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Tracy: In our last episode, community architect Sandra Kulli talked to us about fostering human connection through the design of extraordinary places. Today we're excited to share this very special episode of Results May Vary. We're featuring this year's Stanford d.school Civic Innovation Fellows. This event was recently recorded live as the fellows wrapped up their program and reflected back on their journey of learning design thinking. Fellows are restless experts in their field, accomplished professionals who are focused on accelerating large scale impact. Over the course of the year, they learned Human-Centered Design and use it to explore experiment and advance ambitious projects in their sector. You've already met one of the fellows, In Episode 16, Dr. Mick Smyer talked about his organization Graying Green, which is focused on tapping older adults as a resource for climate action. Today, you'll also be introduced to Angie McKee, the Director of Innovation and Strategy for San Francisco Unified School District's Future Dining Experience. Her project uses student input to reimagine and redesign the school dining experience in order to make it more equitable and enjoyable for all students. You will also meet Mark Brand, one of Canada's most recognized social entrepreneurs. Having successfully created 11 businesses in Vancouver, Mark and his teams are determined to breathe new life into marginalized and isolated communities through food training and meaningful employment. Mario Lugay is a one-time community organizer turned philanthropy entrepreneur. Mario explores bringing the best of technology to the best side of ourselves testing initiatives that will catalyze and support our society's single largest shared civic act, giving. And finally a fifth fellow Sydney Smith-Heimbrock was unable to join the conversation. But her work is no less than helping make our government a workplace that unlocks creativity to solve the complex problems facing our nation. within the federal government, she leads the Innovation Lab at OPM, where they teach Human-Centered Design through workshops and immersion projects with federal leaders and professionals. I had the honor of working with his fellows over the past year, and I'm pleased to introduce them to you today in partnership with the Stanford d.school. Enjoy the show.
Thomas: I'm Thomas Both, Director of the Fellowship. I get to lead this program with these guys. And I get to do it here at the d.school which is pretty cool like so many of you even in this room have been part of the experience of the fellowship for the fellows. So thank you all for doing that and be part of and thanks for being here. We get to invite amazing people here with their own expertise and their own domains and support them to take on a big project, learn design, and apply design a strategy to that project. So it's pretty fun. We're near the end. We've actually this is the last month of the fellowship this year. And so this is our final event. Thanks for being with us for that. And we're going to kind of hear about their journey through a couple of conversations, conversations with the fellows. We want to try to give you a glimpse into what is actually like to use these tools for these complex challenges was like to be in part of the fellowship was it like to be in the cohort as a fellow and do that kind of give you some stories and some conversation to give you that insight into it. So I introduce myself, I'm Thomas, Director. Nadia Romani, Senior Director, Senior Designer, and really co-facilitator of the programming of the fellowship we kind of hand in hand led the program this year.
Nadia: I'll give you a little bit of intro into the program. So we invited this year five fellows, who you'll see you're gonna meet shortly, and you're gonna have to, they're gonna have a chance to have conversations with them and Thomas and with you all. And what we did is they are either social entrepreneurs where they're working on a complex challenge in the world or their systems intrapreneurs, they're working within a complex system, trying to have a social impact and bring innovation into that space. And the way we thought about it is we're giving them a chance to essentially slow down, come here take a step away from the day to day lives, in order to really pinpoint what they want to do, and then speed up their work after they leave. We've been working on developing the curriculum and really understanding the modules we're running people through. And so we have this vision just to give you guys a sense of if you can see it. So basically, we bring them into the majority of the work at the beginning is a lot of Human Centered Design, where we really get them digging into their work. And Thomas will talk a bit about exactly how we do that. And the goal is really to teach what we teach here, but really have them apply it to their projects. And then we also start to introduce strategy and systems thinking, the system's thinking is to get them to map out the complex space they're trying they're trying to work in, and that systems mapping stakeholder mapping, and really pinpoint their intervention, figure out where their intervention plays in the world, and then draft that into a strategy. So try and really create a really concrete theory of change, that helps them fine-tune their activities, their strategy, and their focus. And then the last part is we introduced communications design, because, in order for them to really get people behind their bold visions, they have to be able to communicate it clearly. And so that includes graphic design making, and really trying to visually communicate with infographics and others how they can bring their idea into the world. So those are the three components of the curriculum that we focused on over the two quarters.
Thomas: This year, we started in September, we end at the end of March. So we start with an orientation and then we kind of break up the fall into three cycles, DP 1, DP 2, DP 3. DP 1, we ask fellows to scope a piece of their overall project and do a full cycle on it. DP 2 is about deep ethnography and synthesis work. And then DP 3 is particularly about putting real experiments into the world and learning from those experiments is almost like a pre-pilot for their work and, and for the learning. As part of the DP 3, the fellows also pair up and do sprints together short, I think we need three days sprints together to be able to actually work on each other's projects. And through, I'll just say DP 4 this winter quarter, is really, there's a number of things that happen less structure than the first quarter, but a number of things that fellows are working on piloting their interventions and continue to advance the work the intervention itself, honing their strategy, and developing the vehicle for this thing to live on past the fellowship, how's things going to live in the world, throughout all of it, of course, they're doing the project work itself. They're working with allies, and we have what we call fellows studio. Those are the sessions we work on work together to learn and apply design to the projects. And then the other thing, another big part that we're doing is tangent sessions, which I mentioned, a time of Chrissa, bringing the Teaching Fellows project fellows together with experiences to kind of practice mindsets of design. And then backstories, we have a chance to get to hear everybody's backstory, why, what's happened in their life and what brought them to this moment. It's kind of a little overview of, what we did this year, we will go into the first conversation with Mick and Mario.
Nadia: So Mario started as a community organizer, that's Mario, for people who don't know, in the northwest Bronx before entering into the field of philanthropy. He worked for several foundations and then he co founded the New America Leaders Project in 2010. It's the country's first organization dedicated training first and second generation immigrants to run for elected office. But he's focused here on leveraging tech to help cultivate people's giving both their money, their time and their talent and evolve and solidify their identity as givers through this through his project called the giving side. That's Mario's project. And he's going to talk more about that. And then Mick joined after being the Provost and a tenured Professor of Psychology at Bucknell. Now, he's an expert on aging, who's passionate about climate and came to the d.school to figure out how we can leverage untapped resources of older adults for climate action. His project is called Graying Green Climate Action for An Aging World. And during his time with us, he's been exploring how to move older adults from anxiety about climate change to climate action, and how they can be leaders in the social movement.
Thomas: So we got those intros of you but maybe we could just start with a little bit of start with you, Nick. What are you working on? Where do you come in with? And what have you developed?
Mick: Sure. Well, thank you, Nadia for that really nice introduction. So as not, he said, I'm working on a project called Graying Green Climate Action for An Aging World. And I came in with an idea, which was basically to link to global patterns, population aging, and climate change. And a first step at how you get people to think about that, which was an idea that everybody has a place that we care about. I used to start by asking people do you have a place you care about? And finally I realized, well, everybody answers, yes. And when I was at the copying machine here, one of those serial serendipity events in the d.school, most had we don't ask, just tell people picture the place you care about. So I know, I no longer ask, I say, picture of place you care about. So picture a place you care about. Now picture that place affected by either extreme weather, or climate change. Got the picture? Now picture what you'd like that place to look like 40 to 50 years from now. Now, what do you think it'll look like? What would you like to look like? Okay. So far, I think I have every one of you in the room saying yes. But now the hard question, but you're a d.school crowd so I know you'll do well. Picture, something you could do now, to work towards that vision of 40 to 50 years from now. I'm not going to ask you if you can picture that, because you're going to skew the statistics. But in most audiences, everybody says yes to the first three, and 85 to 90%. Say I have no clue what I can do about achieving that vision. Now, as a clinical psychologist, if I just left you anxious, that's great for business, but not really good for climate action, right. So the next step that I've developed here at the d.school and really coming out of DP 3, and moving into DP 4, is a simple card sorting task. I give people a deck of climate action cards, about 30 climate actions. And I asked them to sort those cards into three piles. One pile is things I already do. Second pile is things I might do. The third pile is things I won't do no way. Pretty simple. The three piles are actually important. First, I'm not going to bug you about things you're not going to do. But I am going to start by celebrating the things you already do. And I did this with a 73 year old woman recently, and she said I am delighted to see how many things I'm already doing. I didn't realize how much I was already doing. I did it this morning with another 70 year old woman, same thing, highly accomplished person who was thrilled at the number of things he's already doing. But the middle pile is the most important one. Because there I say to you, things you might do somewhere in there is your next step on your climate journey. Because you see, I assume we're all on a climate journey. We don't know it maybe. But when we realize that we are we feel better about it. So I take that mental pile, and I say, what's the next step for you. And I use basic goal setting basic behavioral economics and psychology. And I help you develop a goal around that. A SMART goal is to write Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time bound. And we put that into a commitment contract, which has two parts. You tell me what your goal is going to be like this morning, the woman said, I'm gonna insulate the water heater in my house. big step and I'm going to do that over sometime within the next month. And then the commandment contract has two parts. Who else are you going to tell you're going to make a public commitment to and then the part that I really like? Pick an organization whose mission and aims and strategies you oppose? Yes, I know where you're going. Picture an organization whose mission values and strategies you oppose, and make a commitment that if you don't carry out that contract, in her case, if he doesn't insulate that water heater, she's going to give pick $1 amount to that organization. I know someone who lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and is married to a former Provost who made an exercise goal during a political campaign and said I will give money to the opposing candidate. She exercised every day amazingly throughout the whole election campaign. So the idea is to move people from anxiety to action to habit on climate change. And why older adults because the age 60 Plus is a really important demographic overlooked by those in the climate space. So let me just stop there. But that's what I I came in with the idea of Yeah, let's look at those two patterns. And I'm now in the stage of having proven the proof of concept, the first two steps and next step is how do we get them to have it and how do we make that a sticky habit on climate action.
Thomas: You said you came in with this idea of picture place and your concept of combining the idea of aging and climate change. Can you think of a moment in the last seven months that you pivoted or that you that's memorable in where you've got to now?
Mick: Sure, a couple of human moments one, especially, I was in one of those troughs, everybody knows those troughs. You know, I went from well, I got a great idea to I got nothing. And I call up a friend of mine, who is a social media expert. He's been head of digital media for the White House for six years under a previous administration. And I called them up and I said, Megan, I have all these older people who feel really powerless, invisible and ineffective on climate change. What can I do about that? And he said, Well, you know, in a fire drill, you want an orderly exit, and I thought, where is this going? And he said, Well, here's the deal. How about if you reframe for people and help them see that where they are right now is like, rung four on the ladder of climate engagement. Now, he said, You know about the ladder of engagement, and Mario had taught me about the ladder of engagement. Two weeks before coming from his community organizing part. I said, oh, yeah, a lot of engagement. Sure. Yeah, yeah, I know that stuff. But that was a pivotal moment for me, because he helped me see that if I reframe this, it turns out ladders, not a great metaphor for 70 year olds, because they don't want to get on ladders. But reframing as a step on a journey, everybody resonates to that. So for me, that was a pivotal moment. Cool. Does that make sense?
Thomas: In test. Okay, hear from Mario, tell us a bit about what you've been working on, during the fellowship.
Mario: But I came in coming, as Nadia mentioned, from the social sector. And in the social sector, we actually center humans, kind of human interactions and human relationships. And even to the extent that not only in order to pull out insights, but we center humans as our place of accountability, what we keep coming back to right. And so actually coming into this project, I think I was more, I was more familiar with working with people less familiar working with product design. And so it was an interesting space to come here at the d.school, I also came in having worked on the project for a little bit. And, as I mentioned, it is called giving side, the shorthand we have, I use giving because more people give in vote, it is kind of our single largest shared civic act. However, giving seems to imply sacrifice, as committee organizers. Our goal was never to pull from our members sacrifice, or pain or suffering. But instead, our goal was to pull from them happiness and joy, but align with doing good and working with others, right. And so the real purpose of the project of giving side is how do we help everyday individuals align their happiness with doing good with the world. And that comes easily. And it's easily supported for people working in the nonprofit sector, people who work in places like the d.school that is about social impact, but not readily accessible to people who don't have that same privilege to choose their nine to five jobs, to be the impact they want to have on the world. And then in terms of what I learned while here, it's interesting that I think, and I'm not sure if this is correct, but these schools are often referred to as being multi disciplinary. In many ways, I feel like I walked around walking out of here, having learned discipline with its own kind of very specific language, its own kind of body of knowledge. And having introduced like a new perspective, every time I look at something, now I have the perspective of Human Centered Design. But because of the fellowship, it's the perspective plus the possibility that learning a skill set and, and several mindsets allows you to kind of feel like you see things in us and you could take action on it, right. And then in terms of what I'm walking away with, certainly new confidence in the project that we're working with, there were two tests that were happening, this whole fellowship. One was, were the tests that we were the various projects that we were working on testing the actual assumptions underlying assumptions of the work we are doing. But for me, the other test that was happening in parallel was the test of time. You know, Human Centered Design is really good at testing interactions. But the platform I'm working on is also about the integration of our generous selves, our impactful selves into our lives long term. And so seven months, having users on our platform for seven months also kind of provided a ton of insights that have really kind of strengthened at least the path that we're on in the decision to go on that path. And then the last thing I'm walking away with is, I've described Stanford as one of those money booths, you see, like talk shows where you walk in and they start blowing money in there, and your job is just to grab as much as It is possible and stuff in your shirt before they kick you out. And I kind of feel like that's what I'm doing. And you think that, you know, you could develop a strategy, but I've never seen anyone figure out how to get as much of that cash as possible and work out.
Thomas: Was that metaphorical or?
Mario: Well, let's test it out. Yes, we're gonna be handing out envelopes.
Thomas: Both obviously, behavioral psychology, community activist and organizing, coming here learning Human Design, what resonated with what you already do. And how do you think about integrating that into what you do going forward?
Mario: Well, for me, it's empathy. Right? So in organizing, empathy is a value that we believe in that we promote, because we believe the more empathy in the world, the better place it will be, with that fundamental kind of belief that we all do better, when we all do better. But it was always aspirational, right? We need to be more empathetic. And that was about it. And then coming to the d.school, it was empathy as a skill set and mindset, in some ways, really being deployed to develop better products. But within that what it provided and offered for the first time in my life was empathy, as tangible, and that I could have agency and control over. And so it's been the perfect compliment. And I do hope I know, Nadia has talked about it. And others have talked about it, about the ways that we bring those two worlds together and their use of empathy in a way that can kind of build it up with something more powerful, both in how it's deployed, but also in its underlying set of values, which it's used for.
Thomas: Can you say a little more about just actually doing empathy worker ethnography work? What was your goal? Who do you talk to?
Mario: Sure, well, we used it specifically. I mean, I was using it specifically to test out how do people integrate being generous into their lives as an identity, right? And to realize that we have multiple identities, some people are runners on the side, or they're they, they're collectors or their consumers? And so what we're looking at is how do we develop an identity as a giver as an impactful person? And what we had to ask was the question of what would kind of lead you to start tracking your giving your generosity, so you had the opportunity, first to kind of be aware, then be reflective, then be intentional, and then create an identity, there is a hypothesis that the people who are most likely to kind of use my product were the people I knew best. And so when they didn't use it, this is when I deployed Mick in our partner sprints. It would have been awkward for me to go to my friends and be like, hey, how come you're not using the giving side? But it was awkward for Mick to do it. And so make went around to my friends who, you know, especially the ones who would do a lot of things for me, but for some reason weren't sending a receipt.
Thomas: And I was your enforcer?
Mario: Yeah, yeah, muscle, the muscle. And so he went around, and he did deep empathy interviews as to what was the barrier to them sending that first receipt or kind of tracking their giving. And what we found, and we presented a little bit of this, in that in our first midway point presentation, was the appearance or the feelings of shame, scarcity, and vulnerability, and not in these big ways, but enough, that it wasn't desirable to kind of see your giving reflected back. And, you know, through Mick, I just learned about all that.
Thomas: You want to talk about resonating with your expertise?
Mick: Yeah, you know, I came in with a social science research background. So on the one hand, a lot of what is done in the d.school was familiar, but under different names. So empathy work might be qualitative research, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, there were differences. And it took me a while to sort of getting comfortable with that. What do I mean? Well picture the normal distribution. As a psychologist, I'm looking for a generalizable sample right in the middle of that distribution. As a designer, Nadia and Thomas are saying go to the extremes. Don't talk to extreme users and that, Okay, I'm going to trust the process. But okay, so that was pretty interesting, or things like designing by analogy, great concept. So I ended up talking to a friend of mine who trains Marines to meditate. And why did I do that? Because I'm interested in getting people to a habit, and she was training them in the habit of meditation. Their motto is to meditate and destroy, not a model. I want to embody but the very thought that I could go talk to her about how do you develop a habit of meditation. And I could translate some of those lessons into reaching out to older adults. As a psychologist, I probably I not probably, I would not have done that before. So I learned a skill set. And then I think for me, a big issue has been how to integrate. I actually had skills before. So how do I integrate what I knew before with this new skill set? So it's not either-or but both. And that's been part of what I've been doing this term.
Thomas: In your seven or seven months in now. But can we go back to the first week, what struck you from that week, like, what was unexpected that week, it was a moment that you remember just from coming here?
Mick: Actually, for me, one of the moments that stood out was at the end of that week, we did an exercise in a park with Patrick. Patrick led us on a walk, we learned that he was an animal tracker, as well as a former fellow. But at the end of that, he asked us to reflect, which is also part of the design process, right to step back and reflect on what we've been through. And at the end of that first week, I realized now that my metaphor of moving from anxiety to action to habit was really a metaphor for my experience in the fellowship. Because at the end of that first week, I was pretty high on anxiety, like, what am I doing in this place? But the reflection exercise got me to think, well, when have I had this feeling before? And for me, I'm a musician. And I've sat in with world-class musicians because they hadn't heard me play before. And I know that right before you start playing, there is this moment of anxiety, and you say, what the heck am I doing up here? And yet, I've had enough experience with that, to know that, if I just allow it to happen, I'm going to have a great time and good things are gonna happen. Not exactly sure where it's going. Because a lot of times those musicians don't tell me what tune we're playing, which is always exciting. But for me, at the end of that week, that analogy helped me say, oh, being in the d.school is like sitting in with really good musicians. I'm surrounded by people who are really good at this process. I'm not exactly sure where it's going to go. But that anxiety is part of the excitement, so go with it. And so, in a funny way, it was like anxiety, calming by analogy. And it made me feel and by Patrick's exercise really helped me frame that. To make me feel better at that point of anxiety and it worked out.
Thomas: Your wife is on the East Coast, you're out here. What do you tell your families you do here? I mean, I'm still working on that with my wife. I think my wife, Danielle knows at this point, but I don't have my parents exactly know. What do you say all the time?
Mick: Well I tell her, you know, I have the advantage of having been out here before. Last year, I was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. And the difference here is I tell her, I'm really working on taking those ideas and putting them into action, you know, the bias for action, fail for when she gets that idea. She's seen me fail before and learn from it. So that's easy. But you know, I show her the work that I'm doing. You know, she's been one of my subjects, she has done card sorts and given me feedback on it. So I told her, hey, today, I went to a senior center and talked to folks about climate change. And it was pretty eye-opening, or whatever I tell her about the work I'm doing to try to share.
Mario: My partner is a lawyer who works with homeless youth and at risk of homeless youth. So I just tore through the post-its all day and just laughed. But that's what we did the first day it was throwing post-its through. Which is all very confusing. No, but I mean, what I share is, is what I bring home, at least are the insights we get from talking with people, right? Because it's not only useful, but it really is a privilege to just have an excuse to engage the world over and over again, and have these stories about how people exist, how they approach different things. And you know, I'm super fortunate enough that my interaction with people because of my project is when bad things happen in the world, I get to see the other side, right, like I get to see the good that comes back. And so I'm full of stories about why we should look forward what hope there is, you know, and with our platform, like lucky enough to kind of wake up, you know, every Monday morning to see for kind of receipts coming back in from our one user who goes to church and gives to each of the collections and every 15th seeing maybe eight recurring gifts coming over and over again. And so seeing both kinds of random moments of generosity like after the Women's March, we got receipts from 10 different cities from El Paso to Denver, Colorado. But then seeing also the kind of regular This is who I support, this is what I do every month. And getting to share those stories is something that I feel like I also have a responsibility to do, right. Like it almost feels selfish not to tell the story of the kind of people doing good at integrating into their lives.
Thomas: At one point, you talked about product and product design. Sure. But both of you have very behavioral change projects, climate change, very complex, systemic issues. Maybe I don't know if you could talk a little bit about using human centered design, using design thinking, for your challenges, and for complex challenges that are at the system's level?
Mario: Well, I think for me a big another pivot moment was trying to see how making small changes or working on what seemed to be small steps can relate to a big issue like climate change, when you guys did our own individual journey and she gave me the task of saying, well, what are your next small steps and how does that relate to the big issue of climate change? It really helped me see, well, actually, if you start working on things that you can start to affect you can have and leverage those effects. For a big change, where I'm heading now is to move into a digital platform that can then be used to reach more people than I can do in workshops. I know I can get people to take action. I know I can get people to make commitments, and develop a habit if I get them in the workshop. And maybe if I give them one, I'm not sure if it's the wine or the workshop. But that's not going to scale. So for me, the challenge is so how do you do this the challenge that all of us face? How do you scale these efforts in a digital environment? That's what I'm working on now. On Andy, my ally and I first met, you told me to read Dan Ariely. He's Predictably Irrational. And I think how generosity kind of exists in people's lives mostly as a proxy for our relationships with others with causes we care about, in many ways, it's highly irrational. And part of our failures as society to engage more people in what is a beautiful kind of movement and struggle is that we treat it in a very rational manner, like, oh, if you believe in this cost, and you should be involved in this project. And that's it, right? But in fact, like, when I used to coordinate volunteers, people used to be like, how do you make sure people come back and I said, the number one predictor of people coming back to volunteer is not how strongly they care about the cause, or how engaged they are, it's whether they came with a friend, right? Which is not kind of what you'd like to imagine it is. But it is getting back to the fact that what we're talking about is very, very human. I haven't yet found the ways in which it's predictably irrational. And I think that's part of what eventually and what we need to do is scale, the work will start to uncover and what I'm most excited about this product, project and product doing is to show us the ways in which generosity and impact are predictably irrational, or the ways it is rational. And I actually was just to share, like, the moment I knew it was time to quit my job and pursue this full time was after reading a book called Dataclysm, which is written by the founders of OkayCupid, they basically said, we're writing this book because we now understand how people act around attraction when they think no one's looking. And that book had insights on race and ethnicity and gender, that I, as an ethnic studies major, never kind of found myself and, and I was like, Okay, this is fascinating, like, but what if we could have this same insight or the same accessibility to how people act around having an impact on the world or being generous, and thus giving side which is our opportunity both to develop pride in people's identities as givers and activists, but also to know, kind of how people act when they think no one's looking around their generosity impact?
Thomas: I would just add one thing, Tom, I was thinking about your question. And I think for me, a big moment was when my ally Tracy DeLuca, I'd been talking about this ladder of climate engagement. And she said, make the damn ladder, make a physical object. So I got my handy post-it notes and I made a ladder. And pretty quickly, I saw that my ladder was not her ladder. Composting is the first step. And she said composting, sorry, I said not if you live in Palo Alto, she said, but if you live in San Francisco, and but the point was making physical objects, which is obviously everybody in the room knows, okay, yeah, that's part and parcel of what we do. But getting out of my head and into the physical objects, and making that available to other people was a real big accelerator for my process.
In the fellowship, we tried to emphasize experimentation and distinguish between an experiment and a prototype. So oftentimes, especially if you're doing design thinking or humans are diminished in a shorter format, you kind of make something and you show it to somebody or you try to give them the experience of it. We were really trying to emphasize putting your idea out into the real world, the real system you're trying to affect, and seeing what happens. I think you both did that. Maybe just hear about that experience?
Mick: Can I just say a word about the experiment? Because this is one of the words that's sort of when I first heard it. You know, I remember saying to Nadia, experiment, really, I mean, experiment means you control things. And, you know, social science experiments have a certain meaning, totally different meaning here. I guess I have done a couple of things. One with Mario's good help. In the sprint, I developed a Facebook page called Old People Don't Care About Climate Change. And it was a takeoff on a funnier dive video by the same title. And what I was trying to do was to see if I could use Facebook as a platform to get older adults to share their climate memories? And what impact would that have? And in three days with Mario's great help, I got a Facebook page up and running. It's still there. I'm not curating it right now. But it's still getting likes, Mario. Thanks for checking in every day, I appreciate it. So that was an example of putting something out there to see what impact it would have. And more recently, I've been running workshops here, we're trying to look at the impact of how to structure that commitment contract I talked about, and would that affect the stickiness and the ability to move people from action to habit?
Thomas: Is there anything that surprised you or that you got out of the Facebook experiment?
Mick: Yeah, one of the surprises was somebody had a member of my team now, Samantha Feinberg, who's the social media person on my team, who's done a lot of work with Project Happiness. Have you gotten your daily dose of happiness on Facebook? Samantha said, with your demographic 60 and above, you're not going to have to reach out to them, they're gonna find you on Facebook. And I really question that, she's right, you just put it out there and pretty quickly, they will find you. So it was reassuring in some ways. So that as we build out this, the media platform that we're developing, it's pretty clear Facebook, for my demographic, is really one of the key places to be in trying to reach the 60 plus population.
Mario: Our products up and live. I mean, I think the biggest thing for me is just focusing on the moments of surprise. And so because of that, my brother and I, who I work on, on giving side, we have a Slack channel where every time something comes in, that we're surprised about, we put it down, and then we come back to it every week because it's in those moments where our biases are challenged, or our kind of own set of assumptions are thrown into question that I think we had learned things. Yeah, and I feel like that's the biggest takeaway. And that surprise has actually been super, it's made certain things super difficult. The fact that I still can't predict from like, any of you are people in different environments who come onto my platform, who will use it most and who won't, in some ways made me question myself and my understanding of people. But it's also been this kind of inspiring problem of wanting to figure out why get to the bottom of all those questions, but also being okay with allowing those questions that kind of exist in the air.
Mick: I would add one thing on it while I'm here, I've also been running a Social Science Research Project, with some folks at Columbia and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, looking at the difference between legacy induction and place induction. When I asked you to think of a place, psychologists would call it a place induction. And it turns out that asking you to think of a place has a much bigger impact in getting you to think about 40 to 50 years from now, than asking you to think about what your legacy is, why do I go there? Because for me being able to integrate that part of my expertise, and be able to inform the design that I'm doing here that says, Oh, yeah, that that place thing actually works, is really important to integrate those two. So that's been helpful.
Thomas: Okay, we'll leave it there.
Nadia: Sid is with us by Skype. And I want to take a second. So she is leading the Innovation Lab at the federal government's office of personnel and management at OPM. And she also heads up their Presidential Management Program, Fellows Program, and she would have the humble task of trying to bring innovation into and across the US government employee workforce. And others she was already doing this work before she joined us. Her time here was spent on figuring out how to which populations she wanted to work on and more focus on how to work with existing barriers and new ways to approach this challenge. So she's still working on that and has come a long way but will still join us again in the spring and talk about kind of how she's applying that in her work. So I'm now going to introduce Angie and Mark. Angie came to us as a Program Manager for SF Unified School District, a future dining experience. It was an IDEO-designed initiative of student nutrition services. And she's going to be leaving and going back to SFUSC as our Director of Strategy and Innovation for that program. She is deeply passionate about food and making sure students are well-nourished because hungry students have a really hard time learning. Angie is working on alleviating cultural and emotional barriers for students of color concerning school meals, that she's working on the entire experience. But that was something she came here specifically to focus on. Mark, he was a fellow that helped us prototype what it looks like to go through the international visa process. So because he came to us, he came to us from Canada from Vancouver, which apparently is challenging as well. And to do that, to go through that he's already a successful entrepreneur, started many restaurants, a brewery, his own charity, and the nine other businesses in different areas. He also started Save on Meat in Vancouver, a social impact incubator that feeds trains and employs marginalized and isolated communities and saves on meats created an alternative currency. It's a token program where you get a coin and allows someone to feed someone in need without the exchange of money. So use the coin essentially. And it was used over 100,000 times to essentially give people meals without the exchange of money. He was coming here to figure out how they could digitize that program and scale the program. But a while here, I think he's also shifted away from necessarily that specific issue. And he'll talk more about that.
Thomas: Let's go to Angie. Tell me about what you came in with what you've been doing.
Angie: Sure, okay. So I think a lot of you were here at the lookout point conversation or a presentation where I told the story of Marcel, who was an African American student with an SFUSD, who was essentially choosing hunger over school meals, and his choice. Now, these are intentional. His choice was actually what prompted me into this fellowship. And I really wanted to understand why some students were opting in or opting out of our school meal program. And as Nadia said, because hungry students have a hard time learning and we as a school district have an incredible opportunity through school meals to ensure that no child misses out on their educational opportunities, because we can provide them a delicious and nutritious meal. So during this fellowship, I had some really incredible opportunities to interview students, staff, family members, community members, and perform some experiments that really provided a lot of insights into why our students are making their choices around school meals. And those insights essentially identified five key food influencers who exist in our children's lives. Oftentimes, we within the school district, think of school food as kind of like a monolith in terms of influence around food choices. But through the fellowship identified these five different food influences in the community, in the farm, in the home, in the school itself, and through policy, that does have a huge impact on our kids' dietary habits. So as I leave this fellowship, I'm taking with me a framework, which I'm calling the youth food model, which essentially is a tool that we can use within the district, and that other school districts can use to identify opportunity areas amongst those five food influencers, where we can partner together, and essentially create a narrative that exists throughout our children's lives. So inside the school, and beyond those walls of the school building, to create a more holistic food experience for our children. And so as I go back into the district, as Nadia said, I'll be going back as the Director of Innovation and Strategy. And I will be very much focused on this idea of bringing that youth food model back, but then also thinking about how we can design our organization in order to use design thinking as part of an everyday tool. So that way, I no longer exist as a problem solver, but yet, my team can then use those tools to be the problem-solvers within the school food space. And then with that, we also are going to be utilizing a $20 million bond that the citizens of San Francisco approved of the go bond, to revamp our kitchens and really think about the space redesign. So building on all the great work that we've been doing within the district by space redesign, but also thinking about our kitchens. So we have a really awesome opportunity to really reimagine and redesign the system. And I'm kind of taking it as an opportunity also to question if you can, essentially create five new design principles, a new system that can actually change what our old system was manifesting like outcomes, the old system was manifesting. So essentially, we want our children to be joyful eaters. We want them to be feeling very encouraged to participate in the meal program. And then we just also want them to feel very cared for through our meal program. And essentially, I'll know if I've done my job if every single day our kids are essentially looking forward to lunch. So that's what I'm going back into the district doing.
Thomas: Yours is a great project, I think all are like, well, I think you kind of do very concrete face to face things with students like talking to them, interviewing them, experiments. But then also you're coming, you're going back to your district with something much more on a systemic and strategy level and trying to integrate that and get people bought into that and try and actually change the whole system. Maybe to start could just tell us, tell us a couple of specifics. And if you can, like an experiment you did, for example? Sure. And if you can connect that to how does that affect the bigger thinking? But start with maybe to start with experiment?
Angie: Yeah, sure. So I did experiments around snacking, and also seeing if we can incentivize participation in the meal program. And so, you know, when you think about the system as a whole, those are going to be two aspects that are actually going to really have a big impact on the system. But the system as a whole needs to be redesigned and reimagined in order to prompt different outcomes. But in terms of those experiments, when we thought about the snacking, that was actually a really cool experiment, I worked with a group of students, and we did a design workshop where we created a food stand. And then, so talking about the food bottle, and I was talking about all those different influencers and the better part of our children's lives. One was the community. And so I reached out to 10 friends who live in San Francisco, and I was like, would you be willing to donate 10 bucks. And if you could donate 10 bucks, that's going to fund roughly 160 pounds of fruit for two schools to do a snack project. And so from that, we connected the community, we connected farmers, so farmers that existed outside of our USDA commodity crops, and then we also connected the school. And so from those three influencers, we were able to create this food stand within the school and we thought, Hey, this is gonna last for like a week at most. But we set up all these systems with the kids to take care of it, you know, to monitor it, keep the food safe. Within two hours, we had given away all the fruit, the students just walked by the stand, picked it up, and went away with it. When we had persimmons, we had grapefruit, we had mandarins. So we had different types of fruit that are, you know, not what you would normally see on the mill line. So it was pretty, it was exciting, it was encouraging, it was like holy shit, this works. But then going back into the district, I started thinking, I was like, yeah, we can do a snack program. And that's going to be one element of our change, you know. And so that's when I started thinking and Sam yen actually gave me the language around it. But thinking about organizational design, and thinking how we now need to go back and design our organization a little bit more, utilizing the tools of design thinking, utilizing these sets of design principles that we now have to actually integrate the snacking program, get people to understand why the snacking program is valuable. But then also think more broadly about all the potential changes that we can make in order to actually have a food system that really makes our children feel cared for and valued.
Thomas: Hey, one of the I think the challenge, a challenge we all have, in doing these systemic challenges these projects are is that you want to get scale or you want to change the system. But you also have this bind between that and like getting started in a way. Like how do you think about those experiments in terms of affecting your vision or those interviews you did affect your vision, how those interrelate to each other?
Angie: Sure, I can't tell you how many meetings I've sat in and like referenced one of the experiments or referenced an interview with a student, they've given me the stories to tell, to get the buy-in. So I mean, I think we all know that storytelling is a huge part of design thinking, and being able to tell the stories of your work in order to it almost allows for empathy. So that person you're talking to doesn't have to go and do the empathy experience with the kid. But I can tell the story in such a way that gets that buy-in and gets them to feel that emotional connection to the child, or just to show what success can be like, Hey, we did this. We worked with the students to see what we created because the students designed it. And it worked. Like these things can work I was able to. I was in a conversation with a food bank the other day, and I was like, Yeah, I believe in snacking, our team believes in snacking because we saw what can happen if you just put fruit out. You know, in under two hours, you can give away 60 pounds, 60 pounds of fruit. That's a hell of a lot of fruit. And so it's just really exciting to be able to use those stories to validate the work and validate the fact that our kids will eat. We just have to do it in a way that's meaningful to them.
Thomas: Can we go to you? Maybe just tell us about what you came in with what you've been working on, what have you developed?
Mark: Yeah, I just want to give a quick voice to the part of this fellowship that is most exciting is getting to work with people who have aligned work, Angie, and I, the first conversation we had was I work in food systems where people are marginalized. Some of those people marginalized their children and the elderly. Like Mick is old. Just what a gift to have this level of intimacy but also expertise to use throughout. So I came in with the thought that empathy led to 100,000 people being fed in a six-block group The US, which is one of the largest open-air drug markets in North America, which exists in BC, and that empathy was just so targeted towards something. I thought if we can harness that power, how can we scale it? And as a designer of design spaces have designed structural models for staffing for interventions for all sorts of different things. But I never really had the language that was provided here at Stanford, like, what is rapid prototyping? For me that's building a business, and what is iteration? That's when your business isn't working, you change it. And so I had some real skills. And so coming in learning the rest of the hard skills, which were research, actual research, not just like seeing a space and saying, Oh, I think that poker tables are going to be hot. So let's open up okay, spot, but like actually asking people if they like rockfish, you know, as an analogy, so going deeper into ethnography into research, and all of those things, maybe pivot, that the empathy that led people towards using a program and all the donations that we see for our charity for people who are marginalized, they want to be more involved, and they want to co-create a solution to poverty. And so some of the big numbers that came out of that were like seven out of 10 people in North America are one paycheck away from the street. That's a real number. So well, okay, I'm not talking about homelessness anymore at all. I'm talking about poverty, and the alleviation of that poverty, which ends one of those people from one critical moment into that. So how can we then create a system of support, co-creation, intervention, and all of these things, which was massive for me, I would never have gotten there on my own, there's no way I just would never have given myself the space to do the research and meet with people. And at this point, where, you know, clocking in at just under 100, ethnographic interviews, that have no bias. In my own neighborhood, or in my own country, there's a lot of bias around the work that I do. But when I'm sitting on my design, outline some of the interviews, you know, it's just a guy from Stanford doing research. So there's none of that, oh, you work in homelessness, or, you know about what we're doing. It's just talking to another human, which really pivoted my project. And I think that it's put me into space that I never thought I would say it sort of month 6, I was like, You know what, I really need to do more research. And my team was like, what's in the water? Like? Are you ever coming home? Two weeks? The answer was no. But it's just the journey that has shown me so much. And created, my initial thought was, I'm going to come in here, and we're going to create a top-down solution to work on people. That's the idea where we were pivoted to, in the last couple of months, because of the research like, no, that's not the answer at all. And everybody's tried top-down, you know, thousands of agencies that currently exist, we need a bottom-up solution. And that solution has been incredible. We ran an experiment, and I'll go into the experiment if that's okay. Um, which tested all my assumptions around like the quick assumptions of do people have a mobile device? Who is facing poverty and homelessness? And the answer is 100%. Yes, which was nice to be able to show those statistics that if you make less than $15,000, in the United States of America, you get a smartphone, a data plan, and a story. And when I was running the experiment, I brought an experiment, which was a, like a happy meal, white box with waterproof notepads, waterproof pens, a disposable camera, a smartphone, a data plan, socks, socks was important. And I said, I've got these kits, and it was 24 people 18 on the ladder of homelessness, and six who are an agency because I thought it was important for them to share the experience. And everybody went well on the phone. And they were like nexuses, and iPhones and streaming trenches and people living in their cars, etc. So testing that assumption. And then moving through that. One of the questions that Sara said, and we were whiteboarding and just a quick segue, Sara just kept me on page with actually doing the work. Like without having a design ally, I tend to get in a way more conversations. And she was like, these are the post-it notes that we put on the wall with the stuff that you're thinking about. She's really good at keeping me beholden to do how we summarize synthesis. Post it on the wall. Stop talking, start writing. But in that one of the questions that we asked was, what's the skill and so the project itself, the experiment itself was three times a day for a week, I'm gonna send you a prompt, then you can either write it or text it back to me. But to finish the experiment, you have to do all of them, at the end of it will provide a stipend for you to use at your own leisure. And Sarah said we should ask them about skills. like yeah, we should and so the question was what It's a skill you wish you have, that you wish to use more. And from that the whole project just went full stop and pivoted. Because the responses were incredible from somebody saying, I'm fluent in multiple languages. And I'd like to be a translator to her finding a position less than two weeks later, getting $35 an hour doing that specific thing. two gentlemen who had auto mechanic skills, but had PTSD and couldn't be around loud noises. But I want my cars fixed faster. So what if you could have people working graveyards by themselves, and all these other notions of people can be co-designing their own success? And what's more?
Nadia: One other experiment, I think she talked about the experiment we've been doing a second semester, if you will, that didn't start out as an experiment, but has just gone off the rails.
Mark: We will definitely do that. Thomas is gonna run a prompt.
Thomas: The prompt, tell me about that experiment.
Mark: We're iterating. That's what we call this, right? So one of the women in the research study came from severe abuse decades long. And it found herself out of that. And one of the things when we were unpacking the synthesis with Sidney and her, her daughters through meditation, yoga, and multiple other spiritual pieces. And she said I would like to be your researcher or lead researcher on the project. And we were like, Okay, this is dangerous territory, like where do we? Where's our level of responsibility? What do we do here? And we just approached it like what Anything else? And our name is Sylvia Martin. And she started working seven weeks ago doing research. And I think what Sarah was smiling so big about when she was talking about it as a would give Sylvia a specific thing to research and say, Would you mind digging into this for us, and you know, 63 emails later have great detail, exposing all sorts of blind spots, like banging down doors, interviewing people directly about the work one particular interview she did, she went to the Opportunity Center and talked with it, I think it was her seventh trip that she finally got the interview with the guy who ran it. And he ended up just like spilling his guts to her. He's like, I used to work at dawn for six years and a half a paycheck away from the street. And instead of it being a position of her coming to ask for something consistently, and him being overwhelmed with lack of resources, they then became friends. And so they're working towards a common goal. But what Sarah's specifically talking about is one of the key things, the project that we're working on is that resources are impossible to find. We have a list that we uncovered, that has just like lines through it, that was a resource list from Palo Alto, printed in January, in mid-February 80% of the stuff that was on there doesn't exist. So Sylvia took it upon herself, to start correcting these things in Google Maps. And that's part of what we're trying to build. But I didn't tell Sylvia that we're trying to build that. And so she's out like, hammering people and our competitive market. She's hammering them about why their stuff doesn't work, and just showing us all this beautiful space, but also how much pride she takes in the work, I would say that she's co-building the product at this point. I think she's gonna ask for equity.
Thomas: So both are great examples of this, I want to take a chance to talk about it so that we don't talk about that much in terms of the fellowship, but the idea of you becoming then leaders of design thinking or Human Centered Design, you both have teams, you're or you're in you've been in contact with and you're going back to full time now? Or will you stick around for longer? But when you do go back the full time you're here in Palo Alto.
Mark: Once I made it across the border, man, it's not going back.
Thomas: Yeah. Tell me about going back to your team. Let's start with Angie. Like, how does this design fit into now how you're positioned as you go back and work with your team?
Angie: Sure. So my job, in particular, is to go back to teach, essentially design thinking to my team, I led a workshop amongst the managers within the department. And there were four of us or five of six of us there. And in that workshop, you know, we were doing two by twos and everything. And I was using the tools of design thinking without necessarily saying the terms of design things. I wasn't like, this is empathy. This is ideation. This is but by the end of the experience, we had actually come up with our essential design principles of how we're going to be like recreating our department. And so it was fascinating to see that happen and take place because that's something we've been trying to do for the last three years is coming up with this like statement of how we're going to do this and how to create this change. And we were able to do it in a way that like just felt authentic to our way of thinking and operations but yet still utilizing the tools of design thinking and you know, at the end we all went which was really cool, I can't tell you how many workshops I've led within the department now, where we start off with play, which is one of the big things that I learned here was just the idea that you need to have fun and you know, be present, I had been tired office, which is 29 of us in the conference room last week, playing paper, rock scissors, and then cheering, you know, Have y'all done that Stoker you play paper, arches. And then, and so we had the last two and everyone's cheering and stuff. And so it's, it's almost as though I'm integrating the concepts of design thinking into the office through fun, and like through play, and just through showing the folks that you know, what you're doing, this is actually a tool that you can use, if you just kind of alternate just to touch, this is going to amplify your work. So it's been a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to it. I have another series of workshops coming up, where we're going to start working on different problems that we're facing. And I'm just really excited to see our team feel empowered to make a change within the organization. And this set of tools is giving them almost the space to be able to do that, or the resources to be able to do that and how to think about that change a different way, if that isn't common within, you know, come into bureaucracies isn't sure Sid could attest to this. It's exciting. I'm looking forward to it.
Thomas: Cool. You wanna say?
Mark: Sure, I'll just go quickly. We're gonna Mario and Angie are walking the other day Mario was talking about how long it took him to onboard the language of startup through like, being subscribed to a newsletter. And like, he learned all of this language. And I said, the danger for me with my team is I learned language, and then I abused it, I just use it every second word. So I mean, I go in, and I'm just speaking, in a glossary they don't understand was my first visit home. And luckily, they're bold enough at all times that tell me I'm full of crap. And to, like, write the glossary down. And so we started to figure out what our shared language was, which we never did. And so from chefs, to outreach workers to you know, farmers. And so now we have this shared language that was provided through design thinking, we don't call it design thinking, we call it to work. And they better be doing it right now. Right until six, at least. And so yeah, it's just been really amazing to say, you know, we don't need to workshop this, we need to whiteboard this, it's like the whiteboards already exists like they're there in the room, let's get to work and like, plot out what the weeks gonna look like what the months gonna look like. And we're in the middle of a project, we're developing a new brand, right now, we have a small design group. And it's just so much easier. Because if you have a language or a narrative or vernacular around stuff, and you try to, while you're in the process, or inflow of the process, if you have to try and stop and explain it, it ruins that flow. And so now everybody has that shared language on my team, and they correct me when I use it inappropriately.
Thomas: When we start, we kind of base our use process and how we describe the process here, particularly for DP 1, I think we kind of like went through those modes of working, when we've moved on, like, that changes, right. And I'm just wondering if there's times you remember, when you designed your own process, or how you feel like you have adjusted and how you use design in your work?
Angie: I think my biggest example of this is when I was doing empathy interviews for kids, and it was so uncomfortable, like I, my job is to talk to kids, and I was having the hardest time getting them to open up about food, and what makes them happy when they eat, and things like that. And after bombing a few interviews, I was like, I need to figure something out, I need a tool to take into these interviews, that way I can succeed in them, we have like a very finite amount of time. And there's, uh, you know, I want to make sure these interviews are super valuable and super-rich. And so I like going through all the different books I can find here, like, you know, the guides that the school has trying to find an empathy tool. And then I had a moment of like, an aha moment where I was like, I can just design one myself, like, I, that's what you do. And I, I described that is actually a point where I went from. So at the start of the fellowship, I was conscious of my incompetence around design thinking. And then I slowly began to be progressing through the process. And I was like, Okay, now I'm conscious of my competence. And at that moment, when I realized I could just design my own tool, I can take this process and create what I need in order to be successful. That's when I moved into the space of being unconscious of my competence. And it became just a skill set that I just started utilizing. So I actually went to Target and roamed the aisles of Target in the toy section to get inspired about different ideas and things that our kids used to be like that they think are cool that they have fun with. I went to the book section, I went to the video game section, and I spent a good hour, two hours at Target. No one kicked me out. I was impressed. And after that, I essentially created a deck of cards that I take into the interviews with students, you know, ones like the zombie apocalypse is coming, what are the five food items that you're going to pack in your bag, you know, and then I turned it into a game Based on some of the games I saw within target, and it was just like, all of a sudden, I had the students interviewing each other, and like having fun and talking in a way that I couldn't engage with them if I was sitting and talking with them as an adult to them. And so it allowed me to be able to then engage with them around food. And it really transformed my work and transformed my own creative confidence in terms of how like, I could approach problems and how I could just utilize the different tools that I've learned here without having to be like, Okay, this is, you know, like, I need to, I don't know, I can't even think of an example right now. But it just really, it was a pivot. No, it was a wonderful pivot. Now I just draw all the time during meetings and stuff, like taking notes and drawing more people. That's great.
Mark: I think we were talking about it yesterday, not that we rehearsed for this, but just in casual conversation about the way that I designed before it came in the way that I design now. And the best way I can describe it is like it was just designed out of necessity. And now I design out of intention, very specifically towards what the end goal would be, and not in the short term, but in like, what's this look like in 5, 10, 15, 20? And have the ability to, I mean, having a Stanford faculty pass is pretty cool. Because you can go to the VR lab and be like, what are you guys doing? Like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm from the d.school, it's fine. But you get to, you get to dig into what's really possible in the ceiling gets way higher, if there was one at all right into what you're thinking might be and what the future looks like, as it all gets so rapid. And so being able to design by intention, it's just been a yeah, big gift. Was that okay?
Thomas: Okay, thank you. got time for quiet. Last one. And maybe you guys want to answer, what to advise a future fellow? what would you give?
Angie: Alright, so first and foremost, I have explained that the fellowship is like getting a connect the dots book with no description of what the picture is supposed to look like. But you have all the dots and you're supposed to like somehow create something. So know that there will be an image at the end or something. But then I would also just say that taking time to reflect, and I think that's been really great through every single phase of the DP 1, DP 2, DP 3, even now, I'm taking the time to reflect on your work periodically. And documented, really, actually, there's a lot of ideas within that reflection. And I thought that at the beginning, that the ideas we’re going to come through the synthesis or come through the experiments, and those would be my aha moments. But I actually had quite a few aha moments, creating a deck. And so I would just say, even when you're tired and frustrated, and trying to build a deck, like 12 o'clock at night, because you have a presentation The next day, it actually is super, super valuable. So take time to reflect and stay present in the process.
Mark: And I got a couple I think the first one is like show up like really show up as your authentic self, warts and all ask, you know, there's this thing when you go into any new class, it's no different than going to your first day grade five, you're like, I want to impress the other kids. I won't say anything too stupid. I don't know who all these people are running around. I know they all have super important jobs, I don't want to bother them too much. But to like really show up and give as much of your time as you can you were brought here for a reason. But also that there's constantly beautiful things happening with other people in the dive into their processes, when you get stuck it is just a great gift. And there are so many people to riff with and to work with. And the other thing just stops and breathes it in. I got a text message this morning. It was like, congratulations, you know, you just did seven months. And you got you're at Stanford, which is if you know me or my background is really a huge leap. So the imposter syndrome, trust that the people who have vetted you know what they're doing and that you would not be here unless they really believed in you. So soak it in. You guys want to
Mick: What they said, but I would just add, trust the process. And, and allow yourself to go with it even when you're not sure how it goes. And I would just echo something that Mark said, which is not only the fellowship program, but the whole set is designed to be a place where you cannot avoid creative connections. Whether it's while you're cutting your card deck or xeroxing, or trying to figure out how to do things here. People are going to come up to you and say, you know, I was thinking about your project and that kind of, you don't know where that's going to lead except it is going to lead to good places. And you're going to be better for it and your project is going to be better for that. Then, of course, the fellowship. I mean, the fellows are great resources, personally, and professionally, even Mario.
Mario: I'm his favorite. I think for me a couple of things, one, just to remember that we are on parallel tracks, right. So there's our project. But there's also who we are as people going through this process. And then there is the larger systemic change that we were intentionally brought in because we were working on systems levels change. And so to understand that that system-level change may not equal your project, right. And so, by kind of focusing on those three things, I think it allows you to extract as much as you can. And then just the second thing, there's a difference between impact and legacy. And I think the impact is kind of what we learn from Studio from the different sessions. But the legacy will be the relationships that we kind of, have passed this that we formed with each other. And so to, to also remember to invest in that in our time together. And I think we certainly as fellows, and God, I wish Sid was here as well, really kind of investing in each other's lives. Because I think, you know, the legacy of this will be the way that we support each other. And we all kind of see ourselves between the five projects, if you look really closely at what we're doing, they're all going to converge pretty soon. And that moment when it does is going to be super exciting, because it also means that we've built our kind of spheres of influence, so much so that our work starts to overlap, and just become so much more powerful.
Mick: We call that moment the Rapture.
Thomas: Excellent. Thanks, guys, for sharing. Let's give it up for all. A couple more things. Next year, fellowship, Nadia has helped me realize that there's also a whole bunch of people that can't be here can't be one of the five fellows this year, that and we've built tools, curriculum, a way of thinking about these things, that could be a benefit to those folks, too. So next year, we went to a couple of things. One is to have a workshop where we call it an intensive opportunity for folks, not just five, but maybe 50 or more to come here and learn this tool, set this approach and actually bring that back into the organizations into their nonprofit organizations into philanthropy into social impact. So we're gonna do that. And then we will also want to do the deep fellowship as we did, as we've been doing for the past five years, likely starting in January or early 2018. We all send them off as much as we're sending them off. We all send our love. Yeah, could you stand up? And, and, and wish on back? I'll do the count. Okay, so it'll be 123 and then clap and then wish. Okay, let's get down here.
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