Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All David Kelley A powerful and inspiring book from the founders of IDEO, the award-winning design firm, on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the ‘creative types’. But two of the foremost experts in innovation, design and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative.In an entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, and with many of the world's top companies and design firms, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, allow us to think outside the box in terms of how we approach and solve problems.‘Creative Confidence’ is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers. PRAISE FOR CREATIVE CONFIDENCE “A five-star WOW! This wonderful, heartwarming book may literally change the world. Indeed, it must change the world. Don’t just read it. Use it. Now.” —TOM PETERS, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE “An indispensable field guide for creative explorers of all kinds. This compelling book will help build creative muscles for when you need them most.” —TODD SPALETTO, PRESIDENT, THE NORTH FACE “Creativity is not magic, it’s a skill. Get this book and learn the skill from the brothers who have taught it to more people—from nurses to bankers to teachers to computer scientists—than anyone else.” —CHIP HEATH, AUTHOR OF MADE TO STICK, SWITCH, AND DECISIVE “A cross between Steve Jobs’ commencement speech on creativity and a modern-day What Color Is Your Parachute?, the Kelley brothers offer simple but effective tools for the ‘I’m not creative’ set—business leaders and professionals seeking the confidence to innovate.” —JOHN MAEDA, PRESIDENT AND CEO, RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN “This is the only book about creativity that you’ll ever need.” —GUY KAWASAKI, AUTHOR OF APE: AUTHOR, PUBLISHER, ENTREPRENEUR “In hospitality—like in all industries—creativity is the life blood of engaging employees and guests (customers) and it is the capacity that allows you to strengthen your brand with every interaction. This book can help you engage powerfully with employees and customers and keep your brand relevant through changing times.” —MARK HOPLAMAZIAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, HYATT HOTELS CORPORATION “Tom and David have put together a practical, useful and generous book that’s essential reading for anyone in the business of being creative.” —SETH GODIN, AUTHOR OF THE ICARUS DECEPTION “I have long marveled at the Kelley brothers’ ability to innovate in seemingly impenetrable fields (like health care). Now they’ve unfettered that power in all of us, sharing the tools and inspiring the confidence we need to find the very best solutions to complex problems we face at work—and in our personal lives.” —GARY L. GOTTLIEB, M.D., PRESIDENT AND CEO, PARTNERS HEALTHCARE SYSTEM “David and Tom have written an incredibly insightful book that challenges us all to have the courage to break out of our ruts, innovate, and create.” —TIM KOOGLE, FORMER PRESIDENT AND CEO, YAHOO “Developing both the courage and confidence to create and the ability to cultivate original insight is of enormous practical importance, and this new book is the first place I send people to learn how it is done.” —RICHARD MILLER, PRESIDENT, OLIN COLLEGE “David and Tom Kelley show us how to effortlessly dance between the creativity of elementary school and the pragmatism of the business world.” —JOE GEBBIA, COFOUNDER, AIRBNB COPYRIGHT (#ulink_1cca42b1-7386-56dd-a90d-033dd82f4f1a) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013 First published in the United States by Crown Business in 2013 Copyright © David Kelley and Tom Kelley 2013 David Kelley and Tom Kelley assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Illustrations by Beau Bergeron, Alyana Cazalet, and Dan Roam Jacket design by Martin Kay Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007518005 Version: 2015-12-16 Dedication (#ulink_77eff5b7-9f6d-58fe-b805-5af4251b3808) To Mom & Dad … who gave us the freedom to express creative ideas, and the confidence to act on them CONTENTS Cover (#u71221561-af44-573c-9bb6-673b66070b2c) Title Page (#ud3e3c12e-2d69-5b14-8848-f7155b90d410) COPYRIGHT (#ud0d27202-4271-5ff4-a880-29c6fe050b94) Dedication (#u726065cd-4d0b-5570-aed6-b2348394e1b9) PREFACE (#u64dbebd1-c2aa-5e18-9018-92c00c57a934) INTRODUCTION THE HEART OF INNOVATION (#ucdd30f5e-f719-5c1a-9c1e-7fa438f01b32) CHAPTER 1 FLIPFROM DESIGN THINKING TO CREATIVE CONFIDENCE (#ub8b60bb2-7bd3-5551-a389-e772397c50b8) CHAPTER 2 DAREFROM FEAR TO COURAGE (#u78a314bc-d19b-586a-ae74-e963ab0c0d92) CHAPTER 3 SPARKFROM BLANK PAGE TO INSIGHT (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER 4 LEAPFROM PLANNING TO ACTION (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER 5 SEEKFROM DUTY TO PASSION (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER 6 TEAMCREATIVELY CONFIDENT GROUPS (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER 7 MOVECREATIVE CONFIDENCE TO GO (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER 8 NEXTEMBRACE CREATIVE CONFIDENCE (#litres_trial_promo) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo) NOTES (#litres_trial_promo) BY THE SAME AUTHORS (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE AUTHORS (#litres_trial_promo) CREDITS (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo) PREFACE (#ulink_35d5a236-00ba-5191-b882-31fa5e176885) This is a book from two brothers who have been close all their lives. As children in small-town Ohio, we played baseball on the same Tigers Little League teams in the summer and built snow forts together in the winter. We shared a bedroom for fourteen years, tacking up posters of muscle cars on the knotty-pine walls in the kind of finished basement that was popular in the Midwest. We went to the same grade school, joined the same Boy Scout troop, went on family vacations to Lake Erie, and once camped all the way to California and back with our parents and two sisters. We took many things apart, and put some of them back together. But a close-knit relationship and overlapping lives do not mean our paths were the same. David has always been a bit unconventional. His favorite class in high school was art. He played in a local rock band called the Sabers with his friends. He built giant plywood structures like jukeboxes and grandfather clocks for the annual Spring Carnival at Carnegie Mellon. He started a firm called Intergalactic Destruction Company (the month Star Wars debuted in theaters) so he and his friends could do construction work together for the summer. Just for fun, he painted three bold green stripes along the back wall of our parents’ house, still there forty years later. And he always loved creating one-of-a-kind gifts, like the time he made his girlfriend a phone that would dial only his number, no matter what buttons she pushed. Tom, on the other hand, followed a path that seemed more traditional. After studying liberal arts in college, he considered going to law school, tried working at an accounting firm for a while, and played an IT-related role at General Electric. After getting an MBA, he worked in a spreadsheet-intensive position as a management consultant. Along the way, his jobs were mostly predictable, both in their day-to-day work and the longer-term career paths each offered. Then he joined the design world and discovered there was more fun to be had coloring outside the lines. We remained close all this time and spoke to each other most weeks, even when we lived eight thousand miles apart. After David founded the design and innovation firm that would become IDEO, Tom helped out there during business school and then rejoined full-time in 1987. We have worked together ever since, as the firm has continued to grow: David as CEO and then chairman, Tom in leadership roles that included marketing, business development, and storytelling. The story of this book begins in April of 2007, when David—the older brother—got a call from his doctor, who uttered one of the scariest, most dreaded words in the medical lexicon: cancer. He was at his daughter’s fourth-grade class helping nine-year-olds think about how to redesign backpacks when the call came through, and he managed to spend another hour with the young students before breaking away to process this new setback. David had been diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma—throat cancer—and given a 40 percent chance of surviving the ordeal. At that moment, Tom had just wrapped up a presentation to two thousand executives in S?o Paulo, Brazil. As he sat down backstage and switched his cell phone back on, it rang almost immediately. When he got the sobering news of David’s diagnosis, he abandoned the rest of his South American trip and headed straight for the airport. Although he knew there was little he could do to help, he had to get home to see David. We had always been close, but David’s illness further cemented our bond that year. Through the next six months of chemotherapy, radiation, hydration, morphine, and finally surgery, we saw each other almost every day, sometimes talking endlessly and other times passing hours together while speaking barely a word. At the Stanford Cancer Center, we crossed paths with patients who eventually lost their battle with cancer. We couldn’t help wondering whether time was running out for David too. If there is an upside to that terrible disease, it’s that cancer forces deep reflection, causing you to think about purpose and meaning in your life. Everyone we know who has survived cancer says that they look at life differently in its aftermath. Late in the year, as David recovered from surgery, we saw the first real hope of pushing cancer into the background of our lives. Faced with that joyous possibility, we vowed that if David survived, we would do two things together that involved neither doctors nor hospitals: First, we’d take a fun brother/brother trip together somewhere in the world, which we had never done in our adult lives. And second, we would work together side by side on a project that would allow us to share ideas with each other and the world. The trip was an unforgettable week in Tokyo and Kyoto, exploring the best of modern and ancient Japanese cultures. And the collaborative project was creating the book you now hold in your hands. Why a book about creative confidence? Because we have noticed from thirty years at IDEO that innovation can be both fun and rewarding. But as you look at the sweep of your life and start to think of a legacy that survives beyond it, giving others the opportunity to live up to their creative capacity seems like a worthy purpose. In the midst of David’s battle with cancer in 2007, a recurring question was “What was I put on Earth to do?” This book is part of the answer: To reach out to as many people as possible. To give future innovators the opportunity to follow their passions. To help individuals and organizations unleash their full potential—and build their own creative confidence. David and Tom Kelley (photo/illustration credit itr.1 (#litres_trial_promo)) INTRODUCTION THE HEART OF INNOVATION (#ulink_20b127e4-a8cf-5c0a-b761-3e12ee229d70) When you hear the word “creativity,” what do you think of next? If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavors like sculpture, drawing, music, or dance. You may equate “creative” with “artistic.” 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 thirty years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as “the creativity myth.” It is a myth that far too many people share. This book is about the opposite of that myth. It is about what we call “creative confidence.” And at its foundation is the belief that we are all creative. The truth is, we all have far more creative potential waiting to be tapped. We’ve helped thousands of companies bring breakthrough ideas to market—from Apple’s first computer mouse to next-generation surgical tools for Medtronic to fresh brand strategies for The North Face in China. And we’ve also seen that our methods can produce a new creative mindset in people that can dramatically enhance their lives, whether they work in the fields of medicine, law, business, education, or science. Over the past three decades, we’ve helped countless individuals nurture their creativity and put it to valuable use. They’ve created housing optimized for the needs of service men and women returning from war zones. They’ve set up an ad hoc innovation team in a corporate hallway, generating so much energy and noise that the company gave them a dedicated project space. They’ve developed a low-cost system for screening and fitting hearing aids among elderly villagers in developing countries, providing benefit to some of the 360 million people in the world who suffer from disabling hearing loss. The people we’ve helped have many backgrounds but share one common trait: they all have gained creative confidence. 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, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation. Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation. Creative confidence is like a muscle—it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience. Our goal is to help build that confidence in you. Whether you think of yourself as “the creative type” or not, we believe reading this book will help you unlock and draw on more of the creative potential that is within us all. CREATIVITY NOW Creativity is much broader and more universal than what people typically consider the “artistic” fields. We think of creativity as using your imagination to create something new in the world. Creativity comes into play wherever you have the opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. And we believe everyone should have access to that resource. For much of the twentieth century the so-called “creative types”—designers, art directors, copy writers—were relegated to the kids’ table, far from serious discussions. Meanwhile, all the important business conversations took place among the “grown-ups” in boardrooms and meeting spaces down the hall. But the creative endeavors that seemed fanciful or extracurricular a decade ago have now gone mainstream. Education thought leader Sir Ken Robinson—whose riveting 2006 TED Talk asking “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” was the most popular in history—says that creativity “is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” In the business world, creativity manifests itself as innovation. Tech stars such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have unleashed their employees’ creativity to change the lives of billions of people. Today, in every department—from customer service to finance—people have opportunities to experiment with new solutions. Companies desperately need employees’ insights from across the organization. No individual executive or division holds a monopoly on new ideas. Whether you live in Silicon Valley or Shanghai, Munich or Mumbai, you’ve already felt the effects of seismic market shifts. Most businesses today realize that the key to growth, and even survival, is innovation. One recent IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs reports that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises facing the complexity of global commerce today. An Adobe Systems poll of five thousand people on three continents reports that 80 percent of people see unlocking creative potential as key to economic growth. Yet only 25 percent of these individuals feel that they’re living up to their creative potential in their own lives and careers. That’s a lot of wasted talent. How might we shift that balance? How might we help the other 75 percent unleash their creative potential? In 2005, David founded the d.school (formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) to teach design thinking—a methodology for innovating routinely—to future entrepreneurs from Stanford’s graduate schools. Originally, we thought that the primary challenge would be to teach creativity to people who saw themselves as “analytical types.” We soon realized that all of the individuals we worked with already had creativity in spades. (#ulink_1de5525d-2a3e-5e6a-bcf8-abcaa9a58777) Our job was simply to help them recapture it by sharing new skills and mindsets. We have been stunned at how quickly people’s imagination, curiosity, and courage are renewed with just a small amount of practice and encouragement. For the people we’ve worked with, opening up the flow of creativity is like discovering that you’ve been driving a car with the emergency brake on—and suddenly experiencing what it feels like when you release the brake and can drive freely. We see this a lot with executives during workshops, or when we have clients in to collaborate side by side with us. They’ve sat through seminars about innovation before, and they are convinced they know how creative—or how uncreative—they’re going to be. So when we get to a point that’s fuzzy or unconventional—like doing an improv exercise—suddenly they whip out their smartphones, heading for the exits to make “really important” phone calls. Why? Because they are insecure about their abilities in that setting. They instinctively fall back on the defense that “I’m just not the creative type.” In our experience, everybody is the creative type. We know that if we can get individuals to stick with the methodology a while, they will end up doing amazing things. They come up with breakthrough ideas or suggestions and work creatively with a team to develop something truly innovative. They surprise themselves with the realization that they are a lot more creative than they had thought. That early success shakes up how they see themselves and makes them eager to do more. What we’ve found is that we don’t have to generate creativity from scratch. We just need to help people rediscover what they already have: the capacity to imagine—or build upon—new-to-the-world ideas. But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas. That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. Geshe Thupten Jinpa, who has been the Dalai Lama’s chief English translator for more than twenty years, shared an insight with us recently about the nature of creativity. Jinpa pointed out that there’s no word in the Tibetan language for “creativity” or “being creative.” The closest translation is “natural.” In other words, if you want to be more creative, you just have to be more natural. We forget that back in kindergarten, we were all creative. We all played and experimented and tried out weird things without fear or shame. We didn’t know enough not to. The fear of social rejection is something we learned as we got older. And that’s why it’s possible to regain our creative abilities so swiftly and powerfully, even decades later. It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community. We believe that our creative energy is one of our most precious resources. It can help us to find innovative solutions to some of our most intractable problems. CREATIVE CONFIDENCE IN ACTION Creative confidence is a way of experiencing the world that generates new approaches and solutions. We know that anyone can gain creative confidence. We have witnessed it in people from diverse backgrounds and careers. Everyone—from scientists in their labs to senior managers at Fortune 500 companies—can approach life differently, with a new outlook and a larger tool set. Here are a few examples of people who have embraced creative confidence: Creative energy is one of our most precious resources. • A former Olympian entered the airline industry and developed the confidence to tackle her company’s crisis management problems head on. She gathered a volunteer task force of pilots, dispatchers, crew schedulers, and others to prototype procedures following weather-related flight disruptions, leading to a 40 percent faster recovery time. • An army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan rallied over 1,700 people to petition for a pedestrian mall in the local community, proving you don’t have to be a general to have an impact. • Going beyond just the raw facts of a case, a law school student took a human-centered approach to her mock trial. She had the jury picture themselves at the scene of the incident to imagine what it felt like. And through harnessing their empathy, she won—the first time a jury had ever favored her side of that particular case. • A former government executive started a grassroots innovation movement in Washington, D.C., that has grown to over a thousand members. Through workshops and networking events, she is spreading her new perspective on organizational change to other leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs. • After four decades of experience, an elementary school teacher restructured her curriculum into design challenges. Instead of teaching discrete subjects, she created projects that covered the same topics but got students to step away from their desks and think more critically. Their test scores improved, but more important, parents noticed their children were more engaged and inquisitive. You don’t have to switch careers or move to Silicon Valley to change your mindset. You don’t have to become a design consultant or quit your job. The world needs more creative policy makers, office managers, and real estate agents. Whatever your profession, when you approach it with creativity, you’ll come up with new and better solutions and more successes. Creative confidence can inspire whatever work you already do—because you gain a new tool to enhance your problem-solving practices without having to abandon any of your existing techniques. You don’t have to switch careers or move to Silicon Valley to change your mindset. We’ve talked to doctors who have found new ways to empathize with and more effectively treat their patients, looking beyond the surface symptoms. We’ve talked to executive recruiters who use our methods to find new matchups between talented people and the companies that need them most. We’ve talked to social workers who use human-centered approaches to help people in the community understand confusing application forms. People with creative confidence have a greater impact on the world around them—whether that means getting involved with their child’s school, turning a storage room into a vibrant innovation space, or harnessing social media to recruit more bone marrow donors. 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. Our practical experience in the world of innovation and creative confidence aligns closely with his findings. When people transcend the fears that block their creativity, all sorts of new possibilities emerge. Instead of being paralyzed by the prospect of failure, they see every experience as an opportunity they can learn from. The need for control keeps some people stuck at the planning stage of a project. With creative confidence, they become comfortable with uncertainty and are able to leap into action. Instead of resigning themselves to the status quo, or what others have told them to do, they are freed to speak their mind and challenge existing ways of doing things. They act with greater courage, and have more persistence in tackling obstacles. We believe this book will help you overcome the mental blocks that hold back your creativity. Chapter by chapter, we will give you tools that empower you to pursue new ideas with confidence. The stories, methods, and practices that we will share draw on decades of collaboration with creative thinkers everywhere, and we believe they will help you too. THE CREATIVE CONFIDENCE QUEST Today, our mission as authors is to help as many people as possible rediscover their creative potential. Confronted with their newfound creativity, people sometimes confide in us that their mother was a dancer, or their father was an architect. They seem to be rationalizing their spark of creative energy, as if they are searching for concrete evidence. What they don’t realize is that their creative potential was always a part of them—not because of any family history or genetic predisposition, but because it is a natural human ability within us all. Creative confidence is a way of seeing that potential and your place in the world more clearly, unclouded by anxiety and doubt. We hope you’ll join us on our quest to embrace creative confidence in our lives. Together, we can all make the world a better place. (#ulink_51fe0079-dc25-5453-9d27-d0e4a4d2a249) A note about “we”: This book has two authors, so you will see the first person plural a lot. When talking about just one of us, we will say “David” or “Tom.” In some contexts, however, the “we” will mean the team at IDEO, where the two of us work, or the faculty and staff of the d.school, where David spends time. (photo/illustration credit 1.1 (#litres_trial_promo)) CHAPTER 1 FLIP (#ulink_81cf0051-349d-5f4c-9575-caec5d441aad) FROM DESIGN THINKING TO CREATIVE CONFIDENCE Doug Dietz is an earnest, soft-spoken Midwesterner with a wry, endearing smile and eyes that are quick to well up with tears at an emotional moment. A twenty-four-year veteran of General Electric, Doug helps lead design and development of high-tech medical imaging systems for GE Healthcare, an $18 billion division of one of the largest companies in the world. His multimillion-dollar magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems peer painlessly inside the human body in ways that would have been considered magic just a generation ago. A few years back, Doug wrapped up a project on an MRI machine that he had spent two and a half years working on. When he got the opportunity to see it installed in a hospital’s scanning suite, he jumped at the chance. Standing next to his new machine, Doug talked with the technician who was operating it that day. He told her that the MRI scanner had been submitted for an International Design Excellence Award—the “Oscars of design”—and asked her how she liked its new features. “It was a perfect example of bad interviewing technique,” Doug says abashedly. Doug was prepared to come away patting himself on the back for a job well done. But then the technician asked him to step out into the hall for a moment because a patient needed to get a scan. When he did, he saw a frail young girl walking toward him, tightly holding her parents’ hands. The parents looked worried, and their young daughter was clearly scared, all in anticipation of what lay ahead—Doug’s MRI machine. The girl started to sniffle, and Doug himself got choked up telling us her story. As the family passed by, Doug could hear their hushed conversation: “We’ve talked about this. You can be brave,” urged the dad, the strain showing in his own voice. As Doug watched, the little girl’s tears rolled down her cheeks. To Doug’s alarm, the technician picked up the phone to call for an anesthesiologist. And that was when Doug learned that hospitals routinely sedate pediatric patients for their scans because they are so scared that they can’t lie still long enough. As many as 80 percent of pediatric patients have to be sedated. And if an anesthesiologist isn’t available, the scan has to be postponed, causing families to go through their cycle of worry all over again. When Doug witnessed the anxiety and fear his machine caused among the most vulnerable patients, the experience triggered a personal crisis for him that forever changed his perspective. Rather than an elegant, sleek piece of technology, worthy of accolades and admiration, he now saw that—through the eyes of a young child—the MRI looked more like a big scary machine you have to go inside. Pride in his design was replaced with feelings of failure for letting down the very patients he was trying to help. Doug could have quit his job, or simply resigned himself to the situation and moved on. But he didn’t. He returned home and told his wife that he had to make a change. So Doug sought advice on this deep personal and professional challenge from friends and colleagues. His boss at GE, who had encountered Stanford’s d.school while at Procter & Gamble, suggested he try out an executive education class. Searching for a fresh perspective and a different approach to his work, Doug flew to California for a weeklong workshop. He didn’t know quite what to expect, but he was eager to embrace any new methodology that would help him in his quest to make MRIs less frightening for young children. The workshop offered Doug new tools that ignited his creative confidence: He learned about a human-centered approach to design and innovation. He observed and talked to users of existing products and services to better understand consumer needs. He collaborated with managers from other companies and industries on crude prototypes of designs to meet those needs. Gaining new perspectives from them, he continued to experiment and iterate his concepts in class, building on the ideas of others. At the end of the week, the cross-pollination of ideas made him feel more creative and more hopeful than he had when he left home. Going through the human-centered design process with people in diverse industries and roles—from management to human resources to finance—struck a chord in him. “I started to imagine how powerful this tool could be if I brought it back and got cross-functional teams to work together.” By applying human-centered design methods in his own work, Doug believed he could come up with a better solution for children—and he was determined to make it happen. He returned to Milwaukee knowing what he wanted to do. Without significant resources, funding, or support from his own company, Doug knew he couldn’t launch a big R&D project to redesign an MRI machine from scratch. So he focused on redesigning the experience. He started by observing and gaining empathy for young children at a day care center. He talked to child life specialists to understand what pediatric patients went through. He reached out for help from people around him, including a small volunteer team from GE, experts from a local children’s museum, and doctors and staff from two hospitals. Next, he created the first prototype of what would become the “Adventure Series” scanner and was able to get it installed as a pilot program in the children’s hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. By thinking holistically about how children experienced and interacted with the technology, Doug helped transform the MRI suite into a kid’s adventure story, with the patient in a starring role. Making no changes to the complex technology inside the scanner, Doug and his ad hoc team applied colorful decals to the outside of the machine and to every surface in the room, covering the floor, ceilings, walls, and all of the equipment. They also created a script for machine operators so they could lead their young patients through the adventure. One of the prototypes is a pirate ship worthy of an amusement park ride. The ship comes complete with a big wooden captain’s wheel that surrounds the round opening of the chamber—a seafaring detail that also makes the small circumference seem less claustrophobic. The operator tells kids that they will be sailing inside the pirate ship and they have to stay completely still while on the boat. After their “voyage,” they get to pick a small treasure from the pirate’s chest on the other side of the room. In another story, the MRI is a cylindrical spaceship transporting the patient into a space adventure. Just before the whirring and banging of the machine gets louder, the operator encourages young patients to listen closely for the moment that the craft “shifts into hyperdrive.” This reframing transforms a normally terrifying “BOOM-BOOM-BOOM” sound into just another part of the adventure. Including the pirate experience and the rocket ship, there are now nine different “adventures.” GE’s Adventure Series redesigns imaging equipment including MRIs, X-ray machines and CT scanners like the pirate-themed machine pictured here to make the procedures less scary for kids. (photo/illustration credit 1.2 (#litres_trial_promo)) With Doug’s new MRI redesign for kids, the number of pediatric patients needing to be sedated was reduced dramatically. The hospital and GE were happy too because less need for anesthesiologists meant more patients could get scanned each day. Meanwhile, patient satisfaction scores went up 90 percent. But the biggest satisfaction for Doug lies not in the numbers, nor in GE Healthcare’s improved bottom line (although these were important for gaining internal support). His greatest reward came while talking with a mother whose six-year-old daughter had just been scanned in the MRI “pirate ship.” The little girl came over and tugged on her mother’s skirt. “Mommy,” she asked, “can we come back tomorrow?” That simple question made all his effort worthwhile. Less than a year after his epiphany, Doug’s increased creative confidence catapulted him into a new role as a thought leader at GE. Would it be an exaggeration to say that, in the process, Doug also helped change the world a bit? Ask one of those young patients or their parents. They already have the answer. A creative mindset can be a powerful force for looking beyond the status quo. People who use the creative techniques we outline are better able to apply their imagination to painting a picture of the future. They believe they have the ability to improve on existing ideas and positively impact the world around them, whether at work or in their personal lives. Without that belief, Doug wouldn’t have been able to take the first step toward his goal. Creative confidence is an inherently optimistic way of looking at what’s possible. Doug’s story illustrates the way human-centered design can lead to breakthrough innovations. New opportunities for innovation open up when you start the creative problem-solving process with empathy toward your target audience—whether it’s kids or colleagues, clients or consumers. While competitors focused on the never-ending battle surrounding technical specifications (like scanning speed, resolution, etc.), Doug found a whole new way to improve the lives of patients and their families. In our experience, approaching challenges from a human perspective can yield some of the richest opportunities for change. In every innovation program we have been involved with, there are always three factors to balance, represented by the three overlapping circles in the diagram below: Finding the sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability. (photo/illustration credit 1.3 (#litres_trial_promo)) The first has to do with technical factors, or feasibility. In the early days of our work in Silicon Valley, this is where our clients always started. We’ve had clients present us with literally thousands of new technologies, from clever new wheel hubs for bicycles to new ways of chilling the human brain from the inside. A new technology—if it truly works—can be extremely valuable, and can provide the basis for a successful new company or a new line of business. Carbon fiber aircraft components, multi-touch interactive displays, and minimally invasive surgical tools all revolutionized their industries. But cool technology alone is not enough. If it were, we’d all be riding Segways and playing with robotic dogs. The second key element is economic viability, or what we sometimes refer to as business factors. Not only does the technology need to work, but it also needs to be produced and distributed in an economically viable way. It needs to fit into a business model that will allow the enterprise to thrive. When we were growing up in the 1950s, Popular Science magazine suggested that twenty-first-century families would have their own personal helicopter in the backyard. So far, no one has come up with a clever business model to make helicopters affordable for ordinary people. The business factors on that concept just never lined up—and maybe never will. Even in nonprofit organizations, business factors can be critical. If you want to launch a program to increase the availability of safe drinking water in India or to build sanitation systems in Ghana, you need to find a way for it to pay for and sustain itself in the long run. Cool technology alone is not enough. If it were, we’d all be riding Segways and playing with robotic dogs. The third element involves people, and is sometimes referred to as human factors. It’s about deeply understanding human needs. Beyond just observing behaviors, this third aspect of successful innovation programs is about getting at people’s motivations and core beliefs. Human factors aren’t necessarily more important than the other two. But technical factors are well taught in science and engineering programs around the world, and companies everywhere focus energy on the business factors. So we believe that human factors may offer some of the best opportunities for innovation, which is why we always start there. And Doug did too, because GE’s MRI machines already had great technology and business viability. Doug worked to understand how young children perceive MRI machines and what makes them feel safe when introduced to a new experience. Doug’s empathy for his young patients led him to a breakthrough idea and ultimately assured his product’s success. Being human centered is at the core of our innovation process. Deep empathy for people makes our observations powerful sources of inspiration. We aim to understand why people do what they currently do, with the goal of understanding what they might do in the future. Our first-person experiences help us form personal connections with the people for whom we’re innovating. We’ve washed other people’s clothes by hand in their sinks, stayed as guests in housing projects, stood beside surgeons in operating rooms, and calmed agitated passengers in airport security lines—all to build empathy. An empathic approach fuels our process by ensuring we never forget we’re designing for real people. And as a result, we uncover insights and opportunities for truly creative solutions. We’ve collaborated with thousands of clients to leverage the power of empathy, creating everything from easy-to-use lifesaving heart defibrillators to debit cards that help customers save for retirement. We believe successful innovations rely on some element of human-centered design research while balancing the two other elements. Seeking that sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability as you take into account the real needs and desires of your customers is part of what we at IDEO and the d.school call “design thinking.” It’s our process for creativity and innovation. There’s no one-size-fits-all methodology for bringing new ideas to life, but many successful programs include a variation on four steps: inspiration, synthesis, ideation/experimentation, and implementation. In our experience, an innovation or new idea may cycle through many iterations before the process is complete. DESIGN-DRIVEN INNOVATION Here’s an overview of our approach to innovation, as described by IDEO partner Chris Flink. We adapt and evolve our methodologies continuously, so please feel free to make your own variations, as well, fashioning innovation techniques that fit your unique circumstances. 1. INSPIRATION Don’t wait for the proverbial apple to fall on your head. Go out in the world and proactively seek experiences that will spark creative thinking. Interact with experts, immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments, and role-play customer scenarios. Inspiration is fueled by a deliberate, planned course of action. To inspire human-centered innovation, empathy is our reliable, go- to resource. We find that connecting with the needs, desires, and motivations of real people helps to inspire and provoke fresh ideas. Observing people’s behavior in their natural context can help us better understand the factors at play and trigger new insights to fuel our innovation efforts. We shadow and do interviews with a variety of people out in the field. We speak to “extreme users,” for example, discovering how early adopters make clever use of technology. Or, if we are redesigning a kitchen tool like a can opener, we may observe how elderly people use it to look for points of frustration or opportunities for improvement. We look to other industries to see how relevant challenges are addressed. For instance, we may draw parallels between customer service at a restaurant and the patient experience at a hospital in order to improve patient satisfaction. 2. SYNTHESIS After your time in the field, the next step is to begin the complex challenge of “sense-making.” You need to recognize patterns, identify themes, and find meaning in all that you’ve seen, gathered, and observed. We move from concrete observations and individual stories to more abstract truths that span across groups of people. We often organize our observations on an “empathy map” (see Creativity Challenge #4 (#litres_trial_promo), Chapter 7) or create a matrix to categorize types of solutions. During synthesis, we strive to see where the fertile ground is. We translate what we’ve uncovered in our research into actionable frameworks and principles. We reframe the problem and choose where to focus our energy. For example, in retail environments, we’ve discovered that if you change the question from “how might we reduce customer waiting time?” to “how might we reduce perceived waiting time?” it opens up whole new avenues of possibility, like using a video display wall to provide an entertaining distraction. 3. IDEATION AND EXPERIMENTATION Next, we set off on an exploration of new possibilities. We generate countless ideas and consider many divergent options. The most promising ones are advanced in iterative rounds of rapid prototypes—early, rough representations of ideas that are concrete enough for people to react to. The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one. These experiential learning loops help to develop existing concepts and spur new ones. Based on feedback from end users and other stakeholders, we adapt, iterate, and pivot our way to human-centered, compelling, workable solutions. Experimentation can include everything from crafting hundreds of physical models for delivering transdermal vaccines to using driving simulators for testing new vehicle systems to acting out the check-in experience at a hotel lobby. 4. IMPLEMENTATION Before a new idea is rolled out, we refine the design and prepare a road map to the marketplace. Of course, rollouts can vary wildly depending on which elements of an experience or product are involved. Going live with a new online learning platform is very different from offering a new banking service. The implementation phase can have many rounds. More and more companies in every industry are beginning to launch new products, services, or businesses in order to learn. They live in beta, and quickly iterate through new in-market loops that further refine their offering. For example, some retailers launch pop-up stores as a way to test demand in new cities. And Boston-based startup Clover Food Lab began with a single food truck at MIT to gauge the market for its sustainable vegetarian food before the company committed to opening brick-and-mortar restaurant locations. INNOVATING ROUTINELY WITH DESIGN THINKING Design thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners. When we use the term “design” alone, most people ask what we think about their curtains or where we bought our glasses. But a “design thinking” approach means more than just paying attention to aesthetics or developing physical products. Design thinking is a methodology. Using it, we can address a wide variety of personal, social, and business challenges in creative new ways. Design thinking relies on the natural—and coachable—human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional. We’re not suggesting that anyone base a career or run an organization solely on feeling, intuition, and inspiration. But an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. If you have a problem that you can’t analyze easily, or that doesn’t have a metric or enough data to draw upon, design thinking may be able to help you move forward using empathy and prototyping. When you need to achieve a breakthrough innovation or make a creative leap, this methodology can help you dive into the problem and find new insights. IDEO uses this kind of thinking to help organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow. We help clients envision what their new or existing operations might look like in the future—and build road maps for getting there. Beyond the product development work Tom described in The Art of Innovation, we now have the opportunity to create new companies and brands, working with clients all over the world to help them launch new products, services, spaces, and interactive experiences. While we continue to work on products from toys to ATM machines, these days we are just as likely to create a digital toolkit to help consumers sign up for health care insurance or design a better education system for the country of Peru. In the last several years, we have worked directly with clients to help them embed innovation into the fabric of their enterprises. Both at IDEO and in our client organizations, we’ve found that design thinking helps to foster creative cultures and build the internal systems required to sustain innovation and launch new ventures. BORN TO FLIP—THE BIRTH OF THE D.SCHOOL In the early 2000s, David started experimenting with team teaching at Stanford with professors from other parts of the university (like Terry Winograd from Computer Science, Bob Sutton from Management Science and Engineering, and Jim Patell from the business school). Prior to that, David had taught only students in the design division at the School of Engineering who already identified themselves as creative. In these new interdisciplinary courses, however, he worked with MBAs and computer science students who often didn’t think of themselves that way. It was in these classrooms that David and his colleagues could see what unlocking creativity really looked like. Some of the students went beyond just using the tools and embraced the philosophy of design thinking, and in doing so, they developed a new mental outlook, a new self-image, and a new sense of empowerment. Students began visiting him during office hours—sometimes months after the class was over—to tell him that they had started to see themselves as creative individuals for the first time. That they could apply creativity to any challenge. Their eyes would light up with excitement, with a sense of opportunity, of possibility. Sometimes they cried. David came up with a name for the transformation he was observing: “flipping”—changing from one state of mind to another. The playfulness of the term “flipping” reminded him of the joyful poetry of a somersault on a trampoline or a diving board. These students he talked with were engaged and excited in a way that made it clear something in them had changed—permanently. It was the sort of profound impact educators live for. Along with former student George Kembel (now executive director of the d.school), David began to talk with friends and colleagues about starting a new program. He envisioned a place in the university where students from different backgrounds could come to nurture their creative talents and apply their newfound skills to tough challenges. David pointed out that Stanford—like all world-class universities—had Nobel-laureate-quality researchers drilling deeper into their own fields of knowledge. But he suggested that there are tremendous challenges in the twenty-first century that aren’t going to be solved that way. Maybe some solutions will be found by putting that scientist into a room with a businessperson, and a lawyer, and an engineer, and others. Rather than keeping all their eggs in the “going deep” basket, David proposed that Stanford make at least a small side bet on “going broad.” And one day the new institute might have the respect and the cachet of the graduate school of business—commonly known as the “B-school.” That’s how the new venture got its nickname, which has stuck ever since: the “d.school.” When he told Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of enterprise software giant SAP, about the idea, Hasso generously reached for his checkbook. The d.school—officially known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—opened its doors in 2005. NURTURING CREATIVE THINKERS While IDEO’s work historically focused on innovations, from the beginning the Stanford d.school has focused on innovators. Students from every graduate school at Stanford come to take classes at the d.school. It doesn’t issue degrees and doesn’t have any required courses—everyone is there because they want to be. Currently more than seven hundred students attend courses at the d.school each year. Project-based classes are team taught by faculty members from all over the university and by industry practitioners. In this diverse environment, it’s normal to hear many points of view—often conflicting ones. Students learn by doing and tackle real-world challenges, usually in multidisciplinary teams. Beyond just graduate students, executives from all over the world attend workshops, and the K-12 Lab works with children and educators (more than five hundred last year) to help spread confidence in their creative abilities. Classes often start with simple design briefs—succinct articulations of a challenge—like “redesign the experience of getting your morning coffee.” When confronted with a question or a problem such as the morning coffee challenge, people with strong analytical skills tend to snap instantly into problem-solving mode. They leap for the finish line and then start defending their answers. The d.school brings together ideas and people from all over the university. (photo/illustration credit 1.3 (#litres_trial_promo)) For example, think about how quickly a skilled doctor—when presented with a set of symptoms—makes a diagnosis and prescribes a solution. Often it’s a matter of seconds. During one morning coffee challenge a few years back, a med-school student in the class immediately raised a hand and said, “I know what we need: a new kind of coffee creamer.” For such skilled analytical thinkers, an “unresolved” issue hanging in the air is uncomfortable. They are anxious to provide an answer and move on. In routine problem-solving situations, where there is a single right answer, that method is very efficient, and sometimes quite appropriate. Creative thinkers, however, confronted with the same open-ended question, are careful not to rush to judgment. They recognize that there are many possible solutions and are willing to “go wide” first, identifying a number of possible approaches before converging on the ideas most worth implementing. So David and the d.school professors ask the students to set aside their initial answers—the clich? ones already in their heads. They encourage students to dig deeper, to understand the situation better, observing people’s behaviors around coffee drinking in order to identify latent needs and opportunities. After the group has been guided through the design process in a collaborative environment, dozens of ideas emerge: everything from a coffeepot that knows exactly how hot you like your drink—and delivers it that way every time—to an automatic stirrer you drop into your cup. Then professors ask class members if any of the new solutions they arrived at were better than their initial ones. Usually, the answer is yes. One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. A GROWTH STATE OF MIND One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. If you currently feel that you are not a creative person—if you think, “I’m not good at that kind of thing”—you have to let go of that belief before you can move on. You have to believe that learning and growth are possible. In other words, you need to start with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.” Individuals with a growth mindset, Dweck says, “believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.” She makes a compelling case, backed up by extensive research, that regardless of our initial talent, aptitude, or even IQ, we can expand our capabilities through effort and experience. To fully appreciate the growth mindset, it helps to contrast it with its all-too-familiar evil twin, the fixed mindset. Consciously or unconsciously, people with a fixed mindset have the deep-seated belief that everyone is born with only a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of talent. If invited on a journey to creative confidence, people with a fixed mindset will prefer to stay behind in their comfort zone, afraid that the limits of their capabilities will be revealed to others. Dweck explored the self-limiting nature of a fixed mindset in studying the behavior of freshman students at the University of Hong Kong. Since all classes and exams at the university are in English, incoming students who struggle with the English language are at a distinct disadvantage. After assessing the students’ language skills and their mindset, Dweck asked the incoming students a question: “If the faculty offered a course for students who need to improve their English skills, would you take it?” Their answers revealed the power of mindset. “Students with the growth mindset said an emphatic yes. But those with the fixed mindset were not very interested.” In other words, those under the influence of a fixed mindset were willing to sabotage their long-term chances for success rather than expose a potential weakness. If they let the same logic guide their choices throughout life, it’s easy to understand how their perception of their own abilities as permanently limited can become a self-fulfilling hypothesis. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a passport to new adventures. When you open your mind to the possibility that your capabilities are unlimited and unknown, you already have your running shoes on and are ready to race forward. In reality, we all have a little of both mindsets. Sometimes the fixed mindset whispers in one ear: “We’ve never been good at anything creative, so why embarrass ourselves now?” And the growth mindset whispers in the other ear: “Effort is the path to mastery, so let’s at least give this a try.” The question is, which voice are you going to listen to? MAKE YOUR DENT IN THE UNIVERSE With creative confidence comes the desire to proactively guide the course of your life, or your organization, rather than be carried along on the prevailing winds. Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, once told us that what stuck out to him about designers is that they always act with intention. While others may unconsciously go with the default option, design thinkers make everything a conscious and original choice: from how they arrange their bookshelf to how they present their work. When they look around the world, they see opportunities to do things better and have a desire to change them. Once you start creating things, whether it’s laying out a new garden or starting a new company or writing a new piece of code, you start to realize that everything has that intention behind it. Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you? When you unleash your creative confidence, you start to see new ways to improve on the status quo—from how you throw a dinner party to how you run a meeting. And once you become aware of those opportunities, you have to start seizing them. To us, that focused “intentionality” was one of Steve Jobs’s defining characteristics. David met Steve back in 1980 when we designed the first Apple mouse. They became friends during a dozen subsequent projects for Steve’s ventures at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. Steve never took the path of least resistance. He never accepted the world “as is.” He did everything with intentionality. No detail was too small to escape his attention. He also pushed us beyond what we thought we could do—we experienced his “reality distortion field” firsthand. He just kept raising the bar, even when it seemed unreasonable. But we would try, and we would get three-quarters of the way there, which was always farther than we would have gotten by ourselves. Once you start creating things, you realize that everything has intention behind it. After Steve was forced out of Apple and was planning the startup that would become NeXT Computer, he stopped by David’s office one day to talk about his vision for the new machine. Always seeking Zen simplicity, Steve asked David, “What’s the simplest three-dimensional shape in the world?” David was sure that it was a sphere. But that didn’t matter, because the answer Steve was looking for was a cube. And so began our project of helping Steve with the engineering design of his cube-shaped NeXT computer. During that intense project, Steve often called David at home in the middle of the night (in the era before e-mail and texting) to insist that we make some change. What kind of pressing issue couldn’t wait until morning? One night, the call was about whether the plating on some screw on the inside of the cast magnesium cube should be cadmium or nickel. David’s response was something like “Jeez, Steve, it’s on the inside of the box.” But Steve still cared—and we of course changed it. We don’t know if any NeXT customer ever cracked open the machine and saw those perfectly plated fasteners, but Steve left no such details to chance. Steve had a deep sense of creative confidence. He believed—he knew—that you can achieve audacious goals if you have the courage and perseverance to pursue them. He was famous for his exhortation to “make a dent in the universe,” which he expressed this way in a 1994 interview: The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will … pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. Steve’s message was that we all have the ability to change the world. That was certainly true of Steve, a visionary who impacted so many people’s lives and urged us all to “Think Different.” From Doug Dietz to Steve Jobs, all of the creatively confident people we’ve crossed paths with have found a way to apply extraordinary energy and exert remarkable influence. And we know that as you gain creative confidence going forward, you will have the chance to make your own dent in the universe. Start with a growth mindset, the deep-seated belief that your true potential is still unknown. That you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before. In subsequent chapters we’ll offer practical tools that will help you to acquire new skills, find new inspiration, and unleash more of your creative capacities. To do so, you will need to act, and to experience your own creativity firsthand. But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past. (photo/illustration credit 2.1 (#litres_trial_promo)) CHAPTER 2 DARE (#ulink_bf104705-8b0b-512c-9ede-4cad1e4f1993) 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.” Bandura’s work scientifically validates something we’ve been seeing for years: Doubts in one’s creative ability can be cured by guiding people through a series of small successes. And the experience can have a powerful effect on the rest of their lives. The state of mind Bandura calls self-efficacy is closely related to what we think of as creative confidence. People who have creative confidence make better choices, set off more easily in new directions, and are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They see new possibilities and collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. And they approach challenges with newfound courage. But to gain this creative, empowered mindset, sometimes you have to touch the snake. In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success. 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. Take Thomas Edison, for example. Edison, one of the most famous and prolific inventors in history, had failure baked into his creative process. He understood that an experiment ending in failure is not a failed experiment—as long as constructive learning is gained. He invented the incandescent lightbulb, but only after the lessons of a thousand unsuccessful attempts. Edison maintained that the “real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.” In fact, early failure can be crucial to success in innovation. Because the faster you find weaknesses during an innovation cycle, the faster you can improve what needs fixing. We grew up in Ohio, home of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wright brothers are best remembered for what is sometimes called the “first flight,” in December of 1903 at Kitty Hawk. But the focus on that accomplishment overlooks the hundreds of experiments and failed flight trials in the years that led up to that first successful flight. In fact, some reports suggest that the Wright brothers picked Kitty Hawk in part because the remote Outer Banks location would draw less media attention during their experiments. The surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure. Edison and the Wright brothers may seem like ancient history, but the tradition of learning from enlightened trial and error is still very much alive today. When Steelcase decided to reinvent the traditional classroom chair—eclipsing that uncomfortable wooden version with the writing surface rigidly attached to the chair arm—they worked with our design team to build over two hundred prototypes in all shapes and sizes. Early on, they experimented with small paper-and-Scotch-tape models. Later in the project, they constructed plywood components, attaching them to pieces of existing chairs. They went to local colleges, asking students and professors to interact with these “experience models” and give feedback. They carved shapes out of foam and fabricated parts on 3D printers to get a sense of shape and size. They prototyped mechanisms in steel. And as release to manufacturing approached, they built sophisticated full-size models that looked exactly like the real thing. All that relentless experimentation—and the associated learning—paid off. The Node chair replaced the rigidity of its predecessors with a comfortable swivel seat, an adjustable work surface, casters for maneuverability, and a tripod base to hold backpacks. The result is a mobile, flexible twenty-first-century classroom chair that quickly transitions from lecture-based seating to group activities, fitting with today’s varied teaching styles. Launched in 2010, Node chairs are already in use at eight hundred schools and universities around the world. Neither Edison nor the Wright brothers nor modern-day innovators like the design team on the Node chair were defensive or embarrassed about their method of trial and error. Ask seasoned innovators and they will likely have an impressive collection of “war stories” about failures on their path toward success. DESIGNING FOR COURAGE Albert Bandura used the process of guided mastery—a series of small successes—to help people gain courage and overcome deep-seated phobias. What would have been nearly impossible to accomplish in one giant leap became manageable in small steps, with the guidance of someone knowledgeable in the field. In a similar way, we use a step-by-step progression to help people discover and experience the tools and methodologies of design thinking, gradually increasing the level of challenge to help individuals transcend the fear of failure that blocks their best ideas. These small successes are intrinsically rewarding and help people to go on to the next level. In our classes and workshops, we first ask people to work through quick design challenges, whether it’s to redesign the gift-giving experience or to rethink their daily commute. We may jump in with some help or a small nudge, but mostly we let them figure out solutions themselves. Building confidence through experience encourages more creative action in the future, which further bolsters confidence. For this reason, we frequently ask students and team members to complete multiple quick design projects rather than one big project, to maximize the number of learning cycles. At the d.school, one of the goals of getting people to work together on a project is to help them practice new skills and challenge themselves—and most likely experience failure as a result. We believe the lessons learned from failures may make us smarter—even stronger. But that doesn’t make failure any more fun. So most of us naturally try to avoid failure at all costs. Failure is hard, even painful. As Stanford professor Bob Sutton and IDEO partner Diego Rodriguez often say at the d.school, “Failure sucks, but instructs.” The inescapable link between failure and innovation is a lesson you can learn only through doing. We give students a chance to fail as soon as possible, in order to maximize the learning time that follows. Instead of long lectures followed by exercises, most of our classes at the d.school give students a little instruction up front and then get them working on a project or a challenge. We follow up in debriefs to reflect on what succeeded—and what can be learned from things that didn’t work. “Many d.school classes demand that student teams keep pushing the limits of possibility until they face-plant,” says IDEO partner and consulting associate professor Chris Flink. “The personal resilience, courage, and humility born of a healthy failure form a priceless piece of their education and growth.” Facing failure in order to wipe away the fear is something understood intuitively by our friend John “Cass” Cassidy, lifelong innovator and creator of Klutz Press. In his book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, Cass didn’t start us out juggling two balls, or even one. He began with something more basic: “The Drop.” Step one is simply to throw all three balls in the air and let them drop. Then repeat. In learning to juggle, the angst comes from failure—from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, Cass aims to numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor. After we address our fear of failure, juggling becomes a lot easier. The two of us were skeptical at first, but with the help of his simple approach, we really did learn to juggle. Fear of failure holds us back from learning all sorts of new skills, from taking on risks, and from tackling new challenges. Creative confidence asks that we overcome that fear. You know you are going to drop the ball, make mistakes, and go in a wrong direction or two. But you come to accept that it’s part of learning. And in doing so, you are able to remain confident that you are moving forward despite the setbacks. OVERCOMING FEAR OF CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS We know from experience that our students often have a fear of venturing out onto the turf of customers and users in attempts to gain empathy with them. At the d.school, lecturer Caroline O’Connor and managing director Sarah Stein Greenberg have helped many students move past that fear, one step at a time. Here are a few ways of gaining empathy that they suggest, adapted for use in a business context. The techniques on the list start out easy and become increasingly challenging. 1. BE A “FLY ON THE WALL” IN AN ONLINE FORUM. Pay attention as potential customers share feedback, air their grievances, and ask questions. You’re not looking for evaluations of features or cost; you’re searching for pain points and latent needs among the people on the forum. 2. TRY YOUR OWN CUSTOMER SERVICE. Go through the experience of interacting with customer service, pretending to be a customer. Notice how your problem is handled, and how you feel along the way. Try mapping out the individual steps in the process and then graph the ups and downs of your mood or satisfaction. 3. TALK WITH UNEXPECTED EXPERTS. What does the receptionist have to say about your firm’s customer experience? If you’re in health care, talk to a medical assistant rather than a doctor. If you make a physical product, ask a repair person to tell you about what goes wrong with it. 4. PLAY DETECTIVE IN PURSUIT OF INSIGHT. Take some reading material and a pair of headphones to a retail space or an industry conference (or, if your customers are internal, an area where people tend to gather). Observe people’s behavior, and try to figure out what is going on. How are they interacting with your product or service? What can you glean from their body language that indicates their level of engagement or interest? 5. INTERVIEW SOME CUSTOMERS. Think of a few open-ended questions about your product or service. Go to a place where your customers spend time, and find someone you are comfortable approaching. Tell them you’d like to ask a few questions. If the person refuses, no problem, just try someone else. Eventually you’ll find someone who’s willing—even dying—to talk to you. Press for more detail with every question. Ask “Why?” and “Can you tell me more about that?”—even if you think you already know the answer. Sometimes their responses will surprise you and point you toward new opportunities. URGENT OPTIMISM We can all learn something about effort and failure from the world of gaming. Author, futurist, and game designer Jane McGonigal talked to us recently about how video gaming can spark its own form of creative confidence. Jane makes a convincing case that harnessing the power of video games can have a major impact on life in the real world. In the realm of video games, the level of challenge and reward rises proportionately with a gamer’s skills; moving forward always requires concentrated effort, but the next goal is never completely out of reach. This contributes to what Jane calls “urgent optimism”: the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, motivated by the belief that you have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an “epic win” is possible—that it is worth trying, and trying now, over and over again. In the euphoria of an epic win, gamers are shocked to discover the extent of their capabilities. As you move from level to level, success can flip your mindset to a state of creative confidence. We’ve all seen this kind of persistence and gradual mastery of skills in children—from toddlers learning to walk to kids learning how to shoot a basketball. Tom witnessed urgent optimism in action one Christmas morning when his teenage son Sean opened up a Tony Hawk skateboard video game and started trying it out. In addition to the usual on-screen action, the game comes with a controller that looks exactly like a real skateboard—minus the wheels. So there was Sean, balancing on a full-sized skateboard in the family room, surrounded by three generations of Kelleys. The family watched failure after failure as Sean’s character on screen smashed into brick walls, skidded off of railings, and collided with other skaters. Potentially more embarrassing, Sean himself fell off the skateboard controller several times, nearly crashing through the glass coffee table beside him on the floor. But neither the on-screen calamities nor the occasional loss of balance in the physical world fazed Sean one bit. In the social context of the gaming world, he wasn’t really failing—despite the noisy on-screen sound effects of his spectacular falls. Sean knew that he was on a path to learning. In fact, since reading about a video game is not much help, he was on essentially the only path available to gaining expertise. By adapting the best attributes of gaming culture, we can shift people’s view of failure and ratchet up their willingness and determination to persevere. We just need to hold out a “reasonable hope of success,” as well as the possibility of a truly epic win. For example, in working with colleagues or on a team, we’ve found that if team members believe that every idea gets fair consideration, and that a meritocracy allows their proposals to be judged across divisional and hierarchical lines, they tend to put all of their energy and their creative talents to work on ideas and proposals for change. They work harder, persist longer, and maintain their urgent optimism when they believe victory is just around the corner. But even after you overcome your initial fear of failure and gain creative confidence, you need to continue stretching yourself. Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice. Continuing to exercise them will keep them in shape. All innovators need to make creative leaps: What need should you focus on? Which idea do you go with? What should you prototype? That is where experience and intuition come in. Diego Rodriguez in his blog Metacool says that innovation thinkers often use “informed intuition” to identify a great insight, a key need, or a core feature. In other words, relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices. When it comes to bringing new stuff into the world, Diego argues that the number of product cycles you’ve gone through (what he calls “mileage”) trumps the number of years of experience. A twenty-year veteran of the auto industry who works several years on each new vehicle before it goes to market might have experienced far fewer cycles than a software developer working just two years on mobile apps that ship every couple of months. Once you have gone through enough rapid innovation cycles, you will gain familiarity with process and confidence in your ability to assess new ideas. And that confidence results in reduced anxiety in the face of ambiguity when you are bringing new ideas into the world. PERMISSION TO FAIL Whether you consider yourself a “born innovator” or are new to creative confidence, you can get better faster at coming up with new ideas if you give yourself and those around you the leeway to make mistakes from time to time. Permission to fail comes more easily in some settings than others. Venture capitalist Randy Komisar says that what distinguishes pockets of entrepreneurship like Silicon Valley is not their successes but the way they deal with failure. In cultures that encourage entrepreneurs, there is a greater appreciation and understanding of what Komisar calls “constructive failure.” Fear of risk and failure was a central theme when IDEO worked with German entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs on reinventing European venture capital. Research with software developers in the United States and Europe showed that the transition from a stable corporate job to the uncertainty of an early startup was one of the scariest moments in the evolution of a new venture. Many never managed to take that leap of faith. For lots of fledgling entrepreneurs, leaving the comfort and security of a salaried job stopped them in their tracks. So we structured the offering for Hinrichs’s new early-stage investment company, HackFWD, to make that transition less intimidating. We helped give entrepreneurs a support network and resources so they could focus their efforts on what they do best. As part of HackFWD’s “Geek Agreement”—published on the firm’s website—entrepreneurs are paid roughly their current salary for a year as they push their concept toward the beta stage and one step closer to market and profitability. They also get connected to a network of experienced advisors. Quitting your day job remains a scary step, but maintaining your current income for a year makes it easier to pursue new-to-the-world ideas. Within large companies, CEOs and executives have started to make similar efforts to reduce perceived risks and show their commitment to innovation initiatives. For example, VF Corporation—the world’s largest apparel company and owner of dozens of familiar brands ranging from Nautica to The North Face—started an internal innovation fund a few years ago. Overseen by vice president of strategy and innovation Stephen Dull, the fund helps bootstrap innovative ideas at their earliest stages. It allows business unit managers to take entrepreneurial risks while meeting all the performance targets with their current product offerings. One successful innovation fund program explored whether VF’s Wrangler brand, historically popular with cowboys in the American West, could be translated to appeal to motorcycle riders in India. The result was a line of jeans with features like water-repellent fabric that appeal to India’s highly mobile youth market. To date, VF’s innovation fund has sponsored more than ninety-seven such innovative ventures around the world. We all need the latitude to try out new ideas. Look for ways to grant yourself creative license, or give yourself the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Label your next new idea an experiment, and let everyone know that you are just testing it out. Lower others’ expectations, so that failure can lead to learning without career damage. EMBRACE YOUR FAILURES An old proverb reminds us that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” To learn from failure, however, you have to “own” it. You have to figure out what went wrong and what to do better next time. If you don’t, you’re liable to repeat your errors in the future. Acknowledging mistakes is also important for moving on. In doing so, you not only sidestep the psychological pitfalls of cover-up, rationalization, and guilt; you may also find that you enhance your own brand through your honesty, candor, and humility. Ask financial services professionals about their recent performance, and you are likely to hear a lot of “spin,” as they either ignore their losses or cloud them with phrases like “market corrections” or “industry downdrafts.” Nonetheless, one of our favorite examples of a company owning its failures comes from financial services. Bessemer Venture Partners is a well-respected, hundred-year-old venture capital firm that has gotten in on the ground floor of some stellar growth companies. Their website predictably features their “Top Exits.” What’s refreshing and not so predictable is that one click away from these mega-successes is a catalog of miscues and failed foresight Bessemer calls their “Anti-Portfolio.” As Bessemer explains, their “long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.” One of their partners passed over a chance to invest in the Series A round of PayPal, which sold a few years later for $1.5 billion. The firm also passed—seven times—on the chance to invest in FedEx, currently worth over $30 billion. One of the firm’s strongest advocates for the “Anti-Portfolio” idea, partner David Cowan, plays a starring role in its stories of missed opportunities and failures. A former neighbor of Tom’s, Cowan lived within walking distance from the Silicon Valley garage where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google. Cowan was good friends with the woman who rented them the garage, and she tried to introduce him one day to these “two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Cowan’s response: “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?” Bessemer’s Anti-Portfolio is part of a trend among enlightened individuals and organizations who want to shine a bright light on their mistakes and learn from that dispassionate observation. The Forbes Midas List ranks Cowan among the top venture capitalists in the world for turning startup investments into gold. Could owning up to his failures have cleared the path for his out-sized success? Look around, and you will see other signs of this shift in thinking. Failure conferences are cropping up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Author and educator Tina Seelig asks her students to write a “failure r?sum?” that highlights their biggest defeats and screw-ups. She says that smart people accustomed to promoting their successes find it very challenging. In the process of compiling their failure r?sum?, however, they come to own their setbacks, both emotionally and intellectually. “Viewing their experiences through the lens of failure forces them to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way,” Tina writes in her book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. She is brave enough to include her own failure r?sum?, pointing out missteps such as not paying attention to company culture early in her career and avoiding conflicts in personal relationships. Now more aware and open about her early shortcomings, Tina is not held back by them. She’s the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, nurturing tomorrow’s entrepreneurial leaders. THE CLAY HORSE Our fear of being judged is something we learn at a young age. But we don’t start out with it. Most children are naturally daring. They explore new games, meet new people, try new things, and let their imaginations run wild. In our family, that lack of fear manifested itself as a do-it-yourself attitude. If the washing machine broke, you didn’t call a repair person. Instead you walked over to the washer, took it apart, and tried to fix it. That was part of the deal—in our house you were believed to be capable of fixing things. Of course, sometimes home improvement jobs went awry. Once, we disassembled the family piano to see how it worked. Partway through the process, however, we realized that putting it back together wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as taking it apart. What was once a musical instrument became more like a series of art objects. The giant harp-like array of strings from that piano is still leaning up against one wall of our former bedroom in the basement, and the beautiful assembly of eighty-eight wooden hammers is mounted today on a wall in David’s studio. Artistic license was tolerated as well. You could take a perfectly good red bicycle you’d gotten for your birthday, sandblast it the next day, and repaint it neon green, just to make it more interesting—without a word of recrimination. We didn’t know as children that we were creative. We just knew that it was okay for us to try experiments that sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. That we could keep creating, keep tinkering, and trust that something interesting would result if we just stuck with it. David’s best friend in the third grade, Brian, had a different experience with creativity. One day, David and Brian were in art class, sitting at a table with half a dozen classmates. Brian was working on a sculpture, making a horse out of the clay that the teacher kept under the sink. Suddenly one of the girls saw what he was making, leaned over, and said to him, “That’s terrible. That doesn’t look anything like a horse.” Brian’s shoulders sank. Dejected, he wadded up the clay horse and threw it back in the bin. David never saw Brian attempt a creative project again. How often does something like that happen in childhood? Whenever we mention lost-confidence stories like Brian’s to business audiences, someone always comes up to us afterward to share a similar experience when a teacher or parent or peer shut them down. Let’s face it, kids can be cruel to one another. Sometimes, people remember a specific moment when they decided, as children, that they weren’t creative. Rather than be judged, they simply withdrew. They stopped thinking of themselves as creative at all. Author and researcher Bren? Brown, who has interviewed scores of people about their experiences with shame, found that one third of them could recall a “creativity scar,” a specific incident when they were told they weren’t talented as artists, musicians, writers, singers. When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity, the impact can be profound. People start to separate the world into those who are creative and those who are not. They come to see these categories as fixed, forgetting that they too once loved to draw and tell imaginative stories. Too often they opt out of being creative. The tendency to label ourselves as “noncreative” comes from more than just our fear of being judged. As schools cut funding for the arts and high-stakes testing becomes more pervasive, creativity itself is devalued, compared to traditional core subjects like math and science. Those subjects emphasize ways of thinking and problem solving that have a clear-cut single right answer, while many real-world twenty-first-century challenges require more open-minded approaches. Well-meaning teachers and parents play a part when counseling young people toward conventional professions, sending the subtle message that occupations involving creativity are too risky and out of the mainstream. We both know what that feels like. Our guidance counselors told us when we were graduating from high school that we should stay near Akron, Ohio, and work for the local tire companies. They thought we were “dreamers” for setting our sights beyond the familiar. Had we taken their advice, there would be no IDEO or d.school today. Too often they opt out of being creative. Education expert Sir Ken Robinson claims that traditional schooling destroys creativity. “We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make,” he says. “Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn.” Teachers, parents, business leaders, and role models of all kinds have the power either to support or suppress creative confidence in those around them. At the right age, a single cutting remark is sometimes enough to bring our creative pursuits to a standstill. Fortunately, many of us are resilient enough to try again. Sir Ken told us a memorable story about talent that almost went to waste. He was born in Liverpool and made a discovery one day while talking to fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney. Apparently, the legendary singer-songwriter had not done especially well in his musical studies. His high school music teacher had neither given McCartney good marks nor identified any particular musical talent in him. George Harrison had the same teacher and had likewise failed to attract any positive attention in music class. “Let me get this straight,” Sir Ken asked McCartney in amazement, “this teacher had half of the Beatles in his classes and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary!?” Lacking encouragement from the person best positioned to nurture their musical talents, McCartney and Harrison could have “played it safe” and gone to work in Liverpool’s traditional manufacturing and shipping industries. But that “safe” route would have put them in the center of a downward economic spiral. Liverpool’s heavy industry declined precipitously in the following two decades, leading to dizzying unemployment in their hometown and eventually to the closing of the school they had attended, the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Luckily for music fans, McCartney and his friends John, George, and Ringo found encouragement elsewhere. And of course, the Beatles became one of the most successful and beloved groups of all time. Much later, having achieved fame and fortune and been knighted by the queen, Sir Paul McCartney felt the noblesse oblige to help others get the creative chance he nearly missed. After the Liverpool Institute closed, putting his music teacher—and all the other faculty and staff—out of a job, McCartney helped restore the dilapidated nineteenth-century school building from the ground up. Together with educator Mark Featherstone-Witty, he formed the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, a thriving creative environment that helps young people with emerging talent build practical skills in music, acting, and dance. LET GO OF COMPARISON It takes courage to leave the land of certain outcomes and the comfort of what we know to try a new approach or share a wild-sounding idea. In her research on insecurity, Bren? Brown talked with a thousand people to identify what makes them feel inadequate and to understand the downward spirals of feeling “not good enough.” As Brown writes: “When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts.” One way to embrace creativity, Brown says, is to let go of comparison. If you are concerned about conforming or about how you measure up to others’ successes, you won’t perform the risk taking and trailblazing inherent in creative endeavors. Over the years, we’ve noticed from teams we’ve worked with that when people are insecure, they’re not at their best. If they don’t feel like they have the respect of their peers or their boss, they try to boost themselves through self-promotion. Instead of focusing on their work and feeling good about what they produce, they get sidetracked worrying about what other people think. Once that insecurity takes hold, it can create a vicious circle. So whether you work alone or with a team, try hard to disarm it at the earliest opportunity. Give other people credit when it’s due. Pay attention to signs that someone around you is feeling undervalued or has lost his or her self-confidence. Have that difficult conversation with the people around you to air out the issue. Because when you don’t address insecurity, it’s like the family secret that everyone knows but no one talks about. The conversation may be uncomfortable and painful but is often worthwhile in the long run. We’ve seen the pattern dozens of times at IDEO where new employees are uncertain or tentative at first, trying to “be on their best behavior.” And then over time, they let down their guard. You see the transformation in the way they dress and the way they act around people they see as authority figures. As they become more confident, they eventually adopt a bring-your-whole-self-to-work attitude and allow themselves to be vulnerable in a creative context. This vulnerability and ability to trust the people around you can help to overcome so many of the barriers to creative thinking and constructive behavior. Our experience mirrors current research on resilience. Resilient people, in addition to being resourceful problem solvers, are more likely to seek help, have strong social support, and be better connected with colleagues, family, and friends. Resilience is often thought of as a solo effort—the lone hero who falls and rises up again to do battle. In reality, however, reaching out to others is usually a strategy for success. It doesn’t have to be an admission of weakness. We need others to help us bounce back from adversity and hardship. DRAWING CONFIDENCE People who believe they lack creativity often insist, “I can’t draw.” More than any other skill, people see drawing as a litmus test for creativity. Everyone acknowledges that certain skills, like playing the piano, take years of training. But a common misperception is that we’re either good at drawing, or we’re not. In reality, drawing is a skill that you can learn and improve through practice with a little guidance. A sketch is often worth a thousand words. Great communicators in today’s fast-paced business world should never hesitate to reach for a marker pen. Unfortunately, most people shy away from the opportunity to sketch out their idea on the board. Or when they do, they preface their efforts with a disclaimer about their lack of drawing ability. Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin and an expert on the art of visual thinking, says that roughly 25 percent of the businesspeople he works with are reluctant to even pick up a marker (he calls them “red pen” people). And another 50 percent (“yellow pen” people) are only comfortable highlighting or adding details to other people’s drawings. Dan helps people get over their hesitation to grasp the marker pen and approach the whiteboard by lowering the barrier. He does this by dissociating artistic drawing from drawing for communication. One of the lessons in his web-based “Napkin Academy” is called “How to Draw Anything.” He insists that everything you ever need to draw on a whiteboard—or on a napkin—can be deconstructed into five basic shapes: a line, a square, a circle, a triangle, and an irregular shape he calls a blob. Next, he explains drawing fundamentals—such as size, position, and direction—that can seem comically simple yet still go underused. On the topic of size, for example, if you make one object bigger than another, your audience will understand that this object is either closer or—you guessed it—larger. And so it goes. SKETCHING PEOPLE (photo/illustration credit 2.2 (#litres_trial_promo)) If you can draw the five shapes above (and we bet you can), then visual thinker Dan Roam says you are on your way to being able to draw anything—including people. With a focus on drawing for communication—not art—Dan can amp up your sketching skills in a matter of minutes. For example, Dan has three ways of drawing people (as he demonstrates for us below), depending on what you want to get across: 1. Stick figures are very simple and convey mood or emotion—especially if you make the head one third the total size of the person, so you have more room for showing expression; 2. Block figures add a rectangular torso and are good for showing motion or different body postures; 3. Blob figures (also known as “star” people) don’t show emotion or action well but provide a quick way to draw groups and relationships. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/david-kelley/creative-confidence-unleashing-the-creative-potential-within/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.