Thinking through Design Thinking

IDEO /Tim Brown, Bruce Nussbaum and Stanford d.school call it Design Thinking.

Michael Speaks, Michael Shamiyeh, Bruce Mau talk about Design Intelligence,

Nigel Cross writes about Designerly ways of knowing (one of the best books i’ve read so far on design thinking).

All these ideas deal with design as process rather than object. They all articulate and confirm the idea that there is a ’specific way of thinking that is unique to design’ and ‘that this way of thinking is applicable on any problem’ It is a way of seeing, understanding and making the world, and the ‘design way’ is a universal way, there is no problem that can not be solved, … or so it seems (this is one of the claims of Bruce Mau’s Massive change exhibit and book anyway).

Although one has to acknowledge a certain naivety behind this idea, it is non the less very appealing, especially for a designer, or well … an architect like myself.

Thinking about design as a universal problem solving method radically enlarges the arena for design and provides the design discipline with a sense of authority. It provides a credibility to the discipline that is instrumental in getting designer involved in projects at a point where the fundamental decisions are made, instead of calling designers in to only deal with the cosmetics of a project. One has to read the efforts of IDEO and Bruce Nussbaum in this light, as advocating for a design discipline that is more involved at the moments and places where it matters and where it can make a significant impact.

Beside propagating design thinking to businesses, selling the design way of thinking as universally applicable, provides design with a legitimization for engaging with fields that are normally well beyond their reach, beyond the confines of the design discipline. This is something also propagated in the Volume’s opening issue (#1) under the term ‘Architectural Intelligence’ and there is also some of this attitude present in the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” issue (#14). I think these ideas bear fruit, but suffer from overestimation, but that’s what usally happens when one advocates something, it quickly turns into a one dimensional argument.

I would like to point out a few problems I have with the current discourse around design thinking:

Design as problem-solving
The underlying paradigm of what “design” actually is in the “Design Thinking” school, is that it is synonymous with problem-solving. This is a limited view of design, and a problematic one. First of all what does it mean to solve a problem? In design there is not one possible answer to a certain question, there are a lot, see the architectural competition as example.

Also one can always question whether any problem is permanently solvable, especially when its problems have a socio-economical dimension, these are known as wicked problems. (see Rittel, Webber – “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”) The term problem solving sounds too absolutist. How many solutions from 50 years ago are regarded as the root of today’s problems?

The more design becomes technical and a from engineering in which the criteria are technical as well, where the margins of error are so small that solutions can be measured in absolute dimensions, in this sense there is a relation between problem and solution that becomes traceable. Design has a huge cultural component, often the problem is artificial, or invented by the designer themselves and is connected more to a cultural zeitgeist than anything else. In what way can we talk about the brief for a project in terms of a problem?

A problem is something undesired that needs to be resolved, but the brief is defined as a wish-list not a problem definition. The brief inspires a projection of the future, and over the course of a design process there surely is problem-solving going on, but it’s mainly a problem-solving cycle that deals with ones own invented or perceived problems, which is legitimate, but one has to acknowledge that problems are not absolute.

Design is a discipline but not a scientific one!

Design as innovation
Another paradigm underlying “design” in design thinking is the one of progress, that design is instrumental in improving our lives, society and the whole world basically. The term “innovation” embodies the believe that the new is better, that technology will improve our lives, its propelled by the assumptions that science, rationality and efficiency will move the world to a better place. It’s a very technocratic conception of design, one that fits perfectly in our capitalist society. Innovation and problem-solving are two branches that grow from the same tree.

Design thinking doesn’t tell us much about thinking.
The “thinking” in design thinking, doesn’t really deal with explaining the thinking in design, it only scratches the surface of what design thinking is really about. Design thinking as propagated by IDEO and Nussbaum is mostly deals with methodology, process, ‘how-to,’ it doesn’t deal with how design thinking actually works. Usually cases are brought forward of how a typical design approach has been successful in tackling a problem, but from this we don’t learn how thoughts unfold in the design process, how thinking unfolds.

Thus design thinking currently deals with describing behavior, symptoms, the consequence of thoughts but not what design thinking consists of itself. It is much like how the Turning Test for testing if a machine is intelligent or not doesn’t tell us anything about what intelligence itself actually is, it only shows that a machine can behave as a human does! But this tells us nothing about the nature of intelligence itself (John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room‘ thought experiment effectively exposes this flaw of the Turing Test)

Especially this last part intrigues me, i’m interested in how designer have their own rationality, how a design can have its own rationality. Just like a mathematician can say this equation is false, an architects can say, this detail doesn’t make sense in the overall concept of the building. Apparently design choices can be more or less right or wrong, within the network of choices made during the design process, while at the same time all most of the choices are more or less arbitrary! intriguing isn’t it!? What is this kind of logic that is operative in design? What is this intelligence that seems irrational but gives enough foundation for making a choice? What mode of reasoning is at work here?

I researched these questions in my graduation work, which consisted of a comparative literature research of three perspective on “reasoning in architecture“, although the findings are relevant to all design disciplines> The three perspectives come from three authors, from three different fields:

Donald A. Schön (1930-1997) a design researcher, but trained as philosopher who succeeded in describing ‘how designers think’ in a way that designers actually recognize themselves. Shön’s work is interesting because of the categories he introduces. These are fundamental descriptions of how a designer engages in the design activity. His categories are open but still defined enough for designers to recognise the fundamental process they are involved in. It describes an iterative process, but does not specify tasks, design phases or steps from beginning to end. It’s not a method for how-to think, it’s provides insight in how thinking works in design. Schön theory is presented in his book The Reflective Practitioner (1983)

Jeff Hawkins (1957) is a computer architect turned neurologist. He is interested in making truly intelligent machines, but believes one can only do so when we understand how the brain produces intelligence. He states that in the cognitive sciences intelligence is judged by the wrong parameter: behaviour. According to Hawkins this is only a manifestation of what intelligence really is, behaviour is but the surface. Hawkins puts forward a theory that intelligence is determined by prediction. According to him the brain makes continuous predictions about the world it ’sees’ through its senses. It makes this predictions by analogy to the past, to what is already stored in our memory. Hawkins theory in presented in his book On Intelligence (2004) You can watch a lecture by Hawkins on TED and here if you want to get in a bit deeper.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a philosopher, logician and mathematician. Peirce was interested in where new ideas came from, how the mind was able to put forward fruitful ideas, and in that way it was instrumental in the development of knowledge. Peirce believed that deductive and inductive reasoning were not adequate in describing how this worked, thus Peirce developed a third mode of reasoning, abduction, with which he tried to clarify processes of invention and discovery. Another theory of Peirce is also of importance more specifically for the work of architects, that of diagrammatic reasoning.

He developed the concept of diagrammatic reasoning in the context of explaining creativity in mathematics, but it also gives us a deeper insight in how architects reason through making drawings and models. Because like mathematics also architectural design is mediated activity. Peirce’s theories were developed over his entire career, publishing many papers and articles. For this research the explanation of Peirce’s theories is based on the readings of Michael H. G. Hoffmann and Sami Paavola.

Besides these main protagonists, Aristotle’s Rhetoric plays a significant role in describing the nature of reasoning in architectural design.

What all these authors have in common is that they deal with developing a framework for the fundamental elements and processes of creative thought, by naming them, formalizing and theorizing these they open up a possibility of discourse on these ideas. I’ll elaborate the theories these men have put forward later, for now I’ll leave you with a quote:

“. . . in speaking of logic, we do not need to be concerned with processes of inference at all. While it is true that a great deal of what is generally understood to be logic is concerned with deduction, logic in the widest sense, refers to something far more general. It is concerned with the form of abstract structures, and is involved the moment we make pictures of reality and then seek to manipulate these pictures so that we may look further into the reality itself. It is the business of logic to invent purely artificial structures of elements and relations.” (Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964)”

Overview of this Interview:

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).

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

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?

Tom Kelley: It’s an issue for a lot of people who become comfortable with their jobs. If you’ve got a door you can close – a cocoon you can go into – you can go through a day, a week, or maybe even a whole month without learning anything new. It’s nice and comfortable for a while, but you have to have a life strategy, a work strategy, and hopefully a workplace that encourages continuous learning. Otherwise you are definitely falling behind, and the world penalizes you.

VB: Fun and high energy seem to be prevalent at IDEO. Would you talk about this?

Tom Kelley: Ultimately it comes down to passion. It’s about doing the things you love, because it’s no secret that if you do something you love, you will be better at it.

I was in Buenos Aires recently and attended a presentation by Francis Ford Coppola. He said, “Look, I just do the stuff I love. I love wine, so I started a winery. I love pasta, so I have a company that makes pasta. More than any of those I love filmmaking, so that is what I do. Why is it a surprise to anybody that if you do the things you love the most, you will be better than most people?”

I think the single biggest secret to the high level of energy at IDEO is people have blurred the line between work and play. When that occurs no other motivation is required. People are self-motivated when they are doing what they enjoy, and that’s a big part of the culture at IDEO.

VB: You say IDEO is not keen on using focus groups, traditional market research, or “experts” inside your client’s company. Observing real people, such as customers, when designing products or services, inspires you. IDEO uses “unfocus groups”. Would you explain?

Tom Kelley: There are times in the world when focus groups have value, but we think they are somewhat overused. They have value late in the innovation process when you’ve got to choose one of two things to bring to the marketplace.

When you are looking for inspiration early in the innovation process and try to use focus groups, we think it leads to problems. There is a conservatism built into discussions in focus groups because often its members aren’t able to talk about things that don’t exist in the world. This means they can’t help you generate totally new ideas. They can only help you select among two moderately mature ideas.

Our alternative to the focus group in the early phase of the process is the ‘unfocus’ group where we deliberately bring in people who are on the tails of the normal distribution curve. A lot of these sessions happen in our San Francisco office, and we include really unusual people in the group.

In The Ten Faces of Innovation I talk about our work on a different kind of shoe. Among others, we included in the ‘unfocus’ group someone who had a shoe fetish and someone else who was a dominatrix. Clearly they aren’t in the wide part of the random bell curve commonly known as ‘normal’. The process involved having these very unusual people tell their stories, and think out loud about what kind of new products or services they would like to have.

By looking at the needs of people at the edge of the distribution curve we sometimes find hints and clues about how we can ratchet their ideas back a bit and serve the big market in the center of the distribution curve. The “unfocus” group is not going for normalcy, not going directly for the center of the distribution curve. It’s going for the tails but getting insights that can be applied to the big markets in the center.

VB: You point out that teams are at “the heart of the IDEO method.” What does it take to be a top-ranking member of a “hot team”?

Tom Kelley: A good hot team is a meritocracy.

To be a top-ranking member you have to have great ideas, be a great collaborator, and a great prototyper. Being in a hot team is about dedication to the task at hand. It’s about being open to listen to the people around you, and building on the ideas of others.

The great thing about hot teams is the ‘truth will out’ about the people who make significant contributions compared to the people who merely have the mantle of authority. The team will value the people who consistently make contributions.

VB: To be a top ranking leader of a hot team is to bring out those attributes?

Tom Kelley: I think that’s true. The role of a leader is to spot the latent talents of members of the team and like they say in the software program, “Bring to front”. It’s to bring out and nurture people’s abilities that may be hidden under the surface, to help them realize the full extent of their talents.

A big part of leadership in hot teams is lowering barriers. It’s not making rules which restrict people’s creativity. We believe everybody is innately creative, but may be hemmed in by the rules of a situation. Leaders lower those barriers, and let people express themselves and generate new ideas.

VB: Can people at IDEO retain their passion, high energy, ability to work in ever changing teams, intensive work, crazy deadlines, ‘unreachable’ goals, and generation of new ideas at the required frenetic pace? Or from time to time do they need to take a break and work in less pressured environments?

Tom Kelley: There is a place for rest or cessation of activity in any process. Often between projects people will take a break.

I recently took the longest vacation I have ever taken from IDEO. I took my family to Europe and tried to not think about work for a few weeks. The day after we returned home, I woke up at 4:00 a.m., as you sometimes do when jetlagged, and found I had the makings of two books and an article. They were fully formed in my brain. Somebody pointed out to me, “Tom, you know it’s not a coincidence that you had that happen right after a long break”.

Because they are doing something they love the intensity of work at IDEO is not burning people out. It’s not overstressing them, but the sheer energy of it means we sometimes need a break.

It’s like brainstorming. We think the intensity of brainstorming is so high that you can’t do it for eight continuous hours. We like to do it for an hour and then take a break, because it’s more of a sprint than a marathon. I think that’s sometimes also true with innovation projects.

VB: You say, “New ideas come from seeing, smelling, hearing – being there.” You also observe that face-to-face meetings are still necessary – use of the phone or videoconferencing is often not sufficient. Do you have any advice for companies that want to use virtual teams for innovation?

Tom Kelley: Video conferencing technology, which was first demonstrated to the public at the World’s Fair at San Antonio, Texas in 1968, is slowly evolving.

We did an IDEO off-site recently where we had presentations from every office in the firm and, for the first time, we made extensive use of video conferencing. It’s getting better, but even so we still believe that whenever possible at the beginning of a project, or at the time of the formation of a team, there still is no substitute for getting people together face-to-face. Even if only for the first week. The reason is friendships get made and bonds are formed when having dinner together after hours and during sidebar conversations about what people have in common – such as hobbies and other interests. In a videoconference participants are not likely going to be able to have those types of conversations.

We now have a number of people at IDEO, including my brother, David, who have a wormhole connecting them to somebody else in the world. They have a 24/7 video link with audio that you can turn on or off, but it’s on most of the time. With this technology you connect with others because it is like having them next door. Absent of having people co-locate, having that kind of wormhole connection is finally affordable.

Two specific suggestions for companies wanting to use virtual teams for innovation would be to co-locate the team members for a little while at the beginning. Then, to the extent that you can do it, have some full-time video link connections among them.

VB: Does culture have a significant influence when determining the best innovation processes and approaches? For example, are there interesting differences in IDEO’s approaches in its operations in Asia, Europe, and various locations in the U.S.? (Vern’s note: IDEO has offices in Palo Alto in California, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich and Shanghai.)

Tom Kelley: We use a similar innovation process and culture around the world. Every new office in the firm has been started by somebody who has spent years in an existing IDEO office, and therefore is an existing member of our team. We prefer, of course, that the person speak the local language. We’ve never gone to a country and found a strong business leader with good contacts and started an office around that person.

VB: IDEO’s innovation methodology is transported?

Tom Kelley: Not just the methodology, but also the cultural values.

We encourage a lot of cross-pollination, rather than having a new start-up at every new location. For example, I was in IDEO Shanghai a month or so ago. Its head was formerly with our London office, and he has four or five IDEO people from around the world who either are doing a stint in Shanghai for a year or have transferred full time.

VB: You say, “As you observe people in their natural settings, you should not only look for the nuances of human behavior but also strive to infer motivation and emotion.” Would you talk about the role of emotion in the innovation process?

Tom Kelley: A part of making innovation work is understanding and getting under the skin of customers in order to address their issues. Life is not about what they used to call “just the facts, ma’am.”

If you focus only on the specifications of a product or a service, you can leave out a lot. In fact, a big part of an Anthropologist’s discoveries is the departure between what people should do, or even what people say they do, and what they actually do. Even if what they actually do is irrational, you still have to respond to it.

If you leave out the emotional content, you may have the best specifications in the world but people may not buy your product or service.

Does the Apple IPod have better specs, or better data storage per dollar spent than other MP3 players? I don’t think so, but it speaks to emotion. At IDEO we try to remember the emotional component in all of our work.

VB: “How people perceive and use products often handicaps innovation. Companies get this wrong more than almost anything else.” Would you talk about this?

Tom Kelley: Part of a successful innovation is that people understand what something is and how it works. As a starting threshold, people must understand what you are offering and how to use it. There are products and services in the marketplace where it is not very clear what is being offered.

In business school I did a project with a fellow who wanted to revolutionize shoe repair in America. In Europe they have a chain called ‘Mr Minute’, but we don’t have a ‘McDonald’s of Shoe Repair’, which is how he characterized it. He created a business called ‘Shoe Care’. One of its hallmarks was to be clean and nice rather than rough looking like the shoe repair shops we are accustomed to in the U.S. There were beautiful shoes on display, and it was so clean and nice people didn’t know it was a shoe repair store. He opened one retail outlet, but went out of business.

VB: What does it mean to learn from people who “break the rules?”

Tom Kelley: As long as everyone uses your products or services exactly how you think they will you will probably be fine.

However, if you watch the early adopters of your new products or services you can sometimes obtain clues about what people will do in the future. This is certainly true of many tech applications and social networking. Entrepreneurs will put a tool into the marketplace not being sure what people will do with it, and some people will be quite creative in finding new applications for it.

The classic example is the Post-it® Notes. Think of the million things Post-it Notes are used for. When Art Fry created Post-it Notes at 3M he never imagined his innovation would be so broadly used. This is true of a lot of emerging technologies today. Consider Facebook. Who would have anticipated it would be as popular, or used for so many purposes, as it is today?

VB: You quoted an executive of one of the big three U.S. auto companies as saying in the 1930s, “It’s not that we build such bad cars; it’s that they are such lousy customers.” Do you ever encounter this kind of attitude today?

Tom Kelley: There is a certain amount of this type of attitude, often when people are trying out prototypes. If you help create a new product or service, you have a strong mental model of how it works. Then you present it to somebody, and guess what? They haven’t been thinking about this product or service their whole lives so they get confused, or don’t use it correctly. In these circumstances when you are the designer or engineer it’s hard not to say, “It’s obvious!” When that happens it’s a failure of the designer or engineer, not the user.

One of the stories I told in The Art of Innovation is about the Heartstream Defibrillator, the portable defibrillator introduced into the marketplace in 1999 and which you now see in use all over the world. We made it as simple as we thought it could be, just like a laptop computer. But when we prototyped it, people fumbled with the latch. It took people working with the prototype extra seconds to open the defibrillator. When someone is dying of cardiac arrest, you don’t have extra seconds. We could have just sat back with our arms crossed and said, “Gee, these stupid customers. Why can’t they figure it out? It’s a latch just like on their laptops!” The good Anthropologist who is a good open-minded Innovator doesn’t say, “These people are stupid”, he says, “Uh oh, people don’t understand how to use the product. That’s my issue. I have to design it so people can use it.”

If you take that approach we think you will end up with better innovations.

VB: Of course, in the case of the defibrillator, you are dealing with people under very high stress.

Tom Kelley: Very high stress. And in most cases, people without any medical training use the defibulators. The classic situation is their use by flight attendants on aircraft. If there is a doctor on board he or she will be called upon to give medical assistance, but otherwise flight attendants will use the defibrillators. They will be really stressed out because they may be doing it for the first time.

When we designed the device we sought to make it very simple to use. At the time my daughter was six years old. I handed her a test defibrillator with the shock function deactivated, and, “See if you can figure this out.” And she figured it out. A six-year old girl with no instructions figured out how to use it.

You want no barrier to entry for your products and services. You want everybody to say, “Oh, I can use this!” When you have that kind of offering, people will take notice.

That form of simplicity is a great brand trait. It’s the kind of thing that makes companies successful.

VB: The best products and services aspire to the classic design principle “Make simple things simple and complex things possible.”‘ Is this still a sound principle, and if so why do some companies still appear to not have heard the message that customers want more integration and simplicity?

Tom Kelley: I know exactly why that is. It’s the curse of knowledge.

Designers and innovators know about all the features that could be added to their products. There’s a desire to load things with features, but they are not thinking of simplicity as a feature. This is what torpedoed Xerox in the 1980′s. For decades it was the industry leader in photocopying. Then, in the 80′s Xerox started loading on all of the other things its copiers could do, and lost sight of the fact that many people, including senior executives who were signing the cheques, just wanted to make a single copy of an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper. Xerox’s re-designed machines did not allow that to be done simply.

‘Make simple things simple and complex things possible’ is a principle used in software design. But it should also be applied to all kinds of other products and services where so many features have been loaded in that it’s hard to know how to use the product.

In The Ten Faces of Innovation I use the example that it’s hard to find an alarm clock today that does not have ‘his’ and ‘hers’ alarms. I don’t want that. I don’t even want a 24-hour alarm clock. In a hotel I once set the alarm to wake me up at 6:00 a.m., but unbeknownst to me it was actually set for 6:00 p.m. Obviously the alarm didn’t go off at 6:00 a.m. so I didn’t make my appointments on time. They’ve added the 24-hour and ‘his’ and ‘her’ alarm features, which get in the way of simplicity. It makes me want to reconsider buying these products.

I stay 100 nights of the year in hotels. I travel with two of my own alarm clocks. The wake-up service in hotels is an anachronism, something from the 18th or 19th centuries–the old bed and breakfast places where they used to knock on your door at the right hour in the morning. The reason the wake-up service still exists in hotels is because the interface on hotel alarm clocks is so darned bad!

VB: You say, “Brainstorming is practically a religion at IDEO…” What advice do you give clients who say they have tried but been unsuccessful at making brainstorming sessions an integral part of their culture? They can’t keep the enthusiasm and momentum going long enough to get positive results from such sessions.

Tom Kelley: Brainstorming has become quite controversial. There are people who say, “Well, I don’t get it.” I would advise giving brainstorming another try. It’s the engine of innovation at IDEO. Through brainstorming we convert insights from anthropology into value for our clients.

Not only is brainstorming a great generator of ideas and insights, it has ancillary benefits as well. It builds teams. It becomes a kind of a ‘status auction’ by identifying who are the best ideators.

It takes a bit of practice and a willingness to distinguish between a brainstorming session and a meeting. The bad brainstorming sessions I’ve seen have lost that distinction. Participants are not deferring judgment, and not building on the ideas of others. They are acting as if they are at a regular meeting. A brainstormer has a completely different social ecology than a regular meeting.

VB: Would you talk about the “sense of spontaneous team combustion” that arises in a good brainstormer?

Tom Kelley: A good brainstormer is really fun. You build on the ideas of others, so you get more ideas than you ever would on your own. You have a sense of climbing a mountain together.

In a good brainstormer you can almost map the waves of energy in the room. There should be many energy peaks with people shouting, and contributing their ideas.

It can be fun and prolific. Of the 100 ideas generated you might throw more than 90 away, but if in the process you generate a few great ideas, then the brainstormer was completely worthwhile.

Part 2 Tomorrow

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.

Original Article and comments HERE at Strategy-Business.com

The Thought Leader Interview: Tim Brown

The CEO of Silicon Valley–based design firm IDEO contends that elegant, customer-centric design stems from a simple set of thinking practices.

Overview of the Post:

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.

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.

By Tim Brown Original Post and Links HERE at MetropolisMag.com

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.

Only gradually did I come to see the power of design not as a link in a chain but as the hub of a wheel.

When I left the protected world of art school—where everyone looked the same, dressed the same, spoke the same language—and entered the world of business, I spent far more time trying to explain to my clients what design was than actually doing it.

I was approaching the world from a different set of operating principles, and the resulting confusion got in the way of my creativity and productivity.

I also noticed that the people who inspired me were not necessarily members of the design profession.

They were engineers and inventors, like Thomas Edison and Ferdinand Porsche, who seemed to have a human-centered, rather than technology-centered, worldview; behavioral scientists, such as Don Norman, who asked why products were so needlessly confusing; artists, like Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Gormley, who engaged viewers in an experience that made them part of the work; and business leaders, like Steve Jobs and Akio Morita, who were creating unique and meaningful products.

I realized that behind the soaring rhetoric of genius and visionary was a basic commitment to a powerful way of thinking.

A few years ago, during one of the periodic booms and busts that are part of business as usual in Silicon Valley, my colleagues and I were struggling to figure out how to keep IDEO relevant and useful.

There was plenty of interest in our design services, but we were increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed far away from the commonly held view of design: a health-care foundation wanted us to help it restructure its organization; a century-old manufacturing company sought to understand its clients better; an elite university was interested in exploring alternative learning environments.

We were being pulled out of our comfort zone, but this was exciting because it opened up new possibilities for us to have more impact.

We started talking about this expanded field as “design with a small d” in an attempt to move beyond the sculptural objet displayed in lifestyle magazines or on museum pedestals. But this phrase never felt fully satis-factory.

One day I was chatting with my friend David Kelley, a Stanford professor and the founder of IDEO, and he said that every time some-one came to ask him about design, he found himself inserting the word thinking to explain what it is that designers do.

The term design think-ing stuck.

I have become a convert, an evangelist of design thinking, and now use it as a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems.

And I’m not alone. Today the most progressive companies are challenging designers to create ideas at the outset, rather than enlisting them to make an already developed idea more attractive. The old role is tactical; it builds on what exists and moves it one step further.

The new one is strategic; it pulls “design” out of the studio and unleashes its disruptive, game-changing potential. It’s no accident that designers can now be found in the boardrooms of some of the world’s most innovative companies.

As a thought process, design has begun to move upstream.

Moreover, the principles of design thinking turn out to be applicable to a wide range of organizations, not just to companies in search of new products. A competent designer can always improve upon last year’s new widget, but an interdisciplinary team of skilled design thinkers is in a position to tackle more complex problems.

From pediatric obesity and crime prevention to climate change, design thinking is now being applied to a range of challenges that bear little resemblance to the cov-etable objects still filling the pages of today’s coffee-table publications.

The reasons underlying the growing interest in design are clear. As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become a survival strategy.

It is no longer limited to the introduction of new physical products but also includes new processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating. These are exactly the kinds of human-centered tasks that designers work on every day.

The natural evolution from design doing to design thinking reflects the growing rec-ognition on the part of today’s business leaders that design has become too important to be left to designers alone.

One of my heroes is the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a man who lived before the profession of design even existed.

As the challenges of the industrial age spread to every field of human endeavor, a parade of bold innovators who shaped the world, as they have shaped my own thinking, followed him:

William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the visionary educators of the German Bauhaus, the American industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, the team of Ray and Charles Eames.

What they all shared was optimism, an openness to ex-perimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands—to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity.

They didn’t just do design; they lived design.

These great thinkers were not as they appear in the coffee-table books about the “pioneers,” “masters,” and “icons” of modern design. They were not minimalist, esoteric members of design’s elite priesthood, and they did not wear black turtlenecks.

They were creative innovators who bridged the chasm between thinking and doing because they were passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world.

Today we have the opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world. In the process, we may find that we have made our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer and more meaningful.

Tim Brown is president and CEO of IDEO. This essay is an excerpt from his new book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (Harper Business).

Overview of Article:

Redefining a Profession

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.

Born in Britain, Mr. Brown is now the president and chief executive officer of IDEO, a design group based in Palo Alto, California. His book?’s objective is summed up by its subtitle: to demonstrate “How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation.” He marshals lots of examples of how this works in practice, although his underlying theme is as much about how design itself is changing, as how it effects change in other industries.

When Mr. Brown, 47, started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things, such as the widgets he developed in his first project for a machinery manufacturer, or visual ones, like the graphics on a Lucky Strike packet. Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school “design,” which he regards as “technology-centered,” to the “human-centered” discipline of “design thinking” — a term coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop tech products for clients in Silicon Valley.

Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is “about more than style.” In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.

For IDEO’s designers, this has meant working in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers, computer programmers, marketers and behavioral scientists. One design thinking project involved developing a new type of low-tech weekend bicycle — named “coasting” — for Shimano, the Japanese cycle components maker, to persuade the adult Americans who had loved riding their bikes as kids to take up cycling again, rather than developing a dazzling new bicycle as old-school designers would have done.

Another project encouraged the nurses employed by Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. health care group, to work out how to improve the care of patients by redesigning their own schedules. A third analyzed people’s spending habits to invent a new Bank of America service that helps them to save by rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar and depositing the difference in a “Keep the Change” account, just like throwing spare coins into a change jar. IDEO’s teams of design thinkers have also worked on projects for nonprofit organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S. government campaigns, as well as on conventional product design and branding programs.

Mr. Brown gives glimpses of what it’s like to work at IDEO. He recalls an executive from the furniture company, Steelcase, sinking into a snazzy-looking chair only for it to collapse. (It was a painstakingly detailed $40,000 foam prototype, not the real thing.) He also recounts the horror of the lead designer on the development of an Oral-B toothbrush, when he spotted one of his products washed up on a deserted Californian beach, six months after the launch. And what designer wouldn’t relate to his description of how: “I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, ‘Give me the next (Apple) iPod,’ but it’s probably pretty close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond (under their breath), ‘Give me the next (Apple ceo) Steve Jobs.”’

There is a danger of books like this deteriorating into sales pitches, as their designer-authors trot out examples of their companies’ prowess. But Mr. Brown writes with a winning combination of thoughtfulness, pragmatism and enthusiasm. IDEO looms large, but the references are relevant, and interspersed with descriptions of successful exercises by other companies, from the development of the Netflix online movie store, to that of United Airlines’s Premium Service between San Francisco and New York.

Mr. Brown also puts design thinking into a historical context by explaining how some of his design heroes practiced it, albeit unknowingly. Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great 19th-century British engineer, who designed the bridges, viaducts and tunnels of the Great Western Railway in southwest England and Wales, not only as spectacular structures, but to make passengers feel as if they were “floating across the countryside.” They still do.

Critically, he avoids the trap of presenting design thinking as a panacea. Mr. Brown charts its failures as well as successes, and sees confusingly designed Web sites and dysfunctional help lines, as the latterday equivalents of the Industrial Revolution’s “dark satanic mills.” Nor does he pretend that it is easy. Instead, he depicts it as a messy, uncertain, often inconclusive process, albeit one that is more fun, and much more productive than tweaking cigarette packets.

Thoughts on this video: Very short and not a lot of thought provoking info.  Good visuals and a couple of quotables.

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.

Original Post Here Tim Brown »07 September 2008 » In design thinking, divergence and convergence »

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.

Original Post HERE By Robert Sutton at BusinessWeek

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.

THEORY VS. PRACTICE. At group brainstorms, individuals often “tune out” for 5 or 10 minutes to sketch a product or organizational structure inspired by the conversation, and then jump back into the conversation to show the others their idea. In another typical scenario, I recall an IDEO brainstorm about a cool haircutting device, after which one participant, engineer Roby Stancel, ran off to build it. Drawing a hard line between “individual” and “group” creativity in these and dozens of other examples is pointless. What really matters is that the two modes mingle as the creative process unfolds.

This artificial group vs. individual structure isn’t the only problem with brainstorming experiments. These experiments are fake in that nearly all involve people who have no prior experience or training in group brainstorming. These brainstorming virgins (usually undergraduates in psychology classes) are briefly presented a list of rules and are then instructed to spend 10 or 15 minutes generating novel ideas about topics that they know and most likely care nothing about.

A common topic in these experiments is “What would happen if everyone had an extra thumb?” That might be fun to think about, but it isn’t a problem they will ever actually face.

In contrast, consider real brainstorms led by SAP’s Design Services Team in which participants care very much about, say, user-friendly software and will use any good ideas generated on the subject. These brainstorms have already led SAP to develop many clever prototypes and are starting to change the software that the company ships.

INNOVATION ENGINE. These experimental studies also fail to mirror authentic brainstorms because the standard and essential rule “Build on and extend others’ ideas” isn’t applied. To allow cleaner comparisons between group and individual brainstorming “performance,” individuals aren’t asked to consider the ideas of others. In any event, it is impossible to build on the thinking of fellow brainstormers when you work alone.

The main finding from these studies is that people “brainstorming” alone speak more ideas (per person) into a microphone during the 10- or 15-minute period than those in a group brainstorm. Researchers conclude that the “productivity loss” of group brainstorming happens mainly because people take turns talking and therefore can’t spew out ideas as fast. It’s also worth noting that these studies don’t count listening to other people’s ideas as a productive behavior.

I am not joking; most of this research is that trivial.

Group brainstorming isn’t a panacea even when it is done right, and is a waste of time—or worse—when done wrong. But a broad body of peer-reviewed research on teams and organizations, as well as my own observations, suggests that, when brainstorming sessions are managed right and skillfully linked to other work practices, such gatherings can promote innovation. Eight guidelines are especially important for running effective face-to-face brainstorms:

1. Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just to harvest ideas.
Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen shows that creativity occurs when people find ways to build on existing ideas. The power of group brainstorming comes from creating a safe place where people with different ideas can share, blend, and extend their diverse knowledge. If your goal is to just “collect the creative ideas that are out there,” group brainstorms are a waste of time. A Web-based system for collecting ideas or an old-fashioned employee suggestion box is good enough.

2. Don’t bother if people live in fear.
As Sigmund Freud observed, groups bring out the best and the worst in people. If people believe they will be teased, paid less, demoted, fired, or otherwise humiliated, group brainstorming is a bad idea. If your company fires 10% of its employees every year, for instance, people might be too afraid of saying something “dumb” to brainstorm effectively. It is better to have them just work alone.

3. Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions.
Alex Osborn’s 1950s classic Applied Imagination, which popularized brainstorming, gave advice that is still sound: Creativity comes from a blend of individual and collective “ideation.” Skilled organizers tell participants what the topic will be before a brainstorm. I once went to a session on how to give an “itch-less haircut,” and, at the suggestion of the organizer, took a preliminary trip to a salon where I asked the stylist for a cut as “itch-free as possible” to jumpstart my thinking. At the brainstorm, I reported how tightly the stylist wrapped the cape around my neck and how she put talcum powder all over me—effective, if uncomfortable and messy measures.

4. Brainstorming sessions are worthless unless they are woven with other work practices.
Brainstorming is just one of many practices that make a company creative, and it is of little value if it’s not combined with other practices—such as observing users, talking to experts, or building prototype products or experiences—that provide an outlet for the ideas generated. Some of the worst “creative” companies that I’ve worked with are great at coming up with new ideas, but never actually get around to implementing them. A student and I once studied a team that spent a year brainstorming and arguing about a simple product without producing even a single prototype, even though a good engineer could have built one in an hour or two. The project was finally killed when a competitor came out with the product.

5. Brainstorming requires skill and experience both to do and, especially, to facilitate.
In all of the places that I’ve seen brainstorming used effectively—Hewlett-Packard, SAP’s Design Services Team, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (or “The d.school”), the Institute for the Future, Frog Design, and IDEO—brainstorming is treated as a skill that takes months or years to master. Facilitating a session is a skill that takes even longer to develop. If you hold brainstorms every now and then, and they are led by people without skill and experience, don’t be surprised if participants “sit there looking embarrassed, like we’re all new to a nudist colony,” as one manager told The Wall Street Journal. That is how humans act when they do something new and have poor teachers.

6. A good brainstorming session is competitive—in the right way.
In the best brainstorms, people feel pressure to show off what they know and how skilled they are at building on others’ ideas. But people are also competitive in a paradoxical way. They “compete” to get everyone else to contribute, to make everyone feel like part of the group, and to treat everyone as collaborators toward a common goal. The worst thing a manager can do is set up the session as an “I win, you lose” game, in which ideas are explicitly rated, ranked, and rewarded.

A Stanford graduate student once told me about a team leader at his former company who started giving bonuses to people who generated “the best” ideas in brainstorms. The resulting fear and dysfunctional competition drastically reduced the number of ideas generated by what had been a creative and cooperative group just weeks earlier.

7. Use brainstorming sessions for more than just generating good ideas.
Brainstorms aren’t just a place to generate good ideas. At IDEO, these gatherings support the company’s culture and work practices in a host of other ways. Project teams use brainstorms to get inputs from people with diverse skills throughout the company. In the process, a lot of other good things happen. Knowledge is spread about new industries and technologies, newcomers and veterans learn—or are reminded—about who knows what, and jumping into a brainstorm for an hour or so to think about someone else’s problem provides a welcome respite from each designer’s own projects. The explicit goal of a group brainstorm is to generate ideas. But the other benefits of routinely gathering rotating groups of people from around a company to talk about new and old ideas might ultimately be more important for supporting creative work.

8. Follow the rules, or don’t call it a brainstorm.
This is true even if you only hold occasional brainstorms and even if your work doesn’t require constant creativity. The worst “”brainstorms”" happen when the term is used loosely, and the rules aren’t followed—or known—at all. Perhaps the biggest mistake that leaders make is failing to keep their mouths shut. I once went to a meeting that started with the boss saying, “Let’s brainstorm.” He followed this pronouncement with 30 minutes of his own rambling thoughts, without a single idea coming from the others in the room. Now that’s productivity loss!

The rules vary from place to place. But Alex Osborn’s original four still work: 1) Don’t allow criticism; 2) Encourage wild ideas; 3) Go for quantity; 4) Combine and/or improve on others’ ideas. To steal from IDEO, I’d add “One conversation at a time” and “Stay focused on the topic,” as both help save groups from dissolving into disorder.