The Dreamers.

Interviews and articles dispatched weekly

map magazine

Paul Bennett

For some, optimism and pragmatism do not traditionally go hand-in-hand. But for Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer of lauded design and innovation consulting firm IDEO, a combination of the two is what holds the answers to the world’s most pressing problems.

What was your childhood dream?
I was one of those kids who was always colouring in things and drawing and painting. I always wanted to design, although I didn’t know that it was called design. When I was 11, my father bought me a book called The Album Cover Album, and I suddenly wanted to be what was in those days called a commercial artist. I ended up doing a degree in graphic design and from there I went.

For many designers, IDEO is the holy grail. How does one craft a career in the realm of ideas?
I’ll tell you a story. I was asked to speak in parliament in the UK a year ago – I don’t know why they invited me, I think they just wanted to bring in inspirational people! Everyone was asked to introduce themselves – there was a group of us – and everybody else was someone who was fixing something very important. But I just said: ‘I’m a designer.’ And a guy then said to me: ‘Well, why are you here?’ So I told him what we do at IDEO – we talk to normal people and we’re optimistic about what we can learn from them. We have a very honest conversation as people and we figure out ideas together and hopefully bring those ideas to life … There was a long pause, until a politician four rows back said: ‘I think that’s what we’re supposed to do too.’ I think of IDEO in two ways. One – we’re very optimistic people and I think you have to be optimistic to be a designer right now. As an organisation, on a good day we’re really optimistic and on a bad day we can be somewhat naive, but I’d rather be naive than cynical any day. The second thing is that, because IDEO was started as an organisation about products and making stuff, our hands are as important as our minds. To have an optimistic body language, but a pragmatic output, is how you make a career at IDEO, or in design in general.

Do you think many branding-strategy agencies fail because they don’t place enough value on optimism and inspiration?
I think so. We once did a project for a client in The Netherlands looking at the future of feeding babies, and we worked alongside a large multinational branding agency. We fought them tooth and claw, and at the end I said to the client: ‘I have to know how we differ from them.’ And he said this: ‘IDEO was obsessed with finding the truth and telling it, and the others were obsessed with creating a myth and selling it.’ I think truth and optimism go hand-in-hand, because you genuinely need to be okay with the truth. Our entire process is about uncovering small truths in normal people’s lives and being inspired by what we see there.

As OpenIDEO projects evolve, have any caused you to have a great shift in thinking?
All of them have. What’s great about OpenIDEO is the level of global sophistication that it uncovers. We get ideas from Bangladesh, Tibet – everywhere – and it makes you go: ‘Wow, I had no idea we all felt the same.’ There’s something about the global levelling of it that I find very inspiring. You make assumptions that people in different places think different things, but then you realise they think exactly the same as you do. It’s also very interesting to see what experiments are going on around the world with things like food, healthcare and social behaviours that you can learn from. The food challenge we’re doing right now has had the fastest uptake so far. I think the topic struck at the right time and is something that everyone can latch onto. The breadth on the site is pretty incredible – you’ve got everything from policy to vegetable gardens.You have to let your ego diminish. I have a colleague who describes it as post-ego behaviour – you have to be on a post-ego journey. When designers challenge us about OpenIDEO, saying that they can’t believe we’re giving stuff away for free, I say to them that I can’t believe they’re still charging for it. OpenIDEO, to me, is a testament to people’s post-ego behaviour because they only want to see the problem go away, they don’t need their name associated with having solved it. We feel the same way.

You focus on asking the right questions in order to find a great idea. How do we need to adjust our everyday thinking in order to be asking the right questions?
People are looking for these big silver bullets to these big complex problems, but you can’t just go: ‘How do we end hunger?’ Nobody knows where to begin answering it. Whereas, if you ask ‘How do we start to connect rural production with urban consumption?’, it’s at a scale where people can relate to the problem. At IDEO, we’ve got a fixation with breaking problems down into chunks rather than looking for a big answer to a big problem. It’s about thinking how can we make it better, rather than focusing on what’s wrong with it.

When was the last time you were surprised?
I’m actually pleasantly surprised on a daily basis. There are obviously global threads that you start to see again and again, but I’m really excited by the level of sophistication and experiments that are going on around the world. People are tackling things in really interesting ways and there’s a sort of ‘idea anarchy’ that’s going on in the world right now, where people are desperately trying to make things happen. You see change occurring in a really tangible way now. People are asking the same questions but trying to figure out in a local, cultural context how they answer them in their own way.

What inspires you?
I’m very inspired by everything that surrounds me. I don’t read business books – I’d rather use my eyes and just get out there. One of the things I do when I travel is I go and buy local music on vinyl, so I have a vinyl collection that represents my travels.

What has been your greatest challenge?
I think it’s true for all of us – letting go of my ego. It’s a case of being okay with learning. When I had my own business in New York for many years, I was all about teaching and not really about listening. Someone gave me a great piece of advice at IDEO – you don’t need to be the smartest person in the room here, and it’s actually liberating not to be.

What has been your greatest achievement?
That I’m still inspired and not jaded. I like to think of myself as continually excited by what I see. I think it’s very important that you still do and that you don’t just talk about doing.

What are your words of wisdom?
Be optimistic – it will get better. I read an article years ago about flying aeroplanes where they asked a pilot how planes stay in the air. He said that a plane doesn’t stay in the air because of anything mechanical or hydraulic; it stays in the air because everyone flying inside it believes that it can – flying is the collective suspension of disbelief. To me, that’s how I live my life. You have to suspend disbelief, because if you don’t, it doesn’t work. That’s why I love IDEO, because we’re the ultimate disbelief suspenders.