Expert Interview: Claus Raasted
In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by author and thought leader Claus Raasted.
Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essentials Series. I'm Mari Ryan. I'm the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Claus Raasted.
Claus is an author of 31 books, a keynote speaker, a consultant, and a creator of extraordinary experiences. Since 2016 he has been the director of the College of Extraordinary Experiences, an immersive experience that allows people to learn about experience design in a hands-on way. He is the founding partner of the Global Institute for Thought Leadership, and as a coach at McKinsey and Company. He attended the University of Copenhagen where he studied history and philosophy.
Siv, and daughter, Saga.
Claus, welcome. I’m so excited to have you join me here today for this conversation.
Claus Raasted: Thank you, Mari. It’s a pleasure to be here and that was an impressive intro.
Mari Ryan: Well, it was mostly about you so of course it was impressive.
Claus Raasted: That’s why I liked it so much!
Mari Ryan: Your mother would no doubt agree. Today our conversation is about innovation. We hear about innovation so much and we also know that for many businesses innovation is the engine of business growth. It can be said that innovation is essential to business survival – innovate or die. Yet, with so much turmoil going on in the world today and things that are distracting us, I’m wondering if innovation is more challenging now than it has been in the past. Let’s talk a little bit here about our culture in a workplace. How do we create a culture of innovation in the workplace where people will thrive and will be creative?
Claus, when you talk about innovation in the workplace, how do you define it?
Claus Raasted: There are two things to be said here, and then these are kind of my two core messages. I could of course go on for hours and hours, but there are two core things that I always say to anyone who will listen – and quite a few who won’t.
The first one is that when we talk about innovation we all have this vague, fuzzy idea that it’s changing the world and trying things in a new way, but it’s very often we fight the wrong battles. As an example, and this is a joke from the Austrian School of Economics because of course why not quote them, and it’s that you have a restaurant and in the kitchen there is a Michelin-star chef. Somebody has led in a cow into the restaurant and it has taken a huge shit on the floor. In comes a customer and the customer says, oh, I think I’ll choose a different restaurant. The owner goes out and fires the chef and hires a better one.
Now, anyone of course with any sort of common sense will know the problem is not the chef, the problem is the cow, which is still in the restaurant and not the least the kind of cow leftovers that the cow has delightfully decided to put on the floor. That’s the problem. Instead, the restaurant is normally a place where “the better the chef, the better the restaurant” is the normal way we approach things, of course the owner goes out and fires the chef. That is innovation gone wrong in a nutshell. There is so much of that out there. So that’s the first thing to say about it, what innovation is. It’s actually looking at the actual problems and improvements instead of saying there is only one metric. There are many metrics; there are many ways of attacking things.
The second thing is that it’s experimentation. It’s the smallest possible change with the biggest possible impact that you can do now because innovation projects tend to be these big “how do we change the world without doing anything differently? I think for a lot of people out there, whether they are in wellness, or in finance, or they’re working in some sort of big government compliance scheme, then look at what you can do today without asking anyone for permission, and what do you learn from that, and what can you do tomorrow? It’s very easy to get caught up in this “ooh, innovation, we must change everything,” but in reality a lot of it is about changing small things and a lot of innovation is like this small drip-drip, not an explosive hurricane of water.
Mari Ryan: It sounds like what you are suggesting is a series of small iterations, rather than these massive, we’ve got to have a war room with this team that is going to be changing the world, as you say, but that’s not really what you are suggesting. You are suggesting it on a much smaller scale.
Claus Raasted: I’m suggesting actually that I do you do the full scale war room where the CEO sleeps in the war room and is ready to do anything different, or you do it on a tiny scale because what happens most of the time is that somebody somewhere in an organization says, we need to innovate! We need to innovate big! Let’s set down a committee. Let’s have an innovation department. Let’s do this and that as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work, as long as it doesn’t change what leadership feels about things, as long as it’s not really a bother, then they can innovate all they want over in that corner. Or they say, okay, we’re not going to do anything because it’s too impractical because we don’t want to be bothered.
Now I’m saying you should choose an extreme, and one extreme is the very small stuff that you can do drip-drip-drip and people can be inspired by, especially if you have a big chain. Let’s say you have something like McDonald’s and somebody in a McDonald’s in Delaware in the U.S. does something and then suddenly that’s blasted out in internal communications and somebody in Shanghai says let’s do it here as well. That’s lovely.
So either the small drip-drip that others can copy and be inspired by, or the huge, okay, we are now going to set the warehouse on fire because we now no longer produce socks. And why? Well, because we just set the warehouse on fire. But then you need to actually do that and all too often innovation projects end up somewhere in the middle where somebody says let’s do a lot of things, enough that it’s uncomfortable, but not enough where it changes anything. And then it fails.
Mari Ryan: So interesting. Well, let’s go back to that failure topic later, but I’m curious that you mentioned this concept of doing things without permission, and I would think innovation takes a certain amount of risk taking and even vulnerability on behalf of the person or the team that is undertaking that. How do you create that safe environment in a workplace where people feel like it’s safe to do those things without asking permission?
Claus Raasted: McKinsey has this model, which I think is called the influence model or something like that about change projects in general where they say you need to have formal incentives and structures in place, you need to have clear vision, communication, you need to have the right skills, and finally, you need to have role modeling. What often fails in innovation projects, especially if somebody saying, let’s have big change or let’s do things differently, as long as it’s not me.
Ironically, if you go out into an organization it’s easy to sell them on the idea that they should bring in better marketing because then they don’t need to change. Go out and say, you need to change your culture, people are like no, we don’t want to do that because that’s about me. If you say you need to change your marketing, they’re basically saying, we are perfect, we do perfect things, we just need better people to tell the world about it.
It’s much easier if you are not attacking people’s identity. On the other hand, that’s where the real gains are. If I go out and say let me just change all the stuff that you are not uncomfortable about, then sure we can have innovation, we can have improvement, but it is going to be small compared to saying what is your biggest pain? Let me just push right there and let’s see if we can get through that to something meaningful. But that is uncomfortable. Innovation is uncomfortable. It’s deep.
Mari Ryan: Well, that’s the thing, it’s about change. Change creates anxiety. So, how do we innovate and create that culture where people feel comfortable, have the permission, have the authority to be able to do this without creating so much stress, angst, and anxiety that it becomes diminishing to their wellbeing?
Claus Raasted: We should realize that there are two places where innovation happens, and two places where growth happens, and this goes for human individuals as well as organizations. One is when things are really bad. The moment we learn you’ve got cancer, if you don’t change your diet you’ve got six months to live. Oh, now I’m going to do something about it, even though beforehand I probably knew my living wasn’t the healthiest. Now I’m going to do something. Oh, the bank loan has expired and you need to find $6 million on your PNL in the next six months and then now you’re kind of like we’re going to do things differently.
So either this burning platform that consultants have been talking about for years and years that works. It’s uncomfortable, but it works. It’s very hard to set your own platform on fire, but sometimes you need to do that.
The second way, the interesting way, is by creating a feeling of invulnerability. You know that annoying couple? They’ve got four kids they have successful careers, and then when you meet them and you are struggling just to make ends meet they are like, oh, me and Dave have just taken up tango dancing on Thursdays because we felt it would be a new way to express our love. And you want to kill them because there’s so much on top of the world. But that’s also a way of getting to experimentation. It’s being so secure in where you are, it’s being Google. Our core business is so strong that we can waste $1 billion here and waste $1 billion there. And you know what? Some of those wasted billions turn out to be $10 billion ideas.
So either you come from a place of desperation or from a place of invulnerability. That’s easy enough to say because everything in the middle is like, yes, we should have innovation, but not today. Yes, I’d like to go on a diet, but maybe after Christmas. We all know that feeling that yes, I want it differently, but right now I’m busy.
How you create that? The nice thing, especially if you are a big organization, is by moving resources around and making sure people are aligned around your purpose, you can take resources from one place and make them desperate on purpose with their full and willing acceptance, hopefully, and then you can move those resources to another place and make them invulnerable.
Let’s say you have 10 divisions, or 10 entities inside your business, and they all get five resource points each out of a 1 to 10 scale. Take one of them and reduce it to two and suddenly they are desperate and they will try new things. If you did it with their acceptance they’ll be happy even though it’s tough. Then you take another group and you give them those extra points and suddenly they’re at an eight and they are like we own the world, we can try out new stuff. It’s what makes people survive as parents. You sleep now, I’ll take care of the kid, and then when you are rested you take care of the kid and I sleep – especially for people who have twins or something mad like that. They get through it by constantly min/maxing internally in their team because if they just set everything equal then both of them would just be looking – or three if they are in that sort of relationship – would just be looking like zombies all the time.
So part of that is taking that on to yourself and saying I’m going to sacrifice myself for the team so you can be invulnerable, if only for a period.
Mari Ryan: It sounds like collaboration is at the core of this idea of innovation and creativity. You’ve described some of this in the concept of the team. Other thoughts around this idea of collaboration and how it spawns or supports the innovative environment?
Claus Raasted: Part of it is also … You work with wellness. You know this better than anyone, but part of it is about creating the right environment. There are so many numbers to support the fact that joy in the workplace, wellbeing in the workplace have major payoffs on the bottom line, and whether that bottom line is a dollar bottom line, or an innovation bottom line, it’s still true. Somebody who feels safe, who feels listened to, who feels they are in the right place doing the right thing and have the right support, they are going to be crazy innovative. They know if they say “what about …” people will say maybe. Somebody who is not feeling any support, somebody who feels alone and distraught, they are only going to innovate as much as they dare. That’s usually not very much.
Unless you are the boss of a desperate company, then you are going to do everything you can to keep your new ideas and your new thoughts to yourself, but if you are the kind of a front-line employee in a healthy company, then you are going to say what if we did this? What if we did that? What if we tried this? I tried this and it worked like this, I tried that, here’s what I learned. So, wellness is a huge part of innovation.
Mari Ryan: I’m so glad you made that connection because I kept thinking about this. Obviously I take the viewpoint that so many things are connected, innovation can be connected to wellbeing. So many things can be connected to wellbeing. I’m curious, it makes me think of this as kind of a chicken-egg situation, which comes first? Does the wellbeing come first that fosters innovation, or does innovation come first that fosters wellbeing? Which is it?
Claus Raasted: I think it is a chicken/egg situation, but I think than what you are aiming for is create culture and then create wellbeing and innovation will follow. It is much easier to create an environment that makes people excited and free and safe, then all of their brilliance will follow, then if we were saying, if you just get out, if you would just mine your brilliance, then we will be safe on the other side.
So I will always go for creating culture and awareness and then having innovation follow instead of saying we will innovate our way out of this bad organizational health.
Mari Ryan: I love that. That’s great. I’m curious, from your perspective what is it that organizations can do to foster this culture of innovation so that creativity is a part of who they are and what they do?
Claus Raasted: They can actually do a time of things, and ironically I often work on projects where there is very little time, very little resources, very little buy-in. If they have plenty of resources, plenty of time, plenty of buy-in, why do they need outsiders? Nobody calls the consultants if everything is going well unless it is going really well. What I often say to people is take what you can and try to look at the things that don’t cost you time, don’t cost you money, and don’t require buy-in. It’s very easy to come up with solutions where if only we owned the phone book and we are the biggest in the market, and we have Brazilian laws for how to treat your employees, then we could do this or that. That’s just silly.
Look at what you can do – and there’s so many things you can do. Let’s say we are a company that produces shoes. That’s great, maybe we can’t change the shoe design directly, we can definitely hold better meetings, we can definitely foster a more friendly workplace culture, we can definitely create a system for how to encourage people to say yes instead of no, and then the better shoes will follow. It can be a simple thing.
I worked at a place many years ago that when you met at work, it was kind of a children’s institution, you would high-five everyone who was there. All of the other adults, you would go around to the different rooms and you would high-five them and say hey, I’m here. Simple. Super simple. Did it create energy? Of course it did! Could it be copied anywhere? Yes, easily. Would it cost anything? No. Would it take more time? No. Are people doing it? No, because they are looking at how to make the shoe better.
One of the ways I say attack innovation is attack it from the side. Don’t get caught up in the can you make the pipes the water faster if you are a water company. Make the meetings better and then the smart people who are in those meetings will figure out how to make the pipes better.
Mari Ryan: I love it. That is so great and I love the idea that it is so easy to do.
Claus Raasted: Because if not, it’s not going to happen. If you say you should just spend three hours every morning meditating, here are these books you should read, here’s this framework you should follow, here is the Six Sigma process, that … arrgh … kills you. But telling somebody when we meet each other, we high-five, okay? It might not save the world, but it’s going to shift things in the right direction, and then maybe the next thing we do is stop saying no at meetings and instead say, tell me more.
Mari Ryan: I love it. Well, I’m sure our audience wants to learn more about you and the work you are doing, Claus, so if our audience wants to learn more, where can they find you?
Claus Raasted: I am one of those simple people who has only one person with my name in the world, and that’s me. So, Claus Raasted, that’s me, you can find me at clausraasted.com, you can Google me, there’s a YouTube channel, there’s blogs, there’s podcasts, all that sort of circus, but if you Google my name, then there is only me who has that name and you will find a rabbit hole for better and for worse.
Mari Ryan: Well, I think it’s all for better and as always I just love spending time with you. So, thanks so much for being here today it’s great to spend time with you again. Thanks, Claus.
Claus Raasted: Thank you, Mari.
[end of audio]
