I love trying to solve hard problems.

More or less, that's how I've spent my career.

But my success rate has been frustratingly low.

Maybe one out of ten projects succeeds.

That's where my guest today, Sarah Stein Greenberg, comes in.

She's the executive director of the Haso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University,

commonly known as the D-School.

Her job is to teach people like you and me how to solve real-world problems.

Part of what we're trying to teach is that you don't know what you're going to find,

and you have to be responsive.

And actually leaving room for serendipity and openness is hugely beneficial in a creative process.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

To be honest, I don't really know what they do in design schools.

So to start our conversation, I ask you to help me understand what people mean when they use the word design can be a noun.

It could be like the thing you make, or it could be how you make something.

And at the D-School, we actually mean both.

Let me start with an example.

A number of years ago, we had four incredible students who were coming from

very different disciplinary backgrounds. There were two medical students, a civil engineer, and

a policy student. And their names were Edith, Shahed, Jesse, and Katie. They had never met before,

but they were put together on a team in one of our classes at the D-School called Design for Extreme Affordability.

And they were given a challenge, which was to design something useful for a hospital in southern India called the Narayana Health Hospital chain.

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