Zayna Khayat, a Ph.D. trained biomedical scientist, is the Future Strategist at one of Canada’s largest and oldest non-profit health organizations, SE Health. She describes her job title as “a fancy word for Chief Innovation Officer.” Outside of SE Health, Zayna holds faculty positions at Singularity University and the Health Innovation School, as well as an Adjunct Professor position at Rotman School of Management. Her work is creating a better future for senior citizens and aging adults.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Zayna about disruption gurus, Kaiser Permanente, and why she tries to ban the word innovation with her team at SE Health.

Banning the Word ‘Innovation’

According to Zayna, true “Big I” Innovation in healthcare is sluggish at best and barely existent at worst. “It’s steeped in tradition,” she told me. “It’s a business model that hasn’t evolved in 150 years…There’s many forces in place to keep things the way they are.” Her trick for generating real, substantial innovation from her team? Ban the word from their lexicon.

“I don’t like the word innovation and have banned it from my team’s work,” she said. “Healthcare is desperate for a lot of new, so many use the word innovation to describe any change or improvement. It could be just having a good meeting is innovation. Doing something that you should be doing anyway is innovation. And then of course digital, anything digital. I needed language to distinguish our purpose of modernizing and future-proofing our health system and our own org. Hence, we are called the Futures team.”

Zayna especially dislikes the concept of having a dedicated unit to support sustaining innovations in the core; she says it should be an expected piece of every business line. “We will not touch continuous innovation,” she told me. “It’s the easiest thing for any org who’s been operating a certain way forever to assign to the innovation team…because it’s somewhat safe, and you’re so risk-averse, you’re never going to do the big thing that your org and system really need.” Zayna says that for her team, continuous innovation draws away time and resources that should be going towards the work that no one in the core organization could own – remodeling and reinventing Healthcare’s business model.

“The unfinished business [in healthcare] is business model innovation, which is re-architecting the patient value proposition, who does what, and how you get paid. That hasn’t changed, like I said, for decades…we’re called the Futures team because we’re trying to build the next business models and future patient spaces  we need to be in instead of trying to only optimize the current things we do.”

More specifically, Zayna’s team is changing the way seniors receive healthcare in their homes. According to Zayna, healthcare services are moving away from facilities and into the home. “We work on creating future models to keep seniors healthy or to restore their health in the home setting,” she said. “We have two focus areas. One is designing new housing models…The other area is new ways to keep people healthy in their home. I call that the Home-spital…Most activities and procedures are done in a hospital or clinic can now be done in a home setting, it’s just that few are doing it at scale yet.”

Explicitly defining the two areas her team works in has been key to their ability to focus. Zayna says that focus not only directs the efforts of team members but also makes it easy to say “no” to multiple demands and ideas that cross their desks daily.

“Declare your priorities and be ruthlessly focused on those. Otherwise, stuff will come at you in every direction. As soon as you declare you’re the innovation team, it all comes to you because people don’t fully understand what you do or do not do. If you don’t have focus areas, you’ll dilute your resources and move slowly. I’ve seen that over and over again with innovation teams.”

Disruption Gurus: Getting Teeth in the Org

SE Health may be supportive of Zayna’s team creating disruptive breakthroughs in healthcare, but not all organizations can make innovation stick. This may be why so many struggle to maintain their innovation units.

“I see a lot of organizations start an innovation unit or center with ambitious and exciting plans, and then within a year the lead quits and the unit goes away…and then they start again a couple years later. I also see a lot of innovation theatre.”

Zayna defines innovation theatre as “having the shop or unit, with a fancy website or space [to work in], but no real teeth, methodology, or accountability to transform the patient experience, org or sector” She says in order for an innovation team to create impact, a vital requirement is sponsorship by the organization’s top executives.

“[Innovation teams] often report too many layers down in the org, and often to IT, Strategy, or Research & Development instead of the CEO…or the mandate is not commensurate with the quality of the talent or the resources provided; that is, people are part of innovation teams who don’t have the needed tools and methodologies.”

Zayna’s solution? She has heard an idea but rarely seen it in practice: the innovation team is lead by a second CEO – a Chief Entrepreneurship Officer, whose job is to continuously renew the organization’s business model. She says such a CEO can balance out the important work of the Chief Executive Officer, whose job is to keep the org’s current business model running flawlessly. The two would integrate at the board level.

The board, Zayna says, is often what saves a struggling innovation team – “it sometimes just takes one visionary board member who gets it and has enough influence and power to bring everybody else along and challenge the CEO and management team.”  

Nurses & Cockpits: The Kaiser Permanente Story

When I asked Zayna about her favorite innovation story, she told me that she’s particularly fond of the way Kaiser Permanente went about improving the safety of their hospital wards.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a hospital ward, but in the middle of all the chaos, a nurse is dealing with the patient and there are buzzers going off and constant interruptions, yet they also have to administer meds. And sometimes those meds can be lethal if not dosed properly. It’s a dangerous time…but they’re so distracted that medication reconciliation errors can occur. Their numbers were a concern at Kaiser before they took an innovation lens to the problem.”

Kaiser Permanente knew something had to change, so they reached out to their in-house innovation consultancy for help. The innovation team sought out other industries in which professionals had to perform potentially dangerous tasks in distracting environments. Among the places they observed was the cockpit of airplanes.

“There are these few minutes of take-off that nobody is allowed in [the cockpit]. It’s called a sterile cockpit. No one is allowed to enter the sterile cockpit because that’s when all the action could go down in terms of risk to the flight. They took that concept and introduced it [as a sash worn over the shoulder] when a nurse is administering meds. That means you do not touch them, you don’t talk to them, you don’t interrupt her because they’re administering meds.”

The innovation team had incredible results with their sash concept. “They fixed the problem and it stuck,” Zayna said. She told me that she loves this story because it encapsulates what it is that she finds so powerful about human-centered design.

“It starts with no assumptions about anything. If you would have given [the medication reconciliation numbers] to a tech person they would have found a tech solution. If you would have given it to the performance management quality people, they would have found a quality improvement solution…business people would have gotten the data and then just made some change management program and forced it down the throat of the ward nurses…The way [this innovation team] got to that insight about the nurses being so distracted wasn’t from data, it was from observing people interacting with people.”

The post Banning the Word Innovation in the Work of an Innovation Team appeared first on Voltage Control.

B-Hub Prague Executive Director Tom Counsell has built 8 startups across 5 countries, speaking 4 different languages and shows no signs of slowing down.  He describes innovation as potential energy, waiting to be unleashed – “Innovation is like potential energy in physics. It represents the intrinsic creativity and wisdom of a team – the raw potential a team uses to succeed.”

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom about how to build a team that can harness that raw potential–as well as growing ideas–being diplomatic about failure and the amazing innovative power of poor communities.

Bringing an Initial Idea to Maturity

Start-up founders are notoriously protective of their ideas, handing out NDA’s and letting next to no one in on their freshest innovations. According to Tom, this is a mistake. He says that for an idea to mature, it needs to be pushed by the ideas of others – and the best way to make that happen is to share them voraciously.

“Any idea from the beginning is probably a bad idea. It needs to grow…before it survives and is worth investing a bunch of time and effort into.”

What about pesky copycats? Tom says not to worry about them. “No one is going to steal your idea. And even if they do…they’ll never have your vision. They can’t copy that because that comes from your soul when you’re a true founder.”

To Tom, founders need not be afraid of copycats because ideas are not what gives a startup its value.

“The value of a startup is in the ability for the business to execute on that idea, not to have the idea.”

Besides sharing with others, Tom has another piece of advice for helping an idea grow: fail on purpose.

“One thing that I like doing and encouraging people to do is push the boundaries. Do the most extreme version of what your idea is first and expect it to fail.” Tom says exploring an idea to its extreme with the expectation of failure gives you permission to focus on what you can learn rather than becoming laser-focused on first-time success.

Sharing Failure, the Right Way

Viewing failure as a positive learning experience is one thing for an individual but another thing altogether for an entire company. Tom told me he had made the mistake of announcing a failure too early in the past. What he learned was to never announce a failure without also planting the seeds for what’s to come.

“Innovation comes with lots of failure, but widely announcing failure hurts company morale,” he said. “It’s ok to announce the end of projects, but it should be complemented by announcing a plan for moving forward…Most people don’t take failure very well and they get very demotivated if you simply trash everything that they’re working on.”

Not everything that doesn’t seem to work right away is a failure, however; sometimes it’s just the wrong time. “You can come up with a great idea but it’s not necessarily useful right away,” Tom told me. In these cases, he likes to assign a team member to keep it simmering on the back burner. “Let one person take it and let it be their 10% project…Let them play with it for a year or two because you never know what might come out of it later on.”

One of Tom’s favorite innovation success stories is the story of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. “It was not immediately a success,” he told me. “People didn’t know what to use it for right away because no one was used to reading and very few people could read so the printing press took, I don’t know, a good 40 or 50 years before Gutenberg got any fame for doing that.”

The Trouble with Managers

On the subject of what stifles innovation, Tom raised some concerns about the role of middle management. “A middle-manager feels the full weight of failure when things go wrong, but only receives a small share in the success when things go right. So a middle-manager is unlikely to take risks. For that reason, keep your team structure flat and remove middle-manager positions if at all possible,” he said.

What makes someone a leader rather than a manager? According to Tom, leaders are concerned with vision while managers are focused on keeping a project from becoming too complex. He says this difference arises in large part due to the long term vs. short term metrics of success.

“Top-level executives want to see their businesses running lots of experiments because they know if they run 10 different experiments in 10 different departments, then one or two of them is going to yield something really amazing and help transform the business,” he explained. “But none of the managers want to be the ones that fail. So it’s difficult to convince managers or department heads to take risks that the CEO would want them to take because it hurts their career.”

The solution? Tom proposes thinking outside the box to find a better way to measure performance than the black and white success-vs-failure approach.

“Of course, you want to reward success, but you also want to reward an efficient failure.”

Tom says the Google X-Team might be the best example of this approach. “The faster you fail, you get a bonus and a vacation,” he said.

Innovation Starts with HR

Tom describes innovation programs as people programs – and he says HR is their key to success.

“[In the business of innovating] the only thing worth focusing on is intelligent problem-solving and human creativity, so it should be part of HR because it’s a soft skill. HR should be promoting and championing soft skills among everyone in the company because hard skills are becoming less important over time.”

Tom says hard skills are diminishing in value because of the rapid rise of technological innovation; “every single person in the world can generally do most services just because they have access to the internet.” Innovation, however, is a skill Tom finds uniquely human. “Delighting your customers is what you ought to be doing,” he said. “Bringing delight to your customers, that’s a very human thing.”

According to Tom, HR is also a huge key to innovation success because of the role it plays in placing employees. Employees who are in roles that are right for them, Tom says, will push their teams to success while employees who are not well-suited to their positions can stifle the innovative potential of others.

“You shouldn’t just promote whoever is the top performer to become manager because there is no guarantee they’re going to be a good manager,” Tom told me. “Maybe they’re already in the best position for them and they love that position. If you’re going to champion people as innovation leaders, check in on their personality type to make sure they’re not a square peg thrown into a round hole.”

Tom says just as important as matching people to fitting positions, is having a diversity of personality types. He says you need to have more negative, critical thinking people to balance out the innovative visionaries. Otherwise, ideas will not live long enough to be executed. Good communication, he says, is how you facilitate collaboration without fighting between the realists and the dreamers. “You want everyone to be a great communicator because that’s what helps tether the dreamers down to the executors.”

Innovation is Survival

Tom cites MIT Professors Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s book Poor Economics as a huge influence on the way he thinks about innovation and business. “It changed my whole line of thinking about how to run businesses,” he told me. “It’s not a business book but it certainly changed the way I look at [approaching] an emerging market and how to think about…[getting] into the minds of different people that come from vastly different backgrounds than you because that’s certainly really important if you’re going to create a product that serves a customer that is not like you.”

According to Tom, the poorest people in the world are the most innovative. When they are healthy enough to put the work in, he says, they find the most creative solutions to problems. “It’s fundamental to evolution – you innovate, you evolve,” he said. “What they do is they find really creative ways of creating value…In a market of people that’s just oversaturated, you’re forced to create value in some way or do something useful that people will give you money for.”

This is what inspired him while serving with the US Peace Corps. He spent time in Morocco building software with a community there. “The people I served were illiterate and most had never touched a smartphone before and had never heard of the internet,” he told me, “but what I quickly found is that they’re better innovators than me….[my time in Morocco] was where I did my most impactful work, with TheAnou.com.”

The post Harnessing the Potential Energy of Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Kris Pennella, Director of Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs, is on a mission to assist companies in getting products to market faster by transforming their organizational structures.

As someone on my own mission to put a stop to bad meetings by innovating organizations’ meeting cultures, I was excited to speak with Kris about how she utilizes innovation to drive corporate cultural change.

I spoke with Kris about eliminating silos that bar communication between teams within an organization, how to know when an organization is on the precipice of cultural evolution, and the significant value the consumer plays in driving innovation.

The North Star

Several times during our conversation, Kris highlighted the importance of working cross-functionally within an organization. Creating silos, she says, causes organizations to overlook valuable, innovative solutions from the minds of employees outside of pigeon-holed teams or departments. “The team in the mailroom could have a great idea about how to be more operationally efficient about part of their job, which could snowball into leaving time for more efficiencies and abilities to innovate across the organization,” she said. “Good ideas can come from anywhere.”

Cross-functional teamwork doesn’t just happen, though–it must be built into the culture of the organization. Breaking down the silos teams have built themselves into takes more than sending a few members of each team to sit in a room behind closed doors. Kris stressed to me how crucial it is in her line of work to cut through an organization’s structural norms and get different departments comfortable working together. One of their secret weapons for this is weekly program updates.

“When we are working with clients in a timebox innovation accelerator, we send out weekly program updates internally to the organization… If folks feel like they are in the communication loop, and they’ve got some modicum of ownership, it helps with that greatly. It starts opening their minds, ‘Oh, I could be next. I could work on all of these impactful projects. Yeah, I’ve got some ideas.’”

The key to internal communication between departments, Kris says, is being clear about why new ideas and changes in workflow are happening. This is one of the first series of questions she asks when beginning to work with a new client: “Why are you doing this? Why do you want this? What is the challenge you are looking to address with this?” Having a clear goal allows a central point for all members of the organization to rally around, regardless of their unique role. She calls this the North Star because it helps everyone understand where they’re going and travel there together.

The Tipping Point

Even with a bright North Star leading the way, not everyone in an organization is going to be excited, or even willing, to change the way they work. Kris says this is one of the first things she considers when working with a new organization. A program should be built around the company’s willingness to change their ways of working, she says.

“Everybody doesn’t necessarily want to change the way that they work or think about that world in any way, regardless of the fact that there are good ideas everywhere. Some folks are just comfortable in the same old same old, and business as usual, and that’s okay for them. So, getting them excited is really the interesting challenge in doing the work that we do.”

Kris’s weekly program updates play a part here as well. “We work with the C-Suite to develop messaging that goes out communication-wide around why they’re doing this change, why it’s important organizationally,” she said. When organization members understand why changes are happening and how they are going to help them reach that North Star, they are more willing to adapt.

Companies that Kris works with vary widely in their openness to change. Some are hesitant, sheepishly dipping their toes in the water while others can be a little overzealous, diving in before checking on the depth of the water. “It’s about kind of meeting them where they’re at,” Kris said.

When I asked how she knew when an organization was on the precipice of change without even realizing it, Kris told me the telltale sign is when upper management, especially at the executive level, starts to listen to influencers lower down the ladder. “When the executives are starting to take notice, that’s where the tipping point is.”

Innovating Culture, Not Just Product

Kris says companies that innovate their entire organization and not just a product are getting innovation right.

“It shouldn’t just [be] one group that’s sitting behind the closed door and being the innovation empire. It should be a cultural change of ‘good ideas can come from anywhere.’ You build [innovation] into your ways of working so that there is the ability to give folks the breathing room to adjust.”

Cultural transformations are not one size fits all, she told me. Just as organizations differ greatly in their willingness to change, they differ in both how they are currently working and how they want to work. Kris says understanding how these things affect a company’s ability to get a product to market is how her team builds their programs.

A huge catalyst to cultural changes is the introduction of a new generation to the workforce; organizations are being pushed to change based on the evolution of how employees want to work. Kris told me she finds this disruption exciting. “One of the things that I’ve seen is some of the generation, the team members coming out of college and maybe a couple years out of college…they’re inherently more open and agile. They were brought up very culturally different than the generations before them.” She says she sees this within her own team and it’s been a huge asset. “They’re just working in a whole different way than some of us have been…While we are technology focused because we are supporting the Red Hat suite of products on a platform, my team beyond that is a group of musicians, artists, electronics geeks and master chefs. Quite a few of them have other creative interests that they draw upon, which I believe helps strengthen us as a team on a day to day basis.”

While some organizations are, like Kris, excited about the change in work brought upon by generational changes, others are worried about how it will change their ability to attract and retain new talent. Kris responds to these concerns by reemphasizing the need for cultural innovation.

“Part of my discussions with the executives is, ‘Well, what is your culture like? And what would bring them into the company and interest them in working with you? Is it some opportunity to work on some emerging technology and create products on that platform? Is it the opportunity to be able to create and contribute? Do you have that culture?’”

The current disruptive pandemic situation has created additional complexities with consideration for innovation drivers. However, disruption is an opportunity to quickly uncover where some of the most challenging opportunities are for innovation. It is possible to gain insights and drive similar feedback loops. To do so does require additional effort in communication, context and collaboration.

Delivering Value to the Customer

Innovation is all about delivering value to the customer based on a specific goal, Kris says. She also shared that innovation doesn’t come from a cubicle, but rather “getting out and talking, hashing through your ideas.”

During Kris’s time as CEO and Founder of a company that produced grab & go specialty foods, hashing through ideas meant following customers around grocery stores and observing their buying patterns. “One of the ways I would do my market research was literally to follow people around and watch them shop. You just learn a lot from watching folk,” she said. Something interesting that she noticed? Customers are more likely to buy prepared foods during times of economic hardship. “During times of downturn or instability like we had in 2007-2008, people were scaling back on going to restaurants, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted to cook….[Spending] on high end prepared foods actually increased.”

Finding value that can be delivered to the customer can happen through more direct means than watching shoppers from afar, however. Kris spoke to me about how useful it is to speak with customers directly. “Folks inherently, they want to help,” she said. “Even if they’re giving you terrible feedback or being very blunt or don’t like your idea, they still think that they’re helping and there’s value in understanding that.”

When I asked her for an example of an innovation that failed to deliver value to the customer, Kris said New Coke; “What was wrong with old Coke?” she asked.

“Why did they feel that we needed a new version of it? What were the market drivers that drove the executives at Coke saying, ‘Hey, our 100 year old recipe is getting dusty. Let’s go release a new version that nobody is asking for [and] might not like or want.’”

While receiving customer feedback on possible innovations or changes is crucial, Kris recognizes the impracticality in focus-grouping every small decision. She recommends developing a streamlined feedback cycle that is established upfront with the community or teams you’re asking for feedback. “What’s the right cadence for who your customer is?,” she asks.” It’s about setting those expectations and that rapport up front.”

The post Innovating an Organization’s Culture to Drive Product Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think it’s about finding, as an individual, what recovery methods work for you and how you are able to carve that out in your own unique schedule.”- Ceili Cascarano

Sleep seems to be a perpetually tricky routine to land, and it’s one of the most important pillars of our overall health–it affects everything from our immune systems to our cognitive function. Listen in as I, your host Douglas Ferguson, discuss this and more with Ceili Cascarano on Episode 4 of the Control the Room Podcast.

Ceili is currently the co-founder and CEO of Somn, a digital sleep expert that helps people tackle their unique sleep issues. Somn brings clarity to the world of sleep. Without individuals understanding why they can’t sleep, they aren’t able to come up with a solution that works. Somn helps people navigate their sleep journeys and assists them in their sleep process.

Ceili has over ten years of experience in Big 50 corporate healthcare America where she worked on large national brands. She has recently worked in corporate innovation, where she helps build partnerships between Somn and other companies with a good product-market fit.

In today’s episode, Ceili and I  talk about how sleep impacts daily function, different approaches people are taking for individual recovery, and how your daily routine can affect your quality of sleep. We discuss the emotional and physical benefits of exercise, how to speed up the decision-making process in meetings, and why you should never go into a meeting without knowing the purpose of the meeting.

Show Highlights

[01:13] Ceilie’s corporate marketing and innovation experience.
[03:39] The factors that create a market for Somn.
[07:08] The effect of sleep when facilitating meetings.
[10:14] Science-driven resources and solutions to achieve quality sleep.
[13:33] The ability to remove yourself from everyday situations gives your mind space for creativity.
[18:45] The power of a good-enough-to-go viewpoint.
[22:43] Accommodation of structured breaks throughout your day.
[27:35] Ceili on being a good leader.
[30:30] Owning your power in meetings and taking responsibility for your actions.
[33:00] How to take the Somn assessment.

Links | Resources

Ceili on Linked In
Somn

About the Guest

Ceili is currently the co-founder and CEO of Somn, a digital sleep expert that helps people tackle their unique sleep issues. She is a strategist and business builder with 13+ years of experience managing established brands and emerging innovations in CPG, healthcare, and healthtech. Ceili spent over 10 years at Fortune 50 companies, and she has worked most recently in corporate venture capital, assessing new verticals, products, technologies, and business models for investment and growth. She has experience as a commercial leader and P&L owner for LISTERINE® and TYLENOL®.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings. 

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Full Transcript

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Really excited to have Ceili Cascarano on the show today. She is the CEO and co-founder of Somn, and Somn was created to help people navigate the mysterious world of sleep.

Welcome to the show, Ceili.

Ceili: Thanks for having me.

Douglas: Let’s kick it off with a little bit about how you got your start and a little bit more about Somn.

Ceili: Great. So I am a good 10 years in Fortune 50 big company, corporate America and had a phenomenal experience in a big healthcare company, where I worked on tons of brands, and had a phenomenal experience understanding how businesses run. And most recently, actually worked in corporate innovation, where I helped assess startups, partner with startups, and really helped them understand product market fit in service of partnership with this big company.

And so that sort of gave me the startup itch, and was actually working on a project in the sleep space with this company, myself and two other gentlemen. And as corporate priorities always do, the pendulum swung, and they decided to double down on core businesses, move away from whitespace, move away from sort of new verticals. And myself and these other two gentlemen said, “Hey, we really believe in what we’ve been working on. Can we take it and run with it on the outside?” and took a leap of faith and have been doing that for about a year now. The company was really supportive and really wanted to see this flourish, even though it couldn’t happen inside the walls.

And so we just launched the site, still working through a few of the early iterations of that, and excited to be bringing a little bit more clarity to the world of sleep. It’s a really complicated space. There are lots of factors that affect sleep. And one of the biggest issues in this space is that people just don’t understand what’s driving their unique issue. And so they can’t navigate their way to a solution. And so we’re there to help demystify some of that and help people navigate that journey and handhold them a little bit in that process.

Douglas: It’s really exciting to see how much personalization is coming into fields of science like this. It’s interesting. There’s developments on the population health, and then there’s also developments on personalization. And it’s fascinating to see them both moving and how they both can impact us at the macro level and micro level. And I’m personally really interested in how I can—like, the quantified self kind of stuff—where I can learn more about me and how I need to treat myself versus oh, here’s this population study that says 80 percent of the people benefit from this, but what’s unique about me. What sort of stuff are you starting to find?

Ceili: I think the interesting thing in the world of sleep is that it spans such a spectrum of factors, of lighter-touch issues through its actual medical diagnoses. And so what we’re seeing emerge in this space is a strive for personalization. You’re absolutely right. What ends up happening, though, is that a lot of these technologies, a lot of the wearables are right for one subset of the population. They’re right for one underlying factor. Maybe it’s meditation-forward device that’s helping with some of the racing mind and the anxiety. That’s not going to work for somebody whose sleep is affected by hormonal changes, like moving into menopause. And so you are seeing acknowledgment of customization, of personalization, but it’s really hard to navigate all the various things and factors that might affect sleep. And so it is a big, sweaty problem, and we’ve definitely taken higher up in the funnel sort of demystifying as a foundational exploration, what is it that’s affecting your sleep? And then, let’s help you solve it.

And that will shape our roadmap. That’ll shape how we think about solutions we bring to market. But first and foremost, we are focused on the demystification. We’ve created a digital assessment that has taken over 25 clinical scales, and turned them into about five-minute experience to help you understand what’s affecting your sleep so you can find that personal solution. So you’re spot on, and we’re seeing it in so many fields. Sleep is no exception.

Douglas: Yeah, it’s fascinating. It reminds me of a story that we shared, and start with them, about the Crash Test Dummies. When they were first developed, they were developed by men, so the shapes and sizes of these things resembled the average man. And then the sad, sad thing—we both laugh because it’s absurd—but it’s actually a sad, sad thing because you look at the statistics of deaths and injuries on the highway, and women are off the charts, much, much more likely to get injured. And so, to your point, if these devices are only helping a subset of the population, how can we start to serve the others? And I think that’s a noble cause.

Ceili: Yes, we hope so. And also acknowledge we are never going to be able to solve everybody’s issues, underlying factors. And so how can we leverage some of our data, leverage some of those top-of-funnel experiences to get them on the path to the right partner or to the right doctor? So that’s a little bit longer term, but we really think we can play an important role in the ecosystem, where it’s not about us or a competitor; it’s about how do we get you on the path to the right solution. And I am very glad as a woman that there has been some acknowledgment of that, as I wear my seatbelt.

Douglas: Yes, absolutely. Better airbags, for sure.

I was thinking about this whole phenomenon that if you’re going to facilitate a room and you expect them to be there for the room, you have to be there for yourself first. Your psychology has to be stable if you’re going to help manipulate—and manipulate’s the wrong word—but help bring forth some change or take a group in a direction. And so when I think about that, I think in relation to sleep, it seems that sleep plays a big role in that. If we’re not getting quality sleep, then it’s going to be hard for us to show up as facilitator. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts there.

Ceili: Yeah, we talk a lot about sleep, obviously, and the role it plays for overall health. It’s critical. It’s becoming more understood. That’s not just about hours. That’s not just about going to bed at a set time. Even that looks individualized to some extent. I really like taking that even to the notion of recovery. So how do we view sleep in the context of recovery and allowing our body to do what it needs to do overnight to repair itself? How do we think about recovery throughout the day?

My co-founder, one of my co-founders and CTO, is a huge believer in the mini nap. Literally been in sessions with him where he’ll walk away for 20 minutes and go take a catnap. I wish I had that super power. But you’re absolutely right. Then you think about facilitating groups and being in the right headspace, the intentional commitment to recovery, everything from the good sleep at night, but also the recovery through the day, whatever that looks like for you. If it’s a moment to yourself, if it’s the catnap, if it’s a little bit of meditation, all of these things are impacting our ability to function and to operate at our highest level possible.

Douglas: I think about the fatigue that we are experiencing with all these virtual meetings, and also the extra stress. We’ve talked about having the kids around, and, sure, we love our kids, but when they’re tapping at the door when we’re trying to—it as another source of information that we had to process. And that’s coming in, and we have to prioritize and delegate and regulate. And there’s just a lot more coming at us that we have to filter and deal with. And so I agree. Taking those moments of recovery.

It reminds me of athletes have built-in recovery. It’s very planned and very intentional. So they might train really hard, and then, there’s a day of recovery. And they have very specific tools to do that, whether it’s ice baths and saunas and massage and all these things. And so I love this notion of the catnap. And I’ll sometimes just say, “Hey, can we—instead of doing the Zoom, can we just do a phone call?” And then I’ll go sit on my recliner and just kind of veg out but get the work done, and that way when I come back to my desk, I feel a little bit more charged up. And so have you seen other types of tactics or approaches people have been taking to get that recovery?

Ceili: Especially in today’s environment, it’s so individual. And so the catnap might work for my CTO, who has one small kid at home. It just doesn’t work for me. I will be crawled on and slobbered on and hair pulled. So I do think it’s about finding as an individual what recovery methods work for you and how are you able to carve that out within your own unique schedule.

We have seen, especially through the sleep lens, a large rise in things like meditation. Absolutely. I mean, you have phenomenal science-driven resources out there, like Headspace, like Calm, that are helping to facilitate that in an accessible way. Talk therapy, especially in this current environment where therapy used to be more face to face, moving more to the telemedicine model and that becoming more mainstream. Absolutely an uptick as well.

And I do think it’s just about your habits and your routine. We talk a lot about it, actually, at Somn, and is one of our five factors that we focus on is routine and what is the impact of routine on your day, on your sleep? And so how are you making those choices to support that recovery in the current environment?

So, I mean, for me, I’m pretty competitive. I got an Apple Watch, and I’m getting my 30 minutes of exercise every day. And so while exercise itself is not about recovery—that’s about performance, and that’s about exerting effort—taking the intentional minutes after to recover and to have some time to myself and to escape the chaos of life for everybody right now has been really important.

So I think it’s a range of things. I think it’s very individual. And you have to acknowledge that your situation may look different than mine and find ways to build that recovery in a way that works for you.

Douglas: That’s really cool that you mention exercise as a way of disconnecting or resetting. I was recently talking to Jon Fitch about this, about how you can actually vary your level of intensity to dial in the type of recovery you want. So if you want to totally reset your brain, do something really intense, because (a) you’re not going to be to think about anything else because you’re devoting all your resources to that intense cardio. Also, like the deprivation of oxygen—you’re basically pushing your systems to the max. So it’s like you can’t stress out of whatever your cousin just did or whatever. So that can be a really great way to move past this moment and kind of hit a reset button. But if you’re needing to really concentrate on something and think through it, but you’re needing to kind of change the scenery, then a short walk or brisk walk might be just the thing that the doctor ordered. And you mentioned taking walks as well as being something that you are finding relief in.

Ceili: That’s right. I just actually started running again. And you’re spot on. I was in the humidity and dying and couldn’t think about anything other than how miserable I was and how much I hated it. But I have intentionally—and I didn’t really realize this until you mentioned it—I’ve intentionally varied that with walking for my physical purpose. But the emotional and the mental benefit of that as well has been huge to vary that as well. And being able to take the walks, to use that even for a creative reflection, I’ve started building walks even into my schedule as part of my work day as a time to reflect. I mean, you know, in this environment, Zoom fatigue, even without quarantine, we were facing meeting fatigue. And carving out time to think is so much harder than I think any of us realize, and the ability to remove yourself from a setting and find a new one, a new inspiration, is key to both creativity, but being able to find what you were talking about at the beginning, some of that mental headspace to effectively lead and manage teams.

Douglas: I always like to say that if you create space, innovation rushes in. So if we’re just like—if our calendars are crammed full, if our brains are crammed full, where’s the juice for cool things to happen? So I like that notion of having this headspace for that.

You just talked about meeting fatigue. And we were, before the show, talking about as a startup we can just jump in a room and make some decisions. And big companies require, even though it’s just a lot of churn in conversations and circular this and that. And I’m just curious what you found. Are there ways to speed up decisions? How do we get to the destination a little bit quicker, even when we’re having to deal with larger groups?

Ceili: If I had a perfect answer for that, I’d probably be a billionaire.

Douglas: It’s a tough thing, right?

Ceili: It is. The two things that immediately come to mind, number one is being very clear up front on the meeting purpose, the meeting objective. So I was just talking to somebody about this. Had a meeting pop up, no context, I don’t know what this is about, and now having to spend time to figure that out, figure out, am I the right attendee? Am I going to prioritize this? So the better expectation setting we can set up front and what outcome we want at least sets the right framework going in.

Now, I fully acknowledge that might look different at every company. So when I was at big company, the culture was very relationship driven. I remember early in my career, we tried to start a very formal, “Okay, when you send the email, there needs to be an objective, a purpose, a goal; the attendees,” and culturally, it didn’t work. It was too formal. It was too structured.

So how do you lean into the culture of the organization? So if it’s a swing by when we’re back in the office, if it’s Slacking me, if it’s a text, just helping to set the expectation for some of these meetings, however that makes sense culturally, is first and foremost a huge opportunity to overcome the, “Well, this meeting could have been an email sentiment.”

And then second, and it’s something I’ve really grown into in my career, is a mentality and is hard for a lot of perfectionists but I think is critical, especially in the world of innovation, is having the mentality of good enough and go. So you’re never going to get it perfect. You’re never going to get all of the answers. But how do we get to the core of what we’re trying to achieve; align, commit, and go? And again, that’s a mindset. It is easier said than done. But as a facilitator, setting the expectation that this doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough for now until we have new information or more information that will lead us to learn, evolve, pivot has really, really helped me as I’ve grown in my career and as I’ve learned how to prioritize and also not to stress the impossible pursuit of perfection.

Douglas: I love that. You know, it’s funny. I see so many companies, when they’re in that pursuit of perfection, they’re pursuing and pursuing and pursuing. And then finally, it gets to this point where it’s like, “Oh, now we have to release it.” I mean, it’s like, it’s so ridiculous to me because we could have just skipped all that in-between stuff because you still made that decision at the end to do the thing you could have done much earlier. And I think to me, the biggest problem is that people don’t take note of the fact that many decisions are reversible.

Ceili: Absolutely. And as you were speaking, the word that came to mind, they don’t leave room for learning. And the past few years, both on the startup side and the corporate side, where I’ve really sat and spent a lot of my energy, is how you create the room for learning, because there’s always going to be something you didn’t expect. There’s always going to be an insight that develops. And I truly believe that this pursuit of perfection hinders the ability to learn, which rightfully then leads to iteration or to new insights or to new opportunities. And on the corporate side in particular, you want it to be buttoned up and perfect, and you want to go then and pitch it to the C-suite and for it to be shiny and exactly how you have it in your head. But the reality is we don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t know. We don’t know how the market will react. We don’t know how consumers will like a feature or something else that we never planned for. So sitting in the space of learning and really allowing that good-enough-and-go mentality to support that pursuit of learning has been really important in my career.

Douglas: That’s great. And I come back to your point around when you were talking about the structure being too, let’s say formal, for a company that’s very relationship based. And when I heard you describe the things that were necessary to create better results, they sounded more like principles to me than structure. And so I think that a lot of times when people hear those things, though, when they hear, “Oh, we’ve got to set expectations,” they tend to jump the structure. The solution they go to is like very rigid stuff. But like, hey, if we’re just clearer, if we agree that we’re never going to walk into a meeting without understanding the purpose, we don’t have to have a consistent, rigid structure. We can be very relationship and informal about how we communicate that. But just hold that true as a value that we will not walk into a meeting that we don’t feel like we’re going to provide value in.

Ceili: Doug, I love that. And what’s coming to mind is this notion of aligning on the what, what is it that are guiding principles; and allowing room for the hows, so how that gets executed, how we prop that principle up and live and do it every day.

Listen, you know, companies are different and sometimes maybe culture needs to change. But this balance of the what and how when it comes to some of those values and principles, you’re spot on, are two levers we can pull. And I think sometimes people get scared that it has to look a certain way.

Douglas: Yeah. And if we can ladder all that into the why, then we’re really cooking.

Ceili: Absolutely. You’ve hit the mecca at that point.

Douglas: So I want to ask you a somewhat facetious question. So we talked a little bit about facilitators needing sleep. It’s important to recover, be on the A game, and do that self-care, because you spend a lot of time taking care of your participants. And if you haven’t taken care of yourself first, it’s going to be difficult. But what about participants? I saw this funny video loop. I don’t know, it was maybe four months ago or something. And there was a participant falling asleep in the session, and all the other participants started clapping to wake her up. And it’s somewhat funny, but also somewhat sad. Like, she was—now, assuming she’s not narcoleptic or anything, she was so tired that she—or the session was so boring, she fell asleep. So I’ve just wondered if that conjures up any stories or relates to any of the work that you’re doing. I mean, it’s somewhat facetious, but also, I think it’s a curious thing to explore, this notion of attendees being deprived.

Ceili: Yeah. So one story that comes to mind is I was at a training one time that was actually very focused on performance and recovery. And a very senior leader had, very much on this topic, talked about for employees to facilitate some of the recovery for participants, for employees in their day to day. They had put nap pods throughout the maybe first floor. But as a place for employees to recharge, maybe take that catnap, and that nobody used them. And somebody turned to this gentleman and said, “Have you ever used one?” He said, “Oh, no, never.” And then he caught himself and realized what that response was reflecting, of you can put the shiny objects out there, you can do all the cool things, but if you don’t have leaders or facilitators living into those principles and setting the same example, it’s really hard for employees or participants to do the same.

And so where I’ve seen really successful meetings enable participants to promote some of that recovery is a combination of structured breaks. So the rule I’ve heard lately, especially with some of the Zoom work sessions that I’ve been on, is 50 minutes and then a break, no matter what. So building in the structured, but then also those informal check-ins. As you said, sometimes the topic is dragging, or sometimes it’s post lunch and people, it’s starting to settle, and they’re losing steam a little bit. How do you tune into the needs of the group as you’re facilitating and make those impromptu stretch breaks or quick walks or quick breaks and allow for that combination of structure and spontaneity as well?

When I was in B-School, I interned at a company where they were very focused on us for employee productivity, and there literally used to be an alarm that went off every—I want to say it was every two hours. And everybody would line up, and we would do calisthenics together. And I sort of laughed at it at the time, but it was so ahead of the curve. And so I do think there are things in the toolkit that facilitators can bring in, whether it’s stretches. I have this great app called the 7 Minute Workout app. It’s literally down and dirty. You can do a really light touch, quick exercise all the way up to more hardcore. I have not tried the hardcore one yet, so please take that with a bit of a grain of salt. But I do think as leaders, as facilitators, we have to live into the principles, create room and structure for that recovery, but then also tune into our employees, tune into our participants, and say, “Hey, you know what. Actually, we’re at the 30-minute mark, and it’s time. Let’s stretch our legs and get outside. Let’s do a little bit of calisthenics,” whatever that might look like.

Douglas: That’s cool. I have two things I’ll share. I was doing a virtual conference. The conference is in Bangkok, which was really strange because (a) I was up really late to do this virtual conference. And I had mixed feelings because I didn’t have to hop on a plane and deal with jet lag and all that to get to this conference. But also, I was kind of sad that I wasn’t in Bangkok. I’m talking with all these folks in Thailand, but I wasn’t actually there experiencing the city. So it was a lot of weird mixed emotions there. And before we came on, we were in a waiting area. And there was a guy that was giving a session on how to stay more fit during COVID. And his entire exercise routine, it was called Sit and Fit. And there were exercises you could do from your chair, which made me laugh because I was like, “Wait a second. You’re going to take the effort to exercise, but not take the small effort it would take to stand up?”

Ceili: So I’ve got to tell you, that reminds me of the planes. You know, how they have the seat exercises, the roll your ankle. Nobody ever does that. So did people actually partake in this, do you think?

Douglas: I don’t—I mean, it was there, and we were kind of getting cued up to go on. So we were watching the thing before us. It was actually really quite nice because any kind of butterflies or stress that I had evaporated watching this guy do hip movements in his chair and stuff.

Ceili: You’re like, if he can do hip movements from his chair, I can go on and facilitate this.

Douglas: Yeah. I can talk about innovation. No big deal.

The other thing I’ll share is you were talking about doing stretches in your meetings and workshops. And in our weekly facilitation practice, we’ve seen a really cool technique where—and someone had a name for it. I’m forgetting now—but essentially, you go around the meeting, and you have people share a stretch, and then everyone does the stretch. So someone will share the stretch, and we all do the stretch. And then they’ll pick the next person. So it kind of creates a cadence because it’s really hard. You can’t say, “Oh, go around the circle,” because there’s no circle in Zoom. And so that kind of “choose the next person” is a nice dynamic there.

So in general, do you have any favorite questions that you find really provocative or interesting or generally get good juice from a crowd or a coworker?

Ceili: One that may not be provocative, but I have found helps to push the boundaries of thinking, to clarify folks’ perspectives, even to bring in more diversity of thought is something as simple as “tell me more,” especially in big meetings. You’re trying to get to a resolution. You’re trying to get to an objective. There’s folks sometimes that are the leader of the pack. They’ve got the loudest voice in the room. And what’s been really important for me as I have progressed as a leader is ensuring that everybody who wants to have a voice has the opportunity and that I take the time to probe with the folks that maybe are a little more reflective or a little bit quieter. And what I find is that once you get the opening and you use that statement of “tell me more,” it can open up discussion that may not have happened otherwise.

And so a great example. I was in a meeting, and we were pretty close to resolution, and somebody hadn’t really talked, but I knew this person had great insight, great perspective. And that statement of “tell me more” actually ended up leading us down a different path to a different resolution of where we would have gotten otherwise, and also ensured that the loudest voice in the room wasn’t the one that was heard just because it was the loudest voice in the room.

Douglas: Yeah. It’s always tricky when there’s over-talkers or someone feels like they have a lot to share. How do you redirect that and get others talking and stuff? And so I’m always really curious. We call it verbal judo. How do you kind of deflect and get the room kind of really humming and make sure everyone’s active?

I was actually reading something last night about microaggressions, and just the current climate has impacted what’s kind of come across my reading nightstand and in a positive way, I think. And this microaggression article, it was talking about just general things that you can do in certain situations. Because I think the insidious thing about microaggressions is that we don’t realize we’re doing them. And so there was this prompt that I thought—and it relates to what you were talking about except slightly different—it’s, what do you mean by that? So rather than calling—I thought it was so beautiful because rather than villainizing someone for doing something that they’ve been conditioned to do all their life, and there’s no intent behind it, it can give them the opportunity to take it back in a very soft way. And I think that it’s somewhat parallel to the “tell me more about that.” It’s very open, and it kind of puts them in the driver’s seat, to take it where they think it should be taken.

Ceili: Yeah. What’s really nice about that as well is, I’m sure that you leverage this, too, this notion of assuming best intent, that is on the individual who is maybe on the receiving end of the misinterpretation. And what I love about that is let’s empower everybody in this situation. Let me assume best intent as an individual, but let me also prompt a discussion, prompt a reframe, of how I interpreted that, because then maybe I don’t even have to worry about assuming best intent because I realize “Oh, actually, I just interpreted that completely wrong.” And so how do we make everybody active participants in that clarification of meeting, that clarification of intention, and own that there are these microaggressions and own that we are players in that and bring power to sort of that full system of players. So I love that. And that is why I love this notion of “tell me more,” because it opens up both to diversity of thought and folks who may not be the loudest voice in the room, but also allows for a bit of an open-ended share. Share what is on your mind. Share what you want to share.

Douglas: One that’s slightly different but definitely in the same ballpark is I love to ask, what do you think we should do? Because when someone brings me a problem, they probably have some notion of what they think we should do. And I think that’s very empowering to—also, it kind of keeps me from, as a leader, from getting exhausted from having to have all the answers.

Ceili: You know, right or wrong, I’ve also found myself using that notion of we in terms of—failure is maybe too strong a word—but owning the output. So, “Hey, we committed to doing that. And maybe it was actually you, but we are in this together. So how do we sort of rectify or commit to fixing that?” And so this notion of “it’s not you versus me. We are in pursuit of better sleep together,” or “we are in pursuit of better facilitation together,” whatever that is, trying to reframe and reground that common goal probably doesn’t happen enough in startups or corporate.

Douglas: I agree. There’s not enough focus on the purpose. And, you know, if we live there, then a lot of the other decisions become a lot easier.

Ceili: Though easier said than done, yes.

Douglas: Yes, exactly. It’s hard work, and people get uncomfortable doing it. It’s like a lot of times when we do purpose work—and that’s where we like to start—and people can get uncomfortable because it’s difficult. They’ll restate the company slogan and say “Let’s move on.” It’s like—

Ceili: Check.

Douglas: —we need to move past the jargon, you know?

Ceili: Yeah.

Douglas: In closing, you mentioned that there are five factors that you study or promote within Somn, and recovery is one of them. Maybe share the final four, and let listeners know how they can maybe take the assessment, how they can learn more, how they can lean into what you’re working on.

Ceili: Great. I’d love to. So to take the assessment, you go to www.somn.co, and the assessment helps you understand the underlying factors affecting your sleep. And so there are five: mind, so anxiety, racing mind, staying awake at night. Body, so the things that affect your body, your hormone levels, things like that; routine, which I mentioned, is a huge one when it comes to sleep. Just having good routines, productive routines as your routines, as you’re readying yourself for bed. The environment, so environment plays a huge role. The street lights, the noise. I live in the city, so I hear all sorts of crazy stuff that can keep me awake at night. And then social, so the effects of your bed partner, your pets. In my case, kids. So all of those things are underlying factors that affect your sleep. They all may have different solutions, different opportunities to address. That doesn’t mean that it have to be things that you buy. So that’s really what we’ve distilled it down to. And then the notion of recovery is actually sort of a separate sentiment of how do we live into recovery as a benefit in terms of how you think about sleep and the broader efforts driving to health.

Douglas: Excellent. Thanks for sharing. And I encourage everyone to check this out because sleep is so, so important. And love the work that you’re doing. It’s been fun chatting.

Ceili: Hey, Doug. Thanks for having me. And I look forward to learning more about all the great stuff you guys are doing.

Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together.

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