Possibilities and Complexities

We’ve reached the midpoint in our series on the learning business in disruptive times so we want to take some time to reflect on what we’ve learned so far.

After laying the groundwork in the first episode, we then featured interviews with Seth Kahan, founder of Visionary Leadership, and Shilpa Alimchandani, a seasoned diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist.

In this fourth episode of the seven-part series, we revisit reflection questions from our first episode and provide an update on the rapidly evolving issues related to the pandemic, racial justice, the economy, and the elections. We also look at the related practical implications and what all of this means for how a learning business might survive – and potentially even thrive – in these disruptive times.

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[00:18] – A preview of what will be covered in this episode.

Note that coming up later in the series are conversations with Tracey Steiner, senior vice president for education and training at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and Shawn Boynes, executive director of the American Association for Anatomy.

 Revisiting the Reflection Questions

[02:04] –  At the end of the first episode in this series, we offered four questions to you, to get you engaged and thinking about your learning business. Those questions were:

1. What are the types of disruption you and the learners you serve are experiencing now?
2. How are you responding personally and in your learning business to those types of disruption?
3. How can you assess the effectiveness of your response?
4. What else do you need to do to respond?

Our hope is that you spent a little time thinking about your answers, maybe even engaged with a colleague or more to discuss and share.

And perhaps, as you listened to what Seth and Shilpa had to say, you saw new facets or nuances that added to your understanding of these disruptive times and the implications for your learning business, the possibilities and the complexities.

If you haven’t yet engaged with these four questions, there is, of course, still time.

Reflecting on these questions will still be useful and productive.

We always try to model the desired behavior, to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, so we want to revisit the questions, and we’ll start with:

Question 1: What Are the Types of Disruption You and the Learners You Serve Are Experiencing Now?

[03:20] – We had four categories of disruption in mind as we framed this series:

• The pandemic
• Systemic racism
• The economic situation
• Political contentiousness and uncertainty in a major election year

Seth and Shilpa both brought up equity issues beyond questions of racial equity.

Seth remarked on what he sees as “a new level of depth and understanding of the African American experience and how it is a metaphor for all marginalized people”—including people with disabilities, Native Americans, immigrants, and others—and he thinks that progress on the racial equity front will “lift up many boats,” as he put it.

And Shilpa in her work engages with diversity, equity, and inclusion broadly, and that diversity includes not just race but ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status, ability, disability, etc.

We found Seth’s and Shilpa’s connecting racial inequity to other types of equity useful—not to diminish or dilute the U.S.’s history of inequity towards Blacks, but to remind us how learning in one area can be extrapolated and applied in other areas.

In learning, this is the idea of how powerful prior knowledge and schemas in the service of germane cognitive load can be for adult learners.

When we come to understand one thing—like roots of racial inequality in the U.S.—it can help us understand related topics, like sexism, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and so on.

Seth also raised climate change as a type of disruption we’re facing now.

That wasn’t in the four categories of disruption we enumerated, but we heartily concur with Seth that it’s a major issue causing disruption.

Climate change is one that we think many in the events industry, for example, have yet to fully appreciate and account for in preparing for the future.

We also found it interesting that in the conversations Seth is having with 100 CEOs, he’s seeing consensus around climate change.

He’s seeing those CEOs in agreement that climate change is a major issue that has to be dealt with, and so it’s not a question of whether to respond to climate change but how.

And it’s not so much that observation on its own is what we found interesting, rather it’s that he hasn’t seen clear consensus on the systemic racism front—that he’s had some conversations with CEOs who say that’s not impacting them.

We think this ties to what we talked about in the first episode in this series.

Disruption isn’t inherently good or bad.

And disruption—or the effects of disruption—aren’t evenly distributed.

The current economy isn’t bad for everyone. And some people don’t personally suffer because of systemic racism, and so they don’t necessarily see a reason to engage on that topic.

Question 2: How Are You Responding Personally and in Your Learning Business to Those Types of Disruption?

[07:02] – In talking with Shilpa, we heard her say that it can feel “overwhelming” to be someone working on diversity, equity, and inclusion now.

That was a reminder for us that responses to that question “How are you responding personally and in your learning business to those types of disruption?” are at least two-fold.

There’s the gut-level reaction.

And then there’s the choice, the action you choose to take.

But being tuned into your emotions is important. They’re real. And they impact what you feel capable and able to do.

And there’s a kind of corollary between emotions and bias.

Shilpa talked about bias as often the unseen, the unnoticed, and the same goes for emotions.

But if we tune in and notice them, then we can truly choose how to act.

We can work to recognize negative bias and negative emotions, and, by recognizing them, we’re then able to make better choices and decisions.

Shilpa said it really well when she said, “We can’t erase…bias. [But w]e can notice it. We can interrupt it. We can make different choices. We can—in that pause between the thought and the action—choose a different way.”

Seth too talked about emotions, and the dark side of these disruptions. He’s been doing a lot of reading about racism, and that’s not easy stuff. He called it “traumatic” in fact.

But it’s the kind of hard that’s worth doing. It’s the hard of learning. It’s the effort that leads to learning and change.

In terms of how he’s responding personally to the disruptions, he talked about reading, as we were just saying, reading to learn and understand, and he talked about meditation, which have been important for us too.

Shilpa shared that she’s been “really heartened to see just…how deep the learning can be using virtual tools and platforms.” So we know we’re not the only ones being pleasantly surprised.

Shilpa also mentioned that she hopes that important things—like conversations about and work on diversity, equity, and inclusion—don’t get put off indefinitely because of the current disruptive times.

She seemed really excited about the possibilities for dealing with DEI issues even in virtual formats.

She also mentioned being choosier in work, turning down some DEI jobs when the organization didn’t seem committed to change and seemed to be thinking more about one-off workshops.

And that is a common thread for many folks during these times—a lot was taken off our plates with lockdowns and physical distancing.

So it seems many folks are being careful about what they put back on their plate, being somewhat choosey.

And, of course, others have been trying to find a way to put something on their plate.

Seth talked about his business dropping to zero very quickly.

But rather than sit passively and wait it out, he took action—he set out to talk 100 CEOs, to get proximate to the problem, to understand what they were facing.

So he did a lot for free for a time, but it was very valuable to his own learning and understanding, and he was able to make it valuable to others as well—by bringing CEOs together, connecting people so they could share.

We think Seth’s 100 CEOs initiative is brilliant—and he borrowed it from someone else, in another field.

It’s the kind of simple but powerful idea that we can see having broad application.

What might a learning business find out by talking to 100 learners in the next six months?

Definitely a lot.

We can imagine that the market insight and relationship building alone would be amazing.

To learn more about gaining market insight, see our Market Insight Matrix , a tool we developed to  help your organization manage a rigorous and practical market assessment process.

Obviously, Seth started his 100 CEOs initiative early on in the pandemic, but we’re in a fluid situation, dealing with ongoing and evolving types of disruption, so starting an initiative like that at this point could still yield incredible insight into what learners are dealing with personally and professionally and how you might best connect, serve, and support them.

We are absolutely in a fluid situation, so we think it’s worth noting some of what’s changed since we spoke with Seth and Shilpa in the first part of September 2020

 We’re thinking in particular of President Trump’s announcement at the National Archives on September 17, which happened after our conversations with Seth and Shilpa, where he established a national commission to promote patriotic education.

And then on September 22 he issued an executive order on “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping”

On October 7, Susan Robertson, CEO of the American Society of Association Executives—who came up in our conversation with Seth as she’s one of the 100 CEOs he’s talked with since the pandemic—she sent President Trump a letter “condemn[ing] recent White House directives intended to ban diversity and anti-racism training in the federal workplace and retaliate against those that prioritize and value a fair and inclusive workplace that is respectful of all employees.”

Election Day

[14:54] – And who knows what will change before this episode airs and before you are hearing this? We do know that this episode will air on Election Day in the U.S.

We know that early voting has hit record numbers—by October 21 at least 31 million votes have been cast in the U.S. 2020 general election. 31 million compared to just 5.6 million at this time in 2016.

And as of October 25, more ballots have been cast already in 2020 than were cast pre-election in 2016—and that’s with more than a week to go.

Clearly, the pandemic and the contentious political environment are getting voters out in unprecedented numbers.

What we also know is that it’s unlikely that we’ll know the outcome of the presidential and other races by the end of Election Day.

The contentious environment and the regulations around when and for how long mail-in ballots can be counted and legal challenges mean we may be waiting quite a while.

Shilpa brought up unlearning, and we think these disruptive times have made unlearning so important—so many expectations based on how things usually work or used to work—like knowing the winners on Election Day—are being upended.

So there is a need for beginner’s mind to borrow that Zen phrase.

Question 3: How Can You Assess the Effectiveness of Your Response?

[16:58] – This third question will depend at least in part in what you’re doing to respond to the disruptions. The measure, the assessment, ideally being tailored to the actions you’re taking.

One broadly applicable thing we can say, though, is that learning businesses should be looking at not only lagging indicators but also leading indicators.

Lagging indicators would be things like how many enrollments did you get for a new online course or how many registrations for that virtual conference that replaced your usually in-person event.

Those are lagging indicators because they’re after the fact; after you have the online course designed, developed, and rolled out, that’s when you see enrollment numbers. It’s after the virtual conference is planned, that you see registration numbers.

Leading indicators, on the other hand, would give you earlier input on how successful a product or service or any effort, really, might be for your learning business.

Pre-selling would certainly fall in this camp.

But we also think that something like a 100 learners initiative modeled on Seth’s 100 CEOs initiative could yield really useful information and ideas.

Similarly, doing an honest assessment of how inclusive and diverse your facilitators and trainers and SMEs are could be a really great activity in this area. That’s something Shilpa raised.

So another generality, likely to be true for most learning businesses, is that in addition to looking at a mix of leading and lagging indicators, you’ll probably also be looking at qualitative, anecdotal information as well as hard, quantifiable numbers when assessing.

Finally, let’s touch on the fourth and final question we posed in the first episode of this series:

Question 4: What Else Do You Need to Do to Respond?”

[18:50] – The answers here will hopefully come from and be grounded in your answers to the last question—that is, based on an honest assessment of how what you’re doing to respond to these disruptive times is going, you’ll figure out what you need to do instead or in addition.

Or what you’ll need to drop—so sunsetting should be an option.

And that gets back to the idea of being choosey about what gets put on the plate.

As a particular area perhaps worth probing, we know that Seth brought up leadership a couple of times in his conversation.

Disruptive times call for good leadership—they heighten the need for it—and they can also complicate the executing of good leadership.

The pivot to virtual has been hard for some people to lead in.

The kind of input you get when you’re in close physical proximity is different than what you get in a work-from-home situation.

So for learning businesses that offer products and services in leadership, there’s a chance to revisit those offerings and make sure they speak to the current situation.

For learning businesses in general, there’s also the need to assess internal leadership during this disruptive time, and look at what needs to change and to be done in these disruptive times so that the organization internally is working well, so it can respond to—and even be proactive—in supporting its learners and leading its learners.

We would say that more reading is an answer to the “What else do you need to do to respond?” question—or, if not an answer directly, a way at arriving at answers.

Reading is kind of our default/go-to for most anything.

But we have to watch to make sure that we don’t stop at reading, and that we take action too.

We’ll share a bit about some books we’ve read that’s been helpful to us in these disruptive times:

• Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

This came up in our conversation with Seth and was published this summer. It’s an excellent book for helping to understand the current political situation in this country and for helping to understand systemic racism.

The book is a mix of history, biography, personal essay, memoir (Glaude draws in his personal story at times), philosophy, political commentary, and social criticism.

And it very clearly touches on two of the four types of disruption that we had in mind when framing this series.

We’d recommend it to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of race and its impact on politics and really just life in the U.S. today.

Glaude takes his book’s title from Baldwin’s last novel [Just Above My Head]. And here’s the specific passage:

“Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost; it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

Glaude focuses on Baldwin’s need to renew his fight for racial justice throughout his career, how disappointments and setbacks—from the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to Reaganomics. Baldwin doesn’t let himself off his own hook.

Baldwin feels the responsibility.

He doesn’t abdicate.

He begins again, over and over.

We think that Glaude’s book is arguably the story of James Baldwin as a magnificent lifelong learner.

Learning is about changing. And change—at least meaningful change—is often hard to accomplish. And so in Begin Again, we see a powerful example of the need for learners to begin again and to adopt beginner’s mind. And we do think beginner’s mind is a powerful learning stance.

And Glaude keeps circling back to the notion of beginning again throughout his book—in fact, he ends most chapters with some repetition of that notion.