The Power of Play: How to Solve Problems Like a Toy Designer

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The Power of Play: How to Solve Problems Like a Toy Designer

When facing complex business problems, the traditional method of shear force and determination often falls short. To be successful, you need an approach that helps you imagine future scenarios, explore creative solutions, and consider things from new and different perspectives. How do you do this? The key is play. Play gives us permission to dream and diverge, think outside the box, and discover solutions to unprecedented problems.

In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO Partner & Managing Director and instructor of our new course Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving, Michelle Lee, discusses the crucial role of play in addressing complex problems of all shapes and sizes—from healthcare to product design. Michelle shares lessons learned from her experience as a toy designer as well as activities for you to integrate play into your work and bring play-skeptics on board.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Here are our top takeaways from our conversation with Michelle:

1. Toy design can teach us how to be better problem solvers

When we design toys, there are no right or wrong answers. We are prompted to go wide, explore new ideas, and think outside the box. We aren’t afraid to try new things and there are very few constraints on what we can create.

According to Michelle, who began her career in aerospace before pivoting to toy design and then pivoting again to design more broadly, we can bring this same mentality to tackling complex business problems. Today, Michelle works on complex problems across various industries including healthcare, government, education, and consumer goods—but her approach to solving problems is still informed by her experience as a toy designer.

Toy design teaches us the value of play in solving problems. It teaches us that there are rarely single answers to business problems and that often to make progress on problems, we need to first go wide and consider things from new perspectives. Many of the challenges businesses are facing today are incredibly complex, interconnected, and everchanging—to be successful we have to be creative in thinking about how we solve those challenges.