Sascha Evans – The CEO & creative director of We the Creators talks about the power of diversity for innovation, jumping into business with both feet, and having dogged determination.
We the Creators is a neurodivergent led creative consultancy. We work with businesses to create innovative products, services and environments through a neuro-inclusive lens.
You need to be able to innovate and you need to be able to think differently and outside the box.
While it’s important to have that North Star to really know where you’re going, the people who are the best innovators are the people that can be flexible and happy to change their paths and find different routes to get there.
The thing that inspired me to start the business is when I learned that diverse teams are six times more innovative than teams that are not diverse.
I am ADHD, and I grew up not knowing that I’m ADHD, I always knew that I was a bit of a different thinker, and I always came across people that also thought differently.
It just seemed crazy to me that we weren’t using the most of these people that had these extraordinary talents and these different ways of thinking.
How can we bring the most innovative and creative thinkers in to solve the problems that companies are facing?
If you look at how companies are run and who are leading those companies, it tends to be the same types of people, so it’s people from a particular ethnicity or background or way of thinking.
True innovation comes when you get people who are divergent thinkers in the same room – when you actively look at a problem and you try to solve it by bringing in people who have a really, really different perspective from you.
I have always known that I wanted to have an impact on the world but I found that working in different teams and in different organisations wasn’t allowing me to have the impact that I needed.
I decided to set up a business because I knew that the way that I thought and the way that I approach problems was really different to many of the other people that I came across, and I wanted to create an environment where other people were able to do that too.
You’ve got to have a real dogged determination that you believe that what you’re doing is right.
Understand what you want from your life because starting up a business is an all-encompassing task. Understanding whether you want to go for VC investment, or whether you want to bootstrap, or whether you want to this to be something that runs alongside your life is really important. I’ve seen too many people go the wrong way with that and realise too late in the game that that isn’t really what they wanted to do.
We can all find reasons not to do things. If you’re looking to start up your business just get on and do something. Everything that you do, every small step you take, is one step towards you, setting up the business that you want and life that you want to live.
The biggest barrier that I faced when I was thinking about setting up my business was a kind of psychological leap of faith. I was in a job that I was earning relatively okay money. I was able to support my family, but it wasn’t fulfilling me as a person, and so I knew I needed to take this jump.
I jumped two feet in and just went for it. If I was going to have my time again, I would do that a little bit more slowly and ease into running the business a little bit more alongside having the job. It would have meant a lot less of a stressful entry for me.
Seeking out outliers is good for innovation.
Actively seek out businesses and products and services that are run by female founding teams, because those teams are going to have a different perspective on how those products and services are designed. We are often at the edges, and we often understand problems in a different way. You may get a better product or service because of it.
I think the world is a better place if we have more people running companies that think differently.
