Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, is back with his second Cool Friend interview. His new book under discussion is The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, coauthored with Jonathan Littman. From the following you can see how the roles (“faces”) work in real life:
[Someone at a meeting] will say, “Now, Erik, don’t take it personally. I was just being devil’s advocate.” And in fact, nothing could be more personal. They just shot down your favorite idea, right? Anyway, the devil’s advocate makes a pretty darn good illustration of how a role works. … I believe that if we were to catch ourselves about to say, “Let me be devil’s advocate,” we could turn that around into something more constructive, such as, “What this idea really needs, or “What this lacks,” or “The way I would make this better is …”
You can read the whole interview here. Welcome back, Tom!