>> my name is ilana weiss, and i work on theleadership development team as part of google university.and today, it is my pleasure to welcome tim brown to the "authors at google" series.tim brown is the ceo and president of ideo, a global design consultancy focused on creatingimpact through design. ideo has won more industrial design excellenceawards than any other firm, and has been ranked
martin woodworking machinery uk, in the top 25 most innovative companies inthe world by businessweek. tim is an industrial designer by training.and his own work has earned him numerous design awards, and has been exhibited at moma innew york city, axis gallery in tokyo, and the design museum in london.he has participated in the world economic
forum and the ted conference.tim has led strategic client relationships with organizations such as pepsi, mayo clinic,proctor & gamble, and steelcase. many of us are here today because ideo isa company that we really admire. innovation is a core value that drives whatwe do here at google, and who better to understand and also reflect that value than tim?we're also lucky here today, because we're among the first to hear about his new book,hot off the presses last week, "change by design: how design thinking transforms organizationsand inspires innovation." please join me in welcoming tim brown. >> [applause]
tim brown: okay.well, thank you. it's great to be here.it is great to be here. so, i'm going the talk for maybe 25 minutesor so on what happens when we move from design to design thinking.i'm going to start off with a little bit of autobiography.and this rather lousy image is actually the first thing that i ever was hired to designprofessionally. i wasn't even out of design school yet, actually.and it's a woodworking machine, or at least, it's a piece of woodworking machine.and i was hired to make it a little bit easier to use, a little bit more attractive, so thatthis company could sell more spindle molders
and wood saws and other machinery that manyof you may have used; i don't know. and, you know, i think i did a pretty goodjob. in fact, if you happen to be on your vacationin england, and happen to visit a woodworking shop, somewhere in the north of england, asyou may do -- i don't know. i do often -- you'll actually find these machinesstill being used today. unfortunately, you won't find the companythat makes them, because that went out of business, actually, quite soon after i'd donemy project. the next project that i did is a fax machine.and, again, i was hired to put an attractive shell around some -- what was then -- relativelynew technology.
and again, to make it a little bit more attractiveand easy to use. this is actually one of those things thatended up in the design museums. but again, 18 months later, the product wasobsolete. and, of course, now the whole technology isobsolete. my teenage daughters don't even know whatfaxing is. many of you may not either.so, you know, it occurred to me that what passed the design maybe wasn't all that important.you know, making things a bit easier to use, making them a bit more attractive, makingthem a bit more marketable. by focusing on "a design," i was being kindof incremental and not having very much impact.
but i think this kind of small view of designis a relatively recent phenomena, and actually, kind of emerged in the latter half of the20th century as design became a tool of consumerism. so, when we talk about design today and, particularly,when we read about it in the popular press, we're often talking about products like these.amusing? yeah. desirable? probably.important? not very. but this wasn't always the way.and i'd like to suggest that if we take a different view of design, and instead of focusingon the products, focus on design thinking as a process, then design perhaps ends uphaving a bigger impact. so, again, this is a bit of a brit-themedtalk today.
and i apologize, but that's where i come from,as you may recognize from the accent. i don't know. does anybody recognize thisguy? not including the people who already watchedmy ted poll. okay, so this is, you know, perhaps the 19thcentury equivalent of larry page and sergey brin.this is where people wore more interesting clothing, i think, maybe. [laughter] but this is kingdom brunel, and he was a trulygreat engineer, and i think, design thinker from the 19th century in britain.and he built many firsts, including the clifton
suspension bridge, one of the first suspensionbridges in bristol. and the thames tunnel at rotherhithe, oneof the then longest, underwater tunnels in the world.his most famous creation in the south of england -- i grew up very close to it -- and it'scalled the great western railway. and, in fact, one of my favorite things todo as a kid was to ride my bicycle along the edge of the railway line waiting for the bigexpress trains to roll past, much to the consternation of my mother.you can see it represented here in jmw turner's painting, "rain, steam and speed."what was remarkable about brunel when he built this railway was that he wasn't just thinkingabout, "how do i engineer a railway?"
he said that what he wanted to achieve forhis passengers was the experience of floating across the countryside.it's a really great way of thinking about building a railway.and, in order to do that, he had to create the flattest gradients that had ever yet beenbuilt. and that meant long viaducts over river valleys.this one is actually over the river thames, at maidenhead, and long tunnels like the oneat box in wiltshire, but he didn't stop there. he didn't just stop with trying to make thebest railway journey he could. he imagined an integrated transportation system,where it was possible to get on a train in london and get off a ship in new york.one journey from london to new york.
this is the s.s. great western that he builtto take care of the second half of that journey, one of the first transatlantic steamships.so now, although this was a century before the emergence of design as a profession, ireally think that brunel was using design thinking to come up with great innovationsand world-changing designs. and i'm going to talk a little bit about whatthat is. design thinking starts with what roger martin,the university of toronto business school dean, calls "integrated thinking," this abilityto hold opposing constraints in one's head and, from that, get to new solutions.in design, this means balancing desirability -- what people need and want -- with technicalfeasibility and economic viability.
and with breakthrough designs, like the greatwestern railway, we often stretch that balance to the very limit and sometimes break it.and i'm sure many of the things that you do do the same thing.so, somehow we went from this to this. we went from systems' thinkers who were reinventingthe world around us to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glassesworking on small things. as design emerged as a profession, it focusedon a steadily smaller canvas, until it came to stand for fashion, aesthetics, and style.and, you know, i have to admit -- i'm a fully paid member of that priesthood, and somewheremy jacket has my own pair of designer glasses in it.so, i'm throwing stones at myself, as well
as my colleagues, in the design industry.but, i think design is getting big again. and i think that's happening through the applicationof design thinking to new kinds of problems: things like climate change, healthcare, cleanwater, security, social welfare. and, as we see this reemergence of designthinking as something that can have perhaps greater impact, then we can observe some basicideas that design thinking kind of operates through, and we can perhaps learn from it.so, what i'd like to do is talk about a few of those for the next few minutes, and talkabout some of the kinds of projects and problems that they're being applied to.so, now, design thinking starts with the idea of being human-centered.it may integrate the constraints of technology
and economics, but it begins with what peopleneed or might need: what makes life easier, more enjoyable, what makes technology usefuland usable. but this is more than simply good ergonomics,putting the buttons in the right place, whether they're software buttons or hardware buttons.it's often about understanding culture and context before we even know where to startto have our ideas. so, when a team was working in india on anew vision-screening program, they wanted to understand what motivated and excited thesekids, to understand how they might play a role in screening their parents.conversion sound is a small start-up -- actually based here in the bay area -- that's developedan ultra-low-cost, very high quality, digital
hearing aid for developing markets.now, here in the west, these hearing aids are fitted by highly-trained technicians.in places like india, those technicians simply don't exist.and so, it took a team working with community health workers and patients to understandhow a pda application might replace technicians in the diagnosis and fitting service.but, again, the team -- instead of starting with technology -- the team started with peopleand culture. and this idea of closely observing peoplecan lead to recognizing behaviors that can ultimately lead to breakthrough innovations.so -- when a team was interested in studying families in the u.s. to see how they managedtheir money, they saw two interesting behaviors.
this is one of them.they saw people who were rounding up their utility bills when they paid them.and when they asked, "well, why did you do that?"the response was, "well, i don't like to get behind.i don't like to feel that i owe the utility company money."and another behavior that they saw -- which is one that i think many of us exhibit -- was that when people went and paid for a cash transaction, they would take the coinsthat they got in exchange in change, and take them home, stick them in a jar or somewhere,and then every so often, take those to the bank, or give them to the kids to take tothe bank and pay into their savings accounts.
again, when we asked them about this, thisis this idea of saving invisibly, saving without thinking about it.so, that led to the idea of a new savings account for bank of america called "keep thechange." i don't know if any of you use it.and what happens here is that when you go and pay for a transaction with your debitcard, the payment gets rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the change gets put into yoursavings account. so, it takes this kind of behavior of automaticsavings and staying ahead, and applies it to a very simple piece of technology to createa new kind of service. again, it started with recognizing a behaviorand led to an innovation.
so, if design thinking starts with the ideaof being human-centered, then it moves quickly to learning by making things.instead of thinking of "what to build," we "build in order to think."because prototypes help us learn about our ideas, and, the faster we put our prototypesout into the world, the faster we know about the qualities and strengths and weaknessesof our ideas. the faster that we can evolve them, the fasterwe can improve them. now, a lot has been said about the aravindeye clinic in madurai, india. i'm sure many of you have heard of it.it manages to serve vast quantities of very poor patients by taking the revenues fromthose patients that can afford to pay, and
using them to cross-subsidize those who cannot.they're an incredibly efficient organization, but they're also very innovative.and the thing that i noticed when i visited was this willingness to prototype new ideasvery quickly. so, this is the manufacturing facility forone of their biggest cost breakthroughs. it's actually where they manufacture the intraocularlenses that they use to replace damaged lenses -- our own lenses that are damaged by cataracts.and by doing this, they brought the cost down from $200 a pair, when they're made by westernproducers, to just $4 a pair. that's a huge, huge cost savings.and the way they did this was, i think, through a prototyping approach.instead of building some fancy, new factory,
they put the facility in the basement of oneof their hospitals. instead of using the fancy, large-scale machinesthat western producers use, they use low-cost, cad/cam technology to produce their lenses.and they're now the biggest manufacturer of these lenses in the developing world, andactually, they just recently moved into a custom factory.so, if human need is the place to start and prototyping a vehicle for progress, then thereare also questions to be asked about the destination. instead of seeing consumption as its primarygoal, design thinking is beginning to explore the idea and potential of participation.the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagementof everyone in experiences that are meaningful,
productive, and profitable.and clearly, a lot of this capacity to explore more participative experiences has been drivenby the web and many of the things that you all work on.another brit, my apologies. you're getting a great british history lessontoday. when sir william beveridge created the firstof his famous reports in 1942, he proposed what became britain's welfare state, in whichhe hoped that every citizen would be an active participant in their own social welfare.by the time he wrote his third report, he confessed that he had failed, and insteadcreated a society of welfare consumers. hillary cottam, charlie ledbetter, and hugomanassei of participle in england have taken
this idea of participation and, in their manifestoentitled "beveridge 4.0," they've described a model for reinventing the welfare state.one of their projects is this one. it's called southwark circle, in which a smallteam of designers worked with local residents in southern, south london to develop a newmembership organization that helps the elderly with household tasks.ideas were developed and refined with 150 elderly people and their families, beforethe service was launched earlier this year. and the service itself is a combination of"can a for-profit like activities and volunteer activities," and it's really an idea abouttaking a lot of what currently is the responsibility of the healthcare providers and social workersproviders, and bring it back out into the
community where it can be done a lot lessexpensively and often to a higher quality. and, you know, i think that this idea of designingparticipatory systems where value -- over and above cash -- is both generated and measured,isn't only going to be a major theme for design as we go forward, but perhaps a major themefor our economy as a whole. and we can take this idea of participationto its logical conclusion and say that perhaps the way that design can have its greatestimpact is if we take it out of the hands of designers and put it into the hands of everyone.so, a team of nurses and practitioners at kaiser permanente, a local organization, tackledthe problem of improving the patient experience. and one thing they focused on was the exchangeof knowledge between nurses.
in particular, one particular project washow they changed shift. and so, based on a process of observation,brainstorming new ideas, and rapid prototyping, the team developed a completely new way ofchanging shift. and instead of retreating to the nurse's stationto share and tell each other about the various states and needs of patients, they developeda method for changing shift on the ward in front of patients using a simple softwaretool. the innovation brought the time that nursesare away from patients down from 40 minutes on average to just 12 minutes on average,increased patient confidence because now they know what's going on, and increased nursehappiness.
and you multiply that savings by every nurseon every shift on every ward in the 35 hospitals that kaiser has in their system and that resultsin a lot more nursing time. and i think this is just one example of thousandsof opportunities there are in healthcare alone to create innovations if we can get thesekinds of processes into the hands of the people that are actually providing the service.but, unfortunately, good ideas don't sell themselves.any fans of madmen might recognize the image in the background.the 20th century saw the rise of an industry built to tell stories to encourage us to consumemore -- the advertising industry. and yet, when the goal is to create consumptionbut not participation, stories aren't sufficient;
we need movements.one example of that, i think, is this one. it's not every day that you get the primeminister of a g-8 country to launch your campaign, but that's exactly what a team of japanesecreative agency hakuhodo did when they launched this idea called cool biz.have any of you heard of cool biz? it's a great idea.so, this was the, then, prime minister koizumi of japan.and the idea of cool biz was, in order to try to bring down the carbon footprint ofjapan, they wanted to be able to lower the -- or raise, i guess -- the temperature settingson the air-conditioning systems in offices during the summer.one of the biggest things that was preventing
this was the formal dress that japanese businessmenwear. you guys wouldn't have a problem with this.but, all japanese businessmen would turn up in a suit and tie all the way through thesummer. and so, the idea was that, "if we could persuadejapanese businessmen not to wear a tie, we could raise the temperature on the thermometersand save gigatons of carbon, or whatever it is."so, how do you persuade very conservative japanese businessmen to stop wearing a tie?well, the way they did it was, they had a bunch of japanese fashion designers designa whole range of new clothing, and then they had all of the ceos and the prime minister -- all of the ceos of the major corporations
in japan -- do a fashion show with all ofthis new clothing. so, that was one thing they did.the second thing they did as part of this campaign, they got these cool, little badges,and any company that signed up for the cool biz campaign, if you were wearing one of thesebadges, you simply couldn't tell somebody that they were wearing inappropriate dressat work. so now, again, in california, we don't needbadges for that, but in japan, they needed badges for it.but, this movement has ended up with thousands of companies in japan signing up for the coolbiz campaign, and you know a lot of carbon is being saved as a result.they have a similar program in -- oh, one
of the other downsides, by the way, of havingthe temperature set so low in offices was, you'd see most of the japanese women, whowere also formally dressed in skirts and jackets, in the offices with blankets over their knees,because they were freezing cold. so, it had another kind of comfort advantagebenefit to women. and there's a similar program that goes onin the winter called warm biz. same thing. "wear a woolly sweater to work, and we canlower the setting on the thermostat." so an example of, i think -- of going fromthe idea of just telling a story to creating a movement -- in a similar vein, we've beenworking on a project for the international campaign against unwanted pregnancy.and, you know, there's some kind of interesting
statistics.six out of ten pregnancies to women in the 20 to 24 range are unplanned and unwanted.and the goal of the project was to reduce this unplanned pregnancy amongst unmarriedadults. now, the core of this is a website with lotsof services on it. this is just one, helping people select variousforms of contraception. some don't come highly recommended, like champagnecorks perhaps. [laughter]i think there's a piece of string somewhere. i'm not sure what you are supposed to usethat for. but, anyway, sounds very painful.but the service is only going to work if we
kind of get people to engage with it.so a couple of parts of that, there was this whole series of posters rather insulting tothe parenting capabilities of young men. and then, this one -- which is a little hardto tell from this image, but, it'll be a bit more obvious for the next one when you seethe prototype. this is a sticker that goes on a mirror inthe women's bathroom, women's restroom, and that's the sticker.that's the sticker. so when you walk into the bathroom, you canget this rather [laughter] uncomfortable view about what it might be like should you decide,or not decide, to do something. so again, you know, i mean it's the idea ofusing design to get people to engage with
things a little bit more than they might otherwise.so, these are just some of the approaches that design thinking takes and some of thekinds of projects that it's being applied to.but i like to go back to brunel here, and propose a possible connection as to why thisis happening now, why it didn't happen 20 years ago, and why design thinking may bea useful tool. and i think that connection is a pretty simpleone; it's to do with change. in times of great change, we demand new solutions,new alternatives, things that haven't existed before.it's a very simple idea. you know, brunel worked during the heightof the industrial revolution, when every piece
of our economy and society was getting reinvented.now, you know, many of those industrial systems from brunel's time have run their course and,indeed, they're part of the problem today in many cases.and again, we live in the midst of massive change; it's just a different kind of change,driven by different kinds of technology. and that change is forcing us to questionmany of the fundamental components of our society, like healthcare, government, education,and security. and, in periods of change, we need new ideas,because our existing solutions are simply becoming obsolete because of that change.it's a very simple idea. but, why design thinking?because it changes the way that we tackle
problems.instead of focusing on our -- sort of, defaulting to -- our normal convergent approach wherewe make the best choice out of existing alternatives, it encourages us to diverge, to explore newideas, and create new alternatives that haven't existed before.but, before we can do that, before we can diverge, before we can explore new alternatives,there's an important first step. and that first step is, "what's the questionwe're trying to answer?" in the design industry, we might call that,"what's the design brief?" now, brunel may have asked this question,"how to i take a train from london to new york?"he'd have had a hard time building a bridge,
but he did come up with a solution.but, what are the kinds of questions that we might be tackling today?and, we're very lucky we get asked -- just as you are.we're very lucky we get asked lots of really fascinating questions.we get to ask lots of fascinating questions ourselves.these are just some of them we've been working on recently.i won't be very long, so don't worry. one of them, in particular, is a project thatwe've been doing with the acumen fund, which is a social innovation fund in new york.i'm guessing some of you know who they are, because i'm guessing that you have a relationshipwith acumen as well, and on a project actually
funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation.and this is the question, "how might we improve access to safe, drinking water for the world'spoorest people, and at the same time stimulate innovation amongst local water providers?"so, instead of taking the obvious approach and having a bunch of american designers inpalo alto come up with a bunch of new ideas that may or may not have been appropriate,we tried to take a more open, collaborative, and participative approach.so we teamed designers and investment experts up with eleven water organizations acrossindia, and then through a series of workshops, they explored new ideas for product servicesand business models. we then hosted a competition and awarded seed-fundingto five of those organizations.
and then, they developed and tested and iteratedon their ideas. and idea-designers and acumen folks went outand were out in india working with these organizations for several weeks, designing new social marketingcampaigns, community outreach strategies, business models, new water vessels, the drinkingwater, and new service delivery ideas. now, these are just getting -- some of theseare just getting rolled out right now. it's kind of early to see too much of theimpact, although in one case, there's one of the organizations there's one that doeslarge-scale, kind of village-scale, filtration plants for villages in india, and they runon a subscription service. and, by redesigning the kind of communityoutreach strategy they had -- essentially
to design an event to which they invited villagers -- they increased subscription by four times. so we're hoping to see many more kind of areas,sort of, impact like that from these different organizations as they roll out their ideas.and we're just repeating this whole exercise in east africa with a group of ngos there.for me, this is an example of how far design thinking can go from tackling the kinds ofsmall problems i was working on in the beginning of my career.by focusing on the needs of people, using prototypes to move ideas along quickly, gettingthe process out of the hands of designers, and getting the active participation of everyonein the community, can be applied to more important perhaps, bigger questions.and just like brunel, by focusing on systems,
design can have a far greater impact.so there are always areas that i'm particularly interested in, in asking questions about,and thinking about from the perspective of a designer.and i was just kind of going to throw out some of them now.and they might be a useful for the start of any q and a we might have.so three that i been thinking about quite a lot recently, and i think the world's thinkingabout a lot at the moment, at least the top two anyway.this whole issue of reinventing health, not just in america where we're hearing aboutit today, but i mean, to be honest, we don't really have sustainable healthcare systemsanywhere.
and so, it's a pretty big problem.encouraging sustainable consumption i know is something a lot of you guys care abouta lot, but it's something that we're making pretty slow progress on.and imagining a new role for media. one of the reasons i put this one up is becauseyour organization is one that has a huge role to play.you are a media organization, and i think you have a huge role to play in changing therole of media as we go forward. so, on the topic of healthcare, this is onethat i'm particularly interested in. i believe we will only get to a sustainablehealthcare system when we think of healthcare as a life skill, not as sickness to be avoided.and a place to start, at least, is to figure
out, how can we start to educate kids to treathealth as a life skill? to think of health as a life skill just aswe think of many other things as life skills in order to be able to kind of manage andthink about healthcare as they go through their lives.and how can technology help? how can it help get kids interested in health,and give them a means to monitor their progress? i'm going to get you upset.i'm going to use one of your competitors. so what would a health-oriented version offacebook look like? i'm sure there's something better than facebook,but you know, how might it help build communities of kids, or communities of adults, to helpwith their own health?
and how can we better illustrate the connectionbetween nutrition, exercise, and health? there's still a lot of work to do.on the topic of consumption -- i think this is an interesting one and a difficult one -- which is, "how are we going to create closed-loop products -- products that do notuse up and waste resources at any point, from manufacturing through use through disposal -- in terms of products and services -- such that we can create growth for business,because that turns out to be quite important to all of us without extending the depletionof resources?" i mean, for me, this is one of the most challengingquestions that i get to ask as a designer. i mean, as an industrial designer, one ofmy great contributions to society is to create
hundreds of thousands of tons of landfill.and i don't always feel that proud of that. i mean, i feel proud of the products thati've designed. they've been very useful to people.but, in the end, that stuff has ended up in landfills.and we just simply can't continue to do that. so, i think it's an important question.and again, we're making slow progress. we need to apply much more thought to it.on the topic of media, what interests me is, i think media has got itself into this placewhere it considers itself really to be either entertainment or awareness-building.there's definitely an educational role, and we understand that, but can media go beyondthat when it comes to helping us deal with
some of these other pressing problems we haveto deal with? so many of these issues are going to requirebehavior change. they require behavior change at a mass scale.we all have to change our behaviors around health.we all have to change our behaviors around consumption.and what's the role of media in helping us change our behavior?can media be partners to us in helping us change?what new media products and services might help with that?so, you know those are some of the questions that i'm kind of interested in asking thesedays.
so i'd like to believe that design thinking,as one approach to innovation can actually make a difference.it can help create new ideas, new innovations that go beyond the latest products on thehigh street. to do that, we have to go back to this ideaof thinking about design in a more expansive way, more like brunel, less like a priesthoodof professionals. and the first step is to start asking theright questions. that's all i have to say.thank you very much. >> [clapping] >> so, for those of you who don't have torush off to all the sorts of important things
you have to do, then i'd be happy to takea few questions, if you wish. >> thanks for coming.i have a big question. and i think you've already hinted at the answer,but i'm interested to know what your direct answer is to the question.and the question is, "how would you like to save the world?" >> i think it would be excessive, in the extreme,to think that anyone can do that. but, i'd like to work on these kinds of questions.we're getting more of a chance to do that. one of the things that makes me hopeful isthat, when we first started getting interested in working on sort of what i would broadlycall "global questions" rather than simply
the, "how do we design the next soda bottlethat a client might come and ask for, or a piece of tech that a client might ask for."when we first started to do that, it was sort of the only way to do that was to do it onthe side somehow. was to do it either in our spare time or tofind somebody that had a project and we do it on the side.then we found ourselves in the position of being able to convince some, you know, well-fundedfoundations, that they could start to invest in some of that stuff, and that's been great -- people like gates, rockefeller, and others. what's beginning to happen now is that we'refinding some of our large, corporate clients beginning to come, and we're able to ask themsome of these questions.
and they're beginning to engage in them.and i know there are some leading organizations of the world -- of which this is one – that have been doing that for awhile, but, there aren't many.and we're just beginning to see more, and that gives me some hope.because here's the problem i see which is, if we add up all of the innovation capacityof the world's ngos and foundations and people who are excited about solving those problems,and compare it to all the world's capacity for doing r and d and innovation in corporations,we'd be comparing this to this. i mean, there are trillions of dollars spentaround the world on r and d inside corporations today.if we can apply some of that to some of these
problems, i think we'd make a lot more progress.so the only way we're going to do that is if we get these kinds of companies to engage.so that's something i'm pretty excited about. so maybe that's a way that we can make a difference. >> your remark about media and power to peopleto change behavior. and it seems like media's being used to reinforcebehavior or make people behave in ways that are against their own self-interest.and i'm not -- politically it's a long story -- but, for example, like sugary soft drinks.people are bombarded with advertisements. >> i mean, i think it's philosophically andpolitically a really challenging problem, right?because you can go from encouraging behavior
change to propaganda very, very quickly.there have been some, actually, really-effective uses of media to create social change, thathappened in the mid-20th century in countries like germany, and the results weren't thatgreat. and so, there is this -- we're in this sortof very interesting spectrum between, yes, advertising and other forms of media thatreinforce "un-useful behaviors", shall we say, and then propaganda at the other extreme.and we somehow got to find something else. and i think that "something else" is actuallynot about dictating to people what to do. it's about making choices and making the worldtransparent. and i think that's why this organization playssuch an important role is that, the more we
can make information transparent and the morewe can help people interpret that information such that they can make good choices, themore likely they are to make those good choices, i think.but, i mean, it's a really tricky, difficult problem.i don't know. do we want to legislate away from advertising?there's actually an interesting piece on npr this morning that's about just that.it's a tricky one. >> we have people who spend their lives watchingadvertising in fox news, and they believe everything they see.how do you put some other message in there? >> my own solution has been not to have atv in my house, if that helps.
>> thank you. >> you mentioned a minute ago that it seemedvery promising to get these corporations engaged, and what i'm wondering about is, it soundslike you're on the cusp of, from when they weren't very engaged to becoming more engaged.what have you found got them engaged? does it always include some way to profitfrom it? and i'd be interested to hear about that. >> i mean, i think that's the shift that'shappening is that, you know, i first started to see it.i get the chance to go to davos every year,
and i first started to see it there a fewyears ago, where more and more ceos were starting to stand up and talk about this -- talk abouthow they saw that things like their permission to do business in markets was going to beaffected by solving some of these problems. so that was the first sign.and of course, it's one thing for ceos to stand up and talk about it; it's another thingfor corporations to do something about it. and now, what i'm beginning to see is, moreand more companies like unilever, like nike, like nokia, is another example of companiesthat are beginning to see how their businesses are fundamentally going to get impacted byeither not solving these problems or solving them.and, you know, i mean, corporations are self-interested
organisms, right?so when they start to make that connection -- even when there's no short-term profit -- and it's going to be tough. and, you know, wall street makes it tougher,because there's sort of a short-term fixation on profit -- makes it far harder to look outinto the distance and see the time when those profits aren't going to be available.but, i'm seeing more companies that have got the strength of purpose and vision to seethat they need to work on these problems somehow. now, i think one of the problems that mightoccur quite quickly is this sort of chaotic scrum of these organizations trying to getinvolved with different ngos, and the whole thing could get to be a bit of a mess.and i think it's going to take some way of
organizing that.and one of the ways that i think we can start to organize that is, begin to agree on someof the questions we're actually trying to answer.so that, instead of everybody that wants to tackle a problem goes to ask a different question,we can actually start to apply some energy around some sort of questions that we mightactually agree on. again, it's a scale issue for me.it doesn't matter how many of us are interested in tackling these problems.if we're all asking different questions in a very narrow way, it's very hard to tacklethese big, systemic problems. but, if we can start to agree on what someof these questions might be, then we might
be able to apply a lot more capacity to solvingit. >> yeah.i think a couple of things that come to mind for me are the importance of the forums inwhich people will share. like, you mentioned davos, and probably certaininfluential publications and all this and media.and then the other is, i wonder tools to help them recognize it sooner within for the self-interestedreasons potentially. >> yeah.good point. >> so, i'm curious: in your experience, whatkinds of behaviors and practices you've observed that get in the way of this kind of approachto problem identification and solving?
any things that you've discovered help breakdown those kinds of blocks and help people engage in this kind of work? >> well, you know, it's very easy to get intothe routine of just waiting for somebody to come and ask you a question.and, you know, that was the kind of mindset i was in for much of my career.it was like, "okay. what's the next cool client going to walk through the door?and they're going to ask a question. and i'm going to solve that question for them."and it was only as i, kind of -- not just me, but many of my colleagues too -- startedto wonder, "well, you know, this isn't that interesting."either we're getting the same questions over
and over again -- and we've always had thisproblem with ideo, and just i suspect you do too -- but, you know, we've got severeattention deficit disorder. and so we were so excited to do the firstever laptop, and we were so excited to do the original mouse for the lisa computer andthen the macintosh, but by the time somebody came and asked to do the third or fourth one,we just didn't want to do it. and we, you know -- so that's part of whatsort of encouraged us to start asking new kinds of questions.so, it's somehow moving from that reactive -- just waiting for those questions to emerge -- to start to ask them for yourself. for me, the best way to do that is to be asobservant as i can, to watch the world, and
look at the world and try and, often throughpersonal experiences. so i mean, for me, it was going to india,and spending time in some of these hospitals and villages, and actually seeing some ofthese problems firsthand, or spending time in, you know, schools, or wherever it mightbe. i mean, that firsthand experience has actuallybeen an important thing for me, because, one, it allows me to observe behaviors that kindof spark ideas off of my own head. but, it just makes the importance of thosequestions somehow just more visceral. so, thank you. >> hi. [laugh]you talked about taking some of this role
out of the hands of designers and bringingpeople in to engage in these sorts of activities. and also, you talked about children and their,kind of, what they might be exposed to through facebook with more health, kind of.i was wondering if you had thoughts on education and roles that companies like yours and oursand the role of teaching of divergent thinking and convergent thinking and that kind of thing,both from your position in the industry and having been a dad. >> yeah.well, i'm pretty convinced that all kindergarteners know how to do design thinking intuitively,and we beat it out of them, as they go through school.not intentionally, but because schooling focuses
so much on analytical thinking -- which isvaluable. i wouldn't claim that they're not valuable -- but we've forgotten other forms of thinking. so, you know, we have had the opportunityto do some work in early years education and primary education.i would love, obviously love, to see some of these very simple ideas getting, you know,kind of integrated into education, because i think kids would pick them up very easily.they're not difficult concepts. i mean, the skills that one needs to acquirein order to be a great designer in terms of visualization skills, prototyping skills.yes, they may take some while to accumulate, just like the skills in any field do, butthe basic principles are really very simple.
and i think, it's possible for all of us touse them in simple ways in our own lives. so, i'd love to see more of them having moresupport within conventional, primary education. and there are some places where that's happening.there are design-focused, charter high schools and things that are in the united states thathave been quite successful. i'm a little -- the only thing that worriesme about that is this idea you pick people up and say, "okay. you're going to go intoa design school." that's what i did right?i mean, i went to art school. i spent seven years in art school.i made that decision but, through luck, not because i knew that was the right thing forme.
and a lot of people don't get to make thatchoice at the right moment or make the wrong choice.so i'd rather see it being integrated into -- more broadly into general education.i think the uk is a place that's tried to do that, with some success -- not as muchas it might be. partly, again, because -- one of the reasonswhy i'm interested in talking about this as a "thought process" rather than as a "skills-basedidea," although skills are important in design, is because i think that gives it some levelof legitimacy when you compare it to other thought processes.and you can say, "well, how does that compare to narrative approach to thinking?how does that compare to an analytical approach
to thinking?"and you can start to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.and, in fact, we may all be better off if we've got access to all of them.thanks. >> hi.i'm really curious to hear about your creative-thinking process at ideo.i'm really -- when you have -- when you come to -- you have your question -- you come,you kind of deduce it down into a pretty simple specific question.what do you guys actually do in the creative-thinking process?and i'm particularly curious how the balance between people who are process experts increativity and then domain experts, the people
who actually know how the water system worksin india. >> i mean, we're pretty much a community ofgeneralists. so, although people do build domain expertiseover their careers, most of them don't start off that way.and we don't hire domain experts. the way we hire, we use this idea, which ioriginally stole from mckinsey, although i think about it differently, which is thisnotion of hiring t-shaped people. and you've probably heard of it.the idea of a t-shaped person is somebody who's got some skill in something, and, inour case, some skill in something that allows them to do something from a design perspective.so, that could be as a writer, a filmmaker,
an architect, or industrial designer, a businessperson, whatever that is, as long as it contributes to what we do, then that's fine.but we're not interested in just having specialists. what we need are people who've also got thishorizontal stroke of a t, which is this -- kind of, almost sort of -- need to involvethemselves in other parts of the process, in other aspects of the process, in otherthings. and then, more and more, we've got more peoplewho've got multiple vertical strokes to their makeup too.and the reason for that is that, it used to be that design was a relatively simple idea.if i was, as an industrial designer, designing this, i can do that on my own, pretty much.i mean, there's lots of people involved downstream,
you know, perhaps engineering, perhaps manufacturing,certainly distributing it. but, when it comes to kind of figuring outwhat a water cup might be like, or a chair -- you know, the sort of traditional objectsof design -- individual designers can do that relatively well.but, when we're talking about redesigning clean-water systems or energy conservation -- whatever else we might be working on -- it's way too complex for individuals totackle. so we need to work in teams and, at leastfor us, we want to work in teams which are extremely interdisciplinary and able to workvery collaboratively together. in other words, i may be a designer, but icould lead the research team on a project.
or maybe i'm coming up with new business models.we want people with that degree of flexibility and agility.so that's why we have generalists. it's not a simple, linear process, of course.it's messy; it's iterative. we ask the question.we usually re-ask it many times during the -- i mean, whatever we start with -- theoriginal brief -- will have been re-asked, redefined, and sometimes blown-up and startedall over again several times before we get to the end.you know, we do rely a lot on going out into the world and trying to look at how peoplereally behave as a source of our ideas. we do a lot of the obvious things around,kind of, brainstorming other ways of coming
up with ideas.prototyping is a huge core of our culture, so people are building things all the time,and finding new ways to build things in order to try them out.so it's hard to describe it as a step-by-step process.it's a lot messier. we can try and describe it, it always turnsout to be a lot messier. and for me, if there's one deep skill thatpeople who practice design a lot get, it's knowing how to use the tools of the processin messy and interesting ways. i often compare it to being a cabinetmaker,you know. a cabinetmaker will know when to use a plane,when to use a chisel, when to use a piece
of sandpaper.they won't necessarily use them in the same order all the time, but they know exactlythe right moment. and i think that's the kind of process thatdesigners -- it's one where there's all these tools youcan use, and you've just got to pick the right moment to use them, and that's where experiencekind of really helps. >> just a quick follow-up question.when you're selecting people to join ideo, is there something that you've seen over andover again and you're like, "yes, this is the kind of person," something that indicatesthey're the kind of person who will succeed there?
>> well, i mean that whole t-shaped thingis a pretty important filter. they're generally good storytellers, kindof passionate about what they do. but one of the things we found is that, it'svery hard to tell from a resume who's going to make a good person at ideo.and so, you know, we rely a lot on internships for bringing young folks into ideo, and havehistorically done that, which is why we teach a lot -- stanford and other schools aroundthe world -- is because that's the way we get to have two-year-long internships withpeople, and find great people. it's a cultural -- most of our hiring processis about cultural match as much as it is about skill.it's easy enough to tell when somebody has
got the skills.it's a lot harder to tell when somebody has got the cultural fit.so, we spend a lot more of our energy on trying to find out if somebody's got the culturalfit than skills fit. >> thanks. >> thanks again for the inspirational talk.i would like to go back to the three questions that you raised, especially the second one,which is, we should be designing closed-loop systems.i was just curious. what are the dimensions that you are thinkingabout when you talk about the "closed loop"? and just to give a very simple example.if you manufacture a bike, which is made out
of iron and other different parts, it consumesa lot of material and energy. but the person who's riding it saves energyby not using fuel. however, the person loses productivity, becauseit takes longer, but the person is actually using that time to exercise. >> they're damnably complex. >> so. >> i mean, you know, it's going to take youguys to figure out how to even visualize these systems.and actually i think that's one of the problems. it will be a fun thing to work on together.how do we even start to visualize these closed-loop
systems?i find, as a designer, i can start to tinker around with things when i can visualize them.and yet, most of what we have today, in terms of tools to help visualize these kinds ofsystems, are based on life-cycle analysis, which are just -- they're engineering flowcharts,basically. they don't do anything for me as a designer.and, you know, i compare that to kind of hans rosling stuff that you got down in the lobbydown there, which is a great way of visualizing. it's a change of state over time.i think we need similar kinds of clever ways of visualizing these systems.the reality is you've got to look at energy and materiality and i mean there are socialpieces to it too.
and it's extremely, extremely complicated.and i suspect that we will not go from where we are to designing perfect, closed-loop systemsin one leap or ten leaps. it's going to have to kind of be an evolutionaryprocess that's goes on for quite sometime. i think it'll start, right?and it seems to me, we haven't done such a good job of starting it. you mentioned the difference between tellingstories and building movements, and i was curious to hear a little bit more about thatand maybe some of the fundamental differences between approaching telling a story and approachingsuccessfully building a movement. >> the simplest piece of it is a movementthat requires participation, right?
i mean, stories, you know, traditional advertisingcan be consumed. you can sit in front of a tv or a computerand consume advertising; it can affect your decision.but the participation at best is when you go and buy something later.i think, for movements, absolutely require people to participate.and i think, clearly, that's what obama did so successfully with the last election.he got people to go from consuming information about an election to actually participatingin it, you know, in really interesting ways. and so, that, for me, is the big step -- the big difference between a movement and a story.
>> so, more specifically, what characterizesin your mind a successful story vs. a successful movement?are there different fundamental? >> well, i mean, stories are controlled, youknow. i mean, one of the big challenges i think,for corporate america today or corporations all over the world is this idea that they'vespent the last 50 years controlling their brands and controlling the stories that gettold about their brands and producing them in such a way that other people consume thembut they can't change them. in a world of movements, that can't happen,right? you have to let go of your idea and let otherpeople participate in it and change it and
control it.we see lots of examples of that happening, and we see lots of examples of companies tryingto prevent that happening. and they will eventually all lose.eventually all of them will lose that battle, and it's going to require a fundamentallydifferent way of thinking about brands and a fundamentally different way of thinkingabout how we look after or steward those. the simplest vision for me was, i was alwaysused to thinking of companies as being entities with 20-foot-high billboards all the way aroundthem facing out, you know. and i think that's the way we thought aboutcompanies for a long time. they projected an image out into the world,and were often very different from the inside.
and companies like yours have kind of completelyreinvented that idea. you're a company where its internal behavioris its brand. and a lot of the enthusiasm that people havefor google is the fact that people can look inside it -- to some degree, anyway.and i think that's going to be the case for all successful brands, whether they're companiesor whether they're social movements, like climate change.i hope that's somewhat helpful. >> so what do you have to say about the americanauto industry, and are they going to start to let people participate inside? >> it's a sad, sad case.[laughter]and i'm a bit of a car geek myself.
and, you know, fortunately, i got lots ofother great car companies around the world to get passionate about.it was unbelievable, kind of, inability to see the future coming.well, actually, that's not fair. i think they probably saw the future coming.they couldn't figure out what to do about it.i'm sure it will go down as the, kind of, fundamental lesson in how large industriescan just take themselves off the rails. i'm sure good things will come bubble up outof what's left of the u.s. car industry. there will be good brands and good cars andgood things that happen. but, you know, again as a brit, i've beenthrough the decimation of the national car
industry once already.it happened when i was a kid. i grew up in oxford, which was one of thecenters of car manufacturing in the uk. it now makes the mini, which is very good,but it's owned by bmw. it's not a british car.there are no british car companies left. there are none.at least, nothing that doesn't hand-build a few hundred cars a year.everything else is gone -- owned by somebody else.and, you know, i suspect that we're going to see a lot of that same thing happeningwith the american car industry. it'll look very small.it'll look very different in ten years time.
it's kind of a sad thing, but in some waythat inevitability was probably set decades ago.we done? all right. >> thank you all for coming, and a specialthank you to tim.