IDEO

When category-defining challenges like disruption, the accelerating pace of change, and the need to rethink how organizations work are on the table, looking back on the current year and fighting for the same budget won't work. That's why many of the leaders we partner with are massively rethinking their priorities and where to best focus their resources. It’s a lot to balance, but the process doesn’t have to feel like guesswork.

Organizations are quite good at optimizing for today. They’re laser-focused on KPIs, governance, budgeting cycles, and incentives that reward delivering on a quarter’s results. But these systems aren’t well-designed for exploring uncertainty 10 to 20 years in the future. Most organizations don’t have the capacity to continuously sense, interpret, and act on future possibilities. This means they can easily lose their edge. As a futurist, I’ve been helping organizations do this work for years.

Organizations are quite good at optimizing for today. They’re laser-focused on KPIs, governance, budgeting cycles, and incentives that reward delivering on a quarter’s results. But these systems aren’t well-designed for exploring uncertainty 10 to 20 years in the future. Most organizations don’t have the capacity to continuously sense, interpret, and act on future possibilities. This means they can easily lose their edge. As a futurist, I’ve been helping organizations do this work for years.

Early in the relationship, a team of IDEO designers and Eli Lilly leaders traveled the world to understand how people with diabetes live with the disease. Their findings led to the design of a series of award-winning insulin injection pens like SAVVIO. Portable, aesthetically pleasing, and discreet, the pens are suitable for use in both medical and personal settings.

What will it mean when an algorithm can handle 90 percent of your job? What will working with dozens of agents be like? When anyone can build enterprise tools—instantaneously? That future has already arrived at the major AI labs—and faster than almost everyone expected, even Anthropic. Founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who set out to build AI that is safe and useful, it’s now used by millions and was valued at $965 billion in its most recent funding round.

Travel is fundamentally a human experience, and personalization has always been the ideal: the concierge who remembers your name, the host who anticipates your needs, the perfect room tailored to your preferences. But true personalization has traditionally been a luxury, reserved for those with wealth and elite status.

I’ve never been a big fan of medical dramas, but I couldn’t stop watching The Pitt, the HBO Max show about a fictional Pittsburgh ER at a public teaching hospital. The high-stakes medical cases, relentless pace, and scrappy, sleep-deprived team you can’t help but root for had millions of viewers counting down to Thursday nights earlier this year. But for me, it was about watching the work itself. Apparently, I’m not alone.

Imagine an engine that generates alternative endings for stories, a 2x2 visual tool for choosing which films to watch,  or a digital game of telephone that transforms a poem into something altogether different, like a location on a map. For Khyati Trehan, a Design Lead at Google Creative Lab, these are the weird, improbable, delightful explorations that AI is catalyzing.

When we prototype, we embrace what we call the three Rs: rough, rapid, and right. We keep prototypes rough, so that the people we design with feel comfortable providing honest feedback. We move rapidly, getting in as many reps as we can to open up creative possibilities, learn from each iteration, and avoid falling in love with the first ideas that pop into our heads.

For leading fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, one way to escape the echo chamber is to adopt a human-centered approach—to actively listen to consumers and reconnect with the realities of their lives. It’s about more than bringing them in at a certain stage of the project. Their needs have to be considered from the very beginning.