#22: Learning That Lasts

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Proteus Leaders Show. So my guest today is Chris Taylor, who is the founder and CEO of Actionable, which is a company that's dedicated to the proposition that in order to have impact now in the 21st century, learning— our learning must be frequent, relevant, collaborative, and measurable. Love those 4 words. So Chris spends his daylight hours helping clients figure out how to make learning a reality in their organizations through building rich relationships and making new powerful habits. So welcome to the show, Chris.

Thanks for having me, Erika. I've been looking forward to this.

Yes, me too. So Chris, you and I met through the work that Proteus is doing with Actionable to make sure that our executive coaching and our leadership training lead to lasting change for our clients. And I, the more, you know, the more we work with you, and then after you and I spoke, I thought that your insights on learning would be particularly useful to our listeners as leaders. And I suspect that all of you who are listening already know that I believe that being able to learn new skills quickly and well is essential for success. So this lines right up with that.

I think we come from the same egg, as another consultant once put it. So yeah, totally.

Yeah. So let's dive right in. So why don't most approaches to professional learning work very well at this point?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think what I see out there is a lot of extremely talented facilitators, trainers, coaches going in, doing their thing, creating these great aha moments, these light bulbs. People leave the session inspired and invigorated with a whole bunch of things that they want to change the world in when they get back to their desks. And then, you come back in 2 weeks later and sort of ask them how much they remember. And it may be a couple key points from a day-long session. You ask them how much they've applied. And so often, it's next to nothing or they're planning to, right?

Yeah.

And that's the big challenge to me is it's not so much about learning consumption. I think we've done a really great job as an industry of getting to a place where facilitated sessions are strong by and large. But it's not about the learning consumption, it's about the learning application.

Yeah.

And for me, I think, you know, as we move into this extremely rapid-paced world that we all occupy now, the gap in time between when something is learned and when we're supposed to or think we could apply it, if it's not next to instantaneous, there's so many other things that we're bombarded with that make it easy to slip back into old habits. And I think that's the biggest challenge that we're facing is how do you bridge the gap between the vacuum in which we learn something and the real world bombarded by a whole bunch of different stimuli and how we actually come to apply it?

Right. So how do you keep that new learning top of mind until you've really integrated it into how you operate?

Yeah, exactly. You know, one of the— it's funny where we get inspiration. I have a younger brother, substantially younger. He's a professional. He's a veterinarian, fairly well-renowned in his field, and he goes goes to events where he needs to wear a tie with a jacket. And yet this extremely intelligent, extremely high-functioning individual has never learned how to tie a tie. And I had to ask him one day as we were getting ready for our other brother's wedding, and I was going, dude, how, you know, you're wearing a tie every other week. How is it that you don't know how to tie a tie yet? And he sort of looked at me like I had 2 heads. And he said, if I need to learn, I just go on YouTube and it shows me how to do it. I don't need to try to retain that knowledge in my head. It's there for instantaneous learning. when I actually need to apply it.

Oh, wow, 'cause he doesn't need to do it very often, so he doesn't feel like he needs to keep it in his mental Rolodex, kind of.

Yeah, it's that thing where like, what am I gonna do, spend 15 minutes learning how to tie a tie for next time I need to, or I can just access the information immediately when I need it? And I think this is more and more the world that we live in, is that we have so much information at our fingertips, as we all know, that it's, you know, when we learn something that has been decreed by the organization we work for or by ourselves that this is something we need or want to learn, The gap between when we learn it and when we apply it becomes the real challenge to overcome.

Well, so I'm hearing you say 2 things, both of which are fascinating to me and kind of lead into my next question. One is, you have to help people find a way to apply and make whatever they're learning real right away. But also, they have to want to. They have to recognize this as an important capability for them to acquire versus just Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'll go on YouTube next time I need this, which probably won't be that often. So it's both about applying it and that people won't apply it if they don't feel like it's important to their lives.

Right. And one of the things that drives that sense of importance for us, rightly or wrongly, is a sense of urgency. Do I need it right now? And if I don't, then maybe it's not as important, even though those of us that read Covey years ago know that there is a distinction between important and urgent. But for so many of us, they're compressed into a similar vein in the way that we view the world.

Well, and the story about your brother is fascinating because it sounds like we need both. We need to— if you just feel like it's urgent, then you will just learn it once and then put it in your short-term memory and then forget it. But if you feel that it's both urgent and important, you'll try to find a way to make it really a part of your ordinary toolset, right?

Absolutely.

Yep. That's great. Well, so then let's, you know, I talked about in your introduction, you talk about the idea that learning has impact when it's more frequent, more relevant, more collaborative, and more measurable. So can you talk to Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it ties into, you know, the earlier point around how do we, as learning practitioners or as people that are purchasing learning for people in our organization, how do we increase the perceived level of importance of that piece? We may believe it's important, but the people on the receiving end need to believe that as well.

Yeah.

And one of the things that we've seen with the work that we do at Actionable is that when you can— I hate this term, but I struggle to come up with a better one— when you can socialize the learning, which is to say when you can get to a place where where the people that you work with on a daily basis understand the learning, the piece of content, you know, as much as you do, and you've had a chance to discuss as a group how or where or if that piece of content is relevant to the work that you're doing as a team, that social component, that collaborative component of working towards this through a shared understanding is one of the single greatest indicators of whether an idea will be adopted inside or not. And you can look at this inversely. I think particularly people listening to podcasts like this, Erika, we're typically big readers, right? And we've probably all been guilty of reading that breakthrough idea and going, oh, this is fabulous. I need to bring this back to my team. And you go back and you share it with your team with enthusiasm, and they may not roll their eyes in front of you, but there's that sense of, uh-huh, Erika's got another idea.

There's a lot of crickets when you say it.

Exactly. I'll wait for this to pass. There'll be another one in 2 weeks. And it's because I think 2 things. One, it's the rate of change that we're all subjected to. But as much as that, you have a richness of understanding from the book that you read or the article or what have you that you're trying to share in a soundbite that people are on the receiving end of as opposed to being active participants in. And that's one of the things that we do with Actionable and really strive to do is let's throw out the idea, the piece of content, but then let's immediately dig into the question of, So what? Who cares? How does this actually matter to us? Not through the lens of trying to convince people that it makes sense, but instead almost taking an opposite tact of, let's assume that this doesn't matter and let's actually unpack it as a group. And when you give people the space to step into the discussion, and as opposed to coming at it from a position of you need to learn this on top of everything else that you need to do, people are obviously more resistant. So anyway, so we can inverse that by making it more of an inviting conversation rather than a directive to change.

Oh, that's great. So, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking relevant and collaborative. So, the approach you're talking about hits both of those.

Absolutely.

And tell me about measurable.

Sure, absolutely. So, this is one of— I mean, this is the holy grail of the learning and development industry, right? Is we deliver exceptional value. We believe the people that were in the room may believe that, the buyer may believe that, but you've got, you know, An unknown number of layers of management and decision-making above that. And if we're totally honest with ourselves as an industry, we're more often than not perceived as a cost center by the client that is bringing us in, right?

Yeah.

Right. And so, you know, because it's easy to poke holes. I mean, the traditional way of measuring— anyone who's familiar with the Kirkpatrick Phillips, you know, model of sort of looking at impact of training programs, or people that want a more traditional ROI, show me where the impact was. Well, it takes, you know, 12 months, 18 months before you have the internal metrics around productivity or profitability or absenteeism or whatever the desired metric is. And it's so easy 12 months later to poke holes in that and say, well, here's the other external factors that led to this.

Yeah.

So what we've been working on with Actionable, what we're most excited about is if you're looking at those things, those internal measurements of productivity, profitability, et cetera, as lagging indicators, of the impact that you're having, what is the leading indicator that could give you an idea that, yes, this is going to have an impact on those metrics that we care most about?

Yeah.

And traditionally, the things that we've measured in real time have been participant satisfaction. You know, did they enjoy lunch? No, more than that. Did they, did they find value in the session? And then knowledge retention, right? We come back in 6 weeks later, 6 months later to see how much they recall from that session. But as we were talking about earlier, there is a fairly wide gap between learning retention and learning application.

Yes.

And so this is my slow reveal. What we've been doing with Actionable, what we found to be the true leading indicator of those lagging indicators we care about, is behavior change. Can we actually see from that session that someone experienced in a learning environment the one thing that they were planning on making a behavior change around right now? And can we track for 30 days how successful they are in making that behavior change become a new habit. And if we can look at learning retention, shift it immediately on a micro level into learning application, then we can extrapolate out and go back and measure afterwards with real data. Look, here's the people that made a behavior change, and here's the impact that it had on business metrics, on profitability, on productivity.

Oh, that's great. So to show not only behavior change, Subjectively and hopefully objectively to some extent, but to show the correlation between degree of behavior change and impact on business outcome.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I'm glad you said correlation because for any of the data geeks out there, it's really tempting to move to a place of stating causation, of saying, here's a behavior change and therefore we increase productivity by 6%. You know, it's easy to poke holes in that. We're still not there where we can have a single screen up that says $2 spent on training equals $4 in productivity.

Yeah.

No, but even correlation is a great thing to show in this realm. Yeah.

And when you have enough data around enough individuals and enough teams, you can start to show trends, and you're getting a lot closer to a justifiable causation.

Fantastic. Okay. So, I always promise our listeners that we will have some— they will come away from this 15 minutes with some practical takeaways. What specific steps would you say individual leaders can take to support their own learning and their employees' learning in a professional environment?

Sure, I'll give you 2. So, for the first one, what I'd encourage leaders to do is to think about the people on their team and the typical learning environment that they're in, or when we're giving them something new that they need to learn or develop in. And it's typically, again, these ratios fluctuate a little bit, but not a lot, to 90% content, here's all the stuff, and then maybe 10% spent on How does that actually apply? There's an emphasis on, here's what you need to learn, not how are we going to apply it? So, the first thing I'd encourage is anytime you're putting somebody into a learning environment, including yourself, to do your best to flip that ratio. What's a small piece of content that you can take in and then spend 90% of the time, of the energy, of the focus on how that gets applied?

God, it would be hard for me to agree with you more. That's such a great recommendation. Completely agree with that.

We said that at the beginning, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So that's piece one, shift the ratio, try to, try to go with less content, more context, which of course invites more conversation. That leads into my second point, be a coach, which I know sounds trite and is becoming a rapidly overused word. My good friend Michael Bungay Stanier wrote a book called The Coaching Habit, and I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book if you are in a people management role of any kind, if you're a leader of any kind, There's 7 questions in this book, and there's 7 easy questions that you can ask people that bring the conversation more to invite them in to determine for themselves where they might be stuck or a solution that they're working towards. And you can get really quickly to what that tiny kernel of content might need to be through a more elaborate discussion around context and circumstance.

Gotcha. Okay. So thank you so much. I just, I love how you think about learning, partly, you know, because it's kind of self-referential. It aligns so well with how I think about it. But also I just think it's so pragmatic and has really aligned with how people actually do learn. So listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about Chris and about Actionable, just, you can just go to their website actionable.co and they have a lot of great stuff there. And to find out more about how to improve your own ability to learn in any part of your life, you can go to BeBadFirst.com. Proteus site where you'll find a lot of resources as well. So thanks again, Chris. This has been great.

Likewise. Thank you, Erika.

And thank you for listening, everyone. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at ProteusLeader.com. Have an excellent day and thanks for listening.