Ep 109 Creativity: ’Hope is not a strategy’ keynote from HOW Design Live 2020

Show notes

What’s going on, everybody? And welcome into the 109th episode of the Crazy One Podcast. As always, I’m your host, Stephen Gates, and this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else. Now, remember, you can listen to all the shows, get the show notes, and a whole lot more. Including the new YouTube channel. That’s right. The crazy one is now on YouTube where you can get career coaching tutorials, masterclasses, see some of my old keynotes. You can get all that. Just head over to thecrazyone.com. It’s the crazy and the number one.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you get the latest episodes whenever those come out because those have not been as regular as I wish they would have been lately. And finally, if you have any questions, you just want to keep up with my quarantine adventures or anything else like that, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram and you can follow the show on LinkedIn or Facebook. Now, a couple times every year I sort of get like a cheat week or a cheat month or a something because, you know, a big part of what I do is to go around and do keynotes and to teach and coach and whenever you do that stuff. You’re creating a lot of new content and usually whenever I’m doing it for some of the bigger design events, it’s a lot of new content and that those are sort of easy ways to be able to sort of Pull in new content and make it one of the shows. This is going to be maybe the only one. I think there’s going to be maybe one more that I’m going to do this year. That’s going to be able to do that just because obviously because of the quarantine there haven’t been that many events going on and the ability to do stuff like that but. I was honored for the second year in a row to be able to return to How Design Live to be able to do the opening keynote that last year I did it. I was, I think it was the most popular talk at the event by like four times or something crazy. It’s one of the episodes that’s here on the show so you can scroll back through and be able to find that to get the first part of that. But this talk this year was then a continuation of that. I think to sort of reflect on what the last couple months have been like for me, what happened in the talk last year where we sort of looked at I think what sort of happens in companies and inside of individual people about sort of what are those forces that affect creativity. And then I wanted to continue and keep talking about it this year. So this year, it really was, you know, and I think it’s a piece of advice that I found myself giving so often over and over again. It was called Hope is Not a Strategy. And it really is looking at what are some of the forces that shape our opinions, that shape our careers, that shape our work? What are some of the things that we do to stop ourselves in the way that we think and approach things? And then finally, how do we sort of have the ability to change that mindset? Because in many cases, we have the skills. We have the tools. What we lack is the confidence, the context, the perspective to be able to figure out what’s the right way to be able to go about it. So that’s what I wanted to talk about this year in the opening keynote for How Design Live. So, away we go. Enjoy. Welcome to everybody at HAL. Man, I haven’t done a keynote in quite a while. So it’s, it’s great to be able to virtually see everybody and to be able to, to be here today. Um, yeah, so for those of you who don’t know me, that’s what I look like whenever I’m not in a small Zoom square. Like Amy said, I lead the design evangelism practice at Envision. Uh, which basically means I work as a coach, a teacher, uh, recently probably more of a mentor and therapist to companies of all sizes of all design maturities all over the world to help them figure out how to be more creative and be more innovative and stuff like that. Yeah, so for the past four and a half years, I’ve hosted the crazy one it’s sort of been my passion project we talk about creativity leadership design. All sorts of different topics that I feel like don’t get talked about enough. Now, one of the great things whenever you aren’t traveling like an absolute maniac the way that I usually am is that it gives you a little bit of free time. Um, so the crazy one is also now expanded into a YouTube channel to take on a whole new set of content. So every time I do one of these talks, people ask me, What’s the program you use? How do you build your decks? Um, there’s career coaching on there. There’s in-depth looks at my work, all sorts of stuff. So that’s been Up there for I think a couple months now, I think we’ve already racked up like 100,000 views so like to think there’s some pretty good content on all of it. Um, if you haven’t checked any of that out, you can always just head over to the crazy one.com the crazy with the number one.com. To be able to check that out. Where the hell do you even start with what’s been going on in this past year? And so I, the best thing for me is I think this talk is going to be sort of a continuation of the talk from last year. If you were there last year, I think hopefully you remember the talk. It was thankfully, and thanks to all of you, the most popular one last year. If not, there is a recording of it, uh, on the podcast you can go and check out, but this was it, right? Like, this feels like another lifetime. Like, look at everybody sitting so close and they’re not wearing masks and they’re Breathing air without thinking about it and all sorts of weird stuff. But I think, you know, for me, there were there was sort of two things that we talked about last year that felt Like they were sort of the issues of the moment. I think obviously having no idea what it was that was coming, but issues around, you know, you as a person, as a creator, what goes into that. And then what are the issues about sort of doing that creativity inside of any sort of a corporate and company structure? What comes with that? So we sort of had two top line thoughts. The first one on the personal side is that, as you know, again, I’ve talked to people all over the world and things like that. There’s a consistent feeling from so many creatives That we just either feel like we’re broken or we’re doing it wrong or why do I not feel like I’m like everybody else? And that, you know, as a result of that, we had talked about things about building your personal brand. So actually the ability to take control of your career. We talked about imposter syndrome again I think having no idea of the tidal wave of what was going to be coming with that as we got into having to shift into remote and being more isolated more dependent on social media like a lot of those sort of things. But I also wanted to make the point and just sort of let everybody know that whenever you can see as many companies as I have, that every company in the world is dysfunctional. Every single one. And that that’s not something that I ever saw people say a whole lot, but that it was just, it’s a point that needs to be made. But as a result of that, then we had talked about two things. We talked about cognitive bias, which is what is, what are those things That really impact and affect how do we perceive information, this idea of truth, and now we’ve seen documentaries on Netflix and other places dealing with this issue. But also then the ability to create what I was sort of terming as behaviors and these were, how do you create actual change inside of a company, how does that really go on. So I think that was last year. And we ended with this thought that I felt like sort of encapsulated As we as an industry, as we as a group, what were the things, what was the mental state that we needed to adopt? And it was this phrase of exist loudly. And I think, obviously, this hit a chord for a lot of people. I’ve saw people who had put it on clothing. I’ve seen people who have used it in a lot of different contexts. And I think, you know, again, the hindsight being 20-20, not really understanding I think even for me, how important were these topics going to become? And how important was this thought going to become? And so I think to what Amy had referenced, I guess I just want to share a minute and talk about my 2020. And the interesting part for me has been it really has been defined by Two major events that I think have shifted my thinking and to give you some sense of what this year has been like, um, COVID and the American political scene didn’t even make the top two. And because I think, you know, there’s, there’s been a number of things that, that I think really shaped the content that I want to share today. The first one is, and Amy had mentioned this, if you’ve ever seen one of my talks, you’ve seen this photo and you know the story behind it, if you haven’t, Uh, yeah, I do. I’ve always described myself as a second generation creative director because my father was a creative director. This was literally the start of my design education. Which was at two years old, this was the cast iron letterpress that sat in my parents basement, where my dad and I used to go sort of write my storybooks and we would print them so. You know, I’ve been a designer since I was twelve This was, you know, everything I am is very much based in my relationship with him. And so I think Amy had mentioned this before, that all sort of came crashing down about a month ago whenever he suddenly became sick and passed away. And so the past month for me, I think, has been filled with a ton of self-reflection. It’s been filled with going through his studio, like the ability to, I think, interestingly, have The unique perspective of being able to watch, you know, somebody who is not only my hero, but somebody who, you know, was, had a design career to be able to have seen it across the arc of their entire life. From, he did. He served in the military. He was a sentinel at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He was a sergeant of the guard. Um, this is a distinction if you don’t sort of understand what that is. At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it’s been guarded twenty-four hours a day since I believe it was 1964. Becoming one of those guards is the second hardest And least awarded distinction inside the United States Army. The only one that’s harder to get is to become an astronaut. From there through his career that he had in advertising and then sort of his retirement. And I think, you know, one of the things for me is that often in many cases, I think for people you love, you don’t necessarily have a clear perspective always on sort of what their life has been like. But he and I have started over the last year or two and having a really interesting and I think often difficult conversation about how he has come to, he came to realize, it’s still hard to refer to him in the past tense. How he’d come to realize how much imposter syndrome had really influenced and I think he felt like inhibited a lot of his career. And, you know, so for me, I think that this is something I go into more detail in the last episode that I released of the show. It’s, this isn’t going to be the place I want to go into that in more detail. But I think, you know, in a lot of cases for me, there is also the realization that being able to have somebody and be able to watch that even whenever I wasn’t understanding what it was. Very much shaped me because I think in those conversations that he’d had about our relationship, how for me, I had become a response. To what it was I had witnessed in him. Because I think, you know, most sane people don’t put out 108 episodes of a podcast for free. They don’t put out a YouTube channel for free. They… They don’t do what I do, and I think in many cases for me it was something I didn’t even understand for a very long time, but a lot of it for me is to try to help save, I guess, everybody else’s From the struggles that I watched my dad have and sort of trying to come to grips with, you know, what could I have done to try to help him more. But I think this sort of leads into the other moment for me in this year that, you know, having this platform, having built this. It creates a very interesting conversation for me for a lot of different reasons and so whenever you know we went through and we what we witnessed the murder of George Floyd for me it became a moment to try to figure out what and I think for a lot of us what is. What’s the response? How do we move forward? How do we have a conversation around this? And the one thing that I had become very, very clear on was the one voice I did not want to hear was mine. And so having spent some time and some conversation trying to figure out, you know, that again, I think sometimes you move things forward by not speaking. That I had decided I wanted to join the share the mic now movement. And this was where what I did was just holistically turned over the show. To members of the community that were black, brown, indigenous, LGBTQ plus to share whatever content they wanted to share without my involvement. That it really was just about, again, giving them the platform to be able to share that. And I think for me that was, you know, it was an interesting process. I’ve realized this is not going to just become these few episodes. This is now a permanent part of the show because I don’t think these problems are going away. But, but I think the process behind this and my interaction with the community and especially very particular members of the community, I think candidly has pushed me absolutely to the edge because The response that I focused on from this work really came back to two groups. And this was, you know, interesting because I look anytime I think you want to talk about racial issues anytime you want to talk about. Um, equality or anything like that, you can be fairly certain that there can be people who don’t like it. And so for me, through this process, I’ve heard from twenty-seven different members or organizations that are There are usually hate groups who want to let me know what they think about this, about what I’m doing, letting me know that they know where I live, all sorts of really fun and entertaining stuff that you would expect from something like this. And so again, to me, that wasn’t, while it was sad, it wasn’t unexpected. But what I had hoped was how do we have a conversation right because I think as we think about exist loudly as we think about how do we change and evolve as a community. How do we engage and to me this was one of those moments that mattered and the hard part that I had here. Was that no other members of the, your leaders of the community joined this. And let me be clear. There were people who had already been doing this work. This was not new. As you look at. The work of Maurice Cherry or what Debbie Millman has been doing, like a lot of those things. That is not a new thing for them, right? So that is not what I’m saying here. But what I’m saying is other people who had platforms, other people who had voices, other people who had followings of any significance. Seemed to be all about talking about this and retweeting it, but the moment when it asked them to risk something, the voices fell silent. And what does that mean? And so for me, I think, you know, one is this introspection of what is creativity become in this era of COVID and what is it in, you know, this sort of. Generational problem of imposter syndrome of what are we doing with our careers, why do we seem to be struggling with the same issues. And a lot of these things is sort of where I want to, I think, talk and start today. And there’s three things that I want to focus on because I think, you know, these are three things as I’ve spent the time to really think about this and focus on this that I keep coming back to as I’ve seen it through this particular work as I’ve seen it through coaching and other things like that. The first to be able to talk about, you know, I think that for a lot of us, there are forces that influence us. There is this debt that builds up in us. That as we talk about objectivity, truth, our ability to be able to see and understand what’s going on, that I think this debt is often the things that provide the challenges or the barriers to some of our advancement and growth. That I think for a lot of us there, we seem to feel like there’s a way that this should be done. And for me, obviously the amount of coaching that I have done or on individuals over this past year around the mindset and the right around the way that they have approached their work and the way that they’re struggling with that has just absolutely exploded. And then trying to, I think, lastly, to be able to talk about how do we find a new attitude or a new mindset to try to bring some of this stuff to life. But the mental debt issue, I think, was really one of these things because right now I’m working with companies on five continents. So what you’re able to see is that the problems that I think we tend to think are ours, the problem that is is just sort of local to us is not. That a lot of the things that we struggle with are much broader. And so for me, it’s been sitting down and thinking about like, what are the. forces that shape our career. What are these things that I think sort of run in the background and sort of produce this debt for us? And what does that mean? And what I really come down to is I think that there are four different things that over time create these influences that shape our fear that really sort of Produce this why are so many people struggling with similar things but feel like they’re doing it so differently. And I think that for me it really comes back to, you know, I think it starts with what I’ll describe as institutional debt. And that is whenever you have a job, whenever you work at some place for any amount of time, the longer you’re there, the more experience you gain. The more that narrows your focus and sort of your perspective, meaning that whenever you first get to the job, you are so wide open. You’re so open to possibility to try things, to be able to be adventurous, to take risks, to be more creative. And that in many cases, or too many cases, the longer you’re there, the more experience you get, the more you understand the system, the more you understand the politics, the barriers, the red tape, the silos, a lot of those sort of things, the quirks of leadership. That possibility sort of gets winnowed away and narrowed in and narrowed in and narrowed in, so you sort of feel like what is the acceptable way to work? What is the employee that you should be? What are these sort of things that you feel like You know, you, you need to focus on and I think for me, it starts to generate this problem where for too many of us. We focus on who we think other people want us to be and we start to miss out on who we are. I think from there, there is definitely an emotional depth. These are the insecurities that we have and we all have them. Because I think that it really is something that as we go through it just look, this is the process of creativity of trying things insecurity is the cost of admission, but as that starts to build up. That leads into imposter syndrome and that will either you know on the sort of the shallow end caused out on the deep end start to cause real inaction to be able to really start to interfere with the way people are able to move through the world. I think there is career debt. And this is the choices that we make as we go through our career where we have worked to our boss that we have done the projects we have worked on. And I think this building anxiety for if we are quote unquote doing it right. Because I, you know, I think that in many cases what we don’t realize is we sort of talk about that invisible script is there is no right nobody would look at my career path and say hey look do that in reverse and that’s a good idea, but we all seem to have this concept that there is a right way to do this. When there absolutely is not. And I think the last one that definitely needs to be acknowledged is what I think is biased at. And this is about the choices we don’t make and the chance, the damage that we do Really because of either our lack of understanding or ignorance or just open bias against things that don’t affect us. I think whenever I look at. For again, the all of the leaders or the effect that I was hoping was going to happen out of that share the mic now or to get other people to be a part of it. I think the hard reality that I’m left with here is around this bias debt that in most cases. People don’t understand or I think candidly don’t care about what doesn’t affect them. I think, you know, there’s too many white people don’t care about racism because it doesn’t affect them. Too many men don’t care about sexism because it doesn’t affect them. Too many young people don’t care about ageism because it doesn’t affect them. Too many leaders Don’t care about the problems in their company because it doesn’t affect them. They lead a different existence. They don’t have the day-to-day problems that the people doing the work have. And so in many cases, I think, you know, we make decisions and we do these things. And, you know, look, bias can be done with good intention. But I think that for many of us, this ability to what we don’t pay attention to Leads to debt and it leads to damage and that I think understanding these forces becomes very important. And I think, you know, it’s one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed is that this debt builds up. And for me, it really manifests in the way a lot of people talk and in the actions. And I think in many cases without realizing it, because One of the things that COVID has done was we all were in person. We were a community. Last time we did this, we could have all been together. Well, the reality is now we’re all apart. And that for many of us, for our companies, what happens is that shift from being in person to being remote really exposed all of our organizational sin. Problems that we had around having more managers than leaders, lack of trust, uh, you know, bad process, bad tooling, bad whatever it is suddenly came rushing to the surface and then also with us. We find ourselves being more isolated. We find ourselves with the ability to turn this camera on and to put on a performance for thirty or sixty minutes, look really happy, look like the ideal employee and turning it off. And I think, you know, again, never feeling more isolated than what had been going on. And I think a lot of this for me contributes to these, these invisible narratives, these These conversations, and I think for me this was, as we had talked about last year, as we’ve talked about that sort of concept of exists loudly, I think this is the nerve that it sort of struck was that a lot of this. debt we feel the weight of as we carry, and that there are these, the combination of the debt that we have, and then we feel like we should somehow be doing it differently, even though there is no evidence to prove that that is the case. causes these issues. And I think one of the things that I’ve started to really notice, and like I said, is you look at body language, you listen to the way people talk. If you really stop to take the time to listen to people, the thing that, to me, you start to notice Is the repeating pattern of particular words. And for me, a lot of these words that I hear people say often start with the words you and right like on and that these are the ones that they will stop people frustrate them block them. And that they are the manifestation of a lot of these issues. And for me, you know, un is just a prefix that means not, right? That it’s a negative or an opposing force. Some examples of that. I hear people talk to me about how they’re unhappy, either with their lives or sort of what’s going on with their careers, with things like that. They feel unfulfilled. They’ve been going down this. They’ve been feeling like they’ve been the employee that they should have been. They’ve been doing the things that people have asking them to do, but It doesn’t sort of make them happier to be able to do that. Or they do feel like they have a real talent and they’re underestimated. They aren’t given those opportunities. Design isn’t being given a seat at the table. We aren’t able to break through. And that this sort of theme, I think I see repeating itself again and again and again. And so for me, it’s, you know, I think part of what I want to do today is to how do we reshape, take different ownership of some of these words to be able to go from something like this. To different versions of this. To be unafraid to be able to actually be comfortable being yourself to be unforgettable and we talked about this last year history does not remember well behaved people, being the person that your job wants you to be should count for more. It doesn’t. But at the end of the day, how do you make your talent undeniable, especially in a time when we feel so separated, whenever it is harder to be able to do that? What are the things? How do we believe that we can have an impact? And I think for me, one of the first words that I hear come up a lot And I think, you know, for me, it’s even hard. I think I even suffer from this. It is hard to do a keynote. It is hard to put this together and feel like I’m connecting to the community in the way that I used to at a time whenever I’m so distanced from them. And that, you know, you have a hard time believing that some of the realities of social media are real, but unsupported. And this for me is why is it that there are so many of us that are still struggling to break through, to be successful. Why is it that we still see 83% of the world’s design teams are in the middle to the bottom of the maturity model that we built at Envision? Why are these things happening whenever we have talked about this for so long? And like I said, this goes back to me to become so personal to even see this as generational as I was able to look at my dad’s career. To be able to go through his studio and to see the great ideas, the portfolios, the cards, the things that were there. But the problem was they were there. They hadn’t been sent out. They hadn’t been shared. And a lot of this for me is that I think that we are all very much in a lot of different ways, and this has been something that’s been building for a while, experiencing a deep crisis of trust. And I think that we are experiencing a crisis of trust in ourselves and not understanding what normal is in this context, experiencing a trust of crisis in our teams and how do we work together and how do we do things differently, a crisis of trust in our companies and how do we work with them. And again, you know, whenever I have the perspective that I do, you start to see this come to life and a lot of different sort of trends around this. I think one is that I’ve I at least have never seen imposter syndrome feel like it’s running more rampant. That this ability to how do you interact with people? How do you share? How do we having so much of that interaction taken away the feedback that we love so much? That I think, you know, we’re getting to a distrust of ourselves of really questioning. Are we doing the right thing? Are my ideas any good? What is the impact I should have? I think that for a lot of us, there is a rising distrust of companies, whether it’s through, I don’t understand what I need to do to be able to move forward in this company. I don’t understand why what I’m doing hasn’t been good enough. Why am I not be able to do that? I think it’s a reaction to that you’re starting to you’ve seen the rise of the gig economy, which is whole groups of people who are no longer saying my future is with one company I don’t trust them what I want to be able to do is move around the way that I want to move around. And to be able to do that because at the end of the day, I don’t trust that a company has my best interest in mind. I think we’re seeing it in the way that creative talent is brought into these companies. We’ve seen the rise of these sort of tests and different ways of being able to understand what is, you know, creative talent and to be able to do these things. We’re starting to see, I’m starting to see portfolios dying, where for a lot of teams, they don’t want to see portfolios anymore. Because they know it could just simply be a good story. They want to be able to see product. They want to see working files. They want to give you a test. They want to do other things. So I think there’s a distrust of talent that is coming into this process. I think we’re seeing teams that are struggling. This is what the vast majority of my time has spent doing the teams that are struggling to overcome the internal politics to just work with each other. How do we get design and engineering and product and executives to work together together and to not fight each other in this distrust of teamwork? And then in many cases, I think we also, you know, nothing has shown, I think, this lack of trust more than as we’ve moved into remote. I think every single day for six months, I’ve had a conversation with some CEO, C-suite leader, somebody. Who wants to come to me and say, how do I know my people are working because I can’t see them? Again, even the most, even the most skeptical study will tell you remote workers are 20% more productive. But again, we seem to be having this crisis of trust where leaders now need to actually trust the people they’ve hired. And I think all of this again is a debt and takes a toll on us every single day. So part of it for me is the fact that I really think that trust For ourselves, for the people we work with, for our companies is the key to everything. But I think most people do not understand it. And so for me, I want to be able to just sort of quickly explain what this is. And I think it sets the foundation for a lot of the struggles that teams have. Meaning there’s actually two types of trust. And I think people just sort of use trust as a generic catch-all, which isn’t necessarily always the case. Whenever you study it, there are two types. There is practical trust and there is emotional trust. Now practical trust is very much sort of what it was that we you would expect right it’s doing very practical things so it’s things that are often investing in process and tools and applications doing. Basic work and that in many cases the problem is is that as you look at the companies for what it is they value and reward. It is often compliance, meaning you are do you do what you are told. And you go through, and this is the way we do it, and you just simply do it without question, discussion, creativity, or anything like that. Well, the problem is, is that it really is just earned by doing the basics. So for instance, I said that I was going to show up at this event at this time and give this talk for this amount of time. Here I am doing it. Congratulations, everyone has practical trust in me. But if you change the context and think about any other team, you think about your favorite sports team, you think about a music group, you think about anything like that, if the standard that we’re holding is that people only show up and are able to do the basics, There’s not going to be very much success in any of that. Because ultimately what this leads to is it leads to teams and a mentality where a lot of people just simply show up and do what they’re told they come to collect a paycheck and it is a job for them. And as we talk about creativity as we talk about the work that we want to do for so many teams that I talked to who will tell me. That I talk about creativity in a way that they wish they could experience. This is often why. It’s because they don’t necessarily have This deeper emotional trust. And as you look at high performing teams, if you look at high performing companies, the brands that everybody always loves and fetishizes and talks about and says, gee, don’t they do great work? You can track it back to the way that they work. And that it is because they have something that’s called emotional trust. And this is more based in culture. They are much stronger on leadership and coaching. The work they do reflects that. You get much more innovative work and that they are much more invested in teamwork as opposed to individual agendas. And I think a lot of this is that really emotional trust is earned when you know that people are on your side, meaning that people can think about themselves and others. And this just simple twist, right, this simple ability to say that other people matter, other teams matter, those sort of things, Is really the root of empathy. As we talk about that, that’s really what this is. But you also start to see where companies value their people. They trust them. It isn’t just a bunch of executives who are sort of sitting there making a bunch of decisions. That the power is pushed down through the organization. That people are trusted to be able to do it. In many cases when this doesn’t exist, we’ve seen this in remote. Right, this is where you get meeting bloat, where all of a sudden there’s so many of these FOMO meetings of people coming together and having to check on every little detail or how often are you on Slack or how often are you emailing or like all of these sort of things because there just isn’t a basic trust of those sort of people. But it’s when you also come to work for each other, for the team, for the company. This is the best teams I’ve ever been a part of. This is what it was. And you actually hear people talk differently. They’ll say, I believe in. The team. I believe in my boss. I believe in the company’s mission. It isn’t just I’m here because somebody told me to her because it’s a paycheck. But this, it’s sort of the understanding and the juxtaposition of these two that I think for many of us as individuals, for teams and companies lays the foundation of why we struggle. Why do we keep trying new processes, new approaches, these things and we keep getting the same results. Because for too many of us, what we do, and for too many of our teams, what we invest in are these practical skills. Meaning that what this is is that we want to value and we want to invest in and reward showing up and doing the basics. Yet the problem is is that the results that we want, the work that we talk about, the things we say that we want to do are only possible if we have emotional investment in each other. So the investment in one side and the expectation on the other side, that basic, you know, sort of problem is often the foundation for what happens with a lot of these sort of things and why we struggle. Understanding this I think is is often sort of very challenging because I think you know it really is about how do we understand the state of this sort of trust economy. And there’s a simple exercise that I ask people to do, which is to really just go through and to write down the five to ten coworkers or the five to ten teams you work with the most. And to get an understanding of just where, what is the state of the trust economy inside of your team or sort of whatever it is. Now, I think in many cases what you’re going to find is that there are actually three options. None is a very, very viable option for what you want to be able to do with trust, practical or emotional. But I think this often is sort of a sobering state of the union. For the relationships that you have with your co-workers, relationships you have with other teams, what is actually going on there? And so for me, I think it is about how do we start to develop these skills? How do we change and trust differently? Because all the other things that we want to do, all the other things that follow need to sit on this foundation. And so for me, I think it really is about how do you get people to be able to get them to listen, not just talk. And I think in many cases, you know, look, I, I don’t, I, this is a shorter amount of time than usual. So, you know, I put in some of the episodes from the podcast that go into more depth about some of these things. So in this case, go check out episode seventy-eight How do we teach people to actually practice empathy to care about the partners that you work with and understand their goals to be able to really say that look this matters trust matters. And that that is something we’re going to prioritize and be able to do these sort of things. And I think that, you know, we also have this sort of idea of how do we make people more comfortable with feedback. Creativity is a discussion. It’s not about being right. One of the most toxic things you ever see about this is whenever there’s this internal war about who is right. There is not right in the work that we do and the ability to be able to think that doesn’t work and I think that it leads to sort of these next two things that we need to be able to teach people how to lead. But also how to follow. In those moments, how do we let people be able to go through and to be a part of this? But in for so many of it. How do we get to a win-win interaction? That both sides can come away with something. Both sides can be able to move forward. That, you know, again, this idea that someone won Great, congratulations, you won an internal political battle on a on something that no customer is ever going to care about. And then we try to figure out what’s going on there. But for me, I think a lot of this really comes down to, for me, the fact that I increasingly think that this mindset that we have That as we deal with imposter syndrome, as we, you know, look at, you know, a lot of these sort of issues around trust, this concept that we have to do it ourselves is becoming increasingly toxic, especially in the era of COVID and remote work. That this idea that we’re on our own just doesn’t work. And I think Amy had mentioned this in the beginning about the amazing design people list. And so this was something I am, I think this is one of the most extraordinary things that I’ve been a part of, you know, in, in, I think probably even the arc of my career. Started by two guys, Felix, who is in Singapore, James, who is in West Africa and Ghana, came together and said, look, you know, what are the things that we need to do? How do we do things differently? And to be able to take something that went from a Google sheet to be able to put together what I think is one of the most significant resources to be able to start to take on some of the systemic issues in this industry out there today. Amy had mentioned this in the beginning, but if you go to adplist.com slash how that, you know, we were here as the official mentorship partner. But the reason why this was created was yes, to be able to help Get people jobs to be able to get them resource but more importantly to get them the things in this industry that are missing. To get them feedback to be able to get them mentorship be able to get them the feedback on the portfolio they never got. And a lot of that sort of stuff. And so, you know, just for this event, these are some of the design leaders who just for this event, I’m not cherry picking logos to be able to make this look impressive. These are some of the mentors who are available and have volunteered just to be here to be able to help people at how. And so, like I said, whether it’s career coaching, feedback on your portfolio, your resume, any of those sort of things. This is why this was created. We want to talk about exist loudly and having impact. This to me is such the embodiment of what that means. But I think there’s other words that we use a ton. Words like unsure, like, right? Like, why is it so hard to know if we’re going in the right direction? And I think that for many of us, and again, this has been worse during COVID, whenever we don’t have any context, we assume the worst. When we don’t know how other people are doing, we assume that, and a lot of this, I think, comes down to our mindset. And for me, the reality is there is no right way to be successful. And I’ve coached a few too many people over the last few months who come in and they are so down on themselves. They so You know, they’ve been on a hundred, they’ve applied to 130 jobs and not had the right reaction. And within just a few conversations and getting them to think about their mindset a little bit differently. There’s one woman who I coached in particular. Within a month of being able to work through her on this stuff and be able to help change her mindset went from applying to 130 jobs and having two interviews to having four offers within forty-eight hours. And I think, again, we seem to think that there’s this script or this way of doing things that is just isn’t right. And so for me, we’re going to do this backwards, right? Like I’m actually going to put the takeaway at the beginning. Because for too many of us, we don’t seem to realize that success is a concept that only exists in hindsight. Whenever you are going through something, it does not feel like you are doing it right. It does not feel like you’re going to be successful. And this is sort of the thing that I look back over my career is that everything is ugly in the making and beautiful when it works. Everything feels like a mess. It feels like we’re not sure what it is we’re doing whenever we’re doing it. But then when we’re done, oh, gee, isn’t that great? A super quick example for me. One of the pieces, one of the bodies of work that I think was sort of the one that I love the most and most known for was doing the SPG app for Apple Watch. Let’s just simply, let’s quickly look at the true story behind this. So for what everybody sees, right, this is what it ended up with. Great. Screenshot of Tim Cook with, you know, my work behind him. Gee, isn’t that great. It must have been successful. Wow, that was great. No. What this actually started with was a year before Watch was even announced, we went out and I guess, you know, my team and I decided, you know what, we’re going to go apply for Google Glass because we didn’t think it was going to be the next great thing, but we thought, you know what, it’s an actual wearable that we can use. Whenever we got that, the bosses were happy, but you know what? They didn’t give us any budget because they weren’t really sure they believed in it. So myself and the head of engineering, what we did is that we built the app on nights and weekends as a proof of concept to be able to do it. So it wasn’t terribly crazy about having to put that time in. That then we would have came up with the first version of it. Congratulations. You know, hey, everybody’s happy. We have the first version of the app. But oh, by the way, wait. Google actually changed the entire code base, so we had to recode the entire app. Yay, version two. Everybody’s super happy. Oops, nope. Google did it again. They changed the whole code base. And guess what? We have to do version three. Version three then led to us, yay, great. We launched it. The bosses were happy. But the problem was it was Google Glass. They didn’t release it and nobody cared. So what we did then was that there were rumors that there was going to be this thing around Apple Watch. Bosses were intrigued. At that point, what I did without telling anybody was I actually sent our connections at Apple a whole bunch of ideas and saying, hey, I don’t know if this thing is going to be real, but if it is, these are our ideas. Didn’t tell anybody about that. Apple called us and said, hey, do you want to come work on a project? The five of us who actually knew about that were then happy. I was gone for three months to be able to work on it. At this point, The bosses were not happy because I was gone. My team thought I was about to quit. My wife, I think, was pretty much ready to kill me because whenever you’re gone for that amount of time, Not a small thing to be able to happen. Along the way, I actually made a prototype of the watch out of a sugar packet and a rubber band. It’s a long story. Somebody asked me another time. The Apple Watch was announced. Congratulations. Everybody was super happy. Oh, but by the way, the product team wasn’t involved, so they tried to kill something we had just announced on stage with Apple. I started drinking heavily, and then finally it launched, and gee, wasn’t everybody happy? So I think this is the thing, right, is that that is not what success looks like, right? It looks like that way in hindsight. Whenever you’re on stage and it’s done, gee, isn’t that great. But I think for too many times, again, we sort of doubt ourselves and give up on ourselves whenever we do this. And I think, you know, for me, in a lot of cases, the problem is, is that It isn’t that, you know, that the process is going to be what the process is going to be. But for me, it’s again about how do we tend to that mindset? How do we actually be able to look at ourselves in a particular way to be able to see what’s going on? And, you know, for me, I think, you know, what the exercise that I ask a lot of people to do that seems to really help a lot of them is what I want you to be able to do is to be able to go through and ask the people who matter to you. Parents, significant others, siblings, people you work with to be able to just send you the three words that they would use to describe you. Because to be able to say, hey, look, how do we work through the process and that uncertainty, that is going to be a constant. So for me, instead, it’s focusing on the mindset of understanding that that’s what it’s going to be like for everybody. We just need to accept it a bit more. But how do we get, I think, three really important things? And whenever you ask people for those three words, you’re going to start to be able to group them together. You’re going to start to get a sense of what’s going on there. And it’s going to give you, I think, three very important things. The first one is perspective. To just get a sense that we are all our own biggest blind spot and to be able to give you some sense of perspective about how does the world actually see me. To feel some sense of acceptance that what you do matters that what you do has an impact to be able to do those things and to be able to have a reminder of that put the post notes up around your house do those sort of things, but I think it also then starts to give you a vision you can build on. For how do you start to look at yourself? How do you start to look at where it is you go and to be able to find a way forward? And so I think, you know, for me, it really is that You know, in the mindset, it’s that understanding that success always sits on the other side of that stress. It sits on the other side of that you’re doing it wrong. And that in many cases, this only becomes problematic if we give into that mindset to feel like we’re You’re doing it wrong. And so for me, a lot of this then again comes back to words. And for me, it really is about I think, you know, look, if we take the time because one of the things we all have right now is a lot of free time. But to take the time to define who we are, who we think we want to be, and sort of what matters, that it’s how do we start to pull together a vision that embodies those things and what we, who we are. Not what we haven’t accomplished. I think for too many of us that it really is one of those things to be able to do that. But I think that it really is about, again, using these sort of words to be able to create this sort of clarity. So again, for me, it comes back to these two sort of words. Words that end in ER and words that end in OR. Because I think these often, I think, will help us manifest what matters to us and what we want to be. So for me, things like designer. Things like lead-er. Things like innovate-or. These sort of ideas of what matters to us, what makes us happy. Have we taken the time to even think about this stuff? That for me, it is about being a creator, about putting together the podcast, putting together the videos, or in this case, I think often being an influencer, not in the fact that I don’t give a damn how many followers I have. But my ability to actually go out and help people, to influence people, to be able to do those things, that’s what matters. And I think that it also is that ability to have that clarity coupled with the right mindset. That I think for all of us, we need to think about how do we create more and criticize less. It is so easy to be able to go out and to not understand what somebody is going through and to be able to just simply say, hey, look, this is how it could be better. Again, it’s like, you know, Yesterday, somebody on YouTube wrote out to me. And he’s like, yeah, congratulations. I watched your video. I’m now better than you. And here’s what you did wrong. It’s like, OK, great. Congratulations. Like, I don’t know what to tell you. But I think, again, that ability to educate, to be able to share with people, not to hold what you know over them, not to be able to make them feel less than because they don’t understand what that is. I think that ability to empower people to be able to give them the decision to be able to do that to not do the leadership where it’s about who’s in control. I think that for me it’s about that ability to then to go out to develop to be a part of those things to be able to understand somebody else’s perspective to be able to do that not just simply again go out and blame whatever is going on. And I think in many cases it is about how do we collaborate with people? How do we, again, this is why ADP and others to me, I think what I’m doing, I think what those guys have done is just so great because it is about collaborating with people, not just saying it’s somebody else’s problem. But it is about again, how do we come together to inspire ourselves other people come together as a community to support each other to do these things and not just either beat ourselves up or complain about this stuff. Because for me, I think there’s just a few sort of final thoughts that I want to wrap up with with this. And you know, one of the biggest ones for me, and I use this in coaching a lot, is that as we look at the barriers that we’re up against, as we look at how do we get a vision of ourselves, as we look at a lot of these sort of things, listen to how often you use the word hope. I hope I get a new job. I hope that something happens. I hope that they do this. I hope that that happens. I hope hope is not a strategy. And so again, our ability to take what we want from this industry as opposed to hoping what it is they’re going to give us This simple mindset and I think for a lot of these things is just noticing how often we do it. Really becomes important. But I think the other part of it for me in a lot of dealing with these issues around trust and these sort of things is that at the end of the day, what it comes back to for me is that I think to truly be yourself. To show up, to share these sort of things, to do this sort of stuff, really is that it, you know, to just be yourself, to be who you are in the world, I think is one of the most courageous and rebellious acts there is. It is not easy. To say this is who I am. This is how I work. This is what makes me different. That’s why I see so many resumes that just go into here’s where I worked or here’s a couple screenshots because it’s harder to do this. But I think this to me is the opportunity again. To be, I mean, we are going through so much. We are being asked to take on so much that at a time whenever, you know, that level of emotional investment and energy is not an easy thing to be able to do. To me, it continues to come back to this, right? To exist loudly. How do we do this? To be there for each other. And I think, again, for me, this is the opportunity that sits in front of us for the next three days. To be able to help find mentorship, to connect with other people, to get content from, from all these sort of great people in these amazing places to be able to do this. To have conversations and to look at how do we trust ourselves and others to be able to look at our mindset to be able to do those sort of things and then understand that there is individual complexity and all of that but that there is a shared experience here for all of us that I think can be incredibly powerful. Well, that was it from How Design Live 2020. I’m sure that there are a lot of themes that are in there. A number of things that I think I’m still working through on unpacking that I’m sure are going to show up in future episodes and we’re going to be able to explore a bit more. But as always, hey, remember, do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform. And while you’re there, take just a couple seconds. Leave a review. Let people know what you think about the show. As always, everybody down in legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don’t represent any of my current or former employers. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time. But thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury any of us have. I was incredibly humbled you want to spend any of it listening to me. So hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you get something out of it. A bunch more stuff we’re going to explore here in the future. And as always, stay crazy.

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breaking barriers career growth career inspiratio creative mindset creative success HOW Design Live keynote replay limiting beliefs mindset shift personal barriers professional development Stephen Gates sustained success The Crazy One podcast