I’m excited to share my conversation with Kevin Bethune, a multidisciplinary design executive, entrepreneur, best-selling author and keynote speaker based in Redondo Beach, California. He’s been a VP of Strategic design at BCG Digital, A global process product manager at Nike and a Nuclear Engineer at Westinghouse. He currently leads his own firm, https://dreamsdesignandlife.com/
One of his key ideas is “Open your aperture.” -ie, shifting the lens that you are looking at a problem from or through. Design and Design Thinking has so many tools to help us do just that, and find creative approaches to our biggest challenges.
In our conversation, we discussed the importance of embracing creative approaches (since our habitual approaches most likely can’t solve them!) and the need for bold leadership to optimize for curiosity and creativity - because going with business as usual is usually a lot easier than spending time on curiosity.
It takes a willingness to slow down to optimize for curiosity in a business environment that is often so focused on quarterly capitalism.
We also highlight the lack of diversity in design and innovation, particularly in black representation, and the cognitive dissonance of claiming to serve certain communities without actually representing them - an unresolved critique of many innovation firms.
The S-Curve and the Cone of Possibility
Kevin’s book, Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, is CHOCK A BLOCK with diagrams (and I love diagrams!) that will stretch your thinking, but we spent some time on one diagram in particular that combines two classic models of thinking: The cone of possibility and the s-curve.
The Cone of possibility is a cone on its side, with the tip at the present, and the sides of the cone stretching out like rays of sunshine to the right. The rays represent possible futures along the timeline. There are many versions of this diagram online. Kevin’s version calls the center of the cone the “most likely” or projected future. The cone of possibility invites us to consider widening edges - future scenarios that are plausible and even impossible or preposterous futures, not just the projected or ideal future
Opening our aperture to consider multiple possible futures means that our plans can be more resilient, adaptable and even antifragile.
The S-curve is a visual representation of one of my favorite Shakespeare Sonnets. #15:
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check'd even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Things are born (or emerge), they grow, mature and then fade away. Kevin’s version of the S-curve includes more detail:
Emergence
A dip - the trough of disillusionment
A hyper-growth phase that slows into..
Maturity and then…
Decline, or retirement.
Kevin overlays the cone of possibility with a set of cascading s-curves, representing a host of possible trends rising and cresting as we look out into the possible futures.
As Kevin describes this diagram in our conversation, his hands are making waves of opening and closing, diverging and converging. That's what he’s seeing when he looks along the cone of possibility: all of these different trends, multiple pathways. It’s this complex, undulating space that he tries to illustrate for the teams that he works with to help them see a bigger aperture to think inside of.
These diagrams, these mental models, help redesign the conversation about strategy and innovation. We’re not designing for a single, simple, ideal future. We’re looking out at a complex landscape with multiple possible twists and turns. That is how you unlock strategic innovation - step back, widen the aperture and change the conversation.
In short - creative visualization facilitates dialogue and widens perspectives.
More About Kevin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbethune/
https://dreamsdesignandlife.com/
Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a "think tank" that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 25 year career, positioning him to help brands deliver meaningful innovations to enrich people's lives.
His work represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture, and a deep industrial design approach to inform and influence desirable, feasible and business-viable design outcomes.
Kevin also serves as a Board Trustee for ArtCenter College of Design and the Board Chair for the Design Management Institute (DMI).
AI Key Moments
(0:19) - Kevin discusses the challenges of implementing design thinking in business environments, including a bias towards formulaic approaches and a lack of collaboration across disciplines
(4:09) - Kevin suggests that it takes bold leadership and a willingness to slow down to optimize for curiosity and creativity in business
(10:28) - Kevin reflects on how his book has served as a mirror for others and helped them see themselves in his story, as well as how it encourages creative courage and confidence to experiment on curiosities and become a source of influential change within organizations
(13:58) - Kevin explains how opening the aperture and considering a wider range of perspectives can enrich team conversations and inform them with more diverse perspectives
(15:05) - Daniel and Kevin discuss various diagrams in the book related to strategic foresight, including the cone of possibility and S curves of emergence and saturation
(20:02) - Daniel and Kevin discuss the importance of requisite diversity in solving complex challenges and the lack of representation in design and innovation industries
(23:16) - Daniel asks about where conversation design fits into a diagram in Kevin’s book and they discuss the power of visualization in facilitating dialogue and widening perspectives.
(40:50) Kevin emphasizes the importance of tapping into the value criteria of stakeholders and creating new avenues of utility for them.
(43:05) - Kevin suggests being subversive with a good heart and showing what design can bring to help the business, while also considering the implications of every business or design decision.He also talks about value creation and mapping value criteria across stakeholders, emphasizing the need to anticipate where value will be and show up for people in new and novel ways
Full AI Transcript
Daniel Stillman
With that, Kevin, I will officially welcome you to the Conversation Factory. Welcome aboard. Thanks for making the time.
Kevin Bethune
No, thank you for having me. Daniel.
Daniel Stillman
So why does design need reimagining? Can we start right there in the center?
Kevin Bethune
Yes. What I can say is that in my business, this experience is, unfortunately, there still lingers a glass ceiling of ambiguity. It's probably the best way I could describe in terms of how the larger business landscape understands design, or even design thinking, for that matter.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And the differences in between. I think it's just time to sort of revisit where are these approaches sort of coming from, and how do organizations think about potentially wiring themselves to really embrace these philosophies and these capabilities that design could bring to the table?
Daniel Stillman
I love that phrase, wiring themselves to embrace that. What is the glass ceiling of ambiguity, and how should organizations be rewiring themselves to embrace the power of design and design thinking? Which are we allowed to talk about design? I mean, it's like it's gone in and out of fashion so many times. So I appreciate you bringing it back into the conversation. What needs to shift?
Kevin Bethune
There's a couple of things that come to mind. Unfortunately. I think in most business environments, I think a lot of times, we feel this pressure to derisk our approaches, our methods, how we create product. There's just a general derisking. And with that, also, the speed of the clock only seems to be getting faster, thanks to digital. So sometimes I think there's an unfortunate bias toward looking at a methodology. And if a business community is looking at design thinking for the first time, there might be just a bias to want to march through the process in a very formulaic manner.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah.
Kevin Bethune
And those who are perhaps more familiar with creative approaches, creative processes, understand the nonlinearities that one must take to understand how to react to the information that you have available to make the next step forward. And it's very nonlinear. There's a lot of loopbacks, a lot of pivots, a lot of wayfinding that needs to happen that perhaps the frameworks that the business community might read about don't necessarily get into. And the framework can easily fall down in the face of real business complexity. So that's one thing. And then secondly, in a good way, I think design thinking has brokered a conversation to bring different disciplines to the table to at least begin to entertain their creative process. I think that's good. But in reality, I think especially the larger organizations get the bandwidth to actually collaborate, and problem solve across disciplines is still very much the exception. It's not the general rule.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah.
Kevin Bethune
There's not a lot of time to collaborate. And I still find that with organizations big and small.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, you mentioned this. So when we were talking about what we wanted to talk about, the ability, the interest, optimizing for curiosity, creativity, and having an open aperture is really challenging because most many businesses are in the business of optimization and maximization and forward moving. What does it take for business to be willing to step back and have that creative open aperture?
Kevin Bethune
Well, it does take a healthy dose of courage and believers in the power of what these creative approaches could offer. And not just I'm not talking through the lens of just design any discipline. I think it takes bold leadership to empower the different disciplines within their watch, give them the space. And it's something like the old adage around going slow to go fast later. If we sort of slow down to appreciate what each discipline can bring to the table. I don't think it happens over the postit note dance or the whiteboarding. Each discipline has their own depth of expertise and their own strengths that we need to make room for. And if we do that thoughtfully and allow teams to sort of norm and find their optimal chemistry, which isn't necessarily equated to speed all the time, true magic can happen. And once we get to epiphanies that are actually more meaningful to the stakeholders that we're serving, then we can go fast later and shift the stuff that's the most relevant. That's going to hit the need right on the head.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about if we take a step back and talk about your journey? Because the earlier part of the book is there's too much we can't do it justice here. I think your story is worth reading about. You've had a crazy journey. Not everyone has had the opportunity to work on nuclear reactors and sneakers. Not everybody has built an entire new business for a global agency. Right. So what made you want to finally share it and undergo because writing a book is a pain in the ass. Just acknowledge that writing a book is a journey. What made you want to really undergo the travails of book writing to share your story?
Kevin Bethune 06:09
No, I appreciate that and yes, it was a pain in the ass.
Daniel Stillman
Anybody out there thinking about writing a book, think twice. Ask yourself, how long do I want to deal with this pain? And then how long do I want to be talking about this thing?
Kevin Bethune
And I do have to shout out the MIT press. They've been wonderful sages to get me through the process. But as you mean, it's been a unique journey of multidisciplinary leaps and I could say that now, hindsight being 2020. And I can say also that it wasn't surely easy like as I started my career as a nuclear engineer working on reactor mechanical systems to wanting to garner the language of business just by sheer fact of a natural curiosity to want to understand the bigger picture around. The engineering work led to an MBA came into Nike, which created an environment that offered not just the strategic aspects and technical stuff, but that was the first time I was in an environment that had actual formal creativity embodied in the organization as well. And so that really opened my eyes to the power of design and how it could plug into technical and business concerns. Yeah, and I'm thankful that the Nike environment afforded me some runaway to begin to cut my teeth on Nike product and also start to entertain some early forays and quick wins on design and ended up going back to school for design to really solidify that creative foundation. And that was a big gamble when I thought I was done with school to go back to school for more education. But it was a career bet to really solidify my career positioning at the intersections of these disciplines because I think I honestly believe the future is going to require more multidisciplinary collaboration and conversations to breed the next generation of innovations that will be required to meet the needs of the future. And yes, that's where I wanted to plant my flag. And as I mentioned, it wasn't difficult, it surely wasn't welcome traversing these different disciplines. And I think based on recent experience navigating the environment of BCG in recent chapters where we had to stand up new capabilities that were new to BCG, new to BCG's clientele. I did walk away from BCG with this appreciation for the intellectual curiosity that was a huge part of their culture. This notion of eminence, of sharing what you've learned and the act of sharing through written word articles or keynote speaking at industry conferences, that act of freeing up in communities, that knowledge. You open your mind up to embrace new information from those communities and you can bring that back into your work. And so I think that immersion in BCG culture sort of planted the early seeds that perhaps a book could be written based on what I had to help stand up. But interestingly enough, the timing of when I started the writing process was at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, surprisingly, the book went to a very personal place, more so than what I initially expected when I entertained the project with MIT Press.
Daniel Stillman
It was a very reflective time, having all that weird spaciousness in some
Daniel Stillman
you know, you talked about a book being I love this word eminence. And what you sort of sketched out is a classic feedback loop of the way I would describe a book should be. We want it to be a conversation. You're taking all the conversations you've had in your life and turning it into a new conversation. You want people to read it, you want to engage in those dialogues. You want to share ideas from that book and learn. And it creates a new cycle of learning. What's that been like for you now that it's been out for a while now? Is it creating the conversation you were hoping it would start?
Kevin Bethune
Yeah, it's been a year since it's been out. And I'm very thankful for what I've learned over that year of just understanding how it resonates with folks. And I think the consistent thread of feedback was that it served as a mirror of sorts for other people to say through someone's story like take my name out of it. But in diving into someone's story that's had this weird journey, they begin to see a little bit of themselves in that and their own journey. And I think the book helps them open their aperture to understand what they could potentially do, how they could potentially garner more creative courage and confidence to experiment on their curiosities and then taking it a step further. It's also helped them see how they might become a source of more influential change within the organizations and the teams that they're tasked to shepherd.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, that's exciting. For those of you there's no video of this, but Kevin's smiling. I don't know if you may be able to hear it in his that's that's given you some joy. Yes, I think that's really awesome. What are some of your favorite diagrams in the book? Because it is chalk, a block of diagrams. I'm a big fan of a diagram. Clearly you're a bit of a framework nerd yourself, sir.
Kevin Bethune
Clearly. I'm happy that I got a chance to sketch all the figures that you see in the book. I'm a very visual communicator that's I guess why, you know, my editor was like, you need to sketch all your figures. But I do gravitate to the lens a lot. There's a figure of a looking glass staring at the distant time horizon.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And that lens is all about just it's a constant reinforcement I use with all of the collaborations that I'm involved in all around encouraging the teams that I'm a part of to open our aperture. This idea of opening the aperture to regardless of whatever the brief is, whatever the immediate business concern is, we can all stand to take a step back and look at the future through a looking glass. That forces us to really lean into our multidisciplinary collaboration. And if we do that and really leverage the diversity from that, we can populate that lens with all kinds of data points, inspirations, observations, spanning stakeholder needs to business paradigms to trends and exemplars and not taking what is happening in the business world today or the present consensus of how things are supposed to behave as a given.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And by opening our aperture, we can interrogate everything.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah. So let's talk about that because that's in chapter four and the lens. You talk about industry, people, trends, exemplars. This is about future strategic foresight. Right. So let's talk about opening up the aperture and what that means to you because again, this is about stepping back and this is about being curious about more elements of the conversation than just what is the thing we're trying to make now? How do we create immediate value? It's stepping back and looking at the big picture. What's important about that to you? And how can we leverage this diagram, this beautiful, starry eyed aperture that you've created?
Kevin Bethune
I think it's a helpful visual to understand, like whatever we're working on in the short term, if we're not tracking at least an appreciation for what's happening across the landscape, across the continuum of time, across not just what's most likely, like right in front of us as a most likely future, but considering dynamics that maybe force us to diverge and think about scenarios beyond that most likely future. If we cast that net wider, we're basically giving our teams a much richer conversation. We're informing the table with a much more enriched and diverse set of perspectives yes. Than what they might have had or they might have had limited if we were to just attack the brief that's in front of us.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah. You're also kind of implicating another diagram in that chapter around sort of the cone of possibility diagram, which I think is a really important one.
Kevin Bethune
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman
Can you hold those two intention for me when it comes to strategic foresight? And then there's a third one, which I really loved, where it's just a bunch of S curves of emergence and saturation. That was a pretty trippy diagram. That's what you look at when you see the world. That's what Kevin is seeing. It's a cone of possibility and endless S curves of growth and renewal.
Kevin Bethune
Yeah. This is sort of a weird dive into my head in terms of the visualization, because in my mind, it's one visual. Like, if I look through the looking glass at the distant time horizon, that's your lens. But if I turn it sideways, you have your cone of possibility.
Daniel Stillman
Whoa. Oh, I might have missed that. That's looking at the cone of possibility head on.
Kevin Bethune
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman
Wow.
Kevin Bethune
And as we interrogate how forces of change are commingling across that horizon or through the different parts of that cone over time, trends will sort of EB and flow. Innovation that are making traction in the market will ebb and flow. This idea of the S curve, it's like every new innovation is going to go through a process of emergence. There might be some initial disillusionment in terms of the market's appetite for that, as we well have experienced, and then someone figures it out, and eventually we have some scale, and eventually that will need to be matured for something else that comes along to replace it. So this ebb and flow, this intertwining mix of trends and the wake and the decline and maturity, all those things, we sort of have the opportunity to map, do our best to map and illustrate for teams to figure out what scenarios across our future time horizon might we anticipate to better position our organization for success.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah. Again, your hands are just in this. We're making this wave of opening and closing, diverging and converging. And that's what you're seeing when you're looking along that cone of possibility, all of these different trends, and you try to illustrate that for the teams that you work with to help them see what you see. There are so many layers I want to peel on this onion, one that I think would be really important and I would be highly remiss if I didn't bring it up, is diversity. You are a man of color. You talk about this a fair amount in your book, and I feel like there is a conversation that needs to happen more about what diversity really means in these types of transformation conversations. I don't even know where I'll just be honest with you sometimes I don't like to bring it in unless you bring it up explicitly, indirectly, because as far as I'm concerned, your ideas stand alone, and I don't want to racialize them and I don't want to racialize you and your perspective in total transparency. But you are a man of color and you talk about it in your book, and I think it's really important to talk about what diversity means in all of its layers and the conversations you want more people to be having about race after having read your book a lot.
Kevin Bethune
No, I do appreciate that and I do appreciate the safe space that you're creating to have this conversation. It is a very important one. I think it goes the other way as well in that I'm very careful when I engage people around the topics that I bring in the book to say that I can only speak for me. Yes, I am a black African American male that has navigated some really weird multidisciplinary leaps. And so I do understand what marginalization feels like and reflecting on some of the rooms that I've navigated before. At the same time, I also understand as a male, as a tall male, navigating corporate America. And the presence that my presence can embody in a room might be different than someone else who doesn't have the privilege of what certain business communities might feel. When I walk in the room versus I, especially as a male in corporate America, I understand what privilege feels like. And given the benefit of the doubt based on my stature and my voice compared to someone else, so I can only speak for me. And thankfully, we all get to navigate a world that is this beautiful tapestry of intersectionalities and diversity from every slice of the imagination. But unfortunately, when we speak of our experiences navigating a world that is the way it is by design, who's at the table absolutely matters.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And unfortunately, in many of the world class studios and innovation centers and brands, some that I've navigated, some that I've encountered, whether it was through recruiting conversations, I look into those organizations and they don't mirror the beautiful tapestry that is the world. No, especially in design and innovation. Black representation is 1% to 3%, depending on the discipline you're looking at. And they might be claiming to serve an urban demographic that might be half black.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah.
Kevin Bethune
The cognitive dissonance is real.
Daniel Stillman
Yes. The Oscars are so white design is also so white. And what you're highlighting, which is really important, is that there's this concept of requisite diversity in conversation design and complexity theory that if you're going to solve a challenge that's complex, you need to have a group of people that is at least as complex as the challenge they're trying to solve. And I think trying to offer products for a community that you do not represent or relate to in an authentic way is problematic, to say the least. And so you talk about multidisciplinary conversations and the marginalization. That's so easy to have happen. We need to be including people. We people need to be included. Everyone needs to be included in the conversation. That is a really challenging thing to navigate because this idea of inclusion also has the concept of positionality in it. Who is including who?
Kevin Bethune
It sure does. And even the best intentioned practitioners may not realize the harm that they might be complicit with regard to their work. Because representation in the teams is one thing, but what process are they following? That process might have been wired by some limited few in places of power and prestige that have informed the pedagogy in the first place.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And many times what's frustrating is there's a lot of quote unquote, world class studios that will design for certain communities they claim to be designing for. But design for is problematic.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And you take it a step further, design with becomes the next answer, quote unquote. Like, of course we should co create with our stakeholders and be in there with them and using them as an equal thought partner. But even that, I would argue, is not enough.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
To your earlier point, why don't we just ensure that our teams are representative, where we actually have representative teammates that come from those communities that can actually form authentic inroads into those communities.
Daniel Stillman
Yes. So there's so many layers there and that's a whole conversation. One of my favorite diagrams in your book is the one around design as concept creation to product creation and execution versus strategic. It's a sort of two by two space. And in the sort of the upper left hand corner of concept creation and strategic design, which we've talked a little bit about foresight design. And on the lower right, I guess you'd say, is motion design. Industrial design is kind of in the middle. Where my heritage? Where is conversation design and gathering what I would call conversation design, which other people might call gathering design. Kind of what we're talking about now. The ability to create multidisciplinary inclusive, non marginalizing processes, gatherings, conversations by which we create things that create more justice. What is that type of design and where does that go on this diagram? Because I feel like it's missing.
Kevin Bethune
No, you are very correct in that it's missing. And I appreciate the words that you're using because especially in today's climate, these are paradigms that are absolutely important. They're also being interrogated with, like, does a human being do that or is the AI engine with the prompts and the conversations with AI?
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And the speed of the digital clock getting even faster. These are absolutely important. So, yeah, this is an opportunity to even break the visual that I created for this book to expand it. And it's almost like if you take the strategic design corner of the image, this should blow out even further to include the elements that you're describing.
Daniel Stillman
Because I imagine that you are a skilled gatherer. When I looked at all these strategic diagrams, you have so many wonderful two by twos. Of course, you have
Daniel Stillman
vertical versus horizontal innovation, which I loved. I haven't seen that one in a long time, and I still have a hard time really grocking it, whereas you've lived it for years. And I know that you use these to facilitate dialogue. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about what types of conversations you really love to have and how you use all these visuals to facilitate the kinds of conversations you want to have with the companies and teams that you enjoy working with.
Kevin Bethune
I appreciate the question because it makes me reflect that there's been a lot of moments of truth where creative problem solving manifested in very unforeseen ways. And many times, especially over the last 1015 years of my career, there may have been an acute business need, a brief or whatever task that was in front of us. But if there was a moment to leverage my newfound creative skills, many times those stakeholders in the room didn't necessarily know what to ask for or know what to even expect from me beyond the requirements of the brief. And there were moments of truth where there was a brewing connection of dots in my mind that at least spawned the conviction to get out of the chair and walk over to the whiteboard with a sharpie or a whiteboarding marker and visualize what I believe the conversation was provoking. And just by putting a visual on the whiteboard. And granted, I never was your alpha extroverted person or leader in the room. I'm very introspective, very introverted. But there was enough dot connections in my mind that said, you know what, you need to get out of the chair and contribute, and here's a way that you can. So I walk over, I put a grounding visual on the whiteboard, and as much as people are convincing over the conversation, they could look at the visual. And I just felt that power of the visual recentering or reframing or reimagining the course of discussion. And then when they were there, when I had their attention there. And again, this is all about team cohesion around that visual. It gave me a doorway to contribute verbally on top of the visual as well. And so that's been the experience in many instances lately, in that there's an initial ask, but there's always an opportunity to open the aperture. And thanks to the power of visualization, I can use these frameworks, these vehicles, to facilitate a widening of inputs and information and diversity of a perspective that can inform where we're going.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, the power of a visual to ground a conversation as what are they called, chaotic attractors, because conversations can go everywhere. But when you draw two by two, it really does frame the conversation to say, hey, I know you're asking for this type of innovation or this type of transformation. There's also this other quadrant, this other scenario. How are we designing for this? And so I think that's one of the powers of the two x two scenario planning diagram where you were like, we're talking about this future, but this other future is possible and this future and this future is possible. And what is our optionality for each one of these quadrants? It really does help people zoom out.
Kevin Bethune
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman
Can you talk more about what it feels like to do that? As I don't identify as an introvert, I think we're all ambiverts. We all live on a spectrum of introversion and extroversion. And so I'm really curious what it feels like, what it's felt like for you to take up the pen and to lead the conversation through providing visuals, with providing a framework, with getting layering more contribution on top of that, what does that feel like in that moment to step into the circle that way?
Kevin Bethune
It definitely was let me just start over.
Daniel Stillman
Sorry.
Kevin Bethune
I can say that it felt magical in the moments. And the other side of that coin of magic was definitely the fear of making a misstep, making a very visible misstep that was out of my character. But I think in the lead up to the last second half of my career, I do remember feeling the frustration of being that introvert in the room and feeling all the inhibitions of speaking up when those convictions were. Bubbling when I was able to naturally connect the dots in my mind. But fearing the political misstep or doing something that might run contrary to people's expectations of me and making the faux PA. But still we navigate and there's all kinds of mismatches, there's all kinds of biases and myopic sort of tendencies in business to meet the needs of where people are and meeting the needs of where people will be. And if I don't speak up, who will? And so I think that courage eventually presents itself to get up out of the chair and do something. But then I realized the mapping of leadership that has been celebrated in my past career. Chapters was the alpha archetype, the alpha person, always driving the agenda, always driving the smart answer. And I realized, again, we're still navigating with all these biases, all these mismatches. Is there a different way that I could lead? And then I started looking at some of the leaders that were truly role models for me, and they didn't necessarily match to that archetype that had been historically celebrated.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
I've always enjoyed the quiet leader that knows to step away from the team room in a gnarly situation. They might go into their depth of expertise, whether it's coding, drawing, sketching, whatever making, and they bring something back to the team. And they're leading by example, by quietly showing what is possible, then they get out of the way and let the team have a try. Yes, that's leadership, too. You can lead and move the team forward by making, by speaking, by writing, by visualizing. There's many ways to lead, especially with this multidisciplinary opportunity upon us. I'm a fervent believer that we need to embody all kinds of leadership more and more.
Daniel Stillman
Such a beautiful way to lead the conversation, by framing the most important question, by framing the tension in the tension that you see in the challenger in the room and speaking to serve the conversation, not necessarily to say the smartest thing and to bring the attention to yourself. I think that's a beautiful way to look at what I might call conversational leadership. It doesn't have to be driving it, it can be gathering it, it can be corralling it. How else do you love to lead conversations? What are your ideal ways of hosting and bringing people together?
Kevin Bethune
Um,
Kevin Bethune
I think it probably stems from both optimism, but as well as, if I'm honest, past trauma of what it was like to be either recognized as a leader or be accused of being lukewarm or ineffective because I didn't match the archetype of what the organization might have celebrated as leadership. And I've been told in my past, why aren't you like this person? I'm not that person, that's why. But these are things, unfortunately, people hear, and especially when you're not representative of the majority.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
How that lands. I don't think people will fully appreciate the harm that that causes. And again, these are things I had to unpack. But with optimism and also recognizing that I've had huge opportunities of privilege navigating my career in terms of the spaces I've been able to navigate, I'm very optimistic, no matter how hard something is to say, like, what can we pull together as diverse ingredients? And through a collaboration, having a hope that we can answer the call? So I guess in the work, what drives the optimism is the chance to serve someone and actually impact the human experience in a very meaningful way. Does it manifest that way all the time? I think we all fall short of that hope sometimes, but that hope does keep us moving. Forward.
Daniel Stillman
I think that is an extraordinary aspect of the real design mindset. I'm going to remind myself by saying it now to put a link to my friend. I don't know if you know Aisha Bursell and her work. She wrote a book called how to Design the Life You Love, and it's a wonderful book. I had her on my podcast ages ago. She's a Turkish designer, and she talks about optimism as a fundamental aspect of design. And by golly, it is for realsies hard because we live in a very complex, very challenging world. And to maintain your curiosity and your optimism, kevin, how did you get those superpowers?
Kevin Bethune
Honestly, curiosity has been the defining thread. Again, easy to say that now, but I'm always excited by what you can do when you put two and two together and making two from less than obvious places. Sources of inspiration.
Daniel Stillman
Yes.
Kevin Bethune
And learning over my career to always look up, look out, get out of the office walls, and be open source to just like a fisherman, casting the net wide and getting as many rich and different ingredients as possible, no matter the ask, no matter the brief. Good things tend to happen when you do that.
Daniel Stillman
There's that optimism again. Kevin so can you talk briefly about the name of your firm, dreams, Design and Life? I feel like that's an important thing for us to touch on, because I know that's a significant combination for you.
Kevin Bethune
It's funny, the name came from a hashtag that I used on Instagram and Twitter and years prior to me starting the practice, and where the name comes from. I think that optimism analogously. You think of dreaming of what future possibilities could be had. So the idea of being childlike and dreaming and always keeping that hope alive at the other end of the branding is life. And that life is very concrete. There's pragmatic things, there's constraints, there's concrete realities that we have to navigate. But in a beautiful way, I've discovered how and learned how design could transform my life. And design can be a powerful broker or medium in between the dreaming and the life circumstances to create a path toward a better way forward.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, what else would do that but intentionality, right? That's the core of design, believing that optimistically, it is possible to create something different. Boy. All right, Kevin. We've covered a lot of territory. Our time is shockingly, running short. What have we not talked about that is important for us to talk about? Because obviously there's more in your book than we could possibly cover in the time we have. There's more in your life than we could dig into. But what haven't we unpacked that would be worth circling back around and unpacking more?
Kevin Bethune
You know, I am I am even more bullish and fascinated by a lot of the nonlinearities and nuances that are involved in any effort that we have to go after a new innovation opportunity or to even investigate what might be a possibility to go pursue. And I am spending a lot of time noodling on what does nonlinearity mean in our journey toward innovation? What are some of the nuances that make innovation endeavors more successful? And I think of the work of friends like Myro Percini, who's a chief design officer of PepsiCo. His book that came out recently, of course, it's not going to be with an Eyeshot. Give me 1 second.
Kevin Bethune
Where is it?
Kevin Bethune
Of course, it would have walked away from my office. Give me 1 second. I want to get the name right out of respect for him.
Daniel Stillman
It's all good.
Kevin Bethune
So. Yeah, his book is Myra Percini's book, the Human Side of Innovation the Power of People and Love with People. That's just one great example of the nuances around. Like, we have to remember that people still drive the pursuit of innovation versus a framework or a methodology. And some of the attributes, the nuances that he brings to light the characteristics of what he calls unicorns or even designers. And are people in love with people bringing the nuances out? And I think if more people appreciate what to look out for and what to sort of appreciate, that's different than the typical archetypes of leadership that are often celebrated in business. Yes, he's giving us a whole landscape of attributes, of the nuances, of what makes our differences actually compelling when we think about innovation. That's just one facet of these nuances and nonlinearities that I think we really need to unpack for people so that they can identify those attributes and recognize that they're valuable. And that's something that is left on the cutting room floor for what's prioritized.
Daniel Stillman
The idea that it's the people and not the framework is a really beautiful perspective because going back to the name of your firm, Dreams, it really does come down to what is the dream? What are the dreams of the people in the room? What's the dream of the organization? Like, what are we really trying to create? There's no objectively perfect way to do it. It really is driven by the people.
Kevin Bethune
Absolutely. And the people that we were designing for, designing with, or including, they have dreams too. And instead of engaging them with whether do you like this handbag I'm about to sell you? What are their dreams? What are their unmet aspirations? What are their motivators? How can we tap in and show up for them correctly?
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, you mentioned this word wayfinding a couple of times and nonlinearity at the beginning of our conversation as well, that there's a lot of ambiguity in the design process and the process of going from curiosity to product market fit and growth and scale going through that S curve, it's nontrivial. It is complex. What helps you wayfind through that process? How do you be a good wayfinder for the teams that work with you to help them through that process in a way that feels safe.
Kevin Bethune
I do think that fluency is important and especially in environments where maybe design might be the youngest discipline to be at that table of conversation, which is typically the case. So I definitely have seen the disservice of design talking theoretical about its benefits, of why we exist and how great design is. If I beat my chest on that all day, I'm going to sound very theoretical to these other communities that matter equally at the table. So the more that I can be, as one of my mentors puts it all the time, the more I can be subversive with a good heart and show what design can bring to help the business. The collective team. Achieve its goals and ideally, at the same time, be systematically respectful of how we visualize and shine a light on the implications of every business or design decision. We have that opportunity to be subversive, to open everyone's aperture, to think about broader ramifications. And that I think is a beautiful thing when it's allowed to sort of have the breathing room to shine and be delivered.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah, lovingly subversive, being subversive with a good heart. I guess I'm paraphrasing when I think about you stepping up and drawing a diagram about what you are seeing, that seems to me to be wayfinding and to be lovingly wayfinding to say I believe that this is where we are and helping other people see what you see. It's a huge act, but it doesn't have to be so effortful. You just have to get up and draw.
Kevin Bethune
Yeah, honestly, instead of using the word design all the time, instead of not just saying open the aperture all the time and encouraging people to do that. But I'm in the business of value creation and no matter the business opportunity in front of us, it's always a question of like, who are the stakeholders? It's never just about the end, consumer consuming, there's a myriad of stakeholders and oh by the way, the planet is a stakeholder. So let's map the value criteria across that constellation of people or entities and ask ourselves, do we have the convictions and capabilities to answer the call, to answer the need? And oh by the way, those needs are shifting all the time thanks to trends and new paradigms. So can we anticipate where the value will be, where that value criteria will be? And again, all that gives me hope that we can figure out new and novel ways and how to show up for people.
Daniel Stillman
Can you say a little bit more about I love that phrase, new and novel ways to show up for people. Put a little color.
Kevin Bethune
Yeah, I guess. Sort of. The negative paradigm of that is, unfortunately, in a digital hyperconnected world, many times we can feel trapped in this flywheel of marketers marketing things to us and consumers consuming. And we see the perils of that paradigm in terms of the unsustainability of it and the disrespect on ethics and privacy and these kind of things. But instead, if we figure out how to tap into the value criteria of where people are, where people will be, I think we'll be more thoughtful of creating new avenues of utility for people to say, oh, that product or service. I could see that being a part of my life. I'm willing to take a bet and give that a try because maybe that's driving new meaning for me, and I'm willing to go down that avenue of utility you've just created for me by your new product or service. At the same time, that person's also navigating an information rich world with emails and messages and ads and pinching from every single direction. But how can we do a better job of clearing the noise for them and giving them the information that matters so that they would want to use that utility, that meaning that we've created for them. And if we show up consistently and are aligned with their value set with our values, we'll create emotional resonance where they'll keep coming back to that same experience consistently and we'll have a loyal relationship yes. Versus this transaction.
Daniel Stillman
Yes. I can't help but think that we're not just talking about organizations creating products and services for consumers, but also the way you'd like designers, anybody who's creating value to be thinking about all the people that they collaborate with.
Kevin Bethune
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman
Because
Daniel Stillman
creating value with and for other people in a way that helps them clear out the noise is nontrivial. It's very easy to get lost in, well, here's my big deck and I'd like to take you through it slide by slide versus making it easy for somebody to work with you and for you to all to create value together.
Daniel Stillman
I'm going to assume that I can take that message and apply it not just from the inside of an organization to the outside, but between all of the different components of an organization, between all of the stakeholders within a value creation chain. That lesson, I think, is a really beautiful, almost parting moment. We're almost at the end. So where should people go to learn about all things Kevin Bethune? Where can we send people to the Internet so that they can learn more about your book and your work and learn about what?
Kevin Bethune \
I appreciate that. If folks go to Kevinbethun.com Just My Name, there's all kinds of forks in the road to get you where you need to go, whether it's dreams, design and life or the books. And then on social media, it's just at Kevin Bethune. I'm easy to find on all major platforms, so I appreciate the opportunity.
Daniel Stillman
It's my distinct pleasure. So one last micro question. What's your next book going to be called?
Kevin Bethune
Title TBD. But I think folks got a preview a little bit by our conversation around these nonlinearities and nuances.
Daniel Stillman
Nonlinearities and nuances that sounds like the beginning of a trade. PM. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Nonlinearity is oh, boy. I mean, that's a tough one, navigating all that ambiguity.
Kevin Bethune
Yes. I think that's what we're mired in, if we're honest.
Daniel Stillman
Yeah.
Kevin Bethune
So how do we handle it?
Daniel Stillman
How do we handle it? How do we handle it? Kevin, give me the Tweet before I buy the book. How do I handle all that ambiguity? I've got lots. What do I do with it?
Kevin Bethune
Well, I'm going to do my best to shine a light, to give people some wayfinding tools. How about that?
Daniel Stillman
Okay. All right. I might click the preorder button on that.
Kevin Bethune
Awesome.
Daniel Stillman
Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and sharing all of this goodness. And I'm also going to hopefully put some of these diagrams in the post so people know what we're all talking about. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. I really appreciate it.
Kevin Bethune
Thank you for the opportunity. Nice to chat with you.
Daniel Stillman
Okay, we'll call scene.