Bob Sutton

Can You Handle the Mess?

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.

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.

Why The New Yorker's Claim That Brainstorming "Doesn't Work" Is An Overstatement And Possibly Wrong

The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here).  It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative -- all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog. 

I do however have a major quibble.  At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work.  He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established.  But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.

I once devoted way too much time to the question of whether this research shows that brainstorming is useless. In the name of full-disclosure, please note I am a Fellow at IDEO and also a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, which both use brainstorming a lot. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful method, and I have often said that the d.school in particular should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight. (And if you want evidence that the d.school believes in more than just brainstorming, look at their Bootleg.)

But please consider several facts about the brainstorming literature, at least as it stood about 7 or 8 years ago when I last reviewed it carefully and which is consistent with a more recent paper from The Academy of Management Review (Here is the abstract, which is quite short):

1. Nearly all brainstorming research is done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. In fact, there is at least two studies showing that, when facilitated properly, the so called productivity loss disappears. Check this 1996 study and this 2001 study.  To me, these two studies alone call into question the approach taken in most brainstorming studies, which don't use facilitation.   In other words, the conculsion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins.

2. As Keith Sawyer's comment implies, nearly all this research looks at only one measure of effectiveness, how quickly people can produce ideas.  Because people in groups have to take time to listen to each other, it slows the idea generation process. Most brainstorming studies compare the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups. In fact, if creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies, I once figured out that people are exposed to substantially more ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming -- and I would argue that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

3.A key part of face-to-face brainstorming is building on and combining the ideas of others.  This comparison is impossible in most brainstorming studies because an individual working alone is not exposed to the ideas of others.

Indeed, one of the very first posts I did on this blog in 2006  dug on this issue.  As I wrote then, "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." I also wrote about brainstorming here in BusinessWeek and they started with this setup.

The upshot of my research and my reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior. But if you look at the range of positive effects has at a place like IDEO -- spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what,  providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done -- none of which have not been examined in those simple experiments.  If so, those findings about pure efficiency may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating brainstorming in organizations that use it routinely.

In short, I believe that Lehrer's statement that brainstorming "doesn't work" is too sweeping because it has not been studied adequately in real organizations or with people who have real brainstorming skills. Again, I would describe this as a quibble; the article in The New Yorker is otherwise excellent.

P.S. for the true nerds, here is the 1996 academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote:

Download ASQ Storming

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

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!

 

Wisdom from Stanford's Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools

There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506.)  The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it. 

March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us.  For example, he does a lovely job of arguing -- using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great -- that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful.  But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :

        We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

March laments on page 503 :

My experience with business school students is that those who possess an instinct for joy, passion, and beauty often learn to suppress their expression by virtue of a sense that such instincts are unwelcome both in business schools and in business, thereby making the sense self-confirming.

I found this depressingly accurate for too many students, who often seem to lose their spark.  It doesn't just happen in business schools, to be clear, it is a danger in any school or institution that has strong norms, where people are in close physical proximity, and they have a lot of contact with each other (Indeed, Apple especially needs to guard against this now).  I do believe that the d.school -- at least at its best -- sometimes serves as a countervailing force, as the best teachers and classes there do encourage joy and self-expression.  But as much as I love being a professor, I do think that Jim raises an implicit question that every educator needs to keep asking him or herself:

"What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

I am not saying that conformity is all bad, but too often we teach it unwittingly. I am curious about your reactions to March's point.  Is he (and I guess me) too hard on the educational process?  What can be done to educate people without turning them into emotionally repressed and joyless clones?

P.S. BY the way, after I posted it, I realized that March's comment actually is another example of the issue I raised in my last post about how roles can change what do and believe so much.

Evidence that "Retail Therapy" is Effective

Just as I feared!  BPS Research reports a recent article containing a series of small studies that shows "retail therapy" does work -- at least in a sample of young American consumers.  And they found little evidence of regret or guilt after the purchases.  Here is the description of the third and most compelling of the studies:

"Lastly the researchers had 69 undergrads complete two retrospective consumption diaries, two weeks apart, documenting their purchasing behaviour, mood and regrets. All the participants admitted in the first diary to having bought themselves a treat (mostly clothes, but also food, electronics, entertainment products and so on). Sixty-two per cent of these purchases had been motivated by low mood, 28 per cent as a form of celebration. Surprisingly perhaps, treats bought as a form of mood repair were generally about half the value of treats bought for celebration, reinforcing the notion that retail therapy is constrained, not out of control. Moreover, according to the diaries, the retail therapy purchases were overwhelmingly beneficial, leading to mood boosts and no regrets or guilt, even when they were unplanned. Only one participant who'd made a retail therapy purchase said that she would return it, given the opportunity."

I better not show this study to my teenage daughters.  They love retail therapy and I have never seen a hint of guilt from them... only the motivation to do more in the future!

The citation is: Atalay, A., and Meloy, M. (2011). Retail therapy: A strategic effort to improve mood. Psychology and Marketing, 28 (6), 638-659 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20404.

P.S. As I have said before,  BPS Research Digest is one of my favorite places on the web.  Check it out.

 

Guest Column for CNN: On The Virtues of Drinking at Work

I have been getting emails now and then from the folks at CNN.com asking if I would like to do a guest column.  I have not been blogging anywhere much because I've been traveling a lot (I did a workshop on design thinking in Singapore a couple weeks back and just got from giving speeches in Brazil on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Good Boss, Bad Boss)  and using my available time to focus on the scaling project with Huggy Rao. 

As often happens to me, however, I ended-up writing something fun when I was "supposed to" be doing something else.  I was thinking about drinking in the workplace because I had been interviewed for Bloomberg about the subject where, although I was quoted as talking about all the evils (and there are nasty evils), I had actually spent much of the conversation with the reporter talking about how sharing a drink with colleagues can sometimes strengthen the social glue in a workplace.  This is an experience that many of us have enjoyed. And. more broadly, there is some interesting academic research here as well, notably a charming book called Drunken Comportment by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, which uses anthropological and other evidence to challenge to notion that drinking always changes things for the worse.

The final motivation to write the column came after I had a lovely time sharing a drink with some colleagues one Friday afternoon a few weeks back.   So I wrote this little piece from CNN called "Drinking at Work: Its Not All Bad," which just came out today.

Here is how it opens:

At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.

We talked about an array of topics -- a sick friend, kids, a cool wireless speaker the IT guy had set up and our preferences for different brands of Scotch. Then we went our separate ways. I was struck by how much the brief interaction affected me. I felt closer to my colleagues, more relaxed from the great conversation and the Scotch, and I felt good about working at a place that allows employees to take a prudent drink now and then.

That little episode illustrates the role that alcohol plays at its best. 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.

You can read the rest here.

I am curious to hear your reactions to this idea.  What are some of the other advantages of drinking at work? What can a company or boss to do maximize the virtues and minimize the dangers?   It is one of those complex subjects that, while there are times when it is clearly dead wrong (like when airline pilots drink on the job), there are many other times when complaints about imbibing some more like misguided morality plays than constructive objections. 

 

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

 

   
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.

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!

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.

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.)

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."

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:'

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! 

Launch Pad: A Stanford Class Where Students Started 11 Companies

There are many entrepreneurship classes taught throughout the world, in some students talk about how what explains the success and failure of start-ups, and very often, such classes include a business plan competition, where groups pitch ideas for new companies.  These classes often do help people start companies, and at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, our faculty have taught classes that have helped future entrepreneurs in many ways.  But this last term, two Stanford d.school faculty members (and experienced entrepreneurs and bosses) Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn ran a class called Launch Pad where students were just expected to talk about starting a company, the focus on was on launching the company during the 10 week class.  To be part of the class, student teams -- and many more applied than were accepted -- had to pitch their idea to Michael and Perry, and if they believed the idea was viable and the team was motivated enough, then they were accepted in the class to try to launch their company. 

The class has been over for a few week and was one of the most successful things ever done at the d.school.  (To be clear, a lot of what do fails, and I have been involved in some less successful classes with Michael and Perry, but they like most people at the d.school have the attitude that if you are failing a fair amount, you aren't trying hard enough or taking enough risks).  Here is what the d.school website says about the class:

From the first day, students pushed to both launch their own products, while using their experience and expertise to help classmates do the same. Throughout the quarter, teams constantly cycled through the design process, often making major changes to their initial idea in order to hone in on what their potential customers wanted, and what would be viable in the market.
 
The result? Eleven products or service were launched. Collectively, the teams had over $100,000 in revenue by the last day of class. Eight teams are now incorporated in four countries. Add in a bit of press from the New York Times and NBC, as well as a shout-out from Steve Jobs during his talk at the World Wide Developers conference, and you’ve got Launchpad: lifting design thinking teams into entrepreneurial orbit.

Not bad for a 10 week class, Huh? As just two example, check -out this story about Pulse, which Tech Crunch described as a "must have" app for the iPad, it is a news reader that you can but at itunes for 3.99, and is selling quite well. The students who founded it are Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta.  They already have a company called Alphonso Labs, and two employees, and are the one's who got the shout out from Jobs -- note that they just graduated from Stanford two weeks ago and are off to quite a start!  And check out this story on the d.school blog from as few weeks back, they were up to 50,000 downloads and were the #1 paid app at the iPad store.

A much different, but also very promising, is a service called Worker Express that was founded by Pablo Fuentes and Joe Mellin, which helps unemployed construction workers find jobs.  Check out this story on on the local NBC affiliate and this one at Fast Company.  I think the picture above is especially interesting because it shows how the prototyping process worked during Launch Pad, essentially, in the d.school space, the founders of the 11 companies had a "beta" or practice trade-show where they set-up booths and pitched their ideas to a a host of diverse people on campus and to the classes coaches and teachers too, so they could develop and refine their messages.  The picture captures Pablo and Joe pitching their service.

I am very proud of all the students in the class, of Michael and Perry, as well as d.school Fellow Corey Ford, who were part of the teaching team that made this all happen.  Great work.

David Kelley Nails It Again: "The d.school teaches creative confidence."

Last Friday, we had an opening gala for the new building (actually it is a massively reconstructed old building) that houses the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford -- or as everyone calls it, the d.school.  In fact, if you can take a video tour of the new building.  We were swimming in university officials of all kinds, although since it was the d.school, there were more students and former students than anything else.   Hasso gave a lovely and quite funny speech and the good feelings ran high all afternoon.

Many interesting things were said that afternoon. Yet, as is pretty much always the case, our founder and inspiration David Kelley (who also was the co-founder, first CEO and driving force behind IDEO) made the most striking observations.  David commented that, yes, we teach many elements the design thinking process to our students (in fact, many are cataloged in this amazing and free document called "The Bootcamp Bootleg," which I think is better than any book on how to practice design thinking than you can buy). He argued however, that the most important contribution that the d.school makes to Stanford students and the people we teach from outside the university too (from elementary school kids, to Girl Scouts, to doctors, to executives) is creative confidence.  David went on to explain that the main tests used to decide who gets into Stanford and who does not, as well as the bulk of the training in the technical aspects of engineering, math, and the sciences, are constructed to that there is a right answer to the question and it is the student's job to find that answer and report it back to the teacher.

Certainly, such definitive technical knowledge is crucial.  I want engineers who can calculate the right answers so that bridges don't fall down and airplanes don't crash.  As valuable as it is, however, such training -- with its focus on individual achievement under conditions under which the right answers are already known -- means that a lot of the people who come to the d.school for classes lack both the skills and the confidence to work on messy problems where the faculty don't know the answer (this is very disconcerting to some of our students) and the only hope is to keep pushing forward, observing the world and the people in it, identifying unmet needs, brainstorming solutions, and trying to develop prototypes that work -- and failing forward through the disconcerting process.

The thing I liked most about about David's emphasis on "creative confidence" is that I think he nailed the single most important thing that the d.school does when we are successful.  Yes, the assignments we give people and methods we teach them help on the journey, but as David suggested, the result of spending decades in educational system (this is true of the U.S. and other countries) where those anointed as the best students rapidly uncover the one and only tried and proven true answer (look at the blend of SAT scores and grades used by most colleges for admission decisions, at least 90% of that entails uncovering known right answers) is that some of the "smartest" students freak-out the most when faced with messy and unstructured problems.

The journeys that we take students of all ages on just about always entail helping people confront and overcome their discomfort with trying to solve unstructured problems (that the faculty have not already solved -- and in most cases -- don't know how to solve).  When the d.school process works right, that confidence means that, even when people aren't sure what methods to use, they have the energy and will to keep pushing forward, to be undaunted when ideas don't work, to keep trying new ideas, and -- as happens -- even when the deadline for the project comes and they do not have a decent solution, to believe that if they just had another few days, they would have come up with a great solution.   

So, although many words were said about what the d.school does at our opening ceremony and many more will be said in the future.  David has, as always, come-up with the best compact summary of what we strive to do: Teach Creative Confidence. 

P.S. A related argument was made by psychologist Robert Sternberg, who argued that creativity can't happen unless people decide to pursue it. See this post.  But I think David's point is even more crucial, because if people decide to pursue, but lack confidence they can succeed, the are likely to suffer and unlikely to succeed.

Fantastic Free Conference on Reconciling Business Growth and Sustainability on May 4h at Stanford

My friend and colleague Debra Dunn from the Stanford d.school just wrote me about a conference that she is hosting as part of her class on Sustainable Abundance.  She has put together such a fantastic line-up that I think I am going to sneak out of the house to attend.   Here are the details and it is open to the public and free. BUT as they need to know roughly how many people are attending, if you are going to do so, please RSVP to [email protected].  Here is the scoop:

2010 SUSTAINABLE ABUNDANCE MINI CONFERENCE

Theme: Reconciling Business Growth and Sustainability

When:   Tuesday, May 4, 3:15-5:00

Where:  Stanford d.school, Peterson Building (Building 550), Studio 1

Panelists:

Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart.  He was appointed by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott as the first vice president of the company's sustainability initiative. Now he heads Wal-Mart's private brand sourcing strategy and drives   increased ecological transparency of Wal-Mart's suppliers.

Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method Home Products. Lowery now  heads the Greenskeeping team at Method, which is composed of environmental specialists, scientists, and toxicologists

Albert Straus, founder and President of Straus Family Creamery, the first Organic Dairy west of the Mississippi

The conference will be moderated by Debra Dunn and Bob Adams.   Bob pioneered the design for sustainability practice at IDEO, where he is now a Fellow.

The range of experience and skill here is just stunning.  The thing that really impresses me about this line-up is that every person is deeply committed to supporting sustainably in ways that mesh with and support financial performance.  And all five -- the panelists and moderators -- have done more than talk about doing so, they each spent years making it happen,  I also have heard most of them speak, and this is a remarkably lively, fun, and honest group.  Again, please RSVP to [email protected].   

P.S. As an added bonus, if you go to the conference, you get to see the new d.school building, which is very cool.

DoYou Like My New Graphics?

I was rather shocked, and quite delighted, to get an email from Katie Clark at IDEO yesterday with several different new graphics for the top of my blog.  I didn't ask her or talk to her about, she just decided to send me some new ones because she and her colleagues at IDEO were looking at my blog and decided to try some new designs.  I feel mighty lucky to have friends who are world class designers and decide on a whim to give me presents like that.  Thanks Katie!

The new design above is the one I like best.  In the IDEO and d.school spirit, this is a prototype and I can always go back to the old design or perhaps see if you like one of the other one's better.  For starters, what do you think of the new design above?

P.S. I would also like to give a big thank you to Tim Keely for inserting the new graphic.

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.