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 Post: I appreciate the points that Robert makes on how to approach social design.  He offers very practical ways to move the process forward.

Live From PopTech: Designing for Impact

Original Post and Comments HERE at FastCompany.com

The design process really kicked into high gear on day three–Kevin Starr of the Rainer Arnhold Fellows program and I teamed up for our presentation.

Members of the PopTech fellows program

No one is better than Kevin at getting social entrepreneurs to think clearly about their interventions. He set up some basic components of each fellow’s impact model, including the concise definition of their mission and, more importantly, impact measurement.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I prefer to work backwards from impact, rather than forwards from mission in the social innovation design process. It really clears a lot of things up fast. If you know the specific impact that you are trying to achieve, the steps to get you there become very clear. And the organization that you need to drive those steps emerges quickly. With a group that has this kind of creativity and capacity it is all about focus.

I spent most of the five-hour work session focusing on understanding behavior (no surprise), particularly the creation of what Kevin refers to as a Behavior Chain. As you have probably guessed, I define social impact as the ability to drive lasting behavior within a community. And I’m always amazed when we’re able to get past all the aspirational language and break down a social initiative into a discreet set of behavioral building blocks (like getting rural health care workers to collect information with their mobile phones).

The fellows are an exceptionally accomplished bunch. Among them are some real veterans, such as Nigel Waller and Deb Levine. Yet this kind of simple analysis always reveals major gaps in understanding around the participants and behaviors that are central to their work. Here are some of the steps:

• Define a clear and simple impact statement (something measurable) like improving health indicators in resource limited settings (in the case of Diagnostics for All).

• Start working backwards. Entrepreneurs usually know the one thing that’s key to delivering an impact. In the case of Diagnostics for All, it is increased rates of testing in these settings.

• From there, you can back out the rest of the behaviors that need to happen to increase the number of people who are testing all the way up through the typical rural health system.

• Look at the incentives and conditions that are necessary to drive behavior at each link in the chain. Are they present?

It goes a lot deeper beyond that, but you get the idea. Common sense, right? But it requires a number of things:

• You have to know whom you are trying to influence.
• You must think not just about the target participants in your intervention (the families in these remote communities) but all the other participants, such as doctors or public health officials that are essential to delivering impact for the end user.

This last bit is crucial because the most essential, sustainable, and innovative part of your program may be in how you can deliver a change in behavior further upstream in the ecosystem. That can be very hard to do. But once you have figured out how to solve for incentives related to distribution (for example) or procurement you can use that platform to support many different interventions. This is how people like Paul Polak have driven value on such a large scale. Reaching the customer is usually 80% of the battle.

With a first pass at the Behavior Chain my goal was to show them how integrate design methods into their process to test and refine their chain. I provided some structured thinking tools to guide them through the process of testing their assumptions and adapting to changes in conditions. It was a great session, although I wish that I had much more time with each of the fellows.

PopTech fellow Beth Kanter

I was followed by the incredible Bath Kanter who took them through a deep analysis of social media strategies. She drew some nice parallels between my core message about the iterative nature of the design process and how you think through these strategies. You can check out more on her blog. It was an honor to collaborate with Kevin, Beth, and the other faculty members. And throughout the process we were assisted by the incomparable Peter Durand and his nimble graphic facilitation skills. What a treat!

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

Related Stories: Inside PopTech’s Solar-Powered Bag

Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers

Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Overview of this Video:

Thoughts on this Video:  Good look and review of how this can work in any industry, with the right emphasis placed on what you are doing not how you are doing it.

Overview of this Article: Matthew May gives a quick definition of what Design Thinking is and how it is becoming more mainstream.

Thoughts on this Article: I don’t really agree with Matthew’s conclusions on what is currently driving the attention to Design Thinking.  It is more about the effectiveness of results than a stretching of resources.

Original Post Aug 03, 2009 -

Matthew E. May (How to Change the World)

“Design Thinking” has rapidly moved to the forefront of the current management zeitgeist as a fresh take not just on how to rethink key products and services, but also how to reframe everyday processes and projects. In an effort to create a cross-company culture of innovation and collaboration, businesses all over the world are taking a page from design firms, and realizing the rewards.

Graduate schools including Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka d. school) and the Rotman School of Management are helping to lead the way, taking the broad view that the designer’s approach to solving problems goes far beyond the traditional role of design in “making pretty.” Rather, they believe the designer’s blend of creativity and logic is applicable to all aspects of business, and that irrespective of job title, everyone can be a designer of sorts.

What’s driving the move is the very real pressure to innovate in a fiercely competitive marketplace, fueled by a down economy. That pressure falls on the individual, who is asked for higher commitment, more adaptability, quicker progress, better execution, stronger decision-making, and freer thinking. At the same time, they’re told to manage risk, meet short-term objectives, and only bet on sure things. All within the confines of environments that are often anything but free: powerful systems, rigid structures, conflicting agendas, privileged information, political posturing, and limiting rules. The truth is that uncertainty, risk and failure are all part of innovation, and the ability to meet business objectives doesn’t always square with the personal capabilities needed to innovate as required.

The solution? Think like a designer, work like a designer.

Great design is a result of a clear and thorough understanding of the user, creative resolution of competing tensions, multi-discipline collaboration, rapid experimentation via prototyping, with continuous modification and enhancement of ideas and solutions. The best designers leverage their expertise, pursue possibility, reject the status quo as a matter of course, view opposition to their ideas as an inventive challenge, refuse to let bureaucracy and hierarchy stifle their creativity, and use cutbacks and resource constraints drive new ideas and methods.

So what is “Design Thinking”?

Citing a 1969 book by Herbert Simon called The Sciences of the Artificial, Wikipedia defines it this way:

Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the “building up” of ideas.

This raises the question of just what that process looks like. When design firm IDEO agreed in early 2005 to help Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City make their chemotherapy process more patient-friendly, the first thing the IDEO design team did was to take Sloan-Kettering staffers along with them as they followed patients throughout the entire treatment process, including the round trip from home to clinic. That allowed the discovery of a patient stress point: anxiety over treatment, the cause of which was the fact that patients didn’t know what to ask, and the huge information binder was far too daunting.

Understanding the situation allowed designers to ofer up a number of possible solutions, some of which were then carried out in much the same fashion as a scientific experiment. In design lingo, that meant “rapid prototyping.” One pilot entailed simply handing out index cards with “frequently asked questions,” such as “Where can I fill my prescription?” A few trial runs indicated that reviewing the cards during a quick guided tour of the clinic eased patient anxiety tremendously. The experiment quicly became standard operating procedure.

That’s a pretty clear strategy: Investigate, Design, Experiment, Adjust. What a great I.D.E.A.

For more insights from Matthew E. May, visit his past blog posts at here and follow him on Twitter here.

Overview of this Atricle: There is an ongoing debate about exactly what “design thinking” is and specifically about the term “design thinking”.  This article brings up a few of the perspectives.

Thoughts on this Article: Bruce does a good job of getting to the point:  Stop focusing on what it is called and go do it!

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on July 10 on BusinessWeek

Fred Collopy has a great blog item up at Fast Company on why he dislikes the “Thinking” part of the term “Design Thinking.” In essence, Fred argues that the best part of design is the “doing,” not the thinking and the focus on Design Thinking short-changes what designers can really do in education, health and other spaces outside their traditional consumer-oriented activities.

As an early proponent and major supporter of Design Thinking, I can only say “Amen” to Fred. I totally agree. It is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power.

And finally, it is the evolution of design into Design (with or without the “Thinking” term) to redesign large scale social systems in business and civic society that has folks moving to embrace it. In this era of melting models and flaming careers, of economic uncertainty and social volatility, Design has a set of tools and methods that can guide people to new solutions.

Which is why MIT, Harvard, Rotman, McKinsey and dozens of corporations are moving to Design to help navigate the present and the future. It is why in Britain and the Continental governments are embracing Design to help redesign basic social services.

And it is why the World Economic Forum has invited me to join a new GAC–Global Agenda Council on Designing Large Scale Social Systems.

The truth is that despite the clumsiness of the term Design Thinking, there is no limitation to the Doing in the Design Thinking. It is a way of thinking about doing on a strategically big scale–a new learning experience for all children, a better health-care experience for older people, a more honest political system for voters.

The very best analysis of the failure of business schools and the new for management to embrace design principles is Shoshana Zuboff’s remarkable essay on the failure of business school education. A professor at Harvard Business School for 25 years, Zuboff says that the focus on the company and how to make it more efficient is being replaced by a focus on the consumer, the learner, the patient, the individual.

Transaction is being replaced by relationship as the source of value in business. Design’s anthropological focus (its “user-focus”) and its ability to iterate and generate new things off the knowledge about from that anthropological perspective are the powerful tools attracting CEOs, NGOs, and Politicos.

It would be tragic for designers to turn their back on Design just when society is embracing it just because of a dispute over terminology. So Fred, forget the nomenclature. Call it a a banana and let’s get on with helping our society redesign itself.

Overview of this Article:

Thoughts on this Article: It is a good look into the overall process and how all the parts can benefit if and when they work together.  He makes several very good points especially that different areas have very different ways of thinking…and that is actually a good thing.

Appears at UX Matters

By Jim Nieters

Published: July 19, 2009

I hope so! Every discipline on a product team provides unique value—including User Experience, Product Management, Engineering, Sales, and Business Development. But each of them views the world through a different lens. When all of these disciplines deliver strategic value, their products delight users and their companies successfully differentiate themselves in the marketplace—which translates to greater revenue and profitability. Successful companies deliver a tangible value proposition. Think about it. What are the value propositions for Southwest Airlines, Apple Computer, Toyota, and Starbucks? Are they the same? No. Each is unique, and their value propositions are clear.

Just as companies need to differentiate themselves by creating and promoting a clear value proposition, so do UX groups. What is our value proposition? What can UX teams do that other disciplines cannot? We think in terms of design. We communicate visually. Nobody else can do this as well as we can. Other disciplines may do a much better job of communicating numbers in spreadsheets or giving slick presentations highlighting features. What we, as UX professionals, can do is bring possibilities to life by visualizing solutions for stakeholders and enabling them to see those possibilities in tangible form. Whether you’re in a company where UX already has a seat at the strategy table or are working toward that goal, you can help visualize big opportunities for your company.

The premise of this column is that different disciplines have very different ways of thinking. This is not bad. In fact, by leveraging our strengths, we can bridge the gaps between disciplines. The fact is that the different disciplines need one another. Product managers may or may not want designers to help inform product roadmaps. Marketing representatives may not always appreciate user research data. But we can help one another see our blind spots and prevent group-think. We need to question one another’s assumptions, because our different perspectives can broaden each other’s thinking. This kind of cross-pollination of ideas is a critical aspect of sustaining a successful business.

In a presentation to the User Experience community at Yahoo! in 2008, Roger L. Martin, author of the book The Opposable Mind, pointed out that UX research teams think differently from business teams—such as Product Management. UX research teams tend to think in terms of validity—using the perfect methodology—while business teams think in terms of reliability—that is, how representative data is of overall customer needs. They speak different languages.

Martin also pointed out that the best leaders actually encourage contradictory points of view, so they can generate a creative resolution that contains elements of the opposing ideas, but that is superior to each. Unfortunately, most leaders appreciate people who think like they do, not those who question them or present different perspectives. This is why it’s so valuable for UX organizations to let our designs show our thinking—highlighting new ideas and opportunities. If we take a stand on the hill of principle and our ideas are just abstract ideas, they are easy to reject. It’s easy to disagree with theory. Instead, we need to do what we do best—show our thinking through great design visualizations.

One of the things we can do best is help create a common understanding of strategy. The challenge with strategy, as Jared Cole of Adaptive Path suggests in “Making Strategy Tangible,” is that it is often abstract. As such, it can be difficult to envision. This can pose challenges for leaders who want to create alignment around their strategies—that is, who want everyone to understand their strategy and follow it uniformly. When designers are part of the strategic dialogue, they can often help articulate strategies and make them real. In his article, Cole suggests creating rough video sketches. I like the idea.

In fact, one of our principal designers in the advertising products group at Yahoo!, Eric Thomason, sometimes generates rough video sketches to walk stakeholders through a storyboard, bringing a scenario to life. For these video sketches, Eric draws a series of pictures by hand, scans them, and does a voiceover to walk stakeholders through a scenario that solves a problem for users in ways that are new and innovative. These video sketches take him perhaps half a day to produce. Because they’re drawn by hand—think paper prototypes in a video format—they prevent stakeholders from getting stuck on details.

While rough video sketches enable teams to conceptualize ideas rapidly, they’re not the only way to demonstrate design thinking. In fact, in our organization, we have design engineers, who can quickly generate prototypes, ranging from complete, interactive prototypes to simple click-through prototypes to scripted Flash prototypes. All of the design conceptualization processes we follow have some things in common. Researchers and designers come together to identify new opportunities, craft scenarios that would solve a set of user challenges, and create design solutions—helping stakeholders envision the opportunity.

Whether we generate a video sketch, a low-fidelity mockup, or a high-fidelity prototype depends on several factors. These include how much thinking we want stakeholders to assume we have put into an idea, how much market or financial data we have to support a concept, whether we are going to show our solution to users, whether other stakeholders support our ideas, and many other factors. The key factor tying all of our design concepts together is that we, as researchers and designers, bring them to life through design.

While design can help bring strategy to life, I also find that it can help define strategy. As Clayton Christenson points out in The Innovator’s Solution, we cannot cling to practices that have made us successful in the past. We must constantly think anew—to realize innovation as a practice. When organizations I’m part of tend to think incrementally rather than identifying new market opportunities, I empower my UX team to identify new market opportunities. To be sure, not all of our ideas make it to market, but the more we ideate, validate, and iterate, the more likely we are to come up with an idea that delivers significant value to market.

I have to be honest here, as well. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, just trying to keep up with feature design. In fact, that’s our UX team’s primary job. We have to generate UX specifications based on agreed feature roadmaps. I found myself following this pattern just recently and talked with a colleague, Chris Jaffe, who is among the most talented design leaders I have ever met. Chris always has ideas he’s presenting, and every year, two or three of his ideas make it to market. His team is responsible for generating tens of millions of dollars in revenues per year—sometimes more—based on their ideas. He has an innovation factory that contributes to his organization’s profitability. Seeing such examples reminded me again that we need to find the time to come up with new ideas, envision the opportunities they present, and visualize our design ideas for other stakeholders, so our product teams can make our ideas real and bring new products to market.

I would be interested in hearing your stories. How have you helped conceptualize new ideas to enable stakeholders to envision a new future? Please share your unique techniques and experiences!

IDEO’s unique brand of brainstorming is called ”Deep Dive,” a sort of total immersion into the problem at hand. It’s one company’s secret weapon for innovation.”  View part 3

Thoughts on this segment of the video: Very cool product that backs up the whole process.  This process could solve many problems.