Innovation Models and Creative Problem Solving: IO2020 Replay with Karen Holst, Author of Start Within

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska, thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 Virtual Event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found IO2022.com. And now back to the show. 

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Interview Transcript with Karen Holst, Author of Start Within

Brian Ardinger: Karen Holst is the Author of Start Within. Karen and I met a couple months ago. Probably in mid pandemic. She had me on her show. She has a LinkedIn show that she hosts and you're always bringing on some amazing guests. I had a great opportunity to talk to her and talk about what's going on in innovation and entrepreneurship, and this intersection between corporate and startups and such. I'll turn it over to Karen to talk a little bit more. 

Karen Holst: Great. Thank you. I am coming in from New Zealand. I originally was in San Francisco and then moved to Montreal for a couple years and still had San Francisco based work. So, I never really changed my profile in LinkedIn. It was very confusing. I had these, this double life going on, where I was spending half my year in California and half in Montreal. And then had the opportunity to come to Auckland and, and it’s been an adventure, especially given the, the time that we're in right now.

So, thank you for joining and I appreciate everyone sharing why they're joining here today. And I, I will tell you what I get excited about when it comes to innovation. It is unlocking people and doing this work and oftentimes that can be myself when I feel blocked up or maybe a little over my head in what I'm trying to do. Or it might be the team members and the people I'm consulting and bringing along and doing this work. So that's what I'm here to talk about today. 

Quick introduction on myself. My background, I had started a company after acquisition. I joined the California Department of Education and had this moment of what does it mean to innovate in a large organization, a state agency, no matter. And that being very different and that leading to writing the book. I joined IDEO and I also teach through LinkedIn learning. So that's the quick and dirty on me. 

I want to share a quick story on the importance of being bold and what it means to innovate and be the person that's igniting that in others. And this goes back to my ed tech startup. I was a co-founder in my early twenties and definitely feeling a little over my head.

We were going after another round of funding. And I really needed to catalyze teams to think differently and start solving new challenges. And I had reached out to a woman that I, I didn't know, but she was someone I really respected in the corporate world and had grown businesses. She was gracious enough to give me 15 minutes of her time.

And I sat down with her in a video call and said, explain where I was coming from and wanting to, you know, ignite passion and innovation in others. And what advice did she have for me in leading those teams? And she shared out of the gate, she said, don't bake goods and bring them into the office. You'll be seen as the mother caretaker, you know, the baker instead of the leader. 

And I was floored by that response. One, I'm not a baker. I would not put anyone into the, the task of trying to eat something that I make. I, I can do maybe a simple cake with a mix and cookies. But that is not something I would pride and force on my colleagues.

But what I took out of that comment was, you know, assimilate. Fit in. And I looked around and I had, you know, an all-male board from our investment. And we were still looking to diversify our team and hadn't quite landed on how to do that. And so, I did slip a bit in my, what I think was my superpowers and being myself.

And that is one of the takeaways is, you know, being yourself and acknowledging your strengths is a big part of this work and innovating. And also doing that with others when you're leading others. So, to be yourself with the caveat of, but better. And I think what all of this leads to is whether you're the optimistic yaysayer and that's me, or the kind of cross your arm, realistic, you know, pointing and poking holes at problems. All of those are great perspectives to have. It's trying to find that balance. 

And it's in yourself, it's in the teams that you lead. It's how your organization culture is built. All very important. And what it boils down to is being hard on the ideas and soft on people. So not focusing in on, you know, the person that's sharing the idea or talking about it, but really about the, the thing that's being said.

And I really want to go deeper in that today. We have such a short amount of time. I'm going to go quickly. Please feel free to ask questions throughout. I can't see them. So, Brian, if you can let me know of any come in, I can slow down. I'll just kick off with, Start Within framework. And that's the book that I co-authored.

And then we'll talk about the assumptions and mindsets about, around this work and go into two exercises that come from the book that you can use in your own work. Or you can take the teams. And then finish up with questions, of course. Where the book came from was again, when I had gone from my startup, I was hired within the California Department of Education to be entrepreneurial, but what that means within a larger state agency is very different. 

We obviously had lots of government funds and policies to work through and to be responsible around. But also needed to move quickly. It was all about bringing technology into the classroom. So that has to move quickly, but also responsibly.

And it's also bringing in different ways of thinking. I was looking around for tools to do that. And there's so much amazing work out there on the culture of innovation and what leaders can do. But when you're a doer and you're tactically doing this work, I felt that there was an opportunity for Start Within in writing something about how to launch ideas within a big organization.

So that's where it was born. It was focusing in on these doers. And I, I think so much about innovation is around this word that can feel very exclusive. But the people that are doing this work they're innovators. They're close to the problems that are plaguing the company, the customers, the employees. They see the problems and want to fix them.

So, they're not just sitting back and saying, that's a problem for someone else. They're ready to take, you know, action. And they want to make things happen. In addition to that, the challenges, the tension is between getting them from that idea to actually seeing it through. That the organization that they work within there's often bias towards doing things the same. Even when we say we want to do, you know, innovate and do things differently, we just have this inclination to go back to, you know, status quo.

There's also this amount of work outside of, you know, this idea. It's our day job, but we are hired to do...