How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! IDEO: David Kelley

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

It wasn’t unusual for David Kelley to take calls from Steve Jobs in the middle of the night. This came with the territory, as David worked on designing dozens of products for Apple over the years – including their first computer mouse back in 1980. Since then, David and his firm, IDEO, have helped all sorts of companies design new products. David also led the founding of Stanford’s d.school, where students learn to use design principles to solve complex problems.This week on How I Built This Lab, David shares stories from some of the most notable projects of his career. He discusses how diverse perspectives and backgrounds help teams generate new ideas, and explains how organizations can use design thinking to transform culture and foster innovation.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with a place with a all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in the late 1970s, David Kelly founded a product design firm. He helped Steve Jobs design the first Apple computer mouse

and eventually David would merge his design firm with two others to create IDEO. IDEO went on to design thousands of products, everything from Nerf footballs that always fly in a spiral to toothbrushes with squishy handles to the interface inside the Ford F-150. But today, IDEO mainly helps companies design their culture and establish a design forward mindset to trigger innovation. David Kelly isn't just the founder of IDEO, but also the founder of the design school at Stanford. And to say he's a legendary figure in the world of design is almost an understatement. His work has influenced everything from how designers think about user experience to how companies think about hierarchy. And his first job out of college, as an engineer at Boeing in the early 1970s, working on a particularly important part of Boeing's 747 aircraft.

I was in what's called the Passenger payloads group. That means the interior. And, you know, you're a big company. You break it down even further. So I'm in lights and signs. Well, the sign that I responsible for happens to be one we all know well, which was a lavatory occupied sign. Lavatory occupied.

You helped design that sign? Yeah. It's a milestone in aviation history. I was just on an airplane. I just flew back from France to the U.S., and thankfully, there was that lavatory occupied sign. So you were part of that group that, like, you know, you switch that knob and then boom. Boom. That sign lights up.

Yeah, you bet you. Important. How long did it take to design the laboratory occupied sign? You know, it was a long time. Years would be the answer to the question, really, but that's because of the variation in anything. You know, if you notice it's not exactly the same on each airplane. And so that's because the lavatory is in a different place and the door opens on a different side or all that stuff. So you spend all your time doing variations of the original design, right?

So every time they move a seat on the plane, the drawings for that plane has to be completely redone. This is a big drawing, right? The planes are huge. Anyway, so they move a seat back. Well, then the Boeing engineers have to read this. that whole planes. It's a lot of work. So it's a very detail-oriented job. You know, not the kind of job for a kid coming out of a Carnegie Mellon thinking he's going to be designing airplanes, right? Yeah. But still, I mean, pretty important part of the passenger experience, knowing when the lavatory is

occupied or free. You know, you have this really promising career as an engineer at Boeing working on the lavatory sign. It's kind of a cool project. And this would have been your life as an engineer, working for big companies. But there was a decision you made in the late 70s to go to Stanford, to go back to school and to study product design, which was really, I guess, it was a turning point for you. This was a huge pivotal change in your career trajectory. Why did you make that decision? Oh, man, that's an understatement. What a change for me. So I'm an engineer, and I don't really know what's going to happen. Am I just going to be in corporate America for the rest of my life and, you know, use my big personality to move up through management. Or, you know,

is that what I'm going to do? But a friend in a car pool convinced me to go to Stanford. He said, you are perfect for the Stanford career. And he kept bugging me. My grades weren't that good. So I didn't know that I could get into Stanford. So anyway, he convinced me to apply to Stanford. And I have to tell you, since that moment, I feel like I'm the luckiest guy on Earth. You know, I'm doing, it sounds weird, but I'm doing exactly what I was put on Earth to do, which is this brand of design that Stanford taught then and that I continue to teach now around being sensitive to humans and caring about business and caring about technology all at the same time. Yeah. So you get your degree, your master's degree, at Stanford, and you decide to basically

create a design firm, which originally was called David Kelly Design. later become IDO. But help me understand what it was you were going to do. You were going to design physical products, help people design physical products. That was the business initially. Yes. Well, the Stanford program was called product design, for one thing. But at that time, design was a lot about aesthetics. You know, people had all kinds of ideas about when you said the word design, they were thinking, you know, were you a fashion designer or, you know. And so we had this kind of worldview of design as an aesthetic thing. And still a big part of design aesthetics, but that was what people thought that only was that. And so the Stanford program was more about

creativity and more about understanding people and what's meaningful to them. But it was still all around products. That's really what it was all about. So we were lucky, you know, we got early involved in Apple and did the first mouse for them and many other products. Yeah, so let me Let me ask you about that because that's kind of a, not kind of, it turned into a huge deal. 1980, I think, was when you first started to work with Steve Jobs and you would go on to design the first mouse for Apple, which Apple was not a player in 1980. So how did you meet him? Did he come to you?

There was a guy in the Stanford program before me who ended up at Apple. It's a guy named Jerry Manick. And Jerry was the only design person in the company, which it seems hard to imagine. Apple now. Yeah. But anyway, sometime in 79, he came and found me and said, I got this big client I can't keep up with. Would you come and down help me?

Because he had the same point of view about design methodology that he had learned at Stanford, that I had learned at Stanford about the way you go about, you know, making prototypes and understanding people and, you know, being comfortable in a place of not knowing where you're going, which is hard to do. So I went down with him and met Steve. and we ended up doing it for like 50 products for him and Steve became a close friend and you know introduced me to my wife and couldn't have been closer to him it was really that initial connection to Apple for IDEO was called David Kelly designed the time that drove us right

you know normally if you're a small company you have a problem with not having enough work or having too much work because you're so small but we had so many projects from Apple that we really kept going so that that must have been a big turning point because it turns out that that Apple mouse became an iconic product, and there you were. You had designed it. Yeah, and everybody wanted whoever designed the Apple stuff, not just the mouse, but the other things we did for them. And so we ended up doing the first laptop and the first portable defibrillator. And so it was a great time because you had this new knowledge about what would make people fans of your products. Yeah. I want to talk to you about Steve Jobs as a case study for a moment because this was still early days in the David Kelly March to where you are today. And Steve Jobs was also a design guy, right? I mean, he was not an engineer. He was not a coder, a programmer. His genius was marketing. And also he had a great eye, right? He knew what he liked and he knew what he didn't like. But he wasn't sitting there like at an architect's table with drafts of buildings. He knew what he liked. And he actually. actually knew how to sell it. So when you, what do you remember about those early days designing that mouse? Would he call you and say, no, I don't like that or I need to be like this? Or what,

was he already that intense at that time? You bet you. Both of us were single and I'd get a call three o'clock in the morning and he'd say to me, you know, I think those screws on the inside should be cad plated rather than copper plated. I mean, he's very intense. But I have to say, everyone would tell you who was a designer of any kind that in their career they did their best work for Steve. He was the world's best client because he cared so much. I mean, most of the time you're delivering something, a prototype or a product, and everybody's excited about the thing they're doing, but they're not so sensitive to the kind of nuance that we've just been wrestling with. And so it was really fulfilling to have somebody who cares.

to the level. He might have cared that much about the software and the hardware and the everything else, but certainly with respect to the design. And sometimes, you know, it wasn't that fun that he didn't like what you did, but he cared so much. And you went back and iterated and did it better. And you and he both knew it was better by the time that we were done with the product and ready for release. That's a nicest way of saying he was a pain in the ass, which you just said. It was a nicest way of saying that. How did he know? He was right. This is interesting because you are a designer.

You would study design. You would go on to design this mouse with him. How did he know when he was right and when you were right? He was a pain in the ass, yes. But, I mean, he was an exceptional human. And he had a sixth sense of what people really wanted. So he would do things like, you know, we don't need a disc drive in this product or we don't need a fan in this product. And he got those from really understanding people.

And we didn't have to do as much work at digging deep because Steve had a sense of it. And he turned out to be right so often that we were more than willing to follow him. But in 2007, the iPhone was announced. And I had cancer. I had throat cancer at the time. And I was home. Yeah. And Steve showed up on that day and gave me my own iPhone.

Wow. You know, that's not the kind of person that you want to call a pain in the ass, you know. Only in the best, most loving kind of way. Yes, absolutely. Right. Yes. You know, I get a bit emotional about it. Some days you came home thinking he had just praised you and you felt like a million bucks.

Yeah. And sometimes he had told you that was terrible, you know, I'm not paying you for that work. you know, go back and do better, and you felt terrible. But you always felt great in the end. Yeah. I'm curious about, I mean, this kind of leads me to this question about design approach. And I ask about this because I'm just, I love this. And anyone listening should just do a web search for the, I think, Enorme telephone or Enorme

E-N-O-R-M-E. Enorme. Enorme. This is a telephone that is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York because it is so beautiful and iconic. And there's a telephone that you designed. And it is, it's like a Mondrian painting. I wish I had that phone.

You can't get them anymore. Tell me about designing this phone. First, I have a few in my garage. Oh, good. Can you send me one? Sure, sure, sure. Okay, great. They probably don't plug in.

But anyway, I had this friend named Etri Satsas, who was a famous Italian architect. And if you were a designer, you were always in Italy and in love with Italian design. And that's just the way it was in those days. I mean, you look at the cars from that era, for instance. But anyway, Etteri and I both had our own little practices like this. You know, I had David Kelly design, and he had Satsatsatsosciati. And we're thinking, you know, we're not making very much money. We're just charging people a little bit.

So let's do our own products. And so that's what it was. There's a joint venture between Etterre and I. And we just said, you know, Italian design, California technology. How can you go wrong? Yeah. But neither of us were much of a business. business person. And so we designed his phone and had them produced. But it just as beautiful as it was,

it appealed to designers. And so it sold the designers, but it wasn't functional enough to be a big hit because AT&T was given away phones. Had about the same feature set as this. So it was on the cover of every magazine. And I now still have two cards, Lifetime membership to MoMA, New York. Wow. Because, did you know that? That's interesting story. If you have something in the permanent collection, You get a lifetime card. Lifetime card. I'm going to New York with you next time.

Absolutely. No, I'm going to New York with free admission. Absolutely. But anyways, we did the wrong product, but it was blast to work with actory and to come up with a product that was so well received by the design world, basically. And sometimes that's what it's about. It's about just pushing the boundaries. You would eventually and did work on many practical. products that people use and eventually David Kelly Design became IDEO. You merged with two friends,

Bill Mogeridge and Mike Nuttall in the early 90s, and that became IDEO. And for people who aren't familiar with IDEO, it is my description of it would be a collection of the smartest, quirkiest, weirdest people that you could just bring into a room. Like you hired, and I think to this day it still does, but you hired psychologists, biologists, people who dropped out of medical, marketing experts, MBAs, engineers, anthropologists, and you would basically bring them into IDEO and say, you know, this company needs to figure out a design for a new toothbrush. Let's figure it out. The main thing we did was we make ideas tangible, right?

So you're a company and you're thinking you might want to, you know, to do a new toothbrush, as you say. What are the possibilities and what would make a toothbrush better? What's the new to the world idea around the toothbrush? Well, if you want to do that, you have to have a whole bunch of different kinds of people. It says a lot for diversity of all kinds of things, thought, experience. And so by bringing those kind of people in, we'd come up with new to the world ideas in a routine way. It's hard to say innovation in a routine way, but that's the way it felt.

I mean, you literally did, IDEO did literally invent the squishy handle on the toothbrush. that we all are familiar with today. If we don't use an electric, if you use the regular, long time ago. Right? That was, you guys designed that.

That squishy part on the bottom, on the handle of the toothbrush. And I'm not trying to be arrogant, but thousands and thousands of other things. You have four or five hundred projects going in a year. You know, you work across all kinds of different domains and industries. And in some ways,

that's what makes you better. One of the tools that a designer has is that, that they have had a broad experience. And you can apply something that seems pretty straightforward as a methodology and doing things in one industry and bring it to another industry and look like a genius. And all you're doing is doing it the way that other people do it. We have to take a very short break, but we'll be right back with David Kelly, the founder of IDO and Stanford's Design School.

You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. and I'm talking with David Kelly, founder of IDEO, the design firm known for hundreds, if not thousands of the products you interact with every single day. So, David, I want to ask you about there was a, and anybody listening to this should check it out. There's a nightline segment. It was a long segment. It was like 20 minute long segment that was broadcast in 1999 about IDEO. And basically, nightline came to IDEO and said to you guys, hey, we want you to design a better shopping cart.

Here's your five-day project. We're just going to follow you in the design thinking sprint. And if you watch it, it's amazing because this is the late 90s. And the things you were doing are very common today in companies, particularly creative companies. But they were radical. It was like no hierarchy. Project managers, right, for example, that would run small teams, design sprints where people would gather around and just throw out a bunch of ideas. And then like post-pads on the wall and like sketches.

and then people would put little post-ed pads on different sketches that they thought would work, and then they would go to the next iteration. And how did you begin operating that way? I mean, did it just kind of evolve that way, or was it a very kind of prescribed, well-thought-out process for how you wanted people in your team to think about design? Well, one of the basis of where we start is that we believe that everybody's wildly creative. So we involve everybody. I mean, sometimes the receptionist would come up. with the best ideas. So if you believe that the boss is going to have the best ideas, I mean,

if you look at a lot of companies and measure what's going on, the boss is speaking more often than anybody else. We try to get everybody to be in an equal plane with respect to innovation. And so in there came the notion of what a guy named Bob McKim called need finding, which was the human-centered design part where you try to understand what people care about. But as far as in the actual process, it really was a place of valuing everybody. And so there was no hierarchy. I mean, I'm actually embarrassed when you watch that thing. I speak out pretty strongly against, you know, corporate America's approach to this. I'm a little, I'm a little embarrassing. But it's great because, you know, you were basically setting the template for what would eventually happen, which is today, you know, the hierarchy really is flat in much of corporate America.

And that was a radical idea in the 90s. You had people just out of college who were asserting their positions or viewpoints or ideas. And the most senior people were debating them and then going back and forth. And that was very different. I mean, when I started in the workforce in the mid-90s, you kind of, as a young person, you kept quiet. That was the way to behave. Well, yes, if you look at companies today that were innovative in that way, at least companies that were our clients in that way, it is a testament to the fact I believe that a mindset around design or what we call design thinking inherently allows you to come up with ideas and more ideas. It doesn't mean that you're going to be great at picking which the right ones are. But design makes these ideas tangible. When we were building things, we were building prototypes and showing them. to people and having the people who were the experts tell us what was wrong with them,

then we'd go back in our little shop and improve upon it, right? And so that notion of iterative prototyping, making something tangible and then improving it and improving it is really what was going on there, which would achieve real change. So so often we found that being in a place of not knowing is a good place to be. until you get to the big idea. Patience to wait for the big idea is just not inherent. Well, it's inherent in the design kind of way of being, but it's not inherent in corporate America because you look smart if you have the answer early on.

Yeah. Right. So, David, let me ask you about the process of how you kind of solved problems for clients. So you have a client, and they come to you and they say, we want to design a new, let's say, traveler coffee mug. Help us understand how you would organize the teams to tackle that problem. You would assign what, like five people or ten people on that project, a project manager, and then what? Yeah, so at the beginning of a project, you have to kind of understand the roles that are going to be played. I mean, we design alongside of the client and alongside of the potential

user. It's not like IDEO comes up with a big idea and then kind of jams it down your throat or expects that it's going to be the right thing the first time. So we work with the internal people, the manufacturing people, but the team is made up of people that are going to make the whole thing tangible, the people who can build the prototypes, the people who can take it to manufacture, the people who can be really insightful about showing ideas for the prototype to many different people and many different kinds of people, and from that can glean what's meaningful to them.

Like in the start, I don't want to put my two cents on it. What's the most important thing? Maybe keeping the thing warm is the most important thing in a coffee mug and maybe that it fits somewhere. Or maybe that I can rinse it out and use it for something else later in the day. Or, you know, I got no idea what's going to be the big idea that we're going to come up with. And so you need a diverse team of people who can both get to the place of a real inner. and the people who can make it tangible and manufacturable and real. But even things like you mentioned, lots of things you design and of course are just mentioning tiny number of them. But then I don't know if it's a Nerf brand, but a Nerf like football that you have wings on it so that it would always throw a spiral. Yeah, that's a funny thing. So we started out, it was inspired by, you know, Charlie Brown, how you know how Lucy would

take the football away when Charlie Brown tried to kick it, right? And so what we were trying to design was a stand, so you didn't need Lucy holding it for Nerf football. A stand that you could kick it, but it wouldn't get in the way of the flight of the ball, right? So in the process of trying to design that, we came up with something better, which was a way to make the ball always spiral. And so it really happens a lot in design where you think you're working on one thing. But the real innovation is adjacent to that. and you pivot to the place where the real innovation is. And that's what happened in this case, and it has happened a hundred times.

You know, now we had a football that you always throw a spiral, which is a hell of a bigger deal than a stand. Yeah. So I'm wondering about something. I've seen you describe the designer's mindset as one that embraces empathy and optimism and iteration and creativity and ambiguity. Now, on this show, and how I built this, we talk about the entrepreneur's mindset, because I think applies to anybody, no matter what they're doing, whether they're starting a business or whether they work inside of a larger company. But the idea that you can be entrepreneurial at any stage, right, where whatever you do is crucial, right, because that's what generates ideas. Is design thinking based on your understanding of it and how you define it? Is that a framework that anybody can adopt? I think so. I think, you know, it's synonymous with being a good entrepreneur. You know, I have to say I'm overly taken by. this, but I really do think that it's just taking a human-centered approach to innovation

works on all cases. I mean, think about failures and successes of entrepreneurs have a lot to do with did they really have a deep understanding of the user and of the business and of the technology. I mean, all those things require insight, a deeper understanding than the next guy. Otherwise, you don't have a product that's competitive. Yeah. How do you, I mean, you've said, that you believe that everybody is creative. And I agree with you on that.

That creativity isn't some like magical thing that you're touched by the hand of the gods or whatever that only some people have. I agree with you that everybody can access it. But how? How do you believe that people can access creativity? It's really interesting that the world has tried to put people in those categories. Ad agencies in particular have like a creative group and an administrative group, you know, which I think does us a. service. And so what we tend to do, which we try to convince companies to do,

the management of companies and ourselves, is to convince people that they have that inherent creativity is what we call guided mastery. If you can take the people in your group and lead them through a series of small successes, that's the only way we've seen it happen so that people who doubt their creativity or the team in general has some small successes. You just set it up that way. It's easy to do. And they start to say, oh, my God, my team is creative or, oh, I am creative. And you just see such a transformation where they just have more stick-tuitiveness. They work harder. Everything seems to happen. Now, the best thing that can happen, of course, is if senior management buys into this. So we do a lot of leadership

transformation projects in order to get people to the point that they'll allow this kind of guided mastery stuff to happen. But it's just the way it's done, as all I can say, is letting them feel what it feels like to be a little bit successful. And then you keep going. And eventually, you know, people get to the point where they think of themselves creative and then they build a muscle that is a tool and a creative muscle. And then they use that for the rest of their career. It's amazing to watch. Yeah, I mean, I mean, say you are a company now and you want to encourage innovative thinking, right? Let's your Procter & Gamble, okay? And Procter Gamble does a lot of innovative stuff, right? But there are products that are created by these scrappy startups that will go on to, you know, kill them,

kill them, right? And so you're Procter & Gamble and you say, or you're Marriott and you say, you know, we don't want another Airbnb to come up. We want to, we want to be the innovators. But you've got a massive company. You've got thousands of employees and there's bureaucracy and there's HR and there's all kinds of, you know, just levels and layers of processes. But you've got a leader and they really want to cut through that. It strikes me that part of that is people need permission to fail. So how do you help companies develop a culture where they do allow people to spend a lot of time on something that may not actually ever see the light of day. You're absolutely right. That's a real insight in what's going on in our lives every day as we

try to engage with companies. And the real answer is that you just have to have cultural change. And our way of doing that is to first try to get as much leadership buy-in as possible, but then just start doing tangible things. But you have to have a place where people feel like when they walk across the threshold, they can act differently. So how do you make it feel like you're allowed to be a little different? And so these are the kind of projects, these strategy projects or whatever you want to call them, you allow people to, you know, experiment with those and you end up with some kind of prototype, whether it's a service or a system.

And it's just intoxicating on some level that this thing could exist in the world. But, you know, it makes you feel positive about the future when you see somebody paint that picture in a certain way. And so we win people over by making them excited about the future with our ideas. And then they want to be a part of the team. And pretty soon people say, oh, how did that group do that so fast? I want to be a part of that group. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, more with IDEO founder and designer David.

Kelly, you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is David Kelly. He's the founder of IDEO, the design firm, responsible for many of the most innovative products there are in the world today. He's also the founder of Stanford's Design School. So, David, today IDEO doesn't design products so much as it helps companies design things like culture and strategy and way of working. how does a mission-focused organization, let's say a nonprofit, that advocates for, you know, the protection of the environment, for example, how do they make the space to think in an innovative way when so much of their time and effort has to be focused on mission? You know, it's a particular challenge in nonprofits because nonprofits are usually thinly staffed.

They are, you know, people that are not highly paid. They have to fulfill this mission. and that is their North Star, but they also have to be innovative and creative in the way they think about things. So how do you sort of counsel leaders to create the space and time to just do this, even when you're not accomplishing the main goal or the mission? Yeah, it's a good point. This is something about getting somebody enthusiastic about an idea. And so it doesn't take a lot of space or a lot of resources. Another way to look at it is they have a serious task to do.

If we can come in and generate a little fun around coming up with new ideas, they respond very well to that. Yeah. I've seen it happen so many times that even though they have a serious mission, if you can get a bunch of really inspiring people together, them and from our side, and come up with some pretty interesting ideas that could result in improvement or an exciting project that they could do, you know, they'll find a way, they'll find the time that build that small idea into something big and we'll help them. I mean, maybe that's why you need a consultant some of the time.

Yeah. So, David, I want to ask you about what is a typical, like, challenge or pain point that a company comes to you with and says, hey, we're stuck, help us fix it. What is that pain point a problem that you find more often than others? You know, you give me a chance to talk about my favorites. But one of the best examples, I think, to answer your question is a company in Peru called InterCorp. And InterCorp is run by a really lovely man named Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who's very, you know, he's a very successful businessman. And early on, in working with him, in order to transform his company, which he asked us to do, that was his ask, was to make him a more innovative company. We built a thing called La Victoria Labs, which was his people,

and our people together in a facility in Peru. And in there, Carlos and them came up with a notion to make Peru the very best place in Latin America to raise a family. So if you can get to the point where you've got an innovation engine and you've got people who who care and you have a driving force like, I want to make this country the best place in Latin America or a family, then the projects just kind of fall out of that, right? So the one that I'm most involved with is the school system. So Peru, sadly, is consistently rated one of the worst educational systems in the world, unfortunately. And so Carlos gave us and this innovation facility that we built together, staffed by both of us,

to design a new school system. And so we designed every aspect of the school system, the curriculum, the physical buildings, the business models. And I'm happy to say today, you know, we have 63 schools up and running, 51,000 students, and, you know, 99% of those kids end up going to higher education. But for me, it's more personal because when we started this, we didn't know we were doing it all. And we built this school system, which is just beautiful. Now, it's been 10 years, and we're now to the point where people are graduating from that school system in Peru and getting admitted to Stanford. Wow. It's amazing.

And so that just feels so good to have those kids in my office hours and talking to them about their experience at Innova schools, which is what this is called. So, David, is the process that you recommend, right, this sort of design thinking process, about consensus or not? No, it's not about consensus. It's about how excited you can get to people, what we call the center persona, what's going to be meaningful to them? So the boss can say, this is the right way to go,

and I can say this is the right way to go, and I do can say this is the way to go. But it's pretty clear when you start going out and showing the vision that you have for the future with the people that you've been, hopefully been working with them all along, that you can see that that's really what's resonating with them. So, you know, the process is not linear. It's just really a set of tools. People get enthusiastic, you know. Yeah. David,

how important is conflict to designing a better process or a better product or a better culture? Does conflict have to be part of that process? Yeah, I'm afraid it does. I mean, it's not, I wouldn't call it conflict, but a meritocracy of, critiquing each other, meaning that when I say, I think that this idea doesn't work because of this and this and this, the person receiving that critique has to think, oh, he cares about me, that's why he's saying that, rather than to be mad that I'm saying their idea is bad. So there's a way to do constructive critique in a meritocracy kind of organization, but the conflict has to be there. I mean, if the conflict's not there, you're not working at the edge. We're working at the

edge of what's going to be the best possible solution to things. And just can't come up with that off the top of one person's head. There has to be a bunch of different brains and minds and diverse thinkers working on that. And so by definition, they're going to butt heads. They're going to have some conflict. But it's more a question of, does the conflict, feel like it's on the direction of having the best possible outcome, or is it just a personal thing? You're actually in conflict with the person, not in conflict with their ideas. So as long as it's about idea meritocracy, then conflict is helpful, useful, and inevitable. If design thinking is about things like empathy and observation and, you know, optimism and

and creativity and collaboration. Does that still apply to the future of design thinking? I mean, the workplace is changing so much today. Younger people are, you know, obviously entering the workforce now and have a different view of work. They don't think of work in the same way. In many cases, work is what you do to earn money so you can live your life, which is a much more European way of thinking about life. And we're seeing more and more of that, particularly among Gen Ziers and so on.

So is this idea of creating a design mindset and building a culture around the design mindset, does that still apply now? When you sort of see the corporate landscape today, are you thinking that maybe the future of design, design thinking will be different? I always think it will be different. We're always evolving. But, you know, I spent my life hanging around 20-year-olds, young people at Stanford. And, you know, they are different. I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the future, mostly because young people care so much about social practice and doing social good that by the time those people are in charge of the world,

I'm very excited about it. But the world's never been more polarized or challenging and complex. And so, yes, the future needs to be designed in the way I look at it. And so I do see it as one of the things that can really contribute to all this difficulty and complexity that we see out there. And design is just optimistic. I mean, if you're a designer and if you were not optimistic, you wouldn't bother making the next thing because the world was going to end or whatever. But in my students, I see that having the tools and the capabilities to come up with

this possible solutions to complex problems. we're trying to give them those tools, you know, and so I see my role as building capabilities in giving young people tools that they can use on these very complex problems. Yeah. David, as you know, many people listen to this show have their small startups and some big startups. But, you know, I think of like somebody who's got an Etsy store or a little brick-and-mortar business or somebody who's making something in a shared, you know, kitchen and selling at a farmer's market. But that's a lot of people listen to how I built this. And if somebody's listening and thinking, all right, how do I become a design thinker? How do I become that? How do I

apply that to what I do? What's your advice? Well, if you want to change from where you are, or you want to improve your situation, or you want to come up with a bigger idea, then I really believe you have to bring in more brains, more thoughts. The problem is the isolation of not having a person who has had a different experience or from a different country are a different culture. And so the notion of getting more diverse ideas, you talk to a bunch of people who are quite different than you, they're going to have ideas that you would have never dreamed of

because of their different experience. And so it's the diverse thinking. It's the, you know where it is? It's really being positive that I can adopt a mindset that will spawn new ideas and new innovations. That's David Kelly. founder of IDO and Stanford's Design School. David Kelly, thanks so much for joining me on the show.

Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz, and on Instagram, I'm at guy.org. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella and research help from Catherine Seifer. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arabley.

Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.