Become a Skills-Based Organization

• What are the necessary conditions for progressing one’s career?

• How might we engineer those conditions to help employees advance their careers?

The north star of most employees’ motivation to learn is “how will this help my career?” Harness this innate desire and employee engagement dramatically improves. If employees are a ship at sea, their career is a string of journeys to various ports. We’ll explore the necessary conditions—the compass, wind, and sails—that make for a successful journey. 

• What are the key stages of an employee’s career within an organization and how are they related?
• Why is the employee career journey disjointed and inconsistent and how can we fix that?
• Why does putting customers second ultimately help the customer?

We’re going to dig into the cognitive science concept of “transjective agent-arena coupling.” An arena is where a game is played. A game has players, rules, and a goal. If you don’t know the game you’re playing, you’re not going to play it well. We’re going to explore the different stages of an employee’s career (within a company) as a series of different games, each with different goals and rules. And we’re going to design ways to make those games more obvious and engaging to employees… so they win more often.

How does the human mind actually learn?

What does it mean to have insight?

How do insights accumulate into wisdom?

How might we activate this in our everyday work?

We’re going to dive into 4E cognitive science and understand how the human mind makes sense of the world by building an abstract model of relevant relationships and then constantly updating that model based on everyday experience. We’ll also explore how dialog and dialectic are fundamental to the production of insights. I’ll lay out a simple and pragmatic method for leveraging these natural cognitive processes in order to quickly build skills and increase insight by simply doing one’s everyday work.

What does it mean to know something?

What does it mean to grow as a professional?

Is there more to learning than acquiring facts and mastering procedures?

Corporate learning is myopically obsessed with facts and reason as the essence of learning and growth, with a sprinkling of “how to” procedures. But there are deeper, more important and powerful ways of knowing that impact professional growth and wisdom. We’re going to unpack these and apply them to designing a learning culture.

What are skills, really?

How do we define them?

How do we measure them?

How should we manage them?

We’ll step through a design process for defining roles—the boundaries of relevance for workplace learning—breaking them down into skills and activities, and how to identify the most important and impactful skills for any role. We’ll also explore ways to think about mastery and what it means to have fluency in a skill. In each of these the aim will be pragmatism—how can we break down skills into useful components without losing our focus or being overwhelmed by abstraction. This is at the heart of becoming a skills-based organization.

• What are the necessary conditions for growing as a professional?
• How can we engineer those conditions in our organizations?
• At what levels do these conditions operate?

We often hear of “toxic cultures” where learning and growth are impossible. What makes those cultures so bad? We’ll explore the poisonous aspects of those environments, and their inversion (home, edge, and groove) that foster human flourishing and lead to career development and talent flow. We’ll also explore how they show up at multiple levels of the organization.

• What is culture, really?
• Can we actually control, or at least influence, culture?

This is where we really dig into and design an ecology of practice. We’ll start with the three pillars of culture: frameworks, practices, and tools. We’ll understand each of them, drawing off the experience of your own companies. Then we’ll prototype a growth culture that might work for your own company. Finally we’ll brainstorm the practical and political approach to changing culture at your own company.

• Is talent retention really that great?
• What would happen if we retained all our talent?
• Can you truly measure learning and growth? 
• Is there really an ROI to talent development?

At this point you’ll have an ecology of practice and a plan for implementing it. In this session we’ll explore what you should be optimizing for and how to measure if it’s actually working. This is talent flow. People don’t stay at an organization forever. They come and they go. But what’s the right pace of turnover and how can we monitor it and use that to regularly tweak our growth culture?