my kids because I haven't really translated how to do that. So that was another thing of just, you know, sort of the ultimate crucible was trying to use this stuff with me and with my kids. And when they're facing a challenge, like how do I boil it down enough that my four-year-old or even my two-year-old can kind of use it in some way?
Chris: Yeah. Really quick, so you formed i2i? Can you tell us what the purpose of the company is? What's the, I hate to say, mission statement? But what's the point of the company? And what are you trying to do with it?
Ela: You know, I didn't properly design the thinking form, knowing that this is gonna be a prototype. So that has sort of evolved, that's always at the heart of it has been empowering people to do great work. It's not only design thinking, certainly at the core, because that's what I know. And that's kind of my anchor, but I have been just learning a lot about things like systems thinking and adaptive leadership, and a lot of other things like that. And trying to bring kind of the power of all that together, grounded in design thinking to people in a way that is just as actionable as possible, and yet, at the same time, as powerful and profound as I can make it, because life is short, and why not try?
Tracy: So I'm wondering because I'm not sure if most of our audience would know what those things are? How would you describe the system's thinking and adaptive thought process and design thinking to your four-year-old?
Ela: Yeah, well, so all of these things, the things that I just rattle off without even getting too deeply into them. For the scientific method, or a lot of sort of creative processes. A lot of these things, they're all sort of ways that people in different kind of realms have found to stretch themselves to be able to see the present in new ways, or sometimes the past and new ways so that they can see the future in new ways from being able to dig deep into details to be able to zoom out and get big picture perspective. All of those things basically stretch us in those ways. And I think we have a pretty intuitive sense for when like, you're not moving forward because you're not seeing things in a new way they can kind of get you unstuck or you're stuck in the details or you're actually stuck in dreamland for me if you kind of think about the space that forms and creates these sort of four spaces that you can dig into. For me, framing an essential question like a powerful, but the essential question for each one of those that works just as well with a four-year-old, or even a two-year-old as it does with an executive is the way I have found most powerful and kind of giving people like a target to fill out really free to the spaces. But those four questions are sort of growing from the lower left and go around in a circle kind of clockwise. How do you really dig deep into what's going on? So asking, like, what observations Do I have What's happening? And why? It's really that simple. So what's going on? And why observations, that's kind of the first base. The second space is framing a point of view, about what really matters the most about what's going on right now and what could happen? So kind of sweeping around and trying to get to the very top of that space. So getting that point of view, some of the previous folks on this podcast have talked about values or talked about dreams. And that's certainly true at a high level. And sometimes it's, you know, you're doing something that's kind of a smaller issue than that and sometimes it's just your goal or challenge that you have right now. But what's the most important thing that's going on and could happen? And then moving into the upper right, you know, how do you get the big picture about the future is like, Okay, well, ideas, what ideas? Can I imagine? What are all the ways I could make this thing happen that I think should happen? Getting as creative as you can? And then finally, in the lower right, prototyping experiments, you heard a lot of that in the previous podcasts? What's a small step that I can take to see what happens? So those four questions, what's happening, and why? What's the most important thing that's happened or could happen? What are the ways to make that happen? And what's a small step, I can try to see what happens and then come around and back to making observations about this thing you just tried? What happened in my, if there are people involved, you know, what are they doing, saying, thinking, and feeling? Those are the essential questions.
Tracy: Do you have an example of some work you've done recently, where you took somebody through those four questions and sort of what that looks like for them?
Ela: Sure, at a lot of different levels, I suppose I've kind of moved up the scale of teaching in college at Olin College, and also had a lot of young people that come to me for coffee, or whatever they'd like to talk and had a bunch of those recently. And when they inevitably asked me, what should I do with my life, I know enough about their lives to answer that. So we pull out a compass, and, you know, I start to ask them things like, when have you been most excited or most frustrated? When have you felt most fulfilled or frustrated? You know, when do you feel like you're most able to really contribute, sort of exploring the extremes of as we sort of talked about their own experiences? And, you know, they haven't always asked themselves those questions, and then getting them to zoom out and say, Okay, what do you think your biggest challenges and opportunities are, and you start exploring all these things visually, as well as verbally, and physically if you can, but you know, getting them to just draw, you know, who they think they are, and who they like to be and what they'd like to do and then generate some ideas about how they could pursue that. If I have any to offer, I certainly try to add some to the next and then like, help them pick, like, what's the step that you could take to just try out one of those or someone you could go reach out and talk to?
Tracy: How does that resonate with them? What's the reaction? Is that something that they've never thought of before in this way?
Ela: You know, I think for most of these kinds of challenges, I can continue to go up the ladder to people who are trying to make changes in their organizations or the communities. I think it feels really good to stretch in those ways to see both the present and in new ways, like, wow, I hadn't really thought about that. I never noticed that I noticed that in some of the podcasts to people kind of harkening back on things that were important to them in the past, and I hadn't thought about it in a while, or kind of having new ideas, even if you have some concept of where you want to go. But either not having really dreamed as big as they could not have zoomed out as powerfully as they could or, you know, not having kind of thought about all the ways they could pursue it. I think it just feels like motion, it feels like getting unstuck, it feels good in that way. I think people that you meet all have their own ways of approaching it so far. And I would say that I don't think I've met anyone to whom all of that is new. And I think a lot of it isn't new to any of us. Really, it's more about putting it all together into one simple, like an actual visual tangible thing that you can use to prompt yourself to do these things. Because we all know it feels good to do those things. But we don't remember to do them. Usually, especially when whatever the issue is really important to us. That's when we least remember to do them.
Tracy: I just went to a workshop recently on Behavioral Economics. And they're saying that when things are difficult, we always go to the default. And when the default is to do nothing, we do nothing. So if you have big life-changing questions, then chances are you're just going to let life go on and not even take the time to look at it yourself.
Ela: And I think one thing that's really interesting that we heard in some other podcasts is actually even questioning what that default is. Because so often, that default is what we think we're supposed to do or we think other people are supposed to do, and I know that I've found in my life and the people that I've coached, whether it's in their lives or even in their organization like they're trying to do a project, and they're sure that their boss's boss's boss is just going to hate this. A lot of times actually, people forget to just even question what the default is that they're defaulting to. Because often, if you ask the people who you think are setting that default for you, you may find that actually, that's not what they're thinking that way.
Chris: Would you mind sharing a tangible example? Can you tell us some around i2i and experiences with helping people create their lives?
Ela: Yeah, let's see.
Chris: I’m sorry, it's kind of open-ended.
Ela: No problem. So a lot of that life creation is more sort of comes part of the work that I do through my organization. So kinds of things that I do are like I work, for example, with a network of schools that was hoping to become more innovative. And I was coaching them on a like, big-scale about, like discovering and doing AI projects within their schools, these religious schools, your default assumption would be that they're sort of conservative. So they're sort of being coached to do these longer projects through the same thing, right? immerse your observations from a point of view, imagine ideas and prototype experiments, right? Not a big scale. But then the life stuff happens along the way, my general approach is usually to do some combination of like in-person workshops where you really get a hands-on together, and then remote coaching over Skype and, you know, in the especially in the remote coaching sessions, where I'm sort of working with just one group of people at a time, the challenges start to come up. So for example, I had this principal at one of these schools and told me that he really likes this stuff and thought maybe he could leave, maybe even work in an IDEO or something. I was like, oh, I really like this guy. I like this school. And I was like, well, yes, we could talk about that. But also, we sort of rewind and like, talk about this year, and what the experience has been, like of doing it, you know, at your school and try to open up sort of the possibilities, like the frame of what is it that you really want, but with the most important thing about working this way, you know, having sort of the freedom to do it was the big thing, and just sort of the excitement and creativity of it. And he was, after all the principal? So can you shape some of that for yourself, and even the place where you're working? You know, try to reframe that problem a little bit. If you've identified those are the most important values, let's generate some other ideas for how that could happen, even in the shorter run. And I haven't followed up on a Femina or how that's going experiment wise.
Chris: Yeah, that's a great example. So where do you want things to go? As you look to your future? What do you want to do?
Ela: Well, for me, as I kind of hinted before, life is short, my kids are young, and I want to see, let's just see kind of how powerful the concept might be of getting to something, you know, sort of a practice, something between mindsets, which practices help develop, it's hard to just kind of go for a mindset on its own. And like, really complicated processes. You know, as David Kelley said, you can go read a lot about design thinking, but everyone's gonna do that. So can we get to really essential practices like just a little bit more sophisticated maybe than a handshake, but something that people could pull out, really, in any situation, whether it's designing something long term, like their life, or their career, or in the moment, designing a interaction with their boss, with their organization, you know, with the people they work with, with their spouse, with their children, you know, to be able to use the same sort of compass, for all of those different moments, I think, would be so powerful, because I know even me, I'm sort of a process junkie, and I can't hold all these different processes in my mind, not in certainly in a way that I really pull them out and use them in the moment. And so that's my really driving mission, right now. And so that's kind of where I've gone at this compass work, there's a little video on my website that tries to communicate it as quickly as possible. And that's kind of a start here. But I'm hoping to do my focus for the next while at least, and have a bunch of different ideas about how to do this is to try to put something like that out there and see how quickly people can kind of grab hold of it and start working with it and kind of close the feedback loop. Right, share back to me what they're doing with it, whether it's a snapshot of campuses that they've used, made for a campus of their experience using it, like what are their observations of trying to use it, you know, what are the challenges, opportunities that he's framed about what it was like using it? What are their ideas for how to make it better experiments they'd like me to try or they'd like to try, but try to kind of keep pushing this to be as both powerful and flexible as possible in the full sort of all the stages, scales, settings, situations of life and work, because I feel that it's one of the greatest impacts that I could possibly have on my kids lives is one for me to be able to use it in all those ways, because it would make me a better mom to them and make their environment so much better. But if sort of the world around them was meeting every challenge in those kinds of ways. Wouldn't that be great? You know, ends up maybe it's crazy. But life's short, let's see might as well try. And I think that getting it out there letting people sort of push it, break it, flex it. So we can kind of figure out, what's the level of structure, what's the level of flexibility, it's already evolved a lot in my own work. And now it's out and working more and more with people who themselves have their own networks, like some people who, for example, lead, like accelerators, for groups of education, startups or schools, and they're using it with all of their people. And so for me, that's really exciting to see, it continues to really hone it to be able to pass it to someone else, and have them be able to pass to other people, and all those people have to be sort of empowered by it.
Chris: That's awesome. Can you give us a dinner party example? So someone sits next to you at a dinner party and you strike up and say, yeah, I've got a design compass that will help you with your life. Take it to the next level. So how would you describe it? If they don't have time for the website or whatnot? Just how would you for our listeners describe what The Compass is and how people can use it.
Ela: One thing I've taken to doing, I have to confess is carrying just plain white paper in my bag, which is awfully helpful, because I can just put two lines on a piece of paper that intersect, and then start just saying, Okay, well, this is what these are, right? What we're going to do, so draw the two lines, and then we're going through them and then just be like, okay, these are observations, what's going on? And why, right, what are you guys doing thinking, and feeling? Maybe I will save some of this person's specific content, but you can get an idea, right?
Tracy: I know, there's actually gonna say like, Is there somebody whose story you feel comfortable, like walking through what some of those things actually were?
Ela: Well, so in this case, this woman was frustrated with her spouse and feeling that she wasn't really listened to and that we just don't share the same values and those sorts of kinds of things. And just asking questions about like, when she really feels that way and helping her sort of come back into those moments. And you know, it's not all the time, and it's just trying to sort of seeing what sorts of things like, where their interests that are different than when she feels like, oh, that's just so frustrating. You know, we're just so different. And I just didn't care about these things.
Tracy: And was this a conversation or was this like, she was writing things down on the paper?
Ela: A lot of times, we end up just doing it through a conversation, the questions are kind of straightforward enough that you can kind of just ask them like, what's going on and why are you guys thinking, feeling? And then you know, getting ready, like, okay, so let's try and look at this, as the picture in any way, what do you really think is happening? And for her, it was starting to realize that it wasn't what he thought even sometimes it was like she was sort of assuming that just because he didn't like the same things, but like, she was sort of projecting that back and being like, so because he doesn't do it. He doesn't like it, then I guess that means that it's not okay for me. But I asked him, Have you really asked about that? And she started to sort of just wondering like, Is it just me being okay, like having my own time and doing my own things and having time like separately to do things? And then sort of as an idea is just like, wholeheartedly pursue some of these things that she was talking about? And feel like, Can she do that and not feel judged? Or just try to talk to him about it and see if that was changing at all right? Like, if she liked pursuing those things more, it was actually something that was actually a problem for him. And it's just the conversations, I don't know what happened. Just sort of helping to open up like what was really happening, sort of thinking about the whole system, and both herself and this other person. And like, where were the feelings really coming from? Is it things that he was really saying are sort of just assumptions that we all have, right? We just have so many, just kinds of things that we used to see what people are thinking and whether that even matters?
Tracy: Cool! Like having listened to some of the previous episodes that you could map some of the things that came out of those episodes onto The Compass. Did you want to share what some of those were?
Ela: Yeah, sure. They were all great. You had a really wonderful group of people so far.
Tracy: We accept flattery.
Ela: Right? Well, yeah. And in your own story included, you told your own story in the first one. And so one of the things already mentioned, so kind of thinking about like that, seeing the present, like really digging deep, observing, right, what we're doing, saying, thinking and feeling people who are looking at their own past and pulling things out of it, a couple of people pulling like, I used to really love to write that of my past or art kind of maybe the walls of her room told her that she should pull that back out, but, and Aaron and making things and how important that was to him. And just noticing things like, you know, again, like what you're doing and why the whole exercise thing came up a couple of times, like David Kelley noticing that it actually works better for him if he's with other people. And I think you know, saying the opposite. But just sort of noticing, like, when that feels good, and when it doesn't, and not just kind of asking yourself but asking other people, a lot of people talked about, you know, talking to people that you know that, that love you and care about you and ask them what they think. Because a lot of times they can see you as well, they're noticing, right, they care about you and they're noticing what you're doing and how that's making you feel as well. So, those are things that I think a bunch of people talked about. And then you know, people talking about values and dreams, you know, so, like sitting around on the van just, you know, realize that he has values around having control of his own life and being able to design things and having independence and having some solitude or being able to form dreams, as Jessica was talking about. And, you know, the more you have those, the more you continue to sort of pull out from your day to day experiences and realize what those are, it was interesting to sort of hear David Kelley talk about the difference between just trying to name those without doing observation and getting a list that he didn't find himself following up on when he was on a plane and just kind of making his bucket list. And then having I think it was maybe a psychologist, I think, help him start with an observation instead. And notice, what are the things that like, on a daily basis, really make him happy, and then generating his look, you know, list of like, what are his dreams for the next years of his life, I thought that was really interesting. But having those and once you have those, it's just amazing to me how much opportunity starts to line up. Or maybe it's just because you can see it because you've got this big picture view of what's important to you now, see, you'll see the advantage, you'll see that apartment that you want, or, you know, I think you just start to see them everywhere. So the sort of upper right stretching to sort of seeing ways that you can actually make those things happen. People got pretty creative like you're in with as well, it could be a boat, or it could be a tiny house, or it could be a van, I find that you know, once you've got this vision, you start to see opportunities everywhere like even by this morning's running. And one of the things I'm really hoping for is better quality time with my kids. And I saw someone walking with their daughter, and I should start doing that. So I think me and the folks in these podcasts have been able to sort of identity, find more and more ideas within themselves or from other people that fulfill those dreams values. And then mean lower right, pretending experiments, like digging deep into new ways of seeing the future, no shortage of experiments, for sure. The blog seemed like a really great experimental platform for a couple of folks mazing with some blogging or writing serial stories, you know, ways of just putting thoughts out there in small ways and letting people respond to them. In Elle's case, responding massively to them. But also just experiments like back on the exercise, like what are like small, safe ways to try new ways of exercising, and seeing if it works for you or not, before you just kind of throw the baby out the bathwater and decide that running or whatever kind of exercise isn't for you.
Chris: Hey, you've done so many projects and you've observed and talked to lots of people and their commonalities that you observe that compass sounds like it's solving port is awesome. So many stories that Tracy and I've heard and really the point of the podcast is to get people over this gap between ultimately what they want to be and where they are and I'm curious to just hear it here, what do you think that gaps about what keeps people from acting on those higher-order ambitions that they have for themselves?
Ela: Yeah, I think it depends, as one of the ways that I sort of use this kind of is for everything. So one of the things I've done with my students and people I coach is to use it as a spider diagram, where we put like, actual behaviors in each of the quadrants, like, unlikely to observe carefully and get curious and be empathic or, you know, unlikely to really try new things or experiment small ways and be resourceful, you know, like, put those into quadrants and make a big circle, and then let people sort of draw how much of those things they are all the way around. So I find that different people just have different challenges because they have different sorts of habits that they're into. So for some people, it's not even having the dream or having the dream that's not quite the right dream, because they haven't really been paying attention. It might be because they're pursuing should, instead of must, as l talked about because they haven't sent their own most. And that's kind of what David Kelley was talking about, as well. So the people who are, you know, parlors are not happening, it's just not meant to happen for them, it's not even what they really, really want. So underneath, that's keeping it from happening, you know, nothing can go forward if your passion isn't behind it. And once your passion is, boom, right? Like, it just happens, things start to fall into place for you. So that's one is like finding the dream that really matters. Another is being able to frame it as powerfully as possible. So that's kind of the top left, you know, people who kind of know what it is, like they sort of sense but they're not dreaming as big as they could be, or they don't have it crystallized as to like, this is the change I want to make. So sometimes framing is their challenge. Sometimes it's that imagining, right? Actually, they've got this really clear frame and it is specific, they think there's one way for it to happen. And well, you know, the chances of that happening are unfortunately not very good. And so we need to be creative. We need to imagine a lot of different ways that something could happen and be flexible to those and to be really open and to really seek inspiration. And all the places you wouldn't expect to find it. So people who haven't really been able to open up to different possibilities or just haven't been able to find them is another one and then people who are more limited in the right in the lower right which is like being able to actually kind of dig deep and conceive a really concrete experiment that swift it's safe. It's a smart experiment that will actually teach them about what they're really worried about. About actually going to the heart of what they're most afraid of, or what they're most worried isn't going to work and designing experiments around that thing and doing it. So there's been so much about like, just taking that first step, I think about that middle, the point where those two lines cross as a space as well. And that's, I kind of hinted at earlier, that's realizing when you don't have any of those things like you're just, I don't have ideas. I don't have observations. I don't know what experiments. I don't know, nothing. I am just so stressed right now I've had, like clients, especially those I've worked with that are in really important positions in their organizations, they are so stressed, they can't get observant. They can't get creative, they can't get experimental. They just can't. And they need to just center, they need to not try to stretch in any of those ways. But figure out how to recenter just like, not try, but just go for a run or get a bunch more sleep or spend time with a family they need to do. And then you know, it's amazing how you pop out of that without even expecting it with the vision I know, to the biggest sort of epiphanies I had last year that happened while I was hiking. And I was not even thinking about this stuff like that. Am I what I experienced while I was hiking and I wasn't even really thinking about it, you know? And there's something to be said for that too.
Chris: Yeah. The following question is really fascinating. On the heels of that are a lot of creatives, entrepreneurs, artists, they didn't have a framework or a compass, you know, to take them through, and I think, a real gift you're giving people, but do they have something that other people just don't have? I mean, one argument that I've heard out there is everything from its genetics to your motivations higher, or I would just love your point of view on that subject is, did those people just have something that other people don't have? Or do you believe that it's in everybody, they just don't have the tools to unlock it? What's going on there in your mind?
Ela: Well, I think that there are a couple of things. One is to decouple like talent in a particular area, like, you know, a Picasso, like someone is really, really great skilled at a particular kind of art, from more sort of broad creativity, I wouldn't necessarily venture to say that everyone has the potential to be really great in every kind of creative art, which is slightly different than saying, people, all have the potential to be very creative. I think anyone who has small children can see, and this is a really, really struck me and sent me on this mission is that kids do all four of these things, pretty well, maybe not the framing so much. But it didn't take a lot to help my kids do that more consciously. But I mean, try to walk a block with a kid and stop them from observing everything that happens, or asking you why that kid is crying over there. I mean, you know, the whole five why's that we teach ourselves to do in design thinking, right? That's what your two-year-old won't stop doing. And seeing things in new ways. I mean, you walk that block, and they frame you know, what they see very differently than you do. And, you know, if they want to do something, they find the way to do it, right. So keep trying and trying and discovering, you know, think of a new way of doing something. And they're certainly not afraid to experiment by, like, the whole classic, putting building blocks and having to fall over and try again, right, they keep expanding, as always. So I think the experience of having small children has really led me to think that we are born with it. And I know that a lot of people in creativity talk about that. But like being able to stretch in those ways, see the present new ways to the future. Anyways, dig deep and zoom out. I think we all have that capacity. And it comes back to a sort of age-old notion of who we are, what we practice, we are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle said, it's kind of a fundamental part of a lot of different practices from yoga and meditation to religion, right? Like, what are these essential things that we can do that are kind of basic enough that everybody can remember them that keep those abilities alive, and continue to grow them over the course of your life. And so for me, that's what it's really about. And if you're fortunate, and you're in an environment that, you know, continues to foster those, you mean that you have to be really, really conscious of them. Like you can just continue to be really creative, I think, and not even articulate your own process, or actually shy away from that word process a little bit. But you may not even know why or where your creativity comes from, that I think that offering just a little bit of form to that like giving some sense of what those things are and how we support them, just by asking for basic questions, opens up the possibility for all of us to create environments, in our homes, in our organizations that let people continue to develop those things.
Chris: Right. This is awesome. And I love everything you're saying. I think one question I have for you is I heard a recent podcast on someone else's podcast and they were talking about a guy who said I can tell you how to meditate. I can tell you about the different forms of meditation. I could tell you how long you should do it to be effective and I can tell you how great it is for your health but I can tell you that I don't meditate and there's a very large it appears growing population of people that are aware but won't do you know, and You leave them with something that they could take action on?
Ela: Yeah, I mean, I think it would be. So two things. I mean, one is, for me, the aspiration is that the compass is actually something that is just so available and so accessible and simple that, you know, you can just start using it. And I have to say that I've had, as I've gone down this road, like recently, the switch flip between people kind of going through workshops, and being really inspired about design thinking, and kind of getting a sense for the mindsets and all this kind of stuff. You know, they've seen me sketch it for five minutes and just talk about it. And I'm getting an email saying, I just use this with my team, I just use this as my style phase, this is my grandmother. And that, to me, is already a sign that maybe we could get there. And I think that there's two things to that one is getting to being really simple. And the other is being really, really, really applicable and like immediately obvious to people, that they want to use it, why they want to use it, how they're going to use it. So they do and as soon as they do they get such powerful results, that it reinforces really fast. All of that said, the three things I'd leave people with, I mean, I use this mnemonic EIOU, you'll see in the video if you need to, but it's pretty straightforward. It's like if you do it be all in like just put your head and heart, gut and brain, everything into doing it. Embrace everyone, anything that could be part of the system or solution that you're working on. iterate, iterate, iterate, own it, orient yourself, you can start anywhere, don't feel intimidated. Many people start with an experiment and don't even realize that you just do something different. And you go, wait a minute, what has happened, I feel differently. And you start to notice that and you go from there. But the most important thing I leave people with actually is just the poor question. Just notice what's happening in why? Ask yourself what matters most about what could happen? And then you know, what something I could try? Like, which of those things am I going to try? First? I'm just gonna and then commit to doing it. Those are the four questions.
Chris: Yeah, I think what they're asking through our call is like it is to simplify it even down to the four questions is really elegant. And just constantly, I could see people just constantly rotating through those. It's like, any morning, I'm struggling, let me rotate through these four questions. You know, just it seems like a really helpful tool, and then to take it to paper, it just gets exponentially better and better and better.
Ela: So the four basic questions are: what's really happening and why, if there's people involved, what are they doing, saying, thinking, and feeling? What's happening and why, what matters most about what's happening and could happen? What are the ways that I could make that happen? And what's a small step that I can try to see what happens, and then come back? Observe what's happening and why.
Chris: Great, amazing. It's like life simplified.
Tracy: Yeah, it definitely. I mean, I think that you incorporate them in a way that makes them more people-centered, and just more applicable to people's lives versus different activities that you need to engage in, you're just asking yourself questions. You're not necessarily prototyping and building something with your hands or brainstorming and getting five people in the room to help you. You can do this yourself, or you could reach out and do it with other people but you're really just asking fundamental questions about the present and the past and looking towards what the future could hold.
Ela: You know, I think as designers, you're pretty much asking yourself those four questions and trying to use digital, verbal, and physical ways of doing it. And that's how our toolkit of 101 design methods happened.
Chris: That's one of the cleanest descriptors of what distinguishes design that I think I've ever heard and I actually love it for our listeners. Because if you want to just put your toes in the water, ask yourself these four questions, you want to get a little bit more serious. Visualize some of the solutions. If you're ready to really push yourself out of the nest, try it out in a tangible form.
Ela: The four quadrants.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. The observation part and I think that a lot of people will just skip right through that. I've got a friend, that's like, she said, I want to really help people out. She works at One Medical, and she's in health coaching. And ultimately, if you're in health coaching, you're in life coaching. And so she's like, I'm just gonna go out to the park instead of the stand with a sign that says free advice. And a lot of people would think, hey, that would be funny, that would be interesting, or that's dumb or whatever. But what differentiates or she actually did it. And to hear her stories of what people asked her when she just set up the stand in San Francisco in a park with a sign that says free advice. At one point, she had a line of people, people were asking her dating questions and financial questions, and other people just wanted to talk and one thing that was absolutely not true or not expected is that she was busy the whole time. And what you might think, in principle is that no one's gonna walk up to a free advice bar at the park and sure enough, they line up for it. And I just loved her story and then she went back to the park. She made it real and it wasn't hard or difficult. It was just that she went from the idea to action.
Ela: Right, that's pulling that circle, the two most powerful moments really are like at the very top and at the very bottom. The top being where you've just got this crystallized vision, you can just state about the difference you want to make between the present and the future, the big picture. I want everyone to be able to live and breathe this stuff without even thinking about it, right? I want people to be able to face and recognize every challenge creatively. And then the bottom, the very bottom is this magic moment where you take something that is a future idea, you've envisioned, like a concrete experiment you can do and you come around and it's no longer a feature is actually present, you're doing it, you can observe it, you can see what happened, you can see how you feel about it, it's real, you have actually changed the present, right? You've changed things because you've put a real thing out there. And that leap feels like a million bucks. And once you start doing it, as David Kelley talked about, you know, that sense of self-advocacy, it's like it's really addictive. It's really great.
Chris: I really want to grab onto something you're saying right now and wonder if you've been trying this. It seems like people would be more willing to dabble in a lower risk category. So if I've got a little bit of confidence, for example, on how to curate a fun dinner party with my friends, I might take the compass and sort of reimagining that fun way of doing it, which grows my competence to do the thing that might be riskier, which is to play guitar at my own wedding and I'm not a very good guitarist, you know what I mean? So I love that the compass could be taken and applied to something that's much lower risk to raise the confidence for the things that would be much, much riskier, like a career move, or a city move or decision on a relationship, etc. So have you been kind of applying it that way? Or it's more on let's try the low-risk thing first?
Ela: Yeah, I mean, I think that yes, and no, I think it comes up as it comes up. So whatever is on people's minds, or the situation is, I think that at any scale, if it's what matters to the person at the time, and it instantly sorts of makes an impact for them, that's the most helpful thing you can do. And I think sometimes actually, being able to take some of those scary things on making them less scary can be really great because I think this is one of the big things that design thinking is, there's tremendous safety in iteration and little bits of experimentation. That's one of the things that all the speakers so far have talked about is actually like, talking about the big thing, right, like what they're doing with their lives, but sending just five minutes asking yourself like to look at, okay, well, what's my life been like so far in a new way? And what could it be like? That Talk is cheap, so to speak, right? And it can be massively eye-opening. And then you can discover an experiment that's quite real, but quite safe, right? You don't move to the another place, right? You just go spend a weekend, you can find ways to dabble in it. So I think that the killer app in a way is being able to actually not have so many limits about what you're exploring, but rather, how can you take a scary topic and scale it back and just do a five-minute compass on it?
Tracy: You know, I have a friend who has listened to all the episodes, and she's like, I still don't get what design thinking is. And then she went to go see John Maeda speak. And he had defined design thinking in two sentences and she's like, I totally got it. It completely made sense.
Ela: He wasn't speaking about design thinking. So I didn't get to hear his definition of design thinking. I want to know.
Tracy: I know. I'll look it up and put it in the show notes.
Chris: Ela, before we close, I just wanted to say congratulations and it's such a powerful tool that you've created, and for so many people that otherwise wouldn't have access to tools like this. And so it's such a privilege to talk to you and hear about the journey that you've been on and how it's being applied to help people create better lives.
Tracy: And how do we point people to you and the kind of work that you want to be doing?
Ela: My website is i2iexperience.com. The video is under ideas and inspiration or inspiration ideas. So the video that I'm talking about is created as a part of a proposal for South by Southwest education. That's a big sort of education conference. And so it gives a bunch of really concrete examples, which are kind of in the realm of education. But I think they hint at sort of the broader ways that you can use it in your life and others in your organization and everything else. So it's got a little bit of education bent to it, but it's a pretty good kind of start. And if it's something that they want to experiment with at any scale in their life in their organization, otherwise, just reaching out to me is a great way to do it. I hope to have a more formal way of closing that loop and possibly working with some folks at Harvard at schools Project Zero. That's the group that started by Howard Gardner that developed the concept of multiple intelligences and I just have good friends there and where we think it'd be really fun to play with this and just like as it goes out there and try to bring back people's experiences and like document them and how they've experimented how they've, you know, evolved thing and try to make that a bit more like a formal kind of loop closing about it.
Tracy: Nice. All right. Well, thank you so much for all that you're doing and for sharing with us today.
Yeah, that was great. What I loved about this episode was that she had just this really simple tool. It's not even a tool. It's just like quite some questions to ask, and, and get started thinking about things makes it super tangible.
Chris: Yeah, if anything, the tool is a blank sheet of paper and your brain. This one really got me thinking, we did ask a question there and in the end, we inverted the question which was this is a great tool that helps people, but what is it that gets in people's way? And I think that that's the question we should ask often, because just looking at the problems in reverse, and I've been thinking a lot about it, because her tool is really basic. And I could still feel people listening. Even with that simple tool, they still kind of have to face your stuff and I think that she breaks down a great tool for you to sort of face your thing, and put it out there. So just to review, the questions were, what's happening? What matters most to me? Like, what's my point of view? What are the ways that I can make this happen? And then what's something small that I can try? One thing that people miss, and I want to make sure this comes out after talking to Ela is that that loop continues. So you don't stop after that. Here's some that I can try that either worked or didn't. Done. It didn’t work for me, instead, it keeps going. So you go right back to the beginning? No, that's what I tried. So now what's happening now? What matters most? And what else can I do? And then what do I try? So the fact that the loop is continuous is interesting. But I can't help but think just what is getting in the way? And I'm not? I'm not pointing fingers at people? Because this happens to you. And to me as well. It's just pulling out the paper, like, how do we get people to pull out a blank sheet of paper?
Tracy: Right? Or even just mentally ask themselves those questions, right, like, listening to the episode, but it's the, okay, what's one small thing you can do? Then you're like, oh, yeah, I could do this thing, then it's just not a part of your life. It's not a habit that you've created yet. And so there's the effort that it takes to get past it or to get started. I think what we are saying is like, it's a loop and it continues, the power is that once you start to build up some of these small wins, that starts like a flywheel, it starts to just take on its own momentum and pushes you forward. But it's really the effort that it takes in the beginning, that keeps people just stuck.
Chris: Right? And it makes me think about, you know, I think that things that people would plug into that first quadrant are already really daunting. Like she gave the example of a relationship in difficulty, or, you know, people's career and difficulty or education and difficulty. And I can't help but think if I was having this conversation with myself, every week, you know, where I took out the white piece of paper every Sunday night, and I just map and I just did the map, that just seems to reduce some of the significance. But once these things bundle and boil, I think that's what's hard is they, you stuffed them down long enough, and then they become really big things that you have to face. But if there was some sort of a ritual, weekly or otherwise, even daily,
Tracy: I was gonna say, yeah, so go to bed at the end of the day. It's kind of like gratitude journals, except you're trying to come up with experiments for yourself.
Chris: Right, right. It reminds me I think we've talked about it on the show before. I just love that guy that told me once he's like, I can tell you everything about meditation, I can tell you why it's great for me. I can tell you how I can do it in five minutes. But do I do it? No. And it comes back to that. And I just think that's really interesting, just as a human species, like, we just saw so exhausted or, you know, what, what is it that keeps those little inklings of rituals from finding their way in?
Tracy: Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean, Well, one thing I wanted to talk about, too, is, I mean, she was talking about her daughter and kind of using this as a tool for you know, why she's tripping or, you know, it was like a small thing. And I think that that's a really good example of how to use it in a way that isn't daunting.
Chris: It's like tiny, tiny stuff.
Tracy: Yeah, just start with those. Don't try and tackle the why is my relationship failing, you know?
Chris: Yes, start with like, why don't I make the bed in the morning.
Tracy: Yeah, get a couple of wins under your belt and then you can start to break those larger tasks into smaller things.
Chris: Yes. So I just want to also just recognize and appreciate Ela's past and point of view on this I mean, an engineer from MIT. On paper, it looks highly unlikely, right? Okay, this, this brilliant MIT engineer goes into human centeredness and ultimately comes out the other side with a human tool to help people. But what I like about that is an engineer's mindset is typically more practical, and often more linear. I'm not saying Ela's is, but I just found it fascinating that she made that evolution if you will, or in some ways, if you looked at it one way, say that's it a 180. But in a lot of ways, it just ends up making perfect sense. like, Okay, got it. That's a very practical, pragmatic set of tools to get me up and going.
Tracy: Yeah, I'm actually working with a handful of engineers right now, kind of taking them through the design thinking process. And, yeah, it's interesting, because you're right, like, totally brilliant people, super practical, super logical, very problem solution-based. And what I think it does is just expands your capacity to solve problems. It's like, you don't just have the problem. And then you jump to the solution, you have the problem, you kind of expand your point of view around the world to see multiple problems, and then you select the ones to dive deeper in. So I think that for engineers, it's actually a really useful skill to adopt and apply to their own process. But I just noticed, you know, trying to teach people this new way. If there's just a lot of ingrained, you're, you're used to doing things a certain way. And so you're looking for the right answer. And I think what we're talking about, there's not necessarily a right answer, it's a series of, you know, small decisions that you're making along the way that leads to a larger answer that works better than some others would work. But I'm just struck by how you ask questions about how you would do it, how would you do sharing back your stories about people that you've talked to in the field? And it's like, well, I propose that we do it this way. That was when one of the engineer’s examples, and I was like, wow, yeah, that's so different. It's such a different mindset than I'm used to. It's like, No, we could, we don't have to propose the way to do it. We could try in different ways.
Chris: Right, that we're getting a lot of great listener feedback. And thank you all for that. And I think what I'm what I'm finding, and I know you are, too, Tracy, is there are different little pieces from different episodes that people are putting together that work for them. And I think that what I'm loving about the diversity of approaches is, is that different tools work for different folks. And so this has been just another great episode demonstrating another tool and a slight way of looking at different ways of looking at things to help people get going in one direction or another. And I think that it's fair for us to say we're, while we have a point of view, we are relatively tooled agnostic. We don't care. We just want people, to go down and to try and to let us know. So we can evolve our own way of thinking and the way of thinking that is working for different people in different neighborhoods.
Tracy: Yeah, I mean, it'd be curious if folks want to share back on our Facebook page or Twitter, just kind of some of the things they have been trying their little experiments they've been doing or if you use Ela's tool, will have it up on the website. But if you use the tool, or even just think about it in your head, give us some comments back on how it's been working or not working or, you know, changes you've made to it. She's evolving this as she goes along as well. So feedback to her would be fantastic.
Chris: Great. Yeah, check out Ela's compass on the show notes. And thanks, everybody for listening to another great episode.
Tracy: Hi, everyone. All right. That's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them. To do this really well. We'd love for you to participate. Try out and share back your own life design experiments. Or if you've already got a great story of how you've designed your life. We'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page, or resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you'll find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the episode. And if you wouldn't be so kind, subscribe to the show, and share your favorite episodes with friends. that'll lead even more people to start designing their own lives. A big thanks to the folks who help us make the show possible. composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the Results May Vary theme music, Graphic Designer Annessa Braymer for our logo, David Glazier for sound mixing, and team podcast for editing. And of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.