Thoughts on Post: Good notes from a rather long talk.  The notes are worth the read even if you don’t view the video.

A great talk by George Kembel of the Stanford D.School is available to watch online, so here are a few highlights from the talk that we find interesting here at Innoversity:

The d.school is the means of connecting different faculties in Stanford University. Students work in teams on real challenges with engineers, business students, designers and other varied disciplines on campus. They learn the design thinking process which is usually this:

empathy > define > ideate > prototype > test

Teams are not given a defined problem, based on the belief that half of businesses fail not because they didn’t solve the problem, but because they solved the wrong problem.

Instead, students are given a topic that they need to gain empathy for. This has included students visiting Nepal to understand how people deal with preterm babies, and teams visiting Myanmar to improve water irrigation. Because the teams take time to know the people they are creating for, become familiar with their situation and are able to discover needs they were unaware of, the teams are able to discover the meaningful problem that needs to be solved.

In the case of Myanmar, 10 teams went to discover irrigation and water needs. 9 teams came back with good information on what problems to tackle with water. One team discovered instead that 30% of the farmer’s income was spent on kerosene to extend their day. It was also dangerous for the lungs and was a fire hazard. The team decided that the meaningful problem to solve was not the water, but a new way to light the home so that income could be spent elsewhere.

This is now a for-profit business with 60 employees.

D.school has found that by mixing self-declared creatives with people who don’t think of themselves as a creative, that through the design thinking process, they are now more confident in their ability to innovate.

But it takes time for students to trust in the design thinking process, which usually comes after lots of practice and experience in that the methodology works. The unease appears to be the result of not having a defined problem at the start, with a defined goal to work toward. Instead, design thinking is about defining meaningful problems to solve, and then experimenting with as many ways to solve the problem as possible, without a specific target.

D.school as also found that the design thinking process improves collaboration, because teams are focused on external factors (such as helping the people that they have gained empathy for) and instead of competing for which idea to choose, the team chooses all of them and experiments with them in a quick and dirty fashion.

Here is an example of how the team uses the design thinking process to innovate:

1. EMPATHY. The team spends time with the audience they are creating for. This may involve living with them, working with them, asking them questions and observing their behaviour. This is in order to gain empathy. It also allows them to discover needs that the audience may not be aware they have. For instance the family that spent a large amount of money on kerosene may not question a new way to bring light into their home and feel that is just the reality of their circumstance.

2. DEFINE. Using the observations and empathy gained in the first stage, teams frame the problem, put it in context and start to define what problem is meaningful and what they will work to solve.

3. IDEATION. The team then generates as many ideas as possible, with the goal not to produce the best idea, but to produce many varied ideas to try in the next stage.

4. PROTOTYPE. Students take their ideas and express them in a way that can be shared QUICKLY. This are rough, unfinished prototypes, that communicate ideas or allow physical properties to be realised in a basic form.

5. TEST. Students take their prototypes back to the people they worked with from the start. Because the prototypes look unfinished, it sometimes encourages more feedback from the users. Insight is gained into how the prototypes can be improved.

This process allowed a team to develop a baby incubator for $25 instead of $20,000 using materials and low-tech solutions. (sound familiar?)

It requires a certain level of ambiguity and vulnerability in this process, where the goal is not defined until later in the process. Vulnerability is being willing to share unfinished ideas with the team or users. In any case, the teams are encouraged to wait to define the problem, until they have empathy for people. The emphasis is also on effectiveness rather than efficiency. This allows for many attempts, rather than a few choice ones.

Kembel says that they hold to a process rather than a goal. Empathy gives more meaning to their work. It appears that meaning is what drives teams to innovate. The d.school also focuses on innovators rather than innovation. The focus is on training students, rather than on the outcome.

Another note is that Kembel questions ‘what do we measure?’ in educaiton, stating that analytical thinking is easier to measure than creative thinking, and that is the possible reason why children lose their confidence in their creative abilities as they get older. Students are also told they can either be a scientist or an artist, but they can’t be both. This type of thinking is possibly what leads to latent creativity.

There’s much more in his talk, and if you watch it you may discover if you have perfect pitch. I myself was just a half-step away, does that count?

“These thinkers have their feet firmly planted in the practical world, can stretch their heads to the clouds—and simultaneously span all of the space in between”

By Bill Buxton

It has become almost a cliché to say that cross-disciplinary teams are a key component for successful innovation. If certain problems are beyond the scope of any individual—and most of them are—the way to address them is with a team with complementary skills and a common language in which they can all communicate. So far so good. But useful guidance starts to dry up rather quickly beyond that. Since there is no reliable secret formula that can be used by a hiring manager or someone trying to build up appropriate skill sets, I thought that I would share a way of thinking that I have found really useful.

There may be no “I” in team, but every team needs to be made up of “I-shaped” people.

First of all, I should acknowledge the influence of my friend, the co-founder of IDEO, Bill Moggridge. He came up with the wonderful formulation of “T-shaped people”. The vertical aspect of the T represents depth, and the horizontal bar is breadth. So a T-shaped person has basic literacy in a relatively broad domain of relevant knowledge along with real depth of competence in a much narrower domain.

Three Pillars

When you slide multiple Ts together, their cross bars all overlap, indicating that the various Ts have a common language, and, ideally, their combined base can be broad enough to cover the domain of the problem that you are addressing. At Microsoft (MSFT), we try to make sure that in looking at new product or services ideas, we have at least three Ts, which we call BXT, reflecting equal levels of competence and creativity in three domains: business, experience (in design), and technology. These are three interdependent and interwoven pillars we see as the foundation for what we do.

But while I love Bill’s notion of T-shaped people, things are just not that simple. So as both compliment and complement, I propose I-shaped people. These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between.

This idea was crystallized in my mind thanks to another Englishman, one of the early pioneers of human-centered design, Brian Shackel. I once asked him if he had noticed any particular attributes that distinguished the students that went on to do remarkable things compared with the rest.

His answer was as immediate as it was insightful. He said: “The outstanding students all had an outstanding capacity for abstract thinking, yet they also had a really strong grounding in physical materials and tools.” By this, he meant that they could rise above the specifics of a particular problem to think about them in a more abstract, and in some ways, more general way.

Getting Their Hands Dirty

At the same time, as they were growing up, all had been deeply involved in things such as fixing bicycles or cars. In fact, it didn’t matter how this was manifest. What was important that they had a “can do” and “have done” competence in some aspect of the messy, dirty, and fascinating world of physical materials and tools. In short, they were firmly grounded in reality.

These attributes have been at the core of all of the best teams that I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

Is this all there is to know about staffing for innovation? Of course not. But to summarize and synthesise, let me leave you with a few rules of thumb for building a cross-disciplinary team:

• The last thing a team needs is someone else like you. You already have the best in the world: you. What you need is people who fill in the gaps that you left in your own skill set as you built up competence in your specialty. That goes for everyone else on the team. (The only exceptions might be when you are staffing another team, or the problem that you are working on is sufficiently hairy that you need to divide in order to conquer.)

• Know the difference between solid breadth of literacy and deep competence, and test for both in considering candidates. You do not need jacks-of-all-trades.

• If you think you know the core competencies needed for a team, list them on a bunch of Post-it notes, and have each person on the team write the name of the “go-to” person on the team who has the most depth in that area. If you do not have strong consistency in the responses, Houston, you probably have a problem.

• T-shaped is highly desired, but not sufficient. In staffing up teams, interview and test for I-shapedness. I don’t care how good someone is either at the pragmatic or abstract level, there is someone out there who is equally good and who has strength at both ends. Find that person. If you doubt such people exist, just look at the profile of a reasonable sample of Nobel Prize winners. What I suggest you will find —based on having done so myself—is that a very high number share these combined T and I attributes.

• Hire people who do not require predictability and stability in order to be effective. Typically, each problem that confronts you is going to be different and will require different skills. Hence, teams will be constantly reconfigured to meet the demands in front of them.

• Hire people with strong interpersonal skills. Remember, I come from the computer industry and have seen my fair share of brilliant software engineers who have the social skills of an oyster. All that I can say is that I have also seen those with the same skills that know how to communicate, back down, listen, question, and compromise. A Renaissance team of T and I-shaped thinkers is a potentially volatile cocktail. Its value is too precious to be put at risk by even a single individual, regardless of how otherwise talented.

With that, all that I can leave you with is the imperative that you should always cross your Ts, but never dot your Is.

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.