Good Life Project - Tom Kelley: IDEO, Creative Confidence and Innovation

Episode Date: October 21, 2015

Tom Kelley is a partner at renowned design and innovation consultancy IDEO.He's also a best-selling author, along with his brother, IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator David Kelley, of a fantastic book called Creative Confidence. Beyond that, he is an Executive Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the University of Tokyo. As a leading voice on innovation, Tom travels the world, speaking on how to tap the creative potential of individuals and organizations and create a culture of innovation.During his time at IDEO, he's helped the company grow from 15 designers to more than 600 innovators, working on projects that often make a global impact and lead to wide-scale paradigm-shifts. Even as an avowed entrepreneur, when I think about whether I could work with a larger company again, IDEO pretty much tops the list of dream places. Actually, it IS the list.In today's conversation, we take a step back in time. Tom shares how the freedom to play and experiment he had as a kid led to the way he views the world now. We talk about creativity and innovation, especially design thinking, applying the process of design to business and innovation. He and his brother, David, are often credited with helping to define and bring this methodology to the world.We explore the power of story, both in creativity and communications. We also talk about creative culture, what's necessary for it to flourish and we dive into the cancer diagnosis that led him to collaborate with David to write a fantastic book together and how that changed them both.If you are looking to bring more creativity and innovation into what you're doing, this is a don't miss an episode with a leading voice in the field. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You get the story right, not only will people listen to you, people will retell your story, which is what you really want. You want your story, your message to go viral. This week's guest, Tom Kelly, along with his brother, David, are the sort of brains behind an extraordinary creative firm called IDEO. And they're known for having really not just created amazing relationships, amazing products, services, and creative ideas for their clients, but for changing the way that we think about the process of creation, the process of taking things from problem to idea to solutions to products, businesses, services, things in the world. They've sort of developed a language and approach to birthing creativity that flowed out into the

world and became sort of labeled design thinking. And they talk about this. Tom writes about it and the process, the stories behind it in a really fantastic book called Creative Confidence. We also dive into how that book actually ended up getting written. After working with his brother for many years, there was a moment of reckoning that made them basically say, we need to do this, we need to do it together, and we need to do it now. I'm so excited to share this conversation with IDEO's Tom Kelly. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. I have a lot of curiosities about you and about what you do in the world and about what you're building. Do you have a recollection for when this sort of like first seed of deep curiosity around creativity, innovation, all these things start to bud?

Yeah, it's not so traceable to our childhood. If you try to make a link between our current life and creative confidence and our childhood, it's mainly that we just had lots of room to play. It's the opposite of the kind of over-parenting that you have today. It was okay to do stuff. It was okay to try to weld two bicycles together. It was okay to take the piano apart. It was okay to try to fix the home stereo and fail and things like that. And so it wasn't so much that our parents were trying to specifically instill creativity so much as we were free to experiment.

And I really deeply believe that experimentation is a part of how we learn and explore and we figure out, you know, what it is that we like to do and what we're good at and things like that. So, yes, we had lots of room for that in our childhood. Yeah, it's amazing that you say that because I think I'm about 10 years your junior. And I grew up outside of New York City in a small town. And I was the kid who on a Sunday, I would get my dad to drive me to the town junkyard, basically, find parts of bicycles. It's like trigger that thing. And I would come back and duct tape them together to make a Franken-bike until we drove it over enough rocks that it fell apart. It does seem like, and I'm a parent now of a teenager, it does seem like a lot of that, we're so interested in protection.

Yes. Which has its role, but at the same time, what are we taking away? Yeah. You know, part of it gets back to fear of failure. And so if you're really afraid of failure or the consequences of failure, then that locks you up. Right. And so in our childhood, nobody seemed to worry about anything that, you know, I'm not sure seatbelts existed, but I know no one I know ever used them and things like that. And so as a parent today, it's like, danger, danger. I don't, you know, I think seatbelts are very prudent and we should all use them. But in our wanting to keep everything safe is the thing that you can't, you know, make any mistakes along the way. And we have to learn mistakes, you know, and of course you don't want

to give up safety. But metaphorically, if you decide that you want to be a great skier, you know, and of course you don't want to give up safety, but metaphorically, if you decide that you want to be a great skier, you want to be an Olympic skier, right? And if you say to yourself, I want to be an Olympic skier and I never want to fall down, you're destined never to be even a medium skier. If you pursue a course of training that makes it so you never once, you know, fall on your butt on the snow. Because that falling, the thing you did right before falling, usually, is the learning. It's part of the learning process. I mean, so what is it, do you think, that has led to this shift? You know, what are we afraid of that we keep jumping in and saying, no, no, no, no, no, like stop here?

Well, the parenting thing, it's too complicated to dive into, I think. But if you just look at it in a kind of a company setting, if I believe that in my career, I'm never allowed to make the tiniest failure, I'm never allowed to be wrong once in front of my boss or in front of my colleagues, it's hopeless. And so we have to set up a culture for ourselves and for the people we work with. We have to set up a culture that says, hey, we try stuff all the time and not all of it's going to work. And what I found is if you set it up in advance and say, hey, boss, I'd like to try the following experiment. It's an experiment from the beginning. And then if it doesn't quite work out, it's like, yep, yep, that one didn't work, let's try another one.

As opposed to, hey boss, I got the best idea ever. Where you're fully committed to it, it's not an experiment, it's like your career is now tied up with it. And so I think if we, even as CEOs, you know, when they're trying to make change in a company, and I've witnessed this firsthand, when a CEO wants to make change, even then it's good to characterize it as an experiment. Because people will play along with the experiment. And the experiment that didn't work out, that's not necessarily, you know, damaging to your career or your brand at all. Yeah. No, and it's fascinating, too.

And it's interesting, as you're talking about that, and I wasn't planning on going this direction, but it just popped so strongly into my head. You know, we were recording this at a time where Tony Hsieh and Zappos assertively, very publicly involved in this massive, massive and profound and fairly radical shifting culture with a culture that was really very well defined before that. Like it or hate it, you knew what you were coming into. And it seems like such a stark contrast to what you're talking about because they basically came out and said, okay, we're going all in 100%. This is the change that we're making if you're with us stay. If you're not, you know, we're happy to take care of you and bless you on and, you know, a large percentage of people left. So it was almost like the exact opposite approach.

Right? Yeah. I mean, you know, he's, he's got a very strong sense of mission. And if it works for him, great. And for the rest of us kind of regular people, you know, what I found is the experimentation approach works. I'm really good friends with Jim Hackett, who's a former CEO of Steelcase. And Jim, many years ago now, went to his senior management team and said, hey, you know, we're the biggest maker of system furniture in the world, a.k.a. cubicles, right? And he said, and yet we, back then, he was saying, we, the senior executives of this company, we all live in wood-paneled offices with doors that close, and you've got acoustic privacy. And so what he said to me is, what I could have done next is taken the big change approach, old way, new way. And he says, big change is scary to people, especially big change about space. And he says, so change is scary to people, especially big change about space.

And he says, so I, as CEO, it's within my authority to do this, right? He says, I could have proposed big change, you know, blow up your old office, you're going to live in this, you know, this open space. He said, I'd had one by one, every single one of my executives in my office explaining why, ooh, maybe somebody else could do this, but they couldn't, right? He said, instead of big change, he did a little experiment. And he said to them, I propose the following experiment. And what he said to them was, he would keep their office intact for the moment, but he said, I want you to join me.

So he's in on it, too. He's not, you know, standing on high dictating. He's joining, I want you to join me in the open air in on it too. He's not, you know, standing on high dictating. He's doing it. I want you to join me in the open air leadership community, he called it. So he branded it, which always helps. He says, and I want us to try this for six months. He says, all I want you to do is give it an honest try for six months. And then I think an important part of the whole process, he says, and my promise to you, right? Jim's this guy of deep, deep integrity. Everybody takes him at his word. He says, my promise to you is that six months from now, stuff that is not

working, we will definitely address. He never, by the way, said, and you get to go back to your old office. But he promised them that the stuff that wasn't working, they would address. And they did do some fine tuning. But 20 years later, those execs, their offices, old offices long gone, 20 years later, those execs are all still in that open air leadership community, right? And so he made big change, but he did it with a little experiment. And so I think when you propose the little experiment, in that case, you know, he was only asked for six months, he was asked to give an honest drive, he was promising to, you know, do course corrections. Who could resist that one, right?

And by the way, zero, zero people came into his office telling him why it was bad for them. You know, he made it work, right? And, you know, they don't always work out the first time like that. But I just, from Jim and other people I've seen do this, I feel like the experience, like join me in this experiment, I think can be really powerful for people with authority, like the CEO of Steelcase, and for people without authority, the bottom of the, you know, the hierarchy saying, hey, let's try this experiment. Either one works to me. So how much of it working in that case, and probably across the board,

do you think is designing it as an experiment? So let's just try this. Yes. But at the same time, I mean, what he did was he stepped into a place of personal vulnerability. Right. You know, which really ignores people to you. Yes.

If he said, I want you guys to try this for six months, and he didn't step into that place and say, A, I don't know, and I'm not there with you. Totally different experiment. Yes. I spent some time a while back with a CEO of a company I shall not name. And he had a factory. He had a lot of hourly employees building something. And he, as a big motivational thing one day, he closed down the factory. And they had this day of talking about the future of the company. And the theme of the whole thing was get on the bus, right?

And so he shut down the factory. They brought these yellow school buses in. They went from the factory in the morning out to this event space where they had the day-long, you know, pep rally, basically, for the future of the company. And he thought, big success. And, you know, he went home that night and told his wife how well it went and stuff like that. Next day, he still hasn't even reached his desk yet. And one of his young employees comes up and says, boss, that was a great day yesterday. You know, we're all we all support you. We're all on the bus. He says, but listen, and he's got this nervous look on his listen, boss.

I just wanted to say that, you know, at the end of the day, when we got all back, got back on the yellow school bus, and then you got into your Mercedes and drove away. He said, I just, it just didn't feel that good. And he's like, no, duh. And afterwards, it was dead obvious to him, but that idea had never crossed his mind. And so, yes, it helps a lot if you as the leader or you as the person proposing experiment, if you're prepared to go all in, you're prepared to do the experiment along with others. Of course, that, as you say, vulnerability is better. Yeah, and no doubt. And I think also part of the vulnerability is it seems like from those two examples is really it's you saying, I'm the leader, but I don't know. I don't know if

this is going to work or not. I legitimately don't know. And I value your input in the process, which gives people permission to do the same thing. Right. So, and that's really the good news for leaders is you don't have to know, right? Like people ask me all the time about what's ideal strategy for the future. And, you know, our strategy is we're going to do more experiments more quickly than others do. And we're going to learn from the experiments. We're going to listen to what happens to those experiments, right, so that we do actually capture the learning when things don't go wrong or when they do. And so that's a pretty good strategy if you're nimble enough to respond when you learn some things. We, in the history of the firm, we've had dozens of failures, but we move away from the failure.

We move toward the successes. If you take enough shots on goal, you can win. In the case of audio, is the culture that allows that deliberate from the beginning, or was that something that you grew into over time? Yes. So, you know, Jim Collins has the idea of built to last versus good to great. And so it is easier, I would be the first to acknowledge, it is easier to start from the beginning with these principles in mind. And we certainly did, right? Right. The idea of experimentation, the idea of, you know, what we would then call need finding, which is really now what we call design thinking, which is don't even always go straight into problem solving. Find a new problem.

You know, find the need that you want to address with your solutions. And so, yes, and we did. We had that from the beginning. So you brought up the term design thinking. And so for those not in the know about what. So you brought up the term design thinking. And so for those not in the know about what this is, deconstruct this a little bit. Sure. So design thinking is something that we've practiced for decades at IDEO. But I think the term has just emerged in the last 10 years or so.

And I believe we at least arrived at this term independently. I don't know if, you know, we're not claiming ownership on it, but we articulated the, you know, the word a decade or the expression a decade or so ago to describe the mindset that a designer uses in solving a problem, right? And the idea of design thinking is that it's a mindset that goes beyond, you know, a physical object, designing a product or service or something like that, that you can use design thinking to apply to really the most complex problems in the world, right? And so there are many elements of that, but I would say some key themes in design thinking approaches is, one, you start with empathy. You look at the humans

around you. And this is true in the business-to-business world as well as the business-to-consumer world. Also, by the way, applies in the nonprofit world. And so you look at what are the human needs we're trying to address? Who's got a problem with the status quo? Where do people have insecurity? Where do people get lost? What are the problems that maybe they have that they haven't even articulated yet? You know, you'd call those the latent needs, right? And so the one element is that starting with empathy. Another element is the one we were talking about, which is experimentation, the philosophy that says you learn by enlightened trial and error. And if we're going to learn by enlightened trial and error, we're going to do lots of experiments. And we're going to try to do those experiments as quickly and as cheaply as possible because we can't slow the whole process down for more experimentation.

We have to do it with a rapid cycle, right? So there's the empathy. There's the storytelling aspect, which is to wrap your idea, your data, your, you know, the message in a story. Because, and it took us a long time to figure this out, actually, but data doesn't speak for itself very well. You know, we were very technically based in the early origins of the firm. It was all engineers, you know, when I joined. And we thought that stories were what you use when you didn't have data, you know, otherwise known as bull, right?

But now we believe that since the data doesn't speak for itself, wrapping the data in the right story can carry your message forward. You get the story right, not only will people listen to you, people will retell your story, which is what you really want. You want your story, your message to go viral. And I love that. So the three big things that you talked about were empathy, experimentation, and story. And I know we can deconstruct it a little bit more, but I think those are three sort of big buckets to explore a little bit.

You talked a bit about the experimentation. Empathy is fascinating to me. So I've grown a few of my own small business, but I also spent a lot of time training as a copywriter. Right. And one of the things that you learn early on is you write to one person. Right. And you can't write to one person until you really get into their life and their head and everything about them. And it was funny.

There was a moment where, for me, I realized I stopped creating business plans and started writing copy. Right. Because I wanted to know before I did anything, can I really understand on a single individual level what's going on? Right. Yes. And it was a really powerful moment.

And what I realized when I started to become exposed to design thinking is that's sort of like part of the process of deepening into empathy. Right. And a place where this really comes in handy is for the big companies to try to serve everybody. You know, if you're the phone company, if you're, you know, whatever, you serve so much of humanity that you start to, it all becomes a blur. And, you know, our point of view is that, you know, you may serve a billion people and those billion people are made up of the groups, right? And so, you know, we're currently redesigning the voting system for the County of Los Angeles. I think it's the largest voting county or largest number of registered

voters or something in America. And it's everybody, right? But what we've tried to work on is the idea that everybody is these component parts. And let's think about the people who most need our help, you know, the people with limited abilities, the people with sight impairment, the people who have English as second language. And let's see if we can't design an experience that is great for them and in making it great for them is great for the others around them as well. Right. And so breaking this kind of universe of people down into component parts, really we found to be helpful to develop empathy. Our clients are all interested in big data, right? And big data, you know, that really informs decision making but you start to like lose track of the fact that these are humans underneath the data and so we have something called hybrid

insights which is taking the big data but then personifying it you know just taking a slice of the data and say you know what this is like this is like Rebecca let me tell you about Rebecca and Rebecca's not a stereotype you know she's not the you know double income no kids she's not a stereotype. You know, she's not the double income, no kids. She's not the single mom, whatever. You know, Rebecca's got a whole personality. And your customers or the constituents or whoever it is you care about, they have whole personalities. And so when you break them down into individual groups or, you know, ultimately it's individuals, then it's much easier for you as a decision maker to say, oh, I got to worry about Rebecca. Let's make something Rebecca would use.

It so brings the needs to life as opposed to, I got this segment of, you know, 48% of our people have never used this product before. I can't design for 48%, but I can design for Rebecca. Yeah. And, you know, and then there's a lot of Rebecca's. There's, you know, people that represent different elements. But so we think hybrid insights is a way to take the big data but humanize it. Yeah.

So let me ask you a question. I'm really curious about your approach to this then. So a question that comes to me fairly often is, you know, so you'll have a couple of different types of founders or entrepreneurs. Some are product-oriented. Some are service-oriented. You know, like I either want to build or I want to serve. And sometimes there's a crossover, but very often. And a lot of founders, a lot of early-stage people are really product-oriented. And they're in search of the avatar. They're in search of the best possible

Rebecca to build this on. And they look at their product. They look at their company, their brand, and they're like, well, this can fix everything for everybody. And then they'll look and, okay, drill it they're like, well, this can fix everything for everybody. And then they'll look and, you know, okay, drill it down. Like, okay, I have 100 people. How do I choose the one out of the universe of people that I know this could profoundly impact? If my best option is to start out by speaking to one, how do I figure that out? Yeah, it's not even so much that we're targeting one. How do I figure that out? Yeah, it's not even so much that we're targeting one. We're looking at a series of individuals trying to get inspiration. And so the experiment is,

really, it's not so much I'm designing for Rebecca, but I get an idea from Rebecca that I want to build into our next experiment and see if people besides Rebecca like it. You know, we did a product or a project several years ago at the Bank of America. And it was aimed at a specific target market. I think it was a baby boomer women. And we studied them. And we sat in their homes and we had them balance their checkbook. It was actually this group of people we were trying to learn from, you know, still using their paper checkbooks at the time. And we learned a lot from those baby boomer women. And we designed something with them in mind. But we didn't know it was going to be successful. But we, our client, Bank of America, put it out on the market. And the product was called Keep the Change. It was a way that you

use a B of A debit card. And every time you use a debit card, it would round up to the nearest dollar. And then what was left over would go in your savings account. And so it both, for the baby boomer women, it both gave them simplicity in their lives because now they have a bank statement that is all whole numbers, right, because it's rounded up. Right. And every time you use that card, you had this kind of heartwarming feeling. Every time I use this card, I am saving towards my retirement, right? And that turned out to really resonate with Baby More Women and about a million other people who signed up for it. But so we did get the

inspiration from them, but it was certainly our hope that getting it right for them would expand. You know, in the history of innovation, this is not a design from IDEO. Procter & Gamble, this is like 20 years ago, completely redesigned their liquid Tide bottle and they redesigned it for arthritic hands. You know, the elderly people were having trouble opening up that little tiny cap on the top and they made their cap about like four inches in diameter. It also, you know, serves as a measuring cup and stuff like that. But the inspiration for that was arthritic hands. And guess what?

Everybody liked that cap. They have never gone back. Everybody, you know, and then it's been copied as well. It's better for everybody. It's like, you know, the OXO Good Grips kind of thing. Right, and now that's almost like a hipster tool. Yeah, exactly. It is amazing.

I don't want to forget to circle back to sort of like that other really big piece, which is storytelling. It was interesting. A couple of years ago, I had the chance to sit down with a guy named Robert McKee, who teaches this legendary story. In fact, there was that movie about it. Exactly. What's he called again? It starts with an A with Nick Cage. Yes.

Anyway, and we got onto this topic of, you know, I was asking him. I said, you know, he's very well known in the fiction and in the film world. And his book is actually called Story, I think. Right, called Story. He's like the story guy. Yes. And I asked, I said, you know, have you done work with this in the context of companies? Yes.

And he said, yeah. And he said something which fascinated me, which was that the interesting thing is that if you get up on a stage or if you're in a room pitching an idea, you know, and you use story versus slides versus data, he's like, the thing with data is that somebody who comes in a defensive posture and doesn't want to accept the idea, they can sit there and they can go data point by data point in your presentation

and formulate the argument against it. If you come into the same room and you just tell a story, they don't have those data points. And somehow it sneaks under the radar. It's almost like not a fair fight at that point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you see it all the time in business. You'll go in and people want to talk about the feature set. Well, we've got X, we've got Y,

we've got Z, you know, and what we've seen and we've seen a lot of people say, let me tell you a story about a woman named Maria in Kansas City who, you know, was using our product, but then, you know, like decided that she didn't love us. And, you know, and it's like, and as you say, it's hard to argue with, you know, it's a, it's a us. You know, and it's like, and as you say, it's hard to argue with. You know, it's a factual story. You want to get it as accurate as possible. You want to frame it in a way that it influences behavior, right? And so we actually try to combine storytelling with behavioral economics,

you know, the social science of behavior change. It can be quite powerful. For business people, one of the problems with storytelling is they know too much. They want to tell you all the exceptions and all the details and the latest feature and stuff like that. Whereas if you can find a way to distill it down, it can be great. I didn't know Steve Jobs well during his lifetime, but my brother's quite close to him. And, you know, Brother David, who's the founder of IDEO. And Steve was, of course, masterful at this storytelling. And there's a, you know, you can probably think of a dozen stories yourself, stories about Steve's storytelling.

But one that comes to mind for me is back, if you can remember, before the original Apple iPod. This was, you know, before iTunes came out. There were these other, they were called MP3 players. Right, yeah. And there was one called the Rio. There was one, any other, a bunch of them. And they were all talking about compression rates and digital music and

all this kind of stuff. And it's like, do I need one of these? No, I don't think so. No. No, I don't. Not yet at least. And then Steve stood up that year, and this is many years ago, at the Apple Worldwide Development Conference, and he held up an iPod and he told basically a six-word story.

He said, you know what this is? He said, a thousand songs in your pocket. And suddenly it's like, yes, I need that. A thousand songs in my pocket. And me and everybody else, you know, in my neighborhood lined up at the Apple store to get a thousand songs in our pocket so it would be the soundtrack of our lives, right? And so sometimes the story doesn't have to be long.

You just have to figure out, it goes back to empathy. What is the story that's going to resonate with my audience, with the individual or the group that I'm speaking to right now, right? You get that story right, people will listen. And really, ideally, people retell the story. So we recently worked with just this wonderful, charismatic woman. Her name is Jane Park, and she's the CEO of a company called Julep. It's, among other things, it's women's nail polish, right?

And she's built her whole company on social networking. But if you think about it, if you're going to rely on social networking, as many companies do, right, you're asking your customers, your best customers, they call them mavens, your best customers to tell their friends, in this case their girlfriends, stories about you. Well, you want to do that, you better give them a story to tell. Right, exactly. Right? So Jane came to us and said, hey, you know, what can we do that, you know, that has a great story that we, you know, like something that our customers are really gonna want. And so we did, as we always, we start with empathy and we watch women polish their nails at home, right?

And it's so obvious afterwards, every woman in America will laugh when you say, well, yeah, everyone knows that, which is when you're using your dominant hand, it's very easy to put the nail on the other hand. But as soon as you switch to your non-dominant hand, it gets really hard. And that barrier alone sends some women to the salon, right, because that's really hard. And so then we experimented.

We made over 100 prototypes, different ways you could make that easier with a non-dominant hand. And eventually we discover this thing, which also is obvious after you discover it, which is all tools, I mean really all tools that require dexterity are long. Pencils are long, scalpels are long, whatever. And meanwhile, we got this little tiny dinky cap on a bottle, on the nail polish bottle, and you're holding that with just your two fingers between your thumb and your forefinger, this is not dexterous, right? And so we created, you know, with the help of the folks at Julep, this thing, it's called plie, and it's really long. And by the way, it articulates a little bit. I actually have one

of my briefcase, but I don't have it right here. And so that you can, with your non-dominant hand, you can hold it and rest it on, you know, the space between your thumb and your forefinger. Or you can turn it. It kind of twists and articulates. And you can use all of your fingers in a kind of a sideways motion. So first we say nail polish is harder with the non-dominant hand. And it's like everybody's with you on that. And then we talk about, you know, how tools require dexterity or long. And it's like that's an easy story to tell.

And so Jane and Julep tell it to their mavens. And then their mavens tell it to everybody they know. And next thing they know, this product is called Plié that kind of magnetically attaches to the top of all of their bottles. So it's second-order storytelling, right? It's creating a story. And we didn't create the story from scratch. You know, you have to figure out what works. The story has to have authenticity.

You create a story, you basically gift it to others so that they have the chance to tell that story again. Yeah, and it's beautiful. Are you familiar with Jonah Berger's work on Contagion? He's at Wharton, I think, actually. He basically analyzed something like thousands of the most emailed articles from the New York Times to try and find commonalities. And he came up with six different elements. Two of them tie so closely into what you're talking about. One is just story. People share stories like crazy. One of the sub-drivers, what he found, was that they share it because they want, it's about social currency. They want credit for being the person who found the cool story

or the cool thing behind the story. And they want, you know, it's like that gives them that sense of belonging and position in the tribe. Right, sure. Well, in fact, you know, at Dulip, they call them mavens. You know, that's what a maven is. It's the person you seek out, like, hey, I'm buying a new pair of slacks,

you know, like, what color is good this year? The person who knows the answer to that question has always been called a maven, right? And so they've just adopted that term to say, you're going to be the experts among your community. And so it is kind of a gift if you as a company or you as an individual can empower other people to play that role. That's great. And they will hopefully love you for it. Hopefully. And what occurs to me also, zooming the lens out,

and this is something the more I've sort of explored design thinking and looked at the process. And so part of my bigger exploration is how do you live a good life? And we'll kind of circle around to that at the process. And so part of my bigger exploration is how do you live a good life? And we'll kind of circle around to that at the end. But this process, when I look at the sort of like the overarching frame of design thinking, is fascinating for business, but universally applicable to pretty much life. Sure. Absolutely.

This is solving the things. It gives you a process to move you from one place from A to B in a really powerful way. Yeah, yeah. So I have these three books. And the first two are quite successful. But this third one is totally different. I mean, because people reach out to me and tell me about their life, right? And they're not afraid to use the word change my life and stuff like that.

So I have hundreds of these. But the one that stands out in my mind is I was in Iceland. I had the best-selling book in Iceland for a while last year. because if you go there, you know, it's a tiny country. It's easy. You know, if you put a little effort into it, you too could have the bestseller in Iceland for sure. Anyhow, we were there to launch the book and go out to dinner that night with this group of people, including the translator of the book. And I got talking about, you know, I gave like half a dozen examples of cool emails I've gotten from people, you know, in response to the book. And he says to the table at large, he says, yeah, yeah, that's fine. He said, but he says,

I know you've gotten a nice message from a lot of people. But he says, I don't think anyone in the world is going to get more value from this book than my 14-year-old son. And I said, really? I said, I find that hard to believe. I said, first of all, the book came out today. You're not saying your 14-year-old son has read it already, have you? No, no. He says, I read it. It's like, okay. I said, I hope you read it. He says, well, let me tell you my story, right? And his story was not about business or commerce or, you know, whatever. It was about life, right? He says, I, let me tell you my story, right? And his story was not about business or commerce or, you know, whatever. It was about life, right? He says, I'm halfway through your Creative Confidence book.

And my son comes to me and says, Dad, I'd really like to have a new computer. I'd like to have a MacBook Pro. And he says, I told my son, I'm sorry, we just can't afford a computer right now. And he said, that would have been the end of the conversation, except he says, I'm translating a book called Creative Confidence. So he said, I said to my son, let's sit down with this. Let's brainstorm a little bit. He says, let's try to answer the question, how might we make it so that you could earn your own money? You could buy your own computer. He says, we talked about a bunch of ideas, but his son said to him, hey, dad, there's that lawnmower

kind of thing in the basement. He said, maybe I could fix that up. And then I could go door to door and, you know, work in people's yards. And he said, again, he would have said no. His son's 14, didn't know anything about, you know, internal combustion engines and stuff like that. But he says, creative confidence. He said, so, he said, I said to my son, you know, just stay away from the, you know, the blade. I want you to do this safely, but you give it a try. Right? He doesn't think anything more about it.

You know, that's going to be the end of the conversation. But a few days later, he hears that motor spin to life in the basement. His son is somehow, he figures YouTube, he's not sure, figure out how to fix this thing. And he says, and then my son became a lawn mowing machine. Went from door to door to door. He said, your book just came out today. He said, but my son already has his computer, right? And so he tells this story to the whole table. And I thought, what a sweet story. But that wasn't the story. The story was the one, the follow-up. We're going our way out and there's a guy, I don't even know his name.

I'm sure I could look it up, but you know, we're getting up from the table in Reykjavik, Iceland. I'm thinking, okay, I'm never going to see this group of people again in the rest of my life, right? He comes over to my wife and I, and he says, you know, he said, I always read about those inspirational parents. But he said, just seemed too hard. He said, I never had the material. I never had the content for it. He says, I got the content now. He says, I'm going to be one of those parents, right?

And so it wasn't about business. It wasn't about commerce. It was about life. And I thought, wow, how great that I was able to help make that happen in his life. But how great also that I got the chance to hear that from him to share his story back with me. And so, yeah, as you say, it's really, I mean, at its best, it's about life. Yeah. And I, which is, I mean, the stories are beautiful. And it's, it also, it's so powerful in the context of the story that you tell about how the book actually even came

about, which, you know, really was, you know, the seed of, I guess, you know, like, it's a very scary time in your brother's life. Yeah. I was not walking around thinking that I had another book coming in, in my life. But what happened was in 2007, early near 2007, my brother got diagnosed with cancer, it was throat cancer was pretty serious. They gave him a 40% chance of surviving it, you know, it's a five year survival rate. And, and, you know, when your doctor gives you a 40% chance of surviving it. You know, it's a five-year survival rate. And, you know, when your doctor gives you a 40% chance of surviving, you don't even think about the 40, you think about the 60, right? You know, he had a less than 50% chance of surviving it.

And so we just lived in the present. I spent most of that year by my brother's side. And we, you know, had this kind of tacit agreement not to talk about the future. We're just going to live for now. Right. But then, you know, luckily, and with some super great doctoring at the Stanford Hospital, my brother went through the whole regime, you know, chemo and radiation and surgery. And toward the end of that year, he emerged, right? And, you know, here we are eight years later, and my brother's fine. But as he emerged from the cancer journey, we thought for the first time, like, hey, we could actually make plans. What do you want to do?

Right? And so we made two promises to each other. The first promise is that we would take a trip somewhere in the world together, because we actually hadn't, other than, you know, business trips, we hadn't done a leisure trip together ever. Well, not since we were 12 years old. So the first promise was we'd do a trip. But the second promise is we'd do some sort of project together, you know, basically an excuse to hang around together because we're not super good at just hanging out in general. And so that project, and he was like, what should we do? And I said, well, I know how to do a book. Should we do a book? Oh, what should the book be about? And so that was the genesis of this book about creative

confidence that is based both on our work at IDEO and on David's work at the D School at Stanford. Yeah, which is now rippled out. And it's a wonderful book, and we'll certainly link to that in the show notes. My book is so dog-eared and marked up that at some point I just stopped because I was like, it doesn't make sense to dog-ear every page in the book. How did that moment change? Let me not make any assumptions. Did moving through that period with David change the way that you made decisions moving forward? Sure. I mean, it definitely gets you perspective. I mean, you, you know, like you have this, you know, one, you have the sense that life is finite. Right. And wow, better, you know, better enjoy it. There was that Warren Zevon's famous quote, which is enjoy every sandwich. Right. Like the most mundane things. And you can, if you're conscious of it, you can do that. You can enjoy like this moment. And I think this very, very frequently, I would say many times a week, I think, how lucky am I to be right here right now, you know, doing this fun thing, right?

And so there's that. But then there's also the sense of, you know, you better have a purpose, right? Like if life is finite, what do you want to do? You know, my brother and I are both over 50, I'll leave it at that. So, you know, playing on the back nine of life, right? You know, if life is finite and, you know, your career, therefore, is finite too, what do you want to do with the time left? And so both of us really are on this journey and we're approaching it in slightly different ways of how might we nurture the creative confidence of the 75% of people on earth, apparently, who don't feel like they have a chance to live up to their creative best. We tapped into it. There's an Adobe survey called State of Create where they ask 5,000 people this question.

And only 25% said they have a chance to live up to their creative best. And it's like, okay, leaders, you know, influencers of the world, how are we going to lock the other 75%? Because that is an untapped resource, you know. we live in a world of scarce resources of all kinds, right? Including natural resources, including, you know, budget, you know, time, all that. So in that, in a resource constrained environment, really shame on us if we don't take advantage or tap into this untapped resource of the creative potential of people around us. So is that really your burning question these days? That's very high on my list, right? And so that drove the book.

I speak a lot about the book. I was in 13 countries last year talking about creative confidence, try to mentor people where I can in different, you know, association with a few academic programs and things like that. And so, yeah, seems a worthy goal. So, yeah. It's on the one hand, it's so powerful. And I think that, you know, on the other hand, it's really, it's almost sad to think that, you know, such a vast percentage of the population feels so incapable of tapping what they feel, you know, they're capable of. Right. And when you talk to them, you know, sometimes it's a constraint.

You know, it's like, well, my boss doesn't want to hear that from me. Right. And, you know, so sometimes it's not, they don't feel like it's in them. They feel like it's situational. Right. And so I get to speak to those bosses and feel like it's in them. They feel like it's situational. And so I get to speak to those bosses and I say, hey, look, tap into this. We're not saying all their ideas are good, by the way. We want to tap into that credibility so that we can bring those ideas out and then judge them or and then build on them and then prototype them.

So it's not like if all of our employees told us all of their ideas every day, we're going to implement them all. We're not. But, you know, it gets back to that old Linus Pauling quote, you know, won the Nobel Prize twice. And he said, if you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas. And I think it's fair to say that across the board in society, we could use some good ideas. And therefore, we could use, you know, some fresh ideas on which to draw. Yeah. I'm reminded of a study that came out of UPenn, I want to say about five years ago, that looked at some large enterprises. And they were curious about, you know, innovation-driven enterprises.

They were curious about whether ideas generated by teams that were getting killed by the team leader were actually good ideas. Yes. And what they found was that when they sort of like, so they would analyze it, they would let the process happen. Then they would have a group of five independent people analyze the true value of the creative. And what they found was that a huge percentage of really good ideas that were being called for by the team leader, the team leader would then say they, too risky or not good enough, and they would kill them. And they start to ask questions.

And the thing that was really distressing was the team leader didn't even know really that they were doing something, that they were killing all the good ideas that they were asking for. So they're trying to figure out the psychology of it. And their best guess was that in acknowledging the validity

of a really good, creative, innovative idea, which would necessarily put you into a place of uncertainty, you basically adopt it as your own. So you allocate resource towards it. And a lot of leaders had sort of come to a place where you feel comfortable. And you don't want to step back into the abyss on behalf of somebody else's ideas, let alone your own. So you just pretend that it's not a good idea. So you don't have to deal with it. Right. Well, and I really encourage

leaders to get, you know, what they call a reverse mentor, somebody, you know, younger than you that sees, you know, gets access to new trends that are emerging that might not, if you're a senior leader, you might not see. And the reason I do that is there's a danger that the new idea, right? So let's say that the idea called digital photography inside of Kodak in the year 1990, right? The new idea is in fact a good idea for the world, even for the company, but maybe not a good idea for the leader who's playing gatekeeper on good ideas, right? And so if you're that leader, you've got to keep yourself really well informed of things happening in the world. And I do that.

I have two reverse mentors, but I encourage people to do it. And I've had lots of emails from people who say they do it. And if you are responsible for that enterprise, you better have some form of marketplace for ideas, you know, using like an open innovation platform. We have our own for the world. We call it OpenIDEO. But then inside of IDEO, we have an open innovation platform just to keep circulating ideas around so that, you know, if you're in a leadership position, you don't just talk to the people sitting next to you. You know, we're a global enterprise.

We're spread all over the world. I want the smart young employee in Munich or Shanghai to be able to have their idea, you know, come across our desk too, right? And so we do that with an open innovation platform. We'll put a question out across the company. It's like, well, what do you think? Yeah. Right? And so you have to kind of systematically seek those out to get away from the bias of the individual. Yeah.

And again, my mind zooms the lens out. I'm thinking, great concept for business and your career, your vocation, but great concept for life, too. I mean, create this just on your own outside to help you make those really powerful decisions. We all want to be refreshed and on top of things and, you know, have some, you know, have some like currency in the moment. And so, I mean, there's a million ways to do that. But one way that turns out to be really effective is to have somebody that you systematically seek out, you know, the same person over and over again. I've been working with one of my reverse mentors for more than a decade, and they just make me smarter. You know, they, you know, point out things like, hey, Tommy should really look into that.

And conversely, they'll say, I don't think you need to worry about that one. Right, which that's really valuable, releasing me from the obligation of trying to figure out, you know, a new app or something. Like, no, I don't think that one's for you. That's great. That's just as useful as the,

you better figure out Twitter, you know, or whatever the, you know, whatever the thing that they want me to focus on. Yeah, no, I love that. Very useful. So I want to be really respectful of your time. So let's come full circle. Okay. The name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what does, a part of it is about appreciation. A part of it is about kind of enjoying what's been said in front of you, whether it has to do with great wealth or great interest or whatever. And, you know, just appreciating where you are now, because I see,

well, I know some really wealthy people in Silicon Valley who don't seem to appreciate it. And then another is to fall out of this, the kind of comparative thing, right? So in creative confidence, you know, some people say, well, you know, I could never be Picasso or Mozart. It's like, never mind Picasso, never mind Mozart, right? Could you paint at a level that, or, you know, express your art in a way that would be satisfying to you and people around you? Yes, you could. You'd have to practice a little bit, right? But so to, you know, embrace the ability to express oneself without worrying about, you know, that there's going to be somebody better.

Like, hey, you know, unless you win the Olympic gold medal this year, there's always somebody better than you, and that's okay. Right? And so I think some of that is just kind of maintaining your perspective on things. And then, you know, a part of how I feel like I've contributed to a good life is just that kind of curiosity and thirst for learning, is that kind of renewal that happens when you are open to the new learning. I think in some people's lives, they get to a certain point, as you say, in their career or just at an age or something, it's like, where they kind of implicitly say, I know all I ever need to know. And it's like, no, you don't, right? And this is how I think if you stay curious,

it also keeps your mind sharp. My dad is 90 years old. He's about to turn think if you stay curious, you're, you know, it also keeps your mind sharp. You know, my dad is 90 years old. He's about to turn 91. Incredibly curious. You give him a magazine and he will look at every page. We recently went in Forbes magazine in Japan. And I swear to God, my dad, who doesn't speak a word of, you know, any language other than English, flipped through every page of this magazine exclusively in Japanese

and ask us about a hundred questions. Who's this in this picture? What's that? You know, just like maintaining that curiosity, really important to, you know, maintaining a good life, you know, into your older age. We have a 90-year-old designer at IDEO. We're really interested in how you maintain that, you know, a life, you know, as you, as you progress it through the later chapters of life too. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you. Okay. Great.

Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. You know, if you've actually stayed till this point in the conversation, I'm guessing there's a pretty good bet that you've gotten something out of this episode, some nugget, some idea. If that is right and you feel like sharing, then by all means, go ahead. We love when you share these conversations and get the word out. And if you wouldn't mind, I would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds, jump onto iTunes or use your app, and just give us a quick rating or review. When you do that, it helps get the word out,

helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here, and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

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