Four steps for creating a magic circle to give your team permission to be more playful, generative, creative and innovative.

Try this activity at the start of a new project to help your team get comfortable tapping into their intuition.

What does stress or anxiety feel like in your body? How about joy? Try these two warm ups to tune into the physical feeling of joy. They can help set the tone for a generative brainstorming session, a round of introductions, a project kickoff, and many other moments.

Use this 5-minute activity to help define your personal, team, or organizational purpose.

We often have lofty ambitions for things we want to do differently, but don’t know how to get started in realizing those goals. At IDEO, we start with a beacon—a small, tangible win that builds the momentum you need to move from a little change to a big transformation. Here are a few steps for creating your own.

Get your hands in motion and fire up your creativity with this easy warm up activity.

Do you thrive in times of generating options, or making choices? Creative, collaborative work requires us to toggle between moments that expand the space of opportunity—diverging, and ones where we home in and choose how to move forward—converging.

When you’ve spent countless hours, months, or years deep inside a particular field or system, a radically fresh perspective can help unlock sticky problems or inspire new directions of exploration. Use this activity solo or with your team to draw insight from analogous contexts and provoke new areas of thinking.

Brendan Boyle, IDEO partner and founder of the IDEO Play Lab, joined us on the Creative Confidence Podcast to share how to bring more playfulness into your work. Get into a creative mindset and generate an abundance of new ideas with his favorite creative warm ups and group activities. This is the first in a series of articles about our conversation with Brendan.

Try this activity to build trust among your teammates and uncover the skills and perspectives you can each bring forward.

Journey mapping can be daunting. When considering a user journey, we recommend starting with what you know and using this as a spark to help you think creatively about what could be different. Often when designing services we tend to think only about the moment of interaction when the service happens, but it’s important think beyond that moment and consider the entire user experience well before or after the interaction. Here’s an activity to help you get into the mindset of designing for the entire user journey.

Brendan Boyle, Founder of the IDEO Toy Lab and a contributing instructor in our Unlocking Creativity class, has a knack for helping others insert more creativity and playfulness into their work. He recommends that you start every meeting with a creative workout to elevate the energy in the room. Here’s a simple activity in imagination play that Brendan uses to get the team into a more creative headspace.