 Hi, my name is George A. This is The Service Design Show, episode 194. Hey there brave change agent, welcome back again to The Service Design Show, the show where we invite the brightest minds in our field and uncover what's truly needed to design services that resonate with people, push businesses forward and honor our planet. I'm your host Marc Fontaine. Our guest today, George A., is a highly respected design leader, a long time professor and the co-founder of the Greater Good Studio. After working for one of the most prestigious design agencies in our field, that experience left George disillusioned and eventually without a job. It was a turning point for George where he started to wonder what the price is that we pay for not being more critical about the clients we engage with and the challenges that we take on. Because when we primarily focus on the question whether we can do the work instead of whether we should do the work, our skills will get misused for an agenda that we do not support, leading to irresponsible outcomes that go against our values. So ever since George has been on a mission to raise the ethical standard for his own work and for our entire practice, I invited George on the show to share with us why he feels it's harmful to think about good design purely from a craft perspective. The practical ways we can develop our own moral compass that will guide us in the right direction and the key lessons he learned from sending over 50 breakup letters to his clients. If anything, I encourage you to listen closely to the story George shares about the dilemma that they faced as a studio, whether or not to engage in a high stakes project for an autonomous vehicle company and what happened when they raised their concerns to the client. I'm really curious what you would do in that situation. So join us at the campfire and I'll see you back at the end of the conversation for some closing reflections. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show, George. All right, thank you so much for having me, Ma. I'm excited for what's coming ahead, really looking forward to addressing this interesting and important topic. But as we all know, and the trusty listeners of the show, we first do a quick introduction. So for the people who haven't heard about you or googled you yet, could you share in 30 seconds what you do? Sure. Well, hello, everyone. My name is George A. I'm the co-founder and director of Innovation at Greater Decode Studio and my role is to be guiding projects, working with clients who are all either nonprofits, foundations or government. And that's our studio's entire focus is to work in the social sector to use design to make for a more equitable society. That's a good. That's a good, yes, that's very succinct. Thank you. The other part that we have is a lightning round. Five questions for you to get to know you as a person next to the professional. You haven't prepared just the first thing that comes to your mind. They can be challenging and you can pass if you want. Are you ready? Yeah. All right, please finish this sentence. The best part of my day is. Huh. I think that's so interesting. Everything from, I think, my calls with the team. Moments when I'm finally finishing it, that really awkward email. That's usually very satisfying. And then I think looking at the beginning of the day, just to check over like, what have I got to do? So it sounds so banal, so it's so banal. But yeah, just getting on with the work, I think. Let's appreciate those moments. Next one. Lesson that I've learned the hard way is. Goodness. I've been dealing with this thing because I've had this review many times. Asking for help. I have a particularly bad relationship with that. And I was thinking about this the other day that I think it's because as I grew up. Asking for help ended up somehow coming back onto me and then making it somehow my fault. So I think I was trained from an early age to not ask for it. All right, all right, noted. If I had a limited resources, I would. I'd be interesting in working out. Maybe. How to do social change a scale that's really impossible for us to do as a studio and drive it through a lot of the community engagement work that we do. So I don't know, I think a radical type of philanthropy. I don't know something like that. Something to think about. Next one is the best quality in a friend is. So things like being a good listener, all those things are typically. At this current moment, I would really like to have a judgment free. Friend, that would be that would be really helpful. That seems rarer than they should. All right, interesting. And the fifth and final one, you're almost at the closing mark. Our world needs more. We use this term a lot to describe someone who is hopeful and then cynical. So a pissed off optimist might be what I want to ask. We have more of someone who can balance the optimism with real worldness. And then yet somehow not so pissed off that they don't see any hope. So someone who's able to balance both of those things. I'd love to see more of that going on. More pissed off optimists. All right, George, if I ask you the question. Should we deal with what comes to your mind? It, what is the it? I think listen to people who are closer to the problem. I mean, I think that's what we should be doing. This is what's firing off for me when you said it was the it. Yeah, I think I would love to be seeing more people just. Listening to people who are really close to the problem, their proximity to the problem to probably gives us a chance to really share in their expertise. And I think we would bring that up because it's so often discounted as not credible expertise. So that's what I think we should be doing. That's the it, I would say. I don't know if you were thinking about doing something. No, something else at a different scale. This was that we finished the lightning round. And this was the question. This was the question that sort of came up in our prep call ways. I hope that more designers ask this question. Sure, we do. The reason why should we do it is in contrast with can we do it and how do we do it? When can we do it? All those questions around execution, I think, are subordinate to the primary question of should we do it? And I feel like in most of the design industry that I've seen that question is rarely asked, if ever it could have been that I certainly wasn't present for those conversations. But I also think if there isn't an atmosphere or context where should we do this? Should we keep doing this? Isn't allowable throughout the whole length of the project? Then I think you have an execution environment as opposed to one that is a critical thinking environment. So that's why I brought that up, because I think in contrast to how it typically is done, we end up doing a lot of doing without a lot of pausing to think if we should. I think that's just a very commentary and the cost of design industry. I'm sure that a lot of us who are listening right now are asking themselves this question. Have I asked this question recently? Now, I'm sure that something has happened in your journey that triggered you to think about this. Could you take us back to that moment where you maybe for yourself realize, am I asking this question often enough? You know, what's really tough, difficult about that is that I'd hate for this conversation to grounded in. Do I have the agency or do I have the bravery to do it? And I feel like sometimes the moral judgment of someone's ability to ask difficult questions is framed as though do you have the fortitude? And I would want to pause and say, can the environment that you're working in allow it? And I'd say that in almost all the places I worked in that was completely not allowed, only in the shadows and only in private conversations, one on one. So if I ever had the sense of should we do it? Why are we doing this? It was always done in very much clandestine. So I'd say probably one of the there were actually quite a number of different projects when I was working in a global design agency where questions around what is the appropriateness of this? There's an interest in contrast to one of the very first projects I worked on at this agency where we were doing insulin delivery devices. And I felt really very good about it. It was very clear to me that there was going to be some pretty direct behavioral change for a diabetic. And then years later, I'm working on a project for Kool-Aid as part of like a Pepsi portfolio project and a meeting with people going to interviews inside people's homes as is some typical and I'm talking to a gentleman about his consumption of Kool-Aid. He was recommending, as a pro tip, how if he uses the clear Kool-Aid, which is like the the non-colored version that you add to the glass of water, his kids will not think that he's drinking Kool-Aid and he can continue to drink it in stealth mode. But the volume of Kool-Aid he was drinking was like 5x, 10x, what anyone would ever typically have. And the reason we're there is because we had somehow identified super users, super users of Kool-Aid who were off the charts in their consumption. And, you know, there are multiple reasons why someone can become diabetic, but enormous amounts of sugar might be one of them. And I felt as though there's no way this research isn't going to end up harming this person one day and their willing participation in it only makes it more tragic. We're going to pay them, of course. But the idea that the learnings and insights from this is only going to create more consumption for people who are already off the charts in the consumption now. It's very hard to come back and think that this is somehow helping anyone other than this sugar-based corporation. There are others like I worked on a project for BP and I'm working on a convenience store redesigns. And I remember one of the senior designers on the team saying out loud to the client, you almost trying to be provocative, but I was thinking, that's so weird. They were saying, you know, why isn't there one handed food innovation? As in like this is obviously a very American phenomenon, but one handed food would mean you could drive and eat. So what am I doing here? What are we doing here? And I realized that I'm on a train, I can't get off. But again, to say this stuff out loud comes with so much cost materially to me in the moment, as well as once career in those types of settings. I already know what the response would be to that question, which is, well, you don't have to work here to do this. Like you can have those questions, but that weighs the door. So the receptivity is well understood, even though it's not in any employee manual, but it's very, very apparent that this is how it's going to be. So yeah, those types of those types of moments that makes me pause. Thank you for sharing those stories with us. And I'm sure you have many other examples. Now, many questions that arise for us here. But let me let me let me start with this one. So you had these encounters and at some point it was like, OK, I've seen enough. I can't continue working and living this way, making people sick, causing more accidents. What gave you the courage to step away? Choose a different path. Yeah, I really want to not make it a value value judgment because I feel like most people wish they could. And it's only got to be after seven years in this global agency. I felt like I was I was getting very little back. And I certainly knew like it was going to be a matter of time. One of the privileges from working in a place like that is that you leave with like a globally recognized type of reputational borrowing that comes from working from somewhere at that level. But I also knew that if I wanted to go do something else and went to an equivalent studio that is in the same sort of like global tier, not that it was ever really like an office, not like I was like turning down office by any stretch, that's not true. But I also calculated that if I went to work somewhere there like this, it would be the same bullshit over different clients because the industry wide phenomenon of self-deception is so rampant. I can't see that being different at a frog or an astro or a fjord any differently than the one I was working in. So what I wanted to do is work out how do I exit commercial design altogether and how can I do it without with with still the ability to be able to pay my rent. So I was very, very fortunate. I don't think it's to do with courage. It is to do with good fortune that I had fostered a relationship with the Chicago Transit Authority. I was able to have an ongoing relationship with some of the folks that we'd met there and I was able to get a job with an offer. So I went from essentially the coolest disaster to do in Chicago to the largest bureaucracy in Chicago. And that was a very hard left turn. But I also knew that to me, at least I don't want to feel as though I'm in a place where there's a massive misalignment between what we say we do and what we actually do, or at least what we tell ourselves and what's happening out in the world. And I could take the bureaucracy. I could take all of the changes in culture, because at least I knew where I stood. So yes, good fortune and having the financial means to still pay the rent like not not being not sacrificing everything. Now, the examples that you shared. Like the diabetes story or again, people getting killed because they're eating a sandwich while driving. Those, I don't know, those might feel or are a bit on the extreme side. And in those situations, it might be easier to sort of check in with yourself and ask the question, should we do it? But my hunch tells me that most projects. Are are somewhere in a gray area where you just don't know. Yeah, whether or not you should do it. Sadly, from my experience, the diabetes and the convenience store for gas stations is in the middle. It's not that extreme. There are projects I heard about that were for defense contractors. There are projects that were for and House of Bush or, you know, whatever. Be a company that we're working with at that time. To me, that seems even more extreme. So there is a very wide spectrum. And I think one of the tricky things is that when you say what's in the gray, becoming more difficult, I completely agree. One thing I noticed was that there was this really funny, almost like an internalized framework, like a straw man argument. Do you familiar with that, Mark? The idea that that someone you can make a fictional case to say, as long as this is happening, we can do this. So the justification was as long as we aren't doing it, as long as we are doing guns and tobacco, we're fine. So guns and tobacco is like a thousand miles in one direction, but everything short of guns and pedoico is fair game. So what you find is that that that thousand mile wide gray zone is actually quite difficult to navigate because the chance of hitting one of those great projects is going to be probably 99 percent of experience. The one whole wholesome project and the one heinous one will be bookends, but everything else is in the middle. And I think the probably for a lot of designers who work in industry, many projects feel in the gray. So I think what we often lack are tools and a culture and a habit of questioning and then navigating those gray zones. And I think because the predication that we predicated to say, yes, when, how, on what time versus should makes us very useful for folks who work in the gray. Like as an industry, we are actually built for gray, even though perhaps we might not always have consented to that when we first signed up. Does that make sense? Yes, yes, it does make sense. What what have you seen happens when we start asking the question, should we do it next to getting fired and finding careers somewhere else? Yeah, I think getting fired is actually a bit of a boogeyman. I think you could almost argue that perhaps that's the strawman that one uses internally to say, well, I don't want to get fired. I'm not saying that the risk of getting fired isn't there. And I think every one individual's assessment of risk is going to be different per person. It's only different than mine. But I do want to caution that the number of incompetent people you've worked alongside for years who never got fired is clear evidence that getting fired is not that common, actually. And getting fired for being a pain in the ass is probably less risk than being actually either fraudulent or scandalous or somehow deceptive. All right, those are those are potentially real reasons for getting fired, but there's a lot of incompetence that goes around for for years. So I want to temper the fear of that necessarily. I think what can happen, which is quite material, is a reputation, a reputation for being difficult, a reputation for being an agitator, a reputation for being not a good team player. Like things that are sort of deemed as though not professional versus someone who is asking the right questions that can be a real balancing act. And I think what's unfortunate as well is that the racial component can also muddy conversations around who gets to be an agitator, who gets to be annoying, who gets to be a person who raises their hand. Can you give an example of how you of how that plays out? Yeah, I mean, I think in America, there's a there's a pretty constant phenomenon that if you are a person of color, we are not particularly interested in making our jobs harder already because there's often a sense that opportunities for leadership, pathways for leadership being being seen as an equal to your white peers is not always going to be true and is often not true. So then to add a layer of agitation comes with an additional cost that isn't probably fired by everyone. In my particular case, working at this global agency, I had one extra layer of being a foreign national because I came over with a British passport, even though I'm technically Burmese, but grew up in England. I came over as a foreign national, so not as a citizen. So the added risk of deportation is always kind of like looming in the background. I mean, again, I probably have to do quite a number of deliberate sabotaging acts to get fired, but firing would mean deportation. So there's there's that extra burden. But I think if you are a US citizen and a person of color, particularly if you're black and have a bit of black and female, you have so many factors that you are considering at all times that when you are not those identities, it might be curious to you why there isn't a why are you not being more vocal? Could be a question or why are you speaking up more as opposed to I can't believe you spoke up at all considering all of the factors that go into play. So so that context, unfortunately, can muddy who gets to and when. So you end up becoming very, very precise and you end up becoming very conservative about when am I going to spend my shot because I'm not sure if I'm going to get another one. So how would we know? How would we know if it's worth speaking up this time? If the answer to the question should we do it? Is a is a definitive no to the extent that we again need to speak up? How can we know? Yeah, so something I want to reference is now a 12 year journey at our studio to work out how to tackle these very same questions. My co-founder and I have been in multiple design studios where the culture was can we and for how much and when and the question, the environments of why are we doing this? Should we do it? And the possibility of even saying no was so unicorn like it was mythical. So we were quite sure that we wanted to change that environment at our studio and then hold ourselves accountable by hiring perhaps the same agitators that would have otherwise been kept quiet in another place. But I think when we have dialogue with our team and our team is very, very good about keeping the two of us accountable and all up all up in our business whenever we whenever we slip. And I think that there are going to be times when they have seen things that they wish were different and not said anything because I'm sure that they aren't particularly interested in doing all of that emotional labor, bringing things up with us every single time, either. So they are, you know, they're not spending that willy-nilly. But when they do bring up feedback for us, we have to really pause. And it's very, very challenging for us as leaders, as to co-founders to hear it as it would be for anyone. But we are pretty sure that when we react poorly to feedback, we are essentially telling the team we want your feedback to be shallower and less real because we've essentially trained you to say we are taking this seriously. Now, there's a funny phenomenon I'd ask you to do is that sometimes both the co-founder and I I think as a comfort seeking measure sometimes overreact to feedback and like quickly rush to fix something because we kind of want the pain to go away. And in that rushing, I think we might actually be making it worse. What we could or should be doing is maybe just pausing, not doing anything at all and actually sitting with that discomfort, which is so hard. So the reason we do so is that that observation we talked about before, that when we receive feedback and it is received poorly, we're going to ensure shallower feedback the next time. So I've been in many places where the reaction to a question, the reaction to some hesitation or this is giving me concerns, gets shut down immediately, which basically says, oh, we should never talk about this ever again. It's all like knowing if you're in a household with parents who don't entertain certain things. You've trained your kids to react in certain ways so that if you go to a store and you've never bought them candy. Why would they keep trying? So in some environments that is completely understood, no word has to ever be said. So what we've been challenging ourselves to do, and I think this goes in a real powerful and respectful tension with our team is, can you tell us when something is up and then can we make sure we hear it and can we ensure we do it again? Because the chance that it's going to be right is so rare, much more likely is that it's going to be off by a bit. So we have to have a respectful tension of can we work on this together and can we do so through viable, respectful dialogue about, we're both on the same side, can we get to something that's better than either one of us could have gotten? What's interesting about your story is, you sound like somebody who's really diligent and who has a very strong moral compass and weighs decisions on a certain scale, quite heavily. You still obviously get feedback, as you said, is a 12 year long learning journey. If you now look in hindsight, would you be willing to share with us some examples where you made a wrong judgment call, even though you are so diligent? Like what was the feedback that you could have seen coming in hindsight? Oh, Mark, this is that you're coming at a tough time. We're going through so many things at the studio, some of which I really shouldn't even discuss. Let's see. I mean, there are client relationships, plenty, where we think we are on the right page and then something changes. And for most of those cases where there was something that we thought was maybe either an assumption that nobody knew we had made or when there was an agreement that somehow changed, what we've been working out is at the end of each project, we do debriefs, which I think are fairly common amongst design studios. But because we had something that I don't know a lot of places have, which is a gut check, we're pretty good about trying to capture at the end of those debriefs, is there a change to the gut check that we need to make? So let me back up, right? So a gut check that we have at the studio is now on version five. I think I took a look, we've done about 150 gut checks over the last 12 years. That means that we are vetting very thoughtfully, very carefully, what is this incoming business opportunity? So pre-contract, pre-everything. Almost as soon as the first phone call is done, we start developing a gut check. And what we found is that the gut check is about 20 questions. It takes about 40 minutes to fill out. Every one of those questions are there because a project blew up over the question that we didn't ask. Does that make sense? So every one of those questions are hard-earned. So one thing, for instance, was a question that has since then has never been, we've never had to ask, sorry, we've never had to answer in a positive, we just said, okay, right, it's a normal state. But the question was, are we facilitating across one organization or multiple organizations? Because we never thought to do this before. So we worked with a client that was a large federation of member-based organizations or nonprofits. And we went in there thinking, oh, this is just a regular project, how bad can it be? But because of the added complication of working across multiple organizations, everything slows down. So our timeline is off. The way in which we engage with every single one has to be slightly different because of their context. The project was completely mislabeled and miscategorized. So in terms of an error, our judgment or my judgment in particular, we read it wrong. So what we've done then is say, okay, how do we flag for this as an issue since it completely tripped us up? So the utility of making a question that deliberately asks what called us out last time is how we made a gut check. We've basically built up a library of go-to questions so that we can at least pre-identify what kind of project is gonna be, what type of engagement it is, what type of complexity. It doesn't really determine ultimately, it doesn't have a scorecard and say, look, if it's above 50, it's a yes, if it's below 50, it's a no. It's not that simple. It's very qualitative, very discursive. It's about having us engage with our gut instincts, our logic and then say, can we talk about it? Like this idea of the gray that we talked about earlier, to us, this is one of the biggest tools we have at navigating the gray because we're trying to pick apart. Why does this gray element trigger me so much? Why does this gray element make me feel really weird? Even one of the questions we have is what colonial assumptions are embedded in our conversation? What colonial aspects about this project, this RFP, this brief, can we flag? But we should know to ask that because sometimes our clients are on one end a white savior or another trying to be dominant. So we could end up having our project be playing to those old tropes unless we know to ask. Thank you. That helps. An example that you gave, for instance, working across multiple organizations that might be an almost more practical question. I feel that you also have more ethical concerns and questions and guidelines there. Maybe you can touch upon this with in the context of the fact that from my experience, the design community is a bunch of quite optimistic and positive people. So whenever we see a challenge in front of us, we always have the feeling like, let's give it a try. We'll make the best out of it. If anyone does it, let it be us because we sort of... Oh, Mark. All right. I see you're getting fired up. Please go. It's that particular phrasing I have used in talks because I find that it was common in places I've worked of they're going to spend the money anyway. Why not with us? In fact, if they do it with us, I know we're going to do a good job. That is both true and it is a narrative we tell ourselves to not allow for the discomfort of asking those more difficult questions. I think there is a inherent natural, I'd say even human aspect of, if I don't ask, I can't pretend that I didn't know. If I don't ask these questions, I can actually have a certain level of innocence, there I say, or obliviousness that can shield me from greater and later scrutiny and I can be absolved of any probability because how would I to know? So the optimism you describe is absolutely true and it's a beautiful thing that happens across the industry. I want to be cautious that sometimes our optimism can be used against us so that we end up being unwitting tools to an agenda we don't understand either because the client has a reputation they need to burnish and will use us as cover. There is a project manager who has a very pressing need by their boss because if they don't have something to be ready for their press release, someone's going to lose face in front of their voters. There are lots of pressures to appear to be helpful in our sense, our design sense, our industry sense of just give me the problem, I can't wait to get to it. Might not allow us the time to pause to say, if we choose to do it, let's do it well. Not automatically a given. Give me the time, like give me a ganchard, let me just figure this out. Because I think without the pause we are a set of hands and I feel like we're smarter than that. And in fact, our ability to amplify and accelerate the impact that our clients are asking of us actually behooves us to ask, who is this client? What is their story? What do they need from us? And if it's in direct tension with us getting paid, can we talk about that also? Right, the idea that, well, we wouldn't get paid is a same strawman argument, just like guns and tobacco and just like getting fired. That there's a long way to get from, we never get paid to, we only get paid by doing heinous things. There's a lot of gray that we could be navigating picking through and maybe even shaping projects to become more ethical. So I think the idea that we can just do it because we're being optimistic. I only, I have such feelings about it because I believed it so much too, Mark. And then I started to see in my own projects the harm that it was doing and I'm thinking, I don't know if I can stay optimistic in light of this anymore because I allowed myself to just think a little more about what are not even unintended consequences. They are 100% intended consequences. It's highly predictable. It's so obvious in fact that people are gonna be driving and eating one-handed food more conveniently. It's only gonna happen that more calories are gonna be consumed because it's quick, it's cheap, it's fast. There's no healthy outcomes from a project like the ones I've done, or the consumption of more Kool-Aid. It's 100% predictable. So do I wash my hands of it and say, well, that's not my, I'm not paid enough to think about that. Or if we do it, we'll do a good job. I started to question the value of those stories and wonder if perhaps we are getting used or are we using that story to put ourselves to sleep? So if we do pause and take the time to be more diligent, whether or not we should engage in something and if we do under which conditions, I feel people do that to a certain extent, but listening to your arguments, we should be even more, I don't know, more thorough with that. If you look at how your gut check has evolved over the years, are there certain accesses or perspectives or can you, are there patterns in the questions that you ask during the gut check? Oh, yeah, well, it's the same set of questions. And they range from practical to ethical. So practical things can include, like what kind of recruiting conditions are we talking about through to, does this even match up with our skill set because sometimes people get confused. I'm sure, Mark, you've been approached with the things that are not in your wheelhouse because they just think, well, you're a designer, it's all the same. So we have to kind of check to see, like, is this really something we can even do and can we do it on time or even budget is in there, of course. But then ethical things around, what is the sensitivity and the vulnerabilities of this particular group of people? So we're at the point whereby we have an as yet incorporated trauma-informed questions into the gut check it. We have thought to a point where we have now a working draft of a set of ethical practices for our design research, which we, if we get to a proposal, because let's say we get to the gut check and then say, look, we're not gonna pursue it, that we don't even get that far. But if we do put proposals together, we often include this link to a Google doc, which is here are ethical practices so that people are aware of what they're paying for. And we're basically saying, you're paying for us to be more ethical. So that's, I think really, that's like slightly subversive, but I would do like that that we've included it. But the gut check question can really be from practical to, again, ethical around what is the nature of our role here? You know, they're asking the question of like, what are the colonial assumptions and in terms of consequences? It's really directly asking the team and ourselves, how is this gonna go sideways? Because if it did, we should take some responsibility for it. If it doesn't, ooh, great. But again, that optimism we just described, that is such a standard practice, the whole industry is like doing this. It's like saying, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be great. And because they're doing this, there's no planning for when it goes sideways. It's like writing a really bad contract that has so many gaps because it just didn't think it through. That's how we operate on this right now. We're operating on a lot of wishing on a star strategy. I guess that's part of the optimism and maybe that has to do with education and the idea that we are creators and we can fix anything. I don't wanna sort of pick it apart totally, but I'm still curious about that gut check because the question about colonialism, for instance, you formulate a perspective on that with the team. But I'm going to assume that's not a, it's almost never going to be a clear a yes or a no. Like that's probably never going to be a red flag. It's going to describe the situation. And from that, you all have many answers in your gut check, but still no conclusive answer, whether or not you should proceed? Yeah, so one of the ways, the one of the mechanisms, which is I don't think is unique to us, but we do have some hierarchy. The Sarah and I are the going to be the final decision makers on whether to proceed. We have the financial responsibility and we're the owners of the company. So in other places where there are larger companies, where there's a former CEO, there's a board, that everyone is an employee beyond the founders, there's still going to be a hierarchy and there will be a decision made by some ultimate decision maker. Ours just happened to be our version. So the gut check doesn't produce an answer. Does that make sense? It is to produce a thoughtful record of the discussion, which we can look back on, we can refer to. It can be a place also where someone can flag a very, very strong opinion of like, this is really concerning to me. And our duty as the decision makers is to address every one of those points. So what we often do in terms of a practical method is that we take the initial call, Sarah and I will then do fill out the gut check. The gut check then it's thoroughly reviewed by our team to basically check and sniff out any bullshit that's in our answers because the self-deception we could put in there is 100% likely. So they sniff, they sniff. We then have to respond to all those comments. The whole thing takes about an hour to prep then an hour of the dialogue. And then the questions that come up from that dialogue, we then take back to the client. So our next call is armed with a level of piercing insight that we could never have had on the first call. We look so smart on these calls because our team has been so generous about really interrogating what is the nature of these questions. We had this moment where we had a really fascinating, really inspiring client who does a lot of work helping individuals, this is an American organization who helps individuals who have training but not through a traditional four-year degree like a traditional American college system. So they are working professionals but because of the lack of a four-year degree, they've hit what many people call a paper ceiling as in they can't progress in their career and economic ability without that bachelor's. So their organization has a really interesting way of describing the work they wanna do. And we noticed when we were looking at some of the description on their website about how there's something funny about this dialogue. It sounds like they're like, it sounds like they're saving people. So that's weird, you know, which is kind of common in the law and non-profits. Sometimes they say sense of like, these people are so poor and needy, we need, they need our help, which could well be true, but there was like a funny tone to it. So it got flagged by our team and there's like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm gonna have to ask this question of our clients. So it's like, we're going through the call having a really lovely conversation, getting to clarity on what the project is. And there's like, okay, I'm gonna have to buy the bullet. Hey, so we noticed this funny thing on your website but it sounds almost like savior language. What's up with that? Okay. And they said, oh, I'm so glad you said it. We noticed it too. We struggle with that as an organization but and then, you know, we talked about how the language works really well with their funders. It may not necessarily be what they would use but it kind of plays into, which is a bigger issue, telling the narratives that large philanthropy tends to work under, which is what we have all of the money and power. Let's help people who are poor and needy. So that's like, that was actually a really interesting case of like, our team noticed something, we noticed something. I followed through and asking the question, the team were very gracious about receiving it. And then we go to an understanding, okay, cool. Like it didn't say yes or no, it was just like, okay, release on the same page. Does that make sense? Yes. And if you're willing to share, like this one worked out well. What's one iconic story or something that didn't play out the way you hope and where you had to walk away? If you're open to sharing that. Sure. We went for years back and forth. We've done this three times. This is fascinating. With a autonomous vehicle company, there aren't that many, okay? And this one was all about some sort of like RoboTaxi type of service, okay? And I felt very funny about wanting to work on automation of cars when earning a living as a driver can be one of the few economic mobility engines for a lot of immigrants in particular or people who are looking to make a little bit of extra money. So I felt like this is such a direct threat to labor. I don't know how I feel about it. So we asked some questions, the things that people said, well, this is gonna get you fired. Well, this is the kind of thing you wanna ask. So I was like, I was like, daring myself, can we really ask this question? So we asked, hey, so we appreciate all of this inquiry around automation and all the research plans. We think it's pertinent that we also do interviews with drivers to understand what impact it's gonna have on them if automation is going to become the thing because we've learned from other projects that the role of a driver, particularly for older adults, like people who are aging, the driving is a baseline. The companionship that a driver can provide can make a huge difference to whether or not this old person feels like they've been taken care of, especially even just getting in and out of the car. So we sent them thinking, how are they gonna take it? And their response was almost like a straight copy paste of their mission statement from the website that said, our organization's commitment to autonomous vehicles is about saving lives across the highways, because the data shows that traffic accidents tend to be the number one cause of death in America, blah, blah, blah. So they completely just avoided it. And then we never heard back. That was it. What was wild was that they, about a year later, they emailed us to say, hey, so we might be ready to do that project now. The one about labor said, really? So I go, wow, okay, cool. So then we were like, let's reengage. So we were like, we took it seriously. And I think this is what I wanna share. I'm not trying to be a pain. I'm trying to respectfully ask them, engage in like real people. If we wanna talk about it, let's talk about it. If you don't, let's not. But then when they said, we wanna do a project that is about engaging with drivers to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles. Like, oh my God, you've made my day. Let's do it. So I started writing a proposal. And then I got to a point, I was like, wait a second, wait a second. There's something about this that's making me a new thing. It's like I'm constantly trying to sabotage our business. But the new thing was, when we do research with our clients, for our clients, with let's say vulnerable population, let's say like a group of nurses or teachers, our client is typically the known advocate for that group. Does that make sense? There might be the union that is looking for better understanding of what member rights should be. But in this case, our client would be the direct threat to the people we're doing research with. So I thought, hold on, hold on. So I wrote an email saying, how do you want us to engage with this group who might have questions about doing research that might ultimately lose their jobs? Like it doesn't take a particularly smart driver to think it through. They're like, wait, you want to do research on autonomous vehicles? Isn't this going to ultimately get used against me? So I said, what can we say with a straight face when we get asked that question? Okay. And they said, okay, let me think about it. They talked to their bosses, they came back, the project's dead. Okay. Thanks for trying. Maybe next time. So the interrogation of projects with the utmost respect says, let us really think it through. Can we not pretend unintended consequences are not just consequences we chose not to look for? Because it doesn't take much to think it through. And if it does ultimately mean that we don't get to do the project and massive financial risk to us, I think that might be worth it. And that is something that our studio is constantly in tension with and our team is in tension with us. And we are all trying to hold each other in tight companionship and allyship around, can we not let these things slip? And it's very challenging because it's not like I want us to go out of business by any stretch but I also don't want to do things that we know will so easily be causing harm when we just hadn't thought about it enough. You're doing this at your studio with your team. How can we bring this into our broader community? I would ask that the agitators in your companies talk to each other more. I would be amazed if there's ever been an agitator who is the only one who's ever had those feelings in the place you're working. You might have to do a little bit of stealth to find out like, are they one of us? And you can start to get a feeling of what that might be. And then when you feel like you might have a few, maybe invite them out for drinks and ask a few softball questions around, how do you feel about the last project all along? How do you feel about this thing that's coming that line? Engage, and I feel like there are methods that organizers use, like organizers who are trying to rally power that describe understanding both what's at stake and then also trying to do a little bit of co-agitation particularly for those who are already ready who are primed to be agitated. What it might ultimately lead to is a confrontational moment with leadership to say, here are our concerns. And I think that one of the precautions is, I would suggest this, to not go in unprepared and the best way to be prepared is to say, try to write down with your co-agitators, what are our major concerns and then what would we like to see done differently? That feels like a fairly complete package. It takes a lot of work, but I think when you bring that up, you give someone the choice. What can be really, really tough though is, is everyone who is a co-agitator ready for when that, when the leadership says, no, thank you. What do you plan to do then? Quitting is always going to be an option, I'm sure. Even if it's a complete diet financial risk to you, I'm just saying it will always be there. But then the real risk could be, you are now going to be on a blacklist for the rest of your career. Are you ready for those consequences? If you're not, then I would not suggest you go down that path. But I would at least internally, if you never talked to another person, never bring up this confrontation, I would start writing down and keeping almost like a little diary or log of every time I have those feelings and how they're going to be addressed. I think eventually, if you start making note of them and don't brush them aside, you might have to have a moment for yourself and say, do I really want to keep working at this place? Because I think that you might get to a tipping point as I did of like, I don't think it's going to change. I think this place is fundamentally not going to be the place I want it to be. I might have to find a new path. You shared two options, quitting and getting on a blacklist. I think the third option is maybe the most difficult is that when you don't quit and you stay with the company, you're sort of morally compromised if you still engage in the world. Oh, Mark. Oh, Mark. That is what is so paralyzing and so challenging because the longer you stay in environments where there's a really interesting term, moral injury. I heard about this when doing research for a big open letter I wrote, but that continuous moral injury, you end up becoming numb to. And I think one of the reasons why I left the global agency after seven years was a fear I had was that I would no longer be able to tell that the feelings I had about those concerns, I worried I would lose touch with those feelings altogether. And that after the seven year mark is just completely part of my identity now. Not only am I culpable, complicit, implicated, I'm now an active perpetrator. I was fearing an identity shift of I'm a resistor to I'm just getting on with it. So it's scary stuff. Yeah, it's scary stuff. And it would be good if we as a community found a way to keep ourselves accountable and have a more critical perspective on the work that's being done and having this debate out in the public more often. Yeah, I've been giving a series of talks called that quiet little voice across America. And I was just in Australia, New Zealand on something called the doing design differently tour five cities in three weeks, giving the same talk, the quiet little voice trying to rally industry around there being a system of accountability. That is a code of ethics, standards, practices, a licensing requirement, community engagement that would actually hold us accountable, a whole series of different things that are more akin to the professionalization rule set that exists in medicine, in law, engineering has a number, architecture already has it, social work for sure. And I think if we talk about that, one of the positives is if we want our industry to change from a craft based trade into a professional career, there are some requirements that might hold us to say these are the minimum standards we adhere to. And then without them, it makes it very confusing for our clients and more more prevalently, communities that we engage with to know what are your standards because you could at any time say, we didn't know or I'm just an optimist or I just came in here with a beginner's mindset. What's the problem? And like defaulting to not knowing or just doing wishing it upon a star strategy makes us a massive liability. So I would really hope that as an industry we can determine, self-determine a shared set of standards. All my ranking is making my throat sore. That's a good sign. That shared set of standards, I feel that's going to be a follow-up episode, George, because that's a lot of time for today. If somebody from our group who's listening to this conversation got excited and wants to learn more, what is a good place to direct them to? Please come visit our studio's website. It's greatergoodstudio.com. You'll see case studies, of course, but also language we've written around how we do our work, why we do our work, how we started, that there's a lot of, the team has worked so hard to write really good material around why we think this is important. So I hope folks can enjoy. Actually, well, there's one more thing. There is something that's really cool. Mark, can I just go in a little bit? Go on. We do offer something called a fireside chat. So somewhat akin to this, maybe it's not recorded or quite so formal, but we host a virtual fireside chat every month because we knew that when Sarah and I started the studio, we could never get access to either founders or any of the team members of a company and ask quote unquote dumb questions. The ones that we felt like, well, look, I just don't understand how this works or what does this mean again? And the space to be able to have that not be performative was incredibly rare. So we thought, why don't we make a space once a month where we could host for an hour on Zoom and have just anybody ask anything about the industry, about the studio, about projects about like, how does this work without judgment? Because if you don't offer it, you might be waiting for something like that for years. So if anyone's interested, obviously go to the website, but the website has a link to the fireside chat. We love having new people. And over the last, what, 12 years, the questions have gone very sophisticated. They're really hard. They're a lot harder than they used to be. And it used to be things like, what's your favorite project? We haven't had a question like that in years. Now it's more like, what are your thoughts on the industry and how is it the end of design thinking? Like, wow. Like podcast level questions are happening on these calls. Like, oh my God, this is, we're really, we've got to be on our toes. So if folks want to join us for those, we host them every month. You don't, you could, there's no limit. You can just come again and again. It's really, they're really great. Awesome. Good opportunity to continue this conversation and ask you some, it's not about tough questions. Well, just to get your perspective and hear your philosophy on this. George, I want to thank you for making the time to come on and sharing your stories with us at our campfire. So it's great to be challenged and challenge the industry. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for keeping and setting the bar even higher. Yeah, I think we all need that and benefit. Thank you so much, Mark. And really, this is all happening because our studio and our team is pushing us to be better than we are. So I owe so much to them for that attitude. But Mark, I wanted to say, this was a really great interview. I really enjoyed it. And I thought that the questions you had is what activates me. So thank you so much for being so thoughtful in your questions. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. Thank you, George. As we start to wrap up and look back on the conversation, I want to share some of my personal reflections. One thing that surprised me after this conversation with George is maybe how objective and explicit we can make our gut check. If things don't feel right, don't ignore that. Ask why there it is. Write it down and turn it into a checklist. And think about what you can learn from this experience for the next project that you're about to take on. Is there a question you should be asking that you maybe aren't asking right now? This gut check needs to be something that keeps evolving. Having this conversation with yourself on an ongoing and regular basis is probably one of the most valuable habits that you can add to your practice. It's not only going to help you to raise the bar for delivering good design, it's also going to help you deliver more responsible work. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please do me a quick favor. If you haven't done so already, click that like button. It lets me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. Finally, before we part ways, please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today, you've directed your attention towards learning and growing as a professional. So from everyone who you're going to impact through your work, thank you for taking the time and making the commitment. My name is Marc Fontijn and I look forward to having you with us again for a brand new conversation on the service design show. Take care and see you soon.