New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

For listeners, the panoply of podcasts seems to grow daily; and for creators, there’s an exponentially growing audience, which means even the most obscure subject matter is bound to find eager ears.

In 2016, we posted 15 inspiring podcast recommendations from IDEO designers, and exactly two years later, we’ve built a whole new list. This time, we put the call out to all of IDEO, inviting recommendations for all types of programming—whatever our teammates are currently listening to and loving. Hopefully many on this list will be new to you, and will help freshen and diversify your own audio queues.

1. Ear Hustle

Ear Hustle takes an honest look into the lives of people within the confines of the American prison system, and it invokes both laughs and tears. Nigel Poor, a Bay Area-based artist, teams up with Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, both current prisoners at San Quentin, which is California’s oldest prison and houses the greatest number of death row inmates in the nation. The three hosts produce stories at the facility’s media lab, where they explore topics as light as how “cellies”—or roommates—are assigned, and as dark as the gut-wrenching effects of the three strikes law. Regardless of the topic, each episode is eye-opening and humanizing, allowing listeners to understand the realities of living behind bars. —Sue-Jean Sung

2. How I Built This

How I Built This takes listeners on a “behind the scenes” tour of how driven entrepreneurs turned innovative ideas into world-changing companies. The stories are full of passion, challenges, successes, and failure...how couldn't you get hooked on this podcast!? Most compelling is the overwhelming humanity that comes through in each founder’s story. Without question a feel-good podcast that will get your creative juices flowing! —Andrew Evans

3. Switched on Pop

I love Switched on Pop because I love music, and pop music tends to get a bad rap or get brushed off as sugary, over-simplified sound, which is just not the case. This podcast is run by a musicologist and a pop songwriter. They deconstruct songs sonically and lyrically to help give some insight into what the song is doing, and how it achieves its goals. The musicology perspective is fascinating to me and helps me deconstruct other songs that I hear. —Meg Rice

4. How to Be Amazing

How to Be Amazing is an in-depth interview show hosted by comedian, author and actor Michael Ian Black. I love this podcast because Michael Ian Black as a host is simultaneously witty, vulnerable and empathetic. Thus, the conversations move fluidly between banter and deep revelations. The guests are creative types: artists, authors, chefs, musicians. Black's focus is on how each guest manages to find creativity and persevere in his or her field. Every episode ends with an “Amazing 5” recommendation segment, in which the guests recommend a book, music, food, TV, and miscellaneous item. My favorite episodes: David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Maira Kalman, and Judd Apatow. —Mollie West Duffy

5. Love + Radio

I love Love + Radio! It has amazing non-fiction, long-form stories. Each one is unique and totally unexpected. Every time I listen to this podcast, I find myself transported to another world. It's truly magical. One episode in particular that stands out is a series of interviews with a man who is dating a life-sized doll, but [spoiler alert!] you don't realize his girlfriend is a doll until the very end. It’s incredible! You really learn how to feel empathy for people whose lives are worlds away from your own. There's also a three-part series about a woman in Colombia who realizes that the family she's just married into are drug lords. The series follows her story as she moves to the US and later is forced into hiding in the Witness Security Program, after providing information to the US government. Another story I loved was from a woman who had an out-of-body experience while undergoing surgery. —Ali Cottong

6. Containers

I got really into the Containers podcast. I never thought I would geek out so hard on this seemingly mundane part of the global supply chain. As a designer at IDEO, I work with a lot companies on their journeys to become “future fit.” One way companies are becoming future fit is by making the bold shift from a increasingly strained linear economy (take, make, waste) to a more prosperous, circular one (one that is regenerative and keeps materials and resources in flow at their highest use for as long as possible, creating new value along the way).

One huge part of redesigning a future economy is understanding how our economy today is designed. This podcast tells the story of containers, something so seemingly banal and ubiquitous. It colorfully illuminates how they came to be and the role they’ve had in transforming not only our economy but so many facets of our modern society in such a short amount of time.

As we design and prototype new tools, platforms, products, services and ventures in the circular economy, Containers inspired me to see the transformative power that a single, simple, and elegant innovation can have when it allows people to do something they couldn’t do before, at a tremendous scale. —Rhys Thom

7. Death of 1000 Cuts

I’m listening to Season 1 of Death of 1000 Cuts. It’s actually an 8-week writing course given by a poet, Tim Clare. The 15-minute podcast gives advice and a structured 10-minute writing exercise every day for 8 weeks. It helps with stagnant writer’s block, writing confidence, writing fatigue and helps exercise the writing muscles for people to feel empowered to write and to dedicate the time to creativity. I love it because while I’m an (IDEO) lawyer by day, it means I get to do the creative flex thing by night. —Rebecca Wint

8. My Favorite Murder

My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast—not a combination you'd expect, but the hosts, Karen and Georgia, make it go down like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s not at all about glorifying the crimes, but rather, looking into the darkest parts of the human experience and finding a way to laugh. MFM (as fans call it) has also inspired a feminist movement with a massive fan base. There's even an IDEO Slack channel devoted to the podcast. —Jennifer Maer

9. NPR's Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain features amazing storytelling on why we do and think the ways that we do (backed with experts in the field!). Why are people in multi-cultural relationships more creative? Why did a competitive luxury brand gift Snookie a rival Gucci handbag? Why does wearing bright red sneakers make other people feel you're more influential? Why should marriages be more like Pinot than Cabernet? All these questions answered (and more) through the Hidden Brain. —Mike Peng

10. Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention is about climate change, how it's a feminist problem, and has a feminist solution. It's hosted by Maeve Higgins, an awesome comedian and storyteller; and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland (!). It's the first thing I've listened to on climate change that has made me feel something like hope. —Ashley Holtgraver

11. Cocaine and Rhinestones

Cocaine & Rhinestones is an in-depth look at some of the wildest stories of 20th century country music. I suppose I love it because I love old country music and was raised in an environment where Hank Williams was God. But these stories go much deeper than fading memories of hearing steel guitar over a busted truck radio. It's so well researched I might compare it to a Ken Burns documentary. Yes, it's dark, and that's why you'll love it. Murder...check. Alcoholism and adultery...check. People behaving in intolerable ways...check. But all of the negativity and carnage are balanced by unflinching tributes to a truly unique American musical creation. It's incredibly respectful of those who wrote and performed the music. Irony is uncool now anyway. This feels real. —Zach Hobbs

12. The Longest Shortest Time

The Longest Shortest Time is a parenting show. I like to think about someday becoming a parent, but even as someone without children, the way they talk developmental theory makes the whole concept of parenting feel more diverse and accessible. I don't have kids yet, so I listen in to see what my future could look like, and to learn more about youth today. —Stuart Getty

13. Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

I love Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness because, well, Queer Eye is my new obsession, and he just absolutely delights me. He's so smart and yet somewhat hides it to remain more "curious," and he really explores every topic under the sun, from Saudi Arabia to abstinence in addiction therapy. —Madeline Armstrong

14. Change Agent from The New York Times

I've been surprised by how much the stories told on Change Agent stick with me, and how powerful analogous inspiration can be in helping us change our behavior. —Em Havens

15. Racist Sandwich

Racist Sandwich is a podcast about food, race, gender, and class. It's a refreshing, honest, and deeply human look at what happens at that intersection. I really like the podcast because they tell different stories from points of view that are rarely highlighted by traditional media channels. I am a latecomer to the show, but I found their episodes "Tasting Something other than Shame" and "Detroiters are Fighters" to be particularly inspiring. —Sandeep Pahuja

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Now that we consume most of our information through screens, audio programming is a breath of fresh air. Podcasts enable us to get up and out, liberating us from the tether of phones and computers.

That’s a shame, because research shows that feeling joy at work not only increases our wellbeing, but also our performance across the spectrum. Joy increases our working memory and cognitive flexibility, which in turn leads to better problem-solving. Take doctors, for example: Those who have been primed to feel joyful make a correct diagnosis earlier than those in a neutral mindset. Joyful businesspeople consider a wider range of scenarios and make more accurate decisions. Joyful negotiators are more likely to achieve win-win agreements. And it turns out it’s infectious: Joyful leaders spread positivity to their teams, increasing rates of effort and cooperation; and when salespeople exhibit joy, customers respond by spending more time in a store, giving higher satisfaction ratings, and expressing a greater likelihood to return.

Have I convinced you yet? Ok, then. Here are six ways you can transform your work environment to increase joy, and bring out your most productive, collaborative, and creative self.

1. Add a pop of color and light

Research with nearly a thousand office workers across four continents shows that people in more colorful workspaces are more joyful and alert than those in drab spaces. They’re also more confident and friendly. Bright colors reflect more light, which acts like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. If you can’t paint your whole office, try adding an item with a strong pop of color to your desk, like a vibrant piece of art or a yellow mug, to brighten up your space—and your spirits!

For even more joyful energy at work, go toward the light. There’s a reason most people prefer a desk near a sunny window. Light helps regulate our Circadian rhythms, leading to higher energy levels and mood. Research shows that workers who get more light exposure in their offices are more physically active during the day and sleep better at night. Among nurses working on acute care wards, more sunlight exposure correlates to an increase in spontaneous laughter. If you are slow to get going in the morning, see if you can find a spot near a window. Or fight the afternoon slump by taking your meetings outside.

2. Buy a plant

When you’re working in a high pressure situation, make sure to introduce some greenery to your workspace. Exposure to nature helps restore our attention and can mitigate the effects of stress on our bodies and minds—making it less likely that we’ll snap at our teammates. Psychologists believe that looking at nature refreshes our ability to concentrate because it is passive, but also stimulating. In many offices, nature views are a perk reserved for management. But the good news is that studies show even a few plants can improve attention, reduce blood pressure, and even prompt more generous behavior toward others.

3. Keep it cute

One of my most memorable days at IDEO was when one of my coworkers surprised us by arranging for fifteen puppies to visit our office. As people moved from one meeting to another, they couldn’t resist spending a few minutes sitting on the floor cooing and cuddling. It might sound like a distraction, but researchers in Japan have found that looking at pictures of cute things, such as baby animals, may actually help increase concentration. One theory is that cuteness elicits a nurturing impulse that requires focus and care, priming the mind to zoom in and tune out distractions. So, go ahead, share the latest otter video on Slack, peep the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed on your lunch break, and keep those photos of your adorable nieces and nephews on your wall. These joyful bursts of cuteness might just help you when you’re doing work that requires careful thought and attention to detail.

4. Get some air

When you need to zoom out and get perspective on a work challenge, seek out the joy of elevation. Our emotions often seem to lie along a vertical axis: we’re in high spirits or light-hearted when happy, we feel low or heavy-hearted when sad. By moving ourselves physically upward in space—ascending to a roof deck or even just climbing a set of stairs, we not only find a joyful lightness, but also a shift to more big-picture thinking. Psychologists have tested this by intercepting people who have just walked up or down a flight of stairs and asking them to think about people’s behavior. When participants are told that someone is painting a room, those who have just walked down a flight of stairs are more likely to think about the specific actions involved (“applying brush strokes,”) while those who have just walked up the stairs are more likely to think about the broader purpose behind the actions (“making the room look fresh”). Ever have a flash of insight on an airplane? When we need to make big decisions or solve intractable problems, elevation can help us literally “see the forest for the trees” and avoid getting caught in the weeds.

5. Keep the ball rolling

To cultivate a creative mindset, keep a ball or frisbee at your desk. Research shows the kinds of fluid, curving motions we make when we play can help unlock a more flexible thought pattern, which in turn heightens creativity. In one study, participants who made curving motions with their arms came up with more ideas for uses of a newspaper than those who made angular motions. And the ideas they came up with were more original. This might explain why you often find ping pong tables at startups, and suggests that taking time to play might be the perfect warmup for creative work.

6. Turn up the tunes

When you want to help your team find its groove, give them an actual groove. That can produce a phenomenon that scientists call synchrony—when we sing or move in the same rhythm with others. When people experience synchrony, either by tapping out a beat or a rocking in chairs at the same tempo, they display greater generosity and perform better on a cooperative task. Some researchers have speculated that this may have originated when humans first began to coordinate their efforts to achieve complex goals. By noticing the rhythms created through repetitive manual tasks, people could better synchronize their efforts, and perhaps this led to an unconscious sense of unity. If it’s not too distracting, one way to harness this effect may be to play music with a strong beat in your workspace. People will naturally begin to tap or nod along with the music, creating a synchronicity that helps you find your flow.

To learn more about Ingrid’s research on how to design for joy, check out her new book Joyful.

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As a designer who studies joy for a living, one of the questions I am asked most frequently is: How can I find more joy at work? We spend at least a third of our waking hours at the office, and some of us much more than that. Yet most workspaces, with their beige carpets and rows of cubicles, aren’t exactly designed to delight.

Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

Creativity Challenge # 2: Increase your creative output

Anyone who studies dreams will tell you that if you want to remember your dreams, you need a dream journal right beside the bed. The moment you wake up—whether it’s the middle of the night or in the morning—you should capture those dreams before they fade away. The same holds true with your waking “dreams,” your partially or fully formed ideas, your glimpses of possible futures. If you want to maximize your creative output, don’t rely on short-term memory.

Even if you never get to experience Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, you’re likely to have your own moments of brilliance once in a while. When that happens, make an effort to capture those ideas right away, because your short-team memory only holds a thought for fifteen to thirty seconds. One simple way to have more ideas in your arsenal is to start keeping track of them as they occur.

Tool: 15 Seconds of Brilliance
Participants: This is a solo activity
Time: 10 minutes per day
Supplies: Paper and pen, or a digital means of keeping notes

Instructions

When you have an idea or observe something intriguing, take note of it. The actual means of capturing the idea doesn’t matter as much as having it with you at all times. Choose a method or a technology that fits with your lifestyle and your personality:

• Digital tools are great, but paper still works exceptionally well. I always have a pen and a simple folded piece of paper in my back pocket. I also keeps a small pad of paper on my bedside table, with a lighted pen that I can use to jot down an idea while reading or in the middle of the night without fear of waking up my wife.
• My brother David has a whiteboard marker in his shower, so he can write a passing idea before it disappears.
• IDEO partner Brendan Boyle has experimented with various forms of “idea wallets” designed specifically to record his thoughts.
• Mobile voice assistants will let you dictate a quick mental note.
• Your laptop or tablet has all kinds of notepad applications. But we think you’ll get more functionality out of purpose-built programs like Evernote, specifically designed to store such ideas.

So increase your odds in the war against lost ideas. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas you end up with when you make an effort to jot down those sudden moments of insight. Our brains are constantly making connections and associations with other people, things, and ideas we come in contact with. Don’t let those serendipitous insights go to waste.

This post is the second in a series of exercises taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems. Read part one here.

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Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential.

How do you prevent a handoff from becoming a drop-off? I recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review that explores this very question. The following is an excerpt of that article.

How should you create a smoother handoff between teams? In short, you can avoid a drop-off by tailoring each handoff to the teams involved. In many companies, innovation teams tend to fall into three buckets: Explorers, Scalers, and Optimizers (with credit to Bud Caddell and Simon Wardley).

There are four basic models for the handoff, and dozens of hybrids. The right one for each part of your innovation portfolio will depend on how integrated your projects need to be with your core business.

1. The Owner’s Manual

After months—sometimes years—of work, an innovation team extensively documents their work in hundreds of pages of slides, spreadsheets, and other files, and then hands all of that over to a new team to execute. When was the last time you read an Owner’s Manual? Exactly. The new team then risks moving on without absorbing the learning of their predecessors.

2. The Architect

The best way to avoid a drop-off is to eliminate the handoff. In this model, the future owner of the work embeds in the Explorer and Scaler teams. That person then acts as a connector, knowing all of the avenues already explored and all of the learning gained.

3. The Ambassadors

Similar to the previous model, in this model, members of the Explorer, Scaler, and Optimizer teams remain embedded in each phase of the project to ensure that no learning is lost and that each phase of work is designed to feed smoothly into the next. In addition, this model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

4. The Hive

The difference here is that team members don't roll off the project—it remains a blended team from idea to implementation. This model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

Want to dive deeper on innovation handoffs? Read my article in Harvard Business Review.

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If innovation projects are going to succeed, they’ll need to survive a handoff from an innovation team to an execution team. And every time you create a handoff, you risk dropping the baton.

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.