Whole-Life Success Principles Podcast

Dori Etter
Welcome to today's episode. Today we are going to be speaking with Tracy DeLuca. We're going to be talking about creativity and specifically how to access your creativity through the design process. Now, I am super excited that Tracy is here with us. She's done so much -- really phenomenal diversity in her experience, and she's just super fun. I am going to give a little intro of who she is. She's the founder of How Might We Design, which is a creative consultancy focused on the global transformation of clinical and everyday mental health. Recently, she was the principal design lead for Sutter Health's Design and Innovation Team, and Tracy helped launch a series of successful innovation initiatives across that system, including a new virtual first primary care model that integrates behavior change and soon mental health into everyday care. And it's supported by a more accessible value-based insurance experience. So just in that statement, there are a series of questions I'm going to end up asking you, Tracy.

Tracy DeLuca
Okay.

Dori Etter
Additionally, you led the design for Sutter's Mental Health Reimagined initiative, where your work focused on a human-centered deep dive into the acute care experience and strategic development of an engagement platform to support youth 15 to 22 as they transition out of formal care and back into their everyday lives. Now, what you're doing in health care and mental health is really incredible. And prior to your healthcare industry experience, you spent seven years at IDEO as a communications design and project lead, and 10 years working in advertising. You've also mentored social impact fellows at Stanford University's D school and you have your own podcast (we're going to talk a little bit more about here) called Results May Vary, where you really teach design thinking superpowers to as many people as possible. We're going to talk about design thinking superpowers today too. And something that many of us where I live are going to touch soon is the redesign to LA County voting system that you worked on that was featured in the Access and Ability Exhibit for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, actually you guys should be expecting that in the primary voting. It should be being tested. So I'm super excited that it's finally coming to fruition after so many years of work. And just to be clear, I only worked on the first phase of that project that's been going on for a while and many, many people have touched it. So I was just honored to be able to do the research phase of that and sort of help establish some of the strategic frameworks of these moving forward.

Dori Etter
That is amazing, just the breadth of the world and people's lives that you are touching. This is really remarkable and inspiring. And now I'm going to ask you, what does it mean when you say design process.

Tracy DeLuca
There's a lot of baggage I feel that comes with the word design; people come to it through their own experiences. So it could be anything from graphic design to interior design to life design. When I talk about design, what I really mean is decisions. Everything is designed, right? It's either designed by humans or by nature. And that really means it's encoded with instructions for how it exists in the world. And so a blade of grass has its own instructions for how it comes to be. An iPhone also has its own instructions. And when a human is involved with design, that just means that the decisions that were made to determine, "Oh, it's rectangular shape and has the black screen that fits in someone's hand," all of those micro decisions go into a product, a service, an experience. It determines the success of that. And oftentimes, we don't make intentional decisions around these types of projects; we make decisions by default. You know, in a hurry to get something to market we overlook the potential that exists with each of those micro decisions that go into something. And so the design process is a way to creatively and consistently be able to solve complex challenges. So, when I worked at IDEO, their history was really around products. They started as a product design company; they did things like the Apple mouse, the Palm Pilot. And over time, clients would ask them, "Now we have the thing, but how do we have a service experience around this?" You know, so that the Apple Store is a fantastic example of a service experience. When you walk in there, they have classes, they have a Genius Bar. They have people, you know, easy to check you out as soon as you put something in your hand. All of those decisions go into it. And so design and the design process (or some people call it design thinking) has sort of expanded over the years to include more and more things. And now, it's even able to take on complex social challenges. Ideo.org is a great example of an organization that works primarily around issues of poverty and social injustice and reproductive health. And so you can start to solve more and more complex challenges, because this process is so adaptable, and it's agnostic to the environment that you're in. It's a process of empathy. And it's a process of action. And so, the main idea is that you want to understand as best you can, the people that you're designing for. And then you want to have a way to take action around that, and that can be anything from what people probably think of if they know design process at all, which is brainstorming or prototyping or activities like that.

Dori Etter
It sounds to me like it's kind of like bringing a higher level of consciousness to a variety of things that we oftentimes or historically have done on default.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, I've talked about, especially at the beginning of the design process, is a period of sort of holding space, to suspend your judgments and examine your own biases and assumptions, and to hold that space to allow more to come in. So if there's a beam of light shining on the answer, we as humans love to hop to solution, right? We're creative problem-solving creatures, and so we love to hop to a solution immediately. And design is saying just hold up a minute and have more in your consideration set. Expand your environment beyond what you already know. Because we're all intelligent individuals, you know. We have gotten success in our lives, we're still alive. You know, we've successfully navigated complex problems in the past. And so our assumption is, well, we're smart and we can solve these new problems the same way that we've solved the old problems. And in reality, when you have these really complex problems that are intractable, that have been trying to be solved for, you know, time and time again, you actually need a new perspective. And so design allows you to have that, and it gives you the space and time to do that.

Dori Etter
I want to ask you a question. I think we had a decent ending there. And a lot of what you're saying, actually I think we're going to talk more about it, Susan and I, in an upcoming episode, that's called Being Less Stupid. So this all makes a lot of sense. There's many other things I could ask you, but I want to ask, what are some of the results that you have produced out of this? We talked a little bit about work that you've done with this, the LA County's voting system. But can you share a little bit more about some of the actual results that have been produced from the things that you've been a part of using this design process?

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah. And we talked a little bit too about the work that we did at Sutter, where we created a virtual first primary care experience. That was really looking at the entire system and saying, what is the care team model look like? So, you know, who are the actual people? What are the roles that are needed? Why do people need primary care in the first place, and what isn't being served today, and what can we imagine for the future? Originally, we expected that that was going to be a space, right? And we were imagining at the end of the first year, we would have a physical location where we would have all the latest and greatest technology. And really turned out that so many people and clinicians lives would be better served by having a be virtual first option. And then if you need to come in, you can do so. So that was one example. Back in my IDEO days, I did a lot of work in food and beverage. So I helped to reinvent a fruit cup. I helped to bring to life for Anheuser-Busch this in-home draft system called Draft Marks that was on the market for a while. I saw it in Target, so I know it existed out in the wild.

Dori Etter
That's very cool.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, my most favorite project that I ever did was for Genentech. They had come to us (it was a while ago, so this doesn't sound as exciting today), but they could analyze genes overnight. And so they wanted to showcase that technology at the TED conference. And so they've asked us to create some sort of exhibit or interaction with participants at the TED conference that would engage them in the topic of epigenetics. And, you know, pretty tall order for people attending TED who are there to see the talks to network with the most important people, creative thinkers in the world. And so we created an activity where they would come in and they would swab their cheek, and then we would turn their results into an individualized soundtrack overnight. So they could come back the next day and listen to the sounds of their genes.

Dori Etter
Very cool. That is very cool. I think that then I can begin to understand how you started to think about then how do you use these? You know, how can I use this in other areas of my life, not just in work? And I know that part of that was The Results May Vary podcast, but there's so many other things that you've been doing. So I'd love for you to share some of those with us.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, well, I just started to notice that I was using what I've learned at work in my own life. And I was fascinated by that, you know. It started to change the entire way that I approached problem solving in general. So having worked in advertising for 10 years, I'd learned a specific way of creative problem solving. And it was a fairly narrow, and I would say, you know, now having done design for so long, a fairly naive approach to complex problems. And so learning the design process really opened up my capacity to, I say, to solve any challenge that's put in front of me. Now, that's a little bit hyperbolic, because I still have a lot of challenges in my life. But it's a more optimistic approach, and it helps me to see the possibilities and potential that may not have been obvious to me back when I thought that writing an awesome tagline would solve the world's problems.

Susan Howard
I'd like to just ask a question: When you're thinking about that (when you're thinking about what are different areas of my life that I want to impact and work as well), what are the kinds of things that you ask yourself? Are there like certain questions that you ask yourself or certain things that you think about that could be useful for the people listening to this podcast to begin to consider?

Tracy DeLuca
Sure. Well, one very tangible example is, my husband and I are having the conversation that at the end of the day we come home and we want to drink wine and watch TV, and not feeling like that was a really the way that we wanted to be living our lives. And so the questions are really the important piece, asking the right question or reframing something in a way that allows you to be more expansive with your thinking. So the question we asked wasn't, How do we watch less TV and drink less wine at the end of the night? It was thinking about what what is that actually doing for us? And we realized that it felt like a reward. You know, we both worked really hard during the day and we wanted to come home and we wanted to feel rewarded and relaxed in our home. And so by reframing that question to say how we feel more rewarded and relaxed at the end of the day, that opened up the possibilities for our thinking. So we brainstormed around that, and we came up with a list of about six or seven things that we could do. And then we started the prototyping and iteration process. So let's see if we actually do some of the things that we set out to do. And it took a couple of tries to actually work through to a place where we felt comfortable with results, but that was a really practical one that we approached.

Dori Etter
I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about your house in Palm Springs and why you created that and what that means to you in the context of this design thinking. And then we are going to get into offering some ways that our listeners can begin to think think this through as well. But I'd love to hear about your Palm Springs house.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, so the Palm Springs house sort of evolved in a similar fashion where somebody planted the seeds that it was a possibility. I've always loved mid-century modern design; I've always felt drawn to Palm Springs. I describe it as the good kind of weird. There's just something about it that is attractive to me. And somebody had mentioned that they had a house down in Palm Springs, and they would go every weekend. And it just felt like a little vacation. So I thought, well, that's nice and I could never afford to have something like that. And I don't really need to have a weekend escape, necessarily. But it did start me thinking about, how could I use a house in a more creative way? Even thinking of it as a way to be creative with my investments, right? So I have money sitting in my account, and I buy and hold like a good investor. And I thought, is there something that I could do that's more active where I feel like I'm actually using it to enhance my life and enhance the lives of others? So, you know, Airbnb or vacation rental by owner, those types of things allow for a different opportunity for people. And then I started to think, well, I also do workshops. You know, I do design workshops, writing workshops, and what if I turned it into a place where I could host those workshops as well and sort of invite people down to have a Design Your Life experience. And you know, really just make it fun. And I found the most amazing property management company called Acme House Co. And they are a similarly minded company where they're looking to do things that are creative in and unusual. So this past weekend, I just went down and had this great experience of Modernism Week where my house was on tour as a modernism tour that was raising money for the local animal shelter. And my house is called Billy's Astro Lounge; it's named after my dog who we had gotten from a foster family. And so I feel really connected to that cause. We had a big reveal party where we just had so many people coming in experiencing this creative expression. And it really felt like the vision was starting to come to life. And so I feel like the podcast sort of opened me up to that possibility. And, you know, just the thinking of designing your life and helping others do that. And then this is an expression of me trying to do that on my own and practicing what I preach, essentially.

Dori Etter
That's fantastic. And we haven't talked much about The Results May Vary podcast, and I think that we will get into that. But I want to ask you, I hear you keep saying creativity. And a lot of people, there's a record that plays in their head that says, "I'm not creative." And I know that you have a particular perspective on that, and I'd love for you to share some of that. Then also, let's get into some some ways that I can start to challenge that for myself, or how do I begin to apply some of this?

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, I think that all of us or many of us, too many of us, have had an experience early, often in our childhoods, where we're told that our voices aren't good enough to be a singer, our drawings aren't good enough to be an artist, the sounds we're making on our instruments don't make us a musician. And it's unfortunate, because to me there's a difference between artistic ability and creativity. So we're all born creative; we are a creative problem-solving species. David Eagleman wrote this amazing book called "The Runaway Species" where he uses the example of the sea squirt, a mollis that at first, when it's born, has a little tail and a brain, and its whole job is to find a place to perch itself and to then live out the rest of its life. And so it's got to find this place, so it ventures forth and it's seeking this novel experience. And then once it finds its location to stay for the rest of its life, the tail falls off and it consumes its own brain, because it no longer needs that resource. Because it will never again seek novelty. Whereas a human brain has expanded three times size since our beginnings, and the front part, the prefrontal cortex, has gotten six times the size. And that's the part that's our decision-making complex, the part of us that recognizes our own individual selves, our personality, our social skills. Everything that sort of makes us human has evolved at a higher rate than the rest of our brain. And so, I say that if you're a living, breathing, seeking human creature, you are born to be creative. Now you might not have the artistic ability, but those are skills and skills can be learned and honed and trained over time. You know, some people are born with more of a natural proclivity for certain artistic endeavors, but if they don't choose to work on their skills they won't become masters. Whereas somebody who isn't born with those natural abilities can work on the skills and actually be as great as anyone.

Dori Etter
Yeah. And I really believe fundamentally (I work primarily in business strategy and marketing and strategic sales and things like that) and that absolutely is a creative endeavor for me. So that's the other thing, is we think creativity equals art. But creativity is much broader than that. And I think that's part of what the whole point of the design process is, to empower people to apply the context of creativity in many different arenas.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, I think the definition of creativity in the dictionary is something like, creating something that is new and somehow valuable. And that "somehow valuable" piece is completely subjective. So it could just be the value is creating connection between people or entertaining yourself for a few minutes, you know?

Dori Etter
So could you give us a few examples of what someone can do to expand their potential solution set to come up with these creative new and valuable solutions in their own lives?

Tracy DeLuca
So I talk about them is sort of power moves, and there's a few things that we do pretty consistently in the design process that anyone can do. But one is trying to gain as much empathy for the people you're designing for. If that individual is you, that also works. And I would suggest maybe inviting some friends to help you to better understand yourself to some degree. But what you want to have is this felt sense as much as you can, this visceral experience. And so an example of trying to gain this empathy, one of the first projects I ever did was for rheumatoid arthritis patients. And we wanted to understand what it was like to live their daily experience. And so we taped up our joints, our wrists, our ankles, our knees. And we went about the day just trying to do everyday activities. You know, buy a cup of coffee, walk down the block for a couple of blocks, just interacting like you normally would. And then half the team did that in the morning, and then the other half of us were going to do in the afternoon. When we met for lunch, the people who'd done it in the morning, were just, I mean, they were angry. They were in the worst mood. They were exhausted. Their morning has been so horrible, because, again, you think about you're paying for coffee, there's a line of people behind you, the cashier is in a hurry, and you're fumbling with your wallet. Or, you know, you walk down a couple of blocks and your joints are aching, and you're going slower and the people with you don't understand what's happening, because they're not seeing your arm in a sling or something. And that visceral understanding, even for that short period of time, helps you to see exactly what it's like for somebody. So live like that. And so trying to put yourself in these vulnerable positions, or putting yourself in positions where you're uncomfortable as to you're learning something new, just trying to get out of your usual day to day. And then the other things that we do, we'll talk to experts. When we say experts, I mean sometimes we do mean the traditional sense where you know, somebody who's been doing this forever, has a PhD or all these accolades and whatnot. But expert is just an expertise in whatever it is you're designing for. So we did a project with the Girl Scouts where, you know, we really wanted to understand why would a young girl join Girl Scouts these days; there are so many different options available for activities for socializing. And so we had some strategic questions that we wanted to ask, but you can't just go up to a seven year old and ask deep theoretical strategic questions. And so we set up a workshop where the girls could decide to create their own superhero cape. So they got to decide who they were (and not like, from the comic books, but their own superhero), or to create the perfect secret clubhouse, and then we would have them build it. And while they were doing these activities, we were asking them questions and it seemed like a conversation, real casual. And they were just so awesome with their insights and things. And then as designers, we want to make inferences out of what we heard, so we could extrapolate that information. But the girls felt like they just had a great playdate, and we really got the information we needed to have solid strategy.

Dori Etter
I can see the idea of, say, a husband or a wife wanting to improve the relationship in some way and actually setting up an opportunity to not not just ask, are we okay? Or, you know, we need to talk, right? But that idea of setting up an opportunity, environment where we can be together and then engage in a conversation that allows for inferences instead of this sort of really heavy conversation.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, I think nothing kills the creative spirit like the phrase, we need to talk.

Susan Howard
You know, I think one of the other things that I really liked that you're saying about it is a creative endeavor to try to figure out how can I imagine what it's like to be this other person? Those big examples are incredibly creative ways of exploring what somebody else has experienced. And I think that one thing I'm taking away from this conversation is, how can I be more creatively empathetic? You know, how can I actually give myself more of an experience of what it's like to be somebody else? Ultimately, everyone is having their own experience. I can't have your experience, but I can do some things that might actually give me a taste of it. And I think that's just brilliant.

Tracy DeLuca
Yeah, I think so too. I mean, you know, I liken it to when you read a travel guide, you're going to a location that you've never been to before. No matter how much I've traveled and how many guidebooks I've read, I can never really grasp what it's going to be like from simply taking in the information. But as soon as you're in the place and you're having the experience, it's like, "Oh yeah, okay, this makes sense," in a way that it just doesn't when you hear about it or read about it. And so I like to encourage people to put themselves in these new places, new spaces, and experiences just so that they can see the world from a way that they hadn't previously been thinking about it.

Dori Etter
And you said that the design process is fundamentally, for you, empathy and action. And you know, you're using action to achieve empathy as well. So as Susan really pointed out, in the more creatively empathetic. But I'm wondering if you could just briefly kind of share a little bit about that action step, which is that idea of the testing, or you talked about that a little bit more. So maybe an example or some specifics there that a listener could take away?

Tracy DeLuca
Sure. Okay. Yes, because I think that's important. Before like I was saying, we like to jump to solutions. And we like to jump to complete solutions. So we want whatever idea we come up with to be the one that works in its entirety. And then when it doesn't, when the idea comes up again in a different format, we'll say, "Well, we tried that" or "It doesn't work." It's like, well, what part of it doesn't work? Have you broken it down into its component pieces and examined which pieces don't work. Because it could be a good idea. It could just be that the execution of it hasn't been successful. So I can use the example of how to relax at the end of the day again. We came up with, you know, 6 to 10 ideas for what we could do at home to relax at the end of the day and feel rewarded. And we noticed a couple months in, we were back on the couch watching TV. What happened? Those designs expired; they didn't work the way that we wanted them to. And so we did another brainstorm, and we thought, well, okay, what were the reasons why these didn't catch on? You know, behavior change is so difficult. I mean, it's like the Holy Grail of design; it underlies so much of what we experience in the world. And so thinking about, okay, well, what didn't work? Well, this thing requires us to set things up in a way early on in the evening that it just takes too much time. Or, you know, that didn't actually feel rewarding to me; it felt like work. And so, you know, we tried it again. This time we came up with things that were actually outside of the house. So we love comedy, and we love science. And so we started to look for activities out in the world (better if they combine the two together), which we actually found. We did that for a while. And again, it expired after a time. So you kind of just keep working with it. It's more about learning and understanding the process of iteration, then trying to come up with a solution and sticking with that for the rest of your life.

Dori Etter
Yeah, that's brilliant. I love that. I wanted to also ask you about being in the mastermind, because our mastermind group is specifically designed that we are all contributing something and we're also then receiving something in return. And I think that through this conversation, it's really, really clear how your contribution is so incredible to those of us in the mastermind. But I'd love to hear about how the mastermind has made a difference for you, both in your work in your life.

Tracy DeLuca
I feel like it helped hold me accountable to the ideals that I want to be living my life by. It was instrumental in helping me to see that I was capable of more than the work that I was doing. I loved the work that I was doing at Sutter, but I felt like I wasn't necessarily making the impact that I wanted to. By coming to mastermind and learning some of the processes and ways of thinking, and then just having an audience of people to say, "Hmm, this is what you're saying, but this is what I'm seeing you doing. And how do we better align those?" It's such a useful community to be a part of. And equally, I love being able to help others. And so having that permission to both receive help, I feel like it's harder to receive the help than it is to give it to people. So I do have to keep reminding myself, this is a resource available to you. Take advantage of it. But having a consistent drumbeat. So we get together, you know, in person once a month with our specific cohorts, and then once a week we have smaller pods. And then once a quarter, we get together with everybody. So there's just a consistency that helps keep you pushing. Whereas if I was left to my own devices, I just get distracted by shiny things.

Dori Etter
That's awesome. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, thank you so much Tracy. This has been phenomenal. And I know that our listeners, there's a lot of things in here that you can take away. And I really love both the more creatively empathetic, like Susan mentioned, and then that idea of empathy in action and action in empathy. So the dual direction in that, so thank you for that. You can certainly find out more about Tracy at her LinkedIn profile. So it's Tracy DeLuca. You can also find her podcast that she's going to be relaunching, or potentially relaunching soon, called Results May Vary podcast. There are some very cool episodes at that website. And of course these links will also be in the show notes on corelc.org. So thank you, Tracy. Thank you, Susan, and thank you, our listeners.

Tracy DeLuca
Thank you guys. I am so honored to be on the show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai