Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [125]
David Kelley used this same methodology to design solutions for IDEO’s culture. He first proposed to have an extra holiday in the spring, which—after employee input—became an extra day off of one’s choosing each year. It could be your birthday or anniversary or anything else—or nothing. This, in turn, evolved into a loose honor system about “day customization” because, as Kelley remarked, “we didn’t pay much attention anyway.” The move into that new four-story building proved to be a bad prototype, leading everyone back to their original office space. The building down by the freeway was another prototype, which the employees rejected without even trying it out.
The same holistic and dialectical thinking that underlies wisdom is integral to the “creative design methodology” Kelley used to design and maintain IDEO’s culture. Observing employees (or customers) interacting with their environments—instead of isolating them and trying to influence their behavior through motivation (or attractive product features)—is holistic. Building quick prototypes while actively seeking outside input to improve them is profoundly dialectical. According to Kelley, it not only works, but “once you’ve had success a few times, you trust your creative …methodology… and you’ll always use it.” He believes so much in the power of his methodology that he views it as his life’s legacy: “I’ve seen my whole life that my job, my dent in the universe, will be that everybody who comes in contact with me—employees, students—will become more and more confident in their creative ability.” Kelley has even gone beyond influencing employees and students to change the thinking habits of some clients from an analytical approach to a more intuition-based one.
This, too, was not by design. It started as a way to get clients to stop bothering him: “Every client, every businessman who came in said, ‘David, this is a very nice company. When are you going to really make it a company instead of a playground?’” So Kelley redefined the problem, “How can IDEO grow up?” into, “How can clients become less analytically serious and more intuitively creative?” The solution was a consulting activity focused on corporate transformation. Samsung, Kaiser Permanente, and Procter & Gamble, among many others, have benefited from IDEO-facilitated analysis-to-intuition transformation in their business thinking.
P&G, for example, first contacted IDEO to design new products such as the free-standing Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube and the Oral-B toothbrush for kids.13 Later, in a bid to make P&G itself more innovative, CEO A. G. Lafley took his entire forty-person-strong executive team to IDEO’s headquarters to learn about their design and innovation process. (IDEO promptly took them shopping for their own products.) Despite their enthusiasm, these executives were not able to reproduce IDEO’s process back in Cincinnati in the face of resistance from the commercial side of P&G. It was then that, with the help of David Kelley, P&G executives realized that a deeper organizational transformation was required to make IDEO’s innovation process work for them. In addition to transferring its design process to P&G, IDEO also trained more than one hundred P&G internal facilitators in it. IDEO also helped to create an “Innovation Gym” in Cincinnati, a physical space similar to that found in its own headquarters that is ideal for teams using the prototyping design process.
All of this has been beneficial to P&G, even though it falls well short of the thoroughgoing organizational transformation accomplished by Robert McDermott, Rich Teerlink, and others. P&G is a company with many virtues, but it is not a liberated one in the way IDEO is.