For more than twenty-six years, I’ve worked with people, organisations and communities around the world. My work has taken me from classrooms and boardrooms to hospitals, government departments, global businesses and communities often excluded from traditional design.

Today, through INSTILL Academy, I bring those experiences together to help people build greater empathy, clarity, creativity and confidence in the way they lead, work and live.

From Inclusive Design to Creative Leadership

For two decades I was in leadership at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, including ten years as Director.
My work there centred on inclusive and human-centred design: creating products, services, systems and experiences with people rather than simply for them.
Over time, I became increasingly interested in the decisions behind the design.
Who sets the direction?
Who gets heard?
Who gets excluded?
What kind of leadership creates the conditions for better ideas to emerge?
Those questions led to the development of the Creative Leadership model built around three deeply human capabilities:
Empathy. Clarity. Creativity.

A different kind of leadership

That search became more than 25 years of research, teaching and practice. It took me around the world, working with people and organisations from very different cultures and backgrounds. It became the Empathy, Clarity and Creativity model, and eventually my book, Creative Leadership.
Along the way, I learned something I wish I'd known as that quiet child:
Leadership isn't a personality type. It's a practice.
You don't have to dominate a room. You don't need a particular job title. And you certainly don't need someone else's permission to begin.
That's one of the reasons I created INSTILL Academy. To share what I've learned and help more people discover the leader they can become.

A life in conversation

I’ve been fortunate to work with people in more than forty countries from students and civil servants to designers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, academics and communities.
The settings change. The questions are remarkably similar.

• How do we understand one another better?
• How do we make sense of complexity?
• How do we find the courage to create something different?

Some of the organisations I’ve worked with

Creative Leadership published by Penguin 

My book, Creative Leadership: How to Design the 21st-Century Organisation, grew from years of research, teaching and practice.

At its heart is a simple idea: leadership does not belong only to people with impressive titles.

It belongs to anyone willing to develop the empathy to understand, the clarity to see what matters, and the creativity to imagine and act on what could be different.

And another story is taking shape...

Alongside my work in leadership and design, I'm writing The Teashop, a collection of philosophical stories about the small moments, conversations and encounters that shape a life.
It may seem like a different kind of writing, but it comes from the same place: a lifelong curiosity about people, what we can learn from one another, and how we find our way to tell the stories that live in us all.

Why INSTILL Academy exists

I created INSTILL Academy because I wanted to make the ideas I’ve spent my career developing available far beyond the rooms I happen to be teaching in.

Not everyone has access to a design school, an executive programme or an international conference. But everyone deserves the opportunity to grow.

My hope is that this Academy becomes a place where you can think deeply, learn practically and develop the confidence to make a difference in your own way.

You do not need to become someone else to lead. You may simply need to recognise more fully what is already there. 

— Rama