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The story teller of Palo Alto

The Kelley brothers became famous since the Wall Street Journal transformed their company - the IDEO - in a king of kindergarten of creative people. Tom Peters, a management guru, transformed them in a world case-study. The secret according to these creators, revealed by the exuberant younger brother Thomas, that made us walk in a run step in a visit to the seven buildings of the company in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues running around IDEO (2001)

Tom Peters, the most theatrical management guru of America, met the Kelley brothers in an occasional walk in Palo Alto, in 1990, around the Avenue of the University, which leads to the beautiful entrance of Stanford.

Six blocks away of his office, Peters entered in the High Street and discovered some pavilions around.

A peep through the entrance window and he saw a work place that left him very happy - it was the prototype of the company he was looking for to talk in his "Liberation Management", a book that would become highly polemic (Peter's style).

At the time, IDEO (www.ideo.com) was still called David Kelley Design, from the older brother of this couple that is seen as the soul of the industrial design company more successful and original of America.

The man responsible for the marketing of IDEO is Tom, the young brother that, at 46 (2001), is as active as if he was twenty and with loads of humour. His running pace comes from the fact that he rides a bicycle, a sport that more than half of the IDEOs practice and that already lead them to innovate in the segment of mountain bikes.

Tom is the evangelist of the methodology that IDEO uses to innovate. And he does pedagogy telling stories. But he does not make them up. This is not painting, nor adaptation of theory books. It comes directly from their experience since 1978 and more than 4000 design projects and industrial development.

Contagious pleasure

Tom tells the stories with evident pleasure. He took part in them, he saw them triumph or fail. And now he likes to do theory with practical sense on top of them. And the way which he tells, in a movie style, makes them contagious. It seems that we are seeing them in front of us.

The story of the toothbrush for the kids is one of the most bizarre. In a project for Oral-B, the IDEO team discovered that the kids like to hold the toothbrush with their fist closed, and that would require not to copy the format that is made for adults. Conclusion, the toothbrush has to be fatter and look like a toy.

What can you take out of such a trivial story?

The first trick of the IDEO method. "The innovation starts in looking. To observe is the first commitment. It is necessary a sense immersion in the users. Go out there and see how they use things in reality. Not what they say, what they answer in the enquiries or in market studies. Sometimes they do not tell the truth. Looking at flesh and bone people using things we get the right ideas", Tom Kelley tells us.

Second commitment: when you observe take into account that you NEVER should go against the human instinct about the product you want to create. You will be beaten. That's all, he concludes.

This obsession with the observation makes them put the details first, what reminds us of the Japanese. The paradigm at IDEO is the continuing of the old Apple banner in the first times - the famous "user friendly" that seduced the older brother, David, when he met Steve Jobs for the first time and visited the busy Apple place in the 80s.

Tom talks also about total orientation for the user. That requires getting the details of usage - the fact that the kids grab the toothbrush closing their fist - to define the design details and refine the prototypes created.

Another obvious "Japanese" similarity is the taste for master skill of the artisan - the prototypes are always physically visualised. Even if the computer simulation is extreme, the creative people at IDEO like to build the thing, to feel it, to touch it, weight it and see if it works smoothly.

For stupid people, always

The apparatus have to commit to another thing: keep it simple, keep it stupid, you can read on the wall. Sometimes the live or death of a person depends on that, what many designers, engineers and technicians forget.

Tom likes to tell this story - a portable thing for electrocardiograms done on the spot, in the moment of the accident. The idea was that it should be as easy to use as a fire extinguisher. Instead of a complicated interface, full of buttons, it has only two buttons, a screen and practically no instructions. Pressing each button that have a number - first you press there, you look there and then you press elsewhere, a voice speaks to tell you what to do, if you are nervous and cannot even read the enormous numbers.

The moral of the story is that the mechanism already saved lives operated by "stupid" people that do not understand anything about complicated commands and instructions made for an elite of genius techno-specialised that in the difficult moment are not available.

The kindergarten

But how do you manage at IDEO to be so creative? Is this a nest of genius?
Tom laughs and talks with an anarchist air: We are against the genius dictatorship. We distinguish creativity and innovation. What we want is to innovate collectively, transform it in a business step in which the creative people work and discuss jointly. IDEO doesn't practice the rule of 15% of individual time of the 3M or the 30% of Genentech. It practices permanently the 100% of creative craziness jointly, collectively, underline that word, he says.

But how is that possible? The most evident trick for who gets into IDEO is the work environment - the work place. It reminds us of a kindergarten, or a playground.

The environment is, in fact, difficult to describe. You have to go there - not even the photographs are enough to get the idea. The work place has to be a tool of pleasure in the activity and a factor of relationship, favouring the joining of a personalising research with a work environment in group and a talking culture, says Tom, that guides us through tight divisions full of projects, personal objects, bicycles hanging from the ceiling (an innovative system created at IDEO), tables for "brainstorming".

While saying goodbye, as a surprise, he takes the future out of the pocket of his shirt - rings! And he laughed loudly! (His laughing performance remembers me Jeff Bezos of Amazon).

Some rings that came out of a joint project with Media Lab (www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mit-ideo/) of the MIT, in the other American coast. The rings - take note - are one of the models of portable phones of the future. You don't believe? You will see them around one of these next years!