Most people think that innovative ideas just hit like a lightning bolt. A sudden, brilliant idea that comes out of thin air and changes everything. But the truth is, innovation rarely comes out of thin air. Take Airbnb, for example. At first glance, it seems like this wild, random idea was, what if strangers slept in your spare bedroom? But you see, the founders of Airbnb didn't just stumble across this by accident. They studied who they were building for the cash strapped traveler. People who were attending conferences in cities where the hotel rooms were sold out, and young professionals looking for a unique experience in a new city. They brainstormed dozens of possible business models before landing on the one that worked.

And then they did something unexpected. They storyboarded the entire experience from the moment a traveler searched for a place to stay, to knocking on the door of a stranger's home, to leaving a review. They sketched it all out like a movie, scene by scene. So Airbnb didn't happen by luck. It happened by design. And in this episode, we're going to explore the three steps that innovation follows when it is deliberately designed. Personas, divergent thinking, and storyboarding, all present in the Airbnb example.

Now, innovation might feel like magic, but successful innovation is actually built on deliberate design choices. So, again, in this episode, you're going to learn how personas, divergent thinking, and storyboarding work together to create conditions in which innovation can absolutely thrive. And I want you to be thinking about innovation really, as a designed process. So let's contrast for just a moment this myth that innovation hits by lightning bolt versus, I think, a more apt metaphor, which is that innovation is more like a greenhouse. So both can produce something very unlikely and surprising, like sand struck by lightning turns into glass. Yes, that is true, but we can't just wait for that to happen. And this is where design comes into play.

And this is where the greenhouse model fits more and I think is more apt and more appropriate. So if you want to grow tomatoes in a cold Minnesota winter, well, you can't do it outside. But if you cultivate them inside a greenhouse with a tightly controlled environment outside, absolutely, you can grow all the tomatoes you want. And of course they are going to survive. And it's much easier to grow those inside of those controlled conditions than in a freezing winter outside, where, quite frankly, knowing how the Minnesota winters are, because I live here, you just couldn't do it. So I do want to go into give a brief nod to serendipity, though, because serendipity does play a role in innovation. But it's not the role that a lot of people think. A lot of people think that serendipity plays the role of, like, that lightning bolt.

But I think serendipity comes way before the solution in the innovation process. The way that serendipity plays into it is that the problem itself, that the innovation is solving is. Is really the serendipitous thing, like a problem came along that was unique enough. And we'll talk about Airbnb's problem in just a moment, that it required an innovative solution. So I'm not saying that serendipity isn't part of innovation at all, but I think serendipity happens way before the innovative solution that we think of as innovation. In fact, let's just go back to Airbnb and let me sketch out how Airbnb came to be in this world. If you are not familiar.

And in fact, there's a really good chance that if you're listening to this podcast, you have probably stayed in an Airbnb property or seven over the last decade or two. So Joe Jabia and Brian Chesney were graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the best top design schools in the world, and they studied industrial design. Then they moved to California. So they're living in the San Francisco Bay area as new graduates, rising right out of college, and they're totally cash strapped. They're roommates, and they are trying to figure out how to pay, literally how to pay the rent. And they find that there's an industrial design conference happening right there in San Francisco, and all the hotel rooms are sold out. And so they just start kicking around ideas, kind of just having some fun, and they're like, what if we put up people on air mattresses in our apartment and charge them rent? And that's exactly what they did. And so the problem itself, again, might have been that serendipitous thing that led to a solution.

But the solution that they actually built out was very, very much designed. Not, of course, that very first day. So the very first day, three people stayed in their home. A dad from Utah who had four kids, a designer from Boston, and I can't remember who the third one is, but three people stayed in their home. They purchased inflatable air mattresses. You know, the big. The big ones, the big comfy airbeds. And three people stayed in their apartment for $80 a piece for the nights of the conference. So that's how it. The concept first came to be. So we could say there's perhaps some serendipity in the concept of having people stay in their home or in their apartment. But then the way the product was built out truly was an experience in design, which of course isn't surprising given that Jabia and Chesney are both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. So of course, their product was very, very well designed. So let's step through three specific design components that helped them create their design. Now, I don't think they describe how they brought Airbnb into the world quite in this way.

I've studied the process that they, you know, their origin story of how Airbnb came to be, and I'm sort of retrofitting three design principles to it because some of them, I know are explicitly discussed in how they describe how they designed it. But I'm kind of constructing this three step process and applying the Airbnb model to it. Just for clarification. This isn't necessarily how the founders of Airbnb would describe it. Now, also, to be fair, there is a third founder who kind of came on board after that initial stay. Nathan Blecker. And so then those three are the three co founders. Now, once they have this initial design concept figured out, they, they really road tested it in Denver the following year. So all of that happened in 2007. Then the following year, in 2008, they road tested it in Denver or stress tested it, you might say, with the Democratic National Convention happening in Denver. And so there were, you know, an extreme number of people who needed rooms beyond what the hotels had capacity for. And so that was really the first stress test of the idea.

Okay, now let's dive into these three big design concepts and how the Airbnb model followed them in terms of creating a design that really works and is a, a delight, an absolute delight. Okay, so the first one, Personas. So with Personas, what we're doing is we're designing for someone, a specific person or type of person, an archetype, if you will. And so a Persona is simply a profile that represents your ideal customer or your ideal user. It's a way to humanize data by imagining a real person instead of just some demographic data. So thinking about their goals, their frustrations, their needs, so that you're designing solutions that really meet where the person is at and what is important to them. So, for example, if you were designing a product that was not well understood by its where the designers did not understand the users very well, there's a much greater likelihood that that product would fail to meet their needs. It might be a product that would work great, but if they didn't design it for a specific person or type of person, then it might never fall into the right hands.

So let's look at this from just a leadership standpoint for a moment. Leaders innovate best when they understand who they are solving for. So, for example, if you've got, let's say tardiness is an issue in your organization. If you know the types of employees who report to you, and let's say, you know, let's say showing up at a specific time is important, and I know it's not important in all industries, but if it were, you might then look at the different types of folks you have working for you and just don't assume that, let's say you work in a call center. Don't assume that everybody is of the same Persona. You might have the mom who works at the call center. You might have the Persona of the person who has a really long commute.

You might have a Persona of a person who is telecommuting and, uh, shares a car or a ride with other people. Uh, you might have a Persona of an employee who takes public transportation. So you might have all this. And I'm just orienting these different types of Personas about, like, how they get to work and what else they have going on in their lives. But when we think about if I'm going to deal with tardiness, well, I'm maybe going to deal with it or think about it differently for the Persona of the working mom versus the person who's taking public transportation. But when we are designing for a specific person, it makes a whole world of difference because we're thinking again of that specific person. So if it's that working mom, we know that there's other things happening in her life. It's not just showing up to work on time.

She's also got kids that need to be dropped off at daycare or maybe kids that are sick. Maybe partnered or not partnered. There's all these different things that go into that Persona. I think about Persona. I mean, I have Personas for my ideal clients as well. The Persona suggests how old they are, what market they're in, how much they spend on keynote speaking every year and all of those things. And when I am talking to somebody or writing copy for my website or any of those kinds of things, I'm thinking about that ideal buyer that ideal person who would like to hire me. So the Airbnb folks absolutely were thinking about, and specifically people who wanted hotel rooms, but hotel rooms were sold out in their market.

So that was their first type of Persona that they were considering, and they thought long and hard about what that person needs. That person really wants to go to that conference. Maybe they've already purchased the ticket to the conference and thought they'd pick up the lodging later. Now they find out that lodging in that whole market is sold out. And so that drives a certain type of need, a certain type of motivation from the person who is the buyer of the Airbnb. You know, mattress on the living room floor or spare room or whatever it is, maybe. I mean, these days it's very common for people to exit their property entirely so that you have the whole place to yourself, but not necessarily. And so anyway, lots of it's evolved, and they have lots of different Personas now, but when they were first designing, they were designing for that person who already knew they need to be in that city for probably a professional event, and there were no hotel beds available.

All right, now we're going to layer on top of that. Divergent Thinking. Now, if you've been around the podcast a while, you've heard me talk about Divergent Thinking a number of times, most recently in episode 222. 222. That episode was titled Netflix and the adjacent Possible what Streaming Made Possible. So if you've heard that episode, you know about Divergent Thinking already. If you haven't heard that episode, just in a nutshell, Divergent Thinking is the practice of generating as many ideas as possible, even super wild ones, before narrowing down to the best idea or the best set of ideas. It's about opening up the possibilities first and evaluating feasibility second.

So, and here, if you want to think about this abstractly, it's just about, like, coming up with lots and lots and lots of different solutions to a problem before then evaluating those solutions for their viability and deciding which ones of those to try. So when we think about Divergent Thinking as it relates to the Airbnb story, they thought of lots and lots and lots of different business models before they came up with the one that they landed on, where they reached out to people to, you know, solicit them to put their home or spare bedroom on Airbnb, and then the specific process that they followed in terms of revenue share. And like all of the different things the super hosts, all of the different things that now go into that Airbnb experience, that those all came about from Divergent Thinking, the founders of the company, and then as they're, as they grew, their staff thought and still continue to think about new features to add. And they don't just think up a new feature and then add it. They think up a whole bunch of different new features and then they test those. Some of them they test in real life. Some of them they just test by thinking them through feasibility wise before applying them or trying them in the real market. So from a leadership standpoint, as you think about Divergent Thinking, this is really about encouraging lots of creative thinking and lots of ideas before you start to evaluate any of those ideas for quality as you're moving towards innovation.

Now, it's different from brainstorming. I mean, brainstorming is a form of Divergent Thinking, but there are lots of other forms of Divergent thinking as well. And again, if you're not familiar with Divergent thinking or you want a Divergent thinking exercise to do before you start doing some brainstorming with your team, go back and listen to episode 222. We'll link it up in the show notes because that gives you some great ideas about Divergent Thinking and how you can use them in your work. Okay, so again, the founders of Airbnb, they thought specifically about who they were designing for, who this experience was going to be for. Then they thought really with a really wide lens about what might go into that experience and what that business model might look like. And then once they started to figure that out, they storyboarded the whole experience. So you can think about storyboarding as mapping something out, almost like in a comic strip.

So mapping the journey visually, it's a way of sketching out an experience. And again, step by step, like a comic strip or like a movie scene. And it really does help you see how an idea would play out in real life before you're putting people in a specific circumstances circumstance. It also helps you spot gaps and opportunities and problems before you actually build something. So again, from a workplace standpoint, if you're rolling out a new process, you, you might storyboard that out. How does it get announced? Does it get sent out by email? Does it get announced in a team meeting? Do managers learn about it first and you storyboard all, all of those things out and then you might find the gaps? Oh, if the managers find out about it first, does everybody, does every manager tell their staff all at the same time? Is that feasible that everybody's gonna have a team meeting all at the same time? Otherwise, if it gets leaked out from one team before another team hears about it. There might be a lot of chatter in the background, and we don't want that. So, again, you could spot those kinds of things as you rolled out how a new process is going to get announced.

Again, by storyboarding at first. Now, the Airbnb folks, they storyboarded every step along the way from the person who, you know, first finds out that all the hotel rooms in Denver are sold out in advance of the event they want to attend. And then what are the steps they take? What would they search for on the Internet before that would help them find Airbnb and its website? They just. And then once they were in the booking process, what would the booking process be like? What would the user want to know about the property before they felt comfortable? Stay. Literally staying with a stranger? I mean, again, now, these many decades later, it doesn't seem quite so bizarre. But at this. At the time that it was being started, it was really, really bizarre. So they storyboarded every single thing out, and that helped them find gaps in the process so that they could address those gaps and make it an experience that people felt much more comfortable and confident with.

When you think about storyboarding from a leadership standpoint, it makes invisible experiences visible. Because when you're storyboarding and you go just from like, one thing to the next thing, it makes you ask, like, is that. Is. Is that really all there is? Or are there some steps in between that I'm missing? And then you can tease out that storyboard so that you can get the steps in that you were missing. Because, again, when and if you are storyboarding something and I encourage you to try it this week, make your initial storyboard and then set it aside for a day or so, and then come back to it with beginner's mind and think, like, okay, if I knew nothing, let's say you're going to storyboard the onboarding process for new employees in your organization because you're about to hire some people, storyboard that out, set it aside for a day, and then come back to it again with that beginner's mind and think to yourself, if I knew nothing about how onboarding worked and I was a new employee and I followed these steps, would I feel confident that I made a good choice in deciding to work here? I would I feel comfortable, would I be getting my questions answered? What else would I wonder about? And so walk through that storyboard to road test it yourself before, and then, you know, road test it with other people to ask Other people to poke holes in it. Okay, so when we put this all together, I want you to, again, think about innovation as not a bolt of lightning out of the sky, but much more like a greenhouse that is cultivated, that you know, where you can cultivate something to grow that wouldn't otherwise grow. So innovation starts with Personas, developing who you a very, very clear picture of who you are designing this experience or product for, Then divergent thinking, where you're thinking about all the possible ways that. And steps along the process, the ways that this might come together, and then storyboarding it out step by step by step, because this is going to make sure that nothing gets missed.

Again, I bring you back to that greenhouse metaphor, because you've got the soil, the sunlight, and the structure and all of those things, and you might have all of that. But if you don't have a safe place, a safe container for the seed to grow, especially in unlikely conditions like the cold, harsh winter of Minnesota, you're never going to get those tomatoes to grow in January. All right, my friends, here is your call to action this week. I want you to try at least one of the steps that we talked about today. So if you manage a team or if you are in a customer service role, you can think about the people that you serve. So if you're a manager, the people you serve are your employees. If you're in any sort of customer service, whether that. I mean, we're all in customer service, aren't we? We all have internal customers or external customers, and some of us have both.

So think about. You could think about the Personas of the customers that you. That you work with. So you could create a quick Persona or set of Personas, because a lot of times there are multiple Personas. Everybody that you deal with is not exactly the same. You could also ask, what else could we do to spark some divergent thinking? So you might take a process or something that happens a certain way, the way a project rolls out, and you might ask yourself, how else could this go and. And really spark some divergent thinking and, you know, whiteboard those ideas out. Or you could sketch a rough storyboard for a process or for an idea or how you might roll something out.

Or if you're feeling particularly ambitious, you could take all three of these steps, Personas, then divergent thinking, then storyboard, and use all of them in sequence. So, again, I want to remind you, innovation is not random. It is designed when it works well. It does not strike like lightning. It is much more likely to thrive when cultivated just like you would need to use a greenhouse to grow tomatoes in January in Minnesota. All right, my friends, if this information and these ideas resonated with you, I strongly encourage you to make sure that you are subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts or subscribed over on my YouTube channel. Because the podcast goes live on YouTube every Monday morning, just like it goes out to the podcast platforms every Monday morning. And if you were to be watching this on YouTube, you would see that my lip gloss is very shiny today.

I don't know what it what happened today with the lip gloss, but it's super shiny. So hop on over to janelanderson.com YouTube.com janelandersonPhD if you wanna see my super shiny lip gloss on this episode. All right, my friends, be well.