#16: IDEO's Tom Kelley is Design Thinking's ultimate disciple, he makes the case as to why.

hey welcome to high resolution my name is Bobby Goa and I'm Jared Rondo oh my God today big one I'm trying not the Fanboy much Fanboy Fanboy Fanboy okay today we've got an amazing guest you know this Series has 25 masters of design this is one of our 25 Masters but what you guys don't know is about seven of the Masters that we've spoken to were trained by this guy mhm is that right y did I get that number right that's right oh my goodness who are we speaking to that's Tom Kelly he's a partner

here at idea he's going to tell us what Innovation actually is how to build your creative confidence and how to Shepherd the next generation of design leaders how many times do you guys get to sit down with someone like Tom Kelly I what we'll be right back stick stick around we're GNA come right back to this episode for decades design has impacted how we live now it's beginning to shape how we work here at IBM design thinking has given us a new framework for teaming for co-creating with our clients and users it's helping us make

decisions faster and it's keeping humans at the center of everything we [Music] do Tom thanks for joining us sure my pleasure so first question what's one thing about design that's clear to you that you don't think is as clear to other people yeah uh one thing about design is I think it's I think it's really helpful to think of it as a mindset as opposed to a thing right as soon as you think of design as a thing then you get into the word designer as in designer light switch designer coffee cup right and and

so it's this thing and it it boxes design into a pretty narrow space whereas if you think of it as a mindset or even a tool set but a kind of a mindset that you use to focus on any kind of problem or challenge in the world then wow it opens up design to do a lot more than you know making nice coffee cups well see you're a partner at idio um idio is known for innovating right so Innovation is kind of the big standard term that we use around here um I wonder what you

think Innovation is because I hear this a lot in the industry companies say they innovate all the time and I feel like they faint it more often than not so what what is innovation here yeah so Innovation as a word perhaps has gotten overused it certainly applied to things that aren't innovation in my opinion but uh so you know what is it I mean it's really at its fundamental levels it's fresh idea doesn't have to be brand new to the world in the history of the world those are rare fresh idea plus implementation talking about

it doesn't work you going to actually do something that adds value right if you got those three things the the the freshness the implementation and the value then that's it's pretty much an innovation um I you know in 2007 I know the book was released in 2005 I believe the 10 faces of innovation the book that you wrote which by the way if you guys haven't read please do um I read this in 2007 okay this is the first time after I read your book it was the first time I truly started understand the word

Innovation beyond the dictionary term and how how you can actually bring it into the workplace now for people that don't know the 10 faces of innovation I want to quickly go through the 10 and then I have a question for you okay so here here are the 10 faces of innovation uh you've got the learning faces uh you've got the Anthropologist the experimentor the cross-pollinated you've got the organizing faces you've got the hurdler the collaborator and the director then you've got the building faces the building faces are the experien architect the set designer the caregiver

and the Storyteller and I'm curious which face you think you are so this thing about faces there's not a onetoone uh comparison or whatever we can talk about that in a moment if you like but as far as which is my favorite face I would say definitely it's the Anthropologist okay and the reason I say that is I kind of have the faith of a convert on this one you know the anthropology came to idio and by anthropology I mean design research I mean human factors research right but it came to us kind of all

at once in 1991 and at the time I was kind of a little I admit skeptical about it because prior to that you know our work was much more engineering focused right and we bring in these people from the you know the soft Sciences you know so it's a social science anthropology sociology Behavioral Science things like that and I said to my brother I'm not proud of this but I I did say to my brother at the time you know we're from smalltown Ohio and I said this anthropology I said it's kind of California don't

you think by which at the time as a small town Ohio boy I meant you know of questionable value you know like best discussed in a hot tub or something right and so I was skeptical and and I it took me a little while to come around but now I flipped 180 I mean I I completely believe this is the essence of what makes design thinking work is you start with humans of course you've got great Technologies of course you got business goals but you start with humans and say okay we got some humans in

the system here and they could be our employees and they could be the general public they could be students in a school they could be customers or clients right and say okay what is going to make their day what is going to get them promoted what is going to take you know disarm their fears so that they can move forward and and you start from there and it unlocks all kinds of Opp opportunities and so because of that I fell in love with the Anthropologist role and I I still to this day think it is

a very very valuable role here at Ido but also in the World At Large what does an anthropologist do at Ido in a project well um first of all you know we have a few people who actually have a degree in anthropology but it's not requ re ired and in fact pretty much to to work on a project at IDU you need this skill set you need the ability to carefully observe to to listen well to people to get insights from from personal observation right but what do they do a lot of what they do

in the early phases what they do is they create you know they they find they discover a new insight that that takes us on off in a new direction right and so our Engineers for example and and and uh other types of designers are very very good problem solvers but got to know what problem to solve right and in the early stages of project this role called the Anthropologist right regardless of the background of the person practicing that role points us to a new problem like oh hey look at that o there's a person struggling

or there's a person who doesn't understand or there's a person who's trying their best and still getting confused let's solve that problem right and so it it takes us in this new Direction you know later in the project sometimes they're the spokesperson for the humans in the system you know you you you you observe these humans you know Rebecca Maria you know John and then you say o I'm not sure Maria would like this do you see how this would confuse Maria or this would make her worry right and so you you keep the voice

of those humans you know active through the whole proess so the role definitely sounds very interesting and I could obviously see the value of doing that research up front so that you know what problem you're trying to solve but I'm now curious after the Anthropologist has gone off done all this research and discovered a new direction right um how are they presenting their findings to the rest of the team well this is a really important question it is absolutely best if you don't have to present it what we discovered early on is if we go

off even if we take pictures and video clips and things like that you go back back to the experts right the people who've been immersed in the industry for decades and and they distrust your data oh no you didn't see that well here's a picture oh yeah but right and and you get into this whole He Said She Said kind of thing and so it is much much better if you take them along right I mean of course you can't take all of them but we take people along you know when AG Lafley was CEO

of proon gamble you know Mega billion doll company AG went with us we took AG out he came to California we took him out as an individual we watched a single customer you know a six-year-old boy brush his teeth right because then they see it's like yeah we did we did see that right and so so you sidestep that whole issue of course you can't take everyone along and this where the power of Storytelling comes in and here's where if you do video clips but when you do that what we found in in a consultancy

role is we've still always got somebody from the client team who says yep I was there saw it with my own eyes this is what's happening but in in in lie of that though because there are companies where I mean when Tom says hey you know Proctor and Gamble folks come with us into the field like there there's a lot of gravity to that right because you've got the namesake um with with Ido but there are companies that can't do that per se and so they they need to resort to not pulling people along maybe

videotaping it or something right right and so what we found throughout our work is if you there's data and then there's humans right and so you need to present data but if you personify it right and so we'll take pictures of our the person we observe the sometimes call them the user right and then we often we'll blow them up life size what we found is in sometimes in projects we will we will take a full-size photo of them and we'll cut it out on a piece of foam cor and they will be literally with

us in the room through the project in you know in in as a foam cor cutout and then you start to say what's Carl going to say you know Carl's not going to like that idea you know Carl's not going to know where to begin orever and so um it keeps people honest in the process right and you know when we stumbled on to this idea you know a few decades ago about human centered design a great thing about it is everyone can agree on humans right you've got somebody somebody who's you know got a

a technical background you got somebody who's you know more of a business person got all these things and they all have their points of view but we we do share one thing in common which is humans right and so you can kind of rally people around the the kind of human side of the Innovation process more so than almost any individual discipline for for teams uh that are very small maybe perhaps even only one design on right does not have an anthropology degree uh what principles and behaviors can they bring to their team today to

actually start playing that role sure well well first of all the idea about the anthropology degree 99.9% of iders do not have an anthropologist degree so that's good that's good for anyone listening yes well in fact you know I I was hanging around several years ago with a a very prominent Anthropologist guy's name is Grant McCracken and he's probably the most famous Anthropologist in in Canada where he is from he was on the Oprah show as an anthropologist right he's he's well known his field and he said something to me that I've like taken to

heart and told many people at IDE which is he says hey Tom this anthropology stuff is way too important to be left to the Anthropologist right and so we are all practicing this uh you know my background is in political science but I I'm practicing the anthropology role all the time and so there's no issue about can you afford an anthropologist everybody can do this and I I I've written three books that I hope would help people get have at least some of the the tools to do it and so absent the anthropology degree you

you practice this role in a bunch of ways one is you figure out who to observe but really important is you go out into the world without an agenda you don't say oh I bet we're going to see a bunch of people doing this because if you say that before you go yeah yeah you'll see that you'll keep watching until you see that right but but if instead of that you say okay here's a group of customers that's important to us uh IAL right um every financial services company in the world apparently uh because I

spending a lot of time overseas is curious almost confused about how to speak to Millennials right and so you can't go out in the world saying okay let's watch the Millennials you'll watch they'll do this but you say okay here's some humans we care about let's see how they behave right and so if you can do that and if you pay close attention and then if you kind of synthesize what you see pretty well then then you start to get to those insights you you've talked about anthropologists having the the art of beginners mind right

they look at something and they could see the same thing a thousand times for the first time right um that really is an art how do you train that size for there probably startups right now that want to try just going out in the field and observing people and I find there are two problems like the first is you've got an inherent personal bias so you walk in with some assumptions before you watch anything but then the second problem which I might actually might argue is a harder problem to solve which is um how do

you know what to look for and what to listen for and how do you know that you've actually found something uh worth paying attention to sure so there's a few questions there let me start at the beginning about The Beginner's mind part right and this is this is easy for beginners right so we talk to our you know when our our new team members come on it ID will ask them their impressions of things because they they have beginners Mind by definition this is hard for experts right and so when we're dealing with senior people

we'll even just take this on directly and say look you're the expert right you know more about your company you know more about your industry than we are ever going to learn and for purposes of today you want to be a Good anthropologist today we need you to set aside some of what you know and there's actually a an expression that we use sometimes for this um it's not uh it's not coined by IDE we borrowed it from a professor at Stanford who in turn borrowed it from a standup comedian from a long time ago

but it's still quite a useful um mental um you know uh phenomenon and it's the opposite of Dayja Vu right Deja Vu is when you've been there the feeling you've been there before we want the opposite of that and so we call it vuja and bad day is when you're in a place you've been a million times before like the lobby of your own building or the front page of your own website or things like that and you start to see it with fresh eyes you see it the way a child would see it or

a first-time customer would see it and you look for that and you think oh my God look at that you know why do we ask him that question again or why do we make this so difficult right and if you can practice that a little bit then you start to see the things and what we've learned from experience is first practice it on other people's businesses right because you got a lot of baggage about your own business you have the curse of knowledge about your own business so you kind of exercise that muscles looking at

other people's business then you say okay now let's do it on our it's like ah ha look at that right and um and yes it it sometimes reveals opportunities really hidden in plain sight so in your second book well technically your third book the one you wrote with your brother oh yeah that would definitely be the third one yeah that's right creative confidence these books take like one to two your chunks of your life so you don't blur them at all this was number three yes um but I loved the book um and in the

book you and your brother argu in favor of the fact that you argue for two things first that we lose our creativity or the notion that we are all creative at a younger age and then uh you argue for the fact that creativity is a science and something that you can you can bring back if you practice sure um what are some ways that you found uh are good ways to bring creativity back to people on the business side not people that are considered creative but people that are on the business sure um yeah it's

there in everybody you know and my evidentiary proof of that would be kindergarten right like everybody's in Creative like me me I'm creative right and so uh in business people you're not actually kind of bestowing creativity and you're just kind of unburying it right and so there's lots of things you can do um one of our favorite things to do is to get people to realize that they're already having creative thoughts right so um if you ask people it's a kind of a three-step process or whatever first ask people when when during a day might

you be most prone to having a creative thought and and if they're not sure of that then what we do is we ask them to be mindful for like a three or 4 day period of like when did you have creative thoughts and the they fall into patterns um you know in the shower I think number one answer to that and I know why no email in the shower no that's it you know no Angry Birds no no distraction basically and so your mind gets to wander M right in the shower during my commute when

I go for a walk whatever so so we as them to First discover that time and then the second step is be super protective of that time right if it's during my commute and say I don't um say I say I have a car commute then don't listen to the radio certainly don't look to listen to You Know audio books during that commute because that time is super precious right so protected right right and the third element is capture ideas during that time right and so there's the issue in the shower of course right you're

in the shower how am I going to capture it well you know my brother David by the way for me it's not in the shower it's first five minutes of the day but um if yours is in the shower do what my brother does he's got a whiteboard marker in there idea comes to him in the shower he's got a he's got a glass wall in the shower writes it down it's erasable what the heck right and so um the great thing about that is it makes people mindful of the fact that you know what

I do have creative ideas it's just that the short-term memory in my brain is always dusting and cleaning and so I'm getting rid of those creative ideas and so at the end of the day they say what was your most creative idea today it's like no didn't have any well you did you you forgot about him and so if you get in this capture mode all the time and then you know you don't look at them all the time but we would suggest once a week or once every two weeks then sit down with whatever

capture mechanism you've used and look at all of your ideas some of them be terrible some of them you won't be able to read your handwriting by the way if you write them by hand the way I do right but then you realize wow I did have a few good ideas and I'm going to do this one right and so it kind of disarms a little of that like oh no I can't I don't I don't come up with creative ideas everybody does it's like everybody dreams but our brains want to forget our dream like

five minutes after you wake up in the morning most people have forgotten their dreams it was there you had these wildly creative dreams right if you care about your dreams you keep it the dream journal people do that but I care about my creative ideas and so I keep the the creativity log I'm I'm curious what you what happens like between childhood like in kindergarten when everyone wants to draw everyone has ideas and adulthood like what is there's a bunch of things going on um I think the single biggest thing is you start caring too

much what other people think right uh it tends to happen around the fourth grade um in in kids in American school system cuz everybody's a joyful artist in kindergarten and then suddenly you realize some people are better than you like who cares some people are better you know because they probably because they draw more they spend more time on it right um but you you start caring more and then there are some physiological things around that same age this part of your brain the prefrontal cortex starts to mature actually grows in size and it's kind

of the Executive Center of the brain like I'm in charge here and the nice thing for Te teachers in public schools is the it it controls Behavior a little more right kids start to act a little bit more quote like adults but the bad part is it can tend to suppress creativity this is why my creative time is first thing in the morning right think about it at night your creative brain just runs free you fly through the neighborhood you show up at meetings without your clothes on you know like crazy stuff happens your dream

and then for me and other people may have different experience for me uh I feel like that part of my brain that that Executive Center takes a little while to click in in the morning it's kind of like a teenager slow to wake up right um and the the creative part of my brain has a little bit of momentum still going for my dreams right and so that's I think part of what happens uh to kids as they grow up I sorry go ahead yeah and focusing on non-designers now right um so you know they've

created that space for themselves they've been a bit more mindful their ideas right um now they're in a meeting with a bunch of designers and you know this goes back to caring too much about what people think everyone around you can draw better than you right um what are some things that they can do to increase their confidence during ideation and like actually share those ideas they have well maybe we should come back to the drawing topic because it seems an important one but this this question about what can you do so here's the thing

so you're in the room with a bunch of people who are maybe degreed Professionals in design right and so maybe find that a little intimidating here's where doing the observation is really helpful right if you are are working on something from Millennials and over the weekend you spend time hanging out with them or observing them or whatever the designers have their skill set but you are the world expert on your own experience so now you bringing data to the meeting right you say well I'm not sure about that but just this weekend I was hanging

out over at you know so and so and here's what I noticed right no one can no one can argue that point you saw it with your own eyes right and so you get to speak from your personal experience in a on a topic that is relevant to the topic being discussed and so that's one thing where you you bring your own unique knowledge cuz it was something from firsthand experience and so that's that's one element of it it sounds like I mean honestly that could be applied to designers as well because it is a

confidence issue sometimes someone in a room has their own idea but feel like we can share it well speaking of this confidence thing let's go back to the drawing thing because it is the kind of lightning rod for this when people say to me oh I'm not creative the first thing they say after that is yeah I can't draw at all right and it's like who cares you can't draw of of course you can't draw because you you're not taking drawing lessons you can't play the piano ever either like who thinks that you can play

a Mozart kerto without taking piano lessons nobody right so drawing the same way it's a it's a skill you you you practice it had this experience with two of our interns One Summer where they both said to me they're reluctant to go to the Whiteboard and and draw something and it's like oh really tell me about this there's these two interns they both just finished reading the same book and they both said the same thing and the first one was the Harvard MBA it was between years of his MBA and he said well he said

I'm more of a business guy he says I don't really have the drawing talents of these people at Ido and so when I go I'm afraid that people will judge my you know kindergarten drawing skills I'm like oh okay yes that I've heard that before but the one that blew me away was the second guy says yeah I go to school at Art you know at art school at Art Center in Pasadena California he said I know that if you give me time I can draw something good enough to appear on the cover of a

magazine but when I go to the board I got like 10 seconds to draw you know because people are going to be impatient he says I don't want to be I don't want to be judged by my 10c drawing I want to I want to have a chance to do you know my actual drawing abilities it's like oh my God you're both reluctant to go to the board one guy who's not good enough one guy who's too good like let go of it right and so one of the things we try to do at idio

and there's there's whole you know books on this out there is let go of the whole drawing as a um as something you get judged on and just focus on drawing as a way to communicate and anybody can do the drawing as a way to communicate it sounds like anyone ideating or sitting in a room brainstorming sharing ideas uh it sounds like everyone needs to be complicit in this idea that it's okay that we make mistakes uh it's okay that we might not have the answers um do you I I think there's another muscle that

businesses that the making mistakes muscle is like a muscle that businesses don't flex enough or exercise enough and I wonder how else you might tell people in a business to lower their bar or lower their expectations uh in order to actually push forward or break through on new ideas well of course you know we talk a lot about failure and failure still sucks don't get me wrong you know like no one actually wants to fail but I mean if you can from the beginning structure things as experiments and do your failures as quickly and as

cheaply as possible which means more failures early on and fewer failures later on U I think that's a that's a good skill to have it's a practice to have right and as a unless you're the CEO there is this skill that is quite useful which is structuring everything as an experiment right even for CEOs this comes in handy but imagine two scenarios one where I run into my boss's office I say boss boss I got the greatest idea ever right and from a storytelling standpoint by the way never say oh this is the funniest story

you ever heard because right away people say well I'll be the judge of that right so scenario one you go in and say I got the best idea ever yeah right scenario two turns out to be really effective for career management impression management you know failure management is hey boss I'd like to propose the following experiment right it's an experiment already you've reduced the cost of failure right it's an experiment of course experiments are supposed to fail some of the time right and so that more than anything else I think that's part of the key

to it but of course course um when you're when you're setting up the experiment what you want to do it is make it as quick and cheap as possible so in order to do that you have to just test one thing you're not trying to win over a customer and impress our people in the distribution Channel and get my boss promoted and do this is it's like okay boss here's the experiment and here is exactly what we're going to test with this experiment like try to screen everything out and as soon as you make the

experiment narrow enough then it gets a lot cheaper and a lot easier to to structure right and so we're always trying to test kind of where wherever we can one thing at a time for the stakeholder who is overly fixated on the Big Ideas though right like hey guys this Sprint or this month we need to we need to go big we need to go hard right um how do you actually pitch them on this concept of small experiments and small testing like especially if they think it's too too little well uh so the too

little I mean the purpose of the experiment is not to do little the purpose is to do many small things quickly to to do something big and so my best illustration of that you know here we are sitting in our steel case chairs it makes me think love these chairs yes so uh makes me think of a story that I heard from steel case a long time ago so back when Jim Hackett was CEO of steel case he wanted to make a big change he wanted to take his senior executive team out of their private

offices and bring them out into the he call it open a leadership community and you know use the products they design right they're the biggest maker of system Furniture in the world right but they were in these offices with the closed doors and things like that so he says to me Tom at that point I got two options right and by the way he's the CEO he has the authority to make any change he want and still in the 21st century better to use small experiments than even your your Authority as CEO right so he

says option number one I can do big change I can say to my senior management team okay I'm blowing up your old offices you're going to move out into those open spaces and you're going to like it right he could say something like that right he said I have seven direct reports I'd have all seven of them one in a Time come into my office probably spend want to spend an hour telling me why they were special why this couldn't work right big change Always scary office space especially always scary always political don't know why

right so big chain scary he says that's not what I did he said I got my leadership team together and said I propose the following experiment right already people are calmer right I propose the following experiment he says I will keep your offices intact see that's that's not scary right but for the next six months he said I'd like you to join me so he's in on it join me in the open air leadership community and he says all I ask of you is you give this an honest try for the next six months so

also not hard right and then an important thing especially you know at that level he said and my promise to you so Jim is this guy of deep deep Integrity everybody takes him in his word he says my promise to you is that what's not working 6 months from now we will address he never said and you get to go back to your office he didn't but he said we will address right so he says do you think you could give this an honest try for the next six months every single person gave it an

honest try zero people came into his office complaining explaining why this couldn't do the idea stuck they did get rid of theice offices they are still it's probably 20 years later now they're still in the open air leadership Community right and so he made big change I mean getting the senior executive team of a large corporation in America to give up their offices and move anywhere but alone Into You know open air uh spaces that's a big change he did it with little experiments it seems like one of the key pieces there is how you

frame frame it oh framing it's really important and this is why I saying always framing things as an as an experiment really helps it has to genuinely be an experiment right you can't you can't like lie about it right it's like here's an experiment we're going to blow up the off no yes that wouldn't work but um but uh yeah and so big change could happen but you you you do it kind of one little experiment at a time well when you deploy these small experiments my guess is you're probably looking for small wins along

the way right because that compounds into the bigger change um what does small winds look like for uh I guess it depends on the experiment what does what do small wins look like for non non-designer people like what kind of stuff are they looking for well you know a small win is is you know kind of Define in advance what it's going to be you know sometimes it's uh we just get people to show up for our event right you know uh we do a lot of work uh in developing countries right and just getting

people to show up when you're going to explain about the germ theory of disease or you're going to talk about Reproductive Rights or things like that um you know if you if you decide in advance that's that's a win then then then that's a win right um but what would do so typically in a in a design thinking oriented project we'll start with something very small um that that we're we're going to try to experiment with one quick change or something like that and and once we go through it we'll say okay how was that

for you right and people say well that was kind of fun wasn't it and then a really important thing we'll do and we try to get their boss in the room when we ask this question we said well what would cause us not to do this it this way all the time and then they start talking about well there's a rule that you can't do that without a supervisor there's a rule and sometimes the bosses will say oh we don't really have that rule right and so you're kind of Unlocking The Innovation cap capacity of

the of the organization but it's nice to you know to have people show up to your event to have a a a small change that people like and things like that I'm curious should every decision maker and stakeholder in a project be part of the design process and depending on your answer actually let's get that answer first sure I I don't think a design decision is different than any other decision uh that gets made right uh I'm not trying to hold design up on a pedestal saying it is better than all things I would say

you know design thinking is an alternative to or a supplement to analytical thinking which you know the MBA schools have been so good at teaching for the last 100 years and so yes um you want you want any project team to be collaborative and you want to involve the the right decision makers cuz in large companies you need you need to line up a series of decision makers but not design more so than other things and so as soon as you tell me all decision makers then I'm thinking oo it's going to grind to a

halt so uh you you don't have to win over every single person in the company and around what I know this is going to vary from company to company and project to project but around what number do we start getting into the territory of like the returns number of people of people on a team yeah well the size of the team uh of course depends on the complexity of the the project right I just watched the hidden figures movie last night and NASA if you're sending you know humans uh into space big big big team

right at Ido our typical project team is three to six people right you can make change with a pretty small group but of course it depends on the you know the complexity of the task at at hand for decades design has impacted how we live now it's beginning to shape how we work here at IBM design thinking has given us a new framework for teaming for co-creating with our clients and users it's helping us make decisions faster and it's keeping humans at the center of everything we do of course we're inspired by our design program

which is over 60 years old but today I employs more than 1,300 professional designers and we've certified more than 60,000 ibmers in the practices of IBM design thinking the result diverse teams working more closely than ever with our clients their users and our partners to create modern solutions that provide differentiated human- centered outcomes to the world we'd love to share this story more closely with you and I hope to see you soon at one of our IBM Studios [Music] worldwide we'd also like to thank our friends at Envision for their support Envision is the world's

leading product design platform powering the future of digital design through their understanding of the importance of collaboration they're used by some of the most Innovative companies in the world like Facebook Capital 1 Netflix and Airbnb I work with remote teams all the time and I found that keeping a healthy dialogue is really important important without it building strong work relationships gets a lot harder and that leads to poor collaboration I've also found that prototypes are great way for me to show my full vision for design and this helps cut down a lot of back and

forth Invision makes all of this really easy you can rapidly prototype your designs and collaborate across every stage of your project taking your ideas from concept to code it simplifies virtually every aspect of the design workflow and makes collaboration a core part of the process for everyone from Project managers to design ERS developers and writers teams that build digital products are at a serious Advantage when they use Envision Suite of prototyping and collaboration tools it's the best way to get everyone on board visit Invision app.com highresolution for 3 months free what role do you think

personal projects and labors of Love play in the lives of busy people with 95 jobs sure you know in the creative confidence book we talk about a job a career and a calling right job is something you do for money you know career is where you're kind of climbing a ladder you know because that's an achievement level been put out in front of you but a calling is when you just truly love your work right and you you would do it for free except you know it's nice that people pay you and and things like

that and you think about it when you're not at work and it's just you know it's it's really challenging and interesting to you right but not everybody is lucky enough to have found their calling at work and so I think it's important for people to have passion in their lives somewhere right and what we found an idea is sometimes when people have passion in some other part of their life it spills over you know we have people who you know make videos you know on the weekend there's a guy in our Tokyo office who's a

filmmaker who someday wants to go off and do that full-time but in the meantime wow we love that he's spending his spare time developing a skill that we do actually get to use at ID even if he's not you know we didn't hire him as a videographer or a cinematographer but when we need that capability on the project he's he's great at it but even if it's not work-related I think people need something that really engages them and so that kind of passion whether it's you know collecting cars or watching movies or you know playing

bridge or whatever it is that people do in their spare time I think uh I think that's you know that it makes them have richer lives I want to dive deeper into the job career col like that's a it's beautifully laid out yes um what are some of the questions people can ask themselves to identify which one they're in right now gee I think a lot of people know which one they're in I have I have two relatives probably best not up to identify them directly both jobs both jobs in fact they've both recently quit

their jobs on on on this basis where they hate it they drag themselves to work you know they they work for the weekends right uh and so people in the who have jobs I I grew up in manufacturing jobs right we I grew up in a factory town akan Ohio and the factory jobs I I've I've worked in a number of factories and it tends to you know you one minute after you leave work you're done with it you know it doesn't it doesn't follow you at home at all um and so those are pretty

easy to to tell I guess it where it blurs a tiny bit is between the career and the calling right the the um the career can be quite engaging it's like well I'm an assistant vice president if I put in three more years and I get good performance then I'll be a vice president and and that um that is that kind of challenged some people really latch on to that and that's great um but if you step back from it you say well but do you love it well I love the achievement of it right

you you U you're kind of clicking off goals and checking off boxes and and things like that but people with the calling they pretty much know it too right a calling and you know and I feel that way about you know my work at idio is like wow this is fun like wow this is interesting and you know are there hard days sure there's hard days when you're under deadline and and things like that but uh I I no kidding I would say more than once a week I'll just kind of look around and think

wow how lucky am I to be right here right now you know I grew up in this yes with you of course with you right you know I grew up in this little town where no one was expected to reach escape velosophy velocity right um and you know everything was pointed towards you know in my hometown you should go to akan university she work for the tire companies right and that's what that's what people did and and you know nothing against the people who did that but then I look at like wow and I get

to do this and I get to work at ID and I get to speak you know in 40 different countries around the world like wow this is fun right and so it's also fun to work around people who feel the same way right and so uh and and as I talk about in the creative confidence book it's not about the job itself it's about the fit between you and the job my wife was a flight attendant for United Airlines I don't know if you've met any United Airlines flight attendants they don't all love their job

let me just say you if you've flown you've probably talked to somebody who doesn't love their job right my wife loved that job loved it I got to see her just one time on Christmas Day flying soul to San Francisco I was a passenger she was the flight attend I got to see her in action and she loved it right it was a calling for her so it's not that that job is a calling it's that it was a calling for her and so my wish for everybody I have two kids in their 20s My

Wish for them is that they find and I think at least one of them has already found that kind of job that that that is a that is a calling you know one of the one of the things that we've seen in our series is we're we're we're interviewing 25 guests you're one of them of course that's six to seven of these guests started their careers right here right at idio um and and I mean I can't help but notice a pattern that there are some really strong people that leave here that go out and

they do impactful things that actually change the world in some way um what are the principles that Ido emphasizes with these designers that you guys have you know it's like a farm of amazing people well I mean one of the founding principles of Ido you know my brother started the firm in 1978 was want a place where you can work with your friends right in fact he said with your best friends and and so I think that is a part of it you know because even if you have a have a great job or a

career or a calling if you work with people that you don't trust or you don't think value that's a problem right yeah and so if you work in this this great nurturing environment that where where people want you to succeed in fact one of our now key principles value is called make others successful right in that environment where everybody's kind of rooting for you everybody's wanting you to succeed as of course they're trying to succeed themselves I think that that really helps and so we go through this process where uh kind of throughout the year

but especially at this time of year we have a conversation we call looking forward it's like what what do you want to do this year what do how you going to build your skill set how are you going to grow as a person and if you kind of focus on growth all the time it does it does help you kind of dream a little bigger yeah right and and we're always thinking about like how you going to have Maximum Impact on the world yeah so when your brother David Kelly pitched the D school right um

he mentioned that universities were kind of set up for deep thinking on a particular subject area um but that design thinking and the best ideas come from broad thinking right um so there are two questions here the first one is what how do you define the difference between deep thinking and like what does that actually look like within a business and the second one is what do you think Stanford saw in design that led to them investing so heavily into it sure so two questions but deep versus broad so deep you I'll just describe the

way David said it in an academic setting because I think it applies almost directly to the business world what David said in Academia is you know places like Stanford or Berkeley or any of the great universities of the world um deep is you know Nobel laurate quality researchers phds and scientists and you know people with with great minds in in any field going deeper and deeper into fields of knowledge and and he said look we should not stop doing that that is very very important to the future of the world right but what he said

at Stanford and I think it applies in the business world as well is there are problems in the world today that are not going to be solved by going deeper they're going to be solved by going broader getting that business person in the room with a lawyer in the room with the designer maybe an anthropologist and you know somebody from the social sciences right because these complex messy problems are are so multifaceted that no single discipline can solve them right and so it's the same in the business world right of course you want to have

if you're a tech-based company you're one of the best engineers and computer scientists you can find and if you're going to win in the marketplace you also have to have great storytellers you also have to have people with a human Focus that can adapt those Technologies to to to apply right and so I think it's that it's that balance you know and Stanford he was not saying in of he was saying in addition to the the the Deep work that happens what what were the conversations with Stanford that actually led to them investing so because

I can imagine that that translate to some degree what people can say within their own businesses sure um I actually don't know what was in the mind of of uh you know president of Stanford and the and the the dean of the engineering school that have it but I imagine it as an experiment it was not an expensive experiment for Stanford uh when they expressed their tremendous support for the dchool idea they also said to David and you have to raise your own money nice and so David did he he found this uh founder of

sap named hustle plotner and it technically everyone calls it the D School including hasso by the way but it's technically called The Hop plotner Institute of Design at Stanford right and so with David uh leading it and collecting other uh leaders for the D school around it's not like he you know does it single-handedly uh then or now um uh providing leadership and providing the funding it was easy for Stanford to say yes in the short term right in the long term it has worked out to be a tremendous success for Stanford and they're studied

by universities all over the world and they entertain visitors like every day I think at the D school right um but yes I can imagine them thinking of like hey this is a lowcost experiment for us let's Riot what do you think is the biggest idea that Ido has shed light on uh for how people or businesses create and design well I think the biggest idea is actually design thinking right I I believe we well coined the term you know qu this in the world no the world doesn't necessarily believe it it's not we're not

trying to hold it tight it it doesn't it's not important to us that the world give us credit for that or you know we never tried to service Market or anything like that right and people do try to do that all the time right uh and so it it doesn't matter it's like when you do something good in the world like you you know say if you do something for your kids it's not important that your kids be grateful for that because it's not the nature of your Rel relationship with your kids but it's like

it's really nice to know you know yourself that you've done it and so I I feel that way about design thing I mean it has spread across the world um and um and people are using it in all kinds of settings right in academic settings and you know uh social Innovation and things like that and so to to put that out there it's been it's really been just fun to to watch it is a bit of a double- Ed sword though because I feel like a lot of the companies that we've spoken to definitely adopted

the concepts of of design thinking some of them even call it design think of right uh strong brand um but it it feels like to a degree even though it's not fully been realized across all businesses today that it is getting commoditized um and I I I actually wonder if you agree with that but more importantly I wonder what is the next thing that Ido is working on um that will help change the way we build and create sure um getting commoditized I wouldn't say that necessarily I mean I think it's got a very good

long run still ahead of it but um but it is true that some people are practicing it better than others I mean it's like any idea you put in the out in the world some people are going to going to say they're doing it and they're really doing it and they're doing it really well and then other people are going to say they're doing it and they're either not doing it dollar they're doing it poorly that I mean that's the nature you can't there's no uh there's no getting around that you if you if you

want to have that kind of perfect world where things do like you're you're destined to be disappointed right but where's Ido but where is Ido innovating next or well I mean we're really really interested in Social Innovation as you may know we have a nonprofit now called id.org it's been out there for five years it's been doing really just stuff we are so proud of out there in the world and so I think I think there's still a lot of room in that space uh you know our CEO Tim Brown goes to the Davos World

economic Forum every year and has for for a decade and so there are these really big thorny social problems uh yeah I could name any of a dozen but you know recidivism in the US prison system wow really really hard far far beyond you know design you know in the narrow definition and this is why I said at the beginning that it's a mindset it's certainly not an object anymore um I think that there are the most complex problems in the world still will benefit from the application of design thinking and there's of course millions

of those uh still to be addressed and so I think there's plenty of Runway left to Des is still the big thing it's still the big idea well um it's it's just like saying what's the limit of problem solving well problem solving I'm pretty sure is going to be with us forever right and so yeah so it's not necessarily all the process I mean we're looking at things we're looking at uh how do you blend Big Data with design thinking how do you blend uh uh Behavioral Science with design thinking things like that and so

the the the methodology itself will evolve but the the the the types of problems to be addressed by Design thinking and its future descendants are infinite and so I'm not worried about running out of problems to apply this to so one question that came up a lot after we announced that we were going to interview you and this is much on the Lighter Side yes is what does IDE write on all those posted just about every picture that says ID on it yes well I mean it's the the great thing about a Post-It note is

it's unintimidating right if you give me like a blank notebook it's like oh my God what am I going to do with this right whereas the the kind of increment of you know amount of work to fill the post note it's really it's not intimidating at all we have this uh this thing that we use with business people sometimes called draw your partner right in which we force them it takes a little cajoling but they actually always have fun with it in the end you you draw the person next to you but really important start

with a Post-It note because if you're if your drawing is only going to be this big it's way it's already less intimidating right and so if you just think of a post- note as like a pixel right it's just it's small it's un intimidating I oh I can feel one of those I have I have enough of an idea to fill a Post-It note as opposed to a a blank canvas or a blank whiteboard or whatever and so every idea that we have ends up on a posted note in one form or another I think

uh ID is probably keeping 3M afloat at this point yes so on a per capita basis I I think our posted no usage very high and you know we've spoken about some awesome principles during this conversation we spoken about beginner's mind when it comes to anthropology um small experiments um Etc but I'm curious what skills or responsibilities do you think designers are overlooking today that might be costing them credibility in their businesses well you know we've always said that that the when you're creating something new in the world you know in the business World you've

always got to keep in mind the these three factors you know the the the technical factors you know is it is it uh technically feasible the business factors is it viable and then the the human factors is it is it desirable right and and so as design thinkers we're always approaching things from The Human Side but the the thing I think designers need to keep remembering is the circles are approximately the same size it's not like the human circle is the only one important Circle it's in tan with the others the reason we emphasize it

so much is that that the MBA programs of the last 100 years and our client Organization for the most part are already so good at the other two and so the third circle maybe needs a little more emphasis but to just remember that those other two that when we come to Market or when an idea regardless of whether it's in the Prof for-profit world the non for-profit world gets launched on the world world it's got to have all three even in the nonprofit world it's got to have those business factors it's got to be able

to the idea's got to be able to sustain itself out in the world so this idea of kind of being on equal footing not more important than the business people not more important than than technology that that that that all three have to be kind of held together at one time I think that's that's worth remembering for people Tom we reached out to our community and we have five final questions for you we can go through these quickly as you'd like right but this is what's burning up in their mind right now okay and which

Community is this that we're talking this is the design Community this is digital design product design that Community okay that was a good question by the way thank you for asking that um okay so the first question is how should design designers explain the role of design to people in their company sure I mean this is where storytelling comes into play right the it's best to tell the story of design in a way that that relates to the person who's listening right so if you're talking to a business person tell them a story about how

design at into it you know made the difference between you know the products and being uh not so great and this this big bre break through it into it they call it design for Delight right about how design for them equal profits right because you're speaking to a person who's interested in in in profit is like top of top of mind for them but when you're speaking to someone in the the nonprofit Community right speak about impact you know and and use examples of what design change Behavior or design uh you know change the quality

of life for for people in the world and so I think if you you know kind of meet your listener halfway and speak in the language that they value that that's that's really useful the second question is have you noticed any patterns on how design teams are organized that businesses patterns on how design teams are organized um no I mean the the pattern that I've noticed the most in my 30 years at udio is that designers get invited to the table now which we didn't you know when I started out it felt like we were

stuck at the Kids Table Right In fact I had a Japanese client many years ago sakaki basan who said oh I get it the stuff you guys do it's kind of the optional fun part of the business it's like no not optional right and so we were at the kid table a long time ago and now you know the designers are in the boardrooms and conference rooms of you know like companies Across America in the world and so that's the biggest change that that I have noticed so there are a lot of people listening right

now that are either the only designer in their company or one of three designers in their company if you're on a team that small how do you convince the business of the value of design right so I think the the biggest thing you can do is Marshall evident proof right is talk about the IBM success talk about you know into the success of design for delighted into it talk about how design has created these new products and services you know and so that so that people understand that it's not designed for design sake it's designed

in pursuit of the larger goals of the organization the other thing if you're the only designers designer in an organization I would caution people not to hold it too close right if if if the others in organization think that you are the like sole protector that you that you want to own everything about designing your organization then it becomes your idea but as soon as you invite people in it's like hey this design thing's not so magical why don't you help me or hey why don't we do like a book club on this you know

my favorite design book or how about where where you know you're you're kind of inviting people in you know in my speaking world I get to meet all these interesting people and I'm a great film lover and so I was really excited a few years ago I got to meet um Francis for Capa and so I asked the organizers of the event we were in Buenos areus Argentina and I said hey could I get like 5 minutes alone for Capa with Capa and they said well let me see what I could do right and sure

enough I got my five minutes loone with Francis for Capa and one of the things he said I me it was just the whole thing was magical for me but the one of the things he said that is absolutely stuck with me that I think would be applicable in that Designer situation you just described he says Tommy says you know you work with creative people he said so do I he said one thing I've learned over the years when you're working with creative PE people you don't tell them what to do he says you invite

them to the party right and so this idea of the designer starting something really interesting and then inviting people to party it's not my idea like I'm the design Guru it's like hey we got something really interesting going on around design and design thinking in our work why don't you come along you know why don't you join me for the next meeting you can see how this how this works so invite them to the party the next question is how how should designers measure and present the results of their work of their business sure um

the the measurement as I said is you you go back to the metrics that the listener cares about right and different listeners care about different things but but how should they present it present it you know use all the power of Storytelling you have and as much as possible bring those those users those customers into the room and as I mentioned we sometimes physically bring them the room in in the form of you know cardboard cutouts but when you're presenting so if you say you go into a meeting in which seven different people are presenting

their ideas you can pretty much be sure that six of the people are going to have PowerPoint right if you show up with a story that alone can make a difference right let me tell you a story about of a custom of ours in Chicago named Rebecca you last month Rebecca was trying to you know and and you star in about Rebecca that meeting is over everyone's forgotten the 52 PowerPoint bullets right everybody leaves that meeting remembering Rebecca right so got to tell the right story May better make sure that the Rebecca story is compelling

but if you're a designer and you want to have impact tell a story that involving humans it makes a difference all right we can end with this one last final question right as the function and purpose of design continues to evolve sure what are some roles methodologies that will emerge over the next 5 years oh sure there's lot there's a lot coming uh as I said I think there's data science and the the the the challenge for designers will be to to um uh collaborate well with the data scientists we call this Sido hybrid insights

in which you take the data and humanize it or you start from humans and and and uh you know find data that that applies to it and so uh we've had some success in doing that so that's data science uh we're very very interested in Behavioral Science you know that's the social science of behavior change when you're doing big things out in the world you know the ID's mission in the world is disproportionate impact through design if you want to do big things in the world it almost always involves Behavior change I mean historically it

had to do with you know getting customers to buy something that's a certain kind of behavior but we're trying to get people to be true to their own values out in the world whether it's about their diet an exercise plan or whether it's it's about you know drinking the Safe Water instead of the unsafe water right and so combining design thinking with Behavioral Science we think was important and so it's not even necessarily the change in design thing itself so much as the the blending of it with other Sciences other methodologies out in the world

fantastic thank you so much Tom sure thanks a lot hey made it to the end congratulations thanks for watching the episode I really really hope you liked it if you did like it please leave us a review on the iTunes Store and by the way if you have any questions that came up because of the content that that we covered with our guests go on YouTube go on Twitter you can tweet us you can leave us a comment we'll get back to you we'll help you as much as possible at hes podcast that's the the

screen name or the handle for Twitter for Instagram for Facebook find us talk to us we want to converse with you uh we not going to leave here by the way without also thanking our friends at surl video they've been an amazing partner on this entire project so surl video is a creative Studio based out of Portland Oregon they've helped creative communities tell stories for over 10 years they've done advertisements behind the scene footage um and documentaries for companies like Google slack XOXO Festival Adobe Intel they're incredible they've traveled with us through the entire country

document ing these stories with our guests that's incredible thank you so much surl listen if you're a startup looking to elevate your product if you're a big company looking to humanize your brand if you're someone in the creative Community who just wants to tell a story you've got to check out the team at s video It's svideo.com s a lv.com check out our friends at s thank you so much guys you guys have been incredible on this project [Music]