Rachel: What if the best way to solve a complex business problem, like hospital efficiency, has nothing to do with business at all? What if the answer is to ignore the spreadsheets and focus on reducing one single thing: fear? Justine: That feels completely counter-intuitive. Most organizations I know would throw more technology or a new process at that problem, not… feelings. It sounds like you’re about to tell me something that will make my next corporate strategy meeting very awkward. Rachel: It just might. That's the radical idea at the heart of Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg. Justine: And she's not just some theorist, right? She's the Executive Director of the Stanford d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. This book is basically a toolkit straight from the source. Rachel: Exactly. It’s a collection of mindsets and over eighty different exercises from one of the world's epicenters of innovation. It even won the Porchlight award for Innovation & Creativity Book of the Year, so it has some serious credibility behind it. Justine: Okay, so it’s more than just a book, it's a manual from the front lines of creative thinking. Where do we even start with something like that? Rachel: The best way to understand its power is through a story. A story about a group of students who were given a straightforward assignment and ended up changing over a million lives by completely misunderstanding the problem in the most brilliant way possible.

Justine: I'm intrigued. A brilliant misunderstanding sounds like my specialty. What was the assignment? Rachel: It was a d.school class called Design for Extreme Affordability. The year was 2012, and a team of Stanford graduate students—Edith Elliot, Katy Ashe, and a few others—partnered with a famous hospital in Bangalore, India, called Narayana Health. Their task seemed clear: find ways to improve patient flow. Justine: Right, a classic efficiency problem. Get people in and out faster, reduce costs, improve outcomes. I can already picture the flowcharts and spreadsheets they were probably expected to make. Rachel: That’s what they thought, too. Their initial focus was on a very logical metric: reducing hospital readmissions. It’s a huge, expensive problem in healthcare everywhere. Patients get discharged, something goes wrong at home, and they end up right back in the hospital. Justine: Makes perfect sense. A clear, measurable goal. So what happened when they got to India? Rachel: They started doing what the d.school teaches: they went out and talked to people. Not just doctors and administrators, but patients and, crucially, their families. They spent time in the waiting rooms, in the recovery wards, and what they found had very little to do with medical charts or logistics. They found an overwhelming atmosphere of fear. Justine: Fear? What were the families afraid of? Rachel: Everything. Imagine your loved one has just had major heart surgery. You’re sent home with a bag of pills and a sheet of instructions you can barely understand. You’re terrified you’ll do something wrong. Will they be in pain? What if a wound gets infected? How do you even help them sit up or bathe? The families were paralyzed by this emotional and financial burden. They felt completely helpless. Justine: Wow. That’s a powerful observation. The problem wasn't a failure of medical procedure; it was a failure of human support. The system was discharging a patient, but it wasn't preparing a caregiver. Rachel: Precisely. The students had this huge realization. The key wasn't in the hospital at all; it was in what happened after the hospital. They saw that the families, who were desperate to help, were an incredible, untapped resource. They were the most motivated healthcare workers you could possibly imagine. Justine: Hold on, they were just students, right? How did they convince a massive, successful hospital to listen to a bunch of grad students saying, 'Hey, your entire discharge model is focused on the wrong thing'? Rachel: That’s the beauty of the process. They didn't just present a theory; they built something. They created a simple, low-tech prototype. It was a training program for family members, conducted right there in the hospital before the patient was discharged. They used the waiting time, which was usually just a period of anxiety, and turned it into a classroom. Justine: What did they teach them? Complex medical skills? Rachel: The opposite. They taught high-impact, simple health skills. How to monitor for infection. How to manage medication. How to recognize warning signs. They created checklists and used a train-the-trainer model so nurses could easily deliver the program. They were essentially turning family members into confident, capable post-op caregivers. Justine: That's incredible. So they effectively shifted the problem from 'how do we stop people from coming back to the hospital?' to 'how do we reduce the fear and suffering of the families who care for them?' Rachel: Exactly. And one of the founders, Edith Elliot, has a fantastic quote in the book about this. She says, "If we had gone in with the problem statement ‘reduce readmissions to the hospital,’ we wouldn’t have gotten to the same solution. Our problem statement was very emotional. It was about reducing fear and suffering." Justine: And what was the result? Did it work? Rachel: It was a massive success. The pilot program was so popular that other wards in the hospital started demanding it. That student project became a real organization called Noora Health. By the end of 2020, they had trained over a million family members across India and Bangladesh. And the data backed it up: their programs led to a 71% reduction in post-surgical complications for heart patients and a 24% reduction in readmissions. Justine: So by focusing on the emotional problem—the fear—they ended up solving the original business problem more effectively than they ever could have by just looking at the numbers. Rachel: That's the core insight. The most powerful solutions often live in the human, emotional space that we're trained to see as "soft" or secondary to the "real" technical problem.

Justine: This story feels like it's about so much more than just one project. It points to a completely different way of operating in the world. Rachel: It really does. And that brings us to the second big idea from the book. This story is the perfect illustration of what Sarah Stein Greenberg calls "design as an attitude." She quotes the artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy, who said that design should be "transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness." Justine: I like that. It’s democratizing the idea. You don't have to be a 'designer' with a fancy degree who wears black turtlenecks. It’s a mindset anyone can adopt. Rachel: It's a mindset of curiosity and action in the face of the unknown. The Noora Health team didn't have a map. They had a vague starting point, and they learned their way to a solution. And this is where the book gets really profound. The author's mentor, David M. Kelley, the founder of IDEO, has a quote in the book that perfectly captures this. Justine: What does he say? Rachel: He says, "Creative work involves making things seem tangible and real, but what you really take with you to the next challenge or job is not what gets made, but the way to make it, and the understanding of how to do it again." Justine: Ah, so the 'product' of the Noora Health project wasn't just the training program. The real product was the team's new understanding—the process they developed for uncovering a human need and building a solution. The process itself is the prize. Rachel: Yes! The journey from not knowing to knowing is the work. That's the engine of creativity. The book is filled with exercises designed to build that muscle, to make you more comfortable with ambiguity and more skilled at learning your way forward. Justine: Okay, but let's be practical for a moment. That was a team of brilliant Stanford students with institutional support and funding to fly to India. The book itself has been gently criticized by some readers for having so many exercises that require group participation. How does a solo person, or a small team at a regular company without those resources, actually adopt this 'design attitude'? Rachel: That's a fair and important question. The book isn't meant to be a prescriptive list you have to complete from start to finish. It’s a buffet, a toolkit. You don't need to fly to India. The core principle can be applied anywhere. It starts with changing the questions you ask. Justine: What do you mean? Rachel: Instead of starting with "What's the solution?", you start with "What's the human experience here?" Instead of "How can we increase sales?", you could ask, "What's making our customers hesitate? What are they afraid of losing or what do they hope to gain on an emotional level?" It's about shifting your lens from your own goal to their reality. Justine: So it’s less about 'doing design thinking' in a formal, workshop-heavy way, and more about just being relentlessly curious about the human side of any problem you face. Whether it’s a project at work or figuring out why your kids won't do their chores. Rachel: Exactly. The attitude is one of inquiry. You approach the unknown not with a fixed plan, but with a desire to learn. You make a small prototype—a new way of talking about chores, a different kind of meeting agenda—and you see what happens. You learn, you adapt, you try again. The process is the same, whether the stakes are a multi-million dollar hospital system or just getting your Tuesday morning back on track. Justine: That makes it much more accessible. The real work is fighting the urge to jump to a solution before you've truly understood the emotional landscape of the problem. Rachel: And that takes courage. It's uncomfortable to sit in the "I don't know" space. But as the book shows, that's where all the truly innovative answers are hiding.

Rachel: When you pull it all together, the big lesson from the Noora Health story and the entire book is that we are so often trained to solve the problem we are given. We're rewarded for efficiency, for checking the box. Justine: Right, we want to be the person who has the answer, who comes in with the perfect, polished solution. Rachel: But the creative breakthrough, the real innovation, happens when we have the courage to find the real problem. And that problem is almost always a human, emotional one that’s hiding behind the technical one we were assigned. Justine: And that the journey itself, that messy, uncertain process of discovery, is the actual work. The book has another great line about the designer Charles Eames, saying "The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work." It’s not a bug in the system, it's the entire feature. The uncertainty is where the magic happens. Rachel: It completely reframes failure. An experiment that doesn't work isn't a failure; it's just a very effective way of learning something new. It’s a stepping stone on that path from not knowing to knowing. Justine: So what's the one thing people listening can take away from this? Not everyone can redesign a hospital's discharge process. Rachel: The takeaway isn't to go start an NGO. It's to ask one different question this week. When you face a problem, at work or at home, resist the urge to immediately ask, "How can I fix this?" Justine: What should they ask instead? Rachel: Ask, "Who is struggling here, and what are they feeling?" Start there. See what you discover when you lead with empathy instead of efficiency. It might change the entire problem you thought you were solving. Justine: I love that. It's a simple, powerful shift in perspective. And it’s a question anyone can ask, anywhere. We'd love to hear from our listeners about this. What's a problem you've been trying to solve with pure logic that might actually need an emotional lens? Let us know what you discover. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.