44. Choosing College: Bob Moesta and Michael Horn on Why We Hire Education

Hi, this is Clay Christensen, and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call the Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at hbs, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them, and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful.

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Hi, this is Chris Dyek, and you're listening to the Disruptive Voice. I'm here today with Michael Horn and Bob Mesta to discuss their new book, Choosing how to Make Better Learning Decisions throughout yout Life. Michael is a speaker and writer who serves as the head of strategy for the Entangled Group and as a senior partner for Entangled Solutions. And he's calling in from New York this morning. So thank you for doing that, Michael.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Bob is one of the principal architects of the Jobs To Be Done theory and the founder of the Rewired group. We had an excellent discussion about his book this morning, and I am looking forward, very sincerely, to continuing that discussion with you. So, Michael, in September, you and Bob were featured on your podcast Future youe, which you co host with Jeff Salingo, to discuss this book. And I thought that conversation was a great introduction to your findings and your writing process. So I'd like to treat today's conversation as an opportunity to delve deeper into the theory of jobs to be done and some of the advice you offer to entrepreneurs and educators in part three of the book. But we can begin with some broader themes. So can you tell us basically what the book is about and why you chose to present the material in this way?

Yeah, absolutely. And Bob chime in, of course. But, you know, it was interesting. We obviously wanted to help students understand, and parents, frankly, also understand why they were going to college and why they were making the choices that they make. Because so many books and advice and the industry really around choosing college is built around which school and how do I get in and all these other questions. And no one ever steps back to say, what's, what's the actual reason? What's your purpose? What's your motivation? What is your collective set of driving forces that is pulling and pushing you to choose the school that you do. And our research through the jobs we done lens, of course is obsessed with that question of why. Why are you actually making the choices that you do and what's the causality behind it. And so as we unearthed these different sets of reasons that drive people to make the choices that they do, some clear advice fell out. As you know, it's interesting, when Bob and I were working on this and writing it, we basically, we had sessions in Detroit where for each job we would just hit record and talk through the job and basically go through, this is what we really want to tell people. This is what we want to make sure people understand about this job. This is the advice we want people to take from it and so on and on. And then I'd go back and take that recording and basically turn it into prose and, and really try to chunk it up in a way that is really meant for a self help type book to really situate yourself in the job that you are in and then give very clear advice. Much of the famous book, how to Talk so Kids Will Listen does with cartoons use the same tactic here to give parents really clear advice of if you're having this type of conversation, this is what not to say and this is what to say to help coach your child through the decision that they have and really help them prototype an answer to what should be next.

That said to me that there are multiple audiences that this book is aimed for. And that was interesting to me to think, how's a parent going to read this? How's a student going to read this?

Well, I think we drank our own Kool Aid on this one. In terms of framing the jobs that the book will do, what struggling moments is this actually targeted towards? Which is there's a couple, which is the student trying to figure out how do I pick a college? What am I going to do when I go to college? How do we actually just make explicit the implicit things that are going on? I think part of the thing that's a little hard about this is most people don't like to think they're predictable. And so the fact is what we were able to do though is find these kind of underlying causal mechanisms of why people do what they do the other job. So one is just helping the student, whether it's an 18 year old, a 35 year old, a 60 year old, why in the world are you going to go pay some money to go back to either college or to a boot camp or even to an executive like what are you trying to do and how do you make sure that you frame it in the right way, because by framing it in the right way, you can actually make better choices. The other one was, then, how do we actually help schools understand how to serve better? Because they're treating everybody exactly the same. And so this was, how do we actually open the eyes? Like, the struggling moment is the classrooms are getting more and more diverse. Literally, people. We have more and more people coming, but they're not necessarily as satisfied. And the reality is, what do we go do next? And so the whole point was, is that part of it is that they're trying to figure out how to add new courses when they really should be actually figuring out how to actually add better services to help students make progress.

And that's organizing around the job to be done.

Exactly right. Exactly right.

Gotcha.

I think the aspect here is that we talk about context creates value, but contrast creates meaning. And so part of this was also to kind of help people realize why you're not going to school, you're not going for these reasons. And so part of it is to be able to at least help them kind of share what it is. Because, again, everybody asks, like, where do you want to go? Think of it. When you go on vacation, you go to Expedia, the first thing they ask is where. The first question they should be asking is, why do you want to go on vacation? When's the last time you went on vacation? What's the outcome you want from the vacation? But nobody asks that. They ask, hmm, let's go to Cabo. Okay, it's just the wrong question to ask in the beginning.

It's not asking about the reasons.

That's interesting. That's right. And so most people are worried about. The last question you probably ask is where to go, and then you buy. And so nobody's actually helping people with the first part of that question, which is, why do you want to go? What do you want to get out of it? Why now? And what's it worth to you?

The really important framing of what Bob just said is if you understand people's why and they make a choice inconsistent with that, why, or that puts them in a vulnerable position, shall we say, it can have disastrous outcomes. Particularly today, where people take a lot of debt, pay a lot of money to go to college, and if you don't graduate, then you don't get the bump in earnings that you do with a degree, and you're on the hook for all this debt. And so making sure that as you make these choices, you actually complete and you've set yourself up for success is huge. And we found that your entering Y had a lot of predictive power in how you'd frame the rest of the experience and whether it was a good fit for where you were in your context or not. And so being able to identify, but as Bob said, even more importantly, say, oh, this isn't where I am right now. Hugely helpful. Just as a quick example, I think the book probably is going to resonate less with people who are not in this decision making moment right now. But I was speaking yesterday at Google and the student happened to be in the audience. She's a community college student looking to transfer right now. And she was like, oh my God, this is incredibly helpful because I'm literally living these three things right now. You said, and this is going to help me frame my trade offs that I have to make between these decisions as I figure out where to transfer. And so it deeply resonated with her. In the heat of this decision making moment, I do suspect to Bob's point of which, you know, what's the job to be done when you're reading the book? It's probably going to resonate less with someone who's not in the middle of that decision making point right now.

That's right, that's right. I remember we got a review from somebody saying like, and they weren't in the middle of it and they gave it kind of like, well, it's just, it's just, you know, it's an okay book. And we're like, you know, and I literally texted Michael and said like, it worked. Like when they're not in the job, they can't see the book. I'm like, that's the sign of a good book.

Awesome. So can we shift to looking at the underlying causal mechanisms and how you derive those from the data? So you did all these interviews and then Jobs to be done has a kind of structure. Could you talk about what that structure is? The forces of progress, how you came to those?

Yep. So there's really two main structures we talk about. One is called the forces of progress, which are these things that happen to you that basically put you in the position to say I should do something different and change. The underlying premise is that we're creatures of habit and we'll just keep doing what we're doing until there's some push mechanism to say like, you know, this is not good enough or we need to do better or this has to change. And so part of this is as we hear these stories, we actually do the interviews in a story format around basically everything from what was the first thought of when you thought you should go to school? What was passive looking, meaning things that happened in life that made you think you should go to these different schools. Then when you actively looked what had happened and then what are those trade offs and then how did you decide? And so ultimately what we're trying to do is prepare people for the trade offs they have to make to go to school. There's just no ideal school. Like it's either too expensive or it's too far or it's not the right people or like, like it's too big, it's too small. But there's all these trade offs you have to make and being able. When people make trade offs, they feel like they're sacrificing. But the reality is, is, is what it's actually doing is prioritizing your values to say like this is more important than that to me and make sure that I am satisfied for these reasons, not those. And so what we do is these interviews. Then after we do the interviews, we codify them into what we call pushes. What's, what is the context when I, you know, when I don't know what to do next or when I know the job that I like, the career I want and I need to get a certificate to get the job. It's like when about these things and then there's these outcomes and we would call them polls. There's things that, so going to the school. So I will be seen as one of the. I'll have the right, what's the phrase?

Pedigree.

The right pedigree I will be. It's not pedigree, it's more like so I will be respected in the field because I went to this school. But the reality is there's also this frictional components which are anxieties about the new. Is this too far away? Is it too big a class? Can I really step up to this? Can I afford this? Do I really want to do this? Do I know what I want to do at all? There's a whole bunch of anxieties that play into this, that end up kind of playing into those trade offs you have to make. And then there's the habit of do I really need to change? Do I really need to, you know, do something different? Do I really need to go get my master's? Do I really need to go to school? Can I go get a job? And so part of it is taking those stories and then codifying them. In a very. Almost what we would say is the energy, which is the social, emotional and functional energy that they have to extend or expend to get them to go to school. And so by understanding that, we can then see patterns. And those patterns is what came out. So after, you know, over 100 interviews and literally hearing multiple stories of people going to school, we came back to these five underlying causal patterns we call jobs.

We did one of these this morning. We kind of psychoanalyzed my journey here. But, Michael, this is something I actually wanted to bring in. I wanted to get to your process for choosing hbs. So maybe this would be a good way to kind of transition from this to that.

Yeah, absolutely. Bob, you want to interview me or Michael? Yeah, I've done all this once. With me. Yeah.

Yes.

Well, let's start with. Let's talk about the context you were in as you were looking to go to get your mba. Like, where were you? What was going on? What was your undergrad in? Just give us a little background.

Yeah, absolutely. So I was a Yale history major, which was fascinating, but doesn't necessarily lend to an obvious next step. I was the 911 senior class. So as 911 hit, I was working a lot at the student newspaper at the time as a managing editor. And literally it was like 80 hour weeks for the next several weeks. And that was during recruiting season for investment banks and consulting firms, which had sort of been my hypothesis of what I might do, but then lost interest in those things because I wanted something more civically minded, if you will, and frankly didn't have the time to do the recruiting. And. And then.

So wait a second, Michael, I gotta step back. So you just didn't get a job?

I didn't apply to a job.

Right. So it's a combination of the fact of, like, there was something in your life that literally, like, said, okay, you know, this is going on, this is more important. And as it came to it, it's like, you know what? I didn't apply and I missed the recruiting season. So now what am I gonna do?

Somewhat, although more conscious than that, I'm actually interviewed in a Newsweek article by David Brooks during the period where I say I was about McKinsey. And I'm consciously not doing that. I'm applying to CIA, Teach for America. Yada, yada, yada. Got it.

But also to step back out. Oh, sorry, Michael. Just to zoom back out for our audience. This is, you know, in conducting a jobs interview, you will do this kind of interrupting, breaking into the reasoning why people are making the choices they're making.

And challenge them on it and challenge them on. And what you'll realize is I'm actually going to say what it's not like I'm going to actually go too far to make him fix it. So the method itself is built on criminal and intelligence interrogation methods, not quote, market research. And so part of this is to actually understand those causal mechanisms of like, so I just took it too far so he could actually bring it back.

I see.

So that's just a little part of the technique that we're using as we do this. And there's a great book of Never Split the Difference that really talks a lot about these techniques.

Excellent.

So go ahead, keep going. Mike. Michael, Action.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll fast forward a little bit. Just ended up having an opportunity through my network to get introduced to David Gergen who was a trustee at Yale and basically got to work for him for a two year job as his research assistant. And Bob, I'll probably preempt you a little bit. It was basically because I didn't know what I wanted to do next. It was a job where you would meet a lot of interesting people and learn a lot of interesting things and everything from politics to business to international relations, etc. Just get a ton of exposure working and writing. But it was limited for two years and so that's what I ended up doing after college ultimately and self consistent with the civic minded purpose. But it was also a way to spend two years trying to learn more.

And how did you finally get to hbs and where else did you get accepted?

Yeah, so as sort of the second year of the Gergen job dawned, if you will. Every one of his prior people had gone on to law school and I had like a passing interest in constitutional law, but I was really interested in business and actually getting away from writing and getting away from politics. I already noted with where I am now. But I was dying to get into business essentially and felt like a joint JD MBA would be the way to do it. And so I prepared for the lsat, I prepared for the gmat, et cetera, et cetera. I applied to way too many schools, 11 schools I want to say, in the JDM MBA program. So law school and business school got into lots of places for both law and business, got into HBS for business, did not get into Harvard Law School. And you want me to play out the story of how the choice got made?

Yes, that's where we're headed.

Yeah, yeah, I'll run to it. But essentially, here I am, sitting there, going back and forth between this and. My parents came up to Boston and visited me for a weekend, and I took them to the Harvard Business School campus. And we were walking around, and it's gorgeous. You see all the connections that can come from it. It's sort of this idyllic place to spend a couple years, in many ways and so forth. And my dad looked at me and he was like, this is ridiculous. You don't want to be a lawyer. You're going to Harvard Business School. Like, we all know this is what's gonna happen.

Well, and the other. The other part of the story, though, is both your parents are lawyers, and so the whole thing is like. It's like laws there. They're like. They're kind of like, yeah, like, we know where this is going. You should go here. They gave you permission.

Yeah. My dad is like. He's been saying this to me for months. Like, you don't want to be a lawyer. I know who you are. You're not. You're gonna suck at law school. You don't like doing that sort of work. This is never going to work for you. And so I basically came to the conclusion a couple days later that, yes, I would go to hbs, and then I would just reapply to Harvard Law once I was at hbs, literally. I arrived at hbs, and within two weeks, I was like, this is really fun. I don't want to be a lawyer, and I'm not applying to law school. So I just did the business school route and really enjoyed my two years there. I'll let you jump in and psychoanalyze.

So this is. Chris and I were talking about this. Psychoanalysis is like. It goes below the table, and we're not going to go into kind of the Freudian piece of it, but more, it's like, what are the underlying causal mechanisms? And, like, if you think about the Gergen job, it was really about helping you escape so you could actually explore more and figure out what you really wanted to do, as opposed to go get, if you will, a real job, because it actually had a timeframe on it. And then when you got there, it was like, how do I get it? It's either how do I get into my best school, right, and know what I want to do? I still don't know what I want to do in business. But the fact is, if I'm going, school is going to actually uncover it for me, and I'll figure it out when I'm here as opposed to stepping it up, which is, hey, I know I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to go build product and I want it like going to the business school will get me everything I need to actually go do that. So because it was less concrete and more about kind of getting to the best place. My thing is you're in job one.

To come to Harvard 1,000%. And I will tell you, coming into this process and for listeners that don't know the five jobs we unearthed really briefly. One was help me get into my best school, sort of best for its own sake. It's all about the act of getting it in and then figuring it out. The second is help me do what's expected of me. So it's all about doing what someone else expects of you. Third is help me get away, which Bob alluded to, you're running from something, but not necessarily towards something. Fourth, help me step it up. So this is what I'm doing right now. I can't keep doing. And I have a pretty good, clear vision of what I'm moving toward. And it's now or never to step it up. And then the last one helped me extend myself. So life is pretty good. But I've always wanted to learn more, challenge myself, be more, do more. And now I'm going to clear the time and budget in some way to go do that. If you had asked me going into this process, why did I go to hbs? And I would have said, well, I needed to transition into business and sort of get that pivot point. And I probably would have guessed that I would step it up. But when you look at the actual chain of events that occurred and the actual decision making process, not what I said, not what I wrote in my application, which was a compelling vision of an entrepreneurial world in the developing world around starting news media organizations. The actual thing that triggered me was this notion of being in the best and this sort of idyllic atmosphere and having this classic experience experience and being able to figure it out. And so Bob's exactly right. I mean, I was so clearly in to help me get into my best school, which frankly mirrored my undergrad choosing process as well. In retrospect, and probably therefore, it's less of a surprise that at the end of that experience I ended up writing and still somewhat connected to public policy, working with Clay.

But the important part is, again, none of these jobs are good or bad. It's not one or the other. It's like. But knowing that your aunt helped me get into my best school, Most people think it ends when you get in.

Getting in is the trigger to actually moving into a new job where you're in a new context and trying to figure it out.

So that's what Chris and I did at breakfast. He joined me for breakfast this morning, and we walked through. And the way I think you read it was there's these jobs are kind of static, and it's like, no, the jobs change because when you go into something, your context changes. And the moment your context changes, you're now in a new job.

Right.

And I didn't know that I was in Help me Get Away.

Yeah.

By the time I was midway through what I was doing at Middlebury, and that was really interesting to me.

So he said, yeah. So Chris walked in with, I want to be a neurologist. I want to be in neurology. I'm all about the brain. And he got to the point where he's like, you know, like, he got halfway through Middlebury and kind of said, like, yeah, like, wait, I'm not sure I want to do this anymore. And I was like, but if I don't do this, what do I do? And it was like, oh, my God, help me. And he literally took a semester off and then came back and said, okay, I want to study theology. And so the whole notion was, I don't know what I want to do, but theology is going to give me a lot more options to think about things. And merging neurology and theology was pretty interesting, and so how he came to those things. But he figured all that on his own without the book. And the book is there to really kind of provide some structure to, again, not be judgmental, but to say, like, if you're gonna help me get away, help me get away is about exploring, helping. Help me get away is about actually, like, okay, let's unplug. Let's. Literally. Usually you're in a pretty stressful situation. How do you actually get. Get centered again? And then how do you actually start to explore different things you can do? And then once you find it, it's like, all right, now let's pull it in to step it up. Then you become. And step it up. Like, I know what I want to do, and I got to go through these things to get it. So it's the dynamic aspect of these jobs that are really powerful, but it's very hard to kind of articulate in the book. So this book is really kind of geared towards. Let's just talk about what the jobs are and Helping people make, if you will, static decisions. But the reason why the subtitle is there is because we're all lifelong learners. And if we actually understand that, like, I want to extend myself, it's like, yeah, I don't need an A and extend myself. I want to actually go learn from other people. I want to be networked. I want to, you know, I'd rather go take an executive ed class than a class for an A or a B. I don't need grades.

Right.

And so you start to realize what you're willing to trade off to get.

One more editorial on that. Because I think a lot of people, when they hear the milkshake story or they hear the job names that we just laid out for this, they focus on just the name itself and forget that a job is comprised of lots of underlying pushes and pulls and anxieties and habits. And the pushes and pulls, for example, are multifaceted. And something I came to appreciate in the course of this, of working on this with Bob, is that human beings are complicated. We don't do things for just one reason. It's really sets of reasons that move together. And just for those listening, I think to remember that when Bob says, help me extend myself, that's made up of several different forces that are pushing and largely, in that case, pulling you towards something. And it's important to really visualize it or think about it in the context of that set of reasons, not just the narrow name that we gave it.

That's exactly right. And I think the reality is that embedded in each one of the names is actually a very different value code of what's important, what you're willing to give up and what you truly want. And a priority. What's important. So we actually have an app, if you go to choosing college, and there's an app that goes with the book, and it'll literally walk you through and let you take the test. And it'll walk you through the questions of, you know, as you're going to school, what best describes why you need to go to school now? What's your context and what's it more about and what it's not, what's it more about, what's less about? And then we ask about. Tell me about kind of the. What your expectations are and when you. You know, what's gonna happen because you're gonna go to college. And it's like. And it's again, what's it more about? What's it less about? And then we ask about anxieties and same way. And so the reality is, when we see those patterns form, it literally then can tell us kind of where, which job you kind of land in, or, you know, you might be between two jobs, but it's literally, you know, it's not this job and it's not that one, it's these two. And so given that, here's what our recommendations to be thinking about are. And again, giving people ways to frame it as opposed to being prescriptive about it.

One question that I have kind of thinking through how educators and administrators in higher ed can use these theories is to kind of reconcile what will happen, the predictions of the theory with, say, the mission of the school. Because schools are often mission driven institutions. And I was at a liberal arts college and I mean, who knows what that mission even is. But interestingly, Harvard itself does not have a mission. Harvard Business School has a mission, but the university, I looked this up does not have a mission. But for schools where there is a specific mission, let's say that, you know, whatever, HBS's mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Something like this. What if they do this research on why people are coming to HBS and they find out that the predictions of the jobs theory are in tension with what they want to do? What does a school do about that?

Well, I believe the fact is that. So it's an interesting dilemma because it's almost like the educational dilemma, right? Because at some point in time, the fact is that when people come to a school and they don't get what they wanted out of the school, who do they blame? They blame themselves. And so the fact is, like, well, I was an investment banker. I really hated it. I hated the hours. I figured I could come to HBS to find another place to where else I could go in the world, and I end up right back in investment banking. It's like I wanted to, but I just couldn't make it work. So the reality is that at some point in time, they never blame the institution for it. But the reality is that's why the book is written to say, try to be explicit of what you're doing, because at some point in time, the school is designed to actually like when you, at least at Harvard, your internship is usually in the industry you came from. So if you actually want to find a new industry, it's really hard to do that. And there's nobody there to facilitate it because you're literally so competitive in the classes to learn everything that you don't have a moment to say Like, I want to figure out what not for profit is.

Like, this is the internship after your first mba.

Yeah.

Your first year.

Right.

And so part of this is that there's things they could probably do to help, which is like, hey, are you in help me escape or help me get away? It's like, so then set up internships that would be in different things as opposed to in the same things.

Michael, do you have any thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, I think part of this is one of the things that comes out of our research, I think, is that despite a lot of the surveys right now that say all students are going to get a job, and I think higher ed has sort of pushed back against that and said, well, you know, we're not built around helping you find a lowercase J job, essentially a career. Right. And I think actually a lot of the people in the jobs that they are in coming to school, they need a chance to figure out who are they. It's a self discovery process. What are my strengths and weaknesses? What do I like and dislike? What am I passionate about? Questions around how can I contribute to my family, community, society, whatever it is that they may have to learn about themselves. And in many ways I actually think higher ed should say, oh, that's exactly what our original mission was, to help people figure out who they are and forge themselves. It's just that when we've constructed ourselves based on credit hours and courses with lectures, in many cases that's actually not how people learn who they are. And so understanding that and understanding the different jobs that to be done, how can we craft an experience for these different jobs that will actually allow people to get the right kind of discovery for themselves in their context. And so just a quick example on this, which is, you know, community colleges, for example, which is totally the opposite in terms of sort of the mission of say a Middlebury or something like that that you described earlier. But actually to. Community colleges are tough places. They have at least three missions that I can think of. One is transferring students into bachelor's programs. A second is preparing students for the workforce, and a third is just providing continuing education in the community of any sort that you might imagine. And all three of those are actually radically different designs and pull against each other and create a lot of overhead complexity for community college. But stepping back from it, from the students motivation, some students clearly come to the community college with a help me step it up job. They know what they want to go do. They know what they're getting away from. They know the courses or the skills or the credentials that they need. And they're like, I'm going to the community college to get it as quickly as possible. And in recent years, community colleges, many of them have been redesigning themselves around what they call guided pathway programs. So these are course sequence where you get no choice and it's basically you jump on the train and it's the fastest way to get the credential possible and then get out into the job market. Makes a lot of sense when you're in the help me step it up job. But a lot of students are coming in with help me get away, right? They're just running from something, but not necessarily towards something. They need an intentional experience that looks much closer theoretically to what a liberal arts school might offer. Not in actuality, but theoretically, where they have a series of experiences, experiences that allow them to immerse themselves in a variety of fields to learn what they like doing and what they don't like doing. What are their strengths and weaknesses and so forth. And how would you create that experience up front for that student? It's a very different pathway to and through, but I actually think one that can be quite consistent and should be exciting to higher ed if they can get out of their sort of legacy ways of thinking about it. One really quick anecdote to bring this home. I was sharing this research with a community college president about a year and a half ago or so and she got super excited and said, yeah, totally, you know, we have a course. So if you want to be a phlebotomist, someone who draws blood right in clinics, we have a course up front before you go on the guided pathway to become a phlebotomist, where you learn whether you like touching people and the sight of blood. And it's like, that's great, but you really need a whole freaking course to figure out if someone likes touching people in blood. Like, isn't that a 30 minute experience, tops? But people are just so trapped in the coarse way of thinking things, I think that they sometimes can't get out of their own way on this.

That's interesting.

The other thing to me is that it's the lack of accountability on the dollars and the teaching side. Because it feels like if I look at this as a product, I'm pushing the product to the consumer and if they don't actually consume it, that's their problem. They're stuck with the debt and they can't actually, they don't actually consume the thing and it's like, well, they're not trying hard enough. Well, one is if they're not trying hard enough, they should get out. Because it's Lilia. It's a losing battle on every front. The other part is that the school should actually be responsible for actually helping people shape what their, what that pathway is as part of the responsibility to the debt load they're taking on. And so to me, there's some parts of this that feel like we're just, you know, because the money is there and because we can get it from the government. Well, you know, if it takes you five, like there are schools who are saying, yeah, well, just expect five years, like, no, no, we should not at a minimum of 30 grand a year to, you know, 100 grand a year. The question is like, no, we should not be wasting that time. But the thing is, like Michael said, is there's no way to build efficiencies or effectiveness when it literally is just measured by butts and seats and hours.

It's an input based system, not an outcome based system. And so, and in many ways, they actually restrict the ability of education institutions to innovate in the ways that we're talking about because of the nature of, of the regulatory bodies that are focused on. How many books do you have in your library? Do your faculty have PhDs? I heard a really interesting thing recently, you know, General assembly, the coding boot camp, among other programs that they offer, they actually have a requirement that their faculty can only teach a maximum of two years with them before they have to go back to industry. And the reason is that if you stay there too long and so you're essentially tenured, then you get divorced right from industry's needs and you're not actually giving people what they need in the classroom. And that is the exact opposite of what accreditors and traditional post secondary regulatory bodies want to see in colleges and universities. So General Assembly's very intentional and I would say very smart model of saying you can't stay longer than this literally flies in the face of the regulatory regime that we've created. I'll give you one more just to be controversial, but I know Bob and I agree on this one, which is there's a lot of talk right now about free college and trying to make that as a policy. I would say it's the exact wrong thing to do from this research because you're going to push a lot more people in to help me do what's expected of me. They're going to go to school because they feel like they're supposed to do and you've made it frictionless, if you will.

That's interesting.

And it's not going to be the right step for them to actually further progress in their lives. And that it's just going to double down on sort of this input time based notion of skill attainment as opposed to the actual outcomes that we want in life. And that it'll take the value equation out of it. It sort of creates the same challenges we have in health care with a third party system where the person that's ostensibly supposed to be getting the value out of it isn't actually asked to make a trade off in the same way. And that you have this fractured system of buyers and purchasers and users. Right.

It also plays into this trope that the credential in and of itself means something and is important and that everyone should be credentialed and that there should be an expectation for work, et cetera.

Yep.

Yeah. Well, Lumina foundation, years ago they were trying to figure out what should their goal be for post secondary credential rates in the country. Because right now it's something like I'm going to get the stat wrong. But let's say it's 35, 40% today and they want it to be 60% by 2025. And they asked me my opinion of what it should be and I told them 100% because all your skills and things like that ought to be credentialed, just not in the traditional system. Right. As we thought about it. And so they obviously didn't like that answer ultimately. But I think that's what we're. But toward Bob's end of actually making investments to understand how people learn and then how to represent what they've learned and understand those skills and knowledge base, I think it's incredibly important. One other quick point is I think colleges and universities, there'll be really inappropriate ways to sort of do this rapid scale up on cutting edge knowledge and technologies and so forth is my guess in the future. But they'll be really important, I think, for continuing to build the base and the foundation for a lot of these experiences and certain of the short term programs just based on how their research and knowledge creation model works. Just a hypothesis I have that we'll see a lot of boot camps and online programs and things like that spin up or even company created programs frankly to work with skilling up people in rapid ways. And to be fair, universities could create new divisions or work out of their continuing education schools to do some of that work. But I think their core Function will be, will in some ways remain more foundational. But again, with the restructuring that we've talked about.

Yeah. So just to bring that home in the work I do in innovation, what I'm finding is that people are actually grounded in the theories of innovation, but they're not actually grounded in the skills of innovation. And so I recently did a talk on the five skills of an innovator. And one of them, for example, one of them is this notion of empathetic perspective that really good innovators have this ability to see things from way so many different perspectives. They can see it from a macro perspective and jump down into a micro perspective. They can actually see through time. They can play things out, they can see it from what's the VC going to say? What's the technologist going to say? And what do they value? What's the consumer going to say? So you start to realize they almost can fly around kind of their product and see it.

Right.

But where do you learn that skill? And most of them learn it on the fly in building stuff. But the reality is, if I was going to train somebody in it, the best place to learn it is in the theater. How do you actually play a role? How do I actually teach you how to draw from different perspectives? How do I actually help you see things from different perspectives? How do I actually help you how to unplug your value code so you can actually play the role of the finance guy who's going to go like, we can't afford that and say, how are they thinking? And it's not judgmental until you start to realize really good innovators only learn this on by a third time. Founder is so seasoned in all this stuff and it literally is just they ooze this kind of skill, but we don't teach it anywhere. And it's like, well, if you're in innovation, it's got to be technological, it's got to be business oriented, it's got to be. And you're like, no, I need you to actually be empathetic and understand it from different people's perspective.

But do you think that can be taught?

Oh, for sure. I've been doing that for 10 years. So jobs in itself is the very core is trying to just be empathetic from the customer's perspective. Say, what is real Demand versus hey, what do you think of my product? What do you think of my product Is not empathetic. As I talked to you this morning, it was like, what was going on in your life? It had nothing to do with me. Middlebury or Vanderbilt is like you. And so most people don't even know how to actually put themselves in somebody else's shoes. And the way you learn it is through theater, improv, all these different skills. And like, so I feel like. So one of the things I'm doing is I'm trying to build this little thing of a way to learn these skills of innovation because the theories are there, but it's hard to apply modularity and interdependence when you don't have empathetic perspective.

Right. You won't have a real sense of the meaning of those terms.

Exactly. And so this is where I think that's why school has to change, because they just keep adding courses and not taking things away and not rethinking the package, which they have to, you know, kind of deliver.

Thank you both for being here. This is. I've.

We could go on for hours, just so you know. I know like the hard part is Michael's on the phone and. Yeah, Michael and I, like, literally when we, if we're live in the room, this is a six hour diatribe of something, to be honest. We record half of it and like 10 minutes get put out somewhere. But for the most part, we have a passion around this and it's this notion of helping people make progress in their life and that education is a very important piece of that and it's time, it needs to evolve. And the fact is that it's just stuck in its history and having a hard time figuring out kind of what to do next.

Michael, any closing thoughts?

Well, I was going to say, well said, Bob. I mean, you know, I think we're at a really exciting point. Is the other good news though, in education, where a lot of people are willing to ask questions. In higher education, the business model that has historically propped up colleges and universities for many of these places is fundamentally breaking. You know, Clay said 50% of schools will close or merge or declare some sort of bankruptcy in the next couple decades. I've said it's between 25% and probably 40% on the upper end. But, you know, the bottom line is there is a window of opportunity where there's intense demand right now from individuals to reskill and upskill and chart paths and navigate their lives. So there's great demand and the old structures don't make it work. And so there's a, there's a hunger, I think, for innovators to come in and create these pathways. And I think that the jobs is the foundation and then digging deeper. I mean look, the jobs give you how to think and then you've got to figure out exactly your situation and build the right pathway and so forth. And there's a whole bunch more work to be done in any individual school circumstance. But I think it's the foundation for how to think about these questions as we take advantage of new technologies, new findings about how we learn to build the set of educational experiences that we need to continue to support individual learners and frankly society writ large.

Thank you both so much for being here. This has been a super privilege for me to do this.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you for having us. You all do a good service and I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on itunes. Until next time. Good luck everybody.