Finding an opening quote from my conversation with Ayse Birsel – One of Fast Company magazine’s ‘World’s Top 15 Designers’ and author of Design the Life You Love was a challenge, mostly because I delighted in re-listening to each moment of it.
In this opening quote, Ayse is talking about the joys of having a process that guides her in her design journey.
Her wonderful book, Design the Life you Love is not self-help BS...it’s a visual thinking masterpiece and a guide to one of the most powerful and simply stated design processes I’ve ever seen….and I’ve seen and made a lot of them.
The double diamond of design thinking was my first design process, the first map to creativity that I followed, and it helped me design entire work engagements, hour-long meetings and multi-day workshops.
But underneath that framework is a deeper one: Ayse’s De:Re map. De:Re stands for deconstruction and reconstruction, and this idea is essential if you’re going to design anything well.
In the context of designing conversations, meetings and workshops, the key question is: What are the parts that you can see? If you can’t see the parts, you can’t shape them.
That’s why we love frameworks...they help us know what to look for!
The idea of deconstruction is controversial in some spaces. It made me think of one of my favorite quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts... Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts—something is always created too.
-Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What is created through deconstruction is the opportunity to reconstruct something new.
Ayse asks us to apply this framework, methodically, to our lives, so that we can build our biggest design project, our lives, according to principles we can (literally) live with
What’s truly delightful about Ayse’s perspective is that many people still assume that design is for the few - designers. And that designers are akin to artists, disheveled and mysterious and creative. And that creativity is more magic than method. Watch Ayse’s TEDx talk, read her book, and you’ll see...design is for everyone.
The question is...when you look at a problem, what do you see? A messy mass? Or do you start to deconstruct the challenge into its parts?
This is true of a workshop or meeting or a conversation...what are the parts? Who are the players? What are the goals and constraints? Once you start deconstructing...you can start reconstructing a new configuration and a process to get there.
I could go on, but I don’t want to keep you from enjoying this conversation any longer!
Links and More
Design the life you love: The book
Ayse’s TEDx Talk
Her Athena Medal!
About Ayse
Ayse (pronounced Eye-Shay) Birsel is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People 2017. She is the author of Design the Life You Love, A Step-By-Step Guide to Building A Meaningful Future. On the Thinkers50 shortlist for talent, she gives lectures on Design the Organization You Love to corporations. Ayse writes a weekly post on innovation for Inc.com.
Ayse designs award-winning products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, Herman Miller, GE, IKEA, The Scan Foundation, Staples and Toyota.
She is the recipient of numerous awards including Interior Design Best of Year Award in 2018 for Overlay, a new Herman Miller system, multiple IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) and Best of NeoCon Gold Awards, Young Designers Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Athena Award for Excellence in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Ayse is one of only 100 people worldwide to be named as one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches—a program Goldsmith conceived during Ayse’s Design the Life You Love program—along with the President of the World Bank, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and the President of Singularity University. She is a TEDx speaker. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Born in Izmir, Turkey, Ayse came to the US on a Fulbright Scholarship and got her masters degree at Pratt Institute, New York.
Full Transcript
Daniel:
Thanks for making the time for this. Welcome officially to The Conversation Factory. I'm really excited to talk about, there's this quote in your book towards the end where you say, I used to be a designer of things, but now I am a designer of life. And I just thought it was such a beautiful... it's a beautiful idea, it's obviously core to your book. And I'm hoping we can start with what it means to you to be a designer.
Ayse Birsel:
First of all, Daniel, it's so good to be here, to be your guest. We've been talking about this for a long time so finally we're making it happen. So for me what it means to be a designer is to be a problem-solver and to solve problems at the human scale and humanistically. And then being a designer of life, how I define myself now. Because I think that our life is our biggest project, life is a design project.
Ayse Birsel:
And what's great about it is we all have a life so we share this great design project and it's probably the most complex of projects. But it has taught me so much in terms of being a designer once I made that switch. It really made me... I was already quite human-centered, but now it really... it's life-centered. So it's changed how I think about design, it's also changed how we do design with my team, how we think about people so it... and how we look at users as our co-designers as well.
Daniel:
Yes, one thing that comes up for me is, I don't want to call this pushback, but some people might say that life is not a project or a problem. And so is it correct, is it right to treat life as a design challenge? If I say I don't want... my life is not a series of problems I want to solve, it's a canvas I want to paint on or something else, is there... yeah.
Ayse Birsel:
Totally, you're just using a different metaphor. I use the design metaphor, being a designer, somebody could say it's a canvas, somebody could say it's an open book. I think what's common to all these metaphors is that we can think about our life creatively and choose to look at it differently and think differently. And my point of view, because I'm coming from a design background, is to look at it and think about our life like a designer and use design process and tools to approach things.
Daniel:
So I'm so glad we got to metaphor so quickly because there's the quote you have from Jonathan Haidt about metaphor in your book and I think it's so profound. You can hear me flipping through the book, gentle listener. Because this idea of talking about something as a circus or a beehive, metaphors frame problems but they also show opportunities. And so it's a very, very... I don't feel like I get enough opportunity to unpack the power of metaphor in the design process, how does it show up for you?
Ayse Birsel:
From one metaphor lover to another. So maybe a little bit of background on why metaphors, I mean, everything that I know that I'm an expert at is product design, designing systems, and services and experiences. And so I've designed everything from a small pen to a concept car and everything in between, including a toilet seat. So my connection to metaphor is not literary, it's from design research practice and it comes from... I've worked as one of the studios to Herman Miller, the manufacturers and the designers of the Aeron office chair among others. And when I first started working with Herman Miller, the design director there, Jim Long, who's become a great friend was doing research using metaphors and he was asking large organizations to describe themselves in a metaphor, just one metaphor.
Ayse Birsel:
And this refers back to Jonathan Haidt's definition of metaphor is metaphors are really useful for us to understand complex and new things in relation to things we know, so that you can take something as complex as a multinational organization, for example, like Coca-Cola, or GE or GM and describe that whole organization through metaphor and say, we are a beehive, or we are a circus or we are theater. And even though we might not know those organizations and maybe we haven't worked in those organizations, as soon as somebody says my organization is a circus, you have an idea.
Daniel:
Yes, a visual, an image comes to your brain immediately.
Ayse Birsel:
Immediately, so then the second step to that is well, how do you describe that metaphor? Because we're also loaded with biases and preconceptions so you could say, "Oh my God that place is a circus." And really think of this crazy three-ring circus where everybody's running around, all kinds of things are going and perhaps happening out of control. But a circus could also be a beautiful place where very talented people are honing their talents and perfecting them and so much so that they're not afraid of performing these really difficult tasks in front of other people. So the metaphor is important but then how you describe the metaphor is also important.
Daniel:
Yeah, unpacking it and seeing the other side of it is so powerful. The backstage of the circus is not something we often think about. Running away with the circus is such an amazing opportunity. If anybody has ever wondered, "Should I run away with the circus?" The answer is yes, you should do that at one point in your life.
Ayse Birsel:
Exactly, right? And we often... I talk about Design the Life You Love, which is our work at an individual level, but we also do design the work you love, design the teams you love, design the organizations you love with organizations and their teams. And we use this metaphor tool quite frequently because it's a great way for people who work there to bind and come together around an idea, but without it becoming confrontational. Because after all, you talking... if talking about each other, you're talking about the metaphor.
Ayse Birsel:
And sometimes we find that we'll ask team, so we're like, "How do you see yourselves? Describe to us your team in terms of a metaphor." And then there'll be one group and they'll say, "We're climbing Everest." And another group will be like, "We're in a walk-a-thon" and you're like, "Hold on one second, this is the same team." And the work is how can we bring them together and maybe around a yet different metaphor. But then you use the hooks of that to describe what are we doing to get there? What are our shared goals, what are our shared risks et cetera, so.
Daniel:
When you say the word hook, that's so interesting because I think I know what you mean. But I think for those listening you might want to describe like when you say the hooks of the metaphor, what are the contact points of a metaphor?
Ayse Birsel:
That's actually a terminology that I made up. So in trying to get people to understand how to use metaphor is both visually and in a literary form. The hooks are when you say, for example, "My work is climbing Everest." You need to unpack that and say, "Well, what do you mean, what's Everest?" Climbing Everest is something that few people can do. It's a physically and mentally really difficult task. You need a guide to help you go up Everest. You need to be ready for... it's very risky so you need to be ready for different risks.
Ayse Birsel:
And so what they just did is I'm making a list of the hooks in the metaphor. So then those hooks help you think about, "What does that mean for me? Is that for me?" So I often talk about the Everest metaphor as the CEO metaphor because not everybody is capable of climbing Everest. A lot of people can go on hikes but climbing Everest is something else, but then it also forces you to think about who's my guide, so who's my mentor, who's helping me prep for this who has experience doing it? And then how am I getting ready for the risks? What's my avalanche? So those are the hooks.
Daniel:
Yeah, so it seems like even in this small moment when somebody says, "My life is climbing Mount Everest, or my work is climbing Mount Everest." You're applying deconstruction and reconstruction in a very small window of saying, "If this is Everest, what are all the pieces of climbing Everest?" And so I want to talk about deconstruction and reconstruction because obviously, I'm a junkie of frameworks because I think frameworks are ways of designing conversations and helping us think better and plan, work better and be more successful in our interactions with people. If we're sharing the same framework, then we're having the same conversation. And deconstruction reconstruction was wonderful to me because it just... it's so different from so many of the other design-thinky models out there, it's so straightforward, it's so simple and it seems so linguistic and human. And so I'm wondering-
Ayse Birsel:
Thank you.
Daniel:
Yeah, can you just talk a little bit about a DeRe, as you call it?
Ayse Birsel:
I mean, as soon as you saw the deconstruction reconstruction element and metaphors, I knew that you were a framework junkie because this is the first time that somebody has caught onto that. And I was almost going to say something but I don't want to create complexity where it wasn't needed. But you're right, so my process of design is deconstruction reconstruction. And the reason it's deconstruction, reconstruction and not anything else is because it literally is 20 years of experience and expertise in designing award-winning products and then stopping, and I can explain why I stopped, but stopping and kind of looking at how do I think, many people have told me that my value is in thinking differently, but I did it with my gut, I didn't have really a process. And so deconstruction reconstruction was really going... kind of like a journey into my own brain and trying to figure out what's the pattern of my thinking, how do I do this and how do I repeat it?
Ayse Birsel:
And it has four steps in a nutshell. You can apply it to anything, so we've deconstructed everything from life, to laundry machines, to luxury, to management with individuals and with world class organizations. So deconstruction, the first step is taking the whole apart and seeing what something is made up of. The second step is then looking at those parts and pieces and intentionally shifting your point of view so you can see them differently. And you can see them differently so then you can decide which ones you really need, which ones you need to connect differently, which ones you need to get rid of. Which then leads us to the third step, which is reconstruction, putting it back together in a new way and importantly, knowing you can't have everything, so recognizing your constraints. And then the fourth step is giving it expression.
Ayse Birsel:
So for example, your expression of it is designing conversations, my expression of it could be designing a product, somebody else's expression could be designing a strategy for a new platform or your life. So the expression could be many different things and all come in many different forms, it could be written, it could be drawn, it could be a mathematical equation, it also depends on your favorite intelligence.
Daniel:
You mean like emotional versus physical intelligence or what do you mean when you say everyone's favorite-
Ayse Birsel:
Or visual or literally... yeah.
Daniel:
So do you use deconstruction reconstruction as an explicit model with clients? Because my understanding is that it's upfront, it's not necessarily implicit, it's explicit.
Ayse Birsel:
It is explicit and that's very intentional because that allows us... it has two advantages; one is we can deconstruct and reconstruct with our clients and they're quite amazing. Like you said, the tool-set is simple. So anyone can do it, you don't need to be a designer to do it. And so we can do it in a very multidisciplinary way. And the other piece of it is, you see where the ideas are coming from. So if you are a CEO or a chief design officer or a marketing officer, one, you can partake in the process, two, you know how people are thinking.
Daniel:
So I want to deconstruct this a little further because I feel like there's a really subtle point here, which is making it explicit is a choice. Making it an explicit process versus guiding them through it where they don't know that this is what you're doing. What is the value of having... sharing an explicit process with your clients as they are going through the process?
Ayse Birsel:
I think the value again is demystifying design where so many people think that design is a mystery. And I suffer from this because I often joke about you would know when you need to call a plumber, you would know when you need to call a lawyer, but nobody knows when they need a designer. And so in a way... and a lot of our clients are business people. So they are really process driven and so having a process allows us to be on the same page in terms of this is not all kind of fluff and inspiration, there's so much logic that goes into this. It's just a different kind of process, it's a visual process. But nevertheless, it's a process.
Ayse Birsel:
Does that mean there's no magic to it? Yes. I mean, whenever you generate ideas and solve problems, there is some magic. And I think creative people and innovators and designers live for that magic because suddenly you're in this messy complex situation and the process somehow guides you and suddenly you have a clearing and you see the solution and that's what the process is really useful for, it's a roadmap.
Daniel:
Yes, and so I just... it's wonderful to me because when I look at other models for thinking in the design world like the double diamond of discover, define, develop and deliver, I have used discover, define, develop and deliver to divide time across an hour, or a day, or a week or months. And it seems like, I'm guessing you can use deconstruction reconstruction to design a conversation over an hour, or a day or a week with your clients, you're using this metaphor, this narration, this narrative of your process to divide time. It is a way to design your conversations, if I may be so bold.
Ayse Birsel:
Absolutely, and it's funny because as we were starting this conversation, I was thinking to myself, it would be a lot of fun, Daniel, for us to deconstruct and reconstruct some of the conversations that you're designing and so we could do a little project and experiment.
Daniel:
Well, so it's actually funny, I have a sticky note here because one of the parts I love about the book is how you say, "Okay, soup, let's deconstruct soup." And then you have a point of view on soup, the kind of soup you want to make, and then you make the soup that you want to make. And I'm wondering how else you see yourself as designing your conversations. If conversations were soup, what do you see as the parts of conversations that you shape when you're shaping conversations? What do you feel like you can design when you're designing dialogues with your clients?
Ayse Birsel:
I love that question and I think that requires a longer time, but I'll... and maybe that could be a conversation that we do live and we deconstruct and reconstruct a conversation together with your audience. Having said that-
Daniel:
When it's legal to be... to meet in front of a piece of paper together because you're a drawer and I'm a drawer, I would love to do that.
Ayse Birsel:
So to that I'm trying to learn some of the new tools that are online tools, like online white-boarding, maybe that's something we can also experiment with. But coming back to the conversation question, I mean, one of the simplest models for deconstruction, a framework for deconstruction that's also in the book is the four quadrants. So what's the emotion of something? What's the intellect of it? Yay, there you go.
Daniel:
We got here.
Ayse Birsel:
So Daniel is showing me the four quadrants, exactly.
Daniel:
Because I love it.
Ayse Birsel:
So it's the emotion, the physical, the intellect and the spirit. And so those four things, and you can apply this to conversations, you can apply it to ideas, you can apply it to your life, anything you're thinking about. But it helps you think through something in a holistic manner. So what's the emotion of a conversation? For example, right now our conversation is excited and happy and there is a little bit of an unknown, it's organic and we acknowledge that at the beginning. We didn't practice, we're doing this live.
Ayse Birsel:
Then the intellect of it could be... or let me go to the physical. For example, the physical of this conversation is that it's online, we're using Zoom, we're seeing each other on video, we're using headphones, you're recording it. That's in a nutshell, the recording of it. If one of my daughters burst into the room, your audience will hear it.
Ayse Birsel:
So then the intellect about it... the intellect of it is, it's a conversation we build on each other's ideas, it's open-minded, it's also quite intellectual, but it's also visual because we're both interested in similar things, metaphors which are visual tools and frameworks. So that's kind of the intellect of it.
Ayse Birsel:
And there is the spirit of it, the spirit of it is, I think everybody can sense there's mutual respect and admiration and openness to collaboration and trust, that's the spirit part of it. But thank you, Daniel, because I had not thought of conversations across the four quadrants and now that we've done that, I love it, I'm going to use this.
Daniel:
Well, it's interesting because they are very primal quadrants. And yet when I look at it because the elements that I've identified in conversations that are designable... people often say when I asked them what conversations are made out of, emotions come up. But then I ask myself, how do we actually design emotions? And I don't think they're directly designable. And so then the question is how do you design for emotion or design around emotion?
Daniel:
Because I don't think if you're sad, you can't say, "Okay, smush your sadness." And we all know what happens if you try to smush your sadness, it doesn't go away. It's hard to make yourself happy if you're sad or, or be relaxed, relax. And when does that ever work to say, "Hey relax." Because I'm trying to get you to relax but if I say relax, that doesn't make you relax. So if you're trying to design a luxury car, you can't put luxury into it. You have to ask does luxury... what are the signs of luxury, what are the signals of luxury?
Ayse Birsel:
Exactly, that's exactly it. So naming it is not enough, you have to create the conditions for it.
Daniel:
Yes, oh that's so... Right, so that is so interesting. So let's address this, the designing the life you love because this is interesting, designing the conditions. And that's deconstruction, it's so beautiful, this is metacognition at its best. I think one of the things that we talked about before we talked about is this idea of reinvention because this is like when somebody, and I'm asking you 12 questions at once so I'm going to stop.
Daniel:
So one of the questions I'm curious about is how the design your life... Design the Life You Love conversation has evolved over time because you didn't... this book did not just come out of your head, it evolved. And since it's been out in the world, it's taken its own life, it's become a conversation of its own. There's at least several books now that talk about this idea. I think yours was the first that I'm aware of.
Ayse Birsel:
I think in the design world it was. And also it's different in the sense that Design the Life You Love is a process and tool book. It doesn't tell you what a good life is, it just walks you through how you too can design your life. So you were saying something about the book didn't come out fully formed and that made me think of Athena, it didn't come out of Zeus's head fully formed.
Daniel:
Yes, wisdom arrived fully formed out of Zeus's head that's because he swallowed it as a baby. But-
Ayse Birsel:
There you go. So-
Daniel:
Is Athena an important goddess for you? Just as a total side note.
Ayse Birsel:
Athena is a very important goddess for me, for her wisdom but also because Rhode Island School of Design gave me the Athena Award in 2008 even though that... even though I'm not their... I'm not a graduate of RISD they recognize my work in furniture design and so that was pretty cool. The coolest thing is it's a beautiful medal that has the profile of a beautiful Athena on it, so.
Daniel:
Can you put it up again? I want to take up a screenshot of that. She's almost like she's on top of a... she almost has tentacles. It's beautiful and there she's got her-
Ayse Birsel:
Can you see that?
Daniel:
I can, she's got her owl on her shoulder, the traditional sign of Athena.
Ayse Birsel:
Yes, and those tentacles are snakes. And then at the bottom there's, I think that's Zeus. I can't say-
Daniel:
Oh, he's coming out of her head, yeah... his head... and he's got a nose and mustache, that's so cool.
Ayse Birsel:
That's funny, yeah. So coming back to your question, the book didn't come out fully formed and the Design the Life You Love conversation actually started 20 years ago; not that I think about it in terms of years. And it was kind of one of those funny things in life. I was part of Women Presidents' Organization, YPO, not YPO, sorry. I also work with YPO, WPO, world... Women Presidents' Organization. Okay, I totally messed that up but anyways. And the idea was these women CEOs getting together once a month and talking and learning from each other.
Ayse Birsel:
And we did a workshop one day and one of the exercises in the workshop was, describe your goal in one sentence. And I thought, "What's my goal in and how can I do that?" And I was the only designer in that group of women and I thought to myself... I remember not taking it very seriously and thinking, " Who cares?" I was young and so anyways, I wrote the sentence, my life is my biggest design project. And the reason I said that was quietly that because I just wanted to differentiate myself as this is my strength, I'm a designer. And I said that in the moment.
Ayse Birsel:
So imagine that sentence came to kind of follow me through my life after that. And so then fast forward to 2008 when the economy crashed, I found myself with no work. All our clients took their work in house. And it was a very difficult moment because I was a new mom, my partner Bibi and I had become partners in life and work and we really doing very well. And so enjoying our life and enjoying our work and enjoying our family. And then suddenly the work stopped and I felt really at a loss.
Ayse Birsel:
And I think I don't have to explain it too much because today we're in another crisis and I think a lot of us can you viscerally relate to this feeling of what do I do now. And so and I didn't quite know what to do because I love being a designer and I love being needed. And a friend of mine, Leah Kaplan saw... she and I have been working together many, many years and she knows me very well. She saw how frustrated I was and she said, "Look, Ayse you need to think about how you think because you think differently."
Ayse Birsel:
And that, just that... in these moments I think you really need your friends because they see your strengths better than you do yourself. And it was so kind of important for me, that was like a lifeline for me to think that, "Oh, someone still thinks that I bring value." And so that's when I was saying earlier that's... I sat down and develop the deconstruction reconstruction as of at that time, trying to figure out how I think.
Ayse Birsel:
And then once I had that two things happened. One, I showed the process to GE and GE being very process-driven, loved the process and they gave us a project and that was kind of the turning points in our work. We started using deconstruction reconstruction with our clients. And I love... I just want to make a side note for... I love GE because every time we had a new process, new idea, they'd be like, "Oh, we'll try that, we'll try that." That's the best kind of client.
Ayse Birsel:
And then the other piece of it was a friend of mine who was a part of that original group of Women Presidents', Shirley Moulton. She and I were talking and we talked about Design the Life You Love and I talked about, Oh, yes my life being my biggest project and now I have a design process. And then she said, well, she had just started her company, Academy of Life about learning lessons you don't learn at school. And she said, "Ayse you want to do a workshop on that?" And that was the beginning of Design the Life You Love.
Ayse Birsel:
That workshop idea forced me to think about, "Okay, how would you literally apply my design process not to a product but to our life?" And so I had to kind of develop the content for that, do the exercises myself, see if they worked. And then and what I found is, so we did the first workshop and from that it grew word of mouth because there's something really about designing your life that people are really drawn to. Nobody needs any explanation about that. They might not know what product design is, but everybody knows that they can be designers of their life and they're drawn to that idea.
Daniel:
Yes, the idea of being aimless and wandering in your life. We all have to wander in our lives at some point. And then I think at some point everyone knows that it is nice to have a direction; to feel like one is taking up a direction in life. And so for sure, it's a core part of adulting and individuating.
Ayse Birsel:
Very much so. Very much so. And I think especially in moments where change happens and there are transitions in life we feel that need kind of at the core of our being. And that's usually when people come to Design the Life You Love.
Daniel:
Yeah, I mean we haven't talked about, and we're getting close to time is how that process of reinvention, how people can find the resources internally in these stressful times. Because deconstruction reconstruction takes focus and energy and there is a great need for reinvention right now. And I think there's some people who are willing to, or have the resources internally or externally to introspect, to deconstruct and then to reconstruct. But others, it's hard to adapt in this time.
Ayse Birsel:
Absolutely, you're right. This time could be the best time to focus on the longterm because the day to day is really worrisome. But we're forced into a situation our life is designing itself and turning that around and saying, "Hold on one second, I'm the user of my own life. I'm going to design my life and I'm going to do it with optimism and hope and creativity. And I'm going to develop my own roadmap for my own life for the long term." This time is perfect for that. And so a lot of people are reaching out to us and saying, "Yes, actually I've..." like people who have the book had told me, they pulled out the book and thinking about like, how do I design my life now?
Ayse Birsel:
And I agree with you that we have to listen to ourselves. So you might not be ready for it in this moment, but it's good to know that when you are ready, you can design your life and really think about your life like a designer. And so here the principles of design, having the optimism that things will eventually turn out well and that we have the resource to think creatively, having empathy for ourselves, recognizing that this is a difficult time it's painful and having empathy for each other that we're all in this together. But with that we can collaborate, we can help each other. And we can ask what-if questions have an open mind.
Ayse Birsel:
Think holistically, see the big picture, not just only what's going to happen tomorrow, but that we know for sure... We don't know many things, but I think we all know that life is going to change. And how can we make that change a positive change for ourselves, for our family, for our community, and then for our city. And then you grow like for our country and for the world. I think a lot of us are hoping that we'll come out of this crisis wiser and having learned some lessons and to have... maybe go in a better direction. So I'm excited about that.
Ayse Birsel:
And from what I found is that when you're thinking creatively, there's a lot of life force to thinking creatively. And if there's one thing that I learned through Design the Life You Love is that we're all creative, we're all designers of our life but we do need a process and we do need a set of tool. So you can't just tell somebody "Go ahead, design your life, think creatively."
Daniel:
So this is perfect because I'm looking at one card that I wanted to talk about that I think is a tool from your book that's worth using. Is there one of it, I mean there's a lot of wonderful tools in the book. What do you think is, I want to share mine because it's yours, but I also, I'm wondering before I share mine, what do you think is a tool from the book that somebody could use to optimistically start designing their life?
Ayse Birsel:
Daniel, are you asking me to kind of have favorite kids among all my kids?
Daniel:
No, no, just not a favorite. Just the first pencil you take out. You're going to use the pencils, just the first pencil.
Ayse Birsel:
Use all the pencils. So, it's a hard question to answer. I'll tell you the first one that came to my mind is the heroes.
Daniel:
Ding, ding, ding. That was mine.
Ayse Birsel:
You have to post your post it as part of this conversation, they're too funny. Yeah, heroes and I love your drawing.
Daniel:
Thank you.
Ayse Birsel:
Is that the shark?
Daniel:
No, that's actually metacognition on its side.
Ayse Birsel:
Metacognition, okay. So the hero's exercise, it's about inspiration because when we're designing and thinking creatively, inspiration is a key part of that process and helps us to get out of our own head and look for kind of like a bee going from flower to flower looking for pollen to make honey. As a designer, you have to go from book to idea to inspiration and collect different things before you can make your honey, in metaphor.
Daniel:
By the way, do you know that the beehive and the bee is a very ancient symbol of wisdom, much like Athena is? Because exactly of this, the bee pulls and distills and creates a permanent, I mean, honey doesn't go bad. It's an extraordinary substance that bees make. And this is what pulling wisdom from heroes do does so it's so profound. Please continue because I think-
Ayse Birsel:
I love that, I love that. So the hero's exercises about where can we draw inspiration? When it comes to life, our inspiration is other people. So when I'm asking people to think about their heroes it's really not superheroes, but it's about who are the people in your life, people you know, maybe a family member, or a teacher, or a friend or people you know of. And this could be the leader of a political movement or a movement like Mandela, or it could be an author, somebody that influences you. And so, and enlisting, why are they so inspirational to you? What are their qualities that make them different, a hero in your mind?
Ayse Birsel:
And it's really a beautiful exercise because what people don't realize, and I'm going to give away a little bit of the magic here, but when we think about our heroes and what's inspirational about them is we're really connecting with our values. So it's a different way of asking someone what are your values? What matters to you in life? How do you make your choices? But that being a really tough question, it makes it so much easier to do it through this lens of who are your heroes.
Daniel:
Yes, and in conversation design, I often talk about invitation, that invitations, truly invitational invitations opened a door that somebody's happy to walk through. Great questions are amazing invitations. What are your values? Seems like a great question, but it can be very hard for people to answer. Who are your heroes is such a different invitation. Anybody will just pour through. And then you go, and my last question, my second to last question was, what are some of your favorite facilitation tools? And it seems deconstruction... invitation and then deconstruction is still... because when I look at the book, it's inspiration and then deconstruction. And so if we say, who are your heroes? That's inspiration. And then if we deconstruct why, then we get to the values, then we get to the components very beautifully.
Ayse Birsel:
Exactly, exactly and a lot of the book and the design process tools are about getting people out of their heads, moving them into another plane and then having learned different lessons, having been inspired, bringing them back to their own topic, in this case, their life. So the metaphor is the hero's deconstruction, the four quadrants, you name it. And we have many more tools that we use with our clients. It's really to get people to think and to think by doing, without telling them, "You're thinking, you're thinking, think hard." It's just... there's a playful aspect to it.
Ayse Birsel:
Because it's... a lot of these things are very serious problems. So you want to get people kind of out of their heads, out of their worries so that they can think and ask those what-if questions more freely and then come back having seen examples that give them optimism that energize them and then that's when problem-solving happens.
Daniel:
Yes, not when there's stress and fear.
Ayse Birsel:
Yes, and for me, for example, a little anecdote. I mean I realized that these days being where we're at with the virus too much media was like poison for my brain and it really made me panic in a way and worry. And I decided that, I think I was telling you at the beginning of our conversation to have some, not only be socially distant, but also practice some media distance. Because it's, yes, we're in the real situation here, but my strength is problem-solving and thinking differently and looking to the future. And so you need hope to be able to do that.
Daniel:
Yes, and there's a... I'll put a link to this, I can't remember the name of the person who wrote it, but he wrote an article about how we're experiencing what he calls narrative collapse. Literally, we can't see the big picture right now because we're looking at the day to day where our noses are right up against how many... what's happening today? What's happened? Have they passed the budget? How many cases are there? Are planes open? Just details not are we winning or are we losing, what's next?
Ayse Birsel:
And if we have two more minutes, I just want to come back to that because something that really inspired me and this is again, I mentioned Leah's name Leah Kaplan, who's one of my closest collaborators. She sent me an article, and her husband works in the food industry and what's happening with, food and restaurants across the globe, but also New York, kind of the capital of food
Daniel:
I think we might've lost you for a second, Ashe, I'm not sure why. Test one.
Ayse Birsel:
Hello, hello?
Daniel:
Oh, I got you back. There you are, technology.
Ayse Birsel:
It says internet connection was unstable.
Daniel:
Yeah, it's all good. You were saying New York is the food capital of the world and it's serious what's happening.
Ayse Birsel:
And the restaurants are closed. Exactly, so basically with a lot of restaurants are doing in the moment is they are reinventing themselves as retail stores for their neighborhood where people can not only pick up food but also pick up food ingredients. And so this morning I did the deconstruction map of restaurants and then a reconstruction map of them as corner stores inspired by this article that I read. And it made me realize that only when you deconstruct the restaurants, there are one or two things about the restaurant, the dining experience, and the food preparation that if you took those things out and kept everything else in terms of you have ingredients for food, you are experts at dealing with food in a sanitary manner. You are part of a neighborhood. You are a trusted part of this fabric. You are very good at services and creating that human touch, right?
Daniel:
Yes.
Ayse Birsel:
When you start looking at that and then think, oh, the constraint is you can't have people in the same space so take that out, out of the equation. But more or less everything else is enough for you to create the beginnings of a new model and hopefully a temporary model. But so it's really about, I think it... I'm planning on doing this with some of our clients, but looking at, let's deconstruct you, let's understand what's essential, what are things you can transform and what are things that you're right now constrained and cannot have. And then with that, what could be a new solution service, business model that you can develop. And this is, I also want to do this with myself in terms of what are the things that I can keep and build on, what are my strengths and what are the things that I need to... I can't do workshops in person so that I need to put the side, but I can do it virtually. So it's, I think a good exercise.
Daniel:
Yes, very much so. And so I mean I think everyone should definitely read this book because intentionality in everything we do is worth doing. If you're going to do it, you might as well do it on purpose, I would say. That to me is the essence of design is doing things mindfully and intentionally if harnessing a beautiful accident is still intention. I'm wondering, I'm just-
Ayse Birsel:
I would agree.
Daniel:
Before we go there's all these beautiful books behind you. If there's another book that you think everyone should read besides your book because there's actually a nice pile of your books there too. I think everyone should read your book.
Ayse Birsel:
Thank you.
Daniel:
Is there another book that you think everyone should read?
Ayse Birsel:
Yes, you're seeing first of all, two piles.
Daniel:
I'm seeing five piles actually, but-
Ayse Birsel:
One is my pile of... Yeah, many, many piles. So, but I... Let me just tell you some of these books are favorite books and they're very close to me because I want to be... They're friends and some of them actually have become my friends because I've got to meet the authors. And then there's another huge pile of books that... I love books and I have a lot of friends who authors, so they send me their books, but I don't have the time to read. And actually one of my goals during this period is to read every day at least for 15 minutes, which is not a lot of time, but it does accumulate. But I'll tell you one of my favorite, favorite books I'll give you, how about if I give you three books.
Daniel:
These are your good... these are your best friends. I want to meet your friends.
Ayse Birsel:
They're my best friends. Okay, you mentioned... So a call out, a shout out to Jonathan Haidt since you mentioned his name. His book is The Happiness Hypothesis, one of my favorite books, but the ones that I pulled out for you, one is What Got you Here Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith, I love that book. Another book is Dorie Clark, how to stand out, it's called Stand Out. You know Dorie?
Daniel:
Dorie's been on the show, yeah.
Ayse Birsel:
Yay, and then Give and Take.
Daniel:
Oh, Adam Grant?
Ayse Birsel:
Adam Grant, yeah.
Daniel:
Wow, they're getting on my... they'll go on my list, the ever-growing list. It's hard to focus and think right now, 15 minutes a day is a good goal. So is there anything that we haven't talked about that we should talk about? Anything that's missing before we can be complete?
Ayse Birsel:
I think we've talked about so many great things. Thank you so much, you are an amazing conversationalist, surprise, surprise.
Daniel:
Thank you.
Ayse Birsel:
I heard you wrote the book about that, that's coming out, so.
Daniel:
This is not about me plugging, but thank you. There's always time for that.
Ayse Birsel:
So maybe there's still time where I could do two plugging for myself. One is, this week we started Design the Life You Love virtual tea. So a virtual tea is anybody can come on and for an hour we talk about how is everyone feeling, but also do one exercise. We had a guest this week who talked about how to have... how to present yourselves during video conferencing. I did an exercise on there are many constraints so how can we turn constraints into opportunities? And we did that collaboratively. So if anybody is interested in that maybe, I'm sure you'll share our emails but they can email us and we could put them on our email list so that's I think one good thing.
Ayse Birsel:
And then I've also asked the Design the Life You Love community and my friends if they'd be interested in doing Design the Life You Love now since we can't do it in person as a webinar and people were interested. So if anyone in your audience is interested again, they can reach out and we'll send them the information and they could check it up.
Daniel:
Yeah, if there are some links that I can put in the post I'll definitely, please, I'll follow up with you and we can do that as well.
Ayse Birsel:
Great, yeah, that would be a lot of fun.
Daniel:
This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for making the time. It's a delight to design a conversation with you, to co-design it.
Ayse Birsel:
Thank you so much. I had a great time. This was the... We're Friday and this was the highlight of my week. So thank you, Daniel, thank you for inviting me.
Daniel:
Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.