For 6-year-old Dave Jr., a long line at Disneyland triggered a massive meltdown. His parents were concerned and a little embarrassed, but not surprised; Dave Jr. struggled to keep his emotions in check.

Hoping to help, Dave Jr.'s uncle, entrepreneur Craig Lund, joined forces with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a video game designer who had worked on Quick Hit and NBA 2K. Together, they set out to design something that could teach coping skills to kids like Dave Jr. who need to manage “big emotions,” as well as children suffering from anxiety, ADHD, and other behavior issues, which are on the rise.

Their collaboration resulted in a video game called Mightier and a startup called Neuromotion Labs—a 10-person team of psychologists, game designers, and engineers who embedded at IDEO Cambridge for a one-month sprint to improve the game and get ready for launch.

To play Neuromotion's game, kids are first taught simple, calming breathing exercises. During gameplay, kids wear heart-rate monitors on a wrist or arm that detect spikes caused by stress or anger; as their heart rates go up, the game's difficulty increases. Kids have opportunities to pause and try deep breathing to counter the ramped up challenge. As it turns out, "gamifying" restraint builds strong incentives for kids to take charge of their emotions—they have to if they want to win.

Already activated around boosting mental and emotional health, IDEO's design team worked side-by-side with Neuromotion to study how parents and children experience Mightier. From home visits to group interviews to a summer camp-style design session with kid players, live feedback fueled the next iteration of the gaming platform and better product-market fit.

IDEO helped Neuromotion hone the visual design and mechanics of Mightier and expand it's suite of games. The team observed that the Mightier program was more successful the more involved parents of players became, which revealed a need for additional resources for adults. So they created new supports, including a more detailed orientation and a personalized coaching service for parents staffed by trained therapists.

But can a video game actually help kids cope? Early peer-reviewed studies showed that playing Mightier reduced outbursts by 62 percent, oppositional behaviors by 40 percent, and parental stress by 19 percent. After 12 weeks of using Mightier, a survey of kids and parents showed that 96 percent of parents saw positive behavior changes in their children, while 92 percent of kids learned new coping skills.

Shortly after the design sprint, Neuromotion secured its next round of funding and officially launched Mightier’s array of “bioresponsive games.” The games have already been played more than a million times, and Neuromotion has measured more than a 100 million heartbeats. Mightier games are helping kids and families across the country.

What about Dave Jr.? Recently, his sister told Lund she "accidentally" bumped Dave Jr.’s bike off a pier and into the ocean. She was expecting an outburst of anger, but after eight months of playing Mightier, Dave Jr. stayed cool. His uncle couldn’t be prouder.

Many of us have let vegetables wither in the crisper drawer, or thrown out a child’s half-eaten restaurant meal, but the sheer scale of food waste around the globe is hard to grasp. According to the United Nations, about a third of the food the world produces every year—1.3 billion tons—is lost during production or tossed by consumers, with North Americans throwing out the most food per capita. The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days.

IDEO received a series of grants from The Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions, given the power of IDEO’s human-centered design approach to address systemic challenges. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

For IDEO’s first initiative, designers tapped into the enthusiasm of the broader creative community, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, the Closed Loop Foundation, ReFED, and other groups. In the summer of 2016, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—launched the Food Waste Challenge, asking how people might curtail waste by rethinking our relationship with food. Between June and October, more than 20,000 people from 113 countries took part in the challenge, tracking their personal waste and brainstorming solutions.

Challenge participants submitted more than 450 ideas. A team of food industry experts helped select the 12 top proposals, which included software to help people buy food collectively from wholesalers and a service that delivers extra meals from corporate events to those in need. Ultimately, the Closed Loop Foundation chose to award Full Cycle Bioplastics a $50,000 grant to scale up its idea to convert inedible food and paper waste into a fully compostable alternative to oil-based plastic.

At the conclusion of the Food Waste Challenge, OpenIDEO launched the Food Waste Alliance, a platform for participants and experts to stay engaged with the most promising ideas and innovators. The alliance helped entrepreneurs share resources, prototype new concepts, secure funding, hire staff, and form partnerships. OpenIDEO invited hundreds to join the alliance, and 92 percent of members told IDEO they made progress in their work as a result. One member company, RISE, received funding from another participant who discovered RISE through the alliance. This investment let RISE prototype its concept for milling spent grain from beer brewing into flour for baked goods and ultimately join the prestigious Food-X accelerator.

The Rockefeller Foundation also supported IDEO’s work with City Harvest, a New York organization that collects 160,000 pounds of unused food each day and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries. City Harvest wanted to understand the habits of local families who visit food banks in an effort to ensure all the food the group distributes gets eaten. To get a peek into these families’ kitchens, in January 2017, IDEO researchers conducted observations and interviews across New York City’s five boroughs. Pantry customers cooked for the researchers, giving them an inside look at how the families engaged with the food they had available and what food meant to each of them: tradition, stability, even adventure. Based on insights from pantry visitors, IDEO made recommendations for City Harvest, including community-run cooking classes and a way for families to request specific foods or reserve pick-up times by text message. IDEO also created three video vignettes to help build even greater empathy between City Harvest and the people it serves.

In spring 2017, capping IDEO’s work with The Rockefeller Foundation, the organizations teamed up with World Wildlife Fund and Hyatt hotels in Florida, New York, and New Jersey to rethink all-you-can-eat buffets. IDEO studied diners and staff at Hyatt buffets and found that employees—from event planners to kitchen staff—each add a cushion of extra food to cover their bases, while guests overfill their plates to avoid missing out. In the end, diners eat just half the food organizers serve, while the rest goes to waste. This and other data-driven insights gleaned about diners’ habits led to subtle substitutions, including smaller plates of meats and cheeses that can be ordered from servers and individual pastries rather than whole cakes. These alternatives have not only built on Hyatt’s existing food waste management strategies, but have also helped reduce buffet costs at Hyatt Regency Orlando and continued to receive support from guests.

The problem of food waste is too enormous to ignore. Wasted food means squandered resources, lost money, and ultimately, hungry people—more than 15 million in the United States alone. Designers and innovators from coast to coast have helped find solutions to the crisis that fulfill a variety of needs, from preserving produce sent to food pantries to keeping plastic packaging out of the oceans. The Rockefeller Foundation and other IDEO partners are leveraging powerful design techniques to pave the way for a waste-free future.

In 2017, IDEO acquired longtime partner Datascope and integrated the company’s data scientists and engineers. Datascope team members aren’t just passionate data scientists; they’re human-centered designers who happen to work with data, as illustrated by successful collaborations like this one:

In today’s job market, there’s no such thing as being "done" with your education. This is particularly true in the fields of data science, machine learning, and AI, where significant advances are made on a monthly basis. To meet this need for more in-depth training, Metis—part of Kaplan—wanted to create a comprehensive data science program for students from all backgrounds. Metis asked Datascope to design the curriculum from scratch, drawing on the company’s deep expertise in the field.

Datascope spoke with practitioners across industries to identify the key skill sets that make them successful: a grasp of design; fluency with data management, coding, and algorithms; and effective communication with coworkers and the wider world. The team crafted a 12-week bootcamp that develops these specific abilities.

In order to prepare students for the work world, the bootcamp is structured less like a class and more like a company, where students are “hired” as data scientists—with projects to complete—starting on day one.

Students collaborate on group projects and presentations in a way that mirrors real workflows, and practice pair programming to learn from one another. Using techniques drawn from design, students are invited to refine their project briefs and continually reevaluate their approach.

Instead of a final exam, at the end of the course, students tackle five real-world, open-ended data science projects inspired by Datascope’s client work. One project involves using data from subway turnstiles to detect patterns in the volume of street traffic; another asks students to use data they scrape from the web to predict a movie’s box office profits using regression analysis.

After students complete the bootcamp, they receive an additional three months of career support, from mock interviews to site visits with potential employers. In addition to designing the curriculum, Datascope taught the first three student cohorts and helped Metis build its teaching team as it expanded the program from New York to San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. Metis now offers online courses, evening classes, and corporate trainings in data science.

If you’re going to take a data science bootcamp, it’s best to take one designed by data scientists.

You’re whizzing along on your bike, en route to a new restaurant for a client meeting. You reach an unfamiliar intersection; which way to go now?

Instead of dismounting and digging for a phone, you brush your hand along your jacket sleeve for directions, then double-tap the denim to re-start your music. Without taking your eyes off the road, you’ve taken care of the problem.

This intuitive interface for connected apparel began with Levi's, makers of durable workwear for 140 years, and Google, creators of forward-looking technology, which joined forces to fashion the first item of clothing with touch-sensitive, copper-core threads woven directly into the fabric. Once it was established that the first connected garment from the partnership would be a jacket within Levi’s Commuter line, with interaction on the sleeve, Google worked with IDEO, leaders in designing for human needs, to develop the gesture language of the jacket and industrial design of the technology within.

This is the first connected garment that helps us break free from devices. It seamlessly incorporates Jacquard by Google technology to perform digital tasks, such as navigation, communication, and music playing with a few swipes or taps on the sleeve.

Jacquard by Google—a platform that makes it possible to integrate touch and gesture interactivity into fabrics using conductive yarn and standard, industrial looms—was inspired by a curious twist of history. The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, used punch cards to automate the process of weaving complex patterns into fabric. In the 1940s and ’50s, engineers employed a similar punch-card technique to program the first computers.

IDEO spent time on the project early on, collaborating with Google engineers and Levi’s clothiers on the jacket’s development, helping craft an experience that would make the intelligent threads intuitive to wearers.

Working alongside Google and Levi’s, IDEO’s work included:

• The industrial design of the electronics integrated into the snap tag and connector (the tag snaps onto the jacket’s cuff and connects to your phone via Bluetooth)
• A vocabulary of gestures on the cuff of the jacket that lets you interact with the jacket’s technology
• Early exploration of the basic design philosophy and conceptual design for the interaction model of a corresponding smartphone app that ties it all together (works with both iOS and Android phones)

The IDEO team’s first task was to validate what commuters of all stripes wanted from the garment, in addition to the work Levi’s did in researching with its consumers. In interviews, group exercises, and wear tests with urban cyclists and other workers on the go, the team learned that cyclists needed a way to stay connected, while still living in the moment. That meant being able to answer calls, hear text messages, get the next direction, and control their music without using a screen.

Levi’s, Google, and IDEO developed a language of movement for Jacquard-enabled fabric that feels familiar and human and builds on the ways people would naturally interact with a garment (a whole-hand brush along the sleeve, as opposed to a one-finger tap on a touch screen, for instance).

Then came the design and engineering of the snap tag on the jacket’s cuff, which gently notifies you of calls, texts, and other jacket interactions with light and vibration feedback. The flexible, lightweight strap incorporates the look and feel of a Levi’s jean button, while housing advanced electronics that capture touch data. The tag is removable, charges via USB connection, and works in conjunction with a mobile app that lets you configure settings for the garment, set notifications, and customize gestures and interactions.

The Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard by Google changes the game because it’s simply that—a jacket—with technology that adds new utility and value, allowing us to wear our everyday interactions on our sleeves.

The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google hit stores in October 2017.

IDEO and Google have a long history of collaboration. Learn more about our work on Google Bloks here.

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.

Like most organizations, we’re reckoning with how COVID-19 will change how we do business. And as we do, we’re learning a lot from our community—our colleagues living and working under complex, difficult circumstances; our clients whose businesses depend on global transportation; and the people we design for and with on a daily basis.

"Constraints can breed a lot of innovation,” says Charles Hayes, a managing director of IDEO’s studios in Asia. “As designers, how do we design our way through this?"

Here are a few tips based on what we’re learning:

1. Create a virtual meeting survival kit

How many tabs do you have open right now? We equate multiple screens with fractured attention. But just because a meeting is being conducted virtually doesn’t mean it can’t be designed for presence. An IDEO team recently had to find an alternative way to run a 20-person workshop for a foundation in Seattle. They asked themselves: How might we still approximate the level of engagement of an in-person meeting? Better still: how might we make sure this virtual workshop delivers on our client’s needs—focus, alignment, and a set of actionable next steps—while keeping things interesting?

Before the meeting, the team mailed a virtual workshop survival kit, complete with “sleeping bags” for cell phones, mini-whiteboards for people to prototype ideas, and physical takeaways to help the presentation resonate off-screen.

Over the course of the meeting, participants excitedly unwrapped items one by one. It was a way for the IDEO team to show up in the room when they couldn’t actually show up in the room.

2. Design rituals around tools

There are thousands of tools to facilitate remote collaboration—video conferencing! brainstorming tools! task-management software!—but perhaps more important than the specific tool are the processes teams put in place around them. After all, a tool is only as good as its ability to deliver on what the team needs.

Take video conferencing, for example. A reliable video chat box can be a Swiss Army knife to combat the woes of remote collaboration. But spending an entire day jumping from one serious video chat to another is a recipe for bleary eyes. IDEO teams around the world have been running experiments in how video conferencing can be a tool to build culture and connectedness in addition to getting work done.

For one, teams have been continuously changing their virtual video backgrounds—everything from a football game to a family vacation photo—to spark discussion and keep meetings fresh. Regular rituals like daily meditation or morning coffee chats have been ported over to video. And teams are using creative warmups—like a 10-second dance break or a quick show-and-tell of an artifact from the home office—to kick-off meetings.

3. Empower local communities

When travel is off the table, IDEOers have had to find alternative ways to learn from the communities for whom they’re designing. One approach that has become particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19 is Equity Centered Community Design (ECCD). ECCD is a process of designing with—as opposed to designing for—a community.

For example, IDEO recently worked on a project to design a new lifelong learning program for the city of South Bend, Indiana. Rather than rely on traveling to South Bend to conduct research, the IDEO team hired local “community connectors” and a researcher in South Bend to conduct interviews, share prototypes, and co-design with the IDEO team remotely. Now that many cities are sheltering in place, even local communities will have to work remotely. That makes it all the more important to enlist those with hyperlocal context and lines of sight, ensuring there is sensitivity and flexibility around immediate needs. By designing themselves out of the room, the IDEO team received a level of honest feedback they may not have been privy to if they’d been physically present. This method isn’t new, but as movement becomes constrained, it’s even more important to engage local networks to be the eyes and ears on the ground.

4. When you can't do, learn

How long have you been putting off learning that skill? Cleaning up that code base? Building that website? When one door closes, listen for the creak of another opening. Travel constraints can be an opportunity to take a deep breath, hunker down, and try something new. Across IDEO, designers have been using these extenuating circumstances as an opportunity to gather digitally and learn. “We have experimented with a number of things,” says Brian Chien, a director in our Shanghai studio. “Some worked well, and some definitely didn’t.”

Whether it’s prototyping a remote brainstorm, trying out a new tool, or building something by hand, the disruption of your normal routine can be an opportunity to learn something. And if you already have the skills, teach! Designers in our Tokyo office are webcasting tutorials for young design students, sharing skills with those who aren’t able to attend an in-person workshop. What if, when it’s inadvisable to move from place to place, organizations took what they’re saving in travel expenses and invested it into L&D?

At IDEO, we will always believe in the alchemy of creative minds bouncing off one another in a shared space. But COVID-19 has pushed us to get even more comfortable with digital. And while we know necessity is the mother of invention, we still have much to learn—especially from other companies who have been at the forefront of remote collaboration for years.

Of this we’re certain, says Arlin Tao, a senior director in our Shanghai studio: virus aside, remote collaboration is the way of the future. “I think the only thing that most people agree on is when things go back to normal, it's not going to be the normal that we were used to before.”

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It's not uncommon for IDEOers to make house calls. Friendly, in-person conversations are one of our most cherished tools—that kind of design research helps us learn what people collect and eat and carry in their backpacks. Social interactions fuel the insights we use to do our design work. What happens, then, when social interaction is not good for us?

While we tied, she shared the story of leaving her corporate career in design to pursue a year diving deep into the world of knots, teaching herself a new knot every single day. With explorations traversing the historical and functional—from gathering inspiration from sailor’s knots to the future-forward and abstract—her knots have become massive installations, offering an alternative translation for structures like the circuit board and New York City subway system. I left her session deeply inspired by the simple power of dedicating ourselves to daily acts of making and craft—let’s all try it.

In one sentence, who are you?

I make sculpture and installations that elevate the vernacular and inspire awe and understanding; in the context of knots, I work at the intersection of function, design, history, and aesthetics to illuminate what’s most fascinating about knots: the journey of the line.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I developed fluency in the language of knots—and found my artist voice in the process—by learning one new knot every day of the calendar year in 2016 (which was 366 total knots because of the leap year).

How do you get over creative block?

You know, I never have creative block. I have a list as long as my arm of investigations I’m dying to explore and large installation concepts that are awaiting a home.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I’m currently hiring, so today I'm posting a listing for a studio manager position, ordering custom-made cordage for a hotel project in the Maldives, and later on, I'm heading to Gensler San Francisco for the opening reception for a show I’m having there.

What’s your dream installation site?

An airport. I’m obsessed with the notion of the journey of the line, which is evident in my work. The rich metaphors that arise from journeying and traveling are particularly well suited to airports.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I really want to see my work in an airport... and then a TED Talk.

What’s the weirdest or coolest knot you’ve learned? Why?

The five-strand star knot. During my Year of Knots, I tried for over an hour to learn it, only to end up frustrated and in tears. It's complex and the old-timely sailors knotting books were cryptic. But then I mastered it, and now it is my favorite knot to make.

What are you most curious about right now?

People often call me a "fiber artist," but I don’t restrict myself in that way. I’m interested in the journey of the line. So while it’s wonderful to render a line in rope, because rope allows for creating shapes in space without weight, almost anything can be a line. I’m curious about exploring other materials—glass, tubing, metal, and more. I’m still looking for the project that will want me to tie knots out of ethernet cable.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Always and forever: artist Janet Echelman, who makes sculpture on the scale of city blocks that respond to wind, weather, and light. I met and befriended her last year and we spent a day in Paris looking at art. Janet is lovely and her art absolutely takes my breath away. She has a permanent installation in Terminal 2 at the San Francisco Airport that is so beautiful, when I have a flight to catch, I will go to the airport early just to gaze at it. Endless respect to Janet Echelman.

Learn more about Windy's craft in her book, The Year of Knots.

I was feeling a bit sleepy at a design conference this past spring when, upon entering the auditorium for the next talk, I was handed a simple length of rope. My ears perked up with anticipation and curiosity. Enter Windy Chien: ingenious fiber artist who would coach the entire room of conference-goers in learning how to tie a donut knot (it’s adorable and makes for an amazing necklace).

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.