Craig Vezina Interview with Elliott Masie (abridged), May 16, 2020

Elliott Masie: And so there’s never been a moment in a bizarre way when learning has been more important, more central and for the first time in the history of the planet at least a part of it more digital. So the opportunity is there but we’re going to need to give ourselves a collective laxative because to pursue those opportunities we’re going to have to approach it not bound by what our traditions were. The pandemic and the coronavirus it’s novel. And what novel means is there are no metaphors, there are no models and there are no predictors. So we’re going to have to use learning as I really think the readiness to approach all the dimensions of what tomorrow brings. We need to separate radically teaching and learning and I love teaching. I’ve been a teacher my whole life. But I can teach when nobody’s learning and I’ve got to tell you a lot of people can learn when nobody’s teaching. So I think the first thing that we need to look at is move away from the theatrics and the visuals and even the metrics of teaching to really focus in on learning. All around the world people were appropriately send home from campuses and schools and they have been learning at home.

Sadly, a lot of people translated that into hours and hours of presentations and I’m not sure that’s how we learn. We learn by projects. We learn by challenges. I think it’s back into the future sort of. I think we go back into early days on our planet. How do we learn? Shoulder to shoulder. Apprenticed with master. While we look at a Zoom or a Webex or another form of technology we see hundreds of boxes and there are moments we want to bring hundreds of people. But probably some of the most important moments are when two people can have a conversation like you and I are doing. And sometimes it’s a conversation that two people are having and other people can then witness it or react to it or learn from it. So I’m actually enormously intrigued about how we use both technology and design to create different levels of immediacy, of intimacy. I’m a big believer that failure is so important. It’s so important. And how do we learn to fail our way safely to success.

I can teach you any number of skills but if I can actually have you simulate it and fail once or twice – wow, you not only get it but you get the confidence of that. I think those are some of the dimensions as we go forward. I ultimately believe we’re not there yet, Craig, but I ultimately believe that we’re going to have an interplay of what I call smart tech where AI, machine learning are coming to where we’re not wasting somebody’s time by teaching something they already know or they have no need to know. And we don’t waste our time by teaching them in a format that they’re not responsive to. And we don’t waste their time by even teaching them in a language that’s not their native language whether that be engineering or Portuguese. So I am excited when we take the innovations and add some smarter tech into it to truly get to personalized learning which, by the way, is back into the future. That’s how we learned Judo and that’s how we learned to make fires and to hunt dinosaurs and to plant fields. So I’m excited about that future.

But what’s next? How do we build technology? For instance, I can hold up my phone and it can look biometrically that I’m curious or I’m confused or I’m bored and how are we going to build in some of the elements of technology that are already there to optimize the learning and the growth experience of people. Craig may want a visual and Loretta may want a list and Sammy may want to watch somebody do that. So we’re going to need to build a design model into that. And then I think we’re going to need to build a larger sense of data where we look at data that is both data about the human being. So if I’m talking to you I understand what’s your background, what are your interests, what’s your dog’s name. I literally keep a list here of people’s animals names because I see them on Zoom and the next time I go and see how Rover is doing. I know there are people my friend Dan Pink would say there are people that are morning people and there are afternoon people. Why not divide your team into two and do an AM and PM meeting based on when they’re optimized in that sense.

But I think we need to figure out what’s needed for trust. And by the way, coming out of a situation where there’s loss, where there’s panic, where there’s eruption and disruption, trust and empathy are going to be so powerfully needed at the leadership level of organizations and governments and certainly at the level of being able to support learning for our peers or our students. The killer of innovation is perfection. When we’re innovating it’s never perfect. What I love about this moment is that we don’t require perfect, but we have to require what’s engaging. I had a Broadway star, Beth Leavel, and she won a Tony Award and she was singing on one of my live empathy seminars and her fiancé’s sound stopped. And so in the middle of the song her sound stopped. Now she could have stopped but it was live and it was going out to thousands of people. She kicked over her chair, she got up and she did the last part of the song a cappella and dancing. Do you want to know – it was better than if it had worked perfectly. I think that’s true in education. I think that’s true in any form of digital engagement.

It’s not about it being perfect. It’s about it being authentic and therefore, it’s more trustable and more believable. Our educational institutions are real estate based. I’ll say that again. Our educational institutions are real estate based. Our colleges and universities have hundreds of millions of dollars of building. Our schools have tens of thousands or a million dollars or wherever you are in the world of buildings. I’m not saying that it should all go virtual, but we can’t be thinking about it always being facility based. It’s going to be a blend. It’s going to be a hybrid. I think we’re going to have to in a tighter budget moment weave it in. Can we use the science museum as part of teaching our students about science and then for that period of time we have fewer people in school for some social distance. And I think the other dimension of that is the idea that learning can be linear for an entire population. One of the enormous aha’s, particularly for families that had two or more children was that it was the old country school that was reenacted.

So you had a first grader with an older sister who was in fifth grade and they were teaching each other. I think that was so dynamic and I really hope we don’t let that go. I think finally we’re going to have to decide that learning needs to be every day, but it doesn’t have to be all day long. I am not sure that our goal is to take young people from age five and have them learning from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon and three hours of homework. We certainly need to engage them, but I’m not sure that the quantity of instruction is correlated with the quantity of learning that develops them and has them ready for the world. When I finished high school I had no idea what I wanted to do which was delightful. I was at another very disruptive – I’m about to be 70 years old so I graduated high school in the middle of civil rights and the Vietnam War issues in the United States. But when I graduated I had this sense that the future was going to be really different than the past and that my tomorrow would be very different than what my parents experience had been.

And so I became a sort of voyager warrior coming out of high school which made me quite annoying to my parents and teachers, but I kind of feel that’s what we need now. We need people who are warriors, not in a physical battle sense but to be warriors for the unknown that we’ve seen in the healthcare areas. We need it in other areas and I think we’re going to need an awful lot of innovation. And so roles aren’t going to last the way they did. A lot of people who may have lost their job in the pandemic they’re going to go back to work but they may go back to work in a really different way. I had a wonderful conversation with deans of medical colleges asking do we really want our doctors to enter medical college at the age of 21. What about that person who’s 45 and now they’ve finished being a procurement officer suddenly for a corporation, but they really love X. Could they enter medical school at age 45? Well, if we break our molds I think we’re going to approach the future in that different format.

I believe that we’re going to be as learners more active curators to use a technical term. We’re going to be able to move the dials on how much new content do I want a day. Maybe I only want it on Thursdays or maybe I want it in the morning or the afternoon. I want it by video or the like. How do I have an opportunity to walk in someone’s shoes. I just had a wonderful live safari that comes six hours a day from Africa where safari tourism has dropped so they put the same ranger on a truck with a satellite camera. I was mesmerized by watching that. I think what’s going to happen if we look around those next ten years is that our formats are going to change. Our models are going to change. I think we’re going to have to deal with distribution of resources and assets and maybe even wealth in our world because we can’t live in a sense of trust and peace if too many people are on the edge of despair, hunger or disease because they don’t have enough.

But I also think we have to go away from that community means that we click on like on a Facebook or Instagram account to where the community really means that I understand around me who has what resources and capabilities and how do we fit into that. We’ll go way back to schools. It’s so rare that schools bring people with subject matter expertise in that aren’t just a parent of a kid or the like. They should be connecting every day with experts and resources and tutors. Our seniors should be involved maybe by video to coach the student who maybe doesn’t have an at home parent who can help them with that. I think our view of community is going to have to really stretch and be enabled in some ways that allow our survival and our thriving in a changing environment. We’re going to have to figure out how to deal with ambiguity and unknown and uncertainty without panic or divisiveness. What’s really interesting one of my good friends is a Broadway producer and I got to know George Takei. You probably know him from Star Trek days. I asked him what was it like on the Enterprise at a moment of panic and he said well, we’d be heading towards a planet that we didn’t know where it was or what it would be and there was an unknown. But we were unknown together. We knew there were assets and resources so I think one of the greatest challenges that we’re going to have is if we allow our unknowns to divide us.

To divide us globally. I have been enormously intrigued by seeing what Rwanda is doing and Denmark is doing and what Columbia in South America is doing and if we give up that view that there’s knowledge around that wider community and we can learn and collaborate we’re in some deep, deep crap. The other piece that I think is going to be difficult is that we’re never going to be certain of when the next unknown happens. Now I know friends who live in areas where there are tornadoes. I’ve only been near a tornado once and they’re going into tornado season. So my friends in Florida it’s hurricane season coming. It’s hard to imagine that we may literally be awaiting the next pandemic and if that’s the reality and it either paralyzes us we don’t do anything. Or it divides us into well I’ll be okay because I have those resources or it becomes political in the sense of well I’ll manipulate that. Wow, individual areas, societies, countries or the world will be in enormous difficulty.

And my other greatest concern is that we’re going to need to figure out how to process loss. There has been a huge loss just right now and I think we’ll continue to see it and how we process that. I’m up to about 12 people I know who passed away from the virus and I have a friend who’s a doctor and she has about 15 doctors and nurses that have died. How do we process that? How does it not crack us? And it may not be counseling as such but it’s going to need a level of emotional support that will be pretty darn critical. I think the world is rebooting. I don’t know if we deserve to be rebooted, but we’re rebooting and I’m an old techie. When everything else fails I reboot my computer. Sometimes it fixes, sometimes I realize I need to replace a board or I need to go get even a new device in that sense. I think we’re going to go through a reboot and the reboot is for me something that gives us in mid-term. In short term it may be very difficult and painful, but in the mid-term it gives us an opportunity to radically adjust what our world is. Radically adjust what our habits are. Radically adjust what our sense of community is.

And I’m looking towards innovations. I think there are things that have been around we’ve never used. We’ve had video conferences but it used to be all herky jerky and now it’s almost second nature. And then I think I’m enormously interested in what smart design with smart data and with trust, empathy and compassion can do. Whether it is to solve a medical challenge, to solve an educational challenge, to look at how we are going to approach a societal challenge. I think we’re going to see enormous innovation. My hope is it won’t be driven purely by profit. I’ve had the honor of getting to know some of the largest inventors in the world. Been with Steve Wozniak from Apple and with Bill Gates and my friend who invented laparoscopic surgery. Many of them got really, really rich. None of them were start it and motivated by being rich. They started by wanting to solve a problem and I want to hope that we can have our innovation process up ahead be driven by a desire to solve, a desire to make better. And all sorts of tangible and intangible rewards flow from that. But that’s my hope and I am optimistic that we will see much of that.

To me it’s a quadratic equation. It’s not a one line algebraic one. They need the theory. They need the practice. They need the failure. They need role models. They need feedback. And our parents start that process and our teachers continue it and our managers and our colleagues continue that throughout our life. It’s very difficult in the middle of a powerful experience to be able to sum it up and evaluate it. You could look at what was it like to go and graduate high school after 12 years of study or what was it like for somebody to conceive and give birth or what it was like to build a robot or plant a crop and harvest it. We have lots of impressions but really it sometimes takes time to go back and to reflect and understand our learning from that. So be agile right now. Be enormously agile but resist thinking that we’re going to be able to summarize it and understand it fully in real time. Trust that that aha knowledge comes over time and I think that’s probably one of my biggest pieces of advice to folks is experience it with agility, be open to data, learn as you go but don’t write the report card for a while.