Work Matters

Tag: Stanford d school

  • 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.

     

  • Why the Sharp Distinction Between “Individual” and “Group” Brainstorming is False in Real Teams

    I wrote a post earlier in the week about how the claim in The New Yorker that brainstorming "doesn't work" is an oversimplification.  I gave various reasons:  Most of this research is done with novices rather than skilled brainstormers, only looks at one measure (quantity), and ignores how brainstorming is done and the impact it has in real organizations.  As I have been thinking about this research a bit more and of the brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I studied at IDEO years ago, that I see at the Stanford d.school, and especially, that I've seen in recent weeks in some very skilled groups I have seen in action, something struck me:

    The comparison between group and individual brainstorming that underlines this research is false, or at least irrelevant, because both happen at once when skilled practioners do it.

    When a skilled facilitator calls a brainstorm, he or she usually gives the topic in advance and asks members of the group to do some individual thinking about it before the gathering; for example, I once went to a brainstorm at IDEO on how to give an itchless haircut.  I dutifully went to a stylist and asked her to give me an an itchless haircut  She did things like wrapped my neck really tight with the top of the smock and put a bunch of talcum powder on my neck.  So I came prepared to add some ideas. The funniest part was one designer who tried to talk his barber into giving him a haircut while he hung upside down.  It was a crazy idea, but the notion of using gravity to solve other design problems was not — so having this story in the IDEO culture was useful.   

    In addition to the routine practice of encouraging solo idea generation before the group meets (and most relevant to the research) is that if you watch skilled teams, there is a blend of individual and collective idea generation going on most of the time DURING the brainstorming session.  Typically, in a group of say 6 or 7 brainstormers, you will have 2 or 3 people talking about the idea that is in play at the moment — one written on a post-it, written on the board, illustrated with a drawing, or a quick prototype.  Meanwhile, the other 4 or 5 people are half listening, writing ideas on post-its, drawing, building something, or semi-tuning out and just thinking about how to mix their ideas with with those they are hearing and seeing around them.

    There is a method called "brainwriting" where members write ideas on slips of paper, then pass their ideas to each other, and generate new ideas in response to others — all in silence.  As least one experiment shows that brainwriting enables people to develop more and apparently better ideas compared to brainstorming alone. This research is interesting in that, when you watch the best brainstorming groups, although they don't work in silence (the solo brainstorming happens before they meet in many cases … and since they are working in ongoing projects, they have time for individual silent contemplation afterwards as well), people are constantly switching between "solo" mode to generate ideas and "social" mode to share their ideas, listen to others, and build on the ideas of others 

    Real groups do "brainstorming" in much messier ways than it is sliced-up in psychological experiments, but the headline here is that in practice, if you watch how the pros do it, it entails a blend of individual and group idea generation — even during group gatherings.  This insight is, I think, important because skilled brainstormers are constantly switching between "solo" and "social" mode and the best facilitators — I think of people like Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley at the Stanford d.school — constantly take steps to help brainstormers switch back and forth between these modes in the moment.

    Again, I don't want to defend brainstorming too strongly because there may well be better methods for facilitating idea generation and creativity in general .  As I said last time, I do believe that teaching groups how to fight well is probably more important than teaching them how to brainstorm (and a lot harder) if you want to spark creativity, a point made well in The New Yorker story.  I also believe — and can show you evidence, notably from the late Robert Zajonc — that it  is impossible for human-beings to withhold judgement about anything they encounter (despite instructions to do so during brainstorming).  But I confess to be annoyed by the conclusion that "brainstorming doesn't work" because it is based on research that is largely irrelevant to how it is actually done in teams and organizations that use it routinely.

  • Stanford Magazine Story on the d.School: David Kelley as Founder, Jedi Master, and Cover Boy

     

        CV1-d school_FINAL_no-bleed
    The new Stanford Magazine just arrived and it has a fantastic story about the d.school called "Sparks Fly" and a nice sidebar on the efforts by Rich Crandall and others to teach design thinking in schools via their K-12 initiative. I am biased as I have been involved with IDEO (which David also founded) for over 15 years and with the d.school from the start.  As I wrote in a recent post about David's 60th birthday, he has had a huge effect on many people's lives and, I would argue, on bringing an engineering inspired (but appropriately flexible) perspective to problems as diverse as designing better radio shows, to improving company meetings, to launching new companies, to developing a cheap and portable alternative to incubators for premature babies in third world countries. 

    I especially liked how the magazine called David a "Jedi Master" as he has a rather magical and weird ability to mentor people, to give them strange and useful advice (like his reaction to my complaint that the d.school was out of control, when he advised that creativity was a messy process and would never be clean and pretty), to take time to give personal advice and help friends (David and his brother Tom Kelley played a big role in helping me make my decision last year to have surgery at the Cleveland Clinic rather than Stanford), to providing a perspective on leadership as striking a balance between love and money ( a perspective consistent with a lot of research, but stated oh so much better), to doing things that are just plain fun from giving me a singing fish to telling absurd and usually self-deprecating stories.  David is the rare leader who doesn't just talk about empathy, he has it in spades.

  • 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.

  • David Kelley on Love and Money: Dan Pink’s Kind of Guy

    This is a post I out up a few months back.  But as I am a guest on Dan Pink's new show "Office Hours" today at 2 Eastern, I thought I would bring to the top of my blog because David's perspective reminds me of Dan's philosophy and evidence in his bestseller "Drive."  Here goes:

    Yesterday, a couple hundred of us gathered at the Stanford d.school to celebrate David Kelley's 60th birthday.  The outpouring of love and affection was something — the guests included old friends he grew-up with, his family, Stanford colleagues (David is a professor and the main founder of the Stanford d.school), IDEO colleagues (David is co-founder of IDEO, was the first CEO, and the driving force behind the culture), dozens of former students, many of his friends from Silicon Valley businesses, and his friends from the car world (David loves old cars and has a pretty cool collection of old American cars and other cool things like a well-restored and "chopped" Mini and some classic Porsches).  The outpouring of affection was even stronger than it might have been because several years back David was diagnosed with cancer, and he seems to have beat it (his doctor was there, who David thanked for saving his life).

    David is one of the inspiring and wise people I've ever met (I once tried to write a book about him and IDEO called The Attitude of Wisdom… I have written about wisdom in subsequent books, but I still regret not finishing that book.)  One key to David's success is that, before he starts talking to the person in front of him, he actually listens carefully and takes in their body language before offering a comment or opinion — it is a rare talent, and one of many signs of his magnificent empathy. (Here is a recent Fast Company article that covers David and some of his latest accomplishments.)

    Document Kelley Lovemoney

    I could tell a a hundred stories about David, and as part of celebrating his 60th, perhaps I will write out a few more.  But one that has been top of mind lately is his "Love and Money" drawing (he did the one above for Good Boss, Bad Boss, but it remains unchanged over the years).  One of the first times I talked to David in depth, at some point in the early 1990s, as I was asking him about his management philosophy, he drew-out the graphic above and explained that, to run a business, you need to make money, but you also need to retain the talents and motivation of great people.  Yes, he said there are times when love and money go together, but there are always stretches of time when a boss needs to ask people to do things they don't want to do and don't love to make the necessary money required to keep the doors open.  But the smart boss realizes that he or she damn well build up some love points in advance to burn when some unpleasant money tasks are required.  

    This simple idea is strikingly similar to one of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss — albeit one derived from research and theory on leaders rather than David's pencil.  As I argue in the book, the best bosses realize that one of the balancing acts that they walk is between pressing people to perform well for the collective good and treating them with respect, dignity, and injecting joy into their days at work.   This is why I came close to calling Good Boss, Bad Boss "Top Dog on a Tightrope" as the best bosses carry-off this daily balancing act in a masterful way. 

    This is developed on Good Boss, Bad Boss in some detail.  Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 that focuses on my conversation with David about love and money (the same one where he drew the above picture; the original is in my Stanford office):

    David sees his job, or the job of any boss, as enabling people to experience dignity and joy as they travel through their work days (the love part, what I call humanity) AND to do work that keeps the lights on and provides them with fair pay, health care, and other necessities (the money part, what I call performance).  David says that, although sometimes you can accomplish both at once, there are always stretches when people must do things they don’t love to bring in money.  David explains that great bosses work to strike a balance between love and money over time, for example, by making sure that a designer who has worked on a dull, frustrating, and lucrative project gets to choose an inspiring if less profitable project the next time.

    Managers at IDEO don’t accomplish this balancing act just through bigger moves like project assignments.  They do it in little ways too: When designers have been working like dogs and are tired, grumpy, and starting to bicker, managers find little ways to slow things down, have some fun, and promote civility and mutual respect.  This might happen by making sure that a designer who has been grinding away designing a medical device can get a refreshing break by going to a brainstorming session, for example, on how to improve the airport security experience, get doctors to wash their hands, or design new playing pieces for the Monopoly board game. Managers at IDEO also provide breaks by shooting darts from Nerf guns or launching rubber darts called Finger Blasters at their people – which often degenerate into a full-scale 15 minute battles.  Such adolescent antics won’t work in every workplace.  But when the performance pressure starts heating-up and things are on the verge of turning ugly, skilled bosses everywhere find ways to give people a break, or tell a joke, or just make a warm gesture to place more weight on the “humanity” side of the scale.  As David put it, “foam darts aren’t for everybody, but there is always some form of play in every culture that allows people to let off steam.”

    Happy Birthday David.  As the  Neil Young song about his old car goes,  "Long May You Run."

  • 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!