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The more ideas you come up with, the better chance you have to reach a truly brilliant solution. For many, brainstorming is the bread and butter of ideation. It’s a great tool to help teams push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas. Across the thousands of brainstorms IDEO has run—both with internal teams and with clients—we follow seven important rules.

Design thinking has a human-centered core. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes. When you sit down to create a solution for a business need, the first question should always be what's the human need behind it?

What is design thinking? Why does it work? How do I get started with it? Our community had so many great questions on the power and potential of design thinking that we hosted an Ask Me Anything session on the topic with IDEO partners and IDEO U leaders Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Coe Leta Stafford.

In the#1 New York Times bestselling book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and his co-author Dave Evans showed us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling. With their second book, Designing Your Work Life, they zero in on finding happiness at work. In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Bill gives advice on how to assess the potential of your current career and shares ways to redesign and re-engage with your job.

Here is Rochael’s advice for how you can bring more creativity into your role if you work in a functional area like operations or finance.

In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school, and IDEO U Dean Suzanne Gibbs Howard sat down to discuss the core abilities of the most successful design thinking practitioners and personal stories and learnings from David’s friendships with several of today’s most innovative CEOs and leaders. Hear from more innovative leaders on the IDEO U podcast.

Design thinking is no longer a risky new way of working — it’s now regarded by many as a reliable practice for coming up with innovative ideas. And as the practice evolves, it continues to add value to businesses in new ways. But culture and tradition can be difficult to change, even with good evidence. It’s not uncommon for people to struggle a bit with how to bring the mindsets and methods of design thinking into their office and get their team and their boss on board with a new way of working.

In our latest Creative Confidence Series chat, Jocelyn Wyatt, Chief Executive Officer of IDEO.org, and Dean of IDEO U Suzanne Gibbs Howard discussed the unique challenges of designing for the social sector and how to apply advanced design thinking principles to manage multiple stakeholders and solve for complex issues.

Research shows that we view our future selves as strangers. There’s a disconnect between the objective truth that we will age over time and the ability for people to feel like their future self is a real person. Just as it’s imperative to build empathy for users when designing solutions to meet their needs, could we make better decisions by building empathy for our future selves? 

At IDEO, we keep hearing from native spanish speakers who are curious about design thinking and creativity and hungry to learn more. And in our own work in Latin America, we’ve found fantastic people who are setting up innovation labs, building creativity in their teams, and working across companies. As we look to spread design thinking methods and mindsets throughout the globe, we’ve been chatting with IDEO U alums and others who have insight into making design thinking a part of innovation in Latin America.

Lynda Deakin, Managing Director of IDEO’s Design for Food studio, joined Suz to chat about ways design can enable system-wide change in the food industry.

A creative mindset can be a powerful force for looking beyond the status quo. People who use the creative techniques we outline are better able to apply their imagination to painting a picture of the future. They believe they have the ability to improve on existing ideas and positively impact the world around them, whether at work or in their personal lives.