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  People may be deterred from venturing into the turbulent world of design thinking for any number of reasons. They may believe that creativity is an inner gift possessed only by celebrity designers, that it is better just to gaze respectfully at their chairs and lamps in modern art museums. Or they may suppose that it is a skill reserved for a priesthood of trained professionals—after all, we hire “designers” to do everything from cutting our hair to decorating our houses. Others, less in awe of the cult of the designer, may confuse the mastery of tools—including the qualitative tools of brainstorming, visual thinking, and storytelling—with the ability to reach a design solution. And there are those who may feel that without a precise framework or methodology, they will be unable to fathom what is going on. They are the ones who are most likely to bail out when the morale of a team dips, as it invariably will over the life of a project. What they may not appreciate is that design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking.

  As dean of the acclaimed Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Roger Martin is well positioned to observe the world’s great managerial leaders and in particular the ability shared by many of them to hold multiple ideas in tension to reach new solutions. In The Opposable Mind, based on more than fifty in-depth interviews, Martin argues that “thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution enjoy a built-in advantage over thinkers who can consider only one model at a time.” Integrative thinkers know how to widen the scope of issues salient to the problem. They resist the “either/or” in favor of the “both/and” and see nonlinear and multidirectional relationships as a source of inspiration, not contradiction. The most successful leaders, Martin finds, “embrace the mess.” They allow complexity to exist, at least as they search for solutions, because complexity is the most reliable source of creative opportunities. The traits of management leaders, in other words, match the traits I have ascribed to design thinkers. This is no coincidence, and it does not imply that the “opposable mind” is the reward to those who won the genetic lottery. The skills that make for a great design thinker—the ability to spot patterns in the mess of complex inputs; to synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts; to empathize with people different from ourselves—can all be learned.

  One day, perhaps, neurobiologists will be able to plug us into an MRI scanner and determine which parts of the brain light up when we apply integrative thinking. That may make it easier to devise new strategies for teaching people how to do it better. For the moment, at least, our task is not to understand what is going on in our brains but to find ways of getting that thinking out into the world, where it can be shared with others and, ultimately, translated into concrete strategies.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  building to think,

  or the power of prototyping

  Lego launched me on my career as a design thinker. In the early 1970s, when I was nine or ten, England was going through yet another of its periodic recessions and the coal miners had waited until winter to go out on strike. This meant no coal for the power stations, which meant not enough electricity to meet demand, which meant regular blackouts. Determined to do my bit, I marshaled my entire inventory of Legos and built a great big flashlight using some fancy light bricks that glowed in the dark. I proudly handed the flashlight to my mother so that she had enough light to cook my dinner. I had built my first prototype.

  By the age of ten I had learned the power of prototyping based on years of intensive study. As a younger child I had spent hours using Legos and Meccano (known to Americans as Erector Sets) to create a world full of rocket ships, dinosaurs, and robots of every imaginable size and shape. Like every other kid, I was thinking with my hands, using physical props as a springboard for my imagination. This shift from physical to abstract and back again is one of the most fundamental processes by which we explore the universe, unlock our imaginations, and open our minds to new possibilities.

  Most companies are full of people who have set aside such childish pursuits and moved on to more important matters such as writing reports and filling out forms, but one thing strikes the visitor to an organization that uses design thinking: as in any child’s bedroom, there are prototypes everywhere. Peek inside a project room, and you will see prototypes on every surface. Walk the halls, and you will see prototypes being used to tell stories about past projects. You will see prototyping tools ranging from X-acto knives and masking tape to $50,000 laser cutters. Whatever the budget and whatever the facilities, prototyping will be the essence of the place.

  Frank Lloyd Wright claimed that his early childhood experience with Froebel kindergarten blocks—developed by Friedrich Froebel in the 1830s to help children learn the principles of geometry—ignited his creative passion: “The maple-wood blocks…are in my fingers to this day,” he wrote in his autobiography. Charles and Ray Eames, one of the greatest prototyping teams of all times, used prototyping to explore and refine ideas, sometimes over many years. The result was nothing short of the reinvention of twentieth-century furniture. Asked by a curious admirer whether the iconic Eames lounge chair came to him in a flash, Charles replied, “Yes, sort of a thirty-year flash.”

  Since openness to experimentation is the lifeblood of any creative organization, prototyping—the willingness to go ahead and try something by building it—is the best evidence of experimentation. We may think of a prototype as a finished model of a product about to be manufactured, but that definition should be carried much further back in the process. It needs to include studies that may appear rough and simple and encompass more than just physical objects. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to be an industrial designer to adopt the habit of prototyping: financial services executives, retail merchants, hospital administrators, city planners, and transportation engineers can and should participate in this essential component of design thinking, as we shall see. David Kelley calls prototyping “thinking with your hands,” and he contrasts it with specification-led, planning-driven abstract thinking. Both have value and each has its place, but one is much more effective at creating new ideas and driving them forward.

  quick and dirty

  Although it might seem as though frittering away valuable time on sketches and models and simulations will slow work down, prototyping generates results faster. This seems counterintuitive: surely it takes longer to build an idea than to think one? Perhaps, but only for those gifted few who are able to think the right idea the first time. Most problems worth worrying about are complex, and a series of early experiments is often the best way to decide among competing directions. The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them, and zero in on the best solution.

  Gyrus ACMI is on the cutting edge of surgical instrumentation and a leader in developing techniques for minimally invasive surgery. In 2001 IDEO began to work with Gyrus to develop a new apparatus for operating on delicate nasal tissues. Early on in the project the team met with six otolaryngology surgeons to learn how they performed the procedure, the problems with existing instruments, and what characteristics they might be looking for in a new system. One of the surgeons, using imprecise words and awkward hand gestures, described how he might prefer a device with a pistol grip. After they departed one of our designers had grabbed a whiteboard marker and a 35 mm film canister and taped them to a plastic clothespin that was lying nearby, and squeezed the clothespin as if it were a trigger. This rudimentary prototype catapulted the discussion forward, put everyone on the same page, and saved countless meetings, videoconferences, shop time, and airplane tickets. Cost of the prototype in labor and materials: $0 (we were able to rescue the marking pen).

  Just as it can accelerate the pace of a project, prototyping allows the exploration of many ideas in parallel. Early prototypes should be fast, rough, and cheap. The greater the investment in an idea, the more committed one becomes to it. Overinvestment in a refined prototype has two undesirable consequence
s: First, a mediocre idea may go too far toward realization—or even, in the worst case, all the way. Second, the prototyping process itself creates the opportunity to discover new and better ideas at minimal cost. Product designers can use cheap and easy-to-manipulate materials: cardboard, surfboard foam, wood, and even objects and materials they find lying around—anything they can glue or tape or staple together to create a physical approximation of ideas. IDEO’s first and greatest prototype was created when the company consisted of eight scruffy designers crowded together in a studio above Roxy’s dress shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Douglas Dayton and Jim Yurchenco affixed the roller ball from a tube of Ban Roll-on deodorant to the base of a plastic butter dish. Before long Apple Computer was shipping its first mouse.

  enough is enough

  Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as is necessary to generate useful feedback and drive an idea forward. The greater the complexity and expense, the more “finished” it is likely to seem and the less likely its creators will be to profit from constructive feedback—or even to listen to it. The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea to learn about its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generation of more detailed, more refined prototypes. A prototype’s scope should be limited. The purpose of early prototypes might be to understand whether an idea has functional value. Eventually designers need to take the prototype out into the world to get feedback from the intended users of the final product. At this point the surface qualities of the prototype may require a bit more attention so that potential consumers are not distracted by the rough edges or unresolved details. Most people, for example, will find it difficult to visualize how a washing machine made of cardboard will work.

  Some pretty amazing technology is available today for designers to create prototypes quickly and at an extremely high level of fidelity, including ultraprecise laser cutters, computer-aided design tools, and machines that function as 3-D printers. Sometimes they are too good, as we discovered when a Steelcase executive, mistaking an expertly detailed foam model for the real thing, destroyed a $40,000 prototype of the Vecta chair by sitting on it. But all the technology in the world will come to naught if it is used to create prototypes too refined, too detailed, and too early. “Just enough prototyping” means picking what we want to learn about and achieving just enough resolution to make that the focus. An experienced prototyper knows when to say “Enough is enough.”

  prototyping things you can’t pick up

  Most imaginable prototypes up to this point refer to physical products—stuff that hurts when you trip over it or drop it on your toes. The same rules apply when the challenge is a service, a virtual experience, or even an organizational system.

  Anything tangible that lets us explore an idea, evaluate it, and push it forward is a prototype. I have seen sophisticated insulin injection devices that began life as Legos. I have seen software interfaces mocked up with Post-it notes long before a line of code was written. I have seen new concepts for neighborhood banking acted out before clients as a skit, against a backdrop of “counters” made of flimsy foam core—a kind of cardboard material that is very strong, very light, and very cheap—held together with masking tape. In each case an idea has been given expression through an appropriate medium to show to others for feedback.

  The movie industry has long used this practice. Once upon a time, when film was little more than a recorded version of theater, it was feasible to go from a script straight to shooting the movie. But as directors grew more ambitious—and audiences more demanding—they began to include multiple cameras and special effects. The storyboard emerged as a way of mapping out the movie before it was shot to make sure that all the scenes were thought through and that the director wouldn’t get to the editing room only to find a vital angle or crucial shot flawed or missing. As filmmaking grew ever more sophisticated, especially pioneered by Walt Disney Studios’ animation, the storyboard took on an even more important role. It became a prototyping tool that enabled animators to assure themselves that the story hung together before the detail work began. Today, with sophisticated, expensive digital special effects dominating so much of Hollywood, filmmakers have moved to computer-based storyboards and “animatics” to test the motion in a shot before they commit to the real thing.

  Techniques borrowed from film and other creative industries suggest how we might prototype nonphysical experiences. These include scenarios, a form of storytelling in which some potential future situation or state is described using words and pictures. We might, for example, invent a character who fits a set of demographic factors that interest us—a divorced professional woman with two small children, for instance—and develop a believable scenario around her daily routine in order to “observe” how she might use an electric vehicle charger or an online pharmacy.

  When Wi-Fi communications were in their infancy, Vocera developed a video scenario to demonstrate how employees might use a wearable, voice-controlled “communications badge” to stay connected with coworkers anywhere within a company’s network. The short movie followed the rounds of a fictional IT support team and was far more effective in explaining the concept to potential investors than a technical brief or a deck of PowerPoint slides. Sony used the same technique when it was developing its first online concepts in the early 1990s. A design team created scenarios around the lives of teenagers in Tokyo to show how they might use new kinds of online gaming parlors to play interactive video games or sing karaoke songs together. In the early years of the Internet these plausible fictions helped management visualize how it might become the basis of new services and business models.

  Another considerable value of scenarios is that they force us to keep people at the center of the idea, preventing us from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. They remind us at every moment that we are not dealing with things but with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “transactions between people and things.” Prototyping at work is giving form to an idea, allowing us to learn from it, evaluate it against others, and improve upon it.

  A simple scenario structure useful in the development of new services is the “customer journey.” This structure charts the stages through which an imagined customer passes from the beginning of a service experience to the end. The starting point may be imaginary, or it may come directly from observations of people purchasing an airline ticket or deciding whether or not to install solar panels on a roof. In either case, the value of describing a customer journey is that it clarifies where the customer and the service or brand interact. Every one of these “touchpoints” points to an opportunity to provide value to a firm’s intended customers—or to derail them for good.

  Some years ago Amtrak began studying opportunities to improve transportation on the East Coast by offering a high-speed train service between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. By the time Amtrak invited IDEO to participate in what would become the Acela project, the focus had narrowed to the trains themselves and, in fact, to the design of the seats. After spending countless days riding trains with customers, the team created a simple customer journey that described the entire travel process. The journey, for most customers, had ten steps, which included getting to the station, finding parking, buying tickets, locating the platform, and so on. The insight that proved most striking was that passengers did not take their seats on the train until stage eight—most of the experience of train travel, in other words, did not involve the train at all. The team reasoned that every one of the prior steps was an opportunity to create a positive interaction, opportunities that would have been overlooked if they had focused only on the design of the seats. Admittedly, this approach made the project far more complex, but that is typical in the move from design to design thinking. It may not be easy to reconcile the many interests that come into play in getting from Washington to New York, but Amtrak managed to do so and has created a mo
re complete and satisfying experience for its customers. Despite its numerous and well-publicized problems with tracks, brake systems, and wheel sets, Acela has proved to be a popular service. The customer journey was the first prototype in that process.

  acting out

  If playing with Legos is a child’s way of “learning with your hands” and foam core and computer-driven milling machines are the equivalent for grown-up product designers, what does it look like for service innovation—the experience a person may have at a bank, a clinic, or the Department of Motor Vehicles? Our most reliable consultants, here as with so many other products, are kids. As soon as two or three children get together, they start to role-play: they become doctors and nurses, pirates, aliens, or Disney characters. Without prompting, they begin to perform lengthy enactments full of complex plots and subplots. Research suggests that this form of play is not only fun but also helps establish internal scripts by which we navigate as adults.

  TownePlace Suites, an extended-stay hotel brand owned by Marriott, serves business travelers, such as consultants with long-term contracts, who may be required to be away from home for more than just a few nights and want to feel more at home than is usually the case in hotels. They are likely to work in their rooms more regularly, they stay over on weekends, and they may spend time on their own exploring the neighborhood. Marriott wanted to rethink the highly specific experience of these travelers.