303 - Revolutionizing Online Learning Through Experiential Education with NovoEd's Farnaz Ronaghi

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

You are the co-founder and chief technology officer for a company called NovoEd. Which is an online learning management system, and it can be found at Novoid.com. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Why don't we start with, so we can all get to know you a little better. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, as you said, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Novoid, and I was born in, I guess, a small town in the northwest of Iran and raised in Tehran, the capital of the country, and came to the US for grad school to Stanford in 2009, I think. That's when my journey here started. And yeah, founded the company in the second year of my PhD and have been working in online education ever since.

Wow. So tell us about NovoEd.

What's it all about?

NovoEd offers a— it's a software as a service company that offers a platform for the creation and delivery of high-impact learning experiences. Our customers, some of them are large, large companies, enterprises who have to upskill their employees, who have to onboard them, who have to get them ready to really perform in their job functions. And that can happen through one thing, practicing, through doing, through receiving feedback, not budget, not by just consuming content. So that's what enable— what KnowWhat enables enterprises to do. We also work with universities, training firms who are teaching different topics, but many of them are focused on business topics. Just, you can think about an executive MBA or design thinking, innovation, sales skills, stuff like that, or the types of things that our training provider clients offer again to enterprises or consumers. As well.

And I take it you provide the platform and then your clients and customers provide the content.

Yes, exactly. We are the piping behind the scenes.

There you go.

And what is it that differentiates NovoEd from all the other learning platforms that are out there, of which there are, there are many.

There are so many, and it is a crowded market, just like it is actually anywhere else you look at software. What differentiates NovoEd is those two keywords: learning from experience, learning by doing, and learning from peers and feedback, which is really not possible in most of what is online learning out there. It's highly focused on content and one-way transfer of knowledge. There are some knowledge checks, quizzes— learner responded, hence learner has learned. Where we wanna— where we really want to be is for learners to show that they can, and for a change of behavior to take place, and for them to look at how other people may think about the same problem or may solve the same problem and learn from them, as well as receive intentional feedback about the work that they've provided and know how they can improve, how they can take that next step, both in just being ready for their current roles and being able to take the next step in their careers. And there is no single platform that can really bring different content sources that organizations have access to, as well as intentional, essentially learning activities together in a cohesive experience and deliver such, such an outcome.

Most, most online learning, as I understand, is asynchronous. It's one way, right? And what you're saying is that your platform allows for, allows for feedback. And experiential learning for— so students can obviously have a better learning experience and master whatever the skills are that they're trying to master more, more effectively and more efficiently. How do you guys go about doing that?

Yes, as you say, a lot of the existing online learning is focused asynchronous and on the individual. Our core comes from being a cohort learning platform. We started 11, 12 years ago with one essentially research question: how can we implement the type of experience that we deliver to actually students on Stanford campus. In my department, we, we started off working— I started off working with my advisor and one of the— one other faculty member, Chuck Eastley, who offers the Technology Entrepreneurship course to engineering students at Stanford. It's very popular. The core of this class, though, is people getting together, working on an idea, ideating together, receiving feedback from mentors. And the initial point of our technology is really that experiment. Can one do that online with team— with people dispersed all over the world? Can we form a effective teams? Can we have them collaborate with each other? And can we get something tangible built as a result of the work that they do together? And the answer to those was yes and yes. And of course, the scale at which that happens was different. So we had a lot more people who signed up than the people who did something in the course, than the people who actually turned, turned around and created a small company out of the work that they were doing together in the capacity of the course. And since then we have been working at that and changing the technology to meet the needs of L&D professionals. While cohort learning or learning together is one of the best ways to learn, it's also, it comes with a lot of overhead for learning and development departments. And what we do is, is that we just work on removing that overhead and helping them offer this kind of learning, which is effective, not based on our words or our research, but based on 110, 20 years of written educational philosophy from John Dewey on words and, and research that's been done outside of us, but do it at a scale.

You bet.

You've been at this now, you obviously spent probably 5, at least 5 years on your PhD, and that evolved into NovoEd. You've been doing this now for what, 15 years probably?

Well, like 12, yes, maybe 12 years.

What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you really excited to go to work?

First of all, our work by nature is just meaningful. It's about education. I get to see the fact that, that people who are taking courses from our providers— and back then it used to be more directly from us— are getting the benefit. They are excited about how they are changing their lives with the learning that happens on the platform. And these days, while we are farther away from that direct cycle of impact on the learner, on the individual, we know what we are enabling for organizations. It is rarely said and rarely highlighted. However, most of the spend— more— most of the development budgets in organizations are spent in the top small percentage of employees in the organizations because a lot of them are spent on more expensive coaching opportunities, expensive executive courses, etc. What we enabled enterprises to do is to expand high-impact learning experiences across the different tiers of the organization and really go from offering For example, as an example, leadership development is one of them types of development opportunities most organizations provide. The great leadership development oftentimes is offered to the high potential managers, the top tier of leadership. However, we are enabling several of our large clients in hospitality, in financial services, in pharmaceuticals to take that kind of leadership development experience, offer it to all of their middle managers, to offer different flavors of it to their first-time managers. And that's the impact that gets me up and going every morning, solving problems and figuring out how we can truly show up for our customers and enable them best.

And, and what exactly is your day-to-day role as the Chief Technology Officer?

That's—

as a founder, and I think many founders know this without me saying it, the job changes every few quarters or so. I, I wouldn't say every day, but every few quarters or so, uh, so that the answer is different by, uh, every time. However, at, at this point, uh, I own our product vision and work with our product team directly on, um, what our objectives are and what we are prioritizing, what are the reasons for that. And I also work with our AI engineers, directly work with me. So AI is everywhere. Of course, it is part of my work as well. And most of my day-to-day are those two groups of people. And sometimes I'm also involved in where my training is, which is computer science, backend engineering. So scaling infrastructure, those sometimes come into my weeks as well, and they are joy to do.

So how is AI affecting your business?

First of all, the same way that, say, 20 years ago cloud was happening and starting companies was becoming much easier, you can get up a technology up and running much faster than days of on-premise and days that infrastructure was just hefty investment. AI is becoming just like that. So it's becoming part of everyone's basically technology stack for offering value to clients. And on our end, what we want to be able to do for our clients is, first of all, we want to be the place that not just that they build, they prototype, they create different ideas and they find the right type of offering for their audiences. So in creation of learning activities and just inspiring and enabling that to be much faster and also better, as well as running cohort learning, there is so many things that I can help over there. There are just repetitive necessary tasks that our clients who are in the roles of supporting these programs in L&D teams or in training firms have to to take, from sending nudges to learner support. Humans, we can read, but we don't read. There are a lot of questions that are answered, for example, in learning content that learners bring to the teaching staff and ask them. Those are examples of potentially lower value but extremely necessary activities that L&D professionals have to involve themselves with that we are hoping to offload to AI and augment essentially their work.

So you have AI built into your platform so that it, it can help generate content for your clients and provides an interactive experience for the learners. If they have questions, then it can go to AI and at least get a preliminary answer from AI. And, and it works that way. Do I have that correct?

Yes. Yes. And additionally, there are these people, you can call them facilitators. Mm-hmm. But they just come from all different walks of life. They could be employees of the enterprise. They could be a manager in a team in that company. Whose role is really to catalyze, to catalyze the hardest part of learning, which is like giving feedback, looking at the work done by others. And we also enable— we are working on enabling them— that really is not out in the moment of providing that feedback. I'm sorry, I touched my microphone. In the moment of providing that feedback and making them do that more efficiently. Again, not that AI has the expertise to replace them, but there is a ton of data they have to look at, wording they need to work on, contextualization of that feedback for industry the person is coming from, the team the person is coming from, that AI can help fit and make faster.

So what is it, Parnaz, that's unique about you that's made you so successful?

I may not be great at answering that question, but I asked myself that question when I was just 26, 27 years old, just starting a company, my first job, never— and, and I'm also new to this country. It's probably like year 4 of being in America. There's a ton that I don't know. And I actually answered that question by, I have to listen so much better than everyone else, and I have to learn much faster than everyone else. And that's what I try to do every day, that in the past 10 years of trying to capture what others are really telling me and to listening better and leading with the conversations forward, of course I've had, I've found the nuances of that, the limitations of it. And, and, and yeah, and I've always though found a way to put it to work and learn.

So you mentioned listening. Of course, this show is called Listening with Leaders because I'm really interested in talking to leaders who listen. There aren't many leaders who listen. How did you learn how to listen?

I learned by pain. The hard way. When something is failing and you look at it and find the root cause in your own behaviors, that's the hard truth that I haven't created the conditions for actually sharing and listening to happen. I haven't listened well, so the necessary trust for sharing the hard truth with me or the bad news with me hasn't happened.. And I learned that maybe in year 1 of the company that, okay, I really need to change my listening behaviors and how I respond and where I respond, in what ways, what options do I have. And not everything has to be said in words either. And, and yeah, the hard way is really the answer.

I can believe that. And English is obviously— how many languages do you speak? Just Farsi and English?

A little bit of Turkish too, but yes.

Okay, a little Turkish.

Okay. I would imagine that learning English required you to sharpen your listening skills to be able to understand and respond appropriately.

Yes.

How, how important do you think listening is in your day-to-day work?

Extremely important. I actually think that in the position that I am, I'm sometimes far removed from, uh, the core of the problem, but I'm brought— I'm many times I'm being brought into a discussion, whether that might be a problem or it might be a new idea, it might be something that we are exploring. Uh, the one thing that, uh, is critical for me to contribute effectively is to be able to, uh, listen well to what different people in the room are saying. And from what they're saying, what is not being said is really, um, and the undertone of the conversation. And also enable my team members have what I call, uh, curiosity— not what I call, what I've read and, uh, learned is called a curiosity-focused conversation to be able to lead forward.

So what happens when you run across people who don't listen well?

We have conversations. We coach. That's what we do. I actually, there is a book that I have had. I'm a believer of book clubs and upskilling together and learning together and being a team that's growing constantly and has a shared basically language for discussing different concepts. And there are a few books that go into my main set of, hey, have we both read this? Do we both understand this. And one of them is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Sheila's book.

Sure.

Yeah, just— I learned so much from that. And I find that when, when, when I have team members who are not listening, having the conversation and understanding where they are coming from, what is it that they are not discussing, helps move that forward. And it, it takes a lot of repetition, a lot of instances where, okay, now we are hearing it, and now 'You're actually listening.' What are the behaviors that one can show that, that tells others that one has listened? And now from there, let's go to the next step. So it's also a gradual journey that we have to go through together.

Yeah, you might be interested in my book, my fourth book, De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds.

Yes, I, I have to look at that. Yes, yes.

And I teach people how to listen to emotions rather than to words, because the neuroscience shows that when you are reflect somebody's emotional experience, you literally inhibit the emotional centers in the speaker's brain and activate the prefrontal cortex. And that's how you can calm anybody.

That makes sense.

In seconds or less. It's really quite amazing how it works. I discovered the skill as a mediator, I'm a mediator, 20 years ago and ultimately deployed it in maximum security prisons training life inmates how to stop prison violence.

Yes. That was fascinating work. I, I was listening to, to you and learning about that, but I haven't had a chance to read the book. I have to check it out.

Yeah. I think you'll, if you like Sheila's book, then you'll like my book too. And we're all devoted to teaching people the importance of listening, but also how to bring peace into your life because there is so much conflict. I'm sure that as a co-founder of a growing company, you've seen your share of conflict, right?

Right?

Yes. How do we have conversations that are not conflictual, that are transformative? We can have sharp disagreements, but it doesn't mean that we have to be, we don't have to be in conflict about it. And so what my role in life is to teach people how to have these kinds of difficult conversations, as Sheila would put it, and make them transformative rather than conflictual and have people walk away, maybe not agreeing, but not being mad at each other either. Which is really important.

Yes, and such a critical skill. And there is the other side of the story as well, where I run into so many people who are so afraid of that conflict.

That's right.

They have not learned the skills on how to do it without conflict, with curiosity and the focus, with listening to emotions of others, that they, they shy away from it until it is a much larger problem than I need it to be.

And they gotta call me and then pay me the big bucks to come in and solve the problem as a mediator. Exactly right. And the thing that's so amazing is it's so unnecessary because these skills are not difficult to master. Most of my clients master these skills in about 8 weeks. So it's really, once you get it and start practicing it, because you gotta practice it, it's like riding a bicycle, it becomes so natural. You know, you wonder, how did I ever get along without these skills? So it's pretty phenomenal. So where do you see your company going in the next 10 years?

So our clients have been delivering cohort learning experiences for the past 10 years now. And yes, we have to grow that business. We have to grow our impact. We want to be in every single Fortune 500 company and then further expand that into midsize and more. That said, there are also other modalities of this high-impact learning that we are not supporting, and companies do need help with scaling them.. One of them is a learning that happens not necessarily from learning content and activities to contextualize it, but it happens from job-relevant examples or scenarios. When we are looking at client experience folks, at sales, at any client-facing essentially role, a lot of our learning comes from is listening to an instance of an interaction that has happened with a client in the field and then repeating, how would I deal with that? How would I respond to that, uh, so that not only I'm accurate and professional, but I'm also representing the behaviors of our company, our brand, our culture, and take the type of care of our clients that I'm expected to care. So one area is that where we are, we have started building technology in that area, the category of practice, but it's learning from scenarios. It's not learning from role play is one way of delivering that, different versions of it So that's one area. And another area where we want to expand into, and we are well on our way, one-on-one connection building, mentoring in, in, in organization mentoring, where again, companies are trying to enable employees to learn from each other. However, they're having such a difficult time managing the operations of that, finding who is in the population that's addressable by a one-on-one learning opportunity, matching them with each other, staying on top of how well this one-on-one relationship is going, because not every match is made in heaven, and essentially working with people to make it work. That's another area where we're working on a mentoring software with Mentor Plus, its current name, with Learn Plus and Practice Plus that are going to come to life next year and are going to be part of our focus to actually be a talent development platform for different modalities of high impact learning, whether it is happening in one-on-one firm scenarios or in content focused experiences, as well as there are such— there, there's a lot of room for innovation for us to enable learners learn without L&D teams having to sit and craft these learning sequences.

Okay.

And tapping into personalization and, and AI, putting those building blocks, the Lego pieces that L&D teams have created together into a different shape that delivers on a learning outcome of this specific individual.

Hmm. Wow. So you got your work cut out for you.

Yes, yes, yes.

So one more question for Naz and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

One thing about myself, such a difficult one to answer. I'm, I think I come off as very confident and very sure about the decisions that I make to everyone. And if people did not know, didn't know how much of the uncertainties, the concerns that they may have, I do have as well. But I'm just processing them in a different place. Maybe that's one.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Well, to extroverts, I'm an introvert. To introverts, I'm an extrovert. So it changes by day and by the audience.

There you go. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Yes, same here. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.