Leadership & Strategy + Fighter Pilots + Design Education with Jason "TOGA" Trew — DT101 E145

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A Welcome to the Design Thinking 101 podcast. We help people think and solve like a designer. Our guests share stories, lessons, ideas, experience and insights developed while practicing, leading and teaching design thinking. They come to design thinking 101 from business, social innovation, education, design, government, healthcare and other fields to offer you what they've discovered about thinking and solving like a designer. I'm Dejuan Stanford, your Design Thinking 101 host. Today on the Design Thinking 101 podcast, my guest is Jason Toga. True Jason, welcome to the show.

Speaker B Thanks for having me. This is super exciting and I've got to get this off my chest right away. Of all the podcasts I've been on, I am probably the most intimidated by this one because it's such a great podcast and there's so many great people. So thanks for having me.

Speaker A Oh, well, thank you so much. I will endeavor to avoid anything intimidating. Fortunately, the show has evolved into wonderful conversations with people like you that are both casual and fun, but aren't afraid to do the serious and kind of the necessary complexity, difficulty, discomfort. So, yeah, welcome and thank you very much. I'm especially interested in your pathway into now. So many people who have come on the show have blended together many life experiences, work experiences, formative experiences into the way they approach design and human centered design. Let's dive into your origin story and find out how that comes together in you.

Speaker B Perfect. So perhaps uniquely, maybe surprisingly, I started life as an Air Force fighter pilot, which I guess a lot of people that play in this wonderful world of design come through more traditional ways. But everyone, like you said, all your guests have had this really interesting collection of experiences. So mine started at the Air Force Academy. I was able to fulfill this childhood dream of flying F15s. And then about a decade ago, about halfway through my Air Force career, I got to attend the strategy school. And it was probably the toughest year of my adult life. We were reading a book a day, working on a thesis topic, and it's all very conventional, as you can imagine. We're reading Clausewitz, we're reading Sun Tzu, we're reading Geopolitics. But I was starting to get interested in these other things like storytelling and innovation and even play. And I indulged in those ideas even more once I had left the strategy school and gone on to do a PhD in the history of technology at Auburn University. And there was one particularly surprising moment when I was in the stacks at the Air University library and I came across what would may be the oldest book I've actually held in my hand and looked at it, and it was. It's not necessarily the book I was looking for, is this sort of nice serendipitous moment. And there's a. It's dedicated to Icarus as a hero, which really surprised me. For, for those that might not be familiar, Icarus and Daedalus is this myth and, you know, they. They're the first humans to fly. They make these wings of feathers and wax, and Icarus gets overjoyed and flies too close to the sun, is sort of catching. Considered the. The fool. And whereas Daedalus is this mature, you know, pragmatic statesman and craftsman. And so it was very strange to me to see this dedication to Icarus. But fast forward a year after a deep dive into what the myth really meant, and I kind of became convinced that what was missing from the Air Force culture and perhaps many organizations is the playfulness that complements the practicality. So that was in my mind. And then I graduate and I go on to the Air Force Leadership School as one of the commanders and then the dean and then the vice commandant. And in that school, which saw about 4,000 students a year, it was 100% of Air Force active duty captains. Design thinking was actually part of the curriculum. I had seen that. I had come up against it in my PhD, but, you know, with only like a thousand days to finish that program, I had to stay fairly focused and disciplined. But obviously, clearly I needed to get more involved. And it was so contrary to how I operated. And I thought, wow, like this, this is the medicine I need. I. I was not particularly confident in being creative. I had no sort of bias to action, all those kinds of things we talk about on design thinking. So I was absorbing as much as I could from Stanford D School. We visited ideo. We had them come do some training for our faculty. I got certified in Lego Serious Play to help facilitate innovation sprints. I listened to this podcast a lot and started even giving presentations about this thing that I was starting to get comfortable that I knew called design thinking. And then Covid and I was having some workshop withdrawals and, you know, just looking for ways to stay engaged. And I volunteered to write a chapter for a handbook being published by Springer on an introduction to design. It was a collaborative project with a. A group known as the Archipelago of Design. It's a bunch of security professionals who use design in a very interesting way. And at this point, I had two lines of effort. I had a scholarly one which was opening me up to sort of a different world of design, things that I didn't know existed. And I had a more practical line of effort. So I was doing workshops, still teaching classes, one of them on design and strategy and play. And I was also being asked by Space Command and Space Force to ensure design thinking was infused in their organizations and to help them use design thinking to solve some problems. And that made a number of questions just swirl in my mind like what do they think design is? What do I think design is? Am I really a designer? What's the value, even the feasibility of bringing design thinking to non designers? And so some of those thoughts end up in an article that I titled Designfulness. I eventually present that at scad, the Savannah College of Art and Design. And fast forward, now that I'm retired from the Air Force, I am now at SCAD as a professor of design management teaching design thinking. And those classes have this emphasis on clarifying what I think is capital DT design thinking from what I call lowercase dt design thinking.

Speaker A And what's the distinction there in your mind?

Speaker B So as I mentioned, my, my first, my gateway into design thinking was going to Stanford D school, which was great and I love what they do out there and why they do it. For me, that was the totality of design thinking. I did not appreciate until later as I started to take a more scholarly approach, that there's another field of design thinking. And the names that you'll see there are names like Nigel Cross and Lawson and people who half a century ago were really looking at how designers approach problems and largely architects in their studies is how designers think as designers. But this capital dt, and it's capitalized because it's a brand, it's a commodity. And I don't, I don't begrudge them for that. It was, they were doing good work to bring this kind of simplified version to, to people who weren't designers, who could think like designers. And so they, they, you can't help but focus on maybe simplifying it into activities and dropping some of the, some of the craft skills, perhaps that that deep design thinking is about. The problem is that these two things really acknowledge each other. And very few articles talk about the fact that there's two lines of effort. Now when I have students that say, well, I'm reading articles in business journals that say design thinking is a failed experiment, then we have to clarify what design thinking are we talking about as we look at that more in depth in the class. I, I think one of the interesting parts that we focus on is if capital DT focuses On the activities. Lowercase dt is kind of more of a focus on the actors, on them embodying a sort of sensibility in which they will kind of naturally know what to do next as opposed to a more of a checklist recipe that you would give someone who's just starting off. But it's a fascinating journey. I still love going into all the literature with the students and then working through the differences and the. So what of these two things in such a way that exemplifies hopefully design thinking itself. And that's where we go to with the project of how to sort of rethink design thinking.

Speaker A Yeah, I've read a lot of the kind of failed, failed experiment articles and, and that sentiment. I think about things like predictive analytics. You wouldn't send people to a two day predictive analytics workshop and expect them to come back and deliver business results using predictive analytics or someone to have oh, our teams have had a two day training so they're all now data analysts or they're all now AI developers. And there's this combination of both expectation and packaging and the, what I call the recipe ification. I love that word that I just made up of design thinking in terms of oh well, if you do this, do this, do this, do this and you get innovation out at the end, you get solutions at work and it's just not true. So many people bought into that and said, you know, not and not the messy reality of like hey, you can be fantastic at design and innovation. You're still only going to nail it maybe 70, 75% of the time. And the other, the other piece there is the, you know, we have the kind of the workshop driven approach and then there's the actor in action driven approach. So now I'm not sure where I, where I fall, but I focus a lot on the questions and structuring the questions one needs to ask to progress toward a response to a challenge, opportunity or a problem. And I found that when I help people find the right questions, not even the right questions find questions that focuses their curiosity, their inquiry, that tickle that you get when you're faced with a question that allows them to apply their own expertise and knowledge in much better ways than kind of the recipes that are kind of the stage one of the design thinking practice journey.

Speaker B I think it's great. And this, this focus on curiosity and the actor and sort their attitude, they're almost like a, a ready stance, right? Like, like if I can condition people into this stance then to quote James Carson, I know we can't prepare against all surprise, but we can be prepared to be surprised. And I think design, when it goes well, this design thinking project is really sort of conditioning people into this position, this sensibility in which they're ready to handle things with a certain degree of creativity. And it could be that we can't get there unless we train them in something specific that might look linear, it might look small and contain. It's a little bit like sports and sportsmanship, right? If I want my kids to learn sportsmanship, they're going to have to get in the arena and play the sport. Even if that's not really what it's about. It's just. So it's not just about the thing, right. It's about something else sometimes, which I think is why. That's what I finally landed on when I thought, why does Space Force care about design thinking? I eventually came to the conclusion that I actually think it changes the people involved. And if we solve the problem, if we innovate, then that's, you know, in New Orleans, we'd call that Lagnia. That's a little extra. Like, that's bonus. What I really am trying to do is create problem solvers.

Speaker A It's the way the experience changes people's eyes in terms of what you start seeing that you can't not see. When you are presented with a binary in terms of, oh, it's. You can have this or this. It's like, these are. These are our two options. Like, well, this. Here's the third option. Oh, and here's a fourth, and here's a fifth. So why. Why are we, like, focusing on those two? And people get these reflexes around saying, well, wait a minute, have we really understood the problem we're trying to solve? And that doesn't necessarily. It's like, oh, like this magically fixes everything. But, you know, it de. Risks things a little bit. It brings more voices in, brings more ideas in, brings a richer understanding at the beginning. And I think it's those little things along the way. Even if people aren't trying to design workflows with design thinking, service design, etc. Built in, they're still going to bring some of that sensibility to the moments that would correlate to a more structured.

Speaker B Design process, 100% on board. And I think from what I've read the book, like, if someone says, what do you suggest I read? And I want to give them a single source, the one that I think captures what you just said best is experiencing design. Because that Wonderful book is it's accessible without being overly superficial. It definitely has this approach in which the activities are yielding a certain experience which then yields a certain way of being in the world. And what's interesting to me is once you have embodied that sense of being, then sort of the reverse. What does that person then naturally do in those situations which you know you can't control? Right. Like, so if I'm an educator and I'm trying to help these students be conditioned in this ready stance and be very designful, it doesn't mean that when they approach the problem, they're going to approach it in a specific way. Thankfully so. Right. Because they're going to surprise me. And my students really get frustrated with the ambiguity that I have around assignments and whatnot. But I know that if I only expect the answer to a specific question, at best I will get that answer. And if I leave it more open, if I have broad intentions. Wow, they come up with some amazing things.

Speaker A Yeah, it's the. In many ways, you're avoiding constraining someone's intelligence as they learn, and that's in the design of learning systems. Often for the sake of so called rigor and for the sake of the admirable scholarly intentions, constraints are placed on learning. And many times people are like, oh, we demand excellence in this course. Well, excellence is. You've defined it without the student's background in your head. And many times I would often say with every. Every student has the capability of exceeding what we define as excellent due to everything they're bringing to the course. And I see it as my job when I'm in the classroom is creating that, creating the environment that facilitates that. And so leaving space for that, that creates some ambiguity. Leaving ways for people to express what they are uniquely capable of is different from saying, you need to express this this way. And here's a rubric for understanding if you've done it the way I think it should be done. And like all of those sometimes is sort of necessary constraints from a course design standpoint. But from a. When you're designing for learning, it's thinking through like, are these constraints actually limiting even if we achieve excellence, are they limiting where students might take things?

Speaker B And I really didn't understand that, to be honest. I was teaching for a few years. I really didn't understand. I really wasn't in tune to what you just said until I was exposed to design thinking. And I got to admit, I don't think it turned me in. It obviously did not turn me into a professional designer. There's a lot of skills that craft skills that, that I don't have and I really want to work on doing it more. And there's things that my students know to do that I don't. But it was again, once I started to don this sort of designfulness, this sort of like the spillover of, you know, I'm practicing these activities and I'm becoming someone different as a leader and as an educator that I really understand that I needed to let students. I need to have more of a student centered design to my. To my teaching and my course design. And there's a wonderful book called Creating Wicked Students that talks about letting them practice having this sort of authority and, and do it in the safety of a classroom because if we expect them to go out into the. The world full of wicked problems and, and do good work, they're going to need to have some practice in this. And you know what? Again, I'm always like struggling to make sure I. I'm doing right by the institution who obviously has standards and issues. And there's a sort of a expectation that you have the roadmap. I. You know, I. E. The syllabus and, and the students who, I don't know, the students that are going to show up, I don't know what their interests are and I want to keep it fluid and loose and it's, it's what makes teaching exciting, I guess.

Speaker A I don't think I've ever. I don't think in any of the design studio courses I taught with graduate students. And there were I think three or four sections and some summer sections for five years. So I'm not sure how many. I mean, of course that adds up to. But I pretty much routinely changed the syllabus as we went just to take. Take advantage of who was in and listening to what people were wrestling with and listening to what people needed to do their best learning. And so, and when you and I. And there's this funny thing that happens when you start to look at learning science and a design process because a design process is very much a learning process. It could be, it could easily be recast without any of kind of the design jargon and design terms into strictly a process for learning. And it would still be very recognizable. And you could look at through all of, all of these things and it's the, you know, the resistance to making, for example, like the resistance to making mistakes, you know, that, that perfectionism part that often people bring to things and that is the heart of learning. The like, oh, try this didn't work. Try. This didn't work. Try. This didn't work. And we want people to do that a thousand times before they get into a context where the risks are higher, the outcome is more essential to more people, and it's nudging people closer to getting faster, faster on those iterative cycles. That's one of the amazing things. Once I see people really pick up a design designerly way of acting in the world and it's like, oh, just like going through the iterations, it's like, oh, yeah, I want to get through this first draft as soon as possible and then I want to get multiple versions so I can compare them and play with them. And that's when it really starts to click and move.

Speaker B I think the concepts, like you just said, the concepts definitely rhyme and I think that that hints at something. Whereas again, like I mentioned earlier, when I was first exposed to design thinking, I thought, wow, this is so antithetical to how I live. But it seems so useful, like, this is the medicine I need because it does, it sort of hints at something that is perhaps more fundamentally human. And you have to go back to the idea of like, am I a designer? Who's a designer? Can we teach design thinking to anyone? And clearly there are some specialized skills that are very technical that not everyone has developed. I really believe that there's something fundamental to this, that that's sort of like what it means to live well. And I, it seems maybe like I'm blowing this out of proportion, but like, is this a means to a better life and better communities? And I, I am starting to think more and more that that might be the case.

Speaker A Well, when I mention design changing your eyes, it's once you start to see, refining the ability to see problems at a more fundamental level, to see challenges and opportunities at more fundamental level and start to see the first principles in action in those that doesn't restrict itself to a domain you just can't. Like, oh, you have this way of thinking. You're going to start to see this in other, other places. I go to a coffee shop up the street and they said, you know, they have lots of people who are pushing strollers coming in and out while trying to carry coffee or trying to keep a kid out of traffic. So, like, I will put in an automatic door and you know, see it's kind of a renovated space turned into a wonderful little coffee shop. And so they, and bless them, they spent the money to put in the automatic door. And it's worse for people now because it's not quite clear that it's automatic. It still has the doorknobs on it because, like, what did. It's a whole affordance thing. What doorknobs afford. Grab. You want to grab it and push it and pull it. So the door starts to open automatically. People grab the knob like, oh, oh, wait, oh. Then they go. They get inside and they're like, oh, well, I need to close the door. So now they're trying to grab the knob and force it closed. And like, sometimes I shout for, like, it's automatic. It'll close. Like, from across the coffee shop. I was like, take the doorknobs off. Because as long as they're there, people are going to grab them. The buttons that open the door automatically are hidden, like, not nearby. And they're the same color as the background. They don't stand out. Like, all of these things that you just see. But it's a. There's one of those things like, oh, this. I could. I could tell when they're putting. Like, this is going to be a problem. And it's that shift in your eyes that starts to flow into, wait. I keep running into this problem in my life. What is it? What can I learn about it? Who else? How has this been solved in the past? I'm like, okay, what resources do I. And you start to do that. And sometimes people have a conscious process for that, sometimes people don't. But it shows up all over the place in my world and in the world of other people. I know.

Speaker B I love that story and I love your point earlier about it not being restricted to a certain domain. And it reminds me, I sometimes joke that design has made me undisciplined. And in that, I don't mean like a lack of work ethic. I mean like the discipline that we associate with an academic paradigm, the discipline that's sort of associated with. Be a disciple of this one way of doing things for this set of. And only look at them in certain ways. And instead I. I love that design is integrative. And it's integrative in so many different ways. It's, you know, if all views are partial, by which I mean incomplete and biased, then be integrative and pull as many of those in together and hold them in creative tension. I mean, integrative in the sense that you are you taking what you want and need from different disciplines and different domains and speculating and being abductive and iterative and emergent. It, for me, might be one of the most important keywords in design. When I look at design as a fundamentally human thing, not necessarily a specific.

Speaker A Type of design, that sentiment of take what you need, that is so necessary in sort of doing, when doing training and teaching. Some people come in with sort of a dogmatic like, you have to do this this way, and if you're not doing it this way, it's a problem. I come into the approach like, hey, we're going to talk about one way of doing this. But you all bring your experience, your way of working, and the idea here is to take what you need from these ideas to make it easier for you to reach your goals, to make it easier for you to achieve more, to enjoy the work a bit more. And that has allowed me to work in environments where initially people are kind of like, what are we doing here? Why are you here? Why are we spending a day with you?

Speaker B I have had that reaction before, especially when I pull Lego out and I'm like, oh, don't worry. It's a thermoplastic polymer tool made for strategic thinking. You just think it's a toy and we joke around with it. But that point that you just made, I think there's a word that captures this, and it might be surprising, but the word for me is expedient. And I think if art is expressive and science is explanatory, then design is expedient. And what I mean is. I mean a few different things. One, it's about practical impact and what's effective for that particular context, that time, that place, those people, that pain point. I. I also mean something that's sort of opportunistic and. And not just optimal. In fact, optimal doesn't even make sense and something that is advantageous. And that, for me, then sort of links design to strategy. So for me, strategy is the art of realizing advantage. And realizing in that case is both to be aware of and to actualize the advantage. And there's indeed some historical definitions of strategy that define it as a system of expedience. But the reason it's surprising for some is expedient does have this sense of impropriety. It's. It's, you know, sort of morally neutral, if not slightly negative. And you look at the. The origin of the word design and it's. It can be exploited. You know, it can be about exploiting things. It can be scheming. It can be crafty in the sense that we are manipulating material and manipulating minds. And that reminds us, I think, that we need an ethical, Ethical sensibility, an ethical guiding set of principles. So that if this is truly human, to be able to be advantageous, to turn situations into preferred situations, then somewhere along the way we need to have ethics to guide how we are using that superpower. And I do worry that when we only focus on selling things to people or making things pretty so that people will buy it, that we might lose some of what that moral responsibility is. Does that make sense?

Speaker A Oh yeah. It's not might lose. There are all kinds of areas where it is either non existent or very quiet or have lost. I feel no need to be gentle in looking around and seeing and seeing the choices that we have made. And without going well and properly down the rabbit hole. There are, let's say, two kinds of people. We have the flesh and blood people, and we have corporate entities that are considered people. And those corporate entities are using design exactly the way they are designed. And to the extent that there's conflict between those two entities, that is designed into the nature of the existence that we've constructed. And by constructed, I mean through the legal fictions that we apply to two corporate entities and the way we've set up reinforcing patterns through market valuations and earnings reports and quarterly reporting and the short term thinking that limits the ability to really do things beyond the now. And if you create an entity that kind of can live forever, you really want it to think more than four.

Speaker B Months down the road that yes, that rabbit hole is, is deep and winding. And I appreciate your perspective on that. I do, I do come back to this faith that I hold on to that if, if we made it that way, if it is designed that way, then we can design something better. And again, we can't, you know, design is too important to be left to the designers. As, as someone once said. And, and so if we equipped people with this skill, again, I go back to like, why, why try to teach design thinking to thousands of Air Force officers? Are we trying to create a bunch of designers? And I come back to know, like, I want to create agents of change that have a noble mission and are equipped with some creative confidence to go out and see these implications and consequences that you just sketched out and do something different and have the courage to do something different. And I, I've been sort of animated by this. And I've got to admit that I'm not quite sure what that looks like as I navigate post, you know, being the only thing I've ever done in my, in my life professionally is spent 29 years in the Air Force. And now that I'm back in my hometown and wondering what it is that I do with these wonderful things that others have poured into me. I keep circling back to something that has to do with this, like, what do we do to enable, encourage others to use design thinking to go out and do the good work that needs to be done.

Speaker A When you think about the ethics in design, many roads lead to people like Sarah Cantor A and lots of people I've had on the podcast who are doing work with participatory design, co creation, radical participatory design, and the opportunity for many people who are looking at what now, what do we build? Part of that opportunity is designing a set of circumstances where you're safe to say no and you know, asking students to like, rack up some debt and then head out into the design world and oh, by the way, do this ethically. And if you're being asked to do something horrible, you know, if you're like, design an even more addictive E cigarette, say no. Well, how do I eat? What about these loans? And so it's looking at how do we design systems where people can make the ethical choices and be insulated from the negative consequences. And so there's teaching the ethics, but it's, unless you have the circumstances, there's that behavioral change model, the Comm B model where someone has the capability, opportunity and motivation to exhibit a behavior. And unless these things reach a certain threshold, it's not going to happen. And so like teaching ethics, like, all right, well, we can get at a little bit of the capability and then like the, the motivation, like, well, it depends on your moral compass. And we can give some, some arguments why, like, moral choices are a good idea as, as you're a designer. But the opportunity is in many ways tied to more than just good heart and that understanding. And so we have some, some work to do there as well in shaping ways in which as a profession, the ethical choices are something that has more collective support because often when the consequences are on the shoulder of shoulders of one individual, they will not like, hit that threshold moment where they can say, no, I'm not going to do this. And some people will say, yeah, I'm going to take the horrible consequences and just deal with it later. But it's just something I think about when I think about ethics and design.

Speaker B Well, what I love that you brought out in that is the, the idea that it's, it's a system, right? And it's, that goes back to this holistic perspective and integrative. And for me, leaders, if they're design World or any. Anything. You know, part of your sacred duty as a leader is sort of to set the conditions in which people can. Can make the right decisions. You're encouraging them, you're nudging them, you're leading them. It's. It's definitely a model. Less of like an engineer of a train, where I have my hands on the levers. It's more like I'm a gardener, sort of creating the soil, and I can't yell at that plant to grow any faster or grow into a different plant. I sort of set the conditions. It does remind me of a time when I actually wasn't as confident as I am today on what design can do for me. And it was on the cusp of a deployment. So at this point, I had been doing and thinking and talking about design, thinking and play and playfulness for a couple years and was honestly starting to question all of it. And part of it was Covid. I felt like I didn't have a good response or it didn't seem appropriate to. All these things I said were important for us to solve problems creatively. And I sort of was like, I just was. I was at a loss. And I definitely felt going into this deployment in which I was going to serve as what's called the battle director for, you know, a large swath of the world that we call Central Command, Middle East, Syria, all those areas, and sort of have this role at the operations center, helping, you know, be one of the leaders there. I definitely thought, well, this is not the place where I. I will need design thinking and play, and how inappropriate would that be? And as it turns out, paradoxically, I think I felt like it was more important the less it seemed like it was going to be useful. The paradox was play and design were more needed in places where it was less welcome. And the specific example is diversity and sort of the creative abrasion, which is precisely what our new administration seems to fear ideologically. But I think pragmatically, we all know the value of holding different views together, and that friction becomes traction. But the challenge that I had in that environment was that I couldn't bring more people in. It was a classified environment. We're deployed, we're limited in numbers. And I sort of had to activate the diversity of the people that were already there so that all of them showed up. And I mean that in the sense that every single person in the room felt like they could say things, but every single person could bring their. What I started calling their full freaky self to the problem. And I realized that people won't do this unless they feel safe, like you just mentioned, unless they feel safe and supported by each other and sort of. And stretched. Stretched in meaningful ways that they're, they're on their learning edge, right? They're. They're in that sense of flow where they're, they're pushing along towards worthy, worthy causes. And I, I actually asked them this constantly. It was, it was a little strange at first. I kind of even made me cringe a little bit. But I would start every meeting, oh, do you feel safe, supported and stretched in meaningful ways? And I would like to think that dealing with some of the things we dealt with, most of them are classified. The one that isn't classified is our interactions with the Russians that deconflict things over Syria. But I really do feel like this creative conflict allowed them to not just be overly deferential, they would not censor their ideas as much. And even though that's not a typical composition of a design team, I felt like for a moment in time, design did help me create the conditions to do the things that you were just saying.

Speaker A Shaping a team culture where people have time, space, silence and security enables them to do their best work, enables them to bring their full freaky selves to the work. And the joy of having roles and responsibilities is that you can kind of come up with a plan for moving toward a set of goals and objectives and under. And riding above that is an overall strategy. Okay, great. But those remembering that those roles and responsibilities are a fiction, they are a deep abstraction of the people who are doing that work. And if we start as leaders to believe that that abstraction is reality, then we lose access to the full range of skills people bring to an environment. And that is one of the. Go down the checklist of the ways to crush innovation. That is one of them.

Speaker B I think you put that brilliantly. I can't wait to take that little snippet that you just said and show it to my students, share it with my students at scad. I think you captured it in a way that's very concise and accurate.

Speaker A Or you can send the link with a timestamp and away they go.

Speaker B Perfect. That's perfect. This was honestly one of the insights along the way that I learned through failure. Really go back to when I mentioned I was at the Air Force Leadership School. We had a new commandant come in right as I was taking over as the dean. We had just had the self assessment that revealed and maybe things aren't as great. Maybe the foundation of Our school isn't as strong. And I'm sort of. I gave it to him in a metaphor. I said, because, you know, at the time, we were dealing with the same thing at our. Our house in Louisiana. I was like, hey, we just pulled up the floors and it's. The foundation's really bad. So we could patch it up, keep it going for a little bit longer, or we could overhaul this. And. And he said, burn it down. And I was like, all right, here we go. So we. Thankfully, we were all equipped as educators teaching design thinking, and I thought, what a great opportunity for us to eat our own dog food and put this to work. So off we went, redesigning the entire Squadron Officer School experience. That's the name of the school, Squadron Officer School. And I was both facilitating the sort of design competition and also advising the ultimate decider in it, the commandant, General Mills. And I was participating as a designer. And that didn't. That ended up not working well because there was this sense of, like, that I had insider information or maybe this was all just for show, but he had already made a decision. And what I really took away from that was that I needed to do some work ahead of time, making sure everyone was on the not. Not the same page in the sense of the same how we do everything. But we were all being guided by the same North Star. And that. That work, which you could call empathy work, I was like, that is not just the first step in a checklist. And it's not just external. It's not just what are the users involved, but this whole empathy thing is really something. It's a thread that runs through the entire design process. And it's about me, and it's about the team, and it's about all of us together doing the things that you just mentioned so that those abstractions don't become obstacles.

Speaker A And often one of the things I'm looking at is the. And whether I'm working with a team or an organization is the readiness of that team or organization to work in new ways, to play with new concepts. I did a strategy project, and there were deep trust issues. And I was like, okay, we're not going to get to anything transformative on the strategy front if we don't work on the trust issues. Because once again, time, space, silence, security, to get where the leader wanted to go with this project. Like, well, we have to address these trust issues because people will not be able to do work at the level required to get where you need to go. And so I'm often looking at Looking across those areas to say, all right, do the people who are these are principal creators, the people who could be contributing expertise and ideas, do they feel safe? Do they have the time to do this? Do they have the capability in terms of the skills required? Do we need to do anything there? Is there anything that we need to fold into the process quietly to get where we need to go? And I will often fold that into some of the experiences or the one on one conversations that I have, rather than doing something explicit, because often that will just shield up like, whoa, what's going on here?

Speaker B So in that situation, did you intuitively sense that something was off or is this something that you look for, for sort of programmatically in the work that you're doing?

Speaker A So there are a couple ways it comes up. I ask early questions when I'm scoping the project around. Tell me about the last time your team, your group, your organization did something that was a bit radical and risky with an innovation component. And I'll listen to that story. I'll listen to how people talk about programs that they that of programs or initiatives or things that have been tried in the past. Is there this like, oh, try that didn't work, or is it, oh, well, we tried this and what we learned from that was this. And we took what we learned there and then applied it over here. That's a very different world. And then there are the one on one conversations. And that's often I'll do a certain number of those just to get a feel for some of the key voices. I tend to look for people who are influential, people who are the kind of critical, the loving critics, somewhat like the curmudgeons, the people who have a long institutional or team history and the people who have a history of creating new things that work in that environment. And I try to find those people to talk to and hear their stories because I use that information to augment. And that's also a place where I would see like, oh, wait a minute, we're going to need to work, work with the team in this way or support the team and this way or support the people involved across this organization in these ways because of what I've heard here. And it could be trust, it could be everyone's double busy, it could be lots of different things. But that's how I glean that information. And that's before any design research. And in some instances I have to build in a component to go much, much deeper. And there's one project where I, I did 20, 20, 25 one on one conversations to really understand how the delta between people working at their best and the current strategic position of this unit was sitting out and like, okay, in order to achieve the work that I've been brought in to do, how much of this delta do we need to close and how fast and then how can I prepare this work to contribute to that long after I'm gone? And so it's often saying like, okay, what can I set in motion in terms of new habits or attach to other institutional habits or rituals that, that people have? So that's, that's some of how I, how I approach that.

Speaker B I love that your entry into that is essentially tell me a story, tell me, tell me about a time I, I, I love the power of storytelling. Not just for the sake of hey, let's take this, this hard truth or this thing I want you to believe. And I'm going to coat it with something so you can more easily swallow it. I mean something different. I mean, and it is sort of related to I think this power of story. Like you just said, it's, it's a good way to, to hear people, to hear more, you know, beneath the surface of what they're saying, to understand more. But I also think it's a useful tool for thinking and I'm currently fascinated by not just future studies and foresight, but story casting or story thinking or narrative intelligence as a set of activities to go back to experiencing design. A set of activities that help us experience something that then helps cultivate and condition a certain type of, of strategic thinking or designfulness. I'm actually particularly interested in how we might use physical artifacts, Lego Serious Play, for instance, on helping people tell those stories in ways that aren't just cognitive, but gets their hands involved. And there is a program that I only have read about, I haven't been engaged with it at all, but it's, it's principles for Responsible management education and it's a United nations effort to raise the profile of sustainability in both business and management education. There's some principles, it's all related to Sustainable Development Goals and again, I'm not involved in that world, but I'm just curious if we can bring those skills and designfulness in general to that. So you know, if any of your listeners are in that world and they, they want to help me figure out how to get in and see what good work can be done with, with a design school, you know, we're not scad, doesn't have an mba. We have something called the mbi. It's fairly new. It's a Master's of business innovation. But I think we're uniquely situated to kind of bring a lot of things we've talked about, empathy, the storytelling and everything into some of these big, meaty, gritty, messy, wicked problems and see if we can see if we can do some good.

Speaker A I think that is a great place to close on seeing if we can do some good. But before we do, is there anything that you're thinking or feeling that you would like to say?

Speaker B Oh, I appreciate that. I have an immense amount of gratitude for not only being asked to be on the show and contribute and have this conversation with you, but for all the conversations you've had with individuals that have helped me help my students, surely have helped many others understand what this, this slippery thing called design thinking is and all the ways it can be used. I know you and I have had some conversations about what, what can be done on the local level. And, and that's what's on my heart these days of how do I bring this to my new old hometown of Covington, Louisiana, the place we love. But honestly, the, the. I'm also wondering how, how to get engaged at a, at a higher level, whether that's larger organizations or systems of governance. And so if there's anyone out there that is looking for a partner and, and wants to focus on the designers, the design thinkers, the strategists, not just design thinking or strategy as these sort of abstract things, then call me because, because I think there's, again, there's good work that needs to be done. There's a lot of us out here wondering what it is that we do with these skills so that we feel like the world's a better place and our efforts, our noble mission, has an outlet. So anyway, I'm grateful for you allowing me to come out here to share that, and I'm grateful for what you do, man. Thanks.

Speaker A Well, I'm, I'm grateful for you for coming on the show, for everything that you have done through throughout your career. And I'm excited about how you will contribute next and looking, looking forward to our, our next conversation about that.

Speaker B Absolutely.

Leadership & Strategy + Fighter Pilots + Design Education with Jason "TOGA" Trew — DT101 E145

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