Kitabı oku: «Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All», sayfa 3

INNOVATING ROUTINELY WITH DESIGN THINKING

Design thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners. When we use the term “design” alone, most people ask what we think about their curtains or where we bought our glasses. But a “design thinking” approach means more than just paying attention to aesthetics or developing physical products. Design thinking is a methodology. Using it, we can address a wide variety of personal, social, and business challenges in creative new ways.

Design thinking relies on the natural—and coachable—human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional. We’re not suggesting that anyone base a career or run an organization solely on feeling, intuition, and inspiration. But an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. If you have a problem that you can’t analyze easily, or that doesn’t have a metric or enough data to draw upon, design thinking may be able to help you move forward using empathy and prototyping. When you need to achieve a breakthrough innovation or make a creative leap, this methodology can help you dive into the problem and find new insights.

IDEO uses this kind of thinking to help organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow. We help clients envision what their new or existing operations might look like in the future—and build road maps for getting there. Beyond the product development work Tom described in The Art of Innovation, we now have the opportunity to create new companies and brands, working with clients all over the world to help them launch new products, services, spaces, and interactive experiences. While we continue to work on products from toys to ATM machines, these days we are just as likely to create a digital toolkit to help consumers sign up for health care insurance or design a better education system for the country of Peru. In the last several years, we have worked directly with clients to help them embed innovation into the fabric of their enterprises.

Both at IDEO and in our client organizations, we’ve found that design thinking helps to foster creative cultures and build the internal systems required to sustain innovation and launch new ventures.

BORN TO FLIP—THE BIRTH OF THE D.SCHOOL

In the early 2000s, David started experimenting with team teaching at Stanford with professors from other parts of the university (like Terry Winograd from Computer Science, Bob Sutton from Management Science and Engineering, and Jim Patell from the business school). Prior to that, David had taught only students in the design division at the School of Engineering who already identified themselves as creative. In these new interdisciplinary courses, however, he worked with MBAs and computer science students who often didn’t think of themselves that way.

It was in these classrooms that David and his colleagues could see what unlocking creativity really looked like.

Some of the students went beyond just using the tools and embraced the philosophy of design thinking, and in doing so, they developed a new mental outlook, a new self-image, and a new sense of empowerment. Students began visiting him during office hours—sometimes months after the class was over—to tell him that they had started to see themselves as creative individuals for the first time. That they could apply creativity to any challenge. Their eyes would light up with excitement, with a sense of opportunity, of possibility. Sometimes they cried.

David came up with a name for the transformation he was observing: “flipping”—changing from one state of mind to another. The playfulness of the term “flipping” reminded him of the joyful poetry of a somersault on a trampoline or a diving board.

These students he talked with were engaged and excited in a way that made it clear something in them had changed—permanently. It was the sort of profound impact educators live for.

Along with former student George Kembel (now executive director of the d.school), David began to talk with friends and colleagues about starting a new program. He envisioned a place in the university where students from different backgrounds could come to nurture their creative talents and apply their newfound skills to tough challenges. David pointed out that Stanford—like all world-class universities—had Nobel-laureate-quality researchers drilling deeper into their own fields of knowledge. But he suggested that there are tremendous challenges in the twenty-first century that aren’t going to be solved that way. Maybe some solutions will be found by putting that scientist into a room with a businessperson, and a lawyer, and an engineer, and others. Rather than keeping all their eggs in the “going deep” basket, David proposed that Stanford make at least a small side bet on “going broad.” And one day the new institute might have the respect and the cachet of the graduate school of business—commonly known as the “B-school.” That’s how the new venture got its nickname, which has stuck ever since: the “d.school.”

When he told Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of enterprise software giant SAP, about the idea, Hasso generously reached for his checkbook. The d.school—officially known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—opened its doors in 2005.

NURTURING CREATIVE THINKERS

While IDEO’s work historically focused on innovations, from the beginning the Stanford d.school has focused on innovators. Students from every graduate school at Stanford come to take classes at the d.school. It doesn’t issue degrees and doesn’t have any required courses—everyone is there because they want to be. Currently more than seven hundred students attend courses at the d.school each year. Project-based classes are team taught by faculty members from all over the university and by industry practitioners. In this diverse environment, it’s normal to hear many points of view—often conflicting ones. Students learn by doing and tackle real-world challenges, usually in multidisciplinary teams. Beyond just graduate students, executives from all over the world attend workshops, and the K-12 Lab works with children and educators (more than five hundred last year) to help spread confidence in their creative abilities.

Classes often start with simple design briefs—succinct articulations of a challenge—like “redesign the experience of getting your morning coffee.” When confronted with a question or a problem such as the morning coffee challenge, people with strong analytical skills tend to snap instantly into problem-solving mode. They leap for the finish line and then start defending their answers.

The d.school brings together ideas and people from all over the university.

(photo/illustration credit 1.3)

For example, think about how quickly a skilled doctor—when presented with a set of symptoms—makes a diagnosis and prescribes a solution. Often it’s a matter of seconds. During one morning coffee challenge a few years back, a med-school student in the class immediately raised a hand and said, “I know what we need: a new kind of coffee creamer.” For such skilled analytical thinkers, an “unresolved” issue hanging in the air is uncomfortable. They are anxious to provide an answer and move on. In routine problem-solving situations, where there is a single right answer, that method is very efficient, and sometimes quite appropriate. Creative thinkers, however, confronted with the same open-ended question, are careful not to rush to judgment. They recognize that there are many possible solutions and are willing to “go wide” first, identifying a number of possible approaches before converging on the ideas most worth implementing.

So David and the d.school professors ask the students to set aside their initial answers—the cliché ones already in their heads. They encourage students to dig deeper, to understand the situation better, observing people’s behaviors around coffee drinking in order to identify latent needs and opportunities. After the group has been guided through the design process in a collaborative environment, dozens of ideas emerge: everything from a coffeepot that knows exactly how hot you like your drink—and delivers it that way every time—to an automatic stirrer you drop into your cup. Then professors ask class members if any of the new solutions they arrived at were better than their initial ones. Usually, the answer is yes.

One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone.

A GROWTH STATE OF MIND

One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. If you currently feel that you are not a creative person—if you think, “I’m not good at that kind of thing”—you have to let go of that belief before you can move on. You have to believe that learning and growth are possible. In other words, you need to start with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”

Individuals with a growth mindset, Dweck says, “believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.” She makes a compelling case, backed up by extensive research, that regardless of our initial talent, aptitude, or even IQ, we can expand our capabilities through effort and experience.

To fully appreciate the growth mindset, it helps to contrast it with its all-too-familiar evil twin, the fixed mindset. Consciously or unconsciously, people with a fixed mindset have the deep-seated belief that everyone is born with only a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of talent. If invited on a journey to creative confidence, people with a fixed mindset will prefer to stay behind in their comfort zone, afraid that the limits of their capabilities will be revealed to others.

Dweck explored the self-limiting nature of a fixed mindset in studying the behavior of freshman students at the University of Hong Kong. Since all classes and exams at the university are in English, incoming students who struggle with the English language are at a distinct disadvantage. After assessing the students’ language skills and their mindset, Dweck asked the incoming students a question: “If the faculty offered a course for students who need to improve their English skills, would you take it?” Their answers revealed the power of mindset. “Students with the growth mindset said an emphatic yes. But those with the fixed mindset were not very interested.” In other words, those under the influence of a fixed mindset were willing to sabotage their long-term chances for success rather than expose a potential weakness. If they let the same logic guide their choices throughout life, it’s easy to understand how their perception of their own abilities as permanently limited can become a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a passport to new adventures.

When you open your mind to the possibility that your capabilities are unlimited and unknown, you already have your running shoes on and are ready to race forward.

In reality, we all have a little of both mindsets. Sometimes the fixed mindset whispers in one ear: “We’ve never been good at anything creative, so why embarrass ourselves now?” And the growth mindset whispers in the other ear: “Effort is the path to mastery, so let’s at least give this a try.” The question is, which voice are you going to listen to?

MAKE YOUR DENT IN THE UNIVERSE

With creative confidence comes the desire to proactively guide the course of your life, or your organization, rather than be carried along on the prevailing winds. Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, once told us that what stuck out to him about designers is that they always act with intention. While others may unconsciously go with the default option, design thinkers make everything a conscious and original choice: from how they arrange their bookshelf to how they present their work. When they look around the world, they see opportunities to do things better and have a desire to change them. Once you start creating things, whether it’s laying out a new garden or starting a new company or writing a new piece of code, you start to realize that everything has that intention behind it. Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you?

When you unleash your creative confidence, you start to see new ways to improve on the status quo—from how you throw a dinner party to how you run a meeting. And once you become aware of those opportunities, you have to start seizing them.

To us, that focused “intentionality” was one of Steve Jobs’s defining characteristics. David met Steve back in 1980 when we designed the first Apple mouse. They became friends during a dozen subsequent projects for Steve’s ventures at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. Steve never took the path of least resistance. He never accepted the world “as is.” He did everything with intentionality. No detail was too small to escape his attention. He also pushed us beyond what we thought we could do—we experienced his “reality distortion field” firsthand. He just kept raising the bar, even when it seemed unreasonable. But we would try, and we would get three-quarters of the way there, which was always farther than we would have gotten by ourselves.

Once you start creating things, you realize that everything has intention behind it.

After Steve was forced out of Apple and was planning the startup that would become NeXT Computer, he stopped by David’s office one day to talk about his vision for the new machine. Always seeking Zen simplicity, Steve asked David, “What’s the simplest three-dimensional shape in the world?” David was sure that it was a sphere. But that didn’t matter, because the answer Steve was looking for was a cube. And so began our project of helping Steve with the engineering design of his cube-shaped NeXT computer.

During that intense project, Steve often called David at home in the middle of the night (in the era before e-mail and texting) to insist that we make some change. What kind of pressing issue couldn’t wait until morning? One night, the call was about whether the plating on some screw on the inside of the cast magnesium cube should be cadmium or nickel. David’s response was something like “Jeez, Steve, it’s on the inside of the box.” But Steve still cared—and we of course changed it. We don’t know if any NeXT customer ever cracked open the machine and saw those perfectly plated fasteners, but Steve left no such details to chance.

Steve had a deep sense of creative confidence. He believed—he knew—that you can achieve audacious goals if you have the courage and perseverance to pursue them. He was famous for his exhortation to “make a dent in the universe,” which he expressed this way in a 1994 interview:

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will … pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Steve’s message was that we all have the ability to change the world. That was certainly true of Steve, a visionary who impacted so many people’s lives and urged us all to “Think Different.”

From Doug Dietz to Steve Jobs, all of the creatively confident people we’ve crossed paths with have found a way to apply extraordinary energy and exert remarkable influence. And we know that as you gain creative confidence going forward, you will have the chance to make your own dent in the universe. Start with a growth mindset, the deep-seated belief that your true potential is still unknown. That you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before. In subsequent chapters we’ll offer practical tools that will help you to acquire new skills, find new inspiration, and unleash more of your creative capacities. To do so, you will need to act, and to experience your own creativity firsthand. But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past.

(photo/illustration credit 2.1)

CHAPTER 2
DARE

FROM FEAR TO COURAGE

Picture a boa constrictor, draped casually around a man’s neck. In the next room, a woman in a hockey mask and leather gloves stands warily behind a one-way mirror, watching them. Her heart is pounding. She has been terrified of snakes for as long as she can remember. Gardening and hiking have been out of the question, lest a garter snake slither across her path.

Yet here she is, about to walk into the next room and touch the snake of her nightmares.

How does she do it? How does she move from fear to courage?

The mastermind behind her phobia cure—leading the way for thousands more like her—is psychologist Albert Bandura. A Stanford researcher and professor, he has had a profound impact on the world of social learning and has been called the greatest living psychologist. Only Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Jean Piaget ranked higher on a published list of eminent twentieth-century psychologists.

Bandura, now a professor emeritus at age eighty-seven, still works from his office at Stanford.

One day we got to talking about how to cure snake phobias. Basically it takes a lot of patience and small incremental steps, Bandura told us, but he and his colleagues could sometimes cure a phobia that has lasted a lifetime in less than a day.

First, Bandura tells phobic people that there is a snake in the room next door and that they are going in there—to which the typical response is “Like hell I am.”

Next, he leads them through a long sequence of challenges, tailoring each subsequent step to be just within reach. For example, at one point, he has them look through a one-way mirror at a man holding the snake and asks, “What do you think this thing will do?” People with phobias are convinced the snake will wrap itself around the man’s neck and choke him. But contrary to their beliefs, the snake just dangles lazily without choking or constricting at all.

And so it continues. Further along, Bandura asks them to stand at the open door of the room with the snake inside. If that step is too scary, he offers to stand with them at the door.

Many small steps later, eventually they are right there next to the snake. By the end of the session, people touch the snake. And just like that, their phobia is gone.

When Bandura began using this technique, he checked back with people months later and found that the phobia stayed gone, too. One woman even recounted a dream about a boa constrictor that helped her wash the dishes, instead of terrorizing her like the snakes in the nightmares she used to have.

Bandura calls the methodology he uses to cure phobias “guided mastery.”

The process of guided mastery draws on the power of firsthand experience to remove false beliefs. It incorporates psychology tools like vicarious learning, social persuasion, and graduated tasks. Along the way, it helps people confront a major fear and dispel it one small, manageable step at a time.

This discovery—that guided mastery can cure a lifelong phobia in a short time—was a big deal. But Bandura discovered something even more meaningful during his follow-up interviews with the former phobics.

The interviews brought to light some surprising side effects. People mentioned other changes in their lives, changes seemingly unrelated to their phobias: they’d taken up horseback riding, they’d become fearless public speakers, they were exploring new possibilities in their jobs. The dramatic experience of overcoming a phobia that had plagued them for decades—a phobia they had expected to live with for the rest of their lives—had altered their belief system about their own ability to change. It had altered their belief in what they could accomplish. Ultimately, it transformed their lives.

This newfound courage, exhibited by the same people who once had to wear hockey masks to get near a snake, led Bandura to pivot toward a new line of research: how people come to believe that they can change a situation and accomplish what they set out to do in the world.

Since then, Bandura’s research has shown that when people have this belief, they undertake tougher challenges, persevere longer, and are more resilient in the face of obstacles and failure. Bandura calls this belief “self-efficacy.”

Bandura’s work scientifically validates something we’ve been seeing for years: Doubts in one’s creative ability can be cured by guiding people through a series of small successes. And the experience can have a powerful effect on the rest of their lives.

The state of mind Bandura calls self-efficacy is closely related to what we think of as creative confidence.

People who have creative confidence make better choices, set off more easily in new directions, and are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They see new possibilities and collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. And they approach challenges with newfound courage.

But to gain this creative, empowered mindset, sometimes you have to touch the snake.

In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.