Work Matters

Tag: Creativity

  • Final Exam: Design the Ideal Organization. Use Course Concepts to Defend Your Answer

    That is the final exam question that I've been using for about a decade in my graduate class "Organizational Behavior:An Evidence-Based Approach" in our Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford.  Students get 3000 words to answer the question.  I put in on the course outline so they can see it the first day of class.  I do so because I want propsective students to decide if they can deal with a class with so much ambiguity and pressure to write well and because I want students to start thinking about their paper from the first day of class.  I encourage and reward them for being as creative as possible, while at the same time, weaving together concepts related to major themes in the class such as leadership, employee selection and socialization, motivation and rewards, interpersonal influence, group dynamics, organizational change, innovation, and organizational culture. 

    As I tell the students, this is a really hard question.  In fact, so hard, it is difficult for me to answer even after studying the topic for over 30 years. I guess I did answer it in at least one of my books, The No Asshole Rule, although that was a lot longer than 3000 words.  After a decade or so, I have read about 1000 answers to this question.  Every year, I go through the same process with it.  About a week before the papers are due, I start having second thoughts about it as I talk to the students about their struggles with answering such an open-ended question. After all, this is the Stanford Engineering School, and while some our students write beautifully, for many others, this is the first time they have faced such an open-ended writing assignment.  Then, the same thing happens every year.  The pile of papers come in, I start reading them, and I am delighted with the overall quality and dazzled by the best papers — and pleased by the creativity and even joy the students so many students convey. 

    The range and quality of the papers was especially striking this year.  I believe it was largely because my two course assistants, Belinda Chiang and Isaac Waisberg , did such a great job of giving students feedback during the five writing assignments that led up to the final.  I won't list all the titles and themes of the 84 papers we received.  Quite a few were variations of web-based start-ups, as there is a lot of that at Stanford, especially in the School of Engineering.  

    But here are some of the most intriguing ones:

    A nationwide professional wrestling company that "empowers its wrestlers to create quality shows and programming."

    "The Ministry of Love," a government agency on the imaginary planet of "Natan" that has a population of 3 million people and a declining fertility rate.  The mission of the ministry to increase the birth rate via love.  The key roles are "Venuses" who develop ideas and "Cupids" who implement those ideas.

    An ideal organization for a high school "Queen Bee" who "rules the hallways with a fist full of Prada and enough hairspray to glue flies to the walls."

    A non-profit hospice, that nurtures employees "while they deal with the emotions of death on a daily basis."

    Heaven.  Yes, that heaven — where management has two goals 1. provide people with an afterlife fair to their conduct before death and 2. Encourage people to do good on earth.

    "The Ideal NBA Franchise: Transforming the Golden State Warriors into Champions."  This is a tough job as our local basketball team is a perennial loser.

    Revamping the The National Kidney Foundation of Singapore

    "Mystical Weddings," a wedding planning agency located in India.

    The ideal organization for a family.  This was written by a student who had been a dad for just two weeks.  He was suffering sleep deprivation and other stresses and decided to imagine a better solution.  It was touching and made lovely use of course concepts — incentives, influence, and group norms, for example.

    Finally, the most outrageous and one of the best papers in terms of writing and application of course concepts (written by a female student) was: "Living the dream — would you like to to be the third wife of Tom Brady?  A blueprint for the polygynous family."  I never heard of the word "polygynous."  It means polygamous — one husband, multiple wives, the Big Love thing.

    As I said, although I was tempted to abandon this assignment yet again this year, when I read the papers, I was — as usual — struck by how well the best students apply the theory, evidence, and cases from the course in brilliant ways that I could never possibly imagine.  Also, the assignment reveals students who can define but not really apply concepts, as well as those rare students who haven't learned much course content. 

    I am wondering however, if I should open it up next year so that students can produce something other than a paper that uses course concepts to design the ideal organization.  Perhaps they could do a film, a presentation, or design a game that answers the question in some compelling way.  For the most ambitious students, given the entrepreneurial frenzy at Stanford, perhaps taking steps to start your own ideal organization (and telling me what you've learned) might satisfy the requirement as well. I am not sure if this is a good idea as it is hard to beat good old fashioned writing. But I am toying with it.

  • The Virtues of Standing-Up: In Meetings and Elsewhere

    I was thinking back to some of the experiences I had over the last few weeks teaching classes to both Stanford students and executives, and watching some of my fellow teachers and colleagues in action.  I realized that one of the hallmarks, one of the little signs I have learned to look for, is whether people are standing-up or sitting down.  We all learn in school that being a "good student" means that we ought to stay in our seats and be good listeners.  But I kept seeing situations where standing-up was a sign of active learning and leadership.  To give you a a few examples, I noticed that when my course assistants stood up and walked around the classroom, they were more likely to be engaged by students and to create enthusiasm and energy. I noticed that student teams in my classes that stood-up when brainstorming, prototyping, or arguing over ideas seemed more energetic and engaged. 

    Perry and David KelleyAnd I noticed when watching master innovation teacher and coach Perry Klebahn in action at the Stanford d. School that he hardly ever sits down for long, he is always on the prowl, walking over to members of his team to ask how things are going, to give a bit of advice, and to find out what needs to be fixed — and is constantly walking over to to watch teams of students or executives who are working on creative tasks to see if they need a bit advice, coaching, or a gentle kick in the ass to get unstuck. (In fact, that is Perry listening to David Kelley while they were coaching teams — David is the d schools main founder).

    Of course, there are times when sitting down is best: During long meetings, when you want to unwind, when relaxed contemplation is in order.  But these thoughts inspired a couple questions that many of us — including me — need to ask ourselves about the groups we work in and lead: Would it help if I stood up?  Would it help if we all stood up?

    This all reminded me of this passage from Good Boss, Bad Boss (from the chapter on how the best bosses "Serve as a Human Shield"):

    In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

    I’ve been fascinated by stand-up meetings for years.  It started when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, our book on evidence-based management.  We often met in Jeff’s lovely house, typically starting-out in his kitchen.  But we usually ended-up in Jeff’s spacious study — where we both stood, or more often, Jeff sat on the lone chair, and I stood.  Meetings in his study were productive but rarely lasted long.  There was no place for me sit and the discomfort soon drove me out the door (or at least back to the kitchen).  We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by 56 groups where people stood-up during meetings to 55 groups where people sat down.  These were short meetings, in the 10 to 20 minute range, but the researchers found big differences.  Groups that stood-up took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.

    Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies.  Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, “Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing-up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.”

    I keep finding good bosses who use stand-up meetings to speed things along.  One is David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks.  They produce and market dozens of products such as Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili, CDM Coffee and Chicory, No Pudge Fat Free Brownie Mix, and Luzianne Tea.  David and I were having a rollicking conversation about how he works with his team. I started interrogating closely after he mentioned the 15 minute stand-up meeting held in his office four mornings a week. We since exchanged a series of emails about these meetings.  As David explains:

    “The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency.  Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results.  The same is true with meetings.  The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc.  The role of stand-up meetings is not to work on strategic issues or even to resolve an immediate issue.  The role is to bubble up the issues of the day and to identify the ones that need to be worked outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it.   With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there.  We insist that bad news travels just as fast as good news”

    The team also has a 90 minute sit-down meeting each week, where they dig into more strategic issues.  But the quick daily meetings keep the team connected, allow them to spot small problems before they become big ones, and facilitate quick and effective action.  

    Stand-up meetings aren’t right for every meeting or boss.  As we saw in the last chapter in the broken Timbuk2 all-hands meeting, part of the problem with that 45 or so minute gathering was there was no place for most people to sit, which fueled the group’s grumpiness and impatience.  The key lesson is that the best bosses constantly look for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully.  They keep unearthing traditions, procedures, or other things that needlessly slow people down.  In many cases, these speed bumps have been around so long that people don’t even realize they exist or that they do more harm than good.   Try to look at what you and your people do through fresh eyes.  Bring in someone who “doesn’t know any better,” and ask them: What can I do to help my people travel through the day with fewer hassles? 

    What do you think?  How does standing-up help in what you do?  When is it a bad idea?

    P.S. Check out this Wall Street Journal article on stand-up meetings as part of the "Agile" software development process, particularly the "daily scrum."

    P.P.S. Don't miss Jason Yip's article on how to run a stand-up meeting and how to tell when it isn't going well.

     

  • Creativity: Another Reason that Having a Drink — or Two — at Work Isn’t All Bad

    Last April, I had fun writing a guest column for Cnn.Com arguing that having an occasional drink with your colleagues while you are at work isn't all bad:

    In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    Now there is a new study that adds to the symbolic (and I suppose objective) power of alcohol to bring about positive effects. The folks over at BPS Research Digest offer a lovely summary of an experiment called "Uncorking the Muse"  that shows "mild intoxication aids creative problem solving."   The researchers had male subjects between the ages of 21 and 30 consume enough vodka to get their blood alcohol concentration to .07, which is about equal to consuming two pints of beer for an average sized man.  Then they gave them a standard creativity task 'the "Remote Associates Test", a popular test of insightful thinking in which three words are presented on each round (e.g. coin, quick, spoon) and the aim is to identify the one word that best fits these three (e.g. silver).'

    The tipsy respondents performed better on the test than subjects in a sober control group:

    1. "they solved 58 per cent of 15 items on average vs. 42 per cent average success achieved by controls"

    2. "they tended to solve the items more quickly (11.54 seconds per item vs. 15.24 seconds)"

    The reasons they did better and moved faster appear to be lack of inhibition ("intoxicated participants tended to rate their experience of problem solving as more insightful, like an Aha! moment, and less analytic") and, following past research, people with superior memories tend to do worse on this task — because drinking dulls memory, it may help on the Remote Associates Test.  The researchers also speculate that "being mildly drunk facilitates a divergent, diffuse mode of thought, which is useful for such tasks where the answer requires thinking on a tangent."

    I am not arguing that people who do creative work ought to drink all day — there are two many dangers.  As I warned in the CNN piece, booze is best consumed in small doses and with proper precautions.  And of course people who don't or should not drink for health, religious, or other reasons ought not to be pressured to join in the drinking.

    Yet,  this study, when combined when with other work suggesting that drinking can serve as a useful social lubricant, suggest that having a drink or two with your colleagues at the end of the day now and then, and kicking around a few crazy ideas, might both enhance social bonds and generate some great new ideas.  The payoff might include innovative products, services, experiences and the like — if you can remember those sparkling insights after you sober up!

    P.S. The citation is Jarosz, A., Colflesh, G., and Wiley, J. (2012). Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (1), 487-493

  • Creative People Must Be Stopped! Dave Owens’ Great New Book Published Today

    Book-image-suit_red

    Dave Owens was one of my doctoral students about 15 years ago. He always amazed me with has range of talents.  He was not only remarkably well-read and a great field researcher, he could build or fix anything.  There was an interesting moment when he was doing an ethnography at a now defunct design firm.  Dave met with me to complain that he kept going to one meeting after another where the development team brainstormed and argued and argued and talked and talked about what the prototype should be.   It was driving Dave crazy because he had worked at IDEO as a designer for several years and has a masters in product design from Stanford — so he couldn't stand seeing talking as a substitute for prototyping.   He told me had had the parts in his garage and could build a prototype in a day, two at most, and asked if he should.  I discouraged him from doing so because it would compromise his objectivity and neutrality as an ethnographer.   As I have looked back at that advice over the years, I still wonder if I was wrong.  Indeed, the product development team was shut down when pretty much the same product they had been talking about hit the market. If Dave had built that prototype, they might have had a shot at getting to market.  I also have wondered since then if there really is such at thing as an objective or neutral ethnographer. 

    In any event, Dave has taken those skills and gone on to quite career. He has been teaching creativity and innovation at Vanderbilt for years and students love him.  He has worked with many organizations — from Dell to NASA to LEGO — as consultant and even took a break from Vanderbilt to serve as CEO of Griffin Technology.  Dave has wrapped all that practical and academic knowledge into a great new book , Creative People Must Be Stopped. I love the cover.  Dave has put together an information-rich  website for the book.  Dave does a great job of showing various impediments to innovation and then offering tactics and strategies for overcoming them in the book– he has an "Innovation Constraints Survey" you might check-out.  The whole book is fun and useful, but perhaps my favorite chapter is "If it is such a great idea, why isn't our competitor doing it?"  I can't tell how many times I have heard that creativity killer inside of large companies where people are punished for pressing original ideas.

    Let me know what you think of the survey and the book.  I read it in galley form and loved it, and i just ordered a copy from Amazon — I think Dave is sending me one because I did a blurb but I like to support my former students!

     

  • A Talk On Fast Innovation, All In One Great Picture

    A couple weeks ago, I did a talk on "fast innovation" at IDEO.  I gave the talk from a powerpoint deck, but at the same time, while the audience and I discussed the the talk, there was a guy named Kevin Bain who does this thing called
    "graphics scribing."  On a single big piece of paper, he drew images and a few words that summarized the main points.  This is the the third or fourth time I have worked with one of these scribes.  When they are good, like Kevin is, the interaction with the audience unfolds in an interesting and better way than a standard talk.  You see the main points unfolding all on one piece of paper, every now and then the scribe will stop and summarize what he or she has been recording so the group gets a sense of where it has been, and at the end, you've got a cool summary of the talk for the group that is all on one place. 

    It is hard to see the details of the picture below, but if you click on it, you can see a bigger version that is easy to read. Regular readers of this blog and my books will recognize some of my standard themes, like creativity being about doing new things with old things, small wins, and the smart-talk trap.  But I have never seen them put together quite like this, and while "you had to be there" to understand the full context, I am still rather amazed and humbled what a great job he did summarizing core ideas that have taken years for my co-authors and me to develop.  Kevin's website is here if you want to see a few more samples and to contact him about his "graphic facilitation" services.

     

    Bob sutton_innovation_scribing

  • More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential

    Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts.  My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck).  Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

        1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

         2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

        3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

        4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

    I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

    "Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

    I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity — actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies — just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?"  The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic. 

    This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work.  It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups.  As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: “What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"' 

    The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: “How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?”, “How much control over the team’s activities would this member exhibit?”, “I think the applicant is an effective leader.” (α = .86).

    The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed.  Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

    BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer: 

    'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity.  But when asked to describe a creative person, words like “quirky,” “nonconformist” and “unfocused” often take their place right alongside “visionary” and “charismatic.” Says Mueller: “The fact is, people don’t just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them.”'

    Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think — and there is evidence to show — that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders.  In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky.  That is not the boss that most of us want.  It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential.  It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey. 

     This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma — "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person — articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others. 

    On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities — Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others — Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that — especially at this moment in history — we need creative people even more.

    To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful — especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding  yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people — unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

    I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good.  If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

    Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

     

  • New Research: We Are More Creative When We Help Others Than Ourselves

    There is an interesting set of findings from psychological experiments that suggest we see others' flaws and strengths more clearly than our own (I wrote about this in Good Boss, Bad Boss) and that, on average, human-beings make more rational decisions when make them for others rather than themselves.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I advised in Hard Facts:

    See Yourself and Your Organization as Outsiders Do

    A big impediment to evidence-based management is that human beings, especially those with good mental health, often have inflated views of their own talents and prospects for success. This rampant optimism is a double-edged sword. The upside is that it creates positive self-fulfilling prophecies, which increase the odds of success. The downside is that excessive optimism causes people to downplay or not see risks, and to persist despite clear evidence they are traveling down the wrong path. One study found, for example, that over 80 percent of entrepreneurs surveyed estimated that chances were over 70 percent that their venture would succeed, and over 30 percent believed that their firm was certain to succeed—even though only about 35 percent of new businesses survive their first five years.  Max Bazerman’s book on managerial decision making shows that outsiders often make more objective judgments than insiders do—so having a blunt friend, mentor, or counselor can help you see and act on better evidence.  This is one reason why Kathleen Eisenhardt’s study of successful versus unsuccessful Silicon Valley start-ups found that in companies that survived and thrived, the CEO usually had a trusted counselor on the team—while CEOs of unsuccessful firms usually did not. These counselors were typically ten to twenty years older than the CEO, with broad industry experience, and were most valuable for helping CEOs recognize when they were traveling down the wrong path and a shift in strategic direction was needed.

    This finding that it is better to rely on others than ourselves is also seen in a new study described at one of my favorite blogs, BPS research.   Here is the summary at BPS:

    Across four studies involving hundreds of undergrads, Polman and Emich found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves; that participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month; and that participants were more likely to solve an escape-from-tower problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves (a 66 vs. 48 per cent success rate). Briefly, the tower problem requires you to explain how a prisoner escaped the tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. The solution is that he divided the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together.

    For the complete description, go here.  The implication of these diverse studies are quite instructive.  If we want to make better decisions, make faster decisions, have a more realistic picture of our strengths and weaknesses, and now, apparently, be more creative, we need to ask others for their opinions and assistance.   There is even a kind of weird implication that rather than working on our own problems, we should always be working on others.  So, despite the cynicism about consultants, they actually do serve a moreimportant  role than many of us have recognized. Certainly, this research suggests the importance of having mentors and colleagues who will give you help, advise you on decisions, and point out the flaws in your beliefs and actions– and that the world would be a better place if we did so in turn for others.  Another cool implication is that consultants need outside advisors when it comes to tackling their own challenges and problems.  In any event, these studies certainly provide interesting evidence of how much humans we need one another.

    The citation for the creativity research is:

    Polman E, and Emich KJ (2011). Decisions for Others Are More Creative Than Decisions for the Self. Personality and social psychology bulletin

     

  • Do you want to DO design thinking? Start with the d.School’s Bootcamp Bootleg

    Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school.  The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome — fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans). 

    I love the opening paragraph:

    Check this out —
    It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

    This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

    Then the fun begins.  Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:

    Show don't tell.  Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration

    Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage"  is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):

    Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

    To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains.  These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program.   In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK.  Here are a few samples, there are many more:

    Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.

    Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it — and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too.  Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you.  And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking

    Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.

  • Narcissism and Creativity: Intriguing and Troubling Findings

    A trio of researchers — Jack Goncalo and Sharon Kim of Cornell University and Frank Flynn of Stanford — have done a pair of experiments on narcissism and creativity (see the description here) that are fascinating and have some disturbing implications.  In both studies, they used a questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (see the long version of it here and test yourself) to assess if people suffered — or perhaps enjoyed — this characteristic. 

    In the first study, students were placed in pairs and asked to pitch an ideas to their partner for a movie concept. The results: "the ideas impressed the person evaluating the pitch roughly 50% more than did those from the least narcissistic pitchers."  BUT the interesting twist was when these same ideas were evaluated by two independent observers who only saw the ideas on paper, but did not see the pitches:  "Having only seen the movie pitches in written form, they found the narcissists' ideas to be about as creative as proposals from non-narcissists. The difference, the researchers say, was in the pitch itself: narcissists were more enthusiastic, witty, and charming—all traits, according to past research, that people associate with creativity."

    In other words, the live pitches led people to make an attribution error, to confuse stereotypical features of creative people with creative ideas. (This explains, by the way, why creative people who come in bodies that can't pitch need someone on their team to sell their ideas: Steve Wozniak would not have succeeded without Steve Jobs' pizazz.)

    The second study bugs me, and even though I don't like it, I am trying to resist rejecting it because it was done quite well.  "The researchers composed 4 person teams of various numbers of narcissists: asked them to draw up proposals to improve the performance of real businesses and other organizations. Teams made up of three or four narcissists came up with incremental proposals and failed to generate and discuss many ideas, but so did teams with no narcissists. The teams that generated the most ideas were half narcissist."  Senior author Jack Goncalo speculated that this finding may have occurred because: "narcissists can help get ideas on the table. If there are too many of them, however, there may be too many egos in the room, preventing anything from getting done."

    As I said, I am not especially happy about the findings of this study, in part, because even if these findings do generalize to the real world, narcissists do so much damage that they still may not be worth the trouble.  On the other hand, this research is consistent with more applied and qualitative writings by Michael Maccoby (see this HBR article) that suggest narcissists are high magnitude people, with strong pros and cons.  Maccoby summarized this perspective brillantly:

    Leaders such as Jack Welch or George Soros are examples of productive narcissists. They are gifted and creative strategists who see the big picture and find meaning in the risky proposition of changing the world and leaving behind a legacy. Indeed, one reason we look to productive narcissists in times of great transition is that they have the audacity to push through the massive transformations that society periodically undertakes. Productive narcissists are not only risk takers willing to get the job done but also charmers who can convert the masses with their rhetoric. The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success. This tendency toward grandiosity and distrust is the Achilles’ heel of narcissism. Because of it, even brilliant narcissists can come under suspicion for self–involvement, unpredictability and—in extreme cases—paranoia.

    I'd love your reaction to this research and more generally to the notion that — contrary to my biases — that narcissists may at times may be worth the trouble!

  • Brilliant Meets Ridiculous: A New Klutz Book By John Cassidy and Brendan Boyle

    I've known IDEO's Brendan Boyle for a good 15 years. I first heard of him before I met him, as an inspired toy designer and one of the best brainstorming session leaders at IDEO (he now applies design thinking to many problems, from consumer experiences to organizational design and strategy).  I also heard that he had an incredible ability to come up with really crazy ideas that seemed nuts at first, but if you backed them off a little, or thought about them more, you might actually have something that would sell in the marketplace. 

    One of my favorite examples, and one I still use in talks at times, is an idea that Brendan came-up with — a good 15 years ago perhaps even 20 — for a device that enabled you to use (i.e., steal) those coat hangers that were common in hotels in the U.S. (and I still see them in Europe) that have have the little round balls at the top (see the [picture of one below)– which are meant to be useless to steal (the new solution to this problem, of course, is tiny hook on the hangar that is too small to use at home).  Here is a drawing of this product on an old CAD machine (along with the coat hanger0, and apparently, Brendan has the physical prototype someplace:'

    Picture1

    I saw Brendan at a party the other day and was tickled to learn that he is continuing this tradition in a big way.  He just completed a book with Klutz founder John Cassidy that is, essentially, and encyclopedia of about 200 ideas where "brilliant meets ridiculous.  The book is called The Klutz Book of Inventions.  It comes out September 1st. The process by which they produced it was crazy, but very much straight out of the design thinking playbook.  They would sit around and brainstorm ideas that were crazy and fun and just just possibly useful — like coat hanger device above — and when they would decide one was crazy and brilliant enough to put in the book, they would build a working prototype — in the end over 200 prototypes were built by IDEO's shop (our of over 2500 ideas generated).  Brendan said some of the ideas in the book included a StairMaster for elevators, a helium-filled hide-a-bed (so when you got up, it floated to ceiling), and my personal favorite, parking tickets that have scratchers like lottery tickets where, depending on your luck (I actually have not seen this, and my memory may be off, but this is close), you get, say, a double fine, the usual fine, 50% of the fine, no fine, or now and then, they paid you. 

    This last one intrigues me because it is so Brendan — looking for a way to make an awful experience fun — even if this does not work, the approach reflects a great creative process.  You list things that just suck — going to the DMV, getting parking ticket, and on and on, and try to figure out how to make it fun (you can see why he co-teaches a d.school class on play, see this Fast Company story). As an example, I think Disney does a great of with people standing in line, for example.

    The book contains pictures and and the philosophy, that Brendan explains so well, that one of the big impediments to creativity in everyone from kids to college students, to people who do creative work like product designers and artists, to executives is that they take themselves entirely too seriously — is they not only are often afraid to have fun, don't know how to do it, and feel guilty when it happens, they look on people who are having fun with suspicion and try to stop them when they "catch them" the act.

    I just pre-ordered the book because it sounds so fun.  I hope you will join me in the fun.

    P.S. Brendan sent me some pages of the book, and it has line I just love, one I believe to be true: "Dignity is enemy of invention." The creative process is often about trying stuff so weird and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, so one motto might be that embarrassment in combination with pride and persistence are hallmarks of the creative process!