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I wanted to talk to you today

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about creative confidence.

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I'm going to start way back in the third grade

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at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio.

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I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project.

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He was making a horse out of the clay

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that our teacher kept under the sink.

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And at one point one of the girls who was sitting at his table,

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seeing what he was doing,

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leaned over and said to him,

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"That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse."

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And Brian's shoulders sank.

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And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin.

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I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again.

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And I wonder how often that happens.

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It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class,

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a lot of them want to come up after class

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and tell me about their similar experience,

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how a teacher shut them down

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or how a student was particularly cruel to them.

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And some opt out thinking of themselves

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as creative at that point.

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And I see that opting out that happens in childhood,

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and it moves in and becomes more ingrained,

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even by the time you get to adult life.

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So we see a lot of this.

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When we have a workshop

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or when we have clients in to work with us side-by-side,

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eventually we get to the point in the process

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that's funny or unconventional.

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And eventually these bigshot executives whip out their Blackberries

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and they say they have to make really important phone calls,

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and they head for the exits.

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And they're just so uncomfortable.

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When we track them down and ask them what's going on,

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they say something like, "I'm just not the creative type."

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But we know that's not true.

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If they stick with the process, if they stick with it,

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they end up doing amazing things

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and they surprise themselves just how innovative

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they and their teams really are.

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So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have.

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That you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged.

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If you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged.

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And I had a major breakthrough

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when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura.

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I don't know if you know Albert Bandura.

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But if you go to Wikipedia,

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it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history --

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like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura.

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Bandura's 86 and he still works at Stanford.

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And he's just a lovely guy.

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And so I went to see him

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because he has just worked on phobias for a long time,

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which I'm very interested in.

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He had developed this way, this kind of methodology,

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that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time.

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In four hours he had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias.

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And we talked about snakes. I don't know why we talked about snakes.

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We talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia.

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And it was really enjoyable, really interesting.

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He told me that he'd invite the test subject in,

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and he'd say, "You know, there's a snake in the next room

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and we're going to go in there."

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To which, he reported, most of them replied,

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"Hell no, I'm not going in there,

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certainly if there's a snake in there."

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But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful.

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So he'd take people to this two-way mirror

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looking into the room where the snake was,

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and he'd get them comfortable with that.

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And then through a series of steps,

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he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open

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and they'd be looking in there.

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And he'd get them comfortable with that.

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And then many more steps later, baby steps,

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they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on,

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and they'd eventually touch the snake.

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And when they touched the snake everything was fine. They were cured.

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In fact, everything was better than fine.

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These people who had life-long fears of snakes

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were saying things like,

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"Look how beautiful that snake is."

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And they were holding it in their laps.

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Bandura calls this process "guided mastery."

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I love that term: guided mastery.

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And something else happened,

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these people who went through the process and touched the snake

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ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives.

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They tried harder, they persevered longer,

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and they were more resilient in the face of failure.

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They just gained a new confidence.

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And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy --

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the sense that you can change the world

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and that you can attain what you set out to do.

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Well meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me

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because I realized that this famous scientist

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had documented and scientifically validated

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something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years.

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That we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative,

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and we could take them through a series of steps,

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kind of like a series of small successes,

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and they turn fear into familiarity, and they surprise themselves.

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That transformation is amazing.

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We see it at the d.school all the time.

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People from all different kinds of disciplines,

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they think of themselves as only analytical.

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And they come in and they go through the process, our process,

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they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently.

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And they're totally emotionally excited

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about the fact that they walk around

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thinking of themselves as a creative person.

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So I thought one of the things I'd do today

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is take you through and show you what this journey looks like.

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To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz.

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Doug Dietz is a technical person.

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He designs medical imaging equipment,

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large medical imaging equipment.

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He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career.

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But at one point he had a moment of crisis.

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He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use

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when he saw a young family.

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There was a little girl,

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and that little girl was crying and was terrified.

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And Doug was really disappointed to learn

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that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital

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had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine.

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And this was really disappointing to Doug,

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because before this time he was proud of what he did.

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He was saving lives with this machine.

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But it really hurt him to see the fear

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that this machine caused in kids.

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About that time he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes.

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He was learning about our process

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about design thinking, about empathy,

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about iterative prototyping.

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And he was take this new knowledge

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and do something quite extraordinary.

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He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned.

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And this is what he came up with.

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He turned it into an adventure for the kids.

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He painted the walls and he painted the machine,

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and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids,

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like children's museum people.

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And now when the kid comes, it's an experience.

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And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship.

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And when they come, they say,

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"Okay, you're going to go into the pirate ship,

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but be very still because we don't want the pirates to find you."

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And the results were super dramatic.

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So from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated,

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to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated.

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And the hospital and GE were happy too.

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Because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time,

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they could put more kids through the machine in a day.

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So the quantitative results were great.

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But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative.

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He was with one of the mothers

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waiting for her child to come out of the scan.

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And when the little girl came out of her scan,

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she ran up to her mother and said,

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"Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?"

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(Laughter)

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And so I've heard Doug tell the story many times,

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of his personal transformation

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and the breakthrough design that happened from it,

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but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl

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without a tear in his eye.

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Doug's story takes place in a hospital.

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I know a thing or two about hospitals.

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A few years ago I felt a lump on the side of my neck,

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and it was my turn in the MRI machine.

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It was cancer. It was the bad kind.

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I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival.

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So while you're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas

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and everybody's pale and thin

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and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays,

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you think of a lot of things.

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Mostly you think about, Am I going to survive?

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And I thought a lot about,

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What was my daughter's life going to be like without me?

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But you think about other things.

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I thought a lot about, What was I put on Earth to do?

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What was my calling? What should I do?

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And I was lucky because I had lots of options.

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We'd been working in health and wellness

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in K through 12 in the Developing World.

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And so there were lots of projects that I could work on.

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But I decided and I committed to at this point

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to the thing I most wanted to do --

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was to help as many people as possible

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regain the creative confidence they lost along the way.

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And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do.

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I survived, just so you know.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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I really believe

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that when people gain this confidence --

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and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO --

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they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives.

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We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions.

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We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas

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so they can choose from better ideas.

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And they just make better decisions.

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So I know at TED you're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing.

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Everybody has a change-the-world thing.

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If there is one for me, this is it to help this happen.

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So I hope you'll join me on my quest --

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you as thought leaders,

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if would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world

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into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it's some God-given thing,

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and to have people realize that they're naturally creative.

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And those natural people should let their ideas fly.

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That they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy,

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that you can do what you set out to do,

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and that you can reach a place of creative confidence

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and touch the snake.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)