ROTMAN Magazine
Two
thought leaders (and brothers) from the intersection of design thinking and
innovation describe what can happen when you start to believe in your own
creative abilities.
by
Tom Kelley and David Kelley
WHEN
YOU HEAR THE WORD ‘CREATIVITY’, what do you think of next? If you are like many people, your mind
immediately leaps to artistic endeavours like sculpture, drawing, music or
dance. You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers,
but CEOs, lawyers and doctors are not. Or you may feel that being creative is a
fixed trait, like having brown eyes—either you’re born with creative genes or
you’re not.
As
brothers who have worked together for 30 years at the forefront of innovation,
we have come to see this set of misconceptions as ‘the creativity myth.’ Our
latest book — Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential
Within Us All — is about the opposite of that myth: it’s
about what we call ‘creative confidence’.
And at its foundation is the belief that we are all creative.
In the book, we present eight effective strategies
to help you get from‘blank page’ to insight. In this articlewe will present two
of them, in hopes of helping you increase your own creative contributions and
thereby, your creative confidence.
Strategy #1: Think Like a
Traveler
Ever travel to a foreign city? We’ve all heard that ‘travel broadens the
mind,’ but beneath this cliché lies a deep truth: things stand out because
they’re different so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to
how you pay at a restaurant. We learn a
lot when we travel not because we are any smarter on the road, but because we
pay such close attention. On a trip, we become our own version of Sherlock
Holmes, intensely observing the environment around us. We are continuously
trying to figure out a world that is foreign and new. Too often, we go through
day to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our
surroundings. To notice friction points
— and therefore opportunities to do things better — it helps to see the world
with fresh eyes.
When you meet creative people with lots
of ideas constantly bubbling to the surface, you often come away feeling that
they are operating on a different frequency. And they are, most of the time.
They have all their receptors on—and frequently turned up to 11. But the fact
is, we are all capable of operating in this mode.
At the Hasso Plattner Institute of
Design (aka the Stanford d.school), to demonstrate the power of rediscovering
the familiar, we often take executives to places like a gas station or the
airport. They assume they know exactly
what an airport is like. So we have them sit down and watch how the passengers
are lining up, how they get their bags off the carousel, how they talk to the airline
representatives. Most leave the airport feeling surprised at what they have
noticed for the first time. Like the passengers sitting alone at a gate who had
arrived for their flight four hours early ‘just in case’. Or the busy mom who
is paying all her bills as boarding begins. Or the ‘safety rituals’ people
perform, like tapping the side of the plane three times as they step on board.
Rediscovering the familiar is a powerful
example of how looking at something closely can affect what you see. So apply a
‘beginner’s mind’ to something you do or see every day: commuting to work,
eating dinner, or preparing for a meeting. Look for new insights about familiar
things. Think of it as a treasure hunt.
By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a
beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you normally might
have overlooked. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching
out inspiration. And when it comes to inspiration, quantity matters. For
example, part of what makes venture capitalists so business-savvy — and
ultimately so successful — is that they see a lot more ideas than ordinary
people. Young, enthusiastic entrepreneurs come to them every day with
new-to-the-world business ideas in search of funding. In the VC business, it’s
called ‘deal flow’. All other things being equal, the better your deal flow, the
more successful your venture capital firm will be.
What’s true of deal flow for venture
capital firms is true of idea flow, too: the more fresh new ideas that
cross your field of vision each day, the greater your insights will be. The
more ideas you brush up against, or even butt heads with, the more you can give
yourself the venture capitalist’s leverage of seeing a lot of ideas so that you
invest in only the very best. Ask yourself, What can I do to increase my ‘deal
flow’ of new ideas? When was the last time you took a class? Read some unusual
magazines or blogs? Listened to new kinds of music? Travelled a different route
to work? Had coffee with a friend or colleague who can teach you something new?
Connected to ‘big idea’ people via social media?
To keep your thinking fresh, constantly
seek out new sources of information. For example, we watch dozens of TED Talks a
year, scan our favourite news aggregator every morning, and subscribe to
expertly-curated newsletters like Cool News of the Day. We also have
more than 600 IDEO folks in 12 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 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?
For example, the head of the pediatric
intensive care unit at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital got inspiration
from watching a Formula One pit crew on television. He was amazed at the
precisely-sequenced performance of the well-orchestrated team as they serviced
a race car in a matter of seconds. In contrast, the hospital had been
struggling with chaotic patient hand-offs from surgery to the intensive care
unit. So he took the extraordinary step of asking a Ferrari pit crew to coach
his staff members.
Amazingly, the doctors and nurses
translated the pit crew’s techniques into new behaviours. For example, they now
map out tasks and timing for every role in order to minimize the need for
conversation. And they step through a checklist to relay key patient
information. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Ferrari-inspired
changes have reduced technical errors by 42 per cent and information errors by
49 per cent.
When ideas are in short supply, it’s
tempting to become possessive or territorial and limit your options. If you
only have a few ideas in your idea bank, you’re more likely to settle on one of
the few you have, and defend it fiercely, even if it’s not optimal. But when
ideas are plentiful and easy — if you (or your team) have a dozen a day — then
there’s no need to become territorial about them. And if an idea you had gets
blended with others, it’s not a problem. The whole group shares the credit.
After all, there are more ideas where that one came from. 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.
Strategy #2: Empathize With
Your End User
In organizations with millions of
customers, or in industries serving the broad public, there is a temptation to
stereotype or depersonalize customers. They become numbers, transactions, data
points on a bell curve, or parts of a composite character built on market
segmentation data. That type of shortcut might seem useful for understanding
the data, but we’ve found that it doesn’t work well when designing for real
people.
The notions of empathy and
human-centeredness are still not widely practiced in many corporations.
Business people rarely navigate their own websites or watch how people use
their products in a real-world setting. And if you do a word association with a
business person, the word empathy doesn’t come up much. What do we mean by empathy in terms of
creativity and innovation? For us, it’s
the ability to see an experience through another person’s eyes, to recognize
why people do what they do. It’s when you go into the field and watch people
interact with products and services in real time.
Gaining empathy takes some time and
resourcefulness, but there is nothing like observing the person you’re creating
something for to spark new insights. And when you specifically set out to
empathize with your end user, you get your own ego out of the way. We’ve found
that figuring out what other people actually need leads to the most
significant innovations. In other words, empathy is a gateway to better and
sometimes surprising insights that can help distinguish your idea or approach.
You can use this kind of anthropological research in the field to gather inspiration
at the beginning of a project, to validate concepts and prototypes generated
throughout the design process, and to rekindle momentum when ideas or energy
are running low.
At IDEO and the d.school, we like to
observe people in their homes or where they work or play. We watch them
interact with products and services, and sometimes we interview them to better understand
their thoughts and feelings. This kind of hands-on research can even change
your understanding of who your end user is, as it did for one of our teams when
they changed their approach from designing for hospitals and clinics to
designing for rural mothers in their villages.
We
often hire design researchers with social science backgrounds and advanced
degrees in fields like Cognitive Psychology, Anthropology or Linguistics —
people who are sophisticated at gathering and synthesizing insights from
interviews and observations. But you
don’t need an advanced degree to get out into the field. Usually every team
member on a project at IDEO or the d.school takes part in such fieldwork,
because the final concept benefits as a result. As cultural anthropologist Grant
McCracken says, “Anthropology is too important to be left to the anthropologists.”
Everyone can improve their empathy skills with a little practice. You may find
you’ll get some of your best ideas by doing so.
Many
organizations or teams use benchmarking when they want to innovate. They check
out what their competitors are doing and pick what they consider ‘best
practices’. In other words, without questioning current ways of doing things or
seeking new insights, they ‘copy and paste’. In 2007, when PNC Financial Services
was striving to appeal to younger customers, it could have just followed the
competition, hiked up interest rates on its chequing accounts by half a per
cent and promoted them with a marketing campaign. Instead, it created a new
kind of account for young people, attracting 14,000 new customers in the first two
months alone.
PNC’s
story started with seeking to understand the customers it wanted to attract,
and then committing to improving its relationship with them. PNC provides
retail banking, corporate and institutional banking, and asset management
services to more than six million people across the United States. It was
looking to reach a new demographic, ‘Generation Y’, the first generation of
digital natives, roughly ranging from college age to their midthirties. When the team at PNC started getting to know
Gen Y’ers through interviews, it became clear that while tech savvy and adept at
weaving technology seamlessly into their lives, they were far from literate
when it came to banking and managing their finances. Even people who were
making more than enough to live comfortably were often overdrawn on their
account because they would pay bills before their paycheque went through.
The
team realized that Gen Y would benefit from tools to better manage its money.
With greater control over their assets, customers could save more and not overspend,
avoiding overdraft charges. As Mark Jones, the service designer on the project,
describes it, “For the person living hand to mouth, struggling with money
management, the key is to let things be more visible, let them get access, let
them tweak back and forth between accounts very easily.” Bank customers love
the idea of avoiding overdraft fees, but it takes courage for a bank to create such
products, given how highly profitable they are. At the time, banks were
collecting over $30 billion a year in overdraft income, and young adults are
especially prone to incurring those fees. But PNC decided to build better
long-term customer relationships by supporting healthier financial behaviour.
The
PNC Virtual Wallet is a family of banking products that provides customers with
digital access to their finances and enables them to have better control of
their money. Instead of a ledger, a calendar view helps customers visualize
their balance, with estimated future cash flow based on when they get paid and when
they pay bills. The view highlights ‘Danger Days’, when customers might
overdraw their account, so they can reschedule bill payments, promoting better
planning. A money slidebar graphically indicates and controls fund allocation
between Spend, Reserve and Growth. With the Savings Engine, customers can set
their own rules, such as automatically transferring money to savings when they
get paid.
The
new direction has paid off with greater deposit growth, making up for whatever
revenue may have been lost from bounced cheque and overdraft fees. One customer
described his experience, saying, “I’m just out of college and have a lot more things
going in and out than I can keep track of. With Virtual Wallet, I was able to
save some, pay all my bills, and know exactly where all my cash went. I have
never felt more in control of my money
in my life.”
Virtual
Wallet was a departure from ‘business as usual’ for PNC. But the confidence to
go in this direction came from its customers.
By getting to know Gen Y and understanding its needs, PNC gained faith
in the long-term success of the product.
Whenever
we bring corporate executives to observe, meet with and talk to customers, the
experience makes a lasting impression. “Rather
than developing and then testing, we now begin projects with customers, to
incorporate their thinking earlier and more effectively,” says Frederick
Leichter, the chief customer experience officer at Fidelity Investments.
In closing
When
you unleash your creative confidence, you will start to see new ways to improve
on the status quo — from how to throw a dinner party to how to run a meeting.
And once you become aware of those opportunities, you will want to start
seizing them.
The
place to start is with you, as an individual. Even if you ultimately want to
instill creative confidence in your group or organization, we suggest you start
by focusing on your own. If you can unleash your creativity and lead by
example, it will be much more persuasive than just trying to talk others into
changing their behaviour. At its core, creative confidence is about believing
in your ability to create change in the world around you. It is the conviction
that you can achieve what you set out to do. We think this self-assurance — a
belief in your creative capacity — lies at the very heart of innovation.
Tom Kelley is a Partner at IDEO and author of the best-sellers The Art of
Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation.
David Kelley is the founder of IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design,
also known as the Stanford d.school.
Reprinted from
CREATIVE CONFIDENCE: UNLEASHING
THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL WITHIN US ALL
Copyright
© 2013 by
David
Kelley and Tom
Kelley.
Published by
Crown
Business, a division
of
Random House LLC.
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