 This is my first trip to India and it's been a very revealing, wonderful experience for me. Thank you very much for welcoming me and my life suits here in this country. I've been struck by how open, generous people here are. Everybody I've met has been very willing to talk to me and look at me and it's a wonderful thing. Everybody is friendly and they're smart, everyone. There's a lot of depth here and there's one other quality that I see throughout the people that I meet. Regardless, yesterday we went on a long tour of Bangalore. We went to some very upscale houses and some very downscale houses. What we saw was family. We saw this understanding that family is who we are and that it ties us together and a great value of that. The company that my wife and I started, now 26 years ago, Cooper, was also a family company and we brought family values to business. I understand that value in the same way. You may not know this, but in October, just a few months ago, Cooper was acquired by Designit, which is acquired by Wipro. We're now part of Wipro, which is a local company and one that I think could also be described as a family. So I feel very much at home as part of that organization. This picture is a picture of where Sue and I lived. Seven years ago, we left our Silicon Valley house in the heart of the vast Silicon Valley and we bought a ranch. This is what it looks like. We call it Monkey Ranch. Have you ever heard the expression monkey business? Yeah. Well, there's a little of that. And monkey wrenches, I like to make things. And the cool guy at a monkey ranch is a tool. And we also have a cat named Monkey Ranch. Anyway, what you'll see is the background for a lot of my slides. These lush green ones are pictures of Monkey Ranch. And they're a fitting background. A lot of the thinking that's gone into my presentation came from my moving up and seeing life. So now, let's get going here. Can everyone hear me okay? Go in the back. Can you see me okay? I see a couple of hands going up. That's a good, okay. So today, I want to talk about the way I like to vote. It's not unique, but it's somewhat rare. And I call it working backwards. It's widely useful, but it's most powerful as a tool for innovation and creativity. A less obvious application is its usefulness in managing the creative process. Working backwards also gives you insight into the larger world and what your responsibilities are as a citizen. Simply put, working backwards means questioning every assumption before you accept it. You first step backwards with genuine inquiry, and only then do you proceed forwards with knowledge and confidence. Now, it may seem like a waste of time to question every assumption, but rushing in the wrong direction gets you nowhere. The world is simply not out there breathlessly awaiting the release of your poorly conceived. Now, working backwards gives you three main advantages. It helps you know your user and their goals. It helps you to see possible solutions, and it helps you to see the bigger picture. And I'll talk about each of these. Now, you've probably heard that old saying, success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. There's a lot of truth to that saying and a little bit of vision to be the foundation for a huge amount of hard work. Working backwards is how you find your vision. It's that 1% inspiration that all the sweat comes from working forwards. You can't escape that huge quantity of perspiring work. It has to be done. The problem is that creating massive failures takes just as much hard work and perspiration. The difference is the 1% inspiration. What differentiates successful products from failures is something new and different, something better and friendlier, something that hasn't been done before, or something that has never been this easy to use or to learn. And we call such differentiation innovation, and it comes with a built-in conundrum, a dilemma. Innovation, by definition, is doing something counter-intuitive, something that has never been done before. And if you've never done it before, it's a certainty that you don't know how to do it yet. So regardless of your previous experience with similar projects, the more innovative it is, the more it diverges from the known. Working backwards demands that you do things differently. Or to use the proper management term, you're doing it the wrong way. You won't just be doing this in a vacuum. You have to fight for your right to work backwards. Working backwards really pisses me. I've always worked backwards. I just naturally question assumptions. I don't just want to see results. I want to see how things work. I don't just want to see the play. I want to see what goes on backstage. I'm a born rule-breaker and a shit-disturber and a road-less traveled guy. As a young man, I wore my hair long, I dropped out, and I always did what people said I shouldn't do. For 40 years, I've been designing and writing and critiquing software and technology. And working backwards is my superpower. When someone tells me I have to choose between A, B, I always choose C. It really pisses me off. Over the years, I've invented many design tools for working backwards, like para-design and user personas. One of our oldest tools is an exercise called pretend-its-magic. More than any other, it exemplifies the power of working backwards to break new ground and to frustrate conventional things. Pretending-its-magic is easy. You just ask yourself, how would we solve this problem if anything were possible? Typically, conventional design and engineering begins with a ritual recitation of constraints and requirements. These tell you what you can't do and what you must do. But this approach condemns you to doing what you already know in ways that you're already familiar with. It's a roadblock to innovation. It's assuming before knowing. It's working forwards before you've worked backwards. It emphasizes history, convention, old technology, old mental models, and just the way we do things around here. Instead, it's better to work backwards. Start by throwing out everything, all your assumptions, all those known limitations. For the moment, just assume that all technical problems can be solved, that all organizational hurdles can be overcome, that all resources only imagine the possibilities. What does the user want and what would make them? For example, if you have to build a bridge across a river, you would normally start by building concrete abutments and then laying steel girders between them. But when you build a bridge backwards, you start by asking, what is the fundamental purpose of the bridge? Who needs to get across the stream? Why? Are there existing forms or variants that could do the job? And what else could it be? Now, you can see the objective with more clarity. You can better understand why this bridge needs to exist, and the essential feature set becomes clear. You can see what isn't needed, what doesn't belong, and those tasks that don't need to be done anymore. But importantly, you can see the opportunities to do more than people ask for, to go beyond the minimum requirements, to give people a car instead of just a faster horse, or a whale instead of a cucumber, or to put a dead end in the units. You probably still have to build a bridge, but now you can clearly see how to build the bridge more efficiently and make it more effective for its users. Maybe be something more. Maybe, like this small Northern California town, the citizens realized that the simple footbridge that they needed to build should do more than just get pedestrians across the Sacramento River. That its soaring power should tell time. That it should unite their town and be a source of civic pride. That it could become a symbol of their city and revitalize it by becoming a popular tourist attraction. The Sundial Bridge, a simple but elegant crossing, is a huge success and has done as much for the small country town of Reddit as the Golden Gate Bridge has done in San Francisco. It's counter-intuitive to make a bridge tell time and be a tourist attraction. And when it was first proposed, it probably pleased people up. When you work forwards, you take what you have and you improve it incrementally. But when you work backwards, you examine its underlying purpose and what it's trying to accomplish. Its goals. Companies have their goals and you have to satisfy them. But users usually have different goals and theirs are more important. Companies often imagine that their purpose is equivalent to their users. And that's one reason why those companies. So when your boss tells you to deliver some feature or some service to your user, you have to first find out what the user is. You have to seek out your users and listen to them. You need to learn their motivations and get into their heads to absorb their mental knowledge. You question the nature of your product and you reshape the experience. You change the fundamental value of the product which in turn affects the strategy of the entire business. Working backwards is doing what you don't know how to do in the hopes of finding a better way to do it. Working forwards is doing what you do know how to do because you've done it before and you know it works. Above all, working backwards is a challenge for you. A challenge to step back and ask why. A challenge to look outside the known boundaries, to ask yourself and others to me. Eventually, you find yourself asking even bigger questions beyond business. Questions about our society, our government, and about social justice. The more you work backwards, the more connections you see in the world around you, the more inequality you detect and the more opportunity to make a better world. Each way of working has different characteristics. Some of the differences between working forwards and backwards are, forwards confirms what you think while backwards discovers something new. Forwards optimizes the existing while backwards develops the opportunity. Forwards is brittle. Backwards could adapt to changes. Forwards concentrates on constraints and requirements while backwards looks at new possibilities. And forwards asks, where are we right? Backwards asks, where are we? Now let's talk about the first strength of working backwards, knowing who your user is and what their time can accomplish. So Cooper, the innovation and consulting company that my wife Sue and I founded 26 years ago, now part of the Zynut. Over the years, we've served clients large and small around the country and around the world. Cooper uses what we call the gold-rected method because it's based on understanding the user's goals. While we tailor our efforts for the particular situation, everything we do is based on the simple idea that knowing the user's goals helps you design a new one. First, you identify your user. Who are they? What differentiates? You'd be surprised how many companies will open their users. Second, you determine what their desired end statement is. What's their goal? Where do they want to end up? Then third, you find out what motivates them to get there. Sometimes it's just because they want to go home to their family. You need to ask the question, why do they want to do it? Knowing these three things informs everything a company must do to innovate. You lose sight of them. It just doesn't matter how cool your products are. They're not going to see you. When Cooper first started 26 years ago, designing digital systems was in its infancy. I had been building them for 15 years, so I knew the territory. But there were no academic programs, no books, no process, no tools, no terminology, no job roles, and certainly no industry credibility. We had to invent both a practice and a profession. And all we had was our commitment to making software easier for people to use. At each step of the way, we worked from first principles. Who is the user? What are their goals? Why? We started out as an interaction design company, showing our clients how to get more done with screens. But the more we worked backwards, the more powerful we became. We discovered that our tools and techniques for interaction design were precisely the tools needed to innovate. Using them, we assist our clients to create, to invent, and to transform their businesses from being product-centered to user-centered. This is why today we call ourselves innovation. As my friend Molly Knicks of Uber says, design is the process used to build products. That is, design is not a phase in the process. It is the process. When you work backwards, design is not just a part of business, but rather, business becomes a part of design. Design is what informs every aspect of the business, and it has more to do with success in manufacturing, marketing, sales, or finance. We don't have any illusions about being experts in our clients' business. They haven't been doing their business for years, and it's almost a certainty that they know their users and what they should provide to them. The problem is typically that the correct answers are hidden amongst the incorrect answers, the way the trees hide the forests. A client once described us as experts at becoming experts. We know how to learn a lot from very modest input. Our job is to guide the client onto the right road, not to carve that road for them. Often our job is to show them a new way of seeing what they see every day. The value that we bring is our perspective as deeply interested outsiders. We enter as a tabula rasa, a blank slate without any preconceptions. We're looking for unexpected patterns in amorphous data. We call our stance omnivorous and non-judgmental. We want to hear everything about anything. Or, as I like to say, we draw on our deep well of ignorance. Now, for the sake of practicality, this has to be done quickly, but speed is our ally. Imagine that you are trying to assess the quality of the smoothness of a surface. To get an overall read of the quality, you have to work backwards. You really want to sweep your hand quickly across the width of it to feel for any roughness. You touch it in one place to confirm a rough spot to repair, but you sweep across it to get the big picture of what needs work. Recently, one of Cooper's favorite clients provided a great example of how this works. And by the time we were done, both Cooper and the client were surprised by what we had learned. The Village Plus is a United Airlines loyal member managing free supply of hospitals. They hired Cooper to help them generate more trading and quality. They wanted more members to redeem both more miles for more mergers. But they already had a lot of valuable data, but the data wasn't telling you. They knew about their users' capital patterns, their incomes, their demographics, and market segmentation. But what exactly does that mean? Now user personas is one of the inventions that's been widely adopted in the design world. They are hypothetical archetypes based on empirical research that represent real users. Now some people will tell you that personas are obsolete or they don't work. They just don't know how to make them or to use them. We find personas to be one of the most effective tools in our kit. And we use them on virtually every project we do. In this case, senior Cooper designers, Nate Clinton and Steve Colley, went into the field and observed Village Plus users in their natural habitat. They weren't trying to find out what offers they had in place, but instead sought to discover their goals. Nate and Steve found three groups with different goals. They then created three representatives, personas. Neil, the million-miler, the road warrior, all he wants is comfort. He wants to stay upgraded, and he wants more legroom. Margaret, who flies for business, is not very much. She loves collecting her miles, and she dreams of that big vacation trip. And then there's Bradley, digitally adept millennial youth. He doesn't fly that much. He sure likes to get his stuff. Now, these personas are not based on demographics, but on what they want and why they want them. The client mostly liked Neil and Margaret, because Neil and Margaret are already the biggest users, and they always seemed to provide the best opportunities. But we worked with the two senior executives there. The first executive was a marketing guy. He knew what he wanted from the very beginning. Their current solution was emailing attractive merchandise offers, but members mostly ignored it. So, executive one wanted us to create a mobile app that would deliver even more attractive merchandise offers. Classic working forward, doing more of the same, only doing it harder on a new platform. Now, we expressed our grave doubts about this plan, explaining that more advertisements on more platforms weren't what their users wanted, and executive number one was really pissed off. But it was at this point that the mileage plus executive number two stepped in. He was willing to work backwards. The narrative that he heard from our personas was new and original and compelling. He saw a previously obscured opportunity with the persona of the young tattooed traveling. Executive number two then showed us an orphanage technology that the company had previously worked on, but it then discarded. They could generate retail gift cards on the fly in a store on a smartphone. They had thrown it away because they didn't see a way to make money. Working closely with executive number two, we developed a plan, a design, and then we pulled from the product. It was released as United Mileage Plus X, a smartphone app aimed squarely at the smallest but most promising market. Users could get at least double miles by using the app by merchandise, besides retail stores. This was a key motivator for Bradley. The X app has been hugely successful for our client. With it used to generate over $100 billion in just over a year. We know members love it. It's 35 cents a day. And every month it grows by 20 cents. It's been a very desirable millennium. For the sake of it, all of the realities of innovation are present in this story. It took exploration, teamwork, and a willingness to question closely held beliefs. And it pissed people off. The executive knew his gift card technology was cool, but it wasn't used until we could look at it through the lens of the user. Field studies are an exercise in searching for what we don't know we don't know, rather than as a confirmation of our assumptions. And as is often the case, the client already had the answer. But they needed some outside perspective to help them to see it in its true light. The mileage plus X app nicely demonstrates another important notion. And it is that working forward is an integral part of the process. First we did the sweep, then we did the cut. Now executive number one was a smart guy. And for me as a lifelong entrepreneur I know that his self confidence and his relentless drive is what makes productivity and it is indispensable to success. But I've also been a lifelong inventor and I know that my constant willingness to question my assumptions is equally indispensable. It's the quality that innovates and delights users. So I arrived at this accident. Your ego gets it built but it's your humility that gets it loved. And to succeed in a world of innovation you need both these things. Okay, now let's talk about the second part of working back helping you to see absolute solutions. In 2005 I think a year of the machinist training at night at City College a two-year technical college in San Francisco that's my classroom. I learned how to shape steel and the lathe and the milling machine. These are my two biggest last projects of this and a pair of in balloon gears. The instructor would give us a blueprint of what we had to make. Then he'd demonstrate the method then he'd let us do it for ourselves. This ancient craft isn't about radical innovation it's about mastery of tools and processes. The thing about cutting steel is that it isn't very forgiving. If you aren't doing it right things go pear shaped very quickly. So I worked backwards. I would measure, plan, set up my work then I'd ask around then I'd measure again change my setup, plan, measure all before I put the tool to the metal. And I began to notice an interesting pattern. I always was the last student to start cutting steel. But even more interesting I was always the first student to finish and I had good results too. The lesson here is a simple one starting sooner doesn't mean finishing sooner. You need to be willing to give yourself time to be correct. The surprise is that this lesson comes straight out of the industrial age. In the digital world it's even more true not because the technology is so hard to change but because people have already made up their minds and minds are harder to change than software. In general for most people it doesn't come naturally to work backwards. Your gut intuition and your common sense aren't good enough to endure. Do they ever work? Human awareness and behavior is deeply biased. Over the last few decades the science of human cognition has made remarkable advances. Contrary to popular belief humans don't hear what we think we hear and we don't see what we think we see and we don't make decisions that are wrong. Accepting is hard for any one of us but it's particularly hard for business people who have depended on our common sense for centuries. John Minouzian began this delightful codex of known human cognitive illusions any one of which would lead us astray but taken together you see by so many of these how defenseless understandings and misconceptions adding insult to injury is that a subset of these illusions has a sole effect of making us disbelieve the truth and instead doubling out on our group in thinking. These include such illusions as confirmation bias where we only listen to things that agree with what we already know or zero risk bias whether be certain or correct cognitive biases pervade institutions as well and they manifest as silent cultural abuse for example most companies are biased for its success this means that no matter how much they say over and over again fail fast failure is not a good thing for your career most companies are also biased towards action which means that they reward hard work more than they reward patient reflection about whether or not that works it takes it takes strenuous mental effort to think objectively common sense is just our cognitive biases speak and it makes me wonder subject to this daunting plethora of bad ways of thinking how could humans have ever emerged from that moving for you in his book thinking fast and slow the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman humans have two entirely separate mechanisms of thought that he calls fast and slow if I ask you your name the fast part of your mind answers automatically but if I ask you to multiply 16 by 7 you stop walking that's the slow part we all have and it works just fine but it consumes a lot of energy so it's very very lazy any time a fast thinking mind offers an alternative answer we snap it up before we bother to get our slow thinking out of bed so we think yesterday we made money so tomorrow we do the same that's fast thinking that's easy but if we do something new and different we'll let that make money see now to add to that means that we have to wake up our slow thinking mind and that's harder now most of you have noticed the clever parallel between slow thinking and work backwards when you work backwards it's the slow thinking part of your mind it's another clue to why working backwards is counterintuitive in the industrial age westerners learned to make machines of gears, belts and levers no matter how complex such machines get they remain simple deterministic systems they're not complex systems like personal relationships natural ecosystems corporate cultures and software platforms unfortunately it's so much easier to think of complex systems as simple systems with single simple causes and single simple effects we tell stories and we cite anecdotes so we can believe this all in an effort to rely on the lazy fast thinking part of our minds and spare the hard work that we do the problem is that we can tweak complex systems as though they were simple machines and we can often get predictable results but that's not all you get in John Gall's memorable phrase anytime you act upon a complex system the system always gets back in other words you might get the results one but you will always get some other unintended consequences and you probably will find it you can start fracking in Oklahoma for example and quintuple your yields of oil but you also destroy the state's bedrock in all of recorded history Oklahoma had no measurable seismic activity but when they began fracking in 2009 Oklahoma became the most seismically active state in the continental U.S. with more than 1,000 earthquakes of 3.0 every year for California there are always unintended consequences when you mess with complex systems and frequently the downside of the consequence is much greater than the predicted upside social media is another example of unintended consequences at first it was an amazing tool for keeping us together and for uniting old friends but the algorithms facebook and twitter use create a personal echo chamber for each of us increasingly the only thoughts and opinions we see are those that match our own gradually we lose sight of what is really happening in the world the creators of social media only wanted to help but no one could forget those second of the week right? now it's time to talk about the third strike of working backwards this is helping you to see the bigger picture you and I are the practitioners we are the backwards workers the slow thinkers we're building the future out of design and behavior and it's our job to ask the hard questions in my 40 years in the trenches to show which questions are the toughest the first tough question isn't what should we do here but it's rather what is our goal the second tough question isn't whose fault is this but rather whose responsibility is this our job doesn't stop at making a change Robert Oppenheimer the atomic bomb made a great product upon seeing the bomb explode for the first time he began to question the role of the atomic bomb in the world he started working backwards and he discovered that his real goal his ultimate responsibility was to be a good scientist we have now as an industry we've arrived at our own Robert Oppenheimer moment when we work backwards our vision expands and we see beyond our comfort we can sweep our hand across the fabric of the entire social world and we feel that we know that we have worked to do we look up from our screens we see a world of right with inequality and the projects we work on every day are often the root cause of that inequality the capitalism of software web apps, social media and shopping carts has eaten the world and now we're trying to catch it our legislative protections have failed from a citizen's point of view Uber is a tax attack and Airbnb is a hotel chain but because their business models are innovative they claim to be something different and they escape the regulation that protect us when we work backwards is the only way we're going to invent a legal mechanism that can keep pace with disruptive innovation these are all unpredictable unintended consequences of innovation it's nobody's fault but it's become our job to fix things when we work backwards far enough our goal is revealed not as making product a profit but creating a peaceful environment for everyone one that we would be proud to pass on this is our job we're just technologists tweaking this but increasingly the levers of the economy are in our hands when we wonder who's responsible to do this we must ask ourselves congressman John Lewis' famous question if it's not us then who and if not now if it's something we ask and it may not be something we want but the responsibility for and the power to create a just and peaceful society is more in our hands than in anybody else's so how can we use our privilege as educated and affluent people to achieve this desire and stay we're like the keystone in the arch we won't stay up without us here's where our ego and our humility come together to make our world better we have a big job in front of us so now you see the power of working backwards it connects you to your users so you can really get to know them and understand their motivations and goals and it gives you a fresh point of view so you can find innovative approaches and it gives you the bigger picture so you can see how your work fits into the larger world working backwards has implications not just for your product but for your teams, your company and our society when you become an innovator you become more powerful and that means you must also become more responsive you need to assess not just the immediate value of your creativity but the long term effects of it there are those in our society who idolize people who make a lot of money and buy big houses and yachts I want to elevate people who fight inequality Gustavo Petro the mayor of Bogota said a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars it's where the rich use public transportation this is the kind of thinking that I respect who makes their projects part of the larger social world and makes the world better one app at a time no project is too small for working backwards the way to create a better world is to make certain every tiny piece of the world you create makes you a better answer I think give him a standing ovation