Midea, one of China’s largest appliance manufacturers, wanted to identify growth opportunities in the domestic consumer market, while focusing on people’s cultural beliefs around health and well-being. During the course of the project, IDEO found that Midea could play a key role in building a healthier nation.

The team set out to design potential future products for Tong (“through, whole, and to understand”) that are built around the basic themes of eating, breathing, and being: an easy-to-use, hassle-free herbal tea dispenser, an air balancer that improves and balances the quality of air in the home, and a body-balancing mobile phone app that encourages users to rebalance their body condition where needed, through movements created with the Chinese philosophies of well-being in mind.

The Tong project was featured extensively in the press, and opened further conversations with Midea about creating new value and extending into new markets.

Put food on the table or keep the furnace running on a frigid day? It’s an unfortunate choice many low-income families in Flint, Michigan, face.

To help customers in Flint and other Michigan towns stay on top of their utility bills and better understand the relationship between their energy consumption and the resulting costs, Consumers Energy partnered with IDEO and utility assistance provider The Heat and Warmth Fund (THAW) to create an innovative pilot billing program called Clear Control in late 2013.

The pilot was designed with three major human-centered changes to the traditional utility experience:

• Instead of monthly bills, participants received two bills per month. Shorter billing periods allowed for smaller, more frequent payments, helping customers match available funds with their ability to pay.
• Daily text updates on energy usage and bill amounts kept consumption top of mind.
• Consumers Energy offered personalized, in-home audits to help customers make low-cost, high-impact changes to their energy bills.

A year later, the results of the pilot are energizing. Clear Control participants accumulated no new debt, while the control group owed $300; pilot customers used 20 percent less electricity, reducing their bills by $200 per year; and 95 percent of participants paid their bills in full and on time, compared with 35 percent in the control group. The utility company simultaneously benefited by avoiding arrearages, late-payment fees, and shutoffs. Consumers plans to incorporate Clear Control lessons into its overall energy assistance program design and development moving forward.

"It’s no longer ‘me’ against ‘them’—now it’s ‘us,’" said one Clear Control participant.

In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to develop a mouse for their radical new computer, the Lisa. Previous attempts at mouse design, by Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, yielded results that were too expensive and hard to make. The Apple mouse needed to be more reliable and less than 10 percent of the cost of the earlier versions.

To start, the design team created a cheaper, much-improved mechanism that would operate the mouse, and found that a complex, plastic "ribcage" would hold the pieces together. The team similarly tested and refined the mouse’s other key components, from the audible and tactile click of the button to the rubberized coating on the ball. A record turntable spun for days, logging “mouse miles” to check the reliability of the electromechanical assembly.

The resulting mouse proved mechanically and economically sound and was changed only slightly when adapted for use with the first Macintosh computer. The basic mechanism design is used in virtually all mechanical mouses produced to date.

Food is the heart of most cultures. In China, one of the oldest cultures in the world, food is central to family gatherings and celebrations. It’s what binds people, a tangible way of showing love and respect. But in recent years, the Chinese food industry has suffered from concerns around safety.

Two siblings, Harn and Anmao Sun, set out on an ambitious venture: to create a trusted source of food in China and, by setting an example, to instigate a movement around conscious farming practices. The American-born entrepreneurs launched Hunter Gatherer, a restaurant and retail food space built around a transparent supply chain, from farm to table to grocery shelves. The venture is based on growing and serving what they call real food: The ingredients are chemical-free and come from known and trusted sources—food they’d eat themselves. The purpose of the venture is simple: to serve people real food that is their right.

Having studied and worked in the US, Harn and Anmao grew accustomed to browsing farmers markets on Saturday mornings or picking up a burrito at Chipotle. But when they returned to China, they were unsure about the safety of the food they were eating.

“In China, you wouldn’t go to a food stand, because you’d be concerned about the ingredients,” Anmao said. “You can’t take the safety for granted.”

Hunter Gatherer’s very existence challenges bedrock assumptions about how food is produced in China. A long and depressing list of scandals—milk contaminated with melamine, pork produced from diseased pigs, used cooking oil repackaged and sold as new—has rocked the public trust.

“In China, agriculture is going through a huge change,” Anmao said. “In the US, agriculture operations are regulated. Farmers’ practices are regulated. If they use pesticides, there are limits because these farmers understand that once a certain threshold is hit, additional pesticides will not yield more crops. But in China, pesticide use came about 30 years after the US and Europe, and because of a lack of full understanding, farmers in China incorrectly operate under the assumption that more pesticides means more crop yields. Also, with over 250 million farmers in China, it becomes immensely difficult to properly regulate everyone.”

New Ventures

Harn and Anmao wanted to restore trust in the simple act of eating in China, and they came to IDEO to build a scalable business based on that vision. This was essentially a startup, a shared commitment between IDEO and Hunter Gatherer.

“I’ve lived in Shanghai for the past seven years, and as a relatively active and health-conscious person, I’ve had to invest quite a bit of time in finding food that I trust,” said Charles Hayes, managing director of IDEO Shanghai. “That investment has been both in the time it takes to research the sources of ingredients but also a literal investment in paying a high price for imported food just for that extra peace of mind.”

Anmao and Harn took up residence in the IDEO Shanghai offices to incubate their business. Together with IDEO designers, they tested packaging, cooked countless meals, and found ways to introduce unfamiliar ingredients to Chinese consumers. They discussed different concepts of lunch and dinner, and how notions of freshness in Chinese culture might affect cold-storage systems. In IDEO’s prototyping kitchen, the teams tested all manner of different foods, flavors, colors, mixes, and price points, and they brought consumers in to try them out. IDEO designers, along with the founding team, also worked on the brand and positioning of what would eventually become the Hunter Gatherer enterprise—its location, human resources, and marketing strategies.

As the restaurant concept came together, finding the right food sources had to be addressed. Traditional agriculture couldn’t be trusted; organic certifications were available on the black market, and safety protocols around chemical use were nonexistent. Anmao and Harn decided to invest in their own farms. They met with farmers, asked questions about their methods, and walked in the fields to see for themselves. Eventually they settled on two plots of land outside Shanghai and began developing more than 80 different crops to be used in the restaurant.

From Seed to Table

When it came time to find the right space for the first location, Anmao and Harn discovered an open, airy storefront on Anfu Road in Shanghai’s tree-lined former French Concession area. They designed and built a retail space and kitchen, and along with IDEO designers, they trained the staff and organized workflows. The staff set the tables with Mason jars filled with flowers, hung photographs of the farmers who grew the food, and put up a sign that showcases the percentage of vegetables coming directly from the Hunter Gatherer farms, already more than 70 percent in less than a year after opening.

Customers can shop for fresh vegetables, locally sourced and imported canned and jarred goods, bins of cereal, freshly made smoothies, artisan sauces, and exotic chocolates. Upstairs, they can feast on delicious dishes in the homey restaurant.

Reviews have been glowing. One customer raved about the machine that grinds fresh nuts. Another loved the open space, the “good vibes,” and the refreshing cucumber water. Young people go there on dates, and families return for the delicious menu variety.

The convivial space has blossomed into more than just a restaurant and grocery store. It’s become a gathering place of sorts, both for the community and for partners who share the same vision. Farmers and food purveyors are invited to showcase their products at seasonal events and to mingle with customers and share recipes and stories.

“Hunter Gatherer has come to symbolize a kind of lifestyle the Chinese people have been looking for,” said Eugene Lin, an IDEO business designer. “A place they can enjoy hanging out with friends, as well as a movement and mission they can stand behind.”

A Digital Future

This is just the beginning of the venture. The plan is to open 40 more locations throughout China. But the vision for Hunter Gatherer’s growth is bigger than brick-and-mortar restaurants—where the business will truly scale is in the digital space. Eventually, the plan is to launch a Hunter Gatherer online grocery store from which anyone can buy food grown from trusted sources.

“We have to create trust with the consumer. It’s the most difficult and most valuable thing to do in China, especially with food,” Anmao said. “Our brick-and-mortar locations will establish that increased trust. Then we can go online and grow the idea to the rest of the country.”

Will Hunter Gatherer have a hand in changing the way that the world’s most populous nation thinks about food? Its principles are already spreading, from neighboring farmers adopting more sustainable planting methods, to a growing market for products like wine.

But the true sign of success will be almost invisible—the moment when an increase in demand will result in safe food for everyone and when real food becomes commonplace.

I kind of wish this really happened, but at the same time, I’m definitely glad it didn’t. The towering jellyfish was part of my imagination—sort of. It was in the 1994 IMAX film Into The Deep. This moment kicked off my life-long obsession with documentary films, and IMAX holds a nostalgic place in my heart. As a designer, I find immense curiosity peering into other experiences and worlds. Whether it’s spending an hour and a half shopping with a ninety-year-old fashion icon or exploring the complex, magical world of mushrooms, documentaries have the incredible power to make you see the world differently.

With the reality of COVID-19 and shelter-in-place orders across the globe, now more than ever, we need to stay inspired by people, places, and things—even if they are on screens. In 2016, we shared 12 documentaries that sparked our creativity, and now feels like an appropriate time to update that list.

Similar to our original post, this is a curated list of recommendations from IDEO designers. It’s a collection of classics and newbies. Some will make you laugh, others will make you cry—and we hope all will reignite that creative spark.

1. Between the Folds

“I grew up in Asia and origami was something I loved to do but I had no idea that this humble paper art form had both such artistic and scientific depths. This documentary blew me away with its beauty and passion, the scope and depth of its inquiry and its empathic glimpse into what for many people is a lifelong obsession. As my colleague Devin said: ‘Holy shit, I can't believe that is all paper.’” —Paul Bennett

2. Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World

“This documentary highlights the work of Bellingcat, a group of citizen-journalists that use social media to fact-check events and actually uncover the real parties involved. Their claim to fame: They identified the party that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which killed 298 people back in July 2014.

“It’s a film that highlights our new reality, where the truth isn't always simple and straightforward. This particular documentary also serves as inspiration for those of us that do design research. It hints at the research that can be done using social signals, buzz analytics, diary studies, data science, etc., where we get insight directly from people. It highlights how researchers often solve puzzles by exploring the extremes and see things through the eyes of the people who experience them.” —Marcelle van Beusekom

3. Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl)

"This film follows a group of young girls as they build confidence in the classroom and within the walls of a skatepark in Kabul, Afghanistan. Part of their education on their skateboards is building resilience—to get back up and try again after you fall. During the uncertainty that surrounds them, the school and the skatepark become a place of refuge. You can see them transform throughout the film, finding their voices and their courage.

"In the work that we do with IDEO.org, we aim to create gender-transformative solutions—those which push the boundaries that are in place within the environment and systems to increase equity and opportunity for everyone. This film reminded me that transformation has to happen personally, for each individual, in order for change to be possible on a larger scale. During a recent project focusing on women's economic empowerment in rural Bangladesh, I kept asking myself, what's the skateboard for these women? How might we unlock the courage to imagine a prosperous future?" —Anna Zylicz

4. Jodorowsky's Dune

“We always say 'design loves constraints,' but Jodorowsky's Dune is a reminder that imagination (and ego) could care less about the restrictions of budgets, timelines, or even reality. It's a film about a movie that never got made, but the creators' dreams were so big they managed to change cinema forever without shooting a single frame. Some ambitious dreams fly too close to the creative sun. The cast of characters in this movie wanted to drill to the center of the sun and blow the whole thing up. How can you not love that?” —Brian Janosch

5. Still Bill

“The world recently lost Bill Withers, one of the greatest songwriters and musicians of the 20th century (“Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Grandma’s Hands”). This biopic is incredibly touching for many reasons, but I find inspiration in how Withers approached his own creative process. He was 34 when his first record came out (late bloomers are also a personal inspiration) and his career ended by the mid-1980s. He wrote these timeless, tender songs about life and connection and then when he wasn’t able to work the way he wanted, he walked away from the industry completely. He talks about being honest with himself and true to his own principles rather than being focused on impressing other people. Sometimes I feel that snag in my own creative process—I start thinking about an imagined audience, which distracts and dissuades me. This was a reminder to create just for myself.” —Meredith Adams

6. Advanced Style

“Advanced Style, the documentary based on photographer Ari Seth Cohen's blog of the same name, highlights the signature fashion styles of New York women ranging from 62 to 95 years old. As someone who fully embraces the notion that clothes are an outward expression of the creative inner self, my own fashion sense has been deeply influenced by these ladies. The hats, the sunglasses, the furs, the florals, the feathers are just...all next level. But more than their impeccable fashion sense, they are living examples that women can be stylish and fabulous at any age.” —Tracee Worley

7. Shirkers

“I love the movie Shirkers. It's an exploration of memory, following filmmaker Sandi Tan as she tracks down a film she made with her friends in Singapore in the early 90s, learning that their mentor wasn't really the person she thought he was. Everything about the film, from the vintage footage to the slow revealing of the story, is enigmatic and dreamy, reminding me that we don't have to escape reality to find ourselves in a fairytale. As the director starts to understand her past, the present becomes even less clear—and there's just something really beautiful about how this film shows that process.” —Ali Cottong

8. Fantastic Fungi

“The movie and its subject matter—the healing and potentially planet-saving abilities of the fungus beneath our feet—walks the line between science and spirituality. It's a refreshing, joyful, and thought-provoking take on what we might learn by better listening to the unseen world around us.

“I'm also reading Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, so it was fun to see one of the key players in that book (Paul Stamets) come to life on the screen.” —Sally Sosa

9. MATANGI / MAYA / MIA

“An unapologetic, energetic, and wonderfully unpolished look at the life and career of musician Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A. I was lucky to see the premiere of this film at Sundance. I walked into the theater expecting to see a profile of a ‘controversial’ pop star, but instead witnessed a portrait of an immigrant, an activist, a mother, and a groundbreaking artist with human vulnerabilities and flaws that makes M.I.A. even more compelling to me.” —Devin Peek

10. Beauty is Embarrassing

“What drew me into Beauty Is Embarrassing is, well, puppets. Specifically, the bizarre, crude, and comedic puppets of Pee Wee's Playhouse. That show was more formative than I ever realized as a kid, but I recognize now that that my creative happy place is right there in the hazy, hilarious middle ground between being "too adult for kids" and "too childish for adults." This documentary revealed that Wayne White, the artist at the center of it, has built his entire career on that middle ground. His creative spirit, to me, is exactly what he says in the film: "so beautiful it hurts my feelings.” —Brian Janosch

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I vividly remember the first time I met a 50-foot, translucent jellyfish. The free-floating creature fell toward me as I gazed, locked in a state of paralysis. Its tentacles were hypnotizing.

Tight regulations have often stymied innovation, but one of the bright spots of this moment is realizing that regulations aren’t the real problem—they are more often a perceived roadblock that shuts down innovative thinking before it grows into real-world solutions. The fact is, regulations should set the baseline for what must be considered, rather than restrict the height of what can be achieved.

Right now, regulations in healthcare are seeing rapid, radical shifts. Processes that have historically taken years—like launching telemedicine platforms and adapting insurance coverage—are now taking weeks or days. Scientists are working to develop vaccines in record time. Companies outside of healthcare are jumping in, too: Manufacturers whose only products included car parts are now making ventilators. 3-D printers are being thrown into service to create PPE. As one client told me, “Every rule that can be broken is being broken. Every regulation that can be waived is being waived.” The world doesn’t have time to wait.

In this moment of crisis, failing systems are confirming what we already knew: The healthcare system is brittle, and it wasn’t built to handle a global pandemic. How leaders move now will dictate the kind of progress we can make, in the short- and long-term.

Here is a guide to innovating within regulations—no matter the industry—at a time when we need it most.

Take a wider view

Healthcare professionals spend so much time putting out the fires immediately in front of them that they have little time or mental space to widen their lens and focus on long-term priorities. Leaders need that time to create a vision of their future—even in times of crisis.

When Dr. Michael R. Jaff, former president of Newton-Wellesley Hospital, a community hospital in the Boston area, started his tenure, he spent the first six months listening to staff all across the organization. “There's a lot of time that has to be spent to really dig through where you are, what challenges you face as an organization, where you want to get to,” he says. “That's got to be clear.” His listening tour informed what would become the vision for his term as president: to compete and win against competitors by delivering the best patient experience. To get there, he had to usher in a new era of innovation at the hospital, and empower those around him to go after radical solutions to entrenched problems.

Related video: How listening to patient voices inspired Newton-Wellesley Hospital to redesign their culture.

Offer pathways & permission to do things differently

In a typical day at a hospital, healthcare workers don’t have the time or mental space to think creatively about new approaches to care delivery. If hospitals want their workforce to embrace and embody the spirit of innovation, employees need not only the permission to think differently, but also the structures and roadmaps that make action possible.

Dr. Jaff understood clearly that for employees who’ve been acculturated to a certain way of working, it’s not sufficient to simply say they can approach things differently, or that the organization wants to move in a new direction. “You have to design what it is that you're trying to do,” says Jaff, “You have to empower people to believe that in fact, it's a key goal of the organization. You have to permit them to try and fail and try again all within boundaries.”

Jaff and his leadership team worked with IDEO to set up multiple nodes for learning and prototyping. The program they created focused on delivering a better patient experience. It began with a pilot project in the Women’s Imaging Center and then a deeper engagement with the Outpatient Surgery Center. As part of an executive education program, another set of internal teams learned to identify user needs, like an improved discharge experience; and to develop prototypes to help address those needs. Ultimately, staff were empowered by taking their ideas from concept to real-world testing and implementation.

Jaff also made his commitment to innovation clear with a designated lab space in the hospital’s old coffee shop, a much-coveted location along the main hallway. Dubbed the Department of Tomorrow, it offered a standing invitation to all employees to stop by and learn more about all the work happening across the hospital. The stories from this work became a kind of currency: Leadership shared big and small examples of change in meetings, at events, and in conversation, as evidence of Newton-Wellesley’s evolution.

No one’s clinical or administrative workloads were decreased to make this work possible. Managers scheduled shifts and breaks differently to allow teams time for focused collaboration. Everyone taking part knew that failure—something that usually has dire consequences in healthcare—was a form of learning in this context. They were driven by the chance to make change.

Seek new perspectives

In healthcare, where expertise is celebrated, seeing the medical experience through a patient’s eyes can be hard.

Long before teaming up with IDEO, the imaging department at Newton-Wellesley had a reputation for being patient-centered and achieving consistently-high industry survey scores. It would have been easy to assume that everyone on the team really understood what patients go through when they get mammograms—the fear, the discomfort, the worry over getting a life-altering cancer diagnosis. But it wasn’t always clear. To deepen empathy for the patient experience, the IDEO team designed an exercise for the care providers that evoked anxiety and uncertainty. They brought in a tarot card reader and, like patients awaiting news in a waiting room, members of the imaging team had their fortunes read, many for the first time. They felt the discomfort, uncertainty and vulnerability of receiving a verdict on their lives from a person they didn’t know well. Though it was a staged experience that doesn’t directly compare to the patient experience, it generated a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play and how they could be improved.

To help the Newton-Wellesley Hospital day surgery team see their work from a new angle, the IDEO team led them on an expedition to the JetBlue terminal of Boston Logan Airport. Similar to a surgical team, where diverse team members all connect with patients asynchronously, the staff of an airline provide continuous customer service for passengers, from ticket purchase to check-in to security to boarding to flight. This sequence of interactions comprises the overall experience of the traveler. In both circumstances, a human is at the center. By viewing the analogous process in a different industry, it was possible to return to thinking about healthcare delivery with fresh eyes.

Allow discomfort to be part of the process

No matter the industry, it can be highly uncomfortable to do things differently, even when everyone is aligned on the ultimate goal of innovating and creating change. So much of healthcare is about following protocol. Billing. Process improvement. Hierarchy in healthcare adds to that discomfort. Often, there are big divides between roles and status, and people are more often judged on their mistakes, rather than their successes. Can department chiefs and front desk receptionists work as peers on a team? Can we prototype a new service experience with real patients going in for surgery?

Leaders who want to affect change need to explicitly acknowledge and address that discomfort. An example from another industry: Three years ago, Bowdoin College teamed up with IDEO to rethink its admissions process. Much like healthcare, college admissions abide by certain regulations as well as administrative policies. How colleges read and assess applications may be unique to each institution, but they are driven by stringent protocols and standards. Bowdoin admissions officers conducted very thorough and thoughtful readings of each application. But that thoroughness led to redundancy and sometimes delayed final decisions. At the same time, the idea of changing the process made the admissions officers fear they would compromise what they valued most: giving each hopeful applicant full consideration they deserve. To interrogate different methods, the team implemented highly-structured A/B testing of different ways of reading applications. The result? The team discovered that they could make decisions earlier in the process and still come up with the same results. The testing gave the team confidence, and ultimately changed their long-held beliefs of how applications “should” be read.

Given that A/B testing proved that some variables had little effect on the team’s final admissions decisions, IDEO redesigned the reading process and included a system called “magic sort,” which helps parse groups of applications based on a new set of counselor assessments to route each to its next round of reviews more efficiently.

In healthcare, as in many tightly regulated industries, expertise is held sacred, which means nobody wants to feel like—or appear as if—they don’t know how to arrive at a solution. But the purpose of using design to solve problems is to allow uncertainty and open questions to drive new thinking. The point is to explore possibilities through prototyping and learning.

Use regulations as a springboard for innovation

Working in highly-regulated environments can put a damper on creative thinking. However, regulatory change, especially in healthcare, is providing new opportunities for innovation. Revised reimbursement policies are enabling telemedicine to grow. The reduction of certain HIPAA guidelines temporarily offers some flexibility in care delivery. And permitting doctors to practice medicine beyond the state where they are licensed enables more care in disease hotspots.

Still, these regulatory shifts alone don’t create innovation. They are a starting point, often enforced through compliance or penalty. Innovation is about delivering beyond this baseline and aiming for what is aspirational. Changes in healthcare delivery, for instance, enable us to ask the question of how best to deliver patient-centered care through video chat.

Even in the business of regulation itself, there is room for innovation. When the US Congress set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they established a system for taking complaints from consumers who had been scammed and were seeking resolution. The CFPB also took on a financial education mission: to make people smarter about their finances. But rather than structure the agency in a traditional way, by siloing complaints, financial education, and industry regulation, the CFPB’s collaboration with IDEO pointed in another direction: that these three domains can work together in useful harmony. By thinking of them holistically, the agency could be more effective than its predecessors in serving the public. For instance, by pairing financial education and regulation, the agency was able to create new loan disclosure requirements that make the terms more clear and understandable. The CFPB’s complaint data helped the agency prioritize areas to investigate; a spike in the number of people complaining about improperly-opened accounts at Wells Fargo Bank led to a discovery of widespread fraudulent practices. The agency eventually ended up blowing the whistle on the bank, leading to the largest fine in the history of financial services.

When it comes to innovation, having the right mindset is more important than the process: the mindset is what leads to new ideas, resilient responses, and openness to trying things differently, even at the risk of failure. People drive change. For Newton-Wellesley Hospital, according to their Chief Quality & Experience Officer, Dr. Jodi Larson, it was this change that helped employees go “from being idea generators to being change-makers. That was a big deal for us.”

And this has translated in their response to COVID: Within 24 hours, testing tents were procured and set up; workflows were designed and integrated into their electronic medical record system; PPE protocols were established. “Everyone jumped in with great ideas," says Larson. "The valets, nurses, docs, food services. It’s created a new bond and trust among colleagues. People are working in areas they’ve never worked in, and working in parts of the hospital they never had before. Different minds are coming together.” COVID has accelerated the change that was already underway. “We are making decisions and making things work that we never had the courage to attempt before. This is who we are now.”

Illustrations by Lisk Feng

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While COVID-19 has caused worldwide devastation, it has also revealed broken aspects of many critical systems, and raised the urgency of fixing them. In healthcare in particular, we are seeing that entrenched ways of delivering care have left us ill-prepared to respond to a crisis of this magnitude.

The biggest challenge to businesses right now isn't uncertainty, but ambiguity—a condition in which the future is unclear, the past is no help, and we don't even know what we don't know. There's no predicting when the pandemic will end, nor what “business as usual” will look like when it does.

Late last month, Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, acknowledged the unparalleled challenge leaders face trying to buoy their organizations in the absence of any familiar strategies. Though Slack is one of a handful of companies experiencing massive growth right now, Butterfield and his team are still struggling to predict the future. Other companies are not this fortunate, and have had to halt operations, let go of employees, and make other painful decisions.

Understanding that organizations are facing a broad range of challenges and have varying capacities, the question becomes, how might businesses create new ways to push ahead intelligently? Human-centered design can offer leaders an alternate set of mindsets and methods for navigating ambiguity. Here are four ways forward, along with inspiring examples and questions to drive action.

Lead with people and the business will follow

Perhaps the most well-known design thinking model suggests that innovation occurs at the intersection of consumer desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility. Many leaders are currently mired in thinking about what’s possible in this new world (technical feasibility) and what the economic impact of COVID-19 might be (business viability). While a business model pivot or reapplication of technology may be critical for some businesses to stay afloat, it’s important not to forget to lead with people (consumer desirability).

Focusing on customers’ needs is a way to rally a company and employees around a purposeful cause. It also offers focus and clarity operationally and strategically, and points to a clear path forward that can deliver value.

Restaurants were one of the industries immediately and dramatically affected by the pandemic. Many dining establishments have had to lay off employees or shut down entirely. Canlis, a fine-dining restaurant in Seattle, chose early on to shift their business in a way that leads with customers. Throwing out the rule book, Canlis turned their restaurant into three distinct offers: large family meals, CSA boxes, and to-go cocktails and wine. These options make it easy and efficient for customers to get what they need, while keeping many of their employees working. Restaurants around the world are now taking similar actions, driven by real attention to people’s current needs.

Questions to inspire action:

• How are our core customers’ needs changing right now? How can we deliver on those needs during the pandemic?
• Who can we learn from in our organization that is closest to the needs of our people, partners, and consumers? Better yet, how might we engage with our people, partners, and consumers directly to learn from them?
  

Forge unexpected partnerships to meaningfully pivot

Part of what makes the current changes so complex is their scale. In travel and hospitality, for example, metrics like trips and bookings are unmoored: What will travel mean in the wake of a pandemic that doesn’t have a known endpoint? CPG companies have been hit with destabilizing shocks to demand that not only put pressure on supply chains, but raise existential questions about what people will value after the crisis. The meaning of “essential” across products, services, jobs, and needs is evolving in real time. We must simultaneously grapple with the abstract and tactical, and the immediate and the indefinite.

It’s inspiring to see examples of companies redirecting their capabilities toward urgent needs—distilleries using their alcohol to produce hand sanitizer, automakers shifting to produce ventilators and respirators. But this kind of quick adaptation isn’t simple and the opportunity isn’t always clear. Stepping outside of our own domains and even our companies to connect can help.

Coronavirus has sparked rare collaboration between some of the world’s biggest business rivals. Apple and Google recently joined forces to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, and pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi are teaming up to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

Pivoting in this moment calls for collective processing aided by viewpoints from different departments and types of thinkers. Some companies are relying on open innovation, which can be used internally to break down silos, or externally to find new partners to bring ideas to life. IDEO’s open innovation portfolio recently launched the COVID-19 Business Pivot Challenge to help organizations wrangle the present complexity and adapt at various scales through collaboration. The Challenge is open to anyone involved in business adaptation, from C-level executives to business students, and startups to global corporations. Participants are working together to find partners, develop new offerings, and secure funding.

Questions to inspire action:

• What points of view are we missing on our team and how might they help us uncover opportunities and identify blind spots?
• Who can we partner with right now to deliver something unique or previously impossible to our teams, business, or society?
  

Experiment today to strengthen the business for tomorrow

The time has never been better to experiment. This means considering fundamental changes in business and operating models out of necessity, while also prototyping new channels, offerings, pricing structures, and value propositions.

The pandemic has caused some organizations to challenge the status quo of legacy industries, questioning fundamental beliefs and paradigms that have long been held sacred. Film studios, for example, have historically resisted releasing movies straight to online platforms, in the interest of preserving their relationships with movie theaters and maximizing everyone's financial gain in the film ecosystem. But with theaters shut down, many studios have been forced to either delay blockbusters or experiment with online releases, putting pressure on the previously sacred release window. Paramount’s The Lovebirds was set to release in theatres on April 3, but will now debut on Netflix. And Disney released Frozen II on Disney+ three months ahead of schedule, giving many parents a much-needed break.

Experimenting doesn’t have to result in a full-scale business model transformation or a polished new offering. This is a moment of extreme leniency: Customers will forgive scrappiness and even mistakes, and they’ll appreciate effort and vulnerability from organizations who try. Moreover, experimenting in low-fidelity ways allows teams to quickly iterate, minimize costs, and preserve optionality. In other words, there’s little investment required for potentially high return.

Airbnb, like all travel and hospitality businesses, has been hit hard by COVID-19. But they have worked to respond quickly: First, they mobilized their rental marketplace to offer units free of charge or at subsidized rates to healthcare providers in need, waiving their own fees in the process. In the meantime, Airbnb has launched online experiences that provide new things for customers to do while stuck at home and an alternative source of income for hosts. Their email announcing the offer read, “Let’s try something new together.” Airbnb transparently recognizes that this won’t replace the travel experiences that customers wish they could be doing, but we can try to make the situation a bit better, together.

Whether through major shifts or small trials, experimentation not only serves as a response to the current times, but can also pave the way for future strategy. While some companies are testing by necessity, organizations with the means to do so can consider how prototyping today might strengthen their value propositions and capabilities tomorrow.

Questions to inspire action:

• If we’re in an all-hands-on-deck moment, is there a group of employees that can start to think about how we might operate differently during COVID-19? What are simple experiments we could run in the next few days?
• If we’re able to dedicate time and resources, how might we use this moment to challenge the fundamental assumptions of our business and industry? What are simple experiments we could run in the next few weeks?
  

Leverage scarcity and constraints

It’s understandable to feel an overall sense of scarcity right now. Organizations are inundated with legal, health, social, and operating constraints. It may seem counterintuitive, but these perceived limitations often create generative circumstances for growth and innovation. A recent study on innovation in crisis found that during the Great Depression, while the total number of patents decreased, the average level of quality increased, mitigating the quantitative decline with more innovative impact overall. In many ways, today, we are witnessing this same jump-start in business innovation in light of COVID-19.

OpenTable, a company that allows diners to make restaurant reservations, is using today’s constraints to find new opportunities. Since many restaurants are no longer allowing customers to dine in, OpenTable’s core offering is no longer relevant. But rather than become obsolete, they used this constraint to make a quick shift and repurpose their platform. The team developed a new tool that leverages their core offering by partnering with grocery stores, allowing customers to select shopping times at supermarkets and to avoid overcrowding.

History has shown us that scarcity can be the mother of invention. Take the beloved hazelnut spread Nutella. The product was created due to a cocoa shortage during World War II. Italian confectioner Pietro Ferrero decided to make a new paste using hazelnuts, sugar, and a smaller amount of cocoa. The rest is sweet-tooth history.

Questions to inspire action:

• How might we turn these new constraints into the cornerstones of our business?
• What is the core promise or value we provide to customers? How might we repurpose the assets that we still have to keep delivering on this promise or value?

We are in challenging times. Leaders are being called to make difficult decisions around their business’ strategy, operations, and people. As we continue to navigate these uncharted waters, we can find ways for ambiguity to be an aid, rather than an impediment, to progress. Design-led mindsets like empathy, collaboration, experimentation, and even scarcity can be guiding lights along the way.

Illustration by Kateryna Romanova

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The coronavirus pandemic has generated tremendous uncertainty for businesses. But while the scale of the crisis is new, uncertainty itself is not—it's a natural condition of doing business, and numerous tools exist to quantify and mitigate it. Most strategies rely on accumulated knowledge from the past—there's a precedent on which to make sense of unknowns. COVID-19 breaks all that. There is no precedent for how to respond to this moment, much less steer ahead.

The primary question in this moment should be: How might we each play our part in bringing this pandemic to an end? But it's a moment, too, for reflection on the future. Who do we want to be when we emerge from the worst of this? What do we want our organizations to stand for? These are questions of strategy—of what it means to win.

How does your organization define winning? What is that challenging shared goal that gets your people out of bed each day, excited to play their part? If your organization is like most I’ve worked with, you may struggle to answer that question. Despite all the time and resources poured into strategy work each year, few organizations have a widely understood definition of winning that goes beyond making money for shareholders.

Fifty years ago, in The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, economist Milton Friedman argued that the purpose of a business is to serve its owners. The leader’s role, he wrote, is “to conduct the business in accordance with their [owners’] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society.” This notion, which is the foundation of the doctrine of shareholder value maximization, is now pervasive. But it’s showing considerable signs of wear and tear as we become more aware of the negative consequences of putting profits ahead of people.

Solely prioritizing short-run outcomes for shareholders does little to bring meaning to our work; it stymies innovation; it reduces our business fitness; and it makes much, much harder the real work of strategy. Meaning comes from creating real value in the world, which means we need to think broadly in terms of who we’re winning with (and for). Innovation requires a long-term perspective, so we need to think about winning beyond this quarter or even this year. Business fitness (the financial and strategic resilience of a company over time) depends on being attuned to things that shareholders may not see. To ensure our viability, we need to seek out signals as to what customers, employees, and societies care about. Strategy is about building a firm that can win both now and in the future, so we need to be more holistic in our approach to making choices.

If it is time to move past shareholder value, how might we define winning in a more useful way, that spurs rather than stops innovation? How might we set aspirations that don’t suggest a win-lose frame? How might we seek instead to create value for customers, for employees, and for investors?

Find the right language

In the process of developing a strategy for kyu, the collective of organizations that includes IDEO and SYPartners, some leaders rejected the notion of “winning” entirely, recoiling at a word that felt tied to a scarcity mindset. If we’re winning, they asked, who is losing?

Tim Brown and Susan Schuman, the kyu vice chairs who co-led the strategy discussions, thought hard about how to navigate that challenge. As Brown notes, they came to see that “we’re really creating a community at kyu—a collective that aims to unleash creativity and to help people flourish.” He goes on: “What we realized is that communities don’t win or lose, they thrive or falter.” The kyu strategy focuses on what it would mean to create a community that can truly thrive over time. Thriving may not be the term that resonates with your organization, but language matters. To redefine winning to be more inclusive, work with your team to find a mental model for winning that works for you, then build shared definitions of the models you choose.

Shift the timeline

Another way to push on current, unsustainable definitions of winning is to publicly shift the time horizon so that sustainability, both economical and ecological, can be integrated into our aspirations. Unless we look further out, we will continue to plunder the future to fund the present and to degrade the planet to drive profit. For inspiration on what is possible, look to Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever.

In an interview for my book Creating Great Choices, Polman explained how he set out to change the time horizon at Unilever: “One of the things I had to do was to move the business to a longer-term plan,” he said. “We had become victims of chasing our own tail, cutting our internal spending in capital, R&D, or IT to reach the market expectations. We were developing our brand spends on a quarterly basis and not doing the right things...We were catering to the shorter-term shareholders.”

Polman decreed that the company would stop quarterly reporting and stop giving guidance. He embarked on a far-reaching environmental sustainability effort, and he reinvested in R&D, talent development, and brand building.

Polman believed that shareholders whose interests were aligned with Unilever (i.e. long-run profitability and environmental sustainability) would eventually buy into his plan. Taking a long-term perspective on winning not only let Unilever invest in innovation for customers and in development for its people, it let leadership focus on the fundamentals of the business rather than managing short-run expectations. As a result, it created lots of shareholder value too. In the decade Polman headed Unilever, its stock price increased 170 percent, creating more value for shareholders than most companies in the FTSE 100. This is a win-win-win solution, and it was powered by a willingness to show up differently in the world.

Define your purpose

A third way to redefine winning productively is to connect our aspirations to a larger purpose. Think of purpose as the human “why” that explains the reason a company exists. The best purpose statements are very human: they connect the work of the organization to real people, to real needs, and to real problems to be solved. By defining a meaningful purpose, companies can demonstrate to employees and customers what they stand for and why. The purpose can then set the context for the strategy; we can define what winning means in service of our overall purpose.

One company that demonstrates the power of connecting purpose to strategy is Orbia. Until 2019, Orbia was called Mexichem and it was mainly known as a chemical company. Last year, along with a new brand, Orbia unveiled a new purpose: To “advance life around the world,” tackling some of humanity’s biggest shared challenges, like food security, water scarcity, and livable cities.

Had it continued to define itself as a chemical company, Mexichem could have followed a path to near-inevitable commoditization. Instead, CEO Daniel Martinez-Valle and Orbia’s leadership team worked with IDEO to define a higher bar with a bold new purpose. Now the team is working to connect its strategic choices, its resource allocations and its employee incentives to that larger purpose. Doing that means reorganizing the structure of the company into five business groups, each aimed at addressing a unique global challenge, defining meaningful sustainability targets for each business, and investing in innovation in significant new ways. That’s really the power of purpose: it can align the organization, motivate employees, and promise customers something they can believe in. No wonder purpose-led companies tend to have higher employee engagement, happier customers, and better overall performance. They win on multiple dimensions.

Winning isn’t easy. It’s tempting to define winning narrowly, to make the task seem easier: winning means increasing the stock price this quarter. But as the last few months have demonstrated, a shareholder-led definition of winning is not only hollow, it can leave organizations with nothing to fall back on in a time of crisis. We need a far richer, more aspirational understanding of what it can really mean to win. To get there, ask how we could define a winning aspiration, using language that fits our organization, push out on the time horizon, connect strategic goals to a larger sense of purpose and give ourselves room to dream big.

In a moment of crisis, it can be difficult to think beyond the next hour, the next day, the next week. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for each of us, as we grapple with our duty of care to our employees, to our communities, to each other, to ourselves. The unprecedented disruption created by this crisis should be seen first and foremost in humanitarian terms, connecting to the very real personal toll of this disease—serious illness and lives lost, isolation and fear, worsening unemployment and economic precarity.

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.