SPOTLIGHT ON: Strategic Planning with The James House

The James House board of directors was aboutto change dramatically as a number of terms were expiring and a handful of members were about to retire. It was a critical opportunity for the organization to fill these positions in a way that would reflect their objectives for the future.

In order to develop an active, hands-on board integrated with The James House staff they needed to take a good look at the organization and really assess its position in the community. Floricane was brought on to guide that process and to help The James House align its goals in pursuit of a shared vision.

download a PDF of The James Case Study

Visual Arts Center Gets Creative in the Workplace

Thinking differently. Getting out of the box. Sparking innovation. Driving creativity.

No matter how you want to phrase it, there’s a renewed demand within organizations for individuals and teams that can bring new ideas to the table, demonstrate their value to the bottom line and deliver something new to drive business.

The Visual Arts Center of Richmond thinks it has just what Richmond area organizations are looking for – their new Creativity at Work program is designed to provide tools and strategies that drive innovation in the workplace. It happens this fall as a team of business experts and artists come together to lead participants from across Richmond through a three-month program.

The three full-day workshops happen over three months. Each is focused on a different topic:

• Igniting the Creative Spark is built around Leonardo daVinci’s principles for creativity, and will be facilitated by Harry Vardis of Atlanta-based Creative Focus Inc.

• Seeing with Unique Vision will encourage participants to think outside of traditional patterns, and explore the value of bringing new perspectives to the table. Chip Ransler of Husk Power Systems will facilitate.

• The Intersection of Collaboration and Innovation will explore the unspoken rules of creativity an experimentation, and will be facilitated by Steve Van Allen of QVC Network.

The artistic team will be ceramic artist Richard McCord, painter Amie Oliver and sculptor James Chalkey.

Working with the original design team for the Creativity Work program was one of my more challenging volunteer opportunities last fall – sorting through all of the possibilities to give shape to a focused series of creative lessons was no easy task! But the evolving team of educators, artists and businesspeople – led by Jo Kennedy and Amie Joyaux of the Visual Arts Center – landed a solid program framework, and it looks like the Visual Arts Center team has provided plenty of shape, color and texture to our original ideas.

Registration for the three-month program closes on June 1, and the Visual Arts Center is encouraging organizations to consider sending cross-functional teams and high-performing leaders. Tuition is $3,000, and you’re welcome to contact Jo Kennedy, President and CEO of the Visual Arts Center, if you want to discuss the program further. Her number is 804.353.3761.

Virginia Poverty Law Center: Our Newest Client

We’ll be spending some time in May with the Virginia Poverty Law Center, a statewide nonprofit, discussing ways in which their team of attorneys and support staff can more effectively collaborate; brainstorming ways the team can best tackle new initiatives in the year ahead; and discussing their organizational vision. The Virginia Poverty Law Center is the only organization in Virginia that provides ongoing training and support to local legal aid programs, private attorneys and their clients with a focus on the legal rights of Virginia’s lower-income residents.

Richmond Community Hospital: A Chapter in the Conversation

Talking to local physicians over the past several months as part of my work with Bon Secours Richmond Health Systems has been a history lesson – and a lesson in Richmond’s racial legacy, the importance of community, and the deep passion many doctors bring to their work.

Richmond Community Hospital (RCH) opened its doors more than 100 years ago in Jackson Ward, and moved onto Overbrook Road behind Virginia Union University in the 1930s. It wasn’t more than a half-mile from the old Richmond Memorial Hospital. For decades, black patients turned down Overbrook Road while white patients motored up to the doors of Richmond Memorial. Community made a final move in 1980 to its present location on North 28th Street in Church Hill; Bon Secours acquired it in 1995.

While many people know RCH for its important history, I’ve had a meaningful opportunity to explore the hospital’s future. It is so well-positioned to be in service to an almost-forgotten corner of the city – Church Hill and the broader East End (including portions of Henrico County) – that its mission literally is its middle name.

Over the past three months, Juliet Brown and I have been meeting with area physicians – including some of the leading black doctors in Richmond who were so instrumental in Community’s success – to talk about ways in which Bon Secours can broaden and strengthen RCH’s service to the community, and explore ideas on broadening that community. And while the outcomes of our work are for the leadership at RCH to discuss and share, it is exciting that much of what the physician community already sees in RCH mirrors what the hospital’s staff has worked hard to create.

For us, this has been exactly the sort of engagement we love – one which gives the Floricane team space to facilitate meaningful, actionable conversations that position groups of people to create a strong future together.

We can’t wait to see the future Richmond Community Hospital emerge from the heart of Church Hill.

Evening at Mortons: Exploring Richmond’s Neighborhoods

The second Evening at Morton’s discussion was held in April with a stellar panel representing a variety of Richmond neighborhoods and professions – and all focused on the changing character of the places many in Richmond call home.

The Evening at Morton’s discussions usually bring 5-6 people together over dinner to discuss topics of interest or importance to the broader community. I facilitate the discussion, which is “live blogged” and “live tweeted” for people to follow in-the-moment or after-the-fact; there’s also an audio recording, which is usually made available within a few days. The media sponsor for the series is Richmond.com, and they have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of advance reporting and live coverage of the discussions.

In fact, Richmond.com’s Karri Peifer did such a great job of capturing the neighborhood discussion, that I’ll just let her take it from here. You can read her whole summary at Richmond.com or go read through the live blog transcript. Here’s a taste of the conversation:

The fantastic panel, comprised of realtors, a school board member, a historian and the city's Director of Community Development, brought in voices from all over the city's distinct neighborhoods and by the end of the two hour dinner conversation, which was broadcasted online, one thing was certain: two hours isn't nearly enough time to cover Richmond's neighborhoods.

From moderator, Floricane founder and Northside resident John Sarvay's opening question, asking the panelists to name their favorite neighborhood, it was clear that there's plenty to love about the neighborhoods of Richmond.

Whether it's the spirit of community in the East End, as Don Coleman, Richmond School Board member and life-long East End resident noted; access to a yard, parks, and the river that Jeffrey Ruggles, Curator of Prints and Photographs of the Virginia Historical Society cherishes about his Woodland Heights neighborhood; the diversity in Battery Park that Chris Hilbert, Ginter Park resident and 3rd District City Councilman, loves; or admiration for the civic and community activism that helped to revitalize Richmond's Neighborhoods in Bloom, that Rachel Flynn, Director of Community Development for the City of Richmond and Manchester resident, mentioned, this panel was clearly passionate about their city.

"We are running out of neighborhoods to discover," said Chris Small, owner and principal broker for Small & Associates Real Estate. "All of our neighborhoods have so much potential and so much going for them now."

For Rick Jarvis, owner of One South Realty Group, Virginia Commonwealth University deserves much of the credit for the recent progress and success of the city, though he thinks "without the economic downturn, we might be farther along."

Jarvis also noted that though the areas east of Belvidere have historically struggled, people who have lived in that area for a long time call the improvements "amazing."

The panel cited both First Fridays and Lift Coffeeshop as examples of things headed in the right direction in that area.

Overall, though, for the panel, the key to any current or future success for Richmond is entirely connected to community – to Richmonders themselves being involved and committed to their city.

As usual, the conversation went where it needed to go – my primary job was to make sure the participants all had an opportunity to engage, and that the conversation maintained momentum. And – as usual – the conversation consistently turned back to the idea of community, and its importance.

The next Evening at Morton’s discussion will be held in June.

Join Richmond’s Innovation Celebration on May 19

Hot on the heels of last month’s Creativity Forum featuring Dan Pink comes another Richmond first – focused on innovation in business.

The May 19 innovation event was born from the intersection of history, community and consulting – with a splash of passion and exuberanc e – when conversations between three of Richmond’s “big idea” guys turned into Richmond’s Innovation Celebration.

“It was through conversations with Mark Brady of Alchemy and Bill Martin at the Valentine that sparked this for me,” says Gayle Turner of Catch Your Limit Consulting. “Bill said that we’re not doing a good job – period – of selling the value of creativity and innovation in Richmond. And then Mark came along and pointed out that we keep searching for a national identity… but we continue to be a center that not only cranks out new ideas but also people who do things differently.”

Gayle took those powerful kernels into a discussion with Sara Dunnigan at the Greater Richmond Partnership. One thing led to another, and soon Gayle and Sara found themselves sitting with Ken Kahn of VCU’s da Vinci Center for Innovation and Andrew LeVasseur of the Virginia Productivity Improvement Fund creating an event centered on innovation.

Participants will spend a day not just discussing how innovation happens, but identifying all of the places throughout the Richmond region where it is already happening.

While there will be a handful of speakers throughout the day sharing ideas and perspectives, Gayle insists that it is the small group conversations that will make the day hum.

“We’re going to ask people to talk about what they are doing within their own organizations to foster innovation," Gayle says. "We’re going to ask them what they are seeing in the region, and who is really making a difference.”

Sara Dunnigan will speak to participants about a new tool to measure and monitor innovation across the region.

“One of the places that inspired us was Maine, which identified the things they felt are crucial for innovation in their state,” Gayle says. “What can we find that we’re doing well, but can do more of or pay more attention to around Richmond? Let’s start measuring those things, and let’s test them. If they make a difference, continue them. If not, do something else.”

One paradigm shift organizers are hoping to help create is one where the Richmond region not only begins to see the innovation right under its nose, but to support and encourage it.

“We do a lot of new things worthy of recognition in Richmond, but we don’t seem to acknowledge them,” Gayle says.

The May 19 Richmond Innovation Celebration may play a role in changing that. Registration for the event is open to the public, and details on the speakers and day’s agenda are on the website.

Five Minutes on Innovation with Tom Silvestri

Tom Silvestri became president and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2005 as technology was forcing the newspaper industry to begin thinking seriously about change and innovation. That process was accelerated by the economic recession, and by Silvestri’s own ideas about the relationship between innovation and business. I sat down with Silvestri earlier in April to discuss his views on innovation.

What Richmond Needs Now

It came up at a Greater Richmond Chamber HYPE (Helping Young Professionals Engage) night where they invited me to talk about community and leadership topics. It was really a fun exchange. Somebody asked me, "What does Richmond need," and I had a one word answer, "Innovation." I told them how important they were to the community because innovation feeds off of energy and off of ideas.

Innovation Is A Process, Not An Activity< br />When you get innovation, you’re eager to do it. The first thing you do is set up a summit or a meeting or website. You’re eager to orchestrate this because you’re so excited, but Andy Stevanovich’s [a Richmond-based consultant] three-step process really captured it for me. He put “innovation” on the back-end; he put “ideas” on the front-end; and between the two, he inserted “process.” And you could actually cross process out and put “creativity.” That just said a lot – that to get to innovation, you have to go through a creative process or a period of creativity.

For a mature business, really looking at your processes and how you get stuff done and converting that into creativity is huge, because it becomes cathartic. From the business side, the instinct is to slap a return on investment on that idea. And that usually bleeds the creativity out of it, so there’s no place to flourish it. But if you send it through a creative process, the chances of going through innovation, of testing and trying it out, of conviction and encouragement are all there.

Very few things are profitable at the gate. You’ve died and gone to Heaven, if you find the open space, you have an idea that’s good enough, people are coming in droves and you have money coming out the ying-yang. But that’s a rare occasion. So you have to find innovation that pays for itself. That’s really tough.

Practice Makes Perfect

The first business is to anticipate. You have to practice anticipating to get good at innovation. That is really hard. How do you anticipate? You guess – fiction is anticipation, research can point you, conversations can anticipate.

Anticipation is the greatest sign to the open space where nobody is. But it’s not like you come out of the woods into an open space and you wonder, “How did I get here?” You’ve actually plotted to get there by anticipating. You’ve discovered it.

The next order of business is collaboration. Individually, you can come up with the idea, but that only makes you an inventor. It doesn’t make you an innovator, because an innovator always needs somebody else. So you move from anticipation to collaboration.

And then you have to move quickly to execution, because nobody is excited by all theory. Business people ask what you’re going to do with it. The community goes, “Huh?” And your family wants to know where the money is. So you have to execute it.

This notion of anticipate, collaborate, execute becomes a Wheel of Fortune that you’re constantly spinning. It becomes the basis for your innovation, because then you have to innovate again and you have to lock in that something good actually happened.

If you anticipate, you change the conversation and people start looking forward. And if you collaborate, then you have a place for the conversation to go. And when you execute, you get something done.

How to Get Started...

Innovation literature abounds. It’s all around us.

Here’s what I would do. I would alternate what you really want to do and read something you have no interest in.

For example, the videos from the TED conference. I try to watch one a day. There’s no practical reason for me to listen a 20 minute video about surgical checklists, but the whole conference is about thinking differently and innovation. I find that information fascinating.

I think you have to read history. You don’t have to be a history major. I started to read biographies of presidents, and when you get into them you find out how fallible they were, how crazy the time was, how personalities collided, how things got done. Read histories about your hometown -- you get this new wave of innovation, thinking and thought leaders, but you get it from an historical perspective.

I don’t think you can learn creativity from a workshop.

If you’re interested in it, you’ll always find a way. If you’re not interested, you’ll never do it. So why make the disinterested part of it? Although they play a key role; in fact, they may be the best executors.

I mix my reading up -- business books, history books, magazines. I find myself reading things I never would have read just to understand the patterns of thought.

Who Hid Workplace Motivation? It Lies Within.

If you live in Richmond, and you attended Dan Pink's lecture at the University of Richmond in early April, this PBS NewsHour piece by economics reporter Paul Solmon does an excellent job of walking you through one of Pink's key points about motivation. If you didn't attend Pink's lecture, the nine-minute video segment is a reasonably good substitute for what was an exceptionally good morning.

In a nutshell, Pink uses several decades of solid research to demonstrate that money is not the great motivator. Money matters. We need it to live, and most employees want to see it distributed in two ways – fairly (no huge pay discrepencies from worker to worker) and reasonably (as in "enough money to live reasonably well"). The companies who understand some of the deeper drivers for solid performance are doing things a little differently, Solmon reports.

In Pink's new book "Drive" he makes a compelling case that the three biggest drivers for performance (at work and in life) are autonomy (give me some freedom of choice), mastery (help me get better) and purpose (remind me that my work matters). I think there are a couple of additional drivers, but I wholeheartedly agree with Pink's premise.