Stanford Webinar - Apply Design Thinking in Your Work

we're live we got the right slides are ready to go hi my name is Phil Burnett again I'm the executive director of design program we're going to talk about design thinking and applying it in the workplace so the first the first thing I want to start with is sort of a quote from ours our our senior academic a person David Kelly David's also the founder of the d.school our Institute for design thinking here at Stanford and prior to that was the founder of IDEO which is probably one of the world's premier sort of innovation consultancies and David is the sort of big thinker behind the Design Thinking idea we had been teaching design as Stanford for over 50 years the design program that I run which has both an undergraduate and a graduate degree program in it you can get an undergraduate degree and mechanical engineering and product design and you can get a graduate degree in design both from the mechanical engineering school that program started in 1963 and we've been working in this very multidisciplinary radical collaboration methodology for a long long time but around 2004 2005 David came up with the idea of moving our work into a wider domain of problem solving for everybody so reframing it as a method of thinking design thinking and he's been quoted in his TED talk and in his book on creative confidence and saying we believe that the next generation of innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers and Design Thinking is just that it's just a way of solving problems David will describe it optin is just another tool in your tool belt just because you master the principles of design thinking doesn't mean that you give up on you know using other powerful methods scientific method engineering thinking and the methods of making decisions that you're taught in a sort of a business school or business kind of thinking but Design Thinking works particularly well on large scale multidisciplinary problems where it's really difficult to get clear boundary conditions and lots and lots of data typically other methods of making decisions require that you have good data in order to make good decisions in the case of design problems you almost never have any data because you're really projecting and designing things that are going to occur in the future and as we all know you can't get data on stuff that hasn't happened yet anyway we talk about the workplace I want to sort of maybe demystify this and with the potential of oversimplifying it you know work is just a place where people go everyday and it's organized typically around certain tasks that have to get done certain certain vertical tasks like marketing manufacturing operations design engineering research and then it's organized around the skills that people have in those different domains and really if you break it down you know the culture of any organization is just this collection of behaviors what do we do when we get to work do we go to lots of planning and budget meetings we go to lots of meetings where we talk about stuff or do we spend most of our time designing building you know creating and when you if you're talking about transforming the way you work and when we have the master series class on campus I get a chance to me with 60 70 people almost every time and they're all in different kinds of work environments in the financial industry in the design industries in in hospitality and finance you name it and they talked to me about the things they do at work and mostly they say that the stuff that they do at work doesn't feel as productive or as generative as it could be and they're very interesting in learning about design and design methods to sort of try to supercharge the innovation and just supercharge the environment and so I always come back to well if you want to transform your work what you're really saying is I want to do different things when I get there so we're really talking about what are the behaviors that you're going to change and one of the skills to children boy with these new behaviors to kind of change the way work occurs for you and you know we think that you change those things by first training yourself up on these new ideas that design thinking and then essentially modeling these new behaviors when you behave like a creative person your staff your team other people see those behaviors and they want to emulate your particular if you're in a leadership position so you know creativity is not a very magical thing it's actually a pretty simple thing to understand all humans are naturally creative we're tool makers and builders by nature unfortunately a lot of your education in the u.s. anyway has some and a beaten creativity out of you and there may be you know bureaucratic structures or ways of working which also limit you what you think is this possible scope of creative behaviors at your work but I think if we just focus on you know these kind of ideas about what sort of behaviors to creative people use and kind of mindsets to they engage in and then we think about what you need to do to kind of learn those skills we can we can have a pretty robust conversation about how do you transform your work environment so design thinking is both a process and a series of mindsets the design thinking process starts with empathy we always say don't start with a problem start with people people are where the the interesting data is people are an interesting thing to observe then we redefine the problem we ib8 an ideation is just in a general term for lots and lots of ways that we have of coming up with lots and lots of ideas that theory being with the more ideas you have the better your choices will be and then we know that you can't just design in a vacuum so we like that we have a bias to action we like to build stuff and test it and build stuff and test it and then that way we kind of seek to understand the problem in a different way even if you don't use that process you know you could think like a design thinker you can think like we think and that is intended tends to be these five things and bias to action you'll notice in most design thinking workshops and in the training that we do here at Stanford there's not a lot of planning not a lot of charting not a lot of stuff that although it may be useful in certain domains when you're in the domain of innovation planning sort of such things down it comes up to work so we have a bias to action we tend to start with actions and then and then dissect the data we get from those actions we believe in radical collaboration which is truly collaboration across the organizations across disciplines marketing working with engineering working with design working with operations working with the field salespeople all on the same team we believe you know that when you get lots and lots of people together that have really speak different languages and come into problems in a different way you get innovative solutions but you also get a lot of chaos because people don't know how to work together and so we train people on the process as a kind of anchor to make sure that the team knows what they're doing and they're always mindful of how to move forward curiosity is probably the number one mindset of a designer and the idea of reframing problems taking whatever the problem statement is and really flipping it upside down expanding it abstracting and finding ways to approach the problem that expand the potential solution space you know when I work with teams to come to the master class you know I'm generally impressed with the you know the smart and dedicated people that show up and want to do a good job and want to learn how to do things better and my premise is if I took any six people and put them on a team and I gave them a problem they're all smart neural motivated and you know plus or minus a few degrees if everybody's working on the same problem with a smart motivated team they're going to get a pretty good cluster of answers but the answers will be clustered around some norm the trick is if I give the one team the design problem and say go and I take the other team of sadness and give you some information those guys don't have and the information will be a sort of a nuanced data set about users preferences and opinions users you know where they get blocked where they get unblocked and kind of the kinds of things that might delight these users and give that team special that special information they're going to come up with much better ideas just because they reframed the problem you know everybody else was working on the coffee cup and they were working on creating the Starbucks experience which is really a completely different problems when we talk about reframing it's a super powerful tool and we're going to get into that a little bit in this talk as we talk about you know what we can actually accomplish in the next 20 minutes or so to talk about this process so when people say I just break it down for me in five minutes what's this whole design thinking about it to just remember two things we can't remember the whole thing and the five mindsets and the you know five steps and whatever just remember two things empathy and brainstorming empathy because we're going to start with people not the problem we're not going to we're not going to solve the problem of building a better wheel barrel a better office chair better something we're going to go out and look at people in offices and figure out what their behaviors are we're going to go watch construction guys on a jobsite move stuff around and see how they how they do it and then we're going to take that data and we're going to come up with lots and lots I mean lots of ideas hundreds of ideas not one or two that we choose from but literally hundreds that we choose from and the ideas will be because of the process we use we'll some will be close to existing solutions and some will be completely different solutions completely reframing the problem so if we're just going to focus on these for this talk right now because I think it's where I can give you one or two tools that are instantaneously actionable in your organization and and with that kind of a brief intervention maybe you can get something going that won't you that you'll find useful so essentially the empathy step is we steal from the tools of the anthropologists and ethnographers and we do a lot of observation and we ask lots of questions and then we come back with all this sort of interesting observational data we take videos of people we and we ask them lots of questions and we just observe there we do what we call a moccasin walk we'd spend a day with our users to try to understand what's really going on users are interesting people of course they're going to try to help you when you ask them questions and they're actually going to try to please you and tell you the things that you want to hear they're also going to tell you about the ways they think their job should be not the way it actually is they're going to they're going to tell you about the aspirational qualities of the problem they're working on how good they're at it but when you actually observe them and watch how they do all these little workarounds and and how they have difficulties understanding you know how the software really works or how they opened the product really functions you get a lot of information but the thing that we find is that without putting that information into a couple of different frameworks it's really hard to decide what's actionable and what's not so the one in the one empathy framework that I think is the most accessible and it's a pretty straightforward idea is we have an overall framework and this is just a little chunk of it where we put a two by two together where we go from concrete to abstract and then on the horizontal axis its analysis on the left and synthesis on the right and there's a complex method of filling out this framework but the one I want to look at is when we're trying to get some insights from our observation we have a couple of different techniques over in this top left quadrant we digesting customer and user needs at the abstract level we do a thing called an empathy map that I'm going to show you and we do if we use the hierarchy of needs Maslow's hierarchy of needs in a specific way to try to capture information and framework it in a way that we can do something with we have a bunch of other techniques as well but I'm not going to go into those right now so there's a classic a little diagram I think it comes from the ideal guys and what you see on the left is sort of the external world of this mythical user what you see on the right is the internal world of this user and here's here's the sort of truism when you add in the world and you talk to people who are using your products you want to come up with better ideas for your products or your services your financial services whatever the experiences that you've designed for your customers all you can really get out of them is you can observe what they do their actual behaviors the way in which they work and the workaround they have and you can talk to them and you can hear what they say but we never believe that what they say and what they do is actually what's going on we believe that what's really going on is what they're thinking but the thoughts behind the way they framed what they say including trying to please you or trying to look better than they really are and then what they do is really not so as is really drew their behaviors are really driven by their feelings and a lot of times there's a mismatch between what someone feels about a situation what they say about the situation so a very simple framework it tends to really open up this design space and really be productive is this simple little two-by-two you go out in the world and you write down on a sticky note or in your notebook all the things you saw people doing let's say we were talking about where the wheel barrel company we want a new wheel barrow first of all you'd never ask for a new wheel barrow because that's a wheel barrow as a solution not a problem the problem is how do I move stuff around the job site and get it to where people need it when they need it on time you know it's always delivered you know to the edge of the job site on a big pallet all the bricks are over there but the Claire's they're somewhere else so you never frame the problem around the solution which is the wheel but you say how do we move stuff around so you got in a job site and you watch what people do you watch how they move stuff around and sometimes they use wheelbarrows and sometimes they don't and sometimes they come up with very creative ways of sort of jury-rigging wheelbarrows to do things they were never intended to do and then you interview them and you find out what what they say about what they're doing but then the design team takes those those observations and maybe you've had three or four people but do three or four different observations so then you write them all down on post-it notes and you do cluster them in the do column and in the say column maybe some things overlap maybe some things are completely contradictory people said completely different things different users had completely different needs so you cluster those on the left side of the diagram and then the the insight part the creative part is you now you have to sort of make a guess it's truly I guess it's me we call it design intuition that's what they said but what are they really thinking you know I'm sure you've had this experience is where you know you people have said something that they root but it really came from a deeper internal story or thought so when you break down the observations this way you find that on the right-hand side if you figure out what their guess what they're thinking and guess what they're actually feeling the feelings are the emotions surrounding things that feelings have to do with how the behaviors are mapped into their internal world for instance I think one of the thing I was at Apple for seven years working on the notebooks that devil did in the early and mid 90s our observation the general observation that Apple's built around is that technology makes people feel stupid you're using a Windows machine or some other kind of an Android machine nowadays or something and you're trying to get a simple task done like somebody asked me what's Ryan's phone number while I'm on a call with you know with a Corinne and I got to look up his phone number while I'm simultaneously talking and on every other phone on the planet what would you do you would say well I'm probably going to hang up on you but I'll give it a try and then you try to sort through menus and then you would hang up on the person and you know and the phone would make you both feel inadequate and stupid because it was clearly your fault not the phone's fault that you couldn't find the data you wanted and you took that feeling and internalized it as a sort of overall sense that I'm not good at technology when when that's the Nats the key once you want you to discover that story that feeling and what's going on behind the actions you realize oh I can make you fall in love with my product if I don't make you feel stupid if I make you feel powerful and so all of Apple's work is really you know just focused around that idea of putting the hand the power in the hands of the user and making the actions so transparent that you don't have to learn them you just know how to do them right so looking up a phone number on a iPhone with a big graphics screen and the numbers you know scrolling in a and you know at the end of a simple touch interaction you never feel stupid so you can use empathy mapping as a general case for whatever observations you've made and the insights come from looking at the thoughts and the feelings that you can ply from the actions and the words another way to you know another way to map things sort of according to the human need again you know we don't start with a problem we start with the people so we go out and we talk to bricklayers and carpenters and stuff from the job site or we talk to cell phone users we have a theory that every action every interaction every product actually touches on all five levels of the hierarchy of needs this is you know Abraham Mansell's worked from a long time ago you know I think current psychology indicates that although he thought this was a hierarchy and you needed to fulfill psychological safety you know love and belonging needs before you could fulfill esteem or self actualization that we now know that that's not true you can you can actually still be struggling with you know you know your basic safety and and physiological needs you can be very very poor but still be executing art at a very high level in order to create you know self actualization but our theory in using this is that you just take any action you've seen and you map it against all of the layers because every action has something to do with how you feel about yourself every action has something to do with creating you know some sort of sense of safety or psychological or physical and every action that you do to go in you're interacting with products or services can create senses of self-esteem create senses of belonging what are brands brands are just you know things you belong to you belong to them you believe as you don't buy wranglers you buy Apple you don't buy value by you know you like Disney you don't like Nickelodeon so you know you're always belonging to something in the consumer culture and it's always around some kind of a need and oftentimes the only observations you have may and one or two of these frameworks are one of the true these layers but what you do is you then through that design intuition thing that that creative leap to say well how does this tool that the carpenter is using actually create self-actualization and self-esteem for the carpenter when it looks like it's simply just about you know creating a easier way to do a task and those those conceptual leap soft and again just like with the empathy map unlock a possible observation or at least a point of view that you can now prototype test and see what see what what new innovation will come out of it so basically what both of these frameworks do is they argue they're arguing that in every product in every interaction and every service or experience that you that you offer your customer consumer whether it's designed or not it is it is a it's a it's an experience that has touchpoints experience that they go through and that it is not simply the rationalization of I wanted something you provided it I bought the product or service I used it we're done it's always about the internal state emotional state of the user and if you and since you cannot observe people don't have glass heads and they don't tell you what their emotional interstate is all about you you become expert again using the tools of ethnography observation putting yourself you know in an empathetic situation walking in their shoes doing what they do you put yourself in a situation to understand the emotional needs of that are behind the physical or observable actions and once you've understood that using these frameworks a whole bunch of new ideas become possible and then you use the brainstorming and prototyping and testing process to see which of your insights turn out to prove true so it although it's those two primers are pretty simple you know say do versus thing feel put things on the hierarchy of needs they're actually one we don't notice most people don't do those unless they're trained in design thinking bait they execute a functional solution but they don't execute a solution that delights or engages a user in a deep way you know I'm I teach in the design school I teach engineers how to do great design we do come from a sort of you know strict design tradition form does follow function the way we teach it but remember the you know the form follows function one of the functions of objects in our built world particularly in the technological world where objects can be increased and click difficult and opaque and hard to use one of the functions of objects is to delight us one of the functions of objects is to be beautiful so that our built world is a beautiful place it's not simply the you know the old Bauhaus Germanic notion that function was strictly the mechanical function of the product to resolve the you know the need of the strict usage because there is no such thing with human beings as you know it's just the usage it's always about how the person feels and so when you open up your design process to the empathy step it really changes the information you have to design with and we find that that's one of the major things that leads to innovation ok so if you've got if you've got if you're the team that's got all this new data about how users think and feel and what they actually how the product even the simplest little product contributes to their self-actualization or self-knowledge an awareness and then projection of themselves in the world is competent and intelligent people now you've got to come up with lots of ideas and here's the other just again when I only have a little bit of time this is the other one I hit on my particular brainstorming we have lots of techniques for ideation but particularly I want to talk about brainstorming because because so many people do it so wrong and and then they don't get the results they want and then they blame brainstorming is the process and the studies on brainstorming that have said brainstorming doesn't work are flawed a number of ways but brainstorming can really not work when you don't do it correctly or you don't do it well but when it is done properly it creates the opportunity to generate hundreds of ideas and number one thing we see when we're looking working with startups working with large companies doesn't matter the scale people grab the first idea or the first couple of ideas and run with and and ninety-nine out of a hundred times those first couple of ideas are the things that are available to you they're the things you know how to do and so by definition they're not innovations they're line extensions they're small increments on the existing ideas of products but by definition they're the first thing that was available to you to your thinking which are the team's thinking and they are not innovative enough and people truncate the process because they want to get into implementation implementation always feels good even when you're implementing the wrong thing your bills just love you know organizations love to see action action looks like implementation and over and over again we see people implementing essentially mediocre ideas with gusto and then wondering why you know they didn't they didn't move the bar on the sales meal or on the innovation needle so here's what what we say brainstorming is this complicated thing it's really about the mind-body relationship it's about engaging more intelligence than just your intellectual intelligence you have kinesthetic intelligence you have emotional intelligence which we were just talking about the whole empathy pieces about amplifying the emotional intelligence and information in that spectrum you have information about cultural things you have information about physical things all of that gets employed in a robust brainstorming process and I like to use the analogy to jazz because if you think about what a jazz ensemble does it gets together and it innovates in the moment it tries to play songs in a way that it's never been played before but everybody's playing the same song and everybody's trying to sort of solve the same problem and I love this analogy because when I see people getting together for brainstorming and they aren't prepping properly there they're not they're not assembling the team properly it sort of feels to me kind of like a jazz ensemble that's disorganized right so I happen to be a jazz fan kind of blue is the best-selling jazz album of all time it was an all-star cast pulled together by Miles Davis Bill Evans on piano Jimmy Cobb on drums Paul Chambers Cannonball Adderley John Coltrane Miles Davis these were the Titans of jazz in that era and when they came together they were able to create something that nobody had ever created before and just you know kind of blow the socks off of the jazz world now imagine you know I say hey Ryan let's get together and play some jazz and you've never played a saxophone before but here's your saxophone and Corinne here sure um I want you to play drums and I want you to sit in with Bill Evans and Miles Davis you know it's going to be pretty impossible for you to even play the instruments much less get to the level where you can play the instrument so the mechanics disappear and what you're actually doing is playing off of the other musicians and expanding and growing the ideas you know that are being presented musically in the moment you know in a temporal framework you got to stay on track on the music you can't stop the music in the middle and go what note am I supposed to play now I mean so the mechanics of brainstorming are exactly identical to the mechanics of great jazz you have to be expert at your instrument your instruments your brain you have to be willing to be free and connected in the moment to every idea that's on the table and you have to be able to respond you know without critic internal criticism or external criticism and your goal is to make something happen that you had no idea of when you started and so the mechanics of this are difficult and even perfect mechanics do not make great improvisation I know lots of people who are great you know mechanical musicians who cannot improvise apparently this is a 10,000 hour problem I mean I see people sitting down to brain and they don't do it very much and they haven't done it a lot and they've not really ever gotten past a sort of novice stage of improvisation if you believe in the 10,000 hours to mastery I'm going to get it if you haven't done you know really good structured brainstorming with facilitation to make sure that you're doing it well for at least 100 hours you're still not even competent and to move from competent experts probably going to take you a thousand hours so even if you brainstorm three hours a week every week on your job right you know that's only going to get you 150 hours and so when you sit down to brainstorm make sure you're brainstorming with people who are at least expert or at least competent at this so that you have the opportunity to take the combined competencies and create some music nobody's ever heard before so this discipline of letting go and inventing in the moment really takes quite a bit of practice it's not as simple as people make it it's not just sitting in a room tossing out ideas that's not making music so brainstorming is effective but it works a couple of unique ways one the session that you have generates ideas in itself and if you do it correctly the session isn't over until you've sort of then ranked those ideas but the session is also fodder for later thinking whatever came up in the session still exists it's sort of a live discussion that happens even after and so oftentimes when people measure the output of brainstorming sessions they're not measuring what happens 24 48 72 hours later and the other big thing about brainstorming it's a impact on your work process is today we come in and brainstorm Monday is the day we do brain start we do a really structured brainstorming to two hours in the morning the charts in the afternoon that's really different than today is the day we come in and do planning today is the day we come in and do budgeting it's a different behavior and once it becomes a normal behavior and normative behavior in your organization you've started to move the organization from saying the most important clearly the most important thing we do in the organization is what we spend the most time on right so if we spend the most time on planning it must be that we're not a product organization we're planning organization there's a great quote from the former CEO for dalla malaise who came from one of the young engineers at Ford he said culture eats process for lunch and he was talking to this young engineer what do you mean by this well I thought I'd join when I joined for it I thought I was during a car culture I want I wanted to design cars I wanted to talk about the Mustang I wanted to talk about cars I've been here three years I've been in planning meetings tollgate meetings I've been in lots of meetings but none of these meetings have we ever talked about a car so clearly we're not a car culture and I just do a quick assessment around your own organization take it a call to take your calendar from last week add up the amount of time you did different activities planning budgeting you know creative innovative activities done things and the thing you spent the most time on is the thing that evidently your organization values the most because that's where it's spending all the time and money when you change out some of those behaviors for brainstorming a new norm is established and a shift in the culture is established because you're saying something else has value but the other real reason brainstorming hasn't been as effective maybe in some places as it could be is that it's not really kind of doing it the way we think you should do it brainstorming actually has four parts to it only one part of the brainstorming session most people skip the other three so here are the four parts dreaming the problem warming up the actual brainstorm which is what everybody says they're doing even though they don't necessarily do it that well but that's the thing and then they tend to stop right there and then they don't do the next step which is grouping and selecting ideas so you got to frame a good problem right framing is actually really the reframing thing it's the coming up with something that's that's open-ended enough so that a large number of ideas can exist under that question but setting a goal without describing the solution you know saying how can I move bricks or construction materials from here to there on a jobsite is a very different question than how do I make a better wheelbarrow making a wheelbarrow is a noun and then noun is always a solution reframed question a good question for a brainstorm is always about an action Reverb if you have a noun in york in your framing question you've described a solution and it's not going to work it's not it's a it's not it's not a subtle difference it's actually a huge difference the difference between saying designing wheelbarrows and getting more versions of the noun versus designing a new method or process for transporting materials completely different problem so you want to ask an open-ended question use a verb not a noun but if you're too abstract nothing happens and we also see people saying trying to you know Bowie ocean solve world peace make everybody happy those aren't questions that can get any traction on that's like you're trying to improvise the jazz but you haven't picked a song yet you need a song you need something that focuses the energy of the group but but the big big errors are you to making it too big or making it actually brainstorming the solution at the problem warming up people are going to come from the budget meeting or they're going to come from right now it's it's finals week at Stanford pretty soon so never try to brainstorm during finals week because people's brains are just not in that mode right then you know but you do need to move people from their analytic mind to their synthetic mind from the critical focused attention which is a powerful thing to have in business to a non-judgmental open focus which is a powerful thing to have when you're trying to do innovation and that's not a transition that's made easily we did intend to do warm-up exercises we steal a lot from improv comedy we steal a lot from theater we steal a lot just just from ceilings right if you come to most um these school classrooms it almost looks like a kindergarten because we have playdough and popsicle sticks and and pipe cleaners and construction paper and little scissors but we get people in a building mode we give them play clay and we have them play and we do other things to sort of move them out of their critical to their analytic or to their non-judgmental synthesis focus in the brainstorm itself we find that if you have a central facilitator who's writing down all the ideas it goes too slowly typically a brainstorming - team is too two-five don't go much more than five or six or you just can't get enough conversation going rapidly enough think about it you know you never see jazz improvisational jazz groups that are bigger than six by the time they get to eight twelve fourteen it's not really improvisational anymore they're playing off a score you got to be able to see each other and react to each other so you know in human beings that's about a five person circle no bigger than that but in order for that to be very generative and for the be lakhs of ideas everybody has to be able to write down and post their own they write them and post them in in rapid sequence and that gets rid of the bottleneck of the facilitator and then we have the rules you got a different judgment you got to go for volume stay on track one conversation at a time the more you draw the more visual you are the better headline which just means describe the idea really quickly and let somebody else get their idea up don't don't say it's a wheelbarrow that has a motor and the motor has this other thing on it and it's got the transmission with just say motorized wheel barrow and go you want to build up the idea of others and stay on topic you've heard all these things before encourage wild ideas let me tell you why they're there and why they work you you defer judgment because the number one thing that crushes human creativity is fear you're afraid you'll be called out to be stupid you're afraid you'll say something that's offensive you're afraid you'll say something that's so weird that people will look at you funny it and if we don't make a safe space and disconnect the fear motivation your pre sensor ideas even before you know you've had them literally things won't even come into consciousness because you'll be in a state of fear we measure people in a brain scanner and we notice the amygdala is firing we noticed a fight or flight or freeze response is firing when that is happening it is almost impossible to be creative so you've got to enter for judgment and let people feel safe in order to have the kinds of ideas that you want to have your visual because you want to give voice to nonverbal thinking about 60% of your brains a visual processor a lot of ideas show up as engines but they can't be put into words so sketching is a great way to have more ideas it doesn't matter how well you sketch just you know crazy little you know cartoons are better then really elaborate sketches building on the ideas others loaner lowers his ownership barrier so we're all having ideas and I'm allowed to build on top of Renza is or currents ideas it's fine it wasn't my idea in the first place so I'm not attached to it I'm not going to be afraid if it's too crazy I just it was Ryan's crazy idea not mine I just made it weirder and I like the idea of encouraging stealing this is the one place square where if you don't have an idea just wait for somebody else to have an idea that's what happens in a jazz group Miles Davis starts playing a riff from you know somewhere my prince will come and then somebody else starts playing Surrey with the fringe on top and the two on top of those things and somebody comes on top of that with another another riff for another notion of a son and that whole thing is what's the beautiful thing it's not just the one idea at a time you've probably been in brain storms just before chart bad where everybody has one idea at a time we call this popcorn brainstorm everything you know I just just explode randomly from the center of the group when you use a yes and methodology out of improv yeah I just get better and better much faster and encouraging wild ideas because there's always groupthink in any group there's always the sort of stereotypical thinking people show up at a brainstorming session with a whole bunch of ideas they've already had and they want to tell you those ideas great let them get better those that those are typically the ideas I refer to as the junk people come with great get them all on the board post them all and then go way beyond those right David Kelly's you know famous for saying look if you don't go beyond the normal you can't come back to anything innovative so you don't know you've gone across the line until your way across the line and so we'll change up brainstorming for saying imagine there's no gravity and we're on the moon or imagine you're a purple elephant how would you solve this problem we're just looking for crazy ideas that that then we're going to execute those but that those will stimulate ideas farther from the center that can be made actionable so that's why we have those those things I here's the thing that this is the one that just kills me people go in a room maybe if they even warm up maybe they brainstorm fantastically beautiful music has been made but somebody forgot to turn on the tape recorders and we have no record of it at all what actually happens mostly is people take a picture of the whiteboard there's all these post-its on the whiteboard it's like yeah I'll take a picture of the whiteboard and that's where I just go to die they live on cell phone cameras pictures of hundreds of post-its on a whiteboard and nobody does anything with them so it's perfectly reasonable for your boss to say I think this is a waste of time what did you guys accomplish oh we had a bunch of ideas why it was really great a lot of fun you know we had candy and we did this fun warm-up improv thing it's like well what happened so you don't want to be judging during the brainstorm but right after the brainstorm is the perfect time to group and select ideas that look promising now here's the deal if you just select you know first lots of ideas overlap and so you that one of these you put them on posters you can kind of cluster all the ideas about changing the way the field service organization works and cluster all the other ideas about the way you know wheelbarrows have two wheels or five wheels or ten wheels and then you start and then you start overlaying you know some questions on the ideas because what you want to walk away with when your boss says what happened in the brainstorming sessions you know we had 142 ideas we down selected those into six categories that we think you know have something to do with our business model well we've got one wildcard category that we think has got the most innovative stuff in it and we down selected from that to five things you want to prototype and try with customers that get you promoted that kind of you know talking about what happened in the brainstorm is how you make it proactive and useful and here's the deal if you just select for the ideas that are feasible you're back to doing the stuff that you knew you can do before you got in the room so you got to pick a different selection criteria we particularly like most delightful because delightful brings in the customers voice brings in that thing is going to just make somebody go oh I got to have that I didn't know I wanted that but I got to have that now there's a rumor that Apple does know there's no research or market stuff is that true Apple does more research with customers anybody on the planet they don't ask customers if they should do a phone but they do once they get their idea to do a phone they research the heck out of it because there they are they're after that delightful customer experience that's experience where you didn't even know you wanted the darn thing as soon as you see it try it you have to have it so grouping and selecting is critical pick a criteria that makes sense the takeaways are if you change the way you work and you change the time you spend on these new behaviors you will actually change the outcomes of work and also everybody's experience of it things you focus on practicing empathy that leads to each side empathy that leads to insights and move to the Jazz brainstorming model I like to call it and then if you personally model the behavior you want from your team you act differently and you reward differently you're going to discover that that work has transformed is transforming itself into a much more creative and innovative experience and by the way it takes about eight weeks to create a new behavior the behavioral psychologists tell us I'm seven weeks into my new diet I'm not sure I'm there yet but it does take a while to transform behaviors and organizations but if you just actively you know you think everybody should act pretty soon they will change their behaviors to be what you're looking for well there's a couple there's a couple that are pretty pretty tactical and lemme answer those first question came in sure we have a facilitator while brainstorming and I think my recommendation is you always have someone who's organized a brainstorm who's you know you always have Miles Davis we're going to play this song we're going to work on this problem and the person who actually is very careful about selecting that multidisciplinary team that's going to brainstorm together so that's what the facilitators role is they're not the bottleneck in the idea having our idea recording so I've really should be putting things together and bringing their own ideas down on post-its and posting it individually but yeah there is a there isn't typically a person who calls the session and organizes the and just the framing and organizing of ideas at the end and a report out to whoever the stakeholders are can you get can I get give you an example of a kind of insights that I realized from the empathy effort well you know here's the thing you know I always say you don't start with the problem you start with people but of course everybody just starts with a problem even at the d.school you know we have a class called the proneural design for extreme affordability where we're trying to work on the big questions poverty infant mortality food supply particularly in the developing world and there was a team that was given a problem to go to Nepal and design really inexpensive low costing cue because incubators and us incubators you know made in the technological world of 40 50 60 $70,000 things and there was a theory that that the third world or developing nations couldn't afford incubators so we needed a low-cost one design $100 incubator a $500 incubator so this team got all together used their design thinking skills went over to the Stanford ICU unit looked at how incubators and immature babies you know are connected came up with some plans and then they put in Nepal when they got there the doctor they were supposed to be working with said well these are really dumb ideas and you don't understand the problem come with me and he took them to the ruins of the room where the babies would be kept and he said what do you notice in this room and they said well you have lots of incubators this yeah I get incubators donated anytime I want that's not the problem what else do you notice and one of the kids finally said where are all the babies he goes yeah there's no babies in the hospital babies aren't born in hospitals and Nepal they're born in villages come with me eight hours in a Jeep down a dusty road to a village where they met three women who had just you know in the last six months lost their babies and they realized one they had the wrong problem too they need to detect these women to find out what was really going on what was really going on is because of bad prenatal care low birth weight babies are born low birth weight just means they're compromised and that they can't regulate their body temperature the reason they need to be an incubator simply because if they are if they aren't kept warm they literally die of hypothermia will it reframe the problem that's the embrace company they started a company out of this they make an infant's essentially a sleeping bag that you can suck an infant in you boil a particular chemical in a pot of water you stick that in the sleeping bag and you can keep it in from warm at body temperature for you know the eight to twelve hours it takes to get to a hospital but just recognizing one that the problem was incorrectly frames to that they were willing to break out of the framing of the NGO that they were working with three it's just actually talking to the women and finding out well their first designs were little boxes and the women said no that looks like a coffin I'm not going to put my baby in that and then it was like you know you can't just take the baby to the hospital you got to take the baby the mom and the whole family to the hospital because it's not like she's going to drop the kids at daycare that doesn't exist so the whole iteration of that design and really understanding who the user was it took nine months to a year they've shipped hundreds of thousands of these baby sleeping bags and and saved they believe hundreds of thousands of babies in the process last one is going to prote this to your boss how do you get how do you get people to want to try you know try something like this there was also a question about incentives what do you have to do for incentives so organizations are just like people they're fearful you need to lower fear the way you lower fear is a boss is you change the incentives because your team's going to fail it's going to fail a lot when they're trying to do innovation that the whole notion of innovation is to do something that's never been done before what do you think the success rate on that is well if you're a venture capitalist and you're famous in the valley your success rate is one in ten so if you're not willing to act like a venture capitalist you're not ready for innovation it would be one argument so what the boss can do it is always change the incentive we actually do incentives for failure for what we call good failures failures so you'll learn a lot from that are highly generative so that's what a boss can do how do you convince the boss to try this stuff it's almost always you pick a small project that's not on the critical path it might even just be let's redesign how we do purchase artists around here let's redesign how we do expense reports around here because it's such a pain in the ass right pick something is that critical path demonstrate that a team can work this way and then through a series of prototypes you know asking interesting questions that you actually get to a more interesting problem than the problem of you know expense reports and once you've demonstrated it's successfully in a couple of small things you'll be given permission to do something bigger almost always we find when this organizations flip from a planning based organization to a design thinking our creativity based organization it comes because somebody up top was willing to give a team a little bit of leeway to triumph fail and give them some air cover some protection from the rest of the organization but that a team kind of took it on themselves to transform their behavior so you have this little cell of new behavior that starts to be successful it starts to create some some recognition in the organization for the way they're solving problems but they were protected in their early days by some visionary manager or boss who can who can cover for them while they're doing you know strange things like innovation I think that's all the time we have for questions we're in a little bit over apologize for that I'm going to turn it back to cringe thank you for joining us today and if you have any follow-up questions we will be sending out a recording of this session within a week and you can reply to us there with additional inquiries in regards to the program as well as any other follow-up questions thanks again bye-bye

Channel: stanfordonline

Views: 136,962

Rating: 4.909091 out of 5

Keywords: stanford, stanfordonline, stanford university, webinar, design thinking, bill burnett, d.thinking, innovation, masters series, ims

Id: U499U4TcyY8

Length: 50min 5sec (3005 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015