The Sh*tFixers: Bob Sutton Interviews David Kelley, Design Thinking Superstar

Key Takeaways

[Music] foreign [Music] episode of what Huggy Rao and I decided to call this fixers um we're this is roughly a monthly series um where we talk to people who are good at getting in and fixing organizational problems and our first guest is my friend uh David Kelly and David who for many of you needs no introduction um David is a Stanford Professor he's a chaired professor the thing I love about David is he's beat the system completely has no PhD he doesn't do Publications but he has done things like started a company that that created thousands of products and other changes Ideo um he's really the driving force behind the Stanford d-school sort of the Innovation education shop at Stanford and uh so David is somebody who has always to me pushed institutions to the point where I I never thought things were possible and then that kind of change occurred and you you you come up with stuff that I still can't believe that you've gotten away with to tell you the truth and the so the first time I met David I looked it up 1993. we well so we've known each other a long time and and my students kept doing case studies of this crazy guy with a mustache named David Kelly and so one of my PhD students at I one of your former students Andy hargadon and I we went to see David in Downtown Palo Alto I still remember he was in the sauce with all this junk in it all this products and everything and we said David we want to do an ethnography and and he gave us the phone list of idea when I do had about 45 employees in Downtown Palo Alto in those days and you said here's the phone list stay as long as you want and we stayed a year and a half and then I was an ideal fellow for 20 or so and you still haven't gotten rid of it so Stephen let's let's start out and talk about about Ideo because uh you and uh and Bill mogridge and somebody else started idea what was the con concept behind that because at that time it was a very radical design firm Excuse me yes the real truth is that idea started in 1978 wow as a company of the Kelly designed and then it became David Kelly designed a very humble title [Music] and yes dkd and um uh audio happened later that with the merger of some other companies but it's it's the same entity the whole time anyway the um I had the whole impetus for this was I had worked in Corporate America for a while and I really hated it it was really bad for me um you know they they took you and sat you down next to somebody and say this is the person on your team you know and um then the project came from somewhere and it it was already the project already like something this big to work on yeah yeah you know you know and the and the project already had the solution embedded in the project statement so what I really wanted to do with the with the beginning of Ideo was to um to make it such that projects allowed the people who were working on them to come up with new to the world stuff rather than having it already well defined and maybe most importantly uh I wanted people to have choice in who they worked with yep um and so um I would pick my friends they would pick other people that they knew that they liked and so we from the center we built out this team based on uh who we wanted to work with it's a completely different environment when you're basically treating the other person as a friend as opposed to as as a colleague I don't know quite how to describe that but that's what happened that was the magic of the early days was you know when we needed to do something it's like how would friends answer that question yeah that's how they decided so I remember I mean when I first got there and met you I was just sort of astounded because I was worth because you were a consulting firm I was used to other firms and you said to me it some client came with an inquiry and you said to him well let's see if anybody here is interested in working on it yeah and if they're if they're interested that'll be great but if they're not interested then we won't be able to do it for you it just sort of blew my mind because like I was just a you know corporate in America you will do this I mean that was the whole model yeah yeah sure we had an early um sales guy named Dave David Haygood and um he he would tell uh potential clients they say they had this project and he would say you know that project's not interesting enough for me to take it back to the company you know and and then companies would try to make their project more interesting it's kind of arrogant but it wouldn't work in our in our culture to be forced to work on something and we were constantly um rejecting things you know some people wouldn't work for the military so we didn't do anything for the military some people thought you know selling carbonated beverages to Children you know and so yeah reject those um and uh we were um we were lucky enough to have enough work I mean the question is if we were desperate for work would we have made well I I remember that when there was downturns you would take work you wouldn't take when things were really good because you got to feed people sure sure we we were lucky my mentor a guy named Bob McCann who said when I started the company that um you know be careful because um design firms tend to porp us meaning they have too much work and then they have to go back and forth uh but we were lucky enough to to um have you know be the design firm of record for Apple at the time and so we just had so much work that we could be um picky about what else we did and you in the beginning you were a pure mechanical Design shop with a little industrial design right that's what not because I remember looking at the at the percentage of people when we first started studying you it was something like 37 mechanical engineers and eight industrial designs yeah well like that it depends what you call them a mechanical engineer because our mechanical engine years came out of the Stanford design program so they probably had mechanical engineering degrees but I wouldn't characterize them as mechanical engineering and that's you brought a bill mahogridge and that's what happened so his firm was primarily industrial design and we were primarily mechanical engineering or engineering and so um uh we started doing projects together because the client wanted everything done all the way they wanted both how it works and how it looks and so that they didn't have to fight that out we fought it out and we just um we just started to realize that we was like it was like an idea to be full service we could offer industrial design and Engineering at the same time people so tell folks what bill modridge is famous for I mean he invented the the modern design for the clamshell laptop yeah bill bill was a wonderful person I still miss him every day anyway he um his firm designed all kinds in in those days we were designing all kinds I mean all of us were designing new to the world stuff because the technology was just coming up so so I mean I don't know who what the form of it would have been but it was easy to do something new to the world when there wasn't any laptops there wasn't a mouse so there wasn't you know pull down menus or whatever so we were it was pretty heady days as far as inventing and so Bill uh I was working for a company called grid systems and they had they had the first lap grid wanted to design the first laptop and bill and his firm designed it it's a beautiful oh is that the grid was it was like a five thousand dollar laptop that yeah that was so expensive nobody would buy it but but you and those that you could get the patent for having the the keys and the display cover each other to protect each other because they thought of it well there wasn't any reason to think about it because there wasn't any laptops yeah and so so folks look up Bill's picture he talked and looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars and he was so classy I mean that guy was such a classic I learned a lot from him absolutely so so idea okay in an idea we'll get to the d-school in a minute but the thing about idea was there was this point where you kind of started pivoting from uh applying design well to products to processes into organizational design I mean I I even remember uh Diego Rodriguez who I think is watching that one one of your partners saying he worked for steel case when he was young and designed a table and then he was helping them design their organizational structure and use the exact same process yes I think so talk a little bit about that transition yeah so yeah so our process is really uh we call it human centered but it's really around trying to understand what's meaningful to people and how to get things to work well in the people sense uh and sometimes that's a product in the beginning it was only product so that's all we knew but then it started to move towards Services right you can see how the same process of really understanding um what the tray should look like on an airplane and how you should serve the food is very much in the same understanding what's going on with the people in this industry right and then we started designing experiences and systems and we found that our process because it was so human centered for sure but also because it was so prototype driven that we could quickly make something and it could be it could be a story of a service or acting out an experience right and um you could just all the the things that were wrong just came out in the Prototype and then we just fixed them you know you you you find you you you you have in your mind that some something's going to happen a certain way or something's going to look or work a certain way and then you build a quick one and you say oh my God that you can't walk on that side of that because you'll bump into this right and then we can we then we can quickly change it and so the the our process seemed to have um um seemed to apply broadly both because of how human-centered it was and and how quickly we were willing to switch directions pivot in a different direction based on on our prototyping so so I I'm going to tell a little story and David knows this is coming so with one of the most amazing things I ever saw you do and you I saw you do a lot of amazing things but there used to be at Ideo this astounding meeting called the Monday morning meeting and uh and the best still the best meetings I've ever been to there'd be 60 people sitting around and you would have 60 people like rocking and cranked up at uh nine o'clock in the morning on and these are like you know Engineers who like to stay up late but anyhow so so what David did is David did this reorganization and what happened idea got big enough that you couldn't just have one big group yeah so you broke it into three Studios and by the way the most amazing reorganization I've ever seen those of you who are watching so probably been through organizations where you are told you are reorganized and you are not on this team well this reorganization was he had three Studio leaders it was a Brennan Boyle who were the uh I'm trying to remember who they and two others and they made the pitch please join my studio so people had a choice of what group they're being put into you go in any Studio you wanted and people were really nervous about the reorganization what David did to see the see his mustache he shaved off his mustache nobody had ever seen him without his mustache and he and he had this line which I and he said so this organization it's just like our products this is a prototype it's just like my mustache I can grow it back it was and everybody was just blown away by that in that reorganization it worked for a while and then you did something else yeah yeah but the thing that I loved about that it it and I still think about that is this notion that an organization just like a product is a prototype and that's that's what we do at the Disco too yeah so yeah I know the the thing about organizational changes I mean it needs to be done even in in almost all organizations that's why you have a job anyways but um but it but we always wanted to be able to say nope that didn't work you know you know like a month or two months in um we one of the we you could say you could change that we were gonna in the studios and we say oh no that's not going to work so we're going to have to break into these this kind of organization but um one of the times in our life we did a lot of work for Steelcase and one of the big times in our life was this thing of um moving from private offices to cubicles which is a big deal it's a big deal right still a big deal or or maybe not cubicles was not a good choice but um open plan versus private offices right and we're now almost all open plan everybody in the planet is almost open place there's a lot of evidence it just sucks too by the way but anyway but it is what it is but um there at this time you know take a law firm everybody was in their own right and we had to try to talk them out of their offices right and into an open plan was a really tough sell so just like everything else we do we would say um we're gonna try it and if it doesn't work we're going to go back to the old way and in this particular case most people preferred the open plan with some enclaves so they could have privacy if they wanted but in the there was more exciting to be out in there yeah so so the I'm thinking of that original concept was cave and Commons right yes that's right because we used to go out and talk with with Hackett it was the CEO of uh of Steelcase at the time in in the and I think the problem with a lot of the folks who went to open offices is they give you all Commons and no caves yeah so so that might be it so so okay the ideal Adventure interesting fascinating but and the other thing about David is and I don't even know how you get away with this but he's like a full professor at Stanford he he's got a chair he's in the National Academy of engineering and he's a CEO of a company so he's kind of doing all the stuff and and uh but then you you get this idea so it's like 2002 and I remember it used to say I want to start something that's called the d-school and we'd go to Ideo as it was like Terry Winograd Bernie Roth Jim Patel and he'd kind of give us wine and was in food it was really fun the thing about David I think I've eaten a hundred thousand dollars worth of Ideal food in my life he's I do is very good with food and and I just and I I just look at my even my email folders have Kelly's dream and then one day you came back with 35 million dollars from hasso Platinum so we had to do something so why don't you describe a little bit about yourself I'm going to go back and talk about having two full-time jobs I I highly recommend having two full-time jobs because in those days when I was not at ID though they thought I was at Stanford and when I was not at Stanford they thought I was audio I could be anywhere you know I mean I was I could be you know out in the bay um so anyway so I really like two full-time jobs as uh because nobody knows Dodge at the B school so the D school um uh well first it was a joke the d-school because the B School such a big deal here and so we wanted to be funny and so we caught ourselves to D school we kept getting ceason's assist um yeah every administrator told you to stop calling at the Disco except by the end they were calling it The D score but anyway um the notion really came to me was that um if you go around Stanford there's just a lot of people in doing something they don't want to do the you know the professors are teaching classes they don't want to teach but they have to teach a certain number of classes so they teach you know introduction to chemistry or whatever they have to teach and the students really don't want to take the classes they're they're a lot of them anyways because they're required right I mean they would take elective classes they don't so if you just look down from the top you see a place where there's rooms full of people who don't want to be in those rooms and that made me think I want a place where um where people opt in they're there because they want to and so initially we didn't give the students credit for the classes and we didn't pay the professors so I remember not being paid today and I remember you complaining about yeah of course I complained uh but uh anyway but so that that option I still taught the classes though yeah I know you did you did you did taught a lot of classes and so that notion of opting in and and wanting to be there for the right reasons was the thing that really got me uh excited and then that you know we we had done a lot of talking about multi-disciplinary teaching and stuff but it really was you know we go to a meeting and divide up whatever the money was and go back and do what we were doing here before and it was so it was just talk and I really wanted a place where professors came from all over the university uh to to teach together and we were successful at that it was amazing you know I don't know I think there's 50 professors teach there oh it's it's just every Department you know that so I'm thinking of some of the because David because this was before any classes you sort of laid out okay so classes are required none of our classes will be required there was that then you have this concept of sage on stage which means one Professor like me just talking the whole time yeah and then no your thing was the professor doesn't talk so much the students actually have to do something and well and and there has to be multiple professors in the room at the same time not one point of view at least two and maybe more and and by the way just having you know had a taught at the d-school and having to struggle with Stanford so at Stanford they try to give you less credit when you do a team Todd class even though it's actually more work because you have to coordinate with more people yeah so so there's that but but the other thing and I think this is getting to prototyping maybe we can talk about this and and talk about some of the things that you're most proud of because the D school really does have classes where people prototype products prototype companies they prototype their lives right I mean it's it's just remarkable so yeah so talk a little bit about some of the things that you're most proud of and it's just right across from here it's just such a buzzy exciting place still when I walk in there I'm like wow well you know it it's a lot um it's a lot uh more exciting than I ever dreamed it would be and it's been copying you know continuously in Academia now and that feels that feels really good but um what the the things that um um remind me there's a class called um extreme affordability yeah and that was like the first class did you co-founded that with Jim Patel yeah and um and just seeing how excited the students were to actually go in country and prototype something that was going to help people who had real needs so the concept of this class is you before the class it's a two quarter class you send the students to do need finding all over the world right well to whatever their they you know they're going to do you know uh incubators for babies that in in India or Africa that don't can't maintain their body weight in you know out in the Villages and so they're going to go to those places yes and do the need finding there and they're just so excited when the students come back and you know and a lot of companies been a lot of companies that have been started out of just that class in the in the um yeah Embrace you're talking about the one with the baby warmer so yeah so tell the Embrace story because the Embrace story is a great story well Embrace um the students I'll tell a couple quick ones the students when and uh were kind of came to the collusion that they needed more incubators that was because there were so many babies that died because they didn't they did they couldn't keep warm enough to maintain their body weight and so they went over to I think design a a low-cost incubator and then just because of the way the process our process works they figured out that didn't didn't do any good have an incubator in the hospital the people the babies were all dying out in the Villages so the problem wasn't to build a better incubator the problem is to keep babies warm exactly so they ended up with making something that looked like a sleeping bag with paraffin in it and you heat it up and I don't know how many hundred thousand lives they've saved at this point uh but it was it was that way another one that um is when um to um I'm blanking on the name of Terry winograd's class but um anyway they they went to Africa to look at um at uh fires they they found that um they found that you know there were these Villages were you know the kind of electrical systems weren't that robust and so they'd have fires and they went and I think everybody thought they were going to do a low-cost fire extinguisher right but when they got there and and really got to know the people they weren't they were worried about fire but they were worried about fire for a specific reason which was their immigration documents would burn and then they wouldn't be legal in that place and that was really scary to them so a fire meant they could lose their home so anyways I'll make a long story short the students figure out that that's really the problem they get pickup trucks and get scanners and they go and they go around and scan all the documents of of that the people having they put them in the cloud and now you know you don't have to worry about your your because they can pull them they teach them how to pull them down they don't have to worry about um you know the documents burning it's that kind of excitement you can see how that would turn Stanford students on to make that kind of contribution and there's many many more and and to me I mean let's maybe just sort of back up here and we've already got one questions please keep um asking questions um but let's kind of go through because one of the things that's happened with a lot of people picking up design thinking we were talking about this and getting ready for this that that it's all these messy things yes but there's two or three things that you keep coming back to need finding rapid prototyping what else what would be a bias towards action rather than sitting with your laptop in a room someplace get out there into things and then humans human centered yeah so the the bias towards action is really interesting and I already mentioned Diego Rodriguez one of your students um who we've both learned a lot from and and this is question I've taught with Diego at the d-school and people say bias towards actions you're going to screw things up but but Diego always asks this question I love which is where is your place for failing so it's sort of like the difference between crashing in the flight simulator versus the actual airplane yeah so how do you how do you get because and you've worked with a lot of organizations that are really resistant to trying anything oh it might screw it up right so how do you how do you get them to sort of move yeah well um because you're very Charming with this no well you I don't know about that but um it um what we believe is that you need to um do something that uh Albert bandura called the guided Mastery a series of small successes you can't go into um to a to a company and do the kind of wholesale change that we would have in mind when we first got there right because they would just it would be rejected right too different right and so um the trick is to to have some like experiments have some little um winds by picking something that's smaller and and there's an and there's obvious we want to set it us up for Success so there's obviously a pivot from where the people are thinking they should go what they're doing now and if you just pivot a little bit you get a much better result and so we start by um start by having those little wins and then people start to notice and oh I wanted I want to have you know I want to do things that way if that's going to be successful so it's uh it takes a lot of of um small wins so I mean a good example of that and I'd love with you um to jump in on this I mean one of idio's biggest clients while was uh Procter and Gamble yes this amazing woman Claudia Katra who we just love Claudia so Claudia LED this design thinking movement and it spread throughout much of the company and had a big effect but I remember she started with the Mr Clean people because first of all they were desperate because they were Mr Clean was just sort of like sales were just going down and down and and and they were so desperate that you worked with them to help reform and you came up with the Swiffer right well I'm not sure you're I was not on that project but something yes something um that was new to the world came out of the the dull thing that that they had right right and so yeah that's that I mean that's not a tip atypical for Ideo or for the d-square you know you can you you uh you can go and it's part of it is you know the leadership being so open at both places I mean um Sarah Stein Greenberg who's the executive director of the d-school is really really good at um getting people to do stuff that needs to be done and and that they um they feel like they contribute uh uh across the board and so her team is uh is is doing a fantastic job right now I just walked across there from there all right okay so we got some question um okay so this is Ajit I don't know where Ajit just sometimes companies have a hard time getting buy-in from clients around design thinking even Centric process it feels strange and wrong to them so how do you get them on board you just talked about doing a little small win yeah um I I remember hasso platner our donor the hustle platner Institute of Design once I I have one answer and I'll see what it so I I remember I was at sap giving a talk and and Hasa was giving grief uh I won't name him but but to another executive and he said to the executive this is a guy who led strategy I don't understand a word you say I understand every word that David Kelly says so that's one thing you say is you actually speak English so that's one way to convince him what what else do you do to get buy-in um well I think um it's about storytelling to get buy-in you got to be good at storytelling right and um I think in most cases especially when the product or service has social value which is the kind of stuff we tend to work on now um a well done video that builds empathy for the people if you can picture if you're the company and you're having trouble buying into the process um if you can show a few um uh empathy based videos of what's going to happen if we do it this way um it's you that's the human part it eventually wins people over I mean yes the company you know is worried about shareholder value more than they're worried about taking care of everybody but I you know it's a it's a it's a getting good at storytelling and make quick little videos painting a picture of the future I mean the hard part is when they're when they're having trouble um accepting this process um they're not thinking about what the consequence is to the Future because nobody's shown that if you can paint a picture of what the future is going to be like with these new ideas in it somehow that's easy for people to it's like you see science fit if you read a science fiction book it's easy to picture what would happen if that I mean so one thing that sort of comes to mind to be a little concrete so in the early days and I used to think you were nuts by the way there's a lot of times I thought you were crazy yeah he had this picture in front of his office he had this picture of where's Waldo yeah and and you had people sort of running around in different groups and that was your vision of the d-school and that's kind of how the diesel works yeah if you stand up on the second floor and look down in a day when like when it's easy when it's busy it looks like it's just like where's Waldo so so what do I know because you have these pictures um so this idea is sort of painting a picture future and then getting people to live little pieces of it that's one of the sort of experience yes prototypes that you guys are really good at building students are really good at it but I I just even remember uh to tell tales on uh one of your great students Perry Claymont is one of the best teachers at the Stanford D School Perry was well he invented the modern Snowshoe he was very senior at Patagonia and now teaches all sorts of classes so Perry was the CEO of Timbuktu he was CEO of Timbuktu and our students we took him up on a bus and Perry's CEO he had the worst corporate meeting I have ever seen in my life and literally our students were on the bus we couldn't believe people were falling asleep they were interrupting they were confused I mean it was really like terrible and blessed Perry's heart what we did was we had our students come in and what they did was they had him and his team role play what a good meeting would be and and so that was to me that's sort of living the future and he did change the meeting yeah um and and you are very good at running meetings well Perry is probably good too but that was to me a really good example of our students created an experienced prototype in the d-school we put it on the bus we go to the meeting we observe it and then we build the Prototype and then we try to get the user uh to critique it and then to live it and try it in the in the real world maybe that's the full cycle design there are there are better I mean there's you know I mean there's science here you know that's what you I mean there there are better ways to run meetings and worse ways around meetings there are better ways to incentivize employees and worse ways to incentivize in place so you know if if you can get it right then you know the question is of getting them to adopt it if you can get it right and show some small successes people move they know they don't move a 100 no no no they move a bit and then once once we're going and and there's a couple of successful uh products or Services out there then it really um it really can take off because people want to be successful and they see it a new way to be successful they do that and that's why people like you're talking about Claudia kochka that's why she um protected people in a in a most people uh today have some kind of design d-school-like place inside of the company it was called the gym I think near the gym that's right I remember the gym yeah anyways well that's to protect them long enough to have some success right right so and you know one of the things to be snide but one of the things that I used to hear I'm your designers say is you don't show unfinished work to stupid people so so there's there's some people you can sort of show your really crappy prototype too right I actually I even remember uh bill mogridge I won't name the company but like yelling not very nicely at somebody who had spent like a hundred thousand dollars on this prototype he said that's the Prototype you should have made with paper for 10 bucks yeah um but but this idea of not showing um unfinished work and making it safe for the idea it's actually it's funny it's funny you bring that up I actually met I I kind of measure companies Now by how crummy the Prototype is that they can take to the CEO if the C if the CEO is hitting on all cylinders with respect to this then they're happy to see unfinished work right a crummy prototype but that's not the way most companies are if you've got 10 minutes with the CEO you polish you make it perfect you make it perfect you know but you're not at that point so now you're at the whim of whether she or he um like it whereas if instead if he'd gone in you know two months earlier and said boss this is what I'm thinking there's these three what do you think yeah then you would have yeah but I'm sorry no no but the CEOs are are usually so busy and everything that they're not um they're not um happy about going seeing the crummy stuff right right right and are you talking about Jim hacker to a CEO of Steelcase Anna Ford I think Jim is somebody you can show pretty crummy in fact I remember he wants to he wants to have his say he wants to have you know uh and his point of view Incorporated down the road well I remember I think you got Hackett hooked on Ideo he was head of marketing at Steelcase before a CEO and he was on a team and he was there prototyping at midnight with him like cutting up boxes I mean you you really got him to drink the drink the the Kool-Aid so um so I mean this idea of prototyping is interesting so so there's some questions here and I I I like I like this question from May about uh there's a couple questions here about being design thinking being a buzzword and so forth and the interesting thing and just the the years I've known you nobody knew what design thinking was in fact when I first met you nobody used the word design thinking and then and people used to joke maybe it's called design doing instead of design thinking and stuff like that and there was there's been this sort of Arc and we talked and this happens to almost all management movements where first it's an idea nobody knows what it is and I even remember Claudia kochka who was one of the early adopters saying I'm not going to call it design thinking because nobody what it is I'm just going to call it Innovation and then all these people adopted it yeah and now we have a situation where let's be honest in some places it's not getting a great name because it's not being done very well that's right so why don't you talk a little bit about the Arc of the movement well I think I think I mean I'm not in embarrassed by that I think all movements do that quality movement same story so we just had there was just a big fight about design thinking on our alumni thing and um so it's it's the part about not doing it well so if you go up and you just you kind of slap the word design thinking on whatever process you have then you can say boy that doesn't work very well right right we know I mean I'm going to be arrogant but we know works I mean you know we've seen it happen so maybe it doesn't work yeah it works a lot of places but um but now you've got now as it gets to be um uh watered down let's say then yeah no I mean we see people saying they do design thinking they're not even talking to customers you know they're doing the sit in their office with the laptop open they're kind of design thinking the same thing happened with the first thing that happened in that in my life was brainstorming so brainstorming yeah I remember and it was very useful in generating lots of ideas um but as it caught on it began to mean a meeting any meeting where you were going to talk about uh you know ideas was the brain so oh let's have a brainstormer well brainstormer has a formal rules and a exact you know layout on how you do it and uh and it became mean a meeting well design thinking is in that well so the I mean brainstorming is an interesting example because I mean idea was famous for brainstorming you had a famous ABC Nightline the best-selling Nightline video of all times with was when you made the shopping cart yeah and there was all this brainstorming session it looked really cool and brainstorming was important at least when we studied Ideo but one thing that Andy hargiton and I figured out is people spent less than five percent of their time in brainstorms yeah they it was part of a whole process so people would say oh brainstorming doesn't work and to us brainstorming is just one little part of the creative process you got to have the Prototype you got to test it you got to revise it yeah and and maybe you'd have a special brainstorm if you were stuck with a design problem where people would come in and try to fix it yeah I I remember going to a brainstorm is a specific technical problem and people fixed it and then we ended the brainstorm after about 20 minutes yeah so at some point we get to people you know like I never use the word brainstorm anymore I probably won't use the word design thinking right anymore right it's just it's just uh how it happens um and but you know people are really good at um latching on to some kind of uh frame right right and and so in the early days the design thinking was a really good frame to say I'm going to act differently right really so I'm it's and the company is going to allow me to act differently and that in itself and then it makes a difference about the process but that in itself you know I'm allowed and see people say that all the time about the d-school uh professors from different parts of the University they say boy I walk across the threshold and I know I'm allowed to active really here so so I mean just one test that I use and let's go look at some of the other questions here but one test that I use because a lot of the organizations we work with because we do uh teaching at the D school so they'll set up a teaching operation where they teach uh sort of watered down 45-minute versions of design thinking and they'll say we've trained one company in particular that was a decently yeah yeah I'm not going to name them they they were really proud of training something like 5 000 people right and then so I kept asking the question and I asked this question for years can I can you show me one product or service that has been changed by Design thinking and they'd always change the subject and eventually after a decade they have abandoned their design thinking movement and what that meant was they ended the classes but they they never implemented the process in everyday life and that's what Claudia kochka did was actually there was some classes but she would find specific products and services that in organizational designs that needed to be changed at Procter Gamble and her people would change them and to me that's a there's a difference between talking about it and doing it and I think training is really uh dangerous yes it is I I do think that um sometimes these movements I'm not thinking about design thinking in general but sometimes these movements serve their purpose because they allow people to have a new frame and that so I when the one just thought of it was hack it at Ford had this thing called now near far now near far now and so whenever you were talking about a product where you had to talk about what's the now version of that what's the near coming and what's the far version of that and it it sounds like a pretty simple thing but it really made everybody have a different discussion rather than like work on one thing and work on a new car no they worked on the near your car you know the now car the near car and the far car and so it really set you I mean I'm just saying it's just a random example of how having a frame and I think design thinking was a frame for some people and had some Advantage even if they didn't uh use it properly okay properly defined by us which isn't it doesn't mean it's proper okay so there's a couple questions here which I'll get to but one thing I kind of want to do we got about what 18 minutes left is so one thing that's amazing about knowing David the years I have is is that the number of people famous people who have like just been sort of uh smitten with you I've seen and one let's kind of go through and talk about what you've learned about chip fixing a word you don't like we can talk about how you would fix the word pictures I have to tell a story so when we had a news Provost here persist drought yes and I was at the Disco and Tom Hanks happened to be there and she said to me this is this a normal day give me a tour because one of his kids was there so yeah his kid was here but you being with Tom Hanks is not as all shopping shopping so so well we'll start with Tom Hanks so what'd you learn from Tom Hanks um I learned and that you can be you know that all that Hollywood Glitz and stuff you can be a completely different kind of person you can be a you know a really solid citizen who cares about things that are important like typewriters and in fact he's obsessed with typewriters is a whole documentary about his typewriters but I mean he's a really good actor but he is having dinner with him he is uh just a a a a a genuinely nice person but I don't know how we got off on him well well so let's talk I mean Steve Jobs who you he was one of your best friends you were very close to to Steve Jobs so so tell us a little bit about what you learned from Steve Jobs and maybe what you taught him too because he you have a pattern with him even on the Apple three I remember that yeah yeah you know I don't know if I taught him anything but he taught me a lot I mean any design firm any designer who worked for Steve he was their best client they they would tell you for sure because he cared so much right and so what I learned from him was you should do everything to the hilt I mean you know why why not care about the box that it's in you know why why you know and and so um it was it was great because you could just you know go you know just go to the to the most extreme thing you could think of and he would entertain it right even though he would sometimes say well it's too expensive but he would still challenge you to go back so some days some days you were a hero and that felt really good and some days you were a heel because he would say that's not good enough or I thought you were good or what something something tough he's tough but um but it always in was in the the process of trying to make something like really much better than you thought you could make and you know so you know I mean the the most famous thing we did from was the mouse and um he he wanted it for I don't know Seventeen dollars or so it was some number like that the team could tell you anyway and um we were not coming anywhere close to that and so expensive too expensive and so we um we just kept kept at it and the thing happened there which is really interesting was we were trying to make the mouse such that it was accurate meaning you moved the mouse on the table an inch and then it moved on the screen 1.00 inches right and so that was that Precision was adding a lot of cost into the mouse and then one time when we were fooling around with it we realized the human brains in the loop if you draw the block diagram we don't need to be that accurate you got the human brain right right in Loop so if you want to move it from here to to this point the person's brain stops it it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter so now the cost just went and I think that's the kind of thing that Steve would force you to do in order to make his unrealistic goals so I mean he I mean he was a complicated character one person I've talked about him a lot with not as much as you um is Ed catmore from Pixar worked with him for 28 eight years yeah and and the one thing Ed would say is that yes he would get mad sometimes but but the main thing he would do with Pixar is he would push people for Pride yeah that you want to be proud of the work that you did when you look well if you please Steve you were proud I mean that's that was for sure I remember actually because I've been around Ideo so long I remember I was hanging around idea when he came back Steve came back in 1997 as as an interim CEO to fix the company one of the first things he did was he called Denny Boyle yeah uh just retired from Ideo recently who was it he was one of your first eight employees or so wasn't he and and Danny I think designed 40 Apple products and one of the things that Steve did because he'd been gone for a while was he called Denny and said run me through the the Apple product line and tell me what you think of it so that was the sort of relationship that you had with them yeah yes it did yeah and you know I mean he we all hear all these um you hear all these uh stories about how tough he was and he was tough and he was difficult to work with but he's also very um caring person you know he had cancer and I had cancer and when I uh when he found out that I had cancer he came over the house and he came over the house regularly and um you know helped me through you know making decisions about chemotherapy and stuff like that and he gives it you in the hospital and and he did and he he nag your doctors and nurses to take care of you I mean such a complicated guy both loving and difficult all at the same yeah my my surgeon I mean who you know for years I I went back to um you know to have to have him look at my throat again and my surgeon always retold me the story of jobs coming in his office and and poking him on the chest and told him he was going to do a good job of surgery so he had high standards well good and you're still alive yeah I'm still alive so so I mean so that's one of the stories about Steve is that you hear the comp he was a very complicated person and and certainly I wrote a book called The no hassle Rule and I do mention that he could be an sometime but a complicated person yeah um Okay so we've got about 13 minutes um uh this one's too found from Barrett any insights on bring Innovation to the Department of Motor Vehicles okay you can fix the California give me an idea um you know the truth is the department I mean it's a mess but the Department of Motor Vehicle holds made a big leap when they started having appointments right yeah so there's a line that that's just as bad as it always was right but there's a line next to it that if you you know get an appointment or willing to wait until the your appointment date they're pretty efficient I mean I was surprised I'm a collector of old cars and so I'm at the DMV a lot because you know they're always doing different things and getting license plates from the year that the car was made and all that kind of stuff and I think it got a lot better but um the main thing is the way the way to improve it in my mind would be to make it uh more enjoyable for the people who work there is a great place to work we we did a bank for uh Carlos Rodriguez Pasteur um in in Peru the richest guy in Peru basically yeah but that but it was the same thing with the tellers in the in the bank how do you make them and we did this one little thing which we put a little like white board Blackboard next to thing and and then they wrote something on it like I remember one guy wrote I want to be the president of Peru right or you know um I love scuba diving or whatever and then we watched as the people coming up to the to the teller had something to talk to the talent about so humanizes them and humanize them and it's you know it that's the that's the DMV needs DMV needs is you know for that person not to be you know I I as I say I go there all the time I just try to be sickening sweet so that I can get through my process and agree with them but um it's because their job is just not very fulfilling so so I mean one example following Barrett's thing that I that I it's not the DMV but it's close there were three different folks um who went through the Stanford D school um who started a a non-profit in mission called Sevilla to improve the process I don't know if you heard about this I think it's an amazing story and and what they did was there's a benefits form for people who get unemployment insurance uh health care services from the state of Michigan um that about two and a half million people fill out every year and it was the worst form in the country and they made it about a third the length and they made it much more clear they just this form and they've saved thousands of hours and also one of the side effects you talk about the people who work in the Social Services offices they worked really heavily with them so the number of people who go to those offices because they can't figure out how to fill out the form even though more people are filling it out it's dropped by about 50 percent and to me that's a you know this that isn't exactly the DMV but it's pretty close it's in in people talk about the notion that um that government services well we have to have them and they can be better in fact one of the guests we're going to have in November here is a guy named Todd Park who was CTO for Obama and he some of us will remember all the problems of signing up for uh Obamacare the charitable website so he led an effort to fix that cool so and to me that's consistent with design thinking you prototype you'd be user focused yeah and you get things done yeah one of the things that's most rewarding in some ways is when like you when you work with the group you were just talking about working with a Social Services Group or if we worked for the DMV people um and and we fixed it and it was much better the just them saying that this happens a lot with pride saying I'm the one right yes I'm the one who I mean just the ownership of the change is also really important yeah and and and the story from Sevilla is it is it the people who they initially stereotype there's these sort of heartless bureaucrats they said these people cared the most they had the most information these are these people are the reason that they fixed it and and because they knew the problems and you know there's this great uh there's this great Michael Lewis the guy who wrote liars poker and all the other stuff he has this notion uh that that you find the person six levels down yeah and that's the person who knows how the system works so well I certainly don't want to give anybody the impression that the designers go in and design stuff for other people the truth is yo