Trend - Learning: we are all Teachers and Students

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue on our wonderful journey into our very recent hot off the press trends report. And today we're talking about learning and the, we discovered this really big insight. That, when we think about learning, we need to imagine that we are so not only students, but teachers as well.

Now the background to this is it feels like these days we're always confronting new and different questions and learning skills, particularly after a year of working from home. And this idea of upskilling has kind of moved from a once in a while. You know, something you might do once a year, once every half year.

And it's really. Transitioned into a continuous activity because [00:01:00] Hey, the world has changed so much. So it is natural that we need to learn a whole bunch of new things. So let's talk about how we can understand our teammates and how we can learn and grow together. How we can be both student and teacher.

Now the report that I'm referring to, it's our emerging trends report. You can get that at bottom-up dot IO. And the fascinating thing that we discovered is that 45% of the people that participated in the survey and in the interviews, I'm talking about over a hundred product experts, gurus. From all around the world, Europe, U S and Australia.

What we discovered is that 45% of them found that learning a new skill from Alice is the hardest thing. When we talk about learning and proving our skills. Now, if you look at the data, it is crazy to see how much this idea of learning a new skill from somebody else is the hardest thing versus [00:02:00] like researching case studies.

No problem. Rob role-play training. Yeah. That's pretty straightforward. Participating in a group reflections and group discussions. That's all easy. It's really, when it come, it becomes. Two people together going deep. And it was really interesting because here's what we discovered. Uh, the whole thing is that organizations have these, these gurus, these individuals have mastered particular part of the business.

I think it's fair to say that. You kind of can feel a little bit held hostage by these guys because they are the guru. And because the knowledge hasn't been captured, everybody's running to that person who is of this source to get the information. And this is highly inefficient with certainly no scalable.

And then it becomes a question of time. It's really fascinating to [00:03:00] see that this practical idea, this practical act of sitting together and learning together person, a training person, B. Is actually the hardest thing. It's way harder than something that I consider to be hard coaching and mentoring. It's way harder than getting a good group discussion.

It is going deep together at the same time in the same place. This came back really strongly. It was confirmed in the surveys and the interviews. It's fascinating to see that learning particularly the sharing and development of deep skills has become so hard and think about it. If your, a modern knowledge worker, chances are at least half, if not more of your day is being, uh, you know, dealing with zoom and Hangouts and, and teams and jumping from meeting to meeting to meeting.

So where heritage attention is so scarce, [00:04:00] we're trying to block out a few hours for ourselves to do our work, uh, and not just being meetings. So I think this is really, uh, at the heart of the context and the challenge that we face in learning. It's just hard to carve out that time and to talk together.

And to now, the reason why that's such a big deal issue is that there's so much to learn. Think about how much the world has changed in just 16, 18 months. Life was all fine. And then COVID happened in 2020 and the world has really dramatically changed. Some might even say accelerated. So this means that there is going to be a ton of new things to learn.

Think about it. Um, how to do multi-channel omni-channel direct to customer, uh, products. That's now not a nice to have it. We can't kind of do it in our own time. It's a constraint that is now mandatory and it has to be done because people can't go to stores or as we can [00:05:00] come out of COVID now in 2021, people kind of like the convenience of omni-channel direct to customer experiences.

So there's going to be a whole new job to do, to even get people back in the stores and to find a reason for shopping in person in a mall. So with all of that happening, uh, in the world of our users, there's no surprise that we need to learn a lot because if that's changed, we have to learn new techniques.

The same thing goes with employees. So on the backend, on the inside of the organization, all the employees are now working remote or hybrid working or working on different roster days. Everything's changed inside and outside of the company. So therefore lots and lots to learn. So the first insight that I have for you around what we can do, what action can we take is we can synchronize this learning time where we actually make it a mandatory [00:06:00] to come together to exchange knowledge, to share deep knowledge.

Tell me how I can do this. Show me how I can do this. And if you don't do that, it's simply it would from our report, it would seem, it is almost impossible to make happen. So this is the first kind of cornerstone to learning. There is you've got to understand that the volume. Of knowledge that we need to acquire now has increased.

You have to realize that time is scarce. So if you're not deliberate about putting that in the agenda, it just simply won't happen. Okay. I got a couple more thoughts to build on this that will help you understand this idea of teachers and students, and the fact that we're both. So naturally you need to make pointing scalable.

You can't have a single point of failure. You can't have just one person that knows or so your idea would be okay, let's go train the trainer. Now, the interesting thing here is training. The trainers means this, that if you step back, we are all teachers. And we are [00:07:00] all students or just, we go into different modes at different times.

This is the only sensible, scalable way to address this need of learning within the organization. You cannot have these choke points where Jane or bill. No, all there is to know about a certain thing. But if you can't talk to them, then you're stuffed. That cannot be the way we work. It's got to be smarter than that.

So the key thing to acknowledge is that we're all, we're all teachers and we're all students. So let me tell you this little story. We did an interview with the head of retail distribution at BCIS sta it's a large bank in Romania. And what they do is they have a process of learning where they actually vote on the topic and they then nominate somebody in the team to teach that topic.

So depending on the day, you might be a student or a teacher, depending on that day, you might be absorbing a new skill from one [00:08:00] of your colleagues, but here's the key thing. You have chosen, voted for participated in the choice of the, if you will, the curriculum. And so therefore you're much more ready to learn and understand.

And what was really interesting is a lot of people didn't see themselves as teachers. But what we learned from this case study is they actually discovered. Although it's a bit of a stretch goal that are a little bit uncomfortable, of course, who wouldn't be, but they actually learned that they could gro...