What is equity-centered community design? This transformative concept focuses on centering the voices and decision-making power of individuals with lived experience, who Creative Reaction Lab refers to as “living experts.” It also calls on human-centered design experts and others to use their leverage, access, and influence to support and amplify community voices. In this session, CCI’s Chris Conley chats with Hilary Sedovic, a systems thinker and former learning & education director at Creative Reaction Lab. Sedovic, who calls herself a “redesigner for justice,” sheds light onto the key role that design allies have in empowering living experts. Creative Reaction Lab emphasizes building quality relationships, humility, and embracing a collective investment in community well-being in order to move towards greater equity and inclusivity in design. Learn how this type of civic engagement and the redesigning for justice movement can move us to reshape the narrative -- creating a just world through authentic collaboration and community-centered approaches in the design process.
What is equity-centered community design? This transformative concept focuses on centering the voices and decision-making power of individuals with lived experience, who Creative Reaction Lab refers to as “living experts.” It also calls on human-centered design experts and others to use their leverage, access, and influence to support and amplify community voices. In this session, CCI’s Chris Conley chats with Hilary Sedovic, a systems thinker and former learning & education director at Creative Reaction Lab. Sedovic, who calls herself a “redesigner for justice,” sheds light onto the key role that design allies have in empowering living experts. Creative Reaction Lab emphasizes building quality relationships, humility, and embracing a collective investment in community well-being in order to move towards greater equity and inclusivity in design. Learn how this type of civic engagement and the redesigning for justice movement can move us to reshape the narrative -- creating a just world through authentic collaboration and community-centered approaches in the design process.
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*The following is an automated transcript. Please excuse any errors or hilarious mistakes.
Episode Teaser // Hilary Sedovic (guest):
People who have lived experience with the issue being addressed need to be centered and hold decision-making power. Those who don't have that lived experience, need to leverage their power and access on behalf of equity designers or, we refer to them as "living experts."
Health Pilots podcast intro:
Welcome to the Health Pilots podcast presented by the Center for Care Innovations. This podcast is about strengthening the health and wellbeing of historically underinvested communities. Every episode offers new ideas and practical advice that you can apply today!
Chris Conley (host):
Hello, everybody I'd like to welcome. Hilary Sedovic from Creative Reaction Lab, who is with us today to talk a little bit about equity centered community design and some of the ways that they apply it at Creative Reaction lab to start out, what I'd like to do is just share Hilary's background.
And so Hilary is the learning and education director at creative reaction. She's a social work professional who supports the co-creation of interventions that will promote equitable community outcomes through systems change, dedicated to curiosity and a growth mindset. You can often find her pointing at things and asking "why," or, "could you say more about that?"
Hilary is the learning and education director, where she designs and facilitates workshops, supporting institutions and individuals seeking to better understand and center equity and inclusion in their. She develops curricula and other tools for equity center, community design process, and manages their evaluation strategy.
She's a systems thinker and a self proclaimed evaluation geek. Hilary is forever contemplating interconnectedness process, leverage points, outcomes, access, power, and equity. Hilary has also supported her local community as a lead facilitator of the witnessing whiteness program through the YWC Metro center.
She guides, racially caucused, white groups of community participants through facilitated discussion and activities to support positive racial identity development that will spur action towards dismantling racism and promoting racial equity. Now in there, I also mentioned equity centered community.
And I just want to pop over here to the Creative Reaction Lab site, which I encourage you to visit and learn more about equity center, community design. I'd like to read what it is. It takes typical design process of defining iterating, prototyping, testing, and improving. It takes it further by integrating factors that are essential for equitable design practices and outcomes, humility, history, and acknowledging and dismantling power constructs and inviting diverse co creators. It centers the live experience of people and the value of context, recognizing the significant influences that identity and power have on the narratives that we shape around ourselves and others.
Awesome. Welcome Hilary. It's great to have you here today with us.
Hilary Sedovic:
Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Conley:
Yeah. Thank you for all the great work you do.
The positive change you're bringing to St. Louis and nationally because Creative Reaction Lab is hosting webinars to share this equity-centered community design and the kind of work. So thank you for the influence and impact you're having across the. Thank you. So why don't we get started by just having you talk a little bit about your background and how you came into this kind of work?
Hilary Sedovic:
Sure. To attempt to make a longer story short? I usually start with saying that I went to college thinking I wanted to be a high school English teacher and quickly realized that I did not want to go. English papers for the rest of my life, but recognize that there's an underlying theme for me in my own education and experience, when it came to reading and writing that I, it was more about seeing feeling seen and my experience being validated through another's work and the way that they express themselves.
And I eventually found my way to social work. Fortunately the second semester of undergrad. And I usually say that that really felt like coming home to my own brain and heart. I often talk about how my parents, my, my dad, as an engineer and my mother was both an editor and I was very interested in human beings and psychology.
And so combining those things, I think have a lot of sense when it comes to social work. And with a social work education, generalist practice and systems thinking and looking at people in environments and meeting people where they are - really has combined with what I think my brain already brought into a space and --
And through that education, I ultimately ended up pursuing my graduate degree in focusing rather than Individual work, where a lot of folks see social workers inaction, in case worker and therapist I was particularly interested in more macro level practice. So looking at programs being developed and evaluated and really trying to figure out what does it mean to like how do we best evaluate if we're doing what we say we're doing and how do we continue to improve, especially with some of these, big systemic issues that we're wrestling with.
And I'm on my way to Creative Reaction Lab having seen Antionette Carroll our founder and CEO speak at a local event. And I refer to it as the Antoinette Effect where she just the energy and what she brings to a space and the things that she needs. Yes. It is just often very resonant.
And so for me, when I saw her speak and talking about how the systems of oppression are by design. Therefore they can be redesigned for me. I was like, yes. And so I followed creative reactions creative reaction lab's work for a number of years until there was finally an opportunity.
And I was the third full-time staff member hired in 2018. And for me, equity-centered community design, when we talk a lot about the power of language, the word design for me, I was like does that apply to me? No one has ever used the word design in a way that made me feel that was a space that I should be included in, that I had a right to be there. But when I looked at the concepts and practices and values of equity-centered community design, I was like, oh yeah, this makes complete sense. It's a systems thinking - this is addressing root causes. This is meeting people where they are.
This is valuing self-determination in history. That was really my entry into Creative Reaction Lab and recognizing yeah, I do have a seat here in many people do, what does it look like to create spaces where more people recognize that they do belong here and that they have.
Chris Conley:
That's awesome. Many people- I'm sure many people have felt it.
But many people are simply not exposed to design, but when they are historically, it's been very elitist and it's about the designers doing the work for the other people because they're the experts and that's one of the joys of our work here at the Catalyst program and bringing healthcare and community-based professionals into the world of human centered design and showing that we are all designers, because we all can configure the world in ways, whether we design policies or organizations or hiring practices, all of those things are designed, whether people realize it or not.
And as you said, realizing that you have a role in designing the world to be more equitable, to break down the structures that have traditionally marginalized people, is exactly the principle of what design should be all about. It doesn't have to sit over there in the high design realm of just corporate communications and product design and all those things where it's traditionally practiced.
I love that. So let's talk a little bit about centering equity stories. Just talk a little bit about doing that work, and I know it's natural for you. I know it's embedded into what you guys do, and as our Catalysts listen, what talk about some of the things that they need to be aware of as they start to bring that work into their projects, or try to surface equity or histories in their projects.
It's a very vague question. I know.
Hilary Sedovic:
I like to process things before I answering because also I often had many thoughts running at once and so I usually need to pluck a few and filter them. The thing that we start with often, and this is why literally this, the center of equity-centered community design - if you were to look at the image which was designed to very intentionally is history and healing. And just outside of that is acknowledging and dismantling power constructs. And so with that, when I think about bringing equity into a space or looking to name it to amplify, it really starts with narrative and history.
Where, we've all been so steeped in so many systems, and values, and told what is how you contribute value to society, or this is the way it's done, this is what it means to be a professional, this is what it means to contribute to a community. And how often those narratives that many of us are socialized in are coming from a space of power-over, people who have held power, the various identities - namely, especially in this country and beyond - white folks holding power - through that their identities constraining the narratives that we're all fed. And so with that, when I think about equity, there's a lot of unpacking and unlearning first, because many of us in our formal education spaces are fed the dominant narrative with no room to question the fact that history is actually dynamic and changes based on who is telling it.
And so oftentimes with equity, especially when we, we're focused on racial and ethnic equity, unpacking some of the narratives, regardless of the identities in the room of what are we bringing to the space already? What do we believe to be true about the work we are doing about the ways that we interact with one another? And how do we begin to challenge those? Because I will always be in a space of "this is how it's done," depending on where that narrative came from. Or I'm going to ask where that narrative came from. And then I'm going to say, "now what's the opposite of that?" Because I'm not willing to just accept that anymore.
And making sure that we are listening to folks who are saying "[No], I know that y'all have fed into that. And that's actually not, that's not THE way - that's not the only thing that's available to us." And so when it comes to centering equity in our work, it looks like so many different things, but I do believe that it begins with unpacking and unlearning narratives and then figuring out what does it mean to relearn it. And we have to really practice again and again, and have a space of trying and testing and, centering our own humility and vulnerability to say, "I'm a human being. I am here to grow and learn. And we've never had equity ever in this world."
And so, we can work for this together. But there aren't very clear... I'll stop myself there- because there are actually are pretty clear action steps of how we can move ourselves there by, challenging what is currently the status quo. I'm getting a little tangential.
Chris Conley:
Oh, not at all. Not at all. I think I just want to highlight some points you're making that are fantastic, which is first of all, just having a conversation and a reflective space to say, "what do we believe to be true?" And getting those on the table and then questioning them, "why are they true? Do they have to be true?" Or in your case, that awesome question, "what's the opposite of that? How would it look if it was completely different?" And that being an intentional process for realizing that there are -- to identifying and in realizing the inequities in our organization, and our team in our community, in our stuck door that, that we work in. So I think that's awesome.
We have a a learning module in the Catalyst program, which is about identifying conventions and orthodoxies and questioning them. And again, we have these principles in there that are meant to elicit some of those, but this year we get to bring it much explicitly. Let's have that - let's identify the convention in the orthodoxies and then in equity or power structures that we tell ourselves or that we have in our work.
One other quick question, and maybe we'll get into this a little bit more, but my intuition tells me that one of the hardest things for organizations and you work with institutions and organizations, not just community members themselves - it's very hard for an organization or institution, to be honest with themselves about the power structures that exist. Every year in Catalyst, we have teams where there is a power dynamic that you can clearly see is happening on the team. Is there a way to approach that or how can teams start to work with that in their work?
Hilary Sedovic:
And to clarify, you're saying the organizations and then also part of the dynamic within the teams themselves. Which one are you wanting me to talk about?
Chris Conley:
Let's talk about the teams. Let's talk about the team first because that's the closest working group, the center of the onion.
Hilary Sedovic:
Yeah. It's, to me like obviously, or maybe not, obviously I believe that everything starts with relationship. And there are multiple people and working in equity and justice spaces that talk about moving at the speed of trust, and trust and respect looks like many different things to many different people.
And in my ideal world, we form a team, we sit down, we're like, here are my identities. Here is how society recognizes them when it comes to power in the way that we have in this iteration of our country, understand, understood power to look like. And here's what we need to look out for as we work with one another. That would be it, and have an agreement to hold each other accountable and to hold ourselves accountable to when we're starting to fall into those traps saying, Hey, am I doing this, y'all? So you had named that this might be something that comes up for you. I feel like that's happening right now and having that conversation and leaning in together again, though, that comes with a certain amount of relationship building. We find that ourselves, at our organization while we have our organizational values and ways of working with one another, and it is very valuable to a lot of folks, especially some people wrestle with it when they come in, because they're like, "wow, this is great. Like co-creation power shifting," but then they're like, "this is hard." Because it is very counter to the, what they have been told it means to be in a workplace with one another.
Some of our entry level professionals her like, oh, like I know we talked about power shift. But I guess I like, I still have to overcome this narrative for myself that I've been told that until I reach a certain level of authority, my ideas don't matter. And so we've had to like practice, building people up and being like, you're here for a reason. I want to hear what you have to say. You have decision making power here. And so when I think about teams, it feels like it has to be practicing the habits. And so, similarly though, if you don't already have a relationship with these folks, you have to be building a relationship while muddling through some of this tough stuff.
If that's at least where I would feel like it can and should go, but it, I'm not going to pretend like it's easy. Especially because again, you don't know folks. So how do you believe that this can be a safe and brave space to have these conversations in a way that aren't going to cause more harm?
Chris Conley:
I think you're saying a great thing about how our teams, which are just getting. Can set the tone from the beginning of part of their commitment in doing this project as to build a relationship with each other, to build trust so that the work can become even better. So that they can work in a way that pushes the work forward, builds relationships and actually makes progress in the areas of equity or power structures. I think it's interesting - you gave the example of the young professional. I do I give a talk every year at different college classrooms, mostly engineering classrooms. And I ask, what does it mean to be professional? And I call that into question because they're like "show up on time," "do what you say you're going to do."
And that it feels like the bar is so low. And I think the being professional in this day and age, what it is to do work is actually dismantling those power structures that were set up 50 years ago, 70 years ago, as corporations or organizations started building a theory about how to efficiently run companies.
Hilary Sedovic:
I was going to say as well though, what we often unpack around professionalism though, is that so many of our norms of professionalism are steeped in white supremacy. The worship of time in a way that we devalue somebody else's worth and what they can bring, if they show up five minutes late to a meeting. The perfectionism is part of white supremacy is a sense of urgency that sacrifices, equity and inclusion. And we're just, we're married to a deadline and we're like, "Ooh while would be nice to have folks as know community members as teammates, we don't have time and we only have so much money." Those things are wrapped up in white supremacy. And so that's also what we talk about a lot in our organization -
I think that we have some shared ground where like we're all working to address white supremacy in ourselves because we've all been so steeped in it. So we can work through that together and be like, "Ooh, I'm like, I'm in perfectionism right now. And I like, this is what I'm seeing happening - can you help me get out of this?"
Chris Conley:
Awesome. One more point about teams. And I went off on a tangent on professional work, but you mentioned the entry, the young professional, and I think this is where the leaders have a really important and hard role for them to play. And it doesn't matter that it's hard.
They have to do it. They have to drop their sense of authority, their leadership that they've gotten to where they've gotten to because they always spoke up first or they always did their job. It's important for them to drop that and become much more humble. And I find that's one of the - it's one of the hardest things for leaders to do. I'm not sure why, except the world's been telling them the other way is the important way for 20, 30 years in their career.
Hilary Sedovic:
When you say that the leaders have to do that in my mind, I say the "titled leaders" because I think that is the dominant narrative of this is how you become a "titled" leader. This is how you hold power. And I can't remember what I was listening to recently - on some podcast about, talking about this narrative of "knowledge is power."
And it is true that "knowledge is power," but it is, it feels like it has become "knowledge is power" through the "fake it till you make it." So don't act like you, "if you don't know you better act like you do," "if you were wrong, you better not admit it," "if you need help, you dare don't say so," because then you are sacrificing the power that you have and you've worked so hard to get.
That's also when we examine those narratives around leadership is, that as exactly as you said, the person to speak up first, or maybe the loudest, or has the most ideas running in their brain that just spew out their mouth - I'm talking about myself right now. With this concept of leadership, we're looking over and erasing so many people and so much value that people contribute to a space when we are not valuing our introverts as leaders, when we are not valuing other ways of leadership that are not steeped in white supremacy and patriarchy and so on. We're missing a lot.
Chris Conley:
Yeah. And I think that's the amazing point about this is that when you actually let go and start to listen more and to bring other voices in, the world opens up.
Interesting perspectives. Things you never knew were happening because you never gave it space. And this is what I don't understand why leaders don't do it. We can talk a little bit about why they don't do it, but I think once you start adopting and transforming your practice and breaking down these traditional norms, work is so much more meaningful.
It's so much more collaborative and fulfilling as you work through the problem with others, not through, a decision-making process and a time-based project that you agreed on: "Here's the steps we're going to take." And you get two steps in and you're like, "whoa, we know completely different things. We should do this differently." "Nope. We agreed to do the project like this."
What are you talking about? [laughs] Since when is adaptability and learning more not a good thing in business or in organizations?
Awesome. What else are you thinking about? I don't have a second question to follow up with that.
Hilary Sedovic:
I'm thinking about many things, Chris, that's a dangerous question. [laughs] I could talk a little bit about what we've seen, and I think I spoke to this already a little bit, but the challenges that folks have when it comes to titled leaders and their buy-in to equity-centered work and engaging in vulnerability and power shifting. Because more often than not we've had this trend in our workshops and we're working to determine how to best address it and moving forward, but where we do two hours, four hours, eight hours of learning together - and at the end, the attendees are like, "wow," like this is "yes, absolutely." It was kind of my way coming to Creative Reaction. I'm like, "yeah, of course this makes so much sense. I want this."
And then they say, "now, how do we convince leadership?"
And I'm like, "oh, they're not here?"
Oh, they're NOT here. Okay."
And so that's something that we've been grappling with of what kind of requirements do we set for folks engaging in this work with us - if we're doing this work with you, your leadership needs to be there. They need to be there the whole time. And they need to be - what does it look like to have that buy-in beyond a, one-off like, this is not an one-off DEI workshops or a diversity-equity-inclusion workshop. This is about planting seeds and what is your sustainability plan and your growth plan? And so when it comes to leadership, again, I come back to the person and their heart and what the narrative they have been steeped into - especially later in life, when you have really ingrained in a lot of narratives and protected yourself. I'm a big Brene Brown fan, fellow social worker kind of thing, but have really armored up, but this is what it means to be successful, this is who I know myself to be... And speaking of Brene, yeah we're on a first name basis...
[laughs] She said in one of her podcasts recently that her research has found that one of the biggest shame-triggers in the workplace is the fear of being irrelevant. And I think about that a lot. When it comes to these conversations around equity and inclusion, given how many generations we have of titled leadership being white men, that now being challenged to consider that they are no longer relevant, or they do not have the capacity to address these things that they truly don't have the knowledge and experience. And this is, for some folks, it feels like a whole new language. It's a new way of working with one another, and we see that not just in equity work, we know that this is a trend in an aging workforce, when it comes to this feeling of irrelevance.
And so I think that just brings up even more armor. And just like standing your ground and being like, "no, I don't need to change. I've been doing it right. I've experienced success. And I don't need to be there. I don't need to learn anymore." And it also often in an organization that has been so ingrained with certain ways of working and ways of being like, "wait, but this is going to flip us on our heads and that sounds really uncomfortable. And I don't know what the right answer is. And so I don't want to do that."
Chris Conley:
When leadership is really needed, in this case, leadership would be embracing it and saying, "I am very uncomfortable with this. I need to learn about it and I'm going to make sure our organization is investing time, and with each other, to figure this out." That's leadership, not the title that you talk about - not the title that you've already identified as well - it's just, it's a promotion in the organization and accumulation of power so that you have- you kind of get permission to pay less and less attention, and just say more and more, which is so outdated now and such a horrible way to run an organization and it just won't be sustainable, as you said, this approach won't be sustainable.
We have to admit you're advanced in your career - you've accomplished great things with these organizations. If leaders are watching this, take a second to reflect on some of the things we talked about in a Catalyst Mindset video that we did: humility empathy, equity, and inclusion - and just reflect on where those show up in your daily life, in your work life, and where you could start making progress. I hope there's a thought of doing that and not denying it - we all have to do this. Even if we're talking about it on a video interview, we have work to do - we have to constantly, it's a practice as Hilary said.
Hilary Sedovic:
And you don't have to do it alone either. That's the thing, too. And I know sometimes because I get passionate about it. Maybe sometimes I come off as like judging or admonishing folks, but really, to me, it is more about just saying, "this is just the reality. There's only so much that we know and what we have been fed," and that's been my journey, as you named having led some groups with witnessing whiteness, that was a part of me engaging even deeper in my own understanding of whiteness, and I continue to be in that daily ,and I will be in it for a lifetime consistently. In our organization, and especially as I now am the director of our department, which honestly partly has come from the significant growth of numbers of our organization, we went from 4 full-time staff members, 3 to 4 full-time staff members in February 2020, to now 16.
And so with that, Antionette and I have - What does it mean for me to be a white woman leading this department within this organization that is centering racial equity, and I'm already thinking about succession planning. I think I bring value to this space. We talk a lot about the need for both - and this is going to get jargon-y, so we can link an article - like equity designers and design allies at the table. And so, it's not like white folks shouldn't be doing this work, but I am consistently like, "how am I, regardless of my intentions influencing outcomes from a white lens?" When I think about our engagements, I'm like, oh, a lot of our audience actually have many of the same identities that I do - white women between the ages of 25 and I think about 45. And I'm like, okay, I can normalize that - because I'm like because most of the folks who follow our work are in education or nonprofit and are the higher proportion within that work. And then when we think about equity work and so on there's just a lot to unpack.
And so I've had to then ask myself daily - Ooh, like regardless of my intentions, how am I influencing the decisions that we're making, about how we present learning to people and the angle that we put on it. And I'm like - this is why we have a tea. It's not appropriate for me to hold all the power and decision-making of how people are learning and what they're learning, and that there are times that I can and have caused harm because of that. and bringing that to the team and being like, y'all I messed up.
And so when I think about, this calling leaders, titled leaders and beyond into this conversation - it really does take discomfort, but sitting with that in ourselves, and it doesn't mean that we're bad people or we're broken - it's: we're human beings. And because of that though, we also have a responsibility that once we know about it, we need to dig deeper. And to me, that's the journey.
Chris Conley:
Awesome. I would just encourage that. You, I think what's, so people fear the feelings that come with that, that either guilt or shame. Huge one. But what people don't realize is by sitting with it and moving into it and inviting other people to collaborate with you, that's the healing part of it.
That's the part that will make the shame go away. As you make progress with others and realize that you're improving on what was happening before. I just can't emphasize enough that when you start doing the work, the meaningfulness and the satisfaction of your work just goes way up, instead of the fear of shame or what are people going to think, or "I'm just going to constantly be called out at meetings." But when you start doing the work with others and letting them lead, adopting their suggestions of how others could learn this content, because they're, they have the lived experience that you're trying to. Support and access. It just makes everything better and hopefully people can get over the shame and fear to enter that work.
So I want to respect your time. Is there something you'd like to share with our teams who are starting on projects? Everything from food insecurity, to serving families with parents coming back from incarceration, to addiction support services... the wide range of ways are 12 or 13 teams are engaging with community -
What are some of the advice or lessons you would share with them, maybe lessons, or sorry, advice, or thoughts that might help them do this work? ...Like good luck! [Laughs]
Hilary Sedovic:
Yeah, no, as you can tell, I could talk about it for a long time. I think some of the things that I come back to is this framing that we have. The movement of redesigners for justice. And that's when I'm mentioned equity designers and design allies, this is the way that we distinguish, what your role should be - on the basis it's contextual - in redesigning for justice.
People who have lived experience with the issue being addressed need to be centered and hold decision-making power. And those who don't have that lived experience, need to leverage their power and access on behalf of equity designers or, we refer to them as living experts and that can look like many things, and it absolutely also includes paying people for their time as living experts and really considering the history of, as you've mentioned earlier Chris, this -- Antionette often refers to it as the yo-yo effect that she experienced growing up where some do-gooders come in, they say, "We're gonna fix this for you. We've talked to you for a little bit. Now we're going to go back here behind our closed doors. We're going to come up with something." And then, they might ask what you think about it before they implement. But otherwise they're like, "Here's what made for you. Good luck. Bye." And so considering, regardless if you have directly done that in this community or not - that narrative is there, there's already been harm done.
And so starting from a place of relationship and process like being at the center of things in quality and relationship versus solely focused on product and outcome - that is where we can move more toward equity when we are on that foundation of relationship and connection to community and collective investment. That's like hard investment and financial investment and all of these things time investment to move this forward. And I think a lot about, how do we engage community members in this work as team members, but in your team as well considering the various identities that you hold, and in which spaces, various folks, identities and experiences should be centered.
So for example, if we were working on something that was addressing reproductive justice, that would be something I have lived experience with. Now, if it were an issue that was directly affecting Black women - I think about, especially in St. Louis, where we have horrific rates of infant mortality, and maternal mortality in some of our zip codes that are comparable to that of - we call it now the global south - that is not my space to be the decision maker.
I need to move as much as possible to center the decision-making power and expertise of people who have that lived experience, because it is super valuable. And they don't need to have PhDs. They don't need to have written a book about it, or be on panels about it. Although we should invite people and pay them to speak about it, but we really need to be reexamining what expertise means to ourselves as well.
That's one piece of advice that I would give and to consistently be challenging ourselves of our first thoughts saying, "And why do I think that?" Some people are like, "that sounds really tiring," and I'm like, "Uh huh!" It is, there's a lot happening out there and it is tiring, but also that's how we're going to push against the status quo and create something different.
Chris Conley:
That's right. We might say, you have to use beginner's mind. You have to see everything as new, like a child does because none of those biases exist early on. And that's a good way of questioning that you're curious, and you take beginner's mind to your work and it's a little less about constantly questioning yourself, but exploring and creatively exploring the space.
Hilary you're amazing. I want to thank you so much for taking time this morning. We have a lot to learn from you from Creative Reaction Lab, from the lived experience experts. And I just think that, I keep reflecting on, we used to call in the design world, everybody was a "user" that you were, that you are designing for.
And I think the shift to living experts as far more appropriate, because that both implies that there they are, the experts who know what's happened. That you will learn from, and they are the ones who know what kinds of potential solutions will be adopted, be helpful, will create value, et cetera. Such a wonderful shift.
Health Pilots podcast outro:
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