Ep 33 Methodologies: Design Thinking P1 - Overview and Inspiration phase

The first in a 3 part series on Design Thinking that will teach you all the important parts of this methodology that I learned while becoming an IDEO-certified Design Thinking trainer. In this episode, I will give you an overview of all of the parts of Design Thinking and then explore the first inspiration phase, which consists of research and synthesis.

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Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, I am back once again with a 33rd 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 a whole host of other things that matter to creative people. Now, this is a show I've been waiting to do for quite a while, because I wanted to get it right, because it's something that I really love. And as a result, I wanted to make sure that I talked about it that I taught it the right way. And what we're going to talk about today is design thinking. Now design thinking is something that has been getting a ton of play lately. For the first time in a really long time. Tons of people are talking about it. everybody's interested. Everybody wants to find out about it, understand what it is or talk about it kind of like they even understand what it means. But it's interesting as somebody who's been using it for quite a while, you find out that design thinking lately has sort of become this generic term like Kleenex or Xerox or something Where people just simply slap that term on their process of problem solving a problem, whether they actually understand it or not. It's understandable for me, I guess, because design thinking can be complicated to understand. If you go to the Wikipedia page about design thinking, it's about six miles long. And I'll be honest, that page confuses the hell out of me, and I understand what it is. And I've been doing it for probably this point, almost 20 years. So what hope does the average person have but to probably misuse the term, try to sound cool and slap it on something when they don't actually understand it. So this is going to be a crash course. So you can understand it and more importantly, understand how to use it. I'm going to break this up into three episodes. This will obviously be the first of those three, because I really just want to go through the three phases of design thinking. And normally I'll be honest, this is something that I usually teach in at a minimum, a one day Crash Course ideally believe this is a three to five day class for me to really be able to dig in on this. The reality is I don't think anybody wants to listen to a three or a five day long podcast. So we're going to abbreviate a bit. And the key to this thing is going to be that design thinking is a methodology. It's a way to solve problems. And the challenge for you, just to be quite honest, is going to be that you're going to have to try to take notes about this methodology, whether it's the show notes, whether it's your own notes, but then you're gonna have to work to apply this to your problems. And you're probably gonna have to do that a couple times to really understand the nuances. That's honestly why this class is usually three or five days long. Because in most cases, I want to do a one day Crash Course just basically do what I'm doing here. Just in one big shock and awe moment, just expose you to what the hell is this whole thing, then take the next two days and really go through it in depth. So this may actually be some of you may need to come back multiple times. You may need to listen to it a couple times. You know, the One thing I can tell you, though is that, take those notes, but to actually go out and to try to use it, that's going to be the best way to learn. I've taught this for years and years. And trust me, that's going to be the best way to learn it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to as we go along to try to make this as interactive as possible to try to have these moments. And honestly, it's probably going to be in the second and the third show mainly. But these places, we're going to do some exercises. And I'm going to encourage you when we do this to stop the podcast to do the exercise. And then we're going to come back and talk about Could you do it? How well did you do it? What were the things that went well, what were the common challenges? Then once we do that, then we can keep on moving from there. But so for today, with this first installment, we're going to tackle two things. The first is just a generic big overview of just what the hell is design thinking to actually understand so that people generally can just get a good foundation, get the right headset, get the right mindset, probably more than a headset, a headset would just be headphones, that makes no damn sense. But maybe let's get the right mindset instead. And then from there, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the first phase of design thinking, which is called inspiration. But we'll get to what all those all those phases are, and all that stuff here in a second. But let's start with just the basics of just what is design thinking. Now, the funny part for me, who's somebody that's actually been paying attention to this for some amount of time, is that everybody seems to think that design thinking is new. Well, the reality is, is that design thinking was actually created in the 1960s. And that it was probably perfected and initially grew to fame through the company, IDEO, really in the early 90s. Like around probably around 1991. So this has been around for quite a while, almost 60 years, so it's not actually anything that's that new. But why is it found fame or why is it found interest again recently, and if you listen to the show for any amount of time you hear me talk about As creatives we're really in this place right now, where we have the chance and the opportunity with companies that we probably haven't had since the Industrial Revolution, because companies want to be more innovative. But quite honestly, they don't know how to teach their people how to be more creative. They don't know how to get the good ideas out of them outside of just happenstance, or when it sort of happens just almost by accident. So for us, for the creatives, this is a massive opportunity. Because it shifts us from just being seen as doers, the people who make pretty pictures, we write pretty words, we do things like that, but we're seen as more executed. And it shifts that perception. Because what it does is it exposes all the things that have been behind the scenes for us for so long, which is really the creative process. And it gives us the chance to teach and to lead that process inside of these companies. And anytime you can guide something That powerful. Well, that's incredibly impactful. It shifts perceptions, it shifts budgets, it shifts, team sizes, it shifts a whole host of other things. But that's really the opportunity here. And I that's why I think so many people in so many companies have been running back to rediscover design thinking because there's this need, but how do you teach people to be creative? And the one thing I'll say is that I've been using design thinking for over 20 years, and I am a IDEO certified design thinking trainer. Sounds cool. The hell does it actually mean? So what that actually means is that over the course of my career, I've actually partnered with IDEO. And I've actually gone through whenever I do these three day, these five day classes, I've actually done it with instructors from IDEO, who teach design thinking for them. So I've watched them teach, I've taught alongside them and then I've run my own classes with them, watching them and giving me notes. So that's why it's actually certified because I've actually gone through the training with them to make sure that I'm teaching it the right way. Now, design thinking is a method. We've said that before, right? So what does that mean? It's just a way to be able to help expose creativity to give it form to give it steps to give it away that all of a sudden, everybody can be a part of this process. And that's an incredibly important point. Because one of the big things if you want to bring about change, one of the big things if you want to affect your company, or really anything else, is that design can't be a means unto itself. It can't be its own little precious protected world. Because we have clients, we have tech groups, we have all these other things that surround the design team. Now if you want to affect change, what you need to do is then you need to be the Sherpas of creativity, you need to bring those people in, and there's incredible power in that. There's power to affect change. There's power to really shift the perception of your group and do a lot of really substantial things. But the great part about it, the fascinating the powerful part of it is that whenever you bring people in to be creative, you can bring about that change. But in a way that doesn't seem obvious. It doesn't feel like politics or like you're campaigning. It's just simply asking everybody to be a part of the process. Because the reality is that everybody is creative. If you look at a bunch of kindergarteners, they'll all paint they'll all sing. They'll all pretend they're superheroes. It's the education system. It's our different sociologies and ideologies. That tends to train that out of us. That says that Oh, unless you're actually an artist who's painting who's wearing a blu ray in the corner doing a watercolor their spirit animal unless you're doing that, well, then you're not creative. I don't believe that. I don't believe it for a second creativity is a team sport. And this is where design thinking is so great, because it just simply reawakens this in a lot of people. It is that methodology and it's for a creative way, a problem solving. Design doesn't have to even be part of the process, it doesn't even have to be an output of the process quite honestly, I use design thinking to solve all sorts of things that weren't visual. I've used it to solve organization design, how am I gonna put my team together? You know, you can use it to solve or even go on your next vacation, you can use it to decide what house you're gonna buy. Like, there's tons of things where you can just do it with because it's a problem solving methodology. The reality is that what it does really well is that it's really well balanced. Because it's a methodology that really looks at people's needs and desires to see is it technologically feasible and strategically viable? Because that's really the intersection of three really important things. Do people want it? Can we build it? And then is it actually going to move the needle? Is it going to be profitable? Or is it going to have some sort of an effect? Because that's in the middle of that is where design thinking really wants to live? At the core of that though, and there's a very important part That sentence is that it really starts with a deep understanding of people. That's why one of the things you may hear from time to time is you'll actually hear design thinking referred to as human centered design, which again, seems like it's a $3 word sort of way of saying it. But there are different ways of doing this. But a lot of this is just really how do we put the consumer, the user, the person who's actually doing this at the middle of all of this. But the biggest problem with design thinking, the biggest problem to you using it, the biggest problem to you getting it adopted in your company, is going to be in the title. And this is the thing that I've seen time and time again, that the single biggest obstacle to design thinking is the word design in the title. This is what throws most people off. If it was called creative thinking, then probably a whole bunch more people would be able to easily rally to it. But it's that word design. And I can tell you, as somebody who's brought this into multiple organizations, that's what's gonna trip you up. People think, Oh, I have to be able to draw, oh, I have to be able to, you know, to actually be visual and things like that. And that's actually not the case. So just understand that going in that that's going to be your biggest barrier, honestly, is that once you can get people to give it a chance, once you can get them involved with it, they'll love it. But it's getting them over the design part of design thinking that's going to be a big challenge. So let's move on from kind of the basic the big overview all that hoopla into, what are the three parts I talked about this or mentioned it before? What are the three parts of design thinking? The way that I'll try to explain this to you is I think the design thinking process is really probably best thought of as a system of what probably honestly like overlapping phases, rather than a sequence of orderly steps. And the challenge here, though, is going to be that yes, they're going to overlap whenever you do it. But it's hard to teach that way. So that the methodology whenever I teach it, I tend to teach it as a linear sequence. But the thing that you're gonna see whenever you do it is that it rarely is that linear that you may go through one phase and then have to back up because you found some sort of insight. And you need to actually go back and vet that insight again, or you need to kind of move through in this sort of an overlapping way. That's what I said is that it's just, it's hard to teach that way. There's the three phases. And what those are are inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Three words. And inspiration, which is what we're going to talk about here in a minute, is really just a means of opening up the problem or the opportunity through research activities. And there can be a number of these and we'll talk about what those might mean. But it's just really kind of saying like, Okay, look, we have a problem statement, we have a brief we have something we need to solve for. How are we going to start to open this up and figure out where are the opportunities for us to be able to then go and do ideation in the next phase. And then the ideation phase is really the process of generating, developing and testing ideas. It's It's really just exactly what you would expect out of something called ideation. And then finally, we have implementation. And this is the path that leads from, you know, really the project stage into people's lives. This is how do we make it real? How do we actually get it out into the world? How do we actually launch this thing, but those are gonna be really just like I said that the three phases of that, for this just for this teaching, like I said, we are going to present them as linear. But like I said, whenever you actually do it, in practice, it's not nearly so orderly. Because that's why I said there's sometimes you may find something, some key insight later in the steps. That means you'll have to go back to some of the earlier ways of doing things as just a simple overview. And I'll actually put this diagram in the show notes so that you can actually visually see this, you don't feel like you have to scribble all this down, just phonetically. But as we look at inspiration, ideation implementation, each of those really have two to three different parts to them. inspiration, which is what we're going to talk about today. Well, it starts with a design challenge, then you move into research, where we just kind of say, Okay, look, we're gonna, we're going to go going to go into this with no preconceived notions and just see where is the opportunity, then we go into synthesis where we really take that research and kind of say, Okay, how do we extrapolate this into the Why? What's the insight that we're going to find out of that. And then we move into ideation, which is really about the cycle between actually doing ideation of radiating and then prototyping, of just trying to fail fast of getting the idea out there and getting it in a form that people can really play around with. And then the implementation, we have three areas they're testing. So it obviously is you're prototyping and doing those sort of things, that how to actually get this in a form that people can interact with. There's a real simple overlap that you can see as you go from ideation to prototyping, to testing that spans ideation and implementation. And again, that's going to be more of a loop than a line. So here again, I'm going to keep just kind of referencing that just so that you don't get overly caught up in the fact that you should only do each of these ones. But then as you come out of testing, you have to refine and kind of say, Okay, how do we make things better? Ultimately, then delivering now laid across these three phases with these multiple parts, really is the creative process. And it's the want and the ask of how do we generate ideas? How do we generate insights? How do we generate all these different things along this point? And what that really brings in is is honestly, probably what is the core of creativity, which is the concept of divergent and convergent thinking. It sounds very intimidating, what the hell does that mean? Besides the fact that you can sound smart in your next you know, big meeting. What it really means is that if you think about your creative process, think about the last project you worked on. What you often will do is whenever you actually are in an ideation phase, you diverged, diverged means going out going big, you go out and you think of A lot of different ideas, a lot of different possibilities, what are all the different ways that we can potentially solve a problem? Well, then you end up with a table full of post it notes, a notebook full of sketches something right. But then what you have to do is you go, Wow, that's a lot of stuff. And not all of this is going to actually work. So how do I whittle down? How do I convert? How do I come back together? to just focus on the best? How do I focus on the strongest? How do I weed out the weak parts of this? And the thing that I'll tell you is that, you know, the best teams that I've ever worked with are brutal in this process. If you look at the Googles, the apples, the Facebook's, any kind of team that you feel like puts out a really good product. What I'm gonna bet you is that there is a certain level of brutality in that process on their creative team, because only the strongest ideas should rise and the weakest need to go away. And that the harder you are with that the more you try to pressure test it inside of your team. The more you can diverged and converge, and be able to improve the quality of the ideas, the better the work is that goes out the door. Because I think that often is in this part is often where mediocrity comes in is because teams will let bad ideas live on too long teams won't press to really try to say, look, this isn't good enough, we're starting too much with the obvious. We're not pushing beyond that, into trying to do something that really is different. And you can see that because as I've taught design thinking all over the world, maybe it will say I have 10 teams in a room. nine of them will come up with almost the exact same answer to whatever the problem is that we're posing to them. It tends to be obvious, it tends to be safe and and I get that in a lot of cases, you can say, Well, look, you know, you're trying to teach them all this in just a matter of a couple hours. So of course they're going to run to the obvious solution. I would probably argue that I think that the problem may be a touchdown. Bigger than that? Because I just think too often we accept the easy answer too often we accept the first answer without really pushing for different for bigger for greater. And I think that that's a key part of this is as you do this process, divergent convergent thinking, how do you end up being the one team that genuinely thinks of something different, and not the other nine that basically all arrive at the exact same place? You know, it's just, it's tough. Because not long ago, I actually taught this class at Adobe max. And I think there probably were about 10 teams there. I think nine of them eight or nine of them, we asked them to rethink basically a conference badge. How do you remember somebody's name? How do you remember the things that you know really kind of make all these people that you meet memorable? Well, the funny part was so out of these 10 teams, nine of them did a wearable that had some sort of display that You know, it was just it was all basically the same thing. And so you can actually see this in the presentations, where by the fourth or fifth one, they're kind of going like, okay, yeah, we basically have what everybody else does. But then you have the teams that push harder that start to come up with something, however fanciful. It may be, they get very interesting when design team stands out, in particular for me, where the team actually went through and they said, Okay, look, we're designing this experience for creatives. So whenever you're actually going to meet somebody, and you're going to be a part of their conference badge or something like that, if we want a visual representation. Why don't we actually customize the typeface that your badges in to match your personality? So if I meet a woman, she's from Fort Worth in Texas, she runs a small design shop, maybe I would have a more filigreed typeface, as opposed to somebody with a big personality from say, New York City. Maybe that's a bold or a black face and a sans serif, but it was something that was a very interesting idea, a very interesting opportunity to do something very, very different. Much more interesting than just kind of like, Oh, it's a wearable that has your name on it. But that was the thing is it was that one team out of the 10 that stepped out to do something different that you could see the differentiation. And everybody went, man, that's really cool. But that's gonna be the hard part here is when you go through this, how do you hold yourself to that standard, because that's going to be the challenge. This is just a methodology. This is not a magic bullet. And you've heard me talk about this in the past, all that I can do, the best that I can do is to teach you this method. The way you apply it, the standards that you use, the amount of effort that you put into it is what is going to determine if this is successful or not. This is a tool, no different than a pencil, and for all of our innovation for all of our creativity, if you can't lead it, if you don't have somebody to communicate with it, it's not gonna matter. Because it is just a tool. So where are you going to go with it? How are you going to do something it's actually going to be better with it. So with that sermon over, let's move on to the first part of this, which is inspiration. And the first phase around inspiration, really is the first step in this process. And the first part of that is a design challenge. And that is literally what it sounds like. What is the problem that we have to solve? This could be your creative brief, this could be just wherever you're gonna get the problem from. That's the point of initiation. This is the thing we have to rally around, understand solve for. Now, I've talked about this in the past and other shows. And I think it's worth repeating here as well. That it's incredibly critical, though, that you make sure that you actually have a problem to be solved. Because this was a challenge that I found in multiple companies. It's a challenge whenever I go out and teach that I see time and time again, right from the very first step. Teams screw themselves. Because what they do is they have clients who don't show up With a problem to be solved, they have a client who shows up with a solution to be vetted. This could come in many different forms. This could come in the form of an execution. Or what they do is they come in, they say, oh, we'd love to have a website, we'd love to have a Twitter feed, we'd love to have a podcast be on Snapchat, do all sorts of these different things, but their execution lead. And the problem is going to be that this methodology is going to really struggle with that, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to impose a solution, you're trying to impose a solution to be vetted, not a problem to be solved. Well, anytime you go execution lead like this, creativity falls down creativity struggles, for that very reason, because I'm pre defining the path that it needs to be on. What I want on the input of this, what I want on the front end of this is what is the consumer need, what's the user need? What's the thing that we need to solve for? Free of execution, free of delivery? And it may be at the end that we may still come back. And it may be a website, it might be Twitter, it might be Snapchat, it might be any of those things. But let's not pre define, let's not constrain the thinking too early. That's like I said, it's just time and time again, you just you have to be clear on this. Because if you go into this, and again, they just want you to kind of coloring the lines that they've already drawn. No methodology in the world is going to help you be able to really kind of break free of that and do something really interesting. I think that the way that I would look at this is it through your research, you can help refine and define that challenge. Because research is something that doesn't get nearly enough love when it comes to creativity. It's something that I really believe in. It's something that I really lean on. But I think for most people it's not sexy. It's like talking about process are talking about, you know, statistics or numbers or something like that, but the reality is, it's a incredibly important, I think you just maybe need to think about research a little bit differently that this isn't somebody out there with a clipboard taking a poll. Because once you get that design challenge, what you need to do is you need to go out and observe with fresh eyes. Because design thinking really starts with research because what we've got to do is we have to gain empathy, and we have to gain understanding for the people that we're designing for. And you're gonna hear that word empathy a lot. If you've ever read anything about design thinking you've ever looked into this, that's probably the word that comes up the most is empathy. And when we talk about research, there probably is at least for me, there are a ton a ton of different ways that you can do research and there are I'm sure a lot more people who are a hell of a lot more qualified to talk about it than I am. But for me, the three that I tend to go to are the three that have been the most successful for me. have really been immersion. observation and interviewing. Because I think that depending on what the problem is that the mix of those things may skew or they move or may move around a little bit more, but I think Don't be so arrogant that you just simply assume that you understand the person you're designing for, oh, no, I, I get it. I understand what they are. If you haven't actually walked a mile in their shoes, literally, which is what immersion is, if you haven't gone and truly watched these people, if you haven't talked to them, you don't truly have empathy. You have this sort of like arrogance of empathy, right? You have the whiff of it your your empathy, adjacent, I don't know, figure out how to what a better way to phrase that. But that's the thing, right, is that you probably really want to do all of these things if you can. But keep in mind that the objective is always to find a deeper understanding of the consumers, the users, the person's latent needs, what is it they really need, because if you can find that need, you can find an opportunity So let's talk about those three just to touch more immersion observation and interviewing. immersion is literally walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. If you're, I don't know what if you're designing for a fast food company go work at the drive in whenever I worked at automotive clients, I've gone and built drive trains. I've gone in test driven cars, I've stocked people in gas stations, I've done all sorts of things, basically, because I want to really understand what is it like to be that person? Because there's no substitute for it. There's no just like, Oh, no, no, I kind of sort of get it. You really need to commit. I've talked in the past and people have called me crazy for that. But whatever I worked at Starwood Hotels, I literally worked and lived for 364 days in a Western Hotel in Morristown, New Jersey. Why the hell would I live in a hotel for 364 days, because we're probably half of it was really the fact that I was just moving so there was a literal need, but then passed. That it was wanting to genuinely immerse myself into what does the hotel guest go through? Not somebody who's there for like three or four nights, but somebody who really is what was our most valuable consumer, the people who were staying with us 100 200 300 400 nights a year. And Yoshi actually can stay 400 nights a year. I know, you just thought they're 365 days. Why did he say 400? Because if you actually booked multiple rooms on your account, you can actually go over 365 days. And I know people who do this, but that's the thing like, what are those people going through? Because if they're that valuable, and they're not just the person who stays with us twice a year for three nights, what's that experience? Like? How is it different? So for me, it was truly about immersion, of going and working it, you know, and living in this hotel, to get a deeper understanding about that. While I was there, I could then do the next thing, which was interviewing. And this was literally going out and talk to people. I would sit in the lobby. And what I would do is that I could talk to the guests who stayed there, I could see who are the faces that are actually eyes were coming there every week or every other week, I could talk to the staff behind the desk, I could talk to the housekeeping, you know, crew and I could do those different things. Because what I wanted to do was to understand what worked well, from a brand standpoint, from a logistics standpoint, from just a digital opportunity standpoint, what were the things that they thought, you know what, that was really easy. But then where were the places were like, Look, we have a need here. There's something that isn't working very well. And that that was really the area was like, Okay, look, there's an opportunity there. But it was interviewing those people going back to the automotive clients, I've talked about this in the past, there are gas stations in Texas and in parts of New York, I still cannot go to because I used to actually go and try to interview people who own certain cars. I'm six foot four, I have a big voice, not a small guy. Some people if you're really a car guy is perfectly fine with me coming up and asking about your car. They love to talk about it. Other people it scared the living crap out of them. But that was my thing was I wanted to go out I wanted genuine interviews. I didn't want them in a mirrored you know room with a one way mirror. Probably a two way mirror. Better. But it's one of those things where it's just, I needed it to be more genuine. And then also staying in the hotel stalking people in gas stations. Let me do the third thing, which was really observation. Because the challenge that you're going to find is that what people say and what they do rarely line up. If you think about usability testing, you're gonna go design a new app. And you say, okay, we want you to do something, can you see the button to book a hotel room to buy a car to do whatever it is? And they'll say, Yes, absolutely. And then you watch them spend the next two to three minutes trying to find that button. Well, what they said and what they did, don't line up. And so I think this is why just sometimes keeping your mouth shut, and actually watching what they do can be far more impactful than actually what they say. And I think that especially for me, who's somebody who does design who is very concerned with usability, find ability, you know, different aspects like that. The ability to just be quiet, and then just watch can be very powerful. So whenever you're doing this, you're going out, you're immersing yourself, you're interviewing people you're observing. So what should you be looking for? And let's think about the people that you talk to. Because in general, what I'll say is that these people are going to fall into really one of three camps. You have the people on the one hand, who never do whatever it is you're looking to solve for. They don't stay in hotels, they don't drive cars. It's just, it's not something they engage with, with what whatever the problem is. You're the people in the middle. We're probably 80% of the people if we're being honest, who are the ones who do it regularly. They travel regularly enough, they drive pretty much every day. It's something that's a regular part of what they do. And then you have the 10%. On the other end, these are the people who actually do it professionally. They travel for a living, they're racecar drivers, they're whatever you know, that thing is, but it just literally they've taken it to that extreme. And what you're going to do, is that you're going to be reading tempted to just talk to the people in the middle that 80%. But the problem with that is going to be the thing that I've found is that I don't want that 80% they're really predictable. Whenever I talked about staying in the hotel, I talked about wanting to understand the extreme case, the people who were there the 100 200 300 400 nights a year, right? Those are the people because they're not as predictable. their needs are different. They sit on the extreme. And the reason why I do that, the reason why I think you should do that. And why you should talk to the edges is because that's where you're going to find the most interesting insights. Because when you look for those extreme users, you tend to find extreme usage behaviors. And that that's where interesting, things really start to come to light. Because if you're just talking about 80% in the middle, they're much harder to mine out. They're much harder to find those opportunities. And I think that's where most people fall down, is they say, oh, we're going to go talk to the average person. Well, if everybody else is talking to the average person, you're probably not going to find very many opportunities. There. Talk to the people who never do it. And how do we get them to start doing it or talk to the people who literally do it professionally, and our true masters what that whatever that thing is, because that's the part where you should really start to look for this. And I think that that's the part that makes it interesting. It makes it good. So, with that in mind, okay, you're going to go out, you're going to talk to the people that are on the edges. Here again, what should you look for? And for me, there's probably, I think I've figured out four things that are the Hallmark. So whenever I see these, I try to really dial in, I try to really pay attention because I know that there's an opportunity there. So what the hell are those things? The first one is to look for places where the consumer the person who's either never done it, or the professional has created a workaround or an adaptation. Here again, if I drive a car professionally, maybe I've modified the interior maybe I modified the gasps pedal this seat, something, because I do this all the time. And there is something that regularly annoys me. And I need to create a workaround or an adaptation for that. And again, this could be very obvious, it could be very subtle. But whenever that happens, and you see this in somebody that does it to the extreme, you know that there's an opportunity there. Because if they're finding it, well, then the average person probably has that problem, too. It just probably takes them longer to come to realize that. So look for those sorts of things. Look for the things that people care about. Because that's the thing is, especially when you're talking to people who hardly ever do it or do it professionally, it tends to be easier to spot these things. Because they'll go from just talking about it like it's an everyday occurrence to really becoming passionate. And they become passionate about what do they love, they become passionate about what do they really hate about something. But here again, that's an important opportunity, because that could be an area of opportunity. Look for things that are missing. What are the things for you, you're looking at this and saying, hey, You know, that would be easier. This would be better if such and such was there, if there's this step in the process if there's this thing on the particular product, because in those moments where something are missing here, again, that's an opportunity. And then the last thing that I've learned to do is is just to take serious mental note of anything that I find surprising that I didn't expect. Because coming into this, I have that arrogance. I've stayed in hotels, I've driven cars, I tend to have some sort of research, some sort of empathy, I've done something. So I'm not just coming into a project cold, I have some expectation or some point of reference to what this thing is. So there's something along this that is surprising. And it's whether it's in behavior, whether it's in any of these sort of things, really take note of that really look at that. And I think that that really is going to kind of get you through this part of like the research process. And like I said, there's a lot of different ways to do that. This for me is just sort of like the Crash Course version of this I'm looking at, you know, these sorts of things. And again, you can go out and there are people who are a lot smarter than me, in this part of it to be able to really kind of dig in on that research part. But from there, let's go on to the third part of this inspiration phase, which is synthesis. And now synthesis is how do we make meaning from our observations, it's moving from observation to insight. And this can sometimes be hard to keep apart, because what you're going to do your natural tendency, whenever you're actually doing your research, is to start to want to start to doing this synthesis to try to make meaning out of it. And you're gonna have to force yourself and force other people to just simply stay in the observation in the immersion in the interview, to gather that information without judgment and without synthesis, which can be very difficult. But what you don't want to do is you don't want to start leading the witness. You don't want to start maybe missing opportunities. Covering things up glazing over things, because you're already moving on to synthesizing. And that's really the part of it. Right? So how do you maybe how do we clarify that a little bit more observations? research are the what? They're just the facts. insights, synthesis are the why it's the interpretation of the facts. And so that's the thing is, whenever I'm doing the research, I'm doing the observation, the interviewing the immersion, all I want is the facts. So just, I mean, whatever, whatever this 1960s TV show was dragnet, that was it. Like just the facts, man, like, that's all we need, like, just be that person who's just sticking to the facts. Whereas, you know, whenever you get into the insights piece, that's the why the interpretation. This is where the creative side of you can start to come out a little bit more. So just be disciplined, knowing that that creative moment is coming. And so when we talk about insights, really what it insight is, is it's a statement about people's behavior, about their values about their mental model that highlights needs or areas to be improved. Because that's really what we've been looking for. That's what we said we were trying to get towards was how do we get to this place of understanding this? Well, let's look at an example. And this is one that that IDEO uses to teach because they had helped actually kind of create this, that we'll look at an example from banking. And what they actually observed was that they were like, Okay, look, we're just gonna go out and observe people, whenever they write out their bills, electric bill, water bill, just things like that. And what they started to see was that whenever people did that, they kept rounding up. So if the bill was for 2359, they would write the bill for $24. They kept rounding up. Why was that happening? Well, the people that they interviewed said that it was easier just to do the math, and a little bit more than that, that they knew for sure that they would always have a little bit extra in their utility account for next month. They had a cushion. Right, it was just and it was just also simply easier to do round numbers. Because that way when I'm balancing my checkbook, whenever I'm doing my bank account, I don't end up with all these little remainders all these little sense that I have to add up to zeros, much simpler, makes sense. But the insight that came out of that is that rounding up provides a cushion for the next bill. It's a proactive way to pay down the next bill. And so what could come out of that, and so actually, what came out of that was the round up, you know, kind of keep the change program, where they would actually do is that, to try to make math easier on people, they would round up any transaction to the next whole number, and then take the difference where those cents were, and put it in a savings account. That's an easy thing. But they knew that it was a mentality that people could do and that there was an insight there that they could leverage to be able to start to build a product on. Now when we talk about an insight, what makes a good insight, right, because that's the hard part. This is the interpretive part of this, where it's just, there's only so much I can do in a podcast to help coach you on kind of what this stuff is, but In general, I think there are three things that should make up a good insight. The first is that it should represent an unmet need. And what that means is that it points to an area that needs improvement. Math is hard, it's easier to do whole numbers. But when we talk about this, like an insight is something again, that how do we make things better? And so let's go back to my own personal example. Let's go back to my hotel example. Because one of the things that I could see that needed improvement was basically the the whole part of the digital experience once you got to the hotel, because at the time the company did a great job and really cared about everything up until you hit the book now button. So what did that mean? It meant that we'd constructed websites we had done SEO we had done a ton of things that would get you in would show you very pretty photos would romance you on what the hotel was all driving you to look at the rate and actually hit the book now button but all of our digital channels once you Did that fell apart? Maybe you got an email a couple days before you arrived, that told you when your checking date was going to be maybe your confirmation number. But in general, all the digital channels went silent after you hit booked. Now, that was a massive unmet need. That was something that needed to be improved, especially whenever you start to see we had competitors coming into the market. You had the Airbnb ease, you had these different aggregators, who could own the top part of that funnel just as well as we could. The physical hotel, the experience once you got there, that was something they had to hand over to us no matter what because you're going to be in our physical building. So when you sit in the lobby, whenever you notice these things, I can see that that was an unmet need that people wanted to know. You know, when was the restaurant open? When was the pool open? Could they check in at different times what was going on around them, there was this whole thing where I don't want to dry out my laptop and dig through some, you know, huge website to go in and search the property, find it. dig down to some Fifth Level page to figure out When the damn polls open, why can't you just tell me that? That was one of the things for me that was kind of like okay, you know those unmet needs really formed the foundation of a ton of work that we did at Starwood was to figure out how do we go take these? What I think a lot of people thought were innocuous things about even keyless entry. You know, that everybody had those plastic cards for 40 years? Why the hell? You know, do you need to do you need those things? Well, because the two most popular things that people come to the desk for is they forgot the room number, or something was wrong with their key. They lost it, they put an extra credit card to got demagnetized there was an unmet need there. And so there's a pain point. The next thing as we're talking about these three things is that a good insight should reveal an aha, that once you say it, once you say it out loud what you say to a group of people, it should clarify and simplify your research. There is that Ah, that's why people do that. That's why this is going on. That's why we see people having this behavior. There is an aha that uncovers what you saw in the research. And finally, here again, an insight is going to be a challenge the same way, whenever you did the research, the challenge was not to start doing the synthesis too soon, whenever you're actually doing the insights, the problem is that you don't want an insight to be a solution. Because what I wanted to do is I want it to inspire an idea. But it doesn't point to a single idea. Here again, let's go back to the hotel example. Because what I the insight was, was that, you know, we really could be doing a much better job in digital channels, once you actually got to the hotel. It wasn't saying we could do it, it'd be doing a much better job with email with websites with, you know, this particular moment. It just said, Look, you know, there is a broad opportunity there that we need to be able to go out and get after, how do you say this in a different way? I think that it should be that is your insight needs to be an authentic, non obvious meaning this isn't the first thing that you think of thing that is really revealing of how people think or feel. And the non obvious part is what is key there. Because what I said is, whenever I teach this and nine out of 10 teams come to the same solution, they went with a non obvious they went with with an obvious actually insight, it's a problem. Because if what you're doing is just simply taking the obvious thing, taking the thing that anybody could see, in four months, six months, nine months, a year, whatever you bring your product to market, either you're gonna bring the exact same solution that your competitor is or somebody else is going to beat you to that problem, because here again, it's obvious. But an insight also shouldn't be three things. threes are a nice round number. And insight shouldn't be a slogan. This isn't marketing. It shouldn't be something there we go. Oh, that's you know, there's a slogan there's a tagline something that we can all kind of rally around. It shouldn't be a mission statement. And it like I said before, it should not be a solution. Because slogans or marketing mission statements are for driving your business, and the solution is left to the actual ideation phase. So there are times whenever I will see this process somewhat get polluted by people who actually go through and try to craft these things. Just keep focused on that. So that's the first part of it. That's the first part of design thinking. You hopefully you're sitting there going, Wow, that doesn't seem like it's that complicated. And I probably feel like I know a lot more about it than I thought I would. But it's the first piece of this is this inspiration phase is like we went through and said, make sure that you have a clear design challenge, that you have a problem to be solved, not a solution to be vetted, that you take the time to do research. Take the time I know it's not sexy. I know creating is so much more fun, especially for creative people. I get it. But the reality is, is that if I don't have good research, if I haven't gone out if I haven't done my immersions I haven't done my interviewing I haven't done my observations to find the thing. That I can then take into synthesis to for my insights against the work that I'm going to do is going to be weak, it's going to be bad. It's not going to be differentiated. People aren't going to care, whatever you launch it in. Isn't that ultimately why we're doing this? So it's like I said, I know what this first part of it as we talk about research and this synthesis, it's not sexy, but it's not supposed to be great design is a visual expression of great thinking. And that's the part right is it's the great thinking that we have to set ourselves up for because as we go into ideation, I'll start to talk about going through and teaching you how do we go from the research in the synthesis? How do we craft that bridge that you can then start brainstorming against because I know that's a real challenge. A lot of people fall down there. We have tons and tons of research, we've synthesized insights out of it. We have not a clue then how to start brainstorming against it. So we're going to talk about that in the next episode. We're going to talk about how do you do ideation How do you run a budget? brainstorm how do you actually press to make sure the work is really good? Well, then beyond that, then how do I start prototyping that work? How do I test it? How do I fail fast? Because that's an incredibly key part of this, the days of creativity being this precious little thing. Or over. You have to put it in front of consumers, you have to have that dialogue. You can't be so precious about your work. Hopefully, this was helpful. As always, what I would say is that if you have more questions, if there are things that you thought, wow, that made a lot of sense, if you thought there are things you're like, Look, I really wish he would explain that differently. I wish he would dig in more. Head over to Facebook, search for The Crazy One podcast. Like that page. You can go in, you can ask questions on there. I try to reply as quickly as I can. Unless I'm stuck on an airplane someplace. I'm usually answering it within. Honestly, I tried to do it within a couple hours. Like I said, if I'm traveling or something, maybe a touch longer, but I'm pretty dedicated to that. Ask the question there and I add the same Because I want other people to see the question I want them to be able to interact with it if we're giving advice let's grow as a community Let's learn as a community. So if there are things you want to know, go over there like the page because there's also more stuff that I put up there. So I find interesting articles as I find things that go out there whenever the shows come out. Whenever I do my weekly inspirations on Friday all that stuff goes there so you can go and participate in part of that and I think that will be a good place like I said, Don't sit silently and just kind of say, Oh, you know, I feel dumb. The only dumb question is the one that doesn't get asked. So go there, put it up there. If you like the show the only compensation I ever asked for head over to iTunes, head over to your favorite you know, podcast platform, leave a review. If you're feeling like you just want to do it quick go in click on the stars, you feel a little more generous going right? A couple words. Because I think it brings more people to the show. It really kind of lets people know that this because look, everybody in their brother has a blog and a podcast, right? The ones that have the good reviews, the ones that you know, you can tell that people are really bought into those are the ones that get the traction. And that's what we're trying to do here is we're trying to spread that message. As always, if you want to get all these show notes, if you want to see the charts that I was talking about, head over to podcast, Stephen Gates calm, Steven is s t e p h n calm. Whenever you get there, you can find out more about other episodes, you can see related articles. And like I said, all the notes for this that I've actually been working on to put this show together, I put them all up there. So I've done a lot of work on making that a lot more extensive. So head over there. As always, the boys down illegal always want me to remind you that the views here are my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are always just me out here talking. And 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 that we have. And I'm always incredibly humbled that you want to spend any of it with me. So until next time, when we get to phase two, when we talk about the bridge from research into creativity, whenever we talk about how do you actually start bringing those insights to life. Do what we always do say what we always say Hey, stay crazy