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TRANSCRIPT

Five Key Quotes:

When computing moved to the cloud, the frequency of upgrades to software and new innovation that could happen started moving at such a pace. I just finished Michelle Weise's book Long Life Learning, and there's actually a graph in there that talks about where humans were kind of in front of the technology, and then there was a point where technology moved in front of humans. I think it's been pronounced at different times, we’ve definitely had that, but I think when things moved into the cloud, automation became something happening more quickly. When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.

I think there are a lot of days that we in talent development can't see the forest for the trees. We get really caught up in semantics, in instructional design methodology, in which learning system we're going to have, and whether we're doing workflow learning

I work in learning and talent development in companies. And she says, Oh, so you're one of the people that helps people that already have skills get more skills.

If a CEO comes to a CLO and says, do we have the skills for the future? The way they will know that is not because they have a skills cloud, it’s because their intimacy with the business leaders and business strategy lets them articulate where the business is going.

What skills should we have? How do we solve this?—from deep down in the deepest of my gut, I am saying, do not forget why you decided to do this. Stay focused on the impact that we have. Do good work. Solve the problems, but ultimately do not lose sight of our frontline, of our non-exempt employees of the talent and potential we have in our organizations, and let's go change the world. Let's make it better. Let's do the work, figure it out, and leave the world better when it's all said and done then than where it is today.

Dani Johnson:
Today, we talk to Matthew Daniel of Guild Education.

Matthew Daniel:
We are creating skill debt. I personally think that when I look in the mirror and I look at 88 million Americans—and maybe you don't love that number, you want to cut in half, whatever the number is you want to take—we have a skill shortage. And that skill shortage is the result—brace yourself—it’s a result of Learning and Talent Development not doing their job. And I celebrate that number, because it's so much opportunity; never have we mattered more!

Dani Johnson:
Matthew Daniel is the principal consultant on the employer solutions team at Guild Education. His focus is on supporting Fortune 500 companies to put together plans to up-skill and re-skill their talent for the future of work, especially in light of COVID.

Guild is at the forefront of the future of the work movement. They partner with Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit universities to offer educational benefits to their employees with a focus on frontline workers. Some of their partners include America's largest companies like Walmart, Disney, Discover, Taco Bell and Chipotle.

I have the opportunity to talk to Matthew about once a month about skills re-skilling, skilling 2.0, and everything that's going on with respect to it, and I found that he has a really interesting perspective when it comes to skills and its impact on frontline workers and diversity and inclusion. One of the things that captivates me about how Matthew speaks about skills is his ability to think about things differently. Matthew steps out of the traditional way that we talk about skills and introduces this concept of ‘perishable’ skills versus ‘durable’ skills that I find really intriguing.

Dani Johnson:
Matthew, welcome; we’re very happy to have you today on our podcast about Skills. This season, we're talking about all things skills, and you and I have had several conversations about the ins and outs of what's going on in that world, so thank you very much for joining us.

Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, it means I’ve been given the opportunity to get on the phone and rant and rave about skills. We're going to do it, so thanks for the opportunity to chat.

Dani Johnson:
But you're one of the most passionate people I've ever talked to you about this, so we're, we're very excited to have you here just to start out. I'm wondering if you can give us a brief overview of you and your work at Guild, kind of what you do.

Matthew Daniel:
So me as a human; I’ll just say 15 years in learning and talent development, and I guess longer than that now, but incredibly passionate about helping people develop the skills that they need to go be successful, to be better, to do better, and the impact that that has on families and generations long after this moment.

And so that makes me really passionate. That's brought me to Guild, and Guild has this mission really to unlock opportunity for America's workforce, specifically through education; we use a double-bottom-line business model that does well by doing good. So if I say that a little bit differently Guild is a B Corp, and that allows us to a) really work with both on the education side, the learning side, and with corporations to put together education benefits in a way that a gets to business strategy and b) really elevates the employee experience.

We’re hyper-focused on the frontline early career employees, and so we built out this dynamic learning marketplace with universities and learning partners that focus on serving adult working learners. These aren't colleges and universities that are focused on 18 to 22 year olds; these are really programs that are focused on people who have jobs, who have kids, who have a regular job, life, and help them develop new skills.

I actually work directly with the employer partners. So we have employers that come to us like Chipotle, Walmart, Disney, folks like that, who are trying to transform their workforce to engage their workforce. And so I get to work with a team of economists and learning folks and I get to work with consultants who are looking at business strategy and really thinking about talent a couple of years down the line, and how do we actually build out programs and policies that help move people in an organization into these programs, and then really develop the skills that are needed for a couple of years down the line to help the business actually execute on strategy.

Dani Johnson:
It sounds fascinating and it sounds super necessary right now, given the state of the world. I want to ask you a question about your own skills; tell us a little bit about the skills that you need for your work today, and how you got them.

Matthew Daniel:
Number one, obviously is talent strategy, and that is a thing that I got from doing. I was in-house at Capital One, I’ve been around learning and talent development for a while, and I've gotten to see it at a number of large organizations. Usually at moments of transformation, I started with GP Strategies and we did a lot of outsourcing in the learning space; they still do, but it gave me a chance to be at places like Microsoft or Cigna or Bristol-Myers Squibb at the moment that they were changing the way they were approaching learning. And so I got to see a lot of how you build an L&D function in a way that actually supports the business. And then I went in-house at Capital One and had the great fortune of being there in the middle of our digital transformation, and so that skill of how do I think about the talent I have and up-skill those folks and how am I bringing in the right talent, and then what is the up-skilling even the right talent needs whenever they land that came through reps.

Another skill: writing and research is a part of my job, and I wanted to give a plug to Ms. Linda Williams in Whitehall High School for Junior Level Advanced Grammar; I have never had a better writing course in my life than I had my junior year of high school. So like that skill that I take and use every day, everywhere, was something that started there. And of course it just got better. On the research side, I have historiography, I have a BA in history and historiography, if you don't know it it's like the way that history is written. It was one of my favorites; I didn't even know what it was. It was one of my favorite courses in the world of fake news. Like the first time that I read three chapters on Reconstruction by different authors who like saw that through different frames, I just realized how much bias we bring to them, which has really been a skill, you know, over the years that has served me well, as I'm trying to look at business strategy and think about like, how do we approach this and how is my own bias weighing into the solutions I'm bringing to the table anyway. And that's about enough about that.

Stacia Garr:
You and I are like soul twins on this; I’m a historian as well, and my favorite courses were on propaganda. And then also similarly I took a single course, whatever, 12 weeks on Abraham Lincoln, I read like 10 different books on Abraham Lincoln and how they all portrayed him differently and how the authors were influenced by where they were in the time in history,and all this other stuff.

Chris Pirie:
We have a whole ‘poets versus quants’ kind of thing through the whole season emerging here. Hope the best one wins!

Dani Johnson:
We talked a lot yesterday about soft skills and how some of our non-traditional backgrounds have really helped us in the work that we do now, especially the research and the writing and those types of things. It was interesting that we think our kids think when they get out of college, that's what they're going to be doing the rest of their lives. That's hardly ever true; I think about, I mean, I graduated with a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and I am worlds away from that.

Matthew Daniel:
All I wanted from college was to get out for three and a half years, because my big goal was just to get the credential; like, I didn't want to go to college, I really just knew that the credential played into my opportunities in the future. And I came from a family where literally no-one had ever graduated from college before, and I was a first-generation college grad, and I just knew it was important to open doors. Other than that, like all I wanted, History was the thing that I could stay engaged with and like to take 20 hours a semester and finish. And so that's what I did.

Dani Johnson:
That's awesome. But I want to switch over a little bit to just kind of skills in general. So why do you think skills are hot or important right now?

Matthew Daniel:
Skills were always a bit of a challenge. I mean, if we go back decades, but ultimately when computing moved to the cloud, the frequency of upgrades to software and new innovation that could happen started moving at such a pace. I just finished Michelle Weise's book Long Life Learning, and there's actually a graph in there that talks about where humans were kind of in front of the technology, and then there was a point where technology moved in front of humans. I think it's been pronounced at different times, we’ve definitely had that, but I think when things moved into the cloud, automation became something happening more quickly. When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.

So I think why skills are hot in one form is like innovation, cloud technology, automation; I think on another broader issue of like, why is it hot in companies? Ultimately, buying our way out of talent shortages through talent acquisition is not a sustainable approach. It's pushing wages higher, it's in HR, talent acquisition is large, is highly operationally focused and is a large volume of activity in the organization. And it is just not sustainable to continue. I mean, there was a time in companies where all promotions hired from internal talent, like over 70% of what you had was coming from internal, that change really pushed outside, we needed skills and we were infusing it from outside the organization, but ultimately it's not a great business strategy to always think you can hire all the skills you need in the future.

And so this is from a talent development lens. It's really pushed us in my opinion, into a conversation about skills continuously, because we're not just needing to hire it, it’s not sustainable to hire it the way we are now we've got to develop those skills, and so it's become a kind of an economic conversation about supply versus demand. And it just has pushed that conversation to the top.

Dani Johnson:
That's really interesting. I don't ever, I don't think I ever sort of glommed onto the fact that the term talent shortage comes from, you know, acquiring talent from the outside. If you were continuously developing your people, you'd never have a talent shortage.

Matthew Daniel:
Right.

Dani Johnson:
Talk to me a little bit about soft skills in relation to what you just said, because I agree with you that, you know, the cloud has definitely accelerated everything. We had a great conversation with Lisa Kay Solomon and she talked a lot about soft skills and design and some of those types of things. I'm interested to understand how those soft skills fit into the conversation.

Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, this is so interesting.

Dani Johnson:
And I know you don't call them ‘soft’ skills.

Matthew Daniel
I don’t. You know, here's the thing—I think I'm going to go on a tirade for just a second, you guys figure out how you use this—I think there are a lot of days that we in talent development can't see the forest for the trees. We get really caught up in semantics, in instructional design methodology, in which learning system we're going to have, and whether we're doing workflow learning. And does it all matter, like, I don't know if this is appropriate for a podcast, but some of that is just ultimately bullshit, like, go ahead and put the bleep over by word there. But ultimately we are spending a lot of time and energy around it, should it be called soft and hard and all those things end up being more marketing focused than they are substantive in the field that we're in.

Ultimately, here's the challenge that I think we're up against: we have 88 million Americans who don't have the skills they need to lead us into the future of work. And that's a problem. And so taking a step back. I think we, through both working in Entangled and working at Guild, we had a project that we were doing for a university that was trying to figure out how do we handle lifelong learning: how do we handle the complexity of what is people coming in and out of the university throughout a very long life, and where their real challenges that they're up against? And about that time, you've also got this Bersin by Deloitte data point, it’s made it all over the place and it was based on other research, but it was the durability of skill or the half-life of skills is roughly five years; in the more technical, it’s closer to two and a half. And so the response from the L&D community has been, especially in this cloud-based technology, it's all changing is to start to index heavily on, then we have to build an entire organization, systems, tools, models, so that we are constantly pumping out shorter content more frequently. Like that was the response to that data point. And a lot of it has to do with marketing. Right? Like everybody launched latched on to that con that concept. And they were like, great; make it short, make it fast, get just the skill you need and go. And what we said is, okay, wait,let's just take that some school skills are more durable and some are less durable. And let's think about the implications of that in itself, which is to say if the entire L&D function spins up a ton of energy around just pumping out perishable skills, are we creating the talent that needs to lead us to the future, or are we just going to have to constantly keep finding talent as a result? We're going to have to go shop for whatever company has talent that's two years ahead of me? Great, Capital One went through the digital transformation five years ago I'm going through it now, so I'll just go hire all their talent because they've already done this thing, they have those skills rather than looking at my people and going, like, do we have the durable skills that we need in our shop to get through this transition, to get through this change, have I built a workforce?

And let me just talk about when I say durable versus perishable, what we kind of separated into three buckets and the way that we talk about it and think about it. There are highly durable skills, and these are dispositions of ways of thinking and acting at this really broad scale. Then there's semi-durable skills, which we kind of classify as frameworks or methodologies. They stick around longer than just what technology you're using today, but they may not last as long as this disposition about for you, the way that you go do critical research, right? You have a way of thinking of the world, of taking really complex ideas as an analyst and breaking it down and solving the problem you use methodology or semi-durable approaches, which changed every couple of years, they're more stable. And then on the last bracket, we talk about perishable skills. So that's generally probably more related to technology; I mean, let's be honest, Microsoft Word is about as reliable a skill as you could have gotten, right? Like technology versus soft or, you know, those things don't really matter, the question is how durable is the skill, in my opinion. And so when we start thinking of that, if we think of agile, you know, durable agile skills or taking really complex products and bringing it down in the minimum viable products, that's the dispositional skill of being able to do that. You do that through scrum and kanban, those are your semi-durable methodologies. And then ultimately you're using, you know, whatever the platform is, Asana or a JIRA or whatever that thing is. And knowing how to use that tool to live out the method, to then live out the concept of delivering—those are kind of in higher order. So here's the thing, Asana you're going to replace that in three years, we all live in America, we know like you're going to replace that whole technology over and over again. The method is a little more stable, but the disposition is the thing that is most stable or durable.

So here's where that landed us. If some skills are more perishable and some skills are more durable, what are the implications of that? And the more that I thought about this, and of course, Guild brings this lens to the table where we're constantly thinking about the frontline, If I think about the way that I distribute the development of skills in my organization and if I'm really honest, when I look in the mirror, I give the most durable, dispositional skills to executives, to leaders, Ivy League grads, because like number one that costs me the most to hire and number two, like I'm going to make the investment because they're going to be my leaders. And then we look at the frontline and we kind of look at them and go, well, you know, heck, you're making $17 an hour, you’re going to go somewhere else or we're going to replace you. So let's just teach you how to click the button in the system that we have today to make sure that you can do the task that we have.

And to a certain degree, I think workflow learning in the concept of embedded learning, reinforces that concept more than anything. I mean, if workflow learning is about doing while learning, which is a little bit different to me where you're thinking about how do I actually practice the skill? That's one thing. But if workflow is embedded from the sense of learn how to click the button or learn how to say the thing, when you get the phone call or just super-tactically, what process do I use today to process this thing in my large company, then all I am giving you, over and over, is a perishable skill. You guys have worked in the technology world, we call when you make bad decisions about coding a system to give a user what they want, we call it technical debt. We're like, Oh, you want that button on that page? Well, the architecture of our system doesn't really work that way, but we'll give you that button, and we just know every release we have to maintain that. It's a problem, It's trouble, but we’ll go do that thing.

We are creating skill debt. I personally think that when I look in the mirror and I look at 88 million Americans, and maybe you don't love that number, you want to cut in half, whatever the number is you want to take, we have a skill shortage. And that skill shortage is the result—brace yourself—it’s a result of learning and talent development not doing their job. And I celebrate that number because it's so much opportunity—never have we mattered more!

But honestly, when I look at that, as somebody who's been in this field for 15-plus years, it breaks me to think that we have created an industry that ultimately sells products so well and has a growing budget and it's doing great things, and yet the impact that we're having is diminishing in terms of impact, especially the frontline employees who right now in a K-shaped recovery of an economy are taking the greatest hits.

Something is fundamentally broken about the way that we're thinking about this. And I don't know that I have the solution to it, but what I do think is that if we walked into to developing our talent and a) didn't say, oh, you’re frontline employees so we don't need to invest less, but b) if we also said, how do I make sure that while I'm teaching you to click the button, because you know, by God, you've got to do that thing and keep it going, how do I make sure that I'm giving you frameworks or similar durable skills and dispositions, or ways of thinking about problems and solving problems and approaching the world that set you up to last in this company longer and set us up as a company to be better able to navigate the next challenge without me just teaching you how to click the button.

Dani Johnson:
That was very eloquent and I want to point out that you wrote an article on this in CLO magazine, and we'll put the link on the page so that the people can get to that. And I think the emphasis that you put on frontline workers leads me to my next question is, you know, how do skills and access to data about skills affect diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging?

Matthew Daniel:
Ultimately, if this way of thinking about skills and the investment that we make in frontline skills, being more focused on throwaway skills, how to use the processes and tools that they have, the reflection moment that I have in that is that we—learning and development—could be reinforcing systemic inequities more than we care to admit.

Quick story. I'm starting at Entangled; it’s a lot of people who don't come from workforce learning. There's this young lady, she’s probably 24, 25 years old, she’s fresh out of grad school, she’s got an MBA. She's smart. We meet for one-on-one. I said, Hey, I'm Matthew, I work in learning and talent development in companies. And she says, Oh, so you're one of the people that helps people that already have skills get more skills. And I was like, I'm one of the people who takes everybody who graduates from college and gets them ready for the workforce. You know what kind of like in my head, I went on this whole, but that question—her name is Frances, that question that Frances asked me—that kept me up at night for the next couple of months, because I started asking myself if I reframe that question, was she fully informed in that question? Absolutely not, I mean, look, there’s Capital One as an example, there were 400 of us supporting 3000 roles where there are 30,000 defined skills, we’re trying to figure out how to keep the business running—it’s a hard job, right?

And this whole thing of skills is super hard, but ultimately I think we, forgive me for using the phrase, we kind of whitewash this issue, through like making courses and opportunities. Like, we go to our business resource group and we create some special employee resource group, whatever you call them, that we create kind of programs for diverse talent, a cohort of 20 per year to get into some kind of access, or we make our courses more diverse in terms of the representation in the course. And we're like, Oh, we pat ourselves on the back that we're doing work towards equity. And I think a really hard look that I've had to do in the mirror this year in reflection over the past 12 months is that I have stood up systems, created policies, established processes, all in the name of fiscal responsibility about, you know, how much do we have to spend on external content and what's our budget for these courses and how many people can we pay to have license to the system. And we have, over and over, eliminated the people at the end of the spectrum, frontline talent, from access to our content, to our systems. And ultimately not only have we created our own skill shortage by only focusing on the task in front of us; we've also robbed the opportunities from the talent.

We say all the time, talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not. And ultimately we in L&D may be robbing our organizations of some of the greatest potential in talent, because they sit in the frontline and they're non-exempt employees and so they just don't get access to content or the systems or the programs or the mentoring or the class. I think of Capital One, here's, you know, you're going to be an executive you come in and one of these rotational programs and we give you how the business makes money in presentation skills and storytelling skills, and we give you all those things, and then we wonder why the folks at that end of the spectrum performed better than folks in the frontline. We are clearly segmenting, I guess, is the kind word, but we are, we are dividing our talent. And that frontline talent is where most of our poverty employees that come from poverty live, where our employees that come from rural backgrounds, from black backgrounds and, and, and other people of color, we, we take those people and we do it in our heads by separating exempt versus non-exempt. But essentially what we're doing is we're locking down access to more skills to the people who would benefit the most from it. And I think that requires a hard reflection on if we're making the right decisions and what part we play.

Dani Johnson:
We completely agree—this has been a soapbox of ours for, I don't know, eight or nine months now. We're exempting the frontline, and we're also exempting those that aren't considered quote, unquote leadership or high potential. And so we basically rate people early on in their careers and that's who they are the rest of their careers, there’s not an opportunity to get out, which is kind of horrifying given the fact that we've made so many leaps and bounds to scale learning. It doesn't cost us as much as it used to, but we're still making that distinction between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to developing skills and giving knowledge.

Stacia Garr:
The potentially intriguing thing about skills, though, is that we may be able to use it to circumvent some of these decisions that we've made. So if you think back, you know, you mentioned Matthew, you’re, you know, first-generation college graduate, you know, there are plenty of other really smart people out there who may not have graduated college who have only a High School degree. My brother actually is one of them; he owns his own business, there was no big corporation that was going to take him because he doesn't have a college degree, but he’s an incredibly effective human being.

And so I'm wondering if, is there an opportunity for us to think about skills as a way to maybe bypass some of the traditional gates that we've put in place? You know, Dani and I have talked about how, you know, the requirement for a college degree for a lot of jobs is a little bit of a ridiculous thing. And so can we turn to skills instead as a way to think about, you know, whether it's the credentialing or it's the certification that someone can do the job, as a way to get around some of those gates that we've put in place that disproportionately impact some of these diverse communities.

Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And companies are doing that. I mean, there are companies who are getting a lot of notoriety for this. I think IBM has like 15% of their workforce that they are making, we call that skill-based hiring, right? That's the industry term for it. So you have companies like IBM, or Google has come out and said, they'll make hires that way, Apple’s done the same way. I even have a friend at Humana. They have, I think, eliminated ‘college graduates’ from something like 50% of their job postings, which is really significant. So does skill-based hiring help make up that ground? I hope and would wholly agree, but that has to be one of a part of an ecosystem.

So let's go back to what we talked about a moment ago. What, like, what's the big thing that we're trying to solve and it's an entire ecosystem. The people who help determine what skills you get are your state government in K-12, it's your universities, both private and public, in college, it's workforce development boards, state agencies then county structures. You have those of us in the workplace that are trying to develop school skills. And quite frankly, all of us are speaking different languages. We're using different skills, we're using different approaches. We're using a different technology—in fact, there aren't a whole lot of places we even interact with each other. You know, one of the reasons I loved Macy's learning conference is because all the K-12 and higher ed people that showed up, like I really thought it was weird for a really long time. What are they doing here with all of us learning people, but ed tech and corporate learning technology are getting closer and closer every single year. And so I think you're right on, and I want to see the whole world move to this, I actually have a piece coming out, hopefully in the spring about this concept of both skill-based hiring. But I think the other side of that is going to be when we do skill-based hiring, we need to acknowledge that there are going to be gaps. One of the things that I want to see in this world of skill-based hiring is this greater integration of talent acquisition and talent development. As a matter of fact, I just got a new mentor at the beginning of the year, and my new mentor is in talent acquisition because I just feel like I don't know enough about what happens on that side of the fence. And then in many organizations, excuse me, talent acquisition, talent development are a bit disassociated except for, with hypos, right, because hypos, we got to hire them, but we know they don't have all the things we need. So we're going to put them in these development programs, these really rich development programs.

And I think in this skill-based hiring world, if we walk into that and believe that we're going to hire all the skills that we need by eliminating the college degree, I don't think that's realistic, I think we're deluding ourselves. So there has to be a way that talent development and talent acquisition work together. And so I think of like gateway jobs skills that let's take a CSR, customer support rep, right? Most companies are loaded with CSRs, lots of talent there and there's a lot of need in computer user support specialists, it’s like a 11% growth over the next five years, as far as jobs go and so there's a lot of skill-matching.

To your point, where if we did better at looking at that from a skill standpoint, instead of just looking at a degree, we could actually say, well, you know, I could take you here and with one one month bootcamp, I could not hire a bunch of college grads and I could take people out of my call centers where I had a whole lot of talent, and move them over and easy to replace talent easier, certainly then computer user support. So if I start looking at what some of those pathways are in the organization and I intentionally build the infrastructure between talent acquisition and talent development to make sure I'm skilling people for that, then that can be a really successful approach in my mind. But it has to, it's an ecosystem, right? We're back to this; it’s a really big problem, and it needs really good partners within the organization and outside the organization who are looking at it and helping you solve it. But ultimately you put college degree as an on the job description and you've eliminated 76% I believe is the number of black candidates, and something like 80% of Latinx candidates. So like, yes, we will never get to equitable opportunities as long as we're making a degree a toll-gate.

Chris Pirie:
Could you talk briefly about the relationship between skills and experience? It seems to me as a hiring manager, one of the things that I would pivot more strongly on is somebody's experience rather than a sort of a list of skills that frankly are hard to describe and define?

Matthew Daniel:
So I've been a hiring manager; that’s one of the things that's always interesting in this conversation to me are people who talk a lot about skills, but have not really had to hire many people. I had a team of about 15 at Capital One and that 15 folks, each one of those job postings brought in more than a hundred people who applied for that job. And so I do think we have a technology gap here that just isn't scaled, the applicant tracking system just doesn't do a good job of helping us get through this issue, and it's just easier to put a college degree is like the thing that helps us. But Chris, the question is super-valid from the standpoint of how I don't just want to see a list of skills, right? I'm going to list skills that are no more valuable to me than the name of a college degree—maybe even less so. I do want to see the experience or the story. And then on the other side, we're still telling you, but I need a one page resume that you submit here. Like, we are putting this pressure on candidates that is just unreasonable. And we're putting pressure on hiring managers that's unreasonable. If you're getting 80 resumes, I mean, a good recruiter is filtering through that and giving you the 12, but also I didn't always trust my recruiters, I went through a lot of resumes myself and was like, did you see this project they worked on, this is exactly what I need. That's what I need. What's not in your job description. Well, you told me I needed to keep the job description consistent so that we didn't have any risk on compensation analysis. Right? Like this whole system is somehow broken.

But ultimately, yeah, you're right: the experience tells me a lot more than a list of skills. I want to know how you use those skills. And the example there is agile; when somebody says I've worked with agile, my question is what I mean, what does that mean? Like, does that mean you understand kanban or scrum again, the, the kind of middle skills. Do you understand how to use JIRA? Like you so good? You can put stories into, that’s one part of agile, or do you get it at a fundamental level or the dispositional level where you're thinking about how do I take really complex things and break it up? Which I also think is where some of the skill libraries that we have available to us fail us. When you get one word like agile to describe something that is massively complex, it does not tell me what I need to know.

Chris Pirie:
I'll give you an example of that. We looked at a skill library from, in my previous role from a very, very large provider who claimed to have hundreds of thousands of skills documented in their library, and we were rolling out cloud computing and we needed people who were skilled in managing containers. And it turns out that if you went to this skills library and looked at managing containers, it was always about moving big metal boxes around. So, you know, I think that the essence of this for me is we don't have the language to describe what we're talking about; it’s not precise enough that we can bring technology to bear on this problem of mixing the job that needs to be done with the people who have the capability to do it in a very friendly manner working on them.

Matthew Daniel:
That's right. You have like MZ partnering with Western Governors partnering with Salesforce and Google to work on the open skills network. So they're working on what is a definition of a rich skill descriptor, and putting context around it—MZ’s working on skills, not even just in language, but clustering, they're using machine learning to figure out what the clusters give context to a skill. So there is good work happening here, but it's not baked into the systems that we have today, it’s not baked into the processes and it's going to get better. Like I am a hopeful person; we are going to figure this out, the world is going to get better, but my God is it painful between now and then to see how broken it is and know that we want it to be more.

Chris Pirie:
I love the optimism, and I share your frustration about the capabilities of L&D teams; I mean, my life's work now is trying to fix that, or at least draw attention to it. And many people in the future might not have—in fact, many people today—might not have an L&D department, right? I'm a gig worker. I have stitched together five or six different jobs—we’re already 10 years from Daniel Pink's book Free Agent Nation, right? So what do you think about people who exist outside of corporations? It seems to me this fixing this is very important for them.

Matthew Daniel:
I'm just going to own that. I have spent almost the entirety of my career focusing on the Fortune 500. I actually, because I was thinking about this exact question this morning, I was looking up, my three-year-old is like, what are you doing, Daddy, can I have more cereal? And I am on my phone going and how many employees are represented by the Fortune 500, right? Like I am thinking about this exact question and how many people, it leaves out of the equation and quite frankly, small business, which makes up 50% of our economy, they don't have the means to do what we're talking about here. I mean, you're talking about gig workers, and gig workers have the obligation on their own to develop, and I was actually looking at some data on this, not too long ago in the IT space gig workers actually keep their skills up better than people who are in-house, so I think gig workers are less of a problem than small business employees, who need to have access to skill development, but are unlikely to get that coming from their own business.

Which is why I go back to the ecosystem; this is where I think having learning partners and some kind of a guide to help them get there that's not just selling me something, like I need a third party to help me make this journey in my own talent development that's not biased to just their own content, which unfortunately is what I get a lot of times.

Chris Pirie:
I have one more quick question, and this is on my soapbox, to use Dani’s phrase, is about the granularity with which we manage all this stuff a little bit related to the last question. You said something like 30,000 defined skills at one of your customers or one of the places where you've worked; in my experience, it all gets unmanageable very, very quickly. So what would your advice be to a learning leader today who is getting questions from their CEO about, do we have the skills for the future? And is being pulled by the industry into this big mapping exercise that's going to consume trillions of person hours. What would your advice be on how to think about the skills that my organization needs?

Matthew Daniel:
Are you sure Dani didn’t set you up to ask this question? Okay. So Dani and I have talked about this a bit, because I do think it's too unwieldy. I think that there are companies and organizations who have the means and capacity to go take on the entire skills cloud and figure out exactly what skills are needed and what the frameworks are. I think many organizations, especially in the scrappy L&D world, need… if a CEO comes to a CLO and says, do we have the skills for the future? The way they will know that is not because they have a skills cloud, it’s because their intimacy with the business leaders and business strategy lets them articulate where the business is going.

On that one, I want to nail it on the head that no matter how good the technology gets, it is not going to predict what skills are needed in the future, at least not anytime in the near future. You need to get that through your awareness of what's happening in the business and your ability to see what's coming down the pike—acquisitions, decisions about different products, all those kinds of things that's where that insight about whether or not you have the skills for the future should be.

The other thing that I'll say about this, and this is where Dani and I have spoken: I know the whole world is moving towards skills. I had a piece in Training magazine, not too long ago where I said like, don't figure out all the skills in your company—there are 30,000. Here's what I want you to do; I want you to go find the 10 jobs that are in greatest demand in your organization, and map the skills for just those 10 jobs. And then I want you to go find the 10 places where you are most likely to automate or lay people off, and I want you to go find their skills. And then I went from each of those, it's unlikely that one is going to match to the other, right? If ‘data scientist’ is your greatest demand, it's unlikely that CSRs are going to get you there in a short term, in, you know, six months of learning. What is more likely, though, is CSRs gets you to computer user support specialist, and computer user support specialists gets you to engineering. And then we have these kind of two-step processes: instead of solving for 30,000 skills, solve for the top 10 in-demand jobs and the top 10 in-decline jobs. And those are going to take you through; you'll end up mapping a solid 30 to 40 roles in your organization, but you'll actually have something you can go do three months from now. If you try and map the entire skill framework for your company three years from now, you will call me and say, well, we were getting really close and then we changed out our HCM, or we were getting really close and we decided to go with a new concept provider, or we've decided to old LSP, or it's always going to be disrupted by what's in the ecosystem, go solve the problem, get that done, earn the credibility, get better at it. And then you'll know whether that skills cloud actually is valid whenever it shows up at your door.

Stacia Garr:
I just want to comment, because I think that for kind of on the people analytics side, we've been doing a lot of this type of work with workforce planning, strategic workforce planning, but I want to kind of call out the thing that I think is maybe different than what you said, Matthew, which is this idea of kind of the two-step or even potentially three-step process where you truly are thinking about, you know, given those top 10 and those declining 10, how does that basically create or impact a talent pipeline between the two and kind of thinking about that connection?

And so I just want to call that out, because I don't think I've ever heard anybody articulate it in that way but I think that that could potentially be really powerful, particularly if you're focused in the way that you mentioned. And I think come to some of the themes we've talked about both within this podcast and also in our research, I think it's a much more humanistic approach than, you know, so many of the others, which are like, okay, well, you know, these 10 types jobs are going to go away and sorry guys.

Matthew Daniel:
I have a piece I'm working on for CLO next month, and what I have said is that, like the theme of the piece, the secret to talent mobility is humanity, not machinery. And I think it's wraparound support and people who can advocate for you, you are more likely to get more talent mobility through that than you are through your HCMS recommendation, that is the next skill that you need for now. There will be a time where it won't be that way, but ultimately right now, like use humanity to get you there and that's going to serve you well for the next couple of years.

Dani Johnson:
Couple of themes I've heard from you, Matthew and one is this, and it’s a really important problem to solve. We have to solve it. The second thing I heard from you was it can't be solved entirely with tech right now—it can’t, we have to leverage our humanness and all that comes along with that, including our ability to think reasonably and deeply about this, rather than just relying on technology. And then the third thing that I think I've heard is stories, strangely, like from the very beginning through the end of this conversation, I've been hearing stories. You can't look at a resume and decide if that person is worthy of a job; you’ve got to get into the stories, you can't just look at the data and decide, do you have the skills you need? You've got to get into the stories.

Every time I talk to you, I think to myself, man, this is a big mess and that the other thing that I think is, but I'm really hopeful that we'll get there. And that's one of the reasons that I've always really liked our conversations is because even though we're talking about really hard things and we're not there yet, you leave me hopeful for the future of solving this problem. So thank you so much for being with us today; it was fantastic, and we'll make sure that the articles that you've written about this topic are available on our website so that people can continue to study.

Matthew Daniel:
Can I leave with this? I want to leave with this. I said the reason I do this is because I want to make people better, and here's what I believe: I believe that if you are in the field of learning and talent development, or overall human resources, you didn't get into the field generally because you thought to yourself, Oh my God, I love HCMs, or you thought I can't wait to write the next policy to cover one of the big problems and exposures we have in our company. And you didn't think, man, I love laying people off, right? All those things that are a part of our job, as LMS is and SCORM and content integration, those are just the things. If you were in a room with me, it would be like guttural, like standing on a chair, yelling, is to remind this field of why we got in this: we got in this because we saw that people can be better, and do better, and that if we pay attention to people and we make investments in them it yields business results, but it also has generational impacts.

So as people out there are thinking about skills—what skills do we need? What skills should we have? How do we solve this?—from deep down in the deepest of my gut, I am saying, do not forget why you decided to do this. Stay focused on the impact that we have. Do good work. Solve the problems, but ultimately do not lose sight of our frontline, of our non-exempt employees of the talent and potential we have in our organizations, and let's go change the world. Let's make it better. Let's do the work, figure it out, and leave the world better when it's all said and done then than where it is today.

Dani Johnson:
That was beautiful. Matthew, thank you so much for your time and your passion. It's been a great conversation.

Matthew Daniel:
Thanks guys.

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

We are very grateful to Workday for its exclusive sponsorship of this season of the Workplace Stories by RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.  

TRANSCRIPT

The five key podcast soundbites:

What I introduce to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity, and to use their imagination in order to expand their perspective around what might be—and then to bring those futures to life.

I think about skills as learnable abilities, but what does that mean? It means you can develop an ability, do something, by practicing it over time. Much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills; how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.

One of the things that's interesting to me as I get more serious and more focused on teaching futures literacy and futures thinking and strategic foresight as a strategic skillset, is that it's not really taught anywhere. And it's certainly not taught in a foundational K-12 context. The closest thing you can get is History and Humanities.

To me, learning is the currency of possibility; I not only makes me more creative as an educator, as an author, as an idea person, about trying to make sense of where we're going, but I think it gives me the opportunity to be more resilient—when you learn, you're more resilient.

There is so much emphasis on getting to answers quickly: on performing. What do we need for the future? We need people comfortable with being curious. We need people comfortable being courageous and being able to say, I don't know this, but I know it's a problem, so how else can I learn more about it?

Welcome to Workplace Stories hosted by RedThread Research, where we look for the Red Thread connecting humans, ideas, stories, and data—defining the near future of people and work practices.

Stacia Garr:

My name is Stacia Garr, and I'm the co-founder and principal analyst at Red Thread Research, along with Dani Johnson, who is also co-founder and principal analyst at Red Thread and Chris Pirie of the Learning Futures Group. We're excited to welcome you to our first podcast season: this episode is part of Season One, called The Skills Obsession in which we investigate the current preoccupation with all things skills. We talk to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners about the current state of thinking on why and how we are managing skills at the people and organizational level.

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the Red Thread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday. It's one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
I help students learn skills they don't yet know that they need.

Dani Johnson:
That was Lisa Kay Solomon of the Stanford University d.school. Lisa is a best-selling author, educator, speaker, and dynamic force for good in the world; she’s dedicated her career to making design more accessible and learnable. Lisa is currently a designer in residence at the Stanford d.school, where she focuses on bridging the disciplines of Futures and Design Thinking, creating experiences like The Future's Happening to help students learn and practice the skills they don't even know. They need.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
I think about skills as learnable abilities, and so much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills. So how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.

Dani Johnson:
Lisa is a long time friend. We've had the opportunity to sit in a couple of her sessions at the d.school, and we were really intrigued with how they made us think differently and how she's talking about the skills that people will need in the future.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
We can see the past, but we can't influence it. We can't see the future, but we can influence it. And so to me, that's a call for getting more serious about the scales and the discipline of learning how to imagine a multiplicity of futures, or at the very least challenge our status quo.
Dani Johnson:
Let's listen into our conversation with Lisa Kay Solomon.

Stacia Garr:
Welcome, Lisa, thanks so much for joining us on this podcast: we’re going to be talking all about skills in this season, and we are just delighted to have you helping us think through skills and the future of work. And what does that all mean as we bring it together? So can we maybe start with a little bit about you and your work? I know you mentioned that you are helping people design and think about the future: can you tell us a little bit more? What does that mean: what is your work?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, Stacia, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be talking about skills, and as they relate to the future of work—I think about this all day, every day.
And the challenge in part with my work is that at the d.school, where I teach classes about the future and design, I help students learn skills that they don't yet know that they need, because what I introduce them to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity, and to use their imagination in order to expand their perspective around what might be—and then to bring those futures to life.
And if you think about where most of these students have done their foundational learning… you won't see any of those skills in there! So it's very much applying some of the foundational skills around learning how to read and literacies across all different disciplines, in new ways. So my work is really to not only bring these students on board, to help them see that they are capable of learning these new skills, but to give them the space, to master them over time.

Stacia Garr:
Amazing. Well, let's step back because you used the word skills. I use the word skills as we started this, but what does that even mean? It's a really broad concept, and so what does that word mean to you?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Again, I want to say thank you for doing a whole series on skills, because skills are, it's one of those words that we throw around, and we may be talking about different things, I don't think there's any necessarily one definition; the way I think about it, I think about skills as learnable abilities—again, more, more meta words—but what, what does that mean?
That means that you can develop the ability, do something by practicing it over time. And so much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills. So how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.

Stacia Garr:
One thing we've been wrestling with is since we've been doing the research is this concept of skills versus competencies. And are those things that you just mentioned, are they, are they competencies or are they skills? Are we kind of just calling what we used to call competencies skills now? Or does it even matter?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't tend to get hung up too much on the semantics, as long as they don't confuse us. So that's why I like to break it down to the smallest bit.

So for about nine years, I taught at a really revolutionary program in San Francisco. That was an MBA in design strategy, housed at the California College of Arts. So imagine, right—this is probably like mind-blowing to some of your listeners right now—like what is an MBA program doing in a 110-year old Arts and Crafts school in San Francisco? Crazy, right?

And what I used to say about that program—and we could talk a lot about it, because it was my first introduction to actually transitioning my career from being an advisor to an educator where I had to think very seriously around what am I organizing this learning experience against—what are the skills that I hope that our students come out of this program with?

And it allowed me to articulate that, for starters, I wanted employers and organizations to know that when they hired a DMBA-er, as we used to say, they were getting a certain kind of talent that they wouldn't necessarily find in a more traditional program, because we utilized some of the critique-based, project-based learning typically done in arts or architecture applied towards analytics and systems thinking and business processes that the employers were getting, or the people hiring them were getting someone that was more adaptable, more flexible, more resilient, more comfortable with iteration and rapid learning.
Is that a skill? Is that a competency? Does it matter? I don't know. It only matters because we've developed systems that are trying to measure these things. And so it was really interesting to try to help the students understand that what they were learning may not be yet on the hiring docket of what these organizations were looking for on paper, but they were developing the skills that these organizations needed for the future.
Stacia Garr:
Interesting. Yeah, that reminds me, Dani and I have very different backgrounds. She is an Engineer and I am actually a Historian by education. And one of the things I've talked about as being the most valuable that I learned from that education is pattern recognition. And what we do as researchers in HR is pattern recognition, seeing things, and ideally seeing them before other people do so that we can help elevate the understanding of what's happening out there.
But I think it speaks exactly to what you're saying: as a historian, no one was saying I was going to apply that skillset to doing this type of work, but it gives you that foundation to really do amazing things in really any context.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
I love that you share that partnership. I feel like you just model the debate. My husband and I argue every night about what our children should be learning. He's in the venture capital business, he loves STEM, he loves coding, and I do too, and I do think technology is and will continue to be a huge part of our future. And we talk at the d.school about the importance of coding literacy and even understanding that tech really is the design material of the future. And Stacia, to your point, like where do you learn how to imagine the future by understanding the past by understanding patterns? I love the Mark Twain quote that I heard was recently debunked, but until I hear the original person said this quote, I'm going to keep saying it, which is that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

You know, one of the things that's interesting to me as I get more serious and more focused on teaching futures literacy and futures thinking and strategic foresight as a strategic skillset, is that it's not really taught anywhere. And it's certainly not taught in a foundational K-12 context. The closest thing you can get is History and Humanities, which is ironic, right? That the closest thing to helping you understand the future is actually to study the past.
And I'll bring in another one of my favorite quotes from Stewart Brand, who was the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and he actually created was one of the founders of Global Business Network as scenario planning from where I first did my futures work almost 20 years ago. And he says, we can see the past, but we can't influence it; we can't see the future, but we can influence it.
And so to me, that's a call for getting more serious about the skills and the discipline of learning, how to imagine a multiplicity of futures or the very least challenge our status quo of this official future that we're all walking around with.

Stacia Garr:
Right, right, and I love that idea of multiplicity of futures—so this concept that we may think that there is one future, but there clearly isn't and, and having a sense of thinking through what could those different futures look like and what are, back to our topic, what are the skills that we might need to make those futures come to life in a way that is satisfying for each of us.

You’ve talked a lot about your transition, you mentioned going from an advisor to an educator, and obviously the skillset that you have as a Futurist is not one that you necessarily learned in a specific place. So can you talk a little bit about the skills you need to do your work today, and how you even acquired them?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
How much time do we have? I don’t know—I’m still figuring it out! I mean, one of the things I love about my work is I learn something every day. To me, learning is the currency of possibility; I not only makes me more creative as an educator, as an author, as an idea person, about trying to make sense of where we're going, but I think it gives me the opportunity to be more resilient—when you learn, you're more resilient. And that's what I love about design, and why I'm so passionate about teaching the skills of design: who doesn't want to feel like they have agency over their future, even when the world around us is getting more complex and filled with more ambiguity and uncertainty?

So I take these skills very seriously as an educator, as a designer of new possibilities, as a parent, as a member of my community: I'm always asking ‘what if,’ right? That's probably the biggest, quite the biggest skill that I bring to the table is this sense of maybe applied optimism or applied possibility, which is this combination of like observing the world around me first, having the humility to not go in there with a solution looking for a problem, but to really pause and pay attention, what's really going on here, and to try to understand it at different levels, like what's the presenting source of pain or challenge—what’s maybe driving that, so now you're sort of look at it through a systems lens to try to understand, like what might be the root causes, then the ability to say, well, all right, what parts can I influence, and what parts are out of my control? And then the ability to say, well, ‘what if’—what if we tried this and the ability to put that out there, not knowing if it's a right idea or not.So over time, being confident that or comfortable maybe offering up a possibility without full information or guarantee that it's going to be the right one.

And I want to juxtapose that with where so much of our foundational schooling is, and certainly a lot of what I see in the Stanford students, which is there is so much systemic reward for being right. There is so much emphasis on getting to answers quickly: on performing. What do we need for the future? We need people comfortable with being curious. We need people comfortable being courageous and being able to say, I don't know this, but I know it's a problem, so how else can I learn more about it? Who else can I bring here?

And I think that's the other big skill that I have Stacia which is, I am very excited to build and learn from others, build relationships and learn from others, and I fully credit my mom for that, and that is because she was a chief learning officer for 25 years. And before that got her training in psychology counselling—so she's a PhD who loved to unpack the dynamic of the human experience.

She actually wrote a class at Penn when I was too young to even appreciate what a rock star she was, called the psychology of personal growth. How cool is that—that this woman was so ahead of her time. I mean, now, she'd be like a Brené Brown or an Oprah!

And her intuition was like, she saw these Penn students—we grew up in Philadelphia, and she worked and taught at Penn—and she saw these students like so raring to achieve, and she wanted to give them an opportunity to pause, to learn about themselves. And so that was my context growing up—seeing someone who was herself, always learning and asking questions. And she used to say when she went in as a chief learning officer, that her job was to be the learning partner of the leaders that she worked with. I just thought, That's so cool.
Chris Pirie:
I'm going to chime in here with a question, if I can, based on what I've heard so far? One of the things I'm hearing from you is quite a lot of references to what I would call ‘mindsets’ or ‘approaches’? It might be useful to talk a little bit about design, about your sort of stock in trade, around design. What do you think are the skills and the mindsets that are important for design, and what's happening in the design world? Because I'm sure it's not standing still; I'm sure there are changes and forces at work on the world of design. So talk about design through the lens of, of skills, if you could?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, design is another big topic that we could cover. And I think part of what I try to do in my contribution to the field is to break it down so that everyone could see themselves in the definition of design. So there's lots of different ways to describe design—design as an output, design as a process, design is a set of practices, which is where I tend to fall. Because again, those practices are teachable and learnable.
And I'll give you two definitions that I love just to make sure that everyone, because this is a learning podcast around skills, they may be like, I'm not a designer. Well, newsflash—I think if you're in the learning business, you're in the design business. And here's why: my favorite definition of design comes from my dear friend and colleague Nathan Shedroff, who started that MBA design program that I mentioned earlier, and he's been in design for 30 years.

And what he says is as a designer, it is my responsibility to make choices that trigger the right responses. To make choices that trigger the right responses. Okay, so that's interesting, so that seems to suggest that first of all, you are in the service business, right? Because your job is to make a choice that sets somebody else up for success.

And if this is still abstract, just think about like, I often say to people, what's, what's something well-designed in your mind that, that you love. And I get to answers more than any first time. First people say, I love my iPhone. Okay, well, a number of people made choices to help you love your iPhone. Right? What does your iPhone do for you? Well, it's a mini-computer in your hand and it's seamless and it's beautiful, okay: so they made choices to trigger those responses. And so it suggests that you need to know enough about the people you are designing for them—what success looks like for them or the kind of goals you're trying to trigger for them?
So in the spirit of a learning context, your job as a learning professional is to create choices, to help the person you're designing for, you’re making choices for, be successful. So you need to understand what success means for them? What does it mean in the context of the role? What does it mean in the context of the organization? What does it mean in the context of the industry? So you have to have a lot of different information before you make any decisions about what it is that you were going to bring for them forward to them.
So that's design, and then I'll try to even get it down a bit more concrete. When I think about, and this comes from the work of Don Norman originally, he was a cognitive scientist/psychologist who wrote the book The Design of Everyday Things, which is a foundational book in the world of design. And he basically said design's role is to do two things: one is to deliver functional utility. So, again, in the context of learning, am I helping you learn something you didn't know that helps you do your job as a functional utility. And I would say, and this is what makes great design, the emotional engagement piece, right? So you're not just learning it because it's like hideous and you're trying to memorize it; you are becoming more of yourself when you're learning it. There's an element of joy. There's an element of vibrancy. There's an element of humanity, because humans have that emotion. And we now know from research, that emotion is actually triggered to learning and that's equally important in the decisions you're making, right? Which is why, for example, and I'm just going to take this meander down to this most basic level in the spirit of design, like you could design a very dry worksheet to try to get someone to learn something new—or you could create an immersive experience, where they're using their full body. Which one is going to have the lasting impact that you want in terms of them advancing their abilities in some way? We know it's the ladder. Well, that takes a totally different skillset to do so.

Stacia Garr:
I love this. One thing I don't think we told you before we roped you into talking to us today is the other group that is going to be listening to this podcast is people analytics leaders, because people analytics is very much so a part of understanding skills, quantifying skills and helping us think through what ones we need in the organization in the future.

And some of the research we've been doing around people analytics technology really gets at this point around making your words, making choices, that enable success. And we've been talking a lot about how, before you, as a people analytics leader, design a study, or you design a dashboard, you need to understand the people who will be using that dashboard will be using that data. What decisions are they trying to make? And what does the success mean as a result of those decisions? But I think the point that you just made kind of made a light bulb go off in my head around the emotional component. So when Dani and I write a study, we use a story brand perspective, which is understanding what the high level problem is, what the specific problem is, and then what the emotional personal problem is. And so for anybody who, in this example, is using a people analytics dashboard, or is looking at the skills problem from a quantifiable perspective, they're going to have an emotional angle to this too. And as we think about how we present data or how we present decisions, we need to be thinking about that emotional connection, so are we going to be able to help that person solve the problem that may be stymieing their career right now? Or the one that they say we've just got to be able to get our heads around what new things we need to do, because that is an emotional problem, too, and we can bring data to bear on that, but understanding that that's a problem that we need to solve. In addition to the presenting problem, I think you called it simply, what skills do we need an organization?

So I love this idea of applying the utility and the emotional component to some of these kinds of more data-driven questions that we see with skills as well.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
I mean, it's such an interesting point, Stacia, and I think it is Blue Sky territory around. Re-Imagining what these metrics are for some of these more qualitative and hard to measure skills. Like I said, we're at the dawn of a new era and in many ways, the last 10 months of navigating three crises at the same time between the pandemic and the economic crisis that we're facing and the real reckoning on institutional racism and demand for changes in how organizations support diversity—the old metrics don't fly, none of them! (Well, not none of them, but very few of them.)
So we have to be comfortable in really saying, let's design backwards. At the end of the day, not only do we want to be able to show results for our organization that shows whatever it is, profitability, growth, resilience, strength, we also want to be able to say, what does it mean for someone to feel like they are thriving at this organization—to feel like they are contributing their best talents and passion and power, even, to this opportunity? Because of course we know that’s what's going to enable them to stay and recruit others and put their best foot forward.

I'm not up to date on the latest numbers around engagement, around trust, around support, but I don't think they're good. So something tells me, and so we're doing a lot of work measuring the wrong stuff. Now, I don't mean to say that so glibly, because then of course the answer was, well, what’s the right stuff we should measure. And I don't think we know yet how to measure some of this stuff. How do we measure imagination? How do we even measure curiosity? How many times somebody put a question in a team search form, how do we measure the strength of your relationships, the diversity of your race? We're beginning to, but I don't think we should fall in love with these early metrics; we’re not there yet.

I remember a couple years ago I had a conversation with the head of school, my daughters go to a really fabulous school, all girls school and the head of school pick these character themes every year to do deep dives into. And one year as resilience, understanding I live in Silicon Valley and the pressure to perform at Silicon Valley is out of proportion with, I think the developmental needs of young people, not unique to this school and sort of endemic to certainly this area and many others. And so I thought it was a very noble and brave thing to be able to say, look, we're going to focus this year on resilience. And I remember being at a parent coffee and it just raised my hand. I was like, if this goes, well, how do we know? How do we know that our girls are more resilient? (This happens to be an all girls school.) How do we know? And I have to believe that in this answer, and this is very draconian, it has to be something better than they don't mention being depressed. That's not the metric!

And so I think that's the creative challenge ahead of us is to really say like, what is it, what is it we're shooting for now? The exciting part is that I think different fields are getting at this, but we need to come together some ways—we have some studies on happiness, some studies on thriving, some studies on becoming on growth mindset. And we need a sort of mind-meld of some of these to really understand what that looks like in the context of a work in the context of community contribution.
So I'm hopeful, I'm excited—but I think we have a long way to go.

Chris Pirie:
Some really interesting ideas that I just took away from the conversation so far is one is you, you mentioned that skills are teachable, eEven these mindset type skills of resilience and fortitude and curiosity, they're teachable as well. So that's kind of an interesting parameter.

The other connection that I'm making is with the work we've been doing around purpose, which turns out to be a lot about human motivation and the psychology of engagement. And I think we're in that territory again here, in terms of thinking through what a skill is; if I can write code it's useless unless I'm motivated to do that to solve a problem. And, and so there's something very, very interesting about that.

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Yeah. I just want to pick up on a couple of things there, Chris, thank you for calling that out. It is. I keep coming back to my purpose, which is to help make these intangible skills, teachable and learnable.

I believe that, every day, and I feel so privileged to do this work and I love the idea that our all leaders leaders of all ages—and I'm doing increasingly more work with K-12, because my experience working with executives frankly, is that we have to spend a whole lot of time unlearning to then relearn—and so my systems thinking brain was like, why don't we just get it earlier in the pipeline to teach them that?

So it's like, why don't we try that? So I'm doing a lot of work, actually, with schools in K-12 around creating futures, programming and literacy, and what does that mean? And we're just in the early stages of articulating that, but one of the foundational ones that is true for both design and futures is this notion of navigating ambiguity. I totally agree with you, Chris, that it's a mindset, but it is also a skillset. Let me give you a couple examples of that. One of the ways that we tolerate ambiguity is just to identify that there are a number of ways that something might unfold—that there's not a single right answer. And so we actually spend time identifying a spectrum of possibilities, right? And so we even did this when I did some early scenario planning around COVID, back in March, where we said okay, well, what's one critical uncertainty that we don't know about how it's going to unfold. Well, is the pandemic going to be short and relatively quick, or is it going to be long, longer and more durable in some ways… How do you know, let's unpack that?

Well, what would lead it to be short and quick? Oh, well, we have therapeutics that work, we have abundant testing, we have PPE, we have supportive healthcare. We have vaccines. Okay… what would lead to it being longer? Oh, well we do have shortages. So now, all of a sudden, we're doing another design principle, which is going from the abstract to concrete in order to help break down the ambiguity of ‘how long would this pandemic last’ into more understandable terms.

Now, again, we're not predicting, but we're managing our ambiguity by naming ends and by breaking it down and allowing us to get into a more active research mode than we would have with that big question of, I don't know when the pandemic is going to end.

So that's one strategy, and therefore like coupling it with a couple of practices on how to navigate that question. That’s just one of them. So next week, I'm starting winter quarter teaching my favorite class, called Inventing the Future with Tina Seelig, who is a brilliant creativity entrepreneur guru at Stanford, a real thought leader and author, and Drew Endy, who runs Bioengineering—such a fun class. The whole purpose of the class is to get students more comfortable unpacking the ambiguity around us. And the original inspiration for the class when we started developing it three years ago was to help primarily engineering and CS students not jump to the question of, can we build it, but to really pause and say, should we build it? How do we know? Well, what if we could give you skills and practices that at least help you better understand the potential implications of it? So that's just one sort of specific example. And over the course of the 10 weeks in the quarter, we introduced various creativity and futures practices in order to develop, help them develop the skills to think about what it means to invent the future.

Stacia Garr:
Very cool. My husband was one of those Stanford students who actually took Tina Seelig’s class, and I can't say how much just her approach and her thinking at the d.school just changed his approach. He was a master's student, and it just I think fundamentally shifts once you've gone through that experience of design and over the course of 10 weeks, incredibly shifts the way you look at the world. So I just want to put an exclamation point on the work that you're doing and folks at the d.school are doing, because I think it makes a huge difference; I've seen it!

Lisa Kay Solonon:
That's great to hear it; it’s transformational. What's so fun is when you see the light switch flip; you just don't know exactly when it's going to happen, but it is that embodied cognition about like, wait, what—I don't have to accept these assumptions at face value. I have the ability to identify all the assumptions, ask myself what would be the opposite, then go into a research mode to see if the opposite might be true?
I mean, it's transformational, it’s epic, but Tina's brilliant and the class is designed to make it accessible to say the ability to imagine something new—the ability to ‘be innovative’ or a creative problem solver. That's not for a select few, that's for all of us, If we allocate intentional practice to these skills, we cannot get better at things we don't practice; I don't know about you, but I was not born learning how to make a beautiful PowerPoint. I just wasn’t, right; I had to practice.

And so then you have to put yourself in a position where to say, how could I practice with people that are masters at their craft—how can I learn from them, how can I apprentice from them, how can I use technology to facilitate that? So, yes, it starts with a mindset, as Chris said earlier, which is foundationally a growth mindset that I can learn something, I want to learn something, I'm capable of learning something. And then it's the grit, it's the perseverance, it's over time, and being willing to take feedback and say, how could I do better?
Chris Pirie:
But there's something else going on at the d.school in the context of Stanford that I think is interesting too. Because if I'm at Stanford, studying Neuroscience or Biology, there is an accepted curricular and path of study to do that, right; there is a set of skills that I need to acquire, whether it’s how to properly use a pipette or understand the knowledge base around chemical interactions, whatever.

What you do in that context, though, what the d.school does in that context is sort of collide people together from different disciplines. And so I think you're saying that there's something going on other than following this sort of established set of skills and knowledge acquisition. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Absolutely—and I agree with you, Chris, we are a very, very lucky place. I mean, the d.school, first of all, is a little bit of misnomer in that it's not really a school from a standpoint of having a curriculum; it’s a institute of experimentation and creativity, really, which allows us and encourages us to take Stanford students from all disciplines, whether they're master's students or undergrad, CS, Humanities, PhDs, to come and learn together in an experiential class that exposes them to these practices of creative problem solving against a real-world problem, ideally.

And so you're exactly right, Chris—we want students that come in with their body of knowledge, their depth that they are learning, and to then go adjacent to go abroad—I mean, sometimes we talk about T-shaped people where they’re kind of applying their different skills.

Again Stacia, this has really helped my dinner conversations with my husband; the book Range that came out which talks about the importance of being able to pull from different disciplines. This of course, makes me think of Steven Johnson's work on where good ideas come from, where he talks about the adjacent possible. And so there's something about the d.school that creates an environment of psychological safety. I mean, we know that if you sign up for a class at the d.school, part of our job as educators is to make it safe, to take risks. And in fact, on day one of our class on Inventing the Future, we say to the students, if you come to this class, you get a guaranteed A, this is not your class. We can't tell you what an A looks like; we can tell you that you have to show up every day,ready to learn, ready to take risks, ready to go into new places.

So again, Chris, your point, that's not in the textbook; that’s not like, okay, now I'm at the 201 level. And Chris, you and I have talked about this before; this is why I love, for example, the practices of improvisational theater, because it forces you to get comfortable taking the next step without all the information. And a lot of times at the d.school, some of the opening activities we'll do are steeped in improvisational theater practices; we call them Stokes or warmups, but they're really to kind of get you present, get you loose. It's been very interesting to learn how to translate them in a remote setting, but we're doing it, and we are pushing our craft on that.

But Chris, going back to your point about the sort of pedagogical difference to say, you are not here to acquire knowledge that has a checklist; you are here to identify areas of practice that you want to explore for yourself. And the d.school, even in the last few years, has really has really migrated its focus from teaching the design thinking process, which was really popularized by David Kelly at the d.school, which is a user set human-centered approach to solving problems, first, you got to understand and empathize and you have to define what the problem and new idea. I think that that process was useful as an on-ramp, but I was always as a human capacity person, and I was always interested in what did it unleash? What were the practices that it unleashed—what did that process afford you, the experience of getting exposure to.

And over the last five years or so, we've been migrating from teaching the process or a process to really teaching abilities. And we have identified these eight design abilities that include navigating ambiguity, communicating deliberately building and crafting intentionally experimenting rapidly, moving between abstract and concrete. And I encourage anyone to go to the d.school to really read through them because I don't want to overwhelm you with, with all of them, but to me, this is the sort of the layer that you can add on to any of those discreet disciplines that will really expand your ability to solve important problems.
Chris Pirie:
Great. It's great because you've introduced another synonym that we can use for skills—this notion of ‘abilities.’

Dani, I know you have some, some questions, sorry.

Dani Johnson:
I have so many questions! As an engineer, I’ve always looked for the right answer, because that's how I was brought up. But I'm curious, Lisa, about your take on when we started needing to go back to our human self and look at design? It seems like the majority of progress that has been made since the beginning of humankind has been made because we were doing what you're now having to teach students to do? So when did that switch? When did we start needing to introduce this back into our human selves?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Gosh, it's so interesting, Dani, I agree with you… I feel like this is a terrible metaphor, but I sometimes think about the movie Soylent Green, ’It's about people—go back to the people!’ It was terrible, because they were eating people, but it is why I think I'm so passionate about design, because I think design is fundamentally human it’s a human scale, requires real nuance; it requires all the skills that I know you've spent a lot of time researching around what makes learning human, and I don't have a great definitive answer to you. But my hunch tells me is that it started probably a hundred years ago when we moved to a more industrial model of education, of kind of moving towards valuing efficiency, over exploration—the move towards multiple choice tests and personality tests and intelligence tests, and those kinds of things, and then we created a whole systems around it that are really, really hard to dismantle.
I mentioned earlier, I'm a parent of teenagers. I mean, I cheered for joy when all the standardized tests for college entry were canceled, initially, because I felt like, wow, this frees up 100 hours of studying for a stupid test. Forgive me if any of your listeners are working at the College Board, but it's like, we know, we know that these are not indicators of future success, and yet we rely so much on these numbers, right, that were gamified because we've created a whole industry around it. I actually posted either like a blog post or something about it early in April, and I was like, what can these young people do with these hours back? Imagine, maybe they give back to their community, maybe they take some creative risks; maybe they become social entrepreneurs or find civic agency and engagement?

And sure enough, the industry found a way to keep crawling back and make it even more terrible for these young people to go through. And I just think that is soul-crushing, and not a long-term resilient activity for them to be doing. So Dani, I agree with you. I mean, there was just, again, why it's so exciting to see some of these movements in K-12 project-based learning Reggio Emilia, even… I remember like this like 10 years ago and Google was really, maybe 15 years ago, and there was this like 60 minutes special with Sergei and Larry and they're like, what's your secret, and they're like, well, we were both in Montessori school, and everyone was, yay, Montessori!

I think that in part the education system values something different. And then, in the last 15 years, and I'm a little biased being in Silicon Valley, but we started to have a very techno-centric view—that technology was going to create abundance. And we're just at the beginning of really unpacking, like, what are the dangers of that perspective? How do we really challenge it? Who's making the technology, what are the biases that go into it?
Chris, you had asked a question that I'm realizing I never came back to around what’s the future of design? I think the future of design is design justice—designing for equity and really using those same design skills that we use to create great products to actually say, how do we use that to dismantle some of these systems and to rethink?

At the d.school, we're doing a huge push around using design abilities to make emerging tech more accessible through analog modalities like AI cards so we can teach fundamental algorithms to six year olds so that they don't just have technology happened to them, but they have the wherewithal to say, Hey, is this a classification algorithm? Is this a clustering algorithm? How would I know, where do they get the data? How can I challenge that? And to really think of those as literacies that we need to take seriously.
Chris Pirie:
Ethics as well. Ethics for engineers.

Dani Johnson:
I think it's interesting that you're going back to K through 12; I think it's obviously the right move. I mean, we've been talking to CLOs and CHROs for years and years; I think they face different pressures as well, like we talked about the system being in place for a hundred years and the metrics that they're measured against and the system built around meeting those metrics, and having to teach skills in a certain way so that things are most efficient; it seems like such a big problem.

Are you optimistic that we'll ever unpack some of these systems, and make it a better place?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
I think it's going to be a battle; I have to remain optimistic, or else I've got to resign tomorrow. I mean, I am advocating more and more of my time to doing this and we have to work with you really future-forward educators and administrators willing to do it because, again, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg question going back to station's point earlier about like, how are we measuring these things? We don't yet have the measurements, so you need some role to be able to say, no, what? We know that we are building, courageous, resilient young leaders. We know that we are, and so it is going to be important that we allocate time towards that, and that may not be measurable yet. So it takes some courageous schools and some creative educators to say, look, this candidate or the profile of our students are not going to look like the students that you're used to getting: we think they're better.

And so like, we're going to need some big player in the system—to be able to take a public stand on that. And I do think that we have a slight opening here; never let a good crisis go to waste. So I think that UC systems, for example, stopped taking SATs altogether this year. So the question will be like, is this a blip? Or are they like, we can't wait once the vaccines let's get those testing machines up and running again, or are they going to use this time to say, how else can we better understand which students do well and why, what are their qualitative characteristics? And then to create a system around it where they're connecting, like what happens next with these students, right, because of these qualities and then downward to say, Hey, look, High Schools: this is the stuff we're looking for.

For years, we've just been in this default mode of, well, let's just take what's available, SAT scores, GPA, but because this is such a strange year, as so many of the status quo systems were disrupted. We have an opportunity to reimagine, but we have to put a stake in the ground. One of the things that we're doing around our K-12 futures initiative is, we're trying to, ahead of time, articulate as if they were the World Economic Forum Skills of the Future—like we’re trying to make some of those connections from the beginning to say, look, this isn't happening as a one-off, this isn't a like little niche program like Reggio Emilia and preschools and child-centric—no, this is actually serving you, big corporation! So I think there's an opportunity to connect some dots.

Stacia Garr:
I think one thing that sort of came to mind as you were talking about that is our view of what data is. We think of it in terms of numbers; in the last couple of years, and especially within the last 10 months, we've seen reputation becomes so much more important. And I use the term reputation in how do you quantify a person without quantifying the person? So things like portfolios have become much more important word of mouth, and rating how well you like to work with somebody has become much more important.

The rating systems I think have started to change. Usually when we talk to organizations, it's all about those quantifiable skills, doing things in a certain way, the most efficient way, but we're starting to see some of those things creep in. And so it gives me hope that we can figure that out as well. I think tech will play a part in helping to digest some of that and help us make better decisions.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, that’s why the work you're doing is so important, right? Because you're putting the research behind it. And I love the work, for example, you've been doing or exploring the role of tech to really promote diversity within organizations. It's not the lip service, not just like changing the diversity statement, but really challenging in productive ways.

I believe that people are not changing because they don't want to, they just don't know how—I really approach this from a much more empathetic standpoint and to say like, well, we're going to have to learn together, and we may not do it right away. I mean, that's the other thing we have to suspend our desire to solve it and fix it, right? These are problems. And so like a big part of my work is finding those bright spots and really unpacking them to say like, how is this not an anomaly, how can we learn from this? Like what, what else is there?

But it’s also humbling work. And Dani, just to give you like another example over the summer, we did a lot of scenario planning with schools, K-12 schools, getting back in the Fall. And at the time, if you remember, way back in the summer, we were kind of optimistic that we could go back in Fall; I mean, yes, there was the looming threat of a second/third wave, but it looked like things were subsiding. And so it's like, do we go back in person? Do we go hybrid? And so they were looking at different possibilities, and we asked them to take a design lens and say what do you know to be true among everything? Even though we can't predict the future, from a human perspective, from the stakeholder group that you are serving at your core, which is students, what do we know to be universally true?

What we knew to be universally true is that these students need more social-emotional support than ever before; whatever their conditions were, they’ve been isolated, they’ve been cut off from human connection; non-negotiable, and now that we know the teachers need that too.

Okay, great, so we have that fundamental truth going in. Okay, what are we going to do for the schedule? In my mind, it was like a no-brainer—take 20% off the content and fill it with community connection, whatever, it was so obvious to me, 20%, 40% whatever, it’s so clear what the need is. And yet schools could barely budge. It was, well, if we just shift this five minutes, we could get another lab in there, we can… and I'm like, step away from the standards. Who is stopping you?

And this gets back to a fundamental lesson. My very, very first job out of college was working on a political campaign, where I was trying to raise money in order to get Harris Wofford re-elected, who was the Senator from Pennsylvania, started the Peace Corps, early Civil Rights Act. It was a very expensive race at the time; I was 21 years old, and they're like, you have to raise $7 million. Okay! So now that's like the equivalent of $50 million something, and I was like, no problem, 21 years old, government major, I’m a newbie but they'll teach me how to do it. They'll teach me how to raise $7 million, right? And what I learned like week one, there was no ‘they’—I had to figure it out. And of course it was clear, like don't break this rule, there were laws even then, so don't do this, but everything else you can do. So it was a really early lesson in navigating, like how to get towards angles, but how to learn, how to be scrappy and figuring it out. And I think there's a lot of that going on—that just people, like I said, going back to the same mantra, you leaders cannot be expected to be masters at things they've never had a chance to practice. And definitely that's where school leaders are; and definitely, I think that's where a lot of organization leaders are.
Dani Johnson:
Let me ask you one final question. I feel like I've been hugging the conversation a little bit, but kind of tying it back and taking that last statement and tying it back to skills: if you had one piece of advice to give leaders that are struggling through this skills question, what would that advice be?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I would say design backwards. Design backwards to say, when you think about your teammates, your colleagues, people working at your organization, and you think about what would allow them to do their jobs to their best ability and to identify them—it's not the same job, lots of different nuances, what does that look like? And what is the best way that they may be able to learn those skills in order to not just do their jobs, but to feel that sense of purpose, to feel like they are connected to something bigger than themselves, because we know that that will keep them motivated and keep them excited and engaged, which is important, and to allow them at least for a little bit, I know it's uncomfortable for a lot of people cause they there's a lot of investment, a lot of sunk costs and systems that everyone knows that don't work, but we use them anyway.
Park that aside, and do some dream-storming. If you could say, what would it look like for this to really be a learning organisation and for people to design backwards, to say that they are able to learn what they need to while doing their work, what would allow that to happen? And then to do the analysis to say, well, where are we right now? Where do we need to be? What should we stop investing in? Even though we might've spent a few million dollars, our context has shifted, we know new things now that we didn't know. And if the investment we made is not going to get us to where we need to be, let's make the hard decision and say, let's not keep investing.

Stacia Garr:
I know we are close to the end, but I want to come back to something you said, Lisa. In the context of K through 12 education and how we can make this stick, you said we need to have a few courageous partners. You referenced the UC system specifically regarding SAT scores; I think that applies to the corporate world as well—that we need a few courageous organizations, right?

And so one of the questions I've been thinking about as you've been talking is how do we do that? How do we scale this? Like the d.school, as wonderful as it is, doesn't exist outside of our little bubble here. How do we find those courageous corporations? And how do we scale some of the magic of what you're doing around design to think about the skills and really the workforce of the future that we're trying to design?

So that's kind of my question about advice. How do we scale this?

Lisa Kay Solomon:
It's a great question. So excited for your next guest to answer it.

Yes, we are lucky at the d.school. We're small, and in fact I really want to get props to a couple of my colleagues that run something at the d.school called the Uuniversity Innovation Fellows Program. And they started this many years ago, I don't exactly know, over five years ago to, in some ways address this exact problem, how do we help scale design practices and social impact on college campuses that don't have the luxury of having their own d.school?

And so they created this amazing fellowship program where students apply from universities all around the world with faculty sponsorship. The idea is that they spend time at the d.school—they used to do it in person, but they're now finding ways to design it remotely—and they come and they get some exposure to the work that we do and the practices and the ways of thinking and the mindsets, and then they go back to their university campuses and they apply it towards a social innovation challenge there, or a leadership challenge or a student challenge, so steeped in real-world humans that are trying to create new value in their local places of their campuses.

And the impact has been just extraordinary, and I think that they have researched it and they've written a book about it. So I love that model, because we're scaling communities of practice, both in a kind of thoughtful, high-touch way, though I don't think they were ever an algorithmic substitute for observation and empathy, and thank God, right? Because there's always a need for these kinds of human skills; you need to have a high touch and the d.school is not the only one doing it. I think that, again, we can, we can look to a lot of different industries that know how to do that well, particularly in the care-taking space and even in the, in the teaching space. And then we can sort of allow for networks to share and spread that with their local communities in that way.

So I think that is certainly a way to continue to grow. Now, listen, it's not the exponential scale that we're used to doing when we ship software, but humans are not software, right? And I think this is one of the biggest tensions that I think all human capacity supporters, learners, people analytics need to contend with—that the learning that we're talking about, the learning of mindsets and the learning of these very human practices can be ignited in a short timeframe, you can get exposed to it. You can have the life, but they develop over a long timeframe, right?

So I always say like learning sits within many tensions right now. Learning is fast, right: we can Google something, we get the answer bubble, but learning this kind of learning is slow; we don't become resilient in an hour. We become resilient because we intentionally practice resilient in different forms. And, and so I think we just need to honor some of the constraints of that if we really want to build these skills for a lifetime, we have to honor that scaling bit. They take a little bit longer, but doesn't mean it's not possible.
Stacia Garr:
Wonderful. Lisa, thank you. This has been as engaging as we hoped even more so. And I think your thoughts on how we take these somewhat seemingly nebulous concepts and make them concrete has been incredibly valuable. So, thank you!

Lisa Kay Solomon:
Thank you. So fun. I mean, yeah, lots of learning ahead.

Chris Pirie:
So much food for thought. Thank you—thanks, Lisa.

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the red thread research podcast today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday. It's one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial HR and planning system for a changing world. Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information, and access exclusive content, at www.workday.com/skills.

Global enterprises rely on its collaborative online learning platform to build high-value capabilities that result in real impact, with its customers working to deliver powerful, engaging learning that activates deep skill development, from leadership to design thinking and digital transformation, as well as driving measurable business outcomes.

TRANSCRIPT

Four key quotes:

“By everyone knowing our purpose statement, it creates a golden thread—so no matter where you are in the world, what culture you have, whether you're a new employee or a tenured employee, what service line you're in and what work you do you come to work to do every day, we are all connected by the fact that we are all building a better working world.”

“Purpose alone is not a magic bullet and it never belongs in a conversation by itself; purpose + vision + long-term value, when you look at that equation, that is the power equation.”

“If you want to be an organization that claims to be purpose- and vision-led, you need to be led by leaders who themselves are purpose- and vision-led, which means developing a platform and program around personal purpose and vision.”

“We view the role of L&D as having a role in helping people become better, right? Better performers, better colleagues, better leaders, better people, and helping people discover and activate their purpose and vision almost immediately makes them better in all of those categories. And of course, many complementary ways outside of L&D to also activate purpose. But you know, your question is about how the role that L&D teams play in bringing purpose and vision, it's helping people become better people.”

Chris Pirie:

You're listening to Learning Is The New Working, a podcast by the Learning Futures Group about the future of Workplace Learning and the people helping define it.

This is an episode in our ’Is Purpose Working?’ season—a collaboration with Dani and Stacia from RedThread Research. This episode is sponsored by NovoEd: global enterprises rely on NovoEd's collaborative, cohort-based learning platform to deliver high-value programs with real business impact. With NovoEd, you deliver powerful and engaging learning that activates deep skill development and drugs and measurable business outcomes.

On March the 11th, at 10:00 am Pacific time, NovoEd is hosting a live webinar where you can join RedThread Research founder Stacia Garr, Dani Johnson and myself to discuss what we've learned in our season exploring the implications for learning and talent management of purpose aligned organizations.

We can't wait to meet you and to get your questions and observations and experiences on the topic of purpose alignment, as well as share our own reflections and research. We're really looking forward to it; to register for your seat, submit questions and access lots of bonus material around all these episodes, including transcripts, please go to www.NovoEd.com/purpose.

“Purpose alone is not a magic bullet, and it never belongs in the conversation by itself. Purpose + vision + long term value—when you look at that equation, that is the power equation. That's the one that if you really want to make a difference in the world for all of your stakeholders, that's the equation that's necessary when you think about high strategy.”

Chris Pirie:
In this episode, Stacia and I interviewed Tal Goldhamer and Jeff Steir. They’re both in the professional services firm, EY. Jeff has led the ‘purpose plus vision’ practice for EY Americas since 2014, where he and his team help organizations and their leaders articulate what they stand for and implement purpose at scale. Tal is the chief learning officer for EY's America's division of over 80,000 individuals across 30 countries.

As you will hear, Jeff and Tal work really closely together in a unique partnership that revolves around the power of purpose. Their work forms a sort of virtuous circle that helps both customers and employees understand their personal and organizational purpose and where the insights gained from the customer-facing work that Jeff does informs employee facing programs that Tal runs and which in turn are made available to those customers to help them define their own and build a better working world.

Tal Goldhamer:
Hi, it's Tal Goldhamer; I’m the chief learning officer at EY for the Americas practice.

Jeff Stier:
And this is Jeff Stier: my job title is the lead for the ‘purpose and realize’ solution within people advisory services at EY.

Chris Pirie:
Well guys, welcome to Learning Is The New Working and thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights with our audience today. Today, I'm joined by Stacia, and we're going to talk to you about purpose driven organizations, and I know we're going to have a really interesting conversation, so welcome to the podcast.

Tal Goldhamer:
Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Stacia. You know, one of the things that I'll share a little bit of why I'm so excited about this; I wake up every day inspired to make things better for others so that they can thrive and in turn, make things better for others. And we've been on a purpose-envisioned journey for a few years, and we've learned a lot and we're excited to share all of what we've learned with your listeners, so thanks for having us.

Chris Pirie:
Could you start by telling us what part of the world you live in and work in and why?

Tal Goldhamer:
Well, because of the pandemic, it's a trickier question, but I was born and raised in New York City, technically work in New York City, although I’m right now physically in Denver, Colorado—I made a pandemic getaway and escaped with my family out here. So it's a two-pronged answer; my heart is in New York City, but my heart is finding a home in Denver, Colorado.

Stacia Garr:
Those mountains will do it to ya!

Tal Goldhamer:
The mountains and the skiing, so yeah.

Jeff Stier:
So I was born in Connecticut, but spent the last 26 years in New York City, raised a family in the city; right now, sheltering in place in the Northern Catskills, in a town that I love to say the name called Cornwallville, lots of farmers. It is 12 miles from a ski mountain, so we get a lot of skiing up here as well. And you asked the question why I never thought I was going to raise a family in New York City—I grew up in the country—but my wife is from Queens, New York and she is an only child and her mother lived in Queens, so she tricked me to moving from Boston to New York city so that we can be close to her mom. And it was a great decision and we've been very happy raising our family there.

Chris Pirie:
Can each of you tell me what your job title is and sort of briefly describe the scope of your responsibilities?

Tal Goldhamer:
So our team works every day to develop programs where people are so inspired by what they're learning and they're experiencing that they feel compelled to pass it on to others. And as the chief learning officer for EY in the Americas, we try to create that world for over 80,000 people in about 30 different countries.

Jeff Stier:
I look over a practice called ‘purpose vision and long-term value realized;’ we help organizations transform around those three foundational elements that I call high strategy. When an organization is looking to create what they stand for, what they believe in, and then use that as filters in decisions for how they run their companies, we help them create high strategies around purpose, vision, and long-term value. We've been doing that for about eight years, both internally with EY and externally with clients.

Stacia Garr:
I love that focus on long-term value. One of the things that we've seen here with the podcast is how a potential impediment to purpose is short-term thinking—you know, not knowing when you're going to get the return on purpose. And so I love that you are combining those two concepts and kind of helping people think about that longer term in what you're ultimately trying to become.

Jeff Stier:
About three years ago, we had an ‘aha’ moment—that purpose was one element of high strategy, but vision looking to the future was another. And of course, when you look to the future, what you want to become, and the impact you want to have on the world, those things require some measurement that so you know, you're progressing on that journey. And so long-term value, purpose envision where the natural mix is in the equation for us.

Chris Pirie:
I think what else is really great about having both of you in this conversation is both the internal perspective and responsibilities that you have, Tal, and the insights that you bring into the dialogue, Jeff. For anybody who's not familiar, and that can't be many people, but it's good to just cover our bases, can one of you introduce the EY business and business model?

Jeff Stier:
About nine years ago, we had a new CEO take office and he looked to the future and realized that the consulting business was something that was going to grow significantly. As part of EY, we had primarily been known as a tax and audit organization, and we were called Ernst & Young at the time, with a tagline of ‘quality in everything we do’—very inward-focused.

And he had the vision to say, what got us here won't get us there. And so as part of our own transformation and the legacy he wanted to leave, we changed our name formally from Ernst & Young to EY, that tagline ‘quality in everything we do’ to a purpose statement of ‘building a better working world,’ and we began to transform ourselves around that high strategy.

As we began doing that, a lot of our clients had interest in purpose as well. The leaders at Davos were starting to talk about that. And so we started getting requests in the strategy practice where I sat at the time saying, can you help us take the lessons you've learned—positive and negative—and transform ourselves?

And so that's the journey we've been on. And, and now that's the business model, at least Tal and I work on together, both through the internal and the external client-facing side.

Chris Pirie:
What's the talent landscape look like at EY?

Tal Goldhamer:
We hire tens of thousands of people each year as both we, as we continue to grow and as we expand our portfolio of services. And when we look at the overall demographic of our people, you look across the 300,000 people we have globally, or the 80,000 people we have in the Americas, it may be surprising to you or maybe not but the average age is in the late twenties—it’s around 28 years old.

And so as an average workforce age, that probably skews a bit younger than many other companies; perhaps it's because the number of people we hired directly off college campuses each year, among other things. And of course we have people that are younger and people that are older than that, so everything we design, everything we do for our people as part of the talent organization is incredibly focused on the diverse workforce, whether it's the age, ethnicity, backgrounds, gender, and so on.

Chris Pirie:
We've alluded to this a little bit, but it'd be good to know where you each fit in the sort of organizational model and how you collaborate and in what context you come together and work together.

Tal Goldhamer:
Our team is part of the EY Americas talent organization. So we have the pleasure of being part of our L&D team or learning team. And so we support all of our professionals, both our internal facing professionals and all of our external facing client-serving professionals.

Jeff Stier:
And I sit within the Americas consulting practice. There are different practices, as you've heard Tal allude to, and in the role that we play, we actually work across all of the practices, all of the service lines, because every organization, no matter whether you want tax, audit, or consulting, has a vision for the future, whether it's articulated or not. And many of the organizations, I would say about 30% that we're working with right now, also want to become purpose-driven. So we cross service lines, break down silos and work across the Americas.

Stacia Garr:
I know you mentioned, Jeff, that a few years or a number of years ago now changed its tagline, but I'm curious about purpose specifically, and if EY has an explicit purpose statement, and if so, what it is?

Jeff Stier:
We do have an explicit purpose statement, and it is ‘building a better working world.’ But the reality is, and this is true with most organizations, purpose comes from your past purpose is why you exist, it's the DNA of your organization. And the fact is for 150 years, EY has always served the capital markets or Ernst & Young before it became the why and helping to use the capital markets to build a better working world.

So it was unstated, but it was there. And as part of our exploration to become a purpose-driven organization, we excavated, if you will, that magic from our past and brought it forward to modern future, thus building a better working world, which is a phrase and a feeling and a belief that 300,000 of our people across the world now all know and can all articulate.

Stacia Garr:
So the tagline is the purpose statement.

Jeff Stier:
Well, I’d never call, but I'd never call a purpose statement a tagline, but the moniker with which we've come now is our purpose statement; the purpose statement has replaced the traditional tagline.

Stacia Garr:
Can you talk to us a little bit more about this focus on purpose? I know you just, you kind of went back into the past and pulled some of that forward into our purview, but what's the history behind it? What was the rational kind of argument for a greater focus on purpose?

Jeff Stier:
We've always been a purposeful organization, although without the clear purpose statement different people articulated our purpose in different ways. In different words, you could ask 300,000 people and you might've gotten a different answer—all rooted in the same concept, but not clearly articulated.

And that's the thing: purpose is that thing that gives us a feeling of great fulfillment and provides us with meaning and keeps everybody in the organization aligned and focused on what that is. So when you create a consistent vocabulary for all of our professionals, in this case a clear declaration of 'building a better working world,’ you know, every one of our professionals, regardless of where they live in the world. And regardless of what part of the business they're in everyone's using that consistent phrase with each other, with our clients and in our communities. And there's great power in having that crystal clear articulation and a set of words, that's common and it's meaningful to all of our people, our clients and communities.

Tal Goldhamer:
Can I add something there? By everyone knowing our purpose statement, it creates a golden thread–so no matter where you are in the world, what culture you have, whether you're a new employee or a tenured employee, what service line you're in and what work you do you come to work to do every day, we are all connected by the fact that we are all building a better working world.So you could go into a dining room in Japan, or in Brazil, or in Michigan, and begin to have a conversation, because that golden thread, the glue that connects us all, there's one thing we can say that does that is that we work at a company called EY that believes in building a better working world. And that is very powerful.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things I was most excited about when we were first talking about having you all on the podcast is that you all have been doing this for a while, but not necessarily as long as some of our other podcast folks, who have been doing this, like literally since the 1800s. And so what I want to know a bit more about is kind of twofold. One is, is this overall purpose journey, and then specifically something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, which is the Business Round Table statement in the fall of 2019 and how that's impacted your journey.

Jeff Stier:
I suspect that if you went back and asked the original founders, Mr. Ernst, Mr. Winnie, Mr. Young, whether they form their accounting company with a purpose and a vision of mine, the answer would be yes, of course they did—almost every new organization, every startup is founded in that manner.

And the fact that we have rediscovered and re articulated it is important now, particularly at this time in the evolution of business. I would say that if you look at a purpose maturity model with zero if you're just starting out in a hundred percent, if it's fully activated, the journey, it never ends. So I would always question if anyone claims that they're at a hundred percent and for EY, perhaps we're at 75%, we've realized that articulation is the start, but activation really is what matters. I call it the ‘say-do gap’. You could say the words, but if you're not doing it, there's know authenticity where we are truly being authentic and drinking our own champagne, when we talk about it, when we bring it to our clients.

The BRT statement, it was really nice to see; it was very natural for our current chairman to sign it along with about 200 other CEOs. And it validated for us that we were no longer, at least when it comes to big organizations, really big organizations, on the journey alone. And that there was really now a commitment to change the way people looked at, and accounted for, purpose.

In our journey, there were a couple of recent ‘aha’ moments that we realized that are very, very important. I alluded to one earlier that purpose alone is not a magic bullet and it never belongs in a conversation by itself; purpose + vision + long-term value, when you look at that equation, that is the power equation. That's the one that if you really want to make a difference in the world for all of your stakeholders, that's the equation that's necessary when you think about high strategy.

The second thing that we've noticed in our journey, the ‘aha’ moment is that if you want to be an organization that claims to be purpose- and vision-led, you need to be led by leaders who themselves are purpose- and vision-led, which means developing a platform and program around personal purpose and vision. And I really believe that Tal and EY are leading innovation globally around this, both how it fits in or what we call is nested organizational purpose envision, how you do it using digital, virtual technology at scale, and in embedding it into the DNA of how we build and train leaders and all of our people.

Stacia Garr:
I love that you mentioned that part, because we've spent a lot of time talking about the importance of connecting individual purpose to the broader organization. But I think you had mentioned this idea of kind of nesting, and that there's an intermediary, there's the team and the nests that you're in, if you will. And that's so important to connect the purpose as well.

Jeff Stier:
We do. Just on that point, we actually have data through our own internal surveys that show that pre some of the creation of nested purposes of our service lines and divisions, at some point the enthusiasm about being a purpose-led organization wore off and there wasn't as much incitement and or enthusiasm.

As soon as we began to create this nested idea, you felt that you belong to a unique tribe within the organization, and you could really connect your everyday work to building a better working world. How did someone in the customer practice come to work every day and do customer things—how were they building a better working world? That connection was really hard to make, but when you create a nested purpose at the functional level, and then more than that, understand your personal purpose and can align that with the daily work that you do in support of building a better working world, you really get employee engagement—you get employee productivity, and it drives innovation because now suddenly you could see how, no matter what role you have, even if it's at a junior level, the things you're doing are helping to build a better working world.

Stacia Garr:
I love how you're, you're basically sharing pretty practical advice on how to make this come alive in a culture and to come alive for individuals. Can you talk to us a little bit more about how you do that and kind of in the operational running of your business?

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah, it's a great question. It comes down to a little bit of what you were just talking about, Stacia, that’s really, the way we look at is proximity, proximity to the individual, you know, at the macro-organizational level our purpose is building a better working world. And we know that discovering and activating each person's personal purpose and personal vision is also important, but there's something in the middle there, right? It's how do you get closer proximity to the individual in the work that they're doing? And so what we were just talking about—of having nested purposes—many of our businesses and practices have articulated their own nested purpose, and that helps our people connect from their personal purpose to the nested purpose, and that's all in service to the overall purpose of building a better working world. Jeff had mentioned this golden thread idea, and there's also a really nice golden thread when you can articulate your personal purpose and personal vision, because we talked about personal vision is we think it's a really important dimension here, connecting that to a nested purpose of what your team, your broader team is doing, and overall connecting that to building a better working world.

So we think that's really important. I’ll just mention a couple of other things, which is we've had a lot of amazing support from some of our more senior, most senior executives, many of whom have discovered and articulated their own personal purpose and vision. And they've been using it in their communications and in their decision-making and talking about the fact that they've been using their personal purpose and their vision in their decision-making. And as we know, people's social model, right? Those around them and their leaders, so there's this natural movement that we see beginning.

And last thing I'll mention is we, a few years ago, we reimagined and challenged ourselves around what the attributes are of the best leaders. Many organizations have leadership models, so we took a step back. Our ours was good and it was fine a number of years ago, but less fit for purpose these days; organizational culture and workforces have changed.

And we said, we need to reevaluate. Imagine our leadership model and we put purpose and vision at the core. And we did that because we wanted it to serve as a reminder to everyone that it all starts with your personal purpose envisioned, because how do you lead others if you don't know how to lead yourself first?

And we use this in lots of ways, we use it from career conversations to feedback and even to promotion evaluations. So these are just a few examples how we're using our purpose operationally, influencing how we work and how we operate.

Stacia Garr:
I know that you've both mentioned a couple of times the purpose and how it's a little bit different than vision. And so I'm wondering, it seems like a good opportunity to kind of dive into that. So can you tell us a little bit about how you will see those things differently and related?

Jeff Stier:
Purpose? Whether it's personal or organizational, purpose is about what gives you great fulfillment. It's what gives you great meaning it's that, you know, that feeling that you get when you come home after a very difficult day and you still feel good: you might have had even a tough day, tough conversations or bad news or whatever it might be, but you still feel a feeling of fulfilment.

And the question is why do you feel that fulfilment? Well, probably because the work that you had done was very much aligned to your purpose, or as part of your organization, you accomplish something for your customers, your clients, or for the world. And that's rooted in your past—purpose is generally rooted in your past. It's based on origin stories.

Now by contrast, vision is generally a forward and future looking thing. It's a description of the impact that you as an organization or you as an individual want to have in the world. And that impact in that world is different for everybody. For some people, it's the immediate circle around them. For other people it's a bit of a wider circle and you know, yet for other people, it's the entire world, right? I mean, we can all think about people who we consider visionaries in the world and they truly are impacting the world. But you don't have to be a visionary to have a vision: you just have to have a view and articulation of the impact that you as an organization or you as an individual want to have in the world.

Tal Goldhamer:
For years, this idea of fulfilment has been questioned and what makes up fulfilment. And we think that personal purpose and personal vision and organizational purpose are part of what gives daily meaning to the work that you do daily. So in many ways, personal purpose is about daily meaning and daily fulfilment while I'm sorry, purpose is about daily, meaning daily fulfilment, and vision is about daily inspiration, inspiration about what that we have a hopeful or optimistic future.

And when you understand that you can wield these two tools, right, in the proper way to create the cultural mindsets, to create the strategies. But they're two very different tools when wielded.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I've never seen it described in that sort of temporal forward-looking backward looking where, but I really get it. There was another sort of definition question that it might make sense based on something you said, Jeff, something like purpose alone doesn't get you where you need to be. There's long term value and business operations. I can't remember. Could you repeat that piece for me and just maybe unpack it a little bit?

Jeff Stier:
So what I'm about to say might be a little heretical coming from a guy who built his career at EY by being the purpose guy, but here's what we now have come to believe. And I alluded to it earlier. The future is inevitable tomorrow. You and I, all of us will wake up personally, and we will be there tomorrow and tomorrow. Every organization has another day in the organization. It's unavoidable. It's inevitable planning for the future if you want to be successful is required, right?

Any CEO who's ever hired by the board, I guarantee you, although I've never been in any of those conversations has been asked, where can you take us? What can we do to get there? Purpose is completely optional, right? You can be a very successful person or organization if you plan for your future effectively and build the roadmap to get there. And we all do that in our lives, whether we know it or not. If in high school, you decide, you want to go to medical school, you know, you have to study certain topics, you have to get certain grades. You have to go to certain schools and you build a plan to get there. It's the same thing with your personal life now, each of you, all of us, and also as a business. But purpose is optional.

We happen to believe that organizations that will be the most successful over the long-term build both a purpose and a vision strategy—a future strategy because you have to, and a current strategy around purpose that is really important in today's age. Why? Because given the way Millennials and Gen Z value purpose, if you want to attract and retain those employees, you really better have a purpose strategy.

Given the fact, and I know we may talk about this later, but we're in the middle of a pandemic where the meaning of work and the meaning of life and the meaning of relationships has completely changed. People are looking for more meaning in their lives; people are looking for purpose in their lives today in a vision for the future, you better be an organization in our opinion, that has both—and that the best organizations balance being purposeful/cause-related/meaningful with having an optimistic view of where they're headed and what they want to accomplish.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things that we've talked about a bit with the research is how with these changing workforce dynamics and particularly some of the things you mentioned around the social justice movements and others, but also around things like gig work, where you can work any time, any place.

The question becomes what is the value of an organization to an individual? By joining an organization and putting on some level of the constraints that you have, particularly with a big organization, what do I get? And I feel like my answer, at least, to that question is, if it's a purpose-driven organization, you become a part of something that is much bigger than yourself that enables you to accomplish your kind of same purpose-driven approach, your personal purpose, but at scale. And to me, that seems to be one of the big reasons, one of the most compelling reasons to join a high quality organization.

Jeff Stier:
I think that's true, Stacia, if the company is doing their purpose gig, as opposed to just saying it. Because purpose is so popular today. Tal and I have coined a phrase, there's a lot of purpose malpractice that's going on. And purpose malpractice is when you'll attract an employee to go for the reasons that you just described. But when you get there, it's just not true, right? The covenant doesn't exist between the company and the person to deliver on the promise. What's the promise? You’re going to work hard for me as an organization, and I'm going to care about you, and I'm going to do things that demonstrate I care about you and how this is different from a gig networker, a gig worker typically they'll do the job for the organization, you’ll get paid and you'll move on. You know, companies with employees have a real opportunity—and this is one of the things that Tal’s team does in learning and development—is beyond my agenda. It's helped me learn things that I care about that are advancing my personal purpose, my personal vision, right? A work with clients who align with building a better working world. But the things I believe in helped me get in on projects that align that.

So I believe that we believe that the covenant between the company, when that exists and you join a purposeful company and they do for you what they promise and you do for them, what they promise, then you can really begin to change.

Stacia Garr:
Let's turn a little bit to the relationship between you two, and how you all collaborate and what opportunities are really created by aligning Tal, your internal perspective and mission with the customer-facing mission of Jeff.

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really great and unique collaboration. We've built programs, whether it's to help with organizational purpose envision that we use internally for the various businesses within EY, and we've built personal purpose and vision discovery programs that we offer to all of our people.

And the key here is that with any programs, what often makes programs stronger is continual feedback. And the more feedback we get the stronger a program gets, and we've been running the programs internally for a few years. And then collaborating with Jeff, we began offering the same programs to our clients and with each offering of the program, whether it's internally or externally, we get more feedback and makes the programs that much better and that much stronger. We have the benefit of running the programs with thousands of people within EY which provides us with great insights on what works and what could be better than when we iterate the program, and we've done that many times and then offered it to clients and get even more diversity and more range of thinking around what works and what works well and what could be better.

And so we have the EY culture that informs the design, and then we have now the benefit of running the programs in many other organizational cultures and with each offering, we strengthen the program and continue to strengthen the programs. We learn something every time. So it's Jeff, I will share here, but it's fantastic.

Jeff Stier:
I agree. It's been an amazing personal journey for me and getting to both work with Tal and make an impact both ways. It's not usual that you can make the impact inside and out in that way, and both of us do that.

The other cool thing is this creates a huge competitive advantage for us and talking with clients. Why? Because when we're in pitches, there are very few organizations that are pitching or responding to purpose and vision and long-term value work that can actually say authentically and credibly, we're doing it ourselves, right? And we're going to be able to help you because we've stepped in mud before you, we've also done other things great before you, and we can help you both avoid those missteps, and accelerate the things where we know it works.

And so that is a real competitive advantage that this collaboration has been able to bring to our pitches and to our conversations with potential clients.

Chris Pirie:
Do you invite your customers to come in and experience your programs—do you go that far?

Tal Goldhamer:
We generally don't intermingle sort of participants meaning that when we offer for our people, we typically offer them as cohorts for our people. But the cool thing is we have an infrastructure in place, so when we're working with clients on, on projects and they have an interest in some of our programs, we're able to easily turn on and, and run programs for our clients. So we typically run them as separate cohorts. But the cool thing is it's essentially the same program.

Stacia Garr:
You had mentioned a few minutes ago, Jeff, that, one of the benefits is that you all can help folks understand what mud is not to step in and from some of the lessons learned that you all have had. So I'm wondering if you can share with us what are some of the challenges or some of the toughest problems facing organizations in the immediate future as they think about this? Or what are some of the things that you've learned along the way?

Jeff Stier:
Yes. So the things that I see personally, given the practice that we lead and the work that Tal and I are doing together, and particularly at this moment in time, as you ask, it's about wellbeing, it's about morale and it's about mindset and mental health.

It's a really, really tough time when many of the things that people thought were important to them and the perks are stripped away. So for example, for organizations like ours and others, where you have people who traveled a great deal and were on client sites, think about what you get from that. Well, when you travel and you stay in hotels, you get frequent flyer miles, and you get frequent hotel miles; when you travel and on your road, your company's paying for your food. When you travel and you're on the road, there's usually a group of people who you can hang out with and bond with, and it's usually a lot of fun. And if you are moving from engagement to engagement or client to client, you might also be paid to explore and experience new cities.

That no longer exists. And so it's stripped back to, I'm sitting in my apartment or my home. I'm on virtual calls all day. I'm being asked to perform in a world where I've never been taught to perform this way before, by having relationships. What am I doing this for? And so we're seeing both within and outside of EY, a real challenge to morale and motivation. And so the reason Tal and I are called in on this is because, if the organization doubled down on their vision for the future.

The natural state of human beings is to hope for a better future. And when we are in tough times, we always hope for a better future. The best CEOs of these times today are balancing being pragmatic about making money and doing things currently with optimism for the future. People need that as well. So doubling down on the purpose of your enterprise or your function, and then helping people understand their own personal purpose and vision, and then maybe having your leadership double down too, getting on your people's agenda, to help them understand that being within the organization, we can help you with your morale because we're going to move your personal agenda forward. Those are the biggest challenges facing us today.

And that's why the work that Tal and I are doing both together and separately is really, really called on more and more.

Stacia Garr:
It's interesting, because I was at Deloitte, I'm still in one of these social networks, Fishbowl. I don't know if you guys are, you know, I'm sure you do. And it's so true because I've been out of it long enough that I hadn't really thought about, you know, all the kinds of consulting perks and benefits and, and just the litany of people who are like, I'm not on the road anymore, I’m not seeing people! It’s so true and it's widespread across the industry. I really like how you're thinking about reframing it.

Tal Goldhamer:
And every organization that has a B2B Salesforce, right, is in the same boat, every single one and it's sector agnostic. So this is affecting a hundred percent of clients across a hundred percent of the sectors.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think about the role of L&D in the shift to a purpose focus? We talked about some very specific programs that you land, but how important is the role of L&D in a purpose-aligned organization?

Tal Goldhamer:
L&D could be a really great Trojan horse in serving up many different types of great development programs. From my discussions and travels with other CLOs, generally speaking, most organizations and the people in those organizations are well, they're learning organizations and learning people: people like to learn. That's a human thing, right? In general, people like to learn new things and explore new things and realize new things and find insights. So there is for the most part built in demand at organizations for L&D to come to the table with great content and great programs and purpose-envisioned discovery are interesting because they're not really learning in a traditional sense, we're not teaching people knowledge. I mean, there's a little bit of learning that's happening, but this is about self discovery; this is a more of a working workshop or working session. Cause we're not training people.

We view the role of L&D as having a role in helping people become better, right? Better performers, better colleagues, better leaders, better people, and helping people discover and activate their purpose and vision almost immediately makes them better in all of those categories. And of course, many complementary ways outside of L & D to also activate purpose. But you know, your question is about how the role that L&D teams play in bringing purpose and vision, it's helping people become better people.

Chris Pirie:
Tell us something about those programs and maybe some of the human impact?

Tal Goldhamer:
Sure—I mean, it's, it's one of the things that we actually love talking about, you know, it's the understanding that humans are the center of a purpose-driven organization. And if we unlock the power of personal purpose and personal vision within each of our people, it naturally supports and connects to an organization's purpose. In our case, you know, building a better working world.

Many people spend good chunks of their life, doing what we call ‘chasing purpose’. When we talk to most people at the average age of our professionals are somewhere in the late twenties or early thirties. And so they've grown up and they've come to the workforce, knowing that purpose is important in some way, but in having conversations with them they know it's important, but they don't know how they're going to go and find their purpose: you know, it's almost like they're going to stumble upon it in some way or come across it and something's going to click for them, and suddenly their work and their life is going to have a different meaning.

And then to tie it all together, you know, we talked about vision. Most of them probably haven't really thought about vision. You mentioned some, even the Red Cross, there's certainly a vision there that attracts people based on the impact that it wants to have. So we describe it as people are chasing purpose: we view it as our role as helping people be more efficient about it. We've developed the programs that help people articulate their personal purpose, their personal vision, and then figure out a way to actually activate it, put it into use and tie it into whether it's the nested purpose of the organization or the macro purpose, the overall purpose of an organization, the vision of the organization and a vision for their life, instead of people literally jumping around and hoping one day they'll stumble upon it; we're making it more efficient for them.

You asked about, you know, human impact and, and stories around people. I mean, the cool thing about the role and the work that Jeff and I are doing together is that we, if, if we do it well, we think we do it well. If we do it well, people are really excited because they've learned something about themselves that they otherwise didn't know.

In my case, I finally articulated my personal purpose and vision in my early to mid-forties. All right. Well, it would have been much more efficient for me to know that when I entered the workforce, and I would have been able to align more of the work and choose projects and do things. Sometimes you don't have a choice of what you're going to work on, but to the extent that you do have a choice, or you have the ability to influence it, it's much cooler to know that early on.

And so, as I mentioned, one of the cool things that Jeff and I have the opportunity to be the recipients of, is that as people go through these programs they love to come back to us and to our teams and share what they've come up with and how it's impacted their lives. So with your permission I'll share one or two stories, which you know, just recent stories.

So, the story of a woman that we heard recently of probably 80% of her job was unfulfilling, you know, 20% of her job. She really liked 80%. She didn't like so by all accounts, that's probably not a great ratio in terms of how you're going to spend a large part of your waking hours for most people. And so, you know, she went through the program, articulated her purpose, articulated her vision, and suddenly had a language and vocabulary that she was able to then use as a lens to look at the work she was doing, and then realized that the 20% is what really fulfilled her.

She realized why a filter, because the vocabulary gave her language to be able to use as a lens, and then sat down with her team leader and said, look, you know, here's the stuff that I really love about my job. I feel like I do it well. I feel like it gives me great fulfilment: I want to do more of it. And here's the stuff that I like less.

And she didn't say, I'm not going to do 80%, but she just said, here's the stuff that I really enjoy, and here's the stuff that really drives me. And here's the stuff that really doesn't drive me. Well, it turns out the team leader said, well, you know, it's funny that you should be bringing this up, because I've been thinking about expanding this part of our team, and it really aligns with what you're describing is your purpose, your vision, the impact that you want to have, would you like to take on more of this kind of work?

Of course the answer was yes! So suddenly, she reported that 80% of her job was incredibly fulfilling, incredibly meaningful to her, incredibly impactful for her and impactful for her team. IT totally aligned. And 20% was still stuff she wasn't really thrilled with, but it went from being 80% to just 20%. That’s an incredible story.

I'll give you one other one, And this is really about people feeling empowered. When you go through the process of discovering your personal purpose and vision, we've talked about, it gives you a vocabulary. And that vocabulary gives you a little bit of empowerment and confidence to share with others. And so we just recently heard a story of another team leader who went through the process, was inspired by it. Didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with it—not everyone has a clear view of how to put into use, but he sat down with his team and said, Hey, I want to share with you, we know a lot about each other, cause we worked together for a few years, but here's what really drives me. Here's what really motivates me.

And instantly, what happens when people share their purpose, even if they don't describe that it's their purpose or their vision, but when you begin to share it, its authenticity shines through in the conversation. You have no choice, but because you're being vulnerable, you're being authentic. You're sharing what gives you great personal fulfilment and the impact that you want to have. And the people on his team then went through the program and discovered their vision. And then they sat down and had a meaningful conversation, the most authentic conversation they'd been working together for years, and they came back to us that we now understand each other. We now appreciate each other.

The team leader said, you know what? I know when I have work that has to be delegated out. I know who I'm going to delegate what work to, because it's aligned with their purpose and with their vision. So these are two stories, but the great thing about one of the pleasures that Jeff and I have is being the recipients of being able to hear so many of these types of stories, because that's really what we were interested in is human impact.

Chris Pirie:
We have this whole poets versus quants sub-theme going through our podcasts, Dani, our engineer is not with us today, but I love the fact that this is really about language and giving people the constructs to have conversations around the stuff that's so important to us. It really is, you know, thinking about the future, collaborating effectively with others, telling stories—they’re deeply, deeply human traits. And I think that's why this is all so powerful.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. One of the things that occurs to me as you've been talking is if you think about the ‘I’ and the ‘B’ of that—the inclusion and belonging: if you have people who are like Tal’s story, be able to reform their work or to at least make the meaningful connections with others to understand this is who I am and this is what really drives me. That can only have a positive impact, I would think, on both inclusion and belonging.

Jeff Stier:
It does, Stacia. And this is where part of my personal purpose is to give everyone confidence to reach for their unique, remarkable. On the belonging side of it, and the inclusion part of it, if you understand that, no matter who the person is, they have a unique, remarkable and they have a fundamental right to exist in the world with their unique, remarkable. It almost should be built into the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence: then you understand that. I need to make room for these people to belong. Because frankly, and I remember when I was a kid when I was bullied, because I looked like I didn't belong. I went from a religious school to a secular school and I look like it. And who are you to tell me that, what do you know about who I am inside? Right? Nothing is the answer. This allows you to have that insight and to recognize that everyone has a place, everyone has something to contribute, everyone has a right to belong. And the companies and teams that appreciate and act on that are better off.

Stacia Garr:
I'm going to jump in and channel Dani and her engineering/quant side, because I want to be sure we get to this question–which is, we've been talking about all the amazing, in many ways, quality to have benefits of focus on purpose, but many organizations want to know, you know, what are kind of some of the metrics, what are some of the accountability measures that we might have: like Tal, you mentioned to knew that we've moved the ball forward on purpose, that some of the things we've done have actually worked. So I'd love to understand from, from either of you, how were you thinking about measuring purpose and the impact of it?

Tal Goldhamer:
People go through a program and discover their personal purpose and personal vision. We know when they've done that, and we can see on a timeline the before and after. And as you can imagine, as a professional services firm, we have lots of data; we love data and we analyse data—we’re analytics, or many of us are.

And so we can look at things like performance reviews, how their leaders view them, and people who have gone through and discovered their purpose and vision before they've done it. And after we have questions in our people survey, we do a periodic people survey and a question that we've asked is, do your leaders inspire you? And we can see whether or not people have changed their answer, or the trends in answers before and after somebody's gone through a personal purpose and personal vision discovery. Jeff, maybe you can jump in with some of the things that you've been working on.

Jeff Stier:
So for example, and Stacia, you talked about long-term value and you identified that earlier. In the EPIC report—and this is a global report that was contributed to about 40 organizations that manage assets of over $70 trillion—its goal was to create financial, quantitative metrics assigned to the creation of long-term value, of which purpose was one of them.

So let's talk about two of the drivers. One is employees. An employee is a driver of long-term value. And if you think about going back to the idea of fulfilment, when you understand your personal purpose and personal vision, and you feel like you're working for an organization, someone bigger than you, you are more engaged: and when you are more engaged, you are more productive, and when you're more and more productive, you lower the cost of labor. And when you lower the cost of labor, it drops directly to the bottom line, and globally, it's been agreed by these 40 organizations, and now everyone else who is sort of accepted at, by lowering the cost of labor and if you back it up, and if you work all the way back, you can get to organizational personal purpose as ingredients in helping that happen. There's a direct tie.

When you look at another driver, which is on the customer side of it, people who believe in what you believe in as an organization—customers, right—are more likely to purchase your products. There's also statistics that show that they're more likely to be loyal to you. And there's a whole bunch of statistics about what loyalty will bring to you: so for example, it lowers the cost of acquiring a customer, because you don't have to spend as much money with a loyal customer, very loyal customers, customers have the heart, emotional loyalty. And so there are clearly direct benefits when you believe in whether it's the case of an organization or the organization's leader and what they stand for, and you remain loyal to higher margins, lower cost of acquisition, higher retention, all drops directly to the bottom line.

I could go on about that in each one of the five categories that have been studied by Epic, there's a tie to purpose, long-term value, which means including vision, and a direct benefit to the bottom line.

Stacia Garr:
Did you all do any of this analysis internally? Have you been able to kind of show and see the impact of your journey?

Tal Goldhamer:
We have, and I would call it a journey, so we are doing it. And we're starting to see: we launched the program at scale about a year and a half to two years ago, so it's not something that flips and you start seeing the trends immediately; you need time. So we are starting to go through it, and we're starting to see things like the impact to leadership skills in performance reviews. We're starting to see the impact to retention. Cause again, as you discover purpose and vision, and you're able to like the stories I shared or one of the stories I shared, you're able to to adjust the work that you're doing. And sometimes it's just a matter of looking at your work differently and realizing why you enjoy your work and realizing what you'd be giving up if you were to change.

So we're starting to see the impact of retention and we're continuing to work on some of the other metrics, but we're, the trends are showing that they actually are having the impact we think it should have.

Chris Pirie:
We ask everybody who comes on the podcast this question; let me pick on Jeff first!

The question we ask is, why do you do the work that you do? Was there somebody or something that inspired you to focus your professional life on this topic?

Jeff Stier:
I started the story with you when I was in grade school, and I came to a school where I was different and my English class—I loved English—I read a book called Grendel, Grendel's of character in Beowulf, the epic poem. I don't know if you remember, but Grendel was a monster on the inside, but a human on the outside, but a human on the insight. And I, I love the story about Grenville because Grendel lived in the time of the Vikings and Grendel lived alone with his or her mother and only wanted to be human. And when he or she heard the Vikings celebrating would come and knock on the Mead Hall door because they wanted to celebrate and be with other humans, because it was human on the inside. And of course, when the Vikings opened the door, all they saw was this monster on the outside and would chase Grendel away.

And the thing that I appreciated was I felt like Grendel. I felt like I joined the school and they didn't look at the insight. And the thing I appreciated about Grendel was Grendel was tenacious; chased away always came back, knocked on the door again and again and again, and never gave up. And so my personal purpose is about being tenacious—that when people say you can't do something, I get the spark inside of me that says you can do it, and that to recognize, and I shared this before that everyone has unique, remarkable. You just have to look for it and you can't tell from the outside.

So that is my spark. And frankly, I did not discover that until I came to EY and stumbled into this role net tall and then began building the personal purpose program that what I do every day is to help people have confidence that they are unique—that don't worry about what people say, what they don't know, who you are. Let's discover who you are, look into, who you are, and then you can become really remarkable and make remarkable contributions to your team or organization.

So I love the work that I do everyday. It's very personal to me, because it goes way back in my story as a development of a human being.

Chris Pirie:
Great, just thank you Jeff for sharing. Thank you, Tal?

Jeff Stier:
I look back and I would say I didn't pick the role in the job and the things that I'm doing. I think, I feel like it picked me and you know, like Jeff you know, I shared my purpose earlier, which is to make things better for others so that they can thrive and in turn, make things better for others. No matter what I was doing throughout my career, I didn't have those words, but no matter what I was doing throughout my career, I felt great when I was making things better for others—whatever it was, whether it was in my personal life, my work life, I was feeling great when I felt like I was contributing to the world and get meaning from it. When I was helping make things better for others and they were thriving and they in turn can make things better for others.

And what you hear in that, hopefully, is a bit of a ripple type of effect. I like doing things at scale, doing things that will impact lots of people. I feel great when I'm having a one-on-one conversation, I'm making them feel better; I feel incredible when I do things that I know will have a ripple effect and help many, many people, because I love scale, and I love big impact and making things better.

And so when this role came about and this opportunity to be in this role, there wasn't a moment of hesitation. Why? Because I knew in the role that I had that I would be able to make things better for others. At the time, I didn't know that I'd be doing it through purpose and vision; I thought I'd be doing it through lots of other L&D initiatives and programs, which I still do. The purpose and vision is just a part of what I do.

So I feel like it chose me and I wish I didn't know about it, but I wish I would've had my purpose and vision earlier on in my career, because it would have helped me get probably to this path, into this role, that much quicker.

Chris Pirie:
Great! Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for the conversation today—I’m really thrilled that we managed to get you in our season: you bring a really interesting perspective to the conversation. Is there some way where people can tap into your work and find out more about what you do?

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah. I mean, you could certainly find us on LinkedIn so you can look for us on LinkedIn. You can also email us directly. So my email is [email protected] and Jeff, you’re [email protected].

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful, thank you both; this has been inspiring, and I think folks will also be able to say, I can do that, which I think was one of our goals.

Jeff Stier & Tal Goldhamer:
Thank you very much.

Chris Pirie:
We're very grateful to the team at NovoEd for their sponsorship of this season. Global enterprises rely on NovoEd’s collaborative, online learning platform to build high value capabilities that result in real impact. With NovoEd, you deliver powerful, engaging, learning that activates deep skill development and drives measurable business outcomes.

You can access the research that we discuss here and a ton of other great research and insights at www.redthreadresearch.com—and you can subscribe to the podcast, of course, at www.learningisthenewworking.org.