Book of the Week: Creative Confidence
22 Jul 2014
Since I was inspired to build a creative company from reading Creativity, Inc., I decided to read Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley and so I can be creative myself. Tom and David Kelley started IDEO, a famous design firm. I’ve been a fan of IDEO since watching the Nightline special on redesigning a shopping cart. The founding of Stanford’s d.school has only made me more of a fan. Creative Confidence We are all innately creative, but school beats the creativity out of you. When you’re afraid of looking stupid, you lose ability to be creative. To teach people how to design well, Tom and David had to show people that they can be creative. By using techniques similar to how people get over the fear of snakes, they guided people through baby steps and let people practice their creativity. Eventually something flips in their head and they realize they were creative all along. This book is about developing your creative confidence. Design Thinking 
Seeking that sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability as you take into account the real needs and desires of your customer is part of what we at IDEO and the d.school call “design thinking”.
This book focusing on #3, being able to design something that address the core wants and needs of people. Making something desirable is something that is hard to get right. Some startups are currently doing desirable and feasible, but not exactly viable. I think desirability is a hard problem to tackle. Freedom to Fail
The surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.
Startups encounter a lot of failure. The ones that succeed either are lucky and get it right quickly or have enough runway to keep trying things and failing. Eventually you are going to succeed and it is going to be awesome. Once you realize you can do it, the world opens up to you. There is not much freedom to fail in school, so people are risk adverse. By being risk adverse, they do not grow or learn as quickly. A ceramics instructor split the class in half. Half were to be graded on quality and the other half to be graded on quantity. By the end o the class, the half with quantity produced better pieces, because they practiced their craft more by doing many iterations. The ones who made a lot of crappy pots learned quicker, because they were given permission to fail. Interviewing
One misconception about empathy is that it means going to your customers, asking them what they want, and then giving them exactly what they asked for. That strategy usually doesn’t work well. People often lack the self-awareness (or the vocabulary) to express their needs. And they seldom consider options that don’t yet exist in the world.
- Show me - have people show you, take photos and notes
- Draw it - ask people to visualize through drawing or diagram
- Five Why’s - keep asking why to get to underlying reason
- Think aloud - ask participants to think aloud to uncover motivations, concerns, perceptions and reasoning.
A big part of design thinking is going out and interacting with people and getting real data on the problem from the people it affects. People give bad suggestions, but they know if something is wrong. If Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Interviews take time, so you should use the time in the interview to get the most information out. You are trying to peak inside their brains as much as you can. You want to see things through their eyes. Money vs the Heart 
Money will always be easier to measure, which is why it takes a little effort to value the heart.
The heart is a very tricky thing. One must strike a balance between money and following the heart. If things aren’t economically viable, you can’t follow your heart. There is no point in being rich and miserable. There is also no point in being poor and always worrying when you’re going to be able to pay the bills. Choosing to follow money can put you under the “curse of competence”. You’re good enough to get by doing your successfully job, but you get no fulfillment from it. Those people are soulless cogs working for the man. Passion What are you good at? What will people pay you to do? What were you born to do? They refer to Good to Great when considering what to do. You need to find the intersection of these three questions. I think these intersections are always of 3 entities, because it is easier to draw a Venn diagram for it. You can read all you want about creativity, but nothing beats doing. Purchase Creative Confidence on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.