Female voice
You’re listening to a Design Council podcast. For more podcasts, visit www.designcouncil.org.uk
Mat Hunter
So, to pick up where Ralph left off, be polite. Hello. So, my name’s Mat. So there are two protagonists in this story, one is me, and the other is the company I work for, and the reason why I include both is because I think we’re both trying to be design leaders. I’m trying to be a design leader within IDEO and out into the world, and IDEO as an organisation is really trying to be a leader of the design industry out in the world.
So, IDEO has always been a design leader, I mean even…it was formed actually from groups of companies that started about 30 years ago, but it wasn’t actually until about 17 years ago that it was formed. And it was formed for this reason; here was the apple mouse that was designed by the companies, before they formed to join IDEO. And on the left we’ve got the work of industrial designers, what will it look like and feel like, and on the right we’ve got the issues of how will it work, and is it manufacturable?
The thing about the apple mouse, which was so groundbreaking here, was that really this was a prototype that lived in the research laboratories of Xerox Park in California. The mouse there was for the star interface, that became the Macintosh interface in 1983, 1984, cost about £1,000 or £2,000. So here we had engineers making things manufacturable and less expensive, and industrial designs making them useful, Okay, to be a leader of an industry let’s push the two together, form one company, and call it Turnkey Product Development.
So there you had a company trying to lead within an industry; the sort of product development industry, and say, let’s merge, let’s make it easier for our clients to move forward. 17 years later we’re trying to be a leader in a very different sense. We’re very lucky to be associated in a very positive sense, with the word innovation, so there are a few accolades like this where apparently we’re the fifth most innovative company in the world, after Google, Apple, Facebook and GE. Well, make of it what you will. The point is that we’re trying to work in more industries than ever before.
Top right, aviation. Designing light jets, here we’re designing things for the American Red Cross, so health care, how will people donate more blood? Working with the centre for disease control in the US, how will we prevent teenage obesity? Working with the Acumen Fund here on water, we all know that a huge number of people around the world don’t have access to clean water. Or the more prosaic design in bank accounts for Bank of America.
So for us, what’s important here is we are trying to bring design thinking, and design skills, the way in which we approach the world, and what we do out into the real world; and that’s our definition of leadership. It’s not just being a leader within a particular kind of industry, working for design managers, but getting CEOs, Prime Ministers, Presidents, to take seriously the perspective that designers have, and for us this is the ultimate goal.
And than there’s me, and here’s me in 1994, just graduating from the RCA as an interaction designer, and in the background is the beginnings of my thesis work that I started while being the interaction design intern in IDEOs San Francisco office. So the following year I joined IDEO, in 1995, and 13 years later here’s the inaugural group of IDEO partners. I’ll talk a little bit more about what this group is about, but really the challenge I now have is to work with these people to make this organisation even more extraordinarily successful, and even more sustainable for the next, I don’t know, 10, 20, 30 years. For me that’s one hell of a challenge of design leadership.
And the final bit of background is just to say a little bit about my career path through IDEO, because I think it’s fairly typical. You start off by being a designer, here’s what I know how to do. Now being from the RCA, I was quite opinionated, so I’d always be saying, ‘here’s the way we should be dealing with interaction design.’ So after a few years of doing that they say, ‘okay, fine, if you’re so opinionated why you don’t you really try and be a thought leader for this particular discipline, and move forward this body of thought, beyond just working on projects.’ And if you do that for long enough, of course, you’re engaging with people, because I have to engage with all the other interaction designers, I have to bring them along with me, so that teaches you, sort of, community people skills. And ultimately, at some point, you get asked to help run an office, which is now multiple disciplines, but you’ve built your people skills.
But you’re always thinking about it from a designer’s perspective. What is it to run a design community? And then eventually you get asked to run an office, or I was asked to run the London office, which for me is, again, leading a design community. But now you’re having to design the community, you’re hiring people, you’re shaping processes, but always being very designerly about it – and I’ll get back to that in a minute.
And then continuing to build business [unclear], how is it that you run a business? Well, you’ve got to understand the finance underneath it; you’ve got to understand really what is going on with clients, and ultimately, as a partner, really trying to design a design business for the long term. But all the way through it’s design and I’ll try and explain that through the six things I’d be thinking if I was you.
So, number one, how do I get taken seriously in the outside world? I learnt this the hard way becoming a student, being a student and graduating from Central St. Martins as an industrial designer, which is my first degree, in 1993. It was in the middle pretty much, of a recession, and frankly there weren’t many jobs, so I suddenly realised I wasn’t that relevant to the outside world. Luckily, on doing my Masters Degree, I found I was incredibly relevant to the outside world, because it was just at the cusp when the Internet was growing, and interaction designers were Gods, and we could go and work anywhere we liked.
But for me it’s been an exciting journey to keep…try and work out my relevance continually, I’m no longer really a full time interaction designer, so what am I? An evangelist for design thinking perhaps, you know, a thinker about innovation. What is it that I contribute to the outside world? How do I talk about it without using design as a word? And it’s interesting IDEO also has had to do this. If we’re to work beyond the design industry, actually some people in the outside world have design in a very small box, and if we want to expand the box we have to use different words. So we’ve had flak sometimes, as an organisation, for using words like innovation, and hardly ever mentioning design. But we care deeply about design, but we want to put design in a different context.
These days we want even to move the word innovation forward, because it’s a slightly flabby general process word. And really talk about what is the impact that you want to achieve in the world, for which you might require innovation. So, constantly trying to work out what your relevance is, we are always trying to help our designers, therefore, get out of the design industry, get out of where they think they are, and try and explain themselves to people who don’t really understand what design is.
Point number two; you are more than your stuff. So a really interesting evolution, we like to say, is portfolio, process, point of view. You actually need all three of these, but you start at the left and build right. So typically people start by saying, here’s the stuff I did and it builds credibility, sure, we used to have a lot of IDEO presentations that started with a slide. Not anymore actually. And it says, look at all the stuff I’ve done, but the conversation kind of stops there. And then sometimes you’d say, okay here’s all the stuff I’ve done, and I’ve got a really, sort of, wonderful process that will guarantee success in the future.
And this is interesting but this is still not really focussing on the end goal, the impact that I was talking on. For us, what’s really exciting is when people either will change design leaders, junior level will either experiment with process, which is really important, rather than feeling constrained by it. But ultimately you need to think beyond process, to what we call point of view. Again, having an opinion about the outside world, how will you know how to change the world if you don’t have an opinion about it? How will you know where to take a business into new parts of the world, unless you have an opinion about it? So sometimes it is process change, you know?
Here’s a book called Thoughtless Acts, which is by one of our senior thought leaders, and this is all about helping everyone, not just designers, look out into the world and empathise more with consumers. And here we have a little thought piece we created around youth attitudes towards ethical fashion. The interesting point being if you go and ask 16 or 17 year olds about whether or not they want to go and buy second hand clothes from a charity store they say, ‘ooh no that’s revolting.’ And you know what, when showing this to a charity store head of retail they said, I had no idea.
So this is how you begin to really seem impressive in the world, if you actually get beyond, here’s what I did previously, here’s the process [unclear] but actually say, I have a unique perspective in the world. You know, designer’s perspective is different from any others, here’s what I think about your business. It takes confidence to do this because, you know, it’s just your opinion based on a few interviews, perhaps, or other forms of evidence. But nevertheless it’s important.
Three, take your expertise seriously, and that of others. This comes back to some points that Ralph was making actually. Designers need credibility, sorry, design leaders need credibility, everyone needs credibility, and one of the hardest things as a leader is, as you sort of overlook more and more parts of a business and become more general, you can lose credibility with designers. And it’s important always we feel, to get stuck in at the coal face helping on projects, working with clients.
If you become a general manager which is too easy to do, you know, I oversee quite a large proportion of the business. If I flit between meetings just turning up and saying a few words and leaving, no-one has got any sense of who I am, and it’s incredibly important to do that. But at the same time we need collaboration and empathy, so in IDEO we always talk about T-shapeness, you need depth but you need breadth. And in leadership this sense of empathy for others, and humility, is incredibly important.
So I think at IDEO we really try and grow leaders that don’t lead from the front so much, unless they really have to, but really lead from the middle. But always maintain that credibility, because you can’t lead from the middle unless you belong in the middle. Strategy is nothing without action so you know this is another one of those cautionary tales that companies like ours that wants to grow the impact of design in the world, because you say, well, right let’s go upstream let’s go work alongside McKinsey and management consultancies. Let’s do strategy, and yes, we can do strategic work in a different way from the analytically driven organisations, but we would only be doing half the job if we didn’t turn it into real results. So we’re always talking about, think to build and build to think.
Our offer is ‘think to build’, we think great things but we know how to build them, but also it’s important always to build things in order to think. So here was more of the American Red Cross blood drive thing. This is a prototype built out of cardboard and stuff, which real volunteers and real blood donors engaged with, in order to work out whether or not it was any good, and then we built the final thing. So prototype in product services, food, anything, is incredibly important. And the same is true as a leader. At the moment, for instance, as a leader of IDEO, we’re thinking very carefully about how we can grow more senior female leaders, let’s say.
One of the biggest impediments for women still, over men, is that they choose to take on more childcare duties, and we’ve done a really bad job in the past of supporting part time work. Now ultimately, we know that this will benefit the whole of the company, be you someone with a child or not, female or male, but it starts with this corner case. So rather than just talk about it for ages, rather than talk about making policy, what we’re doing is quickly trying some experiments on a project where we’ve got two people job sharing. Neither of them has a baby yet, but we’re just trying some stuff out just to see whether it works. So even when we’re talking about abstract leadership problems within a design organisation, we come to [unclear] to our designing prototyping routes.
Five, two more to go, creative culture is really fragile. Coming back to this comment about strategy, it’s too easy to bring lots of interesting flavours into your organisation, and forget ultimately you are a design business. Design businesses require…it was mentioned in the audience, the sense of creativity is sort of serendipitous, it needs protecting, it’s very fragile.
A great diagram that David Kelly, one of our founders always draws is this, it’s a see-saw with money on the left, he’s American so it’s Dollars, and heart on the right. Many design companies, as they try and scale, need cash, and they either go to the money markets, or they get sort of acquired by someone else, or get significant investments. As soon as you do that people can easily go, right, let’s tune this up to make more money. It kills a design business, because you lose the heart, what you want to do. For us, this is one of the biggest conundrums in the world – how you scale up a design business, how you lead a design business for the long term, without thrashing it for profit, and maintaining this balance between great work, exciting projects to tackle, but also making enough money for it to be a successful business.
And finally, think really big but act really small. So the point was made already earlier, I think inspiration is one of the key things. I love the fact that George Cox, the ex-chairman of the Design Council, when publicising his Cox Review, the influential Cox Review, said, if Microsoft had been started in the UK I think they would have wanted to be the biggest software company in Guildford. And I think sometimes, the design industry in the UK is a bit like that, it doesn’t really think very big.
You’ll have seen a big picture of the world there, for me what was interesting about the picture of the world, is that it is what the astronauts showed us. And apparently environmental concern was first raised when people could see the world as a whole. And yet you see the world as a whole, you see how small you are, so the sense of ambition, wow, look how amazing this is. And yet my God, I’m a small component, is a really important part of the balance. So what we’re trying to do always with our leaders is catalyse them, make them connect with really inspiring people that make them see how big the world is, how big the opportunity is, but always do it in a low ego way.
And if I characterised sometimes the stereotype of design leadership, if you take the stereotype that the Ikea ads have, it’s actually someone probably with rather small ambitions as a design leader - oh, I wish to create the next generation of lamps and tables - but a rather big ego. And so this imbalance between small vision, large ego, is completely wrong. We feel we need big vision, small ego, and that’s it. Thank you.
Female voice
You’ve been listening to a Design Council podcast. For more podcasts, visit www.designcouncil.org.uk