Some conversations refuse to follow a neat arc. They wander, circle back, and surface tensions instead of offering tidy answers, and that is precisely what makes them worth spending time with.
In a recent episode of The Learning Experience Operations Show, Jason Gorman sat down with Jen Briselli, co-founder of Topology and former Chief Design Strategy Officer at MadPow, for a discussion that felt less like an interview and more like an exploration of how learning actually happens inside real systems, with real people, operating under real constraints.
At its core, the conversation returned again and again to a simple but challenging idea: learning can’t be forced, but it can be enabled.
Listen to the podcast on your favorite directory:
From Teaching to Enabling
Jen’s career path does not follow a straight line. She began as a physics major, became a high school teacher, moved into design strategy, and eventually founded a systems-oriented consultancy. On paper, the trajectory might look unconventional, but in practice, it reveals a consistent way of seeing the world.
That worldview was shaped early in the classroom, where Jen discovered that mastering a subject was very different from helping someone else make sense of it. As a physics teacher, she saw firsthand that students arrived with wildly different mental models, motivations, and constraints, and that no amount of perfect lesson planning could guarantee learning if the conditions were wrong.
“I don’t see myself as someone who defines outcomes for people,” Jen explained. “I try to make the path easier for desirable things to emerge.”
That distinction is subtle, but it matters. Teaching often implies delivery, and facilitation often implies control. Enabling, by contrast, requires a different posture altogether, one rooted in curiosity, humility, and trust.
Rather than asking how to get people to change, Jen focuses on understanding the conditions that make change possible in the first place. This shift moves learning away from transactions and toward relationships, and it reframes the role of the designer, facilitator, or learning leader as someone who shapes environments rather than dictates destinations.
This same approach now shows up in her consulting work, where she often resists the pressure to jump straight to solutions and instead helps teams surface the hidden assumptions, constraints, and dynamics shaping their decisions long before anything is designed or delivered.
The Value of Being Marginally Irresponsible
One of the most memorable ideas in the conversation emerged from an unexpected place: a story about Jen’s father, who worked as a construction project manager and once told her,
“Sometimes you have to be marginally irresponsible.”
Not reckless or careless, but willing to take small, bounded risks when certainty is impossible.
That lesson became a personal compass for Jen during pivotal moments in her own career, including the decision to leave a stable teaching role with a pension to return to graduate school and enter an entirely new field. Later, it showed up again when she stepped away from an executive role to co-found Topology, choosing autonomy and experimentation over predictability.
That idea shows up everywhere in Jen’s work. It influences how she approaches strategy, how she designs workshops, and how she thinks about learning inside complex systems. In environments that resist prediction, rigid plans often collapse under their own weight, while experiments, probes, and small bets create room for adaptation.
Instead of over-optimizing upfront, Jen pays attention to momentum and direction, asking whether a team is moving toward something better than where it started rather than whether it is perfectly aligned with a predefined roadmap. This mindset can be deeply uncomfortable for organizations that crave predictability, but it is often the only honest response to complexity.
Her clients often experience this as a subtle but powerful shift, where progress comes not from grand transformation programs, but from a series of thoughtful moves that compound over time.
Why Behavior Change Is a Narrow Lens
In learning organizations, behavior change is frequently treated as the ultimate measure of success. Did people do the thing, did the metric move, did performance improve?
Jen does not dismiss behavior outright, but she is clear about its limits.
“Behavior is visible and measurable, which is why it’s appealing,” she noted. “But it’s a severely limited way of understanding what actually changes when humans learn.”
Behavior is only one signal among many, and it often obscures shifts in judgment, confidence, intention, and sense-making that matter just as much. When metrics stop serving as information and start becoming targets, learning narrows, and people begin optimizing for compliance rather than capability.
Jen has seen this play out in large organizations that invest heavily in training programs tied to specific performance indicators, only to find that people learn how to game the system rather than grow within it. The numbers may improve temporarily, but the underlying capacity to adapt remains unchanged.
Jen advocates for a different approach, one that treats measurement as a way to take the temperature rather than enforce quotas. Patterns, stories, and signals often reveal more than dashboards ever could, especially when the goal is adaptation rather than control.
In this view, learning is not about hitting predefined outcomes. It is about moving in the right direction over time and adjusting as new information emerges.
Sense, Respond, Repeat
Throughout the conversation, one phrase kept resurfacing: sense and respond.
In practice, this means building systems that can notice what is happening in real time and adjust accordingly, rather than relying on quarterly check-ins or postmortems after damage has already been done. It may involve narrative feedback instead of surveys, workshops that prioritize clarity over deliverables, or leaders who are willing to let go of the illusion that control equals competence.
Jen described projects where teams entered a room expecting a tightly scripted agenda and left with something far more valuable: a shared understanding of how their work intersected and where they could act immediately. In these moments, progress did not wait for a final report or executive approval. It began the next day.
Jen described her best facilitation work as nearly invisible. If it is done well, people do not remember the process itself. They remember the insight that emerged and the momentum that followed.
“If I do a good job,” she said, “they forget I was even there.”
That is not a lack of presence. It is a sign of craft.
What AI Changes and What It Doesn’t
No modern conversation about learning avoids AI, and this one was no exception. Jen’s perspective, however, was notably grounded.
She pays attention, experiments, and stays informed, but she does not invest much energy in prediction.
“I don’t think learning has fundamentally changed,” she said. “Learning is adaptation, and that’s been true for humans forever.”
In her work, AI currently shows up less as a grand disruptor and more as a practical tool that can either support or undermine learning depending on how it is used. When AI accelerates sense-making, reflection, or collaboration, it can add real value. When it replaces judgment or shortcuts understanding, it does the opposite.
In her view, AI is a tool, albeit a powerful one, but not a replacement for human sense-making or apprenticeship. The more important question is not whether AI will disrupt learning, but whether it will support people learning together or further isolate them from one another.
If AI helps humans reflect, build judgment, and apprentice with each other, it may meaningfully contribute. If it simply accelerates output while hollowing out understanding, it will not.
Learning as an Act of Trust
What makes this conversation linger is not a single framework or takeaway, but the philosophy running underneath it all.
Jen’s work rests on a belief that can feel radical in many organizations: people want to learn, and they already know more than we tend to assume. The role of learning leaders is not to fill gaps, but to remove friction, create safety for difficult thinking, and trust that, given the right conditions, people will adapt.
That trust is not easy. It requires letting go of certainty, resisting the urge to control, and being willing, at times, to be marginally irresponsible.
Listen to the full conversation with Jen Briselli on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Jen Briselli
Jason Gorman (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Learning Experience Operations Show. My name is Jason Gorman. I am joined today by Jen Briselli Jen is a strategist, designer, researcher, and educator who helps teams realize the transformational potential of risky play, complexity-informed design strategy, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Driven by deep curiosity to understand the hidden patterns across disparate domains and the desire to
Jen (00:17)
you
Jason Gorman (00:27)
empower other humans with these insights, Jen partners with brave folks who work at a similar intersection and want to provoke, create, or occasionally subvert. And I’m just going to editorialize here, Jen, and say, maybe not that occasional. Previously as Chief Design Strategy Officer at MadPow, and now as co-founder of Topology, which is a systems-oriented experience strategy firm.
Jen (00:41)
the clock.
Jason Gorman (00:52)
She helps co-create the services, experiences, and the conditions that enable people to live well on their own terms. Welcome to the show, Jen Briselli.
Jen (01:03)
Thank you, Jason. My pleasure to be here.
Jason Gorman (01:07)
So I’m trying a new thing. I’m kind of in beta mode with this podcast. ⁓ And the new thing is, you’ve probably heard, like I don’t, what was that? Inside the Actors Studio, they used to do like that 10 questions at the end. Well, I’m gonna do like 10 questions, a little lightning round, but it’s at the beginning. And so we’re gonna do that first. So the rule here is just a sentence or two, no explanations. Right? We can circle back, we’ll circle back.
Jen (01:11)
It’s awesome.
the worst. This is the worst
for me. The absolute worst. I want to add, I don’t even know what the questions are yet and I already want to add caveats and color and asterisks and all that. So great.
Jason Gorman (01:44)
Well, you
know what? I have a notebook in front of me. I’m going to write stuff down because I know how this is going to work. I’m going to ask you a question. You’re going to say something. So Jen and I know each other a bit. And we hang out and we talk about stuff. And I’m usually writing down stuff when we do that. So I’m imagining that when you’re answering these questions, I’m going to write stuff down. We will have the opportunity to go deeper into the brilliant things you say.
Jen (01:47)
That’s all good. All good.
It’s all good. I will do my best to follow the rules. I’m not a good rule follower, but I will do my best for you.
Jason Gorman (02:11)
Okay.
I know
that’s why I editorialized there. It’s not that occasional. Okay, so first lightning round question. So at the end of the little intro that I just gave for you was the phrase, she helps organizations co-create the services, experiences, and the conditions that enable people to live well on their own terms. So can you give me a sentence or two more on the…
enable people to live well on their own terms.
Jen (02:45)
It is not for me, us, anybody who is in a facilitative role to dictate what “live well” means, but rather to make the road or the path to that place easier for someone to travel or to adjust the conditions in which desirable things can emerge without the need for
me as a practitioner to define or try to directly drive what that desirable outcome must be. I think that is far more powerful and scalable than trying to define the outcome in my own way and then drive the process to that end.
Jason Gorman (03:32)
That’s good. That’s good. That was tough one. Well, I’m gonna ask you a second part to that question. Can you give me a sentence just on what you mean by live well? I think what I would love for people to understand is what’s your why.
Jen (03:34)
Okay, this one’s hard. That’s a bad one. Don’t ask me that in a lightning round ever again.
okay.
think that at the end of the day, I want to help other people achieve whatever they want to achieve. And when I say live well, it could be accomplish a goal, learn a thing, acquire a skill. It could be arrive in a new place. It could just be notice a new thing. It could be get to a certain point in their career. There’s so many things that this can be.
Which is kind of why this question is so hard for me even answer because it’s so meta. But the point is I have largely come to see myself as a facilitator of things. I use the word enabler a lot. Being an enabler means I don’t get to, but actually I look at it as I don’t need to understand deeply exactly what and why someone is trying to accomplish something. What I can do is figure out how to help them do it.
Jason Gorman (04:30)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (04:45)
And like the secret of course ingredient to that is always learning. I know I’m spoiler, but ⁓ yeah. So to me, it’s about enabling. Do I still apply a moral lens sometimes? Sure. I don’t help everybody do everything they want to do. I’m not going to help people do things that I think are morally or ethically problematic. But when we say live well, that’s not up to me or you. It’s up to them.
Jason Gorman (05:06)
Love that. Okay, next question. When you were working and you’re totally dialed in, what are you most likely to be doing?
Jen (05:15)
this question is interesting because I immediately try to think of like when I’m working on my computer, like what am I doing? Am I listening to certain music or whatever? But if I pause and really ask myself, if I’m really dialed in, it’s probably when I’m not in front of my computer, it’s more likely the times where I am in a room with people. When you say, think of a time you’ve been really dialed in at work. It’s me facilitating something like a workshop or a collaborative session.
That’s it. It’s me in that moment on, not on stage, because I don’t like to be the star in those settings, but actively sensing and responding what’s happening in the room and the body language and the plan that we may have laid out that becomes irrelevant within the first 10 minutes and then kind of co-creating the rest of the collaboration from there.
Jason Gorman (06:02)
Great, okay.
Next question, what is a specific event or moment that inspired you to do what you do?
Jen (06:04)
and what is.
I’m a disappointment for some of these questions. know, like, I don’t think there is one. think there’s my life, my life has been a chain series of these in like every possible sense of the word. Yeah. I’ll think more about it as we chat, but I don’t have an easy answer to this one. Cause I also don’t know what I do. What inspired me to do what I do? Being born as a human in the world and being curious.
Jason Gorman (06:18)
valid answer.
Jen (06:38)
and then following that curiosity. So there was never a moment.
Jason Gorman (06:42)
Okay, good. Next question, what advice would you give your 21 year old self just starting out?
Jen (06:48)
Trust your instincts. Trust your instincts. I think this question often makes you think about like what would you want to change or what would you want to make sure you don’t change. But I don’t, I don’t think I would try to actually guide the younger version of me or anyone else for that matter in any way other than that it’s, it’s been a good ride. So do what you do. Trust your instincts. They’ve served you well. Maybe trust them better earlier, sooner.
Jason Gorman (07:17)
All right. I know you have an answer to this one. What scale are you trying to pick up right now?
Jen (07:22)
Well, on one hand, I’ve been learning to play the drums for a little while. So that’s maybe not a good answer because I’m like maybe an intermediate now in a couple of years. So maybe that doesn’t count as trying to pick up. I’m still going to say that though, because I’m actually really I working on certain aspects of drumming. So for me, the limb independence is very difficult, especially with my left foot. So I’m working on limb independence.
Jason Gorman (07:32)
Mm-hmm.
Limb Independence.
Jen (07:51)
programming skills.
Jason Gorman (07:51)
I could probably do a thousand of these episodes. That’s probably the only time I’m going to hear Limb Independence.
Jen (08:00)
You know, people sounds tangential, but, you know, people talk a lot about anybody in the audience who plays drums or other instruments. Like there’s that process where you’re first learning anything and it’s in working memory and you’re really conscious of it and you’re thinking hard. Like when you’re first learning something with the drums and you’re really you’re counting slow and you feel like you’re going like insanely, insanely slow. And then over time, you get a little bit faster. And then eventually, for me, the experience always feels like the knowledge drops out of my like
cognitive conscious working memory and like into my body. And those moments where I realized, wait, this is now stored in my body and my muscles and my brain is free to like add new things and new layers. So like, even if other people on this podcast won’t say limb independence, like what limb independence represents to me in the journey of learning how to play the drums is not unlike I’m sure what any other answer to that question would be, which is not, I’m trying to acquire the skill.
of tapping my left foot separately from my right. I am looking forward to the day where my left foot can act independently so that it frees me up for the next level of this thing.
Jason Gorman (08:59)
Yeah.
Jen (09:09)
Someday, left foot.
Jason Gorman (09:11)
Someday left foot. Last question in the lightning round. What are you most anxious about for the future? ⁓ boy, I’m sorry, it’s a big question, but what’s a bite-sized, what’s a bite-sized?
Jen (09:21)
warning. ⁓
this is an interesting one. And I’m trying to follow the rules. So I’ll keep it short. I’m actually not anxious. Maybe I operate from a place of enough privilege. I’m like keenly hyper aware of all the things that one can be anxious about but
For me, it’s less of an anxiousness and it’s more of an apprehensiveness and not in the I’m scared apprehensive, but just like I’m taking it all in and I’m really paying attention to a lot of the signals around how young people are learning how to be in this world. And it both brings me a sense of despair when we think about mental health and we think about the roles of social media and AI, but it also brings me a lot of hope and joy when I watch how young people
especially right now, challenge norms and challenge constructs that have not been productive for us as a society and a species. you know, everything is both. There’s always a little of everything in every question. So I broke the rules. But my answer there is I’m not anxious. But I do think the answer is ⁓ what are young people going to do? It’s going to be it’s going to be good to see. I look forward to trying to help it help it along as best I can until I’m not in the in the process of it all anymore.
Jason Gorman (10:43)
Thank you.
Jen (10:43)
That wasn’t much of a lightning round. was more like a, maybe like a bit rainy longer.
Jason Gorman (10:46)
I know. think I have a ways… I
have a ways to go as a host. I mean, let’s just call it.
Jen (10:53)
Well that’s not me!
You don’t want to become too much of
a dictator when it comes to this. It’s good.
Jason Gorman (11:01)
No, definitely not. ⁓ So you kind of alluded to this before. You have a bit of an unusual background. ⁓ It has definitely not been a straight line for you. And I wonder if you could give a little bit of a kind of a quick tour of how you got to be doing what you do today. ⁓ And then maybe a little bit more color commentary about what you do today really is.
Jen (11:19)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, because I’m sure I also, you know, compared to other guests and maybe compared to a lot of the audience, you know, I don’t have a title like instructional designer or learning experience designer, even though I kind of regard what I do as being that at its core no matter what, but we’ll come back to that. ⁓ Yeah, the shortest version is I started off my educational journey, ⁓ majoring in physics. So as a kid, like I think a lot of us, I
was very curious. I obviously am still very curious. You know, I have all the buzzwords on my resume that we all do, problem solver, love learning, want to learn about everything, da da da. And to 17 year old Jen, you know, I would have loved to have studied everything, but you have to pick something. And I kind of at that point was like, well, physics represents like the most fundamental. I’ll start there. And it’s probably best for me to learn that from other humans. And I can always be picking up and learning other things along the way. So that was my logic.
I studied physics, you know, I enjoyed it, but I realized within a couple years in my undergrad that I did not want to go to grad school for physics. I probably would have really loved that, but I didn’t want to climb higher in what I saw as like a disciplinary silo. ⁓ I was already also sort of double majoring, minoring. I forget how it all landed in philosophy and a few other fields, and I didn’t want to just be stuck in one place. So it just happened that I’d been doing a lot of peer tutoring.
And I was really enjoying that challenge of understanding people’s mental models. Physics was a place I had always done well. It’s a difficult subject, but I grokked it relatively easily compared to my peers. And I thought it was so fascinating to try to understand somebody else’s mental model about physics that would be very different from my own, but trying to help them construct meaning with their own schemas. And I just found that fascinating.
Jason Gorman (12:51)
Hmm.
Jen (13:15)
If you had told me when I was in high school I was going to become a high school teacher, I would have told you to just F right off because it was like not at all part of my like future vision of myself. I had a lot of preconceived notions about teachers that I think a lot of people do. Those who can’t teach, you know, that whole thing. I was very much not at all, I was a surprise teacher is what had happened for me. But I did, because I’d been doing all that peer tutoring, I thought to myself,
Jason Gorman (13:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (13:39)
isn’t this actually what teachers do? What if I should become a teacher? So I went and in the process of finishing my degree, I minored in education as well. And I went and became a high school physics teacher. And I did that for almost a decade. I loved it at first. I loved teaching. I loved figuring out how to help people do everything I just described. ⁓ But after a few years, I started to feel like I was living kind of like
the movie Groundhog Day. And I didn’t have this language at the time, but I definitely felt like I was being handed the same design brief and asked to solve the same problem in a different way, which some people love. I have plenty of friends who are still teachers. They love knowing that they do the same thing on day 63 every year because it gives them a benchmark to continue to grow and advance their practice. And so there’s no shade on that way of working. But for me,
Jason Gorman (14:19)
Yeah.
Jen (14:27)
I just serendipitously had also started to learn about the world of information design and then by extension, experience design. didn’t know any of that stuff existed when I was younger. And I realized I’m designing learning experiences. I want to figure out how to design other kinds of experiences because the process by which you get into someone’s mind and understand how they make sense of the world, that sense making that you do, I was so intrigued by that being applied to other domains.
So ⁓ cutting a much longer story shorter, I did leave the classroom and went back to grad school and I studied ⁓ service design and strategy and there was a lot of systems thinking as part of that. And so then moved into the world of, you know, what folks would know now as UX or experience design and strategy and spent some time at a couple of different agencies. I was at a place called Mad Pow for long time and moved up through levels of leadership there and towards the end was in an executive role, which was very eye-opening, you know, and then.
Jason Gorman (15:05)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (15:24)
I think you mentioned now found in my own little thing, typology. So what I do is kind of the marriage of that entire narrative journey. It’s easy for me to draw a thread right along through. I think some people could look at that on a resume and go, physics, teacher, designer, you’re a weirdo. Like, yeah, but I look back now and can recognize that I don’t care about learning now because I was a teacher. I ended up.
Jason Gorman (15:24)
you
Hmm.
Yeah.
Jen (15:51)
being drawn to teacher because even before teaching, learning was kind of just core for me. I would not have had this language until the last couple of years, but at the end of the day, even when I’m working with clients in big corporate sort of organizational challenges, whether it’s improving the experience for their customers or improving experiences for their internal employees.
or figuring out how to help people work together more effectively. Like none of those things have the word learning tacked onto them in the title, but like the secret thing is that there’s always some form of learning involved and the better and more effective that individuals, teams and large groups can learn, the better they’re gonna achieve whatever their other goals are. So in some ways I look at any goal that a client ever comes to me with as the secondary goal.
Jason Gorman (16:28)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (16:42)
behind the secret primary goal, which is learning. So I’m like a secret learning experience designer, but you won’t see that in most of my sales materials because I think a lot of people don’t recognize that. The uniqueness of the learning experience design field is that you guys, you know, we all get to, we get to talk about it explicitly. So.
Jason Gorman (17:03)
Well, you know, it’s interesting that you say that because there is a real, especially in learning and development, which is a term that’s typically reserved for corporate, like this work in corporations, there’s this like real hesitancy to use the word learning, especially to describe the outcome of what you’re trying to do. So it’s really more about like performance, behavior change.
Jen (17:26)
Yep.
Yep.
Jason Gorman (17:27)
And
we will get to some of those things later in this conversation, but it’s, ⁓ I don’t know, kind of refreshing that you’re just describing that as this core goal.
Jen (17:42)
Yeah. mean, to me, learning is such a hard word. You and I talked about this already in the past, but it’s hard to say the word learning and not immediately have a lot of different things that flash through someone’s mind. They think of formal classroom learning. They think of learning and development in a corporate setting, which most people boil down to training, or they think about learning as in learning loops, as in how do get feedback about the product we’re trying to launch or, you know, those kinds of things. But it’s always flattened into this very
Jason Gorman (17:47)
Hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jen (18:12)
reductionist and unfortunately oftentimes either transactional or performative metric. and ⁓ I mean, we all have to work with some of that stuff in the world that we’re in, but I will always be over here kind of trying to reserve learning as this like four dimensional concept that is really just a fundamental innate property of living things and our ability to take in information about our environment and take action and see what happens and then adjust course and adapt.
Jason Gorman (18:29)
Hmm.
Jen (18:42)
Like to me, learning means adaptation, period. And it isn’t just a human that does it. It’s humans do it in concert together. Humans do it in concert or in reaction to their environment. And it can be, you know, living environments as well as non-living environments. So if you follow that too far, you get way too philosophical. So, you know, like I said, generally you have to kind of speak the language of the environment you’re trying to be effective inside. But the thing inside the Trojan horse is always learning.
Jason Gorman (19:09)
Yeah, I I suppose it was probably not so totally different when you were a physics teacher, right? Those kids were not, they weren’t waking up in the morning and being like, oh, physics class today, can’t wait. Probably. Maybe if you’re really lucky, a couple were.
Jen (19:20)
Yeah, well, ouch, okay, well, rude, rude,
I’m just kidding. But most people I know, like they think back to physics if they took physics in school and like one of two things are true. They hated their physics teacher because they were dry and boring and it was hard and they just did a terrible time or they loved their physics teacher. Something about physics. I once had somebody, I wish I could remember who said this to me.
Jason Gorman (19:31)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jen (19:43)
⁓ I would love to credit this person, but they once told me that they’ve always thought of physics majors as two types. There are the types of physics majors who want to like really study the laws of physics. They get into astronomy. It’s all about kind of categorizing and all that. And then there are the people who study physics, like it’s a liberal art. It’s a way of thinking. And I was like, oof, you got me, like a hundred percent the latter. But I say that because you could almost imagine two kinds of physics teachers, you know, that are like,
Jason Gorman (19:59)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
received.
Jen (20:10)
the kind of teacher that they make like Mr. Holland’s opus type movies about, or you get like, I’m a physics teacher who wants to just make sure you memorize and understand Newton’s laws. But to that end, you take a class of 30 kids, and there are kids in that room who are in that class purely because it’s a college prereq, and they just want their A. And you have kids in that class who don’t even want to be in there, regardless of it being a prereq, and they’re there because their parents or someone else is making them. And then there are kids who
you know, for whatever reason they’re in there, it doesn’t matter, they actually love it. And the point I want to make, and I think this is true for all of the people we collaborate with, is you don’t know who it is right away. You won’t know. You won’t know until even years after they’re gone and out of the class. You can say, I know this kid’s in here because of this reason, but students who reached out to me years and years later weren’t always the ones I expected. So you don’t know that when you’re thinking about who you’re doing your learning experience design work for as well.
Jason Gorman (20:41)
Mm-hmm.
That’s right. That’s right.
Yeah. Yeah.
It’s so true. I love that point. I think all the time about, you know, we do this work, I think of it as setting the stage to help people use the word enabling, right? To set the stage to help people think, to change their lives, to arrive at some kind of aspiration that they have for themselves, to become something different or better that they want for themselves. And I think a good designer sets, you know, helps.
give people the conditions that they can do that on their own terms and that’s sort what you said earlier. ⁓
Jen (21:37)
Yeah, in fact, your answer
right now is actually a way better answer to the lightning question than the one I gave. we should just go edit. Just edit your answer in for mine. That’s what I meant to say.
Jason Gorman (21:42)
I’ll just edit that in. Through the magic. Yeah, fair
enough. I’m curious, so you, from the teaching to the design that you do now, I’m wondering if there are any, if there’s an operating principle around doing your work that kind of survived through these jobs.
Jen (21:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there’s actually two good answers to this. The first is probably the one people will find more useful is that ⁓ I think there’s a really important difference between teaching and facilitating learning. They’re not like mutually exclusive, but they are not the same thing. And I think that applies to any kind of practice that is meant to be enabling other people. So I think other things that fall into this category would be things like people management or
even just facilitation as its own skill set. These are things that also are the fields where people assume that if you can do the thing, then you can teach the thing or you can manage the thing or you can facilitate other people doing the thing. And nobody really respects that there’s like a skill set unto itself, which, know, again, see modern society views of teachers and such, which, you know, there’s all kinds of other things caught up in that. to that end, I think that understanding that teaching kind of implies something
that is different than facilitating learning. And good teaching is facilitating learning, but it’s not an automatic. And so take that now and draw the parallels into the world of design or any other kind of experiential kind of based work where you’re trying to design curriculum or you’re trying to support other people who are in educational or training or development kind of role. There’s a difference between the active verb of me doing a thing that achieves a thing either for you or on your behalf.
or me trying to arrange the conditions, move the constructs into place, put the tools in your hands, put the apprenticeship models in place, whatever it needs to be so that you then engage in and make the meaning for yourself. So teaching versus facilitating learning, designing an outcome versus facilitating an experience, take that and multiply it to all the different contexts. That to me has been.
Jason Gorman (23:42)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (23:58)
the key. I’m far more committed and passionate about facilitating the thing that needs to emerge because it’s far more effective even if it feels indirect at first. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I have another answer to that question though, which has actually been the true guiding light for me, which comes from a story. One time I was with my dad who, ⁓ before he retired, worked for years in construction. He’s an engineer and he worked as like a basically a project manager for very large construction.
Jason Gorman (24:05)
Yeah.
Jen (24:28)
projects, big name, high profile things. And so one time we were, think I was in high school, maybe even middle school, and we had, we were going out to eat, we were sitting and waiting for our table to be ready with the whole family. And I was just making conversation, asked my dad how his job was going. And he said something like, well, drywall is supposed to be up by Friday. It’s not yet. I told the electrical guys that they can go ahead and start on Monday, regardless, or sorry, I reversed it. So obviously electrical is supposed to go in before drywall. And he was like, basically telling me,
He was gonna have drywall go up on Monday regardless. And I was like, wait, but what if the electricians don’t get done? And he was like, too bad. The drywall’s going up on Monday. And if the electrical’s not in, then it’s gonna be on the electricians to go in and put it in. And then they’re gonna have to pay for the cost of redoing the drywall. You know, he would take it out of their, you know, their invoice. And I remember being, and this was very typical of things my dad would share. This is those of you who have any connections to the world of construction. This won’t actually be that crazy to you. But I remember being, you know, like,
Jason Gorman (25:04)
Thank
Thank you.
Jen (25:24)
13 or something and thinking to myself, my God, that sounds crazy. Like, what if they call your bluff? What if they don’t get it done? And he was like, and I was like, isn’t that kind of irresponsible? Like you’re the main like guy. And he looks me dead on and he goes, I’ll never forget this. He goes, the key to life is that sometimes you have to be marginally irresponsible. And I was like, what a weird thing for my dad to tell me at age 13 or 14.
Jason Gorman (25:37)
Hmm.
Hmm ⁓
Jen (25:53)
But I’ve never forgotten it. And I think that there’s a key here that it isn’t just be irresponsible, it’s be marginally irresponsible. And if you are faced with a moment where you’re kind of unsure, this goes back to like follow your instincts, there’s a lot of gain to be had from being marginally irresponsible, taking those small risks, figuring about what your affordable losses could be.
Jason Gorman (26:00)
Thank
Jen (26:17)
⁓ And that’s where that concept of risky play and, you know, kind of small bets and probes and experiments I think are so key. So my guiding principle from the moment I went from being a physics major who thought I would be a physicist to go, wait, I’m going to go be a physics teacher. Everybody in my life is telling me I’ll be overeducated in its career suicide. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted to do that. And that’s when I said, this feels a little irresponsible, but I’m going to do it.
And then fast forward 10 years, I’m a teacher and I’m thinking about leaving that behind. The pension, the job security and going back to school and spending a ton of money on a master’s degree and then entering a wholly new field. Again, people are like, that’s crazy. And I was like, it feels irresponsible, but it’s what I want to do. And it’s not like, I’m not going to put my house and husband and life at risk. It’s not insanely irresponsible. It’s just marginally irresponsible. So.
Jason Gorman (26:45)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (27:11)
Multiply that by many more times, and here I am today.
Jason Gorman (27:16)
One comment and then I want to follow up on that because I it’s very interesting Comment was I was definitely not attacking you as a physics teacher. I Actually, actually I love physics. I was one of those people who I Generally didn’t love science, but I did love physics and I even though I wasn’t great at it I
Jen (27:24)
I know that.
Jason Gorman (27:39)
I actually lobbied to be in the honors the harder physics class because it was so fun and I had this yeah, it was pretty nerdy and I had ⁓ a I had this physics teacher that was He was probably in his late 70s and he was Almost certainly the smartest person I’ve ever known ⁓
Jen (27:44)
Wow, what a nerd. What a nerd.
Jason Gorman (28:02)
He had done some kind of top secret something, somewhere, right? And he certainly didn’t have to work. He was only working because we asked him, why are you doing this? And he said, because I’m learning stuff from you. Right? That was his answer. Anyway, I had a very good experience with physics. Yes. No, I know.
Jen (28:16)
Yes. ⁓
Just for the record, no, absolutely no offense, Dagan. I was just giving you a hard time because the tropes though, they
do exist for a reason, you know, and we’re talking about physics, but it exists for any kind of domain. Anybody that might be listening to this can probably imagine. And so that’s kind of why I thought it was kind of hilarious to think about physics. ⁓
Jason Gorman (28:37)
Well, there’s a little bit of
a serious thing in there too, which is that, I guess what I really meant when I said that is that, whatever, 17 years old, I just wasn’t thinking about school. If I had to list the things I cared about and wanted to do, school was not on the top 10. And I was nerdy and it wasn’t on my top 10. So, you know.
Jen (28:48)
Yeah.
Even the kids who
did think they wanted, you loved school, you know, the good, the good, I was a good kid, but I was a good kid because I also kind of learned that being a good kid earned me a lot of freedom. know, was, freedom was the principle for me at that age, but it was, ⁓ I think that that, it still rings true. I mean, it’s, you, you don’t really know when you’re a teenager, what is meaningful to you.
Jason Gorman (29:04)
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Jen (29:26)
And then we kind of assume you get to a certain point in your life later where, well, know, things are more fully formed. It’s not wet cement anymore. But I actually think it’s wet cement until the day you die, you know? So I think that the same challenge you would face as a physics teacher or any kind of teacher of children or young adults, anybody here who, you know, does any kind of adult learning knows that those things can, the wet cement nature of the human brain and experience and cognition, it stays wet.
Jason Gorman (29:33)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (29:55)
forever. And I think the more that folks can grapple with that and acknowledge that the better learning will happen.
Jason Gorman (29:59)
You said, what was the term? Marginally irresponsible, is that right? Okay. Very nice. When you were saying that, I was thinking about some of the words that you chose for, ⁓ know, ask people to write their intros, just it’s a big reveal for anybody who’s listening. ⁓ But so, you know, you’re using terms like risky play, complexity-informed design strategy, transdisciplinary collaboration.
Jen (30:03)
Phil Brizelli everybody, shout out.
Jason Gorman (30:27)
So when I think about these things, and because I know you, I know that it’s not like you are coming in and doing a kind of straightforward, replicable thing for your clients. You are coming in and you are, I would imagine, bringing that marginal irresponsibility with you because it creates an environment where more unexpected things can happen.
And I would wonder, I’m wondering if you could just talk about a specific project that you’ve done recently that really kind of explains what you do in concrete terms, but then also gets a little bit into some of that kind of interesting process. because I think for me, like one of the theories that I have about work is that there is this, there’s this tight constant tension between defined process and some improvisation.
And I love that and what you just described and I’m hoping you can tease that out about what you do.
Jen (31:31)
Yeah, I think that the word that I hear, especially as you tee this up, is scaffolding. You you want process to be scaffolding. That, like when a building is being constructed, the scaffolding, you know, provides some support, makes the construction of something easier, safer, or just possible. But scaffolding itself isn’t meant to be permanent or, you know,
Jason Gorman (31:37)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (31:58)
something that is crystallized and rigid and therefore more fragile. if you think about like scaffolding, like we see on construction sites and on buildings is usually made of some kind of metal, but like historically people have used things like bamboo as scaffolding. And you can also think about human skeleton as a form of scaffolding. So, you know, can extend the metaphor wherever you want, but I think that tension is.
a good creative tension if you can maintain the flexibility or the impermanence of or the whatever you want to use for an adjective of that scaffolding or that process. And I think a lot of folks will over rely on a process for a couple reasons that can become dysfunctional, namely that there isn’t trust in the ability to actually sense and adapt, ⁓ you know, to any kind of incoming information. So you want to rely on or offload the cognitive
weight of that onto a process that we’ve all agreed is good and safe, or from like a relational angle, if you’re in an environment and an organization where it’s not safe to take risks, ⁓ you want to make sure that what you’re doing is aligned to a process because then you can use that as cover. So we’re not talking about process like that, but I’ll give you an example. mean, the work we do is, there’s kind of like, it spans the gamut, right? There are definitely partnerships and engagements that would look familiar to a lot of people where
Jason Gorman (33:09)
Yeah.
Jen (33:18)
We might come in and help do some research, qualitative research with humans to understand needs, expectations, whatever. And we might help our clients synthesize what we learn from that research and then figure out. Well, like anything experience related, the reason I was gonna stay high level was to compare it to something, but it’s a good point. ⁓ like.
Jason Gorman (33:30)
Around what though? Like what kind of problem are you solving? Yeah.
Jen (33:40)
⁓ using a specific product, you know, or a specific tool. We did some stuff this summer actually that I would consider a very conventional project, which was helping an EdTech VR company that does a lot in the nurse education space. ⁓ And they are very effective and highly regarded in like nursing schools, but they’re interested in using their technology or offering it to the post licensure nurse education world. So of course their tools are already really effective in some contexts, but in this case,
Jason Gorman (33:42)
Yeah.
Jen (34:09)
How do we understand what nurses who are already working are doing and where would these kind of tools fit in for them? And there’s a difference between going into that process at the like feature and content level, like, well, what are the different features and content they need and what is the curriculum and the pedagogical kind of structure of that need to be? We weren’t even talking at that level. They were like, we just want to get a better understanding of what this entire group of humans post-licensure nurse education
What is it even like and what are their needs and are they different than, spoiler, of course they’re different than what they are in nursing school. So we did a bunch of research to talk to a lot of folks, nurse educators and others in a lot of different care settings too. Think about the difference between a hospital or a long-term care environment or an at-home care setting. And the research can look a lot of different ways, interviews and site visits and observations and narrative inquiry, whatever. Point is,
Jason Gorman (34:42)
Yeah.
Jen (35:04)
You know, we’re trying to understand something about an experience, but it isn’t just, this a satisfactory experience? It’s the whole context and the context dependence of every piece and part. And then what comes out of that isn’t just prioritize this content or, you know, do these features first and try them out with this client. It’s more about the overarching themes or principles that can actually be abstracted that maintain their usefulness across contexts where things are so different.
And then that gives them a bit of more of a starting point to say, okay, well, let’s prioritize here, here, here, here, but, they can go on and figure out exactly which content, exactly which kind of features, you know, they’ll get the most bang for their buck or have the most overlap with things that are already on their roadmap, but operating at that just slightly higher than, you know, not content and features level to understand, but not so high that we’re just doing marketing research because they had plenty of that, you know, they’ve had their other vendors come in and do their market landscapes and all that. So.
Jason Gorman (36:02)
Yeah.
Jen (36:03)
That’s a good example of like very conventional help, you know, understand something about experience, figure out what it means. And we do that as collaboratively as possible. That sense making process is far more effective if I’m facilitating the client doing that rather than me just delivering recommendations. And then something comes out of that and whatever it is, it’s less about the artifact. Is it a playbook? Is it…
Jason Gorman (36:09)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Jen (36:30)
Is it a plan? Is it a map? Like it could be so many things. It’s all of those are just containers for the information that then guides or you know continues a process forward. And again, it’s learning in a way, but that’s a good example of what I would consider a kind of like I’ve just described like a process and you could turn that into the double diamond if you’re familiar with the double diamond, you know, or versions of it and all the other kind of design and strategy processes that are out there. Yeah, we did some research. We did
Jason Gorman (36:49)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (36:59)
some synthesis, I talk a lot about sense making and then decision making. You can talk about divergent and convergent phases. All of these apply. But I wanna contrast that with another kind of project that we do a lot and that is when someone says, I don’t need that. I just need your help figuring something out. We have to do X, Y, Z thing and we’re not sure how. And this is the most difficult kind of thing for me to explain because…
what does the case study look like? It’s different and unique for every client. So it’s like, we did this for this client, but it’s not what you need. So like, how do you even talk about it? But I’ll give the example of a large healthcare organization who we’d done some other work with them. So they knew a little bit about how we work and how I bring complexity science and learning into this process. And they just said, we need to engage a bunch of people from across the enterprise in a bunch of individual kind of topic deep dive.
workshop sessions, for lack of a better way to say it. They were like, we need to run a bunch of workshops and bring a bunch of people together to kind of put heads together on some things where the container is all that’s been defined. Get humans in a room. And I was like, do you want the outcome like to be, you know, what are you talking about for outcomes here? I mean, are you looking to have a roadmap at the end of each of these days for the next year? Are you looking to have ideas? You looking to have experiments identified? What are you looking for? And they were very open-ended about it.
Jason Gorman (37:56)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Jen (38:20)
That’s not very common. But the other reality is even when someone says, no, we don’t expect to have a roadmap at the end of a six hour session. But the answer is like, yes, secretly we do. So you have to kind of uncover what the real needs are, right? But there was, that was a good example where in that case, anybody who was kind of involved in the work would probably have described it as Jen and Topology came in and helped plan and design and then actively facilitate this highly collaborative
Jason Gorman (38:28)
Of course.
Jen (38:50)
very interesting series of workshops in some ways looked like most other workshops you’ve ever been to and in other ways was very different. And her facilitation style isn’t like her at the front of room being the expert. It’s kind of the opposite of that. If I do a good job, they forget I was ever there that day. But there’s, that’s it. They would have just said it was a workshop and it got brains together in a room.
And suddenly we all were able to connect the dots between our roles. Some of us didn’t realize other people, you know, had connections to the same particular thing we’re talking about. And the topics I’m bringing up, I’m leaving generic on purpose, but they were performance-based things that this organization needed to improve, you know, on certain metrics or performance indicators. And it was basically a function of bringing people together and letting the cognitive diversity of everybody in that room highlight where there were opportunities or where there was potential.
and what were the many small but right next steps and actions they could start taking the very next day to start making some meaningful progress. And so part of that, of course, when I do these kinds of projects is I deliver something afterwards, a summary of what we uncovered or whatever, but in this kind of a scenario, nobody waits around for that because if it’s done well, literally the next day, something’s already moving and I just send a PDF later that no one needs to open.
So I contrast those two kind of projects though, because those look very different in their structure. To me, they are both using the exact same set of skills, which is listening for, trying to understand where there are signals that we need to read that we’re not reading or uncover information we don’t have or fill in knowledge gaps or what have you. But more importantly, it’s also a matter of creating.
Jason Gorman (40:11)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jen (40:36)
What the other phrase I like to use a lot is creating a safe space for dangerous thinking. It doesn’t have to literally be dangerous, but in those workshop settings or in the work to do the research around this particular market for this tool, you can follow a very standard process that everybody has seen and known, you know, and then all you’re doing is really executing something that somebody else just doesn’t have the time for.
But in this case, and I think in what a lot of people who probably are gonna listen to this podcast are far more interested in is that extra layer of, I can bring in something, whether it’s an interesting perspective or a little provocation, or in my case, it’s more about like, we’re just gonna carve out a space where you can actually explore things that you didn’t get to explore elsewhere, or you wouldn’t feel safe exploring elsewhere in this organization, because you’d be sticking your neck out in a way that could be bad for your career. So outsiders get the,
opportunity to provide that more than insiders, unfortunately, but also fortunately, because that’s just the balance we strike. So I don’t know if that helps, if it answers what you’re asking, but yes.
Jason Gorman (41:33)
Mm-hmm.
It does. Yes, and
⁓ if I had many, many, many, many critiques of my own field ⁓ of just, I don’t know, learning experience design, learning operations, one of them is that we tend to rush much too fast to ⁓ converging on solutions.
And I don’t know why that is. I think maybe we’re not given the room oftentimes to do that kind of divergent activity that you’re talking about. And you are really one of the people that got me really thinking about taking that more seriously in my own practice and what we do at Jackrabbit. But I’m wondering if you could maybe think about the Venn diagram between
what you do and how you work your practice and then what a person who’s responsible for building some kind of training or learning program does and where is that overlap? What does that look like? Maybe what’s inside the little overlapping slice and maybe what’s the stuff that feels like it probably isn’t gonna come into the work of.
Jen (42:53)
give a fast answer, which is it’s a circle. It’s all overlapping. in the spirit, no, think it’s a good question. It’s worth it. It’s worth unpacking a little. No, no, stop. You’re doing great. You’re doing great. Getting around this. This is, ⁓ it’s actually really it’s an interesting question to unpack because truthfully, on a lot of the work that I do, and I think people who work in the way I do, if they’re good at what they do, they’re actually
Jason Gorman (42:56)
It’s a circle. No, no, no, go get it. No, it’s maybe it’s a terrible question.
No, no, I’m just being, trying to be self-deprecating in a funny way. That’s all.
Jen (43:23)
approaching most of these kinds of engagements in the same way as somebody who is thinking about who’s my audience and what are they bringing? They’re not empty boxes. We know this. They’re not blank slates. They’re not empty boxes. So much training and development is like, well, we just know that they don’t have this and then they need it. So it’s going from a not have to a have, but like we all know that’s completely reductionist and not at all accurate. So I’m not even going to entertain it, but.
We have to think about who the audience is, what are they bringing, what is the context? Everything is context dependent in a complex system. ⁓ And then with all of that in mind, what am I trying to help enable? And if you are designing a training or if you are trying to ⁓ design a research ⁓ process or you’re trying to outline an experiment or a probe or a prototype,
In any of these scenarios, you’re still operating in that kind of structure or the overlap in the Venn diagram. You know, the short version to answering this, as much as I hate to do it, is to say that these are all rhetorical arts or craft. And I say rhetorical as in like the actual ancient Roman and Greek art of rhetoric, like Aristotle rhetoric, not like art of lying rhetoric, but the actual craft of rhetoric.
where you have to understand your audience and you have to uncover and think through, know, rhetoricians would say lines of reasoning or arguments, but less about persuasion and more what are going to be the doorways or the portals in or the levers by which somebody can take something they didn’t have before and now use, know, whether it’s a skill, whether it’s knowledge, whether it’s a new tool they need to use, whether it’s information that comes from a research study. I think good
designers and strategists are naturally also, by virtue of being good at that, they have to be good at designing learning experiences. And I think good learning experience designers and everybody who would be in that field or adjacent is a good designer and strategist. So I only have joke when I say the Venn diagram is a circle, but I also think probably the place where they separate is how narrowly constrained
the people who are either sponsoring your work or who are setting out the objectives, how narrowly constrained their viewfinder is. So in my work and a lot of the design and strategy stuff that isn’t gonna use terms like learning, they’ve got a kind of bigger or different viewfinder around what they’re doing, which gives me a little more leeway to say, well, I don’t have to use this language, I’ll use this language or, know, et cetera, versus if someone is literally asking for.
learning experience or a training or development roadmap or whatever it needs to be, you are more constrained in the language that you use and in the activities or the methods by which you achieve it. But the philosophical approach to me is pretty much the same.
Jason Gorman (46:24)
I think in your LinkedIn profile, I’m not sure it’s there anymore, but I think you used to have the words chaotic good. Is that still there? It’s excellent. You want to make it clear to people that this is a space that you inhabit, you want to inhabit, and then you have a lot of value in that space. I think we have a hard time in general in…
Jen (46:32)
No, it’s still there. Still there. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (46:48)
learning the learning professionals, know a very a way way way too many people ⁓ on LinkedIn just we can just single that out will complain about about How they’re not being taken seriously enough by their own organization or they’re you know They’re not allowed to actually do the kind of work that you just described and it’s it’s endlessly and it should be endlessly frustrating To people and when people ask me, what do I do if I don’t have that?
Jen (47:10)
yeah.
Jason Gorman (47:18)
I give them ideas for advocating for it and then I say, if you don’t get those, then you need to quit your job. Because you’re never going to get your way. It’s just, it’s, this stuff is incredibly important, but you’re right. I think it does have a lot to do with what is the person in leadership position looking for. But I think there are, there are things that we should be able to do to help people understand why those things are valuable.
Jen (47:25)
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes. And I would also say this, everybody in my field actually has that exact same complaint. So you hear me, everybody who’s listening to me talk about how I’m talking about my field and who’s like, my gosh, I don’t want to be an instructional designer anymore. I want to go off and do agendas. No, because come to my LinkedIn feed and it’s also full of design and experience and systems and complexity folks who for various reasons are all lobbying the same complaints. What I do is being reduced and flattened down to X, Y, Z, right? Design is
Jason Gorman (47:47)
in.
is that right? Okay,
Yeah.
Hmm.
Jen (48:12)
having this existential crisis again, where it seems like not only 15 years ago, there were lots of arguments about the difference between UX and UI and design having a role, you know, a seat at the table and blah, blah, blah. This design is more than making things pretty. Yeah, well, we got a seat at the table and it’s a table that is basically controlled by shareholder driven, you know, profit motive quarterly earnings reports. So how is that going for you? But I think that it’s probably there’s a reason that this particular
Jason Gorman (48:24)
The seat at the table. Yeah.
Jen (48:41)
topic actually comes up in almost every conversation I have with folks like this. ⁓ I don’t think it’s in every single field, but it isn’t unique to design. It’s not unique to learning. It’s also very common in a lot of systems and complexity communities, people who have gotten very, very interested in either systems thinking or complexity science in recent years and the way you can apply that to all kinds of things, consulting management, et cetera. There’s always this kind of moment of like,
this is incredible or this work is so important, you know, and then fast forward, you know, cut to they don’t get what we do. I don’t know how to advocate them. The leaders should be doing this or that. And they flatten what I’m trying to do, or they constrain it to this. And what I have to say to that is ⁓ until the larger economic systems that we’re operating in shift, which I hope happens, I think there are things happening that will lead us to that, but that’s not happening anytime soon overnight, et cetera. So I am very much.
a proponent of a way of thinking about the present as the thing you have to work with. I know it sounds counterintuitive because future and future vision and the transformative power of imagination is really important. Visions of the future can help us get really, you know, like easily unstuck from status quo’s, but at the end of the day, the material that I have to design with is the present and the present has a dispositional state.
Jason Gorman (49:44)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jen (50:04)
which means there are certain things that are gonna be more doable than others. And if I can work with the dispositional state of the present or with the current energy of the system, then I can achieve what I wanna achieve more effectively. And so when it comes to that crisis of my leaders don’t understand the value of my work, they reduce what I’m supposed to do to being this small part of the process, but I should be involved over here in this bigger way or…
Nobody understands this craft or profession. It’s so constrained, it’s ineffective. First of all, y’all need to go find each other. So like learning and design and systems and complexity, people need to go find each other and realize you’re all sharing that frustration. But at the same time, like don’t wait for Superman. No one’s coming to come in and no magic leader anywhere is going to suddenly make it. I mean, there are definitely orgs that are exceptions and leaders that are exceptions, but I have long looked at this as
Jason Gorman (50:45)
here here.
Hmm.
Jen (51:00)
sort of similar to language learning, ⁓ where yes, you can teach someone grammar, yes, you can teach someone why it’s important to be able to speak a language or speak it correctly, but the more effective way is through immersion. So I have simply learned everything I’ve been curious enough to learn about, and I find ways to fold it into my practice. Do I tell my clients that what I’m doing is this kind of design or I’m involving a certain component of complexity science? No.
Jason Gorman (51:02)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (51:28)
Unless they’re interested and they want to hear about it. Usually they’re not. But I do it. I fold it into what I’m doing. And by virtue of people’s proximity to me and my work, they might sense you’re doing that a little differently than I would have anticipated. Talk to me about why. Can I learn more about this? And the folks who are interested, then it grows through proximity. They want to also be involved. And then the influence of a certain way of working has its own momentum. And you don’t have to wait for a C-suite executive to have the epiphany.
or the bravery to go against whatever conventional management wisdom might be and say, yeah, designers, learning professionals, et cetera, here you go, blank check, no timeline, do what you need to do that’s gonna be right for the customer or the learner. You don’t have to wait for that to happen. You kind of start to build the practice and then people kind of start through immersion and proximity to support the momentum or the flywheel. That is very abstract. Like I realize I’m speaking in like generalities, but I just have to honor.
Jason Gorman (52:09)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (52:27)
the frustration that you pointed out and it’s shared by so many people and it’s not a solution. But the reason I don’t feel bogged down by it is that I don’t, of course I’m outside of an organization. intentionally, if outside are on purpose, but I think that even then I still have to convince somebody else in the value of what I’m doing to invite me in and pay me for it. And I don’t need them to agree that design or learning or this or that is
Jason Gorman (52:40)
Yeah, right. Yep.
Jen (52:54)
the most important thing in the world, I just need them to trust that I can help them achieve whatever it is they’re trying to achieve. And then I go off and do exactly what I know needs to be done. And I earn the right to keep doing more of it. And I think a lot more people actually are a lot more capable of that than they recognize.
Jason Gorman (53:11)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that there’s an element to what you’re saying where it sounds like. ⁓
You don’t always have to ask for permission to go do the things. Go do the things. Prove that they’re useful. Don’t even do them formally. You can do them informally. Have all kinds of other things in your organization, other people, other ideas, inform what you’re doing.
Jen (53:32)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (53:32)
Don’t
go to your boss and ask them if it’s okay to do that. Just go ahead and do it and let it be part of what you do. And then down the line, you can expose some of those things. One of the things, I mentioned this earlier and I wanted to circle back around to it. I have a question about behavior change, but I don’t even know if it’s the right question to ask. So I’m actually gonna call an audible on myself. Here’s what we’re gonna do.
I
If behavior change is the right thing for me to ask you a question about, can you come up with the best question and then answer it? And if it isn’t the right question, can you come up with a better question? The reason that this is an important question, as I mentioned before, is that a lot of people in learning operations are being held accountable for some sort of measurable change, understandably. And I have…
I get it. I know why that’s true and it makes sense, but it’s hard. It’s really hard to measure change in this field. We’re not talking about like clicks on a web page. So when we’re thinking about change, should we be thinking about behavior change? What’s the right question and then how would you answer it? ⁓
Jen (54:52)
Really, you’re making me do a lot more work here, Jason. I’m just kidding. So is it the right question? Yes and no. ⁓ I think, and you’ve kind of alluded to this, do think behavior change and behavior itself as a target or metric is sexy and appealing because it is visible and measurable.
Jason Gorman (54:57)
Well, you know, I want people to get their money’s worth.
Jen (55:21)
And there are all these platitudes about like, can’t manage what you can’t measure. Bullshit, first of all, I call on that. But second, I understand the dynamic, which is we need to have some level of confidence that this thing we did or money we invested had some desirable outcome. And therefore, we have to know how to measure success. And then when you start talking about learning, we’re all in philosophy land. And does it feel good on the inside? Yes, great. That’s not going to cut it.
So I understand it and I actually think there are definitely some contexts and scenarios where behavior is a very good indicator of something that has changed and it has been a result of a learning process. So it’s not like I would throw it away as an indicator, but I would say it is but one thing and I would like more people to think a little bit more broadly about how you might measure.
learning. But the other thing is also just the notion of measurement in general. I’m sure many of your listeners are already familiar with Goodheart’s Law or whatever version of it out there they might have heard, which is any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. So is your goal to measure for informational and sort of, you know, guiding purposes? Or are you creating a target to use as a carrot or a stick?
to drive some kind of process. You know, in some ways, at least in the learning world, you can talk about formative versus evaluative, right? It’s not language I can use with a lot of people, but at least here, it’s the same idea. So I think behavior as a way of identifying what success can look like is meaningful, especially when you think about health and health-related behaviors, or you think about…
Jason Gorman (56:46)
Hmm.
Jen (57:12)
user or customer or learner driven behaviors. So you set the goal. You what I’d like to be able to do is have left foot independence. What’s my target behavior? That I can play this song at this speed with my left foot hitting the right beats. In that case, that’s meaningful to me, the learner, and it’s a visible measurable thing. So it might give me a bit of a motivational boost when I see that I’m actually making progress. I didn’t realize I was, but I measured my beats per minute and did it.
Jason Gorman (57:22)
Okay. ⁓
Mm-hmm.
Jen (57:41)
You know, so there’s value. But my contrast to that, my yes and slash let me contradict everything I just said is that behavior is actually a severely limited way of thinking about what actually happens when humans learn. That simple as that. A behavior is one of the most prominent aspects of most of the behavior change design practice and practitioners that I know and people that I really respect and have taught me a lot about that world. One of the first things they always highlight
Jason Gorman (57:55)
Hmm.
Jen (58:10)
is that if you’re going to identify behavior change targets, the actual behavior needs to be visible and measurable. Otherwise, it’s not a target for change. That makes a lot of logical sense, but it also constrains literally everything you’re doing to something that can actually show up as a change in behavior. And it kind of discounts anything that isn’t that behavior, changes in attitudes, changes of intentions, changes of the way you interact with other humans.
Jason Gorman (58:18)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (58:38)
all of which can have other effects on things. So to try not to make this go on too long, what I would say is the question, I don’t even know what the question should be, but I think the provocation should be to respond to behavior change with a bit of a like, yes, and also what else? Because there are a lot of domains where you can measure, and I’m saying measure, not make a target out of, but you can measure how effective something is
Jason Gorman (58:43)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jen (59:07)
in more narrative-based ways and indirect ways that will let you get at those things that are kind of intangible but still meaningful and still lead to desirable outcomes. Because look, at the end of the day, I mean, the equation is you’re trying to go from the current state to some future state that is for some reason more desirable. It’s as simple as that, right? You’re trying to go from current to preferred. Good old Herb Simon and his definition of design. So if you’re gonna do that,
Jason Gorman (59:28)
Mm. Mm. Yeah.
Jen (59:36)
How will you know if the future state you arrive at is more preferred or not? Usually we try to pre-define it. We can go, we hit it. There’s another way to do it. And that is to not do that, but to rather try things and interventions that you have reason to think could lead to preferred outcomes. And then along the way, pause and go, where are we right now? Is where we’re at better than where we were? Yeah? OK, then let’s keep going. If it’s not, OK, let’s try some other things.
Jason Gorman (59:42)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:00:05)
It’s a little bit like the difference between plotting that roadmap, you know, here’s my destination and I’ve plotted my course to get there. And then of course, you know, I’m going to drive along and then hit a mountain or hit a roadblock or hit something that I can’t drive through. And then realize I’ve got to go off course. And then I’ve lost track of everything versus I just know that I need to head north.
North is a better place to be, but it’s okay if I go this way, that way, this way, that way. And at every moment in time, stop and orient myself. Are we headed North? No. If we’re not headed North, but we’re still doing what we need to be doing to get to North eventually, okay. If not, let’s turn around and get going North. This is something that, mean, deserves way more conversation and I’m not doing it a lot of justice, but if any of your listeners are curious, there’s a concept called the vector theory of change. Guy named Dave Snowden and others have talked a lot about it. I think it’s compelling. I think it’s a nice way to contrast a more.
Jason Gorman (1:00:26)
Yeah.
Jen (1:00:53)
linear logical theory of change that most behavior change is built on. It’s more about momentum and direction than it is about desired end states being predefined. So that’s what we’ll say.
Jason Gorman (1:01:04)
So, let’s say I’m a VP at an 80,000 person organization.
Jen (1:01:10)
Yeah. Woof. Bummer. I’m just kidding.
Jason Gorman (1:01:12)
that
has, know, the organization just has an insatiable hunger for concrete metrics about everything. Just that’s what it does. And I know that I have to, that I’m responsible to certain metrics around people’s performance and their behavior on the job.
⁓
How would you counsel me to both, I can’t dodge, I can’t not do that, right? I have to these targets. But how do I do that kind of, I forget how you put it, that directional piece along the way?
Jen (1:02:01)
So in order to be able to do that, you have to have the ability, I know that phrase sense and respond I’ve used a few times is like everywhere now. It’s becoming a bit, I don’t know, its own stereotype. But I like to use that as a way to kind of talk about this and unpack what do those two words literally mean? In order to be able to navigate this increasingly volatile VUCA world, whatever.
to get into there, or just to understand that what you’re working in is probably a complex adaptive system. Not all workplaces and challenges are, but this is why complexity science I find so valuable these days, because most are. In order for that to be effective and to navigate effectively through those environments, the word sense, you have to somehow be able to sense what is happening in more real time and reliable ways. I’ll come back to that. And you have to go to respond to it.
Jason Gorman (1:02:52)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:02:54)
So even if
you’re really good at sensing what’s going on or reading the signals or measuring or tracking, whatever you need to track, if you can’t respond to it in an agile way and it takes you nine months to redo a strategy for something, then you’re in trouble. So it’s both pieces. And so my counsel for someone in that role, and this is one of the reasons I often put in my bio that I work with brave leaders because sometimes it’s an act of bravery to even go against conventional wisdom in the world of management science, but it actually boils down to figuring out how in your organization,
Jason Gorman (1:03:02)
Hmm.
Jen (1:03:23)
can you effectively sense what is happening? So if we’re talking about employees and performance or engagement, it doesn’t mean always having those metrics that we’re used to talking about be the carrot or the stick, but it could mean other ways of measuring how people are experiencing their work. that, you know, people go right to like, is it pulse surveys? Like, yeah, maybe if it’s effective, but there are actually lots of really good tools and methods out there.
something called like narrative inquiry or naturalized sense making that uses narrative processes where you can actually just solicit from your people quick stories about what it is like in their work, which sounds like, this is a little bit hokey and therapeutic, right? No, because actually en masse in like large quantitative scale, collections of that kind of insight, you will see strong hotspots and signals like,
this group or this segment or these people in these roles or these people in this of this tenure or whatever patterns are going to emerge. Those are going to be way more useful than a lot of the conventional metrics about performance. And then the other part of it is how do you respond when you see those signals? It’s not assign those guys a training, fire that group, put them on a PIP, whatever. It’s context dependent.
talk to those people and find out what is preventing them from doing their jobs more effectively or whatever it is you’re measuring. I went right to employee engagement, but that was just to keep it concrete. again, the advice is not really radically overhaul what you do, but is be a little bit more open to methods that are not using metrics as targets and really reinvest in the idea of measuring as temperature checking.
Jason Gorman (1:04:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Jen (1:05:12)
And
when you’ve got a better sense of it’s too hot over here, it’s too cold over here, you can then go figure out what do you guys need to be hotter or colder and trusting, distributing the decision-making power, giving people enough autonomy or agency, you know, up to a tolerable limit, like financially or otherwise, to do what they need to do to do their jobs effectively. Proves remarkably successful.
The hardest part of everything I’m talking about is not actually doing it. It is just this like leap of faith that I think it feels like to let go of a lot of the conventional ways people are taught to manage large organizations. And I have to acknowledge it’s not always doable because if you’re a VP in an 80 person thousand firm, you’re probably not the one who gets to decide that you are working with a bunch of other peer, you know, and probably a tier or two above you and then a number of people below you. And so
To that I would say, and I think your previous comment was really spot on, you don’t always have to make this a big thing that we all buy into and advocate a big change. Sometimes it’s just what is within your local sphere of influence and where can you start incorporating some of these kind of ideas just within what is yours. And if you’re a VP, that might be bigger. If you’re a junior level designer or learning person somewhere, it’s still you and two other people. Fine, start finding ways to experiment with what I’m talking about.
Jason Gorman (1:06:14)
Hmm.
Right.
Jen (1:06:36)
I also thought I would just mention too, I think people are really quick to think metric and think numbers. There is so much value to be had in the way that humans just naturally communicate about experience and performance. And there is so much rich data, and I said the word data, that you can get from collecting on an ongoing basis, not quarterly surveys, the kinds of experiences that people inside your company are having and the…
Jason Gorman (1:06:41)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:07:04)
the experiences that your customers are having and getting them to interpret their own experience is the key, right? Instead of us being the expert interpreters of that, which, know, in a research role is often what you’re doing, letting these people be the ethnographer of their own experience, doing that at a large quantitative scale, as I mentioned, you suddenly have more reliable data about what it means to be performing a job inside your company than any, you know,
Jason Gorman (1:07:04)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Jen (1:07:31)
Qualtrics or McKinsey oriented survey might tell you. there’s tons and tons of really good info about that. And if you, can send you some links you can put in like show notes if you want, but.
Jason Gorman (1:07:41)
That would be great.
I would love that. We have to get to the obligatory AI question.
Jen (1:07:47)
Pass.
Just kidding, go ahead. I’m game, I’ll give it a go.
Jason Gorman (1:07:51)
Oh, we talked a little bit about the past, we talked about the present. We should talk about the future.
Jen (1:07:56)
Future is a man-eating idol, man. I’m an illiterate Anyway, go ahead.
Jason Gorman (1:08:00)
Yeah, you know, I, this is the hardest question to answer, I think, ⁓ that I have asked anybody on this show, which is, what happens next? And let me ask you, in particular with you,
how do you think it will impact your work?
Jen (1:08:21)
I’m not really, it’s gonna sound so stupid. I kind of don’t care and I’m not paying attention to how I think it’s going to impact my work in the future. I’m paying attention to how it’s impacting my work right now. My work, but my clients and my partner’s work too. So I do care a lot about it. I’m paying attention to it and I’m using the tools and I’m, am definitely in the camp of.
I’m a skeptic, I’m a Luddite in some ways. I am also not head in the sand. And I think that AI is not unlike the internet. think what a time for us to be alive, Jason, that we get to live through two of these giant technological ontological shifts. What else is coming? One was enough for me. Thank you. yeah, ⁓ I definitely, I am basically not really spending much energy.
we should say in a predictive mode. And I know you’re not like asking literally for predictions, but I don’t invest a lot of energy in prediction in domains where the complexity is high because it to me seems like a waste of energy, literally. I put my energy more in sensing what is happening immediately right now and the disposition of what I am sensing. So, you know, I think there’s a bubble. I think the bubble will be corrected.
Jason Gorman (1:09:25)
Hmm.
Jen (1:09:41)
I don’t think AI is gonna just like disappear. And I think that probably what will likely happen, here I am contradicting myself, making predictions, is that I think not right now, but eventually organizations will have to kind of figure out how AI fits in an organic way and how to support humans using AI in an organic way, not mandating and not using it as an excuse.
Jason Gorman (1:09:50)
Thank
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:10:09)
to do things they do or don’t want to do between layoffs and other things. ⁓ But I think that’s a ways away because we’re still in shiny tech mode and it’s such an easy tool for folks who are very techno centered and future centered. It’s like you can’t see anything beyond it. So the prediction I am not even willing to make, but I’m making is that I think that it’s like here to stay.
⁓ I don’t think that it’s going to radically overhaul the way that we work with each other in the same way that I don’t think the internet did. And you’re like, Jen, what are you talking about? Of course the internet did. Nah, humans still interact with each other. Humans still get together to solve problems together. ⁓ What the internet did was connect us in ways we weren’t connected so that information can flow more easily and quickly. And that has had both wonderful, amazing effects. And it also has
Jason Gorman (1:10:39)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:11:08)
terrible effects. And I think the same parallel thing will be true with AI. So the answer really is I’m not invested in trying to predict the future. I’m much more interested in paying attention to where it’s at right now. And right now in most of my work and for most of my clients, it truly is still play with this and figure out how to make yourself more efficient. And all it’s really doing is making what people already have been doing either a little faster or a little slower, depending on the task.
Jason Gorman (1:11:10)
Mm-hmm.
Jen (1:11:38)
And I think right now it’s washing out to about a sum of zero, but for whatever the cost of the AI was, minus whatever the cost of the people they’ve laid off is. And that calculus works out differently in every organization. So eventually I think there will be more work to be done in terms of helping organizations reground themselves in good collaboration. But I think that’s going to take a little while for people to think about.
Jason Gorman (1:11:59)
Hmm.
Your answer leads really nicely into my last question. If I do this thing, I’ll ask you for your question once we’re off air. I ask everybody to come up with a question to ask the next guest. And I have a question from a person. His name is Brick Meyer. He’s director of L &D at HeatSpring, which does a lot of training for people who are in clean energy, clean technology.
Jen (1:12:07)
Ooh. Okay.
Jason Gorman (1:12:30)
⁓ Brick’s a very thoughtful guy. had a great question that I thought would be interesting for you to answer. So here’s his question. Looking beyond the current AI hype, when will we know that student learning has fundamentally changed because of AI? What might be evidence of that change?
Jen (1:12:48)
This question takes as a given that AI is going to fundamentally change student learning, doesn’t it?
I don’t think I, I don’t think I don’t think I grant that. I want to honor it. want to honor it. ⁓ but I’ll, I’ll give both sides of the answer. So a, I don’t, I don’t think that’s a given. I actually don’t think, but again, somebody who has just sat through this episode kind of already gets the philosophical stance here. ⁓ so I probably don’t have to belabor it. I think that learning is an innate thing that all living
Jason Gorman (1:12:52)
I guess it does. Yeah, I don’t know. All right, keep going. You don’t have to. Brick’s not here. Yeah.
Jen (1:13:21)
and maybe even non-living, I don’t know, things possess. I think that a lot of what we have built as structures for ourselves can sometimes make it hard to stay connected to that innate instinct. Instinct’s the word I probably want here. ⁓ If we didn’t have the instinct to learn, then evolution would not happen and nobody would exist. But I think because we have built structures between some forms of schooling and then other parts of how we engage in the world, we kind of disconnect ourselves from that instinct. So.
A lot of the work I often talk about, people have heard me say, is not teaching anybody anything new. It’s more like just reconnecting something that’s been disconnected or unkinking the hose so that you get better at learning faster and then you can be doing all the things we’ve talked about today inside your org without much help. But to that end, I think that AI simply becomes one of many other tools or interfaces or lenses that we put on.
the process by which we engage with each other to engage in that adaptation that I talked about earlier. I don’t think this is going to sound insane, but bear with me. I do not think learning has fundamentally changed or will ever fundamentally change when you define it as the core instinct to engage with and respond to and adapt in response to your environment. That’s the same for us now as it was millennia ago. So to give AI this like,
power that it’s going to somehow change us at our core evolutionary DNA, I think is well, wrong. But I also don’t think that’s what he meant. So if I now honor what the intention is largely like, is AI going to change the way education looks in like modern society? Probably. I think the evidence of it having a fundamental shift for us isn’t going to be in like what school looks like or with how, you know, people seek information. I think the real, the real sign would be
If we figure out a way to not use AI to replace parts of the human information processing process, but rather to enable more natural human apprenticeships in every way. I don’t mean apprenticeship just like in trades and stuff, but the most evolutionarily efficient form of learning, know, cross transgenerational knowledge building and all of our various fields and disciplines.
Jason Gorman (1:15:30)
Mm. Mm.
Jen (1:15:43)
always operates in some form of apprenticeship, formal or informal. And I think as long as AI is still replacing people and making that harder, the shift won’t be there. But if we can figure out how to have AI make it easier for humans to apprentice with each other, then it will probably satisfy the criteria that I think he was probably asking about. So that’s my best attempt.
Jason Gorman (1:16:09)
Thank you. That’s great. We’ve come to the end. This has been great. We could obviously keep going. So we’re gonna have to have you back.
Jen (1:16:13)
Love it.
Yeah, we’ll do a round two.
Jason Gorman (1:16:24)
We’ll do a round two. But for now, I have to just really express my appreciation for coming on, doing this show with me. It’s always great to see you, Jen. By the way, our favorite coffee shop, it was rated like 76, like number 76 in the country. It’s some flowers recently, yeah. Yeah, so we’ll have to go and enjoy that again soon. Anyway.
Jen (1:16:34)
My pleasure.
Really? Oh, nice. I did not see that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I
was going to say, if anybody wants an idea of what coffee chats with me and Jason look like, it was basically this. So, and I recognize this one may be a little atypical compared to the other folks you chat with. I don’t know. It’ll depend on who your other guests are, but I’ll be very curious. Yeah. Cool. That’s awesome.
Jason Gorman (1:16:55)
Yeah, yeah, indeed.
People from, yeah, really different backgrounds, actually. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Well, thanks again, really appreciate it.
Jen (1:17:12)
I’ll be back anytime. You know where to find me. Thanks.
Jason Gorman (1:17:15)
All right.