 going to talk about learning. A particular kind of learning that I think, based on a lot of the messages you heard this morning, is really coming and it's really here that's something we can take advantage of right now. Now, I've been very, very lucky in my career and my work life that I've been able to be a part of a variety of really high learning environments. Some of them explicit where learning was the intent of the work and some of them more implicit like adaptive path which pioneered a lot of the user experience thinking and experimented a lot, made a lot of crazy mistakes, had a lot of really beautiful experiments and really was able to be an environment of high learning. Now I spend my time in a very structured learning environment as a college professor for California College of the Arts which is in San Francisco and has an undergraduate and graduate program specifically around interaction design which kind of didn't exist in that incarnation when I was coming through my education. So it's an interesting way to participate. I also host a little bit of a podcast with a partner in crime, Laura Klein. If swearing or drinking is a problem for you, I don't recommend it, but if you can get beyond that then we talked about our past experiences. You're welcome to give it a listen. It's what is wrong with UX. So I am curious because every environment I go into I try and find how can our group together become a learning environment, even if it's just temporary. And so I'm gonna ask you a couple questions and see if we can create a small temporary learning environment just among us within this room. So first of all, I'd like to ask if you believe that any of these things on this list will impact your company some time within the next five years. Go ahead and raise your hand and I'll, like, we gotta force the hands. That's some good hands. Use those of you in the front if you want to crane around and look, you can see. All right, and now I'd like you to raise your hand. If you're actively designing with or using any of these tools, technology is like today. Same list. So some like, no, but kinda like I read an article or those people over in data science are talking about stuff, right? There's a lot of that feeling that we're not quite there yet, but we know it's coming. We know it's important. So thank you for that. The third question is, do you believe the job you're doing now will be the same in five years? Where are those hands? Oh yeah, yeah. Like the lawyers, security lawyers. Like I'm fine, right? But no other hands went up. And the last question I have is, do you plan to go back to school for anything specifically related to your course of work? To be able to train up or re-educate explicitly in a program dedicated to that. Go ahead and raise your hand. You've got a good smattering, but not nearly as many who said that those things were going to be important to our companies. So those four questions and your responses to them kind of set the tone for a different way of learning within the context of work that I've been thinking of and exploring pretty explicitly within the last few years. Now, now comes the section of the talk where it's either platitudes or basic statements of truth. And I really want to give a shout out to Becky for setting a good tone for the types of things that I'm going to talk about. And then she took her talk in a way about collaboration. I'm going to take the talk in a way about learning. So UX work, when we emerged as a field, we hitched our wagon to a star of digital invention and we're never going to get away from that. Which means we're tied by nature to new and emerging technologies. That is who we are. And that rapid pace of tech, it's not going to slow down. Every, you know, there's quotes from like the 1800s that say, time is moving so fast, technology is moving so fast. So this is not a new human emotion. But what it is, is a parent that at least the pace we're living with now is not going to quote calm down. It's here with us. Now I can look back over a longer period of time in my career and say there are hot spots where there's a lot of new invention. Things coming online that need to be adapted into good design and products for people. But it never gets cool. It's either hot or warm. You never get cool or cold. So the tempo of change is really here with us. And so that means that as practitioners, we need to stay current, but it's hard. It's hard to do that when we're doing, doing, doing all the time. There's a natural gap there. And there's a report put out by Deloitte, coming of age digitally, where they interviewed 4,300 executives, company leaders, et cetera globally, about how are your organizations adapting to kind of this digital pace of invention? And this is a question they asked, how often do you need to update your skills to work effectively in a digital environment? And the answers were telling, right? So 75, 73% said at least every six months. Six months. That's barely a performance review in most companies, right? And the 44% that said continuously had stopped thinking in that way, I think, about when you get trained and when you use your training into just this more mash-up of constant and evocative learning, evolving learning all the time. Then there was this terrific quote, couple quotes to pull out, that gave a little bit more context to how we feel in our organizations today. And that is individuals report needing to continually develop their skills, but they don't really say they get little or no support from the organizations. And then there was this other telling quote, it's like, many people say they are happy and willing to do it themselves. They just don't want anything standing in their way. Again, another little data plane to signal that something new is happening and how we're going to accommodate the rapid pace of change. So two situations arise from this kind of environment, right? The first is that seasoned folks who are doing and performing are at risk of getting stale. Meaning they're no longer able to keep up with kind of some of the newer things because they're already effective using tools that they have in their arsenal. And for this one, I'm gonna quote a personal member of my network who is a design leader at a very large Bay Area company. She said I could use the quote if I didn't use her name or her company. But this is something she said and I've heard it from other practitioners who are fairly seasoned in their career. She's like, I don't even really know how to use sketch. Now maybe she's not using that as part of her daily productivity. I'm sure she would know more if she did. But losing touch of the tools when you're responsible for the care and support of a team that uses them becomes very disconcerting very quickly. And she was thinking, I should just take a year off and just retool, just retool up as a sabbatical. Instead of her sabbatical time advancing her thinking, she was thinking, I just gotta catch up. Man, that can't really be good. So you think, well, but there's always newer people. They're getting the current skills and tools. They'll just come in and kind of replace the deadwood over time. It just kind of all goes, it's a flow. Turns out there's barriers to that too. So new folks often have trouble getting hired, especially when they're very early in their career. There's a perception that they might have the skills, but they don't necessarily have the demonstrated practice, the organizational behaviors, or that kind of sense of maturity that's required for really high capacity participation in a company. And so this, and this will differ globally. I tried to do a little research in different countries to find out if this is a global pattern, but it is a very strong pattern in the hiring areas, in the Bay Area in the States, is that there's this five year barrier that people can't get hired until they have five years experience. So it comes out in a few ways. Some were hostile than others, and this broadens it out to software development, but Jath Atwood, posted on Stack Overflow, kind of this angry squeed, this is only part of it, the calm part, against the myth of five years experience. And he says, what software developers do best is learn. So what companies should be looking for is these passionate, driven, flexible self-learners, which is exactly what the Deloitte Report kind of reported on, is we do need self-learners. On the UX side, there's a report, State of UX Design in 2019 by UX Collective, and this is granted, I've seen some similar numbers, this is not actual numbers, this is a joke, they just added a zero, but the feeling of hiring is very clear with this, right, it's like why there's like nothing, except for those infamous or mythic unicorn, five plus, 10 plus years people who can do everything at the senior level, and that's not helping our companies either. So add to that the fact that we have jobs that won't even exist yet, so you can hire for current skills, but we don't know where they're gonna go. And that really taps into some of the things that Stephen was talking about in his keynote, about these nine skills, I don't have any of those skills on my resume, I don't even know about like five of them, right? So what are we gonna do when the jobs change? When I address groups of graduate students, and they're very freaked out about getting work, and with kind of a grim picture I can see that, but the overall perspective is good, it's a growing field. I do predict and say you will have jobs that don't exist yet, and although that might sound flip, I have mostly had jobs that didn't exist when I graduated. There weren't those kinds of things, so I know this to be a truth that I've lived, many people in the practice have lived, and I predict that it will continue. So here's a strange data point, I love doing stuff on Google because God knows what's coming up. I'm not, is anyone here from Australia? Oh, rats. I was hoping that we could talk to someone in the 30%. So IKEA commissioned their own research, and it revealed that 70% of Australians don't know really what the future of work looks like. And I'm thinking, who are the other 30%, we should talk to them, because clearly they think they know, like why are we not taking advantage of that? And again, that same trend that people don't feel like the companies are supporting their own evolution and their skill set, and that they're hiring for jobs that didn't exist previously. So now this is becoming more and more of a theme that we're hearing. So that means that ultimately as a field, we as practitioners kind of have a problem. We have a problem with the skills gap, we have a glut of young learners, we have a dearth of kind of seasoned people who are kind of maybe stymied in their current organizational participation because their skills are becoming lag. But as a designer, putting on a happy hat, that also means that we have that opportunity. So I got to thinking, doing some of the research about what would it look like to have a way to learn that really works for work? Like an intentional way, not an ad hoc way. And that posed the question of, well, how do we learn? Like, how are we learning now? What are the current conditions? In those current conditions, there's two big ones. We have something that's a structured, intentional environment with a formal learning curriculum with a direct intent to teach or create learners or people who have a certain level of skill or knowledge. And let's just call that school, okay? And then we have another environment which is very hands on, it's very output oriented, it's very day to day, it's related to our earning capacity and our livelihood and let's just call that work, right? So both environments have attributes of something we're gonna need to have a continuous learning culture. But we can't look at each one of them in their pure state. We need to kind of mix up a hybrid. So things like in school, you might get the latest tools but you have a delayed ability to apply them because you're not yet working. Whereas at work, you might get ad hoc training for workshops or help from other colleagues as Becky so beautifully described. But you don't necessarily have some of the formative or theoretical foundations for why those things matter. So if what we would have was somehow an interesting blend between what would that tasty, yummy combination of flavors look like that would just say it's the best of both worlds? And I don't think any of us have the answer but I do have an observation and a story I'd like to share about an experience that I had which is most directly applicable to this problem. And that is I was a co-creator of the UX curriculum at a startup called Tradecraft in San Francisco. And Tradecraft was a small learning program for people already in their career so not directly out of undergraduate and there's some associations of a degree you didn't need a degree to come, it was unaccredited but it wasn't a classroom based program. It was designed explicitly to help people that wanted to take their current skills and move into UX roles, adopt the behaviors, the beliefs, the mindsets that would help them be successful in fast growing and evolving companies of which we have a lot of in the Bay Area. So you have founders sometimes who start a company, it grows to a certain point and then they need to hire and hire and they don't want entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs are pain in the butt to deal with. They've already got an entrepreneur, they've got a founder. They need entrepreneurial people who are comfortable without systems, who can help evolve systems as they grow and who can take a lot of self-directed choices and value judgments to push a product from a beginning stage to a later stage and scale. That's a hard thing to do. And so the program was started and they were small cohorts, about 12 people each and it was really set up as a company. We had some client companies, we worked with startups. The learning took place in very small, almost workshop-based formats of which Laura Klein, my colleague and I co-created and co-designed and delivered. But the big thing about tradecraft that was magic was it was intentionally designed as a learning environment, not as a school where there was teaching but as a place that fomented and fostered learning behaviors. And the cohorts over time, instead of having like in a school you have a semester and then everybody comes, they all learn and then they all leave, you have another semester, what we had was overlapping cohorts by design. So before one cohort would leave, it was 12 weeks, at four weeks in another cohort would start and there'd be the cohort in the middle. The next four weeks another cohort would start. So over time what you got was people learning from people who were only four weeks ahead of them but the culture was enduring. So nine cohorts later, 12 cohorts later, ideas that were invented by the first cohort were stronger, adapted, changeable. It was extraordinary. So a highly iterative environment. A lot of things that you'd see in a traditional design company like sticky notes on walls, a lot of collaborative work, et cetera, was part of the design of that program. And the results were extraordinary too. So the cost was 12,000 bucks US and 12 weeks and the agreement was after three months you needed to have a job in the field that you would stay in for six months to a year or you got your money back. So that was kind of what your money for your mouth is. Three years after those cohorts left and I spent 18 months there so I created the program, saw it through and then moved on to other challenges but these were the numbers and kind of the roles that people had from a very intensive learning environment. Now remember many of them were working adjacent but none of them had UX experience. They never designed a product in that way. And these are the types of roles that they either got after exiting the program or were in throughout a short period of time before that five year threshold within three years of exiting that program. And it was pretty impressive. Now granted we were set up in the Bay Area. There's a lot of companies there that hire for this. There are companies that are evolved as far as how to hire well for UX but I still think the results really spoke for themselves. And so then I had to thinking, well what would we do if we wanted to replicate this? What does it really mean to install or create or foster a sense of continued learning? And here are a few attributes that I think all of the, if you Google continuous learning environment, culture, et cetera, you're gonna find a lot of stuff. So there's a lot of richness there I hope you could explore. But my goal is to make it as simple as possible so it's almost easier for you to do these things than not to do them. That is my secret wish. So what are the attributes of continuous learning? Well, it's individually directed and self-motivated. This is not a training program where you are assigned to show up at a certain time because your boss said so. This is something that needs to come from the individual. It is peer to peer, collective and social. So people learn behaviors, content, theories, methods, all of that practical stuff from each other. Again, very similar to what Becky was talking about in the balance team concept. It's learning partnerships. So moving away from any terminology of teacher and student or even mentor and mentee into learning partners. So for people in authority, that can be hard. For people with expertise, they believe that they're experts, that that is an identity. And getting loose of that identity to become someone who owns your expertise but is not identified by being an expert is a heart-emotional choice. These learning partnerships are key to that continuous environment. And lastly, it's baked into the word continuous. This is not a one and done. You don't learn that thing and move on. You keep evolving and developing more sophisticated knowledge structures about that idea or topic. And so these are very different from a traditional training program. And they're more worldly, real-world applicable than a big batch institutional kind of structured educational environment as well. But if we take advantage of these, I think that we can start to have those behaviors in our own company. So I'm gonna point out two things in the rest of our time together. The first is a map to guide us. And then the second are some simple and practical tools that you can use. Starting tomorrow or perhaps even today to be able to put this into work in your own company. So I'm gonna start with the framework. Part of the design effort at Tradecraft was about learning theory. Now if you start looking around for learning theories, two are gonna pop up all the time. There's a ton out there. Two are gonna pop up all the time. And the first is Noel Birch's Four Stages of Competence. And in a nutshell, it's almost like a Maslow-ish thing that starts with the bottom, I don't know what I don't know. And then the middle is like, I know what I don't know. And then the third one is I know what I know. And then the last at the hierarchy top is I don't know what I know. Meaning you have so much expertise and master you've forgotten the beginning. Now that's all very well and good, but I'm skeptical about pyramids that go up to one pointed top when we're talking about a continuous learning system. So here's the second theory that also comes up a lot. Oh my God, it's like the Dryfus model, a skills acquisition. And here we have this little running figure, whoo, I'm going all the way to be master, right? And you go through these various different kind of understanding stages and you change your role. You go from learning to doing to teaching. And it's so clean and so tidy and it's so broken for the kind of environments that we need because again, like where do you go from the top? Once you're an expert. So these are helpful for training programs, but I don't think they're helpful for the kind of work that we're doing and the kind of learning we need to be doing. So what could be helpful? Again, I'm sure there's many things out there, but this is a book and a theory that I think is really meaningful because it has direct immediate practical applications. Let's get back to that. So How Learning Works is a book based on a collection of research driven methods and tools from the university setting. So already by taking this into more of a company setting, it's a little skeptical about whether or not it would be the same kind of outputs. What I'm not skeptical about is does it work? Because we used it as a direct design tool for tradecraft and it did work. So one of the areas, one of the research pieces that came out of that was this desire of a four stage learning model by researchers who put together a variety of different models and research and validated how people could come to a learning behavior. And that was Perry, Belinky, Max, or Magolda. And then I visualized it because that's the way I understand and remember information and that's what I'm gonna communicate to you. So if you have this theoretical framework, imagine that there's these four different stages. They're not steps. They are stages and they're somewhat sequential but you kind of can be in multiple stages at the same time. Now they range from simplistic knowledge to sophisticated knowledge. So simplistic knowledge might be, you have some basic understanding but you don't really see the whole picture. And sophisticated means that you can have much more nuanced and involved conversations and demonstrate a different level of expertise. What makes this model different from something like the sequential Dreyfus model is instead of having, instead of having, well, let me introduce the phases first, sorry. So the four different phases, which are bizarrely named, another weird part of the model, is duality, multiplicity, relativism, and then commitment. Now, the official name for this model, I had to write this down, is the Epistemological Development Model for Intellectual Development and Adults. Would anyone like to repeat that back to me because I don't think I can say it again? So I needed a shortcut because I just don't have that kind of time. So what I created was a moniker for it. It is ugly, but surprisingly memorable. So I call this Dumu Relcom. It always prompts for those words because they're a little abstract. And when I refer to the Dumu Relcom, it means this kind of stage of learning. All right, so, what's different about this model than the sequential ones is it has three attributes that we haven't seen in a lot of other learning models. The first is what beliefs does the learner have? The second is what behaviors do they exhibit? And the third is what is the learning partner's role in helping that learner thrive? And by filling these in for each stage, you can see how it could be applicable to a corporate environment or a workplace environment. So let's go through them one by one. So in duality, in duality the belief is that knowledge is about amassing a pile of facts, right? Like the more facts I know, the more knowledgeable I will be. And that there is an idea that something is right and something is wrong. And I get this mostly when I talk to practitioners who are learning design research practice. Maybe usability testing is a good example. Has anyone here said or been asked what's the right number of users for a usability testing session, right? Now, has anyone ever said or heard someone who clearly was just trying to be annoying saying it depends, right? We are the most annoying field in the world because people are like, where's the milk? Well, it depends. Depends on what kind of milk you want. Like, yeah, I'm a user researcher, right? Like, what's the context of the milk? What are you gonna use it for? It's like, where's the milk? Just give me the milk. So we're very annoying. But anyway, part of it is because so little of our job deals with right and wrong facts, right? We gotta move beyond that. So the behaviors that you see in a learner who's at this stage of knowledge is they avoid all ambiguity. They just want an answer and that's fair. We want an answer, but it's not going to be the kind of sophisticated knowledge learning that you're going to need to get. So they also focus on the right answer, what is correct. You get this in things like math where there often is a correct answer. A school-based teaching, especially a program like what we have in the United States, is very test-driven. There's right and wrong answers as an assumption and different cultures vary, but some cultures are much more organized around being right and correct, even if they need to make up a social construct for that rather than having this kind of ambiguous learning. So the partner's role in this stage is to teach, to answer the questions, to deliver the knowledge, to deliver the facts. This is a classroom-based, sage on stage kind of model. And it works because the knowledge is very, very simplistic. That's the duality phase. The next phase, multiplicity, things get a little bit more interesting. In multiplicity, the belief is that knowledge is based on personal opinions and perspectives, that opinions matter, that life experience matters, and that everyone has something to offer. And there's a lot of truth in that. The beliefs are, or the behaviors are, this opinionated debate. Like, well, I think this, I think this. You're wrong, I think that. It can get quite antagonistic. And your search is not for the right answer, but for the best answer. I'm gonna find the best possible thing. The person with the most authority, the person with the most demonstrated expertise, I'm gonna listen to that person. And again, there's a lot of truth in that learning. May you have some acceptance of complexity? But it's still, you're still fighting for that idea of almost perfection or rightness. And the partner's role here is to elicit, to really draw out those opinions and perspectives. Because until people voice them, sometimes they don't know that there's a different alternative way of looking at things. So really eliciting, listening, facilitating the conversation in a healthy way. Under relativism, it starts to get exciting. Because relativism is kind of the first stage of true expertise or mastery demonstration. And in this, the beliefs are that knowledge can and should be validated with evidence. You might go out and see what happens. Give it a try. Look for evidence that you can create. So this is much more of a hypothesis test type of mindset. And the behaviors are you'd have that quest for evidence. So this is the first stage where you're making something, whereas a learner, you're trying to create something and then validate it or see how it performs in the real world. And so you're looking at real world experience. What happened when you did that? What did you think would happen and what was different? So it's much more of a reflective type of learning. And in this, the learner's partner's role is to guide. It's to point out interesting evidence, to point out potential methods for experimentation. The last phase is commitment. And this is where the knowledge structures are the most sophisticated. Under commitment, you realize that knowledge is contextual and ethical. That there's actual consequences to the types of evidence you collect and how you surface that. The behaviors are the ability to reference evidence, pretty fluidly, and to evaluate it in a nuanced way, to accept complexity, and then to apply and create new models of thinking. This is a very inventive stage. This is a stage where a lot of designers live. The partner's role in this is to collaborate, to be an equal peer in that process, to not teach there's not a much of authority relationship. This is about collective togetherness. And it's called commitment because at this point, you are spending time and effort in such a dedicated way that it's probably not just a side gig for you. This is probably where your heart and passion really lies. So with this model, which is, oh, I love this, it's so funny. The feedback loop is always like, finish the model, we'll take our picture. Also, all the slides will be online as well. So now that we have this fully fleshed out model, you can think about it as all of these stages are natural. We go through them, but they're kind of about on ramping, just getting enough information that you can kind of orient yourself. And really, this is about contributing. So this is where the money hits the, or the rubber hits the road. And that's an exciting stage. So what we asked at Tradecraft, after kind of identifying this model by being interesting to experiment with, was if we were open about this process with all of our learners, how quickly could we get here in a realistic way? If it's somewhat of a building stages, how could we get there faster? And what we defined with the cohorts were four different learning activities that we would use as part of our everyday behavior design to try and escalate and amplify this learning. And so these are the parts that cross the threshold. The first is encourage listening and exploring perspectives. So if someone's asking for a right question, prompt them, like, what do you think? What do you think is going on? Tell me what you've seen or understood. Who are you listening to? Who have you researched? So using inquiry as a tool to kind of get people from right and wrong into this, hmm, maybe there's a different way. If you're in multiplicity, the prompt is ask why and make things. So if people are in a debate, it's how could we test this? What could you make that could help you have more information or more evidence about what you think? And that pushes them into this higher order of learning and relativism. The third threshold behavior is turning evidence into experience. So what happens when you go out, you make a proposal, and this can be as simple as a wireframe, right? And getting feedback from someone, then what do you do with it? How do you internalize that? And how do you work with that mastery that you're starting to develop? And the last one is, how do you reflect, evaluate, and share it? So learning on your own behalf is wonderful, but when we're talking about a continuous learning environment, we're talking about sharing that wealth, right? Letting other people learn something from you so that they don't have to go through the direct process in the same way. They'll go through it in their own way. So that's this do-me-well-come framework. And with that as kind of a checkpoint of what behaviors can we as individual learners adopt, I think that's a major way to start to create a culture of continuous learning in your environments. You don't need a big initiative, you don't need a lot of money, you just need a commitment to the behaviors to escalate yourself into a faster learning pace. So how do you do that? Well, let's talk about a few very simple practices that you can start doing right away. And because designers love simple steps, I've broken this down to three steps to action because it'll make it seem so crazy and simple, right? So the first is, and there's alliteration, because I love you. All right, so the first is set an intention, like what am I gonna do, make that clear. The second is start simple. It's always gonna get more complicated, complexity just comes to us, right? But start simple. And the third is share your progress. For each one of these, there's a couple methods that I'd like to share with you that I've seen work and that I propose, I use myself and I think that you will also find success with. So for the first set an intention is the learn list, which is a fancy name for a sticky note with a couple things on it that you would like to explore and learn. I would maybe advise one of those nine skills that Stephen talked about in his keynote, pick one, or pick another area of technological invention that you think is important to you and your company that you can pursue for a period of time. To do that, you want two to four, you can pick your number, more than five starts feeling scary, like that's procrastination in a box right there, but two to four concrete specific things that you would like to learn and that will benefit both you and your organization. Making sure they benefit your organization can start to give you the permission to use some of your work time and cycles to do that learning process. You wanna generate it alone, but you also wanna be very accountable, so you wanna share it. Hey, folks, I'm learning about machine learning, specifically around healthcare outcomes. This is what I wanna focus on. Once you do that, then kind of a social proof of the social network can really help you. You've made a declaration, and it is so simple that it's kind of stupid. I mean, I made a fancy slide, I did a sketch and everything, but really, this comes under the incredibly technical term of WSD, who someone said to me once, like, oh, do you know the WSD principle? I'm like, no, changed my life. They're like, write shit down. I was like, I can do that. I just said that word. I'm so sorry, I meant to say stuff. I said stuff, redub that. But that is it, like write something down, seriously. It's so much easier when you externalize it, it's ridiculous. Easier to do this than not to. The second is objectives and key results, and I'm curious because this is a common now, becoming more common management practice if any companies are using OKRs in your daily work. A few, I suspect there will be more as this becomes more adopted. The OKRs were pioneered, they're actually pioneered by Andy Grove when he was at Intel, but they were really popularized by Google. So nobody was ever fired by buying IBM. Nobody was ever kicked off a stage for referencing Google, I guess. But the objectives and key results are a little different in that you set an objective, it should be a stretch goal, and then you measure some type of quantitative element of that so that you can really track progress towards it. It mostly keeps it top of mind. And it forces you to have some type of quantifiable behavior that you can count, which makes it helpful and more manageable. So these are periodic, quantitative measures of progress, and you can use them personally, you don't need to have your whole team do them. They're originally intended for an entire organization, when they kind of cascade through the different organizational levels, but you can use them as a personal tool. You wanna set the goals as a stretch goal, so that you can actually be always working towards it. If you make all of your OKRs, I've heard, you're not doing it right. There should be a few that you don't, because they should always be out there in front of you. And this helps you routinize the achieving objectives. So it helps you kind of build into your everyday thing that you're not gonna be done, that you're gonna continue working on it. It helps you carve out the time. And as a staff at Tradecraft, we did this, then it was a challenge. But when it became part of the culture, it became so much easier, and it was so rewarding, because you can literally see your progress. On a hard day, you can look back and say, I've come this far, it's worth working a little more. Christina Woodkey is a marvelous design advocate, and she's worked at California College of the Arts as well. She wrote a book, Radical Focus, specifically about OKRs. I highly recommend it. And she talks about her personal OKRs as of this lucky rock in her pocket, something she can kind of hold on to, because it takes that wishful thinking and it turns it into a plan. So that's the start part, or the set part. You set your intention by writing something down, and then actually setting some objectives and goals towards it. So the second stage, then, is to start simple. And the first one for that is a concept called the knowledge map. And if there's one thing that you take away from this talk today, it's curiosity and excitement about doing a knowledge map, because I found it to be very transformative, both as a personal practice and as a team practice. A knowledge map is a hand-drawn concept diagram, if you will, of the terms, methods, all the stuff related to a topic of expertise or a domain area that you'd like to learn more about. And they take various different forms, but part of why they're helpful is they help you visualize the concepts in a way that's related. It's not a list. You can't do it on a computer. Maybe on a tablet, but it should be a spatially oriented map. Again, you wanna generate this solo and then maybe link up with other people who might have a similar learning objective. It's amazing. It's almost like ancestry when you tap into one of the online programs and you've done a certain amount of genealogy and then you find that one random cousin and all of a sudden your genealogy is like five times as large. Sometimes if you're learning one part of a domain topic, say around machine learning, you can actually tap into other kinds of expertise because other people know different things. You'll iterate and redraw and enhance and redraw as you grow. That's part of the explicit learning communication process and it is challenging, but super, super rewarding. And on this one I have a story. I worked with a practitioner at Adaptive Path named Theresa Brazen. She's now senior director of learning programs at Cooper. And she came to Adaptive Path and she had expertise in filmmaking and it was a painter, but she didn't know much about the UX world. She kept calling us like, I don't know what you crazy people are talking about. So she was a project manager and had direct client responsibilities and so her number one goal was to get really smart about UX really quickly, which as we know is not easy. And her first step was to write stuff down. This is her very first knowledge map and I love it because the title says, user experience design industry jargon map. She's like y'all saying things, don't know what they mean. So there's really not any synthesis, just a bunch of bubble words. Over time the maps that she made started to evidence more understanding. She made sub maps and other little diagrams and over time as her knowledge built, they built in more sophistication. And she entered wrapping all of that up into a talk that she did at South by Southwest on tools and methods to learn, navigate, make a name for yourself for the UX landscape because she had an incredibly rapid learning curve. Interestingly enough, after having that experience and using it as a method in some of my teachings and workshops, this book how learning work says, if you ask any of your learners to do something about understanding their knowledge, it's have them map their knowledge at the beginning of work and of a curriculum and map it at the end and they'll see, literally see how much more they understand. The second part, which I'm gonna just touch on because it's a rich territory for starting simple as deliberate practice. And deliberate practice is more than just doing something over and over. You take a series of a big topic, you chunk it down into smaller steps and then you ritualize a daily practice around that. I put one hour, your mileage will vary, might be one hour a week, but try and do a little bit over a period of time. Not this one perfect focused day where you can just get it all done, right? That's a myth, doesn't exist, don't do that. Like give yourself 10, 15 minutes a day, even at that and use whatever you output to get continuous feedback. So Anders Erickson, who coined that term, has a great book called Peek. And the reason why you wanna associate this with a learning behavior, not just an output behavior, is you can do the same thing a lot, but just because you're doing the same thing over and over doesn't mean you're learning anything. So his quote is, if you're doing your job and you're just doing more and more of it, you're actually not gonna get any better. So deliberate practice is intentionally designed to help you escalate and advance your skill set. So our third learning behavior under sharing your progress is about talking about your ideas. Sharing them in a more structured way, probably with your team, maybe with the public, up to you, in a very intentional way. And at Tradecraft we did a teach session. At Adaptive Path we had brown bags and open design sessions. At CCA we have show and share. They take all kinds of forms. They usually have a presenter or a speaker sharing some kind of set of information that they've learned or an experience they've had. So they're short, like five to seven minutes, you don't want an hour long talk. They're frequent. New contributors are encouraged to share their expertise because when new contributors come into a team they often bring things with them. And the whole team gets to learn together. It also has another very important element which is learning is hard and sometimes we don't celebrate it as much. So in a workplace environment we don't have something like graduation. So we need to design points of celebration and this is a really good one. Now when I was at Tradecraft, as I'd mentioned it was an assignment. So we had to stand up every morning with the cold cohort and each morning we did a teach session. One of the participant designers did a teach session. They could pick any topic they wanted. Sometimes it was something they already knew, sometimes it was something they just learned. Packaging up your learning forces you to take another understanding of it then you might have a few just kind of let it slide. Turns out we're not the only ones doing this. So there's Googler to Googler which is a program at Google which is specifically around these peer learners and these peer partners and with amazing adoption. And there's a short video by Karen May. She is the VP of People Development at Google but you can read about how they've started to instill some of their learning cultures. Some companies have brown bags. Super simple, you show up. You have food over lunch. There's some kind of discussion or structured presentation. You share what you've learned. You can also invite people from outside the company. Kind of bring some new ideas in and it allows you exposure to new ideas. Which keeps your people and yourself from getting spale. The last piece is publishing. Now if doing a spoken presentation isn't for you consider how you would write your ideas down. There's so many more formats and venues on that and having someone encourage you to summarize or being able to encourage someone else to summarize their thinking and put it out there has a lot of long term benefits both for the team as well as their careers for the longer term. So publish early, publish often. I highly recommend medium. Your company blogs, even internal blogs if there's some security issues or topics that you can't expose and linked in. And this just isn't for people who are learning it for the first time. So one of a former colleague and someone I have high degree of respect for is Dan Saffer. He's the author of three books, designing interactions, micro interactions and gestural interface. And in 2014 he decided that he wanted a way to get his tea perfectly brewed without waking up his wife. And so he did a small, magical, enchanted object. He was going to build an Arduino to iPhone app but he wanted it to be beautiful so he was going to put it in a T tin. So he ended up doing it and on that path he ended up writing about his experience and what went wrong and what went right. I love this one like it's just constantly when it tweeted him or when it texted him Dan your tea is ready, your tea is ready and he's like shut it off. So all of his mistakes, all of his process all of his thinking is all embedded in this long medium post. And he was so generous to take the time and effort to write that out. But the most helpful part of that is the very last sentence where Dan who is a recognized expert with a ton of expertise says maybe somebody reading this will think of other, better, more universal uses for something like this. And he stepped out of his comfort zone way out and that's probably where something. So that's something else that a continuous learning environment demands of us is that we step out of our comfort zone away from the things we don't know or we do know into the things that we don't. So with all of this kind of options and constellations of your math I'd like you to think how you can use these tools for your continuous learning. I recognize I'm between you and the breaks so I'm not going to ask you to do this right now as I had hoped but I do want you to do this sometime before the end of today which is start that learn list. Write down two to four things that you want to learn. Maybe it's something that came up in the content today. Share with someone at the break, after the break, at drinks. It's always great after a few drinks. Get inspired. And from one learning environment to another. Thank you very much for your time.