Ben Marc Diendéré at the Factry Foundation

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He has worked for public corporations, publicly traded companies and cooperatives. In each case, he has left a mark with his creativity. Great news: he’s bringing his talent to the Factry.

The word “creativity” suffers a little from its success, it is used for everything. What does it mean to you?

I have lived on different continents and have had experiences working in different sectors: culture, telecom, media, agribusiness, agriculture, transportation. I have observed that the only common thing that determines the success or failure of a company is creativity. Between strategic plans where we make and break, centralize or decentralize, make acquisitions: was there enough creativity in these operations? I’m not talking about marketing or communications… Were these companies more daring than others?

For example, when Quebecor and Videotron abandoned Videoway and switched to Illico, they separated themselves from a whole part of the company. They prioritized instinct, the famous right side of the brain that we don’t listen to. And yet, that’s where everything goes.

In my career, I’ve seen instinctive decisions that looked like mere impulses, but that turned out to be winners. Creativity has to do with audacity, risk, inventiveness, it’s a real lever.

Ben Marc Diendéré Factry 2

Photo credit : Martine Doucet

 

Have you always been creative?

I’ve always educated myself to be creative. I hate the idea of being a photocopier, of doing and redoing, and duplicating a pattern the same way. I’ve had very different bosses and every time one of them helped me move forward, it was because they activated their passion, intuition and artistic temperament. That je-ne-sais-quoi which makes you think differently from everyone else…

I was lucky to have bosses who accepted that I take risks. Like when I participated in la Coop fédéré strategic plan. One day, I said, “We have to change our name. It was a big risk for a 90-year-old brand! But the name no longer reflected what the organization had become. And, on top of that, it didn’t work in English. It was very risky. But I was convinced that I was right, and that’s how it happened! Today, it’s called Sollio Groupe Coopératif, and the organization is present throughout Quebec and the world.

In general, are we creative enough in Quebec?

When you’re born in the St. Lawrence Valley, there are a lot of risks that other people live on the planet that you don’t have. We have water, natural resources and security. This situation of well-being means that we can be more creative, more quickly. And yet, we are still waiting for the crisis to change our ways.

We are not totally ready to innovate, because we think that we have to heal the wounds before changing things. But wounds are part of change. In the rail industry, for example, one of the things that struck me the most was the extent to which we are not ready to abandon old patterns. We don’t give ourselves the means to be creative.

Yet, during the pandemic, we collectively innovated, right?

We were forced to be creative because of the crisis! What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t wait for a crisis to change our ways. One day, some comedians decided that humour wasn’t just humour; they got creative and invented a real industry.

Certainly the pandemic brought good things, like teleworking. It threw the daily commute to the office out the window. I call it the trucker’s syndrome: his ride starts with a small problem and, by the end, it becomes a big problem. The time spent commuting makes you dwell on your personal problems on the way to work and bring your job problems home. Teleworking has revealed what we are as a society: we define ourselves too much by work.

We’re coming out of the pandemic, and we’re not asking ourselves the right questions. We’re not anticipating the problems, we’re trailing behind. Are we trying to solve the traffic problem? We build tunnels and bridges… Too many deer in a park, what do we do? We shoot them! We need to bring creativity into this. We have to think differently.

Why did you decide to join the Factry Foundation team?

I came to the Factry Foundation with a desire to lobby and lead. I don’t want a job where I’m going to be bored… I wanted to answer the why, the famous why, to make sense of my life.

I want to participate in changing things and answer the question: what does Quebec need in the next 10 or 15 years? I think we need to promote creativity everywhere: in education, in business, in the francophonie, in health, in education, in the media as well. The government is the biggest employer in the country, and it has to understand that it can’t change the institutions with reforms. The whole design has to be redone!

The Factry is much more than workshops, I see it as the great promoter of creativity. We need to remind those who choose to be creative that they are not crazy and we need to tell the government that creativity is not about coloring; it is the solution to solve demographic, climate and public health issues, to find concrete solutions to the labor shortage, to democracy. Russia bothers us because it is not democratic; we are a democracy, but we don’t vote anymore… And yet, we are not working on the organization of electronic voting. And yet, we are not working on the organization of the electronic vote, but we can do it by making the procedure more secure. We can improve everything by being creative, even social justice.

The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones… We just stopped hitting flints together to make fire. And we did it differently. So now is the time to change.


Ben Marc Diendéré joins the Factry Foundation Board of Directors composed of:

  • Philippe Meunier: Chairman, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder, Sid Lee
  • Guillaume Lavoie: Partner, Torys
  • Camille Baudry: Operations Manager, Factry
  • Ian Kirouac: Executive Vice President – Strategic Initiatives, Pomerleau
  • Isabelle Bettez: Tech Entrepreneur, Administrator & Coach
  • Helena Di Oliveira: Purchasing Director, Rolling Stock & Components, North America, Alstom
  • Stéphane Vidal: Vice President Marketing and Communications, D-BOX

Nathalie Schneider

Nathalie Schneider is a journalist specializing in the outdoors and adventure tourism and has a large number of field reports to her credit. She is an outdoor columnist for Le Devoir and occasionally for Radio-Canada radio. She is also interested in subjects related to society, art and the environment.