Lesley D’Souza:
Empathy isn’t a thing that we are that we just inherently have. It is a muscle, you can practice it, you can get better at it. You can, you can lean on it more and develop it. And, and I think that Design Thinking is like a training program to make sure that you’re, you’re keeping your empathy at its highest level.

Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we’re talking about design thinking in student affairs, with two authors of the new book, design thinking in student affairs, along with two students at a time with so many challenges facing student affairs, we’re seeing real calls to innovate and create something new that better serve students, the profession and all of higher education. Today, we’re going to explore how design thinking might help us create something better going forward. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is brought to you by Stylus, visit styluspub.com and use the promo code

Keith Edwards:
SAnow for 30% off all their books and free shipping, including this one. Today’s episode is also sponsored by EverFi. The trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities. Everfi the standard of care for students, safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker consultant and coach. And you can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibue peoples. Let’s get to the conversation and meet our panelists and guests today. I’m so excited to have all of you here. Why don’t we start with a little bit of introduction and how you’re connected to design thinking Julia, we’re going to kick it off with you.

Julia Allworth:
Yeah. Thanks Keith. I’m so grateful to be here. Hi everyone. My name’s Julia Allworth. I use she, her, Hers pronouns and I’m here today at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where I manage the innovation hub and the innovation hub, we hire and train students from every degree and discipline and study level in design thinking. And they use design thinking to form teams of consultants that work on problems at the university that impact the student experience. So I’m one of the authors of the book and really grateful to be here sharing with all of you today.

Keith Edwards:
Thank you. Let’s go over to your co-author Lesley, go ahead.

Lesley D’Souza:
Hi, I’m Lesley D’Souza. I’m the director of strategic storytelling and digital engagement at Western University.

Keith Edwards:
Best title ever. I don’t know.

Lesley D’Souza:
Bit to do with it.

Lesley D’Souza:
Might’ve slipped that storytelling in there. And I’m speaking to you today from London, which is on the traditional lands of the people’s. I have, I connected with Julia about design thinking. Back when I was working at Ryerson, I’ve been working in student affairs for about 15 years and I kind of started out in orientation and student programs. And then I branched out into assessment and I got into design thinking as kind of an alternative way to think about how we do assessment in student affairs. The fact of how it’s based around a core of empathy really is what shifted, how I think about data, how we collect data, what we do with data and how we work with students. So I coauthor on this book and super excited to be here.

Keith Edwards:
We’re missing one of your co-authors. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your third author? Just so we get his mentioned in here as well.

Lesley D’Souza:
So our third author is Gavin Henning, and he’s a professor at New England college in New Hampshire. He’s been a long-standing leader in student affairs. I met Gavin when he was the president of ACPA several years ago. And he’s been leading the charge with assessment and he was on the council for the advancement of standards in higher education. He’s been all over the place. So he’s a very,

Keith Edwards:
Yes, we’ve had them on around equity based assessment and he’s got two more books coming out. So we’re just going to let Gavin be on this conversation. We’ll do this one without him. We’ll get him on the podcast as well. So thanks. Thanks for mentioning him. And we have two students who are working with you. We’re going to kind of bring this all to life for us. Spencer, tell us a little bit about you.

Spencer Y. Ki:
Hello everyone, excuse me. My name is Spencer Ki. He, him, his and it is my privilege to be the research support writer and editor at UFT’s innovation hub, where I work under the brilliant guidance of Julia to support all of the project teams. Just a little bit in whatever way I can to craft the written deliverables to make them accessible, easy to read for any sort of audience. I’m a novice in design thinking. I’ve really only been in this area, so to speak for the past year with the innovation hub, but it’s really, really shifted my mindset already. I’ve always been a more quantitative person as a student. I’m, I’m double majoring in physics and statistics. So it’s all about numbers for me and having to learn how to just appreciate, you know, something that’s not hard data that you can’t grasp. What is equally valuable as information has really been eyeopening for me. And it’s really augmented all of the rest of my studies and work and everything. So I’m really happy to be part of the innovation hub and thanks for having us.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. We’re so glad you’re here and I love that mindset. I think we’re going to hear more about that. Betelehem let’s hear from you.

Betelehem Gulilat:
Hi, my name is Betelehem. I go by she, her, hers pronouns and I’m a third year pharmacy student at the University of Toronto. And when I’m not chipping away on my computer and developing content or working as a story as a pharmacy students, I’m also working within the innovation hub as a content writer. And I helped develop the blog content and share stories from students across the University of Toronto to kind of highlight some of the important needs that is highlighted within those stories and share them in a way that is compelling to drive the real ways that we can improve student life on campus. So design thinking actually for me is pretty new similar to Spencer as well. It’s been about a year, a bit over a year now that I’ve worked with, from the innovation hub and it’s been a really eye-opening experience for me. I realized that there’s so much that design thinking can be used for in not only student life, but in different fields. And it’s a great way to actually understand the real human needs and create an actual impact within whatever community or space that we’re in, something that I’m really excited about. And yeah, I’m excited to explore today.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. I’m so glad you’re here. I loved reading the book that you, the authors dedicated to students. And so I think that was really powerful for me. And I love that you wanted to have two students part of the conversation. I’m really excited about that. Let’s begin with what is design thinking. Let’s begin with some definitions and help folks who are not familiar with some understanding. And I think let’s start with Julia. Why don’t you tell us what is design thinking and what are we talking about here?

Julia Allworth:
Absolutely. So design thinking as I understand it is both a method and a mindset, at least that’s up, that’s what we’re taught and that’s what we know. And it’s a method really for innovation that has a set of steps to create new things, right, that better meet people’s needs, but it’s also a mindset and a way of doing things. And as I’ve worked more in design thinking, I’ve come to learn that the mindset and the, and the doing of it and the thinking about things that’s you know, failure is learning. And all these concepts that we learn is actually more important than the set of steps that we present to you in the book. A few more things I’ll say design thinking is that it really is a process for better understanding how people experience wicked problems. So we can talk a little bit more about that later, but wicked problems are these really sort of tangled and messy problems that are multiple problems all in one. And it’s based on the idea that people support what they create. So it’s about bringing people into the process of the design, designing with the people who are going to be the end beneficiaries of whatever the design is, so that they’re really bringing their own lived experience into the process.

Keith Edwards:
I love this because I think so many of the challenges we face in our world today really are wicked problems, but we also live in a time where we want the simplest binary thinking either, or, and I love wicked problems really is not just both and, but both end times so many different things. Lesley, what would you add to design thinking? Does it go by different names? Are there different definitions? Tell us a little bit more.

Lesley D’Souza:
Yeah. I think the fact that it is both like kind of an ethos and a method mean that sometimes people will say design thinking and they mean kind of the philosophy or they mean like the mindset. And sometimes they’re talking about the specific set of steps, you know, that Stanford D school put out. And then if you’re talking about specific process, there’s a few different ones that, that are slightly different from each other. There’s community, the, oh my goodness, I’m blanking on the name community equity. I wrote that part, centered community design human centered design and, and all of these are very similar, but, but include some slightly different pieces that, that shift them a little bit. So I think that the beauty of that is you can kind of find a process that best meets your needs. I really highly encourage people to look at the ones focused on equity, like liberatory design and, and just understand what these extra lenses that they, they actually put into the process can do to help you make sure that you’re thinking with an equity lens.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. I really appreciated that in the book I’ve seen the Stanford design school five-step process, and then all the other variations, how they amend that not only was helpful in understanding that, but also helped me better understand the Stanford design school, right. How it got changed and what got added to it. Added clarity. Go ahead, Lesley, what else were we going to add?

Lesley D’Souza:
Yeah, no. And then I think the only other thing I wanted to add was the power of story within the design thinking process. So I, a lot of my work in digital engagement is focused on social media. We know social media algorithms really kind of elevate posts that are on either end of the spectrum. And they don’t really foster great discourse because that’s not what the algorithms are built to do. And so if you write a post that’s like morally outraged and really, you know, incendiary, that’s going to get more engagement than a post that really is exploring discourse and really like trying to, to understand ideas and trying to bring people together. So that’s the irony because, you know, social media is this technology that has Supreme power to bring people together. And yet it does in many cases drive people apart because of how these algorithms work.

Lesley D’Souza:
Design thinking, I think is kind of the antithesis to that because it’s structures in listening. So you have to listen to people’s stories. There are actual steps and exercises that you do as a designer that really force you to sit in empathy and, and understand someone before passing judgment and deciding what you think is right for them. And so I think that for me, the ethos of design thinking is something that is so needed right now, because it is on the other side of the spectrum from where we find ourselves having challenging conversations, which is right now, mainly on social media.

Keith Edwards:
Well, I really that I think so many of us are craving the antidote to this outrage, binary thinking polarization. I know we have all our guests are coming to us from Canada today, but we just had a mini election here in the United States and how we went into that. And how we talk about it is as, just as you described on these polarized either or continuum. So I think so many of us are craving the antidote to that in our culture, in our lives, in our national discourse and in our communities from, from large to small. So this is really exciting. Julia mentioned wicked problems. And with rather than for two really kind of critical concepts to this, I’d love it to hear from Betelehem. And then Spencer if you have some examples that you’ve seen or experienced around wicked problems or the width, rather than for process Betelehem, let’s start with you.

Betelehem Gulilat:
Yeah. So from my experience writing for the innovation hub, I have some opportunities to interview students for a variety of topics. One that I can think of, or that I’ve done recently has to do with returning to campus. So now that school has shifted back to in-person learning, I realized that there’s a lot of challenges that students face that actually is not something that is a simple problem that we can just solve. You think that returning to campus should be a shift that everyone’s kind of looking forward to because that’s kind of what we’ve been always been used to, but there’s a lot there that I ended up delving into through these interviews with students to understand that there’s actually a lot of changes with hybrid models now being used, where some students aren’t really comfortable with the shifts of choosing between virtual or going into campus.

Betelehem Gulilat:
Some people really enjoyed being at home because of the comfort of not having to leave your house, everything being in one space. And then now having to go back to campus, there’s the element of finances that you have to think of. Also the element of even nervousness or anxiety that comes with being in a space with students that you weren’t really used to seeing for the past year. So through that conversation that I had with students, I realized there’s a lot of problems that we can’t really put one solution to, and we actually have to delve and listen to each story and understand and empathize with. And I think some of the wonderful opportunity of working with innovation hub as a student is I get to kind of understand that side of it because I’m a student myself. So in a way I’m trying to also be unbiased and actually hear their experience, but I also feel empathy directly as well as the students. So that’s an example I can think of.

Keith Edwards:
Well, and you’re bringing your own lens. And I think this is a, this is a great example because we have this narrative, this simplified narrative of virtual or in-person, and everybody wants in person, cause it’s normal. It’s what we were doing, but you’re really complicating that. And I love the use of assessment, the use of your own experience and really helping us really empathize what really are people feeling? What are they experiencing? How are they seeing this? What are they navigating? So we better understand this wicked problem. Go ahead Julia.

Julia Allworth:
Yeah. If I may just jump in here too, because I think one of the things I’ve learned in doing design thinking work is that as human beings, our tendency is really to want to solve a problem. There’s a problem. There’s a solution, right? That’s sort of the traditional way of thinking. And with wicked problems, there’s not one solution, right? There’s a lot of complicating factors, as Betelehem’s mentioning about coming back to campus the pandemic, this is a wicked problem. There’s so many problems within it, right? And so design thinking really helps us to think about all of the different stakeholders empathize and understand that there’s many solutions to wicked problems that, and they, and no one solution will fix it. Right. And so it’s really about spending time steeping in that problem, getting to know it. I think we put like an Einstein quote in the book that says, you know, if Einstein had an hour to solve a problem. He would have spent 55 minutes in the problem and five minutes in the solution and design thing he really says, yeah, let’s spend that time really understanding the problem empathizing with the people that have the problem and not jump right to solutions. But as I found working with students and with just people in general, we love to jump right to the solution. Right. So understanding what a wicked problem is and that willingness to stay in the problem is a big part of this.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. What a wonderful kind of counter-culture reminder here. I love it. We’ve talked about wicked problems a little bit of with, rather than for Spencer. Do you have an example of this kind of coming to your mind as we’re having this conversation?

Spencer Y. Ki:
Oh yes, definitely. And I’d love to elaborate on the with rather than for perspective. And in fact, I would like to say that Julia is underselling almost what she has been able to accomplish leading the innovation team here in that we don’t design just with, rather than for students, but, you know, as, as Beth and I’s existence attest to, we design like with, excuse me, I messed that up, but not just with, rather than four, but by students as well. Beth and I, our students, the majority of people working in the innovation of our students and we’re able to extend not just empathy, but experience. So when Beth and I both have a high level view of the projects because we all work with all the different teams and have a tiny bit of a hand at each different pot at the innovation hub.

Spencer Y. Ki:
And with every single project that’s going on I’m speaking for myself, of course, but I suspect Beth, Beth, what, I’m your do you have a similar experience in that you identify just a little bit, right? Not just empathy, you don’t just understand where the students are coming from. You don’t just like, you feel compassion, but you know what they’re going through, right? You have either experienced things that they have talked about yourself, or you know, someone at least two who’s experienced the same things that these students are attesting too. And that perspective I would say is, is incredibly valuable because even though all of the permanent staff/grownups at the innovation hub, Julia, and I’ll be great rest of the leadership team, even though they are the most empathetic semi administrative staff at UFT. I know. It’s really the student experience in the present, right? We’re going to class, we’re going to lab lecture is we’re working on homework at home at three in the morning. That’s really coloring our work that we pour into these reports and these written deliverables and these presentations administration. And that’s something that couldn’t be accomplished through any other kind of problem-solving lens.

Keith Edwards:
I think this is really important that the present that is the word that you said that I’m really sticking with because there was a time that we could go back to what happened five years ago to inform what we’re doing now, but that’s over you know, things are completely different, completely different in so many ways than they were two years ago. Things are even completely different than they were six months ago. I dunno about what what the timing was again, but there was this lovely July, 2021 where we thought COVID was over. It turns out no, that wasn’t. And so there’s been all these fits and starts. And so really what is happening now? What are people experiencing now? How are they feeling now? How are they engaging with this now? And all the complexity is really great. In the book, you’re also talking a lot about using design thinking for organizational change, informing organizational change and assessment, which we’ve heard a little bit about. Lesley, could you talk a little bit about org change and assessment?

Lesley D’Souza:
Yeah, I think the chapter on organizational change in it, like there’s so many theories on, on how you can get a lot of them. I did. I think, I think that each one has its own merits. And so we kind of divided them up into, you know, theories and processes that describe individual change at the individual level versus theories that describe change at an organizational level. And the thing that I love about design thinking is that it can, it can deal with both because the process changes people. And so what we, what I heard a lot when, when I started talking about design thinking assessment and like how we can shift how we do assessment to gather data and incorporate empathy as a step in our assessment process, there were a lot of people who were saying things like, I will never be able to sell that to my Institute, like my institution, this is too touchy, feely.

Lesley D’Souza:
Like they are never going to want to do this. Like, how do you get them to a place where this is like language, they would feel comfortable. Like if I say this, they’re not gonna want to use it. And the reality is that you can also use a design thinking process to get them there because the process itself creates readiness. And, and that’s in some ways why the innovative changes work because the best solution might not work within the culture because you haven’t necessarily done the work to shift the culture stories to a place where it’s ready to accept the solution. And so, like the process brings people in, it helps them feel, heard. It generates that buy-in that groundswell. And so I think it’s, it’s a massive, important tool for organizational change. And for decision-makers, there’s this really fascinating article that came out in the Atlantic several years ago now about how feeling power, not necessarily being in a position of power, but feeling powerful, actually, anesthetizes your empathy.

Lesley D’Souza:
So you, you lose the ability to feel empathy for others. And there’s a whole bunch of like evolutionary theory about why that is. But the reality is that if you’re, you’re feeling power over others and you’re making decisions for others, it’s very easy to lose connection and to lose empathy for the people you’re serving. And so we have to create structures, processes, and things in our environment as leaders to ensure that we’re continually returning to our community and to our frontline people, to make sure that we’re listening and we’re empathizing with them because otherwise you can get isolated up in your office and you don’t know students, and you’re making decisions for the students who used to have, or for the students you want to have, but not, yeah, but not for, not for the people who are there with you right now, because you’re not with them. And design thinking really creates ways like tangible things that you can do to activate your empathy and make sure that you don’t lose it. Empathy isn’t a thing that we are that we just inherently have. It is a muscle, you can practice it, you can get better at it. You can, you can lean on it more and develop it. And, and I think that design thinking is like a training program to make sure that you’re, you’re keeping your empathy at its highest level. Because otherwise you lose it.

Keith Edwards:
You just reminded me of we’re talking about solutions or strategies, but you’re saying culture, right? There’s the old saying culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? If you don’t have a culture that’s open to this, that can be really powerful. And this notion of empathy, I just want to mention, we’ve talked about the Stanford design school or D school. This process that we give we’re referring to is empathize, define ideate, prototype, and then test. And then we loop back around to see how that went. Right. And that’s one of the assessment comes in. Could you talk a little bit about that and connection to assessment?

Lesley D’Souza:
Yeah. So there’s a chapter in the book where I basically took the student affairs assessment model we were using. And I kind of like Frankensteined it with design thinking and added in storytelling because when we’re talking about culture and data stories can be data, you can have inputs as stories, but stories are also, we have to make sure that we’re putting stories back into the culture to shift that readiness needle. And so when we’re, when we’re looking at stories, stories are the programming language of our culture. And so we need to really understand what we’re putting out there and make sure that those stories are data informed, make sure that they’re based in reality and make sure that they are inclusive and centering the right people as the tellers of those stories and design thinking is really how you can make sure that the designers who, you know, with rather than for our part of generating the stories that are going to affect positive change, and that will fundamentally shift how we do assessment. Because then you start to be able to listen to students and listen to what they say and not say anecdotal, like it’s a bad word. You know, you can, you can gather those stories and teach people that, you know, there, there are limitations to how you can use those stories as data, but there’s also limitations to quantitative data and how you can use that, that we don’t talk about enough.

Julia Allworth:
There’s an example. I’ll just jump in here real quick. There’s an example in the book that I give that, I think it sort of illustrates this because we, I had a real aha moment in doing design thinking work, where we had our sort of inaugural team of folks working on design thinking. The first year we did it, we coupled staff and students together and train them up and built design teams. And we had an event where we were presenting backs, the data, including personas to a group of senior administrators of what we’ve learned. And there was a persona, I think it was a trans student that also had some accessibility needs and like very intersectional person that we had met with. We we told their story and I had a very senior administrator at the university come up to me after this and say, you know, Julia, I’ve heard statistics about this particular problem over and over again.

Julia Allworth:
And I get the reports and I see the surveys, but something about hearing that person’s story today, I can’t sit with this problem anymore. I have to act. And there’s something about this process that changes people because it’s, so it tugs on your heart strings, there’s a humanity to it. We can read a report about, you know, X percent of students struggled to find community or different sort of stats like that and say, oh, that’s unfortunate, right? What should we do about that? We could do this. We could do that. We solve it. But taking that time to really understand this is what happened for this student creates this unrest that I think that’s where the culture change really starts is when people can’t sit with the problem anymore, that they can’t sleep at night anymore until they start to take some kind of action. That’s where real change sort of starts to happen. At least from my perspective of what I’ve seen.

Lesley D’Souza:
A hundred percent. Yeah. It’s the, it’s the emotional connection that hearing a person’s story does to you. And, and so like our rational thought is what kind of makes us individuals, and we can make decisions based on data, like hard data and rational things without considering the human impact. But you can’t listen to somebody’s story, have that activate your emotions and then make decisions for them that don’t take into account their humanity. And I think that that’s, that’s what I loved about bringing design, thinking into how we conduct assessment in student affairs and in higher education. If there’s also a lot of indigenous pedagogy that that needs to be referenced because storytelling is a key tenant to almost every indigenous pedagogy on the planet. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because we are made of stories and it’s how we learn and it’s how we teach. And so I think that without a w we have to acknowledge that design thinking in some ways is parts of indigenous pedagogy repackaged. And it’s a really important consideration to make, because it means we’re returning to our roots as humans and trying to make sure that we’re appreciating not only our objective thoughts, but also appreciating our emotions and our spirit and bringing that into processes where we’re creating things for humans.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. You’re reminding me, I think so many of us, we know better as student affairs professionals, but our mental model is still our own college experience. Right. We go back to hearing a conduct, hearing about a student in an alcohol case. We’re imagining where we were and the environments have changed. The students have changed. The whole experience is completely different. And so how do we, how do we bring that now? I don’t think any of us think that’s a good idea. And I think if we’re honest, we do it. And so this empathy both as Spencer loves the data and the charts, right. But also the stories and the antidotes, which were Brene Brown would say is just data with a soul bringing that empathy in. And as Julia was mentioning you know, I had a boss who was a Dean, but didn’t care much about the numbers, but he powerful story would really shift his thinking, his boss, my vice-president didn’t care so much about stories, but she loved data. She really wanted the numbers. And so how do we, as change makers have both of those at our disposal to make the case particularly one of the challenges to those old mental models is they don’t reflect the realities of the world, of social media, of all the challenges that students face and the diversity of students. A big part of the book also is around equity and design thinking. And as you’ve already pointed to, how do we integrate that in? Do you want to say a little bit more about equity in design thinking? Lesley?

Lesley D’Souza:
Sure. So I think design thinking is fundamentally about listening and it, and it teaches people how to listen well, and, and it values, it raises the value of emotional needs to the same level as all of the other data that we collect. And I think that those things are really key to the process and allow it to be supportive of an equity centered approach. The thing that is really important to consider is that you can do a design thinking process and want to solve an equity problem. But if you don’t understand equity and you don’t understand your privilege and you don’t understand bias, you’re still going to come up with bias solutions. So you’re still going to reinforce inequity. So you, this is not a magic solution to equity. This is a tool that blends well with equity, because if you teach your designers to think with equity lenses, this can be incredibly powerful. But if you ignore those things and you sent her the same people in decision-making spaces without truly listening, you can, you can still be reinforcing inequity.

Keith Edwards:
Just so appreciating all of this, because it just seems to me it’s the antidote to what is going on. It’s the antidote to so many of the challenges from simple oversimplified problems to a lack of empathy, to not really being equitable in how we think about things or who we include or how the solutions happened, or how they get brought through. So this is really feeling rich. We want to shift and talk about how we do this in student affairs practice super broadly defined Spencer, I’m wondering if there are ways that you’ve seen this play out that that could be really helpful to folks who are maybe listening to this and saying, this is really exciting, but how does this relate to student affairs and student services and housing and conduct and new student orientation and all of the services we’re trying to provide, what’s kind of coming up for you?

Spencer Y. Ki:
Well, definitely, actually I want to jump off on what you just mentioned there, Keith, about oversimplify problems and tied back to the entire conversation just now in that design thinking at least in my experience has really allowed us to see the problems behind the problems or rather the, the metal problems, so to speak. And one example, one example I’m thinking of just this moment is at the innovation hub, we were working on a project called learning about failure, right, where we were interviewing students about how it felt to fail kind of why they not necessarily why they were failing, but why they thought they were failing, how they could be supported. And the beauty of this project really was that normally we don’t think of failure as the problem, rather, it’s the outcome of a problem, right? So if, say in a usual kind of conversation, we’d say, oh, X amount of students failed

Spencer Y. Ki:
this course, we need to rework the course or something to that effect. You, you don’t think about the failure as an entity in itself, right? It’s just a negative outcome. But what we found in this learning through failure project is that the failure itself is valuable. You know, failure is a learning experience. And so many students were united in this failure. It’s there, there is an undercurrent, you know in high-powered universities, we’re all overachievers. These kinds of students that we, we don’t allow ourselves any sort of leeway and we’re flexibility in our grades or in our extracurricular achievements. And this is very much a unifying undercurrent at UFT among the student body. And it’s not something that anyone had really, really studied before, how much failure the feeling was tending the student body. We were just seeing it as an outcome of, of negative things happening. You know, this course is,

Keith Edwards:
Hold on to avoid at all costs and our perfectionist, which tendencies, which has lots of roots included in white supremacy. And I love that you’re reframing failure as learning. Go ahead. I just couldn’t help myself, Spencer.

Spencer Y. Ki:
No, no. That encapsulates it perfectly. I that’s pretty much all I wanted to mention that this reframing of the perspective opened up of course, new problems, right? How, how to approach this failure culture, but also in a sense eliminated some other problems, right? Maybe it’s not so bad to fail it really, it could be spun as a positive. And that’s just part of the university experience. I know Julia, that you mentioned this at a very positive reception to administration, if you just wanted to to speak to that a bit.

Julia Allworth:
Yeah, no, I mean, it, it was, I think one of the key sort of takeaways for folks in student affairs and even in the academic realm was really around allowing space for failure, right? Oftentimes we get this sort of parental lists sort of like we have to cushion things or protect people. It’s sort of human nature. We want to take care of people. Right. and I think as the administrative staff, we’re guilty of that sometimes, but to really find through the design thinking process in this example that actually giving space for failure, creating spaces that the university for failure to feel like something that you can practice doing well or practice experiencing before the stakes are a little bit higher in other spaces was really, really important.

Keith Edwards:
This failure part, I think is so critical because I think so many I’m thinking about students, but we can apply this to student affairs professionals. The overachievers who’ve spent our life, as Spencer mentioned, getting it right, that first failure can be really scary and really threatening. We’ll do anything to avoid it. And people who failed a lot, really struggled through life for all sorts of reasons, including systematic oppression. I feel like I can’t fail again. Otherwise it’s going to mean that I’m a failure. So I think that the students who struggle the most and the students who have been the most successful are really averse to failure. Those folks who are in the middle of we’ve had a little mix of it has some failures, but it’s been okay. They have a better chance of seeing it as are not, not failure, but oh, I can learn from that and really, really grow from that. I think it’s a really powerful thing. When we think about persistence and retention and success in so many things, go ahead, Lesley,

Lesley D’Souza:
There’s a, there’s also a pattern that you see. And if we, if we stop, if we stop punishing failure and assigning guilt and shame associated with failure, instead treated as learning we would see a lot more innovation. We would see a lot more exceptional things happening because I tell my kids this all the time, the people who lose the most are also the people who win the most. So we really need to normalize putting yourself out there and risking failure because otherwise you can’t achieve. Excellence.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Well, Beth, we’ll go to you for one more example, but I can’t resist as we were watching the Olympics and Suni Lee. Who’s here from where I am in Minneapolis and St. Paul. My daughter’s saying I want to be a gymnast like her. And I said, in order to be a great gymnast, you have to be willing to be a really bad one first. And that goes to everything. If you want to be a great dancer at weddings, you have to be willing to be a really bad dancer. Like if you want to be a great, terrible, essential part in the process. So I love that Betelehem. What are some, maybe some other examples around student affairs, student services, how we do our work that this could shine some light on?

Betelehem Gulilat:
Yes. So I also, the failure aspect is also holding me in as well. But another thing I thought of is about creativity and how design thinking in a student space is a really a great opportunity for students to also practice their creative aspects. To know that it’s not just, you know, our academics that we always just have to focus on, but there’s a way that we can also practice and bring our ideas into the university and bring it to life through creative, creative thinking. And I think there was actually a blog post that I kind of explore that idea of creativity, where we can actually see innovation being put into place by giving us space for students to creatively fail in a way where we can practice and ideate together and discuss our ideas and come up with new ways of approaching a problem.

Betelehem Gulilat:
And I think students actually would be a perfect way to be able to incorporate this using design thinking in university, because we have our experience as students as well. And then there’s also new ideas that we bring in into these problem sets. And I think that that’s something creativity is very important for, for higher education. And I also noticed that design thinking is part of creativity and failure without innovation, without failure. There’s no innovation and creativity is part of that. So I think that’s something I think that we can also explore a bit more within higher education for students.

Keith Edwards:
Oh, sorry. Just add, then we’ll go to your Julia that the creativity is so important and we for forever have had the story that a higher ed is slow to change. And then last March, we changed like that. We had a colleague on the podcast Ebenezer Bonnie Gallagher, her who said, we proved that we can change on a dime. We can do it in a day. That doesn’t mean we did it well. So now how do we change and create an innovate? Well, and I think design thinking is a great process to add to that Julia. What were you going to add?

Julia Allworth:
I just want to this point about student affairs, I had to jump in because I really think in our institutions, our students are our greatest assets. Speaking of creativity, speaking of diversity and equity there’s a really great equity centered designer that I love and admire internet Carol. We talk about her in the book. She her, her group did the equity, separate communities design. She talks about this idea of equity designers and equity allies. And you only get to be an equity designer. If you identify as part of the group that you’re designing for equity allies are the rest of us who are not technically part of the group. So us in student affairs, technically most of us aren’t students anymore. Some of us are still, it’s still a pursuing academics, but really when we think about the diversity of our student body in our work at the innovation hub, and I think this is how it should be done, we have to bring students into that work.

Julia Allworth:
So there’s so many times where we sit around in a room full of staff and faculty and talk about students and what they need and what they want and how we’re going to retain them and all those conversations. And I’m a big advocate for me as an ally, I have to really advocate for let’s bring those students into the conversation and Lesley and Gavin. And I, when we, when we wrote this book really talked to them about, that’s why we dedicated to students. That’s the point we really want to emphasize is that I mean, all three of us identify as white cis-gendered settlers. You know, we have, there’s a lot of sort of privilege in our own positionality in writing this book. And we know that and understand that. But I think one of the things that we have to do as allies is that we have to do the work, right. We have to participate, and this is our contribution. And we’ve had conversations at length about that, but we’re not the designers, right? Our, our role is to really enable and educate and equip and get out of the way for, in our case students to be the designers of their own reality. Right. And so looking for meaningful ways to do that and bringing in all that richness and creativity and all the skillsets that we have right. In our own sort of backyards here, the schools, right.

Keith Edwards:
Right. You’re really connecting it to a really student centered or inclusive process and how rather than the people holding the process, being the solution finders, they’re really holding a process. And I think we can benefit from that in so many different aspects.

Lesley D’Souza:
And just to, just to add to that too, I think that a lot of people look at this process and they’re kind of like, well, like sometimes I there’s a grant due, or like I gotta, I gotta produce, and I don’t have time to do this whole process and bring students in at every level. Cause it does take time. And, and I would just push back and say that, you know, how many times do we start programs that get run into the ground? Because we didn’t do the upfront work. It costs more, it’s less efficient if we don’t do it right from the beginning. And you need to generate that. Buy-In that, that culture shift that readiness in order to land the right solution. So you can have the best solution in the world and it might be the greatest program ever. And it won’t be accepted by the community unless you go through a process where you bring the community in at the beginning,

Keith Edwards:
Oh, you’re talking about programs on a college campus, but we can talk about efforts to address racism in communities policing, schooling, poverty, so many different things that we’re all facing well, as we knew we would, we are, we are all excited and we’re all energized. And we are running out of time. This podcast is called Student Affairs NOW we’d like to end with the question, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now? And if you want to add where folks can connect with you please go ahead and add that, Beth, let’s start with you. What are you troubling now?

Betelehem Gulilat:
Yes. that’s a very good question. There’s a lot to think about. I think equity is something I really do want to explore more about within student spaces, because it’s something I think when it comes to privilege, we all have some sort of form of privilege. And I think wherever there is privilege or an advantage that someone has, there’s someone that has a disadvantage. And I think that is something we have to kind of think more internally for ourselves. What is an advantage that we have that others don’t have and how can we minimize that gap and how, how can we individually in our own spaces do that within student life or even in any other system that we’re part of. So that’s something that’s very troubling for me. I know it’s not like a one size fit, all kind of approach that we can do. It’s probably going to take a lot of time, but just from this conversation, I’m really sparked by that I, that topic actually, and something.

Keith Edwards:
It sounds like a wicked problem, Betelehem, really great modeling here. Excellent. Spencer, what is, what is what are you pondering or troubling now?

Spencer Y. Ki:
I’m just dwelling on to date this podcast, a little for future listeners about the pandemic and returning to campus, right. I there’s definitely so much to be done in the academic sphere. You know, the in-person slash online slash facilitation of everyone, international students that are, that that’s all been thoroughly studied, but the student experience is more than just academics course. And there’s an entire generation of student clubs who’ve lost their refunding entire generation of first-years who have no extracurricular experience because they couldn’t experience university at all in first year. And that’s, that’s a loss that’s unquantifiable to the student experience, right? You can’t put a number on how much of the outside of the classroom experience students have lost over COVID-19. And really the only way to approach that problems with design thinking, I would say. And it’s something that really bears looking at, looking towards. I think to encapsulate the entire conversation, the quote that’s been dwelling with me is that you can’t empathize with a statistic. I just wanted to put that out there because that’s been pinging around in my head for the last 10 minutes.

Keith Edwards:
Well look what you’ve done. You’ve created this physics and stats major into this big empathy advocate. It’s so great. Thank you Spencer.

Spencer Y. Ki:
A hundred percent.

Keith Edwards:
Lesley what’s what is with you now?

Lesley D’Souza:
I’ve been thinking a long time about what the real purpose of higher education is and what it’s structure like, how it’s structured right now, what that accomplishes and, and how that’s misaligned. I think with what we hope higher education does, which is support greater learning and innovation. And, and right now, unfortunately, I look at a lot of the colonial aspects of the way our system works and higher education right now is, is almost like a, like a social case to ticket. And so we have to be very conscious of our power as change-makers within education, which is probably one of the single most powerful tools. We have to shift our culture aside from social media. And yeah, like I’m looking at how technology is going to disrupt it and how, how learning might change might change for the better or for the worse.

Lesley D’Souza:
And I’m thinking a lot about, I am thinking a lot about social media and how we’ve handed the keys to our culture, to private enterprises and their algorithms in a way that has never happened for in humanity. It used to be that, you know, like the media industry was our, with our culture holder. But, but it was driven by market forces and, and now we’ve handed over our culture and our psychology to, to these companies that manage how we communicate and what we see and how we talk to each other. And it’s, it’s scary to me because it changes what what’s possible for us.

Keith Edwards:
I love the, the hope and then a realistic call to action. This sense of urgency that you’re bringing with us. Julia, wonder what is with you now?

Julia Allworth:
Oh, wow. So inspired by everything. My colleagues have all the shared here. Thank you, Betelehem, Spencer and Lesley and Keith. For me, I guess one thing that’s percolating always is the people aspect of design thinking that really designed thinking can change the people that get involved in it, but also this piece on equity that inequity and systems of oppression in our society are by design, right? They’re designed that way. We know that and design thinking can be a tool for designing for equity, but we have to use it intentionally. Right. And I don’t want to lie. I mean, there’s a lot of ways that design thinking has been used to perpetuate the status quo. So we want to really emphasize that focus on those empty, those equity centered design models and bring the right people into the process. And I think through doing this work, what I’ve learned is that there’s no better way to connect students to each other. For example, in this work, then having one student talk to another student in depth about their experience and really something magical happens. Both students feel really good about that. It’s this great connection, but also we realized just there are these sort of universal unmet needs that we need to explore. So yeah, I guess I’m thinking about this idea of, because inequity is by design. We need to think about equity by design as well. And there’s intentionality to that.

Keith Edwards:
That’s where we’re going to end it. That’s so good. That’s a really great way to kind of summarize it. I want to thank all of you so much for being here Julia and Lesley, congratulations on the new book Spencer and Betelehem. Thank you so much for bringing the student center perspective and your perspective as students. This has been really wonderful. We want to, as we conclude, thank our sponsors of today’s episode Stylus and EverFi. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor of Student Affairs NOW podcast browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com, including this book, you can use promo code SANow for 30% off all books plus free shipping. You can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @styluspub and EverFi. For over 20 years, EverFi

Keith Edwards:
has been the trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities with efficacy studies behind their courses. You will have confidence that you’re using the standard of care for students’ safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it transform the future of your institution and the community you serve. Learn more ever everfi.com/studentaffairsnow. Huge shout out to Nat Ambrosey, the production assistant of the podcast behind the scenes who makes us all look and sound good. If you’re listening today and not already receiving our newsletter, please visit our website at studentaffairsnow.com scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list. Get the latest every Wednesday morning about the newest episodes coming out. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Thanks again to the fabulous guests today and everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week all. Thank you.

https://www.lesleydsouza.com/

https://www.juliaallworth.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencer-ki/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgulilat/

The UofT Innovation Hub: http://blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca/innovationhub/ 

Failure Project @ Innovation Hub: http://blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca/innovationhub/lets-talk-about-failure-2/ 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ – the atlantic article I mentioned

https://www.creativereactionlab.com/ – Creative Reaction Lab, founded by Antoinette Carroll, who use Equity-Centred Community Design