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Episode 15: Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, on the power of design thinking
Transcript
Mike Kearney: IDEO is one of the most recognized innovation design firms in the world. I
remember personally falling in love with the way they work when I watched a
Nightline episode almost 20 years ago—I think it was around 1999—where they
showed how they applied their way of innovating to a shopping cart. I mean,
probably not the most innovative thing that you would think of, a shopping cart,
but they applied their innovation approach to it. And it was incredible how they
redesigned it using the thing that they call design thinking. Now, I'm personally
not sure what happened to the shopping cart, if it was actually used in any
grocery stores, but I was captivated by the way that they went about solving a
design challenge, which was to make the shopping cart better.
Now, when you step back and you look at what they have done since then, they
have had an impact on so many projects, from the first Apple mouse to the Bank
of America Keep the Change program to redesigning schools in Peru. It's actually
a good friend of mine who led that project and it's just so incredible what they
have done in so many different industries.
And today, I have this incredible opportunity to interview Tim Brown, the CEO of
IDEO. And this is another perfect example of talking to a leader outside of the
traditional risk, crisis, and disruption conversation. I'm excited to get his
thoughts on the power of design thinking—you're going to learn more about
that in a few minutes—to solving gnarly problems to how CEOs can get ahead of
disruption and why it is so hard for people to properly plan for a crisis.
Tim Brown: One of the great challenges that organizations have is that they want to know
the answer to the question before they've asked it. So getting people
comfortable with not doing that, the sort of—it sounds so very soft and fuzzy—
but the truth is organizations that are comfortable with creativity and
innovation are ones that are willing to make the leap of faith and give
themselves time to actually explore their ideas before they judge them.
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Mike Kearney: Welcome to Resilient, where we hear stories from leaders on risk, crisis, and
disruption. And we get those stories by meeting our guests on their home turf.
Now, I used to always say—or I always say in every episode—we jump in a
plane. But, guess what? I live in the Bay Area, so I all I had to do was jump in my
car and come over to San Francisco. My name's Mike Kearney, the leader of
Deloitte's Strategic Risk practice, and I have this unbelievable good fortune for a
portion of my job to sit down with some incredible leaders who really define
what it is to be resilient. And I will tell you, I am personally enjoying these
conversations. I hope you are as well.
And today, I am sitting in these really cool offices and they are unbelievable—
really open, creative space. People get to design the area where they're sitting
and where Tim, the CEO that I'm about to interview, sits around with all of his
employees. You know, if you were to walk through here, you would not know
he's the CEO because he's just one of the guys and gals. And I'll tell you, this is
exactly the type of space that IDEO sits in to spark creativity. When you think of
where you need to be to spark creativity, this is where you need to be. It's a
place to explore new ideas and to develop solutions that will have an impact on
the world. So, without further ado, let's get to it: my conversation with Tim
Brown, the CEO of IDEO.
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Mike Kearney: Tim, welcome to Resilient. I'll tell you, I've been thinking about this. I'm a pretty
big fan of yours. I've studied IDEO. I've studied you, I think I've read your book,
your TED talk, read your—I read your blog all the time on LinkedIn—so this is a
pretty special moment for me. So thank you for joining.
Tim Brown: Well, thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me along.
Mike Kearney: Awesome. So let me start. I always like to start off with something that I find
interesting. So when I was combing through all of your articles, one of the things
that I see you talk a lot about is that when you're focused on projects, you need
to focus on impact that goes kinda beyond the mundane, and one of the other
things you've talked about, especially when you've talked to younger people, is
that you need to work on things that you believe in. And the question I have for
you is: Why do you think we spend so much time, as a society, working on stuff
that doesn't make an impact—that really doesn't move the needle? I'm super
curious about your response to that.
Tim Brown: Well, I—you know, I guess what—to some degree, our society requires a lot of
activity just to kind of work, right?
Mike Kearney: Right.
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Tim Brown: And it's easy for—I mean, take email as a good example, right? Email is one of
those systems that's incredibly valuable. But, in order for it to work, it requires
enormous amounts of maintenance, like actually reading all the email you get
and actually responding to some percentage of it. Even though—if you probably
did a survey, I reckon if I went and analyzed all of my years of email, I bet less
than one percent of it is actually really impactful. But I probably wouldn't have
got to that one percent if I'd been—unless I'd been willing to do most of the rest
of the 99 percent.
I think our society's a little bit like that. It's part of the goal, actually—of
designers, I think—to figure out how can we design as much of that unnecessary
99 percent out so that we can focus on things that matter. Not always easy to
do. Not even always easy to recognize what the 99 percent is. But I think that's
one of the goals of design is actually to simplify certain things in life so that we
can focus on the things that matter.
Mike Kearney: That truly matter. So, Tim, let's talk about you. Where'd you grow up?
Tim Brown: So I grew up in a little rural area of—south of England just outside Oxford.
Mike Kearney: Where'd you go to school?
Tim Brown: Well, I think of school as being art school. I went to school school, but then—so I
went to art school originally at University of Northumbria in Newcastle and then
the Royal College of Arts in London.
Mike Kearney: And then you were a designer initially. I've read a lot about some furniture
you've done—designed and stuff like that.
Tim Brown: I still think of myself as a designer even though I don't draw things up. And I
mean, never at all anymore, but designing is about a—it's as much a state of
mind as anything else. So I still have the design state of mind. In fact, the only—
the moment when I realized I could actually be a CEO with any degree of
confidence was when I realized I could treat it as a design problem because I
knew how to treat things as a design problem because that's what I'd been
taught to do. But the truthful answer to your question is, yes, at the beginning, I
was really designing stuff like products and furniture and things like that, and I
don't do so much of that anymore.
Mike Kearney: And so how did you move into, though, helping organizations innovate and—I
totally agree with your point that it's all about design, different type of design.
How did you move into that, from what people would think of as typical design,
into designing challenges?
Tim Brown: Well, you know, I only realized this relatively recently. I'm a bit of a slow learner,
but I realized that I've been asking essentially one question all the way through
my career, and I actually—I remember the first time I asked this question. I was
a second-year undergrad design student and I was asked to write—for some
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reason, somebody asked me to write an article for a national magazine on what
I thought the future of design was. And I asked the question, "What should
design do next?" I could see what it was doing now, but what should it do next?
I've been asking that question all the way through my career. It's always been,
for me, the driving question, actually. From why are we applying design to what
we do apply it to and why wouldn't we apply it to something else?
So, in the end, getting to how organizations think and behave is a natural
extension. You've got to get there eventually if you ask that question, right? I
mean, I started off asking, "Okay, design is about products. That's what I was
taught to do, but why shouldn't it be about experiences? Or why shouldn't we
be designing services? Or how might we design to meet—to have social impact
instead of just business impact? Or how might we design systems?" Eventually,
you get to: “How might we design organizations?” Right? It's just obvious.
Mike Kearney: So let's start with IDEO, because I really want to jump into design thinking. But
one of the things that I find interesting is, when I talk to people, I'm like, "I've
got to work with this great organization, IDEO." There's been some cool things
that we've worked on with you, and I get two responses: "Oh my God, they are
the coolest company. We love working with them," or, "Who?" So for those
who would say, "Who?" Who's IDEO?
Tim Brown: I wish that was an easy question to answer. It's less easy. I mean, you know, we
are essentially a big group of designers who take on challenges for which design
thinking is an appropriate lens, which is not very helpful, of course. But we
started off absolutely in the world of design products. I mean, David Kelley, Bill
Moggridge, and Mike Nuttall, the founders of IDEO, they were product
designers, engineers. And we were famous for designing the first mouse that
went onto the—became part of the Apple Mac or the first-ever laptop
computer. So the questions we were answering back then was, "How do we
make technology useful to people?"
And really, we're still answering that question today. It's just that we have an
infinitely broader definition of what technology is, right? I mean, back then, it
was the latest technology coming out of Silicon Valley. And obviously, that still
has a huge impact on many of the things that we're designing. But the truth is,
anything that's man-made is essentially technology, right? Because it wasn't
natural. It's either natural—naturally occurring—or it's technology.
So when we make something, it's technology. And when we shape the world
and the way we use that technology to meet our needs, that's design. And so
whatever it might be—you can think of health care as a technology. So we're
shaping the way hospitals deliver health care or the way a particular medical
device might deliver a particular benefit to a patient or to a doctor. Learning is a
technology, so we're shaping the way kids experience school or the way
technology is helping change the way that we learn. The way we make food is a
technology. The way we grow food, the way we cook food. So we're helping
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shape the kinds of foods that we're going to eat in the future and the way that
we're going to eat them.
And so we're still doing that. We're still—our organizations are technology. If
you think about it, the way we organize and communicate in a business, that's a
technology. So we're helping shape the way organizations do that.
Mike Kearney: So let's talk about design thinking. One of the things—I know a lot of what
you're describing is design thinking. And it almost could be applied to any
technology, as you're suggesting. Can you maybe just describe what it is and
how it can help? And one of the things that I love about this podcast is, we
created it for senior leaders, and a lot of the focus was on risk, crisis, and
disruption. But I'm not here to talk about risk, crisis, and disruption necessarily
with you today. But what I find fascinating is this whole notion of design
thinking can be applied to these type of issues, and that's really what I'm
interested in exploring with you. So tell us about design thinking.
Tim Brown: Well, at first, I would say that design thinking actually is an interesting way of—
and a very effective way of—mitigating risks around things you don't know
about.
Mike Kearney: Right.
Tim Brown: Right? I mean, a lot of—when we talk about risk, a lot of the time, we're talking
about things we know about, that we can analyze, and we can use analytical
techniques to understanding the risk. But there are a whole bunch of things we
don't know about because they don't exist yet. There are things that we have
not made choices about. There are things that we have not yet created. And so
we can't use analytical methods for understanding the risk or anything else
about something that does not yet exist.
So, instead, we use methods like design thinking. And what design thinking does
is, essentially it falls into three buckets, if you like. The first bucket is: How do we
ask better questions? How do we make ourselves more curious? How do we
search for the insights that might cause us to essentially ask the question: Why
does something like that have to be like that? And could it be different?
Alright, so we do that in different ways. I mean, we—a lot of great designers—
are naturally curious. A lot of great leaders are naturally curious. But we also
spent a lot of our time going out and following people in their lives, collecting
information about how they live their lives, because it's—a big part of asking
interesting questions is getting out of your own experience and getting into the
experience of others. One of the things that businesses often actually create for
themselves—which is, I believe, a significant risk—is they don't think from their
customer's standpoint in nearly enough of—anything like enough of the time.
They're thinking about what their customer should be like from their
perspective as a business, but they're not actually understanding the lives and
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aspirations and needs of their customers. So get out and understand it. So we
have methods and techniques for doing that.
Mike Kearney: So it's interesting you're bringing that up because I think what you're getting at,
to a certain degree, is having deep empathy. Like really walking in the shoes
of—whether it's your clients or customers or whomever it may be. So, yeah.
Tim Brown: Yeah, exactly. And really, that's all in the intent of asking more interesting
questions. I believe there's plenty of evidence out there. I also believe it
intuitively that, really, the hardest part of the creative process, of getting to a
really interesting new answer, is actually asking a really interesting new
question. And so getting yourself into environments where you're noticing that
things are different—it's one of the reasons why, when we travel to a new part
of the world for the first time, we notice all kinds of things that we've forgotten
to notice back home because we're aware of all the newness of things.
Mike Kearney: One of the things I find interesting—and I'm going to point out, first of all—I
think you have given new insight to how to manage risk, and you probably
didn't even think that coming in here. But especially with the idea of asking the
right questions, kind of inherent and understanding what are those challenges
or things that are going to get in your way in the future, is about asking good
questions. The point to what I was going to make is the whole notion of
prototyping. One of the things I find is—oftentimes, in organizations of all types,
we try to be—we strive for perfection. We try to create—especially in the
consulting environment, working behind the scenes, we have to have that
perfect document or final deliverable to our clients before we actually get them
engaged. And it really doesn't matter if it's the perfect deliverable—it's what
they think about it.
Tim Brown: Well, that's the great irony, in a way, that in our attempt to reduce risk by—so
we make something perfect because we don't want people to find fault with
it—we actually increase the risk because it's so likely that our first answer will
not be the right one, right? And then we've put all of that work in, all of that
effort. And we're sort of so committed to this idea we actually can't go back and
fix it, which is actually a much riskier place to be than having shared our ideas
early and iterated them and changed them until every—until we see that
they're right. And so that's why I think that, often, great leaders of innovation-
biased organizations are the leaders that engage with the innovation process
really early on.
Mike Kearney: Absolutely.
Tim Brown: They're quite happy to see ideas in a very rough and ready state so that they can
engage with them early, and organizations that wait until the very end to see an
idea are often the ones that have actually not had innovation—
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Mike Kearney: It's interesting because you're basically—what you're saying is that there's
greater—the longer you wait and the less buy-in that you get through that
development process, the greater risk you're bringing to whatever it is you're
developing or putting out into your organization or out into the marketplace.
Tim Brown: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And we've seen this pretty well illustrated in the last, I
don't know, five years or so with the shift from a waterfall approach to
designing software to an agile approach to designing software. Because if you
think about it, that's exactly what agile is: It's highly iterative, very fast, you get
things done very quickly. Whereas the old approach, which was write a big spec,
get everything figured out, then go build all the software, and we—and to be
honest, the results of so many of the disasters we've seen, particularly in
government, with large software projects going off the rails is because of that
old approach. Very risky approach to the way that you do innovation.
Mike Kearney: So one of the things that I've learned a little bit about in doing my preparation is
the work that you're doing with organizations around really embedding
innovation, making it successful. And I think it's around designing for change.
Can you talk about that a bit? I know it's something you're passionate about.
Tim Brown: Well, yeah. I mean, I'm all about how we use design to have the maximum
amount of impact. And it's become very clear to all of us that one way to do that
is to equip organizations to be better at this themselves, right? And the reason
for doing that is not just because I want more designers in the world or more
people to recognize who I am or who IDEO is, unlike my schoolmaster when I
said I was going to go and go to arts school and be a designer. And he thought I
was lost forever and would never have a job.
I actually think that organizations have to go through a relatively fundamental
shift as we move into the future, which is to go from a focus on what we might
call sort of operational competitiveness, where, really, you're measured based
on your ability to be more efficient than anybody else, to a world where,
because of the rapid pace of technological change and other external factors—
to be honest with you, what organizations need to be is more creatively
competitive, which means that their capacity to have new ideas, embrace new
ideas, and execute new ideas needs to be much higher than it is today. And I
think that is a form of resilience, right? And at some level, I would argue, it's a
way of reducing organizational risk because we—there's no doubt we're going
to be in an environment where the quantity of new ideas that we're facing,
either ours or other people's, is going to get greater and greater all the time.
So I want to equip organizations to be able to handle all these creative
challenges, because I think if we don't, they will simply—they'll die out at an
even faster rate than they already are. Because the irony of contemporary
business and contemporary society is that we've never had more capacity to
create new ideas, but then at the same time, those ideas have never had more
capacity to punish companies that don't create new ideas, right? I mean, we see
8. this happening in every industry: companies getting disrupted because they
were too slow to either have new ideas or embrace new ideas. So that's why I
think it's tremendously important that we help companies be more comfortable
with some of the things that those of us who kind of live in a creative
environment are comfortable with. Things like ambiguity. Being better at asking
questions, better at iterating new ideas, better at executing on those ideas
when they have them. We find ourselves today working with very interesting
organizations all over the world who want to increase the output and impact of
the ideas that they have within their own organizations.
Mike Kearney: Is there one thing—when you look at these organizations, is there a theme?
Because I can even think about, well, clients that I've worked with and even our
own firm. It's not hard to come up with the ideas. It's not even necessarily hard
to figure out what you need to do. It's hard, in some respects, to execute and
have impact. Is there something that you've seen that's a common theme across
these organizations that are challenged to take the ideas and make impact?
Tim Brown: Well—
Mike Kearney: Or have impact?
Tim Brown: One of the fundamental problems is that we've done an extremely good job
over the last few decades of teaching ourselves to be very analytically minded.
And kids that come out of business school, that's—most of the techniques that
they've been taught are really techniques of analysis. And the trouble is
analytics really don't tell you much about the quality of a new idea. They don't
tell you much about whether a new idea's going to be successful. And—
Mike Kearney: And the challenge is a lot of innovation programs—I was just there looking at
something today. It's all about time, impact, revenue. It's all an analytical
process.
Tim Brown: Exactly. So one of the great challenges that organizations have is they want to
know the answer to the question before they've asked it. So getting people
comfortable with not doing that, the sort of—it sounds so very soft and fuzzy,
but the truth is organizations that are comfortable with creativity and
innovation are ones that are willing to make the leap of faith and give
themselves time to actually explore their ideas before they judge them. I mean,
my colleague and IDEO founder, David Kelley, wrote a great book with his
brother, Tom, called Creative Confidence if you guys got—
Mike Kearney: Yep.
Tim Brown: They define creative confidence as the ability to have new ideas and then the
confidence to act on them. And the confidence to act on them is all about giving
yourself time to actually explore them before you try and analyze them about
whether they're going to be successful or not. So one of the ways that we've—
successful ways, in fact—that we've found of kind of nudging that cultural
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teach; we have our own online university; we have workshop programs that we
give; we have toolkits that we offer. But really, the way to teach what that level
of creative confidence is, at a high level, is to work alongside them.
Mike Kearney: Absolutely.
Tim Brown: So we have these labs inside some of our clients—I know you do some of the
same kinds of things—but where great IDEO designers and design thinkers can
work alongside with great leaders from the clients and they can go build things
together. And it doesn't require doing that many times before they start having
high degrees of confidence.
Mike Kearney: It's funny that you say that because we do have labs at Deloitte and I used to run
our lab program for about five years. So thank you, because you guys helped
us create it. It changed the way that I consult. And what I mean by that is, rather
than having that first or second—you're in a back room, powering—or putting
forth a PowerPoint deck, it's like actually collaborating with your clients. That
always comes to better results. It has changed the way I think about consulting.
Tim Brown: Well, the funny thing is we figured this out about 2,000 years ago. If you look at
the way the great art forms and craft skills were taught, they were taught
through apprenticeship. They weren't taught through certification. They weren't
taught in classrooms. Michelangelo taught his apprentices how to sculpt or how
to paint. He didn't run a class and stand up in front and teach on a chalkboard
and have them go away and do great pieces of work. He —and so this idea of
apprenticeship, this idea of doing together, I think, is actually kind of a learning
mode that we need to reemphasize in business. And, actually, in modern society
as a whole.
Mike Kearney: So I want to pivot to—and it's actually leveraging a lot of what we talked
about—but to disruption. And you talked a bit about it. Every industry—and you
gave a bunch of examples—health care, media. Everybody is under disruption.
What fascinates me are the CEOs who know that change is coming but they
don't do anything about it, seemingly, because they probably don't want to kill
the golden goose. Any thoughts on your experience? Because you've worked
with a bunch of companies—mature, emerging. Any thoughts on how design
thinking or any of the concepts that you've brought up can help them get ahead
of the disruption? Because what we find, just as an aside, it is actually the
number one risk that a company faces. Not financial or operational compliance.
It's strategic, which means they're not responding to these changes fast enough
in the marketplace.
Tim Brown: Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, and I get how frightening it is as a CEO, particularly,
when the requirements we're placing on CEOs to manage the sort of short-term
complexities of business have never been greater than they are today. And so at
some level, it—we shouldn't be at all surprised that even the very best of them
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struggle to think both strategically and operationally at the same time. I wonder
sometimes why we don't have to rethink the way that—that's almost the
operating model for the CEO, but that's probably a conversation for another
time.
But it's—I mean, it comes back to what we were talking about right at the
beginning, in a way. How can we help CEOs ask better questions? Many of the
CEOs I've talked to have said that they feel like, in order to be helpful, they need
to be different kinds of leaders from the way that they used to be. That this idea
of the executive leader, if you like—the leader who is essentially there to make
the final decision is less helpful in an environment where disruption is all
around. And that, in fact, they need to think of themselves more as sort of a
player/coach. In other words, they need to use their experience and their
perspective, which is—let's face it—their perspective is kind of the broadest of
anybody in the company's simply by seeing what they see—needs to be brought
to bear to help the pieces of their organization they're asking to innovate, help
them be more effective in that.
So for instance, I was teaching to—sorry, talking to—one of our clients, big
German technology company, and he was saying that he's never had to know
more about the technologies and customers that his business serves today than
he does have to today. Because he has to be able to help teams do their work—
not just wait for them to finish and then show them the finished product. And in
fact, what—as we've studied it, we realized that, in fact, that leading in this sort
of environment of, hopefully, more intense creativity, certainly more intense
disruption, requires multiple leadership approaches or stances, if you will. And
that our best leaders need to be able to step between those stances quite
effectively.
So if we think of being the player/coach, it's a bit like leading from the side,
right? You're there and alongside; you're helping teams. Perhaps you're helping
them redirect their experiments or understand what they're really learning and
what questions they should be asking. There's still a moment where leaders
need to lead from the front. But instead of leading from the front with answers,
which is kind of what we've told CEOs we want them to do in the past; we want
the CEO to have every answer. In my view, the way to lead from the front as a
CEO in the future is to have the right questions. And have those questions that
provide direction to the organization.
So I've often thought of the metaphor—there is the explorer, right? And the
explorer asks, "Well, what might be over the horizon if we go that way?" And
then everybody follows him or her and they go over that horizon and they
discover something. And so it's the questions that give direction that I think are
tremendously important.
And then there's also a role of leadership, which is very much leading from
behind. And that's really a useful metaphor there, is the metaphor of the
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gardener, which is really to set the conditions, to do the nurturing, to cultivate
the conditions for creativity. For innovation, recognizing where the existing
culture might be shutting down innovation, recognizing the new needs of talent,
recognizing the kinds of environments, for instance, that might support—or
even designing the kinds of rituals that an organization might need in order to
shift its attention from being purely operationally focused to being innovation
and operationally focused.
Mike Kearney: I was going to ask you about those three type of roles as CEO. I think you wrote
a blog on that, but I want to dive in a little more into the right questions. I
wonder— and I'm just thinking about this off the top of my head. Do you think
part of the reason why organizations go through that disruption cycle, or are
disrupted, is not only that they're not asking the questions, but maybe they
don't want to ask the questions? Because—do you know where I'm going with
that?
Tim Brown: Well, part of the problem is that so very often, the business that you have
designed yourself to be in is not actually the business you're in.
Mike Kearney: Right.
Tim Brown: And so, you know, for instance—I mean, a lot of people have spoken about
this—but the newspaper business was designed to be in the printing pieces of
paper business, when actually it was in the local advertising business, right? But
all of the design, all of the operations of the newspaper business was in
capturing stories, putting them down in type, and shipping them out on pieces
of paper. That's not actually what they were selling. What they were selling was
local advertising to local merchants for their local community. So when that got
disrupted by Craigslist and then a whole bunch of other people, they were
powerless to react because they'd been putting all their effort into designing
themselves for a business they weren't actually in anymore.
Mike Kearney: Couple question, I know that you guys have done some projects around crisis,
and my question's not gonna be necessarily on crisis, per se, but the Rubicon
Project, RN72, one of the things I personally reflect on—
Tim Brown: I think it was SF72.
Mike Kearney: SF—
Tim Brown: RN72's a really good bar that's just around the corner—which I would
thoroughly recommend, but SF—
Mike Kearney: That is really scary.
Tim Brown: But SF72 is actually what it—
Mike Kearney: SF—and I live in San Francisco.
Tim Brown: There you go.
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Mike Kearney: But, so I was here in the Loma Prieta earthquake—that actually may say
something about where my priorities are.
Tim Brown: They have a great wine list.
Mike Kearney: I just had lunch there last week. That's funny. It's on Mission, right?
Tim Brown: Yeah.
Mike Kearney: Okay, so—
Tim Brown: It's in the building that's going down into the ground faster than—
Mike Kearney: The question I was going to ask is, I was in the Bay Area during the Loma Prieta
earthquake, so I know what a pretty traumatic earthquake looks like.
Tim Brown: Me too. I was there as well.
Mike Kearney: And I'm no better prepared today for an earthquake than I was then. And what
I'm curious about, because—and I'm not going to name any of the companies
because they're a lot of our clients—but seemingly, every day in the news, there
is a company that is going through what we'd call kind of a novel crisis. Like they
never saw it coming, but boom, it hit them. And what fascinates me is
organizations—and maybe it's just the way people cognitively think—but why
don't people pay attention until it actually hits? I don't know if you have any
insights on that or—
Tim Brown: You know, I hadn't given it a huge amount of thought. I do think that part of the
problem is there's a seemingly almost infinite set of possible black swans, or
whatever you want to call them, right?
Mike Kearney: Sure.
Tim Brown: So trying to prepare for all of them in any kind of considered way would take up
all your time as a leader and you wouldn't do anything. I think partly it's because
our brains are actually wired that way. Our brains literally are wired to ignore a
lot of these risks because there are so many of them that if we didn't ignore
them, we would simply be paralyzed and we would do nothing. And so we have
a—we can be quite responsive. And when we have fight-or-flight mechanisms
that are designed to respond very quickly, but we're actually not that good at
planning for all of these possible outcomes because there are literally are so
many of them. So that would be one thing I would say.
I think the second thing is that even organizations who arguably are
professionals at it, like, say, the Army. You know, they tend to plan for certain
kinds of risks and don't plan for others. Or at least the way they plan for others
is not to know what the risk is and know what their actual response is going to
be, but to put the kinds of systems in place that create resilience, I guess, and—
Mike Kearney: It doesn't matter what the actual risk is. They—yeah.
13. 13
Tim Brown: Right, and I think that's—that would be my approach—like, "What are the things
that give us organizational resilience?" For instance, we had an interesting
little example of it a couple years ago. I was in Boston when the
bombings happened at the marathon, and it turned out that I think—yeah, three
IDEO folks were running in that marathon. Now, there was no place at IDEO
which had an, "I'm running the Boston Marathon today in case anything
happened." We don't have a mechanism like that. We know a little bit about
when people are in dangerous countries, but apart from that, we don't have any
kind of centralized process. Within less than 15 minutes, we knew exactly who
was there and we were in touch with them. And the reason was because the
social network at IDEO is intensely strong, right? I mean—
Mike Kearney: That's fascinating.
Tim Brown: This really—this organization was set up to be a group of people working with
their friends. And it's still set up that way, so within moments, we had emails
flying around with, "Well, I know Ian's running the marathon today," and so we
knew within 15 minutes who it was without having any centralized system for it.
And so I think of that kind of network of friendship, if you like, as being a
resilience platform for IDEO.
Mike Kearney: I always ask—one of the last questions is: How would you describe a resilient
leader or organization? I think you almost just described at least one attribute of
a resilient organization: one that's socially networked.
Tim Brown: Yeah, I mean, it's turned out to be quite valuable in those situations. It has lots
of other value, too. We have really good parties, for instance. But—
Mike Kearney: I've been to a few, so thank you.
Tim Brown: The other thing I believe is that resilient organizations are ones that—where
their systems are kind of culturally attuned. In other words, they rely on the
strengths of the culture, not the weaknesses of the culture. So, for instance,
knowledge sharing systems, which would rely on all the things that we're weak
at, like rigorously putting everything down in one place and putting everything
into the same format, you know—which you can't force anybody at IDEO to do
that. And so that's never going to be a system that—even though good, shared
knowledge would clearly be a good thing, it isn't going to work. So that's not the
right way of designing knowledge sharing at IDEO because it forces us to make
use of all of our weaknesses rather than our strengths.
Mike Kearney: So, Tim, you guys have worked on so many different projects, as you were
talking about at the beginning. From redesigning Peruvian schools, which I think
is a really cool project, to—
Tim Brown: We’re very proud of that.
14. 14
Mike Kearney: Yeah. That was fantastic. And then, also, you talked about the Microsoft—or the
Apple mouse. Well, that was a slip—
Tim Brown: We did the Microsoft mouse, too, so you're okay there.
Mike Kearney: Oh, you did? Okay.
Tim Brown: You're safe.
Mike Kearney: I'm okay. What's the one project you wouldn't do? Have you guys ever thought
about that? Is there anything that you wouldn't touch?
Tim Brown: Well, I mean, there—given that we're trying to help the world have positive
impact through design, we don't work on things that are specifically designed to
harm people. That's a pretty—I mean, so weapons are easy, like you don't work
on weapons. There are other things that get a bit gray and we have certainly
worked in industries where you could argue, you know, the food and beverage
industry—there are things that are not always great. I think we believe that, like
many people do, I suspect, that we can make change happen within those
industries, so to not engage would be maybe a bit shortsighted. But we're
constantly having debates about should we be working on certain things or not.
As our knowledge, as our science, as our perspectives socially and societally
change, we're constantly having debates about what's good to work on and
what might not be so good to work on. But, in general, we do try and avoid
working on things that clearly are intended to have harm.
Mike Kearney: I think one thing that's fascinating—tell me if this is true or false—and that is
you almost have to recruit the folks at IDEO to work on projects. I think that's—
I've never seen that before working with IDEO, but what's good about it is if you
have a team, you know that they're passionate about the project that they're
working on.
Tim Brown: Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't always make it the easiest business in the world to run.
Mike Kearney: Yeah, I understand that.
Tim Brown: But yeah, it—I mean, if you think about—again, if our goal is to raise the bar as
high as we can to get the most creative work we can out of the most creative
talent we can find, then how would you possibly go about it another way and
expect it to be successful in the long term? So we recruit talent that's highly
demanding about what it gets to work on and then we have to try and meet
those demands best we can. The good news is we also recruit talent at IDEO
that's very broad-minded, that sees the world in very interesting ways, and does
not have a narrow-minded view of what impact is or a narrow-minded view of
what interesting is. So in that sense, we get to work on a lot of different things.
Mike Kearney: Is there a project that you personally are dying to do that you haven't had an
opportunity to work on?
15. 15
Tim Brown: Well, I've always—this is one answer I've had to this question over the years,
which I think is still relevant, but I've always wanted to design a space station.
Partly it's because I love science fiction and space and that kind of stuff. And it
seems highly romantic to design, but also because I'm really interested in
ecosystems, right? And whenever we design an ecosystem on planet Earth,
there are a whole bunch of things that we have to accept that are very hard to
design for, which are so many of the externalities of the ecosystem, right? So if
you're trying to design a city, then you can't design a city in isolation from
everything else in existence.
Well, the cool thing about a space station is that it’s actually an ecosystem that's
in isolation from everything else. So you could actually imagine kind of designing
everything. Now, you probably couldn't succeed at designing everything, but at
least you could imagine that that might be possible. And so I'm fascinated by
those kinds of challenges. So I think I'd still put space station at the top of my
list.
Mike Kearney: That's probably the coolest answer I've gotten so far. So let me—there's a quote
you have. I think it was in a video or something, but this is about kids that are
coming out of school, okay? And you had said, "Parents don't have to love your
career; you do." What advice would you give to kids coming out of school
nowadays?
Tim Brown: Well, it's easy to say, "Do what you're passionate about," but I know when I was
a kid, I did not know what I was passionate about. I discovered it as I went
along. In fact, I discovered my—the confidence to even be passionate much
later on. I mean, by the time—I was well into my college career before I even
knew that I could be passionate about anything, to be really honest with you,
but that was maybe just my first—
Mike Kearney: That's great advice because I've got a 17-year-old boy, so maybe I need to take
that into consideration.
Tim Brown: So yeah, I think my encouragement would be to be experimental. And by
experimental, I mean try things and then reflect on them. Don't just try them
and then move on, but try it and think about what was it like to go through that
experience. "What did I like about it? What did I not like about it? How might it
help me decide what to do next?" And I would treat not just my academic life
that way; I would treat other things that way, too. So I guess that would be one
piece of advice.
I would have another one, which we've talked about a lot already, which would
be: Do the best you possibly can to be curious. Because it's the questions you
ask that you're going to be most interested in answering, not the questions
other people ask, right? So the more curious you are, the more you wonder
about things, the more likely you are to discover questions that you're then
actually passionate about.
16. 16
Mike Kearney: Sure.
Tim Brown: So, for me, finally discovering that that question, "What does design do next?"
was kind of a motivating force for me, which is usually liberating, right? And I can
be open and honest about it. So when people don't like that I'm always trying
to figure out how IDEO should do the next thing instead of doing the thing we're
already doing, it's like, "Well, this is just a question that has always—isn't
just me," right? Because you get that—when you get me, you get that question.
Mike Kearney: Right.
Tim Brown: And so I think discovering the questions that you can be passionate about, if you
like, is more important than discovering the answers you're passionate about.
Mike Kearney: Well, I think that's also a good alternative to the passion point that you were
making at the beginning. Just figure out the questions that you're interested in
answering, and if you continue down that path, you'll find the right thing for
you.
Tim Brown: Right, and many of them will be small questions. And then just every so often,
you'll trip over a big one that can keep you going for a decent chunk of a career.
Mike Kearney: Which, actually, you know what, in some respects, that goes back to the very
first question I asked about impact. Because, ultimately, if you're asking the
right questions that matter to you, they probably matter to other people and
society in general. So if you're focusing on that, that's where you can make
impact.
Tim Brown: Look, and even if they don't matter to everybody else, if you ask a question that
matters to you and you make progress against it, then that's good enough.
Mike Kearney: That's good enough. What's the one piece of advice you give to CEOs around—
I'm sure you probably are asked all the time, "How do I innovate in an
organization?" What's the one—is there a silver bullet or a one thing you say to
them?
Tim Brown: You know, I would. It's very hard, I mean, because CEOs have difficult jobs and
they are given advice all the time. I guess I would encourage CEOs to find the
time to reflect and ask some different questions than the ones that they
normally ask. Don't know what those questions should be about. They could be
about innovation. They could be about their people and what they think about
the people that they work with. They could be about the customers. I don't—it
doesn't really matter very much, but I just don't think CEOs give themselves
much time to reflect and to ask questions that they don't normally ask.
Mike Kearney: That's interesting. Yeah, because they don't have the—I mean, they seemingly
think they do not have the time so they're not making the time.
17. 17
Tim Brown: Right, but it's by not having the time that I think in the end, you do yourself, as a
leader, and your organization the biggest disservice.
Mike Kearney: So two last questions and I'm going let you off the hook. What is the one book
you recommend to people on innovation other than Change by Design, because
I'm sure that's—
Tim Brown: Well, you know, I spend a lot of my time sort of advising business people what
books to read on creativity, but actually, funnily enough, the most influential
book—or set of books, actually—on the way to think in the way that we just
talked about, reflectively, were all written by Peter Drucker. So, I mean, I—and
this is what I advise to every designer who says, "What book should I read on
business?" Well, I say, "Go buy the complete works of Peter Drucker," which is
kind of an abridged thing, and go read those and if it's one of his books, then go
read the one on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Mike Kearney: Fantastic. So if you weren't the CEO of IDEO, what would you be doing?
Tim Brown: You know, I went off originally to art school thinking I would want to be a
painter, and I realized, actually, I liked 3D. So I think if I wasn't being the CEO of
IDEO, I'd love to imagine that I could survive at least enough to buy the old
sandwich by being a sculptor. I probably couldn't survive by being a sculptor,
but that's what I would—what I think I would have liked to have done.
Mike Kearney: Awesome. Tim, thank you very much. This has been fantastic.
Tim Brown: Thank you, thank you. It's been great.
---------------------------
Mike Kearney: I have to tell you, like I opened up, that was a treat for me. I have, like I said, I've
read Tim Brown's books, I read his LinkedIn profile and all of the articles he puts
out there, I watch his videos. To say I'm a fan of Tim Brown would be an
understatement, and I'm hoping that you enjoyed that as much as I do.
And I want to thank everybody out there for listening to Resilient. As you know,
this is a Deloitte podcast, but the podcast focuses on our guests, not everything
that Deloitte has to say. And the podcast is produced by our friends at Rivet
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