Design Economics Podcast (Season 2 | Episode 2)
Join host Vinny Tafuro for a conversation with Dr. Stan Deetz, exploring why corporations—not governments—make most decisions affecting our lives. Stan reveals how externalized costs and the relentless pursuit of speed are destroying economic systems, from quarterly reporting cycles to high-frequency trading. They discuss practical solutions, including enforcing antitrust legislation, using transaction taxes to make short-termism expensive, and designing collaborative processes that enable diverse stakeholders to make creative decisions together where it matters most—in corporate boardrooms and community spaces.
2025, Communication Theory at the Crossroads – Stan’s newest book developing the theory of relational constructionism and co-generative democracy, providing frameworks for designing interaction processes that enable diverse groups to make creative, mutually beneficial decisions together.
About Dr Stan Deetz
Stan’s job and joy is to facilitate high-quality collaborative decisions. This included 1) helping people remove the structural and systemic features of life that make inclusivity harder; and 2) designing positive processes for helping diverse groups make creative, mutually beneficial choices. Stan has worked primarily with international projects, including private sector organizational change, community decision-making, and private/public cooperation. His organizational change and community development work has primarily focused on developing more collaborative cultures and enhancing the communication skills necessary for making collaborations effective.
He believes that good collaborative processes can increase creativity, impacting on new product and social choice development, provide for greater efficiency and effectiveness in personal, community, and organizational goal accomplishment, create higher levels of mutual commitment, and enhance greater customization to local needs and circumstances.
Stan Deetz, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus and a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at UCB, he was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance and long-term Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. His research and professional practice have focused on inter-sector governance processes, micro-practices of power in organizations, and designing interaction processes for collaborative decision-making.
Deetz is author/co-author of over 150 scholarly essays and several books, including Leading Organizations through Transitions, Doing Critical Management Research, Communication Theory at the Crossroads, Managing Interpersonal Communication, Transforming Communication–Transforming Business, and Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and is a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar and an International Communication Association Past-President and Fellow. He has lectured widely giving well over one hundred visiting scholar and invited public lectures at nearly one hundred universities in twenty-four countries. He is currently President of Interaction Design for Innovation, LLC, and works internationally with projects fostering organizational/institutional change and collaborative decision-making processes.
About the Design Economics Podcast
The Design Economics Podcast explores how design thinking can revolutionize economics for the 21st century. Learn about the Institute for Economic Evolution’s three tenets of design economics and meet the pioneering thinkers who are shaping this approach. From challenging economic orthodoxy to creating human-centered solutions, explore how design economics is evolving economics to better serve humanity and the environment.
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