It is good to be home again after traveling for over a month. My wife and I are both on sabbatical, and we have been visiting people and places in order to deepen friendships and deepen our curiosity, wonder, and knowledge. (You can see a bit of that in my previous posts and in some I’ll write soon.)

Back at home among my books, one of my reads this morning is a chapter from Creative Acts for Curious People.

The book is by Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of “the d.school” at Stanford.

This is one of my go-to books for creative thinking. Every chapter is a gem. And you don’t have to read it front-to-back. Dive in anywhere. It will likely be worthwhile.

Today I read a chapter on how to “see things in a new way.” The basic idea: immerse yourself in the system you intend to change. This is a key lesson for leaders: find the friction points in your system by exposing yourself to them.

One obvious takeaway for higher education is that every administrator should experience student life on a regular basis.

**Try to find your way through the systems you’ve made, and you’ll find it easier to tell where change is needed. **

You’ll probably also see good things you didn’t know existed.

Either way, that’s a win.