L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - New Digital Transformation: How L&D Can Learn From R&D And Triumph with AI-enabled Work

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

According to this week’s guest Steven Miller, the answer is the virtuous cycle of automation AND augmentation. Steven is a co-author of Working With AI. He has spent 40 years researching and working with cutting-edge technology, beginning with robotics in the 1980s at Carnegie Mellon University. For the last two decades, he has been deeply involved in digital transformations via academic, government, and industry arenas, working with teams in IT, L&D, R&D, executive leadership, and others.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, 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. Today we're speaking with Stephen Miller. Stephen is a co-author of the book Working with AI and professor emeritus at Singapore Management University. Before earning his current title at SMU, he was the founding dean of the university's School of Information Systems. Stephen's career in academia started at Carnegie Mellon University,

where he taught courses on computer-integrated manufacturing systems and robotics applications. Since then, he has contributed extensively, through work in industry and research, to digital transformation efforts and capability development. His latest work has monitored the relationship between these two things in the form of AI application deployment, the scenarios of which we discuss today. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Stephen Miller. Stephen, it's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, Tyler. I wanted to have you on because we spoke just last week, just Friday actually, on a live session, and you really sparked my interest in how you spoke about learning.

I actually didn't realize that you had the level of expertise that you had on learning. But the topic of that call was artificial intelligence. It was for an AI-oriented campaign. And I want to kick things off by asking you to give sort of the most critical point that I found from that conversation, which is sort of how you address the question of macro automation of jobs and in organizations. And the way you essentially put it is automation and augmentation. You do believe that we should automate what we can ultimately, but we should do so in the hope of generating new work, new products and new

services and dedicating work to those things. So, you know, automation takes care of the stuff that we've been doing for a long time and we've kind of simplified and optimized, but we must also augment new work with new tools and new applications. And we have to kind of create this virtuous cycle whereby the things that we're augmenting, but not quite automating, we're hoping to eventually automate, which creates more room for new jobs and new work and new productivity. Is that essentially right? Yes, Tyler, you've got it. The key point is in automation, we're trying to take the amount of labor out of what's being done. But if we just stop there, it's going to be problematic for two reasons. One is the company will become more efficient, but will freeze in its capabilities.

The second, of exploration, experimentation, adaptation that leads to the creation of new jobs and services. It's got to be more than a hope. It's got to be an imperative, both for two reasons. One is because if you look at most companies, not all, but most, a lot of the ways they're serving their customers or bringing in their revenue, it could be private sector, public sector, are doing things above and beyond what they did 30, 50, 100 years ago. Maybe they don't exist that long, but you get the idea. So they have to be creating the new services to keep alive and adaptive for their own well-being. And also, new types of work tend to be labor-intensive for fairly long periods of time until we get familiar enough with them to the point where we can stabilize them, control them, and automate them. So as you said, it's got to be this virtuous cycle. This virtuous cycle is what's resulted in more and more higher and higher levels of employment up to the current time, mind you, even with increasing degrees of technological sophistication and automation.

The big question people have is, will that continue given that our AI enablement has really reached a new kind of level where the capacity for the AI-enabled technology to do things above and beyond the specifics of what's trained on and to work in more general purpose ways really has reached new levels. But even so, I think this cycle can and must continue. And it's not a function of the technology. It's not predetermined. It depends on the choices people make in organizations that's why it's so

important lnd people understand this you work pretty closely with lnd folks i think you've also worked pretty closely with rnd folks research and development and i'm wondering if there's going to be some changes between these two functions at organizations in the near future because i generally think of rnd as those that are mean, it's definitely certain industries where they have the stronger functions, but anything from medicine and obviously new product development, much larger organizations. But the strategies deployed by R&D departments seem to be the types of things that I think L&D departments are going to really need to adopt in the near future. Because when it comes to workflow and just operations and adopting AI technology, whatever it is to optimize your operations, I feel like there's going to need

to be some experimentation and robust involvement from companies. So my question is, do you think that R&D and L&D are going to have, you know, more overlap? Are there going to be organizations where they kind of merge these functions? Any strategic things that L and D should learn from R and D? What do you think about that? You're the first person I've ever come across who's sort of raised this point about contrast between R and D groups and L and D groups. And what can L and D groups learn from R and D groups? It's really powerful. All right. With the acknowledgement that many companies don't have R&D groups, even if they're doing some new things, it's only a subset of companies, often larger companies on one extreme, startups ups on the other okay but uh be that as it may r and d groups inherently are learning groups

because they're trying to do things where the roadmap isn't there and everything they do is learning through search learning through experimentation and, and having the acuity of a hawk's eye on feedback and everything you do, did it work as I expected it to work or not? And if so, how do I pivot one step closer to what is more likely to work. So R&D groups are learning organizations. I mean, to state the obvious, but when you step back and think about it, and there's no template, there's no blueprint.

Now, not all of L&D, but a lot of L&D and a lot of organizations is for structured, familiar work. There's the bread and butter things, the onboarding, the compliance training. These are things where the roadmap is quite clear. And there's other kinds of ways in which L&D teams will work with outside vendors to package teaching, or they'll work with universities to have a very small subset of people do maybe special degree programs, but then a larger set of people doing continuing education programs. And they'll do some custom work inside, right? Now, I think the big lesson that I would summarize for the learning from an R&D team for L&D people is let's stop associating learning with teaching and courses. I think a lot of L&D people already know this. It's not like I'm saying something

they've never heard before. But under production pressure, you revert back to sort of what you can get done in a given period of time. And we have an issue, what course can we make available? We have an issue. What course can we make available? Okay. And in some organizations, I can't say how many, L&D is relegated to being an administrative group that arranges for the provision of courses. Right. And that's just the way the company works. There are other examples. So,

I want to acknowledge that there's a wider range of ways in which L&D teams work, but that's the way it is in some places. Now, it's not easy being in the shoes of an L&D professional. You don't own the domain. You don't own the resources. You don't have the expertise, right? You're not driving the strategic directions of the company. So it's like, well, if that's the case, how can I really make a difference? And that's a frustration that a lot of L&D people have. There are times when structured training delivered in a conventional classroom way, whether it's on-site or off-site, whether it's a prepackaged material that some external source has, or whether it's some things you put together internally. There's a number of situations where that stuff makes sense. One part of the reason it makes sense is the content in itself. The other part is the

socialization process that just by taking people out of the everyday work pressure and machinery, if you will, it gives people the ability to informally during the class breaks and also during the Q&A and just discussion that normally happens in these things, talk to each other. And that informal and social aspect of learning is often as important as the content itself. And again, I think people know this. So when I say break the association between we deliver horses and learning, the one thing that's really obvious from looking at R&D groups is they are almost entirely learning by doing, but not in just a random way. They're very goal-oriented. They know the result that they're trying to do. They're very systematic about looking at the feedback of each of their trials. When they do a trial, and a trial doesn't necessarily mean a clinical trial, it's just an iteration on anything, using the Agile terminology, a sprint on whatever it is they're trying to put together, right? They're usually very good about visualizing what we did

relative to the target that we're going to and communicating to the team about this. And then what was it about our hypothesis that led to that gap? What do we try next? In other words, they are incorporating all of the fundamentals of learning as part of their work. They are embedding the practices of learning into their working. And even though as R&D, their work is, I wouldn't say unstructured, it's target-driven, goal-driven, but they're discovering the roadmap as they go. Their approach to learning in good R&D teams is quite systematic. Right? Now, not in all, but in a number of companies, and I dare say, regrettably, in too many companies, when people think of L&D, they think of, I need a course outside of the context of the everyday work. Versus, as I say, there's a role and room for courses for certain kinds of things.

It's never going to go away. Versus the everyday work that we do is just full of opportunities for ways that we can provide scaffolding, some degree of structure. So even though the L&D people don't own the domain, don't own the resources, don't own the KPIs, there are ways where they can make sure that when certain kinds of major project reviews are done, the learning element, the reflections, the lessons learned, the follow-ups from them are incorporated. All right? Now, one of the most important aspects of learning is once you have a goal, meaning a target, I'm going to assume the motivation. In many settings, you cannot assume the motivation, but I'm going to assume the motivation. In many settings, you cannot assume the motivation, but I'm going to assume the motivation here for a moment. The thing that really drives learning is here's how I think I should get to that goal. I try. I see a gap. And there's a very clear and systematic process of evaluating the reason why what I just did did not hit the goal.

In plain English, feedback. But not just you're wrong and yell at people. Feedback so people understand the reason for why something's not what it should be. All right. for why something's not what it should be. All right. Now, there are a handful of special kinds of organizations that are known for a safety-first approach where people are seldomly penalized for making errors, actual misses, and near misses surface.

All right? They create, I'm going to use this term, the psychological safety in the organization so that people are not punished for making errors. Now, people are to be held accountable for errors, and errors are not to be celebrated. And certain people do certain things that are certain kinds of errors. It's not to say there aren't repercussions. But we all know that in so many organizational settings, we are quiet about near misses. And if a miss of some type can be threatening to us or our team, other than the absolute necessary obligatory reporting, people try and keep this under the

radar, which actually is exactly the opposite of what you want if you want to drive a learning culture. Now, how do you start collecting cases about errors, near misses, and actual misses? context-specific case studies that are stories that can be shared. Based on that, how do you then not necessarily deliver more classes, but give people the resources and do the simplification of the work processes that makes it less likely that these things will occur. safety people, above and beyond just doing the bread and butter stuff of the onboarding training, the compliance training, sort of the standard management development and supervisor kind of training. So how to turn the everyday work setting into rich opportunities for better scaffolding and some degree of structure in the learning process. I think that's the big lesson that they can take from the R&D teams.

You have worked extensively with Singapore. You lived there for, I think, two decades. You worked with the government. You worked with, obviously, universities there. You taught there. You worked with obviously universities there um you taught there you worked with organizations etc the singaporean government did something cool uh white spaces i think is what it was called and you wrote about this in one of your uh one of the studies that you did they created

an opportunity for virtually anybody in their digital transformation infrastructure to come up with an idea and propose how to accomplish that thing and what solution it would create. They were given three months to create an MVP, a minimum viable product. And then from there, they were given further resources and even, you know, budget to create something there. And I found this really fascinating because to me, psychological safety is, I think, as you kind of alluded to, it's kind of like bogged down in that in just the buzzword nature of it at this point where we all kind of start to think in our heads, OK, psychological safety, you know, freedom to speak up and speak out and that sort of thing. But also that refers to the opportunity to get something wrong, to expand ideas a little bit

and hopefully innovate, I think, is the ultimate hope there. But I am actually kind of a believer that we need to go beyond the psychological safety and systematize the innovation opportunities. So you actually need to create avenues for innovation opportunities and set things aside like resources and budget, if that's possible, to really encourage these sorts of things. And to me, this is sort of where the L&D and R&D overlap because there are so many, through the conversations that I've had, I've learned there are so many L&D leaders

that are looking to teach innovation in some way, to inspire creativity in their people. And this can be for one of a million different reasons, whether it's to have something as fascinating as a new product come from somebody who's kind of a frontline worker or something like that, or to improve processes internally, or just to, you know, have generally better communication among teams. It could be as simple as that too. But these, this idea of actually a systematized opportunity given out

for innovation and for creativity, I think that's really critical. And I imagine you've maybe seen more opportunities like this, but would you agree that that sort of initiative is important? A government organization called the Government Technology Agency of Singapore, referred to as GovTech. The second one is DBS Bank, which is a private sector organization that's been well acclaimed for digital transformation over the last 13 years. And the third one is Changi Airport Group. Anybody who's flown in that region of the world would know of Changi Airport. It's won the world's best airport award many, many, many times. So it's widely regarded as a super high-performance, high-service organization. It's actually a private organization, though it does sort of have a special type of link to the government. All right. So the important thing is all three of these are operational organizations. You know, it's not like they're working in the depths of chemistry or physics or materials or biomedical. And what I'll broadly say is that type of research

organization. These are work under pressure, everyday operational organizations whose main issue is sort of to deliver operating systems organizationally for the goods and services related to what they do. And that's important because most companies are like that. And I think your L&D people can relate to that kind of environment. All right. So GovTech's got to both administer the IT operations of like the in Singapore we call them the ministries but that would be for all the main functions of government for all the main agencies under each of the main ministries what do I mean by ministries like transportation and housing and health. And some of these groups have their own quite substantial IT teams, right? And then GovTech builds a lot of horizontal infrastructure across the government. For example, when I log in to any service in Singapore, I need to check something about my

income tax or about I'm an American citizen, but a permanent resident there, something about the pension funds I've accumulated there or some kind of service. There's a national ID that they created, and it's really simple, but powerful and effective. Well, they create that kind of horizontal infrastructure or somebody registers the birth of a child or registers for school or a new business wants to register and do so in a simple way as opposed to having to put in the same information 10 times. They create all that kind of stuff. So they do very real world operational things. All right. operational things, all right? And they have all the production pressures that any of your L&D people experience from the environments that they do, but they do carve out this white space

program where if one of their teams, and they have a variety of different kinds of teams, some on the operational side, some on the product development side, some on the data engineering side, the cybersecurity side, the governance side. They have to sort of have all of those things. But if one of those teams has something they want to try, small budget and an initial three months to see if we can make progress. Now, Three months to see if we can make progress. Now, that is not viewed as a training exercise, but it is a training to do innovation pilots, even knowing that a lot of them won't, even if they work to some degree, you might not get it to the degree that it's going to lead to the business result that you want.

Or even if it's interesting to some extent because of priorities, you might throw it away. How to keep an eye on those things and view them as competency building exercises. They're great for retention. They're great for motivation, which, you know, what's the bane of an M&D person? We put in all this effort to train someone and they leave. So things that create the environment that sort of makes it interesting and fun, despite the pressure that people are under, which is the big challenge, is important. And don't ask me why, but in a lot of cases, as busy as people are and as loaded as they are, when they get to do an innovation project, small scale, that's of their choosing with a few of their teammates, even though it requires them to put in extra hours, it's their extra hours. It's their choice. And on one hand, it's like, oh God, these people are so busy,

don't overload them. And yet, I'm not going to report this with scientific numbers, but just from qualitative conversations from people involved in these things, people are like, oh, what a breath of fresh air. That's the thing that gives me the hope that I should stay in this organization and keep at it. This is a good place to work. So there's sort of a paradox there, even though it's in addition to their extra work. the next stage, go to the next stage, in which it then transitions from on top of your everyday work to it becomes your work. You know, they reallocate the portfolios and people feel that they're learning new things, you know? So a lot of parts of organizations are doing things to promote innovation. So it's not like in a lot of places, the L&D people need to say we need a new innovation course. I'm going to say in most places, that's already happening. Maybe not all places, but you get the idea. But the idea of treating these innovation pilots of various scales, of various durations, as part of our formal training program, even though it's not like a regular class-based formal training program, is key. Treating job rotations as part of the training program

in other words adding structure and scalability and a systematic approach to learning by doing and then the more that that can be done and then in very targeted ways, there's supplements for classroom type stuff. Then I think the impact of the classroom stuff will be much, much, much greater. Now, DBS Bank, DBS is a very profitable company, but they're a very commercially driven company. a very profitable company, but they're a very commercially driven company. They're very systematic about technology pilots. They do them all the time. They kill a lot of them, not in a bad way. We try it. We see what its limitations are. We got it. We think this is great stuff. We'll wait. We're not ready with the use case where we have the use case, but our customer might not be ready for the use case. So there are examples

where they'll do it and it's like, okay, we now know how to do this when the need will come to do this and the internal staff like it and it's capability building in addition to the system that they have for doing online courses and you know doing in-person courses but but the point is the learning by doing is blended in and there some of the major groups have their own L&D specialist so that the L&D specialist gets attuned to the domain needs of that group and how to then put together the mixture of learning by doing with sort of the conventional structured teaching-based training. All right. Now, Changi Airport, of course, has an HR group that's very progressive and very good. But let me just make mention of two things of something I personally experienced. This goes back a few years. So let's

say 2017, 2018, 2019. They knew they wanted to accelerate the rate at which they could do certain types of digital transformation projects, make use of what at that time were advanced analytics and applications of AI. Okay? So rather than just pumping a lot of courses to people, they created a special administrative arrangement with one of the consulting firms. It happened to be Accenture, but this kind of thing could be done with a number of consulting firms. And they did not do the standard procurement of, here's what I'm buying, the spec. It was, we're going to do pilots in these, say, five areas. And we're not even going to define exactly what those are at the moment. We're just going to define certain things on customer predictions related to retail type of stuff, some things related to operations and a variety of this.

And these are the kind of technologies that we want to get up to speed on. And then they put together a joint team, situated them literally inside the airport in a working office. Once you walked into that special workspace, you couldn't tell who was from the consulting firm, who was from the airport, in the sense that they're all commingled as one team. Then they did these trial projects, and then there was a cross-functional team of executives

that would evaluate them on a steady basis. What an amazing learning program. It was adopting some of the principles of how an R&D team works, but these weren't R&D like I'm going to create a new nanomaterial. These were all R&D on will these help me with my near-term operational issues, but beyond what I'm capable of doing today with my existing methods, ways of working, and whatnot. And the emphasis on the way of working, the agile, the sprints, the cross-functional, The agile, the sprints, the cross-functional, the bit about communities of practice related to this was as important as the actual results of here's the increased percentage in the prediction that I can make as a result of rolling in these methods, right? So there they were experimenting with both process with, wow, W-O-W, the way of working, as well as the actual,

am I hitting the target I looked at? And it was just a fabulous training and acceleration of capability enhancement. And then in addition, Chingy Airport would do a learning festival that HR would coordinate. And a number of companies for years have been doing this, but it's worth mentioning that just as a reminder to L&D professionals on how important it does. Like one year, the learning festival, there was a special issue on applications of making AI real. And the people who actually did the projects did presentations. Okay. And then a wide range of people from across the company sat in. I got to do the coaching for the people doing the presentations to just help them tighten the presentations so that the story came through clearer and sharper. more clearly and powerfully communicate to a broader audience was itself training and capability development and an experience they very much enjoyed in addition to the actual work they did

for the project. So these are all ways in which learning goes beyond so many of the standard things that L&D people do. Another year, they had a learning festival where the theme was experimentation. What do we mean by experimentation? And let me show examples of experimentation. There was another year where the learning festival was termed safe to speed. was termed safe to speed. Like all companies, we want to move fast, but if we don't do so safely, and if we don't get the safety embedded in our digital, we can't move faster. It's the analogy of car brakes. Prior to the time that automobiles had good brakes, you could only go so fast. Once you had good brakes and those kind of control and restraining mechanisms, you could go faster.

So these are ways in which L&D can act as a catalyst and an orchestrator, even though they don't own the content. and an orchestrator, even though they don't own the content. And this notion that your entire work system and the everyday work is the thing that you draw from to get work-embedded learning and learning by doing in a more structured way. There's a few important details about the Changi example that I want to pick out there. I think it's really important to acknowledge, obviously, you know, this was a very robust implementation. So working with Accenture and you mentioned having cross-functional executives that were assessing all the employees. These are big things. Really quickly, I want to go over, you sent me an eight-step process, the essentials of learning, a slide that you put together, and really quickly, those steps or those parts are one, motivation, two, goals, three, attention,

four, goal-directed practice, five, targeted feedback on errors, which is what I want to hone in on shortly, six, active engagement, seven, rehearsal over time and consolidation, eight, pathway to mastery, which we will hopefully also address. When it comes to, I've talked about motivation and goals and attention and those sorts of things and practice on this show a good amount, but feedback is a challenging one, targeted feedback on errors. So when I think about this Changi example, if they had executives dedicated to this assessment process, it was all built in. It was all in there. But in a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to the learning that they're doing, but also just in

general performance, there can be challenges to delivering and receiving feedback that just come with the nature of business. So like you mentioned, there can be errors that cause issues. And then instead of a learning scenario, it turns into a devastating scenario or a catastrophe and that makes learning very difficult. There's just simple culpability. There is a restriction on time in a lot of organizations to actually go through that assessment process, a restriction on resources, and it can just be really hard to have those conversations, giving feedback and moving forward from them. So do you have advice generally for organizations that may

not have the extent of resources like Changi or some of these other examples that you're giving as to how they can go about giving feedback? Yeah, everybody knows what a complicated thing this is. You're talking to L&D people, so they know the difference between formative assessment and summative assessment. You know, this comes from classroom stuff, but let's take it into things that count in the workplace. Everybody's got to go through their annual review and, you know, we sort of know all the mixed feelings about both giving annual reviews and receiving them. But this is not the kind of feedback I'm talking about. I'm talking about feedback more on everyday things, on the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly.

And let me sharpen, and it's not the totality of how are you doing as an employee. It's task-based. We're trying to do something related to this process improvement. We're trying to do something about this presentation we're putting together. It's work product-based. You know what I mean? So that's a little different than the overall assessment that is, you know, it's got a lot associated with it because people are being judged and the salary increments come from that. All right. And I think it's the minutia of these things that make me think, So, you know, we'll take that as a sort of a general situation that we all have to struggle with. But this notion that, yes, we all suffer

from the everyday production pressures and we have to meet it, whatever line we're in, but I'm there every day to help your development. And this isn't the L&D person. It's the teammate. It's the supervisor. It's the first, second, and third level manager above that I might be unforgiving about performance targets. about performance targets, but I'm very sympathetic to, supportive of, and forgiving of things related to personal development and capability building. You know what I mean? I have met senior executives who the only thing they care about is the KPI. And if people and organizations get chewed up in the process,

it doesn't matter. They get the KPI and they're proud. They're very results-driven, right? And can you still be that way? Or can you be 98% of that way or nearly you know, nearly. But at the same time, when you critique things, and even if we're off the goal that we want to be off of, okay, we acknowledge that. We're accountable for it. But then it's, well, why? Why was that? What was the difference between our way of thinking, our way of working, and what we hope to achieve and what we did achieve? What do we learn from this situation? You, the team doing this, you give me your suggestions on what we would do different next time. I'm not promising you'll have a next time. I don't mean that the employee disappears. I mean, the project might or might not continue. But what did we take away from this? And I have met senior executives who are demanding on the KPIs, but the employees feel they're super sympathetic to the learning process. And these are not L&D people, but everything they do has that spirit of L&D to it. So for L&D to really work in an organization, it can't just be the L&D people. I think every L&D person listening to this knows that. And they're all saying, yes, yes, yes. If only I could get my management to understand. And some of them are lucky. You do have management who understand. Individual-level competency building only takes you so far, right? It's organizational learning, team learning, organizational learning that we really care about. The way of working is as important to innovation and productivity as the skill set of an individual.

And that way of working, by definition, crosses processes, crosses functions, right? Can only happen at the organizational learning. So these are the things that make for a real, quote unquote, learning-based organization. So that's a culture thing. Every company likes to talk about culture, right? You know, in their own ways, whatever kind of company they are. How do we demonstrate that learning and development is part of our culture? And when we give those examples, the amount of classroom training time we allow for each employee is only one small part of that, as opposed to the major part that's referred to.

And then as I mentioned before, the final part of your eight-part essential learning concept is pathway to mastery. And you break this down in a few ways, acquiring component skills, combining and integrating component skills and knowledge, and then learning when and how to apply component skills and knowledge. And I learning when and how to apply component skills and knowledge. And I've talked about mastery in many different contexts on this show. It's generally something along the lines of, you know, extensive practice, teaching others, you know, and many times I'm talking to folks from pharma companies or something like that, where, you know, mastery is built into the research process and what they're doing because everybody's a doctor of research and that's,

you know, that's their career. But when it comes to mastery and this sort of framework of meta knowledge and the application and understanding of those component skills, how does one best identify and obtain component skills and understand what this ultimately means when they're seeking mastery. resource in the hands of everyone who's listening today or your broader audience audience that follows your lnd work this um i sent you two presentations uh tyler and one summarized principles of learning it's a tutorial i put together the ideas aren't mine. The ideas are ranging from one side of the spectrum to a brain scientist, to science of learning people, to people out of the teaching center at Carnegie Mellon University who've done a fabulous job, who sort of came up with this pathway to mastery idea, up with this pathway to mastery idea, to an applied L&D professional who's really come to rethink a lot of what it takes to make learning effective in companies, to a Harvard Business School professor.

And my value-add contribution was to do the extraction and organization so that an audience like this could go through that body of material in one slide set, easily pick out what they want. All right. So in that slide set, you'll see some of the answers. So if people remember nothing bad, but Tyler, send me that slide set, right? In addition to this summary side of the essentials of learning and these eight items on one side to see how they all work as a system. Make it public, Tyler. Share it with people.

Okay. So this notion of even knowing what component skills are, then creating structures where people reinforce the mental models. In situations that are either normal work situations or specific training situations, you'd go about it different ways. But this bit about giving practice to integrating component skills, you can do this in offline training through situational simulation. Then in terms of work embedded stuff, it's, you know, you're doing the real thing and it's feedback and critique in a supportive, constructive way without mincing words. You know, you don't, when you give people feedback, it doesn't mean you're wishy-washy about, well, it was okay when it wasn't okay. You sort of need to be hard-headed and quite frank about that kind of stuff, but in a supportive way of, we're all doing this to learn how to learn, right?

And you need coaches. This is where some offline teaching helps. It's also where having, quote unquote, teachers play that role as part of the work process, even though it's not an offline, you know, pulled out of the normal work setting where people know how to give feedback on why your mental model was such that you made errors. So that's why this bit about organizational mechanisms to provide feedback, not on macro employee performance, but on task level performance is so supportive. And how do, you know, we need to be more productive. We need both automation and augmentation to free up some time. So we have time to do these kinds of discussions, right? And, you know, you just need a little bit of breathing space to do this kind of stuff. And it makes all the difference for the world, not only for competency development, but for retention. as you said earlier, as long as we're thinking of it that way. I do think there's a good degree of education that needs to happen pretty universally on how these tools and applications are going to work and how machine learning and AI and automation, a little bit more knowledge

needs to be shared universally about the technology behind these things. And I would like to ask you, where does the onus fall at the end of the day? Is it on organizations to educate their people? Is it on the education industry and institutions to actually teach technology a little bit differently? Is it on the government to create programs for teaching people? Or does it ultimately just have to fall to the individual because of the nature of how we learn and work? What do you think about that?

Well, I'm going to give you an answer that's not going to surprise you. The answer has to be all of the above. The individual company can't control the broader society, although they can provide inputs. So everybody's got to do what they can from within their perspective. As I said, within a company, when people think of L&D, sometimes the first question, the CEO asks, uh, how many courses are in our course catalog? And, you know, the larger, the more impressive it seems. But, um, let me come back to something that people would see if they, uh, do the follow-up to get these resources I made mention of, that tutorial on learning. Learning's an active verb. You cannot do it to people. They have to do it within their own head. You can picture someone, you can tell someone, in this sense, in a conventional use of the word of a teacher telling people stuff you can teach someone but you cannot learn someone right they have to do it

by you know with themselves right be it in a class setting or in um in their own work setting. But you have to do to learn, whether it's conceptual or whether it's hands-on. Okay. So, companies have to realize that learning is not the same as classes and teaching and do everything they can to create a learning culture, a learning environment in a no-nonsense way that's still driving goals, targets. And understanding for certain things to happen, people have to have the ability to focus attention. Because there are a lot of companies where people have no hope of focusing attention on stuff. There's got to be clear goals. DBS Bank is a good case of a company that very aggressively builds out new technology capability, but they're very targeted in how they do it in the sense of we want to test if we're able to do the following with it. Let's create a use case and test if we can do this kind of thing. So there's a goal, a systematic approach with both operational teams on the line, as well on the line could be the office, field service, factory, you know, any of those settings, as well as teams whose full-time work is to try new stuff and the coupling of how that works.

Multifunctional executive teams who are sort of steering this stuff, making sure it happens and gives feedback. All right. sure it happens and gives feedback. All right. Just the way people talk about projects, talk about success as well as the 10 things we had to do that weren't successful, but unless we did them, we wouldn't be here and be successful. And let us sort of stylize and crystallize those lessons learned, both in terms of stories and PowerPoints and in terms of changes that make things easier for people to not repeat the same mistakes. That's where the organization has to actively engage. So I would think for L&D professionals, the thing that they can most influence is within their

realm. Some schools are more progressive than others about experience-based learning, about new topics, about joint projects with industry. Industry is always thinking about what it needs to do today the school should be thinking a little further out and there's different kinds of schools you know polytechnics community colleges vocational training different different sort of tiers of university not in a bad way but just in terms of their different focus i'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that most of them, even though some faster than others, are mostly moving in the right direction on this stuff, either being pushed or pulled, however it's happening. complicated. I've been in Singapore for 23 years. I'm an American citizen, worked in the US before then, but then I've been away for a long time. And you see what happens when there's alignment. That's all I'm going to say. You see the power of alignment, both within different parts of

the government and between public and private sector. It doesn't mean everybody agrees on everything. It means that they're still able to come together to say, we will make X happen and we will do it not just in a one-off thing, but we'll do it, we'll stick with it for two, three, five years, then keep evaluating and then see the path forward. then keep evaluating and then see the path forward. US, I'm sort of getting recalibrated. There's so many levels of government. So it's hard to make a simple statement with,

but I would come back to one piece of advice. You do the possible with the available. And rather than lamenting what government can or should or doesn't do, or things going on with some aspects of the political conflict in this country, you work with the most local groups that are there who can help you. And you use the resources that you can use and stop complaining about anything else. And as I say, you just do the possible with the available, with whatever outside resources. Make your own organization a success. And if you can show success in your own organization, it's likely that some local government group will want to show you as a poster child, girl or boy, that with some of our help to whatever

degree, look at the success that they've been had. And that actually helps government agencies get more resources for helping. So what I'm saying is do the possible with the available, create examples of success, look for ways to build coalitions. And what more can you do? Well, again, thank you, Stephen. Before we wrap up, can you just let our audience know where they can learn more about you and your work? Well, Tyler, I'm going to do three things. I'm going to get three resources to you, and I'm going to need your help on getting them distributed because it has been so recent that I've come back to the U.S. I haven't set up a good website on all this stuff yet. The big tutorial on learning across those five different sources. Now, I did this in October 2020. So, of course, there have maybe been some updates and some more up-to-date things. But this is really solid stuff. And actually, it's like 98% right on, and it would only be a small amount of update. So I think it will help people a lot.

This Essentials of Learning in One Slide, which I put together, pulling together a lot of material from those five different sources, but people like you have found it very helpful. And then I'm going to send you a page of links, Tyler, that has six teaching case studies about digital transformation and some other articles I've written up that are written for practitioner audiences, written for professionals about AI deployments and digital transformation. And they have some good lessons learned. Some are in the context of digital government. Some are in the context of healthcare or scale public healthcare systems. in the context of companies and make that stuff available to all of your people. And that's my job to create stuff that helps them. Yes, absolutely. We will make that available. It should be somewhere on our journal page where we put each episode of the podcast for our listeners. So check there. May not be available immediately, but once we get everything organized, we will have it out there. So check back after that. And once again, Tyler, thank you for your efforts that really make a

difference and in your own way, help make the world a better place. Thank you so much, Stephen. I really appreciate that. But again, Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a great conversation, a great second conversation. And for all of our listeners at home, thank you for joining. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract.

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