L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Learning-Based Work: Moving Beyond Doing Work to Defining Work through Discovery & Dialogue

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

The relationship between learning and work is experiencing a period of rapid evolution. Whereas we once trained as apprentices or students for a very specific skill set that could reliably carry us through a lifelong career, we now enhance our abilities on a daily basis with the help of technology. Soon enough, we’ll have to embrace an entirely new paradigm that posits work as learning and learning as work within a system that encourages us to define our own roles through constant discovery of knowledge.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week on the show, I welcome Dr. Rachel Fichter. Rachel is a consultant, executive coach, and educator who strives to reconceptualize leadership and the relationship between learning and work. Her learning and development career spans more than 20 years at a number of global financial organizations, including J.P. Morgan and S&P Global. Rachel earned her doctorate of

education in adult learning and leadership from Columbia's Teachers College, where she is now an adjunct faculty member teaching in the Department of Organization and Leadership. She encourages organizations to address the complexity of modern global challenges, not by doubling down on entrenched work systems, but by embracing democratic and generative business practices, with an emphasis on dialogue and discovery. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Rachel Fichter. Rachel, it's wonderful to have you on. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. So we spoke about a couple weeks ago. You gave me a couple books in reference to the

conversation that we're about to have, just to kind of brush up on your leadership ideas, the concepts that you teach as an educator. And one of those books is Design Unbound by, I think, Ann Pendleton Julian and John Seeley Brown are the co-authors on that. They introduce this concept of wicked problems. And these are sort of large societal problems, if I'm understanding correctly, that you can't solve with a singular solution. And in many cases, the solutions that we implement societally end up revealing more about the nature of that problem. And it kind of grows and expands and it's a sort of, you know, a seemingly endless problem. work is that you tend to think in terms of opus and the teaching that you do is very large scale and thinking about the very deep future, fourth industrial revolution, sustainability, big, big issues. So what are the wicked problems, you know, maybe including those two things, but even more, what are the wicked problems that you hope to address in the work that you do? Yeah, well, first of all, Tyler, good for you for reading that book, because it's a pretty big one.

I didn't read the whole thing, I have to admit. I read some in the beginning, but I got the key points. Even reading a couple of chapters is already pretty remarkable. So, well, first of all, just to elaborate a little bit on wicked problems. Wicked problems are not new. So I think the term was coined in the 70s already. So we had wicked problems in the last, you know, in 1973, just like we do now. And what I like to do is sort of distinguish between the idea of complicated problems and complex problems. And complicated problems are problems that you can break apart into small pieces and solve for. And complex problems, which are ultimately wicked problems, are problems which

in a way, they can't be solved. Because as you said, kind of like the moment that you start to try to solve them, they change. The nature of the problem changes the moment you interact with it. And that's kind of where we go into this design unbound title in itself. And so, of course, I would say that the ones that I'm really fixated on right now are centered on the three lenses of sustainability that we use, talking about environmental, social, and economic sustainability. You wrote a piece earlier this year in which you describe your central ethos as collective leadership. I want to spend some time talking about that because I love the idea.

And you talk a lot about whole social ecological systems, you know, thinking about work in the society that we live in, you know, the grand scheme of the people, all the moving parts of it, and doing the work that we do with a holistic awareness of all that's going on. And this was kind of alluded to, actually, it wasn't alluded to, it was kind of the point of the first chapter of Design Unbound, where they're talking about, I think it was the Venezuelan paper orchestra, I think it was. And I guess to kind of further couch this conversation, if you could, maybe, can you elaborate on that idea of the sort of social ecological systems

that we work in and kind of how you think we should be thinking about the work that we do and the organizations that we create? Yeah, that's a it's a really important question. And I guess where it starts is that, you know, when when we think about working in an organization or in the workplace, and of course, this goes into learning as well, we often pretend that the organization is like a closed system in itself. And so that we can operate within that organization, or we can even do our own thing, right? Where then we always think about individual learning, we think about individual this or individual that. And now we're starting to say, well, actually, you know, things don't really happen individually. So we start to think about teamwork, and we all talk about teamwork. But then we go back and we pay people

based on individual performance. And we don't take into consideration how individuals are enabled or disabled through the teams and the broader organization and the policies and the procedures, the institution itself, and then, of course, broader society. So what I'm trying to do here is to explain that we are nested into these multiple systems. We've got certainly our own system. So for example, my family is a system, and then there's my extended family, then there's my community, there are my friends that might be connected to work or not connected to work, I like to go and work out. So maybe I meet people at the gym, etc. And I have my, you know, friends, and I travel, and then I meet people, etc, all of that.

So those are my systems. And then there's the organizational aspect of the system, the, you know, the or the organizational system itself. But the idea, when we talk about this is the goal of our organization, and then we do these nice little cascades of objectives down, we end up not really paying attention to the fact that there's so many other systems that we all of these employees are part of and that they influence and shape the organization. We pretend that it doesn't exist because it's hard. And that's where it becomes wicked. Because the moment that you can kind of pretend that, you know, an organization is in a bubble, and that it can, let's say it has these particular strategic goals

and then we all focus on those goals. And you can then break down any kind of problems into these little, you know, small components, et cetera. It gives you a kind of like a false sense of, oh, I can manage this, but actually that it does, it, it, it creates more problems because you're not taking into consideration all of these different things that we do in our own personal lives here, let's say in Brooklyn, where you and I both are today, that might have an effect in Cambodia or something, right? And so we have to start to think in these kind of holistic perspectives rather than always trying to break things down into little bits and pieces. perspectives, rather than always trying to break things down into little bits and pieces.

When I see organizations that are really rigid in their hierarchies and their systems, and they don't diverge too much from traditional ways of thinking and producing, there tends to be what seems like a lot of entropy and a lot of conflict in organizations like that. And then I see, you know, larger organizations, especially in the tech space that are much more encouraging of, they invest directly in innovation and different ways of thinking. I tend to say, I'm thinking of like, you know, just like the big tech companies that just have like seemingly endless capital to just innovate and invest in sort of new ideas and new ways of thinking. Those things seem to me to be productive. I think the jury is still out as to how much that actually generates and what it really creates and what that effect, you know, new products and new services have on society. But what I do see

is that companies that don't have a lot of flexibility in these ways tend to, they seem to be characterized by entropy. And what, again, back to this idea of collective leadership, what you describe is this sort of non-hierarchical, generative, integrated process, not an outcome, but a process, I think is actually how you describe it in one of your pieces, is this type of leadership that emphasizes the impact that diverse people, whether it's diverse ways of thinking, roles that they have, you know, skill sets that they have, and then the systems around them that you just described, those, those people, you know, coming together in some, some kind of, I mean, do you want to go ahead and describe what collective leadership has

ultimately meant here? I'll turn it over to you. So you can kind of explain what that is, if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think there are several things in what you're saying right now. First of all, command and control is the result of the Industrial Revolution. We are no longer in that Industrial Revolution. And yet we still operate with the same assumptions in a very complex, vastly different world from 100 plus years ago. We still use the same assumptions. So we still operate with, for example, you know, as I was saying earlier, this idea of the desire to break things down into its smallest component parts, that's part of like what we did on the assembly line, right? And we even teach kids that way. So we don't teach people in wholes, we teach them in pieces. And then later on, we say, we're surprised. And we say, well, look, we have to break things down. We convince ourselves somehow that people's brains are just not capable of thinking in holes because we actually taught them to think in little bits and pieces.

And we took away their ability to think in holes, or we didn't develop that ability. And then we kind of pretend that we're hardwired, that complexity is too much, or we didn't develop that ability. And, and, and then we kind of pretend that we're hardwired, that complexity is too much, and we have to break it down. Somebody, some CEO or something, or a leadership team, or an executive team has the answers, and they can break it down for everybody else, right? Okay, so, so, but it doesn't work. And it doesn't even work with the tech companies either, because even those tech companies are operating with the same principles, the same assumptions. They're just coming up with really innovative products.

And one of the things that I'll, you know, I'm sure we'll get into this when we talk about sustainability, and this will lead into my definition of collective leadership for you. definition of collective leadership for you. But one of the, you know, one of the challenges that I see is, is that while we are all running and rushing to find, while we're all rushing to develop new products that are sustainable, we, we are not actually building sustainable companies to do that. Okay. Uh, so the companies are still operating under maximum profits and shareholder value and shareholder supremacy and all of those things. often say, okay, we're going to use the triple bottom line, which is the people, profit, planet approach, it has become a tool, like an accounting tool that is more used as a way to entice investors rather than to really, really become sustainable. And so along those lines, I think what we're still doing, and again, I would say that there are

organizations that are making changes and have made changes in this area like B Corps and things and social enterprises, et cetera. But overall, what I think is happening is that we still have this conception of leadership as an individual endeavor. A hundred years ago, we talked about the great man theories of leadership, right? He was a great man. And, you know, looked like a leader, tall, you know, and all of that. Just sounds problematic from the start. For sure, for sure. But that's kind of what we had was this idea. And we talked about the charismatic leader and all of these things that we expected these

leaders to be like superheroes. And then slowly we've changed over the last 20 years. We really think about leadership as something we see that leaders are flawed. We talk about the idea of spiky leaders, leaders that have certain amazing qualities, but then are flawed in other areas. And so we're starting to see them more as human beings. But we still see them and we still develop them in organizations as individuals. And what I argue is that in a world of wicked problems, and in a world where we are dealing with unprecedented complexity, you know, think artificial intelligence, sustainability, all of those things, right?

It's not possible for one person to have the answers. So we're shifting from this notion of leadership as an individual endeavor toward thinking about leadership as a process of engagement and also an outcome of that process. And behind that is that you then have, there is no way that one person can have all of the answers in this kind of complexity. That's what I'm arguing. No matter how brilliant they are. And we've got so many brilliant leaders in the world. There's no doubt about that. Much more brilliant than I am, for sure. I know my limitations. I know that there are

people out there who are incredibly brilliant and can see so many of these aspects that I was talking about. They do think in systems, undoubtedly, but they're also constrained by the system within which they operate. If you've got somebody as a CEO or a member of a C-suite, one of the big challenges for them is that if they decide that they really want to focus on planet as part of their bottom line, and they don't make as much profit, they have two big problems, their board and their investors. And chances are, they will get kicked out if they try to focus on something other than making profits. So, so they, they have so many trade-offs that they need to make.

But the reality of the world that we live in right now is that there are so many wicked problems out there. We need a diverse set of people at all levels in the organization to be weighing in, to be sharing their insights, their knowledge, their wisdom. And I think that's what we forget when we think about hierarchy. And again, that's another remnant of the Industrial Revolution. When we think about hierarchy, we assume that the people who are higher up have more wisdom than the people who are lower down. But that is not the case. People are wise. We just don't tap into that wisdom. And so collective leadership taps into that wisdom. And it acknowledges that it's not possible for one person or even a small group of

people to have the answers. So the idea of the collective is that the answers emerge through dialogue. And that's one of the types of dialogue that we talk about is generative dialogue, That's one of the types of dialogue that we talk about is generative dialogue, dialogue that builds and taps into the wisdom that respects the individuals and that sees them as whole people, that sees them as people who are wise and who have incredible experience and unique insights to share and contribute that can then help to solve these wicked problems and of course against the backdrop of what i said before which is like it doesn't you don't really solve these problems you you start to shape them and then they reshape and and then the answers begin to emerge or unfold i have heard some version of this argument a few different times from guests on my show where just the idea that it's usually just posited as innovation, innovation and creativity that to the product and customers or whatever and a whole life of their own with all its intricacies to come up with a good idea. And we should empower our organizations to do that. We should empower our people within the organizations to have those opportunities and innovate and

create something fantastic for the whole organization that really revolutionizes things. I think overwhelmingly, we aren't really there yet in any capacity, let alone, you know, the one that you're describing, which is, I think, much more grandiose and focused really on, you know, where the world is at sort of an inflection point. But what I do feel like is that we're kind of at the edge of a curve, which represents, you know, in the past, we understood that leaders of our organizations made those big decisions. And we looked to them to figure out how to carry us through tough times, you know, how do we pivot? How do we reorganize? How do we find a way to make more money and sustain these jobs and these people's livelihoods and keep going? Now, it's it seems to be becoming harder across the board and industry for to rely on those

leaders. And I think there's something about the pace of change of technology and how it's just things are so unpredictable and disruption just makes it 10 times harder to really, you know, just feel secure with a company or with an individual job even. And the curve that I'm talking about that I feel like we're on the edge of is we still rely on our leaders and our leaders still kind of think and want or trust that they can be the ones that make the change that carry us through these tough times. But they can sense that something does need to change. And I think it's going to be in this direction where it's just so hard to make a radical change in a company that alters

process, product, service, operations, because that's a big risk. But now it's starting to become apparent that we have to take that risk. And that risk actually might be sort of like just distributing the creativity duty, like really empowering people, as I described at the top of what I'm saying right now, to come up with ideas and to make big changes. I feel like we're kind of right on the edge of that right now. The really important thing to note, though, is that I don't think our overarching education systems are supporting this so that people can comfortably go into organizations and feel like, yeah, I can make a change here or like I know what the world needs. And through the frame of my organization, its capabilities, I can maybe, you know, make a dent.

I think that our education systems referring to traditional education and school and all that is still kind of putting us into boxes and not really putting us in that space. And that's why I want to, you know, just segue very neatly into learning based work, which is another really big topic that you have written extensively about. This is a new work paradigm. You give like five different kinds of learning in the, I think, the chapter that you wrote for a book that I read through. And this is like the newest paradigm, whereas we've all dealt with school and training and learning at work. Now we're kind of in the phase of learning in the flow of work and optimizing our jobs and making it accessible and available to us. But learning-based work is really a whole new idea where it's hard to explain.

I'll give it a quick shot and then I'll turn it over. But it represents discovery, work that represents discovery pretty much at the core of what you're doing. And it's constantly pushing us to the next tier of innovation. And is that right? Is that a good start? Take it over from there. Yeah, kudos to you.

You've done your homework, Tyler. I did my best. Yeah, in a way, I think what we've, I wrote, I've written a couple of articles and a book chapter and another paper on this topic and still exploring it further with two colleagues of mine, Professor Victoria Marsick at Teachers College, Columbia University, which is where I'm affiliated, and Karen Watkins, who is at the University of Georgia. And the three of us have been writing on this for several years now. And in many ways, what we're doing embodies this concept in itself, because the idea behind

it is that there is a shift in the relationship between work and learning. And that traditionally, when we were thinking about learning in the workplace, it was mostly there to serve the goals of the organization. What were the strategic goals of the organization? How did those translate down, you know, get the traditional cascade that we've been doing for multiple decades, and then identifying what are the needs, the learning needs, identifying uh what are the needs the learning needs and and then from there developing training that would help people develop the skills in order to be able to uh deliver on their goals right very kind of traditional linear type of model and and that's it's not that that doesn't exist anymore and and in some ways it still will, because there are some technical skills that people need

to develop that and, and in order to achieve certain goals, right. And so that's, it's not that it goes away. But there is so much work, which is related to define what the work is, you're never going to be innovative. So how can you actually say, we are going to develop learning based on this to help people innovate? Because if you really want to be innovative, you have to come up with something completely different. Now, there's a quote that's attributed to Einstein that goes something like, you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that you use that created the problem in the first place. And so that resonates a lot with me. And I think the learning-based work concept is very much in that vein, which is to say that if you put learning into the job description of the people who are in the company,

and you make it a priority, then the work can emerge. That's the idea behind learning-based work. And by the way, it is a play on words. So there's a theory by a man named Joseph Raylan called work-based learning that came out in, I think, around 2008. And that looks at, it's very experiential. You might be familiar with things like action learning, which is something that we typically use a lot. So, you know, there's different forms of action learning, but often as part of leadership development, you'll give people a problem that they need to solve. And then they go and they spend about six months working on it. And then if they're lucky, something might happen to it. But most of the time, unfortunately, the CEO says, thank you. And then it goes into some kind of a drawer. And maybe, who knows, something might happen later on.

I've seen that happen maybe a year or two later. Somebody says, oh, yeah, we were working on that. So that's more of a work-based learning type of thing, because the problem is given to you. And then you come up with a solution to it. And of course, that will generate new work. But it's not necessarily really creative, because you've been given a brief from the beginning. And the real difference with learning based work is that there is no brief. And your responsibility, again, I believe that people have so much to offer. There's so much knowledge and insight and experience that they have. And if you unleash that and you give them the tools to unleash that, that's where the learning and development function can also play a big role, create the right environment in which people can gain the skills that they need to be able to operate in this very ambiguous, complex environment, and then to define the work as opposed to

being told, oh, you're going to innovate on X, which ultimately is, how can that really be an innovation? I've been a marketer for, I don't know, five years now. And I have been lucky enough to work in both incumbent companies that have a very strong place in their industry, as well as disruptors attempting to disrupt and entrepreneurs attempting to disrupt entire industries. And in both cases, honestly, I think this might be more a sign of the times than just the nature of the times than, you know, just the nature of the positions. But I've been lucky enough to have pretty strong creative freedom in doing what I'm doing. You know, I think marketing is always one of those kinds of

roles that just allows you to experiment. It's, you know, a lot of testing. In most cases, it's not just testing of the existing systems that you use for, you know, lead generation and that sort of thing, demand generation, but it's also testing whatever else is new. Like I do social media for get abstract and you better bet that as soon as threads was released from, you know, Instagram, we made a threads account and like pretty quickly we're, you know, doing an analysis of what that could result in. And it's, you know, it's looking at what's new, it's testing, experimenting, assessing results, iterating, you know, trying again, failing all of that. And to me, it is, it is learning based work. That's what marketing has always been. But at the end

of the day, it's a pretty simple goal. You know, it's to make more money, it's to grow, it's to do those things. And I'm just wondering, are there, you know, in your perspective, in your purview and the people that you've dealt with, the people that you coach and the organizations that you've been in, I'm sure you've seen work that resembles this idea already. I mean, you've worked in like major banks where the goal is always, you know, to perform very highly on a daily basis. And I'm just curious, are there exemplars or existing places, industries, kinds of roles where learning-based work is kind of already in effect or it's kind of in a proto

form where it can be observed and modeled after? Yeah, of course. Absolutely. And in our second paper that we wrote, we give examples of sightings. We call them sightings because we're not seeing it in a really systematic way in most of the organizations that we're familiar with. What we're seeing is that people are realizing that something is not working the way it is now. that the needs of the organization, that there's something missing and people can't quite put their finger on it. And they don't really know what to do. So all of the learning that we've had in the past has not prepared us to be able to have the answers. And this is another aspect of learning-based work, which can be kind of threatening for somebody like me. I mean, I have a doctorate in adult learning, and I did that because I thought, well, I really need to know my craft and my field, and I want to be a scholar

and practitioner. What I'm also learning is that it can become self-limiting to have that kind of knowledge and expertise because I feel like I need to perpetuate certain things because that's how academia works, for example. So you can't write a dissertation if you don't build on previous work. if you don't build on previous work. But how can you be really creative and come up with genuinely new ideas if you're constantly iterating on what other people have done before? It's not to say that it doesn't happen. It's just much harder. And what I'm seeing in organizations is people realizing the limitations of the tools and the skills that they've learned. And I'm referring now to learning and development professionals in terms of their ability to help the organization deal with whatever complexities are coming their way.

I mean, think about COVID and think about all of the social sustainability challenges, etc. that we've been facing over the last few years. And like, none of the tools are working anymore. And so as we were writing this paper, the second paper, we were talking with, my colleagues were actually writing a book together, which I contributed to called Rethinking Learning and Development. And so as part of those conversations, they had dozens and dozens of interviews with people. And we started kind of parsing those interviews to see what was bubbling up that just seemed to be kind of different. And we see it across industries and mostly in industries that are knowledge-based industries, right?

I mean, most are nowadays because of the way the world is changing so fast. But, you know, you might see it less in a manufacturing kind of, you know, at a plant or something like that. But where you're seeing things that are where knowledge and gaining new knowledge is crucial, these old tools are not working anymore. And so pretty much across all of the industries that we were looking at, we saw people experimenting and trying things out that they had never thought about doing before and kind of throwing out their expertise. What does it look like then? What does learning-based work look like? You talk about providing the tools and the resources, and it seems like a very autonomous system, but how does that look from a day-to-day perspective of somebody who is working in, I don't know,

product development or sales or marketing, any specific category of work, you know, how do we actually implement this? How much freedom is given? You know, how does management performance review work? Like, how do we actually take care of all that? This, this, this, like, this collective leadership idea seems very strong. And it's, it makes a lot of sense. But how do we apply that to these systems? And how does it come out at the end of the day? You know, we all spend eight hours a day at work or something along those lines. That could change as well, I guess, theoretically. But, you know, how can you describe this right now? It's a really great question. And of course, here I am writing about all this stuff.

And, you know, it's easy to theorize about it. But, you know, how does it play out in practice? And I think that's part of the messiness is that we just don't really know yet. But what I can tell you is that, again, it plays out in the collective. And so one of the examples in one of the papers that we wrote was about what was going on when George Floyd was murdered. And many of these organizations were coming out with statements about diversity. And, and, and of course, that was also in conjunction with, with COVID, etc. And, and so there was a situation in which a team was, was mandated to

do diversity training. And that could look like we're going to roll something out and have everybody do some kind of an online training and check the box, which I saw during that time as well. But what they did was they actually started having a lot of conversations with people and conversations with people of color, people who were actually in the organization who represented the diverse population. And those conversations, the way they were structured in such an open and emergent kind of way that the ideas for what should be done came from those, the people who were engaged in the conversations, not the experts, so to speak. circles and conversations that they had actually defined the work that was necessary to get at a different level around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging than they had done previously. So that's an example. It's squishy, but in a way, I think this is also really characteristic of us being in this, where we are at an inflection point in the world, because we're, works that we still use that are no longer

applicable. And the new assumptions are more around listening and emergence and letting things bubble up in kind of a bottom-up, creating momentum. And so, yes, it naturally, it doesn't lend itself in a certain way to, I'm going to give you three tools that are going to help you navigate complexity and deal with social sustainability and do learning-based work because that actually goes completely

against the whole point of it. Yeah. The story that you're telling me about how organizations kind of reacted, which I mean, I was aware of and seeing when it was taking place with George Floyd at that time, how organizations were reacting, how people on social media were reacting and giving up their platforms to people of color and that sort of thing and amplifying those voices. It reminds me of, again, the Abreu Paper Orchestra from Venezuela, the story from Design Unbound, where it was a very loosely created system that ended up having a very serious impact

on sort of like the culture of that entire country, basically, because what they were doing was they were giving children paper instruments and teaching them how to be a member of an orchestra without learning how to play the instrument. And I think it started as, you know, they didn't really have access to the instruments because that was expensive and just the whole system around that, but they could still teach them how to do it and how to even sing the songs and the tones of the instruments and that sort of thing. And they taught them a lot until they could then actually afford the instruments and then go off into an orchestra. And it's And it's this sort of organic development of, okay, we have a very clear problem here. And this

orchestra system was helping address the many different ills that, you know, children in poverty face in Venezuela at the time. We have a series of problems here. What can we do to, you know, work directly with those people experiencing the problems and, you know, something that gives feedback and results in a distinct change. And it seems like kind of organically developed over time and resulted in having, you know, world-class musicians all over the world because of this. And my, my question is, you know, can we, can we all find these, like these issues and these problems that are so serious in all of our organizations? Can we find a way that the organizations that we

end up in or that we, you know, the way that we join organizations is not like, you know, you go out, you search your, your dream mission and you're just welcomed into it. It's a lot more complex and people end up in jobs. They don't love, companies they don't love, that sort of thing. But theoretically, is it possible that we join organizations and we all sort of identify critical issues and combine that with the capabilities of our organizations such that we can actually find some way to create this change? It's complex. I think the answer is ultimately yes. And I do see lots of examples of these that are just very hard to articulate. But my I do want to relay this into a distinct question for you, which is, I know that you work with C suite successors a lot. That's something that is a big part of you know, your coaching and consultancy. And I'm just

very curious as to what it is you actually do with them. I'm sure a lot of it has to be kept under wraps. But I'm curious if you're kind of instilling these messages in those who are going to be the C-suite leaders of the future of the next generation, you know, like, are you encouraging them to think about wicked problems and how to alternatively address them by kind of shirking the traditional hierarchy of businesses and thinking about collective leadership? And are those messages received? Well, what's it like? Tell me what's going on in those conversations. Well, I'll start with another quote that I love. This quote is attributed to Rumi.

And it basically says, yesterday, I was clever, and I wanted to change the world. Today, I'm wise, and I'm changing myself. And that's how I work with executives. It's not possible to make these changes unless you've gone inside of yourself and you look at your own inner game and understand your own motivations, your values, what's important to you, why you do what you do, why you may not make changes when there are certain things that you want to see changed, how there are tensions that emerge between your own value system and the value system of the organization and how you deal with those tensions. But what I find so often when I'm working with executives is that they haven't thought about it

enough. They don't take the time, the busy bees all over the world, right? Getting things done that they don't take the time to reflect on what is really important to them and understand the tensions that they experience inside of themselves and how those tensions then play out with all of the most important contributions that I can make. Because when people start to see, really understand where their behaviors come from, what kind of behaviors become self limiting over time? What are the gifts and the curses associated? curses associated, and what are the values, the motivations, the needs that underlie these things to dig in that deep way, that's the moment where you can then make choices to do things differently. And I think it's at that moment that it becomes possible to start to dream differently, dream of a different system, a different way. And yes, in many ways, I think these changes really do start at the local level. There was an article in the New York Times the other day about Silverton, Colorado, and some of the challenges that they were facing around polarization in a very small town. And the dialogues that were created and the idea of going deep into understanding what people's

needs were, they were actually able to see that the needs were all the same or very similar. And that started to bring people together. It happens at a very local level. It's about talking with each individual person. And I know it can sound daunting, but there are so many people doing this kind of great work in places around and what's going to happen. And this is where the inflection point is and where things are going to shift is that all of these things are going to start to bubble up and start to merge into something that's greater and give it more momentum so that it can then grow into a bigger movement. The reason that I do this podcast is not because I am paid to or because it's my job. It's because I have a very firm belief that learning and development professionals at the large organizations that they have a substantial enough presence have the most critical role

in industry, in business, which is they simultaneously have an ability to influence the direction that the employees in their organizations go, what they learn and the lens through which they learn it. I think that can really impact how ideas around AI, fourth industrial revolution, how those technologies and how those things are being used and adopted and applied in the real world, especially as products and services. You know, there's a critical part of research and development as well that I wish I could influence a little bit more, but understanding that L&D folks have the ability to provide that continuous education. They also have the ability to influence leadership by demonstrating the power

of the learning that they provide to their people. And just because they generally have access to leadership and, you know, they are moving an organization in a direction. And there's what I see is so much, there's always conflict, you know, convincing leadership that we need to get budget for this and that we need to teach people this and the tools and all of that. There's always, you know, conflict and it's always a challenge to get leadership to approve learning and development, everything. And I just want to end this off by asking you, since you have contributed to rethinking learning and development,

what can L&D folks do to start to move their organizations in this direction, this less hierarchical, more generative, dialogue-, dialogue based type thinking that results in, you know, this sort of approach toward problem solving? I think it's the same thing as what I've been doing with the leaders that I work with. And what I'm doing with myself, honestly, is really understanding my own motivations, my values, what's important to me, understanding what I'm willing to fight for. And, you know, it's a challenge. There's no doubt about it because, you know, I'm at a point in my career where I made some choices because I have achieved a certain level of financial stability

and my children are out of the house, et cetera. And so I don't need to take care of them anymore. But, and so you end up experiencing all of these tensions inside of you because you have competing values. But the first thing is to be very clear on what is really important to you and how you might be working in a way that goes against what's important to you. And then you have to start to make the hard choices. I also think that there are a lot of

people who are in the same situation. And one of the things that I've done is in conversations with a range of learning and development professionals is to learn more about what they're experiencing. Many of them feel very isolated because they really want to, they do this exactly for those reasons that you just talked about. But if they confront too much, they feel like they're at risk. And so there's this tension. And I actually recently ran a workshop called conform or confront. And it was for learning and development professionals, because that's a very real, real tension that people that people have in this in this world. So I would say that, I mean, there's no silver bullet to this. But it starts on the inside. It starts with being clear on who you are, what's important to you, why you do what you do, and how you can align those values and motivations to the actual work that you do. And, and yes, I mean, in some ways, there will always be compromises. And that's okay, because we have to, you know, we have to make a living, right? And we can't just quit everything and go live. Well, some people could, I guess, you know, live in the middle of nowhere. But, and which actually, sometimes I think about it, like, about like oh that could be maybe i should do that at some point but we all think about that sometimes yeah

i think some of it is also that i've changed so much in my own perceptions over the years and in terms of what's important to me and i've become so much more aware that I start to ask myself questions that never would have even come up previously. But I guess what I would do, again, is just start to encourage learning and development professionals to be very clear on what their circumstances are, what's important to them, and what kind of compromises they're making, why they're making those compromises. And and then maybe to think about what's the arc of my career? And how do I move over time, maybe towards a life that is really fully in line with my values and motivations, rather than kind of saying, Okay, I'm going to do all this stuff now until I retire and then I'll flip the switch and do something completely different. No silver bullet. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. This was a wonderful

conversation. I would love to actually have you on again in the future. We're running out of time now, but I'd love to have you on again in the future and discuss these concepts even further because there's a lot here and this was a very deep conversation. So thank you so much for joining me. I really do appreciate it. Thank you, Tyler, for asking such amazing questions and really being so thoughtful. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. Thank you. That means a lot. For everyone listening at home, thank you so much for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.