Creative Confidence | Tom Kelley & David Kelley | Talks at Google

Welcome to a very creative afternoon and an Authors AtGoogle Talk. My name is Frederik. Please join me in welcoming David and Tom Kelley.

They've just published recently a book, 'Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.' And I actually had the pleasure of having lunch with Tom and David. And David asked me, I think the second question, so what are we going to do here? Google is already very creative. So let us come back to that question later on.

So, Tom, you published various books around innovation, 'The Art of Innovation,' 'The Ten Faces of Innovation,' bestselling books. So what motivated you to really publish this book around creative confidence now?

Sure. So this book is actually quite different than my other books. It focuses more on the individual. It's more about creativity per se and stuff like that. So it has a business audience, but it actually speaks to a broader audience. So we're a 'New York Times' bestseller as of two days ago. And it's not in the business category. It's in the advice category, which is quite different. But why'd I write this book? And really, the answer is, you know, two chairs away from me is my brother. Back in 2007, David was sick. David had throat cancer. And they only gave him a 40% chance of survival. And, wow, in that situation, you confront a lot of demons, you know. And that was hanging over our heads for a long time. I spent most of the year with him in '07. And after chemo and radiation, and eventually surgery, toward the end of the year, at least a possibility arose, became more tangible, that he was going to survive. And, you know, you can see, he's there. That's the answer six years later. And so we had talked about the future all year. And so late in 2007, then we did. We felt like we had permission to talk about the future. And so as we did that, we made two promises to each other. David and I have worked together for almost 30 years. And the two promises were, one, that we would take a trip together. Because, oddly, we have never traveled together as adults. Our big trip was in 1967. We drove from Ohio to California, you know, the promised land. And so in our work at IDEO, if one of us goes to a meeting in Grand Rapids or wherever, the other one doesn't have to go, right? And so we don't travel together. So promise number one is to do a trip together. And that became this really fun trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, two places that I really like. And, oh, I got to pick. So I picked. But then, the other promise was that we would do a project together. David and I are not very good at leisure. You know, we couldn't just hang out for some months together or play golf or I don't know. Just not in our DNA. And so if you want to spend time together, you got to think of something to work on together. And so we said we'd do a project. And at that time we didn't know what the project would be. But the project became a book. It became the book called 'Creative Confidence' that is sitting right there.

Speaking of different things you did in your life, David, you founded a very successful company called IDEO. You also started an educational institution called the Stanford d.school. So you also started a revolution around innovation and innovators in general and using design thinking as a framework to really push that forward. Can you speak a little bit about what you have learned throughout the years, about innovation in general but also about innovators?

You both write in your book that you want to make the world a better place through embracing creative confidence in our lives. At Google, we have a similar mission on making the world a better place through technology. So where do you see the parallels in what you're trying to achieve and what we're trying to achieve with technology?

Sure. I mean, those two are not in conflict in any way, right? What we're seeing is this trend, this kind of maker trend, that we've experienced both in our teams and in the world at large, in which new technologies put creative tools in everybody's hands. You know, there's that old line about, in the 20th century, kids watch TV. In the 21st century, kids make TV. I think they're talking about YouTube when they say that, right? And so I think the two go hand in hand. I mean, we just maybe approach it from a slightly different direction. But one of the things that we've latched on to early on is a year or two ago there was an Adobe study called 'State of Create,' in which they, you know, with an interest not unlike yours—they want to use technology to help people in their focus on creativity—and so they ask 5,000 people in five different countries about their beliefs surrounding creativity—one about the link between creativity and economic development. And 80% of people said, unlocking creativity is critical to economic development, which we thought was great. But really interesting was the follow-on question. And they said, well, how about you? How about you as an individual? Do you have a chance to live up to your creative potential? In other words, do you have a chance to bring your whole self to work? And across the world, only 25% of the people said yes to that. And so we think it's a worthy goal. I mean, it's a worthy question, for us and for you, of how might we unlock the creativity of the other 75%, right? And so you might approach that question from a slightly different direction than us. But I think we're both quite interested in how to change the world in that way.

So coming back to that question, so how would you actually recommend organizations going about unlocking the potential of creative people in their organizations?

Yeah. You know, in cultures there's a really important moment we've discovered. And I personally have worked with 1,500 clients, and David, I'm sure, a lot more. And there's a really important moment in which a not yet perfect idea gets put on the table. And people look really closely to see how do leaders especially react to that. You know, you've probably heard those stories about the tyrant boss who, you bring in the unfinished thing, and they say, how would our organization be worse if you weren't here tomorrow, you know, that kind of, like, get out of my office, because you haven't thought through every detail of this idea yet. But in great cultures, in creative cultures, the first instinct is to build on the idea. There's a skill we call squinting, in which you ignore the surface details and you look at the shape of the idea and try to figure out how could you make it better. And if the leaders of an organization are squinters, you know, are the kind of people who look past the surface details, what we found is, there's a better idea flow within the company. More ideas come up, because you don't have to self-edit. You don't have to wait until your idea is perfect. You bring it out in its embryonic form and say, well, I'm thinking about this, because you're allowed to kind of think out loud about things. You know, here in the Valley, ask any venture capitalist, and they will tell you that all other things equal, the VC firm with the better deal flow wins, right, because they're picking from 1,000 instead of picking from five possibilities. And so we think it's true with companies with idea flow. If you're the kind of company—and I know that in many ways you are—if you're the kind of company in which ideas get circulated all of the time—and many fall by the wayside, because they're not yet perfect or because they don't pan out—you still have this rich culture of ideas to choose from. What we found is that those are the companies that succeed and sustain in the long run.

So let's move from an organizational level to an individual level. I think that's very interesting. So what prevents, actually, people for having those creative breakthroughs? So is there a routine, especially like if, maybe, you have a personal routine you want to share about David or David wants to share about Tom, like how you actually train the creative muscle, if that's even possible. So some people do meditation, and they would go work out. So what are you doing?

You spoke a little bit about this beginner's mind or child's mind, and you quoted, I think, a lot of times, that you should really embrace that in everything you're doing. So what would you actually recommend for parents then? Because I saw that in your book, you also dedicate your book to your parents. What would you recommend—that's the first question for you—for parents, what they should do with their kids? But secondly, how did your parents influence you throughout your lives?

Sure. You know, this parenting thing is hard, as you've probably noticed. Those kids don't come with instruction sets. It's sometimes hard to know, is this where I'm supposed to be firm? Is this where I'm supposed to be laissez-faire, or whatever? But just think about our parents. It wasn't that they were artists or something. It wasn't that they got out the finger paints with us every day. It was that they give us a lot of space to do things, that they weren't quick to judge us or to kind of reign us in when we got a little creative. You know, David and I took a lot of stuff apart as kids, including the family piano. And many of those things never went back together. A piano, once you take it apart, it's actually kind of beautiful. Those 88 hammers, David's got those up on his wall. But nobody ever played that piano afterwards. And the parents never complained. And so I think it's just kind of permission to misbehave a little bit, permission to be creative. And you have this sort of nurturing environment that says, and it's still going to be OK, right? And so that's really what our parents did for us. And that's what I've tried to do for my kids.

Well, speaking of fluorescent green, so, OK, that was David's bike. And so it's kind of his to do whatever he wanted to. But he came home from college—he went to Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad—and he came home from college freshman year, and he got four shades of green paint, including fluorescent green, and painted a stripe, like four feet high and 40 feet long, against the back wall of the house. And you can imagine a parent in a small town in Ohio being not sure about that, right? But that green stripe's still there all these years later.

So what changed about David? Great. What changed about David over the years, then? You spoke about when he was 12. But what's really now when you say, oh, David, that's really why you're childlike, not childish?

Sure. So there's that great quote from Picasso. He says, every child is an artist, and the challenge is to remain an artist after you grow up. So David and I were quite different as kids. And the thing about David is he had indication, there were tells even as a small child, that he was going to be creative, that he was going to become a designer one day or something, whereas I was the opposite. You couldn't have spotted it in me. And so I think that—for a lot of you, you might have fit David's pattern more as kids—but the fact that I could cross over that line, I think is good news for lots of people out in the business community and beyond. Because I wanted to be a lawyer, for God's sake. What was I thinking? I'm not sure. I got the GMAT, abandoned that, but got an MBA, worked for an accounting firm, worked five years doing spreadsheets—first by hand, because we didn't have those computer things, and then on the early laptop machines—and so at age 35, no indication, right, that I was going to have a chance to have a creative life. And so this is good news. Because you can decide today. You can change later in life. And so I just basically immersed myself in the creative environment at IDEO and gained creative confidence in that process. And so, you know, yeah, you could spot the stuff in David, but, yeah, hard to tell in some of the rest of us.

So two more questions. And then, I want to open it up for the Googlers to ask questions to you. The first one is, when you think about what's next—so in the next five to 10 years—I think that's a time frame we as Googlers think, like it's way in the future, but it's still something you can somehow guess what's going on—so what are your plans? You started a successful company. You started a successful educational institution. You wrote various books really successfully. So what's next?

You know, I bet David's got his own answer. But for me, this book is out, and it's done, and books are so hard. I'm not sure I'm doing another one. So the idea is out in the world now. But I feel like it's got a pretty long run, this idea of creative confidence, that dealing with the 75%. And so I've been working on innovations, you know, the products, the services, the digital experiences for 30 years. And I was thinking, the next decade or so, that I would focus more, or at least as much, on innovators, on inspiring individuals—especially early in their careers, because they have so much promise coming up—to get in touch with their creative confidence so they can make a bigger impact on the world and have more fun at work. You know, we did those 100 interviews. And it is so much fun to be around those people who have gained creative confidence basically around the fourth grade, a lot of them. And it happens for kids a lot there. They decided they weren't creative, and their world gets smaller when they make that decision. They kind of opt out of stuff. And then, everybody we interviewed, everybody—and it wasn't a random sampling of the universe. We sought them out—but all 100 of the people we interviewed had decided at some point that they were creative. And, wow, just the look in their eyes. They're fun to be around. And in the process, it's stuff isn't even limited by creativity. They are taking on bigger challenges. They are more resilient in the face of obstacles, more perseverance. They're just cool. I mean, they're just fun to be around.

So Googlers in general, I think, are really passionate about working on big, audacious goals. So what would be one big, audacious goal or problem for you which a lot of people should actually work on in the next three or four years?

Yeah, and for me I would say the big goal would be cracking the code on behavior change. You know, so much of what we do, all of our social innovation work, and even our work in health care and things like that, we're trying to change behavior of the constituents that matter to us. They're not always customers, even. And that's really hard. People cling to their old patterns even when their old patterns aren't the best for them. And so, for example, I did a work with the water in developing countries. We're in India trying to get people to drink the safe water, the filtered water, the water that won't make them sick. But they've been drinking that other water for generations. And so the old way to do that, the attempted behavior change approach to that, is you send a social worker into the village, and they talk about the germ theory of disease, you know, fascinating stuff, right? And they're explaining why you shouldn't really drink that water from the well, at least untreated. You should get this other water, which is not free, right? Now, we're talking about families for whom any new expense means trading off something else. They're living very close to the Earth. And so they'll be there, really, with their best interests at heart, trying to convince this community to go for the safe water. And then, someone will raise their hand. And apparently it happens a fair amount. Someone will raise their hand and says something like, well, you know, my mother gave me water from that well. You're not saying my mom is wrong, are you? And if you're that social worker in that little village in India and that question comes up, I would urge you to just leave immediately. There is no beating that question. You're not going to change behavior in that village that day. Because we're very conscious, we're hiring behavioral economists, we're very interested in this behavior change, what we do is we show up in the village with our own generator, because you can't trust the power supply, and a projector and a white sheet that becomes our screen. And during the day, we hand out pamphlets. And then we start with singing and dancing, because you know, if you advertise germ theory of disease, not everybody shows up, right? And so singing and dancing, we've got a crowd. And then, with the crowd assembled—and it's pretty much the whole village, because what else is going on that night, right, you know, they're not watching reruns of anything, because there's no TVs, right, and so we got the attention of the whole village—we hook up a microscope to that projector. And we show them a drop of the water they've been drinking for generations. And we don't have to check in advance. It is alive with small animals. It is really scary to see your filthy water in that way. And then, we go to some local supplier of the safe water, and we put a drop of that on it. And it's not always perfect, by the way. But it's always way, way better than this really scary looking water with the animals in it, very small animals. And then we ask a different question. And the behavioral economists call this choice architecture, which is the ability to frame the question in a way that people make answers that are true to their belief system. And so now they've seen the unsafe water. They've seen the safe water. And we say, never mind your mom. Your mom did the best she could. We address them as parents. And we say, OK, now that you have seen it, now that you have seen the water in this new way, which water do you want your children to drink? And if you can frame that question in that way, people will change. People will give up a little something else in order to have the safe water for their families. And so to do that with diet and exercise, to do that with planning for retirement or saving for college or the thousand other things, energy usage, or recycling, or other things, that's a big thing to crack the code on.

Right. Thank you. So we have a microphone over here. If you want to please start lining up and ask your questions.

Hi. So I have a question that's actually kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum of what you've been talking about. And that's being overwhelmed by the opportunity to be creative and come up with ideas. I think I speak for a lot of people. Perhaps I've just been fortunate. But in my role and experience at Google, I've been a lot of situations where there's support for creativity and the opportunity to create ideas creates just an overwhelming set of options. And teams can just spin and spin and spin coming up with ideas, all of them great. But you run out of time and even energy to reduce them to actual practicing get things done from that perspective. So curious as to what your experience in a place like the d.school, where likely there is a lot of that going on, is how do you stop that, and how do you just move forward with an idea or a select set of ideas and get them working?

Right. So I totally believe you that that's a problem at Google. And I'm going to go on record and say in the other 99.9% of client organizations I work with, this is not their problem. But nevertheless, you have this issue. And so what we would recommend in a situation like that is find the quickest, cheapest way you can prototype the alternative ideas. Because in the prototype, you kind of bring them to life a little more, so that it gets just a little more tangible in a way that reasonable people—that would be customers, maybe—could look at it and say, oh, I would totally go for that or, like, oh, no, I would never use that, right? And so if you have lots of ideas but you can prototype them all up to a level in which you can get good feedback from it, then the kind of winners will start to emerge.

We're doing a lot of work with open innovation out in the world. It's called OpenIDEO. The current challenge is actually about creative confidence. But we'll ask a question. People submit ideas. And then they participate. The open innovation community participates, in evaluating the ideas. And we've now worked with companies. There's other people unrelated to us doing this internally, where it's open innovation, but it's only open within the company in which the collective community of the company judges and says, wow, we really like this idea. So you've got more than just what your boss likes. You've got what the whole community believes has value for the future.

I was just going to ask, I think in 'The Ten Faces of Innovation' you discussed the group of, I think, it was fifth graders that you worked with, or five-year-olds. I forget what the number was. I was just wondering how that's been going since then, if that's something you guys still use?

So this is a question about an old book. Fifth graders we worked with. Don't know. But that prompts a story, which is one of the favorites. Of the 100 people we interviewed, there's this teacher, teaches the fifth grade. Her name is Marcy Barton. And she has been teaching for 42 years. And so I'm sure you've had those kind of teachers, 42 years in. They developed their syllabus 41 years ago. And they've been in full implementation/repetition mode ever since. And that doesn't quite describe Marcy. So Marcy comes to the d.school. She comes to a two-day program for educators. And by the way, I am going to sound like a paid spokesperson for the d.school. I'm not a Stanford guy at all. I'm a Berkeley guy, right? But Marcy is an amazing person. She comes to the d.school for this two-day program. And based on that two days, she basically changes her life. She reinvents her curriculum from scratch after that two-day seminar. And she does all project-based learning with her kids now. And so instead of standing at the board and talking about immigration in the New World, she turns the desks upside down and puts the kids inside and wraps it with craft paper. And now they're in the ship going to the New World. And they write their constitution while they're in the ship. And then, when they get there, they use their math skills and make a perfect scale model of the community. And everything is a project. And her kids have done remarkably well. And Marcy, at one point in the interview, she says, my kids are wonderfully more creative and they're engaged. And she says, and write this down. And I'm thinking, Marcy, we're taping this interview. But anyhow, she still wants us to write. And she says, and tell those parents, my kids do better on the standardized tests, too. She says, of course, they do better on the standardized tests. She says, my kids are engaged every single day of the school year. And so Marcy says, in the interview, this design thinking stuff she picked up at the d.school, she says, this is the cornerstone of my career and my life. And so that's Marcy story. But it's so ridiculously unbelievable that David and I had to take three steps back and think, OK, how are we going to explain this to anybody? So here's our theory. There's an old saying, sometimes attributed to Plutarch, but there's another possible source for it, where someone once said that education is not the filling of a vessel, it's the lighting of a fire, which is not entirely true. Because in the airline magazine, when it says you can learn Mandarin in five days, that is bull. You cannot learn Mandarin in five days. And here's why. Because it's the filling of a vessel. It's vocabulary. It's grammar. It's tonality. It's really, really hard. But with Marcy, at the d.school, she didn't fill any vessels. She lit a fire. She had almost everything she needed and just had this one more spark that set it all off. And so, anyhow, my favorite fifth grade teacher in the world now, even though we met fairly recently.

Great. More questions?

Was there any difference when you did the survey across the different countries, or that survey you had mentioned, in terms of culturally whether the US or any one country is really behind or really ahead and what the driver may have been?

Sure. You gotta look at the whole survey. I was interested in the overall response. But when you look at the individual country responses, it's fascinating. Because, basically, every country thinks that they are the most creative country in the world, right, though no one else thinks they are. But the exception to that is Japan. Everybody thinks that Japan is creative except Japanese people. And so there's just this weird kind of asymmetry to the belief systems from country to country. But that gets at this very central theme in our book, which is that creative confidence is the combination of the natural ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them. And so I've spent a ton of my life in Japan. I think it's a tremendously creative country. And sometimes, in modern Japan, people don't have the courage to stand up and say, this is a good idea. They feel like they have to self-edit, they can't express their creativity. And so, I think, a huge opportunity there. But, yeah, country by country, it's quite interesting to see how they see themselves so differently than other countries see them.

Have you guys had any instances where the design approach didn't work or it failed? And then, what did you guys do about it?

Sure. Have we had failures? Yeah, you bet we have. I mean, this is the essence of our approach. If you're not failing, wow, you're just not taking any risks. It's like, I want to learn to ski, but I never want to fall down, right? Good luck with that. And so lots of failures along the way. We were just doing a social innovation project in Ghana that had to do with, let's just call it, sanitation issues so as not to turn off the whole crowd. But anyhow, the sanitation issue is public sanitation issues. And we had this idea that we'd put up signs all over the community and that we would draw maps of where the big issues were by having people call in and say, over there, there's a problem, over there. And so we put these signs up all over the community, call in. And we got zero phone calls. I mean, well, in fact, the phone rang. But nobody was ever there. It's like, what the heck? I mean, how are we going to get data this way, right? And then, we were outsiders. We didn't fully understand. We hadn't done all of the design research we needed to understand the community we were working in. And it turns out—I guess, this is true in many parts of Africa—an incoming phone call on your cellphone is free. An outgoing phone call is the one you pay for, right? So nobody is going to pay for a phone call to tell you about sanitation issues. And so there is this practice very common in that part of the world called flashing. And flashing is when you call someone just enough to make their phone ring and record your caller ID number, and then you hang up. And if they want to talk to you—in other words, if they want to pay for the phone call—then they'll call you back. And so we went and changed all of the signs all over and said, don't call this number, flash this number. And then, we got all kinds of data, right? But shame on us for not having figured it out. I mean, we could have printed those signs once instead of twice. But we were naive just as that outsider in the Indian village didn't fully understand all of the things that were making those family decisions. We didn't understand the local community enough to get it right the first time.

Well, there was that whole phase called pen-based computers, many of you too young to remember. But we and all of our clients failed in that phase. Nobody wanted those things.

You know, a great microculture in the world that has got the right attitude about failure is the gaming culture. I mean, you think about gaming, it's about failure. I tell a story in the book about my son Sean who, Christmas Day a few years back, got the Tony Hawk skateboarding game. And those of you who have played it may know, it's got a skateboard inside. It's got a full-size skateboard that you stand on. And it controls the game. And he's there in front of three generations of Kelleys, right, trying out his new game. And on-screen, his avatar—you know, his character on-screen, is smashing into the wall, like, a couple of hundred times. And unlike some other video games, he's also physically falling off of the skateboard and nearly breaking the glass coffee table and stuff like that. And I'm sitting there watching him for, like, half an hour. And it suddenly occurs to me, this is amazing, right? I mean, he's got the whole family watching him fail time after time after time, and he's not the tiniest bit embarrassed. So how is it that in the gaming culture, you have this what Jane McGonigal calls urgent optimism. It's like, OK, that failed. Better try again, as opposed to, in real life, where you say, oh, that failed. I'm marked for life, right? And so, if we can have a little bit more of the gaming culture, the best parts of the gaming culture, out here in the physical world, that would be a good thing.

Great. I think that's a great note to end on, to encourage everybody over the weekend at least to try a game—fail a couple of times, even if it's juggling. We have books which David and Tom might sign the back for a special price. And thanks, everybody, for coming. And have a great weekend.