Brendan Boyle: Playing With Purpose [Entire Talk]

The back row, the people in the back row, they're really— there they are, okay. MSE, okay.

Okay, well, I have to say it sounds like a lot of fun. Is it fun or is it hard work? Can you give us a snapshot of what life is like working all day toiling away designing toys?

So we're— I'm a toy inventor, that's my profession. I also teach over at the D School, we'll get into that. But it's a lot of effort, let's put it that way, but it's what we call fit. If you find something you really like doing, you're going to keep doing it. So a lot of effort, but it feels creatively satisfying. So you enjoy doing it versus fun might be like, oh, it's fun to go to the beach, right? I have no problem with that. But it's like if you find something you really are engaged in, for us this is what my class is about around play behaviors. It's around really getting into it and sort of losing yourself in time. And yeah, it is crazy. It's a crazy industry. It's a really tough way to make a living. I would— it's a challenging way to make a living.

So, okay, so explain to us— this is a bunch of people who are really interested in entrepreneurship and innovation, and clearly designing toys is an entrepreneurial endeavor. Can you tell us a little bit about the funnel? I know there's a really interesting funnel of going from ideas to actually seeing a product on the shelf.

Started the Toy Lab with a fantastic woman named Fern Mandelbaum, and she's a Stanford person also. And we left— each left our respective companies, and I had 10 ideas, and 3 of them were in the toy world. And we thought we were going to start a toy company, like manufacture like Mattel or Hasbro or Moose or Spin Master. Then we started asking questions like you guys are doing. If you're a good entrepreneur, you have that sort of license to ask questions when you're starting. People really want to help out. And we discovered this whole world of— there are some really professional firms around toy invention where you come up— so my life is around— and my team— I'll use the word I a lot, but it's a team now. And it's a pretty good-sized team. IDEO is 650 folks. So I say that's my team, but I have 10 dedicated folks in the toy lab. So we come up with ideas. Then we have to prototype them, build them, get them to work. And then we pitch them. So we spend a fair amount of our time with an inventor's hat, a fair amount of time with a builder's hat— and this can be physical or digital stuff— and then a fair amount of time with a sales hat, trying to get people to buy so we can keep doing what we're doing because we like it.

So you talked about the idea, the building, the selling. How many ideas do you have?

How many of those do you build? Yeah, back to your funnel. So I like to say I've probably failed more than anyone in this room because our funnel is a lot of ideas that don't make it. So I'm really— people say get comfortable with failure. I guess I'm pretty comfortable with failure. So we'll probably have— Bob Sutton did some numbers on our group a while ago. It was like 4,000 ideas a year, just ideas, like something on a Post-it, maybe a little sketch. And out of that, 400 were probably rendered, 50 or 60 prototyped. We probably sell 5 or 6, and hopefully 2 or 3 make money. So it's a lot of nos. But every idea we have, we kind of think is really cool. And then a lot of people don't.

Do you go back and revisit the ones that have been thrown away?

We'll go back and we'll look at the prototypes, those ones that we've invested in, and see if there's a way— maybe they're a little bit before their time, or maybe there's a way to rework them so they'll be a little more relevant. So yeah, we keep a whole database of everything. And some ideas we can sell right away, some ideas it might take 6 or 7 years, right? So—

Well, so that's what I was going to ask. How long is that process, right, if you're going from 4,000 to 400 to 40?

Well, yeah, hopefully that's a year process. OK. A day process. That's a long-ass day. Sorry. That's a long day. So no, it's a year process. But we've been doing this for 20 years. So we have a lot of things what we would call in the vault, ideas in the vault. Hopefully they're— still good and maybe we can sell them someday.

So this is interesting. So you've got this process, is everyone moving in sync through this process or do you have a lot of things that are starting up all the time? So you constantly have new ideas, constantly new prototypes or is there sort of a year schedule that you go through?

Yeah, if you look at our like production line, it would be idea. So we have 2 or 3 brainstorms a week and that might be the farm, right, what we're growing and then there's People are dedicated on projects they're really excited about. If we're building something robotic like a really cool dinosaur or something with 6 motors in it, that's what we're working on, keep it a secret. That's going to take a lot of time to work on that and get everything right. So we're investing heavy in something like that.

That's so cool. So I love the fact that you have several brainstorms a week. As someone who loves brainstorming, that just sounds wonderful. How do you actually frame each of those brainstorms? Do you come in and just say, hey, what ideas do you have? Or do you go, we're looking at a dinosaur toy, or we're looking at a car toy?

Yeah. If you've taken a d.school class or you're involved in design methodology or Tina's class, you'll quickly understand it's what are the insights? Something has to be around insight. So we spent a lot of time going into kids' homes, talking to moms and dads, and interviewing and observing, being kind of what Tom Kelley calls the modern-day anthropologist, sort of seeing what's happening, seeing behaviors. If you can take a behavior and put that into something, then it's going to resonate, which is really cool. Can I show you a toy to show some behavior? So this is— I brought some toys, guys. This is a— everyone might know or might not know the property Dusty, which is a Pixar property. Dusty is a plane. It's kind of like the Cars property, but he's afraid of heights. So he's basically an RC car. For 3-year-olds. So he doesn't really fly. So he goes on the ground. And a 3-year-old, if you give them a remote control, they don't know what they're doing. They're just— right? But how does a 3-year-old pretend they're flying? Can you guys act it out? Can everyone act it out together? Yeah. So we took that behavior, and then we gave him these little wings. And then when he tilts this way, he goes that way. And then he tilts this way. It goes that way. I got a big wingspan. A little 3-year-old behind it is pretty cute. So—

This is Tom 127 to your Reed. That's so fun. So how did you come up with that idea? Or how did your group come up with it?

By watching kids. And then someone was pretending they're flying and remembering they did it themselves and said, how do we incorporate that into a toy? And then the way we prototyped that was we had that. And someone behind the curtain driving it. When the kid did this, we turned it that way. So that saved us some money on the prototyping.

Well, I love that idea.

And then once we sold it, then we had to make it work, right?

But that's what's really cool, and I'm so fascinated with the way you do that is do these really, really quick and dirty inexpensive prototypes that test whether a concept will work without actually spending any money or even putting any technology into it. So talk about that process.

That's a real tenet of IDEO. It's a real tenet of the d.school. It's like high-fidelity thinking, low-fidelity prototyping. Because you want to rough and rapid to get the idea out there so you can learn from it, not test to validate. Get it out there to learn from it and so you can make it better. For those of you who will start running companies someday, what you want is when you're CEO to have that sort of ability to squint and see the real thing through a rough and rapid model because we see so many cultures that the model prototype has to be beautiful before they show it to the CEO or management because they're going, what's this piece of crap? And then your whole culture then understands, ooh, we got to make it look good, and they're wasting all this time.

Right. And of course, I understand in that situation you're much less likely to get feedback. You now are fully committed to something that might not work. So doing these really quick prototypes is really valuable.

It's a culture. It's a culture thing. And you can do that physical or digital. You love the example where we were working with Sesame Street. We've done a whole bunch of apps with Sesame Street digital toys. And we were trying to figure out how Elmo does his dance. And Sesame's in New York. My team's here. And we didn't want to do any programming yet. So the team had a clever idea. They plotted out an iPhone like this big and then glued it to foam core, cut the hole out, and then acted out the scene with a live actor behind it. The interaction was someone touching— you touch this button and Elmo dances like this. And we could do that and then shoot a video of that in a morning. We went back and forth 3 or 4 times before we had to do any software. So that is a really low-fidelity way to do digital too, which is cool.

Yeah, I love that. I think that it's called Monster Maker, right? And I love the fact that in a really short time without any technology, basically no money, and you were able to really get some great feedback on the concept.

Yeah.

Great. So one of the things that's super interesting about toys is that they often foreshadow the technology that we're going to be adapting as adults in our lives. How do you try to anticipate what's going to be happening in the real world and then adapt that to toys?

Yeah, well, my team's really lucky because Ideal's working in almost every industry, so we can see what's happening in transportation, and we can see what's happening in consumer products, and we can see what's happening in health. So it's interesting. So we did a $300 Barbie Hello Dreamhouse that was out this Christmas. $300. That's good if you're in debt or it's a lot of royalties. So it's a smart dreamhouse. It's got all this cool smart technology in it. And we've been working on smart houses for a long time at IDEO. For billionaires or other types of folks. And all this sort of stuff like the Nest and other stuff is sort of recognizing your behavior versus programming. No one wants to program. So we put all this same kind of thinking into this cool Barbie house. It was awesome. It was on Jimmy Fallon, which was really funny.

So see, really it's not expensive. I can get a whole house for $300.

Yeah, you get a whole house for $300. Try that in Palo Alto somewhere. Put it on a piece of land.

Yeah, well, so that's an interesting point is that for $300 I can get a real house. Do you use this actually as a way to test concepts for real products in the real world? I mean, are toys a foreshadowing?

Right, yeah, toys is kind of a foreshadowing because pretty fast in the marketplace and a lot of technology finds its way in toys in a hurry. Like RFID was in toys in a hurry, different colored LEDs were in toys in a hurry just because Toys don't last long. You buy a refrigerator, it's going to be there for 15 years. So the technology is hard to sort of keep updating on that in a hurry. But toys have such a short life, and a lot of them are physical. So you'll see this technology in there, which is pretty interesting.

Very cool. So can you tell us a little bit about the relationship you have with the manufacturers who I assume are also the distributors, right?

Yeah. So we have great long-term relationships with Mattel and Hasbro and Fisher-Price and any of the big toy companies, Moose and— who's got kids out here, anybody? So if you have a 3-year-old or 5-year-old daughter, you know what Shopkins is, which is— if not, it's a— Are you the guy? No. But I know the guy. But it's a brand that went from zero to almost $1 billion. We do have a Shopkins item called the Shopkins Tall Mall. It's like a dream house for— but yeah, so these are long-term relationships. These are our customers, so to speak. And it's a little bit— there's always tension there because they— Mattel has a huge design department. But the market forces are such that about a third of all new toys are licensed from the outside because the toy industry has been looking outside for ideas a lot longer than other industries. Sort of a little bit of open innovation but with known innovation partners like my company and others. It's interesting because they can't tell you exactly what they want because they tell their own team, but they're looking and you start to understand, you start to get some really good institutional knowledge. Like I've been visiting these guys for 20 years, so I have a history and know their history and know their product line and kind of know where they should be fishing, so to speak.

So are the toy manufacturers and distributors like Mattel, are they like venture capitalists? That there you go in and pitch them and then they say yes, yes or no?

No, it's much more like a screenplay or royalty deal. They'll publish your work, so to speak. If you're an author, you'll get a royalty on a book. Although people care who wrote a book, they don't necessarily care if IDEO invented a toy or not, unfortunately.

Yeah, but they might say I want something—

But it's a long-term relationship, so it's I got some really good advice from an inventor when I first started. He said, it's important you sell something, but it's more important you get invited back to the meeting. So, because if you don't get invited back, you're not going to have a sustainable business because if you go in and burn your bridges on one deal, you know, go through it.

Do you find that you're often working on the same projects, the type of things that they are? Yeah. And so you have sort of intellectual property issues?

Uh-huh, exactly. It's a relationship built on long-term trust, so if they say we're working on something very similar, we'll take their word for it because they're not going to try to rip us off because there's a tension, they want us to come back too, right? So, but we all see the same things in the marketplace, we were exposed to similar ideas and sometimes things are—

Everyone's right, the same ideas bubble up to the top.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so let's go back, into the lab where you're designing all this. What makes something fun?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It has to have an element of surprise, of delight. It has to meet some kind of— it's best if it's based on some kind of insight. And the insight could just be it wants to be fun, right? But that's like the plane had that sort of element of magic because it out like you're actually flying. This is— let me show you another toy. This is a— you haven't jumped to failure yet, but I'm going to jump to a failure story. This is one of my earlier products. This is a baseball bat, for those of you listening online. It's just a kid's baseball bat. And it was called Grand Slam Bubble Bat. You hit this button, and there's a mechanism in here, and out came a bunch of baseball-sized bubbles. And then you smashed them, right? Like, pretty clever idea. Yeah, I thought that was great. So this is early in my career. I'm at Mattel in a conference room. I think it was one of my first meetings with them. And there are 5 or 6 execs there, and they're all sitting there looking pretty formal, back when people wore suits. And I'm hitting the button. There's a mechanism here, and it's not working. I'm feeling like, oh no. So I just try to jiggle it, and then I swing it, and it just threw bubble stuff out. And laced them across the suits, right? And they looked at me like, are you goofing on me? So I was like, that was a huge failure. I was very polite and wrote them each a sorry note, so I got invited back. I went back and fixed it, and then we sold it to another company. And it came out and had a really cool commercial. It was doing really well. And then there's— I think it's Roger— I forget his name, but it was a lawyer who once a year put out the 10 most dangerous toys. Oh no. And the Bubble Bat was number 5 on the list, and that killed sales on the Bubble Bat. So that product failed twice.

When you design something and you pitch it, have there been any that have been picked up that you have been totally surprised by their success? I mean, this is— you were sort of surprised that people didn't love it instantly, but—

Yeah, no, you never know until the scorecard is out and it's in the marketplace. Like, some people may love it and it's got a ton of tooling and advertising and then it still doesn't do well, right? So that's always surprising. Or it's like, wow, this did like 5 times better than we thought it did, which is great. But it— I used to get— it's such a roller coaster. I used to really go up and down on that. Now I think I'm— It's because I'm older, I'm just a little more steady.

Do you think that market timing plays a big role in kids' toys? I mean, it certainly does with consumer electronics. It has to be the right time. How does timing fit into this?

Well, timing definitely fits because if you're in this industry, it's fourth quarter and everything— it's like 70% of your sales are fourth quarter. So if you're missing Christmas, you're missing out, right?

So that's timing in the year.

Timing in the year. Timing otherwise is like, Yeah, if you're right now skill and action low-cost games— has anyone seen Pie Face? Anyone played Pie Face? It's a crazy game, but it's $20 and it smacks a pie at you. And it actually was out in the '60s and then someone brought it back. But there's sort of a trend around getting family away from screen time and playing a fun game like this. So there are all sorts of these things out now. And if you're chasing those kind of ideas now, it's too late because you've got to be thinking what's 2 years out, 3 years out. So some of it is definitely there's luck, but there's luck if you're really working hard on these things.

So let's go back further into your— into the design process and the brainstorming. A lot of people say brainstorming doesn't work and they try to do brainstorming and they're not successful. What makes brainstorming in your group successful?

Yeah, that's a really great question. If you back off of brainstorming a little bit and think of the design process, there's inspiration. So you've got to get inspired, see something your competitors aren't seeing. Then there's ideation. Take what you saw, it's framed up somehow into an opportunity, a strategy. And then ideation. And brainstorming is just one technique. I mean, you could have a technique where you get good ideas in the shower. That's just not very repeatable. You have to run home or tell your boss.

And use a lot of water.

Yeah, use a lot of water. But for us, brainstorming is a really great tool that we know how to use. So I think it gets a bad rap because people who just read the rules and try it once don't actually know how to do it. It's like— I think it's Sutton's, or maybe it's your analogy around if you put 4 people in a room and they know how to play musical instruments, they can jam pretty well. But if you put 4 people who don't know how to play, it's not going to sound very good at all, right? So if you are practiced at brainstorming, you understand it, You're going to get better at it. It's a muscle. If you think about ideation too as divergent thinking, how wide can you go versus converging? And we are so good— everyone in this room is probably so good at converging thinking because you didn't get into Stanford, you didn't get all these degrees without converging and making decisions and understanding how to get to the answer in a hurry. Divergent thinking is just like, how do you keep your brain going wide and ridiculous ideas and all sorts of crazy ideas? Because that's where you're going to find a good idea. If you're really close to being ridiculous, it probably could be brilliant. Otherwise, it's just OK. So getting in that mode— and then there's confusion around folks think creative people are only divergent. They're just constantly like— no. They know when to turn it on and when to turn it off versus too many people go a little bit and then close, a little bit and then close.

Well, see, that's one of the big problems, right? If you're actually evaluating the ideas too early, You kill them. Can you talk about how you get people ready for a brainstorming session where they can be as prepared for divergent thinking as possible?

So when we bring in new folks, we sort of indoctrinate them a little bit at a time. So you put them in with a bunch of good brainstormers so they see that behavior and they know how it's working. So that's one way. Before we go into the brainstorm, you have to have your question. It's all around the right question. So we've got the insights, we've got the question. But we'll do a lot of list making. A lot of list making gets your brain just rapid fire. So a lot of list making, and then we'll—

Well, can you just double-click on that? Give me an example of a list.

If we're doing a— let's say we're inventing a car for travel, plane, car, transportation. So what do people do on planes? Types of play, all these kind of things, just list, list. What do kids do for fun? What do kids do that's stupid? Just how do you do this list in a hurry? That sort of gets your brain sort of rapid firing. Then we'll discover something that works really well. Then we'll say, let's do a couple minutes of head downtime and sketch up 2 or 3 ideas. We're huge Post-it users, by the way. People come in and think, you guys are nuts. But it's a way you can cluster in teams. So then we'll do a couple minutes of heads-down time to sketch up 2 or 3 ideas, which is, we found, really good for some of the introverts. So they can get some ideas down. And then people start to share, then riff and build off them.

So that's really interesting. I was going to ask you about the trade-off between individual time and team time. Do you find that when people brainstorm by themselves and then come back, that they're very wedded to their own idea, or—

No, if we don't get much time for that, it's just like to get a few ideas out of your head right away, and then we're all gonna build on it.

Okay.

And we're very clear at a brainstorm to let anyone new in the room know that these ideas are all the group's ideas, that they wouldn't exist if everyone wasn't here, right? Like, it's not just one musician in the band, it's everyone, right? So we're careful not to call that Tina's idea or Brenda's idea. We'll number the ideas so you can go to the numbers. And then we'll have a little mini-goal. Let's get 50 ideas. And that flips everything around in people's heads.

So obviously brainstorming session is only good as the brains in the room. What type of people do you have on your team?

A lot of industrial designers, mechanical engineers, computer science, A lot of technical folks and then the design researchers, but we at IDEO and the D School look for what we call T-shaped people. They have a real depth in one area. That might be design. It might be computer science. But they love to— they're interested in the other disciplines. They're really interested in design research. So they play well. If you think more of an I-shaped person is more of a guru, they only want to do their stuff. And they get kind of grumpy. If they're talking about other people's stuff. The gurus can be great, but they're just not fit for our culture.

Do you invite them in? Do you invite in people to participate?

No, we'll— oh, we'll interview gurus like crazy because they're experts and they're extreme, so you want to know what they're thinking. But they're not necessarily right for our culture.

Great. Does everybody on these teams have to be able to build something? Do they all have to be able to build something?

In the toy group, they have to be able to build, whether it's physical or digital, they have to build and make something. Tangible. So a lot of folks are— there's a lot of sort of misconception around ideas where it's all in your head, and then you just have to give it to someone else. There's a lot of what we call thinking with your hands. So as you're building, you're designing and creating at the same time. The brain gets way too much credit. The hand should get just as much credit, because it's sort of informing your decision and making things happen and discovering things and inventions as you go.

Super. So how do you manage a group of creative people like this? I mean, I imagine you get a bunch of folks who have lots of independent ideas. How do you— what type of culture do you create and how do you manage that group?

Yeah, I was on a panel once with— and a similar question came up. I was on a panel with a Navy SEAL, the captain of the America's Cup, and the president of Sonos, the founder of Sonos. And the audience asked me, he said, what do you do from your teams to keep them from burning out? And I looked at the CEO and I said, this is the guy who can answer that question. And he said, they're burned out when they fall over. So it was just like, all right, we don't burn our guys out that much. No, you look for— so we'll brainstorm and then we'll look for ideas that we want to— we'll kind of do a vote. Or some editing from the senior folks is what we think has more potential. And then we'll look for who's really passionate around trying to make that come to life. And that might be one person pointing it. If it's a robotics person, we got that person on our team, they're going to be really jazzed about that. If it's some type of fashion doll and it's got to be beautiful and all this, we've got that kind of person. So we'll have people at different points, but other folks then will come in and help because they're excited about learning. On something. That's really neat about any organization if it's framed up the right way, if it's a learning organization, because you want to— personally, you want to learn something new, a new skill, a new talent. So we have that sort of mindset around learning. So you think you're in school and once you're out, you're done learning. It should be— you should always have that sort of appetite to keep learning, because it's more creatively satisfying.

So I know that you're really passionate also about space and how the physical space affects the way you think, the way you behave. Can you describe the space that you guys have designed? I know it's gone through lots of iterations. So maybe you could share a little bit about how the space has been designed and how it's changed over time and why.

Yeah, space is— for those who own companies or already do, it's one of the most underutilized resources. For innovation because people just lay it out and they don't think about it or they just, what looks cool or what's cost effective. So it doesn't have to be expensive. It just has to help your behavior. So we have a lot of space in the toy lab or at IDEO or at the d.school what we call the we space. How do we work together better? So there's a lot of project spaces versus the me space, which is my office. I want it quiet. I want a view. That's not important to us. All the action for our new folks is not about an office. In fact, there's almost no offices. They're about, where's my project space? What are my tools? Who's on my team? So we want to have tons of interesting project spaces. We had a team working for Fender Guitar at IDEO. And they were worried that the musicians would be too cool. So they brainstormed and they thought— And they found an old Airstream down in Santa Barbara. So they drove down there, got it, brought it up, gutted it, and made it into their project space. So that looks really cool now.

It fit the bill.

Yeah, it fit the bill. But yeah, so in the toy lab, it's definitely a makerspace. Their project bench are sort of these super cool project toy lab benches that it's got every tool you need there. There's a little mini shop there, even though the big shop's 200 yards away. And then our digital team sits right there in that space too. Our design for play team sits right in that space. So it's a lot of action happening there.

What about prototyping materials? Do you have any?

Yeah, we have a wall. I think I've got $15,000 of Container Store drawers there of all different stuff, all labeled by materials, mechanisms, Literally, we have this. Because we're working on a lot of Barbie. There's super good Barbies. There's good Barbies. There's distressed Barbies. And there's Barbie parts.

Well, I'll tell you, when I was a kid—

And it's not her mental stage. That's so funny.

Because when I was a kid, my uncle worked in a toy store. And he used to bring us bags of Barbie heads. Oh, that's scary. I could loan them to you. So you have all these parts. Do you use them for inspiration?

Oh, no, we use them for tinkering. So you have stuff. So you can grab something and make something. Make one of those low-fidelity rough-and-rapid models. So you don't want to be wasting a lot of your time going out and finding stuff when you kind of can collect it.

So I know you're teaching a class here that you've taught for many years on play to innovation. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you teach this. And I don't know, maybe some folks in the room will get inspired to try some of these ideas.

Yeah, so thank you. It's in the spring. It's the d.school. This class is about 35. That's about as big as a class we can take. Oh, and a few years ago I started setting the class each day in a circle. I think you might do the same. So if you think back to kindergarten, you were in a circle. And you're in a circle, and I discovered this way everyone's in the front row and there's no sort of checking out in the back. So there's eye contact with everyone. It's really hard to be on your device checking that out. So that's what kindergarten teachers do. And then you can reconfigure if you're doing projects and other things like that. But the class— you want to know about the class? The class overall is this intersection of play and innovation and how important that is. And play sort of has a PR problem. Most people think— most adults think play is frivolous, or they think it's for kids. Most companies think at best play is break time, foosball, ping pong table. And those are great. Nothing wrong with foosball, ping pong, a break. But for me, play is engagement. It's are you focused, are you excited, are you— and we've talked about this just in the beginning. It's intrinsic. It's built into us. We want this satisfaction. So kind of the two biggest reasons we come to work are purpose and play. And there's now a lot of science happening around play, kind of where the science of sleep was 30 years ago, about how important sleep is now. No one sort of doubts the science of sleep. So the science of play— and I'm not a science, but Dr. Stuart Brown, who's a leader in this area, he helps teach the class and has been studying play from the science point of view his whole life. And then different behaviors. So we use a lot of role-playing when we're interviewing people or pretending we're something, a lot of role-playing. We use a lot of exploratory play for ideation. And then we use a lot of constructive play when we're prototyping. So those behaviors are enjoyable for us, so we want to keep doing it. So, and then you can think of play as your playground. Is this a safe place to innovate in? Is it okay to take a risk and have a terrible idea that you don't know is a terrible idea, but you're not going to get like chewed out? So, yeah.

What kind of projects did you do?

Oh, yeah, so in my class, we always try to get some corporate partners. We had some really great ones. Anheuser-Busch, how to make the designated driver role the fun role or the cool role.

That's a great one.

That was really interesting. It turned out a lot of people want to be the designated driver, some of the insights, but they were afraid to admit it because then they weren't cool, right? So that was cool. One team had a fabulous solution, at least I thought so. You buy a 24-pack and they're just color-coded, 4 colors, and one of the colors is alcoholic. So you're playing a game and you have to figure out who's not drunk and that person is trying to act drunk. You're drunk. No, you are. We had a really delightful one with Scholastic on how to make lifelong readers. If you think about books and how few books everyone's reading pads and other things. I kind of think the last real book will be a kid's book, right? And there's some great insights on that project around so many parents stop reading to their kids once their kids can start reading. Because hey, kid can read. I don't need to read to them anymore. Versus it is really beneficial to keep reading for as long as that kid will let you read. And you can discuss and change the content out to something higher. All around how to— I called it, I didn't even know they had a term for it, but I approached them about making budgeting more playful. And they said, oh yeah, we have a financial literacy department, which sounded— that doesn't sound playful, right? So that was interesting. Yeah, so it's that type of real-world projects.

But isn't that so interesting that the idea that you can make anything fun, right?

You can make it engaging, right? So if it's more engaging, you'll have better loyal customers. If it's interesting and you want to come back for it. It's all around that, like does this pull you in, is it delightful, is it surprising, is there something there that makes you want to keep doing it?

Great. In a couple minutes, I'm going to open up to questions to the audience, so you can start thinking about the fun questions that you have. I also love the book you wrote with John Cassidy about basically an invention. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, John Cass is helping in the class too, he's awesome. He's the founder of Flux and a lot of you— You guys probably grew up with Klutz books. He kind of invented this concept of books plus— books plus juggling, books plus other stuff. And Cass and I wrote this book called "The Klutz Book of Inventions." And it was all around this concept— to get brilliant ideas, you have to be really comfortable with ridiculous ones. So the guy who first invented the wheel, probably people thought, that's stupid. What do we need that for? So we brainstormed thousands of ideas. We prototyped 162 of them and then photographed them and put them in the book. So we built all these crazy things. And the front of the book talks about how to think like an inventor. And the last couple of pages talk about process. And it's perfect if you're 10 years old or you like to feel like you're 10 years old. Because you're 10 years old, you have enough life experience so you think You kind of know what's going on, but you're still very optimistic. You want flying cars and other things in the future. So there's one of my favorites for the 10-year-old. There's a pull-down, kind of like a blind, but it's got a perfect photograph of your room completely made up and looking perfect. So mom walks by, hey, it looks good. For adults, there's one, if you've ever gotten a parking ticket at Stanford, no one's ever gotten that, right? How do you put some delight back into a parking ticket? So we came up with this idea of a scratch-off parking ticket. So it was like, we owe you the fine. So you could take a little risk in there and double the fine, right? But it was like— so someone from a city municipality came up to me after a talk and said, you know, that would probably work. If you do the math, people, you give enough discounts because people from out of town throw away tickets and it's hard to collect, right? So we had one, if you ever had a broken arm or a sling, it had a pictogram of like a shark biting you or falling off a ladder. So yeah, and then we had all these things built. And when people would walk through on tours of IDEO, they'd think, what the heck? This is crazy. But yeah, otherwise, but again, folks who have had brilliant ideas and gone and started amazing companies will tell you stories of folks said it was ridiculous. Amazing stories around that, right?

Well, so this is really important. So you come up with all these ideas, really crazy ideas. At what point do you say it's actually not so crazy?

Well, we said that in the book. We said if you take any of these, send us some money. It's up to you. We don't care. No, what we did get is literally the book did really well. It was like 300,000 copies or something. But we got hundreds and hundreds of drawings of inventions from kids of these really cool delightful things. So they're thinking and they're drawing. I love that they're physically drawing. Drawing, because I think that's just a trait of creative people. They don't have to draw wonderfully, but they just like to draw something. So the back of the neck and stuff. So getting, inspiring some of the next generation around inventors is really great.

Great. Well, let's see what inspiring questions we have. Who has a question? Yes.

How do you deal with being stuck?

So the question is, how do you deal with being stuck?

Yeah. I think there's a lot for me, and I encourage my team, is this mind-body connection. So go for a run, go for a walk. But we're built to move, and there's something about not moving enough that I think doesn't help. So folks who are fidgeters like to fidget, and they like to move. But so getting out and going for a walk, or we have our friend Fern, who her meeting is basically walking the dish, right? Getting that movement, I think, helps get unstuck. Great. Yes. So I have a kid. I'm curious about how both you and the toy manufacturers balance the play and the fun with parental goals like fostering non-cognitive skills or encouraging little girls to go into science, right? Yeah. So I love when people buy toys, trust me. And I'll argue a toy is a tool. But I will coach any parent to go get a giant refrigerator box and play and spend time with your kid. Be with your kid and do stuff you enjoy. They'll sense your enjoyment and get that passion and figure out, oh, that's neat. I want to do something like that. Whether it's that exact thing, but they'll sense what you like versus trying to give them all these different things, like I got to put them in everything. If you actually— Stuart Brown, Dr. Brown, he says it's something, a twinkle in the eye, that kids recognize that. And they sense that engagement, that passion. So that's all I can say.

You could just sell refrigerators. Great.

Similar to that question, how do you simultaneously get product market fit with the child who's going to be using the toy and with the parent who's going to be buying it and are those always—

No.

I'm going to repeat the question just so everyone hears it. So your customer is both the kid and the parent, right? And so the question is, who are you really selling to, the kid or the parent? And are they different?

Yeah, it depends so much on age. People try to lump kids into all age, like an 8-year-old to a 4-year-old. An 8-year-old's twice as much life. When a 3-year-old says, I'm 3 and a half, that's a big deal. A 40-year-old doesn't say, I'm 44 and a half, right? So understanding what age range is in there. So for preschoolers, you're really targeting the mom and the dad. And then when they get a little bit older, then that kid has so much more say, and they want that, they want that. When they get older, a little bit older, they're making car choices. They're, you know, we've seen tweens making the car choice, telling, we want this one. So it really depends on the age of the child. And then it also depends on, is it a first child or second child too, because there's so many different dynamics happening in that. But understanding those forces, we have what we call kind of the SpongeBob effect on some things. Mom doesn't really know what it is, but she knows it's not terrible. But the kid really wants it because it's kind of edgy, right? So that SpongeBob effect just sort of keeps going up. Then mom starts to get more and more nervous depending on what age it's at. Good question.

Great.

Yes. You mentioned that you document all the ideas and you generate a lot of ideas.

How do you manage that?

And do you have a mechanism to revisit an idea? No. I mean repeat it.

OK, please.

You get all these ideas. How do you capture them? How do you store them? How do you manage basically your entire collection of ideas?

So great question. So say we do a brainstorm and we have 100 ideas. We'll quickly vote on the ones that we think have merit. So that might be 5 to 10. The rest of the ideas we're not going to capture. We literally are going to let them fall to the floor. They're not important to us. Because we can do another brainstorm, and those ideas will be more relevant than keeping all the old ideas. It's just too much. And they're really just an inkling of an idea. They're more like a headline. You're going to have to push those further. So once they become something that we're going to prototype, then we're going to capture it and we have a database and the videos and photographs, all that kind of stuff. But people treat all ideas as equal and they're not. There's just like quickly decide which ones you need to elevate, which are rising, and let the rest fall.

Great.

In addition to just observing children, as you mentioned, what ways do you how do you kind of get in the mindset of young children or kind of what they're interested in and what they would like to do? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, you want to repeat it?

Yes, I need to for the podcast. Okay. So how do you get into the right mindset, like the kids' mindset to get ready to design for them?

Yeah, we did a product a while back with Fisher-Price called Jumperoo, which took the— for parents, it took the one that hung in the doorframe and made it a freestanding one. 'Cause doorframe one was great. My son used it. But moms thought the thing was going to fall down. If you lived in a small apartment, it actually blocked a key pathway. And then this is a while— this is over 10 years ago, maybe more. And YouTube was just coming online. I thought it would be interesting to search "jumperoo." And there were something like 12,000 individual jumperoo videos because parents were so excited to see their kid jumping up and down. So that was like, wow, we can do some insights work just by looking online, which is interesting. But the mindset is to constantly kind of keep a heartbeat of seeing— and we have a database of kid testers, which we've got to keep current because kids get older and they're out of the database. So keeping current with that, keeping time in homes relevant. We find a lot of parents think they're experts on kids, but what they are experts on their kids because they don't spend enough time. So I have a lot of folks in the toy lab who don't have kids, but they are experts on kids because they're spending a lot of time and they have a sense of what's happening.

Great. Yes.

So I'm just wondering, because you said play is an engagement, and I think it's very encouraging to be in that kind of environment, so you get to create stuff. And I understand that's a part of IDEAL's culture. However, I had like in this summer, I had chance to teach some of the students from China, and then one challenge I face is because I heard some of the students' complaints is, okay, I enjoy this environment a lot, but when I go back, a lot of teachers might just put me down, say, hey, there's black and white. I'm just wondering from you, how would you encourage that?

So really good question, really challenging. We see this in company cultures. We come over here and we get to do all this stuff, and then we go back there and it's not. So one is either try to change that— and we encourage to try little experiments and do things— or get out of that. Because you can't— go find somewhere else. If you're in a culture that just won't accept it, and that's not a fit for you, and you don't want that, For students, I think it's just sort of like sometimes if you're the only creative person, you might shine a little bit more. But that's a really tough challenge, and I'm not sure I know how to handle that except have them come to Stanford more often.

Great. Back there. To your point about the mind-body connection and stuffness, Have you explored just like physical environments, ways that people could actually be physically moving in the moment to get unstuck?

Yeah.

So the question is, are there very specific things you can do physically in the moment to get unstuck?

Physically. Yeah, you can hold your hands like this. Everyone do this. And then you can make a big figure 8. Everyone, for our podcast, we're making it. We're holding our— clasping our hands and we're making a big figure 8. So you can do this online.

We should make a video.

And this— we're not going to do it that long. I've been told this connects your right and left brain together because you're circling across. So if there are any scientists in the room who want to prove that, you can do that.

That's a good question.

We'll do a PET scan while we do it. I had a former TA who came into my class, and then she gave a real simple— she's repeating someone else's work, but she gave a real simple brainstorm topic and teams of 2 came up with ideas. Then she made everyone run around the d.school. Then we did a similar topic. And it was like 23% more ideas or something. It's not the perfect case, but she's trying to illustrate. And people felt a little more— so some type of burst in making it acceptable in the culture. So it's like—

Yeah, what are your favorite— besides figure 8s— what are your favorite warm-up activities?

This one's really good. I make my students do this one. So put both feet on the ground flat. And then take your right foot and circle it in a clockwise manner. Everyone play along. Keep circling it in a clockwise manner. Take your right hand, hold it up high, and then draw a big number 6. Keep circling clockwise. This is from John Cassidy's book of immaturity, but— yeah, all right, stop doing it now. But what I tell my students is if you think you can multitask, you can't because you do two things worse. So you can do one of these, I can do this, but you try to do them together. So that's my lesson out of it, but I'm trying to get people not to screen time. I agree.

That loosened us up.

Great.

More ideas? Great.

When you were talking about brainstorming, One of the things that I thought was interesting was that once you start brainstorming, you don't assign ideas to any one person, like they belong to the group. But there are also times in a career, especially earlier on, where you want to be recognized for good ideas that you're coming up with. So how should like a young professional balance being a team player and being creative with getting credit for what they're coming up with?

So the question is that balance between being a team player and getting credit for the work. I mean, if you're constantly giving everybody else credit, how do you get recognition for your ideas?

That's a really good question. There's a book I read called The Art of Possibilities, which is by a couple— yeah, Xander is the Boston Philharmonic— Benjamin Xander, the conductor, and his wife, who's a psychiatrist. And he has one chapter in there about contribution. And it's just like, if you're going to contribute, contribute, contribute, it's going to come back to you. Somehow it just doesn't feel like it will, but it will. Getting that mindset or that mode and you're known as the person who's helping everyone else out, I think it's going to come back to you. Or you're going to get such a good idea you're just going to go start your own company. You won't need credit. So you'll be giving everyone else credit. I think that's a lot of what Stanford coaches is. We make great employers, right? So, but I find that— It's just more enjoyable. Or hopefully you got a business lead who's looking out for you, right? And that kind of stuff.

Great. Yes?

How do you toe the line between ridiculousness and feasibility?

How do you toe the line between ridiculousness and feasibility?

Yeah, at some point you can converge. And then you can have a manufacturing engineer in the room. You can have all sorts of folks who can— or any type of adult in the room who said this is not possible. And then either someone who's really excited about it is going to push back and make it possible, or it will fall to the floor. But the risk is not being in that realm and just playing it safe too much. And you won't get to something that's interesting.

Well, so knowing that you're going to have to build it, does it ever inhibit your ideas?

Sometimes it will. But sometimes people want the challenge because they're comfortable in building something they thought they couldn't build before and they want that feeling again. Or it seeks them out to ask some other help, some other expert. So sometimes, like if it's too much, like this is going to be a transporter, we can't build that yet. But yeah, it's challenging. It's a really good question, like where do we put our resources? Because everything we're working on, we haven't sold. We have no guarantees. So are we going to invest heavy into this or are we going to pull back? Cool. Yes.

You mentioned the short lifespan of toys in general, which probably translates to a lot of toys ending up in landfills or being thrown away once they've been played with for a year or two. How do you think about the waste you're creating potentially, and do you ever think about trying to design for longer lifespans? I mean, the same applies for gadgets for adults. I think this is a big issue now.

So the question is, Okay, these toys have a really short lifespan and they end up in the landfills. How do you think about the responsibility of basically adding to the piles of junk?

So really great question and do you still have any of your favorite toys?

Maybe a couple stuffed animals.

Okay. So I'm curious if any Legos have actually ever gotten thrown out. I had to stop asking my class, what's your favorite toy? Because I knew it was going to be LEGO. So I had to go to the second one. So I think a lot of toys actually get saved or passed down. They go fast just because the marketplace is hungry to sell something different. It's like a movie. There's always new movies. We don't just keep watching the same movie. So it's some of that. So my hope is we're building— play things that are going to last. But yeah, sometimes stuff isn't— the companies we work with actually have high quality. They're making a lot of good stuff. I get depressed when I walk into a CVS and I see these junky toys that are basically, we call them plastic by the pound. And that's not stuff we work on. So I'm with you on that. So that's where I'd rather not have a toy in that case, go do something else. Great.

In a culture that's comfortable with failure, what do you do with people or teams that aren't performing?

Or is that not something that—

Great. So in a culture that is comfortable with failure, how do you actually deal with teams that are not performing?

Yeah, so I think then they need to reevaluate what their goals are, what their objectives are. Are they working together? Can we— basically, it's like we want to help that team, right? 'Cause other teams might remember when they had some humble times. So it's what's wrong, it's kind of like fixing a sport team. What are you gonna do to make it better versus like let them go or something. So I think it's a lot around training and a lot around best practices. So I'd have to dive in deeper to see exactly, but my guess is it's around training and best practices. I'm 23 years old, maybe I'm a Stanford undergrad, or maybe I was at Michigan State, came here, got my master's. How would you evaluate whether I was a good fit for IDEO?

So the question is, I've just come out of school, how does IDEO decide if someone's a good fit for the firm?

Yeah, well— Well, actually a little more specific. Yes. How would you, Brendan, evaluate? How would I evaluate myself? How would I evaluate myself?

No, how would you evaluate a candidate? How do you evaluate candidates?

As undergraduates. Yeah, well, undergrads are becoming better and better here. It's just amazing how— the D School is supposed to be grads only, but I try to sneak in undergrads. Don't tell anyone if you're an undergrad. But for me, it's really hard for me to interview someone that hasn't been a student. So the student's one thing. But the other thing we do is when we have that 23-year-old come over, we'll put them with the team for a day and put them in a brainstorm and have them make something. And so then the team starts to see, is there potential here? Can we apprentice this person along? And that type of thing.

So it is really an apprenticeship. When someone comes in, they get brought up to speed.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. They're going to be paired with one of the more senior toy inventors. And they're going to teach them some of these techniques and show them the ropes and that kind of stuff.

Great. Super. Yes.

When you think of someone who isn't naturally creative, how do you foster creativity? Yeah. So who thinks you're naturally creative? Raise your hand. All right. It's something funny. If I said, who thinks you're a really good driver? People are like, yeah, I'm the worst. I'm awesome. But there's something around creativity where we feel a little bit humble, even if we feel like we're creative, because we might lose it. So creativity for us isn't like you're born with it. We think it's a muscle. And if you're a tennis player and you keep practicing, you'll get better at it. You may not be world class, but you could get pretty good. So we think people feel they're not creative because they haven't been practicing it. And usually what happens, you're in the 4th, 5th grade and you're pretty good at drawing and your teacher says, you're really creative. And then you start to feel creative and then that keeps building. So this is what's really fun at the d.school. When people get there, they start to realize, I am creative. It wasn't that I wasn't, it was just blocked. So helping people realize that and giving them tools and and allowing them to practice that muscle.

So I'm going to build on that by asking the final question. So imagine flashback, you're now sitting in this classroom, you're a graduate student or undergrad, what advice do you wish someone had given you when you were that age?

I'd say— wow, that's a great question. I'd say get really good at your craft, at the I in your T-shape, but be interested in everything else. But figure out what you could get in the door with because you're really good at this. But be interested in else. I love when people tell us about their hobbies because their hobbies start to really say where their interests are. And they're secret sort of resources for us, what people's hobbies are. So IDEO is really interested in everyone's hobby because they'll find out, oh, you're interested in that? We'll put you on that kind of project. But figure out what that craft is and understand it. And then if you're interested in an industry or an area, go deep on the history and sort of understand it, not just like that company you're interviewing today, like what's this industry's history and, you know, yeah.

Well, this was incredibly inspiring. Please join me in thanking Brendan.

Thank you, guys.