“Coming up with ideas is interesting and indefinable, isn’t it? The brain is a funny thing. An idea often emerges in the shower, or during a walk. Your brain has been ticking away and the idea just bubbles up. Occasionally you feel, ‘God, I’ve gone dry.’ It’s like writers’ block. Shortly before the launch of a new car, when I’ve used all my existing ideas, I think, ‘Now what?’ But running the car produces new ideas as you understand what you’ve created.”
The Delta Wing. It looks like a rocket, but it's a car. It also represents a fundamental, albeit still potential, paradigm shift in our conception of what a racing car can be. I love the way it looks, and am even more excited about what it represents.
For students of the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, the key question isn't "will it win?", but "how did it come to be?". Hopefully someday someone will write a book on the story of the Delta Wing. For now there's Wikipedia and this good Popular Mechanics article for those of you interested in the backstory on this amazing car.
Because I don't know enough yet about the how on this one, let's focus on the what. If the Delta Wing were a movie and you were the director, here are the characters you'd ask central casting to deliver to your set to weave a compelling tale of daring innovation:
The Ace Technologist: Ben Bowlby is the technical mastermind behind the Delta Wing and the leader of a spectacularly talented and experienced design team. I admire the elegance of his design vision, and the way in which he went back to first principles in order to reach for a new outcome. The Delta Wing effectively performs as well as cars having double the horsepower. That kind of elegant efficiency is what we need in the world today. Efficiency is sexy, a notion that some wayward manufacturers would do well to rediscover.
The Visionary Entrepreneurs: two business-savvy racers were instrumental in making the Delta Wing happen. Chip Ganassi provided financial backing for the first prototype of the Delta Wing, which was not accepted by the racing series it was designed for (see The Enlightened Incubator entry below). Duncan Dayton then took the ball and ran with it, recasting the Delta Wing as a Le Mans competitor, and practising some magic to build a coalition capable of developing, building, testing, and ultimately running a competitive new racecar design — quite a task. Dayton epitomizes the truest sense of entrepreneurship: making things happen by making the smartest use of the resources you have at hand. Dr. Don Panoz, an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, and Scott Atherton also played pivotal roles in the genesis of the Delta Wing. And last but not least, kudos to Nissan for having the guts to engage with this endeavor as a motor supplier and sponsor. Their commitment to innovating makes me want that GT-R even more.
A Team of Artists Who Ship: The Delta Wing is built by the heroes at All American Racers (AAR). AAR is hallowed ground in the racing world, as place where heroes like Dan Gurney and Phil Remington still walk the halls. Over its long history, AAR has proven to be one of the most innovative institutions based on US soil. I don't know about you, but the idea that the master maker Phil Remington had a hand in the creation of the Delta Wing, well, it sends shivers down my spine.
The Enlightened Incubator: you can't run a race car without a sanctioning body to hold the race. At the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans race, there are 55 positions available for race cars to compete. Early on in the Delta Wing venture, Duncan Dayton and company secured the 56th place on the grid from the sanctioning body for Le Mans, the Automobile Clube de l'Quest. While the Delta Wing won't be contesting the Le Mans race for points, it will be an integral part of the racing field, and will live out of the "56th garage" at the Le Mans circuit. This idea of the 56th garage being available represents highly enlightened thinking when it comes to the art and science of innovation. I've written before here on the vital importance of designating a place for the people in your organization to fail. And while I hope the Delta Wing has a successful race at Le Mans, no matter what happens they will have learned a substantial amount, and the cause of innovation will be served. Next year's car will be that much better due to the enlightened incubation of Garage 56.
Professionals to Get the Job Done: at the track, the Delta Wing will be run by the storied Highcroft Racing team. Though most of the focus in racing is on the driver, it is actually one of the ultimate team sports, especially in the kind of endurance racing the Delta Wing is designed for. Ideas are one thing, executing against them is quite another. It takes a village.
A Brave Protagonist: and then there's the human in the hot seat, Marino Franchitti. Race drivers are only as good as their last race — it's an incredibly competitive sport, and there's a line of drivers out the door waiting to take over your spot. That's why I admire Marino Franchitti's willingness to take on the reputational and career risk of driving not just a new car, but a new paradigm. Unfortunately, the world of racing does not operate by the rule of Silicon Valley, and failures are not celebrated as points of learning. On the other hand, someone had to pilot the Wright Flyer, and now Orville's name is one for the ages. Hats off to Marino, and here's to him showing us how fast this thing can really go, WFO. He has guts.
One Sexy Beast: from an aesthetic standpoint, I think the Delta Wing rocks. It looks wicked – why be beautiful when you could be interesting? Of course, I've been accused of having a rather unmainstream view of car aesthetics (here, here, and here, for example), but I call 'em like I see 'em. This thing grabs your attention, and keeps it. I believe a whole generation of 8-year-old kids are going to fall in love with automobiles because of the Delta Wing. And here's a suggestion to the fine folks at Polyphony and Nissan: create a digital version of the Delta Wing and let the rest of us drive it virutally in Gran Turismo 5. It'll do wonders for the Nissan brand, and it will create a pull effect on the conservative world of racing: we really want to see you professionals race the cars we love driving online.
To sum it up, if you're going to shift a paradigm, you could do worse than to try and do it with a really sexy beast like this one, but you'd better have the entire innovation ecosystem in place, too. Enjoy the photos and videos below.
My friend and colleague Bob Sutton wrote an interesting post last week on the topics of good bosses, FUBAR, and SNAFU. Having personally contributed to a few SNAFU situations (honestly, how could you not if you've ever shipped anything real?), and living a large part of my life these days helping others work through situations mired in the muck of FUBAR, I really appreciated his post. It's one that anyone engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life should read. Here's an excerpt:
But it is impossible to be a leader without facing stretches where you and your followers are overwhelmed with the complexity and uncertainty of it all. When this happens, to maintain everyone’s spirits keep them moving forward, and to sustain collective stamina, sometimes it is best to embrace the mess–at least for a while.
This challenge reminded me of two of the most famous and fun World War II expressions:
SNAFU — situation normal, all f**ked-up
FUBAR — f**ked-up beyond all recognition
One CEO I know… uses the distinction between the two to help decide whether a "mess" requires intervention, or it is best to leave people alone for awhile to let them work through it.
He asks his team, or the group muddling through mess: "Is it a snafu or fubar situation? " He finds this to be a useful diagnostic question because, if it is just usual normal level confusion, error, and angst that is endemic to uncertain and creative work, then it is best to leave people alone and let hem muddle forward. But if it is fubar, so fucked-up that real incompetence is doing real damage, the group is completely frozen by fear, good people are leaving or suffering deeply, customers are fleeing, or enduring damage is being done to a company or brand — then it is time to intervene.
I love this distinction between SNAFU and FUBAR, and as a leader of, and contributor to, teams engaging in the creation of new things, I find it really useful, on several levels.
First, if I tried to deal with every FUBAR and SNAFU situation on my radar, I would go completely batty. As Bob also writes, indifference can be as important as passion, and knowing what not to engage in helps save your passion for the things that really matter to you and the people you work with. Focusing on FUBARs seems like a great way to spend your time as a manager.
Second, what I judge as SNAFU may not be SNAFU to those really close to the matter, such as the core design team working on a project. When exposed to the chaos that is a design effort in the middle of things, it is hard as an outsider to feel as much confidence about where things are going as the folks who are working on it each day. In those situations, you have to go more by their body language than by the content, as the tendency at these points as an outsider is to see a lot of SNAFU, perhaps because it is. But experience says that the SNAFU feeling may actually be part and parcel of the design process; if you're not feeling it you may not be pushing enough. And calling SNAFU on a team may actually have an effect opposite to what you desire, as imposing your opinion on folks who have the experience and wherewithal to work out their own problems is as sure a ways as any to sap morale, destroy confidence, and extinguish the spark of intrinsic motivation. As Bob says, better to let people work through their own problems, so long as you have confidence that the time, resources, and talent are there to make it happen.
FUBAR, on the other hand, demands action. These situations cause damage to brands, organizations, careers, and sometimes even people. It's a sign of good leadership when they are identified honestly, and dealt with effectively, even if it means long, difficult road to reach a solution
So, in a long-winded way, I agree with Bob. But, I do think there's more to this story. There's another World War II acronym called SUSFU, and it is some ways the most pernicous of this trio of f-bomb acronyms. Here's what it stands for:
SUSFU: situation unchanged, still f**ked up
Of all the "FU" family of acronyms, SUSFU is the one that really gets my goat. SUSFU is the groundhog day version of FUBAR, in that it invovles something that's a mess, but which somehow has been left unresolved so long as to become routine, even invisible. At one point a SUSFU was a FUBAR, but maybe it didn't get fixed, and then people got scared to deal with it, and then they chose to live with it rather than try to challenge it. This can happen in one's personal life, in a long-lived team, certainly in an organization of any size, and especially in society. Think of big wrongs which existed in our own culture for many years — such as limited voting rights — and in each case you'll see as SUSFU loitering around the premises. Global warming is a SUSFU. The lack of vocational training and apprenticeships in this country for the mechanically-minded is a SUSFU. That lackluster loss leader in your product lineup is also a SUSFU.
FUBAR's are usually self-evident and feel like a crisis to most observers, so taking the responsibility to express the leadership to resolve them, while challenging and hard, is a relatively straightforward decision. A SUSFU, on the other hand, is likely to be flying under the radar to the part where it's become part of everyday life, so remedying it will demand the vision, sense of humor, and fortitude of Brad Pitt's character in Moneyball. SUSFU's are resilient SOB's, rising zombie-like to thwart all your best efforts to move forward. The upside is that the payoff for righting a SUSFU can be enormous. To be sure, slaying a SUSFU may be a quixotic endeavor, but in my opinion we need more people to take up the cause of moving past them.
Here's my challenge to you: in the next year, could you identify one SUSFU in your life and then try to make it better? Imagine the the collective impact of thousands of us unf**king all those SUSFU's. Pretty f**king awesome, no? Go for it. JFDI.
… you can't be the leader you want and ought to be. Or more than a million.
Here's my personal short list:
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.
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!
“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.”
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
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:
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.
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.
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.