By Christopher Tarantino, the award-winning CEO/founder of Epicenter Innovation and an international speaker on human-centered innovation.
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“Resilience” and “innovation” are big buzzwords in the zeitgeist right now. But with nearly a decade of experience in the public safety industry, I know that being resilient and innovative can make a huge difference when it comes to community safety and care. Because these two concepts are of the utmost importance to us and our team, we let them guide our practices when it comes to running our business effectively. So with that in mind, here are the top five practices that our core business team engages in that foster resilience and innovation in every part of the work that we do.
1. ‘Ways Of Working’ Sessions
I believe the foundation of a team lies in team members’ mutual understanding of each other. If you don’t build a knowledge base about each other—how people think, how they respond to criticism, how they work best—then there’s little chance of building a more resilient team in order to do more resilient work. To build this base of knowledge, we hold what we call “ways of working” sessions once a quarter. During these sessions, members of your team should take multiple assessments—personality, cognitive, psychometric and so on—and in the session, go over the results. The results can prompt thoughtful conversations about how the combination of your personalities and preferences makes your team stronger. They’ve been a game changer in building our team’s resilience.
2. 1:1s
Like many organizations, our core team has weekly one-on-ones to check in on work, but we like to think we do them a little differently. Before the weekly one-on-one, I recommend using an online platform that helps you and your team members organize your thoughts with prompts and checklists. The answers in the platform can help guide your conversations, so by the time you talk, you’re already a couple of steps ahead of yourselves. It’s a good way to make conversations more effective and efficient so that you have more time to generate solutions.
3. Accessible Communication Tools
Accessibility is a subject that’s currently abuzz with discussion in our industry as it pertains to making our plans and response as emergency managers more accessible for our communities. But thinking and designing for accessibility can be difficult when some of the foundational elements of your business aren’t accessible. Utilizing the right communication tools can help you make your business more accessible, which in turn, can support efforts to make it more resilient and innovative. Platforms that offer 24-hour access for users or tools that generate live captions during audio presentations are two good examples of utilizing innovative technology to build and expand your team’s resilience.
4. Brainstorming Outside Of Your Industry
Brainstorming, idea generation and thinking outside the box are all ways to explain the often elusive but very necessary practice of innovating. We believe that there is always a better way to do something, so we take this practice very seriously. There are a couple of ways to enhance brainstorming efforts to yield more effective results:
Using Tools To Generate Ideas
“There are no bad ideas” can be hard for human beings to fully accept in a work environment. Some of us innately fear “being wrong” or “looking stupid.” Aside from building your work environment to be more supportive, one way to combat these thoughts is by utilizing technology for brainstorming. For example, we use AI to generate ideas knowing that they won’t all be good, but they all might lead us somewhere that we never thought about going before. In our experience, allowing technology to do some of the leg work can make for a more fun and collaborative environment.
Meeting People Outside Of Your Industry
When we were deep in a research project on measuring resilience and innovation, we learned that one of the most effective ways to brainstorm new ideas is to talk with people who work in industries that have nothing to do with yours. Sometimes you know so much about what’s around you that you can’t see outside of it. For example, if you make ice cream and you’re developing new flavors, you might be stuck thinking about what your customers like. But if you talk with a scientist who studies the chemistry of flavors, they might be able to provide you with some groundbreaking insight into the future of human taste. And that might determine what flavors you decide to pursue.
5. Incorporating Wellness Highlights
Something we’ve learned about resilience and innovation is that in order to implement them successfully, meeting people where they are is key. That’s why we don’t have a formal wellness program. Instead, consider offering a variety of wellness benefits but leaving it up to the individual whether or not they want to participate. Additionally, during your weekly core team meeting, you can dedicate five minutes to what our company calls “wellness highlights.” Each member of the team can use this time to answer these questions:
1. How did you feel last week?
2. How do you feel this week?
3. What’s one thing you’re going to do for yourself this week?
The answers to these questions can cover topics ranging from physical health to mental health and emotional health. The wellness highlight is a way to keep team members accountable, hold space for each other and maintain a compassionate work environment. In this case, evaluating individual wellness can be the first step toward evaluating individual resilience, which then affects the resilience of the team and its work.
