If you are leading product development or any form of design teams or creative professionals or leading an innovation effort, I think you will find the short video very insightful. In the video, James Dyson answers questions on product design curated from twitter. I think that the selection of questions and the answers given by James Dyson as part of this AMA are really worth listening multiple times.
You can watch the entire video here.
One fundamental learning for us as leaders from his response and from his journey as an inventor / innovator is that, a truly innovative product or service typically finds it hard to find acceptance, not only in the market but even within the organisation.
So, if we, as leaders, want to create a culture that supports creativity that leads to innovations, we need to learn to see these innovations with a different lens and learn to support such creative ideas.
I recently delivered a talk on how to be creative on demand. You can find a recording of the same here.
I also delivered a talk on how to create a culture that supports creativity and innovation. You can find the recording of the same here as well.
Also, there is a lot that we can learn from designers and how they use prototyping as a way to test hypothesis and validate what works, what doesn’t work and why. This creates a more deeper understanding about both – what works and what doesn’t.
We can use the same process when we are faced with uncertainty. We can come up with hypothesis and create prototypes to test them and in the process learn about what works, what doesn’t and more importantly, why. I have written elsewhere about insights on leading under uncertainty here (Making Judgement calls), here (How can CEO’s Lead in Uncertain Times and Thrive – Great advice from Ram Charan) and here (Leading in a VUCA World – One conversation at a Time).
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I think James Dyson offers some really good insight for both product designers, innovators and leaders who lead these product designers / innovators. Some of these insights are explicit and some others implicit. As leaders, we are usually adept at reading between the lines and therefore can learn from the implicit insights shared by James.
He also shared a lot of insights in a conversation with Tim Ferris on his podcast. You can listen to the longer (much longer) conversation here. I have a ton of notes from that conversation, which I plan to share sometime soon.
