This podcast features Scott Berkun, author and speaker, and his keynote, “The Dance of the Possible” from the design leadership conference Prototypes, Process & Play on August 10th, 2017.

Prototypes, Process & Play presentation podcasts are sponsored by Balsamiq – with Balsamiq Mockups, anyone can design great software.

Scott Berkun – Keynote

Author & Speaker

Scott Berkun is a bestselling author and popular speaker on creativity, philosophy, culture, business and many other subjects. He’s the author of seven books, including The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared, or been mentioned, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, USA Today, Fast Company, National Public Radio, The Huffington Post and other media. He studied philosophy, computer science and design at CMU, was a manager at Microsoft (’94-’03) and WordPress.com (’10-’12), and currently works full time as a writer and speaker.

For more, keep up with Scott at scottberkun.com or on Twitter as @berkun.

The Dance of the Possible

You work with ideas, big and small, all day long–isn’t it time you learn the deep patterns that explain your successes and failures? This short and fun presentation, based on a new book will share timeless patterns and entertaining insights that can help you be more creative and productive all at the same time. From finding creative confidence to getting better feedback, you’ll be entertained as you’re challenged to think differently about thinking. Bring your toughest questions and situations and get useful and entertaining advice during this heavily interactive session.

Presentation Transcript

Please note:

Transcription was recorded live; there may be errors (typographical and contextual), as well as omissions or other content gaffes.

​Additionally,​ there was microphone feedback that happened in the room from time to time, and we did our best to minimize it in the podcasts. We apologize for any disruptions to your listening experience that this may cause.

Scott Berkun:

If you walk down the street a few blocks from where you’re sitting right now, you’ll see a golden – like this. How many of you are locals, by the way? You probably have walked by this building a few times and haven’t noticed. I’m going to tell you a story about this building and a bunch of other buildings and tie it all around user experience design and how this should work.

So the name of this building is an unusual building. It’s called the Manadanoc building. It sounds like something from Game of Thrones or a Sesame Street character. I thought it came from a person, but it doesn’t. It’s an English word. It is an isolated hill or ridge rising above. One of the odd things that happens when you start reading very specific words in other fields you realize how irritating it is when people if a field insist on moving more tough language than necessary. For me trying to figure out what Manodknock is not that helpful. That’s not the goal of my story to hit you over the head with fancy vocabulary. Instead I want to talk about this building and tie it to another building that is far more wellknown.

This building was finished in 1891. When it was finished, it was the tallest building in Chicago and probably most of the east coast. When it was finished, it was designed with a certain model and a certain paradigm of brick‑based buildings. It was 16 stories high, but that’s very hard to do when you’re building with brick. You don’t see very many skyscrapers that are very high when they’re made with brick. But they figured out how to build it. It was the first building with electric light. And fire systems. It’s an amazing artifact of design history and it’s only a few blocks away. You can go inside the building and read about it.

But at the same time that this building was built, and it was towering over all the other buildings around it. It was like a tourist attraction in Chicago. At the same time, there was another group of people working in another building. Two French engineers who had an idea for a different kind of building, a different kind of design. And they worked for a guy whose name you may know, his name was Eiffel. And they pitched him on a design they had for a tower. Something like this. They knew the world’s fair was coming to Paris. He was not that famous, but famous enough to be the kind of person who could possibly put together a project of this scale. They wanted to pitch him on this idea. They didn’t want to overwhelm him with the scale of it. So they did something that designers do all the time. This is a personal lesson here, whenever you’re pitching an idea that is really ambitious, often it can fail because of its ambitious. You have to provide cues for how people can relate to it.

That’s Notre Dame. Standing on top of Notre Dame is the statue of liberty. So you can get an idea of what they were proposing. He was like it’s kind of tall. But I’m not into tall. By the way paraphrasing here. That’s not exactly what he said. It’s a very Scott‑oriented dialogue. Yeah, it’s tall, but we don’t want to make a tall building. We want to make something characteristic and emotive and interesting artistically. So they went back to the drawing board and they realized there was another kind of talent to have that they didn’t possess. They reached out to another engineer, another architect, who was a little bit more experienced but had a set of skills they did not possess. They got him involved in the project. They pitched him. He got involved. They came up with a new set of designs that looked a little bit more familiar. Now we’re seeing some of the intricacies that the Eiffel Tower is known for.

So all three of them. These three relatively young engineers or designers, if I can use that word to apply to them, they then had to go back to Eiffel and pitch him again on this idea. It wasn’t the first time or the second time. It was the third or fourth time. Finally he said fine! I like it. Eiffel had to go and pitch basically Paris. There was a committee put together who decided who was going to pick the World Fair’s tower. There were other entrants in that fair. And once they were convinced, they offered not enough money for the project. As often goes on in software development projects, he said I need ten weeks for this. They said okay you get five. He said I will do that provided I can profit from the building. I get ticket sales, rights to it. And in a nutshell that’s how the Eiffel Tower project was born.

When you’re told bits of a story, any kind of great invention or created or designed thing in the world, usually you have an origin story that goes that far and then it skips to the end. That’s the amazing finished thing and it’s amazing.

I’m going to tell you the story. So once they had the plan together, they started building it. Everyone in Paris, the elites in Paris, the poets, the musicians, the elite class. The equivalent of the blogosphere got together in 1887 and they got together and they hated the idea of the Eiffel Tower. They thought it was disgusting.

300 of the elites at the time, 300 of them, and all the subfactions in the design world, or whatever field you’re in, all the subfactions of people who hate each other because they are so close. The endless battles about tiny semantics, even though they had all the same kind of applicable in fighting, 300of them got together and wrote a document. We protest in the name of all the indignation of slightest French tastes against the indignation of this monstrous tower. This giant street lamp, this apparatus, incomplete, confused, and deformed. This is pretty brutal stuff! I’ve been in some tough product group reviews with executives and design briefings where no one in the room liked what I said or liked what the team put together. But I’ve never had 300 of my peers get together and are write an essay and publish it in basically every newspaper telling me to stop something I had just started working on. But that’s where the Eiffel Tower came from. If you go back and look at the artifacts, there’s some great photography of the construction of the building.

If you imagine what it looked like in the day when nothing had been built this before, and referencing the Mododanoc building, it was brick or stone. So this, to those eyes, it does look like a bulky mass. It’s not finished.

The Eiffel Tower today, it’s the most beloved building in France. The French people love it. It’s basically their icon. But we take it for granted that all of the challenges the ideas behind the building had to face and had to be defended in different contexts and different ways to reach the point where it could be finished. The plan was to tear it down once it was finished. There is a side story of how it was defended and became a landmark.

I’m going to use this Eiffel Tower story as a way to illustrate some other general ideas about working with ideas. And as designers or writers or researchers, whatever the work is that you do, the central element of it is working with ideas. And often you’re working with people who don’t have the same background or savvy or experience of working with ideas, and some of the things that you’re doing is doing some of the stuff that Eiffel had to do. Managing people’s perceptions of ideas, persuade them, and get better with your ideas, and working with people in meetings to help them get their best ideas out.

So my name is Scott Berkun. This book is called &8220;The Dance Of the Possible.&8221; If you tweet, my handle is @Berkun. I’ll post the slides after I’m done.

How many of you are designers versus researchers? Raise your hand if you’re a designer? Okay. Raise your hand if you’re a researcher. Okay, raise your hand if you are other. Okay, do we have any accountants? Jugglers? Governors? Senators? Mostly designers. Okay.

So the first lesson that comes out of the Eiffel Tower story is central to all of the studies from psychology into people who see nationally good development ideas. What is the process in the mind? What is the process in the brain? The simplest way to define it and describe it is this. All ideas are made of other ideas. And I want you to say it with me. Okay, one, two, three.

Audience:

All ideas are made of other ideas.

Scott Berkun:

Perfect. You sound just like a cult. Perfect. Perfect to start a two‑day event all about design and thinking about process and prototyping.

So Eiffel, I mentioned that when the two young engineers pitched him on the idea originally he was like &8220;I’m not really that jazzed by it.&8221; He wasn’t that jazzed by it because he knew the history of a lot of other buildings that looked like it. This one was built in New York state about ten years before the Paris World Fair. It became a cliche, a theme, that every World Fair would have a building that is very high.

Eiffel said it was built without regard for form and it’s specifically commercial in purpose.

I should have mentioned Eiffel was an entrepreneur. He built buildings to make money from them. But at the same time he had a sensibility about the aesthetics of things that are made. You get paid a salary and you know it’s for profit. But at the same time we’re trying to uphold a higher standard. We use the word empathy a lot now sloppy. We used to use the word empathy to call out some kind of morality. A kind of higher standard that we’re trying to raise the world to, or at least the people who are going to pay to use the product.

So there’s a long history of these buildings that have been around for a while. I live in Seattle. The Space Needle.

People who come to Seattle, are they thinking that the Space Needle is for ideas that have been made before. Of course not. You have to become a student of the things that you want to emulate. The secret that lurks in every is every book, movie, film is comprised of pieces. And if you’re able to take it apart and see those pieces, you now provide yourself the opportunity to use those pieces in a different way. I move it this way and twist it that way. And that is the basics for how anyone creates everything. The reuse of certain components.

I’m a writer. I use words. Did I invent words? Probably by accident. Spelling them. I didn’t know that Mododanoc was a word. So whenever you feel stuck, the lesson in this, a long history and lesson is if ever you feel stuck or unmotivated or if ever you’re given an assignment and don’t know how to begin, if there is something in the world that you’re attempting to solve a problem on. Maybe there is something on paper that was done, instead of being a calendar project you could look at paper calendars, go and look at those pieces and study them. And it will reveal to you ideas that if I recomprise this and bring it back to if world that you work in. I want to show you a picture.

Anyone want to guess at what this is?

Audience:

Sewing machine engine.

Scott Berkun:

That’s a good guess. That’s not what it is. I’ll tell you why after people have a chance to guess. I’ll give you a clue. This is meant to be – um, think of, I’ll just tell you.

[Laughter]

Okay. So this is an early prototype of this. This is the first prototype for the mouse. We take the mouse for granted. It’s existed in the world for us. I’m old enough. Some of you are young enough where you grew up when a mouse already existed. But we take it for granted. It was standard for how we interact with computers except for laptops and things. The gentleman’s name which should be a household name was trying to figure out a way for how to make it easier for human beings to interact with machines. Human beings and machines. What did he do? He came up with ideas on his own. But he did the same thing I just described. The same process. So how else do units interact with machines. And this is in the 1960s. 1965, ’67. So what is the most dominant way that people interact with machines. Sewing machines is one. People drive with their hands. They use their feet to do very fine motor control. The gas pedal and throttle. Your foot could be a way that you interact with things.

There was a paper that I once read that say we actually designed cars wrong. That the throttle should be a wheel that you turn with your hands and the foot pedals like in an airplane should control direction. That’s an interesting 101 mental model, user experiment to do, can you experiment with that and make it work better? That’s a tangent.

My point is you can take any idea, anything that you think is brilliant and amazing and done by a genius and tear it apart. I can see something new and make it better in some way. We see this in the arts, too. This is the Vetruvian man. Does anyone know why it’s called that? It’s called Vitruvian Man because there was a Roman architect called Vitruvius. By the way I’m not an historian. I am a designer. But in order to be better as a designer, I wanted to study how other people design and manage things.

We’re proud of an interest, design principles, design standards. This is the book that invented design patterns. Or the book that documented them anyway. He put everything that he knew about Roman architecture. Books at that time were privileged publishing. There’s weird stuff in there like his favorite recipe for poridge and how he didn’t like his neighbors.

Da Vinci drew this. But he drew it based on something that Vitruvius did. And the knowledge in that book, he probably got bits of that knowledge too from others, too. So if you’re ever frustrated and your team isn’t going anywhere, you have to go back and say I need ideas and we need to break this down into smaller pieces and experiment with recombine them.

So this book that I wrote that is about understanding ideas better, one of the claims that I make in my frustrations is there are so many ideas on creativity. And the idea generation is not that hard. If you’re able to break an idea down to pieces and recombine them and experiment and play, you’ll find new ideas. The harder part is what do you do with those ideas? What do you do with psychology. The feelings of dealing with uncertainty. Those are the problems that are hard.

The second thing that comes up in so many books and thoughts about creativity is that creativity is some kind of a talent. It’s something that you possess. So Fred is so creative. Sally is so creative. Bobby, he’s not that creative. He’s a hard worker. That’s something innate in you. That’s really not true.

Anyone suitably motivated will be creative. I prefer to think of creativity instead of a noun, something you possess, as an activity.

When somebody comes up to me and says I want to be more creative, great. More creative in what? Do you want to play guitar? Write software what do you want to create? I want to be more creative in everything. I can’t help you there. If you want to be more creative in thinking, I would say you should write, make movies.

How does someone become a great guitarist or musician, they practice it. Through the act of playing, they get better. They can do more things. They can try more ideas out. There is no way around it.

I’m a writer, I want to write a book. Great. What have you written so far? I haven’t written anything yet. Well I can’t help you then. You have to be creating in order to be creative. There is no way around it.

People who we often label as creative thinkers are often people who are simply willing to express ideas that come across their minds, pure ambitions. We all have ideas when we’re sitting in some boring meeting and we’re thinking should I say this now? There’s some inhibition that there’s going to be fear of judgment and we’re going to say something that could be rejected. So we repress it. And we hold it back. Our culture teaches us. No definitive measurable KPI or measurable amount of goodness in the thing. Just do anything is the goal.

As we get older we get more comfortable and motivated by external motivation. Did you get an A on your test? Did you graduate with honors? What’s your salary? Did you get promoted? Those are all external values. And we forget that the whole process of creating stuff and developing ideas is about that initial experimentation.

If you’re thinking I want to be more creative and a creative thinker, that’s great. Whenever you have that thing come across your mind, I wonder what would happen if we took the navigation on the left side and put it on the right side. Who came up with that? It’s a good question to answer. Fun one. Good.

That’s a question you have. Now you have to put some energy behind that idea to actually make it into a verb. Let me go and make a prototype of that thing. It’s the only way you can explore the idea and change it from being a noun to being an action thing.

One fun way to think about creative thinking, I mentioned a few minutes ago, I really think anyone can be better at developing ideas simply by finding ideas of motivation. The classic ones are easy. People are passionate about an idea. It could be a greedy ambition. Eiffel was partially motivated by ambition. But there are things that go on in our brain when we’re motivated for trivial things.

Think of the last time that you lost your keys. Or lost your phone. That’s probably a better metaphor. A lot of us, if you could choose to lose your keys or your phone, I’ll lose my keys. I can call my friends on my phone. But imagine losing something of value like your phone. Initially you say oh, it’s not here. So you do the next most easily available thing. But once you exhaust that in the first few minutes of exploring, you get very creative in where to look for your lost keys. You look on your couch. You look through clothing that you haven’t worn in years. You know you haven’t worn them, but you’re looking in them anyway. That’s the human experience of being motive to be creative. You’re not using any process like My Maps or brainstorming techniques. It’s not a school class you had to take. It’s innate enough as problem solvers. If you’re sufficiently motivated, you’ll start trying new things. The more ambitious you are, the more ideas you’ll try because the problem is harder and it requires more experimentation to create a result.

Now this phrase, "The dance of the possible" it’s a friendlier metaphor for me than most of the ways we think about problem solving. No matter how smart you are, apps you built, websites you designed, every time you do something new, you have inherent challenges that are unavoidable. You’re dealing with the unknown. You’re making something that has never been made before. At least not with this client, in this day. It is something new manifested in the world. There are challenges that come with that. And some of those challenges are hard, frustrating, emotionally taxing. So it’s something we have to work with on every project. You’re going to find the flow, the rhythm, you’re going to go to the left, go to the right. Sometimes you need more ideas, less ideas. It’s a dance.

In a dance, uncertainty is part of the fun. It’s part of the pleasure of it. You wouldn’t do a dance if you’re standing in the same place and obsessively counting about one, two, three, four, without enjoying anything.

I’m going to switch to another kind of a story. I want to talk to you briefly about Magellan. It may not seem all that creative to be an explorer, but I think there are a lot of parallels between people who explore and people who design things. Explorers look at a map and they say where is a spot of things I haven’t done before. I want to go there. I’m going to go there, I’m going to find something useful and bring it back and deal with the unknown. And if you’re designing something for a customer, for a client, if you’re designing something, you’re dealing with the unknown. It could be version 7 of some accounting program, which doesn’t seem like it’s all that radical or interesting, but it is the unknown. We presume when we change it we can make it better, but you’re not a hundred percent certain of that. Many, many projects make stuff worse. All the stuff that frustrates us, most of them are not version one. Maybe they were better in the earlier versions.

Magellan is famous for circumnavigating the globe. Great. It’s round. You go with the curve of the ocean. Would you disappear. They kind of had an idea of how it would work. But it seemed to us in the present, how hard could it have been.

But part of what betrays us is when we look at the history of it, the Strait of Magellan, the actually straight is here. We see it as a bird’s eye view, how hard could it have been? You have a boat and you have scurvy and crappy food to deal with. But that’s the wrong way to think about the problem and the wrong way to think about history. The same way that most of you thought the Eiffel Tower was kind of flawed or at least flawed if you want to be a designer or maker of things. The point that you want to have about history if you’re a designer or maker of things, what was their daily life like? What was the point of view in that moment like that when there was uncertainty? Because all the projects we do, we face uncertainty.

So when you look at something like this, maps of that region. You’re on the east coast and you want to get to the west, they don’t know what’s there. Now it looks very different. Now if you’re the project manager for the Magellan project or your web development effort, we don’t know. We have a spec and a schedule, but we don’t know. Unknown! And in fact, it’s even harder than this. If you’re actually in a boat facing what would be discovered to be the Strait of Magellan, this is what it looked like.

Now I’m not a sailor. I don’t know that much really about geography or geology. But if I’m trying to get across the continent and I look at this inlet and I see that mountain, I’m not thinking this is the right way. I wouldn’t go this way. It just seems like it’s a daft thing to attempt to do. But any explorer at any time. An artistic explorer, pioneer of any kind deals with this. It’s what you deal with again if you’re working on a project and it hasn’t been built yet, you’re working on the second iteration, but you’re not sure. We planned six iterations, but did we discover everything we need to in that time? Don’t know.

One of the secrets that tied back to design in a way that explorers use was the same thing we do. Exploring alternatives. When they were stuck at some inlet, they’re not sure where to go, they have multiple boats. Send one boat in one direction, you go west. Another boat, you go east, you go north. Come back and share the data with me and now I’m informed a little bit about all my alternatives. I’ve divided up the big unknown into smaller slices and that’s what you work with.

Now it demands that same kind of resource allocation. If you work with someone who is obsessed with efficiency, which many people want in the world. They want the sky, but can only afford to pay pennys for it, it seems like waste. You’re a designer. It’s like telling you an explorer. You don’t know which inlet is the right one? It’s the same thing.

The psychology of the unknown is this inherent characteristic of making things. I tend to find a story of a genius, not even a genius, but a successful inventor, creator in any field who while they’re working on a thing maintained complete certainty for the way they wanted to in that project.

Projects get abandoned because they know halfway through this is not going to work. I’m not going to complete this symphony. It’s way too ambitious. The unknowns are getting bigger and bigger faster than my ability to solve them. But the ability of dealing with the unknown is a large part of what it takes to lead unknowns and uncertainty. We’re going to try three alternatives and pick the best one and if it’s not none, we’ll try more alternatives. We’ll get better.

But to pretend there is some methodology that eliminate this is sense of not being sure of what’s next is absurd. I think it’s a denial of the reality of what it is to create a work of any kind in any field.

I call this the dance of the unknown. I’m going to show you the one chart I have from the entire presentation here. That all projects they start at the beginning. And then you come up with ideas and very quickly it spreads. The space of ideas that you’re working with gets very big.

This is known as divergence. That’s the fancy language in psychological literature. Divergent thinking. Also a young adult movie and book series, "Divergent."

No matter how well you do, there’s always the possibility that there was something you didn’t think of. Always possible. Can’t deny it. The reality of making new things. For Eiffel, there could be things that he thought of later and didn’t predict it. Eiffel looks at the Eiffel Tower and sees a lot of things that he could have done or should have done. Every musician or writer has complaints about things. Springsteen didn’t like "Born to Run." There are a lot of people who look back in their field and there is this psychology of the unknown. They wish there was a way they could have looked at every possibility and made the right choice.

At some point, now the goal merges. One set of ideas. Very different skillset. Some people are much better at divergence. They’re much better in the beginning of projects. Some are better at convergence. Some are better at the end of projects. If any of you are project leaders, it’s good to know the basic psychological profiles of people you work with.

A brainstorming meeting where there is one guy in the room who says you can’t do that. It’s too hard. It would take a week, two months. You can’t work that way. But these patterns, growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking are inherent in all kinds of creative work. I’m biased because I am a writer. The one creative process that everybody knows, if you write an essay in high school, you know about writing drafts. You know about it.

The idea of drafts which is really where the idea of iteration in the software world comes from, when you’re dealing with enough complexity you can’t possibly get everything right in a single iteration. You can’t expect to. There’s too many unknowns.

The goal then is to diverge and converge. You do enough divergence. You do a prototype and do a user study on it. Read a draft and then you learn more and diverge and converge. Every creative field has the same kind of process. They’re named different things. Divergent and convergent.

The reminder here, the lesson here is that the Eiffel Tower you see it as a thing of beauty. And I showed you the early pictures of it. There were five phases where the Eiffel Tower had to go through these iterations back and forth.

So my last story for you, my last little lesson or question about, lesson I guess is a better word, is this question of what is good. What is good? I want you to think for a moment about these two images here. And the context of what is good.

Recently on Facebook, a friend of mine posted this. He’s like Keanu Reeves is one of the greatest actors of all time. Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep. At first I thought he was joking. And then one of his friends said The Matrix trilogy is one of the best of all times. He’s been in a lot of good movies.

The big Mac is one of the most successful items of consumption in the world. It’s also like 40 years old. It’s been around for a long time. Still one of the most well known and beloved by many people objects in the world. But what is good? What does good mean? Is he a good actor? Is the Big Mac a good product? A good design? It depends. It depends. This is where any discussion of creativity must go to. Because if you’re creating something for the world, for a customer, for a client, or for yourself, you can come up with many ideas as you want. Idea generation is not that hard, really. And how do you pick between those things to answer the question what is good.

What’s the goal? How do I compare this thing to that thing?

Now, a lot of what goes on in software development I think is a very super rational attempt to answer what is inherently subjective question of what is good. Vision documents and prototypes and scenarios. All these attempts where someone has the notion of what is good and it’s mapped into a document or a form that’s used for discussion by a team.

But I’ve seen in many cases, and this isn’t always true, but I’ve seen in many cases all these processes can be highly subverted simply because the V.P. or the director or the client doesn’t like it. They just don’t think it’s good. You can do all this work. All you want. In an attempt to convince people in your idea of what is good. But there’s a subjective component to it.

At the end of the day decisions are going to be made on someone’s inherent subjective notion of what is good. Is it fast enough? You can measure. How it feels versus the actual metrics for how fast it loads.

Another way to think about what is good is to ask these questions. This is an important problem to solve. For the Big Mac, whose problem is it? There’s a user centered way to ask that question. Whose problem is it? How do we make a food project that is easy to engineer, shelf stable for three months, holds up well, doesn’t get soggy after 20 minutes and is cheap to manufacture, then your Big Mac may be to your answer. If you want something that doesn’t give you heart disease, you may have a different answer.

Who is a good actor, we’ll come back around to what is good.

So the Monadnock Building, it was considered good. But after the Eiffel Tower, this building doesn’t even make it to the top ten buildings to look at, even though for its time it was incredibly good and progressive.

What is good? Floors and office buildings, electricity. Great lattice work in the stairwells. It’s a beautiful building. And you can live and work in it. But the Eiffel Tower is an empty steel case. You can’t live in that. Is that good? A tiny house at least you can live in. The Eiffel Tower, you can’t live in it at all. They used the word monstrousty. But it’s this artiface of this kind of hubrous.

One of the things that you’ll get out of today, this round of dazzle for the book, ask the question what is good. Every speaker you’re going to hear today is going to tell you about a process, an idea, a project, their idea about what good is. My suggestion to you is use that to your advantage today. How is the speaker saying what is good compare to you.

With that, I will say thank you. And I have a minute or two for questions perhaps? Is that true? Thank you for listening. I’ll take a round of applause.

[Applause]

Anyone have questions? If you have a question, you get a book. That’s the simple way this works. Audience participation.

Audience:

I don’t know if you talk about this in the book, but I think one of the challenges a lot of us have as designers is (background noise) One of the ideas as designers is to get people on the team. You’re trying to get them active in like saying no you are creative. So I’m wondering if you talk about any (background noise)

My undergraduate degree was in engineering. First day. Steal their phone. Hide their phone. Not creative? See all the places that they look.

[Laughter]

The second thing is actually engineering is very creative. I studied engineering for a while in school. It’s just unstructured and naive in the way it’s taught. You have to invent things in a way. It’s just not structured. It’s very black box. And I think that is a way to get at it, too. The engineer that you’re working with has experience at making projects. They’ve all been very creative. But they don’t think of it that way. I asked them to pick a challenging algorithm they had to write or a problem they had to solve and ask them to explain the thought process. They are invariably going to say I tried this and it didn’t work. And you can take exactly what they say and go to the white board and map it to whatever creative design process you’re using. Exploring, contracting. And that comparison, that connection, to say oh, these are similar. That’s what I would do. Get them to think that the process of engineering is a creative process, because it is.

Anyone else? One more. Yes?

Audience:

What you just answered. With getting them to be more creative, how do you get them to do that active creating sooner?

Scott Berkun:

Sooner?

Audience:

Yeah, with prototyping, they want the vision. The question of what we’re solving (background noise) But then they want so much guidance without being able to actively create.

Scott Berkun:

I’ll give you the short answer and then the long answer I’ll think about. There is so much of any – I used to manage engineers. So much is about your rapport with them. If they trust you, they’ll be far more willing to try any of your suggestions than if they don’t respect you. It almost doesn’t matter how you are as long as they see you as a useful person. The worst thing you can do is say I’m a designer, I’m going to hit you over the head, here is this process that we would like to believe it works. It almost never does. You have conversations in small ways. That would be my strongest recommendation.

So thank you all for listening. I’ll see you around.

[Applause]

About Chicago Camps

Chicago Camps, LLC (chicagocamps.org) was founded in 2012. They plan multiple low cost, high-value events primarily in Chicago.