My guest is Jeanne Liedtka, Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and an absolute rockstar of Design Thinking. She’s the author of (most recently) Experiencing Design and joins me this episode to talk about getting started with Design Thinking and some pitfalls that can happen along the way as you move yourself and your organization towards not just doing design thinking but experiencing it - the road to mastery, moving past the surface level with Design Thinking.
Jeanne’s latest book Experiencing Design is organized around a powerful framework that separates Doing vs. Experiencing vs. Becoming. This frame clarifies the transformational journey of an individual as they engage more deeply with Design Thinking.
If you want to deepen and expand your understanding of Design Thinking past the Stanford Design School Hexagons, I highly recommend Jeanne’s books. Her 2011 book, Designing for Growth, co-authored with Tim Ogilvy, was a crucial moment in my introduction to the power and breadth of Design Thinking.
Jeanne and I have both had this experience with folks we’ve worked with, and maybe you have had it happen to you: you take a workshop and a lightbulb clicks on in your head... You find a new way of working that you see limitless potential in, that you want to implement and share with others.
People say, "I wish my team, my organisation, could work this way. Where can I start?"
And when you bring the tools and tips back to work, something falls flat…transforming how we work together is non-trivial. It’s not just about the tools - the doing. It’s about the mindsets - the experiencing and becoming.
Jeanne and I talk about getting started with the tools of Design Thinking, some of the pitfalls that happen along the way, and how learning in action is a really fundamental and challenging shift both for the individual innovator and also for the organisation as a whole.
Many people who I train in these new ways of working say their primary block is that others are not doing it too, that *everyone* isn’t trained in these tools. And while I’d love to train the whole organization, it’s not always possible, or even wise. My advice is usually, "Start really, really small, and do it in ways that no one can tell you no. Ask for forgiveness instead of permission."
The ROI of DT
Jeanne and I also talk about the real ROI on DT. Organizations focus on the visible ROI of Design Thinking - what we will see- first the outputs, the templates, the workshops, and then the innovation they hope for - moving the needle in the business.
But the real transformational aspect of Design Thinking is the way people are changed by the activities - what they experience and what they become. (check out the show notes for images of Jeanne’s Iceberg model of the ROI of DT)
Design Thinking is, of course, doing activities like gathering data, identifying insights, establishing design criteria, generating ideas, prototyping, and experimenting...but each of them results in the individual person experiencing sense-making, alignment, and emergence - some of the real gold in Design Thinking.
And all the while, they are becoming more empathetic and confident, collaborative, comfortable with co-creation and difference, able to bring ideas to life, resilient, and adaptive. This is the more deep, more durable transformation that is possible with Design Thinking...this is the real ROI of DT.
MVC: Minimum Viable Competencies
One of Jeanne's really profound contributions in the book is the idea of "minimum viable competencies": the things we can look for in the people that we are trying to transform and bring on board to this new way of working. Can they listen to understand? Can they separate facts from interpretations of the facts? Are they comfortable with ambiguity? Can they respect other viewpoints? Check out Jeanne’s book for a comprehensive list of MVC and a survey to help you benchmark your organization’s skills.
Jeanne and I also dive into how Design Thinking catalyzes organizational change at the conversational level. For example, in the Emergence phase, she talks about thinking broadly about who you invite to the conversation, and she highlights requisite variety: the idea that the diversity of people in the conversation should match the complexity of the conversation, of the challenge we’re hoping to solve.
Refer back to my interview with Professor and Conversational Cybernetics expert Paul Pangaro for a deeper dive into requisite variety and how it applies to conversation dynamics. Also check out my interview with Jason Cyr, a Design Executive at Cisco, where he shares similar reflections on diversity and coalition building in driving a Design Thinking transformation.
We also talked about how Design Thinking has a lot of tools, a lot of doings, that help with upfront discovery and testing, but when it comes to learning in action and alignment folks find it challenging to find turn-taking structures that help scaffold the process - in other words, they need facilitation skills: structures to help our conversations be productive: listening non-defensively to critique, exploring disconfirming data with curiosity, accepting imperfect data and moving on... these are not Design Thinking tools, these are conversation design tools. This is where DT bleeds into leadership and self-management.
Another point from our conversation that is really important is that different people have different experiences throughout the arc of the design thinking process. Jeanne has this wonderful diagram in her book about how the different DISC profiles of influencer, analyst, driver, and supporter will have different emotional arcs as they go through the Design Thinking process from beginning to end. I think it's really, really important to understand that we need to have empathy with all of our collaborators. We may have a great time with the upfront part of the process, like discovery, and have a really hard time during prototyping and testing. We need a diverse group of collaborators so that we can draw on their perspectives and balance our experience with theirs.
It's important to push against our own biases and to continuously ask, "What kind of diversity is needed for this challenge?" For that, I highly recommend you listen to my conversation with Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, who I spoke with earlier this year about Decolonizing Design Thinking. It's a really powerful conversation.
It was a great pleasure to be able to sit down and talk with Jeanne Liedtka, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!
LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND RESOURCES
Jeanne's Website
Why Design Thinking Works
Jeanne's books
The Iceberg of DT ROI: from Jeanne’s interview with Mural: https://www.mural.co/roi
I love Jeanne's Iceberg of Design Thinking, which clarifies and visualizes the ROI of Design Thinking.
At the top, we see the tangible outcomes of innovation and organisational velocity. Underneath, below the line, we see people's ways of thinking and talking. So there are changes of perception and changes at the conversational level: this is where people are becoming different and changing their mindsets.
Minute 3
You can ask people to change their behaviors all you want, but until you teach them a new tool that helps them do that, then your odds of success aren't too high.
Minute 12
If you're always worried about, am I doing it right? Am I getting right? Is this a quality output? It's totally counterproductive and you completely get in your own way. So a lot of my role as an educator is to lessen their anxiety, to get them to trust me, to get them to try the tools out, to get them to accept the imperfection and be shoved along to the next question even though they don't really feel like they've answered the first question the way they should. To help them come out the other end with something worthwhile. If you accomplish that, they will go back and do it again. If you fail to get them through the whole process, producing something worthwhile, then they may fall in love with the idea of doing ethnography or brainstorming with post-it notes or stuff, but you're not really materially changing their behavior.
Minute 14
There's two groups of people that I am usually very optimistic about giving Design Thinking a meaningful try. One is the volunteers, the people like you said, who are just waiting to fall in love with it. Someone said, not long ago, I've been carrying a lock around my whole life and Design Thinking was the key. Those people are going to do it and they're going to love it and stay with you. The other group are people who are desperate to solve problems; who've already tried all the other ways, who have to try something new if they really want to solve this problem. Those are the other people who are willing to invest in trying Design Thinking.
Minute 21
We focus Design Thinking on the products we are producing for others. So we think Design Thinking is mostly about an output for others, but it starts with ourselves and working on ourselves. And I think what we've come to believe through this research is you are not going to achieve the truly transformational impact that Design Thinking is capable of, unless innovators themselves change on the journey.
One manager we talked to said that in order to do this well, you had to be able to call your own baby ugly. And I just loved that phrasing because it captures it. It's how do you, having engaged, then detach? Or maybe a different way to think about it is how do you remain passionate and engaged around making someone's life better while detaching yourself from any particular solution to get there?
Minute 34
So visualization is the other piece, right? So we've got the user-driven ethnographic deep understanding piece. We've got the conversational rules piece, then we've got the visualization piece. And the three of those together make a form of collaboration possible. It wasn't possible with just dialogue. It wasn't possible with just the search conferences. Just brainstorming or just ethnography was never going to produce it either. It's this coming together, this gestalt of design all coming together and that's what's really unique about it. It's the kind of accelerating effect that they have on each other when they work together well that I think is so amazing about it. But you need the whole thing. It's not like you can't use pieces of it, sure you can. But transformation, I think, requires that you buy the whole package and commit to work through.
MORE ABOUT JEANNE
Jeanne M. Liedtka is a faculty member at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation, where she was responsible for overseeing all activities associated with corporate learning and development for the Fortune 50 corporation, including executive education, career development processes, employer-sponsored education and learning portal and web-based activities.
At Darden, where she formerly served as associate dean of the MBA program and as executive director of the Batten Institute, Jeanne works with both MBAs and executives in the areas of Design Thinking, innovation and leading growth. Her passion is exploring how organizations can engage employees at every level in thinking creatively about the design of powerful futures.
Jeanne's current research focuses on design-led innovation in the government and social sector, as does her forthcoming book, Designing for the Greater Good. Her previous books include: The Catalyst; How You Can Lead Extraordinary Growth (winner of the Business Week best innovation books of 2009); Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (winner of the 1800 CEO READ best management book of 2011) and its accompanying field guide, The Designing for Growth Field Book: A Step by Step Guide; The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System and Process; and Solving Business Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Daniel Stiillman:
Jeanne Liedtka welcome to the Conversation Factory. Thanks for making time for this. I know you've had a long day.
Jeanne Liedtka:
It's great to be here.
Daniel Stiillman:
Thank you. It's kind of you to say. Okay. So let's take the wide lens first, since that's the Design Thinking way. Can you tell me about your journey into experiencing design in a high sketch? How did you get to this point? When did you fall in love with Design Thinking?
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah. Well-
Daniel Stiillman:
What was your meet cute?
Jeanne Liedtka:
The story goes back a while, I started down the path of... I was a strategist of BCG is where I worked after my MBA and my PhD is in strategy and I was always interested in strategic planning, which is an unusual thing to be interested in, most people aren't. But I always struggled for a way to help leaders understand how important the role of strategic planning was, and that it was really about enacting a vision of a different future. So it wasn't about filling out pieces of paper and things like that, it was about envisioning and sharing this new world that could be.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So I looked around for ways to teach it and I pretty quickly hit on architecture and the metaphor of designing. I have the advantage of being here at the University of Virginia, where the main grounds as we call them was designed by Thomas Jefferson to be an academical village. And it's a beautiful story of design. He had a vision of education that was education for democracy rather than the prevailing pattern of education for monarchy. And so he designed this whole thing. Physically the village sits on a green and looks like a village, but the subjects he had people study, the kinds of faculty he hired, the honor system he put in place, all of this was part of this beautiful meta design of which the outcome would be the kinds of behaviors he was trying to encourage.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. Creating the conditions.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah, that was a model for me. So for a while, when I had students, whether they were executives or MBAs, and we were talking about strategic planning, I would take them to the lawn and we would walk around and talk about Jefferson's vision and how he made that vision real. And then we would talk about how they as leaders were architects of a space, but it's not bricks and mortar, it's culture and systems and process and all those other kinds of things. So I spent a lot of time talking about architecture as a metaphor for a long time. But you can only do so much with a metaphor. You run out pretty quickly once everybody gets it. And there wasn't a lot that architects did specifically that was all that helpful.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But then Design Thinking started to get talked about, and I can't even remember... I was already following the design world, but as I started to explore Design Thinking, I thought, well, now wait a minute. This really allows us to move designing from metaphor to toolkit and toolkits are what people need. And to call Design Thinking a toolkit is a massive oversimplification, but at its best, it offers tools. And those are the kinds of things that people need to change their behaviors. That's my belief. You can ask people to change their behaviors all you want, but until you teach them a new tool that helps them do that, then your odds of success aren't too high. So I started paying attention to Design Thinking. I immediately fell in love with it. I think in part because there are the people who need Design Thinking and the people who don't. People who are intuitive design-
Daniel Stiillman:
It isn't for everybody?
Jeanne Liedtka:
It is for everybody but people get at it very different ways. So for designers and for leaders of innovation and like the managers we've studied who were very good at organic growth, they don't need a process. They almost don't call it anything. It's just intuitive. It's the way they behave. But there's this other whole group of people of whom I am one; my undergraduate is in accounting, raised in a very linear way. I'm quite concerned about change, somewhere along the line to borrow Carol Dweck's notion of a fixed mind-set. We learned that being right and being smart were the same thing. And so we're imprinted with all of these disabilities that are ill suited for a world of innovation. And what Design Thinking does is it gives me a set of behaviors I can copy so that I can begin to do what the intuitives can do just by nature.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And I think it personally appealed to me because I was one of the people who really needed it. And I think like anything else, it's hard to teach something you're intuitively good at because you don't understand where people go wrong. But not having been good at it, I was just like amazed by it but troubled that designers didn't seem to be able to talk to us analytic types. And so I looked for a long time, I wanted to teach it to the MBAs, I looked for a long time; I couldn't find any materials that I felt like translated this incredibly powerful thing I could see into things that were accessible for the people I was teaching. So that's when I wrote the Designing for Growth book with Tim Ogilvie and we had the advantage that Tim's a designer and an engineer.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So he straddles the line between linear thinkers and design thinkers. And he has a wonderful visual sense himself. Whereas I'm a writer, I'm all about the printed word. And so I could write and Tim could visualize, and it was a good combination, I think. And it appeared at a moment when people needed what it offered. That kind of bridging, that translation device. And I was really off and running. And since then, I've spent the last 10 years just trying to understand more about why it works and how it works and how it shows up and in particular, how to help non-designers appreciate and acquire the amazing competency set around Design Thinking.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. It's quite a journey. And I actually think I was at a launch party in New York. Was it 2011? When did that book...
Jeanne Liedtka:
2011, was the Designing for Growth book.
Daniel Stiillman:
So I have a copy of it hiding in my house and I'll just say from my own experience as a designer, who was like, "Oh,..." I learned about Design Thinking after design school. And I was like, "Man, if I can learn this stuff, everyone should probably know this." And I think a lot of people think, oh, Design Thinking is a five phase methodology with a bunch of hexagons. And what I loved about that book that you and Tim put together was the questions, the phases as questions, what is, what if, what wows, what works? I'm like, these are just good questions. And summarizing the Design Thinking process as a series of meditations, introspections conversations to have, I still like to blow people's minds who think it's hexagons with your model, that it's a series of questions [crosstalk 00:07:43] or a double diamond.
Daniel Stiillman:
Now Design Thinking is obviously gone through waves. You've been through all of them, cycles of boom and bust. And I want to talk about the lens of the experience you and I have both had of somebody coming to a workshop, a Design Thinking workshop, and they go, "Oh my God." They light up. They're like, "This is it." They have the experience that you had, they have the experience I had and they go, "Everyone should do this." My mother tells a story of how she and her friend made a batch of crackers and they came out so well, they literally just handed them out on the subway. This was of course the '60s in New York and so you could do that thing. And they were like, "These are amazing." And people would be like, "Okay." And they're like, "Oh my God, these are really good." When you taste something delicious, you want other people to taste it.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Exactly.
Daniel Stiillman:
And usually what happens is I find they hit a wall. They don't know where to start. They don't know how to... It's like they've gone through the hero's journey and there's the rejection of the prize of the boon on the other side where people haven't had the experience they've had, they don't know how to teach people or on-board them. They don't know how to teach them the tools or take them through the process. And they want everyone to have a common language. They want everyone to work in this way. And I guess one of my questions for you is what advice do you have for these people at the beginning of, because there's still people in the beginning of their Design Thinking journey. Those of us who are haggard wizened, hardened professionals on it, there are people who are still like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." What do you say to those people who are just getting that spark of Design Thinking? What should they watch out for look out for think about as they start to go on their journey?
Jeanne Liedtka:
Well, I think there's lots of levels of good stuff that Design Thinking can do. Even if you do Design Thinking badly, I think it's better than not doing it at all for most managers. Now, that's not true if you're being paid to design something really expensive and stuff. But for most people that are adding Design Thinking to an existing, largely analytical toolkit, I see very little downside. Because they don't think they're designers and they're not going to go up and try it and outlive their skillset.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And even one interview with someone that you learn something about is better than none at all, so I'm very comfortable with this idea that some of it is good and you should just get in there and try it. On the other hand, what we all worry about in organizations in particular is the Design Thinking loses its legitimacy, because people think you can all get all the great benefits in one day hackathons.
Daniel Stiillman:
Right. What, you can't? You can't do Design Thinking? It's not a process that you do end to end in a fixed period of time, every time?
Jeanne Liedtka:
No. You can get the wow that you were talking about earlier in a one day hackathon. And that's what they're good for. I think they're good for whetting people's appetites, but the reality of it is, when you're taking analytically trained people and introducing them to a decision process and toolkit that is so different than what we currently work with. You need to give them a lot more structure and a lot more digestion time and coaching and all that stuff to really affect their day to day practice. Sure, they can go off while they're in class and do some theoretical case and come up with stuff.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But if you want people to go back to work and actually use it, then you need to give them a lot of help. Now, it doesn't have to be expensive help. One of the things that I've really been excited about is the ability to teach Design Thinking online in a really scalable and inexpensive way. So a lot of other stuff we say, "Well you have got to fly to Charlottesville, Virginia and spend $8,000 and we'll teach you how to be a great leader or a strategic thinker."
Daniel Stiillman:
Sure.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Design Thinking now you have to commit to a class that may run eight or 10 weeks and you have to pick a project to work on and you have to do it consistently. But what I can tell those people is if you stay with me-
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes.
Jeanne Liedtka:
You do the work, at the end you will have produced something you can be proud of. And it gives me a thrill to be able to say that, but this is what I do with the MBAs, because I think in some ways, anxiety is the biggest obstacle to fully experiencing the power of Design Thinking.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah, I think one of the things... I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Jeanne Liedtka:
No. I was going to say so if you're always worried about, am I doing it right? Am I getting right? Is this a quality output? It's totally counterproductive and you completely get in your own way. So a lot of my role as an educator is to lessen their anxiety, to get them to trust me, to get them to try the tools out, to get them to accept the imperfection and be shoved along to the next question even though they don't really feel like they've answered the first question the way they should. To help them come out the other end with something worthwhile. If you accomplish that, they will go back and do it again. If you fail to get them through the whole process, producing something worthwhile, then they may fall in love with the idea of doing ethnography or brainstorming with post-it notes or stuff, but you're not really materially changing their behavior.
Daniel Stiillman:
I think the thing that I've noticed, and maybe you've experienced this too, is that people already have jobs that occupy pretty much 100 to 110% of their time. And Design Thinking shows up as a new way of working that seems to add another job that they're supposed to do. Innovation and Design Thinking and all these other new practices wind up feeling like another five or 10% of what they're doing instead of organizations finding a way to reduce or integrate what they're doing. And I see that as a real challenge where people want to practice it, but they just don't know how to literally find the time. They're like, "Well, how do I do it? When do I do it?" Because it's just on top of everything else.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah. And I have a bias on this, I think, Design Thinking should be taught in projects and it should be taught in projects that people choose themselves out of their own world that they would do anyway.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah.
Jeanne Liedtka:
There's two groups of people that I am usually very optimistic with about giving Design Thinking a meaningful trial. One is the volunteers, the people like you said, who are just waiting to fall in love with it. It's that someone's said not long ago, I've been carrying a lock around my whole life and Design Thinking was the key. Those people are going to do it and they're going to love it and stay with you. The other group are people who are desperate to solve problems; who've already tried all the other ways, who have to try something new if they really want to solve this problem. Those are the other people who are willing to invest in trying Design Thinking.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But again, you have to make it something that they need to do anyway. You have to make it safe for them to do. You have to layer on the cognitive complexity so that it's accessible and you don't overwhelm them with too much at one time. So you have to introduce them carefully, but I think that's really what we've spent like 13 years doing now, trying to figure out how to make the process better. And we started off with those four questions and 10 tools that was the Designing for Growth book. And we pretty quickly discovered trying to actually teach it to people, that that wasn't enough, because they could use the tools, but they didn't know how to string the tools together and they could ask the questions, but they didn't know how to transition from one question to another. So I could ask what it is and go off and do a bunch of ethnography, but then they didn't understand how to pull that into ideation.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So then we started looking at the intersections of the four questions and adding structure to help people. So we added the design criteria between what is, and what if, because the design criteria took everything you got learned, forced you to prioritize it and distill it down to a short set of qualities of what your idea needed to accomplish. And then we transitioned into coming up with ideas and people could do it because they clearly were able to pull the learning in real shape. Then between ideation and testing, we created this napkin pitch because again, people would have a billion ideas. They wouldn't begin to know how to test them or which ones to test. And so we introduced this notion, well think about first of all, how you'd execute it? What are the assumptions you're making? What are the assumptions you're making about the value? Why should the organization want it? And parsed it off into this simple little thing.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So that was really round two where we dealt with the intersections. Then we figured out nobody knew what to do at the front end. So the people were asking what if, but they were completely defining problems that Design Thinking wasn't suited for, or they were designing wicked problems. I get very frustrated with all this talk about Design Thinking is for wicked problems. So people think they need to tackle world hunger with it.
Daniel Stiillman:
Right.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And the reality is nobody ever safely learned by starting with tackling the wicked problem. So you need to help people define a problem in their world that they can safely attempt Design Thinking on without too much visibility and risk to themselves, but that is meaningful enough that it matters that you solve it.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. It's a very sweet spot of not triggering, but significant.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So the selection of the project is absolutely critical. So we ended up building a bunch of stuff in the front end that was like, well, how to scope a problem, how to know whether you had the right problem and then how to be the problem into the research plan. All of this stuff that happened before you actually went out to the field to gather data. So now we have 15 steps for gods' sake and I'm cognizant of how ridiculous it is to have 15 steps to do something creative. The reality is people don't need 15 steps after they've done it a couple of times, but the first time through those steps really happen, really are needed.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And then in the last batch of learning where we had a process and a system, we were shoving people through and it felt kind of right; the question was how to deepen it. What were we using? Where was the travel through the questions and the steps at all? Where were we still losing people? And we started reading the journals we'd been collecting. So as part of my teaching of Design Thinking of the MBAs in particular for 10 years, I've asked them to journal on a weekly basis about their experiences as we go through process. I also at different points in time would have them pulse their level of comfort at each week. We've given them some diagnostic instruments like the disc to help sort all this out.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So what we did for this book is we stepped back and just went really deep about this personal journey individuals were on and tried to mind that level of data, through ways to deepen their learning. And what we realized pretty quickly was it wasn't about the tools they were being taught, it was about the experience they were having. And so the question shifted from how to better teach the tools to how to deepen the experience of the learning at each stage, which interacts with the tools. But really what it produces is somebody who's different as a person, not somebody who's just developed this set of skills. So, it's very deep work, but it's driven by this fairly self-evident obvious work of trying to learn how to master these skills.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. So two things I just want to maybe double set or highlight in what you were talking about is the importance of the spaces between the phases and coaching or facilitative leadership to push people through these phases, even when they don't feel like they're necessarily ready for the next one. This is where learning an action really comes into place. And I want to make sure we make some time to talk about that. But first I feel like it's worth talking about the diagram.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah.
Daniel Stiillman:
There's two phases of this, where there's the doing of the thing with the tool, what somebody is experiencing and what the shift is internally that they experience at each phase. And I do think this is a really interesting aspect of an insight in your book because I don't think many people think about the changes that happen on the individual level, how Design Thinking changes how they approach the world.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Exactly. We focus Design Thinking on the products we are producing for others. So we think Design Thinking is mostly about an output for others, but it starts with ourselves and working on ourselves. And I think what we've come to believe through this research is you are not going to achieve the truly transformational impact that Design Thinking is capable of, unless innovators themselves change on the journey.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And what's interesting too, is we talk about Design Thinking this massive lump of stuff that is quite discreet. So when you go through the Design Thinking process, in some ways you can position immersion and experimentation at opposite ends, learning and action. In immersion, we're telling everybody you're supposed to be emotionally engaged. You're supposed to value the subjective, all this stuff. Then we get to experimentation learning and action, we're saying, "Okay, now you've got to detach. You got to be objective. You've got to look for confirming data." It's completely opposite behaviors that the same process is asking for. And so often, if you don't make that explicit, you just confuse the hell out of people.
Daniel Stiillman:
This is emotional agility that you're talking about, Jeanne. This diagram of the different disc profiles and what they experienced through the journey of Design Thinking, I think says we will all be experiencing joy and pain at different times. And just to acknowledge that our experience is going to be different. I want to zoom in if we can, because I loved the iceberg diagram. I think a lot of people come to Design Thinking because they want the ROI. They want innovation. They want organizational agility. And underneath the line of the iceberg are ways that people see and changes in the conversation and I don't know if that is mind-set changes because I don't think many people realize the sloshing around and disruption to the power structures that will happen.
Daniel Stiillman:
Specifically, I want to talk about the minimum viable competencies in learning in action and a quite a few... Because it seems like on the conversational level, the idea of needing to be right, what you talked about, we're all paid to be smart versus willing to be wrong. I'm a creator and I love my ideas and I'm emotionally attached to them versus I'm in a scientist or an investor, or I'm empathic to the person I'm solving for. I want all the proof versus I'm willing to accept enough to move forward into my hypothesis. I find these are tremendously challenging at the atomic scale of the conversation in an organization, needing to be right and needing proof are fundamental. And I don't think anybody starts on their Design Thinking journey thinking, "Oh, let's blow up authoritative thinking and de-center ourselves from the conversation."
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah. I do think that the whole back end of Design Thinking, the testing things is it's the real opportunity area for educators now. Most people fall in love with the process during the immersion. They're all nervous. I always joke that I have these MBAs who think they could run a giant corporation a day after graduation, but when I tell them to go, they have to go to the supermarket and interview a person, they fall apart. They're like, "Oh my God, I can't do that. That's not what I signed up for." They have this fear-
Daniel Stiillman:
Talking to strangers.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Exactly. Yeah, "I don't mind texting them, can I just text the questions to them? Do I actually have to see them?" But once they do it, a goodly percentage of them, it opens up their work. They really see the power. There's none of those good feelings in testing for the most part. The front end is about opening up new opportunities and creating possibilities. The backend is about finding out what doesn't work and stop doing it. And we are able to help learners a lot less on the backend. The kind of structure and tools that we're able to use with people on the front end, we don't have for the back end.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So in some ways I think the backend is harder to begin with. It's more universal because it isn't just Design Thinking that requires that you be good at hypothesis driven thinking, if you're trying to do agile, if you're trying to do lean start up, if you're trying to do a whole bunch of stuff, even without the front end of Design Thinking, you still have to learn how to design and run experiments. And people are generally terrible at it. Even smart, quantitatively oriented people are pretty terrible at it. They design experiments, they give them the answers that they wanted.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. You talk about fighting bias. And I feel like we should address briefly that Design Thinking can help fight bias, but it also can totally play into it.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Absolutely. One manager we talked to said that in order to do this well, you had to be able to call your own baby ugly.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And I just loved that at phrasing because it captures it. It's how do you, having engaged, then detach? Or maybe a different way to think about it is how do you remain passionate and engaged around making someone's life better while detaching yourself from any particular solution to get there?
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes. How do we do that Jeanne?
Jeanne Liedtka:
I'll put you through that. Other than by recognizing... I mean, this is a problem that doesn't belong to Design Thinking what Kahneman-Tversky, when did they start to publish about this? In the '40s or the '50s. Hypothesis, confirmation bias, probably the most well-recognized bias that's out there. We confirm what we want to believe. And so awareness becomes huge. To me, if there's a couple of threads that show up everywhere in Design Thinking, one is conversation, that it's always about conversation. Whether it's conversation with who I'm designing for, conversation with the people I'm designing with, conversation with myself. It's all about how do we structure more productive conversations in across difference and in times of threat.
Daniel Stiillman:
And as you say, Design Thinking, doesn't actually have specific tools aside from when I think about alignment and sense-making where the group dynamics are implied in affinity clustering, but they're not specifically called out. You talk about learning together through dialogue, and then turn-taking structures and listening non-defensively to critique exploring disconfirming data with curiosity. This is at the conversational level, but as you talk about in the book, Design Thinking has something to say about it. Design Thinking disrupts older patterns of conversation, but it doesn't actually... How can Design Thinking help at the conversational level changing the way that we make meaning together?
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah. Well, I think there's always in the background, this context of, is there something, is there with designed biggie. For instance, didn't we already know about brainstorming? Didn't we already know about ethnography? We certainly already knew about all this stuff that we're making part of it. Dialogue, how long has that been around? Since Socrates or something?
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes. That's true.
Jeanne Liedtka:
So what's amazing to me about Design Thinking is the way it comes together and these pieces accelerate the impact of the other pieces. And so dialogue to me and here you could go back to Peter Senge and systems thinking. He basically said everything you need to say about Design Thinking back when he wrote The Fifth Discipline, only nobody could do it. The [inaudible 00:30:00] was too hard. So even people who got it know they should be doing it. The ladder of inquiry and all that stuff; it was more than most people can actually handle. And so the simplicity of Design Thinking, saying, "Okay, there's these things..."
Jeanne Liedtka:
First of all, there's turn taking. So everybody has to go around the table and take a turn. Second there's the no debate rule, which is if you find yourself defending something and listening to argue, rather than listening to understand, stop talking about that and talk about something else and come back to that later. There's things like, think about the diversity in your group; do you have requisite variety? The group composition has to match the nature of the problem. I mean there's visualization which is-
Daniel Stiillman:
Can we just pause on that very briefly, because most people don't... I actually had Paul Pangaro on my podcast way back in season one. This is a concept from cybernetics that many people are not familiar with. And I was so overjoyed to see you talk about this, the idea of a group of people as complex as the problem. That is who you need to invite into the challenge.
Jeanne Liedtka:
To me the two-
Daniel Stiillman:
Diversity of what are we inviting into the conversation as you said.
Jeanne Liedtka:
In the [inaudible 00:31:13], right? And I mean, of course we tend to go to one extreme or the other in my experience with people. I work with museums and social service organizations, they basically want to invite everybody into the conversation, everybody. And businesses want to go off and have a retreat with only the senior executives in McKinsey.
Daniel Stiillman:
Right.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And the reality of it is every problem drives a different kind of conversation and a different group. And you kind of have to work backwards from the problem as to who should be in the conversation. And so we have this kind of the last bastion of executive privilege is strategy, for instance so you don't invite anybody into that. And then at the other extreme is what I think of as the kumbaya effect, where we think all we have to do is put all these people who are different in the room and ask them to talk and good things will happen, which is absolutely not true.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Somewhere in the middle are what some people have called these micro structures, where you structure the conversation and you control the conversation. You don't control the people, you don't control the content of what they talk about; what you control is the structure of the conversation. And I mean, we can go back to, well, the UN calls it the democratic dialogue, is their phrase for it. We used to have search committees or search... What is it? It was searches that was kind of community organizing. In architecture, we had the Duany Plater-Zyberk kind of put everybody together for a week and design a whole town of the charrette. So it's been called many things and it's floated around for a long time. But it's really only when you couple it with designs immersive front end.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Because you can't let people let go of their own parochial perspectives unless you give them something more powerful to latch onto. But the front end of Design Thinking says is, look, here's what we're all going to latch onto; we're going to all commit to this person we're designing for, and we're going to design what they want and need given the current reality of their lives. And that's what we're going to align around. And out of that comes emergence, which is our ability to work together across difference to come up with higher order solutions that no one of us could ever had.
Daniel Stiillman:
So I want to give two shout outs. One is if, I'll share it with you and for people listening, I had Leslie and Noel on my podcast at the beginning of the season, she talks about decolonizing Design Thinking. And this question of who do we invite in the conversation? Which direction is the conversation going? Are we helping the other, or is the other here, who controls that dialogue? And the other is I don't know if you've read Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. He talks about aboriginal ways of thinking and making and talking.
Daniel Stiillman:
And I used to always talk to teams about air talk and he talks about sand talk. His book is drawing on the ground, is like a fundamentally ancient way of dialoguing. And I think what Design Thinking does to change the conversation is, well, we're not just going to go talk to a bunch of people, but we're going to make a persona. And we're going to sit around the fire of the persona and meditate on that and look at it. We're going to look at the journey map together. It puts the conversation in another place, it takes it outside of our heads.
Jeanne Liedtka:
My own head. Exactly. So visualization is the other piece, right? So we've got the user-driven ethnographic deep understanding piece. We've got the conversational rules piece, then we've got the visualization piece. And the three of those together make a form of collaboration possible. It wasn't possible with just dialogue. It wasn't possible with just the search conferences. Just brainstorming or just ethnography was never going to produce it either. It's this coming together, this gestalt of design all coming together and that's what's really unique about it. It's the kind of accelerating effect that they have on each other when they work together well that I think is so amazing about it. But you need the whole thing. I mean, [crosstalk 00:35:24]-
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah, it's a cycle.
Jeanne Liedtka:
It's not like you can't use pieces of it, sure you can. But transformation, I think requires that you buy the whole package and commit to work through.
Daniel Stiillman:
As a consultant I perfectly agree with you that they have to buy the whole pa... They can't just buy the first part, you have to get the whole thing. I think it would be remiss of us to not talk about the minimum viable competencies holistically, because I think one thing that's interesting is many people think of Design Thinking as a tool kit that they can acquire without changing who they are. And what you're showing in this self-reflective tool is building our own personal development plan based on my own perception of, am I listening to understand? Do I observe versus interpret? How am I with my comfort of ambiguity? Can I engage in co-creation? Do I build on the ideas of others? And being very clear about the inner growth I want to engage in. I get to choose which of these minimum viable competencies I want to grow in. And I've been teaching Design Thinking for a long time. I feel like the inner aspect of connecting it to a personal growth plan is profound. I don't see it integrated often.
Jeanne Liedtka:
I don't know if you've ever tried to read Heidegger, I've tried and failed. But one of the things he talks about that has been enormously influential for me is this notion of the withheld. And it's this idea that we all have a better higher version of ourselves inside. But then we share it very selectively, mostly just with our family and friends and things like that. We rarely invite people to bring it into the workplace. And you can't insist on it. You basically create the conditions that invite someone to share their withheld, right?
Jeanne Liedtka:
And to me, that's a lot of the magic of this. I mean, it's very similar to Theory U, [inaudible 00:37:30] work. It's this notion of the future is inside of us; we just have to get it out. And we need to figure out how to lose all these dysfunctional kind of competitive habits and things like that, that prevent us really tapping into the richness that a diversity of perspective brings. But people need to know what specific behaviors to change. So for instance, you can send someone out and say, "Now, go out and do [inaudible 00:38:05]." And you can read all about anthropologists and all that.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But the reality of it is you've got to work on their listening skills. There's a very specific set of fields. You listen differently in order to do this work well. And what I would have often been frustrated about is that it's all this vague abstract kind of stuff with Design Thinking. And the reality of it is if you want to make anything measurable, if you want to be able to demonstrate increases from competency, if you want to connect, for instance, people's individual learning with organizational goals and strategies and all that kind of stuff, you need observable behaviors. You can't assess someone's mindset. You don't have access, I mean over time may be.
Daniel Stiillman:
No it's hidden as you say.
Jeanne Liedtka:
We have translated to things that are specific and that I can observe in other people as well. But one of the things I'm really excited about that we experimented a little with in my MBA class this year was the 360 version of that instrument. So I can make a self-assessment, I can decide where I want to work and what matters to me; I can pick a couple of things, and then I can get feedback with people who are working really closely with me to give me the kind of reality check on am I seeing a version of me that no one else is? Am I diluted?
Daniel Stiillman:
Right. Am I respecting other people's viewpoints? You tell me whether I'm respecting your viewpoints or not.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And we all know that many of the people who are most active in teaching this stuff are the ones who don't practice it. So you need to [crosstalk 00:39:48] again.
Daniel Stiillman:
I try.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yeah, exactly. We try. I mean, I have to say one of the things I find interesting these days is I've gained a lot of self-awareness around, for instance, my personality type and I'm a driver, so I always want action. I want to go, go, go. I kind of run over people who don't agree with me, that's kind of stuff I got. I said now, after all these years of self-awareness, I now realize that I'm doing that, but I still do it. I just feel poopy for it. So when somebody [crosstalk 00:40:23]-
Daniel Stiillman:
That's a step.
Jeanne Liedtka:
I've always substituted guilt for lack of awareness, but it is a step. Because once you got to get people to jail and to recognize that what they're doing is wrong before they have any incentive to do what's right.
Daniel Stiillman:
They have to see the gap.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But you can't say to someone here, "Just go do better ethnography." You can say to them, "How are you listening? Are you listening through your own solution?" So in the diaries of the students, you can see it. Their awareness that they're listening through their own solution. It's really profound when they realize to what extent they're doing that.
Daniel Stiillman:
And just to highlight the importance of creating space. When you talk about designing the conversation, enforcing the boundary and defining the space for this type of internal reflection, to have the conversation with other people and to make it specific so that it can be practical and fruitful is profound. We're running low on time together. I'd love for you to just reflect for a moment, since we're talking about the importance of reflection, what haven't I asked you? What's important to say that hasn't been said, and are there any ahas that you want to check out with from this conversation?
Jeanne Liedtka:
As an educator, one of the things that's wonderful for me is that coaching really makes a difference. The teaching really makes a difference. Leadership really makes a difference. I mean in strategy, I was raised as a strategist where you basically want the McDonald's model, which is you want to build all the intelligence into the system because human beings are unreliable. And you can do that in a lot of things. You cannot do that in innovation because you can't do that and create new worlds. So what's special about this is that every individual can make a difference. I mean, I love how small scale Design Thinking is. That's one of the reasons why it's so subversive.
Jeanne Liedtka:
I talk to teachers and teachers are rule followers generally, and they're waiting to be given permission by the school superintendent or something to go off and do these new behaviors. But I can say to them, "Look, go into your class tomorrow and just turn some of this stuff. Try just focusing on making the lives of the 20 kids that are looking at you better and learning richer." You don't need anybody's permission to do that. You don't need a lot of money to do that. You don't need to be a smarter, better person to do that. You just need to do stuff like listen differently and try and see how they see the world. And allow them to test your ideas and allow them to be the decision maker, what works for them and what doesn't.
Jeanne Liedtka:
These are really simple things that you can bring to people. And in a world that's so complex with so many wicked problems where we so often feel like it's out of control and there's nothing we can do about it. The fact that you can give people back a confidence in their ability to control part of their world; even if it's a little part, that's really important to me, that's really critical and I think we all need that now. So the needs that Design Thinking fulfills are much bigger than just innovation or a better product, or...
Jeanne Liedtka:
Even things like building trust, I think they're giving us faith and hope that we can act and we can make a difference and we can make people's lives better and that just feels good. I think I worry... A lot of times when you're implementing stuff in business organizations, you're really fighting a tide. I mean, shareholder value never made anybody feel better other than the shareholder who was getting money at the end of it.
Daniel Stiillman:
I know it briefly then.
Jeanne Liedtka:
But Design Thinking feels good. And at a grassroots level, a lot of people just want to keep doing it. So it makes me more optimistic because we know organizational change is incredibly hard.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And I don't like to spend a lot of time telling people how their organizational culture needs to change in order to support this because nobody controls that, it just makes them feel powerless and it's incredibly difficult work to do. You can go off tomorrow and you can listen differently and you can shift the conversation in the small world you live in. And in the long-term those small shifts can make a huge difference. And so I think that's a subversive element I've always loved.
Jeanne Liedtka:
As a child of the Woodstock Generation, I inherently distrust authority and I don't have a lot of faith in reforming bureaucracies in large organizations. But I do have a lot of faith in individual people and in their innate desire to help other people and to better control their own world and find meaning in their worlds something that people like Dan Pink have been talking about for a long time. And I think Design Thinking as simple as it is, it can bring a lot of those kinds of profound things to people where it works.
Daniel Stiillman:
Thank you for that. The idea of forgiveness over permission; I remember the first time somebody said that to me, it is profound. It is hard to think about bucking the system and pushing back. But at the conversational level, you can have power over the conversation, power to invite people or disinvite them to a meeting, but the power to actually silence someone, we have the ability to express ourselves in the conversation. It may not make you very popular to ask why or who is this for, and what is the value of this to the end customer? And all of the questions that Design Thinking asks us to ask, we can ask in the moment on the conversational level.
Jeanne Liedtka:
And you know the trouble I have with the permission versus forgiveness stuff; the whole point of experimentation is when you blow it, you don't have to ask permission because nobody even noticed. So much of the benefit of Design Thinking is as risk manager. I mean, it's treated as this airy berry thing, but it's a risk management tool. It teaches us how to fail cheaply and quickly so that nobody else does notice. So you don't need to ask either permission or forgiveness, you just learn and you move on. And I think that's a really important aspect of Design Thinking that we're done just saying, look, embrace your failure. We're saying, make your failure insignificant in which case yeah, sure I'll embrace insignificant failure. Nobody wants to embrace visible giant embarrassing failure.
Daniel Stiillman:
A prototype in people's minds is often a pilot. Whereas what you're talking about is something so small, trying something so small, the tiny domino that it's like, "Oh, I learn something," but no one else... I call it failing cheaply quickly and quiet.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Yes. Exactly. And we don't even think of that. We've been so ingrained to think big. I mean, Design Thinking is about thinking as small as possible. The possibility you envision maybe big, but the risks you take, we want to keep as small as possible. It's the way entrepreneurs have to early on or aren't bank robbed by lots of money and so I think there's a lot of struggle team. There's a lot of depth to all this Design Thinking stuff. It's so much more than a bundle of tools, but it is those tools that make possible everything else. They're the drivers of the experience. Now, my belief is you can't get really good at the tools unless you have a deep experience of that part of Design Thinking, but you also can't have the deep experience unless you're trying hard with the tools. So it's a very symbiotic relationship I think.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yeah. Doing, experiencing and becoming there's a virtuous cycle. We really should check out, Jeanne Liedtka people should go on the internet to find you where they should buy your multiple books. I'll provide links to all of them but is there one place you'd like to make sure that people go on the internet to learn more about all things, Jeanne Liedtka?
Jeanne Liedtka:
Well of course I've created a website like everybody else that is just like jeanneliedtka.com. And I've tried to put everything on that, the educational piece, the writing piece, all of those together. The nice part of having a really weird name is that there's hardly anybody else on the internet that you can confuse with me. So in fact I'm pretty easy to find and the university is good at creating web pages and all of that kind of stuff. So, I'm all over the place out there, trying to [inaudible 00:49:52] that's probably harder. But I often think that we suffer from plenty, not scarcity. And so having a place to start and it kind of contained world to explore, I think can be really important in a world where we have too much information not true.
Daniel Stiillman:
Yes. That's completely fair. And lesson learned on Design Thinking I agree. It's giving people a slice of the elephant rather than the whole one. So I'll direct people to that. Jeanne, thank you so much for writing the book, I think people should read it. It is an important perspective on this thing that some people think they know everything about. And some people aren't at the beginning of their journey of, but I think both people can learn a lot from what you've written. So thanks for your time.
Jeanne Liedtka:
Oh, and thank you for asking me great questions Daniel.
Daniel Stiillman:
That's my job. Well, we'll call Singh. I know we're at time...