David Kelley, Founder of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and the design and innovation consultancy, IDEO.
What are those four fears?
We take people through a process of small successes, one success after another. You have a little success, it's hard to get going, so you have a small success, and that feels good.
What are those four fears?
- Fear of the messy unknown (as against all that nice, safe and comfortable that comes to your desk automatically) and of getting out and going to places where people don't know you. Reality is always messier than the prepackaged data that comes to your desk.
- Fear of being judged. As you get older you're worried everybody's is going to judge you and make fun if you don't say exactly the right thing. It drives people to just remain silent or not take risks.
- Fear of the first step. For the writer, it's the blank page. For the teacher, it's like the first day of school. That is really the hardest because once you start, you have momentum. It is so much easier to hang back and not take that first step.
- Fear of letting go. Fear of losing control where people think they have to control every aspect of something.
We take people through a process of small successes, one success after another. You have a little success, it's hard to get going, so you have a small success, and that feels good.
And then we hold their hands and we do another step and that feels good. And pretty soon when you've done this for a while, you get down to the end and you surprise yourself.
oh my God, look how creative that solution was that I came up with.We call this creative confidence. The famous psychologist at Stanford, Albert Bandura, calls it self-efficacy. This sense that you know how the world's put together and that you can do what you set out to do.
So our deal is you're just building these muscles. These are tools that we give people and you're building a muscle. So it's not as easy, you have to get past your habit of thinking of yourself as not creative and thinking that this is hard.
But once you start having some successes, then it makes it real easy for you to keep going. It's sort of like you started to play the piano and everybody was saying boy, you can really play the piano well. Then that spurs you on to keep going even though it's a lot of mileage.
But my favorite is this news aggregator called "Pulse." These two students started out, they were in computer science and kind of reluctant to this go out and talk to people kind of thing.
But through the class, they were convinced to hang out in a coffee shop every day for about five weeks. And each time they talked to people, they got a better idea. And they kept releasing their product, and they kept going, and they eventually made "Pulse" which was the best-selling iPad app there was out there at the time.
Well sure. For example, one of the things you can do is you can just go online. And most companies now have forums where the customers collect. Where they talk about the company so you're just listening to what they say.One thing we encourage people to do is just call in, pretend you're a customer. Call in to your customer service line, see what that experience actually is. Because you'd be surprised how many senior executives haven't really experienced their own service in the way that a first-time customer does.
Sure. Fear of letting go, it starts with just acknowledging that I'm not going to have all the inputs. No matter how smart I might be, if the problem is a significant one, I can't control the solution from start to finish and so you have an open mind about this. And so one really powerful tool is open innovation schemes where you really ask the world for a solution.
At IDEO we have a open innovation platform we call Open IDEO. And we put these social innovation questions out into the world and 30,000 people from 170 different countries have helped us work on really tough social issues. And so yes, we have 600 people who we think are pretty smart, but we went to the world to look for answers. And so we're letting go of our own feeling, we're like OK, we got to solve this all ourselves.
And so in the article, we tell a story about Bonnie Simi who was then director of airport planning for JetBlue Airways. She's now head of HR for the company. But she wanted to wrestle with this problem in which they'd had a big flight delay. There had been a big storm at JFK, and it disrupted their flight service for six days.
And if you had too much fear of letting go, you'd try to solve the whole problem yourself, you'd try to be the hero. But that's not what she did. She brought 120 front-line employees together for a day and they wrote every problem on a Post-it and they filled a room with Post-its. And then she worked with teams throughout the company along the way. And so she gained her creative confidence by letting others help.
I want to move on to fear of the first step. I know that entrepreneurs talk a lot about low-cost experiments. But how might one do that in a big bureaucratic organization which typically requires lots of analysis and approvals before getting a new project or new idea off the ground? David, can you address that?
So what we ask them to do is to do their job. You're not going to endear yourself to the people in your company if you say no, I don't want to do it the way the company does it. I'm going to go off and do this other thing.
Instead we say, do your job, but also take these new skills that you've learned and try some experiments on your own. And then after you have a little success, we find that people will pay attention. And pretty soon they notice oh, that group's more creative, look what they're doing. And so by doing these kind of little experiments on the side, you can get the ball rolling.
Doug Dietz was a design engineer at GE who had worked on MRI machines. He decided that on his own he was going to go to the hospital and see what was going out with the machine and use these user-centered approaches that we had. And he was doing his regular job as well. But he really noticed that the children were having trouble dealing with this big machine.
And so he started designing ideas for ways to make it enjoyable. Like it was a Pirate ship and the kids would be more playful. And in the end, his way of looking at things really resonated and the whole company turned on a dime. He built these little quick prototypes and the company saw them, and the kids reacted to them, and the hospital reacted to it. And pretty soon it was a mainstream idea now, it wasn't just this one guy going off.
And because our approach is so human-centered, we find that it's really easy for people to adopt that point of view. So you're normally doing it a certain way, and you're doing it in a more human-centered way and people will react to that. And the individuals react, and then the whole organization will react. So mainly what we're talking about is you build some very low-cost prototype of what your big idea is in addition to your normal job.
So we've had great success with working for a car company and we're doing some kind of new interface. Instead of spending a lot of time making a new car or going through the process of doing something completely digital, we just put a camera in the front seat and drive around. And then we have a bunch of film and then we can edit that and make it work.
Or when we're doing prototypes of things for children's television network, apps for kids. Instead of doing a lot of digital work and having to use a lot of computer time, we will do things like take a big cardboard thing and cut out a shape that's the size of a real human and then we just put the camera on but we dance behind it. And then you can show it to the other people in the company and get them excited and say what you think about this? What if Elmo does this?
And there's so low investment in our kind of quick and dirty prototypes that you can do those on the side and then start building excitement around it. It's much easier than trying to convince the company that they should do things a different way. You win them over through the kind of success of the quick prototype. And that builds confidence in everybody that you know that what you're going to do is going to work.
TOM KELLEY: Well, Dave and I have been working on innovation for something like 30 years at IDEO. And so people might think that we have a slight bias on this subject. So maybe if I turn to a more objective third party source. In one of the recent IBM global surveys, they go around the world, interview 1,500 global CEOs. They asked the CEOs what was keeping them up at night and they talked a lot about complexity. And then in the summary of the findings they said that creativity was the single most important competency for organizations trying to navigate through that complexity. So this is not designers, this is not real self-identified creatives. This is the CEOs of public and private sector enterprises.
And there's actually a more recent survey from Adobe where they went out 5,000 people in five different countries and they asked them questions about creativity. And 80% said that unlocking creativity was important for economic growth. And I loved that they phrased it in that way, "unlocking creativity," Because you don't have to teach people creativity. It's there inside them, you just have to unlock it.
And so we think that anybody can gain creative competency. You just need the right kind of nudge, the right kind of spark. And so historically, David and his work at Stanford has been teaching designers in the product design program. But with this new product at the d.school, he's teaching non-designers.
See, there are graduate students from all seven schools-- the law school, the business school, the medical school. And so these are not self-identified creatives, and yet we found a way to unlock their creativity. And so it's possible to do with anybody and we think it's really important for economic growth in an organization, in a community, even in a nation.
ALISON BEARD: Well, that's a very hopeful message. Tom, David, thanks so much for your time today.
TOM KELLEY: It was a pleasure, thanks.
DAVID KELLEY: Thanks, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That was Tom and David Kelley of IDEO. To read their December article "Reclaim Your Creative Confidence," go to hbr.org.
oh my God, look how creative that solution was that I came up with.We call this creative confidence. The famous psychologist at Stanford, Albert Bandura, calls it self-efficacy. This sense that you know how the world's put together and that you can do what you set out to do.
So our deal is you're just building these muscles. These are tools that we give people and you're building a muscle. So it's not as easy, you have to get past your habit of thinking of yourself as not creative and thinking that this is hard.
But once you start having some successes, then it makes it real easy for you to keep going. It's sort of like you started to play the piano and everybody was saying boy, you can really play the piano well. Then that spurs you on to keep going even though it's a lot of mileage.
But my favorite is this news aggregator called "Pulse." These two students started out, they were in computer science and kind of reluctant to this go out and talk to people kind of thing.
But through the class, they were convinced to hang out in a coffee shop every day for about five weeks. And each time they talked to people, they got a better idea. And they kept releasing their product, and they kept going, and they eventually made "Pulse" which was the best-selling iPad app there was out there at the time.
Well sure. For example, one of the things you can do is you can just go online. And most companies now have forums where the customers collect. Where they talk about the company so you're just listening to what they say.One thing we encourage people to do is just call in, pretend you're a customer. Call in to your customer service line, see what that experience actually is. Because you'd be surprised how many senior executives haven't really experienced their own service in the way that a first-time customer does.
Sure. Fear of letting go, it starts with just acknowledging that I'm not going to have all the inputs. No matter how smart I might be, if the problem is a significant one, I can't control the solution from start to finish and so you have an open mind about this. And so one really powerful tool is open innovation schemes where you really ask the world for a solution.
At IDEO we have a open innovation platform we call Open IDEO. And we put these social innovation questions out into the world and 30,000 people from 170 different countries have helped us work on really tough social issues. And so yes, we have 600 people who we think are pretty smart, but we went to the world to look for answers. And so we're letting go of our own feeling, we're like OK, we got to solve this all ourselves.
And so in the article, we tell a story about Bonnie Simi who was then director of airport planning for JetBlue Airways. She's now head of HR for the company. But she wanted to wrestle with this problem in which they'd had a big flight delay. There had been a big storm at JFK, and it disrupted their flight service for six days.
And if you had too much fear of letting go, you'd try to solve the whole problem yourself, you'd try to be the hero. But that's not what she did. She brought 120 front-line employees together for a day and they wrote every problem on a Post-it and they filled a room with Post-its. And then she worked with teams throughout the company along the way. And so she gained her creative confidence by letting others help.
I want to move on to fear of the first step. I know that entrepreneurs talk a lot about low-cost experiments. But how might one do that in a big bureaucratic organization which typically requires lots of analysis and approvals before getting a new project or new idea off the ground? David, can you address that?
So what we ask them to do is to do their job. You're not going to endear yourself to the people in your company if you say no, I don't want to do it the way the company does it. I'm going to go off and do this other thing.
Instead we say, do your job, but also take these new skills that you've learned and try some experiments on your own. And then after you have a little success, we find that people will pay attention. And pretty soon they notice oh, that group's more creative, look what they're doing. And so by doing these kind of little experiments on the side, you can get the ball rolling.
Doug Dietz was a design engineer at GE who had worked on MRI machines. He decided that on his own he was going to go to the hospital and see what was going out with the machine and use these user-centered approaches that we had. And he was doing his regular job as well. But he really noticed that the children were having trouble dealing with this big machine.
And so he started designing ideas for ways to make it enjoyable. Like it was a Pirate ship and the kids would be more playful. And in the end, his way of looking at things really resonated and the whole company turned on a dime. He built these little quick prototypes and the company saw them, and the kids reacted to them, and the hospital reacted to it. And pretty soon it was a mainstream idea now, it wasn't just this one guy going off.
And because our approach is so human-centered, we find that it's really easy for people to adopt that point of view. So you're normally doing it a certain way, and you're doing it in a more human-centered way and people will react to that. And the individuals react, and then the whole organization will react. So mainly what we're talking about is you build some very low-cost prototype of what your big idea is in addition to your normal job.
So we've had great success with working for a car company and we're doing some kind of new interface. Instead of spending a lot of time making a new car or going through the process of doing something completely digital, we just put a camera in the front seat and drive around. And then we have a bunch of film and then we can edit that and make it work.
Or when we're doing prototypes of things for children's television network, apps for kids. Instead of doing a lot of digital work and having to use a lot of computer time, we will do things like take a big cardboard thing and cut out a shape that's the size of a real human and then we just put the camera on but we dance behind it. And then you can show it to the other people in the company and get them excited and say what you think about this? What if Elmo does this?
And there's so low investment in our kind of quick and dirty prototypes that you can do those on the side and then start building excitement around it. It's much easier than trying to convince the company that they should do things a different way. You win them over through the kind of success of the quick prototype. And that builds confidence in everybody that you know that what you're going to do is going to work.
TOM KELLEY: Well, Dave and I have been working on innovation for something like 30 years at IDEO. And so people might think that we have a slight bias on this subject. So maybe if I turn to a more objective third party source. In one of the recent IBM global surveys, they go around the world, interview 1,500 global CEOs. They asked the CEOs what was keeping them up at night and they talked a lot about complexity. And then in the summary of the findings they said that creativity was the single most important competency for organizations trying to navigate through that complexity. So this is not designers, this is not real self-identified creatives. This is the CEOs of public and private sector enterprises.
And there's actually a more recent survey from Adobe where they went out 5,000 people in five different countries and they asked them questions about creativity. And 80% said that unlocking creativity was important for economic growth. And I loved that they phrased it in that way, "unlocking creativity," Because you don't have to teach people creativity. It's there inside them, you just have to unlock it.
And so we think that anybody can gain creative competency. You just need the right kind of nudge, the right kind of spark. And so historically, David and his work at Stanford has been teaching designers in the product design program. But with this new product at the d.school, he's teaching non-designers.
See, there are graduate students from all seven schools-- the law school, the business school, the medical school. And so these are not self-identified creatives, and yet we found a way to unlock their creativity. And so it's possible to do with anybody and we think it's really important for economic growth in an organization, in a community, even in a nation.
ALISON BEARD: Well, that's a very hopeful message. Tom, David, thanks so much for your time today.
TOM KELLEY: It was a pleasure, thanks.
DAVID KELLEY: Thanks, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That was Tom and David Kelley of IDEO. To read their December article "Reclaim Your Creative Confidence," go to hbr.org.
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