• 49:17
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Innovation culture, product development, customer listening, technology commercialization, engineering communication, risk management, leadership attitudes, idea flow, team brainstorming, healthcare innovation, Next Wave Health, Jacksonville Tech Fest, preventative medicine, chronic disease management, technological acumen.
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Dasha Tyshlek
Dasha Tyshlek 00:09
I love that love that energy,
Damon Pistulka 00:10
Yeah, gotta get it going. Alright, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am excited for our guest today, because we have none other than Dasha. Ty select here today from stratacraft, stratcraft talking about building a culture of innovation. I am so excited to talk with you today. We were talking before the before the show started. So much having on, Dasha, thanks for being here today.
Dasha Tyshlek 00:44
It’s my pleasure, and I just love your enthusiasm. I think we need to approach everything in life with this level of energy. Why not? I think so.
Damon Pistulka 00:52
Why not? That’s what I say. That’s what I say. So, Dasha, when we’re talking on the show, we always like to get some of the background from the people that are talking so share with us now you’re a repeat offender. I’m sorry you came back again, it’s and get to deal with this show, but we’re glad to have you, and it’s awesome. Tell us a little bit about your background so we can understand where you’re coming from and how you got to doing what you’re doing. Yeah,
Dasha Tyshlek 01:20
yeah, absolutely. And it’s, it’s so amazing to return to a show and kind of also see the progress you’ve made over time, and the things, how things have evolved, and the topics you want to tackle one year versus another, yeah. But my background, I’m an engineer by training, but I always say that I’m not that great at the actual engineering job. I immensely respect the people who are incredible researchers and designers, though, and I’ve always found myself among the engineering team, kind of the person who focuses the group and then finds the people with the problem to see if they like the solution we came up with, and doing a lot of the relationship work, as well as a lot of the communication of, you know, because technologies can be very hard to understand, but then you can kind of explain them to people who sort of understand technology like, you know, engineers even sometimes have different specialties, and sometimes they need someone to speak kind of engineering between them, but Not that you know they they can. If you ask any one of them to explain too much, they’ll go really deep into explanations, and you’re kind of lost. So sometimes you need someone who can translate to both other technical audiences and other less technical audiences, as well as like general audiences who maybe have zero background. And I really love navigating that, that conversation between very technical to less technical, and figuring out ways that we can make things more approachable, help people ask the right questions, and even predicting what kind of concerns people are going to have, so that the engineers can tackle them ahead of time. So I’ve always had that, that skill, that interest, for really long time. And when I was doing internships, I got to work in this field called research translation, or it’s sometimes called technology commercialization. I got to do several different internships with this. I got to see multiple projects that were in various stages of being translated. And when I went out into the field and got jobs, I was always seeing that that was a continually growing interest. I want to know, like, what’s the newest thing, and why is it working, or what’s not working about it? How’s it going to solve problems? And then I had the really wonderful opportunity over different career steps to work in a position where I was working on kind of custom development projects. So clients would come in, and they would have different needs, and I was in a kind of a defense technology development house. We had a particular set of expertise, and we would try to help them, and we were really good at what we did. They would sometimes know a lot about this field, and sometimes less, but they would have problems. And we were doing a lot of product development, you know, 12 plus projects per year. So I had the chance to see not only how we did product development, but we were working a specialized component and as a part of these larger programs. So I was also seeing how the project kind of flow worked within all of our customers product development teams, and I got to trace that I was director of business development. So my job included the marketing component, the transition into sales and customer service, and then also I managed the project manager who oversaw product development. So I got to see basically everything from initial client contact all the way through to when we transition to manufacturing. And one thing I noticed all the time is that some companies, my clients, were very easy to work with when it came to product development, meaning they. Had a good idea of what they wanted. They had the right people on the team. They understood their user really well, and we had a really great relationship. We could predict things. We could work through problems exceptionally well every you know, even when something didn’t work as we expected, when we put the components together, the problem solving was really effective and collaborative. And very importantly, when it went to manufacturing, there was predictability to what we were going to be manufacturing. And some of these projects can be, you know, defense and life sciences can be very complex, and you can have very complicated supply chains. So that predictability in development process and post development process and manufacturing so important, saves so much money that you don’t have to expedite. You’re not running around like suddenly reinstating a program that had been on pause for two years. And so there were some clients we worked with exceptionally well, and then somewhere things were always bumpy, and it wasn’t because the the people weren’t of quality, or the engineering thinking wasn’t there. It wasn’t anything like that. I started trying to figure out what it was that was creating that. And it was really all about roadmaps and roadmaps. You know, they talk about it in software engineering, in engineering a lot, but for many of these companies that have many R D projects simultaneously that they didn’t really have road maps. They there was nothing that they had articulated about how they’re going to be approaching projects over time that could easily be translated into a conversation with a vendor about things we might need to start exploring earlier on and defining and like trying to predict costs and stuff. So I started figuring out, how do companies like this develop good roadmaps? And our company ended up, we ended up going through a transformation process where I helped develop scorecards for how we were going to assess projects out if they’re good fits for us. And we ended up putting together some roadmaps that we shared with our vendors, which they loved. They were so happy when we did that. They were able to tell us a lot ahead of time if there were any issues in material procurement, they were able to say to us, you know, we think we could do this process faster and better, but we need to have this quantity of product. If for you, do you think we’ll have that in the next year, six months, and we could talk about the costs of them improving this process or adding machines. It was, it was so transparent and so collaborative. And then some of my clients went through a similar process. I’d seen some new leadership come in to two different teams, and they went through that incredibly rigorous process of articulating what they wanted, and it was amazing. Our relationships with those companies went from like we really love the projects, but we always struggle to figure out what’s going on with each other, and we don’t know who to call or what’s going you know, everybody always feels there was miscommunication, to feeling like we’re 100% on the same page and that, you know, we’re just a phone call away. And if there’s something that comes up, we’re going to know about it ahead of time. We’re never going to be, you know, in a state of panic and feeling just open, free communications and a sense of order to all of this, you know, creative process that is during product development,
Damon Pistulka 08:16
yeah, and those, I mean, even though it’s engineers and product development, it can get pretty chaotic, especially in complex products and complex projects that you’re trying to execute on with a lot of lot of moving pieces, right? Because one one design change in a seemingly, you know, probably not critical component can make a huge difference, because it could change lead times. It could change 17 other things that are associated with it and and then unintended consequences, like if you know, if you’re building something with heat, and you stick something in there with more heat, and you don’t adjust your cooling, and then you just overload your temperature. There’s just so many different things that you can do that are crazy with, with that of it’s not really structured properly, exactly.
Dasha Tyshlek 09:04
And there’s, you know, even when you’re in manufacturing already, like, there’s two different companies performing the same test on some equipment are going to get different results because of calibration and software. And you know, the how they’re testing, engineer just set things up and what they used to testing versus what they haven’t seen before, or some parameter. And so that communication is so important, because it’s the difference between trust that everybody’s doing their best, the ability to just get in a room together and problem solve quickly, versus kind of finger pointing and blame games and people kind of feeling like they need to hide information because somebody’s gonna, you know, yell at them, because that happens too, right? You have, you have problems that you don’t know who’s responsible, and you know, the best response is, let’s all figure it out. And. We’re responsible, we’ll fix it. And the worst is, like that can’t possibly be us. They must have said something wrong. We really shouldn’t look into it. If we, if we go down this route, everybody’s going to be angry. So we better, you know, ignore the problem until it becomes a bigger problem. See
Damon Pistulka 10:16
if it shows up. Yeah, yeah, that’s not good. But you’re right. It’s it really is. You know, innovation is not easy. Innovation is not easy whether you’re developing products where you’re developing a different business processes. I was in a meeting today, we’re talking about different business processes to get better outcomes. It is an incredibly hard whether you’re developing a product or that are physical items or or helping people to change the way that we do things, to get get more desirable outcomes like that, that’s for sure. Oh,
Dasha Tyshlek 10:49
absolutely. And you know, processes are hard to develop, they are hard to teach and and get people to adopt, and then they’re really hard to follow, because if you design a process that’s too convoluted, or one that doesn’t explain exactly what’s going on very well, leaves open gaps where people are like but what am I involved at this point? Or what is my responsibility Exactly? Then you you, you know that confusion can translate into a disruption in flow or communication gaps or just stall time while everybody tries to figure out what happened. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 11:24
yeah, it’s crazy. So, so you have had a ton of experience in companies that are just repeatedly innovating, innovating developing new, developing new and today we’re talking about, you know, building a culture of innovation. What are some of the keys that you know? Well, first of all, what do you consider a culture of innovation? Yeah,
Dasha Tyshlek 11:50
a company that has a culture of innovation is is, well, first of all, they’re able to produce outcomes that are innovative. And I don’t mean just put together an engineering product in a kind of Lego style fashion, but they’re able to really address problems in a novel way, maybe develop solutions that have never existed before, or that have never existed in this combination of solutions before, there’s an element of technological acumen that goes into it, usually, or some research, where you’re finding out new information and you’re testing and experimenting until you develop a solution that can be proven to be working. So, as you know, I have, I have a small side business in it’s a farm, and I’m not, you know, it’s a small business. I don’t have to say that I’m super innovative. I didn’t invent a new type of blueberry. I’m not doing anything with those blueberries that has never been done before. It’s very routine. And I don’t I’m not innovative in this business. I’m just doing a great job with my business. It’s okay not to be super innovative. There’s lots of things that just need to be done well, the way they’ve been done before, but a culture of innovation, you know, is something that a lot of engineering firms are trying to cultivate, because they want to have a product that surpasses other products, maybe cost, maybe they’re both better in quality and cost, right? How cool is that? Yeah, perform better and be cheaper or perform better and be more durable and more long lasting, or solve more problems while performing better on the past ones, that type of thing. So a culture of innovation requires that you have both an ability to cultivate top notch creative engineering thinking and expertise, or, you know, scientific thinking and expertise. And you also have to be very connected with the people who have the problems. Because if you’re just developing gadgets, that’s great. That’s very technologically great, like it’s it requires acumen and skill, but if you’re not matching that with problems, you’re not really pushing it to the next level. So, you know, we there’s a lot of different things that have been invented that sit on the shelf and don’t provide any value or impact, and that’s a that’s a big loss to us, because someone who with incredible creative energy had put a lot of time into that, and it could have potentially benefited humanity and benefited them as well, but now it’s not being used. So I’m not saying that they’re not innovative, but to have a company that functions with a culture of innovation, those two things for sure have to exist.
Damon Pistulka 14:36
Yeah. So what do you think are some of the biggest barriers an organization sees when they’re trying to hey, we definitely need to be more innovative. We need to get this into our culture. What are some of the barriers that really hold them back?
Dasha Tyshlek 14:52
Yeah, there’s, there’s a few things an organization needs to balance really well. One, I think, is. Is how you do your business development and sales. So, you know, a lot of organizations will focus on a lot of sales. People will focus on the selling piece of the sales. But if you have a culture that’s trying to be innovative and invent and improve on a continuous basis, you also have to have processes which typically end up not having a place in a smaller firm, in larger firms, they might have like a team for this, but smaller firms, you know, it, it you your sales team are the people who are primarily with the customer. And if they’re just selling and they’re not listening and they’re not getting curious, they’re not just just sometimes listening to the customer. Just tell us what you’re working on, like, what else is out there. What do you think about what’s going on in this industry? Are you guys going to go after any of this, even if these projects have nothing to do with you? Don’t have to say, well, pick us, pick us. Do it with us, right? You can just listen and understand where are, where’s their innovation going, Yeah, even have some of these conversations with your CTO or your chief engineer in the room to just showcase where are they heading and what are they thinking about, so your team can be informed and be thinking about some of their future problems. That’s one thing you know. You can’t just be selling. You have to spend some time really learning about your customers future needs, and it takes a different kind of approach. You’re just not you have to put on a completely different hat. Yeah. Another thing is how you manage your engineering talent and innovation process. You can’t be too risk averse, and you have to manage vision and purpose. Here’s why, if you’re doing innovation, some things aren’t always going to work. There will be projects that people are enthusiastic about, but then the funding dries up, or that you attempted, but maybe you were collaborating with another team, and they attempted, and something of their technology didn’t work and they weren’t willing to put the money in. There can be reasons why innovative projects stop or fail before they’re ever, you know, released, and it can be demoralizing when you are doing continuous innovation that you don’t have 100% business success with each thing that you work on. Another great example is, if you’re doing a bunch of work, and then you sort of invent things as you go, you know, you kind of have, like, things on the shelf, because you’ve got an engineering team. They are very creative and innovative, and they are doing their work, and then they put stuff, and they create processes and new technologies, and then you have, you don’t know what to do with it, and so now you have a shelf full of sleeping projects, yeah, and the engineering team is like, why do we come up with this stuff? You know? Like they want to feel valued and that the work had some value long term. So this is where you want to allow, you want to create opportunities for some of the experimentation and project creation, but you also have to manage vision and purpose so that some of these failures and things that don’t result in a completed product do not become something demoralizing where they say like, Oh, these, you know, our clients don’t care. They just leave projects or our management doesn’t care we invent this stuff, and they just sit it on the shelf, and marketing team doesn’t do anything with it, right? You never want to create that feeling that all of that creative energy resulted in no progress. Engineers love to invent and do creative technological core, but they do also really want to see that this stuff progresses and moves along. So you have to have a balance between you want to encourage experimentation and new developments, but you have to have some way to then either use them or try to contextualize them as progress towards other projects. You have to kind of evaluate them and have a process that focuses the engineers attention towards particular types of innovations that you might actually be able to use for your future clients. And this is where that information about what are the future needs of my customers matches that. Okay, where should we take some early risks and potentially develop some some things, but that we have hopes, good hopes, good reason to believe that would actually be useful to our clients, you know, five years from now. So think these two things are really important to get right. You don’t want to stifle creativity, and you don’t want to also create a sense that projects are going nowhere, that you’re encouraging creativity but you’re not making use of them, or, you know, that this energy is just sitting on the shelf and all that creative work. Yeah, because
Damon Pistulka 19:43
it nothing deflates the creative or the innovative mindset more than seeing their greatest ideas just be gathering dust. Yes,
Dasha Tyshlek 19:54
exactly, and sometimes even they’re not best ideas, but also gathering dust. Know you want to, you want to encourage people, because also, you know, if you have a team of engineers, they also have to advance and learn. Sometimes they have to do things on their own in the way that they want to approach it, even if there might be a better solution or a faster solution, so that they can learn and experiment like that’s the nature of the research. But you have to. It’s not just everybody just gets to do whatever they want, all managed. And this is where that vision and purpose, you know, if you can create an impetus for innovation, and say, in this area, we experiment and learn, and we really need you to try some new stuff out so that we can see if we can develop things for five years ahead. So if you channel that towards something that your clients are going to need. Yeah, I think
Damon Pistulka 20:44
that’s that’s a big part of it, and kind of leads into another question I had about, you know about developing and building this culture of innovation is, how do leadership behaviors influence whether you are building an innovative culture, or innovative mindsets across the culture. I mean, because I have to believe that if the leaders are acting one way, or they’re doing, you know, just it really can be a big factor in whether you’re not building that culture of innovation. Yeah,
Dasha Tyshlek 21:17
the leadership team really matters a lot, because the leadership sets, you know, they really set the culture, their attitudes, their attitudes towards the company, their attitudes towards the clients and the customers, all of that sets the attitudes of everybody else. And so the language that you use towards your customers, for example, in a time of trouble where there are problems, and maybe the customer is the one who caused the problem, that that happens all the time, right? Yeah, and, and I’m not saying the customer is always right, but the language that you use, the attitudes that you project, if you’re always complaining about your vendors, or you’re always complaining about your clients because they’re doing this badly or that badly, or they’re not moving fast enough. So the Pro, like the project managers, really important person, typically in these types of companies, whose attitudes either proliferate all of the project and everybody’s upset with everybody or, you know, and I’ve had this happen to me. I’ve once joined a call client had brought in a new project manager, brand new person. He’s never been on this project before, and he brings in this mechanical engineer into the call. First time we’ve heard this mechanical engineer on that project. We’ve never known her. She didn’t know us. We didn’t know her. He didn’t know us, we didn’t know him. The project’s been going on for some time, though, and she and also in this particular industry, just to know, like, there was only two women in the room, me and her, right? And it’s like, that’s, those are the only two women in the project. And the introduction was, before we feed you to the wolves.
Damon Pistulka 22:54
Oh, my. And I was like, we’re the wolves.
Dasha Tyshlek 22:57
I’m the wolf. Like, you know that kind of language that creates an attitude right away, yeah, these people are adversarial rather than collaborative, that we’re going to be picked apart and questioned rather than collaborated with. And you know, I have to reflect whether I was acting in a wolf like fashion, but if this person had known me for some time, I would have gone back and reflected on that and said, Did I say something that really got them frazzled? But in this particular case, I knew it couldn’t have been anything I said to this person, at least it may be to some other project manager, because I’ve never, I’ve never met him or her before, yeah, how I was introduced. So, you know, the way that you speak about about opportunities, the way that you speak about your clients, their problems, their challenges, the way you speak about the other teams in your company, that that’s That in itself, is just like it’s such a simple thing, and it’s not something big and visionary, usually cognizant. Your leadership team has to be somewhat optimistic. They have to be really respectful. They they can’t be too chaotic, right for the engineering team. If you want your innovation team to produce innovation, you can’t go in there with, like, your own ideas constantly and just shout them at the innovation team. And because, you know, if you have a lot of people who are very creative, then one of the common traits of being creative is being easily energized by other people’s creative ideas, right? So if you have a leadership that sort of sends people in different directions all the time and sort of comes in with their own ideas and assumes that what the purpose of the scientific or engineering team is, is to kind of just enable those ideas and not to do their own creative thinking. Then you’re going to have some, some chaos in that team, for sure. And then you have to, you know, you have to treat everybody’s ideas respectfully. Doesn’t mean that we adopt or go with every idea, but you have to be. Able to be encouraging of people developing ideas and testing things. It just is how you have to be. You can’t just always be like, well, your idea isn’t that good, so stop doing it. You know, sometimes you have to be like, Okay, this is an interesting direction, a way we might try to solve the problem. Let’s prioritize. Let’s pick, like, what we’re going to try first, and then if that doesn’t work, maybe we’ll try this second, right? Then that level of diplomacy makes a huge difference. Nobody wants to feel like they are, you know, not. Their creative ideas wasn’t good enough. They’re doing the absolutely their best. And takes a lot of training and thought process to to get to that point well,
Damon Pistulka 25:42
and that’s a great point, because after about, you know, a few times of that, those people tend to the ideas quit flowing. Because I try an idea, oh, that’s not good enough. Or I tried idea and I test it and fail and someone criticizes it. That’s even worse, I think, because, you know, if as a leader, and if you want to be innovative, you have to encourage controlled risk taking, I just a fantastic believer. I 100% behind that, because you have to empower people to take controlled risk. And innovation doesn’t happen without risk. It’s like, Don’t risk the whole company going off a cliff, risk the company getting stuck in a mud puddle for a little bit, and then everybody helping us out and and laughing about it and realizing that we need to put a little bit bigger flow down, and we’ll go right through it next time, right? Or something like that. It’s, it’s not, but that that risk taking, if it doesn’t happen, your innovation goes down, because everybody’s like, well, this is the way we do it, or this is a way that’s been developed before,
Dasha Tyshlek 26:54
exactly, exactly, right? Have you read, um, idea flow?
Damon Pistulka 27:00
No, I have not excellent book,
Dasha Tyshlek 27:02
but I’ll try to summarize the main concept. It’s quite transformative, at least in my work it has been. The concept is that, you know, it’s very basic. We sometimes we just get the first idea that comes to mind, and there is absolutely no scientific evidence, but that’s the best idea. It’s just the first idea. And so the authors really challenge you, both at the individual level as well as at the company level, to develop a practice of creating idea flow so that you have more than one idea for the things that you do. And it can be simple things, like, what’s going to be the title of this podcast? And instead of putting the first one, trying your best to come up with three, right? Or how am I going to try to solve this particular problem, this bro, this tire issue that I’m having, maybe I take it to the mechanic. I could buy a piece of, you know, tape that you stick in there. Maybe I could call up a friend, right? Having more than one solution that you at the very least take a preliminary look at, so that you’re not stuck with just the first ideas. And then as you develop that as a company, and you encourage people to have more ideas, then everybody’s ability to generate ideas improves, yeah, and also, everybody’s ego about their first idea decreases. Because, you know, if we can only pick one idea, and everybody came with 10, you know, you you don’t have as many eggs in any one basket, I’d say. So it helps with both the risk taking as well as the management of rejection and things like that. The other thing I would say is the thing that kills a lot of creativity is Team brainstorming. You know, I think a lot of us have grown up with the concept of brainstorming, but over and over again, we’re seeing that the best way to actually generate original ideas is for people to think about the problem independently. And then when you get into problem solving sessions, then to kind of go with a discussion based approach to resolving from ideas that are already very well thought through. If you try to solve with everybody in the room. The quiet person who has a really great idea, but is usually sitting back and just watching everybody in a chaotic mess is just like, I’m never going to get this idea in. You know, somebody who’s really loud might just speak louder. And again, the first idea concept starts to take over, because you’re not going to take up half an hour developing all your thoughts on this, right? Because everybody kind of has to speak so brain don’t do brainstorming to encourage creativity. Have people be able to work independently and then bring full on concepts to Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 29:58
I bet that May. A huge difference, because, like you said, if you’re sitting down fresh and haven’t thought through something, and you’re trying to come up with ideas, and someone across the table, across the room, says something, and it pulls you in a different direction. Your idea that you had could be a modification of another idea, a better idea, and it’s all based on your own individualized experience. If that other idea got you off track, you could have missed, missed a better idea, and then to be able to set independently, like you said, and think it through and go, Okay, here’s how I would solve it if I was doing it based on my experience level, on my world, and the way I see things. And then when it comes together with another idea that’s developed to that point, we have a chance of actually marrying more of the good things of them, rather than just going down. Who’s ever personality is stronger down their idea flow
Dasha Tyshlek 30:53
Exactly, exactly. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 30:57
that’s really cool, because it’s not, it’s a small thing, right? But it’s a small but huge. The small but huge thing, if you want to be innovative, is just simply, as you said, have people think about it and have their own ideas on how to solve it before we come together to find a group solution,
Dasha Tyshlek 31:17
exactly? And you know, as you start thinking about things, you oftentimes discard ideas that have come and you do your own pros and cons, and you might draw that on paper, but you never get to do that in a problem solving session. So you really want to what you want to be doing is more like, here’s the problem do, like a mini pitch session. Here you are all assigned to think about how to best solve it independently tomorrow at whatever time. Bring, you know, a drawing, bring some analysis, bring this or that, things that are more complete, and we’ll review them together and then decide on kind of initial design direction.
Damon Pistulka 31:58
Yeah, yeah. Super cool. That’s great. That’s that’s a great piece of information here, golden nugget, because have people develop their ideas independently and then come together so the team can put, put an idea together, or through your through a few solutions together, rather than let them try to build it all together at once, from the beginning, that’s a big deal. Great. So I got another hard question for you. So this one, this one might be so what advice would you give to a company that is trying to reignite their innovation after a period of stagnant, stagnation, right? Because a lot of companies, they see success, and they’ll go, Okay, this is the way we’re going to do it. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do this. And they lose the innovation because they lose the innovation piece, the innovative thinking, the innovative people, because we move from we had to be innovative to solve the problems that we’re solving into now we’re just developing more of the things down the same path that that we found worked.
Dasha Tyshlek 33:06
Yeah, I mean, assessing if you’re capable of innovating is probably the first step. That’s a that’s a hard look in the mirror, but you have to look and say, Do I have the team or the people? Because if you don’t have any of the people and your team has become very risk averse, you know, you’re not going to be able to immediately. It’s not going to be like all right, now we’re going to innovate. You know, you’re if you have other people in your team managers who reduce risk taking, if you have a sales culture that’s all sell, sell, sell, and no listening going on in terms of, like, listening to things that aren’t happening just today, but really out there, like it is a very different skill set than just focusing on the immediate kind of product solution fit. You have to be, you have to have somebody who’s who’s kind of thinking about a lot of different things and picking up trends between people, and then, like, asking new questions all the time. They’re they’re really not. You’re not in sales mode at that point. You’re in these, like, explo exploratory modes, where you’re trying to synthesize, what am I hearing this client and that client, or, you know, this part of the market. And these doctors are saying, like, this is a problem, but then the administrators are saying, something different is a problem. How do we marry that? So it requires you to have those people on board. And if your culture doesn’t have that, you might consider you could do like a sub team, I guess. But you have to always be careful if you’ve got a very like, got one, two or three people over here doing innovative things, and then it has to transition here. So what? What would I say? Okay, you have to assess it. And if there’s particular elements of your culture that stifle innovation, then you’re going to have to reform them, and that might mean changing out the team. Right? We don’t like to think about that, but some. Sometimes you have to change the team in order to get a different result, because each of us is as an individual, is very likely to be, in some ways, repeating the kinds of results we do now. You don’t have to change everybody out. You have to kind of figure out where is the most pressure to conform, the most bureaucratic processes, most silo type of thinking. Where is that coming from? And if you can eliminate either that that silo thinking like you force everybody to work together or to conform into the system so that information is flowing, or you change out the people who are actively suppressing creativity, then you might be able to now restart innovation, and then you have to bring the problems to the team. So you have to go do that assessment. You have to get good problems from somewhere. When people start their companies, what do they do? Like, if you’re coming from a university, you’re going through this I Corps program, through NSF, right? And the I Corps program, they say you have to push your ego out the door, and you got to go talk to 100 potential customers to and you can’t show them your product. You have to ask open ended questions to find out what challenges they’re having. So you’re not allowed to impose your solution and try to push it to them. And that’s the standard. That’s one of the standards. You know, there are other ways. It’s not always 100 people, but that’s the standard. You go, Listen, standard. You go listen to 100 people and you don’t try to tell them that you will have the answer. So I think you have to go through and figure out what that looks like for your company. Is there already a set of customers that you’re serving that you could go and re interview in that open ended way to learn more about them? Do you need to go look at a different sector and go explore that? But the the standards are are the same. Those practices are very similar. If you’re an established company, if you’re a startup, you have to get back into customer listening mode.
Damon Pistulka 36:55
Customer listening mode, customer
Dasha Tyshlek 36:58
discovery, right? It’s you go and you discover things from them, and you go out like an explorer, yeah, not entirely knowing what the landscape is going to look like, and being very, very curious.
Damon Pistulka 37:08
Yeah, that’s cool. You do have to get that curiosity back if you want to become innovative, because otherwise it’s just the same stuff regurgitated. And
Dasha Tyshlek 37:19
you know, people, a lot of our problems in humanity are the same, right? Shelter, food, but the world is change. There’s so many things that are changing all the time. Like, you know, today, like, I’m sure, so many companies problem. One of their problems is people keep saying this word, AI, I don’t know, do I need it? Like, yeah, even you know, just new things happening in the marketplace can create lots of new opportunities. But if you don’t talk to your clients and find out what else kind of things are bothering them, then you will only hear about the problem that relates to what you already have.
Damon Pistulka 37:54
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great point. Great point. So Dasha, you, you told me, before we getting on, before we got on today, that you are launching a conference. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because that sounds pretty exciting. Yes,
Dasha Tyshlek 38:07
I have had this idea. I would say, sort of seize upon me. I don’t, I can’t say that I seize this idea. I feel like it came to me after I traveled to several conferences, some with my clients, and I saw some conferences that, what I thought were, they were presenting, that they were kind of showing a future vision for healthcare. But I did not get the sense that there was much of a vision shown and that the relation, you know, I was pretty disappointed, and I think seeing that problem and seeing my client, they were happy with the conference, but I thought we really ought to do better. We can have more of the right people in the room. One of my particular concerns was that it felt like the technologists and the doctors weren’t in the same room together to talk about problem and so and even in there were some doctors at this conference. It was mostly technologists, but the doctors had their own panel, separate of the technologists on a completely different topic. So I thought, you know, how are we? How are we going to figure out how to solve these problems, if the people with the problems are talking by themselves and the people with solutions are talking about themselves. And, you know, doctors are, they are super busy and extremely strapped for time. We all know this because of how short our appointments are, yeah, and to to have doctors in the room and not to be able to have that conversation jointly, it seems like a massive you know, and there are conferences doctors go to where they discuss innovation in healthcare, but they don’t have any, I’ve been to those two. They don’t have any technologists in the room. And I wonder, how do you talk about the future innovations? Yeah, when you don’t have any of the people who are building them there, they would pay you money to hear. This right now, you know, that’s that was kind of the concept, the problem I was seeing. And then an opportunity came by, and this idea had already been sort of occupying my mind for I was probably about a year before the opportunity to put it into place came about. And the opportunity was this conference we have in Jacksonville called Jack tech fest, and they are doing this conference, but it’s not one conference. It’s a series of mini conferences, kind of staggered with each other and then united by some kind of key events, like a pitch night and the TEDx thing. So there’s like, things you do separately, and then you do them together, and then you do separately, and then you do them together. And so I am creating Next Wave health is the name of the conference, as part of Jack tech fast. It’s going to be in August. And right now we’re building, you know, the coalition, I would say we had our first kind of information session to get interest for people who are going to speak, attend exhibit, to explain what we’re built, you know, what we’re trying to build, and also get people’s ideas at the same time on like, what they want to see happen. So that’s that’s pretty exciting for me.
Damon Pistulka 41:19
Yeah, yeah. So what do you hope that people can take away from this conference that they might not really get from from another one? Yeah.
Dasha Tyshlek 41:28
So one big thing is, I’m going to ensure we have both representation from the people developing technology the people adopting and using the technology at the same time, so that our conversation doesn’t just focus on the implementation or on the development, but rather on how we get maximum impact from these ideas. And so the panel topics are really going to be focused on kind of future vision for healthcare and particular problems that can be solved. So that, to me, is very exciting now, because it’s a first instance of the conference, we’re picking kind of challenges that are pretty cross cutting so that we can also learn about how our community here in Jacksonville and around Florida and Georgia thinks about it. But kind of the direction we are heading right now is that we will, for sure, talk about the rising cost of healthcare, and, you know, innovative solutions that have been tried to address it, and this might include some technological solutions, but also non technological solutions, maybe new ways of providing care to patients, maybe figuring out how to better, you know, ensure that the patients who are in critical condition are prioritized in some different way, like, there’s a lot of things that can be debated, discussed. They’re not all great. Some of them are better than others, and we got to figure out what’s working, and how can we learn from that? Yeah, and another one is, of course, prevention of chronic diseases. And I’m very interested in some of the developments. Personally, I’m very interested in some of the developments in preventative and predictive medicine. I think our like health record can go from being kind of a static thing to something that not just like captures it into a deck of materials that no no one’s going to ever really dig through and figure out what it all means. But we’re entering a world where we might be able to use that history, your personal history, to really predict what might be happening and better diagnose you using all that information so but there’s a huge challenges in getting there, because there’s like, 1000 different electronic record management systems, yeah, yeah. And some companies are trying to solve that aspect of it. Others the prediction piece, and then the doctors are trying to figure out, how do we integrate that into the care? And of course, patients and individuals who just want to know, how is it going to affect me? How do I get access to it? Is it going to cost me something? How is my data going to be used? And so one of the things that’s also a little bit different about my conference concept is, I’ve been noticing that there’s a kind of a profile of people that is particularly interested in their own personal health and in a really great position to disseminate great information to others. And these are CEOs of companies and CTOs, typically, too. A lot of companies with kind of a technological lean will have CEO, CTOs, chief product officer, who are also really into listening to health podcasts, and they’re at the top of their companies, oftentimes at in a position to really help inform things like benefits and decision making at the health level of their company, as well as create culture to make decisions. Do we serve donuts at events, or do we not simple things like that? But if we have those people and we’re also able to educate. Of them and answer some of their questions. We can also proliferate new ideas, not only in, you know, to doctors, but also to the patient population, but in a way that’s scalable and translatable, where you have, you know, companies taking interest, and companies have so much opportunity to actually advocate for changes in the healthcare system, because they pay for health of their employees, and they bear a huge portion of the cost. They also bear a huge portion of the cost of bad outcomes. If their employees don’t get great care, then they lose productivity, then they have amazing talent on, you know, unable to come into work, etc. So I think after COVID, we’ve had a kind of a a lot of different things that have happened. But one of the things we’ve seen is that health care and employment, being employed and how you work at a company, are very related, and that employers got much more concerned about, how do we manage health. You know, they’ve never really been in that position before. Sometimes they didn’t want to be in this position of trying to manage the health, you know, trying to, like, do we? Do we work remote? Do we not do, you know, just having to put in these policies. But one of the things it has is made people think a lot more about health within the company sphere. And so I want to use that energy that we got from that towards being able to implement good changes, reduce costs, and see if we can disseminate information that can be positive for chronic disease sort of management, as well as for people being more proactive and being able to also advocate for themselves in the healthcare system.
Damon Pistulka 46:44
Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds like you’re gonna gonna shake up the jack Jacksonville tech fest a little bit there with your your conference and helping people find a new ways of coming together to improve healthcare. That’s cool.
Dasha Tyshlek 47:00
Yeah, I’m, I think we’re seeing so much more. I think it’s a great thing that people are becoming more interested in their own health. I think it’s, it’s not really a thing you can out, you know, you’re can have a doctor really help you. I mean, you can’t do a surgery on yourself unless you’re a CIA agent or something like that, you know, as they show in the movies. But, but you do need to know about your health as much as possible. Can’t outsource that piece of it, the decision making piece of it, and I would really like for for our society to generally become really passionate about managing their health as much as they can, and being more knowledgeable about health and being more knowledgeable about food and being more knowledgeable about how to prevent diseases and to have a healthy lifestyle. So to me, this is both hitting kind of my passion for technology translation and getting wonderful research and science into the world, as well as my more kind of, just like, I just want people to eat healthy. Kind of side,
Damon Pistulka 48:08
awesome, awesome. Well, Dasha, thanks so much for being here today, talking about building a culture of innovation and then sharing about your your conference you’re going to have at the jack tech fest, Next Wave health in the Jacksonville area. I just appreciate you stopping by today. Thank
Dasha Tyshlek 48:29
you so much, Damon for having me. What a lovely, lovely opportunity. It’s
Damon Pistulka 48:34
so great to have you. And I want to also thank all the listeners out there. I can see you on the on the screen that we got people listening all over on the different platforms. Thank you so much. I want to thank Okafor to stopping by and say, Wow, that’s great. He dropped that comment a little bit ago on on as Dasha was talking, thanks everyone for being here. If you came in late, you want to go back to the beginning and hear Dasha from the beginning talking about building a culture of innovation, talking about her experience and some of the things that she’s seen companies do to really help influence and build that culture of innovation. Thanks, everyone. Dasha, hang out. We’ll finish on offline. Do.
