Tea Time with Tim Brown

Good, good, good. It's been great to follow what's been going on. Exciting after a year and a house work. Explorations going on, I think it's one of those topics that's just got immense potential, and so I'm looking forward to over time how we discover all kinds of new rituals, and maybe we'll steal some of them. I'm a big one for the Picasso School of thought, which is great artists steel, so I'm looking forward to having a few rituals we can steal, right.

Well, I grew up in England, as you might tell, in the middle of nowhere in Wales. And it was part of a competition. We set off and ended up in this fog and got completely lost on this mountainside somewhere. We had to figure out what to do, and we kind of completely screwed it up basically. We ended up coming off the mountainside literally miles away from where we should be; we had to march and get ourselves home. So it was a bit of a disaster, but in some ways it was a great leadership moment because we were in the middle of failure. We had to figure out what to do, not lose our cool, and actually kind of try and enjoy it. At the end, I actually felt a real sense of accomplishment even though we'd completely messed it up because we dealt with it right and we got back home.

It wasn't so much that I was leading something, but the first very strong feedback I got that helped me become a better leader. And this is something I still deal with. I remember when I was first in the San Francisco studio, first moved out from the UK, and the go... and I was just keep arguing for what my idea was the right idea, and he got really ticked off at me. As far as I was concerned the idea was what mattered, but it was that moment I realized: the quality of my ideas isn't necessarily going to make me successful in the future. That was the first moment I realized that if I was going to become effective as a leader, I would have to think differently about my ideas versus other people's ideas. I'd probably have to start listening a bit more. It took me another 10 or 15 years to get any good at it, I think, but it was a moment when I realized...

Here and what we mean: one of the most important underlying themes of the course is this idea that in order to maximize the creative output of any organization or any team, you have to unlock the creativity of everybody, or as many people in that team. This is the balance we're trying to make. This is what we've got: this new way of leading versus how we might have thought about leadership in the past where leadership was a lot to do with decision-making and ideas, and people were part of the decision-making process but they didn't necessarily have value in their own right. We're trying to separate a little bit this idea of decision-making and this idea of how you get the best ideas. When do those ideas come from? All of the evidence is that the leader needs to be thinking constantly 'What do I need to do to unlock the creativity of my team or my organization?' And that is not simply just to let them go; it's not to give them a blank canvas, because we know that leads to creative anarchy if you like. So we get to this idea that by giving some direction through questioning, through directing the way in which people's lens—through which the team starts to look at the problem—that's a way of giving guidance but without reducing the creative output of the team. So it's that tension. And then there are moments when the decision-making process essentially says, as a leader, 'I think the best way for us to look is through this set of questions.' Anyone that has to have a deciding moment... How do you make a decision just in yourself about whether to lean in and decide or whether to hold that space?

Over time, it is difficult. And if you're somebody like I am—tending to be somebody who can be quite decisive sometimes—it takes real restraint and self-discipline to first say, 'Is the way I'm trying to do this first?' Goodness, should I be asking a question here, understand, go through that loop before I say it might be a decision. It can be difficult. That same thing I've talked about before, arguing for five years: it's just putting that filter there. That filter on my thinking for a moment is: what's the best way to have a team move forward successfully?

Take seven years, but we know culture change is slow. How do we think about measuring creative culture? Well, culture is essentially made up of values and behaviors, right? Values you can assess in an organization, and a shift in values—although that tends to be the slowest to change—one of the reasons people talk about seven years is because changing values is very difficult. Changing behaviors can be a little bit faster. You can support the change in behavior, and you can start to measure those behaviors. Some of them might be quite tangible. Some organizations simply measure how many brainstorms we're having now compared to what we used to. That's a pretty crude thing, but it's a start. And one that we've used is time to consumer. We work with organizations where we've measured that coming down from 18 months down to a few weeks, and we've used tools like better collaborative innovation spaces, a mission to use much rougher, less finished forms of prototyping. There are mechanisms and tools you can use to accelerate those behaviors. I think that's a good place to start. Ultimately, you want to measure impact. Ultimately, you want to measure what the output of a creative organization is. So you certainly want to know what your theory of impact is—what's your hypothesis for how your organization or team is going to have impact—but it's going to be quite a long time before you can measure that.

Yeah, I think engagement is really important. The statistics on engagement in organizations and business organizations in the U.S. are terrible; it's way below 50% of people really engaged in the purpose of the organization. The more purposeful the organization, the more people are engaged. Engagement often has to do with creative capacity. People who are exhausted, who are scared, who are... behaviors and outcomes in organizations that look at that change engagement. There are lots of engagement surveys out there, so it might be an interesting place to start if you're attempting to make a change in creative culture: measure engagement at the beginning and measure engagement as you get further down the road.

One of the interesting things I've noticed about the rituals of people exploring—and it may well be because the ritual example we used at IDEO was one that was about bringing people together—there are rituals to do with bringing people together, which are great, but there are kinds of rituals that might be more relevant to the individual. One that we care about a lot at IDEO—and Paul Bennett, who shows up in the course, you'll have seen this video by now—he talks about the importance of essentially training to be creative like an athlete. You have to be creatively fit, so he talks a lot about inspiration. There are inspirational rituals, things that you might do on your own. For example, someone made one new animation every day for a year. The first ones were very crude, but that discipline allowed him to explore and master a whole new set of skills. That's a great example of a ritual: doing something creative or inspirational every day, searching for an image you find inspiring, going for a half-hour walk in the woods every day and thinking about new things. There are things one can do as an individual that are ritualistic that help with the idea of creative fitness. That's a great category of rituals. But I would also say people keeping space and time for creating these things—how can you do them in small micro moments?

Related to that, one of the things we do with failure is we can and kind of turn it into something else. I always find it quite hard to think of really crisp examples because so much of what I do is like putting hypotheses out there that are obviously wrong, but by putting them out there—often by putting a hypothesis on a whiteboard and realizing it's completely wrong—learning from that is my primary creative mode. So failure is my primary creative mode. It happens all the time, so it's a little bit hard for me to call a really crisp example. Because failure isn't just the failure to reach a goal; failure is the incompleteness of something which you're exploring. There are forms of catastrophic failure, like launching a product nobody liked or putting a team together that completely blew up. There's always learning involved, but I do my best to avoid those. The truth is, part of the language problem of failure in creativity and innovation is we think of those forms of failure and not the everyday, every moment version, which is actually more useful. Failure is a creative mode. The most toxic thing in an environment is when people respond to that in a nasty, aggressive, or derogatory way. As a creative leader, you have to stand against those interactions where somebody says 'that's a stupid idea' and explains why your stupid idea is stupid—because that will shut that creative mode down in no time. You can come back and say 'I think this,' which is very different from what you think, but if you associate the failure of the idea with the failure of the individual, nobody in their right mind will contribute. Having a very clear analytical argument can sometimes lead to that association between the stupidity of the idea and the individual.

Individuals that work together over time, who do multiple projects over time, get better and better at this. What you end up building underneath the surface is a level of trust: the trust that even if somebody criticizes my idea, I know they're doing it from the right place, and ultimately we're going to get to a better place because we've done it before. The hardest time to do this is when a team is coming together for the first time. As a leader, you have to manage the emotions of that very carefully. If it's a team that has never worked together before doing something quite difficult, you probably have to be more tolerant or more optimistic. They do get better and better the longer they work together. One of the challenges in the modern business environment, where teams are often coming together in sort of random ways and don't spend a lot of time together, is that trust is very hard to build. But ultimately, it's an incredibly valuable asset. I see individuals who have worked together for a long time—in some cases at IDEO for years—who are able to be really quite critical of each other and it not be emotionally damaging, resulting in much better ideas.

Well, moving from the professional to the emotional, putting people together, taking people away, putting them in a situation where they get to learn about each other's lives. That's all an important starting point. To expect people to walk into a room not having met before in a very professional environment, not understanding the personalities of each other, and expect them to be vulnerable—which is what we need to be creative—is a lot to ask. Most people won't do it. It takes time and an understanding of how personalities work. We do quite a lot of work at IDEO using various tools to understand personalities. That helps when someone reacts in a certain way—it may well be because of their personality type, not a reflection on the idea itself.

Well, I'll tell you how I do it: by making sure that I get time to focus on creativity and do things I find inspiring. That's whether it's making sure I have time to contribute to projects where I know I'm helping teams, whether it's because I have my own creative projects I'm working on, or just because I go out and visit museums, go to interesting gallery shows, or get out into the world. I actually see it as a responsibility, because if I'm not creatively inspired, if I'm not creatively energized, then how can I expect my team to be? In fact, if I'm exhausted and overworked and I start narrowing down my perspective, I will do a less good job of helping them be successful. And more importantly, I'm acting as a really bad role model, because if they see that, they most certainly will follow. You can't lead creatively from a point of exhaustion; it's simply impossible.

How do you pick the little places where those are your topics? You are faster and it's more complex earlier, because you have these other responsibilities. So it takes more discipline, a greater mastery, and it takes knowing where the edges of your own performance are. If you know that when you've just got off a transatlantic flight you're less likely to be open-minded, then don't set up a review meeting with the project team just after you got off the plane. It's in nobody's interest to do that, no matter how crunched your calendar is. For me, it's about stepping back and having the question: 'Is this the fittest thing that I could do? Am I leading to greater fitness—my own fitness and the fitness of the team?'

You work with the team to keep them on their edge. I try my own rituals. I love sharing creative experiences I've had. It's a ritual of sorts. I find it's one of the ways I can energize a team. Instead of getting excited about an idea, I love to bring cross-connection. I spend a lot of my time doing a lot of different things, so I get to join dots in interesting ways. I see that as a creative exercise I've always enjoyed. When I do that and have points of inspiration that come from different places, I'll share them with the team. 'Wouldn't it be interesting to think about this in this context?' I find those kinds of connections very creatively energizing. It's often useful for the team, as it gives them new questions to ask and new things to explore. If I'm not making those new patterns, there's something missing from my own career or life. I sense it. I go through periods where I'm doing a lot of it and feel great, then periods where I'm so busy I'm not having the right kinds of experiences or meetings, and I feel less satisfied. I have this little gauge in my head—like a 'connection needle.' Is it pointing in the right direction?

Having a very interesting conversation by email with an old colleague about this topic. He interpreted some things I've been saying as either you can't do anything in an organization unless the senior leaders buy into the idea of creativity and design thinking. I appreciated that one can go on a journey; if in order to do that the CEO has to believe... So it was a very interesting conversation. There's lots of evidence to show how people in very large organizations have started to make progress without having that senior leadership buy-in. It was all about showing the evidence of wins. It wasn't showing the evidence of doing things more creatively or more customer-focused, but actually showing evidence that this is a better way of doing things. That's one way of creating slow, steady incremental but important change: show the evidence that the ideas are better or more closely connected to the customer. Also, tell big stories. It might just be that the concept is a little better, or that the session you had reached a better quality. It doesn't have to be huge, but they should be good at capturing evidence. What I think comes out time and time again from our experience at IDEO is that leaders find most compelling not just the ideas but the insights. The customer insights or the insights about the organization, or insights about how you connect technology to customer needs—those are often things leaders find very interesting because they're a new way of looking at the future. So make sure you're really good at telling those stories, identify the good ones, and be very good at hanging on to them. Because so much of being creative and design thinking is sort of common sense. It's experienced, not something you can build a big intellectual argument for easily. The last thing I advise is just look for opportunities where you may be able to bring these senior leaders into the experience. I remember many years ago, we had a summit meeting with a series of senior leaders from a big pharma company. I took the new CEO, who hadn't yet taken up the role, and we went to visit a patient using the drug. The whole experience of injecting the drug was painful, and it was completely mind-changing for him. He rightly believed in the goodness of the drugs they were creating, but had no understanding of what the actual customer experience was. From that moment—he continues to be the CEO of that company today—he has been a huge advocate of the importance of design-mindedness and understanding the real needs of users. I really do attribute that experience as the beginning of that journey for him. We just used the meeting to go have him meet a customer.

Question from David about how creative followership links to creative leadership. I haven't thought about the concept of creative followership. I would suggest—I don't know how much evidence—but my gut would say that anybody really involved in a creative process is in some way being a creative leader. It's more of a scale. As you get on to be a creative leader, you have to learn new skills. I talked about it at the beginning: I had to learn that skill of balancing the importance of my own idea with the importance of other people's ideas. That's a key difference between being a creative contributor and a creative leader. It's a very difficult set of circumstances to orchestrate. It requires good decision-making, open-mindedness, curiosity—all of which are leadership qualities. So to be a great follower, you also have to be a little bit of a leader. You may not have all the skills yet for projecting that leadership beyond yourself, and that's something we learn as we go along. One of the things we've found at IDEO is that a lot of great creative people are leaders in some contexts but not in others. I would never argue that to be a credible leader you have to be a natural extrovert. In fact, I find a lot of natural extroverts are not always very curious. They may be great at relationship building but not necessarily curious about the conversation itself. It's interesting. It feels like we're talking about practicing following as very different—it's not just doing what you've been told; it's practicing a set of behaviors at a different scale. If you think about the basic framework we talk about—leading from different stances: from in front, from alongside, from behind—that implies that you have to know how to follow. So I think the word 'followship' is not a common word, but leadership is a difficult word too. We're getting more sophisticated about it.

The list of weaknesses is a long one; we could spend another hour talking about that. But one I thought about is that I know a lot of creative people are very good at taking an idea and just getting on with something. When you're part of a team, that's great, but as you become a creative leader, it can be very frustrating when you're not the one getting all the things done. If you just go and get on with stuff, you can separate them and entrench the team. That's a battle I constantly fight. Another weakness: I am more reactive than proactive. I respond to emergencies or what other people want. It's a battle sometimes to keep enough space for me to do the things I know I should be doing, or to stay creatively inspired. There are moments when I need help from others to defend space or remember not to go crazy with travel. That's a weakness I constantly deal with. It's very difficult because part of my job as a CEO is to do lots of different things, so it's easy to say yes to lots of things. It can be satisfying for one's ego to be asked to do things. Having the strength of mind to know how to make good choices is important.

People are creative outside when we believe in people bringing creativity to their work. It's very common to find people with other creative passions that don't always connect to their work, but they can contribute to their continued creative energy and engagement. Whether it's cooking, painting, or music—we have endless musicians at IDEO. Letting them bring that into their work, not just as a counterbalance, but connecting it in some way to support their creative work. Encouraging people to find those outside passions and bring them in—that's so important. We always talk about bringing the outside in. It gives so many things. It seems like spending time on something not directly related to results, but people always thank you for it afterward. It's amazing. Another version of that we have is a ritual really: 'Your IPO stories.' Every three or four months, a small group of folks will present a personal creative story or their own life story. It's remarkable how much comes out of it. It completely changes people's perceptions of individuals at IDEO.