People First: Innovating the Individual

Ricardo Brito wanted to direct horror films. Design became his career almost by accident, taking him from graphics and branding into product development, service design and leadership. By the time of this Innovation Rockstars conversation, he was working as Innovation Lead at Doodle and asking questions that reached well beyond the design department.

One of those questions is uncomfortable: how much of an organization's resistance to innovation comes from the fears and assumptions of the people leading it?

Brito has little patience for another framework presented as the answer to that problem. He wants leaders to examine their own behavior, make room for people to question familiar answers and judge ideas by the problems they solve. His warning for anyone doing that work is personal and direct: ego can get in the way of learning.

Look at what people are afraid of

Across his work with different industries, Brito repeatedly encountered fear. People worried about losing customers, losing budget, looking bad in front of a manager or taking a risk that might damage their career.

He connects those concerns with the environment leadership creates. An organization can ask people to experiment while making the consequences of an unsuccessful attempt feel personally threatening. The resulting caution should not be surprising.

His argument is that leaders bring their own beliefs and fears into their decisions. Those decisions, in turn, shape what colleagues feel able to do. Before demanding a different innovation culture, leaders need to examine how their own reactions contribute to the current one.

“your ego is your worst enemy.”

That does not make innovation solely an individual responsibility. Brito also discusses structures, goals and processes. But it does mean that a new method is unlikely to change much if the people using it remain unwilling to question their existing convictions.

Check whether the impressive idea solves a useful problem

Brito does not object to ambition, a shared vision or a motivating direction. He objects to pursuing something because it sounds impressive without examining why it matters.

He asks whether the measures used to celebrate a project reflect its impact on the customer. A number can look encouraging to investors or colleagues while revealing little about the importance of the underlying problem or the quality of the solution.

That question is especially relevant to an established product team. Assumptions that supported earlier success can become less useful as a market changes. Brito describes the need to unlearn and rethink, rather than treating familiar answers as permanent truths.

At Doodle, his own move toward innovation followed work across departments, where he could bring service-design thinking and another perspective to projects outside the design function. He describes himself as one contributor within the organization, not the sole person responsible for its capacity to innovate.

For R&D leaders, the practical challenge is to keep the customer problem visible when an exciting concept begins to dominate the conversation. The appeal of the technology or presentation should not substitute for evidence that the work is useful.

Create room to think, not just another training course

Brito distinguishes acquiring skills from changing an attitude or way of thinking. Education budgets and courses can be valuable, but adding another skill does not necessarily help someone question the assumptions guiding their decisions.

His internal approach is grounded in projects. He describes sitting with colleagues and creating space for them to reflect and explore, rather than presenting his work as a formal one-to-one coaching program throughout Doodle.

A formative experience was joining a company that told him he had its trust from day one. He remembers how different that felt from assuming trust had to be earned before he could act. The experience shaped his view of what a supportive environment can make possible.

He also describes the limit of external advice. If leaders repeatedly hire consultants but reject the uncomfortable findings they receive, another engagement may reproduce the same frustration. The organization still has to decide whether it is willing to change.

Separate structural silos from human misunderstandings

Brito identifies two kinds of barriers between teams. Some are built into the organization, such as conflicting goals or processes that put groups in competition. Others arise between individuals through different expectations, communication habits or unresolved tensions.

Service design can help make the structural barriers visible by examining how the parts of the organization fit together. Leaders then need to decide whether to change responsibilities, processes or objectives. Asking colleagues to collaborate more enthusiastically will not resolve goals that keep pushing them in opposite directions.

Interpersonal barriers need attention too. Brito notes that remote work can leave people seeing one another only in brief snapshots. Without enough conversation, they can create explanations for each other's behavior that are never checked.

Recognizing which problem is present helps avoid treating every silo as the same kind of failure. Some require an organizational decision; others begin to shift when people understand each other better.

Let different perspectives produce something tangible

Brito's favorite example from his career is creating the IoT Service Kit with an engineering colleague who loved board games. They saw a need for a way to help people imagine and design connected services, and combined their perspectives in an open-source tool.

The story gives a practical expression to his people-first argument. A designer and an engineer brought different strengths to a shared problem and made something others could use.

“How can you make a new product or innovate in a company if you don't innovate the way you think?”

For Brito, the answer begins with willingness: to question a belief, hear a different perspective and make experimentation feel safe enough to attempt. Those changes are less visible than a new template, but they influence what a team can do with every template it already has.