“You also want to avoid this culture of ‘innovation is this shiny magic bullet’. No. That's also a culture that we want to demystify. Innovation is ways of thinking, ways of doing, and of course ways of achieving concrete, tangible results (and) outcomes –impact at scale.”

Adaptation is essential to innovation. Growing up in Togo, West Africa, Laté Lawson-Lartego worked a summer job as a community volunteer, exposing him early on to the disparities happening in his backyard. As more of the industry opened up to him, he began to realize the systematic problems stifling the field’s progress. Inspired to expand his knowledge, Laté continued to travel and grow his educational portfolio, but rising political unrest in Togo unexpectedly forced him to flee his home country.

The sudden departure caused Laté to develop a new, invaluable skill: the ability to adapt and progress amid risk and uncertainty. From there, hard work, combined with his wealth of knowledge, led him to his position as Chief Innovation Officer at Oxfam, where he develops leadership strategies to best build and support innovation within the organization.

In this episode, Laté tells us more about how his work and personal experiences allowed him to find the balance between taking leaps of faith and being overly strategic in order to cultivate and grow innovation.

Contents

1 - Discovering divides

2 - Laté’s first innovations 

3 - Building Room For Innovation at large organizations

4 - Embracing failure

5 - Balancing controlled failure and pushing the boundaries

Links

• Historic Agency
• Oxfam Website
• Laté Lawson-Lartego on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:

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