Excerpts from "Creative Confidence​: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All" by Tom Kelley and David Kelley

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Introduction: The Heart of Innovation


As legendary psychologist and Stanford professor Albert Bandura has shown, our belief systems affect our actions, goals, and perception. Individuals who come to believe that they can effect change are more likely to accomplish what they set out to do. Bandura calls that conviction “self-efficacy.” People with self-efficacy set their sights higher, try harder, persevere longer, and show more resilience in the face of failure.

Chapter 2 – Dare: From Fear to Courage

Picture a boa constrictor, draped casually around a man’s neck. In the next room, a woman in a hockey mask and leather gloves stands warily behind a one-way mirror, watching them. Her heart is pounding. She has been terrified of snakes for as long as she can remember. Gardening and hiking have been out of the question, lest a garter snake slither across her path.

Yet here she is, about to walk into the next room and touch the snake of her nightmares.

How does she do it? How does she move from fear to courage?

The mastermind behind her phobia cure—leading the way for thousands more like her—is psychologist Albert Bandura. A Stanford researcher and professor, he has had a profound impact on the world of social learning and has been called the greatest living psychologist. Only Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Jean Piaget ranked higher on a published list of eminent twentieth-century psychologists.

Bandura, now a professor emeritus at age eighty-seven, still works from his office at Stanford.

One day we got to talking about how to cure snake phobias. Basically it takes a lot of patience and small incremental steps, Bandura told us, but he and his colleagues could sometimes cure a phobia that has lasted a lifetime in less than a day.

First, Bandura tells phobic people that there is a snake in the room next door and that they are going in there—to which the typical response is “Like hell I am.”

Next, he leads them through a long sequence of challenges, tailoring each subsequent step to be just within reach. For example, at one point, he has them look through a one-way mirror at a man holding the snake and asks, “What do you think this thing will do?” People with phobias are convinced the snake will wrap itself around the man’s neck and choke him. But contrary to their beliefs, the snake just dangles lazily without choking or constricting at all.

And so it continues. Further along, Bandura asks them to stand at the open door of the room with the snake inside. If that step is too scary, he offers to stand with them at the door.

Many small steps later, eventually they are right there next to the snake. By the end of the session, people touch the snake. And just like that, their phobia is gone.

When Bandura began using this technique, he checked back with people months later and found that the phobia stayed gone, too. One woman even recounted a dream about a boa constrictor that helped her wash the dishes, instead of terrorizing her like the snakes in the nightmares she used to have.

Bandura calls the methodology he uses to cure phobias “guided mastery.”

The process of guided mastery draws on the power of firsthand experience to remove false beliefs. It incorporates psychology tools like vicarious learning, social persuasion, and graduated tasks. Along the way, it helps people confront a major fear and dispel it one small, manageable step at a time.

This discovery—that guided mastery can cure a lifelong phobia in a short time—was a big deal. But Bandura discovered something even more meaningful during his follow-up interviews with the former phobics.

The interviews brought to light some surprising side effects. People mentioned other changes in their lives, changes seemingly unrelated to their phobias: they’d taken up horseback riding, they’d become fearless public speakers, they were exploring new possibilities in their jobs. The dramatic experience of overcoming a phobia that had plagued them for decades—a phobia they had expected to live with for the rest of their lives—had altered their belief system about their own ability to change. It had altered their belief in what they could accomplish. Ultimately, it transformed their lives.

This newfound courage, exhibited by the same people who once had to wear hockey masks to get near a snake, led Bandura to pivot toward a new line of research: how people come to believe that they can change a situation and accomplish what they set out to do in the world.

Since then, Bandura’s research has shown that when people have this belief, they undertake tougher challenges, persevere longer, and are more resilient in the face of obstacles and failure. Bandura calls this belief “self-efficacy.”


THE FAILURE PARADOX
A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure—they just don’t let that stop them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate “strokes of genius” don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period. They take more shots at the goal. That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.

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More than a century ago, poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson urged us to “do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.” While the certainty Emerson offers may be arguable, the spirit of his advice remains just as powerful to this day.

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After all, as Hungarian essayist György Konrád once said, “Courage is only the accumulation of small steps.”


Chapter 3 – Spark: From Blank Page to Insight


CHOOSE CREATIVITY

“If psychologists wish to teach creativity,” says Sternberg, “they likely will do better to encourage people to decide for creativity, to impress on them the joys of making this decision, and also to inoculate them for some of the challenges attendant on this decision. Deciding for creativity does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but without the decision, it certainly will not.”



MAKE A COMMUNITY CHALKBOARD
One way to find inspiration is to ask questions in an unexpected space, either online or in physical locations. In our San Francisco office, we have a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard in one of the restrooms. It serves as an informal forum and gives us a quick read of what’s going on and what’s on people’s minds. Questions like “What fun things can we do this year?” or “What healthy snacks would you recommend to a friend?” adorn the board. Sometimes an unfinished drawing—an empty aquarium, for example—may inspire visual additions.

To create your own community chalkboard, here are a few tips from IDEO senior experience manager Alan Ratliff:

EXPERIMENT FIRST. Try out different sizes and placements before you commit to changing the walls. We started with a small chalkboard and then scaled it up after the idea took off. We now apply black chalkboard paint directly to the walls for maximum flexibility.

CHOOSE A MEDIUM. Although we use whiteboards in most of our meeting rooms, chalk on a chalkboard is a fun alternative. It is inviting and easily erasable, so people don’t think twice about adding to or changing what’s there.

PROMPT FOR IDEAS. Blank slates are intimidating. So get things rolling with a leading question or a drawing that people can build on.

REFRESH REGULARLY. Like the contents of a refrigerator, what’s up on the board usually goes bad in about a week. Then it’s time to erase and start over.

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To keep your thinking fresh, constantly seek out new sources of information. For example, we watch dozens of TED Talks a year, scan our favorite news aggregator every morning, and subscribe to expertly curated newsletters like Cool News of the Day. We also have more than six hundred IDEO folks in seven countries selectively sharing new ideas they think are “too good to miss.” If all that sounds overwhelming, it’s not. Once you’ve found the right data streams for you, it can be incredibly energizing.

Another place to find inspiration is to look for new ideas from different cultures or different kinds of organizations. This kind of cross-pollination between departments, companies, and industries can be particularly useful for individuals who have been working at the same job for a while. Even if you have kept up with the industry blogs and trade publications or studied up on the best of class, it’s hard to gain competitive advantage if you and your competitors are consuming all the same data. So why not keep an eye out for new sources of information and learning?

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Business guru Stephen Covey called this attitude an “abundance mentality,” and if you or your team has one, you’ll find it much easier to go from blank page to insight.

As Sternberg says, you can choose to be creative. But you have to make an effort to stay inspired and turn creativity into a habit.

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HYBRID INSIGHTS: EMPATHY IN A WORLD OF BIG DATA

Does empathy research conflict with the trend toward “big data”? It’s true that there has historically been a split between quantitative market research and qualitative researchers or ethnographers. But is it necessary to disconnect the human stories from the data? Design researchers have recently begun bridging the gulf with what we call “hybrid insights.” It’s an approach that integrates quantitative research into human-centered design. Hybrid insights allow us to embed stories in the data, bringing the data to life. It brings the “why” and the “what” together. Hybrid insights can include designing a survey in a human-centered way (for example, by being more thoughtful about how we ask questions and keep people engaged). Or it can mean more rigorous concept evaluation where we test prototypes with a large number of users to see if a certain direction merits more exploration.

Coupling insights based on empathy with analytic confidence within relevant target markets may be a way to take the best of both research approaches. So while we’re sure the big data trend will continue to grow, decision makers should be careful not to forget about the underlying human element.

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As the American writer Mark Twain said a century ago, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.” Don’t be fooled by what you “know for sure” about your customer, yourself, your business, or the world. Seek out opportunities to observe and update your worldview.


CULTIVATE CREATIVE SERENDIPITY
French chemist Louis Pasteur famously asserted 160 years ago that “chance favors the trained mind.” In fact, some translations of his original phrase (Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés) suggest that he really meant chance favors only the prepared mind. The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.

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Maybe Pasteur really meant “Chance favors people who do lots of experiments and then pay very close attention when something unexpected happens.” Less quotable, of course, but probably more descriptive of reality.


Chapter 4 – Leap: From Planning to Action

THE “DO SOMETHING” MINDSET

While the path of least resistance is usually to coast along in neutral, people with creative confidence have a “do something” mindset. They believe their actions can make a positive difference, so they act. They recognize that waiting for a perfect plan or forecast might take forever, so they move forward, knowing they will not always be right but optimistic about their ability to experiment and conduct midcourse corrections further down the road.

John Keefe, a senior editor at Manhattan radio station WNYC, one day heard his colleague lament about how often her mom was left waiting at city bus stops, not knowing when the next bus would arrive. Just pause for a moment, and ask yourself the following question: If you worked for New York City Transit and your boss asked you to solve that problem, how soon would you promise to get a system up and running? Six weeks? Ten? John, who doesn’t even work for the transit authority, said, “Give me till the end of the day,” converting a colleague’s passing comment into a personal mission. Within twenty-four hours, he created a working prototype of a service that allowed bus riders to call in, input their bus stop number, and hear the location of the next approaching bus (even without a smartphone).

To bring the idea to life in such a short time, John had to get creative about using existing services. He bought a toll-free phone number for a dollar per month from Twilio, a service that connects a telephone number to web-based programs. He wrote a small program that sends the bus stop code to the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority site, accesses real-time location data, and then converts the answer from text to speech. A few seconds later, the caller hears a message like this: “the next bus to arrive at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue heading north is nine stops away.” He did all that in a single day. And when we called the number a year later to check it out, John’s little hack was still working.


STOP PLANNING AND START ACTING

With a more proactive mindset, you will start to see more opportunities for action around you. But seeing is not enough. You still need to act.

Many of us get stuck between wanting to act and taking action. The uncertainty of the uncharted path ahead can be daunting. Sometimes it feels as if circumstances are conspiring against us, and we find ourselves riveted in place.

In corporate cultures, that hesitation can translate into what professors Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer call the “knowing-doing gap”: the space between what we know we should do and what we actually do. It can lead to company paralysis when talk becomes a substitute for action.

After learning about the knowing-doing gap, we began to see it everywhere. For example, we witnessed it firsthand at the EastmanKodak Company. On a cold spring day in the mid-1990s, an IDEO team traveled to Rochester, New York, for an audience with the Kodak executive team. We found a group of leaders with deep expertise who at least intellectually understood that the future of photography was digital.

Looking back, business historians may be tempted to suggest that Kodak’s leadership was naïve. But that was not the case. In fact, we had to race to keep up with CEO George Fisher’s agile mind. And no one could say Kodak lacked knowledge of digital photography. They had actually invented the digital camera in 1975 and later pioneered the world’s first megapixel sensor. Kodak had a head start that should have yielded lasting advantage. So why didn’t all that knowledge and first-mover advantage turn into decisive action?

For starters, tradition got in the way of innovation. Kodak’s glorious past was just too alluring. Kodak had essentially owned consumer photography for a hundred years, with market share in some segments as high as 90 percent. By contrast, digital ventures all seemed so risky, and Kodak wasn’t providing enough “soft landings” for managers willing to take career risks in those new areas. Facing strong global competitors in the digital market, Kodak knew that it would struggle, and fear of failure transfixed the management team.

Caught in the knowing-doing gap, Kodak clung too closely to the chemistry-based business that had been so successful for them in the twentieth century, underinvesting in the digital world of the twenty-first. What we saw at Kodak was not a lack of information but the failure to turn insight into effective action. As a result, one of the most powerful brands in America lost its way.

No company that falls behind the competition is guilty of standing completely still. But sometimes our efforts fail because of the level of commitment to change. “I’ll try” can become a halfhearted promise of follow-through rather than decisive action. The d.school’s academic director Bernie Roth demonstrates this idea with a brief exercise that his students say delivers a lasting message. He holds out a water bottle and asks them to try to take it from him. Facing gray-haired Bernie, a fifty-year veteran of the Stanford Design Program, students usually hesitate as they try to grab it from him. Their initial efforts yield nothing. His grasp just grows more ironclad as the strapping twenty-year-olds and powerful CEOs try to wrestle the bottle away from the octogenarian.

Bernie then reframes the exercise. He says to stop trying and just do it—take it from him. The next person strides forward and successfully wrenches the bottle away. What changed? As Bernie explains it, a subtle excuse lies in the idea of “trying.” It’s as if today is for attempts, and the real action will happen at some vague future moment. To achieve your goal, to topple the barriers that stand in your way, you have to be focused on getting it done now. Or as Yoda, another wise and seasoned change master, put it to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

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In other words, to ultimately reach a creative breakthrough, you just need to start, regardless of small failures that may occur along the way. It’s unlikely that your first try at anything will be a success. But that’s okay. It’s hard to be “best” right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements. The messiness of such trial and error may seem uncomfortable at first, but action allows most of us to learn at a faster rate; it’s almost a prerequisite for success. Otherwise, the desire to be best can get in the way of getting better.

This lesson was brought to life for us in a story from the insightful book Art & Fear. A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during the first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw pots nonstop in every session. And although it was counterintuitive to his students, you can guess how his experiment came out: at the end of the course, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent the most time actually practicing their craft.

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ACTION CATALYSTS
Sometimes you need to give yourself a little nudge. To get over the natural propensity for inaction, figure out what is holding you back and tackle that in some way. Here are some catalysts we use to get started:

1. GET HELP. Hire somebody or recruit a willing colleague for a short period to help you. Make your problem someone else’s for a while; share the burden to see if they—or you—come up with a new way to make progress.

2. CREATE PEER PRESSURE. David has found that he needs someone else in the room to get started. Even if the person doesn’t give feedback or add ideas, they provide social pressure to make David show up, the first step to getting something done. For example, using a personal trainer helps motivate David to go to the gym. Even when he’s not feeling energetic, he still turns up for his workout because he has made a commitment to his trainer.

3. GATHER AN AUDIENCE. Find an attentive listener to move an idea out of your head and into the real world. Talk your ideas through to get your creative juices flowing. And if your audience can give you feedback or food for thought, that’s an added bonus.

4. DO A BAD JOB. Suspend judgment of how well you are doing it. Just get something out there. We’ve found over the years that one way to get traction at the beginning of an innovation project is to write the “bad ad” first: a quick, sometimes even corny advertisement that describes whatever the finished product will be.

5. LOWER THE STAKES. If the problem you are working on feels so important that everything hinges on it, make it less important. Thinking of the perfect place for your team’s next offsite meeting might paralyze you with indecision. But if you just list a dozen possible places, you might have the “perfect” location before you know it.



USE CONSTRAINT TO FUEL CREATIVE ACTION

Athough “creative constraint” sounds like an oxymoron, one way to spark creative action is to constrain it. Given a choice, most of us would of course prefer a little more budget, a little more staff, and a little more time. But constraints can spur creativity and incite action, as long as you have the confidence to embrace them.

When we talk to executives about implementing new innovation processes in their organizations, they often don’t seem to know where to start. But if we ask them what they could do in a week with a shoestring budget, you’d be amazed at the great ideas they come up with. After an executive education workshop, a vice president at Fidelity Investments told us he was going to try a crazy time constraint on his next project to open up thinking and force rapid iteration. The kickoff meeting for a six-month project was the following Monday. In the “business as usual” schedule for a new web-based customer offering, his team would have roughly two months of planning, two months of making wireframes (outlining the basic page layouts, navigation, functionality, etc.), and two months of preparing the customer-ready version. This time would be different. “When my team meets on Monday,” he said, “I’m going to tell them we have today to do the whole project.” And at the end of the day, he planned to give the team “extensions” of a week and then a month. He was confident that if they spent more time iterating through many ideas rather than trying to plan for a perfect one, the finished product would be more robust and more innovative.


EXPERIMENT TO LEARN

Several years back, an IDEO team wanted to illustrate new electronic features for a luxury European car company. The automaker was planning to build intelligence into both the key and the car, and the team wanted to demonstrate how the driver’s enhanced experience would look and feel. First, the team filmed someone driving an existing car while acting out the new interaction. Then, using a combination of quick physical props and simple digital effects, they made the new features come alive. The finished video clip simulated the appearance and functionality of a future dashboard with new digital displays and interactions.

The result was nothing like the sophisticated special-effects wizardry you’d see from Industrial Light & Magic. But it only took a week to create, and it captured the team’s vision well enough for the car company’s executives to decide whether the feature set was headed in the right direction. “I love this idea,” one of them said. He didn’t mean the new features, but the process for testing it. “Last time we did something like this, we built a full system into a dashboard, spent many months and almost a million dollars. Then we took a video of it. You skipped the car and went straight to the video,” he said with a laugh.

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As IDEO design director Tom Hulme puts it, “Release your idea into the wild before it’s ready.” Real-world market testing (even when you know you have more development to do) can be an invaluable source of insight.


Chapter 5 – Seek: From Duty to Passion

Work doesn’t have to feel like “Work with a capital W.” You should be able to feel passion, purpose, and meaning in whatever you do.

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A JOB, A CAREER, OR A CALLING
Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management, has extensively researched working life, surveying people in a variety of occupations. She has found that people have one of three distinct attitudes toward the work they do: they think of it as either a job, a career, or a calling. And the difference is crucial. When work is strictly a job, it may effectively pay the bills, but you’re living mostly for the weekend and your hobbies. Those who see work as a career focus on promotions and getting ahead, putting in long hours to achieve a more impressive title, a larger office, or a higher salary. In other words, you are focused on checking off achievements rather than pursuing deeper meaning. In contrast, for those who pursue a calling, their work is intrinsically rewarding in its own right—not just a means to an end. So, what you do professionally fulfills you personally as well. And often that work is meaningful because you are contributing to a larger purpose or feel part of a larger community. As Wrzesniewski points out, the origins of the word “calling” are religious, but it maintains its meaning in the secular context of work: the sense that you are contributing to a higher value or to something bigger than yourself.


SEEK YOUR PASSION
When people go for the heart—when they seek out passion in their work—they can tap into and unleash inner reserves of energy and enthusiasm. One way to begin accessing this inner reserve is to jot down moments in your life when you feel really alive. What were you doing and who were you with? What about it did you love? How can you re-create key elements in other situations? Once you’ve identified a few areas you want to explore further, commit to taking a single tiny action each day to broaden your portfolio of creative experiences in those areas.


RATE MY DAY
As David emerged from his cancer treatments at the end of 2007, he realized that he had literally been given a second chance in life. On the advice of psychiatrist Dr. C. Barr Taylor, David began using a very simple method of examining what his days were like and finding ways to make them better.

Every evening before bedtime, he would reflect briefly on the ups and downs of his waking hours. He would then score the day in terms of how much fun he had, on a scale from one to ten, and mark it on his calendar. After collecting a couple weeks’ worth of data, he went back and reflected over his calendar together with Barr to find what activities drove the number up or down.

They discovered some surprising patterns. Days in which David had a solitary hour or two in his studio space—a rustic loft over a barn—were more rewarding, happier days. And his score bumped up even higher when he blasted his favorite music while making something in the studio—whether it was a metal bracelet, a custom piece of wooden furniture, or a papier-mâché Halloween costume. He identified which activities—work related and otherwise—gave him the greatest sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. He also noticed which ones dragged him down. And then he began gravitating toward those activities that raised his scores and away from things that lowered them.

It was a very simple process. But it led David to moments of epiphany and behavior change—articulating new insights he hadn’t previously discovered about himself.

So try identifying the things that bring you happiness and fulfillment. Look for ways to incorporate more of those things in your life, whether it’s helping others, getting more exercise, reading more books, going to a live concert, or taking a cooking class. A designer at IDEO used to place stickers in her appointment book to note moments when she was happy, anxious, or sad. The modern-day equivalent can be easily found with mood-mapping apps that allow you to keep track of your daily ups and downs, so you know what you want to do more of—and what you want to do your best to avoid. This “mood meter” can help you think about both your work and your personal life.

You don’t necessarily have to do anything elaborate to gain some new insight into yourself. Simply take the time to ask yourself each day, “When was I at my best?” or “When was work most rewarding?” It can help point you toward roles or activities that will enrich your work and reveal what gives you the greatest pleasure or fulfillment.


THE COURAGE TO LEAP
One corporate manager we know who started with small steps is Monica Jerez at 3M. We first met Monica a few years ago at an innovation conference in the Dominican Republic. For years, Monica had felt she was supposed to hide her creativity away in order to succeed in her career. But inspired by design thinking and empowered by a 3M growth-oriented leadership class, Monica became a whirlwind of action. As global portfolio manager in 3M’s floor-care division, she read voraciously to find new sources of inspiration: books on innovation, business publications, and several daily newspapers. She visited the local Target store each week, walking every aisle in search of new ideas from product categories as far afield as beverages and oral care. She teamed up with a technical partner within 3M to help build a multidisciplinary team with design, technical, marketing, business, consumer insight, and manufacturing skills. She populated her office at 3M with so many products, prototypes, and Post-it notes that it looked like a design studio.

Originally, Monica had no budget for field research. But she didn’t let that stop her. As the busy mom of four children, she had plenty of opportunity to study how families handle clutter. She had her house professionally cleaned and took a video of the cleaning in action, using the camera on her phone. The resulting video was so ripe with potential business opportunities that Monica commissioned more videos from 3M teams in twenty countries around the world. “My mind just became so big,” Monica said with a laugh. “It redefined me.”

Monica never considered herself to be the kind of creative person who would apply for a patent. But in the past year, she has filed for more than a dozen. A key innovation metric at 3M is the new product vitality index (NPVI), which tracks the percent of the company’s sales that are from products introduced in the last five years. Monica’s business unit’s NPVI was double the company average last year. She was promoted to Hispanic Market Leader for 3M’s Consumer & Office Business and has been recognized as a role model for other emerging leaders at the company. With newfound confidence in her creative contributions, she’s having more fun at work, delivering more value for 3M, and inspiring others around her to do the same.

MAKE A CHANGE
Lauren Weinstein felt for some time that she didn’t see eye to eye with the other law school students in her class. They were laser-focused on getting good grades and on learning all the legal precedents. At every turn, they seemed to ask, “What do previous cases suggest?” Lauren understood the importance of the rule of law but also found herself wondering about other matters. Who were the people in the case? What were their personal histories? Could that affect the outcome of a case? When she asked those kinds of questions aloud, she would get funny looks from her colleagues.

When she attended a class at the d.school for the first time, everything felt very foreign to her, but also very liberating. Instead of being pressured to recite back case law to get the “right” answer, she could experiment, and iterate toward a better solution. She didn’t have to censor herself or be afraid of getting an answer “wrong.” It was as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

Before taking the class, Lauren had felt “a little creative,” but she also knew herself to be timid and wishy-washy when it came to standing up for her ideas. Forced to come up with a hundred ideas in group ideation sessions—working on topics like innovative retirement options for baby boomers—she proved to herself she was creative, could handle uncertainty, and could initiate change in the world around her.

That confidence first blossomed in the classroom. But it eventually trickled back to the courtroom. At the same time Lauren was taking classes at the d.school, she was also preparing for a mock trial held at the Palo Alto Courthouse, to be argued before a judge and jury. The case concerned a construction worker who had been hit by a train. Lauren was assigned to argue the side of the victim. She knew the odds were against her: historically, the plaintiff’s side in this particular trial had never won because the facts of the case favored the train company. In previous mock trails, the same details were presented in essentially the same way, and the outcome was always the same.

So Lauren came up with a new approach. When she shared her plan with her partner on the case, he tried to talk her out of it. But she was determined to try. During closing arguments, Lauren approached the jury box. She asked the jury members to close their eyes. “Imagine that you are having a nightmare. And in this nightmare, you are trapped on a train that is speeding down the tracks …” She had them picture the situation from the point of view of not only the people on the train but also the man who was hit. The case was no longer a straightforward recitation of facts and precedents; it was about what the construction worker experienced. The jury ultimately voted in her favor, and the judge said afterward that she had given the best argument he’d ever heard in that mock trial.

Asked how she got up the nerve to take a dramatically different approach, Lauren attributed it in part to the new creative confidence she had gained. “Nothing feels out of my comfort zone or the realm of possibility anymore,” she says.


Chapter 6 – Team: Creatively Confident

If you want your team to innovate routinely, you’ll need to nurture a creative culture.

Take, for example, the cultural transition at Intuit shepherded by its vice president of design innovation, Kaaren Hanson. Back in the 1980s, Scott Cook had founded Intuit based on simplicity, beginning with its flagship Quicken product and expanding into now-familiar software programs like QuickBooks and Turbo-Tax. But eventually the company’s growth slowed, and its executive leadership realized Intuit needed to go beyond incremental improvements to create breakthroughs. So Scott asked Kaaren—a young design director at the time—to help him reinvigorate the cycle of growth and innovation that had fueled the company’s dramatic rise in its early days.

Looking for new tools, she took a course on customer-focused innovation at the d.school and learned about the principles described in this book. Kaaren also brought together ideas from such influential business thinkers as Geoffrey Moore, Fred Reichheld, and Clayton Christensen. The result was a way forward that the company called “Design for Delight”—referred to internally as D4D. For the employees at Intuit, design for delight means “evoking positive emotion by going beyond customer expectations in delivering ease and benefit so people buy more and tell others about the experience.” Among the principles are: 1) deep customer empathy; 2) going broad to go narrow (i.e., seeking many ideas before converging on a solution); and 3) rapid experiments with customers.

Emerging from an executive offsite in 2007, D4D had the support of a lot of senior management. But Kaaren quickly learned that while buy-in from the top is necessary, it is not enough to guarantee success. The company got mired in what Kaaren calls “the talking phase,” in which lots of people vocally express their support but no actual action is taken or progress made. “We made that mistake … twice,” she says, referring to a second offsite over a year later. Key executives all agreed that Design for Delight was important to the future of the company and wanted to incorporate it in their groups. Yet D4D still remained more of a vision than a reality.

So in August of 2008, Kaaren recruited nine of the best design thinkers in the company to join her in a group called the InnovationCatalysts to spark creative initiatives and serve as coaches to help managers turn D4D ideas into action. The Catalysts came from design, research, and product management and were in positions close to the day-to-day operations of the company. Only two of them reported directly to Kaaren, but she gained access to about 10 percent of each of the other Catalysts’ time (two days a month) and probably a much larger percentage of their mind-share. They went in search of opportunities to delight customers and spur innovative practices across the organization.

In one early project, a five-person Intuit team (including three Catalysts) created a user-friendly mobile app called SnapTax that helps customers prepare and file straightforward tax returns. The team observed dozens of young people from their target audience in places they would naturally frequent, like Starbucks and Chipotle. The Catalysts and their collaborators quickly went through eight rounds of software prototyping in the same number of weeks, gathering customer feedback and then iterating their design in each round to make the application stronger and easier to use.

To use the app, you simply take a photo of your annual W-2 Wage and Tax Statement and answer a few questions on your phone. Moments later, your tax forms are ready to ship. So how well does SnapTax fit with Intuit’s definition of design for delight? Does it create positive emotion? Check. Does it go beyond customer expectations? Check. Does it create ease of use and a clear benefit to consumers? Check and check.

As Intuit began to design for delight among consumers, the company found itself renewing its culture of innovation. In other words, the creative process they used was contagious. As Kaaren says, “Fun is self-reinforcing.… Delighting customers grows our company and engages our employees.”

The original group of Catalysts has grown to nearly two hundred, spread throughout the company, mentoring and collaborating with many hundreds more. Along with working on their own projects, they coach managers on the innovation process: facilitating brainstorms, helping conduct user interviews, building prototypes.

The Catalyst group is still being rolled out, but Intuit is already feeling its effects. Customer loyalty metrics like net promoter scores are up, as well as revenues, profits, and market capitalization. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, who has studied the company’s performance in recent years, found Intuit now seizes new opportunities more quickly, and they’ve increased their mobile app offering from zero to eighteen within a span of two years. In 2011, Intuit appeared on Forbes’s annual list of the world’s one hundred most innovative companies. Kaaren wants to “embed D4D into the DNA of Intuit by 2015,” at which point the Catalysts won’t even need to exist as a distinct group.

How did Kaaren and her colleagues build a creatively confident group, driven by new ideas? They got at least half a dozen things right:

• They gained broad executive support, which helped the Catalyst program cut across organizational lines.

• They launched grassroots action that required only modest middle-management commitment by using small percentages of employees’ time.

• They leveraged one of the core principles of the company—simplicity—and gave it new life with the tangible concept of “Design for Delight.”

• They handpicked the first few Catalysts to help jumpstart the program, knowing that it could be scaled up later, once the group had some momentum.

• They avoided big complex products owned by other departments and divisions within the company and instead launched small experiments in search of some early wins in new markets.

• They set a multiyear time horizon, recognizing that real culture change diffuses slowly through a large organization.

The Catalyst program has been a resounding success at Intuit. But it required a lot of experimentation, effort, and resilience every step of the way. Creatively confident organizations aren’t built overnight. Even successful creative initiatives like the Catalyst program go through a series of phases before they “cross the chasm” and become part of the mainstream culture of an organization.

*****

The most robust method to boost creative confidence is through guided mastery. Like learning how to drive a golf ball up the middle of the fairway, the most effective way of learning how to innovate routinely is through practice and coaching.

To build a creative organization, you need to build creative confidence among key players, one individual at a time. Innovation leader Claudia Kotchka helped introduce design thinking at Procter & Gamble. For her, getting people to experience the methodology firsthand was key. “I always say, ‘Show, don’t tell,’ ” Claudia explains. “The bottom line is, you just have to get as many people through it as you can. Because once someone experiences it, they are forever changed.” Many clients have mentioned the importance of having trained innovation coaches within the company who can guide others toward creative confidence. While Intuit has its “Innovation Catalysts,” other companies have their own versions, with names that range from “facilitators” to “co-conspirators.”

KARAOKE CONFIDENCE IN YOUR WORK CULTURE
Karaoke confidence seems to rely on a few key ingredients. And we’ve noticed that those same ingredients are essential for encouraging cultures of innovation everywhere. Here are five guidelines that can improve your next karaoke experience—and your innovation culture:

• Keep your sense of humor

• Build on the energy of others

• Minimize hierarchy

• Value team camaraderie and trust

• Defer judgment—at least temporarily

*****

When a group embraces the concept of building on the ideas of others, it can unleash all sorts of creative energy. And the result looks something like this:

Four IDEO team members were driving back to their hotel after a long day in the field observing users. Suddenly they realized they were running low on Post-it notes. If you’ve seen a photo or video of our office, you know that Post-its are nearly essential tools for us to jot down interview observations, brainstorm ideas, record process steps, and so on. Nearly anything can go on a Post-it, which then gets placed on a wall or a board. Our entire office gets covered with them. So the team needed to quickly figure out how to get more Post-its at that late hour.

Somewhere in the space between punchy humor and cynicism, one team member wondered aloud if they should just recycle their used Post-its, holding up an old one when the same idea resurfaced. After the laughter subsided, that idea triggered a flood of additional suggestions. Everyone chimed in, riffing off previous ideas or inspired with new ones: a Post-it Rolodex, Post-it Bingo, Post-it maps. There are already something like four thousand unique Post-it products on the market. But as the group playfully tossed concepts back and forth, they invented a new one: a pad of Post-its interspersed with carbon paper. You write an idea on a Post-it, and when it goes up on the board you still have a carbon copy of it in the pad. Without any extra effort, the flow of ideas is memorialized on the pad itself. They immediately dubbed their new concept “Flowst-its” (rhymes with Post-its). The IDEO team member driving the car almost had to pull off the road, he was laughing so hard.

“Flowst-its” probably won’t become a real product (though one designer started building a prototype). But the way it was generated exemplifies what creative collaboration looks like at its best. Exchanging ideas within a group of people who trust one another—without fear of judgment or failure—can feel electric. Your idea spurs another person’s. The results might have been challenging for you to develop by yourself or probably would have taken longer. And coming up with them certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun. In our experience working on thousands of innovation projects for many of the world’s most demanding companies, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

To make those kinds of innovation teams work, people have to buy into the mindset of working together toward a shared solution. No one person is responsible for the final outcome. It is the result of everyone’s contribution. Instead of individuals protecting or promoting “my idea,” colleagues become comfortable with group ownership. When a client recently asked the members of one of our project teams to write their names on each of their Post-its in an ideation session—as a way of assigning credit—we really struggled. We were so accustomed to fluidly building directly on each other’s ideas in that setting, it felt really countercultural to say “This one is mine.”

Collaboration works especially well when members bring different backgrounds or perspectives to the team. That’s why we mix engineers, anthropologists, and business designers on project teams with surgeons, food scientists, and behavioral economists. By working in diverse multidisciplinary teams, we can get to a place that would have been impossible for one of us to reach alone. Bringing together a variety of life experiences and contrasting perspectives results in a creative tension that often leads to more innovative and interesting ideas.

*****

Gathering diverse minds together can be particularly valuable when facing complex and multidimensional challenges. JetBlue Airways learned that lesson in the aftermath of a customer service nightmare in 2007. When an ice storm closed JFK International Airport for six hours, weak links in the airline’s operations led to flight disruptions that lasted six days. Some passengers were left stranded on the tarmac for ten hours at a time. The debacle cost JetBlue an estimated $30 million and prompted the airline’s board to force out founder/CEO David Neeleman.

The root causes of JetBlue’s slow recovery were subtle and multifaceted. To diagnose and solve the problem, the airline first brought in a consultant, spending more than a million dollars on lengthy reports. After no improvements resulted, Bonny Simi, then director of Airport and People Planning, proposed a different strategy to her boss. Instead of the top-down view, Bonny suggested they try a bottom-up approach with a multidisciplinary team. Her fresh outlook might stem partly from her eclectic and extraordinary background, which has included stints as an Olympic athlete (she raced down the luge track in Sarajevo, Calgary, and Albertville), a sportscaster, and a United Airlines pilot.

Bonny got the go-ahead for a single day’s time from people representing every facet of frontline operations—pilots, flight attendants, dispatchers, crew schedulers, and others. Her plan was for them to map out together the complex interaction of events that gets triggered during “irregular operations,” like inclement weather. There was a lot of doubt about the approach that first day. “Three quarters of the room were skeptics and the other quarter were cynics,” says Bonny.

But they gave it a shot. They imagined a thunderstorm had canceled forty flights and then itemized every step of their recovery actions on yellow Post-it notes. Wherever a problem was identified, they wrote it on a pink Post-it. For example, they uncovered the fact that managers were using different formatting on a spreadsheet of flights to be canceled. The variations in how the data was presented led to miscommunication, confusion, and ultimately the cancellation of the wrong flights.

By the end of the day, there were more than a thousand pink Post-its, and Bonny got permission to form a task force to tackle the most important ones. Over the next several months Bonny worked with 120 JetBlue employees, mostly hourly workers who had volunteered. Empowered to change operations flow, people became “unbelievable evangelists” in supporting the effort, Bonny says.

By seeking answers from the collective, Bonny did more than she could ever have done alone. JetBlue reportedly began to recover from major disruptions 40 percent faster than before. “You realize that you aren’t going to solve the problem sitting in an office,” says Bonny. “You need to get out and talk to the people who are actually dealing with it, whether that’s your customers or your frontline employees.”

*****

Another experiment in creative space we are trying out—on permanent loan from our friends at Steelcase—is something called the Digital Yurt. You can’t miss the yurt when entering the lobby of our design studio in Palo Alto. Pure white, the Digital Yurt is a tapered cylinder about twelve feet in diameter that looks a bit like a small spaceship hovering just above the floor. It’s a fun semiprivate meeting space for a small group, inspired by the picturesque tents used in Mongolia for centuries.

The yurt has sparked countless informal business conversations. But our favorite source of cultural reinforcement comes not from the yurt itself but from the round white table that lives inside it. Remember when Mom taught you the rule about “No writing on the furniture?” It’s one of a thousand rules we’ve internalized as part of being “well-behaved” members of modern society. But when you sit down in the yurt, you are given a clear signal that you’ve entered a space where you’re encouraged to act differently. Almost everyone starts drawing on the circular white table inside the yurt, without even asking whether it’s okay.

What triggers this reversal of “business as usual”? For starters, the table surface is made entirely of paper—doughnut-shaped white sheets stacked almost a foot high. Roughly the diameter of car tires, they can be torn off once they are filled with writing or artwork. Recessed in the center of that circular table is a large bowl filled with dozens of thick colored pencils. In other words, the environment in the yurt is sending you clear nonverbal signals. The paper provides the proverbial tabula rasa—a blank space waiting for you to customize it. And the well-worn pencils are clearly not there just for show. Often you will see the drawings of those who came before you, communicating instantly that here is a place where you can throw the old rules away and start drawing something new.

Space can affect us that way. Just as the right party atmosphere can bring out your “inner party animal,” the right work environment can bring out your latent creative capacity. An open space facilitates communication and transparency. Wide stairways encourage serendipitous conversations among people from different departments. Ubiquitous writing surfaces prompt spontaneous ideation sessions. Dedicated project spaces can help the team be more cohesive.

So, be intentional about your workspace. For most organizations, space is their second-biggest expense—overshadowed only by the compensation of the people who work in that space. Companies should spend those space dollars wisely. If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don’t put them in a drab, ordinary space.

*****

Here are a few examples of the things we learned along the way (some of which are captured in a book called Make Space by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, co-directors of the d.school Environments Collaborative):

• KEEP PEOPLE TOGETHER BUT NOT TOO CLOSE. We wanted close collaboration. But it was too crowded when we put all of the faculty at one table. Now each person has a desk, but they are clustered in an open space without divisions.

• CONSIDER SOUND. The trailer’s wood and polycarbonate space dividers were meant to provide a feeling of openness and collaboration, but when we started using them, the importance of acoustic privacy became apparent. While the makeshift walls delineated different areas, they didn’t stop sound, which made it hard to concentrate.

• ADD FLEXIBILITY–IN THE RIGHT PLACES. The team put everything on wheels: couches, tables, dividers, whiteboards, and supply carts. This flexibility allowed easy transition between varied uses. But it also proved there is a limit to flexibility, when it becomes more disorienting than liberating (like when the photocopier doesn’t stay put).

• TAILOR SPACES TO EXPERIENCES. The staff also created a few “micro-environments” in the d.school. These closet-sized spaces, ranging from a “white room” for ideating to a plush lounge, suggest different modes of work and give teams a choice customized to their current activity.

• CREATE AN ATMOSPHERE THAT GIVES PEOPLE PERMISSION TO EXPERIMENT. At the d.school, most surfaces are raw plywood, foam, concrete, or whiteboard with minimal or no delicate finishes and no sense of preciousness. Rough materials signal “feel free to experiment,” instead of “handle with care.” This may seem like common sense, but it’s not so common in the corporate world. Tom did a workshop years ago in a beautiful, brand-new corporate learning center for a well-respected Fortune 500 corporation. When he started to put up some posters to use in the workshop, someone stopped him, insisting that there was a rule about “no tape on the painted surfaces.” When the surfaces in a learning center inhibit part of the learning process, it might be time to reassess.

• DON’T BE AFRAID TO GO BIG WITH YOUR SPACE PROTOTYPES. You can do full-scale prototyping on a shoestring. Chalk out the layout of a new space. Use twine or long runs of butcher paper to simulate walls. With cheap materials, you can start to visualize a new space in a way that helps the future occupants try out alternatives and visualize the “feel” of it.

• USE DIPLOMACY. Start with a small experiment before the big launch. Let people experience the low-fidelity full-scale prototype to get used to the idea. Bring people together to celebrate the transition to something new, whether it’s christening a new building with a bottle of champagne or bestowing ceremonial keys on the group moving into a space.

Creating a self-imposed constraint like moving once a year may sound crazy, but it could also be just the push your group needs to constantly reinvent itself and stay on its toes. Look for opportunities to scramble things up. If you are planning a renovation, prototype ideas for the new space in your current one or at an interim location. If you have a new project, seize the opportunity to tailor your surroundings to that project. If changing your work environment becomes a regular occurrence, it will naturally become more reconfigurable and dynamic. So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.

*****

INNOVATION LEADERSHIP

One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of. At his best, Steve Jobs was a multiplier with his “reality distortion field.” He convinced people around him that they could do the impossible and then magically enabled them to actually pull it off. And we can all probably remember at least one diminisher we’ve worked for, who made us feel that—no matter what we did—our efforts didn’t really matter.


MULTIPLY THE IMPACT OF YOUR TEAM

Liz suggests that leaders who are multipliers can double the output of a team or company and improve morale in the process. Here’s how you can become a multiplier:

• Be a “talent magnet” who attracts and retains the best, most creative people and helps them reach their highest potential.

• Find a worthy challenge or mission that motivates people to stretch their thinking.

• Encourage spirited debate that allows different views to be expressed and considered.

• Give team members ownership of results and invest in their success.


So use the strategies of a multiplier to help individuals in your group live up to their creative potential. And don’t forget to be on the lookout for the creative leaders of tomorrow. If you do not yet have that mantle of authority in your organization, be a thought leader. Serve as a reverse mentor to others in the seat of power.

Warren Bennis, one of today’s leading thinkers on the art of leadership, spent years studying groundbreaking groups such as the Walt Disney Studios (while Walt was still alive), Xerox PARC, and Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Here are some of the highlights from his study of groups:

• Great groups believe they are on a mission from God. Beyond mere financial success, they genuinely believe they will make the world a better place.

• Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. “And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more,” says Warren.

• Great groups ship. “They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas.” Warren characterized the successful collaborations he studied as “dreams with deadlines.”


Part of the reason we can all understand the passion and performance of Warren’s great groups is that most of us have been on one ourselves, whether undertaking a school project or tackling a new company initiative. Belonging to a strong creative team can be one of the most rewarding aspects of working life. And having experienced the heady feeling of being on a great team, we all long to be part of one again.

BRINGING INNOVATION TO P&G
Even with strong leadership, it is hard to achieve cultural change inside a large organization. To give you a better picture of how an organization can build creative confidence from the ground up, we’d like to share the story of how Procter & Gamble transformed itself during A.G. Lafley’s first tenure as CEO. Among the strong leaders behind P&G’s dramatic change, a central player was Claudia Kotchka, vice president for design innovation and strategy.

Called by some a “cultural alchemist,” Claudia has just the right mix of patience, perseverance, and force of personality to spread creative confidence across a huge corporation. Among her achievements at the largest consumer packaged goods company in the world was to—asFast Company put it—“transform the company from a place that’s good at selling ‘more goop, better’ into one whose products infuse delight into customers’ lives.” And she’s proof positive that you don’t need to have a degree in design to apply these methodologies. Before coming to P&G, she began her career as a certified public accountant.

When A.G. Lafley first became CEO, he asked Claudia to build design into the heart of the company. Most of Claudia’s P&G career up until then involved marketing and general management, including running a successful service business inside the company, where she explored using design methodologies. Lafley told her that P&G was “just a technology company,” but that technology alone wasn’t enough. He wanted a total customer experience. She knew it would be hard to turn 100,000 employees into design thinkers inspired with creative confidence. When she read about design thinking for the first time, her reaction was “Whoa, this is so far from what we do. How am I going to get there? How am I going to learn this?”

But she was willing to try. She sent out a note to P&G business leaders and asked for their toughest problems, offering to help solve them. Her inbox was inundated. She then created an innovation fund to send a group of buttoned-down P&G executives to IDEO to work side by side with designers on some of those thorny problems.

It was a rough cultural transition: most of the P&G employees were immersing themselves in a design cycle that looked unlike anything they’d experienced before. Claudia remembers how a marketing executive called her in a panic from the design studio saying, “These people have no process! We have to teach them the P&G way.” Claudia calmed her down and asked the exec to go with the flow a little longer. And she did, becoming a fervent supporter of the new innovation methods.

Claudia later brought in innovation practitioners to conduct workshops at P&G. Eventually employees were trained as facilitators of the process so they could lead the workshops themselves. In one workshop, the Olay team wrestled with the problem that consumers had trouble distinguishing the different products in the Olay line. The team had planned to redesign the packaging. But they scrapped that solution after they realized through the workshop that by the time the consumer got to the store shelves, it was too late—if they didn’t already know what they were looking for, they weren’t going to figure it out in the store. So the team instead reframed the question, which guided them toward building a website called “Olay for You.” It helped consumers figure out what product they should use and gave them personalized recommendations before they went to the store.

P&G developed a steady stream of products that way. But what was far more important to Claudia was the creative confidence P&G executives gained from going through the design cycle.

What did the workshops look like? In a whirlwind three days, employees were guided through applying the process of brainstorming, researching end users, building prototypes, and fleshing out concepts to a problem they were struggling with. High-level executives often arrived at these workshops expecting to start with a PowerPoint presentation. “And step one, we throw them in with consumers. They are freaking out. They want to see an agenda, and we’re like, nope, sorry,” says Claudia. “The workshop moves so fast they don’t have time to question the process. They are immediately engaged.” One of P&G’s vice chairs told Claudia it was the best training he had ever had, both because it didn’t feel like training and because he was solving a real problem that was important to his group. “Every single one of those workshops was a hit because they would come away with insights they never expected,” says Claudia. A.G. Lafley even came to Claudia with a problem—how can we get the business units to work together instead of being siloed in their own profit centers?

With permission to experiment, Claudia and P&G figured out a number of things during this time of organizational change:

• TESTIMONIALS—NOT JUST METRICS AND RESULTS–ARE PERSUASIVE. Stories and votes of confidence from those who had experienced the new innovation methodology were key in convincing others of its value. “People had to believe that the workshops were worth their time or they wouldn’t do them,” Claudia says.

• PROTOTYPING IS BOTH A POWERFUL INNOVATION TOOL AND A POWERFUL CULTURAL VALUE. “Everything is a prototype,” says Claudia. “So, we would do an org change and I would say to everyone, ‘It’s a prototype.’ Which means (a) I have permission to be wrong and (b) I want your feedback if it’s not working.” Ideas were no longer sacred. If your idea was dismissed, you didn’t feel bad or feel as if your idea had gotten killed. “That’s magic. It’s so huge. Because when people get locked into something, it’s hard to get them off of it, and then their feelings are hurt,” says Claudia.

• TRAINING ALL THE DISCIPLINES HELPS DISSEMINATE CHANGE. Training people from all disciplines helped instill creative confidence organization-wide: purchasing, supply chain, market research, marketing, R&D—even finance. “Finance people are amazingly creative,” says Claudia. “The workshops were the first time they talked to consumers, and they loved it. And you know what they would say? I’m bringing my whole self to the job.” As a result, there were facilitators throughout the organization: “HR would be sitting around saying, ‘What are we going to do about the retention of women?’ ” says Claudia. “And the facilitator would say, ‘I can help us fix that.’ ”

Claudia helped bring creative confidence to P&G by getting as many people as possible to experience small successes for themselves. Today, P&G has three hundred facilitators throughout the company who continue to train employees in how to embed innovation thinking in every aspect of the organization.

As A.G. said of Claudia upon her retirement from P&G, “Under Claudia’s leadership, in only seven years, we’ve built world-class design capability at P&G. She has helped integrate design and design thinking into how we innovate and how we operate as a company. Her passion for the power of design has strengthened our brands and our business.”


Chapter 7 – Move: Creative Confidence to go

CREATIVITY CHALLENGE #7:

ELIMINATE HIERARCHY TO IMPROVE IDEA FLOW.

While Speed Dating is useful in situations where people don’t know each other well, sometimes in group meetings you will encounter the opposite problem: a group where people know each other too well. Or, more specifically, a group in which hierarchy is so well established that the more junior members in the room self-edit and defer to the executives rather than putting their best ideas on the table.

To reduce hierarchy (which inhibits conversation) and self-censoring (which is equally limiting), the d.school has recently been experimenting with a “nickname warm-up.” Using a stack of colorful names the instructors have prepared in advance, the activity is a way to temporarily level out the organization during a creative working session. Each participant is given a persona to allow them to “try on” new behaviors.


TOOL: Nickname Warm-up

PARTICIPANTS: Groups of six to twelve people per facilitator

TIME: A few minutes per person

SUPPLIES: Name tags for all participants with the fake names written out. A hat and a ball for each facilitator.


INSTRUCTIONS

1. Each participant reaches into the hat, draws out a name tag, and puts it on. Use names that lend themselves to humor and emotion. Teams tend to produce their best work when the group is having fun. Some of the monikers can imply a big dose of street credibility, while others suggest quirky personalities—for example, Dr. Fabulous, Squirt, Mr. Big Heart, The Clumsy Entertainer, or The Rooster.

2. The facilitator gathers the group in a circle and tosses the ball. Whoever catches it introduces themselves using their new nickname and then tells a short story (created on the spot) about how they acquired this nickname as a child.

3. After their self-introduction, they toss the ball to a new person, until everyone has had a chance to share their new name and story.

4. The rule for the rest of the workshop—strictly enforced—is that everyone must use only these nicknames when referring to themselves or others.




TIPS FROM THE FIELD

Do the name tags work? Although this is a relatively new exercise, experience so far suggests that the answer is yes. At a recent management event, the CEO of a global hospitality company drew the “Squirt” nickname. There was a pregnant pause in the room as everyone waited to see how he would react. But he gamely played along through the rest of the workshop, and the organizers felt it contributed to an open environment in which people could speak freely.

The goal is to flatten out the hierarchy, so it’s important to get the senior people in the room to participate. Leading by example will naturally break some of the barriers to free-flowing collaboration.