Creative Confidence

"At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you."

— Tom Kelley and David Kelley

David Kelley founded IDEO, one of the most influential design and innovation firms in the world, and in 2005 founded at Stanford the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, where design thinking is taught to students from every discipline. Tom, his brother, is a partner at IDEO and author of The Art of Innovation. The book starts from what they saw in decades of workshops: most adults declare themselves "not creative," and many remember the moment in childhood when someone mocked a drawing or an idea and they decided never to try again.

The belief it changes is that creativity is a matter for designers and artists. For the Kelleys it is a way of solving problems anyone can practice, and what holds it back is almost never lack of talent, but fear of being wrong in front of others.

Three key ideas:

• The block is fear and it is cured with gradual exposure. The Kelleys draw on the work of psychologist Albert Bandura, who cured people with snake phobias in a few hours. First they saw the snake through a mirror, then through an open door, then they watched someone touch it, touched it with a thick glove and finally with their bare hand. Bandura called that sequence of small successes "guided mastery," and the Kelleys apply it to creativity: each small success builds the confidence for the next.
• Empathy comes before the idea. The book's central case is that of Doug Dietz, a GE engineer who designed medical imaging equipment. In a hospital he saw a little girl terrified before entering her MRI scanner, and learned that about 80 percent of pediatric patients had to be sedated to get through the exam. Instead of improving the machine, Dietz observed the children and redesigned the experience as an adventure: the room became a pirate ship and the child is asked to stay very still so the pirates won't find them. The technology didn't change, the experience did, and the share of sedated children dropped to about 10 percent.
• Thinking with your hands beats thinking in your head. A quick, simple prototype teaches more than a week of discussion, because people react to concrete things, not to descriptions. Creativity is worth something when you dare to act on your ideas.

From there come concrete practices. The most useful for a founder is the bug list: writing down during the day every thing that frustrates you, from a bureaucratic procedure to a confusing screen, because every annoyance is a design opportunity. Another is moving from duty to passion: the Kelleys draw a seesaw with a dollar sign on one side and a heart on the other, and ask you to check whether your work weighs only on the money side.

A simple place to begin: choose a small problem in your company, observe for half an hour the person who lives it without asking questions, build in under an hour a solution in paper, cardboard or a spreadsheet, and put it in front of them. Don't explain it, just watch what they do with it. For your team, set a rule in product meetings: no idea is discussed in the abstract; whoever proposes it brings a sketch and whoever criticizes it proposes an alternative.

As a founder it will help you design from the customer's experience and not from the technology. It will also help you redesign a collections process, an account opening or a customer's first visit to a branch, and get your team to lose the fear of proposing.