The Institute of Design in Chicago is a semi-autonomous part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. And while its parent university has suffered an unfortunate decline in stature over the last few decades, I.D. (as it’s called) has experienced an inverse trajectory. Over the last ten years, the Institute of Design has emerged as a powerhouse in truly hybrid thinking. Consequently, Jump Associates now recruits more new hires from ID than from any other institution save Stanford, where I and several of my colleagues teach.

Last Saturday, I was honored to be the commencement speaker at I.D.’s graduation ceremony. I stuck to the traditional format of commencement speeches and read a prepared text from the podium.  This was an unfamiliar experience for me, as my talks typically involve me roaming around a stage, cracking jokes and speaking extemporaneously from PowerPoint.  Nonetheless, the results were not abysmal. I received several requests for copies of my text, so I include it here.

Some notes of attribution: the speech borrows heavily from some of my previous articles, with significant additions from my partner Pete Mortensen. I learned of the wonderful story of Lewis and Clark from my brother Udaya, who in turn drew it from Undaunted Courage by the late Stephen Ambrose. Here’s the speech…

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“Thank you.  I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest design schools in the world.  Of course, to say that the Institute of Design is a design school is a bit of an accommodation: to say that you are all designers doesn’t actually tell the whole story. Many of you simply don’t have the skills that any reasonable person would expect from a designer. Heck, some of you couldn’t draw a lamp or toaster if your life depended on it. But that’s okay.  Because your life doesn’t depend on it. In fact, your livelihoods depend on you being able to do other things.  And in any case, if you are a brilliant toaster designer, then I would also hope that you are fluent in Mandarin and desire to live in Asia, and are willing to work for far more hours and far less money than what our modern rendition of the Protestant work ethic would imply.  Because that’s seems to be where design is headed.  But for you, the term designer doesn’t seem to fit.

“I’m equally befuddled by the term design thinker. And even though I teach in a school that champions design thinking, I’ve always felt that talking about design thinking as something separate from design resulted in something diminished. Too many of the folks who consider themselves to be purely design thinkers are really just design talkers, able to expound ad nauseaum without actually doing the deed.

“And yet, I do think that the journey that all of you are on is far more powerful than any of those careworn concepts.  So I’d like to spend some time talking about what I do think makes you all so brilliant, and what makes you so needed in the world today.

“You see, the real greatness in what you represent is not that you are designers.  You’re actually something far more special than that. You’re a brilliant alchemy of multiple disciplines.  Yes, on one hand many of you do possess the skills and mindset of a designer, but many of you are equally adept in the social sciences.  And you bring an understanding of business strategy that so many designers and social scientists lack.

“You’re hybrid thinkers. One part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist. And it’s the willful mash up of these disciplines that makes you great, because you’re also more than the sum of these parts.  It turns out that when you put all of that knowledge into one head, a remarkable thing begins to happen – those fields began to blur, change, and become something altogether new.  They hybridize.  And all of a sudden you’re writing business plans like a designer, studying people like a strategist, and designing products like a student of culture. You have the empathy to sense what’s needed before anyone else can, you have the creativity to come up with surprising and elegant solutions, and you understand execution, the ability to get things done. This is a rare set of talents, and, in my opinion, it’s what our society needs most right now.

“Our companies, our governments and our social institutions have just spent the last 75 years creating systems and structures to handle incredibly complicated problems, starting with the storming of Normandy, and working right through the Space Race, the Cold War, and the building of the Internet. Today, if you can ask a good question, our organizations have the power to provide you with a very detailed answer to what ails you. You just need to know the right question to ask.

“In fact, it's that very question: "What is the question?" that seems to be the nub of the problem these days. In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, the ambiguity that surrounds us is rising to unprecedented levels. And that's a kind of problem that our current systems can't handle.

“These problems will only increase in our lifetime.  In the next hundred years, people will fight wars over water the way that we fought wars over oil in the last hundred years.  Our healthcare system is bankrupting our government and gradually strangling our economy. The United States now incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than the Soviet Union did under Stalin. And rates of mental depression seem to be doubling every ten years. For all of these problems, there is no straightforward path to a solution. The metrics of success are unclear. And simply applying the accumulated wisdom of an existing field will not work.

“That’s problematic because large organizations are phenomenally good at managing complexity, but they're actually quite bad at tackling this sort of ambiguity. And the difference between ambiguity and complexity is an important one. A problem of complexity is like playing a game of chess.  It’s hard to play chess; we train supercomputers to do it.  But it’s an incredibly clear problem.  There are only sixty-four squares on a chessboard and thirty-two pieces.  And it’s not like new kinds of pieces appear in the middle of the game with new rules that we hadn’t counted on.  That’s very different from an ambiguous problem.  An ambiguous problem is having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time. That’s a fairly simple situation, but it's what you don't know that you don't know that can get you into trouble. And problems like health care and poverty and entertainment and joyfulness are challenges of ambiguity, not complexity.  And we’re just not set up to face it.

“But there is an answer to the greatest problems facing our society: people like you.  Because hybrid thinkers are the antidote to ambiguity. Take healthcare for example. Is fixing the American healthcare system a medical problem, a political problem, an economic problem, a social problem, a religious problem, or a technological problem? The answer is "yes." It's all of the above. And you can’t solve it simply by getting a doctor, an economist and a priest into a room. That's the start of a great joke, but not an answer to the problem. Getting these folks together just results in having them talk past each other.

“What we need are people who are adept at deliberately mashing these disciplines together.  We need people like you.  That is the journey that you came to when you joined the Institute of Design.

“But that’s the good news.

“The problem is that, despite our need for hybrid thinking, we live in a world of silos.  A world that actively seeks to squash all of us into narrow boxes. You see, we praise Leonardo da Vinci, but we live in the world of Henry Ford: a world of increased narrowness and specialization.

“Think back to when you were 5 years old. If I had asked you when you were 5 to make a list of all the things that you were interested in, that list might have been 50 or more things.  And by the time you were in sixth grade, that list had been reduced to 20 things.  And by the time you graduated high school, you were lucky if you allowed yourself to be interested in 5 things.

“That’s not by accident.  That was your brain responding to the constant pressure for depth and specialization.  That was you responding to the old saying that “A jack of all trades is a master of none.”  But that’s an old piece of advice.  And some user manuals do go out of date. And yet, we still live in a world that forces hybrid thinkers like yourselves to pretend that your experts in something, design or innovation or whatever.

“The situation is made more challenging because it’s hard for hybrid thinkers to measure their progress. The siloed world has created narrow ladders of success with very clear rungs demarcated to show how far along you’ve moved.  Hybrid thinkers have no such clear ladders.  And sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether you’re exploring something new or simply wandering in circles.

“There is, of course, no greater exemplar of this challenge than Meriwether Lewis.  Lewis was one of history’s greatest explorers.  Indeed, Lewis and Clark led the original expedition to open up the American frontier.  To map territory that had previously been unknown to those of European Descent.  And to ultimately take the first fragile steps in what would ultimately become a century of westward expansion for a new country.  And it all started with that first trip, a trip that Lewis and Clark might not have survived.

“It’s important to note that Meriwether Lewis was selected for the mission precisely because he was a hybrid thinker. As aide de camp and protégé of Thomas Jefferson, Lewis had been schooled in history, cartography, architecture, botany and zoology.  And while his partner James Clark brought to their team the prodigious depth of experience of a life long career in the military, Lewis offered the expedition the broad set of skills that were required to not just make the trip, but make sure that the trip was worth taking.  His job was to learn what was out there.  What this new land was like.  Who its inhabitants were.  What the terrain was like.  And what plants and animals and other wonders awaited American pioneers.

“We can learn so much about navigating ambiguity by considering how Lewis felt in the midst of his journey. Fortunately for us, Lewis kept a detailed diary, not just of his experience, but of the meaning he made of it.  And as luck would have it, Lewis’ crossing of the Continental Divide coincided with his thirty-first birthday.   And so sitting there, at the literal apex of his journey, having successfully avoided drought and famine and pestilence and death at the hands of hostile indigenous nations, Lewis contemplated his achievements.  And he wrote:

"This day I completed my thirty first year. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation.  I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."

“To translate his diary into modern terms, Lewis asked himself, having just successfully explored the continental United States, having opened up the wilderness to a new nation, having written himself into the annals of history, ”Dear Diary, today I turned 31.  And what the hell do I have to show for it?”

“Sometimes, when our career is an act of discovery, our own achievements are not apparent, even to ourselves. And exploring a new continent, can feel a lot like wandering in the wilderness.

“This, then, is my challenge to you. Though there is tremendous excitement today around things like innovation and design, don’t use this excitement as an excuse to build another new silo. We will accomplish little if every government, business, and institution established a department for this new flavor of design. We’ll have just one more group that doesn’t operate well outside its comfort zone or communicate effectively with people outside their silo.

“Instead, go to the places that value you for the hybrid nature of your thinking.  Find places that give you room to think with your entire brain, not just one tiny piece of it. As you head out and make your mark on the world, find or build yourself a haven for other folks who are just as passionate about mashing up previously existing fields of thought as you are.

“Talk about how the diversity of your backgrounds actually changes how you think compared to your siloed peers, and then demonstrate that difference through the power of your actions.

“Continue to feed your head, reading more in what you already know and outside what you know. Maintain the hunger to expand your field of vision to something approaching three dimensions.

“And finally, socialize with other hybrid thinkers. Go where they are, spend time with them, and remind yourselves that you aren’t strange.  Remind yourselves that you aren’t alone.  And remind yourselves that you’re doing something more than making better things, you’re making things better.

“I look forward to bearing witness to the great things that you all will accomplish. May you continue on the intellectual journey that brought you to the Institute of Design. May your successes grow from more to more as your talents are put to the test.  And may the world be enriched as a result.

“Thank you all very much.”