by Tim Brown
1. The best ideas emerge when the whole organizational ecosystem—not just its designers and engineers and certainly not just management—has room to experiment.
2. Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting consumer base, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones best placed to respond and most motivated to do so.
3. Ideas should not be favored based on who creates them. (Repeat aloud.)
4. Ideas that create a buzz should be favored. Indeed, ideas should gain a vocal following, however small, before being given organizational support.
5. The “gardening” skills of senior leadership should be used to tend, prune, and harvest ideas. MBAs call this “risk tolerance.” I call it the top-down bit.
6. An overarching purpose should be articulated so that the organization has a sense of direction and innovators don’t feel the need for constant supervision.
These rules apply to almost every field of innovation. Together they ensure that the seeds of individual creativity take root—even in the aisles of a grocery store.
John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, has applied this idea of bottom-up experimentation to his business since its founding, in 1980. Now the world’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods, Whole Foods organizes each store’s employees into small teams and encourages them to experiment with better ways to serve Whole Foods customers. These might include different display ideas or products selected to meet local customers’ needs. Each store may have its own unique regional and even neighborhood identity. Managers are encouraged to share the best ideas so that they propagate outward across the company rather than remaining localized. None of this may sound all that revolutionary, but what Mackey has done since the earliest days of the company—he started with a single grocery store in Austin, Texas, and a total workforce of nineteen—is to make sure that every employee understands, appreciates, and has the ability to contribute to the overall vision of the company. These ideas act as navigational beacons for the localized innovations taking place throughout the organization.
As with each of the stories I’ve told, there is a moral to be drawn from this one: don’t let the results of bottom-up experimentation dissipate into unstructured ideas and unresolved plans. Some companies provide suggestion boxes intended to harvest the bottom-up creativity of the organization. They tend to fail, leaving management to wonder why ungrateful employees pour coffee into them if they are hanging on the wall or flame them if they are online. At best they tend to yield small and incremental ideas. More often they go nowhere because there is no obvious mechanism for acting upon suggestions. What is needed is a serious commitment from the top of the corporate pyramid, and it will be repaid by better ideas from the base. Any promising experiment should have a chance to gain organizational support in the form of a project sustained by appropriate resources and driven by definable goals.
There is a simple test for this, though I have to admit that it has taken some getting used to: when I receive a cautiously worded memo asking for permission to try something, I find myself becoming equally cautious. But when I am ambushed in the parking lot by a group of hyperactive people falling all over one another to tell me about the unbelievably cool project they are working on, their energy infects me and my antennae go way, way up. Some of these projects will go wrong. Energy will be wasted (whatever that means) and money will be lost (we know exactly what that means). But even in these cases there is an old adage that remains worth pondering: in the words of my countryman Alexander Pope (back in the days when design thinkers did their best thinking in Latin), “Errare humanum est, perdonare divinum”—“To err is human, to forgive divine.”
a culture of optimism
The obvious counterpart to an attitude of experimentation is a climate of optimism. Sometimes the state of the world makes this difficult to sustain, but the fact remains that curiosity does not thrive in organizations that have grown cynical. Ideas are smothered before they have a chance to come to life. People willing to take risks are driven out. Up-and-coming leaders steer clear of projects with uncertain outcomes out of fear that participation might damage their chances for advancement. Project teams are nervous, suspicious, and prone to second-guessing what management “really” wants. Even when leadership wants to promote disruptive innovation and open-ended experimentation, it will find that no one is willing to step forward without permission—which usually means defeat before the start.
Without optimism—the unshakable belief that things could be better than they are—the will to experiment will be continually frustrated until it withers. Positive encouragement does not require the pretense that all ideas are created equal. It remains the responsibility of leadership to make discerning judgments, which will inspire confidence if people feel that their ideas have been given a fair hearing.
To harvest the power of design thinking, individuals, teams, and whole organizations have to cultivate optimism. People have to believe that it is within their power (or at least the power of their team) to create new ideas, that will serve unmet needs, and that will have a positive impact. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the summer of 1997 after being dismissed by his own board, he found a demoralized company that had spread its resources across no fewer than fifteen product platforms. Those teams were, in effect, competing with one another for survival. With all the boldness for which he is known, Jobs slashed the company’s offerings from fifteen to four: a desktop and a laptop for professionals and a desktop and a laptop “for the rest of us.” Every employee understood that the project he or she was working on represented fully one-quarter of Apple’s business and there was no possibility that it would be killed by an accountant scrutinizing the balance sheets. Optimism soared, morale turned 180 degrees, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Optimism requires confidence, and confidence is built on trust. And trust, as we know, flows in both directions.
To find out whether a company is optimistic, experimental, and attuned to risk, people should simply use their senses: look for a colorful landscape of messy disorder rather than a suburban grid of tidy beige cubicles. Listen for bursts of raucous laughter rather than the constant drone of subdued conversation. Because IDEO does a great deal of work in the food and beverage industry, employs food scientists, and maintains an industrial kitchen, I can often literally smell excitement in the air. In general, try to be alert to the nodes where it all comes together, because that is where new ideas originate. I love to slip downstairs and observe members of a team at work building prototypes out of Legos or enacting an improvisational skit to explore a new service interaction. Above all, I love to be allowed to sit in on a brainstorm.
brainstorming
Business school professors are fond of writing learned articles about the value of brainstorming. I encourage them to continue to do so (after all, some of my best friends are business school professors, and it keeps them busy and out of my way). Some surveys claim that motivated individuals can generate more ideas in the equivalent time working on their own. Other case studies demonstrate that brainstorming is as essential to creativity as exercise is to a healthy heart. As is so often the case, there is truth on both sides.
The skeptics certainly have a case: a well-intentioned manager who assembles a group of individuals who don’t know one another, who are skeptical, and who lack confidence and gives them a tough problem to brainstorm is likely to get fewer viable ideas than if each of them had been sent away to think about the problem individually. Brainstorming, ironically, is a structured way of breaking out of structure. It takes practice.
As with cricket or football (or their American equivalents), there are rules for brainstorming. The rules lay out the playing field within which a team of players can perform at high levels. Without rules there is no framework for a group to collaborate within, and a brainstorming session is more likely to degenerate into either an orderly meeting or an unproductive free-for-all with a lot of talking and not much lis
tening. Every organization has its own variations on the rules of brainstorming (just as every family seems to have its own version of Scrabble or Monopoly). At IDEO we have dedicated rooms for our brainstorming sessions, and the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is “Build on the ideas of others.” It’s right up there with “Thou shalt not kill” and “Honor thy father and thy mother,” as it ensures that every participant is invested in the last idea put forward and has the chance to move it along.
Not long ago we were working on a kids’ product for Nike. Although we have plenty of skilled toy designers on our staff, sometimes it makes sense to hire expert consultants to help us out. So we waited until their Saturday-morning cartoons were over and invited a group of eight-to-ten-year-olds to come in to our Palo Alto studios. After warming them up with orange juice and French toast, we split the boys and girls into two different rooms, gave them some instructions, and let them have at it for about an hour. When we gathered the results, the difference between the two groups was striking. The girls had come up with more than two hundred ideas whereas the boys had barely managed fifty. Boys, at this age, find it more difficult to focus and to listen—attributes essential to genuine collaboration. The girls were just the opposite. Fortunately, it’s not my task to decide whether this disparity is the result of genetic inheritance, cultural norms, or birth order, but I can say that what we saw in these side-by-side brainstorms was real evidence of the power of building on the ideas of others. The boys, so eager to get their own ideas out there, were barely conscious of the ideas coming from their fellow brainstormers; the girls, without prompting, conducted a spirited but nonetheless serial conversation in which each idea related to the one that had come before and became a springboard to the one that came next. They were sparking off one another and getting better ideas as a result.
Brainstorming is not necessarily the ultimate technique for idea generation, and it cannot be built into the structure of every organization. But it does prove its worth when the goal is to open up a broad spectrum of ideas. Other approaches are important for making choices, but nothing beats a good brainstorming session for creating them.
visual thinking
Design professionals spend years learning how to draw. Drawing practice is not so much in order to illustrate ideas, which can now be done with cheap software. Instead, designers learn to draw so that they can express their ideas. Words and numbers are fine, but only drawing can simultaneously reveal both the functional characteristics of an idea and its emotional content. To draw an idea accurately, decisions have to be made that can be avoided by even the most precise language; aesthetic issues have to be addressed that cannot be resolved by the most elegant mathematical calculation. Whether the task at hand is a hair dryer, a weekend retreat in the country, or an annual report, drawing forces decisions.
Visual thinking takes many forms. We should not suppose that it is restricted to objective illustration. In fact, it is not even necessary to possess drawing skills. In November 1972, relaxing in a late-night deli in Honolulu at the end of a long day of conference proceedings, a couple of biochemists took out a cocktail napkin and shared some crude drawings of bacteria having sex. A few years later Stanley Cohen was on a plane to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize and Herbert Boyer was pulling his red Ferrari into the parking lot of Genentech.
All children draw. Somewhere in the course of becoming logical, verbally oriented adults, they unlearn this elemental skill. Experts in creative problem solving such as Bob McKim, founder of Stanford’s product design program, or the United Kingdom’s prolific Edward de Bono, devoted much of their creative energy to mind maps, two-by-two matrices, and other visual frameworks that help explore and describe ideas in valuable ways.
When I use drawing to express an idea, I get different results than if I try to express it with words, and I usually get to them more quickly. I have to have a whiteboard or sketch pad nearby whenever I am discussing ideas with colleagues. I get stuck unless I can work it out visually. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks are justly famous (no less a collector than Bill Gates snatched up the Hammer Codex when it came up for auction in 1994), but Leonardo didn’t just use them to work out his own ideas. Often he simply stopped in the street to capture something he needed to figure out: a tangle of weeds; the curl of a cat sleeping in the sun; an eddy of water swirling in a gutter. Moreover, scholars poring over his mechanical drawings have punctured the myth that every sketch depicts his own inventions. Like any accomplished design thinker, Leonardo da Vinci used his drawing skills to build on the ideas of others.
to post, or not to Post-it
Most people, by now, know the story of the humble Post-it note: Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist working at 3M back in the 1960s, happened upon an adhesive with some curious properties. His employer, quite reasonably, did not see the utility of “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres,” aka glue that does not stick, and gave him little encouragement. It was not until one of his colleagues, Art Fry, began to use the adhesive to keep his bookmarks from falling out of his church hymnal that a plausible use was found for the little yellow notes. It is now a billion-dollar product and one of 3M’s most valuable assets.
The Post-it note stands as an object lesson in how organizational timidity threatens to kill off a great idea. But those ubiquitous little stickies have proven themselves to be an important tool of innovation in and of themselves. Festooned on the walls of project spaces, they have helped untold numbers of design thinkers first to capture their wide-ranging insights and then to order them into meaningful patterns. The Post-it note, in all its pastel glory, embodies the movement from the divergent phase that is the source of our inspiration to the convergent phase that is the road map to our solutions.
The techniques of the design thinker that I have been describing—brainstorming, visual thinking—contribute to the divergent process of creating choices. But accumulating options is merely an exercise if we do not move on to the convergent phase of making choices. Doing so is critical if a project is to move from a rousing exercise in creative idea generation toward a resolution. Just for that reason, however, it can be one of the most difficult tasks that a design team faces. Given the opportunity, every design team will diverge endlessly. There is always a more interesting idea just around the corner, and until the budget runs out they will happily turn one corner after another. It is here that one of the simplest tools available for convergence comes into play: the Post-it note.
Once everyone is gathered together for a project review, there needs to be a process for selecting the ideas that are strongest and hold the greatest promise. Storyboards help—panels that illustrate, almost like comic strips, the sequence of events a user might experience in checking into a hotel, opening a bank ac-count, or using a newly purchased electronic device. Sometimes it helps to create alternate scenarios. But sooner or later some level of consensus is called for, and it rarely comes about by debate or executive fiat. What is needed is some kind of tool to extract the intuition of the group, and this is where a generous supply of Post-it notes cannot be beat. At IDEO we use them to submit ideas to the “butterfly test.”
Invented by Bill Moggridge, design thinker extraordinaire and one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley design, the butterfly test is a thoroughly unscientific but amazingly effective process for extracting a few key insights from a mass of data. Let’s imagine that by the end of a deep research phase, numerous brainstorming sessions, and endless prototypes, an entire wall of the project room has been covered with promising ideas. Each participant is then given a small number of small Post-it “ballots” to attach to the ideas they think should move forward. Members of the team flutter about the room inspecting the tableau of ideas, and before long it is clear which ones have attracted the most “butterflies.” Of course, all kinds of issues come into play, including politics and personalities, bu
t that is what reaching consensus is all about. Give and take. Compromise and creative combination. All these and more play a part in reaching the end result. The process is not about democracy, it is about maximizing the capacities of teams to converge on the best solutions. It’s chaotic, but it works surprisingly well and can be adapted to the peculiarities of many organizations.
I don’t mean this to be an advertisement for 3M. The Post-it note, which encourages people to capture a quick thought, reposition it, or reject it, is just one of many tools available to deal with one insistent fact common to every design project: deadlines. Though we all have deadlines all of the time, in the divergent and exploratory phase of design thinking, deadlines take on an extra level of importance. They refer to the process and not the people. The deadline is the fixed point on the horizon where everything stops and the final evaluation begins. These points may seem arbitrary and unwelcome, but an experienced project leader knows how to use them to turn options into decisions. It’s unwise to have a deadline every day, at least in the earlier phases of a project. Nor does it work to stretch it out for six months. It takes judgment to determine when a team will reach a point where management input, reflection, redirection, and selection are most likely to be valuable.
I have not yet met a client who says, “Take all the time you need.” All project work is bound by limits: limits of technology, limits of skill, limits of knowledge. But the calendar is probably the most insistent limit of them all because it brings us back to the bottom line. As Ben Franklin, America’s first and most adventurous real design thinker, pointed out in a letter to a young tradesman, “Time is money.”
I have saved for last the single most powerful tool of design thinking. This is not CAD, rapid prototyping, or even offshore manufacturing but that empathic, intuitive, pattern-recognizing, parallel-processing, and neural-networking Internet that each of us carries between our ears. For the time being, at any rate, it is our ability to construct complex concepts that are both functionally relevant and emotionally resonant that sets humans apart from the ever more sophisticated machines we use to assist us. As long as there is no algorithm that will tell us how to bring divergent possibilities into a convergent reality or analytical detail into a synthetic whole, this talent will guarantee that accomplished design thinkers have a place in the world.