This episode is a replay of my main stage keynote from HOW Design Live 2019. This talk is a culmination of everything I have seen and learned over the past year and a half working at InVision. It is made up of three truths that I think affect all of us and the six things we need to work on in our companies and in our work and lives.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode82
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This episode is a replay of my main stage keynote from HOW Design Live 2019. This talk is a culmination of everything I have seen and learned over the past year and a half working at InVision. It is made up of three truths that I think affect all of us and the six things we need to work on in our companies and in our work and lives.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode82
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 82nd episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps empower creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show. So you get the latest episodes. Whenever those come out. And wherever they're on your favorite podcast platform. take just a second and leave a review lets people know what you think about the show gets more people the message and I definitely appreciate it. As always, you can listen to all the shows, just head over to the crazy one calm, that's the crazy and the number one calm. You can get all the show show notes, links, everything we talked about in every show, just head over there. Now today's show is another replay and this is because I think you know there's a decent part of the amount of work that I do is putting keynotes together for these big events. The last episode we did was one that I thought was super, super important. It was a discussion about innovation with myself, Siena and Greg Larkin. And this is sort of the other part of What happened at how design live? So this was the mainstage keynote that I did. And this was, I think this was sort of the culmination of talks that have given at South by and a bunch of other ones, I think really starting to hone in on the issues that I've been seeing inside of teams, and the issues that I've also been seeing inside of individuals. And I think I recently did this as an envision webinar. But there's just something about doing these talks live, there's something about doing them in front of a big audience that just brings a different energy brings a sort of a different focus to that. Now the future is created was the original talk. I think, since then, it's sort of been I think most people will refer to it as the exist loudly talk. But I think this was one of those rare moments where I felt like I kind of showed up with the right talk at the right moment to the right audience, and was really just sort of a nice culmination of the work that I've been doing over the last year and a half. So hopefully you like it. I think hopefully, you're gonna hear some of the themes we've talked about over the course of the show. Just sort of encapsulated, a little bit cleaner and a little bit stronger than maybe What I've done before this is the future is creative from how to design live 2019. So my title is the head design evangelist at envision. And I know a lot of people will think like, whenever I've heard from somebody with that title, I usually walk away thinking that more creativity went into the creation of the title than anything their job has ever yielded. This is why HBO Silicon Valley is a documentary. Absolutely. But this has been an interesting thing. And this is gonna be a really interesting talk for me because a year ago, I walked away from a lifetime since I was two years old, of being a designer being a head of design, because I had this really interesting conversation with Clark from envision. If you ever get those emails, number one question I get, yes, Clark is a real person. I will post photos of him. He's not like an email bot. But he just said look like what do you think the industry needs? And I said, we're in this really interesting moment. But I see so many people struggling to break through and he went great. Write that write a job description for how to fix that shit. Okay. And that was on the back of so about two and a half years ago, I started my podcast called the crazy one. And we'll get into that in a little bit because I thought, yeah, the world needs another podcast. But these are kind of like two real passions of mine. So you know, just to kind of give you a little bit of background on this and envision we sort of look at design look at the world through three lenses. We look at it through platforms. So obviously, this is a mark major part of what we do 100% of the world's fortune 100 brands use our tools. If you're building digital products, you're probably building it with our tools. We've recently launched studio Design System Manager, a lot of really cool stuff. If you just think we're like that cloud platforming, you know, prototyping company, go take another look. But the space where I really occupy is those top two in people in what happens with a company and cultures of the teams that are around the world and practices and what are the processes and methodologies and like Amy said, I have spent the last year traveling the world working with thee. You name it. Design companies. An interesting thing for me. And the reason why I wanted to bring this talk was because what I thought I sort of had this hunch, right, I had this hunch that something was going on. And after I went through, and these are some of the companies we work with, I realized the hunch maybe went a little bit deeper. And so what I want to do for this next hour, I want to be honest, and that's not a typo. I want to be honest with a capital H. There'll be other typos people tweet about them. It'll be a lot of fun. But that's the one thing that I've discovered. I worked with some of the most amazing, most prolific design teams anywhere in the world. And I watch what they go through. I watch everybody being here, something brought you here. So what I want to do is I want to have an honest conversation about what is the moment that we're going through right now. And what do we need to do to start affecting some change and we're Start by just with a couple truths. And the first truth is that look, if I'm going to be totally honest, what the hell does the future is creative even mean? Right? You will see that. It's like, Oh, that's great. But before being honest, that's written to appeal to the hope and insecurity and all of us. It's great creatives. We are a broken people. We will get into that more in a moment. But that's the thing, right? Because that's why we come we all feel like oh, my God, I could be doing it better. Man, everybody else is doing it better. There's a lot of hope in that. But that's the hope and possibility. For the last decade, I have been saying this. We're in a moment in time where as creative people, we have the ability to affect business in ways that we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution. The fact that I was a Global Head of design at a financial institution, the fact that there are chief design officers that are out there, the fact that I was in the back of a cab in New York City just a week ago, and saw the words design thinking on that annoying little television that always blares in the back of the car. Whenever you're in there means that we're having a moment. But the interesting part is that with opportunity, so often comes reality and insecurity. Because what I see is so many people are struggling to break through there. One of the things that we did it envision a few months ago is we did the world's largest look at what was the current state of design maturity in the world today. Because I think a lot of cases if you want to actually have a conversation about how your company is doing, you didn't have a realistic baseline for where that goes. And what we did is we went through and created this study, there's an amazing brilliant woman who I work with, namely Buley Lee has been a research has been around for a really long time we put the study together. And in the study there are five levels of design maturity level one, the lowest one is basically make it pretty we're going to tell you what to do. level five is we're gonna have a real impact on design. Interesting thing whenever you look at this, that whenever you out of 2200 different companies, 33 Industries, 74 different countries 83% of the world's companies right now, whenever we look Design maturity are stuck in the middle to the bottom tier of what's going on in design maturity, 75% of them will acknowledge that they know that they have a design team. So if you go to the CEO, they don't say who anymore. They know that they need it. They just don't know what the hell that means. And so many design teams, the number one number one question I get asked is how do we demonstrate the value of design? That should scare the hell out everybody in this room, because that means we're having a moment. But if we don't figure out how to break through, if we don't start to become a core part of the business, then those resources go other places. And then everybody starts talking about that moment whenever everybody did design thinking. And so here's what I would encourage you to do. The full report, if you want to head to design better calm, you can download the whole thing there. It's about 55 pages long, it will actually give you metrics about what actually happens at companies is to be able to see that on average. If you have a company that is has high design maturity, you're going to ship products about five times faster. About six times cheaper, your company valuation is gonna be about 26 times higher little numbers people tend to pay attention to. But here's the other truth. The our real problem right now isn't having bigger ideas. It's not creating better designs. Because for all of us, and when all of this right, like, what actually happens is that we have these ideas. Our problem is dealing with all the bullshit that surrounds all those ideas. Every single one of you is afraid to laugh at that because either your bosses here, you just thought of somebody a project that you're working on a meeting that you had today, some other project that just got killed, cut down, made smaller, made safer, but that's the problem. We can have great ideas, our abilities to deal with everything that surrounds them. That's the real issue that we're struggling with. And so in a lot of work that I do, the thing that I've come to really realize is that if you want to create change There are two different places that you can work. There's behavior and this is where most companies and most people spend their time. The problem is behavior is the expression of a problem. It's the way people act. It's the things that we say. It's the the different rituals and stuff that we go through. But just like any behavior, this is if you spend your time there, yes, I can fix the behavior, I'm going to act a little bit differently. Maybe we're going to get a new set of values. And like if the first letter of all those values somehow adds up to a word that has something to do with our company, we get like bonus points. never understand that. Like I said, therapy. This is what most of what I do, right? I think most of the time what I do in the industry right now is I'm like part therapist and part interventionist. That's probably what this is gonna be today, right? Like more than a few times, you're gonna nudge somebody next to you, you're gonna smile like circle a trust factor like this is gonna be fun. But if you're just browsing behavior, the problem is people will behave differently, but then the problem is going to manifest itself. someplace else down the road. So what I want to talk about today is how do we change thinking because the way people think that's the real problem. Just you're dealing with behavior that that's not going to get you where you need to go. So that's what we're gonna focus today. But here's the other thing that I think is interesting. Every single company in the world is dysfunctional. Like everybody that's like nervous laughter nervous, like, Look, this is I don't care who you are, like, whatever the company is, you fantasize about whatever the company is you love. They're dysfunctional. Here's the truth. The better companies in the world are just really good at good knowledge in it and dealing with it. One of the best descriptions I ever heard of this was a really really senior designer at Apple described them as a swan going across the lake. The world saw the the swan, beautiful, majestic gliding effortlessly, it looked amazing. But the reality of it was what was below the water was thrashing and churning and it was a complete mess. They just packaged it up better than everybody else. and acknowledge what their issues are. But here's the thing that I've discovered is that most companies seem to be more afraid of changing their process than actually being disrupted. It's amazing to me, I had a meeting with a company not too long ago, this was this set like a pink elephant in the middle of the room the whole day. At the end of it, they asked me, they said, Steve, what's our superpower? What are we really good at? I said, you read too many books. And they said, No, no, no, tell us what we're really good at. I see what you're really good at is rationalizing mediocrity. Now the reaction was about like that. But nobody wants to say it out loud. Nobody wants to say their company is dysfunctional. Nobody wants to talk about this stuff. This is all sitting around like a stack of pink elephants and we just feed them all frickin peanuts. Right? This is why Greg Larkin, who is here so Thursday, Greg and, and myself and Sina Messiah from x bar are doing it are doing a panel on this subject, because in Greg's book, this might get me fired. He really got me on to this theory that I started to think about About how for most companies right now, because of the way their processes are because of how afraid they are for so many things, the innovation that they need will probably not be authorized is I look at what happened in my own career at Citibank, at Starwood, all the work that was innovative was only innovative in hindsight, it almost got me fired on the way there. That needs to change, because at a certain point, what the organization say and what they do, has got to start to match. Because what happens in most organizations, again, if we're being really honest, CEO, visionary, talking to the press doing a lot of this stuff about what do we want to do at our company? This is who we want to be sounds really good, yay. But then they have their leadership. And isn't it funny how that messaging never seems to make it down past the CEO into the organization. They talk about it a lot. They you know, we company meetings, this is what we're doing. But then wherever you actually say, Great, how is that coming down the organization doesn't happen. So then what happens we have a whole bunch of innovation theater. We run around, we make press releases. As we make screenshots we talk about all the amazing stuff we're gonna do we start innovation labs that have no connection to the rest of the company and strangely fail 18 months later, and no one can figure out why. So the 12 months later, we can come back under a new acronym, and try it again. Everyone who is laughing, I told you this was going to be therapy. That's the thing that I've discovered, no matter where you go in the world, no matter what language you speak, everybody does the same dumb shit. Because it is human nature to be able to do this. And then the other thing that you see then is that there's a reality app. So okay, great leadership said do this. And everybody who needs to do it is standing around going watch. We don't have the time, budget sanity, money, any way to be able to do this. And so it gets neuter down it becomes like some sort of bu thing, and then it never really gets out to what it needs to be and then at the very bottom of this equation, you have the design team. Right, they show up make it pretty, what I met with so many companies They're like, Look, we just made a whole bunch of engineering decisions. We made a whole bunch of different product decisions. Our executives made a whole bunch of design decisions, but those weren't design decisions. I'm sorry what? Like are you not okay so yeah, that's like I said that's like an intervention moment. But then the other problem that we have as a design team is then there's a value gap right because ever like the worst part of so much of what we do the worst part of design thinking the worst part of design Sprint's The worst part of all this stuff is the word design in it surprising Oh, that's a design thing like somehow we're off wearing a Bray we're like wearing like a watercolor or spirit animal or something like what? Like look I get it we all wear black like okay, like you know, you give me that the more you know the more like a head of design you're the thicker your glasses get, I get it. In my case, it backfires. This is why half the time when I'm walking around New York City, and this has happened multiple times, that people will come up to me and like want to take a photo. And at first I was like, man, my podcast is killing it. And by the third time when they said thank you Drew Carey. Welcome to my world. But this is the problem, right? Our companies work like that. And again, we're all aware that this is going on, but we don't talk about we can't figure out how to do it. And I said this before, but this is I've never seen this set out loud. Every single one of us if we're being honest, feels broken. I work with so many leaders in so many different places where like, at least once or twice a week someone is crying. Because they're like, Look, I don't understand if I'm doing this right. I don't understand what is going on. I don't understand. Like, I feel like I'm doing it wrong. But isn't it amazing? Like when you go on social media, everybody's like tall and beautiful and perfect. And everything on dribble is amazing. And like filled with typos and like all kinds of great stuff. Like that's what I want to do. Like how about we do this? How would if this year for Halloween, we all goes who we pretend to be on social media. That would be amazing. Because what do we do as an industry we fetish sighs the beginning in the end, we love like, you know, Steven was in the garage starting apple and we love whatever we can put on behance and Pinterest and all that stuff. We don't want to talk about the middle. We don't want to talk about the fact we have problems we create keep creating this manufactured reality. It's killing us. It's killing this industry. It's driving everybody to feel like they can't measure up. And that's my thing, right? Like, I've just, I feel this for myself. I feel this with the people that I work with, like the energy that it takes for us to lie about how we were doing and hide this from everyone is absolutely exhausting. All of you have done it this week. You saw somebody, maybe you knew them. How's it going? Well, it's great. My team is brilliant. They're all tall. They're all handsome. They're good looking. All of our work is fantastic. Our budgets are plentiful. People are lined up down the block to be able to come work for our team. My CEO is genius sees everything about me. I think I'm going to become the next CEO. And then afterwards, you're just kind of like God, please just somebody different hire me because I need to quit. But even in this space that should be so safe even in this place where there is so much support for what it is we're doing. It's amazing the masks that we wear, and it's exhausting. Like, I'm tired. And so many people else I talked to were so tired. Like you're tired of talking about the same problems and not seeing any results. How many conferences have I've been to? How many talks have there been that just talk about the same thing? Like that's a problem like, yep. Great lot of head nodding, not kind of short on what we're gonna do about it. But yeah, it's a problem. Whoo. This is why we're going to write books about creativity and self help and all that stuff to the cows come home, because there's more money in that but actually trying to fix it. That's why I said like, Are we all tired of pretending like everything is great. I'm not saying that this becomes like, you know, some big cult or something like that. But how about if we actually have a little bit of honesty, that maybe there are times that we have issues and there are things that we would like some support on, but that we know that some things need to happen for us to be able to do that. that are hard. And I think more than anything else like, aren't we just simply tired of this idiotic social media comparison and doing all this other stuff where we can comparing our insides and everybody else's outsides it is a comparison we will never win. Because insecurity is the entry price of creativity. And to be able to say that, like everybody else, they look so buttoned up everybody else, like I mean, this is leading to real social surrogacy problems and really things like that. But for me, it's also like just not knowing how the hell to start to fix any of this stuff. That's what I want to do today is I'm gonna start to talk about for me the things that I've learned, and a lot of the subjects that I don't see people talking about, about how do we start to actually go after and fix some of this stuff. And for me, there are two parts of this equation. There's the Wii, and there's the U. The Wii is your company, your team and their culture. The EU is your brand, your process and your insecurities because I hate to break it to you. We all know you have them. I did a big conference for big company last week I talked about like design imposter syndrome. And you'd see people nudging each other and stuff like that, at the end of it, I said, You do know that everybody at the table knows which one of these You are right. And everybody just sat there looking horrified. But we're going to talk about these two things, and how to find a little bit of balance here. The word problems was interesting. Because I think that there in many cases, I think there are three areas that we need to be able to work on, to be able to really start to make a difference in your company, in your team and in your work. And a lot of cases, these aren't the things that a lot of people I think necessarily think about. The first one is actually to start to look at the psychology that drives Why do people act the way that they do the world over why time and time again, no matter where you go, no matter what company you went to, because like, in my career, all I want I just like for all of us, like don't we just want to find someplace where like the company's not insane With like leadership that whenever they say something you're like, you know what, that's actually a good idea. We can do that. I can see how I can help. Right? But a lot of this is starting to look at what is the psychological issues that we all share. And that's what cognitive biases and that's the thing. There are hard wired reasons why people struggle to be original, and to try new things. Part of this is because a lot of people have forgotten how to be creative. Because that's a weird thing. Like if you go to a kindergarten and you watch little kids, everybody's creative. Everybody's a painter, everybody's a superhero. Everybody does all that stuff. We can think our jobs, our society, our education system, for telling a lot of them that that's not a viable career. We're just the kids who didn't listen. We're the ones that survived. But cognitive biases are a psychological trend that really look at these are deficiencies and limitations in thinking and this can be due to errors in memory, it can be due to like Social attribution issues where you've grown up different things like that, it can just simply be a miscalculation or miss remembering something that was going on. Now, there are a lot of different benefits to this. But the best companies that I work with this is part of their onboarding. Because for them, they know that if people are able to understand this, there's a shared vocabulary that they can then use to talk about human nature and actually be able to hold each other accountable to this stuff. Because without it, what happens is we have no ability to look at people and say, Look, this is why you're doing this, what we do is that you are frustrated, you're stupid, you don't get it, right. Like this is why for so many ad agencies, there was like the agency version and the client version, because we didn't understand how to deal with cognitive bias. There are 12 different types of cognitive bias. And don't be afraid this is not a psychology class. We're not going over all 12. But these are what they are. And then that link, there's a link to actually if you want to go and find out more about these, you can find all 12 of these there, but what we're going to do is we're going to focus on three of them. These are three things that I guarantee you every single day in the work that you do. And every customer that you interact with, these are things that you will interact with on your team or with your clients. The first one confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is mostly unconsciously on some people consciously, the fact that you only want to agree with perspectives that support your pre existing views. And you want to ignore anything that doesn't align with that. Here in America, you could start to think of Oh, gee, I don't know politics, everyone's social media feed for the fact that anything that you don't agree with, we're going to get rid of, because that's the thing is, as a society, no matter where you are in the world, we like to surround ourselves with people who think like us who look like us who act like us. It's just a simple it's a natural part of a tribal mentality. The problem is, whenever you're unaware of it, this starts to become a real issue. Because what happens is that whenever you start to do your work, what do you do? You like to work with people who tell you are brilliant and amazing. And you're a genius. And yes, I love it. And those are fantastic. And those are the people I want. Why? Because one, I'm just awesome. But two then makes it so much easier because then my work is never not good enough. Those people are like, Hey, you know what could be better? Most of the time, you're like, Great, thanks so much. I'm going to go talk to the people who tell me I'm awesome. But none of that does any good for our work. None of that because again, the best teams that I work with understand this, and they understand that the best work comes out of a tension, the tension between two different opinions. They hire for it, they build their teams for it, they actually look for that tension between those two people so that you have somebody that's going to push back against you. The best teams are the ones that you know, if you show up with anything, but your best work, you're gonna hear about it. They're gonna push you on it, they're gonna try to break your idea. They're gonna be an almost brutal pursuit of the best ideas because that's the thing all the design teams that everybody loves the best. I guarantee you that That's the way that they act about this stuff. But that's the thing is that your challenge is how do you actually understand this, look at this, embrace the fact that what you need, you need this tension, you need this pushback, and more than anything, you may even need to start hiring this because there is nothing worse than whenever all sudden, you have a homogenous team of everybody who thinks the same and acts the same, and does all this sort of stuff. Because then the work starts to get really boring. You need to understand that that diversity is the strength of what we're doing here. observation, selection bias. What does this mean? This is whenever you start to notice things that maybe you didn't see before, and then you assume that how often that's happened is increased. Real simple example for this. Anybody who's ever bought a car, you go through the car buying process, you start to shop around, you start to think this is the model I want. Maybe that's even the color I want. I think that I really liked this car. And it is amazing that somehow all of a sudden you see those cars everywhere. And you think to yourself, I'm a genius look Get all the people who are buying these cars. Look at that color. Nobody has that color. I'm Look, I am this, this is what I need to do, I need to absolutely i need to do this. There are no more cars on the road, it's just all of a sudden your brain has started to notice them more. And then again, that's the problem is that the frequency has not increased. But all of a sudden, you're talking yourself into why this is such a really good idea whenever it comes to your work. The problem is, is that for most people, as soon as they have that insight, as soon as they have that idea, they start to see the justification everywhere, they start to see the idea everywhere. This is also actually coupled again with a psychological problem, where whenever you actually are posed with a challenge, it creates this little tension in your brain. And whenever you have an idea whenever you say, Hey, I really like this and you have that observation it releases a little bit dopamine. It's the exact same thing happens that whenever you unlock your phone or you get a like on social media, it's while you are physically addicted to your devices, but it's also why creativity will make everybody into evil drug addicts because you get a Really addicted to that. And that's why after that, for so many teams, they don't have additional ideas. It's like one a one B, one C, and like the head of design comes back and says, Hey, do something different. It's like one D, and it's like, no look we need. But that's why people do this is because it's an actual psychological problem. projection bias. This is a really interesting one as well. projection bias is whenever you assume that everybody else thinks or thinks the way that you do. And like team projection bias, this becomes really interesting, because a lot of the teams whenever I go out and work with them, you have a design team, you have a tech team, you have a product team, you have a client that's out there. And each one of them is convinced that they have the perspective they have the the right thing of being able to do. But the problem with this is that most of the time whenever I look at the way they work, it's much more like this. where everyone is running around trying to figure out who's right. Am I right? Am I right is design right is tech right? Who's right? whose opinion is right. Funny thing about that is that for the companies that value those internal political battles, your work and your culture Customer loses. Because at the end of the day, what should matter is what your customer wants and if they are right, but that's the thing if you're going to run around spending the entire time figuring out who internally is right? And that you're projecting what you want onto everyone else. Great, congratulations, you want to political war and have fun waving at your customers as they walk away. Because they're not the one they don't care about v2. They don't care about the next version. They don't care about why you had a great idea. They got neutered down, there's a cold reality that all they care about is the work that's in front of them. It's amazing again, how many of us can rationalize that. But for a lot of people, a lot of creatives that I work with whenever I do coaching for them, because for me like I come in I coach I teach I try and do thought leadership this for everybody. Individual projection bias for creatives is also really interesting. Because you have you and you have your customer. And I'm constantly amazed. And I've done this, like whenever I went to go work at star hotels, I lived in a hotel for 364 days because I wanted empathy for my customer. Wherever worked automotive accounts, there are still gas stations in New York City in Texas. I'm not invited Back to Oh yeah, because I used to hang out or like talk to those people about the car, they drove six foot four middle of the night, you walk over and talk to them, either they're really excited to call the to to talk to you about their car, or they were really excited to call the cops. Not much in the middle, that was funnier than that you guys need to wake up. Not gonna do it. But here's the thing, right, is that in many cases, you can get empathy from your customer, you can start to walk a mile in their shoes. But the thing that I will always argue is that the moment you actually start to design an experience for them, you are not your customer do not have the arrogance of saying, This is why for me, I'm so amazed when I work with so many companies. They have like a persona. God forbid they have a persona. And it's amazing how you go from team to Team how everybody's sort of assigned to different personality that persona, like they are civil in schizophrenia and have 36 different ways of acting. Because what is it we're doing? We're not actually talking to real people. No, because then we'd be forced Have a conversation about what they really like, and no, no, it's gonna become a little bit too uncomfortable. But that's the thing is with us, we do not project yourself to think that I'm always the customer. Because that's the thing is what you want to be able to do here is to actually go and talk with real people actually able to put your work in front of real people see how it is that they actually react? And also for the fact that don't think that whenever you're doing this, that it's about who is right, because that's the other amazing part, when you're able to talk to your customers. It is not about if I'm right, or you're right, or things like that. It's about what does the customer want? It is an incredibly politically disarming sort of way of working with people, whenever you do stuff like that. A lot of it then is, okay, great. We understand that there are these barriers, we understand the companies work this way. How do you actually then start to shape and make this a little bit different? By this point, you've started to realize that I think that everything can be explained with two circles a little bit better we're getting there. Okay. Any great team though there is a balance between process and culture right? Because process gives us the ability to have a structure. But the problem is if your company is all process, what you end up doing is checking a lot of boxes, but there's no real connection to the mission, I'm doing things because somebody told me that I need to be doing it. But on the other hand, if I'm all culture, that I have a real connection to the mission, but with no structure, there's no impact, and there is no scale. So it's the ability to sort of balance the two of these things. And this becomes really hard. And I think in a lot of cases, it is about how do you sort of create behaviors. And with a lot of the teams that I work with, I'll start to talk about why I think behaviors are really important sort of accessible point, to start to craft, how you want a company to be able to act, because I see so many companies that have a mission statement. What the hell do I do with a mission statement, like that's great for the investors, it's able to put into a press release. I don't understand what that has to do with my day job. So the ability to actually create things that people can relate to, really becomes important. I'll give you a few examples of some of the behaviors that I've created for some of my teams. These have been things like putting customers at the center of our work, because I had a projection bias problem where everybody wanted to run around and say that they were right. This was where my team was getting solutions to be vetted rather than problems to be solved. And that that became a real issue. So for this, I wanted to have this behavior because every time we did anything, I needed an acceptable way for everybody to say, look, we have to change the source of truth, doing things like inviting diverse perspectives to the table, I had a collaboration problem. Nobody wanted to invite legal or the regulators, nobody wanted to be able to bring those people to the table. Because, like you'd say, legal, like it was Voldemort. It was somebody like, you know, yeah, well, we have this really good idea and has anybody we're gonna pass the call. Like, some they're gonna drop down out of the ceiling, if you say the word or, like, right, but it's like, but they're the most demonized and overlooked people in the whole process. Because we go through the whole process, come up with a bunch of ideas, and then show them a finished thing at the end and go, Hey, approve it. Yeah, of course. What What choice do they have you've given them a yes or no decision. Like that stuff doesn't work. iterate quickly. And frequently. These are teams that have methodology problems, or what they want to do is the only way to say this is our idea that we're going to work on it all year long? Yeah, that's a fantastic way of investing a lot of money and a lot of political capital and getting to the place where you're gonna launch something that may be good, that may not but either way, you're launching it. And if it's not good, then you get to spend a whole lot of time justifying to all your executives, why it doesn't suck. Kind of a problem. Other things like this confident and respectful, but not delicate. I love it. Six people just went Hmm. How much time do we spend vs and each other and not really saying what's going on? Right? Like, this is the byline to my life. Because if you spent any amount of time with me, that's the thing. I'll be confident I'll be respectful, but we are telling the truth. But the ability to say these things, because the benefit of doing this stuff is it allows everyone to hold everybody else accountable to the behaviors, the biases, and those sorts of cultural barriers inside of your company. Because without it, what you do is you have a lot of conversations where either people go Look, I really wish you wouldn't act that way. So, or we're not gonna let you act that way. And then you sort of get to become the surrogate asshole, neither of which are outcomes that are really good. But the ability to say, Look, guys, we agree that we're inviting diverse perspectives to the table, we agreed that we're going to be honest, the ability for the team to have that conversation. And so that they can have that conversation without leadership in the room makes a massive, massive difference. And here's the other secret I'm gonna tell you. None of it's gonna be rocket science. But apparently what it is, is writing it down and holding people accountable to it. Because that apparently doesn't seem to happen very often. But it's also looking at the fact that you can do different things because for me, I still will argue and have argued this for years that there's a difference between design and creativity, teams that are commodities based their value in design, design is the visual expression of good thinking, creativity, creativity is what companies want. They want the ability to be able to think they want the ability to be more consumer centric. They want to solve problems, different ways. But everybody, like we said before, has forgotten how to do that. So whenever we think about this, when we think about this Thinking design Sprint's this is a way to be able to show them the way back to be able to do this. And what it allows you to do is to have this like Trojan horse for change. And but it's also understanding that what we do really well is that we are used to jumping off the cliffs and building our wings on the way down, assuming we're not going to like wily coyote into the bottom of the canyon wherever we get there. Because we are used to that sort of being uncomfortable everybody else your organization is not that terrifies them. And so our ability to do that stuff becomes incredibly important. But that's the thing is that it empowers your team, to be the one that can guide this process empowers your team without touching an org chart with ever having a political move without having to have a conversation or reorg or anything else. All it is is can let us help you have better ideas. It is amazing how powerful that can become. Just to say look, we're going to help you do this. Now let's talk about you for a little bit. Again, people As creatives we've got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. comfort for me is the enemy of greatness. Because the ability to just simply say that, like, I've done this, and it's been successful, so I'm just going to keep doing it sounds really good. It's amazing how it doesn't hold up. And I think that for me here again, there's three things that I want to talk about. I want to talk about for you as an individual, the importance of understanding and talking about your brand, understanding design imposter syndrome, and maybe someplace we need to start looking for some new answers. Now, your brand is a really interesting thing, because I think for a lot of us, as we look at our career, there's a tension that I think we're all sort of innately aware of, but don't tend to talk about or look at too much. Because what it is, is that for your current company, they want a team player. They want somebody who is they're investing in the team investing in the company 100%. But then an interesting thing happens. You decide maybe you want to move on, maybe you want to get another job, maybe you want to do something different And now there's this interesting thing your next company wants to know, what have you done? Is it unique and strong individual. And building your brand becomes a really interesting thing. I've spent 15 years with companies sort of allowing me to do it and being really cautious about it. Because what it allows you to do is to do this interesting thing of just not accepting what this industry gives you. But it takes some amount of control in it. I can't tell you how frustrating it is for how many creatives I talked to and when I talk about their new job, they say, yeah, this is what I could get. This is what was available. And then it's amazing how 15 years down the line, they're like, Yeah, no, I'm gonna like go open and like an herbal holistic surf shop or something. I'm like, I don't like what, but it's just like, there is this idea that for us. And so often with a lot of our companies, it is discouraged to think about having some amount of leverage or power whenever it comes to actually being in the bargaining table. And the other problem with this is that I see hundreds of resumes I talked to tons of emerging designers It is amazing. And those resumes that Id how pointless they all are. They are filled with these overuse cliches, this business speak. They say nothing about who the person is. And most of them whenever I press them, I realize because that person is not ever actually spending any time thinking about it. The two interview questions I asked the most to trip people up the most one, can you actually tell me how you have an idea? Amazing how many crickets that gets. The second one is can you tell me what you need to be happy? I've had people who have come back 48 to 72 hours later saying they have not slept, because they have no idea what the answers are to those questions. If you were sitting there going, Wow, maybe I should figure that out. It's amazing how methodical we are about our work. It's amazing how methodical we are about our clients and about our business. And it's amazing how happenstance we are with ourselves. Where we'll just kind of say like, hey, whatever happens happens. I do not believe in that. And the other thing I will tell you is your brand is not where you worked, and it is not where you went to school. It is amazing to me how many resumes I get, and it's Here's where I worked. Here's where I went to school. So what what makes you different? What like if this is your first introduction, your first introduction is just kind of like peace. That's it. Like, what's it like that makes no sense. So this is the thing, your brand needs to have four things. And I want people to think about this. The first thing that it needs is some level of consistency. Meaning that you need to work on your brain like it is another job. Don't just be like everybody else, whenever I can tell that you're about to quit your job, because all of a sudden, you're asking for LinkedIn recommendations, and you've updated your photo. And all of a sudden, you haven't been on Twitter for three and a half years. But Wow, you're tweeting every day. And it's like until you your boss probably knows it too. But the ability to actually invest in your network because the thing I can tell you I've been laid off from to my last four jobs. I've been laid off with my work running globally in an apple commercial. If you think that you are safe in your job right now in a business cannot come in and change that you are kidding yourself. The ability to invest in us and so your network is there so your brand is there. When you need it is incredibly important. It needs to be credible in the fact that it actually needs to represent you. Because I can tell you, it is exhausting to run around pretending like you're somebody you're not. And also, this funny thing happens that whenever somebody hires you thinking you're somebody you're not, the job doesn't tend to work out too well. And also, because there's this little thing that like for creatives, we tend to smell bs better than most people. So again, the ability to actually be credible and realistic, like do this crazy thing in your portfolio, instead of just posting a screenshot, how about you actually say what the work was You did? crazy idea. Because here's the thing, if somebody is going to hire you, because you just posted a bunch of screenshots, it's a job you should not want, because they're gonna treat you like a commodity and get you to go in there and do a whole bunch of work that you're not going to be too thrilled about. It should actually be here's another crazy one creative. Like I can tell you right now, I want to find the person who convince people that putting like percentages for how much you know an apple was a good idea. I want to hug that person down. Because it's like, oh, I'm sorry. Like, yeah, you're at 6% in sketch compared to what? What does that mean? Like I get it that you know it but like, what? Like, okay, great. We all went on Pinterest and we put in like visual resume like I get in, right? Like, you know, somewhere you know some marketplace made a bunch of money but like, Hey, here's the thought, like, Don't quote other people don't use percentages. Don't put your education first, like people who quote other people drive me crazy. It's like, yeah, I want to talk about my creativity by quoting somebody else.
Unknown Speaker :What
Stephen Gates :everybody who didn't laugh is like tonight, change resume. Update, like update this before we send it to him. I do that all the time because people will like send me the resume like we'd love to work at envision. I'll write them back lovingly, and say you're not going to and here's why. It's a broken system but the last thing is like look, be memorable. Do this crazy thing to stand out own what it is you're good at. It's amazing to me why everybody tries to be different by acting the same. And I know it's scary. looking for a job building a brand to standing in front of the world and going God police somebody loved me. It's full of trolls, haters, stupid people, so many people that embrace that anonymity of the Internet, and are so emboldened by it. History doesn't remember well behaved people. The brands that you love, don't do the same thing as everybody else. If you thought about yourself as a product, you would not market yourself the way that you do. And so for me, like with your brand, do these four things. Because time after time, resume after resume portfolio after portfolio. People just go in and put up so many different screenshots and it just it is a betrayal to their talent. I see so many amazing people who are not getting opportunities they deserve because they don't know how to tell Their own story. And it's important because it will help you in the job you're in today and the job you have tomorrow. But here's the other thing I will tell you. And this is the way I've always thought about building brands, build a brand that someone will hate. It sounds strange, but at the point, whenever you have built something that is that clear, and that strong, it means that it stands for something that a lot of people are gonna stand up and say, You know what, I'm all about that. But then other people are gonna say, you know what, that's not for me. Companies, brands and everything else, so that way, I was gleefully happy this year. I actually started get my own trolls this year. Oh my god, I love it. I wish they were more creative and they had more like to do but like for the fact that they just want to hate me. I'm like I am so on the right track. This is amazing. Because I just like I don't find these people and meet them because I'm just fascinated by like, anyway, different talk. Design imposter syndrome. Isn't it amazing? Right now we're like, you know, this is what we think we need to learn in art school. This is what we think it's actually going to take to become A successful designer. And then this is actually what it takes to be successful. And this is this whole amazing thing that sort of happened because what came along with that is like, wow, there's all this insecurity that's going on right now because we're being asked to do so many things that we didn't go to school for. Part of it has become, because we've gone through this sort of transition from visual to product design. And with that insecurity came all these imposters. Now there are five types of imposters we're going to go through them real quick. And here's the thing that I can guarantee you you are more you're at least one or more of them. If you think you are not Congratulations, you are lying to yourself. The perfectionist, the perfectionist is somebody that sets these really high goals for themselves and think if they don't measure up to them, then they failed. Real easy way to be able to judge this in people. Like if you have difficulty delegating to people and then get really frustrated with the results. In basically if you were in a leadership position at any creative organization. This is what you are because you will watch other people's you start to become a leader you start to watch them design and your brain like an SNL skit. Just give me like just give me the mouse don't wait don't turn it that way don't don't why that cut no that's the No no, no make the logo smaller. What do you keep it all inside? That's a perfectionist, insecurity, Superman or Superwoman. These are people that feel like they're phonies, working alongside real people. And what do you need to do is work harder to be able to measure up whenever you go back to work next week, really easy to spot, the people who are there and stay later at work that everybody else even if their works already done. huge problem of mine. Don't think I'm that creative, but I'm like, Look, I'm gonna outwork everybody. Real easy to spot everybody who just laughed, shares that problem with me. So I said circle of trust. geniuses, geniuses are people that are a little bit the opposite. These are people that feel like they don't actually get it right the first time, then they probably failed. geniuses are really easy to spot because of these people that the idea of like having a mentor drives them crazy. Because they're just like, Look, I can do it. I can do it on my own. As we get into an individualist an individualist is somebody that's a little bit different. These are the people that actually feel like if they ask for help, it reveals that they're an imposter. They're pretty easy to spot as well. Because these are people who never frame requests with the word AI. It's always what the team needs, what the project needs, it's always things like that. That's what they're really after. The expert experts are interesting because these are people who are kind of like somehow I've tricked my employer into hiring me. And at some point, they're gonna figure out that I don't know what it is that I'm doing. And like some sort of Dragon or something, right, like they just hoard endlessly hoard training. They don't need it, but they're just like constantly I need to know more. I need to know more. I need to keep learning. I need to keep doing this. Everybody who's got their head down laughing like this right now. Like, it's okay. We know circle of trust, but like, as I said, like, these are the sorts of things that are going on right now. But identifying and understanding your imposters is incredibly important, because we have them it's not a weakness. It's something that is really, really important to this. These are mine. Most of the time it is that Superman, where I That's what I said, I don't, there are so many people who are so much more creative than me. My abilities just been, I'll just sleep less than they will. And I think a lot of it for me is also as it comes to you to stop looking to other people for answers. It's an amazing insecurity trap that we do with a lot of this stuff like your talent has taken you this far. It has taken you to a company that said, Yes, I'll pay all the money for you to be able to come here, stay at a hotel, do all this stuff, right? Like you found some success. But as a speaker, that's all you ever want, right? It's just that one like, Whoa, like right from the back. We're gonna party later, I like you. But the problem is, is that your talent is taking you this far. But the challenges from here what's left are the things that are crammed into the dark corners, your psyche, it's the stuff that's uncomfortable. It's the stuff that deals with your childhood. It's stuff that deals with your parents. It's the stuff that deals with A lot of those sorts of things. And all of a sudden, you're like, I need Dr. Phil on the couch, right? But your ability to deal with that will depend on how successful you're going to be from here. And there are two things that I want to talk about this because there are so many incredible creative people that I work with, who cannot and will not own and love who they are. Because here's the thing, I'm going to tell you, your background is your strength. It is not your weakness, everybody feels like it is their weakness, because maybe they grew up in a search or in a situation that wasn't great. Maybe they didn't go to a great school, maybe they haven't worked at the best companies. There's a gentleman who I'm coaching right now, who said to me, like Steve, I'd love to be able to go out and start speaking. But I'm afraid because whenever I look at my background, I grew up in the south. I worked at a megachurch for 10 years, and people are gonna think I'm a racist. And I said, Well, are you? They said, Well, no, I've got two adopted black sons. I'm like, maybe go tell that story then. That's his strength, but he sees it as an insecurity cuz he like people are gonna judge me. You have to understand that for so many of us, your backstory is not going to change. This is what I wasted 38 years In my life, apologizing for where I came from and what I did and thinking that it wasn't enough. The moment that I started to make peace with myself was the moment my work got better. And the other part of that, is that you from now on, have the answers. So many people come to me for advice, Steve, this is what I should do. What do you think you should do? I should do this. Great. All you're doing is coming to me looking for validation. You know the answer. Stop looking to everybody else for validation for what it is you're doing. You're enough. You're smart enough. You understand what it is you need to do. What you lack is confidence and trust to actually do something about it. So many amazing people like I'm sorry, this is why stupid people are successful. Because they're unencumbered by fear. But it's like yeah, who throw it out there. That fails. We'll do it again. Screw it. Right stop making stupid people famous. But this is my thing, right? Why? Why don't we have these conversations? Right, why? Why are these things that we are so afraid to talk about? Like one of the things for me that I find? I find it flattering, but I find it very sad is this. People come up to me after talks, they said, My God, I love listening to you, you're so honest. Who are you surrounding yourself with? That that's rare? I don't mean that as a joke. I mean, that is a serious question. Like if you do not have people in your life and are surrounding yourself with people at work, who will tell you the truth, who are going to support you, who will be able to build you up around this stuff, you need to find different jobs, you need to find different people, you need to find a different support system, right? These conversations cannot continue to be rare. The ability for us not to be able to do this is what's holding us back. And I think that's the thing for me, that's such a challenge because change I can tell you is gonna require four things and these are my asks of everybody. It requires courage. To be able to step up and say the things and do the things that you were scared of to be able to step up and do something. And again, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Because if you want to change and you want your work to get better, and you want your team to get better, and you want to find that next step, it's gonna mean that you have to do something that makes you uncomfortable. And you may even have to fail at it. You're gonna need to actually be vulnerable about this. For me vulnerabilities is the best new leadership quality that there is out there. But vulnerability only comes for certain people, vulnerabilities come with boundaries. vulnerability is not something that you just go out and do with everybody. But for those who deserve it. You need to be honest about what it is you're going through and ask for help about that. Stop with this bullshit of every time somebody asks you. You got that knee jerk reaction, I'm okay. I'm fine. Everything's good. Are you really No, actually, my life's falling apart? Okay, so let's maybe start there. You're going to need to actually take a risk. You're not going to do something new, right? By doing the same old stuff that you've always done. For me, I will tell you there's a fine line between crazy and stupid But crazy people do change the world because we're willing to risk something, risk it in yourself. And if ever there was a place to do it, it is with the people that are in this room, to do it with strangers to do it with people who again, you have just met, there are opportunities that surround you in this place to be able to start to take risks and put yourself out there with these sort of people. And I think it's going to take some amount of emotional exposure, to be able to go out and actually risk something because I can tell you as creatives we actually care about what we do, because what happens anytime I get a blank piece of paper, I get a blank screen and make a mark or write a word I like to write write a line of code, I take a photograph, whatever it is, it is a personal expression of some part of me. And to say that there is not an emotional component to what we do is not being honest with ourselves. And so for me the ability to look at these four things courage, vulnerability, risk and emotional exposure. These are the things that will get us where we need to go. These are the things that if you look at that and have an honest conversation about that, what's going to take your career to where you want it to be. But the way that I summed this up for a lot of the people that I coach and for a lot of the people that I work with, is for everybody, here's my only ask. And then I'll say thank you and be done. Is this exist loudly? We all have voices that the world needs to hear. We all have things to say. We all have opinions that we need to put out there. We have other people that need support and a need to hear what is it going on with what it is that we do our ability to say that Oh, nobody cares about the ability to say that what I'm doing isn't enough. Is you compromising yourself? This is what is going to make the change. This is for all of us. And this is the hard part is that this there is no magic bullet to this. This is a lot of looking in the mirror and figuring out what do you need to do differently? That's my hope. That's a challenge for all of us. And look, I think at envision this is this is absolutely why I've been hired to be able to do this right. We Want to be able to be here to help do these sorts of things, we want to be able to create things like design leadership forum where you can have real conversations about this stuff. We want to be able to start to create these things. Where again, there's no salespeople. We don't talk about product. It's about how do we actually elevate what is going on in this industry and be there to support people to be able to do that. If you are not sick of hearing my voice, I've got about 76 episodes of the crazy one you can get on any major podcast platform, feel free. Like I said, you want to listen to that have at it. But here's the other thing. That's my email address. And that's my social media. I will answer any single person that writes to me, I don't care what the issue is. I don't care what it is you're dealing with. I don't care what the problem is or how alone that you feel like you were going through. You write to me and I will get you but I will get back to you. If I'm traveling. Maybe you have to nudge me and say Hey, asshole, remember you need to get back to me. But that's what we're here for. That's my hope and my challenge for all of us. exist loudly. Thanks so much. Well, that was my keynote and how design Hopefully, I think you saw that this, this really was sort of the culmination of a lot of these different things, trying to crystallize it and compress it into just one talk. So hopefully you found that useful. And we're going to be back to New Content starting back up in the next show. But until then, like I said before, make sure you leave a review, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as always, if you want to find out more about these things, you want to get the show notes, talk about articles, things like that. Head over to the crazy one calm, that's the crazy, number one calm, feel free to follow me on social media, like the show on Facebook, you can do all those sort of things, reach out, ask questions, look for updates, do all that sort of stuff. As usual, everybody down illegal wants me to remind you that the views on the show are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my own thoughts. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury any of us have was incredibly humbled. You want to spend any of it with me. So hopefully you got something out of this. Hopefully it's got you a little bit more fired up to exist loudly and remember All the while while you're doing it, stay crazy