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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.

One of the best ways to get inspired is to look outside your context. When working on new design challenges, IDEO designers often use analogous inspiration to gain fresh perspective. For example, emergency room doctors can get insights about organizing their medical supplies by spending time with a Nascar pit crew and an airline employee might get ideas about check-in by observing a hotel front desk.

This excerpt from Creative Confidence by IDEO Founder David Kelley and IDEO Partner Tom Kelley lays out the creativity challenge of the customer journey map as a way to gain new insights and develop empathy with your customers.