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.

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?

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.

As founder of IDEO, for over 30 years David Kelley has been tackling complex problems using design. We sat down with David to talk about what he’s learned over the decades and why design thinking is more relevant now than ever. But as David says, don’t trust us, design thinking is our religion.  

In our Creative Confidence Series chat with IDEO Design Researcher Silvia Vergani and Principal Research Scientist at Verily Life Sciences Danielle Schlosser, we chatted about the challenges and opportunities in healthcare innovation today and how healthcare practitioners can begin to apply a more human-centered approach to their work. When design thinking methodologies are applied to healthcare they lead to a human focus and an openness to generate and test lots of ideas to find more innovative, far-reaching solutions. 

In our recent Creative Confidence webinar series, we talked with IDEO Partner Tom Kelley about scaling creativity and unlocking creative potential throughout an organization. Here are a few of our favorite highlights.