Taking play seriously

Picture a room of senior stakeholders, each one quietly waiting for a reason to say no. Every idea that surfaces is shot down in seconds until someone suggests a simple imagination exercise, and the whole conversation cracks open. That moment, and what it reveals about how adults think, sits at the heart of Michelle Lee’s episode.

Michelle is Partner and Executive Managing Director at IDEO, the design consultancy behind the original Apple mouse and decades of category-defining work. Her argument is that play doesn’t just belong in the nursery, it belongs in the boardroom. Curiosity, creativity, and experimentation are what adults are trained out of and exactly what organisations need to rediscover if they’re to stay ahead of change.

Drawing on a career that began in aerospace engineering and ran through the toy industry before leading her to IDEO, Michelle explains why the hardest problems in health, education, and the future of work are best met by going wide before going deep. She’s just as sharp on the tools shaping modern design, which she frames as accelerators of human judgement rather than substitutes for it. Her advice is simple: stop mandating change, and start inspiring it.