Creative Confidence

Creative Confidence Plot Summary

Introduction

When Doug Dietz saw a little girl crying, terrified of his MRI machine, his heart shattered. After spending years designing medical equipment for GE Healthcare, he'd always viewed his work through the lens of technical excellence. But that day, watching a child face the cold, intimidating tunnel of his creation, Doug realized he'd overlooked something essential: the human experience. This moment of empathy changed everything, sending Doug on a journey to transform scary medical equipment into adventures for children—turning MRI machines into pirate ships and space rockets—reducing pediatric sedation rates dramatically and bringing joy where there was once fear. This transformation wasn't about Doug suddenly acquiring new technical skills. Rather, it was about him reconnecting with his innate creative capacity and having the confidence to act on it. We all possess remarkable creative potential. The journey toward unleashing this potential begins when we embrace what the authors call "creative confidence"—the belief that we can change the world around us through creative action. This mindset isn't reserved for artists or designers. It lives within everyone, waiting to be rediscovered through small successes, guided mastery, and the courage to move from fear to action. Throughout these pages, you'll discover how to reclaim your creative power, overcome the barriers that hold you back, and tap into a natural reservoir of innovation that can transform not only your work but your entire approach to life.

Chapter 1: Flipping the Mindset: Embracing Design Thinking

Doug's revelation at the hospital catapulted him into action. Without significant resources or funding from his company, he decided to redesign the experience rather than the machine itself. He observed children at a day care center, talked with child life specialists, and assembled a volunteer team. Together, they transformed sterile medical environments into immersive adventures. One prototype turned an MRI scanner into a pirate ship, complete with a wooden captain's wheel surrounding the opening of the chamber. The technician would tell children they were sailing on the pirate ship and needed to stay perfectly still during their voyage. Afterward, they could select a small treasure from a pirate chest. The results were remarkable. Pediatric sedation rates plummeted, hospital efficiency improved, and patient satisfaction scores rose by 90 percent. But for Doug, the most meaningful feedback came when a six-year-old girl, after completing her scan in the "pirate ship," tugged on her mother's skirt and asked, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?" That simple question made all his efforts worthwhile. At the heart of Doug's innovation was a human-centered approach—what the authors call "design thinking." This methodology balances three essential elements: technical feasibility (can we build it?), business viability (can it succeed financially?), and human desirability (do people want or need it?). While most organizations excel at the first two, the human factor often represents untapped opportunity. The design thinking process moves through cycles of inspiration, synthesis, ideation/experimentation, and implementation—all starting with deep empathy for the people you're designing for. This empathic foundation represents a fundamental mindset shift. Instead of asking "How can we make the MRI less intimidating?" Doug reframed the challenge as "How might we transform a frightening medical procedure into an adventure that children actually enjoy?" This reframing—this flipping of perspective—opens new possibilities that technical improvements alone could never reveal. It's not about becoming more artistic; it's about reconnecting with a natural, childlike capacity to question, wonder, and imagine different futures. The power of this mindset shift extends far beyond healthcare or product design. When we approach challenges with creative confidence and human empathy, we start seeing opportunities for improvement everywhere. We become active shapers of our environment rather than passive observers. As the authors demonstrate through Doug's story and countless others, the first step toward unleashing human potential often begins with flipping our perspective—seeing with fresh eyes and having the confidence to act on what we discover.

Chapter 2: Daring to Act: Overcoming Fear of Failure

Picture a woman standing nervously behind a one-way mirror, watching a man with a boa constrictor draped casually around his neck. Her heart pounds as she prepares to confront her lifelong snake phobia. This scene comes from pioneering psychologist Albert Bandura's research on overcoming fears. Through a process he called "guided mastery," Bandura would lead phobic individuals through a sequence of small, manageable steps—from watching someone hold a snake to eventually touching one themselves. Remarkably, this approach could cure lifelong phobias in less than a day. But Bandura discovered something even more profound during follow-up interviews. People who conquered their snake phobias reported unexpected changes in other areas of their lives—they took up horseback riding, became fearless public speakers, explored new career possibilities. Overcoming one significant fear had transformed their entire belief system about what they could accomplish. Bandura called this newfound belief "self-efficacy"—the conviction that you can influence your situation and achieve what you set out to do. The authors draw a direct parallel between Bandura's research and creative confidence. The path from fear to courage follows a similar trajectory, with small successes building upon each other until transformation occurs. Thomas Edison exemplified this approach, viewing his numerous "failed" experiments not as failures at all but as necessary steps toward breakthrough. He famously said the real measure of success is "the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours." Similarly, the Wright brothers experienced countless failed flight trials before their historic success at Kitty Hawk. This perspective contradicts how most people approach creative challenges. When faced with potential failure, many retreat to safety. The prospect of judgment—of being told "that doesn't look like a horse" as happened to David Kelley's childhood friend in art class—can shut down creative expression for years, even decades. Organizations reinforce this caution with cultures that punish mistakes rather than learning from them. The authors describe how Bessemer Venture Partners counters this tendency with their "Anti-Portfolio"—a public catalog of their biggest missed opportunities, including passing on early investments in Google and FedEx. What these stories reveal is that creative confidence isn't about avoiding failure—it's about reframing how we think about it. When we see setbacks as information rather than indictments of our abilities, we become more willing to experiment, take risks, and persist through difficulty. Like Bandura's phobia patients, each small success builds our belief that we can effect change in the world. As Hungarian essayist György Konrád once said, "Courage is only the accumulation of small steps." The journey from fear to creative confidence begins with daring to take that first step.

Chapter 3: Sparking Insights: Finding Inspiration Through Empathy

When Rahul Panicker, Jane Chen, Linus Liang, and Naganand Murty began a design project to create a low-cost infant incubator for developing countries, they had little idea their work would evolve into Embrace—a revolutionary infant warmer that would eventually help thousands of premature babies. Their journey began with research: each year, fifteen million premature babies are born worldwide, with a million dying within twenty-four hours. Traditional incubators cost upwards of $20,000—impossibly expensive for most hospitals in developing regions. The breakthrough came when team member Linus Liang traveled to Nepal for field research. In a modern urban hospital, he noticed something perplexing: many donated incubators sat empty despite the desperate need. A doctor explained that mothers often delivered babies in villages thirty miles away. Even if they could reach the hospital, family needs meant mothers usually took their babies home after just a few days, regardless of medical advice. This insight completely reframed their challenge. Instead of designing a cheaper hospital incubator, they needed a solution that could work in a mother's home in a remote village. The team created an innovative sleeping bag-like device containing a phase-change material that, once warmed, maintains consistent temperature for four hours. Priced at a fraction of traditional incubators, it requires no constant electricity and can be used anywhere. When they tested prototypes in India, they gained further insights through empathy. One village mother explained that because Western medicines seemed so powerful, she would give her baby only half the prescribed dose "just to be safe." This observation led the team to replace numeric temperature indicators with a simple "OK" signal, preventing dangerous under-heating. This story illustrates how empathy—the ability to understand others' experiences and perspectives—forms the foundation of innovation. The authors describe empathy as "looking beyond what you already know for sure." When the Embrace team observed actual user behaviors and contexts, they discovered needs they never would have anticipated from behind their desks at Stanford. Similarly, while designing ice cream scoops, IDEO researchers noticed people licking residual ice cream off the scoop before placing it in the sink—an observation that led to "mouth-friendly" designs with no sharp edges. The authors suggest several practical approaches for gaining empathy: think like a traveler who notices every detail; engage in "relaxed attention" that allows unexpected connections; conduct interviews and observations in the field; ask probing "why" questions; reframe challenges to get at deeper human needs; and build a creative support network. Throughout, they emphasize that empathy isn't about asking people what they want and giving it to them. It's about understanding latent needs people might not even recognize themselves. The power of empathy extends far beyond product design. By deeply understanding the experiences of others—whether customers, colleagues, or family members—we gain insights that spark creative solutions to previously intractable problems. As the Embrace team demonstrated, when we set aside our assumptions and truly see the world through others' eyes, we open ourselves to breakthrough innovations that can transform lives.

Chapter 4: Leaping Forward: Rapid Prototyping and Experimentation

When Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta enrolled in Stanford's d.school LaunchPad class, neither expected to transform the digital news landscape. Both were self-described "geeks"—analytical and somewhat introverted engineering students. Their first assignment: build a functional prototype in just four days for an iPad news app. With no time to waste, they set up camp in a Palo Alto café where they spent ten hours daily observing potential users and rapidly iterating their design. "The iPad had just come out, so people were really curious about it," Akshay explains. When passersby inevitably stopped to ask about the device, he would hand it over with their latest prototype open and simply watch how people interacted with it. After observing hundreds of such impromptu user tests, the team made thousands of small iterations—everything from interaction patterns to button sizes. "In two weeks," Akshay recalls, "we went from people saying, 'This is crap' to 'Is this app preloaded on the iPad?'" The result was Pulse News, an elegant news reader that would eventually be downloaded by over twenty million people, featured by Steve Jobs at Apple's developer conference, and later acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million. What made Pulse successful wasn't just the founders' technical brilliance but their bias toward action—what the authors call "moving from planning to action." While many projects stall in endless preparation, Akshay and Ankit embraced rapid experimentation, letting user feedback guide their development. They exemplified Newton's first law of motion applied to innovation: "a body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to stay in motion." Organizations and individuals that thrive are those that initiate action, launch rapid innovation cycles, and learn by doing rather than waiting for perfect conditions. The authors share numerous techniques for overcoming inertia. One approach is embracing constraints rather than viewing them as limitations. When filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola needed a right-hand-drive taxi for a scene but had only left-hand-drive vehicles available, he creatively flipped the image in post-production rather than flying in an expensive car. Similarly, IDEO designers Adam Skaates and Coe Leta Stafford had just one hour to convince skeptical clients about a new dance feature for Elmo's Monster Maker app. Rather than giving up, they created an ingenious low-tech prototype: Adam stood behind a life-sized iPhone cutout while Coe Leta recorded with her webcam, simulating how children would interact with the app. Their quick video prototype was so persuasive that the feature was included in the final product. Prototyping isn't just for products—it works for services, spaces, and experiences too. When Walgreens wanted to reimagine the pharmacy experience, a team built a full-scale foam core prototype of a new store layout, allowing executives to physically walk through the concept. This tangible experience built crucial support for what would become Walgreens' successful "health and daily living" store format, where pharmacists quadrupled their customer interactions. The lesson throughout these stories is clear: innovation thrives on experimentation rather than perfection. The best innovators build quick, rough prototypes to test ideas early, embrace constraints as creative catalysts, and launch to learn rather than waiting until everything is flawless. As Ankit reflected, "Creativity is always in hindsight. It's not about just coming up with the one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at a hundred other solutions before arriving at the best one."

Chapter 5: Seeking Purpose: Aligning Passion with Work

David often draws a simple but profound sketch for his students: a seesaw with a heart on one side and a dollar sign on the other. This image captures the tension many face between pursuing financial security and following their passion. It's a balancing act that both authors have navigated throughout their careers. Tom once walked away from a lucrative management consulting job that would have tripled his salary to continue working at IDEO. David declined the chance for a potentially profitable IPO to focus on teaching and building creative confidence in others. Jeremy Utley's story illuminates this tension. As a young adult with natural analytical talents, Jeremy followed the advice of well-meaning career counselors into financial analysis. Though competent at his job, he found no fulfillment in it and resigned himself to "hating whatever I did for the next twenty years." During his MBA studies, he enrolled in a d.school course as a diversion from traditional business classes. Halfway through, Jeremy realized he was working harder but enjoying it far more than his other coursework. "I'd been writing off the Bootcamp course as 'playtime,'" he says. "I realized it was just as rigorous as anything I had done in the past, but much more rewarding." Jeremy eventually left his traditional career path—even repaying his former employer for two years of tuition—to join the d.school team. Today, he no longer uses the word "work" to describe what he does; he simply says he's "at Stanford" or "hanging out at the d.school." This transformation reflects what researcher Amy Wrzesniewski discovered about how people view their work: as a job (a means to a paycheck), a career (focused on advancement), or a calling (intrinsically rewarding and connected to a larger purpose). The difference isn't necessarily about the profession itself. As the authors point out, one person's flight attendant job can be another person's calling, depending on whether they see it as merely serving drinks or creating meaningful human connections at 30,000 feet. Finding your calling often requires experimentation. Biophysics PhD candidate Scott Woody felt increasingly trapped in solitary lab work studying motor proteins. After taking a d.school class called "Creative Gym," he discovered a passion for entrepreneurship and innovation. Despite being just a year or two away from earning his doctorate, Scott left his program to found a startup focused on improving how businesses recruit talent. When his mother initially questioned this dramatic shift, she changed her mind upon seeing him in person: he was visibly happier than he'd been in years. The authors offer practical suggestions for discovering your own calling: keep a journal noting moments when you feel most alive; try side projects that might reveal new passions; rate each day on a happiness scale to identify patterns; and apply design thinking to your own life by treating it as a project to be prototyped and improved. They emphasize that following your passion doesn't mean work will be effortless—as cellist Yo-Yo Ma told a young music student, he still practices up to six hours daily despite being at the pinnacle of his field. The heart/dollar seesaw reminds us that while financial security matters, true fulfillment comes from work that engages our whole selves. As 3M executive Monica Jerez discovered when she embraced design thinking, "My mind just became so big." By seeking alignment between our work and deeper purpose, we tap into inner reserves of energy and enthusiasm that transform not just our careers but our entire approach to life.

Chapter 6: Building Team Chemistry: Fostering Collaborative Innovation

When Kaaren Hanson took on the challenge of revitalizing Intuit's innovation culture, she quickly learned that executive support alone wouldn't create lasting change. Despite enthusiastic backing from senior leaders, the company's "Design for Delight" initiative initially remained more vision than reality. The breakthrough came when Kaaren recruited nine of Intuit's best design thinkers to form a group called Innovation Catalysts, who would spark creative initiatives and coach managers in turning ideas into action. One early project involved creating SnapTax, a user-friendly mobile app for filing simple tax returns. A small team including three Catalysts observed dozens of potential users in their natural environments like coffee shops, quickly prototyped eight versions in as many weeks, and created an application that let users simply photograph their W-2 forms and answer a few questions to complete their taxes. The project embodied Intuit's definition of "Design for Delight"—evoking positive emotion by exceeding customer expectations and delivering simplicity and benefit. As this success spread, the original nine Catalysts grew to nearly two hundred throughout the company, mentoring hundreds more colleagues. The results were measurable: higher customer loyalty metrics, increased revenues and profits, and recognition on Forbes' list of the world's most innovative companies. Kaaren's insight was that cultural transformation requires both "air coverage" (executive support) and "ground troops" (frontline innovators who implement new practices daily). The authors outline several principles for building creatively confident teams. One concept they call "karaoke confidence"—the ability to perform without fear of judgment or ridicule, similar to how amateur singers feel empowered to take the microphone in supportive environments. Creative cultures thrive when they maintain a sense of humor, build on others' energy, minimize hierarchy, value camaraderie, and temporarily defer judgment. Instead of saying "That's a bad idea," team members ask "What would make it better?" or "What new idea does that spark?" Physical space also plays a crucial role in fostering innovation. When the d.school needed temporary quarters, they prototyped different environments, learning valuable lessons with each iteration: keeping people together but not too close, considering acoustic privacy, adding flexibility in the right places, tailoring spaces to different activities, and creating an atmosphere that gives permission to experiment. Simple environmental cues—like the Digital Yurt at IDEO with its paper table surface and bowl of colored pencils—can send powerful nonverbal signals that innovation is welcome. Language similarly shapes creative culture. When Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black noticed negative speech patterns had created an environment hostile to new ideas, she instituted a ten-dollar fine for phrases like "we've tried that already" or "that will never work." The authors advocate positive alternatives like "How might we...?"—an optimistic phrase that suggests improvement is always possible while lowering the bar just enough to consider improbable ideas. What emerges from these stories is a vision of innovation as inherently collaborative. The myth of the lone creative genius gives way to diverse, multidisciplinary teams whose members build on each other's strengths. As JetBlue's Bonny Simi discovered when tackling operational problems after a customer service crisis, "You realize that you aren't going to solve the problem sitting in an office. You need to get out and talk to the people who are actually dealing with it." By creating supportive environments where team members feel safe to experiment, organizations can unleash the collective creative confidence that drives breakthrough innovation.

Chapter 7: Taking Action: Practical Tools for Creative Transformation

In 2007, Marcy Barton stood at a crossroads. After four decades as a fifth-grade teacher, she felt frustrated watching creativity drain from her students as standardized testing increasingly dominated education. Rather than accepting this trend, she attended a design thinking workshop at Stanford's d.school and emerged with renewed determination to reignite creative learning. She completely restructured her curriculum, turning required academic standards into design challenges. Her students didn't just read about American colonization—they flipped their desks over to create ships sailing to the New World and used math skills to build scale models of colonies. The results were remarkable: improved test scores and, more importantly, students who asked better questions and engaged more deeply with the world around them. Marcy's transformation exemplifies what the authors call "the do something mindset"—the belief that positive change is possible through action rather than observation or complaint. This proactive stance distinguishes creatively confident individuals. When radio producer John Keefe heard a colleague lament about unreliable city bus schedules, he didn't just sympathize—he built a working phone service in a single day that let riders call for real-time bus locations. His immediate action inspired others, including author Tom Kelley, who successfully petitioned his city to move a dangerously placed bus shelter after noticing it blocked a children's bike path. The authors have developed numerous practical tools to help readers build their own creative confidence through action. Their mindmapping technique helps generate divergent ideas by starting with a central concept and branching outward until unexpected connections emerge. The "Thirty Circles Exercise" challenges participants to transform blank circles into recognizable objects in three minutes, demonstrating how fluency (quantity of ideas) combines with flexibility (diversity of ideas) to produce breakthrough thinking. "Empathy maps" organize field observations into what people say, do, think, and feel, revealing patterns and insights that might otherwise remain hidden. For collaborative settings, tools like "Speed Dating" break down social barriers by pairing participants for brief, meaningful conversations, while "Nickname Warm-ups" temporarily flatten hierarchies by giving everyone playful personas that free them from organizational roles. When offering feedback, the simple "I like/I wish" framework encourages constructive critique that builds rather than diminishes creative confidence. And "Customer Journey Maps" help teams systematically identify innovation opportunities by documenting each step in a user's experience. These tools share a common thread: they make the creative process tangible and accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or self-perception. As designer Bill Moggridge observed, "Few people think about it or are aware of it. But there is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere." The authors' message is clear—creative confidence isn't achieved through reading, thinking, or talking alone. It requires action, taken one step at a time, through experiencing a series of small successes. The most powerful approach may be treating your own life as a design project. Experiment with different behaviors, gather feedback, iterate, and improve. As Pressfield reminds us, "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us." Creative confidence offers a bridge between those two lives—a way to transform what could be into what is through the courage to act.

Summary

Creative confidence isn't some rare, inborn talent possessed by a lucky few—it's our natural birthright that many of us have forgotten how to access. Through dozens of compelling stories, we've witnessed how ordinary people like Doug Dietz, Marcy Barton, and John Keefe transformed their lives and work by reconnecting with this innate capacity. Their journeys reveal a consistent pattern: creative confidence emerges through guided mastery, small successes, and the courage to take that first uncertain step. When we reframe failure as learning, embrace human empathy as our starting point, and adopt a bias toward action rather than endless planning, we open ourselves to breakthrough innovations that would otherwise remain undiscovered. The power of creative confidence extends far beyond traditional "creative" fields. Whether you're a teacher reimagining education, an executive building an innovative culture, or simply someone seeking more meaning in daily life, the principles and tools shared throughout these pages offer a practical pathway forward. Start by choosing creativity as a mindset. Practice empathy to discover unmet needs. Build quick prototypes to learn and iterate. Find the sweet spot where your skills, passions, and opportunities overlap. And perhaps most importantly, surround yourself with others who nurture rather than diminish your creative spark. As psychologist Albert Bandura's research demonstrates, our belief in our capacity to create positive change profoundly influences what we attempt and achieve. By embracing creative confidence, you gain the power to reimagine not just products and services, but your entire approach to life's challenges—transforming what you once saw as impossible into your new reality.

About Author

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Tom Kelley

Thomas Kelley runs the marketing side of the hugely successful industrial product design firm IDEO. His brother, David, started the company in 1977 in Palo Alto, CA. One of his earliest projects was designing the first mouse for Steve Jobs at Apple Computers.

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