Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

Some Neato Design Thinking Videos & Podcasts

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Designing_interactions

Here’s some spectacularly neato design thinking stuff to take a look at.  Definitely worth spending more than a few hours on, with the added bonus that it’s all in video and podcast form.  If you’re anything like me, and your eyes hurt from reading so much, it’s a pleasure to be able to sit back, relax, and imbibe words of wisdom from great design thinkers the world round.

  • My colleague Bill Moggridge of IDEO is coming out with a wonderful book called Designing Interactions.  I suggest you buy it!  It’s on my Xmas list. But also take some time to watch Bill’s video interviews with an amazing group of design thinkers (for free) on the companion website to the book.  There are a bunch of my pals from IDEO on there, and also a blogger friend in the form of John Maeda, and a Stanford d.school colleague in Terry Winograd, and many other interesting people.  Fantastic.
  • One the great things about teaching is that you get to hang out with people who remind you how much you can really get done in life when you stop worrying about doing it and just do it.  These people are called students.  Perhaps you know some.  I’ve been happy in the past year to get to know Matt Wyndowe, a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who was part of the Creating Infectious Action class I taught this past Spring.  Matt and his classmate Julio Vasconcellos are building an impressive collection of podcasts on the subject of innovation called, quite appropriately, iinnovate.  There you’ll find podcasts with such luminaries as Mike Ramsay, David Kelley, and Andy Rachleff.  And remember, these guys are full time grad students, which has to be the equivalent of having at least three "real" jobs, even if they do go play golf on Wednesdays.

Enjoy!

Thoughts on to-do lists

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Do you have a "to do" list?  Odds are you do.  Spoken or unspoken, written or not, we all carry around some sense of the stuff we should be doing (or not).  Companies and organizations do, too.  But they’re mostly secret.  Let the world know what you’re thinking of working on, and you’re screwed, right?  Competitors will copy your amazing strategic plan in a snap, customers won’t buy your existing offering as they wait for the next thing to come out, and whenever you have a key project schedule slip, shareholders will sue you for issuing misleading future-looking statements.  Clearly, it would be a bad idea to share one’s to-do list with the world.  Or maybe not, if you’re a business-by-design kind of organization interested in being innovative in a customer-centric way. 

If brands are about what you do in the world, and not just about what you say you do in the world, and if relationships are built around some notion of trust, then why not do something concrete which shows that you’re investing in your relationship with customers for the long term?  And for me, that could mean putting your organization’s "to-do" list out in public for all the world to see.  Here’s something I saw a few weeks ago while on a sneak preview of Daniel Libeskind’s new Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum:

Todolistdam

This poster to-do list wasn’t hidden away in some bureaucratic space administrator’s back room.  No sir, the good people of the Denver Art Museum had the guts to print this thing in poster format and place it right smack-dab in the lobby.  Everyone could see it, everyone had to see it.  And I appreciate how open they are with the list:  we haven’t put in seating, the store ain’t done, and we know there are no signs.  We’re working on it.  And as we improve the space, we’ll check it off and let you know that we know that these are the things that make or break your museum experience.

Just think what could happen if more organizations put their to-do lists out in public.  I think we’d all feel a lot better about doing business with each other.  Say — just for the sake of discussion — that you run the FAA’s website and you’ve found some embarrassing typos on your site.  But you can’t fix them right away because your web admin is out hiking in Bora Bora (by the way, they’ve now been fixed).  What if you could add the "Fix Typos on Travelers page" on your public FAA To Do List blog, right after the entry "Make our site almost as good as that best website ever from Tenacious D"?  Knowing that someone intends to do something, that they are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to improve things, can go a long way toward making you believe.

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone.  So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help ’em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki.  Now I’m part of the solution, and probably part of the brand.  It’s about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn’t.  At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source.  Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art.  I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list.  I would add an entry right now.  Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Ouchdamwall

Ouch!

Beyond the box

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Say what you want, think what you want, feel what you want about the rock band Tenacious D.

But when it comes to the design of B2C websites, I don’t know that I’ve seen anything lately quite as fresh and innovative as The D’s promotional website for their new movie.  It just could be the greatest website ever created.

Instead of the usual cluster of clickable static pages, we get a story, some humor, a lot of fun, and above all, an experience.  An almost cinematic experience.  It’s the Tenacious D brand writ large, dude.  It’s like inward singing but for websites.

( update 11 October 2006:  in the grand tradition of The D, parts of this post were written tongue-in-cheek.  Humorous.  As in, it’s probably not the best website ever.  Because of this, I’m not going to be able to respond to every email and blog link I receive assailing my marketing and aesthetic tastes.  But you have to admit, it is pretty cool. )

Learning to Innovate

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BusinessWeek recently published a great piece about the growing trend of using design thinking as a means to teach people how to innovate.  I’m particularly proud that the Mozilla project from the Creating Infectious Action class I co-taught with Bob Sutton is the lead story in the article:

Tech geeks love
Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which is impervious to most viruses, but
mainstream America has yet to embrace it. How does Mozilla move beyond
invention (cool browser, neat functions) to an innovation that
translates into market success (a Net tool so hot it upends Microsoft’s
Corp.’s Explorer)? It’s a perfect problem for a classroom case study. So last
spring, Mozilla’s business development team turned to Stanford
University. But instead of going to the business school, they headed
for the double-wide trailer that housed Stanford’s Hasso Plattner
Institute of Design, dubbed the "D-school" on campus. The course was
team-taught by Stanford profs and industry professionals. Each student
worked in a team that included a B-schooler, a computer science major,
and a product designer. And each team used design thinking to shape a
business plan for Mozilla.

It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a
focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This
D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest
management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would
have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at
creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to
consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the
first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to
come up with a panoply of possible winners.

This is a great overview of both the class we taught and the philosophy behind it.  There’s a big difference between knowing how to analyze a business situation versus knowing how to create and execute on a business innovation problem.  For more on what we did in the class, here’s a post I wrote earlier this year, and best of all is this post by Bob Sutton, which rightfully celebrates the students from the class. 

One thing I’d like to make clear is that I’m not anti-MBA.  Far from it.  I value my management education a great deal, and believe that an MBA provides individuals with very useful set of analytical tools, as well as the ability to thin-slice most business situations.  However, I do think that the typical MBA program is mostly focused on becoming a master of business-as-usual, which is a critical body of knowledge when it comes to running a profitable organization.  One way (and the best way, I believe) to learn how to engage in innovative behavior is to become a master of business-by-design, and that’s what we’re doing in our Business + Design classes at the Stanford d.school.  Organizations need to know how to do both.  And those organizations need doers and innovators who can bridge the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design.

The importance of being frequestly fractal

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Yesterday I went to the FAA website to see the latest carry-on guidelines.  Here’s what I saw:

Faascreengrab_1

What does "Frequestly" mean?  And how about the use of "our" instead of "out"? 

Here’s the obvious observation of the day: typos like these aren’t really helping the FAA brand.  I actually like the word "frequestly", and would find it to be brand enhancing if I heard it from Cranium or Virgin or Mini, but when the FAA speaks, we need it to sound like James Earl Jones.  We want the FAA to show us at every opportunity that they have their act together.  Brands are fractal entities, and the meaning of the whole is to found in the execution of even the lowliest detail.  Especially if your brand is all about rigor, safety, and juggling lots of big, heavy balls without dropping even one in a million.

Attention: Mandatory Reading

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Roger Martin has written a wickedly good — and important — essay about business + design in the latest issue of Fast Company.  It’s a continuation of some themes he’s been exploring recently, such as the notions of validity and reliability, and of business-as-usual and business-by-design.  In my mind, business cultures of reliability and validity are perfect companions to Christensen’s notions of sustaining and disruptive business models.  As Martin states:

And so, as a rough rule of thumb, when your challenge is to create
value or seize an emerging opportunity, the solution is to perform like
a design team: Work iteratively, build a prototype, elicit feedback,
refine it, and repeat. Give yourself a chance to uncover problems and
fix them in real time, as the process unfolds. On the other hand,
running a supply chain, building a forecasting model, compiling the
financials–these functions are best left to people who work in fixed
roles with permanent tasks, people more adept at describing "my
responsibilities" than "our responsibilities."

Knowing what type of work you’re working on is much more than half the battle when it comes to managing for growth.  It gives you a chance ot pick the right tool for the job.  After all, you wouldn’t try to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in a single-engine floatplane, nor would you try to drop in to an Alaskan fishing village in a 747.  Match the business tools you have at hand to the business outcome you desire.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"Nobody goes through life without encountering obstacles, disappointments, and problems. Nobody can keep from making mistakes or taking a wrong turn. Nobody can escape illness or avoid the specter of failure. Let me point out that coping with success is easy. How you deal with adversity, with failure, and with setbacks will reveal your true character. How nimble you are about getting back on your feet after some large or small disaster or defeat will help you to determine just how far those feet of yours will take you in the world."
– Vartan Gregorian