Transcript: Creativity: How to Work Well With Constraints, People and AI | Asaf Pearl Bershadsky

Opening and introductions

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi Asaf, how's it going? All good, how are you? Great. So nice to have you here. Asaf, what do you do in life?

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [00:07] I still don't know how to define it myself, but I'll try to keep it as simple as possible. The field I work in is called Innovation Design. And what I basically do is design innovation processes. Now, that can take all kinds of forms: it can be mentoring entrepreneurs, working with local authorities, with organizations, government ministries, it can be one-on-one work with an entrepreneur, and it can also be big events like hackathons, which is mostly what I've been doing lately. But all these things, we don't, we, I say we because in the end it's a studio. I don't do things only on the technical production side, or in one-on-one meetings; we look at everything through the people. Through the people, the whole field I work in is called Human-Centered Innovation, and it doesn't matter if it's a hackathon, or working with an entrepreneur, or working on a venture, we always put the people at the center and build everything around them. So let's sum up that basically you help people be creative

Eyal David: [01:14] during hackathons, I think that will lay the foundation for our conversation. We're in a period where creativity is a very important and needed thing, maybe always, but now all the more so when we have such power as AI, and I'd like us to start with what creativity is in your eyes.

What creativity is and why it's a muscle

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [01:35] So first I'll put a headline on it. Saying I help people be creative makes it sound very simple, but really, every time you want to create innovation, which, I apologize, is a word I like less, because in Hebrew it doesn't sound good, it has the word "new" in it, and innovation isn't necessarily something new, everywhere we'll need creativity. Now, the trick isn't being creative in the sense of making something new, or cool, or some crazy branding, or a website that's a knockout. The trick in being creative is knowing how to crack things in a slightly different way. Now, there's a definition of creativity I really like. Some say it's creating something new by connecting several things together, which I relate to, but there's a definition by a researcher named Dorte Nielsen, who says that in the end creativity is a muscle, and it's the ability of a creative person to take a lot of things, understand the connections between them and create something new from them, but the muscle aspect is that the more you practice this action, the more you strengthen that muscle. And I always tell everyone I work with that basically creativity is like running: everyone can run. There's even a guy in Yarkon Park who runs without legs, he has those carbon blades. I mean, if he can run... forget that, if I did a half Ironman, and I'm not the greatest athlete in the world, everyone can run. The question is simply how you do it. You do it fast, slow, you do it when it's hard for you, when it's not, I mean, but in the end it's a muscle. If you train yourself the right way, everything, you don't have any problem, even with a health issue, even without legs it's possible. But you can do it in your own right measure, and all you need to do is build the box you work in. Because creativity is a space, it's working within a predefined space and finding solutions around it.

Creativity = working within constraints

Eyal David: [03:43] I really agree, and I also liked what you said about the guy with the blades, and I'll say why. Because like you said, everyone can run, but once I added some limitation of, okay, he can't because he has some problem, some creativity was created here,

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [03:57] and then it leads to that word you don't like, but that's creativity. Creativity is knowing, you need a box. When people are told, think outside the box, that's a small part of the process. In the end, when we talk about creativity, we talk about two main processes. One is divergent thinking, which means you think in every direction, that's outside the box. You, I always show this picture of a shower head, spraying drops in every direction, wetting everything in every direction. But in the end, for creativity itself, you need convergent thinking. And convergent thinking is like a funnel, you collect the right drops. You put them inside the box you built, because in the end you have constraints. For example, I wanted to do, let's take the example, back to the running example. I wanted to do a half Ironman. Now, at 40 I can't suddenly do a half Ironman like a 20-year-old, right? So I need to take into account that one side of the box is my physical limitations, age. Another side of the box, another edge, is the time I have, because I also need to work in the meantime. A third side of the box, say, the challenges I have along the way. For example, I don't like swimming. So now I have another constraint. Now I need to learn to work inside this box, and how you work inside this box, inside this space, that's where creativity is. So I know I'm not good at swimming, so I'll swim slower, but I'm good at cycling, so I'll make up for it on the bike. And even on the bike, I'm not like the Norwegian or the Dane in the race who finished the bike before I even got on mine, but I know I'm good enough not to be last. I mean, you set your own constraints? And then you run with it. Now, to connect this for a moment to the real world, because it's very nice to talk about physical limitations, in the end, also when you need to be creative in the world of entrepreneurship, you need one side of the box to be what budget you have. Two, what space you want to work in. If you don't define your work space, your challenge space, you can't operate in it. Another side of the box is things you need to define for yourself. Do I have time, space, other resources, I don't know, does it need to be something lean, or something with a crazy budget right now? Am I inside an organization or outside an organization? If I'm inside an organization, I need to connect to the organizational culture. So when you now come to one organization or another, to lead a hackathon, for example.

Divergent vs. convergent thinking

Creativity in entrepreneurship: time, resources and context

Eyal David: [06:24] Obviously you need to encourage creativity so there's content you can work with, right? Enough ventures. Where do you feel people get stuck most around creativity?

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [06:35] Because with creativity, like you said, since it's a muscle, you can use methods. Now, people, what they usually do in this world of creativity, and I experience this everywhere, okay? I have to say that we as Israelis think we're creative, because we're a slightly different culture from the rest of the world, we know everything. And then when you come to a challenge, you don't always research. Now, again, I'm taking the extreme for a moment, not the most extreme, a reasonable extreme, because there are excellent entrepreneurs in Israel who study the challenge environment excellently. But before we approach a challenge, in order to be creative in it, we must have knowledge. Like I said before, creativity is the ability to connect different pieces of information into something new. If I don't have different pieces of information, I can't connect something new. So there are methods for locating, for defining the challenge environment. That's one. You need to ask lots of questions. What's the problem? Where did it happen before? Who are the stakeholders? Why does it need solving? Why is it an opportunity? Why this? Tons of questions you have to ask, because if you don't learn it, you won't be able to get into it. Let me give an example for a moment, okay? I won't give examples of ventures I worked on, but I'll give an example of my own, just a student project, okay? A master's project I did in my innovation design degree. We said we wanted to make a kind of Etsy for food. Like, a platform like Shopify, Etsy, but for something cool and artisanal. We started studying the field. We discovered that in the United States there's a law called The Cottage Food Law, which allows you to make and sell food from home, as long as it doesn't require refrigerated transport. So, like, we saw there's a good market, and then we said, okay, but who are our customers besides the sellers? And then we started researching and researching and researching, and discovered, get this, that it's a market of over 20 billion dollars a year, that there are even people called locavores, like carnivores, they're simply people who eat local food and are willing to pay 7% to 8% more to eat local food. And then we discover and research and understand that there's meaning to the story here, it's not just about making an Etsy or Shopify or whatever, there's meaning to the story, there's already a persona to look at, and then you can be creative, because we see, let's look for a moment at who the sellers are too, they're not all tech people, we understand how to do something, let's create a platform that suits them. You have to research the challenge environment, because you'll discover very new things, like for example that all the startups that worked in this field failed on logistics.

Why you must research the challenge space

Eyal David: [09:16] So okay, so I understand that basically what you're saying is that the first thing people fall on is probably that they don't understand the problem space or the whole context well enough.

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [09:23] Let me put an asterisk here. The challenge space. The challenge space. Now, I explained this to you when we had our preliminary conversations, but it's important to explain it, and it's also part of the learning. I try not to use the word problem, because a problem is something that has a solution. It's usually one-to-one. A challenge contains a set of problems, and sometimes when I address some of the problems within the challenge, I've solved the challenge, I don't have to solve all the problems. By the way, this in general, as a mindset: when you want to solve a problem in the world, don't try to solve it, try to solve the challenge it sits in,

A challenge, not a problem

Eyal David: [10:01] so you can respond better. You're absolutely right. Even when we interview in English, I really always say, What is your challenge? So there are many obstacles that can limit us on the way to dealing with a challenge, and then we'll need to address it with creativity. Where else do you feel there's being stuck in these areas? Because I want us to move on to talk about what unlocks that being stuck.

Simplicity as the basis of product value

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [10:26] And what do you see that does work and help? What I usually see is that people look for templates. If you want to set up some mini market, for example, I work a lot in social impact, I run hackathons on autism, mental health, domestic violence and more and more. And entrepreneurs come there who don't, say, know about pricing. Now, let's try to be creative for a moment, because they have solutions, they have things that work, children on the spectrum get a solution one way or another. In Israel there are relatively good solutions, but let's think for a moment about being creative: who pays, why do they pay, what's the alternative cost, things like that where they don't always take the right direction. And here, by the way, learning the challenge environment also means learning another field you now need to deal with: pricing. Many entrepreneurs, at least the ones I meet, get stuck on making things simple. The most important thing is to ask people what they want, how much they're willing to pay, how they want to pay, whether they have the energy to become a staffing company now or not. Because nobody will deal with accounting. We're both business owners, it's the most horrible thing there is. So that's where I see it, and the change, I have to say the change that happens, I can talk about in the hackathons. Because with entrepreneurs, when I work with them one-on-one, I work with them one-on-one, it's like... but in the hackathons... after they go through, in my hackathons they go through training. They don't just come to the event and leave; they get trainings, if there are technologies they get them from the technologies, if it's things related to intellectual property or patents, they get trainings on that. But they go through a very, very basic lecture with me called From Idea to Innovation, or From Idea to Product, depending on what headline I feel like that day. One of the things there is that I talk about Human-Centered Design, and in Human-Centered Design you learn to make things simple, because people are simple. True, we're complex, but in the end there's behavior, and behavior can be complicated and complex, it can also be simple. So if we know, for example, that a therapist who does occupational therapy, don't bother her now with a complicated system, with accounting, make it a button. She needs a button. One, that she presses, the client pays, she gets money. That's it,

Eyal David: [12:56] you need to give her a button, that's the story, that's her pain point. That's the whole idea. I was wondering what helps you be creative. You're a very creative person, at least from the outside that's how I see it. What helps your thinking, how did you cultivate that muscle? One, I try very hard not to stop. Explain.

How to cultivate creativity day to day

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [13:14] I'm very multidisciplinary. Let's give an example. I have piles of books on innovation, creative thinking, business, like all of us, we have some huge library, design books. I don't read the books. I can't, I have ADHD. For me, reading a book is horrible. I read the table of contents. I know the table of contents. By the way, I'm also going to do something with vibe coding, where I'll put in the table of contents and it'll help me build content based on it. And when I now need to build a lecture or create content or make videos, I go back to the table of contents, look, go into the content, pull out what I need and adapt it. That, by the way, is one of the things I also tell my kids, how they differ from us, our generation. We always say the new generation is more creative; it's not more creative, it thinks differently from us. But for example, when I explain to my eldest son, Noam, what I had to do as a kid to make a film, to make a short video, and I had to make a lot of connections, because I'd shoot on a video camera, and then I had to edit it in the video itself, so I had to find all the cables, until I had a computer with FireWire, and if I say FireWire now and someone doesn't get it, I've marked myself in the wrong yearbook. And then I need, you know, those banana plugs that connect RCA to... audio, video, red, white, yellow and all that, and in the video I need to calculate the edit, how I do it, because I need to hit record here, then pause there, then rewind and do... the process was much more complex. And that made me, at least as a kid, constantly think about what I need to connect. And today, to preserve that, I do a few very interesting things. One, me and ChatGPT, one of the best things there is. I talk to it all the time. Now, not in the sense of what's the temperature, let's plan a trip; I talk to it at the level of brainstorming with it all the time. I give it situations, by the way I also created GPTs that help me with this, I put methods inside, and I'm constantly researching. The second thing I do, don't let my kids hear this, I'm on YouTube all the time. Now, I'm not on YouTube to watch Shorts; I take my content in the right doses, the way I can, and if you work right on YouTube, the algorithm learns you, it always generates more pieces of content for you, and you can make the connections. You can create a lot of new things, and one of the things I also try very hard to do is get to know, listen to and learn from people who are different from me by orders of magnitude. What you talked about is basically

How to use AI as a thinking tool

Eyal David: [15:54] consuming lots of content in small doses and indexing it somehow, and now you're talking about opening yourself up, exactly.

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [16:01] Now, they're very connected to each other; the content on YouTube, or on any other platform, whether reading, or watching, or listening, each with something good and strong in it, is still consuming things you don't do day to day. But if you, for example, and I love telling this, I took a carpentry course. Now, there are several kinds of carpentry courses. I took a course with one of the coolest carpenters I know. Everything he does, he learned a system: making jigs and turning everything into scale. I mean, now he wants to make, I don't know, some garden furniture. He usually goes to a place, and they'll explain to you, you do this, and then angles and so on, do it once. He made a jig. Now, what's a jig? He puts the boards, he knows the board dimensions, puts them inside, between other boards he made before, and sits, and goes zap, zap, zap, zap, tons, and he makes tons of garden corners, tons of seating corners like that. And then you say, okay, the man is a genius. Now, I can take that, and it's not about the master carpenter, because he learned things from him and all is fine, and he works with CNC and knows how to do a lot of things with it. By the way, in a moment let me give an anecdote about him and creativity. He runs woodworking workshops, you know, for families, organizations and so on. And he said, what's the most expensive thing in woodworking? The waste you throw away? The wood. The wood here, yes, that's what I'm saying. So he found a carpentry shop that makes closets. He takes from them the 60-centimeter piece that's left at the end of the sheet. Now, they throw it in the trash. He takes piles of it, puts it in the CNC, makes jigs, tak-tak-tak of chairs, benches and so on, and runs workshops. Amazing. I took the method of templates, and now I run hackathons. In hackathons, I could take each hackathon, open it from scratch, start doing the whole process and do it. But I understood that if I work hard once and create a process that fits and is clear to everyone, all I need to do is a template. So you know, I had a website on Wix that I duplicate every time, change its design to match the design of the organization I'm working with, but it runs, including the automations, including the mailing, including everything. You create a process for yourself where over time I actually worked less and less hard on the process, and managed to bring more value in strategic consulting, in building an entrepreneur community, in creating continuity. We're part of the hackathons, we continue to an accelerator afterwards, I mean, the organization builds an accelerator, or we refer them to existing accelerators. The more work I took off myself thanks to the carpenter's templates, you created more time for yourself, I created more time to develop and be more creative. Today, in the age of AI, I can play around, I sit all day building things, I'll send you, I'm making a button that gives advice. Now it sounds silly, but in the end, through that button, through that use case, I learned how to create agents that pull information to give the advice, how to work right, how to give the right prompts so the UX and UI are the way I want, how to build an admin page that manages these buttons. And then, like, along the way I suddenly say, hey, I made a button, maybe I can sell this button to people, so they'll have random advice for it. You're constantly, you let the brain work, so you do. The most important thing, and this really is the most important, is to also do things you're not capable of doing. I'm 47, I still skateboard, roller-blade, every time I fall I want to die from the agony, I ride a bike, I do things that aren't my mainstream, that hurt me, that aren't comfortable for me.

Eyal David: [19:49] Actually what really made me curious is, first of all I understood that you take small projects and experiment on them, and that's how you also encourage the creativity in you, around a small goal, like that button you mentioned. But I'm curious for a second, take me back a moment, AI came in in '23, how was that? Like, it's not something you did until you were curious and started talking to it. First of all, I have to note,

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [20:16] and I put this as a headline: I'm not a self-appointed AI expert. Not at all. When I took AI as a work tool, and that's how I see it, purely a work tool, I don't expect too much from it and I'm not disappointed when it lets me down. I took ChatGPT and Claude, I subscribed, I also believe that if you don't pay, you're the product, so I always pay for every service I use. And I gave them a job interview, okay? I have, I can surely find the prompt for it and all that. I gave them a job interview, I told them, welcome to the studio, Seagull Innovation Studio, you're in a job interview, tell me why you think you can work at the studio. I said, if I approach them, I couldn't, like, let's put it this way, as someone who studied software engineering in the past, didn't finish, but studied two years of it, after all that crap I left, but I, I have no patience for prompts. People deal with prompt engineering, it's endless. I said, if it's not accessible to me as a person in my plain language, simply, yes. If it's not accessible to me, it's a tool that will disappear from me... I gave them a job interview, they answered why they're suited to work at my studio. They even named their dream project, and they chose names for themselves. Claude doesn't create images, and ChatGPT does. So Claude built a prompt for its image, so I could make it in ChatGPT. It had a picture, like, I had the character of the designer. Respect. And then I understood something very interesting: that I need to talk, and I no longer work with Claude, only with ChatGPT, I think you need to talk to it as a colleague. I mean, what do you think about this, what do you say about this, what do you do about this. That's also how I approach working with AI. I work a lot with Base44, as it improves more and more and more, I talk to it in free language, precise though, I don't leave it too many things that aren't understood, but one of the most important things I learned in life and in my degrees is the ability to ask questions. If you don't know how to ask questions properly, asking questions is a field, okay? I learned it, say, in two information science courses in my bachelor's degree. If you don't know how to build a question properly, no matter which AI you have, it won't be a very good work tool. I don't think AI will be able to replace people who know how to ask questions. You're giving me this look now... let me explain for a moment, okay? I'm taking it for a moment from the design point of view. I really understand the importance of it today, as you describe. Let me explain, let me explain a moment. Go ahead then, okay. I personally think everything related to linear work, meaning programming, which we already see today. Even though there's a lot of creativity in programming, in the end it's something that produces a product, I mean, give it a problem and it'll solve it better or worse, it'll do it. Things related to engineering, I think that, say, designing a building from an engineering standpoint, the day will come when AI will be better than a person, because in the end it can do a lot of calculations at once, but there's something it won't be able to replace, at least not in the near term, the way I see it, and that's the ability to ask questions, the way designers ask. And this goes back many times again to the challenge environment. When you're in the world of design thinking, one of the things you deal with most is not just the questions and the research, but where you attack the problem from at all. And if you don't know how to ask questions properly, you won't always reach the problem from the right place. I think it's an ability AI won't have yet, and it's very important for us to have the ability to ask questions, because the answers are there. It's very important for someone like me, in my profession, to know how to ask questions. I think what you talked about a lot was around context. The context you come with, which AI currently doesn't have. Let me speak for a moment now from the perspective of someone who deals with the person at the center. You deal with the person at the center, and it doesn't matter if it's a hackathon or an app or a service at Maccabi Healthcare Services, okay? Just say Maccabi, it could also be Clalit or whichever. In the end, the questions or the understanding or the emotion or the smile a person has while you interview them, or the fact that they look up, you pick up, AI isn't there yet. Maybe it will be in a while, maybe there's analysis, you know, in video, you can see people's expressions, but the connection between people's expression and the atmosphere in the room, the temperature, all that, AI doesn't know how to do yet, right now. I also don't see it happening soon. I think in recent years they teach more to get to the result, to ask what result we even need. It's exactly like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes, 42. But what was the question? I see it when I work with young entrepreneurs, even young people who work with me in the hackathons. In the end, they say, okay, give me the thing, what's the problem? I'll send you a WhatsApp message, done, let's do it on WhatsApp, let's finish it, let's do everything on WhatsApp. But what about sitting over a cup of coffee first and talking about what we're going to do? How are we going to do it? What happens if not? Like, we're not there yet, like, at least for me, it's a problem. So I think it's an excellent tool for things that are computational, and I understand, let's call them product, okay? But not product in the sense of this podcast, product in the tech sense, where in the end there's an output. Want a lesson plan? And I do that quite a lot. I want a lesson plan for my lecture, this is the topic. By the way, sometimes I give it recordings of my lecture, generate a transcript, and it builds me a lesson plan. That's great. Saves me money on doing it, on giving it to someone else. But if I tell it, listen, now this lesson plan needs to be in Africa, in... I don't know, at 45 degrees, for kids who can't read or write, and I have no projector, I don't have this, here I'm already starting to complicate it. I think what you said is actually very true in the product sense, right? It's also very true for product management, and for entrepreneurship,

Why questions matter more than answers

Eyal David: [26:39] that it takes the dry parts out of the equation and leaves us with the thinking around the questions, around the context, okay? After all, in practice, why was the product management role born? It's project management in the end, but you need someone who understands the context. There's a developer, there's a designer, there's UX, there's the business, there's the boss, there's the customer, you need someone to sit there and say, okay, wait a second. And take responsibility for this thing, okay. But I'm saying, in the end, like, someone who'll feel, it's pressure on the more, it's pressure, it's... totally, but I just want to complete what I said earlier about AI, I actually didn't mean, I think yes, AGI will probably eat us, but I actually didn't go there, but what it lacks today is context, and what interested me, even more than context, depth, okay? That's also the reason vertical products today are something it's harder for AI to get into, because that prior knowledge is missing. I'm actually curious, if you now had to teach AI how to ask better questions. Again, it's probably exposed to information. That it would ask? Yes. Okay. Around.

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [27:47] What would be the tip you'd give it? Wow, you've stumped me. You took me to places of sensors, where it could get more inputs, and it could... you can get lots of inputs, you can do everything, but in the end I'd start by teaching it one very simple question. By the way, there's this model... of the five? No. No, forget it, root cause analysis, it knows how to do. Five times, ask why. A question in which direction, that's also one. Yes, it gives that technically. Let's say if it's related to emotions or things like that, it'll be more complicated, but the method exists. By the way, I usually put it in GPT, when I give to entrepreneurs, I throw methods into it, it executes them, it's better, sometimes better than me. What do you mean sometimes? Always better than me. But there's an ideation technique. Its central question is, what's your blue sky? When you ask someone what their blue sky is, it's not about the product, it's not about the idea, it's what your dream in life is, okay? And from that you can derive a lot of things. You want a small example? Sure, what else are we doing here today? I taught, I was a teaching assistant in a lab in the master's program in innovation design, a design thinking lab. I won't say which company we worked with and all that, but we worked with a very traditional company, in logistics no less, and I was sure that when I got to their offices it would be like, some carpenter with, like in the movies, some Irish guy sitting with a bottle of whiskey with his feet up giving orders. That's also what you thought when you got here, that it would be the carpenter, but go on. No, but like, like, you know, like in the movies, some logistics company like that, and I got there and it's high-tech, okay? It was crazy offices. We worked there with one of the employees, and now it's a relatively small company, we talked there with one of the employees, the students interviewed her, and one of the things that came up from the interview, when they asked her, what's your blue sky? She said she wants a day off. I mean, okay, every employee in the country can take a day off. She says, not take a day off, be off. That nobody calls me, nobody talks to me, none of that. And in a small company, where everyone has their own role, it's not a big organization, you know, where if someone's not there, at most you move something in the schedule. She can't truly be off. Now, it sounds like, now, AI could, it would say, fine, let her go on vacation, it'll replace her. That it'll take it, she'll explain to it what's important, it'll replace her, and she'll be available. I'm deliberately taking something extreme for a moment. But no, we said, okay, what do we do, and by the way, this is interesting Human Centered Design, these are students, they're always the most creative. If we want her to be able to go on vacation and for her knowledge to be usable, what do you need to do? Leave documentation. A knowledge management system, right? You know, every, excuse me, organizational consultant, that's usually where it goes, a knowledge management system. But in a small company, where everyone has their own knowledge, and if it's no longer, the knowledge isn't his domain, he doesn't need it. So we took, the students came up with a very interesting project, they said, let's do a swap. Let's take role holders, we won't call it knowledge management now, we'll swap them for two weeks, as an experience, but the receiving department has to prepare a teaching file, and when it ends, the role holder who teaches has to make a summary file. What do you call that simply? The trick, basically, at the end of the day, we created the knowledge, we wrote the knowledge. Yes, yes, yes. And through that a situation was created where you can share knowledge without people being afraid of losing their domain. Their workplace, yes. Back to AI for a moment, because that was the example. The question of what's your blue sky, and what's your dream, and drawing conclusions about people from it, that's the first thing I'd teach it. Because today there are many AI applications that use... that go in psychological directions, psychologists, psychiatrists. I met a startup in Spain, in Barcelona, at one of the big hubs, that just from voice intonation, people known to have anxiety, can tell if they're in distress. The AI calls the person, asks a question or two, three questions, they answer, and from that it knows whether there's distress or not, and can raise red flags. It works. There are companies in Israel that do this, even [unclear]. That's an example I know, there are ones that through the phone, through characterizing what you do on the phone, if you scroll fast, switch quickly, can tell if you're in a high or a low. There are many things that do this, but nobody's there, but again, these are linear things. In the end there's tons of data, and it knows statistics. In the blue sky there are no statistics. Because everyone has a different dream. So that, I think that's maybe the first question I'd...

A human example: "a real day off"

Eyal David: [32:53] Interesting, interesting that you went there, because really we as people, again, as business owners too probably, that's the first thing I do when I interview an employee or a new client. I'll ask you a question, but, okay, that brings us back to where would you do it? Probably over a cup of coffee. What will I ask you? Of course.

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [33:12] I'd also bring it out, when I do an interview, when you do design thinking processes, I'm talking about the method now, not the concept, you do, there are two things, you do surveys to get information... quantitative. Yes, let's call it technical. Okay. You do observations, because what people say isn't always what they do, and it's also very interesting just to watch people, people working in a factory. So you know they press this button so that, say, there's a pot, they press it, the pot comes down. Because you can make the press, make the pot. But you don't know what they do between button and button. They can tell you, I press the button. But in between, maybe they're sitting, talking, on the phone, dreaming, singing, and then you can design a different work environment. There's an example for that too, but...

Eyal David: [34:02] Put it in parentheses. Whatever you want. Come on, go ahead. Yes? If it's short, then go ahead. Short. Someone talked to me,

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [34:09] actually I don't remember so I can't give it away, about how they built a cool new dashboard for IT people in organizations. They can sit, control everything and see, give the best solution, designed, cool and so on. I told him, excellent. Did you ask an IT person what they want to see in the dashboard? No, I know. We're IT people, we, we researched a bit, this is what it should be. I told him, listen, I'm not an IT person, but I'm telling you the first thing I want to see on the screen is nothing. I don't want to see anything. I want to see an empty screen, at most Netflix, and that on my night shift I can read a book or study for my degree, because... unless something happens. Yes, unless something happens. So make me an empty screen. By the way, my boss too, that's what he'll want, because he'll want to give me other work, instead of you looking... ah, at the screen, everything's managed by computer anyway, with AI. So make it so that every now and then a red light turns on, there's now this... like, but what can happen? A user didn't come up, an admin does this... what could it be? Why do I need to sit all day? It's not a nuclear reactor, staring at gadgets all day.

Eyal David: [35:16] That's an example of what we talked about. Wow, listen, I was thinking along the way about how much perspective you could give us on traditional organizations and their attitude toward innovation, which really interests me, we'll probably do that another time. And in general, your view on AI and where it's going, that also really interested me. So you said, I read the...

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [35:38] I basically read, like a grocery list, the table of contents, and then I know where to jump, I'm also a take-the-lead type. What else... but that, by the way, is knowledge that when I... I have to emphasize. Really. So they don't think I read only a chapter, and then I don't have... and then I'm kind of contradicting myself on learning the challenge environment, right? It's not that I don't read books; there are books where I already know the information. I have the knowledge. For example, in a design thinking process, I know how to do design thinking, I know the whole process. I buy design thinking books that are a bit different from what I do, with all kinds of techniques, say, for running a workshop. I don't need to read the whole book on what design thinking is and so on. I need the workshop stuff, because I know the context.

Eyal David: [36:24] As we wrap up, tell me for a moment, so we talked about Hackautism, do you want to expand on it in a few words? About Hackautism specifically, the one happening this week.

Hackautism: ecosystem-based innovation

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [36:32] Listen, Hackautism, and the truth is it's one of many hackathons I run, but Hackautism is a very, very good example. It's Rimon, the CEO and founder understood there's a very, very big gap. By the way, understanding of the challenge environment. We're not a nonprofit, I say we because besides having my business, I also manage innovation at the nonprofit. We're not trying to solve the problems of autistic people. We don't have therapists, we don't have psychologists, we don't have anything, like, related purely to treating autistic people. What we do is we created an ecosystem, because we understood there's no single place that takes all the ideas of the entrepreneurs and ventures and gives them context. Because there are many, if you knew how many nonprofits deal with autism, and how many entrepreneurs there are in autism, and how many companies, and how many of all that, it's a lot, and it's like everyone's alone. They don't talk to each other, so they don't learn from the context. So what we do, and this is already the seventh year of the hackathon. First, we gather everyone in one place for 24 hours. More precisely, more, it's 36 hours, end to end. Second, we teach them basic entrepreneurship tools. What a persona is, a user journey, not only in the UX aspects, sometimes there's a tendency to think it's UX, like, user journey, no? A user journey is pure, every business owner needs to build one for themselves. Two user journeys: of their user today, and of the user they somehow want to have in their business. And we teach them ideation, we teach them [unclear], we teach them lots and lots of tools, and then they get to the hackathon. But the hackathon is a nice event. And we have fun at the hackathon, and develop, and get the best mentors we can bring from all fields in... from all fields. Business, product, marketing, storytelling, the best. And they guide, they're the ones guiding it. But that's the hackathon event, an experiential event, it's exposure, it's very cool. The beautiful thing we do afterwards, and here it also connects to the way I work, is we take them to an accelerator, and in the accelerator, unlike, say, the one we're sitting in now, we don't take only the entrepreneurs. We take the entrepreneurs, put them inside the College of Management, pair them with multidisciplinary students who open up their... not only open their minds, they're also young people with lots of energy, everyone wants to write the business plan, to do this, to do that, and we launch them forward a few more steps. When we create something like that, we really bring value. Now, we bring double value here: we bring value to the ecosystem that's already existed for seven years, and ventures that get to demo day and investor night, and get invested, and companies, get grants from... what's it called? The Innovation Authority, and fly abroad, and all kinds of things. And we also bring value to the ecosystem itself, because we keep bringing them more new entrepreneurs. That's Hackautism in that sense, and on my personal level, it's about the only place where I'm always the facilitator of this hackathon, but it's also the only place that's also mine. Like, I'm part of the... I continue, my face, I don't do an event, finish, shake hands and walk out. So that's why it always has a warm place in my heart, and we're stepping on the gas with it. One of the reasons I'm in Israel this week.

Wrap-up

Eyal David: [40:16] Right. I'm glad we gave it its place. If people want to get in touch with you, LinkedIn, Instagram,

Asaf Pearl Bershadsky: [40:22] Facebook, email, search Google for Seagull Innovation Studio. ChatGPT too, I think, already... knows us. Yes, yes, I test it every now and then. I try testing on Google too. The problem is that because we're in Spain, I... now I already say, Seagull Innovation Studio, some company in Canada, I don't know, makes something. That's not us, and just contact me. In the end, I say studio and so on, it's me and my wife, who does the marketing. Can people reach out? I never say no to good coffee, a nice Zoom. What do you care? You get on Zoom and your coffee is your coffee.

Eyal David: [41:00] Yes. Thank you very much Asaf, so glad you came, it was interesting and fascinating. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for the invitation. Bye bye. Bye.