I'm so glad all of you come today because really I'm actually a little bit nervous.
And so don't tell everybody out there because I'm just going to look right here because
you guys make me feel really good that you all came to share with us today.
It's actually, it's really the way it is.
And actually when Ryan was talking earlier, I was talking about what kids do and what
we can learn from kids.
The first thing I noticed when I snuck out of the room was like, how spread out we are.
That even though we're fewer people today, we're still spread out all the way to the
corners and how many times I've gone in to speak with kids and it's totally different
like they all collect on top of each other right in front.
Something to learn about that and why they're doing that I think.
I'm like so thrilled to be here.
It's been such a great conference so far.
I hope I can add to that.
There's been so many great talks and so many great presentations and honestly it has completely
messed up my mind.
I have rewritten this thing probably ten times since I've been here.
It's not easy to come toward the end because all this stuff is happening.
All these fantastic talks and people talking about things and I'm in a quandary of what
I could add to all that that might bring meaning to all of you.
On the other side very personally, it's been great to be here because it's given me time
out.
It's given me and a couple of my team members here time to sit back and reflect on what
we started five years ago and really where we've come.
I think how we've managed to bring really design as an equal part of the whole business.
Not to be leading, not to be on top but as an equal partnership through the whole business.
I thought that's what I'll just share with you all today.
Some of the very simple things I think when I show you this you go wow that's really simple
and basic.
I think that's actually why it helped us and why it worked.
Some really basic simple things that I'll share.
Last year, just to set the stage maybe, oh yeah I can click, right, yeah I can click.
So last year we were really honored to receive an IDEA award, Silver Award, that's Craig,
he's here.
He'll tell you all about it and that changed our trajectory, it was important for us.
People in the company sort of rallied around that and kind of understood it because there
were so many people behind that project.
And so now this year we're on stage here.
And so I'll tell a little bit about that journey, how the company's changed and how
we got to where we are.
But first, most importantly I think, this is Saturday morning, right?
Saturday morning.
Do you guys remember Saturday morning?
Right.
Okay, so Saturday morning.
So sit back, relax, get another bowl of Captain Crunch, where's the Captain Crunch?
Next time.
And I'm just going to start with a little story here to set the stage, okay?
So this is what a kindergarten class looked like in 1970.
We have anybody from kindergarten here, kindergarten?
Going to kindergarten starting soon.
They look a little funny, don't they?
Look at those weird clothes.
Anyway, this was my kindergarten class in California back in 1970.
She looks nice, but that one she was really tough.
She used to grab our ears.
And this was George.
George was very appropriately named because he was a little bit like Curious George.
He was always trying new things.
He was adventurous.
He also tended to get in trouble.
And this was myself here.
I'm not sure.
I don't think my dad knew how to use a bowl.
I'm not sure what's with the haircut.
But anyway, there we were, and we were good buddies.
And in the kindergarten, we spent most of our time whenever we could outdoors.
It was Santa Barbara, so you could be outdoors almost all the time.
And there was sort of a little asphalt area where we could run around.
But the best thing was, is it went up in a hill, and these hills were covered by bushes.
And beyond the bushes was a chain-link fence.
And the bushes were great because you could make all kinds of paths through the bushes.
You know, when we broke off all the branches and we had little burrows and little hideaways
and little forts in there, and we felt like we were miles away from everybody.
But of course, Mrs. Swanson there could always just by yelling get us back in a minute.
One day out there, I hear George call out.
Call out in help of some guy.
You know, help, I'm stuck, or something like that.
And when I came to George, I found that he had a hand full of these big juicy berries,
blackberries, big handful.
The only problem was, his hand was on the other side of the chain-link fence.
He put his hand through the chain-link fence to grab these berries.
And now that he had them, he certainly didn't want to let them go, but he did want his hand
to be on the other side of the fence.
So I don't really recall how we got there.
This was quite a long time ago, at least a few years.
But somehow, together, we figured out that what we would do is he would drop the berries
as close to the fence as he could, and then we could sort of finger them through, maybe
use a stick and kind of get them through there.
So George wasn't completely open to this, because after all, he did have the berries
in his hand.
But he did, and they were a little bit dusty and kind of a little bit smushed, but we got
some of the berries to the other side of the fence.
So really, there's nothing remarkable about George, nothing, well, actually there was,
but there's nothing remarkable about me.
There's nothing remarkable about this story.
It's what happens on the playground all the time.
Like I'm sure all you guys have maybe got your hands stuck in a fence or something like
that.
I'm sure all of you out there can remember times when you were allowed to play freely,
when you were allowed to follow your own narrative and just go where it took you without sort
of the interference and hovering of parents, you just got into all kinds of adventures
like this.
And for me personally, I think back at this little story here quite often.
Because when I look at it, it contains sort of four, I don't know what to call them, factors
or elements or experiences that I think I still live on every day.
And so I'm just going to take a minute to walk through how I saw that picture.
So the first thing was empathy.
Oh, I've kind of got it spelled a little well, okay.
So we've heard a lot about empathy at this conference and I've been really very happy
to hear people talk about it.
And not just talking about it as empathy for our end user, but empathy for our teammate,
empathy for other people around the board table who look at things different that have
different backgrounds to this.
And I'm just going to take a minute because that word's really, really important.
Empathy is like the greatest thing you guys all do.
It's the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within
their frame of reference, right?
Getting outside ourselves and seeing, and that's what we all do, right?
And that's how this story started.
There's nothing special about me.
I had empathy for George's situation, like, oh man, he wants the berries, his hand is
over there.
You know?
And then came what?
Some critical thinking.
Albeit probably very primitive critical thinking, but we went through this process, like, hey,
hand and berries are going to have to separate in order to work this way out, unless we
just want jam or something pulled through the fence.
So you know, and then a little creative problem solving.
We probably could have solved it a lot of other ways.
Maybe if we were taller, we could have slowly lifted them up over.
Maybe we could have taken one berry through at a time.
I don't know.
But we got the job done well enough.
And the reason for our success was really due to collaboration.
And I could imagine that there was probably not a whole lot of communication, but I think
there was a whole lot of trust.
So the collaboration, just a good amount or enough communication, but a whole lot of trust.
I think that's actually the proportions in that for me, anyway.
So I tell this story, obviously, because that's what we did as kids, naturally, every day
on the playground, that's what we still do today.
That's what we do today when we make a product.
It's also what we do when we build a team.
It's also what we do when we sit around and try to figure out how to lead the company.
So getting back to the company, about five, seven years ago, this is what the company
looked like, okay?
Good solid playground equipment for the North American market.
I might go as far to say it was traditional, a bit same-same in the market, didn't really
identify itself so differently from what the other manufacturers were making.
It was a family-owned business.
It had been built up with the industry.
The industry went through a wave of safety and lots of playgrounds had to be taken out
and new ones had to be put in.
So the whole industry went up and this company also went up with that.
But it wasn't really built on any kind of design background.
In fact, I think some of the people that were there before me would say, the father or the
son in the family would come down and say, designers, hey, draw us up a bunch of great
pretty pictures and we'll pick out the one we like and that's what we'll do.
I think it was probably something like that.
So there was no plan.
There was no process.
There was no procedure, market study or things like that to really get products out in the
field.
So I was very fortunate five years ago to move from Denmark back to the United States
and join this team because there was a great team of designers and there was a team of
engineers who had been there a lot of years and knew all about this industry.
So there was a lot to build on and there was a great lean manufacturing.
So we had everything from sales, marketing, manufacturing, design, engineering.
We had it all the way through from start to finish, but no process.
So the first thing we did is we decided we're just going to start at the beginning.
We're just going to start and you don't even have to look at that.
I mean, we're just going to start with a simple milestone process.
We knew all the things we had to get done.
We knew we couldn't jump over any of the steps.
We knew even though we threw tons of money at some of these steps, we couldn't make some
of them go any faster.
And we also knew if we kept interrupting ourselves as we had been doing, we were never going
to make it to the end.
If we let sales suddenly come run in one day and go, oh, I just lost a project.
I now need something that does this because the competition has it.
We would never get done what we were actually planning to get done.
It's kind of pretty simple.
It's kind of, I always talked about like, look, we're on a, we're on a trip.
We're trying to get to Chicago.
If we keep making detours, sides and lefts, we're never going to get there if that's really
where we want to go.
So we got this milestone process going.
We got the CEO on board.
He was actually very favorable to this, understood the need for it.
We got the director of marketing, director of sales, and so on.
And we made this plan and we were all set, ready to run.
About two weeks later, the CEO called the head of engineering and said, hey, I'd like
to work, you guys to work on some different products.
Oh boy, like the whole plan was starting to erode and dissolve.
So lots of pushback.
We had to stay firm.
And I think for a couple years there, my main job was just to repeat and repeat and protect
that plan, protect what we had going for us.
And one of the things that helped was that this kind of thing was so easy to draw, right?
I mean, so it wasn't just a philosophy or in some filing cabinet or up on the wall,
one place in the building, pretty.
Because this was so easy, we began drawing it all the time.
Marketing could start drawing it.
The engineers could draw this.
So in every meeting, any time, we could refer back.
And we did it again and again and again through the years.
We even got tattoos made.
See?
The tattoos made, like, remember the milestone process.
So having something that was also very simple to communicate was very important.
The next thing we did was we changed our space just a little bit.
So we changed the interior, not with a big decoration, but just opened it up.
We started putting more things on the wall.
We started inviting other parts of the departments to come down and see what we were doing.
And we changed this space.
So this is our outdoor little area.
I'm up on the balcony.
It's a three-story balcony looking down.
And this was just sort of a grass, many times muddy area right outside our little design
space.
So we got permission to put some concrete in, and we started building things out there
where everybody could see them.
And we started having play tests.
Oh, my gosh, like, we'd never had play tests at this company before.
It had been going since the 70s, they'd never really had, like, kids in to test things before
they went out in any kind of significant or real way.
So this is a play test.
You bring kids in.
These are from some local after-school programs.
But maybe what's most important about this picture, because I know you guys all do this
kind of stuff, what's most important are these two right here.
So this is Robin and Barbara.
And they're in the marketing department.
It was like the first time we started bringing departments together so early in the process.
But they saw what we were doing, and they wanted to come down and be part of it so that
they could build it into their story and make it theirs as well.
And that kind of developed into other play tests.
And here, again, is Robin.
I don't know if you can see, but just a huge smile on her face.
It also changed her work and brought her more into what was really going on in the company.
Maybe you can see, because we invited everybody and told everybody this was going on, we started
to get just other people gathering around, up on the balconies.
People coming out of CAD people or finance people or whoever.
We invited their children to be part of the play tests.
So that was another huge thing.
Somebody I think was Nate, who had his fantastic 10 points the other day.
He was just like, you just got to do some things.
Don't shove it down their throats.
Just like do some things and find out what sticks.
Another thing we started doing, no, we didn't start playing volleyball, but we started talking
about team.
We started talking about team a lot.
And at first, for maybe two years, they were like, what's team?
Why are you talking about team?
And I was like, look, we're going to have home teams and work teams.
Home team is like all you designers, all you engineers, all you...
And then the work team is like when you all come together to work in the project and you
come together.
And I never knew, that's actually me there in the blue pants and they're singing, I never
knew I could draw so much from my own personal background.
So I'd remind all of us, hey, what else do we do in our lives that's so applicable to
what we do now?
Because in this situation, you've got to move as one in a very small space.
You've got to sound as one.
You've got to stay the same rhythm and the same beat and you've got to play it all the
way through to the end of the...
You can't stop in the middle, you can't divert to something else.
People are counting on you keeping the rhythm and you've got to practice and practice and
practice.
Gaby is always saying, we've got to keep practicing, we've got to keep doing the drills.
So we talked a lot about team and again, you could draw this very easily.
Anybody could draw this.
Hey, we're a team, we're all connected like this, we're from different departments.
In fact, when we started drawing this, we realized we were missing the project coordinator.
Like, wow, hey, actually we don't have a project coordinator.
That's why things aren't always going so well.
So we got ourselves a project coordinator so we could do this.
We read a book.
I don't know if any of you have read this book, but we didn't write a book about theory
or design theory or process or procedure or lean.
We'd all read those things.
It's just a normal book, but it talks about the importance of being team and really having
the right people rowing in the direction you want together.
We talked about the how, these guys have heard it a ton.
Not so much the what, but the how.
So what do I mean by that?
It's like, we're all designers, we're all makers of things.
But guess what?
There are a lot of makers of things and there are other makers of things making other products
in other companies.
Yeah, we do that, but how do we do it?
How do we do it as a team?
How do we play together?
What are the rules we set, right?
You guys play soccer.
Are we the kind that trip people?
Are we the kind that just lob it deep?
No, we play the game this way.
This is our code.
That was really important.
I took it so far as to say to the team, this is what you're going to be evaluated on at
the end of the year.
Now, what you do, you should all be doing great design.
I'm going to evaluate you on how you're doing it, how you're doing it together, collaborating
in your team, but all with other departments.
Really simple.
I don't even know what you call this thing, the innovation curve or something like that.
This is not my specialty, but we didn't even have something like this.
The marketing thought we were going there and sales thought we were going there and
product thought we were going there.
Until we started drawing this and communicating and even the CEO started drawing this, we
didn't know this is where we're trying to hit with this project.
Again, really simple basic communicating things that we just started sharing again
and again and again.
Another one, and this is second to last, we recently we acquired.
We went from one playground brand to five.
How do we keep track of all this?
How do we design and distinguish, delineate five different brands?
Again, a very simple model that we started sharing with sales.
We started saying, look you guys, not everything can be exclusive to your brand.
We just can't do it.
We're going to have to share some things.
We had to start having those tough dialogues about what are we going to share across these
different brands, across different sales rep groups, and we'll do some things that are
in the middle there.
If things that you could think of that have the same chassis, that have the same sort
of under structure, but look different, look like the brand, and actually this was then
adopted by the sales group and the board of directors.
They made it into a rectangle because I guess they like rectangles better, but the last
one here that's super important to me right now is this.
My role in innovation as vice president of innovation, it's so important for me, and
it always has been to have this kind of balance and alignment with marketing and sales.
I've found that if one of those legs is too short or one of those is overpowering the
others, you're just going to tip that whole process.
Simple model.
We draw it all the time.
Guys, remember the tripod.
We have to be united.
We have to be aligned.
We have to be supporting each other and equal.
I find that when they're equal, there's a natural tension, and that tension brings
more dialogue.
If one's stronger, it's just like, no, we're going to do it this way.
All right.
This is what we were so gracefully awarded for last year, and I think all those things
I just showed did make a difference to our company.
It brought us to a new place, and it increased our effectiveness, it increased our efficiency,
our timeliness, our respect for each other, our team spirit, and it really helped us to
get to our most important goal, which was 20 billion laughs.
We got them.
We reached it, and I can't even tell you how many billions of smiles we got, but these
are a few of the things we've done in the last few years, and I'm just going to go through
them very, very quickly.
Playform 7, it's kind of a sculpture.
You can see it's used all different ways by all different age groups.
This project was one of the earlier ones, just about taking that classic play dome that
everybody knew, all adults knew, all kids knew.
It just wasn't really that easy to build, or most kids aren't triangular, so just changing
that, redesigning that, simple changes, but with a new look.
Here's another project we did in the last couple years about just laying it all out,
transparent, not a lot of walls and barriers.
You can just get there, you can choose your own route through the play.
Here's one for the smaller kids.
This is, again, another functional test.
We make these things, bring them in, about all these little blocks that you can build
and bring.
Obviously, you can't do it yourself, but our salespeople can arrange these in all different
sizes and shapes.
This project, we did with the architect Richard Dattner, who did some of the fantastic play
spaces in Central Park back in the 70s.
We revived this project with him.
It was a great collaboration, and I have to do a pitch for the Design Museum Foundation.
If you don't know it, there's a wonderful foundation to work with.
They've formed an incredible show, like all of you who have kids or ever were a kid, like
anybody here who's ever been a kid.
You should go check this out.
It's been traveling from Boston, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and we'd love to
bring it here to Atlanta.
Anybody else you don't want to bring that about?
It's the whole history of play and design, and where that's been through the years.
Great group to work with.
Lastly, this is a new one, Infinite, it's kind of combining some of the traditional things
with some new things.
That's the first install in San Francisco is still going on.
That was a lot to say.
What about the business part?
Well, I started just as a little architect, making some things, ended up as a designer
in this.
Now I'm VP of this global innovation thing, didn't really ask for that, but I find like
I'm doing the same things.
I'm doing the same thing as I did with George back on the playground.
I'm trying to be empathetic.
I'm trying to use my skills with critical thinking, creative problem solving, and collaboration.
One of the things I noticed around, and we can all remember this, I noticed around the
table, the executive table, is a lot of those educations, they didn't have creative problem
solving.
That's not a fault.
That's something we have to be empathetic about.
We're using all this language, and we have all these expectations sometimes, like how
can they can't just go through this process?
We have to understand that that's our role on that team.
It's like if I look back at that volleyball, I was the setter.
That was my role.
I wasn't the middle blocker up there.
I needed that guy.
We all need each other around the table.
Our role as understanding or dipping into empathy and these other processes and collaboration
is super important.
That's a funny one, because sometimes, seriously, at the executive meeting table, I have to
say, guys, gals, don't you remember?
Don't you remember building with blocks?
Don't you remember when you started with these blocks and then your friend added some more
and you built something new?
Then you said, oh yeah, that's good, that's really cool, and we can do this.
Or you said, hey, what if we tried this?
What if we tried to drop the berries?
I'm having to support and encourage all the time in that group.
It's as if they've forgotten lessons on the playground, like waiting in line or not pushing
at the top of the slide or digging a hole together to China.
That's been my role to remind, to keep at it.
Sometimes though, I have to say, I really wonder how business functions at all.
This whole business thing is new to me.
How does it function at all without a designer in the executive layer?
Actually, these days, I'm asking myself, how does government function at all without that?
Not to get political, but Thomas Jefferson, architect, Benjamin Franklin, incredible
inventor, wide over all range of things.
Where are those kinds of people today at that level?
I would encourage any of you, I guess that's my last message.
Any of you who have the chance or have the dream or the wish to get a little bit up into
that table, into that kind of work, even if it means leaving your pencil and paper behind,
if any of you still use a pencil and paper, even if it means leaving that behind, take
that jump because you know what, the executive table really needs designers there.
It really needs what we do, not because we do something special, not because I do something
special to save this company, but because we're an important team member at that table.
So thank you very much.
