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.
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. (more…)
Overview of this Interview: This is 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.
Vern Burkhardt (VB): What are some of the most interesting and exciting parts of your job as General Manager of IDEO?
Tom Kelley: The most interesting and exciting are tapping into the collective brain of the 530 people who work at IDEO. I am not a designer, engineer, or anthropologist so I don’t generate the source material at IDEO. I am the lucky guy who gets to tap into the reservoir of great insights that are being generated there every day.
I recently spent three days at an off-site meeting where most of the participants were IDEO people from around the world. They shared new insights about healthcare, green technology, and media entertainment projects we are working on. Wow, it was an incredible download because there’s a lot of interesting ’stuff’ going on. Being a part of that community is one of the most interesting aspects of my job.
VB: It’s a highly creative environment.
Tom Kelley: Since we are members of the same family at IDEO open sharing occurs. It’s fun to see the latest things. It’s the future because these are innovations that haven’t yet been announced to the world.
VB: You say if you could choose just one persona it would be the Anthropologist. No doubt because you are adept at one of the hardest parts of the innovation process – “seeing with fresh eyes”. Which one or two of the other nine personas do you especially enjoy playing in terms of “being innovative?” [Vern's note: Tom Kelley describes ten 'roles' – the 'personas' – various members of an innovation team may choose to take on. They are the learning personas (Anthropologist, Experimenter, and Cross-pollinator), the organizing personas (Hurdler, Collaborator and Director), and the building personas (Experience Architect, Set Designer, Caregiver, and Storyteller).]
Tom Kelley: Anthropology is number one in my mind, but I also love the Experience Architect. The Experience Architect takes the insights from anthropology and other sources, and converts them into the customer experience, employee experience, or whatever is the target audience. How you translate or adapt insights into action when thinking about the customer journey and trying to be special at every step along the way, rather than only considering your product as a commodity is fascinating.
I also like the Set Designer. They’re the person who uses the physical environment as a strategic tool to influence the attitude, behavior, or even the performance of the team that works in a physical space. While it may not be the most powerful of the innovation roles, it’s often the persona most frequently overlooked. People don’t think of space as being strategic. At IDEO we think space can be quite strategic, and that it can affect everything that happens.
There is a new book out titled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. I am in the middle of reading it. The authors talk about how making small changes can make a difference. For example, retailers understand that if you put candy at the eye level of young children they will grab onto it, and their mom will be encouraged to buy it. That’s not necessarily a positive nudge, but it works and increases sales.
In the same way, small changes in the work environment can change behavior, encourage interactions, get people to share more things, and keep people from being isolated. It can make for better brain storming sessions. That’s why I like the Set Designer.
VB: It can keep people from becoming stale? (more…)
Overview of Article: This is an interview with Tim Brown, primarily on the information in his book, Change for Design, but also on his views of the implications of Design Thinking in a few specific areas.
Thoughts on this Article: I like both the questions and the answers in this interview. The S+B team did a good job of getting into the ideas and asking appropaite questions that give deeper insight into the topics that Tim addressed. This interview also continues to highlight for me the differences between Tim Brown’s views of Design Thinking and Roger Martin’s views. It will be interesting to see who becomes the primary voice on the Design Thinking movement.
The screensaver on Tim Brown’s office computer is a selection of photographs of classic automobiles. Some of the pictures came from colleagues at IDEO, including a few of the cars in company cofounder David Kelley’s collection. As one might expect, fascination with objects is a common trait at this 550-person design firm headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. “We all grew up,” says Brown, “making or working with beautiful things.”
Another common trait at IDEO is a fascination with systems — especially those involving such complex, interconnected issues as reconceiving marketing campaigns, rethinking the materials in packaging, and redesigning health-care delivery and early childhood education. IDEO is perhaps the earliest and best-known design firm to promote what Brown calls “design thinking”: a holistic approach to innovation, including in-depth customer insight and rapid prototyping, aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. This means addressing the look and feel of the product being designed, as designers conventionally do. But it also means reconsidering the way it meets consumers’ unspoken needs, as well as reworking the infrastructure that enables the product and the supply chain that delivers it. (more…)
Overview of the Post: Tim Brown is interviewed by WNYC on his book and the concept of Design Thinking.
Thoughts on this Post: Pretty interesting interview. This helps those who are new to the concept to get a pretty good understanding of how Design Thinking works and can be used in non-design settings.
Overview of Article: Tim Brown gives the background story on how he ended up in Design and then became one of the leading voices in the field of Design Thinking.
Thoughts on this Article: This connects Tim’s new book Change by Design and the overall story of what Design Thinking is, how it came to be important and what it can offer.
The Making of a Design Thinker
It took years before this industrial designer realized that the true power of his craft transcended the physical object.
I was trained as an industrial designer, but it took me a long time before I realized the difference between being a designer and thinking like one. Seven years of undergraduate and graduate education and 15 years of professional practice went by before I had any inkling that what I was doing was more than simply a link in a chain that connected a client’s engineering department to the folks upstairs in marketing.
The first products I designed as a professional were for Wadkin Bursgreen, a venerable English machinery manufacturer. The company invited a young and untested designer into its midst to help improve its professional woodworking machines. I spent a summer creating drawings and models of better-looking circular saws and easier-to-use spindle molders.
I think I did a reasonably good job—it’s still possible to find my work in factories 30 years later—but you’ll no longer find the Wadkin Bursgreen Company, which has long since gone out of business. As a designer, I didn’t see that it was the future of the woodworking industry that was in question, not the design of its machines. (more…)
Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.
Thoughts on this Article: This is a simple overview of the book, but doesn’t really capture the heart of the book. Tim Brown is arguably the most visible spokesperson on the topic, and often sets the tone for what will happen in that industry. The NY Times reporter presents Tim as a designer who now practices Design Thinking, when in reality – he is an industrial products person, who understood the importance of design in creating a marketable product. That is a significant difference.
LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. “Oh, I don’t know,” drawled the designer. “Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package… I’ll call you then.”
Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike’s sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, “Change by Design.” “Few designers today would even touch this type of project,” he writes of Loewy’s assignment. “What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter.”
He’s kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I’d like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown. (more…)
Overview of Post: Tim Brown weighs in on the challenges that some teams face using Design Thinking. The topic is primarily on the parts of the process that ‘feel’ odd to people unaccustomed to the process.
Thoughts on this Post: Tim brings a few common barriers to the forefront and prepares you for them. Getting past these can enable you to be successful.
John Maeda (President of RISD) would likely answer that question by saying “a banana”. He often talks about how hard it is to describe design and I agree with him.
On the other hand I think one of the biggest obstacles to using design thinking as an effective problem solving approach is anticipating what it feels like. We are not used to wondering about how processes feel. I think we assume they all feel the same and in conventional business that is probably true. (more…)
Overview of Article: Robert Sutton takes on the idea that group brainstorming is not an efficient way to generate ideas. He references his time working with IDEO and makes very good points on what actually constitutes “efficient” brainstorming.
Thoughts on Article: I give this one to you as a classic on the ‘Brainstorming’ element of the Design Thing process. Sutton makes very good points on the importance of having a team, but of making sure that you also have the right environment for that team to be productive. This is a very good article.
Should your team brainstorm as a group or as individuals? At creative companies, switching between the two modes can be seamless—and highly productive
A recent Wall Street Journal story took on the hot topic of brainstorming. Titled “Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own,” the piece quoted research showing that people are “more creative” when they “brainstorm” alone rather than in meetings and offered supporting testimonials from managers.
This is a subject I am quite familiar with. Along with Andy Hargadon, I completed an 18-month ethnography in the 1990s on how the innovation consultants at IDEO do creative work, and we’ve both spent much of the past decade studying other innovative organizations. At the time, Andy was my PhD student, and now he is an associate professor at the University of California at Davis.
We agree that badly managed face-to-face brainstorms do stifle creativity and we agree that, even when brainstorming is done right, people probably can still generate ideas faster when they work alone. But it is total nonsense to conclude that if you want creativity, you ought to keep your people in solitary confinement where they can’t “waste time” listening to and building on the ideas of others.
Here’s the problem: Most studies of brainstorming are rigorous but irrelevant to the challenge of managing creative work. For starters, comparing whether creativity happens best in groups or alone is pretty silly when you look at how creative work is actually done. At creative companies, people switch between both modes so seamlessly that it is hard to notice where individual work ends and group work starts. (more…)
Overview of Article: This is a report from Memorial Hospital on what happened when IDEO consulted with them and the results they experienced.
Thoughts on the Article: For most of us, it is good to see the process in action, and to gain new insights into possible solutions to problems or challenges that we are facing. With the focus on Obama and Health Care reform, I thought this was worth a look.
An Immersion in Innovation Culture: Memorial Dives Deep
“Success depends on both what you do and how you do it.”-Tom Kelley, IDEO General Manager
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm
Memorial Health System has long recognized that equally important to finding new solutions in healthcare is understanding the process that leads to those solutions. Underpinning this theory is the belief that good ideas don’t just drop out of the sky at random, but are likely to emerge from a culture which fosters innovative thinking and creativity as a core element of its identity and operations. IDEO, a leading design company, holds this philosophy as the pillar of its work. Known throughout the world, IDEO’s consultants have worked on such diverse projects as designing Apple’s first computer mouse to reinventing the dressing rooms at Prada’s New York store. Perhaps the only thing that rivals the ingenuity of their designs is the way they think of them. Their most riveting “product” can’t be held in your hand or touched, as it’s the methodology itself behind their designs. And experience is the best approach to understanding it.
In the fall of 2002, IDEO brought that experience to Memorial Hospital and Health System. Contracted to help with the development of the hospital’s new Heart and Vascular Center , IDEO consultants began observing the current hospital environment to find insights into how the Center might be best designed. A series of three two-day gatherings, dubbed “Deep Dives” by IDEO came next. It’s primarily from the last of these Deep Dive experiences that the following account is drawn. It’s our hope that these insights will be used to replicate elements of the process of innovation in many future Memorial projects and in the very culture of our lives. (more…)
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.
Overview of this Interview: This is an interview with Tom Kelley on many aspects of leading at IDEO and the things they are still learning as a company.
Tom Kelley: Since we are members of the same family at IDEO open sharing occurs. It’s fun to see the latest things. It’s the future because these are innovations that haven’t yet been announced to the world.
Overview of the Post: Tim Brown is interviewed by WNYC on his book and the concept of Design Thinking.
Overview of Article: Tim Brown gives the background story on how he ended up in Design and then became one of the leading voices in the field of Design Thinking.
Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.
Overview of Article: Robert Sutton takes on the idea that group brainstorming is not an efficient way to generate ideas. He references his time working with IDEO and makes very good points on what actually constitutes “efficient” brainstorming. 
An Immersion in Innovation Culture: Memorial Dives Deep