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My guest for Episode #158 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Karen Hold. She is the Founder of Experience Labs and her work is grounded in a core belief that design thinking provides an enabling social technology that facilitates adaptation and effective problem-solving in complex social systems.
Karen began her career in business and strategy on the Folgers Coffee brand team in the early 90s (part of Proctor & Gamble) — influenced by the work of Tom Peters, who was my guest in Episode 58.
One of the authors of the Book: Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey from Columbia Business School Publishing.
In today's episode, Karen shares her “favorite mistake” story about having all of her professional eggs in the telecom industry basket. What did she learn about the need to diversify when all of her customers went bankrupt? What actions did she take to move forward in a better way?
We also talk about questions and topics including:
- Being more intentional about diversifying in what to do next?
- Folgers experience? Lessons from learning brand management?
- The influence of Tom Peters? In Search of Excellence
- A family of designers Who were some of your key mentors? Grandfather Leroy Grumman…
“A rough answer to the right question is better than a detailed answer to the wrong question.”
Leroy Grumman
- How does that idea connect to entrepreneurship, innovation?
- “Effective problem solving in complex social systems?”
- What is a complex social system?
- How does Design thinking help with customer understanding and problem solving?
- “From ego centricity to empathy”
- Why is “the discovery process” so important, something to dive deeply into, before we start testing products or services?
- Can you apply the lessons from the book to the writing of the book?
- “Test your way to success” — peer review for an academic book
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- Quotes
- How to subscribe
- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (Likely Contains Mistakes)
Mark Graban:
Episode 158 Karen Hold, Author of the book Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey.
Karen Hold:
So my favorite mistake takes me back about 20 years.
Mark Graban:
I'm Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes. Because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth, and professional success.
Mark Graban:
Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com for more information about Karen, her company, her book, and more. Look for links in the show notes or go to markgraban.com/mistake158. As always, thanks for listening. And now here's the episode. Well hi everybody.
Mark Graban:
Welcome to My Favorite Mistake, and our guest today is Karen Hold. She is the founder of Experience Labs and her work is grounded in a core belief that design thinking provides an enabling social technology that facilitates adaptation and effective problem solving in complex social systems. There's a lot to dig into there in our conversation today. Karen began her career in business and strategy on the Folgers Coffee Brand Team in the early 90s, part of Procter & Gamble.
Mark Graban:
She was influenced greatly by the work of, I'll call him, the legendary management author and thinker Tom Peters. Tom was actually the guest here on episode 58 of My Favorite Mistake. He's a big influence on me as well. Karen is one of the authors of the book Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey. It's from Columbia Business School Publishing, and her website is experiencelabs.org. So with all that, Karen, welcome to the podcast.
Mark Graban:
How are you today?
Karen Hold:
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Mark Graban:
I want to explore and we'll talk about the book. I want to hear about some of your connections or the influence of Tom Peters and some other important people in your life and career. But as we usually do here, we'll dive right in. I'd love to hear your story. What is your favorite mistake?
Karen Hold:
So my favorite mistake takes me back about 20 years. I was working in telecommunications in the go-go years of the 90s, and my husband and I were actually working together. So we had a publishing company together, which meant we worked together, we invested together. And when the bubble burst, that also meant that our livelihood burst and our personal investments burst. So my favorite mistake, or I guess the mistake that I learned the most from was not diversifying because I was working with my husband, all of our professional investments were tied together and our personal investments were tied together at the time.
Karen Hold:
So when the bubble burst and I would say 90% of our clients went bankrupt within about six months of the telecom bubble bursting, I remembered something my father said, which was, “Karen, the first principle of investment is to diversify.” And I wish I had done that. We were having a lot of fun in telecom in the 90s, but it was a wise lesson to learn because now as we begin to see all this new investment in the metaverse and exciting electrical applications with flying cars and electric vehicles, it's just a good reminder to stay grounded and diversified in those investments.
Mark Graban:
Wow. And yeah, that's a more immediate impact than having an investment portfolio or retirement portfolio that's not diversified. If you both lose your income at the same time. Oh, my gosh. That's hard to anticipate.
Mark Graban:
Or you don't want to anticipate something like that could happen, right?
Karen Hold:
Yeah. You don't anticipate something like that could happen. And we didn't go bankrupt, thankfully. We hung on for a long time. We hung on for about six years thinking, surely this market is going to come back, surely this industry is going to come back.
Karen Hold:
And I remember a year after the bubble burst, I was sitting outside with a venture capitalist who had been a good friend to us, and he said, “Karen, this market is not coming back for 17 years.” 17 years, that's a long time. Especially when there was so much investment in the telecommunications industry during the 90s that seemed impossible to believe and impossible to accept. But in the end, he was absolutely right. The industry still hasn't come back, I think in large part because the industry has matured. And so it doesn't attract the same kind of wild over-investment that it had in the 90s, but it was a hard lesson to learn.
Mark Graban:
Wow. And you know. And thank you. Well, for one, thank you for sharing the story. Thank you for framing it as a learning opportunity.
Mark Graban:
I'd be curious to hear then from that learning as you and your husband decided what to do next professionally. I'm sure there were some different choices, more diversification in your work.
Karen Hold:
Yes, I ended up leaving the telecommunications industry. So I hung on for about six years. During that time, we had a daughter and I spent less time in the industry than I had, which gave me time to think, time to read. And I married into a family of designers, brilliant designers. And so I spent that time really delving into new work.
Karen Hold:
And that ultimately led me to my current professional pursuits in innovation because I was so attracted by the work that my husband's grandfather did and the role model that he was for me. And I was able to take a step back and really reflect on those experiences. And so ultimately I left telecommunications and I moved into the innovation space and founded my company a couple of years later.
Mark Graban:
And what did your husband end up doing? Did he stay behind in telecom or find another direction?
Karen Hold:
Yes, he stayed in telecom. He's still in telecom. The industry has changed, obviously, since the bubble burst, but yes, he's still doing telecommunications work and enjoys it. So he stayed in the industry, but I moved on.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And did it take a while? You mentioned six years after the bubble burst, was there a certain… How do you find the balance between trying to stick with it? Disprove the person who said it was going to be 17 years to recover?
Mark Graban:
I'm curious, what was your thought process of stay with it, stay with it? Was it a gradual recognition of, okay, maybe I should move on? Was there something that prompted that more specifically?
Karen Hold:
Yeah, there wasn't. There wasn't any one moment that finally pushed us over the edge or pushed me over the edge? I would say it was multiple moments of recognition that the industry has changed and it's not likely to return to the way it was. And I think I had that conversation in my head all the time, that tape is playing, is it going to come back?
Karen Hold:
Is it not going to come back? Should I make a move? Should I not make a move? Because again, when you make a move out of an industry, you're also making a move away from connections. You're making a move away from a social community of support.
Karen Hold:
And to make a choice to loosen those ties and to leave that industry was not something that I could do overnight. And so I'd say those six years was really a loosening of ties, a loosening of relationships, a recognition that there were other things in the world to discover. And I think ultimately when I reflected back on the experience I had had during the go-go years, I wanted that experience again. And I wasn't having that experience anymore. I wasn't growing professionally.
Karen Hold:
I was hanging on and I didn't like that feeling. I didn't look forward to doing the work anymore. And yet the world had moved on and there were exciting things to discover and I wanted that again.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, and you had made, it sounds like a career transition at one point of going from Folgers and P&G brand management. And then I'd love to hear more about that work, excuse me, and how Tom Peters, how his work helped you.
Mark Graban:
But what was that transition from P&G into working in telecom?
Karen Hold:
Yeah, well, that seems like a really radical shift, doesn't it? So when I went to Cincinnati and I took my dream job, and it was my dream job because I'd read In Search of Excellence when I was a junior in college. And I was so mesmerized, I think, by Tom's writing, if I can call him Tom, Tom's writing.
Mark Graban:
I think he'd be okay with that. He's pretty casual.
Karen Hold:
And I was so mesmerized by the intentionality of the way the companies he wrote about in his book organized themselves, built their brands and delivered value for the customers that they were serving. And I wanted to work for one of those companies. And P&G just happened to be one of those companies. And so I actually interviewed when I was in college and I didn't get the job, but I wasn't going to be deterred.
Karen Hold:
I came back to Washington, where I grew up. I worked in politics for about five years and the work was too slow for me. The amount of change that happens in politics and in policy happens very slowly. And so I decided to go to business school and get my MBA so that I could go back to this world that I had read about in Tom's book. And then I interviewed with P&G again, got my dream job working on the Folgers brand.
Karen Hold:
We moved to Cincinnati, and my husband had gone to the University of Pennsylvania and started taking classes at the University of Cincinnati. And after his first semester, he decided that he was bored and without, I don't know how he did this, without my knowing, he signed up for all second-year classes his second semester of his first year and wrote the business plan for a new business.
Karen Hold:
And so on our third anniversary in August of that summer, he and my father conspired to put together the incorporation papers for a new business. And he said, “I'm going to start this new business and I want you to join me.” And, you know, I was still a newlywed. Here I was at my dream job, but I was still a newlywed. And David had this big vision.
Karen Hold:
His grandfather had been a very successful entrepreneur. And I thought, this sounds really exciting, so it seems very unlike me. But I took a big leap. It wasn't without some pain. We had to leave Cincinnati.
Karen Hold:
We moved in with my parents for a year because we still owned a townhouse in Cincinnati that we hadn't been able to sell. And we bootstrapped the first year of our business, but we made it. And within a year, we were on our own. And within, I think, two years, we had moved out to Idaho, which was really a beautiful place to live and a really important place for our growth of our company because we left behind the traffic and the busyness of city life to land in a very rural but beautiful part of the world in Sun Valley and Ketchum, Idaho, where we had extra hours in our day to think. And it was really that reflection and thought time, extra thought time that we had available to us that really allowed us to grow our business and aspire to do the things that we wanted to do.
Mark Graban:
And you mentioned a family of designers and you didn't do the name-dropping. So I'll do this because I thought this was fascinating when I learned this that you're… So I have this right? Your husband's grandfather was Leroy Grumman of the Grumman Corporation from the aerospace field.
Karen Hold:
Yes, yes.
Mark Graban:
So that's nowadays Northrop Grumman, but a legendary name in aviation. So, I mean, what sort of inspiration flows down through the family of his work as a designer and an entrepreneur?
Karen Hold:
Well, his influence is extraordinary. First of all, he was a man of very few words, and I never met him; he died in 1983, and I didn't meet my husband until 1988. But of course, he was such a profound influence on the family. And the stories were a very important part of the family dynamic and the family culture. And so because he was a man of very few words, I learned how to use another language because he really didn't use an auditory language to communicate.
Karen Hold:
And my mother-in-law really was not a talker either. Her favorite courses in college were drawing and design and color. And so I, and I grew up in a family of lawyers. My dad was a lawyer, and he uses his voice every day in his profession. And so to marry into a family where you don't use an auditory language to communicate, it's not like they were deaf or mute or anything.
Karen Hold:
It's just that they used a visual language to communicate. And so Grandfather Grumman really revolutionized naval aviation with the prototypes that he built. In the 30s, the Secretary of the Navy came to Grandpa and asked him to double the number of aircraft on aircraft carriers because we were losing the war in the Pacific and we needed to figure out how to get more planes up in the air. And most aviation executives were trying to fold the wings of the plane because all planes had fixed wings at that point. So they're trying to fold the wings up and the wings lost stability when you folded them up.
Karen Hold:
So the story goes that Grandpa was sitting at the end of this long table with all of his engineers, brilliant engineers, describing their ideas for how we could solve this, how he could solve this problem. And he was tinkering at the other end with an eraser and two paper clips and absorbing all of the information but visualizing how the problem could be solved. He didn't speak a word and the conversation ends at him. And he puts this prototype with this simple eraser and two paperclips on the table. And instantly everyone in the room knew that the problem that they had figured out collectively was really the problem of a pivot.
Karen Hold:
And if you could fold the wing back like the wing of a bird, then you could maintain the stability in the wing, but also achieve the folding capability that was required to get that space-saving that you needed on a ship. And so everyone in the room instantly knew what that meant. And none of it had happened with words, right? It had happened with this very simple visual prototype that was created with everyday objects. And then they took that simple prototype to the model maker and had a proper model made and took that down to the Secretary of the Navy and put that wing design, a prototyped wing design, on the Secretary of the Navy's desk.
Karen Hold:
And he instantly knew what that meant. So that wing design went into the Hellcat and the Avenger, which were really important planes for us during World War II and helped us win the war in the Pacific.
Mark Graban:
That's such a great story about the power of prototyping. You might know the one exercise that's used a lot where you're trying to build the tallest tower that you can with dry spaghetti and marshmallows.
Karen Hold:
Yes, yes.
Mark Graban:
He would have excelled at that.
Karen Hold:
I bet he would have.
Mark Graban:
Because, like the punchline, I think of that whole story is that MBA students, and you have an MBA, I have an MBA, so I'm not speaking out of turn, that MBA students do very poorly in that challenge because they talk about it, they try to design the perfect design, and then they don't have much time to execute. Where little kids start tinkering and experimenting.
Karen Hold:
And kindergarteners always outscore MBAs. That's right. I love that story.
Mark Graban:
There's the power of prototyping, and that's come through in software design and startup methodologies these days. Maybe we can come back to that point. But there's a quote that you shared from Leroy Grumman. “A rough answer to the right question is better than a detailed answer to the wrong question.” And that really speaks to me, like a lot of the work I do of taking a pause to say, have we properly defined the problem?
Mark Graban:
There's a related quote from a different engineer, Charles Kettering says something like, “A problem well defined is half solved.” Similar idea. But I was curious if you could elaborate on Grumman's quote. “A rough answer to the right question is better than a detailed answer to the wrong question.” How do you extend that thinking into entrepreneurship and innovation?
Karen Hold:
I'm so glad you picked up on that quote. It is one of the most important lessons that I learned from him. And I find myself repeating that phrase often and especially when I work with innovators, reinforcing to them the value of just starting and doing right. I think so often we think of prototypes as dress rehearsals for the real thing, and we don't spend the time trying to figure out if we even are asking the right questions. And it is so important to make sure you're answering the right question, because I think what's hard for innovators to believe is that most of the time they're going to get it wrong.
Karen Hold:
Because we're smart, we often equate that with being right. And that's not the case in innovation. In innovation, we are most likely going to be wrong most of the time. So go out, test your assumptions, find out what has to be true for your idea to be a really good idea, and then you will get to success. But by making those small bets frequently, instead of waiting and placing big bets infrequently, you can test your way to success and ensure that you are answering the right question and you're solving the right problem.
Mark Graban:
And I think that methodology, to me, it's in line with the theme of this podcast of learning from mistakes. Hopefully, small mistakes move us forward in a way that prevents large mistakes. That's really what we're trying to convey here, I think.
Karen Hold:
Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think it's hard for most innovators to accept that we are going to get it wrong. And there is an expectation that we're going to be wrong. In Silicon Valley, the investors who are at the top of their game, VC investors who are at the top of their game, for every 10 investments they make, only 1.8 are successful. And they are the very best at what they do.
Karen Hold:
And we don't extend that same expectation to ourselves in innovation. We expect to get 10 out of 10. Right. And that's just not the case. It's not the math, that's not innovation math.
Karen Hold:
And so it's unrealistic to set that expectation on yourself and to set that expectation on others when they're in innovation.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's a good point. Where, yeah, VC investors are diversifying in a way that makes me think back to the story you and your husband… That was unfortunately not a small mistake that prevented larger mistakes. But a good point of if somebody had only invested in Google, okay, yeah, they would have really hit a home run, but chances are they invested in Google and another company or two that did okay, and then a few that were just complete flops. And that's just, that's to be expected.
Mark Graban:
And that's a good reminder to the rest of us, don't expect perfection. Like, even in a company, if we're thinking about different projects or different new products, is there a similar thought process of, well, maybe they're not all going to be perfect, they won't all be home runs.
Karen Hold:
That's right. And what I like to tell people is that if you keep an innovation inventory, then some of those products, services, experiences that you've designed may not be a home run today, but if you keep them in inventory, they may serve a purpose later. But you have to, you have to recognize that the way innovation works is that the number of ideas that you have, the large quantity of ideas that you have, will actually yield more successful ideas. It's not about having a high quality of idea. It's about having a large quantity of ideas that will get you to a good idea.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So again, the title of the book I want to come back to, the book here is Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey. And one of the endorsements on the back is from Roger L. Martin, who I'm a little bit familiar with some of his work when it comes to strategy. And when you use that phrase, what has to be true, if I'm correct, is sort of connected to his work on strategy. This idea of realizing you're not going to have a perfect strategy any more than you might have a perfect prototype and that you have to move forward, iterate, test, evolve.
Mark Graban:
Is that fair to say?
Karen Hold:
Right. And I think what's important for people to recognize is that you can't prove a new idea. You can prove the assumption or you can disprove the assumptions behind a new idea, but you can't prove a new idea until you put it out into the market. So the most important thing you can do as an entrepreneur is identify the assumptions that have to be true for your idea to be a good idea and to create value, and then go about the process of validating those assumptions. And either you validate them and you gain confidence in your idea, or you invalidate them and you make an iteration to your idea so that you get to success faster.
Mark Graban:
And so I think that's probably one of the goals of the book. And so one thing I was going to ask you back in your bio, you use this phrase, talk about the importance of effective problem solving in complex social systems. So there are two parts that I was going to ask you to unpack. Maybe first off, but going backward, what is a complex social system?
Karen Hold:
Well, I think that's every organization we work in.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, right.
Karen Hold:
I think the way we do work in most organizations, especially most big organizations, is in silos. And often when we work in our own particular area of expertise, we are working with other people who use a similar vocabulary and have a similar background that we do professionally, meaning they've been trained in a similar manner, so they recognize the same language, they recognize the same types of data that are used for decision making. And it's comfortable because we have a certain way of working within our particular area of expertise. But then other divisions of that same organization have also developed their own particular language and their own particular way of working. And so we've got these silos in organizations that function independently from each other and are not able to collaborate and build products and services together because they don't have a way of working across those differences.
Karen Hold:
What we know about innovation is that diverse teams create much better results than similar teams, teams that have people with similar experiences and similar expertise. You have to work across difference within the organization. But we all have grown up figuring out how to do our work in different ways. And so without the social structures, processes in place to work across that difference, most organizations let that go by the wayside and they don't build those cultures of innovation that require work across those silos.
Mark Graban:
What I hear you saying is one of the keys, then back to that first part of the phrase, the effective problem solving. One of the keys is breaking down silos.
Karen Hold:
Yes.
Mark Graban:
And focusing on it seemed like another piece of it. And maybe this comes back to design thinking and what's in the book: understanding the customer. Not just doing market research of would they use our gadget that we've created, but, you know, understanding like, you know, there's a related phrase that comes to mind from Clayton Christensen's work of, you know, the “job to be done” and the need to understand that. So how does design thinking help us in that understanding in a way that leads us to more effective problem-solving?
Karen Hold:
Well, let's answer that two ways. One is that when we're working in those silos, I think what happens is some particular divisions of organizations think, that's not my problem. Right. I'm not… often marketing gets labeled as being responsible for the customer, when in reality, everyone in the organization is a part of creating the experience that you're delivering to a customer, whether it's a product or a service. Right. But in organizations where there are strong silos, customer ownership ends up being somebody's responsibility, and it's usually not mine. Right. We recognize customers only as data points, but we don't recognize them for their needs.
Karen Hold:
Then the other piece of this is that when we do have responsibility for the customer, we have to move ourselves from understanding that customer from our own perspective and our own experiences to really stepping into somebody else's world and giving them the benefit of the doubt that they might be having a set of experiences that are different from our own. And that is becoming and moving from egocentricity to empathy, which is absolutely critical in the work that we do in design thinking and really the work in creating value for our customers.
Mark Graban:
Looking at the book, people might think a book about design is focused on, you know, the product that you're designing or the service that you're creating. But, you know, there's four chapters here on the discovery process. So why, you know, for the listener here, the potential reader of the book, why is that discovery process so important to what happens during that process?
Karen Hold:
Yeah, well, let me back up one step and tell you that we wrote the book for the users of design thinking and really anyone that's doing innovation. Like you said, there are a lot of books out there that address the topic of how to make a better widget or how to create a better service. That's not why we wrote this book. We really wrote this book for the people who were doing the innovation work to help them understand what it takes in terms of mindset and behavior shifts in order to do that work well.
Karen Hold:
And so we've broken that into phases. We have a pretty repeatable framework for that in the structure that we've written the book that creates some wayfinding for that. And you're right, we have a big section on discovery. Discovery, because we think that that first half of the innovation process, when we are trying to understand really what the attributes of our ideal solution are, requires so many mindset shifts and behavior shifts in ourselves in order to be successful. And the rest of the work really depends on those fundamental shifts taking place in order for us to be really curious about the people we're solving for and be able to shift our own thinking to be able to solve for the people that we're serving.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, and I flagged the page here. It talks about some of these mindset shifts. That's not an easy phrase to say, mindset shifts. I say that very carefully. I stumbled over it.
Mark Graban:
It could have been worse things. That, you know, I don't do work in innovation per se, but when I work with organizations around continuous improvement, like, I think there's a fine line or a spectrum there. But, you know, for one, it says, you know, the shift from needing to be right and avoiding failure to a mindset that's willing to be wrong. And maybe there's this part, they're willing to admit being wrong.
Karen Hold:
That's right.
Mark Graban:
So I think listeners of this podcast are probably cool with the idea of admitting the willingness to be wrong. And then there's this other part here. Or a couple of things of, instead of looking for proof that I'm right, testing ideas as hypotheses and being willing to disprove your ideas, as you mentioned earlier, if you could kind of elaborate on…
Mark Graban:
Is that easier said than done?
Karen Hold:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm working with a set of innovators right now who are riding what we call the innovation roller coaster. You know, the days that your assumptions are invalidated is a steep dive on that roller coaster.
Karen Hold:
And the days where your assumptions are validated is, you know, a great ride up to the top. But it's this constant moving from validation to invalidation, and it's not a ride that everyone is willing or able to take. I would say that for a lot of people, I would say for probably 75% of the people that I work with, innovation is a fragile environment to willingly step into because there's so much ambiguity. Right.
Karen Hold:
Again, back to this question about figuring out what the right question is to even be solving. There's a lot of ambiguity around that and a lot of discomfort that you have to be willing to accept. And not everybody is comfortable with that ambiguity. I often say that doing this work is sometimes like working in a hoarder's house because you do all this research, you collect all this information, and then it's sort of dumped into this room. And you have to try and find the one or two gems that are going to really help you create real value for your customers.
Karen Hold:
But that means you have to sort through a lot of junk in order to find those gems. And not everybody is willing to do that or wants to do that. And then when it comes to testing, I think finding out that you're wrong, that stings. There's no other way around that. Listen, we all identify as being smart.
Karen Hold:
And like I said earlier, we often equate being smart with being right. And to find out that our assumptions are wrong, that stings. That's not for everyone.
Mark Graban:
Maybe it's possible to build up some toughness around that or getting more comfortable. Maybe toughness isn't the right word. Comfort. Comfort with that discomfort and recognizing. I love your roller coaster analogy.
Mark Graban:
Like the first time you go down that steep hill, if you don't hit the brakes, that downward motion gives energy to come back up, at least partway, if the next hill up isn't too steep to require the click-clack mechanism that pulls you up. I guess a roller coaster is only fun because after that first big tall climb, the rest of it is just continued motion of the downward leading to the next uphill climb.
Karen Hold:
And that's right.
Mark Graban:
The next fun curve that makes you say, “Whee.”
Karen Hold:
That's right. And that is the constant day-to-day work of innovation is the not knowing. Right. You never know what's around the corner and but you also never know the highs that you're going to experience, which I think are exhilarating for most people. And it sure is…
Karen Hold:
I think it sure beats being bored day in and day out in a job that maybe doesn't provide that same sort of exhilaration.
Mark Graban:
Sure. Well, it could be exhilarating to have a book published. So let me come back to the book before we wrap up here. Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey with your other co-authors. Was that an example of three women from different silos or different perspectives coming together to write this?
Karen Hold:
Well, I met Jean, who, Jean Liedtka, who's already a best-selling author and I think this is her sixth or seventh book with Experiencing Design. I met her about seven years ago and she was writing her last, she was just about to start writing her last book and she sent out a call for papers or for stories, I think, and she was looking for stories of federal innovators in the D.C. area. And I'm based in D.C. and so I think I just responded to an email she sent out, “Hey, I'm working in innovation in D.C. I know some people that are doing some interesting things.”
Karen Hold:
“Maybe we could have a Zoom call” or I guess not even a Zoom call. I guess, “let's just have a call and, you know, I can share some of my contacts.” She said, “Well, I'm going to be in D.C. Why don't we get together?” So three hours later, after this wonderful coffee that we had, we started to share the work that we were doing and she very graciously brought me into her world.
Karen Hold:
And I often say that working with Jean Liedtka is like working with an Olympic athlete. She's at the top of her game. She's always pushing new boundaries. She's so eager and hungry for learning and research. And I just felt really lucky to work with her and to really dive into her world of research.
Karen Hold:
And then Jessica was Jean's research assistant and we were having so much fun, the three of us working together, that we asked Jessica to come and join us. So Jessica's doing a lot of great work. She's based in Philadelphia and she's doing a lot of great work in this field as well. So I feel very lucky and privileged to have two amazing co-authors to do this work with.
Mark Graban:
That's Great. Jean is at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Great school, of course. So I wanted to ask maybe one other question about the book. And it's a meta question in a way, not about the metaverse, a meta question about applying the ideas in this book to the writing of the book.
Mark Graban:
Namely, like with a book, can you test your way to success? And were there certain assumptions of what must be true for this book to have an impact or to be successful?
Karen Hold:
Absolutely. So we really used a design approach to writing the book. We immersed ourselves in the research, which is what we write about in the book. We made sense of the data that we found. If you had seen my office during that time, I had thousands of sticky notes on big blackboards that I used to try and find patterns in the data that we were collecting.
Karen Hold:
And then of course, we had to align all together on what we thought that meant. And sometimes we were aligned, sometimes we were not aligned. And we had to work through that as any team works through, trying to develop a clear point of view on what we thought our data was telling us. And then we began developing some brand new frameworks that we had not used in any of our work before that could help us understand what we were trying to offer to our reader.
Karen Hold:
And then of course, because this is an academic book, we had to send this out for peer review before we ever published. So in that way, we did test it. We sent it out to colleagues of our own, but we also had to send it out as part of the peer review process. And these are blind reviews, so we don't know who was reviewing the book. And they needed to be able to tell our publisher whether they thought the world needed this book or the world did not need this book.
Karen Hold:
I guess we did okay. They thought we needed this book. But at the very end, you know, we were at the 11th hour and we added a whole new section to the book because in having conversations with the people that we were sharing our work with, and in really sort of wrapping a bow around the work that we had done, we realized that we needed a way for people to implement the entire, you know, first chapters of the book. And we hadn't done that. And so we created this personal development plan that is at the end of the book.
Karen Hold:
No wonder. And that actually, we still had a publishing deadline. So we added this personal development plan. It's an analog copy that's in the book. But that set us on this year-long journey since we turned in our manuscript to develop an assessment tool that we just published three weeks ago that is really an add-on to the book.
Karen Hold:
So the work continues. We had to publish it. We had a publishing deadline and so we published what we had. But the work continues and we're so thrilled now with the outcome to extend this work even further with this Innovation Mindsets assessment that we launched with our partners in London.
Karen Hold:
We launched it with Treehouse Innovation. So anyone can take this assessment and understand their skill levels as it applies to the skill level that the minimum viable competencies that we write about in the book.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, it's a very interesting assessment here. Many, many pages of things where people do evaluate their, it's fair to say, evaluate how far you are along in that… try again. Mindset shift. How far along you are in the mindset shift.
Karen Hold:
Yes. And that's the innovator's journey. When we wrote the book, our working title was The Innovator's Journey. And at the, again at the 11th hour, our publisher said we need to call this Experiencing Design. And then the second half tagline is The Innovator's Journey.
Karen Hold:
And we thought, yes, that's exactly right. What we've written about is the transformation that you will experience in that journey when you experience design. And it really is that journey of becoming someone new in the process. And it's not a static moment in time. It is a journey.
Karen Hold:
And the Innovation Mindset Assessment will give you a snapshot of what that looks like today. And the personal development plan will then give you a way to help you develop as a person and work on those skills that you want to work on.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, that's great. So Karen, thank you. I'm going to hold the book up again. Our guest today has been Karen Hold, the founder of Experience Labs. Again, the website is experiencelabs.org. The book is Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey and it's published through Columbia Business School Publishing.
Mark Graban:
Karen, thank you so much for, you know, not just sharing your story, but for the great conversation about the book and the things you're working on. Really appreciate it.
Karen Hold:
Thank you so much. It's been a treat.
Mark Graban:
Well, thanks again to Karen Hold for a great discussion today. To learn more about her, to learn about Experience Labs and her book, look for links in the show notes or you can go to markgraban.com/mistake158. As always, I want to thank you for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to reflect on your own mistakes, how you can learn from them, or turn them into a positive.
Mark Graban:
I've had listeners tell me they started being more open and honest about mistakes in their work, and they're trying to create a workplace culture where it's safe to speak up about problems because that leads to more improvement and better business results. If you have feedback or a story to share, you can email me myfavoritemistake@gmail.com and again, our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. Hey podcast listeners. I'm excited to announce the release of the audiobook version of my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Listen and dive into powerful insights on fostering growth through mistakes. Whether you're a leader, entrepreneur, or just trying to get better at learning from mistakes, this audiobook is for you.
Mark Graban:
Get it now on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. Visit mistakesbook.com for more info.