L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Learning About Learning: Investing in Human Intelligence (HI) to Ensure Sustainable Work

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Organizations have a responsibility to their people to create a sustainable future, both in terms of the world we live in, and the careers they create. To discuss how leaders can craft such a future through learning, we speak with Teri Hart on this week’s episode. As an author, work futurist, and Head of Talent Development at Zurich NA, Teri has spent many years building educational programs meant to future-proof employees and inspire them to charge ahead into a challenging future.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, we address the most important developments in edtech, leadership strategy, and workflow learning. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Terry Hart. In addition to serving as VP Head of Talent Development at Zurich North America, Terry is also a speaker, work futurist, and author of the book Hardwired to Learn. Terry, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks, Tyler. Happy to be here. Reddit yourselves. It starts off with a very robust but concise overview of the history of psychology and what we know about how we learn. And it's a wonderful primer I actually used to do. I used to work a lot with psychologists pretty directly. And I didn't study psychology by any means, but I learned a lot about the history of research. And this brought up, you know, a lot of what I learned kind of reminded me about the importance of kind of how my own brain works and what I need to do to be a better learner myself. But ultimately, I want to start toward the end of the book, actually the very end of the book, where you talk about human intelligence, which you abbreviate as H.I., big capital letters. I'm not sure if you actually coined this term. I think it might be out there in other realms as well. I'm not sure if you actually coined this term.

I think it might be out there in other realms as well. But you sort of posit this as in comparison to AI and artificial intelligence. And it almost felt like you were a bit prescient when you wrote the book because it was a couple of years ago before the explosion brought along by ChatGPT and what AI is really doing right now. And ultimately, what you discuss is how we need to sort of allocate resources and investment in human intelligence, HI, in order to, you know, be as effective as we want to be with AI and just, you know, as organizations and as business leaders and that sort of thing in the world. And I want to know, how do you feel right now? It's been a couple

years since you wrote the book. Are we on the right path when it comes to HI and AI? want to know, how do you feel right now? It's been a couple years since you wrote the book. Are we on the right path when it comes to HI and AI? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I just want to thank you for the compliments and also for noticing, yes, I did coin that term HI. I was actually really excited to discover that it wasn't in use and actually very excited to sort of talk about it in the context of the rapidly evolving landscape around AI technology. I just thought it was just so timely and lucky. I knew that as I was writing the book, AI tech was evolving really rapidly and all the experts and signs were sort of starting to point in that direction just as a result of the pandemic. A lot of companies were adopting AI technologies

very rapidly. And now that has accelerated even more, as you pointed out. And you probably noticed that I brought in a lot of economic concepts into my book. I think economics provides just really great frameworks for us to think about things and see how decisions are made. And one framework I thought was really helpful to understanding sort of these trade-offs with AI and HI was this concept of production possibilities frontier. So a PPF, and some of you might remember from Economics 101, it's basically a graph. And so it's just a curved graph and it shows all the different combinations of output based on investment trade-offs. And so I like to actually just give a good example. I can't remember what I used in the book, but a favorite example of mine is the trade-off between shelter

and food. And I think that's just one we can all relate to. We spend money on our home, we spend money on food. We understand that spending more money on our home leaves less money for food and vice versa. And there's an optimal point for most of us at which we're balancing the possibilities. And we have the right house for us and the right food that we want to eat, whether we like to dine out frequently or whether we like to make frugal meals at home, those differences all depend on our own individual preferences. And really, it's kind of interesting that the concept of diminishing returns comes into play here too, because having a bigger home may result in

increased pleasure, but there's a point in which having a nicer home starts to matter less, particularly if you're not able to eat because of it. And so if you think about AI and HI, the PPF is just a really great framework to think about how we're making investments in people and technology. And one of the questions that struck me is, really, are we investing enough in HI given the investment in AI? And I think the philosophical underpinnings of this is just very compelling. You know, I think that we are investing in helping computers learn with AI.

And so what are we doing to help employees learn? And I do think we are making investments in helping people learn. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But I think it's important that we think about how we're pacing our investment in AI really thoughtfully so that we're aligning human advancement with technical advancement. A report actually was just published today by McKinsey today on June 14th, that it highlighted four areas of occupations that would be disrupted by AI. And the article actually said that 850 occupations are going to be disrupted, and that AI is going to automate 60 to 70% of what employees do today. And so that is just

unprecedented disruption to work. And it's really important that we take a step back and make sure that we're pacing that in a way that people have the right skills to manage through that change and also navigate their careers as well. And then also we have to understand how that might adversely impact people and result in inequality and things like that. I feel like this report is directly connected to what we discussed in our pre-chat before we hit the record button, which was the sustainability of work, long-term sustainability. We talked about the World Economic Forum's good work framework, I believe is what it's called. For those that don't know, that outlines five key changes that organizations need to make to, you know, commit themselves to sustainable economies and

industries and to their people ultimately. And there are three enablers that they list. I want to make sure I get those right here. The first two of these enablers are human-centric leadership and thoughtful application of technology, which is pretty directly what we're talking about here. Are we moving in the right direction for sustainable work? Is this what you're saying? We need to really reconsider our investment there? I'll make one observation myself before I let you go. The inflection AI is what it's called, I believe. They're working on something that's called Pi right now, which is sort of like a friendlier,

more sociable AI chatbot. And there's been some, not backlash, but some responses that aren't too favorable of the concept of it. But I read that Inflection AI received $255 million for a seed round of investment, which I'm pretty sure kind of blows the concept of a seed round right out of the water. And it's one data point, but it's a pretty big data point. And for me, this feels like we're, you know, the human centricity and thoughtful application of tech. It really feels like things have changed in terms of what that really means since, you know, the WEF came out with this framework. And

it feels like it's maybe even caused by the spike in AI. What do you think? It's really mind blowing what's happening. And I like to be the optimist. And I think that there are probably different things happening with different companies and companies are talking about different things. I think that I've seen a lot of leaders really show up in this space. I believe that as leaders, we're obligated to help our organizations and society at large navigate these changes. And as I mentioned, I think we need to be deliberate and thoughtful. And so that we're really optimizing the positive impacts.

And like I said, I like to take an optimistic view of this because I think that energizing people around the optimistic view is the best way forward. So I'm being deliberate and intentional about that. And the good work framework, which is a fantastic example of this pointing the direction and illuminating the right path for companies who want to do the right thing. And so the World Economic Forum and 14 companies partnered on this initiative. And the goal was to really foster a more resilient, a more equitable, more inclusive, and more human-centric future of work.

And so as we think about the future of work in light of all the technology and AI, and as we think about the challenges that people are experiencing as work is evolving, how can we be really thoughtful and make sure that the future of work is good? And so I believe that subscribing to this thinking is going to be really critical for companies if they're to thrive and sustain their own ability to meet the needs of all their stakeholders. So not just stockholders, but also employees and customers. I personally love the work that Larry Fink has done as the CEO of BlackRock to drive more visibility around ESG for investors. And S in ESG is becoming more prominent than ever before.

And that is, I think, great for us in the world of HR and human resources and thinking about how we can support our businesses in thinking about people. I have a great opportunity. I serve on the Chief Learning and Talent Officer Board for I4CP. My peers include the heads of learning from some of the largest companies, IBM and Microsoft and Johnson Controls. I was actually just on a call a couple hours ago with

more than 60 peers. And the facilitator actually asked at the beginning of the call, peers. And the facilitator actually asked at the beginning of the call, what's top of mind for leaders? And talent was number two, right behind strategy execution and much higher than AI, which was a bit further down the list. And so the truth is that the pandemic has actually reshaped the expectations of leaders and the expectations of employees. I mean, one of the things that I think about is the Edelman trust barometer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but last year, the trust barometer revealed that employees expect leaders to be societal leaders, not just leaders of the company. And so a good example of that is recently with Disney, example of that is recently with Disney, who wavered at first on coming out in favor of LGBT rights, but most recently hosted a conference. And so companies are learning that employees care

and that they want employers to care about the employees. And that shows up in a lot of different ways. Employees want to feel purpose-driven. They want to work where there is diversity of thought and where well-being is valued. And at the same time, if we really want to live into the new world of work, leaders are going to need to be able to energize employees and build resilience to nurture that well-being and actually drive capacity and capability in the organization. So I see a trend of corporations talking about building new leadership capabilities to live into these expectations. I think a lot of this is driven by these broader discussions with WEF and BlackRock and some of our think tanks that we're involved in. And I think there's great work going on in this space.

And I think there's great work going on in this space. A critical component of leadership's dedication to employees is, I think, and I think you agree, is promoting from within, is dedicating their resources to teaching their existing employees the things that are going to take them into the future within that company alongside them and really dedicating themselves to the ones who have spent the time within their own organizations. You have some pretty strong systems for this at Zurich. I'd love to hear what it is that you're doing and also how you think companies should think about filling talent gaps and hiring and recruiting more broadly. Yeah, that's great.

I mean, you can look at our annual report and sort of look at all the public information out there and see how sustainability is important to Zurich. And people's sustainability is one of the key pillars of this sustainability. And as I mentioned, we're actually one of those 14 partners that worked with WEF on this good work framework. And as we started to look at, and this is something that we're certainly just getting our head around, but as we started to look at what it would take to make work or really people more sustainable, we asked ourselves, what would be something where we really are supporting our employees throughout their life cycle. We're helping them find a way to access roles in the company with early career programs. We would help them navigate career options and help them grow once inside the organization. We would send them off with well wishes if they left so that we could welcome them back later.

And so starting to think about that, we actually set a goal around internal hiring. And so that's something that we're starting to shape up is how we're driving internal hiring. And as part of my work, one of the things I've been doing is framing up our work around skills development. And so a lot of companies are shifting to this skills first mentality. I think IBM was one of the first companies to actually really drive this. Probably more than 20 years ago, former CEO Ginni Rometty,

who, by the way, just published a book, Good Power, she started this sort of skills first approach with hiring at IBM to really enable hiring enough people to do the work that IBM needed to do, but also drive a diverse workforce and be able to hire people with disabilities and do a lot of this, what really is good work. And so when we think about developing skills in the context of career development, And so when we think about developing skills in the context of career development, we know that we need to put the employee in the driver's seat. In some organizations, and in Zurich, I think this is true, it can be difficult for employees to navigate their careers when there are a lot of options.

And so if there isn't a very clear-cut career path in an organization for employees, or you want to create opportunities for movement, particularly from either jobs that are being automated or lower paying jobs to higher paying jobs, we have to think about, well, what supports do employees need? We're actually starting to put some thinking around that. We understand that it's a system, a system of tools that enables the employees to assess their skills and understand their skills, understand what skills they might develop. It helps illuminate career pathways and then connects them with really meaningful development, meaningful on-the-job learning opportunities, meaningful educational opportunities. And so we started to shape up what that looks like.

And one of the things, I think just an early result that we've gotten that's been really exciting is we did a short pilot with career coaching and just very human. So certainly there's some technology involved in the solution that we're bringing to our employees. But we also wanted to just understand like employees need connection and people sometimes just want to talk to people. And so the results of career coaching have been phenomenal and helping employees feel like they have a next step in their career and they know where to go to get the development

they need. And also that they feel valued and feel like they have a great place to work and build their career. valued and feel like they have a great place to work and build their career. That's very encouraging to hear because right now feels like one of those times where we can all expect to see that in about 10 years, some of the most popular jobs will be the ones that don't even exist today, much like, you know, all the programming jobs that came after the internet and things with social media and whatnot. Like, I don't think my job existed 10 or 12 years ago when I do it to get abstract. And it feels like one of those times where we don't really know

what's going to come next in terms of employment opportunities and that sort of thing. So it's very encouraging to hear. To that point, though, your book does a great job of sort of addressing that feeling, that thought, that idea by emphasizing just being a better learner as opposed to, you know, effectively learning concepts and skills and being good at learning for the purpose of organizational goals. What you do is you advocate for learning about learning so that we can be better learners. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's really the crux of my book. And to be honest, it was a little bit of an aha moment for me. And I don't know that I quite had my finger on the pulse of what I was trying to get at until I stumbled upon this particular piece, which is

we have learned more about how the brain works in the last 20 years than the last 200. I mean, more about how the brain works in the last 20 years than the last 200. I mean, it wasn't until 1999, which wasn't that long ago, that we found out that the adult brain still produces stem cells. I mean, up until 1999, for 100 years of neuroscience, we thought that the adult brain no longer created new stem cells. And so when we think of learning, we don't actually think about our capability to learn. We sort of think about it as a given, and we sort of assume that it goes downhill as we get older. And it does change. Our learning abilities change as we get older. I actually don't think they go downhill. I think they just change. And so understanding how they change is really critical.

And understanding what's getting in the way of us learning is really important. And being very intentional about what is getting in the way of our learning is critical in order to drive learning. And one of the things I think just learning for the sake of learning, one of the big barriers to learning is motivation. And one of the easiest ways to overcome motivation is to be intrinsically motivated, right? And so learning about something you want to learn about is going to drive you to learn more than anything else, right?

But understand that that does not necessarily mean the easy learning is the right learning. But by overcoming the barrier of motivation, you actually have an opportunity to rework your brain and build skills and capabilities around learning. And by the way, learning something that you want to learn is not always the only thing to do because sometimes learning something difficult or learning something that you think you're not good at learning can be a better way to learn as well. Of course, I think inevitably there's always going to be people at organizations when you're, you know, doing the L&D thing, when you're distributing courses or trainings or whatever

it is, there's always going to be a number of people that don't learn effectively and that don't really want to learn and just aren't going to be, you know, the most effective at applying what they have learned. I've talked about this as like three buckets in the past with a few other guests where it's those who take it and run with it and they do great. Those who need an extra sort of push after they've consumed the material and, you know, to really get into that application, effective application phase. And then inevitably people who just aren't going to do much with it and, you know, sort of fall by the wayside. And you've already talked about some of these barriers, you know, the motivation thing. And but there are several others that you actually, you know,

list in the book, and you discuss them at length. I'd like to talk about sort of systematically, what can we do as organizations and as leaders to help those that are in need of more help in the cases of learning to do better? What can leaders and the organizations themselves actually do to help more people learn more effectively? That's a great question. And I honestly could talk about that for hours because it's something, I mean, this is my job.

How do we help organizations learn more effectively, knowing that not everybody wants to learn? And so breaking that down and understanding what gets in the way of learning and how can we overcome those barriers is really, really critical. You know, I talked about lack of motivation. And one of the things that's essential to the lack of motivation is a lot of times people are unmotivated because they don't think it matters. And so, you know, they don't think it's going to make a difference for them. By the way, there's a just a huge body of work by Albert Bandura, who actually passed away, I think he was 95, a couple of years ago, Stanford professor, and, you know, just

wonderful body of work on this notion of self-efficacy. you know, just wonderful body of work on this notion of self-efficacy. And we are intrinsically motivated to learn things when we believe that it serves us. And this is sort of commonsensical, but understanding that really well is critical in understanding a lot of things, right? Our ability to achieve any kind of goal is dependent on the belief that what we do is going to matter. And so if you think about what that means for leaders and companies to make it feel like employees matter and that their investments in learning are going to make a difference for them is really critical. And so some of the things that we've been doing is helping employees think through their career strategies and understand how they want to progress in their career and how they might want to align that to different

development opportunities so that what they do does matter. That actually is really important. And we actually do speak a lot to how important learning is. And so leaders dedicating time to talking about it or dedicating time at their team meetings to learning is, I think, really important to overcoming that. And then also just understanding, I mean, one of my favorite barriers to talk about is this concept, again, kind of an economic construct, this concept of free writing. And it actually happens quite a bit. And it's happening right now, really quite a bit with AI. And you can just think about how many people are really picking up chat GPT

and trying to understand it and then trying to understand what the implications of that are going to be. There are a lot of people who haven't installed it or tried to even look at it and some people who don't even know what it is. And then there are people who have installed it and started looking at it and started asking questions and trying to learn about how they might use it. Or I know one of the things I do is I teach HR classes at Marquette

University. And I try to think about how can I help my students use it in a productive way versus banning it? Because I think it's kind of like the next calculator, right? We don't want to necessarily ban it, but how do we use that to augment the work that we're doing? And so if we're not picking up these new technologies and learning them and we're letting other people doing them, learn them, all of the process that we're going through to understand them and all the critical thinking and problem solving and all of those things, that is a workout for our brains. And so when people are not engaging in that activity and sort of just waiting and seeing until letting other people try to figure it out, they're actually leaving a lot of growth on the table by sort of opting out of that process. And so I think trying to drive that more

as leaders in the organization, drive that thinking, doing brainstorming sessions, expecting people to contribute and drive energy around using the tools and getting everyone to adopt it. I mean, one thing that was great about the pandemic, by the way, is not everybody was utilizing sort of the tools that had been rolled out to all of corporate America. Not everybody was using them to the degree that they could be used. And then we were all working from home and suddenly we all had to. And it really, it really propelled our skills. Right. So I think there's a lot of things leaders can do to actually start to really push people into learning, understanding that, you know, that kind of learning isn't necessarily go read a book or take a class, but to experiment and practice and play and

try to figure things out. I want to touch on your point of sort of identifying the long-term benefit or value of learning. One of the barriers is that people just don't always see that value and the investment doesn't seem to justify itself. One of my favorite parts of the book is when you tell the story of you were doing an Ironman, I believe it was. Is that right? It was an Ironman.

You were practicing for it. You were training for it. And it sort of became a part of your identity. And, you know, that's, that's sort of the learning process, the skill building process is that you go through that you see yourself, you envision yourself as I will complete, you know, an Ironman, and it will be a massive, massive achievement. And then you tell about how when you completed it, I don't remember who it was, but the guy says, congratulations, Terry, you are an Ironman. And that's that's a really cool story. It reminds me of like when I was practicing to dunk as a as a high schooler, I was like

someday I'm going to be the guy who dunks at this high school. And over like a year of training, I figured it out and it was a really rewarding journey. But those are those are sort of those like intrinsic journeys that we take. But those are those are sort of those like intrinsic journeys that we take. Whereas when we're at an organization that isn't entirely under our control and is influenced by many other factors and the path that we see isn't as clear, you already addressed that idea of, you know, kind of giving that vision of career pathing and, you know, just sort of career coaching and that sort of thing. But is there ultimately more that we can do to encourage people to have that enthusiasm about the growth process? Yeah, I love your example that you just gave, because you reflected on the results of a long term investment that you made in learning something. And so we talk about, we actually have learning sessions on career agility, actually based on a lot of the content from my book. And I think, you know, really kind of tuning into some of these techniques and approaches can really drive learning. And I

just think this idea of reflecting on experiences, I know we talk about reflecting on failure, but just actually reflecting on our accomplishments, too. Because I think one of the things that I've noticed in reflecting more on my own accomplishments is, wow, they're all long plays. We don't sustain big changes from one time course, from one thing that we do. And so, you know, that leads me to believe, like, set these audacious goals for yourself and then be very patient with yourself in achieving them. And I think also very pragmatic and recognize, you know, I think the Ironman, by the way, just perfect analogy for everything because you might have a bad training day. And, you know, I remember many days like I'm not a very good runner. People assume that I did Ironman and I must be a good runner, but no, I would prefer the swimming and the bike part of it. And I would just

prefer to stop after that. But the run is actually you have to do after you bike 112 miles, you have to run a marathon. And so, you know, it's a lot to gear up for. And so you think as you're training, you might actually do a long bike ride on a Saturday and then Sunday need to run. And there were some days where I felt like, okay, I'm not going to be able to run today. And I could have looked at it as a failure, but I didn't. I just looked at it as that's part of the process. And so looking back and getting to the finish line and being able to, by the way, I say this forever because now it's 2017 and I wouldn't be able to do this again in the near future.

But it's just that act of reflection and that practice of reflection can help fuel that next step that you take to do something big for yourself. And so I think trying to drive that habit in organizations of reflecting not only on mistakes, where you can learn from some of the mistakes we make, but just from the successes and from those long plays that we made. And another thing too, I think you see a lot of this more like just if you go on LinkedIn, there's all these different things about leaders talking about connecting to purpose.

I love talking about connecting to purpose because it's one of those things where it actually does a lot of different things for our brain. But it really is sort of that neurotransmitter effect that it has when we do something that's aligned with our purpose and it helps drive happiness. And people who are purpose-driven are healthier. They show slower rates of cognitive decline and things like that. But they also are capable of doing things and things like that, but they also are capable of doing things that nobody thinks that they can do or they might not think they can do.

And so I think there's a little bit of just thinking through, and again, it's the how to build learning capability and how to think about learning that really interests me because the learning is the work part of it, right? And we know we have to do that, but how do you get yourself excited about that works is key. Another important concept in your writing is the zone of proximal development, the ZPD, which is sort of the knowledge space or skill space that's more or less adjacent to what one already knows and is familiar with. So the spaces that it would be relatively easy to learn within and to maybe develop a new skill set within because, you know, they already have, you know, some adjacent skills

or adjacent knowledge. Can you talk about how at Zurich you're taking advantage of this concept or just more broadly about how different companies are utilizing this to teach and train their people? Yeah, absolutely. So this concept is ZPD. By the way, this has been, you know, I learned about it when I was working on my master's degree many years ago in education. And it's just been my favorite thing to talk about and favorite thing to think about because it applies not only to learning, but I feel like almost everything in life. It was a term that Vygotsky, a social psychologist, developed to really talk about what you just said is just really what is that incremental next level for that person to learn. And so it was used, by the way, to talk, to apply more to high school students and

child development. But if you think about it, it's just applicable to adults and everything we can think about as well. And so I think it's especially applicable in these days in the workplace, just because of how many different skill sets are developing and so rapidly and you know, where one might need to develop their career. And absolutely, too, you want to think about, you want it to be achievable, right? And so when you think about your zone of proximal development, it helps make learning achievable. And so as we think about building skills, technical skills, and things like that, one of the things we're doing, and a lot of companies are doing is they put in these talent marketplaces and they allow individuals to find opportunities that will grow the skills that they're looking to grow.

And maybe they already have some of those skills and they're looking to grow those skills. And they have the opportunity to work alongside somebody who has those skills and they can develop those skills on the job. And it's kind of like internal gig work, although most companies that I'm aware of are using these talent marketplaces more part-time opportunities. I think it's more about development when employees use these learning programs. And it's part of how we are thinking about skills development. And I know a lot of companies in recent years have kind of stood up their own talent marketplaces to drive skills development, as well as just being able to move people to where the work is needed very quickly as well, too.

You said earlier that learning is often most effective when it's not easy, when it's something that's challenging you, and especially when it's done slower. There's a lot of research about the sort of two types of thinking, I believe. So I can't remember which book it is. A Mind for Numbers, I believe. Barbara Oakley sounds right. There's focused and diffuse thinking and understanding how your brain works in that way between those two systems of thinking allows you to more effectively learn things quickly and retain things and build new skills. And your sort of summation of all this is that it's often better to take the slower or more difficult path to learning instead of, for instance, like cramming for a test, which I swear I mastered in school. And to this day, I swear by it. But at the end of the day, you know,

sort of slower, more deliberate learning is more effective. And my question to you is, how do we reconcile this with the fact that we need to we need to learn efficiently at work, you know, workflow learning and learning in the flow of work is a is a critical term that we're using. And it's not easy. You know, the conference board recently released their workforce survey, almost 40% of employees feel worse off than they did six months ago, in terms of their mental health. And half of those people who said that cited too much work. So people are busy, you know, they're doing a lot. And it can be hard to convince such people that, you know, learning, especially slow learning is really good for them. So what do we do? How do we reconcile that?

Well, and maybe slower work is good, too. I mean, it's interesting, because I think Barbara Oakley's book, it's interesting. And, And I just had the aha moment now. It reminds me a bit of Dan Kahneman and his work around type one and type two thinking. And so type one is thinking that really rapid, intuitive, automatic thinking that we have. And I almost feel like when we're stressed, we're in this mode where our limbic system is on overdrive and our amygdala is hijacked. You've heard that term probably. And when that happens, like our prefrontal cortex becomes disengaged and we're just not thinking. And so slowing down actually can help us engage our prefrontal cortex and actually take that slower, more logical, analytical,

conscious, effortful approach to thinking through things. And so I actually think that that's just that in and of itself will help improve wellness at work to drive less urgency around things. You know, one of the things that I do as a leader, by the way, is I try not to send a lot of emails. And it sounds rather basic, but I don't want to be hijacking my team's brains all the time with urgent matters. And, you know, certainly I say that and there are times when I'm pulling together a presentation and I might need some data or something happens and maybe there's a risk that we need to address. But as leaders,

we can control that pace and manage that so that we're leaving people in their thinking space. We're not taking them out of that and disengaging them from their thinking brains. But the other part of this too is just this idea of learning. And I think this is as important, you know, a lot of times, particularly in the L&D space in corporate America, we provide learning interventions that our employees like. And a lot of times these interventions are entertaining and fun, and people will give you, you know, their reviews afterwards on surveys and say, this was just awesome. But when we go to look at change and the impact that it had, it might not always have that impact because we didn't do the work

of learning and we didn't necessarily have people doing that work. And so we find, by the way, when we actually ask people to do hard work, that the surveys kind of go down and they don't like it as much. But it's tied to a lot of work that Elizabeth and Robert Bjork did with the University of California, LA, this idea of creating desirable difficulties. And so we really need to reframe how we think about learning and understand that learning is enhanced

when it is difficult and learning is better when it's difficult. And so I think there's lots of great LinkedIn learning content out there but we have to recognize that that's incremental and a piece of it and we need to think more broadly about what that slower more difficult path is to learn and how we're going to apply those things to make it more difficult. I have a couple piggyback questions about learning interventions that I want to bring up really quickly. So when I hear

the word intervention, that kind of makes me think of something went wrong. And you know, something needs to be fixed there. Obviously, it doesn't just mean that. But that's what pops into my head. That's the connotation. And that's, that's a really important type of learning is, hey, you screwed up, bucko, we got to change what you did there. And this is not uncommon organizations, people fail, they, you know, they don't hit their goals, which isn't, you know, a huge thing that requires all kinds of proper intervention. But sometimes mistakes, proper mistakes are made or errors are made and learning does need to take place.

And this is just one of those difficult things where it's like, you know, it's hard to acknowledge that you failed and then go through the process of, you know, a sort of drawn out process of fixing what you did wrong. That can just be embarrassing. It can be difficult. And then also sometimes it can be very difficult to even admit or acknowledge that you failed such that it can then be identified so that you undergo some sort of a learning plan to improve what you did wrong. So my ultimate question is, this is just it's a difficult series of conversations to have around failure, and around fixing what went wrong, ultimately, between leaders and learning leaders who identify, hey, this went wrong, we need to teach you something there. And also the people who made the mistake that might have to acknowledge it and

come to terms with it and then undergo that learning. So do you have any advice for how to navigate those conversations and those processes? learning. So do you have any advice for how to navigate those conversations and those processes? Yeah, I mean, this is actually just a really interesting topic because, you know, I think it actually speaks back to what we were talking at the beginning around expectations for leaders. And one of the expectations, I think,

in the new world of work for leaders is that they're creating psychological safety for their teams so that they understand that failure is a part of our work. And certainly there's some kind of failure that isn't tolerable, right? I mean, there's certain things that we can't make mistakes with, but there are a lot of things that we can make mistakes with. I actually had a

boss many years ago when I was at GE who said she doesn't know of anybody who ever died from training. And I don't know if that's actually entirely true. I think there probably are some people who maybe were injured because of an employee's lack of training, but overall that's probably true. And so if you think about mistakes in that context and what the result of the mistake was and trying to think about how you can turn that into the learning opportunity as leaders, how can we embrace that and how can we create safety? And by the way, that's not easy. I know I try to do that and I found many situations where we make a maybe public mistake and it's a little bit difficult to sort of dial back from that. But I found many situations where we make a maybe public mistake and it's a little bit

difficult to sort of dial back from that. But I think that's number one is just creating that psychological safety. And then two, just the awareness that, you know, really failure is actually one of the best ways to learn. And so as we think about leadership development and manager training, for example, one of the things that we like to do is sort of push people to a failure point. We either do that with like a simulation of some kind or an assessment of some kind or where, you know, leaders might have the opportunity to do a 360 and they find that they maybe have a different version of themselves than their employees do. And so those are the kinds of things that can actually drive people to sort of reflect on the person that they want to be and how they want to

show up and then give them an opportunity to reshape their direction in terms of their behaviors and things like that. So I think it's really just how do we continue to shift our mindset around what failure is and look at it as a learning opportunity. And by the way, I feel like I've had a lot of personal practice with that. And I think you can become really good at accepting failure. Of course. I mean, this is very close to one of your frameworks from the book. I have it written down here. There are many sort of like four step or four part frameworks or three to five part frameworks, I guess is more like one of them is connect to purpose and learn from experience, both

of which I think we've addressed pretty directly at some length already. And then three and four are practice unknowing and see yourself as unfinished. And I think those are very key. There is sort of the mindset behind that. And I think those are very key. There is sort of the mindset behind that. Again, you know, how can we systematically encourage people to to feel that way when somebody is hired for a job? You know, it's that's usually an indicator.

Hey, we looked at your resume. We looked at your experience. We know that you know how to do this. At the same time, we know that you're an unfinished piece of work that you're going to continue learning and that there are some things that you have to unlearn. That's not a conversation I've ever had with, you know, a superior of mine, my boss, who said, you know, but we also understand that you're sort of growing in this very serious and specific way. Do you encourage those sorts of conversations as well? Because that's that seems what this framework sort of encourages.

Yeah, I've actually had conversations with employees, you know, like, look, I hired you because of what you know, I already know what you know, or I already have some ideas of what you know. Now it's time to actually go to the next, you know, we actually need to take what you know, and what you don't know and get to the next step, which is what hasn't happened yet, or what that next goal is. And so, you know, I think expertise, bias, and the different things that get in the way of our learning are really critical and also very important. And so I like to think of adult brains are very interesting because a lot of our dendritic material that builds new connections has died away. For lack of a better word, it's called dendritic pruning.

And so if you think of a tree and you think of the branches of the tree and you think of fewer branches in the adult brain on the dendrites, and the great part of that is we've worn these great paths around our knowledge and we've created our personal matrix in our brains, our personal matrix of the world, our personal matrix around our expertise. So I might be an expert on learning and that expertise can get in the way if we have to do something new. And so recognizing, hey, this is the way that I've done it in the past. This is the way that I know how to do it. But knowing that now things are different and the assumptions are different and the way of doing it in the future might be different. And so moving past our own biases, I mean, I do hear quite often people tend to rely on, well, this is how I learned it. And so

everybody else should learn it that way. And it's like, well, that was 20 years ago. And, you know, you kind of had a completely different contact basis for learning than individuals that are coming into this today. And so just recognizing like things are different. When in our learning agility session, we just, we like to talk about the Columbia disaster and the Challenger disaster and just point to some of the expertise bias that actually led these renowned scientists to, you know, sort of think a 2.7 pound piece of foam would be harmless when it hit the side, you know, going however many hundreds of miles per hour. And it's kind of unfathomable, but, you know, when we think we know things, it actually gets in the way of our thinking sometimes. And so that's something that I think it's important to, again, for leaders to role model some humility and vulnerability and even, again, recognizing mistakes and recognizing when you're wrong, but also encouraging new and different viewpoints so that we can learn new things.

I love this, seeing yourself as unfinished. And there's a couple of researchers that I typically like to look at. Many people are familiar with Carol Dweck and growth mindset. And then there's also Dan Gilbert, who talks about the end of history illusion, which is just this idea that the person we are now was the person that we were always meant to be and we're finished. And this is how I am. And by the way, like I see it every day. So, you know,

I've had an opportunity to kind of read a lot of his research, watch his TED talk, and people believe that their opinions, their preferences, their tastes, their thinking around things aren't going to change. And, you know, 10 years later, they find, well, actually, I'm a completely different person. And so realizing that, you know, that's an illusion that we are the person that we were always meant to be right now actually helps us embrace this growth mindset that Carol Dweck talked about. And by the way, when we look at ourselves as sort of growing and changing and always being able to learn, it actually gives us a tremendous amount of resilience and helps us be sort of survivors when things around us are tough.

And the other thing I think it does, which is actually just helps us be more compassionate towards other people. It helps us stop defining people by maybe something that they did two years ago and just recognizing I am not the same person as I was 10 minutes ago. And so, you know, I think there's that saying, the same man never steps in the same river twice because he's not the same man and it's not the same river. So that is just something that

I like to carry with me as you think about how people behave and interact. I recognize that, you know, we're always learning, we're always changing, growing. This is one of my favorite topics, specifically sort of like the curse of knowledge and the curse of expertise, where especially those that are very well educated and know very, very well what it is that they're doing and have mastered what it is that they do. They, you know, tend to have blind spots because of that. And my question to you is, how do we educate those who are extremely educated or who are already sort of, you know, what they do is they educate others or they help develop others. You probably work with tons of people who are geniuses. I mean, you probably have lots of people at Zurich who are very, very intelligent people

who have endured that dendritic pruning, who are older and maybe have master's degrees or doctors, that sort of thing. And those people probably don't really wanna keep doing school once they get to their job because they wanna pursue their careers. So how do you convince them that this is a critical part of what you're doing as a person in your career, especially these days? How do you how do you get those people to learn?

Well, it's interesting. I mean, I think there's lots of things packed into that question, including, you know, as we think about, like, I actually spent some time in McKinsey learning. And so very, very smart people and very, very bright people that I work with, just the world's renowned experts in the field. And by the way, I love that, love being surrounded by, you know, just always feeling like you're never the smartest one in the room. I think I actually think that's kind of exciting and thrilling. And so it's just a lot of fun, but also understanding that it does actually get in the way of learning a lot of times if people think that they sort of already know all the answers.

And so I think from a learning perspective, I already talked about the role of failure and about kind of opening and illuminating sort of mistakes. And, you know, like if you think about NASA and the Challenger disaster and those things, like there was work done afterwards to kind of illuminate what went wrong. And the researchers eventually learned from that. I mean, there was Columbia and Challenger. So there were a couple of mistakes made before that learning really happened.

But that is one way is just like that reflecting on mistakes. But the other piece of this too, as we think about leaders and as we think about what we're asking them to do, you know, I talk a little bit about different strategies and sort of learning hacks for overcoming some of the challenges. And one of them is just teaching others. And so as leaders have to take a step back from their work and teach others, and you sort of maybe give them a challenge to drive some new thinking around things, it actually helps them start to reframe their own thinking around it and grow their own thinking and evolve their own thinking. And so I think it's really important to involve leaders in these roles because by getting them into the habit of evolving their thinking, they actually grow a habit around

evolving their thinking. And so I think that's just really, really powerful. And it's a learning hack to teach others. And by the way, I've been doing that for years, just being in learning and development. I've been writing training for things I'm not an expert on for many, many years. And it's just been a great way to learn things. Great.

I think that's a perfect place for us to wrap, Terry. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Before I let you go, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and your work? Sure. I do have a website, hardwiredtolearn.com. And then my book is also available on Amazon. So please check me out there. Again, thank you so much for listeners at home. Thank you for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. Again, thank you so much for listeners at home. Thank you for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode.

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