'Ideas emerge from creative friction'

IN CONVERSATION

Ideo, the globally celebrated design firm, has helped some of the world's best companies revisit the way they create customer experience, through its innovative thinking on design issues, including organisation-related design. Its clients include BBC, McDonalds, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Procter & Gamble, among others. Ideo's success could arguably be attributed to the way it hires employees and gets them to work as a team. In India to announce a design course with Welingkar Institute, Shilajeet Banerjee, director, technology futures and Kingshuk Das, senior strategist spoke to Mohini Suchanti and Prasad Sangameshwaran.

Ideo is known to hire people from different backgrounds, from engineers to anthropologists. How do you choose the kind of people you hire at the design firm?

Banerjee: We look for T-shaped people, who have the depth and knowledge of a particular skill or vertical, but have the empathy for other disciplines as well. At Ideo, we are a curious mix of mechanical engineers, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists and sociologists.

The common thread between us is our collaborative outlook, an insatiable appetite to learn and question conventional ways of doing things. The T shape helps as they bring their depth of knowledge to a project but imbibe processes from others' knowledge as well. We do not necessarily look at smart or creative people, but we'd rather hire people with the right attitude, who are problem solvers. Does the success of a creative process always depend on seamless teamwork?

Das: Teamwork guides our creative action. We are not always holding hands or singing in unison. In fact, sometimes outstanding ideas emerge because of 'creative friction' or the process of understanding the positives and misgivings of each other's ideas. However, we do a fair job of understanding each other.

How do you create a culture that encourages continuous creativity?

Banerjee: We follow a structured chaos. We let employees alone instead of tightening controls. At the same time we encourage a collaborative process and allow our people to take risks. We also need to understand how much of themselves employees actually bring to work.

That is required for unfettered creativity. Employees need not always do things that please the boss. But they get so attached to projects in a way that it is their life.

You spoke about allowing employees to take risks. Does the essence of innovation lie in risk taking?

Banerjee: It is not necessary to have a natural tendency towards risk taking. It can be something that's learned over time and become an acquired attitude. By definition, risk taking is going into territory that is not defined.

We look at risk as our friend and you minimise failure. Instead of taking a great risk we take small risks thus mitigating risk. We would fail in the early stages rather than succeed soon. We build success at every stage by eliminating failure.

When organisations like yours grew to become a large entity how did you ensure that people retained the same culture?

Das: When organisations grow large and people get into silos, communication breaks down. Our organisation is designed as a collection of small organisations which are focused on a specific task.

When the task gets completed the team is dismantled and the people get into a completely different team and people take new roles. Hence they do not slip into codes or formulae. By doing this they share a lot of info because of the diversity of work they do.

Does success in design ensure success in business?

Banerjee: If you narrowly define success as the design of objects, then no! Our purview has gone way beyond design of artefacts; into bringing humans to the centre of innovation. Design thinking is being used to discover new markets and transforming business processes.