S1E6 Stefan Moritz: Taking bold moves to grow into

Stefan Moritz has spent 25 years at the edge of design: helping name service design when it barely existed, building one of Europe's most unusual creative studios in a Swedish forest, running design and employee experience at McKinsey, and now co-founding the Doodle Time Institute to study how humans relate to time. He and Pauline go deep on what made Veride's culture genuinely unreplicable, why agencies that survive the AI transition will be the ones who kept their creative instinct instead of chasing efficiency, and why the right question is not how to balance life and work but how to design several lives at once. Stefan is a service design pioneer, speaker, and co-founder of the Doodle Time Institute, a research and experimentation collective working on time agency: helping people and organizations reclaim intentional control over how they spend their time. He spent a decade at McKinsey Design and before that helped build Veride, the Swedish innovation studio, into a world-class creative agency. Caring rebels: what actually held Veride's culture together for decades The building, the lunch bell, and the infrastructure of belonging Grow for growing's sake, or grow into something: the question agencies avoid AI is happening to us again, and companies are reacting the same way they did post-COVID The future of design is not visual: why creative agencies are the most important people in the room right now Time agency, the Doodle Time Institute, and why freed-up time keeps disappearing Seven lives in parallel: a thought experiment on meaning and reinvention Follow Stefan on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stefanmoritz/ -- Polar Bear exists because great teams deserve great people ops. We work with creative agencies and consulting boutiques to build the career paths, cultures, and systems that make talented people want to stay. Our main mission is to protect human connection at work, so we started At The Den to connect with leaders who inspire us and give them a space to share their stories, lessons, and hard-won wisdom on building stronger, happier, more resilient teams. Follow Pauline on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry/ Explore Polar Bear: www.meet-polar-bear.com All episodes: www.meet-polar-bear.com/podcast