S8E2: Innovation Culture With Claus Raasted

Embark on a journey of innovation culture. Today's episode explores the concept of innovation culture with Claus Raasted, Director at The College of Extraordinary Experiences & Chief Learning Officer at Academics Academy. Raasted shares captivating insights into navigating stagnant systems and revealing the untapped opportunity space within seemingly rigid structures. Join us on this thought-provoking journey as we dive into the heart of embracing change and fostering innovation.

Today we are discussing:
College of Extraordinary Experiences (0:35)
Experience Design as a Discipline (3:50)
Innovation Culture (6:28)
Navigating Stagnant Systems (10:09)
Opportunity Space (12:50)
Problem-Solving Process (16:12)
Perception of Change (20:47)
Academics Academy (26:22)

Visit the Experience University website for more information!
www.experienceuniversity.org

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Facebook: Experience University
Instagram: @kristin.malek

Transcript

Dr. K:
Claus, thank you so much for joining me today for our podcast on The Experience University.

Claus:
Thank you, thank you.

Dr. K:
Absolutely. I want to tell the listeners exactly how I met you because I think it's a fascinating story. I was at PCMA one year, and well, I had known of Ruud and Ruul from the Event Design Canvas for years because I did my Event Design Canvas Level One and Two in 2016 and have been kind of staying in touch with them throughout the years. They presented at PCMA in 2019 in January, and I was assigned to be their moderator in their room. The whole time, they were talking about the College of Extraordinary Experiences. At the end of it, he pulls me aside (because he couldn't go that year) and he did this selfie video. He said, "You know Claus, this is Kristin, and she's taking my place at the college." It was very top secret. I had no idea what was happening. Later on that year, I was at the College of Extraordinary Experiences, and I met you.

Wow, that event changed my life in so many ways. I wanted to thank you and tell everyone how I know you. You jump on an airplane and go to a country in Europe; you go to Germany or Poland. Well, some people went to Poland; some people went to Germany, so it depends on where you went. Then you get on this bus to rural Poland and some medieval Harry Potter Castle. It was absolutely incredible. So, do you want to take a brief second just to talk about the genius behind the college and definitely plug it because it was such an incredible experience.

Claus:
Thank you for the very kind words on that. Also, nice bit of credit to Ruud and Ruul. One of the things they've been doing is talking about the college to their event design students forever. We're very grateful for that because having people come and say, "Hey, here's an awesome person you should meet; they should go to the college" is a pretty nice thing for us as organizers, right? Having that pre-validation. The reason that's nice is not only because we get to meet cool people but because the college is all about curating difference.

The essence of the event is to take people from different backgrounds, nationalities, different regions, different age groups, different income groups, different professional backgrounds, and lump them together in a castle in Poland. Let them have a couple of crazy days together, and then the connections that come out of that lead to interesting conversations. That means that somebody might be sitting at a table where there's a university professor from the event design space. There's somebody who's a race car driver, somebody who does underwear shaping, which turns out is a real profession, somebody is a street magician or does traditional Japanese dance. When you put those people together and create an environment where they feel open and trusting, you get some pretty magical results. Of course, doing it at a castle in Poland doesn't hurt. That’s the college.

Dr. K:
Absolutely. I will tell you it was everything you just said, and so much more, at such a higher level, the people that you meet there and their backgrounds. And really, for me, it's the way of thinking. You have a simple question, and then you see how everybody thinks, and it just expands your mind, which is great. Now for our podcast for this season, for season eight, I am interviewing people from very diverse backgrounds, kind of like what you're saying of really looking at the differences. So we have people from completely different disciplines. I like to call them the weird and the wacky, and comparing that to event design and event design innovation that we traditionally think of. So you are Mr. Experience Designer. Can you share with us about experience design as a discipline? For those who are listening to the podcast, who might not know.

Claus:
The first thing to be aware of here, when we talk about experience design, is experience design as a discipline is only for the very arrogant and strange people. And by that, I mean that it's essentially like saying, taking somebody who plays the guitar or somebody who plays the drums, plays the harmonica or who sings and says, “That's all great, but me, I'm a musician.” I say, “Oh, ok. So do you sing?” “Well, yes. But I'm a musician.” Say, “Ah, you also play the guitar.” “Yes. And the piano and the trombone. And I make weird music out of dolphin shells,” and they say, “We didn't even know dolphins had shells.” It's, ah, but I am a musician. So part of it is this instead of looking at specific disciplines like behavior, design or service design, or sound design, or even event design, which has a lot of these things, then we take it a step up and we look at the overall experience design.

And while that seems very pretentious, and sometimes it is, at its core, is going between different worlds and picking up tricks and tidbits here and using them in other places. So if it's helping redesign an airport one day and a bar the next day and a music festival the third day, then you take things from these different spaces and you use them in your experience design. You use what people are doing in crowd control at a music festival of 50,000 people. You take those principles and you think, how can I learn from that and use it for children's birthday with 20 people? And maybe there's nothing, but maybe there's something you say, “Oh, wait a minute,” we can apply from very, very different universes because we have that overall lens, that lens of experience design. I don't know if anybody got any wiser from that explanation. The idea is to not just look at what you're doing, but to look at it in a very cross-disciplinary way, and then it gets weird and wacky, but also wonderful.

Dr. K:
Absolutely. I love that description. I've been very vocal on the podcast about where I live, and I live in the Midwest in the United States. And so typically things start in pockets in Europe or in Australia and then they spread a little further, and then they come to the coast of the United States, and then like seven years later, they become innovative in the Midwest. So I might be 10 to 15 years behind the rest of the world maybe. But, that means that everything that I learn in Europe and I learned in Australia and I bring to the Midwest, I seem super innovative, but you are truly like the innovation, innovation culture, when I think of Europe, and I think of all the incredible things going on there. Your name is always somehow attached to it. So can you talk to the listeners today about innovation culture, and how you see it, and why people don't do things differently?

Claus:
So I talk a lot about innovation culture. It's what I give most of my T notes on at various places in the world. So this is my ballpark. And what I find is, it's actually some very, very simple truths, and the first one is that everybody wants innovation, nobody wants change. Now, the annoying thing is that innovation is just a different word for change. So we as humans, we like to say, “Ah if it worked yesterday, let's do it again today.” But if you do that enough yesterdays, if you, if you do enough things the way it was done yesterday, at some point, you get to enough yesterday's. At some point, you get to, oh, this process hasn't changed for 50 years, or this chair we're sitting on is breaking down because we haven't shifted the chairs for 50 years. And we all understand that intuitively, we understand the idea of technical debt or cultural debt that if we don't sometimes look at the chairs, at some point, we're gonna have some very old chairs, if we don't change the hardware. We're gonna be doing our accounting on Windows 95 PCs that came out in 1997, and nobody wants that right.

The same with our cultural processes: there used to be a time when hiring a woman was like, we would never do that. And now we do. But when did that change? All these things changed, And what is tricky is that, it's very easy to look at history and say, “Of course there's change, there's development, there's progress, things are different.” But going from yesterday we did this, to tomorrow we'll do something different, that's very, very hard for most of us, especially in a professional context. Innovation culture is trying to create that understanding that we should always be checking – hey, maybe this should be looked at – because if not, we end up with things where we've just been doing what worked yesterday; we've been doing that for a long time.

We just had a great example. Corona was a worldwide innovation catalyst. There were so many things where people said, “Oh, you can't do this,” or “you can't do that,” and “this is impossible,” or “this works great.” And, suddenly it didn't. And anybody who said, “Oh, but we, of course, we should have our meetings physically.” Yeah, except it's illegal and dangerous. Oh, OK, then let's try something new because we had this incentive to do something different. And that understanding that innovation is necessary. We all have that, but we don't like doing it until somebody forces or something forces our hand, and now we're a little bit on the other side of it and we're going back to good old let's do what worked yesterday without looking at something different tomorrow. That's my big fight. That's getting people to be a little bit more playful. A little bit more experimental. A little bit more innovation-oriented.

Dr. K:
Absolutely. I'm gonna ask an extraordinarily selfish question for myself and my fellow academics on here. Now, I am so humbled and thankful to be a bit of a polymath. I do event design consulting, I do some mindset culture and NLP master coaching, so I've got my hands in quite a few buckets, but one of the buckets that I have my hand in is higher education, and not just higher education, but higher education in the United States.

And I do feel like that's different, and to further subsegment it, down in our segmentation process, I'm in a public institution, in higher education in the United States. And this is one of the institutions where it's as a system; you have innovative people, but the system is so archaic. Tips or tricks for people who are super frustrated. They feel like they're stuck in a system, they're super innovative, but the system itself needs to change, and you can't just tear down the system and put up a new one with its current regulations. So how can you move an institution forward? How can you get the system to encourage innovation at that point?

Claus:
I love that as a question, and I'll answer it in two ways. One is that the first thing to do in any system, no matter what you're part of, whether you work for a shipping company or a university, or you're a football coach, doesn't matter what you do, if you look at your own space, you will learn things. If you're a football coach and you look at what other football coaches are doing, you're gonna learn stuff; you're gonna get inspired. Somebody's gonna have new plays or new ways of training or new ways of motivating or new ways of getting outside some rule or some limitation. That's great. But if you want the radical stuff, you need to look at different things, look at something that's tangential like what the basketball people do, but maybe also something that's completely random: how does a circus director run their circus? How does somebody who runs a coal mine motivate their employees? Is there something you can use?

So the first thing is, and I see this in universities and higher education, in general, that have a blindness problem, is that because they are centers of learning and knowledge and experience, there tends to be a feeling of people come to us to learn, we don't go to them to learn. And it's just like Disney, Disney is wonderful, amazing. All sorts of people go to Disney and say, “Wow, you're Disney. How do you do things?” But Disney isn't necessarily that good at looking outside, and saying maybe if we want to stay top dog, we should get external inspiration as well.  So number one is look outside, and if you're at a university, there is an inbuilt systemic tendency to say, “We're the smart ones; people should come to us. We shouldn't come to them.” But the reality is that's just bullshit. The smarter you are, the more you should look to other people.

So that's number one, and number two is, whenever you are in a big compliance, heavy tradition, heavy thing, again, is it medicine? Is it government? Is it education? It's tempting to look at all the stuff you can't change. It's tempting to look at all the crap stuff that you cannot do anything about and say, “Oh,” but the reality is there's always a bigger opportunity space than we realize. It doesn't say anything in any university rules that I read that you have to have boring meetings. It doesn't say a lot about which plants you can use to decorate your offices. It doesn't say anything about: can you have a fun YouTube channel on the side, where the Dean of the university has one minute with Frederick, like President Roosevelt's old fireside chats? There's a lot of things it doesn't say. But we tend to, when we have a thing we want to change, we tend to try to push against what's there; we try to say, “Oh, these are the work rules,” or “these are the meeting rules,” or “this is how pay is organized,” or “this is how the physical space is done,” and then we push it and push and push, and it doesn't really go anywhere because these institutions are hard to change.

Instead, look around them, look at stuff that is allowed, right? Nobody says you as a professor can't go into a classroom and say, “Before we get into today's lecture, I'm gonna tell you about the worst mistake I made that's related to today's lecture.” My stepfather, who's a professor of computer science and has been so for many, many years, used to teach at the Danish University of Copenhagen at the Computer Science Division there. And one of the things he did, this is many, many years ago, he was teaching one of these introduction to computer science, level zero, with hundreds of people in the auditorium. And he was one of these classic opening lectures where everybody's there, and nobody really pays attention because they're new at the university, and they've got other things on their mind. He comes in, and he starts trying to get his computer to work and plug it into the projector, and he can't get to work. Then he does a little bit of stuff on a blackboard, and then he goes back to the computer, and it gets more and more annoying, and some of the students are laughing a little bit, and it's a comical moment with the professor who can't get the projector to work. Everybody's seen that, and then he goes back to the blackboard, and he does more. And then on the third try, he just loses his shit, and he takes the computer, and he smashes it on the floor and yells at it. And then he says, “Ok, enough with the technology, let's pay attention to this.”

Now, what none of the students in that room was that the computer never worked. This was all staged. And he said, “Not only did everybody who was there remember that he smashed the computer. They also had a very, very high recollection of the lecture itself.” Because if the professor has just smashed the computer in frustration, you're gonna be like, “What else is going on?” and you might just listen to what he's teaching, and it says nowhere, nowhere in the university rules does it say, “you may not use cheats on your students to get them to pay attention.”

Dr. K:
Absolutely. I love that. So, one of the things that I'm fascinated with, and I think the listeners to the podcast will be fascinated with, and I don't know that you can accurately explain it, but we're gonna try, is knowing how Claus’s his mind works. So, when a client comes to you, and they say here's my problem. How does your brain process it from problem to end solution?

Claus:
So, yeah, I get two types. Right. There's the ones that are simple. Somebody wants me to give a talk somewhere, and then I usually stay more or less within the confines of that. I might mess it up. I might do something tricky. I might play around with them and mess with their heads. But, I keep it within that confine. When somebody comes with something a little bit more open, something like we'd like you to do an event for us, or we'd like some coaching for our leadership, and how to think differently. Then I generally try to look at the spaces where they haven't looked.

Right. And it's so often, again, this possibility space thing. One of the things I do is whenever I talk with a client, whatever that may look like, the moment they say, "But of course, this can't be done" or "Of course, we have to," that's my first "Why?" And it could be something like, "But of course, we have to charge entrance for our event." Say,  “Why, why do we have to charge anything? What if we did it for free?” "Well, then we'd have no budget." "Oh, so you're doing an event for 2000 people? And you're saying the only way to get budget is from the participants? Interesting." And then they start thinking.

I had somebody who wanted to do something on a racetrack. They had built Go Karts, and they wanted to use the go-carts on the racetrack. And in the conversation I said, "Do you have any Formula One partners? Have you worked with any of the big Formula One teams or racetracks for your Go Karts?" And they said, “No, but you can't race an electric Go Kart,” which they produce; “You can't race that on a Formula One racetrack.” I said, "Oh, that's interesting. Why? Is it something in the gravel or is it the surface or like, there might be something technical?"

"No, no, no, because the Go Kart engine is made to go in a lot of turns. So if you just press the pedal to the accelerator and then you floor it for a one kilometer, it's gonna burn out the motor. And on a big Formula One racetrack, you have long stretches of just going straight ahead” So he said, "it's gonna kill the motor." I said, "Ah, but couldn't you then just drive a little bit slower on those long stretches?" He said, "Yes, you could, but it would be boring because then you're just going 100 kilometers an hour for those seconds." I said, "Ok. So what you're saying is it's not impossible, but in your view, there will be every round several boring seconds and that's not good. So that makes it impossible."

And these are two very different things, right? One is somebody saying this is impossible. And another is saying we think that if we do it, there will be a moment, in this case, only several seconds that will be slightly less than exhilarating. Personally, driving 100 kilometers an hour doesn't sound too slow to me. And if you're doing it for a couple of milliseconds, or a couple of seconds, that doesn't sound that bad actually. But this finding out - what do people think is impossible and saying, “Is there something there?” Because the moment somebody says, “Oh, it's impossible,” then you can be very, very sure that people in their industry, in their space, in their company, whatever it is. They also think that. Say that let's do a big event without a keynote speaker - “What? We have to have one.” “Why? Why do we have to have any speakers? Or do we have to do lunch this way at all?”

That's if you can poke that, and when you find their impossibles, some of them, you'll find it's just not doable, but some of them is where there is some interesting thing to exploit. And very often when you're in a situation like that, when you ask people, “Why is it impossible?” or “Why do we have to?” you'll find their answers fall apart very, very fast. So that's where I try to go.

Dr. K:
I love that. I'm gonna listen for that. I always listen to it as barriers to overcome or to design for. But I love how you phrase that in that way. All right, two more questions and we've got time. If we go a little bit over, our podcast listeners are gonna absolutely love all this content. So one of the things that I love to do, you alluded to earlier, is I love to go to competitor or industry events. I love the immersive education. I like to see what everybody's up to.

So I try to go to between five and 15 events a year, and I try to at least hit one international event. And the last few years, I would say post COVID, right, I would say they have not been by and large. I mean, there's examples, right? Like the college is an example, but by and large, the majority of events I feel have fallen flat. And so I'm sharing this with some industry colleagues and with some faculty colleagues and they're like, "Well, Kristin, you're just so advanced, and you're not the target market anymore." And then I'm like, "I don't believe that that's true. We're talking about experience design, right? Not just like the specific content points. This is immersive design.” And I understand that people's brains have changed during COVID. I understand that people want different things or prioritizing different things. But Claus answer this for me: why does so much keep being so terrible? That's not even a grammatically correct sentence. But like why is so much so terrible? Can you answer that for me?

Claus:
Yes. Last time we met was in San Diego for PCMA’s big flagship convening leaders, and parts of it were great, but parts of it were just terrible, right? We have an industry leader doing a huge event with so much money. I can't believe it. So many interesting people. So much yes there. And there's just part of it that sucks. And part of it, number one reason things aren't better, is because people don't believe they can be better. I recently was at a very, very interesting seminar on emotional intelligence amongst leaders, and also in groups professional settings, and the guy who spoke, he said a lot of interesting things.

He's one of the leaders in this field in Denmark. But what he said that really stuck with me was he said, “When you have people who are in toxic workplaces where there's paranoia, and nobody's supporting, and they're afraid of the bosses, and everything is just terrible. And they hear about well functioning, high functioning teams, where everybody trusts each other and there's openness and they can go to their boss and say, ‘Hey, boss, I think you're wrong’ and they can self regulate, and all these sorts of things, they don't believe it's true.”

And the other way around, he also said,  “When you go to these people who are from well functioning teams, and talk to them about how bad it is, they don't believe it either.” So, neither side believes the other side exists. And that means that when you and I go to some of these people, industry veterans, 20 years and, wow, wow, wow, they're really happy. And we say, “You know what, this is a nice bike you've got here. It's a really nice bike. But we build Ferraris. Do you want us to come here and help you? Just a little bit of Ferrari?” And what they hear is, “Ah, you build Ferraris.” It must be like our bike, just with red wheels. And we're like, “No, no, no. This is, you have a thing that drives 40 kilometers an hour by somebody pedaling it. We build a slick race car that drives 300 kilometers an hour, and you're sitting inside it listening to rock and roll music, and you're just pressing the pedal,” and they say, “Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we hear you, 50 kilometers an hour. No, no, we don't need that” because they simply cannot see how different it could be.

That's number one, is that they don't believe how much better it could be. And for a lot of us, we have a hard time seeing how they can't see it. Number two, is that changing things that work is very hard. It's very, very easy, if you're again, football coach, you're down 42 to 0, it's raining. Some assistant coach says, “Boss, let's try something new.” You're gonna say, “Great. Do you want to smuggle in cocaine? I'm willing to try anything. This is the Super Bowl. We're down 42 to 0. I'm up for any sort of risk because what else is gonna happen?” But if you're ahead 28 to 21 and somebody says, “I know how we can cement this lead.” It's hard to take chances. It's very hard to take chances.

And one of the tips I give when I coach innovation culture is to say, “You need to experiment even when you're winning because that's when you can afford it.” And generally we fall into these categories of either we're losing or either things are desperate, and then we innovate or they're going extremely well. Right? We're the ones ahead 42 to nothing. Then we might put in the reserve kicker, or we might try a new, but it has to get that far before we feel vulnerable enough. And anything in between, if the reply is “Yes, it would be nice to do it differently, but how about next quarter or not right now? Or I can't risk it today.” And the bigger the thing, the harder it is. The US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have the metric system.  Objectively, the system is terrible. Right? The metric system is smart. It's logical. It makes sense. You can transfer it between leaders and kilos. It really works. Where the whole pounds, and inches, and quarts, and waka wakas, it's objectively terrible. But if somebody came and said, “Let's change this tomorrow,” the person in charge of leading that charge at whatever governmental level wouldn't say, “Here's how good it will be.” But they say, “Oh, but see how much pain it needs to get there. Let's just use it tomorrow.” Let's just use it tomorrow, and suddenly, we're stuck with it now, and the same goes for public health care, or for election systems, or for technology, that the pain of the change is what we see, not the joy or the lack of pain after the change. Unless we hit something like Corona, unless we hit something like a global pandemic, where we can't say, ah but let's wait until later, because it's now.

Dr. K:
I absolutely love that. I absolutely love that. And as we're wrapping up the podcast, one last question: I saw a super cryptic post on your LinkedIn about something called Academics Academy and since this podcast won't release for at least a couple of weeks, and that will be launched in live, give me all the skinny on it, first up.

Claus:
So as we speak, the Academics Academy is not public, but hopefully it will be before this airs. Essentially, it's taking two basic ideas and flipping them on their head. One is we talked about that universities feel generally that they're the places people come to get educated, right? You have Harvard educates other people. You have Wharton Business School educates other people. You have universities in London saying, “We teach others how to do things well,” but turns out that academics don't know everything and some things they even struggle with.

So I banded together with the British Academic Institution, the Natural Resources Institute from the University of Greenwich and said, “Why don't we go in and find out what academics need and help them learn that?” Because a lot of the teaching within the academic space, which you're teaching university faculty, for example, is either scattered or internal or informal or just non-existent. We said, “There is a need here, not for the core stuff. I'm not gonna go in and teach professors how to do research.” No, no, no. I may be arrogant but it stops there. But stuff like using storytelling and grant writing? Maybe. Not having to use as much time on administrative hassle? How do you build an academic brand? All these sorts of things that are very much part of academic life, but nobody teaches them. And, it turns out, and this is not just my words, but very nice surveys done from very respected institutions, show that academics quit their jobs because of lack of professional development.

Yes, they quit them because they have too low pay, or too many work hours, or bad leadership, but these reasons ranked lower than lack of continued professional development. And number two is that the stuff that they get annoyed at, the stuff that sucks out their life and their energy, isn't the core stuff. It's all these things they haven't been trained for. So he said, “What if we go in and train academics in the things that actually causes them pain?” Well, that hopefully when you hear this, that will have launched, it's called the Academics Academy. The idea is to help train faculty members in the things they need, not the things that they already know.

Dr. K:
I love that. I'm so excited to check it out and see all the offerings because let me tell you, I would have answered the survey responses the exact same way you just said. So that's good. So as we're wrapping up, one practical takeaway for all of our guests listening to the podcast, and then we'll be done.

Claus:
The opportunity space is always bigger than you think, and the easiest way to do something different, no matter how little maneuvering room you think you have, there is always more, but it might be in spaces you don't think of.  One of the classic examples, and I'll give you that as a takeaway, is whenever I talk to event designers who I haven't met before, I always start by asking them, “So who designs the toilet experience at your event?” And 98% of the time they say, “What do you mean?” I say, “Aha. So you're saying a place where everybody goes during an event, a central experience? Very human. You don't design that, huh?” And that starts them thinking. So look for opportunity spaces, and if you're in doubt, start with the toilet, that's where shit goes down.

Dr. K:
I love that. I love that so much. Well, Claus, thank you so much for being on the podcast and the video. I've got to check out the system that you have going on here. I need like a lower third and everything going on. So, I appreciate your time and your insights on the podcast for everybody here.

Claus:
Thank you for this Kristen.

Dr. K:
Absolutely. Well, for everybody, we have another exciting podcast coming up. So stay tuned and thank you so much for making the time to take the time.