Deep Dive: Learning as a Strategy for Organizational Change with Chris Myers

So I'm excited to welcome Chris. So Christopher Myers, um, is PhD, is an assistant professor and academic director of executive education at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School with joint faculty appointments in the School of Medicine and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. His research explores questions of learning, um, development, innovation, all of those things in organizations, and he focuses in particular on learning in healthcare organizations and other knowledge-intensive industries. So fun fact, I actually got connected to Chris via former K-Connect speaker and friend of the community Dorothy Leonard, who many of you might remember her sharing a lot of her work on critical knowledge. So I asked Dorothy a question I like to ask smart connected people: who do you know that you think I should know? And her immediate answer was Chris Myers, and I think y'all are going to see why very shortly. So I'm very happy to welcome Chris Myers to K Connect. Chris, will you please turn on your camera and unmute yourself?

Hi, good morning everyone.

Hey, welcome.

Thanks for having me, and hopefully I can live up to Dorothy's kind introduction there. Yeah, maybe she just thought I would be entertaining and, you know, a good lesson of what not to do, so she shared my contact information in that spirit.

Fair enough. Either way, we're gonna learn something. So I'm sure that's not the case. So Chris, maybe just— I gave a little bit of a background of kind of you at Johns Hopkins and what you're working on, but maybe you could go a little bit deeper and tell us a little bit more about your responsibilities and your multiple roles at Johns Hopkins.

Yeah, so, you know, I joined Johns Hopkins back in 2016. We're a relatively new business school. And so, you know, like many organizations, and like I imagine many of you, you know, listening in, we take on a lot of different roles. And so many of us wear multiple hats to, to really help grow the organization and develop what we're doing. And so in addition to my sort of primary role as a faculty member and researcher studying learning in organizations, I get to serve as the academic director of our executive education program. So, you know, that's the, the division where we offer, you know, non-credit education programs and leadership development programs for working professionals. And it's just one of the best parts of my role because we get to, you know, our students are great, but it's really, really fun working with folks who are knee-deep in a problem right now. And, you know, much like the, the answers that were coming through in the chat, trying to figure out something and, you know, to be able to help work to organize a course and bring our faculty's expertise to bear on what people need to know to be able to, to be effective and successful in their roles. And then they get to go back on Monday morning and start doing it right away versus maybe doing it 2 years in the future when they graduate in some company, but we don't know which one yet. Yeah, it's really exciting to get to work with folks in that capacity.

I can imagine. That sounds great. Um, I want to kind of go back to the beginning and think about Chris Myers as a kid and think about—

it's a dangerous thought.

What were you interested in as a kid? What were you like? Where would you spend, you know, hours of time?

So, you know, I know when we've spoken in the past, we've talked about this notion of the underlying cosmic logic, which is a concept that an advisor of mine, Kathleen Sutcliffe, is a big proponent of, which is that as we look backwards over our life and our career, you know, we start to make sense of all of the patterns. And so, you know, it might sound a little weird, but it actually fits in the way I see my cosmic logic is that, you know, as a kid, my— one of my first and foremost dreams was to be a Power Ranger.

You might have to explain what a Power Ranger is to some of the folks on this call.

Just think spandex-clad superheroes, you know, battling a new bad guy every single week. I was obsessed as a kid, favorite TV show, and couldn't get enough of it. And so actually got involved in martial arts as a result of that, closest thing we could do, I guess, in real life. And through that, really found a passion for teaching and trying to develop knowledge and skill both with and for other people. And so, you know, I laugh because that That early desire was really, you know, what, what led me to make a couple choices to, to inform some hobbies when I was a kid that have really stuck with me and been kind of an undergirding theme of what I've done, you know, since then. I'm long since retired and probably couldn't put my foot over my waist anymore in terms of kicking height, but, uh, you know, that really kind of set me on a path to think about, you know, a role as a teacher, and that's been a really meaningful thing for me.

Yeah, let's follow that cosmic logic. So you went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did a, if I have this right, yes, in business administration. So why Chapel Hill? Why study business? How did you, how did Power Rangers and martial arts get into business administration?

Yeah, translate into all that. Yeah, who knows? But, you know, as a good Carolina boy growing up, you know, UNC was always on the map and the place where I wanted to be. Went and visited there and just fell in love and really wanted to go to Carolina and originally had plans to be an accountant. I was gonna go and study accountancy in business school and I guess the Power Rangers thing was gonna be on nights and weekends and accounting would be the 9 to 5. But a couple things happened early on in my time at Carolina actually. I got involved in outdoor education. So kind of one degree removed from the martial arts education program. Perhaps, of still in an instructing kind of role, but this time taking other students on backpacking, rock climbing, and sea kayaking expeditions. And that has been a theme that has stuck with me. And I actually now, with one of our amazing team members at the Carey Business School, a guy named Mike Doyle, who directs our Office of Experiential Learning, he and I continue to do that. We take our MBA and MS students now backpacking or sea kayaking as part of leadership development programming. At the Carey Business School. So had an opportunity to do that and really again kind of scratch that itch of not only instructing and helping other people learn and develop skills, but watching the team dynamic aspect of it as well. When we think about a lot of the challenges that work teams have, they're even more obvious and apparent when you put them in the middle of the woods, lost, hot, hungry, you know, haven't had a shower in 6 days. All the office politics just turn into real-life decision crises. And so it sounds a lot, you know, cheesy to say almost, I guess, you know, but it really, you know, kind of honed my interest in understanding team dynamics. But I didn't really know that that's what I was interested in, you know. I knew I liked it. I didn't quite have the right language and words to wrap around it, but I knew it was fascinating to me.

And did you have any sense that you could do that as a career?

Um, so that's, that's where the second revelation came in of, uh, yeah, I was doing that. I was in business school, accounting all the way, uh, and I took my required organizational behavior course, um, and I was so fortunate to take it with, at the time, a total unknown young new professor named Adam Grant. He's gone on to have multiple TED Talks, a huge podcast, several New York Times bestselling books. He's all over the place now. Yeah, but at the time he was just sort of— he taught the Tuesday, Thursday 9 o'clock section. And so that's, that's where I went. And watching him teach and seeing him explain that these concepts have names and have research behind them, and that there are people who spend their whole career unpacking those and trying to understand how do we do them better, particularly in really important work contexts. At that point, I was hooked. And I think, you know, I mean, I had much more audacity back then. I think I actually went to his office hours at one point and just asked him how I got his job. I really wanted his job. And that's— that was the path for me. And he had gone to the University of Michigan to get his PhD. And so that's where I set my sights for the next adventure was, you know, all right, well, if That's where you took the advice.

Literally, like, I want to become you, so I will go through the same program.

Yeah, I considered a lot of different ones, but, um, for a variety of reasons, Michigan was just such a great place and a wonderful fit that, um, you know, and it certainly didn't hurt that that's where Adam went. So I, I thought, all right, well, I can at least get that step in the process right.

I think from a previous conversation, one of the things— and I don't know if this is with Adam or someone else— you talked about getting interested in was this idea of learning from failure. And I'm wondering if you can kind of bring us into how that became interesting to you and what you learned— well, learned then and then have continued to explore.

Yeah, so it was the focus of my undergraduate thesis. Again, we had an embarrassment of riches at the time on the OB faculty. UNC still does, but at the time I was there, there was another faculty member named Francesca Gino, who's now at the Harvard Business School and also bestselling books, all sorts of great stuff, but was earlier in her career and, you know, agreed to advise me on this undergraduate thesis to understand, you know, what's the role of failure in learning from our experiences. And at the time, I was actually interested in kind of management education. You know, it struck me that a lot of the things we would do in business school courses were little team exercises or things, and, you know, many of them did not go very well. So we were meant to learn from our, our failed experiences doing that. You know, we would do a simulated climb up Mount Everest, and as somebody who was doing these real climbs, you know, on the weekends, to then see, oh, we're actually using this in the classroom to try to teach these management concepts, I wanted to understand how that, that process worked a little bit. And that kind of fueled a continuing interest. That particular project has sort of laid dormant for a little while, but, um, you know, it kind of gave rise to this, this broader interest of how do we try to make sense of the experiences that we have and use those to inform our, our future success.

Got it. Yeah, well, I think we're going to probably come back to that, um, a little bit down the road. Um, so Michigan, that was next following Adam Grant.

Um, yeah, always a good life decision. Just do what Adam Grant does.

Why a PhD? Like, what were you— what kind of drew you to the academic life? Or I guess, did you know what you were getting into? And that's kind of a sub-question in there.

Yeah, I don't know that I fully knew it or got it, or, you know, certainly didn't understand some of the, you know, challenges or hurdles that exist in academic life, but I think the The opportunity to be kind of a lifetime dabbler and a lifetime observer of all of these organizations was really appealing. You know, I would hear Adam and Francesca and others talk about, you know, oh, I went and did a study with this organization, or I went and worked with this group of firefighters, or with this group. And, you know, it, it felt like a really amazing opportunity to kind of fuel the ADD a little bit of, you know, I don't have to lock into any one industry or career path. I can, you know, investigate the things that I find interesting and, you know, try to see what is it that we can learn from those settings. You know, it's— there's almost a weird meta point to it of, you know, research is all about learning. We're trying to go and see why this group of people or this organization does a particular thing, or why when people, you know, have this characteristic, they tend to perform in this way, or when they answer questions this way, they tend to answer those questions a corresponding way. You know, we're trying to go and unpack those little nuggets and nuances of lived experience and try to draw more general lessons from them. So it really was a way to kind of fuel this curiosity or interest in ongoing learning.

And one of those groups that you kind of mentioned them kind of reporting back from meeting with interesting groups of people, one of the areas that you've told me you've spent time is with flight nurses.

Yeah.

Category of people. So maybe tell us like what— I don't, I didn't know much about flight nurses before you and I started talking. So like, who are they? What do they do? Why did you become interested in them? Like, take me into your, your work with them.

Yeah. So it was, you know, a really fortunate opportunity to get to work with, um, a couple of different air medical organizations. Um, one in particular that, uh, trans— so what these organizations do and these teams do is they're the, The flight crews that typically transfer patients either from the scene of an accident back to a larger hospital, or more often than not, from a smaller community hospital that may have exceeded its capacity to care for that particular patient. And they'll transport them back to a large tertiary care center where there may be, you know, more experts or resources available. Um, it was a world that I knew very little about, uh, as well. I actually sort of stumbled into it while trying to study ambulance teams. Because I figured those were— I understood what, you know, EMTs and paramedics were doing, and through that work found these air medical transport professionals, both the flight nurses, also flight paramedics, there's flight physicians, you know, it's a whole kind of branch of the medical space, and, you know, the work they do is, is obviously critical and very important, but also just endlessly fascinating from a learning standpoint because they're always doing something unusual, right? By definition, if something is going according to plan, according to the textbook, you know, you probably don't need to get flown in a helicopter. And the saying was always, right, like, if we show up, you know, you're having a pretty bad day. Things are not going according to plan. And so it was just a fascinating environment to really try to unpack some of these dynamics of learning that don't fit the mold that we typically think of, of 10,000 hours, same thing, develop rote expertise and experience. They were really needing to be adaptive and agile and nimble in the way they responded to all these cases, not to mention to responding to all of these cases in a resource-constrained environment, because they would take these patients from, even at these small community hospitals, you know, a well-resourced environment, you know, lots of staff, lots of physical resources, you know, time, air conditioning, right? Heat, uh, in the winter. Um, and they would take them in the back of an aircraft and the most common helicopter used for air medical transportation in the US has roughly the working volume of a 2008 Honda Civic. Um, I compared at one point, so they're providing kind of ICU-level care in the back of a Honda Civic. And developing the knowledge and expertise that comes along with navigating those challenges was also just really fascinating. So it was a cool opportunity to study a really unique kind of organizational setting, but also one where we could see some parallels to other environments. We're all working in increasingly constrained resource settings. We're all being asked to be adaptive and agile and nimble. Nobody gets 10,000 hours anymore, it seems, to master just one particular skill set. So it was an extreme setting, but one that I thought, you know, if we really unpack this and understand it, there might be some things that resonate to other settings as well.

Yeah, and I'd be curious, like if you, so this audience, our audience, right, is architecture engineering firms or business in general. What could architects, engineers, business folks learn from these flight nurses and their kind of more extreme situation?

Yeah, so, you know, stop me if I'm just grossly mischaracterizing architecture, 'cause I'll just go based off of television stereotypes. You know, so I'm sure that they're, they're outdated, but, you know, increasingly it seems that, you know, all of the projects we take on, everything starts to become more and more of a one-off, perhaps more so than 20 or 30 years ago when things were a little bit more standardized or cookie-cutter, or, you know, the, the techniques perhaps even were simpler, so it limited the things that we could do. There was a more finite range of options, you know, as technology has expanded, right? As you move into, you know, the opportunity to use 3D modeling, for instance, it allows you to do all sorts of new stuff. I know, Chris, you and I have spoken about how it also might mask some problems that you don't see unfolding, right? But there's certainly, at just a base level, way more complexity and way more options now. So, you know, the way of developing expertise is going to look a lot different. It's not going to be just rote, you know, you need to apprentice on X number of projects and by the time you've done that, you will be, you know, pretty familiar with basically the whole catalog of things that you would be expected to know. Now, you know, you may work on 5, 10 projects and the next 5, 10 may look totally different from that. And so it's really about getting to some of those more general principles and abstract ideas that you would be able to adapt and apply across settings.

So what were some of the knowledge sharing practices you saw with the flight nurses you think that other people could repeat? Like, how did they learn from all these one-offs and spread knowledge within their organization?

Yeah, so the thing that really fascinated me about them and kept me engaged in this context was the way that they used stories. So, you know, there was all sorts of storytelling happening within this group of people. Both in kind of a structured sense. So, you know, every time they changed shifts, there was a report-off and there was sort of the story of, well, here's what happened today. Here's what's going on with the aircraft, but also just kind of in the informal, like, you know, once 3 years ago, we flew a patient who had X condition, or, you know, oh, this reminds me of a time that I saw X. And these stories would get told, retold, passed around throughout the team. And they served as kind of this collective memory of these rare events that, that happened. And so, you know, it was fascinating to watch them use this very informal practice, but they used it very deliberately. I mean, to the extent that they, they would talk about with new people joining the team, they would talk to them about needing to learn how to tell a story effectively.

Oh wow.

You know, the way that people were typically trained to impart information in a medical setting was very list-like. It was just documenting. Okay. At, you know, 0300 this occurred, then this occurred, then that occurred, then I did this, then I did that. And so initially you'll see people, you know, during these shift changes and report-offs giving that kind of explanation. And some of the more seasoned flight nurses would say, no, no, no, what we really want to understand is tell me the story. What were you thinking? What happened? What went through your head? Let's unpack that. And they use it again to, to try to shift this to more an accumulation of, of wisdom and sort of an attitude of approaching these flights rather than an accumulation of knowledge and facts and information. And so, you know, they would really push that storytelling process, of course, alongside a number of other learning opportunities and tools. They would do elaborate simulations, they would do a lot of kind of self-study and maintenance of their certifications and all sorts of stuff like that. But there's some things that just can't be taught in a book or can't be trained, you know, in a simulation, especially in this aeromedical space. And because only 2 flight nurses, uh, and 1 useless organizational psychologist are on the helicopter at any given time, um, you know, how do you relay that message back to the other 20 people in the organization? You know, we're not all wearing GoPros for them to go back and watch the footage or something. So they would try to recreate these experiences by telling the story of it. And they'd use props and all sorts of resources that they had available to try to make sense of it and unpack what they had learned from that experience.

When did this happen? Like when in their kind of their week or their month, like how does this take place? Do they have like regular meetings where they share these things?

Yeah, so they have some formal mechanisms like many of us might, so debriefs and they have a weekly, what they call the grand rounds meeting. So they would go through many of the cases from the past week, that tended to be more of kind of that clinical explanation and story, but really what it was downtime. So these teams would hang out at their base. I shouldn't say hang out, they were on duty, you know, they were working, but if they weren't on a call, you know, they might just be working at the computer, completing some paperwork, doing some of their certification courses, those kinds of things. And, you know, something would either come up or they'd be reviewing a chart you know, a medical record from a case that had been flown earlier, and they'll say, wow, look at this, I can't believe that, how did that happen, how'd that go, what were you thinking? If they happen to be working with the person who flew that, or if they hear a story at shift change, or even something as simple as if there's a story on the TV in the background, sometimes it would remind people of a particular experience they'd had, and they just sort of share these stories in that downtime, and so it was really interesting to see how critical that off time was for their learning and development. And we see that, you know, increasingly under fire, both in the medical space. One of the teams that I studied had actually tried to sort of fend off a cost-cutting measure from the hospital management, saying we have these really highly paid nurses who are sitting around doing nothing while they wait for a call to come in. Why don't we have them in the emergency department or in the ICU, and then when a car comes in, they can just run and put on the flaps, drop everything, yeah, and leave. Um, yeah, you know, kind of a classic management versus frontline, uh, misunderstanding of how the world works, but also a failure to recognize the value of that downtime. And I think when we look across all industries, we see that, yeah, that informal time both increasingly under fire from cost-cutting or performance-pressure kind of moves, but also being threatened by exactly what we're doing right now of, you know, needing to do everything virtually. It's hard to have these casual chance encounters when everything is a scheduled Zoom meeting.

So I think I'm curious to see both that— sorry, go ahead, Chris.

Yeah, no, no, no, please.

I was gonna say, either Johns Hopkins or then with the different organizations you're studying, over the last 4 months, I guess, at this point, how have you seen— have you seen anyone kind of trying to successfully recreate that serendipitous or kind of chance encounter?

I know, you know, I see kind of the media reports of, you know, what people are trying of just Zoom lunches, you know, Zoom hangouts, happy hour kind of things. And, you know, I think are certainly a step in the right direction. I think that we still haven't yet quite cracked the problem of, you know, how do we replicate the— we both happen to be in the break room while a microwave burrito is— yeah, I don't know if we want to call it cooking if it's a microwave burrito, right? It's to become mildly edible. You know, what does that look like, right? You know, are we all just hanging out in those Zoom rooms whoever pops on, you say, "Oh, hey, I haven't talked to you in a while." I think that how to replicate those informal interactions is definitely a big challenge and will cross different organizations. Some folks have a norm where, you know, people are kind of online, even if they're looking off somewhere else working, you know, they're around, they're available. Others, everything's very tightly scheduled. I think one of the To the extent that there are silver linings to a pandemic, one of them will be that this is forcing a lot more experimentation and variation. I think before the pandemic, a lot of people, myself included, probably would have just said, "Yeah, you probably can't really fully replicate it. There's just not a great way to do it." I think hopefully we will see some attempts at that just born out of necessity that might illuminate new paths forward for all of us.

Well, you wrote an article called— and I love the title— Vicarious Learning in the Time of Coronavirus. So two things there. One is, what is vicarious learning? And I know this is a field and an area that you've done a lot of work in. So what's vicarious learning? And then how is it evolving in what we're seeing in the coronavirus pandemic?

Yeah, so vicarious learning is really just kind of an umbrella term for this idea of how we learn from other people's experiences. So, you know, it's under that big umbrella, you have things like observational learning, you have social learning, you have all these different kinds of manifestations and theories around it. But at a broad level, it's the same idea that we've had since childhood of you see your parent touch the hot stove and you see them pull their hand back, swear, whatever the reaction might have been, and you go, okay, that's probably not something I should be doing, that, that looked unpleasant, rather than needing to go through your whole life making all of your inferences through your own trial and error. And this is something that had always been kind of lurking in the background for me of the work that I was doing, given some of the settings that, that I either worked in or studied. So in outdoor education, for instance, When things go wrong, they can go quite wrong, and we really strive to not repeat the same. So, you know, we, we once left our backpacks unattended for a while and bear got into them. So when we returned to our backpacks, we encountered a bear and had to figure out, you know, that was a real trial and error kind of situation, right? I've got a group of 14 students myself, my co-instructor, and a bear. It was like, all right, cool, we don't have anything in the policy manual for this. But, you know, we were, we were very lucky that, you know, it didn't cause— the bear didn't cause us too much trouble. But one of the things we did was go back and recount that story and talk through what we did and what we could have done differently so that others don't— who found themselves in a similar situation didn't need to do their own trial and error, right? Same is true, obviously, and in medicine. Trial and error is kind of the least preferred way we'd like to be, uh, receiving our healthcare. Sure. We'd like to know that, oh, okay, somebody else somewhere else has tried this, it worked, you know, we're gonna try that here. So it had always been kind of lurking and latent, um, but a lot of the work that I've been trying to do is how do we bring that more to the fore in the organization? Because we often kind of treat it as incidental or informal But it plays a really important role in so many organizational settings that it can be a really valuable thing for organizations to build in as part of either their culture or their formal practices, that we create these opportunities for vicarious learning. And to your point about the coronavirus, what I was talking about in that article is some of the impediments that we've seen. To vicarious learning in the face of the coronavirus, that when we see the way that it's been tackled or treated elsewhere, in an ideal world, we would learn from all the things that went well and poorly as the disease spreads, so that each time it hits a new geographic region, we should be better at our response to it. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be how the data are panning out, right? We seem to still be waiting to learn from our own trial and error each time we encounter it, right? We, the royal we at a global level, right? That, you know, we're not taking advantage of the lessons learned. And so I try to unpack, you know, what might be some of the reasons behind that. One is that a lot of our knowledge of the coronavirus is mediated through television, news reports, intergovernmental agency reports, that can lose some of the detail and nuance that might be needed, right, that you would get if you just had direct conversations, doctors working in China and doctors working in Italy and doctors working in Baltimore. But the second is that we're all socially distanced as well, meaning that, you know, hanging out with somebody to hear how they treated coronavirus is less and less an option now, particularly outside of your local area. And so, you know, I think we've been increasingly turning to digital tools to try to provide avenues for some of that vicarious learning. So just as an example, some doctors here at Hopkins, through personal network contacts, arranged a video conference with colleagues in China to really just kind of get the download from them of what were you seeing, what did you try, you know, about this, what should we be working on, you know, what were the biggest challenges, what were the biggest missed opportunities, and they found it immensely helpful, but they had to kind of backchannel and set it up through these personal network contacts, because there weren't channels or mechanisms already in place for that to happen more easily.

Are there things that, that are easier to learn vicariously through someone else versus things that you would even consider impossible or very hard to learn vicariously.

Yeah, this was one of the things that really puzzled me about the flight nurses, actually, and motivated me to really do some research there, was our accumulated wisdom suggests that, you know, we can learn a lot of things about the culture of an organization or kind of the way we do things here, you know. Oh, don't ask this person on Wednesdays because they're always in a bad mood, because, right, you know, whatever happens on Tuesday night, you know, they, they have to take their kids to soccer practice and the team always loses, so they're always in a bad mood on Wednesday morning. But these kind of incidental learning type things would be the ones that spread most effectively through something like stories or through vicarious learning. But what I saw with the air medical teams is they were actually passing pretty kind of mission-critical knowledge and information via these vicarious learning mechanisms. And so, you know, while I'm sure there are things that you really need to just experience yourself and don't fully make sense until you've done them yourself, I do think that adding vicarious learning to our toolkit can be really beneficial. There's an informal saying in medicine of, you know, see one, do one, teach one. And I always note to people that two-thirds of that are about vicarious learning, right? It's about seeing one from somebody else, teaching somebody else to do, and sharing your experience so that someone else can learn from your experience. You know, the doing though is still probably quite important. You know, one of the things I always notice, I spent a couple years working with these flight nurses. I am in no way prepared to deliver effective medical care in the back of a—

Sure.

And I just by virtue of being there, I heard the same stories, but I didn't get the same lessons that has also done this themselves would absorb from the story that somebody shared. So I think they're, they're sort of multiplicative in that sense that the more you have learned on your own, the more you can also get out of somebody else's story. It's that, that notion of absorptive capacity. The more you know, the more you're ready to absorb out of someone else's experience as well.

Um, so Chris, Eric put a comment in the, in the chat, um, around, uh, the downtime situation for nurses maybe not being as translatable to our industry with architecture and engineering firms, right? And he notes that you've got people in the same office tackling the same problem at the same time on different projects while sitting two rows away from each other. So this seems silly, but like, how do we— what are your thoughts? How do we change that reality?

Yeah, it really is. And so, you know, I think you're absolutely right. This is a unique context, and it really throws into sharp relief some of these processes. And the real game for the rest of us is, okay, what, what of that could we adopt or absorb into our own organizational setting? You know, in terms of the same people, different people working on the same problem, but for different projects. You know, I know we see lots of organizations try to use wikis or Slack channels, task manager type applications, but building that into the, the fundamental processes— when I was at the Harvard Business School, I had— who were trying to, in essence, automate some of this process. They never got the idea fully off the ground, and you'll probably understand why as I explain it, but they had a piece of software that would track everything everyone was looking at on their work computers. That's usually where they lost everyone's interest, but what it would do is it would recommend to you somebody who was sort of traveling in the same knowledge domain and say, you know, hey Chris, I see that you're, you're looking at this. It turns out Greg was looking through all the same documents last week, right, on the company intranet. Maybe check in with Greg. It seems like you guys are, are working similar problems or trying to get to similar solutions. So if we could find ways to, to identify when people are working on similar types of problems, that might help facilitate some of those connections. Because again, the, the informal ones are great, but You know, the microwave burrito conversations are great because it usually is, oh, I'm here late, I'm working on this, and the other person says, oh, actually I wrote a bit of code last week that would solve that problem for our team. I'm happy to email it over to you if it'd be helpful. Um, the trick is, as our organizations grow larger and more complex, how do you identify the people who are most likely to have that productive conversation?

Yeah, one of this makes me think, Chris, of the kind of the Working Out Loud movement a little bit. You know, some of the tactics there are simply as when you start each workday, you kind of put into whatever it is, intranet, Slack, Teams, your tool of choice, what you're working on that day. And what that can often do is unlock, hey, I worked on the kind of things you were saying, is I worked on that last week, or I'm also working on that today.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, like all knowledge management systems or practices, getting that embedded in the culture and getting people to follow through with it and to really share and look through it and update it. And, you know, those are the big implementation challenges. And so, you know, the earlier we can get that into kind of the DNA of an organization, hopefully the less we have to rely on these tools that try to automate it, because unfortunately that usually works through data mining and things that people find uncomfortable or unpleasant for other reasons.

Sure, yeah. Yeah, we've seen— I don't know if this is something that you've seen in your work too. I'm thinking about like lean methodology and stick, you know, just even those daily stand-ups for 5 to 10 minutes at the beginning of the workday to talk about what everyone's got going on. Is that something— I mean, I guess doctors do that, right? This is where my knowledge of doctors becomes like your knowledge of architecture. Like, I'm going off things I've seen, I've seen on TV. But like, are there methods for that that you've seen just outside of the flight nurses?

I think devoting some time in team meetings to what's the biggest problem on your plate right now, you know, or what's the biggest win you've had, you know, the quirkiest tool you've discovered, you know, just really normalizing that talking out loud, as you're saying. You know, we've seen There are organizations, for instance, that will award points or, you know, some kind of engagement strategy for how often people use the knowledge management system or when they can solve other people's problems, or even just informally kind of recognizing somebody who figured out a way to not reinvent the wheel. You know, that when we go around the table and give our updates, you know, are you sharing something an example of a time when you did find a bit of knowledge and where did you find it, how did you incorporate it, how did you use it, just to help people flex those muscles because I think it is a learned skill. There's both sort of an attitude to it of, you know, knowing what to ask other people, right, but also knowing how to make yourself and your own experiences available to others for them to come and seek you out, but then just the, the muscle of it. Of overcoming what is sometimes ingrained in us of this desire to, I need to figure it out myself in order to prove my own worth and value. And so we're often going to Google before we're going to the person two desks down from us, when that's probably the much more reliable source. And so as we flex that skill to say, I'm gonna take a walk around, or in a meeting, I'm gonna be willing to be the one to pipe up and say, I'm really stuck on this. If anybody's got any ideas or tips, I'm all ears. I think those practices become really essential.

Got it. Chris, I just want to pause for a second. I got a little note on the back channel that your audio sounds a little choppy. Do you have an alternative set of headphones or would speaker be an option? Do you have something?

Yeah, let me try something different.

Okay.

How's that now?

I think that's better, so we'll give that one a try.

Great. I can still hear you.

Can you still— oh yeah, that'd be, that'd be helpful.

There we go. How's that?

That's much better, thank you. One of the things you did— yeah, it's always in a— exactly. One of the things that you did at the University of Michigan is you were part of a group called the Center for Positive Organizations, and I'm curious to know what— first, like, what a positive organization is. That's great, I'd like to be part of one. And then what did the center do? Like, what kind of research projects or did it work on, did you work on there?

Yeah, so at a broad level, you know, positive organizing or positive organizations is really, you know, it's a response in a way to the way, the predominant ways that people had researched and sort of advocated for management practices and organizations, which was very focused on resolving deficits that how do we take things that aren't working well and make them work better, rather than understanding how do we take things that are working okay and make them work excellently. Um, and so it's more, you know, you'll, you'll hear people talk about it, it's akin to positive psychology and these ideas of, you know, if positive psychology is into human flourishing, positive organizational scholarship is oriented around, you know, organizational flourishing of what does what are the practices that, that help an organization not just survive and exist, but really thrive. And so learning and growth are obviously a huge part of that, that, you know, learning in the historic sense might have been viewed as filling knowledge deficits. And that was really kind of the training mentality was, we have people who don't know what they need to know in order to do this job, let's get them to know what they need to know. And now they know how to do it. I think we've really evolved into thinking about learning and development in organizations as how do we take people from the current skill set they have to a skill— a more elaborated skill set that is going to take them further than where they are right now, rather than just making them competent at this particular task or role. And so, you know, I, I had seen a lot of alignment with the ways that I was studying and thinking about learning in organizations that were reflected in the kinds of discussions and approaches that were being adopted in positive organizational scholarship.

What's so— like, this idea of learning from extreme success is something that I think, if I have this right, that's something that's related to what you studied or what the Center for Positive Organizations would want to look into. So what is, what is this idea of learning from extreme successes, maybe that What does that mean, and can you provide some examples?

Yeah, it's a great example of kind of shifting from this deficit mentality of, you know, in a lot of work, my own work included, we look at how do we learn from things that didn't go well. And that's obviously hugely important, particularly, you know, in health settings. We devote a lot of time and attention to learning from things that didn't go well. But we usually treat anything that kind of cleared the bar as, okay, that was good. It went fine. Not much we need to unpack or debrief from that. And while that might be true for something that went exactly how we expected, there's also what my colleagues and I, Ryan Quinn, Steph Simmons, Shirley Kopelman, and I have called these exceptional successes, where it didn't go how we expected it to go because it went so much better. And there's a lot of learning value in those. And so, you know, we set out to understand just at a very, very preliminary exploratory kind of level, are people noticing that and are they motivated to learn from those stories of exceptional success as well? So we looked across emergency department clinicians and also just members of the general public doing an online simulated task. And we saw that, you know, their motivation to learn from somebody else's experience did kind of follow this U-shape where it was higher as we got to both extremes of the performance continuum, meaning that whether it was extremely low or extremely high performance, there was a notedly higher degree of motivation to learn from those experiences. So it sort of validated what we know that we seem to be more motivated to learn from failures versus success, although we observed kind of mixed support for that. But what we observed really consistent support for was this idea that there is a boost in motivation, learning from exceptional success relative to these kind of things that went just as we expected them to go. And so, you know, that, that's kind of an example of the, the positive organizational scholarship approaches, you know. It's a school of thought that, that invites us to think about other forms of —of growth, other forms of performance improvement in organizations that can be really valuable because it's easier sometimes, easier sometimes to get someone to come out and talk about an exceptional success than to, you know, bring themselves to the front of the table and tell everybody about their failure. So if we can learn from both of those sets of experiences, but one is a lot easier for us to to share and generate within an organization, then it's really valuable that we know about that and try to understand how we can use those in organizations.

Why do you think we just, we don't do that naturally, or what did you learn about why, why that's not a more common practice?

So when we look across, um, you know, the existing research that's kind of talked about this, we think it's due to a couple things. One is there's a hard demarcation usually between failure and what I'll call not failure, kind of lumping together success and exceptional success, right? We know once it's over the bar. Beyond that, it gets kind of fuzzy. Was that what we expected? Was that really exceptional? We might judge it differently. So our perceptions of the performance matter quite a bit, uh, even on the failure side actually, because that bar is also, you know, up for debate sometimes of what, what's a failure and what isn't. But the second thing is, um, we can think about some of the attributional processes that we make, particularly when we're trying to learn from others' experiences. Dewas K.C., Francesca Gino, and Bradley Stats have a wonderful paper looking at cardiac surgeons learning from their own and others' experience. And they observe evidence that's consistent with this idea of the fundamental attribution error, that when we see our own successes, we attribute it to our actions, something about me, Personally. Um, and when we look at our own failures, we attribute it to a situational cause. Oh, well, you know, this surgery didn't go well, not because I did a bad job, but because this tool wasn't right. You know, this thing didn't work. Uh, some, something in the situation, but we do the exact opposite for others' performances. So when something goes really well, we attribute it to luck or, you know, they had a good OR team. They had something else that was really good. And when they fail, we attribute it to them personally. They're a bad person. They did this wrong. So that can make it more challenging at times to seek out and try to learn from others' exceptional successes if we're attributing them to these situational causes. Well, it was luck. They, you know, they just got a good one, and nothing I can take from that other than wait for my next chance to, to get a good situation or to be lucky. But when we can actually sit ourselves down and try to make sense of those experiences, there's something of value there and there is some latent motivation to learn from those experiences.

It would also follow, I think, from what you explained that we are— it's harder for us to learn from our own failures then as well.

It can be for sure. And that's what, what Diwas KC and colleagues observed was that surgeons' own performance, their own successes was a better predictor of their kind of future performance than their own past failures, suggesting that they were internalizing some lessons of those successes better than they were internalizing the lessons of failure.

Interesting. Johns Hopkins, what took you there? Michigan, Harvard, then Johns Hopkins. Why did you, why did you decide to join and what were you hoping to study or achieve? Achieve there?

Yeah, so, you know, I mean, it's come up a number of times just in the examples that I've given that a lot of my work is oriented around healthcare. Right. So I think from a large-scale perspective, there's just something really valuable about trying to understand how healthcare organizations can work better, because the improvements that we see aren't, you know, necessarily just things like profit or efficiency, you know, they can be real life or death outcomes in these cases. And so, you know, it's an arena that, that has a lot of interest and I think also a lot of opportunity to improve in terms of its organizing capacities. So, you know, the opportunity to come down and work at Johns Hopkins, one of the leading health-oriented institutions in the world, and to, to focus my research on that intersection of healthcare and management really was a big appeal and allowed me to expand my research in these new and interesting domains.

And one of the areas I think we've talked about is burnout and the medical industry. And this is a huge topic. This is a topic in our industry also, but it's been a big one in healthcare for a long time. And I'm curious, kind of, what are, what are organizations, healthcare organizations doing about it? What are the organizational development, organizational learning, knowledge management angles to that?

Yeah, I think that's— it's such an important one, and it's one where, you know, what changes we need to make are sometimes lagging behind the ones we're willing to make. So, you know, we see a lot of organizations in healthcare, they, they'll host ice cream socials and they'll, you know, do all of these, um, sort of small interventions to improve people's burnout. Um, but really what we see mattering is some of the fundamental organizational processes and structures. And so we're now seeing those organizations really try to step back and look at some of those more fundamental elements and how those relate to healthcare providers' burnout. So, you know, I was fortunate to work with some wonderful colleagues here at Hopkins, Heather Satay and Sanjay Desai, to understand burnout among internal medicine residents. And what we observed, for instance, was that the degree to which that, that resident reported being part of a team that engaged in a lot of learning behavior, um, as well as receiving support from the organization, um, and their own sort of individual orientation to learning, all of those things predicted their burnout. So it wasn't just a matter of the individual characteristic, right? Some people are more prone to it than others. That's not really the story. It's not just, am I getting the support from the organization? That's part of the story, but also, you know, what are the behaviors of the people that I'm working with on a daily basis? So that, that team element mattered a lot. And in particular, the team's engagement in learning, because we know that from other research by some colleagues at the University of Michigan, Chen Zhang and others, that learning can help buffer some of these effects of stress that we experience at work, both in a kind of direct way that if we learn something new that helps us do the task that is stressing us out, it can obviously reduce some of that stress, but also that just learning and expanding our, our knowledge and our capacity can be restorative in a sense that, that helps us deal with burnout and stress. So, you know, I think as we consider things like knowledge management and learning cultures and organizations, recognizing that those aren't just means to performance ends, right? They're not just to sharing knowledge within organizations, but they can actually improve individuals' experience of their work, right? They're hopefully less burned out and correspondingly more engaged. I think that recognition is really starting to grow, and so we're seeing that, you know, it's less about trinkets and bells and whistles to to try to paint over, you know, difficult organizational processes. It's more about getting in there, tackling those, those elements of culture and process, and incorporating learning deeply into those seems to be a really promising avenue.

And given what you said about learning and stress, it seems like in this pandemic, a lot of our clients and folks that we know have talked and said, like, how are we going to keep our learning and development programs a priority when things are the way they are, right? And it sounds like this is a useful tool for managing some of that stress and keeping people engaged. We've known learning keeps people engaged, but the part about managing stress, I feel like, is new, for at least to me.

Yeah, and there, you know, I'm happy to share some of the research, and we had a short article in the Harvard Business Review summarizing some of that work that might be of interest. As we're not only sort of building our own interest in it, but making the case in this era of increased budget shortfall and financial challenge to make that case for continuing to invest in learning and continuing to invest in knowledge management. I mean, it's a cliché and trope to say that learning and training are the first things to get cut when times get tight. But if we start to understand them not as window dressing, not as, you know, nice-to-haves, but really as essential to the culture, the engagement, the performance of the organization, then hopefully they get a little bit further up the list on safety from budget cuts.

Yeah, I think if you were willing to share— if you share that with me, Chris, I'll share it out with other folks. That's great. Absolutely. I'm going to start taking some questions. I've got a few more, but I saw that Julie Weston added a question in the chat, and this is— sorry, not in the chat, in the Q&A panel. Julie, I'm going to go ahead and enable you to be able to ask your question.

Hi. Thanks for coming and talking to us. From your observations, the groups that you've watched, what are your best tips for facilitating the learning and knowledge transfer in virtual environments, like being the facilitator? Is it the setting structure? Is there particular discussion patterns or interaction types that work better? Yeah, I think, you know, I'll start by giving the standard social scientist disclaimer, which is, you know, it always depends on the context of the organization and the specific needs. But I think we can take this gathering as a great opportunity, that one of the things virtual has going for it is that we can be sort of operating on multiple channels, if not simultaneously, at least in parallel, that, you know, we can capture notes and comments as people are speaking, we can log questions, we can circle back to them, we can crowdsource answers to some of the questions that we have in ways that, that in in-person meetings might not allow, because we don't want 20 people speaking all at once, but we can have 20 people typing all at once. So I think some of it is encouraging ourselves, and this is something I've been trying to do in my own work and my own practice, is to not write off the opportunity and just think, we've got to get through this. It's a poor facsimile of an in-person meeting, but really probe these virtual meetings for the new opportunities that are created. And so I've seen a lot of people trying to structure these virtual environments to be more kind of multi-input oriented than we might see in other settings, because they lend themselves to it. And I think that can be really effective. What I've seen is in virtual settings, we can often get a really nice diverse set of perspectives and come to a, a kind of more well-rounded decision or consensus, and more quickly than what I've seen in some in-person meetings, because we can allow people to speak more quickly and share different perspectives more in parallel. So I think any opportunities we have in meetings to kind of open up those multiple channels to allow that different input to come in, when we're in person and you know, really we can only speak one at a time, we run the risk of being anchored by what everybody is saying. So, you know, the person who went before said an idea and everybody seemed to nod, and then we go, okay, that seems to be the direction everybody wants to go in. My way left field idea over here, I'm either gonna keep to myself or I'm gonna pivot it and kind of put it more in the ballpark of what the growing consensus seems to be. Sometimes there's real value in just taking in all of the wild ideas at the same time, and the virtual format can, can give us that. There's a practice of this idea of brainwriting, right, that before brainstorming, you know, allowing people— and there's good research evidence for it as well, actually— that allowing people to just submit things quietly in writing, anonymously, even in a live meeting and going through and reading out all of them, we generate more creative and particularly divergent ideas that can enable us to find out something new that we wouldn't have found out if we started on one idea and then every comment after that was just a slight elaboration of that same idea. So I think there's a lot of really cool structures and opportunities that we have because of the virtual format that might helpful. So that's a long, rambly thought on that, but hope there's something in there.

Yeah, I love the brainwriting stuff. That's great. I'm kind of curious, Chris, as you're kind of looking back over your career, um, about organizational learning, kind of like, what are some of the things that, um, that would have helped you the most to know when you first got started out that you've learned over time?

It's a good question. I should say, you know, over my career, you know, when I look like I'm 14 years old, it's clearly not that long of a time. So I'm, I'm certainly more, and hope to stay in the learning phase. But I think, you know, one of the things that, that has really, you know, just in every organization I've gone to, or every organization I've worked with, recognizing kind of the duality of knowledge management in the sense that, you know, knowledge management giveth and knowledge management taketh away in the sense of it provides this really helpful backbone to learning in most organizations, but it can also, you know, constrain and really limit some of the learning that happens. So, you know, I was speaking with a manager in one organization and said, "Oh, I love it. I use the knowledge management system all the time. I find an article on the thing I'm interested in, I scroll to the bottom, I see who wrote it, and I call them." And so you kind of think like, okay, well, there it is, right? It giveth. That's a connection we might not have made otherwise, but it taketh away in the sense of however much time somebody devoted into actually writing up the article, people aren't reading them and they're not using them. So how do we try to balance those two things?

Is that a rational act? What do you think about that? The person that does that, what does that tell you?

I think it depends. If it's a setting where we're lather, rinse, repeat, we need a particular bit of code, for instance, for an app, and now we're building a new app, we need the same functionality of allow somebody to log into the app, check their password against the server, that kind of thing. Yeah, go on the knowledge portal, get the bit of code for how that is done. But increasingly, the kinds of things we're trying to solve for and figure out require tweaking and adapting knowledge that won't be perfectly represented in that KMS. And so, I think in that kind of setting, it is rational. You had mentioned Dorothy Leonard at the outset. She and I wrote a case study of NASA JPL. She actually wrote a fascinating case study earlier, and so we were kind of doing an update on that process. But we heard a story about how, in preparation for the Mars 2020 lander, they were going back through the earlier Mars rovers, because again, don't reinvent the wheel. If you landed one successfully on there, um, let's try to stick where we can to the original design. But one of the challenges that they ran into was the documentation for that original design, um, assumed so many things and, um, was based on so many kind of principles that either didn't apply anymore or, um, were not written down or not known by the newer engineers working on Mars 2020. So they talk about needing to go and track down a former NASA contractor who now lived in Spain to ask one question about like, what assumptions did you put when you set this limit for tolerance for a certain piece of equipment? Because when you did it, it was fixed, but now we want to put it on a flexible drum head and let it move, but your documentation is just written for it being fixed. And so we don't actually know the assumptions you made or the behind-the-scenes numbers you put in. So we can't actually adapt that until we go fly over to Spain, hunt you down, and ask you what sounds like one question. You know, just, hey, what was this number that you put in? I know it's not that simple. And it's literally rocket science. So, you know, I'm sure I'm doing a horrible job. In summarizing it, but that kind of challenge was pervasive. And there was actually a, a camp within JPL that was of the mind that they should actually just start from scratch in building the Mars 2020 rover, because at least then the knowledge would reside with the current engineers. They wouldn't be trying to make sense of somebody else's notes or miss an assumption someone else made that, you know, maybe there was value in just totally starting from scratch so that everybody had the full picture and the full kind of gestalt understanding of how everything was going to work. Which, you know, we think about the cost and the difficulty and the risk associated with that of not learning from our past successes, but the process of that learning from others' experience can be so challenging that it becomes suddenly that it seems like a good idea to just ignore it and start over. That to me is the— it's again the duality of it. The opportunity is there, but how do we structure it in ways that make the benefit outweigh the cost?

And I think maybe it's fair to say that the folks that were working on the first set of— the first set of— well, I guess their drawings and documentation, whatever it was, weren't necessarily documenting with future engineers or designers in mind, right?

Absolutely, right? You're, you're under pressure, you know, uh, and I'm gonna forget the exact specifics, but, uh, a window to launch from Mars comes, I want to say, every 2 years, but not often.

So someone can fact-check in the, in the chat.

Yeah, yeah, somebody here that might— if I get that wrong, there's something about elliptical orbits and, uh, right, there's a good window to launch So Mars 2020, so named because 2020 is the window. Now I have not checked in recently to see if they're still on track for that, but yeah, so you're under time pressure that getting the job done and, you know, like all good engineering majors, they wait until the last second to really get it all the way done. EJ, every 2.2 years.

There you go. And Sarah. Hey, this is a wonderful community you all have.

I wish I had that in teaching, just automatically correct any of the things that's wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, there's a lot of performance pressure. So absolutely, documenting it for somebody else in the future, that falls way to the bottom of the priority list of, you know, that need to get done in order to get this launch to happen. So you're right, I wouldn't be shocked if you actually open up that documentation and it's all notes to self that don't make sense for somebody who's coming on board to be able to read that. So, you know, JPL and NASA more broadly have been really trying to tackle some of these challenges. They will bring retired engineers back in for, you know, one day a week to share their experience and share their knowledge. They've started these, these bigger repositories, video-based repositories, uh, that are searchable through text. Um, so they're transcribed and then they're searchable. So you can, um, get it more in somebody's own words than in a technical report. So, you know, there, there's certainly a lot of efforts being made, but gosh, that's a big thorny problem, especially on the scale that, that you're talking about there. And with the kind of one-shot that you get to get it right.

Yeah, absolutely. Folks, if you guys have questions, feel free to throw them in the Q&A panel. I'll keep going otherwise. I'm kind of curious, Chris, like where you're thinking about taking your research next. What seems really interesting to you that you haven't explored yet?

So, you know, one domain that is just really kind of early stage, you know, we're exploring a little bit now is, is trying to figure out, you know, how do we map some of this space in between formal and informal learning and organization? To have been pretty content for 50 years or so, at least on the kind of research or the OD side, and say there's formal learning processes and there's informal learning processes. So we've got training, we've got formal education, we've got onboarding, you know, we also have, you know, the informal vicarious learning that happens, the, you know, knowledge sharing, all those sorts of things. Um, but over time we see organizations adopting a lot of what I'll call kind of semi-formal strategies. So, you know, things that have their roots in formal organizational systems, but work through more informal mechanisms. So when hospitals roll out, um, an electronic health record system, for instance, there are often super users who get more training than the average user, but they're not trainers. They're just, they just get extra training and then they become kind of a point person or number one helper in their unit or team who's going to help other people troubleshoot problems. So they get some formal resources, but the way they're sharing that knowledge looks just like any other informal knowledge sharing of, you know, asking for advice, getting somebody's help with a problem that you're having. And I think we're, we see a lot of those kinds of semi-formal learning strategies getting rolled out in organizations as leaders and companies are trying to, to ride that knife edge of the benefits of something being formalized and, and structured, so you know what knowledge is getting spread around out there, also taking advantage of the, the ease of spread and the, the sort of scalability of some of these informal, um, practices that that can keep up faster than a formal training can, for instance, as things change and as protocols or tools change. And we've seen it a little bit in our health system here around personal protective equipment and COVID. How do we keep up with changing guidelines all the time? So, you know, that, that's some work that a few colleagues and I are just really beginning now to try to better understand that, that semi-formal formal space, because I think it already matters quite a bit in most organizations, and I think we will probably continue trending in that direction.

One of the things that makes me think of is the— you know, somebody put this phrase in my head, and I don't remember who, a long time ago, about the idea that there's a half-life to knowledge and that it's shrinking as time goes forward. In other words, the things that we learn are valid for shorter and shorter periods of time, and knowledge is turning over incredibly growing really quickly. I'm curious to know, like, is this super users— do you think that's partly a reaction to that half-life of knowledge shrinking?

I think it certainly could be. The semi-formal approach, right, would ideally, you know, you sort of arm a smaller group of people with the formal knowledge and, you know, then they can spread it and update it and adapt it more readily and hopefully also serve as a conduit back to share with the organization of how people are using this knowledge or what people are doing out on the front lines. I mean, I'd wager that if most of us went through the kind of list of formal training materials that we have in our organization, if 50% or more are up to date, are still relevant or useful, I think that would be a pretty good win. I would wager that many of our organizations would struggle with that, where at least one slide in the formal presentation you just look at and go, oh wait, we didn't renew our license to that program like 7 years ago, you know, we just haven't updated the training and everybody just skipped over that slide and we keep moving as if it still works because it's costly and difficult to change these formal mechanisms. Normally on the fly, you know, we see good, but also sometimes bad practices that just spread like wildfire in organizations, right? You know, the, the workarounds where, you know, you walk in and everybody goes, okay, well, you would think you'd put date in the date field, but it actually turns out the best way to do it is to put it in notes tab 2. Um, right. You know, all sorts of these little workarounds that never get documented anywhere, but somehow everyone in the organization knows that that that's the best way to do it. So how do you take the best of both of those approaches? Because if it isn't working to put date in the date field in the, you know, whatever the electronic health record, the whatever program it is, it'd be good if we could change that systematically, but also recognizing that that will come much later than, you know, kind of the widespread existence of the problem. And so having that semi-formal structure might be a way to connect those two disconnected halves.

Yeah, interesting. Scott Griggs, you have a question. Scott, I think you might be muted.

I think we were fighting over the mute. There we go. Yeah, I was just wondering if you were sort of starting from scratch or if there were cultural norms or prerequisites that you're building on. And specifically, early on in the conversation, you were talking about the use of stories with the Life Flight pilots and how it depended on downtime. And then I sort of had that little follow-up that in my own personal experience, if I don't build in time to sort of be or reflect, if I'm always in doing mode, I have a hard time learning stuff. Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, if one major lesson that I took from those air medical teams was just the value of that in-between time, you know, time in between projects, time in between, you know, cases, tasks, whatever it may be, to try to reflect and, and make sense of what it is that you're experiencing. I think sometimes in our— perhaps in our rush to formalize or legitimate that, that time, we've turned it into another task of, you know, okay, when we get done with this consulting project, we're going to devote 3 days to debriefing it. But to justify those 3 days, we turn it into a whole laundry list of tasks. We need to write up this summary, we need to do that, we need to do this, and it becomes more just doing rather than actually sitting with the thoughts and reflecting on them. And that, you know, accepting that as a norm within the culture, that some time where it looks like nothing is happening can actually be really, really good for us, is I think just increasingly valuable because we want to— in that desire to look busy or to justify the Zoom meeting, for instance, we need an agenda and we need a purpose. So if we're going to have a reflection meeting over Zoom, we're going to have 5 discussion questions and everyone is going to chip in and, you know, we're going to talk through all these things. Um, sometimes there's value in that, that just total free form. And, you know, I think organizations where that can happen more naturally, um, just have that inherent advantage. So I think there's just something structural to those flight teams in a sense that that gives them that opportunity to do it. But for the rest of us, we can think about, you know, ways that we, we try to block that in. Um, and the challenge being that it's expensive, right? It's, it's time that isn't being spent doing something. And just like the hospital administrators who wanted those flight nurses in the emergency department during all of that downtime, um, it will only be after the fact when the team stops performing as well on their flights, um, you know, 6 months down the line, maybe that we start to realize the cost of that decision. And often in organizations, you know, that are slow to change or, you know, where those changes are difficult, um, that can be the end of it. It's, well, it's in place now. We're just going to have to deal with that. And so if you have the chance to start it up from scratch, you know, accepting that and just factoring that in as, as fixed overhead, that, that time may not look productive on any given week, but over the span of 6 months or a year, we're going to see the value add of it. I think it can be really— it's a great strategy and step forward.

Chris, there's a person I'm thinking of who wrote— his kind of area of field was reflective practitioners, and I think it's Schoen or something like that. Does that sound familiar at all to you?

Edward Schein. Ed Schein.

Yeah, Ed Schein. I think that's it. Yeah, I think he even studied architects, and that was kind of one of his, I think, big takeaways is building in that reflective, unstructured time. Um, yeah, easier said than done, right? But absolutely.

Yeah. Um, and I think, you know, given the technological tools and the, the push that has come from those, you know, I know I said earlier they give us a lot of opportunities but they also, you know, we know, wed us so much to productivity and to this idea that we can be always on, that even at the individual level, the time you might have had in the past to decompress and reflect on the drive home or, you know, in the evenings is now, you know, well, I've got my cell phone so I can take conference calls while I'm driving home and that becomes more doing time. And so I think we have to be even more guarded and precious about giving ourselves that necessary space.

I love it. Yeah, it's in the chat now. That's the book I was talking about. Thank you. Thanks, Sarah.

So not Ed Sheeran. Sorry.

Yeah. So one thought I have for you, Chris, as we start wrapping up is like, what— we've been talking about kind of like new practices and observations. Are there things that you've seen both in your work and others, like learning, learning strategies and approaches that we're letting go of because they no longer seem relevant or they seem to be harmful or not effective. Like, what are your thoughts on like what you would tell people not to do in terms of learning?

That's a really good question. Um, you know, I think just broadly, you know, this notion of, um, kind of formal training seems to be, you know, on the on the way out, you know, in, in the classic sense that we think about it, you know, of there are increasingly fewer and fewer roles where it's, you know, you need to do this task exactly this way. And so, you know, any kind of learning effort, you know, again, that's, that really comes from that, a pure deficit mentality or just a pure you know, I almost want to say—

It's kind of the Taylorist, right? Like, it's just like, it's a very mechanistic view of the world, right? It's like, there's buckets to be filled with things. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think, you know, it's— learning has certainly been part and parcel of that Taylorist kind of mechanical view, the view of, you know, the organization or the individual as this machine, computer that takes in this, processes it, puts this out. Or we talk about the flow of knowledge, right? We have this metaphor of conduits and pipes and things that transfer. And I think if we can shift our thinking to something about how it builds our capacity and how it builds our— Sim Sitkin and Cathy Sutcliffe and Carl Weick have talked about how we build our response repertoires. What we're really doing is we're lining up and kind of fleshing out our repertoire of potential responses in the future. That's a different way of thinking about it than learning what to do in this particular situation. That, you know, when, when the car comes down the manufacturing line, I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that, and then pass it on to somebody else. Thinking about how do I expand my, my repertoire so that, you know, that when the next weird client comes in or the next, you know, unique project comes up, I've got a library of things I can go, okay, I can pull a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and combine it together and generate a solution to this problem. And so that way of thinking about learning in organizations rewards breadth. It rewards, you know, kind of non-traditional learning. So, you know, allowing people to go off and study something that does not seem immediately task relevant, going off and, you know, just taking time to develop a non-work skill set, for instance. You know, I think if we look back at— I mean, spin the wheel and pick a book of, you know, some famous leader and some famous organization, you'll almost always see that there's some piece of it that they brought from a hobby, from an outside interest, from You know, the fact that they used to be a photographer and now they understood how to solve this problem that previously nobody understood.

They're getting at T-shaped people, I think, a little bit.

Exactly. It sounds like. You know, that there's a huge value add and an increasing value add to that breadth. And I'd almost argue that the depth of the T is probably shallowing up a little bit as get technological tools that can aid us in some of the depth elements, you know, that can help even more, you know, in terms of AI or machine learning to kind of execute some of the specifics. We can see even more value out of that breadth than the creative approach that comes from those broad interests as well as the deep work. Right.

But I think I want to go all the way back to the flight nurses though, because I think about like our, our industry, right, and how the breadth seems to be continuing, like that becomes, seems to be becoming more and more important. In other words, like with the flight nurses, I think you told me a story a few months ago, um, well, you shared with me is like there isn't, there are so many different things that can happen that like trying to train somebody on all the potential things that are going to happen seems impossible. And I think you shared a story, and I'm going to get it wrong, where like Ah, somebody was, um, there was like a situation in a car and getting somebody out of a car. I can't remember what it was. I'm gonna— I might—

Yeah, there's lots of good ones. Um, perhaps the one, um, that we're, we're thinking of is, you know, there's, um, a procedure where you place a breathing tube in someone's throat. That's typically done, uh, in an ideal case in a surgical operating room. With a sterile field and laying down in a nice position on the table. There was someone who needed that tube but was pinned upright in their vehicle. And so, you know, the person needed to come through the sunroof of the vehicle and intubate the person that way. That is on zero nursing school curriculum exams. On zero. I mean, you, you couldn't have invented a weirder scenario or question, but with some, um, you know, kind of general principles, you, you say, okay, well, if I need to come at it from this angle, and, you know, I understand some of the limitations that I have and the, the opportunities, the tools that I have, you know, somebody figured it out. Um, and I think the thing that I took away from the flight nurses was not only the breadth of each individual person to kind of say, okay, I can bricolage, a creative solution to this problem. But then what do you do to try to scale that to other people so that for anybody who, uh, did not have climb through the sunroof in their mental repertoire, that now they do. And not only have it, but they now have a better version of it than what I had walking into that scenario. And so that's where the teams would, you know, they would mock up, they would sit a patient mannequin upright and practice trying to do it. They would try alternatives. What if you came through the windshield and had somebody from the front to be able to do it, you know, and kind of experiment with all of those things hypothetically. Um, again, not that there was going to be an exam where they had to do that. Yeah. Not that they were going to have to do that the next day. That— the most likely outcome is that never happens again.

But they've built up— I love that word you used— you're— but it's built up a repertoire of potential responses and different things you can draw on in a different kind of situation, perhaps.

Exactly. And so it's less about how do I intubate somebody who's pinned upright in a car, because again, for, for most of them, that'll never happen in their career or never happen again for the ones who did see it. But on the off chance that it does happen again, or just for the, the value that comes from having that in the repertoire, it's worth that learning process and engaging in that. That storytelling and sharing.

Cool stuff, Chris. Thank you so much for, for doing this. Um, every time we talk, I, I just really enjoy geeking out with you on all things learning and knowledge and trying to draw things out of your world into ours. So thank you very much for making time, um, for us and for sharing this.

It's always a fun chat.