[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, #278, I am so excited to share this conversation with Nicola Ulibarri about design thinking in teaching, research and beyond.

[00:00:16] Production credit: Produced by Innovate Learning. Maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:25] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so excited to introduce you today to Nicola Ulibarri.

At the start of her PhD studies at Stanford University, she took a class in Design Thinking hoping it would accelerate her work. Inspired by the usefulness of this experience, in 2010, she joined with Amanda Cravens, Anja Svetina Nabergoj, Adam Royalty, and Sebastian Kernbach to develop Creativity in Research, a project to enhance the creativity of busy researchers with design thinking.

Drawing on the scientific research on creativity, they developed a practical workshop for graduate students and faculty. In the years teaching this workshop, they have seen repeatedly, that increasing creative confidence leads to greater productivity and more innovation research outputs. At the same time, learning to focus on the process of research has an emotional impact on how students approach research, as they seem to have less stress and a greater sense of control, ultimately becoming happier as well as more creatively productive researchers.

The team recently turned the workshop curriculum into a book, Creativity in Research: Cultivate Clarity, Be Innovative and Make Progress in your Research Journey, but as you’ll discover throughout the interview, it’s not just focused on research. Today, we’ll talk a lot about enhancing our teaching and really just our professional work lives as well. A little bit more about Nicola. She’s an assistant professor in Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, where she leads an interdisciplinary research team that studies water and infrastructure governance.

Her team combines approaches from environmental planning, public administration and water resource engineering to improve the interactions between people, infrastructure and the environment. In her free time, she is a trivia fanatic, expert online video watcher and loves hiking. Nicola, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:01] Nicola Ulibarri: Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here, Bonni.

[00:03:04] Bonni: I am like a kid in the candy store right now [laughs] because I’m so excited to talk to you. Why don’t we start at the beginning? When did you first find out about design thinking?

[00:03:16] Nicola: I was first introduced the idea of design thinking back in 2010, which is when I started my PhD at Stanford. I had no idea what design thinking was, but there is an institute on campus, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, and they teach a bunch of classes on this thing that’s about innovation, design thinking. I signed up for a class in the first quarter of my PhD. It was kind of a boot camp, just dive in and learn design thinking applied to several different problems. It was really fun and really challenging and kind of got me hooked, so that was my start on design thinking.

[00:04:01] Bonni: We could spend about 10 episodes and not even finish with the definition but can you give us your, if you’re talking to a– I don’t know, I was going to say a three-year-old but no, you’re talking to a seven-year-old of an overview of design thinking?

[00:04:16] Nicola: Yes, so design thinking is essentially a creative problem-solving methodology that really starts from understanding and addressing human needs. It came out of product design most originally and so thinking about, “Okay, if we’re designing a new medical device or we’re designing a new sleeping bag, you want to go out, you want to interview the people who are going to be using this device to see what works, what doesn’t and then develop something new.”

One thing that’s really cool about the way that it’s taught at Stanford is that innovation is a learnable process. Instead of, “Oh, you have to be this brilliant creative person to be innovative.” It’s instead, “No, if you follow these particular steps, if you adopt these particular mindsets, then you can start to come up with new ideas that will work for whoever your users are.” That’s a little bit about what design thinking is.

[00:05:18] Bonni: Just one of the many reasons I was excited to talk to you has to do with the speaking that I’ve been doing recently. So much of the theme of what I’ve talked about in keynotes is imagination and I’m just completely captivated by this idea that so often we will limit ourselves because we think the problem is we don’t have the resources. Oftentimes, that’s financial or that’s space or that’s the people, and that so often, it’s actually we just don’t have the capacity for the imagination that would actually show us that really there’s so much more abundance than we realize is there.

I’m totally oversimplifying because then I’d have to talk for [laughs] three to six episodes just to even unpack it completely but I’m just seeing this connection between my fascination with just our limitations in terms of our imagination, which often to me seems like it really is a limitation of creativity and not, I hate to use this overused analogy, but just not exercising those muscles enough. Does that resonate? Am I on the right track here?

[00:06:19] Nicola: Yes, definitely. One of the things in design thinking that you often see is this idea of a flare and then a focus. The idea being that there are times where, yes, you need to put your head down and you need to move forward and get things done, but that there are other times where you need to step back and let go of all of the assumptions you have about what’s realistic based on your resources or based off of what you know or the people you have at your disposal and really just think big and come up with as many ideas as possible. Absolutely thinking about, okay, how do we tap into our imagination? How do we force ourselves essentially to step back and start with generating as many ideas as possible, is a really important part of design thinking.

[00:07:15] Bonni: Another reason why I was so excited about having you here today is that it hits on so much of what we do. This definitely comes up, of course, in our research, and that’s what your book is focused on with your co-authors, but also in our teaching and I know you have a chapter in there about teaching, and then also just being more effective at our work in general.

I know enough to interview someone who wrote a book about design thinking, that’s my extent of it, but I have played around with it and I do give examples in many of my classes. For me, I’ve taught classes in marketing, for example, getting to understand from a product design, who is going to be using this and really understanding their context and their needs and their challenges is so important in that.

I’ve used examples but I’m certainly not going to be writing any books anytime [laughs] soon. I’m so excited for us today to explore three broad areas. First, we’re going to look at approaches and techniques for this whole category you call, where am I right now? Then we’re going to look at a whole set of things around what can I do differently? Then some supporting abilities that can help us as we’re doing those two things. That’s where we’re headed, for anyone that wants an outline, that’s what we’re doing. Let’s start out with what do you think of when you talk about these approaches around where am I right now?

[00:08:37] Nicola: Actually, before we dive in there, I do want to comment a little bit. You brought up you’re used to teaching design thinking in applying it to marketing and that’s– Again, the history of design thinking is very much outward focused, so you’re designing for some other set of users. All of the context though that we cover in the book and that I think are really fascinating for the listeners are designing for yourself.

When you are solving a problem and you’re teaching or trying to come up with a new research project or figuring out how to manage your time more effectively, all of those you are the user essentially. That’s one of the big things that we’ve done is trying to adapt this outward-looking, “Okay, how do I go out and empathize with my users?” Instead, think about. “Okay, how do I learn about what I am doing and what I need to learn to do differently to overcome this problem or to become more innovative?”

[00:09:42] Bonni: That makes so much sense. [chuckles] On my bookshelf upstairs, I literally think I have an entire bookshelf just of books on creativity but I don’t think any of them look at it from this paradigm. I think you’re onto something. I think you should write a book. Oh, wait, you already did. [laughs]

[00:09:57] Nicola: Yes, exactly. That’s the goal at least. Yes.

[00:09:59] Bonni: No. It really seems distinct and unique and so helpful for us because so many times we are embarking on these things interdependently but also sometimes independently and that’s a good starting point for us too. All right, so the where am I right now?

[00:10:12] Nicola: Where am I right now? Yes, so the book is framed around seven abilities, so we call them. These are essentially things based off of scientific research on creativity that creative people do. We start with a group of abilities that are really focused on understanding who you are and what you’re doing. The idea being if there’s no way that you can redesign your teaching or your redesign, the way that you write papers or anything like that, unless you start from what you’re currently doing.

That is looking, learning to be mindful of what you do. What are the unconscious thoughts that you carry? What are the behaviors that you’re doing? How do you tend to spend your time day to day? It’s also learning to tap into your emotions. Learning, think turning in word and thinking about, okay, is this activity making me happy or sad and what does that then say about how effective I am in doing that activity.

Then the third of these core of where am I right now is watching the stories and narratives that you tell about yourself or about the things that you are doing. To use an example in teaching would be do you consider yourself to be a good teacher? Do you enjoy teaching or is it a burden thinking about or different types of teaching perhaps? By uncovering, okay, what am I doing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? What do I say about what I’m doing, that helps you set up a baseline for understanding, okay, what works and maybe what are some of the problems that I would like to start doing differently or start addressing differently.

[00:12:13] Bonni: This reflective work is so important. It’s so important. You just said that one thing and my mind just started building a giant mind map of even just around the kinds of, I don’t even like the word policies, but I can’t think of a better one. Like the things in our syllabus around grading and around late policies and attendance and all that like that.

There’s so much to unpack and at least in my experience when I came into higher ed, I just had other people’s syllabi to look at, but not the behind the scenes of how those things were arrived at. I would say knowing what I know now, there was a lot of flawed assumptions there that those people who had been handing those things down hadn’t done the work around the narrative and the story, so this is fascinating to me.

[00:13:01] Nicola: Absolutely. One thing that’s for those of us working in higher education that’s particularly hard about doing this reflective practice is that it does take time. You do have to pause and remember to check in, whether it’s as you’re going, as you’re in the middle of teaching a class or in the middle of a meeting or in the middle of writing paper or at the end of the day or the end of the semester or whatever and we’re all so incredibly busy. That it definitely takes attention to force yourself to do this work.

[00:13:40] Bonni: Both of my pregnancies were labeled as, and at least in one of the cases we’re actually [chuckles] a high risk pregnancy maybe to [laughs] get my whole medical history here, but I felt like a little bit like I was forced, but it turned out to be a wonderful thing to be a lot more practiced around mindfulness because I thought that I had to be much more aware of my stress levels.

They actually in the chronicle of higher ed, they asked a few of us a while back to respond with what is something that really changed our teaching. That was really what I reflected on because I had to be aware first off of just my body. When was the last time I ate and not allowing things to overwhelm me with stress that which I know is coming up but at the end too.

I actually am now seeing the parallels between there but then also to be aware of what’s going on in my mind too. I feel like I’ve improved on this but not because I took the time like you’re saying, but I now have seen the pay off and it really is worth the time because then you can just be so much more effective in the long run. It actually can make you better off, but you just don’t see it yet early on.

[00:14:49] Nicola: I guess on that note it is, yes, it takes time but it doesn’t have to be, I’m dedicating half an hour of my day to have developed a mindfulness meditation practice. It can be I’m going to take 15 seconds every three hours and pause and notice what I’m doing and make a quick note to myself.

[00:15:14] Bonni: You’re reminding me too that I started to do that even before a class starts. Don’t just jump right in and literally take 15 seconds to 30 seconds and the students don’t even notice because they’re all getting settled and stuff so I have really become practiced at doing that too. This is so cool. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about this. I’m so excited about this one. This whole area of things that we can do differently to help us really tap into this creativity.

[00:15:42] Nicola: Yes, exactly. There’s any number of problems or challenges that we face in our day to day lives as educators and as researchers. Some of these might be things that maybe you notice coming out of your mindfulness practice and noticing what it is that you’re doing. There’s often also just problems that come up of I need to deal with this colleague who really gets on my nerves or I have to prep a new class for next semester or I don’t know how to deal with that really quiet student in the back and I can’t get them to engage.

Here is where the heart of design thinking really comes in, which is an iterative process going from framing a problem, brainstorming solutions to that problem and then testing out those solutions in really rapid ways so you can learn quickly. To start on the framing of a problem is to not just assume that the first problem you see is necessarily the root of the problem or is going to be attractable problem to solve.

I’ll use an example of, let’s say you’re a PhD student and you’re really frustrated after a meeting with your advisor and you’re like, “Oh my advisor sucks.” Yes, that is a statement of a problem, but you’re not really going to be able to do anything with that to come up with a solution to making your advisor less sucky [chuckles] and so what problem finding and framing says is, okay, let’s step back and let’s really explore this problem and let’s think about what are all of the different pieces of the problem space that you might come up with

Maybe it’s that my advisor doesn’t respond to emails quickly. Maybe it’s that my advisor tends to talk over me when we have meetings and I don’t feel like I’m being heard or maybe it’s that I’m actually just really nervous with when I meet with my advisor and so I don’t feel like I am showing him my best ideas. Whatever that is or him or her, sorry to not to gender and so there you start to open up a bigger set of ideas and some of those will feel like things that, okay, actually I could start problem solving on this.

The next step is then, to take one of those problem framing and generate some ideas from it. This is where your ideas around imagination really come in. Let’s say that the problem is that my advisor’s too busy and I can’t meet with them or I can’t meet with them as regularly as I would like to. There you would start literally just brainstorming and thinking about, well how might I get the feedback I need on a more regular basis?

There again, I stated that pretty carefully. You’ll notice I said on a regular basis, it didn’t have to come from your adviser and it’s really thinking about the feedback and support that you need as a PhD student. Instead if I had said, well, how can I make my advisor meet with me where I’ve more regularly, that’s going to constrain the ideas that you’ve come up with. In brainstorming, it’s one is just literally write down as many ideas as you possibly can or bring in a friend and help have them help come up with as many ideas as you can.

This is where the real innovation comes, because probabilistically you will not have a breakthrough idea unless you have a lot of ideas to choose from because most of your ideas are going to be really lousy. Come up with as many ideas as possible. Then choose some that are exciting to you or that you think are going to be more effective, or that are totally pie in the sky and maybe won’t work, but if they did, it would be amazing. There, you’ll choose one and start to test it out. In design thinking, the terminology we use for this stuff is called prototyping. For those folks who are coming out of software design or engineering, a prototype is obviously a partial realization of whatever the full idea is. But in design thinking, it’s more broadly used. It’s really about the intentional use of small failures and learning from those small failures.

You’re going to come up with a way that you can really quickly test out your idea and see if it will work, and you know that it’s not going to be perfect. That’s the whole point, the idea is to test it out quickly, and then be able to try something new and try something new over and over. It doesn’t have to be a physical product. It could be putting together a script of a play to practice a conversation with your advisor, but imagine it with a friend.

Or it could be testing out what would it be like if I approach other faculty perhaps to get the feedback that I’m looking for or other PhD students. Coming up with something that you can reasonably implement in 15 minutes, or a day or a week, to test it out, and then practice, see what works, see what didn’t and then try, keep iterating and iterating and iterating until it feels like you have a solution.

[00:21:50] Bonni: I’ve got three things I want to reflect back to you just because you said so many important things. One, you talked about, not my advisor sucks and that defining the problem that way, and you distinguished the venting kinds of things that are more general versus the behavior things and that you can actually do something about. Also, what you did there was to help us avoid having assumptions around those things. This comes up so often.

I just love, so many people are writing about this in their own teaching, where we make the assumption about the student that comes in wearing the earbuds, and we think that is, oh, the story I’m telling myself right now is that you don’t respect me or what this class is, but that there’s so much more like that, that’s not going to help us because we’re going to be wrong much of the time. Most of the time, what we think people are projecting has nothing to do with us and is such a more complex story than we’re telling ourselves. That was the first thing I wanted to say.

Then related to that is, you’re helping us really define the actual problem and you distinguish that when you get frustrated, and let’s just say I maybe have had this happened to me before where you’re so frustrated about the thing, but that’s not actually the problem. If your advisor doesn’t get back to you, it feels like the problem because it’s aggravating. Actually, the problem, as you said, is not getting the feedback that you need.

If we’re really careful about managing our own thought process, and this and really making sure that we have the problem that’s going to help us in design thinking helps us do that, as well as your book does, too, and helping us get better at that. Then with the prototyping, I was thinking of so many things where it can help other people be willing to experiment more if you describe things in this way it’s a pilot, or just going to try it out.

It can help us not over prepare for our classes. I don’t think I have to like, this is the most magnificent. It’s one of the reasons, it’s not the only reason but James Lange has a very popular book called Small Teaching. I was so excited because he said the next book he was going to write was Big Teaching. He described in that book like all these little things that you can do, you don’t have to change the world, just tweak a little thing and you’re going to impact the learning.

He said he hasn’t gotten to Big Teaching because the thing’s just taken off like crazy, more than he ever could have imagined. I think we’re teaching people how to prototype. It’s not an exact parallel, but I just see that we’re experimenting. We’re trying, we’re failing faster, like you said, and that’s just such a good thing to encourage in our teaching and our research.

[00:24:28] Nicola: Absolutely, yes. So many people too, as soon as you have the expectation of, well, I’m trying to create the finished product, I need the perfect lecture, or I need the perfect website or whatever it is that you’re working on. That then is exactly where you start getting procrastination and I can’t move forward because I don’t know how to get from the really bad version or idea that I have in my head to that finished thing. Here instead, it’s not saying, well, how do I get to the finished, polished, perfect version? But instead, okay, what can I do in the next 10 minutes to make progress?

[00:25:13] Bonni: The other thing that that leaves room for, and I’m sure you’ve thought of this too, is that we leave room for our students. Why are we thinking we need the finished product before we go into the classroom or we’ve never even met this particular group of students? We should never go in thinking that we’re done ever, ever, ever. [laughs]

[00:25:31] Nicola: Exactly. The idea of prototyping has been really powerful for me in both my research and in my teaching and really just in, it’s okay that it’s not going to be perfect, and I’m going to try out this new idea, and it very well could fall flat on its face and it might work and it’ll most likely be somewhere in the middle. Then I’ll have another chance next quarter or next week, or maybe never to try it out again. That happens on both a micro level in terms of, “Okay, let’s try interacting with a shy student in a particular way.”

On the large level of, I don’t have much time to put together the syllabus for a new class, and yes, I could spend all the time in the world trying to come up with the perfect structure where every single item will build on the next. Or I could say, “Here’s the rough idea, and it’s probably not going to work and I’ll change it next year, but my students will still get something out of it.”

[00:26:39] Bonni: I would even say before then you get, what do you want to explore here and there that much more invested in the class too? This last one, I could talk to you all day, but I know you don’t have all day and the listeners don’t have all day. We’ll do this last one, and that is all around some other supporting abilities that can work within these two frameworks you’ve gone over.

[00:27:03] Nicola: Yes. I actually just was talking about feedback, and that is one of the really important supporting abilities. These abilities are things that you should be doing throughout the process to help you be more creative. Whether you are trying to just understand your baseline, where are you right now or thinking about this, what can I do different and trying to help with new ideas. The first of those is teaming and feedback.

You’ll note I use the word teaming rather than teamwork. That’s intentional, because in a lot of research fields, we think of teamwork as, “Okay, here’s my research lab, and that’s who I work with, and that’s my team.” Here we are saying, “No, this is going to be a group of people who it’s a very fluid group and you’ll be pulling in different types of people at different stages based on the type of feedback that you need.”

It’s really as much about as early as you can, in this problem solving process, start asking other people for feedback on what it is that you’re doing, and try to make those people as diverse as possible. Don’t just always go to your one colleague who you always get feedback from, but think about asking your students for feedback on a new assignment that you’re testing out. Or ask another professor to come and sit on your class or ask your kids to help you develop something for a new lecture. Really just thinking about how do we get feedback from people?

Part of that is that other people are really good at helping us see the assumptions that we hold. Even if you’re stellar at that problem framing process, you still probably aren’t seeing the whole picture, because we all have blinders. If you pull in other people that they can look at things and say, “Well, did you think about this? Maybe you could step back or you have a really strong emotional attachment here, why don’t you try we framing it in this way?” Always building in opportunities for trying on other people.

Then the second supporting ability is managing your energy. Basically, energy is really critical for obviously getting through the day without being exhausted. Also if you understand your natural cycles of energy, when you tend to be most alert versus most tired, or what types of activities give you energy or draw energy away, then you can start to schedule your day or your week so that you protect the times that you’re most alert to do the really heavy lifting creative innovative work that you need to.

[00:30:09] Bonni: There’s so much that we could unpack here, although we are going to run out of time momentarily. Thank you for–I know we’ve been talking about the managing energy and managing teamwork. I just wanted to mention really quick that in terms of feedback one thing that really was transformative to me was reading a book called The Four Agreements.

These four agreements are all agreements we could make with ourselves and with others that will help us be more successful. Most of the time, although not right now, but most of the time I can only remember one of them because it’s that powerful to me. I read the book like 20 years ago or maybe even 25 and it was never take anything personally.

When it comes to taking feedback, I’m not perfect at it, but when I follow that agreement, it’s amazing because we can have all these assumptions that go into taking feedback and stories that we tell ourselves about the other person’s feedback, but if we let all of that go, what a freeing thing it is and you can just be so much more effective but also less stressed. It’s just, it’s not personal. I’m getting feedback and this is wonderful.

As a lot of times I find that people have this around their writing because our writing feels like it’s us and if you criticize my writing, you’re criticizing me. If we can take all of that away, we can become better writers [laughs] because it’s not us. Our ideas are in there, but our writing itself, it’s a skill and they can get better, but not if we’re defensive about it. Anyway, I don’t know if any of that, not taking anything personally resonates with you at all.

[00:31:44] Nicola: It absolutely does. Yes. It ties also back to the idea of prototyping there because if you’re presenting whatever it is that you’re asking for feedback on as a rough draft version then both, it helps you to maybe not be quite so attached to it being good enough for them to not tear it apart and therefore not taking the feedback as personally. It also opens it up so because people will be more willing to maybe give you deeper feedback or give you the type of feedback that you need.

I’ve also seen people maybe hold onto something for too long before they ask for feedback and they think that it’s excellent and then they send it out and it comes back metaphorically dripping with threading. That can be really devastating if it is something that you did pour your heart and soul into. They’re getting to get that feedback as early as possible when you can still incorporate it.

[00:32:49] Bonni: Such a good point. Before we get to today’s recommendations segment, I just want to say a quick things to today’s episode sponsor and that is TextExpander. You’ve heard me talk about them many times. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, TextExpander is an essential tool. It’s one of the first things I install on any new computer or device that I purchase.

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Well what it does is it puts all the essential information in there, but I do like to personalize it. If I’m inviting someone because another person recommended them, which often is how I get such wonderful guests and I’ll say, “Oh, and by the way, this person invited you to so I can make it personal,” but it still has a certain consistency and all the links are there and it just really makes my work so much smoother.

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This is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and I just have a quick one. I recently wrote a blog post called Top 10 tools for learning. It’s actually my vote into Jane Hart’s annual survey that she does every year. It used to be the top 100 tools for learning, but now it’s top 200 tools for learning and she takes votes in on three different categories.

It’s workplace learning, it’s education or it’s personal professional like individual learning. You just make up your list of top 10 and then you identify which one of those falls into those three categories and she compiles these every year. I’d suggest that people go have a look at that top 10 tools for learning. Since I don’t exactly remember when her survey actually gets all compiled and goes live, and I don’t know when this episode is going on.

I don’t have either of those dates in my head. If they’re there by now, I’ll put them in the show notes and if not I’ll come back and update them later on. So you can go have a look at my post, which is there now. When she gets the votes out, it’s so fun to go and browse in those different categories and really get an idea of how we can use technology to enhance what it is, whether it’s our personal professional learning, workplace learning or as we’re using that to enhance our teaching. Have a look at that and Nicola, I’m going to pass it back over to you for your recommendations.

[00:36:33] Nicola: My recommendation is to use a time tracking app and the one that I love is Toggl, T-O-G-G-L and I first started using it back in 2014 and have been tracking my work hours consistently ever since. Part of it is from the design thinking world of knowing what I am doing with my time. Just I can see, okay, every week or every month, how much time am I spending on teaching? How much time am I spending on service? How much time am I spending on research?

There are times where I’m concerned about working too many hours sometimes where I’m concerned about working too few hours. You really get good data on that. One of the things I really like about Toggl though is you also can break things down into different projects. I have projects for every research projects that I have going or a particular manuscript I’m working on.

I have projects for different committees that I serve on on my campus. I have projects for every class that I teach and that means that now having used it for five years, I have data on if I agreed to serve on a new committee, how many hours will it take on average, which is really helpful thinking about, do I actually have the bandwidth to do this or not or how long does it take me to write a paper, a sole authored paper versus a coauthored paper. That for me has been really helpful. Just being able to look, then look back at, okay, what have I done, but also make good decisions about what I’m going to do with my time going forward.

[00:38:26] Bonni: Earlier in the episode, you made mention to not wanting to gender or something and I was chuckling because you were talking about at the time and advisors speaking over someone and I did see like your research would back up that there’s all this linguistic research around interrupting and it does happen more often than that men will interrupt than women.

I was like, and then here it sadly does happen that we women will wind up spending more hours in service at our institutions and it can be of course wonderful for our students and wonderful for shared governance but really not so good for earning promotion or tenure if we let that get out of out of whack. It is important to talk about some of these gender things.

Does that not also happen with men? Of course it does, but just when I look at those charts, I can’t remember where I saw it or I’d put it in the show notes, but just, if you’re a woman, it’s just off the charts worse of a problem, statistically speaking, and then a woman of color, it just gets amplified even more. What a wonderful way though to be able to, because it’s so hard.

You can’t expect the institution to set these boundaries for you. It’s just not realistic so being more self-aware helps you be able to set them. Then all the way back to your earlier point, then you can get your teaming [chuckles] together and start to ask for guidance for other people who have been presented with similar challenges. How do I navigate saying no to this while not politically really causing too terribly much damage. That there’s a art at doing that that can be slightly different depending on your institution and your department or make up so what great advice, thank you so much.

[00:40:06] Nicola: Absolutely.

[00:40:08] Bonni: Well, I am so appreciative to you bringing this topic to us and Teaching in Higher Ed and excited to read your book, I’m excited for listeners to read your book and just, what a wonderful resource. I just appreciate you sharing on today’s episode.

[00:40:22] Nicola: Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful to be here and wonderful to meet you in sort of person wow–

[00:40:29] Bonni: [laughs] we’re about–

[00:40:30] Nicola: –having been listening to the show for a very long time.

[00:40:34] Bonni: We’re about– I’m laughing because we are probably 30 minutes from each other, maybe not even 30 minutes but it made much sense for both of us to do this over Zoom. I get to see you and your smile and your expressions and it’s been such a delight.

[00:40:47] Nicola: It’s been wonderful.

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[00:40:51] Bonni: What a wonderful opportunity it has been to get to explore these principles on Design Thinking with Nicola. Thank you so much for being the guest to today’s episode and thanks to each of you for listening. It’s just so wonderful to be a part of this community with you and I enjoy hearing from you on Twitter and email or however else that you reach out.

I have yet to receive a carrier pigeon, but maybe one of these days. [laughs] If you would like to be better connected with me and what’s coming out not just on the podcast but also in the blog, please feel free to sign up for the weekly update. It’ll automatically send you the show notes for the most recent episodes show as well as an article written about teaching or productivity by me. That can be accessed at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. See you next time.

[music]

[00:41:45] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.