Posts Tagged ‘design thinking’
Dec 15 2008
This fall I spent time as an informal advisor at Stanford University’s d.school (formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford). Headed by George Kembel, the d.school is one of the leading design schools in the world and one of the most prominent proponents of design thinking.
The d.school emphasizes observation, design, iteration, and teamwork by applying the following tenets:
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Leverage the team: At the d.school, students from many different backgrounds (including product design, business, engineering, journalism, and education) come together in part to learn how to work together. Each person is strong in their area, but often people with different backgrounds have a different vocabulary, value different approaches, and have different ways of looking at issues and opportunities. One of the d.school’s goals is to ensure that people are overcoming and leveraging these differences, so that 1) they can be part of productive teams, and 2) there is a sense that many of the challenges society faces today can best be overcome by people from different disciplines working effectively together and looking at issues from many perspectives at once.
- Develop deep empathy and always go back to your users: During my time at the d.school, I definitely saw this in action. During “team time”, it was common for teams to venture out of the building to talk to people about their ideas, to try out their ideas, and get feedback. In their presentations, teams included photos, videos, and other information about real people’s lives and how the team’s idea could fit into those people’s lives.
- Bias towards action & iterate, iterate, iterate: Teams are encouraged to repeat the design approach to quickly iterate on ideas, rather than coming to a solution quickly.
- Always treat your prototypes like a piñata: Prototypes are a means to learn more about an idea and engage potential users. Teams are encouraged not to become attached to ideas to quickly, but instead to see how they can use the design approach build and refine their ideas.
- Think “Wild” First; “Making It Real” will come later. Important considerations such as feasibility and viability were scheduled for later in the quarter after the teams had time to create a wide range of ideas based on understanding people and their needs.
There are many things I admire and about the d.school, including its commitment to apply the design approach to itself: its physical space, classes, curriculum, etc. For example, at the end of every class, teachers and students are encouraged to participate in an open discussion about what worked well and what could be improved next time. The physical space is considered a prototype in action. Adjustments are constantly being made to improve and facilitate the experience.
Thank you to George Kembel, Scott Doorley, Dave Baggeroer, and the staff and students at the d.school for making my time there so enjoyable and worthwhile, and to Michael Dearing and Steve Bishop for their help in making the contacts.
If you’re interested in learning more about the d.school, go to the website or stop by for a tour.
– Jeff
Stanford's d.school
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Nov 1 2008
How can an organization foster creativity? Can an organization develop an approach that increases its chances of success over time, and even enables it to export its approach to other organizations?
Ed Catmull, a cofounder of Pixar and the president of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, explores these questions in September’s Harvard Business Review.
He cites Pixar’s incredible history of box office success (specifically, nine blockbuster films in a row, starting with 1995’s Toy Story) and describes Pixar’s approach and principles to creativity that has contributed to that success.
Several of Catmull’s points reinforced those made by Tim Brown in his article on design thinking (which I wrote about it in June). These include:
- Putting together a team of people who come from a variety of backgrounds, work well together, and who “solve problems and make progress”.
- Having a clear, unifying vision with clear ownership: Catmull writes, “We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people”.
- Providing support to leaders: Catmull describes meetings where directors can leverage a “creative brain trust” to get feedback and new ideas: “When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group … and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion … After a session, it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice … the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice.”
- Leveraging the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm of the entire team, “giving them all the information they need to do the job right without telling them how to do it. Each person on a film should be given creative ownership of even the smallest task.”
- Having clear standards: “Everything we touch needs to be excellent … there has to be one quality bar for every film we produce.”
- Building a community: “That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet.”
- Ensuring rapid iteration as a method to learn and improve (not finalize). “In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards … and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music … The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are … We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better.”
- Enabling everyone to communicate with anyone: “The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission.”
- Making it safe for everyone to offer ideas.
- Conducting post-mortems: To make these useful, he recommends asking “each group to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn’t do. The balance between the positive and the negative helps make it a safer environment.”
Catmull notes that one test of these principles is whether they can be transferred to another organization to achieve similar results. If movie revenue is one measure of success, we’ll find out soon: Bolt, the first movie from Disney Animation Studios since Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, opens November 21, 2008.
– Jeff
Pixar sign photo by Thomas Hawk. Some rights reserved.
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Aug 3 2008
Today’s New York Times features an article on the benefits of creating smaller teams. As a team increases in size, so do the difficulties in ensuring the team has clear responsibility, clear accountability, and is able to innovate quickly. The author, Janet Rae-Dupree, writes “By breaking huge business units into smaller, nimbler teams, companies stand a chance of rekindling the creative spark that got them rolling in the first place.”
Ben Grimes, a high-tech CTO, makes another important point: “By making sure products in development meet customer needs each step of the way, Avocent has been able to avoid spending weeks correcting errors in the final product”. How did they do it? By empowering a small, cross-functional team who involved customers throughout the product process.
In my experience, when it comes to creating a more effective team, smaller is better — customers and organizations see better results sooner, and the people on the team are energized and eager to take on the next challenge. Count on it.
– Jeff
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