Serial creative entrepreneur and Founder of Make Happy, Jonathan Bannister, explores the power of divergent vs. convergent thinking, how you can maximize your creative abilities to fuel innovation and become a problem solving wiz, and much more.

Join us monthly for more expert tips & tricks! 👉 Reserve your Master Session spot today

About Jonathan

Jonathan started his business life at global advertising agency Leo Burnett in London before moving to Hong Kong in 1994, where he helped found the strategic planning department. It was in Hong Kong that Jonathan discovered that you could be paid to run workshops. He hasn't looked back since and still is stunned that people want to pay him to do something that is such fun!

For the last ten years, Jonathan has run Make Happy, a creative facilitation and innovation agency. The focus is on helping clients foster creativity, innovation and adaptability within their teams and organisations. Make Happy do this by using a range of creative problem solving and facilitation techniques, including Lego Serious Play, Design Thinking and team building.

Jonathan is a Fellow of the RSA, a member of the Academic Council of the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Mumbai, is a trainer and facilitator in Lego Serious Play methods and teaches the foundation course at the CEF's annual CPSI Conference at The University of Buffalo, NY. Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn or visit makehappy.co.uk for more.

Transcription

Talia (00:04):

Thanks for joining us today, everyone. We're so excited to have you all here and welcome to Master Sessions with PowerBx. Just so you know, these sessions are recorded, so there's no need to take any notes. We will have a transcription with everything mentioned today that we'll be sharing after the event. My name is Talia Kemp, and I'm the Director of Client Success at PowerBx. Today, I'm joined by Jonathan Bannister, the Founder of Make Happy. Jonathan is a Business and Communication Strategist with a passion for helping organizations drive creativity throughout their companies. Welcome, Jonathan!

Making you an innovation master or how to survive the robots

Jonathan (00:44):

Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me and hopefully sounds all okay. I am in the office. They are doing a play upstairs. So, there's actors and musicians crashing around, but hopefully that'll work. I'm gonna share my screen and I'm just going to, I, I always call this how to survive the robots, because I think creativity is the one thing that at the moment, at the moment we have over, over the robots and AI and you know, we, if we can keep that, that's the one thing that humans have, and I'll talk in the next 15 minutes about why I think this is, this is so important, but it isn't just me. If you actually look at the world, the world economic forum, and that's the group that puts on Davos each year, every couple of years, they, they do a global survey of the skills that businesses are looking for.

The Top 10 Skills of 2025

Jonathan (01:42):

And you only have to look at that to see those are the top 10 skills they say businesses are going to, are asking for and will need in 2025. And look at that in the, in the, under the problem solving, this idea of analytical thinking, innovation, complex problem solving, we don't teach. We don't teach anybody complex problem solving in our schools, and then we expect them to go out and suddenly be able to, to solve complex problems. Well, how's that critical thinking, analysis, and then this idea of creativity. And the question that I, I normally would, would do to, you know, to you is, I'd ask you for what's your definition of creativity, ask the, ask all of you out there for know the definition of creativity and, you know, and I think it's, it's worth thinking what it is. And the answers I tend to get is that people tend to think that creativity is a way of thinking and innovation is about getting to an, to an end result, about creating something new or different than already exists. Here are some other great quotes. I love this one from Stan. You know, create, you know, creativity and novelty that's useful. I think that's wonderful. And you know, Alex Osborn, one of the founding, one of the founding parents, fathers, mothers of creativity, went on to set up, he was the O in BBDO, the, the, the US ad agency. And he talked about the mental capacity to visualize, to foresee and to generate ideas.

What do you need to be creative? 

Jonathan (03:18):

They thought differently, didn't they? You know, and you only have to look at them and they, you know, and how now we probably don't look at them as, as that radical, but you know, when John and Yoko were, you know, were rocking the world, you know, they were really different to what was going on. And then Sir Ken Robinson, he's a, he's a Brit who did a lot in education. He talks about creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value, and isn't that interesting that it's about having value. So, what do you need to be creative? What do you need to have innovation? I would argue it's three key things, it's your attitude and approach. And I'm going to come back to that again and again, and again, your attitude, but you also have to have a sense of what your team's attitude is, because if a t, if you don't have a real sense of where your team's going, you won't be able to get that.

Jonathan (04:15):

You know, you won't be able to get that. And then you need a process and process tools. And that I think is interesting in terms of creativity, this idea that creativity is not just a random act. You are more creative when you follow a process and let's just take a step back. And this photo, and this is really where a lot of the original thinking happened. You have to imagine, take yourself back, 1940, 1944, 1 of the biggest bombing raids over, over Nazi Germany, and planes left from all over the UK from something like 60 different airfields that day. And they were flying off and they were flying across the channel and outside, you had the, the Spitfires and the Hurricanes were giving them cover, but they could only give them cover till they reached, probably, Holland.

Jonathan (05:12):

And over the channel, the gunners would test their guns. The aimer was, you know, the, the navigator was plotting a route and that day, that raid to Essen was over a railhead north of Berlin, a hugely important railhead north of Berlin, where some, some, some Mosquitoes and they were, they were known as the Pathfinders. The Mosquitoes had gone in earlier, and had dropped flares over the, over the railhead to guide these people in. But suddenly you're flying this plane and the Captain suddenly finds he's no longer flying the plane as he used, it should fly. It's just not, it's just not working. And to cut a long story short, why did some pilots still manage when they're plane no longer was flying? When they had been hit either by a Messerschmitt night fighter, or they'd been hit by flak from bel, below, how would they, what was the process that they went through to solve a problem, which started as fuzzy, that allowed them to make their target mission critical, mission critical target that they made, and they got rid of their payloads and then bring that crew back.

Jonathan (06:26):

And some pilots failed almost immediately. And there was a lot of research on how the decision-making went on amongst the crews. Why were some crews, as a team, able to bring planes back, which when they landed, people were looking at them going, oh my goodness. And it wasn't on this raid. There's one famous raid where a pilot brought back a plane and he had only one engine going. He had lost three engines before he left France and he had to cross the channel with one play. So, take a step forward, huge amounts of research about the creativity and the thought process of how they did it. And I'm actually going to jump and scribble now on this board, because then an American mathematician came along and her name was Dr. Ruth Noller and Ruth Noller, who probably is my superhero by the way. And she came up with a mathematical formula for creativity, and isn't that rocking, that you can take creativity and make it a mathematical book. Pen not needed.

Jonathan (07:30):

Hope you can all see this. And she said, the creativity, C, let's call it C, equals the sum of K times I times E. And what she said is K as your, K is your knowledge, how knowledgeable are you? And it's not just sector knowledge. You have to be, if you're going to be really creative, you have to have a breadth of knowledge. And what I always say to people is don't always read the same magazine, occasionally go to the magazine rack and pick out something you wouldn't read. Don't always go and see exactly the same genre of film or read the same genre books. If you've never read a Sci-fi book read one. And if it is, read Ian M. Banks' Excession, blow your mind. And that's all you need to do. That one will suddenly give you a new take on the work.

Jonathan (08:25):

And then she said, I, and I is your imagination. How good are you at divergent thinking? Because you've got to have ideas. If you're faced with a problem, you've got to have knowledge and use your knowledge. And then you've got to have some ideas. And then E is how good are you at convergent thinking and evaluation? Because there's no point in just having a wall full of post-it notes and you can't begin to go, actually, that one is better than that one or if we take that idea and we mix it with that idea, we merge and we get something better. But she also added, says Jonathan trying to work out, remember which camera he's looking at, I always get, I get so excited talking about creativity. It always goes a bit Pete Tong and Pete Tong is, I'm now getting on a quick aside and Talia later, we'll say, "Jonathan, you only had 15 minutes".

Jonathan (09:12):

Pete Tong is Cockney rhyming slang for it's all gone wrong. Okay. And you'll have to look up that later, but she said, she added A, small A, and small A is your attitude. So, are you one of those people that sucks the energy out of every meeting or you one of those people that are constantly going, Talia, thank you for that. That's made me think of that or Mina, what a great idea, but maybe we could even do this. And another way of looking at it is, are you a "yes, but" person or a "yes, and" person? And if you've never done that in pairs, fantastic exercise where you get people standing, if you've got in your team and one person says, I, I don't know, plan your fall party or a staff party, and the person gets an idea and the other person receiving the idea initially has to go "yes, but", and try and build on it and then hands it back.

Jonathan (10:13):

And that person goes, "yes, but yes, but yes, but", and see what happens to the energy in the room. Boom, it'll go, it'll crash. Am I back to the right camera? I am. And then you try it with "yes, and", and the energy just goes. I was teaching last week at Trinity college, Dublin with a bunch of pharmacy students. And when we did that exercise, the first bit, the noise was a bit there, when I did the second exercise with a "yes, and" the noise went through the roof. And so there was something in that equation. Yeah, and I've actually, I've got it here because we can share the deck afterwards. There's something in the equation isn't there, but how did those crews, how did those crews solve problems? What was it about their creativity? And then, you know, one of the things we talk about is that creative performance is a balance of how you use your knowledge, how you use imagination.

Jonathan (11:04):

And if you do workshops with me and do my training, I spend my whole time say, okay, team, we're now doing divergent thinking or okay, team. We're now doing convergent thinking and action. And that's one thing that we've added to that equation since, is you've got to have action. Otherwise it's just a bunch of notes and we all have different combinations of that. We have different combinations of how we like to learn. How do we like to gain knowledge? You can probably guess from the way I am, I do it through direct experience. Even though I'm sitting behind a bunch of books, I tend to read the first chapter, the last chapter, and then bin the rest because one, business books have too much in between, but I like to experience it. But other people have a much stronger preference for sort of abstract, detached thinking.

Jonathan (11:50):

They want to sort of read it. And some of you out there will have your energy, it's not a scale, it's your energy. Your energy will go up when you're using your knowledge for evaluating ideas. And some of you, your energy will go up when you're using your knowledge for ideation. And you can probably guess that I'm in the ideation. So I am, if you look at that as a quadrant, I sit in the sort of, the top left quadrant. Why is that important? Because that actually all sits around how we like to do things and do we do them well, which is a question I would often ask people that within an innovation cycle, within creativity, there are certain things at work that all of you would like to do and do well. And there'll also be things where your energy plummets. Yeah? And what do we get is the top corner, which I am.

Jonathan (12:45):

I'm known as a Generator. I love ambiguity. I love it when Talia rang me up a few, a couple of months ago and said Jonathan, we've got this and I'm going "feed me, feed me, give me the fans". By the way, my energy plummeted when I actually sat there and go, "okay, I've got 15 minutes. I better write this", when I have to optimize, because it's the bottom of the corner. Luckily, my business partner, her energy goes through the roof in terms of optimizing. So, she's great at saying, "no, Jonathan, get it done". Talia, how am I doing for time? Because I forgot to put my timer on. Good. And then you need, you'll have some people who, who like sort of seeing the big picture, beginning to generate ideas, other people who put the plans in, and then you've got your implementers, and it's important because that's how we problem solve.

Jonathan (13:31):

Yeah, and the cognitive, you know, it's not what we know in terms of our differences in education or gender. It's how we process. And the creative process has four stages, surprise, surprise. And the first is you've got to get stuff to start it. All of you in your jobs will be faced with problems. Yeah? Now those problems might be an opportunity problem. It isn't always a negative problem. It might be, we've got a great opportunity to launch a new product, or it might be customers just dropped their price on that product. Oh goodness, what are we going to do? Then you've got to define what is the actual problem we're working on and how do we put ideas together to solve it? Then we have to turn those into a plan. And then we have to implement.

Jonathan (14:18):

Remember I was talking about that bombing raid over Essen, way back in 1944. And this is where it links back to that, is that some crews were going from finding a problem, my plane is not flying, and they jumped straight to implementation, which is everybody out. Other crews went, what is the problem? What do we know about this problem? And they started to go through and the, the, the, the top gunner said, "Captain, I can see that there's a starboard engines, you know is on fire". And the Engineer's going, "yeah, I can see that I'm losing power." They did a whole lot of gathering ideas, and then they were able to say, "our actual problem is we've lost engine number four, we have a fuel leak, a fuel leak out of tank number six." And then they were able to start to say, what can we do about it?

Jonathan (15:12):

And then the Pilot said, "we'll take us up 10,000 feet. So, the oxygen, the oxygen drops, and maybe we can put the fire out." The engineer is diverting fuel from that tank and trying to stop the fuel in that engine. The navigator is looking at a route. They're going through all of this, and then they implement. And trust me, in most businesses, people do not bother with the ideation and the developing of ideas. They jump from box one to four. So, what are some tips that you can take into your businesses straight away? And here's one, in terms of con, con, in terms of, well convergent thinking is that, you know, you, you need to be deliberate. You need to align decision, decision-making the time and the respect it needs. You need to check your objectives. What were the objectives you had set?

Jonathan (16:13):

You need to improve ideas, even when you would do, you know, you're coming in. Don't just go, that's the idea. Look at strengthening it. Be affirmative. It's so, it's so debilitating, isn't it, when you've actually got some interesting ideas and remember an idea, when you first birth the idea it's weak, it's actually like a baby. You know, it can't speak and it needs it's mum, or it needs nurturing. Be affirmative. Look after that idea and consider novelty. Yeah. It's so easy to just drop back to, to the, to the, to the same old, same old or an incremental change. And then here is some blocks to creative thinking. And, you know, we don't like to just, you know, we, we're human beings. So much of our education is about judging. And I'll tell you, sorry, there is a slide that I have missed, which is the rules for divergent thinking, which is to build on other people's ideas and don't censor yourself.

Jonathan (17:18):

How many times have you been in a, in a meeting where maybe somebody afterwards came out and said, you know, I thought we could have done that. And you go, well, why didn't you say so, but you've got to make it safe. Are your meetings safe enough that people are willing to throw out any idea and that it won't be shot down? Yeah? And if you don't make the meeting safe, people won't offer an idea. Yeah. And one of the things that we always say is, and this is a really difficult concept. If there's only one thing you remember about this little talk is that you never, ever, ever under any circumstances, that when you are doing divergent thinking, you do convergent thinking. When you're doing divergent thinking, you never do convergent thinking.

Jonathan (18:09):

You say to your team, you say to your group, let's spend five minutes generating some ideas. And the team has to know that in that five minutes anything goes. I was running a workshop the other day, and someone said to me, "Jonathan!" And I said, "yes." He said, "Jonathan!" I said, "yes." And he said, "Jonathan, I was in a workshop the other day. And somebody went, gave an idea and let's call the idea bananas." And I said, "so, just out of interest, what did you do?" He said, "well, I told him". I said, "okay, you told him what?" He said, "I told him he was wrong." And I said, "let's, can we role play that?" So he, I said, "you just say bananas again." And this guy went, "bananas" and I went, "Amir, that is a stupid idea."

Jonathan (18:54):

What have I done to the energy in the room? And if you, even if I hadn't done it as, as harshly as that, if I'd just gone, "Amir, you're wrong", what have I done to the energy in the room? Not just to Amir, but to anybody else that we're talking to. What could I have done? And he said, "well, I could have just ignored it". I said, "brilliant, how about this? Maybe you could have even said, Jacqueline, thank you for giving me that thought starter, how about apples? You could have even taken the wrong idea and not critiqued it and credited the person with your thought starter and built on it and given them something else. Because you know, you're coming to the divergent phase where you'll be able to much more gently than you do, go, do you know I'm not sure that bananas are right for this project or, or you know, are right. And you could have taken it off." And that's something I'd ask you all to try when you go back to your next meeting. Yeah.? You say to the team, you need to signpost, with creativity it is so important to signpost where you are. You need to say to the team, this is a divergent thinking phase, or this is a convergent thinking phase. And then you need to tell them, teach them these blocks. Yeah. Which is you don't have to be practical. Have some fun. Give me a wild idea. Yeah.

Jonathan (20:33):

It doesn't matter if an idea is imperfect, we'll have a stage to improve it. What might it do to any of us to build on that idea? How often do people sit there going, "I can't say anything because if I say it, people will, people might laugh at me or people might think I'm wrong, or people might..." You know, you feel foolish. They only feel foolish If you don't have the confidence and your, your team or your organization has not made it safe for people to express their ideas and their creativity. Yeah. That, too difficult. It might fail. It doesn't matter. We can work on that later. Yeah. And actually, here's my, I just got the order wrong. So, sorry about that, but guidelines, don't have any logic. Have some fun. In the same way as in this, I could have gone and stopped and gone, "Jonathan, you Nana". See, I brought banana back into it.

Jonathan (21:29):

"You've got your slide in the wrong order", but you just go on. I'm happy with it. I've still got the point across, you know, have some fun. You want people to have some fun, you know, when they are when they are doing that thinking. Go for quantity. All the research shows that quantity gives you quality. So if us, as a group, started to come up with ideas for how might we get some of the kids who've missed out on education because of COVID over the last 12 months, yeah, and having to sort of be from home. And I asked each of you for one idea, I'm not sure we would actually come up with anything that was maybe radically different. But if I said to all of you, I need 20 ideas, yeah, on how can we improve the life chances of all those children out there who's missed education over the last 12 months or not had the full education? We would have, out of the 40, the 50, the 60 ideas we would have, I think we'd start to get some stuff that was really interesting.

Jonathan (22:39):

Go for quantity. Don't interrupt yourself, your thoughts. That you've got a master class on that from me, it is just stream your thoughts and that's where creativity, creativity comes. And you've got to go, you've got to go for wild ideas because trust me, I can take a team who's come up with a wild idea and I can make it a bit safer. The amount of energy it takes to take the most boring and mundane idea, and try and make, and by the way, that's not my internet slowing down, and try to make a boring idea interesting is supremely more energy. Yeah. So, and by the way, sometimes draw. Even us, you know, the very act of drawing. I do huge amounts of workshops with Lego. You know, we take Lego, you know, I've got Lego.

Jonathan (23:35):

You can't really see it in this office, but there is about a ton of Lego over there. And we run workshops with Lego, getting people to build their ideas out legos. So, yesterday, I was up in Birmingham, running a workshop with a team, a tech company that's grown so fast that at the beginning of lockdown there were 30 people. I think in the room yesterday, were 50. And in actual fact, 10 people hadn't come. They've doubled in size in the last 12 months, half the people haven't met each other. And rather than just do it with post-it notes, we built models of what they thought a high performing team should look like and visually, we had it there in 3D. Wow. Wow. That was fun, much more exciting. Yeah. And sometimes knick an idea. I could knick an idea off Jas and just, oh, I like that little bit of the idea you've just thrown at me, you know, and maybe I'll stick it in with an idea from Cesar. It doesn't matter. You know, that idea, you don't have to take the whole, the whole thing. Talia, time?

Talia (24:37):

We should probably move to Q&A soon.

Jonathan (24:41):

That's fine. And then build, build, build, build. Constantly build. And then, I'll crash through the last couple of things cause I've got them here because it'll be, you know, you can, you can cut it. And then where did all of this go? It goes to things like design thinking. Yeah. And all of this creativity is built on this, this idea that you do divergent, convergent thinking. This is the design council in the UK's approach. Look, divergent, convergent thinking, allowing you to free up. Questions?

Q&A

Talia (25:14):

Okay. So, now we're going to start the Q&A portion. Make sure to have your camera on, please introduce yourselves and your companies when you ask your question. And go ahead and raise your hand if you have a question.

Jonathan (25:33):

All stunned in silence. Oh my. Jas?

Jasmin (25:39):

So I'm Jas. I am a Channel Manager here at Envoy and we're a workplace management software company. And so, my question for you, because of everything that's going on, kind of related to creativity, but where do you see the future of workplace collaboration heading as many organizations are moving to a hybrid work environment?

Jonathan (26:00):

Well, I, I mean, I think that's, I, that is a great question, Jas. And I think we have, a lot of the workshops we're running at the moment is around, is around that. And you know, what's really interesting? If you'd asked me that question 18 months ago, I'd have gone, it all has to be face-to-face. Yeah. My business fell off a cliff last March. I ran workshops face-to-face. With a friend in America, David and I rebuilt it going, how do we do hybrid? How do we, how do we allow people to join and, you know, spend some time at home, give them that same experience. We now really think that we can give people the same experience if not better at times, working from home with a Miro, we use Miro. I think he, I don't know how you, I pronounce it Miro. He always pronounces it something different.

Jonathan (26:51):

But you know, one of those giant whiteboards where we build really interesting landscapes. And so, I think that the, if you, if you have ways of engaging people and making sure that they feel that they can engage when they are not onsite, as well as onsite, you get, I think you get the best of both worlds. I think actually, you know, that when you bring them into the office, there's certain types of workshops you would run, like maybe more problem solving, generating ideas. If I'm doing strategy, do you know, and I prefer to do strategy in a, when people are working from, from home. So, I run a workshop for a tech company in London and Sydney. So we had to, that was hybrid by definition, but they said you can come in and work with the London team here because they're in the office.

Jonathan (27:39):

I said, no, can we please have all of those, that team for this workshop working from home, because I want everybody to have an equal experience. And they said afterwards, it was the best decision they'd made. So I, I think I'm excited about it because I think, but I think you've got to really think about what you're getting people to do when they're working from home and how you allow them to express their creativity and do they work there and what do you want them to do when they come back in and are sitting together? What, what, what are you trying to, how do you build a culture in that way? But this idea that you can't build culture online, I think is, I think is, is rubbish. We're testing, beta testing, something called Remotion, which is it's literally on our screen. So, I can see all the people I collaborate with and when they're on there and I literally go click, and then David in Baltimore. I was chatting to David when Talia came on, he's in Baltimore and I didn't have to open Zoom. I went bang, bang. We had a chat. He asked me how I was, bing, bang, done. Have I answered the question or not?

Jasmin (28:47):

Yes. I love your answer. Thank you.

Jonathan (28:51):

Do I have any more? Cesar, do you want to hit me with something? Nope.

Cesar (29:04):

No, thank you.

Jonathan (29:05):

That's okay. And I think the other thing just going, Jas, back to, back to that, I still think we're also learning. I still think that the learning, because I think what we've now also come out of is that slight sort of lockdown mentality where people were really worried about COVID and they're beginning to navigate this, you know, this, you know, this, this sort of dual, you know, this dual world and then not necessarily feeling the pressure of having to be safe and are now going, how do we do that? And I also think by the way, Jas, is you've got to give people the kit at home to enjoy. And so I work off a big screen here and an absolutely giant screen here. You now, have lights there.

Jonathan (29:47):

You saw in the thing, I had two cameras. I still can go analog over here if I want. Now, of course I'm a facilitator. I'm not expecting everybody working from home to have a Canon 5D Mark IV camera to, to film with, but I do question why companies aren't really making sure, you know, that their teams, when they're working from home, you're giving them the landscape, you know, and the tech to, you know, to do that, to, you know, how do you keep in touch with your, with your, with your friends? And I think you look at the innovation, the creativity of companies like Remotion, you know, coming along and going, they've seen a problem and they go, how do we keep culture going?

Talia (30:30):

I'd like to ask you a question, Jonathan. So, what's one thing that you think we could do starting today to be more creative in our lives?

Jonathan (30:44):

Don't censor yourself. I think so much of what we do is about cen, you know, we censor ourselves. We, you know, we think, oh God, if I offer that somebody else is going to, is going to ridicule it, as I sort of said earlier in that. Or, they're going to potentially say, no, you know, no, you can't do that. Or, it's not like how we do it around here. Or, you know, we don't have the money, the budget, duh, duh, duh, duh. And I think if we all, but that, by the way, doesn't mean that you don't censor your, you know, there's certain things I do want you to censor yourself from, yeah? You know, but I think in terms of with creativity, that idea that if you've got a thought starter offer it, because if, you know, it's not about you, it's actually about, and just take, you know, you. Now, if I offer you an idea, you now have the ability to take my idea and build on it. So, if I've censored myself, I'm actually stopping all of the rest of you on this call from using your creativity to take that thought starter and make something different or better.

Talia (31:52):

Hmm, mmm.

Jonathan (31:52):

But, I think it's so different because, you know, you think about school and the way we teach, teach people, you know, we teach our children that two plus two is four, you know, it's all about being right or wrong, right or wrong. And you know, you go through, in your case, you know high school and then sort of universities, et cetera. You know, how many colored pencils did you have in your bag, Talia, when you went to school when you were four?

Talia (32:18):

I'm sure, like 20 or so.

Jonathan (32:22):

And how many have you got on your desk at the moment?

Talia (32:24):

I have no colored pencils on my desk. I do have a couple of colored pens.

Jonathan (32:28):

Okay, but you do you see, I mean, I know that's in a way a silly analogy, but I think it is, we take the color, you know, we take the color out of our lives in some ways. And I think, you know, I'm interested, you know, and I suppose asking some of the team here, like Jas, you know, in terms of your business, how do you, how are you approaching the, the software that you make? How are you approaching, keeping that culture, keeping that creativity going?

Jasmin (32:56):

Yeah. So, we build the software to help companies introduce a hybrid model. So, if you're looking to make sure that everyone feels safe by going into the office, we have technology or products that can help you as an employee feel comfortable. So if, for example, if you're wanting to make sure that everyone in the office is getting vaccinated, or everyone has a negative test, we have processes and workflows integrated within our products that allow you to make note that you are vaccinated or that you have negative tests and then send it to HR. So we're, we're not forcing everyone to go back, but if you want to go back, we'll make you feel safe. And if you want to stay at home, Envoy has provided the tools so that you can be successful at home. So, for example, I have two monitors and my laptop and I have a stand, I have everything that I need to be successful at home, and you can see my whiteboard. So, they are supplying us with what we need to be able to be creative and to kind of collaborate with our colleagues, even if it's in a remote environment.

Jonathan (34:07):

Okay, lovely. And I think that's, you know, that's key. And I think Talia, as well as the, the, the, the, you know, you take people, you put them in that situation. I think it is, you give them the opportunity to work from home, but you've got to make sure that people feel safe from home, that, that they are sort of connecting with other people. Can we actually, you know, can I put forward an idea and how do you put, put forward an idea? So one, is going back to that, don't sense yourself, and the other one is, which is totally different. And it's why, when I was talking about it earlier, I repeated it twice, is that when you do divergent thinking, you don't do convergent thinking. They happen sequentially, but they are separate. And I think if you, if you ask any team, any organization, any individual, and you just give yourself, you go, okay, five minutes divergent. Now I'll converge. Changes everything, changes everything.

Talia (35:12):

Well, thank you. I think that's all the time that we have today. So, thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise, Jonathan. If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to have a transcription and all the information discussed here, as well as a link to register for next month's session in the description box below. And each month we'll be sharing, we'll be joined by industry experts to discuss the future of work. So, until we see you again, have a wonderful month. Thank you.

Resources from this session

Make Happy 👉 makehappy.co.uk

Miro 👉 miro.com

Remotion 👉 remotion.com

Envoy 👉 envoy.com

Zapp Pad 👉 Powerbx.com/pages/zapp-pad

Zoom 👉 Zoom.us

Zoom Solutions 👉 Powerbx.com/pages/zoom-solutions