In this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk about all things creativity, innovation, and design. Our guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of Stanford’s Design School, aka the d.school.

She has a new book out called Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. They have taken years of learning and ideas from Stanford’s Design school and put it in this awesome new book, and we get to dive in to all of it.

Sarah shares why reflections matter so much, and also tells why metacognition is important. We dig into what it's like running one of the most well-known design schools in the world, and how design students are different today than they were in the not-so-distant past. Also, pay special attention to Sarah's ideas on weird and the role of curiosity in creativity and design.

Sarah Stein Greenberg on Reflections and Creativity

Sarah talks about finally being back in the physical space of Stanford campus. She describes the space that she has a space for reflection, full of writing space to record her thoughts as they come.

When asked if reflection is really important in design, Sara shares that it plays a part in it. That it is something that should go hand-in-hand with action.

“I think reflection is kind of the underappreciated partner of action. In a lot of cases, when people think about creativity, they think about brainstorming and exuberance, and that that spark of inspiration. But reflection, I think about it as it's like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those two things are, inextricably linked action and reflection. So yeah, I'm a big proponent of those quiet moments, where you're trying to make sense or really think about what might be the implications of your creative work.” = Sarah Stein Greenberg

What? So What? Now What?

Sarah shares about the difference between thinking and reflection. Thinking might include everything from coming up with new ideas, charting the vision, or even some parts of analysis / research. Reflection focuses more on thinking about your own process or practice, or looking back at your data more critically.

Sarah goes on to say that reflection in particular benefits from specific scaffolding and practices, and brings up one of her favorite one: the What? / So What? / Now What?, which a few of her colleagues have originated.

“The scaffold is called What? So what? Now What? You can kind of have a scaffolded reflection and think about, what did I just learn in that particular class or that particular project? How do I want to improve my own work? But if you use a scaffold like What, So What, and Now What, you really get into the details. You might write down everything that happened, then you might think about what did all of that mean? Why is that important? Why did that feel like what I wanted to capture? And then Now What is the opportunity to think for each of those. So what for each of those implications? What do I want to do about that? Is that something I want to practice? Is that something I want to improve?” = Sarah Stein Greenberg

For Sarah, the quality of reflections changes dramatically if you have a detailed flow on how to approach and assess what you currently have.

Sarah Stein Greenberg on Metacognition

The conversation then steers into how a lot of people nowadays aren’t really thinking, or thinking about thinking. Most content or “new things” in the market are just variations of the same things that we already have, just rebranded or given a new “spin”.

Sarah agrees with this sentiment, and also talks about metacognition, which is the technical term for “thinking about thinking”. For her, it's a skill that should be embedded in the heart of our education.

“(Metacognition) is one of those kinds of secret skills that I firmly believe should be embed...