Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

When one health-care organization brought in IDEO to redesign the patient experience, the executives were probably expecting a stylish PowerPoint presentation with new, creative designs for the hospital rooms. Instead, what they got was a mind-numbing six-minute video clip. The video showed nothing but the ceiling of a hospital room. “When you lie in a hospital bed all day,” IDEO’s chief creative officer Paul Bennett explained, “all you do is look at the roof, and it’s a really shitty experience.”42 What Bennett describes as “a blinding glimpse of the bleeding obvious” came after IDEO employees put themselves in a patient’s shoes. An IDEO designer checked in to the hospital as a patient and lay in an actual patient bed for hours, getting wheeled around, staring at the ceiling tiles, and capturing the abysmal experience on a video camera. That six-minute clip of the dull tiles was a small glimpse of the overall patient journey—a “mix of boredom and anxiety from feeling lost, uninformed, and out of control,” as IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown said.43 Six minutes of footage was sufficient for the hospital employees to spring into action. They decorated the ceilings, put up whiteboards for visitors to leave messages to the patients, and transformed the style and color of the patient rooms to make them more personal. They also put rearview mirrors on hospital stretchers to allow patients to see and connect with the doctors and nurses wheeling them around. IDEO’s presentation ultimately ki...