Creative Leadership in Times of Uncertainty

Creative leadership in times of uncertainty

There’s no single recipe for leading through uncertain times. In moments like these, IDEO Co-Chair Tim Brown likes to turn to creativity because it allows leaders to balance staying hyper-focused on the challenges they’re facing today while still thinking optimistically about the future.

In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Tim shares how leaders can tap into creative leadership to navigate the challenges of today. He talks about what challenges are top of mind for leaders today, why creativity is a counter intuitive solution to the challenges of today, and practical tips for how leaders can tap into their creativity to navigate tensions.

 

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

 

In this episode with Tim, we cover:

(2:20) Introduction and what’s inspiring Tim lately

(7:33) Challenges facing leaders today

(10:40) Why creative leadership is important in this moment

(18:30) The 3 leadership modes

(27:52) Why asking questions is a creative act

(47:18) Conclusion and Tim’s advice for his younger self

 


If you want to learn more about how to lead with vision, through culture, and alongside your team, check out our online course Leading for Creativity, taught by Tim.


 

Transcript:

Coe Leta Stafford:

Hello, and welcome to the Creative Confidence Podcast, where we talk to special guests about creativity, leadership, and innovation. I'm Coe Leta Stafford, a partner at IDEO. I am so excited for our conversation today. We are talking with Tim Brown. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Brown:

Hello Coe. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me along.

Coe Leta Stafford:

We're so happy to have you. So we'll be talking with Tim Brown about creative leadership, and he'll be sharing some practical tips and strategies for how we can all tap into creativity as a leader to navigate times of uncertainty. So, Tim, to get us started, what is something that you always carry with you or will find on your desk?

Tim Brown:

Well, it's on my desk today. It's often on my desk when I'm traveling around. This is like my latest toy that I'm really excited about. And this'll just have just, I'm just, I'm exposing some of my design geekness here. It's a very utilitarian thing, so I'll show it on the camera. It's a power supply, right? I love it because it's a power supply that I can use to power everything that I have. So my computer, my Apple watch, my phone, my headphones, all in one. It’s powerful enough to do it. I mean, it's a practical thing, but this is, for me, this is what creativity is all about. It's got this thing that's truly delightful about it.

So you probably won't be able to tell, but this thing is incredibly thin, right? It's maybe 12 millimeters, something like that. In America, it's just over half an inch. It has on the front 120 volt power, a power socket for a regular plug. But the cool thing is the prongs of the plug are actually longer, deeper than the power supply itself. So how can this possibly work, right? But when you push the plug in, you know, if you can, I'll hold, hold it close. There's a small gap. The surface pops out.

So that's just incredibly clever. It's really simple, really clever and delightful, and I love it. When you pop it out again, it disappears. And now this thing is thinner than it should be in order to plug. So this for me is like, creative problem solving is about doing something that's useful, but also something that's delightful. And so I get a little bit of pleasure every time I use this thing. I love it. So that's something I'm carrying around with me everywhere I go these days.

Coe Leta Stafford:

What a great start, Tim. I love that. And like you said, that just summarizes what great design and creativity does. It's useful, and solves needs and can add a moment of delight to your day. Thank you for that.

So let me tell you about Tim. Tim Brown is the co-chair of IDEO and vice-chair of the kyu collective. He's the author of Change by Design and has introduced design thinking to business leaders worldwide. Tim has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Rotman Magazine, and his TED Talks “Serious Play” and “Designers Think Big” have reached millions.

As you may know, his work focuses on creative leadership and the strategic application of design across many sectors, healthcare, education, tech, mobility, and more. So again, Tim, what a pleasure to have you here today. What are some of the qualities that you encounter, Tim, when you talk with leaders in terms of what they are facing right now as leaders?

Tim Brown:

Well, I think there's something about the kinds of challenges that we're facing today. And I suspect if we took ourselves back, we may have always said the same thing, but they seem larger than ever. They seem more systemic than ever. I think they fall into a couple of categories, at least the ones that I'm talking to leaders about. There are ones that I think of as being largely reactive. You know, somehow circumstances have changed in a big way, and now we've gotta think about a whole bunch of things that we weren't thinking about, before. Now, you know, the obvious example of that is what's happened is the pandemic and how that's changed our approach to work, whether it's our technical approach to work, remote versus hybrid, or our mental approach to work, in terms of what we are, what we can and wish to have as a balance of work and how we want work to play a role in our lives.

So that's largely been imposed on leaders, right? They didn't really see it coming, and now it's a big thing that they've gotta deal with. Another example is one where, at least for a lot of organizations today, it's a little less reactive, a little bit more proactive—in other words, organizations and leaders are deciding to deal with it. An example of that is climate. I mean, climate, let's face it, is gonna be the world's biggest reactive problem ultimately. But right now, largely the organizations that are really diving in and tackling it seriously are thinking about it proactively. They're thinking about it kind of relatively early. And they're trying to figure out what their role as an organization might be in what I would call a climate era. The whole new economy of the climate era that's gonna exist over the coming decades.

So some of these big things are reactive, some of them are proactive. Both of them have one thing in common, though, which is that they seem incredibly complex in the present, and they are, but we also need to figure out where we're gonna go in the future, right? We can't actually solve them in the present. We actually have to think about how we solve them in the future. What state do we want to get to? What new kind of balance of circumstances? What new solutions will we ultimately need to figure out in order to forge our way into the future around these things. And so they are both problems of the present and problems of the future.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I love that. Thank you for saying that. Context, problems of the present, opportunities of the future, reactive, proactive. So I think we can all relate to these challenges in some way. So how do we move forward? How do you, as a leader, balance and navigate and hold this tension? So I know, Tim, you would say creative leadership is a very powerful tool. Um, so you teach a whole course on this. And in it you describe creative leadership as an approach to leadership that will help you tackle complex challenges by navigating ambiguity, enabling collaboration, and maintaining momentum. So why is this approach so important for this moment we're in and the uncertainty of many of these challenges?

Tim Brown:

Yeah, I mean, I'd take a step back and say when we're facing these large complex challenges, when we're facing the unknown, we need new kinds of choices. We need new kinds of solutions. So we need creativity, right? We need our organizations to reveal, search out, provide new choices, new paths to follow, right? In order to have creativity, you need creative leadership. In order to unpack the potential of an organization and unpack the potential of the people who make up any organization, you need the right kind of leadership.

The kind of leadership you need for efficient execution, which is what we tend to do when we can sort of already see the future…in times of relative abundance, in times of relative stability, we can focus all our attention on efficient execution because we sort of know the parameters and we can see into the future is a bit like staring at a railroad track going into the future. And we have done historically for quite a long time focus most of our leadership effort on execution. But when those railroad tracks disappear, and suddenly all you can see is fog, that's when you need new choices. We don't know what direction we're gonna take through it. We need new ideas, and that's when we need a different kind of leadership.

Coe Leta Stafford:

But it sounds so counterintuitive. It sounds like if you don't know where you're going, you might wanna focus even more on the present or just executing in the present.

Tim Brown:

Well, we think about where we are today, where we're worried about heading into recession, where if we're in business, we can see our customers being less willing to buy our products and services. If we're employed by an organization, we can wonder about the future of our jobs. And that does tend to pull us into the present. That kind of anxiety tends to pull us into the present. And often the only thing we need, we know how to do when we are thinking about the present, is to figure out a way to kind of do more of what we were doing before.

Coe Leta Stafford:

So what should we do instead?

Tim Brown:

Well, I would just make the argument that if you think about it logically in a situation where there's less abundance, where there's less possibility naturally occurring around you, then the world's just got a little bit more competitive. And when the world's a bit more competitive, the ones that ultimately succeed are gonna be the ones that figure out new ways to do things or figure out how to be different or figure out how to offer something the world needs, but doesn't realize there's a solution to. That's when creativity is so important. In fact, if we look back historically, there's just countless examples of really great ideas and great organizations that have emerged in times of recession.

When actually, there isn't a time of abundance, but actually there's a time of constraint, and people are really forced to think creatively in order to create something new. You can go right the way back into the Great Depression in the ‘30s. And that's when things like Fortune Magazine were created. Or you go to the recession in the early ‘90s, that's when Google appeared. There are lots and lots of examples of great organizations that have appeared in times of constraint.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you for that. So how does creative leadership help? Like, I think a lot of us have a mental model that creative leadership is for just innovation when you're ready to diverge and think new or there's a disruption, but it actually can be something for these moments of uncertainty. Tell us more about that. Why is that?

Tim Brown:

Well, I mean, at its heart, creativity is about asking an unexpected question in order to get an unexpected answer. I mean, and those unexpected questions are normally stimulated by looking at the world slightly differently or getting different information than others have that cause you to see things differently and see possibilities differently. It's not the myth, which is creativity is about some blindingly brilliant idea that jumps out of superhuman minds. It's about people putting themselves in a position to look at the world differently. And so, you know, again, in a moment of crisis or in a moment of confusion or uncertainty, it's harder work to look at the world differently. But when, when you do so, it can reveal all kinds of new kinds of possibilities.

And so I'll give an example. So back when the pandemic hit, I think like everybody else, I felt pretty helpless in that moment, sent home because of lockdown, and I couldn't do anything. And, you know, I remember really feeling quite hopeless, not knowing how to think about the future. And then a number of folks around IDEO started to think about some of the very immediate problems of how do we get okay protective gear out to people who need it. I started getting people reaching out to me from the medical health community saying, how do we think about getting the right kinds of behaviors to happen? And so as soon as I started working on the problem, and I saw this across IDEO too, as soon as we started working on the problem, even though it was often very simple things like how can we make some masks to get to local hospitals or how can we begin to tackle this problem going forward, I felt this sense of agency. I felt like I was much more in control and I was actually contributing to moving forward. And so that was in a very immediate moment of dealing with the next 90 days or dealing with the next 30 days, but it was very powerful for me. And I think a lot of other people, it's like we could just dive in and start to make a difference.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you for sharing that, Tim. Everything from, we need creativity to be able to ask the unexpected questions to you personally sharing. I think there's this myth we have that leaders should have all the answers and they know what to do in all contexts. And you even admitted you felt helpless with these things.

Tim Brown:

Yeah. And we talk about this in the Leading for Creativity course, which is this idea that actually leadership, you exhibit much more leadership through asking the right questions rather than having the right answers.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Let's start to go towards the tips and strategies. So help us all, Tim. How could we start to develop new practices to be a creative leader and to practice our creativity in this? What does it look like in practice? And I understand there's kind of two big sets of leadership skills that we can all practice. The first one is leadership modes. So I've heard you talk about, as a creative leader, it's not just one role. You talk about three modalities. So this idea of leading from the front, leading alongside, and leading from behind. So tell us more. What does that look like in practice?

Tim Brown:

Yeah. I mean, this notion that it's a kind of a multimodal practice I think is important for multiple reasons. I mean, firstly, in our sort of executional operational mode, we tend to think of leaders as being the place where the decisions get made, right? The ultimate call, where in order to make that decision, you have to have all the information. And we've tended to assume that is what leadership is in any circumstance. But it gets you into trouble when you are trying to unlock the creativity of an organization, right? It's not about unlocking your own creativity, it's about unlocking the creativity of a whole organization. Because if you assume you have to make all the calls, then you're assuming you are gonna have all the good ideas.

And, you know, it doesn't really matter how brilliant you are. It is highly unlikely that you'll have all the ideas, as many good ideas as the whole organization is capable of. So we need to have leadership practices that unlock the organization. And I've observed three that help. And I'm not saying this is a complete set. I think there may well be others, but three are really useful to think about. So there is a role for the traditional leader, the CEO, the head of department, the head of a team, that's sort of leading from the front role. But as I've mentioned already, that's not about having the answers. It's about asking questions, questions that help orient the team, or orient the organization or strive for things that they might otherwise not strive for.

I tend to think of my metaphor of an explorer who might stand on a beach with a telescope and wonder what's over the horizon and ask, “What do we think is over that horizon?” And then of course, it's up to a hard whole group of people to figure out how to go there. As an example that we talk about in the course, somebody I've worked with for a long time is a leader from Peru, who's a business leader there. Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who asked the question when he was interested in figuring out how to help the middle class of Peru—what would an international quality, low-cost, large scale school system look like for our country?

And then a whole bunch of people went away and built it, right? And so the Innova school system that came as a result of that question has transformed not only his very large business, but also helps show the way in terms of what effective low cost education can do in Latin America. So that all started with a question, and that I think is real leadership from the front. Then we talk about sort of setting the conditions for creativity. So if you're asking the questions in order to orient a team or an organization, then setting the conditions, making it possible for an organization to thrive as it explores, is another one of those roles. And I think of the metaphor of a gardener there.

I mean, tending the garden, feeding the soil, watering the soil, it's an obvious one. That can take all kinds of guises. I mean, in some cases it might be hiring the right team. In other cases it might be providing rituals that get a team to feel more empowered or more creative. And we talk about that quite a lot in the course. A leader that I've observed in the last couple of years, who I think does it in a slightly different way, is Stéphane Bancel, who's the CEO of Moderna. And he was worried about how rapidly the culture was scaling at Moderna, you can imagine how quickly it scaled over the last several years as they've taken on Covid vaccine.

And what he focused on was describing the mindsets of how their culture thinks, so that as all of these new people were coming in, they could plug in much faster that they understood when they were in a meeting, why people were talking about risk in a certain way, or why people were thinking about the future in a certain way by making sure that they had sort of described these mindsets in a way that was shareable to people. That's a great example, I think, of meeting from behind, of setting the conditions for others to be successful.

And then the third one is leading from the side. And you know, for anybody that watches sports, it's the player-coach, the coach who has played the game as it were and understands what it feels like to be a player and understand the uncertainty perhaps, or the risks that you take, then help take that extra bit of risk or make that decision or move forward or think a little differently about the problem while working alongside the team.

And that's this mode of leading from the side and basically kind of rolling your sleeves up, getting your hands dirty within the creative process. And somebody that I worked with for many years, who I think is supremely good at that, is Jim Hackett, who was the CEO of Ford through their big transformation towards electrification. And he's somebody who would never fail to turn up to a big workshop where the team was grappling with new problems and help coach. He himself was a very serious college level football player and has a lot of respect for the people that coached him. So he is always taken this coaching approach. He finds it very natural, I think. But I think we have to remember that those of us that have had previous experiences can be useful. Again, not in providing the answers to the team, but providing the confidence or the nudges that it might take in order for the team to move forward.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I love that you just, thank you for summarizing all those three modes so eloquently. So tell us, help those of us who may be new to this, should a leader be good at all three of those modes?

Tim Brown:

I think we run the risk whenever we talk about leadership of any kind, of implying that we all have to be superhuman and superlative at everything. And of course, you know, that's not realistic and not true, and can actually get us into trouble when we think it is true. We should all understand them. We should all practice them, try them and remember them. But we won't all necessarily be great at all of them. And so my approach to that is always to make sure that I'm working with people who are really good at the things that I’m not good at—and it's not always the case of whether I'm good at it or not good at it, but if I am in a moment in my life or in a phase of work where I just know I'm not gonna pay enough attention to one of them, then I might rely on somebody else to do that for me.

So I'll give you a good example. I mean, the last year or so, I stepped back into leading IDEO, and Paul Bennett stepped up alongside me, and he's been our creative Chief Creative Officer for a long time. And the reason that works so well, not least that we worked together for 20 years, but was because as I was finding myself immersed in a lot of the important questions of the organization, he was obsessed about questions of the future of the work. And that was a really important set of questions to keep asking. But I knew that I wasn't gonna be paying enough attention to those, but he was. And so together we were able to kind of perform the totality of what the organization needed, at least get closer to that.

And I think it is important to recognize whether it's because of what you're focusing on or your own confidence or expertise when you need help, and when others might be able to provide some of these modes in a way that you can't because the whole organization will benefit from that sort of humility as to like, okay, what, what am I really doing effectively? What do I need help doing?

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you for sharing that. That's such a good point of just when to recognize maybe when you need to pair or call on the expertise of someone else. Also, maybe when you need to tune into, you might need to switch modes. You might not even be aware.

So a whole other set of strategies besides leadership modes is asking questions. And you often talk about this paired with listening. So everybody agrees, listening is a good idea for leaders, no controversy there. Why do you connect that to being able to ask better questions then? And let's just talk about questions too.

Tim Brown:

Well, I mean, I believe questions are a creative act, right? That questions take you and whoever you are interacting with from one set of assumptions, breaking those assumptions and exploring some new possibilities. That's what questions do. They're rarely about to simply give me the answer to this very specific thing. Particularly in business, we usually ask questions, which are open-ended questions. And in order to ask a good question, you need new insights and new data, right? And there were really, I think, two principle ways that I think that we use most of the time, of getting to those insights that cause you to ask a question that you might not otherwise have asked.

One is that you hear something coming from somebody else, you are listening to what they're saying, and you are thinking about that in a way which says, what is it? What is it not? Maybe not what's on the surface, but what am I hearing? What am I feeling from them? What's the subtext of what they're saying that causes you to ask a question that takes you forward in some way? A really good example of doing that is, you know, in the design world, when we're trying to discover what people really might need, they rarely tell you.

People will rarely articulate what it is they need, particularly when you're asking them, or trying to figure out what they might need in the future. And particularly when you're talking about what they might need that is based on some new technology or some new solution that they may not have experienced before, right? Because it's very hard for us to project. But if you listen hard enough, and you can often divine some insight as to what's really bugging them or what their real concerns are. And then if you ask the right question, you can kind of open that up and explore it. So listening deeply is a way of getting to data, a way of getting to an insight that from which you can ask an interesting question.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I like the hint. You gave a hint too. You said you really tune into the feelings, you get curious about the feelings. Like emotions are a great place to get curious and really listen.

Tim Brown:

Well, yes, for two reasons. Firstly, because emotions are often the thing that give away what people are really thinking. And secondly, because so often, particularly in business, we think that rational data is what's going to move the problem forward, whereas in fact, it's not people what, not necessarily what people know is right, but what people feel is right. Um, and it's why, you know, the marketing industries exist, right? Because they tap into our emotions. And so there are two reasons why it's important, and you know, also it's that you are getting a lot of data, so you have to use your intuition a little bit. So listening is a really important part of getting to that new insight that allows you to ask a new question. Equally, observation is another way of doing it.

Where you can look at the world and see things and wonder about them, and ask questions. Well, why does the world choose to do things that way? Why do things happen that way? And, by observing, you can again, get to new insights and get to new data, which leads you to new questions. And a form of observation is receiving new information. I like to read about topics that are not necessarily related to what I do, because I find that they often lead me to really new insights. And when I'm reading a book right now on animal senses, and it's a really interesting book about the science of senses. But what's even more interesting about it is you realize that other species, animals, live in totally different worlds of perception based on having different senses. And that's a really interesting insight, because that happens to human beings too, right? We live based on what we perceive, we experience the world fundamentally differently. And it's really important to remember that when you're trying to design for them. That was just a random example, but I find that any new form of data can lead to an interesting new question.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. Your good friend and colleague who we've had on the podcast, Keith Yamashita, talks at length about how important it is to keep expanding your sources of input about the world and curiosities about the world.

Tim Brown:

Yeah. I think that's exactly right.

Coe Leta Stafford:

So to summarize, part of why listening is so important, there's kind of two principled ideas. So one is you are listening for insights, new insights and understanding of the world, and also observing the world to ask better questions. Tim, you said, one of the reasons why you love asking questions and beautiful questions is you're breaking assumptions. What does that mean? And why is that part of what you think about as a creative leader?

Tim Brown:

Because I think when you use a question to break some assumptions, you immediately open up the landscape of possibilities in terms of solutions. So there's a form of question, for instance, that I love, which leads to something that's called a thought experiment.

And thought experiments have been around for a long time. It's quite a well known approach to thinking about the world. One of the four first thought experiments about the future goes all the way back. And I'm sure there are examples going further back than this, but this one's well documented back to 1517 when Thomas Moore asked the question of what a democratic society might look like. And the thought experiment that he used to explore what a democratic society might look like was, was this island that he called utopia. That was when the word utopia got invented. It's come to mean now thinking about optimistic futures, but back then it was a thought experiment about what a democratic society might look like.

Um, we can jump forward to the last century when Albert Einstein thought, what would it be like to stand or dance on a beam of light? And he used that thought experiment to figure out what his theory of relativity was. And so thought experiments come from asking questions that seem kind of nuts at some level, dancing on a beam of light. What the heck does that mean? I'll give you an example of a thought experiment that I've been encouraging people to play around with recently in the climate space, which is what will we do when we have abundant, limitless supplies of carbon-free energy?

Coe Leta Stafford:

Hmm.

Tim Brown:

We will get there. It's, I mean, we have the science now to get there, so we will get there, we'll get to a point where we are not creating CO2 with any of our energy supplies. When you could use as much energy as you like, you could do all kinds of interesting things with, and you move from an attitude of constraint and limitation to one of abundance and possibility. And the way that we tackle certain problems will change when we have limitless energy. And I just, I mean, that's sort of a whimsical thought experiment in some ways, but it gets you thinking about possible climate solutions quite differently. So that's an example of a thought experiment that starts with a question that challenges assumptions, right? Because right now we just assume energy's a problem, and what happens if we assume the opposite of that, that energy actually, there's as much of it as we want, and we can do what we want with it.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I love that that ties back to where our whole conversation started too. Some of these high level challenges and this idea of the default might be very hyper focused on the present, but asking a question like that allows you to imagine different possibilities, and then you can still backtrack. So what would that mean, what we might start doing now?

Tim Brown:

Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, you know, one, it means we should be focusing all of our efforts on as much renewable energy as possible, because when we have plenty of it, we'll be able to do a whole bunch of things that we can't imagine doing today.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. So thank you so much, Tim. I just want to thank everyone for joining us. So Tim, our last question is quite simply, what leadership advice would you give yourself at an earlier stage in your career? And as you think of that one, thank you for joining everyone. What an amazing community. I would love to see more of you keep building and learning on these topics.

So again, we have been joined today by Tim Brown talking about the use of creative leadership in times of uncertainty. If you'd like what you've heard today, I invite you to check out more episodes in our podcast called the Creative Confidence Series. As we mentioned, Keith Yamashita’s episode is a great one for inspiration.

I'll also mention, Tim is an instructor of our course Leading for Creativity. And if you want even more tips on how to be a better creative leader and empower more people on your team and organization, I invite you to check that out. And with that, thank you everyone for joining. And, Tim, close us out. What advice would you have given a younger Tim Brown?

Tim Brown:

I would have advised myself to do a better job of building a practice of reflection. And only because When you're trying to be creative, when you're trying to kind of explore the world, it can sometimes feel like, well, you're forever moving forward, and I'm not quite sure what I've achieved or whether I'm achieving enough. And I think getting into a practice of reflection is really helpful. There are different ways of doing that. I mean, there's one CEO I work with who every other Saturday morning, he sits down for two or three hours and just thinks about have I made any progress, and what does that mean and what should I be thinking about that I'm not thinking about? So he has a kind of a ritual.

I found that some of the best moments of reflection for me are when I am asked to give a talk about something or teach, or write an article or write a book. That's a kind of mega reflection when you do that. But it took me a long time to get to the importance of it. But I think, the reason is you realize how much you're learning, and then you can use that learning when you realize if you're not conscious about it, you can't use it, right? So you realize how much you're learning, you perhaps realize, well, I may not be making as much progress here as I want, so I need to pay more attention to it. Stop yourself getting distracted. So I think having a good, whatever your personal practice about reflection is, making sure you've got one, and that you use it to help appreciate what you're doing, because creativity is a wonderful way to live your life, but also to keep driving you forward.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Magnificent, what a gift you've been today, Tim. Thank you for, for all all you've shared, all your expertise. Thank you everyone for joining. I think all of us are leaving a little more inspired. And as usual, I encourage all of us to try out something this week. Just try it, something that you learned from this, from Tim, and let's all practice the ways we can be better creative leaders. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Brown:

Thanks Coe, and everyone. It's a lot of fun. Thanks everybody.

 

About the Speaker

Tim Brown
Co-Chair, IDEO

Tim Brown is co-chair of IDEO of global design and innovation firm IDEO and Vice Chair of the kyu Collective. His best selling book Change By Design has introduced design thinking to business leaders worldwide. Tim has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Rotman Magazine and his TED talks Serious Play and Designers Think Big have reached millions. His work focuses on creative leadership and the strategic application of design across sectors such as health, education, technology, mobility and global development.

 


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