GA 412 | Lean and Design with Andy Switky

The idea that you're gonna get it right the first time is just. It literally never happens. I have worked on hundreds and hundreds of projects, and the reason that we make prototypes is because we know they're gonna fail, but we're gonna learn a ton from them. And we, you know, we often say fail early to succeed sooner.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Andy Switke to the show. Now, Andy has a background in design thinking. He also does a lot of work in healthcare, so designing things. And then he's a professor at Stanford out in California, where he's teaching various topics to the. To the students out there. And so. But today we spend quite a bit of time talking about just a whole idea of design thinking and design in general, and then the interplay between design thinking and lean and how they're similar, how they're different. We also spend some time thinking about, like, what can lean learn from the design world? And then what can design learn from the lean world? It was a really interesting conversation, and I think you're going to enjoy this one. So show notes, which will include links to everything Andy and I talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode four 12. 412. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 412. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Andy, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

All right, all right. Well, I know you've listened the show, and we do like to get things rolling with a quote. So do you have one?

I do. I actually have a couple of quotes that I love. And my first one, because we're going to be talking about Lean so much, is from Taichi Ono, who said, and I have to get the quote right. He said, having no problems is the biggest problem of all. And to me, it's a warning against complacency and against kind of resting on your successes. And I feel like it's also just kind of a warning against laziness. You can always do better. You can always be better. So I love that quote.

Yeah, good one, Good one. What's your second one?

Oh, it's a pair of quotes that are kind of saying the same thing in two different ways. The first is the military quote that says, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You make plans and you make plans, and then things happen. And the more modern version of that is Mike Tyson, who was asked if he had a plan for his fight, and he said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Exactly.

So I like those quotes and I think I'm going to add one more. It's a quote by William Gibson, the author, science fiction author, and he said the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And the things that people are doing out in the world are, they're amazing. And we all try to solve problems on our own, but often the sort of the seeds of those solutions are out there in the world and we just have to be curious and we have to go search for them and we have to go find them. So those are my quotes for today.

Nice, nice. I like it, I like it. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about your background, how you first got involved and your line of work and then tell us what you're up to these days.

I'll start with what I do now. I have a bit of an eclectic career right now. I mostly work in healthcare and I mostly work with poor and vulnerable populations. And I work as a designer, a lot of systems design and service design with some kind of digital design thrown in. But I also teach materials and manufacturing at Stanford University here in California. And I got there by way of the chip business. When I got out of school, it was the chip business, the silicon. And Silicon Valley was the kind of the only place that was really doing a lot of hiring. And as a new, newly minted mechanical engineer, I wound up at semiconductor and then at a startup that didn't quite get airborne for about a total of about 10 years. And then quite by accident, I wound up at a design firm based in Palo Alto called Ideo. Ideo, which at the time was just kind of emerging as a really influential and important hub of innovation and design. And the reason that they were hiring kind of chip geeks like me, manufacturing and mechanical engineering geeks like me, is that they in the innovation biz, you finish a design and you hand it off to your client. And because it's new, it's their kind of definition of innovation. They don't have the wherewithal, the know how to build it. So David Kelly, who was the founder and CEO at the time, hired a small group of us to be that bridge between innovation and building and going to factories. So I was that kind of link between the creative, kind of chaotic side of design and innovation and the hard nosed edges of like actually getting things built in factories. So I did that for many years. You hang out at a design firm long enough and you become a designer yourself. And that's kind of what happened. So that's. That's what I do now.

Nice. Nice. All right, so I got to ask a selfish question. So I have. One of my daughters is interested in. She's in high school, and she's interested in going into engineering. And so I've been. We've been researching the different types of engineers, you know, and so I've been sending. The other day, I sent her a link to, oh, here's what a mechanical engineer does. Here's what an industrial engineer does. Here's what a civil engineer does. Here's what, you know, on and on and on. And pretty much all her replies were, oh, that looks really interesting. I'm like, yeah, they are. They're all interesting. So what advice do you have for our young. Now, she loves math, and she's okay. She does fine in science and whatnot, but she loves math. Okay, so what do you tell a young girl who is aspiring to some sort of engineering. It all looks interested. Loves math and so. So and science. What do you think? What's her. What's her career advice for her?

I mean, I think there's no better foundation than being curious and excited about everything. I think, you know, at some point you. You start to specialize, but there are paths out there where you don't actually have to specialize. Stanford has a product design program where it's sor. Part art, part mechanical engineering, part other stuff, and you get to be a bit of a jack of all trades. But being curious and being interested in everything, it's fantastic. I would not push into any direction yet. That's gonna come later.

Nice. Yeah, good, good, good.

That's fantastic. Yeah. Be curious about everything.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, well, good stuff. Well, hey, Andy, I know that you've mentioned design, and design thinking is something that's right up your alley, obviously. And much of our audience is into Lean, and there's some, I'm sure, folks in the design world out there as well. But let's talk a little bit about Lean and design thinking and tell us your take on it. Are they different? Are they similar?

Sure. Yeah. I think design thinking. So my background in mechanical and manufacturing engineering led to working at a design company, but I led the manufacturing group for many years at ideo. And so I straddled the line between the world of design and the world of manufacturing. And what I'd say is that they're related and that creativity exists in both of those domains. But design thinking is really good at understanding people and crafting responses to the needs that they have. So it's a lot of ethnography, anthropology, cultural anthropology, psychology, what those of us who have engineering degrees call the soft sciences, which probably infuriates those people, but they're really good at understanding people and human behavior and figuring out what to design. I think of Lean as a set of tools and principles that are about optimization and kind of operations, but they're intimately related. Like we can come up with ideas about things to do as designers that can't be made in a factory, then kind of why bother? And then I think also what happens in the factory has a lot to do with the kind of enabling the creative side of the house. So the back and forth between what is possible, pushing the art of what is possible to accommodate the art of what is needed. And so I think that's the relationship between those two.

Are you familiar with Richard Sheridan and Menlo Innovations, those guys out there at University of Michigan?

A little bit. Not as much as I should be.

Yeah. So they have a really cool take on you mentioned, sort of like they have team members with their title is oh, I hope I get this right, High tech anthropologist or something like that. And their job is literally to just. They're a software. Right. Mostly software producers. And so somebody will hire them to, you know, create some sort of software or application or whatever it might be. And so they'll send their, their high tech anthropologists out to where this product is going to be used or whatnot. One of my favorite stories was they were developing some app that was going to run on an iPad, more sort of in a construction field environment type thing. And so they got out there and they realized that everybody wore gloves. They're like, wait a minute, I got to hit the iPad. And just little things like that you don't think about until you go out and see how are people going to use my product. I feel like this whole idea of design thinking and just understanding how is your product or your service going to be used and impact the world is so important. And it's so often forgotten, isn't.

Is it is almost always forgotten. And yet there is a process for understanding that. I mean, I think the, the idea that you're going to get it right the first time is just. It literally never happens. I have worked on hundreds and hundreds of projects and the reason that we make prototypes is because we know they're going to fail, but we're going to learn a ton from them.

Yeah.

And we, you know, we often say fail early to succeed. Sooner. And there is nothing that, that can substitute for taking a prototype out into the field and showing to somebody, handing it to them and realizing, yeah, they can't use this because they've got gloves on. It's very silly. There's a good story, too, about the first defibrillators, the portable defibrillators. The instructions are very clear on what to do, but in the videos of people trying them out, there were a couple of points where they really, they, they couldn't figure out, like, what to do. It says, put these on the chest. And people were like, I don't know where to put them. And even though it kind of doesn't matter that much where you put them, there's a lot of tolerance to where you put them. It turns out that if you tell people exactly where to place them, they do it and they do it a lot faster. So you only learn that through trial and error, making prototypes and watching people. So, yeah, we get it wrong all the time, but we do it in order to kind of get better.

Yeah. A little while ago you talked about sort of that, the interplay between, say, manufacturing a good or a service versus, you know, designing it. So when you're thinking about designing something, how much should manufacturing or manufacturability, perhaps design for manufacturability, as we used to call it. At least you know how much of that come into play when you're, when you're in those early, you know, design, you know, processes.

Yeah. As you can imagine, I've thought about this a lot, and as a consultant, as a consultant at a product design company, what we want to hear from clients is go nuts. We, like, we don't, we don't want, we don't want to think inside the box. We don't care about, like, anything. And, and yet that's never or almost never true. I think of these extremes. I. There's a kind of an apocryphal story of Ikea where they would send their designers to the factories in Asia and say, you can design whatever you want, but it has to use the existing materials and machines that this factory has. So this beautiful lamp is a product of the constraints that were applied to it. And then I think of what it would be like if I went to a client of mine 10 years ago when all laptops were either kind of plasticky or stamped metal, and I said, you know, we're going to hog this out of billet aluminum. And like, they would just say, you're fired. And yet Apple is able to take billet aluminum and machine laptops out of it. So, you know, in the one sense, they're often. Are almost always constraints, and then in other cases, it can be sort of like the designers want and get whatever they want. That's pretty unusual, though.

Yeah. What's your. One of your most memorable design experiences, like maybe thinking prototypes for some cool product that you were working on. Can you think of any fun examples that you're allowed to share? I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, many of them are sort of top secret. But what I will say is that when I started ideo's office in Shanghai, both as a kind of a design hub for our work in Asia, but also because of its proximity to manufacturing, and we built this network of model makers, and we had agreed to a design project with a big company that makes vacuum cleaners. And we had shown them a concept that we never should have shown them because it was completely impractical, it was impossible to build. The client fell in love with it, and all of the model making came to Shanghai. So kind of gave us a Runway of financing for a few months. And that prototype, everything is machined. It wound up being a $30,000 or $40,000 prototype. The looks like works like prototypes. Got the motors, everything's supposed to work. Comes back to Palo Alto, the client is there when we turn it on for the first time, and everybody's very excited and turned it on. There's a bang and a puff of smoke, and it caught on fire, and we had to call the fire department to come in and put it out. So that was a. Right. We made a prototype. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't work.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. That's something else.

Sometimes you make prototypes to validate whether the idea is sound. And so it doesn't necessarily look like the final thing, but it behaves like the final thing. So I worked with a company, it was a telco, and we were trying to get a little bit more life out of landlines, which seems so antiquated now. This is about 10 or 12 years ago, and we built a tablet computer that did a bunch of kind of social things for families, help keep families organized and connected. And we built these 10 or 12 prototypes. Very expensive to build, as you might imagine, custom tablets. But we put them into people's hands, and the people who got them didn't want to let them go. There's kind of a man behind the curtain pulling levers to make it seem like it was working. But it worked so well that they. They were hugging them and they didn't want to let them go. So sometimes that validation is. You can get validation from a prototype of the idea that is really rewarding and really pointed in the right direction.

Yeah. Have you, I'm curious, do you know Eric Reese, the Lean Startup?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lean Startup.

Yeah. So. So, you know, obviously they're focusing sort of in the business side with their, you know, MVP as they call it, minimal viable product sort of thing from. But I'm wondering, is there any harmony between kind of like your thinking and some of the lean startup thinking? Is there?

Yeah, absolutely. I work a lot with early stage entrepreneurs and a few of my students have gone on to start companies that are in various stages. And the idea of the concept of minimal viable product, minimum viable product, is so useful. It's do what you need to do to learn what you need to learn. If you do more than that, you're not actually getting kind of benefit from it. There is. So. Yeah, and you can think of that as like the business equivalent of making a prototype. What's the least we can do to test an idea? And there is a kind of a. For every current, there's a counter current. There's also a current where people are saying, you know what we want to do the maximum viable product. We want to, we want to figure, we want to stuff this full of everything, all our vision, everything. We're not going to stop until it's done. That's not usually very successful because it's really expensive. It can take a really long time and at some point you have to be done. So I think what Eric Reese and the Lean Startup and those guys are doing is spot on. And they're doing it so you can fail early to succeed sooner. Let's get the thing out there and let's learn, learn, learn.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's flip it around. We've been talking about a lot of design thinking thing, but what can design thinkers learn from lean thinkers and maybe operational excellence?

Yeah, it's a difficult question. I think there's a certain amount of empathy that needs to happen between these two camps. The people who are coming up with ideas and the people who are implementing ideas. And I think I'm thinking of a client of mine in China. It was a big electronics manufacturer. It was the biggest electronics manufacturer in China and they had a very tortured product development process. We had been hired to design all of their TVs for instance. And then by the time it actually got to the factory and it got out into the market, they were Pretty crummy. And. And it was because there was sort of anger along every step of the chain from the design team. We'd hand it to the engineers, the engineers at hand to the manufacturer, the factory, the factory would, you know, make their own changes. No one was happy. And what we did the next year, when we designed the next model year, is that I was like, look, we're going to sit down, everyone in a room, and we're going to show you concepts, and we're going to hash them out, and we're going to figure out why we want to do it this way, and then we're all going to be on the same page. And in fact, that's what we did. The CEO was really clear. He didn't want to hire us to be management consultants. So we did management consulting without actually being management consultants. We brought everybody together and got a shared language and a shared vision of what this thing was supposed to be. And we kind of got rid of handoffs after that.

Very cool. I want to pivot now a little bit just to more education. I'm curious. We are experienced there at Stanford teaching, teaching this stuff, right? So we teach lean and design and design thinking, whatnot. A lot of it. You know, to really learn and practice something, you got to practice it. You got to go deliberately practice something, right? To deeply learn it, you can learn a theory out of a book or a video or a podcast or whatever it might be. But how do you go about it? How do you go about teaching? Teaching design to Orlean in an academics environment?

Learn everything from podcasts, Ron?

Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, to me, that's the great thing about teaching what I teach. I felt like I graduated from Stanford and I felt like I left not knowing how to do anything. I, you know, I had no context for the mathy, sort of difficult stuff that you learn in engineering school. And over the years, when I kind of figured out, it's like you learn engineering, but you don't learn how to be an engineer. And what I, when I came back to teach at Stanford, it was to give that context, to give some sort of like a practical reason for the things that you learn in engineering school. So for the class that I teach in the fall, every week I do a lecture, and then on Monday, and then Friday we go to a factory. And so it's almost one to one for every, you know, I'll do a lecture on injection molding, and then we go visit plastic on a great injection molder in the Bay Area. Here I will do a Lecture on stamping or foundry or, you know, some other kind of process. And then we go to a factory and it's. It goes from sort of, ooh, like I'm seeing this thing to ah, now I kind of get it. I'm getting the contact, like, why I have to learn this. If I design a part that has a bent piece of sheet metal, turns out I pretty much need to know how sheet metal works. You can't just read it in a book. And going to the factory gives students the kind of context that really they must have in order to be good engineers. So that's why I absolutely love going to the factories and giving context to these students.

Go to Gemba, right? Teaching them. I love it.

Exactly. I cannot tell you how often going to the Gemba comes up. I am doing a project right now on long term care and assisted living facilities. Very, very removed from the kinds of stuff that we've been talking about. And yet one of the best assisted living facilities has a CEO whose office is in the facility. He walks through, greets the residents. He knows who the staff are. He goes through the kitchen, he eats with them. He is going to the Gemba. And that's part, part of what makes him such a good CEO of this assisted living facility. Gemba comes up all the time.

I love it. I love it. What advice do you have for people listening that maybe they want to. Maybe they tinker in design or maybe they tinker and lean or whatever, but sort of bringing out the best of both. Did you have any practical advice or tips for folks out there?

Yeah, I have a few. One is to embrace failure, which I talked about before. Especially as we get older, we are less likely to put ourselves out there and experiment and try things. If you ask a kindergartner or a third grader to sing right there, no problem. They'll do whatever you want. Ask an adult to do that and there's no way. Ask a third grader to dance in class, no problem. You know, we don't do that as we get older. And so the things that we try, we're not going to be very good at and at the beginning, but that's normal and natural. And I kind of want people to just embrace being crummy at something. I am mediocre at very many things and I have embraced that. So that's one of them.

Got it. Do you? What about the second one?

I'd say one of the other principles is kaizen. Embracing kaizen. And that sort of goes along with being willing to Fail. The professor that I teach with in the fall, Professor Beach. Dave beach was my professor when I was an undergrad at Stanford, and that was a long time ago. And he's been teaching the Introduction to Product Realization. It's kind of the shop class where you learn how to run machines and things. And he's been doing that since probably the late 70s. And every year that I see Dave, he says, oh, this class, me 103, me 203. I've made a bunch of changes this year. It's going to be the best it's ever going to be. And he's been doing that every year for 40 years. And he's right. It's better every single year. I think the idea that you're going to get something right and stick with it, to me is just kind of. I just can't understand that. So even in the classes that I teach on my own, I'm changing them every single time I teach them. They're different, sometimes radically different, but always noticeably different. And I think they're getting better. I think they're like Professor Beach's class. It's getting better and better and better.

What makes people like professor beach, you said, or.

Yep. Professor Beach.

Like, what makes a gentleman like that, who's been at it for so long, like, what gives them the motivation, you think, to just keep going, you know, and keep getting better? Like, that's a. There's, like, intrinsic motivation deep inside that. That man, it sounds like. Right. Like, how do you. How does one get that? Or is that just a gift or just a. I don't know, something that you have? What do you think?

I think. Let's go back to your daughter. Yeah. And being interested and excited in something, I think leads you to engage with it, engage with materials in a way that makes you always want to know more and do more and be more. My first mentor at IDEO had been there. I think he was part of the original crew there. And he was cantankerous, best engineer there, really irascible. And he would get mad at our clients when they would change our designs. And it had left our hands. It was out of our hands. But he was so passionate about owning the decisions that we had made. They were made for the right reasons and all of that, that he couldn't. He just couldn't let go. And I think, you know, like professor beach, you know, it's. It is the kind of love of the material and your. Your sense of who you are is wrapped up in some of these things. So maybe like your daughter, that's a. That's actually a good place to be. I think you. You must. You must have that as well.

Probably. A little bit. Probably. Yeah. Yeah, well. And I feel like for people like yourself and professor beach, the love of the students. Right. And seeing people, seeing the light bulb go off, so to speak. Right. I mean, that's magical. Right. It's very addicting almost. Right. To see young people come in and see them flourish and then maybe in his case, probably see people he thought 20 years ago, you know, coming back in, like you, you know, and here you are. That's got to be. A tremendous amount of.

It is tremendously gratifying. There is an analog to that in the factory. When you go into a factory and teach a factory how to make this new thing, those light bulbs do go off. And I think the places that are so focused on repetition, kind of rote work, that light bulb goes out. But if you go to a factory where you're teaching how to do this new thing, the light bulbs go on. And as you do Kaizen, as you can bring new things in, as you rearrange markets go up and down, that light bulb burns brighter and brighter if you do it right. And that is incredibly gratifying. It is like teaching.

Yeah, for sure. Fantastic. Ah, Andy, this has been fun. Hey, if people want to connect with you, what's the best way?

Best way is probably through my stanford email address, aswitkestanford eduardo. Or you can go to my consulting website, codenamecollective.com.

Okay. Yeah, and we'll put that in the. In the show notes. Are you on LinkedIn? I guess as well.

I'm on LinkedIn, yeah. Who is not LinkedIn, right?

Exactly, exactly. All right, so this is episode 412. So just go to GembaPodcast.com, look for episode 412 and we'll get all the Andy's links. So, hey, thanks again, man, for coming on. And I'll keep sending you engineering questions as my daughter gets closer and closer.

Send her my way.

Out to California and go to Stanford. You know, you can teach her up.

It's not a bad place. I think she would probably like it.

So come on out. Exactly. All right, take care. Thanks, Andy.

Great talking to you, Ron. Thanks again.

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