Tom Kelley on IDEO part 2
Overview of this Interview: This is PART 2 of an interview with Tom Kelley on many aspects of leading at IDEO and the things they are still learning as a company.
Thoughts on this Interview: Vern Burkhardt does a great job of asking insightful questions into the things that Tom has learned as a leader in a company that is rewriting the rules of design and business. I appreciate that Tom brings the importance that Face to Face communications as a primary issues for effectiveness.
Original Interview HERE at ideaconnection.com
Design Thinking for Innovation
Interview with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, and Author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation
Begin Part 2…
VB: “There’s something terribly liberating about applying an abundance mentality to your ideas, thinking, and work. There’s a Zen-like force here at play…” Would you talk about this?
Tom Kelley: An abundance mentality drives innovation.
The opposite of an abundance mentality is a scarcity mentality. If people have a scarcity mentality about their ideas, and we’ve all encountered people like this, they’ve usually got one favorite idea. They’ve been plugging at this one idea for the last decade, and are worried about not getting enough credit for it. They’re defending their idea–even if it’s weak they’re defensive about it.
If you can have the opposite attitude – an abundance mentality – it goes a long way towards fueling a culture of innovation. With this mentality you are more likely to say, “I’ve got this idea, but you may take it and build on it.” You and the other person go back and forth and when he or she says, “This part won’t work”, you are more likely to reply, “Okay, how can we make it work?” rather than, “No, I think it will”. You are not defending your turf all the time.
In an abundance mentality, you are more generous with your ideas because you know you’ve got more. This allows you to blend and mix your ideas, and to get synergy. It’s an important cultural value that contributes to innovation.
In an innovation culture, people will know you are continuously creating and contributing new ideas. The group doesn’t concern itself with who created the ideas. It’s more of a group effort.
At IDEO we believe everything that is done in organizations today is ultimately a group effort. An abundance mentality helps fuel that type of perspective.
VB: You say, “Prototyping is a state of mind.” “When all else fails, prototype til you’re silly.” Why is it so powerful?
Tom Kelley: At IDEO we use prototyping for lots of different things. Sometimes for thinking out loud. Even if you don’t show your prototype to anyone, you get a chance to think, “That part’s not right, is it?” and go back to the drawing board.
We don’t use only prototyping for a physical product. For some services we use videos. We also prototype by acting things out in skits.
In a group setting, prototyping manifests your idea in a tangible way so others can give you constructive feedback. If you just wave your hands around about an idea, people will say, “Hmm, that seems interesting”, but it will be intangible to them.
As soon as you make your idea visible and tangible the feedback becomes more tangible. We use prototyping a lot to get input that allows us to improve on an idea, and to build organizational support for the idea.
Prototyping has a lot of value. Near the end of the innovation process, we validate a prototype by asking whether we’ve got it right. If so we can take it to market.
VB: Does prototyping compensate for the limitations of language?
Tom Kelley: In certain respects, yes. The great thing about prototypes for products is that they are so physical and tangible they cut across language barriers. At IDEO we’ve had designers who didn’t have great English language skills, but the physical expressions of products through prototypes are enough to move the conversation forward.
By the way, only about 30% of the innovations we do these days at IDEO are with products.
VB: Do IDEO offices still have a ‘Tech Box’, and if so does it still serve the purpose of cross-pollination?
Tom Kelley: We do have tech boxes in our offices all over the world. They accumulate interesting technologies we think will, or could be, useful in our work.
They started as a cardboard box under Dennis Boyle’s desk at our 660 studio office, which he called the “Magic Box”. Back then he tried to get people to make contributions to it, but they were reluctant to make donations. It felt like giving Dennis your coolest technologies. When we renamed it the “Tech Box” and moved it to the centre of the office, it was on display to all staff, and then people wanted to make contributions to it.
The Tech Boxes are a good source of inspiration when we go into a brainstorming session, or when we’re stuck on a problem. Most of our design challenges combine human aspects, for which we use the Anthropology persona, business aspects, and technology aspects. Sometimes the Tech Box can be useful for looking at emerging technologies that can be applied to the human and business issues we are wrestling with.
VB: To stimulate the brain to look at things from a different perspective?
Tom Kelley: To remind you of what is possible. Many items in our Tech Boxes are right on the edge of emergence. They are currently not financially viable for wide spread use, or the technology is just coming out. There is no ‘regular stuff’ in Tech Boxes. All of the items are slightly edgy.
Sometimes things that seem too exotic and expensive when used in small quantities can become cheaper and more practical when put into widespread use. One of our favorite items in the Tech Box is a nickel titanium alloy called “Nitinol”. It’s quite expensive, but we’ve found several opportunities to use it in small quantities to do exactly what we want. It’s an example of how we use the Tech Box to help us succeed.
VB: Would you talk about “verb products”, about creating experiences that resonate with your customers?
Tom Kelley: This is the idea of focusing on the verbs and not the nouns.
There is a danger in the design world, especially in products but it can also apply to services, of you falling in love with your brand and the object you’re making, and then of your customers not falling in love with your product.
There is a thing we call “product lust”, which occurs when the product lures in customers.
Most of the time when people recommend your offering to others, they use verbs. They talk about the experience they have with your products and services. We think that if you look at customer experience in terms of verbs, it will lead to more success.
Think of the Apple iPod example I used earlier. The fact that it’s beautiful is not the whole story. It’s the experience. The iPod became the leading music player in the world because of the link between iPod hardware and iTunes. It became super easy to download music, and it’s this design experience that’s created billions of dollars of value for Apple. I just heard that Apple had its best second quarter in its history despite the current economy and other things going on in the world. Their offering is still compelling, and I would argue it is in large part because they focused on the verbs as well as the nouns.
VB: What are “trigger points” as they relate to customer experience?
Tom Kelley: We call trigger points the one or two essential elements in a product that are important to your customers. Sometimes you gain a competitive edge by fixing a problem or designing a great customer experience around those trigger points. If you make everything about your product or service continuously better and add more features, you may end up with a product or service that customers can’t afford and don’t understand.
One of the trigger points I talk about in The Ten Faces of Innovation is a comfortable bed in a hotel. Many customers will give up many other amenities in a hotel if they can count on a comfortable bed.
There’s a tipping point that gets somebody over a threshold. For example, when IDEO was working on the PDA Palm V, one of the early personal digital systems and predecessor to what is now the Smart Phone, it mattered a lot whether or not it fit in the pocket of men’s shirts. If it was one millimeter larger than a shirt pocket, it was a non-starter from a sales point of view. So there are thresholds that become really important.
Another example is battery life. The difference is huge between an electronic product that makes it through an entire day and one that doesn’t. There are major benefits to a battery that needs to be charged only once a day, and will never fail you compared to one that holds only enough power to get you through three quarters of a day. Give me any electronic product, such as a cell phone or computer – whether or not it will get me through a full day is a trigger point.
VB: What is the difference between a good idea and a successful product?
Tom Kelley: There are good ideas that, for one reason or another, don’t succeed. They show promise, but may be a little too early.
In the early ‘90s, we worked on pen-based computers. I thought they were clever – a really good idea. I worked on one called Momenta that I would have invested in if the founder of the company had given me the chance. It had a nice interface. It was beautiful. But it was not successful. I think partly because it was slightly ahead of its time. The software and processors to drive it were not fast enough, so it had a response time lag that became slightly annoying. As a result it didn’t behave in a way people anticipated it would.
A good idea has to be delivered affordably – the business side – and it must work in a way people want – the technology side. Plenty of good ideas over the years have failed. Others have been ahead of their time, needed to be shelved for a while, and introduced into the marketplace at a later date.
VB: In the year 2000 you predicted what some high-tech products might look like in 2010. Do you have a few predictions for 2020?
Tom Kelley: Social networking is the thing that I think is most likely to reinvent the world in a way I can’t predict. I don’t think the people of my generation who are making decisions in large corporations fully understand the effect social networks are going to have on their worlds. The effect of everybody knowing everything about everything.
It’s going to be impossible for you to shield your customers or your prospective customers from all the positive and negative reviews by everybody you’ve served in the past. The role of marketing is completely changed by the fact that your customers have access to all this information. Sometimes it may even be skewed information that you are powerless to change. Prospective customers will be able to hear from those of your past customers who are the most passionate about your product or service. If you’ve got a great brand, they’ll hear passion on the positive side. If you’ve got a bad brand, they’ll hear passion on the negative side.
You have to assume that in 2020 your customers will know everything–all the good and bad about you. iPhones will soon have a port that allows for a scanner. It’s not a big leap to imagine you seeing something on a grocery shelf that purports to be a ‘new healthy food’ and scanning it’s bar code to download what others have said about the product before buying it. You will be able to see how many stars it gets in the social community, whether it’s considered good or bad, and what the ‘word on the street’ says about whether or not it’s worth the money.
This is a significant difference compared to now when you read the label and, if it sounds good, you may decide to try it. In this future world, if the social community has concluded your product is not worth the money being asked for it, you might as well withdraw it from the marketplace. I think this is a future that may well be played out.
VB: In The Ten Faces of Innovation you say, “…the Devil’s Advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today.” Why do you think playing this role has become so prevalent in group dynamics? Is it almost always a disguise for protecting the status quo, or worse, for being mean spirited?
Tom Kelley: The Devil’s Advocate is usually defending the status quo. The book was actually going to be titled ‘Beyond the Devil’s Advocate’, but the publisher didn’t like it so we used it for the first chapter instead.
What I don’t like about the role is that the Devil’s Advocate scores points or gets credit in some organizations for just being a clever critic. You’re in a meeting where everything is going well, and somebody raises their hand and says, “Let me be the Devil’s Advocate for a minute.” In doing so, they stop the meeting dead, deliver their critique, and then their participation is done. Whatever proposal or discussion was underway has lost all its momentum.
I don’t mind the critique part of the role, but if they are the smartest person in the room, which they assume they are, I want the Devil’s Advocates to play the other side too. I want them to say, “I think this idea has flaws and here is how it could be made better.” They should at least be willing to apply their brainpower to resolving the problems they are pointing out. For the most part, the Devil’s Advocates I have encountered have not played this positive, contributing role.
VB: It’s easier to play a negative role than to contribute.
Tom Kelley: I didn’t tell the whole story in The Ten Faces of Innovation. I did a lot of research on the Devil’s Advocate. Pope Sixtus V of the Catholic Church created the Devil’s Advocate role in 1587 for the purpose of taking a skeptical view of a candidate for canonization. He didn’t want everybody to be a ‘yes man”.
In large organizations if the big boss signals he is in favor of something, then everybody else piles on. Imagine how, in a very hierarchal organization like the Catholic Church, if the Pope just smiled once, others would think that is the way we have to go. To prevent this the Devil’s Advocate role was created to argue the other side.
A couple of things about how that role was established in the Catholic Church are instructive. One is that it was an appointed role. How much better would I feel about the Devil’s Advocate in my organization if I knew it was a role the person was appointed to and is supposed to play, compared to being self-appointed. The Devil’s Advocates in the business world and other social environments are self-appointed. The second is that the role had an opposing side. When the Devil’s Advocate role was created there was also a God’s Advocate. It was meant to be an argument between equals.
The original idea of Devil’s Advocate has been extrapolated, or cross-pollinated for use in the business world. In the original concept it had balance. In the business world today it does not have balance. The Devil’s Advocates have too much power and do not feel obligated to describe how they would make an idea better.
By the way, the Catholic Church got rid of the office of the Devil’s Advocate.
VB: You tell us that “contagious enthusiasm” might best describe your brother David, who founded IDEO. Is ‘Director’ his most comfortable persona?
Tom Kelley: Interesting, that’s a good question. I never thought about it, but it’s certainly one of them for David.
The kind of Director we talk about at IDEO is like the best stage and screen directors. It’s somebody who isn’t trying to be a star. With the notable exception of Alfred Hitchcock, a Hollywood director never appears on screen. Directors see it as their job to attract the most talented people from around the world and turn them into stars. IDEO is more than 30 years old, and that has been David’s approach from the very beginning.
I think David would say that the first role of a great leader is to make other leaders.
VB: You say, ‘…over time, we learned to apply our “design thinking’ approach from product-innovation programs to the world of services, experiences, and even cultures.’ Would you talk about how IDEO’s approach has been applied to cultures?
Tom Kelley: Our ‘design thinking’ is a distillation of the innovation process that Designers at IDEO and elsewhere use to create new products and services. It involves the Anthropology persona, experimentation, and an open-minded brainstorming approach, and we can apply it to other areas.
We’ve used it when working with companies on their cultures. For example, quite a while back we worked with Samsung to establish a culture of innovation. They previously had a pretty autocratic culture. We had a joint office, and for three years lived side by side with the Samsung folks. I’m not saying it was only IDEO’s doing, but along the way Samsung enhanced their culture of innovation, and it has been very successful for them. The Samsung brand is now larger and has more value than the brand called Sony. I would say that is mostly because of their strong culture of innovation.
We also worked with Procter & Gamble and many other firms on their culture of innovation.
We are now talking to countries about promoting a culture of innovation. I cannot publicly point to any yet. I am hoping the process goes well, because if we can encourage a country to have a culture of innovation – we would start with really small countries – that would be wonderful. We will see what happens with that process.
VB: Singapore might be an example.
Tom Kelley: We can’t take any credit for it, but Singapore as a nation is possibly the leader in the world at having a culture of innovation. I lived in Singapore and have been back several times in the last several years. I believe they are systematically pursuing that culture more than any other nation in the world.
VB: Why are T-shaped people gems in the innovation process?
Tom Kelley: This gets to T-shaped versus I-shaped people.
I-shaped people are very strong in their vertical category. They are great engineers, scientists, anthropologists or other specialists, and they drill deep in their area of expertise. In the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, where I live, there are engineers who say, “I don’t suffer fools gladly”. What they sometimes mean is, “I don’t like talking to people who aren’t engineers”. The world needs I-shaped people, but we have found they don’t have a place at IDEO.
At IDEO we like T-shaped people who have a strong core of expertise, but combine it with a genuine respect for, interest in, and preferably experience with, other areas as well. For the kind of innovation we are practicing at IDEO we need people with varied areas of expertise to ‘play’ well with each other. A T-shaped person might be an engineer who does fine art in their spare time, is interested in anthropology and maybe took some under-graduate courses in it, or some other esoteric combination of interests.
T-shaped people have more attachment points. They are more likely to make a contribution to a team, and build on the ideas of others. Part of our recruiting and hiring process is looking for T-shaped characteristics.
VB: You say, ‘Scarcity and tough constraints force you to break new ground because the “business as usual” path is simply not available.’ Does this portend well for innovation during the current recession and the challenges many companies, the whole financial system, and many governments and other organizations are facing?
Tom Kelley: Yes, the current recession is a perfect example that forces you to think harder. It forces you to look for new opportunities, and to increase the value of your offering.
A recession, especially a serious one like we are currently experiencing, is actually good news for innovators. It shakes people out of the status quo. For instance, you may have had the same banking relationship for the last 30 years. But in this environment you’re starting to think maybe others offer more value or safety for your money, or better customer service. Suddenly you’re looking around.
You may have known there was free calling on Skype and voice over-ride services, but have been with your old phone company for a long time and am comfortable with it. In a recession you might start thinking you’ve got this existing relationship, but don’t want to be stupid about it. You’ll at least scan the horizon, and see if there’s an innovator offering more value or more of what you need.
Innovators who have had difficulty cracking into a market are suddenly seeing a new openness from customers of all types. Customers are suddenly looking around so it opens doors previously closed.
VB: You say, “Names can make a huge difference in almost any new product or service. We believe that anything worth working on is worth naming.” How do you determine if a name has ‘zip’, and will therefore contribute to success?
Tom Kelley: Ultimately the way to test anything like that is by talking to all the smart people you know, and seeing how they react. There’s a science to naming. IDEO gets involved in naming, and sometimes collaborates with naming firms.
There’s also a science to the use of individual consonants. There are letters in the English alphabet that human’s perceive as slow letters, such as ‘l’, ‘m’, and ‘n’. Others we perceive as fast, like ‘z’, ‘x’, and ‘v’.
There was a product called ‘Zipper’ that didn’t do well until they changed its name. A good name helps carry your message forward, and is consistent with other aspects of the brand. You want to build that understanding into your name.
It’s funny when you look at some of the old names people got away with in a less sophisticated era. I talk a lot about WD-40. It’s oil that does water displacement—that’s what the WD stands for. If you were naming this product in 2009 you’d come up with a better name, but as a legacy brand it has a lot of strength. Once you establish a name over a period of decades it develops strength of its own.
When coming to the market with something new, the name either helps or hinders your launch. A great name helps.
Part 3 (final) Tomorrow
Tags: Ideo, Innovation, tom kelley
