A Conversation with Tom Kelley

Tom Kelley is a professional innovator. As the general manager of IDEO, the global design and development firm, Kelley helped lead the firm through thousands of innovation programs over the last twenty years. According to a 2008 ranking by Fast Company, IDEO is the fifth most innovative company in the world. Kelley is also the author of two acclaimed books that explain how to build environments and companies that support the creation of new ideas, and do a better job of bringing those ideas to market: The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation.

SJ: So the interesting thing I think about IDEO is this: Most businesses at least pay lip service to being interested in innovation and some are quite good at it. But with IDEO it is literally your business: your job is to come up with new ideas and new products both for other people and for yourselves. And you guys have been in the space for two decades now. Have you seen something change in the climate over that time, in how people think about innovation?

 

TK: The big one is that innovation [is] now almost universally perceived as this irrepressible force. When my first book, The Art of Innovation, came out, I found myself in situations where I had to justify innovation—especially in Europe, I was like, wait, you’re kidding, right? And that’s completely gone away. Everybody gets it, that they are competing on a global basis with almost everybody else. It’s a hot, flat world. And in that world, clearly, you have to innovate. And to be honest, if you’re in a high-cost country like the United States or a region like Western Europe, you’ve got to be extra innovative—because you have to compensate for the cost differential that you have compared to some pretty darn competitive and clever places in the world.

 

SJ: You know, that brief history of the firm reminds me of a question I’ve actually thought about a lot—you actually probably have the best answer to this. The question, really, of design. So much of the material that I’ve been writing about is about open networks and open-source models and big collaborative systems and things like that. And yet I think there is this sense that people have, that design is one of those things that doesn’t work very well in that context—that design by committee is a negative phrase for a reason. And yet you guys have figured out some kind of way to be real innovators in design, to kind of come up with new, collaborative models at the same time. Is there a way to design within a larger group that actually works?

 

TK: I think that a way that we’ve succeeded in design is to redefine the word. Because, inescapably, when I joined IDEO, design was about styling. And we didn’t start from styling. We were called at the time David Kelley Design, named for my brother. But we had no industrial designers; we did zero styling at the time. Our designers were all engineers; in fact they all had master’s degrees in engineering from Stanford. But I think the way that the design world, writ large, has succeeded is stretching it from design, meaning styling, to design thinking, which is to say, a thought process. Back when I was speaking mostly about design, I could see the brains of some business people shutting down. The old definition of design seemed exclusionary. You had to wear a black turtleneck to be a member of that club. But the great thing about design thinking is it’s accessible to everyone. It involves mental muscles that some people haven’t been using lately, but that everybody has from their childhood.

 

SJ: And how would you define that kind of thinking, as opposed to other forms?

 

TK: I am shying away from the use of the words left and right brain. It involves some humility, this form of thinking, or let’s say problem solving, because you don’t start with the answer. With the highly trained analytical minds that people are walking around with, you see a problem and you have a reaction. You have an instant answer in some cases. You would say that that answer comes from your expertise, from your informed intuition. And sometimes that answer could be the right one. But the design-thinking approach says: “Of course I see possibilities here. But I want to defer judgment a little bit—I want to take a humanistic approach, I want to first check in with—you know, what do humans do, what do humans need with respect to this problem?”

And then, a part of the design-thinking process is this iterative prototyping. Now, understanding what the human needs are, I think I have some answers, as opposed to the answer, and so a good design thinker is really facile, really quick with prototyping, and uses the quickest, cheapest prototyping approach available. Sometimes that approach doesn’t involve going to the machine shop at all. Sometimes it involves storytelling, storyboarding, making a video, whatever, but they get these multiple ideas out on the table, and then they get feedback. In complex problems, they get feedback from all the constituents, and then armed with that, the observation they got from looking at human needs, and then the prototyping, where they learn from each prototype, then they’re able to go forward, to pick which thing to implement and then go forward with it. But it starts with that humility—the humility of “I have approaches, but I don’t have the answer.”

So my brother David formed this school at Stanford called the “d school”—the d is for design. And the concept is that all these great universities in the United States and elsewhere have “B schools”—business schools—and the concept is to try to create something that has the same respectability. So when he went to the president of the university to pitch the idea of the d school, he said: “At Stanford University like at all great universities, we have Nobel-laureate-quality people drilling deeper and deeper into fields of knowledge. Some of those fields are technical knowledge and some are the humanities, but these are brilliant people, working and writing about stuff that lots of people don’t even understand because it is so deep and complex.” And so David said, “Look, I would like to propose that there might be problems in the world today that are not going to be solved by specialists drilling deeper into their field of knowledge. That there might be problems out there, and it seems like there’s kind of a lot of them out there to me, that are going to be solved by going broader, by getting a business person in a room with an economist in the room with a scientist in the room with an engineer.”

 

SJ: This is something we’ve both written quite a bit about, the idea of cross-pollination—trying to make those connections across different fields, or different problem spaces. How do you cultivate that?

 

TK: The example that pops to mind, and you may know of it, is the Aravind Eye Hospital in India. Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy comes to America, he visits the McDonald’s Hamburger University in the U.S. and gets a view into their operational efficiency, and he says, “I wonder what the McDonald’s of health care is.” And so this is very far afield from health care by definition. But he’s sitting in a fast-food restaurant and he cross-pollinates across national boundaries, across industries, comes up with the Aravind Eye Hospital, and it’s an amazing place. I have not been, but I’ve read a lot about it. They’ve done something like a million cataract surgeries at an average cost of twenty dollars. And they’ve got health care outcomes competitive with U.S. companies. So I actually think now there’s a second-order opportunity for cross-pollination, which is from Aravind Eye Hospital back to the U.S. health care system. There must be ideas that we could reimport from the Aravind Eye Hospital.

There’s a story I’ve told to a lot of my business audiences about a doc from the emergency room going to watch the pit crew at the Indianapolis 500. He’s actually with a group of docs, and they’re initially thinking they have nothing to learn from people with grease under their fingernails—but in fact, while they’re there they notice that when the guys jump over the wall to service the race cars, they have everything at their fingertips. Each person knows exactly what their job is, and each person has all their tools, all their materials, all their supplies right there at arm’s length or in pockets, ready to go. And one of the docs says, “Hey, I work in a business where seconds matter, too, and I don’t have that. I see somebody with something major, arterial bleeding, I still gotta send people to get the piece parts, you know, get me three of those and two of those and whatever.” So one of the docs said he was going to start pre-kitting stuff right away, that he was going to have on hand, right at his fingertips, some of the things that he was going to need.

So in fact, I would argue with cross-pollination, it’s the only way, if you really want to innovate. Because if you think you’re going to innovate by reading your industry’s trade magazine, good luck with that. Because every other competitor has that trade magazine on their desk. And so it’s good for keeping up with your industry, but it’s not good for getting ahead of your industry. And so you almost have to be looking elsewhere.

 

SJ: How do you do that in terms of the internal organization of the company?

 

TK: Well, one thing is just to make it clear that it’s important. So I used to, for years, run some of the management meetings at IDEO. Before that, my brother ran them all. And I would say that the first twenty years of the firm, nearly every group Mondaymorning meeting started with show-and-tell. And if you think about it, show-and-tell is very childish, it’s very kindergarten-y. But if you think about what show-and-tell is, it’s cross-pollination. And so if you have a culture that welcomes that, then you’re getting this continuous stimulation of ideas from the outside.

 

SJ: And what are they showing at show-and-tell?

 

TK: It’s everything. It is a new technology that they’ve uncovered, it’s an interesting book that they’ve read, it’s an event that’s going on. If you think of your most precious resource, in any organization, it’s attention. The attention of the leaders and the team. Just the fact that you’re willing to devote that attention, that kind of precious time, to bring stuff in. Not knowing whether it’s going to be good stuff or not. It says it’s important.

 

SJ: One other thing that I think is interesting in the book [The Art of Innovation]—you have a whole chapter on brainstorming. And brainstorming, there’s been kind of a backlash against it in the last ten years. Is there a legitimacy to that backlash, or are people doing it wrong?

 

TK: I think those are mostly straw-man arguments. Sure, many brainstorms are being done badly, so they don’t get good results. So then let’s do them well! At IDEO we get extreme value out of brainstorming. Part of the value comes from tapping into the whole brain of the organization. As a practical matter, on any given project, whether it’s an internal project or a project in our case for a client, we may have 550 people at IDEO but you only get like five of those people on your team. So that’s a limitation. But, through brainstorming, you can get, for one hour, anybody in the firm. And so I am no longer limited by the content knowledge of my five project team members.

 

SJ: It sounds like what you’re saying is that it’s not your normal, everyday team that brainstorms. Instead, the idea is to get new people in, from around the organization—so you get a much more diverse mix of folks for that session.

 

TK: If in your company, if you walk into the room and you can’t tell in thirty seconds, in ten seconds, is this a brainstorm or is this a meeting—then you’re not doing brainstorming right, I would argue. In fact, the social ecology of the two are opposites. In a meeting, the boss gets to run the meeting. In a meeting, people take notes; it shows respect for what’s going on in the room. In a meeting, if somebody says something stupid, or something that would be a problem, I owe it to my colleagues to say, “Oh, remember, we tried that last year and it failed.” So in a brainstorm, all the opposites are true. In the brainstorming, especially in companies where brainstorming is not well entrenched, I gotta ask the boss to leave the room. If people are posturing, if people are waiting for the boss to say something and piling on, that is disrupting the free flow of ideas. The boss should set up the problem if he or she wants to be there, say how important it is, and then leave, so that the ideas can flow. In a brainstorm, I would never want anyone to be taking notes because that withdraws them from the fray. I want them to be right in there. And so, of course, the thing where you share your expertise, your critique, that happens right when the brainstorm is over. But [if] we really critique, it just kills the flow of ideas. So there’s an energy to a brainstorming session that makes it unlike a meeting in many, many ways. It’s a sprint, not a marathon. You don’t—the type of brainstorming we are talking about, you don’t do it for eight hours. You don’t even do it for the whole afternoon. You do it for sixty or ninety minutes, and then if you’ve still got more to be done, you bring in another team to work on it, because it’s kind of mentally exhausting.

 

SJ: You have in your Palo Alto offices—there is some amazing, fairly celebrated work space there. How can space be used to encourage this kind of thinking?

 

TK: Sure, this is a slightly frustrating topic for me because I just feel like there’s resistance to the idea. I feel like when I walk around, when I visit corporate America, and I’ve worked personally with fifteen hundred clients, it’s as if somebody decided that space is not important. It’s as if they said, “I just want to get everyone on my team a desk, a chair, and a wastebasket because anything more than that, any more attention or effort paid on space, would be wasted, like electricity, or plant watering.” It’s a utility. We believe the opposite. We believe that space can be strategic, that if you get the space right, it can affect the attitude and performance and behavior of the people on the team. There’s a great book out there, it’s a coffee-table book, called I Wish I Worked There, or something. And it’s these great spaces, I think not including IDEO’s space, but places like Pixar and Google, and Apple, places like that. And you think, “Wait a minute, so these are the companies that routinely go to the top of the mostinnovative-companies-in-the-world list, and they have the most innovative space. Hmm, could that be a coincidence?” You know, I don’t think so. It’s not like space does the whole thing on its own, but I think that space contributes greatly. And I don’t mean beautiful space, I mean, space that has the kind of functional aspects that you want.

Even in Palo Alto, where we’re paying some of the highest rents in the world, everybody’s got two spaces currently. Everybody’s got some personal space and that personal space is shrinking every year, because there’s more space being allocated to project spaces. So the practical matter, at IDEO, you spend, as one of the professionals (as opposed to the support staff )—you spend ninety-eight percent of your life in the project world. So that’s why we define these project spaces. This is an expensive idea, by the way; the cheaper and more traditional way would be to have conference rooms, so you got your desk and when you meet you go to the conference room. Well, that’s a problem, because in a conference room, you gotta generate your energy from scratch every time. So imagine you and I are on a project to change health care in America. And we get together in the conference room, and we’ve got tremendous energy going on, we’ve got pictures on the walls of the patients we’re thinking about, or the doctors. We’ve got a diagram of the network of how health care gets paid for in America, and we’ve got all this stuff—and then the hour’s up. We take that stuff down off the walls, our hour’s up, we gotta leave the room. Whereas in a project room, all that information stays up for the length of the project. So then you get what’s called “persistence of information.” As soon as I step back inside of that space, I’m in that project again. That picture of that patient is still up on the wall, and that really complicated network of how the docs interact with the insurance companies is still up there. In fact, it gives me a chance to build on it. Imagine that that complex network gets written on the wall in the conference room, and then it gets erased. Even if you write “Do Not Erase” it gets erased within forty-eight hours.

 

SJ: I love that because I feel like there is this attitude out there of “yes, we need to be more creative with our space, let’s put a foosball table in, and then we’re done.”

 

TK: I really do believe that you can tweak the space in ways that make it work. One way that you do that is, you make it a little less sacred. There’s a large, successful Fortune 100 company who shall remain nameless, and I spoke at one of their brand-new innovation and learning centers. It was a gorgeous building, and it’s only been open like a week, and I went to put up these giant Postit notes on the walls and they said, “Oh, no, we’re not allowed to put anything up on painted surfaces.” Come on, you’re kidding? If you look at the d school at Stanford—they spent millions of dollars retrofitting this old building there. And you look at it and you think, “Wow, it looks like a kindergarten classroom here.” So there’s nothing precious in the space at all. Everything’s movable, everything’s rough-and-ready. And if you’ve got that going with your space, then everybody feels empowered to make it work for what we’re doing today, as opposed to thinking, “Oh gee I have to call somebody in facilities. I’d like to move this from point A to point B, but I’d better not touch it.” I think that’s a part of space. So I’d be the first one to admit, our space is not always beautiful. It’s certainly not cleaned up. It is very messy. But it works.