In the Moses myth, innovation is a miracle that results when   a special person raises his or her hands to God.   The Red Sea parts, the iPod is born.   Pick your own utopian outcome.   The message is the same.   It's that the innovation takes a special gift.   One that most of us just don't have.

Like most myths this just isn't true.

Of course there are creative geniuses, no one would want to   deny that truly extraordinary minds, like Steve Jobs, exist.

But genius is not the only way to produce innovation.   And believing the Moses myth undermines managers' confidence in   their own abilities.   And what I want to do is just ask for equal time to tell a different version of   the story of innovation and where it comes from.

This is a view of the creative process that was offered by an employee of   Apple a few years back, and it is one of my favorites.   Not because I agree with it,   but because I think it captures the Moses myth beautifully.

That old story that innovation is a black box.   It's a hopeless tangle.   And the ability to think creatively is the mysterious one that belongs to   a special class of people.

In this class, we are going to respectively disagree with that story and   tell a different one.

Rather than waiting for Moses to show up and part the Red Sea for   us we are going to figure out how to build bridges to cross over to the other side.   To that promised land of the new future so   that we can reliably manufacture our own miracles.

So let's look at a different view of the creative process.

In this view, the tangled mess morphs, into a systematic series of questions.

The first of these questions is, what is?   And it explores current reality.

All successful innovation begins, I believe,   with an accurate assessment of what is going on today.   Indeed starting out by developing a better understanding of   current reality is a hallmark of design thinking and   it's the core of design's data intensive and user driven approach.

Managers frequently want to run immediately to the future to start   the innovation process by brainstorming new options and ideas.   And they find it hard to focus on immersing themselves to the here and now.   We're so impatient to get to creating new stuff.

But attending to the present pays dividends in two crucial ways.   First, it helps broaden and perhaps even change completely our   definition of the problem or opportunity we want to tackle.

We can unwittingly throw away all kinds of opportunities for   innovation before we even get started if we adopt too narrow or   too conventional a definition of the problem.

Second, this attention to the present helps uncover unarticulated needs,   which are the key to producing the kind of innovative design   criteria that generate really differentiated solutions.   And those are the kind that we want to build profitable businesses.

What is saves us from having to rely entirely on   our own imagination as we move into idea development.   And it gives us solid and   ideally deep insight into what our stakeholders truly want and need.   Which reduces the risk of failure with a new idea.

Focusing on what is helps us to specify what a great solution will   look like without telling us the solution itself.

Now, having accomplished that, we're ready to ask the second question, what if, and   begin to generate ideas and explore possible solutions.

So, we've examined the data we've gathered, we've identified patterns and   insights and we've translated these into specific design criteria as   part of the what is phase.   Now we're going to use those criteria to ask what if?   Keeping in mind that we want to start this part of the process by   focusing on possibilities.

What if anything were possible?

That I believe is one of the most powerful questions anyone can ask.

]So often we get trapped into starting with constraints rather than possibilities.   And then the future ends up looking a lot like the present.

This phase is where brainstorming occurs.   Brainstorming is a process that most managers have learned to hate.   But this time I promise will be different.   No more asking you to come up with ten novel uses for a paperclip.

Rather than relying entirely on our imaginations and   idea generation, we're going to go back and use the insights and the criteria   we generated during data gathering and pose a series of trigger questions.

Those questions will help us think outside of our own boxes and   generate multiple creative ideas.

In fact, we can think of each of these individual ideas as though they   were a single Lego block.

Just the kind of Lego's we all played with as children.

And then in concept development we're going to take those individual ideas and   combine them,   just the way kids do with Lego's, into all kinds of different cool creations.

And we'll call these creations our business concepts.

And now that we have a whole set of business concepts it's time to move to   the first stage of testing by asking our third question.   What wows?

In this stage we're going to treat each of our business   concepts explicitly as a hypothesis.   And begin to think systematically about evaluating them against our   design criteria.

Now if we get the first two questions approximately right   we'll find to our simultaneous pleasure and dismay that we   have far too many interesting concepts to move forward all at once.   And so we have to make some hard choices.

As we whittle the field of concepts to a manageable number, we're looking for   those that hit the sweet spot.   The wow spot.   Where the chance of significant upside for   our stakeholders matches our organizational resources and   capabilities and our ability to sustainably deliver the new offering.   This is the Wow Zone.

And making this assessment involves surfacing and   testing the assumptions about why each of our concepts is a good idea.

The concepts that wow, the ones that pass the first test, are good candidates for   turning into experiments to be conducted with actual users.   In order to do this, we need to transform the concepts into   something a potential customer can interact with, a prototype.

So finally we're ready to learn from the real world by asking our fourth question.   What works.   And trying out a low fidelity prototype with actual users.   If they like it and give us useful feedback, then we refine the prototype and   test it with yet more users.   Iterating our way until we feel confident about the value of our new idea and   are ready to scale it.   As we move through what works.   It's important to keep in mind some of the principles behind this learning in   action stage.

Work and fast feedback cycles.   Minimize the cost of conducting experiments.   Fail early to succeed sooner and test for key tradeoffs and assumptions early on.

And there you have it.

Just four questions that will help us build the bridge to more   innovative solutions and manufacture our own miracles without relying on Moses.

And so, this is what I'm going to be focusing on in our time together.   Design thinking as a problem solving approach that asks four questions, and   that is human-centered, possibility-driven, option-focused, and   iterative in its approach.   Let me talk about each of those for a moment in turn.   Human-centered is where we always start, with people.   With real human beings.   Not demographics or segmentation schemes.   Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and   the problems of the people we hope to generate value for   before we're allowed to start generating solutions.

This is why it's often called user-driven design.

It adopts market research methodologies that are qualitative, and empathetic.   And it's also enthusiastic about engaging other human beings in co-creation.

Design thinking is also possibility-driven.   It uses this information we've learned to ask the question, what if anything,   were possible?

As we begin to create new ideas about how to serve them.

It also focuses on generating multiple option, and   avoids putting our eggs in particular solution basket.

Because we're guessing about our stakeholders needs and   wants, when we go after unarticulated needs.   We expect to be wrong a lot, so we want to put multiple irons in the fire and   let our stakeholders tell us which works for   them, which means we want to manage a portfolio of new ideas.

Finally, the process is iterative.   It's committed to conducting cycles of real world experiments rather than   running analysis using historical data.

It's a process of continuously forming and   testing and then reforming our ideas about what works.   We don't expect to get it right the first time.   We expect to iterate our way to success.

Let's learn some more about design thinking from some experts on   the subject by viewing the video, what is design thinking.   We've created that video here at Darden and I'd like you to check it out and   I'll rejoin you to look at design thinking in action when you're finished.

