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Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters. Thank you for joining us today at the Culture Shift Podcast. I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Today we will be talking to creative economist Neil Ramsay about the role of creativity in shifting education businesses, organizations, and the economy. Here at Culture Shift Agency, we are looking to understand new ways of thinking so we can all play an active role in creating positive culture shift. By positive we mean moving towards a more balanced, fair, loving, evolving existence. With that, we welcome Neil Ramsay. So welcome to the Culture Shift Podcast. We are very happy to have Neil Ramsay. Neil Ramsay is a creative economist, so I wanted to bring him on to talk about what it's like to work with institutions and businesses that are traditional and what it's like to break these organizations open and help them to find new ways of thinking so that they can shift their cultures and be better at what they do. So thank you so much for making time for this.
Neil Ramsay:
Absolutely.
Martha Williams:
I'd love to hear about your journey and how you got to be what you call a creative economist and then talk a little bit about what is a creative economist.
Neil Ramsay:
My background is quite varied. I pursued a very omnivorous set of interests. It was a nonlinear approach to say how I got to this point as my background is business, economics and finance,
Martha Williams:
I just want to just chime in because I feel like we, you know, we used to live in a world of what, what do you do? And I feel like we're moving a little bit into a world of how do you do what you do.
Neil Ramsay:
Yeah, what do you do? Well, part of how I got here is like, I can't stand that question. I don't think it's relevant. It's signaling and this an investigation for compartmentalization and that exists for certain reasons because we're in systems that are heavily dependent on othering, which I'll talk about later. Perhaps it's really, please tell me what box you fit in. And hopefully if I understand that box, then I will understand you. So it's really a shortcut. It's not really an interest in who you are. It's just really more of a, let me find out what you can possibly mean or do for me. And that's where the, what do you do comes and that's, that's just my opinion. I mean, it's gotten a lot to with, it's rapidly finding out social status by finding out your one's usefulness to someone else and things of that nature. It's a very transactional question. It's not a human question. It's a, it's a transactional question.
Martha Williams:
Yes. So from this, you called yourself or you call yourself a creative economist. What are you, what projects are you working on? That will help us understand more clearly what it is that you do. Seeing that what you do is how you do it, you know, so, but what is the context for you practicing these ways of thinking?
Neil Ramsay:
I don't separate many things from a way of being. So I think perhaps for the best, if the best way for you or your listeners to understand that my approach, it's my, it's a way of being, as a creative economist to just get to your question. I'm economics, art and education. So I came from a background of working with early stage companies. I'm working with entrepreneurs, which let's say I find them find that, you know, an entrepreneur is a very interesting person. Entrepreneurs are very, very different usually in my experience from a corporate manager, right. And an entrepreneur's way of being is often such that they hate the role of a corporate manager. The really truly good ones know sort of when to exit or to pass the baton, because it usually signals success and then they have to pass the Baton to that type of person.
Neil Ramsay:
So now you know, that's, and the reason I mentioned that is because my way of being my being is stems from curiosity. I'm very curious about the way of things. Okay. And from an early stage on, from these places that sort of satiates the reason of many hats is because I look at the entire system. I'm a lateral thinker, so, and I enjoy that perspective of flying at 30, 40, 50,000 feet and taking a look and then looking at systems and networks. So as a creative economist, I'm economics, art and education and my lens is economics. My method is, as an artist and my distribution channel is education. So it's trans-disciplinary. Each informs the other, informs the other end of my course design and teaching and advising. And currently I am a visiting faculty at FIU in residence co-designing their art and design incubator.
Neil Ramsay:
We're sitting in right now and taking art space creatives through entrepreneurial real practices. So I'm on a team of, there's three of us in total. We're solving for the deficit of art school for artists that choose to be working artists, but not only via the gallery or museum options. So we're changing the paradigm, because it is not a lecture, it is not textbooks. It is experiential, immersive real practices. I work with decision makers directors and founders and I'm helping push the process of solution focused ideating, strategy, implementation and differentiation. But predominantly I hold the viewpoint of external examining, internal looking outward, kind of like looking in a mirror. And you will, for example, organizational culture. I'll give you a very concrete example. Especially university institutions are bureaucratic entities and entrepreneurial activity exists on the other side of the spectrum. So it's oil and water.
Neil Ramsay:
So you can take, they can teach it, they can talk about it from a textbook, but when you're trying, when you're attempting to create a real practice experience of what it means to be on, this is what I'm saying, I focus on being an entrepreneur. And that's quite different than reading about being an entrepreneur. That is where these realizations come and that's where you have to, that's where we have to manage that. And it's bridging really spaces that are often antagonistic, but the aim is for shifts and positive shifts. You've got a lot of, there's a lot of questioning and there's a lot of ah-has and that's the goal because we are in a world of specialization and I respect that and there's a lot of specialists, but in specialization also means there's, it's very siloed. There's lack of exposure to anything that exists outside of that specialization. The realization is, or what occurs is that I've never seen it from that perspective. I've never been able to think from that way. You know, one of the things I say is if you want to scare a manager to death, show up as a creative.
Martha Williams:
Makes sense. Managers never really liked me.
Neil Ramsay:
I don't want to generalize them all. I don't want to put them all in the bag.
Martha Williams:
Out of the ideas that you're swimming in, what in your experience has the most impact in terms of shifting people and possibly shifting a culture or culture in a bigger way?
Neil Ramsay:
Relationships.
Martha Williams:
Okay. Tell me more.
Neil Ramsay:
Where do you see the most shift or the most change? And that's the ability to build relationship because it takes a lot of trust. It takes a lot of trust. It's not easy and it's risk. Creativity is risk, right? And the two cannot be separated. Business operates from a place of mitigating risks. So it's not alarming to me or, or anything that absolute creativity I call it doesn't bode well. And organizational structures. Yeah. So I call it absolute.
Martha Williams:
Is that an emergency fire drill that's coming?
Neil Ramsay:
I've been here three years and never had this. No. It's because there are gun shooters and more sorts of things happening, so now we have a lot of emergency fire.
Martha Williams:
What should we do? Should we just wait? I don’t know. How long do you think it will be?
Neil Ramsay:
This is new to me as it is to you. We're going through this experience together. This is very apropos for a topic.
Martha Williams:
How is it apropos in your mind?
Neil Ramsay:
Uncertainty and this is why we don't see absolute creativity often thriving within structures, this level of size and operation because you just can't have people running around being creative. Well that's what I'm saying. It's a myth everyone running around since that night I made it sound ridiculous, but if it was everybody running around being creative, solving problems, that sounds really good. It's how you speak about it in a perspective in which you shine a light on it. And when I talk about absolute creativity or I talk about artists, I can talk about them as problem solvers and as problem solvers and having perspectives and ways of viewing things and doing it in practice is often considered too high of a cost, too many operational structures.
Martha Williams:
So there's two things. First of all, if this kind of creative thinking became normal, what do you think things would look like? That's one question. The other is in your experience, what is the cost of creative thinking inside of organizations?
Neil Ramsay:
The costs? Well, it exists. It exist predominantly in research and development and research and development is from a financial management point of view. From a CFO point of view, from a controller's point of view, that's a very expensive proposition. Right? Because you are experimenting, right? We'll use the word experimenting. Uyou are having controlled risks situations in your basically setting up the structure that has a high prospect of failures and it's actually designed to get through as many failures as possible to hopefully find something that works. So within an organization that is really expensive.
Martha Williams:
So you can't even take those creative thinking risks because it's too expensive to take those risks.
Neil Ramsay:
Absolutely. And that's one of the factors of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Being able to fail is a privilege, but that's, that's, that's just follow through on this because what's important now, ok, I just said, okay, well research and development is really sort of the unit within the business structure that was typically charged with holding risks. What's occurring is that type of thinking is occurring within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And then if they achieve some form of traction or success or that thought to approach solving this market problem, then the bigger institution can simply acquire it. So the research and development and that creativity has been outsourced. I address it from the education point of view or address it from people young and early in the, in their, in their journey point of view. I address it from those who are mature and, and afraid of risk point of view. All right? It's, it's, it's a multilateral approach.
Martha Williams:
If you could amplify any one of your ideas, into the popular culture, what, what would you choose?
Neil Ramsay:
I am you. If people recognize people and could see and think, I am you. I think that's what I would choose. We're busy defining how, what is other, all I'm saying is that this interconnectivity, there's things are connected. It's the othering is the attempt to dismantle or to not recognize the connection. This is why I say "I am you" right? If we took "I am you" and applied that to technology, that will address inclusivity, that we'll start to address diversity that will dissolve to address a lot of things in technology and design. Simply design. Right.
Martha Williams:
Makes sense. And I like that statement. I am you, it's very simple. I think very, very gettable. But I think part of what drives all the zero sum race to the top is our economic system. It's about kind of one-upping and gaining. It's about being on top. So is there something we can do to make a difference towards world that's more inclusive and creative?
Neil Ramsay:
Well I'm going to stress "I am you." Everything's connected. So if you're a root cause, if a root cause is the inability to even see and see an other or difference as "I am you" or even to be able to approach it that way. "I Am you." You put that in architecture, put that in technology, put that in politics, put that in philanthropy, put that in health, put that in the home. "I Am." You put that in our social systems, transportation systems. Just put that method of being and thinking "I am you." And if we can do that, it will change how we design.
Martha Williams:
Well I was going to ask you sort of, I want winding down and I was going to ask you one last question. If you could make your ideas bigger and have a bigger impact, what would that look like for you?
Neil Ramsay:
It would be an Institute of connectivity. That's what my idea is. Bigger would look like an Institute of connectivity from the premise that we have all the solutions to most of our problems dispersed among disconnected silos of self preservation and interest and what we need and what we need. Our plugins designed connectivity for bigger and better impact. And guess what the motto will be.
Martha Williams:
I am you.
Neil Ramsay:
There you go.
Martha Williams:
So I want to thank you.
Neil Ramsay:
I appreciate the time.
Martha Williams:
Thank you for joining us today and remember to comment like share, follow anywhere you get your podcasts to learn more about culture shift agency goes to culture shift agency.com.