[Music] it used to be that you deferred to the boss is it the boss is always going to have the best ideas not likely here nimble fingers alert minds and tireless machines and it used to be in most companies that chaos was discouraged this is where the crazies live this is where we do our work it's different good morning good morning it used to be you were supposed to climb the corporate ladder status is who comes up with the best ideas not who's the oldest not who's who's been with the company longest not who has
that biggest title if you go into a culture and there's a bunch of stiffs going around i can guarantee they're luck they're not likely to invent anything you could stack us up big as big as you want that's great thanks a lot and we had a great time today well forget the way it used to be tonight the deep dive one company's secret weapon or innovation [Music] [Music] [Applause] a lot further along in this broadcast near the end as a matter of fact you will hear one of the central characters suggest that we look around
the only thing that's not designed by anybody he will say is nature actually you could say the same thing by observing that the only designs that don't require constant modification are the ones we find in nature but the point is well taken from the buildings in which we live and work to the cars we drive or the knives and forks with which we eat everything we use was designed to create some sort of marriage between form and function does it work and can we make it look interesting or attractive there's an interesting distinction between design
and invention whoever came up with the idea of dental floss for example was an inventor but the man or woman who put it inside that clever little plastic box that lets you tear off just the right length that was a designer now how does the process of designing a better product work here was the premise of the program we went to ideo the product design folk and said take something old and familiar like say the shopping cart and completely redesign it for us in just five days abc news correspondent jack smith tells us what happened
next nine in the morning day one and these people have a deadline to meet so welcome to the kickoff of the shopping cart project this is palo alto california in the heart of silicon valley and these are designers at ideo probably the most influential product development firm in the world designers are the reason tvs have square screens chairs four legs and toothbrushes nowadays those squishy handles in fact it was ideo that designed those squishy handles ideo has designed everything from high-tech medical equipment to the 25-foot mechanical whale in the movie free willy and the first
computer mouse for apple smith ski goggles nike sunglasses nec computer screens hundreds of products we take for granted this is a called the neat squeeze squeeze tooth uh toothpaste tube which you would voted that the man who runs ido is dave kelly a stanford engineering professor with a groucho marx mustache a dab of genius and an approach to innovation that usually works thank you fred but not always i can show you some products that failed came up with this idea called monster shoes where you take these little monsters and lace them into your shoes like
this and we built a bunch of them and um they didn't want those either mostly what ideo designs though does work and it works very well dave and his design teams create about 90 new products every year the point is that we're not actually experts at any given area you know we're kind of experts on the process of how you design stuff so we don't care if you give us a tooth brush a toothpaste tube a tractor a space shuttle you know a chair it's all the same to us we like want to figure out
how to innovate in in by using our process applying it and so for the next five days the team will apply that process to bringing the supermarket shopping cart into the 21st century i think first we should maybe all acknowledge that it's kind of insane to do an entire an entire project in a week project leader is peter skillman a 35 year old stanford engineer project leader because he's good with groups not because of seniority he's only been at ido for six years the rest of the team is eclectic but that's typical here whitney mortimer
harvard mba peter coughlin linguist tom kelly dave's brother marketing expert jane fulton sorry psychologist alex kazakhs 26 a biology major who's turned down medical school three times because he's having too much fun at ipo kids climbing up and doing this safety emerges early as an important issue 22 000 child injuries a year which is and so they're hospitalized injuries i mean there are many others reported in the store that's yeah actually that's hospitalized and theft it turns out a lot of carts are stolen you know what is the average life of a car does it
last two years five years ten years and and how big is this theft thing 10 am as the team works it becomes clear there are no titles here no permanent assignments the other side says it gives us a lot of help says be safe everyone appears to be equal and they love to mock corporate america i'll give you a status i'll give you a big red ball on a on a on a on a post and that says you're a big guy if you got a ball you're a senior vice president you know what do
i get the desk red ball it's all same in a very innovative culture you can't have a kind of hierarchy of here's the boss and the next person down the next person down the next person down because it's impossible that the boss is the one who's had the insightful experience with shopping carts it's just not possible according to kelly even employees who merely listen to the boss don't add that much either so you gotta hire people who don't listen to you and that i don't think corporate america wants to hear that right yet i think
we ought to start making those lists about the kind of questions that we're going to have the team splits into groups to find out firsthand what the people who use make and repair shopping carts really think okay the problem with the plastic cart is the wind catches it yeah and these things have been clocked at 35 across the parking lot that's actually a pretty good point the the trick is to find these real experts and so that you can learn much more quickly than you could by just kind of doing in the normal way and
trying to learn about it yourself from everything i read these things aren't that safe either you know um so probably the seat itself is going to have to be redesigned what you're seeing here is the kind of social science like anthropologists you know like you go and study tribes what is it that they do that we can learn from that will help us design a better cart one of the interesting things for me is looking at how people really don't like to let go of the cart except for the professional shopper whose strategy is to
leave the cart at various places in corporate america many bosses like measure whether they're whether their people are you know the good people or the people who are performing the ones that they see at their desk all the time that couldn't be further from the truth the people who are really getting the information are out here talking to the buzzes of the world going to to meet other experts much more useful than sitting at your desk 3 30 in the afternoon and the group is back at ideo there is no let up both each team
is going to demonstrate and communicate and share everything that they've learned today people went off in the four corners of the earth and are coming back with the golden keys to the innovation a uh shopping cart has been clocked at 35 miles an hour traveling through a parking lot in the wind we were in the store what two hours and and it was truly frightening just to see the kind of stuff going on you got to designate some people to make damn sure that the store owner's point of view is represented after nine straight hours
the team is tired they call it a day so uh are very cool well uh that's great thanks a lot we had a great time today [Applause] [Music] i want to get together and start here day two and the start of ido's unique brand of brainstorming they call it a deep dive a sort of total immersion in the problem at hand ido's mantra for innovation is written everywhere one conversation at a time stay focused encourage wild ideas defer judgment build on the ideas of others that's the hardest thing for people do is to restrain themselves
from criticizing an idea so if anybody starts to nail an idea they get the bill the deep dive begins and for the next few hours the ideas pour out and are posted on the walls oh the blind the the privacy blind like when you're buying six cases of condoms yeah no one sees it's warp nesting is it sort of has to nest if it doesn't nest we don't have a solution oh don't grow pants and velcro seats for the kids and you just drop them down there like like velcro seats velcro pants for kids yeah
see ya you have to have some wild ideas and then you build on those wild ideas and end up being better ideas than if you said if you if everybody only came up with same things you know kind of appropriate things you'd never like have any points to take off to to build a really innovative idea it's organized details organized it's not organized um what it is is it's focused chaos by 11 am the group begins narrowing down the hundreds of ideas written or drawn on the walls how by voting for them vote with your
post-it not not with an idea that's cool but with an idea that's cool and buildable um if it's if it's too far out there and it can't be built in a day then i don't think we should vote on it why not have you be the judge because because i'm i'm gonna be wrong it's the team that that's able to really judge what the best idea otherwise ideas wouldn't come out that's right enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning blown genius enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius if anything
sums up ideo's approach that is it that and the focused chaos that seems to go with it um i think a point of view i call it the sport utility vehicle cart it is noon worried that the team is drifting what can only be called a group of self-appointed adults under dave kelly holds an informal side session we don't want to tell them what to build or else we take away the benefit of the whole thing right what needs should they optimize their solutions yes the purpose is to refocus the deep dive maybe we arbitrarily
say we do five teams four or five four five four or five teams and we and we give each team a need area hey can we uh grab everybody over to the wall here there has to be a command decision it becomes very autocratic for a very short period of time in defining what things people are going to work on like it or not the team is told it will split into groups to build mock-ups covering four areas of concern that have been identified shopping safety checkout and finding what you're looking for i noticed that
toward the end of the process the adults took over yeah that's because we we have no choice but to to stop that cycle i mean there's um if you don't work under time constraints you could never get anything done because it's a messy process and go on forever while the team starts building prototypes dave kelly takes me on a tour of the rest of ideo what's happening in here is uh that's a client meeting that's a first client meeting that's the first time we've met with the client so we haven't trained them yet if we
took them straight from there into a room where music was blaring and everybody was throwing nerf darts at each other that would be a little hard to take you know so we're warming them up but this is this is where the crazies live this is where we do our work it's different you can tell with their place is playful in about the first 15 minutes as you walk down the hall being playful is of huge importance for being innovative i mean if you go into a culture and there's a bunch of stiffs going around they're
not i can guarantee they're like they're not likely to invent anything invent anything like this futuristic looking instrument for kids so no matter what you do with that thing you always sound great you always sound good you have to make it so that this can happen whoa it doesn't break no it doesn't break there's a whole department at ido devoted to toys turns out to be one of its most profitable areas fun too so got these little wings and no matter what you do if i get in trouble here it's always a spiral at ideo
they found that fresh ideas come faster in a fun place not only is the furniture on wheels to suit the needs of the moment but people are encouraged actually to build their own work areas and they were designing this space and they said to me you know we'd like to have you know four thousand dollars extra in our budget for a dc three wing and i said uh dc you have to have that and they said yeah they have to have it so it's a dc3 piece of a dc3 wing yeah that's just decor that's
the car that's um ambiance you know that says we're weird and we're proud of it umbrellas on the ceiling to shade computer screens from direct sunlight and bicycles on ropes to prevent clutter the first guy who hung a bike up on a thing he didn't come to me and ask me he didn't ask some facilities person was okay he tried it and then like he waited and see if anybody complained if nobody complained another guy hung a bike up and pretty soon everybody's got their bikes up and nobody's complained right so it's that whole thing
of trying stuff and ask forgiveness you know instead of asking permission is the way people come up with new ideas ideo has such a reputation for innovation that client companies are increasingly asking dave not just for new products but also to remake their corporate cultures you may be looking at the workplace of the future here it's one thing to be able to do a product once in a while but if you can build a culture and a process where you routinely come up with great ideas that's what the companies really want okay peter we're done
back at the shop it is six o'clock and the four mock-ups are ready for showing baskets also can be if you think you will have more volume baskets can be put in a modular shopping cart you pile hand baskets onto a high-tech cart that gets you through the traffic jam at checkout that you could mount a scanner on the shopping cart so that you as the customer as you pull it off the shelf would scan each item one that's built around child safety and another that let shoppers talk to the supermarket staff remotely uh yeah
where can i find any yogurt but the adults again decide more work needs to be done before the mock-ups can be combined into one last prototype why don't we have all the carts come up here for a second i think you'd take a piece of each one of these ideas and kind of back it off a little bit and then put it in the yeah in the design the design is still not there but there's another motto at ido fail often in order to succeed sooner and some of the team will be up half the
night trying to put together a design that finally does work so it is day five and dave kelly has no idea what the final cart looks like only the team does if they kind of got their heads down they don't look at me i'm nervous you know if they say wait till you see it then i know we're in good shape so i'm getting wait until you see it i think it's it that'll be good there it is [Applause] so we took the best elements out of each prototype designed this entire cart in a day
and then this cart was fabricated in a day with an amazing team of people in our machine shop pulling this off working in shifts throughout the night wow i'm impressed so are we the cart which is designed to cost about the same as today's cart is different in every other way hand baskets that stack in a metal frame and major improvements for all you you just lift the handle up you drop the uh put the children in and then you can close the um the the handle right over them and they instantly have some little
bit of a work surface that they can play with what do you think well i'm very proud of the team i think it's it's great this does this work for you works for me great it's also beautiful i mean let's you know take it over to a local supermarket and see what they say yeah it works really well the cart's wheels turn 90 degrees so it can move sideways no more lifting up the rear in a tight spot and you shop in a totally different way rather than taking your cart everywhere you go in the
store through a crowded store like this much more efficient to take a small basket rush around to where the particular shelves are and come back and put them back put them here and treat this as like a center for your shopping and with a high-tech scanner so that in the future you skip the checkout traffic jam here's how you would scan an item reach over and pick up anything like like the salad dressing and i would i would scan it if i want to accept that item i would just press plus and then drop it
in my basket because stores don't yet have those high-tech scanners the team designed checking out today means doing it the old-fashioned way but the bags are hung on hooks on the cart's frame remember there is no basket here why get rid of the big basket the basket is tyranny the basket is tyranny because it's not really needed if all your stuff ends up in bags why need the basket in the first place talk to me about theft there's no value in this card without the basket because you can't carry anything in it it's useless to
anybody you can't use it as a barbecue so it's not going to get stolen that's right so there's all the appeal to store over there yes i love it i think it looks great at first i was a little shocked but i think it's you have some fantastic ideas here it needs a little refining but i think that it's great i mean we would we would want them it makes us feel great uh and she also gave us some really good comments about how we can make this thing better just wherever you are look around
the only thing that's not designed by somebody like is nature so the trees are not designed by us but everything you see everything you see every light fitting every flower vase every scale every stand for fruit everything is designed has to go through this kind of process and they can do a better or a better or worse job of innovating or improving but everything is designed it has to go through this process it wasn't just effortless oh my god so that's how it works thing that i saw there it was actually hard work it's a
lot of hard work um we all love it so it doesn't look like it's hard work but it's a lot of hours a lot of hours also an open mind a boss who demands fresh ideas be quirky and clash with his a belief that chaos can be constructive and teamwork a great deal of teamwork and these are the recipes for how innovation takes place you
