Stanford Webinar - Design Thinking: What is it and why should I care?

perry clavon is the director of executive education at the d school and an adjunct faculty professor at stanford school of engineering he's a seasoned entrepreneur and a product designer but

despite his years of running startups and corporations perry's true calling is teaching which is why we love to have him it's so much fun and then also with us today we have jeremy utley jeremy is

the director of executive education at the d school and an adjunct professor at stanford school of engineering he's also an outstanding collaborator and teaches many celebrated courses at stanford

gentlemen it's always a pleasure thank you for being here with us today and take it away awesome thanks so much robin we're thrilled to get to see everyone today

and we're excited to get started this question what is design thinking and why should i care is something that we hear often at stanford and in the world and there's a great thing about design

thinking becoming a popular term which is that lots of people are curious about it it's somewhat well known but there's a downside which is that all of a sudden it starts to seem special or

inaccessible and that's ironic for us because the goal of design thinking is actually to make the tools and mindsets and ways of thinking that have helped designers

solve problems available to folks who don't consider themselves to be designers or maybe even don't consider themselves to be creative so very simply design thinking is a way of coming up

with ideas and seeing whether they're any good very simply and it's meant to be not some specialized thing that's reserved for the chosen few but a set of

tools that can help anyone in any career in any organization in any role in the organization be more effective at solving the problems you're tackling there whether those problems look like

introducing new products into the market or crafting a sales pitch or writing a subject line to an email or designing an expense reimbursement process

we see all of those as opportunities for design thinking or for coming up with ideas and learning whether they're good ideas very simply just to get started we want to start

with this quote by linus pauling he said to get a good idea you need a lot of ideas and that's something that very few people really appreciate it's

the it's said so simply as only a two-time nobel prize winning chemist could say it but it's actually profound what the research indicates is that the

single most important variable that affects how good your ideas are is how many ideas you have and so while many people are really

focused on coming up with better ideas the truth is they should be coming up with more ideas the way to get to better is actually to generate more and what we would say is

that design thinking is an exceptional idea generation methodology to put it very simply it's a great way to come up with a volume of ideas and you may be

familiar with a process visualization that we've used and popularized now about 10 or 15 years ago through a video that perry and i made and we released it on youtube it ended up being viewed gosh

half a million or maybe even a million times and so this visualization became very popular probably more popular than it should have become but it became a way to describe one way to think about

what designers do which is very simply they empathize with people they're trying to design for meaning they try to get to know them and understand their feelings and emotions etc then they

define a problem to be solved meaning they start with that loose understanding of human beings and say what problem really matters to those people and then they idh they generate a bunch of

potential solutions and through series of prototyping and testing implement and refine and discover whether their ideas are any good and the useful thing about this way of visualizing the

process is it helps us put various tools that designers might use that we might recommend that anyone in any role might consider bringing into their problem solving process it helps us put them

into buckets that's been really great the downside of us using this visualization is a lot of people have taken design thinking as a

recipe of sorts or a formula of sorts and they assume that if you you know if you empty the powder into the bowl and then you add water and then you beat it and add an egg that all of a sudden the

cake's gonna come out and so it's not it's a little bit misleading in so far as it looks like a linear sequence of events that has a clear beginning and an end point it's more a set of mindsets

and so rather than talking about a fixed process per se what we thought would be fun to do is actually introduce design thinking by way of a story because we have the incredible privilege of getting to interact with some of the most

innovative individuals and innovative organizations and even organizations that don't really seem innovative but their employees actually are and they're doing really cool things we hear a bunch of

great stories and we feel that we're stewards of those stories we have the opportunity to showcase how a mindset of a designer leads to breakthroughs and

leads to realizations and meaningful impact in human beings lives so we want to tell quickly the story of our friend bill pacheco who has a very had a very

illustrious career not only as an engineering leader at cybex but also as a director at keurig dr pepper and he now teaches at trinity college most

importantly though i like to think that his that the most important organization he's involved with is perry's nightmare where he is my doubles partner in tennis and we like to give very hard time on the tennis court but perry would you

like to tell the story of bill and his incredible innovations yes so pleasure i just said just to clarify on the tennis you know front there you know there's another partner involved i

have a doubles partner logan may be on the on the group right now logan deans and i um and uh you know bill gets a lot of practice these days he and his brother play all the time so

um anyway and i you know i'm pretty busy here phil you know so anyway um uh bill also teaches at bu now as well so boston university um terrific fellow and it's such a pleasure one of the great things

about doing the work we do is actually being able to um not only talk about alumni of the programs but use these live examples and this is something great about the the

programs we put together is it's just terrific to with linkedin and hear stories from you all and see how you're using the tools we teach and it actually drives a lot of the changes bill for example

the story i'm about to share with you a lot of the techniques we use in prototyping that one step jeremy talked about have come from the direct work with bill pacheco so with that we'll talk about so for

those of you that that the two companies mentioned keurig is a coffee company it has those capsules you may have you stayed in a hotel or been to you know an airport or

whatever their capsules and they have this neat technology he he was um did the product design there for a period of time with the team and also um earlier in his career when we met him he was

working at a company called cybex if you've been on a treadmill machine if you've been on an elliptical trainer a stationary bicycle they're one of the major major suppliers

of equipment like that and chances are you've been on something actually bill's designed if you've been to a hotel gym and actually used anything or for a big corporate gym

so with that um i wanted to go and talk a little bit so we're going to dive a little bit deeper on so so what we're going to tell is a story of bill using design thinking as a

way to sort of bring life to the the steps that um jeremy spoke about and actually be able to talk to you about what um what this looks like in real life okay

and i think that's a big component we're passionate about this program is we cover all aspects of design thinking how you might use it in teams and how you might use it in a larger larger organization which is what this story's

about so here's um cybex cybex is part of a group of competitors making a product so we're going to talk a little bit about um treadmills so treadmills the thing is

you you hop on top of and you run and you actually use for um a workout okay so these are their competitors so at the time we sort of click into this this was um

you know about 10 years ago probably bill was was doing this kind of work um and these are the competitors and they're you know like any company they're sort of duking it out with these people you

know fighting for market share and um bill having had you know training in design thinking you know went to a gym and actually um used some

of the techniques of empathy that first stage is you sort of open up your brain you you observe you um maybe inquire and actually talk to folks asking more open-ended questions but you

leave yourself open to inputs there's many many different techniques this is a good example of observation so what bill did was he took his notebook spent a while and just stayed and watched

and what he noticed you can tell he's he shared these pictures you can see these folks if you just go in close to your screen you'll see these these amazing machines that have you know all this terrific technology and these monitors

all stuff people are holding on to all the screens and and holding on to things for dear life you got the sense there's something more going on here than um

i'm aware of you know this is and something we seek to understand in those early stages of design thinking is understanding emotions of the users not he didn't measure you know um how

long are people on the treadmill how much do they you know talk about it wasn't data collection he was really looking at faces any what he noticed was the emotion that was fear what he knows is people were

afraid on these machines and he thought oh my god that's that's super interesting to understand and use that to launch into design thinking and begin to understand this this um

why they might be feeling fear and take a sort of a very open perspective to that so as he as he talked to folks and and began to understand he developed um

some ideas around basically changing the structure around these products so keep in mind now he's part of an organization cybex he has a boss

um and this is a category of product that the assumption was like many products it's it's pretty much set there's a there's a treadmill you run on there's a

screen you know we've got lots of competitors there's much better things you know bill could be working on so he he sort of did some quick drawings he sort of said i'm gonna i'm gonna try to make a

machine that that deals with this aspect of fear and maybe gives people more places to hold on to he did some quick prototypes he did some quick drawings and like we all do he went to his boss

and he showed it to him and this is the the note he got back so those you can't read it says uh he did this presentation and showed there's a picture behind this that's that's hidden but it's a it's a prototype with

these pvc pipes that he sort of built out quickly which is a technique of rapid prototyping so he's got this insight about fear he's done some work to build something he's got some ideas and his boss ray says

i'm not a fan of anything in this presentation so part of what we see as folks use these tools and techniques in their organization is they're new and part of what uh jeremy actually does

a component with another collaborator from stanford uh justin farrell about how you might think about approaching these organizations this this was a typical response is you know

there's nothing to do with treadmills treadmills are a safe business his boss wanted him to move on and do something else um what he knew was bill knew he had a great insight he knew the the end user

was afraid he knew there needed to be changes he could tell there was an opportunity to sort of pursue this further so what he did was he went a step further and he actually um decided to

take a little bit of extra time you know not not a huge amount of time but but built up some really quick prototypes and began to sort of put these extra railings on and these these things that

were sort of designed very very differently to allow people points of connection to the machine that weren't about the electronics and weren't about things that were not intended for that purpose which is what he saw before

and he did a really interesting thing that as you get to the design process you he's he noticed something in empathy this idea of fear he framed it up and said i'm gonna build a machine that

addresses these these um points of stability and these these fear points and what drives that fear he ideated came up with a bunch of ideas that was that presentation he did one step further he said hey i'm gonna prototype

and test and that's a great way to validate to say i'm going to put this out there for just a little bit and see if see how the user responds to it so his his idea was to show his his boss

ultimately some information from that prototype and test cycle which is what we espouse so he went out he put these really rough prototypes they they look really polished but he's literally welding little bars onto them and making him

look good he took him to a hotel gym and he just he measured how many people picked the machine with these new you know rails and new sort of ergonomics how many people picked the

existing machine they were just side by side and he got really good data and something we espoused with our students is how do you actually put something out in the world

and use it to to make sure you validate it not only validated the problem jerry talked about there's sort of two things going on definitely validated by people picking one or the other there's something to the

the aspect of fear they look at that machine and they say no no they want this one and then he would talk to people after using it and see what their experience was like and get that data that data allowed him ultimately to put

something into market so this is a was a success financially great for the company great outcome but more so what bill knew was he was

solving a real human need which is at the core of what we teach with design thinking is too often we sort of walk through like accepting an existing problem statement you know a lot of business problem statements might be

around how do we increase revenue or how do we sell more in the reframe that happened with bill was he learned hey for for our products there's this emotion fear and i'm gonna actually use that to

design and ultimately design a far better product and it's a great outcome and a terrific product and if you see it in the marketplace you'll know all the backstory of where it came from but i think a good example of running through

that entire cycle of design it's an amazing story and there's some amazing uh comments happening in the chat too someone mentioned uh let's see

ray said wait you're telling me that he took action and made a prototype even after his boss said he didn't like it and what we'd say is there's really two really important things there that are

worth unpacking just in response to that um that question right or that realization right because a lot of us go my boss said he hates it so it's done but design thinking is

really useful and it relates to vivian's point around the pandemic of trust as well design thinking puts us in such close proximity to the people that we're designing for or we're trying to

innovate for and it could be a you know a human being in a gym it could also be an employee who's the recipient of an hr policy or an employee who's trying to

file their expense reimbursements or it could be it could be any one of those things right so we don't mean to only limit this way of thinking to new product introductions but the point is

using a designer's mindset one of the things we advocate is getting close to the people whose lives you're hoping to impact by your work and what happened for bill is he got conviction

that people were afraid people felt unsafe and as he's watching and interacting with people in gyms that conviction grew there's there's a need for for a perception of safety here

that i feel is a really a real human need a real human pain that deserves to be met and i think and we've seen that countless times with many individuals inside organizations the senior

management will say you know to our friend doug deeds who pioneered an incredible innovation at ge with a pediatric device that the senior leadership at the time said there's very

few pediatric wards in the united states don't waste your time on this but just like bill doug had engaged with the people whose lives he was trying to improve with design

and he felt their pain strongly enough to ignore what his bosses said effectively and one of the amazing things about design is all of a sudden you can quickly become the resident

expert in the people's lives who you're hoping to transform with your work efforts and so that's the first thing the second thing is and i think it's also related to ray's question about wait bill just pushed through even

though his boss said no what he realized is his boss is reacting to an idea but he has no information he doesn't understand there's no way to contextualize the idea other than

according to his own past history and what bill realized what's really magical is part of the design mindset is saying really quickly i can actually create data you know our organizations love

data and we think about looking up data and looking up research reports but what designers are doing or what individuals who don't consider themselves creative or designers before but who are using these tools that's who

we're calling designers what designers do is they're actually finding clever ways to create new data sets which help them make better decisions

and as perry mentioned when bill put the couple of you know prototype units inside of a hotel he was able to watch people vote with their feet and so even though ray's got 65 patents

in the space and even though he thinks it's a bad idea he can't deny the fact that when 30 people walked into the gym 28 of them chose this machine why did they choose it that really

validated the sense of fear that bill had picked up on right and so it's that kind of enlightened trial and error that we're advocating where you're really deeply connecting with the people whose lives are hoping to change

and then you're willing humbly to be learning whether you've got it right or not and if bill had implemented it and it didn't go well i think he would have given up the hunt or he would have found a different way to go about trying to

convey a sense of safety but the point is not insubordination the point is thoughtful care about how do we impact the people whose lives we are trying to

impact and how can we help stimulate our own thinking as we said at the beginning with this linus pauling quote we need a lot of ideas and there's some research that indicates

that the average corporate brainstorm generates two ideas just two and so what design thinking does is it helps teams overcome that tendency to settle

very very quickly but we mentioned before that this this way that we've been describing the design process is a little bit outdated and so we thought would be fun to do before we dive into some more of these

questions here and perry maybe you can be looking at the questions and seeing if there's anything that we want to start with but we thought it'd be useful to say how we think about describing the process now if it's not these five

colorful hexagons how do we describe it now and what we'd say is very simply design thinking is made in advance on conventional problem solving where conventional problem solving

basically is this a boss says implement this solution they hand you a grain of sand they hand you an ideopost it do this right that's it and what design thinking said it makes two meaningful

advances the first advance that we advocate is we say hang on before we converge on one solution let's diverge and let's generate as many possible ideas or ways to solve the

problem that's been given as possible so the first step is diverge before we come verbs right and that's an enormous advance over implement this solution the other significant advance that we have

made in the d-school is that we've said actually let's recognize that there's two pieces to any problem-solving endeavor and we think a lot about problem-solving but let's stop for a second let's talk

about problem finding because really implicit to any solution we're trying to implement is a problem that we think we want to solve and what designers have become very adept at

is being as clear about the problem they're trying to solve as they are about the solution that they're advocating and just like with the solution it's also an opportunity

that we diverge we generate lots of potential problems and ways of thinking about the problem or framing as we might say before we converge and it's useful to think that there's these two

discrete outputs to a design effort because a lot of times people just think about the answer and what we would say is the question is every bit as important john dewey the famous american educational reformer said a problem well

put is half solved and so a lot of the efforts that we spend in the design practice and that you might spend if you're doing finance or hr or product development or marketing or content

strategy a lot of your time is actually spent framing a problem worth solving before you ever even undertake the tools to think about how you solve it the goal ultimately is to get this high degree of

alignment where you have a high degree of confidence that the problem that you've identified and the solution you've imagined overlap and everybody's you know goal is that these things would overlap

perfectly it rarely happens that way in the beginning more often than not there's kind of a misfit and there's not a uh there's not quite the right way to think

about it and so teams that get good at design are constantly assessing both of the of these things the problem that they've articulated and the solutions they've imagined and they're assessing their fit

and the way they assess their fit is by being uh by being clear about not only what they're working on meaning right now we focus on the problem or we focus on the

solution but also how they're working meaning are we are we generating options are we making decisions so if you think about those that kind of that two by two

there are four discrete buckets that we could draw from at any time to help us think about how we might advance our thinking and when we talk about process now a lot of times we talk in terms of these buckets because it's a

little bit more useful it's a little bit less prescriptive it's a little bit less sequential and it helps us capture the goal is for any team to be able to be

fluent about what kind of activity do i need to undertake right now to continue to advance my learning about the problem we're trying to solve or the way that we're trying to solve it and so ultimately

we aren't looking for robots or automatons who can perfectly recite chapter and verse on the correct sequence of events so much as individuals who have a fluency and a

confidence and a capability around self navigating what am i working on right now how should i be working and what tools would be appropriate for me to draw upon next that's how we like to

think about process here with that i'll stop and maybe perry have you seen a couple questions that we want to dive into absolutely so there's um so rick white uh in the middle of the

list made a great comment and um i wanted to go back to it so it's number if yours are numbered it's number 33.

um but it's a it's a great comment jeremy that sort of punctuates something you've been saying and i think he he he wrote it better than you said it just gotta call it out

there you got it i love it he said um businesses seem to keep us focused on the product parentheses output it seems like you are saying that

creative process needs more inputs and i would say that's a that's i wish that we had you know like put that at the at the beginning as like almost like a tenant

for designers which i very much agree is you're mindful of inputs so in the story about bill he was mindful about inputs he was mindful about going out and getting more content

he was sort of able to say you know if i think about treadmills or think about the next project i'm going to work on have i spent some time in a gym and just observed have i spent some

time do i have some ideas about how people are feeling on some of that and he may have gone there on a day when he noticed somebody on the stationary

bicycle to be a different story about a stationary bicycle but he was mindful i need i need some input and he's as an individual i know him to be that way now he's mindful about his

inputs and mindful about am i spending time you know we give one actually one of the components of the class is about daily practice and about techniques for you as an

individual to build being mindful about inputs into your practice but designers are seeking inputs to frame up interesting new questions

but bill found a really interesting problem because he was mindful of inputs and then later on when he said hey you know what my what my maybe my boss needs is some other input to this project

which is some data some some information from testing to see what happens um and then there was a question i wanted to sort of tie in with this which that was was um

fascinating so jonathan laplante um number three i'm glad you pointed that one out hoping for them too i've tried the design thinking brainstorming method with a few business

partners and our issue is usually that we end up with a list of hundreds of ideas which is great work awesome um some of them really good

but then we go back to the opportunity we had before the design thinking brainstorming session sadly i find business partners will fall back on whatever seems like it is the

easiest path what they know and don't want to so it goes on but but the idea is you're you're selecting when you use this process so

bill sort of in a way that story we we tell the magical story of persevering and making it through that and um you know getting to a very interesting outcome what i love jonathan is the honesty so

thank you for the comment that one thing that's hard is you know so many of the problems you know we face and i'm sure all of you face in your personal life and your professional life

sort of that the problem you know presupposes this path and you know i think we come in we say oh design thinking you know wander around and look at these things and dream up a

new problem and you know the reality is i love john that well that's super fun and we did that and we generally watched your idea but then you come back in and it's we got to get stuff done here we're

done with the design part you know we've got to select something got to move forward with something that that for sure solves this problem and we'd say the the one of the things we espouse and

sort of you if you think about design thinking it's largely we're finding a problem and then we're we're solving that problem is this there's two halves of the diagram or or on the screen right now the two halves

of what's happening there you know we would say on the on the um the product side on the on the production side we espouse really really

rapid prototyping techniques so taking an attitude of how can i spend just a little bit longer or even shorten if you're coming up with hundreds of ideas hundreds of ideas john then i

would say shorten your brainstorming time and leave time right then and there to build some of the ideas to make some really rough prototypes to

to keep alive some of the wilder ideas and say we're going to suspend this this sort of decision making and we're just going to build out a couple of these and make them real and we teach these

very very fast and simple low resolution prototyping techniques and that's a fabulous skill to go through life with is how do i build a quick prototype you know this is

something you know robin who somebody was asking what was the name of the person robin's been amazing in building the content of the programs that's been the approach we've taken to to building the courses is how do we do something

really really quick to jeremy's point put it up on youtube get some feedback and then do another one that's completely different and that's the way we approach it is the question i would be asking jonathan is how do i do

you know 10 prototypes and do it so quickly and so efficiently that that we can do that in minutes and get some concepts to be real so we can actually have some data to evaluate because i

think the thing is missing is you can select an idea from that list that's doable for the business but you you if you had a chance to compare it to some of the other ideas a little bit as you

went further you might have some data to move forward with yeah the other thing i would say there just on that question jonathan is if you don't have the opportunity to um

if you don't have the opportunity to create something in the middle of the interaction then then another great thing you can do is you can at least schedule time for creating something later we call that

writing a love note to your future self because a lot of times you realize we've got potential here but we and we're out of time we're about to rush to other meetings if if there's no ownership and there's

no sense of uh when the follow-up is then there's not going to be a new conversation unless there's new information and a lot of times folks teams tend to kick these decisions down the road or like you said

just default to what we already decided we wanted to do and the only way to change that is if someone you know at amazon they call them single threaded ownership or single

threaded leaders someone takes responsibility for it so a great a great tactic is as a leader say who's going to take this and run with us in the next week when we meet next week what are we what are we asking about are we asking

about you know uh click-through rates open rates or like what what do we want to know about and then commission someone to actually create that data and then the other thing they'd say is what

are they going to stop doing you can't give somebody something new without also kind of drawing back some level of responsibility so which two or three standing meetings do they not need to

attend in the next week so that they can create that data a lot of times it's actually it's almost like you know i've worked in india for a while and there's what's known in india as the last mile

problem it's like it's really difficult to penetrate to the last mile in rural areas and that's where the majority of the population is this is a last mile problem when it comes to operationalizing innovation

ownership what's the next step what's the outcome and a lot of times with nebulous new ideas it's kind of nobody's job and if you allow it to be nobody's job leaving a

meeting you shouldn't be surprised that nobody does anything right so to flip that script you have to actually assign the work and use it's go with enthusiasm who's stoked on it who really wants to

see who really wants to explore great you're going to own it and we're so excited to see the data next week in our next team meeting yeah the other one so there's a there's a bunch in here that follow up so ray a

quick a quick question that i think follows up on that what method do you suggest to sort out a lot of ideas so the practical thing we we actually teach is is being mindful about selection

process so as you move from ideation you're generating lots and lots of ideas meaning you've you've found that that emotional insight as bill did he framed

up a unique challenge how do i make uh people not fearful of their experience on exercise equipment if you generated a lot of ideas then you might select you might you might come up with more

interesting selection criteria you know recently um another associative of ours uh dr catherine segovia who we teach with a lot who's actually in the

program here she runs the practice component um we've been working with this medical company and we've been we've been talking to them a lot they're generating all kinds of new ideas about

this this really interesting um medical product i can't go to details on it because it's all sort of super secret and we've talked a lot about this topic of how do you select ideas you know one

selection criteria if you want to go you know back and talk about um you know rick and jonathan a little bit they you might just default to a selection criteria what's within our budget what can we do we've talked about being more mindful of

selecting ideas you know what could dazzle you know the customer what what could make the custom in billscape what would make the customer feel incredibly safe

what would make the customer feel like they could start you know immediately on this exercise device those might be selection criteria to sort through ideas and there's no

exact selection criteria meaning what what jeremy and i do a lot in classes is we might take a group of ideas and select with one selection criteria we might select with the the you know

what can we what can we what do we think we could do on a tight budget great there are a couple ideas that come to mind then we might take you know a different color you know um dot or a different color post-it and sort of put

tabs on other ones we might select which one would most likely delight the customer which one would actually uh deliver a unique experience versus our competitors but the point is

we're slicing and dicing ideas with multiple selection criteria and i think too often we move as these these folks talked about in those quite early questions with a singular

one like we've got to have a list you know 100 this is the best this is this is what we're going to start with and what we espouse is mix it up try different selection criteria it's almost like you

you get a mosaic sometimes it looks like a heat map where we're selecting with so many different criteria and you've got all these different colors to be different things on a group of post-its um that you can actually sort of see

potentially multiple aspects of solutions and come up with a um this is maybe a something we we can talk about in the in another

question as well jeremy is this idea of building a portfolio that i think another thing designers do is they think about having a portfolio of solutions

not going to that single solution early on but saying how about i build a group of solutions how many select a bunch of different ideas based on different selection criteria it leaves my options

open and it allows me to to have different prototypes out there generating comparative data and and helping me see the path forward out of vagueness to clarity and that's

what we always espouse we have a we have a class called d leadership and i think at different times the the teams are working on two or three problem statements each was

two or three prototypes so that it gives them it's a lot of work and a lot of confusion sometimes and it gives them a lot of clarity as to a direction forward if you will that this idea of building multiple

solutions and the same thing with having multiple selection criteria i wanted to um i wanted to go to ava de breva's uh i hope i'm saying that right ava um question

or comment she said customers don't know what they want you can go ahead and ask them right uh as henry ford said if i ask my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse she uses these examples do you need amazon prime do you

need facebook do you need airbnb so leaving them to come up with their needs based on the problems they have doesn't seem like the most efficient approach and ava if whatever you're doing for your employment doesn't work out please

come and join our team at stanford because we couldn't agree more um there is we are not human-centered design is not customer-led design it's not uh it's not

taking instructions from the customer far from it and you have to be careful to craft uh experiments really is what we would say it's an experimental mindset that give you highly credible

data and in another one of our sessions we you may have seen this if you've seen many of our webinars but it's worth just repeating very briefly just taking as this as a case study

january 2016 the executive team of westfield mall in downtown san francisco is having a emergency meeting because tenants on their fourth floor moving out

of the fourth floor rents are falling and they don't understand what to do they've got a problem with foot traffic tenants keep saying not enough people are coming up here and despite the beautiful frescoes

and panoramic views of the city it's not enough to drive foot traffic to the fourth floor and actually forestall the plummet of rent and so they've got a crisis on their hands they had a quick brainstorm one of

the ideas that came out of the brainstorm was we should put a beer garden on the fourth floor wouldn't that be amazing you know same thing about startup founders coming up like greek gods onto mount olympus and drinking

ambrosia it'd be wonderful so thankfully they thought we should at least ask people if they like this idea they went down to the to the lobby to

the first floor to the food court if we built a beer garden on the fourth floor gorgeous views would you come something like 85 percent of people said yes

and so ava to your chagrin i'm sure they spent quite a bit of money to build out this beer garden and it won't surprise you i know ava to to realize that months

later it was a colossal uh mishap they hardly attracted any more foot traffic to the fourth floor rents continued to fall uh tenants continued to move out and they

were left scratching their heads saying what did we do wrong right we came up we brainstormed we came up with ideas we asked people what they wanted and they brought us in to be a

part of that post-mortem so to speak and one of the things that became clear is they had this great data right they talked to a thousand people 850 of them said yes if you build it will come and

what we challenged them on was it's it may be data but not all data is created equal and you ask people what they like you know is it i mean i've been the

puppy dog intern before myself saying mister would you sign up for a magazine put me down for a nickel buddy you know and people say yes but it's not really an indication of what they'll do

and we worked with the team as they tried to solve the problem in the future saying how do we create environments and experiences and offers that yield more highly credible data you know one of the

simplest ideas that came out of this discussion you can hire an hourly worker put them at the top of the fourth floor escalator outside of the you know elevator bank

put a bunch of curtains up right not do any of the actual remodeling work or renovation work give the intern you know a pitcher a beer and a cactus so it's a beer garden technically

and then put signs all over the mall saying visit our beer garden on the fourth floor it's like any time somebody comes up in turn form a beer you know great it's free where's the where's the garden while we're still working on it but we're so

glad you're here right really quickly you know if the intern with his third hand or her third hand is just kind of clicking how many people are coming up really quickly they realized that that value proposition wasn't driving foot traffic

and the big question is when people become aware of an opportunity do they hit the fourth floor button on the elevator and that's what they should have been measuring and because they said if we

did it would you come they gave people an opportunity to lie to them customers will lie to you not because they're malicious but because one they can't imagine the truth and two

i don't want to tell the poor puppy dog intern with the clipboard no it just doesn't feel good right so you have to you have to design um interactions that give you more highly credible data than survey

information so to all that say just wanted to second what uh dr ava de brova professor emeritus mentioned don't ask people what they want we totally agree

yeah and then you you've also answered i think a couple other questions jeremy somebody asked is there could you give an example of design thinking that doesn't involve um engineering

um i think it was a jessica and then which is a great so now you get an example that involves beer drinking and i'd say somebody else um asked i think it was valerie one of your

questions about um hey is it do you have to use this for a product and can you use it for a process and absolutely you can use it for a process i think that sometimes as

examples uh we pick something that's like oh this is this is clever and a product tends to you know go and we can sort of tell a quick story and there's an output there's a thing that it all

goes into um process we have we have amazing alumni stories i remember one that comes to mind was a executive one of our programs and design thinking that that uh

went uh back to american express and redesigned you know the entire process for for helping folks to get stuck in a in a big weather event you notice that hey one of the things that happens is

all of our processes sort of break down in these big events like the recent one hurricane i did people are delayed stuck in airports we don't have new solutions and there's tech different techniques

for it um we espouse a lot of um improvisational activities so if we're thinking about a product you know we you know valerie you and i are thinking about hey we have a different idea for a process what if somebody called in and

then they got this and then this happened we might act it out i might act like the customer and you might act like the process sounds weird but i come in and say hey i'm perry i'm stuck in the

airport and then you would you would respond you'd respond you know we run through a scenario together that would be one prototype then we try a different one and we might even do that with um

then bringing in a actual outside user and um act as if it exists and run somebody through it with the minimum effort to sort of build anything

and a lot of times this results in um sort of multiple flow charts so we might have a flow chart of one process and a flowchart of another and a flowchart of another and we we would sort of be able

to compare which ones are faster which ones um you know result in um outcomes that are favorable which ones create new questions yeah we could we could again sort of look at those and evaluate them

but absolutely um process is is a largely actually if i think about so many of the student projects now we deal with process is becoming much more actually what we we use it for

if i think about um many many of the projects going on in classes at stanford i'm just trying to uh to answer a bunch of questions

as much as i can in the chat here looks like one link we shared at one point was broken i'm trying to go in and tell people that it's fixed yeah and i don't

recall any questions somebody else was asking a little bit about um how to get teams to do this and how do you approach teams and um i would say one of the things i'm

scanning for the person's name as i look somewhere else here but um um anyway so if you could find jeremy it was earlier on but in terms of application of teams i think one of the

um the big ideas with david kelly and starting the design school um is that students going through our programs have

a consistent approach and i think the biggest thing to to bringing this into an organization is we we see a lot of times teams have trouble when you know one person's ideating while the

next person's trying to build a prototype or somebody's trying to make a decision and converge while the other person to jeremy's point is diverging and coming up with new ideas and i think the

teaching a consistent process to teams if there's any sort of amazing you know insight to what the d school has done at stanford is it's given language to students to to have

consistent process and it's even a few of our a couple students even commenting here chris i see on there like on the questions um so but i think they could comment as as

well if if you ever talk to them is like it's really cool to have a consistent understanding because chris for example is a student on there is asking a question he comes to a session on

wednesday mornings for this class we do and he might be talking to an mba student or a different student or something but they have a consistent understanding of an approach and consistent language around it so they

can even comment on each other's work and dive in and help each other and for teams working that consistent understanding of a process is amazingly helpful particularly think about the

kind of work we're working on it's uncertain work design is uncertain work so so in a way it it amplifies a lot of emotion it amplifies a lot of the the

challenges with working with teams and consistency of understanding we're doing we're ideating right now we're generating ideas we'll make a decision at the end of that we'll then prototype

and test we'll then evaluate the data from testing it gives um teams the ability to work effectively with a consistent approach to problem solving

if there's one sort of tenant with this is we have seen it really really effective if a team has a consistent approach to a problem solving technique we have time for more questions you

think perry or should we try to wrap or what do you what do you think i'm going to push these i just wanted to call it we had we had two folks that um asked questions that we wanted to definitely cover um

marty these are people that submitted um early questions uh marty i thought this question was great about a water utilities so they're dealing and she's she's in water utilities

um and the question was how could i develop a way for people to use data collaboratively with the goal for them to adopt and embrace a new way to

discommune community old practice so she's trying to design i i take this and i say wow uh marty is such an interesting problem and i'm glad because it follows on the heels of that that

answer like hey design can be used for process this is a process and i think what's what's interesting is you should approach this as um you know do some of the work that

david did i would say design thinking 101 is go out and ask your peers you know ask them what kind of challenges they're having getting to you know decisions in the organization what kind of challenges they're having with

people's understanding of data what kind of challenges they're having how they're feeling about results you'll gain some insights and then frame up the your effort i think is to design a new

process inside of the company it's a great example sort of a more advanced example which i love we're covering um use the input from emotion frame up a different challenge and then actively try try running a

meeting differently jeremy had mentioned this that a lot of times we some of the output we get is you know how do i run this meeting differently and that meeting is a chance to design and it's a thing that can be designed just like um

you know the treadmill device so um approach it as how do i gather more input you know i think you're you're i can tell a frustration i want to change this old practice we'll gather input

from employees understand their emotional needs understand the challenges they're having build some problem statements around that and then try some prototyping and then the other one i wanted to cover

do you want to cover this one jeremy that's such a interesting go ahead okay or nair from glendale this is an interesting product i could use it for

my covet times it's a sensorized shoe insole that measures your weight so jeremy at different times of cover wait let's be honest jeremy you've had some problems with donuts both of us at

different times i've had a few excursions that's true yeah yeah um so uh we want to provide one stress-free metric which will provide happiness and

holistic feedback on how to increase activity and improve wellness should it be binary am i doing good or not or should it be a more detailed report um

with all of the metrics so the there um i have no idea and i think you're asking this because it's the end seem to have no idea and the answer is i would this would be a fabulous thing

the previous project as well as fabulous projects for design thinking it's like i think it'd be so interesting to understand not about the metric there

that's not if you focus focus on what's the metric what's metric but i think what's so interesting is what do people want to know about their health i mean perry's joking about donuts but there's actually something i i would love to

interview on this and be interviewed about what are my needs what what are my concerns about my health on a daily basis particularly in this in the world we're living in now where i'm standing in the same you know square meter year for the whole day

you know how am i feeling about my health what what are what are um some potential you know things tell me about the lab man ask a question tell me about the last time you thought about your health while you're standing in front of

the screen and how do you address it tell me that story you could do all kinds of really fun interviews and get some insights and get some challenges and

then potentially deliver different types of information prototypes so different types of answers on metrics and information to these individuals and get a sense of how they react to them and i

wouldn't approach this as the one thing and the question i think is interesting to call out is looking for an answer i think early on i would look for how do i create a portfolio of potential dashboards of

information how do i create dozens that i could show users that might be a mindset to take on the very beginning that i'm not going to get to that answer i'm going to get to a a bunch of

different potential creative answers put them in front of users and i'm going to continue to learn and eventually get to a subset that we want to put out as product so that jeremy i think we have just a

couple minutes to cover that last bit of content yeah i would say the one thing that i would mention just before we've got a couple of slides we wanted to wrap with but one thing that i wanted to mention

is it's it's very important to realize conventional wisdom is often right and sometimes wrong and in many organizations like you saw

it with ray right there is a conventional paradigm you know 1905 is known as the miracle year i don't know if you're aware of this but it's when einstein wrote

his groundbreaking works on relativity what's interesting is in 1900 just five years earlier lord kelvin had reported to the british association for the advancement of

science there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now all that remains is more and more precise measurement and he was the world authority in

physics right which is to say what even the experts even world renowned experts are sometimes wrong and it takes a little bit of naivete it takes a little bit of fresh perspective

it takes a big bit of a beginner's mindset to challenge convention and and you shouldn't expect to challenge conviction convention and not experience resistance there's a reason it's

convention conventional wisdom is usually right but challenging it oftentimes leads to unexpected breakthroughs we've seen it across industries from arts to science

to uh to law even challenging conventions is a really great way to do it but don't expect to be your resistance free path there will be resistance there just as we wrap one of the things

hopefully that you identified in all of our answers to these questions is we don't have the answers we are not answer guys we are approach

guys and design thinking itself isn't an answer it's an approach and what we would say is be thoughtful about your approach and we can coach individuals on the approach

but i love like nera's question who knows if it should be binary right but you know what she what what perry basically advised her is define the outcome variable meaning what are you hoping somebody does

check back again tomorrow share on social media whatever it is right define the outcome variable and then do both of those things and see which one impacts your outcome variable

in the most desirable way wow when i make it binary all of a sudden people's engagement goes through the roof right or when i give a detailed report it does right but we're advocating an approach

and the approach that we advocate is one where we're mindful of the questions that are driving our action a lot of people talk about the miracle year terry just you know it's all the miracle year

um but the uh i'm trying to watch chat and talk at the same time it's i wouldn't recommend it i'm like a a cow that has multiple stomachs except with my brain

and i'm randomly thinking of metaphors while doing this my point is design thinking isn't isn't only action a lot of people think about design thinking they hear bias towards action

and it could just be this frivolous random you know set of active flurry of activity what we advocate is thoughtful deliberate action where we just where we know we're not going to know the answer

until we act so action is a must but what action we take is informed by thoughtful inquiry and we call it inquiry driven design and i'll just finish by saying if you think about how

what's the question how do i know which bucket to draw from you've got to be able to answer a couple of questions one is what's our big unknown and i've got this here

unfortunately the the uh on 24 someone mentioned on 24 needs to be redesigned that's funny um but it's a simple wheel where we can say okay what's my big unknown do i not know the problem i'm trying to

solve okay good or do i not know you know the answer to the problem i've identified right so what's our big unknown and then what kind of thinking is going to help us make progress do we

need to be so once i say okay i'm on the blue right now do i need to be j uh you know uh making decisions or do i need to be generating options right and if i say i

need to be making decisions great then where do i need to be drawing tools from well i should probably be drawing tools from that converge on the solution bucket oh

i know these several tools to converge on solutions here's what's kind of behind those sliders there but are these questions basically but when we talk about

the process of design we're not just talking about action and we're not just talking about a sequence or a prescription or a recipe we're talking about a thoughtful inquiry-led

approach to taking action in order to address uncertainty both on the solutions that we're imagining side and also on the problems we are attempting to solve aside so this is how we think

about process hopefully this has been a demystifying experience for you our goal is to make these tools and these mindsets accessible to

somebody in product development and somebody in hr and somebody in accounting wherever it is we believe that we can bring more rigor more fun and better

problem solving to whatever role you might play in your organization whatever industry your organization might be in and we hope the tools we've shared today just wet your appetite a little bit there's no way to go in deeply into the

tools but that's what the online programs are for there's an amazing set of resources and tools in these programs and we're excited to see how you use them not only to impact your work but

also to change your life and to change the world we wish you all the best of luck and jeremy and your rap you didn't lose anybody 682 of you are still here

so anyway awesome and we me when we say we we are passionate about these tools being out there and you using them and we love hearing from you with hard

questions or you know um these amazing some people are sharing if you can see all the questions sharing how they view some of these tools and we just find that fascinating and it keeps us hard at

work so thank you and thank all of you for the amazing uh questions we love it i wish we could get to all of them we have done our best um but thank you so much

perry and jeremy that was great and everyone who's here with us today the engagement was just so fabulous it really felt like a personal one-on-one conversation and i

just really love that dynamic also when you guys submit questions or you know expand on something that gives us great insight about where we need to go next so the content that we can produce and you know

answer these um so that was really helpful and thanks so much for joining us today and we're going to sign off from stanford thanks perry thanks jeremy thank you

have a great day everybody you