Journey mapping can be daunting. When considering a user journey, we recommend starting with what you know and using this as a spark to help you think creatively about what could be different. Often when designing services we tend to think only about the moment of interaction when the service happens, but it’s important think beyond that moment and consider the entire user experience well before or after the interaction. Here’s an activity to help you get into the mindset of designing for the entire user journey.

In our latest Creative Confidence Series Chat, Suzanne Gibbs Howard, Dean of IDEO U, chatted with Mathew Chow, Director of Organizational Design at IDEO San Francisco, about prototyping organizational change.

In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, IDEO managing director and Human-Centered Service Design instructor Melanie Bell-Mayeda and IDEO U’s Coe Leta Stafford shared stories and tips about how to use service design to bring more meaningful experiences to customers and organizations.

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.

In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, IDEO U Dean Suzanne Gibbs Howard sat down with Brynn Harrington, Director of People Growth at Facebook, to discuss the question, what’s truly motivating to people in the modern workplace? They also explored the topics of a recent Harvard Business Review article Brynn co-authored: The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause.

Reflective self-awareness is the entry point to creative leadership. Being comfortable with not knowing the answers, learning from failure, and collaborating with others different from yourself are essential to creativity, and they all involve a healthy dose of self-awareness. Here are two actionable ways to put yourself in a reflective mode, and to help you discover the role you were meant to play, in your career and as a leader.

As Tim Brown says, old school models of leadership are not enough anymore. Top-down mandates and telling people what to do doesn’t lead to the creativity and innovation that allows modern companies to make an impact. Instead, leadership is about generating, embracing, and executing bold ideas—”even when the path is not clear.” And that all starts with asking questions.

One of the best ways to get inspired is to look outside your context. When working on new design challenges, IDEO designers often use analogous inspiration to gain fresh perspective. For example, emergency room doctors can get insights about organizing their medical supplies by spending time with a Nascar pit crew and an airline employee might get ideas about check-in by observing a hotel front desk.

Teachers are the innovators education has been waiting for, and design thinking can help them activate their own creativity and solve the biggest challenges in education today. In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, Coe sat down with with Sandy Speicher, Managing Director of IDEO’s education practice and a strategic adviser to the K-12 Lab Network at the Stanford d.school, to discuss design thinking in education and how teachers can be powerful change agents for schools and education as a whole.

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.

More and more businesses are in touch with their customers from an information perspective, but not necessarily an insights perspective. The purpose of insights is to connect head and heart knowledge—information plus inspiration. Too often, information just describes phenomena with no clear path of what to do with it. But the best insights reveal behaviors or phenomena and point to solutions or ideas. And because insights are grounded in human needs and desires, they lead to ideas that create value in people’s lives.

At IDEO, we believe that you can design the parts of a business just like you can any product, service, or brand. As Amy points out, it’s about realizing that it’s not just product design that makes a company successful in the market—it’s about the business model, the revenue model, the operations, the strategy, and even the IT. It’s about blending the rigor of traditional business strategies and tools with design, all in the service of meeting a human need.