In this talk he calls for creating new developer tools that enable the developer/creator to have more immediate visual connection with the product as opposed to the arbitrary representation of the product (the code).  Moreover, he lays out an admonition to “invent on principle” – recognize a wrong, commit to right it, and deploy technology solutions to solve it.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Objectified – Documentary from Rohan on Vimeo.

Cofounding  a new venture nine months ago has provided an opportunity to infuse design thinking into a technology company from the beginning. Below are a few things we’ve tried along the way.  If you are curious about design thinking, just pick one and get started!

1. Learn what it’s all about: the best place to learn about design thinking is Stanford’s bootcamp bootleg found here. This 100 page bootleg document is the best summary I have found and was created by probably the institutional leader in the field: the Stanford d.school.  Empathize. Define.  Ideate.  Prototype.  Test.  That’s it!

2. Practice thinking visually: A key component to design thinking is expressing  ideas visually. Don’t be afraid if you are a bad drawer!  Just start!  For example, I used to track all of my job candidates in Microsoft Excel. Recently, I wrote all the candidates names out on small Post-it notes and lined them up on the wall. It was amazing how often I ended up thinking about these people just by glancing over at the wall.  So think about it this way: the more content you write out or even print out and put on the wall or the whiteboard, the larger screen size you have!  Moreover, actively mapping out ideas or people in a 2D,  flexible space, enables your mind to better organize and understand the data.  Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin is a helpful place to start to learn how to draw basic diagrams and illustration.  Or check out some additional training materials around “visual note taking” from Dave Gray, Sunnibrown’s Visual Note Taking 101, and Austin Kleon’s Ideas Worth Stealing.

3. Design your space: We have tried to maximize the visual whitespace in our office so that as many square inches are as functional as possible. We have big glass doors that work for posted notes and whiteboard markers, we painted a 10′ by 30′  wall in IdeaPaint (a paintable white board – expensive but works well), covered 3 other walls with foamcore (a lightweight foam poster product sold in big sheets at design stores, usually about $15 for a 4′x8′ sheet),  and gave everyone awesome white glass desks from Ikea so their workspace is writeable!

4. Choose your tools: Go ahead and go to Amazon right now and order a box of fine point sharpie markers (black and red), and small Post-it notes.   Make a habit of always carrying them with you. For example, I was in a bar last week and ended up mapping out someone’s idea with about 20 posted notes on the table. Yes, it was a bit odd, but we had a good time doing it.   I also have come to love my ActionMethod Journal, with tearable pages, a to-do list, and nice rubber cover.

5. Practice as a team:  friends at a design-heavy venture accelerator in Austin called Thinktiv suggested a fantastic book called Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, which lays out a few dozen really fun, engaging games that a team can play in order to solve difficult problems.

6. Make friends with designers: Austin  is lucky to have  a very rich design ecosystem, created in part by frog design and sustained by folks like Jon Kolko and his Austin Center for Design and Dean Kakridas.  I have made a point to meet these designers, learn how they work, and find small ways to engage them in our company’s work. For example, we ran a full-day design thinking workshop around the future of postal communication with a half dozen designers, our team, and a few volunteers from craigslist; over eight hours we came up with a few hundred ideas.

During my first encounter with design thinking I was a bit intimidated: I was not an artist, I didn’t wear cool black glasses,  I had never been trained in this…. But,  the great news is that design thinking is actually accessible to anyone and has the power to bring big ideas and creativity into any organization.

Consider Crowley, a dreamer who was fascinated by the idea of bringing a gaming layer to the physical world.  Indeed he even wrote his NYU thesis on the subject.  And it was this nearly-academic curiosity that shaped his vision for the company.  ”We just want to get all these things built… and to put as many pieces in place as possible.  After we do that, then we’ll try to monetize,” he explained.  ”And if we can’t monetize, at least we will have pushed the world forward a little.  We taught people about check-ins.  We taught them about location services and about life as a game,” he offered.  For Crowley, monetization is literally an afterthought.  It is secondary in sequence and importance to product and impact.  To understand Crowley and founders like him, it is critical to understand his personal motivations.  He values teaching society about a concept.  He values helping people build better relationships.  And he values pioneering sociological concepts that enable future companies to realize his vision.  His passion reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s line: “It is amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Yet this attitude–indifference to ownership and IP, a disinterest in monetization–would seem a poor fit for the model of venture-backed s-corps that nearly all of these companies pursue.  How do we make sense of the essentially communitarian, visionary disposition of innovative founders in the context of venture-backed companies with billion dollar valuations?  Would Martin Luther King have built a megachurch and charged for attendance?  Would Karl Marx have required a subscription for his podcast?  Would Mother Theresa have billed $500 an hour for a hospital visit?  Probably not.

A conversation with Chris Cox, VP of Product for facebook, helped me answer this question.  He said that in certain ways facebook should be a non-profit.  Facebook’s mission–”to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”–sounds like it could be the mission of the Reporters Without Borders or the Berkman Center.  So why not run facebook as a nonprofit?  They ran into a little problem: in order to realize the mission, they needed a few hundred of the smartest engineers, pedabytes of data storage, and world class infrastructure.  And to have this, they needed money.  And lots of it.

The essential tension is this: in order to realize revolutionary impact from innovative new technology products–even ones with social, communitarian purposes–the business must have a way to monetize so that it can finance the development, roll out, and support of the product.  Thus for facebook, monetization became a tactic to help realize the vision of the product–monetization was not an end in itself.

We might even go as far as to say that the success of revolutionary internet companies is partly explained by the absence of monetization strategies at their founding.  Monetization ought to emerge—but only as a supporting mechanism to realizing the vision.

This post was written for Launching Technology Ventures, a course taught by Professor Tom Eisenmann at Harvard Business School.  The blog can be found here.

• Apple’s Ron Johnson describes that Apple is about building a beautiful product or experience and then persuading users that they actually want it.
• At Zynga, their math-driven product development cycle essentially says: if we can make one penny more by making the tractor have 6 pixel wheels instead of 5 pixel wheels, let’s do it.

The former is about having a vision of adding value and meaning to the user… of contributing to their human flourishing… of capturing a valuable insight into what makes them happy and building something that fulfills a desire they may not have even known they had.  These product developers have vision, insight, and a deep understanding of people.  Think Ideo: hundreds of man hours spent on observation, questioning, sketching, prototyping… and eventually out comes a beautiful shopping cart.

The latter is about a huge array of A/B testing that constantly iterates based on the user feedback.  These product developers begin with a basic idea and turn it over to the user, allowing thousands or millions of them to lead the product in any direction the users desire.  (From the offline world), think Harrah’s casino:  eye-grabbing blinking, beeping, waitresses, booze, dealers… all “A/B tested” to extract every last penny from casino goers.

On the surface, these two approaches seem incompatible.  Yet in a recent exchange Eric Ries helped make sense of how insightful vision can be combined with iterative, agile implementation.  I identified this dichotomy: if you are trying to build something users don’t know they need, then it doesn’t make sense to ask them what they want (cf. Henry Ford’s quip: “Had I asked them what they wanted they would have said ‘a faster horse.’”)  Eric said it clearly: “Listen to your customers, but don’t do what they say. Their feedback tells you about them, not about you.”

In this integrated approach, the developer never becomes a mercenary–under the control of the user and meeting their every desire. They remain a visionary… but not an arrogant, ignorant one.  They begin with a dream… but really get to know the people for whom they want to dream to become a reality.  Observation and data collection is critical not in order to dictate design but rather to clarify and focus vision.  (Nate Gross reminded me of Doug Bowman’s resignation letter from Google in which he wrote, “data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.”)

On a visit with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, I laid out these two approaches and asked which Facebook pursues.  She said: “Both.”  Zuck began with a vision of connecting the world; indeed this vision involved people sharing in ways that they current do not.  His vision is quite Apple-like in that he has an insight into what will make people flourish; even though users don’t know they want this, over time they will realize it.  And Zuck’s job is to bring them along on this journey.  Although the vision is clear, the implementation is not.  Facebook has to understand and learn from its users to find out exactly how to create deeply social and meaningful experiences.  So in effect Facebook began with a long-term vision to which they will lead users, yet the path to that vision is unclear.  Zuck has a vision… but gets to converse with 650 million users about how to get there. Perhaps Zuck has pulled off “doing both.”

Yet it would be false to “do both” in the sense of being partly one and partly the other. Products created with a hint of vision and a hint of feedback are likely neither visionary nor useful.  Successfully combining the two approaches requires a keen understanding of the role of vision and the role of feedback.  Both Steve Jobs and Zuck do this incredibly well and are what I would call “ethnographer visionaries” – leaders whose profound product visions come not out of prophecy or momentary brilliance but rather out of a deep understanding of people.  In the realm of product management, I favor visionaries over zealots and statisticians over mercenaries.

As you walk down the alley between two rusty warehouses, you get a glimpse of waves crashing under the Bay Bridge. When you enter the facility, bright sunlight pours through curved skylight windows, bringing to life the dark tones of the original wood flooring, the shine of beautiful metallic chairs, and the bright white of meticulously organized shelves. The employees move around quickly, though not hurried, often carrying a recently brewed cup of exotic tea.  The people themselves are works of art–their distinctive hair, stylish yet hipster clothing, and rare footwear.  Small moments over a catered lunch or taking in views of the bay provide opportunities to talk about their passions, their vision, and how they can make the world a more beautiful place.

This is Ideo – a revolutionary design firm whose patriarch, David Kelley, invented “design thinking” (see this for a great introduction) and founded Stanford’s d.school. These institutions and this school of thought is exerting tremendous influence on corporations and their attempts to innovate. However, when Ideo hipsters meet corporate pinstripes, some things get lost in translation.  This clash of cultures–you might even say of civilizations–is instructive for how big corporations ought to partner with innovators/creatives.

Corporations are desperate for innovation.  John Hagel argues that American companies have seen dramatically reduced return on assets in the last four decades, due in large part to changes in technology and failure to innovate.  So big companies have received the message: it is time to innovate.  I was recently with a VP of a large corporation after his first encounter with Ideo.  Although he did not know exactly what Ideo does or what it might mean for his business, he told me: ”I want to get some Ideo.” ”If only we could have a team like that at our company,” he reflected.

Following an encounter with these chic, innovative, and inspiring designers, it is easy to understand this urge to build a team of Ideo-like innovators inside your corporation–yet this desire should be quashed.  The cultural gulf between creative hipsters and analytical pinstripes is so deep that the best hope we have is to facilitate short, structured exchanges of ideas and information.  Deeper cultural integration–the kind required to actually build a team within a corporation–is likely impossible for five reasons:

1. Designers are communitarians disinterested in profits: the entire apparatus of human resources and talent management built in the last 50 years in an era of knowledge workers does not work for creatives.  (See HBS Grad Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen for color on this.)   They are rarely motivated by money and instead desire respect from their peers and to know they made something more beautiful than they found it. There are numerous examples of cases where creatives turn down profitable work because they fear the impact to their reputation of producing something that is not avant-garde.   Successfully managing and motivating prima donnas is nearly impossible inside today’s corporation.

2. Design firms (or internal business units) have no business model: Even the most famous design firms today exhibit tumultuous corporate histories: filled with mergers, breakups, big personalities, and poor economic performance. This troubled corporate history suggests that creative business units inside larger corporations are likely to be loss leaders.  So even if the fees from design consultants seem high, the alternative of bringing the creative’s in-house will prove even more expensive–and certainly more painful.

3. Designers are hard to manage: They are often disinterested in profits, are unwilling to work for clients they do not like, push back on practical feedback from strategy and business people, and expect to be treated as “artists” (said with french accent).

4. Designers are hard to attract: Given the importance of reputation and pedigree of firm, you might assume that any designer who would be willing to work for a non-innovative big company is a designer you should not hire.

5. Designers are hard to retain: Even if the corporation is able to attract high-quality designers it will be very difficult to retain them. Pushing new, innovative ideas (whether radical product designs or edgy marketing materials) through big corporations is a difficult process. You can probably assume that only a small percentage of new ideas generated from within the company actually see the light of day. This process is likely to prove very frustrating for creatives employed in-house. If Ideo delivers a set of product recommendations to clients and the client chooses to not accept them, the Ideo designer can walk away thinking, “They have no idea what they are doing. Thank goodness I do not work there.”  If the designers worked in-house, their frequent frustration would kill their motivation and likely result in high turnover.

Designers are absolutely critical for the future of innovation–and therefore for the future of the modern corporation. And it is more than just their chic clothing and beautiful whiteboards–their process of idea generation is remarkable and will likely be responsible for tremendous economic growth. However, managers of modern corporations must be smart in how they partner with designers. Given the tremendous cultural gulf, these partnerships should be created between two separate firms–firms that have two very different business models–instead of trying to merge the corporate entities by bringing creatives in-house.

Note: this semester at Harvard Business School I am privileged to study with Karim Lakhani, who is leading a seminar on Managing Innovation. Karim is a superb teacher and evangelist of innovation. I’m borrowing one of his favorite quotes to give you a glimpse into what excites him:

Creativity is dangerous.  We cannot open ourselves to new  insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions.  We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval or rejection.  Creative achievement is the boldest  initiative of mind, an adventure that takes its hero simultaneously to the rim of knowledge and the limits of propriety. Its pleasure is not the comfort of the safe harbor,  but the thrill of reaching sail. – Robert Grudin, “The Grace of Great Things”

A few weeks ago I had the privilege to visit Chick-fil-A headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, for an all-day tour and series of discussion with the company leadership.  Based on my conversations, here’s my impression of how Chick-fil-A sees its business: 1,600 community spaces where 7+ million Americans spend time with their friends and family… and to these spaces their customers bring their stories, their needs, and their hopes. Although it is great chicken sandwiches and a welcoming restaurant that get people in the door, once customers show up employees have an opportunity–albeit brief–for real interaction. Yes there is customer service: taking orders, making change, delivering food. However, there’s more. Chick-fil-A wants to serve the full range of needs of its customers. So when an elderly woman walks in the door, the posture isn’t just: “what value meal can I serve this woman?” It is also: “What is this woman’s story?” and “In my few minutes of interaction, how can I somehow connect with and empower this woman?”

Watch this vignette about how Chick-fil-A sees its customers:
So given these powerful personal stories of individual customers, what can Chick-Fil-A employees really DO?  Yes, it is unreasonable to be the personal social worker for every customer–employees can’t leave work to go run errands for an elderly person.  But let’s set aside zero sum thinking and explore ways that employees really can serve customers in realistic ways.

Consider Martha–a 73 year old woman who every day visits her husband in a senior home, where he lives out his final years while suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  Today is an ordinary Tuesday.  After her morning coffee and toast, Martha drives to visit her husband.  But on this Tuesday, after 2 years of visiting every day, her husband doesn’t recognize her.  Imagine: the love of your life–your best friend–no longer knows who you are.  That is a story.  That is an experience.  This is no ordinary Tuesday.

Consider the rest of her day.  She leaves an hour later with her world changed.  She drives to Chick-Fil-A to eat lunch.  Over the next 45 minutes, she will sit quietly, eating her sandwich and thinking about her morning. At that very moment what does Martha need?  Errands run? No.  Financial support?  No.  Educational opportunities? No. Martha needs empathy – she needs her story to be known – she needs to have an opportunity to tell her story – she needs someone to listen to her story.

Giving someone the opportunity to tell their story is a precious gift.  On its surface it seems silly.  You might say: that some nice guy sits and listens to an old woman talk about her husband doesn’t do anything–he’s still dying, she’s still sad–all you’ve done is feel good about yourself.  But think of it this way: remember back to a time when you first told someone something–”I love you,” “I’m pregnant,” “our dad died.”  Verbalizing an observation or experience brings reality to it in a way that simply keeping it in your memory does not.  Oral story telling is a performative experience for the listener and the teller.  It enables the teller to process, communicate, and share her experience, in a way that solitary reflection does not. And perhaps most importantly, that someone wants to be your audience says that your story matters–that it is worth hearing and worth telling.  Having an audience communicates “you matter.”   And the act of communicating that story forces a rational, psychological, and emotional processing of the experience for the story teller.  Indeed, story telling is about much more than communicating information; if employee Jim asks Martha “How are you?” and Martha begins to share her story, this is not an act of transferring information; Jim would not say, “Can you drop me an email on that?”  Rather, story telling–or rather story listening–is an opportunity to show someone that they matter. Giving someone your focused attention, listening attentively, and being emotionally present in the conversation together authentically say “I care about you.”

The reality is that most people have stories to tell.  The tragedy is that no one is there to listen–no one even bothers to ask.  So we are left feeling that our stories don’t matter–that we don’t matter.  Because most people interact with retail business several times a day, consumer-facing businesses have an opportunity to enable story telling on a massive scale. Enabling millions of people to tell their story will cause fairly profound social change (whether decreased depression and suicide, greater self-actualization, increased confidence and optimism, etc.).  In addition to serving customers’ material needs, businesses oriented this way might begin to serve customers’ social, psychological, and emotional needs.

To begin exploring the merits of this proposal, try out your hand at story listening.  As you navigate your day or show up at a conference, try to see how many stories you can enable to be told.  Practice asking good questions.  Practice creating little moments of authenticity and trust in which someone feels able to share openly.  Find the person sitting alone in the lunchroom or standing in the corner during the meet and great and go listen to their story. Go give someone an audience–you might be reminding someone that they matter – something we all need to hear from time to time..

Things I’m still thinking about:

• How can we train and equip employees to be “story listeners”?
• How can we measure the impact and relevance of story telling?
• Are there story listening “best practices”?
• Need we be able to do more than listen?  If the story teller has real needs (e.g. addiction, abuse, employment, etc.), should we be able to equip or at least refer them?
• Historically: who in society serves as story listeners?  Pastors? Coworkers? Psychiatrists?  Is it odd that business would have to serve this role?
• Maybe we’re really just talking about people being listeners… and they have to do so at a business because that is simply where they are during the day. So perhaps a business-led listening movement is ill-fated.

Edward Tufte – the father of visual representation of data – has a wonderful essay on the perils of Powerpoint.  He writes, “the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”  Zing.

Into this morass of bad fonts and poor communication lands an emerging school of “visual thinking.”  Dan Roam’s book The Back of a Napkin is a fabulous “how-to” guide for using diagrams and sketches to present ideas.  It’s so basic – yet so profound.

A friend recently introduced me to the workshops, consulting, and writing of Nancy Duarte.  Her books – resonate and slide:ology – layout her VisualStory methodology that uses graphics to communicate a persuasive story.  The books themselves are works of art.  Check out this video for a bit about her storytelling approach.

When it comes to actually sitting down to create your presentation, consider using Prezi.com, an awesome tool for communicating ideas. Everytime I use Prezi, at least a dozen folks come and ask me about it! It’s really superb and works nicely with the design thinking approach I discussed earlier.  Check out this prezi presentation by clicking the “play” button below.

One of the best ways to continue to improve your presentation skills is to be critical and thoughtful as you sit through the presentations of others.  Think through what worked and didn’t work.  If you keep incorporating the best tricks from great communicators, you’ll be a pro in no time.

What are some of your best strategies for presenting ideas?  Any great tips for using powerpoint?  I’d love to learn what has worked best for you.

For anyone new to the field, it is worth buying a book by Edward Tufte, considered the grandfather of data visualization.  Trained as a political scientist, Tufte began exploring data representation on his own as a side project,
self-published a “little book” (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) on the subject, and over a few years essentially became the father of a new discipline.   Next time you are around hackers, check out their bookshelf.  Positioned next to MySQL, PHP, and JSON books, you’ll often seen the oversized Tufte hardback.  A surprising number of serious hackers have been inspired by Tufte’s work.   I have also heard that Tufte’s one-day in person course is truly superb—and a great way to get a good price on the books.

Knowledge:

Getting Things Done (buy here): the classic book on the subject.  I really believe this book can change your life.  Allen has consulted with hundreds of top executives.  What he finds is that after these executives implement a trusted system for task/project management, they unleash an inner-creativity.  They literally start coming up with all sorts of new ideas for their business or personal interests.  Allen argues that since the human mind is so inefficient in determining what to store in its short term “RAM,” once you clear that memory of lots of tasks and reminders (by writing them down in an organized fashion), you free up intellectual computing ability to devote to other processes (including brainstorming). You can find a summary of some of the book’s highlights here.

The Art of Project Management: kudos to my friend Joe Barillari for sending this great piece my way.  This piece is a chapter out of a book by the same title by Scott Berkun, a longtime project manager at Microsoft.

The summary points:

• Everything can be represented in an ordered list. Most of the work of project management is correctly prioritizing things and leading the team in carrying them out.
• The three most basic ordered lists are: project goals (vision), list of features, and list of work items. They should always be in sync with each other. Each work item contributes to a feature, and each feature contributes to a goal.
• There is a bright yellow line between priority 1 work and everything else.
• Things happen when you say no. If you can’t say no, you effectively have no priorities.
• The PM has to keep the team honest and keep them close to reality.
• Knowing the critical path in engineering and team processes enables efficiency.
• You must be both relentless and savvy to make things happen.

Tools:

Paper Goods: GTD lays out an approach to task management.  But once you’ve developed this strategy, you must find the right tools to help you execute.   Some GTD aficionados have built software apps based on the book.  I have sampled many of these and find them to leave something to be desired.  Most of them suffer from a limiting user interface that does not allow you to see all of your projects at one time.  Despite my love of technology, I keep coming back to the old-fashioned paper solution from Levenger.  Their Pocket Briefcase makes use of stationery-quality 3×5 index cards.  (See Levenger’s “How To” on Pocket Briefcases and 3×5 Cards.)  I use these cards to implement my own version of the GTD strategy; for each project or workflow I create a new index card.  I write the title on the top and the list of tasks down the card.   For projects that involve multiple workflows, I create a separate card for each workflow.  This system allows me to keep track of dozens of projects and 50+ workflows, all in one place.  I even use 3×5 cards to take meeting notes; on one card I take “notes” (a short summary/major questions/etc.) and on my existing work-flow card I check off, change, or add tasks.

In a future post I’ll walk you through this in more detail.  For now, let me explain one key feature: the “tickler” list.  Every day I hear about a book, learn about someone I should meet, or come up with an idea; while these are great, they aren’t actionable today.  They may be important, but they aren’t urgent.  These tasks have two possible futures: (1) they are forgotten; or (2) they take up our RAM (your mind keeps pinging you saying “buy this book… don’t forget! Buy this book.”)  My “tickler list” is a list of non-actionable tasks, people, or ideas that I’m saving for the future.  I keep a tickler card for each project I’m involved in.  Organizationally, I have found the card bleachers really handy for sorting tasks on my desk, and the action folio great for carrying projects with me on the go.

Software: Of all of the web 2.0 / computer based programs, the two I like are Toodledo and Action Method.  Toodledo is a simple program for sorting, categorizing, and prioritizing tasks.  The iPhone UI is great, although the web-UI is pretty limiting.  Action Method has a beautiful, highly functional UI in all three media: web, desktop-based Adobe Air app, and iPhone.  It also brings advanced team-based functionality that gives it some functionality of Basecamp.  For MAC users, Things is the best one I’ve seen.  Another handy app is Rescue Time, which is as profound as it is simple.  Based on the insultingly simple premise that many of us waste time in front of our computer, it helps track how we spend time on our computers (by monitoring which application window is active) and provides helpful analytics and tools that equip us to spend that time more effectively.  Despite several attempts at setting up Basecamp and Microsoft’s Sharepoint, I remain unimpressed with the collaboration tools available.  Google Wave, which I’ve been playing with for a few weeks now, has made some major leaps in this area.  Given that I can’t invite any of my friends to join, however, it has been hard to fully explore.

Screen Shot of Action Method Desktop App