For more than 40 years, Sage has helped businesses of all sizes navigate complex business environments. While many of its larger customers have the means and the structure to support climate initiatives, many of its smaller customers do not.

Sage wanted to help its SMB customers get ahead of future climate regulations and meet consumer expectations. And building carbon-footprint evaluation and mitigation tools would also dovetail nicely with Sage’s own climate aspirations: cutting its own emissions in half by 2030. Together, Sage and IDEO investigated how the company could leverage the data in its platform to calculate its customers’ emissions, both direct and indirect, and how that information could spur action as they aim to hit net zero.

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To get started, the design team went deep with customers running all kinds of businesses—from a taxi company to a champagne bar to a falconry center. Business owners shared that their focus often has to be on the day-to-day, a series of small decisions that, when added together, lead to business success. For many, tackling a problem as complex as climate change felt overwhelming. IDEO and Sage synthesized those insights and began working across verticals and products, bringing together experts from marketing, technology, sustainability, and operations to build out new concepts. With the help of two carbon accountants, the team worked to figure out how existing data could inform customers about both their direct and indirect emissions, which can be harder to track. Given how tight SMBs’ margins are, they focused on how that knowledge could fuel emissions-cutting changes that also save money, giving businesses extra incentive to take action. Together, the team created a roadmap of customer outcomes and experience guidelines to help shape future products.

Sage has taken that work forward, launching Sage Earth, a platform that aims to help businesses measure, manage, and mitigate emissions—even across supply chains. With carbon accounting now built directly into all Sage Accounting and Sage for Accountants products in the UK, Sage has made climate action practical and accessible for millions of SMBs. By automating emissions measurement and reporting, Sage Earth removes barriers of cost and complexity, empowering business owners and their accountants to stay competitive in supply chains where up to 95 percent of emissions occur. 

From co-developing the UK Voluntary SME Carbon Reporting Standard to launching a Carbon Accounting API, which gives banks, fintechs, and other platforms access to Sage’s Carbon Engine, Sage is embedding sustainability into the systems people already trust—helping hundreds of thousands (and rapidly increasing) small businesses turn climate ambition into everyday action.

Small- and medium-sized businesses—companies with fewer than 500 employees—make up about 90% of the world’s businesses, according to U.N.-backed SME Climate Hub.

Two thirds of small businesses don’t know how they’re going to reach net zero, and lack the resources to do so, according to a recent survey by SME Climate Hub. Still, the majority reported they want to act on climate, recognizing it can help them become a more resilient business.

Large companies may be the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, but an estimated 80% of those emissions come from supply chains—often made up of smaller enterprises.

Scaling rapidly

in the three years since the launch of Sage Earth, which is now being used by hundreds of thousands of businesses

World's 1st

open-source hybrid emissions factors dataset, Carbon Commons, led by Sage, helps SMBs calculate carbon footprints using existing data

Menopause is much more than a biological transition—it is a profound shift that often arrives just when people experiencing it start to feel invisible. Because it has long been shrouded in darkness as an unmentionable female affliction, those going through menopause often feel unprepared and alone.

Recognizing that its customer demographic makes QVC uniquely positioned to surface conversations and provide support to those dealing with menopause, the video commerce retailer partnered with IDEO to figure out how it could not only meet customer needs, but also flip the conversation on midlife. To learn more, a team of female design researchers held in-depth interviews with folks experiencing it firsthand. The people they spoke to had limited information about what was going on with their bodies, and in some cases, it took years before they understood that symptoms they were experiencing were related to menopause. Respondents also reported that midlife brought a change in social status and the feeling of being boxed in by stereotypes.

QVC and IDEO worked together to design an integrated suite of offerings that could give customers a safe space to discover and share more about menopause. That included an on-air programming series called “Menopause Your Way,” where QVC could support those going through menopause in the privacy of their own homes, a digital landing page with useful solutions, and social media campaigns to help women share and learn more about each others’ experiences. Because people experience menopause and choose to manage it in many different ways, the team wanted to create an integrated ecosystem of content that women could access according to their unique journeys. The new offering helped QVC  reach its core audience with solutions and relevant products, and created a space where menopause is out in the open and part of an ongoing conversation. And in the process, QVC evolved to become a more customer-centric company, putting its audience and their needs at the heart of its offerings.

9/10 of British menopausal women say society and brands overlook them.

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1 in 2 women in the UK admitted they didn’t know what was happening to them during perimenopause.

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Nearly 40% of menopausal women are being prescribed antidepressants to help manage their symptoms, despite 4 out of 5 describing the treatment as “inappropriate.”

Season 2

a series focused on menopause is now in its second season

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Healthcare is a complex web of institutions, interaction, relationships, and services. In England, the National Health Service consists of thousands of separate organizations spread across the country. This fragmented structure means that rolling out digital tools and using them to their full potential can be difficult.

NHSX approached IDEO and Public Digital, IDEO’s sister company, for help designing user-centered resources that would empower Children and Young People’s Mental Health (CYPMH) practitioners to use digital tools more effectively, shifting service design from a reactive to a proactive process, and allowing each regional organization to create the best digital services for their children and young people.

The team took a human-centered approach, tapping into the perspectives, challenges and needs of NHS practitioners and leaders across the system over months of research. They then designed a set of accessible, straightforward online resources, courses, and templates that would enable a practitioner to start their own local service transformations. These included everything from practical advice on improving users’ experiences of CYPMH, to teaching methods for service design, to content focused on achieving digital transformation at scale.

The resources were easy to implement and replicate, allowing mental health practitioners across the country to seamlessly integrate physical and digital, create firebreaks in the system, and better bridge the gap between seeking care and receiving it. They were designed to evolve over time, and the work is replicable across the NHS, with the potential to touch millions of lives.

By empowering practitioners to utilize these digital tools to ease the burden of care, NHSX plans to create a positive ripple effect across the entire NHS, its partner organizations, and the country at large.

In a study undertaken in July 2020, the first summer of the COVID pandemic, the NHS found that clinically significant mental health conditions amongst children had risen by 50% compared to three years earlier.

More options, more access

digital resources are helping children and young people access more options for their mental health care

It’s not easy to shift the paradigm for an entire industry. But when a company comes along that promises to reinvent air travel, it opens up a blue sky of opportunities. That’s the flight path for Boom Supersonic, which is thinking big about how passengers arrive at their destination not only faster, but also with a greater sense of wellbeing.

To really comprehend the experience of flying in the unique contoured profile of this ultrafast jet, and to help Boom make key decisions about the design of the plane, the IDEO team believed that you had to go beyond algorithms and schematics—you needed to actually board it.

Using a “build-first” approach, the team quickly constructed a full-scale mockup of the fuselage from plywood and foam core. That became a prototyping platform to test multiple seating configurations, galley and lavatory size and placement, luggage storage solutions, and other concepts that would differentiate and add value to the passenger experience. For the first time, the Boom team was able to set foot in its own aircraft and truly understand the experience from the perspective of its clientele. The exercise allowed the Boom team to confidently make decisions by comparing multiple cabin configurations and options in full-scale.

Throughout the project, Boom and IDEO invited future travelers aboard to interact with the prototype and offer feedback. That input culminated in a more refined model, with augmented windows, moonroof, in-flight entertainment screens, and sound design—all further augmented by a Virtual Reality component to allow our future travelers to fully immerse in this new experience.

Together, Boom and IDEO brought a sneak peak to the Farnborough International Airshow, a biannual exhibition for the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries. The event was an opportunity to give the industry and potential customers a preview of Boom’s innovative new jet. In collaboration with the client, an exhibition architect, and a digital production agency, the team created an immersive environment designed to make the Overture experience feel tangible, eliciting the wonder of this revolutionary plane.

Boom’s presence at Farnborough not only underscored the Overture’s progress but provided an inspiring glimpse into the future of air travel. During the air show the company announced the production Overture design, a market-expanding alliance with Northrop Grumman, and agreements with tier one suppliers Collins Aerospace, Safran, and Eaton. Not long after, Boom received its largest order to date, this one from American Airlines. 

The prospect of getting to London in time for dinner just got a little closer.

Boom plans for Overture to get from New York to Frankfurt in just over four hours instead of the eight hours spent on a commercial jet today.

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The Overture supersonic jet has a cruising speed of Mach 1.7, about twice as fast as today’s commercial planes. Overture is built to fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

20 Overture deposits

made by American Airlines, joining current customers United Airlines and Japan Airlines

We asked IDEOers across a diverse range of locations, teams, and roles—even ones that aren’t typically thought of as creative—to share the best creative advice they’ve ever received and how it’s impacted their work. We hope you find their responses as inspiring as we do.

Trust your unique perspective

Coming to IDEO as someone who wasn't from a "creative" background (large emphasis on the quotes there), I had a ton of concern about how I would show up on teams with people who were so fluent in the things that seemed to be what IDEO was "really about"—the creative stuff.

Early in my time here, I was on a walk with another organizational designer, mid-existential crisis when she said to me, "Your job is to be thinking about what no one else in the room is thinking about." She helped me see that I didn't have to immediately have every answer or every iota of expertise; I just needed to be using my lens on the world to make our collective design richer.

IDEO touts its cross-functional team structure, and I am a true believer in that element of our work. Unlocking my creative process has been so much about believing in the value of what I bring to the table and understanding its unique contribution to what we are all building together.

– Natalie Osterweil, Senior Organizational Designer, Cambridge

Schedule time for creativity

Martin Bone (an IDEO design director circa 2008) once told me about how he organized his schedule to carve out large blocks of time for doing deep design work of his own. Each week, he would make a long calendar appointment (often an entire day) to be his design time, and would decline any meetings or calls during it. This allowed him to get to a deeper level of work that only a non-distracted state could achieve.

Paul Graham calls this contrast in methods of working maker's schedule vs. manager's schedule. He points out that even a short meeting scheduled in the middle of the day is enough to disrupt or demotivate deep craft or thinking work. In order to maintain my own personal craft alongside other work responsibilities, I've found it effective to put similar calendar blocks on my calendar and to completely disconnect from email, phone, and Slack during these times. This focus also takes discipline beyond a calendar event, but with practice, it can really lead to better work and growth as a craft-oriented designer, even as management responsibilities increase.

– Gian Pangaro, Creative Director, IDEO CoLab, Cambridge

Disconnect from your ego

I’m an executor. I like to get shit done and make an impact. That’s how I think many of my friends, family, and colleagues would categorize me—and I agree! When I came into IDEO, creativity wasn’t a value of mine, nor did I see myself as a creative person. When it came to brainstorming ideas, to me it was all about having the best idea, and having the best idea meant it was feasible, viable, and could have an impact right away.

I learned quickly I was wrong. Virginia Martinez, our Talent Director in San Francisco, helped me when I was having a hard time engaging with IDEO’s brainstorming process. Instead of trying to show my competency through my ideas, she told me, "To get to great ideas, you need to have lots of ideas as a group. And the best idea is not always the most realistic or easy to implement. The fun and crazy ideas can be just as good to drive teams to think more creatively."

Something so simple never occurred to me! I realized that I was attaching my ego to my ideas, that my ideas and my input reflected my competency—but no one else was looking at it with that lens. I realized the diversity of ideas that led to so many possibilities was creativity—something I never saw as an important part of our Learning and Development work, which I'm focused on. That also helped me feel more excited and comfortable in brainstorms because I was walking in with an open mind rather than ready to prove my point.

It has changed my approach to the work, my approach to how I design programs, and my approach to collaboration.

– Jen Casimiro, Talent Lead, San Francisco

Stop and smell the roses

My mom has always told me to take the time to smell the roses. It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized how lucky I was to have a parent who taught me at a young age that it wasn't always about getting to the end of the race first. Enjoying the journey was just as important.

"Smelling the roses" has taught me to pause and take in my surroundings, being inspired by the seemingly mundane artifacts that I might otherwise have missed—curiously shaped gum stuck on the sidewalk, fine wood grain patterns in furniture, and the intriguing strangers I pass on the street. Each elicits ideas for new stories, inventions, or adventures. If I ever feel stuck or need inspiration, I know I just have to pause and take a look around me.

– Michelle Lee, Play Lab Portfolio Director, Palo Alto

Make your work visual

The best creative advice I ever received came from Mike Stringer at the beginning of my first project at IDEO. This was when IDEO's data science discipline was still young; I was navigating the challenge of working with designers of other disciplines.

Mike came to my project space and told me to "put stuff on boards and share." While this might be something natural for any other designer, some data scientists are very attached to their laptop, scripts, and simulations. In more traditional data science positions, I normally wouldn’t put data science on boards (the most I shared in my previous job was a decision tree on a whiteboard).

Mike suggested I make my work visible to the rest of the team to make data science more transparent, spark curiosity in my team, and start new conversations. I created a variety of hand-sketched data visuals and made them a prominent part of the project space to serve as a catalyst for brainstorming and discussion. Sharing my sketches with a variety of designers from a broad spectrum of disciplines (interaction, research, software, business, and more) made my work more transparent and helped establish a common language, allowing data science to grow organically within the team. I now make that approach part of my work style, and I share it with other data scientists whenever I see the opportunity.

– Fra Valsecchi, Data Science Design Lead, Chicago

Pull a card

I regularly seek advice from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies card deck. They compiled it in the early 1970's to help overcome creative block in the studio. When you feel stuck, you draw a card and do whatever it says. For example, "Ask people to work against their better judgment," or "Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them," or "What would your closest friend do?" Often the advice is a bit unclear, but the vagueness prompts new ideas.

– Michael Hendrix, Global Director of Design, Cambridge

Embrace the Sharknado

A bad movie is better than an unfinished movie. As a filmmaker, there's this temptation to keep working on something or tweak it infinitely. However, there's a power in seeing something fully through, and then starting something else new that you can build and learn from. Also, it's so rare that your finished product is truly "bad." What would that even look like? Worst case scenario, you miss your mark but you learn something. Best case scenario, Sharknado.

– Sephora Woldu, Senior Leadership Coordinator, San Francisco

Accept your failures and iterate, iterate, iterate

The best creative advice I ever received was a good walloping. I was 28 and had landed an assignment from Alex Heard at the New York Times Magazine, an editor known for his unsparing red pen. I was to write a short piece about an alternative film festival. I interviewed the founders, thought up a clever lead, and submitted a draft. This is good, I thought. Funny.

The next day, Alex called and read the article back to me, word for word. "Are you kidding me?" he said. He was indignant. It was like I'd made him drink toilet water. When the call was over, I cursed myself and cried. I’d failed, and he’d dropped a grenade in my lap so I’d suffer no illusions that my work needed anything less than a good and brutal pulverizing. I called an editor friend, enlisting him to give me honest feedback. Then I sat down and rewrote the piece 103 times. When I finally ginned up the courage to send it in again, Alex called me immediately. "You did it,” he said. ”I'm proud of you. I’ll run it this Sunday."

Find someone who’ll give it to you straight, then iterate, iterate, iterate. Keep at it until your hand falls off. That's how I learned to write.

– Shoshana Berger, Senior Editorial Director, San Francisco

Remember ideas aren’t worth a single penny

"Ideas aren't worth a single penny." These are the words of wisdom that a colleague at my previous job gave me a couple of years back. He was the type of creative director that I only expected to find in fiction: almost always late to work, usually hungover, wore a Dumbledore style beard, and always ready to mutter out the most unexpected and astonishing ideas. When brainstorming, he would always kick-start the session with the most hilarious, intoxicating fantasy concept. He was known in the industry as the ultimate idea man.

That was why his advice struck me as a surprise. He told me that he would willingly give away any of his ideas for free, because that’s not what we’re being paid for as professionals—it’s the execution of the idea.

I look back to this whenever I find myself too attached to an idea, or when the team is stuck in a rabbit hole of conceptual debates, picking ideas apart one by one. Anyone can come up with the same idea sooner or later; our job is to not just come up with the idea, but to bring it to life, and that is what we should be proud of. That is where true impact lies.

– Daisuke “Dice” Yukita, Senior Interaction Designer, Tokyo

Focus on the story

The advice that still rings true to me today and on the path to become a designer is never lose focus of the story you want to tell. Every single experience, physical thing, or digital product you create is based on a sequence of decisions you make during the design process. It’s essential that every decision has a purpose—that’s how you get the most potential out of your design. A memorable, human story is the groundwork to purposeful design.

– Susanne Duswald, Industrial Designer, Munich

Invite others to the party

Several years ago, I ran into film director Frances Ford Coppola. Because we were both speakers at the same event, I managed to spend a few minutes alone with Coppola backstage, and one of the things he said that day has stuck with me ever since: "When you are working with creative people, you don't tell them what to do. You invite them to the party."

I have used his advice many times, including right now at D4V (Design for Ventures), IDEO's Tokyo-based venture capital firm. We invest in promising Japanese start-ups and then invite the design team here to "join the party," using creative tools to help the young companies thrive.

– Tom Kelley, IDEO Partner

Creativity often isn't the work of a single, solitary genius. In fact, it's usually when a set of diverse perspectives come together that we're able to see new possibilities for solving problems. That's why creative collaboration is crucial—and it's also why creative mentorship is so important. Sure, you can (and dare we say should) work through these 10 exercises from Creative Confidence to hone your individual chops, but creative mentorship is what allows us to push ourselves and our work forward. This got us thinking: What else could we learn about creativity from the people we work with every day? What have they learned from their mentors?

That time you built a spreadsheet for collecting data from your team and adjusted it based on their feedback? That was prototyping. When you ran your big presentation with a couple colleagues and swapped out a few slides because someone said it didn’t quite flow? Also prototyping.

At its simplest, we'd argue that prototyping is the intentional testing of ideas. The key is to do it quickly and thoughtfully. Need a little help figuring out where to begin? Here are four resources to get you started.

1. When you're at the very, very beginning

Kicking things off can be the hardest part. If you’re still trying to figure out exactly how prototyping will fit into your or your team’s creative process, try pulling some ideas from this story of one IDEO team’s experiment with early-stage prototyping.

READ: Why You Should Start Prototyping—Right Now

2. When your next project isn’t designing a thing, but designing a service

Many of our everyday transactions—everything from paying for coffee to selecting airline tickets—are highly designed processes. But where do you start when your project is creating a service, not an object? Dive in with these tips.

READ: 3 Tips to Help You Prototype A Service

3. When the constraints of your project feel like they’re testing you

Been there. If (and when) you’re feeling stuck, lean on the how might we questions in this piece about leveraging design constraints to get you moving.

READ: The Bright Side of Design Constraints: 3 Tips for Leveraging Limitations

4. When you need an example

Itching to see prototyping in action? Follow one of IDEO’s designers as he experiments with 360˚ video.

READ: How to Experiment With 360˚ Video

Say you're not necessarily a designer (raises hand), and you're a little intimidated by what you think of as the ultra-technical practice of prototyping (raises hand again). Here's the thing: You may not realize it, but you've prototyped before.

Listening effectively requires unlearning how we typically have a conversation. We have to reorient why we converse in the first place—away from the urge to validate ourselves and toward our curiosity about the other person. Krista Tippett, an entrepreneur who studies wisdom and compassion, calls this practice “generous listening.” To practice generous listening with others, Tippett says, is to release your assumptions about them, embrace ambiguity, and be willing to be surprised.

Sound radical? In this day and age, starting any dialogue assumption-free might feel like a challenge, but as designers, we often practice generous listening. Our process is powered by finding inspiration in people’s lived experience. In order to create something new, we have to be listening closely and openly enough to hear the unexpected.

We often see how transformative listening is for the people involved in our design research process. At the start of a project, we sit with people for hours, listening as they share their stories. It’s humbling when, on their doorstep later, they thank us. We know we’re grateful for the wealth of knowledge and ideas they have given us, but our presence as listeners must have been a gift too.

Whether it’s to aid one another’s understanding of ourselves or generate new ideas, these are my favorite exercises to practice, as Tippett calls it, generous listening.

1. "What's holding your attention?"

We all carry the baggage of our messy, human lives to our jobs. Starting your team’s day by answering this check-in question can help alleviate the tension people carry into the workplace, whether it’s lingering anxiety about an argument with a spouse or worry over a child’s first day at school.

Give everyone a minute to reflect on the question. Ask each person to share for two minutes. When someone else is sharing, listen, and if it feels appropriate, think of a follow-up question to ask them later.

Listening is not about silently waiting your turn to speak, but about asking more curious questions. Once each person is done, thank them for sharing.

2. Creative Tensions

In this exercise, people reveal how they feel about a nuanced issue by where they stand in the room. You can create tension to probe everything from company culture to the value of social connection.

To begin, pose a tension—an open-ended statement with two opposing responses—to the group. A good tension has a spectrum of answers between the two poles. For example: Working on a deadline makes me feel: Energized ↔ stressed. When preparing tensions, ask yourself: Is this a balanced tension? Am I being generous to each side? Writing tensions, just like asking insightful questions, is a skill. Revise yours until it feels balanced.

Now comes the physical part. Ask everyone to distribute themselves from one end of a room to the other based on where they stand on the tension. In this example, those on the far left feel energized by deadlines; those on the far right feel intense stress. Folks in the middle are or a mix of the two.

Once people have arranged themselves, invite those on the far ends to share why they stood there. Invite others to move if something someone else says changes their point of view. Repeat this process for people standing in the middle—why are they toeing the line?

Creative Tensions is a tool developed by IDEO and the Sundance Institute Theatre Program. You can learn more about running Creative Tensions here.

3. Hopes and fears

This activity is an opportunity for a team to share the hopes and fears that underlie certain behaviors, but often go unsaid. It’s a useful exercise for alleviating anxiety and rallying a team around common goals.

In a small group, have everyone write 1 to 3 hopes and 1 to 3 fears about the start of a project, a new initiative, or another discrete topic. A volunteer shares a fear first. People with similar responses share next to surface common themes. Repeat this style of sharing for people’s hopes (to end on an optimistic note).

4. “Tell me more about that.”

This is every curious person’s favorite conversation starter. Did someone just get wide-eyed and describe their weekend as “odd?" Or sigh describing their first job as a server as “wild?"

“Tell me more about that” is an open-ended, fail-proof phrase that gives people permission to talk about what they’re holding behind an unusual word or cryptic statement. It’s a powerful gesture that signals you are ready to follow wherever someone’s inner monologue is taking them.

The fruit of these exercises hinges on your commitment to listen differently. For The Civil Conversations Project, an organization Tippett founded to create compassionate civic discourse, becoming a generous listener is part of the individual “human change that makes meaningful social change possible.” The project begs the question: If listening is at the root of collective progress, what then is the cost of not hearing each other?

“What’s holding your attention?” is an exercise created by Alexis Gonzalez Black. Special thanks to Tracee Worley, Simo Stolzoff, and Jayme Brown for their contributions.

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Listening spurs personal transformation. You might’ve guessed that’s true for the listener—hearing new ideas can create sparks of inspiration or revelations about one’s own beliefs. But being listened to can also be transformative. Research has found being heard can shape a speaker’s emotions, help them grapple with complexity, and even temper extreme perspectives.

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But in organizations wired for efficiency, it can be difficult to quickly adapt—a potentially fatal shortcoming in a world where disruption and technological change are constant. We often see these organizations unravel and reassemble abruptly, resulting in jarring employee experiences and decreased productivity; or change course entirely, building something new that causes more damage than value. As a result, companies are dying more quickly than ever: Today, the average age of an S&P 500 company is less than 20 years old; in the 1950s, it was nearly 60.

Given all the factors threatening the vitality of companies, what factors can instead contribute to their longevity? One source of inspiration comes from cities—and the planning and development that underpin their resilience. While the best cities do seem to function like fine-tuned machines, their systems are in fact much more adaptable, flexible, and resilient—more like a living organism than a machine. In his book Scale, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West asks, “if cities are indeed some sort of superorganism, then why do almost none of them ever die?“

The reason is that they learn to evolve in response to changing conditions—a quality that is equally critical to companies. Every business leader stands to glean some adaptive tools by taking a page from urban leaders who’ve deployed adaptive responses to their local challenges.

The “just enough” strategy

After the massive 2010 earthquake destroyed 80 percent of buildings in Iquique, Chile, architect Alejandro Aravena was tasked with developing a new city plan for Iquique. His solution was unexpected: he designed a replicable house that would be half-complete when handed over to the inhabitants. On one side, the home would be move-in ready, sufficient to meet the legal requirements for low-income housing; on the other side, a vacant frame would give residents agency in determining how their own home would ultimately be. Concrete foundations, plumbing, insulation, and electricity were all provided for inhabitants, who could expand on the basic design by taking workshops and buying building materials through the city. This design gave residents a starting point to design their future, rather than a mandate. In the end, they each owned their homes.

This kind of “just enough” strategy could help businesses adapt, too. In times of change, organizations tend to set new visions in multi-year timeframes — forecasting three, five, or even 10 years ahead. Leaders develop detailed road maps explaining how every part of the organization must change in order to reach these goals. But these macro-level and long-term mandates often don’t feel tangible or attainable to employees, especially when they’re asked to report on progress every three months. This results in a lack of momentum, support, and internal innovation.

Instead, organizations can think about creating a “minimum viable organization” (MVO)—the basic foundation and tools needed in order for talent to step in to help create and shape the company’s future innovation and growth.

Zalando, Europe’s largest fashion retailer, is one of the companies that has successfully employed this approach. To more quickly adapt to industry changes, and carry out their new vision to reimagine fashion for the good of all, IDEO designers and Zalando employees established a dedicated product innovation team and lab. Rather than devoting months to strategizing or establishing an entirely new innovation department, the lab offered the MVO conditions to yield faster, more tangible progress on a long-term vision that the company could internally rally around and take to the market. In the three years since its launch, the lab has built and sent to market multiple new products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street-style photos; and Collabary, a digital tool that connects online fashion influencers with brands.

A nimble plan for scaling

Curitiba, Brazil, is considered one of the best examples of urban planning in the world. When the city’s population exploded in the 1960s, residents worried that overcrowding and traffic congestion would threaten the city’s history and character. To address the issue, architect Jaime Lerner rolled out the Curitiba Master Plan. The plan introduced a public bus system, and required all new development to be concentrated along the bus routes to maximize use. He also introduced the Trinary Road System, which features dedicated bus lanes at the center of the thoroughfare, with parallel streets on either side for private vehicle traffic.

Rather than primarily investing in new infrastructures, Lerner focused on innovating within existing conditions, focusing on roads, public spaces, and downtown areas. As a result, he designed a system that facilitated the city’s scale while still preserving its culture.

What can businesses learn from Lerner’s approach? When organizations scale, many companies rely on structural reorganization to address challenges with stakeholders, process, and other complexities. But while that approach adjusts the high-level org chart and shifts reporting lines, it does not change informal human dynamics, relationships, and emotions, which largely influence workplace culture, engagement, and productivity.

In his TED talk, designer Alastair Parvin tells the story of an architecture firm that was working with a school to help address narrow hallways in light of a growing student population. In between classes, the corridors became congested, resulting in difficulty monitoring student behavior and bullying. But rather than expanding the hallways or building a new space for the school, the firm redesigned the school bell system. “Instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places at different times, and distribute the traffic through the corridors,” says Parvin. “It solves the same problem.”

Like Curitiba, organizations can shift the way they operate while maintaining existing structures, rather than creating entirely new ones, which often disrupt workplace culture.

Taking a “regional” approach

Cities also offer guidance for how to work with partners—and even competitors—to achieve a big, important goal. As a part of the Helsinki City Planning Department’s 2009 Strategic Spatial Plan, the city decided to think about serving the needs of the whole region, rather than those only within the city’s boundaries. This meant that Helsinki had to redefine its existing economic, social, and environmental relationships, changing who it served. The city also formed new principles and policies for key issues like business activities, housing, and the city landscape, enabling development beyond Helsinki’s boundaries.

Most companies intentionally define clear boundaries and relationships between themselves and the outside world. To a certain extent, this is expected: Nearly every business school student is introduced to Porter’s Five Forces, a popular model used to inform corporate strategy. As part of the framework, future managers learn that by reducing the number of competitors in the market, a business can ensure long-term dominance. But as a result of adopting traditional business frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces, organizations naturally view their relationship to other industry players as competitive or transactional. This creates boundaries between a company and those outside its walls.

Like Helsinki, organizations are rethinking the boundaries of their responsibility by working to address big issues like climate change. Despite being considered industry competitors, leaders from Danone, Rabobank, Nature’s Path, McDonald’s, and Starbucks recently joined forces through CoLab, IDEO’s platform for collaborative impact. During a week-long design sprint, they worked side-by-side to develop solutions, emerging with one concept that helped food companies access better ingredients; and another that used a circular model to offer food delivery to apartment dwellers.

These companies recognize that there’s an opportunity to both stay ahead of the market and generate broader impact by looking beyond their organization’s own walls and intellectual property. This requires companies to form new collaborative relationships to push industries forward together.

While companies can still benefit from using Porter’s Five Forces—and even sometimes from structural reorgs—fresh, innovative thinking is required to address the complex challenges businesses face today. To that end, cities can serve as inspiration for organizations navigating change, helping them to rethink the efficiency-driven approaches that once enabled success, and orient instead toward nimble, flexible, human solutions.

Illustrations by Ryan Johnson

Organizations have long been engineered like fine-tuned machines: They allocate processes and resources (sometimes human) into specializations, each churning and passing their output to the next group. This efficiency has allowed companies to scale, prevent competitors from entering the market, and dominate their industries.

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.