Good afternoon.
You guys awake?
People in the back?
In the cheap seats?
No power back there.
I know I was sitting there.
I'm going to talk to you about dangerous ideas.
And I wanted to thank Mr. Zeldman, Mr. Myers,
for giving me the chance to talk about dangerous ideas
in our industry.
When we go to events, we spend a lot of time focusing on tactics.
How do we get better at typography?
How do we think about content in a more effective way?
How do we get better at layout and interaction design?
Those are all very important and very central things to what we all do,
which is making stuff.
But there's a set of issues and questions and challenges
that are also central to us and what we all want to do
that we don't talk about very often because we are afraid to.
And it's only through talking about things that scare us,
things that make us uncomfortable,
that's really the only place where a lot of the progress
that we want to see happen in our industry, in our companies,
in the kind of work we produce for our clients and for ourselves.
It's only when we get ourselves a little bit uncomfortable
that we're probably in the space where we have the most to grow.
And I feel honored to be able to have the opportunity to talk to you
about some things that will probably make you uncomfortable,
probably make you a little bit nervous.
But also hopefully, if I do a good job,
have the effect of allowing you to think about all the work
that you do in a different way.
My work and all of your work, I like to think of us all
as people who we are the masters of ideas.
It's our job to either develop ideas for things
or take ideas that are around us, from clients, from users,
and figure out how to integrate them together
and actually manifest them in the world through something.
So we are all the masters of ideas.
We try to be the masters of ideas.
The first idea that I want to offer to you,
which is scary to us, is the notion that everyone is a designer,
that everyone in the world in some fashion,
whether they're aware of it or not,
whether they would articulate what they do this way or not,
does manipulate ideas in the world.
They do it too.
Whether we're talking about how a child organizes their play set,
how they build a Lego construction,
whether we're talking about a chef in a kitchen.
These are all people who are acting with the word design.
They are designing things.
And if you go around in the world and you pay attention
and you look more carefully or with a more open mind,
you can see acts of engineering and design going on
by ordinary people all the time.
You see it at the checkout counter
when what should be a really simple interface
for paying for stuff with a debit card or a credit card,
has some post-it note label that was put there by the cashier
because they're sick of answering the question every time,
but which button to push.
There's a kind of editorializing design that goes on all the time in the world.
And you think of all the little habits that we have.
We manipulate an object that was designed for one purpose
and we use it for some other purpose.
We just habituated this.
We see someone else do it and we learn it
and it just becomes part of how we behave in the world.
These are all acts of design.
If you think of what you do as an engineer or as a designer
or as a writer, there's some problem that you're dealing with.
You develop some kind of proposed solution
and then you go and build it.
That same cycle is what goes on for ordinary people,
lay people all the time.
Sometimes design doesn't work out that well.
Now, to be fair, all design involves trade-offs
and all engineering involves trade-offs
and many of the complaints that you get from your customers
or your users about some of the things that you build,
you know exactly why that trade-off was necessary.
And so the trade-off that was necessary here
is to provide all of you with the feature
of having power at your chair,
a certain trade-off was required.
Somehow that power has to make it to you.
Of course, I don't know exactly what the other options were
in terms of how big that conduit had to be
and the labeling is somewhat entertaining,
especially when people only notice the caution sign
after they've stumbled on something.
It's really kind of funny to watch.
But since we are here talking about user research,
I actually spent some time sitting in the corner
and I wanted to get some data to provide you with
about exactly how good or bad this design was.
So it turns out about 1 in 20 stumbled.
That rate doubled for people who weren't really paying attention,
which I didn't really feel so bad about.
But for the number of people here who actually are using power,
which I think is probably at least half of you,
50% of you, you could argue it's a reasonable trade-off.
For every one person who stumbles,
five people get power.
I mean, I don't know.
As long as it's not you, that kind of works out.
But anyway, I offer that as an example
of designers around us all the time
and people design things that we use.
We don't think of them as engineers.
We don't think of them as interaction designers.
We don't think of them as content creators.
But really, if you put that lens on,
you can see the world in a much more interesting way.
This can be dangerous for us
because we don't want to make it seem like it's easy
and trivial to do what we do,
but I'm going to get to why it's good for us too.
You also see in people's kitchens
and how people organize their space.
Anyone here who cooks knows how important it is.
You want to put things in the right place.
There's a French word for it,
mes en place, which is about organizing things
and prepping your kitchen so you can use it properly.
And if you go to different people's homes or houses,
you can see there's an infinite number of ways
people choose to design the environment
that they live and work in.
And that is a kind of design.
There's actually a book.
Some of the pictures that I've shown are from this book
by Jane Surrey, who's a researcher
and, I believe, a designer at IDEO.
And the book is called Thoughtless Acts,
and it's a collection of photographs
like the ones that I've shown you.
And it's a fantastic book.
It's really just a bunch of pictures.
There's not a lot of analysis or data,
but it's a reminder to anyone who makes stuff for a living,
which is all of you, about how we are all makers.
And if you do this professionally,
you are part of this larger community of people
who interact with the world and change it, hopefully,
for the better.
Now, the problem, the danger,
the thing that we hate is that when we deal with a client
who believes too heavily that they're a designer,
that they think that because they like the color blue
that everything should be blue,
or that they've heard a few phrases from Mad Men
or some TV show, that they use that phrase again and again
about wanting something that has more sizzle,
or, that's great, but can you make it pop?
And we all have these experiences with people
that were frustrated by their pretense
that they know what we do.
But that's a very negative way to look at
what is, I am hypothesizing,
is an inherent quality in our species.
We tend to design, all of us do it.
And if we are offended or upset every time
someone steps on our toes or hurts our ego
by pretending they can do what we do,
and we get angry about them, we get angry about it,
we are resistant to what is a natural instinct for all people.
There's a much better way to deal with people
in your world and in your workplace
when they infringe on your sensibility for your expertise.
So instead of saying, you know, this really sucks.
I got a client again, or my boss thinks he can do what I do.
Instead of looking at it that way,
there's a much more positive way to look at it,
which is, yes, they are a designer or an engineer.
They're just really, really bad.
They're horrible at it.
But they are, in fact, doing design.
It's just really bad.
If you flip into that worldview,
you allow yourself to see people,
your coworkers and your clients and your boss
from that perspective.
That gives you a very powerful opportunity
that instead of being an elitist,
instead of being the person who's the crankiest person in the room
who always seems offended by everything,
it empowers you to become a leader.
If you're now willing to explain to them what they don't understand,
you're willing to pull them aside and explain to them
that the color blue, simply because they like it,
doesn't define an aesthetic.
It doesn't define an aesthetic for the goals of a particular project.
Or a thousand little things that annoy you.
Instead of seeing that as a negative,
it is a positive.
And that your job as a creator,
as someone who's a master at working with ideas,
is to help other people get better at working with ideas.
If you see it that way,
now you become a leader in the kind of change
and creating the kind of environment that you want around you.
If you do see the people you work with
as simply being bad or uninformed
at this particular craft,
the only way they're ever going to get better
is if you talk to them and teach them.
One of the challenges
that doesn't get talked about very much
in our industry
is that you guys are all very special.
The fact that you're here,
the fact that you're an engineer
or a writer or a designer
puts you in the minority of kinds of work
in the history of the universe.
You're empowered.
You have the power to go and make stuff.
Lots of people, the majority of people who've ever worked
in the history of our species haven't had that power.
The downside of having that power
is that you will almost always be in the minority.
You will almost always be working with people
who don't have as much experience creating things as you do.
And you can complain about that, which many of us like to do.
Often events like this
end up feeling a little bit like support groups
where you all get together and share the same complaints
and just talk about this power in that
that you realize you're not alone in your feeling.
But it's not productive power
and it doesn't change anything.
I'm offering to you, change your world view of those things.
If you allow, if you accept the possibility that everyone's a designer
and the only way these people are going to be less sucky designers
or less sucky engineers or less sucky writers
is if you teach them, now you're in charge.
Now you see them differently and it's an opportunity
that you can take advantage of.
Second dangerous idea I have for you is about the word power.
Over my career, I've had many different roles.
I've worked as a usability engineer.
I've worked as an interaction designer.
But I spent most of my career working as a team lead.
I managed teams of people.
And the main reason for that change
wasn't because I was frustrated with design
or frustrated with doing user research.
I like doing those things.
The main complaint that I had, the problem I had
is I spent a lot of time basically giving advice to people
who could then choose to accept it or reject it.
And I felt that why am I on this sideline, so to speak,
giving something to someone else
who's going to make a decision about the design
or about the engineering?
Why am I in an advisory role?
I want to be the decision maker about these things that affect design.
And so I changed into a role where I recognized
in the environment that I worked in,
that was how I had actual power over how things were built.
And that's what I cared about.
I wanted to have an impact on how things were actually built.
So there's a little exercise that you can do in your workplace,
in your world, to think about what is it you really have power over.
And there's a spectrum that I like to think of
in the whole realm of ideas.
And on one end of the spectrum, the most powerful creative person
is what we would call an artist.
An artist gets up in the morning or in the afternoon
or the evening, and they go to the canvas and they paint.
And they put whatever they want on the canvas.
They buy whatever paints they can afford,
but they go to the canvas, they put whatever they want.
They can erase it whenever they want.
They can start over whenever they want.
They can call it done whenever they want.
That is an artist.
That is someone who is in complete control of the thing they are making.
You don't have to answer to anyone.
There's no debates. There's no stakeholders. There's no committees.
It's just them. That's an artist.
Somewhere in the middle is a designer or an engineer
or some set of decisions that are made for you
by your boss or by your client.
There's some set of decisions that affect the design,
sometimes in very significant ways, that are made by someone else,
and then there's some subset that you get to make.
And depending on where you work, that's a bigger or smaller pile.
And then you can go further along into the less and less powerful,
the advisory role, which is sort of how I describe being a user researcher,
that you put together some analysis, you write up a report,
you offer it to someone else.
And they decide how much of it they're going to follow or not.
You make recommendations. That's your output.
And, of course, on the total end is just being a lackey,
someone who goes around and gets coffee,
or, you know, schedules, meetings for people, I don't know.
Somewhere in there is you.
And you have to decide for yourself the complaints that you have
about the quality of work that you make.
Would you feel, would you be able to remedy those problems
if you moved somewhere else on that spectrum?
And I think in many cases the answer is yes.
Many cases the answer is yes.
If you're always complaining, I don't have enough budget,
who decides the budget?
There's a person whose job it is to decide the budget.
If you want to have more choice over the clients you pick,
someone has that job.
It's probably not someone in a specialized creative role.
I think if you, you can visualize this in a bunch of different ways.
This is one way to visualize you.
You can imagine the big circle is all the decisions that go on
on a project, and the little circle is the one
that you know you have complete control over.
And for many creatives and many engineers,
relative to the totality of a project,
that circle is really small.
One side effect of working in an environment where you feel
you have a small degree of influence,
a small degree of control, is you tend, we tend to defend it.
We tend to get very defensive about it.
And we reject people who criticize us or who don't understand us.
We hunker down and become very defensive
about the limited territory that we have.
If we want to have more impact and more influence
on the quality of the ideas that have our name on them
that go out the door, that's not going to work.
Having a small degree of influence and control
and protecting it doesn't make things any better.
It just keeps what you have intact.
As a designer, I offer from the beginning
a few examples of real-world design.
Design that's not about websites and CSS
and actual design in the real world.
And fans of those examples, because people who design stuff
in the real world deal with much more challenging constraints
than we do.
Much more challenging constraints.
And I find it's fascinating to be a voyager
into other kinds of designs.
And I'm going to take you on a short little voyage
to a kind of design that's just called,
I guess you should call it military history.
I love thinking about designing for military
because unlike, sometimes we take ourselves so seriously
that somehow we believe people's lives are at stake
because of the navigation structure we put together.
We're so worried about it.
There are kinds of designs where people's lives are literally at stake.
If you designed a sword or a tank or a fort,
your actually decisions you make will affect
whether certain people will live or die.
So my story I want to tell you is about a trip I took recently
to Israel.
And I managed to go to Masada,
which is what you see a picture of here.
It's a fortification that was built 2,000 years ago
on the top of a cliff face.
And it was a fortification that was the retreat
when there was a big war between the Jews of Israel at the time
and the Romans and the Romans burned down Jerusalem.
Some of the Jews fled, they went up to the top of Masada,
and it was this hideout.
And it had been engineered and built to be a hideout.
It was like the first rate, first class hideout.
It had all these walls, these layers of walls
so even if someone managed to sneak up to the top somehow,
there were two layers of walls people could shoot stuff down at.
You can see in this picture in the background,
that's the Dead Sea and behind it are the mountains of Jordan.
They had these systems of, you can imagine,
if ever you fortified yourself in your office
and didn't want to talk to anyone for a while,
you know that you need supplies, right?
You need water or whiskey or potato chips,
whatever your supply of choice is, it's all fine.
But if you're going to hunker down and protect yourself,
that's what you need.
So Herod, who was the architect who designed this whole building,
had this huge system of cisterns
that all the rainwater and runoff water from all the areas around
would drain into these huge vats of water
so that they would have water for as long as they needed to.
And you can see in this picture for scale,
the woman standing down there on the right,
that's actually my wife.
She's about five feet tall.
She's not two inches tall, she's about five feet tall.
So the thing is about 80 feet high.
This enormously amazingly engineered,
the best bunker built in the history of engineering.
This is probably a candidate for that.
The problem, though, with bunkering down,
this metaphor is going to come back around to us and design,
I promise, the problem with hunkering down and bunkering down
is it means you are no longer mobile.
You become fixed in your thinking.
In this case, in the physical case,
you become fixed in your location.
But if you decide where your turf is,
I'm not going to answer these questions.
I'm only going to do this.
I'm not going to talk about aesthetics with these people.
I'm only going to do that.
When you hunker down philosophically and with ideas,
it means there's a whole bunch of questions
you're never allowing yourself to ask again.
What happened in this case at the top of Masada,
because they were hunkered down in their mobile,
the Romans eventually found out where they were
and built this huge fence all the way around Masada,
six foot high fence.
And they made it so no one could get in or out.
And then they decided you could see
there's this rectangular thing on the right,
this rectangular area on the right.
The Romans built this huge encampment
and they decided they were going to build a wall,
build this embankment to climb up to the top of Masada
and break through.
And you can imagine what it must have been like
to stand at the top of this huge fortification
that you'd spent years and years building.
And you're looking down at this thing,
you think it's this fantastic fortification,
one of the best ever built.
And watch slowly as this tower gets built
that you know you can't escape from
because you have nowhere to go.
So I tell you this long story about my trip
because if you have very little territory,
if you feel unempowered,
you feel you're always on the defensive,
building those walls and those fortifications
doesn't really help you at all
towards the larger goals you probably have.
The philosophical goals you have,
the passionate goals you have,
about all these ideas you have in your mind
that you want to express through your work.
Bunkering down will not help you.
It will protect what you have, but it limits you as well.
There are other things that we do that I think limit us,
that these habits that we fall into.
Because we're in an industry
and many of us are in roles that are in the minority
and the organizations that we work for,
we built up these little passive-aggressive,
self-defensive habits.
And this includes the language that we use.
There's lots of language that we use
that doesn't really help us very much.
So I travel a lot.
I'm invited into organizations and companies
to talk to them about or listen
about how they work with ideas,
figure out creative processes,
how people can get companies to get better work
to go out of the door.
And one of the first things I listen to
is how actual project teams talk to each other.
What language do they share with each other?
And I find almost all the time,
the more jargon that's being used,
the lower the quality that project team will produce.
When good teams are working together,
passionate, smart people who like each other work together,
all the pretense drops away.
People are focused instead on words like
problem and solution and prototype and experiment.
It's focused on the work.
And jargon is never focused on the work.
Jargon is almost always focused on the person
speaking, trying to sound smart.
Or trying to blindside you into something
by using words that they know you don't know
and they know you're afraid to ask what they mean.
So I have this little phrase that I like to say
whenever I'm in a room and there's lots of jargon.
Whoever's using the most jargon
actually has the least confidence in their ideas.
If you really believe in your ideas,
you wouldn't need any jargon.
You talk about the problem, you talk about the customer,
you show your design, that's all that you need.
You don't need any of that other stuff.
I think jargon is also an attempt,
it's often something done by people
who feel like they have a little power,
they need to control the vocabulary
in order to feel like they own something.
That's a very weak thing to own,
because words are cheap, words are free,
I'm a writer, I know this.
I can use any word I want from the entire dictionary,
same price, it's all free.
I can use any word I want, I can make up words,
all free, it doesn't make me any smarter,
it doesn't make my ideas any better.
It's purely a kind of intimidation.
It's a kind of intimidation that people
who are not that confident in what they actually have to say
often end up using.
I'm systematic and consulting agencies
or consulting firms build it
into their culture that these are the preferred
words to use.
I think that's poisonous to people
who care deeply about ideas, because it's a distraction
and it's an unfair tactic
if you care about merit,
rather than force.
The last thing I want to say about power
is that there's three different notions
of power to think about.
There's actually entire books
on management about these things
and I don't think that their
concept is that complicated
but it's useful to think about these three different kinds.
The most common kind of power
is power that's granted, and that means
that someone who already has power
says this person's going to be the team manager.
It's been granted to them
by the virtue of their job title, they have power.
Even if they're not very good at their job,
even if no one really likes working with them,
people still have to listen to them
because they have granted power.
We all of us know a project manager
or a boss that we have worked with
or for that we didn't think was that competent
but we worked with them anyway
and we listened to them anyway
because they had granted power.
Second kind of power is earned power.
Power that's been earned.
Think of someone you worked with, a co-worker,
you didn't know them at all, so you just treated them like
well, I don't know you, so we'll work together
and as you work with them, their ideas
were consistently good, they were good collaborators,
they built up your respect and your trust.
Now the next time it was a difficult situation,
no one knows what the right answer is
and they offered a suggestion,
they have power in that situation
because they have earned it.
They've earned it by their reputation and by their work.
That's earned power.
In good organizations, the people who have granted power
are also people who have earned it
but it's not necessarily true.
So in some situations, the person who's
the most highest ranking person in the room
could actually have very little earned trust,
earned power from the team
and someone who's actually
very low, an individual developer, an individual designer
who has the most trust
actually has the most power in the room.
The last thing I want to say about power
is claiming power
and this is the more Machiavellian part
of my presentation.
So claiming power, that sounds really subversive.
Like when no one's looking,
you're going to knock someone on the head
and take their seat or something
and that's not what I mean.
I think that there's power
that all of you have
that's available to you
but you have to claim it.
And the anecdote that I can share about this
is about whiteboards.
How many of you work in an environment
where there's whiteboards in most offices, most rooms?
Almost all of you, okay.
The whiteboard industry seems to be thriving
and well in Boston. That's fantastic.
Buy stock in a whiteboard company.
The thing about whiteboards,
this is something I've noticed as a traveler,
someone who's in many meetings
and many different companies where creativity
or ideas are being discussed and developed
is that there's often a great deal of fear
about who will go to the whiteboard first.
The people who are probably most qualified
to go to the whiteboard first
is you guys.
If you go to the whiteboard first,
I'm giving away one of my tricks here,
if you go to the whiteboard first,
you instantly gain power.
If we're in a discussion, we're brainstorming
to build something, and I go to the whiteboard first
and I've heard you say something
and I go to the whiteboard and go,
do you mean this or do you mean this?
I have now changed the conversation
from being abstract
and verbal to being
specific and visual.
That's powerful.
We are visual creatures.
We are all visual creatures.
Even people who don't like to look at pictures,
even people who only read books,
they only want to read, read, read text, text, text.
We're based on visual
perception.
So if you put yourself in, you claim that role,
which any of you who are designers
and even many of you who are engineers,
you might not even be great at drawing things,
but you're good at conveying ideas visually.
If you put yourself in that role,
you instantly gain a certain kind of credibility
and you change the quality of the conversation
in the room.
Now, I've seen many whiteboards
in many different workplaces.
I've seen the ones that are sprayed on the walls.
There are many kinds of things.
I've yet to see a sign above them
that says you have to be of a certain rank
to go to the whiteboard first.
So that power is available to you.
If you want to use your power with ideas,
your ability to create and think about ideas
for the better,
then become that facilitator in the room.
Not just to draw your own ideas,
but to help other people and visualize
and express the conversation.
You can change the conversation for the better.
There's no one else who's going to do that.
It's going to be you guys.
So if you guys sit there and you're thinking,
oh, I totally know what he's talking about,
but he's not explaining it very well.
Stand up and do something about it.
If you don't do that,
then there's no one else probably in the room who can.
There's probably no one else in the room
who's even thinking that thought.
So my third dangerous idea for you,
scary idea,
has to do with
specialization
and generalization.
If you look at
any person,
any function, any job role,
with a specific expertise,
I make widgets. I'm a widget maker.
That's what I do.
If you look above them, or in this example,
you look broader than them,
at some point you can go one level up
and maybe you have the lead widget maker,
the team manager for the widget maker,
also specialized,
specializations.
At some point you go up to a person
who's not a specialist anymore.
This kind of jargon or parlance,
that's the generalist.
That's the person where all the specializations now line up.
Every designer, every engineer,
every writer, they all report into one person.
That's the general manager,
that's the generalist role.
That's the person who has a lot of power
over what makes for
a lot of power over engineering decisions
and design decisions
that are not specifically called those things.
Budget, schedule, timeline,
direction, vision,
those are all things set by someone
who's in a generalist role.
A lot of what ends up going on
for people who are in specialized roles,
so a lot of my career was spent in a generalist role.
I managed teams of people
with very diverse disciplines
and I was the unification point of all those things.
When I worked as a specialist,
I used to have all this pressure
and this sense of urgency
to go on in big meetings.
Five people, ten people, twelve people.
A lot of discussions where all the specials
are in a room, we're all arguing over
which to go this way, which to go that way.
I used to feel a lot of pressure about what was happening there.
I would feel that
if I didn't speak up and represent my discipline,
my discipline, my role, my perspective,
it would not get heard.
When I became a generalist,
I learned there's a whole other layer
of what goes on that has nothing to do
with those meetings.
The notion of a meeting itself
is a very powerful misrepresentation
of how decisions are made in most organizations.
Not all organizations,
but most of them.
There's this notion about rooms
and this division of influence.
In-room, power,
and out-of-room power.
In-room power,
if you're in a debate,
in a discussion, are we going to go
with this design direction or this design direction
and you're in the room
and you're a high-ranking person
or you have a lot of influence and you speak up,
that's in-room power.
If you can effectively convey an idea
to 10 people at once
or fight for a point of view with that many people around,
that's in-room power.
It means your skills at rhetoric and debate
and persuasion with large groups of people
or medium-sized groups of people is good.
That's in-room power.
Out-of-room power,
which seems less important
in many organizations,
but it's important in this.
If I'm sitting in a meeting
with this bunch of people here
and this guy is actually the head boss,
what's your name?
Sorry?
Paro.
And he's in charge
and there's a meeting, there's a big debate
and the three of us are disagreeing
in which direction to go
and out of the meeting, when the meeting is over,
I catch him in the hallway
or ask him for coffee
and make the decision whenever he wants.
And what happened in the meeting
is not entirely a pretense,
but it's a very different context.
From social psychology and behavioral psychology,
we all know that people behave differently
depending on who is around.
If he's in a meeting and he's the powerful decision-maker
and there's 10 people in the room,
10 people who work for him,
10 people who complain to him about certain things,
when he's in that room he has the pressure
of all those contexts at the same time.
It's a very difficult situation
and there's nothing.
If I catch him privately, I catch him alone,
I catch him in a different context, if that's formal,
if there's just two of us in a room,
we can speak more frankly.
My power and influence is much greater.
I'm not competing with anyone anymore.
So in-room power and out-of-room power,
this is something I didn't really discover
until I became the person
who actually had that much influence.
As an individual, I always thought the battle
was in the meeting, I had to prep for the meeting,
I had to bring handouts to them,
I had to be realistic and I learned
that the opposite is actually true.
And related to this,
and coming back to
all three of these things,
about being the ambassador
for good ideas, about power
and about generous roles,
is asking the question,
for your own ideas,
how much of your own energy
are you willing to put behind them?
Because you could argue,
in the meeting, I'm going to say what I think is right.
If my boss doesn't go for it
and the client doesn't go for it,
not my problem.
Not my problem.
I spoke up.
I'll just complain for the rest of the project
that they didn't do what I wanted.
Which we do all the time, right?
That's kind of a hobby for us.
The question then becomes,
when in your career are you going to decide
that that's not enough,
that your sense
of the value of your own idea
is significant enough
that you are willing to do more than that?
Now, I am not saying
there's plenty of clients
and bosses that putting in that much of yourself
is not warranted.
I totally grant you that.
But in your career,
in your job,
there has to be some percentage of times
when it is warranted
and only you are going to be able to figure that out.
So the question to ask yourself then,
when was the last time
that you were that guy who,
after the meeting, you went down to the client and said,
hey, can I talk to you?
Can I get coffee with you? Can I call you later?
Talk to you more about the pitch I made?
Can I follow up with you?
There has to be some percentage of the time.
If you're not willing to do that for your own ideas,
you as the creator,
you as the maker,
you're not willing to do that for your own ideas,
then it's kind of crazy to expect anyone else
to do that for your ideas either.
Just stand up and be accountable
and be truly passionate.
Match the passion you have for your ideas
with action in the world.
That's a very dangerous idea
because we're all very, very passionate.
But how do we manifest that passion
proactively or pragmatically
in our work environment?
That's a very different thing.
That's a very scary thing.
And my fourth point for you
has to do with
framing
the problem differently.
And
a lot of my early work experience,
sales was taken care of.
There was a sales team, there was a different group.
My job was just to manage,
to come up with ideas and develop them and ship them,
manage other people who were doing the same thing.
So sales was just this other, this foreign entity.
Stuff sold, but I just thought
because our ideas are so awesome,
that's why everything sells.
Sales people, it's easy.
They don't have to do very much work.
So I didn't have a very high opinion of sales.
I'd never really worked, I'd done telemarketing,
a horrible telemarketing experience when I was like 15.
I'd never really thought of sales as something
that I needed to do or know much about.
But then, I had this other experience
years ago
where I was on vacation, I was on the beach
and I was watching, you know,
you've been to the beach and you see there are these vendors
who walk around from person to person selling
chachis, little necklaces, little things.
And I remember watching them and thinking about,
you know, like this guy,
this is what he's doing.
This is his job, his role
as he's created it or defined it.
And most of his job is rejection.
He's going from person to person
trying to sell something
and mostly getting rejected.
And as I watched this person do this,
I had this other, this connect,
this, this, this,
it connected me to my own feelings
about working with ideas.
And what I know about the history
of people who've worked with ideas,
writers and musicians and artists
and designers and developers,
that if your ideas are good,
even if your ideas are good,
you're going to spend a lot of time pitching to people
and getting rejected.
Just an unavoidable part of the process.
And I thought about all the things that I had to do
for my team or for my own ideas
and I think about it now, so primarily now
I'm a writer, I write books,
I write articles for magazines
and I've been successful.
People assume because I've been successful,
if I have an idea for a magazine article,
I can just call up someone at Forbes and go,
I got another one for you, are you ready?
And I just send it to them and they publish it.
And my book publisher, I can just,
hey, I got another book, here it is.
No, I have to pitch.
Every movie you see, every TV show you watch,
everything has been pitched
dozens or if not hundreds of times
by that creator before that idea landed somewhere.
So it's worth thinking about the fact
that everyone has to pitch ideas
and a lot of what you do as a maker,
as someone who works with ideas,
is not only develop things and build things
but convince other people of the value,
the potential value of an idea
you have for something to be built.
So you can look at a lot of the tasks that we do
from prototyping things
to pitching ideas
in the formal sense of pitching
to evangelizing,
to asking for more resources for something,
asking for more schedule.
Pitches, these are all attempts
to ask for something you don't have.
In fact, what I am doing right now is a kind of pitching.
I'm trying to convince you guys
of the value of the things I'm saying.
So I'm doing a pitch about pitching
within a pitch, very meta.
If you don't see sales as a pejorative,
if you realize it's a central theme
in your work,
it shows up again and again
in all the little tasks,
all the little things you need to have happen
is to get manifested.
It now becomes a potential asset.
It becomes
the reason why one person
may be successful with their ideas
is not even because of the quality of their ideas,
but their ability to be persuasive.
They will need to convey their passion,
their willingness to show up
and pitch and pitch and pitch
and learn from those pitches.
Ask, well, you didn't accept what I said,
I accept that.
What could I have done differently in my pitch?
What did you need me to say or talk about
that might have convinced you?
If you see it now as a core part of what you do,
your attitude about it is very different.
And I guess I am pitching you
on the unavoidable
aspect of
persuasion
and trying to develop certain kinds of charisma,
not necessarily physical charisma,
but charisma about how you describe your ideas
so that other people resonate with them.
Instead of just being surprised
and offended when people don't understand
that you see it and ideas being so important.
There was a
design management institute event
that I attended where
design manager
Samantha at REI was talking about
this core skill that she cares about
which is talking to people she doesn't like.
That a lot of the key roles she needs support from
to get her ideas through the
organization or out to clients
depends on talking to people she doesn't like.
Someone in accounting because there's a budget issue.
Someone in engineering
because there's something they want to build
they don't know how to do that yet.
Someone in marketing because in order for this idea to work
they need PR support for it.
Talking to people you don't like
and this sounds like a really strange
and odd thing to call out.
But most of us
who are engineers and builders
we pursued our careers largely
to avoid other people.
We spend all of our
time staring at screens.
That's weird.
The grand scheme of a species
to spend as much time as possible
not looking at each other
it's a little bit odd.
Now it's wonderful, it's very empowering
but it's a little bit odd.
I think there's definitely something in us about
the kind of interactions
that we like
and our choices we make
trying to avoid situations that make us uncomfortable.
Sometimes the best possible way
the most important thing you can do
to develop an idea
to improve the chances of an idea you really care about
will manifest itself in the world
is to get the support of someone
you really don't like talking to.
Sometimes that's the reality of it
and the thing that I learned over my career was
the more powerful I became
the more important I became
the more time I ended up having to spend
with people I didn't like.
I don't know why that is
maybe it's people who are rat racers
and ladder climbers
or just more difficult people to deal with
or they're less pleasant to be around
but my experience was
as I became a general manager
of large groups of people
my job became more and more about making sure
those relationships and those interactions
were actually functional and healthy
so the people working for me
the designers and developers and writers and engineers
they could have a clean landscape of cooperation
inside the organization
or with clients or with other groups
and they could say
last I want to say on this
has to do with job titles
and
I'm fascinated by language
I've talked about jargon before
and I've mentioned that I've been in this industry
for a long time
and there's this fascinating anthropological
sociological study you can do
with the job titles that we've had in our career
and how the
the factionalism by which many of us
make very strong claims about
being an architect
I'm a content strategy specialist architect
designer, taxonomist
we have this long series
we like all those words in all those language
and I have to say that as a generalist
as someone who's a manager
I think that
people pay attention to your output
more than they do your label
that if I'm good
at getting stuff done
if I am someone who's effective
and I'm trying to work
with other people who are effective
I'll go to you no matter what your job title is
your job title becomes irrelevant
it's not as if the job title
is going to make me want to work with you
independent of your ability
so you do come across people
who
they believe
that's the way that they're going to achieve
what they want is simply by changing their job title
the job title
and the label that we give ourselves
that's where the power is it's external again
instead of just focusing on saying
hey I'm a developer, I'm a designer
I'm a writer, I don't need any more labeling
like that the verb for what I do
should be my label and everything else
will come out of producing good work
reliably for other people and being
available to share in the process
of trying to make good things
my last point for you has to do
with
the unavoidable nature of creativity
a lot of the work that I do
a lot of the writing that I do is about
idea development, not just idea generation
idea generation turns out to be pretty straightforward
but idea development, how do you take an idea
from something you think about in the shower
bring it to your group, develop it, propose it
prototype it, release it, that whole process
how do you maintain good ideas
how do you
in an organization or with clients
how do you
how do you get around the unavoidable challenge
of trying to bring new, bettered ideas
to people when human nature
is so focused and resistant
to change, we're so
heavily hinged on status quo
and this is an essential
unavoidable element to being creative
to being progressive
and that means that you will always
be facing some kind of resistance
no matter how good your idea is
no matter how awesome your reputation is
if you are pushing things forward
you will face resistance
I'm a fan of architecture
for the same reason I'm a fan of
historic warfare related things
and then I find that the
design of these things has so many constraints
that we don't have to deal with
and I find that empowering
so architecture unlike the work that most of us do
these are decisions made with
permanence in mind
if you're going to build a museum
or a fort or a monument
part of the specification is
this will last for
hundreds of years
our constraints never
go anywhere near that
we bet on the fact that we know
the things we make will be thrown away
but if you had to make a decision
a design decision, an engineering decision
for a hundred years
you'd have to think about it really hard
and if your clients know and they're paying you
to make something that's going to last that long
they're going to think about it really hard too
so those sets of constraints
and challenges interest me
so I'm always looking for buildings
and works of architecture
that were challenging in some way
and then I can go to those places
and walk around and get inspiration
from trying to figure out and think about
how the people, the designers, the builders
how they convinced their client to do these things
how they convinced themselves
that they were certain about the approach they took
so here in Boston there's a building
the Institute of Contemporary Art picture is shown here
that's a really unusual building
there's a bunch of odd things about this forum museum
one of the things
that struck me about the building
is how many of you have been
to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City
nine of you, ah, very good
you guys are cultured
that's awesome
so that's the definition of culture I guess
the Guggenheim, you've been to the Guggenheim
so the problem with the Guggenheim
is that there's several problems with the Guggenheim
but most museums are very boring buildings
they tend to be boring because the whole idea
is to create a vessel to put art in
and most art will look best
in rectilinear shapes
so the walls are always, they're usually white
they're painted a flat white color
and that means you can hang things on them
art can be of different shapes
but it's a blank canvas, if you will, for art
but in this building
they made a bunch of unusual choices with angles
there's lots of rooms that are angled
so the problem with the Guggenheim
it's a circular building
so if ever you've been to the Guggenheim
a lot of the art there doesn't really look quite right
because if you put a canvas
on a curved wall
when you walk up to it, your whole frame of reference
is very different than what the artist intended
so many artists actually complain about this
and they don't want to be shown in the spiral part of the building
they want to be shown in the separate
that's actually a part of the building that's not true for
anyway, after this is an example
you guys are in Boston, many of you are not from here
many of you are from here
and have no interest in architecture
but maybe I've piqued your interest
in ways to go into buildings and use that
as an inspiration for thinking about
the challenges that you should be taking on in your own work
and
to drive the point home
if someone could convince
a city
and the very wealthy people
who are putting lots of money into the design
into the building, this building for them
if the designer, the engineer could convince them
on the concept
of having these angular lines
for an art building
they could convince them to do that
what is it that you should be convincing your client to do
or your boss to do
or your co-worker to do
what interesting pitch or challenging pitch
really ballsy pitch have you made
in the last month
or six months
or a year
I mean it's one thing to get turned down for a pitch
but you never even offer the pitch
well whose problem is that
you can't blame the person
for saying no if they never had the opportunity
to say yes
so the last note I want to close on
is a
thing about what it means to be creators
what it means to be makers and designers
and builders
there's only a certain amount of things that
there's a certain set of questions
a certain set of
calls to action that only we are
responsible for
we really shouldn't depend on other people to do these things for us
someone has to ask a tough question
someone has to be willing to put their neck out
for an idea
someone has to do that
someone has to be the champion for creativity
and for pushing beyond the status quo
and my call to you guys
the most dangerous idea that I have
is that's you
if you feel outnumbered
you feel like you're on Masada
you're the only person there
fortifying yourself and building up more walls
is not going to get you the environment that you want
it's not going to allow you to achieve the kind of work that you want
to put yourself behind those ideas
and see what happens
and allow yourself to recognize the persuasion
and these other skills that aren't traditionally
thought of as building
not traditionally thought of as creative
those are central to your ability
to get the ideas you do have manifested
in the world
so those are my photo credits
and I want to thank you for paying attention
and listening, thank you
thank you very much
do I have time for Q&A?
yes?
okay, so I challenged you guys
to be considered dangerous ideas
so I'm happy to answer any question
however dangerous it might be
yes
at what age can you start this?
I mean I've got kids in high school
how far back do you push this?
when can this start?
how do you instill the sort of power
of ideas in little kids
and do you see that happening?
I think during pregnancy we start
you got to start right from the beginning
the best answer to that question
is to invert the question
I think the kids have this down pat
they just make stuff
they just do
it's kind of inspiring
in a way that you can see
I mentioned earlier on that we're all designers
you watch kids, they're all creators
they're sloppy and messy, they make weird stuff
but they're making
and somewhere along the way
it's a combination I think
of our education system
it's a combination of our culture
it's a combination of what we value
once we become adults
wanting to become professionals, wanting to fit in
wanting to get good grades
and whenever I'm asked to go somewhere
and help a group be more creative
help them work with ideas in a better way
a lot of it is reminding people
they used to do this stuff instinctively
and getting them back into modes of play
where it's okay to do play at work
now you guys are in a different territory
you guys do creative work all the time
you guys are not in the average
you guys are well above the average
in terms of your own capacity
for developing ideas because that's what you do
so to answer your question
I don't think of working the other way
I think the kids have it right
children have it right
what should we be doing to protect that
as they move into professional roles
as we're pressuring them to get good grades
getting good grades is not creative
that's usually trying to figure out
what the right specific answer is
there's nothing creative about that
knowing the date the revolutionary war started
there's nothing creative about that
it's a singular answer
so how do we protect that
from achievement
yes in the back
it's coming
the mic's coming
awkward silence
awkward silence
how do you transform a culture
that's driven by consensus
for decision making
how do you transform a culture
that's driven by consensus
you stage a coup
yeah
so you go in late at night
and you change everyone's locks
except for the people in your faction
and then you take over
and close the doors
go up on top like Masada
and throw stuff down on people and they show up
culture change is very difficult
and there's lots of books
and consultants that offer
oh just do this it's very very hard
think about trying to change the culture in your family
like wow
that would be almost impossible
because that's so deeply rooted in how people
identify themselves how your mom
or your dad or your grandfather
I think what I would do
if I was in a culture that was
committee driven or consensus driven
I would have to ask for a project
it could be very small
but ask for a project where I was allowed
to run things differently
a small project
give me a month, give me these two developers
we're going to run this project
but I want to do an experiment
I'm not going to report to the committee
that usually I'd have to answer to
give me a month, let me show you the results
I'll go and do that
if I go and do that and come back
with results that even the committee agrees
is superior
I now have my argument for why
projects should be managed differently
but what I offered
in there
echoes back to one of the points that I mean
I have to put myself at risk to do that
I have to say I am willing to manage a project
in a different way
and if it doesn't go well
I'm going to be accountable for not going well
someone has to be willing to take that kind of risk
culture change will then happen because people go
wait, how did the team Scott manage
how did he do such a great job
oh they didn't have to report to us
now there's a proposal the committee can look at
and decide
someone else in the committee said you know what
I want to manage my project the way Scott did
and now all of a sudden you have
at least a small
they're all bought into working differently
and you grow it it's organic and you grow it
but it starts with someone
being willing to take a risk
and it's unlikely to be the people in power
with the status quo set up
yes
before you start now
about everyone
did you say as an example
of
people who are not very good designers
do you think
that they're better designers than us
but what about people who are general
who in fact are
designers maybe not very graphic
but are good designers
but when you look at the designers
product on the larger level
how does the designers
recognize
how does the designers
design their own
wow okay
I'll repeat the question
as opposed to being threatened
by an ordinary designer
okay so the question was
how do designers recognize
this is probably true for engineers too
but how do designers recognize
higher levels of design than their own
meaning
you can think of designing a team
as organizational design
so I want to think about the different roles
the different way they're going to fit together
it is a kind of design
it's not interaction design
it's a kind of design and not feel threatened by them
I think that it all comes down
to something that sounds very trivial
which is trust
if I work with you
and you have a different view of the world than I do
and you have different skills than I have
and I see the value of them
there's two instinctive responses I can have
just biologically
I can feel threatened by you
you're going to take power away from me
I might lose my job because of your skills
or I can feel empowered by it
wow you have a value you can add
that I couldn't it's going to make my ideas
and your ideas better so the result that we produce
is improved
the difference that flips the bit there
how much do I trust you
if I don't know you I probably don't trust you
if I've been beaten up in other organizations
with people taking away authority from me
I have a back story I'm not going to trust you
so the job then is
who's our boss how are they creating an environment
that us with our diverse skill sets
that could seem to threaten each other
how are they setting this up to feel trust instead
trust is a
it's a five letter word it's very simple
we are very bad in general
in organizations with clients
at figuring out how to build trust
how to protect it how to maintain it
how to repair it very bad
I think that's a fundamental skill that we all should be learning
that's my answer it's about trust
and whoever is the most senior person in the room
they have the most responsibility
for creating an environment that's trustworthy
so if ever I walk in the door of a project team
where I can tell people don't trust each other
I look around a room and figure who is in charge
this is their fault
it's probably because they don't trust people
that's why people don't trust each other
I have time Ava for one more question
I saw more hands before
maybe I've scared them off you got it
okay
so what is your strategy
when you are pitching an idea
to multiple stakeholders
and
they themselves have
opposing
opinions
between the stakeholders
okay
so strategy for pitching to multiple stakeholders
there's a set of
things I can think about
the first is that
momentum is powerful among
groups and committees
so if I know there's five stakeholders
the first thing I think about
is who do I have the best relationship with already
if I can
if before I go
if I pitch you
and you're my first pitch and I don't have any
I can't say that your peers have already supported me
that's the hardest pitch to do
the easiest pitch to do is if I come to you
say the four other stakeholders are already on board
you're the last
I'm not gonna threaten you that way
but if I can come to you
and say I've already earned the credibility
of people like you
and they're behind this
that changes the pitch before you even said the idea
so I'm gonna think of the five
who do I have the best rapport with
they might not even have the most power
they might be the least influential
but getting their buy-in first
makes going to the second person a lot easier
that's the first thing I would do
the second thing is I might
I might try to do some kind of analysis
like
this is very analytical but I would go through
245 and go through all the criteria
that they have and try to find where the overlaps
where's the sweet spot
I think they're all gonna agree on these three constraints
and I know that this one's gonna agree
I wanna have some analytical
landscape and that may change what I do next
I'm looking for a way that I can kill two birds
or three birds with one stone and figure out
where the that may even change the idea that I pitch
if I realize that they're all gonna line up
on this and they're not gonna go for that
that might even simplify my idea in a bunch of ways
well thank you for listening
and I hope you think of other dangerous ideas
thank you
