Boring people are not born boring. They are trained to become conformist by a system that fears change, that pushes towards the mainstream, that teaches one to fear judgement, avoid experimentation, await permission, and value approval over real impact.
In their book Creative Confidence, legendary designers Tom and David Kelley, founders of IDEO, argue that anyone can unleash their creative potential by overcoming fear and bad habits that lead people to doubt themselves and stay in the safe zone.
People get ossified into conformity by negative feedback, fear of failure, over-attachment to a certain fixed image, and self-doubt. But a growing amount of research and literature shows that the most successful companies are successful because they reinvented their market and are able to generate creative strategies.
The book Blue Ocean Strategy is all about finding that unique place where one doesn’t have to compete with everyone else. Avoiding the red waters of hyper competitive commodity selling, and into one’s unique and inimitable stretch of ocean. Perhaps one so unexpected it’s entirely yours.
Design and Strategy, in the meantime, are getting evermore intertwined. Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer, formerly from 3M, is quoted as saying:
“if I say “knife,” you are going to visualize a kind of knife. I’m going to visualize another knife, and if there were other people in the room, they would visualize many different kinds of knives. But if I design a knife right now, I align everybody around that knife. Let’s say that in the room there is a marketer who tells me the brand is not visible enough. There is an ergonomist who tells me the handle is not comfortable enough. There is a scientist who tells me the blade is not sharp enough. These are not mistakes. They’re not failures in the process. They’re how prototyping surfaces issues that don’t emerge in the abstract. That’s the power of design and prototyping.”
From: “PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer on Creating an Organization Where Design Can Thrive” In Harvard Business Review, 2015.
Increasingly, business strategies of giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce are synonymous with their design solutions, and the way it positions them in the market and opens new opportunity.
One cannot discuss Facebook’s strategy without the decision to bring Stories (invented by Snapchat) into all its products. Or to find a way to make all messaging inter-operable across platforms. One cannot discuss Apple’s strategy without discussing their opinionated take on what computing would look like in 5, 10, or 20 years.
The people who create these strategies don’t fit the classic part of the big consulting firms: Serious people in dark suites, identical briefcases, and all the “right answers”.
They generally look like artists or rebels. If you looked at Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg in the early years – you wouldn’t see corporate giants in the making. You’d see troublemakers, and people who didn’t quite fit in.
That’s not a coincidence – it’s the mark of innovative thinkers, and the mark of living without the fear of trying new, creative ideas.
It’s time we realized Strategy isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking interesting questions that weren’t asked before. It’s about having new ideas that are hard to understand upfront, but that seem obvious in retrospect.
It’s not about projecting a false sense of certainty, and it certainly isn’t about being boring.
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Remake Labs is a global Design Sprint agency dedicated to better outcomes through rapid prototyping.
