Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
[00:00:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the city is brought to you by BABLE Smart Cities we enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smartcities EU.
[00:00:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: So today I'm traveling back to one of my favourite cities up north, so to speak. Actually, we have had a different guest from the same city on one of our first episodes of the podcast. If there are any original listeners here or those who have heard it, it's episode number four. And yes, it's the city of Helsingborg, Sweden.
Back then, I was attending H 22, where the whole city opened up and became a stage for innovation. And when I was there, I also attended an urban future for the first time, the event that was being held there, and I attended a workshop with the guests today, and I've been thinking about it for the last couple of years, actually. So I was inspired by the leadership initiative she spoke about, and because of that, I invited her to share today with you all a little bit of her insights and experiences. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Lisa Olsson. She's the innovation and transformation director for the city of Helsingborg in Sweden. Welcome, Lisa.
[00:01:47] Lisa Olsson: Thank you so much for having me here.
[00:01:50] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. So I always like to start off the episode with a little teaser. And so in episode number four, I asked Asa to describe Helsingborg in three words, and she chose bold, ambitious, and fun. And I'm wondering if you can add an additional three words that you would use to describe Helsingborg.
[00:02:14] Lisa Olsson: Transparent, I would say. Good.
[00:02:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, good. Transparent. Any additional words?
[00:02:23] Lisa Olsson: What did you say? Bold, fun, and ambitious. Ambitious.
Open.
[00:02:33] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, for sure. So do you agree that Helsingborg is also very bold and ambitious and fun? Do you agree with her assessment?
[00:02:42] Lisa Olsson: I totally agree.
[00:02:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: I also perfect really interesting city initiatives also that you're getting into. Before we get into some of the work that you're doing now at the city, I would love to give the listeners a little bit more background into who you are. Where did you come from and how did you get here today?
[00:03:08] Lisa Olsson: Okay. Yeah, I've always been working with transformation.
I have made 20 plus years in the private sector, working to sort of create the future for different businesses. I've been mainly working in the media industry, in the banking industry, actually, before I came here, right before I came to the city, I worked for the insurance sector, running an innovation company and trying to change the mindset of insurance, going from being the one paying out money when something bad has happened to instead focusing on preventing things to happen.
So we worked on different safety solution to make sure that bad things don't happen.
And that's a big shift and sets things in a whole new perspective.
And you also need to work more across collaborate to make that work. But as I get older, I think it was more and more important to me to work with truly meaningful things. And I wanted to work with societal needs, trying to help to rethink the way it works today. So I think it's really a privilege to work for the society. And I've never changed my decision to go from the private sector to the public sector. And today I'm working as our innovation and transformation director, trying to help our nine different administrations and our eight municipality owned companies to be good at challenging themselves constantly, both the way that they work and what they offer out to the residents. Yeah.
[00:04:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: So if I'm understanding correctly, we talk a lot about governments having silos, and you're in kind of the position to transform the way governments are working from the inside out. Is that a fair assessment?
[00:05:12] Lisa Olsson: Yeah, I think.
[00:05:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay, perfect.
So when I was in your workshop at Urban Future, you were telling a story about how you were assigning challenges to random departments in Helsingborg. And I really, really love that story. And so I want to already just go ahead and dig into it. Would you mind telling also everyone else this very interesting story?
[00:05:41] Lisa Olsson: Yeah.
To set the context, I think everyone needs to understand that we are a politically controlled organization, and that sometimes means that we become too silo based because we are given tasks and missions and then we are expected to act upon them.
And we need to work more cross sector through different sectors together to solve the true challenges that our residents are facing. And we can't just look at the way that we are organized today. We need to look from the needs.
So what we did was that with a little bit of help from our statistic department, that analyzes facts and research reports and everything really, truly factor based information, took 1516 different citywide challenges that we have. That is truly everyone's responsibility to work with.
It's questions like the climate questions and safety issues and integration aspects and such things.
And if we are going to solve those, we need to work cross sectoral to actually come up with the right solutions. And it needs to be everyone's responsibility. So we try to communicate those city challenges in a way, and we actually put responsibility across different administrations. So, for example, our culture department, maybe they didn't think that it was their responsibility to work with safety issues, for example, and we actually challenged them, saying that it is your task to do that.
So we handed out responsibility in a way that I don't think they expected.
And the first time they didn't get to choose, we just handed it out. And the second time we did that, the year after they had realized that, okay, this is actually really good to put different perspectives on the really hard challenges that we have. So then they wanted to have different challenges, but the first year they were actually forced.
I don't know if that was the thing you remembered.
[00:08:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, absolutely. Also, maybe you can give a couple of examples. I think I remember that, for example, you gave like your tourism department or something, aging populations or something related to that.
[00:08:35] Lisa Olsson: I don't know if you can give.
[00:08:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: A couple of concrete examples.
[00:08:38] Lisa Olsson: Yeah, but how to. I think. I don't know. I actually don't remember what examples I made. But our elderly administration worked together with the cultural administration on how to cure loneliness, for example.
And we have never had that cross collaboration before in that sense. And we had some wonderful result of mixing competences and looking at things in totally different angles.
And I think that it was an eye opener for many of the administrations that when you let people in with different aspects of things, then you have better solutions. Because we think we know everything about our own area, so that the solutions that we come up with is pretty narrow, I think.
And when you put another layer, someone who looks at it quite differently, we have a totally different result and try new things that we never would have done otherwise.
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: And if you were to kind of do it all over again, would you? And would you do it differently?
[00:10:05] Lisa Olsson: We still do it, but there are things that, of course, that we need to improve.
I think we could be a bit tougher when we follow up the results. I think also we could be better at communicating the effects.
So that's something that we are working on at the moment. It is important to actually show the true effects in a good and good way, both to everyone that works in the city, but of course, also to the residents of the city. What was the results of this initiative? What was the effects, so that we need to improve, I think.
[00:10:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, that makes sense. And what do you think in your role? You're working across departments. What do you think is the main determining factor on why people are being. Why governments are working in silos and kind of the one determinant in breaking them out of silos.
[00:11:07] Lisa Olsson: But I think the whole construction that our departments, they have their own political group that gives them all the missions, all the tasks and sets the goals. And when they do that, I think we need to have more common goals. To say that the whole city have a common goal to have more safety in the city or to work with integration or unemployment. And it's everyone's responsibility. But when the political side of it gives you one goal, then you are focusing on that. So more common goals, I think that's important for the whole structure, but we can't just sit and wait for that. So at the same time, we need to push this cross sectoral innovation and the responsibility side with different initiatives. And that's what we try to do with the challenges, the citywide challenges that we are working with.
But it is controversial because they are not politically decided. So it's quite controversial.
[00:12:30] Tamlyn Shimizu: What has the feedback been from either the politicians or also from the people working in the city?
[00:12:39] Lisa Olsson: Different feedback, I think from all of the employees. It's very positive. It's extremely positive because they feel that now they work from the needs of the residents and not the way that we are organized.
[00:12:57] Tamlyn Shimizu: More purpose driven.
[00:13:02] Lisa Olsson: If I go outside here and ask one of our residents, do you know how we are organized in the city? They don't care when we look at different solutions. We also need not to care on how we are organized and just trying to solve the challenges that we have. But it's very easy to go into.
This is not my area. I don't have budget for this or my employees. They need to work with the missions we have been given from the politicians. It takes a lot from our leaders to go to rise above that and take true responsibility for the question and saying, okay, it's not in my mandate, but I will help.
I think when we try to transform the city, we actually work with three different layers, so to speak. We work with the culture, and the culture says that we need all to be enablers and we need to be open and we need to take responsibility and we need to dare and test and do new things. We work with the capabilities that we know how to take on those challenges and how to work with them. And we work also with the third aspect, and that's the structure. So we have been working really hard to have the same structure for the innovation work throughout the different administrations of the city. So it's easy to, if you have an id, you know where to go, and it's easy to get fundings from different administrations. And that's kind of a mechanism that helps us to work cross sectoral and that has been really important for us.
[00:14:54] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting work that you're doing with that. You talked a lot about some about the responsibilities, taking responsibility as leaders. And I'd like to dig more into the topic of leadership. This is a topic that I'm really passionate about and also one that we're exploring a lot more in the podcast.
I'm wondering, from your experience, what you think is kind of the defining element of success in leaders. Is it taking responsibility? What advice would you give to other leaders?
[00:15:25] Lisa Olsson: The most important advice, I think, is to lead by example, because we can't just say stuff like dare test do if we don't truly mean it.
So lead by example is really important.
I think it's important to understand that if we want to create a new future, and we must, because of the challenges that we are facing in so many different areas, we need to take some bold and active decisions today.
So we can't just sit and wait. We need to take actions today. And some of them decisions will be bold and they will be risky. And some of the decisions that we need to take, they won't succeed. So we need to accept failures. We need to accept that we don't have all the answers.
I think that's a big step.
And many leaders of today, they are kind of, I don't know if the right word is foster, but they come from a world where we use risk analysis and trying to remove risks, and they always expect a result of every initiatives. And Sweden is very democratic, so when we have taken a decision, we stick by it.
And when you work with transformation and innovation, it's not those kind of mechanisms that will make us succeed. Instead, we need to try new things and we need to be open. And as a leader, you need to be humble enough to say that I don't have all the answers, let's try it out. And that goes a bit against what you are taught.
You are kind of taught to have all the answers, and now it's the other way around.
So we talk a lot about that. We have leadership programs, management programs, and talk a lot about being humble and having no prestige and be able to say, okay, I don't know. I actually don't know. So let's try it.
[00:17:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. It's so important for leaders to really embody this spirit of, okay, authority. I make a decision, I think, and then be willing to pivot very quickly when they see, okay, that didn't work. Let's pivot.
[00:18:09] Lisa Olsson: Ask for help. Sorry, I interrupted you also to say that, okay, it requires a lot to say that, okay, this is my area. I work with the care of elderly people, but I need help.
That also requires you to be quite humble and saying that I need help from the private sector and I need help from different, another administration. I can sit with this problem that we are facing at the moment, that we have so much more elderly people in our city in the coming 15 years, and we won't solve this by working the way that we are doing today. It's not impossible. It's an equation that doesn't work. And then you need to acknowledge that and saying that we need help. It can't be just a question for us. We need help from all of you guys and from research and private sector and everyone.
[00:19:11] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very good advice for all the leaders out there.
We're seeing AI, for example, taking over right now and transforming the way cities are working, the way organizations are working. I'm wondering what your perspective is on that and how that's kind of shaping the work that you do and the work that Helsingbach is doing.
[00:19:34] Lisa Olsson: I think it will shape us immensely the coming years. And I think we need to embrace it, and we need to look at it from different angles. It's not an IT question. It's an h and R question also.
But we need to realize that we can't handle the climate changes without enormous technological advances. We cannot take care of our elderly people within the city if we don't use technology. We have so many areas where we won't be able to handle our challenges if we don't embrace. And the cost of not using AI is really high.
You can ask any of the research institutes and they will say that the alternative cost of not using it is extremely high for the public sector. So we need to embrace it in all aspects and levels. But we also need to realize that it will be an HR question to kind of work with all of our employees, seeing that some roles will disappear, but there will be new ones, and there will be a resistance from within the organization using new technology because work will disappear.
So it's also an H and R question of it that I don't think we talk about. Enough.
So it's a complex question and I actually got that question the other day and they said that won't the challenge be that your residents won't be BABLE to understand new technology or embrace it? And I said, I don't think that is the challenge at all. I think the challenges are internal in our organization because our residents, they are really quick to adopt to new solutions that improve the quality of life. And I mean, it's just too good to look at yourself. I think it's so much tougher when we have a new system at work and I complain about that, but in my private life I just embrace everything that makes my life easier and more effective.
[00:22:03] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting times to see how AI develops. Are you using AI internally within the council right now? In which ways are you using it?
[00:22:16] Lisa Olsson: We are using it in many different ways.
We have a lot of innovation initiatives that uses AI and we work closely to different AI companies that are helping us. We are also building the capacity internally and we're also using it more and more in our own work. I mean, I use Chat GPT every day in my work. Me too.
It would be stupid not to.
And we try and educate everyone in the city how you can use it. And we built our own small modules in Chat GPT that helps from the smallest things to really complex things. So we try and I think most of us realize that we really need to embrace this.
[00:23:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, definitely.
And do you have maybe a particular, usually we ask people working in cities about a particular project or use case that you would really like to highlight that might be helpful for others to learn from. You already told a great story. I know that I asked of you, but maybe you also have something else that you want to highlight.
[00:23:39] Lisa Olsson: A specific initiative that goes on.
Could be, yeah, we have many.
I think the most important thing that we. I will give in a concrete example as well, but I think the most important thing that we do is that we are transparent and open. So we have all of our initiatives, all the failures we have made and all the success stories that we have, we are transparent with them. So we have an open database innovation Helsingboard SA, where we actually post everything.
And we do that because we want to have synergies throughout the city, but also to lead by example. Because if every city would do that, it would be fantastic. Because we can't think that we are the smartest people on earth, because we're not. We need to look on what other cities are doing and get the help from them. And we are not using the tax money in the right way. If we are investing in everything ourselves, we need to learn from others. So I think I would like to send forward absolutely good message out there. Everyone actually posted and to be open about the failures as well, because that's what we learn from.
But if you want an example, because I guess that's fun to hear about as well, I have an example that we'll showcase outside my door in just a bit. And that's a really important initiative, because in Helsing boy, we have too many children that doesn't go through whole school, they don't pass school. And we know that not just for those people and their families and for the whole society, it's really important that all children go through school.
And now we have this, it's actually AI initiatives initiative, where we try to improve school operation and increase the chances of more people reaching upper secondary school by analyzing real large amounts of data on various factors that we previously didn't think had effect.
And that's kind of.
We analyze so many different things. Absence of the teachers, staff turnover, sick leave, where the children live, where the parents live, and all kinds of data. We analyze to see early indicators on which students will not go through whole school, so we can do early actions to prevent that from happening.
And if we succeed with that, I think all schools in Sweden would be able to use that tool. So I implemented on 20 different schools in Helsingboy at the moment. And we hope that all schools in Helsingboy will have this tool.
[00:27:03] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting initiative and also ties really well back into the AI topic. I also remembered something when you were speaking about talking about failures, that in Helsonburg you have an award for the biggest failure. Am I remembering that?
Can't remember if that was you that told that story or if it was someone else. But I think there have been some pretty funny ones as well.
[00:27:30] Lisa Olsson: Right? There has been really funny ones.
Of course, it's not the mistake that we are celebrating. We are celebrating the learnings we get from the mistake.
So that's important. But it's also kind of a statement that we allow mistake. It's okay to fail. It's okay to make mistakes because that's how you learn. And from all the resource reports at the moment, they are saying the new kind of leadership is to focus on psychological safety, where you are allowed to fail and to not have the answers. And those are the organizations that do really well. It's organizations where you have this psychological safety, where it's okay to speak out and such things. So it's also actually research based that it's good to have this kind of culture. So every year we celebrate someone who has made a big mistake and the learnings from it. So I don't know if you wanted an example, if you want to give.
[00:28:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: An example, I think you gave one that was really funny last time. I can't remember what it was exactly.
[00:28:43] Lisa Olsson: But I think we gave an example. That was a couple of years ago where our elderly administration. I don't know if it's called that in English, but I guess you know what I mean. They had the id to purchase driver's license to 25 employees that drives around and help elderly people in their home. They ride a bike and they clean their homes, they help them with medicine and food and such things.
So they went out and purchased 25, I think it was driver's license so that they could drive a car instead. But the problem was that for one, they hadn't realized that if they can't just give a driver's license, it costs a lot of money in Sweden to take a driver's license. So they would be given extra tax.
And the other thing was that nobody wanted a driver's license. They hadn't asked them, do you want a driver's license? So they turned it down, every single one of them, because they liked to ride the bike. It gave them time in the nature. It was making them more healthy. They got time to relax and they liked the bike more. So they didn't want any driver's. So the lesson here is, once again, you have to look at the needs and from the users, what do they want? And they didn't do that at all. They just thought they had all the answers.
[00:30:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: Ask first, right.
[00:30:26] Lisa Olsson: And do the research first. What is the true problem here? And did they really want this or not?
And they didn't.
[00:30:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good example.
So now we get to the open floor. I don't know if you have anything else that you really want the listeners to know that we didn't touch on yet today. Is there anything else that you really want to shout about today.
[00:30:57] Lisa Olsson: Regarding the way that we work in Helsingborg?
[00:31:00] Tamlyn Shimizu: Anything?
[00:31:06] Lisa Olsson: Tough question is so many things.
[00:31:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: You also don't have to take the open floor. I just always give it as an option. That way you feel like you got everything out on the table.
[00:31:17] Lisa Olsson: If I have a couple of minutes, I could say that we always put three perspectives in Helsing boy on the way that we work, we look upon innovation and transformation from three angles. We say to everyone here that we need to have id driven innovation. And that means that it's allowed for anyone to come with an id.
It doesn't matter if it's company or resident or employee. They need to know where to go, if they have a new idea of how to make this city better. And then they need to be well taken care of when they come with that idea. And everyone needs to be able to ask for funding and such things. That's an important aspect of the work here, id driven innovation. But then we can't just rely upon that. So we also need to work what we call challenge driven innovation. And that was what we talked about before, that we actually point out the big, hard, tough challenges that we have in our city and that we are transparent about them and that we take responsibility for them cross sectoral. So the safety questions of the city is everyone's responsibility. The climate question is everyone's responsibility.
So that's what challenge driven innovation is really about. And where we also are transparent on which areas we need help because we don't sit with all the answers. So if we don't tell the world where we have problems, we can't get that help either. And the third perspective is what we call possibility driven innovation. And that's that we need to steal more things from others that they have proven is effective and it's nice to steal.
We don't sit with all the answers. There are possibilities out there that we need to embrace and quickly implement in Helsing boy. And the other aspect of possibility driven innovation is that we need to look upon a new technology as possibilities. You talked about AI before. Then we need to show what can you do with AI? What can you do with IoT? What can you do with all these new things that blockchain, for example, and then the different administrations of the city, they can match that with their needs, but if they don't know what you can use the sensor for, they can't match it. We can't expect our teachers to know that stuff for other people that works in the city, or our residents for that matter. So we need to show the possibilities of new technology.
[00:34:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really interesting. So we have idea driven, challenge driven and possibility driven innovation. I love those aspects. I think I'm going to steal that for different things as well. By the way, I like to call, we talk a lot about replication on the podcast and also in our work as BABLE as well. And kind of this possibility driven innovation I like to call also like copy edit paste when we're talking, copy something, edit it for your own context, and then paste it into the city.
[00:34:36] Lisa Olsson: Really cool.
[00:34:37] Tamlyn Shimizu: So that's the end of the main interview segment, but we have our short segment that we like to play around with now, the one we chose for you is very fitting, I think, to also what we spoke about today, and it's called trial and error.
[00:34:55] Tamlyn Shimizu: Trial and error.
What went wrong, what mistakes were made along the way, and more importantly, what lessons were learned.
[00:35:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: I think we already dug into a lot, but I want to put a leadership twist on it. Like leadership fails and wonders. So what leadership fails have you seen? Or if you want to have made, if you want to be bold and put that out there for yourself, what were the main lessons that came from that?
[00:35:34] Lisa Olsson: Yeah. I think our biggest challenge is.
[00:35:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: It.
[00:35:43] Lisa Olsson: May sound strange, but the big obstacles that we have in our organization is middle management. And we sometimes forget them because we are very focused on working with a high level leadership through the city and making them truly understand why it's important to work with these issues.
And we make them understand. And then we kind of empower the people on the ground, all of the employees, saying that you can come with your ids, you can ask for funding, and we will free resources and we will do all this stuff.
And then we haven't kind of committed it on their closest leader.
And that's where it fails.
So that's the thing that we have learned the hard way. And I have so many examples of that where we have really good ideas and the top management says yes, and the people that are committed to it, they just want to do the work. And then we have middle management that said, no, this is not in my budget and this is not in my area and you shouldn't work with that. It's a truly good idea. That would change a lot of things, but I need you to do this instead.
I think that's the most tricky part that we have and where we have failed, I have so many examples and I can't out those.
Someone might listen and it's not fair, but that's the true tricky part of it, I think.
[00:37:30] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good example from this week.
[00:37:32] Lisa Olsson: I could tell you, but it feels wrong to out the initial.
[00:37:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: I understand with the difficulties.
[00:37:42] Lisa Olsson: I mean.
[00:37:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, this mismatch, it's mismatched.
[00:37:47] Lisa Olsson: And we have forgotten to really have the commitment all the way down. We have the commitment from the bottom and from the top, but not in the middle.
[00:37:58] Tamlyn Shimizu: Not in the middle.
[00:37:59] Lisa Olsson: Yeah.
[00:38:01] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really good lesson.
[00:38:02] Lisa Olsson: Thank you. Because they need to accept that if we're going to make this work, they need to free time. You can't expect people to run initiatives at the same time you're doing your normal work. You can't both be a teacher and do a really radical innovation work that will change the school at the same time. You can't expect people to do that. And then you need to free their time.
And that power to free time is often in the hands of their leader.
[00:38:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting. I've never actually thought about that before.
[00:38:41] Lisa Olsson: So yeah, thank you.
[00:38:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Also, you're bringing to life for myself also lots of ideas and situations where some of these things have happened. So thank you for sharing the very last question. And it's the question that we ask every single guest is to you, what is a smart city?
[00:39:03] Lisa Olsson: Um, I think a smart city is, is a city that is open and embraces new ideas that make the city more resilient, more sustainable and more caring.
[00:39:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good definition. I just love asking it because we get so many different perspectives from people's walks of life. So yeah, thank you so much, Lisa, that's all I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it. I definitely enjoyed our little conversation and I've learned a lot from you and I know our listeners will also take a lot of really good lessons from you. So thank you so much.
[00:39:50] Lisa Olsson: Thank you.
[00:39:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: And to all of our listeners, don't forget you can always create a free account on bable-smartcities to find out more about smart city projects, solutions and implementations. So thank you very much for listening.
[00:40:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban lifestyle.
