Interview: Tom Hulme

Tom Hulme is a Design Director at IDEO

Avi: How do you define yourself?

Tom: An enthusiastic generalist. Lucky. Ultimately I hope it will be the stuff around me that defines me – startups, OpenIDEO, IDEO projects, family and friends…

Avi: What does Design mean to you?

Tom: It's thoughtful and passionate creation, in any medium. A considered approach to creating solutions that solve real human needs – as such I truly believe everyone has the capacity to be a designer… I guess I would say that as I have no formal design training!

Avi: How would you characterize IDEO?

Tom: IDEO is a function of its people – a diverse group united by a desire to have positive impact. We have developed various approaches to increase that impact: a truly human-centered approach (we centered on human needs even when working in business to business projects), diverse teams (we have learnt that this sparks creativity) and a increased emphasis on designing business models. I'm looking forward to seeing new approaches emerge too…

Avi: Does IDEO have a generic innovation process?

Tom: Many people, when they think of innovation companies, imagine anarchy and suppose that processes aren't important. But we find that having a process unlocks creativity for a few reasons. One the most important is it gives people a clear sense of where they are. It also gives people a common language around which they can discuss the projects. So we do have a process. What we don't necessarily have is a one-size-fits-all process. So we adapt it to the specific challenge that we're working on. So sometimes our challenges will be more strategic. That's happening more and more in which case we spend a larger portion of the project or the challenge actually figuring out the challenge question itself. Whereas other times we have work that's more tactical where we can move into the execution earlier.

So we change the process, but there are some commonalities across it. It's been always human-centered (anyone can try out the process for themselves by downloading the Human-Centered Design Toolkit). So even if we're working in business to business, we make sure that human needs lie at the heart of it. Secondly, wherever possible we prioritize making stuff. Building to learn is a really important part of our approach – it's the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users. We're always where we can make stuff.

Avi: How can one use empathy to come up with new solutions?

Tom: It's a contentious topic because you have a lot of people that question the validity of empathy and point to examples like having focus groups, which I think is a mistake because focus groups are just one very small way of understanding human needs.

I think first and foremost we believe that you have to address real human needs to solve problems. If there isn't a need there, you certainly won't get traction. Empathy is about understanding the truths in those needs. So one of the things we often find in projects is that if you ask people about something, they give you a clear opinion. But then if you watch them, you'll find that the way that they behave actually contradicts the opinion they gave previously. Often we behave in ways that we're not cognizant of. It's subconscious and we don't want to admit it.

So we spend a lot of time really trying to understand the people that we're designing for and understand their nuanced way of living and design to that rather than just design what they might tell us in a focus group. One of the tools that we use to do that is to get extreme users because they give a wonderful insight as to the truth of the needs. For some reason we all love to fit humans into some sort of bell curve, and most big companies address the middle of a bell curve. Whereas the one thing you can be certain of is that the market's moving away from that towards one direction. We spend a lot of time looking at extremes because it gives us more of an indication of some of the needs.

I'll give you an example about the point around really deep empathy and understanding context. I met a lady probably a month ago who had done work in Africa around the difficulty of water access in rural Africa. So she went out there and they had to make some ideas around building pumps in villages and they realized the women in the villages were having to walk five miles each way in order to collect drinking water. And they thought great, the answer is obviously to build a pump. Sounds logical. The women won't have to travel five miles each way. Then they went out to the specific village and they asked the ladies, look we've got this idea if water is important to you. The women agreed and said obviously it's incredibly important to us. And they said we have an opportunity to build a pump so you don't have to travel anymore.And the ladies all looked horrified. And they said you don't seem to want this pump in your village? And the ladies said "No way! Those five miles each way to the water are the only time we get to get away from our husbands. Don't take that away from us!".

So you have to really understand people's truth skills. If you asked them superficially do you think immediate access to water is important they would have said yes, but not if it means that they can't have their escape.

Avi: Then there is a phase where you shift gears and come up with solutions nobody has thought of before?

Tom: Yes. I wouldn't want to say that we come up with solutions that no one has ever come up with before because I think many people have had most of the ideas that exist. What we try to do is we try to tweak those solutions and approach them holistically so that in its entirety we create something that is optimized for the human need. So we're agnostic, for example, about the way that we might address it. We're agnostic often at the start of projects about what we're going to use to address the problem. I think that's important because it keeps the playing field open so that you can create the perfect solution to address the need.

Avi: You emphasize that it's not just important to rephrase the answers, but also to reframe the question.

Tom: Historically we've lived in a world where the context wasn't changing so quickly so we could afford to come up with the question and spend a huge amount of time answering it. I think that paradigm has changed completely because now all of our circumstances are changing all the time.

So if you and I, through the course of this interview, set ourselves a big question, firstly, I think that question should be dynamic. It should change given the change in context. And secondly it should change based on our increasing knowledge. So, for example, if we ask ourselves through the course of this interview that what makes a great interview is our challenge, let's come up with a wonderful interview. Even as I start to answer questions you and I will have a slightly shifting opinion on what that means and tomorrow when we see another wonderful interview that maybe changes everyone's perception of what a good interview is. So I think the days where you could afford to draw a line around a specific question are gone.

We have to treat questions dynamically and it's because circumstances start to change, it's because answers start to change the question itself, and it's because our thoughts around what good is change as well. So when you throw those things together I think a question should be an incredibly dynamic thing.

Avi: What do you hold in mind as a baseline awareness of how to improve the quality of anything you do?

Tom: I'm motivated by positive impact. So spending time as a teacher in a school in Africa was the most formative thing I've ever done in my life, I think. It taught me that while sometimes money is an output and a result of positive impact, it doesn't need to be, so I try to hold myself accountable to that fundamental of positive impact. And I don't know that you can ever quantify it. I think it's subjective. I think it's incredibly qualitative, but I try and make decisions relatively based on whether it has a positive impact. If that sounds very flakey, I don't want it to sound flakey, but to me that's everything. I look to achieve that impact as efficiently as I can.

Avi: An impact can be changing one person's relationship to something.

Tom: Exactly. And I don't know that I'm sophisticated in making these judgment calls, but I often have a struggle whether I should have a deeper impact for an individual or a slighter impact for many and when making decisions on projects versus how to spend my time I find myself wrestling with that all the time.

I have had the most inspiring emails as a result of some of my talks. I find them unbelievably humbling. I've had them ranging from a gentleman in Kyoto in Japan who works for a Samurai armor company who are thinking of going into women's apparel ranging across to a guy who works in real estate in the US who was getting really passive in his company and it sort of triggered a change in his philosophy.

Avi: How did OpenIDEO originate?

Tom: OpenIDEO stemmed from my desire to explore extreme new approaches for IDEO. As an entrepreneur I can't help looking for disruptive approaches, a mindset which was amplified after I studied under Clayton Christensen. IDEO had taught me the importance of having diverse input to feed the creative process, this coupled with our increasing desire to participate anchored my belief that online tools could disrupt traditional innovation approaches.

In 2008 I began sketching out what was to become OpenIDEO more fully – at that time it was simply the idea of a platform to solve challenges for social good, comprising a modular process which would take the best of offline and online input and some sort of algorithm to measure and celebrate contributions. My vision for OpenIDEO was to create a platform which empowers a global community, valuing everyone's contribution. I iterated the idea over the following 12 months but the real step change in development came when we put a team behind the idea to develop it further in the Summer of 2009. I was joined by two other IDEO designers from London that had shown a real interest in the concept – Nathan Waterhouse and Haiyan Zhang. We made (and still make) a great team and launched the site in a closed Beta in the Summer of 2010.

We run OpenIDEO as a lean startup – with relatively short sprints to implement new features that are often suggested by the community. The vision we now develop together remains pretty much unchanged – we want to increase engagement to solve the challenges of our time and create positive impact – impact being the only metric that really matters.

Avi: What have you learnt from the OpenIDEO community?

Tom: We have contributors from over 200 countries on OpenIDEO. It's been great to see how supportive the community has been of one another. We designed threaded comments because we noticed the community beginning to have conversations around concepts and inspirations. An increasing number of concepts are built on others. The collaboration maps show how the concepts grow through the collision of inspirations and other concepts

Another key learning has been that those that don't participate can still be highly engaged. Traditional websites refer to those that don't contribute as 'lurkers' and see them as uninteresting and unimportant. I was reminded how engaged these people can be when we received a hand drawn Christmas Card from a user in Malaysia who had never participated – she had clearly been engaged!

It's all a good reminder that OpenIDEO is creating impact through creation of concepts that will have impact in the world (the destination) but also through the journey (building engagement around some of the challenges of our time). OpenIDEO is being used in a variety of ways we hadn't necessarily envisaged, one of the most inspiring has been seeing teachers globally ask their students to contribute to the process, from Ghana to the US. I love the fact that the site is meritocratic – it doesn't matter if you went to college or what you studied – your contributions alone define you.

Avi: But you still need people in the field to take a leap and get things done – A lot of stuff gets caught up in bureaucracy.

Tom: We're not naive to how difficult execution is. But I think there's some interesting examples out there where through the process of learning you can build demand. So Kickstarter is a phenomenally interesting version of this, where Kickstarter takes the risk out of launching a business because you get people to commit to purchase. So like we saw with American Idol as an emergent model, they're kind of de-risking an industry because instead of investing money and making a big launch, it gives the opportunity to test the market, to understand people's true needs, and therefore you have demand built into the process.

I hope that could be a facet of OpenIDEO ongoing. So we may not have the scale for that to be true as of yet, but you could imagine circumstances where you might come up with a lovely idea to solve one of the challenges and the encouragement you get from the community gives you the confidence to act and then you've got momentum on day one.

So this is one of the areas we are focusing on most at the moment, in fact right now we're designing how the 'realization phase' might look on the site. We like the idea of enabling teams to coalesce to implement ideas and to give the implementers a voice on the platform so that they can share learnings.

Avi: One thing is like money will spoil it.

Tom: I strongly agree with you. When initially thinking about it I looked at a 108 similar platforms and the one thing that became clear in all of them is as soon as you make money the motivator, kind of the ultimate extrinsic motivator, everything else collapses in the system. Then you bring in real gaming. Then you actually collapse the collaboration, the mutual support and things. So if there's one thing I can say with a level of certainty is that we won't sort of risk that by having prize based systems.