Seeing What Others Don't - Creative Leadership Stories from Design Thinking & Fusion

CJ Meadows: Most people think seeing is automatic and that we all see the same thing. But my work with creative leaders and radical innovators has taught me that no, that's not true. These kinds of high-value creators and business leaders see what others don't. So I'd like to share some stories with you from design thinking and lateral innovation or fusion. In fact, it's 10 ways of seeing that I'd like to share with you in ways that they see and we can as well to create more value. So first of all, what is design thinking? And I'll be telling some stories about design thinking. It's a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit and thinking processes. To see what people really need and want and design solutions for them that are technologically feasible and business viable to offer. What about fusion? What is that concept? Well, in nuclear fusion, two nuclei come together to form a new one, thereby releasing a great deal of energy into the world. Likewise, in business, science and technology, and the arts and humanities, we can combine two technologies, two industries, business models, social classes, organizational silos, two fields to create something new that releases a great deal of value into the world. So how do these people see in these value-creating ways? Well, first of all, it may sound a silly idea, but it's really good advice to see with your eyes, not your ears. What on earth do I mean? Well, in fact, it's one of my favorite design thinking stories. And there was a pharmaceutical company that discovered that oftentimes in a home The only person who can open a childproof bottle is a child, okay, and this is a bad thing. So they wanted to create new bottle designs. So being very marketing-centric, they created focus groups. They got a bunch of old people to come into focus groups, and they would hand them a new design and say, okay, please take this home, come back and tell us what you think. And they'd give them a new design, and folks would come back and say, "Yeah, fine, fine." They'd give another new design, okay, version 2, version 3, version 53, and they'd take them home, and there was one little old lady in particular who every time she came back, she'd say, "Oh yeah, yeah, it's fine." Okay, they got nowhere. And so in desperation, they hired some creative type folks, design thinkers, a design team. Now, designers don't haul people into their offices and focus groups. They go out and observe people where they live and work and see what their real problems are. So of course, the team went to her house. They knock on her door. She invites them into the living room. Everyone sits down. They all get cozy and they give her the new bottle design. Oh, thank you. And they say, oh ma'am, could, could we see you open the bottle? And she said, oh yeah, sure. And she left. And they said, um, uh, ma'am, where are you? I'm in the kitchen. 'Can we come in the kitchen too?' 'Oh yeah, yeah, sure.' And they watched her go over to the wall and flip the electric switch. 'Rrrrmmmm, eeeeee.' And she looks inside the bottle. She had no problem opening any bottle they gave her. Because she opened it with her ham slicer. And no one in the focus group leading the groups thought to say, "Oh, by the way, are you opening this with your ham slicer?" And she didn't think to tell them that, "Yeah, of course I open it with my ham slicer. It doesn't matter what you give me." So what's the lesson? The lesson is don't just listen to what people tell you. Because they don't know what to tell you and you don't know the questions to ask. You'll have to go and see them where they live and work. So my question for you is, when was the last time you got out of your office and spent time with clients and customers where they work and use your services? When will you? Second story for today is also from design thinking. Not only do design thinkers get out and see for themselves with their own eyes— well, where, where do they go? Okay, so they decide to go partly based on extremes. So if you have to look at the mainstream users, you're going to have to look at a lot of them, and you're you're only going to see subtle differences between them. But a really good idea is to look at the lows and the highs. Look at people who have a terrific amount of trouble with your products and services and really hate them so you can easily see the problems. Look at your super users who love your products and services, love you, and use them in innovative ways that you can share with other people. How about an example? Okay, let's do an example. So there was a kitchen tools company that made everything cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and there was just no way to go further along that route, and they were going to go bankrupt. In a last-ditch effort to save the company, they hired designers. Okay, a little late, but better late than never. So, the designers said, well, look, we want to see lows and highs, find the problems and opportunities, see them for real, and then do some good design work to offer things people really need and want. So, who has trouble with kitchen tools on the low end? Okay, every time I ask in a face-to-face group, at least somebody comes up and says, man, Usually there's a group of married women who pop up and say, "Husbands!" Okay, but wait a minute. On the high end, who are your expert kitchen tool users, 14, 15, 16 hours a day? Well, oftentimes that's a chef. Often they are men, and sometimes they're even married. Okay, so the team looked at chefs and bartenders and people who work in soup kitchens. All right, but we still haven't figured out the low end. All right, well, we just had an example of an elder lady with arthritis opening a bottle. Aha! Okay, so older people with arthritis might have trouble using kitchen tools. Folks who have various disabilities. Well, if you're not old, then you might be young. Children have trouble. With kitchen tools. So here's what they did. They watched a grandmother and a granddaughter making pizza. And when the little girl was trying to roll the pizza cutter that— with that round blade and that handle on the side, she couldn't do it because she didn't have enough strength in her wrist and her elbow. So what'd she do? She turned and— the handle on top and cut the pizza that way, which by the way is dangerous. Don't let your kids do that. Now, when they saw pizza chefs cutting pizza, they noticed another thing. They'll pull the pizza out of the oven, they take that round cutter and a handle and go bang, bang, bang to break up the crust of the pizza. And then to cut it, what do they do? They put the handle on top because 14, 15, 16 hours a day, they know it's very easy to do. So because they saw the same thing on both sides, the designers decided to put the handle of the pizza cutter where? Obviously on top. And so on the left-hand side of your screen, you're looking at a pizza cutter that is super comfortable and super easy to use, and by the way, stylish and dishwasher safe. The designers made a whole line of products that were super easy and super comfortable. What happened to the company? Everyone loved them. The company grew, and they became the envy of the rest of the industry. So, final note, um, why don't designers look at the mass market, who are the real most of the users of the product? Well, it's because you can learn so much more quickly and easily by looking at the lows and highs. If you've just put up an office building, how many people in a wheelchair do you need to see to know that there's a problem with your steps? Just one. It's a great way to learn. So my question for you today is, who are your lows and highs? And when will you seek them out? As a matter of fact, if you start looking for stuff, you'll notice it coming to you. Now, not only do designers look at lows and highs, we also look at analogies. Here's an example. There was a hospital emergency room where the doctors, nurses, and administrators wanted to get better. Okay, what is better for an emergency room? Well, the services have to be fast and they have to be right. It's got to be the right thing to do or somebody could die. So by analogy, where could you look way outside of hospital rooms to get some good ideas. They talked about it for a while and figured out, ah, Formula One racing. So they put the ER in charge— they put other doctors and nurses in charge for a day. And the doctors, the nurses, and the design team went to Formula One, sat right in front of the pit crew, and watched as the car patients rolled in. And the pit crew would scurry out, and they would do this, and they would do that. And people were constantly nudging each other saying, "Ooh, look at that. Did you see? That's a good idea. We don't do that. Why don't we do that? Let's do that." And they brought back so many good ideas to the emergency room, and they didn't stop there. They invited the design— the Pit Crew team to come to the hospital and said, "Well, here's what we do. How would you do it?" Many more lives were saved. And the business grew quite well. So, my question for you is, where could you go for good ideas way beyond your normal? When will you? Now, something that both design thinkers and fusioneers do is see with their hands. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. When my kids would go and play with everything, I kept telling them, you look with your eyes, not your fingers. And only after years of design thinking did I realize my kids were right and I was wrong. You see so much and learn so much when you prototype, experiment. And when you play and mess around with stuff. Now, there was a, there was a sports scientist, a really brilliant one named Dr. Kenneth Graham. He worked with the Australian Olympic team and in particular with Matt Mitchum. Now, Dr. Graham made a mathematical model to predict the scores that the judges would issue for— well, since Matt was in diving— for particular dives and routines. Now there were a couple of error terms, things he couldn't quite predict, and he couldn't quite figure out why. He was thinking about it and played around with it, and he discovered that the error terms were thus: judges would award higher scores than he expected when it was a hard dive. They also issued higher scores than expected at the end of a routine, a multi-dive routine. Now, since he's playing with it, he went to Matt and he said, hey, hey, hey, Matt, now I know everybody does their hardest dives first, because you're fresh and less likely to make a mistake. But what if you did your hardest dive at the end of the routine? Would you make extra marks because it was hard and extra marks because it was at the end of the routine? They tried it out. Matt earned the highest score in Olympic history. So there is some value in playing around with stuff. So big question: when was the last time you played with something out of curiosity and followed up what didn't make sense? Are you too wrapped up in day-to-day management to do that? Can you carve some time out of your day to play and mess around, recognizing that there is value in it. Will you? Now the next story is of someone who saw something really big. It's Arun Abhi. He co-founded IPAC Securities. With some friends of his, he saw big trends of globalization of the financial markets and products and services and deregulation of the Australian market in particular. He saw these two waves were going to crash together into a populace that was not educated to make choices about their own financial future. So who can you go to for advice? Well, of course there were financial advisors, but the business model at the time was that those advisors are paid a commission for the financial products and services they sell. That's a conflict of interest. They're not rewarded for taking care of the client, they're rewarded for selling. Aharon said this is really wrong. And his friends agreed with him, him, and they together created IPAC Securities, which crafted a totally new business model whereby clients would pay for independent financial advice and management geared towards managing assets for the benefit of the client, not a salesman. It took a while for that new business model to take root. Matter of fact, it took 10 years of struggling and building, but passionately sticking to their values and beliefs. Ultimately, it paid off. He and his partners sold IPAC to AXA for $180 million US dollars. At which time they had about 70,000 clients around the world and $15 billion under management. So they saw something big, took action, and stuck with it. The question then: what big trends will crash into your world? What will happen? What will you do? But do you have to see only big things? No. It can be very, very important to see small things. Bank of America hired a design team to make a particular thing for them. And so being, of course, a design team, based on our earlier story, you know, they're not just going to do what they're told and design something pretty. They've got to go out and find the needs and opportunities and desires. They've got to go out and see for themselves. So they said, hey, bank, this is great, but we need to go to the homes of your customers and non-customers and see how people manage their money. Not a problem. Off they went. They noticed two things in a lot of homes. First of all, Businessmen would come home wearing a suit. Well, what of course is the first thing they want to do? Get out of the damn suit. Very uncomfortable. So before you get out of the suit, you need to empty your pockets. So the guys would take all their change out and put them in jars. The unmarried ones, I think, do put, put the stuff in a drawer or on a tabletop, but if you're married, you'll learn to put it in a jar. Now, the design team looked at the jar in one home and thought, hmm, I wonder how much money is in that jar. And home after home, they saw more jars. And they thought, hmm, I wonder how much money is in jars all over the nation. Oh my goodness. They noticed another thing too. When people wrote checks to pay bills, and indeed people actually still do this, I know it's unbelievable, they would round up the amount owed to say the phone company. So if the phone company is asking for $94.87, a lot of people write a check for $95. It's easier to write the check, easier to do their bookkeeping, And if they miss a payment, they can always say, oh no, no, no, no, no, take the— please take off the penalty. I always overpay you. Fair enough. So the designers looked at this and said, hmm, wait a minute, there's a lot of little bits of change. They're going out of people's homes absolutely unnecessarily. How much is that if you add it up? Well, tying the two together, they came up with a new idea. They went back to Bank of America and said, "We don't want to make the thing you hired us to make. We want you to make the Keep the Change program." So with this new kind of bank account, people will sign up online, sign up to pay their bills automatically, The change up to the next dollar would be rounded up, and that change will go into the savings account of the customer. Sounds like a really small idea, right? It added up. 12 million new customers later, they had helped people save 3.1 $1.2 billion. Not bad for something small. So what small thing do your customers and clients do that could add up to something big? Now, it's important to see what's big. It's important to see what's small. Sometimes it's important to see what isn't there at all. Sorry if I sound like Dr. Seuss. Jack Cowan, an insurance salesman from Canada, went to Australia, and he noticed 50 people in a takeout queue for Chinese food. He was talking to people in the queue and found that, well, there was no other place to get takeaway, quick, fast food. So he thought about it and talked to his friends, talked them into lending him some money to bring the first KFC franchise to Australia. It worked quite well, thank you. Everybody loved the KFC that he built up, so he built up another one. And another one, and another one. Pretty soon he decided to diversify into burgers and did a deal with Burger King. That was the start of the Hungry Jack's brand. He also bought up pizza restaurants, but he thought, hey, what if, you know, you really should be able to order centrally and have pizzas go out from wherever the pizzas happen to be and you happen to be. Those restaurants were folded then into Domino's Pizza, and today he is the chairman of Domino's Pizza. Jack saw something that wasn't even there but could be there, probably should be there, and created billions of dollars worth of business that employ tens of thousands of people. Serve many thousands of customers, and resulted in a net worth for him over $1.7 billion. So my question for you is, what have you noticed that someone should do something about? Will you? Another person who shuts his eyes in order to see with his imagination is painter Paul Gauguin. Now, believe it or not, you can also see with your heart and your feet. Here's an example. Sister Cyril Mooney was a nun and school principal at the Loreto School in Calcutta. Part of the program that the students would go through is to do community service, and she had seen poor children nearby living under a bridge. So she, so she said to a student team, hey, go under the bridge and find out how many poor kids there are over there so we can design some programs for them. Great. So the students went under the bridge, interviewed the kids that they found there, came back and said, "Oh, Sister, Sister, there are no poor children under the bridge. They're all quite fat." Because they hadn't yet worked with poor children, they couldn't see that they had the advanced stages of malnutrition. In which the body swells. Sister said, "Okay, okay, you go and join the teaching program for the poor kids in the villages, okay? And off you go." 6 months later, the kids came back and said, "Oh, Sister, Sister, why do we take a bus to teach poor kids off in the village when there are poor kids living nearby right under a bridge?" And she said, "Oh, really?" "Yeah!" "Well, maybe you ought to design a program for them over there." "Yeah, we'll do that." And that's what they did. You'll never extend your reach until you have the heart to go out and do so. And you may not be able to see until you've started working on it already. As a matter of fact, Sister Cyril, the one thing, the one piece of advice she gives to business people is this: don't start whatever it is you want to do with your business plan and your strategy and your funding request before you even do thing one. Just do it. Get out there Do good. When people see the good that you're creating, resources will come. But just get started. And as the kids can tell you, you may have to start that journey in order to be able to see around the corner. Over the course of 35 years, Sister Cyril with her teachers and her students started program after program after program that ultimately changed the lives of 450,000 people. So what do you feel is a big opportunity, but you have no facts and you think you'll never get a budget to pursue it? What will you do? Will you just do it? Second to last story here. Not only do these amazing creative people see what's big, see what's small, see what's not there, heart, feet, and the rest, they see through a mental workshop window from, from mental diversity. Let me give you an example. Dr. Karen Stevenson, when she was studying her undergraduate, she learned art and quantum chemistry. And her friend said to her, "You're a— you're taking what? What kind of a job are you going to get with that?" And she said, "Well, hey, it's a liberal arts college. Can't I study what I want?" Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, fine, fine. Interestingly, in the art program, one of the tests they gave to the art students was to identify the artist and the year of a painting based on its brush strokes of part of a painting. And Karen was able to do this 100%. At first, with that first test, she said, "Oh, isn't that fantastic? Just got lucky, I guess." Following year, they give the test again with new paintings. 100%. She is a master recognizer of patterns, honed with her art education. Now, when she graduated, she didn't become a commercial artist. She actually did become a chemist. And she was on the mezzanine of the chemistry building one day, looked down and saw people moving in a pattern she recognized from molecules interacting in quantum chemistry. Oh my gosh, what a eureka moment, big eureka. She said, this is incredible, it's the same thing. Could there be a unified theory of interaction, whether it's a person, a chemical, or whatever. She was absolutely smitten with the idea, quit her job, went back to graduate school, and studied anthropology, mathematical modeling, computer programming, business consulting, Now, her advisor sat her down one day and said, "You know, Karen, you really need to focus." And she said, "What? I don't understand. This is insane. I am focused like a laser beam on one thing. I'm just borrowing from different disciplines to do it." And learn and borrow and create she did. She created some of the base mathematics that's used in social network modeling. She crafted a software program and algorithms to do social network modeling and made a company, NetForm, which was called by CIO Magazine one of the 100 most innovative firms in the world. She helps Merrill Lynch, do the analysis of their employee networks. Her work was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. She works with the Pentagon. She works in— she, she was with the AIDS studies when AIDS first came out, studying Ground Zero to understand the dispersal of the condition, a condition that had never existed before. Um, big data, security, cybersecurity, and she's still going and still making new discoveries. What would you create by combining very diverse parts of yourself and your interests? Are you diverse? Or would like to be? Final story: George Kolovos. George was around at the beginning of popularization of the internet, and he also had a friend who had a spa and beauty products business, and he noticed how harried and time-strapped her clients were, these professional women. And he thought the internet might offer great opportunities if we combine the internet and beauty products. So his was one of the first e-cosmetics companies in the world. He combined the technology people, the creatives, the business, and grew it. But it wasn't ultimately what he wanted it to be. It was a little early. So he did shut that one down. And later on, he saw great potential doing the same thing but with menu ordering. So for any of us who just this past week have ordered GrabFood, Food Panda, Deliveroo, or all the rest, He and his creative team got together and combined restaurant ordering from multiple restaurants over the internet and crafted a business model out of that. Um, George pulled together the creatives, the design team, the strategic vision, and so much more. Did it work? Yeah, you have them to thank for doing the groundwork in this industry. And MenuLog IPO'd for $850 million. Not bad. So he had taken vision and learning from one experience and did it again in a different context and better than he ever could have if he hadn't done the first one. So my question to you then is, What have you failed or succeeded and learned from? Frankly, it could be your next big success. So is seeing important? Do we see differently? I think we probably all agree that yes, we see differently. Is it important? Well, let's think about it. The first story was seeing with your eyes, not your ears, the pharmaceutical bottles. That project produced safety for millions of people because they got out and saw with their own eyes. Seeing with extremes as a design thinker in the kitchen tools company, made the company grow instead of going bankrupt. Seeing with analogies, you know, the hospital emergency room and Formula One, saved many lives and made a healthy business. When Kenneth Graham was seeing with his hands and playing around with models, the result was the highest score in Olympic history. Seeing what's big was the start of $180 million company and $15 billion under management in Australia. Seeing what's small at Bank of America led to 12 million new customers and $3.1 billion saved. Seeing what wasn't there but maybe should be there led to billions of dollars of business founded by Jack Cowen and $1.7 billion in personal net worth. Seeing with her heart and her feet, just do it, meant that 450,000 lives were changed by Sister Cyril and her colleagues. Seeing with a diverse mind, crafted in art and quantum chemistry, ultimately led to one of the 100 most innovative companies in the world according to CIO Magazine. And seeing and learning and working, trying out, then doing it again in a new context led to an $850 million IPO for MenuLog. So my big question for you is, what do you see? Now, You should note that none of these people did everything by themselves. You don't create billions of dollars worth of business by yourself. Do you have a friend to see it with? And do others help you see? Do you help them see? Thank you. For more stories of seeing and innovation, Feel free to run over to the multimedia book, Innovation Through Fusion, and come and visit us at SP Jain School of Global Management. Also have a look at my website for not only fusion, but design thinking stories as well. Thank you.