Solve Problems with Misfit Thinking | Gord Bennett | Episode 203

Scott McCarthy [00:00:00]:
In episode two zero three of the peak performance leadership podcast, we speak to design thinker, Gord Bennett, and he’s gonna tell you how you can change the way you think to solve your problems. That’s right folks. It’s all about changing your mindset and solving your problems today. Are you ready for this? Alright. Let’s do it. Welcome one. Welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:46]:
This podcast couples my twenty years of military experience as a senior Canadian army officer with world class guests to bring you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website at movingforwardleadership.com. And with that, let’s get to the show. Yes. Welcome one. Welcome all. Thanks for coming out. Is it it is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy.

Scott McCarthy [00:01:24]:
It’s so good to have you here, whether this is your two hundred and third time, well, plus time checking out the podcast or it’s your first time. You are welcome here because guess what? I am certain this is the place for you because you’re here because cause you wanna be a leader and not a boss. You want to motivate, inspire and bring together your team and not just pound them to the ground. Segregate them, separate them and cause in fighting. And that is why you’re here at the peak performance leadership podcast. And you know what? I was there with you. Absolutely. I’ve been there and I am on a journey now to help rid the world of those evil evil bosses because we can do it.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:16]:
We can do it. We are the wave. We are the future. You listen to this podcast. You are the future, and I am so proud of all of you. And today, we got an action packed awesome show. We have a personal friend of mine, Gord Bennett, doctor Gord Bennett, actually, I should say. Or if we wanna get into full time, full terms, lieutenant colonel, doctor Gord Bennett.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:47]:
Gord and I continue to serve together in the Canadian army. We’re both lieutenant colonels. We’re both logistics officers. I’ve known Gordon for quite some time, and he has come out with his own book, all about design thinking. And he calls it, and I’m actually holding a copy. Thanks, Gordo. Misfit thinking. He’s using design thinking to energize innovation and creativity.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:15]:
Now let’s think about that for a second, shall we? Energize, innovate, creativity. That’s what us as leaders, we need to strive to do every day. We want to energize our people. We want to instill that culture of innovation and creativity. Why? Because yesterday’s solutions will not solve tomorrow’s problems. So we need to change the way we think and the way we solve problems. And that and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Gord Bennett is here on the show. As I said, he is continues to serve in the Canadian army alongside myself.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:57]:
He does hold a doctorate in business, and he is the author of the book, Misfit thinking. Gordon and I talk about whole lack of different topics in this show. What design thinking is how to execute on problem discovery, what idea generation is so important, the structure of the design team and its importance, how leaders can establish a safe culture within the design team. That was a super interesting chat we had. And you know what? Whole lot more. I’ve known Gord for, oh, about ten years now. And I tell you, he is an excellent speaker. He is super knowledgeable.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:41]:
This guy’s way smarter than I am, folks. So you’re in for a treat here today. All right. I think that’s enough. So why don’t you sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with cord Bennett on how you can change your problems and the way you’re thinking with misfit thinking. Gord Bennett, buddy. Welcome to the podcast. So good to have you here.

Gord Bennett [00:05:20]:
Hey. This is awesome, Scott. I really appreciate this opportunity. I I love talking about logistics, business, and and all things design. Of course, we’ve had some great conversations in the past. Really looking forward to this opportunity. I know your listeners are gonna love it.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:32]:
Who would have thunk that, when we first met as two young, I will say young captains will be here as two lieutenant colonels, doing a podcast on leadership and now with your new book about design thinking. Who would have thunk that?

Gord Bennett [00:05:47]:
I would not have thought of that, in probably a thousand years. I mean, maybe going into the future sometime, I would have written a book or something, but, you know, just everything happened to come together and and it’s been a a unique adventure for sure.

Scott McCarthy [00:06:00]:
Alright. So let’s dive in. Let’s let’s let’s hit design thinking. And, the first thing out of the gate, you know, from your standpoint, what is design thinking in the first place? And when we say design thinking, what should the listener really be, you know, thinking themselves?

Gord Bennett [00:06:17]:
So design thinking is all about problem solving and how we can generate better solutions at the end of the day, for whatever problem that we’re looking at facing. So it’s a it’s a flexible tool. It’s a human centric tool. It’s a creative tool. And ultimately, what we see happening with people that routinely apply design thinking is we get a better result than other types of methods that are out there. So typically, a person will look at a problem or look at a situation say, I think this is the problem. Here’s the solution. Let’s implement.

Gord Bennett [00:06:51]:
What design thinking does, it’s built on three different pillars of problem discovery, solution generation or ideation, and prototyping and testing. And when we follow the design thinking process, we end up getting rid of a lot of the problems that we have with our problem discovery and actually discovering what the problems are. And the end result is actually much better than the traditional method of, hey, let’s just launch with this particular idea. So it’s a set of of steps. There’s about 13 different models out there that, teach people how to do design thinking in different ways. And it’s really been starting to catch on with big business. Capital One uses it now on a regular basis. PepsiCo uses it on a regular basis.

Gord Bennett [00:07:35]:
The Harvard Business Review in 2018 said it was one of the next biggest tools for business. And by extension, we’ve used it in governments, militaries, NGOs, and even, local clubs, for example. So it’s a relatively new tool, and and that’s partly why I’m out there talking about design thinking where we’ve got the book published, where we’ve got a bunch of resources online. Even the Rotman School of Business in Toronto has got some excellent resources on on design thinking because it’s becoming increasingly important to get that edge over your competitors and to solve the problems that you’re facing within your organization.

Scott McCarthy [00:08:13]:
Cool. So you mentioned the three different pillars of design thinking. So let’s let’s jump down that rabbit hole, shall we? And so the listener out there can have a deeper understanding. So let’s go into the first one. The first one you said was sorry.

Gord Bennett [00:08:28]:
Problem Problem discovery.

Scott McCarthy [00:08:31]:
Problem discovery. There we go. I was thinking definition was in my head, but that’s too militaristic. So let’s talk about problem discovery out out of the gate. And so what do you mean by problem discovery? Like, shouldn’t that just be natural person? There’s a problem.

Gord Bennett [00:08:47]:
Here it is. You would think it would be natural, but if you take a look around at the current environment that we’re in, whether it’s pandemic or otherwise, you see a lot of people saying, well, here’s our solution. And you ask them, well, how did you come to that solution? Well, I just think it’s what the what we need to do. Well, how do we know that that’s what we need to do if you haven’t actually gone down the path to figure out what the problem is and what the environment is surrounding that problem? And what design thinking will do is it will help you identify the environment, and then it will help you pinpoint what the problem is within that particular, realm. So when we look at design thinking, we’re looking from different perspectives as well on who’s necessarily involved with a particular element of the problem that we’re facing. As we dig down, we’re gonna find insights that will help lead us to innovative and creative ideas that we can then prototype and and ultimately, generate. Typically, we find with people, we wanna default to the easiest thing that we see. And I’ll use an interesting example, and probably talk about this in different parts of the podcast.

Gord Bennett [00:09:50]:
When I was a company commander for, an army company in Gagetown A Few Years ago, I had a bunch of people working for me, and I had the largest fleet of vehicles, the government has in the country, and we were responsible for a training area. And my staff came to me one day and they said, sir, can you sign this requisition form for $80,000 worth of cutting edges? Now cutting edges are a sacrificial piece of material that goes at the end of a bulldozer blade or a greater blade or an excavator tooth or those types of things, and it it wears out so that you don’t wear out the actual bucket itself. And I said to myself, I said, you know, $80,000 is a lot of money. They said, oh, don’t worry about it. We normally spend a hundred and $50,000. We’ll have another requisition form for you in a couple of months. And I said, holy cow. This is crazy.

Gord Bennett [00:10:34]:
Something doesn’t seem right. So right there, we start to see the part of the essence of design thinking in terms of something doesn’t seem right. We have a qualitative issue at hand. Sometimes we have data to back it up and sometimes we don’t. In this particular case, we didn’t have any quantitative data, and we didn’t really have the means to be able to generate reliable quantitative data. We just had to look at it and say, something doesn’t seem right. Why doesn’t it seem right? And so we applied the Toyota technique of the five whys, like, why is this occurring? So why is the second step occurring? Why is the third step occurring? To try to figure out what the problem is or if there even was a problem in this particular circumstance. And what I found initially with the staff is they would jump to conclusions.

Gord Bennett [00:11:21]:
They and one person said, you know what? The drivers aren’t properly trained. That’s the that’s the problem. Another person said, the cutting edges are poor quality. Another person said, the drivers just don’t like changing them, so they’re complaining about it. Another person said, the drivers are abusing the equipment. So these were all of the problems that they had, quote, unquote, identified at the beginning, but they weren’t backed up by any type of observation. And it was just, hey. Here’s what the problem is.

Gord Bennett [00:11:49]:
I know what we can do to fix it. We’re gonna do driver training. How do we follow that regular path because of that that being the easy button and we can just generate a solution? Okay. We’re doing a training package. We would never have captured actually what the problem was. Now I’ll expand on that problem a little bit here as well because it ties into the other two pillars that I briefly mentioned there earlier. So we convened a design thinking group, and we went into depth to see what was involved with that problem discovery aspect. What was it like to look through the eyes of the driver that is driving a grader? What was it like to be the maintainer that’s fixing the vehicles? What was it like to be somebody that’s using the roads that, were in the training area? And, I mean, we maintained hundreds of kilometers of roads.

Gord Bennett [00:12:32]:
So we expected some wear and tear. We expected some roads will wear out. And what we actually found was that the, cutting edges were getting damaged by hitting pieces of bedrock that were poking up through the road. So we asked the question, well, why is there bedrock poking up through the road? Did we not build this road, a couple of years ago? And what we found was that the rotation of maintenance on the roads was on a four year rotation. So each road would get maintained once every four years. The problem was that the usage of the roads didn’t meet with the time. So you had some roads that were being used constantly every day all the time and some that would wash out with spring runoff, Other roads, it would hardly get used at all. So if you had a road that was getting used extensively and the gravel was getting blown off and the material was shift shuffling around, if you brought a grader or an excavator on top of that road and you try to push the gravel back on the road, you’re not gonna see the little pieces of bedrock that are poking out that were damaging the cutting edges.

Gord Bennett [00:13:31]:
And had we not delved into that problem discovery piece using that different perspective of the driver and the maintainer and and then these other perspectives, we wouldn’t have come up with that idea on, hey. This is what’s actually causing the damage on the blades. And then going into different solutions that we could do to fix that particular problem and then prototype those solutions and and figure out how we could fix it. So rather than jumping to what we thought was the problem, we could actually do a discovery phase and find out what the real problem actually was.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:05]:
That’s, you know, that’s awesome because I feel like so many leaders out there and businesses jump right to immediate conclusions. Right? Because, well, everyone’s strapped for time. Everyone’s busy, and they’re like, okay. There’s the problem. We’re spending way too much money on blades. Okay. Driver training or maybe design’s wrong or whatever. You know, pick the easiest solution.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:28]:
Hit that easy button, but it never actually solves the problem. And then it just, you know, metaphor metaphor is is self, I can’t speak right now, into something different. You know, another problem pops up. And then you’re like, why are we having this problem? But the reality is we never hit that root cause. Right? Asking our question, you know, asking that question like, what is the actual actual problem here? Here? So I really like that example. So that is the whole, problem discovery phase. Now I I feel like you moved right through those next two phases, right, through the whole two phases. So let’s let’s boom right back a bit.

Scott McCarthy [00:15:07]:
Let’s go through the second phase of your design thinking philosophy.

Gord Bennett [00:15:11]:
So absolutely. So that’s, idea generation. And idea generation is really interesting in its own right because if we look back at our solution, people are like, I’m making a training plan. Okay. So how do you know that that new training plan is actually the solution that we need to do? And how is it gonna create the end effect or the result that we need at the end of the day? And I use about 40 different idea generation techniques to help generate ideas to solve particular problems. And what we do in that stage is there’s brainstorming is certainly one of them. There’s a whole bunch of other techniques, and we start generating these ideas. And one of the things I like to do is take these ideas, write one idea per sticky note, and stick it up on a wall.

Gord Bennett [00:15:53]:
And then the other members of the design team can come in. They can have a look at the the other ideas that are there. They can post their own ideas, and then we can take them and we can group them after. And I’ve done this many, many times. I’ve got some some pictures on my website, where people are doing this type of work. And what we find is when you have a diverse team of people that come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and professional design teams like IDEO in Silicon Valley will actually have a really diverse, team. They’ll have people like an anthropologist, an engineer, an artist, somebody from marketing, maybe a finance person, maybe a sociologist. All of these people get together.

Gord Bennett [00:16:36]:
They have crazy different backgrounds, and you wouldn’t think that normally those people would all work together and work harmoniously. But what ends up happening is as each one of those diverse members of the team starts coming up with ideas based on their experience and their backgrounds and their observations of the of the situation, you start getting all kinds of really, really interesting ideas. And then from there, you can start building on more ideas until you have ideas that are desirable, feasible, and viable, which we’ll probably talk about a little bit later. But what we do is we wanna generate a ton of ideas. We don’t put judgment on the ideas at the beginning. We just wanna get them out there. And it’s a really fun experience once you get into the rhythm of it. Now sometimes, especially with new design teams, we kinda get stuck on trying to generate some unique ideas.

Gord Bennett [00:17:27]:
And I’ve had this happen actually quite a few times, especially with people that have never done design thinking before. So we’ll use different techniques to be able to generate, more ideas. Sometimes we’re using priming techniques. Sometimes, we’re using, what if scenarios. Well, what if we could do this? Or what if this piece of the scenario change? Or what if we took something out of the scenario or inputted something into a scenario? Or maybe we bring somebody in that has a completely different perspective and say, here’s the problem that we figured out. What do you think about doing this? And you can bring people in on a temporary basis to help create those, those ideas and generate those ideas. This is probably the funnest part of of design thinking because it’s not uncommon to have, you know, thirty, forty, 50, 60 different ideas to solve a particular problem. And this applies to simple problems, and it applies to complex or wicked problems as well.

Gord Bennett [00:18:19]:
So you can have people come in. You can you can generate all these really cool ideas and then start grouping them together into ones that you wanna look at doing into the next stage of prototyping and testing.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:32]:
Now you mentioned the design team there a few times. And I I assume from what you’re saying, it’s important you know to get a wide range of different types of people and to, you know, get all kinds of ideas. Now is there some kind of format or structure that team should look like, or is it more free flowing in just going with it and see what comes out of that the whole process with design thinking?

Gord Bennett [00:19:00]:
No. It’s a that’s a really good term to use there, free flowing, because that’s exactly what we look at when we’re doing design thinking. And we wanna have that free flow. We know that a small business, for example, is not gonna be able to bring in an anthropologist and a sociologist and probably not an engineer. They’re gonna have the staff that they have within their business to help generate ideas. Maybe they can bring a customer in to be part of that team, or maybe they can collect some information from their customers or end users. So you work with what you have. And if you can help encourage people to be open and creative, not being judgmental of the ideas, and and make it into a fun exercise, even with a a lesser diverse team.

Gord Bennett [00:19:40]:
Like, suppose I owned an auto shop and I’ve got some mechanics, I’ve got a front end person, I’ve got some parts people, and I’ve got a customer. No. It’s not super diverse, but I’ve got enough people there from within my organization that I can generate a number of great ideas that can help make that business function better, help the employees be happier, and have better customer service. So the more diverse you can make it, the better off you’re going to be to a point, obviously. Once you get above about 10 people for each design team, you start to have some people, sit quietly in the back and need encouragement to get up and speak, or you get too many opinions all over the place that start to get that gets kinda messy. I generally find that between six to eight people is the ideal number. So you have enough that you have some degree of diversity, but you don’t have so many as that people aren’t contributing. So, yeah, it’s free flowing.

Gord Bennett [00:20:29]:
Absolutely.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:32]:
That’s awesome. Now you mentioned something interesting there, and that is the idea of, you know, establishing a culture within the design team of, not being judgmental, being open, being transparent. You know, it’s a safe place to bring up ideas, to question ideas, etcetera. For the leaders listening out there, how should they go about establishing that culture within that team to enable the maximum results for

Gord Bennett [00:21:00]:
it? Well, there’s probably a couple of ideas that I would suggest. I would say number one, be genuine. If you’re a genuine individual, and people understand your perspectives and if you’re open to new ideas, then you’re gonna have a free flowing amount of ideas. Organizations that I’ve been to where there’s a fear of failure or where there’s a fear of what the boss is gonna think or where people are trying to juggle their way into the next career position, so careerism, places where people are punished for failure and fit in the mistakes like legitimate failure, not, not blatant failure. It’s those type of cultures that have a tendency not to be as creative as other cultures where the boss can come in and say, look, you know what? I’m gonna leave this up to you guys. I want you to just come in and with a couple of awesome ideas afterwards. We’re not talking about ranks. We’re not talking about hierarchy or titles or anything like that.

Gord Bennett [00:21:55]:
It’s not doctor so and so or or colonel so and so or general whatever or CEO or c suite guy over here. If you’re on that common floor and that common understanding, then you’re gonna generate a lot better ideas. So from a leadership perspective, it’s extremely important that you’re open with your your folks. You create that culture of openness where people feel that they can they can say something and they’re not gonna be judged for it or put down for it. The worst ones are the ones where I see people trying to placate the boss so that they can look good for their own career progression, and that does not work very well with design thinking teams.

Scott McCarthy [00:22:38]:
No. I I can imagine that. I would suggest for the leaders listening out there, you know, if you’re running a a problem session, you know, a design thinking session, and you find someone like that in your team. It’s it’s immediate removal from there because there’s gonna be end up becoming cancer. And the reality is it’s gonna be, I would suggest, would be counterproductive to the whole point of the process in the first place, which is get to the root cause of a problem, find a viable solution to the problem, and then find a great way to implement the solution. Right?

Gord Bennett [00:23:08]:
That that’s exactly it. I mean, I use the term disin innovation periodically, where we have

Scott McCarthy [00:23:14]:
Good call.

Gord Bennett [00:23:14]:
Individuals that actively whether they do it subconsciously or whether they do it overtly, they they attack innovation. They throw up roadblocks. They’re they’re more bureaucratic. They can’t think outside the domain of of what they’re they’re in. And I’ve seen this in a number of different occasions. And when you have dis innovation within an organization, either intentionally or unintentionally, you’re gonna have some significant problems in trying to implement innovative solutions. So getting the right people on the team and doing small wins is a great way to start, disseminating how you’re going to do innovation and change that innovation culture within the organization. Sure.

Gord Bennett [00:23:59]:
In some instances, there’s there’s a role for gatekeepers, but certainly not with design thinking and creative, thought. It it certainly stifles it.

Scott McCarthy [00:24:10]:
Awesome. So we’ve gone through, executing this problem discovery. We talked about idea generation. We talked about the structure of the team, establishing a culture, and the impacts that that per that careers type person may have on it. The one thing we kinda jumped over, for all good reasons was the third phase of your process there. So why don’t we boom ring back, hit that next? So why don’t you, bring us into, you know, the final stages of design thinking process for listener out there?

Gord Bennett [00:24:37]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So just about every design thinking model that you’re gonna see out there, and and there’s different models because people learn and understand things in in different way. But generally speaking, the last piece of it that you’re gonna do is gonna be prototyping and testing. Now this is critically important, especially in today’s competitive business environment. If you wanna get an edge over your competitor I mean, you don’t wanna fight a fair fight. You want the odds in your favor, and design thinking will bring that. And doing that, using prototyping before you come up with your final product is gonna help give you that edge over your competitor.

Gord Bennett [00:25:10]:
It’s gonna help minimize, problems with your final design. So we talked a little bit earlier about people that jumped to conclusions. Here’s my solution. Implement. One of the other problems with that is that if you’ve never tested, or prototype the particular solution that you have, you’re gonna have some significant problems. And if you think about software as an example, let’s suppose you’re building a new software system. You never test on anything. You don’t prototype it, and you push it right out to the market.

Gord Bennett [00:25:37]:
Guaranteed, people will find bugs in it. Maybe there’s a security problem. Maybe there’s a user friendliness issue. You would never do that in industry that blatantly, yet we see it happening all the time. What we do with, design thinking is we wanna fail early and fail fast. And we often think about failure as a bad thing. But in design thinking, failure is actually a good thing. Because we take that list of ideas and we pick out the ones that are the most viable, the most desirable, and the most feasible, and then we’ll take those ideas and and we’ll say, okay.

Gord Bennett [00:26:13]:
How could we prototype this on a very simple way? And some of the companies that have visited California, for example, have actual shops within their lines that will build simple prototypes. They’ve got woodworking and metalworking shops. They’ve got arts and crafts things. And it’s it’s really interesting. You can actually see some of the examples of simple prototypes if you just do a Google search under images, design thinking prototypes. You’ll see people with cardboard boxes glued together with popsicle sticks to represent something that they’re they’re trying to replicate, or you’ll see an office built out of cardboard boxes where they’re replicating a service, that they’re looking at implementing. The advantage of prototyping is there there’s a couple of them actually. You iron out mistakes early and errors that could cause a massive failure in your product or service later on, and you’re doing it earlier.

Gord Bennett [00:27:05]:
So you’re doing these incremental changes right away. And that way, it’s easy to course correct along the way as opposed to, say, you built an entire car. You ship it off to the consumer, and they’re like, this thing is a piece of junk because this doesn’t work, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t work. If you prototype those pieces in their individual components before assembling it, then prototype the assembled car, and then test of that car to make sure everything works, you’re gonna have a much better product than jumping right to a conclusion. A couple of years ago, I was invited to go sit on a was being championed as a as a design thinking, board for a project that was going to occur thirty years down the road. And I got there, and I’m like, this is very interesting. Let’s see what they have. I was just a participant.

Gord Bennett [00:27:48]:
I wasn’t the facilitator for it. And the, the boss comes in and he says, hey. We wanna determine what this is going to look like thirty years down the road. And I said, holy cow. Look thirty years backwards. Did anybody see the Internet coming? Probably not. So what you find with prototyping is you’re doing it. You’re doing these, adjustments as you go, and you’re I’m not saying you’re building the plane in the air necessarily, but you’re you’re getting rid of the things that are not gonna be conducive to creating a good product as you go before you even get to the testing stage.

Gord Bennett [00:28:21]:
So you can try this little piece, doesn’t work, adjust. Try something else over here, adjust. And you’ll actually end up with a better product at the end of the day or a better service, and there’ll be less testing to do at the end. So it actually works out to be less expensive to do the simple prototyping with the failed early, failed fast, then jumping right to the end in launching your particular product or service. So it’s pretty amazing actually that you go through these little incremental steps to generate what you’ve got at the end. And when we’re looking at even an end product in this example of what’s gonna happen thirty years from now, had they looked five years down the road, had they had a diverse team with people from academia, people from industry with this particular technology they were looking at, they would have had a much better result than trying to guess what’s gonna happen thirty years down the road and coming up with a final solution for thirty years down the road. Simply it’s it’s not gonna work.

Scott McCarthy [00:29:13]:
You know, I often talk about, when we do problem solving slash implementation new plans, ideas, whatever, right, of of the metaphor of the plane leaving New York and going to London, England and say, okay. Well, if the pilot just set the course once and left it for eight hours, he’d probably end up in, like, Norway or maybe Africa somewhere, maybe, you know, or Greece. Right? You gotta do those course corrections, and it’s always those little tiny course course corrections along the route. And that’s totally fine. It’s totally fine. And you’ve just, you know, solidified that even with your process that we need to go through these prototyping phases. We need to go through these testing phases because we don’t know exactly how it’s going to pan out, how things are going to work. We have a good idea.

Scott McCarthy [00:30:04]:
We might have a hypothesis, but we don’t know for sure. So we go ahead. We test it out. We test it with a small group of people or we test the a product or a service on a focus group or whatever, and then we make those incremental changes because it’s a lot easier to do that than it is just to blow the whole thing up and start from scratch again.

Gord Bennett [00:30:27]:
Yeah. That’s absolutely correct. And what I find even with it sounds ridiculous, but using simple prototypes like using crafting supplies to to build something that looks like what you’re trying to trying to accomplish at a very simple simple level. Like, let’s suppose you’re making some kind of three d goggles. Well, you wanna make sure they have a good fit. So you’re gonna use some materials, glue some stuff together, make sure it looks the look is there. The other thing that we find is when you’re developing a product for somebody else. So a number of these design companies that that do this on a full time basis will be designing things like toys or or they’re designing, ATM screens or they’re designing a user experience or they’re redesigning commercial food delivery experiences or school lunch feeding or what it’s like to be a hospital patient.

Gord Bennett [00:31:15]:
They they’re able to build simple prototypes to give that purchaser, the the company that’s buying their services, an idea of what they’re looking at. And this a lot of people are visual and tactile. And And so if you can give them something that’s visual and tactile, whether it’s a video or something they can hold in their hands, it makes it much easier also to communicate what you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, if you put a 30 page report in front of somebody with all the specifications of three d goggles, it’s a lot easier just to handle a prototype and say, here’s kind of the shape that we’re looking at. Here’s how it fits on your face.

Scott McCarthy [00:31:55]:
Yeah. For sure. Now that brings me to a follow-up question. So I imagine the listener out there is thinking, okay. You’re talking a lot about design thinking and prototyping and testing and, you know, arts and crafts here and all this stuff. That’s great for actual physical products. But what if we’re looking to you know, we’re wanna implement design thinking on a solution for our people or our structure of our organization? How can we apply those principles to that type of scenario when it’s not an actual physical good we’re working on?

Gord Bennett [00:32:25]:
That’s a that’s an excellent question, and there’s a number of different ways that you can do that. So one of the ways you can start is with the tabletop exercise where you have scenario players around the table, much like a a military war game. War game is actually a type of prototyping. So military folks in the audience will certainly understand that. But you can run a scenario with people playing different roles and how they’re gonna progress through whatever it is that you’re trying to do. And services are a great example of that. So, in one instance, I was talking to a design company and they were redesigning, feeding, large scale feeding. And so they took the the customer that they had and they went to a a baseball stadium, and they said, let’s take a look at how people get fed in a baseball stadium.

Gord Bennett [00:33:11]:
Are there things that we can replicate within your institutional feeding example? And then what you can do is you can take people and put them through the service process that you’re gonna do for these particular folks. In one of IDEO’s examples, for example, they took somebody and put them on a stretcher and brought them into a hospital and said, here’s our simulated patient, and had the hospital walk them through the entire process of what it was like to be a patient. And then they could actually take management and do the same thing with them. So when somebody flicks on the light, if you’re and I’ll speak from experience here. You’re lying in a hospital bed with a a smashed and shattered pelvis, and somebody comes into your your hospital room at 02:00 in the morning, and you’ve just gotten to sleep an hour earlier, and you’re hooked up to all kinds of machines, they flip the light on and then they say, hey. We got some paperwork for you to sign. You know, could that paperwork not have waited till 07:00 in the morning or 08:00 in the morning when the when the pain meds wear off and I can actually sign the paperwork? I’m not gonna be running anywhere to get out of the hospital so you know where I am. Does that really have to be done right now? So it was these types of experiences that they were able to put people through when they’re trialing a new service.

Gord Bennett [00:34:23]:
Like, take your customer, take your employees, put them through that service delivery that you think you’re gonna do. Or try a tabletop exercise where you’re gonna play, different roles, or run it through a scenario as if you’re acting and and, and act it out.

Scott McCarthy [00:34:40]:
No. That’s all great advice for sure. And, you know, it’s often about getting the feedback, and you can get the feedback directly through those, through those processes. Right? That’s awesome, Gord. What I’d like to hit on as we slowly start to wrap up here is failures, and I love talking about failures. You mentioned, you know, fail fast, fail early, so you can learn from that. Now what I’d like for the listener to get is understanding where leaders generally fail in the process overall, you know, where they make the biggest mistakes in implementing this type of thinking and process to find solutions to their problems. So what’s your advice for leaders out there?

Gord Bennett [00:35:22]:
I would say there’s a couple of things they can do to facilitate it. Number one, be open to failure, and failure on a small scale. We’re not talking, blatant failures where somebody’s absolutely negligent in doing something. We’re talking about the types of things where, hey. I’ve got this product. Man, it didn’t really work out very well. Using an example of, military training. So I just came out of a training organization, Canada’s National Logistics Training School, and we did a lot of this type of design thinking.

Gord Bennett [00:35:51]:
And I told my staff, I said, we’re gonna fail. We’re gonna fail a few times. We’re gonna prototype some stuff, and it’s not gonna work. We’re gonna try something over here. It’s not gonna work. Nobody is getting punished for failing to do this. Now if you steal some money, well, that’s a completely different story. Fortunately, that never happened.

Gord Bennett [00:36:08]:
But if we try something in in our training and it doesn’t work, then let’s figure out why it didn’t work and try something again. So you’ve gotta have leaders that are open to that type of experimentation. They need to be open and not punishing people for failure. They need to create a climate that is accepting of new ideas, for sure. I would say it’s probably those are the biggest ones that I’ve seen. And then careerism would be the other one I would see. If the leader is all about, their next promotion or their next, job somewhere else or getting hired on by another company and that’s their motivation, And that motivation is gonna be felt by the staff that are there, and you’re not gonna get the best out of your staff, and you’re not gonna get the best out of the design process either because you’re thinking about it from a a a selfish perspective, if you will. Whereas design thinking, we’re designing products and services for an end user somewhere to benefit somebody else, not benefit ourselves.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:10]:
Awesome. I love that last part. Not to benefit ourselves, but to benefit others. That’s awesome. Gore, my man, this has been a it’s been an honor. It’s been a pleasure. Sir, thank you for a copy of your book. I haven’t gotten through it yet, but I will get to it.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:25]:
That’s for sure. I promise you. As we wrap up here, though, I do got a couple last questions for you. One being a question asked all the guests here at the peak performance leadership podcast. And as according to you, Gord Bennett, what makes a great leader?

Gord Bennett [00:37:42]:
Man, there’s so many things that, that can make a great leader. I would say humble service to others first. And the reason I say that is if you are focused on other people first, focused on your employees, focused on your customers, focused on your end users, you will get so much more out of them. Not that you’re trying to get something out of them, but people will perform, much, much better. When I left command, in July of this year well, actually, I guess it was last year now, 2021. I told the incoming commandant, I said, there’s only one thing you need to know as a leader, and I said, that’s love your troops. So that if you do that one thing, everything else will fall into place. They will work hard.

Gord Bennett [00:38:38]:
They’ll be dedicated. They will, develop themselves. You will execute, discipline as required, in the way that it needs to be done without harshness and without contempt. If you do that one thing, love your love your troops or your customers, you could insert your employees. Other things will will fall into place and you’ll be a phenomenal leader.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:09]:
Love it. Love it. And the following question of the show, how can people find you? How can they follow you? How can they grab a copy of the book? It’s all but you now. Oh. Shameless plugs. Have at it.

Gord Bennett [00:39:17]:
Fantastic. So I’ve got a website at misfitdesignthinking.com. I’ve got some free training materials there. Feel free to download them, watch the video, share them with other people, use them as you see fit. It’s not a problem. It’s free there. You can find me on Twitter at misfit underscore thinker. I do post on there, occasionally.

Gord Bennett [00:39:36]:
I try to get in there a couple of times a week. Over the Christmas holidays, a little bit less than that. My book can be found at, the Friesen Press bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You can get ecopies through Google Play, Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo. And the title is Misfit Design Thinking, Using Design Thinking to Energize Innovation and Creativity. And, shout out to, one of my friends. He’s, he’s an executive banker in United States. He actually helped me with the title there for energizing innovation and creativity because he uses design thinking in his bank in New York.

Gord Bennett [00:40:10]:
So, that’s fantastic. But, yeah, you can see all my content there on misfitdesignthinking.com. You can also see where to buy the book there as well. So by all means, download the materials, use them, and it’s, it’s fantastic.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:25]:
You know, saying that a banker on Wall Street, helped influence you with this book, that doesn’t give it credibility. I don’t know what would. So there you go. Go folks, go grab a copy. The links that Gord mentioned are all in the show notes. If you go to movingforwardleadership.com/20three, so 203, they’re all there in the show notes. Gord, my friend, thank you for coming on. It’s been a pleasure.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:50]:
It’s been Slice. And, man, I still can’t get over that word to actually doing this.

Gord Bennett [00:40:54]:
Yes. Fantastic. It’s been a great opportunity, Scott. Appreciate it.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:59]:
And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Peak Performance Leadership podcast. But you know what you could do to truly support the podcast and know that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend, and that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them. If you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams, or their organization. So do that. Help me help a friend win win all around and hey, you look like a great friend at the same time.

Scott McCarthy [00:41:38]:
So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more. There’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be. Whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.com forward / subscribe. And until next time, lead, don’t boss, and thanks for coming out. Take care now.