| Learning Is The New Working Season 1 A new podcast from Chris Pirie, ex-Oracle and Microsoft Chief Learning Officer and now independent investigator of The Future of Workplace Learning. A set of stimulating conversations are going to happen with some of the leading thinkers and edge practitioners in the modern Workplace Learning space, from Chief Learning Officers to Learning Experience Designers, from Neuroscientists to Technologists, vendors of Learning Tech and the HR leaders charged with developing human capital potential. Season1 Episode1: You Now Live on Planet VUCA. Live With It! Read the transcript, to learn, from well-known author and commentator on Workplace Learning issues Lisa Kay Solomon on: How a part of The Philly Diaspora ended up in Menlo Park Why you can be scared or fascinated by the future – but you can’t ignore it What ‘Outside-In Thinking’ about change would look like – and how it could help your organization Why CEOs need to drop the PowerPoint and start a meeting with a bit of Bold Wonderment… but not in a Kumbaya Way What a journey from Transactional to Mission Learning is all about Why our minds are coded to remember, not empathize – and how you can exploit that and finally, the interesting – and surprising – self-test to find out if you’re a Designer, too. Resources to help us all learn together: Lisa recommends we look at her main website www.lisakaysolomon.com, but also ‘Just Google me’ – as she has a wealth of content and interviews out there to research. Her books are available from Amazon here: Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation Find out more about the d.school – more formally, The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University – here, and find out how to take a class or join one of its regular executive workshops here We’d like to make two special shout outs – thanks to Season One sponsors and Learning Future Group network members Intrepid by VitalSource. Check them out at www.intrepidlearning.com – and a special thank you to the great Portland musicians YACHT who provide our intro music, ‘I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler.’ So did we – which is why we want to get you help to make it Cooler, together. |
Music: I thought the future would be cool. I thought the future would be cooler.
Chris Pirie: Well we respectfully disagree with that bright Portland pop band Portland band YACHT. We think the future will be cooler, especially when it comes to the future of workplace learning. Hence, Learning is the New Working, a podcast series brought to you by The Learning Futures Group. Our mission is to help leaders and organizations build learning focused work cultures that will help them transform, innovate and build trust with their employees and customers. My name is Chris Pirie, and I’m the CEO of The Learning Futures Group, your host for what we hope will be a brilliant set of conversations with leading edge practitioners and thinkers in fields related to work place learning.
Music: I thought the future would be cooler.
Chris Pirie: We explore topics that we believe are critical to building a modern approach to learning in the face of profound changes in the workplace. Topics including neuro science, data science, software engineering, social science and design thinking. We believe this is really important work and work that we approach with passion, curiosity and a learning mindset. On the way, we’ll sit down with academics, writers, thinkers, ed tech vendors and practitioners, including chief learning officers who are redefining the workplace learning experience. We’ll learn a lot together and I hope we’ll have some fun, because while the future may be uncertain, it’s our job to make it much cooler.
Music: I thought the future would be cooler.
Chris Pirie: Also, helping find the future of workplace learning are this episodes sponsor, the smart folks at Intrepid Learning. They develop a powerful, collaborative learning platform that empowers organizations to solve high stakes business challenges through engaging and implied learning delivered at quality and at scale. I’ve worked with their technology myself and I can confirm they’re really disrupting the old school learning approaches, they help individuals learn and improve, and organizations transform and grow. Check them out please at www.intrepidlearning.com.
Chris Pirie: Now, let’s get on with the show.
Music: I thought the future would be cooler.
Chris Pirie: So, I’d like to welcome Lisa K. Solomon to The Learning Futures Group podcast series. Lisa, welcome.
Lisa Solomon: Thank you, Chris, great to be here.
Chris Pirie: Yes, great to talk to you. Look, there are many, many facets of your work that are super relevant to The Learning Futures Group audience. Including but not limited to, your thinking about leadership in ambiguous and rapidly changing times, your techniques for thinking about the future and how to prepare for it, your thinking and writing on innovation and how to do great innovation, and then last but not least, sort of design as a learnable practice. So we could talk all day and you know that, but I think today we’ll focus on design practice in this conversation, and perhaps explore some of the ideas that you’re working on in that space.
Chris Pirie: I want to start with a fairly quick fire round of questions to sort of sketch the big picture of your work and what you do for our listeners, and then we’ll kind of relax a little bit and we’ll talk about some big meaningful questions. Is that okay?
Lisa Solomon: Sounds fantastic.
Chris Pirie: Okay. Great.
Chris Pirie: So, maybe you could start by telling us where in the world you live, and why did you choose to live there if you did choose to live there?
Lisa Solomon: That’s a great first question, Chris. I am currently talking to you from the Bay Area, which is where I live and work and have for the last 20 years. Specifically, in a town called Menlo Park, which is about a mile from Stanford University’s campus, so right in the center of Silicon Valley. My roots stem from outside of Philadelphia. So I, even though I’ve been here 20 years, still feel an east coast diaspora, trying to make her way in the world of technology.
Chris Pirie: Well it’s an exciting place to live for sure and the center of a lot of cultural and technology leadership for the whole world. So, a good choice I’d say, I’m also a Bay Area fan myself.
Chris Pirie: Before we get into the specifics of the work you do, Lisa, can you talk to us about … perhaps you could describe what you think of as your mission.
Lisa Solomon: It’s a great question and I do feel very privileged to be doing this work, my life’s work in the Bay Area, where it is the center of so much exciting activity around where the future’s going. My passion, my life’s mission is to help ignite and foster creative agency in leaders of all ages. So I work with some of our youngest leaders, starting in K12 through executives, to help them build the scales that will make them more generative and resilient in times of increasing change.
Chris Pirie: Wow. Leaders of all ages, I’d love to hear more about your entry level leaders, I’m not familiar with your work in that space, but that could be good, we could go there. I think we should probably start, then, in terms of your work about the future. One of the things that I’ve learned from you, I sat in on one of your classes at Stanford, and I learned that people often think about the future from an inside out perspective, what’s going to happen to them. You shared some amazing techniques about how to think about the future and why that’s an important thing for organizations, leaders and individuals to do.
Chris Pirie: So, tell me how you got interested in thinking about the future.
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. I think thinking about the future, processing what may happen in the future, is a skill set and a set of practices that we can all learn. I got started in futures work a little over 15 years ago, when I joined a wonderful group called The Global Business Network that focused on a practice called scenario planning. Helping leaders, not just understand the future that was articulated in their strategic plan, usually a single future, that’s delineated by a few sensitivity analysis assumption checks and instead help them understand a multiplicity of futures, based on external forces that would be shaping the world that they were competing in. Many organizations tend to do their strategic planning looking at a swat analysis, as you said from the inside out, what is our organization, what are we good at, what our weakness is. That leaves them blindsided to how the world is changing around them, and it turns out if we just put our attention towards those external trends, we can get much better at spotting them, not so that we predict the future, but that we are less surprised by it, and we’re more able to take advantage of an opening opportunity.
Chris Pirie: So, fascinating stuff, can you talk a little about some of the techniques that you would use or that you would help leaders and organizations kind of go through to start thinking from the outside in?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. One of the most fundamental practices that all leaders and all of your listeners can start doing right now, is to make a practice at looking at external forces that may be shaping their industry. So not just what’s happening in the competitive space like we’re trained to look at, but what’s happening around trends, for example, in demography, or in social trends, and one of the biggest ones we’ve seen of course, is that younger generations seem less interested in buying things, and much for interested in sharing things. That’s had a tremendous impact on many, many industries and organizations.
Lisa Solomon: We could also look at, of course, technical trends, and that’s a big one here particularly in Silicon Valley. How is technology emerging? What kind of implications are they having about how products are getting strengthened by the ubiquitous amounts of data that they’re collecting, and that’s changing the face of what not only companies are able to create, but what customers expect. So we can take a look at those trends outside of your organization.
Chris Pirie: So those trends may, for example, you know if I’m in the software business, or let’s say I’m in the automotive business. You’re encouraging us and help look at trends that may apply to other business segments or other parts of peoples lives.
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely, and to do that actively. I mean, one of the easiest things that you can start to do is to create a futures wall. Ask all of the employees or people that work within your organization to post headlines that they find fascinating, to share things that they’re absorbing from their perspective, and to use that as an on ramp to an interesting conversation.
Chris Pirie: Fascinating. I think this is really relevant for our audience because I really think chief learning officers and learning leaders in organizations are really understanding now that their job is to perhaps prepare people for future roles, roles that we can’t quite maybe even get our arms around yet. So this exercise of understanding the forces at work and how they’re going to shape the future of our industry and of the particular roles that we might need in our organization seems highly relevant.
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. I mean, it does a couple things. One is that it hones the sensing skills within your organization, both at individual level and the collective level. It also helps hone this pattern recognition, so what are the things we can see between the emerging signals or trends that we’re seeing. The third critical thing it does is that it promotes imagination, and this, Chris, I cannot stress enough to all of your listeners who are in a learning capacity.
Lisa Solomon: We tend to focus our learning agenda on things that are known, skills that are teachable, that fit within a box or a program. I think one of the most important things that all leaders and learners can do is to start to promote imagination and opportunities to practice making bolder statements or wonderments about what the future may hold. Again, not so that they predict the future to be correct, so that they can get ahead of it.
Chris Pirie: Yeah, that’s really interesting, because I think when … certainly before I’d spoken to you earlier and spent some time with you when I thought about futurists, I thought about people who were in the prediction business. It turns out that the exercises that you walk people through, are not really about that at all, they’re about looking at things that might combine to change the world that you operate in today and it seems to be almost insurance policy to be really great at this kind of work.
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. It becomes part of how you take in information of all kids, whether it’s within your organization or outside. As you know, Chris, because you attended my class, one of my favorite ways to get people into a futurist mindset is to play a game with them. One of my favorites comes from a colleague of mine who teaches Futures and Foresight at Carnegie Mellon University, a futurist named Stuart Candy. He created a fabulous game called The Thing From the Future. It’s a card deck game that has three different kinds of prompts to immediately get you into an imaginative mode, a generative mode and a conversational mode about things that might be.
Lisa Solomon: One of the prompts might be is … it will set first a context in a crazy future, in an alien future, in an exponential future, in a feminist future, in a wild future. So it sets the context, then it has another deck of cards that says, there is a blank, a noun, there is a festival, there’s an app, there’s a learning program, there’s a monument. Then the last one is towards the attention of what that future is for, about a justice. So it might say, in a feminist future, there was a monument about justice, what is it? It just asks you to quickly brainstorm.
Lisa Solomon: It turns out that once we get into this generative mode, our juices start going and we feel more ready to take some risks about making sense of the world around us.
Chris Pirie: Super cool and really fun exercises, I personally had a great time thinking about a future where people would live to be 140 years old and what are the consequences for different types of businesses and we decided that being married for 80 years might get a little bit boring, so we had very, very interesting conversations about what opportunities that would show up, but these are great models.
Chris Pirie: Can you, maybe just back up a little piece and talk about this notion of VUCA that I’ve heard you speak about, which I think is perhaps your … the rational for why you call for these new modes of thinking and these new modes of leadership. Can you define that term for us and for people who haven’t heard it before?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely, VUCA is actually a term that was coined by US military planners a couple of decades ago and it stands for a world that’s filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It’s pretty interesting that this is now a term two decades old, so they thought the world then was filled with VUCA. I think it’s helpful for all leaders and all learners to set their context that as crazy and as unpredictable as today’s world feels, tomorrow will not be more simple, right, VUCA is a constant and will continue to be.
Lisa Solomon: So, it puts us in a very different mindset about what our roles are as leaders and as learners. Going back to the conversation we were just having about the importance of getting into a futurist mindset, understand that the world is VUCA, suggests that learning how to embrace ambiguity, learning how to get comfortable in a wold that’s changing fast, that’s filled with uncertainty has got to be one of our biggest priorities, because that is a given. That is not going to change, so we need to shift away from putting all of our attention around skills that are bounded and nullable, right, knowledge acquisition.
Chris Pirie: Yeah.
Lisa Solomon: [crosstalk 00:14:42] move towards, how do help people practice what it’s like to operate as their best selves when they can’t possibly have all the answers about the work that they’re doing.
Chris Pirie: This is a fundamental shift in thinking for people in the workplace learning business, for sure. I think for decades we’ve been, I mean, you know, our practice evolved from time study and the idea of training people to be more efficient and to do particular behaviors, and still today, I see leaders and learning leaders really struggling to make sense of the world, complex world, on behalf of their learners and then sort of codify and simplify for them. It seems to me that the much more important skill to develop is the comfort with that ambiguity, rather than try to resolve the ambiguous situation for people. I see that a lot, so these are really critical skills, I think, for the future of workplace learning.
Lisa Solomon: I completely agree and I want to acknowledge that this is, as you said, a big shift, and not going to be an easy one.
Chris Pirie: Yes.
Lisa Solomon: We like things that are measurable. Listen, this is how we went through our primary schooling. We got A’s on stuff that was knowable, when we knew how to spell, we got an A, when we know where states and capitals and countries are, we get an A, but I would love to see, maybe one of your listeners can show us an example when they got rewarded for asking a divergent question. Something that was not on the test, or they got acknowledgement about showing up and taking a creative risk that didn’t lead to a fantastic outcome. So that messy middle stuff, all that space where we have to practice being in the land of unknown, it’s invisible. So, I think learning leaders are going to have to reimagine the metrics and the incentives that they put in place to get the learners comfortable with practicing these new practices.
Chris Pirie: Yeah, 100%, and I think even to point of developing new tools and it’s why I’m really fascinated about the tools that you use to help people think about the future, these are super relevant because the tool sets we have to work with today feel kind of redundant, by the time you define learning objectives, and cascade down the knowledge from senior people you totally miss the point.
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely, and I would say, Chris, that while we can recognize that this is going to be a big shift, we can also start immediately. I would love it, for example, if every leader started an important conversation with a short generative game. If they did something that acknowledged that they wanted to get the people around the table in a different head space, and they were willing to take a risk to do it, or if leaders started meetings with an open ended question, as opposed to a PowerPoint. So I think there are things that we can do in particular for leaders to model that they care about learning, and that learning is critical to where the organization needs to go as it relates to strategic decisions, that those two things are not separate, and that helping leaders learn in the context of their work will be about modeling it in the context of their work.
Chris Pirie: Well I know you have a great resource for people on that, and we’re going to come back to that at the end of the call, we [inaudible 00:18:10] will talk to that as a lot of tactical, practical advice that you have for people.
Chris Pirie: Could we shift a little bit to your current role, and the work you’re doing a the Stanford D School, as it’s called. Could you briefly introduce us, for those of us who might not know, what the D school is and what it’s purpose is in the world?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. So, I am very lucky that right now I am on faculty and have a designer and residence role to do some of this experimental work at The Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford University. This, as you call it, affectionately known as the D school, was created about 14 years ago, by a design visionary named David Kelley, who was a product design major himself as an undergraduate and graduate at Stanford University, and was very moved by some of the classes he took there around divergent approaches to solving problems.
Lisa Solomon: He had a professor there named Robert [inaudible 00:19:15], who wrote a book called Visual Thinking, taught a class called Visual Thinking that ultimately morphed into what we now know as Design Thinking. David Kelley thought very strongly that classes in Design Thinking should be made more available to students outside of just the product design major. So, the D School has been created to help students across all majors and schools at Stanford, and even outside of Stanford, to come and take classes that promote creative agency and confidence.
Chris Pirie: So, anybody studying any kind of major at Stanford can come together, is it kind of like a semester long program, do people get mixed up?
Lisa Solomon: By design, they get mixed up. So, the D School actually, as you pointed out, it does not take applications itself, so you have to be registered as a student in another school, and you are invited to apply to partake in a D School class. They offer about 60 throughout the year, some are for credit and a full quarter, some are actually two quarters, and some are smaller in format. A few years ago, they created their own experimental format of teaching, called a pop-up class, where you can take an evening class or a weekend class. It’s designed to allow their instructor community to take creative risks, and the learners that they invite to take their class to also learn with them, so it’s very, very effective.
Chris Pirie: Well, there’s design thinking as a practice and an approach, seems to be kind of on fire right now, I hear about it everywhere, I’ve seen examples of buildings that have been created using design thinking or programs. Can you perhaps, in case there are people listening who have not had the chance to learn about design thinking, could you give a super quick primer on the principles of design thinking?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. It’s been very exciting to see how design thinking has taken off, really in the last 10 years, across sector and around the world. Design thinking some core fundamental principles to it, one is it looks at understanding problems from the standpoint of the user or the customer or the intended beneficiary of the kind of solution that you’re trying to bring about. So in other words, it’s not about creating something because you want it to be true, it’s about immersing yourself deeply and empathetically into the other users perspective, to understand what are their pains and gains. That’s why design thinking is also known as user centered design, so starting from the user out. So for learners on this call, hopefully they’re now thinking, or listening to this conversation, hopefully they’re thinking well, well my users are the learners within the organizations, so how do I understand what they need from me as someone responsible for creating or administering a learning program or learning agenda.
Lisa Solomon: Design also asks that we get into a discovery mindset, right, that we may have some hunches about what learners need in this case, but we don’t really know until we go and spend time understanding what the world looks like from their perspective. So designers are really good at observation, they’re really good at asking open ended questions, they’re really good at gathering insights from the user perspective by immersing themselves in a variety of design research techniques.
Chris Pirie: The word empathy is a really important word in this approach, right?
Lisa Solomon: It’s a huge word in this approach. So, there are many, many benefits to how design thinking has scaled throughout organizations, I think one of the biggest ones is that it’s helped us develop a sense of how to understand another’s perspective. The empathetic view point is to say, I don’t want to make assumptions about what your life is like or what’s getting in the way from allowing you to do your best work, I want to feel what that’s like on your behalf. In fact, maybe I could even experience it so I can really understand.
Chris Pirie: Right, right. So, that’s sort of interesting in that I’ll think that many of our listeners take orders from leaders in their organization about what to teach, certainly that was my experience, their leaders have strong points of view on the capabilities and the behaviors that they want to see in their organization. What you’re saying is don’t start there, start with the learners themselves, and kind of walk a mile in their shoes to understand where they might need help. Is that a good way to put it?
Lisa Solomon: That’s exactly right, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to ask a learner in your organization, what makes for a great day? When you feel like you’re doing your best work, what has happened? Right? Not even to start with, what do you need to learn, right, because learning is a mechanism to allow them to be engaged at work. So what do makes for a great day? What happens when things get in your way? Can you tell me a story about that? So designers go for vivid stories to unlock insights. They don’t go in there with those predefined questions of, do you want the learning to be administered your mobile phone or through your email? That’s not a design driven question, a design driven question is help me understand when you feel most fulfilled, help me understand the best learning experience that you had and why it was. So designers ask a lot of why questions. So that’s a key part.
Lisa Solomon: I want to just round it out, Chris, though because the discovery piece is just the first part. The second important part of a design thinking process is that when you bring new ideas to life, you have a mindset of rapidly testing it, of coming up with a hypothesis and figuring out how to quickly prototype it in order to get feed back to allow you to understand what about your hypothesis was correct, and what about it needs tweaking. The faster you can get your idea out there and the faster you can get feedback, the faster you can change, and guess what, that’s a mode of learning. So one of the reasons why I love design thinking is that it helps us become better learners.
Chris Pirie: Great, great insight. I think this rapid prototyping with things that you have to hand is really a freeing, a liberating idea where you can try things out without the massive expense of investment of time and get really amazing immediate feedback on the value of the idea or the experiment. I love it.
Lisa Solomon: [inaudible 00:26:08] I would say that a note of caution around this is that if your culture is not willing to absorb something that’s in its earliest form asking for feedback, that can be a little tricky. So I want to encourage your listeners who are within, perhaps, more traditional organizations that are only used to sharing things that are fully polished, for them to use the language that says something like, hey I’m trying something new out, and as a result, I don’t have all the answers yet, would you be willing to take a look at this early draft?
Chris Pirie: We could … there’s one branch of the conversation that could go off now down this sort of growth mindset and the kind of … the value of failure and learning from failure, but I want to resist that thread a little bit, maybe we’ll come back to that in another conversation, but there’s definitely a lot of resonance there.
Chris Pirie: So, we’ve learned about the D School and it’s role at Stanford, and we’ve learned a little bit about design thinking and the sort of practices there. What is your role as designer in residence there and what kind of work do you get to do in this extraordinary place?
Lisa Solomon: Well, a couple things I want to say about the D School and how it’s helping the rest of the world learn [crosstalk 00:27:25]. So, first of that the D School has really done a wonderful job codifying a lot of it’s practices and making them available in various resources online, so I encourage all of your listeners to do that, to go and search for some of those materials because they’re really helpful and as you can imagine, designed with you in mind. The second thing I want to say about the D School which make it a particularly exciting place for the work that I am excited to continue to bring forward, is that as the design thinking process has gotten more popular, it is also realized that the process is an on ramp to learning these abilities that will help us navigate an uncertain world.
Lisa Solomon: So, the D School has been focusing on being intentional by teaching its students to navigate ambiguity, something we’ve been talking about a lot already. It’s been teaching its students about how to navigate between abstract concepts and concrete ideas, so that they can be more comfortable when it’s not obvious what the real problem is that they’re trying to solve. They’re helping students build an understanding in communicating deliberately. How they can get others to understand their ideas and help them move them forward. So it’s been evolving from just teaching a design thinking process that, as we talked about, starts with empathy and user understanding, and building on that a more broad set of skills that helps all leaders navigate this world that we’re living in.
Lisa Solomon: So the work that I have been doing since joining there earlier this year, is to apply some of those practices around how design might inform where some of the technologies are going, or how design could have a place in thinking about some of the implications and the ethical implications of some of the choices that we’re making now. So I’m really extending design by blending in some of these futurist practices and also helping apply them towards these real world unfolding opportunities that are also laden with some potential challenges.
Chris Pirie: Can you give us an example of the kind of program that you’ve been able to put together to do this?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely. So one of the early programs I put together was a learning session around the neuro science of empathy. So as we talked about, empathy is becoming a more widely understood practice for helping understand what learners need from us and perhaps what customers need from us and using it as a strategic capability to really help drive growth and resilience within your organization.
Lisa Solomon: We brought in a colleague that teaches at Notre Dame to understand what are we learning about brain science that will help us be more empathetic practitioners and learners. It turns out that … we learned this from this program, that while our brains are not wired, necessarily, for empathy, they are wired for memory. So when we seep ourself in common experiences, or something in the past that could help us understand the feeling of another, what they may be experiencing on, that turns out will help make us a more empathetic listener.
Lisa Solomon: So we’re trying to explore intentionally some adjacencies around design to make us all better designers and better educators.
Chris Pirie: It strikes me, a couple of things, one is we’re all designers, it’s not just the people who create the technical products we use everyday and the people with the black [inaudible 00:31:07] shirts on. We’re all designing every day in our work, is that fair to say? That these approaches around clear communication, rapid experimentation, empathetic understanding of opportunities are applicable to all of us in all our work, is that fair?
Lisa Solomon: 100% fair. What I like to say to people is that if you make decisions that affect other people, you are a designer, and I just want to pause there for a minute. So, [inaudible 00:31:40] listeners, do you make decisions that affect other people, then you’re a designer. What I mean by that is that you have a responsibility to think ahead of time around what did the person who will be affected by the decision that you’re making need from you? What do they need from you? So that’s a design question. What I say is that it helps to understand that when you design something well, you are delivering functional utility to them. So for all of the learners, right, they’re perhaps learning something that will help them do their job better, or help them be a higher performer in their organization, but equally important, they’re feeling something about that, as well. So a decision that you’re making may help the learner feel excited, motivated, confident, ready, so all of those things can be traced back to the decision that you make. Are you setting them up for success?
Chris Pirie: There’s another topic here that I’d really like you to talk about if you could, Lisa. I think it’s very relevant for the audience. I have personal knowledge of this, you are a great convenor of people. I think you get pretty fired up by pulling together people from different disciplines, as well, and so, sort of two part question is why the multidisciplinary approach in your work, and secondly how do you go about thinking through and designing an event that sort of convenes and brings together people from different disciplines?
Lisa Solomon: Well thank you for bringing that up, that is a passion of mine, in part because I consider myself a lifelong learner and I love learning through conversations.
Chris Pirie: Go team. Yeah. Great.
Lisa Solomon: So, one of the practices I learned early on in working in the field of scenario planning, is that to create great imaginative futures requires a lot of different perspectives to be involved, and that is a gift. We’re now learning more and more that diversity helps spur new ideas, it helps refine ideas more quickly and it helps scale ideas more quickly, because other people can see themselves in the idea. So when you are trying to investigate a new area, or you’re trying to discover something that doesn’t quite exist before, bringing around multiple perspectives to get them to share their insights and knowledge and allow their ideas to recombine in new ways, I think A is a form of creativity and B is one of the most potent forms of learning. So that gets me personally excited.
Chris Pirie: I’ve got it and I think is it because people from different discipline approach problems from different perspectives and different ways, is that where the creative magic comes from?
Lisa Solomon: I think it’s part of it. We all walk around with our own world view of how we’re taking in the information. Some of that we can tap into pretty quickly, and some of that is deeper in, that requires us to create a safe place for those different perspectives to come together. This is important for learning and all learning professionals, it’s also incredibly important for anyone that’s involved in a conversation around diversity and inclusion. Which is another very, very high topic these days. A lot of time people think diversity is about let’s just get different people from different backgrounds around the table, that’s a piece of the equation and it’s far from done. I think to get them to really contribute and to feel like they are invited, fully [crosstalk 00:35:25]-
Chris Pirie: Where the inclusion comes in, right?
Lisa Solomon: That’s exactly right.
Chris Pirie: What I like about the work that you do is that these events that you design, these experiences that you design really help foster that because you’re absolutely right, it’s pointless gathering together a dispersate experts with a broad range of expertise if there’s not a mechanism for them to get in the mindset of sharing and get in the mindset of listening and sort of tackle problems as a collective. You could easily see the potential for a lot of discord in that situation.
Lisa Solomon: Well, that’s right and by no means are my conversations that I design, you know, kumbaya fests, I mean, if you can appreciate that discord and discomfort can lead to great insights and that there’s data in there, and that’s a learning moment, then that can be very powerful. I think the thing that can get in the way is when there’s what I call unproductive friction. That can come when you, in this case, invite different perspectives to the table and you don’t give them proper briefing, you don’t help them understand what the purpose is of the conversation, you don’t connect them to the people that are there to learn from them and they feel isolated, or they feel disconnected. So, a lot of times people will say to me, “wow, Lisa, that conversation was so fantastic, I learned so much, you make it look so easy.” It’s actually a tremendous amount of work.
Lisa Solomon: First of all, ahead of time, to think through all those design choices, and I prep my participants like crazy to help them feel like they are ready to give their best investment forward. I always say to people that work with me, “listen I want this to be easy for you, I want this to be fun for you, and I want this to be high impact for you.” So that means that they are my user. I have to design this for them, and I have to design for the wider audience that is going to benefit from their contribution.
Chris Pirie: What I love about your work that I’ve been personally able to experience, Lisa, is this notion that it is an experience. I think in our discipline we need to move away from training that’s been very transactional, I sign up for a course, I take a class online, I complete a test, so on and so forth, in favor of giving people missions and giving people kind of rich experiences that frame the world in new ways for them and to prepare them to exist in a volatile and uncertain world. That’s probably the best thing we can do for our people today and I love how you’ve approached that.
Chris Pirie: Before we just kind of round out here and give people some side posts to materials that they might be able to access to understand your work a little more, would you share with us something a little personal about your inspiration. Like where did you derive your inspiration for doing the kind of work that you do particularly in the context of learning and teaching. We like to ask our guests what fires them up about what they do.
Lisa Solomon: Thank you for that question, that’s a very easy one for me to talk about because learning was literally built into my DNA. Chris, I’m not sure you know this, but I am the daughter of a chief learning officer .
Chris Pirie: Oh I did not.
Lisa Solomon: Helping leaders within the organizations that she worked with become better leaders by becoming better learners. So, when I was growing up the conversations that we had around the dinner table were around causal loop diagrams, [inaudible 00:39:22] thinking, and reducing variants and learning circles and quality circles. So this was very much seeped into my DNA by my mother who I watched continue to pursue her own passion of learning. She got her PHD later in life and to this day, is one of the best learners that I know. So, I feel so lucky that that was my fundamental model growing up, was a women that was passionate about her work and saw her learning as a vehicle not just for her work but for her life. So that was fantastic.
Chris Pirie: That’s great. Great story, I actually did not know that. So you’re actually in the family business, you’re continuing the family business.
Lisa Solomon: I am continuing the family business, and so it’s wonderful that she is still my best learning partner.
Chris Pirie: Fantastic. I love it. Listen, Lisa, thank you so much for your time, great conversation and just tons and tons of ideas and material that I think our audience will find super useful. Could you give us some side posts on where we could go to learn a little bit more about you and your work?
Lisa Solomon: Thank you, Chris, yeah I know we talked a lot about [inaudible 00:40:35] concepts and one of the things I try to do is to write about some of these ideas and ways that are very useful and relevant and applicable to work everyday. So I want to encourage people to go to my website which has many, many resources and articles and videos and that’s lisakaysolomon.com all spelled out and-
Chris Pirie: That’s Lisa K-A-Y, middle name I assume, Solomon. Got it.
Lisa Solomon: Yes, all O’s, S-O-L-O-M-O-N and it’s a resource page that has a lot of material there. You could also just Google me because there are quite a number of videos that will come up and other articles I’ve written for other publications.
Chris Pirie: Terrific. There is of course … there is access to the D School, they do some corporate learning programs, is that true?
Lisa Solomon: That is true. There is an open enrollment program that they offer a few times a year on design thinking and some of the core principles it is very experiential and very powerful so I encourage some of your listeners to check that out.
Chris Pirie: Yeah and last but not least, there are two books, you’re a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Moments of Impact, which is really about designing strategic conversations and has kind of rich set of tools and actionable approaches for your sort of philosophy on how to design great experiences and conversations. Then a book which I admit I have not read yet, which is your Designing a Better Business book, which is about strategies for innovation, right?
Lisa Solomon: Absolutely and that is very, very useful from the standpoint there are 20 different tools in there and online there are facilitator guides so you can start using some of those practices right away.
Chris Pirie: Lisa, it’s been extraordinary as always, thank you for your time and for sharing with The Learning Futures Group audience your work. We scratched the surface, I’m afraid there’s much more that we could have spoken about but I think people are going to find this super valuable so thank you so much for your time.
Lisa Solomon: Chris, thank you, it’s been a fantastic conversation and thank you for the work you’re doing, it’s really important.
Music: I thought the future would be cooler.
Chris Pirie: Thanks for listening to Learning is the New Working, the podcast brought to you by The Learning Futures Group, and by our friends at Intrepid by Vital Source. Please check them out at www.intrepidlearning.com. They have a fabulous platform for building at scale, high quality learning programs that draws on the wisdom of crowds and really helps you digitize your learning strategy.