 and welcome to The Creative Life, the collaborative production between Think Tech Kauai and the American Creativity Association. I'm Darlene Boyger, host for today and joining me is guest, Dawn DePasco. Dawn is coming to us from her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a very sunny day. We have been, if you've been following us and watching us to our viewers, you've probably noticed we've been doing a number of shows on innovation, the past few offerings. And it seems to me, even though we've got deep into theory and deep into practice, we really have not nailed it down as to how to create a climate for innovation. And I, my hope and also our guest hope, Dawn's hope is that we can do that for you today. So Dawn, welcome to The Creative Life. It's really a pleasure to have you here and with such an exciting topic. And perhaps we can start off with something we were talking about before we went on the air. And that's a question. If innovation is a priority for companies, why does it seem that so many struggle with how to get there? Right, thanks, Darlene. I think one of the real challenges is that so many organizations have such varying definitions of it, right? And if we asked everybody who is viewing this now or in the future to write down what they thought the definition of innovation was within a company, they would come up with as many people as there are on the viewing, from the viewing listeners. And I think what happens is because we have such different definitions, we don't necessarily hone in on what it is, let alone know how to make it happen, right? So there's a premise right there that's the issue. There are hundreds and hundreds of definitions of innovation, right? Hundreds of them, some more specific than others. But the other part to this that makes it so challenging is it's something that companies desperately want. They want this thing called innovation. They want their people to be innovative, right? So one of the things that we really see is that like a lot of the research says that these companies are all prioritizing innovation. There was a really cool study that was done by Eric Anderson and Bradley Johnson, Jameson, I'm sorry, Jameson in 2019, November 2019. And they were asking the question, do the top US corporations often use the same words in their vision, mission and values? And what do you think came up on the top of all three of those lists? I mean, really, it was either the word like innovate or innovation, right? And they were checking the 100 largest US corporations based on market capitalization. So what we know is this is something that everybody's saying they want. 70% of senior executives say innovation is one of the top three drivers for us to meet our strategic initiatives. We want it badly. We kind of know what it is, right? We're just not sure kind of how to get there. And so there's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of ambiguity around it. And when you get down to saying, okay, like Darlene and your corporation, what are you gonna do to make innovation happen? Darlene's going like, what are we talking about? How are we defining? How are we gonna know what it looks like when we see it, et cetera? And that's part of the challenge. Fortunately, there's been some work in this area that I think a lot of companies paid attention to, but there's still a lot, a lot of confusion. It just sounds good, right? It's like a nice sound bite. We're an innovative company. Or we want innovation or we rely on innovation. Sounds good. Now let's make it happen. And they're like... Yeah, definitely. I don't know what to do. Similar to the word creativity. Creativity and innovation automatically when people hear it, it seems to be a commendation and it seems to be a good thing. Exactly. Maybe we can take apart some of that. You referenced a definition. What is your definition of innovation? Well, I'm going to give you down, but it's okay. And I won't be formalized in this. I don't have anything prepared for this necessarily, but I would think that in the field, we typically look at it as applied creativity. So you can be very creative in a lot of different ways. You can be a creative thinker. You can be out of the box thinker. You can be just very brilliant about thinking different kinds of thoughts that don't really fit into any one construct. But innovation is taking that creativity and making it something practical and typically something that can be marketed and sold. And it's something that's useful to some population out in the market. So to me, if I was looking at that, I'd say practical, marketable, accessible product or service to people who want it. So within the concept of innovation as an applied strength, it seems that climate and culture come in. And many people seem to assume that climate and culture are interchangeable or are morphing into one another. What are some of your thoughts on the distinction between climate and culture? That's a great question. So a lot of times, and it's so funny, I was just asked to speak on the top of creating cultures for innovation. And I did it because it was the title of what I needed to speak to. But in the context of that talk I did the other day, I had to really tease them apart. So when we take a look at culture and climate, culture is very much like the roots of an organization. It's your history, it's your values. It's your customs, your beliefs, how we do things here. Sometimes companies will say it's the something way, which means it's deeply rooted. And that's wonderful. And you need those roots to spring from. At the same time, climate is malleable based on what people experience in the workplace. So it's not just the underpinnings. How does it feel to walk in the door of that organization or go into that office in that moment? And includes all kinds of things, obviously, like do I have, am I challenged in my work? Do people make sure I have enough time to, oh, thanks for making it larger, thank you. Do people make sure that I have enough time to think, right? Do we welcome debate? How do we treat that when we disagree from that? Does innovation spring, that kind of thing? Is there a conflict? How do we handle it? Because conflict has a negative impact, actually, on innovation. That's one of the criteria we'll talk about on things like even humor. Like if there is an environment you walk into where people are happy, you get the sense that they're probably going to be comfortable coming up with ideas and being fun. And we know that humor affects that innovative spirit, which is really cool. And I've done that a lot of times. I've done training for a million years. And I can tell when I walk into an organization, I walk into a group of people, I can tell immediately if it's healthy or unhealthy by how are they working with each other? How are they challenging each other? Do they debate without being concerned? It's going to be misconstrued. Are they having fun with each other? And if they're doing all those things, I can kind of tell it's a healthy climate. And if we think about it, all of us can think about a time when we've had like a boss changed, new boss. In that instance, that there's a new leader that climate has changed, that new leader has not affected those roots at all, OK, but has affected the climate. I want to address one more thing, because sometimes people think, well, culture isn't changeable. And what I want to invite us to think about is that when there is a vision of where an organization wants to go. And I just worked with the company a couple of weeks ago. Family business has grown a lot. The culture deeply rooted, right? But now they have a new CEO who has a big vision, wants to go there. But they're saying the cultural stuff is going to hold us down. Here's what I invited him to think about. Take a look at that vision. Take a look at some of that cultural stuff, those beliefs, those things that maybe keep us from being innovative. And then ask yourselves, which of these? What do we know about our beliefs? What are our values? Just brainstorm. What are all our things that we hold dear? And then take a look at that and say, what is it about that that we really do hold dear? So, for instance, if we used to have a team of people, we used to have a golf outing, right? Is it the golf outing we have to carry forward to hit our vision? No, it might be a little outdated, right? But we would say, what about that in our culture is important to us and it might be the chance to get together and to do some social event. So now the problem statement becomes, what can we do that will create an opportunity for us to start to blend some relationships, get to know some people, start to do some things to engage for our organization that will help us to reach that particular vision for our company. So you can alter culture and it shouldn't be updated, right? Sometimes just think we can't do it, but the climate itself can change in an instant. But you still have to work, I think, a little bit on those roots. So you briefly referenced leaders, the leader, perhaps, of a company or the managers. And we all know that a great manager should know how to coach, motivate, and give constructive criticism in just the right way. Yeah. We also know that that doesn't always happen. But the reason to have it go the right way is so employees are challenged, productive and happy at work. So you mentioned sense of humor, having fun with things, having the golf outings. Yeah. What happens if one or more of those dimensions are missing? OK. The leader doesn't know how to coach. Right. Right. Exactly. Right. And can I just take us back a little bit and I'll take a swat? Sure. So what I want to share with you is I'm going to kind of ask us to look at some really seminal research in the field about climate because it's going to link to the leaders role, which is really important because I want to make those linkages. What's really cool about this is I've studied innovation for years. I've studied leadership for years. And all of a sudden, like you said, there's like a real then diagram of overlap between the impact of good leadership or bad leadership on a company's ability to be innovative. So, Max, could you just go to slide one? For a second. OK. This is going to be a very strange place to start. But in 19 this there were companies in Sweden and they were making parts for this 1958 Volvo. OK, this I said seminal research goes way back. It's been going until today. And the research was the companies were making a part for this Volvo. Go to the next slide, if you will. OK, so what happened is Hornet fault, Dr. Hornet fault was hired by one of these plants to come in and say, what should we be doing to make us more efficient? It gets better, all this kind of stuff. Hornet fault went into the plant, the first plant. They were vibrant, coming up with ideas. Innovative people were happy. They were smiling. There was humor. There was energy in this plant. And he went down and he looked to see what he thought should happen. But he went down 50 kilometers down the road. To a same plant, making the same part for that same car. There was like cigarette butts and gums and ideas, suggestion box, people weren't happy. There was no energy and it was really flat. And he said, how could two different locations, two plants, have such a different climate when they were making the same parts? What would make it? So he started to do some investigation around people's behaviors and and what the climate was. He starts switching his research and went a different direction. He then connects up with Harry Neistrom. Harry Neistrom is also in Sweden, but he's doing different research about innovative climate, innovative companies. He's taking a look at companies and he's identifying them as either stagnant or innovative. Innovative means that they're taking products to market. Remember what I said about you have to create something useful, purposeful, something that you people can use, right? He's yeah. So he's taking a look at like innovators stagnant and he's saying, are these companies investing in products that will and will really encourage long term sustainability of the company? And they're commercially doing well. And he classified these into like, do they have technical novelty? So some piece of this, something that's never done before or might be a market novelty. This product has ever been seen in the market before. The other alternate was stagnant. And these were unsuccessful, creating new products, just commercially not sustainable. The two of them get together. They compare their research and they say, they scratch your hand and they go, is it possible that this climate difference where people are happy versus not happy can be interrelated and correlated to the innovative, successful company and what they found statistically significant relationship? So now that becomes the seminal research on climate, right? Go to the next slide first. And let's go to slide four, Max, and I'll show you the comparison. I'm going to hit your leadership question. OK, OK. So what they found from their research, but there were kind of nine dimensions of climate. If these things were in place, people were more likely to bring their best up to work to think, to be excited. And they were the things that you saw. Remember in that tree that were all the climate dimension. Yes, yes. Right. So look at this list. Now, I want to just identify the conflict and debate are in their different colors. Debates very positive. You are, if Darlene and I argue about something and we don't agree, we probably end up coming up with something new this better, right? But if we get to the point where we're digging our heels and it gets personal conflict decreases, decreases the innovation. OK, so there's a flip side. So we really want to stick with all these plus the green debate. Now, if we take a look at these, Darlene, what would you say the number of those dimensions are that would be affected by a leader? Actually, John, I have to refer to the paper because I can't see those. Oh, OK. Certainly trust is is one of my favorites. Uh huh. Leader effects trust. What else do they affect? Well, actually, I can see where a leader could affect all of all of them. Certainly taking in all of them. So if we take a look at this, I mean, does the leader give you challenging work to do or not? Right? Based on your brainpower. Yes. Does the leader give you freedom to maybe explore some new things, right? Some independence on how you go about things. Absolutely. Does the leader, you're right, create that element of trust in an environment? Yes. Idea time. If your leader says, hey, Darlene, do you need some time to go do some thinking? Go take off. I used to do this with people. Say, where do you think best go? Go, go, go think, right? Is there people to what were some examples of where they thought best? Yeah, well, really, well, we've really depended some people wanted to go for a walk. Some people wanted to go sit under a tree. Usually it was not necessarily in the work environment because there's too much outside of the office. Yeah, too much, too much noise, right? And too many your own personal distractions, right? And at home, too many distractions at home. So usually it was like out of way from everything, right? Even playfulness and humor. I mean, I've had bosses, a lot of us have, that thought if there's laughter coming out of your conference room, you're goofing off. They didn't know your laugh, they just came up with something really cool. And it's not necessarily neat, right? Idea support. Do we say, hey, that's an interesting idea, Darlene, tell me more or do we say that'll never work, right? So think about just the environment you we set as a leader and then risk taking. Do I say, hey, Darlene, sounds like you have something really interesting there. Why don't you try it out and see what happens? Do I encourage that? Or do I say, like, don't go there, something may not work right, right? Or how do we mitigate the risk? So every one of these measures that they had proven from, again, like 60 years of research, it continues today to be the research on the field of climate, climate for innovation all affected by leaders. Now, go to that last slide, if you will, that slide five, Max, and I'm gonna answer Darlene's question. And there are a number of resources that support this graphic, by the way. The leader in what they say or do, like you mentioned coaching, right? Supporting people, complimenting them sincerely when they've done something well so they know they make a difference, right? Making them feel good, all that engagement stuff. Whatever the leader does, if they also know that one of their responsibility is to manage that climate that we just talked about, all of those things, right? And really manage that. They will have a 40 to 80% impact on productivity. 40 to 80% impact on productivity. Now, if a leader is going about their merry way and they're just there doing their job, but they don't know they're responsible for setting up an environment that's really healthy for people to feel they can bring their best thinking, they have less than two to 4% impact. It's like, because their body is sitting in a chair at the end of a Zoom call, they might have a little bit of impact, but not significantly so. Now, what's really interesting about this, like I said, I've studied leadership for years, I'm with a major player in the leadership training world. And this is where this totally makes sense to me, right? Because when we look at all the engagement studies, when we look at what are the behaviors that leaders need to do to engage, retain their employees, right? Excite them, motivate them, put them in good positions. They all have to do with the things you're saying. Good coaching, supporting people's ideas, being supportive instead of taking over, just saying, you look like you're struggling, what help can I give you? Putting them in a position to succeed, challenging, put giving them challenging roles to have, of course that has to do with engagement. And this is where we start to see the overlap. Between many of these items on this list are dependent, are dependent to your point, Darlene, on really having really good coaching and communication skills. Absolutely really super important. And we can see the Venn diagram, it would almost be like an eclipse if we looked at leadership skill, what's needed for our climate for innovation and engagement. And it really comes down to the, really comes down to the leadership. I think the statistics you shared were quite interesting to say the least and also something to generate some more thoughtfulness towards that area. I don't recall seeing or hearing much about the statistical analysis and that's probably because most of the people that we've had the luxury to interview are practitioners but you're both, you're a combination of a researcher and a practitioner. And I think we do have to give credit to the research especially if we have a good researcher extracting and sifting out the key points which brings me to something you mentioned and we did a little tease for the write up on this show for our viewers and that was what three things do you think in your opinion should companies do to start a sustainable climate for innovation? Okay, absolutely. I'm gonna reference research because I, you know, with the PhD you always look at the research bars before you open your mouth, right? So one of the pieces of research that I thought was the most fascinating was research stump by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Now we don't normally think about them as researchers in the innovation world. No, we really don't. No, I know, right? But they had done some really cool survey work. I think it's called innovation survey, came out of London, came out of the UK and it was basically shared that from their research substantially they were taking a look at performers in the marketplace, right? The top 10 performers, they also took a look at if we take a look at all the companies then we take a look at what separates like the bottom 20% of the companies from the top 20% of the companies of like the time 1,000 companies what are the differentiators? And they did extensive research. I still think some of the best research has ever been done. And they showed basically that there were like 10 fundamental characteristics of innovation innovative companies. They found three underlying capabilities which I'll answer for a second and then two contrasting management styles which you and I can imagine what they are, right? Like that's pretty easy. Like, okay, I wanna put my people first versus it's all about me. You know, I mean, we know those two management styles, right? Fundamental characteristics included things like recruiting challenging managers, right? It might include things like allow ideas and knowledge to flow freely, right? We just saw that, right? It might be encourage participation into turning ideas into actions, right? Taking concepts into marketplace. It might be trusting people. Yeah, it might be trusting people to implement change. All these things, right? So you will see some of those 10 characteristics that PWC came up with will dovetail beautifully with some of the things we just saw in the research from Horneckfall and Harry Nystrom. Now the three underlying capabilities they came up with, they said there have to be three things in place for these characteristics to happen and if we have the right management style in place, right? And they were inclusive leadership, okay? So is the leadership inclusive of people who contribute to ideas and innovative thought, right? There's a proverb that says that if two people believe the same, you only need one, okay? So inclusive leadership means getting people on the table that make things quite differently than you and when you're not sure why they should be there, that's probably who you should invite, right? Inclusive leadership. Delivered process means you have some kind of process in place to kind of allow people, give them skills and tools to be able to be innovative. So Darlene, you and I probably have talked or I know you've been ACAC, you know this, creative problem-solving tools, right? Like all of these hundreds and hundreds of tools to facilitate thinking and then to focus on what's the most usable of all those ideas. I think according to Gerard Puccio's work up at the International Center for Creative Studies, Dr. Gerard Puccio had done some research years ago and said, when you come up with all these ideas, there are about 139 ways to knock them all down to what you're gonna do, to keep focusing until you get your final idea. 139, right? Hundreds of ways to get people to generate ideas. But we have to have processes, we have to have tools and techniques for people to know how to pull ideas out of people and what to do with them once you have them out there, right? So that's Delivered Process. And the third piece, creative climate. Are you doing those things even in Horan Eckball's work that sets up a climate that says, we're usually innovative. Whatever that is, right? Are we challenging? We give them ideas, we say that's an expectation. And I remember hearing stories years ago and Darlene, you probably know more about this than I do with, I think it was 3M that told everybody to take 10% of their time and just sit and think and create, right? They said like, we want you to just think there and create and some companies do that. So three things, inclusive leadership, not just your brain, collective wisdom, the Delivered Process, which would be tools and techniques and teaching your leaders how to generate all that stuff from people and what to do once they get it, right? And I love CPS, Creative Problem Solving. I love it, use it all the time. And creative climate. Now having said that, I do want to say, like I said, I've always been in the leadership space and taught leadership communication skills. I also do creative problem solving facilitation. So I take groups from, we're completely, we don't know what we want to do to like, here's our final ideas, like from soup to nuts, right? And what I found was as a leader, I've been a vice president, I've been in senior leadership positions. I found that with those two skills coupled together, anything is possible. Cause I have good people, they have good brains. I know how to pull things out of them. I know how to create the climate for them. And that means that there's virtually nothing as a leader that would be impossible for us to accomplish. And I rely on those two skills set specifically to let me take people wherever they need to go. Who have a question submitted from a viewer and that is, does culture create climate? Boy, that's a really great question. Maybe I would rephrase it saying, might culture create climate? Yeah, it absolutely can. No, I think it absolutely can. If you have a culture, I will just do an example of maybe an older company, maybe family owned just grew from something, now it's bigger, right? They have, the culture underpinnings are so strong that there are people that wanna hold on to those and they will act in ways, leaders will act in ways that support that culture. So I think, yes, is it changeable? Yes, it is, does it take a lot of work? Yes, it does. Like I said, I worked with one company who brought me in to work on their culture and their climate. Fear based, privately owned company, person was really innovative, who started up pioneering brilliant person. And the culture was so strong that that fear based completely stopped everybody from thinking and contributing. And we had to really work on trying to modify that culture and modify some of those leadership, that leadership behavior. But when you have maybe an owner who doesn't wanna change it, it makes it very hard because people just fall in line and do what the person at the top wants. So that you can. So it sounds like you feel that culture would be very far more difficult to change than climate. Oh yeah, remember, culture is deeply rooted, right? There has to be a real compelling evidence. And for the companies that don't change their culture, if it isn't helping their, if it's not helping their climate to be healthy, right? If it isn't a healthy culture, it's not gonna be healthy climate. Maybe we can put it that way. Unhealthy cultures will create unhealthy climates. Unhealthy climates will keep a organization from being sustainable. It will, it just won't make it because we always have to be adapting those cultural things to become more contemporary, to be more current with what else is going on in the market in the global economy and people's, what people like and not like, right? We have to change all that, come on. What do you think, we're winding down here so we are near the end. What do you think employees really want from workplace culture and climate? From culture, I think they wanna know that they're stability. That's the one thing that culture gives. From climate, remember we said that's your experience every time you go to work and resume call, anything. I think desperately, people wanna be given freedom to think. They want to be recognized for the way they think and what they bring, that's the different perspective. And they wanna, mostly they wanna be seen. If I shop for work every day and I bring my very best stuff, right? And remember when we share ideas, that's the culmination of our experience or education where our brain thinks, our creativity. It's very deeply personal. So I would wanna know if I bring my very best stuff to you that is recognized and not, maybe it's not always allowed but it's recognized and it's appreciated that I did that. So I do it again. I think people just wanna be seen and they want you to know I've got a brain in here and somebody's saying it. John, I really thank you for making the time to join us. And I think there is something unique that you brought to our conversation this afternoon and that was more the personalization and bringing the humanness of climate and culture and the workplace. So I truly thank you. And to our viewers, you have been watching The Creative Life with our guest, Don DePasco. And Don has been working very actively in this conversation to give us a better understanding about climate and culture in the workplace and other places too if we had more time to go. So once again, thank you, Don for joining us. Thanks to our viewers for being with us today and we look forward to being back in two weeks and until two weeks, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.