To bring students healthy food at school, San Francisco Unified School District had already hired Revolution Foods, a caterer that serves some of the highest-nutrition meals in the nation. But when the lunch bell rang, 72 percent of those who could afford lunch weren’t showing up; students didn’t want to wait in the long lines or rush to finish, so they headed off-campus to eat.

Working alongside more than 1,300 students, parents, union leaders, nutrition staff, board commissioners, principals, teachers, and community groups, IDEO and SFUSD redesigned school lunch. Together, they developed recommendations for three age-appropriate dining experiences, from communal eating to student-designed spaces to new technology platforms, and worked to develop a robust business model.

In September 2013, the San Francisco Unified School Board expressed unanimous enthusiasm for IDEO’s work, clearing the path for this new vision of student-centered lunch to take root.

You can learn more about the cafeteria, and hear firsthand from the students, in this immersive, interactive story.

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Steelcase and IDEO have been collaborating for more than 25 years. The relationship has influenced furniture design across a range of environments, from work spaces to hospitals to schools, and has resulted in numerous design awards for iconic pieces like the Node Chair for classrooms and the innovative modern office chair Leap WorkLounge.

At the heart of the relationship lie trust and a spirit of collaboration, said IDEO founder David Kelley, allowing the space for innovation. “It has to be the collaboration between our inherent innovation capabilities and their extraordinary internal knowledge about the market and what they do best,” Kelley said. The way IDEO began working with Steelcase decades ago has influenced the way they continue to work today, involved in all areas of the business, from design and engineering to strategy and marketing.

The first collaboration in 1989 was for a new Steelcase division called Details, and featured desktop products to go along with its already successful line of office furniture. From the beginning, IDEO founder David Kelley and a group of designers were involved in helping Steelcase with decision-making on every level of the new division, from product strategy to hiring and everything in between. The particular blend of strategy, design, and engineering used to help Details become successful actually became the prototype project for the future IDEO, and is the blueprint for how IDEO works today.

What followed were a series of projects in which Steelcase and IDEO explored moving away from the traditional office cubicle toward furniture that was more architectural and open. More than 10 years ago, Steelcase noticed that the way people worked was changing from static work in offices to more fluid environments that were technology-enabled with laptops and mobile phones. This insight led to two collaborations, Room Wizard and media:scape, design efforts that captured this changing landscape by extending intelligent work to be supported by digital products, not just physical ones.

Jim Hackett, former CEO of Steelcase, said that an early brainstorming exercise in IDEO’s Palo Alto studio made him realize the power of a human-centered design approach. “They asked me to come to Palo Alto for a brainstorming exercise, so I went through the literal exercise that IDEO was having clients do at the time,” Hackett said. “As I was cutting foam core on the floor of one of the studios, I was thinking: I would never work the same way again after doing this. Not just designers should work like this, but anybody who is a knowledge worker should work like this.”

The collaboration’s many successes had a profound impact on Steelcase, and on Hackett personally: “I’m so humbled, I can’t even express it. I can’t tell you how many waves of joy come over me when I’m at IDEO. It’s just an extraordinary part of my life.”

Over the years, the two companies have been in nearly daily communication, a practice that has informed the work of both. While Hackett brought Steelcase’s perspective of corporate boardrooms and running a global company, Kelley and IDEO were working in the most innovative place in the world, saturated in design. Both companies agree that neither would be the same today without the experience gleaned from the other.

Some of the projects include:

RoomWizard
Aiming to connect the convenience of digital technology to physical spaces, the teams designed RoomWizard, a web-accessible touch-screen display that provides the real-time status of shared meeting rooms, simplifying the process of reserving and managing those spaces.

Leap WorkLounge and Ottoman
Building on their earlier work on the Leap Chair, the teams created a work chair with the comfort and style of a classic club chair, a luxury Leap Chair that takes work away from the desk.

i2i Chair
In researching the needs of a growing number of collaborative settings, Steelcase identified an opportunity to combine task and lounge seating. Named for the collaboration it enables, the i2i chair supports a variety of postures, including sideways, reclining, perching, and leaning. Winner of the Spark Gold Award, 2010, and the IDEA Silver Award, 2009.

Amia Chair
Steelcase and IDEO designed a task chair with modern ergonomic capabilities that accommodated a wide range of body types at a lower price point. Winner of the IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, 2009.

media:scape
Steelcase asked IDEO to help evaluate and design a “walk up and connect” experience that merged furniture and technology to help teams access and share information. Designed to look light, open, and inviting, media:scape used a pedestal table with cleverly embedded hardware and interactive technology to foster group work. Winner of the IDEA Bronze award for Office & Productivity, 2011.

Node Chair
IDEO collaborated with Steelcase to design a platform for improving the classroom experience. The final product, dubbed the Node chair, has received praise for promoting student collaboration, allowing educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses. Winner of five design awards.

Watch: A love letter to Node.

A great healthcare experience shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be available to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they need.

Planned Parenthood health centers have opened their doors to every woman and man for 100 years with this core conviction, offering services ranging from pap tests, cancer screenings, and breast exams to contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, counseling, and education.

As the healthcare landscape continues to shift, Planned Parenthood is evolving to lead the progress. For the past year, the organization worked side by side with IDEO to rethink and prototype a patient and employee experience that elevates individuals and their health and well-being.

Together, the teams designed a number of patient and employee interactions and corresponding prototypes that address different patient needs: education, personalization, connection, and support for any decision.

Concepts in Development

These concepts are being rolled out across health centers around the country:

Welcoming Waiting Areas
To help set the right tone for patients from the time they enter the door, the teams designed waiting rooms that offer different types of environments for different needs. The Hub is an area that transforms the passive waiting room experience to a greeting area that’s staffed by knowledgeable guides who help orient patients, and quiet nesting spaces for reflection and privacy. Patients can spend time with friends and family in a social, kid-friendly common area, and those who want to get involved to support Planned Parenthood’s mission can learn about health and advocacy information. This modular design toolkit can adapt to the individual buildings, budgets, and community needs of any existing Planned Parenthood health center.

Restorative Recovery Rooms
For women who are recovering from surgical procedures, small thoughtful details have a magnified positive impact. Redesigned recovery rooms have been separated into semi-private spaces, accommodating loved ones who want to join patients after a procedure. Soothing colors and soft, warm fabrics create a comforting environment, and service gestures including cards with words of support and encouragement from staff reinforce Planned Parenthood’s promise. A take-home kit provides clear information about what to expect during recovery and recommendations for follow-up care.

Unifying Employees
Because the heart of Planned Parenthood is its dedicated employees, we developed and launched an engagement and training program that provides staff with the tools and support they need to do their best work. In This Together, an employee engagement training, prepares staff to work with a vastly diverse community, reduce stigma around health choices, and empower patients to take control of their care. It’s based on a clearly defined set of workplace values and service standards, common goals that help employees across the global organization work together to provide top-notch experiences at every location.

Vision for the Future

These concepts are in varying stages of development, with plans to launch coming soon.

Patient-Physician Tool and Educational App
Visit Companion is a prototype for a suite of digital tools that help patients learn about their reproductive health choices and create personalized plans with their clinicians. While they wait, or anytime before a visit, patients can learn the answers to common questions related to their appointment and see side-by-side comparisons of their care options. The app uses familiar language and symbols to describe symptoms and side effects, and it provides a record of what was discussed during the visit as well as reminders for follow-up appointments.

Simplified Medical Forms
For the 2 million-plus patients who visit Planned Parenthood health centers, there’s an opportunity to make appointments more convenient and straightforward. Currently in prototyping stages, Friendly Forms is an easy-to-understand, interactive digital questionnaire written in simple, conversational language that was designed by replicating how Planned Parenthood clinicians speak to their patients. The forms adapt as patients answer questions, giving only the prompts that are relevant. Patients will be able to complete Friendly Forms any time before their appointment, so it’s easier to complete the forms accurately.

Holistic Women’s Health Care
Women who rely on Planned Parenthood for their sexual and reproductive healthcare can benefit from having trusted clinicians guide their care throughout their lifetime. Through the Well Woman Plus program, Planned Parenthood will connect women to trusted providers for care beyond physical exams and birth control consultation. Clinicians will use interactive digital and physical tools to map out lifelong health care milestones and help patients think proactively about their future, from family planning to preventive screenings.

To learn more, go to PlannedParenthoodExperience.org.

Find out more about Planned Parenthood's approach to creativity in this Q&A with executive vice president and chief brand officer Dawn Laguens.

La Victoria Lab (LVL) is a group of designers, anthropologists, architects, and entrepreneurs working on improving the lives of the Peruvian middle class. Founded in 2014, LVL is the Innovation Lab of Intercorp, an economic group of 35 companies spanning banks, malls, cinemas, schools, health care clinics, and more. Intercorp was founded by Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, one of Peru’s most successful entrepreneurs, employs more than 90,000 people, and accounts for almost 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Peru is one of South America’s fastest growing economies, with a healthy 6 percent year-on-year growth from 2007 to 2017, on average. That rising economic tide, along with government policy, has created extraordinary social mobility: Between 2005 and 2017, the share of poverty fell from 55% to 22%, of a population of 32 million.

Know The Customer

As Peruvians’ lives have improved, the new middle class's needs and aspirations have changed: They’re entrepreneurial, expect great services, and want the best for their children. That challenge and opportunity led Rodríguez-Pastor to enlist IDEO to bring our empathic approach to the construction of Innova Schools, a new school system, and to redesign Interbank's customer experience"

Success in these two projects bred ambition. Intercorp, Rodríguez-Pastor realized, needed to build two capabilities: a deep, bedrock understanding of the new middle class, and an innovation capability with which his companies could create new products, services, and experiences. “I want a little IDEO,” Rodriguez-Pastor said, and the germ of LVL took root.

A Lab Takes Shape

In early 2014, as contractors broke ground on the Lab, its founders set about hiring an eclectic team from across the globe and undertook their first project: to deeply understand the needs, desires, hopes, and dreams of the emerging middle class.

Three months of ethnographic research was followed by three months of bringing their insights to life. LVL’s team surrounded themselves with mementos of people’s lives: toys, products, ads, as well as video interviews with families, to help Intercorp’s executives literally step into the lives of their prospective customers.

Solutions and Skills

Powered by those insights, La Victoria Lab has brought human-centered problem-solving to a variety of Intercorp’s companies, including new retail ventures, and improving the cinema-going and banking experience.

In 2015, the Lab began scaling its efforts to build innovation capabilities across all of the portfolio companies by using IDEO’s innovation readiness assessment, Creative Difference. Each company received a report of their strengths and improvement areas, and as a result, LVL facilitated workshops and community groups focused on building essential capabilities.

"Creative Difference is the first tool that has allowed my team and the organization to have a precise picture of where we are in the spectrum of doing truly innovative work. Now, we can identify our strengths and areas of improvement, we can develop work plans and actions based on data, and can start to really dig deep into innovation,” says Aurelia Alvarado, Director of Innovation, Innova Schools.

La Victoria Lab’s experiments are catalyzed by Intercorp’s scale, reach, and national ambition. Innova Schools, for example, is now Peru’s biggest private school network (read more about Innova here). And Interbank’s new retail experience rolled out to more than 180 branches nationally.

As LVL matures, its focus is changing, says Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer, Intercorp. “There's a transition taking place at La Victoria Lab, from a studio undertaking typical design projects, to a platform for impact-led journeys that start at pipeline discovery, defining key performance indicators, all the way to implementation and stewardship."

Just as important as the projects it delivers is the wider intent of LVL. The aim is for IDEO’s role within La Victoria Lab to wane, as Intercorp’s waxes, and the company’s internal Innovation capability and culture strengthen. LVL’s ventures range from mindset-changing initiatives, such as curating Peru's largest innovation festival, to deeply transformative endeavors targeted at reinventing the core value propositions of Intercorp's insurance, drugstores, and medical services. It envisions massive cross-organizational transformation.

“Innovation,” said Rodríguez-Pastor, “is too important to be outsourced.”

Keep up to date with the latest projects from La Victoria Lab: lavictoria.pe

"For the latest developments on our work with Intercorp, head to "The Possibilities Business: An Oral History of Organization Transformation"

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.