Tom and David Kelley are brothers behind the design and consulting firm IDEO known for designing the first Apple mouse and an early laptop computer. David Kelley also founded the d.school Institute of Design at Stanford while Tom Kelley wrote the popular book“The Art of Innovation,” in 2001.
Now they are back with a new book that details how early failures, defeats and setbacks can lead otherwise creative people to shut down their own best ideas. The book offers a range of examples of how people gained the kind of creative confidence you might see on a kindergarten playground, using the kind of “design thinking” methodologies their firm popularized.
The following is an edited interview:
Q.
Your book is called “Creative Confidence.” Do you think that in our personal lives, or in business, there is a larger problem of creative insecurity?
A.
David Kelley: I’d say yes. Most of our cultures in corporate America are not set up to reward failure in the same way we reward success.
We’ve been so excited to find both at IDEO and the d. school at Stanford that it turns out people are all kind of wildly creative. I know it sounds like Pollyanna, but we’ve really found that to be true. The real issue is: what’s blocking them?
That kind of fear of failure or fear of being judged is what’s really going on. People don’t have the confidence to push their ideas because they’re fearful someone will shut them down and they’ll be known as “the person who came up with that bad idea.”
Q.
Is there anybody who is just kind of hopeless on this front? Like that guy in accounting?
A.
Tom Kelley: We think everybody’s got this inside them. Now, it’s not on the surface with everybody.
There’s this kind of misguided view that if you’re creative this stuff is effortless. It’s just not true! Even Mozart didn’t sit down at the piano on the first day. People do need a little help. They sometimes need tools or methodologies.
We think it’s worth putting in the effort. We did more than one hundred interviews for the book and a hundred out of a hundred people discovered this creative confidence. They went from not self-identifying as “creative” and then discovered that they were. And I gotta tell you, it is so much fun to be around people like that. It’s not just that they have visible creativity. They view the world in a different way. They view themselves in a different way.
Q.
Technology seems like an inherently creative field. Why is that?
A.
Tom Kelley: In the tech world, the pace of the industry is truly innovate or die. If you have a vintage wine business, there’s still innovation there, in the way you market and tell your stories, but it’s not a survival skill. If you can’t be creative in the tech world, you better take your bat and ball and go home.
Q.
If someone reading this wanted to be more creative right now, what would you tell them to do?
A.
David Kelley: You’ve got a project you want to work on? Jump right in. Get involved. Go meet all the stakeholders. Go talk to users.
What normally happens is a planning stage. We think planning is good, but not in the beginning. Planning is good after you know what you’re doing, after you’ve had insights. So this bias towards action is to start doing it, rather than procrastinating, or planning.
And if you’re at a big company and it’s hard to get started because there’s just so much resistance to what you’re doing, we really believe in telling everyone, “it’s an experiment,” so it’s not so precious and you can do it in kind of a quick and dirty way. It’s really like starting a bunch of small brush fires in different places, and you hope they come together and make something of consequence.
Q.
Let’s say I’m sitting in a room and I’m given an assignment to be creative with a group of people, and yet everyone is sitting there stiffly discussing ideas in a really formal way. What’s the best way to inject a more creative vibe into the room? Jump on the table? Buy a bunch of Post-it notes? Give everyone a hug and a whiteboard?
A.
Tom Kelley: We have a list of specific techniques, but one simple one is to get out of the room. As long as you are in the room, all you have available to you are a subset of ideas already in the brains of the people who are there.
What we find is consistent with creatively confident people is they start with the idea that they don’t have all the answers. They go out and observe human behavior around them, on whatever problem they’re working on, and use that. People out there are misbehaving. People out there are acting differently than you imagine. In the difference between your worldview and the actual ground truth there is sometimes an idea or opportunity.
Q.
You’re both wearing large hats in your author photo in the book. Do you wear the hats because you are creative, or do you believe the hats make you more creative?
A.
Tom Kelley: I was born on the Fourth of July andI have a big Fourth of July party every year. At our party this year, I had a photo booth. We were wearing hats because it’s the Fourth of July! It’s sunny. We later had a professional photographer come in and do pictures of us in a studio. It just didn’t seem to have as much life.
David Kelley: You find people that are confident, for any reason, and they’re liable to dress in way that is more expressive, and not worry so much about what other people are going to think.
Tom Kelley: In corporate settings always try to find a way to break down the hierarchy so ideas can flow freely. We don’t use hats much. I have used hats with a liquor company in the Southeast. Way more powerful than hats — is wigs.
Tom Kelley: In corporate settings always try to find a way to break down the hierarchy so ideas can flow freely. We don’t use hats much. I have used hats with a liquor company in the Southeast. Way more powerful than hats — is wigs.
In the stiffest corporate settings, for example, with the Asian managers of a European company in Beijing a few years ago who were really hard to warm up. And then we put wigs on them, blond wigs in many cases, so they could play another role. It was not “me making a fool of myself.” It was, “this is a guy in a blond wig.” I didn’t have enough for each person. They wanted more wigs!
These were, in my opinion, dull guys. I put the wigs on and they were fabulous. And they came up with ideas that were patentable.
Creative confidence is really two things combined. It’s the natural ability to come up with breakthrough ideas, combined with the courage to act on them. In a lot of our interviews, prior to getting creative confidence, it wasn’t that they didn’t have ideas, they self-edited. They felt that their work environment or their life environment was such that it didn’t encourage you to air an idea outside the norm.
But with creative confidence, they have the idea. And then they speak up. And they experiment. So they’re really less fearful. The confidence gives them the courage to go forward.
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