Seek Surprises
When Kelly Garrett Zeigler, an extraordinary executive with decades of experience leading customer insights for brands like Vans and Mattel, retraces one of her greatest creative achievements, she can’t help but be a little embarrassed by the truth:
It all started in the bathroom.
“After a few weeks, across multiple homes, we kept finding ourselves in bathrooms. Not at all a place where you’re supposed to be. But it wasn’t a one off. It was genuinely something that multiple people kept pointing us to — this one very unexpected place.”
This sort of thing happens all the time when doing human centered design work: we find ourselves in places we “aren’t supposed to be.” We find customers taking the conversation in unexpected directions, challenging our carefully curated scripts and questionnaires.
And that’s a good thing!
In fact, we should be disappointed when we aren’t taken off script. Off-script is where all the interesting stuff is discovered. And usually, the way it strikes you isn’t “That’s exactly what I thought,” but rather “Wait, what?” As Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but,‘Thats funny…’”
Imagination is sparked by surprises. If we want to stimulate fresh thinking, we should seek surprises. Expecting them, welcoming them. The difficulty is that surprises often take the form of challenged assumptions, which we humans woefully resist. As Kelly describes the aha moment at Mattel, “A lot of us had the assumption like you wouldn’t want to put a little car in a tub — won’t it rust or won’t something happen? It’s not a place we were even advocating for the product to be used, but kind of it was…”
Welcoming the surprise, however — allowing herself and her team to be taken in an unexpected direction — ultimately yielded an entirely new product opportunity: “It was completely novel. I think that was an example of like a category extension that was just unexpected. That had a really tangible benefit, so we got our product in a new place with the same consumer in a different way. That’s a gold star for what we’re trying to do. It opened up a brand new opportunity.”
As Robert Grudin so eloquently put it in his fabulous, The Grace of Great Things, to innovate, “One must cultivate a chronic attention to things that do not totally fit, agree or makes sense.”
In short, one must welcome surprises.
Related: Go Off-Script
Related: Note What’s Funny
Related: Willing To Go Off-Road
Related: Paint & Pipette Presents: Kelly Garrett Zeigler
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.