Live at Learnovation 2024 with Elliot Masie

TRANSCRIPT: ELLIOT MASIE

Intro:  The Inside Learning Podcast is brought to you by the Learnovate Centre. Learnovate’s research explores the power of learning to unlock human potential. Find out more about Learnovate’s research on the science of learning and the future of work at learnovatecentre.org.

Aidan McCullen: You’re very welcome to a very special episode of inside learning here in the Aviva stadium in Dublin. We are joined by the brilliant Elliot Masie. Welcome to Dublin,

Elliot Masie: Thank you. And it’s amazing to be doing this not only in Ireland, but in this wonderful stadium where I imagine their athletic events, their concerts. And today we have Learnovation.

Aidan McCullen:  We’re in  October, by the way, and Elliot kindly brought some nice weather with him, which we didn’t have a couple of days ago. So you’re very lucky. I was thinking about how to even frame today’s conversation. And did loads of research, listened to lots of interviews.

The Big Think had you on, did loads of stuff, your own interviews on online. All the musicals this man has created. Mrs. Doubtfire is one of his shares there as well. There’s, I noticed that the Wikipedia page has been updated recently, but still needs updating because he’s on 12 books now.

Elliot Masie: They happen, they happen, yeah.

Aidan McCullen: And last thing I want to tell you before he gets stuck into a conversation is the term e-learning. That we use all the time. We’ve used it probably thousands of times on this show. Is attributed to Elliot Masie.

Elliot Masie: And it was intriguing because nobody cared about that until the pandemic, and once the pandemic happened, I was getting calls from journalists all around the world and they were saying, well, how come e-learning is boring or how come e-learning is different than and the like? But it was me and other people that were part of that early innovation in in the 1990s to imagine what learning and technology would be. And now we’re at this event and we’re even talking about the next generation with AI and the like. It’s a very, very exciting moment.

Aidan McCullen:  The two absolute passions I have are learning and innovation and you’re at the intersection of those both things, which really when you meet, when you see that intersection, the middle is creativity. The middle of that Venn diagram is creativity. Elliot has a vast amount of creativity inside you. I’d love you to share a little bit of that experience with our audience because that brought to e-learning is the magic.

Elliot Masie: I think creativity, is the human quality. It is and I think of creativity built on another one that’s part of that intersection, which is storytelling, and what better place to talk about storytelling than here in Ireland. But when a mother is telling a story to a child, or when you’re sitting on the floor to hear that from, your grandfather, or maybe you’re at work and you are walking a new employee through what the process is. Ultimately you want to tell a story, but you have two choices. It can be a dull story, or it can be a story that lights it up.

And it is that creativity moment when we realise that as human beings, we can bring our content, our context, and then our challenges. And creativity makes almost everything, it’s the juice of life. Whether I’m giving a keynote speech. Whether I’m preparing a meal for friends, or  whether I’m just sitting, and chatting with a colleague about something. You have to inject creativity to get to that point of innovation.

Aidan McCullen: That shift you talked about, so the pandemic was an accelerant for any type of digital business model, e-learning, absolutely. People have been forced upon them, and sometimes we need a crisis like that to push through a new innovation. What I found most interesting is, even connecting with you here, we usually do audio.

So it’s the first time the audience has seen me as well. And it’s the energy aspect. So I’m always torn between this. When a client, I work in facilitating, doing workshops, keynotes. And when you do an e keynote versus an in person keynote, I’m always torn. I always prefer to do the in person and there’s a dilemma there.

Elliot Masie: And that’s because whether we like it or not. Up until around now, when we did something digitally, we were publishing it. E-learning was an amazing invention in the 1990s. It allowed us to publish content. But the reality is, it was never better than when we were with a great instructor, a wonderful role model, a compassionate manager, or subject matter expert.

And what we’re now starting to look at, and I think that’s where digital happens even for you to say to me “Let’s do this interview, but let’s do it standing outside in front of a beautiful gigantic athletic stadium” because for the viewer it changes their experience from one of just hearing it to seeing it, and it’s a little chilly, so I said to my colleague, “Hey go get me my jacket”. I didn’t think I’d have my Winnie the Pooh jacket! It adds to the process and totally, yeah, and I think that’s what learning innovation is about is we shouldn’t be just trying to do the same lesson, the same textbook, the same idea, presentation over and over again, but rather continually ask, how can I make it more engaging? How can I stimulate the learner? And I’m so excited because I think we’re now at a moment when we will be able to do those online programs in ways that are significantly more energising than what you and I were doing one year, two year or three years ago.

Aidan McCullen: That human piece is core to all the work you’ve done.

So you’re a deep background in creativity, but we’re at a point in human history where AI is significant. And so I thought about you and because we’re here in the stadium, it’s not quite the same, but hockey, the famous hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, and the quote that’s attributed to him when he was asked by a journalist, “How are you so good, man? How do you know where the puck’s gonna be?” He goes, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is”. And I thought about you, you’ve been waiting for others to catch up with that puck.

Elliot Masie: I have. And, and part of what you do if you are a, a thinker, an analyst, is  you don’t have the right answer, but you have the right question.

So that part of what I do, and I think what what learning innovators do, is we ask the right question. So AI is fascinating. So here’s a question I often ask my friends who are AI experts at all the different tech companies. And I go, “tell me something I’m going to stop doing that I’m now doing as I start to use AI?”. Or what skill do I need to leverage the power of AI? Or how do I trust that the content I’m getting back is appropriate versus hallucinogenic or, or the like? But I think our role has to be one of asking these push questions to help people understand and explore, and I actually go a bit farther. I think we have to commit to failing our way to success. And so partially what we’re doing right now and at this moment is we have all this innovation coming. We have to try it and bluntly, some of it doesn’t work very well. Some of it will work really well in a year or three years, but we have to give ourselves permission to fail creatively to get to success.

Aidan McCullen: Many of our audience are startup founders, they’re entrepreneurs, they’re exploring e-learning and they’re adding in elements of AI, etc. So your advice to them, because there’s sometimes there’s people are mistaking to think I need to say AI is part of my e learning. You’re, you’re hearing this loads as well. Like this is a fallacy.

Elliot Masie: We call it AI washing. It’s where you add the word AI and suddenly it seems better. I literally got a phone call from somebody who said, I want to send you my product and I want you to look at it. I said, well, what is it? He said, I have an AI pillow. What do you mean an AI pillow? Well, you sleep on it and AI is going to gather all sorts of information about your health and your wellness. Well, there wasn’t one bit of AI in it. He just put the AI sticker on the side of it to suddenly look cool and innovative. And we’re going to have to be disciplined, try things, including trying things when we decide no, that’s not, that doesn’t work right now, or that works in some situation, or even it works differently in different cultures. We know working internationally – if I am, if I’m leading a workshop for a group of colleagues in Germany and a same workshop later in Brazil, I can’t teach it the same way. Because in Germany they want structure, in Brazil they want to argue with me. But that’s part of the creativity that we have, that we’ve got to be agile and adapt to these different processes.

Aidan McCullen: I was thinking how to even phrase this question and I love this analogy or this picture, if you picture in your mind that you walk into a kitchen, the sink is overflowing and do you grab a mop or do you turn off the tap? And I always use it as this analogy for the education system to go we’re at this point where the sink is overflowing, that the, there’s a huge change coming to society.

But the pack work, the education system at the source, is not feeding through to what we need from people. All these things you talked about, creativity, failing, the ability to fail, but also the resilience to fail.

Elliot Masie: Or even if we go a step back and we can think about a teacher, whether they are teaching, in the younger age, in college, or in a corporate environment, do they have time to be a learner?

Because the more I’m a learner, the better teacher I am. And so they’re going to have to figure out in this changing world, what do I teach? What do I teach to a good example right now for all of the entrepreneurs is, am I now doing education products to get people to memorize it, to familiarize it, or just to be able to perform with it.

And we have a new cognitive model we’re going to have to deal with of, what does the employee as a learner. What do they mean in an increasingly technologically intense world?

Aidan McCullen: That’s a huge part of your work, the corporate learning environment and creating products, and delivering for that corporate world. The need for that is never so more pronounced than today because, I don’t think we’ve, yet realized the impact AI is going to have on the working world. There is going to be jobs obliterated, but there’s going to be others created. And learning is the key to be the survivor. You were talking about, the startups and the survival of the fittest. The same thing is going to happen.

Elliot Masie: And one of the changes, we used to teach people how to do their job at the beginning of their job. We called it an orientation or a walk on or induction. Well, the reality now is that it doesn’t work. I’ve got to get you started. And then that person is going to need to go and learn some more in two months, in six months, in 12 months.

We have to create a culture of continuous learning. And some of it, it’s going to be from an instructor and some of it’s going to be online. And I bet a lot of it may be from AI. And I hope more and more it’s from collaborating with fellow, employees along the way.

And not being afraid of asking the question. Every now and then my friends who have kids will say, Any advice to me as a parent, I want my kid to do better in school? And I go, focus on asking your kid questions that stretch their imagination. You know, and they could even be a question for which you don’t have the answer.

So let’s even take a look here, in the United States, suddenly the people in baseball figured out that there was a lot of data that they could gather and that a manager who had data could make a whole bunch of different decisions. Well, we look at this beautiful arena here, but think about what the data set must be for the teams that are playing here. And in the future, how does that get right down to the individual athlete, that they spend an hour in practice or like, and afterwards they pick up their phone and they see, wow, my speed of acceleration was 2 percent down, I moved to the right, I’ve got to stretch that muscle there because we’ve got to create, and I think it’s true, we’ve got to treat every employee like an athlete. And we have to treat every athlete as an individual who is continuously getting better and stretching their skills.

Aidan McCullen: A last one for you. So, we’ve gone right back to the source, turning off the tap. Now, if you think about it, the mop work. So in the boardroom, I think many of our audience are L&D leaders, HR leaders, and traditionally, they were seen as almost admin roles, look after payroll, look after letting people go or onboarding, induction, etc.

But now, they really do need a place at the boardroom table?

Elliot Masie: They do, and the word we have to use is performance. To be quite honest, I know many, many CEOs of big global companies. They’re not overly interested in whether or not their employees have learned. You know what they’re interested in?

Can they perform? Can they retain them? Can they eventually promote them? Can they get them to collaborate with each other? Can they give them the products or services or coaching to get around where perhaps their gaps are or their flaws are? So yeah, I get excited if we think about the ultimate ability if you run an organization to create it as a learning culture to be not teachers, but in a way, I think we’re going to be learning engineers and to create exciting moments of learning, much like when this stadium will fill up. You have to fill up your stadium of learners and create with technology and good methodology, high impact experiences.  And for you who are founders that can also create profitability and growth for your company.

Aidan McCullen: And where can people find you? 

Elliot Masie: emasie@masie.com. I’m actually going to be here in Ireland for about six weeks. I’m going to be living here starting on at the beginning of November. But you can find me online.

Aidan McCullen: Elliot Masie, it was an absolute pleasure bringing the weather with you. Join us here in the beautiful Aviva Stadium. Elliot Masie, thank you for joining us. An honour, an absolute honour. Take care, everybody.

Outro: Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning. Inside Learning is brought to you by the Learnovate Centre in Trinity College, Dublin. Learnovate is funded by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. Visit learnovatecentre.org to find out more about our research on the science of learning and the future of work.