What I learned @ Stanford d.School

Sharing my learning from the d.School

A post about my learnings turned into a ramble about the power we have and our ability to affect people’s lives

Sharing some of learnings at Stanford University, Design Thinking and Innovation.
It’s been mostly about failing ironically.

[This article was written elsewhere I long time ago, reposting it here for your consumption.]

Personally and professionally, understanding that when you try to be a perfectionist you risk whirling out of control when things just don’t fit your ideal. Better the person who can fail over and over again, learning why each time, and iterating to a better place.
The most difficult part is to not build walls of protection every time you fall, like a mother to her son. One should forensically look back only for causality and not to incessantly and emotionally ruminate on failure. You have to begin to see the fall as a necessary part of getting back up. Do this correctly and upon getting back up you will see the world just that much clearer.

Let’s admit it, we fail daily. We cheat on diets because we wanted ice cream. We watch tv instead of studying. We procrastinate and put off or responsibilities. We project ourselves in a nature that doesn’t represent us as well as we’d like, we workout and then have a cupcake soon after. While it is important to be honest about our failure, the pinnacle point of progressing is not in failure in and of itself, it is what we do when we fail that is.

So how we observe ourselves to improve is key. Our habitual thoughts and behaviours WILL create our reality. You may even feel powerless to your mind and it’s seemingly impulsiveness. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you truly start observing who you are and what makes you move and what make you stand still, you can start to change things. We need to measure our baselines.

My ethnographer side of me has to ask people questions about why they do things like “eat ice cream while on a diet”. The funny thing is, most people don’t know the answer; but as humans we are resilient in coming up with ways to explain ourselves, “well I really really wanted ice cream, and I felt I deserved it”. My job is to provoke deeper insights, into their why, I care less about the ice cream and more about how this ladies principles are guiding her to do this. By looking at their thresholds, I say “why did you deserve it?”, and after some time you start to understand how their person works, their stance on the world, and what tools they use to wade through it.

Gaining great amounts of empathy. I go with a patient on one of their dates, in to their homes to understand how they deal with their medical conditions, I want so badly to become that person, because if I do, not only will it help my client, but also because I want to see their worldview and understand them, how they have come to see the world.

What I’ve learned is much more about myself.
Because in qualitative research you learn that you can’t go in “objectively” as the data would say. I go in with my worldview, and I mute it, you can not peel it away, so embrace it as a baseline. Now embrace them. Embrace their lives. Truly listen.

These learnings have taught me to broaden my worldview, embrace the ambiguity and listen to my own feelings. Sure I help clients create products and services that match users needs after research, but I don’t believe that’s the point anymore. I learn how to open up my worldview and truly empathise.

Ender’s game has a fantastic quote that resonates so well with me:

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them –” -Ender
Although he is talking about defeat this is much more about empathy. At least from my worldview. When you look at a beaten child, you feel instinctual empathy. Some can even feel the physical pain, that is what Ender is talking about here, becoming that person. Standing in their shoes, and when you can do that, you can love. When you accept them you can love them. Not only love them but you are able to help them or in Ender’s case defeat them.

The democrats and the republicans are all just people. You hate them? But you do not know them. You hate the president? But yet you do not know him. The foreigners and the party kids are all just people. Finding ways to live this very weird life. If you cannot become them by empathising with them first, then how can you move to hating or disliking them? Some of us stand on our world views firmly and contrast others worldview and decide that as the basis to right and wrong. But we have only lived for 1 small life, the basis to me is to understand before I move forward. And to continuously understand.

Your motivations are not the same as theirs. Their cultural group has a different view on values. The boyfriend that seems to not care because he does not speak much verbally, may be a non-verbal person. Any number of possibilities. If we don’t open up our world views to the possibilities, and dare to ask about theirs, we might as well become selfish robots in cults.

I dare you to challenge yourself when someone like a “Fresno meth head” asks you for money, I dare you to empathise with him/her, to ask him/her about their life. Truly try to understand. Hold back your judgements. The same way you binge Netflix when you are stressed out could be the same triggered feeling he gets just before he decides to do meth. I’m not saying give them all your money, I’m saying we are escalating the problem by being judgemental.

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but contrary extreme positions”?—?Friedrich Nietzsche
If you take an extreme position on people and that becomes the norm, “these people do this”, say underprivileged “culturally” considered Mexican American families, and they pick up on it, their behaviours can begin to just reconfirm that “norm” out of being expected to act that way.

Paulo Andre Nino?—?posted a video about Worst Behaviour that exemplifies that in a great way. Confirmation bias, “because you expect me to be this way, I will be even more extremely this way”. It’s a rubber band effect of being repressed or stereotyped. In our history the only way to truly change is to be opposite. The democrats and the republicans, the have and have nots, democracy or communism, the civil and the uncivil, moving forward I believe we must learn to hold 2 seemingly opposing thoughts in our head and take the best from both sides and put it together.

We have a drastic effect on people and we should be more responsible on how we use that.

These aren’t lessons in ethnographic research, business design, or innovation, these have been life changing lessons, and I’d thought I’d share them. I would have never thought a school and a company would teach me these types of things, but then again it’s all about perspective.

I am still learning about what we have come to know of people and organised groups of people called companies, and I wanted to share with you on the journey thus far.
Have a splendid day.