digest
Good afternoon. I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence. I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio. I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project. He was making a horse out of the clay that our teacher kept under the sink. At one point, one of the girls sitting at his table, seeing what he was doing, leaned over and said to him, "That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse, right?" Brian's shoulders sank, and he wadded up the clay horse and threw it back in the bin. I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again, and I wonder how often that happens.
When I tell that story of Brian to my class, a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience: how a teacher shut them down, or how a student was particularly cruel to them, and they opted out of thinking of themselves as creative at that point. I see that opting out happen in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained even by the time we get to adult life. So we see a lot of this. When we have a workshop or we have clients in to work with us side by side, eventually we get to the point in the process that's kind of fuzzy or unconventional, and eventually these big-shot executives whip out their BlackBerries and say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits. They're just so uncomfortable. When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, "I'm just not the creative type." But we know that's not true. If they stick with the process, they end up doing amazing things, and they surprise themselves with how innovative they and their teams really are.
So I've been looking at this kind of fear of judgment that we have, that you don't do things because you're afraid you're going to be judged if you don't say the right creative thing. I had a major breakthrough when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura. I don't know if you know Albert Bandura, but if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history, like Freud, Skinner, or somebody in that category. Bandura is 86 and he still works at Stanford. He's a lovely guy. I went to see him because he's worked on fear for a long time, which I'm very interested in. He had developed a methodology that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time, like in four hours. He had a huge cure rate for people who had phobias. We talked about snakes. I don't know why we talked about snakes, but we talked about fear of snakes as a phobia. It was really enjoyable and really interesting.
He told me that he'd invite the test subject in and say, "There's a snake in the next room, and we're going to go in there." Most of them replied, "Hell no, I'm not going in there if there's a snake in there." But Bandura had a step-by-step process that was super successful. He'd take people to a two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was, and he'd get them comfortable with that. Then, through a series of steps, he'd move them, and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open, looking in, and he'd get them comfortable with that. Then many more steps later, in baby steps, they'd be in the room. They'd have a leather glove, like a welder's glove, on, and they'd eventually touch the snake. When they touched the snake, everything was fine. They were cured. In fact, everything was better than fine. These people who had lifelong fears of snakes were saying things like, "Look how beautiful that snake is," and they were holding it in their laps.
Bandura calls this process guided mastery, which I love as a term. Something else happened: the people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They gained a new confidence, and Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy: the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.
Meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me, because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something we've seen happen over the last 30 years: we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative and take them through a series of steps, a series of small successes, and they turned fear into familiarity and surprised themselves. That transformation is amazing. We see it at the d.school all the time. People from all different kinds of disciplines think of themselves as only analytical, and they come in and go through our process. They build confidence, and now they think of themselves differently, and they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as creative people.
So one of the things I'd do today is take you through, and show you, what this journey looks like to me. That journey looks like Doug Deets. Doug Deets is a technical person. He designs medical imaging equipment, large medical imaging equipment. He's worked for GE and he's had a fantastic career, but at one point he had a moment of crisis. He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use when he saw a young family. There was a little girl, and that little girl was crying and terrified. Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with this MRI machine. This was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time he was proud of what he did. He was saving lives with this machine, but it really hurt him to see the fear this machine caused in kids.
About that time he was at the d.school at Stanford, taking classes. He was learning about our process: design thinking, empathy, iterative prototyping. He took this new knowledge and did something quite extraordinary. He redesigned the entire experience of being scanned. This is what he came up with. He turned it into an adventure for the kids. He painted the walls, he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like Children's Museum people. Now when a kid comes, it's an experience. They talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship. When they come, they say, "Okay, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still, because we don't want the pirate to find you." The results were super dramatic: from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated to something like 10 percent. The hospital and GE were happy too, because they didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, and they could put more kids through the machine in a day. The quantitative results were great, but the results Doug cared about were much more qualitative. He was with one of the mothers, waiting for her child to come out of the scan, and when the little girl came out, she ran up to her mother and said, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?"
I've heard Doug tell this story many times, of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that came from it, but I've never seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye.
Doug's story takes place in a hospital, and I know a thing or two about hospitals. A few years ago I felt a lump on the side of my neck, and it was my turn in the MRI machine. It was cancer, the bad kind. I was told I had about a 40 percent chance of survival. While you're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas, and everybody's pale and thin, waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things. Mostly you think, "Am I going to survive?" I thought a lot about what my daughter's life would be like without me, but I also thought a lot about what I was put on Earth to do, what my calling was, what I should do. I was lucky, because I had lots of options. We've been working in health and wellness, K through 12, and the developing world, so there were lots of projects I could work on. But I decided, and I committed at that point, that the thing I most wanted to do was help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along the way. If I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do. I survived, just so you know.
I really believe that when people gain this confidence, and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO, they start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting ideas, so they can choose from better ideas, and they just make better decisions. I know at TED you're supposed to have a "change the world" kind of thing. Everybody has a change-the-world thing, and if there is one for me, this is it: to help this happen. So I hope you'll join me on my quest. As thought leaders, it would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, as if it's some god-given thing. I'd like people to realize that they're naturally creative, and that those natural people should let their ideas fly. They should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy: that they can do what they set out to do, and that they can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake. Thank you.