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In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO’s Brendan Boyle shares how to bring more playfulness into your work. This is the second in a series of articles about our conversation with Brendan.

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.

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.

Even just five years ago, in many companies, only some people had permission to be creative. But that’s changing—quickly. Creativity isn’t only important in fields like design and advertising, but in law, finance, and even medicine. A reliance on multidisciplinary teams means that everyone is expected to dream up novel and game-changing ideas. And as more jobs become automated, creativity as a skill will be more important than ever. It’s the tool everyone can use to break patterns, generate new ideas, and make big leaps.

Curious about what makes a successful, innovative team, Google led a two-year research project with 280 teams. They found only one distinction between innovative and non-innovative teams—psychological safety.