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Ashley Jablow spent a year inside the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, watching paper files travel by hand and by email between people who couldn’t share a building. The innovation she remembers most clearly wasn’t a system overhaul or a policy rewrite. It was a woman at a desk who figured out she could sign a PDF and stop printing it.
Ashley Jablow is somewhere inside the Environmental Protection Agency, in the Office of Pesticide Programs, doing the unglamorous version of her job. She is running research interviews. She is asking the people who actually review the safety and efficacy of the pesticides that get used on the country’s food supply how their work moves from one person to the next. The answer, she finds, is paper. Hundreds of pages of paper. A reviewer signs a file, scans it, emails it, and the next person prints it, signs it, scans it, and sends it on. The buildings are spread out. The people inside them are dedicated. The system runs on toner.
One afternoon a woman at one of the desks calls Ashley over.
“Ashley, I wanna show you something that I’ve figured out,” the woman says.
“Please, show me what — show me your work,” Ashley says back.
“This is what I’ve figured out,” the woman says. “Instead of printing each file every time I receive it, I have figured out how to put my digital signature, my electronic signature, on this PDF, so that I don’t have to print out hundreds of pages.”
Ashley admits, when she tells me this, that her first reaction was not the right one.
“I was like, yeah, like, what’s so exciting about that?” she says. “Doesn’t everybody know how to annotate a PDF?”
I want to sit with her admission for a second, because it is the thing the essay is about. Ashley Jablow came to the EPA from IDEO. She had already spent years inside a design and innovation company so famous for its method that the word design lost a syllable when consultants said it. She had then helped run Open IDEO, the open-innovation startup that crowdsourced design challenges for social and environmental impact — a niche inside a niche inside a niche, which she could feel narrowing around her. Six weeks after she got the call accepting her to the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, she had moved her husband and her fifteen-month-old son from San Francisco to the East Coast and reported for a one-year tour of duty inside a federal agency. The fellowship was supposed to broaden her aperture. It did. She has lived in Virginia for over a decade now.
And there she was, standing over the shoulder of a public servant, looking at an annotated PDF, thinking: that’s it?
The honest answer is yes. That’s it.
She tells me what she had to unlearn to see it. At IDEO, the pace was such that she used to fantasize about a single pill that would give her every nutrient she needed at lunchtime so she would not have to stop working. Moving into government, she says, felt like stepping off the moving walkway at the airport — the involuntary lurch forward, the sense that something underneath you had stopped without warning, the long recalibrating look around. How are we ever going to get anything done at this pace? she remembers thinking.
The other thing she had to unlearn was the front page. In the private sector, the front page of the newspaper is the prize — let’s have some wins, let’s share them, let’s blow up our launch metrics in public. Inside the government, the front page is the failure condition. If you are on it, something has gone wrong with public money. She names it without preamble: in the public sector, the goal is to avoid being on the front page, and that is the gravitational field every person around her was working inside. Conservatism is not a personality trait there. It is the structure of the building.
I’m not going to flatten this into a clean Silicon-Valley-bad, government-good fable, because Ashley does not, and the woman at the desk would not. The point of the digital signature is not that government is virtuous. The point is that, inside that incentive structure, the innovation that survived was the one she could prove was harmless. No press release. No keynote. A reviewer figured out that the Sign tool in Acrobat existed, and the cascade of printers downstream went quiet by however much paper one workflow accounted for. The frontier of innovation, for that office, was an annotation menu nobody had bothered to open.
I ask Ashley to tell me what the word innovation even means to her after a year of looking at things like that, and she goes to the Latin.
“The Latin root of the word innovation means change,” she says. “Means to begin again, to renew.”
Then, almost as an afterthought: change is actually everywhere. It’s a constant. The seasons change. Babies learn to walk. We get older. Change is quite neutral when you think about it out in nature. Innovation, on her reading, is a fancy borrowed word for the most ordinary thing in the world. It is not novelty. It is not flash. It is not the front page. It is the act, performed honestly inside a constraint, of beginning again.
This is where I have to disclose something, because the essay would be dishonest without it. I’d spent the first part of our call indulging a long tangent about K-Pop Demon Hunters — the way the animation studio behind Spider-Verse sweated the pre-production until the story landed; the way Sony quietly sold the film to Netflix for a fraction of what it later earned; the way Ted Sarandos called it Netflix’s Frozen. I was using it as a stand-in for stewardship. Care about the narrative, I was saying, and the audience shows up. Skip the narrative, green-light the IP because you bought it, and the audience does not. Ashley listened. She let me finish. And then she did something that was, in retrospect, the entire move of the conversation: she pulled the example back to the EPA woman. The studio in Los Angeles and the reviewer at the EPA were doing the same thing, just on different stages. They were performing the unglamorous work and not skipping it.
It struck me, late, that the reason her example was easier to dismiss than mine was that hers did not flatter the listener. There is no founder myth at the end of a digital signature. There is no Netflix chart. There is only the next file, signed without printing, passed to the next person. The cost compounds invisibly. The savings compounds invisibly. The work is the same.
This is the part where, on most podcast calls, the guest would pivot to a framework. Ashley does not. She tells me, instead, about being an imposter at IDEO. I remember spending my time at IDEO honestly like such an imposter, she says — there was so much to learn, there was a lot of jargon, there was a kind of black box process she was trying to learn on the job. She left, did the EPA year, and only then, metabolizing what she had learned, came to the realization that it was quite simple. There was, she says, an awful lot of peacocking around the word. Shiny and bright and innovation, this hallowed space. The reality was always more ordinary: figure out what people want, what they will use, what they’re struggling with. Imagine some possibilities. Try the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing you can try right now to learn the most.
It is not rocket science. It is not brain surgery.
The way she puts the prototype piece is the line I keep replaying. One of the leaders at IDEO, when she was still there, told her that a prototype is a prop that tells a story. The prop is what you bring to a research session to ask: how do you think you might use this? Where do you see it breaking? Tell me the story of that. The digital signature, in that frame, was already a prototype. The reviewer at the EPA was already a designer. She just had not been peacocked at long enough to know what to call herself.
Late in the call I make the mistake — the useful kind — of asking Ashley how she would coach somebody whose candor cuts the people around them. I am thinking, when I ask, about Steve Jobs in his exile years. I am also thinking, transparently, about myself, because I have been candid to the point of making people feel small, and I have not entirely figured out how to stop. Ashley does not answer the question I asked. She answers a better one.
She turns the lens on the relationship.
Let’s say I have a value of predictability, she says. I like structure, I like order, I like a plan. And let’s say, Caden, you have a value of spontaneity, the creative process, that aha moment.
Neither of those values is right or wrong. Neither is the smart one. We are assigned to work on a project together. We have six weeks. She is going to walk into the first meeting and say: what is our plan, what is our schedule, what are our midpoints? I am going to walk into that meeting and say: I need some openness, some time and space, to let it come to me. We are going to have conflict, she says, not because either of us is unprofessional but because we are approaching the same problem from different values, and we have forgotten to name the values out loud.
I should be clear about what just happened. She was not running an exercise. She was reading me. I do not like giving estimates I have not earned the right to give. I do, in fact, ask for two weeks of exploration before I will commit to a number. I do, in fact, lurch when the calendar is the only thing in the room. She named my actual operating system using the example, and she did it without making me feel small.
This, I realize later, was the actual demonstration of the coaching skill she had just been describing. The hardest part of learning to lead, she quotes the coach Jerry Colonna, is learning to lead yourself. She does not say it about me. She says it about Steve Jobs. But she put it in the air between us, and then she modeled the same thing she was naming. The being and the doing. How you show up next to a person, before you ask the person to do anything.
Soft skills, the cliché says, are the soft stuff. Hard results are the hard stuff. Ashley spent the call quietly inverting that. The reason a P&L lands at the end of a quarter is that, six weeks earlier, two people with different values walked into the same room and agreed on how to work together. The reason a pesticide review actually moves through the building is that a reviewer at a desk decides, on her own, to stop printing. The reason a film is good is that someone sweated the script while the calendar said ship.
The work, in every one of those frames, is the same. It is small. It is specific. It is operational. It is the thing you can do today inside the constraint you are inside. You can call it innovation if you like. The Latin word means to begin again, which is what the woman at the EPA was doing, file by file, while the front page elsewhere belonged to the people who did not have to.
I think about her, after the call. The reviewer Ashley still remembers. Whoever she is, she is presumably still at her desk somewhere, signing pesticide files. She is not on the front page. The work, by definition, has not been on the front page. Pages that did not need to be printed do not show up in any news cycle.
They show up, instead, in the absence of themselves. In a printer that did not run. In a toner cartridge that did not get replaced. In a paragraph at the end of a podcast about a woman whose name nobody learned, whose change everybody benefits from, whose innovation Ashley Jablow can still describe twelve years later as the one that mattered.
That is the front page Ashley spent a year learning to read.
Guest Bio: Ashley Jablow
Ashley Jablow is the Founder and Principal of Wayfinders Collective and creator of Life Design School, a creative studio dedicated to helping leaders and professionals redesign their work and lives with human-centered intention. Rising to prominence in the 2010s through her work at the intersection of design thinking, civic innovation, and leadership development, she became known for translating the methods of the world’s leading design consultancies into practical frameworks for individuals and organizations navigating change. Since founding Wayfinders Collective in 2017, she has accumulated 500-plus hours of coach training through the Coaches Training Institute and built a practice spanning executive coaching, organizational facilitation, and on-demand learning resources.
Previously, as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, she embedded with federal agencies to bring human-centered design methods into government — most notably at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she studied workflow bottlenecks in the Office of Pesticide Programs, and at the National Archives, where she led open design of technology for citizen access to historical records. The fellowship, originally a one-year commitment, permanently relocated her family from San Francisco to Virginia. She subsequently served as Vice President of Development & Impact at Vizzuality, a Spanish data visualization and design firm, where she was their first U.S. hire and launched the company’s inaugural American office.
Earlier in her career, she joined IDEO as the first full-time hire on the OpenIDEO platform, a global crowdsourcing initiative running online design challenges for social and environmental impact. She holds a BA in Sociology and Spanish from the University of Michigan and an MBA in Marketing and Corporate Responsibility from Boston University.
As creator of The Clarity Kit, a free 30-minute on-demand workshop available at lifedesignschool.co, she helps participants identify the core problem they need to solve before entering solution mode — applying the same diagnostic rigor she developed across IDEO, government, and consulting to the challenge of personal reinvention.
Hey,
Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.
I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
