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>> What does it take to change the world, a breakthrough idea?
An unparalleled background in technology and execution?
Rich, wealthy connections to Stanford investors?
Over my ten years of experience in consulting, in startup financing and
high tech in Silicone Valley, I've become convinced that we
are profoundly mistaken in our conventional wisdom in what it
takes to make breakthrough technology succeed and to truly change the world.
It took me a moment of meeting the Google ex co-founder face-to-face to realize
that the techniques that astrophysicists and laser scientists are using
in Silicon Valley's most innovative laboratories are simple, repeatable steps
that anyone with access to basic supplies can start doing at home right away.
And even more excitingly, if we were to really realize this as a society,
our communities, companies and classrooms would never be the same.
My journey toward learning more about innovation began when I was
a young girl in Topeka, Kansas.
When I was young, my greatest hope for
the future of technology would be that we would invent a better remote control.
>> [LAUGH] >> And my greatest hope for
government was that we'd find a way to keep the streets swept,
particularly in the snow while minimizing taxes for my dad's small business.
Growing up in Kansas, I never imagined that a non-engineer could work for
a company like Google.
But in 2010, I found out.
In fact, they could.
And after a year of getting my ducks in a row, I applied for Google and
I landed my first job there.
Very quickly into my time at Google,
I got the opportunity to help build tech support teams, to help make Gmail and
other Google apps usable by businesses large and small around the world.
We started off trying to train people from many cultures how to answer a simple tech
question on the phone and resolve it, so the customer could move on with their day.
But over time we started to realize that this awesome staff we built
weren't just tech support agents.
In fact, they were very skillful, very creative humans who could do a lot more
for the humans on the other side of the phone than we had originally thought.
At first, we started small.
Helping new customers go from fixing an early problem to anticipating what might
happen next.
Then if someone called with one question, we try and help figure out what was
actually going on that they were trying to use technology to solve.
And then finally, we realized that if we were really effective at helping our
customers on the phone,
we could help them bring technology to bear on their workforce and
their company to power present and future goals that they found important.
The most amazing learning for me in this process was actually that innovation
doesn't have to happen only for teams that are developing software.
In fact, when you can teach people to innovate whose work involves other people,
amazing things can happen and things can transform
with the smallest intervention is one interaction on the phone.
After Alexis Google, it wasn't long before I found myself in a very strange
classroom in an innovation mansion on the border of Alamo Square in San Francisco.
I stepped through the beautiful entryway,
looked at the grand staircase coming down from above and followed red rope lights
into a mysterious basement that turned out to be a very curious place indeed.
Here Tom Chi, a Co-Founder of Google X was unveiling the methods that
Google X's engineers had used to develop breakthrough technologies
that put the Internet on floating balloons.
I was very excited and I was especially enthusiastic, because the one thing our
team hadn't figured out how to do was to solve a bottleneck and engineering talent.
Basically, how did we get more technical skills and
technical people to help bring our customer insights into real opportunities,
and tools for our customers.
As Tom began to share,
he talked about how a lot of the world's wealth runs through its largest companies,
but companies don't actually develop all of the technology that they create.
And whether they develop it or not, they tend to own the patents for 20 more years.
What I started to realize is we couldn't just trust that the world's big companies
would have a handle on the innovation that we really need
to solve the problems we want to see solved in our lifetime.
Instead, it was going to take a lot of people working together really quickly in
order to tackle problems on the scale of climate change and
we were going to need to get started right away.
As Tom shared the method, I started to become astonished.
Because what I imagined would be a highly math intensive engineering specific
discipline really boiled down to three steps that Google access engineers
use over and over, and over to reduce uncertainty, and bring the reality.
Bring the present in the future into present reality.
Step one, start with a skit.
Step two,
build something basic using pretty accessible kindergarten level supplies.
And step three, change as you go.
Again and again, they repeated this process.
And in the room, we use post-its and scissors to do the same thing.
Start with a skit.
Build something basic.
Change as you go.
Start with a skit.
Build something basic.
Change as you go.
The more we repeated this process, the more it started to sink in.
It wasn't just my team at Google that had had everything we needed to move
forward on building technology in our corporate context, but actually
the classrooms I had grown up in in Kansas had everything we needed then too.
I was infuriated.
I'm not sure where got the message that in order to create the future,
I needed access to the best science and technology labs and
teachers who had 20 years of experience in data science.
But at this point, I started to realize that if we all truly believe in this
potential, a lot could change and
a lot more people could be involved in directing that change.
The next stage in my career was a three-year stint testing my hypothesis
that this was a basic process that anybody could learn.
I taught people from 50 organizations from the US Department of Labor
to Girl Scouts at a science and tech camp.
I taught corporate, entrepreneurial and nonprofit sector leaders from Norway
to Vietnam and including the American Midwest and the biggest insight I
had from that journey was a workshop I taught to undergrads in Central Iowa.
The workshop began and everyone started, and very quickly as I do.
I said, let's going.
Time to build, right?
Yehey, and this young woman named Chelsea looked up at me and said, I can't do it.
I can't go forward and I said, why not?
She looks at me and said, you're asking me to create and
no ones ever even told me I can be creative
That's when I realized that there are thousands of creators besides my
original self who don't even realize that we can create.
And in fact, we are creating all the time.
But our own lack of awareness that, that's what we're already up to and
it's absolutely us who can do it holds us back from really making
headway on the things we care about the most.
What I learned over the course of this journey is that imagination and
invention aren't hyperspecific technologies that no one can use.
It's that actually, it's more like imagination is a muscle.
It's a process that anybody can pickup that you can exercise and develop.
And by practicing in this method, you can begin to make real progress
on the things you care about and your community cares about the most and
you can empower your workforce and your economy to do exactly the same.
If we really live like imagination as a muscle,
you all can make a huge difference, even in the rest of this week.
Maybe you would start by looking around you for people with wild ideas who
really could just grab a piece of scrap paper and start to draw what the wireframe
interface would look like rather than applying to another accelerator.
Or worse yet, quitting if they don't get in.
You could look around at the groups, the communities and
the workforces that you are a part of for places where actually a lot more is
possible than humans just doing routine activities.
And if you did, you might find out that the unemployment graph flipped.
Starts to look like capacity to innovate and
you could put your ear to the ground for some innovators, either likely or
unlikely who might not yet have been told that, in fact, they too can be creative.
Returning to your routine today, I invite you to start this process by keeping
an open mind for maybe a project that you haven't been able to move forward yet.
Is there something that you can just put on a rough sheet of paper and
hand to a friend to test?
If you did, I think you might discover that you are far more inventive,
even very rapidly than you ever dared to think.
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