Redesigning Life and Work for a New World with Ayse Birsel, Alex Osterwalder and Tendayi Viki

Okay, let's get started. It's five o' clock here in Switzerland where I am and I'll get us kicked off on Swiss time. So welcome everybody. So we have a beautiful group. We're gonna talk about redesigning the life and work you love for a new world. And we have a wonderful guest today. Now let me just see if I can check change the slides juggling between my screens. So we're going to do a live session, very interactive, with Ayesha, who I'll introduce in a moment. Tenday and I will co host. We will have also some time for Q and A and dive right in with that participant. So let me introduce Aisha Birsel, a great friend who I really admire for her brilliance and for being so positive always and bringing so many new things to the world. Aisha was chosen as one of the hundred top creative people in the world by Fast Company, multiple design awards, designer by profession. But then really interesting, brought the design process to designing the life you love, which is wonderful. And I actually joined with my daughter in New York where Aisha is. She was 13 year old then and we worked on designing our life. So that was a wonderful experience. We also have Tenday with us again today who will co host with me. And with that, let me just introduce a series of books. Aisha's book has been really a game changer for many people, including myself, and it was wonderful to actually do this with my daughter. Designing the life I love. Aisha, I understand you're working on a new book now. Do you already have a title?

Yes, my working title is design the work you love.

Wonderful. Great. Tenday, you just showed the book as well. You went through it. Awesome. Anybody who doesn't have it, I really recommend getting it. It's also, you know, what we love at Strategizer, very visual book and very practical. So you can get it and start working right away. Tendai, you just launched a book recently, Pirates in the Navy. One sentence. What is it about?

Pirates in the navy is about how entrepreneurs can drive innovation within their companies by building a bridge between, you know, the main organization and the innovation work that they're doing. So don't just be a pirate, but be a pirate in the navy.

That's the backstory because I always say don't be a pirate in innovation because pirates get killed. Right? And then tendaises, pirates in the Navy, we launched the book the invincible company. That's not the topic today though. Aisha and I have talked quite a bit about designing the work or the Company you love, right? Just a quick hint, if you're interested in our virtual masterclass, we just finished one last week, so it's three half day sessions that you can do with us. Just go check it out. For the moment, you get the early bird tickets. Those will expire pretty soon, so get on board. And now I will hand over to Ayesha, who designed an interactive session with us. Aisha, welcome Today.

Alex, thank you so much for that lovely introduction. And Tendayi, it's great to see you. And I was thinking to go with your book, you might want to have kind of like a pirate's loop, you know, an earring, and they are called one. Hello, everyone. It's such a pleasure to see you and to connect with you. Thanks to Alex, I can see you're calling all over the world as well. Delighted. I'm waiting for somebody to call in from Dakar, so just ping your friends in Dakar. I'm delighted to see that some people are calling in from New York and Istanbul. So with that, how about I start sharing my slides and then, like Alex, I'm very much a visual person, so want to do slides and talk at the same time.

Wonderful.

All right, welcome, everyone, to design the life you love. The new normal edition with Alex and myself, where I want to take you through. Oops. My. For some reason, my allergies are on, but I want to talk to you a little bit about why design your life? But first, let me make my heart beat. This is my heart beating with excitement at having this moment together with you. So thank you so much for being here. And I just wanted to give you a sense that where I come from is the product design land. And I think you've probably, maybe without knowing, you might have sat on one of my products. So it might have been an office system that I designed for Herman Miller, maybe a concept car that we helped design for Toyota. But now the game changer is if you sat on one of my toilets. Because some of you know that I'm known as the queen of toilets, something I'm very proud of. Not many designers get to do that, but that experience led to me thinking about how I think. And I realized that there was a rhythm, a logic to how I design things. And I developed a design thinking methodology that I call deconstruction reconstruction. And then I thought to myself, once I had that, I think that our lives are our biggest project. And with that, I was like, what can I apply this process to my life as a test ground? And with that, developed the Idea of design, the life you love. And then as Alex was mentioning it, wrote a book about it. And it's a very visual, playful book. My goal was to invite anyone and everyone to come and think like a designer about their life. And as things would have it, thousands of people have actually designed their lives using the book or coming to our seminars. And as Alex was mentioning, and Alex, I think your daughter is my youngest. Actually, I correct myself. My daughter was one of my youngest students or participants. AWA came when she was nine and she designed her life. So at the end of the session, when we asked everyone, so, what's your design vision? She said she was 9. She said, the life I love is doing what my mother tells me to do. Now she's 16. So her ideas of life design has changed. But then, you know, Alex's daughter came, my younger daughter came. They were 12 and 13 at the time. And people who are as young as 90 plus have also designed their lives and everyone in between. And what I've learned from that is that people are extraordinarily creative, but like all of us, they need a process. You can't just. And you know, Alex, you talk about this as well. You can't just tell people, be innovative, design this, think out of the box on their own. We ourselves need a methodology, a process. So what I did is I shared my process with everyone and coupled it with life. And the process has four steps. The first step is deconstruction. As you can see on the screen, it's taking the whole apart. The second step is then looking at those parts from a different perspective, gathering inspiration points of view. Third step is the other side of deconstruction. It's reconstruction. Because what you deconstruct, you need to put back together, knowing you can't have everything. And then the last bit or the last step is expression, giving it form. So what I want to do today together is actually do some of the use some of the tools from deconstruction reconstruction to think about our life and work in this moment of crises, where actually everything we know is being deconstructed. So why not do it ourselves? But also importantly, put it back together in a new way? So with that couple ground rules. One is thinking like a designer. Thinking like a designer is the foundation of design thinking. And number one, thinking optimistically, no matter how hard the problem or the challenge we have as designers, the optimism that we're going to come up with a better solution, and this optimism in this moment where we're being challenged by COVID 19 and currently in the States by racism. It's really important to keep that optimism really up and think we are going to solve for a better future. Second is empathy. Having empathy for other people. But it's also really important to have empathy for yourself. Third piece is thinking holistically, seeing the big picture. Because when you see the big picture, you can make connections like you haven't connections or dots you haven't connected before, then asking what questions. Which is all about having an open mind. And when you have an open mind, you're not afraid of ideating. You also kind of accept the fact that sometimes our best ideas start from the worst places. And then the fifth is being collaborative, which is what we're doing together today. Alex and I and Tendayi are collaborating and you are collaborating with us. I've found that since we started sheltering in place and things have gone virtual, actually I've collaborated much more. There is an openness to understanding that it's so. It's not easy for us alone, but together we can truly make a difference. And then the last bit is playful because when we're playing, we're not afraid of making mistakes. We're like kids, we're excited by trying new things and that's really the mood for design. So are you ready to be playful? I can see the box. So, Alex? Yeah. You're on. Alright. What I wanted to do is take a few moments for us to warm up our right brains. And to do that, I want to bring us to our superheroes. And the reason for that is I was reading this quote the other day and it really resonated with me. Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued. And in this moment we have a similar need to be rescued. Actually, what I learned is superheroes came to being around World War II when people were feeling desperate. They needed peace, they needed things to go back to a new normal. And that's not that different from where we're at today. And with that, I wanted to ask you to. To imagine and visualize yourself as your own superhero with your superpower and kryptonite. And to get you started, I just wanted to share with you my own drawing for this. So this is Aisha in a super pose. You can see me. I should stand up like Alex. This is Aisha being a superhero. And my superpower is I can deconstruct and reconstruct anything. I'm really good at that. But my kryptonite is self doubt and this inner voice that sometimes Talks to me. And you know that kryptonite in superhero language is the thing that cancels out your superpower. So recognizing that is really important that we have both the superpower and Kryptonite. And really the point is being mindful about our Kryptonite and kind of being intentional about keeping it down so that our superpower could really go forward and conquer the world. So with that, if you could please put into the chat box, you know, what's your superpower and what's your kryptonite. And let's have like a race in the chat box and see how many of these we can get up there. And I'm going to stop sharing for a second to see the chat box.

Got a couple coming in saying, listening, superpower, curiosity.

Great.

It's going to go really fast.

Yeah.

Nice.

Constant learning. Superpower.

My Kryptonite is reading the chat box at this speed is a superpower. Alex, you're doing so well.

Empathy and connector doubt. So a lot of people also putting their Kryptonite. I love that dual aspect. Right. Fear of failure.

Always like that. Right. It's. The duality is where greatest value come from. So I'm Alex. You want to speak to that for a second? How you use dualities.

The duality. Yeah. In companies, it's the same thing. And there it might not be, you know, the Kryptonite, but that duality between, you know, executing what you want, what you need to manage and inventing the future, those are kind of forces that fight against each other. And here what you're saying with the Kryptonite is the same kind of forces fighting against each other, not always easy to handle. Right? Yeah.

Superpower like success, Kryptonite like complacency. That's what we're trying to deal with inside large companies.

Absolutely. And I think being aware of it really makes a difference because then you could also collaborate and get help. I mean, I find that my best kind of tool for getting over my Kryptonite self doubt is connecting with my friends who value me. And that's a game changer. So I can get into my superpower of deconstruction, reconstruction. And if my team is on the call, I just want to say hello to Seda Eves and Leah Kaplan and Meltan Parluck, who really are my superpowers. So they make a huge difference. So with that, I love how this is going. Superpower, willingness to learn Kryptonite, negative thinking, self doubt, complacency. Kryptonite not to speak up fast enough. That's really cool.

Here we have one Kryptonite, Nutella. That's an interesting one.

That is a great one. My kids have the same Kryptonite.

Can I ask you a quick question? Because the visualizing. Right. You were mentioning the visualizing aspect, and here you're getting us to make it explicit. Right. When did you kind of realize that this making visual and making these things explicit. Right. These opposites, like, is powerful. How did. Where did that come from?

I think there are two things. One is I'm always interested in opposites. So I guess that has something to do with me being Turkish and kind of, as you know, Turkey is both on the Anatolian side, the east, and the European side, the West. So this Turkish people are really interesting in that we are very. Our superpower is that we manage dualities really well. West and east and secular and religious and old and new. And so with that, I find that dualities, things that actually oppose and cancel each other out, if you can bring them into harmony, that's where the best value comes from. So a very easy example of that is work and vacation. You know, you want to work or you need to work, but you want to be on vacation, and they cancel each other out. The trick is feeling like you're on vacation when you're working, which is what we're all doing here right now. But also importantly, working on vacation. I mean, I've. I do my best work when I'm on vacation and. And where I feel like I want to do it and I don't have to do a lot of it, but even an hour or so really gets my ideas going. And I think, Alex, you do something similar. You go to your happy place to do your best work, and I do the same.

I call it workation. Workation in the sense that you go to a beautiful, inspiring place. For me, it's the Alps. Tendai. Where's your happy place to create?

Yeah, I like it when I. When I. When I. When I'm back home in Zimbabwe, just go up to the hills there and just start writing. And this concept of working on vacation. Asia, you need to talk to my wife about this.

I will attend. I. A little trick, and here's the hard part is you have to, like, your best time is before anyone wakes up. So you have to do it before your wife wakes up. And then just like, pretend like nothing happened.

Perfect, I'll do that. Then there's nothing to talk about.

That's really cool. Okay. And then the Other. The other duality, I think, Alex, this is what I was hearing, is the visualization versus text. Drawing things and writing about things, which I think is incredibly powerful. And if there's one thing that I've learned from asking people to design their life and doing it visually is that we can all draw. And in fact, drawing is just expressing what's in your head in a different way. It's not about drawing something beautiful. It's really kind of doing this, like, left, right, brain, back and forth that creates a much fuller picture than if we were only writing. So to everyone who's on the call today, even though I'm asking you to put things in the chat box, I would really ask you to also draw yourself as a superhero, because you'll find that you think about it differently when you draw it. And who cares if it was. It's a horrible, you know, stickman. I mean, Alex, you do these amazing drawings. Actually, I have one printed here. Look, Alex, look at that.

That's the ugliest thing on the planet. But it works, right? It's not about making it look good. Yeah.

And there's a feeling to this, and there is a kind of a power to it that, you know, typed words don't have. And together, that's how you make your books. And that's how I make my books. Is the drawing and the text together. Okay. I think I need to now take you to my. From you as superheroes, I want to take us to another place. Can you see my screen?

Yep.

Okay. So one of the most important things in creative thinking, whether you're designing a business with Alex or designing products or a life with me, it's really the ability to see things differently. Doing that intentionally so. I love this quote by Shakespeare, who, of course, put it best. There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And that gives you a sense of what creativity and point of view is all about. How can I look at the same thing and things and see it from a different perspective? And so what I wanted to do now with you, if everybody's. I think you're all willing, if you're here, you're here to try these things out. I want to gather inspiration. But before we do that, I wanted to give you an example from one of our products. Office systems for Herman Miller, the Resolve Office system, which came out actually 20 years ago, but to this day, it's one of the most innovative office systems out there. And the reason for that is at the time when everybody was using cubicles and Feeling like they're boxed in these 90 degree boxes. I wanted to. Well, I was asked to design an office system. And the first thing that I did is I actually took a foam core and I'll show you. Imagine this is a foam core. And I had never sat in a cubicle before, so I kind of folded the foam core in half in full scale, so. See that? And sat in a 90 degree corner. And I realized that when you sit in a 90 degree corner, you feel like a kid who's being punished. It's like being sent to the corner. And I thought that's not the way we want people to feel in the office. And so because this was foam core and it was easy to bend, I just bent it out, so I should do this. It was 90 degrees like that. And then I just opened it up and it became 120 degrees. And when I was sitting in that, I thought, this is really interesting. This feels so much more welcoming. And I realized that 120 degrees is how we open up our arms when we want to embrace someone, when we want to hug someone. And I hope you still remember how to hug people because, you know, hopefully we'll be able to go back to that. But that's the angle of a hug. And then that led me to think about where else have I seen 120 degrees? And I realized nature built on 120 degrees. And the reason for that is 120 degrees is actually the most economic structure that you can create. So suddenly this cubicle idea was turned on its head into using 120 degrees, following our instincts of welcoming someone and creating a very welcoming work, all because of the inspiration of, like, how can a workplace hug someone? How can a workplace be more economic in terms of its structure? So with that, I just want to take you to our inspirational portion of exercises and ask you about your heroes. So you've thought about yourself as your own superhero as a reminder of we're all superheroes of our own life and work. But now, in this moment of challenge, think about who is your hero in a moment of crisis, and what is it about them that inspire you? And what would you do to be more like your hero? So Tendayi or Matt, if you could help me, and let's see if you could just put into the chat box, who's your hero? What are their qualities? And what would you do to be more like them? And while you do that, I'm going to share my hero with everyone. And Alex, you know, Marshall, both Alex and I Met because of Marshall Goldsmith, who created Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches. And we're both members of 100 coaches. But the reason that Marshall inspires me, not only did he introduce me to Alex, who, you know, you have to understand, Alex, before I met him, to me was like a God. And I used to dream. And Alex, I don't know if you know this, but I used to think about, like, oh, how cool it would be if I could meet Alex, but it must be really difficult to meet him and he must be so unapproachable. And then I walk into one of Marshall's meeting and I sit next to you, and then you turn to me and smile. And it turns out that Alex is an incredible human being, hugely accessible. So, anyways, thank you, Alex, for being my friend and Marshall for bringing us together. And I might be talking too much here, but I'll just give you the example. When COVID 19 started, the first thing Marshall did was because we are his community, he reached out to his community and said, everyone, I'm going to set up a daily meeting where we're going to get together every day at 10:00am New York time. Whoever can call in, call in and let's help each other. And he said, if I can help one person through this process, my goal is accomplished. And in that moment, he inspired me first of all with his generosity. And that's why I drew his beard in the shape of love, because he's so full of love. He calls himself a modern Buddhist monk. Actually, Marshall does. So anyways, he gathered his community together and I thought, that's something that I could do. And I thought to myself, who's my community? People who design their lives and work. I reached out to my community and I thought since Marshall said if I could help one person, I thought, okay, the bar is low. If I could help one person, that's great. And with that, I started doing these virtual teas, actually every Wednesday at 5pm and they're open to everyone. And we should put that into the chat box. So whoever wants to join us today at 5:00pm New York Times. But anyways, what we do is similar to what we do here is we try to think differently and like designers for an hour. So while I'm talking, I hope you're writing down your heroes, their qualities, and what would you do to be more like them during this moment of crises? Into the chat box. Is anyone doing that?

Yeah, loads of people.

I'll stop sharing so I can see the chat box.

Barack and Michelle Obama, who are selfless Focused, optimistic, always there for mankind. Estrela Le Guin. Her wit, wisdom, turns of phrase to stimulate my creativity and generosity. My dad speaks, writes and works with integrity. Roger Federer for his determination and humility. That must be a Swiss person.

I told somebody to write that down just so he had a Swiss representative.

Somewhere, Nelson Mandela, for his modest.

I wrote a whole article about Roger Federer as being my hero. So I'm with you. Whoever wrote that.

We didn't hear. Tendai, we didn't hear you.

My grandmother, she's late, but she was really resilient. She was a housemaid. She used to go around cleaning white folks houses in Zimbabwe. But she made sure that my parents had the best education possible and then me as well. She raised me too. And so she's. Yeah, she's my hero and Tendai.

So then let's practice the follow up question with you and everyone. This is for you as well. I love that you're thinking about your grandma and her resilience. And actually I want to turn that back on to you and say, tendayi, you are resilient.

Thank you.

That's one of your values. Because what we recognize in our heroes are our own values. That's why we see it, otherwise we wouldn't seeing it right. And it's a great way to connect with our values. And in moments like this where things are challenging, it's really hard to remember because things are changing. It's really hard to remember what are my values. And use the hero's exercise to remember your values to remind you of those things. Because that's how you can design anything. When you design something, you need to make choices. And the way you make choices is by connecting and thinking about your own values. And so I would say, Tendayi, in these moments of time, these challenging times, your value is being resilient. So with that, what would you do differently or tomorrow because you're resilient, something comes to your mind?

I would immediately. So one of my kryptonite things is I worry a lot and I fear failure. But if one of my values is to be resilient, then I need not fear failure so much because even if I fail, I've got the resiliency to survive that. So that's a really great insight. Thank you so much for that.

I love that. And so.

Aisha, can I ask you a question? I think that what would be nice to illustrate is the story maybe of Marshall when he did the heroes exercise. Like what did it open up to him? Because that might be an interesting thing for others to kind of see. You know, that that Hero's exercise can be a really. An eye opener, right?

It's actually. It's a huge eye opener. And one of my favorite exercises, what happens. What Alex is referring to is our friend Marshall Goldsmith. When I mean, so the story is, Marshall came to design the life you love to support me. He said, let's do a workshop, and I'll bring my friends. He came with 70 of his friends. This was years ago when my book had just come out. And that's the kind of person that Marshall is. But then he came and he designed his Life and the Heroes exercise. He thought about his own heroes. And his heroes, Alex, you know, are. It's like a who's who of the world. It starts with Buddha, but then it's Frances Hasselbein, Peter Drucker, Paul Hershey. And he realized that all of his heroes had actually a common trait, and that was they were his teachers, and they had taught him everything he knows without asking for anything in return. So just like I'm asking you, then I ask, what would you do to be more like your heroes? And he realized in that moment that he also needed to teach everything he knows to other people without asking for anything in return for free. And with that, Marshall Goldsmith 100 started. And in the beginning, it was Marshall Goldsmith 15 coaches. But then it was such an incredible response to it. 17,000 people applied to it, and. And then the group got bigger and bigger. But I think, Alex, you and I were among the first 15. So that's the story, and that is how powerful that is, because this has now become Marshall's legacy project. So again, back to Alex. You know this. Whether you're designing helping businesses design themselves, or designing products, systems, services, or life and work, you can't design anything if you're not coming from a place of values, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Some people are saying Marshall didn't know that act. Marshall knows that activity. He made the Heroes exercise famous, I think, by. Because he tells about it to everyone. So. Okay, Tande, anything you're seeing in the chat box?

Yeah, I know. People are just talking about how, you know, they kind of love the quote. Somebody was quoting Nelson Mandela. So Mandela came up a lot as the hero to many. And so, yeah, I think it's a fantastic conversation we're having. And this whole idea that you should have your values, influence the decisions you make is also something we advise companies. Have the kind of company you want to be, have that influence the choices you make in terms of the innovations.

You start engaging in as well. And so actually, Tenday, you just reminded me, Alex, we did this together with you the other day. Why don't you share your hero?

So, you know, one of the heroes, and that was interesting when sharing with Aisha, is Prince the musician. And you know, what I really liked about Prince is not just the music per se, but the fact that he didn't really care what others thought. He was into creating great music and what he thought was the best possible for the musicians around him, with him, but didn't really care, you know, will people like it or not? Like, it might be kind of an overstatement, but, you know, wouldn't change what he thought was right. Just because people would ask for something. And that, I think, was the strength. Trying not to copy others, not to do what people really want, per se, in terms of saying, but actually creating what he thought was the right thing to do. And that is something definitely with Strategizer, even when we create business tools, people tell us this or tell us that, and we try to help them with their jobs to be done, but we don't really listen per se what they want. We try to help them solve their challenge. So I think there's this idea of creativity to help solve a problem, but with. With selective listening, right? This again, is duality between. You hear, you see, but you don't take everything just like. Like that. And then there's the vision, right, the kind of difference between art and science. The art is the creativity part, and the science is maybe the more methodological part. But it's not one or the other. It's this tension between the two. And I just loved how Prince did that for. For music. And then when I heard that, you know, you're also a Prince fan, it was pretty interesting to hear that.

It was really interesting. And you're reminding me that. You know what's interesting about heroes? What I realized I've been using the heroes exercise to connect people with their values for many, many years. Because if I were to ask any one of you, what are your values? It's such a hard question. And the answers usually are very traditional, like honesty, like helping other people. Okay, those are great. But when you think through the lens of your heroes, it really is a game changer because you realize you connect with a much deeper sense of your heroes. And even though Alex and I have Prince as a shared hero, how he sees Prince and how I see Prince are very different. So people can have the same hero, but you're Going to each recognize your own value in your hero. And that's super personal. So one thing for everyone as we go forward, I've been thinking about, like, how could you use your heroes on a daily basis with something very simple that you could do? And some of you are very used to, like, using journaling. And so in your journal, you could just do a quick entry and for that day, think of someone who inspires you and why. And then even for that day, you could say, that's my value. This person inspires me for their originality. And today I'm going to practice that value and I'm going to be original. And then you could decide how you want to be original, Whether it's like, what you're wearing that way that day is going to be original, or you're going to come up with an original quote or an original idea or even an original recipe for dinner. That's totally up to you. But it's those things that allow us to practice our values every day and become better designers of our life and work. So I have. Do I have a couple more minutes to share my screen and maybe conclude the interactive part, and then we could take some questions. Okay, so then, okay, I said this, but I want to be very explicit about it. Once you write down your heroes and their qualities and you recognize these are your values, you can cross out your hero's name and put your name down and treat this as your own list of values. And. And even though now you know the reveal, it's okay, just practice that and gather inspiration from people that you admire that inspire you. And these people could be, you know, family members. This person could be somebody on the street that does something that you recognize. It could be people you know of. So that's our heroes. And I think Matt is going to share. I have a longer explanation of our Heroes exercise in a link that we created. So if Matt, you could share the link and everybody could download the Heroes Exercise. It tells you a little bit about how this tool came to be, because it didn't quite start this way. It also revealed itself to me over time. And Alex. This is our Alex Osterweilder designed the business you love. And I should yourself design the life you love and the importance of our values, because once you know your values, then you can create value. And Alex, you take your side of the list.

Okay. Yeah. So something. Can you hear me? Well, I'm not sure. Okay, so something that, you know, we were. We were thinking about when we worked on the Invincible company is what where do invincible companies really create value? Because it's not just about making money, right? If it was just about that, well, that's not great for society for anybody except for shareholders. So, you know, we really have this strong belief at strategizers that the greatest companies, they create value for customers, number one, and then create value for their organization, number two, because if you go bankrupt, you can't create value for customers anymore. Right. And if you go create value for customers, well, you're not going to live for very long as a company. But.

Did we lose Alex?

Alex got frozen.

Oh, man.

All right, we'll wait for Alex. So how about I do my side of the list while we wait for Alex to come back? This was inspired by how Alex thinks about creating value for businesses in his business model Canvas, and also most recently, invincible Companies. And I thought in a very similar way, designing your life and designing your work first of all creates value for yourself, because it's your life. Remember, it's your life. Two, it creates value for your family and your circle of friends. Because if you're connected to your values and if you're designing your own life, your family and your friends are your collaborators, so you also create value for them, then it's really important. What I found is that when we design our life, we also design our work. And if we are connected to our values and really want to create value, we also do it at our workplaces, and we bring. We use our superpowers and bring our best selves to work. And that benefits companies and industries. And the last bit is when you create the life you love, the work you love, and you've created value for yourself, your family, your work, you then think about creating value for society. So the circles go from you. The next circle is your family and friends, the next circle is your work, and the next circle is society. And then from that, your neighborhood, your city, your country, and the world. And it grows out like that. And you see, Alex is back. Alex, I did my side while waiting for you. So go back to your value list, which inspired this.

Yeah, so sorry. My connection seems to be unstable today. So, again, what we think is remarkable, companies, they create value, number one for customers, because otherwise you're out of business pretty soon, but also for the organization, for the company, because again, then if you don't capture the value, you're also out of business pretty soon. But what's important then is that you create value also for your team. And that seems kind of trivial, but we're only seeing now with COVID 19 that not that many companies actually treat their team really well and respectful and help them actually work at a place they love to work at. Statistics show that 7 out of 10 people don't want to work where they work. But then the last one, the fourth one, I think is incredibly important. And there's value in that. Not just for value for society, but again, also for the organization. And for me, a great example is Unilever. When Paul Pullman took over as CEO, he actually tried to tick the boxes on all four. And they had a really focused strategy around sustainability, so they wouldn't just say, hey, we're going to do csr, corporate social responsibility for the fourth one. But this is going to be part of our strategy. So I think there are more and more companies that are going in this direction, Patagonia and so on, because it just makes good sense, not just for the business, but for all of the stakeholders involved. And I found that amazing when we had this conversation that these parallels actually came up between what you are thinking and what we are thinking is very interesting. Kind of both sides of the same thing, right?

Absolutely. And, you know, you do it through your tools, you know, business model canvas and all the new tools that you've created. And I do it through deconstruction, reconstruction and. But I. And this is part of the reason why I'm thinking that my. The book I'm working on now is Design the Work youk Love. And Alex, you had told me design the work and workplace you love because it's based on these ideas of like, if you can design your life, you can also design your work, you can design your workplace and then create value for your customers. So it's kind of like talking vessels, right?

And I think, you know, what I would add is I think we're seeing a new generation of leaders and managers who really aspire to create great workplaces more. Because it makes sense from all the angles. You have the salesforce founder who is starting to talk about how can companies be a force of good? And that's coming out of this crisis where we still see the worst of the old world, I think. But that's when you usually transition. Now it's still pretty bad in many companies, the conditions. And we see those workers on the front lines, they weren't paid very well. A lot of people get fired in terrible ways. But I think that's, for me, you know, being very optimistic. Something. Something I learned from you. It's like the end of an era where we're moving to a much more positive view of what organizations, companies, not just government institutions, can do for society. Because the end of the day, you know, we spend most of our time at work and, you know, if we create a better workplace, we actually can create a better world. It's not. This is not corporate social responsibility. This is. This is of part. Part of what business should be doing.

Absolutely. And there's much more humanism to it. That's what gives me hope. And then you and I both have teenage kids and they give us hope. So. Yeah. And on that note, I think this is my last slide. Just a reminder that if you'd like to learn more, you can get the book Design the Life youe Love. Hopefully you have the link to our newsletter, which has the PDF for the Heroes exercise. And I just want to think about how I can get the information for the weekly teas to everyone. So we have it posted or will post it on our LinkedIn so on my LinkedIn page. And you can come today or next Wednesday. And it would be great to see you. And this is the kind of thing we do, helping people design their life and work and then working with corporations design the life and work of their end users. So it's, it's one, one deconstruction reconstruction story. One big deconstruction reconstruction story. So I'll stop sharing.

Ayesha, some people are already asking about the new book which you're working on right now. So I guess the best way is to sign up to the newsletter, then they'll be informed about the new book.

Yes, absolutely. And one thing that I'm doing, everyone, you'll have a preview of the new book on the Thinkers50 website. I interview some of the leading thought leaders like Alex and Marshall, but also Rita McGrath and Dori Clark and others about the work they love and what we could learn from them and their visual interviews. They are actually a whole interview distilled to very simple visuals. But I think there are a lot of takeaways there. And the book is going to be built on what I'm learning from them. So you could have a preview of that. So, yeah.

Tenda, do you want to kick it off with some questions? Yeah.

I have a quick question for you, Ayesha. So in your book, you've got this nice quote by Ralph Kaplan that talks about how when it comes to life, there's no such thing as design, there's only redesign. And that's even more true for existing companies that have had success for 50 to 100 years. And so that's a Real challenge when we're trying to work with those companies to help them sort of design their strategy or even sort of redesign and rethink what they might look like in the future. What do you think about that redesign the company you love? When you've got 20,000 employees and 100 year trading history and sort of the inertia of momentum pushing you in one direction, how do you stop and start deconstructing that?

Well, you tenda. You want to show that page. Actually, that's one of my favorite.

Yes, there it is.

That's my dear friend Ralph Kaplan. The first thing he told me was like, eye shape, come on. People don't design their life. They have a life already. They redesign it. I was like, okay, yeah, that was humbling. And Ralph is an amazing design thinker and has been one of my mentors and great inspiration. So thank you, Tenday, for reminding of us of that.

I mean.

A couple things come to my mind. One is you cannot design or redesign if you don't have a challenge or set of problems. That's my personal feeling. If things are going, like, all great and perfect, you can't design a company, you can't design a product, you can't design a life because there's nothing to solve for. If anything, I would say don't deconstruct it and don't start, you know, but most of the time, you know, there's no such ideal world. So luckily for Alex and for myself and other creative thinkers like Tenday, there are plenty of problems to solve. And that's where you try to take challenges and constraints and turn them on their head, lean into them and come up with better solutions. And Alex, you talk about this. I find that there are two kinds of companies, or same company, different times. People sometimes want to do an evolution. Some people want to do a revolution. And Alex, your terminology is a little bit different. So you call it, tell me again.

Exploit explore.

Yeah, I knew that. Exploit explore. Exactly. And so identifying that and knowing like, are we exploiting or are we exploiting something exists which is evolutionary, you know, a little bit. Right. Or are we exploring new territory and that's revolutionary. Making those decisions or understanding who's going to do what is really essential, I find. And sometimes the way you set up the constraints actually show the way. So one thing I shared with everyone, the Resolve system. A little bit earlier when I was talking about the Resolve system for Herman Miller, when they hired me to do that, they told me something they didn't know if they wanted an evolution or a revolution. And they were kind of hesitating, but they said one thing. They said, ayesha, whatever you do, it has to be 50% the cost of our lowest costing office system, which was at the time action office. And I was like, huh? They didn't realize it, but they in that moment told me that this was going to be a revolution. And of course, being a designer, I love that because I want to do revolutions, I don't want to do evolutions most of the time. And here's why. How could you take 50% off of something that already is their lowest offering? Right? You can't evolutionize, you can't exploit that. So that was my revelation, was like, hey, they just told me this is going to be a revolution. And I went right into it. And I love it when sometimes companies, they don't know what they're going to do, but the way they set the challenges tells you how this thing is going to go.

A quick question, follow up question to that. So how much for you, when we talk about product design or maybe life design, how much does the process differ between evolution and revolution? Is it, I guess the foundation is very similar, but what's different about how the process is set up for those two? Or is it exactly the same?

So the difference is in the nuances. For me, everything is a deconstruction reconstruction problem. But how you change your point of view as you go from deconstructing and looking at the parts to how you're reconstructing and putting it back together, the middle is where the creativity happens. That's the point of view where you shift your point of view from today to the future. And the way you gather inspiration, the way you do research, the way you co design, who you co design with, who are your sponsors, who are your champions, all of that goes into that middle bucket. The messy middle is where stuff happens. And if your values are, you know, we just talked about values, right? If your values are evolutionary values and if your team's values are evolutionary, if your client is afraid of taking too much risk, all of that is going to influence you to have a reconstruction that's evolutionary. But I find it's really important who you work with. If you work with people who are passionate about revolution like you are, then you set the formula to get revolution at the end. But I've been on, and I'm sure, Alex, you find this as well. I've been on project teams where the goal is revolutionary, but the project team is incapable of thinking in a revolutionary manner. And they Take it down. And most of the times when we've worked on projects like this, you get nothing at the end. It's like, better abort.

I'm sure Tendai has seen that in some of the innovation and strategy projects. Right?

Exactly.

Yeah, better abort.

I think that's the right response. Yeah. So just one final question for you, Eisha, that people are kind of interested in just yourself. A really great comment here. Thank you so much for, you know, doing this transition from designing products and giving us a great vision to help us design our lives. Do you see another transition in your future life, like helping societies redesign the world that somebody suggested that for you?

I love that. You know, I might. I hope so. And I'm just this morning finding myself in that position and thinking about it because as you know, I'm living in the States, we live in New York and we're in. Our difficult times with COVID have been compounded with the very, very unfortunate death of George Floyd and the kind of this re recognition of police brutality. And with that, the injustice that we are, it was already always there, but we're now kind of feeling it once again. And with that, I was talking with one of my friends, Terry Jackson, and he wrote something to me and he said, deconstruct racism, Ayesha, to reconstruct love. And with that, he gave me my next project where I want to collaborate with Terry Jackson, who's an amazing executive leadership coach and thought leader, to figure out, okay, how does one do that and how could you go from racism to love? What happens in the middle, that messy middle. And so if anybody's interested in that, please connect with me on LinkedIn and we can have a dialogue going. But I think that that's going to be one of my projects and I'm going to actually help ask the help of my 16 year old daughter who is the VP of her diversity club at school. And she's already done two podcasts on race from the perspective of a teenager. And I'm going, she doesn't know this, but I'm going to enlist her her help in doing that.

That's a big project.

Alex, you've done that with your kids, right?

Yeah, it's wonderful to work with the kids. Hey, Aisha, to wrap up, maybe just what would be your one small tip for people to get started with redesigning their lives? Because it sounds so big, right? So what's the one little thing to get started?

I think what I said earlier is all of those are tips, but maybe one tip is to Ask yourself, do you want to design your life? Is there something that you want to think differently about your life? And is this moment an opportunity where everything about our life is being changed? So do you want to deconstruct your life and put it back together? If you decide that, then I think, you know, you'll think about it differently and you might get the book or you might read up on it. But my sense is nobody can impose that on you. It has to come from inside of you where you're like, okay, for whatever reason, I've lost my job or my kids are, you know, they left and I'm an empty nester or I've been very successful, but now I want to create value for society. Whatever your point of departure is, if you have that instinct inside you, then it must mean it's time to design your life and your work because they go hand in hand.

Thank you, Ayesha for sharing. Thanks for joining us. We wonderful session. I can only recommend go check out Aisha's work and the next book. I'm really curious about that one. Tenday, thank you for joining as well for co hosting and Matt, behind the scenes, thank you for setting this all up and getting us going and everybody for joining this session and looking forward to seeing you next time.

Everybody, Alex and I and Matt and everyone, thank you. It was really, this was so much fun. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye Bye.