Tom and David
Image: Winni Wintermeyer
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Everyone is born creative, but schools and jobs and the hegemony of the conventionally minded steamroller it out of us. So argue David and Tom Kelley, who as leaders of iconic innovation firm IDEO have unparalleled cred on this subject. In their new book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, the brothers urge a universal uncorseting of our creative selves. Editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan spoke with the Kelley brothers about how companies can tap this undeveloped human resource.
Define “creative confidence.”
Tom: Creative confidence is the natural human ability to come up with breakthrough ideas combined with the courage to act on them. The courage turns out to be a really important part. Because lots of people have these ideas in passing but are too timid to put them into action.
David: Or afraid of the reactions they will get from the people when they do.
Why hasn’t companies’ obsession with innovation and risk-taking translated into greater creative confidence among employees?
Tom: Culturally we’re trained — in business schools at least — to trust the analytical side and to trust the things you measure. And most companies are measured on this short-term stuff. To do the breakthrough innovations, sometimes you have to defer gratification. You’ve got to take a leap that may not pay off today or this month but that builds your brand and builds your company for the future.
If playfulness and experimentation are important to creativity, should managers think differently about scheduling and deadlines?
Tom: When people get creative confidence they focus more on iterations, doing experiments. Thomas Edison said that one of the greatest measures of your ability is how many experiments you can do within 24 hours. There was a leader from a financial services firm who went to the d.school. [Stanford’s institute of design, founded by David Kelley.] He said, when we launch a new product it takes six months for planning, two months for visual representation of the framework of web pages, and two months for productizing a new online service offering. When he went back to his day job he said, starting next week I’m going to give them a day to do the whole thing. Then I’m going to give them an extension of a few more days. We will still make our deadline. But I can be on the twentieth iteration instead of the first iteration. And it will be better.
David: You can have a deadline and have a first not-that-great idea and get it done. The trick is to get as many iterations in and as many generations in as possible before the deadline. Deadlines are kind of arbitrary anyway. I can spend the rest of my life designing a wastebasket and just keep making it better. You run out of time and budget. In our world it’s just how many iterations can you get done given that they call time? In the Launchpad class at Stanford [where Kelley is a professor] students have five weeks to get a product live in the world. It’s amazing what students can get done in that time.
David: Once you have that kind of design bias, everything you do is with intent. You wrap a present for somebody’s birthday or how you decide to get somewhere. It’s all design. If you look around, everywhere there has been some decisions made about that object or about that experience. We notice that people do things with intent. They decided to do it this way as opposed to letting it happen to them.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
To learn more about the Kelleys and their IDEO colleagues, please click here.
Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture. @LeighEBuchanan