Introduction to Employing Differences

[00:00:03] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

[00:00:09] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:10] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:11] Paul: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, are we motivated to learn? 

When is the Right Time to Learn?

[00:00:19] Karen: So one of the things as a consultant that I get asked is, when is the right time? So I have a bunch of things that I think any community or any organization trying to work together would really benefit from learning about how to work through conflict, how to communicate, how to facilitate meetings.

[00:00:36] Karen: There's a menu of them. And I will often meet with a group that is convinced that that would be a good idea. But the question is, do we do it now? Maybe we're still adding members to our group. Do we wait till everybody's here? When is the right time? And my answer is when you're ready to do the work, like when you're willing to do the work. 

Conditions for Effective Learning

[00:00:58] Karen: And Paul and I were talking about what are the conditions that come into play that make us ready to actually engage?

[00:01:08] Karen: Because learning being a not passive activity as a general rule. The person doing the learning. Also that's not necessarily the organizer who's talking to me. But the people who are gonna do the learning need to be in a place where they will engage, where they will participate, where they will think about it and do the work that we're talking about.

[00:01:29] Karen: So we wanted to talk today about what does it take to get us motivated enough that learning is a likely outcome?

[00:01:36] Paul: Yeah, not just spending the time together and maybe seeing whatever slides or charts or handouts, you know, that happen. And then going back to our, our old ways of being. Right. 

The Importance of Motivation

[00:01:46] Paul: That's the, one of the things that I often talk about is that we only really know that learning has happened when behavior change occurs.

[00:01:54] Paul: So it's not just that we understand something or that we were exposed to something, that we actually do things differently. And doing things differently is hard, right? We have to get that information, you know, we have to get those ideas into us, but then we also have to practice them. We actually have to put them into action.

[00:02:09] Paul: We have to figure out how do I do that in my context, sort of thing. And so sometimes, it's useful for there to be problems, I guess is one of the wings that I would say it. Because you know much as you and I, Karen, love this kind of thing, right? When we're talking about interpersonal stuff, we're talking about the space between collaboration skills, working with conflict, you know, all of this stuff.

[00:02:30] Paul: You and I kind of know that as human beings, we have ample opportunities to apply that sort of skill and that kind of learning, but that's also kind of how you and I are oriented. Like that, we're just kind of always doing that. And it's important to recognize that not everybody is looking for an opportunity to build these skills and apply them next week in their conversations with their boss, their neighbor, their whomever.

[00:02:55] Paul: They're just kind of going, eh, this is what it is, right? I can work with it as it is. And so, in some ways it's really useful. I think one of the things that motivates us to actually learn. And to go through that learning process is when there's something that we are usefully discontent about, right?

[00:03:11] Paul: That there's something that we're not happy with where we go and we can see that actually learning something, that doing something different could get us something better, right? Where we actually see how our lives, our situations, our experiences could be meaningfully better by actually doing some skill building and some learning.

[00:03:32] Karen: I think it's only fair to say, Paul, that you know, we say you and I are interested in this and ready for it. And that's probably at least partly because we get to apply it to other people's problems.

[00:03:44] Paul: True enough. 

[00:03:47] Karen: So much less painful that way.

[00:03:50] Paul: Yes. Agreed. My mom used to have a needle point in her office that said, learn from the mistakes of others. You don't have time to make them all yourself. That kind of thing. 

Relevance and Application in Learning

[00:04:02] Karen: But in the real world, we don't do things unless we have a place to apply them. And most of the kinds of things that we talk about here are things that we're not applying most of us to other people's problems. You and I do, but mostly this is stuff that we're applying within the groups that we're members of or that we're facilitators for, or that we're leaders of or whatever.

[00:04:24] Karen: And because we're within the system and the system isn't about this kind of work, the system is about something else. It's about getting some work done. It's about an organizational objective. It's about something else. If you're part of a group that part of the mission is to get better at relationship skills, that's fabulous.

[00:04:42] Karen: You're probably already ready for the work. But short of that, in real life, most of the time we're about something else. And so, in order to be motivated enough, in order to be ready to activate it enough to apply it enough to actually take it in and learn it. In order for that to be true, there almost always has to be a problem that will be solved by this.

[00:05:05] Paul: And I think that because any, you know, it's not that people aren't motivated to learn, right? It's that oftentimes that motivation is just towards a different type of problem. So I work, for example, in a lot of software teams. And in organizations like that they're interested in learning, but most of the time what they're oriented towards, like what their system is about, is building technology.

[00:05:27] Paul: And most of their learning energies are devoted towards things in that technical domain. Like how do we get better at these particular types of things? Because most of the time that is the big problem that's in front of them, that they really need to be focused on, and it then needs to be the case that enough people kind of understand.

[00:05:46] Paul: Oh, actually the friction in our teams right now is a bigger problem than our lack of technical knowledge about how to build these systems. You know, that they have to have that moment where it makes sense for them to shift their focus from one type of learning. To this other type of learning, the type of learning that we're talking about around social skills and collaboration and things like that.

[00:06:10] Paul: And so it's legit, like I could totally understand that, as you said, most of the time we're in a group, we're in a system that isn't about that interpersonal skill building. It's about something else. And so our attention is correctly focused elsewhere, and that's why, you know, having kind of a big enough problem. Hopefully not too big, but that motivates us to do something, is important. 

Challenges in Learning Interpersonal Skills

[00:06:36] Karen: Yeah, I think there's a moment where the attitude of a group may shift from, yeah, we don't have time for all that touchy feely stuff. We just have to get things done to, can't we all just get along so that we can get things done? And it's somewhere in that shift. Maybe not if you're all the way to the far end of it, but somewhere in that shift that there's enough tension, enough disruption, enough potential for improvement.

[00:07:05] Karen: That's visible to everybody that we say, you know, we wanna get together and build this. And then I think we have enough motivation that it's rational to set aside time and energy to build that thing.

[00:07:19] Paul: And I'd say beyond just the time and energy and sort of the motivation behind it, the other thing that does is it gives us something to work with because one of the things we know about the way that humans learn and process information is that we have this relevancy filter that's kind of always going on.

[00:07:34] Paul: You know, this is the extreme example of this, right? Is the kid who raises the hand in class saying, will this be on the test? But I mean, we're kind of always doing that where the test is like, am I gonna need to or be able to apply this next week when we're working together, you know, kind of thing.

[00:07:49] Paul: And if the answer is no, like if we don't see how it's going to be useful to us, then even if we're exposed to it, we're not likely to retain it. And so it can just kind of fall out of our brains. Right. So it's not just a question of motivation. But also of like where we really see the relevance such that we can retain it, but also so that we have things we can apply it to and practice on.

[00:08:13] Paul: Right. If somehow you work in an organization or live in a community where there is no conflict at all, in this utopian space. Then, you know, developing skills on how to get better at conflict will be really hard for you because you won't have any chance to practice, right?

[00:08:30] Paul: There won't be any things to work with. As a trainer, I often like to come in and I'll do some work, you know, with the sponsor ahead of time to find out like what are relevant topics for us to dig into around whatever it is. For example, I was doing a training class at one point with my business partner Allison, about how can managers effectively roll out changes and support changes that they themselves did not come up with, right?

[00:08:58] Paul: That they didn't make the decision around, which is something we've talked about on the show before. And I said, do you have any, and that's in the material right, for this class? And we said, have you had any situations like that? And they're like, we have a return to office mandate. And so it was like, okay, great, we've got something relevant to work with.

[00:09:14] Paul: And it was interesting because, I mean, it was far enough in the past that they weren't working it live, right? There wasn't a like, I'm gonna apply this right now, but it was also emotionally charged enough and sort of unprocessed enough that we could use it. Like it was a live example to go, ah, okay, this is what happened, that maps onto these concepts that we've been talking about in this way.

[00:09:38] Paul: So if we had it to do over again, things that we might have done are things like that. And so it was live and relevant for these folks and so they could see it and they learned the concepts that we were teaching much, much better because we were doing it in the frame of something that was real in their lived experience.

[00:09:57] Paul: And in their shared experience, because they all had that as a group together. 

[00:10:01] Karen: Yeah, I think the application part is absolutely essential. 

Balancing Crisis and Learning

[00:10:18] Karen: There has to be a way to practice the thing that you're learning, and I think the other thing you're pointing to is often the learning space is best served when while there is a problem, it's not a giant problem There may be a flame, but the whole house isn't on fire yet.

[00:10:21] Karen: And that is the ideal learning space because once the house is on fire, your brain is not set up to learn, and it is a capacity issue. In the same way that you were talking about relevancy as a filter, and we say, okay, we're only gonna devote our capacity to it if it's relevant to our lives, if we have a use for it.

[00:10:39] Karen: Our brain also says if there's a crisis. All of my energy is going to the crisis and surviving the crisis, and none of it is going to be available for learning new skills. And so, if we can find that moment where we're motivated enough, we have enough of a problem, we have enough of a challenge that we're ready to learn, but it's not so much that it's overwhelming.

[00:11:02] Karen: That's great. And having said that, I just wanna name that, that's not when clients call me. Clients call me when the house is on fire. Then they ask, well, we need the skills and we need this fire put out, and which do we do first? And can we do only one of them? And we're gonna talk about that next week.

[00:11:21] Paul: Yes, that is in fact, my experience as well is that oftentimes when people call, it's later than we recommend, right? The house is on fire. It's not that we have the problem, the problem now has us, and so we are gonna talk about that next week.

Recap and Conclusion

[00:11:35] Paul: But really to recap where we've been here today, we're talking about the question of, are we motivated to learn?

[00:11:41] Paul: And in particular when we're talking about learning, we're talking about learning interpersonal skills, collaboration skills, and the sorts of things that we talk about here on the show. And motivation is important, right? Because normally most of the groups that we're part of aren't built around these types of skills.

[00:11:59] Paul: They are necessary for the work that we need to do together, but they're not the purpose of the organizations or the communities or the companies that we're in that system isn't about that type of interpersonal work. It's about some other type of work. And most of the time our learning energy is devoted towards that.

[00:12:17] Paul: And so in order for us to be motivated enough to shift our focus and our attention and our learning abilities to something that is more about how do we work better together, how do we coexist more peacefully, right? There needs to be some amount of discontent with what's going on.

[00:12:33] Paul: There needs to be a problem, that it needs to be obvious enough to us that we actually need to address that in order to be able to continue to function in the way that we need in order to carry out whatever our mission is, to do the things that we're trying to do together. So it needs to be a big enough problem that we're willing to dig in, but ideally not so huge of a problem.

[00:12:54] Paul: That it puts us into that sort of crisis survival mode. Because our capacity to learn is really constrained by, you know, one our reactivity to this big, big problem that we have. If there's too much, too big of a problem, if we're in too much of a crisis, we're not gonna be able to retain or learn anything.

[00:13:12] Paul: But also it has to be big enough that there's relevancy to the things that we're learning And that we have spaces to practice. As it turns out, our experience of most groups is that they actually have all of those things, right? They've got room to practice, they've got relevancy. That's generally not the problem, but oftentimes we really just need to be thinking about like, is it worth shifting our focus? And how do we do that before it's too late, before the house is on fire? Is really the key thing there.

[00:13:40] Karen: And that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:13:44] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis, and this has been Employing Differences.