Full transcription:
Chris: This morning, I thought that design thinking is, very well, is to think about the large population, and how do we design something for a large population that does, hopefully, something great for them.
David: An extraordinary, something that’s meaningful to that group.
Chris: And I thought it was interesting this morning, as I was thinking about what we're up to is just you start to limit, you start to narrow how many people you're designing for, but ultimately down to the individual. And I think the question we're after is, if that's possible, if that's a good idea, if design thinking applies there, so we came up with some questions, but I'd love to just get your initial hunch reaction.
David: And the question is, my reaction to the design thinking for the individual and why does it make sense? So, first, you have to understand that design thinking is like my religion. So I think it applies to everything and it would interest me that design thinking, you smear it on this, and it's gonna be having an epiphany, right? But after making that disclosure, no. I really think that design thinking is a way of trying to uncover what's meaningful for people. I mean, if you can't talk to us 15 seconds by design thinking before we start talking about empathy for people, and you can, you can be as altruistic in that, what we mean is that sometimes, commercially, we're trying to find a big market, or we're trying to please a market that's well-heeled, so they can afford to buy or that's the top of the kind of business application of design thinking. But I, of course, think it all goes all the way down to the individual who's looking at how to have a more enjoyable life, or, or someone who's trying to have self-efficacy. Bandura, a big psychologist in this theory of self-efficacy, really enchanted me, especially since I discovered it after we started talking about Creative Confidence. Funny thing, but, if you can get to the point where you have a sense of kind of what the world's about, and that you can accomplish what you set out to do somewhere, to me, happiness is somewhere in there. It's not in the I'm singing zippity doo das dancing around all the time eating ice cream. So if you take that kind of direction, then I do believe that design thinking, prototyping, empathy, and collaborating with others leads directly to self-efficacy or creative confidence. So that's what gives me the belief that design thinking is beneficial to the individual. I totally believe that it leads to creative confidence.
Chris: Right. The main question that we have for you is for yourself, have you done that either consciously or subconsciously? Have you applied the tools of design thinking to your own life?
David: Yeah, absolutely. It's hard because as an old man, you're breaking a lot of habits to get to a new place, you have to break habits. One of the things about design thinking is, this open-minded, discovering non-obvious things, the thing that makes it so great, commercially, is it that we discover kind of non-obvious needs, and once you have a non-obvious need, you're only one step away from a successful product direction, or practice or point of view. And so I really think that you are doing that, but you have to break habits as an individual. That's the thing - can your understanding, can whatever techniques you use in design thinking, is it possible that those will break your existing habits? Because the way we practice it is not as cerebral as some people might think, but it is pretty cerebral, like what are the steps and how to go about it? The way it happens in our first step is complete immersion, which is not cerebral, that's like jumping right in. But that's like saying, you can be rich just get a million dollars or you can exercise just go over there and run on that treadmill, right? I mean, it's like, there's no snappy answer here. So I believe that the main tenets of design thinking around, a bias towards action and experimentation can lead because I think what I've seen in my own life, that's what we're really talking about, is that when I experiment every once in a while, I discover something that resonates with me, and then I'll continue to put that in my life, right? I don't like exercising very much. But, I play touch football with my friends in the park and I knock myself out and I could do that for hour after hour. So I discover through trying many different approaches to exercise, I find that I'm the kind of guy who has to play a team sport, I'm not an individual person. I've been known to be the ringleader of several things. And so I can start my Football League, I can start my morning walk with friends, I can use my skills to do that. But until I got that, until I had that epiphany that I'm not an individual exerciser. And I don't know that I would get in there if I hadn't had this kind of mind mapping, experimentation started little something, oversee here and have low importance. And just try 10 things of low importance and see if, if one of those doesn't jump to importance. Think the most of the people that I know who are trying are trying for something really important. They make one thing really important. And then if it fails, it's a problem. And we're not like that design thinkers at all. We don't know, we don't have any allegiance to any idea until it becomes emotional, only ours, right. And so lots of ideas, rather than an individual plan approach seems to be the best thing about design thinking for, for personal life change, right?
Tracy: So what we're hoping our audiences are people who don't have a background in design thinking at all. And what we've noticed is that when we talk to people about it, who don't know IDEO or whatever, is that it does seem very cerebral. So could you explain to the audience sort of what design thinking means? On a very basic level?
David: Yeah, I'd be glad to do that. On some level, I think that you just want to stay away from the word design thinking in this particular realm. You want to stay with empathy and happiness and emotional feelings, and what's blocking your creativity and stuff like that. And so, the nice thing about it isn't, I've tried to do that a few times, the nice thing about that is, once you won somebody over, then there's this huge depth of kind of literature in this, I think the best thing that can happen is if you don't bring up the word design thinking, and you get people going in this kind of guided mastery, where they have a little bit of success and then they have the energy to get through the design thinking literature and the design thinking hurdle, or whatever it is to do that. And so if you can get them going in the right direction, then I think that the design thinking thing is a backup that will just keep them going. It was the way for me with the research of Bandura. I brought him up already. Whereas I'm doing my thing, and then I discovered Bandura and now there's this scientist who’s saying, written, which sounds like the same thing to me. And now I can go deeper into something I already care about, I would have been totally unable to read Bandura’s papers before knowing the kind of connection to the stuff that I'm passionate about. So I think that the tenets of design thinking, I don't know you can present it as a design thinking and do a great job of making it endearing. And then they'll ignore that design thinking word probably, as they said the word certainly works for us in business and in school, right? Because it was the words design thinking moving away from design actually cracked the code, to design being a way of thinking rather than design being just something to do with your hands. So I'm into that. But anyway, I think the tenets of design thinking that play regardless of what you call them, are really this notion of bias towards action. I think so many people plan, they draw out their stuff they're going to do when they talk to other people and this planning thing is wrongheaded, even if you're doing with other people, which a lot of times they're not, they're doing it by themselves, they're making a list and they're on a plane ride home, and the writing, all the things are going to change about their life. And by the way, I did that, when I get cancer, I was making all kinds of deals with God, what I was going to do that would change my life and you just don't do it. I mean that's what the psychologists were telling me, but they did say that if you put kind of one stake in the ground and told all your friends, you were going to do that you would do one thing, but you weren't going to be a different person even faced with a terminal disease. That's how strong our habits are. So the only chance you have of changing those habits is to get something that resonates, that feels good, that you get encouragement from your friends. That's unlikely to happen sitting around making lists or planning, it's just that cathartic moment, that extraordinary feeling that makes you do something different, isn't going to happen planning. So, the main tenet of design thinking is this bias towards action where if you're interested in something just have the guts to lower your fear of being judged, and just jump right in, whether it's singing karaoke, or whether it's joining the Sierra Club and going for a hike. I mean, you just have to get over that line. So now we're to the point of it, I don't know how to do the motivational part of that. I mean, now we're to like Tony Robbins, how do you know, how do you jump into it, but we don't know whether the way we tell the story or whatever because we have a captive audience or people are paying money, or I don't know what it is. But we have a huge track record of being able to convince people to jump in. And then they provide the energy after that. Because once you're there, once you're out there among people, once you're out there among school kids, watching kids have lunch, I mean, the energy, if you're trying to redesign lunch, the energy is just overwhelming. And you, as a human, build that empathy. It's so fun to watch engineers in particular because that's mostly what I used to teach exclusively. And they're not known for their extraversion. And so to get them out and actually meet people, and have those people show interest in their ideas. It's more overwhelming for them than it is for a good salesperson who's used to talking to people and having them react. So I really think that design thinking’s main tenet is this - Lowering that fear of being judged somehow, and just jumping in, and then it kind of picks up momentum, snowballs. We're holding their hands in the case of students, and in the case of clients at IDEO, but, it does snowball pretty easily. It's not as hard as I envisioned when I first started the d. school, if you get them out there.
Chris: Yeah, makes me wonder. I think what's been irritating me and Tracy when it comes up is if it starts to feel like life coaching, was really like self-helpy. And one of the ways around that, that I think is in line with design thinking is design thinking naturally has this optimism bias and so one of the things I've been thinking about is, well, let's not apply it to what people already self identify as their problems, but rather, the things they always wanted to try or just like, look to these. And it might be that some of those problems are resolved through that. And it's less about, let's take a problem and apply these new tools.
David: I mean, it's really clear that you have to go somewhere. This stuff you've been thinking about and making lists about for the last 10 years is so cliched and so worked over in your brain, right? That it won't create the spark. Yeah, one of the reasons that I like Mind Mapping so much is Mind Mapping forces you to keep going further than your brain has been before. By asking yourself why I would like to exercise and pretty soon you're out there and you're halfway to the actual root cause, Why am I torturing myself with this wish, and what's in it for me? I mean that at the umbrella kind of level. So I really think that design thinking has that to offer over self-help if you can really get people to, to get at what's really meaningful to them, but you have to push, and they have to push themselves out. We don't do anything other than well, I think what as I was saying before, but I think what we do is help take away the blocks. We don't add creativity. I mean, there's a misnomer. We don't teach creativity, we don't, we don't make people any more creative than they always were. But as you remove those blocks, you see it all the time, and their eyes sparkle, and they get really excited when they have jumped off that bridge and a bungee cord equivalent. And they always wanted to, and once they do that, it's you know. I told the story before, but I remember very well as my young daughter who was afraid of the slide at the park because it was way too tall. It was way too tall. I'm not sure I was going to climb up there anyway, it was way too tall. And so when she saw the other kids do it, being there so many times and seeing other kids do it, there's something about, you start to self identify, like, I could do that, that girl did it right, I could do it. And then, for the first time, she did it, and then after she did it once, it was dark and late and getting cold and I want to go home, and she's still going on the slide because it's that way about everything? They all have that, the metaphor, that slide, we got that. And it's hard, you got to muster something to get to the top. So my problem is the immersion in design thinking, if I can get somebody to have an immersive experience here, where I do something we got, I mean, nine times out of 10, we got him. But the problem is, we're not hitting that many people, right? I mean, in the scope of the world, right? So in the attempt to write the book or saying, can you write a book, I'm not sure that reading a book is going to do this. Because I know an immersive experience is where it's at, but I don't know that reading a book has a lot of impacts, we'll see. But anyway, this thing I'm most excited, of course, is this thing where we actually hold people's hand and get them over that fear of snakes or karaoke, or whatever it is. They really go, yeah, it's just like a kid in grade school. Another is the pet of the piano teacher and the piano teacher shows a lot of interest and, and encouraging that kid is going to play the piano probably for life compared to this kid who's somebody says to him, that sounds terrible. He’s probably not gonna stick with lessons for more than a couple of months. It’ll be just kind of duty.
Tracy: So when you were talking about when you're going through your cancer, and you said that you kind of made all these agreements with God and lists of things you're going to change about yourself? What were some of those things? And how did you approach it at that moment?
David: Well, I can't even remember, but they were old, I was gonna spend more time on my classes, spend more time with my daughter, being nicer to my mother, I don't know, whatever it is. But I had this psychologist or psychiatrist, named Dr. Taylor, and he is a Stanford guy. And he did something I thought was really interesting, which helped me a lot, which was this notion of keeping track of what's fun. I was all about, how am I going to seriously be a better human in the kind of a moral sense. That's why I said God, it's in a moral sense. And he was more down the path of you're going to be happier if you just self gratify. Right, and that's not me naturally. I'm naturally trying to make sure everybody else's happy, right? I mean, that helps with leadership, but it doesn't help with having a good time. Anyway, so he did this thing with me, which is really interesting, which was you have everything that's on your calendar that you've done that day. And at the end of the day, he wants you to rate it zero to 10, what day it was, and then he's a scientist, right? So and then you have this data, you can go back and say, Look, this day was a seven, this day was a six, this day was a five and you can see what was on that day. And if you pattern-recognize, you can see what kind of things on your day drive your number up and down. That's really useful information. Because through the whole thing, I do think that this self-gratifying is the answer that went looking for what's fun, a lot of people I think, would disagree with me. But I really think that trying to figure out what's fun to you. Because there's a lot of stuff that looks like fun, that doesn't feel like fun to people, they're doing it because it looks like bias told to them that it's fun, right? It's like, traveling to Europe is fun, or going to Disneyland, where it's actually when you actually look at the statistics on Disneyland, people are not having that much fun. They're going to remember it fondly later, but they're not enjoying at the moment, it's long lines, so you're trying to find those things that are just fun to you. And really, it's an exciting notion if you can, but I'm an engineer, so having the numbers, that was good, but there's got to be other ways to do it that you are mindful of. When you're looking for happiness, or fun as the goal, then I think it's different, you have a different bias, then I'm going to be a better person.
Chris: I'm so glad you told that story. I was gonna remember that. And I was gonna ask you if you'd share it. So glad you did. Has that stayed with you?
David: Yeah, I still remember those things. I still do some of the things that drive the number down. And I still do some of the things that drive the number up, but I'm mindful. And when I see a thing come in that drives the number up, I think it actually is more likely to drive the number up because I pre-expect. I mean, there's probably a term for that. But I'm biased towards noticing that I'm mindful and I'm just about to do something that I know is fun to me. And so I enjoy it more. It's a little bit like mindfulness training. Where being present, so that's something I've spent some time doing. And so I'm sitting here with you guys, and I can practice being present here and not worry about my to-do list or who's outside that door waiting to talk to me, or, the emails I haven't answered or whatever, yeah, that's still going to be there. But if I can push it to the back and be present, I learned that in my cancer time that mindfulness, that was going to make for a more pleasurable life rather than everything's a task. Before that, I really saw everything, even fun things as tasks. And now I saw I sort them a little more into tasks.
Chris: Did your inner engineer really resist that? I mean, I think a lot of people hearing this would think, Oh, here we go again, I'm in Northern California mindfulness thing. Did you embrace that? Or was it a did your inner engineer resist it?
David: No. Oh, well, I think my nervous ADD resisted in more than my engineer. There are good engineers who don't have this, and I'm one of the ones who's like a nervous, worrier type. And so it's there all the time.
Tracy: Yeah, that's really resonant, my husband's an engineer, and he goes hiking every day. And every day, I say, have a good time. And he's like, I'm not doing it to have a good time I'm doing it because I have to do it. Because that's what you do to be healthy. Like, alright, well then enjoy enduring it.
Chris: One of the things we've been thinking about is, what are the best learnings from design thinking that could be applied to individuals? What should be maybe left? Or enhanced? And what could be new? And as you're talking, one of the things I'm thinking is, design thinking is typically best done as a team.
David: The kind of radical collaboration part of it is where we expect to come up with a lot of the ideas.
Chris: Right. So as the individual I do wonder if that's an opportunity as to individual pursuits tends to be just I think alone, I work on it alone, etc. But the idea of putting a team together for that, you know?
David: I have done that where I'm from, which is to have my personal advisory group, and they can put me on their personal advisory group. But other than mind mapping, I brought that up a couple of times. Mind Mapping isn't an inherently individual sport. And I think it has a real benefit in pulling that stuff out from the individual. Almost everything else is a team sport that I know of all of our techniques. And so you, you have to figure out who's on your team. And at work, it's pretty straightforward, but who's on your personal team? And so again, you have to break down that fear of either asking the favor or in what you find, of course, is that your real friends want to be on your personal advisory team. And if they feel successful, then they want you on their personal advisory team. And yeah, I hardly ever go to, to a meeting where I'm just taking my own thoughts with me, because I've been with my friends or my advisory team, and talked about what we're going to talk about in this meeting. And, so I'm bringing a synthesis because I really think that people who are predisposed to use design thinking or is it more synthesizers? It seems like we're idea generators, but I think we're actually designed idea, synthesizers have lots of different that's what's what you were just talking about so that the diversity of the people in the team This is the place where the breakthrough ideas come from, not from you sitting in a room by yourself. So seems like how do you blow that out so that every time your idea-generating even about your own psychology, it's a team sport, I think is a lesson from design thinking, because the idea of the D school, somebody gave us a hard problem, we wouldn't go to our office and think about it, we'd be finding the best people we could find, and, and getting them on our team and going somewhere together. So that should apply to you individually.
Chris: Yeah. So has anyone you've probably talked about design thinking explained design thinking so many times, at work, every time I explain it, it tends to be a little bit of a mouthful. It's hard to just sort of roll it out. And I'm curious, how do you quickly describe design thinking to somebody that's never heard of it before?
David: I just say it's a tool, it's a methodology for routinely coming up with ideas.
Tracy: And then when they say, Well, what are the tools or methodology? What does that mean?
David: Well, then I just tell the story abbreviated as we just did in the last 15 minutes, right? I mean, it's just the empathy and the experimentation and team-ness of it, and the diversity of it, if it was a snappy answer, it’d be more like a cookbook, there's not a cookbook, and you shouldn't think of it that way. We say it's a tool, or it's a mindset, describe anything that's complex, emotionally complex very quickly, I think if you get people generally down the path, that it's a way to come up, it's a way to routinely come up with unique ideas, important ideas, important to you or to your thing. It's a routine innovation methodology. Those are all terrible words, they don't add up to too friendly banter.
Tracy: Yeah. I mean, one of them, we keep talking about who are the people that we're thinking when we're thinking about in instructing them on what this means. And I keep going back to my mom who lives in a suburb in Ohio.
David: Mine, too.
Tracy Yeah. And so I wonder.
Chris: She still doesn't know what we do. And I don't think my dad fully gets it either.
Tracy: Yeah. And so I think like when you go back to Barberton, how do you talk about it to people? Do they understand what you're about out here?
David: No. I mean, I full honesty, I don't try. It's just so economically depressed, that I sound like an arrogant son of a bitch from California because I speak of opportunity that doesn't exist for them. And so it's more like I can work on the psychology of them having a good time today. And that's the best I can do. There are people who are working on making those places in the country, vital again, right. And they're working on a different level of Maslow's thing is they're talking about food and water. I know. And so I don't want to be arrogant and talk about this. This esoteric Stanford psychology stuff when they need more basic self-help. Yeah. So that's interesting.
Tracy: We just hosted a session this weekend with some folks, just first experiments, and how they could start designing their life. And what came up and a part of me thinks, well, we do a lot of work with, like, low socioeconomic backgrounds. And so how do we and I think design thinking is so powerful. And it is a tool in those areas.
David: What you were talking about with low economic areas, when you're talking about, like engagement with a school, I was talking about the individual, right? I go home to a bunch of individuals. If I went back to the boys club, or the Ohio brass company, then I suppose it applies directly, because there's a central purpose of the thing. It's not self-help. It's really jumpstarting the economic engine, and then I'm all over that in any part of the country, especially in those parts of the country. The thing is, kids, you asked me basically, about adults about that question in that kind of part of the world. But kids, I feel the opposite about right, I mean, that our positive bias plays very well with kids and inspires them and hopefully gets them passionate about doing, what they were put on earth to do in that way. So if I just think about the adults whose habits are so strong, that they're really hard to change. I mean, as I say it, it would be nice to spend time, really doing now that I just don't feel as well equipped to do that as I would finding a church group, or now I'm all energized, to help them have self-efficacy. But individually, I don't know how to help people who need those basic enthusiasms for life.
Chris: Yeah, love to get your just kind of gut reaction to the project. And the pursuit of the far side, it's like, you guys are definitely barking up the wrong tree to run at that, you know, an amazing application, what's your reaction?
David: Well, I'm an engineer, right? Look at data. I mean, we have a course here called designing your life. And I don't know that much about it. I just know, it was super oversubscribed, and everybody seems to talk to them. And there are magazine articles being written about it. And we're doing it from a very, inside of Stanford our age group is very narrow. And so that leaves you guys the rest of the world, right, as far as you know, but I believe in this experiment. I think we've started a little brush fire at Stanford about this. And it looks like it's taken off and it's important. So, my advice to you guys is carved out the piece that you're particularly interested in, right? Don't pick, 18 to 22-year-old people who live in Palo Alto. And you know, you're in.
Chris: A little shop down the street.
David: I'll go back to the first thing that I said, it's my religion. I can't see past the gleaming eyes of the kids who are in my office crying because it feels so good inside their bodies, to be a creative person when they never felt that in their life, and they're 20 years old, they always thought of themselves as noncreative. And now, they've been through a bunch of D school things or design things and all of a sudden, they're walking around and saying, I'm a creative person. Look at this. Look what I did. Look at this. Look, at what my team did, look at what I did, look at it.
Tracy: Yeah, I think that you definitely have indoctrinated a lot of people into the world of design thinking, which is amazing, because it does, it opens up opportunities for young people that they've never thought possible for them.
David: I mean, it's my tool. It's my mindset. But I really do think of it as present and future tools are also in the tool belt, right? I mean, things that psychiatrists do or things that coaches do things that people who are turned on by a subject and ones that want that subject at all. Those are our other tools. In the tool belt, just this is the one that I'm gonna work on. There must be more tools. Right? I mean, it's like, we're not the only planet in the solar system, I’m sure.
Tracy: I've been saying that I think design thinking to me is as important as the scientific method. Which is, the scientific method helps you make sense of the world around you. And design thinking helps you to influence it or change it.
David: Right. And so the scientific method is adopted as Yes. Like, fact, right. And design thinking still new and exactly, sure. So be nice. If this design thinking becomes more like an accepted path to creativity. We'll see. I mean, seems like it's, it's moving in the right direction.
Tracy: Yeah. We're all working on it.
Chris: All right. Well, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Amazing. As usual, inspired.