INBOUND 2016: Dr. Leon Segal - "Today is a Prototype for Tomorrow"

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Leon Siegel of Innovationship. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi to the people in the room next door. Thanks for joining us. How's the conference so far? Enjoying it. Give it a hand. So I'm here to talk about a creative and collaborative process called design thinking. The title is Today is a Prototype for Tomorrow. So I want to take a minute to just kind of reset your lenses of how you look at the world. Okay? So everybody in this room, just look to that wall, first of all, so you're not looking at me, but just everything you see was designed by someone. Okay? That white wall was designed by someone. The exit signs were the hinges on the doors, the doorknobs. You can look back here. The chairs you're sitting on, the clothes you're wearing, the laptops you're holding, the phones, the software in the laptops, everything was designed by someone. When designers look at the world, they see an opportunity to design it better. You go with a good designer. And I've had the great fortune to work with some of the world's greatest designers. You go with them to lunch. Half the lunch, you're talking to them. Half the lunch, they're busy inspecting the cutlery and the salt shaker and the cup and thinking in their minds how they would have designed it differently, better, worse, whatever, right? Everything is a prototype for the next thing. Today is a prototype for tomorrow. You are spending a day today here in inbound. Everything you do today you can learn from, you can take forward and maybe do differently tomorrow. That's the essence of it. So if you want, you can leave, but stay. There's more coming. Okay, I'll give you a brief biography of mine because I think it helps explain this whole thing of design thinking that I'm here to talk about. And you've heard a lot. It's funny because initially it says silicon Valley secret weapon. The bad news is it's not such a secret anymore, right? Everybody's talking about design thinking, used to be innovation. Now they're talking about design thinking, and in a year or two, it'll be something else that somebody will come up with. So this worked before I was born at some point, grew up, spent time. I was a pilot in the Air Force, spent time flying helicopters, and then worked as a consultant in the aviation industry, designing cockpits of helicopters. After a couple of years of doing that, I realized that I can become a big expert in a very small field. And that wasn't appealing to me. I also. Aviation was, as I said, was A great prototype for me for other things I could do. So I went to the University of Illinois, Champaign, urbana, got a PhD in cognitive psychology and human factors. From there I got a grant to do the research for my PhD at NASA in California. Designing cockpits for future aircraft and spacecraft, stuff like that. Talking now, this is early 90s, and myself and another very good friend from NASA, we had a company and we did some consulting work in the San Francisco Bay Area with companies that were just starting to understand this whole concept of designing for experience, innovation, et cetera. One of the companies I consulted with was a company called Ideo. Who's heard of Ideo? Great. My favorite company in the world for sure. So I worked, I left NASA, I sold my share in my company to my partner, joined ido, worked for four years in the headquarters in Palo Alto, then moved back to Tel Aviv. I'm originally from Israel and opened an IDO studio there and ran that for a few years and in 2012 returned to the Bay Area to open together with a few other ex idoers, a company called innovationship. And what we do is literally travel the world and teach design thinking because we think it's a great way to look at the world and be creative. And I hope that through what I share here, you'll understand why we love it so much. It really is. And on my business card and in our website, it says innovation made personal. And one of the reasons is that design thinking is a mindset. And like any other mindset, when you learn it, it doesn't stop at 5 o' clock when you leave your office or when you're not working anymore. So if you learn to be creative, you'll be creative in all your life, whether it's cooking or playing with your kids, or going shopping or going camping, whatever you do, you'll take that with you personally. Kind of on a personal side. I'm an amateur musician. I play soprano saxophone. I have a family, two boys and a wonderful wife. These are a few clients I've worked with over the years. The reason the logos are up there are primarily to show the diversity. It's like we say we're content, agnostic, I'd work with anyone. I've done snack food for China and things for BMW and motorcycles for Piaggio and remote controls for Microsoft and band aids for 3M. It's like I really. Projects come and go and products come and go. What's interesting are people and their creative desire to express themselves. That's the most fun part of my job. So let's start with innovation. What's innovation? It's a lot like a Rorschach test. It's whatever you think it is. There's some agreement on it, and I'll show that in a minute. But it's interesting that a buzzword like that and most of the projects we get are people hiring us because they don't have enough innovation in their company. One of the most interesting things is on that first phone call to say, really, what does innovation mean to you? And you hear stories that are amazing. Again, I love people, so it's always fascinating to open that one up. So, as I said, it's really up to you to interpret. But there are a few things we can agree on. Okay, for me, these are the three main factors that have to be addressed when we. We talk about innovation. It has to be feasible, something you can do, and it has to be viable in the business sense. So some artists create huge sculptures that obviously they're feasible. It takes them years to put them together. They're also desirable because people go to look at them. It's not a great business proposition. It's not something you can do a lot of. It's not something you can sustain. It's not something you can really form a company around. Okay, so what we want to do is constantly ask ourselves, you know, can we do it? Is it something we can really do? Can we benefit from doing it? And in a sense, can we continue doing it? Can we build a business around it? Because doing it once is not enough. If you're talking about innovation in the industrial kind of business sense, and does it fill a need? Is it really something that people need? Is it something that is desirable because it's beautiful? Philippe Stark, the designer, has all these amazing kitchen gadgets. This spider looking like lemon squeezer and stuff. It's desirable. It doesn't necessarily fill a huge need because other lemon squeezers work much better, but it's desirable. So he makes them and he sells them. So desirable opens up, of course, a whole conversation about emotions, what people want, what people desire. I also. I want to stop for a minute because I was listening to some podcasts yesterday, and there's this obsession we have as a culture in innovation. And it's funny, because I'm here, my company's called Innovation Ship, and I sell innovation. That's my bread and butter. But there's something about not everything has to be changed, and some things work well and some things can be maintained and enhanced. But this obsession we have with innovation is something I'd kind of raise a yellow flag about and say, let's make sure we're innovating in things we really need to innovate. And not just doing it for the sake of appearing in Wired magazine or getting some Steve Jobs type of thing. It's more complex than that. If we step back and say, where do innovations come from? One obvious place is luck and luck. I have a friend who said to me, if you get to choose in life, you want to be smart or lucky, I hope you're smart enough to ask to be lucky. Luck is great. And I've been very lucky. And I think we're all just lucky. If we're sitting here in this room, we're all fortunate and gratitude is in order. Right. Luck is a great place where many innovative, revolutionary products came out. For example, those who know the story of the post it note. So 3M are in the business of making adhesives that stick. And they tried an adhesive that would stick really well and they ended up with some adhesive that wouldn't really stick well to anything. And they actually canned that project and shipped it off to the warehouse somewhere. They had some sheets of paper at the time, all they had was yellow paper to prototype it on. So they just shipped it off and kept it in a warehouse somewhere. And after a few years of this lying in the warehouse, one of the people who was on the team was an avid, I don't know if that's the right word, but used to go to church every Sunday and had a hymn book and he had these little pieces of paper that he kept in the hymn book to mark all the hymns that you had to turn the page to. Every time he opened it, the paper would fall out. And after a few years, he remembered that they did this experiment that didn't quite work out and maybe he could take. So he ran to the warehouse, he got scissors, he cut these sheets of paper to these little yellow strips and he stuck them in the hymn book and they didn't fall out. That's how we got yellow post its. And you know, as kind of design thinkers and innovators and stuff, that's our kind of weapon of choice, right? It's that and a Sharpie pen. And I'm in business, I can go into any workshop. So luck is great and I wish you all to be as lucky as possible forever. But you cannot count on luck. Right? The next thing is vision. We all know stories of people with vision. We're more familiar with the people from our western culture. Who made the media, etc. From Edison through Walt Disney and Steve and Elon Musk. Vision is great. And these people have not only the vision, but also the ability to engage groups of people to make that vision come true. And that is a wonderful, amazing, unique, and very, very rare capability. Right? So if you are a visionary at that scale, or if you happen to be lucky enough to be recruited by someone like that, or if you listen to some of the stories, maybe unlucky to be recruited by some of these crazy people, you are set. But even these people, one of the things they bring with them in the vision, in the idea, is a process. Okay? And a process. And I say and a mindset, because there is no process without mindset. I love this. There's a quote, Peter Drucker said, culture eats strategy for lunch. You can have the greatest process in place. The CEO can come in and bring Deloitte McKinsey and all these guys and, you know, devise this amazing thing. If the culture, if the mindset isn't there, it's not going to work. You have to have a process. Everybody has to have a process. And the process is the one thing you can count on because you can be lucky sometimes and you can have a visionary person and they can be wrong sometimes. You have to have a process. A process is a way for you to do. It's a way for you to prototype things and learn from your own actions. That's the only way to grow. Okay, so this is one illustration of what a design thinking process could look like. There are many different ways. If you go Google design thinking, go images, design thinking, process images. There's all these hexagons and circles and stuff. It's pretty challenging to decide which one you like. This is one where we've used. We're changing. I won't go into process now just because there's other stuff I want to touch on. But the whole point is, have a process, know your process, change it. If it doesn't work for you, enhance it where it does work for you. But make sure you know your process and make sure there's a mindset that supports it. Okay, so if we go back to this innovation chart that I showed earlier. What's unique for design thinking is that the process starts here with people, and the process ends with people. It's all about being inspired by going out into the world and seeing what people need, what people want, how people do things, how people don't do things, all of that. Learn from people, design for them, come Full circle around, give them what you're designing and producing and learn from them what worked and what didn't work. Your process has to be iterative in that sense of starting with people, coming back to people and continuing. And that will fuel and inspire you to continue doing your work. Okay, Empathy, creativity, collaboration. These are the three pillars that design thinking stands on. Okay, I will go into each one of them in a bit more detail towards the end, but I'll just say that creativity is on the personal level. How might we take an entire organization from the person standing outside the door parking your car? Maybe in some organizations they do that to the receptionist and all the way up to the CEO. How can we make everybody more creative? And it's not easy because in our culture, after the age of three or four, creativity starts being suppressed. The educational system is all about people, people, little people, children having the right answers, not asking too many questions, not getting up and dancing because they feel like it. And you take a three, four year old kid, they're all dancers, painters, musicians, poets, actors, they do everything. And then by the time you're seven or eight or nine, your school teachers have made a point of saying, sit down, relax, stop jumping around, you're not that, you're not that, et cetera. So creativity is a key ingredient to loosen up, give people that creative confidence. Collaboration is another key one. Of course, we all work in organizations, and today with the products being what they are, you have to have a team, you have to work in a team. And being creative in a team context is an art in and of itself. Because many times creativity is linked to ego. And once you get ego playing in your team performance is going to drop. You're not going to be as creative as you could be. So collaboration is another one. And empathy is the place of learning from people, but also knowing how to listen to your organization, to your teammates, to your stakeholders, to your clients, to your children and spouse, all of that. The empathy part is really important. So some kind of bullet points to just highlight what this mindset brings with it. Okay, one, I said avoid quick solutions. We love quick solutions. We get gold stars at school if we're the first one to raise our hand and give the right answer. Right. It's all about solving. And you see people trained don't to offend anyone. But many people who come out of business school, engineers too. I have to say, people are used. When a client comes, they expect you to immediately give them a solution. And somewhere as a consultant, many consultants feel that their job is don't worry, I've got the solution. No. Okay. Learn. Avoid quick solutions. It's really, in a sense, falling in love with a problem is what we need to do. Really embracing the challenge. Focus on people. I've mentioned that a few times. Find diverse inspiration. This comes back to the whole prototype notion. The world is full of prototypes for us to learn from. What are you going to be inspired by? A visit to the zoo? A flight in Virgin Airlines? A program you saw on tv? What's going to inspire you to do your next thing? The world is a gold mine for inspiration. Right? Everything is a prototype. Mention that. Remember that everything is a prototype for you to play with. Think by doing, build the next prototype. You can think, of course, but the best way to actually think is by doing. Build something simple, cheap, quick and iterate, iterate, iterate. As many times as you can do it, you will do it better. There's a rich history to design thinking, started in the 40s and 50s by Charles Osborne, who was an advertising person. There's a big advertising firm called bbdo. O is the O from Osborne. He was really interested in how people are creative. He wrote books about it. He coined the term brainstorming. He did a lot of work and that kind of got more or less abducted by the design world, graphic design, industrial designers, et cetera, and then reemerged. What Ido did a great job with in the 90s is taking and defining, designing and sharing the process. And people said to us at the time, they said, you're crazy. You working with your clients, you give them your process, they'll never come back. The opposite is true. If you share your process with your clients, A, they become much better clients, and B, they'll come back because they realize how much they don't know. So there was ido. Now there's a D school at Stanford. What's nice about the D school is you don't actually get at Stanford for a design thinking diploma. The D school does not give out diplomas. It's a place for people from all departments to come in and learn the mindset. So you can get biotech and law school and medical school and art school and business school. Everybody comes into the D school to learn this process of creativity, collaboration and empathy. There's a bunch of books out again. Google design thinking. I want to focus now on two steps in the design thinking process that I think are just interesting and fun. Okay, so the first one will be defining the challenge. This is key. When somebody comes and asks you a question, help Me build the next driverless car. Okay. A question like that, defining the challenge itself is really key. And I can illustrate this by a pretty bad joke that keeps on being repeated. So I will share it with you. Don't expect too much laughter. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? I got a one right there. What's that? If it really, really wants to change, that's how many therapists it takes. Yeah, there's the one about the two psychiatrists. I'll tell it to you later. So the minute you say, how many designers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is, does it have to be a light bulb? Okay, thank you. That's exactly the amount of laughter this gets every time. But the thing is, the problem is darkness. The problem isn't the light bulb. And so if you step back, because if you start thinking light bulb, you're thinking distribution, infrastructure, electricity, the whole thing. Right. If you step back and you say, okay, how do we light this darkness? It opens up opportunities for many more interesting solutions to emerge. One of them that is one of my favorite is this designer called Ilak Diaz from the Philippines. He's got a project called Liter of Light. You take a liter bottle of Pepsi or Coke or something like that, fill it with water, put some bleach in it so it doesn't create any algae or anything. This goes in shantytowns, favelas. All the places where they don't have light, even during the day, don't have electricity. Most of them don't have running water. You drill a small round hole in the roof, you put this bottle halfway in, and the refracted sunlight will give you an equivalent of about a 60 watt lamp. And they're using it now in Southeast Asia, Africa and somewhat. It started also in South America in private homes. This is a warehouse. Now, these, again, are places that during the day, didn't have any light. People would have to go out to read or do anything or burn fires inside these little tin shacks and breathe in the fumes and all of that. So this is, again, if you say, and one of the things, we kind of train our clients that whenever they come with a quick solution, we say, it's like a code. We say, does it have to be a light bulb? Does it have to be a driverless car? What's the problem? So that place of defining the problem is key because that will shape what you end up with. This is another great example for those of you who know it. God bless you. Those who don't I'm going to tell it to you because I love this story. Okay, so this is an engineer called Abraham Wald, who, during the Second World War, he was a mathematician at mit. He was hired by the Air Force or recruited by The Air Force, U.S. air Force to help protect the airplanes. Airplanes. Tens of thousands of airplanes were shot down in the Second World War. Airplanes get shot down because you cannot armor an entire airplane because then it's a tank. It won't take off. Right. Weight is critical. So you really have to decide where you protect your airplane. So Abraham Wald goes South Pacific, first day on base, he goes. He grabs a soldier and he says. He gives him this chart without the red dots. And he says, I want you to stand at the end of the Runway, and every plane of ours that lands, I want you to mark with a red pen where the bullet holes are. So a couple of weeks later, soldier shows up, very proud. Mr. Wald. Mr. Wald. This is it. These are the places where we're being hit. We're being hit here and here and here and here. Should we arm all of them? And Abraham Wald looks at him and says, you don't understand. These are the planes that came back so we survive all these bullet holes. We need to be looking at the places where there are no bullet holes, because given that people are firing up at the sky, when we get hit in these other places, that's when our planes fall. So he took. It takes a second to think about it, but it's such a beautiful flip, right? And that's something I want to invite you to do. And I said the words earlier. Fall in love with a problem. Take time to think of the challenge you have. Let's design an app to blah, blah, blah. Let's build a car to this and that. Let's do a marketing campaign that will do this, this, this and that. Stop for a minute and say, does it have to be a light bulb? Right? So that's the defining is a key thing that will shape your entire innovation and creative process. The way you think about it. The other thing about design thinking is that it really. And this happened in the 90s, and it was amazing to be there. While it happened in the Valley, it was like people stopped talking about technology and started talking about experience. It was all about. And designers have said this, 50s, 60s, Bauhaus, wherever you want to go, study design. Things are excuses for experience. We're designing experiences. And the props are just props. They come and go. Today I'm using this, tomorrow I'LL be using another remote control. It will give me another experience. But this is just a prop and unfortunately, probably not a recyclable one. So the shift from things to experience. Apple came out with a Newton. It was about technology. It was about Steve Jobs and his team demonstrating to the world, look what we can do with technology. It didn't work that great. Didn't catch on later. Out came the Palm. The Palm was something that was born out of identifying a need, some need to bridge the digital with the analog, the atoms with the bits. Okay? When the Palm came out, it was very successful, and it was still at the level of a gadget. It was born out of the utility it gave people. One of the amazing things is people learned, changed their handwriting to use this thing. For those of you old enough to remember, there was this graffiti thing. And at the time, there was a big argument. People never, oh, handwriting is such a personal thing. You know, nobody will change it. People did. Where it jumped up a level was when it went to the Palm 5. When the Palm 5 came out. And I was lucky to be on the team that designed the Palm V. The day it came out, all the newspapers said that Palm has made a huge mistake that's going to sink the company. Because this device had the same memory, the same processor, in fact, smaller memory, same battery, same everything. Technologically, it was identical to the palm 3X. It was thinner, it was made of a different material, and it was designed solely to change the user experience. And what happened with this product is it was the first PDA personal digital assistant that cracked open the world of female consumers. Women started buying the Palm 5, and the Palm 5 became the leading product for Palm. That's actually what put Palm on the map. And their value exceeded threecom's value. Threecom was their mother company. There's more to Palm, and those who know the story know, but this was the first time there was a real focus on experience. But there are more examples of this. You know, Diamond Rio, there were all these basically digital Walkman that came out into the market, and they all looked like a memory unit with some LCD on it. And people would go, and you'd hook it up to your computer and you'd actually be using it as an external drive with a headphone jack, and that's it. That was technology. But when you look at experience, this is experience. Itunes came out two years before the first ipod came out. It was free software. It was Steve Jobs way to say, I know you all love music, and I know you all love Entertainment. And I know you're all handling lots of files now that we're in a digital world, let me give you a great user experience of handling your digital entertainment. And a couple of years later he came out and said, okay, here's a device for you to jump in there. Okay? So this is another example of moving from technology to an experience function. MRI machine. GE great machine, Amazing performance. Children were horrified going through it. And Doug Dietz, one of the engineers, went to the D school at Stanford, understood about empathy and decided that he wants to do something about the fact that children were. 80% of children had some kind of really terrible experience going through it. It delayed people moving through it took more staff members and parents and stuff to be involved in that. And he went back and he said, do we need to design a new machine for children? And he ended up saying, no, it's about the experience. And this is what GE does now. They have these stickers and you tell stories. You tell the kids stories in the meetings before you say, you know you're going to go on a big adventure on a pirate ship. Would you like to go on a pirate ship? And the kid says, yeah. And you find that after going through this thing, you have to lie very quietly so the pirates don't catch you. You just build on that story. Through putting stickers on these machines, GE have cut down from 80% to 30, 30% the failed kind of pass throughs of MRIs for young children, it's all about experience. Starbucks started selling coffee beans until Howard Schultz went to Europe and realized that coffee is not a bean. Coffee is an experience. And now we have Starbucks everywhere. It's the experience of stopping somewhere in the middle of the day. It's the experience of leaving your office so you have some quiet. For some people it's the experience of leaving home so they have some quiet. Whatever it is, it's the experience. So I'd like you to look around now and from now on, every moment you are awake and see that everything is a prototype. Okay, and what can you learn from? You can many times, of course, if you're in a company, you make your own prototypes in order to inspire your ongoing creative. So every product you make is a prototype for the next one. When Steve Jobs showed the first iPhone, he already knew iPhone 2 and 3 in the pipeline. This was a prototype for him to see how would people react to this so he can design the next one. Right? So creativity is on the personal level, right? Be creative, encourage others to be creative. Have the courage to Be creative, allow others to be creative. And there is really no failure if what you're doing is learning from your creativity. Collaboration is at the level of the organization. Learn to collaborate while you're creative. Learn to make the most of the creativity you have and the creativity you kind of unleash by starting to do some of these things. And finally, empathy. And I can't believe that this is the one thing that is not showing up there due to contrast. And it's there, but you can't see it. Am I right? Oh, it's there. Good. Empathy, inspiration and impact. So the one part is really using people as your inspiration for creativity. What do people want? What do people need? What do people say? Okay, what do people do? All of that inspires you. But also look at what impact you're making on people. How do they use your product? How do they use other products? And who are your users? Is your user the person who buys your software and puts it on their phone? Maybe their child is using that phone and they're using that. Who else? Who are your users? And think big. We're talking about big in the sense of. Think of the planet we're living in and what impact we're having on people that we're not designing for, but will end up having to recycle our product, dig it up from some landfill somewhere in a hundred years. Our impact is huge. So keep that in mind, too. Empathy, not only for us and our business, but for our customers and everybody else that surrounds us. Thank you.