Design Is Deconstruction First: Why Your Life, Business, and Startup Idea Need a Blank Page

In this conversation, I explore the intersection of design, business, and personal fulfillment—especially through the lens of healthcare innovation. I believe the best solutions often come from deconstructing problems, not just reacting to them. That mindset has shaped how I approach both clinical challenges and startup opportunities.

One of the core messages I share is around life design: identifying what brings you joy, then being intentional about shaping your life and career around it. I talk about how physicians—despite being trained in rigid systems—have immense capacity to innovate. We just need more spaces that invite us to lead.

That’s why I introduced the idea of a physician incubator program—something designed to support doctors who are ready to step into advisory, founder, or innovation roles. Because when we bring our clinical expertise to the table, we don’t just improve systems—we redesign them entirely.

Episode Highlights:

[00:00] - The Essence of Design in Business and Life
[02:49]  - Deconstructing Problems for Effective Solutions
[07:34] - Life Design: Choosing What Brings Joy
[10:08] - Innovating in Healthcare: The Physician's Role
[14:35] - Creating Pathways for Physician Entrepreneurs

Transcript

Alison Curfman: 0:00

I think that where a lot of physicians struggle is in this kind of middle area of designing a business around it and identifying if this could be a viable idea, and really understanding unit economics and how to structure your offer. Welcome to StartUp physicians. Please Like and follow our show to join our community of physicians who are reimagining healthcare delivery.

Unknown: 0:27

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Startup Physicians. This is Alison Curfman. Today, I want to walk you through a concept that cuts across kind of all of the ways that I live and work and how I really design, and I think that design isn't just about making things pretty or look good, it's about solving the right problem with clarity and intention. And whether I'm working on my business or working with a founder on their business or inside a health system, real design always starts with the same principle for me, which is that you begin by taking things apart. And this is true in business design, in startup design, and in life design. And so I think of it as you know, we see all these problems in healthcare and and we see how the layers of complexity lead to problems for patients or for clinicians. And if you really want to solve for that, you really need to kind of like, pick it apart and figure out, like, what leads to this thing and what causes this problem, and what all contributes and which pieces of the patient journey are worth keeping or should be changed. And when I work with founders or early stage teams, we really start by deconstructing the problem, not by trying to start with a solution. And I really loved my recent conversation with a venture capitalist and founder who really laid out this four step framework of starting with the problem, then the solution, understanding the total addressable market and the unit economics. And that's that's really what we do when we build businesses. And most physician founders start with the problem because they live it, you know where the issues are, but then they jump ahead to building solutions or platforms without really breaking it all the way down. And startups really succeed when they reverse engineer from a very well understood pain point. So what is the job to be done? What is broken and where is the opportunity to intervene? At my first company, our first product wasn't a feature, it was a very clearly mapped, patient journey of where families struggled, what their current system failed to deliver, and what better would look like. And that's really the first step, and once the problem is understood, the business needs to be designed around that, and that's where a lot of early stage efforts can fall apart. So great insight becomes a mess of disorganized delivery, because the business may not be structurally or financially sound. So just as a personal example, as far as my own business, I just recently rebuilt my business org chart, not because I have a huge team. I really don't but I needed a blueprint for how the business should function in its core divisions, and what are the tasks, and who owns what, and what are we measuring? And so designing a business is like engineering a system. You don't just build it as you go. You need to architect this, and it is really a process that you know, as you take the pieces of a problem and pick them apart and decide which ones are worth keeping in from the status quo and which ones we need to discard and go back to the drawing board, that it's almost like, if any of you have read the life changing magic of tidying up the Konmari method or whatever about decluttering, that you always start by getting everything out and kind of deciding which pieces bring you joy, and you get rid of all the rest. Like that is actually a core piece of design when you're trying to identify how to make optimize something and really make it streamlined and meaningful. And in some ways, life design really mirrors business or startup design, and that's kind of where it gets personal. This same framework to use to build companies, it's actually what I use to design my life. I was recently talking with my husband. We were talking about his work as a neurologist, and really trying to get into for both of us, like, what brings us joy from our work, and what are pieces that we. I would rather not do more of because we were just talking about how you really can choose to spend your time intentionally. And I use this metaphor of Legos. We do a lot of Legos at my house, and really was imagining that your life, or your work life, is a Lego structure. So maybe it's functional, but it's got pieces in there that you maybe didn't choose, and they're stuck today together in ways that may not make sense anymore. And if you were to, you know, decide, well, I I've always been living this life, or always been following this path because it's it's put together. It works this way. This is the way it's supposed to be, but you never stop and determine, like, are these components actually what I want here anymore? Does it still make sense? I find that this concept of kind of breaking everything down into sections, and then taking each section and breaking it down into sub pieces until you get to the actual like units of things that you do, and determining, do I like this? Do I want to spend my time and energy doing this? Is this something I want to dedicate my effort to? And so sometimes I map this for my own life, where I do it for, like, my work life and then for my personal life. So for personal maybe I have, like, my health and wellness and my my kids and my hobbies and my marriage and my home and finance and things like that, little like just subsections that take my time and attention, and then within each of those even deciding further subsections of, you know, what are all the things that go into managing the household or the kids or whatever, and which ones of those do I like doing? And which ones are those Would I rather like delegate to someone else? And what I find is that you may have been living with this Lego structure that's got a bunch of pieces that you like, but a bunch that you really don't want anymore, and you can't actually offload them unless you take them apart and look at them. And so you may decide that you put them into, you know, three piles you just want to keep all the blue Legos and build something new with that, and then you have a pile of stuff that's like, really clearly, like, oh my gosh, I totally could get someone else to do these for me, or I could take these off my plate, or I could just say no to that. I could stop bringing, you know, snacks for the soccer chamber, whatever, whatever you just want to say no to, like, just take some of those off your plate, and then you've got some that you don't really know what to do with. There's no one really to do them for you. But you've now gained the insight that you those don't bring you joy, and as opportunities come up to offload those sorts of things, or you think of solutions that maybe your nanny could take on some of these things, or maybe you have some other layer of support. Maybe you get a VA, something like that, that can help you really kind of figure that out. But if you don't take those things apart. It's hard to really know what brings you joy and what you want to keep and you know, when I was talking to my husband, I had him do this with his practice. I said, like, you know, what sort of patients do you like to see? What sort of things makes you feel like you're really contributing in a way that only you can and and what are things that you know feel like they kind of drain you, because sometimes there's certain types of patients or types of interactions, or parts of an interaction that is super repetitive or just doesn't feel like it is giving contributing to your highest purpose. And so I think that this is a concept that we can use for both our work lives and our personal lives. But you can't just live on autopilot and expect to arrive at a destination that you choose as a separate kind of endeavor. We recently went through this life design sort of exercise with our kids, because we talk to them a lot about how they want to spend their time and what they enjoy doing, and ended up finding this alternative pathway that we decided to take to basically homeschool but participate in a local Co Op that will cover all their core subjects, but be a lot less time intensive, but really would free us up more time to be able to travel as a family and pursue some of our own interests. And there's times that I feel that like traditional school maybe isn't teaching our kids all the things that they need to live in a modern society and at the same time, like maybe there's some things that are great about school and the social side of things, but we kind of found different Lego pieces to fill those needs. And so it felt a little radical at first, but only because we hadn't really questioned this default. And. So once we really asked what we wanted our days and rhythms and weeks to look like, the answer really came into focus. And so it goes for, you know, my personal life, my kids, my business, my business that I run, and then the businesses that I've built, the startups that I'm helping piece together. Because I really do focus on this zero to one phase of growth, the design phase, and getting companies to market and getting them launched. And I think it's a really important exercise. And I just, I love the analogy of Legos, taking them apart. And can marrying your Legos, but when it comes to actually deciding how to make a contribution to healthcare. Many of you listening have a sort of tension around knowing that you know what the problems are in healthcare, and that you actually have ideas of how to solve it, because you've lived through the problem. You've seen it maybe 100 200 500 times over in different patients, and you have an idea of a way you can make healthcare better. And I want you to recognize how valuable that is. It's such an incredible value to have a deep understanding of a problem and actually have a network of other clinicians and patients who can give their perspective, and that really gives you an edge. And I think that where a lot of physicians struggle is in this kind of middle area of designing a business around it, and identifying if this could be a viable idea, and really understanding unit economics and how to structure your offer, and I know that you all have been through decades of school, these are just skills that you can learn. It's something that I definitely have learned over the past few years, especially as I've watched and participated in a number of different companies coming together and growing and building and launching, and if you want to have more influence or work on your own terms, or step into the innovation space, whether you're more interested in like an easier entry of consulting or advising while you keep Your job, or if you actually want to become a founder, then now is really the time to begin. You don't need a full business plan. You just need to start making your blueprint and designing that first, starting with your problem, identifying all the layers, breaking it down, sketching your, you know, patient journey or consumer journey, and start identifying what your solution would look like if it were built with total intention, if you could do anything for this problem, if the sky was the limit and you could do anything to solve it, what would that Look Like sometimes those, those really big brainstorm exercises are really useful, because some comp, even if you can't build that as a full stack solution, some component of it will come to that creativity, and you'll start to see all the different options of how you could care for patients in a new way, or bring a new idea to healthcare. And I think that designing that sort of thing with intention, it cuts past so many layers of, you know, bureaucracy and institutional barriers that have led to the way we do things for a certain problem it and none of this costs money. All of this is just like a thinking exercise. And if you train yourself to do this over and over and over again, I mean, I do it with, like, everything. I'm always constantly thinking this way, but you'll start to realize there's so many other options out there, whether you're talking about for your own life and career, or you're talking about, like, the way we treat sickle cell patients or something like that, some specific issue that you're dealing with in your patient population, and you'll realize that, you know, we do things a certain way because of the systems that they exist in. And if you wanted to, you actually could just create another system. It's just that you could break out of anything. And yes, you absolutely with any business model. Need to understand the unit economics and determine if it can be viable and financially sustainable. But the visioning exercise, or the creativity exercise of breaking down a problem and mapping out the components. It's it's a thought exercise. You can do that with just a pen and a piece of paper, and you could do it planning out your life and your time, or you could do it really tackling a problem in healthcare that you feel like needs to be solved. Yeah. And so one of the things that I want to share with you all is that I have been working on creating a new pathway for physicians. My my goal, having gone through the whole startup life cycle and working with a lot of different companies now is to just bring more physician voices into this space. I want to create so many more pathways for physicians to cross over into industry, because it's there's not a fellowship in startups. You can't there's not like a well paved road to get over into industry and innovation and startups. And I just think that this industry needs us. They need really strong clinical voices that have so much experience and understand the needs of patients, and then they also need kind of that guidance of physicians that can think in an agile way and understand how startups work. And I think that a lot of physicians have great ideas and could launch their own businesses. And so I have been thinking about what it would look like to have a real physician incubator program. So this would be an opportunity to take the problem that you want to deconstruct and the solution that you are considering and really get into the deep dive of understanding the total addressable market, building a financial model, understanding unit economics, having a lot of expert guidance and external expert guidance and input from VC networks to be able to really develop an idea and get it venture ready if you need to raise capital. And so that's something that is coming. It's not live yet. The idea is forming, and I've been working on that. So if you are interested in staying updated on the incubator, please sign up on our website to receive our emails. And in the meantime, I want you to, again, get out a blank page of paper, sketch your org chart for your business, or map your week and your time and figure out what time blocks mean something to you, and which ones are maybe something you you don't want to do anymore. Take your Legos apart, reimagine your work, because you can't build a life that you love if you never bothered to imagine it. So I'm really excited. I hope you guys can take this concept and apply it to your businesses and to your life, and maybe even take your kids Legos apart tonight. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that. They'll get really mad. Anyways, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Startup Physicians. Don't forget to like, follow and share.