The evolving role of design and thought leadership. | Charlotte Burgess-Auburn | 450

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Charlotte Burgess Auburn, and let me give you her bio real quickly because it's fascinating. So she's a designer, an artist, and an educator. She's got a background in production for fine arts and theaters. And experience at the MIT Media Lab. She's been the director of community at the Stanford D School since 2005, where she also teaches classes on the role of self-awareness and creativity in design. She's born in Rome, Italy, to American and Dutch parents who were both teachers and was raised in Massachusetts in a fully academic environment. So before we go through the rest of this, I'm more interested in talking to her. So, uh, we've cut your bio short to get right to the good stuff.

Fantastic. Oh, I love it. Cool.

So welcome aboard.

Thanks.

So you are in the, definitely in the academic space, right?

Yes.

But it's more than that, right? So give, give us the, what, what does a day in the life look like if that's a thing? That's a new one.

Ah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm something that I, I like to call, at Stanford, I like to call it staffulty, which is a staffulty. Yeah. I'm a staff member at Stanford. The Director of Community at the Stanford D School. But I'm also a lecturer, so I teach classes as well. And the D School is full of us. It's full of people who are both doers and teachers. And so it's not unusual at all. But I enjoy it because it gives me a peek at both sides of the— at least two sides of our triangular equation. Of learners, doers, and teachers. And I'm always learning no matter what. Yep.

Yeah.

So having my job be doing and teaching is very nice.

Got it. So oftentimes when in my work, cuz we do a lot of work with author speakers, thought leaders, academics, et cetera. Academics are a little bit different. General statement, right? In terms of what do I mean by that? They go really, really deep. Right? Their standards are really, really high.

Mm-hmm.

Yet, and I'm not saying this is you, right? Like, you know, speed at which they sort of operate is a little bit different than standard business speed. Now the d.school might be a little bit different, but maybe does that resonate or am I not such on that?

Well, I mean, uh, the d.school operates, um, in many ways a lot faster than the rest of Stanford. So we, our cycles are pretty quick because our focus is around teaching. Design to students, and the— that cycle is quarter by quarter by quarter. And so we move, we move pretty swiftly. Stanford is a research institution, you know, a very large research institution, and research tends to run at a much slower cycle. Thankfully, we don't really want people to be like cranking out their research as fast as possible.

Yeah, right, right. And so sometimes there's no drive-through for research, right? That's not an innovation.

Bad idea, I think. I think it's a bad idea. So we tend to kind of move a little faster than the, than the research part of, of the Stanford institution. But at the same time, a lot of the interests and areas of inquiry and the types of content that we are applying design to are coming from faculty at Stanford, from students who are studying with faculty at Stanford. Um, and so, uh, it's not, I would say our work is not separate from what the rest of Stanford is doing. It's really just that we are bringing a kind of design lens to, to the work that is to be done.

So your title is interesting in terms of Director of Community, right? So that's that Staffelty piece. So what does that actually mean? What is that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's funny how, it's funny how I, I feel like I've sort of grown into that title. I chose that title on the, like, the, my first day of work at Stanford. I went over it with David, David Kelly and George Campbell, who was then the executive director, and we were like, what are we going to call me? And we chose it because I felt like the community angle of it would, would appeal to students. And, uh, one of my, you know, main tasks for the first 5 or so years of the existence of the D School was just to connect with students and kind of draw them in and get them interested. Interested and, and help them. And then, uh, we chose the director side because I, I needed to be able to get into offices at Stanford, um, to get people to do a few things for me here and there. And if you're a coordinator or a manager, nobody wants to, you know, take your call. So, so I would be like, I'm the director of community. I mean, they just didn't know that I was like, for the first year or so, like one of like two people.

One of one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. But over the, over the years, I feel like I've grown into it. So, yeah.

So, but give me an example of what are the type of things that, that entails that falls under your—

Yeah. So a lot of what I've done in the past, you know, the d.school is now getting close to 20 years old. It's not quite, but, um, and for beginning arc of its kind of like startup career, my main job was around, around community was connecting with students, right? I threw a lot of parties. I did a lot of info sessions, you know, all that, that, those kinds of things. I did a lot of mentoring of students. Okay. Um, a little bit of career advising, I guess I would call it.

Uh, so kind of a catchall. So how has that evolved now? Well, two-part question. So, I love this sort of the origin story, right? So, so not, not many people get to be involved in a startup university in the heart of the startup universe, right? Like, what better place to have a startup university than in the Valley, right? But so how has the role matured and evolved, and where is thought leadership part of that evolution?

Yeah, so I would say Like, at this juncture, my job is to kind of oversee a larger group of people who are— who collectively we are all working to help students to onboard new design skills and then use them out in the world. And that means, like, how do we connect our current students with our alumni? How do we, um, how do we collect connect our current students and our alumni with organizations that may want to hire them? How do we help students orient and navigate in an incredibly fast-paced and changing landscape of work and life? Yeah.

Right. Hello COVID. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Hello COVID. Hello AI. Hello.

Right. Yeah.

Right. An explosion of change. In, in the design landscape, um, and in the landscape of almost every type of career really at this moment is pretty intense. And so, um, giving them the skills to try and navigate that, and then also the resources to do that. Like part of, part of what we do is, is resource-based, but, um, but a lot of what we do is kind of, uh, skills-based. We're trying to teach people useful skills to go along with their kind of design skills. They're kind of hard design skills. I'm teaching them sort of soft design skills.

Got it. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcast and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcasts. So if you were to think about that through the lens of thought leadership, either yours or some at the universities, what, how, how does that connect? How do those dots connect?

I guess what I would say is I like to be a champion for the role of self-awareness in the skills of design and it has always been a bit of a— I don't want to say a fight, but like you have to sort of tussle for your, for your spot at the table.

Um, so stay there a minute. I was on a call on another issue earlier today with, uh, and one of the members on the call was a designer at a big tech company, and there was this sense of A, being different, right? Because when you're in a tech company, sort of there's the tech culture and they look at like a designer like, oh, maybe you're a second-class citizen or we don't even know what that is, whatever.

Yeah.

And there's also designers, and I'll, this is a generalization, so give you the caveat there. You know, designers also, you know, when they put their work out, it is more, I believe, an extension of themselves or perceived to be than maybe someone writing a line of code or, you know, an accountant. Doing a spreadsheet or whatever. How do you get them to deal with that? That I could give you horrendous feedback on a piece of work that you did from a design standpoint, but it doesn't mean that Charlotte's a horrible person, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think designers have to get used to people, they both have to get used to people critiquing their work. But they also have to learn how to drive a critique so that they understand, both they and their client understand, right? Like, we're talking about the work, we're talking about the output, we're not talking about the input. But I also think there is this— I wouldn't call it exactly a stigma, but there's this sense of perception in, within sort of a high technology culture that like design is fuzzy and weird and it can't be quantified. Right. And therefore it's like not terribly, you, you know, it's a little bit less than. Yeah.

But then it, but, but then when you, when you, when you unpeel that and say Google for years, part of the beauty of Google was the simplicity of the design of the search bar compared to, yeah. You know, its competitor 100 years ago was Yahoo, where you went on their pages.

Yeah.

It was just like, things were spinning and flying and like, you know, every designer was like, you know, convulsing when they looked at that. Right.

And yeah.

You know, uh, if you don't know Yahoo, Google it. It used to be a thing, right? It's still kind of a thing, but, but anyway, right?

But I guess my point is that a designer is essentially to, to advocate for the types of, the types of skills that designers use that are not, um, particularly quantifiable, but that have a lot to do with what the outcome of their work is. Right? So a sense of awareness of their own interest and their own creativity and curiosity, a, you know, a kind of that sense of like the quirkiness that ends up with something novel, right? Something actually different.

So yeah, so there is the, the stereotypical, you know, anytime you see an advertisement or whatever and there's a room of people, you're like, oh, that must be the goofy designer because they made them with purple glasses or high tops or something, almost like, oh, look at me, I'm a designer, whatever. But there is permission to be a bit of the outsider, to be a bit of a contrarian. You might not want a dentist that's sort of out there and quirky or a pilot, obviously. There are certain roles where creativity, like, do I want to be on a plane with the world's most creative pilot? Probably not. Right?

Yeah. I mean, I think the d.school also really represents the flip side of that, which is that, you know, it's our great belief that everyone is creative and that everyone is a designer and that you do not have to identify as being a designer to do design.

Um, but that's, but that's the embracing of design thinking, right? Versus, because I have very little creative skills defined traditionally. Ask me to draw or ask me to do that and, and back of the line, right? But I could clearly understand, appreciate, and use design thinking often. But it's two very different things. Like the underlying principles, the mindsets and all that, I love. The fact that I have no creative skills is like, okay, well, whether it's a birth defect or just that's not my thing. I've got other skills.

Yeah. I mean, that also depends on very much on how narrowly you define creative skills. I mean, you're saying that creative skills are like drawing, but that's actually just like a tiny sliver of potential.

No, that's very true. So creativity could be problem solving, could be— yeah, all that.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that often people will drive themselves down to that kind of narrow point and say, I can't do that. And by doing that, they actually cut themselves off from all these other skills that they could acquire and use that are the ones that actually drive creativity, they drive invention, they drive innovation and collaboration. And, and so like, it's my goal to like open that up and be like, stop defining creativity like this and start defining it like this so that you can work on this and not worry about that. Thank you.

Right. So it's almost the, the democratization or the, an inclusiveness. Yeah.

Yeah.

Of creativity for all. Cool. All right. So as we start to wrap up here, Charlotte, any, any final words of wisdom to share or thoughts to share with folks? Because you're—

Yeah, I mean, I feel like— Yeah, I feel like owning your own set of values and your own set of creative skills, right? And understanding that you can build those, that you can build your creative skills, and that you can use your values in life to actually help propel you into a more creative place. In your work, in your career, in your collaborations, right? Like, don't be afraid of it. Get in there.

Yeah. No, I love that. Right? Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Get in there and start working. It's, it's nothing but fun, honestly.

Yeah. No, I love that. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today and coming on board and sharing your story with us. Thanks, Charlotte. Appreciate it.

Yeah. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

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