Strategy advisor Roger Martin shares common mistakes people make in the early stages of strategic planning and how to avoid them. 

Are you struggling with a challenge at work and wish you could get some words of wisdom from someone who’s been there? In our new Creative Confidence Podcast series, Mentor Moment, we call on IDEO professionals to help our IDEO U community.

Design thinking has inspired startups, nonprofits, and even large companies to take a human-centered approach when creating new products. Explore our favorite examples of products and services that came from design thinking, including a prescription home-delivery system and the first wearable breast pump.

IDEO Senior Portfolio Director Dwayne Edwards gives a framework for balancing intuition and data, shares strategies to surface an intuitive ability in yourself and in your team, and talks about the importance of building self-awareness to fuel your intuition.

Work can be a way to grow professional skills, a place to build close relationships, or an opportunity to make an impact in the world. Use design thinking to improve your work life—by finding the right career questions, getting inspiration from the real world, and prototyping ideas in the workplace.

Experience design is the crafting of distinct, memorable and transformative moments in time. Experience designers aren’t just designing what people might do, but also what people might feel. Well-designed experiences change your audience in some way—a shift in feelings, beliefs or actions.

Systems design challenges are the focus of Melanie Bell-Mayeda’s work at IDEO. As a partner and managing director, she has worked in systems design for 20+ years. In this conversation, she shares her approach to mapping complex systems, how to identify the layers of a system in order to spot opportunities for change, and ways to manage bias in systems design.

The most impactful lessons and skills we’ve gained from our podcast guests, learners, and IDEO U instructors in 2020.

Here are the books we’ve found helpful for deepening our understanding of design thinking.

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.

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.