It's time for another mini-series, and this time we're looking at all things operational learning. We start the series by discussing one area that makes operational learning so crucial - complexity science.

(Transcript Start)


[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to

[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name. What a dumb

[00:00:07] spk_0: names. So stupid.

[00:00:22] spk_1: All right. Welcome back. Fun. Fact of the day every time before we press record, we get the giggles and it takes like 15 seconds and multiple tries to get it started. But we're, we're back episode 11. And it's super exciting because we're starting another mini series. We are. You knew this,

[00:00:43] spk_0: I mean, no, no, sorry. The inflection of my voice,

[00:00:47] spk_1: I'll start. We're starting another mini series. We are marginally better. Um So we're gonna do, we talked about on last episode, we didn't dive deeply into what a learning team was and we thought about it some more and said, well, maybe we'll do a mini series about operational learning, which we're going to start in today's episode. But rather than go through it from like here's what operation learning is and here's how you go and do it. We're going to spend this episode maybe next episode talking about the underlying science as to why operation learning is important and how you can do it. So that'll be the mini series. I'm not sure how many episodes will be just yet, but we're, we're pumped, we're excited. But before we jump into that and talk about some of those underlying layers, we owe you some homework answers.

[00:01:36] spk_0: Did you do the homework?

[00:01:38] spk_1: I thought about it. I thought about a time when I might have to do the homework.

[00:01:45] spk_0: Ok. So, so the homework was uh we had been talked talking about the idea of agency and allowing people to take ownership. And so our homework was trying to create space for people to take ownership rather than sort of try to force it upon someone of like, hey, you're gonna go do this. Um Meaning we have a plan, right? So we take a time in our life where a plan has been created. And then rather than delegating elements of the plan, if we are person in charge of that plan, instead, we invite people to uh own pieces that they feel like they can own. So they make the decision on what they want to go do.

[00:02:26] spk_1: And I thought about a time when that made sense to me, um which I guess it makes sense all the time. But a a good work example that, you know, is, is not safety related when I was in my last company, I was promoted as a part of our merger to lead the new business side of the world. And I had a couple of managers reporting to me and we realized that while we were excited about the merger, we didn't really know how to convey the value of what this merger would bring to customers or prospective customers. And we needed to take the time to define it. So we sat down and said, right, well, if we're going to hire more people, because we're going to grow as a result of this merger, we're gonna be able, we're gonna need to communicate to them that people that we're hiring and our potential customers, why this merger is so special, the most special merger ever. And we decided we would create sort of a couple of one cheaters that maybe defined what the value is going to be on a piece of paper that you could learn from. And we, we determined through the conversation that we probably needed different, you know, one cheaters for each sort of vertical we sold into and one of them is going to be technology, one media and one finance. And we all agreed that was important. And I said, great. So room of people, what parts do you want to own? And it worked out that each one of the managers actually had sort of a specialization in each one of those areas. And they were quick to say, I want to take the one that I'm really good at because I'm really good at it. And I can kind of use that both to not have a super hard time. Creating this thing, but also bring a ton of value with what we're going to create. So that worked really well. It was very easy because they were very passionate about being able to say I have expertise, I'm gonna go be able to use this and I let them own how they wanted to create it. And then I just kind of took everything and put it onto a PDF, took full credit for it, gave no credit to that group and it's not all that. But uh yeah, that was, that was kind of one of the experiences that I had.

[00:04:24] spk_0: Yeah. So you didn't do the homework, but you did the homework is what I'm hearing.

[00:04:29] spk_1: I've done, I did the homework before I even knew it was homework. I was like, this is going to come up again some point on a podcast that I will host. Um OK, so that was last time's homework. Um And at the end of the last episode, I said we owed everyone a brief overview of what a learning team was, right?

[00:04:51] spk_0: Because we, we gave an example of a learning team. Actually, that was, we gave a, a story that was part of a learning team. But then we didn't really take a lot of time to talk about what a learning team is. So, is that, is that what we should do right now?

[00:05:06] spk_1: Yeah, that's why we brought it up. We didn't bring it up to ignore it. Um

[00:05:10] spk_0: OK, so a learning team is uh a type of operational learning. So it's got a little bit of structure to it. So in order to understand a learning team, we probably have to talk about what operational learning is and operational learning is learning directly from the folks that are executing a task at any level in an organization to learn from their perspective, what it takes to do it like, what does it take to actually get that work done? A learning team just creates a little bit of structure around that, right? So in terms of how many people you'd normally talk to, maybe how long you'd normally talk to folks, how you kind of set up the discussion and make sure that you have somebody sort of sponsoring the discussion. And oftentimes organizations use learning teams and this little bit of structure in order to start operational learning, right? Because it's a kind of like form to leave form. It's a place to begin figuring out how you operationally learn and many organizations do it as a way to respond to events. So we already know that there's some sort of brittleness in our system, there's something that we want to learn about. There is a task or a process that we want to learn about because we've had an event. And so organizations have this bit of structure called the learning team in order to start to operationally learn about what's going on there. Yeah,

[00:06:28] spk_1: because it can feel, I mean, we talk about it in such broad strokes, comes to operation learning and how you can do it everywhere that you're doing work and you can learn from those doing the work and it just seems like a huge leap to make and learning teams is a pretty good place to start, right? Because it's got some structure to it. You can step into it, you can give it a shot and like you said, form to leave form, which I'm not gonna take the time to explain. But it took me a while to get what that actually meant. The 1st 67 times you used it uh which is probably three days for you. So

[00:07:01] spk_0: yeah, and but you said something important because because you said that operational learning, right can feel overwhelming because you can use it anywhere. And I think that also the opposite can feel true, meaning it either can feel overwhelming or it can feel like something that we've are already doing because it's hard to tell the difference on the face of it. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between OK, what is operational learning versus like what's just having a conversation with someone? Like I talk to people all the time. So what, what makes operational learning, operational learning? Like what makes it any different than anything else we've ever done before? You

[00:07:39] spk_1: know what's really fun about this? I have a strange feeling that you're going to tell us. It's almost like I, I feel like it's what's coming next. No,

[00:07:49] spk_0: just give it a, we probably should actually talk to that. Um, because so maybe what we do, we'll give people kind of the pieces of what operational learning is. But then I, I do think you're right that we have to talk a bit about complexity in order to make even operational learning, make sense. OK? So operational learning, learning from the people who are executing the work, right? But there are a few uh ingredients maybe that make it different from other things that we've done. The first ingredient or piece of it is the fact that uh we want to be able to be teachable. And I, I think we, we should give credit to Bob Edwards for those words because I, I would say, hey, we need to be able to ask questions differently and respond to things differently. And Bob has an amazing way of taking all of the very long ways that I have to say something and make it make a lot more sense. So his words are, we need to know how to be teachable as facilitators and as leaders in an organization. So that's element kind of number one or ingredient, number one to operational learning. And then in order for people to be able to teach us, we actually have to create an environment where people are able to do that some people call that creating psychological safety. I really wish I remember who said this so that we can give credit to it. But I don't remember who said it. And we've tried to give credit to a bunch of people and nobody will take it. So um uh creating conditions for candor. Um that, that is a, a terminology that I think really helps with this aspect of psychological safety. So that's element number two conditions for Candor. And then there's sort of some structural pieces of the order in which we do things one we learn first. And in operational learning, we're learning about what it takes to get something done, even if an event is the reason that we came together. Um we want to value soak time. So soak time is just kind of downtime between pieces of the conversation where in operational learning, you're going to have multiple times that you're meeting or talking with a group or with an individual and between that is soak time that just allows us to kind of process information as it's happening. Doesn't put a lot of pressure on us to try to come up with either all of the information or solution sets right away. Um Another structural piece is defining the problems as opposed to just jumping right towards trying to solve something as we actually take the time to articulate what are we trying to address? And it's usually multiple things. It's hardly ever one, I don't think it's ever been one thing, at least that I've been part of, um, and then try storming, mean, actually taking the time to try out little pieces, little pilots of things to see if they're going to work. Which last episode we had a kind of a story that was all around a bunch of different tri storming opportunities. Right. So those are the pieces did. I, I mentioned all 66 of them, six of them. Um And that's what makes up operational learning. That's what makes it a little bit different than a regular conversation. And I think probably all of those pieces require some more explanation than just this snippet that we did um which

[00:10:56] spk_1: we will definitely go into. But I think we, we talk about this a lot, which is we, we want operational learning or learning teams to feel like the natural byproduct of pushing against your normal thought process. So sort of transitioning from, well, I need to go do an investigation to, if I believe the underlying principles of hop the science behind it, then I probably want to go and do that differently. And the way I do that differently is operation learning, right? So we got to talk about the elements before and let people determine if they even want to go and try operational learning,

[00:11:31] spk_0: right? Because I, I think kind of on the face of it, we you could theoretically go say, you know, here's a bunch of steps. This is how you would ask questions differently. This is like how you'd operationally learn. But to your point, I'm not sure that it has nearly as much value as understanding what, what is operational learning trying to accomplish that we haven't accomplished in the past or maybe that we were accomplishing but didn't have the right language or, or words to explain what it was. Um And why does it

[00:12:02] spk_1: matter and why does it matter? And so we always find ourselves going back to complexity science almost every time when we start with. Why? Right.

[00:12:11] spk_0: Yeah. Complexity science is as far as I can understand the basis for why anything like operational learning makes any sense to do. And so we go, do you have like a drum roll or like a come on, you've got a bunch of different buttons but lots of different

[00:12:31] spk_1: right now that the device we use to capture everything is on change my voice mode. And I don't think we want to experiment with that. I'm pretty sure. But, but are you, are

[00:12:43] spk_0: you a positive

[00:12:44] spk_1: point in this series in the mini series of operational learning? I will use that and change my voice and we'll see if it works and then everyone will stop listening. Right. Start over. We'll do it again.

[00:12:58] spk_0: All right. So we're just gonna have to imagine a drum roll then

[00:13:01] spk_1: leading into it.

[00:13:03] spk_0: Well, if you did it, I mean, hopefully the microphones would be good enough. It wouldn't even pick it up if you did the drum roll.

[00:13:08] spk_1: I don't know. I hope so.

[00:13:12] spk_0: All right. So pretend drum roll moving into complexity, complexity science, because complexity is actually the reason why it would make sense to try to understand what it takes to get work done. Even if the reason why we think we need to understand that is to solve what feels like a discrete problem, meaning like we had an event, something didn't go to plan something went wrong. And yet what we're offering up in this space is to say, even if that's true, it would be incredibly helpful for us to be talking about what it takes to get a job done as opposed to just focusing on what went seemingly wrong in that moment in time. And we ask people a lot like when we're out having a conversation around this, like why they think that's true? And we get a lot of like interesting answers. So we'll say we'll pose the question is, hey, why do you think it might be true that you'd want to understand what it takes to get a job done as opposed to just focusing on the event? Do you remember any of the answers? We sometimes get met? Oh man,

[00:14:22] spk_1: let me think.

[00:14:24] spk_0: Uh I'll, I'll throw out a few. Um It puts people at ease. That's one of the answers that people say keep going um, they say, like you can, you can sort of trick people into telling you things that they didn't mean to tell you. That's another answer. We get, um, we get people saying that, um, people don't know what's important to talk about. So talking about things broader is helpful. Um, what else do we get? There's a lot of underlying tones of trickery that often people think that that's the reason, like you can ease somebody into a discussion, you can sort of lull them into a false sense of comfort and then, and then really squeeze the answer out of them once, once they trust you. Um, which

[00:15:16] spk_1: it reminds me of early, right out of college. I was working in retail and we had to work with loss prevention anytime there was an incident. And typically the incident, unfortunately, we, they really cared, it was an employee stealing something and they had strategies and one of those strategies was, hey, look, I, I mean, look, sometimes we just forget and it's, it's, it's bad to steal a lot of things, but I mean, sometimes we steal one or two things, right? That's not so bad. I'm your friend and like

[00:15:45] spk_0: good cop instead of good cop.

[00:15:46] spk_1: Like I know what you're doing.

[00:15:49] spk_0: I gonna lull you into this.

[00:15:50] spk_1: But it, it does feel like that. It feels like the is if we make them comfortable and make them feel that they can trust us,

[00:16:00] spk_0: then they'll tell us their

[00:16:00] spk_1: deepest dark show, as we said, the smoking gun. Yeah, it was, uh, the candlestick in the, in the library like that. That's what they're gonna tell us. And that's just that.

[00:16:11] spk_0: So for clarity, that's, that's not the reason, that's not the reason that we operationally learned. Um, we operationally learn because, um, the relationships between things in real life are not nearly as simple and causal as we tend to simplify them in our mind. Um Actually, for most of us, many of us, maybe all of us, I'm not sure. Um We're, we're taught to see the world as uh an ordered system, um which we're going to throw out some terminology here and do a little bit of explanation of the terminology. Um But we're, we're taught to see the world as uh having discrete cause and effect. Um Like, um we're almost taughtt to see the world as though everything is a machine. Um and machines actually, they follow the laws of physics, right? So it's fantastic because they are ordered systems and they do have discrete cause and effect meaning if something breaks and you have a machine not function, you can go find something causal, right? You can find the broken thing, you can fix it and it's going to work again

[00:17:15] spk_1: and, and those range, right? So you have very simple ones like a mouse trap where you and I could look at it and be like, I think that's broken, I mix it and I mean,

[00:17:24] spk_0: you could have

[00:17:25] spk_1: and then there's complex things or sorry, there's complicated things, not complex things, complicated things that we need help with. We need Bob Edwards to come in and say this, say fix a car that I just,

[00:17:38] spk_0: I just open the hood and look at him like I don't, I don't make

[00:17:41] spk_1: your fist. No,

[00:17:43] spk_0: not again. Yeah. So you need somebody with expertise. And oftentimes if something is very complicated, if you have an ordered system that you know, it has a, a lot of pieces to it, right? A lot of different subsystems, you're gonna need multiple subject matter experts, right? You're gonna need maybe somebody who understands the mechanical pieces and somebody understands maybe the electronic interfaces and um you're not gonna have one person that's gonna know all of it. But those are all ordered systems and the characteristics of order systems are fantastic because they are predictable. They're predictable because cause and effect is, is static. It's, you are going to have a cause and an effect. And although the more complicated the ordered system gets, the more complicated those relationships get, they are still all knowable. And if you have enough brains and the right brains in a room, you can actually predict all the different failure modalities when we're in an ordered system. But we function as humans in complex adaptive systems. We're interfacing with mechanical areas, right? We're interfacing with things that fall into the ordered system. But our interface and our relationships with each other within an organization is a complex adaptive system. And the relationships and complex adaptive systems are not nearly as simple as that. You don't have cause and effect existing the same way as it does in an ordered system. Meaning like you could make a change and think, you understand how that change is going to affect things and it could be wildly different than the way that you predicted it. And as hard as we try to predict those changes, we, it is not all knowable, you can see patterns, right? And you can recognize patterns but everything is constantly changing and moving. Um It is not, it doesn't really matter how many really, really smart brains you put in a room to try to predict things. The closest that we get is uh being able to see patterns of what is happening and not being able to predict exactly what will happen in the future. What that means in terms of if we have something quote unquote break, meaning if we have an event and it's not a purely mechanical thing, right? It's not just a piece of equipment that has failed. Um There isn't, uh that one thing that you can go fix, it's actually, uh maybe a better way of thinking about failure in a complex adaptive system is it's, um, it's a perfect storm. It's a, it's a lot of stuff

[00:20:07] spk_1: combination of normal

[00:20:09] spk_0: variability. Yes. I think, er, Doctor Eric Nele helps with that terminology for us. It's just, it's a combination of like, mostly very, very normal things that even one like in and of themselves, those normal things would not usually be considered a problem. It's the combination of a bunch of kind of seemingly normal things that leads to the problem. So when we get to thinking about operational learning what we're trying to understand is the seemingly normal things. And we're trying to understand the range of those seemingly normal things. And one of the easier ways to talk about that is by just having people teach you about what it takes to get something done because you could have good days, you can have bad days, you're dealing with a lot of different variables, you're adapting, you're, you're constantly trying to create success and in telling the stories of that you are articulating that normal variability. And maybe it would be helpful for us to just give like one example for people to think about

[00:21:15] spk_1: before we get into this.

[00:21:19] spk_0: So if, if all of this sort of this talk of order systems and complex systems isn't making a lot of sense. Uh The example that I hold on to that helps me a bunch is just thinking about like my morning routine and what it takes to either like get to work or get to, you know, wherever you go in the morning and that on any given day, you could have a really, really good day in which a bunch of things seem to go well, and you're like ahead of plan ahead of schedule, um, you could theoretically arrive somewhere early if you wanted to and then you can have examples of really bad days, um, where you're not had a plan and, and no matter how hard you try, you're probably not going to get to wherever you're trying to go on time and then you have everything in between and there's a bunch of little tiny pieces that make up that reality, right? Everything from whether your alarm goes off, whether you woke up early before your alarm, whether or not you were excessively tired or not excessively tired in terms of your relationship with that alarm, everything about what you need to do in terms of feeding yourself or not, feeding yourself before you leave the house in terms of your relationships with other people in your house and whether you have kids that you're dealing with or not dealing with or whether they're not, you know, you have a bunch of things that you have to execute to get the house ready for you to leave in terms of your transportation methods and the, whether your car is working or maybe you have a bus schedule that you're, or maybe there's traffic, maybe there's not traffic, there's all of these different pieces and if they all come together and they're all working really well or maybe even overperforming, man, you're having a great morning. Things are cruising. It feels like it's like

[00:22:54] spk_1: you, you wake up before the alarm, your kids are up, their lunches are packed. Um, the car is ready. I mean, you, he had foresight into like making sure everything was organized. The dog runs outside, goes to the bathroom, runs back inside, uh is goes right to sleep again. So everything's calm and you get out ahead of schedule. No traffic. Great day, great day. And there's the opposite where it's uh you sleep past your alarm. The kids don't want to get up. They're fighting about everything. There's no food ready, but you have to make some real quick. The dog gets out when you let him outside, he runs away. Uh, there's traffic, the car doesn't start and now we're late and then there's the ones we deal with probably most days, let's say 99% of the time is maybe you slept past your alarm. But the kids are awake and you did pack your lunch and the dog's ok and there's a little bit of traffic. That's a normal

[00:23:43] spk_0: day, right? But you, you adapt, you are able to create success and you're still there within whatever given time frame you had to be. So operational learning is the equivalent of understanding what it takes to get to work, including those good days, including those bad days with the the hopes of being able to create enough of a mental picture that you can, you can understand what somebody is dealing with. And those things that we're dealing with are oftentimes that normal variability. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the kind of the beginning of the beginning of operational learning in terms of even the beginning of understanding complexity.

[00:24:24] spk_1: I think it's a, it's a good place to stop for today because we're going to give some homework. And I think we'll probably talk a little bit more about complexity next time and, and we'll keep the subject rolling. So uh we have some, some homework.

[00:24:39] spk_0: Should I tell people what it is or should they just guess

[00:24:43] spk_1: it's complex? So you have to guess the homework, that's how this is showing you.

[00:24:48] spk_0: So part of us identifying and really understanding the fact that we are in this complex adaptive system is to be able to see that sometimes we oversimplify things, right. So we like to believe we're in sort of this predictable ordered system where you can know things and you can always make sure your outcomes are positive outcomes. And so we just want to take a minute to try to identify a place where maybe we are incorrectly oversimplifying something. So we want an example of a time that you're experiencing or maybe you're seeing somebody else experience where we have oversimplified a cause in terms of why we think something is going wrong.

[00:25:36] spk_1: Let's quickly quickly show that based in the morning. Right. So today you, you came over so we could record this podcast if we, if you were late. And my question to you was Andy, why were you late?

[00:25:49] spk_0: I would tell you, it's because I had to drop off the laundry to get it laundered at, for the airbnb. And, um,

[00:25:57] spk_1: it was already too long. I just wanted to say we

[00:26:01] spk_0: had, I had to drop off the laundry and I had to drop off the laundry and that's why I was late. Ok.

[00:26:04] spk_1: And so next time you're coming over, make sure you drop off the laundry earlier. So you're not late again. Boom. Done over. Simplified the heck out of that. Now, if I wanted to do it, the, the way that we're saying as I would say, hey, teach me what it's like to get over here, uh, when we have to record a podcast. What's it like for you to

[00:26:21] spk_0: do that? Oh, my goodness. You don't have enough time for what it's like if I unpacked everything that I had to navigate this morning in order to even get here with enough mental capacity to even begin to do a podcast, it would take another 25 minutes to even start to explain all of the things that I had to navigate, including up and including to the fact that I thus far this morning have reorganized two rooms in my house and wasn't even sure. If I was going to have a car to use to get here, that's just two of the variables that had to happen this morning for me to get here.

[00:27:00] spk_1: I have no further questions. That's it. Uh Thank you for listening and we'll pick up on this complexity science and operation learning uh mini series next time. Thank you all. Take care.

[00:27:21] spk_0: Well, that's

[00:27:23] spk_1: it. Yep. Another one in the books we did it.

[00:27:27] spk_0: If you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website www dot hop podcast dot com.

[00:27:39] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A ST dot com. It's still

[00:27:46] spk_0: such a stupid name.

[00:27:48] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.