Taking on Climate Change with Design Thinking: Silicon Valley's David Johnson

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

Dave Johnson is a Silicon Valley attorney and climate change activist whose attention to design thinking suggests a less well-traveled approach to dealing with global threats.

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson is a lawyer, teacher, and writer. Over the last twenty years, he has served as general counsel for several tech companies in Silicon Valley. For the last decade, he has held teaching and research posts at Stanford Law School and the Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is currently working on a book titled Climate Activism by Design, bringing design principles to bear on citizen activists responding to corporate and government inaction on this immediate, existential crisis facing all of humankind.

Insights from this episode:

• What design thinking is
• Empathy in business
• Buzzwords in leadership
• Differences between empathy and sympathy
• Importance of criticism
• Design thinking for legal systems
• Application of design thinking to social systems
• Details about the content in his book

Quotes from the show:

• “My take on this is that design thinking in its most core form was always somewhere inside the sphere of design work” —Dave Johnson [11:20]
• “I think empathy can be categorized as yet another buzzword, which is a term that has some inherent meaning, but it gets lost on a larger crowd because it's more about saying the most current idea that is coming out of the business schools or engineering schools” —Dave Johnson [18:00]
• “Empathy is a sort of innate skill that oftentimes sociopaths are very adept at using. It’s important to understand that it’s a powerful tool and has to be used with quite a bit of care” —Dave Johnson [22:19]
• “Some of that criticism is healthy and useful for furthering, both restraining and honing the idea as it moves forward and some of it is just, for lack of a better phrase, complaining” —Dave Johnson [23:31]
• “Steve Jobs is famous for, I’m going to paraphrase him, ‘People think that design is how the product looks. We don’t think that at all, design is how the product works’” —Dave Johnson [26:09]
• “Design is going from the idea, the concept, to actually creating the service or product. Virtually none of which has anything to do with the marketing department” —Dave Johnson [26:17]
• “It's in human nature, it’s deep in our brain DNA: We respond to critical threats, and we do not respond well to chronic threats. We respond to the acute and not the chronic, and climate change is the chronic” —Dave Johnson [40:46]
• “We are waiting for, in America, too long, for some kind of trigger spark that gets everybody to take the step from outside of the circle to inside the circle, and that then develops its own momentum” —Dave Johnson [48:30]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

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Maron Greenleaf

LinkedIn: Dave Johnson

Website: David Johnson

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.