- So let's dig in.
This is gonna be a great conversation.
So Nick, why don't you
tell us a little bit
about where you are right
now and what you're doing?
- Yeah.
Hello I am Nick Dawson and
my day job where I spend
most of my time is running the innovation
and human-centered design team
for Johns Hopkins Medicine.
In healthcare, we don't
even know of 2.0 yet
so there's no danger
of us using any of the
startup terms.
Healthcare is a pretty regulated
and in a lot of ways
I think it's safe to
say antiquated industry.
And our team's job is to
push against all of those boundaries
and try to make things a
lot more patient centered
and more provider centered
when we're able to.
- Great.
And Sarah how about you?
- Hi my name is Sarah Rothenberg.
I work at AltSchool.
AltSchool is a team of
technologists and engineers
who are co-developing a
platform to superpower
educators in the classroom
by leveraging personalized instruction.
And we co-developed
this platform as a team.
My background is actually in education.
I'm a former kindergarten teacher.
I taught for 10 years
before joining AltSchool
as an educator and now I work as the
operations and innovation lead.
Kind of helping this
co-development come to life
and run the operations of our schools.
- Great and Aaron.
- I'm Aaron Wickstrom.
I'm a managing partner of
Wickstorm Dairies and Valsigna Farms.
We're located about 90 miles east of here
in the San Joaquin valley.
I'm the fourth generation of our family
to run our family farm.
We farm about a thousand
acres and have 2,400
of the little pretty Jersey brown cows
that are great for milk and cheese.
So if you've ever eaten any cheese
there's a possibility maybe
some of it started at our farm.
Being in the farming
business, having animals,
we work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
and this year we're celebrating
our 77th year in business.
So with a complicated
mobile workforce like that
and multiple locations, we
found Slack has kind of been
the perfect tool to
kind of bind all that together
and be able to communicate efficiently.
- And I have to ask Aaron is this
did you plan on going directly
into the family business?
- I did not.
So growing up I enjoyed
working on the farm,
working, you know, with
the people on our team.
I was like this is a lot of work.
It's almost more of a, not
really a job, a lifestyle.
'Cause it is 24 hours a day.
I never shuts down, it never stops.
So I went to finance,
went to school in Chicago.
Thought I'd go into investment banking or
kind of the hedge
industry, risk management.
When it got to my senior
year after a few internships
so I go okay
your first year out of school
it's going to be 90 hours
minimum work starting out.
I was like well if I'm
going to work 90 hours
I may go back and try the family business
'cause that would be kind of the hours
getting started again.
Went back, gave it two years
and falling in love with it
and love what I get to do everyday.
- Awesome.
So Nick, I think a lot of us hear about
Johns Hopkins being a very innovative
and forward thinking institution.
But you're here sort of
intro-ing and telling us
that we are not in the 2.0 category.
So I would love to understand a little bit
about the process of introducing new
technologies, tools or
just sort of your approach
in general to innovation in the hospital.
- Yeah.
So I think there are kind of
two halves to healthcare right.
There's the part that's
the medical science side
and I look at the breakthroughs
that are coming out
with things like CRISPR
that's gene editing.
I still think an x-ray is rocket science.
I think there's some things that we do
in the medical side of things that is
just incredible breakthroughs in science.
But from an operations standpoint,
healthcare hasn't in a hundred years.
It's still this factory operation where
regrettably the patient
is often the product
the thing that moves
through the factory floor.
So a lot of our work has
been kind of two things.
One is to be directly applied.
We're physically in the main lobby.
We have a big 6,000 square
foot space in the main lobby
in one of the hospitals.
So we try to go from
inspiration usually based on
hearing from patients or
family members and their needs
to implementation really, really quickly.
And in doing that we've realized
that another big part of our work
is exporting our style and our culture.
So our team looks very
different than any other team
in a hospital.
We work in an open workspace.
We work on Slack instead of email.
And that seems kind of like a little thing
if you're use to working in a
more modern work environment
but it's a pretty radical
thing to healthcare.
So it's a lot of pushing
those traditional boundaries.
We're starting to find out
where we run up against
some of the norms and some
of that has been around
IT based innovation.
We run a completely
separate parallel network
in the hospital that
we put in in the quietness of night
and it existed for about a year
and then we use it for IoT devices.
We use it for VR.
We use it for all of our innovation stuff
that's not clinical.
So we don't put patient information on it.
We got away with it for a long time
and we're starting to
get some questions about
things like that
and we're having to go
back and, maybe prove the
value isn't the right phrase,
but go back and explain why having a
open, non-clinical network is an enabler
of innovation for us.
- I think one of the things
when you're trying to
push forward new ways of
working or new technologies
in organizations that
are a little bit more
entrenched is that you often
ask for forgiveness later.
Right.
You just sort of go forth
and see what happens
and then prove the case.
- Very much true, yeah.
- Sarah I think you're in a
very interesting environment
where you are blending engineering
and technical expertise
with all of the mastery
involved in teaching
and bringing forth the
next generation of leaders.
You have a great background
because you are a teacher.
So talk a little bit about how AltSchool
is making it possible for
teachers to collaborate
with engineers and each
other in a way that you
couldn't in a traditional
classroom setting.
- Yeah.
So what's unique that I
didn't really mention about
AltSchool is that we have
four actual lab school
campuses here in San Francisco
and we have three in New York.
And each lab school has
educators, amazing educators
who are collaborating in the
four walls of the school.
But because we are able to
leverage technology like Slack
we're able to collaborate in a
group of educators and colleagues that's
so much greater than just what's available
for us at our school site.
Or even as an educator
it can be really lonely
being in the classroom.
Yes you're surrounded by
these amazing little people
who are doing amazing things
but it's not the same as
really kind of having that
collaborative interaction
with other adults,
both educators and engineers.
So one of my favorite
examples of kind of how we're
doing this and using Slack is
we have a Slack channel
that's called Magic Wand.
And within the Slack
channel we have educators
and engineers and product and design
and an educator can be
in the classroom teaching
and have this moment where they just say
I wish I had this.
This could superpower my teaching.
This could superpower
my students' learning
and they can enter that
in the Slack channel
and all of a sudden it's broadcasted to
our entire team at the headquarters
that's working on really
building this technology
and building this platform.
Yeah, it's one of my favorite channels
to kind of see all the
great things happening
and then two weeks, three
weeks, four months, two years
later we actually see
that product come to life
and it's really amazing.
- How do you think that
has changed the way
the engineering team or
the product management team
develops their products or
thinks about their users?
Because they have this really
direct communication channel.
So what's changed there
as a result of this?
- The educators are also the ones building
the technology.
So it's for the educators with
the educators so I think ...
I didn't grow up working in technology so
for me I kind of think
that when I was teaching
I was using all these tools
and so often I would think to myself
who designed this.
You know, like what I can't use this.
This doesn't really help me.
So I think for an engineer
someone that's working
to build this product
to get to actually be in the classroom
co-developing with the
educators and with the students
just really takes it to the next level.
- Awesome.
So Aaron, your farm really
is an early adopter.
You have integrated a
lot of different types
of technologies and
tools into the operations
and how you work
and I'll love to understand your process.
How do you choose new technologies,
evaluate them and then
ultimately roll it out?
Because you have a lot
of daily tasks going on.
You don't have a bunch of people
sitting in a conference room everyday
and the luxury of having training sessions
and things like that.
So how does that process work?
- For us we strive, you know,
each and everyday to
make sure our operation
that we kind of have that culture
of continuous improvement.
I always have a drive, I wake
up and we tackle a problem.
How can we do this better?
There's got to be a better way.
So the first thing we look if
whether it's a digital
tool, piece of equipment,
or a new process we're going to implement
on one of the farms.
The most important question,
the first question,
we ask is is this gonna make
the job easier day to day
for the people on our team.
'Cause our people are our
most important resource
that we have.
We have a fantastic,
talented group of people
I get to work with everyday.
If that question in yes then we'll look at
how can we quantify?
Is this tool making it easier?
How is it gonna drive efficiencies
in the overall operation?
If those both questions are yes then
we'll go ahead and move forward with it.
And part of that is
right from the beginning
is make sure that our team is involved
in the planning process
however you use that tool.
I think one of the reasons
Slack has been very successful
for us and everybody uses it
for the past two and a half
years we've been using
it is 'cause they were in
at the group floor.
I had a hair brained idea
of like we have to make
our communication system better.
I told Janine previously on a call
we have lot of complicated
equipment on the farm.
Keep things running.
One of them is a solid separation system
that deals with the backend
waste straying from the cows.
So with that there's tons
of pumps, roller presses,
solid separation equipment,
automated equipment
and sometimes stuff will go awry at 2 a.m.
So that equipment will send
a text out to team of people
that are trained in taking care of that.
And before we used Slack
we're just a really polite group of people
and no one wanted to call the other person
or text in the middle of
the night wake them up
be like I'll take care of it.
If it's 2 a.m. I was guilty of that too.
I'd go out and be like okay I got it.
I'mma fix it, let everybody sleep.
Well within 10 minutes I got
four other people showing up.
I look and I'm like this is crazy.
It took two minutes to fix.
That was kind of the advent of
how do we have a system that
allows quick communication.
We're not having redundant
crossover of people
showing up multiple jobs.
It's run more efficiently
especially when it
just takes one person or if you need help
it's really easy in realtime
to request that help
or idea.
It's kind of a group effort
to implement those tools
and technologies.
- Just want to hook onto
something Sarah you said
that, and totally inspired by,
we've been rolling out tablets
to patients and families
and the primary use case
is to literally just get
real time feedback.
And right now it's a smiley
face scale and freeform
text field and we get that in the Slack
in realtime.
And I think the idea of saying instead of
how's your experience to say
if you had a magic wand
and could make your
doctor's visit, your
healthcare stay better
and then take that and make
that our product development
in the sense that our
product is healthcare
that is a really cool idea.
I hope we can steal that.
(laughter)
- Awesome.
This is a liquid network
like happening in realtime.
One of the things we really
did when were getting to know
each other talk about co-development a lot
and you've each touched
on it a little bit.
I'd love to hear more
about that specifically
as it relates to empowering
the different groups
that you work with.
'Cause this was the theme that came up
that part of the co-development
process means that
you don't impose things on patients or on
the nurses or the staff
but they're actually
advocating for themselves in
a way that feels incredibly
natural and fluid.
So I'd love to just hear
about that from each of you
because the environments are so different
and interestingly you also all have pieces
that are very on-call in nature
and on-demand in
incredibly different ways.
Well Nick why don't we start with you.
- Yeah I took some notes last night.
I was thinking about that very topic
and I looked at them this
morning and I realized
I should not have written
those notes after a day
of wine tasting up in the valley.
So they're not nearly as
coherent as I thought.
But then I spent some time
this morning thinking about it.
And I think for us as
designers in particular
if we say we're design driven
first of human-centered first
the idea of not doing
co-design feels wrong
especially in healthcare.
That is a fundamental human endeavor
and it's really hard.
So when I talk to a lot of
my colleagues and peers and
counterparts in other places they say
we would love to do
co-design with patients
but it's so hard because
a thousand reasons.
And chief among them is
you have to treat them
like an equal part of your team
and that feels like a
really worthY challenge.
We'd been doing it in
a couple nascent ways
but are kind of putting a
lot more energy into that.
So one big step was saying alright
we're gonna bring on three
or four patient innovators
in residence.
We're gonna pay them
like part of our team.
We're gonna give them transportation
to and from the hospital
'cause it's not easy to get to.
So how do we level that playing field
so that they can be truly
co-designers with us.
I think another big part of that is saying
we have to acknowledge
that their energy level,
their schedules are
probably dictated by a lot
of things including their
own life and hobbies and jobs
but maybe also what makes them
a patient in the first place.
If you're an expert user of
healthcare you by definition
have that to deal with and
that's a hard thing to do.
So we've been thinking a lot about it but
I think the biggest first step for us
have been to pull them into the team
a lot more actively.
- Fantastic.
How about you Sarah?
- When I think about co-design
the first thing that
kind of comes up to me
which is also something
that Nick, you touched on,
is that relationship piece.
It's really the co-designing
and developing something
that's not just a teacher and an engineer.
Not just a teacher and a student.
Not just a student and a parent.
Like it's this whole
ecosystem of relationships
that you're kind of
building and tapping into
and you're taking the needs
and recognizing the needs
of our learners and our
needs of our educators
and our needs of our parents.
'Cause they're learning
partners in the journey as well.
So it's that whole kind of ecosystem
of all the different players
and how you have the relationships
that contribute to kind of the mission
that everyone's trying to drive forward.
- And Aaron?
- I think co-designing any system
I think it's in today's day and age
you have to.
I look at myself, you know,
would I wanna go work for a company
where I had no say in how I worked.
Everything was traditional, top down.
There's no say.
I think for us we have extremely high
employee retention, low turnover rate
and I think a key piece of that is
everybody has invested
interest and how they work.
I don't have all the answers.
I know what goals we need to strive toward
and ultimately what
needs to be accomplished
but in between there I trust our people.
The brilliance they have,
the great ideas they have
to figure out that process.
We do that together with a
lot of brainstorming sessions
or we'll start off with plan a and
if we get halfway through we found
well that didn't work so well.
You know, we need to
make some changes here.
Tweak it a little bit
to get to our end goal
and because of that
people having that invested interest
and the time and thought
it takes to implement that
tool or process or that
piece of equipment.
They have invested interest
in making it succeed so
I think that's key to any
organization these days.
- I love all of the qualities
that you're touching on.
You're all touching on
empathy, relationships, trust,
adaptability, flexibility.
Has that changed the way
that you think about who you
hire and bring onto your
teams or the way that you
celebrate behaviors and
try to hold up examples
across your organizations?
- It certainly has for us.
We have this ...
I don't know, maybe it's lofty notion,
but have this concept of
saying like you need to
bring your full self to the job.
And it means being able
to kind of ebb and flow
pretty quickly and
dramatically between being
goofy and talking about something
that is not work related
and being very serious
and deep about the work
at the same time.
In the switching, we see it
happen on our Slack channel
all the time and sometimes it's segmented
into different channels but
we do it in realtime too.
That's a little bit of that
thing that's where we're
trying to export our work style
to the rest of the organization.
But it also, you pointed,
it has changed how we think
about hiring people too.
So our hiring process becomes ....
Our joke is that we look
for our kind of weirdo.
When we know 'em when we meet 'em.
Part of that is having
that conversation be
very broad and very
wide and not just about
the work domain expertise.
- I'm (mumbles) sort of culture exporting
and then we'll come back.
Something that happen quite
a bit in the government.
A lot of what we did
around tech and design
was we created these small teams
and we empowered them to
really accomplish things
on specific segments of
problems and in that process
working with us and partnering
with different parts
of the big giant bureaucracy,
we saw culture change.
How is that going?
'Cause it's funny, you don't
often realize you're doing it
until you step back and say
like of everybody else
wants an open office
or everyone else wants to get on Slack.
- Part of that discussion
that I danced around earlier
this kind of increased
scrutiny of some of our
tools including Slack
happened the other day
in the open and one of my colleagues,
one of our senior designers,
misheard thankfully.
He heard that they're
coming for our Slack board
and it was like this
William Wallace moment
where I think he was
ready to grab a pitchfork
and like you will never take my freedom.
He actually said "if that
happens, I will pay for it
on my own credit card
and expense it back."
Thankfully that was not on the table
and it wasn't a discussion
but I think a lot of it is
it challenges people's
maybe traditional notions
and traditional power.
So if you're,
I think I can just say this
this isn't being recorded right?
Nobody else will ever know?
- I think it is being recorded.
- Oh well alright.
(laughter)
- It's not live stream.
- If you perceive that your power
comes from controlling the exchange server
and the firewall and the content filter
like our style of work really
makes you confront whether
that's actual power
or if it's just having a key to something.
So I think sometimes what we're seeing
is people just feeling
insecure about their role
and it comes out as
attacking our work style.
At least that's the way
I choose to look at it.
'Cause we can have a
lot of empathy for that
instead of anger.
- Yeah, so let's build
on that thinking about
hiring and talent and
you know, not getting the
super controlling people in the room.
- Well I wanted to go
back to a word that you
brought up earlier Janine
which was celebrate
and of course that resonated with me
'cause my work in the
kindergarten classroom.
And if anybody has ever spent time in an
elementary school classroom,
you celebrate everything.
Which is an amazing environment to be in
but sometimes it just
gets lost in that one
isolated moment and so
one thing I wanted to
kind of talk about is how
it's changed our culture
of celebrating.
Where a child all of a sudden gets that
t h sound and it's like an amazing moment
and having something like
Slack where we actually have a
channel that's called gong
worthy that you can celebrate
these small moments and these small wins
and again broadcast it to a
whole network of other educators
who can totally appreciate that this child
just got that t h sound.
Or that something really
amazing in the classroom.
Or that you just completed
a really amazing lesson
and you want to share
it with your colleagues
in our Brooklyn Heights campus
or out Palo Alto campus.
So I think that it's taken
this culture of celebrating
those really exciting moments.
Those gong worthy moments
and making it shareable.
- We call ours gratitude and appreciation.
Your titles are much ...
(laughter)
- We're teachers.
(laughter)
- I love that what is normally
in a more corporate setting
it's like best practice sharing becomes
celebrations and gongs and gratitude.
- We have those too.
- This is much more fun.
(laughter)
- Aaron how about you?
- With the hiring process,
the first question I ask everybody is
are you okay with change?
And I ask it about 15 more times
because we run our business
want it to be transparent
and part of that is
new stuff comes along.
There's a lot of change and you know
I wanna find people who'll adapt to that
and also just those qualities
of being true team players.
We look at no one's more
important than anybody else.
We're all team players.
I view each person on our
team they have so much to add
to the business as a whole so.
Try to operate that way.
And just the culture of having
an open communication tool,
I felt like in the past
when that communication
was a little bit different
stuff was kind of siloed.
What other people were doing
were kind of a mystery.
They have it a little easier than I do.
Or I'm working harder than everyone else.
So kind of taking away those barriers and
having free flowing communication,
everybody realizes that
everybody works hard,
everybody's trying their
best to add to the team.
So that has been key with our culture.
If someone needs help,
it's right there realtime
and people are willing to
step up and do that everyday.
- Well it sounds like you
all have fantastic teams
but let's get real for a second.
There's always some
resistance when we're putting
in new ways of working or we're saying
ah we're gonna try it and it
might work and it might now.
Right?
Sometimes there's some fatigue with that.
So what are the other
William Wallace moments
that come to mind.
What are the other times
where somebody got really
frustrated or they really
didn't want to this
and maybe overcame it or maybe didn't?
- We recently brought in,
shoot I'm going to use
both of the buzzwords you said not to,
we just integrated our lean
team into our innovation team.
(laughter)
- If it was bingo, (mumbles).
- And I think they came
from a much more rigid
hierarchical operating model and
sometimes on our team jokingly
refer to our leadership
model as kind of vacuum based leadership
but in the sense that we create the vacuum
and then let everybody fill
it the way they want to best
or the way they're best able to.
And I think for that team and at least
the way they had been use to working
this idea of saying we don't
know what the answer is yet
but you are safe to go out
and explore and figure it out
was almost like a radical
lack of structure.
I think that they revolted
against it a little bit
and said no you have
to tell me exactly what
step a, b and c are.
We said it's a little
bit like Lewis and Clark
crossing the country.
I know we've gotta get to the west coast.
We know we shouldn't go too
far north or too far south
but that's it.
We have some guideposts and
we don't know what's gonna be
between us and the other coast.
I think they're getting more
and more comfortable with it.
But it also helped us say
there are times when some
more structure helps.
Had to build muscle.
- Definitely.
You have any thoughts on that Sarah?
- AltSchool started using early on.
Like 2014, trying to remember, 2014, 2015
and when we first kind of
rolled it out we had two teams.
We had a headquarters
which was our engineer,
product design and we had our educators
which was our teachers
teaching in the classrooms.
We did this thinking that
the educators were really
busy in the classroom
which of course we are.
But it was kind of like
to protect both teams
from kind of feeling
like they were inundated
with information or communication.
My role was kind of
straddling these two worlds.
Where I was in the headquarters
and I was in the educator
and the teams weren't communicating.
There was literally a wall, a virtual wall
in between these two teams.
So we decided that
couple years ago to
really breakdown that wall
and to merge this headquarter Slack
and this educator Slack.
So now all of sudden everybody's one team
which when you think back right
ah, why didn't we just do
that in the first place.
But it was kind of a poignant moment where
duh, of course this makes so much sense.
So now there's really all
this amazing collaboration
that's going on.
- Awesome.
Aaron any moment of resistance
or light bulb moments
that you found?
- Yeah.
I mean it always seems like
we have that one person
that hates change.
Thinking in our operation
that one person is
usually the same person every time
but he's been with us for
going on over 30 years.
It's just a wonderful person.
He's one of those people
that you have to prove
that this is gonna make it better.
I think if he really sat
down and thought about
hey in the past 10 years
the ideas and tools
we've implemented,
my job is a lot easier today.
So a lot of that is just
making the effort of making
sure people understand why
we're doing stuff the way we're doing it
and why this change is good.
We're not doing to make
they're life difficult
or upend stuff especially for a person
who doesn't like change.
That's good for us to think through of
why are we doing this.
Are we doing this just because
it's a cool thing to use
or is it really benefiting
the people that are going to be using it?
That's kind of what (mumbles) our process.
- I have a few more questions
but I just wanna take
a moment to see there's
any questions burning
on the audience's mind.
Because I know we're
between you and lunch.
Okay we are running a mic
so if anybody has a question
feel free to raise your
hand and grab the mic.
One more thing I'm really curious about is
how do you define innovation
in your organizations?
'Cause this is something
that we talked about a lot
when we first met
how that is a word that's
thrown around all the time
and sometimes it seems a little more lofty
in the term then actually implementing it.
So I'll start with you Aaron.
- When I thought about that question
you think innovation,
you think of big things.
Advent of personal computing, smartphones,
you know, internet of things revolution.
But looking at our business
farming is a pretty mature business.
It's been happening since
the beginning of time
and probably everybody here
if you go back in family
tree far enough, there's
someone that was a farmer
most likely.
So with us, in our industry,
not a lot of big seismic
or disruptive changes.
But we found there's been a lot of
innovation in optimizing current systems.
Using the technology that's available.
We're still doing some of the same things.
We have to feed cows.
We have to milk cows.
We have to grow field
crops, corn and wheat
to feed our cows.
Those have always happened
for hundreds and thousands of years
but the way we do it has changed.
Right now from my smartphone
I can look a hundred miles away
tell exactly in one of my fields
what the soil moisture is.
If it needs to be irrigated,
from another app I can fire up
Precision Irrigation system
all while sitting here.
Before that was someone out everyday
checking fields, digging
in the dirt feeling
well I think there's enough water in here.
So a lot of that they're small innovations
but they have a big
impact on the way we work.
Then ultimately it allows
us to be better stewards
of our resources.
You know our people,
our animals, our land,
our water and our air.
Because we've been
fortunate to be in business
for 77 years, four generations.
Hopefully I wanna leave
our operation and all our
resources in better shape
then when I started.
I'm already working on my
four year old daughter Ingrid
telling her how fun it is to be a farmer
but her current career goals are
medical doctor who's also a ballerina
and a princess.
(laugher)
So farming might have a hard
time competing with those.
Those are pretty cool.
- How about Sarah, innovations?
- You're daughter sounds awesome.
- She is wonderful.
- She has a magic wand I think.
- She does.
(laughter)
- Innovation to me feels,
a lot of the things that
Aaron was saying in education.
It's taking something that is old
and innovating, making it new again.
Not replacing it but taking the things
that may need some TLC
and kind of making it
new and relevant to today's
society and to the future.
I think education it's
really important to continue
to innovate because we
have little four year olds
that wanna be all these things
and we really want to
meet them where they are
so taking something like
technology and being able to
not replace an educator ever
but to really superpower that educator
in a way that they can meet the child
exactly where they are.
Which historically, you know,
you go into a classroom, you
teach a bunch of third graders
the third grade curriculum
because they're all seven years old.
That's really not doing a
service to put the child
front and center of their learning
and kind of hone in one
what it is that's going to
excite them and what's
gonna propel them into this
future that we don't really
know what it looks like yet.
So I think innovation
really is taking that
old thing and figuring out
how we can make it new.
- How 'bout you Nick?
- First of all Aaron, I'm blown away.
The only way for the
most part to really know
how a building full of patients are doing
is to go room to room and have somebody
physically but eyes on them.
And that you can check soil quality
and see equipment status
on your phone remotely
makes me jealous.
If your daughter does becomes a doctor,
then she could bring that
learning to healthcare
that'd be the innovation.
- Hopefully.
- I think for us, we've
gotten really enamored with
speed in very small things
and being very applied.
So we kind of stripped our
human-centered design model
down to, we call it, listen, imagine, do.
And we starting last year took
everybody in the organization
who was a leader of any
kind from the frontline
up to the c-suite had to do
this was by our CEO's mandate
two human-centered design
innovation projects
to meet their goals for the year.
We coached a lot of really
small scope fast things.
It's that idea that it doesn't have to be
a super computer and it
doesn't have to be an app.
It can be this really
simple tweak to a process
or something already
existing to your point Sarah.
That idea of doing it quickly
and testing things quickly
and seeing what works and
going from low fidelity
to high fidelity and
cheap or free to expensive
but doing it really quickly
but radically in service of the end user.
That's about as succinct as I feel like
I can get to a definition.
Or it's just the bullshit
corporate buzzword of ...
- I like all of these
definitions much better.
So last question which
is a little bit of a
lighting round.
We could not have done x without Slack.
I'll give you a second
'cause I don't think I
prepped you guys with that one actually.
- So we, I mentioned it,
we're putting tablets
in patients' hands.
They can literally tell us
how they're doing in realtime.
We're getting a better response
rate than the government
mandated surveys we have
to use in healthcare.
It's changing the power
dynamic in healthcare
and making our patients feel empowered
in a way that you
normally have to surrender
all of your autonomy
when you're a patient.
We could not have empowered
patients without Slack.
It is the core OS of our team for that.
- That's awesome.
- I'd say wouldn't be
able to have collaborated
with rapid innovation
without Slack on-demand.
- I could not be up here without my phone
buzzing like crazy with phone calls.
(laughter)
- Well thank you so much
Nick, Aaron and Sarah.
This was fantastic and thank you to
everyone here for joining us.
Oh we do have a question.
- Yeah, thanks.
I'd be interested in you
talking about how in your teams
you deal with the multiple
communications channel challenge.
Because you're communicating
within your teams
on Slack but then you got a lot of other
people that you have to communicate with.
That's a complaint I get from mine is
okay I still gotta pay attention to,
I'm in the government,
to Outlook email for a
lot of things.
- We certainly struggle with that.
The organization uses email.
In some ways that does create
a nice little division.
We can say anything that
happens in this space
is our innovation space.
And we know that if we're outside of it
it changes kind of our tone, our decorum,
maybe our formality in it.
But I think my honest to
acknowledge the struggle is real.
And now text messaging
for everybody that says
well my inbox is full.
It's too many modalities.
- I'd also add to that we're just in this
incredible transitional inflection point.
I think where organizations
are sort of using everything
and nobody's really decided
on the suite of tools
that work.
I feel like we're in the
weird moment whereby we're all
operating differently by
organization and then teams within.
I'm hoping time will sort that.
One more question and then we'll wrap up.
- [Audience member] I'm super
loud so I can just scream
(mumbles).
I feel the kid who's asking
the question after the bell
or something here so sorry.
I know you guys are in the
more traditional spaces
and it's one thing just to
move from email and chat
to Slack.
Another potentially to add an
application on top of that.
We heard this morning
something like a thousand
applications on Slack now.
So have you guys had any
experience with that,
adding an application on top of Slack
and any cool antidotes would be awesome.
I'll add a brief, funny antidote
we ask a very simple yes or no question.
We've had multiple times
where people have responded
sorry I don't know you,
how do I know you are
working at our organization.
Things like that adding an
application on top of Slack.
- For us we integrate G
Suite and Google Drive
which has been valuable, transfer files.
If someone's at a remote location
we can send it to that
person if they don't
have access to it already.
We also integrate with
Asana for project management
and scheduling.
We found that's been a great tool
with the kind of dynamic
nature our business
and realtime.
Our manager or myself who
can move stuff around.
It makes everybody's job a lot easier
and also allows us to see how fast,
where they're at in that progress
of getting a task or job complete.
So those have been ...
We keep finding new ones that
add value to our workflow.
- Alright.
Well I think we'll still be around
in case more questions popup.
Thank you again for joining us.
(applause)
