Discussion Assignment Part 1

APPLY DESIGN THINKING IN YOUR WORK

Bill Burnett

We are live. We get the right slides and ready to go. Hi, my name is Bill Burnett. Again, I am the executive

director of Stanford. And we are going to talk about Design Thinking and applying it in the workplace. So,

the first thing I want to start with this, I have a quote from our senior academic person, David Kelley.

David is also the founder of the d. school, our institute for Design Thinking here at Stanford. And prior to

that, he was the founder of IDEO, which is probably one of the world's premier sort of innovation

consultancies.

And David is the sort of the big thinker behind the Design Thinking idea. We had been teaching design at

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 in 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 have 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 is a method of

thinking, design thinking. And he has been quoted in this TED Talk and in his book on Creative Confidence

and saying, "We believe the next generation of innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers."

And Design Thinking is just a way of solving problems. David will describe it up and it is just another tool

in your tool belt. Just because you master the principles of design thinking does not mean that you give

up on of using other powerful methods, scientific method, engineering thinking, and the methods of

making decisions that you are 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 is 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 are really projecting and designing things that are going to

occur in the future. And as we all know, you cannot get data on stuff that has not happened yet.

Anyway, we talk about the workplace. I want to sort of maybe demystify this with the potential of

oversimplifying it. Work is just a place where people go everyday and it is organized typically, around

certain task that have to get done in a certain vertical task like marketing, manufacturing, operations,

design, engineering, research. And then it is organized around the skills that people have in those

different domains. And really, if you break it down, the culture of any organization is just this collection of

behaviors, what do we do when we get to work. Do we go do lots of planning and budget meeting? So we

go to lots of meetings where we talk about stuff. Or do we spend most of our time designing, building,

creating?

And if you are talking about transforming the way you work, and when we have the Master Series class

on campus, I get a chance to meet with 60, 70 people almost everytime and then they are all in different

kinds of work environments, in the financial industries, in the design industries, and in hospitality and

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finance. You name it. And they talk to me about the things they do at work. And mostly, they say that the

stuff that they do at work does not feel as productive or as generative as it could be and they are very

interested in learning about design and design methods to sort of try to supercharge the innovation or

just supercharge the environment.

And so, I always come back to, well, if you want to transform your work, what you are really saying is I

want to do different things when I get there. So, we are really talking about what are the behaviors that

you are going to change and what are the skills that you employ with these new behaviors, you got to

change the way work occurs for you. And we think as you change those things by first training yourself up

on these new ideas like Design Thinking and then, essentially modeling these new behaviors. When you

behavior like a creative person, your staff, your team, other people, see those behaviors that they want to

emulate you, particularly doing a leadership position.

So, creativity is not a very magical thing, it is actually a pretty simple thing to understand, all humans are

naturally creative where toolmakers and builders by nature. But unfortunately, a lot of your education in

the U.S. anyway, has... got a beaten creativity out of you. And then maybe 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 these kind of ideas about what sort of behaviors do creative people use?

What kind of mindsets do they engage in? And then we think about what you need to do that kind of

learn those skills, we can have a pretty robust conversation about how do you transform your work

environment.

So, Design Thinking is both the process and a series of mindsets. The Design Thinking process starts with

empathy. We always say, "Do not start with the problem, start with people." People are where the

interesting data is, and people are an interesting thing to observe. Then we redefine the problem, we

ideate and ideation is just a general term for lots and lots of ways that we have of coming up with lots

and lots of ideas, but they are being with the more ideas you have, the better... your choices will be. And

then we know that you cannot just design in a vacuum so we like to have... we have a bias to action. We

like to build stuff and test it, and build stuff and test it. And in that way, we kind of seek to understand the

problem in a different way.

Even if you do not use that process, you could think like a design thinker. You can think like we think and

that is... tends to be these five things, bias to action. You will notice in most Design Thinking workshops

and in the training that we do here at Stanford, there is not a lot of planning, not a lot of port charting,

not a lot of stuff that a lot it would maybe useful in certain domains when you are in the domain of

innovation. Planning is sort of slow things down and comes up to work. So, we have a bias to action. We

tend to start with actions, and then dissect the data we get from those actions.

We believe in radical collaboration which is truly collaboration across in organizations, across disciplines,

marketing, working with engineering, working with design, working with operations, working with the

field sales people, all in the same team. We believe and that when you get lots and lots of people

together that really speak different languages and come at the problems in a different way, you get

innovative solutions but you also get a lot of chaos because people do not know how to work together.

And so, we train people on the process as kind of anchor to make sure the team knows what they are

doing and they are 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 it, finding

ways to approach the problem that expand the potential solution space.

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When I work with... it seems to come with the Master class. I am generally impressed with the smart and

dedicated people that show up, I want to do a good job, I want to learn how to do things better. And my

premises, if I took any six people and put them on in team and I give them a problem. They are all smart,

they are all motivated and plus or minus, the few degrees, if everybody is working on the same problem

with the smart motivated team, they are 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 aside initially,

I am getting maybe some information those guys do not have. And the information will be a sort of a

nuance data set about users, preferences and opinions. Users in a way they get blocked, where they get

unblocked and kind of the kinds of things that might delight these users and give that team especially

that special information. They are going to come up with much better ideas just because they reframe to

the problem. Everybody else is working in the coffee cup and they were working on creating the

Starbucks experience, which is really a completely different problem. When we talking about reframing, it

is a super powerful tool and we are going to get into that a little bit in this talk as we talk about 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 is this whole Design Thinking

about?" If you just remember two things, if we cannot remember the whole thing in the five mindsets and

the five step and whatever, just remember two things, empathy and brainstorming. Empathy, because we

are going to start with people, not the problem. We are not going to solve the problem of building a

better wheelbarrow, a better office chair, a better something. We are going to go out and look at people

in offices and figure out what their behaviors are. We are going to go watch construction guys on a job

site, move stuff around and see how they do it. And then we are going to take that data and we are going

to come up with lots and lots, I mean lots... 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, some will be

close to existing solutions and some will be completely different solutions, completely reframing the

problem.

So, we are just going to focus on these for this talk right now because I think it is where I can give you one

or two tools that are instantaneously actionable in your organization. And with that kind of a brief

intervention, maybe you can get something going that I want you, that you will find useful.

So, essentially, the empathy step is... and 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 of these sort of interesting observational data, we take videos of people, and we ask them lots of

questions and we just observe there. We do what we call a moccasin luck, which we spend a day with our

users to try to understand what is really going on.

Users are interesting people. Of course, they are going to try to help you when you ask some questions

and they are actually going to try to please you and tell you things that you want to hear. They are also

going to tell you about the way they think their job should be, not the way it actually is. They are going to

tell you about the aspirational qualities of the problems they are working on, and how good they are at it.

But when you actually observe them and watch how they do all these little workarounds and how they

have difficulties understanding, how the stuff really works or how the products really functions. You get a

lot of information.

The thing that we find is that without... so putting that information into a couple of different frameworks,

it is really hard to decide what is actionable and what is not. The one empathy framework that I think is

the most accessible, and it is a pretty straightforward idea, is we have an overall framework and it is just a

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little, a chunk of it where we put a two-by-two together, where we go from concrete to abstract and then

on the horizontal axis gets analysis on the left and synthesis on the right. And there is a complex now

that I am filling out this framework.

But the one I want to look at is, when we are trying to get some insights from our observation, we have a

couple of different techniques over in this top left quadrant, digesting customer and user needs at the

abstract level. We do a thing called an empathy map that I am going to show you and we do... we use the

Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, in a specific way in try to capture information and

framework in the way that we can do something with. We have a bunch of other techniques as well but I

am not going to go into those right now.

So, this is classic little diagram, I think it comes from the IDEO guys. And I want you to see on the left, it is

sort of the external world of this mythical user. I want you to see on the right is the internal world of this

user. And here is the sort of truism. When you are out 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 experience is that you could design 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 problems that 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 is going on. We believe that

what is really going on is what they are thinking, the thoughts behind the way they frame is 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, is this really... their behaviors are really driven by their feelings. And a lot of times, there is some

mismatch between what someone feels about a situation, what they say about a situation.

So a very simple framework could 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 us say, we are talking about where the wheelbarrow

company, we want to do wheelbarrow. First of all, you would never ask for a new wheelbarrow because

that is... the wheelbarrow is 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. It is always delivered to the edge of the

job site on a big pallet, all the bricks are over there but the bricklayers are somewhere else. So you never

frame the problem around the solution which is the wheelbarrow. It is just how do we move stuff around.

So, you go out 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 do not and sometimes, they come up with very

creative ways and sort of jury rigging wheelbarrows to do things they were never intended to do. And

then, you interview them and then you find out what they say about what they are doing. But then, the

design team takes those observations and maybe you had three or four people go out and do three or

four different observations so then you write them all down and post some notes and you cluster them in

the Do column and in the Say column, maybe some things overlap. Maybe some things are completely

contradictory. People say completely different things. Different users had completely different needs. So

cluster those on the left side of the diagram.

And then the insight part, the creative part is you now you have to sort of make a guess. It is truly a guess.

We call it design intuition. That is what they said, but what are they really thinking. I am sure you had this

experience where people have said something but it really came from a deeper internal story or thought.

So, when you break down that observations this way, you find that on the right hand side, if you figure

out what they guess what they are thinking and guess what they are actually feeling, the feelings are the

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emotion surrounding things, the 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

Apple did in the early... in mid '90s. Our observation, the general observation that Apple's built around is

that technology makes people feel stupid. You are using a Windows machine or some other kind of an

Android machine nowadays or something and you are trying to get a simple task done like, somebody

asked me what is Ryan's phone number while I am on a call with... and I got to look up at his phone

number while I am simultaneously talking on every other phone on the planet, what would you do? You

would say, "Well, I am probably going to hang up on you but I will give it a try," and then you try to start to

menus and then you would hang up on the person. And their phone would make you both feel

inadequate and stupid because it was clearly your fault, not the phone's fault that you could not find the

data you wanted.

And you took that feeling and internalize it as a sort of overall sense that I am not good at technology,

and that is the key. Once you discover that story, that feeling in what is going on behind the actions, you

will realize, "Oh, I can make you fall in love with my product. If I do not make you feel stupid if I make you

feel powerful." And so all of Apple's work is really just focused around that idea of putting the power in

the hands of the user and making the actions so transparent but you do not have to learn them, you just

know how to do them, right? So, looking above phone number on iPhone with a big graphic screen and

the numbers scrolling 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 have made and the

insights come from looking at the thoughts and the feelings that you comply from the actions and the

words.

Another way to map things sort of according to the human need again, we do not start with a problem,

we start with the people. So we go out and we talk to bricklayers and carpenters and the stuff on the job

site, or we talk to cellphone 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 Abraham Maslow's wrote long time

ago, thinks current psychology indicates that although he thought this was the hierarchy and you need it

to fulfill psychology safety or 11 belonging needs before you could fulfill esteem or self-actualization that

we know not that it is not true. You can actually still be struggling with your basic safety and physiological

needs, you can be very, very poor but still be executing hard at a very high level in order to create self-

actualization.

But our theory in using this is that you just take any action you have 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 some sort of sense of safety either psychological or physical. And every

action that you do particularly, when you are interacting with products or services can create senses of

self-esteem, create senses of belonging. What are brands? Brands are just things you belong to. You

belong to the... you buy Levis, you do not buy Wranglers. You would buy Apple, you do not buy Dell. You

buy... you like Disney, you do not like Nickelodeon.

So you are always belonging to something in the consumer culture and it is always around some kind of a

need. And oftentimes, the only observations you have maybe are in one or two of these frameworks or

one of the two of these layers but what you do is you then do that design intuition thing that creative lead

to say, "Well, how does this tool that the carpenter is using actually creates self-actualization and self-

esteem for the carpenter when it looks like you would simply just about creating easier way to do a task.

And those conceptual leads often again, just like with the empathy map, unlock a possible observation or

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at least a point of view that you can now prototyping and testing and see what new innovation will come

out of it.

So basically, what both of these frameworks do is they are arguing that in every product, in every

interaction, in every service or experience that you offer your customer consumer, whether it is designed

or not, it is an experience that has touched points. It is an experience that they go through. And it is not

simply the rationalization of, "I wanted something, you provided it. I bought the product or service, I used

it. We are done." It is always about the internal state, the emotional state of the user. And since you

cannot... people do not have glass heads and they do not tell you what their emotional interstate is all

about, you become expert, again, using the tools of ethnography, observation, putting yourself in an

empathetic situation walking in their shoes, doing what they do. You put yourself in a situation to

understand the emotional needs that are behind the physical or observable actions. And once you have

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, although it is... those two, pretty much are pretty simple because they do versus they can feel, put

things on the Hierarchy of Needs. They are actually... one, we noticed that most people do not do those

unless they are trained in Design Thinking. They execute a functional solution but they do not execute a

solution that the lights are engaged as a user in a deep way.

I teach in the design school. I teach engineers how to do great design. We do come from a sort of a strict

design tradition to form, does follow function the way we teach it. But remember, the form of all this

function, what are the functions of objects in our built world particularly, in the technological world where

objects can be increasingly difficult and opaque and are 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

is not simply that the old.. dramatic notion, that function was strictly the mechanical function of the

product to resolve the need of the strict usage because there is no such thing with human beings as it is

just the usage. It is 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 is one of the major things that lead to innovation.

Okay, so you have got... if you are the team that has got all these new data, about how users think and

feel and what they actually... how the products... even the simplest little product contributes to their self-

actualization or self-knowledge by awareness and then projection of themselves in the world is confident

and intelligent people. Now, you got to come over lots of ideas. And here is the other... and just again, I

only have a little bit of time. This is the other one I hit on. And particularly brainstorming, we have lots of

techniques for ideation but particularly, I want to talk about brainstorming because so many people do it

so wrong and then they do not get the results they want and then they blame brainstorming is the

process. And the studies on brainstorming that just said brainstorming does not work or flawed in a

number of ways.

But brainstorming can really not work when you do not do it correctly or you do not 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 are looking... working with Startups or working with large companies, it does not matter to

the scale. People grab that first idea or the first couple of ideas and run with them, and 99 out of a 100

times, those first couple of ideas are the things that are available to you. They are the things you know

how to do.

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And so by definition, they are not innovations. They are line extensions. They are small increments on the

existing ideas of products. But by definition, they are the first that was available to your thinking or to 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 are implementing the

wrong thing... 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 they

did not move the bar in the sales meal or on the innovation.

So here is what we say. Brainstorming is this complicated thing. It is really about the mind-body

relationship. It is about engaging more intelligence and then, 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

implemented in a robust brainstorming process.

And like to use the analogy through 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 have never been played

before but everybody is playing the same song and everybody is trying to solve the same problem. And I

love this analogy because when I see people getting together for brainstorming and they are not

prepping properly. They are not assembling the team properly, it sort of feels to me kind of like a jazz

ensemble that is disorganized.

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 put Miles Davis. Bill Evans on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Paul Chambers, Cannonball

Adderly, 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 kind of blow the socks

off of the jazz world.

Now, imagine... I say, "Hey, Ryan, let us get together and play some jazz and you never played the

saxophone before but here, here is your saxophone and Corrine, here is your... I want you to play drums

and I want you to sit in with Bill Evans and Miles Davis." It is going to be pretty impossible for you to even

play the instrument, much less get to the level where you can play the instrument. So the mechanics

disappear and what you are actually doing is playing off of the other musicians and expanding and

growing the ideas that are being presented musically in the moment, in a temporal framework. You got

to stay on track on the music. You cannot stop the music in the middle and go, "What note am I suppose

to play now?"

The mechanics of brainstorming are exactly identical to the mechanics of great jazz. You have to be

expert at your instrument. Your instrument is your brain. You have to be willing to be free and connected

in the moment to every idea that is on the table and you have to be able to respond without 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 these are difficult and even perfect mechanics do not make great

improvisation. I know lots of people who are great mechanical musicians who cannot improvise.

Now partly, this is a 10,000-hour problem. I mean, people sitting down the brainstorm and they do not do

it very much and they have not done it a lot and they have not really ever gotten past the set of novice

stage of improvisation. If you believe in the 10,000 hours to mastery, I am going to argue that you have

not done really good structured brainstorming with facilitation to make sure that you are doing it well for

at least a hundred hours. You are still not even competent. And to move from competent to experts,

could probably going to take you a thousand hours.

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So even if you brainstorm three hours a week every week on your job, that is only going to get you 150

hours. And so, when you sit down to brainstorm, make sure you are brainstorming with people who are

at least the expert or at least competent at this so that you have the opportunity to take the combined

competencies and create some music nobody has ever heard before. So this discipline of letting go and

inventing in the moment really takes quite a bit of practice. It is not a simple as people make it nice. It is

not just sitting in a room tossing out ideas. That is not making music.

So brainstorming is effective but it works in a couple of unique ways. One, the session that you have

generates ideas in itself, and if you do it correctly, the session is not over until you have sorted and

ranked those ideas. But the session is also furthered for later thinking whatever it came up in the session

still exist as sort of a live discussion that happens even after it. So often times when people measure the

operative brainstorming sessions, they are not measuring what happens 24, 48, 72 hours later.

And the other big thing about brainstorming, it sort of impact on you work process is, today we come in

and brainstorm, Monday is the day where you brainstorm. We do a really structured brainstorming. We

do two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. That is really different than, today is the day

we come in and do planning. Today is the day we come in and do budgeting. It is a different behavior.

And once it becomes a normal behavior, a normative behavior in the organization, you 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. So, if we spend the most time on planning, it must be

that we are not a product organization, we are a planning organization.

There is a great quote from the former CEO of Ford, Alan Mullaly, who became from one of the engineers

with Ford. He said, "Culture eats process for lunch." He was talking to the same insurance, "What do you

mean by that?" He says, "Well, I thought when I joined Ford, I thought was joining a car culture. I want to

design cars. I want to talk about the Mustang. I wanted to talk about cars. I have been here three years. I

have been in planning meetings, tollgate meetings. I have been in lots of meeting but none of these

meetings have we ever talked about a car. So clearly, we are not a car culture." Let us just do a quick

assessment of our organization. Take your calendar from last week out of the amount of time you did

different activates, planning, budgeting, creative, innovative activities and a lot of things. And the thing

you spent the most time on is the thing that evidently your organization values the most because that is

where it is 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 are seeing something else has value. But the other real reason

brainstorming has not been as effective maybe in some places is it could be it is not really kind of doing it

the way we think you should do it. Brainstorming actually has four parts to it only one part is the

brainstorming session. Most people skip the other three.

So get the four parts. Framing the problem, warming up, the actual brainstorm, which is what everybody

says they are doing even though they do not necessarily do it that well. Well, that is that the thing. And

then they tend to stop right there and then they do not do the next step, which is grouping and selecting

ideas.

So you got to frame a good problem. Framing is actually really the reframing thing. It is the coming up

with something that is open-ended enough so that a large number of ideas can exist under that question.

But setting a goal without describing the solution, saying, "How can I move bricks and construction

materials from here to there on a jobsite?" is a different question than how do I make a better

wheelbarrow. Making a wheelbarrow is a noun and then noun is always the solution.

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Reframed question, a good question for brainstorm is always about an action or a verb. If you have a

noun in your framing question, you described a solution and it is not going to work. It is not a subtle

difference. It is actually a huge difference. The difference in saying designing a wheelbarrow from getting

more versions of the noun versus designing a new method, a 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 are too abstract, nothing happens. And that we also see people saying, that is kind of trying to burl

the ocean, solve world peace, make everybody happy. Those are not questions that can get any attraction

on. Just like you are trying to improvise the jazz but you have not picked a song yet. You need a song. You

need something that focuses the energy of the group. But the big errors are either making it too big or

making it actually brainstorming the solution not the problem.

Warming up, people are going to come from the budget meeting or they are going to come from... right

now, it is a 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. But you do need to move people from their analytic

mind to their synthetic mind, from their critical focused attention, which is a power thing to have in

business to a nonjudgmental open focus, which is a powerful thing to have when you are trying to do

innovation. And that is not a transition that is made easily. We tend to do warm up exercises. We steal a

lot from improv comedy. We steal a lot from theater. We steal a lot... just from... if you come to the

most... these school classrooms, it almost looks like a kindergarten because we have Play Dough and

Popsicle sticks 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 nonjudgmental synthesis focus.

In the brainstorm itself, we find that if you have a central facilitator who is writing down all the ideas, it

goes through slowly. Typically, a brainstorm team is three to five do not go much more than five or six or

you just cannot get enough conversation going rapidly enough. Think about it. You never see jazz,

improvisational jazz groups that are bigger than six. By the time they get to eight, twelve, fourteen, it is

not really improvisation anymore. They are playing off the score. You got to be able to see each other and

react to each other. So in human beings, that is a lot of five person circle, no bigger than that. But in order

for that to be very generative and so there will be lots of ideas, everybody has to be able to write down

and post their own, write them and post them in rapid sequence and that gets through the bottleneck of

the facilitator.

And then, we have the rules. You have a different judgment. You got to go for volume. Stand 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. Do not say it is a

wheelbarrow that has a motor and the motor hast this other thing on it and it has got transmission. Just

say, motorized wheelbarrow and go. You want to build up the idea of others and stay on topic. You have

heard all these things before and encourage wild ideas.

Let me tell you why they are there and why they work. You defer judgment because the number one

thing that crushes human creativity is fear. You are afraid you will be called out to be stupid. You are

afraid you will stay something that is offensive. You are afraid you will say something that is so weird that

people will look at you funny. If we do not make a safe space and disconnect the fear motivation, your

presence, your ideas even before you know you have had them. Literally, things would not even come in

to consciousness because you will be in the state of fear. We measure people in a brain scanner and we

notice the amygdala is firing. We notice the fight or flight or freeze response is firing. When that is

happening, it is almost impossible to be creative. So you got to... judgment and let people feel safe in

order to have the kinds of ideas that you want to have.

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You are visual because you want to give voice to nonverbal thinking. About 60% of brain are visual

processor. A lot of ideas show up as images but they cannot be put into words, so sketching is a great

way to have more ideas. It does not matter how well you sketch, just crazy little cartoons are better than

really elaborate sketches.

Building on the ideas of others, lower this ownership barrier, so if we are all having ideas and I am

allowed to build on top or Ryan's ideas, or Corrine's ideas, it is fine. It was not my idea in the first place, so

I am not attached to it. I am not going to be afraid if it is too crazy. I just... it was Ryan's case of the idea,

not mine. I just made it weirder. And I like the idea of encouraging stealing. I mean, this is the one place

where if you do not have an idea, just wait for somebody else to have an idea. That is what happens in a

jazz group. Miles Davis starts playing a rift from Somewhere My Prince Will Come and then somebody

else starts playing... on top and the two on top and those things and somebody comes on in top of that

with another rift or another notion with song and that whole thing is what is the beautiful thing. It is not

just the one idea at a time.

You have probably been in brainstorm, just... kind of bad where everybody has one idea at a time. We call

this popcorn brainstorm because everything... the ideas just explode randomly from the center of the

group. When you use a yes end methodology out of an improv, that just gets better and better much

faster.

And encouraging wild ideas because there is always group sync in any group. There is always the

stereotypical thinking. People show up at a brainstorming session with a whole bunch of ideas they have

already had and they want to tell you those ideas. Great, let them get... those are typically the ideas that

will produce to junk people come with. Great, get them all on the board, post them all and then go way

beyond those. David Kelly's famous saying, "If you do not go beyond the normal, you cannot come back

to anything innovative." So you do not know you are going to cross the line until you are way across the

line. And so, we will change that brainstorming to sync up. Imagine there is no gravity and we are on the

moon or imagine you are a purple elephant, how would you solve this problem? We are just looking for

crazy ideas not that we are going to execute those but those will stimulate ideas farther from the center

than can be made actionable. So that is why we have those things.

Now here is 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 recorder so we have no record of it all. What actually happens mostly is people take a

picture of the whiteboard. There are all these posters on the whiteboard and it is like, "Yeah, yeah. I will

take a picture of the whiteboard." And that is where ideas go to die. They live on cellphone cameras,

pictures of hundreds of postage on a whiteboard and nobody does anything with them.

So it is perfectly reasonable for your boss to say, "I think this is a waste of time. What did you guys

accomplish?" "Oh, we have a bunch of ideas, boss. It was really great. We had a lot of fun. We had candy

and we did this fine warm up, and improv thing and it is like..." "Well, what happened?" So you do not

want to be judging during the brainstorm but right after the brainstorm, it is the perfect time to group

and select ideas that look promising.

Now, here is the deal. If you just select... first... lots of ideas overlap and so you just... you put them on

posters. You kind of cluster all the ideas about changing the way the field service organizational works in

cluster, all the other ideas about the way wheelbarrows have two wheels or five wheels or 10 wheels. And

then you start overlaying some questions on the ideas because what you want to walk away with when

your boss says, "What happened in the brainstorming sessions?" "We had 142 ideas. We down selected

those into six categories that we think has something to do with our business model. We have got one

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wild card category that we think got the most innovative stuff in it and we down selected from that to five

things we want to prototype and try with customers." That gets you promoted. That kind of talking about

what happened in the brainstorm is how you make it proactive and useful.

And here is the deal, if you just select for the ideas that are feasible, you are back to doing the stuff that

you knew you could 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 customer's voice, brings in that thing that

is just going to make somebody go, "Oh, I got to have that. I did not know I wanted that but I got to have

that."

Now, there is a rumor that Apple does know... research or market stuff. It is not true. Apple does more

research with customers than anybody in the planet. They do not 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 they

are after that delightful customer experience. That experience where you do I know you wanted the darn

thing. It is just you see it and 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... empathy that leads to insights and move to the jazz brainstorming model, I love to call it. And

then if you personally modeled the behavior you want from your team, you act differently and you

reward differently, you are going to discover that work 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

am seven weeks into my new diet. I am not sure I am there yet but it does take a while to transform

behaviors and organizations. But if you just act the way you think everybody should have, pretty soon,

they will change their behaviors to be what you are looking for.

Well, there is a couple that are pretty tactical and let me answer those first. The question came in trough,

we have a facilitator while brainstorming and I think my recommendation is you always have someone

who is organized the brainstorm who is... you always have a Miles Davis. We are going to play this song.

We are going to work on this problem and the person who actually is very careful about selecting that

multidisciplinary team that is going to brainstorm together. So that is what that facilitator's role is. They

are not the bottleneck in the idea having or idea of recording. So I really should be putting things

together on... putting their own ideas down on postage and posting it individually. But yeah, there is

typically person who calls the session and organizes the... and just the framing and organizing of ideas

will be and then they report out to whoever they... the stakeholders are.

Can I give you give an example of kind of the insights that are realized from the empathy effort? Well, you

know, that is just the thing. I always say, you do not start with the problem, you start with people. But of

course, everybody just starts with the problem even at the d. school. We have a class called,

entrepreneurial design purchasing affordability, where we are 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 a really inexpensive low-cost incubator because incubators

and the U.S. incubators made in the technological world are 40, 50, 60, 70,000 dollars things. And there is

a theory that the third world or developing nations could not afford incubators so we need a low-cost

one. Design a $100 incubator or a $500 incubator.

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So this team got all together, user Design Thinking skills, went over to Stanford ICU unit, looked at how

incubators and premature babies are connected. Get off with some plans and then they flew to Nepal.

When they got there, the doctor, they were supposed to working with said, "This is really dumb ideas and

you do not understand the problem. Come with me." And he took them to 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." He said, "Yeah I get in incubators donated anytime we want. That is not the problem. What

else do you notice?" And one of the kids finally said, "Where are the babies?" He goes, "Yeah, there are no

babies in the hospital. Babies are not born in hospitals in Nepal. They are born in villages. Come with

me."

Eight hours in the jeep down a dusty road to a village where they met three women, who had just... in

their last six months, lost their babies. And they realized one, they had their own problem. Two, they

need to... they are going 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 are compromised and

that they cannot regulate their body temperature. The reason they need to be in an incubator is simply

because if they are not kept warm, they literally die of hypothermia.

Completely reframed the problem that is the embrace company. They started a company out of this.

They make an infant, essentially, a sleeping bag that you can tuck an infant in. You oil a particular

chemical in on a pot of water, you stick that in the sleeping bag and you can keep an infant warm at body

temperature for the eight to twelve hours it takes to get to a hospital. But just recognizing one of the

problems was incorrectly frames to that they were willing to break out of the framing of the NGO that

they were working with... 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 am not going to put my baby in that." And

then it was like, you cannot just take the baby to the hospital. You got to take the baby, the mom and the

whole family to the hospital because there is not like she is going to drop the kids at daycare. That does

not exist.

So the whole iteration of that design and really understanding who the user was, it took nine months to a

year. They have shipped hundreds of thousands of these baby sleeping bags and saved, I believe,

hundreds of thousands of babies in the process.

Last one, if you want to forward this to your boss, how do you get people to want to 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 are fearful. You need to lower fear. The way you lower fear as a boss is you

change the incentives because your team is going to fail. It is going to fail a lot when they are trying to do

innovation. The whole notion of innovation is to do something that has never been done before. What do

you think the success rate on that is? Well, if you are a venture capitalist and your famous in the valley,

your success rate is one-tenth. So if you are not willing to act like a venture capitalist, you are not ready

for innovation. That would be one argument.

So what the boss can do... is change incentive. We actually do incentives for failure, for what we call good

failures. Failures that you will learn a lot from that are highly generative. That is what a boss can do. How

do you convince the boss to try this stuff? It is almost always... you pick a small project that is not on a

critical path. It might even just be, "Let us redesign how we do purchase... around here and let us

redesign how do we expense reports around here because it is such a pain in the ass, right?"

Pick something that is not critical path, demonstrate that a team can work this way and that there is a

series of prototypes, you know asking interesting questions that you are actually get to a more interesting

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problem than the problem of expense reports. I want you to demonstrate it successfully in a couple of

small things. You will be given permission to do something bigger.

Almost always refinement, just organizations flip from a planning based organization to a Design

Thinking or creativity based organization. It comes because somebody up top was willing to give a team a

little bit of leeway to try and fail and give them some air cover, some protection from the rest of the

organization. But the 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 and starts to create some recognition in the

organization for the way they are solving problems but they will protect it in their early days by some

visionary manager or boss who can cover for them while they are doing strange things like innovation.

I think that is all the time we have for questions. We went a little bit over post session out and I am going

to turn it back to Corrine.

Corrine

Thank you for joining us today. 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.

REFERENCES Stanford Webinar: Apply Design Thinking in Your Work

L i c e n s e d u n d e r a C r e a t i v e C o m m o n s A t t r i b u t i o n 3 . 0 L i c e n s e .

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