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Rickie is a seasoned Creative Director & Design Director who successfully leads 360-degree campaigns for high-profile clients and turns big-picture ideas into compelling multi-platform campaigns.  Together we talk about experiential design and what it takes to be an artisan in this field.
Find Rickie here: IG @littlecountryfox |  Linkedin | rickieashman.com
Katty
Rickie, so excited to have you here on the Artisan Podcast. I know we've known each other through Artisan for a long time, but this is the first time you and I are actually sitting down to have a chat.
 
Rickie
Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.  
 
Katty
How did you get started as a creative? And when did you know that being a creative was a passion for you? 
Rickie
I was always a doodler and a daydreamer, according to my teachers, and I got special permission when I was in middle school to doodle because the teacher saw that my grades were good.
In fact, I was at the top of my class in middle school, so they knew that it wasn't impeding my learning abilities. But, their one rule was that I had to doodle in a separate notebook and not in my class notes or in my textbook, which I was fond of doodling in. And flash forward to the beginning of my career I missed out on the opportunity to go to art school.
It was something that I had wanted to do, but I grew up in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina hit towards the tail end of my high school year.
So, I think my parents were thinking practically when they guided me into going to business school for college. So, when I graduated, I think I ended up moving into a creative career through sheer force of will.
On my first job, I began to teach myself Photoshop through my early interest in art where I was learning how to color-correct photography and illustrations. And then, in my first job, our designer left the company and there was a hole to fill, and I volunteered to take it on and thus began my early career as a designer.
Katty
So that's pretty amazing that your teachers recognized the importance of doodling and didn't curtail that but actually gave you permission, if you will, to be able to do that.
Rickie
Yeah,  I think so. And I think, what also has really helped throughout my career is the ability to tell a story. And starting off as a wannabe illustrator, as a kid where I would draw out stories and plot lines in a linear comic book-like format, has always stuck with me.
I had a brief stint getting into creative writing in high school as well. So working on more of the advertising front, where oftentimes a lot of what we do is storytelling in a sense for both the client and the consumer to get the buy in. I think that's also helped ground me and my approach.
So doodling led to a good overall process for creative thinking. And I think it's a great mental exercise particularly, when you're having writer's block, shall we say, sometimes it's good to just, do something with your hands while your mind is working away.
While I doodle less these days, sometimes I find myself scribbling. In my work notes.
Katty
Love that. Yeah, I'm reading this book right now. Actually, not that far into it, but even in the first few chapters, it's called Your Brain on Art it talks a lot about just the connection of art and just, even the doodling piece of it, but the importance of just allowing your brain to travel and be able to do that.
It helps with writer's block. It helps with anything, really any kind of block but just that physical process, just what it does, the chemicals in your brain,  pretty amazing. 
So you moved from your love of illustration and you built on that and your love of design and you built on that. How did you get into experiential design? And how would you describe experiential design versus traditional creative work? 
Rickie
Yeah, I think  Again, really through happenstance when I began my career, I was working brand side. So I handled everything from print to digital to occa

Executive coach and team development expert: Jamie Douraghy  jdouraghy com.
LinkedIn profile:  
 
Hello Everyone.  I'm excited to welcome Jamie to this podcast and introduce you to him. You may wonder why we have the same last name… It's because we're married! I was looking to create this series of podcasts on company culture and realized that, right here,is someone who has expertise in helping companies and leadership teams build culture using the strengths of the team
And I thought… Hey, Jamie, would you come and talk to me about building company culture? So here we are!  Jamie, glad to have you here. Finally, after 30 years of marriage, our first podcast together!
Jamie: Yes, we've been negotiating this moment for quite some time now. 
Katty: Exactly, So what I wanted to dive in with you in this….With everything that has changed in the past few years with COVID and the Great Resignation and this whole movement with hybrid and remote and so on and so forth. We talk about how companies go about in terms of building culture, and learn about their teams. And I know that one of the frameworks that you use is StrengthsFinders.
So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that and the importance of knowing what strengths people BRING, and what it is that they NEED on a particular team. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background and how you've come to this point.
 
Jamie: Absolutely. My, journey into this world of understanding why, how, and what people need to do to work better together began about 11/ 12 years ago, when I went through the proverbial discovery of your WHY, and then the HOW and WHAT became easier.
What I appreciate about CliftonStrengths is that it focuses on HOW we do what we do, when we know our WHY, which is intrinsic and very personal, our WHAT can become much more dynamic. And then many individuals can get lost in how they're doing what they're doing when they're not clear on that. And CliftonStrengths, as you take the assessment, you look at your 34 complete talents and the top five become your strengths.
Those are the ones to initially focus on. When I'm working with companies is focus on the talents of 6 through 10, because that's where we are learning that the true potential lies and the greatest potential to be unlocked are, is in the talents that are not necessarily our strengths.
Katty: So you mean the first five of those 10 is something that naturally occurs. It's the six through 10 that the potential and the opportunities lie within.
Jamie: Exactly. For example, Context is my number two (strength). I don't have to think about watching a documentary or what I'm going to learn from a specific book. I just pick it up, or I just do it.   
My number six or seven is Maximizer, where I need to take good things and I want to make them great. I have to put a little bit more intentionality and a little bit more thought into it. It's not an automatic process.
Katty: So really a growth opportunity even for every individual.
Jamie: Definitely. Our greatest growth, for me, lies within the six through ten. 
Katty: How would you say…from a team dynamics standpoint,  I know you've shared in the past that GallupStrengths or CliftonStrengths is not a hiring tool, but more of a development tool.  Can you share a little bit more about that and how hiring managers as a whole can utilize tools like CliftonStrengths to be able to develop their core team, and their people?
Jamie: These tools show how good a person may be on paper,  or as a result of algorithms and science that have been put out there. Where the greatest growth happens is when they are doing the work.  And when I know how I can do some things better than others, then I can team up with the right people that are, if not, better at certain areas and partner up with them.  And for me, that's where team dynamics become more important than growing just one individual.
 It's really how you grow the entire team, and wh

https://www.joyful.co/   |  Linkedin
Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency that designs and activates company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups.
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Welcome to this next episode of the artisan podcast. My name is Katty Douraghy. I'm the president of Artisan Creative and your host for the artisan podcast.
Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, the co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency. They design and activate company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups.
In this profound shift that we've had lately in the world of work, the rise of stress and burnout across leaders and employees and finding this need for best-in-class companies to re-recruit their talent and welcome them to a better future. Joyful saw this opportunity to focus their unique skill sets on this vital lever of growth, which is culture.
And that is what has brought us here to this conversation to talk about company culture employee retention, and bringing more joy to work. So with that, please welcome Allen and so happy to have you.
Let's welcome Allen Hardin to the podcast.  Allen and I are both part of an organization called EO, The Entrepreneurs Organization, and I was fortunate enough to visit his offices a few weeks back I just loved what I saw there. I saw all the joy that was there with everything that they have created for clients and that’s what has brought us to this conversation.
Katty I was really curious about the genesis of Joyful and your background, Alan, and have an opportunity for us to just really connect and chat.
Allen: Thank you so much for having me. Katty. I really appreciate the opportunity.  
Katty: I think with everything that's happened through COVID, with everybody being remote and now people being hybrid and some people not even knowing yet what their company culture and or their org is going to be like. Whether they're gonna bring everybody back or not or stay hybrid thing, it's just a really important topic to talk about, you know? Build and maintain culture through this. Craziness. This new work place that we're in.
Allen:  So there's a number of milestone moments that have happened over the last few years that everybody reset or refocused on it, but it's continuing to change as well. So that's the important thing to recognize is that you're never quite done working on your company culture. It's something that always needs a little bit of attention.
Katty: Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about you and kind of how you started in the space and what kind of was the impetus to start Joyful?
Allen: Yeah, absolutely. My background really stems from live event production. So in the early years of our company, that's what we really focused on. We originally started in 2015. And we're producing big events for ourselves, public events, ticketed events in the Portland area, but also producing big events for clients.
And one of our colleagues has said in the past that any live event any live experience is inherently a cultural experience. And I think that that is what really helped us focus and refocus on the path that we're on now. Focusing on company culture.
 
Live events in that world require a number of different mindsets if you will. And I like to say that you have to be one part visionary, right, really seeing the big picture and being optimistic of what could be and creating this emotive thing that really makes people feel something at an event or an experience that they have. But you also have to be very pragmatic, but you have to be able to execute those things on the ground and deliver on that promise because people will know, in

www.theotheeros.com
LinkedIn | Instagram | X  
Eros Marcello a software engineer/ developer and architect specializing in human interfacing artificial intelligence, with a special focus on conversational AI systems, voice assistance, chat bots and ambient computing.
 
Eros has been doing this since 2015 and even though today for the rest of us laymen in the industry we're hearing about AI everywhere, for Eros this has been something he's been passionately working in for quite a few years.
 
 Super excited to have him here to talk to us about artificial intelligence and help demystify some of the terminology that you all may be hearing out there.
 
 I'm so excited to welcome Eros Marcello to this conversation to learn a little bit more about AI. He is so fully well versed in it and has been working in AI at since 2015, when it was just not even a glimmer in my eyes so I'm so glad that to have somebody here who's an expert in that space.
 
Eros glad to have you here I would love to just jump into the conversation with you. For many of us this this buzz that we're hearing everywhere sounds new, as if it's just suddenly come to fruition. But that is clearly not the case, as it's been around for a long time, and you've been involved in it for a long time.  
 
Can you take us to as a creative, as an artist, as an architect, as an engineer take us through your genesis and how did you get involved and how did you get started. Let's just start at the beginning.
 
Eros:
 The beginning could be charted back sequentially working in large format facilities, as surprise surprise the music industry, which you know was the initial interest and was on the decline. You'd have this kind of alternate audio projects, sound design projects that would come into these the last remaining, especially on the East and West, Northeast and So-cal areas, the last era of large format analog-based facilities with large recording consoles and hardware and tape machines.
 I got to experience that, which was a great primer for AI for many reasons, we'll get more into that later.
So what happened was that you'd have voiceover coming in for telephony systems, and they would record these sterile, high-fidelity captures of voice that would become the UI sound banks, or used for speech synthesis engines for call centers.
That was the exposure to what was to come with voice tech folks in that space, the call center world, that really started shifting my gears into what AI machine learning was and how I may fit into it.
Fast forward, I got into digital signal processing and analog emulation, so making high caliber tools for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase , Mac and PC for sound production and music production. specifically analog circuitry emulation and magnetic tape emulation “in the box” as it's called that gave me my design and engineering acumen.
Come 2015/2016, Samsung came along and said you’ve done voice-over,  know NLP, machine learning, and AI, because I studied it and acquired the theoretical knowledge and had an understanding of the fundamentals.  I didn't know where I fit yet, and then they're like so you know about, plus you’re into voice, plus you have design background with the software that you worked on.  I worked on the first touchscreen recording console called the Raven MTX for a company called Slate Digital. So I accidentally created the trifecta that was required to create what they wanted to do which was Bigxby which was Samsung's iteration of the series for the Galaxy S8 and they wanted me to design the persona… and that as they say is history.
Samsung Research America, became my playground they moved me up from LA to the Bay Area and that was it.
 It hasn't really stopped since it's been a meteoric ascension upward. They didn't even know what to call it back then, they called it a UX writing position, but UX writers don't generate large textual datasets and annotate data and then batch and live test neural networks. Becau

Rachel Cooke | Lead Above Noise | Modern Mentor Podcast
 
Katty: Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Rachel Cooke to our session here today and talking about the employee experience and why it is so impactful for both engagement as well as retention in our companies. Welcome, Rachel. So happy to have you here. I’m excited to talk to you about this incredibly impactful journey that our employees go through and that we go through as business owners and as managers of our teams.
Katty: I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting Rachel at the Association of Talent Development Conference in San Diego. We've been talking about having her on here so that we can talk about the WHY of this amazing initiative, as well as the road trip that Rachel refers to when she talks about the employee experience. Why don't we start there? Let's talk about this journey, this road trip that we're on.
Rachel: That's awesome. You have such a good memory, Katty. I do love a good metaphor when I talk about these things. I use the road trip metaphor, you could pick many, but I think sometimes, something like the employee experience can feel kind of cloudy and ethereal and nobody quite knows how to wrap their hands around it. And so, I like to say that the employee experience is a journey and I think about it as a road trip and it has these three core elements.
To take a successful road trip, you need a destination; you need to understand where you are going, you need a road map; you need some turn-by-turn directions, and then hopefully you've got some fuel in the tank, and if you're lucky, some snacks and a playlist, but something to sort of fuel you or give momentum to your journey. That's how I like to think about it.
Katty: I love that. Can we start at the beginning of that employee experience? We're in the recruitment space here at Artisan Creative and I sometimes get the impression that the employee experience for some companies starts after the onboarding. But we see the employee experience, the candidate experience if you will, even before being hired. You know how the interviews are conducted, how they're being responded to during that whole application process. So maybe it's the pre-journey of the journey, right, the conversation, and that state. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rachel: Yeah, I see your pre-candidate experience and I would say it goes back even further than that which is the experience that your existing employees are having within your organization, such that they are going to be ambassadors of and successful recruiters of that talent to whom you want to deliver that amazing candidate experience. I do think it is always ongoing and continuous.
I think fundamentally for me, what stands out about the employee experience and where a lot of well-intentioned companies are getting it wrong, is that I think companies tend to think about the work that we're doing and then the employee experience,  that we think about later when we have free time. Which spoiler, we never have free time. I believe that a real powerful employee experience fuels rather than follows the work.
I think employee experience is not about free food, foosball tables, and sort of fancy cocktail parties. It begins with how we enable our employees to deliver the work that we have hired them to do.
I think that resonates even in the interview process. Even in the recruitment process, I see organizations posting roles and then running these potential candidates through the wringer with really complex application processes. You've got applicant tracking systems, you've got recruiters that have this as #17 on the priority list and people are interviewing with 27 different people and then waiting months and months and frankly, in a buyers' market, which we may not be in right now but we will be in again it's an off-putting experience for somebody to have.
For me, the fundamental first question is what can we be doing as organizations to streamline and s

Desmond Lomax is a Senior Consultant, Master Facilitator, and Implementation Leader in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion work at the Arbinger Institute.
Find Desmond on Linkedin
Arbinger books: Anatomy of Peace | The Outward Mindset | Leadership and Self-Deception
What I especially appreciated was how you were able to take this topic that is top of mind and many people out there are talking about it, but you were able to humanize it and you were able to allow the audience to be able to connect from a human to human level. That obviously is so important in every environment, every circle that we’re in. 
For our conversation, I wanted to bring that into the workplace, specifically hiring and integrating new people into the mix. But before we get into that, I'd love to just know how you get involved in this line of work.
Desmond: I started in the prison system. I was a therapist for the prison system and it was my first introduction to marginalized people struggling to make it in society, outside of my personal experiences.
I can't think of too many things more difficult than coming out of a prison system and returning as a citizen of the society and not feeling that you have the capacity or the resources to be able to do that successfully.
So I went from a therapist to a manager, to a state director where I was in charge of all the programming outside of the prison in the state of Utah. From there, I started teaching courses in Forensic Social Work at the University of Utah. I'm a Licensed Clinical Therapist, so it all came together.
I started doing many podcasts and videos about the things I've learned, and then my son passed away. I lost a child, he was a freshman in college. He committed suicide. I found myself in this unique position where I was like okay, Dezzy, you’ve been through some stuff now, you know what it's like to lose a child to something horrific. What can you do differently in society to create a greater sense of inclusion and belonging?
I think that's what motivates me. My son seemed isolated and alone, even though we talked every day. We had a lot of communication and people cared about him, but there just wasn't a sense of belonging for him. I wanted to do something about that. I just took all of this background and my knowledge and as I was working with Arbinger, I joined their design team, and we created the curriculum called Outward Inclusion and I spent the last few years sharing the message of what it looks like in your organization and in your space where we can, 1)  see the humanity of another person, and then 2) understand our impact on that humanity.
As simple as that sounds, there are things that we all have that interfere with our ability to do those two basic things. I've been working all over this country, all over internationally, just doing the work, being motivated by the loss I've experienced and the knowledge that I've gained.
Katty: Thank you for sharing that and heartfelt condolences. I don't know how long ago that was, but it's always fresh in the heart of anyone who's lost someone. Thank you for sharing that with us. I appreciate that you took something so devastating and you were able to turn it around and then bring positive impact to others from it.
Desmond: Yes, I hope so. What I've learned is that loss is energy. It's bonafide energy and either you do something with it, or it does something with you. I would like to say there are all these other options, but either that is the same energy that is just really hard. I've seen both of them in my life so I'm not trying to say I'm on one side or the other. But loss is a lot of energy that you need to transform into something or else that loss will transform you. That's what I've learned and that's what I'm trying to do.
Katty: Thank you for doing that and thank you for including us in that conversation. Let's go back to the two-pointers that you mentioned. The first one was seeing the humanity in each other and the second on