My guest today is Sarah Stein Greenberg, the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, better known as d.school. Sarah has built her career on helping companies unlock innovation and creativity. She's also the author of a new book ‘Creative Acts For Curious People’.

In this episode, we talk about how boredom helps you to be creative, the questions to ask instead of making small talk, how design can help you reframe your problems, ways to develop empathy and much more. It's a book chock-full of takeaways and the conversation is too.

In the book, there are a whole set of practices and assignments that we teach all the time. And there's a set of those that are about really cultivating your ability to notice in new ways and to spot opportunities that are kind of hiding in plain sight.

One of my favourite ones is called the derive. And the derive is like, if you are stuck on a problem or you just feel like you're lacking curiosity, the derive is just a fantastic approach. It involves taking 30 minutes, maybe an hour and taking a walk in a familiar neighbourhood or part of the place, the city that you live in.

And, instead of planning your route in advance, you let your route be dictated by what you notice along the way. So you get a wide range of observations and ahas and just something as simple as a 30 or 60-minute investment in that ability to shift what your brain is taking in and what your brain is filtering out can lead to all kinds of other benefits.