Over more than a century of leadership in the food and beverage industry, The J.M Smucker Company has expanded its range of products to maintain its relevance and address market demand. Today, the company leads numerous categories, with beloved products like Jif, Milk-Bone, and Folgers, which are the top choices of millions of Americans. By growing and diversifying their brands over the decades, Smucker has successfully weathered major shifts in consumer habits and technology. Today, though, CPG companies are experiencing unprecedented disruption, and leaders at Smucker understand that the escalating pace of change will require more than just new products.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company recognized the need to identify new market opportunities and establish practices that put innovation and growth at the heart of their business. And he saw the potential to bring those goals to life through his relationship with IDEO.

WATCH: Balancing innovation and efficiency through design has helped Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company, brave the unfamiliar, transform organizations, and ultimately bring game-changing ideas to market faster.

Geoff has stewarded a close partnership with IDEO for over a decade and throughout roles at numerous organizations. Together, Geoff and IDEO have worked on 25 projects, beginning while Geoff was VP of Marketing at Big Heart Pet Brands, and continuing on throughout his career at The J.M. Smucker Company. By working with IDEO to adopt a design thinking approach, Geoff has enabled collaboration across teams and empowered his organizations to find new ways of working that result in measurable business impact. For The J.M. Smucker Company, the partnership has brought creativity and human-centered design to the forefront of its operations, strengthening its ability to bring new products and brands to market and create a pipeline of growth.

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company has shifted to embrace growth and innovation as a mindset throughout the organization to bring more consistency to the innovation process.

Looking to the past to creatively connect with the future

As an example of this, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company suggested to IDEO that they explore how Folgers, America’s leading at-home coffee brand, might resonate more deeply with a millennial audience. Design research revealed that the mindset of today’s millennial coffee drinkers aligned with Folgers entrepreneurial brand roots. The teams collaborated to create a new concept: a brand called 1850 and an end-to-end, go-to-market product experience, including packaging, retail, and merchandise. 1850 hit shelves in 2018 and has since been reported by IRI Advantage as the top launch in the Coffee Category for 2019.

Frankly, I don’t think innovation gets any easier. You just get a little more comfortable with the discomfort, and that’s when the work starts to get consistently better.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

Creating an innovation pipeline that’s inspired by consumers’ needs

With 1850 underway, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company continued to invest in human-centered design to drive new offerings. The next collaboration with IDEO explored how Jif, the iconic peanut butter brand, could extend beyond the jar and become more readily accessible and appealing to busy parents who want to feel confident about the snacks they give their kids.

The design team was moved by the challenges that parents face: They want the best for their kids, but struggle to choose between what’s wholesome and what’s convenient on a daily basis. The ideal foods are filling, nutritious, and energizing, but often take more time to prepare and aren’t backpack or carpool-friendly. On the other hand, more convenient options tend to be full of empty carbs. Based on this insight, IDEO and Jif decided to tackle the snack-time parenting struggle. The IDEO and Jif teams worked side-by-side to prototype multiple product ideas and formats and tested them with on-the-go families to ultimately create Power Ups.

Available at over 200 retailers worldwide and online at Amazon, Jif Power Ups make wholesome, delicious grab-and-go snacking possible for kids and parents alike, across products ranging from Soft Baked Bars to Creamy Clusters, which are filled with peanut butter and rolled in whole grain oats. All are made with peanuts as the first ingredient and contain no high fructose corn syrup. Since going to market in 2018, Jif Power Ups has been named the top innovation launch in the Snack Bars category by IRI Market Advantage.

Design thinking underpins everything we do.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President & Corporate Officer, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company is on a transformational journey, committed to three pillars of growth: Lead in the best categories, build brands consumers love, and be everywhere.

The J.M. Smucker Company has experienced accelerated growth and speed to market by testing bold new ideas and evolving the role of innovation at the company. Design thinking and consumer empathy have permeated the organization’s new product development process, making it easier to uncover sharp, human-centered insights that lead to thoughtful and uniquely differentiated brands in a competitive, ever-shifting, and overcrowded industry. The work has fueled Geoff’s vision to inspire a culture of innovation at the company so that it can move at the speed of consumers and remain a best-in-class family of brands for future generations.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Oakland, California. A line of lunchtime diners snakes out the door of dosa by DOSA. Upon entering, eaters are greeted by the smell of tangy dosa—a large paper-thin crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils—and sweet, spicy chai. Turquoise chairs pop against a floor-to-ceiling mural by Oakland artist Namita Kapoor that transports diners to Chandni Chowk, one of the busiest markets in Old Delhi, as if enjoying their food at a local vendor.

In 2003, Emily and Anjan Mitra spent their honeymoon in India, savoring the street food of Anjan’s childhood in Mumbai (often still called Bombay). After returning to San Francisco, they found themselves longing for those distinctive flavors and dishes. Realizing that most Bay Area diners had never seen nor tasted these foods, Emily and Anjan founded DOSA, an upscale, full-service restaurant that introduced the Bay Area to Southern Indian cuisine. Locals came to try the unique, plant-forward dishes, and left with satisfied bellies and a broader understanding of Indian culture.

The entrepreneurs envisioned a brand extension of DOSA: a counter-service restaurant that could scale nationally. The hospitality venture, called dosa by DOSA, would offer healthful Indian street food made from local and seasonal ingredients. Emily and Anjan also set out to expand their existing product line-up—including cold lassi beverages, simmering sauces, and grab-and-go-meals—to national grocers and retailers and needed launch-ready packaging that was convenient, eye-catching, and environmentally-friendly. The new expression would enable consumers to experience dosa by DOSA and Southern India in a variety of forms and places. Emily and Anjan partnered with IDEO to establish a cohesive and consistent brand experience, from the restaurant and to-go meals to retail stores and mobile delivery.

In close partnership with the founders, their staff, Feldman Architecture and MPADA, IDEO set out to bring dosa by DOSA to life and help it scale through brand, environment, and experience design. This included creating everything from the logo and packaging to the menu and operations strategy, with each element tying back to the founders’ vision of sharing Indian heritage and traditions through cuisine.

The group began by seeking cultural inspiration for dosa by DOSA’s brand identity system—the logo, colors, values, fonts, and messaging—to guide future designs. They were inspired by Indian truck drivers who decorate their trucks with garlands, signs, or flags that engage other drivers or bring luck. The dosa by DOSA logo design and its wood-cut typeface are inspired by the dimensionality of this homespun art form, while the vibrant, eclectic colors reflect the streets and textures of urban Mumbai.

The goal of opening people’s minds to Indian cooking and culture extends to the packaging, which meets customers’ needs and playfully educates them. The food containers—made from recycled and compostable material—feature brightly patterned labels reminiscent of the trucks. Some have built-in compartments suited to multiple dipping chutneys, making it convenient to sample a variety of Indian flavors. Paper tray covers resembling Mumbai newspapers offer eating tips like “Be civilized. Eat with your hands,” encouraging diners to experience an Indian custom.

The vibrant brand comes to life across an array of packaging, including cold cups printed with the phrase “thanda thanda pani”—meaning “cold cold water”—which comes from a popular Indian parody of the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby."

To design the diner experience and restaurant environment in a way that invites curiosity about the culture and cuisine, the team started with diners: They identified key moments in their experience like entering, waiting in line, and paying. The floor plan, furniture, lighting, signage, and menu were designed around these touchpoints. For example, while customers wait in line, they can watch dosa being prepared, as if they’re eager and hungry travelers awaiting street food.

The dosa by DOSA menu includes distinctive items like coconut kale mung bean salad and hot masala chai made with caramelized milk—the way Anjan’s mother prepared it. To help the restaurant scale, the team created a preliminary furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) budget, 3D renderings of the space, and an operations strategy for the founders and their employees.

The dosa by DOSA flagship launched in January 2018 in Oakland, California. The IDEO brand guidelines have enabled the dosa by DOSA team to independently and easily shepherd new product lines to market, including salads, wraps, curry bowls, samosas, and simmer sauces. The brand’s packaged food launched in over 200 natural food stores in 24 months—including over 100 Whole Foods locations—as well as online retailers and delivery services like Good Eggs and Caviar. These items and the restaurant have helped Emily and Anjan realize their vision of bringing the flavor and spirit of Southern Indian cuisine to new communities around the world.

In recent years, due to shifts in Japan’s demographics, the food industry has faced challenges such as a decrease in market size and a shrinking number of producers. As a result, social impact opportunities abound in this field.

When Japanese software company NJC (Nippon Jimuki Co. Ltd.) approached IDEO seeking to identify new business opportunities that would build on the company’s core strengths, the food and agriculture industry rose up as a promising area of focus.

NJC is a well-established software company that has spent over 50 years helping to build backend business systems for small to medium enterprises. NJC works across healthcare, retail, and food and beverage, computerizing core processes to support and improve operations.

In partnership with IDEO, NJC explored its strengths and potential as an organization, as well as the ideas and visions of the employees, and emerged with the goal of using their capabilities to address large-scale issues facing regional farmers.

During research across Japan, local growers described challenges with multi-layered supply chains and analog systems, which led to “overwork for minimal profit,” as well as a gap between supply and demand. Because agricultural wholesalers lacked clear information in advance on the status of crops or the volume to be harvested, they struggled to negotiate with buyers, which led to wasted food On the other hand, the farmers who grow the crops are engaged in manual labor, and do not always have the energy to focus on business aspects such as efficiency or the pursuit of increased profitability, which leads to a diminished interest in farming among young people.

One question that emerged through research was why agricultural producers weren’t utilizing IT. This evolved into “How can profitability be improved for all stakeholders?” and, “How might we create a system that will provide useful data without creating a burden for either farmers or agricultural wholesalers?”

The result was fudoloop.

fudoloop is an app that enables farmers and wholesalers to conduct business more profitably by bringing transparency to the fluctuating produce market. Through fudoloop, wholesalers receive information from farmers a day in advance, and can coordinate the various requests of buyers, such as order size, production location and other special requests. As a result, wholesalers can function as “community managers,” doing business with both producers and buyers at a more appropriate price point.

NJC aims for fudoloop to be the first step in a cycle that brings value to all stakeholders, from farmers to wholesalers, retailers and even customers, by redefining the “middleman” role of produce wholesalers.

The population of Tokyo’s metropolitan area is twice as big as New York, and the daily influx of workers from the suburbs increases that number sixfold. Congestion on trains traveling through the center of Tokyo during commuting hours is said to reach somewhere close to 200 percent of the trains’ capacity.

East Japan Railway Company (known as JR East) is the world’s largest railway company by revenue, operating 12,000 trains daily and serving 6.4 billion passengers per year.

In March 2014, JR East leveraged their extensive operations and passenger data to publish a consumer app that provided train location information, congestion status, air conditioning temperature, and wayfinding tools.

The app was downloaded more than 3.8 million times; however, its features and usability proved unsatisfactory to users. In an attempt to be comprehensive in addressing passenger needs, the app was weighed down with data and worked sluggishly. Competitors’ apps were named above JR East in customer satisfaction surveys, highlighting the company’s need to address the tool’s usability.

JR East’s Technical Division approached IDEO to help design an attractive and consistent user-centered experience through its digital ecosystem. With a team of interaction designers, they launched a project to create a new version of their app.

During the research phase, the IDEO team observed passengers’ behaviors and decision-making processes and noticed that people were using several apps at once to get more personalized and complete information.

The team created a set of paper-based prototypes to test how users would react to various functionalities. Surprisingly, users ranked versions with limited functionalities higher than those with a broad range of features.

This insight informed a new prototype that enabled a customized user experience based on traveler needs. Wayfinding proved to be the most frequently selected feature, so the new app was designed around helping passenger navigate during their trips.

Although JR East had traditionally outsourced their app development, IDEO encouraged them to organize their own internal team. In cooperation with Pivotal—a frequent IDEO partner familiar with human-centered approaches—the internal team was trained in agile development and built the new app themselves. A prototype was released in November 2017 as “Go! by Train.” It was so successful in the market that the earlier JR East app was replaced entirely with the content of the new design.

JR East's internal development team was recognized by the company for their exceptional output, and will be integral to the company's human-centered digital transformation going forward.

We've studied the effects of emotions in the workplace, and the research shows that managers can make or break an office. In one poll, 50% of people said they’ve quit a job to remove themselves from a bad manager. (In another survey, 65% of folks said they’d take a new boss over a pay raise. Ouch.)

Managers often set the tone of the workplace. But that doesn’t mean managing has to be stoic, emotionless work. In fact, we think it should be the opposite.

There’s no set formula for becoming a perfect boss, but we have a few tips for building a positive emotional culture in the office and supporting the needs of the people that work for you.

Manage individually

After surveying almost 80,000 people, researcher Marcus Buckingham came up with the insight that “average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess.” In checkers, every piece is the same: they’re interchangeable. But winning a game of chess requires you to understand each piece’s strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t effectively play unless you understand why each piece is unique.

One of Mollie’s favorite examples of this individualized approach is IDEO’s new employee survey, which includes hardball questions like, “What’s your favorite office snack?” and “What kind of flowers do you like?” The answers give teams an understanding of their new colleagues right off the bat, and help managers address a newbie’s individual interests—even if it’s just a preference for vanilla vs. chocolate.

Address your feelings without becoming “emotionally leaky”

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott recalls a morning when a report told her, “I know what kind of day I’m going to have by the kind of mood you’re in when you walk in the door.” Managing your feelings is as important as managing your team; what you consider a throwaway comment or a momentary bad mood can ruin someone’s day. Reactive, hot-tempered managers are hurtful and demoralizing.

But don’t pretend that you’re not allowed to have feelings (you’re human. Accept it!). “The idea that you’re never going to have a bad day as a boss is bullshit,” Kim says. “The best thing to do is to cop to it. Say to your team, ‘I’m having a bad day, and I’m trying my best not to take it out on you. But if it seems like I’m having a bad day, it’s because I am.’”

You don’t necessarily have to go into great detail (oversharing is another complicated topic), but acknowledging that there’s something going on can help those around you avoid unnecessary anxiety.

Figure yourself out first

Like we said: You’re human. That means you have your own emotional responses to unpack before you’re fully equipped to help others do the same. The best leaders are able to hit the pause button when they become emotional, sit with their feelings, and understand where they’re coming from. Instead of taking action immediately, they ask themselves, “What’s behind this emotion?”

A great manager will realize, for example, that anxiety about meeting a deadline can be mitigated by building structure to help a team get work done on time, or that a tough design review means that next time, more prototypes might be necessary. Tapping into your emotional toolkit will help you arm others for the emotional demands of the office.

Listen

It sounds basic, but it bears repeating. One of the questions Wharton Professor Adam Grant fields most often is, how do you have your suggestions heard when you’re not in charge? "These are not questions asked by leaders," Grant notes. Hearing people out is an extremely important part of letting them know you appreciate their work.

Listening is also the only way leaders can understand the source of problems or strong emotions. As a manager, ask questions instead of immediately trying to problem solve. You’ll never understand another person’s perspective unless you listen and show compassion.

Find time to prioritize yourself

Managing means cooking something on every burner without burning anything. You also have to time every step perfectly to make sure the meal comes together. If the simple thought of that balancing act exhausts you, try taking a "Shultz hour." When he was in office, former Secretary of State George Shultz protected one hour each week for solitary reflection with paper and pen. No one was allowed to interrupt him (except the president or his wife, which we understand).

If solo time feels a little too isolating, seek support. Try connecting with peers and folks who have a similar role with whom you feel safe talking openly about personal and professional issues. As Liz Koenig, who managed Teach for America teachers, told us, “You can’t pour out of an empty cup.”

Acknowledging emotions in the workplace is one thing; harnessing their power to become a better manager is another. It’s not impossible, but it does take work. We’d recommend not putting on a brave face, but instead getting a little vulnerable with the people that work for you. Here’s one last reminder: You’re human.

Like playing the flute or choosing the right sized Tupperware for your leftovers, being a good manager is a skill. You’re not born knowing how to play scales or eyeball specific volumes of pasta—it’s something learned and practiced. And when it comes to building your managerial muscles and shepherding others through a career journey, there are a lot of emotional skills that can really boost your toolkit.

Not necessarily, says Chris Nyffeler, IDEO Executive Design Director and a faculty member in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts. Those vocational skills are important, but they can come later. A foundation in design—whether built through education or early career experience—comes from understanding the process and building up the soft skills that all designers, but especially interaction designers, need to master.

Chris would often see his students hung up on mastering tools first. But according to him, great interaction designers have three things at their core—empathy for users, storytelling chops, and the instinct to prototype.

1. Empathy for users

The role of a designer is to be the voice of and advocate for the end user. This is especially true when you're working in-house alongside engineering and product teams that might feel disconnected from the customer.

Empathy starts with an awareness of others and an ability to detect their emotions and understand their perspective. What does it actually feel like to live with a problem, and how would a potential solution actually fix it? “The more that you can build that muscle of empathy,” Chris says, “the better you're going to be as a designer.”

And for more seasoned in-house designers, the more you can help your counterparts across the organization develop their empathy muscles, the more successful it will make you and your UX team in delivering great products to market.

2. The desire to tell a story

Chris describes storytelling as effectively envisioning ideas and putting them into a more strategic framework. That frame could be user insights (how the work is right for the user), a business context (how the work builds on business goals), or organizational context (how the team is well equipped to deliver on the work).

“Storytelling is an under-appreciated soft skill,” Chris says. Storytelling doesn’t just come in handy for presenting your ideas—it helps build consensus with cross-functional teams. Being able to share your ideas and bring others on board helps designers be strong advocates for their own work.

3. The instinct to prototype

At IDEO, we talk about prototyping as a central step in the design process, but it's also a mindset that should be fundamental to the way an interaction designer thinks.

“As they have an idea, great designers put pen to paper, or pixels on screen, or just start building something as a way of working out their process,” Chris says.

Designers should be skilled at prototyping at various levels of fidelity, but most importantly, their gut instinct should push them to test ideas early and often.

“I love seeing that, especially from designers who are just discovering prototyping as a tool in their tool belt,” Chris says. “Seeing them realize that there’s more than one way of doing things, and that their first assumption of how they should present an experience could be right or wrong.”

Putting unfinished, scrappy ideas out into the world can make a designer feel uncomfortable, but Chris says the best prototypes leave room for users to co-design parts of the experience. “If they show you something that’s not working,” Chris says, “quickly change it. Move a button, rewrite copy, replace an image. Users can also take you down unexpected, delightful paths that can lead you to a powerful new idea."

Connecting more deeply with that end user—the person you’re designing for—is key to developing all three of these skills.

Want to learn more about interaction design? Dive deeper with IDEO U’s on-demand class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences.

How do you identify the makings of a great interaction designer? Is it coding expertise? Mastery of digital tools? A beautiful portfolio of visual design work?

Turns out it's really hard to get people to think about why they'd use technology they don’t understand for a problem they don’t know exists. And that's exactly the challenge we've taken on at the CoLab, IDEO’s collaborative innovation lab—to determine what humans will need in the connected future.

How does that affect our quarterly design sprints? The goal isn't faster execution—as it would be with a typical work sprint—but rather surfacing and validating new opportunities.

Here's how it works: At the start of the sprint, each multidisciplinary team (a motley crew of designers, technologists, and businesspeople who range from students to entrepreneurs to corporate representatives) is given a design brief that specifies a technology to use, like blockchain or machine learning. Teams are charged with quickly getting their heads around the emerging technology, creating their first prototype, gathering feedback, iterating, synthesizing, and sharing their design.

Over the past four years, we’ve created well over 200 prototypes and learned a ton.

Here are our best tips for how to run a highly productive design sprint:

1. Big questions need small starting points

When you’re asking a huge, provocative question, you could spend months coming up with answers. So, before the sprint, we make sure we take time to craft specific briefs to work on—design challenges that are bite-sized enough that we can (in)validate them during the course of a week, but broad enough that we can sink our teeth into them.

We might start with a question like: “How might decentralized technologies change the ways communities reduce risk?” and include a suggested prototype like: “Build a peer to peer insurance product for travel using blockchain technology.” This level of specificity can feel stifling at first—but it helps teams get moving fast toward a prototype.

2. Timebox everything

An exploratory sprint can feel directionless at first—you’re trying to make something new with a brand new tool, which means you could do almost anything. The best way to not devolve into endless spiraling is by scheduling every phase of design down to the minute. When you know your team needs to make a decision between A and B in the next seven minutes, well, you put on your big kid pants and decide. By giving yourself a series of minideadlines, you can accomplish more iterations and ultimately, a better prototype at the end of your sprint.

3. Show up with a prototype

When you’re working with a revolutionary technology and trying to explain your idea to a potential user, their eyes glaze over. Showing up to user testing sessions with a prototype—even if it’s far from final—makes the future tangible and accessible. You’re not talking about faster horses anymore, you’ve got people imagining cars.

4. Strong ideas weakly held

Making something takes confidence, and nothing builds confidence like concrete evidence that you’re headed in the right direction. But evidence is hard to come by in the world of emerging tech. Try prototyping as if you’re right—and then listening as if you’re wrong. This means putting your prototype in front of people and learning from all the ways it didn’t work for them—giving you both evidence and direction on what to build.

5. Find the right questions, not perfect solutions

Exploration is about charting unfamiliar territory. Sometimes that means you get it all wrong and end up at a dead-end. But that doesn’t mean the sprint was a failure! As we said, the goal of an exploratory sprint is not to execute a million dollar idea in record time, but to surface new opportunities.

At the end of the sprint, when it’s time to present your prototype, focus the conversation on what you learned: What would you build next time to make an even better, more human-centered solution? What advice would you give to others designing with these technologies?

6. Science fair, not pitch deck

Rather than jazz hands, Powerpoints, and promises of what your prototype could do, we always end our sprints in a science fair format: multiple hands-on demos happening alongside one another, with lots of room for discussion.

This lets people experience prototypes individually and then come back together to reflect on how the ideas worked for them (or didn’t). It’s another round of user feedback that furthers our learning and participants walk away with real insights that might apply to their work beyond the sprint.

It’s not always easy to run a sprint. It means breaking out of your regular work routine and collaborating with a team to do something intense and exhausting that you aren’t always sure is going to work. It means building with tools you don’t know how to use (yet).

But when we follow these rules, our sprints offer up reams of new ideas, insights, opportunities, and next steps that send us galloping toward a more human-centered future.

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Know that timeworn Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”? Turns out Ford probably never said that. But as designers who are trying to imagine and build the future, we’ve found it to be a very useful notion.

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

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Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.