Alan Todd, Udemy Executive and Author, on Cohort-Based Learning, Psychological Safety, and Inspiring Curiosity in Teams

Transcript

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:48

Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan Todd 00:02:49

Aydin, thank you for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:51

Yeah, very excited to do this. It’s Always fun to do this with another podcast producer. So you know the drill and how these things go. There’s a lot for us to talk about today, but I thought maybe a really good place to begin is that you’ve been an entrepreneur. Today you’re at Udemy, but prior to joining Udemy, you’ve actually built and sold three different companies and from what I understand, all roughly in the same industry and the same space. So I’d love for you to tell us maybe a little bit about the companies that you started and why you’re so passionate about the space that the companies have been in.

Alan Todd 00:03:27

Yeah, sure. So I graduated from college and this is the late 80s, and I started the tech skills boot camp business. And the way I kind of fell into that is PCs were kind of new, tech skills were brand new. They were coming onto the scene, people were building networks. And so I started a company called Knowledge Soft and we did tech skills boot camps across the northeast. We sort of. And these were all in person. You had to come to a room filled with computers in computer training centers, if you could imagine.

Alan Todd 00:04:00

And we trained people on anything from Microsoft to Lotus to Oracle to all of the technologies that were coming out of that day. And so that was kind of my first jump. Complete bootstrap, had no money, was completely broke, wasn’t married. So that was my foray. And so about 10 years in, we’re into kind of the middle to the late 90s, we started building a piece of software to manage the training business and ultimately Group Gartner invested in that first company or in the second company, Knowledge Planet, to say if you sell off the tech bootcamp, we’ll invest to help you build what became known as a learning management system. We built one of the first ones. We had Gartner and IBM and Netscape and all the early tech pioneers. It was like the beginning of the browser.

Alan Todd 00:04:49

So it was a very. One of the first browser based applications. Anyway, so I sold Knowledge Soft and got completely out of the bootcamp business. It’s still running. The business is still run today by Ranstad, which is a large global staffing company. Anyway, so then we did Knowledge Planet and Knowledge Planet was a learning management system. And so we grew that to millions of users all over the world. And then that was ultimately acquired by a private equity group.

Alan Todd 00:05:15

I took a little break after that was after that acquisition I had a two year non compete. I went to University of Pennsylvania. I did a doctoral program in learning leadership at the Wharton School and the Graduate School of Education and Had a blast and then came out and started corpu. That was my third company and that was acquired by Udemy two years ago. And so I’ve been focused on helping get Udemy launched with the Udemy Leadership Academy and a podcast and doing the things to sort of make that business grow inside Udemy.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:46

That’s super interesting. And so corp, you, I mean, you were there for a long time, right from beginning to acquisition.

Alan Todd 00:05:51

Yes, that was a harder, a way harder thing than I thought. The thing that we thought. The thesis for Corpu was really simple. I’m doing this doctoral program and at the same time, you see Facebook and social media, people are spending four hours online. This was at the beginning of Facebook coming into its own as a commercial application outside of higher ed. And we were in E learning, online learning. We couldn’t get people to want to stay on and do a class for 10 minutes and so on Facebook, they’re on for four hours. So I’m like, okay, there’s something right.

Alan Todd 00:06:22

At the exact same time I’m learning about theories of learning. There was this whole sort of course on sociocultural theory and I had this massive epiphany. Rather than connect people to content, which is hard to keep people engaged, you connect people to people and you use the content as a lens through which they talk about real work, they engage in dialogue and conversation, and all of a sudden, poof. We invented what became online cohort based learning. It’s kind of a popular concept right now. We built a purpose built platform for cohort based learning. Here’s the part that took longer. Not building the technology, but getting senior leaders in Fortune 500 Global 2000 large organizations to believe that you could build an online experience that delivered the same outcomes as face to face tech skills.

Alan Todd 00:07:08

Everybody bought that story and they bought it. For the last 30 years, leadership is still a battle. Now Covid has accelerated that. But it’s been very, very hard to change the perceptions, particularly of the older generations that are like, no, I can’t do this online. Like, we got to get together. We’re going to take the senior leadership team to an off site. We’re going to go bring in an outside speaker. They’ll spend enormous amounts of money on that with very little to show.

Alan Todd 00:07:32

But you can do with a guided learning journey with cohort learning. I mean, you can do incredible things with leadership development for a fraction twice as fast. You can scale it to 10 times as many people for a fraction of the cost.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:07:45

And so what is cohort based learning?

Alan Todd 00:07:48

Cohort based learning Is essentially the idea of harnessing collective intelligence. The way I think about it is when you’re growing a business, you have everything you need. A lot of people don’t believe that. They think they need more of this and more they gotta bring in some consultants than big companies sending this like, let’s get a strategy. You have everything you need if you can harness collective intelligence. So how do I do that? Well, it’s about connecting people together in purpose built groups and having them solve complex problems, generate and spread ideas, teach and learn from each other and experts inside and outside the company and capture and share that knowledge. So cohort learning enables you to do all that. It doesn’t put primacy on the content because content’s everywhere we can get the content.

Alan Todd 00:08:33

It puts primacy on this process of connection, this human connection. So connecting people to people is very human. It keeps them very engaged. Obviously you can see what happens with social media. So the idea is more like social learning and putting focus on connection for.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:50

These groups and the cohorts that you create, do they tend to be people from the same company or this is people from different companies? Right.

Alan Todd 00:08:59

So it could be either way. We do a ton with large, mostly private cohorts that are for within a company. So if your company is trying to grow and you need to develop some new leadership skills, it could be leading with the hybrid world or AI coming. Like what are the new things? Or change management or critical thinking could be negotiation, influence, persuasion. So there’s all these kinds of topics that are taught at elite business schools. So we partner with the world’s experts from top professors and top bestselling book authors and build cohort programs. And so you basically get the idea is get a group of people to do it together, go on that journey together with people in your company. So do we do open programs? Yes.

Alan Todd 00:09:42

Where you can have 50 people in a cohort from 50 different companies. But the real power is where you can harness the collective intelligence of the people in that group to actually work on real problems. So we think of it as it’s real problem solving. When you take a journey for innovation right now, I mean you’re going to build a business model canvas and a business plan for an idea to drive revenue at your company. And you’re going to be taught by world class experts. They’re going to drive you through a process to get to an outcome and you’re going to sort of share, create that shared vision and shared outcome. It doesn’t mean you have to execute, but you’re Going to build a whole bunch of skills by using real problems, problem based learning and real social learning, connecting with people and doing real work.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:25

It reminds me of just the case study method. So I assume that people come in, maybe they consume some content before, but it sounds like in real time they’re solving problems and maybe building on each other’s solutions. And it really feels like an actual classroom versus I’m just going to watch this class on 2x speed and get through the material but not actually digest anything.

Alan Todd 00:10:46

Yeah, that’s exactly right. So there’s none of that. So if you watch. Right. Watching is one mode of learning and it’s actually one of the weaker ones. Right. So if you look at learning activity in the brain and how do we move things from working memory or short term memory into long term memory? The most powerful forms of active learning are discussion, dialogue, connecting people and asking them a question, getting them to talk, and reflection. So we always focus on, you may have to read something, watch something, reflect on something, and then engage in a dialogue.

Alan Todd 00:11:16

So have a conversation with people forces you to think so you can read. And we try to chunk the readings into small chunks and videos into small chunks. So that’s a great way to learn and you can do it yourself. Anybody building a team right now or trying to scale you can pick an article that you found. It could be from Harvard Business Review, a chapter in a book. I’ve seen people like photocopy two pages from a book PDF it, send it to their team. Read this before our weekly meeting and our next weekly meeting, we’re going to devote an hour to the conversation and we’re going to answer these three questions. Maybe it’s like how to lead through Gen AI? How should we think about it? What’s within the realm of possibility where we can take our company and what do we have to do to build some stronger capability around this topic? If we think it’s worth investing in, what should we do as a team differently to get there?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:12:04

I think this is super interesting. Like you said, certain types of learning work better. Discussion and thinking about things in a group setting can make that learning better. And it seems like I was going to actually ask you that question. How can someone take this concept and for topics that are really important for their team to learn, how can they actually make sure that they learn those topics? And I love this idea of just taking something. Everybody pre read it. We’re going to spend the whole hour discussing how it relates to us and are there things that teams can do in order to get better at learning certain topics that you think are important. Any other, that’s a really cool way to go about it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:12:43

I’m wondering if there are other ones that one should adopt.

Alan Todd 00:12:46

Well, I think the big question that we should ask ourselves is why aren’t more people doing this? So people preach like you should be a lifelong learner. I mean, how many I’ve heard that, what, a hundred thousand times? You’ve heard that every day of your life. But nobody really explains kind of the mechanics of what should we do differently with our team today? Like if we all say we’re that, well, that doesn’t harness collective genius. That doesn’t build the organizational capability. Maybe I read some stuff and you read some stuff. We’re both individually getting better. Well, If I have 50 people or 20 or a team of five and all five went off and got an MBA from five different of the top five MBA programs in the world, that wouldn’t make us a better team. It wouldn’t give us a better vision, a better strategy.

Alan Todd 00:13:28

We would next get better because you’d be off going and doing individual learning. So I’m not against individual learning. You have to do that too. But part of this is the job of the manager is to teach, coach and motivate. You got to inspire people. You got to say, hey, everybody is AI important? Do we care? Let’s find the best one or two. Everybody find one article and lead a one hour conversation, a 30 minute conversation. 15 minutes.

Alan Todd 00:13:53

We’ll take our weekly meeting, we have an hour. We’ll take 15 minutes and learn something new through structured dialogue. Just us and there’s eight of us on the team. We got the next eight weeks covered. We’ll figure out if we learn something after that. I guarantee you at the end of eight weeks, if people had the article and practiced being a good facilitator, meaning a good coach, a leader. As a coach, each person has their chance. Am I a good listener? Do I ask good questions? Am I willing to make sure in dialogue I’ve got to get every person connected into the conversation.

Alan Todd 00:14:26

If I get every person right. The dialogue comes from the Latin roots dia logos, which roughly translates into shared meaning flowing through a group. So I think what you want when you’re with your team is to get to shared meaning. On what problems are we trying to solve? What capability are we trying to build? Like that’s what you want the team focused on. So if you could imagine getting every team in your company doing that and now think of the organization as a Team of teams. Stanley McChrystal, the general that sort of prosecuted the war on terror, who I’m interviewing actually in another week or two. But he wrote a book called Team of Teams which was a great idea. He said we were perfectly organized, the US military in a hierarchy and we had command and control, the best system in the world.

Alan Todd 00:15:09

But then we went to fight an enemy that was a network. Every time you could kill a cell, another one popped up. And so I’ve been studying kind of this network model for a long time, thinking about it is the most powerful form of organization you could have. Imagine if you have every team learning, that’s organizational learning. It’s the most sustainable source of competitive advantage. I don’t think anything can beat that as an idea. And if every team is a learning team and you operate as a team of teams, I mean now you’re building a decentralized organization that can’t be killed. And it’s like Hydra, the multi headed beast in mythology.

Alan Todd 00:15:43

You cut one head off, it grows two more back. Like that’s how you want to design your organization. And I think when you design it for learning, but you got to teach people how to do it right. You have to create the conditions and shape the environment, give them the tools and say this is what we’re doing. I think it’s a great thing for CEOs to do. They read more than everyone else. Great. Find the thing that’s got your heart and your imagination right now and have people read it and do small discussion groups, give them some reflection questions and then maybe have an all hands meeting and say what did the group.

Alan Todd 00:16:11

Let’s talk. Let’s have a sort of real dialogue with the company about the burning issues that we all care about with an informed framework. And ultimately we’re trying to get to common language frameworks and tools. That’s how you build an organizational capability. That’s how you beat your competitors. Is when everybody has a common language, frameworks and tools for a certain thing. I don’t care what the thing is. It could be influence negotiation, business plan, driving new innovation, launching business model, whatever it is you like.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:16:39

It’s very interesting because I’ve often run into this problem where say I will go read something, consume something and then I will get an insight. And then my goal is to try and convince everybody else that we should do a particular thing based on this insight I had from this other content that nobody else has consumed.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:16:58

It doesn’t work that well.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:00

Now you’re getting me to think about this Team based learning, maybe. I approach it as a multi step process of like, hey, everybody needs to go consume this content. We’re going to discuss it. And then I’m sure if they had the same context I did, they’re likely to come up with the same conclusions and outcomes and that’ll.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:17

It may seem slower, but I have.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:19

A feeling that it actually might be faster over the long term.

Alan Todd 00:17:22

Well, there’s no question. So Daniel Kahneman, who passed away a couple of weeks ago, won the Nobel Prize for a lot of his work on creating the whole category of behavioral economics. And Kahneman’s basically says that humans were biologically lazy. We’re inherently lazy. So our brains are real fast and we make all of our decisions with gut instinct in split seconds. And those are called heuristics. Right. We use rules of thumb and heuristics and we make them fast.

Alan Todd 00:17:49

And the way to be successful, if you’re going to build a learning organization, if you’re going to become an organization that learns that can’t be killed, that out learns the competition that shapes the learning curve that everyone else has to follow, you have to do that through slow thinking. There’s no such thing as fast, it’s only slow. It’s the opposite he calls System one and System two. So we’re in System one all the time. The only way to get to System two thinking is to stop and slow down and maybe get with a group of people and make sure the phones are not in the room and make sure that the laptops are closed. And we really grapple with what it is we’re talking about. And Aidan, with your passion and experience, you know how to do this. But the thing that I think people don’t know how to do is when you find something you like, you have got to find a way to get other people to have the same desire that you have.

Alan Todd 00:18:42

That’s where I think you’ve got to motivate. You got to teach, coach and motivate. You’ve got to inspire them. You have to instill in them a sense of curiosity. They say it’s very hard. I’ve had curiosity experts, I talked to them. You can’t teach curiosity. It’s Antoine Sand Zuper.

Alan Todd 00:18:56

He had a famous quote I love as a French writer, but it was like, if you want to build a ship, don’t get a bunch of people and start collecting wood and assigning tasks. Teach them to long for the sea. So that’s the answer. Teach them when you have the peace you want. Part one is teach them to long for the sea, make them want it. If you can find a way to get people curious, finding something that hooks on to them and they’re each motivated differently than you are. And this is true, of course, for every team leader. So what? The way you’re wired is not the way the rest of the people on your team are wired.

Alan Todd 00:19:35

So you’ve got to find ways to get to them, to get to their curiosity so that they want to read this thing and they’re excited to have the conversation. It can’t be just because you want to do it. And by the way, there’s one more thing. Once you do that and you have the discussion, if you take the time to be a good facilitator, take absolutely a beginner’s mind. Act like you know nothing, Be as Socrates said, I know one thing, I know nothing. Come to the meeting as the expert. You probably read the article three times. You highlight you have all the ideas, use none of them.

Alan Todd 00:20:06

Come to the meeting and make sure that each person, say, each person’s going to have a chance to be heard. I want you to feel seen. I want you to feel heard. We’re going to have a conversation. We’re talking about building urgent capabilities to solve our big burning issues to drive this company into the future. So when we have this conversation, let’s make some stakes. Let’s, let’s. The stakes are high.

Alan Todd 00:20:28

We’re going to have an important conversation, by the way. We’re going to build this muscle and we’re going to do it more. But I want all of us to start to build this muscle. But the key to the dialogue is that everyone is heard and you get to shared meaning. So I can’t have Aydin’s vision anymore and I can’t have Aydin’s plan anymore. I have to go from my plan to our plan, from my vision to our vision. So your job as a leader, I don’t care if it’s of a team or of an enterprise, your job as a leader is to get everybody there and have no person left behind. To borrow a phrase, is how do I pull everyone along? How do I get the introverts and the extroverts and the motivated and the not motivated and the excitable and the bored.

Alan Todd 00:21:06

I gotta get all of them if I’m gonna harness collective intelligence. And if I can harness that, I can beat every competitor in the world.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:22:04

I love this idea of getting people to yearn for the C. And you talked about teaching, coaching, motivating. Have you found effective ways to be able to do that to get people to yearn for an outcome over your course? Building multiple companies or at Udemy, like anything that you’ve done that you feel works, or if there’s an example or a story that comes to mind, there’s.

Alan Todd 00:22:26

Kind of my practical experience, but I do a lot of research on this topic and we do it with other companies. But ultimately, if you have deep passion and conviction, you meaning any leader you can get, your enthusiasm is contagious. People come to work and they’re looking for somebody like, where are we going, boss? Where are we going? Take me on a ride. Tell me the dream. So if you can sketch the dream the way you do it, you sketch the dream, then you let everyone else fill in the pieces. Don’t fill in all the pieces. Even if you have them, get rid of them, throw them out, hide them, sketch the vision and the dream. And you say to the team, how are we going to do this? How can we get there is the dream, right? And if you have passion and conviction, you’re going to convince a lot of people to want to go with you because you’re going to do that with that kind of energy.

Alan Todd 00:23:13

And people need someone to step up. So it’s the manager’s opportunity. I don’t care if you’re a frontline leader or a CEO. The manager has the opportunity to drive that vision. And I’ve done it at every single company, right? It’s like, how do we get the best people to join us? I talk about a vision at Corpus. I said, we’re going to be Harvard meets McKinsey for the 21st century and we are going to deliver 10 times the business impact for 1/10 of the cost. Do you want to go try and do that? We’re going to build executive education that is world class, that is as good as Harvard Business School for a fraction of the cost. And like people are, yeah, okay, how are we going to do that? I don’t know.

Alan Todd 00:23:52

Now we know what we’re solving for. We now got a point forward. And then you have some rules, right? So if you start to think about some of the leadership rules, hopefully you’re thinking about how do I get the best out of everybody? And there’s plenty of research on what the best managers do and how you do that. And part of it is slowing down, quieting your ego, creating space for them to flourish, creating a safe space where they feel, as Abraham Maslow said, safe enough to dare. If everybody doesn’t feel that, then they’re going to sort of be quiet. They’re going to be worried. You want them in that safe, slow space. The slow space is Daniel Kahneman, our Nobel Prize winner, who taught us that’s the most powerful way for us to think together and solve problems.

Alan Todd 00:24:30

And Maslow, of course, Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School wrote a book called the Fearless Organization, which is all about creating psychological safety. She’s kind of popularized that concept and it’s super powerful. So if you can tell vision and be passionate with conviction, people are going to follow you. And now it’s about you creating the conditions and shaping the environment for them. What do I mean by creating the conditions and shaping the environment? Make sure the environment is positive. You have to have a positive orientation, some energy, positive, pulling people up. There’s all kinds of good stuff on positive psychology, but it has to be a safe environment where they feel safe enough to dare. Has to be slow.

Alan Todd 00:25:05

We have to stop and pull back and not have phones, not have any distractions, not talk about the current day to day reality that there’s a hundred screaming customers. We have to put that all on hold to do the really important deep shared thinking, to solve the bigger problems, the intractable ones, or to achieve the big visions that whatever the gap, there’s either an abundance gap we’re swimming towards that is to achieve this great big vision, or there’s a deficit gap. It’s like we’ve got a big problem that we need to solve and close that. But no matter what we’re doing, there better be a gap between whatever we’re doing today and where we want to be in a year.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:41

This is really interesting to me. I mean, I love the way that you articulated the vision. It does sound super ambitious and inspiring. 10x the outcome at 1/10 the cost. I mean, that sounds incredible. And then you Also said, don’t fill in the pieces. And so my question becomes the. You obviously know some of the pieces to do that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:26:00

You obviously have some theories around how you’re going to go about doing that. Which pieces do you fill in and which ones don’t you fill in? And how do you hold yourself back from talking about those things? Does it ever get to a point where you’re like, this is not going in the direction I want it to. I’m going to fill in a piece right now. The term sounds. I get the understanding of the term. I just want to understand, like in practicality, how nuanced is this? Don’t fill in the pieces.

Alan Todd 00:26:27

You have zeroed in on exactly what the issue is. It is a nuanced issue. If you say to me, am I good at this? No. Do I do it perfectly? No. I have an answer. You know, like, if you get a big enough ego, you have an answer to everything. You’re a founder of the company, you’re the CEO, and you probably read more and think more about it than everybody else. And it’s really fighting the impulse.

Alan Todd 00:26:48

And that’s all. System one, thinking that fast. I got the answers, I got the heuristics. I have the rules of thumb. I have the experience that hurts you in the long run. So you have to recognize that that system one thinking is bad and you want system two. The next thing you have to remember that if you want a great leader, gets the most out of others. So if you’re going to be a great leader, you have got to create the space for others to fill in those blanks and color.

Alan Todd 00:27:14

And I don’t think it means. I think a lot of people misunderstand this. They think that each functional leader go build your functional plan. I think that’s flawed. Like marketing. Build a marketing plan. Sales. Build a sales plan.

Alan Todd 00:27:26

Engineering product. Build a product plan. And you’re the functional experts. Go do that. After three decades of studying this, I’m not convinced that that is the best way to do things. But what I do know is that if you had all of those people and a whole bunch more thinking this through in some structured dialogue about how would we go to market, how would we solve that for the customer? If you can lead with questions, quiet your ego enough to shut up and listen for the answer, right? That’s the hardest thing for all of us to do. It’s the hardest thing for a leader to. People always say listening skills, but nobody really knows what that means.

Alan Todd 00:28:03

What it really means is you have to Be able to quiet your mind. Which means I can’t have distractions, I can’t have phones, I can’t have the laptop screen open. I just can’t. At least for me. I look at the research on multitasking. It says that it’s a myth. There’s no such thing. We can’t do it.

Alan Todd 00:28:19

So it’s back to these simple things for a leader. Just close off all that technology. When you have a burning issue or something important or a skill to build, close it. If people say, I know I’m going to use my laptop to write down, don’t do that. Close it. Sit and say, let’s talk about how would we do this? And the beauty, the beauty comes from the diversity of the cohort. And again, a cohort could be your team, it could be teams of teams. But that cohort diversity is where all the sparks of magic come from.

Alan Todd 00:28:47

So you want to let that happen. And so the best ideas for marketing won’t come from a marketing person or from product. From a product. It comes from the interaction. This is how all innovations come about in the world. They don’t come about from functional expertise. They come about from a diverse network. Not a homogeneous network, but a heterogeneous network.

Alan Todd 00:29:06

So just keep that in mind. Is diverse teams thinking and talking in a slow, quiet, focused, deep manner?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:14

Yeah, it’s super interesting. And especially when you said, sometimes the best marketing ideas won’t come from the marketing team. It really starts to explain this idea of what happens in a cohort. Getting the right cohort, asking the right questions, slowing down System 1 or ignoring it Maybe a little bit. And the thing that I also wanted to ask you about is you also said how it was important when you get a group of people like this to ultimately, if your role is the facilitator, is to try and get people to the. To shared vision. How do you do that? Does that happen often? Or do you find that sometimes you can’t actually get to get everybody to kind of agree on one direction and you have to step in as maybe the leader and just make the call?

Alan Todd 00:29:59

The answer is you will never have unanimous consensus. You strive for that, right? It’s like striving for Six Sigma perfection. Okay, I want everybody bought in. At some point, the leader has to say, we’re going. Whether you’re bought in or not. What I’m going to do is make sure that you feel seen and you feel heard, because everybody’s voice matters and you matter at this company. You won’t get what you want, but you will get your day in court. You will be seen, you will be heard.

Alan Todd 00:30:31

And I will make sure. I don’t want anyone to say, that’s Aydin’s crazy idea about where we’re going. Companies, that’s what they do. They go. Aydin’s got another crazy idea. I guess we’ll see where that goes. And this happens with founders, CEOs, senior leaders, all the time. They have another fine program.

Alan Todd 00:30:48

They have another shiny red object. You read an article, it’s another shiny red object. So this is where you have to slow down and be really thoughtful and not chase bubbles. You’ve got to be slow and thoughtful, but. And you’ve got to strive for getting everybody to have a voice. Every voice matters. I have to include you. I don’t care if you’re an introvert.

Alan Todd 00:31:07

I don’t care if you’re a remote employee that we don’t see. We need to hear, what do you think? And know that at this company, you’re going to be called on to do that. If I’m a good frontline leader with a team of five, I should do that every week. Aydin, you didn’t talk today. What do you think? And we need people to do that. That’s what you. Every leader should be doing that with every person, every meeting. Don’t let anyone get out of a meeting without contributing, not just for their update.

Alan Todd 00:31:30

Oh, I did this this week. But for something that we’re talking about that matters to the group. And I think people don’t do. They give them a pass. They turn their camera off. They’re not calling on those people and pulling them into the. Inviting them into the conversation. And as a result, you can only imagine that these people are, you know, distracted.

Alan Todd 00:31:46

They maybe have the best of intention, but they’re distracted. And we. We have to overcome that. So a leisure part of our job is, I got to say to people, we got to turn the phones off and the laptops off. We got to get them out of the room. This is important. Then we can turn them on again and do all the stuff. But every now and then, we just have to slow down and create the space.

Alan Todd 00:32:02

We have to create that environment, create the space for learning. And the space for learning doesn’t have all the stuff going.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:32:08

Yeah. So one of the things you also said is that you don’t believe that necessarily the best way to come up with a company plan is to tell each one of your functional leaders to go off and write their own thing and then come back and present that, and I’m going to relate that to this topic of if people are not actively participating in a meeting, then they’re going to get distracted. One of the things that I’ve seen is sometimes it gets difficult to get people interested in the topics that are not directly related to them. So you imagine an executive meeting, the marketing person speaking. Maybe someone in engineering is not as attentive to what’s being discussed and maybe they zone out. I imagine there’s probably like a way to do this where the team can be more engaged in the conversations. I’m wondering if you have any tips or advice on how to really bring people into whatever the discussion is.

Alan Todd 00:33:03

The simple way to do that is tell everybody that we’re going to run the company differently now. We’re going to engage in dialogue and we think dialogue is important. It’s the most powerful form of active learning that exists. If I summarized 100 years of brain science, neuroscience, the science of education, the psychology of education, right? We’re going to engage in dialogue, everybody. And that means we need to hear from you. We want you engaged. So if I send off functional leaders to go build functional plans and bring it all back together, what I get is a Frankenstein plan. Because everybody built like these things, it may not all come back together and look like a beautiful mosaic.

Alan Todd 00:33:37

It might look like Frankenstein. So what we need is when we’re doing marketing, instead of a one way monologue, hey, give us the marketing update. We engage in a dialogue, which is a multiparty conversation to get to shared vision and shared meaning about what our marketing goals are. I don’t need you to be marketing experts, but I need the product gal and the engineering lead to say, do you know what we’re trying to do? Do you know what we’re, what we’re going, what our priorities are? Give us feedback. How does that fit with what you all are doing? What are the points of connection? So dialogue. To me, the saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So to go far together, you use the most powerful form of learning.

Alan Todd 00:34:20

That’s dialogue. You create a positive, safe, slow environment. You create that space. You have to it often, maybe it’s once a month, maybe it’s once a quarter, maybe it’s once a year at your leadership team meeting. Maybe it’s once a week for 15 minutes, but you create that and you invite every brain into the game. If it’s just straight status updates against something, there’s nothing new to learn. Maybe dialogue is overkill. So you don’t do it.

Alan Todd 00:34:42

And then I have no, I have no solution for the people that aren’t interested in hearing that update. They may in fact zone out.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:34:49

That makes a lot of sense. One thing that I also wanted to ask you about in terms of like tactics to create more cohort based learning, create more dialogue. What do you think of the idea of book clubs? Have you done that in your companies or had, you know, recommended lists of books or discussion formats where like every month people come together to talk about a particular thing?

Alan Todd 00:35:10

Lots of people try those. The biggest problem I’ve seen is that they struggle to make them sustainable. So I think you have to find ways to make those sustainable. And the second biggest problem is the secret in nonfiction is only about 5% of the people actually read the book. Right. The other 95% get through the first two chapters and then kind of bag out. And the same is true about a lot of online learning. When you take content in an online education, which is again where I live, if I just get you to watch videos, I might have a 5 to 10% completion rate.

Alan Todd 00:35:41

And that’s kind of the known for online e learning asynchronous alone. Now if I connect you in a cohort and get you to do those things in a purpose built group with structure and we say, okay, it’s going to be 30 minutes a day for the next three weeks. We’re going on a three week journey together and we are going to finish with a brand new plan for how we are going to tackle AI at this company and we’re going to do it all together. We’re not going to have a marketing AI plan and an engineering AI plan and a product roadmap AI plan and a finance AI. We’re going to just do it together and we’re going to go through this and we’re going to use common language frameworks and tools to go through it. So that’s how we do cohort learning that is very effective. My problem with book clubs, I love them, but I’ve never. They’re hard to sustain.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:36:26

It’s really good to hear the pitfalls and things that you’ve seen so people know if they’re going to experiment with something like that.

Alan Todd 00:36:32

That’s why I say start small. You’re not going to get everybody in your company to read a book. I don’t care if you wrote the book, they will not do it. I don’t care. You can give everybody $1,000 bonus for reading the book. They will do whatever they have test they have to pass to prove they read it. They’ll pass that test, but they will not read the book and absorb the material and think about it. So the simpler thing for you, for anyone listening, if you’re a team leader, is just get an article, get them something they can read.

Alan Todd 00:37:00

That’s 10 minutes, 15 minutes. By the way, there’s a lot of research coming out that we’re so distracted now where people can’t even pay attention for 10 or 15 minutes. I mean, this is a problem. And it’s a muscle that you have to build. Curiosity is a muscle we have to build. We have to teach people to be curious, to ask what if? That’s how we do scenario planning and think about our future. We got to get everybody doing that. And we have to teach them to calm, quiet their ego, calm their body, calm, slow down that monkey mind, just get it into a peaceful spot.

Alan Todd 00:37:29

You can do that with mindfulness, but that’s how you’re at your best. That’s how you engage in the best dialogue. It’s how you come up with the best ideas, get the most work done. And by the way, if you do a little that stuff together, you’re going to be really happy at work and healthy and live longer and have more success. Like all these great things come from slowing it down and doing it together.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:37:49

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that that sums it up nicely. One of the things I wanted to ask you. So you’re the host of a successful podcast leading up podcast done under the UDEMY umbrella. I know recently you’ve been chatting with a number of guests really focusing on emerging technologies, generative AI. And this is all the talk. And it feels like it’s all the talk, but at the same time, it feels like the fastest moving thing that we’ve seen in a very long time. So I feel like every company is affected in a bunch of different ways.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:22

But I am very curious, from your perspective, have there been highlights or learnings or observations that you had? Maybe two to three things that you’ve learned in this latest podcast series?

Alan Todd 00:38:33

Yeah. So right now, what I would say is everyone’s talking about Gen AI, but it’s really interesting. And so we’ve conducted studies, we’ve done research is nobody knows what to do. That would be my summary, number one. Number two, 78% of people, and we validate this against two or three other studies. Accenture did a study. We at Udemy, we did a study, got a very large sampling. 78% are worried about their jobs.

Alan Todd 00:38:56

So it’s hard to get buy in when there’s that much fear. So to me one of the biggest problems right now is getting people over the fear. And if you go well how do you do that? Well the answer is learning. Let’s see who’s curious about AI. The biggest mistake I see right now is people think AI that they’re supposed to become a computer scientist or learn computer science as a business leader or worker. You don’t need to know anything about machine learning. You don’t even have to, you don’t have to know about how the black box behind a large language model works. You have to educate yourself about what is prompt engineering.

Alan Todd 00:39:32

How do I ask this thing, how can I refine it and fine tune this by asking a bunch of questions and getting it narrow and smart. Leaders have to understand what are the capabilities that will arise from AI. Vasant Dhar is an NYU professor that I had on the podcast. He’s an AI expert, brought quantitative high speed trading to Wall street and he said the biggest thing I tell leaders now read philosophy books and learn how to ask questions. Because AI is so profoundly powerful you need to ask or have you all taken the time to say what business are we in? Who is our customer? How will AI change what they do and how they do it? Let’s get to the questions. And I always love the Einstein, Albert Einstein quote, it’s attributed to him, but I believe in this. If you have an hour to solve a problem, spend 55 minutes on the question or to come up with a solution, spend 55 minutes on the problem and 5 on the solution. Like spend all of your time swimming around in that problem pond.

Alan Todd 00:40:32

And so with generative AI particular you’ve got to imagine three or four scenarios of the future and you should be working those out with your team together. Then that’s what we see. And you should be asking some existential questions, the philosophical ones. That was what Vasanthar would advise. And you should be inviting as many people to the conversation so that you say to employees, none of us knows what the future holds. But what we want for all of us is not necessarily lifetime employment. We want lifetime employability. We all have to be at the cutting edge of our skills to be productive and useful in this world.

Alan Todd 00:41:04

And we talk about how fast it goes. It’s not that hard. How many books have you read on AI? If the answer is zero in the last two years, you’re behind to anybody. Just read the Coming Wave by Mustafa Soliman from Google DeepMind. Just read what big thinkers are saying about it. Right? There’s a handful of good blogs and Ethan Mollock from Wharton, he’s the guy people should follow. Right now. He’s playing around, not as an engineer, just as a user, like how can I learn faster and how can I do things? And he’s writing really cool stuff.

Alan Todd 00:41:32

He just wrote a new book. I just started listening to it on audible. I forget the name of the book, but Ethan Mollock at Wharton is. He’s doing great stuff that everybody should be up to speed on.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:42

Yes, I mean, that sounds great. And also thanks for the recommendations. We’ll definitely put those in the show notes. I’m curious too. I’m going to check out Ethan’s work. So, Alan, this has been an amazing conversation. We’ve covered a lot of ground. I think you really sold me on this idea of cohort based learning dialogue as being like the best way of active learning.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:42:00

And also lots of practical tips on how to do those things. Ideas like get people to yearn for the outcome. Don’t fill in the pieces, slow down your system. 1. So many great things. The way we usually like to end the podcast as a final question is for all the leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft. Are there any final tips, tricks or words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

Alan Todd 00:42:23

Yeah, I think make sure that you’re connecting people to a purpose that is greater than themselves. Right. So organizations have to have a purpose, a why, and make sure that every person, the research is really clear about what motivates people. Intrinsic motivation at work. And there are three clear things. Number one is they want meaningful work connected to something. Doing work that’s bigger than me. The famous.

Alan Todd 00:42:48

There’s two quotes I always use. John F. Kennedy walking around NASA. He sees the janitor pushing a broom. Hey, sir, what do you do? And the guy says, I’m helping to put a man on the moon. That’s a guy that has meaning at work. And the other one is you ask the bricklayer, what are you doing? I’m laying bricks. Yes.

Alan Todd 00:43:00

The other guy, I’m building a cathedral. So the boss has to get the team leader, the manager, a frontline leader, every leader. You’ve got to be able to connect people to that. The work you do matters for more than just you. You’re making a difference for others. I have to connect you to meaningful relationships, making sure that you’re connected to team. So in a hybrid world and remote and with Gen Z coming, Gen Z is the loneliest generation that has ever been recorded. Right? They have.

Alan Todd 00:43:26

They are the least connected on a human basis because they’re the most connected on a digital basis. So if you’re a leader, you’ve got to connect them with other people. You have to create again that conversation. Every weekly meeting, check in, Aidan, how are you doing? That’s the one. Probably the most important question you can ask in every one on one is you open it up and say, how are you doing? And if that needs to be a 30 minute answer and it’s only a 30 minute meeting, let it go, let it flow for as long as that person needs to answer. And it used to be I grew up in a world where you didn’t talk about your personal life and you don’t bring that to work. You absolutely will fail as a leader today if you are not checking in with people and say, how are you doing? And caring about them as a person. Empathetically, empathic.

Alan Todd 00:44:09

You have to have that. So connect them to the purpose. Connect them to people. Make them feel like I’m part of a team that does something meaningful together and my boss respects me. That’s the empathy that you have to show. Those would be the three things. Connect them to the purpose, connect them to the team so they feel connected and connect them to you. Make sure that they’re feeling your love, your empathy, that you’re listening when you’re talking to them.

Alan Todd 00:44:35

You’re not distracted, you’re not multitasking. You don’t cancel on them all the time. Treat them like you would treat your biggest customer. You wouldn’t cancel. You would. You would take the meeting. I think a lot of times we take each other for granted. We do this with spouses and partners as well, where we.

Alan Todd 00:44:51

And you just have to remember to try and check yourself at that. And it’s like the other thing I said earlier, I’ll just do a sort of call back to that. Try to calm yourself down and not jump in and give answers. Let them swim around and struggle a little bit. Swim around in the struggle pond and teach them. And great leaders have all done that. They let them struggle. Herb Kelleher’s famous for doing that.

Alan Todd 00:45:14

Southwest Steve Jobs, famous for doing that at Apple. Just don’t jump in and tell everybody the answer.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:19

I feel like we got so many bonus tips at the end there. So that was awesome. Alan, thank you so much for doing this. This has been awesome.

Alan Todd 00:45:26

Thank you, Aidan, thanks for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:28

And that’s it for today.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:30

Thank you so much for tuning into.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:31

This episode of the supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript@www.fell Fellow.app Supermanagers.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:41

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:43

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