#120—Matt Beane: Mastering the Learning Gap: Skill Building in an AI-Augmented World

Matt Beane, is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has conducted extensive field research with robots and AI seeks to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use in the workforce. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the TED stage.  Curiously enough, 2012 he was also selected as a “Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer.” 

Matt took a two-year hiatus from his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup.  All this is testament to his passion for bridging what he calls the “master-apprentice gap.”  In this discussion, we dive deep into topics from his book, The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.
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In this episode, Matt shares: 

• His concept of “the skill code,”— and the 3 Cs needed to ensure skills are able to transfer between humans
• The setbacks organizations could face if they don’t address the widening gap that is preventing upcoming workers from gaining skills from more experience workers. Imagine what happens if – doctors, lawyers, engineers, chefs, and other apprenticeship-heavy professions are unable to build bench skills
• What science and psychology teach us about how humans have traditionally learned and developed
• The steps business leaders can take to ensure that this novice-expert gap remains manageable

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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:13—Introducing Matt+ the topic of today’s episode
3:18—If you really know me, you know that...
5:07—What's your definition of strategy?
05:50—Matt shares what lead him to the subject his research and latest book 
11:20—Learning skills through a three-tiered approach: See one, do one, teach one
14:48— Defining skill vs knowledge
16:38—3 Cs: Challenge
21:35—3 Cs: Complexity 
23:42—3 Cs: Connection
28:48—The impact of AI on capability building
31:41— Organizational strategy for skill preservation
34:12—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?
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Additional Resources:
Personal site: www.mattbeane.com
Link to book: The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbeane
Twitter: https://x.com/mattbeane

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Matt, thank you so much for being here with us. I'm so excited for this conversation. I enjoyed reading your book. I enjoyed listening to podcast and interviews, there's so many places we can go. What I love about your work is that there are people who write things because it's a topic that's needed. Right? And there are people who research something, and you've been researching this for a long time before it was known necessarily that it was needed. Right? And so now it is more important than ever. So I'm excited to unpack that with you.
 
 I wanna open up with 2 questions I ask everyone. Before we get into it. The first 1 is just for us to get to do you a little bit. Personally, we have nothing to do it. All with your work is if you could complete the sentence for me.  If you really know me, you know that.
 
 Matt Beane: I am an absolute science fiction obsessed geek.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: What's a recent science fiction book or movie or show that you would recommend.
 
 Matt Beane: Thank you so much for giving me the chance to give a great shout out to a book called There Is No Antimemetics Division.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: What? What does Antimemetics mean?
 
 Matt Beane: The author's name is, contains vowels. QNTM. There Is No Antimemetics Division, I promise you anyone listening, that if you have even the mildest itch around having your brain melted in a reality enhancing way, this book will scratch that itch.
 
 It's some of the most creative writing that I have ever seen in my entire life. This person has written other books, but this 1, and I'm not no spoilers, will upend. It will just make you uncomfortable. It will change what you think might be the fabric of reality. It's science fiction in a way that you've never quite experienced science fiction.
 
 I'm always looking for ways of thinking or perceiving the world that step outside what we think of as the edges of what humans can even think at all. And there are people out there like Ted Chang. So folks might have seen the movie arrival that was based on 1 of his short stories. He's definitely up there for me. Greg Egan's another mathematician in Australia who writes these incredible mind bending stories.
 
 They're great, but this piece sits apart from the rest for me in the last 10 years.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Let's talk about strategy then. What is your definition of strategy?
 
 Matt Beane: The means of approaching an unknown or unfamiliar goal that allows people to get enrolled and get involved in support, approaching that goal. Right? It's not the goal itself, only it's also the tactics that'll get you there.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And I hear it being a communal effort as well or a communal conference patient enrolling people in the solution on gathering? Or I
 
 Matt Beane: think it's probably also meaningful for an individual to think the strategy in their own life and so on, but I don't think that's the It's a different animal, I think, when it becomes collective.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Alright. So I'm eager to get into the content of your research and book. So when do you open that up for us by bringing us into bring us to the operating table? Where did this where did it start that you became interested in this question?
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. I was doing a study of robotic telepresence in a post-surgical ICU in 20 12 Wow.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: As we do.
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. Occasionally, on the night shift, no less. And in the middle you know, it's probably 02:19 in the morning. 1 of the critical care nurses said, hey. Do you wanna go walk in the operating room?
 
 They're all closed? I'd become friendly with a number of them. I'm like, yeah. Sure. And she said, let me show you the robot.
 
 And I'm like, the what now? Because they all knew that I studied robots. I was the robots in work guy. So she her name is Daniel. She's like, let me go walk you down the hall.
 
 And we poke our head in this room, and I see easily a thousand pound 4 armed robotic apparatus up against the wall with its arms curled up like 4 snake heads ready to strike. And in the other corner of the room, and she said, there's the control console. And I look over there, and there's another, like, 800 pound thousand pound sort of a small, like, a bumper car style thing that you'd rest your face in with 2 windows for me. Look. Like a faceplate.
 
 I'm I
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: was like, I picture, like, maybe, like, when you're getting your eye exams sometimes you Yeah. Well, they just put your face into
 
 Matt Beane: Exactly. Or these days, picture an Apple Vision Pro or Sure. Sure. Sure. 2.
 
 I was a VR nerd at the time. So I'm like, I see that. That's a Stereoscopic, like a display, but also had these intricate hand controllers underneath tucked underneath there. You'd sit down at it and it had foot pedals, even I noticed foot pedals. And this thing controls that thing.
 
 And So we had to go. Like, we weren't really supposed to be there, so I split. But that made me realize, boy, that thing is, like, real, really different than rolling up to a bedside with a patient, with 2 people, some scalpels and retractors and using your forehands to do surgery. And I've always been through all my work even before going back to school. Obsessed with how people learn stuff in particular build skill.
 
 And so I went within the next week, I wrote up a dissertation proposal, like, a quick draft. For my adviser to say, I wanna know how you learn to play that game versus how you learn to do traditional surgery. Because that's just a giant Xbox controller. I mean, give me a break. That's radically different than what we think of as surgery.
 
 Training's gotta be really different. That's closer to flying a plane or something. And, I mean, I didn't even know what I was talking about, but and so I wasn't even watching a procedure. I just, like, looked at the device and thought, what is how does training work? It turns out terribly.
 
 Is the answer. Because everybody's trying to learn how to do that using older methods, approved methods that are appropriate for traditional surgery.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Formal methods is kind of what I'm hearing as well.
 
 Matt Beane: Well, actually, no. In fact, they're relying on a hundred and 60000 year old playbook for how you learn something. Which is to say shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow with somebody's nose more. Let's get to work. You help me out a little bit and just by the doing, you're gonna slowly informally learn.
 
 Sure. There's plenty of book learning you've gotta do before you get to even set foot in that room. But once you're there, the assumption inside surgery, but also, literally, most professions and occupations around the world for thousands of years has been Sure. Sure. Fine.
 
 Learn a few concepts, you know, read a book, but you gotta then show up and you get to do what I say you get to do until you prove to me that you can do more, and then you get to do more, and you wanna earn that trust and respect for me. So you're gonna try hard. It's this informal social compact. In surgery, this is known as dwell time. Like, there are papers about dwell time.
 
 Dwell means, like, literally, you're in the OR, and the assumption is if you're in the OR, that's the best place for you to learn. You're gonna be learning, forget the books, forget the classes at that point. The more dwell time, the better it just turns out, We're breaking that. We broke it in surgery with this new technology. We're breaking it everywhere now with technologies like Chet g and so on, we can get into that.
 
 But they also have this line lingo in in surgery c 1 do 1 teach 1. That's the sort of description of how you
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: see 1, do 1, teach 1. Right?
 
 Matt Beane: So you start in the beginning. You get to watch a little bit. Maybe help on the edges. That gets you oriented, you know the basic support test, then you get to start to do a little bit more, the more you do, then eventually, you're gonna find yourself with somebody looking over your shoulder. And you start even though you're not graduated, the chief resident in a program, for example, this is somebody who's been there for 5 years, still in on paper, in training, they're coaching that junior resident.
 
 It's not the senior attending that's coaching up. So there's this sort of life cycle of that, and there is archaeological evidence for that going back, no joke, 160000 years. And there we are nuking that process by the way that we're deploying intelligent tech like robots in AI now because it makes that novice optional in the work. It allows the expert to be more self serve. They need less help.
 
 And that's great for them. They get better results. The organization loves that too. Good investment, but you're not investing in the next expert.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: : Before we go there I just wanna just help people kinda visualize us. It talks about some of the fields of where this kind of show 1, do 1, teach 1. Like, I love that you talk about restaurants, for example, certainly medical fields. Just bring it life for a little bit. What are some other domains or fields?
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. So that was the right after I finished robotic surgery, I had this burning question like, wait. Is this just this trainee optional block to learning this informal process, just a surgery thing. I didn't think so, but you need data to verify these kind of things. So I ended up writing up a Harvard Business Review article that went across over a dozen different occupations and contexts ranging from investment banking online education, policing, bomb disposal.
 
 I'm trying to think of other examples in their oh, chip design and various kinds of engineering. I mean, it I got a rep you know, let's say, 12, and I brought it down to 4 for that paper, which is online education, investment banking, an Internet startup. And policing, and, like, beat cops in LA. And exactly in the abstract level, exactly the same thing. Going
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: on. And in those fields, how does that skill, develop, or transfer?
 
 Matt Beane: Well, so let let's just take, for instance, the case of the Internet startup. So it turns out that the critical learning that needs to go on there is the founder or the and the core engineers from the customer. And how you build skill and what you build it about, it's not always within an occupation. Like, the senior software engineer teaches the junior software engineer informally and so on. In many cases, it's founder and core engineering team need to stay close to the customer so they understand what the changing requirements are, what's not working, what to build, how to set strategy, actually.
 
 And that's such a matter of skill. It's not just conceptual understanding. Like, you have to actually get good at learning from your customer. And in the case of this Internet startup, managers most in they became sort of midsized by the time I got the data. Most of them outsource their customer contact to a call centre in the Philippines, and then to another 1 based in states.
 
 And it didn't do sort of ride alongs with those folks and just focused on the code, so to speak. A few deviant managers managed to keep their skills sharp in this sort of strategy setting and a tech development, product development front by skipping management responsibilities inside the firm to do ride alongs with those folks in the Philippines and join customer calls. And they got in some trouble for doing that because they that's not a you know, that's not something that you should be focused on at this point. We need to grow the business. We need enrich the code base, that kind of thing.
 
 The imperative on the street inside this little firm was we've outsourced that. What are you doing? Don't go spending you know, So the modal interaction, just like in surgery, the novice got separated from the action and they stopped learning. The managers inside that firm stop building their skill around customer contact, product discovery, development, and strategy setting because they were the novice in that setting. It's weird.
 
 I mean, their formal authority was high, but they're the novice in developing that capability, that skill. And their mentor was their customer. In that case.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. I see. It passed me. I think, like, a definitional kind of clarification would be helpful here. What is the definition of skill?
 
 Like, as opposed to knowledge, let's say.
 
 Matt Beane: Exactly. The ability to reliably get results in uncertain conditions under pressure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Wow. The ability to reliably get results in uncertain situations under pressure.
 
 Matt Beane: Under pressure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Pressure. And what wise pressure in that definition?
 
 Matt Beane: Because if it's easy, then sure you have a little skill. But really what counts is your ability to get results in the real world, not in pristine conditions. And so pressure what pressure is is gonna vary for you, for me, for organizations, for occupation, and so on. But it has to be difficult. You have to be in a setting where it requires your focus, its valuable work, and mistakes are costly.
 
 So there has to be some sort of pressure. It can be customer pressure. It can be time pressure, it can be in surgery, you've got life and death kind of pressure, or simply financial pressure. It doesn't matter. If you've got skill, you can still get results, not just 1 time, but reliably in that kind of context.
 
 You can crank up the volume on all those sliders, right, and make super, super difficult, and then you have to have a huge amount of skill to be able to handle it. So it's not to say that those sliders always have to be maxed. For it to count as skill. It's just there is a pretty firm distinction between that and knowledge, which is conceptual understanding of how to do it. Right?
 
 So you could somebody an MBA student could come out of their program and write down exactly the best research tactics for coming up with a good organizational strategy and keeping it fresh and sharp. That stuff's taught in NBA programs, and they could regurgitate it. Could they do it now under pressure in a real organization when it counts that skill?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And there's some deviance from the ideal case that they study. Got it. And I'd love to break that down a little bit further. And, you know, you talk about challenge, complex connection. And at least in the first 2, you also talk about that sliding scale of it not being too much but the right amount. If you if you don't mind just unpacking let's just start with challenge. What do you mean by challenge?
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. Sure. So the quick commercial for what those 3 letters are about and why they're even in the book. The first third of the book is my best attempt to looking across all the research I'm familiar with, my own, other people's to figure out when people succeed at learning and building a skill at work, what conditions were they in, what is consistent about their experience across all occupation, all technology, and so on. Because if we know what that is, then everyone can look at their own setting and say, do I have those things in place?
 
 And if not, what can I do to make them better? And it turns out that the challenge complexity and connection is that that's the name of the book, the skill code. Those are the 3 ingredients. They get arranged differently for different occupation, people, organizations in industries and so on. But the claim in that book, if you buy it, I do.
 
 Certainly, I drunk my own Kool Aid, is that If you want to max the quality of your skill development, those 3 things need to be in healthy supply. To get to your challenge point, like, what is that? Basically, the research from over 13 different areas, everything from kinesiology to social psychology to sociology to even neuroscience, is that human beings build skill best when we are uncomfortable, and we are not performing at our best. And we are totally focused. In in the case of robotic surgery, these are the residents who if you try to talk to them while they're operating, They probably wouldn't register that you were speaking.
 
 They hear them. Because they're literally sweating. When they get out of that console, they're sweat on the inside of that faceplate with arresting their face. Right? That doesn't mean they're messing up or they're beyond their domain of where they can perform, but they're close to the boundary of what they can do. And they're leaning into really trying to handle this situation, and they are not happy.
 
 They are not comfortable. They are not doing what they know they can do because they are pushing themselves. Or they've got a mentor who's like, Come on now. I in fact, there's a great this 1 surgeon, I love him dearly. He somebody would finish a small portion of a procedure, and he would say, in a very kind of calm reassuring voice.
 
 That was marvelous. Now do it again, but 1000 times faster. Right? And he was right because they were, like, narrowly making progress, that patient would have been on the table for 12 hours, and it would normally take 3 hours due to the procedure. Unacceptable.
 
 You know? It was like I think it was Jack candy back on SNL back in the day who did those deep thoughts kind of things. He sounded like that, but he would be like, hurry the hell up. It's right. And then they would try, then they're learning because there's a mountain of research on this.
 
 Humans do not like feeling uncomfortable. Experiential avoidance is the name of this phenomenon in psychology. Everything we can do basically to avoid feeling uncomfortable, negative emotion, anything like that. We're gonna do it. But the irony is to really build a skill and get good, so to speak.
 
 That's exactly where you need to live.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. I love that. So you as an individual can be thinking for me to build skill, how often am I uncomfortable at work? And for you as an organizational designer or a leader. It's how often are people dealing on come.
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. And I the more I look around, the more I speak in organizations, the more data I get the clearer it is that I mean, people love to complain about padded playgrounds for kids. Right? Organizations have become a bit of a padded playground. Like, people being uncomfortable.
 
 Obviously, there are great reasons why people should not feel uncomfortable in organizations. Plenty of things you need to assure against. But when it comes to pushing yourself, straining towards the edge of your capability, but not past it, that is a zone that many policies and organizations ways of organizing are unintentionally hedging against keeping people out of a zone where they are not performing at their best If you just look at it on a rational economic basis, the last thing you wanna do is have somebody performing at 83 percent of their capability. You want 95. So why pay that tax?
 
 Education's not my business. You went to school. Didn't you? Right. Right.
 
 Right. Right. Now you if you told that to a pro tennis player, or any pro athlete. They spend most of their time practicing, and the good ones, they are never just sitting back and taking free throws. They're like, okay.
 
 Yell at me while I'm doing this. Or I'm gonna wear a blindfold. Or, you know, they push. They fight for a challenge. They know this.
 
 Their coaches know this.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right? So we need those spaces. What you know, we need practice arenas, safe places where we can push ourselves at, you know, to the limit and learn from that. Well, I wanna fully continue on that, but I also want you to cover complexity Sure. Connection.
 
 Matt Beane: Yes. So complexity is 1 that's a little bit less intuitive, but it was the best way I knew how to square with the research, which basically says, When we think of building skill, we think of, like, getting good at something. Let's just say it's using a clicker to advance some slides in a PowerPoint talk or something like that. Sure. You gotta learn how to use that system and handle advancing slides and deal with the where to point that clicker if you're near the stage or what have you.
 
 But that's like the focal part of how we build skill. When you're talking about building skill that's reliable under pressure, remember that definition? That has to be robust to surprises and shocks. So practically, skill that you can count on in a pinch is informed by a broader understanding of the context you're operating in. You can do this a million ways depending on what you're interested in.
 
 But for instance, if you start to get pretty good at that clicker, then you should start to be asking questions like, what's this thing plugged into? Or what about the lighting in here? Or who's making money off this event? Or what about the support staff? What are they doing?
 
 Or etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You look left, you look right, try to understand this broader system you're in involved in. That way, when the power goes out, you actually know what to do because you've seen that before or heard a story from 1 of the tech working on the AV setup on how to you see what I mean? So as much as we go deep on a certain skill, you also have to go broad. Because we are not hyper specialist.
 
 That's not what humans only do when we progress in a career. You kind of as you get good at your focal thing, you gotta be looking left and right and thinking, like, what's the neck thing I wanna master. And how does it complement what I already know? So digesting that complexity is just as necessary as getting good at using that clicker. Metaphorically speaking.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Okay. So there's not so much what I hear you say is not so much, whereas challenge is about putting yourself in challenging situations. Complexity is less about putting yourself in complex situations, but rather exploring the complexity digesting situation. Right, Jessica?
 
 Matt Beane: Yeah. Exactly. And there are ways to do that that are not helpful. There are ways to do that are helpful. For instance, the research is really clear on this.
 
 You wanna do the least book learning necessary to start to play the game. It's like, barely read the manual before you start to try to program that VCR, so to speak. And then try and only when you fail, do you go back to try to do more book learning? We've sort of inverted that in society. We provide a lot of upfront excessive.
 
 Book learning conceptual understanding before letting people roll up their sleeves try and fail a little bit in controlled settings in ways. Then maybe they'll themselves get motivated to be like, what the heck is going on here? That's where the true motivation for learning can come from. So complexity, it's important to digest it intuitively without conceptual understanding as much as you can. Like, only enough information to start to walk in that room and try the thing is the basic inversion of how we normally think about skill.
 
 The last 1 That was a real pleasure to read it and then write about is connection, which is to say bonds of trust and respect between human beings. We do not, in our society, often think of skill, the ability to get results under pressure as directly related to or serially reliant on bonds of trust and respect, but it's a bare fact. The research makes this really clear. Number 1, Where did you come up with the idea for a skill to master in the first place? Other people.
 
 You look up to somebody. You look at a context. You're like, I admire that. I wanna pursue that. I wanna get that result.
 
 That came from human connection that didn't just come out of your mind. Right? So you're embedded in society. But more importantly, the motivation that you need to get up in the morning and push yourself into an uncomfortable place. Often, sometimes it can be totally self directed.
 
 Right? You can go and nerd out about a topic but most of the time for most people, this progresses best when you have someone you look up to, whether you even get to meet them. But usually do, at work, somebody you want, you want their trust and respect. And you wanna prove to them that you're trying hard and you're getting better because you wanna earn a spot. You wanna get ahead.
 
 And on the flip side, if you're that expert, it is meaningful to you to earn the trust and respect of people coming up the chain. Because that means you're being of service, you're paying it back, all of these gifts that you were given and helping to develop the next generation. So the motivation of build skill and cultivate it from both sides is part of that human bond. On top of that though, there's a permission aspect of this, which is very sort of mercenary. You just don't get to play.
 
 You don't get to try unless somebody lets you. Somebody's got the authority to say, sure, you we hire you. Or you can get on this project, or, sure, you can come to that client meeting, or you see what I mean. And the only way you do that is to do a little Prove you hustled, showed up, got it done, and then that person's like, come on. Let's go.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Prove that you could that you can stretch yourself and you can learn. Yeah. I I think it's a book I I've read long time ago kind of a career development book that I teach at Harvard that it was like, the key to an accelerated career is to get roles that you're not qualified for. To get those roles you need someone that you have a connection with who says, look, Matt doesn't know how to do this, but he can learn to do it. And then that puts you in that challenging complex situation.
 
 Matt Beane: Yes. Exactly. And did that trust me that if I have a career, it's definitely partially because of that. Like, I'm very good at first born white male from a family in northern you know, in New England, in the US. I'm very good at talking my way into scenarios.
 
 Right? And that has bit me before. But in general, I can say, look, I can do this part of this, but I know I can help you if you just give me a shot. That's earning the trust and respect of that person for just getting up to that and saying, please let me try. But that's the unusual example.
 
 The sort of more normal 1 is I know a little bit And I'm looking to move up, and I just wanna do this little bit of work because what it does is it proves to you, in controversies, you've seen the results, you've seen my effort that I'm ready for more, and I'm eager, and then you'll give me a shot. And later, by the way, that means, not, I get up in the organization, but You're gonna start to crow to other people about me because you're very proud of me. And then there goes my next opportunity to run a new division. Or start a new organization or get some venture capital or what have you because you want other people to know how this person who was so ambitious and capable that you just gave him a little hand and look at this person. I'm so proud of them. So this this sort of also amplifies the skill opportunity even more.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Love it. Love it. Awesome. So I have so many questions and very little time left now reaching the top of our time with you. What's on my mind is it sounds to me.
 
 Like, what I'm well talking away from is we know that core capabilities are a fundamental important source of competitive advantage, and it's not having a formula and training people in the formula. It is creating the situation for people to develop skills. Right? I think about investment banking. I think Goldman Sachs, they've got an incredible mentorship system.
 
 And now AI and technologies are driving us to be able to pursue productivity more effectively, and you talk about, therefore, this ability to build capabilities and maintain capabilities is being disrupted. Why is that happening? And what do we do about that?
 
 Matt Beane: So the why is straightforward if you think the surgery 1, the I've now generalized this to over 30 contexts, which is the new wave of intelligent technologies is just especially true Make it so that a single expert can self serve far more often too far better results. They don't need novices as much to help in the work anymore. The prototypical example of this right now is if I've got chat, GPT on my phone, I don't have to call a friend as much. In fact, How about a whole bunch less? And so that just means that right when we need people to be building skill the most, that next generation is just gonna struggle a lot to find a way forward to build that skill through human connection and dealing with complexity.
 
 That's not gonna show up on the balance sheet or in obvious signs in the organization health wise, maybe even right now. That's gonna show up in 3 to 5 years. You're gonna pay us. Right?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. And your bench is underdeveloped.
 
 Matt Beane: Right. And or here's the critical immediate problem. You are not learning from those people on the front lines. Because it's not just unidirectional, this learning thing. Experts don't just teach novices.
 
 New people in organizations, the research on this is are really clear. And in occupations, they see stuff that experts are conditioned not to see. They have time to learn stuff. They're learning stuff that is new to the world. Hello, chat, GPT, that senior folks are just too busy and sort of execution focused to really be in the trenches to learn.
 
 So in fact, that cycle of learning is bidirectional. And if you recap it by making those novices optional, the people who set strategy for an organization. The people who need to be informed about what's useful, not useful, good, bad, indifferent about these new technologies are just gonna be under informed. Compared to someone who is finding ways to keep that learning loop life. And so that, I think, is this sort of subtle threat to the learning fabric and organizations.
 
 It's all taken for granted. That if we don't address, you're just gonna be missing critical signal at a time where you need to be better informed than ever.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So do you have, like, 1 specific suggestion? So now we've an organizational designer or a strategist or a leader has said, oh my gosh. You're right. We are losing this next generation because we've cut off skill development. What should that person think of doing next?
 
 Matt Beane: Right. So the what you can count on for certain is that no matter what is going on in your organization, no matter whether you've unintentionally deprived the organization of some of this learning fabric by pursuing productivity. Welcome to the club. People in your organization are doing it anyway. They're finding ways.
 
 You're probably 1 of them too. You're finding ways. To figure all the stuff out. And there's really good research and tactics around when it's time to learn from yourself as an organization. When it's time for the different parts who are all touching proverbial different parts of the elephant, so to speak, And it's time to learn from yourselves of what do you do?
 
 Well, there's a bunch of tactics in user centered innovation in collective strategy making where you get people across a representative set of roles together to share best practices, stay up to speed, run controlled, but aggressive experiments and so on. Communicate about them. The or the literature on organizational change is really clear. If you can find a place where everyone would suspect this new tech is either gonna have no effect or make things much worse, and find a way to make it better, across a representative set of roles, small experiment, and show those results, that's the kind of thing that will unfreeze an organization and get folks thinking, wait, what? You did what now?
 
 We can do what now. So this is in a way old tactics from the playbook of or productive organizational change in strategy making when you've got disruptive technologies. Get that representative set of folks together, learn from each other really fast, also create incentives so that people are motivated to share. Like, what about a big financial reward? For sharing successes and failures with the new technology at any level in the organization.
 
 And so that kind of thing, and then then you'll have the fodder you need to make that big bold decisive strategic mode and be reasonably confident you can pull it off.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. And I love this suggestion of the entry point to that being around the customer or user being the mentor up, that's great. Because that's something that people can get and say, yes. We need that. We can implement a program.
 
 Lovely. Well, so many other questions I have, Matt. People can answer Many of those questions by reading your book, how else can people learn from you and follow you?
 
 Matt Beane: Well, so I'll offer them the first chapter of the book for free. How about that? If they go to out thinkers dot the skill code book dot com, the chapter is waiting for them there, custom for them. So that's step 1. If they just accidentally eliminate that out thinkers bit and go to the skilled codebook dot com, sure.
 
 They'll see the generic sales page for the book but also my sub stack, which is called Wild World of Work. And that has it's not the book. It's additional expanding on the theme kind of new topics I've been writing a couple times a month for almost a year now there. So that's another place that you can go to sort of be like, yeah. But what about There's a piece in there, for example, called don't let AI dumb you down.
 
 Like, about how you might subtly use it in your organization, and you will lose skill over time if you're not careful. So new themes in there. Those 2 resources ought to get you started.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. Well, thank you, Matt. Thanks for making that available to us. For the work that you do and for sharing that with us.
 
 Matt Beane: Thank you. My pleasure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor Zach Ness and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
 
 We'll you soon with another episode of Out Thinkers.