Wonderschool CEO and Co-founder Chris Bennett shares his human-centered process for building and scaling a business.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.