Podcast - Kate Tribe

Hello and welcome to Telstra's innovation podcasts. A series of conversations with innovators in business and government. In this podcast this is Hugh liney talking to Kate Tribe who's head of Tribe Research.

Hugh Liney:  Firstly Kate, lets talk about driving change, which is important for every business organisation and you use the phrase; by exploring your tribe and uncovering their views, tell us about this?

Kate Tribe:  One of the things I think that I see with research is a lot of people see it as a one step thing, that you go and survey a whole lot of people, analyse the results, and then it either sits there on a shelf and doesn't get utilised so it's not driving change, or it still becomes a stagnant process and so I think you need to see researchers going in and exploring people views. So that you can then uncover them, you can then drive change in the organisation, you then need to go and communicate that back to your stakeholders, say thankyou for your participation, really appreciate it, this is how we've driven change as a result. Now we want to ask questions again as a result, and then you can keep going around in that cycle. and so I really see research as an expedition that doesn't get a final point, you keep exploring more and more.

 

Hugh Liney:  Okay that's a nice way of putting it. And one of the interests that we have in this series of podcasts is innovation and resulting processes that end up with a more innovative culture in organisations. Now have you got some advice on, just some ideas on how to generally build a more innovative culture in business and in Australian business?

 

Kate Tribe:  I believe a lot of it is just actually asking people of all levels what their views are and what their inputs are. I went to a great seminar once when someone was talking about involving people from all layers of an organisation and you really need to have even the cleaners there and the factory workers there and she had pulled everyone into a room and she said; 'what can we change in this organisation to make it better?' and there was silence over the room where everyone was too afraid to put their hand up and a few people started talking, all the managers at the front, and then right at the back   someone put their hand up and they said 'does it matter that the fork lift truck's brakes don’t work?' and she talked about how that would have never come out unless they had actually tried to engage everyone and to create change  you really need to empower everyone at every level, not hand pick out special people.

Hugh Liney:  Good point. And also more specifically tell us the further specific strategies about building some innovative culture. For instance I know that you have observed some work on Internet or Intranet forums.

 

Kate Tribe:  Yes Internet forums and intranets are really useful because you can allow everyone to put their ideas forward in a slightly more anonymous way. One of the things we also do is we have a wiki instead of paper based procedures, and because of that whenever someone finds something new they can adjust the wiki to say a new way to do this is possibly to do it this way, and I can then get the feed so if it's really wrong, I can sit down with them and I can say 'Ahh no actually that's interesting that you put that up there it shows that you are on the wrong track, lets talk about that.' Sometimes I get the feeds coming through and I think, 'that’s a brilliant idea I would have never thought of doing it that way it's much easier, it's much more streamlined', so we can still keep the quality control because I can still check it, but everyone is empowered to add their own ideas and add their input.

 

Hugh Liney:  That’s a nice thing, are there any other strategies for you while you're on roll like that.

 

Kate Tribe:  I think number one is, job titles to tack people down, we actually call all our staff very ad hoc names and it's along that exploring theme, so we call our casual staff explorers, my project manager is called discoverer, in the business I'm called the change driver, our admin marketing people are called mappers, our work experience are scouts. And the thinking is that often job titles can block people into a certain way of thinking they can say well I don’t add input into that area, that’s not my area, because I'm just a project manager or I'm just and admin person and often ideas can cross across areas because you can see flow on impact from some other area.

 

Hugh Liney:  Alright but you are suggesting that people can perhaps during the workshop process change their business titles or just drop their business titles.

 

Kate Tribe:  Yes absolutely.

 

Hugh Liney:  Now there a couple pf softwares that you do recommend, firstly you call it part of your tribal toolkit tells us about Cloud Maker.

 

Kate Tribe:  So Cloud Maker's the first tool that we developed as part of tribal toolkit and my whole thinking behind tribal toolkit is that research needs to be seen visually for a whole section of the population to understand it and Cloud Maker creates word clouds where words that don’t have as higher frequency are smaller and words with a higher frequency are bigger. so one really easy way that you can use is you can send out a survey that says when you think of this brand or this organisation what three words come to mind.  And then people can put in just the first three words that come to mind, in the three separate spaces and then you can get a cloud. And the cloud can then be a basis for you to look at and say wow we really like those words. 'Let's put them in our marketing and say this is what comes to people's minds,' and also it’s a good check that your marketing matches with what you're thinking. And then you can have words you don’t want there and you can then go and do further research and exploration knowing why those words are there and what you can do to remove them from peoples thinking when they think about your organisation.

Hugh Liney:  that's a very interesting research tool also you’ve got one called Action Map?

 

Kate Tribe:  So Action Map is completely different but similar in a sense that it's also a visual tool. And what it does is, Action Map looks at both satisfaction and importance when you are getting feedback from a group of stakeholders, a lot of people only ask for satisfaction when they are getting feedback and it's only horizontal platform so if you then go promote all the things that have high satisfaction and start doing business development on all the things that have low satisfaction, you are not considering whether those things are important or not.  So it maps it out onto a square grid. So that what's high importance and high satisfaction you can be marketing, what's low satisfaction and high importance you can be doing business planning on and then those that are low importance probably you don’t need to be investing much into them anymore.

 

Hugh Liney:  Gee that’s also an interesting program and are those softwares available just for your tribe research to use or are these available for companies to use as well?

 

Kate Tribe:  No anyone can go to the website and set up their own account you just go to tribal toolkit com when you set up your own account you get three Cloud Maker credits and that allows you to use some of the functionality within Cloud Maker and then you can buy extra credits and then also with Action Map you can set up a survey and then you by it online when you set your survey up.

 

Hugh Liney:  Ok and that seems a good way to get research implementation.

Kate Tribe:  Absolutely.

 

Hugh Liney:  Look finally Kate, the matter of mentoring comes up in our discussions often. Now for top business achievers in Australia, what are your thoughts and what can be learned from mentors and the importance of them in the workplace and life experience?

Kate Tribe:  I think mentors can provide two main functions, one they can take away the loneliness you sometimes face issues and problems and you think you're the only person in the world that has ever encountered that and it's only when you sit down with someone you can openly express with you can discover that actually, no, you're not alone there and they’ve probably gone through a similar thing, or something they can talk to you about. And also a mentor is great for stretching you, you'll often look at the world and go this is the only way I can deal with this and they will often say have you considered this? Have you considered that?  You might still go the path you originally were going to go on, but at least you are open to looking at other areas.

Hugh Liney:  Okay, Kate Tribe on that positive note of mentoring, thank you very much.

Kate Tribe:  Thank you.

 

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