How to Build a Superpowered Design Thinking Team
From childhood, David Webster always wanted to be an inventor — and from Tokyo to London and San Francisco, he has followed his ambition to design motorcycles for Yamaha, invent new foods with WhatIf, and build factories for Unilever.
He is now a partner at the global design firm IDEO, leading its Palo Alto office through work on pilates machines, needle-free vaccine systems, light-and-motion sculpture, and apps.
Here, David reveals his recipe for the ideal design-thinking team, advice on going off-script while maintaining direction — and three tips for starting entrepreneurs.
THE IDEAL TEAM HAS DIVERSE SUPERPOWERS
The ideal design team is a diverse team.
Our teams always include someone who’s an expert at thinking with their hands, a builder. The builder is preferably at the intersection of the physical and the digital — an engineer-hacker-coder.
There’s always someone whose superpower is empathy. We call this person a human factors expert — someone who can really understand what matters to the users, on their terms.
And we have someone whose superpower is beauty. This is an industrial designer, or communications designer — a virtuoso at aesthetics and striking a chord, aesthetically, with people.
THE PRAGMATIST AND THE EXPERT
Then, the team needs an expert in pragmatically structuring things so that they can exist — aka, an MBA.
We have amazing business people and entrepreneurs who are designers on our team — they understand and help build the vision of what we want to make exist in the world.
But they also know how to bring it into existence in the world, by constructing an enterprise around it, and making it viable.
Finally, deep domain expertise is really important on a design team. We have two surgeons — a neurosurgeon and a cardiologist — because when designing for the health sector, you need those kinds of experts on board as well.
DISCIPLINARIANS AND COLLABORATION
All of these are types of people that we’ll have on our designs teams — but within those types, there are some common traits.
Regardless of design discipline, we find people who are genuinely interested in other people. People who conduct themselves with a kind of lightness and joy.
It’s quite easy to find amazingly strong design disciplinarians who are very focused on the purity of their discipline, and very earnest about it.
You know that those people can be successful designers — but for IDEO we work hard to find people who are both capable, and fundamentally biased towards collaboration.
INNOVATION LIVES OFF-SCRIPT
A lot of the big-step changes and innovation happen off-script.
People have epiphanies in the shower. Someone’s car breaks down — and while they’re stuck there for an hour, they end up figuring out how to do some things differently.
Startups can get intense, with every second of your time completely scheduled and scripted.
But the most powerful innovation can happen when people are doing something that feels like goofing off. It may actually be the most valuable thing that you can do!
Allowing, and assigning value to unstructured time — and then just enjoying each other’s company as people, is really hard to do when you are constantly sprinting. But I’ve noticed it’s often really critical to a startup’s evolution.
ENJOY UNPREDICTABILITY
Have a really low boredom threshold. And don’t forget to enjoy yourself.
There were a couple of decades — the Six Sigma era — when for large organizations, it was all about taking your business and optimizing it, turning it into the most well-oiled machine by removing all rogue parameters.
The game is the opposite now. The world is thrilling, less predictable, and throwing brand new parameters at you faster than ever before.
You have to be really good at enjoying the unpredictability, and rapidly engaging with it — while taking pride in a culture which is hungry for it, and thrives on it.
It’s about a hunger for newness, and enjoying leaps of faith into uncharted territory.
BUT MAINTAIN A ROCK-SOLID ETHOS
Startups go through peaks and troughs, phases and crises.
They get influenced by funders, they have the trials and tribulations of finding and assembling talent.
There’s an inevitable form of pivoting to move forward. And all of this may dilute why the startup embarked on this journey in the first place.
When everything is turbulent and changing, you need a constant, a rock-solid ethos, and an unassailable vision of the vector that you’re on.
It’s about finding and defending that ethos, and your values. What was that first spark, when the founders got together and first said, “Let’s do this!”? You have to articulate that, and be really clear on it.
3 TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS
First, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.
Not because the media says it’s cool, or all your friends are doing it. Not because of the money — or the hypothetical money.
The really strong startup founders can’t stand the idea of their idea not existing in the world. The ones that win are fundamentall hardwired to make it happen.
But the best ones also exist with lightness, expansively, and are not kind of super buttoned-down.
Second, don’t take yourself too seriously.
Allow space for serendipity, joy, youthfulness, and for off-script things to happen. You’ll be really surprised how valuable that is.
Third, check out design, design thinking, the design mindset, and design methodology.
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