Douglas Magazine, April/May 2021 by Page One Publishing

ROUNDTABLE ON MENTAL HEALTH

PART 2 3-ISSUE SERIES

A P R / M AY 2 0 2 1

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS THE UNS T OPPABLE GROW TH OF ISL AND FILMS

CAMPBELL RIVER

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THE

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EVOLVING TO A HUB OF INNOVATION AND IDEATION

AGAINST THE ODDS BIG WIN FOR AURINIA PHARMACEUTICAL S

Andreas Hagen, cofounder of Study-Build

I N C O N V E R S AT I O N WITH

DR. THOMAS HOMER-DIXON DOUGLAS 1 PM41295544

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APRIL/MAY 2021

CONTENTS FEATURES

16 Leveraging Possibilities for Global Transformation Renowned political scientist Thomas Homer Dixon — now director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads — on accelerating positive change. BY CARLA SORRELL

22 Against the Odds

Victoria-based Aurinia Pharmaceuticals is poised for rapid growth after receiving FDA approval for Lupkynis, the first drug of its kind to treat lupus nephritis. BY CARLA SORRELL

28 Campbell River Rising

The city next to the sea and forest is charting a unique course as it evolves into a surprising hub of innovation and ideation. BY ANDREW FINDLAY

36 Shooting for the Stars

After a record year for the Island’s film industry, the sector is hopeful for new production studios to bring in big business. BY DAVID LENNAM

DEPARTMENTS

42 Roundtable on Mental Health

Douglas brings together five Victoria business and human resource leaders for a discussion about the realities of mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. ERIN SKILLEN AND CARLA SORRELL

6 FROM THE EDITOR 11 IN THE KNOW The BC Government’s

ShareSpace, Victoria’s growing tech sector, local delivery, mission to Mars, COAST’s interim board and Carol Anne Hilton’s new book Indigenomics.

54 POINT OF VIEW

Jaimie Boyd on digital innovation in the provincial government.

INTEL (BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE) 48 ENTREPRENEUR

Defining success in a pandemic. BY JIM HAYHURST

49 GROWTH

Implementing digital transformation. BY CLEMENS RETTICH

52 HUMAN RESOURCES

Virtual praise and building a culture of recognition. BY INGRID VAUGHN 4 DOUGLAS

M A G A Z I N E’S

TO WATCH Read all about Douglas’ 10 to Watch winners in our Jun/Jul issue. M A G A Z I N E’S Watch for the 12th Annual 10 to Watch Awards on CHEK TV June 5.

TO WATCH

— THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS —

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

You Have My Attention

Enriched Thinking™ for your family, business and future. To find out how a comprehensive wealth strategy can help you reach your financial goals, contact me. C.P. (Chuck) McNaughton, PFP Senior Wealth Advisor 250.654.3342 charles.mcnaughton@scotiawealth.com

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6 DOUGLAS

A FRIEND RECENTLY TOLD ME that my text replies are “like Amazon, they take three to five business days.” Arguably, that’s not typical of every text, but she is right. I don’t always fall prey to the culture of immediate response. Don’t get me wrong, I spend a lot of time online, and my phone is usually close by. But I value deep focus and will step away or turn off when I need to centre my attention, reflect or get into a state of flow. In a new book by Cal Newport, A World Without Email, the computer science professor and author of seven books shows that our issues with email are much worse than we thought. The average worker sends and receives about 126 business emails a day, with a lot of employees devoting more than three hours a day to emails. Newport describes “the hyperactive mind” created by emails as a productivity disaster that affects profitability and slows economic growth. He suggests that an evolution beyond email is inevitable. To me, this prophecy comes with relief, questions and opportunities. There are incredible tools Evolution has hardwired our brains to available to us, which respond to social obligations. What made sense enhance innovation and for intercommunal tribal life doesn’t help the level of response we have to an inbox full creativity, from economic of unopened emails. Shifting from the pack development through to mentality to the highly personal perspective pharmaceutical biotech, required to let go and go deeper is no easy task. Turning off the emails is like battling your own but we need to be aware of on steroids. the demands on our mental instincts How do we regain control of our attention? health and well-being. This is one of the challenges of a tech-forward society. There are incredible tools available to us, which enhance innovation and creativity, from economic development through to pharmaceutical biotech, but we need to be aware of the demands on our mental health and well-being. Managing the expectations of others is one way to honour your personal working patterns while acknowledging perceived obligations. We’re not all going to do things in the same way, so it’s a good start to have the conversation. This might be easier with a friend like mine, who knows I have a sense of humour. At work it’s a little more complicated, but there are a lot of small shifts we can make to project our preferences. I recently read an article about how email signatures can be used more effectively, including to set clear boundaries. That might mean indicating what times of the day you check your email or acknowledging erratic and unconventional times for messages sent — increasingly common this year. Newport’s predictions will require an ambitious structural overhaul — not a few simple hacks like mine — but I imagine a more people-first approach will characterize the future “world without emails.”

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— Carla Sorrell

WHERE IT ALL HAPPENS Ranked #1 in BC Business as the Most Resilient City and Best Place to Work in British Columbia. Langford’s economic growth is unparalleled in the Capital Regional District and now we know that Langford’s ability to pivot has stacked up against every other city in the province. Over the years, Langford has attracted large, ever-popular retail stores as well as a wide range of smaller, owner-operated stores and restaurants. What is probably less known, is the hard work that has gone on behind the scenes to develop and attract larger employers who can truly help move the dial for Langford’s employment base. Growth in the business sector provides a strong tax base for the City and diverse employment, shopping

and dining options for its residents. The bottom line is Langford is the fastest growing community in BC, offering an affordable and desirable lifestyle with recreational options that attract talent which is important to business owners. The community as a whole and the residents who live and work in Langford are the beneficiaries of this investment and commitment to growth. Increasingly, Langford attracts investors, business owners, and service providers who share Langford’s vision of a vibrant, sustainable, healthy and family friendly community.

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

$80,331 MEDIAN AGE

40.8

MEDIAN SINGLE FAMILY HOME

$594,700

Just 14kms from Victoria, Langford is a City surrounded by nature. Hiking trails, mountain biking and paddle boarding are all just minutes away. Langford offers the ultimate lifestyle with endless outdoor recreational opportunities to balance its many amenities.

Technology businesses continue to seek out office space in Langford as they look to offer talent access to more affordable housing as well as a work/life balance. With so much to offer, Langford has proven to be the ideal place to work, live and raise a family.

NEW COMMERCIAL OFFICE & RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES Belmont Market is home to Vancouver Island’s newest and largest Thrifty Foods store. With over 30 national and local tenants, Belmont Market has become a high traffic retail destination for Langford and the West Shore communities. Immediate retail opportunities remain from 900 to 4,000 square feet, with larger format office and retail available in future phases. Call us today to discuss how your business can thrive at Belmont Market!

Nick Fisher, Sitings Realty Ltd. nick@sitings.ca | 604-628-2581 sitings.ca Terminus at District 56 is an eco-friendly, 5 storey mass timber building designed to connect residents and business in the West Shore. Featuring four storeys of dedicated professional office space and ground floor retail space for lease, Terminus offers flexible floor plans ranging from 680 sq ft to 13,000 sq ft. At Terminus, you can breathe in, branch out, and situate your business in the heart of Downtown Langford.

Matt Fraleigh, District 56 matt.fraleigh@colliers.com | 250-414-8440 district56.ca

TO OPEN A BUSINESS IN LANGFORD,CONTACT: CONTACT DONNA PETRIE, MANAGER OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

dpetrie@langford.ca | 250.391.3403 Learn more at: langfordedc.ca

where epic happens.

With a population of 45,000+, Langford is BC’s fastest-growing community.

www.douglasmagazine.com VOLUME 15 NUMBER 3 PUBLISHERS Lise Gyorkos, Georgina Camilleri

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PROOFREADER Paula Marchese CONTRIBUTING AGENCIES Getty Images p. 12, 22-23

GENERAL INQUIRIES info@douglasmagazine.com SEND PRESS RELEASES TO editor@douglasmagazine.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR letters@douglasmagazine.com TO SUBSCRIBE TO DOUGLAS subscriptions@ douglasmagazine.com ADVERTISING INQUIRIES sales@douglasmagazine.com ONLINE www.douglasmagazine.com FACEBOOK DouglasMagazineVictoria TWITTER twitter.com/Douglasmagazine INSTAGRAM @douglas_magazine COVER Andreas Hagen of Study-Build, see story page 28 Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet Published by PAGE ONE PUBLISHING 580 Ardersier Road, Victoria, BC V8Z 1C7 T 250.595.7243 E info@pageonepublishing.ca www.pageonepublishing.ca Printed in Canada, by Transcontinental Printing Ideas and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of Page One Publishing Inc. or its affiliates; no official endorsement should be inferred. The publisher does not assume any responsibility for the contents of any advertisement and any and all representations or warranties made in such advertising are those of the advertiser and not the publisher. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, in all or part, in any form — printed or electronic — without the express written permission of the publisher. The publisher cannot be held responsible for unsolicited manuscripts and photographs. Canadian Publications Mail Product Sales Agreement #41295544 Undeliverable mail should be directed to Page One Publishing Inc. 580 Ardersier Road, Victoria, BC V8Z 1C7 Douglas magazine is a registered trademark of Page One Publishing Inc.

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[IN THE KNOW] The West Shore ShareSpace is designed by Western Design + Build. It is a pilot that will gauge how coworking could play a big part in the future of work for BC Public Service.

DASHA ARMSTRONG

“I was impressed with their COVID protocols and saw what effort they made to make everyone feel safe,” says Lauri Nerman, a member of the Powerhouse Pinball Club, which offers socially distanced pinball.

BC GOVERNMENT RE-ENVISIONS FUTURE OF WORK Launching a coworking space in a pandemic seems counterintuitive, but the BC Government’s new West Shore ShareSpace is anything but. Ann Squires Ferguson, CEO at Western Design + Build, describes the space as confident and optimistic: “It’s leaning into a future self … and how it’s going to evolve. It’s forward-looking with a sense of anticipation.” That ethos drove progress through the pandemic. It caused some pivots to the project, which had been in the pipeline for years. Research within the BC Government’s Leading Workplace Strategies (LWS) team identified that workspaces across North America, both public and private, are typically underused by 40 to 60 per cent. “It’s the real estate, the technology and HR working together to determine and see what our future focus is,” says Rob Macdonald, director of Workplace Strategies + Planning in the Ministry of Citizen’s Services. And for ShareSpace, says Macdonald, that focus is “providing as much choice and flexibility as possible.” That goal is increasingly important as the future of work is now even more reliant on flexibility. Other motivations include cost of living, work/life balance, accessibility and the potential to collaborate with “a community that extends the boundaries of your normal office or ministry.” “We were really talking about compressing the footprint [of an individual], and now we’re talking about expanding the footprint and giving people more space,” says Squires Ferguson of the impact COVID has on how employees would use the space. “That arc happened during design.” Drawing reference from the work her company had done in the health-care sector, Squires Ferguson and her team were able to respecify materials quickly, choosing hardwearing and easily-to-clean alternatives. Privacy barriers were raised and plexiglass shields added. “The real magic of this ShareSpace is that there’s so much variety,” says Squires Ferguson of the 85 work points, various sized meeting rooms and flexible features that create an environment that can be personalized. Capacity has been reduced by half, down to 50 from 100, with new booking and security software giving the ability to analyze the anonymous data for frequency and patterns of use. DOUGLAS 11

VICTORIA’S TECH STATS

$4.06 B ANNUAL REVENUE

$5.22 B ECONOMIC IMPACT

995

HIGH TECH COMPANIES

16,775

EMPLOYEES SOURCE: VIATEC

TECH IN THE CITY A RESILIENT AND AMBITIOUS TECH SECTOR POINTS TO A BRIGHT FUTURE.

ACCOLADES

he tech sector is one of Victoria’s largest employers and continues to generate jobs at levels that match pre-pandemic recruitment. VIATEC (Victoria Innovation, Advanced Technology and Entrepreneurship Council) is currently posting an average of 120 jobs, a number that hasn’t changed much in a year. “December unemployment numbers [in Victoria] were 5.8 per cent — most cities would love to have that during a regular economy, let alone during a pandemic,” says VIATEC CEO Dan Gunn. “I think tech has a hand in that. “One of the advantages of our tech sector is they’re very globally focused. They get very little of the revenue from their own backyard. That gives them global opportunities to try and pursue, and there’s resilience in that.” Early this year the CBRE Group released a market ranking of the top 10 tech markets in Canada; Victoria ranks seventh above Halifax, Quebec City and Hamilton. The ranking is based on 13 metrics, including talent availability and operating costs, to

gauge suitability of tech employers and prospective employees. The top seven markets, including Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, have maintained their position since 2019. The last decade has seen the sector flourish, changing the landscape for young entrepreneurs and contributing to a culture shift in the city. Alacrity Canada started in Victoria 10 years ago with the purpose of teaching recent graduates how to become entrepreneurs by connecting promising talent with support, mentorship and capital. Over the last decade Alacrity’s portfolio companies have contributed a significant amount to the South Island’s economy. “We started or created somewhere between 250 and 600 jobs throughout the portfolio,” says Alacrity’s general manager Richard Egli. “The annual revenues of the companies add up to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $50 million a year Canadian — that’s only across 10 or 11 companies.” Two of Alacrity’s companies, Tutela and Echosec, were sold in the $30 to 40 million range. Another of their companies, Certn,

successfully raised $43 million last year, elevating it to Victoria’s big league of tech companies with over 100 employees, making it one of the city’s fastest growing businesses. Others in that range have included Latitude Geographics, MediaCore (before it was sold to Workday) and Redbrick. Those who have sold companies are left with money in their pockets, and Egli has watched the positive impact they made on the sector: “They’re investing in the next round of startups, they’re advising and mentoring companies and they’re in their thirties. So they’re going to get to do this for the next 20 to 30 years. It’s pretty wild — the trickle-down impact of this type of work on an ecosystem.” Both Gunn and Egli agree that the next step in Victoria’s evolution

is to retain more companies, seeing them grow to the next level — in the realm of 200 to 500 employees — locally instead of being sold because it makes sense for the founders or investors. Top-level recruitment can be a hindrance, but the changing landscape of remote work may offer benefits as people are able to try out jobs from afar before moving or can undertake the work remotely. “Victoria’s tech sector isn’t in one space. We’re not a gaming town, we’re not a software town, we’re not an alternate energy town — we have all of those things,” says Gunn. “When one area isn’t flying high, then the other ones are, and they can start pulling in the available resources and people along the way. It gives [the sector] a resiliency that helps the overall community and economy.”

[ VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY ]

[ UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA ]

[ OPEN OCEAN ROBOTICS ]

Felicia Fischer, a Vancouver Island University student, has been invited to sit on the ImpAct Student and Alumni Advisory Committee (ISAAC). The national initiative provides strategic input in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through projects that reduce barriers to inclusive access, promote social entrepreneurship, and improve campus sustainability.

Aaron Devor’s position as UVic’s Chair in Trangender Studies — the first of its kind when created in 2016 — has been renewed for another five year term. The role, says Devor, “is needed more than ever as policy-makers and service providers look for research and advice to guide them in supporting an increasingly gender-diverse population.”

Julie Angus, CEO, Open Ocean Robotics, won the Industry Icon Award for Cleantech CEO at the BC Cleantech Awards. The award selects “someone who has made a significant impact and is changing the world of cleantech.” It is one of 12 accolades made within the province’s cleantech community.

12 DOUGLAS

DESIGN/BUILD

BUSINESS IMPACT IMPROVING EQUITY AND MEASURING THE IMPACT OF RACISM LOCALLY

SUSTAINABLE WATER PURIFICATION COURTENAY-BASED Clearflo Solutions is manufacturing sustainable clean drinking water systems, powered by renewable energy.

A GLOBAL ISSUE Worldwide, 785 million people — one in nine — lack access to safe water, and nearly one million people die each year from water, sanitation and hygiene-related diseases. In Canada, at least 40 First Nation reserves have long-term water advisories. ClearFlo, a Courtenay-based company, aims to provide safe, clean water with its mobile clean-water drinking system Mobilpur10. It can be wind or solar powered and is able to deliver 50,000 litres a day, enough for up to 1,500 people. It currently has a successful system up and running in Nanjing, China, and is waiting for COVID restrictions to lift to complete a system in Panama. The company is also in talks with Island First Nations communities. “We are currently talking with two First Nations chiefs to confirm the location of the demonstration system,” says Clearflo founder Kevin Haughton. “We need to ensure we have the proper spot for operations and monitoring.”

NATURAL FILTRATION The Mobilpur10 employs natural filter media, which mimics the Earth’s ground layers. By precisely layering this various media, the system captures contaminants, sediment and bacteria. The water is then filtered through a one micron filter and then disinfected with sodium hypochlorite. Manufactured in ClearFlo’s facility on Vancouver Island, the system is designed to operate in the harshest conditions and is remotely monitored, utilizing onboard communications technology. “The system is generally pumping clean water within three days of arriving on site,” Haughton says.

Scale Collaborative is launching the womenled Thrive Impact Fund to support early stage and growing social enterprises to access flexible and patient loans.

The Victoria’s Foundation’s Fund for Gender Equality is distributing $300,000 to 12 organizations to advance gender equity through leadership and engagement in local projects.

Challenging Racist British Columbia: 150 Years and Counting looks at the history of racist policies impacting Indigenous, Black and racialized communities in B.C. Its seven co-authors include three scholars from UVic.

INNOVATE

STRONG ENOUGH FOR MARS On February 18th the Perseverance rover landed on Mars with a plan to collect geographical specimens by drilling into the red plant. One of the many challenges NASA overcame putting together this mission was to find a material strong enough to drill into the planet’s dense surface. The drill bit tip that will be tasked with extracting samples was made from material manufactured in Langford by Kennametal, a global company that creates tools and technologies for aerospace, earthworks, energy, general engineering and transportation. Twice as strong as steel, the company’s tungsten carbide blanks are used for hard rock mining here on earth — the toughest grade blanks, K92, are used on the rover. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory first began ordering and testing the material in 2014, making the decision in 2018 to use it for the Perseverance.

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Need to get quick input from meeting attendees? With the SurveyMonkey integration app, you can send polls and manage multiple surveys within Zoom. From conducting in-the-moment pulse checks and collecting post-meeting feedback to driving virtual event engagement, the app can enable better remote working experiences.

DOUGLAS 13

CASE STUDY

IN THE COMUNITY SCALING UP VICTORIA’S BLUE ECONOMY

South Island Prosperity Partnership (SIPP) has announced interim board members for the Centre for Ocean Applied Sustainable Technology (COAST) ocean hub and cluster. Combining expertise from the public and private sectors, non-profits, education institutions and SMEs will strengthen the sector’s ability to compete for major national opportunities in the $3-trillion global ocean and marine space. Interim CEO Craig Norris says priorities will be: “Funding, getting membership in and then what we’re delivering.” Norris hopes for initial investments in the realm of $250,000 but notes the capacity to handle three- to four-fold that. The board will work to attract investment for smaller, innovative companies and startups that are looking for venture capital and market opportunities usually tied to large enterprises with global marketing strategies in place. “We have a significant digital technology advantage that’s becoming clearer and clearer,” says Emilie de Rosenroll, CEO of SIPP “We’re able to apply that technology savvy to the ocean space. The goal is to leapfrog the region forward.” Find out more at douglasmagazine.com

KEEPING IT LOCAL

Victoria’s food delivery app was created in response to the high rates and preferential algorithms characteristic of its competitors.

“Tutti has always been a way to bring our community together around a shared love of food. We live in such an incredible multicultural community with amazing restaurants and restaurateurs, and, for me, Tutti has been a way for more people to experience what these businesses and individuals have to offer!” KAISA AIERKEN, FOUNDER AND CEO, TUTTI

BY EMILY DOBBY

Tutti is a Victoria-based food delivery company that maintains exclusive contracts with several restaurants in town, including Il Covo Trattoria, Wind Cries Mary and Be Love. The word “tutti” means “all” or “everything” in Italian, and the company hopes to deliver from all businesses, including farmer’s markets, local retailers, pet food stores — ideally rolling out across the country within a few years. Three years ago, Tutti’s founder and CEO Kaisa Aierken — who had worked in the food industry for a few years already — was discouraged by the high prices charged by other food delivery apps. He started working with a friend to develop an app that could connect and manage users, merchants, and drivers. They got their first customers by promoting the app

through restaurants they partnered with who would tell their in-store customers about them. Creating a fair and accessible platform was important for Aierken, one that users and merchants could access easily that could offer a bilingual option for Chinese customers. In the first phase of lockdown Tutti launched a free meal program for the hospitality industry with a $25 credit per Tutti account provided to hospitality workers. “This was a way for us to support local restaurants with increased demand for their meals,” says Aierken. Aierken values competitive delivery costs and often runs free delivery promotions. Tutti boasts the longest range of all the delivery apps, enabling them to cater to a wider audience. It also offers an automated delivery system, which is ideal for small businesses.

DOUGLAS READS In THINK AGAIN: THE POWER OF KNOWING WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant explores the mindset that leads to productive workplace cultures and thriving professional careers. Grant thinks that flexible and open thinking is based on a willingness to rethink and that working to your values, rather than (fixed) ideas, will yield long-term success. His insights come from examples of people who are willing to update their hypothesis often, or shift strategies based on new data, and from sobering examples of leaders who failed to change their thinking. His advice: surround yourself with people who will challenge your opinion instead of supporting it.

14 DOUGLAS

ALGORITHM The driver dispatch system is integrated with Google Cloud APIs to assign orders, optimize route planning for quick deliveries and calculate accurate fees.

CLIENTS Cold Comfort, Irish Times Pub, JJ Wonton Noodle House, Agrius, Liquor Planet and Spinnakers Brewpub are all exclusive clients.

COST Tutti only takes 10 to 15 per cent of sales. Other delivery apps such as SkiptheDishes, Doordash, and Uber Eats take anywhere from 25 to 35 per cent.

SOFTWARE Vendors control their online storefront and all restaurants have equal visibility, to ensure small mom-and-pop shops are not overshadowed by larger businesses.

Disciplined Value Investing That Works COMPOUND ANNUAL RETURNS (Including reinvested dividends, as of February 15, 2021) 1 YEAR

3 YEAR

5 YEAR

10 YEAR

20 YEAR

INCEPTION1

Odlum Brown Model Portfolio

8.0%

7.9%

10.7%

12.4%

11.4%

14.3%

S&P/TSX Total Return Index

9.8%

7.5%

12.3%

6.4%

6.6%

8.5%

December 15, 1994. *The Odlum Brown Model Portfolio is an all-equity portfolio that was established by the Odlum Brown Equity Research Department on December 15, 1994 with a hypothetical investment of $250,000. It showcases how we believe individual security recommendations may be used within the context of a client portfolio. The Model also provides a basis with which to measure the quality of our advice and the effectiveness of our disciplined investment strategy. Trades are made using the closing price on the day a change is announced. Performance figures do not include any allowance for fees. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

LEADERSHIP

ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT Carol Anne Hilton, founder of the Indigenomics Institute, shares her proposal for an inclusive Indigenous economic development model in her new book Indigenomics: A Seat at the Economic Table.

Successful investing is done by buying and holding high-quality businesses, particularly during times of market uncertainty. I invest alongside my clients in the very same businesses, focusing on companies that will continue to show long-term growth. If you would like to discuss your investment strategy and whether it aligns with your life goals, please contact me today.

R. H. Mark Mawhinney, CPA, CMA, ICD.D, CIM® Associate Portfolio Manager, Investment Advisor

10 CHARACTERISTICS OF AN INDIGENOUS ECONOMY: Place-based — Recognizes and values origin as the

Tel 250-952-7755

relationship to space and people through the deep and lasting connection to place. It is this continuity that forms the sense of responsibility to place and time.

mmawhinney@odlumbrown.com

Relational accountability — Embodies an inherent sacred

Member-Canadian Investor Protection Fund

sense of responsibility and long-term impact for inter-relational decision-making.

Odlum Brown Limited

@Odlum_Brown

Odlum Brown Community

OdlumBrown

Future-based — Framed in multigenerational thinking, it focuses on long-term thinking and decision-making for the seventh generation and beyond. Equality in all universal relationships — Focuses on the

inter-relationship of species and respect for life as a core value. The quality and nature of “exchange” encompasses the protocols of life, the agreements of place and responsibility.

Natural and Supernatural — Connects and values

both the natural and supernatural world — all of the physical, spiritual, and tangible and intangible components.

Reciprocity — Focuses on giving and receiving as core

structures for wealth production and distribution that forms the basis of exchange and the future value of wealth.

Restorative or regenerative — Focuses on economic

progress as a parallel process to responsibility for lands, resource management, conservation and longterm conservation of resources.

“Only taking what is needed” — A core premise of

governance and decision-making — that future generations require this of us today. Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing form relational decision-making.

Economic interdependence — Builds economic

sovereignty (right to an economy) as a mechanism of modernity. Economic sovereignty works to facilitate and uplift the retention of cultural and spiritual identity and the continuity of connection and interdependence.

COMPLETE EYE EXAMINATIONS BY

DR. JASON MAYCOCK DR. TOBY VALLANCE DR. MANDY LETKEMANN DR. NICK CATCHUK OPTOMETRISTS

Measuring Wealth — Through relationship and community and across time, prosperity is confirmed through recognition, protocol, ceremony, the exchange of gifting and distribution. CLIENT: MAYCOCK EYECARE PUBLICATION: DOUGLAS MAGAZINE SHIPPING DATE: NOV 2020; AD SIZE: 4.94” x 4.7”

DOUGLAS 15

IN CONVERSATION THOMAS HOMER-DIXON, DIRECTOR OF THE CASCADE INSTITUTE AT ROYAL ROADS UNIVERSITY

LEVERAGING POSSIBILITIES FOR

GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION Thomas Homer-Dixon is an internationally renowned intellectual activist and entrepreneur. His research is focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how people, organizations and societies can better resolve their conflicts and innovate in response to complex problems. After 40 years in Eastern Canada, he has returned to the West Coast where he grew up, bringing with him a lifetime of research and an appetite for making connections.

BY CARLA SORRELL

PHOTO BY MICHELLE PROCTOR

year ago Thomas Homer-Dixon, Tad to friends, moved across Canada and into the home his father built in Metchosin in 1976. Not only did he bring his family, he also brought a lifetime of research that led to the foundation of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads. Many of his ideas are presented in his most recent book, Commanding Hope, published in September 2020. Growing up in Victoria, his father was the chief forester for the Greater Victoria Water Supply Area, and HomerDixon gained an intimate knowledge of how Victoria’s virtually untreated and uniquely sweet-tasting water is gathered, treated and processed. “Whether people realize it or not, they are deeply grounded in the landscape,” says Homer-Dixon. “Especially the landscape of their childhoods, whether it’s an urban landscape or a rural landscape.” As a student at Carleton University, he founded the national student pugwash organization, which attracted 30,000 members before he handed off leadership. That

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set him on a path: “I’m a serial founder of things,” says Homer-Dixon. “I’m fundamentally an entrepreneur, an academic and intellectual entrepreneur.” He established the Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the University of Toronto and the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo. “[At Waterloo] I really wanted to draw together a team of people, nationally and internationally, working on complex systems issues,” says Homer-Dixon. “I’d increasingly become a complexity scientist in my own work, and I wanted to connect with others doing that kind of work. “The Cascade Institute is an outgrowth of all of these things. It’s the next stage in my own evolution as an intellectual activist and entrepreneur, trying to take this accumulated knowledge and make it usable for society at large … One of the things I’ve tried to specialize in is communicating scientific ideas to a broad public in ways that don’t water the ideas down.“

In his most recent book, Commanding Hope, Homer-Dixon describes the view, transformed by distant forest fires: “Standing on the same cliff, I could see smoke creating a faint horizontal line above the mountains across the Strait, tracing a previously unseen boundary between atmospheric layers.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon at his home office, perched on the edge of a cliff in Metchosin.

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Carla Sorrell: What is the Cascade Institute? Thomas Homer-Dixon: We’re trying

Turn a trusted relationship into intelligent investments.

to leverage possibilities for rapid shifts in positive directions, rather than negative directions. To accelerate, for instance, the zero-carbon energy transition, or to move more aggressively on issues of injustice: economic, racial, social injustice in our societies. Complexity science tells us that these possibilities are there, but often we can’t see them. The Cascade Institute is intended to use the lenses of complexity science as a way of revealing those possibilities, and then telling people about them so that we can act on them.”

Who are you speaking to?

Investing is about working together. Your goals. Our solutions. Jeff Cohen, BA, CFP, FCSI Wealth Advisor Tel: 250-361-2408 jeff.cohen@nbpcd.com

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published by one of our junior researchers. The Cascade Institute has created a foundation or an environment in which that idea could flourish and take off.

Why here, why now? I had a huge interest in making this work here. But I don’t actually think there are other places where I could do this effectively. Just look at the daily letters in the Times Colonist. The conversation is an order of magnitude more advanced than you’d find even in The Globe and Mail. People get it. People are buying electric vehicles and come here because they love the outdoors and they love the natural environment. Vancouver Island is now kind of this crucible of ideological evolution when it comes to green politics in the country. And it’s a cool place to be for that reason.

A big part of our agenda is to take these tools of complexity science and make them understandable and usable Your work seems very by everybody. We also much a calling, and a call “Prior to the understand that in today’s to action for others. How pandemic, it was world, change comes would you describe your like everything from multiple directions purpose? — governments can’t get was locked up. I realized as I came to a long way ahead of the Suddenly the Ernest Becker’s work and mass public and there are pieces of the all the work surrounding these deep divisions within puzzle are all in terror management theory society. So we’re speaking motion and you’re ... this is what gives my life to people who are engaged not sure how meaning. This is what allows in those debates, to provide us to transcend the terror of things are going them a tool so they can be our recognition of our own to reconfigure better resolved or move mortality. Of course, having beyond these divisions. We themselves.” children changes everything. will be speaking to business It kind of rewires you. leaders, governments, I got to this last stage of my career — I’m community leaders, faith leaders and everyday just about to turn 65; I’ve got all this stuff folks who are just really concerned about the that I’ve accumulated in my head. It’s not just direction of the world. knowledge but connections and social capital We have a significant program to develop and people. How can I put this to the best use educational materials, where we take our tools, possible, while at the same time being in a place our methods and show people how they can use them in their own lives; how they can apply where I’d like my family to be because I think it’s healthy, safer, more supportive and gentler. systems mapping, cognitive affective mapping The world is becoming fearful and dangerous in and state space modeling, among other things, all kinds of ways. And yet, on Vancouver Island, to their everyday problems, and understand there’s still this sense of a certain gentleness in … how they might change things in positive the community. directions.

How do you distinguish between your own research and your work within the Cascade Institute?

You talk a lot about intersections. What do you think are the axes to the intersection we are in now?

My new book, Commanding Hope, is like a 200,000 word pitch for the Cascade Institute. The overlaps are extraordinarily close. I have an omnivorous appetite for ideas. And I’m quite happy to let a lot of folks share the stage. This is a big operation. There’s no way one person could establish the entire intellectual framework; I’m just providing the starting points for it. These little things can make a big difference — it might be a paper that’s

Prior to the pandemic, it was like everything was locked up. Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle are all in motion, and you’re not sure how things are going to reconfigure themselves; how our economies are going to work; what our social norms are going to be; or exactly what the political reality is going to be in the future. Now we have an explosion of possibilities, both positive and negative, in front of us.

In the middle part of my book [Commanding Hope] I have to go through the process of saying, the situation, folks, is really bad; these are the empirical facts of the matter. I call them the slow process constraints: that we’re going to lose all the coral reefs on the planet, we’re going to lose most of the forests and the sea levels are going to probably be five to six metres higher. We have to understand those [slow process] constraints and figure out how we can build a positive world within [them]. Maybe some of them we can reverse. We don’t want to give up on that. But we also have to anticipate the high likelihood that those are the boundaries we are going to live within. But within those boundaries, there’s still an almost infinite range of possibilities, many which are still quite positive.

How big of a role does chance play in all this? There was a slim vote balance between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The whole world would have been different; Gore would have moved aggressively on climate change issues. Part of the concern about Trump is that we can’t go back to where we were,. We can’t reverse everything.

I look at this uncertainty, as it’s scary: the possibilities, small things and chance making a huge difference. But it’s also a reason for hope. If somebody had said in 2018 that a girl of 15, [who is] on the spectrum, is going to sit on the steps of the Swedish Parliament building with a little sign saying “School Strike,” and catalyze a global movement of protest against climate inaction, we would have said that’s ridiculous.

It seems like, at this stage in your life, you’re kind of a facilitator. What do you do in this role? I’ve got people who come to me to say, “We’re looking at ways of either reducing or stopping or managing this process, and we would like a platform.“ We create this home for people who are thinking about high leverage interventions. Maybe we can figure out a way where we can lock down billions of tonnes of carbon in the permafrost in Canada. We can provide facilities, some legitimacy, in terms of a research frame.

Where do you sit on technology — optimistic or pessimistic? I’m a techno-realist. I actually don’t believe in optimism or pessimism because the terms imply that you’re selecting data in a

You must have an amazing network across Canada, at a high level of influence. How do you make those introductions and put people together? I came back with a pretty good Rolodex from Ontario, across a lot of different social sectors. I enjoy working with people, and so a lot of those relationships are good, friendly relationships. As necessary and appropriate, I connect and put people together, or I try to bring them into the team or into the project. I just let a lot of this stuff percolate in my mind, and see what connections arise. All those folks on the scientific advisory board for the Cascade Institute, they’re all people I’ve worked with at one point or another. It’s an extraordinary group of people; we have so much talent in this country. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be hitting way above our weight globally on issues like this. ■

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AGAINST THE ODDS The Victoria-based global biotech company Aurinia is poised for rapid growth after receiving coveted FDA approval for Lupkynis, the first drug of its kind to treat lupus nephritis. BY CARLA SORRELL

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t 3:08 p.m. on Friday January 21, Aurinia received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its lupus nephritis treatment, Lupkynis (previously voclosporin). On the following Monday, Aurinia’s stock price (TSX:AUP) closed at $23.91, up 26.7 per cent from Friday’s close at $18.87, giving the company a total market value at the time of more than $3 billion. “It's a huge story of persistence,” says Rob Huizinga, executive vice president of research, who estimates that the odds of FDA approval are as low as 10,000 to one. “There are times when things are dark. You say, wait a second: I believe in the drug; we believe what it does; we believe in where the data is going. Let's continue and persist.” American sales are the holy grail for a company like Aurinia, representing 80 to 90 per cent of their market. The FDA approval indicates a high likelihood that the company will achieve the $60 to 80 million sales targets predicted by analysts. A few months prior to the FDA approval Aurinia signed a $100 million deal ($50 million upfront with $50 million more in future milestones), plus 20 per cent of royalties on all sales, with the Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka to develop and market Lupkynis in Europe and Asia. Aurinia's headquarters are in Victoria, with 50 staff working across departments that include business development and licensing; the American commercial hub is in Maryland with 240 employees; there are small clusters in Edmonton and in Europe. The drug itself is manufactured in Switzerland, packaged into capsules in Florida and blister packed and distributed out of Kansas City. Michael Martin, Aurinia’s chief business officer and cofounder, says the life sciences sector has been “basically ignored here [in Canada] for 20 to 30 years.” The country’s manufacturing capacity has become a focus as the world races for COVID vaccines. Martin predicts that “a major infusion of capital will come from the government in the life sciences, wherever the clusters are: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver/Victoria. “We're going to be able to expand our workforce here to work on these new products that we're going to bring in,” says Martin, whose ambitions for Aurinia are to maintain their reputation for innovation. “If we can raise more capital, we can do bigger things, we can do better things. That's priority one.” DOUGLAS 23

JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

Micheal Martin (left) and Neil Solomons (centre) cofounded Aurinia Pharmaceuticals to improve treatment for lupus nephritis patients. Rob Huizinga (right) was brought on early and has been studying the disease for 18 years.

CONQUERING A SINGLE RARE DISEASE Lupus nephritis is a subset of the rare disease lupus. When lupus autoantibodies attack the kidneys it's called lupus nephritis. If under-treated or untreated, it can lead to kidney function or kidney failure, requiring dialysis or transplant, and it can be fatal. For those reasons, says chief medical officer and cofounder Neil Solomons, “It's a very nasty disease.” It primarily affects young women; 90 per cent of sufferers are women of childbearing age. In the U.S., approximately 100,000 to 200,000 people have the condition which primarily affects Black, Hispanic and Asian women. There is less data on the numbers in Canada, but Solomons estimates approximately 10,000 to 20,000 cases. It’s a difficult disease to study. The challenge to find enough participants with the active disease means a global sample group — Aurinia’s trials took place in 27 countries. 24 DOUGLAS

Patience and travel are required to find and assemble those groups; funds have to be raised for studies that take around two years. “You have to get the master [research participant] having active disease — as they're flaring — to get them at the right time to analyze results,” says Solomons. “You spend all this money, then you flip over the card and see if the drug works.” The results of the study that came out in 2019 were really good. The company decided it was time to apply for FDA approval — another daunting task. In fact, they had already started the New Drug Application process four months before the results came out, with the review for the FDA taking another eight months. “You're doing all these things concurrently because every day is valuable for patients,” says Huizinga. “[Martin is] flying around, talking to investors raising money. We’re [Solomons and I] flying around talking to investigators, trying to get patients into trials.”

“We're all entrepreneurs. We're going to do something else someday in the sector. The more people that you can bring in with high caliber, experience and talents, the better — it just builds the cluster.” Michael Martin

“You’ve never heard about a bad disease until you hear about a solution. Now I think you’re going to hear a lot about lupus nephritis because we have something that works extremely rapidly. I think that the profile of lupus nephritis is going to rise to the surface because finally we have something to offer patients.” - Rob Huizinga Huizinga estimates the volume of paperwork required for the final application, if printed, would fill two semi trucks. Within that mass of information are years of data; one misreported number can undermine the whole application. “Until you get the final approval, you never quite know what's going to go on [the FDA may request another study at any point],” says Solomons. “In the meantime, you've done two studies and spent hundreds, literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and seven or eight years of your life.”

MEETING OF THE MINDS Solomons and Martin met working at Aspreva, a company set up in Victoria based on a deal with Roche, where Solomons had been employed in the company’s U.K. office, to work on less common diseases for their successful renal transplant drug, CellCept. A merger with the Swiss company Vifor saw Aspreva’s Victoria office begin to shrink, while emerging research showed that the multi-targeted therapy used in renal transplants could get better results than CellCept alone. That gave the entrepreneurial pair some ideas. Huizinga has a background in nephrology, the study of kidneys, and is one of a kind in Canada; he has been researching the disease at a molecular level for 18 years. He developed the global clinical program of voclosporin at Isotechnika prior to its merger with Aurinia. “We pieced together the jigsaw puzzle of Mike's business sense, my experience in developing drugs in transplant and Rob's experiences working in a transplant unit,” says Solomons. “It was clear to me that the approach of suppressing the immune systems that had been very successful in transplant could be transferred to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, such as lupus nephritis.” Previous treatments damp down immune activity from attacking the body. At Aspreva, Martin and Solomons saw improved outcomes for lupus nephritis: one in five patients went into remission, which was ultimately the goal — treatments that stop the conditions enough to avoid dialysis or transplant — but still left a lot of room for improvement. Adding Isotechnika’s drug, voclosporin, to the drug they were using at Aspreva saw an improvement in remission 26 DOUGLAS

rates; twice the number of patients in remission in half the time. “That's a really meaningful benefit to patients,” says Huizinga. “It sounds fairly straightforward,” says Solomons. “We have one drug and add another drug on, and we get better results. It’s a bit more complicated; but that's what we do.” Solomons and Martin initially founded Private Aurinia — which, at one point in 2010, was known to the pair as Project Phoenix: Rising from the Ashes and later became Aurinia Pharmaceuticals — and bought the rights for the indication of lupus nephritis (voclosporin) from Isotechnika, a company whose unfortunate financial position, on the brink of bankruptcy, put off Aurinia’s potential investors. That led to a reverse merger with Isotechnika in 2013. Its public listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange allowed the company to raise capital for Aurinia more effectively. They brought in entrepreneur Richard Glickman, whose contacts made the next phase of growth possible. “We merged these organizations,” says Martin, “and, basically right away, we closed $52 million financing, followed by $172 million after our first data, and then another $200 million — we’ve probably raised $1.6 billion over the last seven years.”

THE VALUE OF FDA APPROVAL Until very recently there were no drugs formally approved to treat lupus nephritis. Doctors could recommend medication off-label, but that meant more risks for both doctors and patients. Insurance companies put up barriers to claims for generic drugs. Liability issues are high for doctors who are making their own decisions to prescribe medications and patients are left to weigh risks for themselves. One wallet of 60 capsules of Lupkynis costs close to $4,000, and a patient might need up to three wallets a month. For Canadians who benefit from universal health care, it can be hard to comprehend these costs. For Americans, the cost means life or death. At $60,000, for example, the annual cost of Lupkynis is a deal compared to the annual cost of dialysis at $150,000. “The encouragement for physicians to prescribe is that we have this large safety data

set, specifically looking at patients, like lupus nephritis patients,” says Huizinga. “We have the answer to those specific questions that they're looking for. We have the safety data set; we have the efficacy datasets. That gives them the comfort that they need — a company with a label from the FDA.”

LOOKING FORWARD The company has been growing steadily from its modest headquarters in the Vancouver Island Technology Park, tucked behind Camosun’s Interurban campus. But that’s about to change. In a year Aurinia will move into the fully renovated Times Colonist building, almost doubling their floor space from 12,000 to 20,000 square feet. Aurinia is one of Canada's largest by market cap biotech companies, vying with Zymeworks in Vancouver for second place and after AbCellera, whose recent IPO left their market cap higher than Aurinia’s. “In the history of life sciences in Canada, you develop a drug to point ‘X’, and then you get munched by a big company of some kind,” says Huizinga. “Here, we're developing a sustainable industry that's going to benefit the city; it's going to benefit the life science quarter tremendously in the long term. No matter what happens with the organization, we're going to have them develop that expertise here.” Up until now, admits Martin, the company has “been agnostic to where people live. We just hired the best people.” While that won’t change, Victoria will benefit from the opportunity for top international talent to relocate. The company’s ambition to continue researching and developing new products, rather than resting on their heels to roll out and sell a successful drug, will be a draw for people who want that innovation and growth. “These are people that have great skill sets, that are a lot more resilient to economic changes, because we're working on something that's very global in nature,” says Martin. “I'm very excited about that part; that the research people we bring in, the development people — the product development people — these are thought leader jobs, really well educated. They can really help impact the community here. It's building a life sciences community here that's sustainable.”

“I am fascinated by ‘story’ and innovative ideas that are rooted in place and people. It matters to consumers.”

JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

Andreas Hagen

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Campbell River Rising This city next to sea and forest is charting a unique course as it evolves into a surprising hub of innovation and ideation. by Andrew Findlay

After growing up in Campbell River, Andreas Hagen studied at Harvard where he had the idea for iLab Solutions, a business he created, ran and sold before relocating to Quadra Island where his wife was raised. He is an active participant in rewriting Campbell River’s economic story.

n a mild December afternoon, Andreas Hagen spins up a winding road from the waterfront home on Hyacinthe Bay that he shares with his wife Danielle. Quadra Island’s network of mountain biking and hiking trails is Hagen’s backyard bliss; it’s where he goes to recharge in between Zoom meetings with entrepreneurs and startup founders, or when he’s not tinkering around with this CNC machine in the shop that serves as headquarters for his company Study-Build. It’s a new venture

in partnership with Danielle, a difficult to define hybrid of branding, web development, design, fabrication and prototyping. Tall and lanky, Hagen’s smile and positivity are as infectious as his insatiable curiosity and diverse interests, which spans from music, biking and art to spotting a business idea with potential. He knows a thing or two about good ideas. Hagen grew up in Willow Point, south of Campbell River. Post high school, he attended an international college in Italy before enrolling at Harvard where he studied genetics and conducted research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. DOUGLAS 29

In 2018, Campbell River launched Vancouver Island’s first city-wide fibre optic broadband network in a project cofunded by the city and Island Coastal Economic Trust.

Time spent in the laboratory spawned a business idea with two fellow students: how to bring together expertise, capital and resources across institutions to optimize research and avoid the duplication of effort and repetition of mistakes that is so common in the sciences. Hagen taught himself to write computer code and iLab Solutions was born in 2006, a company he ran for a decade before he and his partners sold it for an undisclosed amount to California-based Agilent Technologies. In the meantime, he had relocated to Quadra Island, where his wife was raised, staying on as iLab’s chief software architect. In 2018, he left the company he cofounded, with an eye to new ventures and adventures. For example, he’s helping to rewrite the economic story of Campbell River, the “Salmon Capital of the World,” with a small group of fellow successful entrepreneurs known as CRAAG (the Campbell River Area Angel Group). “I am fascinated by ‘story’ and innovative ideas that are rooted in place and people. It matters to consumers,” he tells me. He then offers up an apropos exhibit A to 30 DOUGLAS

illustrate the notion of story – his bicycle. The work of art that he’s riding this morning is a hardtail mountain bike, one of less than 50 bikes hand built every year by fellow Quadra Islander Sam Whittingham, the founder, chief bike designer and frame welder of awardwinning Naked Bicycles & Design. Hagen has time, money and plenty of energy, much of which he is directing these days into CRAAG, whose members have each taken their own unique paths to mid-Vancouver Island but have embraced Campbell River and its future. Though the seaside lifestyle, close to nature and away from crowds, unites them, they’re far from wealthy recluses. Along with Hagen, the group includes American tech exec and investor Dana Kammersgard (owner of a 35-hectare island in Surge Narrows near Quadra); physicist, computer scientist, entrepreneur and mountain climber, David Baar; and aquaculture innovator and venture capitalist Rick Segal. Recently the group brought on another member, Chris Nelson of Nelson Investments. Hagen almost blushes at the mention of the term “angel investor.” It doesn’t sit well with him.

“It sounds like some benevolent force that descends from on high. But that’s the accepted term in the investment world,” Hagen says with a shrug. Nomenclature aside, Hagen and his fellow angels at CRAGG are partnering with the City of Campbell River in a unique way to help turn the page from a heavy industrial past, rooted in raw resources, to a nimble 21st century economy with diversity and innovation at its core. NexStream Tech Challenge, a Dragons’ Denstyle competition, is the partnership’s flagship endeavour. The first edition wrapped last September when CRAAG and Campbell River announced the winners: Quadra Island’s Wild Isle Ferments and Portable Electric, who rose to the top of 37 entrants after an intense half year selection process. The competition is open to anyone, from revenue-positive businesses to first-time entrepreneurs. And the term “tech” is loosely applied — it could be anything from an idea that innovates in Campbell River’s traditional sectors of forestry, fishing, aquaculture and tourism to completely out-of-the-box gig-

Rose Klukas, Campbell River’s economic development officer, was the missing ingredient in bringing the Campbell River Area Angel Group (CRAAG) to life.

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economy thinking. Up for grabs are cash, business mentorship, and, if the fit is right, a potential investment or equity stake by a CRAAG member. “I have to say we were surprised by the range of different people who put in proposals, from students to established companies,” Hagen told me. Lifestyle may have brought the members of CRAAG to the Campbell River region, but if it weren’t for a stroke of genius by way of social connecting through Rose Klukas, Campbell River’s enterprising economic development officer, they wouldn’t have known of one another’s existence. Klukas, who previously headed up economic development in Kitimat, joined the Campbell River team in 2016. No stranger to communities anchored by heavy industry but looking to diversify, Klukas says the city of 36,000 was already “making a shift from industrial roots to an entrepreneurial economy,” under the leadership of mayor Andy Adams. In 2017, Campbell River launched Vancouver Island’s first city-wide fibre optic broadband

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“It’s a unique partnership. CRAAG manages the contest – it’s their money. And we do the PR, so there’s minimal bureaucracy,” says Rose Klukas of the NexStream competition. “We’re looking to solve problems not only locally but also globally.”

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JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

Before winning the NexStream competition, Brandon Pirie, owner of Wild Isle Ferments, admits he was as green as seaweed when it came to business.

network in a project cofunded by the city and Island Coastal Economic Trust. A small but diverse gig-and-innovation economy was taking hold, including entrepreneurs like Cris Fletcher, president and founder of Genesis Marketing, which includes Genesis Graphics and G2 CNC. The city’s broadband network gave a big boost to local Matthew Gionet who had moved to Vancouver in the late ‘90s to pursue a career in sound design and editing before returning to his hometown in 2011 to launch EarWorm Sound. His clients include video game and documentary filmmakers, both local and international. “My dad and grandad worked at the pulp and paper mill when it was Fletcher Challenge and I worked there, too,” Gionet says. “When I first moved back, my dad called Campbell River ‘plywood town’ because of all the boarded-up stores.” Since long before its incorporation in 1947, Campbell River’s economic fortunes were inextricably tied to the forest sector. Its industrial tax base collapsed between 2008 and

2010 after both TimberWest and Catalyst Paper closed their operations, collectively shedding 700 high-paying union jobs from the payrolls. It was not a happy time for Campbell River. When Klukas arrived, a sense of optimism was returning, grounded by an understanding that fish and logs are still important, but Campbell River could do a lot more to leverage

its location, affordability and natural attributes to grow a more diverse economy. The choice was clear; rue the past, or honour your roots and move forward with confidence and creativity. “We knew there was a lot more potential for tech and innovation,” Klukas says. But it wasn’t until Klukas met Dave Baar at an economic conference that the ingredients of a special sauce started to bubble. Not long after that encounter, Kammersgard serendipitously phoned Klukas to pitch a business development idea. Kammersgard met Baar, which eventually led to introductions with Hagen and Segal. A shared passion for innovation and entrepreneurship, balanced by diverse skills and experience, created instant synergy. CRAAG was formed. And after some back-of-the-napkin, blue-sky brainstorming with Klukas, they launched NexStream. “It’s a unique partnership. CRAAG manages the contest — it’s their money. And we do the PR, so there’s minimal bureaucracy,” says Klukas, as the next round of NexStream, version 2.0, was about to go live at the end of 2020. “We’re looking to solve problems not only locally but also globally.” Keith Ippel is founder of Spring Activator, a certified B Corporation incubator, accelerator and advisory firm that consults in 40 countries to help communities grow entrepreneurial economies. He has been watching NexStream and the developing Campbell River story carefully and is helping develop a parallel investor challenge, aimed at accredited and non-accredited investors in the Campbell River area. ® “Spring works on a global stage and with communities around the world. For a city of less than 100,000, Campbell River is one of the fastest changing communities I’ve seen,” Ippel says.

He calls the relationship between Rose Klukas and CRAAG “Campbell River’s catalytic moment.” According to Ippel, the truism that defines some of the world’s most successful brands like Apple (“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” said Simon Sinek, in a now famous 2009 TED Talk on leadership) can apply to communities in economic transition. “The members of CRAAG have been there and done that. The NexStream challenge is a way to provide stories and role models and go from launch to growth,” says Ippel, over the phone from his Vancouver office. “The key is

collaboration, honouring and recognizing your strengths but also being willing to look beyond the horizon.” That's an important distinction. NexStream, which announced its first winners last fall, could have taken a parochial approach and restricted the contest to participants with bricks and mortar, or some other connection to the regional economy, but instead CRAAG and the city opened it to the world — literally. “When we set this up, we vowed to stay autonomous of government. We haven’t asked for a toonie or loonie because then you become tied to bureaucracy and red tape,”

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Kammersgard says. “That’s anathema to me.” To help focus the NexStream aspirants, CRAAG established three loosely defined challenges — energy, food security and wildlife monitoring — along with a fourth wild card challenge. First edition winner Mark Rabin, CEO of Portable Electric (a Vancouver-based company that makes small, portable and rechargeable electric generators) is a discerning and experienced entrepreneur. He says the energy challenge was a natural fit for his company, but he had reservations. “I was skeptical at first,” says Rabin, adding that there are plenty of incubator programs and contests that don’t live up to the hype. “But I quickly realized that this was real and genuine.” Besides the $75,000 cash prize and personal development and coaching, Rabin says he’s leveraging CRAAG’s collective technical know-how to develop multi-port capability for Portable Electric’s generators to enable recharging from multiple renewable sources. “Solar when the sun shines; wind when the wind blows,” Rabin says. CRAAG has also taken an equity stake in Portable Electric, and Rabin now has weekly virtual meetings with the group’s members. “It’s easy to start a tech company in B.C but it’s not easy to grow it. What’s missing is access to capital for scaling up,” Rabin says. “I think it’s absolutely phenomenal what they’re doing in Campbell River. It’s forward thinking, it’s

smart money and they’re in our backyard.” CRAAG didn’t have to look further than their own backyard for the other NexStream winner — Brandon Pirie, owner of Wild Isle Ferments, a one-man start-up that is set to launch a retail line of fermented seafood sauces. Pirie is the first to admit that he was as green as seaweed when it comes to business when he jumped into NexStream. He grew up working alongside his two brothers and father at Walcan Seafood, their family-owned seafood processing plant overlooking Discovery Passage on Quadra Island’s west shore. Pirie went on to earn his Red Seal chef’s certification, apprenticing at high-end kitchens in Vancouver, before burning out on the restaurant scene and returning to Quadra Island several years ago with his wife. He took up a new trade — electrician — while experimenting with fermented seafood sauces, mostly sharing them with friends at potlucks. Private enterprise wasn’t even a distant thought, until Hagen urged him to put his hat in the NexStream ring. “I had no idea what NexStream was, but I submitted my proposal and they loved it,” Pirie says. After being named a finalist, CRAAG invited him to move onto the next round, a half year process of idea sharpening and business plan development. Pirie’s initial inspiration was to design and manufacture a residential fermenting Campbell River is making a shift from its industrial roots to an entrepreneurial economy.

This city, next to sea and forest is charting a unique course as it evolves into a surprising hub of innovation and ideation. appliance that would be marketed as a boutique kitchen accessory, like a bread machine. However, in discussions with CRAAG members, the idea pivoted to building a commercial-sized fermenter and packaging and retailing his own fish and seafood sauces under the Wild Isle Ferments brand. It was a natural pivot — Walcan produces a steady supply of seafood by-product that can be easily redirected to Wild Isle’s fermenting process. “It started to build momentum and when I was announced as a winner, it seemed foolish not to take advantage of it,” says Pirie. The $50,000 cash prize was timely, given that he recently became a new father and had quit wiring plugs and light switches for a living. But even more valuable was the business coaching and crash course in start-ups delivered by people who “have been there and done that.”

Kammersgard says Pirie rose above the crowd for a simple reason: “He is willing to learn and was committed to making progress toward goals. We had a lot of entrants with good ideas, but everything was ‘yeah but.’ They were defensive.” Pirie’s start-up is a passion project for Hagen. As Wild Isle Ferments moves from concept to product launch, Hagen is helping the young entrepreneur to leverage local expertise and skills. It has taken on life in ways Pirie never imagined. Cris Fletcher at Genesis G2 CNC is helping design and manufacture the commercial fermenting equipment, while eclectic Quadra Island-raised and now Torontobased academic, artist and author Adrian McKerracher is adding his creative flair to graphic design for the packaging. The journey of Wild Isle fits perfectly with Hagen’s idea of an entrepreneurial story woven together through collaboration, community and creativity, with an eye to the big picture — repurposing a waste stream from a fish plant into a healthy food product and, hopefully, making Pirie a

successful entrepreneur along the way. Rose Klukas and CRAAG barely had time to celebrate round one of NexStream last fall, before launching the next iteration — NexStream 2.0. Four challenges — emergency preparedness and health care, sustainable resources, food security, and the popular wild card challenge attracted nearly 50 initial submissions. So far, 20 applicants have survived into phase three, following a rigorous screening process by CRAAG members that included assessing the problem, solution, market opportunity, market strategy and impact of each idea. “We had entries from as far away as India and Vietnam. There are businesses at different stages in their trajectory, which we believe is important to attracting talent outside of urban centres,” Hagen says. “NexStream is gaining momentum and people are hearing about it.” And as this locally grown tech group gains momentum, so too does Campbell River. Chainsaws and fishing nets are still part of Campbell River’s narrative, but this city, next to sea and forest is charting a unique course as it evolves into a surprising hub of innovation and ideation. ■

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DOUGLAS 35

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS: THE UNSTOPPABLE GROWTH OF ISLAND FILMS BY DAVID LENNAM 2020 was a record year for the Island’s film industry — the economic benefits positively impacting employment, filling hotel vacancies and directly supporting local businesses. The next step in supporting the momentum gained last year is to build the production studios that promise big business. 36 DOUGLAS

FRONT STREET PICTURES

A couple smooches on Dallas Road, a popular filming location in Victoria, where Jack Nicolson once gazed out over the bluffs in Five Easy Pieces.

WANT A LOCAL BUSINESS success story in Gilbert, who’s responsible for marketing the the time of COVID? CRD to producers worldwide, has spent the last The film industry. 10 years selling us to Hollywood, though the According to the Vancouver Island South first four years of her tenure was trying to sell Film & Media Commission, it’s time to celebrate the provincial government on letting Victoria an economic sector that employs locals, brings in on the lucrative distant tax credit that has money into local businesses, is relatively green driven film production in B.C. The lean years, and has a tremendous upside. from 2010-14, saw the film industry spend as “The film industry, of all the industries little as $3 million a year here. out there, is a good news story,” says film Those tax credits, six in all under the commissioner Kathleen Gilbert, surprised by Film Incentive BC Tax Credit Program, cover how little attention is being paid to it. “When everything from distant location filming and so many other industries and businesses are visual FX to scriptwriting, allowing a production struggling so much, we’re at the top of our to save a quarter of its budget and millions of game right now.” dollars. In fact, 2020 was a record year, generating A founding member of the CineVic Society of $50 million in revenue. That’s more than double Independent Filmmakers and someone who has the $19 million of the year before. And that’s worked in film here since the early ’90s, Gilbert money spent directly in the CRD. sees Victoria doing even better. The Capital Region hosted 24 visiting After L.A. and NYC, Vancouver is the third film productions in 2020, plus another 14 largest film production centre in North America, homegrown ones — everything from Air Bud servicing, on average, 400 productions annually Entertainment’s Super Pups, Netflix’s MAID and and generating spending that has increased at the Lifetime Ruby Landry series to Hallmark about 21 per cent a year over the last decade. features like Deliver By Christmas, as well as “We get the overflow,” acknowledges Gilbert. documentaries and commercials. “If they can’t get into Gastown because other We seem to be getting our big break and we films are shooting there, they might come over didn’t have to sit at the counter of a diner in a and shoot in Bastion Square.” tight sweater and great hair to be discovered. She says we’re going to continue to grow, The next step is to grab a bigger share of the but building a studio here is essential to attract $4.1 billion spent on film and TV production more, and bigger, productions. in B.C. last year, the lion’s share in Vancouver. “For my office, we have to put in the same Right now, the effort to land a $3 CRD gets a thinmillion television as-the-budget-of-a2020 WAS A RECORD YEAR, movie that we would Canadian-TV-series to land a $200 million GENERATING $50 MILLION IN 2.5 per cent slice. budget movie, like Even with that Deadpool. And the REVENUE. THAT’S MORE THAN slim portion, film public has to put manages to directly up with the same DOUBLE THE $19 MILLION OF THE employ 2,000 people inconvenience. in Greater Victoria. YEAR BEFORE. AND THAT’S MONEY The benefit to the In fact, says community, in terms Gilbert, the industry SPENT DIRECTLY IN THE CRD. of economic drivers, is got 500 people much more.” working on film FILM: THE NEW TOURISM sets in June who would otherwise have been While film puts dinner on the table, and collecting the CERB. sometimes even buys houses for its employees, “Not only are these people continuing to it’s the spinoff that’s so valuable. Movie shoots spend money, but my tax dollars aren’t going to fill up hotels. They purchase huge stockpiles of support them. It’s just such a win-win situation right now for the film industry.” supplies (everything from lumber to build sets DOUGLAS 37

and gasoline to fuel vehicles and food to fuel crews to costumes, props and even a Langford woman’s cookies that get served up on numerous Hallmark Christmas movie shoots). Last year, as the initial COVID restrictions eased up, Gilbert spoke about how visiting film productions have put people back in hotel rooms faster than anything else. Certainly faster than tourism. A typical movie of the week (MOW) shooting here for 15 days books 450 to 500 hotel room nights. A TV show in 2020, shooting in Victoria for 28 days, booked 720 hotel nights for cast and crew, as well as numerous Airbnb and vacation rentals. In 2013, the blockbuster Godzilla booked 1,550 room nights at two hotels, over five days, and took almost all of the rooms during the off season. A series like Netflix’s MAID, shooting for 75 days, might book as many as 11,000 nights. Victoria native Allen Lewis, Front Street Pictures VP in charge of production, says since 80 per cent of his crew now live in Victoria (including him), they don’t have to rent as many hotel rooms, but they do lay out a lot on locations, filming in private homes and local

“We get the overflow,” acknowledges Gilbert. “If they can’t get into Gastown because other films are shooting there they might come over and shoot in Bastion Square.”

businesses, as well as shopping for items for wardrobe and set decoration — which can include as much as $25 million dollars worth of spending, including wages for crew. Vancouver-based Front Street makes 30 or so movies a year, six to eight in the Capital Region, and is recognized as the biggest player in town.

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FRONT STREET PICTURES

IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME “When I first started 10 years ago,” says the film commissioner,“[film companies] were most interested in how many locations we have, how deep our crew base is and if we have a tax incentive. Now it’s the tax incentive first and they’re asking for studios. “We’ve lost so many shows because we don’t have a studio here.”

COVID INTERRUPTUS The film industry returned to business in June, three months after the pandemic lockdown, and Front Street Pictures was the first with cameras rolling. But the locations they returned to were very different places. “It has radically changed our whole work-load,” says the company’s VP Allen Lewis. “We’ve been lucky. We’ve been able to keep going. We haven’t been shut down. We got through 2020, and, knock on wood, nobody got sick.” The on-set protocols that Front Street, and all film companies, employ are some of the strictest of any industry. Staff must check in every morning at a COVID station, have their temperature checked and answer a pile of questions. Masks are 38 DOUGLAS

mandatory, as is sanitizing everything constantly — sets, props, hands. There are COVID officers on set to enforce the new rules. Even catering has changed. Farewell to buffets and hello to individual lunch boxes. “If someone has a sore throat, we send them home or send them for testing,” says Lewis. And all sets are staffed with limited numbers of crew. None are open to outsiders. Cast members arriving from the States are quarantined and COVID-tested twice a week. More intriguing is the hiring of an intimacy coordinator for consolation about scenes where actors have to be in close proximity to each other. “God willing, when this thing is behind us, a lot of these protocols are probably going to stay,” says Lewis.

FRONT STREET PICTURES

Dallas Gislason calls it the “big missing ingredient” in our film sector. The director of economic development with the South Island Prosperity Partnership (SIPP) says it’s the only way to lure the big productions across the Georgia Strait — and not just for the few days of shooting like Deadpool did at Royal Roads, but for months at a time. “If our region gets one or two or more studios built, then the major projects will start to trickle over, and that’s where things get really interesting.” He says it could boost the economic impact of film into hundreds of millions of dollars a year and could mean a lot of Victorians working in film on the Lower “IF OUR REGION GETS ONE OR Mainland would move back. SIPP’s TWO OR MORE STUDIOS BUILT, Rising Economy Taskforce has also THEN THE MAJOR PROJECTS tagged film as part WILL START TO TRICKLE OVER of the post-COVID economic recovery plan, calling for AND THAT’S WHERE THINGS investment in GET REALLY INTERESTING.” upskilling workers to fill film jobs. That plays into plans Camosun College has for its own film studio. The Taskforce is recommending that the province assist in

establishing an equity stake in the proposed studio, which would give them the recurring revenues to create education programs that link directly to film and new media, explains Gislason. The college wants a $45 million studio complex on five acres at its Interurban campus, with three 20,000-square-feet sound stages and a full training program offered by the school. Camosun’s VP Partnerships Geoff Wilmshurst understands putting a film studio on a college campus, featuring an educational component, is novel in Canada, but feels that it is essential to growing the industry. “If we’re going to build studios here, we’re going to need people to work in them,” he says. Michael Goodwin, a former production designer working on the project, says we currently have enough crew in the region to run three smaller productions simultaneously. Training a workforce is vital to attract the larger shows. “We can educate people who can then literally go onto the floor (of the studio) and start working.” Camosun is hoping to entice a developer to build it, while keeping the college as a partner, which means no cost to Saanich taxpayers, says Saanich mayor Fred Haynes. The province has promised $150,000 for a feasibility study.

DOUGLAS 39

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A film crew on site at the Parliament Buildings. Location is Victoria’s draw: “It’s beautiful and we’ve got the best locations here,” says Allen Lewis of Front Street Pictures.

Vancouver boasts 118 studios and roughly 2.5 million square feet of studio space (not including smaller FX or broadcast stages), but that might be too little. “One of the studios in Vancouver just put in three or four new studios in one of their complexes, and they were prebooked by Disney for five years before they were even finished. That just shows you the insane demand,” says Goodwin. With most studios in the 20,000 square feet range (by comparison, Thrifty Foods on Fairfield is 22,000 square feet), the strategy of creating more than one in Victoria is very real. Depending who you talk to, there are as many as six under consideration now in the region. If size matters, a $300 million plan to put six sound stages on 80 acres of Malahat Nation land near Mill Bay, employing 1,500 people, could be the facility that will raise the eyebrows of film executives.

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40 DOUGLAS

Ken Kantymir moved to Victoria a couple of years ago to continue his career in film after 30 years in the industry in Vancouver. With film starting to boom, the South Island reminds him of Vancouver in 1989 when the industry was bringing in a modest $150 million a year. An effort began there to bring together stakeholders — guilds, unions, supply companies — to create a blueprint to expand the business. “I think that’s exactly what we need to do in Victoria is have a joint council of all the parties involved and plot a course

ENTRY LEVEL IS OFTEN AS A PRODUCTION ASSISTANT (PA) AND CAN PAY $300400/DAY OR MORE FOR A 15-HOUR SHIFT. Beverley Dondale, CEO of Alpha Select Production Services, a local company that produces films and rents gear to film productions, is partnering with the Malahat First Nation. The project would include a business and industrial park, 120-room hotel, shopping and an academy for film skills training. It would also house a huge water-tank studio, a first for Canada. Dondale says most studio ideas on the South Island are too small in scale to draw the bigger productions. “Every time we look we see people who have tried, but there’s nobody who has actually done anything, and this is on a scale that nobody has tried.” Dondale says her investors are in place and is awaiting results from a feasibility study in a few months.

LABOUR BASE AS VITAL AS STUDIO SPACE The film industry demands long hours but pays well. And it’s the sort of business that doesn’t require mad skills to start. Entry level is often as a production assistant (PA) and can pay $300$400/day or more for a 15-hour shift. Longtime CineVic member and indy filmmaker Bryan Skinner started getting jobs on local sets last year as a PA, driving a van and hauling things. Soon he was a trainee assistant

and decide how we’re going to grow the industry,” says Kantymir. Studios, he says, are only one part. Another is convincing the Vancouver-based film supply companies (everything from lights to dollies, generators to camera cranes) to open shop here. “To me, it’s like the trigger finger,” says Kantymir. “A studio is going to trigger enormous impact, but we’re going to have to have all the supply chains in place.” Kantymir has been sniffing about for partners to build a studio — something cutting edge, something they call the Volume, or, more properly, StageCraft.

director on a movie-of-the-week production. Now he’s doing that on a bigger production. Skinner calls it an industry where reputation is key: “The future work you get is all based on what you did last time.” “It’s really important that we have a labour pool to run three major productions here, otherwise, there’s no point in having studios,” says Goodwin stressing the importance of a local labour base. That labour can be a PA or someone in props, hair, makeup, wardrobe, set building, locations, etc. When costume designer Ken Shapkin moved from Vancouver to the Island five years ago, he was the only locally based costume designer. The feast and famine nature of the industry has begun to change as more productions shoot here regularly. Shapkin hasn’t had to return to the Lower Mainland to find work. “If there isn’t steady work, then people need to be employed and jump over to the mainland and we lose them,” he says. “That’s certainly been the case in the past.” He says a studio is the one missing piece to our film puzzle, but he adds it must come with an anchor tenant. “You have to have a long-running show to bankroll (the studio) for the first year, before they start having to piecemeal smaller shows in there.” Bryan Skinner understands the gig. To keep working in film it’s about keeping your rep. “The future work you get in this industry is all based on what you did last time. Reputation is very important.” It might be a parable for film as a whole, as Victoria’s reputation has been five-star so far. “It’s beautiful and we’ve got the best locations,” says Lewis. “I want to be able to keep filming here for the next 25 to 30 years.” ■

If you’ve watched Disney’s The Mandalorian, you’ve seen the result. Massive, wraparound LED screens, powered by the Unreal Engine gaming technology, offer instant sets that replace green screens and physical sets. And it fits nicely in a boutique-sized 10,000 square foot studio with standard 40 foot ceilings. He has had talks with local mayors about his studio and relishes their enthusiasm: “I love how the mayors of these communities have stepped up and said, ‘We will do everything we can to make this happen.’ ”

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DOUGLAS 41

REALITY CHECK

Roundtable on

Mental Health Douglas brings together five Victoria business and human resource leaders to discuss the realities of mental health and well-being in the workplace. BY ERIN SKILLEN AND CARLA SORRELL

42 DOUGLAS

ental health and well-being have come to the fore over the last year as people have been stretched thin, each with their own unique set of stressors. There's no one-stop fix in what is a deeply individualized landscape of anxieties, exacerbated by uncertainty. Douglas brought together a panel of business owners and human resource leaders to talk about how the pandemic has affected mental health and well-being in the workplace. They are united in their forward-thinking approachs toward mental health and have skillfully navigated the subject with their teams and within their organizations through the year. After months of working off the cuff, these companies have found some clarity on what worked and what didn’t, and they have seen, through time and practice, challenges transform into opportunities for new ways of working together. The insights shared among our panelists are honest and open reflections on the realities of addressing mental health within their respective sectors. The themes that came out of this conversation provide insight and thought leadership on what organizations should consider to nurture, retain and attract talent in the future. The conversation reflects the optimism of its participants, who acknowledged the opportunity to reflect on business processes, cast away outdated practices and embrace change where it benefits the culture moving forward.

PANELISTS

Rasool Rayani Owner and President Heart Pharmacy

Before the pandemic Redbrick’s office in downtown Victoria was the working home to a team of over 100 employees. The tech sector had a reputation for its heavy investment in officecentric environments.

RESTRUCTURING TO EASE ANXIETY Evolving provincial and federal health guidelines gave companies a framework that needed to be interpreted and implemented to support their organizational structures and their people. To address anxiety and fear, panelists put their people first, restructuring to form secure and safe places to work. Abstract Developments kept its on-site numbers down by communicating to the team to take caution and only work on site if necessary. The Village restaurants opened five days a week, instead of seven, which meant one core team could run through the week, significantly lessening contact risk, while also getting two full days of rest. “The trickiest thing I think that we heard from the frontline team essentially was dealing with the public’s frustration, confusion and anger,” says Adele Fraser, whose role as director of people and culture at the Village Restaurants was created in response to COVID (she is also a coach and was able to support employees through coaching). “In hospitality, ‘no’ is not really said. So there was a lot of ‘no and,’ having to take a hard line in some cases just to protect the businesses, the guests, everybody who works for us.”

Without a holiday to go on, time off didn’t have the same restorative appeal for some as it once did. At Checkfront, people who hadn’t taken holidays through the year, citing nothing to do, were encouraged to take time off through the summer. At the end of the year, a number of our panelists extended time off over the holidays, in response to a need for additional rest during the stresses of the pandemic. Confronting financial uncertainty for employees was a priority, directly addressing a fundamental level of anxiety. “Some people were in financial distress,” says Jason Morehouse, Checkfront CEO and cofounder. “We gave loans and we increased salaries … that was the message and continues to be the message: We are here to help.” “We treated the health-care workers a little bit differently than we treated the teams manning the retail side of our operations,” says Rasool Rayani, owner and president of Heart Pharmacy, who also introduced a new tolerant sick policy to address concerns about exposure. “Everyone got a pay premium as a response to acknowledgement of the additional risk.

JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

Ryan Hube People and Culture Manager Abstract Developments

Adele Fraser Director, People and Culture The Village Restaurants

Nicole Lee VP, People and Operations Redbrick

Jason Morehouse CEO and Cofounder Checkfront

DOUGLAS 43

Employee engagement was really important for us, especially as we started hearing that [people would] like to come back to the office, saying it would be beneficial for their mental health and well-being.

JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

— Ryan Hube, Abstract Developments

“Traditionally, our benefit utilization skews towards dental. And, in this cycle, it’s skewed more towards the mental health support services that we provide. From our perspective, it’s a good thing that they’re leveraging those resources.”

MICRO-CULTURES With heightened attention to individuals, our panelists have spent time this year reflecting on what a traditionally collective company culture means for a distributed team. Companies

The pandemic has been an amazing opportunity to really look at our business processes and practices, to lean into what’s working and let go of what wasn’t serving us. — Adele Fraser 44 DOUGLAS

Ryan Hube (right), people and culture manager at Abstract Developments, on site with Abstract CEO Mike Miller. The company’s builds are back to full speed.

use culture to attract and retain talent; tech companies especially have a reputation for immersive cultures, from heavy investment in office-centric environments to team-building field trips. So what does a people-first approach to company culture look like? Redbrick’s companies include Assembly, Shift, Leadpages and Rebase — so Nicole Lee, Redbrick’s vice president of people and operations, is experienced at considering the subtleties and differences between groups within the larger company’s umbrella. “Thinking about our culture in terms of micro-cultures,” says Lee. “So instead of it just being the Redbrick culture, we’re really encouraging the businesses to have their subcultures. It’s a little easier to build culture with small groups over Slack and Zoom.” The concept of micro-cultures has a lot of relevance for today’s remote workforce. Drinks nights were never everyone’s cup of tea, nor should they be. Even within a small team,

the idea of micro-cultures has traction. Slack channels might benefit extroverts who miss office banter, but the option to opt out or tune into one-to-one conversations will suit others. Lee stresses that you can’t support people if you don’t know them: “There is a lot of checking in that goes on around here outside of your direct reports.” A manager’s job becomes more attuned to each individual. “Everyone responds to these things differently and has different realities that they’re working with,” says Ryan Hube, people and culture manager at Abstract Developments. “We provide the flexibility for folks to do what they need to and take care of what they’ve got going on at home.” Redbrick’s Lee predicts that people will return to the office three days a week after this, noting that some people feel healthier and better at home, while others need to come in, missing coworkers, collaboration, learning events and the fun of it all. “We had people wanting to come back, to volunteer,” says Fraser. “They were desperate to get off the couch because they had other needs related to mental health that they needed to have met by being back out in the community and meeting with people.”

PRIORITIZING PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY Creating psychological safety, also called emotional safety, for a team is particularly essential in our new business reality. Team members are already stretched thin by the compounding stressors of the pandemic. That fatigue and trauma isn’t going to disappear on its own; there is going to be a process of mental health recovery required in tandem with any physical interventions like vaccinations. As a result, toxic leadership approaches that rely on yelling, bullying and shaming to get results are more likely to lead a fragile workforce to medical leave, rather than professional success. “When we reviewed our teams,” says Morehouse, “the teams that have the biggest amount of emotional safety are the ones that were actually productive.” At the same time, Morehouse recognizes that can be difficult to implement company-wide.

“It’s easy to say, and it’s really hard to do organizationally.” One path to creating emotional safety is consistently communicating that safety throughout the organization, and pushing back when unsafe conversations or activities creep up. This requires agreement about what psychological safety looks like within the organization and what measures can and should be used to nurture and protect it. Many of these companies are using external, confidential mental health programs to support team members and their families as they cope with challenges. Part of developing their organizations’ psychological safety is actively promoting these programs and encouraging team members to reach out when they need help. “We’ve certainly seen pretty strong participation in our EAP [Employee Assistance Program],” says Hube. Morehouse has had a similar response from his team: “I don’t know the adoption rate, but the amount of people that we ended up referring to the program increased exponentially.” Rayani agrees: “This exercise of being aware of the value of investing in one’s mental wellbeing will likely last beyond the pandemic.”

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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of people around you. The American psychologist Daniel Goleman identified the five key elements of emotional intelligence as: selfawareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. These qualities in a person have come to the fore in leadership, even more so through the pandemic, as individual attitudes influence reactions, coping mechanisms and how people perceive the situation. “When you hire glass-half-full kinds of people, the experience of going through this with them is quite different,” says Lee.

The most important thing is to have the level of one-on-ones … that’s where most of the learning and the information comes from. One-on-ones are about building relationships, about really having a good sense of what’s going on for the person you’re talking to, what’s important to them. — Nicole Lee, Redbrick

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Cultivating and identifying emotional intelligence is going to be a big focus moving forward. The panelists discussed how it will factor into hiring; a long hiring process may be key to ensuring that time is taken to really get to know candidates. “We want great performers and experienced people, but we also want people that are really balanced in their EQ or their empathy,” says Morehouse. “That’s a real priority as we go into hiring more leadership into the team.” With teams split and experiencing those very different realities, EQ is crucial in creating a mutual understanding, rooted in empathy, within a business. “We had a very high rate of churn in frontline staff during the first wave of COVID,” says Rayani. “Now that’s stabilized. And so investing in retention has been another activity, noting that there’s a lot of desire for employment right now.” At Heart Pharmacy that meant tactical

Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. — Amy Edmonson, author of The Fearless Organization 46 DOUGLAS FILE NAME: UVic_20-0402_Print-Ad_Douglas_MBA

engagement with individuals experiencing a higher level of need. They provided regular check points and feedback collection, leveraging that feedback to make changes and assuring employees that they were being seen and heard.

NORMALIZING VULNERABILITY COVID has helped usher in a new era in business where it’s okay — and even encouraged — to be authentic about personal struggles without fear of shame or judgment. “I’m seeing a lot more vulnerability in leadership,” says Lee. “It spreads throughout the organization that it’s okay to be vulnerable and to share your challenges.” Morehouse is open about his own anxiety disorder, “which is a welcome gift of mine,” proactively decreasing the stigma and normalizing talking about mental health with and for his team. Lee agrees wholeheartedly with this approach: “There’s nothing more powerful than people you look up to, or that you work with, when they share the things that they’re going through — it makes people feel like it’s safe to talk about this.” The façade that everything is okay all the time, and that we’re able to fully compartmentalize our personal and professional lives, is falling away. More and more, employers are recognizing that teams consist of human beings who have a variety of needs that must

JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

The toolset to support individuals now, versus what was available even two years ago, is dramatically different. Policymaker awareness of that fact is a huge deal. — Rasool Rayani, Heart Pharmacy

be satisfied to empower them to thrive. It takes work, but the benefits are worthwhile. Rayani witnessed this firsthand: “There’s been a higher degree of collaboration, a higher degree of supportiveness, and healthy expressions of anxiety, stress, concern — everyone is feeling the same things, just different contexts. But there’s been a really nice increase in engagement as a result of it.” That openness and vulnerability extends to looking at how companies tackled the early stages of the pandemic. “We were making it up, like the rest of the world early on. It certainly doesn’t mean we did it perfectly,” says Hube. “But we responded fairly quickly and fairly well. We were able to keep folks working and keep folks engaged and got them involved in the process, to work through it together.”

EMPLOYING EMPATHY + INTUITION When looking at his company’s resilience and ability to push through an incredibly difficult year for their industry, Morehouse attributes part of that success to empathy: “Empathy is the big one, which is always important, but very much more so now.” Being empathetic was key for many of these leaders. Hube focused on being open and connecting with his team by “asking the questions. How are you doing? By the way, I’m not okay, and you’re not okay. And that’s okay, so how are you doing?” He and his colleagues developed a remote work SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], which included a requirement

that cameras be on during video meetings. “It was just a way for us to get those visual cues as well,” says Hube. This enabled him to stay connected with remote workers and be able to see if there were any physical signs of struggle that wouldn’t reveal themselves during a voice-only call. Morehouse was also looking for clues in his team’s behaviour on and off camera: “Intuition is really important. Some people are very formed and some people are very closed. You can tell when people are not turning the video on or just glazing into the screen. Just making sure that you’re checking in on that is really important.” “I made a way bigger effort to share a really interesting novel I read or an article that I thought the leadership team would enjoy, or that would invoke a discussion that normally we would have had organically at the office,” says Lee. She recognized the importance of consciously replacing in-person team connections while the team was working remotely and how that would help maintain the team’s relationships with one another. Ultimately, empathy and intuition require a foundation of caring to be effective. Without genuine concern and compassion for your team and their wellbeing, it’s hard to build trust and connection. The more you’re able to create trust and connection, the more reliable your intuition will become and the more likely your team will be to speak up when they’re going through a challenge. ■

DOUGLAS 47

INTEL

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

ENTREPRENEUR

BY JIM HAYHURST

What Success Means in a Pandemic The gap between have and have-not companies has accelerated during COVID. Tech is sometimes the problem, but often the solution too.

In December, Victoria’s tech community raised $72,562 in cash and 36.6 pounds of food for the Mustard Seed through the 2020 VIATEC Foundation Food Bank Challenge.

or many years, the final “gotcha” question to entrepreneurs during pitches was “Well, that all sounds great … but what’s your plan for Amazon?” The true power of this question was in leaving it purposefully opaque. The best investors resisted the urge to start answering their own question before they had finished asking it. Entrepreneurs, therefore, were left to respond however they saw fit: Where do they compete with Amazon currently? How might they handle Amazon entering their space in the future? What did Amazon’s growing dominance over tech services (cloud computing, e-commerce, devices, advertising, data) mean for pricing or customer acquisition costs? Like the infamous Google interviews (“Estimate the number of tennis balls that can fit into a plane ...”), there was no right answer to the Amazon question. The point 48 DOUGLAS

was to assess how entrepreneurs approached impossible challenges and responded to pressure. In many ways, Amazon was the biggest problem (or opportunity) for almost every startup. In fact, the only wrong answer was “I really don’t see how Amazon is an issue for our company.” That was a serious red flag for investors: not only were you naïve and incurious; you lacked humility. One of the better answers I ever heard was “I think it’s crazy to try and compete directly with Amazon, so we won’t. But here’s what I love about their business and would want to emulate.” What followed was an insightful deconstruction of Amazon’s leadership principles, including customer obsession, frugality and bias for action. As Amazon’s influence and appetite expanded, the question wasn’t just asked of tech companies. Today, all organizations — from the corner flower shop to the biggest car companies, from government agencies to

community non-profits — are well-advised to understand how the biggest company in the world impacts, irritates or inspires them. At the very least, they need to be selfaware. Forcing companies to think about Amazon, no matter how tangentially, was — and can still be — a healthy exercise. But, as with everything, moderation is the key. Single-minded obsession can be as deadly as ignorance. Remember, the point of the question wasn’t specifically about Amazon; it was about how you approached the challenge (and the opportunity) of a foundation-shifting presence.

What’s Your Plan For Tech? And so it got me thinking about the past year, the similarly seismic pandemic presence, and the new obsession of realigning our professional, personal and societal ways towards the tech enabled, tech-centric or tech dependent.

Have we simply replaced the question “What’s your plan for Amazon?” with “What’s your plan for tech?” And is the question really “Is tech your problem … or your salvation?” As before, there’s no single answer. Without a doubt, the pandemic has forced a digital reckoning. For some, it has been a gift. According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey, top companies accelerated the digitization of internal operations by three to four years. Even more remarkably, they calculated that the development of digital or digitally enabled products was reduced by seven years. Tech stocks are at all-time highs and companies are on hiring sprees even as layoffs and bankruptcies continue to dominate other sectors. Here in Victoria, we witnessed government transition to digital services in record time, led by B.C.’s Chief Digital Officer Jaimie Boyd and her team who understood this was a generational opportunity requiring agility and urgency. In the private sector, 2020 saw a number of local tech companies quietly raise capital, expand their teams or get acquired. It has been, somewhat oddly, business as usual — or better — for many in tech. But in the same way that the pandemic revealed, and deepened, longstanding inequities in our society, the organizational gap within and among industries has widened exponentially. And it has a lot to do with who’s using tech — and how. In a 2020 Bain & Company study, researchers found that most companies are less productive now than they were 12 months ago. “Companies that were stars before the pandemic have continued to shine,” wrote the authors in a Harvard Business Review report.

GROWTH

“Those with less stellar performance have struggled mightily.” The result is an ever-widening productivity gap. The heightened ability of the top 25 per cent of companies to use technology to drive productivity (especially to liberate employees’ time, talent and energy) combined with the failure of the bottom three-quarters to do so, has resulted in the productivity gap growing from 40 per cent to 50 per cent in less than a year. And this have/have-not divide will only expand with time.

Defining Success To be clear, not every so-called tech company uses tech wisely, nor do all nontech companies lag behind. And not all productivity gains are a result of technology adoption. And yet the signs are there. Taken as a sector, tech in Victoria is in good shape due, in large part, to innate industry characteristics well-suited to a worldwide pandemic and lockdown: early adoption of remote work as an option; diversified global customers; low or flexible/scalable cost structures; and longstanding familiarity with digital collaboration tools. In addition, the sector has also been exercising the critical muscles needed to thrive in these times through its work with VIATEC and Roy Group’s leadership training over many years. Indeed, among the sectors represented on various recovery task forces working with the City of Victoria, SIPP, VIATEC and others, tech companies generally reported lower negative impacts and healthier prospects for recovery.

Not surprisingly, the sector has also been a valued contributor to the Victoria community’s responses to the pandemic. Whether it’s the annual VIATEC Food Bank Challenge, contributions to the Rapid Relief Fund or the numerous ways that I have participated alongside tech leaders in direct support of local businesses and non-profits, it is clear that our sense of community responsibility has been fortified. And so, like the old question about the elephant in the room run by Jeff Bezos, our challenge today requires greater honesty, heightened curiosity and deeper humility. It asks us to acknowledge how lucky we are to be “in tech” (or just “in business”), using tools that we know in uncertain times, not dissimilar to the usual life of a startup. Moreover, it demands that we look up from our screens, use any newfound whitespace in our calendars and any headspace in our brains to continue to give back to the community that welcomed our presence and made success possible in the first place. In the future, I expect investors will still ask tech entrepreneurs about Amazon. But they’ll also ask, “How did the pandemic affect your business?” In amongst the remote work success stories and the lists of SaaS tools they adopted, I hope to hear this just as much: “COVID made us a better company by being better people.”■ Jim Hayhurst is a trusted advisor to purposedriven organizations and leaders. He is currently active in six companies and social impact projects that elevate Victoria’s reputation as a hub of innovation, collaboration and big thinking.

BY CLEMENS RETTICH

Why don’t they just get it? The failure of many large digital transformations projects lies not in the system itself, but in how your people interact with it.

n these turbulent and often fearful times, many organizations have realized they have to invest in transforming themselves, and fast. The highest profile transformations are digital: “moving to the cloud”, “getting into e-Commerce”, or driving greater efficiency by implementing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. DOUGLAS 49

When they are good, they are truly transformational, representing an unprecedented increase in capacity to grow far beyond what was possible before the new system was in place. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study of over 10,640 projects found that a tiny, tiny portion of companies — 2.5 per cent — completed 100 per cent of their [digital transformation] projects successfully. According to McKinsey—Oxford, 17 per cent of IT projects go so badly that they threaten the existence of the company. As someone who leads “lessons learned” studies (colloquially referred to as “postmortems” for good reason) and post-ITimplementation “rescue” engagements, I have seen firsthand what it is like inside those organizations, and it isn’t pretty. When you walk through the door of so many workplaces that are seriously struggling with a major IT project, the first wave that hits you, like a bad smell, is the cynicism. People no longer feel like they can believe

the assurances that “it will get better.” There’s a lack of trust in leadership and a growing culture of blame. People pull into their silos and their shells, they disengage, and the material impacts start: productivity drops, and retention and profits fall. ERP, FMS (Financial Management Systems), LMS (Learning Management), Payroll (Phoenix anyone?), eCommerce, and POS (Point of Sale) implementations: the list for 21st century business is long. For larger organizations these are ERP or FMS projects in the millions. For smaller businesses POS or eCommerce implementations in the tens of thousands. The relative impact though, can be the same, good or bad. When they are good, they are truly transformational, representing an unprecedented increase in capacity to grow far beyond what was possible before the new system was in place. So why do large digital transformation projects, which have the potential to be so positive, fail?

It’s Human The answers don’t lie with poorly managed organizations. They lie in human nature. The plug-in fallacy. Humans have a very transactional sense of change: just buy the

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thing, or take the course, plug it in, and the new lights start flashing and everyone is happy. The truth is that you can’t just plug stuff in. You have to do the hard work of integrating it into the organization; processes have to be adapted, people have to change the way they do things. There’s a reason we call it digital transformation. These aren’t just new toasters sitting on the counter. Assuming tools as powerful as an ERP system for a larger organization, or as impactful as committing to an e-Commerce platform for any organization, is a little like buying a Ferrari but insisting there’s no need to change the way you drive. You’ll never see the return on that investment.

Embrace the Transformation To get the highest return on these investments, there are changes in thinking and internal transformations that we can consider. The most important change in thinking is to understand that the thing itself isn’t going to realize a positive return on the investment you made. It’ll just sit there. You have to be prepared to allow the new system to transform your organization, and recognize that the real driver of value isn’t the new system, it is your people and how they interact with the system.

▶ Transparent collaboration. Long before the first vendor darkens your doorway, the best way to set yourself up for success is to engage your people. Work together to understand fully why the investment needs to be made, what limitations it will be removing, what new capacity it needs to create and what the true cost of the transition will be. The sooner and more fully you commit to transparent collaboration in this way, the greater the chance of the hoped-for return on your investment.

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▶ Acknowledge the losses. A classic tenant of change management is that all change, even to something better, involves loss. If we don’t anticipate and acknowledge this, the risk is that people will cling to what they are comfortable with, what makes them feel productive and less dispensable (because they are experts in the legacy system, but beginners just like everyone else in the new system). Resist the urge to simply trumpet the benefits of the new and shiny thing or tell people to “be more positive” when they share their anxieties about the transition. Listen, engage, empathize.

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▶ Get beyond adoption and look for transformation. You can’t get the best the new reality has to offer if you don’t allow it to change you. Also, no complex tool or entity exists without built-in history, biases and idiosyncrasies. Many of these are what makes the new tool or entity so valuable. But they cannot be used to their potential if we insist on doing things the way we have always done them. If you think you can drive your new Ferrari the way you drove your pickup truck, and expect your investment to yield the results it’s capable of, you are going to be disappointed. ■

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HUMAN RESOURCES BY INGRID VAUGHAN

Virtual praise for a job well done Peer recognition and engagement software can make it easier to build a culture of appreciation for your employees.

n 2021, you’re likely working with either a full or partially remote team, and, from all predictions on work trends, this will remain the norm for some time to come. How do you need to shift to engage a remote or mixed workforce as effectively as when everyone is in the office? Some things remain the same whether employees are working from home or on site. Timely recognition is consistently cited as a catalyst for increased engagement and performance, as is a culture of appreciation. This is much easier to do when you are rubbing shoulders with team members every day. But when many of your connections are only through formal video meetings, the conversation naturally turns to getting the work done. Employee recognition and engagement is typically not on the agenda. Or engagement activities happen in the office but not with the remote team. This can create a negative, even adversarial, relationship dynamic between the two workforces. The statistics illustrated on page 51 were collected well before the onset of COVID and the increase of remote workforces. They reinforce the ROI of strong employee engagement strategies during these new shifts in employee management.

Fortunately, just as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Facetime have changed the way we meet, technology can also draw your team together in new and exciting ways. The use of peer recognition and engagement software has been on the rise over the last 10 years and has skyrocketed since early 2020 when remote teams became the new reality. There are affordable options for even small businesses that can significantly reduce the time managers spend on these tasks and the frustration of feeling like it’s never enough. Choosing one that’s right for you will require a deeper dive, as each one offers slightly different options, depending on what you’re looking for and your budget. If all you want is a way for peers to recognize each other for work well done, which also allows managers to add their perspectives on performance, there are even some free options. However, if you’re looking for tools that provide analytics on what motivates and drives team members, a way to integrate your core values into the peer recognition process, integrations with other tools like Slack or Google Workspace, taking a weekly pulse check on how your team feels about their workload and work environment, building team culture, or systems for

managing performance, paid versions will be required.

Benefits of Peer Recognition and Engagement Software Employee recognition software is beneficial, not only for creating a consistent recognition platform for remote and on-site team members, but also for providing managers with analytics and at-a-glance information that assists with effectively managing performance. Consider this (if you don’t know, the software would have those answers): ▶ How many times did you provide valuable recognition two months ago? ▶ How many employees did you recognize? ▶H ow many employees recognize one another on a regular basis? ▶ Does this recognition impact your mission or revenue? There are a lot of good software options that can generate useful analytics and realtime feedback: Kudos, TINYpulse, Nectar HR, Bonusly and Assembly are a few highly rated tools. The user interface is based on the social media platforms your team is already using every day. They are highly visual, interactive and easy to use. The right one for your

BENEFITS OF PEER RECOGNITION

Fostering alignment

Increasing team bonding and connection

Heightening employee satisfaction

Reducing management time in performance review preparation

Increasing engagement

Greater productivity

Reducing turnover

More timely, real-time feedback

52 DOUGLAS

PEER FEEDBACK IN NUMBERS

49%

of human resources (HR) professionals believe that performance reviews are not an accurate appraisal of employees’ work.

76%

of HR professionals agree that annual performance reviews are more accurate when coupled with ongoing peer feedback.

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of HR professionals use peer feedback in their organization.

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of HR professionals using peer feedback report it having a very positive impact on their organization.

From the joint report Using Recognition and Other Workplace Efforts to Engage Employees, by the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) in collaboration with WorkHuman (pre-COVID data).

business will depend on the features most valuable to you. When part of your workforce is remote, it’s especially vital to have a system that fosters strong bonds between individuals and teams. Using peer recognition and engagement software that ingrains your company’s core values into your team’s minds will save time and money and result in a culture where team members’ hard work is acknowledged. The more this happens, the happier and more committed they’ll be to the organization’s goals and mission. And that’s good for your people and for your business. ■ Ingrid Vaughan, principal of Smart HR and founder of the Smart Leadership Academy, provides HR support and leadership coaching to small business owners and managers.

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DOUGLAS 53

POINT OF VIEW

DIGITAL GOVERNMENT JAIMIE BOYD IS THE CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF BRITISH COLUMBIA. WORKING WITHIN BC’S MINISTRY OF CITIZENS’ SERVICES, HER ROLE IS TO SUPPORT PARTNERS ACROSS THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT TO DELIVER DIGITAL SERVICES TO THE FIVE MILLION PEOPLE OF B.C. Boyd is a Pearson College graduate who grew up in Victoria. She worked for the Government of Canada in Ottawa, specifically on open government — using tools like data and dialogue to support transparency, accountability, innovation and participation, all of which she explains in detail in her 2020 TEDx talk. As one of the first provinces to create this job, B.C. was very well positioned to roll out digital responses to COVID, hot on the heels of Boyd’s return. How would you describe the value of your role? I’m responsible for accelerating digital change in government. Digital government is about using new tools from the internet age to provide great services. Sometimes that means building individual digital services. At other times, it means focusing on policies, tools and culture to make technology sustainable and user-centric. Roles like mine are exciting because they help modernize government. What impact did the pandemic have on what you do? It was exhilarating to see communications experts pivot and provide public health information in ways that were easy for people, including through chatbots. I loved seeing best practices in open source software play out as teams helped people isolate as they returned home to B.C., and then forked that same code to help silviculture workers safely return to work. We scaled enterprise services to support remote workers. Our finance teams pivoted to fast track project approvals.

How are you bringing the private and public tech sector together? I’ve spent most of my career working across sectors. For me, we get better outcomes for everybody when we collaborate — for communities, businesses, taxpayers. We have a vibrant tech sector in B.C. and lots of opportunities to use government procurement to support great jobs here at home. Open innovation is good for our economy, and it’s great for the services that government delivers every day.

54 DOUGLAS

“Responding to COVID has been a challenge for the ages! It sped up a lot of our work,” says Boyd. “Many of our digital teams had no choice other than to collaborate more effectively and deliver new services in days instead of months.” JEFFREY BOSDET / DOUGLAS MAGAZINE

How does B.C.’s digital landscape look from your point of view? We have really wonderful pockets of innovation across government. Our BC Services Cards are world-class pieces of technology. We’re innovating around how we use and manage data. We have teams using robotic process automation to speed up how they process data, so that they can focus on tougher tasks that only humans can do. The pandemic forced governments around the world to dedicate resources to digital priorities; now our challenge is to mainstream one-off digital services into the default way to serve people. I think that reinforcing a culture of service is the key to unlocking this potential.

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