February 4, 2022 | Stephanie Ostermann

WS Shares Replay | Cultivating a Culture of Insight (w/ Calgary Marketing Association)

At the end of January, WS Content Director Stephanie Ostermann presented Cultivating a Culture of Insight as part of the Calgary Marketing Association’s ongoing webinar series. In this webinar, Stephanie explores how a culture of insights can help spark creativity and collaboration in your company, as well as help you find the deeper ideas that will give your brand an edge.

Jan Wood
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jan, of course, I’m with the Calgary Marketing Association and joining me today to talk about Cultivating a Culture of Insight is Stephanie Ostermann. Welcome, Stephanie.

Stephanie Ostermann
Hello, thank you.

Jan Wood
Stephanie I’ll formally introduce you in a moment. But as our attendees join us and everyone gets settled in, I always like to take this time to do a little bit of housekeeping. So I first of all, just want to welcome everyone again and let everyone know that of course, this is a live zoom event, but we are recording this, so all of you who have registered will receive a copy of this recording within the next 24 hours. Stephanie is going to present a PowerPoint or a Google presentation, but this is a topic that deserves a lot of discussion, so we have the Q&A open and please feel free as something comes to your mind throughout the presentation to provide a comment or place your question in the q&a area because we have left lots of time at the end to have a really, really robust discussion. I’d like to thank our members and all of the folks who have either recently joined the Marketing Association or who’ve renewed their membership, thank you for supporting our community as we roll into another season of webinars, we’re anticipating live events, so at some point, but for now we’re our goal is to just keep bringing you webinars, and you know, timely, appropriate and usable information. And I’d also just like to take this opportunity to thank our corporate partners. This is transition time of the year. So we are continuing to have conversations with our corporate partners. But for now, I would love to just say a huge thank you to our Platinum Partners Canada Post and Calgary Economic Development, and our Gold Partners, ATB, Pattison and DAC Group. So without further ado, I am now going to read your biography, Stephanie. So as Content Director of WS, Stephanie has a decade of digital marketing experience with a focus on content and social media. As a speaker, writer and community leader, there is little that she loves more than to share big bold ideas and encourage others to share their topics, which is why of course we’re here today. Stephanie has honed her insights skills through years of getting to know and understand how people show up online, and how they want the brands they love to show up in return. So, Stephanie, I reached out to you after I read your blog about creating a culture of insight, and that was the genesis of this webinar. So folks, if you are interested or not even if you are interested, you should just find her blog. It’s on the WS website. And we’ll touch base on that after the fact. But enjoy the presentation. And well for now. I’ll just turn it over to you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Ostermann
Awesome. Let’s just pop this up here.

Jan Wood
Share Screen time!

Stephanie Ostermann
Here we go. All right. So we’re going to talk about cultivating a culture of insight. I think that, you know, a lot of people’s gut at the beginning is to say, well, I’m not very insightful, or my intuition is bad, or etc, etc. But let’s just put all of that away while we go through this and then we can address some of the ways of overcoming that because I absolutely do not believe that there’s anybody who, kind of, isn’t insightful or can’t hone the skills to be more insightful.

So, and this says the next hour, but I’m going to say it’s probably not going to be a full hour, we’re going to talk about culture, we’re going to look at what creativity is versus what insight is because they’re closely related. We’re going to talk about how you can practice insight within your company, and also avoiding bias. And then at the end, we will have some time for Q&A, which is not on my lovely agenda here.

So let’s hop in. So it’s pretty clear that currently the state of affairs in the world has made it so that creativity and collaboration have really suffered with remote work, Lucid Survey surveyed 1000-ish employees in 2020, as well as about I think it was 300 managers about what working from home was doing to their productivity, creativity and collaboration, so we’ll look at some of those numbers. So first 75% of those remote workers said that their collaboration was suffering a lot working from home which makes sense. We were suddenly all very isolated and not just isolated in our work, but isolated in those ways that we were socializing, there was really no avenue for that, which did, I think, lead to that sense of not having a lot of collaboration at all.

Twenty-five per cent of those said that virtual meetings were inadequate, because there wasn’t enough shared visual collaboration space. So we’ll talk a little bit about how that can be addressed as well, it is a big thing, especially in those organizations that were doing a lot of visual brainstorming, which I think for marketers, in particular, it’s such a big part of what we do and liking to, you know, throw things up on a whiteboard. Twenty-five per cent said their creativity suffered due to working from home, so they were unable to be creative. And I think there is a lot of reason for that that’s outside of just being at home, there was a great deal of stress happening in the world, a lot of people were trying to also learn how to be elementary school teachers, etc.

So, you know, they were really suffering within their creativity. But of that, they said that their creativity suffered, because they really felt like they were working in a bubble. They didn’t know what their colleagues were doing. And I think, you know, we’ve definitely seen that sort of impact with remote work – it became necessary so that we aren’t all sitting in meetings, all day long, 100% of the time, that you really had to buckle down, and maybe only interact regularly with those people that you work directly with, and you would see less of others. And the necessity of getting to work meant kind of turning off your digital methods of communication. So then it wasn’t the same as being in the office where someone could do a quick drive-by, wave at you through your office window, pop in for a chat, ask if you want to walk for a coffee, those sort of things. So for sure, that creativity is partly because of that sense of isolation. Seems all fairly obvious.

So from that, let’s talk about what culture is and from, the easiest way to do that is to talk about what culture is not. And this is a long list and probably one that most of us can relate to. It’s not open-concept office spaces, beanbag chairs and whiteboard walls. Like those are cool things. It looks neat, looks awesome to walk into, check out that whole wall’ a whiteboard or chalkboard or clear Plexi wall, whatever. It’s not ping pong tables, pinball machines, video games, you know, those perks that we were offering in offices. This is really important as we go through these because a lot of these things were lost with remote work.

Now daily or weekly rituals, maybe you have like a morning cheer or your insider language the things that people have to learn when we’re talking about we’re going to have a huddle. What does a huddle mean? What is a kickoff? What is a, you know, any of those number of things, maybe the people aren’t aware of what they are. Also Employee of the Month programs, those are really great ways that people interact with each other. But that’s not a culture.

Friday happy hour free snacks, monthly lunches, again, perks, really fun perks the way that we socialize with each other. But it’s very, very difficult to do these things now, obviously. These are things that may have come in more as we’ve gone remotely -company swag, more swag at home, device credits. So now you’re using your personal cell phone to run Voice Over IP. So we’re going to give you some credits for your devices, we’re going to give you credits for your Wi Fi. We’ve sourced group discounts, so that now when you’re shopping, you’re getting a discount, because we can’t buy you lunch as easily. Or maybe you’re still getting lunch through Uber, etc.

But it’s not like when we suddenly started working from home, every company just ceased to have a culture because we couldn’t go play ping pong on a Friday, where we didn’t have the ability to, you know, use a whiteboard for a brainstorm. Cultures didn’t just disappear. And that’s because these are all perks. These are all nice to haves and they’ve obviously had to be reshaped as we’ve moved through, you know, I don’t want to say the new normal, the next normal, but just how life is.

So then what is culture? At its core culture is a reflection of shared values and beliefs. Harvard Business Review outlines six characteristics that make up corporate culture. They are a vision. So what is the shared mission of your company and how does that you do show up in the world or show up in your industry in reflection of that vision?

Values. Who do we want to be? How will we achieve our mission? Who do we have to be to achieve our mission and what perspectives do we need in order to reflect our mission, our vision forward?

Practices. So this is the actual implementation of your values in your company. If you are a company with a vision that you know, women with children end up at the same pay scale as men, no matter what, no matter how much maternity leave, they take, and you really value that mothers have time with their children at home, or parents, let’s say with parents, not even mothers, then your practices need to probably include a really stellar parent program, some onsite childcare, maybe it’s, you know, in the interim, while a parent is on some type of parental leave, they’re able to access training to keep their skills up. Any of those number of things are the ways that you’re going to put your values and your vision into practice, and they’re vital for your culture.

Now, obviously, people make up part of this culture as well. And we’re going to recruit people that reflect our values and our mission, and that are willing to work within the practices. And they’re probably going to be drawn by those practices – we need to talk about the more, but they’re going to be drawn to that they’re going to be drawn to programs that are of value to them. Maybe it’s flexible working hours, maybe it’s the ability to work from anywhere in the world, once you’re you know, set up, whatever those things are, those people are going to be attracted to that. And so you’re going to have that reflection of culture in the people that you’re recruiting.

Narrative. So what is your origin story? This is your public image. How did the company come to be or how did the company come to be where it is today? Because sometimes there’s an origin story. But so many of us, as we kind of adapt to changes, have had to shift and adjust the ways that we’re approaching things. So what is that narrative, and making sure that everyone in your company knows the narrative. You know, we can think of those kind of famous narratives of the billionaires in their garages creating, you know, e-commerce sites. It’s a narrative, it’s part of the lore of a company. It’s also important to remember that if your narrative becomes too much of your identity, and it’s not really who you are, you want to watch for that as well.

You can’t continue to, you know, say that your culture is small and homegrown when you have, you know, 1000s of employees across the world. And you know, everyone’s expected to interact, and people are just kind of names on a list to each other. It’s harder to say you’re a small, homegrown company, then, but your narrative can be about where that started.

And then lastly, place. Again, this has changed. So the city where you’re in, or the design and architecture of the office, well, we’re not there anymore. So what does that mean in our current context, and it’s something that we all have to explore is, you know, is there a difference? If your quote unquote, head office is in Calgary versus Toronto? Or if your team is 100%, remote and distributed in every province of the country and territory? What does that mean for place in your culture? And how are you expressing it? How are you making sure that everyone is aware of it?

An example, you know of this, and it’s very kind of smaller is I used to own an outsourced call center company with my ex husband. And there was an expectation that you had a physical office with a door that closed so you had a working space. And that’s a little bit about what place meant in the context of this work versus I’m sitting in my big open concept living room, it’s open to the rest of my house that says something about place as well and says something about the culture that I work in. I was telling Jan before we started, my cats are locked in the bedroom but normally, they do make appearances on calls.

So we’ve talked about culture. And now we’re gonna hop into creativity versus insight. So these both involve acute pattern recognition, it’s a eureka moment, or an Oprah aha moment, just that like light bulb flipping on, where you start to see the way these things are connected. And you’re gonna start to perceive that connection between disparate concepts or ideas to be able to reveal something new. So that happens in both instances. Both things involve pattern recognition. I think it’s important to understand, however, it’s about how we’re applying those things that we start to see the difference.

So if we say that creativity is intuitive feeling, and then insight is intuitive understanding. So creativity is thinking outside of the box, we’re looking to create those new ideas, we’re feeling, we’re experiencing, you know, maybe those patterns and sense of those patterns and connections are a little less obvious to us in the moment, because it’s more of you know, we’re being taken on a wave of emotion and we’re feeling those things.

And then insight is thinking back into the box. So it happens after you think outside the box. Now we’re going to pull in our understanding our reasoning and logic to recognize patterns and see the connections. So feeling versus understanding. Which isn’t to say that insights are all left brain and you know, creativity is all right brain. Both take a little bit of both.

Now, where can this get disconnected is that sometimes it’s about attitude and as you’re approaching things, you know, you’ve already explored it, and you’ve decided we can’t think of any new ideas, there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s already been done. That shuts it down. So you can approach from this place of I already know everything I need to know and I don’t want to know any more about it, I’m not gonna explore anymore. That’s a boring job.

The other thing that can sometimes happen is we know too much about a topic, which can also be a bound to imagination, because again, you’re you have this little voice in the back of your head going, No, that’s silly, that’s not going to work. Someone’s already done that, you know, why would anybody bother with those sort of things. So it’s important to really kind of consider that intuitive feeling is kind of without bounds. And we’re really looking at going wherever our intuition takes us. And we’re following intuition in that feeling, and sensing way.

And then when we pull it into looking for the insight, we are going to need to draw on some knowledge, we’re going need to draw on data. And we’re going to need to look for the logical connections and patterns. That’s creativity versus insight.

Now, another thing that’s very important to remember is that insight is making creativity tangible. And so when insight is a practice, it’s going to increase knowledge and understanding and help find those new perspectives. Intuition is formed based on knowledge and experience, whether conscious or not. And that’s where I bring in Malcolm Gladwell, you know, who posited the idea of Blink and Think. Blink being immediate, this is a thing, and then think being I’m thinking and I’m rationalizing, so we could align these with creativity, click blink insightful. And with rational analysis, you know, insight, looking at the data, deeper exploration.

However, Blink is a little dangerous, it can lead to bias and stereotyping and this is where creativity really benefits from a little bit of insight as well is that sometimes everything we’re doing in our creative space is heavily biased towards our experiences, or our beliefs, or our preferences. I mean, let’s not say that they’re all negative things that may just be, you know, you really like the color fuchsia, and so you’re really leaning into fuchsia, and everything or you, you’ve really loved, you know, a certain font, typeface, etc.

So then on the flip side of that, is that Daniel Kahneman, who wrote, and I’m probably saying his last name wrong, who wrote, Thinking Fast and Slow. He says, the confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. So we can really easily think something is an insight when it’s actually just an idea, or it’s actually just a creative thought. But we’re able to tell ourselves a story about it that leads us to believe it’s an insight and that we should follow it or leads us to believe it’s an insight that’s true, and we should follow it. So it’s going to be about making sure that we’re not reflexively grabbing the easiest answer, which is what we are wont to do.

Daniel mentions this in his book, like, we’re kind of lazy at heart. People don’t want to do excessive amounts of work, our brains don’t want to tax themselves. So sometimes we’ll go oh, here’s the answer. No, this is the answer. I can tell you a story about this answer. I am the best used car salesman for my own story and beliefs. And so you’re going to really have to practice insight in a process and you’re going to have to work at it and double check, have a look – is this the easiest answer? Have we just arrived at the quickest solution, which is tempting, you’re busy, we’re all busy. We’re, you know, slammed with work. There’s lots of demands. Are we just arriving at the quickest possible solution that we can hand off and it’s good enough? It’s all right. Here you go. Here’s an idea. Isn’t it cool? Or are we really taking the time to look at it and see is there somewhere further we can go? Are there more connections that we can draw. Can we deepen this and enrich this a little bit more?

So I want to walk us through a quick example. And so let’s pretend that you’ve been asked to come up with an ad concept that’s going to be on outdoor, digital, and print and your key message is that one in three Canadians go to school hungry every day due to food insecurity. So we’re talking about little kids here. So there’s your concept.

Now, you might kind of you know, here’s your quick and, and lazy response. Well, here’s a hungry kid, she’s got us, look how sad she is. She’s so sad. She’s so sad with her empty bowl. Or maybe, you know, here’s this kiddo who’s opening her clearly empty lunch kit in the stock photo, she’s smiling, so I think it’s supposed to have food in it. But you know, maybe she’s disappointed because it’s empty, maybe line up three empty lunchboxes, or three lunch boxes, and one of them is empty.

Those are all addressing the creative part, because we can absolutely pull on emotions by showing this very sad, hungry little girl. Or maybe it’s a relatable moment, for some people, oh, I remember opening my lunch kit and all the other kids had cool stuff. Or I remember that everyone else had lunch money and got to buy from the cafeteria, but I had to eat, you know, the sandwich that my mom sent, and it usually was just bread and cheese. There’s a lot of stories we could tell. See, how I started to do that, I started to dip into a story that would help me reinforce my belief that this is an insight into how we can communicate this idea.

But what I’ll say is that you can always dig a little deeper. And this is an example from WS and from some work that we did for our amazing partners at Mealshare. And so here’s what we actually ended up with.

Food insecurity is about more than just feeling hungry or not having food, it dips into everything. So it’s going to dip into a child’s ability to concentrate and that’s going to impact their ability to learn. So we all remember kids who chewed on pencils, well, here’s this beautiful graphic that dug a little deeper into an insight and made a connection between not having enough lunch food, how kids treat pencils, and what those two things together could communicate about the impact of hunger on learning. So there’s our example. These were applied, you know, on stairs, in rec centers. So they really lent themselves beautifully to outdoor, they did well in digital. And nobody had to chew the pencil, as far as I know.

So let’s talk about how you’re going to build your insightful team next. Now, where this all comes from, is that about two and a half years ago, at WS, we actually built, at the time we were calling it a futurist team. So we had an individual from each department who got together once a week for an hour over lunch and we shared ideas that were related to our particular field, which is agriculture, ag tech, the future of food and the future of farming, essentially. And so the first thing you have to do is create your process and system for collecting ideas and information and making sure they’re shared.

So for us, that looked like having, we had a Twitter API call that was pulling in tweets with related keywords. We had some RSS feeds that were pulling in articles with related keywords, you could set up Google Alerts, you can go on Twitter, and use hashtags, whatever that looks like, but just a way of pulling it in. And this is really important, because we don’t want everyone to just kind of scatter out onto their own personal social feeds and start looking for stuff they want to share. Because obviously, we know this, our social feeds are heavily biased, there’s an algorithm showing us what we want to see, we see what our friends see, a lot of us are kind of living in a bubble. And so we’re going to want to go to those publications that we can easily access but that’s going to create a bit of a skewed collection of information. It’s okay to do that sometimes.

For sure, as you’re doing your normal intake of content, you want to explore and see if there’s things that you’re seeing that connect, but you want also a way to pull in some less biased data. Now data is always biased. Let’s just caveat that. But at least to bring in some things that you may not normally be exposed to using some of these tools, pulling them all into one place that your entire insight team has access to because I may read an article or see an idea and interpret it much differently than someone who sits beside me. And I will tell you that that happens a lot and it’s always interesting. Again, we’re using our experiences and our knowledge of things to decide about what we’re looking at. And so, my experience being vastly different from the experience of my coworker is going to influence the way we’re looking at information.

Next, you’re going to build your team of insight champions and you’re regularly going to rotate these members. So choosing representation from each department and from each level of seniority – you don’t want your team to be entirely made up of C-suite, you don’t want your team to be entirely made up of juniors, but making sure that there’s a little bit of a spread. You’re going to make sure they meet regularly. And you know, it happens no matter what. One person shows up, I mean, it’s hard meeting. But you know, if if there’s five people on your insight team, and two of them can’t make it, that’s okay, you’re still meeting. Because it has to be part of your process and part of your practice. You have to just really commit to it because otherwise, it’s very tempting to let it fall by the wayside as you get busy, as people go on vacation, those sorts of things. And then, you know, oh, we used to do that, you remember that thing we used to do was so much fun, it was so cool, we learned so much, but we don’t do it anymore. Let’s not do that.

You’re also going to want to make sure that this group understands that they’re going to present some of these ideas to a larger group on a regular basis. So sharing these ideas outward is a big deal. It’ll force a few things. One is it’ll make sure that there’s a little bit of this insight work going on. But also, you know, are you ready to present an idea to everybody? Have you dug in enough? Have you seen those connections? And, you know, a presentation doesn’t need to be formal, it doesn’t need to be a slideshow but it’s important to to make sure that they’re sharing some of this to the wider group and also that those are interactive. So having a plan within that presentation to continue to explore those ideas.

For example, maybe your insight team has identified five great ideas, and they write them down on cue cards. And then they split the group into five teams who then have to form questions, come up with further ideas, do more research in a set period of time, let’s say 10 minutes. And you really want to encourage that everybody’s voice is welcome. So no one department is more or less insightful than another, no one role is more or less insightful, and there are no dumb ideas. We don’t parking lot our ideas. We don’t, you know, Oh, yeah. Haha, sure, Jim, that’s great. We’re not doing that.

Every single idea has value and every voice has value. This is so so important, especially when you have this potential inner voice saying you are not insightful, you’re too dumb. Well, what will validate that for a person, if they come up with an idea, and the whole room is like, yeah, hey, let’s parking lot that or whatever the term is, it’s some corporate buzz speak that I don’t actually know. Um, but just making sure that this team is little, you don’t want a giant team, there’ll be too much going on in your meetings. But then you’re going to regularly rotate in new members. So you’re not going to leave the same team always working together. Remember, we’re looking for perspectives, we’re looking for varied experiences.

Now, you’re going to create space for insights. So again, that idea that we’re working from, it’s a practice, it’s something that we do, this is a thing that we do in our company. So you can include time for insightful thinking during meetings. Add five minutes of free thinking at the beginning or mind mapping. Not every meeting, I understand that there’s going to be some meetings where you just have to get something done, but especially in those meetings that are going to need deeper thought, deeper creativity, start people off with this idea that we’re here to look deeper. We’re here to grab a deeper insight. We’re not just going to read the brief, see that it says one in three Canadian children go to school hungry. Okay, that’s the key message. Well, what? There’s the ad – just put those words on the screen. That’s the key message. We’re going to dig deeper, we’re going to assume that we’re going to dig deeper.

Also making it visual, so using digital whiteboarding tools as much as possible. There are lots of them out there. Google Meets has one built in called Jamboard, it saves them for you so you can pull them up later. Everyone can see it, everyone can interact. I have a friend who right at the beginning of the ‘pandemmy’, he went and bought big shower panels from Home Depot. He nailed them up in his basement on the walls, and then he literally had whiteboard. You know what else works? Your shower. Might be a little weird to be in your shower, might you got to play with that. But how can you make visual this, this process again? And you could even go so far as to make sure that everyone in your team has an iPad and an Apple Pencil, because a lot of people like to doodle and draw versus just, you know, typing or creating boxes.

The really beautiful thing about these virtual tools is you can drag in links, you can pop in images in a way that is a little more challenging in a, you know, traditional whiteboard situation. But you’re going to make space, this is something that we’re always doing, as part of everything that we do. We’re always thinking about how we can bring space for insightful thought, for connecting the dots.

And then lastly, you want to make sure that you’re taking action on insights. So your team’s not going to want to do a lot of insightful thinking if over time, it’s clear that it’s just like, yeah, we mind map, we come up with cool ideas. We never ever do them, though, we don’t try them out. So this is a waste of the first 10 minutes of every meeting I go to, and I don’t want to do it anymore. So you want to make sure that you’re taking action.

Now you don’t have to pick the biggest, hugest idea and assign it a giant budget, or a lot of time. It can just be okay, we see a connection between chewed on pencils and hunger and these four people here are going to do some more research and explore that topic more deeply. That could be all it is. And then they’re going to tell us all what they learned. But you have to take some action and test some of those things out. And a big part of testing insights is of course, looking at the data. That’s what’s going to eliminate that inner bias that’s popping up, is that we have to go well, I have a feeling it’s this way but let me see if the data says it’s this way. Everybody has been in a meeting where everybody says I never ever, ever, ever click on pop up ads. But we know that people click on pop up ads. So yes, you may not, gut feeling, do X but the data says something different. So let’s explore that deep more deeply.

Lastly, preventing bias, and this could be a webinar all on its own and it is a webinar on its own for many things, is that bias is, you know, really difficult. And it’s something we’ve all become so much more aware of as we become aware of the lack of diversity in our teams, the lack of equity and inclusion in our teams. Because even if you had a diverse team, were you listening to those team members, or were they just that person that always had something to say? You know, if you think about things like big clothing brands releasing blatantly racist sweatshirts -all that tells me is that either there was nobody in the room who was a person of colour or those voices that said bad idea, guys – they weren’t listened to. They didn’t have enough agency to say, this is a bad plan and have people go, you might be right. Here’s the thing – you get to go, can you show us some information? I mean, let’s be real. For some of them, there shouldn’t have been a need for information. But making sure that we’re not, you know, excluding those voices. So we’re going to critically examine the data. always evaluate every decision against all your available data that you can get and looking for data that disproves assumptions, as well as the data that supports it. It’s super easy, again, that lazy brain, find something that proves their point and ignores everything else. And we all know, you can lie with statistics all day long.

Also, be aware that there are there’s bias in the data itself. So sometimes you have to question those facts, or you have to look at, you know, what were the questions that were asked to get this data? Or how do they decide on who was asked for this data? Those are super important things to consider. Y

You’re gonna want to include a devil’s advocate. This doesn’t need to be one person or the same person all the time, it can be a frame of mind that your insight team, and really everyone in your company takes, is that we’re always looking to challenge those ideas. And people should be comfortable challenging the idea, and especially those ideas that everybody is immediately on board with and largely embraces. We want to make sure that, you know, that person is able to go, um, can I just I want to poke a hole in some of these things. Let’s explore these.

And the key with a devil’s advocate is that people who are having their ideas kind of tested and challenged, can’t get defensive. It’s very hard. It’s very hard. But practicing saying things like thank you for that feedback, we’re going to add it to our exploration of the data, we’re going to examine that idea further, are all great things to say instead of your initial reaction to defend. But making sure that you are including the devil’s advocate, who also understands that some of their role is to add the perspective or to stand in defense of voices that may not be represented in your group. If you are creating, you know, if it’s a group of men – just gonna go really simple here, a group of men creating advertising for a women’s based health product. Who is there to represent the voice of women? If no one in your company is able to challenge in that way, you need to bring someone outside in, we actually talked about.

You’re going to encourage every voice. This is important, if you are a leader and you tend to take over meetings, shh. You’re not going to talk for the first bit, you’re going to let everybody else be the first to share their ideas and opinions and then you’re going to invite the opinions of those people who haven’t talked yet. Everybody knows who those people are, they’re quieter, they’re doodling, they’re obviously deep in thought. They probably say some really insightful, interesting things when they are invited to, but they may not have the courage to speak up or that just may not be in their personality. So make sure that you are giving that time for people to speak.

And you as the leader, you’re also going to be making sure that some people aren’t talking more than they should be. So they’ve actually done some studies. and it shows that in groups of five, even where women outnumber the men, so we have the majority of three, they will still talk around 36% less than their male counterparts. So making sure and one of the ways you can make sure is if in your insight meeting everyone has six minutes or four minutes or you know, you have eight minutes and then we’re stopping, then it’s equal. And we’re not trying to sit through that one person who dominates a conversation and doesn’t let anybody else get a word in edgewise.

Lastly, you want to bring in an outside challenger. So invite your impartial party to evaluate ideas. Again, they’re looking for holes, they’re you know, they’re looking for ways to discuss, this is harder in a work environment of smaller teams. But even bringing in someone who’s not directly related to the project and running an idea past them. This is great when you’re going to that action phase now bring in someone who wasn’t involved and didn’t get all excited about it in the room and have them look at it and they’re looking for gaps. They’re looking for challenges and they’re looking for bias.

Bringing in that outside challenger is also going to help you prevent bias. So if you bring all of these things together, this is how you’re going to be able to create those insights that have really the ability to create amazing new ideas and give you a launching point for even greater and more insightful things to happen. And it’s not always going to be right and it’s not always going to be perfect but I really think it’s, you know, it’s important and it’s exciting when it works and it will take work. But I would love to, you know, see more companies adopt this sort of cultural value, that we all have these amazing perspectives and ideas that can lead us to deeper insights if we are sharing them and collaborating them together. And now, questions.

Jan Wood
Thank you, Stephanie. My computer was hanging there for a second. Okay, I’ve taken four pages of notes, and full page of questions. So bear with me, get myself organized. First of all, anybody who quotes Mike Malcolm Gladwell is good in my world. I devour his books, and I love his podcast. So thank you for bringing him in. Okay, the two big questions that come to me and folks, please, I know that you this is a lot of information to be thrown, not thrown at you, but to discern. But please, as I said, we left a lot of time for Q&A so feel free to formulate your questions, and then get them down into our Q&A area and we’ll start going through them.

Okay, so there’s two things. So you’ve kind of you work for an agency, you’ve come to this from kind of an agency point of view, how do we take this to our corporations? Have you? Did you do that with one of your so you have your core group within your agency? And then have you taken that to a corporate setting? And how has that worked?

Stephanie Ostermann
So I think that, you know, this comes in, even when you start to work directly with a client on especially things like building planning, building out, you know, what do their larger goals and outcomes look like? What is that deeper insight? Especially, when your’e looking at persona building an audience building? I, you know, but let’s say we’re not there’s no marketing agency involved in it, you’re you’re just client side, you are the, you know, a corporation. Again, I think it’s about looking at what is that core value that you’re trying to express and are there ways that you can express it and then further, if you’re selling some type of product or service, is there something you’re missing, an opportunity that you need to find that, you know, maybe you haven’t quite connected the dots on, a way that you could expand a product offering, or spin off a, you know, sister company. Really, though, it needs to come back to what are the values and mission of your company need to be established before this really works or you could go in 800 directions, but really starting in that place of how are we, you know, putting ourselves out there in the industry and in the world? And how are we addressing the needs of our customers or our stakeholders?

Jan Wood
Perfect, so an agency can actually go to their clients and kind of become their corporate conscience? Yes. Work on insight. So, okay, thank you. So the team, you’ve talked about rotating the teams? How many people should be on an inside team? You mentioned five, but that would be say, for? Like, is there an idea? It’s kind of like a, you know, a board of directors or you know, is 15 too many and three not enough? So is there like a minimum five and then a maximum, say 15? Or 20? Like, what have you come across what the magic high number is.

Stephanie Ostermann
I mean, I would say, you know, if you start to look at more than maybe five to seven people, you’re now looking at really long meetings, you’re looking at, you know, people who are maybe less inclined and also more challenging to get everyone together in the same room. So if you’re able to kind of address a five to seven, and I would say even five is a pretty sweet spot. Your bigger thing is making sure there’s there’s diverse representation across that group, whether that representation is about departments and disciplines or about personal lived experiences, but just making sure that you’re not sticking all the same people in the room together, and maybe you’re big enough that you have two of these teams. Or you rotate more frequently in and out. I would say kind of want to give people time to get comfortable with each other. So you also want to spend a little more time you know, I wouldn’t rotate monthly if you’re meeting bi weekly. If you’re meeting weekly, you could probably do a monthly rotation but pulling one person out versus pulling like completely shifting your whole team, Just keep rolling that team along.

Jan Wood
Okay. And is it good to have like in the there is the rotation of the team members to get optimal inclusion, but there also has to be consistency. So is there one leader? Do you keep like one leader in place? And then

Stephanie Ostermann
I would, no, I would say that your first five people, then you’re rotating your new person and four of those people have done it before and they keep sticking with it.

Jan Wood
All right. Well, we have a question from from Richard. Are there any specific strategies for converting the reluctance on our teams to supporting Devil’s advocacy or diversity of thought? I find politeness or perhaps quiet dissent frustrates this sometimes.

Stephanie Ostermann
Yes. Practice. I think even practicing how we react appropriately to feedback. And it maybe takes pulling some people aside or, you know, it maybe takes starting with an even smaller group, to make sure that people’s ideas get shared. You know, you can explore other ways, you know, can you submit confidentially? Yes, you know, anonymously? Yes. But there tends to be this like, well, if that person doesn’t have the guts to come tell me, then I don’t want to hear it. I think it really is a thing that you practice and the way that you practice is by validating that person’s challenge, rather than, you know, knocking it down immediately. And it takes a lot. And it takes a few people who are comfortable saying no, hang on, just a minute, we’re gonna keep hearing this person out and you know, then we will come back to you after, those sorts of things,

Jan Wood
I guess that’s that’s part of the reason why I was asking about oh, and Richard says, awesome. Thank you. So thank you, Richard, for that thought provoking question. I guess that’s why I was asking about, do we need one person to be consistent so that we can keep that umbrella of like, consistent inclusion? Or that question was already asked, or we’ve already had that challenge and this is how we referred to it six months ago.

Stephanie Ostermann
Well, I think it’s rough, it’s really hard when you come into that, well, we’ve already tried that six months ago, because that again, is that shut down thinking, right? Like, we already talked about that. But maybe this person has a new perspective and a new insight so we need to still hear it out. And I think that, you know, yes, you could have one person who was kind of in charge, the key for them would be that they don’t talk. Okay, they’re there to maybe they’re there as a timekeeper. They’re there to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak, but they’re not there as kind of part of the team, because there will then be that desire to go, we’ve already talked about this, we’ve already done that before. And, and you have to really resist that in order to find those insights.

Jan Wood
Perfect. So let’s stay with that. So kind of on the theme of getting somebody to talk. So how do you handle the bad ideas?

Stephanie Ostermann
So I think there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Here’s the thing we’re talking about, yeah, bad ideas. If we’re taking a learning stance, so everything, every interaction we go into, always, is that I have an opportunity to learn from this and to find something here that I didn’t know before, then we’re going to be more open to ideas. So again, that knee jerk, Oh, bad idea, or weird idea. That’s weird, that was strange. You’re going to want to first try and shut that down.

Now, again, because we’re trying to fight bias, we want to make sure that our ideas are not stereotyping. That’s where you start to challenge and challenging an idea that, that you maybe have a different perspective on is fine. The key is not just shutting it down immediately. We just can’t say No, bad idea. I want to talk about that. We have to talk about it. And so inviting, asking more questions. Oh, why do you say that? Or cool? Can you tell me more about your opinion on that or you know, and as an insight team gets kind of into the swing of things and as insights become what everyone is doing maybe you say hey, I was actually on Twitter yesterday and I saw this and that’s why I have this opinion. Oh, okay. Cool. Who’s that person? I’ve never heard of that person on Twitter. Now we’re down the path to opening communication instead of just shutting it down.

Jan Wood
And you know, I’ve been digging a lot lately into why is like one small opinion, why does it get so much airtime. So I really liked that you touched base around data, like use the data, go to the data, and then question the data. So is that? I don’t know, like, is there a quick, is there a three step way to actually make sure that you that is being properly addressed? Or, like the data is being not only found and questioned, but that you dig deep enough?

Stephanie Ostermann
You know, I think that your devil’s advocate, or your outside challenger has that ability to go, Oh, can you support this? Like, where? Where did where did this come from? Why are we saying that X person always does Y? And you’re either able to say, well, you know, because they do, because my neighbor does it, and I do it. Or they’re able to say, well, there was a study done, and it was this and this and this, and then maybe the devil’s advocate says, that’s not a very big sample size. Are we sure? And so I think it’s just continuously kind of pushing and poking at it and going, okay, can we support this, though, with information that we have that’s outside of this group, that’s outside of this idea?

Jan Wood
Okay. All right. So we’ve just got a few minutes, couple minutes left. So if anybody has any last questions, please reach out. I’m just going through my notes here, democracy. So yeah, this is kind of a democracy, isn’t it, especially when you’re when you don’t have one consistent lead that you’re constantly changing out? And that creates a really nice, I think, is I just keep thinking about how do we document this over the long term so that we can see how the insights have built?

Stephanie Ostermann
Yeah, so I think a big part of that is when you’re talking about, you’re going to be presenting some of these ideas to your larger group and you’re also going to be, you know, potentially taking some of these ideas deeper. Making sure that that’s all in one spot, the same way you’re collecting all of these articles and ideas and connections, you do need to have, you know, here’s what other teams explored, because maybe they already found this information and we can save ourselves a little time, because they’ve already pulled up the study. And maybe, you know, you’re able to, I mean, I think it kind of reminds me of like, the way that anything kind of became a thing or a tradition is word of mouth, and we told each other about it and we wrote it on cave walls, so that you know, so for sure writing it down, but also being organic enough, and flexible enough that it’s like yeah, that team did it that way but it’s not working for our team, can we just tweak this a little bit? It doesn’t have to be the exact same every time. And there’s always that possibility you see, quote, unquote, a better way to do it.

Jan Wood
Yeah. And let’s go back to Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point, right? He describes out how we can be doing the same thing over and over and over again. And then there’s one influencer that takes it in another direction with a different thought process. So okay, well, I thank you, Stephanie. I mentioned at the beginning of this folks that you are welcome to, I encourage you to find Stephanie’s blog and provides some really interesting background information on this as well.