Episode 22 of “What is Innovation?” is live! This week, Jared talks with Johnmark Oudersluys, Executive Director of CityLink Center. Johnmark shares how innovation has shaped his uniquely broad career journey. Listen and subscribe today!
Johnmark Oudersluys, Executive Director of CityLink Center (Cincinnati), talks on the importance of energy and activating energy to spark change in your community, re-aligning your values and professional life.
More about our guest:
CityLink Center’s Executive Director is Johnmark Oudersluys, a former corporate strategist with a passion for creating large scale solutions for critical social issues. At CityLink, Johnmark has led the formation of a scalable, integrated center that breaks down barriers for Greater Cincinnati’s unemployed and the working poor to progress out of poverty. Cincinnati has been home for 15+years during which engagement with community has led to deep friendships, the opportunity to meet an amazing wife and start a family, and a profound appreciation for our city.
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Episode Guide:
1:32 - What Is Innovation
2:56 - Importance of Energy and Energy Activation
8:22 - Moments of resistance
12:27 - Citylink
13:55 - Crafting a personal mission statement
14:28 - Rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina
16:08 - Leading Citylink Center
19:10 - Program rich - System poor
21:40 - What's next for Citylink Center
22:12 - Fundamental issues as a sector
25:17 - Innovation: Unnatural?
29:07 - Advice to future innovators
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OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.
/This transcript was automatically generated using AI; please forgive any inconsistencies. We are working to provide the correct and more concise copy of the transcript. For urgent need, please send us an email.
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Jared Simmons 00:05
Hello, and welcome to what is innovation. The podcast that explores the reality of a word that is in danger of losing its meaning altogether. This podcast is produced by Outlast consulting, LLC, a boutique consultancy that helps companies use innovation principles to solve their toughest business problems. I'm your host, Jared Simmons. I'm so excited to have Johnmark Oudersluys. Johnmark Oudersluys is the executive director of Citylink Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. He's also a personal friend, and I am excited to welcome him to the show today. Welcome to the show, Mark.
Johnmark 00:43
Thanks, Jared. Thanks for having me.
Jared Simmons 00:46
All right. There's so many places we could be to go that I'm excited about the conversation. You've done so many different things. Been a consultant, you've been in operations, you've worked at companies like Chiquita, and a lot of other large companies, I'm most intrigued and inspired by your nonprofit work, which is where we met. You've continued that work into this amazing organization you've built. I'm excited to talk to you about your thoughts on innovation and explore a bit about Citylink and and what you've had going on there. I like to kick off every conversation with the same question. What in your mind is innovation?
Johnmark 01:36
I believe innovation is activating insights.
Jared Simmons 01:41
Activating insights. Okay, tell me more about that.
Johnmark 01:45
I think that there's a lot of innovative ideas, there's a lot of innovative thoughts. For me, a lot of times, those insights have come from taking something you see in one place and reapplying it in a different way, in a different environment or different contexts, or taking two ideas and combining those into one. The world has a tremendous amount of incredible ideas. But the activation of those and the action orientation around bringing those to fruition is where things go from a beautiful concept to difficult implementations. It's really around the activation, where I see innovation go from the conceptual to the practical,
Jared Simmons 02:37
In that, the definition of innovation, the activation, I'm a chemical engineer, can't say it. But when I hear activating, I think of activation energy. You're one of the most energetic guys I know and particularly passionate about this space. Tell me about the importance of energy and kind of activating those energy inside.
Johnmark 03:02
I once heard a quote that the richest land and all the world are the grave sites, because there are so many unborn ideas that want to die there with people. One of the things that I've seen in my life, and a large part in the organization that we met at Give Back Cincinnati, and other areas is, a lot of times people either are overwhelmed by the complexity of a challenge that they're faced with, or are thinking at a scale, which is just kind of very personal. There is a really unique space where you can see an opportunity. What I've been really fortunate to be a part of is, when you have a group of people come together, you can actually see large scale ideas take shape, and come to fruition and then continue to evolve and unfold in amazing ways. But if it just stays an idea in your head, to me, that's a great idea but it's not innovative, because it hasn't; like the rubber hasn't met the road.
Jared Simmons 04:20
Now, you and I have traveled the world together, we built houses on multiple continents together. I'm thinking in particular about a specific day in the hot sun in Jejuray, Ghana, where my body was saying it's time to stop, we've moved enough bricks, we've shoveled enough, and there you have a way of convincing people to do a bit more, to be a bit more, to push yourself a little harder and a little farther than think you can in service of a broader goal. That aspect of innovation being able to not just activate insights to drive outcomes for; with your own direct impact, with your own direct effort but being able to inspire that energy and others I think is, is something you uniquely have a gift. I was still tired. I was not super happy until as at the end of the day, but I definitely did more than I thought I could and I was happy with the outcome that we were able to create for the family.
05:31
Thanks for saying that. My wife jokes that I consistently underestimate the time and effort to achieve things. I'm either naive or an optimist. But I think that, especially with groups, there's an incredible capacity there that just needs to give, if you give a little structure, just incredible things can happen. We saw that when Charlie Hall who leads water company here in town kept surfacing this idea of "hey, what have you guys did a Thanksgiving meal, I've seen it down in San Antonio and I think you guys should do that." Finally, we just said "Great, let's do it." We launched fall feasts, the first year. It was great. Carson Palmer came and served, I think we had about 300 guests, in the baum bell center. Then because we took that first step, a friend at Duke Energy Center, Justin said, 'Would you guys want to host that here?" So us taking that first step of seeing, "we can do this and it's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be this polished experience, but we want to do something" led to that now being the largest meal where people from different parts of our community come together to give thanks at Duke Energy Center. They're routinely serving over 5000 people with a suite of now healthcare services, clothes that are available, wellness checks, haircuts, all these things that next generations of leaders have added on. But none of that would have been possible if that first group didn't take action and Charlie didn't have that idea and wasn't willing to put his own kind of skin in the game to make that happen. I'm just a big believer in taking that first step in moving forward.
Jared Simmons 07:35
Wow. I remember the first Fall feast, I did not realize it had grown to that magnitude. So I'm a little stunned and really excited to hear that because there was a very small group that literally was putting up fliers and putting bird paw prints on the sidewalk to you know, lead people to this. I remember those night.
07:59
The complaints from the city manager? To clarify, it was spray chalk not spray paint that we're using.
Jared Simmons 08:10
You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs. That's a great example of getting the ball rolling that inertia and letting it roll downhill. That's amazing.
08:22
One thing that I don't know if you experience with music, but I am a hack woodworker and welder, and there is this moment of resistance internally I face when finishing a project or product, because when it's conceptual, it's perfect and is beautiful. It's going to function perfectly in its conceptual. I found when I started building furniture that I would get to the point where I literally have all the cuts made and all the materials there and I'm ready for final assembly. I found myself like pausing and like not putting the kind of final assembly in place. I had to understand and confront what was happening. The reality is with everything I've ever built, I see all of the flaws once it's complete and once you put it out in public, which just for me means my house. But I walk by and I can see that that table leg is slightly off or oh, wow, there's a gap in that tabletop. When it's conceptual, it's perfect. You can think and talk about like, Oh yeah, I'm going to build this tabletop and it's going to be beautiful and bla bla bla bla bla, once it's made, all the flaws of your creation are put out there. One of the things I've had to overcome is not letting perfection the pursuit of new creations, new creativity, new ventures, or new programs and recognize that we're going to put something out. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be a start and we can build from there.
Jared Simmons 10:07
Thinking about the table in your house, I cannot imagine walking past that and seeing a flaw. It's just a stunning piece of art. When I look at it, I've seen the woodgrain, the texture, the curves, the lines, the shapes, and I just can't even imagine, even trying to find a fault in it. But the way I can relate to what you're saying is a perfect example is through music. My challenge in music is the opposite, that it's gone. When you're doing live music when you're in front of an audience. That note, you can't go back and fix that note, or that word, the lyric or the the key that you missed, the chord that you played incorrectly? It's out there and you can back the train up and unsing it or unplay it? Yeah, so I'm hearing my mistakes while I'm still moving on to the next thing. I think that's a great training. The process you described, I think it's a great training for how to continue to try to perform at your best, knowing that the things you left behind, were not up to your standards, not letting that affect the next thing, and still being confident enough to keep pushing.
11:23
Yeah and probably recognizing that nobody caught that mis-note that you played, right?
Jared Simmons 11:29
I'm still working on that.
Johnmark 11:31
Yeah, but it would be obvious if you stopped playing. If you hit a mis-note, and you're like, that's it, I ruined the song, I'm out of here. Everyone would know that but we can be our own harshest critics because we've got the the idealistic nature of the concept in our mind. When it comes to the actual execution, we are the most cognizant of the difference or the gap between what our ideal was and what we actually put out. Even as, like you as a business owner, and you launching this business is, you get to have an idea of what that looks like. But you probably see in our cognizant of, here are the three things I would have done differently, or five things I would have done differently when the public isn't aware of those at all. That's the tension that you face when creating or innovating or putting something out to the public in that realm.
Jared Simmons 12:26
That's exactly right. That's a great segue to getting you to tell me a bit about CityLink.
Johnmark 12:33
After growing up in Michigan and going into the automotive industry, like you're supposed to in Michigan, I was really, really fortunate that I went into a management trainee program, which was a clever way for them to slide you into a customer service job and have you answer hundreds of phone calls from customers, and seeing if you sink or swim. Then they rotated me around to international and marketing and distribution and customer service down there and then manufacturing. What that did is it gave me a really practical hands on view of organizations, entities, structures, and all those things, which was great. Then had a similar opportunity with Chiquita Banana, to do kind of the same type of thing. There was this tension that I felt from college through my career, which was how can I continue to make an impact within the communities I'm a part of. I had actually gone back to grad school between my first corporation federal mogul, and then Chiquita, and got a degree in economic policy, and sustainable growth and all that fun stuff out at Thunderbird.
13:48
I found myself back in corporate, which was great opportunity. But there was this tension that was always there. One thing that I was advised to do by a mentor was crafting that personal mission statement. When I looked at my experiences and everything else, it was really clear that I felt as if, for me, God had created me to create large scale approaches to social challenges. In my mind, based off of my work with Chiquita, and the stuff that we did together, going around the world, I thought that was going to be an international development. After Katrina, I went with our friend, Joe, and worked on the rebuilding there and felt there was a calling for our church to go there. Throughout a crazy idea, I think this is another part of like the innovators journey of you have this desire to be on the opposite spectrum of the emotional challenge that you may be facing. I went to this big church that we're a part of and said, 'Hey, we're supposed to bring 300 people to New Orleans to help rebuild next year.'
14:58
They were all, understandably skeptical. 'Can you really pull that off?' 'I was like, no problem, no problem at all. We've got a group of friends, they're gonna help do this, it's super easy. Tell us when to go and we'll flip the switch.' Six months later, they're like, 'Okay, do it.' I was like, 'oh, gosh, this is really hard.' Through that I got to know them and we were able to bring Cincinnati, I think over 2000 people down to help rebuild New Orleans. There was a moment there where it was just really clear to me standing in the back of the room and watching people prepare to go help our country with what was a, for me, a profound crisis of identity of do we really care for our neighbors? Do we really uphold and uplift all members of our community in the same way? We got to see kind of an incredible partnership forum with a really inspiring pastor, pastor Luther, down in New Orleans. Through all that, I was just reminded of wow, given the chance, and given the support from friends and family and others, really incredible things are possible.
Johnmark 16:08
I was approached, to see about leading Citylink center, and quite honestly, I was "Oh, you got the wrong guy, I'm supposed to go international," then I looked and it was that opportunity to launch a large scale approach to a persistent challenge of generational poverty in our city. It lined up with everything that I had said, I wanted to be a part of, and our church was going to put $10 million into creating the center. I was very naive, having never worked in social services or human services. The benefit that we had is we were starting from scratch and we just came forward and said, at the time, we're going to address the the challenges that are our neighbors face with a very complex system of support for individuals with very little time and money to navigate. We're going to attempt to resolve the tension that really good social service providers feel of trying to stay in their core competency of maybe financial education or mental health or childcare. Recognizing the folks that they're working with are holistic people who have different aspects of their life that may affect them in different ways and have spillover effects positive or negative. We created this model, which essentially co-locates a bunch of agencies in one place and integrates it. It creates a client centered experience, where a client walks through our doors, and they have one conversation, one person that they work with, to help navigate them to the different services to achieve the goals that they've set for themselves. Then we mobilize volunteers to walk alongside them in the process. What we unintentionally created was an incredible longitudinal correlated data set to help us really understand what's occurring in our clients lives, and then use that to drive continuous improvement. It's been a journey of just continued learning, which has been exciting,
Jared Simmons 18:20
That is exciting. It's the definition of innovation. It's your definition of innovation, activated this organization based on these insights. It's a continuous process of continuing to bring energy to turn these insights into impact within the community. Just for people who may not be familiar, basically, these are folks who would normally have to go to seven or eight different municipal or federal programs, seven or eight different places and seven or eight different conversations, you've not only co-located it, but you've created a through line to give it almost a narrative walk.
Johnmark 19:02
Yeah. Something I previously did not think about or appreciate. Because when we were doing the landscape assessment, and we're really fortunate to have a great team that preceded me with a tremendous amount of research and a bunch of Procter and Gamble folks who did an extensive amount of market research, you look and say we have 86,000 people in poverty, but we have over 2000 social services spending over a billion dollars a year. They had the great insight of our community, it was program rich but system poor. The insight that I think everyone can relate to is we're asking individuals to go from place to place walk into strangers and say, This is why I need your help.
Johnmark 19:54
I am somebody who will try and move a couch upstairs instead of asking a friend for help, how much more are we asking of individuals to walk through doors meet perfect strangers and say, I need your help. Only to find out maybe you came on the wrong day, you're in the wrong kind of family composition or income level. We've asked people just to go from place to place to place and repeat a story of their data sets. That can lead to... there's just this emotional resignation of these organizations aren't really there to help me and this is just too complex. My life can't really change. The whole foundation of the our want was that we wanted to create that client centered process where they come through, and they just have one conversation. And so we were able to aggregate the qualifying criteria across the 14 agencies in house, collect that information, once you have them sit down with one person who's on our team, a service coordinator, have that conversation once. What we're really trying to do there is bring a level of honor and dignity and respect to individuals to prevent them from having to one navigate the geographic barrier that you described, it would take somebody over seven hours to get to all the agencies that are inside this building, and to the emotional barriers of really just telling your story over and over to strangers. That was our original founding premise of why we were launching this model.
Jared Simmons 21:38
Fascinating. What's next? We're sitting here, we're talking about innovation, we're talking about moving things forward but what's next?
Johnmark 21:46
There's a great article we read, it was about the data analytics revolution that took place in baseball, and it was called How The Curious One. We, again, didn't know what we didn't know when we entered this space. Our premise was, we've got all the right ingredients in town, and we just need to pull them together in a different context in order to better serve our clients. What I've come to appreciate and believe, is that we've got some fundamental issues with our sector as a whole. The organization that you and I have been a part of called, Praxis, label this as two fundamental flaws in that the nonprofit's structure, the stakeholder gap, which is our clients are not our paying customers. Therefore, we are shielded in the nonprofit sector from the market forces that would typically drive innovation, and typically drive efficiencies, you can have a nonprofit who doesn't have good outcomes survive for decades, because they tell a good story, and they show a lot of activity. So it'd be like, a burger joint that, buys a lot of ingredients and flips a lot of burgers doesn't have any sales but has a great PR campaign. Somehow some independent third party is just funneling cash to them, even though needs aren't being met and aren't being satisfied. That' s a real fundamental flaw. It goes hand in hand with the other piece that they identified, which is the nobility trap, which says, "Hey, Jared, you're a harsh business person. I'm an enlightened social worker, and leading a social service agency so you shouldn't ask me hard questions because I've dedicated my life to this." We've lost two things that can drive innovation. One is direct market feedback, that would drive changes in our sector, with the economics associated with that. Two is the competition and constructive feedback and criticism that you see happen in the marketplace, through market forces and just through the clarity of understanding what your goal is,
Jared Simmons 24:17
I can see how that dynamic could be reinforcing self reinforcing in terms of, what keeps the lights on what keeps paying your own salary, being completely disconnected from what you're generally doinh, what the impact is there to create. In a lot of ways, if we think about those big gap, the stakeholder gap, that seems to me and again, I consider myself an informed outsider to this space, having dabbled a little bit for a little while, it seems like the more addressable and more easily closed of those two, if you can convince the stakeholders to connect their funding, their input to the organization's output in a way that creates that reinforcing cycle, it seems like that can be a way of trying to start to work on that again.
Johnmark 25:15
Absolutely. There's a great quote that we repeat often here in our walls, that comes from the leadership challenge. It talks about why innovation is not natural. It says that leaders must challenge the process precisely because any system will unconsciously conspire to maintain the status quo and prevent change. When I was back in the consulting world, a lot of things that we would do is we would go in and look at organizations or look at processes, and you would map the process and drive standardization in order to drive efficiency, which is good. But you also, through doing that, are creating a lot of systems and structures to support scalable growth, those systems and structures. I love their their verbiage of will unconsciously conspire, it just becomes more and more difficult to make change. When you look at our sector, and you think about how things have been done for centuries in the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector in the last 50 years, and there is that disconnect between feeling good about the work and actually doing good with the work. There are systems that need to be changed.
Johnmark 26:42
We are really fortunate that we're in current conversations with a couple of funders taking a creative look at how do we link our outcomes with your funding. It was great conversation. One of them was a little taken back, they were like, 'so you don't want us to write you a grant for X amount of 1000s of dollars.' And we were like, 'No, we only want that money for our collaborative, which includes a slew of great local and national partners, if we meet the outcomes,' but it it takes it risk for a nonprofit to do it. But I think that if we're truly truly pursuing what we feel called to, and what we are compelled to see, which is true economic opportunity for all of our neighbors to thrive, we have to take a look and say, what we're doing isn't working, and what are the levers that we could use to drive change. Our team is fully aligned around, if there is another organization which can outperform us, they should get the money.
Jared Simmons 27:31
That is counter a bit to the system and its unconscious, inspiring, but a conscious correction for it is possible, you're demonstrating that you're showing that these systems that you don't have to have a fatalist view of this. It's just acknowledging the challenge, getting the challenge out on paper in front of you, acknowledging this confirmation bias, so that you can address it not so that you can say, "Well, this is the way of the world and how things work so let's just get back to reinforcing." I think the way you take the quote like that and turn it into the foundation for an approach to overcoming it is important and novel and rare in the nonprofit world, and innovative by anybody's definition. How do you think about advice? So I'm sure you're approached a lot. You've built a successful nonprofit and and a successful organization. I'm sure you're approached by a lot of folks who advice do you have any advice for current and future innovators out there?
Johnmark 29:14
So I think that kind of what we've we've touched on a little bit, big piece of my formation was going really broad in my career. I can't say that I loved every student that I had, but I can really recognize how every student has informed a broader view of organizations and structures that has allowed me to reapply distinct pieces in different areas. As a society are are in the business sector or certainly in the nonprofit sector, we sometimes focus solely on specialization. I mean, we're asking 18 year olds to declare what they want to do for the rest of their life. It's figuring out how can we rotate and get that learning and that can most naturally happen in larger entities or corporations. Taking that opportunity, I joke about it now, but I was getting paid as a 22 year old to learn from a really large organization in so just going broad early on, and having hobbies that make you think about things in different ways, exposing yourself to different individuals from different areas, and challenging the ways that you think about things. All of those have helped me reapply different things that I've seen in a new context within the social service field.
Jared Simmons 30:58
Yeah, I can imagine that helps you connect the dots a little differently from from someone who might have taken a more specialized view, or walk through the their view. It's personally helpful. I'm sure it'll be helpful to others. Thank you for your time, Johnmark, I really appreciate you joining us. I know you're busy and the organization is growing. There's a lot of great things happening. I'm personally excited as a friend for your success. Generally, it's inspired as a business person by success as well so thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Johnmark 31:40
That's awesome. Thanks, Jared. Thank you for all the years that you've built into me and challenged my thinking and challenge me to think more broadly about whatever I'm involved in. I deeply appreciate that as well.
Jared Simmons 31:56
All right, take care.
Jared Simmons 32:02
We'd love to hear your thoughts about this week's show. You can drop us a line on Twitter at OUTLAST LLC, or follow us on LinkedIn where we're OUTLAST Consulting. Until next time, keep innovating. Whatever that means.