Designing Better Leadership with Rick Gréfe

Michelle

Welcome to Future Works, a podcast dedicated to the conversation around innovation within the workforce space. Here we're going to share research and inspiration a little bit into what we're building and learning and aspect, and we'll have conversations with leaders. We'll look at case studies and bring our curiosity to explain what it takes to reinvent solutions. As we look at the workforce industry.

Michelle

My name is Michelle.

Gillian

And I'm Gillian, and we are your hosts. We're here to guide you through raw and honest dialog about what's happening in the world of work and, more importantly, how it can be better. And today's guests. It shares the last name with me. He is my dad. I share his last name, I took it. He is a seasoned leader, an educator, and a design thinker with a remarkable career.

Gillian

I'm really happy that we get to share him with you all. Not only did he spend the last two decades of his career reshape Aiga, which is, a global design organization. He has a really compelling, background from educating himself at Dartmouth, spending time with the Navy in the Vietnam War. Going off to Stanford Business School, leading public policy within public broadcasting in Washington, DC, which then led him to take over Aiga.

Gillian

He commuted when I was a kid, commuted from Washington, DC to New York City. Monday through Friday, for at least an entire year before he moved us to Connecticut, which goes to show you how dedicated this man is to being a leader. And AIG was a really pivotal point not to speak for you, Rick, that we'll call you Rick in the podcast.

Gillian

Not to speak for you, but a very, very defining point in your career where, you got to take something, that was kind of crumbling a little bit and turn it around. And so today we're going to connect with Rick on how design thinking found its way into leading an organization. And also tap into his experiences guiding businesses and human beings through change with thoughtful and intentional leadership.

Gillian

Welcome.

Ric

Thank you. Looking forward to.

Gillian

This. I'd love to hear just a couple sentences of, how you kind of introduce yourself to the audience and the listeners.

Ric

You hit on most of the high points, but, there have been a couple of trends in my in my background, as Kellyanne pointed out, I, I went to Dartmouth and then went into naval intelligence and ran an agent network in Cambodia for a while. And then, was an, a, a journalist. I was at Associated Press in, South Bronx and then, time magazine, and that's where I began to value observing, because ultimately that becomes really important, I think, in the career and the career path in terms of becoming not only productive but also innovative and responsive.

Ric

Then I realized that actually, I wanted to be more of an actor than an observer for a brief period of time at least. And so I went to business school in order to introduce techniques and disciplines to the public sector and did urban design and, urban economics, urban policy research. I had my own consulting firm, but then I worked with public broadcasting, and I think there's a lesson there, too, which was, you know, if any of us are any good at consulting, we go from success to success.

Ric

I mean, if you if you're any good, you do something and you look at it and the client is pleased and you walk away, but you can't feel character on successes, you can only build character on failures or risks. And so I thought instead of being a consultant, I should get inside an organization. And that's when I got into public broadcasting and handled legislative strategy and also strategic planning and technology planning.

Ric

And then, I became CEO of Aiga, Professional Association for design, and then ultimately Design Thinker in residence at Williams. And I think with that background shows you is that, and it may be useful for me not to focus so much on design thinking techniques, although I'll hit the high points on it. This diversity in my background points to one mantra I've sort of carried around, which is people like plants need to be repotted regularly or we can root out.

Ric

And so instead of staying the same profession, we might want to go farther because one one thing that it does by moving around is it keeps you fresh. And if you do the same thing over and over, your critical instincts are going to become dull. And even worse, you lose your open mind and it's because you may have done something that you're challenged with today, six years ago and it didn't work, and so you assume it won't work now, which is not the case.

Ric

So there's a lesson there. And I think what I'd like to do is, is reveal a number of lessons like that.

00:05:09:12 - 00:05:20:11 | Gillian

Can being a true observer and a listener can do you believe that that is a skill that can be taught or is that something you're born with know about?

Ric

Some people are born without a shutter on it. But but you can open that shutter with a little discipline. And I think that, if you understand why it's important, then, then maybe it's easier. And so, you know, I definitely I definitely think it can, it can be taught.

Gillian

The repotting kind of example. Just to double click into that for a minute. Can you break it down quite literally? What an example of that for somebody would be. It's truly a different career path is a different role within an organization.

Ric

It's both of those things. I think, you know, I think ultimately being a specialist, is not the best course for someone to take. I think what you want or T-shaped individuals want to have a broad set of skills and interests and curiosity. And then the ascender there is, a single area in which you have a skill set.

Ric

The truth of the matter is, in most of the problems we solve. But you're human. They're complex. It's the adjacencies that define whether a solution is going to be successful or not. You have to be able to look laterally in order to see what the second order consequences are. So if you're not in a single silo for most of your career, it enhances your capacity to look to the left and look to the right and find where the secondary consequences are going to occur.

Ric

And that's normally where success occurs.

Michelle

So I'm interested to know in your experiences what pieces did you apply across the board, like what did you bring with you at each location and sort of maybe track like, which things did you leave behind?

Ric

The dominant attribute I bring is curiosity, right? Curiosity and, and a willingness to move beyond what my current knowledge base is rather than trying to be an expert. It's trying to be someone who's agile and moves across problems, with an open mind. And so in every job I've had, whether it's, house painting on a summer during college or whether it was the Navy, you know, I, I take things from every one of those jobs, and you don't really leave them behind.

Ric

You don't need much behind. Hopefully you leave behind the dynamic that you created in terms of encouraging people to be, thoughtful, open minded, curious and creative. You don't really leave a lot of yourself behind. You take it with you. And it keeps building in terms of this bibliotheque of skills and experiences. When I was a young consultant, before I realized that I should be listening instead of talking at a job with a sewer district in the Sacramento Valley, they wanted to expand their dimension so they could increase the tax base.

Ric

So it was a matter of drawing a, a boundary for a new taxing district on the map. And so after spending several days there and, coming back and announcing that, I thought where the line should be drawn is along the ridge line in the mountains that surrounds the valley. The fire chief said, yeah, that's fine, kid, but you can't pump shit uphill.

Ric

Okay? And that's always been something that I've remembered, because you've got to be careful. You got to get yourself into the mindset of those people you're trying to address.

Gillian

Yeah, actually, I have one ingrained in my head from when I was at Riding Antler, which was, I was saying something more, so to say something than for it to be valuable. And the creative director told me to not state the obvious, and that runs through my head. That was ten years ago, and it runs through my head multiple times a week.

Gillian

Right. You gotta learn.

Ric

I have to learn. And believe me, on one board that I run, it's corporate and public broadcasting, where the board is appointed by the president, and they go around the board table to have discussions. And it was so clear that each board member seemed to be only interested in, saying what they have on their mind rather than on what the agenda is.

Ric

And you realize, you know, you've got to fight some of that stuff sometimes. And as it occurred with you, and you've got to have somebody who's a mentor who straightens you out on that.

Gillian

Let's get into the head of Rick or Faye. Right. When you accepted your CEO position with RGA, it was a shit show. And, you here you are, CEO, getting on a train to New York City. This is, for the listeners, an organization with a chapter in every major city throughout the country. You're not just leading an office in New York of employees.

Gillian

You're leading a community of supporters that are waiting for the big next step. So I'd love to just have you unpack that further.

Ric

I walk into an organization that was 80 years old. And, had probably past its prime in terms of being a small club, very effective designers. And I'm in a very small club in New York and, it, it started to expand nationally, but it was 3000 members. When I left, it was 28,000 members. And when I got there, there were 30 chapters around the country.

Ric

And when I left, there were 72. So we expanded dramatically. Now, what do you do first? The first thing you do is try to get every employee to tell you what their vision is for the organization, and what they think need to be accomplished, that they have not been encouraged to accomplish. And, when you find there are people who have neither of those visions, you might well start changing the staffing a bit and you ultimately, you want everyone to be working for a certain outcome.

Ric

And so that that's what I, what I did first and then introduced, some policies and procedures which some people would say, that sounds awfully bureaucratic. My instinct was, let's not waste time resolving issues over and over and over again. Let's resolve them. Once we write them down, everybody goes follows that unless you object. And then if you object, let's change it.

Ric

But let's not waste time. So there were a number of things giving it a structure, an armature, and then giving it vision and direction and an ambition. It had been a club of very successful designers in, in New York. This was, you know, a rapidly growing profession. And, the question is, how do you turn it from a club to the hub of the profession, club to hub?

Ric

I mean, or, you know, as the, you know, the old moniker would be, from a cathedral to the bazaar. Let's get out of the, you know, cathedral. The chair that bishop sits in and step out in front of the cathedral where everybody's milling around, and that's what you ought to be. And so that was part of what caused such a change.

Ric

And I think that it it gets at once again, who are you really trying to serve.

Gillian

Given how much fun people would have at the Aga conferences? I think you definitely succeeded with that.

Ric

Yeah, yeah, that was party central.

Gillian

All right.

Michelle

Can you give a non designer like a layperson like myself, a good working definition, like when you say design thinking, what are we talking about.

Ric

Here is a little known fact. How did that term come up. It came up because someone named David Kelly, who was the founder of Idea, which was always seen as sort of the, premier design thinking consultancy. A client came to him and asked him to do something. You said, I want you to design it. And he said, no, think.

Ric

And the client said, no design. And David said, no think. And somehow it came together. Because the truth of the matter for designers is that design is 10% of it. Listening is 90% of it. In order to find out, in order to get the dimensions of the problem. So design thinking is simply focused on humans and real people and what they need.

Ric

Because once again, institutions can very easily reach the point where, you know, you are putting something out. It could be a product, it could be information, but that's not necessarily what your client wants. What they want is something else. And so how do you get people to focus on real people rather than precedent or rather than institutional benefit design thinking too easily be called human centered design.

Ric

Observe first. I mean, talk to people. Follow them around, see how they really behave, and then, come up with some rapid prototypes of what you think would solve this problem and test them and if it doesn't work, try another one. I mean, it's a classic case of premature babies had a high mortality rate in India. And, the assumption with the World Health Organization in that case was that there weren't enough incubators.

Ric

The, the researchers went to these hospitals in India, and they were shocked because there were like 10 or 12 high level and expensive incubators there, and all of them were empty. And what they discovered was people had a hard time getting from a rural village to the hospital with a preemie. So what the designers came up with was little sleeping bags.

Ric

Put the child in immediately and you get them to the hospital and instead of $20,000, you know, for a incubator, it was $200 for this little sleeping bag, and they could be distributed easily. So that's where you look at what's really happening and don't come in with assumptions. And that's where design thinking has its strongest play.

Gillian

Design thinking is obviously being utilized in more leadership and management environments than it was when it was more of a product oriented response. I'm curious if you have any tips or tricks up your sleeve around what an intangible prototype can look like from a management standpoint.

Ric

One of the, most important ways to use it is basically communication, because, you know, Elizabeth Warren, Senator Warren, when she set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she hired Rhodes Scholars, Supreme Court clerks to run all the different divisions. I mean, this is brilliant, except she wanted to make sure that they were understanding that it was their output, not their input that was critical.

Ric

So she had us do a design thinking workshop where we we showed them how to think about the individuals who they're trying to serve. And it's basically consumers who are being, you know, manipulated by financial institutions. And at the end of the day, even she said, now I get it. We are not in the information business. We're in the understanding business.

Ric

And so and you could see that people could be providing a lot of information, but it's irrelevant if people can't absorb it properly. So in communication, the idea of really understanding your audiences and understanding what's important to them, what their attention span is, that becomes really critical to being effective.

Gillian

It's shifting perspective, and it's a tool for that. I'm curious how leaders ensure that their team is empowered to lead with curiosity or grow with curiosity. How have you done that as a leader in your in your experience?

Ric

You know, we're all used to the hierarchy where there's a CEO, there's a C-suite, there are, you know, middle managers, and then there are information workers or whatever. Now, if that if that hierarchy exists, then an awful lot of people look up the chain of command to get both direction and, confirmation. And where does that leave the clients?

Ric

The customers? Well, the customers are below the analysts. Right. So everybody is looking up at the management. If you flip the hierarchy and say the function of the CEO and every manager is to look at the relationship between the lower level analysts and customers, and their whole job is to make sure that that relationship is productive, successful, strong, engaging, then the whole attitude of the place is, how do we all work toward this objective of making that a rich customer experience?

Ric

So that's that's certainly, one way to deal with it in design thinking. One of the techniques, you know, and you've all seen here are the stickies on the whiteboard, but there's some there's some functions that go on in that process that are really kind of interesting because, among other things, you want to train people for divergent thinking before convergent thinking.

Ric

In other words, come up with lots of ideas before you limit them. When people put stickies on the on the board and use your Sharpie, the reasoning why don't you just Sharpie is because you can't write very much on a sticky. So? So you have to be accurate, right? And you put them up there and when they reach that board, every suggestion is, anonymous and equal the hierarchy he's got.

Ric

Nobody knows who wrote what. And then if you have a group organized around themes, the group takes credit for the entire group of comments. So you no longer segregating upper level and lower level ideas. You're forcing everybody to participate. So they're things like that that you can do that help people get beyond the certainty and toward, something that it's that is more collaborative, more creative, more open minded.

Michelle

I love how you talked both about like, okay, here's what, you know, our our leadership can do with design thinking. Here is what you could do kind of as a doer in your organization with design thinking. If you were going to give someone a really practical way that you could go apply design thinking to, you know, your next project, what would be, like the very next step?

Michelle

Someone could take.

Ric

Their shoes off. Techniques. As I mentioned, and they're well documented. I mean, idea as published a handbook. And, there are a couple others that are available, you know, once again emphasizing the understanding real people. And that means, you know, not only listening, I mean asking questions, but listening to the answers, but also follow them around and watch them.

Ric

You know, and just let them just spend time with them because you'll discover things that are really surprising. I mean, you will discover why they don't fill out the box on the right on that ballot. You know, you'll find out all kinds of things that, about behavior that aren't part of your intellectual, you know, framework in solving the problem.

Ric

What are you trying to instill in in the people that work with you? You're trying to instill creative confidence to take risks and be creative. You want them to master collaboration, and you respect all ideas. And, you learn to value failure because failure is the way you discover things. Now that can be taken to an extreme. I mean, Musk says, you know, break it and then fix it, right?

Ric

Iterate, iterate, iterate and discover. Storytelling. Storytelling, goes back to at least my experience that you have to be effective in communicating. Let's take an example. The the queen dies and the king. Those are facts. The queen dies and the king dies of a broken heart. Now that's a story. And why is that important? Because people remember it and they share it.

Ric

So suddenly you engage your audience around things you're trying to tell them, and so, you know, you really have to discover storytelling and go on to that next step, which is great. Engage your audience.

Gillian

I'd like to position kind of what we're talking about as your approach to creative leadership. But what would you say to somebody who says, I'm not a creative, I'm not creative. I don't know how this could possibly apply to me. I just I'm curious what you would say to them.

Ric

And what you have to do is you have to take it away from the vocabulary of creative. So let's just talk about abundance. Let's think about how many ideas we can come up with, what could really make a difference. And if there's fear around creativity you want to get, you want to move that aside. I mean, that's the way I would approach that.

Gillian

Well, this has been fantastic. Any other kind of nuggets that you wanted to pass along to us of wisdom?

Ric

Yeah, yeah, there is one actually, there's another lesson that I took early, probably 40 years ago that I've never forgotten. You may know the artist Christo, who used to wrap things in fabric. So, I mean, he wrapped the arc de Triomphe. He wrapped, the rifle Valley in, in Colorado. He had done a 23 mile fence in Marin County of orange fabric.

Ric

And when he did that, I saw him and I said, you know, doesn't it drive you crazy? Working with the planning and zoning people to get permission to put a 23 mile fence across all this property? And he said, Rick, that is the art. Anyone can hang a curtain, get to love the administrative, you know, bureaucratic speed bumps and pride yourself on getting over them rather than feeling frustrated because that's always going to be part of the challenge.

Ric

So don't turn against it because it will compromise your own effectiveness.

Gillian

That is such a good piece of wisdom. I'll be sharing that with my team. Absolutely. Amazing. Rick. Dad, thank you for being here. Anything else from you? Michelle?

Michelle

No, thank you so much. It was so fun to kind of just sit and see the two of you together. So thank you so much for all of the incredible wisdom and just a really fun and informative conversation of so much. I want to, like, go think through.

Ric

Oh good. But, you know, I hope it's useful and I hope it works within your place, you know, of business.

Gillian

We should probably send everyone in the company some post-it notes and maybe a little design, a little duct tape.

Ric

Yeah, right. Exactly.

Gillian

Well, thank you so much for being here, everyone. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed what you listened to today and sparked something in you, hit subscribe and follow along as we continue to explore innovation and imagination in the workplace. Thank you again to Rick or Faye for giving us guidance and wisdom around creative leadership. Opening the door, to design thinking within the workplace and just spending time with us.

Ric

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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