The urgency of attending to our children’s mental health cannot be overstated.

Concern about their well-being was already on the rise in the decade prior to the pandemic. Alongside social inequity, the COVID era has seen soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts. Knowing that mental health is influenced by numerous systemic factors, we met with families of all income levels and heard from practitioners throughout Massachusetts. In some communities, mental health is candidly discussed, in others it remains a taboo subject. Through these conversations, we learned that mental health requires both individuals and their families to be educated, supported, and empowered.

HandholdMA.org helps families find services that work for them and gives them easy access to information on a range of mental health topics. It allows parents to learn from and support one another as they navigate the landscape of mental health together. We took special care to make resources feel approachable for those in communities of color, and curated new resources for everyone from preschoolers to teens—because mental health challenges do not discriminate.

In 2020, a coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health issued an urgent warning that the mental health crisis among children had become a national emergency.

The percentage of emergency department visits for mental health crises rose by 24% for children between the ages of 5 and 11, and 31% for those 12 to 17, compared with 2019.

87,000

site visits to to HandholdMA.org since launch

223,000

people reached in bilingual social media campaign

To help shift vivo’s thinking from a focus on products to a focus on brand-building, IDEO set out to help the company understand how young consumers experience fun—a core tenet of the vivo brand. The new concept store needed to convey joy and fun in a meaningful and memorable way. The project was about more than just designing the space; it was also about piloting into vivo’s future brand systems.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team conducted user research in four different cities in China, then shared the stories of young Chinese consumers with the vivo team. Their interviews revealed that young people value experiences that enrich their lives and create a feeling of positive personal transformation. They seek opportunities to discover new experiences, express themselves in different ways, expand and deepen their social connections, and build knowledge and skills. By leaning on this definition of “enjoyment,” IDEO helped vivo identify the value proposition of the concept store, helping consumers express themselves in new and different ways. The store would allow every visitor to see something unique and find a fresh perspective.

The vivo team took that value proposition into a design brief and later built out the space and interactive experiences. The second floor of the store is dedicated entirely to interactive experiences using photo booths, sound recording, and lighting technology, designed to provide consumers with the kind of enjoyment they seek. vivo launched the concept store in Shenzhen on March 22, 2019, marking an important milestone in vivo’s transformation from a smartphone maker to a consumer brand.

China consumes roughly 30% of the world’s smartphones—which presents a tremendous market opportunity for brands looking to capture young consumers’ loyalty.

Top 1

in China's smartphone market, topping both shipments (sale-in) and retail sales (sale-out), in the first half of 2024

260M active users

within two years of vivo Lab's official opening, with 70% of them young users

The program Tsinghua and IDEO created together consisted of six modules focused on creative leadership: Rediscover Design, Build Design as a Core Competency, Creating the Conditions for Creativity, The Financial Levers for Innovation, Designing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Leading for Tomorrow. 73 Chinese and foreign experts helped teach the modules, including former Forbidden City Palace Museum director Shan Jixiang, the father of Japanese industrial design, Masayuki Kurokawa, and Jake Knapp, author of the book Sprint.

The program’s first cohort included more than 30 entrepreneurs from 20 different industries across nine cities. Participants completed the courses throughout the year, taking full advantage of holistic, interactive teaching and the opportunity to share their own practical experiences. Their feedback consistently demonstrated how the course had given them fresh approaches to problems their companies faced, whether improving internal communication or helping them see the clients they serve from a new perspective.

Liu Feng, the founder of a fast growing tourism development company, was particularly inspired by the Creating the Conditions for Creativity module’s six pillars of corporate transformation concept. Using these pillars, he not only refined the mission and value of his company, but also launched a series of measures to improve all aspects of its operations, from customer service to annual company gatherings. With a newly empowered team, he significantly increased the agility of the organization.

Ting Zhihong, the chairwoman of China’s leading logistics technology company, managed to double its profit during the course. She said her biggest takeaway from the course was how important it is to empower the team. Her company has now set up several platforms that give employees more room to experiment, create, and take part in frontline decision-making, bringing them closer to the company’s management.

Hu Chao, founder and CEO of China’s largest e-commerce platform for childcare goods, found that while other executive courses simply teach knowledge, Lead a Creative China taught him the importance of placing people at the center of what his company is doing.

The first cohort of the program graduated in December 2018. On April 8th, 2019, the Lead a Creative China program received an honorable mention in the education category as part of Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards, becoming the only award-winning Chinese project in the category.

After 40 years of rapid change, China has reached a pivotal point in its growth trajectory. Across the globe, traditional drivers of economic growth have slowed down, creating opportunity define the new economy.

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The Chinese government has laid out a wide range of ambitious policy plans to ensure that China successfully manages this transition, and that the country continues to grow and lead.

Honorable Mention

education category, Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards

China’s digital landscape is dominated by highly integrated mobile apps like WeChat and Alipay that seamlessly combine messaging, shopping, bill payment, and finance management. This shift toward digital-first interactions that are hyper-convenient, personalized, and intuitive has significantly shaped consumer expectations for experiences like finding, booking, and staying in a hotel. To stay competitive and meet—or exceed—young guests’ expectations, Huazhu needed to redesign its Membership App 3.0 to prioritize guest needs across all touchpoints of the hotel journey.

Through in-depth research and member feedback, IDEO discovered the true pain point the Huazhu membership app needed to address: seamlessly integrating the hotel brand’s online and offline experiences. The Huazhu Membership App 3.0 adopted “simple, stable, and real” design principles, simplifying user operations, optimizing the interface, fixing lingering experience issues, maximizing page load speed, and reducing crash rates.

The IDEO team discovered users have different functional needs. Sometimes, users want to search for hotel information quickly. Other times, they prefer to explore and browse content slowly. To meet both needs, the app needed to be optimized for efficiency and exploration. So, the IDEO team upgraded the interface of the Huazhu Membership App, adding quick operation modules and information blocks on the main page, as well as a downward scrolling interface that gradually slows the experience, offering channels for detailed exploration.

Customers also had different needs at different points in their travel journey: before, during, and after their stays. IDEO designed the language and user interface to provide personalized service information for each stage, from booking to post-stay. The app’s content adapts to the user’s travel phase, showing the most relevant service experiences at each point. The content displayed on the app also changes based on user habits, helping the app flex to meet their needs. The design aligns with the Huazhu Hotels Group’s mission to provide personalized service to a diverse clientele.

The team also worked to inject Huazhu’s brand characteristics by offering an upgraded experience in booking, stay, dining, and member benefits and adding features like a 30-second, automatic check-in experience. These thoughtful, personalized updates integrate Huazhu Hotels Group’s meticulous service philosophy, providing customers with a welcoming, human-centered hospitality experience. The updated Huazhu Membership App 3.0 is now available in major app stores, shaping a new generation of user experiences for Huazhu Hotels Group.  

Young travelers in China expect the first touchpoint with a hotel brand to be digital.

5% increase

in monthly active users after the launch of the App's 2.0 version in 2021

The answer is yes, of course. And when companies don’t fix themselves, we feel it in our products and services. The company has designed something—often a digital thing—that fails to give us what we need, and we walk away cursing the air, wondering if the leaders of the company have ever used the service themselves.

But making things that work for humans isn’t easy. We change every five minutes. How can organizations be confident that what works today will work tomorrow? It’s a lot easier to just slap on a Band-Aid and hope it won’t rip off with the first sudden move.

There are vastly different perspectives out there about how to make change happen and stick, and we’re curious about them all, so this fall, we invited five friends who’ve led major transformation projects at their companies to IDEO’s London studio and for an open conversation.

Here are the top 5 takeaways from our Make Change event:

1. Be a curious leader

“The problem I see in a lot of organizations is they have a lot of great tools but the top leaders don’t use them. If you’re not prepared to do what you’re asking everyone else to do, then why should you expect them to? If you want to understand what’s broken in your company, try entering your own expenses.”

—Mike Bracken (Public Digital), the guy who led digital transformation for the UK government (GDS), a model that’s been replicated in Canada, Argentina, Peru, Australia and the U.S. (and he has a letter from Obama to prove it).

If Mike had one piece of advice for making change happen, it would be this: “Go and sit next to a user when they’re using your service or product. I make sure to do six hours of that every month.”

2. Question accepted behaviors

“If you’re in a self-contained moment as an organization, I’d highly recommend that you build an innovation team that sits on the side and role models something really weird and strange, questioning the accepted behaviors. Having a constant dialogue and exchange with other perspectives is what makes companies competitive. But not a team that sits in the ivory tower. Our innovation team has reinvented itself three times in three years according to what the business needs."

—Anne Pascual, VP of Design at Zalando, Europe’s leading online fashion platform, which delivers to 24 million customers and grew its revenue to around €4.5 billion last year.

Anne's advice? “Think big. We tend to be obsessed with the details, but there’s much bigger opportunities out there.”

3. Don't build an innovation lab

“Innovation is far too important to be outsourced. I’m not a believer in gluing an innovation lab onto the side of your organization. If your culture is not innovative, that’s not going to sustain. You’ve got to fix your culture first if you want to be in this for the long term. It’s got to be everyone’s job when they wake up in the morning. And you then have to create the air cover as a leader for that to happen, which is all about creating a no-blame culture. You can’t innovate as fast as we do without sometimes screwing up. We do it regularly, and when we do, we try to learn from it, but we know it just goes with the territory of being a disruptor.”

—Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at Ocado. After a deal with Kruger in May, Ocado’s market cap blew past Marks & Spencer's—a sign of the tectonic shift happening in retail.

Paul's advice would be this: “Tell the truth about what's broken.”

4. Be a DJ

“A good leader is like a DJ—they play the music that makes people move, but they should accept that people will move in different ways and what’s important is that you move to the same rhythm and move forward.”

—Beatriz Lara Bartolomé, former Chief Innovation Officer of BBVA, and EMEA Advisor Director of Globant, a digitally-native technology services company.

To make change happen, Beatriz would advise you to “ask your teams what they think should be improved.”

5. Launch beacon projects

“Launching a product to market in a short period of time is the best organizational change program—you’re going to learn the most about how the company behaves. We call these projects that have a change agenda 'beacons.' Select them for their ability to help you build a new muscle. If you’re not building a new muscle with every project, you’re wasting an opportunity to learn.”

—Luis Cilimingras, IDEO partner and managing director of our London studio. He leads digital transformation and change projects, including starting an innovation studio called La Victoria Lab that creates new products, services, and experiences for Peru’s emerging middle class.

Luis's best advice: “Keep seeking out inspiration. It’s your job to be inspired.”

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Take a behind-the-scenes look at the event.

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People are always looking for ways to improve themselves. But what about companies? Companies are just collections of people, so it makes sense that they’d build up all kinds of bad habits over time. Shouldn’t our organizations be on a self-improvement regimen, continuously trying to fix what’s broken?

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“What's going on there?” asked my colleague Ed, in his usual bouncing demeanor, pointing at my phone propped in its handy, commonly-found, IKEA glassware receptacle.

I was in the last weeks of a project, building out a mobile-first website to showcase our final deliverables. I was going about my usual process, with a minimal set up: designing the UI in Sketch, mirroring the artboards on my phone.

“What? This?” I replied, adjusting the angle of my glass full of iPhone.

“Yeah. I've never seen anyone do that before,” he chimed back.

It dawned on me that this behavior in my design quiver—something I'd been doing since my very first mobile design moment—may not be that common.

Instead of having to stop and pick up my phone every time I need to check my work, I just plop it in a glass, adjust the angle, and check my design’s mobile readiness with a glance.

The adjustability and the “there's probably one lying around” factor of a drinking glass elevates it to a handy design tool that I’ve used throughout my career.

And once you’ve shipped the design, it also makes for a great vessel for a celebratory swally.

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Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

Creativity Challenge #3: Jumpstart an ideation session

Here’s one quick, simple exercise to get creative muscles warmed up. We learned it from David’s mentor, Bob McKim, back when David was a product design student. It’s called Thirty Circles, and you can do it on your own or in a group. The goal is to push people to test their creativity by turning circles into recognizable objects in a very short period of time.

Tool: Thirty Circles Exercise
Participants: Solo or groups of any size
Time: 3 minutes, plus discussion
Supplies: Pen and a piece of paper (per person) with 30 blank circles on it of approximately the same size. (We recommend printing it on an oversized sheet of paper. You can also just ask everyone to draw their own 30 circles on a blank piece of paper.)

Instructions

Step 1: Give each participant one 30 Circles sheet of paper and something to draw with.

Step 2: Turn as many of the blank circles as possible into recognizable objects in three minutes (think clock faces, billiard balls, etc.)

Step 3: Compare results. Look for the quantity or fluency of ideas. How many people filled in ten, fifteen, twenty or more circles? (Typically most people don’t finish.) Next, look for diversity or flexibility in ideas. See if the ideas are derivative (a basketball, a baseball, a volleyball) or distinct (a planet, a cookie, a happy face). Did anyone “break the rules” and combine circles (a snowman or a traffic light)? Were the rules explicit, or just assumed?

Tips from the field

Besides being a great warm-up exercise, Thirty Circles offers a quick lesson about ideation. When you generate ideas, you are balancing two goals: fluency (the speed and quantity of ideas) and flexibility (ideas that are truly different and distinct). We know from experience that it’s easier to have a great idea if you have many to choose from. But if you have a lot of ideas that are just variations on a theme, you might really only have one idea with twenty-nine other versions. When you combine fluency and flexibility, you can generate a rich array of concepts to choose from.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

How could Fintona make their newbies feel comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out?” They began by experimenting on themselves. Their first idea was a goofy one: arm each newbie with a Bat Signal—a flashing red police light that newbies could trigger any time they were stumped to summon help from across the call center.

The first day of the experiment, it was clear that the lights weren't working. Newbies who were already uncomfortable saying, “I don't know,” were even more uncomfortable turning on a flashing emergency light that screamed to the whole floor, “I DON’T KNOW!” When other service agents saw the signal, they just assumed that someone else would jump in and help. The experiment failed.

The team needed to iterate. They thought that maybe each Bat Signal needed a Batmanager—a dedicated leader who could watch the lights and swoop in to save the day. So, the team moved the lights to the managers' offices and asked them to be on the lookout.

That didn't work either. Newbies still felt singled out, and the Batmanagers weren’t at their desks often enough to act as a reliable safety net. Realizing the team needed a private way to call for help, they created a private chat channel—the Bat Chat—where newbies could connect directly with experts from Fintona’s specialized departments.

But the experts didn’t answer any questions. In fact, the only answers that newbies got on the Bat Chat were from other newbies. That gave the team an idea: They would launch the Bat Chat across the entire call center. They figured that veteran agents must know the answer to 80 percent of newbies’ questions, and they might be a safer resource than some stranger in another department.

Finally, success. The Bat Chat took off like crazy. Surprisingly, it wasn’t newbies who first started using the chat, but veteran service agents asking each other questions. As more veteran voices spoke up (or typed up), the newbies started asking their own questions and getting immediate answers.

The Bat Chat was the perfect solution for this team. But, there was no special analysis that they could have done beforehand to figure that out. No market research or benchmarking data would have suggested it. They had to build, fail, iterate, and repeat to find the answer. And once they found it, it didn’t need careful change management to extend it to the rest of Customer Support. It spread by word of mouth, and became a source of pride because the team found their own solution.

Fintona learned some remarkably similar lessons to what Harvard professor Teresa Amabile found in her two-year study of the culture of helping at IDEO: Newbies don’t need to be singled out. They need to see that everyone—even their most successful colleagues—need help sometimes.

This post is an excerpt of a longer article I wrote for Harvard Business Review. Read the full story here.

This article is excerpted from a longer story in Harvard Business Review.

Fintona Financial (not the company’s real name) was growing fast—so fast that their Customer Support call center had tripled in size. They couldn’t recruit fast enough. Many new service agents were pulled out of their two-month training program in as little as two weeks. Eager to look good in front of their bosses, these newbies struggled to answer tricky questions—all too often, they would give a right-sounding answer instead of saying, “I don’t know,” and asking someone for help. This not only triggered inceased call volumes but also began to erode Fintona’s customer satisfaction scores.

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.