Jessica Helfand is the and award-winning designer, artist, writer, and the founding editor of Design Observer. Jessica is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism and is also the host of two podcasts, The Observatory and The Design of Business | The Business of Design. Host Olga Stella talks with Jessica about the impact that crisis can have on the creative process, and the crucial role design will play in helping businesses adapt to our new reality.
Links for reference:
The Design of Business | The Business of Design
This Car Saved Ford by Ellen McGirt
Ford plans mobility testing site behind Michigan Central Station
Timothy Geithner, former Secretary of the Treasury
Jon Iwata, senior advisor to IBM
James Rhee, CEO of Ashley Stewart
The New York Time: Why Zoom is Terrible
Face: A Visual Odyssey by Jessica Helfand
Design for America | Design innovation for social good
Uncertainty: The Design Observer 2020 Summit
Olga: [00:01:00] Well, Jessica, I'm just so excited to have you on the podcast today. I've been an avid listener of The Observatory and The Design of Business | The Business of Design, and so it's a real honor to have you join us today.
Jessica: [00:01:10] I couldn't be happier. Thank you for inviting me.
Olga: [00:01:13]My pleasure, and you know, you sit at such an interesting place during these difficult times. We're in the middle of the pandemic and, from where you sit as a critic, a designer, or a teacher, how are you seeing the ways that designers can be integral to solving the problems that are facing us today?
Jessica: [00:01:30] That is a big question and an excellent question. Of course, there are many perspectives on that depending on, I think many things not least of which is your age and where you come out at this moment and in between professions and where those professions are taking all of us. I've been particularly attuned to students and to young emerging designers who, if we feel rudderless, they are just completely unmoored from a reality that, you know, the educator at in me, the mother in me and my graduate students used to call me "design mom" because I used to sit down with them and say. "Did you take your vitamins? Now let's talk about your thesis." And I think that's still kind of the way I operate. So I expect, we'll talk about this a little bit later on the podcast, but I've been thinking about students a lot because they really have been cast adrift. But I think the saving grace, if there is one at this moment for professional working designers, uh, corporate designers, designers on teams, I think there's two things that come to mind. One is that. I think that urgency breeds a kind of creativity. I think it just, people that are imaginative, people whose go-to solutions in the world have to do with trying to reassess maybe and reassert the coordinates that define any problem, which is a very designer thing to do. But I think it's a very creative thing to do. So I think that's the first thing.
But I think the other thing that I'm seeing, particularly as I dimensionalize my understanding of this crisis in terms of big problems, corporate problems, larger business problems—It's that really good designers are not afraid to ask penetrating questions. And it's that willingness to interrogate your assumptions and say, I don't know what that word means, or how can we maybe get to this a different way?
It's not necessarily, again, just a design conceit. It's a creative, sort of, larger conceptual ideological position that says, I am here to help you solve these wicked problems. We know they're big, let's break them down and let's use that part of our mind. That is, our imagination to maybe get to a different rationale and reroute ourselves to a different end, because obviously the playbooks, the protocols, the systems, the best practices—it's not clear that they're getting us where we need to go.
Olga: [00:03:49] You're right. The need for creativity is now more than ever. And you know, I wonder whether the decision-makers, you know, the business decision-makers. If they're past the point of panic and freezing and trying to address just the cash bloodletting that's happening right now, and to start to think about that.
And if designers who are within these organizations or maybe standing on the outside of them, how can they start to make that case. Do you know? So the businessy types are making these decisions within organizations, whether it's government or corporations.
Jessica: [00:04:23] You know, you're, uh, now that we're all on Zoom all day long, I said to somebody the other day, you're only as good as your rectangle.
Right? Right. So in a sense, you're only as good as the person you report to. You're only as good as the corporation. You work for leadership, which is something that we think about a lot of Design Observer. We think about a lot on the podcast, The Design of Business, how we can actually redefine the vocabulary, the way we talk about leadership, the way we talk about teams. I think it's a very difficult moment to be self-actualized. I mean, it's an important moment to be self-actualized, but I think in these complex organizations, it's really tough.
I will say though, that when designers are embedded into teams and not siloed separately, we're finding empirically looking at different corporations that the values of design become organic to all aspects of the organization.
And so this is why, for example, back in the days when we could gather in person and not be concerned about virus problems, uh, we were doing an annual conference on the design of business. And the first one we did. We did at the Yale School of Management when Michael Beirut and I were teaching there, which we are not doing any longer. And the goal of that conference was, speaks to your question, I think into this idea of non-siloed design skill is that we wanted to make the case to these really an exceptional program there at the school of management Yale. We wanted to make the case that if you have a designer in your C-suite. You are more likely to be ahead of the curve in a million different ways. And so we did that, not by just preaching to the choir or to the, what we hoped would be the choir, but by bringing in senior executives in creative services, senior creative directors at large corporations to present with their CEOs. So we had the head of Pepsi with a Mauro Porcini, who's the Cheif Design Officer at Pepsi. We had the head of The New York Times, with Tom Bodkin, who's for a long time, been the senior creative director at The Times, and these conversations that were moderated in front of an audience of maybe 150-200 people were really seismic in the way they moved the needle towards a conversation where the designer wasn't just this other person who you went to once you had a strategy. It wasn't a separate department that reported to marketing or reported to senior management. It was actually right up there at the very top, having the important critical conversations at the moment they needed to happen. And so I think to come back to your question, the idea that designers will always gravitate together, I mean, they speak a language, they've had similar schooling. And they understand. I mean, increasingly, I think in education we're starting to teach designers to expand their own vocabulary so that when they're teamed with engineers and senior executives, they're not only speaking design speak, but it's not enough to come from below with educational practices, I think it has to really happen organically and systemically incorporations where it's not just get the team together and report to an executive. It's bring designers in at the highest possible level and watch things start to change.
Olga: [00:07:22] Yeah. Involve them in the problem solving from the get-go as opposed to just, creating an aesthetic treatment for the solution at the end.
Jessica: [00:07:29] Can I give you one really quick example?
Olga: [00:07:30] I would love to hear it.
Jessica: [00:07:31] It's a Detroit related example. So my wonderful co-host Ellen McGirt, who writes a column on inclusion and race in business called raceAhead that all of your listeners should subscribe to cause it's fantastic, for Fortune, she's at Fortune.
She wrote this wonderful thing back in 2006 about Ford. And how when the Taurus debuted in 1985 it was different, and the team that created it was different. And that in 1980 Ford had lost, I think, one point $1.5 billion. So what they did was to actually bring in a team of 400 engineers and designers and marketers, and they put them in a room and they set them loose. And that brainstorming, put Ford back in business in a really big way, and that's when the tourist was born. It was Motor Trend's car of the year in 1986 later it was discontinued. But the story that the corporate design story of put 400 people in a room and set them loose. This is not about best practices, this is not about playbooks. It's about what happens when you trust in people and you trust in the creative process. And that invention, I just have a hard time, and I'm a very vocal opponent of white walls and post-it notes, and now that that has become the go to visual vernacular that we say when we're solving problems, I think there are many other ways to do it. And I think designers are very skilled in finding those ways and playing well with others.
Olga: [00:08:53] Right? Yeah. We're starting to see, you know, Ford, not just looking at their products, but really looking at the whole future of mobility and the work that they're doing now to transform our formerly abandoned Michigan Central Railroad. Into a center for mobility and a center for innovation, and it is very much this kind of iterative, creative problem-solving process, not just internally, but also externally with community stakeholders. It's been really fun to watch, and we'll see how it all unfolds over the next couple of years.
Jessica: [00:09:24] I think it's a beautiful example you gave because process is not outcome, and it's scary, if you're a big corporation money's on the line, and revenue models are broken to not think about outcome. But designers, I think if there was a difficult tension for Michael and myself when we taught at the School of Management, it was that. That's our friend Deborah Burke, the architect said, you know, designers think laterally and business people think linearly. It was a difficult thing to invest in the process, to recognize that the component parts; changing the words changing, the approach, investigating, turning, inverting the paradigms by which they knew success could be made or could be achieved or could be banked on, is not necessarily a creative act.
And so process is a scary, messy word for people who are quant-thinkers. Sometimes that is what we learn and whether there's a pandemic or not. I think that's an ongoing thing.
Olga: [00:10:18] It is really interesting because you know, all the management writing talks about, you know, investing in your culture, but process, I mean, what is culture?
Jessica: [00:10:26] It is, if it's processed, you're right.
Olga: [00:10:28] He had a norms and all of that, and. Is it interesting to try to unpack that for business leaders? You've interviewed so many designers and decision-makers over the seven seasons of the business of design, Design of Business, podcasts. What themes have really emerged the to help demonstrate that value of the design process both to the outcomes, but also to the culture and the values of these different organizations?
Jessica: [00:10:32] It's an excellent question, and let me just say that the podcast you're referring to, the Design of Business | The business of Design was co-hosted when we were at Yale, Michael, Beirut and myself.
We did the first six seasons together. And then when we left Yale, I have done the last season with Ellen McGirt, my co-host at Fortune, and we are just about to begin season eight.
The thing I'm the most excited about that we're seeing, there's three people who come to mind, they are Timothy Geithner the former Secretary of the Treasury. I know, not a designer, but bear with me. I'll get back to this. Uh, Jon Iwada, who was for over 30 years, the Head of Marketing and Design at IBM, and James Rhee, who is a Korean-American businessman who bought in bankruptcy, the Ashley Stewart brand of clothing and brought it back to roaring success.
So none of them are designers. One is trained as a communication specialist. One is a businessman and an attorney both degrees at Harvard. Brainiac. They're all brainiacs. And a Timothy Geithner is, you know, an economist, someone who's, who had a public political life. The three of them held positions of enormous power. The three of them have lots of experience and stick to it in the things that they did, right?
So they both for a long time stayed with difficult moments of adversity. And I was blown away by their humility, by their kindness, by their sense of, I think service and stewardship, and by their character. And it's interesting that I who have not any background in leadership who came to my work at Design Observer, my work as an artist, as an educator.
You know, I'm just me. I went to Quaker school when I like, I just like bumbling along like everybody. I found it so remarkable that the work they did really had nothing to do with the work and had to do with who they were as people. And that comes back to something that I think is a theme that Ellen and I are finding at the Design of Business, which is that.
Leadership is primarily about character and it is about the person that you are and the guidance that you bring. Leadership is about listening as much as it is about looking. It's about hiring people that are smarter than you and better than you. It's about staying with it. When the times get difficult, it's about not panicking. It's about recognizing where the limits are.
And I think that to me was so extraordinary. Design can so often be flashy and fancy and shiny, and you know, stars don't emit their own light, right? Like there's something about the idea that these people showed in their conversations with us, such remarkable demonstrations to me of integrity and personal understanding about reality.
Just such humility. I'll say it over and over again. I was really blown away, and I think that I could easily pair it with examples of leadership that I thought were morally reprehensible. A leader of a big corporation. I recently heard who said, you can't be a leader without a follower.
Olga: [00:13:54] Right?
Jessica: [00:13:55] Which I thought was really, and you're saying this to a group of students, and I thought, this is not what they need to hear. This was not helpful. That gets an important thing to say that leadership is about character,.
Olga: [00:14:05] It's even more important now because the decisions that leaders are having to make are really, really hard decisions and impact people's lives and every way they impact their safety, they impact their financial wellbeing, and I think that is going to be even more important as we try to navigate the waters ahead. As you think about these waters ahead, so obviously we're living in a world that is never going back to the way it was before the virus, you know, began its community spread here and everything has changed and will stay changed. So recognizing that, you know, what are the other trends that get implicated in this new world that, you know, we should all be watching, the decision makers should be watching and considering as they're trying to figure out how to navigate.
Jessica: [00:14:25] Well, I can't speak for big, complicated businesses, although I will say that if you are one of those big complicated businesses, you should get yourself an organizational behavior person because those people have got it going on.
I was so impressed when I was at the school of management at Yale with these people who are trained as psychologists and they teach courses on things like global virtual teams, and they look at, I mean, we're not equipped. Those of us who think that a Zoom call. I mean, our morale building on Zoom means having a really pretty background wrong.
It's not about that. That's a wonderful piece in The New York Times today, actually by a writer who talks about the discomforting nature of delay on a phone call or not being able to look at someone's face where the bigger the room, the more people on the screen, the less in touch you are with people. I wrote a book last year on the visual history of the face, and this was really, it was very resonant to me because it's true that we traffic in the mirroring of a kind of validation we see in other people's faces. And this distancing is throwing a huge wrench in that. So it's time to get, I think, ruthlessly objective about the degree to which it is not a design problem. It is an organizational behavior problem. I'm a big, big fan of these people who do that work. It's a huge field that we should know more about.
But the flip side of that, what I can speak to with a little more. Not authority, but certainly confidence is that I have been concerned for a number of years as an educator watching students graduate from elite institutions, programs in design,. I'm going to Yale, I was teaching students in economics and forestry. I mean, you know, really smart kids. I was just out of Caltech this winter teaching these incredible scientists, astronomers that these students who are graduating from these institutions all across the world. Who want to work in technology, who want to work in big misses, who want to work in design, are being asked to join collaborative teams.
Now, there's been a lot written about that, and there are many people who can speak on behalf of that. Certainly the people at IBM, we think are the biggest hiring group of designers anywhere who are teaming designers with engineers all the time, who need to, again, teach designers how to speak languages that aren't just designers. The problem I'm seeing is that the team is the magnet. The team is the alluring carrot at the end of the stick that makes the young student newly minted into whatever profession they've chosen. Gets them to jump in the car on a plane, take a job, join a team. Something's missing in there now that those teams have been torpedoed into a million little boxes on Zoom. Which is that the student leaving the nest of support and understanding and mentorship that comes out of education, is not necessarily equipped to bring those skills to bear on a large complicated team process. Because, we're teaching them how to hone their craft. We're teaching them how to be who they are. The problem is is that we speak in team language, we adhere to team jargon. I think there are great people that run teams and terrible people that run team, but what gets lost and what's particularly getting lost right now, which is why I'm running this column every day.
Is the existential moment when you have been cast adrift by infrastructure or frameworks or all of those things that you thought you were signing on for. Suddenly it's just you alone in your home at a desk trying to make sense of the world you thought you were about to join. That is a real moment of crisis because those are the leaders of tomorrow.
Those are the practitioners of tomorrow, and we can not let them get lost in the shuffle.
Olga: [00:18:33] It rings so true because you know, this is disruptive for all of us, but it's devastating for some of us and especially those young people who are trying to start out and not having that mentoring. I couldn't relate more to that. I mean, think about 10 years ago, you know, the same students who. Struggled through the financial crisis as they graduated. And this is, you know, a thousand times more challenging pride. Don't we talk a little bit more about your new project, The Self-Reliance Project, and you know, this new daily essay about being a maker in this time of crisis. I think our audience would really like to learn more about your thoughts on how a challenging time like this can be a catalyst for introspection and creativity.
Jessica: [00:19:14] I would love to talk about that. So the backstory here Olga is that I was approached by an editor at Thames & Hudson in London about an idea he had to rerelease Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous canonical essay from 1841, which is on Self-Reliance. And he felt that obviously, that it speaks for itself, that the title certainly speaks for itself. And he felt that it was a very opportune moment and an urgent moment to rerelease this text knowing full well, as he did that, it's quite dated. 1841 was a long time ago. It's very white. It's very male. It's very Western. It's very American. I mean, he's an American editor, living in London. We studied philosophy and we had a very, um, I think provocative conversation about how this text might be reissued at a moment when we could use a little historical guidance that might also become sort of relevant to this moment. And I had been thinking parallel and prior to this conversation about the fact that I'm in lockdown. I came out to Los Angeles this winter. I got stuck here. I love it here. Not necessarily being stuck, but I do love it here. But I felt that, I might do something on Design Observer that was a daily column, some kind of daily way to look at something that might help others. So what might that be? I mean, again, that's, that's the thing of leadership, right? I want to keep morale up for our readers.
I want to not be a pulpit, boosterism kind of person, but at the same time, it's not my first rodeo with, you know, I lived through 911 I lived through other crises, nothing quite as dark as this, mind you, but I thought, what could I do in the minute he said, self-reliance and looking at that essay, I thought, aha.
And bell started to go off in my mind. I said, what if I wrote a daily column that looked at, again, comes back to this question of the young person who's between school and the team. What if I looked at this really existential moment through the lens of Emerson, rereading him at this moment. As a lens through which to consider the value of studio practice, because presumably, and I'm going out on a bit of a limb, but on much of one, presumably the person who decided to go to school to study art design, even theater, even architecture, many disciplines that surround the creative mindset. Presumably, people did this because they wanted to make things. They wanted to be involved in using their mind creatively. So suddenly we became a world of post-its and best practices and teams. That doesn't really speak to the fact that whether you're quarantining with a family of six or you're by yourself. It's your life. It's, you know, you came into this life alone. You're going to leave this life alone. This is your life and your professional life that beckons. What does that mean? Where's your voice? How do you locate coordinates that might be different than the ones in which you feel trapped right now? And I started to think about this and I thought, wow. I can do that now. When it gets to the end of every week, all gone.
It's Friday and I've written five essays. I'm ready to stick a fork in my eye. It's really hard. I just writing number 26 right now. It's hard. I vow to keep this up during quarantine. I hope I can, but I have about 300 people subscribing to it. I'm giving talks to students. I spoke to about 150 students last week who are part of something called the Designed for America, which is a sort of franchise, I think it's at 41 schools across the country. And these students were asking questions like, how do I start? Where do I go? How do I differentiate my life from the career I've chosen? What does it mean to make work when no one's giving me a brief? I mean, these are basic, essential questions, and I thought, that is exactly why I'm writing this column. And it's not just for students. Although they were, I think the first line of defense here, they're my primary audience. Is really is to look at the fact that we are not our work. We are not our employers. That the ethical, moral compunctions and conditions that drive who we are as human beings. Something I write about in all my books, I think this is a moment where we have to come to a real reckoning with who we are as a people, which begins with who we are as individuals.
Olga: [00:23:28] Is this a ties back to what you were saying earlier in our conversation around integrity and character. Reading these essays is a way to interrogate your own character. I think it's a good use of time right now as we're, as we're hunkered down.
What advice would you give the students that you were talking to about how to respond to these challenges? You know, if there is a top two or three.
Jessica: [00:23:53] Yeah. Well, the top one I would say is that you are not your work. And so if you were getting a design degree, and this is the same for you, and you could be in your late twenties or early thirties between jobs, thinking about a new career, thinking of graduate students, I think are in some ways suffering even more because they're getting professional degrees that you just stop and you take stock of who you are and not just what you do.
So the example I gave to the young student who asked the question, and I have been asked the question more than once, which makes me think it's a question on many people's minds. Is, for example, let's say you grew up in a bilingual household. You speak another language. That's just not a skill, that's a super-power.
That's an understanding of an entire different cultural realm. You like to write. You like poetry. You're a gardener. You like to draw. It doesn't matter that the thing that you do, you play the cello in really when there's an entire list of things that make you who you are and to be. Basically use this time to take a step back. I'm not here to tell people how to repay their student loans. That is a huge problem. I'm not here to tell people how to get a job and no one's hiring a huge problem, but what I can do, and a friend joke that my column is "daily pastoral guidance for the creative lead despondent," which I suppose it is.
What I can do is take that giant seismic. In a Herculean problem that feels like it's just an enormous thing torpedoing you into an abyss of mediocrity from which will never emerge. No wrong. Step back, get back on dry land. What I can do is say, okay, let's do an inventory. Make a list of all the things you love to do, all the things you don't love to do, and so you start to break apart skills from interests. You start to read things that maybe you aren't reading in school. We read magazines instead of books. Uh, one of the tips I found, I mean, this is helping me that. I miss conversation. So I'm listening to more conversational podcasts. I want to read books, but I don't want to sit and read them cause it's too quiet and lonely. So I listened to them on tape, and then I find someone reading them. I find someone with a British accent or there's so many ways to expand the way you consume the things that sort of stoke the engine. Or feed the, it's sort of like how do you nourish yourself in a time of need with things that will not make you feel like you're copying or revisiting that.
I will say that, and this is not just for students, people that are suffering the most are the people who want things to be the way they were. And you said this yourself a moment ago. They won't become the way they are. That's right. So anyone who begins to sentence, I wish I, why can't I use it? Too. You know, it's a fool's errand, and it's not that you can't feel that way and acknowledge that you're sad, acknowledged that you miss your friends, that you want to hug your children. It doesn't matter, but what you have to do, I think, to thrive, or at least to survive in a moment of such Epic ambiguity. Is to recognize that you are more than the sum of your parts and designed by its very nature knows that. Designers know that we are a multifaceted group of people who think we're agile thinkers.
We don't need to be told that we're agile, we are agile. Creative people have that natural agility. And we just have to dig a little deeper and maybe find resources we didn't know we had and having finding those resources and mining them and tapping into them. That is pure Emerson.
Olga: [00:27:09] Are you finding your own practice changing as a result of this? Both in terms of the writing and just the self-reflection and the crisis?
Jessica: [00:27:15] I am, and I will say it is that unusual to be doing this alone? It's a particular cross to bear for those of us who, you know, it's like musical chairs now, if you got in that chair and there are people around you, great, you have problems, but they're also things that are great people that are alone. And again, a lot of students are facing this. Kids who couldn't go home to their families, cause of visas. I mean, it is, it's hard.. But it also means you have more me-time than you ever thought you needed. And that can be scary. I think we're used to checking in where used to, you know, why do people write in coffee shops?
You know? I mean, Thoreau didn't write in a coffee shop. Right. So again, come back to this moment of creative practice of visiting your practice that the studio is a sanctuary bearing witness to your work. I'm writing about this in the next column. I had a wonderful mentor in graduate school. Who has, he got to the end of his life, went to a studio every day, and some days he just sharpened his pencils. And that was enough, right? It doesn't have to be writing the "great American novel." And so what starts to happen is that the fishers that you thought were going to break you. Those fault lines actually become islands of new opportunity. That is a really exciting thing when that happens. I'll give you an example, if I may.
Absolutely. I am a painter and I've been working on a very complicated series of paintings. They're complicated because I pan on top of photographs and then I make these giant prints and then I pan on top of the prints. It's very labor intensive and the archive I've been working with since the summer is in a place I can't get to you because of the quarantine and it's about faces and I'm interested in portraiture. And I wrote a book on faces and he started to drill down like the boll weevil that I am, and I saw it. You know, it's really interesting. It's not about zoom because I see those faces, but they're small and they're, many of them are my children, I FaceTime at them and it's on my phone. No, what do I see? What are the faces coming into my life in a big, bold, different way? And I realized ridiculous as the sounds. It's the faces of MSNBC. So I started taking photographs of the TV at night of Rachel Maddow and have Sanjay Gupta and all of these people. And what happens when you take your phone, you take a picture at night, there's a strobe, but it's, the colors are weird and they're moving, and so it's a stilt. Anyway. I'm making paintings of those screenshots, and I'm in California, so the color palettes completely emboldened by the fact that I'm in the land of, you know, Alice Neal and Richard Diebenkorn. Yeah. I would never have made that work. It's in a sense, site-specific. It's weird. It's goofy. It's fun. It's serious, and it's all I want to do. I want to get through my column every day and run Design Observer every day and get back to making my paintings because they're teaching me something about looking.
And that's also what designers do. They look and they look and they look some more, and that's again, to come back to your very first question, the humility that designer has and saying, I don't know what that word is. I've never seen that before. That curiosity, that inherent deep well of curiosity is what's going to save us. Whether you're in quarantine for two days or six months, if you can tap into wherever that curiosity will take you, it reaps benefits and dividends and rewards that you can see going in. And that comes again, back to your question, or I think that observation you made, which I couldn't agree with more. That that process is a much more rich arsenal of material for us right now than focusing on outcome where because we don't have those practices in place, we're just going to be thwarted in our own efforts to reach them.
Olga: [00:30:41] I think that's a wonderful way to close out our conversation because it's just a ties up so many of the threads of our conversation and just reinforces how important designers, creative thinkers, and this moment, you know, to both be helpful, but also to be introspective in creative practice. It's just, it's a pivotal moment and I'm hopeful that we're all going to come out of it much stronger and hopefully having really thought about the cracks that the pandemic has exposed in our society and the way that we work. And maybe make us all a little bit more humane and start to address some of those needs.
Jessica: [00:31:20] And you're always, I listened to a few of your podcasts before this one, and you're already doing that. I mean, I'm such a big Detroit fan and watching the Renaissance of your city, seeing you become a UNESCO City, seeing what's going on in the schools there, you know, you speak a lot, if I may, on your podcast. You talk to inclusivity and equitable. Ways of working in not just, it's not a team thing, it's a civic thing, right? It's like you're at a municipal level, at a governmental level. Again, I come back to those three people we had on our podcast in concert with my observation about the work you're doing there in a city that is not on a coast, and you're fighting the fight that we're all fighting. And I think it's about asking really hard questions, and not being afraid of the answers and letting people speak who maybe traditionally, were not given a chance to speak, because those are the observations that we need right now, and those are the teams we should be building, not just the same old, same old. It's the scary moment, but it's a chance to rebuild in a way that. Gives more people a chance, a fighting chance, and it to your beautiful word, a humane chance.
Olga: [00:32:26] Well, I couldn't agree more and I'm so glad we had a chance to talk today and I know, you know, hopefully to continue our conversation in the future, Jessica, because I do also want to just mention, you know, I was looking at interest at the summit that you're putting together for the fall, the Uncertainty Summit through Design Observer, and I think these are going to be themes that we're going to continue to explore and hopefully be able to, I don't want to say, resolve together cause I don't, think that's quite the right thing, but it is a start to see some pathways forward together.
Jessica: [00:32:58] I couldn't agree more. And we hope we'll do our Uncertainty Summit here in Los Angeles on October 8th. But if for whatever reason we are unable to, we will find another way to do it. And just as we were able to do this podcast today, you know, our voice has cannot be silenced just because we can't get on airplanes.
Olga: [00:33:17] That's right. That's right. Well, thank you again so much and I hope to talk with you again soon.
Jessica: [00:33:21] I look forward to it. Thank you Olga.