Pathways to Excellence: Harnessing Creativity in Your Career. Insights from Ruth Stanley.

Have you ever wondered how unleashing your creativity can lead to excellence in your professional life? Ruth Stanley joins us to unravel the threads between ingenuity and superior performance, sharing her transformative leap from government technical writing to inspiring authorship. Her latest collaborative effort, "Your Creativity Sprint," serves as a beacon for those seeking to spark their creative flames. As we traverse her personal narrative, we unlock powerful insights into how we can all imagine—and ultimately create—a better world through persistent innovation and the pursuit of excellence.

This episode is far from just another conversation; it's a gateway to redefining the way we think about creativity and its role across all professions. Ruth highlights the path to communicating complex ideas with simplicity and empathy. She demonstrates that striving for excellence is not just a lofty ideal but a practical approach to uplift our work and the world around us.  Tune in and take a step towards your own journey of habitual excellence.

Chapters

• 0:13 Excellence Models
• 16:25 Creativity and Excellence in Professional Development
• 22:30 Embracing Excellence Through Creative Ideas

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Excellence Foresight Podcast. I'm your host, nancy Noemi. I'm a cultural transformation and organizational excellence consultant, technical leadership coach and a mentor, and my passion has been to make excellence an everyday habit, and my podcast is about practices that matters to improve performance now and to build a better tomorrow for people and organizations they work in. Today's episode is a guest episode, and I'm so pleased to welcome Ruth Stanley to continue an engaging discussion in the sphere of creativity and excellence. Today's episode is on excellence models from compliance to creativity. So let me start by introducing Ruth. Ruth is a former Canadian public servant with over 20 years of experience in excellence frameworks. With over 20 years of experience in excellence frameworks, she co-authored your Creativity Sprint and she's a host of the podcast BOAN Imagination, flow and Creativity. And I'll leave it to Ruth now to tell you a little bit more about yourself. So, ruth, welcome and the floor is yours.

Speaker 2: 1:19

I've always been a creative person, spending so many years in the public service. I had a professor say to me once Ruth, you've been in government far too long, you cannot write anymore. And I thought to myself what I've always been writing Technical writing, standard operating procedures, policies, reports finding that information that I could bring together in a meaningful way. What do you mean?

Speaker 1: 1:57

I cannot write.

Speaker 2: 1:58

So this was like a red flag to a bull and I said to myself how can I challenge myself, how can I begin to write differently and find that descriptive button that I was missing? So that prompted me to start to write different blogs. And then, finally, two books that were very personal to me, about my father and honoring the impact that he made in his world. They're called A Different Type of Bombshell and Ballads. Bombshells and Brotherhood.

Speaker 1: 2:40

I think, ruth, you focused a lot, I think, on creativity in your last book and I think that by itself is a testimonial of the creative part in you, and I think writing it requires a lot of creativity but it also requires a lot of I mean. It's a process right, where you work on getting information, putting it forward for people and making it useful, and I think your latest book is a testimonial to that. You co-authored that book and I had the privilege to read it initially and I think it provides a lot of value for people and that's really a creative way of writing it right. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about it, about its parts, how it's a little bit the format, because I felt it's really something unique that you put out forward for people, thank you. The format, because I felt it's really something unique that you put out forward for people, thank you.

Speaker 2: 3:26

So how we put it together was we put it together together and the process that we used was a process that we learned from one of our co-authors learned from one of our co-authors, dwight Paulus. He lives the Anishinaabe way. He's an Indigenous man and he told us about learning from his perspective is that you look to what people have done before so you find out a little bit about a subject and then it's for you to make that learning your own. So that's what we did with the book. We did a bit of a literature search on creativity and what are some of the themes that came forward, and then we thought about what those themes might mean or where we might see those themes in our own lives or in things that we've written or seen, written or heard or experienced.

Speaker 2: 4:38

And then the final stage in this learning framework that we were privileged to take part in was the responsibility to allow other people to learn in their own way. So that's what we did. We thought how can we make this learning about creativity real for someone that they can try it for themselves? So we came up with these uh challenges and there were. I should remember this, I think there were 35 challenges, so that was the equivalent of about five weeks of challenges. The idea was to push yourself in different ways, the ways that make you human, your sense of your environment in a physical sense, your different thinking styles, emotions, how you relate to other people and maybe even a sense of your own spirituality that's amazing, rusan.

Speaker 1: 5:49

You're talking about learning. You're talking about a lot of things that we teach when we talk about excellence and developing right people to perform better and working with organizations to adopt excellence frameworks and you have worked with excellence frameworks. So my question to you now do you believe in pursuing excellence, and where does excellence stand in what you're doing?

Speaker 2: 6:13

Absolutely. That's what makes us human. As human, we dream, we plan for a better world. It's a gift that we have that we can actually imagine what life could look like Just by acting differently. Thinking differently, engaging differently with our world gives us a reason for being, I guess.

Speaker 1: 6:42

Exactly, and I think when in some of the frameworks and the excellence principles, we focus on seeking perfection and that gives us a drive to keep doing things differently and doing things better and making things in a way which is and here I think creativity comes in doing things really differently and looking at things from a different perspective to make them better and looking at things from a different perspective to make them better. So I think that's really I mean falls into what creativity and excellence could be doing, I mean well together and serving the organizations. Just from your professional or personal experience, can you share an example where you've witnessed the power of harnessing good habits and excellence practices? Have you been and potentially, have you tested that, or maybe on a personal level?

Speaker 2: 7:30

I was involved for about 20 years in something called the Management Accountability Framework. It was something that was modeled on the Baldrige Excellence Model. It was rather interesting. The idea behind it was to make time for improvement projects. Rather than just going with your ongoing operations that you should make time for and think about improvement projects.

Speaker 2: 8:07

What first started was it was very prescriptive, and so it was the annual fiction that you would spend about three weeks and just ramming away to get a particular document made and then you would breathe a sigh of relief, put it on the shelf and not look at it for another year, hoping that something happened during the year that you could talk about. And it was so very rigid. It was more of a compliance attitude. It's you have to have this particular document. Didn't matter if you looked at it. As long as you had it, it was perfect. And there was a growing realization that with that attitude, it was more of a gaming the system how can we get this done as quickly as we can? It has no relation to what we're doing at all, but we did what we were expected to do.

Speaker 2: 9:08

And so there was a Pick the box right, yeah, pick the box, yeah. And there was a growing recognition that context was very important to this process. Not only context, but also that it had to be something that continued. There's no point in having a document if you never looked at it, if it wasn't part of your operations. You weren't actually moving forward and it took a few years for that understanding to happen, few years for that understanding to happen. And at the same time, I was also involved in looking at how to integrate ISO standards into what we were doing. And it was the same kind of thing very prescriptive, and I've seen that there has been an evolution to have it more principle-based and less well. You have to have this specific document where people actually use the standards as a way of being and a starting point. We have this and now what? And for me, that and now what is the flexibility that we need to start creating and doing things differently.

Speaker 1: 10:46

I think this is a great answer with you, and things have evolved and we've seen in the past 10, 12 years that the standards themselves have evolved. Their structure is different. Their focus is, while they're still focusing on the core compliance areas, they want really a change in behavior. They want to change in the way things are done and implemented in organizations. Adopting standards and adopting excellence frameworks is helping organizations do things differently and transform, in a way, the way people are performing in those organizations, and that's a critical area.

Speaker 1: 11:21

I think we move from just ticking boxes, like we said, to really making sure that these practices are part of the day-to-day operations and they're part of the habits of people, and there's a focus on continuous improvement and, like you said, continuous improvement it's critical when it's really part of the day-to-day operation. If it is something we do just like an initiative once a month, it's not going to yield the results we were hoping to get. So thank you very much for this answer and I think it's a great example. What other key lessons or insights did you gain or did you experience that you believe are valuable for others to adopt when they're looking to continuously improve Any practices that you've been following or you've experienced in your work?

Speaker 2: 12:09

This is something that has evolved in my thinking since I started the Bowen podcasts. I was looking into what creativity means in different circumstances and for different people, and there have been a couple of things that came out of this. One of them wasn't something someone said, but it was something I started to understand is that when you want to have excellence, it's not just one thing, it's multifaceted. And one day I was looking at a picture of a fly specifically the fly's eyes and it just hit me is that when you're looking at excellence, you need to take a fly's eye view of things. So just if you think about a fly's eye, it has many lenses and they see things completely different all at the same time.

Speaker 2: 13:27

So when we want to have excellence, we can't just focus on one thing. We have to take a fly's eye view of our organization and what we're doing to see what are all of the different aspects of excellence. So that's one thing that I realized, and the other was that it doesn't have to be those big, momentous things that we do. It can be the smaller things. It can be the smaller things, and I just spoke to someone this week and he made such an impact on me. He said it's make yourself uncomfortable, put yourself in uncomfortable situations and intentionally look for those moments of grace. I thought, wow, how could I say it any differently? And what I got from those moments of grace is it has to be impactful, it has to mean something to you, and that you can take a fly's eye view and find impact and meaning in the smallest of things.

Speaker 1: 14:59

This is great, it's amazing, I think. Thoughts, ruth, and I think when we get out of our comfort zone, this is where we can really test ourselves, this, our limits, and see what we can do, and we could be really amazed by the outcome. And many times we surprise ourselves right when we find out um, when we find new ideas, when we come up with, you know, unique things, and I think that's where I think making people realize that they can do more and can do things differently is very important, and I like the idea of the fly um because absolutely, I mean we need to look at excellence from different, different angles and I thought that I agree with you is sometimes the small things can make a big difference. So I think these are great messages for our audience. Thank you very much for this.

Speaker 1: 15:48

I just want to go back a little bit to your creativity book and the work you've done on creativity, and we say sometimes creativity is usually connected to art and innate talent, and your book talks a lot about those. I mean the third-track challenges and how can we develop creativity. Can you share with our audience one or two things maybe to convince them that they can develop their own creativity moving?

Speaker 2: 16:13

forward Absolutely. Creativity is in our DNA. We are creative beings. It's not just about being able to play the violin or become the next Leonardo da Vinci. It's about tapping into insights, new ideas, new processes, even new relationships. And it's asking ourselves how do I translate what's in my head to the world and how do I make it real for other people? What insights am I getting from my senses, from different modes of thinking or ways of knowing? How can I interact or engage with people differently? It's about just thinking and acting differently. It's no more than that, and one of my podcasts people said it's not. What is creativity? Where is creativity? And it can be anywhere. Doesn't matter which profession it is. Whether you are old or young, or smart or or otherwise, there's always something that will strike you where it makes you stop and think differently or pushes you to act different.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Absolutely. I think we sometimes we don't know the, we don't put the right expectations behind that Right, so we expect to do really big things, break through changes, break through ideas, to be able to say we're creative. But I think creativity is simpler than that and it's like you said, it's available in everything we're doing and we can be creative in everything we're doing. In everything we're doing and we can be creative in everything we're doing. And that's why I think, when we talk about quality and excellence as quality professionals sometimes because we work a lot in SOPs and documents and stuff and writing these kind of things, which sometimes are a little bit dry topics and people don't like to get engaged in we feel we're not great people, like you know, working in quality and excellence. But do you believe quality and excellence professionals can be creative like everybody else?

Speaker 2: 19:10

Just think about your relationships with the people that you are working with with excellence models. It is absolutely creative. When you try to talk to someone who doesn't understand what you're saying, it makes you pull back and go. Oh, how else can I explain this? How can I light a fire under them? Can I explain this? How can I light a fire under them? How can I get them to see that this is a good thing? You stop, you reflect, you pivot, you try another way. How can that not be creative?

Speaker 1: 19:57

Absolutely. I think it's very well put, ruth. Part of communication also is being creative in the way you pass on messages. You're looking at the people around and how to make sure that they understand what you're saying, how to put it for them. Your example of all the flies is a great example. So I think you're giving us here great examples of creativity during this podcast, and I think you're giving us here great examples of creativity during this podcast, and I think everyone can develop those skills and talents by learning certain, I think, ways of doing that. So, ruth, with this we come almost to the end of the episode today and we wanted to talk about excellence models from compliance to creativity. I want to give you the last minute If you'd like to share anything else that we haven't covered in the previous questions, to share with our audience today from your experience on creativity and excellence models.

Speaker 2: 20:51

This is again. This has been a great week for me. This is something that I had understood, that excellence and creativity involves being both intentional but also very generous. Generous with yourself, allowing yourself to be imperfect. Generous in that you're sharing something of yourself with the world, and every time you put something out there that's a little different, you're actually engaging in a very generous act. Excellence also is generous by its very nature, in that you are striving for the betterment of whomever, whether it's your clients, your suppliers, customers, or even a better world. So it is for me. It's an act of generosity.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Again, this is really a very creative way of putting your thoughts, your thoughts out. Truth. I I like the fact that this is. We're talking about generosity here. You talk about empathy. It's about people, right, don't you talk about? Creativity is about people. Excellence is about people. Uh, we do put systems in place, we do work on procedures, hardcore technical stuff, but if we don't really look at the people involved in this and making sure that we provide them the best and we facilitate also a, an environment where they can be their best, I think we'll be missing a lot.

Speaker 1: 22:30

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with our audience today. Thank you very much for um, for these creative ideas, for the. I like really the way you put things forward and I think that shows a nice side of creativity in you. Ruth, I've known you for many years. We've worked together as an ASQ, as as servant member leaders, but I think this is a nice, is a new also facet that I see in what you're doing and how you do things. So again, thank you very much for being with us here today. For our audience, I say please engage with us, be part of the Excellence Foresight community and stay tuned for our next episode We'll be starting to talk about atomic habits for excellence and how practically we can develop excellence habits. Thank you for joining us. Thank you again, ruth, and let's make excellence a habit and shape a better future together. Thank you, it was a pleasure.