Monthly Archives: March 2012

A million reasons why…

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… you can't be the leader you want and ought to be.  Or more than a million.

Here's my personal short list:

  • I'm not powerful enough
  • I'm not wise enough
  • I'm not rich enough
  • I'm not patient enough
  • I'm not smart enough
  • I'm not artistic enough
  • I'm not stubborn enough

For me, and I'd wager for you, this is all bunk.  We're not born ready, and if we can be honest with ourselves, we'll likely never achieve a state of true mastery of anything.  But life is about getting on with things, because life, after all, is finite.  A lot of rewards go to those willing to embrace mediocrity and get on with life.  But fear has a way of getting in the way.  By acknowledging the fear we feel, and not ignoring it, but choosing to act because of it, we give ourselves — and those around us — a gift of inestimable value.

Because, for me, when I'm telling myself all of those "I'm not…" phrases from the list above, that's when I know I'm really on to something.  The fear I feel is a signal that what I'm contemplating not doing is really worth doing.  And to not take the risk of action is to shirk the responsibility of acting when I'm able to act, of delaying or nulifying the value of the gifts I can bring to world.  We owe it to ourselves — and to each other — to go for it, to try to help someone, to make something, to move things forward whenever we can.

Cockroach legs and the future of education

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I'm really passionate about education, particularly when it comes to helping people learn how to become makers and creators.  That's why I'm currently spending a fair bit of my time outside of IDEO teaching and advising at the Stanford d.school, Harvard Business School (as an Entrepreneur in Residence), and at the MIT Media Lab. 

It's a cliche, but when you hang around smart, motivated makers, you learn as much as you teach.  It's particularly gratifying to help someone discover that they're indeed passionate about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, and then to help them figure out how to build an existence around doing it.  In the process, I believe, they become better entrepreneurs, builders, creators — people who get stuff done and help build a better society for all of us.  I just wish this stuff could happen earlier in people's lives, that more kids and young adults had access not just to the training they need, but to a world view where they hear "You can do it!" much more often than "No you can't." or "Who do you think you are?".

I was blessed to grow up in a household where this stuff was in the air.  I took it for granted that people built stuff and that engineering, creativity, art, and the sciences were things worth investing your life in.  After last year's TED I singled out Salman Khan's talk on education as one that knocked my hat in the creek.  At this year's TED I saw a live demonstration which made me think about the awesome creative experiences I had as a kid which set me up to do the things I enjoy doing today.  As it so happens, there's a brilliant video of that same demo I participated in at TED, and you can see it right here — it's the first release done as part of TED's new education initiative called TED-Ed:

Is that cool, or what? From thinking of the brain as a lump of fat, to seeing cockroaches chilling out, to cleverly utilizing the cockroach leg to literally see how a neuron fires, it's science made tangible. And I'd wager it's a lot stickier than anything you saw in high school.

Here's the TED-Ed manifesto:

TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. A new site, which will launch in early April 2012, will feature these new TED-Ed Originals as well as some powerful new learning tools.

It's going to be really cool!  Hopefully this initiative will help lots of kids (and maybe some adults, too!) see how they might learn to creatively express themselves across many realms of human knowledge.  Excellent!

metacool Thought of the Day

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“It is the joy, passion, and beauty that we infuse into life that is the glory of the human species. I think leaders can contribute to that joy— and to its extinguishment. I think administrative memoranda should be constructed as works of poetry, that organization charts should be exquisite pieces of sculpture, that relations between a boss and subordinate should have the qualities of a Balanchine ballet, that work should include immersion into a glorious fiction.”

– James March

 

 

from A Conversation With James G. March on Learning About Leadership, by Joel Podolny

Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2011, Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amle.2011.0003

Prototyping is the process

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MVC-049X

If you google "design thinking process", you'll be presented with a series of diagrams or lists or steps which, in a linear fashion, purport to represent the way a good designer works.  They'll often look something like this:

  1. Understand
  2. Observe
  3. Ideate
  4. Prototype
  5. Test
  6. … and cycle back to Step 1

We're all familiar with cooking manuals, and this one feels not unlike a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies… first this, then that, and then do this.  Easy, safe, predictable, comfortable. 

Except, that's not the way designing really happens.  There is no six-step process to design nirvana.  It doesn't exist.  Over the years I've tolerated and communicated this linear portrayal of the design process because it's an easy way to explain the gist of things to folks not familiar with the art and science of bringing new stuff to life.  The secret is that, when you're designing, it feels like all of these at once.  So I used to draw this linear process up on a wall, and then wave my hands in the air and say something like "But really, it's a big furball… when you're really doing it, you're bouncing all over the place and the steps don't matter." 

I think we can do better than that.  And now I know how.

A wise colleague recently corrected me on all of this.  "Prototyping isn't a step in the process," he said.  "It is the process." 

Exactly.  Designers are always prototyping, whether it's moving things around in their imagination, building a reverse income statement in Excel, or hacking something out of wood using a sidewalk as sandpaper.  The notion that a designer waits until it's "prototyping time" to start messing around with stuff is just wrong.  Prototyping starts when the design process begins, and it never stops.  We build to understand.  We observe for generative insight but we also observe to gather data regarding the hack we just whipped up ten minutes ago.  We ideate with our gut and our hands as much as with our brains.

We prototype all the time.  We must prototype all the time.  Prototyping is the process.

Mo Cheeks and a fundamental question of leadership

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This is from 2003.  You may have seen it before.  I only saw it recently, as I’m not a regular basketball fan.  I have to admit that each time I watch it, I tear up.

The situation was this: 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert had been chosen to sing the US national anthem before the start of a game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Portland Trail Blazers.  The setting was an arena seating almost 20,000 fans.  All of us who’ve ever stepped out the door of our home — which I assume is everyone reading this post right now — has screwed up at one point in life, probably in a very public way.  Can you imagine what it would feel like to be 13 years old and flubbing your lines in front of a crowd of strangers the size of a small town?  Thank goodness for the proactive kindness of Mo Cheeks, the coach of the Trail Blazers at the time.

My question is this: of all the adults on the floor of the arena, why was he the only one to act?  And why did he act so immediately?  Why did he take such a risk to his own reputation — how could he not be embarassed to sing on national television given that his vocal skills are not, ahem, professional-grade?

My definition of leadership is simple: it’s the act of making something happen which otherwise would not have happened.  Mine is an action-oriented definition: if you act and make a difference, you are leading.  Hopefully that difference is a positive one.  If you know the right thing to do, or the right framework to use, you are part of the way there, but you are not leading (yet).  You must act.  It’s the only to make a difference.

A key implication from the example of Mo Cheeks is that acting as a leader demands that we embrace our own mediocrity.  “Am I willing to risk my personal reputation and status for the good of others?” becomes a fundamental question any potential leader must answer.  We must balance the inferior nature of our solution and abilities against what the state of the world would be if we did not act.  Case in point, just imagine if Cheeks had taken 45 seconds to pull up the exact text of the national anthem on a smartphone so that his leadership intervention could be perfect.  Sure, he would have looked better, but in the meantime, things could have turned very ugly for Natalie Gilbert.  Instead, Mo Cheeks turned the energy of the entire arena around.  The sound of the entire arena getting behind Natalie and Mo is really inspiring.  Thank goodness that Cheeks was able to overlook his lack of singing ability, for it allowed him to demonstrate his formidable acumen as a leader.

Be Courageous: Bryan Stevenson

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This talk by Bryan Stevenson was my favorite of TED 2012.  It is an elegant call for action which expertly appeals to our senses of logic, ethics, and emotion.  You may or may not agree with all of Stevenson's arguments, but I would encourage you to listen to this talk all the way through, as I think it works on many levels.  As I tweeted on my way out of the TED auditorium just after this talk had finished, "Bryan Stevenson blew my mind, engaged my heart, and inspired my soul."

And, for those of us interested in making a dent in the universe, his speech is a mandatory lesson in the art of communication.  To be able to speak this convincingly, this naturally, this logically, without benefit of notes or slides or videos, is master class in public speaking.  Wow.

Bryan Stevenson is an innovator.  He looks at our status quo and says "we can do better than this".  Innovating is hard.  Most of the time it's easy — and even fun — to start something, but it's hard to finish.  But in the case of the things that Stevenson pursues, I would argue that it's hard to even start, let alone finish.  As he says in the speech, changing fundamental aspects of the way our world works will make you tired, tired, tired.  But he is an exemplary study in what it means to be brave, brave, brave.

Whatever you're doing, wherever you may be, keep your eyes on the prize, and hold on.  Be courageous.