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I wanted to talk to you today
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
our teacher kept under the sink.

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

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seeing what he was doing,
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, you know?

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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 then some kind of opt out
of thinking of themselves as creative

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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, even,

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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 kind of fuzzy or unconventional.

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And eventually, these big-shot executives
whip out their BlackBerrys

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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
at 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,
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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you know, like Freud, Skinner,
somebody and Bandura.

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(Laughter)

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Bandura is 86 and he still
works at Stanford.

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And he's just a lovely guy.

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So I went to see him,

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because he's 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,

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this, kind of, methodology,

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

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like, in four hours.

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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 --

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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,
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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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
lifelong 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.

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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
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 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,
and this 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
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,
about design thinking, about empathy,

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about iterative prototyping.

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And he would take this new knowledge
and do something quite extraordinary.

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He would redesign the entire experience

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of being scanned.

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And this is what he came up with.

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(Laughter)

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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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"OK, 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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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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and 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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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,

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in your pajamas,

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and everybody's pale and thin --

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(Laughter)

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you know? -- 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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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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and K-12, and the developing world.

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

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But then I decided
and committed at this point,

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to the thing I most wanted to do,

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which was to help as many
people as possible

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regain the creative confidence
they lost along their 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 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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that they actually start
working on the things

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

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isn't that -- 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, kind of, thought leaders.

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It 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 that 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)