Hussain Almossawi
Unleashing Your Creative Mindset
In this episode of Brave UX, Hussain Almossawi explores the mindset and practices 🧘 he’s successfully employed while designing products 👟 at some of the worlds most innovative companies ⭐️.
Highlights include:
- What is the first step in unlocking the potential of product innovation?
- Why is innovation an often overly complicated and opaque subject?
- How have you become comfortable with the risk and reality of failure?
- What is the biggest blocker of product innovation?
- What is the role of diversity in innovation?
Who is Hussain Almossawi?
Hussain is the Founder and Chief Design Officer of Mossawi Studios, where he’s busy blurring the lines between CGI, VFX and product design ✨ for some of the world’s most innovative brands, including Nike, Adidas, Apple, Google, Ford, Pepsi, Samsung and Intel.
He is also the author of an empowering and actionable new design book called, 📘 “The Innovator’s Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing Your Creative Mindset”.
Before founding Mossawi Studios, Hussain was a Senior Designer at Ford Motor Company 🚗.
Hussain’s unique set of multi-disciplinary talents have also seen him shape the future of sport through athlete driven innovations at Adidas 🏀, and as a Design Consultant for Nike, and an Interface Designer for Electronic Arts 🎮.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab; enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
- My guest today is Hussain Almossawi.
- Hussain is the Founder and Chief Design Officer of Mossawi Studios, where he's busy blurring the lines between CGI, VFX, and product design for some of the world's most innovative brands, including Nike, Adidas, apple, Google, Ford, Pepsi, Samsung, and many more.
- He's also the author of a fast empowering and actionable new design book called "The Innovators Handbook: A short Guide to Unleashing Your Creative Mindset", published in September of 2022 and available for order on Amazon now.
- Before founding Mossawi Studios, Hussain was a Senior Designer at Ford Motor Company, and before that he was a Hardware Art Director at Apple where he worked on Apple Watch 7.
- Hussain's unique set of multidisciplinary talents. Have also seen him invest several years at Adidas where he worked to shape the future of sport through athlete driven innovation, as a Senior Advanced Concepts Designer. He has also been a Design Consultant for Nike, an Interface Designer for Electronic Arts, and a Senior Designer Unisono, working for Bahrain's largest telecommunications company.
- A trained industrial designer, Hussain is a Co-Founder and Designer of the nCycle, an innovative and award-winning e-bike concept that was recognized by Yanko Design as one of the top 10 transportation products of 2014.
- Hussain's work and writing has been featured in Wired, Little Book of Characters, Fast Company, Forbes, 3D Artist Magazine, and more. He has also been a speaker at many conferences including Around Conference, Saudi Design Week, and ING Creative Festival. And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Hussain, as-salamu alaykum, and welcome to the show.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's really great to have you here, and it was thoroughly enjoyable watching some of your previous interviews and learning more about your book, Hussain. Now you grew up, one of the things I learned is you grew up in a small island kingdom in the Middle East called Bahrain, which is really a world away from where you now live in New York. And I was curious what stood out for you back in, I think it was around 2006 when you first arrived in the United States, how much of what you experienced in those first few months lined up with what your expectation of life in America would be like?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So it's not really about the life in America. I'd say it all started before that. When I was very young maybe in elementary grade, maybe around sixth grade, seventh grade, I always had this passion for sports and design. I always loved those two areas. And as a young kid, I wanted to do big things. I wanted to work for N B A athletes for soccer athletes or football, and that took me on this journey of designing things, just desktop wallpapers for these players out of passion, no money in return. I did that out of my bedroom after school spent lots of nights just doing these desktop wall papers, de wall papers, getting to know lots of amazing people from around the world. And we did that together as a group and as that passion grew, I had bigger dreams. My dream was always to work for a big company like Nike, Adidas, again, the biggest sports companies in the world.
- So I always looked at myself as if I'm a dream chaser, I have this big goal, I have this big dream. I come from this very tiny island that nobody knows about. How can I make it big? And that became the driving force for me of trying to make it and taking my first step, coming to the US doing my bachelor's degree in graphic design, and then going on this journey, working with clients, doing freelance, doing my master's degree in industrial design, interning with Ogilvy, which is an advertising agency. Then it really started for me when I interned with Nike, got a design internship with Nike back in 2011. So it was really baby steps, steps by step. But the thing was that I always had this dream, I had this vision, I was always focused, I was always persistent that I wanted to make it and I would make it no matter what. And really that's what took me on my journey and being in the US being somewhere else. I mean, of course it played a role. I got to meet some amazing people, but it's really the dream that was alive in my head that kept me going over and over.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I have heard of you refer to yourself in the past as a dream chaser as you just did then. And I also understand that when you were first supplying for jobs, you were rejected from 80 or so of those jobs that you applied for. Now it's clear hearing you describe your approach and having watched several things previously of yours that you are very much committed and determined to the goals that you are pursuing. To whom or to what do you attribute the intensity to which you've, you've pursued these dreams of yours?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- I think it always starts from the home and the community and the bubble that you're in. So for me, I mean, I have the most amazing parents that always supported me from day one. That definitely played a huge role. They are my role models in life. They went through a lot of hardship, they achieved a lot. My parents are both professors, they're retired now. So I think I always had the opportunity to do what I wanted to do. I was given the support, I was being pushed to do what I love to do, and that played a huge role. Then the second level is friends at school. I had some amazing friends that I surrounded myself with that always were excited about. My work always pushed me to go to the next level. And the unifying factor between all those as, I mean whether it's family, friends, community, society, it's being surrounded by positive people.
- And that positive energy is what really keeps you going and thinking that, okay, I did something right now, what's next? What's next? What's next? Whereas negative people, they always try to pull you down or jealousy comes to play, egos come to play. So I guess from day one, I try to surround myself with the right people, with the right friends that pushed me and believed in me, and I also believed in them. And we've pushed each other and now we're all in different disciplines and all. We've achieved some of our dreams and goals that we wanted to. So that's definitely the number one thing. And even up to until this day, I surround myself with very positive friends, coworkers, even in the industry, there's positive people, negative people. How do you surround yourself with the right people? And that's really what keeps you going and makes life easier for you
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And choosing your parents well as a fortunate decision to have had made for you. You mentioned there that they're now both retired, both professors, clearly intelligent people. You also touched on it very briefly that they had endured some hardship in their life. Now obviously not wanting you to describe anything you're uncomfortable here with, but what was it that you observed in their handling of, or reactions to adversity that you thought, oh man, that is a really useful way of being in the world. What was it that you experienced that helped you to forge this determination that you have?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So there's lots of factors. One, I mean when I talk about hardship, my parents didn't necessarily come from the most fortunate or from the most rich families, and they always had this dream of going the highest possible in their education. And for them, that was the dream of getting their PhD. They went to the uk, that's where they studied, and it was really tough having two kids being alone away from home. I feel the same thing. Now. I'm in the us I have two kids and it, it's really tough without family. So they went through a lot of hardships, through a lot of struggles to achieve what they did, whether it was in university, whether it was going doing their master's degree, PhD, raising kids, and so on. So I always look at my parents. I mean, one part of it is the struggle that they went through to achieve what they wanted to achieve reach the highest level of education, become professors in the university.
- That was their dream. And the second part is that when I look at my parents and how much they believe in me and how much my friends believe in me, to me, that creates a sense of pressure that I have to deliver. People are expecting something high of me and I have to deliver to the highest level that I can, of course up to my limits. So that, I think that becomes a huge driving force to me of not just pleasing my parents or friends, but meeting those expectations that are set and hopefully surpassing them as well. So it becomes more of a mental game.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you really are someone who throws himself a hundred percent into his work. And I've heard you talk about this, about being a designer and the way that you approach design, and I'll quote you now, you've said it's a lifestyle really. I never have to think about my job as a nine to five job. I work 24 hours even when I'm sleeping. Sometimes I'm thinking about ideas. It's not a good thing, but you live like you are totally into it. So clearly designs more than a job for you, and yet you're also a father. You mentioned before you had two children, you're a partner and you are many other things as a person outside of design. So what boundaries, if any, have you had to put in place to protect the other valuable aspects of your life?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Yeah, that's a great question. And I actually wrote a blog post about parenting recently and managing your time between parenting family and business and being a designer. So when you first start out as a student, let's say you're in university or you're very passionate about whatever, not just design, it's really easy to go in 24 7 and do what you love, just out of passion. And then as you progress in life and there's other responsibilities that come to play, marriage kids. So there's these different layers that you now have to take care of. I think it's just experience comes to play of how you split your time and how you manage your time. So when I did something for, let's say if I wanted to execute something for 10 hours, 10 years ago, now I can do it in an hour just because I have the experience.
- And if it took me 20 hours to learn something, well, now I know that skill, but I'm just building on my skills. So there's a huge level of experience that comes to play. And then I'm also applying that experience of time management and how I can execute things in a timely manner. And doing the same with my family as well. How can I give my kids the time that they need? How can I be with my wife and give her the time that she needs and so on? Because at the end of the day, if I'm a really successful designer, but I fall short when it comes to family, I think that's a huge failure in life. So I really need to balance the two, and when I do well in my design life, it's going to feed into my family life and so on. So keeping that balance, keeping an eye out for other things that matter in life, that's really important, especially for your mental state as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm. A hundred percent. I, I've also got a family, and I've heard it described previously, this balancing act that we do when we're busy professionally and also wanting to succeed at home is that there are some things, some balls that if you drop, they don't bounce back. And family, I've always viewed as one of those balls that you just can never afford to let it drop
- Hussain Almossawi:
- For sure. And time passes and kids grow really fast. So I could try to become, maybe if I spent all my time just designing and not worrying about family, maybe I could become a much better designer. Maybe I could get much more projects and financially be stronger. But in 20 years when I see my kids are all growing up and I haven't spent the time with them, that's going to sting really bad, really, really
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Bad. Yeah, a hundred percent agree with you a hundred percent. Now, you mentioned earlier on that you started out designing wallpapers for athletes back in Bahrain, and you also mentioned that you had been an intern at Nike, which is fast forwarding, I'd say a decade or more since that time of your life when you were doing those wallpapers, and I think you just finished your masters of design and industrial design and started at Nike. And I heard you talk about this time in your life previously, and I'll quote you again now, you said, this is where my mindset shifted as to what innovation is, what design is. Nike played a huge role in how I look at design until this day. So what was the shift? Was the shift in mindset that you had when you first started at Nike? What did you realize?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So the wallpapers I did up until, let's say going to university, that was in 2006. And then between 2006, it was to 2011, when I got my internship, it was doing my bachelor's degree in graphic design and also doing lots of freelance work for Adidas for other brands, and also interning for ad ad agency Ogilvy in 2011. When I interned at Nike, it was a Nike design internship over the summer. They chose around 11, I think, or they chose around 14 designers, and about 10,000 people had applied. So it's really competitive and challenging, and it really changed the way that I look at design, because before I looked at design as doing something that aesthetically looked cool and pleasing, and to me that was design something that's very visually interesting. But when I joined Nike, I really learned more about the function of things.
- How do you innovate? Innovation was the key word. How are we innovating on this project, the innovation story, and so on. Everything we came out innovation. Even at Nike, lots of people see Nike as a sports company, a shoe company. But when I went to Nike, I learned that no, it's an innovation company that does shoes. It's an innovation company that does sports products and so on. So everything they do, no matter what they do, if Nike wants to design a car tomorrow, is going to about innovation and they just happen to design that car. So innovation, innovation, innovation, that thing came up a lot. And then I was really curious about how do they innovate? Why do they innovate? What are some of the techniques that they use? And throughout my journey in my career, when I went from Nike, when I went to Adidas, EA Sports, Ford, apple, and so on, I saw a lot of overlapping patterns between the mindsets of the amazing people that I worked with. And there was no written guideline or rule book that this is how you innovate, but it was just patterns of things that amazing designers did that allowed them to think outside the box and come up with cool ideas and create the amazing things that we see in the market today. So for me, it all started with Nike.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I do want to come to your book very, very soon. I am curious to understand, because you did spend several years at Nike after your internship, and then you made the jump into Adidas, and you spent several years there as well. This is going back to late 2016, I think, when you started at Adidas in New York. How did that go down with your colleagues at Nike?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So Nike, after my internship, I was consulting with them on several projects, football, running basketball, and so on. So it was more of a consultant role. And then the real full-time job that I got at my dream company was with Adidas as a senior designer. So yeah, ADI, Adidas was amazing. I mean, it was always a learning curve, continued learning from one company to another. At Adidas, I worked with amazing people, I worked on amazing products got to work with amazing athletes especially in the N B A, like James Harden, Damien Lillard and so on. So having that exposure and being close to those athletes and working on things that are at a very high level not only was it exciting and fun, but it was also an amazing experience that I learned a lot from, and I still hold close to me to this day.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, I've heard you describe your time there, and I'll quote you again. You said, I was working on the innovation team where my job was to think about the future, what does the future look like and come up with crazy wild ideas, just how exactly, yeah. So just how far into the future were you looking?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So when you work with innovation teams, whether it's Adidas, whether it's any other company, I mean, every company, the big companies, fortune 500, they have innovation teams that just think about the future. So in the industry, for example, you have a innovation team that looks at things let's say 10 years in the future, and then you have a team that works three to four years out in the future. So the team that I was on, it was looking at things about three to four years out in the future, and then you have a team that is closer to the market that delivers things to the market, which is called the inline team. And then they take, you know, hand off those big ideas, those great ideas to the inline team, and then they start to look at what's realistic, what could be done, what could be brought to the market at this point in time, and they would package it work on it some more, and then ship it out to the market.
- So usually you have those phases in the industry but when it comes to innovation, no matter where you stand, whether you're thinking about four years out, 10 years out, the goal is to think about the future. Let's say what does the year 3,100 look like if I want to design the next shoe? And it just gives you totally different perspective of what is possible. It allows you to ask different kind of questions. It allows you to challenge the manufacturing process. Maybe it's a shoe that flies, maybe it's a shoe that's for Mars, maybe it's a shoe that makes you walk upside down and so on. Some ideas will be super silly, some ideas will be crazy, but just putting those ideas on paper and thinking that nothing is impossible, that's the first step that allows you to unlock your innovation journey and innovation process. And then you start to ask questions, is this possible? Is this not possible? Is this crazy? Can we do this? How can we do this? So it's like you design the future, let's say 3,100, bring it back to 2022, and then see, okay, what's realistic? What can we do in year 2022? And so on. You keep challenging yourself every year, year after year, and going wild and blue sky with those ideas.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're almost unbinding yourself from the current constraints there.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Exactly, exactly. Because I mean, when we start to work with the constraints, we usually, we start to design the exact same stuff that exists. But when we start to challenge ourselves, I mean just changing the year 2022 to year 3000, that in itself gave me a different perspective. Another example is, for example it's called flipped assumptions. I have this example in my book. So let's say we are designing a bicycle or we're designing a restaurant, a restaurant concept. So what are the assumptions we know about a restaurant? It has chairs, it has tables, it has a chef, it has a kitchen. These are the assumptions. Now, if we flip those assumptions, what do we get? It doesn't have chairs, it doesn't have tables, and so on. So what's the result? Okay, maybe if it doesn't have a chef, maybe I can take my food and I can cook my own food. If it doesn't have chairs and tables, maybe it's a picnic setting where you sit on the ground and so on. Again, different perspective. Some ideas are cool, some aren't. Some will work, some will be silly, but it unlocks that perspective that you have and makes you think different
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In all of this. So you've worked inside several of these Fortune 500 companies with these innovation functions and with a strategic focus on leading the market in a certain direction, looking way out and trying to bring back some creative thinking and innovation to the present day, what role has the customer played in the design and innovation process? Just like how involved have the people that you're seeking to serve through the products and experiences that you've been creating? Just how involved, if at all, have they been in this picture?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So the part that we talked about, thinking about the future, crazy ideas that you kind of go wild on your own, it can be built off some insights just to go loose on ideas. But when we are working on a product that is coming out to market, or we are looking for, let's say, starting the brief even before innovation setting the brief of what's the next shoe of 2023? Is it the most comfortable shoe? Is it the most lightweight shoe? Is it the most durable shoe? How do we define that? Any project I've worked on in any industry, it always starts from the brief, which is informed by the insights that we collect from the customers. So when you work at a company like Nike, Adidas, Puma, these sports companies, the ath, it always starts with the athlete. What does the athlete need? Nike has a saying always listen to the voice of the athlete.
- So that's where everything starts. Insights, start talking to them, observing how they play, looking at their injuries, bringing them to the office and having these very high end sports science machines that can scan them and do everything on their feet. So it always starts with the client, with the customer, and that's where we gather our insights. That's where we understand what we need to do. And then once we understand what we need to do, we start to innovate. Then we start to think about what that looks like, like a thousand years from now. But we always have to start from the athlete or the customer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a couple of things that came to mind there when you were describing that. The first is that the products that we buy as consumers from a company like Nike are really gifts that are given to us from the athlete, but channeled through the company. And the other thing that I was thinking there is that the measurement of some of these qualities that you've been describing there, like comfort for example you mentioned the machines that you put the athletes in, and you can understand how the footwear is performing on them. I was curious about that because it's easy for us to say and design that we're going to make the best whatever or the most comfortable or the most durable. And I was curious about how we actually know if that's our desired outcome from an innovation, how do we actually know if we've achieved that?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So the excessive testing that happens once you design the product, let's say it's a football boat there's these machines that it's like robotic arms that just kicks the ball a million times. We're testing just to understand how strong the leather is after how many shots does it still [laugh] look the same way it was in the beginning? Same for the other stuff, the lightweight, the comfort and all that stuff. So there's different testing methods that are in place, but at the end of the day, when a product comes to the market and having people, millions of people around the world test it, you're going to get different conditions that you can't necessarily test for. Environment is one thing maybe it's a shoe that doesn't perform as well in the heat, let's say in the Middle East versus Europe, just because the weather is different, the terrain is different, maybe playing on grass or sand is different and so on. But as a company, you do the most you can through the athletes, letting them test it through the machinery that you have, test it, and then you should be in a much better place without the testing. So you definitely have to do your research, test what you have, and then see how it performs, and then of course, learn from that for the next season and the next season.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah. There's this really beautiful dance that appears to be going on between the blue sky thinking of a thousand years out and the very real need to understand the performance of the product and the here and now. And I really like how those two things seem to be things that a space is made room for in these company's innovation, fun functions. But we would've touched on constraints briefly before and how we don't really want to apply those super early on in the process albeit they may be some of those that are informing the brief that spark our initial blue sky thinking. Now you, you've said about constraints, and in particular I'm thinking time, time and money here. You've said timelines are the most important thing because we're talking about execution and not just ideas that remain as ideas and go nowhere. So my question for you here is what relationship, if any, is there between the time you have to innovate and the quality of the innovation that you end up creating?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So as a innovator, as a designer, it's like a muscle that you train. And when I know that I have one month to come up with ideas is going to pressure me and is going to allow me to come up with let's say, 10 or 20 or a hundred ideas within this timeframe. But when it's open-ended, you're always going to come up with better ideas. If I told you that I can design a certain phone in a better way, and then I sleep on that idea the next day, the next week, the next month, I'm going to keep getting better ideas, better ideas, better ideas, but what's the point of having a good idea that isn't executed? So that's what I meant in the book when I mentioned that. And as designers, I mean our sketchbooks are filled with ideas, but again, what do you execute? What goes back to your question of has it been tested? Have we tried it? Is it possible? So we really need to go and test our ideas, see if it's realistic, can it be made? And then once we have something that is good creating something that's tangible and then working off that prototype, doing a second prototype, a third, a fourth, a fifth, until we reach the desired outcome that we want. But otherwise, it's just a cool idea that lives in a sketchbook and it's a sketch and it's not really going to move the needle.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's a very, very much a practical part of innovation ideas, anyone who can have ideas, there's a common theme out there that turning those ideas into things that actually work in market, that's the really difficult thing. Now, in doing that, in trying to innovate, obviously Obsu assuming a level of risk here because what you do may not work, and I realize that there'll be a process of trying to mitigate that risk as you're going through that as a designer. So let's talk about that. What is it from your experience as a designer working on these teams and being involved in seeing the successes and failures of these teams, what is the key skill or the characteristic that you feel is required to discern which of those ideas have the best chance of being successful in market?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So there's a few things. The first thing is collaboration. When I'm working with a team and I can push my ideas on the team and then bounce ideas off each other, it gives me validity of am I think am being really crazy with my ideas or not. Maybe somebody can twist the idea, change it up a bit, take it to a better place. So when I look at innovation, I always look at, we are at point A, we want to go to point B, but really innovation happens on point C, and we never thought point C's going to happen. So when we land on that territory, collaboration is a huge thing. It pushes you left and and you have to be flexible, and you have to be willing to not be stuck on your ideas. So that's the most important thing. The second thing I'd say, which is a very common factor, and you need as an innovator, and to come up also with great ideas, is being fearless.
- Because the idea of fear and me being afraid of putting my idea on paper and presenting it to you and to the team, the first very first step that's going to kill any idea, I might have an amazing idea just because I think it's a stupid idea or a silly idea. I would never put it out there. So put all your ideas out there, share it with the team, even on the team, it's not just designers. So when I worked in the industry, so it's a designer, it's a developer. I worked with sports science, I worked with a doctor, medical doctor, and those gave you val validation, like, okay, this is what we need to do. This is how we can do it. Can I use this material a manufacturing expert talking to the factory, can we do this now? Can we not do this now? So all these players, they play a huge role into how we innovate and what we can innovate. So definitely learning from them and also bouncing ideas off of each other.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned being fearless in the role of that and actually pushing through some of the doubts that one might have about your ideas and also the role of collaboration there, and fear and collaboration. Well, fear can drive some pretty positive and some pretty negative human behaviors. And collaboration with any other human is often fraught with challenges. That in itself is a bit of a dance in order to get it, to get it right, get it fluid, and get the ideas flowing. You've said before, and I'll quote you again, that negative mindsets are the biggest poison to innovation. Tell me about that.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So this takes us back to the first point that we made about me growing up and surrounding myself with the positive people. So even in the industry where you have the best of the best, supposedly in each company the best designers, the best marketers, the best, so on, there's always, again, the positive people and the negative people. There's the people that want to see you thrive. There's the people that want to take you down. There's the egos, there's the jealousies, there's the politics, there's a lot of stuff. I mean, as a young kid growing up, wanting, having a dream job and wanting to be in the industry, I thought that the moment I make it, it's like, that's it. Happy land. I made it. I didn't need to think about anything else. But in reality, when you're inside, there's so much people fighting against each other trying to get promoted, trying to push for their ideas.
- There's stuff that the public doesn't see. And again, it's different from company to company, I won't generalize, but there is that poison that is there, which is the negative people, the negative mindsets, you might put a great idea on the table, they would kill it just because they don't like you, they don't like somebody else who liked it. There's those kind of dynamics. So even within the industry, speaking, just from my experience, again, I would also choose my team. I would work with the people that I believed in, they believed in me, and that allowed us to come up with the best ideas. Sometimes you're forced to work with some people, but again, I mean, it takes a level of expertise and skill that you'll develop along the years of how to deal with negative people, how to sometimes know who's negative, who's positive, who wants the benefit of the project and so on.
- So that's something that will develop with you, but keeping an eye out for who's positive and who's not it's definitely key. And I also remember a quote that I heard this goes back to your previous question about ideas and execution and all that. So I think it was by Les Brown, he's a very well known motivational public speaker. I think it was him. So he said, the richest place on earth with the most ideas is the graveyard, just because we have all these amazing ideas, and lots of people have amazing ideas that they do nothing about it, and it dies with them in the graveyard. So if you want amazing ideas, go to the graveyard. And I thought that's really powerful of just taking accountability and executing and believing in yourself, because time is really short. Time is really short, and we don't live forever. If you have an idea, go for it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's so true. You and I were talking before we hit record. I recently had a conversation with model, the chief design officer at PepsiCo, and he's obviously a huge proponent of design and innovation within the enterprise. We were talking about his career journey and how while he was at the 3m, I believe that the corporate knives came out and he learned a hard lesson about politics, about people, about associating his self worth with his work, and made some subsequent changes there that have enabled him to become an even greater design leader and become the person he is today. You mentioned, you know, had this idea, this assumption that you get your dream job and then you're in happy land. And it sounded like, you know, you've bumped up against your own version of challenge and things that haven't quite gone to plan in the workplace. What are some of the changes in perspective or practice that you've had to make as a professional, as a designer to manage that pushback, that challenge that you've had from other people?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So sometimes, I mean, when you're in the industry, you have to be very diplomatic at times and understand how the dynamics work and when to push choosing your battles. I think that's really important. And even battles, I don't mean just fighting and all that. I mean, even if you have an idea that you believe in, sometimes it's worth it to really push hard for that idea. How much do you believe in that idea? Sometimes just letting it go. So you have to really play that game with the team. For me personally, I mean, I learned a lot from the industry. I learned a lot from those team dynamics. I learned a lot about run leading teams, working with teams. But for me, always the question was, what's next? And I think that was also part of my journey and progression. What's next? What's next? I want to be here.
- I want to be here. I want to offer this company for this company. And my big, what's next was I want to start my own studio. And since I started my own studio, I mean, I always felt this way that when I'm in the industry, no matter what company I work for, even if it's the biggest company in the world, at the end of the day, I'm just a number. And we've all seen these layoffs that happen just because of an economic situation that happens, or any situation could happen in the company, you could get be let go of your job. You're just a number, you're a slave to that company. Whereas when I'm running my own studio, no matter how small it is, I'm running my own empire. I'm choosing my team, I'm growing my empire. So this idea of having an empire, it's really it motivates me.
- And if you look at the big companies, Adidas, Nike, apple, it all started with one person. They were nothing at one point. So to me, that's the biggest learning of how can I learn from Steve Jobs, how can I learn from Phil Knight, how can I learn from Adam and so on? And being a founder, starting my studio, growing my studio, choosing who I work with, it just takes a lot of the negative people out. It takes a lot of the negative energy out, and I'm running the show the way I want to run it. Of course, there's other challenges running a business, but at least the negative side the negative people and the negative vibes I can get rid of a lot of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of vibes, I've seen your studio, Mossawi Studios show Real, and the sense that your show real gave me was that it's very fluid, very organic, very playfully curious in the way that the work comes across. Now, clearly that's just my subjective interpretation of what I saw, and I was curious about your reflection on your own creative style and what you are trying to, you touched on some of the things you're trying to actualize there through the studio from a personal and professional standpoint, but through the creative lens of what you're trying to do. How do you think about your creative style? Do you think that you have a specific style and from where do you source or feel that you achieve your most inspiration from?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So absolutely. When it comes to style, I always like to think of myself as, and my studio at least of having a modern style, futuristic style and something that is minimal or playful. So those three things are ingredients that I try to infuse into every project that I do. And when it comes to the work that I do with my studio. So my background was in graphic design, then I moved to industrial design, and then I learned visual effects and 3D on my own. So been jumping around as a designer. So my goal has been to blur the lines between industrial design and visual effects. Visual effects means the cool motion, 3D animation that you see, fluids stuff exploding, breaking up. So that kind of crazy stuff. And how can I bring that world with the world of industrial design and blur them together?
- Because when you find these intersections of things that sometimes don't relate, that's where a lot of innovation can happen. So I try to infuse that idea and that principle into my process as well. So that's one thing. When it comes to being inspired I speak about this in the book as well. When I was interning at Nike tinker Hatfield, who's a huge name in the footwear industry I met him and asked him for some advice and how I can grow as a designer. The number one advice he gave me was to be a sponge. And by being a sponge as being open to all new ideas, having not being stuck in your own perspective, when I'm going out in the streets, going to a soccer match, going to a basketball match, observing the game, observing the environment, looking at the stadium, looking at the architecture, looking at the people.
- So just soaking everything in. And that will really inspire you. It might immediately inspire you with an idea, or subconsciously, when you're just open to ideas, it'll pop up at the right time. So just being a sponge and soaking everything in, whether it's reading a book, watching a documentary just being looking at stuff outside of design that really helps me connect the dots in a very interesting way and being curious at all times. And then coming back to the drawing board and coming up with cool ideas that just my imagination can start to come to play.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is that curiosity a conscious or a sort of background process, if you like? Are you actively going through the world thinking, okay, now I've got to turn on my creativity and my curiosity, or is this something that as a sponge, as Tinker was advising you to be that you are just doing through osmosis of just living your life?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- I think definitely takes time to develop that, because at least I speak about myself. I used to be very stuck into my own process of the things I like, just doing more of the things I like. Let's say I like basketball, so I just look into playing basketball looking at basketball athletes. If I'm doing a basketball shoe, looking at what the basketball world looks like. But now that I'm more open I would look at what things that outside of sport looks like. How do those people look at basketball? How is basketball perceived in culture? How is it perceived in different movies and so on. So just looking at things outside of the bubble that I was in opened up a lot of doors and enabled me to think about different and new ideas.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, we've talked about the book. We haven't talked about it directly though. You've recently written a beautifully designed and useful book called The Innovators Handbook, and in that book you break down 10 principles, some of which will come to in a moment. Now, previously you seem to have suggested that you wrote this book because innovation is often talked about yet really practically understood by people. In fact, many people feel overwhelmed by it as a topic and found it very difficult to actually turn into anything real. So why is innovation often difficult for people to wrap their brains around?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- So if you look at innovation books, at least from my experience, every book is like this big, and you get lost in turn into how do I innovate? How do these great minds think? And what's the process? How can I be an innovator? Can I even be an innovator? So I always had those questions growing up as an aspiring designer, as a kid growing up, I always thought saw these amazing ideas, amazing companies, and I was thinking to myself, can I ever do that? How did they do that? Why did I never think about that? So when I worked in the industry and I saw these overlapping patterns between the different companies and the amazing people that I worked with, these are the top 10 insights that I observed, let's say, that I wish I knew 10, 15 years ago growing up. And some of them are simple insights, but it's really, it's not really as complicated as we think it to be.
- When I know how to approach design or innovation, when I have the right mindset towards innovating, I will start to think about ideas in a different way, and I'll start to come up with ideas that I never thought was possible. And that that's the whole idea of the book. It's supposed to be a fun short read, lots of actionable items in it. There's even practical examples of things that we did in the industry, things that I give in my workshops when I'm doing innovation workshops. So very light read, very fun to the point, should be a quick read. And yeah, hopefully it'll inspire people to think about new ideas and supercharge their ideas. And I mentioned in the book in the beginning, this is not Ultimate Guide to innovation. This is a short book that would supercharge your ideas and inspire you hopefully.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you spoke about the insights in there. And the second insight, somewhat ironically, is follow first principles. Now, you've described the application of this from an industrial design setting, and the things that I've heard you talk about previously, and you've said about this, and I'll quote you again, deconstructing everything down to its most basic components. So that's what first principles in a practical sense is. You've also said it's easy to fall into the trap when designing something new, of looking at how things look and exist, and just replicating that and thinking that that is the ultimate way and the best way to do it. So I suppose you're talking about not freeing your mind up to think blue sky enough into an unconstrained future. So why is this breaking things down, deconstructing things down, something, the first principles, why is this something that people should consider doing and as part of their innovation process?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So Elon Musk does this a lot in the industry with SpaceX, with Tesla. When I was in the footwear industry, we did this a lot. And I really loved working on this process, and I still use this process a lot with all the projects that I work on. So basically with first principles let's say I have a shoe, and we did this with signature athletes when I was in the industry, let's say I have a shoe that the brief comes in, it has to be the most lightweight shoe that ever existed. So I would break that shoe into its most simplest form into all of its components that make up the shoe, the laces, the so the cushion, the insole, the vamp, everything. I just tear it apart. I put it on a table. And then my brief was how do I make the most lightweight shoe?
- So now I go to each one of those elements and I start to question, is this serving my purpose? I, let's say we're talking about the laces. Is this the most lightweight laces? Is there any new technologies that exist in 2022 that can allow me to do a even lighter technology that didn't lace, that didn't exist the previous year? Do I even need laces? How can I do laces in a different way? So all these questions, now I'm just asking about one of the components, and then I would either improve that element, which is the laces, I would remove it or I would keep it. And then when you do that to each of the parts and then put the shoe back together, you have a much better understanding of what could be done, where's the potential, where are the opportunities, how can we improve this shoe?
- And usually from my experience, you tend to deliver better on the brief when it comes to doing a lighter shoe, more comfortable shoe, a more durable shoe, and so on. Just because you're asking and questioning every part of the shoe, even the manufacturing process, like maybe something exists now in 2022 that didn't exist in 2021. Maybe there's a new technology in the seatbelt industry that I can use as a fit system in my shoe that didn't exist the previous year. And we do that a lot. We look at different industries, we look at aerospace, we look at baby strollers, we look at all different kind of things, and then we bring it back. Everything leads back to the shoe. Is it creating the most lightweight shoe that ever existed? So when you do that process and when you package the shoe back together, you'll find yourself in a much better place versus where you started.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Your book is very much about the mindset for innovation and something like first principles breaking down essentially people's previous achievements and questioning and challenging and trying to pull them apart so you can build back something better. Strikes me as something that unless your culture is specifically set up to embrace that, that could be quite confronting and quite challenging for some people.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- I don't see it as something that is degrading to the person before you who designed this. It's all a progression. I mean, if the person before me didn't design what they did, I couldn't take it to the next level. So it's all a evolution and it's a progression. And I talk about the idea of evolution in the book. So taking one thing and using that as a springboard to come up with your next idea and your next idea, I mean, all credit goes back to the person who designed the shoe before me and the one before him or before her and so on. So it's the same with the car industry. If you look at how we started with horses and then how we got the first car and where we are today with the electric cars, it's all a progression. We didn't go from horses to electric cars.
- So every person within that process and that journey, definitely they played a huge role in terms of where we are today. And hopefully what we do today, it'll set the grounds for future innovations a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now. If we don't do what we do today, we're not helping the next generation and the one after it. So yeah, it's not one person doing something that is groundbreaking and never been done before. That's not what innovation is. I mean, at least most of the times you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. You can take what exists, evolve it, improve it, take something and tweak it, and you can come up with something that is innovative. And that's what most innovations around us that's how they were made,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And one of the ingredients to help us do that, to improve upon things that you've spoken about, which I believe you're a big believer in wh, which is diversity. And you've said about this, that diversity supercharges your ideas. The more diverse your team is, the more great ideas you can come up with. So when you are working on an innovation project, when you are deconstructing a shoe or whatever else that you've been doing in your career that's required a level of innovation over and above the incremental, what does diversity ideally look like? What kinds of diversity are most important to have in that room?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So there's two kinds of diversity. You want to talk about diversity. The first is diversity in like I mentioned earlier, I'm looking at a shoe that has the best fit system. Okay. I'm looking at stuff that is very unrelated to shoes, looking at baby strollers, how does it keep the baby fit? Looking at seat belts for a fit system, looking at stuff outside of the footwear industry. So that kind of diversity is really important. Finding the intersections. France Johansen has an amazing book called The Medici Effect, and his book is all about finding those intersections and how two things that are very unrelated when you put them together, you can come up with some very innovative and amazing ideas. So that's one part when we talk about diversity. The second part is the actual team. So when we have a team where we come from different cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, languages, skin colors, somebody's married, somebody's single, somebody has kids, somebody doesn't, and so on.
- So the more different we are, the more different our perspectives are in life. When we get together and we get along, that's really important. We have to get along. We start to look at things differently. I might look at designing this water bottle in a certain way just because of my cultural background. You could look at it at a certain way, and then we put those ideas on the table. We could bounce ideas off each other, evolve those ideas. But if we are all the same it's I, not necessarily that we can't come up with cool ideas, but it's going to be more challenging and it's going to be more dry because we all have the same perspectives. We all think the same way. We all talk the same way. And now we're designing a product that if one of us or 10 of us designed it to that probably been the same. So that's where diversity comes to play, pushing each other, looking at things differently. Again, looking at things from outside of your perspective. That's really key.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You touched on that we all need to get along in that setting. You know, almost laughed it off as if you've been in situations before where that
- Hussain Almossawi:
- No, because that's really important. I mean, we can talk about diversity, but if you have a team that is unhappy, you're not going to come up with great ideas. So that's a key factor. But I mean, there's other things that are also there. If you have employees that are underpaid and as diverse as they are, they're not going to come up with great ideas. So given that everything is good the team is happy, the there's positive energy, you put a diverse team together, you're going to come up with great ideas. So it's like a puzzle. But I mean, I focus on the diversity part because that's really key to innovation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Diversity is somewhat like innovation in the sense that it's can be risky. It can be risky to put people together who come from wildly different upbringings and backgrounds, countries, religions, all these things, which in human history have led us to some wonderful, but also some very dark places. It can go wrong. What is the shared quality or belief or way of being in the world that you've seen in the teams that you've worked in that have been the most diverse and the most successful? What is it that has made them special and made them work? Sure.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- I've been on some really, really, really diverse teams. And I'd say the number one thing is respect. At the end of the day, I don't want you to endorse things that I believe in and the things that I think about and my culture and everything else. Neither do you expect that of me. So I think when we have that as a common ground, there is respect. Now we can just focus on work, what language, what language I speak at home, what movies I watch, [laugh], what I do in my spare time, that's my business. And yours is yours, your business. But again, the way I will look at the problem and the brief that we are trying to solve, my background will definitely come to play. Your background will come to play, but the respect is always there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, such an important human quality and would be nice to see more of it everywhere in this world of ours. [laugh], you've said, knowing that failure pushes you to the next level rather than takes you down, I think is a really important mindset to have. And that makes me, this is me now, not you. Me, [laugh] makes me think of Mark Manson's framing of a meaningful life, which I'll paraphrase him here, which is basically not hoping to live one with no problems, but instead trying to live one with better problems where your problems get better over time. So I understand that you've encountered a few problems in your design career. In particular, one that you've talked about in the past is your award-winning concept, E-bike, the end cycle. So what were the problems that you'd encounter that you'd encountered in that project, and how did you focus on making them better over time?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So yeah, failure is a huge thing. And if you look at all the innovators that from the past and even from our time now, all of them pass through different kinds of failures, small and big. And the moment you start to look at failures, that it's something that will allow you to become a better person, have a more experience. I mean, every failure, it's a experience that will elevate you to the next level. And I always tell my students when I'm teaching that one day, when you become successful and you write a book about your journey, do you want to write a book that doesn't have any failures? It's going to be a really boring book. So people learn from those failures. Failure should excite you to at least know what not to do versus doing it again and then falling in the same trap. So I'm actually excited by failure because it's an experience that you can't get from everywhere. Somebody can't tell you, somebody could mentor you of what to do and what not to do. But some failures you'll discover by yourself, and that's really important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was thinking about this, how all of the world's greatest stories of a hero, the hero's journey of mm-hmm. People going through challenges more than one, sometime life threatening challenges. And we are gripped as people globally by this journey. Yet we seem very reluctant to embrace the same feeling around risk and failure and the potential reward
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Rewards. Many people want things to come easier overnight, and that won't happen. I mean, you mentioned the e-bike, I forgot to talk about that. So even with the e-bike and not just the e-bike, like every project I've worked on, I'd say it didn't happen overnight and it didn't happen from the first go. When we talk about innovation in the industry, sometimes we have a cool idea, we prototype it or it's something really different. So again, takes us back to this point A, to point B, to point C, where we innovate and as those failures that teach us and allow us to move forward. So at the bike, we designed this iconic looking bike called the End Cycle. It was me and my designer friend Marine Mao, and we collaborated on this bike. It was a two week project that we sketched out, and it wasn't meant to be more than two weeks, just a concept.
- And then we got excited about it. It became a two month project. We started to look at the details, flush it out more, put it out online. People got excited about it. And then fast forward, we were prototyping it in Italy, each prototype is costing 90,000 euros. So yeah, the first prototype didn't work just because the way that the bike frame looked, it looked very different. It's not something that we had was very conventional in designing bikes. All our bikes looked the same like the past a hundred, 150 years. We were trying to challenge that. So we did one prototype, two prototypes, three until the eighth prototype where we actually got a functioning bike that could work. The frame was stable enough, but it was all those learnings and that process that allowed us to understand what not to do. And I'm sure if somebody was to design that bike today, from day one without seeing our bike, they would go through the same struggles, maybe more, maybe less, but at least we know how to do it and how to improve it and how to build on it. And that's how the most innovative companies in the world look at Apple, Samsung, Nike, and so on. They all have these products that they are building on because they have so much knowledge that their competitors don't have. They know how to do things over the past 30, 40, 50 years that others are just starting to learn what is due to their failures that allow them to be where they are today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really easy for us to look at some of these amazing people in history and deconstruct their approach to life and to intellectually understand that embracing risk and failure has been a key ingredient to their success. Now, I'm really interested in your specific approach here, or the things that you do or that you've seen in your life that have enabled you to flip a situation that makes most people uncomfortable from an existential level. Right. Failures to some people of any degree is almost unacceptable in their life. So what is it that you feel that you have experienced or that you have taught yourself to enable you to be successful in the face of failure and see it as just a stepping stone?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. I mean, there's a lot of situations. One maybe we talked about briefly in the beginning of the podcast which was me having this dream, wanting to work for these big companies. When it came to sports companies, I applied over five years to more than 80 different roles got rejected for different reasons. There was a bad economy visa situation skill sets and so on. Different reasons different times. But the thing that kept me going, and whether it's a job application or whether it's designing a product and having an idea that you want to execute on, I think it's believing in yourself and believing in your dream. The idea of believing that belief, that's really important and that's really key to keep you going and take the noise out because there's a lot of people that will try to take you down even you'll try, you'll start to doubt yourself sometimes.
- But I always say, you have a dream. You try to execute on your vision. You don't just talk the talk, you also walk the walk. And when I try to walk the walk, okay, I try to understand that this is where I am, this is where I want to be, this is how I'm going to do it. If I fail, there's a plan B, plan C, and so on. But all those roads lead to that one goal that I want. I try not to have more than one goal because it's really easy to the moment something goes wrong, you just ditch that idea and go to the second goal or the third goal. So yeah, that's been my motto. [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hussain, that's a wonderful place to end our conversation today. This has been such a positive and a super informative conversation to start my day. Thank you for being so generous with your stories and insights.
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Thank you so much. Pleasure being with you. Thank you so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's definitely my pleasure. And Hussain, if people want to keep up to date with you, what you're up to and where they can learn more about the Innovators Handbook, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Hussain Almossawi:
- Sure. So The Innovator's Handbook is available on Amazon worldwide. If you want to connect with me, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Instagram I'm not using Twitter much, but I'm trying to. So yeah, Instagram and LinkedIn. That's the best places to catch me or email me, of course.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Hussain. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including very detailed chapters, so you can hop around to the points of the conversation that you want to revisit and that interests you the most, including where you can find Hussain, the Innovators Handbook, and all the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, please leave a review on the podcast. Those are super helpful for people to understand what it is that they're getting themselves in for before they hit play, subscribe, so it turns up into your podcast app weekly. And also tell someone else, just one other person, if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth about design.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.