The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Scott (00:01.724)
Hey everybody, welcome back to another fantastic episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, your host, and with me this week, you love her as well. Lots of love to Z-Girls in the house.

Scott (00:22.58)
Zeta!

Zeta (00:23.847)
Scott, how are you today?

Scott (00:25.492)
We're mixing things up, we're having you go first. I know somebody's just banging their head on against the wall, but we'll get to them. But I'm doing really good, I'm doing great. Okay, so we're the Fabulous Learning Nerds, so I'm gonna have a nerd moment. Next week I'm gonna be in Orlando, Florida for Megacon with a bunch of my nerd friends, and we are gonna hang out, and we're gonna nerd it up, that's right. We were talking before the show, Shatner's gonna be there.

Zeta (00:32.124)
I know.

Zeta (00:48.711)
gonna nerd it up.

Scott (00:54.032)
And I got to get his autograph before he cacks. And Rainn Wilson's gonna be there from the office. He has, he's really kind of started a circuit as well. He's got a book out and he's promoting his book, but I love me some Rainn Williams. And of course, Wilson, I'm sorry, Rainn Wilson. Eli Roth is gonna be there, which is cool. But the best of all, and this is ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous, it's off the chain. The stars from...

Zeta (01:01.328)
Oh nice.

Scott (01:23.22)
back to the future will be there. So let's see, Doc Brown, Marty, Biff, and then his mom, those people are all gonna be there. Christopher Lloyd, oh my, but you know how much it, maybe, well here's the thing, if you wanna get a picture with those four, right? $1,300.

Zeta (01:35.879)
Dude, I am super jelly, super jelly. So you're gonna, yeah, you're gonna take pictures, right, and share with us so you can flaunt it.

Zeta (01:51.291)
Oof. Oh. Yeah.

Scott (01:53.414)
I'm in the wrong business, man. I'm in the wrong business. But your opinion, by the way, of Back to the Future?

Zeta (02:01.723)
I would say it's one of the classics. Definitely.

Scott (02:04.768)
I would go one step further. I think it's a perfect movie. I really do. I think it's a perfect movie, but I wanna check myself. And so we're gonna go ahead and ask somebody equally as nerdy what he thinks of Back to the Future. Dan Coonron, everybody.

Zeta (02:07.579)
Yeah.

Scott (02:24.776)
Dan.

daniel (02:26.538)
Oh, I see. Now you want to talk to me. Changing things up, switching things. I don't know if I like this. No, I'm just kidding. This is awesome. Oh, oh, oh. Back to the Future is great. Yeah, no, it's true. No, it's not a perfect movie. It's great. It's great. Okay, okay, okay. Back to the Future is great. I feel like now as we're coming down to like, what? 30 years, the movie's 30 years old?

Zeta (02:31.239)
Leave in the best for last, right? Come on.

Scott (02:32.784)
Nobody asked you if you liked it or not, but...

We gotta keep people under the toes, back to the future. Perfect movie or not.

Scott (02:46.432)
It's a perfect movie.

daniel (02:56.406)
Oh man, I'm old. That like there's parts of it that just don't, that just don't hold up. There's not a lot of perfect movies. I know, I know. But do you know what, I will say this. I do have a movie that I do think is a perfect movie. And that's Galaxy Quest.

Zeta (02:57.339)
Wow, yeah.

Scott (03:05.109)
Ah!

Zeta (03:17.223)
Huh, Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is like the perfect, it's good, it's good. It's still.

Scott (03:18.786)
Um.

daniel (03:19.266)
Dead silence, dead silence. Yeah, what's your question? It's perfect. It's perfect, it's perfect.

Scott (03:26.032)
Right. Uh-huh. It is, it, um, we're going to have to talk about that and, uh, we're going to have to get an, get an opinion on, on that, um, from our, our special guest. But before we do, I just want to know how are you, sir?

daniel (03:32.229)
Hahaha!

daniel (03:43.106)
You know, I think I'm, I think I'm, um, yep, there it is. There it is.

Zeta (03:49.22)
We kind of knew what that, how you were feeling today. Just, yeah.

daniel (03:52.182)
I mean, you know, listen, it covers such a wide spectrum. It's tough to be anything other. Yeah, Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is beautiful. Aliens is great.

Scott (03:58.86)
Galaxy Quest.

Zeta (03:59.839)
Aliens! Aliens is the perfect movie. I will die on that hill.

Scott (04:02.692)
All right. All right. We're going to need a third opinion. So we've got a great show, folks, coming up. We really do. We've got a really important topic to talk about that I know a lot of people like myself have been wondering about. It's in the it's in the top things that I've been talking to my peers about, which is awesome. And it's great. So we're going to introduce our very special guest here tonight in a little segment that we call What's Your Deal?

daniel (04:06.915)
Ahem.

Scott (04:31.892)
James!

James McKenna (04:33.706)
Hey!

Scott (04:35.056)
What's your deal, my friend?

James McKenna (04:37.505)
What's my deal right now? You've given me throwbacks because if I'm not mistaken Galaxy quest is that like 1994 Somewhere around there. I think I was in the or early 95 when I was stationed in Orlando in the Navy And I think I saw it only because I didn't have a car and the only thing we could do is walk to the movie theater and I think I saw like every movie that came out for like

Scott (04:46.056)
Yes.

James McKenna (05:03.429)
nine months. I think I saw that Kelsey Grammer submarine movie like twice because there was nothing to do. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Scott (05:07.803)
Oh, yes!

daniel (05:08.422)
Oh my god, I saw that movie! Periscope's Down! Yes! It's awful and I love it. No, no.

Zeta (05:11.891)
Mm.

Scott (05:13.076)
periscope down is not a perfect movie by the way so continue okay i book

Zeta (05:16.551)
I'm sorry.

James McKenna (05:16.861)
Yeah, yeah. So I would not say it's a perfect movie. I did not ask for my money back either, and I do remember when I saw it, so that's got to be a plus. I have not seen it again, though.

Scott (05:24.007)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (05:28.112)
Yeah. Right. So I before you tell us all about yourself and I do want to get there like back to the future or galaxy quest.

daniel (05:28.278)
It's ahead of its time. Its day is coming, I'm just saying. Time will tell. Ha ha ha.

James McKenna (05:40.941)
Back to the Future. And if I didn't say that, I think I've had the pleasure of having a few conversations with JD Dillon, and who's based half of his Martin Lurden ecosystem book around Back to the Future. And if I said anything wrong, I would get the stink eye.

Scott (05:41.992)
Thank you, sir.

Scott (05:47.784)
Mm-hmm.

daniel (05:56.91)
Hehehehehehe

Scott (05:58.376)
There you go. All right. All right. Enough nerd talk, although we could talk nerd talk all the rest of the evening. James, why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey, who you are, how you got here, and lead us into what we're going to talk about tonight.

James McKenna (06:10.081)
Oh, thanks for having me. This is really exciting. My background is, I've done a lot of things, but I say like, people ask me what's your why, and I say mine is that I have a bone to pick with lost potential, probably starting when I flunked out of college and then had to go work for my rich uncle Sam for a few years. But fast forward several years, I was working, I moved to California from Massachusetts.

And I was trying to be a rich and famous singer songwriter. You see how that worked out because I'm on a learning podcast. But I was working in education. Yeah, I started as an aid and I was a substitute teacher, administrator. And I, you know, solely that became the focus. And I really got interested in working. I worked with a lot of kids that a lot of people had given up on.

daniel (06:48.887)
Hahaha!

James McKenna (07:06.613)
I went back to school and I got a doctorate degree in leadership and learning psychology. So how we learn and what motivates us. And as soon as I graduated, I got a job in the central office of what's called the LA County Office of Education, which is supposed to support 80 school districts and I don't know, 300 charters across 4,400 square miles. So they have a strong central office to do a lot of professional learning. And that was sort of like...

I'd done some coaching and some training on crisis intervention and stuff, but this was where it was now my job to develop training and, and do consultation and technical assistance. And the first thing they asked me to do was, Hey, can you design a blended learning course around this thing called universal design for learning? And so I'd heard of that in my teaching prep, but they spent probably like maybe an hour on it and said, yeah, nobody does this. So I didn't really understand what it was.

But then I spent three years wonking out on cognitive lobe theory and expectancy value and all these things. And they handed me these guidelines and I looked at it and I said, well this is all the stuff I just spent three years trying to learn about and hearing from the folks at SC Fight On by the way, that there's like a 20 year gap between when research happens and when it gets put into the field and if it even gets applied effectively.

And I said, well, this could be a way to bridge the gap, to take all this research around how we learn and what motivates it and make it actionable. And then I said, well, if I'm supposed to train the adults to do this for kids, how do we start taking the professional learning and make it universally designed? And I had some great colleagues, but also there were a lot of models out there. I was used to going training, which looked a lot like.

Scott (08:42.898)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (09:02.205)
sit here, I'm going to read some slides to you, and then you're going to leave with a binder and then you're going to go back and nobody's going to know what you're talking about. I said, well, we got to do better than this. And that's when I started, you know, looking out at the whole wider world of learning and development and joined, you know, professional organizations and read a bunch more books outside of education. And I said, huh, there's an opportunity here for me to.

maybe connect some dots between universal design for learning and what we're doing to raise kids to be the learners, the lifelong learners we need to be. And then think about that, well, how do we provide that for adults? Because it's not like they leave school and suddenly a switch comes on and they're a completely different person and a different type of learner. So that's how I got into this. And it's been really interesting. I spent several years

Scott (09:51.637)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (10:00.801)
working on a book and I know we'll talk about that. But through that I got to meet a lot of people who went a variety of industries. And I found that there's a lot of, we deal with a lot of the same things, whether it's public sector, private sector, different things, because we're all just, how do we help people do the hard work that they're trying to do? Sometimes we talk about it in different ways and we have different value streams, but.

daniel (10:16.814)
Thank you.

James McKenna (10:25.449)
You know, there's a lot that education can learn from the greater world of L&D. And I would say there's things within education that we can bring into the wider focus of L&D. So that's my deal.

Zeta (10:36.899)
I love that like a way to bring it together. If I could just ask real quick, you were saying there are some books that you read that helped you kind of like connect all those points. Was there anything that kind of stood out that you read?

James McKenna (10:50.305)
Yeah, so early on, I think I was diving into Cathy Moore and her action mapping. Also a book that I had, I sort of went back and looked at in new eyes is a book called Turning Research Into Results by Clark and Estes about gap analysis and performance, barriers to performance between knowledge, motivation, and organizational barriers that I had read looking at it in an educational.

concept. I said, wait a second, what about all these other places? So those were two key books. I think lately, over the past couple of years, it's been a lot of the work around ecosystem design, as well as something that resonated with me. And I quoted in my book, a book called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, because too often we look at, well,

we're doing the training. Someone else has to do the coaching or someone else is responsible to make sure they do it. Or someone else, well, we have to own that whole through line. And what we can't, I can't control it. Sure, you can't control it. Can you influence? Can you go to the people that have control over that, that could do the coaching? Can you find out what could help them do the coaching? What's getting in their way? Get it out of their way? That kind of stuff. So that's been very influential on me as well.

Scott (12:18.249)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (12:18.849)
But yeah, I would say that I mentioned JD Dillon, the modern learning ecosystem also designed for modern learning by Lisa MD Owens and Crystal Kadakia and their Owens Kadakia learning cluster design model. I love that. It's very confluent with universal design for learning.

Scott (12:36.192)
Awesome. Great stuff. We're all taking notes. This is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to talk a lot about your book, which is upskill, re-skill, thrive, and we're going to do so folks in our topic of the week.

Zeta (12:37.346)
Thank you. Yeah.

daniel (12:40.554)
Hehehehe

Scott (12:57.432)
Okay, top of the week everybody, expert learning, a skill to close the skills gap. Really great stuff. You know, let's start at the top. You know, your book again, Upskill, Reskill, Thrive. What do you mean by that? Like what's the difference between upscaling and reskilling and why is it important?

daniel (12:57.57)
Hmm

James McKenna (13:22.613)
Well, I'll start with the third word, thrive, right? To thrive, people need to be, if we think about like Maslow, they need to be emotionally engaged in their work. They also need to be gainfully and well-employed so they're not worrying about where they're gonna sleep, how they're gonna pay their bills. If you think about that hierarchy, if you're getting up into like empowerment and actualization, all that other stuff is covered. But life is changing so fast.

So how do you stay viable? How do you make sure that you're valuable in the workplace, whether as an independent or as part of a bigger organization? Well, you have to continuously learn and improve. And so up-skilling and re-skilling are, you know, facets of continuous improvement. So up-skilling is when you learn new knowledge and skills that help you do your current job better.

Scott (14:02.537)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (14:17.617)
Right? Maybe you're using a new piece of software or there's a new process or a new way of looking at customer service, what have you in that same role that you do reskilling is when you're preparing yourself or someone else is helping prepare your combination thereof to go into a new position where you, that requires a different skillset and it's even a bigger departure. And so, you know, I read recently that the, the organization for economic cooperation and development says.

Somewhere in the next decade like over a billion jobs are not gonna exist anymore So, you know huge amount of people we I think we've all heard these things around, you know Most people don't have a lifelong career outside of say doctor or teacher, right? They they change five six seven careers. All that takes is reskilling getting to learning to do a new thing right and so

daniel (15:07.605)
Thank you.

Scott (15:09.888)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (15:14.465)
When I look at that, I say, well, okay, what does it take to learn and improve? And how do you create the conditions for that? So I mentioned universal design for learning. It's this research framework on how people learn and how they're motivated. And what it does is it thinks about this concept of expert learning. So how can people have the will and the skill

to learn and continuously improve and own their own improvement. And to do that, it really takes two big buckets of stuff. One is capacity. Like, I have to know how to vet information and I have to know how to receive and act on feedback. I need to know how to really set goals and how to stop and be reflective. I need to know how to do some strategic planning, how to manage my resources. I should be well-versed and creative

you know, convergent and divergent thinking, all these different things, these skills that make me a good thinker, a good learner, a good person who can evolve and adapt with time. Along with those skills, I could have all those skills, but if I'm not given the time, the support, the resources, the safety to engage those, we need that context for people to operate as expert learners. So you need both. We can't expect everybody to show up at our organizations.

with the disposition, the skills, and the experience to be hard charging learners, but we also can't say, oh, we've got these people, we're now not gonna let them make any decisions, or we want them to be innovators, but damn it, they better get it right the first time, right? Or we want them to share ideas, but we're gonna celebrate the sole experts among other people, right? We have to look at the context in which we have that, we want that learning to occur, and say, does this,

Zeta (16:58.011)
Right.

James McKenna (17:10.713)
promote the things that we want people to do. And it could be, like I said, it could be emotional, it could be time, it could be resources, it could be the physical space. An influential conversation I had years ago was with a person who at the time was a senior VP of a national, I'll say a restaurant chain, restaurant that has bakeries.

and had a wonderful learning management system, spent a lot of money on dynamic content and micro learning, and the proverbial needle wasn't moving. And so he and his team went out to go, well, let's go see what it's like to learn where we're asking them to learn. And in many places, what he found was that people were doing their learning on a little, yeah, for your audience, those were air quotes around learning. So.

Scott (18:00.264)
Yeah, no, I got it. It's good, yeah.

daniel (18:01.185)
Hahaha.

Zeta (18:01.231)
Yeah.

James McKenna (18:03.705)
I realized this is an audio thing. So they were doing all this on an old terminal next to an oven in a working kitchen. Like, how are you supposed to focus? And how are you supposed to be like, oh, this stuff must be important because they put it here in the corner, right? They said, well, what if we figured out a different delivery mechanism? What if we said it's OK for you to go into a different space into this? And they overhauled other pieces. They built in more.

Zeta (18:05.7)
Mm.

James McKenna (18:33.053)
mentoring and observation and experiential learning, but they say like all the content in the world is not going to work if we don't create the right space and relationships and value streams around learning. And so, yeah.

Zeta (18:46.247)
Exactly.

daniel (18:46.282)
You know, I tell you, that's one of those things where it's like, you know, in my past experience, I've helped people produce training and I've built things. And I remember I produced this, like what I thought was a super quick, super easy, like maybe like five minute micro learning. It was going to hit, it was going to go out the door and I got it all packaged up. And I had made a lot of assumptions along the way. And when I handed it off to this team at a site that I hadn't visited,

They were like, hey, this is great. What are we supposed to do with it? and I'm like, ah, you just have your guys log into their computer and they just take the training and He's like, oh our guys don't have computers and I'm like, well you guys have had trainings before like what's How are they been getting it and they're like, oh well, you know like during that like, you know supervisor one-on-ones or coaching sessions They'll sit with their supervisor and the supervisor will let them like use a tablet to like log into the LMS

And I was like, well, how often do those happen? Oh, every few months. And so you're talking about like this, like, you know, this scenario where it's like, hey, it's in a kitchen. But like, that's, I think that's like, just like best laid plans and like, really figuring out what's going on like the ground level is like hyper important. Sorry, I interrupted, go ahead.

James McKenna (19:56.174)
Hmm.

James McKenna (20:07.005)
No, no, that's, there's, I think all of us have a story of how we built it and they didn't come, right?

Zeta (20:12.171)
Exactly, yeah, for real.

daniel (20:12.35)
Yeah.

Scott (20:14.424)
it only works in a kevin costner movie that has been my experience

Zeta (20:18.819)
Yeah.

James McKenna (20:19.101)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm glad to see more conversations around how do we make, you know, mobile ready, you know, micro learning, but then we have to realize there's still a good portion of the of the of the workforce that doesn't have a cell phone. You know, you know, those of us in these spaces like that inconceivable to draw a word from Princess Bride, a near perfect movie. Right.

daniel (20:19.787)
I'm sorry.

daniel (20:37.102)
precisely.

Zeta (20:46.096)
Oh yeah.

daniel (20:46.829)
Pretty good, pretty close.

James McKenna (20:47.913)
Yeah, yeah, that's, you know, we have to really think about the learners. And that's something I advocate in my book. And when I talk with folks, it's like, you need, just like we think about all the other processes and work and the Toyota, you know, total quality management. Go and see like, what is it like to learn for them? What does it feel like? Is it noisy? Do they have time for it? I think we also have to reconceptualize or enhance the conception.

conceptualization or widen the understanding of what learning looks like, right? A lot of us in the L&D spaces embrace the idea that learning can look like a bunch of different things. It can be formal, it can be social, it can be immediate, but you ask a bunch of people and you say, well, I only have like 1%. I think Josh Burson's Center said they found people said less than 1% of their time ready for learning, but I think that's because they think of learning as

Scott (21:23.071)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (21:45.813)
Course or a training it's not necessarily when the boss puts me into a type of assignment I've never had before and guides me so that I learn a new skill set I'm going through some of that in my own my own work and I have other folks well I didn't get to go to this training Yeah, but you're getting to do this new thing and you're learning how to do new things as part of your work So I think there's a reconceptualization for that

Zeta (22:10.575)
Right, right.

James McKenna (22:16.093)
that needs to happen. And I am, I know people use this 70, 20, 10, and then, or, or podifractic, like 33, 30, whatever. I don't care about the percentages, but too often we put too many things in, well, we're just going to do training and then expect all the rest of the stuff to happen. Right. And we're, we're ignoring, uh, all this opportunity to help people learn when it's, uh, when it's best for them to learn or when it's most impactful for them to learn.

Zeta (22:26.471)
Mm-hmm.

Zeta (22:44.007)
So how can we help people cultivate having that growth mindset? How can we help them just embrace these new challenges and opportunities? Do you know of a way that can push that?

James McKenna (22:59.221)
Well, I think there's a lot of ways. I think one of the things is to model it yourself, right? And be mindful of where you look at yourself, where you talk about people and say, well, that person's never gonna learn. Oh, that's kind of a fixed, right? Or how you say, oh, and when you pick, well, these people, I'm gonna invest in their development because I've already decided those other people won't for whatever biases I have.

Zeta (23:14.597)
Right.

James McKenna (23:24.237)
So I think modeling some of that, you could share, like I was learning to do this new thing, I never thought I could be able to do it, but I did this and yeah, I made some mistakes, but along the way, and you could point out whatever help you had or what strategies you used that people could say, oh, that person didn't always know how to do that. They went from A point to B point, and especially now they're saying, and I'm not done, here's where I wanna go with it next. So a lot of times we think, oh, that person just showed up.

and they knew how to do all these things. But I think as you take someone, maybe who's not used, a lot of people, and from their educational experience into work, have this perception that learning is something that's done to them, instead of done by them. So part of it may be looking at them and pointing out to them, look at what you figured out how to do, or part of a training, look at how much you've grown in this area, right? You can do this.

Scott (24:06.591)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (24:22.109)
I think that's, that's can be really powerful. Those are things that when I work with teams who try to look at those small wins and, and celebrate those and say, well, those are growth and that's along the path. You also have to that learning again, a lot of times comes in experimentation. So you have to make a safe space for someone to try new things and convince them. I'm not going to smash you if you get this wrong. All right. And, and yeah, yeah.

Scott (24:42.432)
Mm-hmm.

Zeta (24:47.279)
Right, progress, not perfection, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes.

James McKenna (24:51.449)
Practice makes progress. And yes, you may have a set way of doing things. You can't just throw it out all overnight to try something else, but maybe you can make small spaces for beta testing, right? Or for practice. Okay, you're learning this new process for interacting with the customers. Maybe your first time using it, we're not gonna have you do it right in front of the customer. Maybe it's in a pre-shift meeting.

we're gonna role play this and I'm gonna give you pointers and then we're gonna do it again and watch them and point out to them, look how much you have grown, right? Because a lot of times, I'm the first one to beat myself up for all my sense. We often don't give ourselves enough credit. We've got that negativity bias and it takes someone else to say like, look at what you're able to do. I think those are some of the ways that I think anybody can help other people.

have a more growth mindset and inspire them to learn and improve.

Zeta (25:51.76)
Love that.

Scott (25:52.96)
One of the things that really resonated me in your books, this idea of taking ownership of your own career development, which goes hand in hand with the whole growth mindset. I think the misunderstanding that we have in learning and development is that we get it. We understand the value of coaching. We understand the value of learning. We understand the curious nature of learning and how to be good learners ourselves.

creating a safe place to fail because failure is one of the greatest ways to learn, which is fantastic, but I don't know anybody that I've ever reported to that thought that way. What happens is all of a sudden I wake up one day and I'm like, Scott, you're doing this. I say, well, I don't know how to do that. Well, go figure it out. I don't know if I'm going to like this. That's tough. It's your job.

James McKenna (26:26.862)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (26:48.115)
Hmm

Scott (26:49.564)
That's where I feel like those kinds of thoughts on really owning not just your career development, but your own learning. Because sometimes you'll get real lucky and you'll work for a guy like me that's watering you every day, like, hey, I'm gonna challenge you to think differently, and we're gonna do this, and if you fail, I'm gonna be there to pick you up, and all that other good stuff. But I remember I had a conversation with one of my direct reports, and she's like, I really love all of this mentorship, this is great, it's fantastic, cool. How are you gonna feed yourself when I'm not here? Well, what do you mean? Well.

Where are you going to get fed, in addition to all the great stuff that I've got, where are you going to get your learning from? One day, you're probably going to leave the nest and you're going to have the same experience I have. Talk a little bit more about the importance of that and maybe some other strategies that we might have to make us effective in a work environment where reskilling is kind of an afterthought. That's just my humble opinion.

James McKenna (27:42.677)
Yeah, I think there are multiple ways of looking at that. You know, when I think about people who have been direct reports to me, it's thinking about, okay, where do you want to go and where can we support you within that? And along the way pointing out where, hey, we have, you know, you may have to point out that learning opportunity. Hey, look what you've learned how to do. Because, I mean, the reality is I mentioned Josh Berson.

You know, one of the things that study they found about, you know, quote unquote, the modern learner is they're not waiting for their organization to invest in their upskilling and reskilling. They're going to the LinkedIn's they're going to the Google cert certifications. Right. I recently, you know, in one position, suddenly I found myself really needing some, some support and project management yesterday. So I went on the Google certifications and did that by myself. So I think that.

There are a lot of opportunities for people to engage with learning for things that they want to learn about. But if organizations don't create ways to help support that, especially in show how it aligns with where they are and where they want to go within the organization, they're not going to inspire a lot of loyalty. I think for a lot of people, those type of people that are more prone to be self-directed and maybe they have some skills to build to really be strategic, those folks, they're going to go find it.

And if you haven't been the one to develop them, they're going to find someone else that is going to value those. And what's that old saying? And I know it gets attributed to a bunch of different people. Maybe it's Richard Branson or whoever, you know, what happens if we pay, if we train them and they leave, or what happens if we don't train them and they stay? Right. I think that part of that investment. Yeah. Is that in.

daniel (29:24.941)
Yeah.

Zeta (29:25.636)
Right, right.

James McKenna (29:29.381)
Overt investment in your development. Where do you want to go? Where are we trying to go? And what's the intersection of those two where I can feel comfortable in building your skills in ways that help the team now and aim toward our future goals, but also align where you want to go. And maybe they're looking for sweet spots in there. If the person completely wants to reskill to a different profession that we don't have within the organization, like.

suddenly, you know, if one of my folks decides they want to go be a nurse or put up cell towers, I don't have a lot of work in there. Maybe there's some project management or soft skills we can work through and see where those show up. But I think that looking at upscaling, rescaling, if you're not thinking about how these folks can grow and continuously improve and show them that there's a path,

a viable path for them to do that within your organization, they're gonna find that path somewhere else. Right? Yeah.

daniel (30:31.822)
100% 100 like I

Zeta (30:32.239)
Yeah, really. Like if you don't invest in your people, they're gonna go somewhere where they will get that investment, sorry Dan, go for it.

James McKenna (30:36.311)
Yeah.

daniel (30:39.518)
No, I was going to say the exact kind of self-motivated, get stuff done staff that you want in your business are exactly the kind of folks who if you're not helping them grow and develop, after a minute they're going to be like, I don't know what I'm doing here. You have to make those avenues. You brought up the point you had to go and get skilled in project management. You had to go do that. But what if the place where you were offered that path?

Scott (30:55.645)
Mm-hmm.

daniel (31:07.006)
Like that's a skill set. That's a sense of loyalty. That's, Nope. That's yeah, we have to bake that in better. I believe that very firmly.

James McKenna (31:16.341)
Yeah, and I think another point that I've made in some other writing is along with that is there are a lot of organizations that say they value learning, but does that show up in how they actually do things? So if we have a CEO that, you know, sound bites, you know, Microsoft CEO and says, you know, you should be a learn at all, not just a know at all. Well, are we...

providing paths for people to learn it all? Are we making space for that? Are we incentivizing that? Are we incentivizing team learning and knowledge sharing? Or are we sticking with those of us in the top will decide what you need to know and we will push it down to you in a pace and measured scale that we have decided, right? And then L&D gets to be the order taker that says, okay, we want a training on this and you're gonna roll it out to everybody. Then you're not really

modeling the things that you espouse. And I don't know if you folks are familiar with the great work by Melissa Daimler, reculturing and she had a great article in Harvard Business Review called, why great employees leave quote unquote great cultures. And it's when the leaders don't act in ways they say they believe and people say, you're full of S and I'm going somewhere else, right?

Scott (32:39.264)
Mm-hmm.

There's usually a B in front of that S, by the way. And so, yeah.

daniel (32:42.026)
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

James McKenna (32:42.485)
Yeah. Pick any one of the fun words you want. Um, but they're going to say all of them about you on their way out the door because, you know, you said you believe this, but you're not actually promoting it, you know, and we see that it's not just learning it can be, you know, work life balance or whatever else it is. And people, I think more and more companies are realizing they're not with this continuous need for people to learn and improve.

because business keeps changing, they can't hire their way out of the problem. Let's go find people that upskilled and re-skilled somewhere else and just bring them in here. It's hard to do, it's time consuming, they may not jive with your culture, and it's way more expensive than if you just invest in the people you have, who will then more often than not be loyal to you.

daniel (33:33.783)
Yeah.

James McKenna (33:37.285)
And so your turnover goes down, your engagement goes up because I feel valued, I feel respected, I feel there's a place for me and I can contribute meaningfully and people see me as an individual and not just a cog in the machine or a tool that they use for certain things.

Zeta (33:52.653)
the dream.

Scott (33:52.768)
I believe the statistic that I heard with Gen Z, right? So that's who we're looking at. I haven't heard anything about the alphas, but they're coming and it might be worse. Like the tenure is 18 months, right? So 18 months is their tenure within any organization before they're like, and I think they're leaving because it's like, I'm not getting what I need. And if you don't give them what they need, they will go. So if you have Gen Zers working for you, it doesn't have to be Gen Zers, like it could be anybody.

Like what do I need to give to you so that you can grow and stay and add additional exponential value? How can I help you get to where you need to go? Whether that's to the C-suite one day or maybe to director leadership or maybe you just really want to be that rock star solid performer in position that grows and adds value and learns. I think we have to solve for that. You're absolutely right, James. I mean, there's just going to be a revolving door.

and it's too expensive. What is it? Double my salary to rehire me? That's insane. It wouldn't take much to keep me happy, to keep me in the chair. And oh, by the way, most of it isn't financial. I'm not asking for the financial. I'm asking for the opportunity. You in the book, you talk about your unique value. I just want to be seen for the unique contributions that I bring to this organization.

James McKenna (34:58.083)
Hmm.

James McKenna (35:02.285)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (35:07.486)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (35:20.546)
And I want to seat at the table where I can do those kinds of things.

James McKenna (35:24.457)
Absolutely. Will you to what extent do I get to job craft and move beyond my description into ways that better leverage my My not just my interest but my talents my strengths Where can I you put me in a space where I feel like I'm really contributing to something bigger than myself Which you know is a huge motivator for people now. It's not just about the money I mean money's necessary and money's important and I'm not gonna say that if you

daniel (35:43.214)
Thank you.

James McKenna (35:52.721)
offered me the power ball jackpot, I don't care about that. But it's not enough, right? People need more than that. And I think with the Gen Zers and this, I think, you know, we're dealing with, you know, multiple societal elements around, you know, we talk in general and I don't want to offend individuals because we're talking about generalities, but there's talk around, you know, just resilience and receptiveness to feedback.

daniel (35:55.434)
Huh. Hahaha.

James McKenna (36:21.285)
I've read Gen Zers often consider periods and text messages to be aggressive. Right? And so, yeah. And so we could just say, well they just need to get over that. Well they're not gonna, they're gonna go somewhere else. And maybe you can build some resilience and you can build some understanding and you can, you know, you can build that over time.

Zeta (36:28.423)
Oh wow, I haven't heard that.

James McKenna (36:45.357)
But you gotta meet them where they are and bring them to that place rather than say, well, they just need to do it the way that I had to do it and I had to suck it up. And I, you know, they're running into all the, yeah. Go ahead.

daniel (36:59.024)
I hear people all the time and they come up with that excuse like, well, I had to do it tough. I had to do it this way. Well, if you had to do it a crappy way, that's a terrible reason to expect others to do it the same way. If you had a tough way, you should definitely be trying to make sure that folks coming up behind you don't have to do it the same way. It's better to be a trailblazer than a fence builder.

James McKenna (37:11.615)
Oh yeah.

James McKenna (37:22.173)
Yeah, like if you went back and said, well, if someone swooped down from the heavens and said, I'm going to make this easier, would you have tell that person to go? Or would you say like, yeah, I would like some help here. So yeah, I think we all need to be challenged because then we get to grow like Zeta brought up. Like we need to be challenged, but we don't need, we don't need Scott's word.

daniel (37:34.667)
No, absolutely not!

daniel (37:39.309)
Yeah.

James McKenna (37:51.585)
BS, we don't need unnecessary headaches that get in the way of us doing the things we wanna do.

Scott (37:58.549)
Mm-hmm.

Zeta (37:59.627)
Amen.

James McKenna (38:00.725)
Yeah. I think that same thing goes with learning. You know, I talk about Amazon and their, uh, fanaticism around friction in the customer experience. How do we make it as easy as possible for them to get the things that they want when they want them, where they want them delivered. And I think we need to think about that for the same thing for, uh, learning and for work, you know, how do we make this as frictionless as possible? So,

Scott (38:02.502)
James.

James McKenna (38:29.473)
people can just do the good stuff that they wanna do.

Zeta (38:32.515)
remove obstacles and make it as effortless as possible. I love it. Yeah.

Scott (38:36.884)
Yeah. And we go back to UDL, you talk a lot about variability. Could you expand on that a little bit? I think those two things kind of tie together.

James McKenna (38:42.597)
Mm-hmm.

James McKenna (38:46.697)
Yeah, absolutely. Variability in a nutshell, everybody's different. And not only they're different, the people change over time. So we all experience learning. We all experience life differently based on our interests, our talents, the context, our experiences. And so we have to understand that if we have a whole group of folks and we're putting them into some sort of learning initiative,

They're not all going to experience it the same way. An easy one for people to think about is, well, we always think about accessibility, right? And section 504, things like that, people with disabilities. But I don't think people realize that a fifth of the work source, the workforce, has some sort of identifiable disability, whether it's emotional, cognitive, physical. And two thirds of them aren't going to tell you.

So you need to assume that there are people out there that are gonna need some supports and they're probably not gonna tell you. So you need to anticipate that, that not everybody is going to be able to just watch this video because maybe there's a visual impairment, right? Or listen to this piece or whatever else it is, or navigate this physical space or use this tool, right? But we also have to understand that, you know, people have cultural differences.

They have language differences, right? L and D, education, business. We love our jargon, right? We have to think about, does everybody even understand what we're talking about? And so if we learn our variability says, every brain is different and it, we have these neural networks in our brains that light up when we're engaging in learning. And we have a collection called the effective networks.

that are our emotional engagement in learning, the why of learning. We have something called the recognition networks and that's around how we experience the what of learning. For those of you that like learning science, think of like the information processing model and all those different things. And then there is the strategic network, which is around strategic thinking, right? Executive functions, getting things done, making decisions.

James McKenna (41:09.641)
And a lot of times in learning, we just think about, we do a little lip service to the why, but we focus a lot on the what, and maybe we have one how, they say, okay, they're all gonna show us that they learned by doing this one thing. And that may not give us the best idea of what our people can do. I'll give you a practical example, because he loves, hates it when I do this. My dad has three dozen patents.

daniel (41:19.705)
Thank you.

James McKenna (41:37.909)
He's a semi-retired engineer. He helped make the first portable CAT scanner. He's got patents on machines and airports to scan your baggage, all this kind of stuff. Brilling is the greatest problem solver I've ever seen, bias admitted, right? He's also dyslexic, which I didn't know till I was in the Navy and he would write me letters and I'd call my mom like, why does dad spell light L-I-T-E? Why does he use two R's in very? He's dyslexic. Well, I didn't know that.

Zeta (41:45.271)
Oh wow.

James McKenna (42:06.977)
Well, you didn't need to know it. And you think about how often we look at what people write in an email or in a report, and we make judgments about what that person might be able to do. And if you looked at my dad's emails or his letters or anything else that he writes, you'd think this guy is not as smart as I need to do this work. He had PhDs working for him. He had an associate's degree. He had PhDs working for him, doing all this stuff. But when I was a kid, I asked my dad, what do you do for work?

He said, well, I sit in meetings where they talk about machines they want to build. And I have a sketch pad and a pencil. And at the end of the meeting, when people are done talking, I hold up my drawing and I say, you mean this? And they say, yeah. And I go build it. And people look like, oh, this guy does know how to do things. You know, I know that you have to demonstrate in different ways, but a lot of times if we had, you know, in a much bigger organization that was less personal.

If we had all these different hoops, I know Amazon has a lot of good reasons why they like narratives for people that push for ideas. You got to write like a seven page memo. I think there's value in that, but you might miss out some good ideas because you require everybody to write. So I know that's a long way around, but I wanted to think about, you know, just think about people and say they're not all going to experience the same. And do they have to?

Or do they just all need to get to the place that you want them to go? And could you provide some flexibility so that people could get there in different ways, but still get there?

Scott (43:43.976)
Yeah. Well, you know, I feel like I've gotten this master's education in all things, personal learning and development tonight. And I know that we could talk for another three to four hours on it because it's just fascinating to me. And you're incredible. I really want to thank you for your time. We're going to have to find time to get you back. But as we begin to wrap things up, James, is there something that you

daniel (44:08.159)
Oh yeah.

Scott (44:13.18)
really wanted to share with our audience tonight that you didn't have time to talk about, or maybe there's some things you're working on that you want to share. I'm going to give you like a minute or so to kind of, you know, take us home.

James McKenna (44:25.517)
Well, first of foremost, I just love to connect with folks and learn about what they're doing and what's working and what's challenging and, and have conversations around how we make work better for more people. So first of all, please, anybody, you know, I know you've got my LinkedIn. Hit me up there. That's where I'm most active. I got off Facebook back and wouldn't, you know, pull up politics, took over everything, but hit me up on there. I'd love to get in conversations. Um, also.

If folks follow me, they can join. We've got a learning space for upscale, rescale, thrive, where, you know, have people come in and talk specifically about UDL in the workplace or an inclusive learning. They can join that. I'll also be launching pretty soon. I'm gonna be dripping out some videos around UDL piece by piece. What does it look like to try to minimize threats in learning so that people feel safe to learn?

Here are a couple ideas. So if folks can go on YouTube and they can subscribe there, and pretty soon I'll be sharing those videos out. But those, that would probably be the most things. But first and foremost, just reach out, say hello, introduce yourself, and shoot me an idea or a question.

Scott (45:46.74)
james thank you so much while great stuff really appreciate you have an on will have you on again thank you sir

James McKenna (45:54.657)
Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

Scott (45:56.308)
Daniel-san, could you do me a favor? Could you let our audience know how they could connect with us tonight?

daniel (45:57.895)
Yes, Scott.

daniel (46:03.09)
Absolutely. Alright party people, if you haven't already, email us at nerds at TheL Email us with any questions you might have, join in on the discussion, tell us why Galaxy Quest is the perfect movie and Back to the Future is almost there but not quite. If you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning Nerds. For all of our Instagram peeps, Fab Learning Nerds, and lastly for more information about us, what we do and updates, www.

Scott, I just want to say for all of our folks who are listening at home, watching you grimace and shake your head is the highlight of my evening right there.

Scott (46:41.632)
That's because you're wrong. All right everybody, hey, do me a favor. Please hit that like button, hit that subscribe button. This is a fantastic show. I know you're gonna wanna share this with your friends. So share it with your friends on social media or whatever you wanna use to get the word out. Also do me another quick favor if you could. Please leave a review. I talk about it every week, but.