Tiny ideas, huge leaps: Leading your organisation through uncertainty

“It’s not that you are not creative, you just haven’t worked a little more on developing your capacity. We can all be creative.”
Dr. Maria Camacho

Dr. Maria Camacho is a global leader in design thinking and innovation. With over 30 years of experience across academia, consulting, and industry, she has helped shape the way organisations think about creativity and collaboration.

In this episode, Maria talks about how design thinking can help people and companies navigate uncertainty. She explores what it means to build creative resilience, why mindsets matter more than methods, and how even the most introverted voices can spark game-changing ideas. Maria shares how she mentors teams through ambiguity, resistance, and the messy middle of innovation. She also discusses innovative techniques like silent brainstorming and the ‘Dark Horse Prototype,’ which often reveals surprising insights.

Tune in to find out why creativity isn’t just for artists, how playful workspaces can lead to serious results, and why developing a creative mindset should start early in life,or right now, wherever you are.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• Why design thinking matters now more than ever
• How creative resilience is built through practice
• The emotional highs and lows of the innovation process
• Why organisations still struggle to value design
• Tips to support introverts and quieter voices in ideation
• How to run a “dark horse” prototype that uncovers unexpected solutions
• The role of play and experimentation at work
• Helping teams fall in love with the process, not just the idea
• When to introduce creativity in education and leadership
• What it means to make creativity part of everyone’s role

Key links

Dr. Maria Camacho LinkedIn
Recommended Book: The Design Thinking Toolbox: A Guide to Mastering the Most Popular and Valuable Innovation Methods (Design Thinking Series)
Stanford University
Frog
Swinburne University of Technology

About our guest

Dr. Maria Camacho is a globally recognised expert in design thinking and strategic innovation with over 30 years of experience across academia, industry, and consulting. With a PhD in Design Thinking and a decade-long partnership with Stanford University’s flagship programs, Maria has helped shape innovation practices at global companies and institutions, including Frog, the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care, Westpac, Swinburne University, and global European group Sonae.

Maria’s career spans founding and directing award-winning academic programs, mentoring teams to embrace human-centred approaches, and delivering impactful workshops and keynote speeches around the world. Known for her evidence-based methods, she empowers leaders and teams to tackle complexity with creativity, empathy, and humanity.

Today, Maria runs her independent practice as a speaker, corporate trainer, and advisor, inspiring organisations to foster cultures of innovation and collaborative problem-solving.

Her work blends deep academic insights with practical tools, enabling clients to navigate uncertainty and drive meaningful change.

Some facts:

• Led design thinking and innovation projects for over 100 organisations worldwide.
• Facilitated dozens of workshops with cross-functional groups.
• Speaker at more than 20 international events.
• Developed novel curricula for four academic programs.
• Taught thousands of participants in strategic design and innovation.
• Co-founded and led the Global Sugar Network* for design innovation in affiliation with Stanford University.

* The Sugar Network is the largest global design thinking network bridging industry and academia. It has produced hundreds of innovative products and services (to MVP level) for hundreds of organisations, while training thousands of students, teaching assistants, and industry liaisons across multiple disciplines.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:07
Okay. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Company Road Podcast. So just before we get into this, I wanted to say a massive thank you to all of the listeners on the show and you know who you are. You’ve been supporting me since I set this up over 70 episodes ago now, and you’re still tuning in, which is amazing. We continue to grow and have leaders and intrapreneurs really listening across many places. So. All the continents in the world, people are listening, which is an incredible result. And just goes to show that something that is happening around our conversations in business can transcend countries and cultures and time zones, and we’re bringing together a lot of people. And I really encourage those if you who want to be more active in the conversation, to check out some of the other shows if you haven’t seen them already or heard them already. We’re also gonna be launching a community called Rebel at Work. So if you haven’t heard about Rebel at Work, check it out. rebel@work.com.au and we’d love to see you there. That’s where you can meet a number of different peers and access more learning resources around unexpected ways to bring more impact and positivity into your work in some sort of way. So that’s a bit about me and the show. I want to come back to who we’ve got on the show today. Very exciting. So we’ve got the honour of hosting Dr. Maria Camachoamacho, who’s a globally recognised expert in design thinking and strategic innovation. She’s got over 30 years of experience spanning academia. Industry and consulting. And Maria’s played a pivotal role in shaping innovation practices at renowned institutions such as Frog, the Australian Department of Health Aged Care, Westpac, Swinburne University, and so many more. And Maria, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 1:36
Thank you so much, Chris, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris Hudson: 1:39
Yeah, and Maria, I just go into your work a little bit more. So it’s usually characterised by evidence-based methods that empower leaders and help teams to tackle complexity with a few different things, creativity, empathy, and humanity. You do a lot of things. So you’re on the speaker circuit as an influential speaker. You do corporate training, you’re an advisor, and you help and inspire organisations to really foster cultures of innovation and collaborative problem solving, which I think a lot of organisations need. Put it, frankly, I think a lot of people still need to do that. So in today’s conversation, we’re gonna do a few things. We’re gonna look at how to almost think about innovation and collaboration a little bit differently, but also from the point of view of uncertainty and how to cope with uncertainty and build some level of creative resilience in some sort of way. So often we’re thinking about changing business environment, who’s around and who the leadership is and what we need to do as intrapreneurs. And you know, it feels like the ability to approach challenges with a creative mindset and navigate that. If it’s uncertain and if it’s complex, can be incredibly difficult. And I’d love to just get into some of those topics with Dr. Camacho today. And Maria’s gonna share some insights on building creative confidence and resilience by integrating principles of positive psychology and design thinking. So let’s jump into some of those themes. I think there’s a lot around fear. And we’ll get to all of that in terms of how we navigate some of that with confidence a bit later. But maybe just start with you, Dr. Camacho. Maria, tell us about yourself a little bit and what brings you to this kind of world of helping to empower people with problem solving, thriving amidst continuous challenges.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 3:12
Thank you, Chris. Well, I would say that it’s been a lifelong goal. It started ever since I was studying industrial design back in my Native Columbia, and I always wanted, I had this urge to, put business studies and design together from the start. And so that led me to study a master on design leadership. That was eights ago, I won’t even tell you when, but this was in England and there was a new sort of movement towards the launch of something new that was design management and. That definitely set me in the direction that I’ve been following ever since. I believe in design, in the power of design for profitability, competitivity, adding value, plus helping make the world a better place and workplace a better places that I’ve spent all my life. Sort of promoting that from wherever I’ve been sitting. That’s what I’ve been doing always with industry and with. Students.’cause I’ve been an academic like almost half of that 30 years of experience that I have. So that’s been a pleasure and it’s been a pleasure to see the evolution and I guess there’s still so much to do, which keeps me going because I think up to this day we keep saying that organisations are still not necessarily aware or do not value enough what design brings to the table. So it’s a never ending. Fight, let’s say, but, or battle. But I love battles and I love challenges. So that’s kept me going all the time, despite lots of ups and downs. But it motivates me. I, one of the things that motivated me always, and I did quite a lot of that. While I was in Columbia was thinking that if I value the role the design can play for development. And coming from a developing country and having seen all the poverty and all these situations, I really like the idea of working on design for development. And I created a group about that ages ago that’s ended. But I love the work that organisations like id.org do. I’ve always thought, I think my take on using design to help development is to help small and medium enterprises in development situations, especially with design.’cause if they can acquire these capacity to use design to become more competitive, et cetera, they have to still compete with the global world, even if they’re local rights. But they are the ones that are the, I don’t know, it’s, the percentage is like 98% of. All companies around the world are small and medium enterprises, so they move communities and they move the economy from that smaller level, but it’s huge. So they really need help. So yeah, that’s been a motivation.

Chris Hudson: 6:10
Yeah. Wow. And obviously you’ve done a whole heap of things in the journey of pursuing some of those interests. Do you feel like, has it been your own purpose that you’ve described there that has been always what you’ve come back to, or have you found that your purpose has evolved over time and been fine tuned in some sort of way? Is it you’re quite fixed on the goal and the outcome, or do you feel like there have been other things along the way that have influenced you in your path?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 6:35
I think the goal, the goals. Stayed the same.

Chris Hudson: 6:40
Yeah,

Dr. Maria Camacho: 6:41
always it’s, it’s always been there, perhaps with little changes, but I think what’s changed more, it’s rather the approach that I take to getting there and as the practice and theory of design evolve. Much more has much more possibilities and opportunities have come our way. So I value the emergence of design management and then how. That didn’t necessarily take off within business as we would’ve liked, but design thinking, there’s a lot to say about whether it’s good by whatever the term, but it has done something about bringing design into organisations in a much bigger way than ever before. So I think that’s been very valuable. And that was. In my view, and also because of the research I’ve done, I see that like a confluence of situations that at the turn of the century, all these situations got together to make designs be somebody seen a lot more and being valued a lot more by organisations.

Chris Hudson: 7:51
Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree as well. I think that it’s struggled at times to represent itself adequately, is probably the best way that I can think of putting it in terms of design, because it’s not top of the agenda and there’s confusion around where it sits. There’s confusion around who, who practices design and whether designers are the designers or there are other people that. Should play a role in design. Its commercial value is always being talked about and there’s a big conversation still around whether design should have a seat at the C level and a seat at the top table. And those things are still happening. And I don’t know, it, it feels like, is it the word design?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 8:27
Well, I think as well, if I may add one thing that has been, let’s say, part of my strategy to achieve that goal has been, let’s deal with it at the roots. So it’s education and perhaps that’s what has driven me so much towards education and I’ve had an incredible opportunity of bringing design awareness and capacity and skills and mindsets into, various other knowledge areas, and that’s when I see the transformation that people go through when being able to go themselves through this whole process of designing something, using all this, all the ways to design, has developing your mindsets and just using the process, using the methods and. The way that people transform when they see their end result. People that are from business, engineering, psychology, whatever else, entrepreneurs from different fields. So I’ve seen that over and over and over, and that really fulfils me a lot. Like I’ve taught design for engineers and within engineers. Very often and it’s been just wonderful to see how the uptake, which, you know, in a way it’s like engineering should be designed. It’s designed right. That’s another conversation. Like what is exactly design, but design thinking as per the way we understand it in this new century. That’s the one that I think has been having a great impact on people. And so what I say in a way is it’s ways of thinking that they don’t necessarily teach you at school so much. So you learn a lot about logical thinking and analytical thinking, and then if you go on to study business or engineering, then those mindsets are like cemented. And then if you wanna go into becoming more creative and more empathic and all those things, it’s really hard to undo those structures, which is partly what I’ve been working with. So education has that, and in a way that’s why also. Working now on delivering training for organisations on design thinking so that whoever didn’t ever go through this kind of. Education that changes your mindset, allows you to have like a different way to see the world, then they can do it.

Chris Hudson: 10:54
Yeah. Yeah, that’s really great. I think there’s some catching up to do. As we see, there’s evidence in organisations where it’s just really needed. It feels as an empowerment tool, as a point around enablement, the teams and the team members needs to be able to solve problems creatively for themselves. And have the satisfaction and the joy that comes from taking something to, to the market or even just an internal initiative to some other leaders and to see how it’s received and how it’s fed back. I’ve been, yeah, thinking about it a lot because for a few different reasons. I’ve got young kids and we always look at them and think about how we’re parenting a little bit too, as to when in their educational. Stages as they grow up, when should they be learning about these things to do with problem solving outside of a school curriculum, which teaches you certain techniques. But yeah. Do you have a point of view around when this practice should start?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 11:49
Yeah, that’s true. Well, I guess. Stated Edward de Bono, the big mind and study researcher on creativity said, studying the brain for creativity. He just always said, we all. Lose, like, I don’t know what number it was, but let’s say 80% of our creativity or 90% of our creativity when we turn five. And guess what the reason is? It’s you get, you go into school and then the thing is you go into school and there start to fill your mind with paradigm. The sky is blue, then colory purple, you know? Yeah. Stuff like that and just it goes on and on and sort of teachers that mean no harm at all, but that you start to get. You are full of these structures of what the world should be like and what, how you should think. And before that, kids are like open. That’s why the famous phrase that among others Ideo promotes is to start with the mindset of a child. Start looking at the problem with the mindset of a child.

Chris Hudson: 12:53
How easy is that, do you think, to take on a child’s mindset?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 12:57
I think it’s not easy. Developing a mindset takes practice and that’s something that’s proven. You can always, whatever you do, you can do something today that will start to build your awareness. So that’s already good if you go to a mini workshop on creativity, and that’s it. Something’s being planted on your brain, so that’s good. But to become creative in the sense that you almost don’t even think about it and you just are able to think creatively, it’s practice just like developing a muscle and the way you do it. In design is pretty much through experimenting and just doing and getting yourself into it and going through the lived experience of taking on something and taking it to the other side when you don’t know what the end result is going to be from the get go. So I’ve seen that kind of transformation of the mindsets very many, many, many times, and after lots of prototypes and yeah, you don’t even miss certain need to teach people any theory at all. It’s by doing that you are able to acquire. But yes, it’s little by little that you acquire it.

Chris Hudson: 14:15
Definitely. I think I was just thinking as you were talking, I’m thinking is there a way to describe what that feels like for somebody that maybe doesn’t know? Because yeah, we’ve spent a lot of time in our careers obviously taking in products and services to market, running a load of testing and getting quite in depth research, validating the work that you’re doing. And you get a lot back from that and it’s a real kind of dopamine hit around what’s working, what’s not, what needs to be improved. And you work through, it’s sometimes really hard and confronting to hear, but how would you describe the kind of satisfaction from going through that process yourself so that others might be able to understand what we’re talking about?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 14:54
Yes. Well, look, it’s, it’s full of ups and downs. It’s because it’s not a straightforward process. And for example, when we, when I was working with Stanford and we were following the. The design thinking, their version of design thinking that’s been going on forever. They were even doing a study, they did a study on people’s motivation, level of motivation, going through the design process. And they did this for years and years and years. So they had like lots of data. So they have a curve, right? You start like on a high, right? You’re, you’re like, yes, the world is the limit. Let’s start, let’s do it right? And then you build something and you fall in love with this something and you’re still like, okay, but then you realise it’s not necessarily the right kind of thing or it doesn’t work. And then you’re looking for, and then you start to get like a low, and then you find another idea to continue. And then you go into a high, or you do like a. Funny, creative exercise to just get on a high, which actually works a lot. And then when you get into a more sort of building the final kind of prototypes, yeah, things start to go a little bit, you know? But then once you are delivering the end result, let’s say a final MVP or something, well that’s big time, high of motivation, but you do go through all of that and. When you’re learning the process, when you’re learning to be resilient as you go through it, because at some point I’ve seen people just wanted to say, I don’t want to do with this anymore. I can’t do it. Lots of fears and lots of stress while you learn it because of the ambiguity that you face. And we are, we’re just not built naturally as humans. To go through ambiguity. We like the familiar, we like to, it’s natural for us, so it’s very unnatural to just face the future, which is unknown. So you go through all sorts of stages. So the next project you work on and the next and the next, then you start to become you to acquire that sort of resilience and then the creativity starts to sink in and it’s not a creativity that’s about, oh, it’s brainstorm and have lots of ideas and lots of post-its. That’s important, but it’s not just that. It’s having this kind of creative mindset. It’s how you approach the whole thing, how you approach the problem solving with which kind of attitude, it goes much, much further. So you develop that as you go. As you practice and more you practice, then you’re just not even thinking about it and you’re like maintaining. Somehow you’re calm and knowing because you know that you’re gonna get through to the other side. You don’t know how, and you don’t know what the other side looks like, but you start to acquire that confidence. That you’ll manage, you’ll do it.

Chris Hudson: 17:49
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very interesting. So earlier in my career, I was probably more in a client management type role before I went into more strategic and creative type roles. And in that management role, I was feeling really, I. Frustrated quietly and sometimes not so quietly about the fact that I didn’t have a creative remit with in my role. And so it, in the end, it didn’t feel like the right role for me. And I get the feeling that a number of people out there struggling with that because they feel that creativity is the role. Other people to perform, and because they’re paid to do that, I know that in some instances, particularly in a high pressured environment, creativity and strategy, and anything that feels like it’s a divergent step can feel like a distraction from what some people within the room in that organisation want to do as well. And it just feels like. Playfulness and that experimentation, it can’t always come in, doesn’t always have its place clearly defined. So I’m thinking about the people that are quietly frustrated and maybe what we can do in this conversation to help them kind of see that there is a way to think creatively. But where would you suggest people would start in a way that would be safe and, okay.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 19:07
I think one thing we need more is to educate people a little bit more on why these kinds of approaches work because you just mentioned playfulness and a lot of what you get when you’re practicing and teaching design thinking and doing it with companies in a little creative lab, it’s like the rest of the people will be looking and saying like. Those people are doing nothing. They’re just messing around, right? They’re just playing. What they do is not really meaningful or valid or of value, right? And you get that a lot. But the thing is, nobody’s explained why playfulness is important, and that’s just one item of the way we approach creative work and the playfulness. It’s obvious, but then a lot of people just don’t think about it. It’s the way you open up your mind. It just opens up a space different from your daily routine, and then all those paradigms that the feature got into your head at five plus all the rest ones, you start to be able to put them on the side because you’re playing. And it allows you, it’s like it’s allowed to think differently or to do something differently. So when you allow yourself that, it doesn’t mean that whatever playful thing you did at that very first moment is going to be what’s gonna work.

Chris Hudson: 20:35
Yeah.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 20:35
But you allowed your brain to get to a different space, which otherwise it just can’t switch. Just like that. If you’re not trained, let’s say you cannot just switch like that. You just need to create the conditions, and that means environmental conditions as well, like the surroundings. And when we had covid, that was something very interesting because. Design thinking and the design for in organisations, it’s always practiced. The best practice is to have a space that is playful, that can be very free, et cetera, et cetera. But then we didn’t have that space. So in a way then the digital whiteboards became that space. It was great to see how it was mimicking and you could see everyone running around in the board and that became the equivalent of that physical space. It was great to have that kind of tool. I don’t know what we would’ve done without it ’cause it created that possibility.

Chris Hudson: 21:34
I definitely, I remember that time very clearly and it makes me think, I mean, people on Miros, whatever, you’re using Miro or Figjam or whatever it is, but it, it feels like. Nobody on a whiteboard in a room would’ve ever done some of the things that they’ve been doing on those digital whiteboarding tools. And it feels like even if the technology is augmented now with ai, obviously, you know, it’s being used through those tools and platforms now too, to think of what we can achieve together. I think there’s still time and place obviously for, for running things in person and to have pen and paper and all of that can be incredibly tactile and valuable too. But just the ability of being able to. Get people together, contribute, virtually do it. Publicly or anonymously. You can set things up, you can play games, but it is gamifying the experience of work a little bit. And yeah, since then, I don’t know if there’s been anything that major in the world of work and in that context that has been similar to that level of change because it all just augmented so quickly, didn’t it? In those one to two years where people all have to just jump on and use it. So. Yeah, a big step. A big step. I was gonna ask you about, just more broadly maybe, but around some of the other significant changes that you may have observed in working with organisations that you think are themes. Anything that you feel is coming up that you feel organisations or leaders or emerging leaders need to be paying attention to in this day and age as well.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 22:59
Right. Well, it depends how. Much you already know or have practiced design thinking. If you haven’t, I would say if there was ever a time when you need the kind of mindsets that design thinking brings, this is the time ’cause. Yeah. Oh my God. Isn’t everything changing day by day like crazy? Well, ever since AI and Chat GPT. Obviously that’s like super obvious, but then it’s been happening since the start of the century and it’s been escalating, like it’s been everything, every change has come, it’s coming quicker and quicker. It’s here before we even can even say anything. So the level of uncertainty that we’re living in. The amount of ambiguity that we have to deal with. So it’s not anymore just the realm of designers designing something that doesn’t exist, and it’s the realm of everyone. Everyone is dealing with this kind of situation where you just don’t know. What’s gonna happen next, and you still have to go on and continue to evolve your products or redesign your services or whatever else, right? We just have to go on. So then design thinking with mindsets of how do you throw yourself into that uncertainty and deal with it and handle it in a way that you are able to deal with it. And to not get paralysed, right, because it, it’s something that can happen in this kind of situation. You may be talking a lot about what we need to do and then you’re not doing it. That happens a lot, and this happens to professionals at work at any level. So it’s the high level executive and it’s the junior practitioner as well. It’s, everyone has to face this. But having said that, of course, leaders, because they are. The ones supposedly leading the way. Well, they’re facing quite a huge challenge there because they have to lead the way and they don’t even know which way to go. So they just need to bring everyone along to finding out. And how do you do that? How do you bring people along to find out what, what could, what can we do? And then just get on with it. Do something. It takes courage. It really takes you to be open-minded and at the same time quite organised and determined and just get on and do experimentation and learn from it and continue and continue as you go. Yeah, so I think that’s the opportunity is for everyone to acquire this kind of mindsets. And it’s not for nothing that design thinking started to become something within business in the century at, or the turn of the century. Little after it’s because since then we’ve been seeing change and organisations using their traditional ways of innovating and creating new products and services. They just saw that they weren’t being successful. So that’s plain result in front of your eyes. It’s just not working. Whatever we were doing all our lives, it’s not working. What can we do? And then. Design thinking was there. It was just the evolution of the whole design theory and practice from the, I don’t know, 1940s, all matured and developed is floating around and then it’s the right environment shows itself. So that’s, I think, how design thinking became desired by organisations. And in that sense, it’s something that we still need. I was saying in my. Research in, in my PhD research or I wanted to like talk more about this. The design should be a liberal art, but my supervisors dissuaded me to go that half. A little bit of a hard one, but. It’s you learn languages, geography, history, math, the things you learn, you know, the liberal, the core things that you need to learn in life. And the core things normally include a lot of analytical thinking and none of the creative thinking. So we have like half of us that’s been there just not developed. Since childhood. So I think we all have the opportunity. We should all give us the opportunity to develop that side of us and everyone can. You hear a lot of people saying, I’m not creative.

Chris Hudson: 27:27
Yeah.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 27:27
And I’m just not creative. I cannot, and that’s it. And. The good news is that you, it’s not that you don’t, are not creative, you just haven’t worked a little bit more on developing your capacity. We can all be creative, you know? Yeah. We all have the capacity.

Chris Hudson: 27:45
I think it’s probably because creativity in the way that it was traditionally expected or defined is really around maybe the execution and the final outcome or the output. So, you know, if you couldn’t draw, if you weren’t a fine artist or if you weren’t a graphic designer or a filmmaker. That was your expression in the released artefacts out into the world of the people who see. So creativity is probably associated with that, where it feels as if now creativity is being more broadly applied and you’re not just judged on whether you can draw on a whiteboard or not, but actually in terms of problem solving or in discussion, or even just asking questions that are more lateral and will open up a conversation, there are plenty of ways to express creativity and to engage with it. So. Have I mentioned some of the ones that, that you’ve thought about. Are there any other ones that you think are interesting areas for creativity?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 28:35
Before that you just said something that can let your audience understand this. The Association of Design and Design thinking in these times with those outputs that are like. Often have some, an artistic nature on, on, on the basis of them. The design thinking that we’re trying to enable the world to, to practice and to acquire those mindsets. That design thinking is not about the out that output. If you think of the process of design. If you’re, let’s say you’re thinking about a radical innovation and you just, you’re just really being open. You can have a team of people from whichever profession, doesn’t matter. Just thinking if they have been trained on thinking these ways and experimenting and so on, empathising they’ll take on a problem, reframe the problem, try to understand better what the needs are, discover needs, et cetera. And they might come up with actually what this problem needs is of the nature of a TV program. I don’t know. And everyone was thinking, oh, it’s gonna be a product. A physical product. And so when you liberate that so you can, then you can divide once you decide it’s a TV program and you’re gonna start to develop the actual prototypes and perhaps the more advanced prototype, maybe not even the early ones, you need to bring into the team, those who are actually specialised on creating TV programs. Right. But they didn’t have to be there from the beginning. Not necessarily,

Chris Hudson: 30:17
yeah. Yeah. So

Dr. Maria Camacho: 30:18
you have a, a difference between the design thinking of. Before the actual specific expertise has to come in and after that. And the before one is the one that anyone can practice and anyone can just be creative. Yeah. The second part that’s, you can continue that and we need more creative thinking in implementation as well, so that great opportunities don’t die during the implementation. Like the nobody’s side sometimes dies during the implementation, but.

Chris Hudson: 30:51
Yeah. Yeah. The creativity would sit over the top almost. I mean, it’s a unifier in that sense. It’s ubiquitous and it feels like the first part is probably more about. For those that don’t, aren’t that familiar with design thinking it, it’s obviously more about understanding the problem space, working on the problem, finding the correct problem to solve. And we’re going deep on that and understanding that and prioritise, prioritising where the need for problem solving is really a lot of the time. And then obviously you’re into what the solution might be as an overall territory in some sort of way. And then after that. You can get into some of the more executional elements and figure out how it’s gonna be represented in the market in answer of that need that you’ve identified. So yeah, there’s a lot around that that I think creativity can come in all of those places. But it feels like The other thing that design thinking is interesting for is around an evidence base, but also one around decisioning and justification and validation of what? So it gives you that. It gives you that compass a little bit, and obviously decisioning around creativity isn’t always easy because some people like green and some people like blue, and once you get into it an executional representation of the idea, then it brings out quite a. Quite basic opinion at a very kind of low, and it’s not a constructive conversation for a lot of people, a lot of the time where ideas are being judged for the wrong reasons. So how would you suggest people manage that? That side of things?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 32:20
Yeah. Yeah. When I’ve been mentoring teams that are going through design thinking, I get them into this idea that every, all the ideas that everyone’s having at some point. They came into their head because something else happened before, during the teamwork. So it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It doesn’t only come from an isolated brain.

Chris Hudson: 32:49
Yeah.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 32:49
Everything you’re doing from the get go in teamwork, everyone is influencing the way you’re thinking and that goes around. It just, you’re sort of being influenced, everyone’s being influenced by everyone. So then when suddenly somebody says, got it, the idea, let’s do this, and then eventually the final solution ends up having a lot of that kind of idea embedded into it. Then I dissuade the teams to think, oh, that was this person’s idea. Thanks to them. To him, we managed to get here. Yeah. And it’s not because if you understand how creative teamwork works. It’s when you’re just, when you’re doing a brainstorming, you’re listening to other people’s ideas and somebody’s idea prompts yours. If that other person had not said this, if all these other 10 ideas were not written in front of you, and if somebody had not told a joke at the same time, you just wouldn’t have had that idea. Yeah. In mentorship of teams, I try to tell everyone, ideas are just, everyone’s, yeah. Are the creation of all the team. So I try to make everyone fall in love. With the idea equally, of course, this takes some work around and it’s sometimes it’s a little bit difficult, and obviously there are different opinions, which is something that we learn a lot how to deal with in design thinking because. Design thinking intrinsically, it’s about working in teams of diversity. People. Ideally, if you wanna innovate, you bring people together that come from different fields or cultures or different genders, et cetera. All diversity that you can have, the more diversity, the better. But of course, you tend to not get along with the person that thinks very different. It’s you. And so a bunch of people that everyone thinks totally different from the other one needs. Some work so that you can get to that. But at the same time, if you do it well, you’re obtaining the best of all these different minds. And because problems are systemic and all this complexity that we’re dealing with, it’s systemic. You need different minds together thinking about it. You cannot just put just one mind to look at the problem from just one side.

Chris Hudson: 35:04
Yeah. Yeah. I like the point around diversity, and I’m thinking as well about other situations that I’ve been where the, there’s a bias, right? It’s, I’m just gonna call it a bias in creativity where some people’s voices or confidence with creativity are much louder or, or much more well established than other people’s. So. For those that are struggling with how adequately to represent their idea. Obviously there’s a group of people that are underrepresented in terms of their ideas and contributions probably. And then there’s another group that’s probably overrepresented because they’re talking the loudest and they need to see their idea. I. Going through and the loudest person, most important or highest paid usually puts that stamp on fairly early in the process if, if that is gonna be happening. So I’m just wondering about navigating some of that and it, it all sounds very democratic in practice, but from the point of view of making creativity possible for a diverse group, what have you found to work well?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 36:02
I think we’ve come some way to help those, perhaps the introverts be more heard and methods have come around to enable that. If you have a facilitator that’s working with the team, then of course this facilitator needs to be very aware of enabling everyone to participate. I try to set up a mindset for the team in which you are the one that talks the most. You’re the one that has a thousands ideas every minute and can’t stop telling us about them. You’re gonna have a much better result in this science. It’s been proved if you allow all the others to also express their ideas and be part of the work. So if you become aware, that’s the case scientifically, that if you allow. Create the space for others to work with you and to provide their ideas because you need them. So like I try to create that idea of you, you need the other person’s ideas. It’s, it’s not whether you wanna hear them, it’s you need them. Yeah. So that’s how I put it. And yeah, we used to do a lot of work with Stanford, setting teams up according to their personality, the people’s personalities. Yeah, so we always try to have a balance of how many introverts and extroverts, and then different other aspects of the personality types by Carl Jung. And so we would try to balance so that obviously it, it’s not like just if you have one I introvert person in a team of 10 where everyone is an extrovert. So it’s quite hard. Most certainly that person will not be heard, so it’s something to bear in mind as well if you have the possibility. I know that organisations don’t always have this freedom to do this, but, or the luxury to do this, but if you’re able to set up a team from a few people, think about how you can put together a group of people that I have a diverse kinds of personalities, and that helps a lot as well.

Chris Hudson: 37:59
Can we just to raise in addition to that point, because I think it’s an interesting one in a room full of introverts, what would happen, or, I feel like that’s not the question, but it’s kind of like what creative tools or frameworks for ideation do you think can be applied in a way that gives everyone a chance more democratically? But also seems to be really effective. I just wondered if you had any examples of things that you’d run in the past that have worked really well.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 38:23
Yeah, something that’s, that that works quite well is enabling a silent space in the beginning for a brainstorm, for example, where everyone puts down their ideas by writing, drawing, whatever it is on a piece of paper, and then we hang them all on the wall and then we can look at them and discuss all of them. So. The person that’s an introvert was given the space to, to be with themselves and think about it and put it out there along with everyone else. So they’ll be in the same boat. Every idea might be, can be heard, can be looked at and heard. So that’s one very simple technique that works. And you can like alternate in these with these possibilities. Yeah, of course you need to, and you can do them very silent moments of creativity. So you can do the first one and then you discuss, and then you do another one, and then you discuss. So the exchange of ideas starts to build something and you are allowing the more silent ones to participate. You’re giving them that space.

Chris Hudson: 39:25
Yeah. Yeah. And I think having worked with it myself and teach in the area too, and it feels like the fluidity of the framework. If we can call it framework or the practice, it just feels like, yeah, you are gonna hear everybody’s ideas. So it is good that everyone gets heard, but at the same time, you know, you don’t have to make the idea the final idea and then. Get rid of all the other thinking. Then the rest of the thinking almost accumulates as this bedrock or foundation of insight and creativity that you can always come back to. So if you had an idea and then it was just a concept, but then it ended up being a movie or ended up being an event or an activation or whatever you or a digital product, it doesn’t really matter. But you can come back to that thinking at any point and go back to the insights or go back to some of the ideas and then build out using that raft of thinking that you’ve managed to capture through the process. So I always find that kind of got you to a much richer outcome than just focusing in on one idea and saying that’s all it’s ever gonna be. You know?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 40:24
Absolutely. It’ll

Chris Hudson: 40:25
be open through many other inputs and many builds on what you’ve created in the past through the process too.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 40:31
Yeah. In fact we at Stanford with the Stanford method, we used to practice something that we call the dark horse prototype. I dunno if you’ve heard about that. At, at the interesting thing is right in the beginning of a project, when everyone’s feeling comfortable with whatever they’ve chosen and the idea to pursue is, and everyone’s like, yeah, this is what we’re gonna do. Until the end, right? Then you do this exercise when you tell people, okay, leave your project there where it is. Just stop, put it aside, and now you’re gonna grab one idea that your team had in the past throughout the work that was the silliest, the stupidest, the least feasible. Choose one of those. Yeah, and then work with that one as if it were the best idea. And the results of that were like, okay, so three things could happen. On one hand, it could be that after the dark prototype, nothing happened. They continue fixated on their idea. But normally what would happen is either of these two situations, the previous idea that they were working with suddenly gets twist or an add-on or gets rethought in a way that would’ve have never happened because they suddenly acquired a new insight. And the other situation that happens a lot is. The change of direction is completely. Like they go opposite ways from the original idea that they were already in love with. So that allows them. To think, okay, it’s not that there’s bad ideas and good ideas, you know, there’s ideas and then they can help us progress because we, they enable us to acquire different insights that maybe there’s no other way to have gotten there. So that’s a great approach, a great exercise that works pretty well.

Chris Hudson: 42:12
Yeah. Yeah.’cause you are, you’re asking people how could they make it work if they had to make it work, which is an interesting. Proposition, I think there’s a brain training exercise in itself isn’t, that’s super cool and valuable probably for a lot of leaders that would be, they might be a bit critical or naysayers, that sort of thing can be really powerful.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 42:31
Yeah. Our project clients didn’t like it at all. We would meet with them all the time and then they were like, what are you doing? Why are you going that way? And, but we saw this reaction.

Chris Hudson: 42:43
Yeah,

Dr. Maria Camacho: 42:43
over and over and, and we were like, we had to do this sort of psychological treatment to the client. Say like, look, don’t worry, just wait a little bit. Just wait a little bit. This is gonna go away. It’s let us do this, but it’s my money. Okay, well it’s just a little one. And then when we got to the end of the project and the thing that happened with the dark horse has influenced like in a major way, whatever the end result was, clients are like. Wow. You were right. It is like so amazing to, to get them to see like. Yeah, it actually worked. We, we thought you were crazy. We thought you had, yeah, we thought it was complete failure to work with you.

Chris Hudson: 43:23
Do. Just out of interest, I mean, it’s a slight, slight question, but do you know of any ideas that were the dark horse and ended up being the thing that that went out to market in Any, anything that you’ve worked on that just from humble beginnings of being the thing that nobody worked, wanted to work on to being actually quite interesting and promising for an organisation or a business.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 43:43
I’m thinking, perhaps one, one I can think of was working with the design of an innovative backpack and there there was this dark horse idea of. A backpack that changed colours de depending on how you were dressed. And this didn’t go to production in the end because a lot of these results with the Stanford projects and the clients. We’re too innovative, we’re too extreme for the organisations. They were like, oh my God, this is so incredible. What do we do with it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it happened a lot. But that brought the idea of just like, I don’t know, do you remember the Swatch watches that you could change the lip covers? Yeah, I remember that was something like that for the backpack. I wanted that. Yes, exactly. So it was like some idea of you can sort of. Change, modify your backpack every day somehow so that it’s a different thing every day according to the way you’re dressed or whichever event you’re attending. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that would’ve never happened before. And then there was another group with this backpack project that ended up creating like a costume. It was a backpack and it was like incredible. I mean, that was just like for a fashion design, high-end fashion designing, but it was an incredible way to rethink. What are we thinking about when we say backpack? Does it have. So does it have to be like something that you put in your back and does it have to be that? What is the actual function? Yeah. Or carrying things. Oh, maybe we can carry things on our clothes and Yeah,

Chris Hudson: 45:14
yeah, yeah. Which starts with some of those more fundamental questions around what function is it serving? What could you do with it? How could you stretch the definition of what it’s being already? And I think innovation is in that. It’s in that area of finding. Yeah. Finding a different take on something. And you’ve got a. You gotta think quite carefully about that.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 45:33
Actually, I just remembered one. We did a project with a large group in Portugal called Sonia. They owned this really large supermarket chain called Continente, and they, the project was about rethinking what to do with the physical shop in the smaller shops that they needed to ’cause the, those were becoming more trendy, the smaller ones, but they have like. Big, chunky products like bicycles, mattresses, et cetera. And then in the Dark Horse prototype, the team was thinking, what if there’s no store? What is no store? Store? But it doesn’t have to be Amazon, because obviously it couldn’t be like the same as Amazon. It was not about online shopping.

Chris Hudson: 46:18
Yeah.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 46:19
And they ended up with a product that. Was a digital product that would be able to read whatever you have in your environment. Let’s say you go to a cafe and you fall in love with the coffee cups that they have there, and you just put your phone in front of it and then the phone tells you. Where to buy that cup. Got it. Yeah, instantly. And so it was then, oh, I saw a great bicycle on the road and I’m just gonna look, oh, it’ll tell me where to buy that bicycle. And so it was meant to be that we were going to buy. Everything from the same vendor, Continente, but obviously it would be made up of various vendors. Last thing, I knew they were working on the coding, but again, I don’t know if it saw any fruition, these projects, because they were sew innovative, often the biggest purpose that they served was clients would take a part of it or a future or a bit that they could embed into something that they were working on that they would’ve. Otherwise not ever thought about. And then they would patent those bits to embed them into whatever else they’re working. So that was a lot of the, a lot of the results were of that kind.

Chris Hudson: 47:35
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s, that sounds really cool. And obviously you can start with the beginning of an idea and roll out of how much for success it is or whether it’s gonna work. You are, you’re thinking about all of the possibilities and eventualities for that particular creative idea or execution. You then have to pair it back to the thing that you’re gonna start with, and that could actually be easier than you think. It doesn’t have to be this big,

Dr. Maria Camacho: 47:59
yeah.

Chris Hudson: 48:00
World changing product.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 48:01
And then you can use, as you said before, then you can use. The documentation of all the things that you’ve already worked on to get there. Yeah. Because maybe your great solution is actually at the end you might see that, and that happens as well. Maybe it’s more about the idea that you worked on and you did prototypes and everything like two months ago. Maybe we wanna continue to look at that and then they would do that.

Chris Hudson: 48:22
Yeah. Yeah. Some really interesting points around creativity, design thinking, and its application through the world of work and what we can do with it. I was just gonna ask maybe as a final question, whether you felt there were any resources that really stand out as being really valuable for people that you’d recommend, for those that don’t know of design thinking should check out anything that springs to mind?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 48:42
Yeah, I think the one, the easiest is to recommend books and. My favourite and, and let’s say close to me because they were co-produced with one of the professors at Stanford University that was also my mentor. They are a set of, I think there are now three books and they, who, it’s called The Playbook of Design Thinking and the Toolbox of Design Thinking. The Editor is Wiley. And they were all produced by people that have lots of experience, lots of different authors, which is great because, and then they brought guests with project experiences and so everything there is written based on lots of experience. Yeah. Plus lots of research. So it’s. They are really good. They are great explanations. They go beyond the basics of we have all these tools for creativity. We have all these tools for empathy. They call it Be Beyond, and they’re very focused on industry. So I think they’re really, really good. So Larry Leifer is one of the authors, Larry Leifer, the Design Thinking Playbook, Wiley. Then it’s got like two siblings books. Sibling books.

Chris Hudson: 50:02
Great. Okay. Well we can share those links in the show notes. Yeah. So that people can access them and check them out. So have a look at that. And then, yeah, I think that’s probably about it for our chat. But if anyone wants to get in touch with you, how would they get in touch?

Dr. Maria Camacho: 50:14
Yeah. That was gonna say, the other thing that you can do is get in touch with me.

Chris Hudson: 50:18
Yeah.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 50:19
Yes. I do corporate training. I do mentorship for teams that are working on projects within organisations. Yeah. Or entrepreneurship. And sometimes all you need is because you might have the book and you might know how to go about design thinking, but in the beginning especially, it’s quite hard. So you can, having somebody there that can mentor you every now and then and say, oh. Maybe better to switch this, go this way, go this other way, look at this resource or whatever. That’s something that helps a lot and I’ve witnessed that and they can reach me on LinkedIn. That’s the easiest way. Yeah, so my LinkedIn handle is Maria Camacho design and will anyone can write me an email as well if you like. My email is maria@mariacamacho.com.

Chris Hudson: 51:07
Great. Thanks so much, Maria. I really appreciate you coming onto the show and just from your wealth of experience, talking through all the different perspectives around organisational creativity in one way or another, and obviously design thinking. So thanks so much again for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 51:22
Thank you so much, Chris. It’s been wonderful. And as you can see, I just love to talk about it.

Chris Hudson: 51:28
Yeah, that’s it, and we’ll enjoy hearing it too, so thank you so much.

Dr. Maria Camacho: 51:31
I’m glad about that. Bye everyone.

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