Jon Kolko: How to Use Storytelling to Improve Presentation Content

In Chapter 12 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Are You Learning to Give More Impactful Presentations?"  Kolko has built presentation confidence as his experience has grown and has learned to improve presentation content by using storytelling skills.  Specifically, whether it is a presentation, a keynote, or a workshop, Kolko learns not to assume audience knowledge and to use narrative tools to take his room on a ride. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How are you learning to give more impactful presentations?

Jon Kolko: A lot of it has to do with doing it over and over and over. I don’t think I was like nervous of presenting but now I'm extremely confident with it. It's like anything else. It's like having a conversation. I actually don’t think too much about it but I think a lot about the content of the presentation and increasingly it seems like to reference an earlier question an argument, it seems like I'm structuring a narrative, a story if you'd like, around an endgame and the endgame is so clear to me but it doesn’t make any sense to anybody else if they don’t -- aren’t along for the journey. And so, in a typical presentation or a workshop or a keynote, it's an hour, 50 minutes. And so in 50 minutes, you got to take a couple hundred people along for this ride and there's nothing to assume. You have a wildly diverse audience. You can't assume knowledge about design, knowledge about politics, knowledge about the economy. And so, all those things have to be presented. And I think in many ways, it forces a huge amount of empathy with an audience as if they were the users of a product and you’re product. And so there has to be -- You sort of have to ease into it. I've never ever thought of myself as a good storyteller. Increasingly, I'm thinking of myself as a storyteller and that each time I craft this presentation, it's like a once upon a time. It's like a children’s novel. And everybody sort of comes along for the ride with me. There’s cute little things you can do that would be shocking, use really obtuse statistics to support your argument and juxtapose big words with scary images. And every now and then I’ll use those two just like anybody else. But I think ultimately like those are icing on a cake and if there's no cake, it's crap. And so, the substance of the thing, the content is that story.

Jon Kolko on How to Better Articulate Your Vision

In Chapter 13 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Are You Getting Better at Articulating Your Vision?"  Kolko notes the fundamental importance of repetition and how it helps not only hone your message but also increase your believe in that vision.  He notes the importance of getting his vision framework or scaffold solid so he can easily adapt the messaging to different audiences, for example designers or venture capital investors. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How are you getting better at articulating your vision?

Jon Kolko: The more times you say something, the more you tend to believe it. There is this phenomenon called “sense making” which is part of design synthesis, which is about creating knowledge and one of the sort of theories around how sense making works is that ideas are literally talked into existence, both in your own head. The more you say things, the more connections are made. And then in social psychology settings, the more that I say things and then the more you say things and then we talk knowledge into existence between us, the more we tend to either agree or disagree but at least we understand and empathize with each other. So the more times I say what that vision is, I think that the more I’m able to, the more I'm better able to articulate it and in some respects sell it, gain buy into a controversial idea. I found that the same message in a scaffold works across audiences but the details have to be tremendously different. So I have a fairly succinct story around what Austin Center for Design is, the way that I see the world and the way I’d like to be in 30 to 50 years. But telling that – And so that’s the scaffold. But telling that story to somebody who’s in venture capital and telling it to somebody who’s an NGO and telling it to somebody who’s a practicing designer, the word you use, the way you describe it, the case examples you tend to give, wildly different and they have to be. Just as a quick example, if you talk to a venture capitalist about the same types of things that get a designer excited, it's not that they don’t get it, it actually turns them off and they suddenly are not interested anymore. It seems like a no brainer probably that people speak different languages depending on their backgrounds and disciplines. I think it took me a long time to get the scaffold solid so that I felt comfortable easing in and out of different sort of interim storylines.

Like if I’m changing the story, somehow it's not the real story anymore. But I think I'm comfortable now with this idea that as long as the scaffold is consistent then I'm being true to whatever the vision is and in and out can come the details.

Jon Kolko on How to Make Design Strategy More Implementation Friendly

In Chapter 14 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Make Strategic Thinking More Implementation Friendly?"  Kolko references user experience or UX managers and how they work to make design thinking actionable or tractable.  He notes heuristics, gross principles, and best practices do not work, putting emphasis on the financial or quantitative metrics instead. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you make strategic thinking more implementation-friendly?

Jon Kolko: That’s a good question. And it’s like the first question that anybody who’s sort of in a UX management role will ask when they learn design thinking or design strategy or any of these fancy buzz words is how do you make it actionable and tractable. And I think the answer has a lot to do with the way that you tie it directly to the wants and needs of the different stakeholders. And so, gross generalizations don’t work, heuristics don work, best practices don’t work. The things a designer does have to be buried in the minutia of details related to the stakeholders in order to get traction and buy-in. Typically, that means understanding numbers and finances and goals and metrics. And it's a lot of the stuff the designers typically sneer at and go like, “That’s not my wheelhouse. I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable,” but that’s how you take a design strategy and you create something that’s implementable,  and tractable. Equivalent in softwares, you can write abstractions, different requirements or wire frames but if you want it to be tractable then go write some code, erase all the little metaphors and middlemen and get to the heart of the thing you're trying to do and the same is true to service. So any time that you're designing, any time that your designing the design artifacts or abstractions, and they're super, super effective, those artifacts, but getting to the core of the thing is the way that you can make it tractable.

Jon Kolko on How Organizational Change Affects Product Development

In Chapter 15 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Evaluate When to Continue a Project and When to Kill It?"  Kolko details his consulting experience and how projects more often than not are killed not due to the products themselves but rather organizational change or corporate reorganization.  

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you evaluate when to continue a project and when to kill it?

Jon Kolko: I don’t think I've ever killed a project. I think typically you either run out of money or time or the project evolves into something else. I’ve had projects killed on me as a consultant and I can think of at least three or four examples of that and they’ve always had nothing to do with the product. It's actually really interesting. They always had stuff to do with organizational change. Quarter after quarter profits lead to organizational reorganizations, which lead to what could be very effective, useful and informative products getting killed because the new organization didn’t support them, because the strategic comparatives have changed, because the team that was working on them is now dissolved, all of which are artificial reasons and not very good ideas because they are all driven by dividends. And so maybe if there's a lesson in there, it's -- don’t take your company public. But it's funny because like even within these organizations where you have almost total buy-in from people all the way down the chain, they still bemoan the death of their products, and it's like, look, they see the value of it, they're not in a position organizationally to fight for it. And so, the product gets killed.

Jon Kolko on How to Design Culturally Relevant Social Solutions

In Chapter 16 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Have You Learned More Effectively Across Cultures?"  Kolko notes how design work is culture-dependent.  He notes how impact-based design is local and often constrained by the cultural environment.  This often limits scalability yet allows students to better focus their solution design for the communities it will serve. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How have you learned to work more effectively across different cultures?

Jon Kolko: Design work is explicitly tied to culture and in a super nuanced way. So, a design solution that works in this particular culture may or not work in a different culture and I don’t necessarily mean country or geographic boundary. It can be culture as defined by style, as designed by fashion, anywhere there are shared values. And so, when you're dealing with design for impact, it's really, really local and micro-driven, which is directly at odds with most impact investing and a lot of the places where you will find big money like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who are looking to fund scalable solutions, solutions that aren’t going to affect 500, or 1,000, or 10,000, or even 100,000 people, that are going to affect 10 million people, 100 million people, a billion people. And I don’t claim to know if that’s a good or a bad process for them. I don’t know anything about their inner workings but for where my students are, which is nowhere near that in terms of impact, their solutions can’t, by definition, can't scale outside of a certain locale without changing.

It's not to say they can't change, but it's not a cookie cutter approach and traditionally design has been all about cookie cutter approaches. That is what design for manufacturing is about. It's about taking a single part and mass producing it exactly the same a hundred million times with no defects, shipping it all over the world. You can see where that breaks down in a really, really obtuse and dumb way with adapters on PCs that the same PC, the manufacturer has to make six or seven different ends to plug the thing in, in different countries. That has nothing to do with culture, it has everything to with these Legacy electric grids but that’s the equivalent of how prepared designers are to deal with that issue. It's like that’s all they know. Well, we got to localize it by changing the language and by using a different cord. No, no, no, it's so much deeper than that. The homeless in Belo Horizonte and the homeless in Austin, it's a different world. And to say somehow, “Yeah, I conducted a thousand hours of research with homeless in Austin and therefore my solution transfers to the middle of Brazil,” is just ridiculous. And so, I don’t know how my design work has changed as a result of that but my philosophy toward it is certainly crystallized around this idea of local design decisions being okay, that we don’t have to design for scale en-mass right away.

Jon Kolko on Teaching Venture Capitalist Thinking to Creative Students

In Chapter 17 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Has Working at a Startup Incubator Taught You to Better Teach Entrepreneurship?"  Kolko shares how his experience taught him the language of business and entrepreneurship and how to talk about products and services from a venture capitalist perspective.  For example, Kolko notes venture capitalists look not only at how a product might sell, but also the product intellectual property value. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How has working at a startup incubator taught you to better teach entrepreneurship?

Jon Kolko: It's definitely led me to understand the vocabulary around VCs and financing and how that game works around funding. It is a game and those involved in it will actually gleefully describe it is a game. And so, I think working at sort of the heart of that helps me understand both what that mentality is like and how to leverage it if you want to or how to completely avoid it if you don’t like it.

It is literally a different language and I don’t just mean in terms of vocabulary and jargon. Yeah, there's a ton of jargon and that takes a little getting used to but it's also just a very different way of talking about products and services.

And I’ll give you a very quick example. When a designer creates something new, irrespective of social entrepreneurship or anything else, they think of the value of that thing to a user. And typically, a good VC, will when they look at something new, will think of the IP value of that beyond the simple investment. Meaning yeah, that’s great. I obviously have to get my 10X return over three to five years. And then how can we continue to leverage the intellectual property that’s inherent in this invention well beyond me actually owning -- you know, having a full stake in this company because that will allow me to sort of tweak up that valuation. The notion of an invention having monetary value outside of its sales price and outside of the value for a user is 100 percent missing in the world of design, for better or worse, and I don’t really care to argue the value or non-value of IP right now. But it's just that it doesn’t cross any designer’s mind I've ever worked with in my life. And it's like the first thing that most good VCs will think about.

And so as an example then, if you're trying to teach a student how to present their work during a pitch, one of the things they need to understand is that the person looking at their thing is not thinking about how much is it going to sell for on the shelves of Best Buy, right? There's this second market of IP that they're considering which is totally in a third plane. That designers are like, “I don’t even know what words you're saying.” And that’s just an example. There’s tons of those. There’s tons of different ways of thinking about stuff.

Ask a designer what derivatives trading means. And it's not just that they don’t know because they're inexperienced. They don’t know because their brain doesn’t work that way. It's the same way when you ask somebody who’s in financial services to draw a teapot. They’ll say they can't but it's literally like their brain will not allow them yet to draw that teapot. And I think the closer, the sooner students realize that, the sooner they can decide if they want to overcome that hump or not.

Jon Kolko on How to Define Social Entrepreneurship

In Chapter 18 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Define Social Entrepreneurship?"  Kolko first defines an entrepreneur as someone who takes on the risk and reaps the reward of a situation and who sees opportunity where others see problems.  He differentiates between entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs in both the type of problem and the reward. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you define social entrepreneurship?

Jon Kolko: I think it helps by defining entrepreneurship first. And so an entrepreneur to me is somebody that takes on the risk and reaps the reward of a situation. It's also somebody that sees opportunity where others see problems or issues.

And so, that is true of a social entrepreneur, too. The difference is in the type of problems or opportunities and in the type of risk and reward. A social entrepreneur’s reward may or may not be monetary and typically it is monetary and, or plus in a double bottom line context. It's monetary, sure, there's money at stake but it's also about a larger social or humanitarian issue and that can be something as big and broad as poverty or it could be something extremely simple and detailed like getting the homeless in Austin, Texas to have beds when it's lower than 32 degrees at night. But either way, it's that yes and part of the reward. In terms of the opportunity where some see issues and others see opportunity, I think it constantly has to do with that idea of theory of change that we alluded to previously of: I see the world in a certain way and I would like it to be a different way. And so, I hypothesize how I’ll get there. Working backwards, you sort of get this logic trail of if I do this and this falls into place and this other thing happens, then those on the streets won’t be on the streets when it's 32 degrees or colder.

And so, for me then, a social entrepreneur is somebody who is applying all of the same principles of entrepreneurship and a design-led social entrepreneur is taking all of the same principles of the design but the context of the problem has shifted just a little.

Jon Kolko: How Design Career Choices are Changing

In Chapter 19 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You See Design Career Choices Changing?"  Kolko notes how design careers in the United States are going through a massive overhaul.  For the very top craftsman, there will be jobs in furniture design, graphic design and industrial design.  For the majority, however, students career choices benefit from changing design programs, including interaction design, interactive design, service design, systems thinking and organizational management.  

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you see design career choices changing?

Jon Kolko: So, design as a whole in the US is undergoing a massive overhaul whether it wants to or not. And so, typical professions like graphic design, and industrial design, and furniture design still exist and for those in the 1% and 0.01% percent who are just exceptional craftsmen will get awesome jobs doing them and will get awesome jobs and be happy forever after. But there’s always been sort of a middle ground of, the mid-60 percent in the Bell Curve of designers who just aren’t very good. They're not bad, they're just not very good and they will not be able to get jobs doing graphic design, industrial design, and furniture design anymore. And they may or may not have been taught to do anything else, in which case they’re sort of shit out of luck, which is awful. It's a huge disservice to them because when you're 22 years old, you don’t know any better. You trust your professors and you trust the program you're going through. That the stuff I'm learning is relevant, right? Well, you wouldn’t be teaching it to me if it wasn’t, right? 

So, consequently and probably a decade too late, but still consequently all of the programs in the US are starting to reevaluate what they're teaching. And so you're starting to see programs in interaction design, programs in interactive design, programs in service design and systems thinking, and amorphous programs and design management and organizational change, all of which probably have a component of this design thinking stuff and also still this design-making stuff but the making is really, really, different. 

Service design, which I've always thought of as part of interaction design but I realized I'm in a huge minority and that’s probably a topic for a different point. Service design is poised to be the most needed thing in the United States as we transform into an entirely services-based economy. And so, you go like, “Fine, we're not going to do manufacturing anymore and we still have 300 changed million people, like what are they going to do for a living? Well, they're going to provide services. 

And so, somebody’s going to have to design those services and then train them how to do it. And service could mean anything from service in a healthcare capacity, just walk into the hospital and what happens, start to finish, or it can mean the really menial, like McDonald’s service worker, both of which are designed and both of which need a team of designers and all the agencies and consultancies and advertising, all that horse shit that comes with it to support it. And so, that’s what we're starting to see creep up in design schools and you're seeing it, you know, at the name schools but all of the community colleges and all of the state schools will follow.

What Gets Easier and What Gets Harder - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 1 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What is Getting Easier and What is Getting Harder in Your Life?"  As a strategist working at a design company, Stallings notes how it is getting easier to bring his varied skills together to serve clients.  He notes a growing challenge is understanding that more and more of his work is different than anything done before, which pushes him to look outside his industry as he crafts client strategic plans.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

What It Means to Be a Strategist - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 2 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Does it Mean to Be a Strategist?"  Stallings finds his strategy work is about constantly searching for new ways to create advantages for his clients.  He enjoys the discovery and research process that he gets with each project that play into creating that strategic client plan.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

How to Apply Psychology Passion in Business Work - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 3 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "How Do You Apply Your Passion for Psychology in Your Business Career?"  Stallings' undergraduate education in economics and psychology help him learn how the world works.  For Stallings, his psychology passion helps him generate new approaches and ideas to better understand people and human behavior in a business environment.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

Transcription: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you apply your passion for psychology in your business career?

Hammans Stallings: Psychology has been my -- my secret weapon of sorts, so if you go back to my -- my undergraduate where I spent time to studying economics and psychology, two fields that have not always kind of gotten along. And I spent a lot of time in kind of a state of cognitive dissonance where I was comparing and contrasting how the two fields thought about people and thought about explaining the world.

If you recall, I was very close to going to graduate school for psychology and I'd decided not to because I didn't quite yet know what I wanted to be or how I wanted to make an impact, so -- spent five to six years kind of in the wilderness wandering around before getting to come back to a role where I can work directly upon my background in psychology. That said, when you study those things, those ideas change kind of how you see the world and change how you frame up any situation, as well -- I spent a lot of time studying decision making, cognition and learning and memory.

So, it was always something that I could benefit directly from myself and so I can -- I could always understand that there were any heuristics and biases that might be kind of falling but from a less, say selfish introspective kind of use in psychology toward using them, using those tools and frames as a way to kind of understand other people. I find that business tends to -- to lack I would say, that kind of theoretical framework around people and tends to use one of oversimplification, say marketing is a field. It has people do a lot of self-reporting. We know from psychology that that's really quite bogus yet the entire subcategories in marketing really rely on that assumption being true and it's not. So, I would say that my passion for psychology allows me to -- to sort of see through that, and to see through the self-report and other kind of assumptions like that as bogus. To create new things that maybe are in better fitting with what I know about people.

So it means creating new tools. It means creating a new way of framing up how people are responding, and how they're using things. So, having a background and a passion in psychology for me means that I'm able to generate new things, generate new ideas, whereas, a lot of people I think accept the tools of their field as kind of a given and they don't understand the -- the limitations of those tools. So having a background in a field that, I'd say, should be like a lingua franca for -- for applied social science means that you could actually do cutting edge, you know, creating new tools and new perspectives on -- on people.

Why Psychologist Chooses Design Career - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 4 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Inspires You to Work at the Intersection of Design and Psychology?"  Stallings finds psychology work making peoples lives more meaningful and products and services more useful is an intrinsic motivator.  After graduate school, Stallings looks for an opportunity to use his background and found design work a great outlet for his psychology passion.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

Finding Meaningful Work in Problem Solving Career - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 5 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Makes Your Work Meaningful?"  Stallings finds meaning in the fit between his academic and work background and the problems he tackles on the job.  By framing and understanding problems Stallings gets meaning using tools  from his cumulative education across psychology, economics, and business.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

The Personal Rewards of Traveling for Work - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 6 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Have You Found Most Rewarding About Traveling to New Places?"  Stallings specifically discusses work travel and how it has given him the ability to quickly and repeatedly immerse himself into and appreciate different cultures.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

How to Prepare for an International Work Project - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 7 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Has Working Internationally Taught You About Communicating Across Cultures?"  Stallings shares notes from his work projects in Ukraine, Germany, and Australia and how he has made it a point to arrive early and normalize himself in the culture before work begins.  He references Margaret Mead and the necessity to sit in a culture until no big surprises remain.  Stallings also learns to embrace the human bonds that connect all cultures.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

How to Make Learning a Lifetime Pursuit - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 9 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What is Your Approach to Lifelong Learning?"  Stallings notes how he chooses to work in areas where new problems constantly appear.  This forces him to constantly learn new things so he is better prepared to resolve problems.  He references his work applying behavioral psychology for retail consumers to business model design.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

How to Improve How You Learn - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 10 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "How Are You Improving How You Learn?"  Stallings embraces tools such as his Amazon Kindle and blogs to manage the complexity of new information and knowledge sources.  He finds references in the back of books extremely useful researching and hyperlinking to reference material, especially in an all digital environment.  This helps him understand the formulating evidence, information and theory behind what he reads.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia.

How Strategist Improves Creative Career Skills - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 11 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "How is Your Creative Toolbox Changing?"  Stallings pushes himself to learn from peers to learn new ways to communicate and solve problems.  Through the process he focuses on not only learning new skills but finding ways to connect his skills together.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia.