Work Matters

Tag: design thinking

  • Can You Handle the Mess?

    Proto messy

    Remember that speech from a  Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson famously ranted at Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth?" I was vaguely reminded of it when I saw this picture. It reminded me that, when it comes to creativity and innovation, if you want the innovations, money, and prestige it sometimes produces, you've get to be ready to handle the mess. 

    I love this picture because it is such a great demonstration that prototyping — like so many other parts of creative process — is so messy that it can be distressing to people with orderly minds.  This picture comes from a presentation I heard at an executive program last week called Design Thinking Bootcamp. 

    It was by the amazing Claudia Kotchka, who did great things at VP of Design Innovation and Strategy at P&G — see this video and article.  She built a 300 person organization to spread innovation methods across the company. She retired from P&G a few years back and now helps all sorts of organizations (including the the Stanford d school) imagine and implement design thinking and related insights.  As part of her presentation, she put up this picture from a project P&G did with IDEO  (they did many). We always love having Claudia at the d.school because she spreads so much wisdom and confidence to people who are dealing with such messes.

    That is what prototyping looks like… it even can look this messy when people are developing ideas about HR issues like training and leadership development and organizational strategy issues such as analyses of competitors.

  • The Power of Observing and Talking to Real Humans

    Although Good Boss, Bad Boss focuses more squarely on the relationship between bosses and their immediate charges, one of the main themes of the book — following a design-thinking view of the world — is that the best bosses go to great lengths to develop empathy for both the people they lead and the customers served by their teams and organizations.  Managers and executives sometimes tell me that just looking at sales statistics, aggregated demographics stats, and — now and then — reading compilations of customer complaints and compliments is all they need to do to understand their customer's needs.  There is no need to go out and waste their time watching and talking to customers or potential customers first hand.  

    I am all for quantitative data, but there is a story in Chapter 5 of  Good Boss, Bad Boss that I believe shows there is no substitute for the power of first hand observation:

    When bosses make concerted efforts to understand what it feels like to be a customer, it is remarkably useful for making gaps between knowledge and action vivid and identifying possible repairs.  To illustrate, SYPartners (SYP), an innovation firm based in San Francisco and New York, worked with up-and-coming executives from a big company to develop new financial services for immigrants. The executives arrived with armloads of binders packed with data-rich PowerPoint decks –and were excited about how well they had mastered the charts and statistics.  They got nervous when SYP told them they weren’t going to use that stuff, and instead, would be shadowing customers.   

    SYP broke the team into trios, assigned each a Spanish-speaking translator and Spanish-speaking undocumented worker, and sent them out into the Mission District in San Francisco.  Each team was asked to cash a check in a bank, wire money to a Central American country at Western Union, and observe the undocumented worker do the same things.  Before the observations, these executives knew from their quantitative data that these untapped customers represented a huge opportunity.  But their impressions of what these customers wanted – and would happily pay for – were far off the mark. The shadowing, hands-on efforts, and discussions with undocumented workers provoked them to transform and broaden the offerings they suggested to their firm.  One executive called it “life-changing” and said he would never look at a marketing opportunity the same again.  The executive who initially felt most uncomfortable about following around an illegal immigrant came away most transformed  – arguing adamantly that reams of data aren’t enough, that you need to understand what your customers do and how it feels to do be them.

    In other words, the best bosses know what it feels like to work for them and what it feels like to be one of their customers too!  The closer you can get to an unvarnished and uncensored perspective of the humans that you lead an serve, the better you can understand their needs and what you can do to feel those needs.

    P.S.  Toward that end, a couple years back I was talking to an executive from a major airline about how crummy the experience was of flying coach — how everything from the legroom to the rude staff made it an awful experience. He dismissed my complaint, but eventually admitted that it had been years since he flew coach on any airline.   Perhaps that is one reason that Southwest has stayed so successful for so long — there are no first class seats for their executives hide in!

  • 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.

  • The Better By Design Summit: Cool Things I Heard in New Zealand

       SCCZEN_A_300906SPLMOON3_460x230

    I had the privilege of speaking at the Better By Design CEO Summit in New Zealand last week, which was a delightful event for 300 or so executives.  It was intended to spread knowledge and whip-up enthusiasm about design thinking among businesses in that lovely country.  Our master of ceremonies was the charming and astute Jeremy Moon (pictured above), who is both the Chairman of Better By Design (a New Zealand government group that develops and spreads design thinking), and is also CEO of a firm called Icebreaker, which makes very cool high-tech wool clothing.   Go here to see the line-up of speakers, here for a press report, and here for their blog.  To give you a biased take on the conference, I thought it would be fun to just list some of the cool things I heard people say, as they said a lot of fascinating things that got me thinking.  If you would like to leave a comment, let me know what especially struck you — positive or negative — and why.

    Most of these aren't exact quotes, rather they are the product of my lousy note taking.  So I apologize for any errors or misrepresentations.

    From  Marty Neumeier, author of the The Designful Company:

    Design thinking helps close the gap between knowing and doing, which I call "dragon gap:" When the old map makers wanted to represent uncharted territory, they drew pictures of dragons to represent the scary unknown.

    "We intend to keep innovating" (How Steve Jobs reportedly answered a question about how Apple plans to keep growing.)

    Design is like a sound that only dogs can hear.

    Business keeps speeding-up, but our brains aren't getting any faster.

    A wealth of information creates a paucity of attention.

    Even the lone ranger didn't work alone.

    From Dick Powell, Co-founder Seymourpowell, a UK-based design firm:

    Anthropolology before technology.

    Slow is the new fast.

    The never ending now.

    You can't make a massive change all at once.  The smartest people and companies find ways to keep winning a little bit along the way.

    From Adam Lowry, Co-founder and Chief Greens Keeper, Method Products

    Design is the first signal of human intention (quoting William McDonough)

    Design advances slowly but not gradually — there are long periods where not much happens, punctuated by periods of rapid and dramatic change.  It is like the theory of punctuated equilibrium from evolutionary biology; change happens in fits and starts, in step functions.

    Good design creates good stories.

    We got a lot of free PR, including on Jay Leno's show, for writing advertising copy claiming that our products make your stuff "fricken clean."

    We are in "a constant state of make" at Method.

    We are "people against dirty" and one of our primary challenges is to "Keep Method weird."

    When asked why Method keeps innovating, he answered "our people give a shit."

    We had over 300 SKU's in 2007; now we have about 110.

    I have a veto, but the most powerful thing I can do is to never use it."

    We would rather have a hole (an unfilled position) than an asshole at Method.

    From a panel of who described their design thinking study tour to Silicon Valley, which was composed of executives from New Zealand firms and was sponsored by Better By Design — and was led by Perry Klebahn and Diego Rodriguez:

    Think big, but make it happen step by step'

    To fail is not shameful.

    Teams that do beat teams that talk.

    I am going to get rid of my office and sit with my people.

    Keeping  and growing good people, and strengthening the culture, those are our biggest business risks.( Heard at Method and Google).

    Its hard.

    At Google, they told us "above all, we try not to hire bullies."

    We started out last and finished first in a tire changing competition — that was a wake-up call.

    We were way ahead in the tire change competition, so we started resting on our laurels and we didn't question our assumptions. So the the team that started out worst beat us in the end.  (The tire changing exercise is something I have written about here at HBR.org) 

    Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company, author of Rules of Thumb, and Global Detective:

     This conference keeps going back to a pair of themes I hear everyplace I go now, leadership and change.

    I went to a conference recently where two CEOs of big companies told their people, essentially, that everything will be fine, there is no need to worry.  They pretended to be for change but were really against it.

    The best changes preserve the best of what is already there and get rid of the rest. 

    If you want to change things, make hard things easier. Or raise the cost the cost of the status quo. Or do both.

    Design thinking plays important roles including serving as a problem poser, problem solver, a sensemaking tool, a source of differentiation. It also can be a source inspiration and aspiration.

    When I worked for the City of Portland, Oregon, my boss defined a strategy as anything that solves more than one problem at a time.  That was part of the philosophy that helped transform the city into one of the best places to live in U.S.

    The world is thirsty for difference.

    Design is too important to be left to designers .

    You don't have to it all in one bite (talking about change)

     Rob Fyfe, CEO of Air new Zealand, is a national hero for leading the airline from financial ruin, deep despair, and shame to a place infused pride and excellence — not just among its employees but among every New Zealander I talked to about the airline (which was dozens, as everyone from taxi drivers to teenagers brought it up).  It was just named ATW Airline of the Year, the industry's most prestigious award.

    The airline suffered from a loss of self-belief and pride.

    All the smiling people had left.

    My challenge is to bring people to life.

    It would be like going to a Greenpeace rally in a Hummer (on the challenge of claiming that an airline is green)

    We had delusions of global dominance.   Yet, in the end, we realized that all we had was our New Zealandes –  not so much the beauty of the country, but the charms and quirks of our people.

    I don't spend a lot of time on spreadsheets; I spend it  with my people or thinking about my people.  Several members of my board thought that was all wrong and I should be spending most of my time on financials, but they have come around.

    I spend a day each month doing a job on the airline — working as a flight attendant, a baggage handler, anything but a pilot!

    We use real words, not business language or jargon.  That other stuff sounds fake.

    One of our most successful campaigns featured our people "body painted;" it started with one of our pilots on a billboard and the motto is that our "staff have nothing to hide."

    This isn't meant to be a linear post that makes a clear and integrated point– rather it is a kind of like a Rorschach Test, one of those projective tests where personality and hidden conflicts are allegedly revealed when a person is asked to describe what he or she sees in abstract pictures, images, or artwork.   But I can say that the main thing I was left after the conference and my other social activities with was that the people in New Zealand are an intriguing mix of proud and modest, and competitive and cooperative, and as Diego Rodriguez pointed out, they have a can do attitude in combination with a no asshole rule.  So New Zealanders are well-suited to the design mindset and methods and are a lot of fun to work with.

    Finally, a big thanks to my hosts from Better By Design including Judith Thompson,  Vijayan Kutta, Miriam Wilkins, and Nicky Toresen.  They were fun and extremely competent — and I appreciate their tolerance of my various quirks.

     

  • The d.School in a Box; Download Your Own Free Copy of the Bootcamp Bootleg

    I wrote a long post yesterday about the methods that we teach and apply at the Stanford d.school, and how many have their roots in what has been taught at the Stanford Engineering School (and recall the d.school is a unit of the Engineering School).  But I only talked about these methods and the associated mindset in broad brush.   Fortunately, I can point you to a wonderful handbook that was just posted a couple weeks back on d.schools news — the d.school blog. The folks who teach the introduction to design thinking class,which we call Bootcamp, have complied what they call the Bootcamp Bootleg (get the pdf here). The Bootleg lays out and explains the general "D. Mindsets" like "create clarity from complexity,"  "show don't tell," "get experiential and experimental."  Then it moves to different "modes" including "empathize,"  "define," ideate," "prototype," and "test."   Most useful of all, the Bootleg contains detailed and road tested explanations of many design thinking (and doing) methods: Assuming a beginner's mindset, user camera study, how to "interview for empathy," "team share and capture," empathy map," "powers of ten" and on and on.  The Bootcamp Bootleg provides convenient one-stop shopping for anyone who wants to learn about the nitty-gritty of how design thinkers practices their various crafts, to find tools use throughout the design process, and for anyone who is teaching or coaching a group of design thinkers.

    A big thanks to the team who put together the Bootleg — it is as useful as a tool like this can be, and it is free for the taking!

  • Engineering as a Driving Force Behind the Design Thinking Movement

    One of the most notable and intriguing recent innovations in businesses and business schools is the design thinking movement.  A couple weeks ago, the  New York Times had a big story how MBA education is being reinvented in many places because — as former MBA and d.school star student Laura Jones explained it — “At business school, there was a lot of focus on, ‘You’ve got a great
    idea; here’s how you build a business out of it.’ The d.school said,
    ‘Here’s how you get to that great idea.’  As the article explains, design thinking is now part of the curriculum in many business schools — Stanford, Berkeley, Virginia, and although I am not entirely sure what is going on at Harvard Business School,  I did see that Diego Rodriguez of IDEO (and Metacool fame) led a workshop at IDEO for Harvard MBAs the other day.

    I think that is wonderful that design thinking — with its emphasis on observing and identifying human needs (and not just relying on what they say, but by watching what they do as well), on developing a point of view about what problems need to be addressed, generating ideas, prototyping like crazy, and testing ideas (and doing it all very quickly and not being overly attached to ideas) — is being applied now to so many different kinds of problems: designing better experiences for hospital patients, building a better bicycle for "the rest of us" rather than the tiny percentage of people who are obsessed with bikes, designing and implementing better customer experiences, changing organizational structures, and on and on and on — read IDEO CEO Tim Brown's delightful Change By Design if you want to see the astounding range of problems that are being tackled with design thinking these days.

    There is, however, a part of the story that seems to be slipping away (especially in the business press and in business schools) that I think is important to tell, and that executives, students, and journalists often don't seem to realize: Engineers and engineering schools are one of the main driving forces behind this movement. You can see the impact of engineers clearly in the development of two iconic design thinking organizations that I know well and have been involved in for many years: IDEO, the magnificent innovation firm, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which everyone calls the Stanford d.school.  I did an 18 month ethnography of IDEO in 1990s (with Andy Hargadon, who is now a management professor but already had two degrees in engineering product design from Stanford at the time). I still am involved in the company a bit as an IDEO Fellow.  And I have been teaching at the d.school since it founding.  I guess you could say I was among the founding faculty — but to be honest, one person deserves a lot more credit for starting the d.school than any of us, David Kelley.  He was the driving force — in terms of ideas, building emotional involvement, and raising funds.  And, although IDEO was formed through a merger between David Kelley Design and two industrial design firms, one owned by Mike Nuttall and the other by Bill Moggridge, they will tell you that engineer David Kelley was the strongest driving force — which was why he became CEO when the firm was founded and is currently the Chairman.

    I don't want to leave you with the impression that Industrial Design played a minor role in the rise of the design thinking movement (indeed, Bill Moggridge and current IDEO CEO Tim Brown are industrial designers), but I want to focus on the role David Kelley and other engineers have played in this post.  David is an engineer by training (first at in electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon and then at Stanford in product design) and is a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford.  David was a central figure in teaching product design classes at the  Stanford Engineering School for decades before the d.school was born (and built IDEO at the same time). David  has used his creativity and charm to entice and educate many of us business types to embrace design thinking and there are now lots of MBAs and other business types working at IDEO and teaching at the Stanford d.school.  Yet most of the acknowledged masters of design thinking at the d.school and IDEO have engineering backgrounds (with the main exceptions being industrial designers like Tim and Bill) — in particular, they have degrees in engineering product design.  The essence of what happens at both IDEO and the d.school can be seen in the product design process that has been taught for decades at Stanford — which has been tweaked, refined, and expanded to address a much wider range of problems (and continues to be an ever-evolving prototype at both IDEO and the d.school).

    Consider two of the most revered design thinkers and teachers I know: Diego Rodriguez at IDEO and Perry Klebahn at the d.school.  When I first met Diego, a good 15 years ago, he had just graduated from Stanford (where he earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering) and was working at IDEO.  Diego did get increasingly interested in business, got a Harvard MBA, and now — back at IDEO as a partner and  head of the flagship Palo Alto office– has become one of the most imaginative business thinkers I know (If you don't read Metacool, you are really missing something). Yet, when I talk to Diego, listen to his ideas, and watch his masterful teaching and coaching, I can always see how the magnificent engineering designer inside him remains the strongest guiding force.  His relentless advice to do things like get out and talk to and watch some real human beings, to develop a sharp point of view, to brainstorm, to "prototype until your puke," and to view ideas as easy to get, important to throw away, and ultimately best judged by users and the market (rather than experts) all go back to his product design roots.  This really struck me when, a few years back, Diego was designing a new organizational structure for client that, many years before, he had designed a product for when working as a young IDEO designer.  He remarked to me "The end product is a lot different, but the process I am using is remarkably similar."

    I see the same thing in how Perry approaches problems.  Perry has always been a product guy, as he invented the modern show shoe as a Stanford product design student and then went on to grow a company that sold and spread the product called Atlas, then was COO of Patagonia, and most recently was CEO of Timbuk2. Perry has also taught numerous product design classes at Stanford over the past 20 years, and in the last five years, taught over a dozen classes for students and executives at the Stanford d.school.  In the process, I have watched Perry move beyond and expand his engineering design skills to an ever broader set of problems, things like helping software executives gain empathy for what Gen Y workers want, rethinking the strategy of a Fortune 500 company, and lately we have been talking about how to apply design thinking to reinvent HR.   Yet Perry's engineering roots are always evident.  I was just watching the other day in class as Perry used his product engineering background to guide a class exercise aimed at improving employee selection, recruitment, and socialization practices for our d.school fellows program.  He pressed the students to look for unmet needs, to identify the problem they were trying to solve, to brainstorm ideas for prototypes quickly, and then to test the emerging ideas with users — even though those ideas were unfinished and crude approximations of organizational practices.  This process, although modified by Perry and
    many others to fit problems of all kinds, is simply a variation of the design process that Perry used as a Stanford Engineering School student years ago to invent the modern snowshoe — and then to grow the company and customer based required to make the product succeed.  One of his primary mentors throughout the process was David Kelley, of course. It is no accident that the Stanford d.school is a unit of the Stanford School of Engineering.  It is also no accident that many of us who teach design thinking to students (many of whom are MBAs working on business problems) have been mentored by engineers who are masters of design thinking — people like David, Perry, and Diego. 

    In this vein, the sole Stanford Graduate School of Business professor who teaches regularly at the d.school is Jim Patell.  He teaches magnificent classes on Extreme Affordability, where students design products like water pumps and lights for the poorest people on the planet. Jim was introduced to design thinking by David Kelley and then mentored by him for years.  Now Jim teaches with Dave Beach, an engineering professor who (among any other things) runs the "Product Realization Lab," (the machine shop) at the Stanford Engineering School.

    Certainly, depending on the problem at hand, other talents and disciplines play key roles in d.school classes and the design process.  As an organizational psychologist, I believe the behavioral sciences have a lot to add to design thinking, and certainly believe my expertise is useful classes were we coach students in ways to spread infectious action (like this project) or when veteran executive Debra Dunn and I taught a class that helped Perry and his team at Timbuk2 build a better company meeting.   

    Yes, I am tenured professor in the Stanford Engineering School, but I am not an engineer. The core of what we do at the Stanford d.school and of much of what they do so well at IDEO is rooted most strongly in product design engineering, especially the flavor taught in the Stanford Engineering School.  That is why, frankly, I always feel compelled to involve "real" product designers like Diego and Perry in the d.school classes I teach — even though I am starting to believe that I know this design thinking stuff pretty well after teaching it for four or five years.  Indeed, the masters of this craft aren't just established veterans like David Kelley and his students from long ago like Perry and Diego.  Debra Dunn and I — and our students — have benefited a great deal by involving Kris Woyzbun (now at IDEO) in our class on treating organizational practices as prototypes.   We like the fact that Kris took numerous classes on applying design thinking to business problems from us at the d.school and she was a star student — but I would argue that one of the main reasons she was a star in those classes and now at IDEO is that she also has a masters in engineering product design from Stanford.

    Like many other people at the d.school, I get in arguments about what design thinking is, how it ought to be applied, and the times when it isn't right to use it. But there is little disagreement at Stanford that the brand of design thinking that we teach largely reflects a mindset and set of methods that was developed and refined at the Stanford Engineering School for decades before design thinking was ever a hot business topic. 

    P.S. I want to emphasize that this post reflects my biased experience at Stanford and with IDEO. No doubt, engineers in other organizations and universities have had a huge impact as well. And I said, other disciplines have been crucial as well — at IDEO Industrial Design has been especially critical.