We’re going to dive into 4E cognitive science and understand how the human mind makes sense of the world. We’ll also explore how dialog and dialectic are fundamental to the production of insights. Learn to leverage these natural cognitive processes in order to quickly build skills and increase insight by simply doing one’s everyday work.

Corporate learning, and even modern culture overall, has become obsessed with data and logic as the essence of learning and growth, with a sprinkling of “how to” knowledge of procedures. But there are deeper, forgotten, and far more important and powerful ways of knowing that impact our professional growth and the accumulation of wisdom.

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 that make for  a successful journey.

We’ll step through a design process for defining roles and how to identify the most important and impactful skills. We’ll also explore ways to think about mastery and what it means to have fluency in a skill. How we break down skills into useful components without losing focus or being overwhelmed by abstraction is at the heart of becoming a SBO.

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.

We’ll explore the the poisonous aspects of toxic learning environments, and the inversion that fosters human flourishing and lead to career development and talent flow. We’ll also explore how they show up at multiple levels of the organization.

This is where we design an ecology of practices. We’ll start with the three pillars of culture: frameworks, practices, and tools. 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.

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? This is talent flow. In this session we’ll explore the key metrics you should be optimizing for and how to measure if it’s actually working.