In this Office Hours episode of our Creative Confidence Series, David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school, chats with IDEO U Dean Suzanne Gibbs Howard and answers questions from our community on design thinking, creativity, and leadership. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to this episode on our podcast, and check out their full conversation to hear more of David’s thoughts on the core abilities of the most successful design thinking practitioners.

SUZANNE GIBBS HOWARD: Let's start off with a few questions on trying to increase the influence of a small team doing work with design thinking and creativity.

DAVID KELLEY: This comes up more than anything else. You notice that design thinking is working in other places, or think it has promise, but you're afraid that you can't actually make it work in your organization, or that your organization is not going to be as receptive to it. And I think that's a super valid point of view. But the good news is we've seen a lot of success in it happening. It maybe takes a little longer than you'd hope, but the main idea is that you have to find a clever way to show the power of this kind of thinking that results in something that's measurable, believable, and contributes to the company or to the organization you're working at.

So how do you do an experiment that will show off what this is in essence? I remember a large consumer products company where we just started out by educating everybody. We would throw design thinking workshops, and employees could opt in. We started to attract the people who were somewhat interested or curious, and once they came to the workshop, then you have more advocates in the organization, and in some ways that's the goal.

Then we started doing small projects that people were willing to do with extra budget, or that a particularly enlightened leader would want to support. It's all around getting little brush fires going in the company. If you can get it going, it's liable to be successful, and then you can use that small success.

SUZANNE: And once you get a big success, that's the story that starts that snowball rolling, and it gets more people on board.

DAVID: Yeah, because people are competitive. If you're running a division of the company, and this other division's getting all the attention and press because they came up with this new-to-the-world thing, you're probably saying, "We're going to do that in our space as well." And so it does snowball.

SUZANNE: We have a question building on that from Roger: "Can you talk more about how success in design thinking permeates the entire culture when it starts in one area? How do you navigate the competitive side of things and move toward more collaborative working styles?"

DAVID: One of the tenets of design thinking and the way we do things is radical collaboration among people from different disciplines, different contexts, and stakeholders both inside and outside of the company. It's inherently an open process. If you really believe the diversity of who you're including is going to improve your output, then it's not so hard to include everybody if you really think that including them is going to make you more successful.

If you're in the business of trying to come up with something non-obvious or something new to the world, having different people from different backgrounds and different life experiences, and having that mashup of their experiences and their intuitions is going to more easily result in something new. It's just better for the process and the ability to innovate if it spreads to different stakeholders and different individuals.

SUZANNE: So if you want to turn people from a mindset of competition into collaboration, you should invite them into your creative and generative process?

DAVID: Yeah. If everybody's on the same team driving for the same direction, and the stakes are all aligned, then it's hard to be competitive. I'd think you would have a goal of including everybody you could possibly include because it's not possible that just the senior people or just the knowledgeable people are going to have the best ideas. You really want the mashup between the variety of different people and different points of view. So including them is in your own best interest. Being competitive is not in your own interest if that's the way your methodology works that you build on ideas of others.

“The way you bring anybody into any kind of collaboration is to value their input, make them a part of the process, and help them with other things that they're not as expert in.”
David Kelley

SUZANNE: Tom is asking, "How do you explain design thinking to a marketing person or somebody who's deeply immersed in more evaluative thinking?"

DAVID: The way you bring anybody into any kind of collaboration is to value their input, make them a part of the process, and help them with other things that they're not as expert in. When I started the d.school, it was very hard for the faculty to work together, because they weren't collaborative. But they really enjoyed and built quickly on it once we had a common goal of making fans of the people that we were trying to affect. Whatever discipline you’re in, if you can get down to the humanness of the situation, then people have a reason and a natural bias to join.

SUZANNE: Another question from Tabia: "What do you think is the best way to get people to really, truly, deeply buy in, not just be willing to try, but believe in design thinking as a methodology?"

DAVID: What we've seen is that people have self-interest, and I'm all for that. I think people should self-gratify. We have had examples where a company needed a shot of innovation, and somebody inside of the company started using design thinking methods and did something extraordinary in the company, and then they got promoted four or five times. That makes other people pay attention. I think that finding a way to make yourself more successful, which is really doable here, is the way to get people to buy in.

The methodology we use is called guided mastery. It's hard to jump from designing a small piece of something to doing something that's meaningful to the company in one fell swoop. That's not usual. It's really noticeable, as it turns out, when you do something that's done in this kind of human-centric way as opposed to a business or a technological way.

SUZANNE: One more question about design thinking from Yuri in Montreal: "Can you elaborate on design thinking being more of a mindset than a process?"

DAVID: It's both. A process is like what you learn in a cookbook. Initially, to get involved in design thinking and start to use it in your life and at work, you do need help. I see this kind of methodology as absolutely worthwhile because it really gets you going. But long term, you're going to have to make a lot of creative leaps and have a bunch of insights that are not obvious. Somebody can say, "Design thinking is not that big a deal because it still requires you to be creative." I agree. The ability to look at all the data, or look at all the interviews we've done, or look at all the kind of prototypes you've built, and to come to an insight out of that requires this creative leap. The only way to do that is to have a mindset that allows you to go fast and light to the right place. If you're following the steps, that works, but only to a point.

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