Tom Kelley on IDEO part 3
Overview of this Interview: This is PART 3 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 3…
VB: Would you talk about the concept of mapping your customers’ or potential customers’ journeys?
Tom Kelley: We discovered while designing products and services that you can follow a customers’ journey every step along the way in their dealings with you. Some of the steps include discovering about your service, exploring your offering, trying it for the first time, becoming more familiar with it, and then using it on a regular basis. In each step you can distinguish yourself, you can provide something special as opposed to being the same as every one else.
One slightly extreme example is the backpack company, JanSport, which made its warranty services different than anybody else’s. If you send your backpack in to be re-sewn or repaired JanSport sends you a little postcard with a message from your backpack while it’s at camp. No one would say this warranty service is ordinary.
You want your business to be extraordinary at every step along the way, even at the end of the cycle. We think great companies look at every step of the customer’s journey, and ask whether they’re ordinary or extraordinary. They try, within the constraints of cost, to be extraordinary at every step. There are certain brands that stand out, such as Virgin and Apple, but there are many others as well.
VB: You say, “…when we walk into most offices, our senses shut down from sensory underload.” Is having an ‘innovation lab’ a must if a company wishes to promote a more innovative organizational culture?
Tom Kelley: I’m not sure I would say it is a must, but it certainly helps.
An innovation lab gives you permission to think differently. We go through our day-to-day jobs dedicating a lot of time to getting things out the door, taking care of current operations. It sometimes helps to have a place that prompts you to get out of your normal day-to-day thought patterns.
Some companies have had great successes creating innovation labs, which we describe as an ‘on-site off-site’. Most companies have ‘off-sites’ where they go to a hotel somewhere and brainstorm about something, but only once a quarter or once a year. The fact that you’re at the beach or in Los Vegas signals that it is not real life. An innovation lab in the corporate campus also sends a signal that we’re outside our ordinary path, but still strongly related to work.
I talk in The Ten Faces of Innovation about The Gym at Procter and Gamble, a place where employees exercise their mental muscles. It’s a space in which they’ve had great success in sparking new innovations. I also talk about Mattel, Inc, the toy company that created a space called ‘Platypus’. Lots of companies are coming around to the idea of having an innovation lab space within their corporate campus.
VB: Would you talk about the power of storytelling?
Tom Kelley: This is something we overlooked for the first ten or twenty years at IDEO.
We thought that a new product, service or idea should speak for itself. Now we realize data do not carry the day. When you give people data they forget it almost immediately as it rushes through their short-term memory. But we remember stories from early childhood. A story carries a message, moral, or idea.
We now believe that a story will deliver a message that you really believe in to your internal team. A story will also send a message to the world about your brand. That’s why I encourage people to work on their story telling skills.
VB: It needs to be an interesting story.
Tom Kelley: Yes, there’s a great book on this subject. I have one chapter in my book, but there’s a whole book by Chip and Dan Heath called Made to Stick. I think most people know intuitively, but the Heaths are quite explicit about what makes a story work. It needs to be simple, concrete, credible, emotional, and have an unexpected characteristic to it.
As you said, it needs to be a good story because a bad story is not worth the telling. If you create a good story that’s sticky in the Malcolm Gladwell sense, then that story will carry your message along with it.
VB: What do participants learn at IDEO University?
Tom Kelley: IDEO U is a first exposure to the innovation design process. It’s an offering that has come and gone at IDEO. It’s now often embedded in a larger innovation project as a workshop.
It’s about teaching, as quickly as possible, ideas about the process of design thinking. People could read my book or hear a lecture. But we’ve noticed over the years that it’s helpful if you can practice, if you can act something out. It’s the combination of hearing about an approach and then practicing it yourself. In IDEO U we take a moderately simple design challenge and tackle it in a practiced way over a period of 24 or 48 hours. We go through the whole design process and participants can see that it isn’t so hard, and yet they come out with some good ideas. The next step is to try the same process on the complex, messy problems we wrestle with everyday.
We have a session designed for the high school kids of employees; we call it ‘IDEO Boot Camp’. Both my kids have been through it. Over a one-week period we expose them to design thinking, and they brainstorm, do Anthropology, build things, and receive user feedback. It has the elements of IDEO U but is aimed at the high school level.
VB: Should we learn to color outside the lines but stay on the same page?
Tom Kelley: I use the example of my brother, David. If you always play by the rules you’re overly constraining yourself because innovators do break rules sometimes. They question the way things are done.
Staying on the same page is comparable to what Gordon MacKenzie says in Orbiting the Giant Hair Ball. He points out how organizations establish one rule after another, as part of their history, until the rules become a giant hairball. If you set your foot down on the planet this hairball creates, you get snagged in it, caught in all the rules. If you get stuck there it’s hard to innovate. But if you shoot off into space you’re not helping the organization either. MacKenzie’s central metaphor is to orbit the giant hairball; be near it without getting snagged by the mess of it.
What you just said about coloring outside the lines but staying on the same page is Gordon MacKenzie’s idea of staying close enough so as not to generate wild ideas no one can use. You’re in a position to come up with new, innovative ideas that have a fundamental practicality to them. It’s possible to implement them. They can add value to your organization.
VB: Do you have any final comments for our IdeaConnection readers?
Tom Kelley: The interesting challenge for us these days is how to take the design lessons we’ve learned from products and services, and apply them to broader social issues. We’ve just started on the journey of trying to apply design thinking to the education system in America. Other challenges are applying design thinking to global issues, such as how to get access to clean water around the world. These issues are on the frontier for us; they are the interesting challenges we’re starting to wrestle with.
VB: There are lots of these types of challenges.
Tom Kelley: There are. We think there’s an opportunity to apply design thinking. We’ve been using the left brain analytical model on these problems for the last 50 or 100 years, and we think new thought patterns might open up the possibility of new solutions.
VB: You’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you very much.
Tom Kelley: You’re welcome. Thanks a lot.
Conclusion:
“Products that become hits seem to enjoy a balance of features, price, and that often elusive element of timing.”
‘The best products and services aspire to the classic design principle “Make simple things simple and complex things possible.” Sometimes designing a winning experience is about reining in your wish list and resisting the temptation to do too much.’
Of the ten personas various members of an innovation team may choose to take on, we would do well to choose the two or three roles that most appeal to us, and hone the skills required to play them well.
Tom Kelley’s Bio:
Tom Kelley is the General Manager of IDEO. Working with his brother, IDEO founder David Kelley, Tom has helped manage the firm as it has grown from 20 designers to a staff of 530. During that time, he has been responsible for such diverse areas as business development, marketing, human resources, and operations. Prior to joining IDEO, Tom was a management consultant for Towers Perrin, advising senior executives on organizational and operational issues in North America, Asia and Australia.
He addresses business audiences on how to use innovation to transform business culture and strategic thinking. His tools and insights are from lessons learned at IDEO and other successful design teams.
Tom holds an MBA in marketing from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Delbert J. Duncan citation as the year’s top marketing scholar. He was also named the first-ever Executive Fellow by the dean of the Haas Business School.
Tom Kelley is the author of The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (2001), and The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization (2005).
Tags: Design Thinking Process, Ideo, Process, tom kelley
