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| Image credits: Concordia university (d3center.ca) |
By Tom Kelley and David Kelley
Most people are born creative. As children, we revel in
imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs.
But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start
to stifle those impulses. We learn to be warier of judgment, more cautious,
more analytical. The world seems to divide into "creatives" and "noncreatives,"
and too many people consciously or unconsciously resign themselves to the
latter category.
And yet we know that creativity is essential to success in
any discipline or industry. According to a recent IBM survey of chief
executives around the world, it’s the most sought-after trait in leaders today.
No one can deny that creative thinking has enabled the rise and continued
success of countless companies, from start-ups like Facebook and Google to
stalwarts like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.
Students often come to Stanford University’s "d.school"
(which was founded by one of us—David Kelley—and is formally known as the Hasso
Plattner Institute of Design) to develop their creativity. Clients work with
IDEO, our design and innovation consultancy, for the same reason. But along the
way, we’ve learned that our job isn’t to teach them creativity. It’s to
help them rediscover their creative confidence—the natural ability to come
up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them
strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy
unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing
control.
Easier said than done, you might argue. But we know it’s
possible for people to overcome even their most deep-seated fears. Consider the
work of Albert Bandura, a world-renowned psychologist and Stanford professor.
In one series of early experiments, he helped people conquer lifelong snake
phobias by guiding them through a series of increasingly demanding
interactions. They would start by watching a snake through a two-way mirror.
Once comfortable with that, they’d progress to observing it through an open
door, then to watching someone else touch the snake, then to touching it
themselves through a heavy leather glove, and, finally, in a few hours, to
touching it with their own bare hands. Bandura calls this process of
experiencing one small success after another "guided mastery." The
people who went through it weren’t just cured of a crippling fear they had
assumed was untreatable. They also had less anxiety and more success in other
parts of their lives, taking up new and potentially frightening activities like
horseback riding and public speaking. They tried harder, persevered longer, and
had more resilience in the face of failure. They had gained a new confidence in
their ability to attain what they set out to do.
We’ve used much the same approach over the past 30 years to
help people transcend the fears that block their creativity. You break
challenges down into small steps and then build confidence by succeeding on one
after another. Creativity is something you practice, not just a talent you’re
born with. The process may feel a little uncomfortable at first, but—as the
snake phobics learned—the discomfort quickly fades away and is replaced with
new confidence and capabilities.
Fear of the Messy Unknown
Creative thinking in business begins with having empathy for
your customers (whether they’re internal or external), and you can’t get that
sitting behind a desk. Yes, we know it’s cozy in your office. Everything is
reassuringly familiar; information comes from predictable sources;
contradictory data are weeded out and ignored. Out in the world, it’s more
chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with
irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you
find insights—and creative breakthroughs. Venturing forth in pursuit of
learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and
help you discover nonobvious needs. Otherwise, you risk simply reconfirming
ideas you’ve already had or waiting for others—your customers, your boss, or
even your competitors—to tell you what to do.
At the d.school, we routinely assign students to do this sort
of anthropological fieldwork—to get out of their comfort zones and into the
world—until, suddenly, they start doing it on their own. Consider a computer
scientist, two engineers, and an MBA student, all of whom took the Extreme
Affordability class taught by Stanford business school professor Jim Patell.
They eventually realized that they couldn’t complete their group project—to
research and design a low-cost incubator for newborn babies in the developing
world—while living in safe, suburban California. So they gathered their courage
and visited rural Nepal. Talking with families and doctors firsthand, they
learned that the babies in gravest danger were those born prematurely in areas
far from hospitals. Nepalese villagers didn’t need a cheaper incubator at the
hospital—they needed a fail-safe way to keep babies warm when they were away
from doctors who could do so effectively. Those insights led the team to design
a miniature “sleeping bag” with a pouch containing a special heat-storing wax.
The Embrace Infant Warmer costs 99% less than a traditional incubator and can
maintain the right temperature for up to six hours without an external power
source. The innovation has the potential to save millions of low-birth-weight
and premature babies every year, and it came about only because the team
members were willing to throw themselves into unfamiliar territory.
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| O'Conor and Stein |
Another example comes from two students, Akshay Kothari and
Ankit Gupta, who took the d.school’s Launchpad course. The class required them
to start a company from scratch by the end of the 10-week academic quarter.
Both were self-described “geeks”—technically brilliant, deeply analytical, and
definitely shy. But they opted to work on their project—an elegant news reader
for the then–newly released iPad—off-campus in a Palo Alto café where they’d be
surrounded by potential users. Getting over the awkwardness of approaching
strangers, Akshay gathered feedback by asking café patrons to experiment with
his prototypes. Ankit coded hundreds of small variations to be tested each
day—changing everything from interaction patterns to the size of a button. In a
matter of weeks they rapidly iterated their way to a successful product. "We
went from people saying, ‘This is crap,’" says Akshay, "to ‘Is this
app preloaded on every iPad?’" The result—Pulse News—received public
praise from Steve Jobs at a worldwide developer’s conference only a few months
later, has been downloaded by 15 million people, and is one of the original 50
apps in Apple’s App Store Hall of Fame.
Tom
Kelley is
the general manager of IDEO and the author of The Ten Faces of Innovation (Currency/Doubleday,
2005). He is an executive fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and
at the University of Tokyo. David
Kelley is the founder and chairman of IDEO and the founder of the
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, where he is the Donald W.
Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering.
A version of this was originally published in Harvard Business Review
