At its worst, friction can be a destructive force in an organization. Friction can undermine productivity and innovation, create inefficiency, and even chip away at our energy and enthusiasm for work.
But what if friction could be reframed as something positive—something that makes the right things, like joy, productivity, and creative thinking, easier?
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, organizational psychologist and New York Times best selling author Bob Sutton discusses how great leaders use friction to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. He covers what a friction fixer is, different types of destructive friction and how they show up in organizations, how leaders reframe friction so that it’s productive rather than destructive, and tools and activities that leaders can employ to become a friction fixer.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
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What is Friction?
According to Bob, friction is essentially the feeling that things are harder to do than they ought to be. It exists in every organization, especially as they get larger, older, and more complex. While researching for his book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, Bob heard many people say they were surrounded by frustrations caused by friction—for example, having expense reimbursements bounce back multiple times without any explanation, which can create a lot of frustration and wasted time.
However, through his work and research with companies, Bob learned two things: first, that it’s possible to fight back and create solutions to friction, and second, that in some cases friction can be a good thing.
“Whether you’re the CEO of a large company or a frontline employee, we all have a cone of friction. We have the ability to make things harder or easier for other people.”
Bob Sutton, Organizational Psychologist and New York Times Bestselling Author
Good vs. Bad Friction
What is good or bad friction? It often depends on the nature of the craft that you're engaged in. For example, in emergencies when you need to act quickly, friction can slow things down in a way that’s disadvantageous.
However, Bob says that there are many times in life when friction can be helpful to slow down and figure out what’s going on, rather than rushing off in the wrong direction. Some of the best teams are the ones that can sense when things are messed up and know when to stop and spend more time looking into issues.
Bob gives the analogy of race car drivers—the ones who get around the track the fastest are the ones who know when to brake and when to take a pit stop.
Learn more about tackling complex challenges in your team and organization in our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving.
How to Be a Friction Fixer
Bob says that whether you're the CEO of a large company or you're a frontline employee, we all have a “cone of friction,” or sphere of influence that influences friction. This means that we have the ability to make things harder or easier for other people. If an executive sends frequent, overly long emails, that is a cone of friction that can slow down thousands of people.
One example that Bob gives is the Department of Motor Vehicles, a place you go to to do things like register your vehicle and take your driving test. While Bob typically dreads going there, he found himself having a great experience during one specific visit because there was a frontline supervisor who took it upon himself to walk up and down the line and ask each person why they were there. Afterward, some people realized that they didn’t need to wait in line, and others realized they could just fill out a form instead.
Within his cone of friction, the supervisor was able to be a “friction fixer” and make the experience better for everyone standing in line. By seeing himself as a trustee of other people’s time, he was able to save time and energy for others.
One of Bob’s favorite examples of friction fixing is Michigan’s government benefits form, which two and a half million people fill out each year. In 2015, if you needed to receive food, health insurance, or unemployment, you would need to fill out a form that was 42 pages long. Then, Michael Brennan and his team at Civilla spent a couple of years going through the existing process, developing six prototypes, and creating a new form that was 80% shorter. It complied with the rules and regulations of the state, was rolled out to thousands of employees, and reduced an enormous amount of friction.
Tools to Combat Friction
One tool that Bob suggests to combat friction is called subtraction. He describes “addition sickness” as the tendency for organizations and people to solve problems by adding more. Bob points to research done by Leidy Klotz in his book Subtract, which showed that when people are given chores, from planning a vacation to revising a recipe, the standard solution that humans apply to almost any problem is by making it more complex.
In one experiment, where the best way to improve a Lego model was to remove two or three pieces, and people were even charged for adding more pieces, the default solution people would use would be to add four or five pieces.
This also shows up in organizational life, as managers get paid more to have more people reporting to them. It creates an incentive for organizations and teams to grow and expand. But addition can lead to more rules and regulations, which then creates more friction.
The Subtraction Game
As an exercise in subtraction, Bob says to first identify what's driving you crazy in your workplace. Then, pick something that's feasible to subtract, plus something that would be wild.
An example of a feasible idea that Bob shares is from a management team at a large software company. They typically have a weekly senior team meeting, but they subtracted and changed the meeting to once every two weeks. Another team was frustrated by the number of Slack messages sent and decided to make a collective pledge to reduce messages by 25% in the next week. Examples of wild ideas that Bob has heard is to abolish an entire department, or to get rid of pay differences and pay everybody in the company the exact same amount.
“Friction is essentially that feeling that things are harder to do than they ought to be.”
Bob Sutton, Organizational Psychologist and New York Times Bestselling Author
Key Moments for Friction
One of the key moments to address friction is at the beginning. Bob cites the research of his mentor J. Richard Hackman, who studied what makes teams more or less effective and found that beginnings are important because that's where you have the initial design of a system—figuring out who's in what roles, what the norms are, how resources will be spent, and what the goals are. Bob says that a team charter can be helpful to refer back to. Additionally, prototyping can be useful to have something tangible to riff off of, tweak, and improve.
Another key moment for friction is at the end. It’s important to take time to end things right, because people don’t know a project has ended otherwise. Bob mentions the research of Daniel Kahneman, who says that there is a peak and end rule. This rule says that when people look back on an experience, there are two parts that matter the most: the peak, or best/worst part of the experience, and the way it ends.
Oftentimes, people jump into making a to-do list of what they’re going to do next, before they’ve even finished what they’re working on. Instead, one way to savor endings is to create a “tada list” at the end of the day or end of a project, where you as an individual or team pursue and reflect on what happened, both good and bad.
About the Speaker
Bob Sutton
Organizational Psychologist, Stanford Faculty, New York Times Bestselling Author
Bob Sutton studies leadership, organizational change, innovation, scaling, and workplace dynamics. At Stanford, he is Professor of Management Science and Engineering (emeritus) and a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He co-founded the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Institute of Design (“the d school”), and Center for Work, Technology, and Organization.
Sutton has published over 200 articles in academic and popular outlets and authored eight books. His books include"Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense" (with Jeff Pfeffer), selected by the Toronto Globe and Mail as the best business book of 2006; "The Knowing-Doing Gap" (with Pfeffer) was chosen for Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s "100 Best Business Books of All Time”; and most recently, the “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder” which launched January 30th, 2024.
If you want to learn more about how to tackle complex challenges on your team, check out our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving.
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When facing complex business problems, the traditional method of shear force and determination often falls short. To be successful, you need an approach that helps you imagine future scenarios, explore creative solutions, and consider things from new and different perspectives. How do you do this? The key is play. Play gives us permission to dream and diverge, think outside the box, and discover solutions to unprecedented problems.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO Partner & Managing Director and instructor of our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving, Michelle Lee, discusses the crucial role of play in addressing complex problems of all shapes and sizes—from healthcare to product design. Michelle shares lessons learned from her experience as a toy designer as well as activities for you to integrate play into your work and bring play-skeptics on board.
Here are our top takeaways from our conversation with Michelle:
1. Toy design can teach us how to be better problem solvers
When we design toys, there are no right or wrong answers. We are prompted to go wide, explore new ideas, and think outside the box. We aren’t afraid to try new things and there are very few constraints on what we can create.
According to Michelle, who began her career in aerospace before pivoting to toy design and then pivoting again to design more broadly, we can bring this same mentality to tackling complex business problems. Today, Michelle works on complex problems across various industries including healthcare, government, education, and consumer goods—but her approach to solving problems is still informed by her experience as a toy designer.
Toy design teaches us the value of play in solving problems. It teaches us that there are rarely single answers to business problems and that often to make progress on problems, we need to first go wide and consider things from new perspectives. Many of the challenges businesses are facing today are incredibly complex, interconnected, and everchanging—to be successful we have to be creative in thinking about how we solve those challenges.
“To make progress on problems, we need to first go wide and consider things from new perspectives.”
Michelle Lee, IDEO Partner & Managing Director
2. Play is a mindset and behavior that helps us think outside of the box
For Michelle, play is a mindset and a behavior. It’s an approach to problem solving that helps us go wide, explore new ideas, and think outside of the box.
Michelle shared the example of how we see the power of imagination when watching kids play. A box is not just a container for carrying things from one part of the room to another, a box can be a house, a rocketship, or a storefront to sell baked goods.
When we become adults, it’s easy to get in the habit of looking at something and only seeing one use case that people have been applying for years. We often fall into these single-minded habits when it comes to problem solving too.
However, when we approach things from the standpoint of play, it helps us open up many possibilities rather than focusing on one answer. It enables us to ask more expansive questions like, “What are different ways to approach this problem? What have we taken for granted in the past?”
Try this creative warmup:
Next time you are in a brainstorming session or a moment when you need your team to think wide, begin by asking a creative question. Ask: What are the most outrageous uses for a glass of water?
Spend a few minutes coming up with the most outrageous use cases you can think of—the sky's the limit. Try looking at the glass (or whatever item you choose) through the eyes of a child who has never seen it before. Or pretend you’re a being from outer space encountering a glass for the first time. Then ask, what are the possibilities?
3. Play encourages action and helps de-risk our problem-solving process
One critical aspect of play is that it’s very active. When a child tries something new, they don’t sit around and talk about it or create PowerPoint presentations with a plan. They jump right to exploration, physically moving things around and seeing how things fit together.
Bringing this same attitude to working with complexity can be a great antidote to the paralysis we often feel when we don’t know where to start or are stuck in over-analysis. Play helps us get started by taking the pressure off of “needing to get it right” and creating room for learning through experimentation.
In this way, play can also be a great tool for de-risking. By not shutting down ideas too early, generating lots of possibilities, and then testing ideas in small ways, you’re able to gain confidence in your ideas as you move forward. This means you don’t have to invest all your resources in a half-tested idea but can make progress toward unearthing better, more effective solutions.
“Play helps us get started by taking the pressure off of 'needing to get it right' and creating room for learning through experimentation. ”
Michelle Lee, IDEO Partner & Managing Director
4. There are tools and exercises for intentionally bringing play to work—and gaining buy-in from play-skeptics
Play at work can be designed for. This is especially important when working with teams or stakeholders who are skeptical about the value of play. The number one question Michelle gets asked is how to bring play to teams or work environments that are skeptical about “playing at work” because of industry regulations, time and budget constraints, or even misconceptions.
There are a variety of ways to bring play to work, ranging from simple creative warmups to more thorough methodologies and processes for problem-solving. One of Michelle’s favorite tools is the Magic Circle.
Put simply, the magic circle is a space you can enter that plays by different rules. (Think: a game of chess, a theatre, a court of law, a place of worship.) For Michelle and her team, it’s a space (sometimes a physical room, other times an imagined space) where they can let loose and temporarily put aside the constraints and rules that normally govern their work. The goal of creating a magic circle is to help put people in a mindset where they can be as generative and creative as possible.
Check out our step-by-step guide to creating a magic circle.
Ready to take your learning further? Tap into the power of imagination to tackle complex problems with Michelle’s newest course, Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving.
]]>Fresh off the heels of the most recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, climate is top of mind for many organizations and business leaders. How will businesses adjust to meet ambitious climate goals? How might we design products, services, and experiences that are both sustainable and desirable? What opportunities for innovation does new climate technology present?
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO Senior Design Lead Natalia Vasquez and IDEO Managing Director Bryan Walker discuss the crucial role of design in scaling and increasing the rate of adoption of climate solutions, how to make the most sustainable products, services, and experiences the most desirable, and how to cultivate alignment and imagine visions of the future.
Jump to Section
Challenges for the Climate Era
Design for Desirability in Climate
Examples of Radical Desirability
Design for Alignment and Futuring
Challenges for the Climate Era
According to Natalia, the climate era is a time that's defined by humanity’s first long-term global systems problem that covers every sector and every country. For example, greenhouse gas emissions coming from any one country impacts all countries. Eliminating large parts of the Amazon rainforest influences rain and weather patterns as far away as North America. It's a complicated, interconnected challenge, and working on it requires incredible alignment. Layered on top of that, climate challenges are impacted by what everyone on Earth currently extracts and consumes, and changing that requires a huge culture shift around how and what we value. Bryan explains that some of the challenges that we're facing are really about global collaboration at a scale that we've never seen before.
These issues and more were discussed at COP, or Conference of the Parties, the United Nations convening around climate change. The parties refer to the delegates from the countries around the world that come together, negotiate, and reflect on how they want to reduce their emissions and navigate climate change. It's the forum where decisions are made at the highest level, but all of those choices and conversations then trickle down into the ways that organizations operate and the way that people live their lives. It's an important moment in convening because of the pace and context setting it creates.
At the recent COP meeting, Natalia was excited to see a commitment to move away from fossil fuels, and the first time that it was codified into text. It’s a transition moment where the world agrees that change is needed, and now people are thinking about how to phase out fossil fuels entirely. There was also action and progress against commitments, by making money available to adapt to climate change. Natalia emphasized an announcement around a global initiative to work on fusion, which is a far future renewable energy. That commitment is important because it signals the kind of leaps that we will need to be making.
For Bryan, what left an impression at COP was the scale of diversity. He noticed that beyond commitments, it's now all about action, both in terms of what we are starting and accelerating and what we are phasing out and stopping. He also saw how the private sector has arrived in the climate conversation, which historically has been more public and social sector. Bryan believes that to pull off what we need to pull off, we are going to need to engage the private sector as part of the solution.
“When you imagine the future, one certainty is that climate will affect everything—you can’t opt out.”
Bryan Walker, Managing Director & Designing for Change Instructor, IDEO
Design for Desirability in Climate
According to Bryan, the climate challenge now is a human challenge of adoption. He says when scientists were first sounding the alarm bells, the central question was, can we address climate change? Now, it's flipped into a question of: Will we address climate change? Bryan says that we have all of the solutions we need today to address our Paris Accord climate commitments, whether it’s technology-based, nature-based, or behavioral change-based solutions. Many different organizations have done the work of chronicling those solutions, and measuring how scalable they are and the potential for impact, including Project Drawdown.
While we have the solutions we need today, the question is if we will adopt them fast enough and far enough. Bryan explains that design’s role in the climate challenge is to create and imagine new futures and begin to build and create new experiences that are highly desirable. By making solutions radically desirable, that will lead to widespread adoption.
Learn more about tackling complex challenges like climate in our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving.
Examples of Radical Desirability
Bryan notes that making climate solutions highly desirable is about looking at the solution and figuring out its unique affordances, or attributes that afford new experiences or new capabilities. One example would be the stove. Electric stoves are typically considered to be more climate-friendly than gas stoves. With gas stoves, a lot of people love the burner, the fire, and the familiarity of them. When it comes to electric stoves, what is unique about that technology that you can leverage?
With electric stoves, you don't have a burner—you have a flat surface. And what that could potentially afford you is you could turn the cooking surface into a prep surface. If it were a prep surface, you could put a camera and a projector under the hood and begin to imagine using that technology to help you appropriately prepare your food. It could allow you to know as you cut whether or not you have the right portions, and then once you start cooking you could have your cookbook projected directly onto the surface next to you. In this way, you can begin to think about how you take this unique affordance that a gas stove could not replicate, and take that and turn that into a desirable experience of having an electric stove.
The Ford F-150 Lightning
Bryan gives the example of work that IDEO has done helping Ford Motor Company with its electrification strategy. One iconic project was the design of the electric version of the F-150 truck. The F-150 is a classic pickup truck and the bestselling vehicle in North America for the last few decades. The IDEO team wanted to create not just the electric version of the F-150, but a better F-150 because it's electric: the F-150 Lightning.
The unique affordance you have is because it's electric, you have an energy source. As a result, they incorporated features that were only possible on a truck because it was electric, not internal combustion. For example, you can convert the tailgate into a workbench where you can plug in power tools and go to work. Additionally, if your home goes down with a power outage, you can plug it in as an electricity backup.
The team also thought about how to best utilize what's not there in an electric truck. Without the internal combustion engine in the front hood, you can turn it into massive storage. But they wanted to leverage that even more to make a more desirable vehicle and explored turning it into a cooler, not just a storage unit. Bryan explains how these are all new experiences that you only can bring to life because of the features of the electric truck.
Tesla vs. Toyota
Bryan says that a lot of effort has often been focused on making products more sustainable, meaning the value proposition is, “This is the responsible choice.” That has limitations in terms of the demand and the scale that you can reach because it's a values-based purchase, as opposed to simply making a product that’s better because it's sustainable. Bryan gives the example of sales of the Toyota Prius versus the Tesla Model Y.
While Bryan recognizes Toyota being a real pioneer in the space, he says that the Prius was positioned as an economically responsible choice. With the Model Y, Tesla focused on creating a more desirable choice—a better driving experience that so happened to be powered by electricity, which changed the industry. Bryan says it’s important to make sustainable solutions not just the responsible choice, but the desirable choice.
Design for Alignment and Futuring
Natalia says that when it comes to climate challenges, there's something really interesting that futuring can do around alignment and inspiration. With climate, there are a lot of individual visions and objectives, and a lack of collective alignment makes it difficult. Futuring is about enabling people to envision where they want to go. With futuring, you can start to look at, “What might it look like in the future? What are we all aiming for, and how do we start to work backward to get that alignment?” Natalia thinks of futuring as design, where your inputs and your horizon are not today's behaviors and context, but the emergent observations that you can make and the long-term output that you want to get to.
It's hard for people to feel compelled by global warming or a 1.5-degree change. So how do we make the possibility of the future come to life, both in all of its potential and the challenges and trade-offs and changes that we're going to have to make? Climate is an extremely complex problem, and you need cooperation across all kinds of industries and countries. For example, companies need to report on their emissions. To do that well, they have to understand the emissions of all of their suppliers and all of their buyers, and then what the customer does at the end of life of the product.
Futuring can help with alignment. It allows multiple groups to come together and think, “Can we look at trends together? What are the forces that we're seeing around our industry and the world? Where might those lead us as we think about climate change and its impact on the way that we live and consume? And how do we start to create fictional scenarios or ideas of what could be so that we can choose a preferable future that we wanna be moving towards?” Design can make the future tangible with prototypes, go beyond text and allow us to visualize what’s to come.
“Design can help us build visions for the future that can guide strategies and align people.”
Natalia Vasquez, Senior Design Lead, IDEO
An example of futuring
Natalia gives the example of IDEO’s work with a global meat and dairy company. It’s a challenging industry because there are methane emissions, transportation emissions, and packaging. They looked at trends that would impact their industry, and examined what the implications of those trends might be for their business and their work. Futuring allowed the company to think about future forces that would influence the context in which they would be operating in 10 years out.
In that conversation, they realized that climate was different from other forces like AI and emerging technologies because it’s one they couldn’t opt out of. This led the company to lean into it, and treat it as an opportunity as opposed to a constraint. To imagine the future, the team created scrappy fictional products that could exist in the future. One was a carbon emissions sticker. Another was an app where you could quickly scan any site and see what the emissions would be. This work helped shift the conversation in the company to really center climate as one of the issues that they wanted to make part of their long-term strategy.
Getting started with futuring
Natalia says that with design and futuring, you always want to be curious and learning. A lot of futuring work is signal scanning, which means constantly looking around for emergent behaviors, new events, and emerging technologies. It’s being curious with yourself about what might happen. One activity she suggests as you go through your work is reflecting on a time horizon. What might the world look like 10 years from now? You might imagine abundant renewable energy or a big shift to value nature.
Then, which of those changes would be a headwind versus a tailwind for you? Reflect on what would be great for your work, and what would be more of a challenge to start thinking about how to get ahead of. This can be a powerful way to open up opportunities for the future.
About the Speakers
Natalia Vasquez
Senior Design Lead, IDEO
Natalia's work at IDEO is focused on guiding organizations to imagine and test possible futures for urgent action on climate change within the firm's Strategy and Climate Practices. This includes creating inspiring long-term north stars to rally alignment within influential organizations, exploring how emerging trends can shift systems, and leading cross-industry consortiums for tactical action.
Currently, she is working on IDEO’s global climate strategy and leading an effort to envisage decarbonized, regenerative, and nature-aligned 2030 speculative scenarios. Her work has been featured in Forbes, FastCompany, Bloomberg, in partnership with Conservation International, Closed Loop Partners, the Omidyar Foundation, Walmart, and Meta. Natalia studied International Relations and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University, Design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Futures Studies at Parsons.
Bryan Walker
Managing Director, IDEO
Bryan leads the Design for Change studio, helping leaders transform their organizations’ cultures and businesses in pursuit of innovation, adaptability, and impact.
Bryan is curious about the future of work and how design can affect and support change within complex human systems. Together with his clients, he’s exploring what corporate leaders can learn from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists; how technology, a new generation of employees, and a shifting marketplace is redefining the workplace experience; and how leaders can drive change by movement as opposed to mandates.
Bryan earned a master’s degree in social anthropology from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree in design and environmental analysis from Cornell. Outside the office, he can be found chasing the perfect wave.
If you want to learn more about how to tackle complex challenges, check out our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving.
]]>With every new year, we’re faced with excitement at the open slate ahead of us. We’ve collected some resources to help you take the next step in your career. Whether you’re trying to become a better leader, more creative thinker, or more compelling storyteller, we’re here to support you.
]]>How are you planning to grow this year?
We’ve updated our career guide with our latest articles, tips, and resources to help you grow in your career and as a leader. Whether your goal is to become a better leader, storyteller, strategist, collaborator, creative, or more, we’re here to support you.
Career paths…
If you want to grow into a better leader…
If you want to level up in your career...
If you want to make change in your organization…
If you want to be a better strategic planner…
If you want to become a better storyteller…
If you want to be more creative, collaborative, and playful…
Customer research and insights, when done well, can fuel creativity, innovation, and problem solving. But what makes a good insight? And how do you use your research and insights to help drive prioritization and decision making?
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Arianna McClain, Head of Research and Insights at Cruise, discusses what makes a good insight, the difference between a finding and an insight, how to make customer research impactful, and how to build narratives from insights to align and compel stakeholders.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Definition of an Insight
According to Arianna, the goal of customer research is to understand how a person might feel, think, perceive or engage with a product, service, experience, brand, or company. She says that when doing customer research, there’s a difference between a finding and an insight. A finding is something objective, an observation. An insight, on the other hand, is meant to look deeper into a situation. It’s often unexpected and drives innovation. The finding might be “people do X”; the insight tells you why people engage in that behavior.
We can see the difference between a finding and an insight with an example. If you see a child reaching for a book on a bookshelf, that might be a finding, or observation. But an insight behind that action, which could be uncovered by sitting down to talk to them, is that they're actually asserting their independence by getting a chair to reach the book themselves without help. In this way, insights aim to understand the deeper meaning behind an obvious behavior.
“An insight is meant to look deeper into something. It's the power to see into a situation.”
Arianna McClain, Head of Research & Insights, Cruise
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Insights
While a lot of researchers view themselves as either qualitative or quantitative, Arianna recommends that everyone be mixed-method. She says that for every study, no matter how big or small, you should have a quantitative and a qualitative component.
For example, if you're looking at a lot of data on how people are using your product, you need to also try to physically observe at least one session to provide some context about why you might be seeing those numbers in the data. And if you're engaging in a lot of qualitative interviews, you need at least one survey question to really understand and quantify the severity or frequency of what you're hearing.
Learn more about customer insights and research in our new Human-Centered Insights Certificate.
Tools for Gathering Insights
For Arianna, the most valuable thing about an insight is that it is impactful and actionable. She says that to do this, you need to make sure that you are quantifying the severity and that it's clearly communicated so it can be prioritized. The role of research is to understand how to improve the user experience, but not every pain point impacts user experience in the same way.
Arianna gives an example from her work on a fully autonomous vehicle at Cruise called the Origin. With the Origin, she went to the product team with two insights: that there were uncomfortable headrests, and that adding more screens would make the experience more magical. Fixing an uncomfortable headrest was prioritized because the issue was detrimental—it could cause discomfort, harm, and might cause people to never take a ride again.
Without quantifying severity, the leadership team may simply look at how much each improvement costs to make decisions. The role of research is to help the business understand the right changes that can improve metrics, drive retention and acquisition, and enable leaders to move forward.
One way to measure and quantify the severity of user needs is a simple survey asking people, “How would you rate the experience that you just had?” A Likert scale that has various numbers and responses, such as a scale from 1 to 9 or -5 to 5 (with 0 being neutral), enables you to better understand the user’s experience. Is it broken, neutral, working, or magical? Whether it’s an app or a ride in a self-driving car, the experience can then be put on a scale.
After that, you can ask additional questions to understand the ROI, or return on investment, for fixing a pain point. For example, if the Origin were to have more screens, what would be the added benefit? Would it make the experience significantly better? Would the user take more rides, or is it just a nice to have?
Or if a pain point weren’t fixed, like an uncomfortable headrest, would the user never return? Does it mean they’d be reluctant to use the service? Does it mean they’d still use it but it would annoy them? Likert scales like this allow you to understand how much energy, time, and money to put into fixing the pain points identified.
“Not every pain point impacts the user experience in the same way.”
Arianna McClain, Head of Research & Insights, Cruise
How to Make Customer Research Impactful
Arianna says that the biggest mistake that researchers can make is working in a silo. With her team members coming from so many different companies, each with their own process, she created what they call the “Golden Workflow,” which defines what success looks like for research at Cruise.
The process begins with research initiation, which includes identifying all major stakeholders and becoming familiar with relevant documents and spaces. Before starting a project from scratch, look at what work has been done in the past. Evaluate if research is needed, or if you simply need to redirect people to something that already exists.
In the research definition phase, align with your stakeholders and develop a research plan. Make sure that they're on board with the questions that you're answering, and figure out what data they need to know to move forward.
But at the end of the day, Arianna emphasizes that no matter what phase of the research process you’re in, whether it's research execution or analysis or sharing out, the one thing that must remain consistent is aligning with stakeholders every step of the way—and making sure you're communicating clearly and concisely.
About the Speaker
Arianna McClain
Head of Research & Insights, Cruise
Arianna McClain is the Head of Research & Insights at Cruise, leading a team that works across Cruise’s vehicle programs, internal tools, and consumer products. Her team collaborates on a broad range of critical company challenges and opportunities, such as helping to define company metrics, improve engineering and fleet operations workflows and products, and design Cruise's future ride-hailing and delivery experience.
Before joining Cruise, Arianna's career spanned startups, consulting, and academia. She previously built and led the research function at DoorDash to understand the needs of Consumers, Dashers, and Merchants in order to design a product that all three users love using. Arianna also worked at IDEO to help grow the Design & Data function and worked as a behavioral research scientist at Stanford's School of Medicine.
If you want to learn more about insights and customer research, check out our new Human-Centered Insights Certificate.
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1. Introduction
Systems thinking and design thinking are both approaches to problem solving and innovation. Systems thinking starts with understanding entire systems rather than individualized elements to spot opportunities for change, whereas design thinking is focused on understanding people’s real needs to create human-centered products, services, and processes. It’s important to learn the nuances of each when incorporating them into your practice.
2. What is Systems Thinking?
Systems, like healthcare and cities, are big, multifaceted, dynamic things built for a purpose. They span several services and products working together simultaneously. Some systems benefit society, but some can lead to harm too. Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems, describes systems as made up of structures (institutions), relationships (stakeholders and power dynamics), and paradigms (culture and mindsets).
So what is systems thinking? In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge gives a systems thinking definition as “A discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’ And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character."
Systems thinking has been around for a long time. If you search the history of the field, you will find your way to pioneering systems theorists like Jay W. Forrester, Russell Ackoff, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, and more. They codified much of our modern thinking on systems theory, dynamics, and modeling. But were they the first systems thinkers? Certainly not. There are roots in Native American cultures and worldviews, early feminism, and many other examples.
The concept of wholeness is integral to a systems thinking approach. A system is more than the sum of its parts—it's defined by the interaction of its parts. To understand how a system works, you have to study not the individual elements but the linkages between them. When you start thinking in systems, you can then spot opportunities for change. By bringing more awareness to the process of designing systems, we can all be more intentional about creating equitable ones and dismantling harmful ones.
“A system is more than the sum of its parts—it's defined by the interaction of its parts.”
3. What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.
When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.
We teach the phases of design thinking as linear steps, but in practice the process is not always linear. Some of these steps may happen several times, and you may even jump back and forth between them. The phases of the design thinking process include:
Frame a Question—Identify a driving question that inspires others to search for creative solutions.
Gather Inspiration—Inspire new thinking by discovering what people really need.
Generate Ideas—Push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas.
Make Ideas Tangible—Build rough prototypes to learn how to make ideas better.
Test to Learn—Refine ideas by gathering feedback and experimenting forward.
Share the Story—Craft a human story to inspire others toward action.
If you want to learn more about using a design thinking approach, you can explore design thinking examples, case studies, and activities in our free Design Thinking Resources.
4. The Differences Between Systems Thinking vs. Design Thinking
You might be wondering: when should I use design thinking and when should I use systems thinking? Each approach has its own distinct characteristics and benefits. Here is a comparison of systems thinking and design thinking:
5. Advantages and Drawbacks of Systems Thinking
Systems thinking enables us to overcome stalled decision-making that often occurs when we’re overwhelmed by the scale of a problem and it’s hard to know where to get started. It helps us see the interconnectedness of things, spot patterns, and identify the right areas to focus our efforts. This approach is a good fit for challenges where there's a lot of stakeholders, competing incentives, or no obvious solution.
Other benefits of systems thinking include:
The goal of systems thinking is ultimately to come up with solutions that are more holistic and take into account the needs of all stakeholders while also understanding the dynamics of the system. A common drawback or limitation of systems thinking is getting stuck in the ideation and thinking phase without getting tangible. When practicing systems thinking without including the prototyping mindsets of design thinking, it can be more difficult to implement the solutions that you come up with. Additionally, when you use a solely systems thinking approach, you may overlook the individual human needs and behaviors that you uncover with design thinking.
6. Advantages and Drawbacks of Design Thinking
Design thinking is valuable because it puts people at the center of problem solving. It encourages us to ask questions and find out what our customers and clients need, rather than assuming we already know all the answers. Brainstorming ideas, prototyping, and iterating allow us to learn faster and improve products and services before they go out into the real world.
Over time, the methods and mindsets of design thinking lead to something even more important—creative confidence. The subtle techniques of design thinking unlock mindset shifts that lead people (many for the first time in their lives) to see themselves as creative. Creative confidence gives people the ability to fearlessly (or with less fear) tackle complex problems in the world.
Here are some additional benefits of design thinking, and how it can help your team or organization:
When it comes to drawbacks or limitations of design thinking, some teams may find it difficult to incorporate design thinking because it involves a lot of ambiguity. It’s not a linear path, and sometimes requires looping back to different parts of the process. Additionally, it takes time and practice to practice design thinking at a high level.
Some may also find it difficult to change social norms or behavior on their team. If an organization is used to doing things in a certain way, it might be resistant to a new, more creative way of working. It can be challenging when a team isn’t aligned on applying a design thinking mindset, since it’s such a collaborative approach.
7. Human-Centered Systems Thinking: Integrating Systems Thinking and Design Thinking
Human-centered systems thinking brings together the analytical, holistic tools of systems thinking with the creative human-centered process of design thinking. It’s a mindset and methodology for tackling complex systemic challenges in a human way: staying grounded in the needs of multiple stakeholders while also seeing larger dynamics at play so you can diagnose the real problem, design more effective solutions, and drive real behavior change and positive impact within systems.
Combining systems thinking and design thinking enables you to:
Today, human-centered systems thinking is needed more than ever. We have a greater awareness of the interconnected nature of our world. The challenges we face—as individuals, teams, organizations, communities, and as a society—are myriad and multifaceted. Their scale and complexity can be overwhelming. Where do we begin? How do we start to make sense of things?
So many of our complex systems today are human systems like organizations, which are made up of relationships between people. A human-centered approach to systems thinking starts with people and diagnoses the underlying causes of problems before taking action to solve them, and stays grounded in the needs of many stakeholders while also seeing the larger dynamics at play. When you approach problem solving in this way—deeply human and holistic—you will get to solutions that are more effective, connected, integrated, and ethical.
8. Frameworks, Tools, and Methodologies for Human-Centered Systems Thinking
Human-centered systems thinking isn’t just a theoretical concept—there are practical frameworks and tools that you use to bring it to life. Here are a couple of our favorites:
The Iceberg Model
In a complex system, solving problems requires considering the whole picture and surfacing the root of the problem. The iceberg model is a framework for uncovering the many layers of a system, including behaviors, structures, and mindsets. It helps you:
The Systems Map
A systems map is a tool commonly used by systems designers to lay out all the relationships and interactions between stakeholders in a given system, such as a local high school (shown in the image above). Mapping systems can help you spot opportunities for growth and change.
To create a systems map, follow these steps:
If you want to dive deeper into systems thinking and learn more tools and frameworks, check out our 5-week online course Human-Centered Systems Thinking.
Expand your design thinking skills and confidence with our Foundations in Design Thinking certificate.
]]>Is your strategy just a business plan in disguise? Strategy expert Roger Martin is willing to bet that it is. If it is, you’re not alone. Of the hundreds of companies Roger has advised, most end up with a strategic plan that is just a plan made up of projects, timelines, and deliverables.
So, what makes a strategy? And what makes a good strategy? How do you win at strategic planning?
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Roger Martin discusses how to tell the difference between a plan and a strategy, common strategic planning pitfalls, and what makes a good strategic plan. Roger draws on his experience working with hundreds of companies, including Lego, Procter & Gamble, and Ford, to share stories and case studies about what strategy looks like when done right.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
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A Plan is Not a Strategy
The practice of strategic planning often ends up being almost entirely planning and no strategy. Companies had planning long before the concept of business strategy came into existence in the ‘60s, and according to Roger we’ve kept on planning but simply started to call it strategic planning.
Planning is just saying what you’re going to do in each of the areas you control. As an organization, there are a lot of things you control. You control how many people you hire, how many square feet of office space you lease, how many raw materials you buy, and how much you advertise. Rather than focusing on strategy, this is what companies typically do. They spend a lot of time asking people in each department what they want and coming up with a list of initiatives. But when you add them up, they usually don't compel the customer to do what you want.
The distinguishing feature of strategy is that strategy is about influencing the things you don't control. One of the most important things that you don't control is the customer. You can’t order the customer to give you money—what you need to do is compel them to pay for your product or service so that you can cover your costs and earn a profit. The art of strategy is figuring out how to configure all of the things you control in a way that leads to customers doing what you want them to do. It’s challenging, but that’s the essence of strategy.
“The distinguishing feature of strategy is that strategy is about influencing the things you don’t control.”
Roger Martin, Designing Strategy Instructor
What Makes a Good Strategy
One quality of a good strategy is that it is choiceful, and involves making real choices. Roger says you've made a real strategy choice if the opposite of that choice is not “stupid on its face”. For example, a business strategy of being “consumer-centric” wouldn’t be a real strategy choice, because the opposite strategy of ignoring the consumers entirely wouldn’t make sense. Strategy involves making real choices to do some things and not other things based on a deep understanding of the customer.
Roger gives the example of the Four Seasons hotel chain. In the luxury hotel industry, luxury service is defined as grand architecture and decor and obsequious service. However, Four Seasons made a strategy choice to say, “We're going to define luxury service as service that makes up for what you left at home or at the office, because even though you're staying in a luxury hotel, there's a place you'd rather be—at home.”
Four Seasons was the first hotel chain to put little bottles of shampoo in the showers, because it tied back to their strategic choice of providing services that you have at home. They made a real choice to do something different, and it turned out to be a really good choice, because many people staying in luxury hotels actually preferred that. It's about figuring out what would provide the greatest leverage for you in accomplishing your goals, out of all the things you could do.
If you want to learn more about how to create a successful strategy, check out Roger’s online course Designing Strategy.
Roger’s Strategy Tips
Roger says to remember that you have lots of choices as to where to focus. Within the luxury hotel business, there’s land acquisition, construction, management, and more. It’s easy to default to thinking that the hotel space means doing all those things because everybody else defines it that way, but Four Seasons decided to sell off all of their hotel properties and get out of the hotel development business. They did this because being a real estate developer is such a different business from running a hotel. Without having to worry about that aspect of the business, they were able to focus all of their energy on great service.
Look at where you’re focused now, and ask yourself if that’s optimal. Sometimes it’s beneficial to expand, and sometimes it’s beneficial to narrow down. Most importantly, reflect on where you can provide great value to the customer.
Roger also emphasizes the importance of qualitative data. In a customer survey, you might ask questions on a scale of 1 to 5, which removes all of the nuances. People think about things in a more complex way than numbers. Roger says that the greatest strategies come from a depth of understanding of customers that is hard to acquire when you flatten out the customer.
Given the choice between a quantitative survey of 10,000 people and personally spending an hour with 10 customers, he’d take the latter over the former a hundred percent of the time. When you’re talking with customers, you can pick up little signals that are hard to quantify, such as body language, and you come away with much deeper insights. Then, you can go back and do a quantitative survey.
Roger also says that the more expertise you gain, the finer distinctions you can make. For example, an experienced MD looking at a set of x-rays will see different things versus an intern. The more you understand your customers, the more you can get out of interviews with them.
“Make choices in a way to secure value for the audience you want to serve.”
Roger Martin, Designing Strategy Instructor
About the Speaker
Roger Martin
Strategy Advisor & Former Dean of the Rotman School of Management
Roger Martin is a trusted strategy advisor who’s worked with CEOs of companies worldwide, including Procter & Gamble, Lego, and Ford Motor Company. In 2017, he was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business gurus. He has published 11 books, including Creating Great Choices co-authored by Jennifer Riel, The Design of Business, and Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble.
Roger is Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Rotman School of Management. A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, he received his AB from Harvard College and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to create a successful strategy, check out our 5-week online course Designing Strategy, taught by Roger.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO Senior Business Director Angel Annunciacao shares design tools for testing value propositions, how to understand willingness to pay, and how to uncover insights to help finetune your value proposition.
What is a Value Proposition?
Think of a value proposition (or value prop) as a simple statement that helps describe what benefit a potential customer might get from using a specific product or service over another. It sounds really simple, but it's incredibly invaluable and important in business design—both externally and internally.
Externally, it serves as a foundation for any public communications and marketing that you might do. It's telling your customer clearly what your offer is and why they should choose you over a competitor.
Internally, it's also important because it serves as a north star. It helps the entire organization, whether you’re in accounting or engineering or product, really align on what it is you’re trying to offer in the marketplace and move in the same direction.
How to Write a Value Proposition
At IDEO, we start with a simple fill-in-the-blank sentence:
For [target user], who [user need], [name of concept] solves/provides/helps [benefit].
First, you define who your target user is that you're going after. Then there’s the user need—what is that pain point that you're trying to solve for? The name of your concept is your offering, whether it’s a product or a service. And then the most important part is the benefit that your customer is getting by choosing your offering.
“A value proposition serves as a north star. It helps the entire organization move in the same direction.”
Angel Annunciacao, Senior Business Director at IDEO
Value Proposition Examples
Strong value propositions
Angel gives an example to make it more tangible. Imagine you’re working with Shopify back when they were starting out. Something you might write is:
For the novice entrepreneur, who doesn’t know a lot about launching an ecommerce business, Shopify provides a step by step process to set up, grow, and manage their entire transactions.
While this isn’t Shopify’s actual value proposition, it’s an example of what an effective one might look like. It doesn't get into the details of every single feature, but it's easy to understand and gives us enough information to understand what makes Shopify unique. When we’re thinking about value propositions at IDEO, we like to come up with a few initial value props. It's not about nailing a perfect one on your first try, but coming up with a couple of different hypotheses.
Once we have a few value props that we feel good about, we dig into more questions to really flesh out the benefit. These questions can include:
As we explore these questions, we iterate on the value proposition statements and then often land on a few that we then take into research to get feedback.
Weak value propositions
Let's go back to the Shopify example. What would be not as effective? Here’s an example of a weaker value prop:
For business owners, who need help processing online transactions, Shopify helps owners manage their checkout process.
Angel says that this isn’t as strong as the other value prop for a couple of reasons. First, the target consumer that’s listed here is really broad. While we always want to make sure our target market is large enough that it makes business sense to go after them, we also want to make sure that it's specific enough so that we can really distill the unique needs that this target group has, and build an offering that's helping them solve those needs.
The second reason is the benefit. Helping manage the checkout process could be beneficial and might be a need that entrepreneurs have, but it doesn't really touch on what makes Shopify unique. What's making them unique to what else is out in the marketplace? The first example gets a lot more specific on what value Shopify provides to the customer.
If you want to learn more about IDEO’s approach to business design, check out our online course Designing a Business
How to Test Value Propositions
According to Angel, organizations often feel pressure to rush and nail down the perfect value prop statement quickly. But at the end of the day, value propositions are about testing the consumer's needs, and that's something you want to do early and often. It’s about testing a few hypotheses to make sure that you’re going in the right direction. And what’s great is that you can do this pretty scrappily—and you don’t have to spend a ton of time or money.
A card sort activity
One of Angel’s favorite methods is a card sort activity, where research participants choose from two different options at a time to get to a short list of the benefits that are most important to them.
Angel gives an example of a client that had developed a new technology to help people understand how different food groups would impact their bodies. They had an idea of who their target consumer might be as well as a value proposition that might resonate, but they weren't one hundred percent sure. Angel sat down with the clients and talked through the benefits that their product could offer, and turned them into simple sentences like “A product that shows me ____ about my body when I use it.” They then printed out 12 of them on small 2x3 cards.
To test these, the team would put two at a time in front of their consumers and ask, “Which of these two is more valuable for you?” They would take the ones that the consumer chose, and discard the ones they didn't choose. Along the way, they asked questions like, “Why this one? What's interesting? Why not that one?” After going from 12 cards to 6 cards, and from 6 cards to 3 cards, they had a discussion about the final 3 cards. They asked, “Why these three? What’s standing out to you? Would you change these in any way to make them even more valuable for you?” The team wanted the consumers to really edit them and share what they found valuable.
The card sort activity mimics real life because every purchase out in the world requires a decision or a trade-off. In its simplest form, this activity is asking potential customers to consider these trade-offs and choose the product that would bring them the most value in their life. And in this particular example, the value proposition that the clients had come in with initially was not one of the top three that their consumers gravitated toward.
“At the end of the day, value propositions are about testing the consumer's needs, and that's something you want to do early and often.”
Angel Annunciacao, Senior Business Director at IDEO
A Max-Diff Study
If you need to get to a larger sample size or if you have a shorter amount of time (qualitative research often takes a bit more time), you can run a Max-Diff study. A Max-Diff study essentially asks respondents to evaluate the potential benefits or options within a given set and choose the one that is most important to them and the one that is least important to them.
Let's say you had six value props that you're trying to test. You could put it out into the world and ask the question, “On a scale of one to five, how likely are you to buy this product?” Angel says that the issue with that is oftentimes people will rank all six of the offers as really valuable or not valuable, or rank everything a three out of five. That makes it really difficult to understand which option is really rising to the top.
A Max-Diff, on the other hand, forces respondents to make tradeoffs and indicate a preference between the different options by selecting the most important and least important value props out of the group of six. When you get this kind of data, you're able to see how important the different value propositions are relative to each other, similar to the card sort activity. If you don’t have experience running Max-Diffs and quantitative studies, most survey platforms like Qualtrics or AYTM will have this already built into their platform.
3 Ways to Test Willingness to Pay
Angel says that when it comes to willingness to pay, there’s often a large “say-do gap,” where what people say they'll pay for something is very different from what they're actually willing to pay. She says it’s great to test willingness to pay because it’s a way to test your value proposition—you’re exploring with your consumers how much they value your offering, reflected by what they're willing to pay for it. Angel shares 3 effective ways to test willingness to pay:
1) Asking at the end of an interview
In a qualitative interview, Angel usually goes through and explains what the product or the offering is, has a discussion, and asks many questions. At the end of their time together, her team compensates respondents for their time and insights that they've shared.
In this moment when they receive the money, Angel likes to say something along the lines of, “We actually have the product or offering ready today for you to sign up for or buy. How much of the money that I just gave would you be willing to give back to me in order to get access to it today?” When it comes to parting with real money, people start to put more thought into it, and you can see what the product is actually worth to the consumer.
2) Creating reference anchors
Another way to test willingness to pay is to use reference points to anchor people. This can be an especially effective method when your offering is groundbreaking, and when people don't have a quick idea of what the competition costs and what they would pay. To do this, Angel typically starts by explaining what the offer is then asking four questions:
This method is not going to give you the exact willingness to pay, but it really helps to define the bounds within which your offering can be. If you already know that it should fall within a specific range of these prices, you can make it even more narrow. For example, you can ask if the offering is closer to the cost of a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven or a cup of coffee at a Four Seasons Hotel bar. That can help you define what feels realistic for your offering.
Additionally, Angel says that you can also create reference points with services—you just want to be thoughtful about what you're choosing as the “cup of coffee.” If it's subscriptions, for instance, you could say more or less than a Spotify subscription. It’s about doing the research to see the offerings that people are most familiar with, and creating some quick reference points.
“When it comes to willingness to pay, there’s often a large ‘say-do gap,’ where what people say they'll pay for something is very different from what they're actually willing to pay.”
Angel Annunciacao, Senior Business Director at IDEO
3) Observing real money and products
For testing willingness to pay, Angel also likes to see what people are doing in real life. And when there’s an offering that’s actually on the market, she says you can do this pretty easily through observation.
Angel gives the example of a large e-commerce company that wanted to see how much Gen Z valued sustainable options. They had read reports about how Gen Z really cared about sustainability and wanted greener options, but on their platform, what they were seeing was that the products that were more sustainable weren't necessarily the ones that were selling as well as some of the other options.
To study this, Angel’s team brought together more than a dozen Gen Z consumers who used the platform regularly and were looking to buy some things in the next two weeks. They gave them each $30 to spend and asked them to walk them through their thought process. The team watched the Gen Z participants share their screens as they looked at and compared different products.
About the Speaker
Angel Annunciacao
Senior Business Director, IDEO
Angel is a Systems & Strategy Director at IDEO who specializes in launching new products, building new ventures, and crafting sustainable organizational strategies. Adept at oscillating between the big picture and the minute details, Angel is an expert in setting a vision for both clients and team members and designing the paths to lead them there.
At IDEO, Angel has partnered with clients across industries -- including food & beverage, health, financial services, technology, and NGOs -- in applying human centered research to tackle a diverse set of challenges. Angel earned her MBA at UC Berkeley (Haas) and her B.S. in Business and Communications from UNC-Chapel Hill. On the weekends, you can find her trying out new recipes, exploring a trail in the Redwoods, or immersed in a good mystery novel.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
If you want to dive deeper into value propositions and business design, check out our 5-week course Designing a Business.
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Data is everywhere. Yet, despite so much data at our fingertips, it can often be hard to find the information we need, make sense of it, and take action.
So the question is: How do we find or create the right kind of data to answer our core questions and generate valuable insights?
We're sharing our tips on how to use data from our certificate, Human-Centered Insights. Keep reading below to learn about why data is important today, how to choose the right data, tools and techniques for data analysis, and how to share insights from your data.
1. Introduction: Importance of data analysis in business
As data continues to play a crucial role in the modern business landscape, organizations are increasingly using data to make informed decisions, to gain a competitive advantage, and to increase efficiency.
For those who can thoughtfully leverage data, there is immense opportunity for data-driven innovation and growth. Data at scale can be a rich source of inspiration and insight for the design of new products, services, systems, processes, and experiences.
2. How data impacts business decisions
At IDEO, we take a human-centered approach to using data. Behind every data set are human architects—people who decide what to measure, what not to measure, and how to measure it. And often, humans are the ones doing the collection of that data. Data may look like some objective truth when you see it on a screen, but it comes from a human process.
This perspective allows us to think more creatively about how to use data, particularly in the early decision-making stages of innovation, because we start to think about the contexts in which we collect data, the systematic biases that the data might inherently have, and how to design around that. If the data points collected represent human behaviors from real people, we can start to imagine and empathize with those human stories behind the data.
Using a human-centered lens can help you design better products and services for people. Rather than just looking at data to validate ideas in the final stages or to measure the effectiveness of an idea, this perspective of data-driven decision making and data-driven design empowers us to use data to inform our choices earlier. Data can help us brainstorm, ideate, and think about new concepts. It can give us the information to shape big ideas and decide which directions to move.
Learn how to start using data to uncover actionable insights in our 5-week course Innovating with Data.
3. Choosing the right data: Qualitative vs. Quantitative data
When it comes to data, people often think of tables and spreadsheets, but there are many different types of data. Here are definitions and examples of qualitative and quantitative data:
Keep an eye out for data that was perhaps collected for another purpose but, with some repurposing, could be useful for your core problem. Working with existing data, repurposed to address the core problem, can be a quick and powerful way to innovate with data. If there's no existing data that speaks to your core problem, you can design and gather your own using surveys, questionnaires, interviews, observations, and other methods.
Here are some general tips when using data to generate both qualitative insights and quantitative insights:
4. Data analysis tools
There are many different data analysis tools, data visualization tools, and data mapping tools. Here are a few options:
5. Data analysis techniques
There are some key data analysis techniques and steps that you can incorporate into your practice. Here are some key things to keep in mind when working with data, during the data analysis process:
Define your problem statement
When using data, the best place to start is with a designer's mindset and ensuring you know the right problem to solve—which can be a big task. When innovating with data, many people will start with the data, whether thinking about what to collect or digging into existing data. But before even looking at the data, start with the problem. Instead of immediately optimizing for numbers like revenue and engagement, ask the why behind the problem.
Gaining a deeper understanding of the problem or question will help you get beyond any initial problem statements that presuppose a solution. And get comfortable with the fact that what seemed like one problem might actually be several smaller problems — that will likely have to be solved over time rather than all at once.
Set a goal
It’s essential to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish with the data. Ask yourself these questions:
Define expectations ahead of time
Before diving into data analysis, align with your team on what you’re expecting to learn. If you're using data for decision-making, try to get your team to pre-commit to how you'll move forward if you see one thing versus another in the data. Finally, when visualizing your data, choose a layout that allows you to make comparisons between what you expected to happen and what actually occurred.
Sketch the data
Sketching the data early is one technique that can help save time by giving a clear direction before diving into any data collection or analysis. It’s powerful to think about what the problem is first because ultimately, you want to create a solution that solves the right problem, rather than just using any kind of data to solve a problem that may or may not be the right problem to solve.
Try our free sketching with data activity to see this method in action.
Collaborate with others
One guiding principle when working with data is that data requires a lens. Having a diverse range of opinions, views, and inputs is essential to any creative problem-solving process. When you collaborate with others, you’ll get varying perspectives on how to measure something and how to interpret data.
6. How to extract customer insights from your data
In a data context, many people think of insights as solely whatever the data looks like. For example, if there is an upward trend, you might think the insight is that the numbers are going up. While this is true, customer data insights are not just observations of the data, but are discoveries of patterns that offer new perspectives.
We use insights to inspire new ideas and unlock opportunities to design new products and services to improve lives. When we develop a data insight, that insight can sometimes change how we see the world, including how we think, feel, and act. Developing an insight is part art, part science. When you uncover it, it's this "aha moment" of discovering something that guides you.
Wondering how to derive insights from data? One approach to finding insights taught in our course Innovating with Data is to look for outliers in the data. When you have a series of quantities, outliers are quantities that are way higher or lower than the majority. In more traditional data analysis, you might look at the outliers and then remove them. But when designing with data in a human-centered way, it's often interesting to look at the outliers, ask questions and get curious about why certain data points are so different from the rest.
7. How to share and present data with others
To bring data to life for your audience, it’s important to learn data storytelling. Combining data and storytelling satisfies the left and right brain needs and gives your audience the ability to understand your insights quantitatively and qualitatively. When you incorporate storytelling into your work, it allows you to share insights and ideas in a more human way.
All the data in the world won’t sway your stakeholders to take on a risky new idea if they can’t connect emotionally with what it means. To successfully present data to others, make sure you include deep research and insights about customers, data about what's happening in the market, and experienceable prototypes of solutions. It’s also helpful to give people an opportunity to discuss what they’ve learned in groups. At IDEO, we’ve shared data storytelling examples and data visualization examples in our work with clients across the healthcare, automobile, and finance industries.
8. Conclusion
Data can be a powerful tool for innovation, but it can feel daunting to figure out where to start. The good news is, you don’t have to be a data scientist to tap into the power of data. Anyone can incorporate human-centered data into their work to uncover opportunities for innovation and better understand people and problems.
If you want to dive deeper into how to use data to generate insights and move toward innovation, check out our Human-Centered Insights Certificate.
]]>Being able to influence people is a critical skill if you want to increase your impact at work. Having influence means you can ignite change, motivate people, and be a better leader. But knowing how to have influence when you work remotely can feel challenging—especially if you haven’t done it before.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, we have a conversation with Sacha Connor, the Founder of Virtual Work Insider—a consultancy that coaches organizations to work seamlessly across any distance. Sacha specializes in training geographically distributed and remote teams within companies and agencies. She shares how to have more impact as a remote worker and leader by crafting a plan for influencing across distance.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
How to Create a Virtual Influence Plan
Making Decisions as a Remote Worker
Influencing as a Consultant or Contractor
Navigating Your Career as a Remote Worker
Leadership as a Remote Worker
According to Sacha, there’s an emerging expectation of employees to become an omnimodal leader, which means learning how to become successful at communicating, collaborating, building relationships, and influencing in a fully remote group, in a fully in-person group, and in a hybrid environment.
However, Sacha says that there are unconscious biases at play, especially when we're in these hybrid and remote work environments. One is distance bias, or proximity bias, which is our brain's natural tendency to put more value on the things that are closer to us than those that are farther away. Another is recency bias, which is our tendency to put more value on the people that we’ve heard from or seen more recently.
There's long-standing research that shows that exposure accounts for 60% of career success—much higher than performance, which only accounts for 10%. That’s why it’s so important to have a virtual influence plan. In order to have influence and create that exposure when you're working in hybrid and remote environments, you’ll need to adjust your behaviors to account for distance and mitigate these unconscious biases.
“There’s this emerging expectation of employees to learn how to communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and influence within a fully remote group, in-person group, and hybrid environment.”
Sacha Connor, Founder of Virtual Work Insider
How to Create a Virtual Influence Plan
Sacha sees influence as the ability to motivate and inspire others to take action. The best leaders are those that successfully influence up, down, across, inside, and outside of their organization to be able to impact business results.
Sacha realized that in order to be successful with hitting her business goals and career aspirations, she needed to make her team feel as if she was in that building every day. She needed them to feel her virtual presence, and to lead their thinking and have influence even when she couldn't bump into them at the water cooler.
Based on her past experience as a remote senior business and marketing leader at the Clorox company, Sacha designed a training program to help people create their virtual influence plan. The virtual influence plan includes five steps:
Step #1: Who
First, map out your sphere of influence. On a piece of paper, take five minutes to sketch out all of the different people that you need to influence or gain exposure to up, down, across, inside, and outside your organization. When Sacha reviews these maps, she typically sees that people do a good job of mapping out their internal stakeholders, but might have missed a number of external stakeholders. You may see that you need to influence someone that you don't have direct access to.
Step #2: Why
Now that you've got a map, you need to prioritize. Start with picking a couple of stakeholders that you need to build an influence plan for. The next step is the “why”—you need to get really clear on why you need to influence that person or build exposure with that person. Getting clear on that will help you create a really targeted plan. They could be things like influencing thinking on the business to hit your sales goals, launching a new product, or establishing a personal connection to build trust and raise awareness of your work or your team's work.
Step #3: How
How do your stakeholders like to be communicated with? Are they formal communicators? Do they want emails? Are they looking for in-person meetings where you send a pre-read ahead of time? Or are they more informal? They might like text messages or direct messages or a quick phone call. Oftentimes Sacha hears people say that they don't know how others like to be communicated with. That in and of itself is a great insight and a prompt to go and seek out that information.
Step #4: When
You’ll need to determine the best aperture with which to gain exposure or influence. Sacha says that that means determining the best window of time for when your stakeholder is going to be receptive to your message. Get really specific here—think about day of the week, time of day, a specific window of time in advance of a key milestone. For example, Sacha’s VP that she reported to was based in their Oakland headquarters office. Being in Philadelphia, she didn't have the opportunity to swing by his office, so they jointly decided that the best time to talk was at 7:30am PT. This was when he was in his car driving to the office and Sacha had his undivided attention.
Step #5: What
In this step, you’ll need to decide what tactics you're going to use to influence and gain exposure to each of those stakeholders that you picked. The tactics you choose will depend on what you decided as your “why,” and what you discovered about how your stakeholders like to be communicated with.
If you want to learn more about making an impact on your team, check out our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
Making Decisions as a Remote Worker
Let’s say you need to influence in order to get your recommendation or your proposal approved. If you think about the who, it includes the formal decision maker as well as the informal decision makers, the people who are also going to be influencing the decision maker on your behalf. From there, you can determine when the right aperture for the influence is—perhaps it's five days before the decision meeting. If the decision maker is booked in back-to-back meetings, you might decide that the best way to prime them is through asynchronous communication.
In thinking about this, one idea would be to try something that Sacha calls video mail. When you're about to send an email with a recommendation, proposal, or idea, creating a video can make a message really memorable and sticky, and you can provide more context than writing. It can be as simple as recording yourself, doing some screen sharing with visuals to bring your idea to life, and then sending that to your decision maker ahead of time before the decision.
“There's long-standing research that shows that exposure accounts for 60% of career success—much higher than performance, which only accounts for 10%. So in order to have influence and create that exposure when you're working in these hybrid and remote environments, you need to adjust your behaviors to account for distance.”
Sacha Connor, Founder of Virtual Work Insider
Influencing as a Consultant or Contractor
If you are an external consultant or an agency working with a client on a new project, Sacha says you’re behind extra thick virtual curtains because you're on the outside of that organization. First, take a look at your influence map, and map out who you think on the client side you need to influence or gain exposure to. You may need to ask your client to help fill in some of those gaps.
Sacha recommends attending meetings and getting copied on some of their digital communications because that allows you to see who's invited to certain meetings, observe the meeting interactions, and see who's copied on communications. That can give you a sense of the formal and informal decision makers.
When you get to that last step of the what, consider how you're going to continue to add value. It could be through offering a point of view on the work that's being done. Or it could be leveraging your social media, and indirectly influencing the team by putting out thought leadership content that they will organically see in their feeds.
“I realized that in order to be successful with hitting my business goals and career aspirations, I needed to make my team feel as if I was in that building every day. I needed them to feel my virtual presence. I needed to lead their thinking and have influence even when I couldn't bump into them at the water cooler.”
Sacha Connor, Founder of Virtual Work Insider
As a remote or hybrid worker, there might be other people in other parts of the company or even externally that you want to get to know—to learn from them, to get mentored by them, or to potentially even work for them. This is where you're going to need some help to build out your network. You can talk to your manager, other senior leaders, and your peers to find out who you need to get introduced to and gain exposure to based on your career aspirations.
When you think about the what in that situation, the tactics you could choose include things like an initial coffee chat. Start to build that relationship, virtually if you're at a distance. Or you can find out if you have a hybrid overlap day in the office. It's a great use of in-person, in office time if you have the opportunity.
Additionally, when you connect with someone new, make sure you do your research on that person and determine what value you can actually bring to that interaction so that it's mutually beneficial to both of you. For example, you might want to provide a perspective on something that you know that they're interested in, or something that they're working on. Ultimately, through a virtual influence plan, you can figure out ways to continue to build relationships with your team and organization throughout your career.
About the Speaker
Sacha Connor
Founder, Virtual Work Insider
Sacha Connor is the Founder of Virtual Work Insider, a consultancy that coaches organizations to work seamlessly across any distance. Sacha specializes in training geographically distributed and remote teams within companies and agencies, and Virtual Workforce Employee Resource Group creation.
Sacha has 18 years of business leadership experience at a Fortune 500 company and also agency-side, and 8 years of experience leading large, distributed teams fully remotely. As one of the first remote marketing directors, she led brands worth over $250M and was the first fully remote member of the leadership team for a $1 billion division at The Clorox Company.
You can download Sacha’s free resource to create your own virtual influence plan at: virtualworkinsider.com/ideoinfluence
If you’re interested in learning more skills and techniques to foster creative collaboration and unleash the potential of a team, check out our online course, Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
Data can be a powerful tool for innovation, but it can feel daunting to figure out where to start. Whether you’re overwhelmed with data or needing more, it's hard to know what's relevant to the problem you're trying to solve, confidently interpret the data, and navigate toward innovative solutions. The good news is, you don’t have to be a data scientist to tap into the power of data.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Bo Peng, an instructor of IDEO U’s course Innovating with Data and Senior Portfolio Director of Data Science at IDEO, shares how to use data to uncover opportunities for innovation and better understand people and problems—including the first thing you should do before any data analysis, strategies and tools for pinpointing your challenge and determining the data you need, and a mindset shift that will help you uncover insights in your data.
Different Types of Data
When we're thinking about data, what do we mean? People often think of tables and spreadsheets, but there are many different types data:
A Human-Centered Approach to Data
At IDEO, we take a human-centered approach to using data. Bo says that there are five principles for innovating with data, the most important of which is that data is created by humans. Behind every data set, there are human architects—people who decide what to measure, what not to measure, and how to measure it. And oftentimes, humans are the ones doing the collection of that data. Data may look like some objective truth when you see it in a database on a screen, but it actually comes from a very human process.
That allows us to think more creatively about how to use data, particularly in the early stages of innovation, because we start to think about the contexts in which the data is collected, the systematic biases that the data might inherently have, and how to design around that. If the data points collected represent human behaviors from real people, we can start to imagine and empathize with those human stories behind the data.
When you think from a human-centered lens, it can help you design better products and services for people. Rather than just looking at data to validate ideas in the very last stages or to measure the effectiveness of ideas, this perspective empowers us to use data earlier on. Bo says that data can help us brainstorm, ideate, and think about new concepts. It can inspire us to come up with big ideas and opportunity areas from the get-go.
“Think about the human stories behind the data.”
Bo Peng, Innovating with Data Instructor and Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO
How to Get Started with Using Data
According to Bo, the best place to start with using data is with a designer's mindset, and making sure you know what the right problem to solve in the first place is—which can be a big task. When innovating with data, a lot of people will start with the data, whether it’s thinking about what to collect or digging into existing data. Bo suggests starting with the problem at hand and not even looking at the data at first. Instead of immediately trying to optimize for numbers like revenue and engagement, it's important to ask the why behind the problem, because oftentimes an initial problem statement presupposes a solution with it.
Bo gives the example of IDEO’s work with a company that provides a digital service, including a mobile app and wearables, that helps you sleep better. At the time, they were focused on helping elite athletes get a good night's sleep, especially the night before games. Initially, the company asked IDEO for better charts and graphs on their app because they thought that if the athletes could see more information, then it would help the athletes make those more informed choices and lead to app stickiness.
Bo focused on understanding what the athletes needed first, and the team’s design research actually showed that charts and graphs weren't the sticky or impactful part, just where they had the most data. They found that athletes wanted more human connection behind the app and wearable experience—they wanted an accountability buddy and coaching, not just better charts and graphs. As a result, they decided not to make the data visualizations a central part of the app, and instead added chat and other communication features to create a more human touch.
If you want to learn more about using data to uncover opportunities for innovative solutions, check out our online course Innovating with Data, where Bo is an instructor.
A Tool for Innovating with Data: Sketching
Sketching with the end in mind is a strategy can help you imagine future possibilities with data. Bo shares the example of IDEO’s work with Proctor & Gamble, which wanted to connect 20,000 of its researchers, scientists, and engineers across the world with a tool. Instead of starting with the data, Bo began by sketching with the end in mind. Bo imagined what the end product might look like, sketching out potential screens and product flows. The team presented several sketches as options to the client to get their reaction, before even knowing what the data would be.
They imagined many different interfaces for connecting people in different ways. One of them looked like a Facebook wall, while another looked like a network diagram with nodes and edges. Throughout the process, the client shared what they liked and didn't like, so they could quickly figure out what kinds of interfaces to work toward. The responses to these sketches would later influence what data they collected and what methods to build on the backend, such as statistical methods or machine learning algorithms.
Sketching early on saves time by giving a clear direction before diving into any data collection or analysis. It’s powerful to think about what the problem is in the first place because ultimately, you want to create a solution that solves the right problem, rather than just using any kind of data to solve a problem that may or may not be the right problem to solve in the first place.
“It’s tempting to start with your data. But it’s so powerful to think about what problem you’re solving for in the first place.”
Bo Peng, Innovating with Data Instructor and Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO
Getting Insights Out of Data
In a data context, a lot of people think of insights as solely whatever the data happens to look like. For example, if there’s an upward trend, the insight is that the numbers are going up. While sometimes that's true, insights are not just observations of the data by itself. Bo thinks of insights as discoveries of patterns that offer new perspectives.
We use insights to inspire new ideas and unlock opportunities to design new products and services to improve the way that people live. When we develop an insight, that insight can sometimes change how we see the world, like how we think, how we feel, and how we act. It’s part art, part science, and when you get it, it's like the “aha moment” of discovering something that then also guides you.
One approach to insights: Look for outliers in the data
Bo shares one approach to finding insights that she teaches in her course, which is to look for outliers in the data. When you have a series of quantities, outliers are quantities that are way higher or way lower than most of the others. Say you're a museum director looking at time spent in your museum. Let's say the average visitor of your museum might spend two to three hours there on average. An outlier would be a visit that's either really short, like a minute, or really long, like eight hours from open to close.
You could start to dig into why those really short or really long visits are happening. For the people who are staying for only a minute, what's going on there? Are people walking into the building by mistake? If that’s the case, there could be an opportunity to improve signage. For the really long visits, you can look into what the people who stay there all day are doing. How do they have the time, what contexts do they live in, and how are they experiencing that museum that might be different than the average visitor?
As another example, Bo talks about a company that IDEO worked with that wanted to develop a new frozen meal. The team did interviews with a variety of people, and most purchase behaviors were what they expected. But there was one interesting home visit in which they observed a professional single working woman in her forties who lived alone, with no kids. They looked in her freezer, and in her freezer was a stack of kids frozen meals. It was something they hadn’t seen before, and they got curious about her purchasing behavior.
When they asked her, she said that she was busy and didn’t have time for cooking, which was the same as other people that they interviewed. But she said that she bought frozen kids meals because she thought that nobody would serve an unhealthy meal to children, so they’d be healthier. The team realized that this was an opportunity area, and they were able to design a product that markets healthy frozen meals to professional working adults.
In more traditional data analysis, often you'll take a look at the outliers and then cut them out. You might see them as a fluke or an error in the data recording. That could still be true, and it's important to do due diligence first. But when you're designing with data, it's often interesting to look at the outliers and ask questions and get curious about why certain data points are so different from the rest.
“When we’re talking about the innovation process, often people see data as a method for validating after the fact. But data can help with brainstorming and creating new concepts—it’s really helpful in all parts of the innovation process.”
Bo Peng, Innovating with Data Instructor and Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO
About the Speaker
Bo Peng
Senior Portfolio Director, Data Science, IDEO
Bo works at the intersection of data science and human-centered design, and is passionate about using data as a resource to improve the way we work, play, and think. She co-leads IDEO’s data science practice. Prior to IDEO, she was a partner and data scientist at Datascope, a cutting-edge data science consultancy based in Chicago. Bo led a series of engagements with deep technical expertise, including partnering with P&G to systematically surface subject matter experts and collaboration opportunities, and with Steelcase to prototype the next wave of smart workplace and employee engagement tools. Bo holds an MS in Statistics and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and was named one of Crain's 2019 Tech 50.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
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How do you lead change by bringing people into the process?
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Deirdre Cerminaro and Bryan Walker, instructors of IDEO U’s Change Leadership Certificate, share how to use stakeholder mapping to make people the catalysts for your change, how to turn change skeptics into champions, and how to surface insights about your stakeholders.
Deirdre Cerminaro is the instructor of Human-Centered Systems Thinking and an Executive Design Director at IDEO. Passionate about the power of systems design to create a more equitable future, much of her work at IDEO has focused on designing education systems.
Bryan Walker is the instructor of Designing for Change and is a Managing Director at IDEO, helping leaders transform their organizations’ cultures and businesses in pursuit of innovation, adaptability, and impact. Bryan is curious about the future of work and how design can affect and support change within complex human systems.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
A Tool for Systems Change: Stakeholder Mapping
How to Engage People with Change: Creating a Beacon
What to Do When People are Resistant to Change
What is Change Leadership?
According to Deirdre, there are two core tenets of human-centered systems thinking that really help with leading change. The first is to step back, look at the whole picture, and understand:
The second is to zoom in and understand the needs of people at that moment.
Bryan says that an organization is a system, and one of the primary vehicles in which we shape the world around us. Because of that, it’s important to understand how they work, and how you can change them. While it's easy to overly complicate organizational change, where you focus on structures, processes, policies, norms, and cultures, Bryan emphasizes that at the end of the day, organizations are human.
Organizations are just a group of people working together to try to create something that they could not produce alone. When you focus on the people, you're reminded where change starts and what drives it. At the end of the day, change is always about people who have a vision for a better future.
“Change is about people who have a vision for a better future.”
Bryan Walker, Designing for Change Instructor and Managing Director at IDEO
A Tool for Systems Change: Stakeholder Mapping
Systems maps are tools that can give you a tangible starting point when approaching change. One type of a systems map is a stakeholder map, also called a network map, which enables you to see the people in a system and the connections between them. It's helpful for understanding the broad landscape, but also for identifying who has decision-making power in the system, who's really impacted, who's not connected to one another, where there are potentially misaligned incentives, and so on.
Systems maps are useful for a couple of reasons. First, they make it possible to make our internal mental models visible. We're all walking around with different mental models of how organizations and processes work. Sometimes, we're using the same words but talking about different things. Creating a stakeholder map takes it out of your head and allows you to talk about it tangibly with other people. The other reason stakeholder maps are useful is that people are at the heart of every system, but oftentimes their needs are misunderstood or overlooked.
Stakeholder maps are a tool that you can revisit at any point. Whenever you get new information, you can ask, “How would that fit into this system's map?” It's something that you can use as you're going along a change process to either remap what you've learned or to bring other people and new perspectives in.
Examples of Stakeholder Maps
One example of a stakeholder map is mapping a hospital system. You might map out patients, nurses, and doctors, but also insurance companies, policymakers, chaplains, and family members. There are so many different stakeholders in such a complex system, and you can map the connections, including the flow of money, emotional connections, medical knowledge, decision making, and data. All of this will give you a sense of the whole picture, where there's an interesting opportunity, and where you might actually zoom in and design something.
Here are a couple examples of how IDEO has used stakeholder maps to create impactful change.
Redesigning hospital spaces
IDEO worked with St. Jude's Hospital to understand the needs of families seeking treatment for childhood cancer. Families of patients end up living in housing on campus for long stretches of time, making them important stakeholders in that system. The hospital system also included playgrounds, schools, and jobs, and a systems map shows that only some of the needs of families are being met in the traditional hospital spaces of exam rooms and lobbies.
As a result, St. Jude’s created entirely new spaces for families to play together, take a nap between appointments, have classes for siblings, and give parents spaces to take work calls. A stakeholder map can help you see the whole picture, figure out what’s going on, and design something really tangible.
Improving the nurse experience
Bryan gives another example of a project that IDEO did with Kaiser Permanente. In big hospitals, there are lots of patients, physicians, and nurses. The head of the hospital realized that they had a problem with their shift changes, when physicians and nurses turned over and a new group came in. They believed that there were opportunities for better patient care and efficiencies in terms of hospital management.
They mapped out all the people involved, from those who needed to enact the change to those who were going to be impacted by it. Then, they brought all of them into the creative process from the very beginning, in order to figure out a robust solution that would work for everybody's needs. While leadership was worried that nurses would be resistant to change, they realized how critical the nurses were, not just in the creation of the idea, but the scaling of it across their healthcare network and into other hospitals.
“At the end of the day, organizations are human.”
Bryan Walker, Designing for Change Instructor and Managing Director at IDEO
Why Change Starts with People
People support what they create. The more that you can bring people into the process of creating change, the more likely that change is going to be successfully adopted. You also end up with better ideas, because people can bring in different perspectives. Many design practices are about designing with people and bringing people into the process early.
Deirdre gives the example of work she did with partners who wanted to spur innovation and culture change in high schools in the US. They were trying to understand the potential leverage points in a school system where they could add the most value. They created a big stakeholder map of school systems, including teachers, students, parents, families, coaches, school principals, school leaders, district offices, policymakers, textbook makers, and so on.
One thing that popped out from making the map was that school principals play a hugely influential role in schools. They have access to unique leverage points in the school system—they're the only people in the building that can control the budget, the schedule, teacher training, and events. But they also have very little in the way of support or resources for themselves or as a peer network with each other.
Deirdre saw an opportunity to create a leadership development program to enable school principals to design school culture, giving them the tools of systems thinking to better understand their own schools. They created a co-design schools toolkit, which shared their learnings of the whole system and how to create specific interventions.
If you want to learn more about human-centered approaches to change, check out our Change Leadership Certificate.
How to Engage People with Change: Creating a Beacon
According to Bryan, a beacon is a tangible manifestation of the change you want to see, which begins to show the way forward. Oftentimes, you have a grand vision of the change you want, but how can you do something right now that demonstrates progress towards the vision and the value of beginning to move in that direction? That’s what a beacon is for. It produces demonstrable value, and helps more and more people begin to understand your vision and build the belief that it’s possible.
Bryan gives the example of a large pharmaceutical company in Peru. The vision that they had was digital transformation, adopting new technologies and unlocking the power of the internet to increase customer and employee expectations. While it sounded awesome, it was very abstract. One idea they had was: What if a customer didn't have to go into a drugstore to refill their prescription, but instead could do it by phone and have it delivered to their house? The company would have to develop all sorts of new technology and entirely new roles to fully implement this.
But they wanted to first create a beacon. They picked one store, got a moped, used text messaging, and actually began to deliver prescriptions to people within a 10 block radius. It took this abstract concept of digital transformation and showed how they could deliver greater customer experiences by leveraging technology in new ways. They learned about some customers who, because of physical limitations, couldn't even get to the stores before. With these tangible stories, people could really begin to rally around the idea of digital transformation and then start to come up with other examples or other beacons that began to create a fuller version of the larger vision.
“The more that you can bring people actually into the process of creating change, the more likely that change is to be successfully adopted.”
Deirdre Cerminaro, Human-Centered Systems Thinking Instructor and an Executive Design Director at IDEO
What to Do When People are Resistant to Change
Bryan says that from his experience, listening and making people feel heard often goes a long way when you have somebody who's resistant to change. A lot of the time, it's not that people refuse to change. It’s that they don't want to be changed—they want to be part of the change. And sometimes, the people who you think are going to provide the greatest resistance can actually become the greatest allies and advocates.
Bryan tells the story of a global NGO he worked with. The team was tasked with bringing human-centered design into this organization, in order for them to better design for local communities and have real positive impact. However, there was an individual within leadership that was known for his skepticism. As they were starting to build up the program, grow awareness, and gain momentum, the word went around that this person was very skeptical and didn't believe that the program would work.
Bryan and his team decided to meet with this person and hear what he was skeptical of, and was surprised to learn that he wasn’t skeptical of what they were trying to, he was actually skeptical that they weren't going big enough and that it was too small to succeed. At the scale and size of the organization, and the urgency of the issue, he wanted them to really look at their approach to change and see if they could accelerate and increase it. By listening to him and understanding his perspective, the team was able to create an even better solution.
About the Speakers
Deirdre Cerminaro
Executive Portfolio Director, IDEO
Deirdre is an Executive Design Director and co-lead of the Systems & Strategy practice at IDEO. As a former architectural designer with a background in business and psychology, she has a knack for breaking down complex systems and finding simple levers to drive lasting change. Passionate about the power of systems design to create a more equitable future, much of her work at IDEO has focused on designing education systems—from reimagining student services at a community college in Ohio to creating programs to deliver quality, affordable education at scale in Peru.
Deirdre holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. In her spare time, she can usually be found outside with her dog or off on an adventure. She's ridden her bicycle across the U.S. twice and hiked the 211-mile John Muir Trail.
Bryan Walker
Managing Director, IDEO
Bryan leads the Design for Change studio, helping leaders transform their organizations’ cultures and businesses in pursuit of innovation, adaptability, and impact. Bryan is curious about the future of work and how design can affect and support change within complex human systems. Together with his clients, he’s exploring what corporate leaders can learn from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists; how technology, a new generation of employees, and a shifting marketplace is redefining the workplace experience; and how leaders can drive change by movement as opposed to mandates.
Bryan earned a master’s degree in social anthropology from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree in design and environmental analysis from Cornell. Outside the office, he can be found chasing the perfect wave.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
In order to do their best creative work, teams have to learn how to respect everyone’s individuality and collaborate effectively. Author Kim Scott says building a culture of inclusivity starts with learning how to identify and respond to bias, prejudice, and bullying.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Kim shares a framework for identifying harmful behavior and choosing a response, tools leaders can use to disrupt bias, and ways to be an upstander at work.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
In this episode with Kim, we cover:
(1:30) What Kim learned from writing Radical Candor
(5:00) The 4 roles we all play
(8:00) Defining bias, prejudice, and bullying
(9:40) How to identify bias and how to respond
(12:47) How to identify prejudice and how to respond
(15:08) How to identify bullying and how to respond
(16:56) Using the I, It, You framework to respond
(27:30) How to be an upstander at work: the 5 Ds
(30:48) Audience Q&A
(40:30) Closing
Resources:
If you want to learn how to tap into diverse perspectives to foster creative thinking, check out IDEO U’s online course, Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
About the Speaker
Kim Scott
Author
Kim Scott is the author of Just Work: How to Confront Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Build a Culture of Inclusivity and Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She lives with her family in Silicon Valley.
Transcript:
Lauren Collins Scott:
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Creative Confidence Podcast, where we talk to special guests and subject matter experts about creativity, leadership, innovation, and growth. I'm Lauren Collins Scott, an executive design director at IDEO, and I'll be your host for today. Quick reminder that we always open up the last portion of our podcast for your question, so please share them in the chat. Um, I see some of you've already started already, but please let us know where you're calling in from. I see some folks from Gainesville, from Minneapolis, all the way from Chile and even Plano, Texas. I'm really excited for our conversation today. Today we'll be speaking with author Kim Scott about how to confront Bias, prejudice, and boy at work. Hi Kim.
Kim Scott:
Hi, how are you? I'm just typing in that I'm from Los Altos, California.
Lauren:
Wonderful. I'm calling in from Atlanta, Georgia. So Kim Scott is the author of Just Work, how to Confront Bias, prejudice and Bullying to build a culture of Inclusivity and Radical Candor Via Kick Be a Kickass Boss without losing your humanity and co-founder of the company. Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University, and before that, led AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. Um, and as she just mentioned, she now lives with her family in Silicon Valley. Kim recently came to IDEO to give a talk about her newest book and the framework she created. We found it so impactful that we wanted to give her on this podcast, um, to share all of her tools with the community here. So Kim, we're gonna go ahead and jump right into it. You have a really interesting work history. We just mentioned you manage a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. Is there a skill or learning from one of those past jobs that you employ in your work today?
Kim:
Absolutely. You know, it was when I was starting up that diamond cutting factory in Moscow that I realized that management is actually something interesting and could create a more just world. Uh, in fact, I was, I had to hire some Russian diamond cutters, and I wanna pause for a moment to say that the invasion of Ukraine has really hit me hard. Uh, because the thing that these diamond cutters, these Russian diamond cutters taught me was that the, you know, when I first tried to hire them, they, I thought, oh, this is gonna be easy. The ruble is collapsing and the dollar is strong, and I'm just gonna pay people. That's all management is about is paying people. Right?
And I expected them all to say yes immediately, but instead they said, no, uh, what we wanna do is we wanna first have a picnic. And I was like, okay, well I can do a picnic too. That's easy. And we got all the way through a bottle of vodka, and by the end they, uh, what I realized was that the thing that I had to offer that the state did not have to offer was not money. It was to give a damn. It was, they wanted to know that their boss would care enough about them to get them out of Russia if things went sideways there. Wow. And uh, and as you can imagine, I've been thinking a lot of the about those, those folks, uh, lately. Cause I think they, they are there. I've lost touch with them. But, uh, but, but I did care and we had a great relationship and we had a lot of fun working together. And that was when I realized that, that being a manager can is actually sort of interesting. It's you, you bring your full humanity to the task and it's more fun than I understood.
Lauren:
That's such a great special learning and yes. Much, much deeper than just paying people
Kim:
Sure, absolutely. I was invited to give a Radical Candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco, and I had known the CEO of that company for the better part of a decade. She's a person I like and respect enormously, so I was really excited to give the talk. And when I finished giving the talk, she pulled me aside and she said, Kim, I'm excited to roll out radical candor. I think that it's going to help me build the kind of culture I want, but I gotta tell you, it's much harder for me to roll it out than it is for you. And she went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer anyone, even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, she would get signed with the angry black woman stereotype. And I knew that this was true. She's one of too few black CEOs in tech, or frankly in any other sector.
And I knew that this was true. And as soon as she said it to me, I had sort of four revelations at the same time. The first was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be, that I aspired to be. I had failed to be an upstander. I had been sort of a silent bystander to her experiencing that, that kind of, uh, that those kinds of comments. And in fact, I often hadn't even noticed the extent to which people were saying things like that to her. And the extent to which she had to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant at every meeting we had ever been in together, even though she had what to be ticked off about as we all do at work. Of course. So that was the first thing I had. I sort of had to come to grips with my failure as an upstander.
The second thing that I realized was that not only had I been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her in the workplace, I was also in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me as a white woman in the workplace. I, I think I didn't wanna think of either myself or of her as a victim. And because we have such a strange, a strange attitude towards victims in our society. And so I had just been in denial. I had marched through my whole career sort of pretending that a whole host of things were not happening, that were in fact happening kind of hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit. But there it is, it was the truth. And I think that even less than wanting to think of myself as a victim, did I ever wanna think of myself as the culprit.
And so I was probably even deeper in denial about the kinds of things that I had done, the, the biases that I had, the prejudices even that I had, and the times when I had bullied folks. Uh, I never intended to do those things, but intentions don't matter, impact does.
And last but not least, I realized that as a leader, I had imagined that I was creating these BS free zones, but I had often failed to do that. And that was those sort of four revelations at the same time were what prompted me to write my next book, Just Work, and to organize it around those four different roles, the roles, uh, the, the roles that we all play. Sometimes were the leaders, sometimes were the upstander, sometimes were the person who's harmed and sometimes we're the person who caused harm. So that, uh, that was feedback that I'm really grateful for.
And I think it's also worth pausing and sort of thinking about the different responsibilities we have in each of those roles, because I had, I think, a responsibility to intervene on behalf of my colleague when, when she was getting this kind of, because like, it's ridiculous to call her angry. And the fact that people were calling her an angry black woman was a giant hint that there was
But I think that by defaulting to silence, I was giving up my agency throughout my career. And so what I encourage folks to do is to be proactive. If you're gonna, if you're gonna choose silence, be proactive. Make that a choice, not a default. Because as Audra Lorde said, your silence will not protect you. I think it's also worth sort of exploring the hidden costs of silence feels safer, but it often is not. Um, and next, the person who caused harm, I, I think it's really hard to acknowledge when, when, for me at least, and I imagine for
That's not what I want to be. And so learning how to acknowledge it when we have caused harm and to make amends, not just to apologize, but, but to really make sure that we know what we did wrong and to, to take steps to make it right.
Uh, and last but not least, I think leaders have an obligation, a responsibility to prevent bias, prejudice, and bullying from destroying their team's ability to collaborate. But of course, bias, prejudice and bullying are almost inevitable. These are human behavior. So at the very least, they need to respond in a way that prevents it from happening again. It's the joy of being a leader is that you have to prevent things that are bound to happen.
Lauren:
Thank you, Kim. I love that you took that feedback that you received and were so reflective with it, and were able to think through the different ways that individuals could respond as well as the responsibility that they have. You mentioned a term upstander, which I'll let the audience know. We're going to unpack that a little bit more later in the conversation. Kim, you also mentioned a few other terms that I'd love you to define for the audience. So bias, prejudice, and bullying. If you could give us a brief definition of each of those.
Kim:
Sure. I think as I, as I was writing the book, I thought about why I so often defaulted to silence. And I think part of the reason is that I was conflating bias, prejudice and bullying as though they were all the same thing. And they're actually three different things. So I want to define bias as not meaning it. Bias is usually unconscious. It's reflective of some sort of pattern that is in our society as human beings, we are pattern makers, but we can also change patterns that are not serving as well, that are, that are harming us. So that's bias. Whereas prejudice is a very consciously held belief, usually reflecting some kind of stereotype that is both unfair and inaccurate. And, uh, and, and distinguishing between bias and prejudice is really important. And, and lastly, there's bullying. Usually with bullying, there's no belief, conscious or unconscious going on at all. It's just being mean. Hmm. Uh, and so, so for me, it was very helpful to begin, uh, if you wanna solve a hard problem, it's, it's useful to break it down into parts and, and solve one part at a time.
Lauren:
Yes. I think that's super clear and super helpful. Know what you're starting with. And with the Just Work framework, you've also created a response to each of these. Do you wanna start with bias again, starting with what is it? And then give us an example of a story and how someone should respond in a moment like that and then we can move on to prejudice and bullying as well.
Kim:
Sure. Absolutely. So bias, again, not meaning it. One of my favorite stories about a great response to bias comes from Aileen Lee who started Cowboy Ventures. And she was going into a meeting with two colleagues who were men. And Aileen had the expertise that was gonna win her team the deal. So when they went into the conference room, she sat in the center and her two colleagues sat off to her left. And when the other side filed in, the first person sat across from the guy to Aileen’s left, the next person sat across from the guy to his left. And then they filed on down the table leaving Aileen dangling by herself. And that's often how bias shows up, who decides to sit next to or across from whom. Aileen, however, was undeterred and she started talking and explaining things. And when the other side had questions, they did not direct their questions at Aileen. They directed them at her two colleagues who were men. It happened once. Had anybody ever hear this happen?
Lauren:
Yes. I'm like this. Yes. This is very resonant.
Kim:
Yeah.
Lauren:
I really like that example because he didn't necessarily even accuse anyone of anything. Right. Yeah. He just, he just, brought attention, like you said to something. He noticed something and he changed the dynamics in the room.
Kim:
Yeah. He invited people in to understand. And that's the benefit of, I think, an I statement. I don't think you meant that the way it sounded, or I don't, you know, I I I think that sounded biased. Even if you do wanna sort of, you, we don't have to tiptoe around the tulips of bias.
Lauren:
Yes. Because of course he still needed to win the deal in the end.
Kim:
Yes, yes. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, but so he was sort of holding up a mirror, right? Mm-hmm.
Lauren:
Yes, let's get into prejudice. Yes.
Kim:
Yeah. Yeah. Cuz if you hold up a mirror to prejudice, the other person's gonna grin in that mirror and say, yeah, aren't I good looking? You know? Mm-hmm.
Kim:
And my colleague said, why not? And the hiring manager said, I'm not gonna put that hair in front of the business
Lauren:
Yeah. I, I really like both of these examples. Frankly. It is someone else who's stepping in to point out, you know, the bias and the prejudice and um, whether it's using an I statement or the its statement. Let's get to the real toughy bullying. Yes. Can you again, reground us in what bullying is and how someone should respond in that moment?
Kim:
So bullying at its most basic form is just being mean to someone. And I think a great response to bullying is not an I statement, but rather a you statement. If an I statement kind of invites someone in, a you statement pushes them away a little bit. Hmm. My daughter actually taught me this when she was in third grade. She was getting bullied on the playground and I was encouraging her to say, you know, assume good intent of this kid and say to this kid, I feel sad when you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she bangs her fist on the table and she said, mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they succeeded?
Kim:
Or what's going on for you here? This is not how you usually act. Or even kind of a you non-sequitur. Like, where'd you get that shirt? The point is, when you're using a you statement, you're asking the other person to respond to you. You're not taking on this sort of toxic bullying that they're, that they're sending your way. Um, not, you know, it's not always gonna make you feel much better, but, but in my experience, at least, starting with the word you and then saying something else helps me retain my sense of agency in the moment.
Lauren:
Thank you for that. I see a question in the chat that kind of connects back to what we were mentioning earlier in terms of some of the feedback that you got with radical candor. So the question is, what if no ally is available when you're being biased against? So yes. If there isn't someone else to step into what's happening, whether someone is being biased, prejudice or bullying, what advice do you have for people? And also how do you think about that? In terms of someone's identity?
Kim:
Yes. So I think that very often when, when this stuff is coming at you, you're not sure whether it's bias, prejudice or bullying, and that's okay. So you can respond with what you think it is and then you'll learn something. So if you think it's bias, say the word I, even if you dunno what's gonna come outta your mouth next. If you think, if it feels like prejudice, say the word it and then just notice what comes outta your mouth next. If you think it is bullying, say the word you and then not for me. That's very helpful cuz often I don't know what to say. So that's like an example of what to say when you don't know what to say. What if you don't know what it is. So I'll share a story about a small, a small incident that happened to me, uh, a quote unquote small incident, but it could take us 45 minutes to unpack this.
Kim:
So I was about to go give another radical candor talk. I was about to go on stage and give a radical candor talk. And this was at a tech conference. And so, and it was for tech founders and, and I was, there were very, very few women at this conference. It was probably, I was, there were about 150 people in maybe 10 women who were either entrepreneurs or, or speakers. And so I was about to go on stage and start talking and this man runs up to me and he says, where can I get a safety pin
Kim:
And even though the people staffing the conference were a solid 20 years younger than me and all wearing bright yellow t-shirts, like all he could, they, they had tried to prevent this kind of thing right from happening, the conference organizers. All he could notice was my gender and his need. And so I should have said something. I, I wish in retrospect that I had said something. Uh, and, and I could have said, you know, I don't work here
Lauren:
He would've made his position clear.
Kim:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would've
Kim:
But I think that when you've experienced those things often enough, it can, it can make it harder to respond. Mm-hmm.
Lauren:
So you've given us absolutely the responsibility of a leader. But what if someone isn't a leader? They're not a manager, they're not in a position of power. Yeah. You know, what kind of tools do you have for those individuals?
Kim:
So when, when you're the person harmed, I, what I would encourage folks to do is if it's bias, prejudice or bullying, to make sure that they're being proactive in choosing their response. And it's perfectly fine to choose silence. Mm-hmm.
Kim:
And over time, that sort of robbed me of a feeling of agency. Mm-hmm.
Kim:
And they would practice with each other how to respond when it happens again. And so I think that kind of solidarity is really important to, to build so that you don't feel so gas lit. I also think it can be really helpful to begin documenting what's happening, even if you have no intention of suing. Uh, but that can also help dispel gaslighting because it's so easy to feel like, is it, what is it me? Like, did I do something wrong? And, uh, and especially in the, in the, in the case of bullying. And so just writing down what happened can help, can help dispel gaslighting. And then the other thing I would encourage people who were harmed by these behaviors to do is to locate the exit near a stu mm-hmm.
Lauren:
Um, your story reminds me, when I was more junior in my career, I was working in Europe for an extended period of time mm-hmm.
Kim:
Yeah. I would say that's probably prejudice. Uh, I mean, she was justifying it, you know, she was saying, saying it out loud, but I don't know. I mean, you never really know what's going mm-hmm. On
Lauren:
Absolutely. The bullying could be based on prejudice. Um, yeah. I wanna make sure we have time for questions and also spend a little time exploring the word upstander. Um, which some folks might refer to as an ally. But if you could talk a little bit more about the role of upstanders and how to be one at word chem, that would be super helpful for the audience.
Kim:
Sure. So the role of upstander is to intervene. That's your responsibility. And, and the goal is to stand up to the bias or the prejudice or the bullying or whatever for maybe it was discrimination or harassment or a physical violation. But to stand up, you, you notice something and it didn't seem right and you wanna stand up to it. It's not standing up for someone. You don't wanna wind up like the knight in shining armor or the white savior or something like that. Yes. Uh, but you, you wanna make sure that you are acknowledging what happened. And, and there's an organization called Hollaback that, that has the five Ds. And you can do this directly. Like maybe you can say something, uh, to the person who was, who was causing harm directly, but maybe that doesn't feel safe. Mm-hmm. Maybe you wanna just delay, maybe you wanna pull the person who was harmed by the behavior aside later and talk to them and say, are you okay?
Kim:
And that can be actually really valuable. There was one time when I was working with, uh, I loved the French, but I'm gonna tell a story.
Kim:
You know? So it was, if you don't, if you don't at the very least check in with the person, then you're sort of contributing to the gaslighting you may be experiencing. Mm-hmm.
Lauren:
Awesome. Well, we've got a few minutes for questions. Um, and it sounds like most of them are coming from people who probably aren't in positions of leadership and art managers. There's a question around at some point we have to pick our battles. How do you recommend we do that and also connect it? Do you ever consider what's the opportunity cost to action versus putting it in a box?
Kim:
Yes. So I, I think that this is a very, uh, this is a very personal choice. Mm-hmm.
Lauren:
Yes. I like that cost benefit analysis. Another interesting question we have is trying to understand the difference between a toxic colleague and bullying. So how would you classify and deal with a toxic colleague who indirectly bullies other people?
Kim:
There's a lot of overlap. I mean, a toxic colleague is usually a bully. Mm-hmm.
Kim:
And so, uh, making sure that you're, you're creating, again, creating the space for, for improvement is really important. While again, at the same time protecting yourself. Um, I think bullying the, the deeper definitions of bullying say that someone is intentionally causing harm and they're doing it repeatedly. Mm-hmm. And they won't stop when you point it out to them. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so I think that is, is useful to think about. Whereas like there I tell a bunch of stories in the book about times when I bullied people. Yeah. But when they pointed it out to me, I did stop
Lauren:
Hmm.
Kim:
Yeah. When the bully is your manager, you're often moving into either verbal harassment territory or you're moving into, into physical violation territory. Mm-hmm.
Lauren:
Gosh.
Kim:
I know, gross. And, and I was so like, deep in denial, I called a friend and I said, oh, you know, isn't this nice? He's trying to help me
Lauren:
Thank you Kim. Kim, I wanna make sure actually we get a chance for you to share your purple flag. A lot of the storytelling examples we have have been around how individuals can disrupt, you know, a lot of these situations. But would I like to talk about your purple flag. This is something that people could potentially introduce at an organizational level and take that burden off individuals. Yes. Do you wanna give us like a very short description of what it is and how you use it?
Kim:
Yes, absolutely. So what can leaders do to make it more likely that upstanders will stand up to bias when they notice it and that people who are harmed by bias know what to, what to say when they don't know what to say? Mm-hmm.
Kim:
Another team will say, ouch. The key thing is to, to sit down with your team and agree on a shared vocabulary. So that's step number one. Step number two is to agree on a norm for how to respond when you're the person who caused harm. When it's to you who's biased, who's being pointed out. Cause I don't know about you all, but when someone points out to me that I've said or done something biased, I feel deeply ashamed. And when I'm in shame brain, I am never at my best. And so it's useful to be able to fall back on kind of a, a script almost. So thank you for pointing it out. And either I get it and I'm working on not doing it again, or I don't get it. And that second thing is really hard to say. Cause now I'm doubly ashamed.
Kim:
I'm ashamed cause I've harmed someone and I'm ashamed cuz I'm ignorant. I don't even know what I did wrong. But we are all bound to be in that situation. Some of the time in this. We are living in a world of bias, pattern makers. Some of the patterns are bad. And only if we can disrupt that bias publicly, can we not reinforce it, can we begin to develop a better pattern. Which brings me to the third step. If you get to the end of a meeting and nobody has waived the purple flag or whatever word or phrase you're using, then take a beat. 30 seconds. I'm not talking about a long time. We're talking about disrupting bias, not disrupting every meeting you're ever in, but take a beat to say, what did we miss? What did, did someone say or do something that was biased in this meeting? And in fact, I invite all of you, I bet I said or did some bias things in the course of this. Please tell me what they are, drop it into the chat, uh, because I wanna know, I wanna get better.
Lauren:
Awesome. Well thank you so much Kim. Thank you for taking a moment to explain that and inviting others to, uh, design something or share something in their own organizations. And yes, once uh, Kim and IDEO have worked on the evolution of the purple flag, we will share that out as well. Um, so thank you all for joining us today on the Creative Confidence Podcast. Today we've been hearing from Kim Scott, author of Just Work about how to confront bias, prejudice, and bullying at work. I encourage you to grab a copy of her book, also start using the I, it, you Just Work framework yourselves. Kim has lots of specific tools that you can apply to your work immediately. IDEO U offers online courses on design thinking, innovation, leadership, collaboration and more. If you're looking for more resources to help foster collaboration and tap into diverse perspectives in your team, I invite you to check out our course on Cultivating Creative Collaboration, which starts just in a few weeks on May 25th. You can find out more information about that course at ideou.com/collaboration. Our course, uh, enrollment closes tonight actually, so please check it out. Just go to ideou.com. Once again, thank you so much, Kim. We really appreciate you joining us on the podcast.
Kim:
Thank you so much. Loved being here.
Lauren:
All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks for calling in.
]]>Belonging is essential to building collaborative, inclusive, thriving communities and organizations. How might design frameworks and tools help to foster more belonging in the workplace?
Dr. Susie Wise is an educator, designer, and author of Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities. Susie founded and led the K12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University and practices co-design across sectors as part of the Design for Emergence collective, a group that uses design to equitably change systems.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Susie shares why belonging is important for organizations, how to uncover opportunities to create more inclusivity and connection, and tools and levers of design you can use to invite collaboration.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
The Role of Design in Belonging
Foundational Elements of Belonging
3 Examples of Designing for Belonging
A Definition of Belonging
According to Susie, belonging is the feeling of being welcomed and honored so you can be your full self. In contrast, othering is the opposite, being made to feel like you don't belong and are not invited to participate.
Belonging is important because it enables us to fully engage, cooperate, and collaborate at work, especially in the creative process. Susie explains that it’s a necessary ingredient to be able to actually feel that you can make a contribution.
Note: Susie and Coe note that it’s important to acknowledge their own identities in this conversation around belonging. As people who identify as white cisgendered women, they bring to this topic an awareness of their power, privilege, and responsibility. They also note that their experiences are grounded in a mostly US context.
“Belonging at the end of the day is a necessary feeling for humans to be able to learn and grow.”
Susie Wise
The Role of Design in Belonging
Susie says that everything we experience is designed, whether it's a place, experience, or curriculum—and we're all designers in our various roles in life because we’re creating conditions where people will either feel like they belong or not, whether it’s a meeting at work or a shared meal. As a result, we need to think about the outcomes of what we create, and pay attention to who feels like they belong and who doesn't.
If you want to learn more about how to create a culture of belonging on your team, check out our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
Foundational Elements of Belonging
Designing for belonging is about intentionally designing moments that invite people to fully show up and be themselves. Susie says that this requires a deep understanding of the feeling of belonging, tuning into specific moments, and designing intentional actions to create belonging. These are the 3 foundational elements of belonging:
1. Feeling
Susie emphasizes that belonging is not just an idea, but a feeling that we experience in our bodies. It happens when we are invited to show up, and to share who we are and what we have to contribute. It's important to consider this feeling when designing for belonging.
2. Moments
Design thrives in specificity. Focus on specific moments of belonging, because belonging isn’t generalized. Susie says there are many common moments that matter in an experience, including the moments of:
Image Credit: From Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities, illustrated by Rose Jaffe.
Beyond just emails and meetings, Susie says that there are many levers that we can use to create change and influence. To redesign a particular moment, you can get creative with which levers you use to do it. Some examples of levers include:
“There’s a reason we call it a sense of belonging. It’s because it’s a feeling in our body.”
Susie Wise
3 Examples of Designing for Belonging
Contribution, dissent, and repair are all “moments” that can help to create a sense of belonging. Susie gives three examples of how a team or a community tuned into these moments, then designed a lever for belonging:
About the Speaker
Dr. Susie Wise
Designer & Educator
Dr. Susie Wise is an educator and a designer. Susie practices co-design across sectors as part of the Design for Emergence collective. She is a co-creator of Liberatory Design and her new book is Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities (2022). She founded and led the K12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, California with her family and their talented dog Hijiki.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
Customer centricity is an integral piece of running a successful business, from retaining customers to building a great customer experience to delivering true value to your customers. But when it comes to building a more customer centric culture, it can be difficult to measure progress, identify your true customer benefit, and get others in your organization on board.
Leslie Witt is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health, the world's most comprehensive, accessible and effective mental health and wellbeing platform. Prior to Headspace Health, Leslie was focused on improving financial outcomes—most recently, at Intuit.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Leslie shares how organizations can shift toward more customer centricity. She talks about frameworks for building a more customer centric culture, why customer centricity starts with improving employee health, and how to define and measure your customer benefit.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
In this episode with Leslie, we cover:
(2:38) Introduction and Leslie’s background
(6:45) What is customer centricity?
(15:05) The “oxygen, water, food” framework
(31:09) How to get others on board
(34:12) Audience Q&A
(46:14) Closing and Leslie’s advice for her younger self
If you want to learn more about learn more about how to shift your organization toward human centricity and lead change at your organization, check out our online Change Leadership Certificate.
Transcript:
Coe Leta Stafford:
Hello and welcome everyone to the latest episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, where each week we talk with experts around creativity, innovation, and leadership. I'm Coe Leta Stafford, partner at IDEO. I am so excited for today's conversation. We'll be speaking with Leslie Witt about how to build a culture of customer centricity at your organization. Welcome, Leslie.
Leslie Witt:
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Let me tell you about Leslie and then Leslie, we'll go over to you and let you start talking. Leslie is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health. Prior to Headspace, she was focused on improving financial outcomes most recently at Intuit, and she has a background working with clients such as Visa, Wells Fargo, MetLife, the Gates Foundation, and the World Bank. Leslie is a former partner at IDEO where she worked hand in hand with a lot of global organizations like Amazon, Nike, Walmart, to bring services to life. Leslie has a background in architecture and has taught at Stanford. Leslie, we are delighted to have you here today. You have a rich, extensive history in design and human-centered design and a lot of organizations, so we are so thrilled to hear what you have to share and teach us today.
Leslie Witt:
Oh, well, I, I feel like the pleasure is all mine. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to the incredible crew that you've assembled as fans of the Creative Confidence Podcast. And I can't help but say that when I was a colleague, I was a fan and I feel incredibly lucky to get to have this discourse with you.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you, Leslie. It's mutual. Yes, everyone, Leslie and I know each other. We've known each other for quite a long time, but let's let everybody else get to know you today, Leslie. So as a warmup, let's keep it real simple. I'd love to know something, an item you always have with you or something you keep on your desk that means something to you.
Leslie Witt:
All right. You know, if I'm completely honest here, I'm actually gonna share with you a habit that I have. And it is a habit that is siphoned through my phone. I am obsessive compulsive, and so is my partner around word games. It turns out this is our era, even before Wordle, but we are members of the spelling bee hive, the beehive community. If you have not discovered that yet, it is well worth paying the New York Times for the game's subscription. It is an incredible set of seven letters that brings to life all of your best vocabulary ethos, and then we use it. And this is particularly fun for us when I'm traveling. We achieve amazing independently and we achieve genius together. And for those of you who are beehives, you know what I'm talking about,
Coe Leta Stafford:
I will be googling that later, as will many of us. Thank you. Is that a daily thing for you?
Leslie Witt:
It's daily, yeah. It's wordle, beehive, spelling bee, and crossword on the daily. So I don't always fit in exercising, but I always fit in my games.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I love it. Well, the other thing that I know you are very devoted to is human-centered design, and especially customer centricity. Yes. Which is what we're gonna go into today. So to get us grounded, what do you mean when you say customer centric or customer centricity, and what does it mean for an organization to be really customer-centric? Yeah, let's start there.
Leslie Witt:
All right. Look, it's gonna sound really simple because I think from an ethos perspective, it is incredibly simple. We'll talk a little bit more about, what are some of those barriers and frictions and what are some of the lessons learned? But at the end of the day, being customer centric is really about having and being committed to an organizational culture that puts the customer first in the way that it develops, delivers, refines, and improves products and services. So it's really about understanding, listening, responding to those things with concrete movements and doing so in a way that empowers employees across your organization to act in accord with those values. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it. There's real business value in being customer centric, even if what it fundamentally requires is a shift away from complete dependence on business metrics.
You know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is relationship building. It's advocacy, it's loyalty. And when you think about how that delivers across a customer journey, it makes it that much easier to acquire a customer, makes it that much easier to keep them. They're more willing, they're more resilient to kind of stay with you even through, you know, kind of the thick and the thin. And particularly when a competitor that has something very similar to offer comes into the foreground and it really fuels this virtual cycle where they're out advocating for you. You have broader permission to expand into other areas of their life. And you've built that solid values-based foundation on which to build.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Sounds so simple. I mean, who wouldn't disagree with that? It's an ethos. It's about a deep committed relationship, an authentic relationship. So why do so many organizations and individuals get it wrong? What are some of the challenges? Because I don't think anyone would disagree that this is important. So I actually want to invite this question out to everyone listening today too. What are some of the ways that you see organizations get it wrong or teams when it comes to being more customer centric? Leslie, I would love to hear from your experience, where do organizations stumble or get it wrong?
Leslie Witt:
Yeah. First of all, I think most are trying at some level to be customer centric. There's very few evil genius groups that are sitting there hoping to not deliver on value for their customers. But it's more about prioritization. And I'd also say to a certain extent it's about belief. Do you believe that this is something that you can do in a way that's affordable and in alignment with who you are as a group? There's a few things that I've seen repeatedly, and we got to see a lot of clients come to IDEO in order to become more customer-centric and come very much bearing the scars of some of the frictions. But I'd say for me, the top one is not actually defining and knowing why people are hiring you, what your customer benefit actually is and how to measure it.
And I know, we'll come back to that and talk about it at greater lengths. So I'll kind of leave that in the air. Not understanding the deep interconnectivity between being employee-centric and being customer-centric, and the fact that you gotta feed the employees first in order to actually grow an organization who can deliver on those missions and values. I think I've often seen that for customer-centric orgs, they overly focus on the customers that they currently have and already serve well. Versus really creating the mechanisms to understand the ones that they are not. And that has multiple impacts, but particularly it becomes very fragile when you're trying to remain relevant and can make it very difficult to disrupt your own self. And then I'd say like, last but not least, it really ties up to what is that customer benefit?
Do you understand why your customers come to you? And what they're actually looking for is reliance on vanity metrics and some of the tried and true mechanics. Like say an NPS often gets used as proof without scrutiny, and no one hires you so that they can promote you. It is not a once and done proxy for customer satisfaction or customer centricity. And you have to be always looking at what's the reality of the landscape in which you're operating. Is this a zone where, you know, I'll pick on healthcare for a moment. You often actually see quite high NPS for healthcare, but when you dig in and you understand what it is that people are rating, they're most often rating their care service provider. And that does not affiliate to loyalty or satisfaction with the health system itself. And it certainly doesn't extend to say the health payer and the insurer. And so when you start to collect these metrics and use a proxy as a complete surrogate for definition, you can get into a danger zone.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you, Leslie. But so some of the things you talked about, not actually knowing your customers, not really being connected to the benefit, the reason why a customer is hiring you. What is the job they're hiring you for? Metrics, we're gonna talk about that. And you mentioned this a little bit too, about focusing on only particular customers or the customers you think you know.
Leslie Witt:
And the customers that you have today. So I can go into this deeper later if it becomes more relevant, but when we were looking, you know, Headspace has a very loyal fan base. For those who don't know what the Headspace offering is, we're a meditation and mindfulness platform, and a lovely service. When we decided to go deep on investigating who we serve well and who we weren't serving a few years back, we collected demographic information that we hadn't had historically about our customers. And what we found was they skewed quite white, they skewed very female, they skewed very affluent. On a better kind of diversity bench, we actually were positively indexed around LGBTQIA+. But there's a huge tranche of folks who we fundamentally believe could be benefiting from practices of mindfulness and meditation, who we were failing to reach. And that I just focused on the demographic dimensions of that, but different levels of acuity of need. And once we started to focus attention on who we weren't serving well, it really changed the services that we invested in both directly and eventually through acquisition and merger.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you for sharing that example. And let's go there. So we've just set the space of like, here's the big idea of being customer-centric. Let's talk about what it actually looks like in action. What are some of the things that we can actually do? So I understand, Leslie, you've worked with a lot of organizations and you have one framework that you particularly like to use and share to help teams and organizations build more customer-centric practices. So talk me through it. So I understand it's based on this idea of oxygen, water, and food. Tell me about this framework.
Leslie Witt:
I'm gonna credit where credit is due. So I spent seven years of my career at Intuit, which is a financial technology company that's pretty well famed, and I think it's well deserved, for being quite customer centric and for having invested in building the kind of mechanics and capabilities of customer driven innovation across their entire community. You know, I could go on a long vent, but at the end of the day, all organizations, particularly of any size, are run and drive behaviors based on what it is that they measure. And what they measure fundamentally tells you what it is that they prioritize. And so one of the frameworks that was the framework that unified all executives at Intuit cross function, cross region, cross product was what we called our true north framework. And it had three buckets of metrics, and we'll go into them more deeply over the course of the next 15 minutes or so.
But the first bucket was around employee metrics. Are our employees happy? Are they thriving? Are the people who we want to stay staying? And are we attracting top diverse talent? The second bucket was customers—what is it that they're hiring us for? Are we actually measuring it? Are we actually delivering it? And then this last bucket was shareholder or business metrics. And that framework, employee, customer, shareholder, fell along what we call oxygen water and food, which is that we conceived of the organization as a body. And we thought about these metrics in that level of triage. So oxygen, it turns out you can live without oxygen for about three minutes. Employees are oxygen. And so when it came to the jobs of the managers, it was, even if you were the GM of the biggest business unit, at the end of the day, if your employee metrics weren't thriving, you were failing because you might be able to achieve short-term goals, but you have deprived the future. The second bucket is customers, that's water, and you can live without water for three days, but you know, eventually that catches up to you.
And so understanding what it was that they were hiring us for, and in the case of Intuit, we had distilled it into very simple to say, harder to measure dimensions, which is they hired us because they wanted more money in their pocket, they wanted less work to be done, and they also wanted to be confident and be able to sleep better at night having completed tasks with us, whether they were a small business or someone who was just trying to file their taxes. And, shareholders are important, but they're food. And it actually turns out that the average human can live without food for about two weeks. And so as those metrics might potentially get compromised, we could keep them in the right frame of reference within that metaphor of the overall organizational body.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. It's so tangible. So let's go there. Let's dive into each one. I'd love to, let's start with oxygen. And, and for each, can you tell us a little bit like a grounded story about, about how to think about it, how you measured it?
Leslie Witt:
Yeah, absolutely. So let me talk about a few of the metrics that that stuck and that actually at Headspace, we've carried over as part of what we fundamentally look at, which is to look at employee engagement, to understand how you're doing. I think this is that much more important now as we've all gone through the Covid crisis, we're working in remote and hybrid capacities, it's harder to have that social cohesion and glue that I think just physical co-location in some ways provided for many biases, for all to understand where engagement might be shadowing burnout. So engagement being a primary. Another one is to fundamentally look at retention of highest performing employees. So are we not just attracting folks to come in, but are we retaining those who have the highest potential cross level?
And then, you know, last but not least is to look at that talent attraction. Like what volume of interest are we seeing? Is the idea that this is a great place to work out there in the ether? Who is it attracting? Who isn't it? What I wanted to tell is a little bit of a story are the two metrics that we decided to remove from our tracking at Intuit. And this goes back a few years, but I'd say like with any measurement always comes the potential for a shadow to fall and that it might encourage behaviors that aren't actually in alignment with what you're trying to do. And so the two that we ended up removing, one was what was a manager score, and that was really kind of extracting out some of those engagement measures directly on the manager themselves.
Well, what we found when we looked deeper is that for some managers, this was a great affiliation with performance. But for others, it actually manifested a kind of safety orientation to their teams that was not driving a high performing team or talent culture in tandem with very satisfied employees. And so it was kind of incentivizing and glorifying a mixed measure. The next one really was looking at time to close roles. And so I think for any of you who have tried to hire, being able to attract top talent and bring them over the line is a good goal. But what we found was that it was starting to game the system and that we were encouraging a level of role closure that wasn't actually about top talent. And so I give those as just two tactical examples, but with it, the lesson being what are you measuring and what is it doing that isn't what you actually intended. And so is there a better proxy measure or is it actually something that you should remove from your top level scrutiny?
Coe Leta Stafford:
What I love about that too, Leslie, is it speaks to how this whole metaphor of how organizations are a living system, in the same way with any measurement. You can't just set it and forget it. It also has to adapt and change. And you have to be going through that constant process of what are we measuring? Is it still aligned to our value set and what we intend?
Leslie Witt:
Yeah, absolutely. How do you actually measure employee engagement? At the end of the day, it's the result. It's an aggregation of five measures, most commonly an employee engagement survey. There's best practices around how often you measure that. Like what is that pulse that you're taking on the organization, what's the change over time? And then making sure that you actually scrutinize that based on layers of demographics, level, function, tenure, so that you're understanding for whom this organization is working well and where it isn't. And you use it not just to sort of wave a flag and say, you know, we scored an 86, that's up three points. But really as the start of a conversation, and what we do at Headspace as well as what we did at Intuit is have each leader of a functional organization come back to the table with the insights they've learned and what actions they're taking to drive meaningful improvement based upon that. So that it's really part of the loop. It closes the loop.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Mm-hmm. It's, it's not just measuring, it's accountably responding to and acting on.
Leslie Witt:
Exactly. Yeah. That full loop that says customer centric isn't just listening, it's actually the ability to go from insight to action.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. So let's talk about the next one. I know we can stay here and we can, we can follow up with more questions. Let's talk about water. And this is, this is the focus on customers. Can you just share a little bit more and a story, and maybe how to think about measuring this?
Leslie Witt:
Yeah, yeah. First of all, again, kind of deceptively simple, but you, you should ask yourself one, do I fundamentally know the answer to this? And if I know the answer, am I actually collecting the measures in order to prove out that I am accomplishing the customer benefit? And so I'll give you an example from Headspace. So Headspace is, as I mentioned, a tool that historically was about meditation and mindfulness. And it still is, but we've expanded beyond. And I'll give you the grounded story from this category, which is that we are not there fundamentally, people aren't hiring us so that they can learn to meditate. They often learn to meditate so that they can feel less anxious so that they can be happier, so that they can sleep better at night. And so, defining what those core purposes are, and then coming up with the right sets of measures to ensure that you're actually delivering on that core promise.
And in the case for us, stress and anxiety, it turns out they are great clinical measures that have been established that allow us to do it. And then there's some exciting technologies on things even like voiceprints that help you understand, how stressed is Coe right now? And if she's talking to me, you know, a few minutes from now after she's just listening to a meditation, I can start to deduce how effective it was in the moment. What we found, and I already talked a little bit about this, is that we were well serving those needs for a subset of people. And so we decided to direct our attention to who was coming to our front door. Largely, we found to just feel better, who weren't able to be supported by the services that we provided today.
And this was largely why I joined the company, because what we had found was that especially during Covid, folks were seeking out any type of mental health support that they could glean. And we were seen, although we hadn't forecasted ourselves through this or broadcasted ourselves as such, they were coming to us for mental health support proper. And these were people in very high levels of acuity, intense depression, intense anxiety. They needed human level support. And we essentially had sort of opened a front door to care by offering them a trusted brand and a brand that promised that they could feel happier, but not actually having the service pathways in order to deliver on those needs and changes. And so we ran a pilot around offering mental health resources. It was wildly successful in terms of appetite and desire, and it was the major input into what became the merger of Headspace and Ginger about a year and a half ago. And what is fueling what we currently have in the works for enterprises, which is a fully unified offering that brings to life for our customers a continuum of care that delivers on that core customer benefit.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I mean, what began as just being more customer centric, listening, acknowledging the audiences you weren't reaching, actually opened up an entire new product experience, and that delivered tremendous value, or that's the intent anyway.
Leslie Witt:
And I'd say that that set of metrics on how it delivers values, has a customer-centric lens to it as well, which is really establishing, well, the first value it has to deliver is actually health outcomes. You have to be able to use it and desire to use it and have it deliver on the core promise, which is that you're less stressed, you're less anxious, you have less symptoms of depression, hopefully you're sleeping better. If it's not delivering on that, then we have no right to actually advance into the next category, which is that it's available to a broader swath of folks that it's bringing revenue into the company and eventually that it's delivering on being a profitable service.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. One thing I'm appreciating too, about your experience, Leslie, is a lot of us in our organizations have easy ways to measure behavioral things like number of clicks or transactions. You make a case like so important to so much of our customer centric efforts is the qualitative metrics, whether it's anxiety or stress, all these things. So thank you for just showing us too that that is and can be part of how we design more customer-centric.
Leslie Witt:
I would say absolutely, that those things don't have to stay qualitative. So, you know, for instance, we use very well accepted clinical standards. One's called the PSS, we use the GAD-7, the PHQ-9. There are these quantitative translations of those categories. We also work heavily with outside scientific clinical researchers to create peer reviewed studies. And so figuring out how to take a qualitative insight and what could be a subjective measure and translate it into something that's scalable and quantitative, I think is really key.
Coe Leta Stafford:
That's great.
Leslie Witt:
Yeah.
Coe Leta Stafford:
So let's go in the kind of quantitative and the very measurement and let's wrap up the third pocket here, which is food. So tell me about a story, and how do most organizations think about this, and maybe how should we think about it?
Leslie Witt:
Well, I would say most are a buffet, right? Like this category is not deprived very often. I think that there is an easy way because I think when you look at what, say a CEO, is most held accountable for by a board if they're public, by their shareholders, is delivery on financial metrics. And so, again, when you think about how does an organization become truly customer-centric, part of that is to say, as an internal organization and then as an operating board, are we actually holding the executives accountable to deliver on these core metrics? Are we looking at and inspecting and scrutinizing employee satisfaction? Are we looking at inspecting and scrutinizing delivery on customer benefit? Do we give that anywhere near as much airtime as we gave the last quarter's delivery on revenue margin customer growth? And very rarely does the last category get ignored. I would say it is over loved and overindulged. And so that what you were really looking to do with a framework like this is to create balance and to ensure that that daily habit of opening up a dash isn't just to look at the business metrics. The business metrics matter, but they need to be cast within a broader network.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. So Leslie, you've worked in a lot of organizations, you have a ton of expertise in working with teams around customer centric. So what if this isn't part of your culture? Or what if your team or org is struggling, or there's some pitfalls, what are one or two ways that you encourage people on how they can help shift and grow this ethos in their part of the world or in their context?
Leslie Witt:
Yeah, at some point. And it's always wonderful if it's earlier rather than later. Having top down advocacy and even mandate is really important. I've actually said no to a good number of jobs where an organization is looking to bring in a change agent to make them customer-centric, as like an advocate and irritant in the system, but without giving say, large organizational swaths of control, or embedding this into core policy, you will struggle to find that inefficacious way to work. And I think most often the organization will struggle to find more than the value of putting you on a PR platform internally and externally and, and getting the value for it. So I'd say making sure there's not a sort of vanity set of roles. And I think design and innovation leaders in particular need to be on the watch out for that.
Why is this critical to an organization's future focusing on delivering on that, how customer-centric will actually fuel being business-centric and business growth oriented versus posing those as antipathies. So really finding the right sets of stakeholders to identify this as a core need. It's much more critical to deliver on when it's a need versus a nice to have. I would also say that one of the things I really believe in is how do you demonstrate value as quickly as possible? So there might be, as you kind of chart out the changes necessary, a very wide constellation of possibilities and gaps and improvements needed, or, you know, even step change innovation in order to get to that place. Particularly if where you're starting is that this is a foreign idea or way of operating within the organization, you need to put points on the board.
And so without knowing specific context, I would say that figuring out what myths you might be able to bust with someone in the organization who is friendly to this idea and keen to experiment, and tackling a zone where you have very high level of confidence that you will be able to show how operating in this modality delivered on the organization's needs, which almost always are that it's an alignment with some level of business delivery. So kind of building up some foundation of trust so that then you can start to go more far afield. If you start in the far afield, very seldom will the organization start to glom around you and be magnetically attracted to acting in this capacity.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. Oh, Leslie, we could go on and on. I think we need an entire series of guidance from you, but we are out of time. I have one final question for you, which is just a fun one. And while you think on it, I'm gonna wrap us up. And your question, Leslie, is what advice would you have given to yourself at a younger stage in your career? So while you think on that, I just wanna thank everyone for joining and thank you everyone for listening today. We've been talking with Leslie Witt, Director of Product and Design at Headspace. If you haven't checked out Headspace, I encourage you to do so. They just launched a partnership with the National Parks Collection, and it’s divine.
So I encourage you to check it out. As you know, we've been talking about change leadership in part of this conversation. If that is something you are interested in, I'm thrilled to mention we at IDEO U are about to launch a new certificate program in change leadership, which is all about these things, about your employees, your customer centricity and your business impact. So if you're curious, you'll learn a human-centered approach to this leadership. Unlike traditional management, this is all about putting people, not the process, in the center of everything you do. So I encourage you to check that out at ideou.com/changecert. And with that, let's go back to you, Leslie, on final advice for a younger Leslie.
Leslie Witt:
Okay, great question. I think the nugget I would share with young Leslie is, you don't have to be the smartest person in the room and with that mediate the level of speaking to listening and be open to challenging your own sense of expertise.
I’d probably tell her also to learn how to meditate, because at that level, I think everyone needs to learn how to take care of their mind and to have the ability to calibrate stress and anxiety and learn that there are tools and resources out there to collectively help you and everyone else feel better.
Coe Leta Stafford:
That is beautiful. Thank you Leslie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone for listening.
About the Speaker
Leslie Witt
Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health
Leslie is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health, the world's most comprehensive, accessible and effective mental health and wellbeing platform. Prior to Headspace Health, Leslie was focused on improving financial outcomes — most recently, at Intuit, and previously, with a wide array of partners including financial institutions, fin-tech giants, payment providers, retailers, and non-profits including Visa, Wells Fargo, MetLife, the Gates Foundation, the CFPB and the World Bank.
Beyond her forays in financial wellbeing, which she formalized as a new business while an Associate Partner at innovation firm IDEO, she has worked hand-in-hand with global organizations like Amazon, Nike and Walmart to bring to life retail, hospitality and health & wellness services. Leslie received her Bachelor of Architecture from Rice, her Master of Architecture from Princeton, and most recently taught at Stanford University. She is currently a board member for Filoli Historic House & Gardens in California, a National Historic Trust Property.
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There’s no single recipe for leading through uncertain times. In moments like these, IDEO Co-Chair Tim Brown likes to turn to creativity because it allows leaders to balance staying hyper-focused on the challenges they’re facing today while still thinking optimistically about the future.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Tim shares how leaders can tap into creative leadership to navigate the challenges of today. He talks about what challenges are top of mind for leaders today, why creativity is a counter intuitive solution to the challenges of today, and practical tips for how leaders can tap into their creativity to navigate tensions.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
In this episode with Tim, we cover:
(2:20) Introduction and what’s inspiring Tim lately
(7:33) Challenges facing leaders today
(10:40) Why creative leadership is important in this moment
(18:30) The 3 leadership modes
(27:52) Why asking questions is a creative act
(47:18) Conclusion and Tim’s advice for his younger self
If you want to learn more about how to lead with vision, through culture, and alongside your team, check out our online course Leading for Creativity, taught by Tim.
Transcript:
Coe Leta Stafford:
Hello, and welcome to the Creative Confidence Podcast, where we talk to special guests about creativity, leadership, and innovation. I'm Coe Leta Stafford, a partner at IDEO. I am so excited for our conversation today. We are talking with Tim Brown. Welcome, Tim.
Tim Brown:
Hello Coe. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me along.
Coe Leta Stafford:
We're so happy to have you. So we'll be talking with Tim Brown about creative leadership, and he'll be sharing some practical tips and strategies for how we can all tap into creativity as a leader to navigate times of uncertainty. So, Tim, to get us started, what is something that you always carry with you or will find on your desk?
Tim Brown:
Well, it's on my desk today. It's often on my desk when I'm traveling around. This is like my latest toy that I'm really excited about. And this'll just have just, I'm just, I'm exposing some of my design geekness here. It's a very utilitarian thing, so I'll show it on the camera. It's a power supply, right? I love it because it's a power supply that I can use to power everything that I have. So my computer, my Apple watch, my phone, my headphones, all in one. It’s powerful enough to do it. I mean, it's a practical thing, but this is, for me, this is what creativity is all about. It's got this thing that's truly delightful about it.
So you probably won't be able to tell, but this thing is incredibly thin, right? It's maybe 12 millimeters, something like that. In America, it's just over half an inch. It has on the front 120 volt power, a power socket for a regular plug. But the cool thing is the prongs of the plug are actually longer, deeper than the power supply itself. So how can this possibly work, right? But when you push the plug in, you know, if you can, I'll hold, hold it close. There's a small gap. The surface pops out.
So that's just incredibly clever. It's really simple, really clever and delightful, and I love it. When you pop it out again, it disappears. And now this thing is thinner than it should be in order to plug. So this for me is like, creative problem solving is about doing something that's useful, but also something that's delightful. And so I get a little bit of pleasure every time I use this thing. I love it. So that's something I'm carrying around with me everywhere I go these days.
Coe Leta Stafford:
What a great start, Tim. I love that. And like you said, that just summarizes what great design and creativity does. It's useful, and solves needs and can add a moment of delight to your day. Thank you for that.
So let me tell you about Tim. Tim Brown is the co-chair of IDEO and vice-chair of the kyu collective. He's the author of Change by Design and has introduced design thinking to business leaders worldwide. Tim has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Rotman Magazine, and his TED Talks “Serious Play” and “Designers Think Big” have reached millions.
As you may know, his work focuses on creative leadership and the strategic application of design across many sectors, healthcare, education, tech, mobility, and more. So again, Tim, what a pleasure to have you here today. What are some of the qualities that you encounter, Tim, when you talk with leaders in terms of what they are facing right now as leaders?
Tim Brown:
Well, I think there's something about the kinds of challenges that we're facing today. And I suspect if we took ourselves back, we may have always said the same thing, but they seem larger than ever. They seem more systemic than ever. I think they fall into a couple of categories, at least the ones that I'm talking to leaders about. There are ones that I think of as being largely reactive. You know, somehow circumstances have changed in a big way, and now we've gotta think about a whole bunch of things that we weren't thinking about, before. Now, you know, the obvious example of that is what's happened is the pandemic and how that's changed our approach to work, whether it's our technical approach to work, remote versus hybrid, or our mental approach to work, in terms of what we are, what we can and wish to have as a balance of work and how we want work to play a role in our lives.
So that's largely been imposed on leaders, right? They didn't really see it coming, and now it's a big thing that they've gotta deal with. Another example is one where, at least for a lot of organizations today, it's a little less reactive, a little bit more proactive—in other words, organizations and leaders are deciding to deal with it. An example of that is climate. I mean, climate, let's face it, is gonna be the world's biggest reactive problem ultimately. But right now, largely the organizations that are really diving in and tackling it seriously are thinking about it proactively. They're thinking about it kind of relatively early. And they're trying to figure out what their role as an organization might be in what I would call a climate era. The whole new economy of the climate era that's gonna exist over the coming decades.
So some of these big things are reactive, some of them are proactive. Both of them have one thing in common, though, which is that they seem incredibly complex in the present, and they are, but we also need to figure out where we're gonna go in the future, right? We can't actually solve them in the present. We actually have to think about how we solve them in the future. What state do we want to get to? What new kind of balance of circumstances? What new solutions will we ultimately need to figure out in order to forge our way into the future around these things. And so they are both problems of the present and problems of the future.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I love that. Thank you for saying that. Context, problems of the present, opportunities of the future, reactive, proactive. So I think we can all relate to these challenges in some way. So how do we move forward? How do you, as a leader, balance and navigate and hold this tension? So I know, Tim, you would say creative leadership is a very powerful tool. Um, so you teach a whole course on this. And in it you describe creative leadership as an approach to leadership that will help you tackle complex challenges by navigating ambiguity, enabling collaboration, and maintaining momentum. So why is this approach so important for this moment we're in and the uncertainty of many of these challenges?
Tim Brown:
Yeah, I mean, I'd take a step back and say when we're facing these large complex challenges, when we're facing the unknown, we need new kinds of choices. We need new kinds of solutions. So we need creativity, right? We need our organizations to reveal, search out, provide new choices, new paths to follow, right? In order to have creativity, you need creative leadership. In order to unpack the potential of an organization and unpack the potential of the people who make up any organization, you need the right kind of leadership.
The kind of leadership you need for efficient execution, which is what we tend to do when we can sort of already see the future…in times of relative abundance, in times of relative stability, we can focus all our attention on efficient execution because we sort of know the parameters and we can see into the future is a bit like staring at a railroad track going into the future. And we have done historically for quite a long time focus most of our leadership effort on execution. But when those railroad tracks disappear, and suddenly all you can see is fog, that's when you need new choices. We don't know what direction we're gonna take through it. We need new ideas, and that's when we need a different kind of leadership.
Coe Leta Stafford:
But it sounds so counterintuitive. It sounds like if you don't know where you're going, you might wanna focus even more on the present or just executing in the present.
Tim Brown:
Well, we think about where we are today, where we're worried about heading into recession, where if we're in business, we can see our customers being less willing to buy our products and services. If we're employed by an organization, we can wonder about the future of our jobs. And that does tend to pull us into the present. That kind of anxiety tends to pull us into the present. And often the only thing we need, we know how to do when we are thinking about the present, is to figure out a way to kind of do more of what we were doing before.
Coe Leta Stafford:
So what should we do instead?
Tim Brown:
Well, I would just make the argument that if you think about it logically in a situation where there's less abundance, where there's less possibility naturally occurring around you, then the world's just got a little bit more competitive. And when the world's a bit more competitive, the ones that ultimately succeed are gonna be the ones that figure out new ways to do things or figure out how to be different or figure out how to offer something the world needs, but doesn't realize there's a solution to. That's when creativity is so important. In fact, if we look back historically, there's just countless examples of really great ideas and great organizations that have emerged in times of recession.
When actually, there isn't a time of abundance, but actually there's a time of constraint, and people are really forced to think creatively in order to create something new. You can go right the way back into the Great Depression in the ‘30s. And that's when things like Fortune Magazine were created. Or you go to the recession in the early ‘90s, that's when Google appeared. There are lots and lots of examples of great organizations that have appeared in times of constraint.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you for that. So how does creative leadership help? Like, I think a lot of us have a mental model that creative leadership is for just innovation when you're ready to diverge and think new or there's a disruption, but it actually can be something for these moments of uncertainty. Tell us more about that. Why is that?
Tim Brown:
Well, I mean, at its heart, creativity is about asking an unexpected question in order to get an unexpected answer. I mean, and those unexpected questions are normally stimulated by looking at the world slightly differently or getting different information than others have that cause you to see things differently and see possibilities differently. It's not the myth, which is creativity is about some blindingly brilliant idea that jumps out of superhuman minds. It's about people putting themselves in a position to look at the world differently. And so, you know, again, in a moment of crisis or in a moment of confusion or uncertainty, it's harder work to look at the world differently. But when, when you do so, it can reveal all kinds of new kinds of possibilities.
And so I'll give an example. So back when the pandemic hit, I think like everybody else, I felt pretty helpless in that moment, sent home because of lockdown, and I couldn't do anything. And, you know, I remember really feeling quite hopeless, not knowing how to think about the future. And then a number of folks around IDEO started to think about some of the very immediate problems of how do we get okay protective gear out to people who need it. I started getting people reaching out to me from the medical health community saying, how do we think about getting the right kinds of behaviors to happen? And so as soon as I started working on the problem, and I saw this across IDEO too, as soon as we started working on the problem, even though it was often very simple things like how can we make some masks to get to local hospitals or how can we begin to tackle this problem going forward, I felt this sense of agency. I felt like I was much more in control and I was actually contributing to moving forward. And so that was in a very immediate moment of dealing with the next 90 days or dealing with the next 30 days, but it was very powerful for me. And I think a lot of other people, it's like we could just dive in and start to make a difference.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you for sharing that, Tim. Everything from, we need creativity to be able to ask the unexpected questions to you personally sharing. I think there's this myth we have that leaders should have all the answers and they know what to do in all contexts. And you even admitted you felt helpless with these things.
Tim Brown:
Yeah. And we talk about this in the Leading for Creativity course, which is this idea that actually leadership, you exhibit much more leadership through asking the right questions rather than having the right answers.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Let's start to go towards the tips and strategies. So help us all, Tim. How could we start to develop new practices to be a creative leader and to practice our creativity in this? What does it look like in practice? And I understand there's kind of two big sets of leadership skills that we can all practice. The first one is leadership modes. So I've heard you talk about, as a creative leader, it's not just one role. You talk about three modalities. So this idea of leading from the front, leading alongside, and leading from behind. So tell us more. What does that look like in practice?
Tim Brown:
Yeah. I mean, this notion that it's a kind of a multimodal practice I think is important for multiple reasons. I mean, firstly, in our sort of executional operational mode, we tend to think of leaders as being the place where the decisions get made, right? The ultimate call, where in order to make that decision, you have to have all the information. And we've tended to assume that is what leadership is in any circumstance. But it gets you into trouble when you are trying to unlock the creativity of an organization, right? It's not about unlocking your own creativity, it's about unlocking the creativity of a whole organization. Because if you assume you have to make all the calls, then you're assuming you are gonna have all the good ideas.
And, you know, it doesn't really matter how brilliant you are. It is highly unlikely that you'll have all the ideas, as many good ideas as the whole organization is capable of. So we need to have leadership practices that unlock the organization. And I've observed three that help. And I'm not saying this is a complete set. I think there may well be others, but three are really useful to think about. So there is a role for the traditional leader, the CEO, the head of department, the head of a team, that's sort of leading from the front role. But as I've mentioned already, that's not about having the answers. It's about asking questions, questions that help orient the team, or orient the organization or strive for things that they might otherwise not strive for.
I tend to think of my metaphor of an explorer who might stand on a beach with a telescope and wonder what's over the horizon and ask, “What do we think is over that horizon?” And then of course, it's up to a hard whole group of people to figure out how to go there. As an example that we talk about in the course, somebody I've worked with for a long time is a leader from Peru, who's a business leader there. Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who asked the question when he was interested in figuring out how to help the middle class of Peru—what would an international quality, low-cost, large scale school system look like for our country?
And then a whole bunch of people went away and built it, right? And so the Innova school system that came as a result of that question has transformed not only his very large business, but also helps show the way in terms of what effective low cost education can do in Latin America. So that all started with a question, and that I think is real leadership from the front. Then we talk about sort of setting the conditions for creativity. So if you're asking the questions in order to orient a team or an organization, then setting the conditions, making it possible for an organization to thrive as it explores, is another one of those roles. And I think of the metaphor of a gardener there.
I mean, tending the garden, feeding the soil, watering the soil, it's an obvious one. That can take all kinds of guises. I mean, in some cases it might be hiring the right team. In other cases it might be providing rituals that get a team to feel more empowered or more creative. And we talk about that quite a lot in the course. A leader that I've observed in the last couple of years, who I think does it in a slightly different way, is Stéphane Bancel, who's the CEO of Moderna. And he was worried about how rapidly the culture was scaling at Moderna, you can imagine how quickly it scaled over the last several years as they've taken on Covid vaccine.
And what he focused on was describing the mindsets of how their culture thinks, so that as all of these new people were coming in, they could plug in much faster that they understood when they were in a meeting, why people were talking about risk in a certain way, or why people were thinking about the future in a certain way by making sure that they had sort of described these mindsets in a way that was shareable to people. That's a great example, I think, of meeting from behind, of setting the conditions for others to be successful.
And then the third one is leading from the side. And you know, for anybody that watches sports, it's the player-coach, the coach who has played the game as it were and understands what it feels like to be a player and understand the uncertainty perhaps, or the risks that you take, then help take that extra bit of risk or make that decision or move forward or think a little differently about the problem while working alongside the team.
And that's this mode of leading from the side and basically kind of rolling your sleeves up, getting your hands dirty within the creative process. And somebody that I worked with for many years, who I think is supremely good at that, is Jim Hackett, who was the CEO of Ford through their big transformation towards electrification. And he's somebody who would never fail to turn up to a big workshop where the team was grappling with new problems and help coach. He himself was a very serious college level football player and has a lot of respect for the people that coached him. So he is always taken this coaching approach. He finds it very natural, I think. But I think we have to remember that those of us that have had previous experiences can be useful. Again, not in providing the answers to the team, but providing the confidence or the nudges that it might take in order for the team to move forward.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I love that you just, thank you for summarizing all those three modes so eloquently. So tell us, help those of us who may be new to this, should a leader be good at all three of those modes?
Tim Brown:
I think we run the risk whenever we talk about leadership of any kind, of implying that we all have to be superhuman and superlative at everything. And of course, you know, that's not realistic and not true, and can actually get us into trouble when we think it is true. We should all understand them. We should all practice them, try them and remember them. But we won't all necessarily be great at all of them. And so my approach to that is always to make sure that I'm working with people who are really good at the things that I’m not good at—and it's not always the case of whether I'm good at it or not good at it, but if I am in a moment in my life or in a phase of work where I just know I'm not gonna pay enough attention to one of them, then I might rely on somebody else to do that for me.
So I'll give you a good example. I mean, the last year or so, I stepped back into leading IDEO, and Paul Bennett stepped up alongside me, and he's been our creative Chief Creative Officer for a long time. And the reason that works so well, not least that we worked together for 20 years, but was because as I was finding myself immersed in a lot of the important questions of the organization, he was obsessed about questions of the future of the work. And that was a really important set of questions to keep asking. But I knew that I wasn't gonna be paying enough attention to those, but he was. And so together we were able to kind of perform the totality of what the organization needed, at least get closer to that.
And I think it is important to recognize whether it's because of what you're focusing on or your own confidence or expertise when you need help, and when others might be able to provide some of these modes in a way that you can't because the whole organization will benefit from that sort of humility as to like, okay, what, what am I really doing effectively? What do I need help doing?
Coe Leta Stafford:
Thank you for sharing that. That's such a good point of just when to recognize maybe when you need to pair or call on the expertise of someone else. Also, maybe when you need to tune into, you might need to switch modes. You might not even be aware.
So a whole other set of strategies besides leadership modes is asking questions. And you often talk about this paired with listening. So everybody agrees, listening is a good idea for leaders, no controversy there. Why do you connect that to being able to ask better questions then? And let's just talk about questions too.
Tim Brown:
Well, I mean, I believe questions are a creative act, right? That questions take you and whoever you are interacting with from one set of assumptions, breaking those assumptions and exploring some new possibilities. That's what questions do. They're rarely about to simply give me the answer to this very specific thing. Particularly in business, we usually ask questions, which are open-ended questions. And in order to ask a good question, you need new insights and new data, right? And there were really, I think, two principle ways that I think that we use most of the time, of getting to those insights that cause you to ask a question that you might not otherwise have asked.
One is that you hear something coming from somebody else, you are listening to what they're saying, and you are thinking about that in a way which says, what is it? What is it not? Maybe not what's on the surface, but what am I hearing? What am I feeling from them? What's the subtext of what they're saying that causes you to ask a question that takes you forward in some way? A really good example of doing that is, you know, in the design world, when we're trying to discover what people really might need, they rarely tell you.
People will rarely articulate what it is they need, particularly when you're asking them, or trying to figure out what they might need in the future. And particularly when you're talking about what they might need that is based on some new technology or some new solution that they may not have experienced before, right? Because it's very hard for us to project. But if you listen hard enough, and you can often divine some insight as to what's really bugging them or what their real concerns are. And then if you ask the right question, you can kind of open that up and explore it. So listening deeply is a way of getting to data, a way of getting to an insight that from which you can ask an interesting question.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I like the hint. You gave a hint too. You said you really tune into the feelings, you get curious about the feelings. Like emotions are a great place to get curious and really listen.
Tim Brown:
Well, yes, for two reasons. Firstly, because emotions are often the thing that give away what people are really thinking. And secondly, because so often, particularly in business, we think that rational data is what's going to move the problem forward, whereas in fact, it's not people what, not necessarily what people know is right, but what people feel is right. Um, and it's why, you know, the marketing industries exist, right? Because they tap into our emotions. And so there are two reasons why it's important, and you know, also it's that you are getting a lot of data, so you have to use your intuition a little bit. So listening is a really important part of getting to that new insight that allows you to ask a new question. Equally, observation is another way of doing it.
Where you can look at the world and see things and wonder about them, and ask questions. Well, why does the world choose to do things that way? Why do things happen that way? And, by observing, you can again, get to new insights and get to new data, which leads you to new questions. And a form of observation is receiving new information. I like to read about topics that are not necessarily related to what I do, because I find that they often lead me to really new insights. And when I'm reading a book right now on animal senses, and it's a really interesting book about the science of senses. But what's even more interesting about it is you realize that other species, animals, live in totally different worlds of perception based on having different senses. And that's a really interesting insight, because that happens to human beings too, right? We live based on what we perceive, we experience the world fundamentally differently. And it's really important to remember that when you're trying to design for them. That was just a random example, but I find that any new form of data can lead to an interesting new question.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. Your good friend and colleague who we've had on the podcast, Keith Yamashita, talks at length about how important it is to keep expanding your sources of input about the world and curiosities about the world.
Tim Brown:
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
Coe Leta Stafford:
So to summarize, part of why listening is so important, there's kind of two principled ideas. So one is you are listening for insights, new insights and understanding of the world, and also observing the world to ask better questions. Tim, you said, one of the reasons why you love asking questions and beautiful questions is you're breaking assumptions. What does that mean? And why is that part of what you think about as a creative leader?
Tim Brown:
Because I think when you use a question to break some assumptions, you immediately open up the landscape of possibilities in terms of solutions. So there's a form of question, for instance, that I love, which leads to something that's called a thought experiment.
And thought experiments have been around for a long time. It's quite a well known approach to thinking about the world. One of the four first thought experiments about the future goes all the way back. And I'm sure there are examples going further back than this, but this one's well documented back to 1517 when Thomas Moore asked the question of what a democratic society might look like. And the thought experiment that he used to explore what a democratic society might look like was, was this island that he called utopia. That was when the word utopia got invented. It's come to mean now thinking about optimistic futures, but back then it was a thought experiment about what a democratic society might look like.
Um, we can jump forward to the last century when Albert Einstein thought, what would it be like to stand or dance on a beam of light? And he used that thought experiment to figure out what his theory of relativity was. And so thought experiments come from asking questions that seem kind of nuts at some level, dancing on a beam of light. What the heck does that mean? I'll give you an example of a thought experiment that I've been encouraging people to play around with recently in the climate space, which is what will we do when we have abundant, limitless supplies of carbon-free energy?
Coe Leta Stafford:
Hmm.
Tim Brown:
We will get there. It's, I mean, we have the science now to get there, so we will get there, we'll get to a point where we are not creating CO2 with any of our energy supplies. When you could use as much energy as you like, you could do all kinds of interesting things with, and you move from an attitude of constraint and limitation to one of abundance and possibility. And the way that we tackle certain problems will change when we have limitless energy. And I just, I mean, that's sort of a whimsical thought experiment in some ways, but it gets you thinking about possible climate solutions quite differently. So that's an example of a thought experiment that starts with a question that challenges assumptions, right? Because right now we just assume energy's a problem, and what happens if we assume the opposite of that, that energy actually, there's as much of it as we want, and we can do what we want with it.
Coe Leta Stafford:
I love that that ties back to where our whole conversation started too. Some of these high level challenges and this idea of the default might be very hyper focused on the present, but asking a question like that allows you to imagine different possibilities, and then you can still backtrack. So what would that mean, what we might start doing now?
Tim Brown:
Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, you know, one, it means we should be focusing all of our efforts on as much renewable energy as possible, because when we have plenty of it, we'll be able to do a whole bunch of things that we can't imagine doing today.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Love it. So thank you so much, Tim. I just want to thank everyone for joining us. So Tim, our last question is quite simply, what leadership advice would you give yourself at an earlier stage in your career? And as you think of that one, thank you for joining everyone. What an amazing community. I would love to see more of you keep building and learning on these topics.
So again, we have been joined today by Tim Brown talking about the use of creative leadership in times of uncertainty. If you'd like what you've heard today, I invite you to check out more episodes in our podcast called the Creative Confidence Series. As we mentioned, Keith Yamashita’s episode is a great one for inspiration.
I'll also mention, Tim is an instructor of our course Leading for Creativity. And if you want even more tips on how to be a better creative leader and empower more people on your team and organization, I invite you to check that out. And with that, thank you everyone for joining. And, Tim, close us out. What advice would you have given a younger Tim Brown?
Tim Brown:
I would have advised myself to do a better job of building a practice of reflection. And only because When you're trying to be creative, when you're trying to kind of explore the world, it can sometimes feel like, well, you're forever moving forward, and I'm not quite sure what I've achieved or whether I'm achieving enough. And I think getting into a practice of reflection is really helpful. There are different ways of doing that. I mean, there's one CEO I work with who every other Saturday morning, he sits down for two or three hours and just thinks about have I made any progress, and what does that mean and what should I be thinking about that I'm not thinking about? So he has a kind of a ritual.
I found that some of the best moments of reflection for me are when I am asked to give a talk about something or teach, or write an article or write a book. That's a kind of mega reflection when you do that. But it took me a long time to get to the importance of it. But I think, the reason is you realize how much you're learning, and then you can use that learning when you realize if you're not conscious about it, you can't use it, right? So you realize how much you're learning, you perhaps realize, well, I may not be making as much progress here as I want, so I need to pay more attention to it. Stop yourself getting distracted. So I think having a good, whatever your personal practice about reflection is, making sure you've got one, and that you use it to help appreciate what you're doing, because creativity is a wonderful way to live your life, but also to keep driving you forward.
Coe Leta Stafford:
Magnificent, what a gift you've been today, Tim. Thank you for, for all all you've shared, all your expertise. Thank you everyone for joining. I think all of us are leaving a little more inspired. And as usual, I encourage all of us to try out something this week. Just try it, something that you learned from this, from Tim, and let's all practice the ways we can be better creative leaders. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Brown:
Thanks Coe, and everyone. It's a lot of fun. Thanks everybody.
About the Speaker
Tim Brown
Co-Chair, IDEO
Tim Brown is co-chair of IDEO of global design and innovation firm IDEO and Vice Chair of the kyu Collective. His best selling book Change By Design has introduced design thinking to business leaders worldwide. Tim has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Rotman Magazine and his TED talks Serious Play and Designers Think Big have reached millions. His work focuses on creative leadership and the strategic application of design across sectors such as health, education, technology, mobility and global development.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
What’s something you remember learning in middle school? Why did it stick? What about it made that learning experience memorable, enjoyable, and safe?
These are the questions that Kai Frazier is exploring as an expert in designing experiences and products with her audience in mind. Kai is the founder and CEO of Kai XR, a company that uses Metaverse technologies to expose students to global educational opportunities so they can be better prepared for a highly technical future and learn in a more comprehensive way.
Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear Kai talk about how VR is transforming education, tips on designing with an audience in mind, and how education can inform the future of tech.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
An Education Startup’s Journey
The Intersection of Tech and Education
Designing for Memorable Experiences
A Framework for Designing Experiences
An Education Startup’s Journey
Kai never wanted to be an entrepreneur—she was a middle school history teacher in Northern Virginia, and her school didn’t have a lot of resources. The school didn’t have computer labs or strong wifi, and even though it was located 30 minutes away from the free federal Smithsonian museums, it couldn’t afford the charter buses to get there.
But Kai learned an interesting statistic: when kids go on field trips, they're 95% more likely to graduate from high school because they're exposed to new ideas, new sounds, and new careers, which then dramatically changes their outlook on life.
Kai wanted to find a way to let her students explore the world around them and really connect with what she was teaching in the classroom. She had the idea of filming different experiences in VR and using phones to bring it to her students, and this eventually led her to starting Kai XR, an edtech startup that enables kids to explore the world with different technologies like VR.
The Intersection of Tech and Education
After moving to Silicon Valley, Kai realized that others in the tech industry held assumptions that weren’t necessarily true. For example, there was an expectation of being able to get wifi anywhere, when the students in Kai’s classroom didn’t always have wifi. She could see why innovation wasn't happening in the classroom—the people making technology that was scaling globally didn’t understand the reality of many students across the country.
Kai created Kai XR to bridge the gap between technology and education. As an interactive learning platform, Kai XR uses in-demand technologies such as VR to give students a headstart for the future. Students have the ability to go on more than one hundred virtual field trips that are aligned with their curriculum and help them to explore the world around them.
One of the first virtual field trips that Kai created was to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Many of the students who went weren’t born in the US and didn’t know who MLK was. Another virtual experience Kai XR had was a field trip to the official Obama portraits at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery. To see that they were represented in the museum was important for her students. Experiences like these give students access to experiences that they might not have otherwise.
Find more tips and resources on designing better experiences in our course Human-Centered Service Design.
Advice for Entrepreneurs
In entrepreneurship, Kai says that you have to trust your vision, which will change and grow over time. When she was explaining Kai XR to other people, Kai used to say, “We take kids to different monuments and museums.” They would respond, “Like a virtual field trip, like the Magic School Bus?” Kai began to see how others understood her company and vision, and realized that her job was going to be constantly communicating that vision.
Kai also says that there are often sacrifices that may need to be made. People have an idea and think, “If only I had more time or more money.” Kai says that while you might not have a huge fund to get started, there are steps you can take to reach your goal, whether it’s living with your parents for a while to make the money, not going on vacations, or even selling your house.
Kai explains that the real key is to start where you are, start with what you have, and start with what you know. For her, she figured out there was a big technology gap in education, which is what she knew as a teacher in Washington, DC. She got her first 360 degree camera because she made an Instagram post about VR and Georgetown University reached out to her saying they had a makerspace. With that camera, Kai was able to create her first prototypes for Kai XR.
“You already have what you need to be successful, but are you willing to sacrifice to really trust and bet on yourself?”
Kai Frazier
Designing for Memorable Experiences
One common thing that Kai would hear from her students is, “Where am I in the history books?” A lot of her students of color would internalize early on that they were not a part of history and that their community’s contributions didn’t matter. Because of this, Kai wanted to make sure that Kai XR was intentional about bringing in stories that represented all students. Kai says that there are a lot of unique stories that never see the light of day, and she says those are the stories that need to be elevated.
In some popular VR or immersive experiences, the focus was on stories of oppression and trauma. Kai decided not to go that route, instead using Kai XR’s experiences to show examples of joy and triumph and innovation, things that students would really need to embrace their creativity and be the innovators of the future. She holds a create-athon for students and has them make their own metaverse movie, where she encourages her students to get their stories out there.
Kai also reminds people that technology like VR is a tool that can be used in education, but it doesn’t remove existing pedagogy. To create a meaningful VR experience, the curriculum needs to be considered. Before a VR experience, Kai will give viewing guides with pre-viewing questions to draw on and assess students’ background knowledge:
Kai also emphasizes the importance of learning objectives, such as analyzing, comparing and contrasting, or critiquing. If a learning objective says that students will be able to identify the planets in the solar system, then that means that somewhere in the learning experience, there has to be a callout where all of the planets are identified. Afterward, students can demonstrate their knowledge through post-viewing questions or by creating a model in a makerspace.
“We try to make sure we are showing examples of joy, triumph, and innovation that helps these students embrace their own creativity and encourage them to be the future of their generation.”
Kai Frazier
A Framework for Designing Experiences
Kai says that there’s a framework that she hears a lot from educators when thinking about how to design memorable experiences. It’s the idea of mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors:
Kai gives the example of entrepreneurship. Students will see many examples of young white males who go Silicon Valley to tackle problems. If students see that mirrored over and over again, it gives them a distorted sense of reality, because if they look through a window, they’ll also see that black women are currently the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs.
To Kai, an immersive experience that takes you through a day in someone’s life and creates a level of empathy is a sliding glass door moment. For example, Kai XR has a VR experience of aerospace engineering that shows the journey of Tiera Fletcher, who works at NASA as a rocket scientist. Kai says that not only is it great for Black girls to see that and be inspired, it's also great for everyone else to know that people like her can be in that career. Sliding glass door moments like these get students excited and show them what’s possible.
Create Moments That Matter
Experience design is about creating moments that matter—moments that will stick with people. If you want to go deeper into designing memorable experiences, our online course Human-Centered Service Design teaches you how to tie together human, digital, and physical interactions over time to create a truly differentiated experience for your audience.
“I wanted to make sure that we were being intentional in making all students feel represented.”
Kai Frazier
About the Speaker
Kai Frazier
Founder & CEO at Kai XR
Kai Frazier is an educator turned EdTech entrepreneur passionate about using technology to provide inclusive and accessible opportunities for underestimated communities. Kai is the founder & CEO of Kai XR, a company that uses Metaverse technologies to expose students to global educational opportunities so they can be better prepared for a highly technical future.
Kai served as an entrepreneur in residence at the Kapor Center for Social Impact Techstars' Social Impact cohort sponsored by Cox Enterprises and T-Mobile's Immersive Accelerator. Her work has been featured by Forbes, The U.S. Department of Education, NBC, the Steve Harvey Show & more.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
Do you have an important presentation coming up? Or maybe you want to brush up on your storytelling skills?
Alex Gallafent is a Senior Design Director of Narrative & Strategy at IDEO, where he grounds complex design projects in clarifying, human-centered research, and builds confidence and excitement through story, language, sound, and immersive experiences. He’s also an instructor of our course Impactful Presentations.
In today’s Creative Confidence Podcast, Alex shares insights into how to craft better stories and build presentations that move and inspire your audience. He gives live feedback on real presentations submitted by our listeners to illuminate common presentation pitfalls, how to craft presentations that people remember, and tips and frameworks for presenting.
In this episode with Alex, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction and Alex’s story
(6:03) Presentation feedback on Andy’s pitch deck
(17:07) Presentation feedback on Elaine’s city council proposal
(28:16) Presentation feedback on Cezary’s informational deck
(38:26) Summary of Alex’s tips and insights to apply to any presentation
If you want to learn more about how to shape and share your ideas in ways that engage, inspire, and motivate, check out our online Communicating for Impact Certificate, where Alex is an instructor.
Transcript:
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (00:00):
Hello, everybody. Welcome from literally all over the world. I can already see who's joining us today, and I am incredibly excited to welcome people from everywhere, from Brazil to Mumbai to Cape Town. So, welcome. Hi, I'm Suzanne Gibbs Howard. I am the founder of IDEO U. And I welcome you to the Creative Confidence Podcast where I always have conversations with special guests about creativity, leadership, innovation, and growth. And today I have a very special guest, Alex Gallant. Hello, Alex.
Alex Gallafent (00:41):
Hi, Suz.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (00:42):
Welcome. And Alex is, um, one of our best and most provocative storytellers at ideo. He is a director, senior director of narrative and strategy at ideo. And we are going to talk today about the art of storytelling, how to give a better, more impactful and more persuasive conversation. So we're gonna be diving into some of Alex's top tips, but as always, we're experimenting and doing things differently. And we're going to do this in a way where we've invited some of our community members to share a presentation or a story that they're working on. And then Alex is going to give them live feedback. So we are very excited about that. I'm a little bit more about Alex. So Alex is a senior design director at IDEO and ideo. He has worked with major clients in everything from media to government, to civic innovation, to financial empowerment, hospitality, financial services and beyond.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (01:42):
You name it, he's touched it. He's also a teacher. He teaches design thinking, storytelling, and research at institutions like New York University, the School of the Visual Arts in the new school in Manhattan. Uh, prior to ideo, Alex, you'll, you'll know why as soon as you hear his luscious voice. He's been a correspondent for public Radios the World and the B BBC World Service. He's presented and reported on everything from the rise of digital gurus in India to the intersection of religion and public health in southern Africa. So currently Alex is working with IDEO's, designed for food global impact practice, and he's supporting some key clients through the depth of his craft. So I'm so excited to have you here today.
Alex Gallafent (02:33):
Um, that was very, very flattering Sue's face for radio
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (03:02):
Wonderful. And I know we love it when your conversation in the chat is going as much as we are here in the epicenter. And so please ask your questions at the last few minutes. We will get to your questions. So we welcome those. Um, so our packed agenda today, we're gonna jump right into it. Uh, I thought I'd do one little warm-up question with Alex, which is this. So Alex, you're one of our, our top storytellers. What are some of the things that are in the forefront of your mind and your personal practice or, or tips that you feel like you're constantly giving to other people about telling stories?
Alex Gallafent (03:37):
Well, in New York, I used to perform, uh, improv, improvisational theater. And I was thinking about this as a, maybe a good example to get into this conversation. Now, if you, if you, if you've encountered improv before, the, the idea is that performers on a stage responding to a suggestion from a member of the audience, and then the, the, the game is that you make up the performance. You make up the little play or the scene totally from, from nothing. Everything is made up. And on the stage there's also like nothing in the way of props, maybe a couple of chairs. But what's remarkable, and I wouldn't put myself in this category at all, but what's remarkable about really extraordinary top quality improvisers is that they are able to create, to build the world of that story, um, with nothing other than commitment to the essential idea, commitment, and partnership with the audience.
Alex Gallafent (04:32):
Uh, and commitment to each other agreements about what's going on, uh, and the specificity in the detail of those worlds. And you suddenly, you realize you're looking at two people on an empty stage, but you're seeing a jungle and you'll see them exploring it, and you're seeing them picking a leaf in detail and examining it. That is, that is the power of extraordinary storytelling. That magic thing that happens between presenter, storyteller and audience and everything else is a prop. We're gonna spend some time looking at slides, but if there's anything I want people to take away is this idea that the slides are not the story. The slides are not the presentation. The slides are a pop a, a prop. They're incredibly valuable, powerful aesthetics, matter, structure matters. Slides matter when you're using them, but they're not the story. The story is that thing that happens in between. And so hold, hold onto that. And I think that that'll be something, some of what I hope will talk about today.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (05:28):
That is fantastic. Um, excuse me,
Alex Gallafent (05:32):
You No, no, no worries. Are you okay?
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (05:34):
Alex Gallafent (06:11):
Hey, Andy.
Andy (06:12):
Hey. Hey, Alex.
Alex Gallafent (06:14):
One run my friend. One run. I presume you follow a cricket. That was pretty extraordinary. For anyone who doesn't know New Zealand, just beat my, my native country England by one run in a test match. And it was one of the best things I've ever seen.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (06:26):
So, congratulations. Oh my goodness. Yes. So Andy is in New Zealand. I wanna welcome you from tomorrow, um, for the rest of us. So thank you for joining us early in your morning. So Andy is a chef by trade. He's cooked in restaurants all around the world. He, um, but he also has spent the last 12 years working in tech for a digital product studio. So he was bringing like chef and digital products together. So last year he was working on his master's and started to tackle this project about the problems that families face when it comes to cooking dinner. If you have a family, you know what a problem dinner can be, who cooks, what are you gonna cook? Where are you gonna get the ingredients, the recipes, let alone is it possibly healthy? So today Andy's gonna share with us a presentation for a product that he developed. His product is called Tiny Recipes. It's designed to make it easier for families to cook dinner by giving them simplified, personalized recipes that even a child could cook. So the presentation is a pitch to the potential consumer to tell them how and why tiny recipes will solve their dinner woes. And ultimately the goal is to get people to sign up. So I'm gonna go ahead and we'll pull up Andy's presentation. I'll pass it over to you, Alex.
Alex Gallafent (07:56):
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Thanks Suz. Um, Andy, thank you so much for sharing this. This is awesome. Um, I'm, I'm curious just by, by like asking you to help orient as to what we're looking at here. We're not gonna keep this on screen for long, but if I'm correct, the first sort of section starting top left and then moving across and then downwards, the setup is essentially like a little story about a family and a family situation in the current state. And then after the aha moment, we start talking about the product tiny recipes. Is that correct?
Andy (08:32):
Um, yeah, the speaker notes are on the bottom of the slides that I have. But what I was trying, what I tried to do in the presentation is take the audience on a journey of, um, the problems that they're likely to have, and empathize with, um, at the start. And then what they're currently doing, um, with those problems. And then, um, uh, showing other companies that are trying to solve the problem and how they're not quite working. And then, and then sort of the aha moment and trying to take them on a journey on, um, a different approach.
Alex Gallafent (09:09):
I love that. Um, one of the things that I really appreciate, you know, sometimes presentations especially about products begin with the products. Like we, you know, product Nu slide number one, gonna put it on a ped pedestal, and you haven't done that. You've begun with a situation, a context, a universe, and a state of affairs that's currently unsatisfactory. Um, you know, pre presentation is a, it is kind of one of those, it can feel, at least to me, like a scary word. Sometimes when I give it a capital P it's like I'm presenting the big thing to the world, and I'm hoping that people will like it, whereas there's another meaning to the word presentation, which is like the small p where it's like an offer, a gift. It's like something I'm presenting, I'm putting in front of you, hoping that it's gonna resonate. So I love, love, love that you went for a more human form of presentation, presenting this idea, this notion of a family. Couple of things that I noticed, if it's helpful. Um, so one I'm curious about like the, um, the, almost like the, the camera angle that you've selected to describe this family at the beginning. It's sort of like in, in cinematic language, it's sort of like, it's like mid focus. The photographs are, I think stock photos principally. Is that correct?
Andy (10:22):
Yeah.
Alex Gallafent (10:23):
Um, great. So the stock photos, um, they all show families sort of as a group. Um, we don't necessarily see them in a state of any sort of emotional specificity. We're seeing them cooking, we're seeing them tired in that one. They're all different families as well. So one of the things that has an effect, at least for me, is to take me out of the story. I'm seeing more, um, high level abstracted theme, and I'm seeing, and I'm feeling less of an emotional connection to this archetype or this imaginary family that might hook me right from the beginning about the emotional need that's going on. So that could be one thing to try out, like how could you thread together this opening sequence, almost like playing out an imaginary story, giving them names, you know, showing them in details. What would it actually look like to have a shot that's less about the whole family and more about, you know, a bowl of food, you know, or a messy, you know, bowl of cereal that's at dinnertime, you know, instead of, instead of like the sort of the more generic moments that we have right now.
Alex Gallafent (11:26):
So that might be, how, how does that resonate with you?
Andy (11:29):
Uh, yeah, no, I can do that. I, I, I could even use my own family. Cause what I, what I'm trying to convey is the, um, problem isn't solved by skill. So my chef background doesn't solve the problem.
Alex Gallafent (11:42):
Mm-hmm.
Andy (11:43):
And I've got a busy, busy family, a blended family of six kids. So, uh, I've got that, that problem as well.
Alex Gallafent (11:51):
I love that. And as you bring your own family in midway through, but the photo doesn't show you in that state. It's a fa family of a photo of your family, and you're all, you're all together. But like, it's not about the topic. So tying those two things together, soup could be super cool. And actually you are, you are hinting at a degree of vulnerability that you might be comfortable and not everyone is, but you might be comfortable bringing to the opening of the story by zeroing on your own circumstance, the own your, the own set, the ch set of challenges that you yourselves are, are confronting. I had one question for you. So is the problem fundamentally about food or is the problem is the, is the goal about something deeper than food and food is the mechanism together? I have a hunch, but I'm curious for you, what is the, what is the thing that's being solved by the product?
Andy (12:42):
Um, sharing the load so everyone can contribute and connect. So what I found was there's a primary cook mainly in every house, and they're worn out in the, the tired, and they're, they're over it. And if you can, if you can enable, uh, non cooks and children to be able to also, um, choose dinners, plan, plan what's for dinner, even cook dinner and, and share the load over different nights, um, you can have ha have an a family environment where, uh, everyone's contributing. Um, it's, it's all a bit more balanced out. And it's just, so my approach to the problem is, is incorporating more of the family to, um, to, to the planning and cooking of
Alex Gallafent (13:29):
Food. Yeah, I I love that. And I think you've, you've hit the nail in the head and I think you could afford to highlight one element of that, which is this is about helping families share and connect it. Ha it so happens that food is both part of the problem and in, in your product, part of the solution. But the fundamental goal is to essentially allow a family to be a family in a healthy, flourishing way. And to me, that sort of central drive, like emotional impetus is critical to this so that it doesn't quickly turn into, uh, a presentation about the mechanics of food and cooking. It's critical, but like the fundamental impulse strikes me as if, uh, that it's about like, how do we help families share the load, connect with each other, be families, not be sort of like dispersed and diffuse in their energies and exhausted all the time, be able to be together as a unit. And food is a principle way to do that, and this product, therefore, is a way to bring that to life.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (14:27):
This is great. I think, um, what we're doing today, just catching up a couple people who joined a little bit late, is we're looking at the structure of a couple people's presentations because these presentations is longer than two minutes. We weren't, we're not having people present everything but looking, as you can see here at a bird's eye view of the presentation. And so what I'm hearing in this one is that, um, Andy made some bold moves storytelling wise by starting off with a really human story about a family that, you know, and their qualms and their trials and tribulations with regard to food before diving into everything about the, the, um, tiny recipe's pitch. And Alex, where you're pushing it further is to say, to make it even a more specific family to follow one family's journey. It could even be Andy's family and then maybe Andy, I know when you've talked about your pitch, you, you zoom out and you say, I'm one of these families. And so that could be even more explicit in the presentation. Alex, is that kind of accurate for
Alex Gallafent (15:35):
What you're saying? Yeah, absolutely. With, with the ad that I believe that there is a, an implied human truth at the heart of Andy's story about what it means to be a flourishing family at its best that is, that could afford to be picked out. And actually, you know, your opening and closing slide is the George Elliot quote, um, what do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other, which is not about food, it's about the quality of a family that's flourishing. So leaning into that impulse, I think will help situate this problem. It's expressed through food and the solution expressed through their product in an even richer and more anchored way.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (16:16):
I think with that, we're gonna close it up with Andy, we'll wrap up with you a little bit more after this, but thank you Andy, for sharing your presentation. Thank you, Andy. High level with us today. Thank you. Um, for those of you just joining, we're doing something called live feedback where we've invited people to submit a presentation that they can get Alex Gallant's expert feedback on. Um, and we're looking at the overarching structure over those presentations rather than listening to them go through the entire thing. So thank you all for coming on with us. With that, I'm gonna bring on our second person today, Elaine Yang. So Elaine, welcome to the show. I'll give you a little bit of context for background so that you can be up to speed. We'll show that bird's eye view, overview of the conversation, uh, the presentation, and then Alex and Elaine will dive in.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (17:07):
So Elaine is currently working for the federal government as a strategic planner for areas and infrastructure systems across the Nevada national security site. She has a background in urban planning, and so prior in her career, she was leading a housing element update for an affordable housing project with the city council in a city Claremont, California. And so the presentation that Elena is sharing with us and giving us a little peek at today is from her time with that city council in California. And it's a proposal that she submitted to that council. And I think a lot of us can identify with this moment. You have this big proposal that you're submitting to a lot of people, they're gonna ask a lot of questions. So she had nine members of the city council she was presenting to as well as nearly a hundred community members who are listening in. So you can imagine all of the range of questions she's trying to prepare for, but her goal was to make the case for an affordable housing project that she and her team had developed. So I wanna say welcome to you, Elaine. We'll, we'll bring up just the overview of your presentation to give people a sense of it. And with that, Alex, I'll have you, um, take it away and, and see how you can help Elaine with some feedback.
Alex Gallafent (18:24):
Hi, Elaine. Thanks so much for this. Hi.
Elaine (18:27):
Hi. Thank you.
Alex Gallafent (18:27):
What is it like seeing it again like, uh, you know, since 2017? How does it, how does it, how do you, you know, how does it land with you?
Elaine (18:35):
You know, um, it feels pretty good. Um, it, you know, I question my font decisions, but overall I feel like the content was concise and I, in some cases, perhaps a little, it's, it was a little bit more text per slide than I would do now.
Alex Gallafent (18:53):
Mm-hmm.
Elaine (19:18):
Ultimately, I was trying to present to the city council the reviewing body, um, what, what, what the housing element update consisted of what we did. Um, and this housing element update was a state mandated required update. And so if we didn't get that approval from city council, uh, we would be not compliant with state regulations. And as who's, uh, mentioned, a huge part of the housing element updates was to show that the city could accommodate a certain number of affordable housing within the city. But in order to do that, we needed to do a lot of changes to the zoning and, and the, the municipal code to make sure that we could do so. So, uh, it was, it was a pretty complex presentation,
Alex Gallafent (20:20):
Really complex. So maybe there are two ways for us to explore this presentation, and we'll take them one by one. The first is, I, I'm curious, like what were the tonal qualities that you needed to hit for this to be successful? So was this about, you know, an explanatory turn, you just needed to be ultimately clear, or was it about confidence? And we can talk about how you went about achieving those tones and if there are other approaches to do that.
Elaine (20:47):
I was definitely trying to achieve, um, a tone of confidence of calmness and of knowledge being knowledgeable Right before the meeting or the day before the meeting, my city manager had, uh, had me do the presentation beforehand. And his one word of feedback or one item of feedback was to turn down my excitement. So I did my best to channel my 60, our 70 year old father, you know, in all of his seriousness and, um, did, not didactic, but just like prof, you know, very serious, present the, the project.
Alex Gallafent (21:27):
And did you present pretty much what's on the screen or were there some slides, some moments where it was more like, look, here is evidence, but I'm not gonna speak to it, just know that it's there, or were you really going through each slide and sort of taking people through the details?
Elaine (21:43):
I went through each slide and I went through the details for sure. Yeah, it was really important for them to understand everything in the presentation. You know, this presentation was accompanied by like a 22 page staff report, but the dirty secret is that they often don't read it. So this presentation was kind of making sure that they were fully, um, in, on the same page as us regarding why the housing element update was needed, how we were achieving the affordable housing and what actions they needed to take.
Alex Gallafent (22:16):
Yeah, this, this feels like one of those moments where, you know, it's a bit of a truism that you know, the, tell people what you're gonna say, tell them and then tell 'em what you said, like this, this whole, the presentation feels like an executive summary, but almost feels like it demands an executive summary to the executive summary up the top, you know, the, the, the, the most distilled version of what you described, you know, what's going on, why it's important, and the action they need to take. I could imagine that actually being a preface to going into that detail, because the challenge I can imagine for someone, uh, receiving this presentation, especially receiving it, watching the slides go past, perhaps not being able to refer to anything, maybe like trying to capture notes along the way, is holding the construction of this argument such a different story to Andy's.
Alex Gallafent (23:04):
This is a, this is a complex, that piece of argument that you are, you are constructing moment by moment piece by piece. So almost providing for people a mental model of some scaffolding, like, this is how the jigsaw piece is going to add up. This is the shape you need to hold in your head of what I'm building towards that people can refer back to. Might be an interesting way to buy yourself permission to get to this level of detail. The only thing I'm curious about, um, and it might be that one technique is to sort of vary this move along the way, is different ways to communicate confidence and clarity. Sometimes actually density is exactly what you need because I mean, I remember a project, you know, know, not a presentation, but it was a project for financial consumers and we had prototyped sending a letter out that was, we thought very clear, very distilled, like didn't have too much stuff on the page.
Alex Gallafent (23:57):
And actually a lot of the feedback from consumers, from people was, I, I don't believe this. There isn't enough, there aren't enough words on the page for me to feel like this is authoritative and real. So there might be moments where actually density is necessary to communicate confidence, but there may also be moments where the essential truth of something that you are trying to communicate is lost in the blur. You know, it's like, what of these three points do I really need to remember? Or is like, what does this table actually mean? Is there a summary sentence that just distills the essence of what you're trying to communicate? So moving between those polarities could be an interesting technique to try and determine when you want to go dense, when you want to go clear. Su I think you're
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (24:37):
Jumping, I think this is great. I'm gonna do my best to wrap up all of this. Um, and thank you Elaine, and I, I really wanna give a shout out extra to you because your context is so tricky. Like that point about somebody telling you to control your enthusiasm is that is the unique context of presenting to this kind of government client and trying to command respect and have authority and have confidence and show that, you know, you know, your business and that context. It was super tricky context. I think, um, some of the things that I was hearing from Alex is to think about the jobs to be done from your presentation. And sometimes it's so often that we're using a talk or a story piece of storytelling to serve more than one purpose at once. It's the leave behind and the presentation.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (25:27):
And maybe it's great to make something different for the presentation and attach all of the leave behind as an appendix or, or things you can call up with questions. I also heard Alex talking a lot about, um, about complex presentations and, and explanatory bits, um, and different ways that you can communicate, communicate confidence. I think it is so common for all of us to capture all of the details and see that as the means to show, you know, what's going on in there. There are other ways I'll share one little tip that I use sometimes and I've seen a lot of teams do this is get everything in there, put it all in there, and then wrap up with, um, what is, if there was one big thing I wanted you to remember, the thing I want you to take away from this, say that right up front because that communicates confidence. And then they listen to all of the other data and information that you're giving them with that filter. And that can be a really helpful way to help them digest all of that information and do something with it, not just glaze over when you've put your heart and Saul into presenting this.
Alex Gallafent (26:37):
I know we have to move on, but there's one thing we didn't quite get to, but I would love if we were able to, just thinking more about the audience. So what are they bringing into the room when they encounter this information? Like, have they just come from lunch? Have they come from another meeting that looks just like this? If not with as, as elegant font, font choices. You know, are they, are they going to another meeting afterwards like this? And that's actually something you can even prototype. You can sort of play out for yourself with a team. Like, let's do a session now. Let me get practice the presentation, then go somewhere else and then see, you know, what are the ways that this can stand out or be, um, um, approachable or more memorable in the context of a larger suite of activities that your audience may be engaged in.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (27:20):
Wonderful. With that we're gonna wrap it up with Elaine, thank you so much for your bravery, for sharing and for your hard work and affordable housing.
Alex Gallafent (27:27):
Thank you, Elaine.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (27:29):
Miss that. Thank you. We are going to bring up our third guest and just updating folks who have joined us at various points. We're doing something a little different today instead of just Alex lecturing to you about his top tips for storytelling. We're bringing tips about storytelling and presentation to life through something we call live feedback. So literally we've invited people to submit something that they're working on or have presented to Alex. And Alex is right here going to give them live feedback to bring that to life for you. For those of you who want to follow on at the end, we always wrap up these tips and if you've signed up for this webcast, you will get an email with the wrap up afterwards. So thank you everyone. And Saari, a little bit of background on you. Uh, Cezary is joining us from Ottawa, Canada.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (28:20):
He is a senior business analyst at the transformation, an accelerator hub for the government of Canada. And he helps us clients to accelerate the transformation or change that they're going through. So Cezary has shared a presentation with us that he developed to start educating his team and peers about Agile. So Agile's an iterative approach to project management and often software development. And so Cezary did something really cool and innovative here. He, not only the pr the, some of the things he was doing was dispelling common myths about agile that he had seen in his organization, but his presentation is meant to be highly interactive and engaging. He's built it onto Miro whiteboard, which is a digital collaboration space instead of, um, instead of into slides. And he was inviting folks to start thinking differently about what they do. So he's presented this a few times and he'll often also send out this mural board to peers with hopes that they'll engage with the content on their own. So with that, I'll pass it over to Alex and Cezary is all yours.
Alex Gallafent (29:25):
Hey Cezary.
Cezary (29:26):
Hi.
Alex Gallafent (29:27):
How is this going so far? Like, can you, can you share a little about, a little bit about how deploying this has, has gone with your teams and what the format looks like?
Cezary (29:35):
Yeah, so, uh, our team, uh, at the accelerator hub, uh, is introducing a lot, lot of new ways of thinking and, uh, mindsets to the government, which is a very kind of hierarchical structure and is, uh, uh, very used to working in waterfall, uh, kind of project management. But there's a lot of, uh, talk about agile. There's a lot of misunderstanding about it. So we wanted to combine, uh, and do a few things with this presentation. Not only talk about Agile and, uh, two non-technical audiences cuz Agile is, uh, has been used in IT environments, but now it's coming a little bit more to different types of teams. So we wanted to, uh, show it to them that it's not overwhelming, dispel some of the myths about it. So, uh, also at the same time use innovative presentation tools that are not just sort of talking at you, but uh, are kinda living artifacts that invite, uh, engagement.
Cezary (30:30):
So each slide has, uh, stickies where, um, the participants can go and actually click and provide feedback. They can even, uh, put, uh, and I often have some stickies that people put right all over the place, uh, uh, in with their feedback and comment as we go through. I always do a little changes if the, it gets some feedback that something is not clear, I always ask the participants to, uh, spend some time after or even join the presentation and I try to improve. So it's like a, uh, ongoing, uh, evergreen beta few things at the same time we, we try to do with
Alex Gallafent (31:04):
That. I love that. Thank you so much for that context. So I, there are a few things that I, I really appreciate here. I love that you've made it participatory, um, making space for people to show up and join in and add and comment and and evolve it with you. And it's not sole authorship in that respect. Um, I love that it is, uh, a living document that presumably people can refer to as well as they're making choices and they're going about their work. So it has a different flavor of utility than a simple sort of straightforward, I'm gonna tell you this on this one occasion, but occasion based sort of use feels like an interesting potential topic for us. Uh, when I first encountered this, I thought, how would I feel if this is how I encountered Agile for the very first time?
Alex Gallafent (31:48):
And I felt overwhelmed. I felt like there is a lot here
Cezary (32:45):
You know, it's, uh,
Alex Gallafent (33:34):
That's a, that's a question that that, that there's a hypothesis there or there's an assumption that that presentations are necessarily a one moment proposition, but maybe that's not the case. That's certainly not how we teach in schools. And if you're a teacher, you know that you build lessons over time. So what is to say that your presentation around this topic could not be a series of presentations moment by moment, building knowledge, building confidence, step by step, adding to the store of, uh, of awareness around agile in your team. Um, there's another trick I think that you've sort of left unexplored, which is the myths. I, I love that you pick out that, you know, that your impetus for doing this is to dispel some common myths about, about agile, but you haven't articulated the myths and I'm desperate to know what they are. Those could be a really powerful way for you to structure this content. Myth number one, you know, agile is complicated. I don't know, I'm making this up, but then you have something, you have some tension building for you to respond to and something for people to sort of wrestle within their head and hang onto, um, that just might, might, might give this content something to hang onto rather than sort of floating out there as like, just another way of, you know, of thinking about work.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (34:43):
I'm gonna jump in here with one, one idea, which is something that we teach in one of our storytelling courses, storytelling for Influence. And it's because, so sorry, I so resonate with you. I'm an educator myself and I get so excited about all the content. I want people to have all of it. And one of the things that I've learned over the years through others is to pull back and think about what is the one big idea that we actually need to focus on. And the way to get there is through something that we call the bar test, which is to pretend that you're just, you and Alex are at a bar having a drink, and you're like, ah, I'm working on this thing. And Alex says, tell me what, tell me what's the big idea? What is the big thing you wanna get across about Agile? So could you, like, pretend you've got a cup of tea or coffee or a cocktail at hand, what would you tell Alex about agile?
Cezary (35:36):
Agile is not what you think agile is. A lot of things that you've might have heard about, and it's actually something that I do in the first slide. It's, uh, if you zoom into the first slide, it would really make sense because I say agile is not just being flexible and being able to stand on your hand while you're actually, uh, composing something beautiful. And then I go into talking about the difference of, uh, what the public servants are very familiar with, which is a very kind of a traditional, um, project, uh, management, which is like an orchestra. And I contrast that with, it's more like a jazz, uh, improv. Uh, uh, that's what Agile is all about. That's where it comes from. And then I jump in and sort of try to look at the values really quickly and uh, then I talk about the principles that it's an actual manifesto. It comes from agile manifesto, the values. So
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (36:27):
That is great
Cezary (36:28):
There, that kinda a story and bring them into it and make it excited. There's a lot of talking in the first slide and maybe that's not reflected in visually, but, uh, yes, I do tell the story of the history of it. That's great. And gotta get the people excited.
Alex Gallafent (36:42):
Susan, Alex and I, I just love that you've, like, you've landed on a metaphor that resonates for you. The difference between, you know, operating like an orchestra and operating like a, like a, like a jazz group. I would encourage you to, you know, select that metaphor and, and sort of pursue it. You know, a lot of the images on the subsequent slides are, you know, from different metaphors and maybe there is some utility and some power in, you know, choosing one, seeing how rich it is and seeing how well it, it's able to capture the things that you want to communicate. Um, so that's one recommendation. The other thing, it's, you know, I saw this in the chat as well. There is a question here about when is a presentation, a presentation? When is a presentation a workshop? When is a presentation actually turning into a piece of documentation?
Alex Gallafent (37:28):
So it might be that there are, there are different formats that are more appropriate that you could build off this, you know, this, this central repository to get to the presentation form, like the first introduction version of this where it's like, simplify it on the slides. You're picking a single metaphor so that everyone has the same mental model to pursue as they're getting to grips with the idea initially. And then you move as people, you know, get further into the details towards a format like this where participation becomes more relevant, where you can start introducing a greater level of granularity. So just being intentional about the moment you and your audience is in, and then tuning and tailoring the content to serve that need.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (38:06):
Awesome. I think we are gonna close up with Cezary there. I think each of these three presentations is just an awesome, awesome progress work in progress and fantastic story to start with. And we wanted to get to some of those level 2, 3, 4 kinds of feedback. So, um, I'm gonna try to summarize across all of them to close it out. But Cezary, some of the things that I heard Alex talking about with, with you is, um, you know, that instead of that feeling of overwhelm, giving people everything that you want them to know, how can you peel back and start to understand what the, the big idea is, the singular, you know, if it's all about jazz over an orchestra, how does that metaphor ring throughout? How does that become the one major thing that you want people to know? And then I think also what I'm hearing inherent in that is as you practice your presentation time and time again, and you get feedback from people that can hone your prototype, and that's the best way when you're a teacher who's super passionate about a topic to know what do you make the centerpiece and what do you leave on the, on the cutting room floor.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (39:18):
I think that rolls me back to things that we heard for Elaine. I think a lot of great tips in there also about being really mindful of the job to be done for the particular moment that you're presenting. Is it a leave behind? Is it a presentation? Is it an executive summary? And making things for that unique context, that specific audience is something that I, I really learned and heard you talking about with Elaine's presentation, balancing that complexity of the information to be presented and that desire to show confidence and knowledge, but also still making sure you have a clear, crisp, clean presentation. And then with Andy backing up to that, where we started with his pitch about tiny recipes there, we really went back to some of the places that we always talk about with human-centered storytelling. You know, how do you take something, even if it has a pitch purpose or an informational purpose, and certainly make it human show why you care, show why you're passionate about it, share something about yourself, share a human story, maybe that human story is even about you. And that's a way to make it deeply, deeply memorable and personal. So all of these are some of the things that we learned through this unique approach that we were giving to storytelling, going through live feedback with Alex. Um, Alex, is there anything that I missed in my summary that you wanna make sure that people have today?
Alex Gallafent (40:49):
Well, there, there's one thing, and I spotted it in the chat as well, and it's around, it's around metaphor. So one, one last thought. I mean, I often go to metaphor. I like metaphors. I think they're poetic. I think they provide scaffolding that other people can share, but they're only useful if everyone gets them. Like, if you have to explain the, the, the subject of the metaphor as well as explaining the content of your presentation, maybe it's not the right choice. So not every storytelling presentation requires a metaphor, but if there is a metaphor that fits perfectly that everyone in your audience like can, can latch onto and can understand, it can be a spectacular way to supercharge and accelerate the path to understanding onto which you can then lay much more detail. Um, so yeah, yay, yay metaphor, but is it an obligation? Absolutely not. And choose them carefully.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (41:35):
Nice. Wonderful. So I think today we've filled up all of our time with these live feedback sessions. Please let us know. Send us a note, shoot us something on social media or send us an email to let us know what you thought about this format. We wanted to try something a little different. We're always changing it up with you. Um, today we've been hearing from Alex Gallafent, the senior director of narrative and strategy at ideo. He's an instructor in our presentation called Impactful Presentations. We also have another one called Storytelling for Influence. So those are places where you can learn the basics of storytelling, but we wanted to get into some more of the advanced stuff here today. Today we're also offering a one-time use discount code for our March course run. So you can use, engage and inspire 15 exclamation point to save 15% on your next course purchase and enrollment for our next course run as open until March 7th. And so with that, I just wanna say thank you, thank you, thank you. Especially to Alex and the three people who came on sharing their presentations. It's been an absolutely gift having you with me. Thank you Alex, for all such
Alex Gallafent (42:46):
A pleasure. Thank you.
Suzanne Gibbs Howard (42:47):
And thank you to our community for showing up, giving feedback, participating from wherever you are, all around the road, the world. See you next time.
Alex Gallafent (42:56):
Bye bye. Thank you.
About the Speaker
Alex Gallafent
Senior Director, Narrative & Strategy, IDEO
Alex Gallafent is a Senior Design Director at IDEO. He helps clients, teams, and individuals imagine and do design work that addresses people's deepest needs and meets their highest aspirations. Alex grounds complex design projects in clarifying, human-centered research, and builds confidence and excitement through story, language, sound, and immersive experiences. Recently, Alex has spent time working IDEO's Design for Food global impact practice and is currently focused on supporting key global client relationships through deep craft.
Since joining IDEO, he's worked with major clients in media, government, civic innovation, financial empowerment, hospitality, financial services, and elsewhere. He also teaches design thinking, storytelling, and research at institutions including New York University, The School of Visual Arts, and The New School. He's a lead instructor for IDEO U's Impactful Presentations course.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
We don’t always think of the workplace as a place to go for meaningful friendships. But as it turns out, fostering strong relationships with your coworkers is not only linked to better business outcomes like productivity and employee retention, but can also lead to more fulfillment and belonging both at work and beyond.
Here are insights on work friendships from Kat Vellos, an experience designer, connection coach, and author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear Kat talk about why workplace friendships are important, what questions to ask to help deepen connections with coworkers, and how to think about fostering connection in a hybrid work environment.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Why Work Friends Are Important
Benefits of Healthy Work Friendships
2 Tips for Making Friends at Work
How to Have Better Conversations
Staying Connected With Remote Work
The Business Case for Connection
Why Work Friends Are Important
We use the word “friend” to describe so many of our platonic connections—acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers, and so on. In reality, there’s a wide spectrum of connection that we have in the workplace, from strangers to work spouses. But regardless of whether you’re going to work to make friends, Kat reminds us that a healthy colleagueship can be extremely beneficial because we spend a lot of time with coworkers.
According to surveys, the amount of time we spend with friends outside of work peaks at around 18 years old, then goes downhill and flattens out from our mid-30s until our 80s. Time spent with coworkers, on the other hand, steadily rises from 15 to about 25, then stays high until it drops as people start to retire in their 50s and 60s. That means that for much of our lives, we spend more time with our coworkers than with our friends.
As a result, there’s a real opportunity for connection with the people that we naturally spend a lot of time with. Kat says that a healthy colleagueship with coworkers has many of the same qualities and traits as those in a healthy friendship.
Image source: We Should Get Together
Benefits of Healthy Work Friendships
Friends help us grow and improve through honest feedback and advice. They keep us accountable and aren’t afraid to call us out, but also provide us with a space to be safe and vulnerable.
The benefits of healthy platonic relationships have so many impacts on our health and wellbeing, and Kat notes that healthy friendships and healthy colleagueships share many of the same characteristics. Some key benefits include:
Learn how to collaborate with work friends, colleagues, and teams in our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
2 Tips for Making Friends at Work
While there’s no secret formula for making friends at work, there are tips that Kat recommends:
Image source: We Should Get Together
How to Have Better Conversations
Every conversation is a chance to feel happier and closer, or tired and bored. Instead of defaulting to the same social scripts of “How's the weather? Where are you from? What's new?”, Kat suggests embracing opportunities to approach conversations more bravely. She reminds us that a question is an invitation, and a conversation is an energetic space where we choose to spend time. It can be adventurous, playful, or heartfelt.
In a workplace context, if you’re leading a meeting, start with a warm-up. You can either verbally say or put in the chat, “Hey, we're going to warm up with a different question today.” One of her favorite strategies when talking to a work friend is to say, “I'm taking a new approach to questions this week. Do you want to try it with me?” Think of a few questions that you want to try out. Start with lighter, more open-ended questions, such as:
Generally, it’s important to have a certain depth of trust and closeness in the friendship before asking a deeper question. Kat says it’s also helpful to work up in levels, starting with the lighter questions first. If you feel like the other person is open to a personal question, ask them, “Can I ask you a question that's a little bit personal?” Then, they can decide whether they would like to respond. Some examples of deeper questions from her conversation tools are:
“While some people go to work to make friends and some don’t, a healthy colleagueship can help give the same benefits and similar qualities to a healthy friendship.”
Kat Vellos
Staying Connected with Remote Work
Kat notes that when some people are remote and others are in person, those who are remote are bound to feel more left out. There's an inconsistent field of experience with the connection and type of interaction that they get. For example, if an organization is only doing the transactional interactions asynchronously and saving special conversations for face-to-face, it leads to different groups having different access and different levels of belonging.
Another thing that happens with hybrid and remote work is that because the opportunity for spontaneous connection and interaction isn't going to happen in the hallway, you have to actually make time for it. It’s easy for work to feel more transactional and impersonal when there aren’t those same moments of bonding with coworkers. Kat suggests making space to chat and connect personally with the people on your team, whether it’s at the beginning of meetings or on Slack.
Image source: We Should Get Together
The Business Case for Connection
When you help yourself and your colleagues feel a stronger sense of belonging at work, you are demonstrably and financially supporting your company. Kat points out that research shows that when people feel lonely at work, they're twice as likely to quit and twice as likely to get poached by another company. And when organizations re-fill a role that someone has left, it typically costs between 50% to 200% of their salary to fill that role.
If you’re helping others feel connected at work, you’re saving your company money and supporting efficiency because of all of the institutional memory, belonging, and connection that comes with being there for a long time. Kat wants you to remember that spending the time and money on a 20-minute coffee with a work friend every week saves exponentially more than it would cost if one or both of you left because you didn't feel a sense of connection.
Collaborating with a Team
In the workplace, you’ll need to collaborate with all kinds of people—from your work friends to your manager. In our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration, we teach you how to work with others to set team agreements, give constructive feedback, and create a culture of belonging.
“Healthy friendships and healthy colleagueships have many of the same qualities. Trust, laughter, appreciation, teamwork, and so much more.”
Kat Vellos
About the Speaker
Kat Vellos
Speaker | Facilitator | Experience Designer
Kat Vellos (she/her) is a speaker, experience designer, and connection coach who helps others tap into the meaningful connection they crave in their personal and professional lives. She's the author of "We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships". Vellos has been a celebrated speaker at TEDx, San Francisco Design Week, Lesbians Who Tech, Rosenfeld Media’s DesignOps Summit, General Assembly, Design for America, Social Good Tech Week, Impact Hub, The Manuscript Academy and many more in addition to podcasts like The Good Life Project, The Design of Business, Beautiful Thinkers, and Still Becoming. Her writing and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, Communication Arts, Thrive Global, Yahoo Lifestyle, Design Feast, AIGA blog, Holiday Matinee, and more. Visit her website and learn more about her book We Should Get Together.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
Anyone who tells stories is a storyteller. Yes, novelists, film directors, and anyone who’s done a TED Talk would qualify for that title. But it can also be a teacher going over a lesson with students or an engineer sharing a slide deck with a manager. Storytelling plays an important role across many jobs and organizations—in meetings, board rooms, and brainstorms. We’ve created this guide to storytelling to share our insights on why storytelling is important, common storytelling mistakes, and how to create an effective story.
5 Tips to Be a Better Storyteller
A Framework for Giving Presentations
Why Storytelling is Important
Stories help connect data to emotion and open people’s minds. While every business must pay attention to facts and figures, data alone can’t propel innovation. In fact, research shows an argument based purely on numbers is less effective at changing someone’s mind. Stories are especially helpful when you're trying to rally support for a new idea. When there’s no data to prove something might work, a powerful story can do a better job of showing potential.
Storytelling can have an impact in every single area of a business, from human resources to leadership. Today, companies are incorporating storytelling into so much of what they do, from pitching to branding, and explaining their values. But just as home cooks have a lot to learn before they can become trained chefs, there’s a lot to learn before you can master storytelling.
How to Create a Story Arc
There are so many ways to tell a story. In a business context, it’s just as important as in film or entertainment to think about the way you structure your story and select the right pieces of information for maximum impact. There are 4 main elements in a story:
There is no one right way to tell a story. But the way you choose to organize your information can be the deciding factor in getting your audience to take the action you desire...or not. The story arc of the 4 C’s works well if your presentation has a clear problem and solution.
The story arc is the choreography of your story—how it plays across time and in terms of emotion and how your audience is experiencing your story. As humans, we’re very attuned to story arcs. They can create anticipation and engagement, which leads to better retention and understanding. There are several classic story arcs that can be seen across hundreds of years of literature and storytelling:
Learn more about crafting stories that motivate and inspire in our online course Storytelling for Influence.
5 Tips to Be a Better Storyteller
Here are 5 storytelling tips to keep in mind to put together a great narrative:
1. Put Your Audience First
No matter how you deliver your story—in a live presentation or on paper—the most important thing to think about is how you can engage your audience. Presenting real and personal stories is far more engaging than simply presenting a set of demographics.
2. Take People On an Emotional Journey
If you think about the stories you consume in books and movies, they almost all involve some sort of tension—something that’s overcome by the end of the story. That doesn’t mean that you need to scare your audience, but you do need them to understand the stakes involved and to bring them to a resolution.
3. Test Your Ideas
When you first have a germ of a story idea, explain it to someone else out loud. Keep working on it, and test it on larger groups, different audiences, or even on social media. Once you have a draft or a version you’re ready to tell to an audience, get feedback. We think of this as prototyping your story. It’s a vulnerable exercise, but keep in mind it’s in the service of making your story better.
4. Be a Good Editor
All writers need a good editor, but all writers need to be one, too. Once you feel good about your draft, it’s time to get out your scalpel. See how much you can cut. Or, try telling yourself that your piece can only have three top ideas. Can you narrow your focus to what really matters? It sounds hard, but your story will be better for it.
5. Practice to Reduce Anxiety
Writing on paper is one thing. Telling a story aloud to an audience—whether clients or coworkers—is quite another, particularly if you’re sharing something personal. But having the confidence to get up on stage isn’t a personality trait, it’s a skill, and one that you can work on. One helpful trick is positive visualization, imagining the presentation going well. Try to incorporate meditation, calm breaths, and positive self talk.
Common Storytelling Mistakes
In new and experienced storytellers alike, there are a number of storytelling mistakes that we’ve seen. Here are 7 common ones to look out for:
1. Reading the Slides
The biggest mistake presenters make is putting many words on a slide and then reading them. This is frustrating for an audience, because they can read the words faster than you can say them. The best approach is to have a few words on the slide and explain with more context—that way, the audience actually needs to listen to you.
2. Failing to Rehearse
It's remarkable how few people rehearse their presentations. Some are so nervous about presenting that they don’t want to go through it more than once. Others believe that being rehearsed might make them seem less “natural.” The reality is that every great presenter—from the TED speaker to the stand-up comedian—is heavily rehearsed. If you don't practice, you won’t be prepared.
3. Being abstract
Sometimes, we feel smart being abstract and talking about high-level truths. But stories run on specifics. Audiences remember detail—especially sensorial detail (“It was a dark and stormy night…”). People engage with stories through their senses. That being said, try to make sure the details are relevant to the point of your story. If it's an optimistic story, include details that are uplifting, and so forth.
4. Not Getting to the Point
The first thirty seconds of a story is your opportunity to grab an audience’s attention. If you want to tell a powerful story, it's a bad idea to waste that time on “throat clearing,” or laying out the agenda, defining your terms, introducing yourself, and so on. Find a strong opener, and stick to it.
5. Making it Overly Professional
Some people think that within a professional context they shouldn't display their feelings. They remove all emotion and replace it with business jargon and data, entering the state we call “professional boring mode.” But emotion is what makes a story memorable and incites people to act. It might seem counterintuitive, but speaking naturally and informally with genuine emotion will make you sound confident and help you engage an audience.
6. Not Knowing Your Audience
Yes, you probably have a story you want to tell. But what about the story your audience wants to hear? Time-crunched executives will want you to get to the point quickly, while boots-on-the-ground types will crave nuance and detailed action items. Tell the wrong story to the wrong audience and you'll lose their attention.
7. Having a Non-Ending Ending
“So, uh, yeah, looks like, uh, our time is up, so, uh, I guess I'll stop here...any questions?” That's not a very memorable way to wrap up a story. Your ending is an opportunity to make an impression with your audience. Think about your big finish. And stick the landing.
“Sometimes, we feel smart being abstract and talking about high-level truths. But stories run on specifics.”
Storytelling with Data
You might have lots of compelling data that you’re ready to share with your team. The challenge is how to go from charts and numbers to a story that will move your stakeholders and build alignment around a way forward. Here are a few tips for telling stories with data:
A Framework for Giving Presentations
Use the following presentation framework to tell stories and deliver presentations that are memorable and engaging:
Presence: Be Fully Present for Your Presentation
It can be hard to show up fully present when there are so many distractions around us. Maybe you’re coming out of a stressful meeting or worrying about the health of a family member. Try an exercise like “Lion Mouse.” First, hold up your hands like lion claws and make yourself feel really big, then make your mouth huge and roar like a lion. Now, make your fingers small next to you, squeeze your nose and mouth together, and make tiny squeak noises like a mouse. After going through each of these five times, you’ll start to feel warmed up, loose, and present in the moment.
Originality: Anchor in What’s Authentic to You
Your authentic voice is the thing that only you can bring to your stories. When it comes to our work, many of us talk about what we do, but not why we do it. What are you in it for? Practice the 90-second version of why you do the work that you do, and make sure the story is authentic to you and not a version that anyone else could tell. When you bring originality into your story, you build trust by sharing who you are with others.
Inclusion: Involve Your Audience
In improv, performers use their words and body language to share space with other people. Oftentimes it’s not about being front stage, but rather about being a good scene partner who brings forward other voices. In presentations, inclusion is about involving your audience in the story. As a leader or presenter, being vulnerable in your stories is one way that you can create space for others to tell their own vulnerable stories. And as a listener, being welcoming, attentive, and ready, as if you’re ready to catch a ball from the speaker, creates the opportunity for deeper connection.
Narrative: Give Structure to Your Presentation
The narrative element of presentations is what most people are familiar with. It’s the story arc that gives a structure or formula to something that otherwise might feel abstract. One example is the Pixar story spine, which can apply to many different lengths and formats: “Once upon a time _____. Every day _____. Until one day _____. Because of that _____. Until finally _____.”
Transformation: Focus on the Change You Want
Think about how you want your audience to feel or act after your presentation. Are you hoping to motivate or educate? Do you want people to feel reflective or passionate? One tip is using words that resonate with your audience—for example, specific marketing terms for a meeting with marketing leadership—to explain and bring to life the things you care about. Focusing on the change you want your listeners to go through will help you to maximize the impact of your presentation.
Crafting Your Story
Telling a great story isn’t magic. There are storytelling techniques, tools, and strategies that can make you a more confident and effective storyteller. In our online course Storytelling for Influence, we teach you how to create your story blueprint, build storytelling prototypes, and develop your unique tone and style.
Want to become an even stronger communicator and share your ideas in ways that engage, inspire, and motivate? Check out storytelling resources on the IDEO U blog, or enroll in our online Communicating for Impact Certificate.
When we think about motivating people at work, we often think about things like compensation, bonuses, office perks, deadlines, and other extrinsic motivators. But are these really the factors that motivate us to show up to work every day?
Here are a few insights on motivation at work from Dan Ariely and Wardah Malik of BEworks, an organization that uses human behavior and social science to solve today’s challenges. Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear Dan and Wardah talk about what behavioral science can teach us about how people make decisions, common misconceptions about workplace motivators, and the rising importance of intrinsic motivators in the wake of hybrid and remote work.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivators
Why Intrinsic Motivators are Important
2 Types of Intrinsic Motivation
Examples of Intrinsic Motivators
Motivation with Hybrid and Remote Work
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivators
In the workplace, extrinsic motivators are external rewards like bonuses, health care, and retirement benefits that are meant to influence motivation. Intrinsic motivators are associated with the internal value that you get from doing a job and feeling good about it, and include feelings of pride and ownership. Organizations tend to rely more on extrinsic motivators because our intuition tells us that they do a better job of motivating us.
Why Intrinsic Motivators are Important
In order to study the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, Dan looked at data going back to 2006 on how companies treat their employees, how employees feel about their company, and what that meant for the stock market return of the company. To determine how companies treated employees, he analyzed 80 motivators, such as how satisfied employees were with their company’s retirement benefits, furniture, and coffee.
Dan simulated portfolios with the top companies based on a motivator—for example, quality of coffee—and tracked how it did over time against the S&P 500 stock market index. Portfolios that tracked extrinsic motivators like employee benefits didn’t do significantly better than the S&P 500. In fact, the portfolios that performed the best were the ones that tracked intrinsic motivators.
Learn more about activating meaning and motivation to your work in our online course Power of Purpose.
2 Types of Intrinsic Motivation
There are two main categories of intrinsic motivation:
Examples of Intrinsic Motivators
While there is a wide range of intrinsic motivators in the workplace, these have been found to be especially important:
Motivation with Hybrid and Remote Work
The workplace is changing, from companies introducing hybrid work to four-day work weeks. As employees reevaluate what they care about in work and life, their motivations can change. Delivering on certain motivators, like appreciation and compliments, can look different in a virtual world. Because working in an office offers certain intangible benefits (connecting with others) from working remotely (convenience and time), get the best out of each experience by leaning into the distinct benefits that each provides.
Finding Purpose at Work
Having a clear purpose can guide you through change and motivate you no matter where you sit in an organization. In our online course Power of Purpose, we teach you how to craft a personal or professional purpose statement, find meaning in your work, and activate behavioral change.
Featured IDEO U Guests
Dan Ariely
Co-Founder & Chief Behavioral Scientist of BEworks
Dan Ariely is the Professor of Behavioral Economics at Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and Founding Partner at BEworks. Dan’s ground-breaking experimental research and prolific writing has made him one of the most prominent leaders in the field of Behavioral Economics; an interdisciplinary science combining psychology, and economics to understand human behavior and decision-making.
Wardah Malik
Chief Executive Officer of BEworks
For over a decade, Wardah has been committed to helping leaders develop innovative solutions in health, wealth, sustainability, and organizational behavior using insights and applications grounded in the science of human behavior. Wardah joined BEworks as one of the founding members in 2012 and since guided its global application of behavioral economics across a host of complex business and societal challenges.
Want to hear from more creative leaders and experts? Subscribe to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.
How might we make our workplaces more creative, inspiring, and human-centered? As the future of work continues to evolve, we need to explore new ideas and methods to make organizations more engaging and resilient. From establishing creative work rituals to bringing emotion to work in a productive way, here are 10 lessons from leaders in the IDEO U community on creating a better workplace.
1. Creative energy is built on understanding people on a human level.
Teams that have creative energy share ideas openly, debate well, pursue things that are contrarian, are comfortable breaking the status quo, and know how to jointly confront fear together. To access those creative capabilities, you first have to build a foundation of understanding each other on a whole human level.
Keith Yamashita, founder of the consulting firm SYPartners, encourages people to ask the questions: What is a great life? What is great work? What is great impact? Once you understand each person’s wants and desires, it starts to impact the way you treat and work with one another.
2. Workplace rituals give us psychological safety, purpose, and performance.
When thinking about the benefits and business case for workplace rituals, Erica Keswin, author of Rituals Roadmap, says they provide us with three things.
3. Bringing emotion into work can be productive.
When emotions are brought into the workplace, a team might choose to move on rather than risk things escalating further. But Mollie West Duffy, co-author of the book Big Feelings, encourages teams to stay in the moment and set the right structures to help people move through conflict in a productive way.
Instead of going in with assumptions and starting with your own perspective of what happened, start by asking the other person what their thoughts and feelings are which can create the psychological safety needed for them to share. Approach conversations with mutual respect and a shared goal, and stay in dialogue rather than shutting down.
4. Ask yourself when you feel most aligned with your company.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to figure out what counts as a ritual in your company. Erica Keswin suggests asking what she calls the magic question: “When do you feel most [company]-ish?” (insert the name of your company).
When Erica asks this question to people, she sees a lightbulb go off in their heads as they reflect on the different aspects of the employee experience that stand out to them. Looking at the moments that feel most in line with your company culture will help you identify existing rituals as well as new opportunities for your company.
5. If you’re feeling burnout, figure out what’s causing it.
A common emotion experienced at work is burnout, and according to Liz Fosslien, co-author and illustrator of Big Feelings, there are three different drivers.
You can figure out what’s causing burnout through a burnout assessment, then take steps to address it.
6. Explore the world and find inspiration in duos.
Keith Yamashita says that duos are the atomic unit of trust. There’s a level of trust between two people that doesn’t exist as easily in larger groups, and duos can function as accountability buddies for creative inspiration. Find someone who inspires you with a new perspective, and set aside time to connect with them regularly.
If it feels hard to find the time for these conversations, assess your current interactions. Which are energy nourishing and which are energy depleting? Add up the time you spend on behaviors that don’t inspire you and see how much you can shift to a bigger creative task.
7. Ask “why” to shape your creative identity.
According to Brandon Viney, a creative director at Google, people can often tell you what they love, but not why they love it—and that discovery process is the beginning of establishing your creative identity.
Identify artists, designers, or creatives who you find yourself gravitating toward. Then, find a few pieces of work from each person, and put words to feelings by writing down what you like about them. Brandon found art that resonated with him and began to incorporate the same qualities into his own creative work.
8. Leadership is about asking the right questions, not having the answers.
Dabney Hailey, founder of the consulting firm Hailey Group, says that no leader knows as much as a group who listens to each other. Facilitative leadership is an approach to leadership focused on unlocking a team’s potential, where success is about enabling others to do their best work by asking the right questions rather than having all the answers. Leaders are good at framing work as a learning process for their teams, stepping back, and holding space for others.
9. Encourage participation in your teams by clarifying processes and roles.
It’s easy to let more vocal folks take center stage, but it’s important to offer the opportunity for equal participation. You can do this by clarifying your role and that of the participants right at the beginning.
Start the meeting by outlining the kinds of behaviors that would make the conversation more collaborative and productive. Dabney Hailey says that when we create space for everyone, we realize what it means to really be heard and how wonderful it is to access our colleagues’ thinking.
10. Approach mentoring with empathy.
When becoming a mentor, Brandon Viney notes that it’s important to keep empathy in mind. Don’t assume that everyone is on the same level, starting from the same place with the same information.
People come with different backgrounds and lived experiences, so take the time to understand who they actually are and where they’re coming from. Then, you can empower them by sharing your own experiences and lessons you’ve learned.
If you’re interested in reading more about how to design a creative and innovative workplace, visit the IDEO U Blog or follow us on Instagram @ideo_u.
]]>At IDEO U, we believe in learning by doing—taking what we learn and applying it to real challenges in the world. We’re constantly amazed by the ways our learners are using the lessons they’ve taken from our courses to change their teams, organizations, and communities. Here are 8 IDEO U learners who are applying design thinking mindsets to business, storytelling, and other aspects of their work.
1. Taylor prototyped her message for her TEDx presentation
A creative director and author, Taylor used the lessons she learned on presenting from Impactful Presentations to shape her TEDx Talk on why we fear public speaking. When the pandemic happened, Taylor had to adapt how she delivered her talk for a virtual audience rather than a room full of people.
“If people just hear a lot of details and context, it is information alone. But when they understand that there's a human being with meaning and intention, they're more likely to connect with the story or presentation.”
Taylor’s presentation advice
Read more about Taylor’s story with her TEDx talk and book.
2. Jing incorporated user research to create audio stories that resonate
As a designer, Jing was tasked with designing a more engaging way for people with paralysis to go through physical therapy. She created interactive audio stories, where listeners would perform exercises that followed the narrative of the story. Through Storytelling for Influence, Jing refined the audio stories for different audiences.
“One interesting thing for me was understanding your audience. In our project, we had to think about how to create a story that's appropriate for each kind of audience.”
Jing’s storytelling advice
Read more about Jing’s story of making physical therapy more engaging.
3. Adolfo introduced creative collaboration to transform his team’s culture
As someone in marketing, Adolfo makes creative assets for e-commerce, packaging, catalogs, and social media for clients across Latin America. After getting promoted to lead a team of five, Adolfo took Cultivating Creative Collaboration and changed the team’s collaboration style from one where everyone worked on these assets by themselves to one where people started to share their ideas with one another.
“We set team agreements, because we hadn't really thought about the best ways for us to work together and what we wanted from each other. It brought to light many things that we weren’t considering before and helped us redefine how we were working.”
Adolfo’s collaboration advice
Read more of Adolfo’s story about how he changed his team’s ways of working.
4. Genia crafted her story to raise funding for her business
Genia founded Rock County Jumpstart to help Black business owners find resources, mentors, and tools for their businesses. While taking Storytelling for Influence, Genia crafted the story of how her grandmother’s small business inspired her to start her own, which attracted funders who loved her story.
“Your story is your story, and hold onto it. You might have people who don't like it, but be authentic and tell authentic stories.”
Genia’s storytelling advice
Read more about Genia’s story on finding the right story for her business.
5. Isabela collected user insights to create a better app for seniors
Isabela is a product manager who develops software and apps for seniors who live in senior living communities, empowering them to be more independent and more connected. Because there aren't a lot of studies on usability for seniors, Insights for Innovation inspired Isabela to get to know the seniors they work with better and understand their needs.
“Before you get to a solution, put down your bias and really dig into the problem. If we are able to do this, we will be better human beings and professionals.”
Isabela’s advice on surfacing insights
Read more of Isabela’s story about making seniors more connected.
6. Donna used collaboration to guide complex media projects
Donna, a former media executive, reflected on how important it was to create relationships with people in her organization in order to get a seat at the table and lead teams through impactful media projects. After Leading Complex Projects, Donna’s now coaching the next generation of leaders and guiding a business that creates intergenerational connection.
“People are complex. Projects are complex. How can we create a bridge with people so we can understand a little bit of their complexity and they can understand a little bit of ours? It’s about building relationships with people in your organization.”
Donna’s leadership advice
Read more about Donna’s story of her experiences in the media industry.
7. Karishma led ideation workshops to encourage more innovative ideas
An innovation strategist, Karishma works with a team of intrapreneurs to build blockchain solutions in the gaming industry. Looking for frameworks that would help the team navigate through ambiguity, she took Designing a Business and is facilitating more ideation sessions and workshops that get her team innovative and encourage them to think outside the box.
“Push yourself out of your comfort zone and see how far you can go. When you embrace your vulnerability and individuality, that's when the best in you is brought out.”
Karishma’s advice on business innovation
Read more about Karishma’s story on helping her organization innovate.
8. Madeleine ran experiments to test her strategy before implementing it
Madeleine is an OKR coach who helps organizations set objectives and key results. During Designing Strategy, she built her company’s strategy. She’s now using what she learned to help others overcome their own business challenges.
“Experimentation and validation of ideas. Doing small experiments with strategy is good, because you're not wasting your money or time. You're doing a little to confirm that it's a good option for you or your company.”
Madeleine’s strategy advice
Read more about Madeleine’s story of how she developed her company’s strategy.
Read more stories from our learners or follow IDEO U on Instagram @ideo_u for more inspiring design thinking resources, events, and stories.
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A regular favorite of our readers, we explain what design thinking is, how it can help your organization, and 4 ways to get started.
2. What’s Your Work Superpower (and its Shadow Side)?
Everyone has a superpower at work, from empathy to experimentation. Tips on how to find and activate your superpower.
3. 7 Simple Rules of Brainstorming
When you have a good brainstorming session, ideas start flowing from everybody in the room. These 7 rules of brainstorming are essential.
4. 11 Products & Services Made Using Design Thinking
You might not realize it, but there are products out in the real world that were inspired by design thinking. Here are a few of our favorites.
5. 12 Power Skills to Fuel Your Growth in 2022
Power skills like frame shifting and emotional proofreading are next-level soft skills that can supercharge your work. These 12 power skills can help fuel your personal and career growth.
6. Generalist vs. Specialist: Choosing a Path for Career Success
7. 10 Activities To Generate Better Ideas
8. How to Prototype a New Business
10. Innovation Accounting: What It Is and How to Get Started
A look at what innovation accounting is, and how you can use it to transform your organization.
If you’re interested in reading more on creativity, innovation, and design, visit the IDEO U Blog or follow us on Instagram @ideo_u.
]]>Frameworks can be useful tools for approaching design thinking, strategy, and systems design. Here are some of our commonly used frameworks that we practice and teach in our online IDEO U courses.
Design Thinking Frameworks
Design Thinking Process
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that starts with what is desirable from a human point of view, along with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. There are 6 phases in the design thinking process:
We teach the phases of design thinking as linear steps, but in practice the process is not always linear. Some of the phases may happen several times, and you may move back and forth between them.
Read more design thinking articles, activities, and case studies on our list of design thinking resources.
3 Elements of Design Thinking
There are many design thinking tools and frameworks, but there are 3 mindsets you’ll always find when using a design thinking approach. These are the core elements of design thinking:
Practice the core skills and mindsets of design thinking in our popular online certificate Foundations in Design Thinking.
Strategy Frameworks
Strategy Process Map
In our Designing Strategy course, we define strategy as the act of making choices under uncertainty and competition. The strategy process map, a framework from the course, guides you through the process of creating a winning strategy and helps you avoid getting lost in ambiguity and complexity. With a strategy process map, you:
4 Types of Strategy Stakeholders
When activating strategy, it’s important to collaborate effectively with different stakeholders. As you’re identifying stakeholders, ask yourself two key questions:
While answering these two questions, think about the following categories:
This will set you up to define a plan for when and how to engage those stakeholders. Learn more about engaging stakeholders in the strategy creation process in our Activating Strategy online course.
5 Elements of Strategy Action Plans
To bring strategy to life, every part of an organization needs to be engaged in the process. There are 5 key elements in any strategy action plan:
Dive deeper into strategy creation and implementation in our online course Activating Strategy.
Systems Design Frameworks
Iceberg Model
In a complex system, solving problems requires considering the whole picture and surfacing the root of the problem. The iceberg model is a framework for uncovering the layers of a system. It helps you:
To learn about the iceberg model in more detail, check out our online course Human-Centered Systems Thinking.
A systems map is a tool commonly used by systems designers to lay out all the relationships and interactions between stakeholders in a given system—for example, a local high school as shown in the above image. Mapping systems can help you spot opportunities for growth and change.
Try these steps to create a systems map:
It’s helpful to work with a partner or group when creating systems maps to start to get a more holistic view of the system. Explore more systems design frameworks with these systems thinking resources.
If you’re interested in staying up to date with the latest frameworks from IDEO U, follow us on Instagram @ideo_u.
]]>Tips on designing for uncomfortable conversation topics like sex, mental health, personal finance, and addiction from women’s health entrepreneur Kerry O’Connor.
]]>We’ve all encountered uncomfortable conversation topics—sex, mental health, personal finance, addiction. These are the topics we often avoid talking about, which is one reason they often get overlooked in the business world. But taboos can also be areas with lots of untapped potential where we can design products that solve real unmet needs. The key is learning how to unlock this potential.
Here are 4 tips on designing for sensitive topics from our conversation with Kerry O’Connor, a women’s health entrepreneur and an instructor of one of our most popular courses, Designing a Business. Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear Kerry talk about finding business opportunities by addressing uncomfortable topics, building empathy with your audience, and bringing products that address social taboos to market through prototyping and branding.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
1. Understand empathy gaps
“Creating value is understanding needs and figuring out the value proposition that you can offer.” — Kerry O’Connor
In a biodesign course at Stanford University, Kerry learned that 90% of women tear the first time they deliver a child, and 1 in 18 women experience pelvic pain conditions like vaginismus. Motivated to address this, Kerry formed a team with a few classmates to create a medical device that would address these issues and eventually co-founded Materna Medical, an innovative OB-GYN platform that deals with the most common pelvic floor conditions women face.
As someone who hadn’t gone through the same difficulties as her users, however, Kerry felt an empathy gap. Kerry was able to build trust and better understand what these women needed by talking to them directly and learning about their experiences with pelvic pain, vaginal pain, and vaginal tearing. Many were having these conversations for the first time, and when Kerry shared other stories she’d heard, it helped them realize they weren’t alone with the condition and made them more open to sharing.
While we oftentimes don’t share the same experiences as the people we collaborate with, curiosity and openness can help to bridge empathy gaps. With some conditions, interviewing and finding people to talk to can be challenging, and there may be little data available. It can be helpful to look into communities where people are discussing the issues you’re hoping to address, and ask people you’ve already built trust with to connect you with others who would be good to talk to.
2. Test to find the right price
“Capturing value is about designing your revenue model and understanding the pricing.” — Kerry O’Connor
When you’re creating something that hasn’t existed before, pricing can be elastic. As Kerry developed Materna’s product and conducted user research, Kerry did a flinch test with people: “What if this cost $300? What if it cost $200? What if it cost $100?” She started to see people’s reactions and understanding their mental math—if they were comparing Materna’s product to an electric toothbrush, or to the years and money they had spent on doctors and alternative products.
Once Materna set a price, there was a question of if they should lower the price to reach more people. They decided to prototype their pricing by offering a $50 rebate, which was the difference between the higher and lower prices. To get the rebate, customers needed to take a survey before they started using the product and then another one after three months.
Kerry found that 80% of people were happy to pay the full price and not spend their time on the survey, which indicated that the original price was working. Additionally, people who did want the discount were able to get it, and as a bonus Materna was able to publish the results of the survey to show the medical community the efficacy of their device.
Learn more about business design in our online course Designing a Business.
3. Make the design approachable
“I deeply believe that you can design a business the way you would design a product or service.” — Kerry O’Connor
When developing their product, Materna initially approached the issue from an engineering perspective. As a result, Kerry says the device looked like something that would be kept in the garage rather than in the bedroom, where most women would actually use it.
It was important to change the visual design of the device so that it wouldn’t feel intimidating and people would want it as part of their routine. They also found that many of the women they spoke to had dealt with sexual trauma, so they intentionally decided not to make the device look masculine in any way.
When going to market, the Materna team had to make sure that women saw themselves in the product and consider how it would fit into their lives. They found that their users didn’t think of themselves as patients, and this guided their branding and the way they talked about their products.
4. Bring awareness to the issue
“Delivering value is about how you bridge that gap between the wonderful thing you have to offer and where people are.” — Kerry O’Connor
To get their product out to customers, Materna used multiple channels to spotlight common pelvic and vaginal pain conditions and how their device could help. They went to healthcare providers and physical therapists, who could then share information with women who experienced these conditions. Materna also advertised on the internet, which is an especially important medium when it comes to unspoken topics that feel taboo. Many women naturally searched for solutions and products to address their issues online.
Because topics like pelvic and vaginal pain are difficult to talk about, there can be emotions such as shame or embarrassment involved. But Kerry says that the human experience is only so big, which means that many people are likely experiencing the same thing. Shedding light on these kinds of issues can help create awareness in communities and make an impact on issues that are affecting people’s lives.
About The Speaker
Kerry O’Connor
Women’s Health Entrepreneur
At IDEO, Kerry worked on developing new and sustainable ways to monetize innovations. She co-founded Materna Medical, a medical device startup focused on maternal health, and lectures at the Stanford d.school. Kerry holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Boston University and an MBA from Stanford University.
Want to learn more about IDEO’s approach to business design? Check out our online course Designing a Business.
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As you grow in your personal practice of design thinking, it is critical to develop inclusive mindsets to understand your own perspectives, the perspectives of others, and how they influence collaboration in design.
Here are 4 inclusive mindsets from our Foundations in Design Thinking Certificate, which can help you to adopt a responsible design practice. Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear us dive deeper into the inclusive mindsets and why they’re an important part of any designer’s toolkit.
Why Inclusive Design is Important
“Inclusive mindsets take a lifetime to develop, and our work and approach is a constant work in progress.” — Nusrat Ahmed
People make design choices every single day. However, design is not neutral.* When you’re designing with and for others, you’re bringing a lifetime of personal experiences and biases that affect how you see the world. Our attitudes can disproportionately favor some groups of people as well as lead to exclusion and harm to others.
For example, it’s very common in the US for work teams to design and host after-work cocktail events for team building. This may be a great experience for people who are of a certain age and can drink, but it can exclude those who don't drink for health or religious reasons, plus parents who have to find after-work childcare.
It’s important to develop inclusive mindsets in order to understand your own perspective, the perspectives of others, and how they influence collaboration in design. Inclusivity happens when we design solutions that consider people of all backgrounds; and mindsets are the ways we approach people—our posture, our expectations, and the attitudes that we hold towards them.
At IDEO U, we still have a lot to learn about inclusion and design, especially from our global community of learners. Inclusive mindsets take a lifetime to develop, and our work and approach is a constant work in progress. While this article is not a comprehensive overview of inclusive mindsets, we’re sharing these as one tool to use to get started with incorporating them into your design practice.
*We use the words “design” and “designer” in this article to describe anyone who plays a role in making decisions or creating change in service of and with others. You might be a project leader at work, a member on a school PTA board, or a decision-maker at work or in your community. We think of designers in an intentionally broad way that’s accessible for a variety of contexts.
Mindset #1: Collaborative Relationship-Builder
A collaborative relationship-builder intentionally creates situations where stakeholders are treated as peer collaborators. Some ways of doing this are compensating collaborators for their time and asking them for permission to share their stories. If you successfully adopt this mindset, all of the people involved in the project form authentic interpersonal relationships, and any interventions that come about remain relevant past the end of the official project.
The shadow mindset, or opposite of the collaborative relationship-builder, is the extractive visitor. This is someone who doesn’t give collaborators enough context for the project and doesn’t orient them to their role in the design process. Instead, they simply extract information from collaborators, don’t follow up on how their insights have informed the project, and ultimately develop a negative reputation.
Get started:
Present your findings to collaborators so they see their impact. For example, an impact postcard is a follow-up message that connects the dots between an individual’s contribution and the impact that it created. Be intentional about bringing curiosity and care into your relationships with collaborators.
Take the Inclusive Mindsets module in our online certificate Foundations in Design Thinking.
Mindset #2: Conscientious Advocate
A conscientious advocate actively looks for opportunities to balance power and remove barriers that prevent fair participation. In this context, power is defined as the ability to influence other people and situations, which is impacted by race, gender, age, and other factors. Conscientious advocates identify when some collaborators have power over others and when there are unequal dynamics that can cause harm—and they do whatever they can to bring in those who are left out.
You’ve successfully adopted a conscientious advocate mindset when you understand power differences and how they impact the lives of people in the system, and when you design solutions that help break down unequal systems of power and center those with less power.
The shadow mindset of the conscientious advocate is the complacent bystander. A complacent bystander simply accepts the way things are, even if there are unequal power dynamics between collaborators, and this perpetuates existing dysfunctions and further entrenches inequality through complacent design.
Get started:
Mindset #3: Informed Partner
An informed partner does research on the stakeholders’ context prior to interacting with them. They come in with an understanding of the local history, current events, economy, politics, and other important conditions surrounding their collaborators. Although informed partners come prepared, they respect their collaborators’ expertise and lived experiences over their own research.
The shadow mindset of this is the unprepared beginner, who feels as if they have discovered new information when in reality the information is only new to them, and doesn’t realize that they’re benefiting from the labor of those who educated them.
Get started:
Mindset #4: Curious Researcher
A curious researcher is open and curious about the lived experiences of all collaborators. They try not to bring their own assumptions into the situation, such as by asking questions that they think they already know the answers to. Curious researchers take the time to understand things from their collaborators’ perspectives, and work to find unexpected opportunities together.
The shadow mindset of this is the unobservant savior, who makes assumptions about collaborators based on their own preconceived biases. This can lead to an incomplete understanding of people and their needs as well as an impulse to save them through prescribed solutions.
Get started:
About The Speakers
Coe Leta Stafford
IDEO Partner & Executive Design Director, IDEO U
Coe Leta teaches global audiences the skills of design thinking, human-centered research, rapid prototyping, and storytelling. Since joining IDEO in 2006, she's led numerous creative teams across diverse organizations including Microsoft, Target, Intel, Wells Fargo, Ford, eBay, Hasbro, Sesame Street, and Government and Healthcare groups. Known for expertise in digital design, play, and data, her work has won international awards, patents for clients, and been featured in the New York Times and Wired. Coe Leta has a Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley and guest lectures at Stanford University's d.School. Coe Leta is an instructor in IDEO U’s Insights for Innovation course.
Nusrat Ahmed
Senior Learning Experience Designer, IDEO U
Nusrat takes a human-centered design-thinking approach to developing new courses for IDEO U. She has a background in learning design, finance, UX, entrepreneurship, community organizing, and match-making. She earned a degree in Anthropology from Princeton University and is currently studying Cognitive Science at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University. Nusrat has a deep love and interest in cognitive science, psychology, and hacking human performance. She hopes to help improve human potential by teaching how to learn and remember, not just what to learn.
If you’re interested in learning more about inclusive mindsets, check out our online certificate Foundations in Design Thinking.
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Are you confident in your organization’s ability to implement strategy? Are the strategic goals and priorities clear to you and your team? Are you making the right strategic choices?
Strategy is human-centered, tangible, interconnected, and iterative. It's about choosing where to spend your resources and where not to—essentially placing a bet on the future. But many organizations and teams fall into the trap of spreading themselves too thin for fear of making the wrong choice. Using a human-centered approach to strategy can help you create a strategy that people understand, support, and can take action on.
Watch our interview with Activating Strategy instructor, IDEO COO Iain Roberts, or read the transcript below to learn about the course, get tips on how to activate your strategy, and understand what it’s like to take an IDEO U course.
Activating Strategy: New Course Q&A
How We Think About Strategy
How IDEO U Courses Work
Activating Strategy: New Course Q&A
What is Activating Strategy about?
This course is about fundamentally bringing strategy to life. What does that mean? For me, that means three real things.
Who is Activating Strategy for?
There could be a misconception that strategy is only for the people who set strategy. Often somebody else has set the strategy and we as leaders and individuals are tasked with actually executing upon it. But the reality is we all live and operate in organizations that are trying to move forward in pursuit of a set of goals. So the very simple answer is that this course is for everybody involved in bringing an organization's strategy to life—which includes every person in an organization.
Fundamentally we're asking this question of, how can you understand and execute what is within your control? It’s about how the corporate strategy might relate to your part of the business, the bit that you hold accountability for, because it's within that part of accountability that actually you do have decision space. You do have the ability to make choices in pursuit of the corporate goals in the organization.
What is the unique differentiator for strategy done with design thinking as a foundation versus a traditional management consulting strategy process?
One of the superpowers of design thinking and human-centered design is the ability to imagine future possibilities and then to build prototypes so that we can better understand them. In the context of strategic intent, it’s about how we're going to compete and progress. I believe any strategy that isn't imagining future possibilities is just looking in the rearview mirror.
Using design allows us to not just look at what has been in the past to make analytical, rigorous choices about the future, but also imagine future possibilities and build those possibilities in order to generate new data and new evidence around what the future could look like. Design as a practice brings strategy to life to make it testable and experienceable so that we can create greater confidence and courage about the choices that we might need to make. It's very future-oriented as opposed to analytical and past-oriented.
How is Activating Strategy different from Designing Strategy?
In Designing Strategy, you learn how to surface the bigger challenges that you're facing. It’s about identifying what those strategic options are up front and applying a human-centered, customer-centric strategy process to help you make those winning choices.
In Activating Strategy, you're learning how to then activate those choices by engaging stakeholders and building a shared understanding and creating the conditions to make sure you can win with the choices you've made. Activating Strategy has been designed to complement Designing Strategy. We have a certificate program called Human-Centered Strategy that allows you to take both, and we recommend that you take Designing Strategy first.
“All of those individual choices we make on a day-to-day basis inside of our organizations add up to the strategic intent of an organization.”
Iain Roberts
Often strategy is created at the top of the organization. Will Activating Strategy touch upon how the corporate strategy can be cascaded to lower-level roles?
Absolutely. Strategy is often set at the top, but we don't want it to then just be a waterfall of execution. If that’s the case, you’re not building learning loops into the organization to understand how change is required in the organization to create future progress.
Most of us are in organizations where there is a corporate strategy that we live within. But let's take the example of a Chief Talent Officer working in an organization. There's a corporate strategy, and then the Chief Talent Officer has to ask, how is our talent strategy delivering upon the corporate strategy?
We talk about how each individual can understand their role in an organization, the purpose of the team that they're leading, and how the choices that they can make in and around their team can activate part of the corporate strategy in a cascaded manner.
How much does Activating Strategy prepare you to be the facilitator of strategy discussions versus give you best practices to be successful?
It's a little bit of both. I believe the idea of being a facilitator is key to being able to lead strategically in an organization. Participation of stakeholders, subject matter experts, and the people who are going to actually be able to move ideas forward is absolutely key. So your role as a leader to facilitate conversation and participation is critical, and we share a number of different frameworks and techniques to think about how to excel in that role.
But it’s also about setting you up for success as a leader in the thinking side of this, to have that rigor in thinking and best practices as well as facilitating others participating in the process. It's a balance between the two.
How We Think About Strategy
What do you mean when you say strategy?
Strategy for me is the act of making choices, the hard decisions about where you are going to put your resources (on certain bets) and where you're gonna deemphasize your resources (on the things that are not as important for you to make progress towards your goals).
There are a lot of misconceptions around strategy. One is that executives are the people who set strategy and everyone else executes strategy. I think about strategy being something that an entire organization should participate in. For me, anything that is set at the top and then intended to be executed by other people without their participation is not destined for success.
The second thing is that strategy is often thought about as this thing that we come back to every year. It's only in the middle of strategy season when organizations are asking that question. Strategy is not just this big long-term planning exercise, but it's also this ability to consistently learn about what the future will look like, set experiments to move towards that goal, and bring intentional decision making into the way that teams run on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or month-to-month basis.
The last thing for me when I talk about strategy is that at the end of the day, people bring it to life. The employees of an organization or of a community are really the vessel by which strategy becomes real. It's not a theoretical exercise with a set of frameworks and a spreadsheet. It's actually a set of clear choices, a clear set of provocations around what the future will look like, and then the rigor and intent behind that to have an organization begin to line up and begin to all march in a direction.
“The act of strategy is about making clear choices about what you want the future to look like.”
Iain Roberts
What do you think is the key to a successful or effective strategy?
First and foremost, it's a balance of rigorous thinking with practical doing. It’s the ability to imagine what the future will look like and the ability to begin to create some prototypes or tests that will allow us to understand if that hypothesis about the future is accurate, through feedback and data.
The second is actually that in addition to activated people, we need process. We need to be able to bring together processes and people so that everybody understands what is being asked of them, what their roles and responsibilities are, where they are in the process, and how they can begin to see their own participation shaping that strategy. It’s people understanding that their thumbprint has been left on the strategic intent of the organization.
The last thing comes down to communication, concrete action plans, and building conviction and belief in a group of people that the choices we're making and the direction that it sets is actually worthwhile. So again, bringing together thinking and doing, process and people, and belief and conviction in the future that we're trying to create.
What's the relation between strategic intent and building capabilities for change? Do they both concern the organization and culture?
Yes. We engage in strategy because we're trying to accomplish things that we aren't doing today. We are trying to compete in a marketplace or deliver against an ambitious set of goals that we're looking to accomplish out in the world. Generally speaking, that kind of thinking requires organizations to take on the question of, how do I do new things? How do I do things differently than I do today so that I can continue to compete?
That's where capabilities come in. We talk about this in the course, but it’s this idea that doing new things requires us all to stare at our organizations and ask the fundamental question of, where are we weak? Where are we strong? Where might we need to build new capabilities that will allow us to catalyze a new direction, compete in a new marketplace, and build a new product?
Those two things are intrinsically linked. It's the lack of focus on new capability building or new management system building that often gets in the way of translating great strategy into an activated strategy that creates progress for an organization.
How IDEO U Courses Work
How do IDEO U courses work?
IDEO U is IDEO's learning center. We offer online courses that are designed to equip you with the skills, mindsets, and tools to help you stay relevant and adaptive in a modern world. We offer three types of courses: self-paced courses, cohort courses, and certificate programs. Cohort courses are five weeks long and require around four hours of course work per week. Courses are taught by subject matter experts who have led thousands of projects across industries and around the globe.
What's great about the cohort course experience is that while you'll be learning alongside a global community of learners, you'll still have the flexibility to work at the pace that fits your own schedule. There aren’t mandatory live components, so you don't have to worry about having to log in at a specific time. At the same time, you'll have access to a teaching team, which is composed of experts in the field who are there to provide you feedback, and there are also plenty of options to connect with your fellow learners. I'd say it has the best of both worlds in terms of the flexibility and collaborative components.
What are the pros and cons of taking a course that is new for IDEO U?
We have one to two new courses every year, so we have new courses coming out all the time. You'll be the first people to see this course come to life, which is always exciting. We're always excited to hear your feedback, and the course will evolve with your suggestions and ideas.
A con could be that with our courses, and especially with this new course, there's an emphasis on doing. These are new activities and new workbooks, so we’ll be pushing you to a place of discomfort, which may be different from other learning experiences.
IDEO U’s learning experience includes seeing, trying, reflecting, and sharing.
What is the role of the instructor? Will learners be able to get feedback?
Course instructors have a strong presence in the courses through the course videos, but they're not actively providing feedback or holding direct conversations with our learners. We have a teaching team to ensure that you have the feedback, guidance, and support you need to learn successfully in your course. Our teaching team members are design practitioners that have experience applying course methods and mindsets in a wide variety of contexts around the world.
Who will the teaching assistants be, and how are they trained?
Our teaching team consists of teaching leads and teaching assistants, who are experts in their fields. Many of them have been with IDEO U for many years, and we have selected those who have direct experience with applying the course methods and mindsets in all sorts of contexts around the world. They’ve all been going through multiple training sessions by our instructional designers on not only on the subject matter, but also on how to create safe and collaborative learning experiences and environments.
What are Community Conversations, and how are they related to the course material?
Community Conversations are one-hour live video conversations hosted by the teaching team on Zoom. These happen once per week, with each one having two to three time options to accommodate different time zones. Each week focuses on the lesson that you’ve just gone through, so the output and the content depend on the specific lessons. You'll have the opportunity if you work together with your peers on the tools and mindsets from the course, reflect on what you’ve learned, and also address any challenges that you might be going through.
About The Speaker
Iain Roberts
Partner and COO at IDEO & Instructor at IDEO U
As COO of IDEO, Iain helps the company navigate organizational complexity and works to give designers the creative agency to make a positive impact in the world. Throughout his tenure at IDEO, Iain has led multiple design practices and stewarded some of IDEO’s largest relationships with Fortune 100 companies. He holds a master’s degree in industrial design engineering from the Royal College of Art and a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Southampton University.
If you want to learn more about how to activate your own strategy, check out our course Activating Strategy, taught by Iain Roberts and Jennifer Riel.
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This is part of a series on the unique and circuitous career journeys of the IDEO community. Read more articles on career development and mentorship on the IDEO U blog.
What’s your role at IDEO?
I work as a Lead on IDEO’s Business Development team. I’m specifically focused on fielding incoming opportunities that help potential clients design more human-centered financial systems.
When clients come to IDEO with design and innovation challenges, I shepherd the process of collaborating with them to understand how we can help them and if we’re compatible partners. From there, I plan what the scope of the work would look like and ultimately help transition the relationship from the Business Development team to the Design team, who will tackle the client challenge.
“My biggest career advice is to maintain a log of the feedback you receive and of your accomplishments and learn-from-failure moments.”
Emily D’Arco
How would you describe your career path?
I'm currently based in San Francisco. I went to Georgetown University for college and majored in Justice and Peace Studies and minored in Business and French. My favorite part about living in DC was how profound everything felt—the Lincoln Memorial was a regular stop on my runs and I never got used to it!
After graduation, I moved to NYC and worked for a little over 3 years at a digital marketing agency called Kepler, another kyu company, before coming to IDEO. I did a lot of client relationship management, digital marketing strategy, data-driven storytelling, and project management across a number of different industries, but the highlight of my time there was probably working with The New York Times on executing their The Truth is Worth It brand campaign.
What career advice would you give others?
While I’m still fairly early on in my career, my biggest career advice is to maintain a log of the feedback you receive and of your accomplishments and learn-from-failure moments.
As I’ve advanced in my career, having a repository like this to refer back to has painted a much clearer picture of where my strengths and opportunities lie which, in turn, has helped to inform my career trajectory. It’s also so easy to forget the things you’ve worked on, so having a tangible record of the progress you’ve made facilitates opportunities to reset during challenging times and to guide reflective moments.
Learn about IDEO’s approach to business design in our online course Designing a Business.
Strategy is often seen as a thinking exercise—a set of decisions and plans made by a small group. But strategy is brought to life by the people in every part of an organization every day. And engaging the people involved in creating and activating strategy is missing from most strategy approaches.
Here are 7 strategy myths and tips to overcome them shared by Jennifer Riel, IDEO Partner and Global Director of Strategy and an instructor of IDEO U’s newest course, Activating Strategy. Listen to the full episode on the Creative Confidence Podcast to hear Jennifer talk about how to reframe your thinking to go beyond the common strategy myths, why human centricity is critical, and how to make your strategy more actionable no matter what framework or process you use.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Myth #1: The right way to do strategy is with a very small group of people.
“We need to design our strategy process with the people who are going to need to take action in mind, so that we’re bringing them along.” — Jennifer Riel
While there should be a group of people who have accountability and capability around a strategy, that's different from having three people create the strategy alone and then telling the rest of the company to execute on it.
Many organizations choose to only involve a small group because it feels more manageable, and there’s a belief that with fewer people strategy can move more quickly. However, Jennifer says this assumes the strategy process ends when leaders share it with others to implement. But if you consider the time from the beginning of strategy creation to effective action on that strategy, having a more integrated and human-centered approach that considers the people who are executing on the strategy and invites other stakeholders in at the right moments leads to a much shorter time horizon overall.
Myth #2: Only leaders are responsible for creating strategy, and others are responsible for executing.
“Every one of us needs the ability to design our choices and take action on them.” — Jennifer Riel
Although we tend to think of strategy as happening with creation at the top and then execution at the bottom, Jennifer argues that everyone needs to do both. We all need the ability to design our choices and to take action on them, because every person in an organization makes decisions on how to allocate their time every single day, no matter their role or domain of control.
Myth #3: The creation of strategy is separate from the activation of it.
“It’s always better to think of strategy and activation together as a journey you need to design as you go along.” — Jennifer Riel
Oftentimes organizations approach strategy creation and activation separately, even hiring outside firms to create the strategy and expecting team members to translate and bring it to life internally. When this happens, there’s frequently the frustration of, “Where did this come from and what should I do with it?”
A poll from the IDEO U community on their confidence in strategy activation.
Jennifer suggests looking at strategy creation and activation in an interconnected way, thinking about activation from the beginning and continuing to embed strategy even in the activation phase. When people understand the choices that are being made and their own role in bringing the strategy to life, they’ll be more engaged and ready to take action, and it’ll ultimately make the strategy better.
Learn how to bring strategy to life through your everyday choices in our course Activating Strategy.
Myth #4: Strategy is a thinking task.
“Human centricity is about the acknowledgement that strategy is just a piece of paper without the human beings that bring it to life.” — Jennifer Riel
When we see strategy as a purely intellectual or cognitive task, we tend to leave big gaps, make big assumptions, and leave a lot of things implicit. If we’re able to bring in tangibility and see strategy as doing, whether that's building prototypes or testing to learn, we lean into a more robust way of tackling the problem. Strategy is both a thinking and a doing task when done well.
To go beyond thinking in the strategy process, find ways to translate the words of your strategy into something people can physically and emotionally experience. Jennifer gives the example of a project she did with a US consumer bank. When her team shared potential strategies around the future of the retail banking experience, the bank wasn’t excited by it. Jennifer’s team decided to try creating engaging visualized stories of how customers would experience the bank, and it made the strategy real in a way that their words didn't.
Myth #5: You need 100% certainty before executing strategy.
“If you embrace the idea you can be more or less confident but never certain, then think of the entire process of activating strategy as a journey toward confidence.” — Jennifer Riel
Jennifer says that in a complex world, it’s not possible to be totally certain, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take action. Design is about starting with a rough idea and getting to an evolving product in the market, and you gradually gain more certainty as you move along. You take your initial strategy and build it, get feedback, then build it again slightly better. Instead of certainty, it’s about having the confidence to take the next step.
Myth #6: There’s only one right framework or approach for strategy work.
“Whatever framework you use, the intent should be articulating clear choices in a way that people could do something tomorrow.” — Jennifer Riel
There’s no one right way to do strategy—every organization has a different approach. A framework is just a way to structure your thinking, and whatever framework feels powerful and useful to you in your context can work great. The purpose of frameworks is to communicate the choices that are being made with clarity and specificity.
Jennifer has seen many strategy frameworks, ranging from visualizing a company as a house to OGSM (objectives, goals, strategies, measures). Her least favorite approach is just taking the last strategy and tweaking it. It’s more effective to explore different possibilities, do stress tests, and build and prototype your strategy in the real world. Jennifer personally uses the Playing to Win frameworks in her course Designing Strategy, which she finds intuitive and easy to use in different contexts.
Myth #7: Strategy is a once-a-year task.
“It becomes a part of the work that you do every day.” — Jennifer Riel
Many organizations do strategy every one to five years. Jennifer says that while it’s useful to have moments on the calendar where you put in intensive effort, if strategy is the most important set of things you’re doing to position yourself to win, it doesn’t serve you well to only talk about it once a year or every few years. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to change a strategy that isn’t playing out as you expected, you can have regular strategy discussions on what's working and not working. It’s beneficial to revisit your strategy, and thoughtfully assess what needs to change in between the dedicated moments for strategic planning once a year.
More Articles on Strategy
Want more resources on designing and activating strategy in your organization? Check out these articles from the IDEO U blog:
About The Speaker
Jennifer Riel
Partner & Global Director of Strategy, IDEO
Jennifer has led strategy processes at large public and private sector organizations around the world. She also serves as a strategy and innovation advisor to senior leaders at several Fortune 100 companies. She is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, where she teaches strategy, innovation, and integrative thinking. She co-authored Creating Great Choices with Roger L. Martin. She has published articles in Harvard Business Review, the Globe and Mail, Businessweek, and Strategy Magazine. Jennifer received her MBA from the Rotman School of Management. Her undergraduate degree is in English Literature and History, from Queen’s University.
If you want to learn more about how to activate your own strategy, check out our course Activating Strategy, taught by Jennifer Riel.
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