departments and businesses through
record growth I’ve been involved with
mergers and I’ve been involved with
acquisitions I’ve seen product
introductions product reinventions
product innovations and I’ve hired and I
fired some of the best people in the
world I had a really good run and I
thought when it was all done I was ready
to go do it a lot of people like me do
you sit on boards you become a mentor
your invest in companies but I’m here
somehow at the University of Texas and
I’m teaching our students how to become
empathetic how to make mistakes and how
to lead in this new burgeoning creative
economy so the truth is I ended up in
education but it isn’t so strange that
I’m here for many many years
I hired so many students out of college
and I watched them rise up through the
ranks and then in the last few years
what I noticed is they weren’t being as
successful you see businesses have
changed the business has changed product
cycles today our products cyclones the
need to interact with your end user your
consumer your employee is at rapid pace
we need to work in these
multidisciplinary teams to get anything
done so the work we’re doing here has
two significant goals one it’s to
prepare our students beyond the 40 acres
you see a diploma is just the price of
entry businesses want more and the
second is to and a little harder is to
change decades-old convention in higher
education learning I’m also going to
explain a little bit how we do this a
little bit about human sin
and Design Thinking because I want all
of you to walk away today and think how
can I be more human centered so as I
said higher education does a very good
job particularly here at the University
of Texas we do a great job educating our
students but we do it in silos and those
silos don’t allow us to have cross
disciplinary work now it doesn’t mean
that our students and our professors
don’t want to do that see the problem we
have to solve is our is the funding
problem we’re rewarded for the number of
students in seats in a department we’re
not rewarded for the cross collaborative
work that we do so we have an amazing
opportunity at UT to do something
different because think of it we have
almost infinite knowledge here we have
so much research and so many smart
people in this university the cross
collaboration can is is mind-blowing and
how could we expect a recent set of
graduates to go out into the world if we
haven’t taught them how to collaborate
how to work with others empathy critical
problem-solving we need to be
responsible for teaching them that
because today we are living in a very
multidisciplinary world our students
have to learn about this they have to
learn how to live and work and perform
in this world now we want them to be
fantastic at their craft or their
discipline whether their business or
computer science or engineering or
design but they need to be more they
need to know how to problem-solve they
need to be critical thinkers they need
to understand how to work with others
that are not like them so how do we do
that
so we reimagine higher education sounds
simple right but we’re doing it I want
to talk about this is my favorite part
of the speech
the school the school of design and
creative technologies and what we’re
doing there first of all we are
designing a curriculum that is
responsive to the market you see higher
education has a wonderful way of
teaching a curriculum for 20 years in
the world that we live in today and in
the discipline that we have in our
school that’s very difficult to do this
curriculum embodies design thinking
entrepreneurship and a highly
collaborative work environment and
second we’re changing who teaches it and
where we teach it we decided that all
these 3 credit class three credits 15
week classes that wasn’t necessarily the
way that we needed to do things and
we’ve recognized the need for
entrepreneurial skills to be taught to
creative people so this past semester
who tried something very different 24
students were chosen out of a pool of
about a hundred that applied to take a
class that was taught by really
fantastic designers up at the IBM design
studios in North North Austin so each
week they gone on the bus and they went
up to uh IBM studios and obviously the
bus took them down to and it was funny
as it went on in the semester the team
called it the campus the design campus
because that’s what it became but there
they were learning problems that
businesses or that particular business
was dealing with it’s very much like
they would teach their new employees and
it was it had restrictions and they were
in a corporate environment and they were
working with multidisciplinary teams of
people they didn’t know but we also had
mentors and guest speakers and lots of
people to help shape this experience for
them and I have to tell you it was it
was mind-bending to watch this
think about it think about when you
would have applied for a job if you had
this type of experience or you wrote a
cover letter what would it have been
like for you to talk about something
like this when we went up for the final
presentation after the 15 weeks and we
took a whole bunch of people up there
and I’ll tell you as I’m driving up
there I’m thinking oh my god I hope this
worked but we got up there and these
students were amazing not only was their
thought process and how they solve these
problems just incredible but their
presentation skills the way they felt
confident about themselves they were
transformed by this each and every one
of them told me they wish that more of
their classes were experiential where
they could learn and they could learn
with other people because they felt like
they took knowledge away from there that
they could use for the rest of their
life and you know what as educators and
academics we were transformed by this
too
and this semester because we were so
excited about it we’re doing something
similar with other companies USA a
McKinsey design BNSF railroad wpengine
we’re making sure that our students are
getting real-world experience in a very
different setting we’ve also started
teaching microcredit courses these are
one credit five-week courses because if
we want our students to understand all
about the different disciplines that
we’re working we want them to be able if
you’re a designer go take a computer
science course understand how they solve
problems
what’s the nomenclature if you’re a
computer scientist go take an intro to
design course understand what they’re
talking about what’s fabulous about
these courses and actually all of our
courses is that they’re getting filled
up they’re all filled up there is a need
and a desire and there is a palpable
excitement there’s like a buzz that runs
around this floor that we’re on it’s
very exciting to watch because the
students are not being taught but
they’re learning
it’s one thing to teach it’s another
thing to learn and they’re feeling that
this is something that can help them
going forward we also hired a serial
entrepreneur a woman named Jan Ryan who
happens actually to be here and the
reason we did this is we wanted to bring
entrepreneurial skills right to our
creative team you know what I’ve noticed
in my career is nobody ever ever wanted
to talk to creative people about
business or entrepreneurial skills that
was actually for somebody else that
didn’t make sense to me you know it’s
another piece of the problem it’s a
puzzle for them to solve and our
students have really embraced jan is
inundated with them has really have
really embraced the concept and what to
do with it so you’re wondering probably
who’s teaching all this courses you got
a hint here a lot of them are
professionals there are people that are
in the industry that are doing the work
they’re staying on the cutting edge that
know where the trends are going this is
what’s going to keep our students
competitive in the marketplace this is
what’s going to help them get out there
and get jobs and be recognized so that’s
the how let me talk you a little bit
about the what what are we teaching here
well and how we’re gonna make this stick
so really what’s Yugi empathy how many
of you know what design thinking is or
human-centered design guys anybody take
a course here ok good we’ve got it we’ve
got a few so design thinking or human
centered design is often confused with
the visual aspect of design it’s the
tangibility of it but really what it is
it’s a methodology that designers have
actually used since the 1960s and what
they do with this methodology is they’re
trying to solve a couple of or answer a
couple of questions what is the actual
problem we’re trying to solve and who we
try to solve that problem for
and with this methodology you will go
through a discovery phase and insights
ideation experimentation testing failure
come back to ideation testing failure
and you do kind of a rinse and repeat
until you come up with a solution that’s
human centered that people will use
that’s made for someone it uses often
interdisciplinary team because what you
want to do is get different people’s
ideas of how to solve this you know
people coming at it from a software
perspective and people coming at it from
a design perspective people coming at it
from an engineering perspective will
have different ways of looking at a
problem and we want to make sure that
you bring in all those ways because if
I’ve learned anything there’s never one
way to solve a problem and empathy is a
huge part of what we teach now empathy
is not sympathy it’s not feeling sorry
for people in fact it’s understanding
people at a deep personal level and why
is that important well have you going to
create something for humans you might as
well understand them otherwise we can
create it for the monkey so we want to
understand people now this is a soft
skill this is the skill that hasn’t been
valued so to speak but you know before I
took this position at the University of
Texas I did my design research I did my
human Center design and I talked to
businesses and I talked to professors I
talked to students and I talked to
parents what was very interesting about
this is businesses told me almost
hands-down what they told me the type of
student they just expected the students
coming out of the University of Texas to
have fantastic crafts they were going to
be great engineers or whatever but they
wanted them to have these other skills
and one of those skills was empathy
because they understand today you have
to work in a team dynamic and they have
to be able to work with people and they
have to solve problems quickly
businesses also understand today you
cannot run a business from the bottom of
a spreadsheet anymore it’s about the
unions that surround you and the humans
you serve and we’re seeing more and more
businesses today using this type of
thinking businesses nonprofits
governments it’s all over so how many of
you remember blockbuster here
I loved blockbuster okay so Friday right
Friday would come and that was like the
release day and you’d have to run to
Blockbuster and you get the new release
and you’d run home and I know like
everybody would want to watch it he had
24 hours to watch it the new release now
you can keep the new release longer but
the late fees were quite hefty so you
returned it and this is just the way we
did things right we accepted it that was
the norm so a gentleman named Reed
Hastings was doing the same thing he was
going to blockbuster only he kept his
DVD a little bit too long and when he
went to return it the late fees exceeded
the cost of a new DVD and he said hmm
there’s got to be a better way and what
was that better way Netflix so he and
what Netflix initially did was they just
had a DVD mailing service she bought a
subscription and what you did was you
you know you sent it along and you could
watch it whenever you wanted and it
changed the viewing habits of everybody
you the human owe us we were in control
we can do what we want we didn’t have to
worry about whether we’re gonna have a
late fee or not we just wouldn’t get the
video you know until we sent it back so
Netflix as you know became so popular
that they were trying to get more
content from studios but Studios didn’t
want to get in the content interestingly
enough so they decided they were going
to make their own content which
everybody laughed at but they also had
something they were watching how humans
viewed and what they knew is that humans
viewed things all at once because people
don’t have time
hence not only did they develop new
content but they released it all at once
and we now have the new phenomenon of
binge watching I am a binge watcher I
don’t know about all you but I am a
binge watch er and so what they did was
they really looked at human behavior and
how to make that successful last year I
met a fabulous designer I interviewed
her for my Colin column a woman named
Ariel Keenan she works for the city of
New York um in the innovation group and
she was tasked with figuring out how to
help the homeless population in New York
during dangerous and inclement weather
now New York City is huge so many
agencies and she used design thinking
with all these agencies to map the
journey of a homeless person and all of
these agencies began to co-create with
her in a group how you would change the
system and that went from data to
communications to infrastructure and
they changed it and she was so moved by
that that she created tools for all
these agencies so they can go out and do
this themselves this stuff works now we
can’t talk about the relevance of design
and design thinking we’re talking
getting back to how we teach our
students about mistakes and failure you
see I hate the F word
I think it’s misused because we spend
our lives telling our students and
telling ourselves not to fail how many
of you when you came home with a failing
grade your parents jumped up and down
and said fail fast I don’t think that
happened or in business situation where
you make a mistake and somebody will
usually say to you well whose heads
gonna roll we are actually talking about
learning and what we need to do is make
sure our students understand that making
mistakes is part of continuous learning
we need to be
learning in a continuous fashion it’s
not about failure it’s about learning so
I just want to say this I think the road
from childhood to adulthood is filled
with wonderment with learning with
wanting to seek out information and we
have a job to do which is to make sure
that we’re creating the right
environment and we’re giving our
students the right information to go
forward and be successful not just in
their work career but in their life you
know the speed and pace isn’t been a
slowdown but we need to teach them ways
to cope and deal with it so we can
relieve the stress we need to teach them
how to work in the world that we’re
living in today and what’s great is that
it is happening here at the University
of Texas because you know what we say is
what happens here changes the world and
it’s happening so thank you very much and hook them horns