Stanford Webinar - Design Thinking = Method, Not Magic

let's get started we're going to talk about design thinking so design thing you started here and it's you know it's a process you've probably seen the diagram and we start with empathy we redefine the problem we come up with lots of ideas and then there's a fundamental notion I'm going to talk about this in terms of where because I'm thinking sometimes doesn't work or doesn't doesn't it isn't applied properly there's this this notion of prototyping and testing or with david kelly calls building our way forward that's based on the notion that you know you don't really understand the user until you've built something for them and they've tried you know to use it our experiences so it's also true that although that's a nice process I love this quote I think it was originally Peter Drucker but I heard it first from Alan Mulally who was the former CEO of Ford now mark fields culture eats processed for lunch I've done a little bit of Wikipedia searching I think the original quote from Peter Drucker is culture eats process for breakfast but somewhere in the 90s or 2000s we we decided breakfast was too early so and what this basically means is that if you have a if you have the wrong kind of culture it doesn't matter what process you use design thinking lean startup agile it won't make any difference because the culture will reject the process culture is always stronger than the process or programs that people put in place because culture is that unspoken rules of behavior in any organization and that's really how things get done so we also talked about the Design Thinking mindsets and actually you'll see slightly different versions of this depending on what version you know of a d.school presentation you get we also have you know show not tell you know by a bias to action and and other mindsets in slightly different versions but I like these because I think if you start with curiosity and you're willing to reframe your problem if you if you know that you've got to work across this across disciplines in your organization and collaborate radically and you have a bias to action you are essentially implementing the Design Thinking mind your your acting the way designers do when faced with high uncertainty and the need for novel solutions so that's just a quick background now this idea of it's a method it's not magic is that I want to I want to go into this notion of you know design thinking is not one-size-fits-all and it doesn't always work and we've got quite a bit of experience with you know hundreds and hundreds of companies that have come to our executive program we're teaching one in June the innovation master series master class we also teach boot camps and summer things and so probably you know several thousands of executives have come through our programs taking these things and gone back to their organizations to try to implement them and I think in the last two years or so I've been noticing because I'm on the LinkedIn design thinking group and Facebook group and also it's just you know monitoring social media and articles that have been written about design thinking and you know I don't know if I'd call it a backlash but there's a lot of people questioning whether Design Thinking is actually effective and whether by applying this technique you can in fact achieve significant innovations that have value to your organization I mean it might be one thing if this was a method and it made everybody more creative but creativity itself is not our goal because you know children are creative you know artists are creative but we're interested as innovation and I would define innovation as you know applied creativity creativity applied to a problem where we can measure the output and the output and innovation is often you know market share or or profitability or and some kind of increase in a business metric that we care about so in the last couple years we've been noticing and taking taking note of instances where people have tried to apply design thinking and hasn't worked or where there's a I guess you you know there's always a philosophical argument about one method versus another I did a the last webinar I did was on the Lean Startup versus design thinking what are the differences whether the the similarities so I wanted I wanted to take this time to sort of cover what we know about the implementations of Design Thinking and where we find it to be either less effective or just not effective at all and and see if we can untangle those reasons and that way give people some information on how to improve the effectiveness of their own implementation so you know obviously when we look at this stuff so we can break we can break the reasons that things don't work into two pretty big buckets one is the individuals and organization what limits those individuals place on themselves and how the individuals are either prepared or not prepared to participate in a kind of new nonlinear form of innovation and then of course when you look at organizations there are organizational issues that block this we'll talk about those except they appreciate for it and then there's what we'll call politics I've got a little definition of politics because I just think politics is always easy interesting to talk about in inside organizations there's always politics and it's not I don't even use that as the negative term I think when you get I've seen startups with you know three founders have politics you know around making decisions and who can say what to what and and how comfortable people are you know sharing you know controversial ideas so politics exists everywhere it's just a function of you know when humans get together there's an unspoken set of things that occur and if you don't understand them and you get on the wrong side of politics things don't work I think there's a tremendous amount of a political capital that needs to be spent to change an organization from whatever it was to a design thinking organization so we're gonna look at both of those let's talk about first to individual limits there's four things I'm gonna draw somewhat on the work of Professor Bruce Simon tima at San Francisco State University he's been doing he's in the business school he's done a lot of work studying how Design Thinking does or doesn't get implemented in organizations effectively but if you look at just individuals so if we're going to okay my company you know new coat we always called companies new Co in the valley it's going to be a design thinking organization I hire a bunch of people and off we go well you know those people will not necessarily have been trained in this method and they will have other ideas about ways to work ways to organize workflows and that's just that individuals they're coming in to the organization with those preconceptions and a certain amount of you know to perform surmount of human baggage there's nothing wrong with them it's just the way people are so we find four things are true when we look at organizations across the board and there's ways you can educate and mitigate these impacts but but they are true and if you if you fail to address them of a less likely good outcome one is thing people misunderstand the Design Thinking framework there's a pretty simple framework but they don't quite get it right huge fear of failure this is this is giant in every organization is a big to the personal thing fail a feeling of failure a lack of process practice and then poor team selection and formation so let me go to the first one the next slide no if you look at the cut if you look at design thinking and I explained it to you it seems almost self-evident why wouldn't you talk to people first define what it is that people need then iterate prototype and test it seems like that is although I just spoke with a friend of mine it's just got hired to be the director of designing a startup startup raise 15 million dollars is doing a relatively technical product that the product will be a consumer product they've worked on it for two and a half years raised 15 million dollars he's the head of design he got them he said show me your user user studies in New Year's Day because I want to build off of what we've already got and they said we've never talked to a user but we're sure they're gonna like our thing I can't tell you what it is it's not released yet so you know still companies don't apply this process but on an individual basis if you look through fishing so I think I get it but we find is that people miss misunderstands one critical element of the the design thinking although it's a simple process is actually based on a different theory of knowledge a different theory of what can you know now a lot of times we deal with technical companies so therefore with technical people and technical people like data they even like data that isn't real because it just feels good to them to have some data one one example of a misunderstanding is they said we say did you do a prototype and testings with user they say yeah we did it we did a survey and we got a bunch of interesting data about what people like and don't like and then we point out that at one the survey isn't an interaction nobody tried anything nobody they were just thinking out of their heads and to survey data is highly skewed by the questions you ask so there's a survey is not a prototype but what we find over and over again is that people search for certainty and trying to find data about this thing that doesn't exist yet this future that they want to build a prop for and in that future your behaviors will be completely different because now you have a smartphone and now you're doing all these things that you would never do before you can't survey yourself into that data and you can't and you can't spot experiment and you can't just get five smart people around the room and figure out what people want so the problem here is that underlying the Design Thinking framework is this notion that in this theory of information or theory of knowledge it is you have to admit that it is impossible to get data about the future it's simply impossible if those of you who are product managers out there in the audience or have done this kind of stuff before where you've done user surveys and then you built exactly what the user wanted and then you brought them in for a focus group you said here it is I'm holding it my my phone here it is exactly what you guys wanted everything you said and then the users look at it and they go yeah you know now that I see that I kind of don't got trying to change my mind that's not what I want and that's an example of the impossibility of understanding the future because all the users could tell you is what they could imagine the future to be but once provoke them with the thing now their reality includes this thing and they say oh well if this is possible I want something completely different and that's that's that's the thing where you cannot get reliable data about the problem data reduction therefore and methods of solving the problem like I've got all the data now all I have to do is designs up paying our feudal and the way we solved that problem once you understand that the theory of knowledge is that you cannot get reliable data the only way to get this to sought to resolve the problem is to build your way forward build the thing and say is this it and then they say no and you say well then what if this were true what would you want and then they say oh I want this then if that were true then you build it again and they say is this what you want there's you know actually nobody no no that's not it either and you continue to do this instead of collapsing the users understanding of what the future could be around prototypes they can actually experience because it's only through our embodied experience of these prototypes do we generate the data of what we want okay so if you're saying hey we do like to user studies but we still miss the mark yeah my guess is in talking to lots of companies that you're after day that you're inventing datasets that aren't accurate but because we're technical people and we love data it feels good to get datasets and reduce them to some kind of a marketing requirements document or something else and in this very linear way of working Chris we're going to talk to the users then we're going to get the data set then we're going to write the MRD then the engineers are going to build it and then manufacturing is going to make it it just doesn't work that way and that's why 60 or 70% of the products you know that are introduced and certainly in the consumer field pale you didn't do anything wrong you just believed in data that wasn't real so first piece conceptual problem you have to embrace the idea that it's impossible to get the data you need to design the only thing you can do is build your way forward that's that's hard for you know I'm trained as an engineer that's how it was hard for me to accept it's just a personal thing I cannot except that I keep building things and people keep changing their mind it almost feels like it's not fair this gets back to the second thing which is people to start the panel and every time you build every time you build the prototype and you show it to someone it fails at some level it fails to meet the mark and you have a hypothesis it's like inlene we have a hypothesis and then you do a test you know and it's the build test you know cycle you you will fail 90% of your prototypes will fail to solve the problem you were proposing however they're not actually failures because they generated a whole new set of information that you can build with but people just hate failure we hate failure we change that avoid failure become first grade on to the entire education system it's a huge issue in in the u.s. but I just got it just kicked back from a incubator program in Lisbon and there's been Portugal I've done programs in Germany we have a sister D school in Germany in fact in Europe the fear the stigma for failure is even higher than it is in the US I think one of the things that makes Silicon Valley such a fun place to work is that you can be a young entrepreneur you can have a company you can raise a bunch of money it can totally fail and the venture guys go hey what do you got what's your next idea you know so that we've lowered the bar and failure in Silicon Valley but everywhere I go around the country and certainly in Europe and particularly in Asia the fear of failure is so high that it actually limits people's ability to experience their own creativity now we think that the iterative nature of design thinking going through these processes over and over and over again build up what we like to call failure immunity or at least insensitivity to failure because it's not actually a failure this is prototype something and then learn something new it feels like it but it isn't it it's a different thing so we're not suggesting that you just you know take a project and fail that's not that said yeah brakes by breaking the project into very small increments and presiding over and over and over again this is David tells you fail fast to succeed sooner oh boy people hate the feeling of failure I do too I mean it's a failure immunity I think you just get you to it I don't know that you ever get over that fear the next thing is process practice if I said here's so here's ax everybody on the team here you you get a saxophone you get a drum you get a bass and you get a trumpet okay let's start playing some jazz well you guys don't know how to play your instruments right unless you happen to be your trunk name so why would you expect to be able to make good for music on your first sit down and yet over and over and over again these organizations come they get some training you know that I think that people have been trained in the process and they understand it pretty well but they don't do any practice so they just jump into some big heart problem some big crazy hairy problem that no one's been able to solve they get out of process pretty quickly they resort resort back to old ideas they get afraid of failure so they don't test anything until it's done and then it fails anyway or they or they don't do multiple learning teams they hunker down with a team of like-minded people because they're the people they can work with and it's too hard to work with others so they get out of process and they fail and David Kelly spoken called kids confidence he quotes a lot from psychologist Albert bandura and bandura called creative confidence self efficacy the psychological concept that you have self-efficacy means you believe either make a change in the world and that your actions you know are valuable and you are a valuable person once you have self-efficacy in one place it's getting and getting across the board in your life and he's in the way you get it is guided master small self-contained steps where you learn to overcome your fear and you learn to succeed so again and again and again we see organizations plunge in with you know good intentions but they are but the individuals in the organization the individual people do not have practice competence yet and so they fall back on old behaviors and then say design thinking didn't work so the next one I think is is the number thing that we see across the board okay so individuals teams are just made up of individuals if individuals are uncertain about the process or not really not really you know have enough reps who the through the process to own own that those new behaviors then you put them on teams and the teams are stressed anyway because the teams are working very differently than other teams in the organization and now we've got you know I got a I got a learn to be different myself I gotta learn to be different on this team and I got a half the time we also find that these teams in addition to the Design Thinking exercise their project they've been given they haven't been relieved of their other project responsibilities so they're started doing it part-time but assuming you have an intact team and that they've been you know given a priority on their time to do this they still need a lot of coaching because if it's a multidisciplinary team what you're gonna find is the people from different parts of your organization who you used to do these very formal handoffs with I hand you a market requirements document you do an engineering response I hand you the bill and materials you create the supply chain when you put everybody together in one team they they go through a whole bunch of different processes we like the model of restock mint is a psychologist who studied you know teams and things there's a pretty famous model out there called forming storming norming and performing teams will always go through this you know hey we're just got on the team we're just getting ready to go and then as we start going we start storming because we don't know who's supposed to do what eventually if we get through that part of the process with good coaching and guidance we get to a normative behavior we're a pretty good team and we know how to hand things off between each other and we know what we're doing and then if we have a chance to do this in a couple of different projects we become a high-performance team because we're almost intuitively connected in the process and we know what's next it comes down to mutual respect it comes down to understanding what everybody's deliverables are I was on I was coaching a team Watson it had MBAs and engineers on it very talented people in both in both dimensions and they were trying to solve hard problems the engineers deliverable is typically a prototype for a model of something they build something the NBA's typical deliverable is a slide deck which captures their strategy both are incredibly valuable and and and at appropriate deliverable for each discipline the engineers kept saying one of the marketing guys going to do something I say what are you talking about well they don't do anything just make slides as well that's what they do they make slots with such slides it's that ideas in the slides that important and and marketing guys kept saying when the engineers kind of do something I said well we build all these models they go yellow but like when are they going to make this thing the customer wants we keep giving them slides and they don't do anything so it parka it just took a session to sit down and understand this is what I make and this is how I contribute my information to the team I do you know the finance guys does a spreadsheet the marketing person you know Chris the strategy the designer it's a series of prototypes you know the manufacturing guy tells everybody you can't make that at a customer I'm kidding but that's what they do so if you've never had to be all on the team at the same time you never experience that disconnect and so it's easy to say oh those guys don't do anything because they don't do anything like you do so building this trust building this sort of set of values I value each of our contributions is really hard I'll tell you when we teach multidisciplinary and we put people on teams from all over the university confirming the med school from the business school from the law school which on a design team it takes three or four weeks for the teams to get through the sort of norming and storming phase and really start to work together well interestingly enough the teams that are the most difficult to the vehicle are often the teaching teams because you've got the top political scientists the top computer scientists the top you know professor of business strategy they're used to being the only expert in the room when they get together to co-teach sometimes it doesn't work frankly we've had more teaching teams probably blow up and then student teams so learning how to work together on a team and respect each other's values is really critical moving on it's those are the so you got you got you got come with a low fear of failure to be willing to work hard to learn your process your instrument you've got to be able to understand and value the other people on your team but you're inside a big organization we find big organizations can take Vince you know we've seen fantastic teams that have formed and stormed and then our high performance and they really respect each other I don't know if you saw this research from Google just recently published Google's big data companies that make data where isn't any most of the time I think but they've been studying their high performance teams and low performance teams and they were doing all sorts of socio metrics and psycho metrics on the teams it turns out the only thing they could correlate the high performance where teams that had high social trust where they spoke about things that had nothing to do with the project and trusted each other as people interesting data it's all about you know at the end of the day people but you put the high performance team in the wrong environment and they're gonna fail anyway and then the organization is going to learn the lesson see design doesn't work here and we find that comes to three barriers and then the issues of politics so the three barriers are pretty straightforward conceptual semantics and social again this comes from the work of Professor Hyman at San Francisco State these conceptual blocks are a little bit around the a little bit around personal challenges but they come up around the idea of how do you know how do we have ideas around here and organizations that have very strict rules about what's what's what's allowable thinking and what's not what you'll find is that teams norm to the group thinking it actually impacts the ability their ability to think of ideas quote out of the box or however you wanna think of it out of the culture and so they those ideas never come up for them and they're not very flexible and applying their ideas to the problem at hand Samantha gaps are as sort of a bigger organizational challenge and it gets a little bit to the issue of respect but it's also just about you know when when we talk about value in the accounting department we talk about value this way when you talk about value the engineering department stuck but value this way we think we're agreeing until we get to the point where it's somebody has to make a decision and then we suddenly discover we were not talking about the same thing at all so small differences matter people use the same words to mean different things and they use different words to mean the same thing it sounds like I'm just parsing words here but it's about how how organisations communicate and how they understand each other and and you know even the term prototype which we use in design thinking as this sort of throw away how to ask a good question and elicit a consumer behavior in the technical world the prototype is the thing you build to prove that your design is complete it's a completely different thing and a prototype you know in a business model is a mathematical thing and so you know just even that one word can cause collisions on a team because because huge misunderstandings and lots and lots of inefficiency and then there's a sintering thing that Bruce discovered it's really you know it is this gets back a little bit I think to the Google research that it's all about social interaction there's a huge number of social barriers and organizations it's a network problem you you've probably never had you've probably never been on a team that was truly multidisciplinary across functional you know the engineers to eat lunch with engineers and accountants eat lunch with he comes and marketing guys and girls are brought together you know for a coffee so the social networks haven't been built that could support the kind of radical collaboration and multidisciplinarity which has got to be built on these values of trust and understanding each other's skill sets so that's just happening in companies that that happens across the board in every company you can you can educate around semantics and and social barriers you can co-locate which creates you know a different set of networks and and you can certainly educate by doing things like the master class and other things to up the level of conceptual ability of any organ elissa they're really interesting one which is politics so we've got this interesting definition of politics it comes from a consultant that I work with a lot and him gave Evans as one of the founders of Electronic Arts has been an CEO consultant for years and tries to help CEOs understand politics so politics he we described it's just the invisible influence infrastructure they said invisible you can't see it but everybody knows it's there and it's the thing that sort of is under underline how decisions get made in this organization like I said you can have politics in a company of three You certainly have politics in a company of three hundred thousand so what do I mean by invisible infrastructure and and it'll show you a little two-by-two model so there's two ways things get done in organizations I have the power to make this happen and the CEO I sign the check and things happen or I decide to build a factory and then a factory is built I have the power to make these decisions so that's authority but then it's also influence and a lot of stuff that happens in an organization really happens through influencing I mean I have the power to do something but I have the ability to influence the decision for instance you know I run the degree granting program in the School of Engineering mechanical engineering school and we give out degrees and my fantastic colleague Sarah Simon Stein Greenberg run this executive director of the D school and she runs the DS schools educational programs neither one of us has authority over the other were co-executive directors in different areas but each of us influences each other's ideas and behaviors not get tons of great ideas from Sarah about how to improve our program so and I'm sure you've experienced this too there are people that you know maybe on the dotted on the org chart have the actual authority to make a decision but they always pull influential people in the organization to make the right decisions right so in this two-by-two you can be in the bottom left quadrant you can being an influencer who has no authority on the bottom right you can be you're gonna have no influence and no authority you don't want to be a Nina cos nobody touch two people with no influence and no authority on the top right you can have no influence and lots of a third you're the autocrat you just tell everybody what to do and you can have in the top less influence and authority and we've go to the next slide I'm gonna argue that the power zone is right in that middle on the left side where you may be you are you know your engineering director or your marketing product manager or something product managers by the way almost entirely move products through organizations through influence crop managers almost never have the authority to tell engineering your manufacturing core or my sitting or somebody what to do but they but they're geniuses at intervention through influence and I've always thought my young my young managers that you never managed to Authority anyway because pushing people around because you have power is a very short-term tactic to get anything done in any organization so I like this model because it says look if you want to make a change in an organization you're going to need at least the authority to add allocate the right resources the best use of your authority or power is to say this team has space and money and time to do the thing I want them to do but you're also going to need to go to the next next diagram you're also going to need people who can influence the outcome in a positive way and this is an interesting diagram if you think about any organization that the power zone is you know bigger at the bottom there's lots of people who can make small decisions there are a few people to make big decisions that's the power zone and people but they're people influencing those influencers in the power you know there's fewer influencers with the CEO than there are the park manager and this is imagine this thing is spinning so people go up and then they get spun out you know if they turn out to be powerful with no influence they just get thrown out of the pyramid so to go to the next slide change requires that you have an influencer who has is strategically aligned with the organization's this is culturally aligned understands how things get done around here and had some record of being successful in influencing decisions so this brings me to the next slide is just a little just a little work chart dependent slide or uh apologies so yes I thought some cats will do this first job let's go back to the org chart that's great in most organizations that are sort of you know got any kind of hires you know the way you move up the hierarchy above the vertical slice is to be first individual contributor then maybe a team leader and maybe you get so manage teams and then get to manage multiple teams and improve senior managers managing a whole function or a whole organization then there's a difference between bringing up function to having management responsibilities for a function and having people call P&L or responsibility where it's now you're managing the business and there's multiple functional you know pyramids under you so I mean even in organizations that use a matrix system or they ever they could say they're very flat there's a hierarchy of some sort and obviously there's a lot of social capital and also just good reasons to move up the hierarchy if I've worked 15 years in this organization and I'm now the vice president of marketing or engineering which sugars most may be concerns with innovation I've worked very hard and established not only my power my authority but my influence people believe I'm an influential person and I'm hopefully the CEO has got not only you know the authority of that role but he's got he or she has got the ability to influence people's behavior okay so that's the way it is and it's perfectly aligned with people's motivations I worked harder I'm a form I get more responsibility the more responsibility I can successfully discharge the higher I go in the in the pyramid and the better it is so that's great everybody's motivations is aligned and I'm learning from experts who are you know who manage me and hopefully in a healthy world that's all good we start talking about multidisciplinary teams so we've got a team and the team is typically across you know across so the national on the bottom we bring some marketing people or bring some other people together and now that team is kind of an autonomous thing running on its own and maybe I even empowered it to just go do the right thing you need more resources you've got some and that team is cooking along and they've maybe even being smart and mindful of process they picked a small internal problem to work on first failed a lot then succeeded built a little credibility picked a bigger problem now we're starting now they're starting to get assigned things that are interesting and impactful and strategic problems in the organization and what happens they start hitting what I call the kill zone typically the middle level of management sort of directors vice presidents and things are starting to notice that a team that is not entirely inside their vertical responsibilities is having great success and is building some social capital and some influence in the organization and I don't control that team I can pull you know a couple people off that team will report to me because all I have to do something that's really much more important but I nicely control that team it's not clear who control set team and and it's threatening it's threatening to things just threatening my influence in the organization because a group of people who are much less you know much lower on the power structure are starting to develop influence because of their success and - they're starting to impact my ability to do the only other thing that's actually true about being higher up in the pyramid allocate resources I get to allocate money and people to different you know projects and so there's zero incentive for me to allow this to continue it's completely orthogonal literally it's like it's on a completely different access to my power structure and my influence structure and now I know the CEO wants us to be design thinkers and all but but gosh I've got a bunch of projects need to get done and I really need you know Roni to work on this and I really mean you know Debbie's work on that I really need John to work on that and I know you guys need to travel to visit your customers but you know we've got this travel budget thing and I'm kind of not to travel down 25% so I really can't allow you to travel I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm a team player I'm once now let's design thinking to succeed but I have a thousand ways to strangle your team for access resources influence and power and I'm not going to be it's not going to be over it's never over in these situations and it's not that the vice-president is a bad woman and she's mean and she just wants the team to fail it's just that she's got another set of objectives that need to be met and and those were the objectives that made her so successful in the past and she has no Buy in to this new structure because it's not clear how the success of the Design Thinking multidisciplinary team is going to reflect on her success and so although she will not actively try to destroy it she will passively not participate one example of this and it was a story that AG Lafley told as he was retiring from Procter & Gamble which is one of the biggest conversions to sort of design thinking in a long time but he thought he could flip the organization from a kind of a insular organization to when it was more open and more innovative and he did it was very successful he said he's I could do it in three years and it took eight and at the end he said I had to fire about 50% of my middle managers and it wasn't that they weren't they were just waiting it out they were like okay this is one another one of those fads this has happened before well play along but we won't you know we won't energetically participate or problem-solve and they were just sort of you know killing it killing it slowly and invisibly by dragging their feet in a very loop a very reasonable way because I think people are reasonable in organizations I don't think politics is about being evil it's just like I worked really hard to become the director of this organization and now you're telling me that said that role is not as important as somebody who's just running around making you know post-its on a wall and so I don't buy into that and I'm not going to play I don't know that firing people is the only solution to this problem but I think if you recognize this then then the one solution that we've seen is very successful in peace jump show the next slide is you need two things I always describe it this way you you have to have the next one they're coming we have to have the team empowered multi-discipline team there should be a big arrow that's it see you you need two things you need an empowered and passions team and on that team you need a lot of doers so it tends to be people at the bottom of whatever you're you know power pyramid is partner plus pyramid that team has to be managed by somebody who has tremendous influence in the organization because they will need to identify people in the middle layer to be supporters people in the middle layer to be advocates you know and evangelists for them not also need to identify who in the middle layer they just need to sort of neutralize or stay out of the way and only influencers in organizations know those things they know the culture inside and out and they know who they stay away from but that's that will be insufficient the CEO has to somehow provide air cover when they were doing the transition at at parkland gamble AG Lafley a special lab he gave them a special budget they were exempt from other works they had to do and it was very successful so you need the air cover from people with power and you need an influencer to drive the team we sort of wrap it up two takeaways you know pretty straightforward there's four things we think of that that limit individuals from participating fully and effectively when they're so you know conceptual mints and social barriers the lack of influencers and the lack of sea level support whenever we see an implementation that has not met its objectives those are typically the two number one things lack of sea level support and a lack of an influencer driving the team so let's and they're actually the one other thing I want to point out one large scale transformation is underway right now is IBM and it's the largest one we know of the CEO Ginni Rometty Jeremy Dias said um that they have to transform from a kind of engineering sales culture which is what I've been spent for years and years into its design culture and they're using design thinking as the method Dan Gilbert is a great pageant charges effort he was a CEO of a start-up they bought and he's in he's built the Design Center in Austin and is kind of educating hundreds and hundreds of students at design thinking trained engineers and designers and then deployments throughout IBM I was doing two classes a year I think is 300 and he's doing this for three years so he's got fifteen hundred chain design thinkers to put all over IP em evidence isn't there yet and the stock price err in earnings but there's some evidence that the divisions are really really taking methodology to heart and building at the next generation of IBM software with this in mind and in certain pockets where they've implemented this and introduced new products they're doing very very well but it says four hundred and forty thousand person company and it's a big big task so we're we stay in touch with those guys and they've done a bunch of publishing on what they're doing you can find their stuff on LinkedIn I highly recommend with that we have a few minutes to take some questions from our audience the one question that that came up was around the notion of prototyping we are used to think of prototyping as something that is relevant for maybe a start-up or a small new product how does that come about in a more established company or a very stablished product yeah I mean I think it's it's any product or service or even experience can be prototype to experience design it so I think of a great example of experience design as Disneyland they design every aspect of your walk down Main Street reading all designed by the way to remove as much cash as possible from your Holly but the regardless the size of the organization and again if you're looking at a if you're in a market place where you're relatively stable market share and you're just and you've got a product and you want to do product you know line extension a B and C you probably can do that with a relatively traditional development process you you know you've got a when I was at first at Apple and we've been the first laptops you know we had some very innovative dimensions of several of the first ones were quite in the base because no one had done them before the next ones were the duos this was that went in and out of a dock like a VCR cartridge if you remember VCRs the third one was you know the first integrated networking and everything thing so though in those generational changes we did a less and less and prototyping and testing with users the Venusian Apple doesn't test is silly it's not true but the but the just sort of like hey make this one a little bit faster put a bigger battery in this one get this one a bigger screen those take this one that's they're not really innovation there in your innovation portfolio their new products but they're not radically new to our innovative products so when you it but when you are faced even in a large organization with that I think but the real one real value particularly in a large organization of building prototypes and insisting on experiences with actual users this collapses that whole barrier between the designers the the marketers and the users because now there's an object that we have to all go watch someone you know play with or simulate playing with and remember these these processes can be very simple we do you know user experience prototypes of a new app by putting a staff of post-its on an iPhone and saying the first screen looks like this second screen looks like this the third screen looks like this it's really really low resolution simple things things you could build in an afternoon or in an hour so I think it's even more important in large organizations to get into a culture of prototyping because just the prototypes themselves will collapse that distance between the people thinking of the products and the people using them and when you bring prototypes to meetings it collapses the semantic problem everybody goes oh that's what we're making is that more like I dealt with something else and so it's a really great way to bring consistency build consensus in inside the team and particularly important at communicating what's the team doing - you know people in the management are in the hierarchy so prototypes are even more important in large positions so one last question related to the killzone is I think some of our users or some of our participants here and commented that the killzone may not necessarily be at the higher level it can be all around you in a variety of ways what are some ways that you found effective - - to address that in addition to CEO involvement which is what we refer to the first yeah so if you have if you have good air cover you have somebody who's just going to keep you know keep the key people from trying to destroy the team then the other piece is to have that phenomenal project manager he or she who has tremendous influence in the organization we as a model we said here's the team then around the team or the people the team needs to have support from around that there's a community of people who just want to know what the team is doing and then outside of that there's the people who want the team to fail so you're managing your support layer and your community layer and that's why prototyping and making your work visible having a huddle room or a boardroom where all the stuff is all the time over communicating inside the organization - so that you when you're not at the scary new thing that nobody what you're doing and where you acknowledge that you need the support of that that inner circle of people need to support the project I need to support from the test group and from the marketing group and from the research group so I've got to get them on board and that's why you need a high influence project manager to help drive that and then managing community just outside of that so that so that your your successes are the community's successes seem to be the way to kind of navigate the politics that are very close to the team and then every once in a while you'll run into something somebody who wants to kind of you know be a roadblock and that's where all those Scud missiles from the CEO is helpful the one last question is do you see a generational gap at all in the willingness to adopt these kinds of processes that's a great question I'm trying to think of instances where that would be true you know I don't I don't see any generational generational gap in this at all in fact obviously most of the people who come to the Masterclass they're fairly senior folks in their organization that you know are responsible for innovation or for some kind of a an organization that's that needs to drive change so I see a widespread adoption of these techniques with people who we consider you know more senior managers who therefore probably in an older generation you know the valleys full of companies run by 24 year olds and 22 year olds so I mean they're they're relatively flexible in picking a new process because they have none you know they're not they've not experienced it before but no I don't think it's generational I think if you're in it look if you're in an organization you know one of those there's a couple other questions that are just about like how do you can get this start now to get your CEO interested I think it's was the most of it most of the time when we noticed someone coming and saying hey we need some help with innovation it's because they're really in trouble we had Mary Barrow the CEO G GM here about six months ago and we were chatting about this and she wants to do some transformation in her a huge organization worldwide and and you know and some people were maybe in the audience for sort of doubtful of the you know GM's sort of will to do that she did look we went bankrupt what the heck else do we have to do before people wake up and change something so if people aren't on board with changing I'll take care of that I think he's gonna be I think she's a great great leader for that organization so unfortunately her early tenure has been distracted with some things that were legacy issues for Jim but I think typically organization it's a crisis a new competitor emerges you know unravels their business model they need to think fast on their feet maybe they've had a pretty good time in their market for a while and so they haven't developed a muscle to be you know rapidly innovative and so too oftentimes they come in a time of crisis although I think you know a really great leader would go WOW if we're doing really well right now why don't we go invent the disruption it's going to come instead of wait for some 22 year old to do it in Silicon Valley why don't we go invent our own disruptive technologies and so I I see you know really strong visionary leaders taking that approach as well hopefully you don't have to wait for a crisis yeah so creating a sense of urgency is helpful but not necessary so I want to thank Bill Burnett again for this really insightful webinar and create a little bit of a sense of urgency with all of you folks to hopefully register for a next webinar and also visit us here on campus for the innovation master Series in June and get a chance to soak up more of this really great content and and in vivid and see all this in person with that I want to thank all of you for joining us today you should expect a link with a recording of this webinar within a week and we hope you have a good rest of your day

Channel: stanfordonline

Views: 306,038

Rating: 4.8875041 out of 5

Keywords: stanford, stanfordonline, stanford university, webinar, ims, innovation, design thinking, bill burnett, method, dthinking, innovation masters series

Id: vSuK2C89yjA

Length: 49min 32sec (2972 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2016