Hello everyone! My name is Ladek and my guest for today is Andrew Barry, founder of Curious Lion Learning.
In this very cultural conversation Andrew and I talk about:
3:00 What a learning culture advisory group like Curious Lion does, and the origin, twists and turns Andrew has experienced over the past 5 years as the company has evolved from what he “thought” it would be to its current focus on providing Cohort Based Courses (CBC).
14:00 How a company can go from lip service to championing investing in their people by cultivating a learning culture - and the key factors that make or break success.
21:30 How recognizing and capturing shared stories are critical for creating shared purpose and building culture in an organization
24:00 Bottom up vs. Top down learning - and the pros and cons of each… and how you can leverage having a “point of view” about learning
32:00 How do you scale the CBC model in large organizations or institutions, and what are the factors for success (and typical fails)
Subscribe for the latest news, practice and thought leadership at eLearnMagazine.com
Hello everyone! My name is Ladek and my guest for today is Andrew Barry, founder of Curious Lion Learning.
In this very cultural conversation Andrew and I talk about:
3:00 What a learning culture advisory group like Curious Lion does, and the origin, twists and turns Andrew has experienced over the past 5 years as the company has evolved from what he “thought” it would be to its current focus on providing Cohort Based Courses (CBC).
14:00 How a company can go from lip service to championing investing in their people by cultivating a learning culture - and the key factors that make or break success.
21:30 How recognizing and capturing shared stories are critical for creating shared purpose and building culture in an organization
24:00 Bottom up vs. Top down learning - and the pros and cons of each… and how you can leverage having a “point of view” about learning
32:00 How do you scale the CBC model in large organizations or institutions, and what are the factors for success (and typical fails)
Subscribe for the latest news, practice and thought leadership at eLearnMagazine.com
This is the eLearn Podcast. If you're passionate about the future of learning, you're in the right place. The expert guests on this show provide insights into the latest strategies, practices and technologies for creating killer online learning outcomes. My name is Ladek and I'm your host from Open LMS. The eLearn Podcast is sponsored by eLearn magazine. Your go to resource for all things online learning click bi click How to articles the latest in EdTech Spotlight Unsuccessful Outcomes and Trends in the Marketplace. Subscribe today and never miss a post at eLearn magazine, Dotcom and Open LMS, A company leveraging open source software to deliver a highly effective, customized and engaging learning experience for schools, universities, companies and governments around the world since 2005. Learn more at open l'oms dot net. Hello everyone. My name's Ladek and my guest for today is Andrew Barry, who's the founder of Curious Lion. Learning in this very cultural conversation, Andrew and I talk about what a learning culture advisory group like Curious Lion does and the origin twists and turns Andrew has experienced over the last five years as the company has evolved from what he thought it would be to its current focus on providing cohort based courses or CBCs. We also talk about how a company can go from lip service to championing investing in their people by cultivating a learning culture and the key factors that make or break success. Andrew and I also talk about how recognizing and capturing shared stories are critical for creating shared purpose and building culture in an organization. Andrew And I also talk about bottom up versus top down learning and the pros and cons of each and how you can leverage having a point of view about learning in general. We finish our conversation around how you can scale the CBC model in large organizations or institutions, and what those factors for success and typical fails might really be. And remember, we record this podcast live so that we can interact with you, our listeners, in real time. If you'd like to join the fun every week on LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube, just come over to Elearn magazine dot com and subscribe today. And now, without further ado, I give you Andrew Berry. Andrew, how are you today? I'm good, Ladek. How are you, man? I am fantastic. I love that you also put a curious line in there because that is the company that you founded work for. You know, you do all of the magic for where do we find you sitting? Where are you in the world? I am in Middletown, New Jersey, says the North New Jersey Shore. I'm going to guess that you're not from there. I am not. Yeah. You nailed it. Believe it or not, I've been here. I lived in Manhattan for about 12 years before this. And so this is our first year down here. So, yeah, it's about 12 years in the States, but I don't know if you can guess. I'm originally from. Tasmania. It isn't Australia, but South Africa. Oh, that's you know what, I think I knew that I didn't have that right on South Africa or. Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa. I have had the pleasure of flying through Joburg and I've even been to Lucy too. But for some reason I never, you know, stepped outside and actually experienced South Africa. I'm very disappointed in that. Oh, that's when you go after and rectify in the future. Absolutely. But yeah, no. While North Shore, New Jersey and many people who listen to this podcast before now, I mean, I lived in Hoboken for a couple of years and I work down in Asbury, near Asbury Park there. And this area well, in Hoboken. Fantastic. All right. Cool. Andrew, now that you're on the north shore of Jersey and Curious Lyon has followed you there, obviously. Tell us about your give us the 30 to 60 seconds of what Curious Lyon is and what you do. Yeah. So we're a learning culture advisory firm, fully remote. We're ten people sorry, 12 people right now. And we work with typically B-to-B SAS companies that are in the sort of early growth or high growth stage. And we help them create systems for learning so that that people can learn bottoms up instead of top down. And I love that you nailed that there because that's what we're going to talk about. I want to know the difference between bottom up and top down learning. But before we go there, I want to first compliment you on. You know, as we always do. You know, you do a little research on who you're going to talk to on his podcast and whatnot. I love that. The first thing that you see on the Curious Lyon website, it says Learning isn't the transformation of everything, the transfer of information. It's the transformation of the learner. Mm hmm. I got to tell you, you know, I don't mean to be sappy on a Thursday. Right. We're recording this, what, on top of June? There's. But that's powerful stuff, because when you come right down to it. Right. Like, tell me, like, why did you put that out there? What? Why is that so important to you? Yeah. So, so. So this started from me. I started curious alone five years ago. I when I first started it, I think as most people who start companies had a great idea of what I thought the market wanted. And I went out there to create better top down training. We were going to do, you know, beautifully produced, high quality video production. You know, it's better structural design approaches. We were looking at, I mean, I was looking at was just me at the time. I was looking at AR VR and, you know, these kind of things like, okay, how can we improve this top down approach to training? But what I realized and actually learned this the hard way in that as we started building a team, we got to four people at one point and I got a message in 2019 from one of them saying, I'm leaving. And at that point, there was another one. It was almost had a foot out the door. And so I was faced with losing half the team. And, you know, if they had left, we would have been screwed because we had all these client projects and deadlines and all that to meet. And so when I realized that I wasn't developing them, I wasn't mentoring them, I wasn't coaching them, they weren't learning from each other. We were and still are remote team. They were completely siloed from each other. They were left on their own to figure stuff. I was creating content for them as well. I'm putting it out there, but I was just sort of expecting them to to absorb it, you know, and to internalize it. And we were discussing it. We weren't getting together, figuring out, you know, what it meant to us and people weren't taking time to reflect and all these these good things. And so I at the time, I was also getting into the world of, you know, those those who have been following this this big rise of cohort based courses from the creator economy. All right. So it's the CBC that are coming up in that in that space. And so I joined a whole bunch of them. And I spent I spent a an excessive amount of money on online courses. PIZER Just to and I want it because I want you to continue. But for those who don't know what's a CBC, what does that mean? Yeah. So CBC is the sort of coined term for cohort based course. Okay. Cohort based course. Okay, cool. Yeah. So these like time bound, you know, people come together for 4 to 8 weeks and and learn in live sessions with each other, which. I did not, ironically, but it's literally the antithesis of the MUC, right? The massive online office was just like, Hey, a million people show up and just kind of go through this self-directed learning, which. Yeah, which really doesn't work. Exactly which is it? And so that was when I started to I started to apply because I've been in adult education and corporate training. I was a consultant at KPMG for many years. So for like, I don't know, at the back then it was like 12 years or so. And so I started applying, I actually I started dissecting what they were doing well in code based courses. I started writing about that online, got a lot of entrepreneurs who were writing these courses and I just did. I started working with them. I eventually ran my own course of 150 people last year, teaching them how to create online courses anyway. So this was like a bit of a distraction, a bit of a side business to to I mean, working with companies. But I learn a lot. You know, the thing with online course creators is they are getting they are pushing the boundaries of of education, but are doing it in it through market forces like the best people. They themselves are they're not self-selected, but they the market decides who's doing well and rewards those that are really pushing the boundary. Right. Because it's really hard to sell an online course and to to run a successful one. And so that was and I've seen that these ones that were phenomenally successful were doing some really cool things. And what they were doing was the antithesis, like you said, of what we had been doing to that point with companies. And what they were doing was quite simple. You know, they were bringing people together to talk about their experiences through a common language that was provided by the instructor, you know, by the course creator. And they were they were building things. We were creating things. I joined courses that that helped me better take notes. I joined courses that helped me become a better writer, better speaker. And so everything was about doing those things, getting feedback from people, applying different principles and just making, you know, that deliberate practice approach, that atmospherics and talks about. And it just made so much sense. And so I went back to one of our clients at the time, one of our earliest clients, Pagerduty, and I pitched this idea to, to. You just sorry for the comic break, but did you just say pager duty? Yeah. And not. Not like is it like the old school pagers? I mean, I think that's where it originated from. It's like an incident. Yeah, that's. Awesome. That's fantastic. Sorry. It's great. Their mascot is Page. It's like a little pager. That's also cool. They do, like, incident response stuff for generic teams. All right. Cool. Yeah. And that makes total sense, right? Because you're the person who's on call and, like, you get the beep and you're like, you've got to respond within 30 seconds because, yeah, the servers are all down or like that building is on fire or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. So they're also very forward thinking in their culture and their approach to developing people. And I'm lucky enough to work with some of their Felicia Jones, who's phenomenal people, should definitely give her a follow on LinkedIn. Look her up. She's she's a pioneer in a lot of stuff. And so I pitched this idea to her and she just she loved it. She saw the potential for it. So we ran. And then this was key because I needed an opportunity to put this into practice to see if it would work in a, in a company setting. And so we piloted it back in 2020, early 2020, actually maybe even late 2019 with the six of the EVP is executive vice presidents who are exceptionally busy people. I had a finance head of our product come together. She hand-picked those six, which was key to to the later success of it. And we put them through a six week program that they met once a week, another three things. So this kind of teases out the model a bit for people. So those three things were they would consume some content asynchronously in their own time, that the goal of that was just to give them a common language. So I'll use an example. We introduced them to Carol do X Growth Mindset, Fixed Mindset model and it was pretty pull her TEDTalk on the topic, maybe find some blog posts like Nothing Fancy or I just give people we're not aiming to test them on one of the six features of growth mindset, blah, blah, blah. It's just to give them a common language to talk about. And what this is, is performance management, right? That was kind of the topic, how to better develop and performance manage team members. So growth mindset, fixed mindset so they consume this content get and we had a few others in there I'd give them a common language. Then part two they reflect and each person takes the time. And this is like, you know, in corporate setting, this hardly ever happens. So this was a big new things. People blocked 20 minutes on your 30 minutes and it kind of reflect on what you've just consumed. What does it mean to you, how you think about someone in your team, how who's showing this mindset, who's not? How can you have a common set, you know, like those kind of things? So basically what people come out of that, you know, step two is they come out with their own case study of what they're working on, which is then incredibly powerful because then the third piece and final piece is the live session. Instead of us having to design a scenario, you know, Joe, meet Jim and Sarah. And this is like some kind of like made up example. They come to it with these case studies that they already have in their own team. Exactly right. And so that was incredibly powerful. And so the facilitation of the sessions became very straightforward. It was just get these people in a room and get them talking. And they talked like that. They couldn't stop. And so we did this. They would meet once a week. So was like six weeks and they were three topics and it was their consumption. Reflection meets once a week, go and take action and then meet and debrief that. So that was like a two week sprint. So let me do that three times. And, and it was insane. People loved it. They couldn't get enough of this experience. We set up a Slack channel for those six people. They still to this day meet and talk about it. They also work at the firm, which is huge for Felicia. Actually, like the retention was amazing. Those people have now been advocates of this in their teams. And so through this process, Page has been able to scale this approach, this cohort based approach to learning. And yeah, I mean, so that's kind of that's kind of it. And that's when I our business turned around for the better. And we've just, as I said, grown from fall, almost losing, you know, two of them to 12 people we are now and still growing. I love it. So the second half I'm going to now, first of all, beautiful story. I love the Genesis story. Right. It's it's as someone who's a diehard entrepreneur myself, I just love hearing when you know the Aha. Moment for you. Right. And how it really was serendipity. Right. It was serendipity brought you there, but you were able to grab the horns and shape it into what is now your business. Just absolutely fantastic. And we're I mean, we're. Both in the learning space here. That's what we're in. Another part I'm just going to take us back to your this is your your your landing page. This is the front page of your website. Right. You first talk about the transformation here, but then. This is the first time I've ever seen somebody say we're a learning culture advisory firm. Right. A lot of learning culture. We've heard that now thrown around and whatnot. You've just described it in. You know, not not not in specific terms in that story that you just told about wind is, you know, an EVP ever have 20 minutes to reflect or or is given the you know, given the runway to do that? Right before we go into the top down bottom, it may have a bottom up, top down, you know, framework and those kinds of things. Talk to me about how important it is in the clients that you've worked with now or are working with or the conversation you've had, conversations you've had over the last ten years. Mm hmm. Because there everyone will say, yeah, well, look, we we invest in our people. You know, we want people. That's how much of is it lip service? How much of it is it not? And what's the what's the moment? What's what is is there a factor or two or three factors that actually transforms? A company from lip service to actual action. And then secondly, what different types of learning cultures are there? I know that's the second one is kind of a totally different question. Yeah. Are there different kinds of learning cultures? Yeah. Good ones and bad ones. Yeah. Well, so that's a really good, good double question. So first of all, one of the things we've realized is that you don't create a learning culture, you cultivate one. So learning culture exists no matter what. And it's what is it? It is the the sort of commitment and and willingness of people to see learning opportunities everywhere and to take ownership of their own learning and to mentor each other through that process, to kind of this idea of the journey that everyone's on. And we all have slightly different points of that journey, and we learn best from those just a step ahead of us. And we are the best teachers for that is just a step by us, right? So that's kind of like when whole companies coming together to do that. And so yeah, you've got, you've got good and bad learning cultures I think. Well, what is it? The first question was kind of like, what's. So what's the factor that you've seen your clients that, you know, that shift from lip service about, hey, we invest in our people. We have, you know, we want people to shift from actually, you know, from saying it and having the resources to one where it's like you can really feel it, like, oh my gosh, this team actually grows every year. Or, you know, when we have a new cohort come in and you know, during their intake process, you can feel like, Oh yeah, they know it. Like, what's is there a factor you've seen that actually makes that shift? Yeah. So as a few, I'd say like the most important ones, we actually busy working on a diagnostic for this agreement and really trying to objectively measure healthy learning cultures across companies. I'd say for me, like some of the key things that that have to be in place are. So to turn at the top in such a clichéd way. But leadership demonstrating certain things. What what what is that mean? They need to be showing. They need to be showing vulnerability. They need to be sharing mistakes that they're learning. That they're learning from. Because that's that's the learning opportunity, right? When you make a mistake or there's some sort of failure, like turning that into a learning opportunity is one of the key aspects of learning culture. So the leadership doing that and then therefore creating this is the second piece, a sort of safe environment of trust that people can go and take risks, run experiments, learn from them. For those out there that are listening to this and going like that sounds like the Wild West, I would never want my company to write like that. There are other aspects, right? But another piece is like having clear decision making processes so people know where sign ups are needed and where they aren't, and we know where their sort of boundaries are. So you do need some boundaries, but having those in place gives people still that room to be creative, to take risks and to learn. So that those are two. Those are two or three. I think I said key things. Another one, that's what we say to realize is so important is the intentional management of knowledge. So when when people come together, there's there's a there's a difference between, you know, sort of knowledge that can be put into a book, right. And learned. And then there's tacit knowledge, which is like the nuanced, you know, dealing with people, being in complex, ambiguous environments like B2B sales, for example, for for our clients, those kind of things. You can't write a textbook on. Every situation's different, everything's unique. It's so people based like there's just so many things that that go into that. But I think a lot of people also recognize that there are say there's collectively people within a company have the answers to these questions. All there's some people with a lot of experience, some that bring experience in from outside, others that look at things in new ways, innovation. These are all characteristics of a learning culture. So collectively, if people have the answers, how can we create a system that brings them together that to to, to, to like surface those answers basically. So and that's what happened in that example I talk about pagerduty and in all our clients is that when people are coming together to share these things, someone saying, I've got this issue with this client, they're just so stuck up on this one issue. I can't get them over the line here. Very. Someone else has had that same challenge or a similar one, and they can share what's worked or what hasn't worked in the past. And so the point I was making was around knowledge management. So how do you capture that sort of information? How are you? How are you? How are you capturing in a way that is findable and usable by someone else the next time that that issue comes up? Right. Because pretty much every rejection in the world has been out there, every invention, every idea. This is like a maybe a somewhat controversial opinion. But I don't think there's such a thing as an original idea. It's all been out there. It's just remixed and and maybe looked at it from a different perspective. And so if we sort of acknowledge that and say our company of people have that knowledge already, the learning culture, our approach to that and cultures of cultivating it is how do we bring those people together to share that knowledge in a way that everyone can benefit? MM I'm going to endorse what you said. I think they're probably original ideas, but at the end of the day. We what what we find ourselves. And we're going to go deep down the rabbit hole here if we want to. But ultimately, it's, you know, human survival or human flourishing is really the only question that we're ever really answering. Right. And so that's it. I mean, if we want to get profound on, why are you getting up in the morning? At the end of the day, if it's if it's a widget that you're building that's answering some problem or solving some problem for somebody somewhere that allows them or their business to flourish and therefore survive better and whatnot. Right. So so that's actually yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I actually want to just reinforce that and tie it back to your earlier question of like what's the those companies that I'm not just paying lip service but actually doing something about it, it's capturing those we call those. It's I mean, we were in school and it's but we call them shared stories. So those are specific examples, stories of people in the organization doing a thing that had an impact on a customer or on the community or on whatever. That's it's that's examples of best practice of what great looks like for that role or that function. And part of our work is capturing those and creating a story bank of those because, you know, and then we'll like put that, we'll deliver that out through a podcast or, you know, lots of different ways. But that is what people that's how you get tested knowledge right gets the the impact and you're like, I want to make that kind of a difference. And you can then sort of figure out very quickly what the person did and internalize it. And your and to your tagline. Right. But that's also cult building culture, right? Like not only internally are people do people start attaching themselves to the stories I love? This is something I've spoken about many times myself, like the idea of shared experience. It's so important to us as human animal, right? Like, you know, we this is what we relate. This is the reason why memes happen, right? It's a shared experience. Like we we begin to share it. But then, gosh, when you get to a support experience, you know, for a client or a customer, you have these stories, you can say, well, actually over it, XYZ company, we did this or actually ever, you know, here's we did this and then you flip it around to the sales side and they become solid gold for a sales, you know, function as well where it's just like, well, let me show you all of the different ways that people are happy or satisfied or problems were solved or challenges overcome or new ideas came into fruition. That that's like. A consulting company and go sell this to somebody. I'm not sure. I mean, hey, look, if you. I'm open to different. Yeah, I am. You nailed another aspect of it. It's cross. So when the whole company is doing that to you. One of the things we do is customer mapping. So what are the all the touchpoints the customer has with people? Right. And you said I customer success is that on the one hand it's feeding back into sales and on the front end and the SDR before that. So having that whole like map journey mapped out and then making sure there's consistency across people and that they are, it's not even like, you know, that sounded very top down. Again, it's more like enabling them to come together to establish consistency among themselves. That's what bottoms up learning as well. I was going to say, take me there. So let's let's definitively answer right now, like juxtapose bottom up versus top down learning. And is it something that, you know, if I'm the head of L.A. or I'm the head of people or whatever or the head of training at a company right now and listening to, is this something that I can grab myself on to? Is this is this a skill I can learn? Is this something that's been sitting in front of me all this whole time? And I just need to think about it differently. Like, help. Help us understand. I mean, are do we need to come hire curious lion? What do we need to do? Yeah, well, so a big part of what we do and we just start there. So we, I'm I'm a big believer in creating the category and everything that we put out there and the stuff I write on LinkedIn and all that is about promoting the category, I think. I'm not saying we are always the experts at this. I think there's lots of different ways to do this. We have a we have a very strong point of view on it. Right. And so I think that's important that that we are advocating for this approach rather than like our approach. So that makes sense because I'm learning all the time people are interacting with me on LinkedIn, I especially it's been fantastic because I get a lot of like ideas and feedback from people what they've done well. So that goes back to that. It's really great to hear you describe this because it's weird. I don't know. I that's true. That's true. But it harkens back when I did my MBA, you know, a century ago. There's this one professor who and she was a finance professor. And and I just asked her, like, how do you think about this? You know, like, is there a strategy? You know, is there is there a frame we're using? She's just like, I have a view. And, you know, this is how I present the view. And I'm always adding to it. And, and, but excuse me, but I but this is the view and this is kind of what you're describing here, where when you come into a situation, you're like, look, I have decided or we have decided like we're going to take this approach. There isn't a answer, but there's an approach here. They might describing that correctly. That's 100%. And it's that's a lifelong learning mindset. I like that. And I know that our work will never be complete or that's not what I always said. It'll never be done. I will always be learning. Every time we work with a client, every single time will be better. You know, we're building up, we're developing that pattern recognition, all of those kind of things that help us do this better. So there's a meta thing going on here as well because that's the mindset we're trying to create at our clients and among people. So, so. Bottoms up top that right. So that approach is very bottoms up, by the way, like me putting that stuff on things and I'm doing it very I'm like learning out loud and, and doing it in a way to get feedback and see what's resonating and what other people are doing and sort of constantly developing it. And I try and support others and by sharing my ideas. So that's a that's kind of an essence of the bottoms up approach, everything we've talked about. Let me so let me just define top down for like and if you feel free to add to this as well, but it's, it's that traditional training that we're all used to you, right? And especially that compliance training is the worst at this because it's just the check the box, right? So there's really no need to do anything else. But it's. Sage on the stage. Lecture based 60 minute webinars that are just a lecture. Someone reading you a slide deck like Just give me the book, I'll read it. It's like, I don't need someone else to read this to me type of thing. It's that transfer of information as opposed to transforming, transforming the learner. And I can I can, I can get a visual and you can if this resonates with you, please. Go for it. This. There's literally just popped in my head. If you find yourself. Sitting down and looking forward at a screen at a person or whatever. Being prepared to receive information that's top down learning. Right. Like you're expecting. It's like you. But if you find yourself sitting down and turning to the left or the right to talk to someone. Yeah. I think that would be bottom up. Right. Whereas, like, it's more on the peer experience. This is cohort, right? This is. Yeah, exactly. It's more about let's discover together and let's create learning whether there's another woman that we've had on the show several other times. Her name is Michelle. She used to work for my learning consulting. She now works for Moodle USA, but this is her huge mantra. It's like, why are you even creating the content? Why are you asking your students to build, essentially build the course with you or build the material with you and you're going to discover so much more that way, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly right. I love that analogy of of like if you're just passively consuming something and just staring at a screen versus like interacting with people. And so it's that it's like to us so becomes then if you sort of like zoom out, it's like that's top down. That's that's where people often stop. I can't recall. We've done a needs analysis. We figured out people need to know this. Things repackaged up a really solid 90 minute webinar teaches them everything they need to know presents. It's cool with that. Let's go out to the next needs analysis kind of thing. So now if you zoom out of that saying, okay, what if that's just one part of it? What if we then say. Here's the recommended reflection. I give them prompts to reflect on that piece. First of all, not make it 90 minutes like let's let's get serious about that like this. Let's, let's figure out what is the essential common language that they need to develop, what's the mental model of framework that they need to be introduced to and then say, Well, what should they reflect on? Give them some prompts for that. Get people reflecting. And then what should they be doing to put to practice this? What? Thinking about that? What are some examples of that? And then sharing. So there's reflecting, doing, sharing. I talk about the circle of learning. So if you picture like doings in the middle, that's sort of actually the first step. Like what should you do with this information? Then if you're reflecting after that, you're reflecting on not only what you just consumed, but also the doing. All right, so then the circle expands a bit more and I get doing it reflecting then sharing your point, looking at people to each side of you. You're now, you know, when our thoughts are somewhat of an echo chamber, right? Even if we write them down. Writing them down helps because it forces you to clarify your thinking, but it's still just your thinking. So now in bringing in other people, you're getting feedback, you're getting your ideas are challenged. You may not know stuff of. You may realize you don't understand it fully. It's and I have to explain it better to people. And so that so then sharing. So you're taking all of these these are these are these other points you're learning from people one step ahead of you as well. And then finally, the fourth thing that we add to this circle of learning is teaching. So and I sort of touched on that already, but then the ability to then explain and share your experience with others helps you learn better because you start to see what resonate. And that's me writing. I like to write and I'm teaching what I'm learning, and then I'm getting feedback and I'm and I'm learning more. And then and then of course, I imagine everyone in the companies, Dennis, everyone is doing, reflecting, sharing and teaching. Each one teacher like that company's unbeatable and like it's a, it's a huge competitive advantage. So in my mind, this sounds great for the, you know, two to maybe 50 employees. Maybe 100 employees, right. Like even sounds like it's gets a little unmanageable 100 employees take me to why does this also work in Amazon or, you know, Walmart or even middle sized sort of decent company like a Slack or something like it's now Salesforce. You know, like what this does is it? Is it? If I'm again, you know, the people that we're speaking with right now, the people are listening are either professors and teachers and trainers or they are, you know, they're professionals. These are people who run these departments at corporations. For many of the media, like, how do I control that process? Do or do I care? Yeah. So it's a great question. It's a it's a question of scale. How do you scale something like this? So there is some that last part of the question I think is important. Like there are some there's some letting go. There's somewhat autonomy that you have to to kind of decentralize that that is important in this. But to answer the second question, the best way to do that, to kind of scale and let go of that sort of authority to control things, is through alumni mentors. So what we saw in the pages of example, it was was great. There are over a thousand person company now started with six people and and that so that particular topic this was like this is a certain management level track of training that they had been rolled out they took from those six people because my client does such a good job of picking those six she kind of knew like all of them would really embrace that and want to take it further. Right. But not everyone's going to do that. But you will get you will get you get a bunch that really like this idea, this concept, and it will be willing to leave future sessions. And it goes back to what I said earlier as well, that the facilitation part is not a massive it's not a very onerous ask because all you have to do is just basically bring people together, guide the conversation somewhat, and then they take the participants, the learners take over. So to scale, this is basically picture you run it with six people say four of them are interested in running it again. So then that's not for doing six more. So that's 24 people. All right. And now you've got, say, ten of those. You want to run it again and you do that. And so, like, that's how the best way that this expands, because you've got that consistency, that golden thread of people that have been there since the first one kind of know what the spirit is, what, how to, how to run it, and then be sort of accept the fact that every session is going to be different. Every if you're giving people the exact same answer, models and frameworks, they will it'll immediately be different from the moment they reflect. Right? Because everyone's situation is different. Then when they come together for that live session to share and teach each other, it'll be different. And so and that's great. That's fine because it's, it's helping them with that specific challenge. So it's, it's taking the general, the mental model and applying it to the specific and right. And that's what you want. Because then this is the other thing I talk about integrating, learning and work you're learning as you're working. And you people have these meetings with like a specific idea for a meeting of the clients or a performance review to someone like that. So there's very practical outcomes. What are the you know, we've already been talking for 35 minutes now. I love it. I love how the time always flies. Yeah. And we are both serious fanboys for this. I mean, this is obviously. What are the challenges? What are the challenges? You know, like how do people fall on their face? Where have you seen, you know, companies fail at this? What are or teams fail at it where, you know, either it wasn't led properly or like what are the what are the factors for success? And how do you make sure that, I guess, what are the challenges to be successful? Yeah. So okay, so that's a great question. It is a few three things off the top of my head that that are important here. One is start small so you don't want to run this for the thousand people population, start with a pilot group, grow from there like that is so important. A lot of people want to rush into like you and I, we are so excited about this. Like, you just want to help. If that is a recipe for disaster, the wheels can come off, right? Because and this is also like to my point that, you know, we we call them as, you know, that sort of whole approach I talked about called cohort learning experiences classes. That's our approach for doing it. But it's different in every client and there's certain nuances that so like you've got to kind of run a pilot, see what works for your team. Like maybe, maybe they, you know, maybe setting up a Slack channel for people afterwards to talk through things isn't useful at that company or whatever, right? So you have to kind of like make those little tweaks. So start small. The next one is have someone dedicated as a sort of course manager. So there's a lot of moving parts to this scheduling, you know, setting up the meeting rooms, making sure that the asynchronous content goes out and timely, making sure there's an easy place to go to get access to reflection questions and store them themselves and, you know, helping to organize that whole process. So a lot of moving parts that's cute. Like have a dedicated person to do that and you can train someone with them. Like that's also pretty, pretty key. So you've got you don't have to hire from outside. And then the last thing is you get leadership involved. This is probably like probably the biggest make or break for a thing like this where the pagerduty example that very first when they had their CEO do like show up and just talk for 5 minutes at the beginning, just talking about why, you know, talking about how much investment they put in this, why those people were so important, you know, kind of making that that link. Yeah. And what she did really well Jen she's she does this a lot publicly as well, but she's just very open about her own struggles and challenges and stuff like that. So, you know, she set the tone for that by saying, like, you know, whatever the thing was at the time, like just being very open about those those you know, there's conflicts and all that that she was going through. So so that's key like leadership being involved in setting the tone for sort of vulnerability of being being open to learning from mistakes, that kind of thing was so key because then it gives everyone else permission to do that for sure. And I've also heard as well that not only because again, that goes back to learning culture, right? Like it allows, you know, when you have the person or the people at the top say, you know, this is acceptable and I'm going to participate, it's a huge breath of relief for everyone else. Right. Or is it it's an open invitation for others as well. What about consistency? I've heard before that, you know, if you want change to happen, if you want, you know, a new policy to go through and really be effective, like it's something that you have to communicate is leadership literally till you're blue in the face, right? Like even though you to think you think you've said it 20 times over the last three months, but really you need to say it 200 times over the next six months for it actually is. Has that been your experience to like bend the culture, to change it, to move it 100%? That's such a key point. And it's it's leadership doing that. So it's a constantly demonstrating what we just talked about, talking about the importance of these programs, but also just the cadence of the programs. So running these, you know, these cohort learning experiences for for those listening, I mean, it's sort of trying to paint a picture, visual picture in our minds. But think of the cohort learning experience as as the sort of container for what you said, shared experiences, right? Bringing people together. Now picture a whole bunch of those lined up one after the other. And think of that as a learning program. So that's like a series of these cohort learning experiences so that you might have one on, you know, growth mindset, right? You might have one on how to give feedback when I'm delegating all of those together is part of a program that is about making people better managers. Yeah. Then look at that as. So basically think of it like another program. That's for how to effectively close deals in the sales process. And another one that's for customer success. So what all of the collection on those programs is, is the learning system. So you're starting to develop the habits and routines of learning a new mental model, reflecting on how it can be applied to your situation and discussing it with others and taking action. And that's the system that's bottoms up learning where people are innovating, their problem solving, decentralized. Right. They're coming up with new ideas for each other and for the business. And that's what that's what starts to happen when it's the habits or they're a team to do these things. Fantastic. Andrew There's one last question that I have for everybody that I bring on the podcast and. It's kind of a curve ball winner. What are you excited about? You've got this company, you're growing. You know, you clearly have a topic that you're passionate about, but you individual, it could be in the learning space. It could be some new technology, could be a shiny new object. It could be a process, an organization. What what has you jazz for the near term, you know, like six months, 12 months out. Well, I mean, this is this hasn't been jazz forever. This is kind of like my like this is what keeps me going. And that's potential in others. I, I just think, like I'm the underdog, right? Like the quiet person in your company that's doing incredible work, but not getting recognized. The, you know, the individual contributor that has a really unique insights on customer problem that no one's heard yet. You know, that sort of figured that out themselves. And the the ability for those people to come together in a safe, trusted learning environment, to share that knowledge with their colleagues, and for that knowledge to eventually spread throughout the organization become common practice. You know, so turning my common knowledge into common practice and it all stemming from the potential in each individual. That'll that'll keep me going doing this forever. Fantastic. Andrew Barry, you are the founder, the creator of a company called Curious Lion. You are building learning cultures or you're helping other companies to discover their learning culture in transforming learners all over the world. I can't thank you enough for taking time to be on the show today. That is so, so fun to talk about this stuff with you. And I love what you're doing now. Thanks again for joining me for the eLearn Podcast. Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. Just. Just push. Subscribe on your player right now. And remember, you can join the conversation live on YouTube, Facebook, and my LinkedIn feed every week. I hope to see you there. Thanks.