Design For Strengths: Applying Design Thinking to Individual and Team Strengths

By John K. Coyle

Are you on the cusp of greatness? Do you have untapped potential and talents just waiting to be released? Read this book to learn the same creative problem-solving methodology (Design Thinking) used extensively at Stanford, Google, IDEO, and Apple. This guide will unlock your personal potential, and that of your team and your business.

By exploring the intersection of Design Thinking and strengths-finding, innovation expert John K. Coyle demonstrates what most high achievers intuitively know–that each one of us possesses a unique combination of strengths, talents, skills and capabilities to achieve breakthrough performance–but may need a code to unlock them.
Design for Strengths delivers the process, tools and mindsets required to find and maximize your hidden potential. Illuminated by a captivating narrative of Olympic training and competition, Coyle demonstrates how he used the Design Thinking process and mindset to hack the sport of speedskating and win an Olympic silver medal. This book contains real-life examples of how individuals and organizations can use Design Thinking to define the right problem, and to ask and answer a better question. Instead of "how do I fix my weaknesses?" ask "how can I design for my strengths?"

More than a dozen leading experts contributed to this book, including Steven Kotler, David and Tom Kelley, David Eagleman, Daniel Coyle, Dave Evans and Chip Conley, as well as Olympic gold medalists Apolo Ohno and Meryl Davis. Read the book to expose a hidden-in-plain-sight secret. We all contain the capacity to do something extraordinary--if we design for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John K. Coyle
• Release date: Mar 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732094222

John K. Coyle

JOHN K. COYLE is one of the world’s leading experts in innovation and Design Thinking. He teaches innovation courses at Marquette University and at the CEDIM Graduate school in Monterrey, Mexico. He is an NBC sports analyst, two-time TEDx presenter, author, and sought-after keynote speaker. John spent more than a decade in management consulting and went on to become the head of innovation for a Fortune 500 mobile telecom company. John won an Olympic silver medal in speedskating—an achievement he attributes directly to his Design Thinking background. He earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and is a graduate of Stanford University, where he earned a degree in Product Design. John is known as known as The Time Guy because he is a thought leader in the field of chronoception—the study of how we, as humans, process time. His mission is to innovate the human experience with time. When John is not writing or delivering keynotes and workshops, he enjoys exploring exotic locations, growing trinidad moruga scorpion peppers, and riding his fat tire bike in a leisure suit.

Book preview

PREFACE

For long periods of my life, I walked around in a deadened shuffle with my head in a fog. In both sports and business, there were years, multiple years, where I was trapped in a daily and ever-present struggle—an obsession to overcome my weaknesses. During those periods, the future receded, the present disappeared, and time sped up. Even though I didn’t quite know it at the time, life was quietly miserable in the in-between. As Thoreau put it, The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. I was one of those men.

In the mirror of hindsight, and with significant introspection, I have realized that those periods of time—those with few memories, few highlights, and an inability to be present—were periods in which I was focused intently and desperately on trying not to be a failure. With the sage words of some amazing mentors, and insights from some thoughtful authors (many of whom are in this book), I realized that the return to life, color, and happiness only happened when I finally let go of chasing weaknesses and instead turned toward, and leaned into, my native strengths.

The other day, I took the 6:00 a.m. train to the city and saw this same mass of men waiting at the station. It was a gray morning, and the gray train arrived, and I watched a gray line of workers shuffle forward with no smiles, no conversation, just another day at the office. The same was true on the ride home: a file of zombies with their minds elsewhere. Perhaps my favorite author, Antoine de St. Exupéry, put it best in Wind, Sand, and Stars:

I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

Looking out the window at the people getting off the train, I wondered if they ever asked themselves, Is this it? Is this all there is? I wondered if they too were stuck like I was for so many years.

That is why I wrote this book. I hope that it might help even just a few people get unstuck.

INTRODUCTION

So, what is this book about and who is it for? As the cover suggests, this book is about the intersection of Design Thinking and cultivating your strengths to achieve breakthrough performance. Of course, there is a great deal of readily available information on Design Thinking. There is also a host of (occasionally paradoxical) information on the merits of leaning into strengths.

In the following pages, however, I aim to show a) how to use Design Thinking to b) design a life, a career, or a team for your strengths, in order to c) achieve breakthrough performance. At first, such an investigation might sound simple: spend more time on strengths and less time on weaknesses. But … how can we know if something is truly a strength? Truly a weakness? A skills gap? As will also be explored, oftentimes strengths emerge in the negative space around weaknesses.

This book is for anyone who has worked very hard at something—in business, life, sport, music, hobbies—and stopped seeing progress. High achievers often have a programmed inability to let go, even when there might be a better path forward. If I am successful, by the end of the book, I will have helped you to move beyond your current internal narratives—your entrenched beliefs from childhood—about fixing weaknesses. Instead, you’ll find new ways to identify and design for your native strengths, and to identify and design around your weaknesses. What will also emerge in the thundercloud around weaknesses is the silver lining of the strengths that underpin them. Often, strengths and weaknesses are facets of the same thing.

As the saying goes, Facts tell and stories sell. My intention in writing this book is to share data-driven, proven frameworks for problem solving, and mesh them with emotionally engaging stories that will activate your will to utilize what you have learned. My goal is to empower you to innovate your life, your team, your career, and your company—to help you design for strengths in order to achieve breakthrough performance.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK: The chapters of this book are designed to be somewhat stand-alone. Each chapter generally features 1) a story or vignette to tee up the topic, 2) some essential data-driven framing from Design Thinking and other innovation methodologies to inform the story, and 3) a breakout section with thoughts shared by a world-leading thinker or practitioner of Design Thinking, or a story from a truly inspirational person.

This book is not directly prescriptive. Rather than end each chapter with a list of lessons, to-dos, or activities, my hope—my fondest wish—is that the stories themselves trigger emotions that activate actions.

FOR FREE BONUS MATERIALS including a strengths/ weakness assessment, and the story of my semi-clothed run-in with Tonya Harding at the 1994 Olympics (true!), please visit this web page.

Johnkcoyle.com/strengths-book-freebies

CHAPTER 1

FAILURES AND TURNING POINTS

Quitting … is Good?

During my sophomore year at Stanford, I was handed a lesson in humility. After almost two years of intense focus and diligent studying to complete the physics and math courses required for a mechanical engineering degree, all my hopes came crashing down in one afternoon.

I remember sitting in the darkened semicircle of the classroom, nervous as the professor began to scratch midterm scores on the board for Math 202 Linear Algebra. He drew a graph with a curve, while the assistant passed out the papers. As the professor turned around after finishing his graph, I realized I would have to give up—that I would have to quit. As an achievement-oriented person and an elite athlete, this was not an easy conclusion, but the writing, in this case, was literally on the wall.

The professor explained, Here’s the curve for the exam— the high score was 86 percent, the lowest score was 42 percent, so … He began drawing, 77 to 86 is an A, 68 to 77 is a B …

He droned on, pausing to look at me as I started to raise my hand and then quickly lowered it. Facing me on the paper on the desk was my test score, circled in red: 13 percent. I wasn’t just the worst student in the class, I was the worst by a huge margin, having scored barely a third as many right answers as the second worst student in the class. I was terrible. I was a failure. I was ready to quit. Numbly, I embraced the reality that I would have to drop Math 202, and in so doing, have to change my major, because this was a required class for a degree in Mechanical Engineering.

I shuffled slowly up the stairs, mulling over the situation, including the inevitable call to my parents. However, as I exited the classroom and emerged into the sunny skies of the Stanford quad, I was surprised to discover that rather than feeling regret or disappointment—I felt instead a strange sense of euphoria and emerging possibilities. Suddenly my path, which had been murky with the looming dangers and obstacles of math classes that were nearly or actually out of my reach, had become a bit clearer. There was no more try harder, work harder, or get smarter. Those ships had sailed. Now all that was left was to do something different, which until that very moment, had seemed like the worst thing in the world. It had, instead, become liberating.

Daniel Gilbert illustrates this psychological phenomenon well in his book, Stumbling on Happiness. He shares example after example demonstrating how bad we are at predicting our feelings about future events: The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to. When people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job or a romantic partner … if they flub an interview, flunk an exam, or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful. As it turns out, I was going to be OK, or even better than OK.

Reframing: Failure Becomes a Launchpad

Ididn’t know it at the time, but this pattern—of pursuing something with all my energy only to fail spectacularly— would repeat itself many times throughout my life. What I also didn’t know is that each time I failed for the right reasons, a breakthrough success would nearly always follow on the heels of the defeat.

What is failure for the right reasons? Well, failure for the wrong reasons is all the usual suspects—not trying, not putting in the time, being lazy, giving up too soon. But failing for the right reasons—which often feels the very worst, because of the investment—means failure for the simple reason that you are pursuing the wrong thing. Like the rim of a puzzle or the outlines in a coloring book, this type of defeat lends clarity to the boundaries of our weaknesses and talent gaps. It also sheds light on where to fill-in with our strengths and native capabilities.

I learned from that failure that highly conceptual math was not one of my strengths and never would be. But I also realized that I did love to solve real-world problems. Like many low points in life, this failure became a huge turning point toward the positive. In the weeks that followed, I cast about for a new major, one that would still provide the stability and earning potential of a mechanical engineering degree, while not requiring as much theoretical math.

A Turning Point: Apolo Ohno

Iinterviewed Apolo Ohno, who is the most decorated winter Olympian in US history after winning eight Olympic medals, including two gold, two silver, and four bronze. He’s also a winner of season four of Dancing With the Stars , a serial entrepreneur, and author of Zero Regrets . He shared this story about a turning point in his life:

A defining moment for me in the sport of speedskating came in January of 1997. I remember sitting on the steps of the OTC (Olympic Training Center) with you, John. We had both just failed to make the Olympic team and sat silently, contemplating our future. Just one year prior I had won the US trials—and here I was, sitting on the steps with my head in my hands after coming in 16th place, dead last at the trials, slapped in the face by the reality and enormity of my failure. At that point, you have to ask yourself, What do I do now? This was a turning point for me.

I knew I didn’t fail because I wasn’t good enough. I knew I failed because I lacked focus and commitment. I was focused on the outcome rather than the process. Despite winning the trials the year before as a 14-year-old, I came to the Olympic Trials with no fire, no passion. If I was to continue, I knew something had to change: four years is a long time, and I thought, If you’re really going to do this, you are going to have to learn to become obsessed with the process, not the outcome. For the next four years and beyond, I became obsessed with innovation—with trying to figure out the best technique, the best nutrition, the best ways to train, the best recovery, the best mental processes—mindfulness and meditation, anything to improve my performance.

With that change of focus, I started to appreciate the lifelong journey and take pride and joy in the learning process. Most athletes don’t enjoy training, but every single day I woke up excited—excited to try something new, to make some new tweak that could potentially lead to breakthrough success. One year later, I once again won the US Trials and went on, that same season, to become the youngest skater ever to win a World Cup event.

PS: I don’t know if I ever told you this, but when I was 11, Yuki—my father—and I watched the 1994 Winter Olympics together on television (your games). Those were the Olympics from Lillehammer, Norway: the games most people remember for the Tonya-and-Nancy show. Not in our house. Short track speedskating—now, that was cool. To me, the skaters looked like action superheroes. That is how I got started.

Almost immediately after my failure in math and the subsequent turning point, my attention became attuned to a related program at Stanford called Product Design. Happily, it was still an engineering degree—which would please my parents. But instead of a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, the degree would be a Bachelor of Science in Product Design, which required less math and physics than Mechanical Engineering. Instead, it required nearly the entire Art Design core—an area of secret passion. This unforeseen turning point became one of the most defining (and positive) changes in my life.

After a short and surprisingly easy call with my parents, I changed my major to Product Design. I was assigned a new academic advisor, David Kelley. I had already heard his name in hallowed whispers and was quite daunted prior to our first meeting.

David Kelley was a legend. And his legend only grew in subsequent years. He started working with Steve Jobs back when Apple was still a startup, and remained friends with him until Jobs passed away in 2011. David’s firm, now known as IDEO, designed Apple’s first computer mouse for the Lisa, and adapted it for the launch of the Macintosh in 1984.

He was one of the founding fathers of Design Thinking (Chapter 2 includes the origin story). This is the creative problem-solving process that serves as the spine of this book and will be explored in depth. David, Dennis Boyle, and Rolf Faste each spent a year as my academic advisors, as well as enlightening me as professors.

When Quitting is Good: Chip Conley

Chip Conley, author of Peak and Wisdom at Work , founder of Joie de Vivre, and former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, provided this take on quitting:

In the winter of 2010, I shuttled from the mountaintop to the marketplace each week. I spent quiet time on weekends reflecting about the fact that a company I’d started 23 years earlier, as a means of creating freedom in my life, had turned into what felt like a noose. At the age of 26, with no hotel experience, I bought a pay-by-the-hour motel in San Francisco’s rough Tenderloin neighborhood, renamed it The Phoenix, and my boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre Hospitality was launched. But, two decades later, after creating 52 boutique hotels and surviving two once-in-a-lifetime downturns in less than 10 years, I was tired. I was ready to quit. But not yet ready to retire.

Two years into the Great Recession, I was still putting in 70-hour weeks, but I did my best to get away for part of each weekend to imagine what it would be like to let go of this identity—the founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre—that I’d proudly worn for three-quarters of my adult life. Selling the company at the bottom of an economic downturn wasn’t what I’d imagined or planned; I thought I’d be running the show till my 50th anniversary as CEO, when I would be 76 years old. But, something told me that I needed to evolve. I needed to shed a skin that felt as tightly attached to my identity as a bandage adheres to a wound. I had no idea what it would feel like to rip it off.

I sold Joie de Vivre just short of my 50th birthday, not knowing what would emerge next. There’s a word I’ve recently learned—liminal—that describes the awkward period when you are in between two comfortable identities, like the caterpillar in the chrysalis before emerging as a butterfly. Robert DeNiro said in the film The Intern, Musicians don’t retire. They stop when there’s no more music left inside of them. I knew I still had music inside of me, but I just didn’t know who to share it with, or how.

After a couple of years, when I was getting used to my freedom—but feeling like I wasn’t clear on my new identity—I was approached by the young Airbnb CEO and cofounder Brian Chesky. It was early 2013, and their little tech start-up was starting to gain traction in the marketplace, but no one yet saw them as a true hospitality company, and there wasn’t a senior leader in the company with a hospitality or travel-industry background. So, Brian was looking for someone who could mentor him as CEO, while also applying hospitality magic to this home sharing company. Long story short, I spent four years by Brian’s side as the Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy and, since then, as a Strategic Advisor to the founders, helping them grow into the largest hospitality brand in the world.

If you’d asked me when I was running out of cash and selling Joie de Vivre whether this was a successful end to my two dozen years as CEO, I would have told you a lukewarm, Maybe. At minimum, I felt it was what I needed for my emotional sanity, but it certainly wasn’t a huge financial windfall. And yet, half a dozen years later, I’d taken a historic ride—helping to guide the rocketship Airbnb to democratize hospitality and adding to my personal wealth in ways I’d never imagined. Sometimes you just have to make space in your life and see what will emerge. If your gut is telling you it is time to quit or change something in your life or career—take heed and listen to your intuition.

The next semester, I showed up for my first class in Product Design, ME 101 Visual Thinking. I was introduced to the simple Design Thinking process (although it had not yet been given that name). Little did I know that this shift in major and understanding of the process would also become the secret ingredient to my success in athletics. But I get ahead of myself.

OK, so what is Design Thinking anyway?

CHAPTER 2

DESIGN THINKING 101: WHAT IS IT?

Mechanical Engineering 101 and The Imaginariums

Walking across campus for the first class in my new major of Product Design, I felt both excitement and trepidation. After declaring my intention to switch majors, I had become aware of the buzz around campus about the degree. It ranged from that major is crazy … the people in it are nuts … they are always pulling all-nighters, no one sleeps! to that is the coolest major with the coolest people … their projects are about inventing new things! I had met a few of its practitioners and they were inevitably a little eccentric, consistently high-energy and yet a bit frayed around the edges—talking with starry eyes about their exploits and designs. Product designers were known for a work-hard play-hard culture and a proclivity to stay up for nights-on-end to complete their projects. They also seemed to have more fun studying than anyone else on campus. Over the next 2 ½ years, with X-acto knives, hot-melt glue guns, spray paint, and foam core, I would spend a lot of frenetic days and sleepless nights cutting, gluing, and painting various ideas into working prototypes.

My first class was Mechanical Engineering 101 with Rolf Faste. As I navigated the odd two-tiered floors of Terman Hall, I quickly discerned a different vibe compared to my other courses. Rather than bursting at the seams with their lofty expertise and esoteric knowledge, the professors and students were bubbling with curiosity and possibility.

Settling in, I began learning the tools of visual thinking, including perspective drawing, pen and ink cross-hatch shading, and how to write in a