Andrew Barry on Transformational Learning [Podcast Ep. #25]

Transcribed from the episode audio by AI, so it may contain mistakes.

Ravi0:19Andrew Barry, thanks for joining me.

Andrew0:21Ravi, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ravi0:24Well, I want to start with a really important question. Can dinner parties really save the world? I figured you'd be a good person to ask.

Andrew0:34Yeah, so you've been reading my blog. Yeah, there was an interesting piece I wrote. It was a reflection actually on five years of dinners that we were hosting with a group of friends where we used to spend summers together six plus years ago. And the opportunity to do that sort of fell away. People were often doing their own things. So we thought we wanted a way to kind of get together and stay together as a group of the eight of us. And so we started a little dinner club.

And I actually got this idea from my parents. We would, there would be a host. There'd be a set of rules for it. And we would have like a mascot that the host would then bestow on the new host. And, you know, I learned, we learned so much from that. We've got this probably 90-page Google Doc now of write-ups from each, first of all, I mean, mostly each other's lives, but also just like comments on the events of the day and, you know, of the time.

And now it's five years of history in that document, And so I wrote this article now during COVID, because we haven't been able to do these events anymore this year And so we started doing a few virtual ones And I just realized how much I've missed it and how much value there was and bringing people together to eat, to talk over a meal like there's something about that element as well, like getting together and discussing something over a meal. You've got this other event to distract you and I think it just like you know, cognitively loosens your, your mind and and people just sharing what they're working on, what their updates in their life.

It was amazing. So we did feel like we solved a lot of the world's problems doing that, and I think I want to encourage everyone to sort of organize dinner parties and to think about like a little bit of formalities around them. Well,

Ravi2:22that's that that is one thing I'm missing in this lockdown. Having friends over, new friends over, I agree. That's, you know, the level of, you know, in some ways there's no topic out of bounds when you have a good deal in front of it. You can just, yeah, whether it's cracking jokes or talking about politics or religion or what have you. you, you can get to some pretty meaty issues while you're eating, whatever you're eating. And it takes the edge off. There's an easy segue to, hey, pass me the salt or whatever.

I mean, it's just, and even, you know, I think back to the dinner parties I would have, it's usually a collaborative thing where everyone's helping, bringing a dish and sharing a story of the dish or helping make the main dish and that kind of thing. Yeah.

Andrew3:12Yeah, those are even the best ones. And yeah, we had a pretty, pretty strict rule as well that whatever happened or whatever was spoken about at the dinner table stayed at the dinner table as well. So just encouraged an environment of really deep reflection and sharing. And, you know, when I wrote that article, I found Emmanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, like, wrote like essays on this and used to do this religiously. And Jefferson specifically talks about how important. It was like how he did business. He would have dinner parties at the White House.

Ravi3:41Yeah, in your article, I. You shared that Jefferson would have like an object for conversation, like an icebreaker, like a jar of curiosity or something curious, you know, talk about. A leader I recently coached is very social and part of the company he runs as a consulting firm, and he's quite well known for hosting gatherings, parties. It could be, you know, happy hours or dinner conversations. and he'll always have like table topics, like topics to discuss or things that can spur conversation that can get it going.

And that was a pretty interesting idea as well, just to use, I guess, you can think of it almost like a creativity hack or tool just to break the ice a bit. Completely.

Andrew4:31And a bit of an agenda to it, It actually helps. So we're doing them now virtually with the same group of friends And we set an agenda and we have like an hour and a half conversation on Zoom, and it just makes so much difference to have that structure to it, and then how generative that then becomes. It's just a guideline, right, so it's. Yeah, it's great, I'm with you as well. I miss that so much and I can't wait to kind of go back to those group gatherings.

Yeah.

Ravi4:56so andrew you strike me as a uh transformative learning expert is how you strike me you know we've just known each other for a few months now and and i've read your blog a bit and followed you on twitter and online. I mean, that's how I see you, a transformative learning expert. I'm curious, how would you describe yourself and what you do?

Andrew5:17Yeah, so I appreciate that. And I think you see that because we share something in common and that we're both lifelong learners. Like, we default to wanting to learn and to grow. And you and I both seek out as many online courses as we can have the capacity to handle, probably more than we have the capacity to handle. And I think that's how I identify myself as a lifelong learner. I'm also a practitioner in the space, and I've been doing this for about 15 years now, starting with a big professional service firm, then working with a startup that was doing some really interesting training in the hospitality industry, and then for the last four or five years with my business.

And, yeah, I think marrying those two things, being an avid learner myself and being a practitioner and helping people teach so that others can learn better, I think it's marrying those two is kind of where I see that identity forming now. And the transformational bits is what's really interesting to me now, especially, because it's really what I think we've seen online courses deliver for us, like truly transformational experiences, which is really exciting. So I've enjoyed kind of deconstructing what goes into making. that happen.

Ravi6:41So you started not doing what you're doing now, which we'll get into in a minute, but you started actually as an accountant. Yeah, I'm fascinated with moments of insight that lead people to make choices and decisions and changes. I'd love just to spend some time if you can share what inspired you to go into accounting wanting to be an accountant, becoming a chartered accountant and then you made a switch and you went into learning and development and then you made another switch to entrepreneurship. So maybe we can trace back that path and what were some of the moments that led you to go from A to B to C?

Andrew7:21Yeah, Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I think the accountancy path was something that I'd settled on pretty early, like end of high school. I was always one of those kids who did really well at school and was like pretty academic and bookish and I think like, in a way, was very steeped in like traditional education, like that whole, like memorization frameworks and you know the getting the, the top marks in class and stuff, and so being growing up in South Africa where I did charted accountancy is like the premier profession for someone who who's you know that that ilk and it was, you know it was just the natural thing to do.

All of my friends like we all kind of did that followed that path. It's one of the most rigorous professional qualifications to get in South Africa and certainly in the world, and so, yeah, so that was just a natural progression and I did it and then got into the profession and then you serve an apprenticeship for three years and I just found I wasn't enjoying the work. It didn't make me tick and I know this is something that. Resonates with you and you I mean, you're a perfect example in your own career of like following that thing that makes you tick and I saw for me what it was.

You know, part of this apprenticeship program which is really great the kind of profession does is you have these. You know, each year you have these. They're very training forward. So you have these like training weeks and a lot of different training events and it's all about, you know, upskilling you so that you can eventually move into an in charge and a manager role. But the thing that drew me was just the people who were delivering those trainings looked like they were having so much fun.

And I just, I just loved, like I just wanted to be part of that. So I reached out to them. I sort of saw how I could help out, like get involved in some of internships. And so it was in that process that I fell in love with the sort of deconstructing what makes a good in that case of counsel And so, and then you know, and then, and then the sort of community part of teaching people, and that was just what made it fun and interesting, And so that was kind of how I got into that path and just followed the, the curiosity and the enjoyment part, And then you know, then you get that's feedback, so, and that sort of internal motivator as well, um, of seeing people click and get it and like there's nothing better for me and that's why I've been doing this for 15 years and we'll continue for the rest of my life when you're an educator or a teacher, like seeing that light bulb moment I know you've seen that with your clients and, um, it's, there's nothing better than that.

That's, that is fuel to continue for months, um, when you, when you've had those little, those light bulb moments. So yeah, I think that's of what got me into in the first place. Being with a big global, you're at

Ravi10:12KPMG for quite a while, right?

Andrew10:14KPMG, exactly. Yeah. And so being a global firm, it got me an opportunity to come here to the States. That was 11 years ago. And so I went from teaching the training in South Africa to developing it here in the US. And so it was both sides of the spectrum. And so that was a really good learning experience. And I've also like, I think also like you have been driven, we talked about this earlier, like the lifelong learning, just driven by wanting to learn more. And so I wanted to know how these courses were built and how they, you know, was set up.

And so that was the opportunity I had here. It was meant to just be for two years, but I loved it so much. I loved the culture and the people that I met in the US and so stayed, And so I did that for about five years And then I made this transition. Where I think I started really getting into this is getting into the entrepreneurship side of what. What was like really cutting edge, because I think even KPMG to this day it's still it's such a big, massive organization and they have so much scale to to deal with from a learning and development perspective that often, like the way it works now they continue to to do it right.

It's not like there is a much of an incentive to like reimagine the way that they train things. I think maybe now with COVID that's probably changing quite a bit, and friends of mine are still there attest to that. But um, yeah, so it was. And

Ravi11:39on that and on that piece you know i recently was speaking with a client who um was delivered it was interesting the language she said she said um my team's my organization they're delivering a leadership training to my organization she said it as if like she was like accepting a package from uPS or something and it

Andrew12:01was very weird

Ravi12:02Like even the language, like they are delivering a training to my organization. I'm like, how generic can does that sound? And then she had the training and we had our session the day after, so it was like a half-day leadership workshop thing and, and she said it felt like the the instructor in the training they were trying to push content and get through a set curriculum in a finite amount of time so everyone can get back to work. And so there was little Q&A, there was little dialogue.

Most questions were punted or addressed to an FAQ. And it was a, it was a live training. Yeah. But it was as if the, the, the, the, the, instead of a PowerPoint, it was just a person speaking the PowerPoints. And that's how it was. And I know I've been, I've been put through the ringer of a lot of these trainings. Um, I don't know if that was your experience because you probably associated with other learning development or organizations and what they were doing in the corporate world.

Is that primarily what your experience was? Did you see examples of people doing it right? What was it like when it was done right versus wrong? I'm just curious what you saw there.

Andrew13:13Yeah, I mean, what you just described is such a, it perfectly encapsulates learning, which learning is not the transfer of knowledge. Learning is the transformation of the student, right? That's like, that's the key difference. And yesterday, my wife is, she also a CPA here in the essence. So she's had to do every three years, a four-hour ethics training. And she took maternity leave this year. And so she's basically catching up on all this training. And it's this, it was, it made me cringe. I mean, it's a four-hour slideshow of someone talking in the top right-in corner.

That's it. That's the training. And it's like, and that's not, that's not, from a company, I think, you know, her company wouldn't have put something out like that, but that's what, you know, the ethics boards are doing for training. And so, yeah, that's just transfer of knowledge. And that's not, no one is learning from that. Transformation of students is primarily peer to peer, right? If you think about just how learning happens organically in the workplace, it's from, you reach over to the person next to you and you say, like, how do I do this thing?

And you talk to someone, like you, you talk to someone else. who's in the same, experiencing the same challenges and going through the same journey as you. And you learn from each other because you've all got these different experiences to bring to it. So that's where the really interesting stuff is happening. And we get to work with some really interesting and forward-thinking companies that are incorporating that, which is kind of cool because it's being able to bring the online course structure that you and I are now familiar with into a corporate setting.

And like, reimagine what that looks like. It's working really well in manager training and onboarding. So anything where, you know, someone is like new in a company or new in a role and needs to kind of up skill. So being able to identify what those skills are and then allowing it's kind of great because there's no like you don't need super bells and whistles to do this. It's just creating the right environment for people to learn from each other and to harness that and amplify that.

That's really that. That's the cool push cutting edge stuff I'm seeing.

Ravi15:24So, so look, just to go back to your, your sort of career arc, so you, what was the move from KPMG to what you're doing now? I mean, what inspired you to go out on your own and do something? Like, how did that transition happen? And what was that moment where you said, hey, I'm going to go do my, do my own thing?

Andrew15:44Yeah, So I did it in two stages. I think the thing I hear now from most people struggling with the idea of leaving the corporate world is it's a huge jump, it's massive right. So for me I did it in two steps and I was lucky in that I have friends who had started a business in south africa. They grew it into a global hospitality training company based in geneva. I helped. I came on board as a head of their learning, helped them kind of crystallize their learning, which they had intuitively figured out a lot of it themselves, but it was like the process of then to deconstructuring why it works for them.

So we put a methodology around that. And then I helped them open a New York office. And they've since been acquired by a company here in the US. And they've all done very well for themselves. But I spent about a year and a half there, maybe two years. It was a good bridge between the sort of more traditional environment of KPMG and like this really kind of pushing the envelope with big hotel chains and doing a bit of business development and that. So it gave me like a little bit of an experience of what it takes to run a business.

which is very different to being a practitioner in the business, right? And that's, so that was a big, and still was a learning curve when I eventually sort of plucked up the courage to go out on my own. That transition, interesting enough as well, was because I felt like I, so the idea was, okay, I'm going to replicate what these guys are doing, but for more traditional corporate clients like my previous company or banks, for example. And I thought I'd lined up a bunch. I had a great network of people that worked at KPMG, JPMorgan, those kind of places.

And so I thought, okay, I'm going to make, I'm going to reinvent their compliance training, you know, and like, and it's going to be a great fit, and everyone's going to love it. And so that gave me the courage to kind of eventually go out, that and a very supporting wife as well.

Ravi17:35Very important part of this whole. Huge,

Andrew17:37Huge, huge, Definitely Like yeah, I mean, I could not have done any of this without it, But it gave me that courage to do that. But then the interesting thing, Ravi, was that I've never done any work with the bank ever like it was. It gave me the courage to do it. I've worked with KPMG in various capacities, but that initial idea is completely morphed into something else, and so one of the lessons I learned was that you have to listen to your market and they tell you what they want, and I came with this very like you know, preconceived idea.

I've done like decks on it and all that sort of stuff and none of that matter, because what they actually wanted was something different. And I think just being open to listening to that and then being like in the early stages is just saying yes, everything. Yeah, we'll do that. We can figure that out. That helped me kind of form what we are now doing.

Ravi18:32And so curious line is the name of the company. How did you find that first client? How did that happen?

Andrew18:41Yeah. So it's such a weird luck. Luck is the answer. Because like I said, I went out, I did all the sort of business development work and the personal network. And with the training business, it's also a very long sales cycle. So it takes a long time to get any of that to bet in. But while I was doing that, it was the first summer of working on my own. Someone reached out to me on LinkedIn who had interviewed at the hospitality training company that I worked at around the same time I was leaving.

And she saw I had worked there. And she was going to reach out to ask me. about what it was like to work there and all that sort of thing. And she didn't end up getting the position and I guess checked in, you know, checked in on me or whatever and thought I had kind of gone off and done my own thing. And so, and she then got a role at this company called 1010 data. And that's really where we got our start. And she reached out and she was new in the role.

So it was a perfect fit, because she wanted to do all these great things. She needed to bring in a content partner and a strategy partner to execute on those. And that's where we started and we started with some small projects with them and, you know, we've we've still friends to this day. We did work together for two years, um, after that, just multiple projects, one after the other, and yeah, so you know, a little bit of luck and just, and, like I said, and that was software, we were doing software training like, and it was something I'd never thought we would do, soft training, you know.

And so since then we've had quite a few software clients. Yeah,

Ravi20:12well i'd love you know many of the listeners are managers, leaders in technology industry, other industries. They care about personal development. They don't necessarily work in training and development, but they care about learning. That's a common theme with many people who read my blog or I work with. And so what have you seen when you look at, say, organizations or teams, what have you seen about how they do learning, how they do development, that you seem to be, that seems to be off not working, right?

What do you see the good, bad, and ugly? And then what do you also see as just some common things that might move the needle? Because I know I can imagine an engineering leader who's running a team of 50 people. They're having to skill up constantly, learn new coding languages, learn new frameworks, acquire companies, integrate their technology. There's constant learning, and there's a lack of time. So if that sets the stage, I mean, what do you typically see in companies that, okay, this tends to be what's broken, this tends to be what works, and this might be a solution to help them climb out of that pit of despair, learning despair.

Andrew21:28Yeah, that's a very, very vivid description. And there's a lot to unpack there. I think the thing that the biggest mistake I see companies make is trying to, and it's because it's the easiest way, is to just buy content, right? Or build it, but often buy it. And so it feels like, okay, it's a Band-Aid. Like, we need to learn, we need to teach everyone, you know, I don't know, let's pick a skill, like to be better coaches of their team. And so let's get someone in or we buy a course on that and we'll, then we're done, right?

taught them coaching. But you haven't implemented it. That's the biggest difference. And so there's a couple of things that come from that, that I think companies could do better and that I've seen work really well at companies that are doing this is create an environment. So there's nothing wrong with bringing in content from outside. I think that's actually very smart because often those people are the experts. But you've got to like, you've got to operationalize it. You've got to be able to implement it. And the best way I've seen to do that is to bring, if it's managers, for example, bring them together to talk about these frameworks, these models that they've learned, that they've learned about, and then to give them specific prompts to take action in the real world.

So let's all meet this week and then, you know, discuss it and what it means to you and what some of the challenges you think are. Let's hear from each other so that you, we can do kind of a group sharing on that. And then go off and actually pick someone on your team and have this discussion and try that that model that we just learned, the four P's or whatever. And then next week, we're all going to get back together again and we're going to discuss how it went and what some of the challenges and what the learnings are.

And we started doing this now with a few companies, actually mostly in the Bay Area. And they, I mean, the one, we finished a six-week learning sprint with, it was a pilot for six VP level, like various, they're like second highest level of management. And every single person that went through it came back. First of all, saying we've never had an opportunity to talk about it like this. So it's cross-functional as well. So they were learning from like legal, finance, HR, right? We've never had an opportunity to talk about this in this level of detail.

And it was like it was a vulnerable space. Like they were sharing like people in their teams that they were worried about. And like, and then other people were giving them advice on how to approach it. So they were learning a lot from that. And then we heard from people in the business, HRBPs that came back and said, you know, this Joe who went through the course is like a different person now. He's a different person. And that's, that to me is transformation, right? Like you've turned this person into a better version of themselves.

They've turned themselves into a better version of themselves by taking action, by reflecting and by talking about that with people. you know and there's not it's not really a secret many like bells and whistles to that right it's like you said this to me before as well it's very human just very human and so yeah so that's where I've seen some of the the really special training happened in the last while why do

Ravi24:40You think people I mean this echoes of the dinner party idea, you know. Get people together talking. Yeah, create. Create the space where you can have good conversation on meaningful stuff, why I, exactly what I witnessed sort of core to my whole coaching process is having space for conversation, taking action and talking about what was learned and realized through that action, living your life, doing your job. It doesn't sound like rocket science, but so few people do it. Even I bump into people who say, hey, I'd love to work with you, but do you have like a course?

Do you have like some video? Do you have a Coursera, Udeme or Coursera version that I can take? My personal feeling is I've started many of those courses. I've finished very few. So it does feel like a simple solution, create space and good dialogue over time. It rarely seems to happen. What I've went is when it happens, it can happen at very senior levels. But, you know, I'm coaching a lot of clients at basic. tech companies there are thousands of managers yeah so i'm just curious why you think more people aren't doing it do they not know do people not value it do training and learning learning and development teams who live and breathe this stuff do they not know is simply time and resource like what's yeah is the blocker here

Andrew26:10it's a good question i think a couple things come to mind it's it's it's execute, you know, especially the beginning. It's, it's also just, it's, it's a lot of work for for the people to go through it to, to, to open themselves up, first of all, to carve out time in their busy schedules, right? So that's, and that's, like, prioritizing, and this is where another problem a lot of companies have, like leadership buying is so, so important to show, so in this program, we had the CEO of this public company, show, you know, show up at the beginning in the end of this learning sprint.

really just drive home, like, how important those sessions were. So that's sort of a key starting point. But, and then people, like, it's a little bit awkward at first. Like, people, you know, they don't, so it feels like a lot of work. Like, unless I talk about challenges on my team. And so that's where a good facilitator comes in to kind of start that conversation. And then one or two people, and then we, you know, my client picked six people that she thought would be a good fit for that.

So it also relies on that cohort, the quality of the cohort. But once you got one and two people going, then that's when it starts to feel easy, That's when it starts to feel like, oh, like we should have been doing this all along. But I think there's this big barrier to entry for a couple of those reasons I said the learning, the leadership, buy-in and the fact that it's just like difficult to kind of get that momentum going of people sharing, you know, their challenges with each other.

And yeah, those are the two big ones, I think, because you know, some of the other more tactical stuff is just figuring out what content to cover what, how to structure that and then how to pre-train people so that you're not wasting a lot of time on transferring knowledge in that sessions you want to respect the time, the hour or hour and a half. You have to really just allow people to talk and actually and that's the last thing I'll say is that it's also for a facilitator.

If it's they're not a professional facilitator, it's quite hard to like be, especially if you're the expert to just actually let most of that session be about the participants talking amongst each other. Right, and just facilitating that, not like not having a strong opinion on which direction it should go in, but just kind of putting the guardrails in place.

Ravi28:30That, you know, it's a great point. And most professionals, I believe, come in expecting to be taught, like they were taught in college or places. Yeah, yeah. So they're going to sit, kick back with their coffee. and just sort of multitask while they take it in. Exactly. So there's a level, there's almost an expectation setting of, no, you'll be speaking and thinking. I mean, I was closing with a client this week who was a senior leader at Facebook, engineering leader. You were wrapping up, sort of one-on-one coaching.

And I caught him at the end of the day. Okay? He's had back-to-back since 7 a.m. And we're closing, and I had some questions, I asked. What is he learning about himself? What is he learning about what's useful for him and his team and his life? And a few other questions. And I gave him the questions and I just said, I actually emailed them ahead of time, knowing full well he wasn't going to see it. And he didn't. He's like, yeah, I just, there's no way.

I didn't even look at it. Like, great. Take 10 minutes now and reflect on these questions. I mean, 10 minutes, it wasn't that much time. I would have loved to give him half an hour. 10 minutes, reflect on these questions, jot down some notes, and then we'll talk about it. And he looked at me and he said, and he was smiling when he said, he said, this is a multiple select question, right? Like, you're going to give me options like a checkbox? I don't have to actually think and create.

And he was joking, but the point was his mind had sort of been wrung out like a wet sponge. And then, of course, after a few minutes, he settled. and was able to really connect with his learning. But what you're saying definitely makes sense. There's a level. It's like, I don't know what to call it, effortless effort. Like there's effort, but once you get going, you're in a groove. It's like the stone that you get in. But that initial breaking the ice, the train facilitation is, I mean, myself as a coach, this is a hard, hard thing to.

It's a skill. Yeah, it is a

Andrew30:38skill. Yeah, 100%. And another thing I'll say is. as well, it's not, what I'm finding now is that there's less and less, I think, emphasis on assessment. Like, it's more, you mentioned, it's like reflection. That's what's important. If the learner's connecting with their personal meaning and reason for, for learning that skill, they're going to get so much more out of it because they're getting, they're connected with why they are doing it. Whereas you don't, like, at the end, like to coach people, okay, what was the model, what are the four P's in this model like that?

I mean, that's meaningless, right? it's where you can apply that.

Ravi31:11Which is how we're taught in school, unfortunately. Exactly, exactly. So this is the problem. No, again, with this client, we shared it with the leadership training, they learned a specific model. And I actually, a mentor of mine who went into business consulting, then became an executive coach, trained psychologist. And so he had a private practice for 20-some years. And I have utmost respect for psychology. My wife is a therapist, I have utmost respect. But he was sharing how he learned 77 models in his doctoral program.

77 different models that he had to understand, digest, practice, and use. And he said at the end of the day, it became so much, he just sort of, as he worked with clients discovered a way of being with the clients that was useful. And he might pick a model here and there, but it was not about the models. But often in business, I find that's the case, too. I mean, I was looking at Amazon, there were last, in the U.S. U.S., 150,000 leadership, if you could just type leadership, like, between e-books and books, it's infinite.

Andrew32:17It's infinite. Yeah, I think one thing I'll say to all the managers and people that are leading teams out there that are listening to this is another thing you can think about is just curating that knowledge for people. That's an incredibly valuable offer or service to provide to your team because, you know, It's really just about like them knowing where to access the content when they need it. They don't need to memorize any of this stuff. But if they know which one of those books you should read and maybe in what order and, you know, like that, and videos and all those great content that's out there, that's a huge value at already and gives everyone kind of a bit of an unfair advantage to know where they're accessing.

And we have tools

Ravi33:00now. We have, you know, wikis, even corporate networks. You can build wikis and or use your, your flavor. of one-note, ever-note notion, wrong. Pick your thing. You can sort of crowdsource knowledge and wisdom from the group organically as it would suit your team. So if you're just managing a five-person team, it's like what's working for you. Yeah.

Andrew33:24I love that. I started doing that with my team now. We have one channel on our Slack. It's learning and we outpost a video in there or whatever. And I'll sort of encourage, like, I need it to the beginning. But now it's just people just start putting their notes. from that video underneath it. And it's just, it's amazing because, you know, you read through how other people, what's resonating with them, and you pick up so much more nuance to that. And then it's the shared experience, the shared knowledge within the group, you know?

Now you're all thinking and talking the same language.

Ravi33:55Makes onboarding a lot easier. I used to do that with my teams. I mean, this was back in the room. A while ago, we didn't quite have all the tools we have now, but I mean, we just have a word doc on SharePoint, right? Very corporate. We have a Word Doc on SharePoint with a big table of contents, and everyone, every time I started creating a template, every time we'd hire someone, I typically have a, you know, they'd have their manager, either it was me or someone else, and then they'd have a mentor.

It was more like a peer friend to help And the mentor was responsible for updating that Word Doc and making sure that it had everything they needed And then, as they ramped up, they would then add to it. So it would be this evolving document of just tips and tricks and people to find talk to and things to go and books to read and like sort of implied or not inside baseball on the team and how it operated. It became a quite nice artifact and got the team in the learning mode.

I don't want to overblow it but but for me it felt like it got everyone involved in helping each other learn and grow and sharing knowledge. If they read a good book or read a good the HBR article or had a good conversation with a peer team to capture some of that, so it's not lost, which I feel like in tech, so much wisdom is lost. Yeah, people change every two years change.

Andrew35:19News change companies, yeah, yeah. I think that's really interesting point that you're making here, because one of the probably the number one challenge I see my clients having in the B2B space in a learning sense is how to create. They come to me with this question how do I create a culture of continuous learning? How do I create a team of lifelong learners? Right, that's like if we are working on this and I, if we can crack this, I think that is solving almost every business is a biggest challenge like that, if you get, if your entire company as this culture of learning like you, you have this incredible force field around you.

Right, It's just you're generating so much knowledge and you've got ways to. So I've talked about, I've written quite a bit about this flywheel idea and something we're working on for next year. I mean, if you can create that flywheel, you can just start feeding in content. And that's really all you need to do. Like the people take care of that themselves and the sort of spreading of that knowledge and the sharing and the teasing out, the crowdsourcing, like you say. So, yeah, I think that's such a great example that you just share there as well of how to go about, how to think about creating this culture of continuous learning.

Ravi36:35So maybe we can talk a little bit about the flywheel. Like what is it? So I can see why that matters. And for me, there's from a state of mind perspective, what learning seems to do for me is gets me focused on the journey versus the outcome, the process versus the reward. And from a coaching standpoint, in a psychology standpoint, there are clear benefits of that. Lower stress, more clarity, less pressure. Of less pressure, they perform better. They collaborate better. So the learning focuses seems to be more of a present focus versus a future, even though you can have learning outcomes.

It really gets you out of this, you know, charge the hill, plant my flag at the top mentality. Yeah. Which, while having a vision is important, that mindset. can get in the way of burning and just collaboration in general. But can you speak a bit to what you mean by a flywheel? Yeah.

Andrew37:38So an important point, I think, to lead into this is to say that you know, a lot of senior executives have trouble sometimes letting their team go off and do training because they think it's like taking them away from their work. And part of what the flywheel is trying to say and show is something that I think you and I both agree is just doing is learning like you're. You're learning every single day on the job, just doing the work that you're doing, having conversations with people on your team, with clients, all of that.

So the idea of like you saying that wiki and like having a mechanism for people to share, that is a very important component of this. So it's basically there's like there's four components to it. There's the learner, which is everyone, that's all of us and the peer, and that's also all of us. Right, but in that relationship between you and your peers, As learners learn from peers, they develop skills and become experts. So that's the third element. And experts are people, subject matter experts within organizations who've built up that institutional knowledge that is evolving all the time.

And so you can feed it with outside content, but you need to have thought about how that organic knowledge works, right? because even with culture, the company culture is changing all the time as when people are getting at it. So you need to have some way of capturing that organically. And then experts and the knowledge that they create feed into teachers and teachers slash mentors. I sort of see those two as distinct roles, but two very important in terms of amplifying the knowledge that experts have accumulated.

And then teachers in teaching learners become learners themselves. So that completes that firewheel from learner to peer to expert to teacher back to learner. And if you can see that with one program, like that learning sprints I talked about, that six-week program, everyone who went through that is now eligible to be a mentor for the next one. And so now when you talked about like you've got, you know, maybe 15 senior level management and 150, you know, mid-level management, you can now scale that kind of learning sprint.

by having those alumni of those initial ones lead ones with their team and have 10 managers join those. And you've got all these sort of learning sprints happening around whatever content is needed at the time. And that's the part that you can just feed and just drop in like whatever the content you've identified is the most high leverage, I guess.

Ravi40:14Yeah, I don't know if what just popped into my mind is maybe as part of this is, and another thing missing, in the way I see training done today is having students be the teacher. You know, there's this kind of, like, I used to often hire vendors and trainers to come in and do workshops for us and train us on stuff. Yeah. And you get someone who has expertise and there's a ton of value in that, right? Yep. But then I, I think about myself, you know, I used to teach yoga.

And I remember I was like totally like a yoga nerd, right. And then one day Lisa, my teacher studio owner, said you know, Ravi, you really love yoga. You want to learn, right? I'm like, yeah, like I want to master handstand on duos. She's like, well, you start teaching? Yeah, Like no, I'm not ready. She's like no, if you want to learn, like, teaching is how you learn, Yeah. So there's that kind of aspect to it as part of this loo, As part of this loop, having students maybe moderate and facilitate and yeah, yeah.

And I think that's also just a different way of relating to what it means to be a teacher, what it means to be a leader and facilitator, like, if you're a brand new boss, well, why can't you teach what it means to manage? Why not? You see it fresh, why not? Yeah.

Andrew41:44Yeah and yeah. I love that and and I imagine us. I invite your listeners to and viewers to imagine this. Now you've got so you've got. What's great about that is you've got so when you're teaching. It forces you to clarify your thinking right, and you've got to be able to explain it at first principles to people. So now imagine that's happening across your organization. Imagine now you've got 15, 20 senior level managers doing that for for their next level and it's so. I mean you can't not get the, the essence and the culture of that company embedded in people's minds like that, right?

Like, it's just, it's so scalable.

Ravi42:24Yeah. Well, I see, I see a lot of potential there. Just, I want to, I want to switch gears a little bit and just talk about you just for the last few minutes. And as a lifelong learner, I'm curious for you, you know, what learning curve or curves are you on? Where is your growing edge in your business and your life?

Andrew42:44Yeah, that's a great question. I think the one of the first that come to mind for me a big one for next year is systems thinking, like really starting to deconstruct my business into its component parts and all the systems that make that up, that make up the overall system of that business. Because I think, like most business owners when they get started, I've been working. You know, right at the beginning it was me doing all of the creating, all the training, and so you know, I've slowly built up a team over the over the last few years, but it still relies a lot on me being in the business as opposed to working on the business, and a huge component of that for me is systems thinking, um, and so we've been building SOPs throughout the year and you know we've got those kind of things in place, but it's there's a more macro level of a standard operating procedures yeah, um, for for various things, but that's a that's a micro level and it helps with the little things.

But we need to, we need to be thinking more macro, like how, how. Can this system function without me? To be honest, I mean, that's kind of the a goal here if this thing is going to be sustainable. So that's a big one. There's quite a few great thinkers and books on this topic, And so I'm going to be definitely investing a lot of time in that. I will be getting back into Notion in a big way, because I see that as a great tool to make systems thinking come to life and be able to share that with the team.

So, yeah, and then I think the other one is just how to become a better manager. You know we do. We get to make a lot of this great training for companies like page duty and Pinterest and now and I've learned a lot from that but I need to invest in in my own skill at doing that, because the system still relies on people, right, and I need to be able to empower them to do their best work. So, yeah, I there's a never-ending amount of knowledge out there and skill that that I'm just I'm excited to start on those two things.

Ravi44:47and if people would like to learn more about you about curious lion about what your company does where should they go

Andrew44:53Yeah, so curious lion learningcom. We've got a little resources section, which, which should be a good place to start with some of my essays. We have a podcast called how did you learn that you were on recently, which is actually got someone complimented me yesterday on that episode, by the way, and yeah, it's just fascinating conversations with people to really unpack cognitively and you know process-wise how they learn something. So, and then we'll be releasing an online course next year as well on on this topic.

So, yeah, that's that's the best place you can email me at andrew at curious lion learningcom, and on twitter at bazzeruto, which is b, a, z-z-z-a-r-r-----------.

Ravi45:37awesome while Andrew it's been a pleasure take care and happy learning

Andrew45:41thank you for having me here Thank you.