A Conversation with … Rama Gheerawo | Creative Leadership

As part of our podcast, A Conversation About Design, our Creative Director, Amit Patel, recently sat down for a conversation with a true creative leader in the world of inclusive design, Rama Gheerawo.

You can watch the episode on YouTube, or give a listen on Spotify.

Amit: Rama’s it great to have you with us. Why don’t we start right off the bat with tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’ve been doing over the last few years?

Rama: Sure, thank you Amit. My name is Rama Gheerawo, I think I describe myself as a human first, designer second because that is the right way around. I believe very much in inclusive design, design thinking and have written a book on Creative Leadership called “Creative Leadership Born from Design” which looks a little bit like this and it will be coming out as a Penguin paperback. I have had many different roles – I’ve worked for myself as a designer, I’ve been the director at the Helen Hamlin Center for design over the last decade. But importantly, I use design creativity in spaces and places where there’s exclusion – exclusion by age, by ability, by gender, by race because I think design is one of those most powerful forces on the planet.

So there’s a little potted history. I think just to say I have sat on a lot of award committees, I am an academic by training as well. Sometimes design and Academia don’t quite sit well in the same sentence, but more than that I’m a practical designer and I have run over a hundred projects with government business communities and importantly individuals worldwide.

Amazing, thank you so much for that great intro. There’s so many different points I want to jump into but one of the first ones, you know, particularly for the audience that’s listening – can you explain to us like how does, you know, and your book I’m sure kind of delves into this quite a bit, but how does creative leadership differ from traditional leadership models and what kind of advantages do you think it brings to either businesses or to projects?

So creative leadership actually came from a moment of intense vulnerability, and this was 15-16 years ago. I’d spent that month looking at points of intense exclusion – exclusion by age, by looking at care homes, by gender working with gender disparity both in the Middle East and Colombia, elders in China, you know, farmers in India. It was too much and I ended up crying in the shower and at that point I thought what if there’s one thing that we could change that could change everything and the answer came back resounding – leadership. If you change leadership you change everything.

From that point of view I also had another realization of what if most of what most of us are taught about leadership is wrong? You know, and a quick Google search on leadership training and you realize most of it comes from business – business canvases, or law or policy or politicians. But actually what about our mothers, our grandmothers, our school teachers? What about us? All of us have the ability to be a leader.

So I think that’s probably the number one thing that differs from traditional leadership models which say you have to be born or trained into being a leader, you need to be an ego broadcasting from a podium, you need to be a medaled general or a kind of sharp-suited CEO. But what about the more human heartfelt angles? And that’s really where creative leadership started.

And I think one final thing to say there is I was seeing a lot of leadership training for specific groups – you know, people of color in higher education, for a certain gender, a certain age – and I wanted to create a Leadership Model that was wholly human. So what did I turn to? Good old design. I feel design can make every conversation better, so applying it to different forms of leadership was a natural next step.

And I think that kind of picks up on one of my other questions I kind of prepared – you know, what inspired your focus along the way? So could you tell us a little bit about, you kind of just hinted on there, were there any moments or people or anything, realizations that inspired your focus on what you’re doing today?

I think creative leadership and inclusive design have been inspired by hundreds of tiny conversations that have been had with thousands of people. I mean creative leadership is a little bit of a silent giant because we have trained, you know, thousands if not tens of thousands of people. We trained nearly a thousand Hong Kong civil servants and I think that first Workshop, if I was to land on one example, was a moment because the greatest praise people can give as a designer is when they say what you did was unexpected.

So I was expect- you know, they said to me I was expecting a training in leadership and I got something different. And I still remember that first cohort because they said you didn’t sit down and take us through a sort of PowerPoint of purpose as what I like to call them, where here’s a diagram and we’re going to go through this triangle or circle or these points. You brought us back to humanity. You told us two interesting things that you know our purpose is in our name to work for civil society and to service that civil servant.

And I think that’s what creative leadership does – it’s bringing people back to levels of humanity. So the inspiration is a thousandfold, but it’s people saying things like Sarah in Texas who was put in charge of EDI after the murder of George Floyd, youngest of six siblings and said she was never going to be put in charge of anything and her older five siblings laughed at her at Thanksgiving dinner because they said “what, you’re in charge of something?” There was Ial from Aban, young female creative – three things that sort of worked against her in a traditional structure. And there was Richard from the UK who had spent his last savings having lost his job to come to our world workshop.

And those three people met in a workshop and we talk together, we laugh together, we cry together and we learn together with their different situations. So why doesn’t leadership look like that? Why are we shying away into teachings about leadership being so uncreative and so inhuman and inhumane?

What I love about you know what you’ve just spoken about is just that you’ve kind of touched upon many areas of the globe and how everyone’s kind of coming together and can kind of feel the impact of this. So I just want to slightly kind of pivot to inclusive design now, because I know that you’re doing a lot of work especially with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. So for our audience could you define inclusive design and tell us a little bit why it’s important to approach this in today’s society?

So the Helen Hamlin Center for Design actually defined the term in the early ’90s – ’93, ’94 is when one of the founding directors Roger Coleman was thinking about this. And I really like the definitions that have grown up around it – the best one for me is including the widest number of people in your creative endeavor and that’s really really simple because who doesn’t want that?

You know when I see entrepreneurs, students, startups of today they really differ from 10-15 years ago. You know, you guys are amazing. Why do I say this? Because you’re naturally inclusively minded. You know, it doesn’t need to be something that’s taught, it’s in your DNA because many people don’t want to hear of themselves, they want to hear of the work they want to hear of their patients, they want to hear of their customers, their colleagues.

So inclusive design is a very open-minded attitude to design. I think forms a key component – I would say it’s been slightly overshadowed by things like design for planet, design for sustainability but people forget that a big part of sustainability is people. You know, it’s behaviors – if a simple example, if you’re trying to get everyone to recycle efficiently and effectively, how does an 80-year-old with two hip replacements living on the third floor of an apartment building get their recycling down to the pavement? And we actually worked in Hong Kong and around Europe on some of these kind of situations.

So how does environmental sustainability land with social sustainability? So inclusive design continues to have a place and I think it can speak to many things from politics to finance etc.

I think this is going to be so fascinating for many of our kind of our design alumni you know, students are going through these programs, student people are looking to move into the space. I think it’s such a – you know, I don’t think enough people are really really thinking about it or even aware in many cases. So you know, going back to some of the projects that you’ve worked on in the past, you mentioned some of the names of the brands that you worked with – could you give us an example of where inclusive design has truly made an impact on what they’re trying to achieve?

Absolutely and just to say to your listeners – inclusive design is something you’re doing now. So you know, I don’t want to sit here feeling like I’m a high priest at the altar of inclusivity preaching to convert. All you need to do is tap into your humanity and I think that’s what we do, have done with every project.

So over 20 years ago Terminal 5 at Heathrow – so at the center and this was a project as I was coming online as an inclusive designer myself, but this was a project done with the new Terminal 5 crew that were building and specking and 250 Architects and designers there. And we were asked to give an inclusive design layer. One of the things we did was conduct research, go out and see the difficulties people had and they gave us 50 business users. We turned around and said we don’t need 50 business users, we need five people who will push the envelopes of what we’re doing.

So a five- an 8-year-old girl, an 80-year-old couple who couldn’t lift their suitcases, a visually impaired guy in his 60s and a Japanese tourist who didn’t speak English. Because you can design an airport for them, you can make it better for everyone. And the hundreds of things that we saw in filming their journeys through the old terminal one made that terminal better.

So we’ve done things like ambulances, taxis, we’ve worked with medication packaging. So you know, we’ve applied inclusive design in critical areas such as Hospital Wards but we’ve also gone out to communities – you know, communities of elders in China, we’ve worked in Africa, we’ve worked in Europe and even in South London looking at childhood obesity.

So inclusive design is about bringing that level of understanding of people’s exclusion, of their experiences of life, of the hate, the hurt and the exclusion that they’re experiencing – bringing that right into the designer’s mind, the hand and the creativity. And that’s just such a powerful thing to do because it makes sure that whatever you’re designing you’re getting it right. You’re getting it right because you’re getting it right for people and you’re getting it right for planet. So who doesn’t want to do that?

Yeah absolutely, and you know I think the approach and I love the examples of the personas or the segments that you provided there especially for building a new airport experience or designing a new airport experience. And that kind of leads me onto a question that you know in terms of challenges of approaching and implementing inclusive design – are there any challenges that you can see that face designers and or are there any challenges that you see face designers when trying to kind of sell this in to businesses or to stakeholders?

Oh that’s a beautiful question my friend. One is – the big one is that we’re misunderstood and I have a carefully researched process, findings for this. Go into any Uber or Bolt or Grab or taxi and say to them you’re a designer and look at what the next question is. They’ll say “Graphics or fashion?” or maybe “architecture?” So you’re locked into something that’s already about, you know, and the next question is about aesthetics or something like that.

So designers as givers of form and nothing more – but we are framework workers, we are CEOs, we are facilitators, we are voices for the people we’re designing for and with. And I think this is an incredibly powerful thing that people don’t understand. So part of the designer’s challenge is to move what we’re doing upstairs and upstream.

And part of my work – and you know I’ve got a new YouTube channel that’s launching that’s all around this – it’s about giving us the lexicon, the confidence, the power and the purpose as designers, as creatives, as entrepreneurs and innovators to be able to stand tall and breathe our wisdom and show our strength.

Because you know, I come from an Asian background – and for those of you who are just listening to the podcast I am an Indian male in my ’40s with dark brown skin. I like to think it’s 80% cocoa. I’ve got a neatly trimmed beard and a hairstyle that looks like I’ve just been electrocuted so it’s going straight up. And that – why do I do a visual description? Because it’s all part of the design of this podcast and this conversation to make things easier.

So I think we have to stand in our own truths, we have to be able to express the power that design can bring and the transformation that design can have. And the final thing to say on that because I could talk forever is – if I’m fundamental about anything I’m fundamental about design, but one positive is that design is seen as non-threatening.

So you know, if you’re HR, especially nowadays, you could be viewed with a level of suspicion – what are HR doing here and what are they up to? You know, or accountancy or marketing or senior leadership teams. But designers we can walk through walls, you know, we’re like superheroes from that point of view. Designers are fairly non-threatening but the flip side of that is we can be seen as ineffectual and people that are just brought into make things look pretty and that is still a rhetoric that I hear echoing around the boardrooms and the businesses globally.

It’s fascinating what you said about kind of the HR side of things. We’re working with a team at the moment in terms of our capability training, capability building training and one of the teams mentioned that HR is not wanted at Christmas parties because of what they’re going to see and what they hear about. I found that kind of quite funny as well.

So now just taking that – everything you just kind of mentioned, I think there’s a lot of great things around kind of the role of leadership, the role of the right qualities and I think this kind of brings a nice segway into your book where you discuss a lot more about creative leadership but specifically the integration of creativity, clarity and empathy in this kind of approach to leadership.

So can you first of all just tell us a little bit more about the book itself and I’d love to hear about kind of what inspired you to go off and to start putting it together, and then yeah just tell us a little bit about kind of those three pillars and what leadership can do to cultivate those qualities within their team?

Sure so quite a few questions there but I’m going to wrap them into different threads. No no I love it because it allows the mind and the heart to answer simultaneously. The creative leadership is based on three values which are empathy, clarity and creativity.

Now back in the day when I go back to that crying in the shower moment and I started to rebuild myself and say well what can I do as a designer, I thought well one of the things people understand is a model. So what if we design a model? So empathy was a no-brainer and that came to me as a human being, creativity well that came to me as a designer and the final one clarity took a little bit of time.

But it actually started off with a relationship with an ex-girlfriend which ended in a sort of mess and you know, we’ve all had those relationships. And without any blame being attached anywhere I realized at one moment sitting next to a stranger on the plane and he asked about you know why my face looked so solemn and I told him the story and he said to me in a moment of clarity “you do realize your clarity is that you’re not going to get clarity.”

And a couple of professional experiences as well led to the formulation of clarity and being a designer I love the stability of the triangle. So the model was born. So clarity also links to head, empathy to heart and creativity to hands. So it also has this kind of philosophical body morphic, physiological as well as yogic kind of vibration and resonance.

And that’s something where you know creative leadership isn’t just about another structure or strategy for the workplace – it’s for life, it’s for you, it’s internal, it’s all the things that you see within. So I always think there’s this dichotomy where people are told if you want to improve yourself go running, eat, become vegan, do more yoga – but it’s stuff that’s left for the evenings and weekends.

But what about psychological safety at work? Your example there of HR or whatever they call themselves nowadays – I’ve heard words like people and culture coming in but not being wanted at Christmas parties – it resonates I think with a lot of our listeners because it can feel like there’s a lack of freedom and more kind of control and observation going on and not in a great way.

So how do you at work ensure that your staff, your people, your colleagues resonate and vibrate in the highest possible way and that work is a safe and confident building place for them to be? And you’re not just leading people below you if we were to use the words of traditional hierarchy – you are leading people around you.

You know, I’ve come across security guards at places that I work who I would say are the leaders in the organization because they’re the first welcome, they’re the first wave of welcome. They are also the people who are incredibly kind even though they’ve got this horrible name security – you know they could be RoboCop, they could be Terminator but they act with a sense of empathy.

So in terms of advice for people it’s very very very simple – it’s be connected, be kind, be observant, be conscious, look at who’s around you, who’s missing in a conversation, who haven’t you thanked, who are the quieter people that may need their voices brought forward?

And I think there’s a sort of simple exercise of who haven’t you seen and visibly thanked and that’s maybe something for all of our listeners out there is just reflect on it in your family and at work. You know, was it someone who stayed up all night to finish the presentation and did we all turn around and say well it’s just their job because they’re the intern? Or is it your daughter at home or your husband or your partner or your grandparents who you didn’t see what they do – did you thank them?

And I know we’re filming this right over the Christmas period so now is a good time to put this into practice. So just some little things about human connectivity – bring that back into the organization, don’t treat the organization as just a place of fordism of function and factory. It’s a place to live to breathe and grow so please please please do that.

There’s so many different thoughts going into my head now around you know where to kind of take this next bit of the conversation and I – you know there’s a lot of talk around kind of you know and obviously you’ve clearly done a lot of work with lots of kind of large organizations, global brands who need to be starting to think this way and starting to apply it.

But now we’re moving into 2025 you know and even just in the last couple of weeks so much has been happening with AI and it’s – you know the ability for AI agents to kind of start to do so much more work and help us build and be more productive is never been greater and it will just continue to kind of pop into 2025.

So my question now is if you were – if you had to give any advice to somebody who is about to start a new venture, somebody who’s starting a kind of a new organization, starting to build something from scratch – what can they be doing to make sure they are approaching inclusive design and creative leadership very early on in that journey?

So I think the really important thing is speaking power to purpose. So very early on in your journey it’s actually – you know what happens quite a lot with people when you’re starting off say on an entrepreneurial or innovation journey is fears will come in and start to almost erode at what that initial idea is that you wanted to happen.

I actually believe there’s no such single thing as a road to Damascus moment. I believe you actually build up your insights and your innovations. One very simple thing that I do is – in your life you will have people, you know when you have an idea it’s like growing a small plant but the cold winds of other people’s words or disbelief will attack you, the harsh bright sunshine of your deepest critics who are sometimes called your friends will shine on it.

So how do you grow that inner plant of your idea and your confidence? And you sometimes have to shield it, you sometimes have to share it with the right people and there’s many tools and techniques we have in the book and in the workshops to help with this.

But one of them is this – and I really like this one – I realized that if I had to, if I got a challenging email that I needed to say keep for posterity for whatever reasons – functional, operational, legal or otherwise – I would put it into an email folder called cold storage. And because like a fridge or a freezer you know you can – they self-seal. So when you put that in there you can self-seal that and that email sits in Cold Storage, it doesn’t need to affect you any longer.

But then I also realized you need another one called warm storage. So you know we’ve all had emails or DMs or posts where or comments where people have said what you did was really great – even if it’s your grandmother saying this or your mother you know who almost have to by law tell you you’re doing great. I joke there but you know collect those things up into warm storage and there’ll be an insight, there’ll be a bank of blessings that you build up that you can look to when times are dark, the road is hard or it’s difficult.

And then you realize that actually dark and light are the same thing. That was my realization – the dark and light are the same thing. You know dusk and dawn are both endings and beginnings because you actually have built up your own moments of support. And seek those people that energize you but also challenge you in the right way and step away from any energies that don’t serve you be it a person, a place, a thing – step away from that and I think that’s really important as you’re on the entrepreneurial journey.

And one final little thing – it is the season to be jolly – in the book we talk about injecting a little bit of joy into your everyday. We are terrible critics of ourselves as human beings so creative leadership for creatives especially – for creatives and that’s all of us by the way, every single human – it encourages you to do something in your day that is joyful be it that cup of tea even if the day is so challenging, that beverage, that cup of tea, that moment playing with a dog or as I know someone called Amit does golf, the time with the family as I know we’ve talked about, or just standing and watching a sunrise or a sunset. And that is incredibly important.

So and finally when if that inner critic comes in and says “oh Rama you idiot you did this” you know “you didn’t save the file and it got completely lost” – say three things that are actually positive even if it is you know “hey Rama you got up and you showered and you got out of bed this morning and you are ready for the day” that’s a positive. And you know “Rama you’re going to have 30 seconds of swearing about losing the file but then you’re going to get up and recreate it because it’ll take you 30 minutes it’s not the end of the world” or you know “Rama you’re – you are a good brother you supported your sister” so it’s the three to one ratio.

I love that kind of approach and mindset to take into 2025 I think as many people are – you know without doubt kind of thinking about kind of next year they and like I said earlier so much opportunity so much time to kind and space to kind of build new things and to kind of continue to grow in different areas. I think having that mindset is absolutely right.

So I kind of just want to now with a couple of minutes left just turn it back to a little bit about you and kind of your personal kind of goals – tell us a little bit about what kind of excites you about kind of what’s emerging trend-wise or kind of what does the next five or 10 years look like to you?

So I think one of the trends is this tension battle but it could be a convergence between artificial and human. We talk about artificial intelligence but at the moment you know those databases those informations that we are bringing in are incredibly human and full of human biases as well.

So recognizing, respecting the boundaries of that I think is incredibly important. And let’s not forget that you know all of us in our lives have said this phrase that I haven’t heard from AI yet and the phrase is this – “I don’t know.” So you know we’ve all been stopped in the street and someone will say “so where is – where’s the shops? Where’s Tesco?” and “I don’t know” but you ask AI and it’ll be confidently wrong. It’s like that you know cousin or uncle that comes to family reunions and is confidently wrong about everything.

So I’m looking forward to how we humanize the experiences but also limit them because again AI is a very powerful tool but it could be dangerous and I’m sure we will be talking about that on a future podcast either yours or mine.

I’m really interested in that, I’m interested in how we expand definitions of inclusion because different segments of society are excluded but actually one thing that we all have in common is all of us will have experienced to different degrees layers of exclusion. And what I see in the world is a lot of infighting between one group – it’s like almost how big is my exclusion compared to yours? You know “but I’m a person of color” “no well I’m a person of this gender” “no I’m a person of this age.”

And actually creative leadership is a humble offering to the world to be more equitable and more kind and more connected and recognize that if we’re all on this planet we all have some work to do and we have some work to do together. And our work is about stepping through exclusion, so stepping beyond the rhetoric of exclusion that lives in so many things from newscast to podcast, from kind of books to boardrooms.

So genuinely it’s a – that’s a big ask and personally what am I looking forward to? Well if I may take myself back to being six – you can see behind me I love books and this is just a tenth of the library that I have that you can see on screen – but I always had a dream to have my name on a book with a little penguin next to it and next year that happens. The creative leadership book moves to penguin and an audio book an ebook as well as a paperback. So that is a huge personal achievement.

And I almost want to bring it back to that because what I’ve been speaking about could be quite global concepts but I want to bring it back to what you can do. And I think you know finally it’s just to say follow your creative heart – creativity gets educated out of us so be creative even in the way you plan a dinner party, even in the way you go to work, go different routes. Neuroplasticity – research shows that your brain will thank you. You know brush your teeth with your left hand, do lots of little things to keep that creative impetus going because the world needs to see that creativity is a solution to many many of the ills around us.

And creativity also bridges your strength, your love and your light into those around you and who won’t want to be with you or be next to you or see you? So this is also about the world but it’s also about you.

I mean we’re recording this on a Monday morning and I think that super left me very very inspired everything you’ve just mentioned there so I think that’s the absolute right message and obviously congrats on the book and obviously we’ll be sharing out the relevant links and keeping eye on – I’m very personally again very excited to have you speak at one of our conferences next year I think we’ve already spoken about kind of that what we’re going to be building as well.

There’s one thing I think you left off which is your YouTube channel so in closing I know you’re going to be spreading a lot of wisdom and knowledge through your YouTube channel so in closing can you just tell us a little bit about that and what your plans are for the channel?

Fantastic and thank you for remembering – the YouTube channel is my name Rama Gheerawo and we’re the subtitle at the moment is “the definitive Design Channel.” May sound a little egotistical but the folks that are working around me have taken six months to persuade me to have that title.

What is it about? Well it’s about showcasing the power of design – it’s not just for designers, it’s for anyone with a creative bone. It’s about life wisdoms as well and it’s also talking about creative leadership. There is going to be a sister channel to that which is called the t-shop because the t-shop is a place for conversations so that’s launching early next year and that’s a series of conversations so it’s kind of podcasts, podcast style conversations and you know Amit we really look forward to welcoming you on that. I know we’ve got a date to film that so the tables will turn a little bit and we’ll be delving into your life your career.

So the ethos of the two channels is that it’s not that everyone has a story to tell, it’s that everyone has a story to be heard and our deepest wisdoms come from those quietest most powerful moments and that everyone contributes to human knowledge and human existence. So do subscribe, hit the notification bell on channel which is live and running and keep an eye out for the t-shop as it comes online.

Beautiful I think yeah we’ll definitely share out the relevant links when we publish the podcast as well as links to the book and where people can access that as well. I’d love this conversation I’m feeling very inspired there’s tons of stuff I want to go off and build – obviously continue to build Experience House but other things as part of that as well.

So I think you’ve left me certainly with some really good insights of kind of how to approach that and I’m sure our audience will have taken that away as well. Rama a pleasure to have you with us today I think we’ve been trying to get this in and booked in for quite a while I’m glad we found time during the holiday season to make it happen. Yeah and thank you once again is there anything else that you’d love to add you’d like to add?

 I think there’s three words that I end most of the YouTube broadcast and podcast with and that’s just wishing everyone Joy, Faith and Grace in equal measure, so thank you.