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Classics: The Importance of Using Design to Solve Business Problems with Paul Stonick, KICK Consultancy and Punks & Pinstripes: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Jan 07, 2025

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode, we’re talking how to use design to solve business problems with Paul Stonick. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re exercising your Marketing Smarts!

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • Marketing Smarts Summary
  • Transcript

Strategic Counsel: Classics: The Importance of Using Design to Solve Business Problems with Paul Stonick, KICK Consultancy and Punks & Pinstripes

Too often, design becomes a purely creative exercise. This is a HUGE missed opportunity. When used correctly, design can be a tremendous asset in helping people think differently, flex different tools in their toolkits, and get to unique solutions that wouldn’t otherwise come to fruition. We wanted you to learn from a trusted expert in the worlds of design and business, so we welcomed on Paul Stonick, Founder of KICK Consultancy & Former Vice President of SCADpro – a collaborative design studio connecting current and future art and design professionals with business leaders to solve real-world challenges. He’s also a founding cohort member of Punks & Pinstripes, a private network of transformation executives. This episode covers everything from design thinking to problem solving. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • How do you use design to solve business problems?
  • What is design thinking?
  • Is creative a process or an adjective?
  • How do you get creativity out of people?
  • What were the “aha” moments in Paul’s design journey?
  • How do we break down creative barriers?
  • What is SCADpro?
  • Is Paul a dog or cat person?

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01
Welcome to the Strategic Councsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct, and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team, and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Council podcast.

00:31
I am Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we are bringing back another one of our marketing smarts episodes, the importance of using design to solve business problems with Paul Stonick, vice president of SCAD Pro. This episode launched originally around this time last year actually, and it’s worth a re-listen for all of us. Earlier this year, we did a 10 part series on the creative industry and how it needs to evolve to stay relevant. Paul and the work he is doing is a great example of how this is done.

01:01
Let’s get to it. Too often, and you’ve heard us say this before, design becomes a purely creative exercise. And we believe this is a huge missed opportunity, one where the work becomes a beauty contest of sorts instead of a solution to actual business problems. But when it’s used right, design can be a tremendous asset in helping people think differently, flex different tools in their toolkits, and also really get to unique solutions that would not otherwise come to fruition. Yeah, when I was at P&G, we were…

01:29
definitely guilty of this dichotomy where you want design because you want it to look really, really pretty and you want it to be really outwardly, qualitatively beautiful. But then when you look to see what kind of problems there’s some for the business, you couldn’t rectify the two and then we would get frustrated and then the agency would get frustrated and then what happens after that. Yeah, exactly. So all part of the discussion today.

01:54
And we’re also bringing a guest on to help us discuss this topic. So that’s Paul Stonick, vice president of SCAD Pro and also founding cohort member of punks and pinstripes, which we will talk about a little bit more in depth. But welcome Paul, please introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about you to get started. Sure. Hey everybody, Paul Stonick, vice president of SCAD Pro. I have two decades of what I like to call tradigital experience and brain creative visual. You can send me the royalty on that.

02:21
Visual and UX design. I started in web design back in the mid 90s, back when the magic was written and then pivoted to UX design in 2012. 18 years in e-commerce across fashion, beauty, home improvement, automotive, banking. 15 years in executive design leader roles. I worked for a small company called The Home Depot. You probably heard of it. Leading a team for the fifth largest e-commerce site and a mobile app where we help grow revenue over three years from 700 million to $2 billion.

02:48
My work’s been featured in multiple news outlets, research organizations like Forrester and L2 Gartner, national television spots and multiple Apple WWDC keynotes. So after 20 years in large corporations, I was part of the entrepreneur Exodus and joined an automotive startup leading to design and product. We were acquired by a larger automotive company and after the win of being acquired, most of us were laid off just a few months later. So as I was thinking about Act 3 of my career and what was meaningful and what I really wanted to do, well,

03:18
SCAD had an opportunity, Savannah College of Art and Design, to lead SCAD Pro, where that’s our in-house design research and innovation studio, where we partner with big name brands to solve problem through design thinking. So grooming the next generation of design leaders further up in the funnel in higher education, that’s really meaningful and exciting work. And it’s been an absolute pleasure and honor to be part of that organization and what we’re doing in the design space. Awesome. So as everyone just heard, you are uniquely positioned to have this conversation with us today.

03:47
So with that we’ll get into the importance of using design to solve business problems. And the first piece we want to talk about here, I know Paul when you and I talked initially we really hit it off in this discussion about the overuse term design thinking and how when broken down it’s really very simply problem solving. And so if we could just settle on that and stop trying to get too creative we would be able to have a lot more fruitful discussion. So I would love to just…

04:16
hear your perspective on that, the sort of way that design thinking came to be, what it means in the world and how you feel like it lives today. Yeah, it’s a great topic. And I’m actually quoting a friend of mine who uses this expression and I’ve lifted it from him because we think the same way. And really the worst thing about design thinking is that the word design is in the title. Design doesn’t even have to be part of the output. It’s a human centered approach to solving problems.

04:44
You start by understanding people, wants, needs, frustrations, behaviors, patterns. Design thinking has been around since the sixties, but it’s recently found fame again with traditional and design led companies as well. So every company wants to be innovative, but doesn’t know how to teach their people how to be creative. So that’s where we come in as leaders as well, to be able to teach other parts of the organization how to be creative again. So, yeah, designers have to be part of the output. We’re not coming, we’re not asking people to come in and draw.

05:12
Yes. Stick figures are just fine. It’s really more about the problem solving process. So enter design thinking when we consider the steps of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, it marries both creativity and critical thinking skills together. So it requires teams to generate a lot of ideas. They have to be comfortable with failure and failure doesn’t mean that the game is over. It just means we try again with experience. So it really forces you to keep your mind open, try out many ideas early on.

05:40
So you really just don’t get invested in one because generally your first idea is the worst. So the process harnesses creativity through inquiry. Well, and I think it is, it’s so important because the reason I never liked design thinking was there was never any sort of solve to it, right? You could just kind of like think and think and think and think and think. And so as a terminology, I just never really felt like there was any sort of steps. So the way that you break it down and talk about it, and then also the power of failure within it to then.

06:08
start the process again, I think you’re right, really does get people in the right mindset and not fearful off the bat because you’re not asking them to come in and hop on Illustrator or draw or whatever those types of things are. You’re really just getting at the crux of how are we gonna meaningfully learn in order to solve problems the most effective way. Yeah, exactly. It’s having the right people in the room as well too. So we’re not asking them to draw, but you’re thinking about the different perspectives.

06:33
or different lines of business that can come together and solve the room. So it goes beyond just the holy trinity of design, engineering, and product. You can have data science, marketing, supply chain. You can even have legal in the room as well too. It’s a great, great, great ideas can come from anywhere. Right. But it’s also about staying honest to make sure that you’re not building science fiction. You really want to think about the user at the end of the day. And innovation is one of those words where it’s highly abused in the corporate lexicon right now.

07:02
So innovation is really about eyes wide open and aha moment, a magic moment for the user where they see something different. If you’re taking it to the press or to the board, you’re serving the wrong customer. That’s not what innovation is. It’s really about creating that aha moment. And so I guess my question is, and we had this question a lot when we were going through all these exercises at P&G, is that is creative a process or is creative an adjective used to describe a person? Because I feel like

07:31
people in general will express themselves as being creative or not being creative or there are certain roles that are allowed to be creative and certain roles that are not. You brought up the lawyer. I’m like, I haven’t been in a room where, well, maybe some creative problem solving around claims maybe. So is it a process or is it an adjective? And based on how you answer that question, I might have a follow-up question. Creativity is the expression of design and great thinking.

07:59
Everybody’s creative. Most people just forgot. But not everybody’s a designer. So those are really two different things as well, too. Everybody has creative ideas. They’re just things we forgot along the way. Creatives are the ones that survive. We’re the kids that survived and came through out the other end. So I think it’s an adjective. It’s a process as well, too. I want to respect the process in terms of creativity. And creatives need time to think.

08:25
They need time to be bored, right? To really think through a problem and solve it as well too. So I really think it’d be both, but not everybody’s a designer. So, you know, God forbid Tim in engineering gets a license of Photoshop and starts his, oh, I just mocked this up for you. Here you go. Here’s what I’m thinking. That never happens, right? Or somebody in, you know, somebody’s not using AI to generate these quick concepts. Oh, I thought I just mocked these up for you real quick. Can you make it pop? You know, so.

08:53
That’s the stuff you want to get away from to your point. You don’t want it to, and I was struggling to find the words. I know you use those words a while back about beauty contests. It was driving me crazy. I was like, it wasn’t make it pretty. It’s like, she said something and it’s so brilliant. I’m going to send you the royalty on that one. Well, then I guess my follow-up question to that is how do you pull that creativity out of people when in our, most of us in our day-to-day world are like,

09:20
very functionally and tactically focused. But we’d like to get in rooms and quote unquote, be creative. We have brainstorming sessions, design thinking sessions. I mean, I’ve been part of a numerous amount of them. So how do you pull that out of people? How do you get them to really tap into that piece again? Be open. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s right there. It’s being inclusive, right? So I think that’s really the key is you think about solving problems.

09:45
You want to make sure that you’re being inclusive with your teams, because like we said, great ideas come from anywhere. The power of design thinking is that brings everyone to the table on a project. It creates empowerment. Design teams have to really become the guide and the teacher to others. So that puts your team at the center of the process. And that’s value as well too, going beyond the beauty contest and making things pretty. You’re now teaching others how to be creative. And you can also prove that you can solve anything. You know, teams can work on a deeper problem.

10:13
It’s not just about a digital design or an output. It can be used for organization, processes, facilities, sales, internal events, or even government services. Like we do with SCAD Pro. It can be used to solve anything. So it’s getting that buy-in, but I think my favorite piece of it is that. If you get enough buy-in and you get the right secret society and the right people joining you, the people in the room, you can really become a Trojan horse or a secret weapon. So if you want to create real change, you get buy-in, you have to change the way people think. And that’s part of our role and responsibility as well too.

10:43
It’s not just that the way they behave and yeah, that was part of the big success that we had at Home Depot as well through design thinking and bringing that across the organization. So you have to be a leader in that space and get the people to rally around you and buy into it, but they also need to have skin in the game. How does it affect their line of business or their bottom line? We have to be able to speak the language of business as creatives, but also be able to show them math. And that’s where I think you start getting the ideation and buy in.

11:10
Well, and I mean, that brings up another discussion point here and flipping the conversation a little bit, but also historically it’s been hard to get design a seat at the table, right? And it goes back to kind of that beauty contest and the perception about what design can actually do. And so, you know, I’d love to hear you talk about a little bit about whether it’s Home Depot or the work you’re doing at SCAD Pro.

11:30
how you get design the right seat at the table in order to hear the business challenges and be part of those upstream discussions so that it is actually a tool in the toolkit and can become, like you said, the Trojan horse or the unexpected outcome or all of those things because you now have another piece of the pie that a lot of people kind of push off until they’re ready to make the thing. If design’s not at the table, you pretty much have a parking lot to deal with.

11:56
So the design process is probably not fully understood within an organization. The business value has not been clearly articulated. You got a design reporting into some strange silo or even worse reporting into product, which I can’t stand. And design really needs to be on the same level as product or really just has been articulated to leadership in a very clear way or key stakeholders. So as designers and creatives, we have to be able to talk the language of business. In other words, show the math. So if you’re not as the team that makes it pretty, you’re pretty much in the hole.

12:25
already. So by speaking in the language of business, it really affects the bottom line. So it becomes a much different conversation where you can get buy-in and support. So the work has to connect back to some sort of KPI, some sort of investment, some sort of broader strategy, and not be done in a vacuum. And that’s why you see a lot of these accelerators and incubators die out because they’re doing it in a vacuum. Nobody knows about it. And it doesn’t map back to a bigger strategy. So

12:50
We have to be inclusive of our business partners. Like we were saying earlier, IT, supply chain, operations, marketing, is about getting the right people in the room and then really making it an interdependent team sport. That’s a lot of what we do with scatter pro as well too. We can’t do it alone. We have to be very cross-functional in our thinking and intent. So really making design less of a black box and doing so shows us under the true value and benefit of what design can do. And we did this at the home Depot as well too.

13:17
We took design thinking across the organization and scaling it all the way up to the executive leadership team. It all started very, very grassroots within my team at interconnected experience. And we were showing the value by getting features into the market faster and with less cost. So we could prove that out. We had the math to be able to show that if we do this feature, we could do it a lot faster through a design thinking, uh, facilitation or sprint, but then other teams start to catch on to what we were doing. So not only did it grow through interconnected experience,

13:45
Then we started going across to HR and supply chain and finance. We even stood up a course in Home Depot University, which was Design Thinking 101. And I’m looking at the list of people that are taking this course. I’m like, what part of Home Depot is this? And why are they coming to my class? So that shows value because people understood the value we were bringing to the table at the end of the day. So I love that. And then finally, just to end the story, we brought it all the way up to the executive leadership team, no pressure. I’ve got my C-suite in the room and I’m telling my CFO.

14:15
you need to push past the obvious. And he’s looking up at me like, we should work like this all the time. And I said, I know, you know, so that’s about changing behaviors and mindsets, but look, Home Depot is always gonna be a merchant led organization full stop. It’s never gonna be design led. And we know the design led companies. And those are the ones that are beating the S&P year after year by 228% because they’re thinking in a different way. But that’s what I love about the work at Home Depot is that we really change a lot of behaviors and open up eyes to a new way of problem solving.

14:45
Well, would you mind like going a little bit deeper into that and kind of giving some insight into what does that actually look like? What were the, to the extent that you’re allowed to talk about it, like what was the problem you were solving and how did people engage in a, what’s it going to be for most people, a different way that mindset shift you were talking about in order to be able to solve the problem? What was like the eventual outcome? Because I think that will help to kind of telegraphically bring this process to life for a lot of people.

15:15
And the hot moments too, because I would love to know like with a CEO example, you know, as you go through like, what was it that made the light bulb go off? There were several problems that we were addressing. So we broke them out into smaller groups. But two of the big problems was one, how do you deal with associated rudeness in stores, which is a big problem? And so how do you address that? It’s a big, meaty, complex problem. So going back to what we were saying earlier, that’s not just design is just not part of the output. It could solve anything.

15:42
And then also was delivery issues as well too. And that was a paper death by thousand paper cuts for Home Depot where delivery always seemed to be a problem. How do we solve those particular problems through this process? So we really went through the five steps I talked about earlier and created these worksheets where they were really able to take the blinders off and have unconstrained thinking in terms of, if we were really just to get out of the way and think through how we want to solve these problems and really make it more of a discussion and let them brainstorm and use the process of

16:11
you’re creating ideas, getting up in front of the board, using stickies, facilitating, dot voting, and these types of things, they were able to get to a decision a lot faster. And that’s the beauty of the process as well too, is that it creates this open path for thinking, but also making decisions faster. So you’re not 18 months down the road and you’re still trying to solve the same problem, but you can actually take something that’s actionable and accountable and say, oh, we have three or four action items that we got out of this particular session that we did in an hour and a half. You know, so.

16:39
There’s not a whole lot I can go into in terms of the solves, right? But these are big problems that are facing Home Depot. It was a very interesting process to see that eyes light up moment, especially for my CFOs, like, oh, that’s a behavior change in terms of we should be working like this, that’s an aha moment for me. And for them it’s like, oh, this is a different way of working beyond the traditional ways of sitting in a room for three hours, brainstorming and going over and over a particular topic. Yeah. I think that makes a ton of sense. And I also think.

17:08
It just naturally breaks down silos, right? Because I think a lot of times in those organizations, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is even working on, let alone trying to solve the same challenges together, or they’re all taking their individual run. So part of this is you’re getting to the bigger picture, but then you’re also going in and coming out in order to actually create meaningful change as you’re in there, not just to sit around in the room, like you said, for three hours and talk about it. It’s coming together, working on it together.

17:37
iterating together and making agreement in short order to then go and create action. Exactly. I think the headline is that it’s a together alone type of process as well. So coming together to align on the certain things that we want to take care of and then alone in terms of, okay, we’ll go back into our respective teams and address that problem with the action items that we need to deal with. You had mentioned that there was some companies who do this really well, that they’re more quote unquote design-led from

18:07
it just as a culture, which ones are those and how do you see them different than a traditional quote unquote corporate culture? Yeah, so the ones that I’ve taught mine, Apple, Google, Airbnb, Nike, you know, a lot of these companies are founder led, right? And so they’re coming in from a different perspective. And that’s the beauty when you have a creative, you’re leading a company, they’re seeing things a little bit differently in terms of how it’s run.

18:34
And so you got to quote Steve Jobs, it’s not necessarily how it looks, it’s about how it works. So it’s about thinking differently and how you approach and how you solve a problem. But these companies are beating out the S&P every single year because they’re addressing problems differently. And that design thinking process or design process is baked into their DNA, is wrapped in from who they were from the beginning. So it’s much easier to scale that way when it’s part of your DNA and you’re already on third base when you’re starting the company.

19:04
legacy organization where you’re 175 years old and you’re trying to make this change, design thinking groups and companies like the organizations like the Interconnected Experience the Home Depot, you have to be that speedboat out in front of the Queen Mary that’s really creating change and leading the charge and being able to turn the Queen Mary very slowly in terms of, okay, this is a new way of working or opening up eyes or changing behaviors. All right, so to change the lens a little bit again,

19:32
Obviously your role at SCAD Pro is to kind of teach this younger generation, upcoming generation to reframe the thinking from the beginning because I think what you just said is exactly right. It’s easier to create it from the start. And in this situation, you’re quote unquote raising people to do this level of thinking, this type of thinking, and not having to take away bad behavior from before. So.

19:57
When we talked, we talked a little bit about, and it goes to some of Anne’s comments before, about just being a quote unquote designed school and historically what that looked like versus how very differently this program at SCAD Pro is and what it takes to really teach this, learn this, how you get them to think in this way, because the foreign nature of it, even to someone who went to DAP at UC, right? I know what that was.

20:24
like historically, but I learned far more once I got into the professional experience and had to almost learn how to take what I knew in theory and apply it to the real world of the jobs I was being asked to do. And then to become a strategist on top of it over time was a whole other level of things versus this program, which to me, my perception is it teaches it from the very beginning and you leave with that set of skills and the experience on top of it.

20:51
That’s exactly right. So SCAD Pro is the university’s collaborative innovation studio. And we generate business solutions for the world’s biggest brands, Google, Chick-fil-A, Disney, Coca-Cola, Ford, BMW. But the work that we do at SCAD Pro is really the intersection of art, design and business. But we don’t consider ourselves to be an art school. We consider ourselves to be a creative university and career preparation is woven into every fiber of the, of the universities. Like you were saying, you know, we’re preparing alumni employment.

21:19
In a recent study, 99% of SCAD graduates were employed pursuing further education, or both within 10 months of graduation. So while we encourage our SCAD Bs to be creative and think big, of course, we strive to never forget the needs of the client. Going back to what we were saying earlier, is that we really have to think about the product or service for the end user. 45% of the partners are from Forbes top 100 most valuable companies. We’ve done 700 partnerships to date and over 70 products have been launched in the market.

21:47
But what we can do at SCAD Pro, it’s really anything. It’s digital, physical, with over 100 different majors and minors in a diverse student population from 120 countries in all 50 states. You really get that diverse thinking as well too. Great ideas come from anywhere. So that’s what I love about SCAD Pro and in many ways for the students, it’s an inside out internship. They can take it as a junior, senior, or grad student. They need to have a 3.25 GPA or higher.

22:14
And not only do they get the hard skills of the discipline that they’re bringing to the table or their major, but it’s also the soft skills and all the things that they’re going to need when they go into their creative profession. They’re going to need listening, communication, collaboration, leadership, all the things that they’re going to, they’re going to need to help with their success in their creative fields. I love the, the assimilation of all these different lenses are kind of coming together to really train these

22:44
kids in a different mindset, both from a skill standpoint and then from also an approach standpoint. But I want to go back to something. I’m going to poke on this a little bit. I’m going to try to ask my question. The contrarian in the conversation. Yeah, without being too contrarian because I know my audience here is, I mean, we said and you said it a couple of times, but I’m going to bring up because we used to say it all the time at P&G, but I will tell you 95% of people just didn’t feel like it was true that good ideas could come from anywhere.

23:12
Right? So it’s always something that you philosophize, but it never seems to be something that people believe. And I will say, even though I’m outnumbered here, that a lot of the people who don’t believe it are actual people who are designers by trade or creatives by trade. They don’t believe that good ideas could come from everywhere. They believe that good ideas come from that design, the creative thinking. And I remember facing this a lot within a P and G room where it was like, good ideas could come from anywhere. But it’s like, Oh no, wait a minute.

23:39
No, only good ideas could come from this creative director. No, only good ideas could come from the designer. No, only good ideas could come here. And then we all were kind of like just left to assess the idea which really wasn’t even valued much because we were not creatives or designers by trade. And even when you and I were like in the very beginning trying to figure out where we were gonna do the work, we naturally defined our work based on.

24:02
creative, what was considered a creative assignment and what was considered more of a marketing assignment. The work I would do versus the work you would do. Yeah, exactly. And so we naturally divided that based on what our natural backgrounds were. But then quickly when we broke down those barriers, saw that, hey, I thought, and I think I’d do a pretty good job, written word creative. Yeah, that’s true. But then when I would say I’m a creative, April would just roll her eyes.

24:28
Now she’s bringing all our baggage to the table. Yeah, but I think this is a really important thing because I think it’s what gets in the way of a lot of people feeling bold enough to actually be creative. If the design thinking is the way of the world, so if it’s the way to solve problems, I don’t think a lot of people feel empowered or emboldened to quote unquote be creative or to exhibit design thinking because they’ve been told it’s been reinforced to them that they’re not creative. They’re not design thinkers. They are lawyers. They are engineers. They are…

24:57
business leaders, I mean, other people do the creative and design, we pay for it. They must be the creative and the design experts. So, Anne gets off her soapbox here for a second to ask like a real question. But my question is, is like, how do we break down those barriers? How do people who are not classically trained designers or creatives, how do they get into that conversation? So in fact, good ideas can come from everywhere and people believe that. I mean, is there…

25:24
traits or skills or rules of engagement? Like what does that medium even look like? Help Anne out here. Help my friends at P&G, cause I know that they are gonna be the ones who are very interested in this. The answer is very simple really. And yeah, I would say for the people at P&G is like knock down the doors, invite the people to your meetings. You want to have the meeting that everybody wants to come to, right? In terms of how you can solve problems. So for me, it’s really just making the right invites and having the right people in the room.

25:53
And if I don’t have the right people in the room, then who is that person that we need to answer that particular question? I would then build upon that and say, well, ideas, did you validate it? Bring the data and the research, right? The first idea is not necessarily the best one, but going back to what we were saying earlier, you’re gonna iterate, you’re gonna keep going until you find that the idea is actually validated through your user. So at the end of the day, you’re building for your user and your customer. They’re gonna set you free of what’s working, what’s not working. So you really have to go through the validation process as well too, to prove that an idea actually works.

26:22
So I think for me, it’s really just about being inclusive. You get the right people, you invite them to your meeting and you have them participate, because then they feel like they’ve got skin in the game. Then you start getting the buy-in and then you start getting the word of mouth as well too. Like, hey, this is something that we should be part of or how do we actually scale this? How do we get more teams to join? Or how do we bring this thinking across the organization? For me, it’s really just about being inclusive. I know that’s oversimplifying, but I found that just really inviting people to the table has been the easiest solution.

26:51
Well, and I will say as a person who started as a designer and then went to the quote unquote dark side and did the accountant strategy, I faced some of this stuff too. And I think what I find interesting about what you’re doing at SCAD Pro and what was different about the environments that I grew up in is that there is some of this like the design team or the creatives can be.

27:15
wrongly held on pedestals in certain organizations. And so I think a lot of times those are the barriers that need to be broken down. Absolutely. I mean, at the last agency I was at, I took on the task of starting their very first strategy department. They had never really had that before. And to what you just said, Paul, a lot of it was having the meetings to get buy-in into what I was saying, because traditionally the organization was a creative-led, creative solution organization. And what the definition of that was, copywriters and designers.

27:45
led the charge. And so what I love so much about this new approach is to me, it’s a leveling of the playing field. So it is teaching those creative and design folks what they’re actually doing and how it impacts business and making it mandatory that that becomes part of their success in the situation. And then also giving them the seat at the table with the other folks. But

28:11
educating on the fact that the problems and the solutions need to be solved by this collective group of people. I mean, and you’re famous for saying you get more done when you’re working, you know, no one person can singularly have success. You need the collective expertise of the group. And I think it is through that collaboration and facilitation. And honestly, I do believe that in some of the typical agency organizations, there still is this problem of…

28:37
If there’s a creative in the room, they’re making the decision, they’re the ones that know what they’re doing. If it has design tied to it at all, that’s the be-all end-all. But I don’t believe that that’s the future of any of this, because I think that that’s the archaic way of thinking, and no longer are we just creating the things. It’s not all about the package or the website or any of that anymore. The organizations that are going to be successful are the ones that are solving these bigger, more complex problems together.

29:05
I don’t know, would you agree, Paul? That’s kind of my perspective hearing both of you talk. Yeah, and I’m talking from experience, how we were brought in to solve internal problems as well, too, with the Home Depot. So it wasn’t necessarily external customer facing, but you can use the methodology really to solve anything. And just to go to one step further on the whole concept of idea, and we’ll talk about this in a little bit, it’s really about the concept of presenting outcomes over the idea. Pitch the outcome, not the idea.

29:30
Show the actual data, show the research. We put this feature into a test and this was the outcome from it. Cause anybody can shoot down an idea. If I bring an idea upstairs to leadership and somebody in a corner office doesn’t like that idea, well, they didn’t risk anything and they shot it down. But if I come back with the outcome and say, here’s what we actually delivered and here’s the lift or the KPI or the OKR, well, that depoliticizes the conversation a lot more and starts really.

29:53
thinking through, well, what are we actually doing here? And how does that speak through the language of business, right? And how does that affect that leader’s bottom line? That’s what they want to hear about. They don’t care about my pixel perfect Mona Lisa mock-up that I did. It’s like, they don’t care. Pixel perfect Mona Lisa mock-up. All right. Right. They don’t care about the art department sitting in a corner painting a picture of their spirit animal, right? They really care about what’s happening on the bottom line. So if you can present the outcome, that’s a much different conversation versus the idea.

30:22
Yeah, and I resonate with that a lot. And I think that’s exactly what we preach. And then when we talking about brand, frankly, is that brand and design thinking is really putting brand into action and making it dynamic in a lot of different ways. Uh, and we use brand as a way to solve business problems. And that’s a new way of thinking and really being able to kind of flip it on its head and seeing.

30:49
these elements of being able to really articulate your problem in a way that is first tied to something that foundationally that you can own and that is authentic to you and that you can use to create an experience with your consumer, customer and client and tying that to an overall outcome that you said April is something that everyone needs to contribute to to achieve, I think is one way of breaking down.

31:14
some of these barriers of like good ideas could come from anywhere or how do we solve problems that are beyond just our own little individual silos. So I think that resonates a lot with me. So my follow up question to that would be then is there like a specific structure that you’ve seen that works? Like we’ve talked a lot about quote unquote titles and how titles can get in the way or the backgrounds can get in the way or the functions can get in the way or their specific

31:42
like a structure that you see works really, really well in the context of being able to really propagate this process and this thinking? Yeah, it’s called being a punk. Right? And so look, there’s going to be a whole level of corporate obstructionism that you’re going to have to break through in order to get the buy-in. So I have found that you need to have the testicular fortitude, right, to be able to go through and break through a lot of these layers and just say, I’ve got some…

32:10
clear, crisp thinking here that I want to bring to the table and find my like-minded entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who can all come together and really present the outcome at the end of the day. I think punks have to be a catalyst. They have to have the rebel in the boardroom and change can’t happen without us. So the framework is really pushing freedom in companies where innovation is rarely authorized.

32:35
And so how do you break through? This goes back to what we were saying earlier. It’s about presenting the outcomes, outcomes over output. Present the outcome, not the idea. Creating these secret societies, but also, you really want to find that person within an organization who can be your executive evangelist. Who is that godfather? Who is that godmother that believes in what you’re doing, understands, maybe has come from a creative agency background as well too, and understands the power of design and design thinking that will…

33:04
Create that lane where you can drive a Mac truck right through it in terms of innovation and having the empowerment to create what do you think is a better process as well too. So building this entrepreneurial underground and finding like-minded people who share your mindset and then listing them in the cause as well too. Because once you start having that with your data and with your research, you really start blending this idea of missionary and mercenary as well too that, hey, we’re all.

33:32
part of the bigger mission of what the company wants to do, but we’re mercenaries on the ground rolling up our sleeves and getting stuff done. And I find those have been the best teams and the best solve in terms of breaking through corporate obstructionism. So in short, it’s kind of being a corporate punk. Well, and I mean, we, you know, obviously you’re all about the coin terms, which I totally love and appreciate. But I do think it is, it is interesting because you do, and we talk about this too, is like,

34:01
When you want to go against the grain, it’s finding those like-minded people that are going to join your cause and support it and be brave enough to go and do so. I think that that is really what we’re talking about here is, and we talked about you can be a leader at any level. We talk about that all the time too.

34:20
It’s really hard and not a lot of people will stand up and raise their hand and say, I think there’s a better way, a different way, I want to challenge the status quo, all of those types of things, but that’s really what we’re talking about here. And it was why I so enjoyed our conversation because of the like-mindedness of if we just sit in the way that it’s traditionally been done or the frustrations that have existed and still exist in corporate environments or all of those things, we’re never going to move past where we are and or our organizations are going to be passed up.

34:49
And so it’s really the forward thinking notion of even how is design thinking going to continue to change in order to solve these problems or how a scad pro gonna what’s the next iteration? What are the people we can learn from and what are the new things we need to start to enact to continue to push this forward and the maturation of it? Because I think yes, to the very beginning of the conversation, design thinking has been a term for a long time. Innovation has been a term for a long time, but the processes and the diligence and the

35:17
I think conscientiousness by which it’s put into place in the right situations is where you’re really seeing things move. The punk or the intrapreneur can’t act alone. Going back to what we were saying earlier, it has to be inclusive, it has to be collaborative. You have to find the like-minded people because the intrapreneur who goes at it alone is going to be fired or forgotten. And sometimes it’ll be done publicly as well too. So that godfather or godmother I was talking about earlier, in some ways they have to be your bulletproof vest.

35:45
They’re going to take a bullet for you first if something goes sideways. So who do you find in the organization that’s willing to go to bat for you? And I’ve had the great fortune of having a couple people in my career that have created that air support where they’ll go ahead and take a bullet for us as well too, but also create that lane for innovation and different ways of thinking. And so now in some cases, I’ve been the executive evangelist and say, okay, we’re going to get through corporate obstructionism and remove the BS and say, okay, here’s what we’re actually going to do to get done.

36:14
So it takes a little bit of that thinking of being a little bit of a corporate punk, but you’ve got to play pinch strike sometimes as well to say, I’ve got to be able to show the outcome too. Yeah. And I think that was a lot of my experiences. You could probably sense I’m kind of working through some PTSD as we’re talking. Aren’t we all? I’ll reserve my story for another day because people have heard that one. But if I was going to chat on all my…

36:40
favorite Adam Grant, he would say there’s an element of psychological safety that’s needed in order to be bold. And I would say that there was a lot of some traditional, especially those corporate companies been a long, a long time that doesn’t exist in a way that is easy to sometimes find your crew. I mean, I remember going to Nike, I remember going to Apple, I remember going to Google and everybody getting super excited about the way that they think. And then we come back, we’re like, we can’t do that. We’re not built like that. We’re not structured like that.

37:09
And so it would all kind of fall apart. So do you have advice for people who kind of see that, know what they’re up against, want to try, but know it’s gonna probably take a little bit of time or a little while, and what advice would you give people who want to kind of be that punk, but they’re not feeling brave enough quite yet to do so? Yeah, I would say start small. Look, I think we’ve all been there too. We see the Nikes, the Apples, the Google, how they work, how they operate.

37:38
culture, everything else we’ll get, which I’ll talk about in a second, and people go into design thinking boot camps, or they’ll have a consultant come in for a ridiculous amount of money and tell them this is what you need to do to change your design thinking. And then day one arrives, they’re like, what the hell do we do? And you have this record scratch moment of like, uh-oh, we don’t really know what to do. So really in many ways, putting on my product hat, do an MVP, start small, get the smallest likable product. I would say actually MLP, a minimum likable product in terms of.

38:06
this is something that we can do that’s realistic, right? And you put smart goals around it and say, look, we’re not gonna boil the ocean and solve this huge problem that’s facing the organization, but let’s actually just look at this feature first and use a different way of thinking to get there. And then you kind of start building it by Lego blocks. And so build your MLP, build your MVP, build your framework of governance, get the right people together, create a board of directors, if you will, that can help provide oversight and guidance, but don’t go it alone, right? Try to get other people to help enlist in the call. So I would say start small.

38:34
which is what we did at Home Depot. We started very small grassroots within my organization and then just started to build and grow and gossip success as well too and tell the story up where we could. That’s where you start getting the buy-in as people starting to look at you like, oh, what are they doing over there? We should pay attention. Yeah, it’s a little bit of the ask for forgiveness. When you have the success, people are like, they don’t remember that you went on your own. They use the product of what you did and then they want that. Right, I mean, a term that I’ve used with a lot of my teams for the last,

39:05
12, 15 years is JFDI. And that stands for Just F-ing Do It. Right? Just, just, just F-ing do it. And I’ll be the one that provides the air support. I’ll take the bullet and we’ll ask for forgiveness, but just JFDI blast through the corporate obstructionism and politics and get it done. And so, but we want to show success in outcomes as well too. So as long as I can tell the story up, I could put it on one slide. This is what we did. This is what we achieved. Here are our outcomes. And this is how it maps to your KPIs. It,

39:34
politically disarms the conversation. All right. Well, we do have a few rapid-fire questions for you. But before we get to that, is there any other comments you would close this out? You know, any other things that you’re just, you know, burning desire to say, I feel like this has been a really great discussion all the way around, but we want to give you your sort of podium toward the end here. No, I appreciate that. And just to touch on SCAD Pro a little bit more, the work that we’re doing there is not student work. This is agency level work that we’re doing.

40:04
the clients that we work with, which I mentioned, are really top-notch. So if you go to davidjerman.com right now, David Yermann, the foremost luxury jeweler, we created Create Joy, Give David Yermann, the holiday campaign. So if you see that video on the homepage, we did all that at SCAD. Now you’re really speaking my language. He’s one of my favorites. This is their holiday campaign and really this is their first virtual production. So for social ads, TV.

40:31
The video that’s on the homepage, all that was done in shot with SCAD with SCAD students in partnership with David Yermen. We’ve done work with NASA just in terms of redesigning the ICE Satellite 2 website. We’ve worked with Uber in terms of research and development of concepts for a common cabin interior user experience. So what does a vertiport look like for electric flying vehicles? Working with Delta to create new uniforms that we did in combination with Zach Posen.

40:57
So we’re in healthcare, we’re doing amazing things just in terms of what our partnerships look like. So I would encourage you to come and take a look at SCAD and SCAD Pro. People and companies come to us because it’s unconstrained thinking, it’s Gen Z mindset, it’s multiple perspectives, diverse perspectives as well too. It’s a lot of fun.

41:20
as well. So you get, we encourage our partners to really share the experience. What’s unique about us is that you’re part of the journey all the way through from kickoff to research to check ins to midpoint to final presentation. You’re part of the journey all the way through end to end. So that’s what’s really exciting about the program as well too, is that you get to be part of it. And then we would hope as well too that these students move on and become part of the organization. So we’ve hired

41:47
almost 300 students directly into these companies. And that supports our mission at the end of the day is preparing students for their creative professions. Awesome. I know, I love that too. I wish this was around when I went to design school. Yeah. All right, so few rapid fires here. Just to get to know you a little bit better and have a little fun. A person that is no longer alive that you would most like to meet. I’ve been reflecting on John Lennon the last week or so.

42:14
And only because of the anniversary of his death was a few days ago. And I’ve been reflecting on him and what he was about, what he stood for. And though he was highly controversial sometimes in many ways he was right. Right. So while we may not know the words to give a piece of chance, we all know the course. And so that’s something that we could stand by and live by and going back then.

42:39
He was right and that’s something we could look at today. So I would love to be able to meet John Lennon. I feel like I may have seen him at some point in my youth because I spent a lot of time in New York City when I was a kid, especially in the seventies. And I felt like the Dakota was a place I passed all the time because I was just spending a lot of time in that area where my aunt lived, spending time with her. So I feel like I may have seen him in some, I didn’t know who he was, but I feel like there’s some sort of connection that I may have seen him at some point,

43:09
It’s a pilgrimage I like to make every time I go to New York is going near the Dakota or being past that area. So John Lennon would be my answer. Awesome. Yeah. What are you reading right now? I’m not reading any books right now. So I’m more of like, I’m more of the short form, like articles and things like that. So there’s really no books I’m reading. But if I were to recommend a book for you to read, it would be This Might Get Me Fired, which is…

43:35
Which is by Greg Larkin, who is the founder of Punx and Pinstripes as well too. And that book changed my life. He and I met five years ago at the How Design Conference and we met through a mutual friend and I heard about his book. I read it and Greg and I became fast friends. And I said, everything you say in your book is exactly what I’m doing at the home Depot. You’re just using different language. Right? So as we think about secret societies and evangelists and Godfathers of like, this is exactly what we’re doing.

44:03
You just put it into a language that’s concise and clear. And I love that. So it’ll change your life. It’s a short read, but it’ll probably resonate in many ways. So it’s called, this might get me fired. You both read it down. So we got it. We always like to add to our reading list. Yes. All right. Final one, dog or cat person. Cat. I was a, I was a dog person growing up and had dogs for years. And then like 10 or 12 years ago, I just got to a point where dogs kind of started to skeeve me out a little bit. That was just

44:33
And that’s a technical term in terms of they just kind of gross me out. And I was just like, you know, I’m not a dog person anymore. So I’ve had cats now for about 12, 15 years and we have two cats and I love them to death, but I’ve not become a dog person. It’s very strange how my mind is flipped, but they kind of gross me out. Well, usually you don’t find people that change, especially that hardcore. Some people have both. Yeah, you do.

44:58
I don’t even go near this. I don’t even like the pet dogs here. Like we’ll be out in the neighborhood taking a walk with my wife and she’ll go and get down and pet the dog. And I’m like, I’m good. I’ll stand over here. Okay, well with that, Paul, this has been awesome. Before we close out, please tell people where they can find you if they want to continue the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you again for having me today. This was a lot of fun and but connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s where I live in terms of social media. If you’d like to learn more about SCAD or potential SCAD project,

45:28
Just email me at PStonick@SCAD.edu or DM me on LinkedIn or visit SCAD.edu/SCADpro and happy to tell you more about it. Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to Follow or Subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!