| 00:00:00 - 00:04:00 | Today's guests from the creativity effect have facilitated more than five hundred design thinking projects for over twenty two hospitals, thirty seven international companies and six universities. Karen Tilstra has a PhD in creative leadership and innovation. How cool is that she and Andy Tail Strap stood up in an innovation lab for or Lando Magic and launch the award winning Florida Hospital Innovation Lab. Today we explore the topic of innovation. You're listening to sea sweet blueprint, the show for sea sweet leaders. Here we discussed no byes, approaches to organizational readiness and digital transformation. Let's start the show. Karen, Andy, thank you so much for joining me. I thought a great spot to start is get some common language in place and just talk about how do you describe innovation and how do you describe the type of innovation lab that you helped create? Well, for me, I describe innovation as the outcome of creative process, creative thinking. So an innovation is something that was created and so it came from a creative process, thinking about it, trying it, iterate, iterating it forward. And did you have anything? Yeah, well, I've actually I have maybe a more icono class or I or anti antithesis perspective innovation. I kind of view it as like the opposite of culture. It's kind of like, I think, culture and tradition, or like what have we done before and what's the same things that we've kept going? So innovations like what's a new thing? That kind of goes counter culture, and I think that's also why innovation is sometimes so hard to be able to grasp or understand, because it's the very countered of what the Best Practices or what people have been comfortable doing for so long. So I definitely agree also with what Karen said. I think I like to take a more cultural anthropological approach, but I love care and definition as well. Well. There's lots of definitions. Actually it is hard debated and fact some people say they're there really is no agreed upon definition. But I personally think if we're specific, being really really specific, creative thinking and the creative process leads to innovations. But then you ask the lab and Innovation Lab. There are many kinds of innovation labs and I feel oftentimes organizations specifically to find innovation too narrow. They put innovation off kind of at a addendum to their organization. But the kind of labs I love to work in and that we helped create our design thinking labs, where they sit inside the organization or their virtual or their mobile and they can move around in anyone can access them at any level of the organization and they really exist to be a bridge to frontline knowledge, to the top and a way to get conversations going and learn new things and try new things and get feedback and keep information to knowledge really at the forefront. And design thinking labs, I think, do that really well. They get people connected and they really are deep feedback fields. Yeah, we help design design thinking labs, which would people here innovation lab. They sometimes think, oh, what are you creating? What are those products you're making? What are like? How many d printers do you have? You probably have so many. It's like, no, no, we don't. We don't work on the rapid prototyping side. We work very much on the process and skills side. So we use design thinking methodology, the five stage methodology of using empathy to then reframe or define, than idate prototype and then test. So the innovation labs that we design are ones very focused on design thinking process. To put the people of the organizations, of the employees, because we like to create embedded innovation labs in an organization to make them the experts, where they're the ones bringing forth the knowledge and the expertise. We're just giving them the tools and the process. With design thinking, no, it's really human centered and based on the concept that people care what they help create and they're responsible when they care. So you can have a lot... |
| 00:04:00 - 00:08:01 | ...of things happening in an organization that the top leadership knows nothing about and probably never would be involved, but it directly affects the organization in a big way. And so design thinking innovation labs are, you might say, a little level or a kind of innovation model or strategy that really keeps the frontline knowledge very much known and circulating to the organization in a dynamic way where there's constant feedback and when you have people working on challenges that they see that actually would support the goals and aspirations of the organization and they work on these and they solve them, it just puts the organization that much more forward and that much more relevant. And this the kind of allows we design are really to keep the organization relevant and sustainable. So they never have to be disrupted. I love it. So it's not just an expensive office with the whole bunch of wacky furniture off in the corner somewhere. This is is more of a mindset and a way of bridging the gap across the whole organization. And Karen, I know you know you've often created innovation to Improv you know, I think there's nothing better than frontline workers. They're improvising all the time and you know, I'd be curious you're how do you find those improvisations and then get them to then be pulled back into the rest of the organization? Well, one thing that I found is when you bring innovation to organization, the front line offen says, oh, that's not us, we don't have a voice or don't ask us, we just work here, because they've been so conditioned that they don't really matter. But in reality, when you look at an organization, the front line is where so much knowledge sits and where you can learn so much about what the reason you even exist and so what we actually when one of the first innovation labs I started in the large health care system, it was very intriguing to me to just come out of my doctoral studies and I really wanted to see how we could bridge frontline knowledge to the top leadership and middle management above, but specifically that top strata. And I started really seeing that. In all due respect, but the further people got to the top, the less they were, they were farther from the knowledge. And so we started to invite when we start the lab, top leadership was really behind it and voices were there. You come in, bring your challenges, bring your problems, help us support our goals and aspirations. And the frontline were like, we're afraid to come in. I'll I better not say anything. If I come in and say something, am I going to get fired? And the tool that we used was Improv and I felt really blessed because my sons were in high school at the time and they want to do something more than music or they like sports, but they weren't heavily into sports. And so we started looking at the Improv and we hired an Improv instructor from the local Improv Comedy Club here, which is actually quite well known sat comedy lab, and I got to know Richard, just his name. I got to know him and as we were launching what are this first lab. I start thinking maybe this is a way we could help frontline workers become more comfortable, and so I started thinking of this analogy that this lab was at the way the frontline workers viewed it was an island and to get to the island Ak lab, they had to cross the moat and the Moat was too scary. There are too many sharks and scary things. So improv served as a bridge for people to come in and I discovered that working with frontline staff, they are very eager. Once they feel safe, they're very eager. That have lots of ideas, tons and tons of knowledge and the way we set up there, the way they work to their challenges they brought in. They did have facetime with top leaders and they could share their new insights. They learned solutions that they thought might be helpful in the feedback they had gotten under solutions. It's very dynamic. I heard top leaders say over and over again, wow, this was so helpful. We didn't know that, we would never know that. And I have had the wonderful experience of seeing so many frontline staff who had been working in healthcare for years say to me we have... |
| 00:08:01 - 00:12:00 | ...never had an idea put forward. I never got to speak to a top leader, I got to present at a town hall. Wow, I never imagined in a million years that would happen. And so I found design thinking in bened. Design thinking labs really gave the organization a new language, a new way to actually address challenges but also reimagine their future collaboratively. Yeah, it was a very exciting process. Yeah, and in beded design thinking lab, socially, when we created or you know, Karen, I came on kind of later in the process, because that we created this or care created that in like two thousand and twelve. It's kind of like a structured way to not follow the structure. I don't know care if you can expect, because I remember the Phil created a way for frontline employee specifically like nurses, doctors, patients, really anyone, you know, evs, to be able to hop, skip and jump over the boundaries and the barriers in place in a huge organization. I mean this hospital, the single campus, had like tenzero employees, or several thousand employees at the very least. So how do you get this patient or this nurse in the same room as the CEO or the director and then how do you get that empathy so that the director then can make changes happen throughout the organization? And this design thinking lab created a way to kind of break down that structure in a safe and very collaborative way where it was non aggressive and non confrontational. So it's Virginius on Karen side and she created it from the ground of and it was. It was an incredible place. There's a lot of other studies and other experts that we grew from. But also I really thought that innovation works in an organization when you have a good methodology and you have leadership support. If you lack either, though, it's you're going to go off the rails. But nothing really happens in an organization list leader support. So there has to be leadership training also, or education or bringing them on board. And I found that all leaders want to innovate the challenges. A lot of them don't know how or they feel like they say go innovate right, telling my group to innovate, be creative, but yet they're not changing anything in the structure. So an innovation lab can be very scrappy. Looks like scrappy where you could when we started this particular lab the same way several labs I started. Let's just figure out what we have on hand, tables or chairs and use those. My bigger thing was to get the boards, either whiteboard paint or white boards that people could use. But it doesn't have to cost that much money to get going. I love that. I love the way that you describe it as as you know, giving the front line workers of voice and then also, you know, changing the leadership so that they're set up in a way that they can accept those ideas and accept that voice of the front line workers, because I feel like a lot of people, when they think innovation lab, they think that this is a place where it's just an idea factory where ideas are being cracked out and they're also they have to be like these way off the wall crazy ideas, and people are just frustrated because they're thinking, well, we have so many inefficiencies, we already have plenty of ideas today. Why would we need this idea factory over there? And so, you know, I'm curious. Yeah, I would imagine standing up innovation lab within healthcare is I'm not imagining it's the most straightforward and easy of things. I'd be curious what challenges and resistance and types of things do you face in those types of environments. How long do you got, George? Are we here for the next few hours or one thing, though, that I say that run off the Bat. We say ideas are a diamond dozen. The ideas are everywhere. It's execution of the idea that matters because, and also that's what's so cool about the kind of allows we work with, is you're getting a lot of feedback along the way. It's very innerative and idea might come up and say don't be married to it. Looks like it's not worth exploring. Let's move something else. You talked about challenges. To me, the biggest challenge wherever, if it was healthcare, Pro Sports, government and education, the biggest challenge is getting people to understand they don't have to take themselves so seriously. |
| 00:12:00 - 00:16:00 | They could take the work seriously but not themselves. I'm still struggling with that and and I work with Karen on daily basis. If that point actually things that possible. We're working on a presentation we're doing for a group in Ireland and that's the point we're really driving home, is that if people come together anything's possible. We just have these beliefs that organizations have to operate in certain ways and we have all these structures of communication and all these timelines to get things that proved. We have fooled ourselves in that way. Sometimes it's needed, but most of the time we just need to try something. So that is a big challenge and especially in healthcare, you have lots and lots of egos. But I thought the most challenging thing was to get the front line to relax. It's like they had been so conditioned, like I can't be in the same way with the doctor, I don't dare, I'm not going to say anything to a doctor. We had so by beautiful experiences where doctors worked with staff, nurses, with whole riding across the board, and it all almost always ended with wow. Why weren't we talking sooner? Because of that, of that problem that you the stratification and healthcare and the just different roles people played. I wanted something in that lab that people would have to interact with to say I'm here and all stratifications aside, higher he's going to be put on hold for a minute. And so I've been working with a group that really understood health care, because I didn't come from health care. And we landed on this tree. Wee. We caught the badge tree because badges are a big deal on health care. wheners a badge, and the badges at that point in time really stated where you came from. Top frontline the badges look quite different. The frontline staff had their full name picture. Top just had a name. Front only first name and what they would do. Well, we asked the local artist to design a tree for us. So she came with this bronze tree and it was awesome, but we were kind of joking because of what she brought with, like a marijuana tree, and at that point you know marijuana was so some of the people said this a good omen, but anyway they would. People would come in, we would ask them to hang their badges on this tree and we were very strict about it to start with, because we say we got to own this, otherwise it's going to look sappy and stupid. But people and so we'd say we're checking in, hang badge on the tree, I'm checking in. Badge tree became a symbol for the lab that said to people everyone's welcome and we're going to hear your idea or you're here your thought or your feedback, no matter who you are and who, no matter who, you say it too. And then we said, when you leave, you can take your badge and check out, and we really needed a strong metaphor like that because it was just unheard of. That wet. The combinations of people we had sitting around working on a challenge, talking, brain storming, giving feedback to each other was very was just not done before and when it worked, which most of the time it did, it was awesome. That's great. So so you heard it here. Marijuana kickstarts the innovation process. That's that's what I heard. I remember one guy came in from he was on one of the our teams and operating teams, and he came in because this is awesome. I think they're sanks thing where I wanna and then I looked at my said it does look like every one point. We said, anyway, because name is Arnie. Aren't you save a little too familiar with that? So, anyway, I love that concept of leaving the badge at the door because when I was preparing for this, I started to think about innovation as slightly differently I started to think about it a little bit like organizational mindfulness. You know, at this point in my life have been trying to focus a lot more in mindfulness. And you know, mindfulness is you have all these ideas that are just floating around. You try to make space to, you know, kind of honor that and say, is this an idea that I need right now, or can I just let the idea go? and You keep doing that until you kind of center in on the idea that you need to focus on right now. And you know, along those lines, to really... |
| 00:16:00 - 00:19:59 | ...exercise that mindfulness you need to find the space in the time and front relne workers are so busy and everyone's busy. How do you get an organization, especially you know in healthcare, to carve off the time and carve off the space to dedicate to this? Very good question, and that was the big worry we started. Every lab I've worked with, the big worry is, okay, no one's going to come, or we're going to give them permission and everyone's going to come and sitting here all day long and don't and not do any work, the real rook work. It never happened the second way. People didn't just come in mindlessly. But this is where top leadership really plays a role when you have so we're doing some work for Orange County right now and the top leader has to say we're behind this innovation and we will help you work it out. So we say that leaders do for things either to kill or adhance innovation. One is that they have a voice, that they use their voice to say we're going to really do innovation, we're behind this, we're going to find out what that means. They provide resources, and resources are not just money. It's time, people place and money, but also it's training people and then holding people accountable. And so what I found in every place we had a lab that was successful, and I say successful we know they're not always going to be successful because once leadership changes an organization you don't know what's going to happen. It's just but when you have a leader say we're really behind innovation and then you ask, they ask their people they're responsible for how we going to make this happen, it really does start to work. So that's where it's a multifaceted but you have to have the leader work with leaders and not just expect they know and see. That's one thing that I really had to learn kind of the hard way that top leaders don't always know what innovation is. They don't know how to make it happen. But so when you help the lead to realize if they just hold their direct reports responsible or accountable, what are they doing to help make this happen, and then those people hold the next people accountable, change does happen, and especially when you put some language with that. So when design thinking labs, empathy is a big word. Empathy and feedback, innative learning. You get countable showing not perfect work, work this kind of scruffy. Still it is a process. It's innative in a self. Setting up a labosative process, definitely, and kind of going up what you're saying about organizational mindfulness with our design thinking methodology. But it's not ours. But the way we like to view it is it's eighty percent problem learning and then twenty percent problem solving. So there's a huge focus on that. Empathetic what's really going on here? What's the story? What's the feeling? And in a hospital, you know you'd expect that to be taking place more often, but you know when you get an organization that big things, you lost in the cracks a patient story or or a nurse's feelings. Sometimes you get push the side. So fill the forhause want avation lab provided such an incredibly safe space for that mindfulness, for the learning of what others were going through and that empathetic gathering and understanding and and, as what's Karen saying, with the Voice of Leadership. Leadership has to sanction this, has to bless this and give it like. This is what we need to start focusing on. This is it. I am advocating for this type of creativity and for this empathy. And there's three other things too. There's education, accountability, and then I'm drawing a blank, care care, and there's four this voice, accountability, resources and education. Okay, great, yeah, we just went over this this morning to so, but that's that's what we really say, that the leaders can absolutely be the turning point for innovation within organization because at a place of power and a hierarchy, those four things really fall to the top section, to the top leadership, and it looks different in every setting. To you know, another thing that we've learned, especially when you talk about healthcare, Pro... |
| 00:20:00 - 00:24:00 | Sports, talking a lot about best practice. Best practice is really a good thing. But when you're talking about not getting disrupted or trying to stay relevant or sustainable, you have to really challenge your best practices all the time and think about next practice. So in healthcare that's a really big deal because with magnet hospitals and everyone tried to get to best practice. Sometimes that consumes the whole thing and the next thing we know, some kid in a garage invented something that totally disrupted a whole part of healthcare, which has happened on multiple occasions. So when you're actually an innovation lab can be very vital in helping frontline middle management come in and explore a challenge that they're that they see. What does this look like? What's really going on is, are we still relevant? Is the best practice still what it was to years ago? And getting people to actually have that mindsets a big step, because so many healthcare professionals are really it's drilled as their head best practice, best practice, best practice, and so I can't deviate from what this algorithm of best practice says. So that's an Ashley's port sports has some of that also, but again it's when we stop, pause or breathe and look and see what's happening. That's what we forget to do. Yeah, we we all do. Actually was guilty of this recently. But I love that you talked about both empathy and the learning, because I mean they go hand in hand. But then that number of eighty percent problem learning is, I really think, really impactful because if I use an imaginary timeline of that, say ten days, I could see an executive saying, all right, you know, I'm hoping after two weeks or so I'll start seeing some solutions. And you know, I would think if so, you know, out of ten days, if you're taking eight days to just learn about the problem, let's say it's ten weeks. You know, you're taking eight weeks to learn and only two, two weeks to solve. I could see, you know, people having a lot of anxiety about about that. You know, it's like hey, we really need to get to the solving. And I love that. And maybe that comes to that what you said the the executives need to leave the space for it. What are those things that they do that that kill these innovation labs? Are Innovation? I love that question. Well, executives do good work. Executives are there to execute and they're also people don't tell them the truth. People don't are honest with executives. Executive walks in the room and everyone's behavior changes, and that's one thing a lab tries to do. It's okay and to work with the executive here the truth. Embrace the truth. The truth will set you free, an old saying. The thing is that to train people what learning is and that questions and pauses to notice what's happening are more important often times than answers. And we've often times had the experience when executives arrived it's like, okay, guys, we need to get this down, we need to get it done now. All right, but can you give us time to learn? And so what we would do is we put what I call the four minute report out, and these are forminute little where we tell the executive we seen four minutes just to keep them informed. We just got this new insight. We just went and experience with the ind user experienced. We with and experience with the customer experience. We took our team through the ear emergency room, registrates and process and wow, this is what we learned. We rode around in Gurney's unknown for to the transporters for five hours. We had doctors do that. Wow, this is what we learned. When I've learned executives, when you give them insights that you have drawn from direct experience, not from your survey, not from some crazy thing that comes in the May email. Once you go see a doctor, but actually you walk in the patient shoes, you walk in the doctor shoes, you walk in the nurses shoes and you tell you share it with the executive. Almost always just like wow, we had no idea, we didn't realize, and I've learned that it would executives get insights. My experience has been specially if they're savvy towards innovation or they already have said yes, we want to be innovative, they will come and sit with you and say how do we... |
| 00:24:00 - 00:28:00 | ...miss that, or how can we learn more about that, or what do we need to do next? And I love the design thinking process because it gives a way for people to be created, because you can't just be creative just in an organization. You can't be creative randomly. So design thinking is very iterative, very flexible, but it's very clear pathway forward that gives people opportunity to learn, connect, rethink, pause, try, get feedback, try again, get feedback, all based on the process or the idea that we really don't know. So we're going to learn and when we do learn something, we're gonna not be married to that and we're going to get feedback and we're going to look at feedback as a gift. And we always say there's no such thing as bad feedback. Feedback is just information and that information is a lifeline. How it can be delivered can sometimes be a problem, but yeses, feedback is is always good. Right. Yeah, Hey, you you need to change everything. We just say when you get free back, to say thank you. You don't have to defend or anything. Just say thank you, and so many people are wow. Also, we have developed a fit. Well, it's not just as a lot of people feedback grids. What we love. What you would like to see change questions that came up or new ideas that came up, and when you give people the feedback grid or teach them about feedback, it's really helpful. How they can give it. People's often well, that was another thing executives when they would come to hear some of the projects the outcomes. It's like we don't want to hurt their feelings, we don't want to make them feel discourage. So then we said we got to teach them how to give feedback, and that was really fun and quite actual informative. So we never just assume people know how to give or take feedback. Yeah, that that's a great idea you had. Here's why it's stupid. So that you can say what you love, but then what you'd like to see changed, and also you set the team up to hear that and the formaute report outs, sir, are awesome. I think they're awesome because the executive then they're always in a hurry. It's like, okay, I can do this in four minutes. But what we found if we keep our four minutes, they'll have lots of questions, but that's on there. That's their decision to stay longer. So if I was to add to to the you know, what are ways that executives can kill? We've we've given a few presentations and we found that when in it, when executive define innovation too narrowly, as in like it can only look like this, it can only be an ipod, can only be an iphone, can only be technology or only from certain people. That is a surefired way to absolutely destroy innovation. And what we mean by that, though, is you can't just say anything's innovation, even though, for being technical it is, but it's not. You need a broad definition of innovation so that it can it can take the form of many things. That's why we said we're not. We're not like an RD lab, we're not like a product lad, because innovation could be a nurse behaving differently for a patient, you know, putting on a paper hat to signify that they're in a different role than when they came earlier. It could be an evs using a different tool in a different room. It doesn't have to be such high tech, you know, like dark matter, or like teleportation, like, Whoa, this is so new and so crazy. It can be just using different language for different end users. That is a really valuable point when you're innovating inside the organization you trying to innovate, to create a culture of innovation, is to start to see it over a innovation can be everyone's job. And some people say, okay, that is not true, but I actually think it is, because we've worked with enough organizations and been inside enough organizations for enough hours to see that no matter where you sit in the organization, everybody has room to think creatively and do it better or adapt it to different things. And when people feel free to do that, always aligning to the goals and ask races of the organization. We've seen a pull engagement rise up to twenty three percent for sentile points up. We have seen language change. We have heard people say, you know, I'm interested now. I actually helped modify this,... |
| 00:28:00 - 00:32:00 | ...what we were working on or what we offered. I'm interested. I love this organization and I think for many leaders they don't. I would say that's one thing they really miss, as they somehow fail to understand that when they give their employees latitude to think and make their own position better, it improves the whole organization, but also it really raises their engagement and people want. People love to innovate, they love to think creatively and also people want to be visible. They want to know they matter, and I personally think that having an innovative organizations one of the best ways to let that happen. I love that and and I love that that employee engagement number that you through out there, because one thing I know that a lot of our clients have the challenge with and and really any executive is you. If you are going to create the space, if you are going to give the budget, you need to measure it somehow right. Otherwise are you just throwing money down a black hole? And I know you know some of the darker parts of my mind. One way I like to measure innovation labs is to just view it as an idea killing machine. So, you know, you're taking all these machines and all these ideas and how quickly can we take this idea, kind of feed it through the machine, figure out if it's good or just kill it? And you know inevitably more going to be killed than not. And so I kind of view that's one measurement. Employee engagement is another one that you just said. I'd be curious, you know, is that a crazy way to think about it as a killing machine? But then also are there other ways that you think about measuring it? Big Question too, because how do you measure? Well, we struggle with that. We continue to struggle with it, but there's a couple things we've done. One thing we I was interested in knowing, is how many people, even after the leader said we want to innovate and made it possible. We made it is low barrier and easy access as possible for people to come in and bring us something that they were struggling with. And we had a very simple betting process. How many people would come in, stay with the process, help them build a team get to the final ending? Some happen very rapidly, some tick to a time and then in bed and then say it was worth it, I would do it again. That was interesting to me and we found that overwhelming. Lie. I'm not looking quitte those numbers, but it was well into the s eighty percent and we would and we asked. We were always asking, would you recommend your colleague to come? We were in the ninety percentile. Pro Sports, healthcare, education and private business. Yes, we would tell our employees to come, but we had to always be mindful to that. We needed to let them know when they came in we had a specific goal. They had a goal they needed to they had milestones and needed to reach. But we did struggle to define some of them kind of mystery of things that would happen. So we eventually came up with this ice water steam model. It sounds kind of stupid, I know, but so ice are those situation. Those projects that just had clear we had. We improved our retention rate by forty six percent over the course of the last two years. So clear done. Then the water were like, for example, we had a project we've worked on that we included nurses, doctors, Pillbotomus and some other allied health. They came up with the solution. It was awesome, it worked and we were giving they were giving a report on that. One of the executives came out to me secure and that was that. Now it's been eight months online were so many more things came from that, so many more great intended consequences. So we said, okay, those are water. They start like the mouth of a river and it flows down and things change and it's going. So it's always changing. Then we have our steam where some projects came in and they went out and they got US Thos Day. We don't know what exactly they did in the sense of to make a difference, but everything got better. And so I was telling an executive once I said, you know, sometimes they just come in and get better and I said he said, well, that's good. Let's just count it for. So then that's where we said, okay, those are steam projects. So... |
| 00:32:00 - 00:36:01 | ...shortly after we kind of throw the magic lives. Some executives say, okay, come on, you can major every single thing. I said, yeah, you can, but sometimes I'm measured. It doesn't exactly how it we we we rest and present at it up in Boston at this innovation place and they said talk about your outcome. So I said, okay, we're going to be brave and present our ice water steam model and honestly I drag half my team up there on stage with because I said they're going to think we're tone totally nuts. But after we were done and we explain it, we gave clear examples and came off stage after their whole presentation was over, several people come up and said thank you. That's our experience too. That is so in fact, I've had emails from people over the last couple years after that saying I'm still using that. That saved my neck. Thank you. That was helpful. I don't really know exactly all of the stuff about metrics, but I do think it's important in a lab to major who. How many people come in? Do you have repeat people? Do they feel it's worthwhile? Do they finish the projects? I mean you can always major did the project make a difference? To me, that's kind of them, no brainer of it. But what happened? What Trans What's transformation? To People's language change? Did they have skills they learned in the lab that they started applying to their work? Then my big question was that we ask people that had come for several projects. Do you find you don't need to come to the lab anymore because you learned enough and you're doing it just innately? And several we had a lot of people. Of The people that came several times, the first is lab got going. I would say if there were ten, six of them would say we're just doing it. We created our own little lab and we're doing it with our different people. It's some people say I always want to come back there because I like working in a lab. So those were things I felt were violet viable for a leader. Of course you want to know if their project did anything, but that was easy to measure. But with the to me was what was the transformation happening? And we work closely with the important engagement people in hr we never claimed that our stuff really was all the reason that things made a difference, but it was part of a reason, because I never nothing succeeds in isolation, just like nothing fails isolation. I felt we had to be mindful that if we were teaching new tools. That was part of what made the employee case of race. Anyway, that's a long answer to your question. No, I love it and I think the one of the great items in there is that measurement of have you just taken this into your daily life? Now is this? has this become as natural as breathing? Because that's really how it starts to spread within the whole organization and I love that. No, I was going to say, and that also is very dependent on the leader, because you can have a lot of great innovation work done and the leadership changes, and that's why I like people to really understand that, because people can say wow, you know, we did all that and now we're moving backwards. It's a new leader. It just happens sometimes. It's very dependent on a leader, but people shouldn't give up. There's if they have enough skill, they can talk with leaders. They can. Sometimes it takes a while, but I don't think we should ever give up. Yeah, and some of the the stuff that you can't measure is the most valuable. You know, I just confession time when earlier when you're talking about how, you know, we don't always make the time for these this mindset, I've been staring at some Google spreadsheets that we use for our company for forecasts and for budgets for years and I was, as we're getting towards the end of the year, I was looking for trends, I was looking for various items and I just had a bunch of spreadsheets up and I spent half the day doing it and I eventually just got pissed on my stuff. I was and then I had an Aha moment. I was like, why the heck am I not just looking at visual I like visualization of this. I'm looking like I'm in the Matrix trying to make a patterns out of spreadsheet cells or rather than looking at some nice visually, and I do visualization that you know our company does. I'm it's very much a cobblers shoe kind of dilemma and that's just and I think that's also an example of I don't know how to measure it, because it's great. Now are of my whole executive team. Team can just look at... |
| 00:36:01 - 00:40:04 | ...these visualizations and see trends pop out at them. I don't know how you measure that and would you call that in it like it's at it like Andy, like you said, it's not dark matter, it's not inventing some new technology. You know everyone does data visualizations. But, like, would you classify something like that as innovation? I guess I'll stop there. Yeah, I mean you if you create something newer, better way to do it, because innovations like something useful and novel. But you know, one thing I want to say about data. I'm a big burden about this. We are so focused on collecting data on what happened and we are a lot less focused on why it happened. If we can really and that's I like about design thinking, because design thinking puts you, if forces you, to go to a place to learn why it's happening, because you can have all kinds of data that says this happened, does happen, this happened, but at the times to know why it's that's the more crucial thing. So I think what you said. Is that an innovation? I would say so. I I define anovation quite broadly anything that creates. Any time you create something new that's useful, you created an innovation. I think too, of the question asked afterwards, like why haven't we been doing this before? I think that's a pretty good indicator that what you did was innovative, because if it's that intuitive, that people see and they just instantly get it and they instantly see the value, but no one was implementing it before, I think that's innovative in itself. You're connecting the unseemingly obvious points and it creates a much easier way to go about we had a project once where it was a neonatal unit and little, tiny, tiny premier babies need to be held. Nurses oftentimes don't have time, so they invented this develop this cutler program or volunteers would come in and hold the babies and it just turned it was an awesome program. Everyone loved it, but it turned out to be a big disaster because volunteers to come in when babies weren't be held, nurses woul get upset, doctors tried to work with the baby. It was just a big collision. Well, the guy that was in charge of the unit brought that to the innovation lab and they all we had to share what their frustrations were. They were their own empathy source and that they realize, Oh wow, no one set up a schedule. Okay, it's like, okay, why didn't we think of that? That has been such a great reminder to me of not to mock or scorn the cont when an idea comes up, it's like yeah, why didn't you guys think of that before? It just seems so ridiculous that you didn't think of it. But when you take the whole mature and people are rushing, they're hurried, they're overburdened there they don't often times have time to talk to people, so temper start flying and they were an angry group of people too. And then when they came up with this schedule, okay, let's hang something on the door when the baby's ready to be held, and then some of the People's volages of what will make some little felt, little signs, and that turned into cuttle bugs, cuttle bugs on the door and it became an overnight success. But to be it was like, okay, we could have thought that before, but we did, and I think that's where I have felt a need to tell people it's okay, you didn't think of it because there was other things that play. Emotions are running high, people were annoyed and all that, and so I think that when you say, yeah, we should have thought of its sooner, I've noticed what people could feel really guilty like, wow, was I the one that blocked it? was either one that blocked it, but to give. That's why I think innovation has to be a no shame, no blame game. It's we're learning, we learn from mistakes. It all gives, it's all GRISP for the mill. I love it. It no shame, no blame and it doesn't have to be rocket science. So I figured maybe one item to finish on is, you know, I'm a big fan of cutting through the nonsense and bs and you know there's a lot of lingo and buzz words out there. When you know, think about the the transformation and the innovation space, is or is there are there things out there that people talk about her, that you see out in the ether, that is just, you know, it raises your BS flags and and you'd like to cut through it. Oh Man, we were just talking on the other day we were presenting at Opex in Orlando and it seemed like every presentation was about how to like Improve... |
| 00:40:04 - 00:43:05 | Your company culture and I love how everyone's talking about it but nobody knows what they're talking about the same thing. And that's why I, and you know, I had got my master's in anthropology, so cultures kind of like the focus of that education. And even within that there's a lot of disagreements about what culture means, of what it is. So I just love people are like, we can help you improve your culture in five steps. I'm like, no, you can't. It's okay, don't, just don't even try it. For me, this is where I'm at and I'm much more of a practice, practitioner than theoretical person. If a person can't tell me, okay, this goes sound very harsh, but I found to be true. I want to know what your experience is. When did you try it? How did it work? What did you do? Because if we're just quoting and other people's work, other people's ideas, I think it's helpful and very helpful for our an organization to hear these are the theories and this is what people did, but this is what we did, this is how we did it and this how it work for us, because until you can really get experience, like boots on the ground where you're actually doing it, I think you're just talking theoretically and it's not that meaningful. And that's why, whenever people ask me to talk, if I don't share my own personal experiences with it, we have to sometimes change a lot of the names and things like that, but I don't want them to believe me. I don't think they should believe me unless it's like if I said we raise employee engaged my twenty eight percent. Okay, tell me how you did it. I want to know how it happened. What were the ups and down to that to make that happen? Then I think people are not just talking out of both sides their know it's very easy to talk about theory, but to do to get being a lab or, to be with people, to travel to to where they are and learn from them, there is nothing like it and you never have to worry about B essing people if you have your own personal experience. I love that perspective and I love your approach. Dr Karen Tell Stra and Andy Tailstra, thank you so much for joining me and I guess want to say we're a mother some team, just in case people are wondering. Right for those thillose audio podcast enjoyers out there, George, thank you so much. It was a honor to be here with you and I hope it was helpfully but made sense absolutely. Thank you so much for having us. I enjoyed it. It was fantastic. Well, thank you. Technology should serve vision, not set it. At intevity we design clear blueprints for organizational readiness and digital transformation that allow companies to chart new past. Then we drive the implementation of those plans with our client partners in service of growth. Find out more at www that intevitycom you've been listening to see sweet blueprint. If you like what you've heard, be sure to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss a new episode. And why you're there. We love it if you could leave a rating. Just give us however many stars you think you deserve. Until next time,. |