Tapping Into Design Thinking to Fail Faster
Nurun’s Guthrie Dolin offers an insider’s look at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a.k.a., the d.school.
On the southwestern edge of Stanford University’s campus, near Palo Alto, California, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design occupies one of the many red-tiled roof and sandstone buildings that epitomize the university’s classic, California architectural style. Outside the Thomas F. Peterson Engineering Laboratory, a vintage maroon Chevrolet 3100 truck greets visitors as the “official bus” of the d.school, the name of the Institute most commonly used on campus. It’s here where Guthrie Dolin, Executive Vice President and Director of Strategy at Nurun, begins a tour of the d.school.
As a program lecturer and longtime friend and champion of the d.school, Guthrie possesses unique insights into where the program has been—and where it’s going. Since the program’s inception, Guthrie has helped to build the d.school’s presence within the Stanford University community and beyond. He created the program’s original identity materials and website, and helped to recruit students and teachers. It was during the process of closely working with d.school co-founders David Kelly and George Kembel, that Guthrie was first invited to guest lecture, then eventually invited to teach.
A seasoned creative, strategist, and serial entrepreneur, Guthrie’s extensive background in human-centered design and solid track record of creating innovative and useful products and services for clients such as Google, Coca-Cola, and Tesla Motors, among others, has made him an exemplar of the d.school’s design thinking ethos. Guthrie practices what he teaches, and on a typically beautiful California day earlier this summer, he gave us a rare glimpse inside the d.school.
Founded in Stanford University’s School of Engineering in 2005, thanks in large part to a $35 million donation from SAP AG founder Hasso Plattner, the d.school was created to nurture innovators from radically different backgrounds, including business, the arts, technology, and medicine. As one of the first programs in the country to introduce design thinking principles within an academic setting, the d.school challenges students and faculty to develop innovative, human-centered solutions for real-world problems.
While the d.school doesn’t grant degrees, it serves as the university-wide hub for innovation, bringing together graduate-level students to engage in complex design challenges through rigorous, hands-on practice. Admitting less than 700 students each year, the program is highly competitive, and draws applicants from within Stanford University’s business, engineering, medicine, and arts graduate schools.
“We like to say that the kinds of students who thrive at the d.school are ‘t-shaped’ people, meaning they bring a deep set of skills and knowledge to problem solving within their own fields,” Guthrie said. “And by applying design thinking principles and practices, these experts develop breadth and creative confidence to collaborate with others from very different backgrounds. That’s the basis for the kind of collaboration and co-creation that reveals genuine insights that lead to brilliant solutions to complex problems.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about the d.school’s space is how open it is. Once visitors have walked through the traditional entranceway of the building, they are immediately transported into a kind of grownup playground, thoughtfully designed to inspire creativity at every turn. Windows in the vaulted ceilings offer natural light throughout the building, while colorful furniture (and even more colorful students) occupy the area.
Post-it notes abound and a wall of Polaroid snapshots feature the names and faces of current and past d.school students. Visitors are struck by the diversity of backgrounds that the wall of students represents. It’s that diversity of experience and perspectives that’s key to the success of the program.
In addition to the vast common spaces, there are also smaller, more intimate spaces that allow for work that requires quiet or solitude (or a nap, if necessary).
On the day of our visit, Guthrie pointed out a seemingly spontaneous meeting that was being held by d.school co-founder (and the program’s founding dean) George Kemball and a group of students in an open classroom. The conversation seemed much less like one between a professor and graduate students, and more like a discussion among colleagues. The collegial atmosphere of the d.school stands in stark contrast to the kind of buttoned-up lectures that one might expect in an MBA program. In many ways, the ways of learning and teaching seem to be the antithesis of the highly structured and formal nature of an MBA program.
Indeed, while corporations had historically tapped armies of MBAs to help them solve their most challenging business problems, lately there’s been a shift away from the rigid, Six Sigma philosophies espoused by business schools. Increasingly today, design thinking principles and methodologies have replaced traditional business administration practices at many of the world’s most innovative companies, changing the ways that businesses approach problem solving and to whom they charge with the task of business transformation.
“Design thinking utilizes close, anthropological observation techniques to gain insights into problems that may not yet be articulated by consumers,” Guthrie said. “In the past, companies relied on focus groups to get feedback from consumers about products and services that they were developing. But focus group participants often will respond in ways that they think they’re supposed to. Observing people in their natural environments provides much deeper insights into latent needs and gets much closer to the truth.”
Creating hybrid thinkers who can effectively mine truthful insights is a critical objective of the d.school, and inculcating students into new ways of thinking is an important hallmark of the program.
“If you’re a businessperson, it’s helpful to develop design skills. If you’re a designer, it’s useful to have business skills,” Guthrie said.
Guthrie explained that d.school co-founder David Kelly, who also founded IDEO and has been a longtime professor at Stanford University’s design and engineering programs, used many of the ideas and techniques from the world of consulting to inform the d.school’s approach to academia.
“The idea of the d.school is to bring together people with unique skills and perspectives — social scientists, business people, and technologists — and have them work together to design stuff that’s never been designed, and make things that have never existed before,” Guthrie said.
By providing opportunities to rethink common ideas and explore new ways of working together through the application of design thinking principles, d.school students learn how to take problems within a business context that aren’t necessarily about design, and apply design thinking to them.
“The d.school nurtures the idea that the success of design thinking isn’t about keeping ideas and owning them,” Guthrie said. “It’s about getting the tools into as many people’s hands as possible.”
The d.school was built on the foundation of taking design thinking to all manner of industries, and applying fundamental principles and methodologies, and seeing what happens. Often what happens is the discovery of new ideas and insights that can help to transform businesses.
One of the central tenets of design thinking is rapid prototyping. By prototyping and iterating, design thinking practitioners can work through problems more quickly and efficiently, keeping and expanding solutions that are viable, and shedding those that are not.
The d.school provides students with myriad opportunities to prototype their ideas, often using ordinary materials to create extraordinary objects. From prototyping physical objects to developing digital products and services, various lab space allow students to tap into their creativity and explore new ways of making things.
“It’s a hands-on experience, not just theory,” Guthrie said.
At the end of our tour, we sat down with Guthrie to gain further insights into the class that he’s currently teaching. Guthrie explained that his course, “Designing for Failure,” like all courses at the d.school, is workshop-style, led by a team of instructors, including him, Manish Saggar, and Grace Hawthorne.
@nurun: Tell us more about how you got connected with the d.school and about the class that you’re teaching this term.
@gee3: I’ve been invovled with the d.school from the beginning. I started as a guest lecturer on Launch Pad, which was a kind of crash course where students go from an idea to launching a product in one quarter. Later, I taught a course on guerrilla branding for entrepreneurs. This term, I’m teaching a class called “Designing for Failure” with Manish Saggar and Grace Hawthorne. Our objective was to build a curriculum for students to consider how they think about failure.
@nurun: Why is failure so important in the design process?
@gee3: Failure is an intrinsic part of creating and learning, so it’s important to reframe an outcome — even when it’s bad, especially when it’s bad — as something that’s positive and helpful, rather than something that you dwell upon or are anxious about. We like to say, ‘Fail early and fail often,” as a way to empower creators in failure. If you go away and try to conceive a solution in a cocoon, spend a lot of time and effort on it, and then the solution ultimately fails, you’ve lost a huge investment of time and effort. But if you design a process that allows for failure, then you’re in a constant state of iteration.
@nurun: A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of failure…
@gee3: It’s a lot like how we prototype and test: get in front of users, test, iterate. By failing in small increments along the way, instead of waiting until the end for a colossal failure, there’s a greater chance for success over time.
@nurun: When people hear the word failure, they tend to think it’s the end and there’s no going back.
@gee3: Failure should be thought of like commencement: it’s the beginning of something, not the end. In Myers-Briggs terms, we’re not judgers. We live in an environment where we’re OK with ambiguity. The process of innovation for many is uncomfortable because it requires failure all of the time, big and small. The class is about getting people comfortable with failure, to design into the process the chance to fail and learn, and ultimately to get toward a successful outcome. We want to teach people to understand in themselves how to use failure as a positive force for learning and understanding, rather than as an end.
@nurun: How are the students for your class selected?
@gee3: Every d.school course requires students to apply. Each class has different criteria, but they are all limited to graduate students only. For our class, we ask applicants to briefly write about one epic failure (and the immediate aftermath) that they experienced in their lives. We want to see a diversity in the challenges that students have faced, whether their epic fails were interpersonal or business failures or just not being attentive on the job. Out of 80 applicants, we admitted 19 students.
@nurun: It seems like students are required to demonstrate some level of vulnerability?
@gee3: For sure, but we work to create a safe environment (again, we’re not judgers), so we want students to be open to sharing. Failure is always very personal, so people tend to bring up very personal, emotional things. But when you’re doing something innovative, it always means you might fail, and that’s OK. People who sign up for the course are predisposed to want to understand and to use failure as a way to learn how to succeed.
@nurun: Do you get applicants who are perfectionists who don’t see or accept failure?
@gee3: Sure. There are always applicants who say that their failure is never allowing themselves to fail. It’s probably more acute culturally outside of the U.S., where in other countries, failure simply is not an option. ‘What do you mean the product didn’t work?’ ‘What do you mean it lost money?’ In some ways, the notion of failure is a bit of a luxury, but it’s an important step in the process of innovation.
@nurun: How do design thinking principles help to unpack people’s aversion to failure?
@gee3: What’s difficult for many businesses is the idea that they’re investing in something that has a high chance for failure. People and businesses are naturally failure adverse. The reality is that failure isn’t about whether or not you will fail, it’s when you will fail. Failure is inevitable. The a-ha! moment is only available when someone is doing the riskiest thing. We want to break down the idea of failure, and demonstrate that it’s simply a part of the process of continual growth and evolution. From a design thinking standpoint, it’s about not knowing or not anticipating any given outcome, but to be open to whatever outcome occurs. What sets designers apart from other kinds of practitioners is that they have failure built into their processes, and they choose to learn from failure instead of to be defeated by it.
@nurun: Can building failure into the design process be taught?
@gee3: People love when things work, but they are dismayed when things don’t go as planned. But I think you can mitigate some of the negative feelings by setting expectations and pulling everyone into the process at the start. Hopefully people can learn that failure isn’t the worst thing that can happen. In fact, sometimes failure is the best thing that can happen.
Guthrie Dolin is a seasoned creative executive, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. In his 20-plus-year career, he has founded and led design-driven consultancies as well as helped to launch innovative products and services that range from a DIY magazine (Readymade) to a revolutionary personal aircraft (ICON). Guthrie currently serves as Executive Vice President and Director of Strategy at Nurun, where he leads strategic engagements for clients such as Google, Coca-Cola, and Tesla Motors. He is also a lecturer at the d.school. You can follow him on Twitter @gee3.
