My live-blogged notes
from the opening keynote at Training
Conference 2017, happening this week in San Diego, CA. Forgive any typos or
incoherencies.
Three keynotes speakers in this morning’s session: Temple
Grandin, Anant Agarwal, Ken Blanchard
Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin was non-verbal as a child, autistic.
Through great teachers, mentors, she now has a PhD and is a professor in Animal Science at Colorado State. She’s designed humane cattle systems used at 60% of slaughterhouses in the US.
She’s written loads of books about autism.
(I got two of them at the conference!)
Her advice for getting jobs/building skills of students/adults with autism:
- Get in the back door
- Get early job experience.
Creative geniuses – didn’t follow conventional educational
path…
Autistic Brain (her book)– different ways that people think.
These labels are half-science and half squabbling in conference rooms.
- Photo Realistic Visual Thinking – Object Visualizer – poor at algebra
- Pattern Thinker Spatial Visualizer Music and Math – poor in reading (engineers)
- Verbal Facts Language Translation – poor at drawing
- Auditory Thinker – visual perception fragmented
You need all of the different kinds of minds in design….
Get away from being abstract.
Visual thinkers are associative thinkers – keywords trigger
visual associations.
Lots of our talented visual thinkers are getting screened
out.
AI will replace super specialized tasks – it can’t do tasks
that require generalized knowledge.
Top town visual thinkers tend to overgeneralize.
Lots of people tend to go too abstract.
Skilled trades are good ways to go and they’re outsource
proof.
“Beef Plant Video tour with Temple Grandin”
Take the thing the kid is good at and build on it.
A good boss will know how to work with these quirky guys.
Train ‘em like being in a foreign country – you’re standing too close, you’ve
told the Star Wars story five times and they’re bored with it.
Keep the projects very concrete…make it well-defined.
Project loyalty – my job was to get the project out. So I
just corrected technical mistakes. Don’t get lost in the personality of things…
Keep it simple – five things that they measured for the
cattle plants.
For safety – what are the critical safety concerns? Don’t
focus on the coffee cup lid, when it’s the bigger stuff that matters.
Engineers do the super abstract things…
Industrial mechanics.
Different people think differently. They have different
skills and they complement each other.
Apple: an artist made the interface; engineers had to make
it work
“Get the job done,
don’t be abstract, get out in the field.”
“Drag the suits out of the office” – get the senior leaders
out into the field so they can really see what’s going on They may be kicking
and screaming.
Anant Agarwal: “The
Digital Education Disruption”
Think ahead to 2030 – it’s not that far away.
What fraction of jobs today will still be around in 2030?
50% of today’s jobs will go away.
By 2030, 1 out of 2 people will not have a job due to
automation, AI, technology.
We need a planet-wide upscaling of skills…technology has
changed so much – transportation (uber), theater (Netflix), hospitality
(airbnb)
Every single industry has been completely disrupted, but we
haven’t changed education.
Education is too costly and of poor quality; tech is
building too fast (whole new fields are emerging – e.g., data science – how do
we train people that quickly?), scalability, turnover
For education – who is your customer? Your employee (in
corporate education) – who are they?
In 10 years, 75% of your employees will be milennials.
Tomorrow’s learning will be digital:
- On-demand (fits into busy lifestyles)
- Connected (social, peer recommended, global)
- Personalized (experiential, fun, self-directed)
- Flexible (anytime, anywhere)
- Mobile (learn on-the-go)
Milennials rank professional development as the highest
thing.
We need to disrupt education as we know it.
Median age of a learner on EdX is 28; Age range from 7-90+
Microsoft – 6,000 employees from MS taking EdX courses (just
based on email addresses)
Lots of employees from lots of orgs learning on EdX.
- 43% say they’re getting career advancement opps.
- 47% including EdX certificates on LinkedIn
- 45% included EdX certs on their Resumes
More than 1,300 courses; 10 million global learners 120+
global partners; 35 million course enrollments; 28 median age of EdX learners
Learning has to be different. Using techniques from Big Data
& Neuroscience to rethink how we do things
Active Learning is proven to work for corporate learners –
study by John Gabrielli at MIT of corporate employees – studied them to see
what was most impactful:
- Learn from video (learning outcomes at 55% - post test accuracy)
- Interspersed video with discussion (outcomes better at 60%)
- Interspersed with interpolated testing (68%) – this is active learning and the foundation of the EdX platform.
Why does interspersing videos with interactive exercises
improve outcomes? They looked at EEG – the video EEG shoes more
consistent/passive brain waves; Interpolated testing/active learning - -shows a
lot more engagement with the brain. The brain responds differently to these
techniques.
Using Big Data in learning – capture all the mouseclicks etc
to improve learning.
What’s the right
video length? The answer is SIX
MINUTES. Philip Guo (University of Rochester) – video length vs. engagement –
maximum engagement shows when video is about six minutes in length. Done by
analyzing over 5,000,000 videos.
EdX is seeing huge demand in soft skills content – aka
“power skills” – negotiation, critical thinking, etc.
On average – a millennial will be at a job for TWO
YEARS. So why should I invest in my
employees? Because they see prof development as the # one ask – they want credentials.
So EdX has come up with a new form of credentials. “MicroMasters” – a smaller masters that you
can learn completely online. MOOCs where
you can learn for free.
If you want the certificate, then you pay for that. About
$1,000. You can learn for free, but you pay if you want the cert.
With online learning, you can pretty much teach anything. So
much you can do through virtual reality and simulation. They have virtual labs
on physics, chemistry, etc.
Ken Blanchard, Author “The One
Minute Manager” (Cornell class of 1961 – Go Big Red! Masters from Colgate, PhD
from Cornell)
Leadership can change the energy.
We need planet retraining in leadership. The world needs
more than self-serving leaders.
Leaders think that they know everything. But “none of us is
as smart as all of us.”
His wife, Margie, said: “Write a children’s book for
managers.” – out of that came the One Minute Manager. Only three secrets,. It’s
about keeping it simple.
The only way to get great results is through servant
leadership.
- Keep the message simple
- Wander around
- One minute reprimands
Servant leadership: “just as I have done for you, do to
others” – this isn’t about the inmates running the prison.
Southwest, Nordstrom, Wegman’s, Disney – they all think
leadership is all about your people and not about you.
Leadership =
vision, direction, goals. People need to know where you want to go and what
that vision is…”people without vision perish” – need to have a sense of what business
you’re in, where you want to go, what your values are. That’s the role of the hierarchy – make sure
people know what they’re being asked to do and why they’re there. If your
people don’t know why they’re there, then shame on you.
[The # leadership style in the world is Seagull Leadership –
the manager only swoops in when something goes wrong and makes a lot of noise
and dumps on everything and then flies off].
Turn they typical pyramid upside down.
Lead
with Luv (a book he wrote with the head of Southwest, Colleen Barrett)
Leader: meet with your direct reports for 30 minutes every
two weeks. Let them talk to you about whatever they want to talk about. Your
job is to be in constant communication with them. Your goal is to help them
win.
The key = loving relationships.
(He tells the story of the end of the movie Ghost: “The amazing thing, Molly, is you can take
the love with you.”)
Servant leadership is love in action. Get with the program
and take the love with you.
(What gets in the way of leaders doing this? The human EGO).
