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Michelle Lee
Partner and Executive Managing Director at IDEO, leading the San Francisco studio and its Play Lab; former aerospace and toy industry engineer.
2
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2
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Sep 1, 2026
Taking play seriously
5:32

Asif MoghalHOST
So could you just kind of dig into what do you mean by a play mindset in a professional working environment context?
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5:42Michelle LeeGUEST
And I totally understand when people say, oh my gosh, isn't play just for kids? Isn't it fun? Isn't it frivolous? I think I've come on a whole journey myself of what play means because I got my start as an engineer.
24 MINS LATER
CitriniPocalypse, Dot Com Lore, Gene-Edited Polo Horses | Alap Shah, Will Brown, Michelle Lee, Mike Annunziata
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146:34Michelle LeeGUEST
They have all the scientific knowledge, but they're also the ones going into the lab and running the experiments.
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146:42Michelle LeeGUEST
They can, like, visualize what's going on, and they can make changes as they see things, um, start happening inside the experiments.
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146:51Michelle LeeGUEST
That's what we're trying to capture, right? The ability to be really flexible, to actually reason about the science as, as it is happening, and also taking into account all of the knowledge that's come before us, all the scientific papers, all the different results-
