Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:15: Where we go wrong with learning

00:07:49: Understanding how to learn by doing

00:14:51: Waterfall working vs agile working

00:17:56: Barriers to implementing a learning culture

00:20:22: Teams are more powerful than the individual

00:21:57: Communities of practice

00:26:26: What makes a master a master

00:29:20: Barriers to continual learning

00:32:19: The future is not fixed

00:36:20: The problem with individual psychometric tests

00:40:19: How to get started on learning by doing

00:43:23: David's career advice

00:46:50: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah, and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Each week, we take a topic to do with work and we share some ideas and some actions that we really hope will help you, and it does always help us, to navigate all of our Squiggly Careers with that bit more confidence, clarity and control. 

This week is one of our Ask the Expert episodes, where we're going to be talking about learning with David Erixon. David wrote an article in 2015, and me realising that made me feel very old, called Doing By Learning, and this is an article that I come back to all the time, I regularly refer back to and re-read, I recommend to someone I think at least once a week.  And one of the things that really struck me about this article, about how we learn, how we go about learning, is that David is the Founder of an organisation called Hyper Island, and their quest, their mission, he describes as, "How to teach people about things we yet didn't know anything about", and I think that remains as relevant and as useful today as it was back in 1995, when they created Hyper Island. This idea of Learning by Doing he explains as something called Learning Through Reflection on Doing, and it's not necessarily an easy thing to get your head around, but I think it's worth us all spending some time understanding and thinking about and reflecting on, "What does that mean for me and my day-to-day?"  If we all want to be work in progress, if we want to all be learn-it-alls, what are we actively doing to make that happen?

I'm so glad that after so many years of almost feeling connected to David and his work, through reading it and re-reading it, that we had the chance to have this conversation.  He's been on my list of experts I've wanted to talk to for a very long time and our conversation didn't disappoint me, so I think it's a really great mix of asking some big questions of ourselves, but also some practical ideas that we can all have a go at straightaway.  So, I hope you enjoy listening and I'll be back at the end to let you know how you can learn more. So, David, thank you so much for joining us on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really excited about our conversation today.

David Erixon: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Ellis: So, we're going to dive straight in to this idea of learning at work today, and how we learn and whether we're doing a good job of it.  So, let's talk about where we're not doing a good job, because often that's interesting as a place to start.  What do you see as some of the challenges in terms of perhaps traditionally how we've approached learning at work, what we think it looks like and some of the approaches that we take based on the education that maybe we've all had?

Sarah Ellis: So, I think there are two stories.  I think there's a very individual story about you as an individual and how you think about yourself and how you react to learning for yourself, and we can talk a lot about that.  But I think the other thing is very much down to the organisation and the culture of it.  I usually think of it as a fishbowl, an aquarium or a fish tank, and you've got fish in it but the water can be a very different quality.  Sometimes, it can be a very toxic environment that is not really fruitful and helpful for people to learn, and sometimes that environment can be incredibly good to create a very powerful learning experience.  So, I guess that's culture.

But if I take it back to the inner environment, or the individual, I appreciate the work of Carol Dweck a lot, if you've heard about her -- of course you have!  But the whole idea of Growth Mindset, because I think that a lot of us growing up, and I'm of a slightly older generation than you, but some of us just seem to think that we need to be perfect and if we don't know something, it reflects badly on ourselves.  So, we try to uphold this persona that knows stuff.  The minute that we think or pretend that we know everything, we become terrible learners; that's just the nature of it.  But if we have a mindset that is, "I don't know everything, I'm not perfect.  When I come across something that I don't know anything about, that's fine, I can try to get my head around it and ask lots of questions". 

So, that's the inner environment and it's a lot more than that; I'm doing the superficial version of it now, but that's the inner version. Again, coming back to culture, I think bad organisations, they hate errors, they hate mistakes, they love to point fingers and say, "It wasn't me, it was that person over there [or] that team over there", and it's a culture of fear with very little psychological safety, and not a lot of people are going to be open and disclose and be honest, and it's going to be a high level of pretence in that type of organisation, and that organisation won't learn. An organisation that has a lot of psychological safety, that encourages people to expand as people, it's so much in hierarchical organisations, it's about constraining people in to a role, "No, you're not hired to think about that and do that, you're supposed to just do this little thing over here", and they put people in very, very tight and small boxes; while good organisations, they really encourage to expand and to reach out and to join things up and to collaborate.  And, when you see something that's not working, or something that can be done in a different way, you're encouraged to orchestrate that. This is a very quick survey but we can have that as a starting point perhaps!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think I recognise so much of that in myself, when I think about particularly my early career, when I think about almost what I've had to unlearn and relearn, because I was somebody who went to school and thought, "I don't want to make any mistakes, I'm not going to put my hand up if I'm not 100% confident that I know the answer, because I'll look stupid", and felt quite uncomfortable with that, and then went into very big organisations where no one talked about making mistakes, where you can't help but be a box on an organisational chart and you respond to that environment. It definitely took me quite a few years of almost uncomfortable unlearning to let go of this idea of, "Well, I should know all of the answers.  And if I don't, asking a question or saying I don't know is unacceptable.  I need to pretend to be perfect", and I think loads of people will recognise that reality to some extent, because we know we are all not perfect and we're not in perfect organisations.

David Erixon: Can I just say though, I think there are two enemies here.  One enemy is what you're describing beautifully, it's like, "I don't want to look stupid", because that's attached to shame and also very powerful emotions in a person.  Of course we're going to try to avoid anything that's painful to us. 

So, it is that part of it, but there's also another enemy, and that is when we really, really think that we know how something works, we become utterly stupid.  Because what I see a lot of times is people that have been doing stuff for a very long time, and organisations and big organisations have this in mass, "This is what we've always done and know". The minute that you think you've figured out how the world works and how everything works, what's going to happen is that you're going to stop learning.  So, that's the other enemy and I just want to flag that both of these exist in equal measures.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things that you talk about so brilliantly, and as I mentioned to you when we first connected, you have an incredible article that I think I recommend pretty much every week to at least one person, if not a big group of people, which was all about this idea of learning by doing, and I find this so fascinating because this is potentially one of those areas where there's a bit of a say/do gap, as I would describe it. Everyone says, "We need to do loads more learning by doing", and then often when I ask for examples or, "What does that look like?" then you sort of get a bit of a pause. 

So, I think everybody recognises that we do learn best when we do, when we practise, and you have this great definition where you describe it as, "Learning through reflection on, and while doing", and you're nodding along and reading, but then I don't see this happening as much as you might imagine, individually and in organisations.  So, I still feel that there's so much potential in learning by doing. There was a mistake that you talk about in the article, where you describe that so many of us think learning by doing is learning by trial and error.  I was like, "Yes, that is what I thought learning by doing was"!  So, perhaps you can almost dispel that myth for us; why is it not trial and error, because I was thinking, "I practise, I realise I've not done something quite right and then I course-correct and I get a bit better the next time"?  But I think that is quite a limited view of learning by doing, if I've understood it right.

David Erixon: Yeah, this is a compound question, but I'll try to break it down and see if I can answer it in a satisfactory way.  You see, trial and error is a mental model that we know how something works or doesn't work, so we go, "If I do that, then this happens", and it's incredibly problem-focused, I would say, trial run, because you're trying to figure out a problem.  There's nothing wrong with that because basically what you're saying, the world is a problem to be solved and I'm going to try 10,000 different things and see if any of it sticks and works.  And by the way, that's fine.

But I do think that there's also another way to look at the world, which is much more imaginative, which is sort of, "What if?" which is much more open and I call it an "appreciative enquiry", and actually that's a common term in academics, wherein you envisage something completely different.  This sort of trial and error for me sits very much in, "The world is a problem" type of mentality, while it misses the juice and the power in the "What if?" you know, "What is working and how can we do more of that?" I see this so much in big organisations, and I'm in one of them, being in a big bank, where so much of our attention is just going to what is not working, and we think that we're being good managers and good co-workers and good leaders when we're constantly focusing on what the problem is.  What I'm trying to at least bring to my work is a view that, "Let's for a minute not put attention on what is not working. 

Let's put our attention of what is really working and ask ourselves, 'How can we do more of that?  Where are teams really thriving?'"  And, I'm saying this example because the trial and error goes directly to the problem. By the way, you might not have identified the right problem, you might not even know what the question is, which is also why I think questions, in many ways at least in the start of a process, is way more interesting to occupy your time with.  Let's think about what the question is, and when you have that connection with people and communication with people, you'll find that you end up understanding something way much better, only by asking questions. 

You haven't really got your head together to try to figure out the answer, but yet the subject becomes much more expanded and multi-dimensionalised. There was something else you said though there in the initial question around learning by doing, is that our starting point is usually we want to learn something and we want to get into doing, and I've got a huge bias for that myself because I think that it's a particularly European culture.  I mean, I've been fortunate to work all over the world and seen very different cultures attack this, from Latin American culture, American culture, North American, US/Canadian culture but also Asian and African cultures.  And in Europe, we have a huge bias for trying to analyse our way to a solution. I usually say that the British are really brilliant at figuring out where the perfect place is to move the mountain.  They spend so much time analysing with data, they spend months going, "Where is the perfect place to put the mountain". 

And once they've intellectually dealt with it, they go, "Yeah, it's probably over there", all energy's gone, no mountain is going to be moved.  Everyone's just going, "We've got the answer, so what's the point?" The Americans, I mean jokingly now to stereotype cultures, which is okay, I think; but they're the opposite.  They all get really excited about moving the mountain and they rally the troops and the whole community comes together and the mountain gets moved many times to the wrong place.

Sarah Ellis: But it gets moved!

David Erixon: But what I do like about the American approach is that there is so much that emerges when you actually start doing stuff that you never could think about beforehand.  You really don't get to the real issues and to the opportunities unless you actually step into action.  And I think many, many times, we hold ourselves back to start doing stuff, because we think we need to have the answer before we do it.  I'm saying, actually to start doing it will help us get to the answer sooner. But it only works to the third reflection in your question that I have, which is the whole point of reflection. 

Because, what maybe lacks a little bit in that American example I gave stereotypically, and you know, we're playing around here so don't take it too seriously, but what lacks there is someone that says, "Okay, we've done a little bit now, let's look at what we're doing, let's get together, let's talk about it and is this the right thing?  What have we learnt so far; what has emerged?  Is there potentially another way of doing it?  Have we found some new thing that we should think about?" So much in our way of working culture is the traditional waterfall way, I'm sure you've spoken a lot about waterfall and agile on this podcast, but the waterfall way, when you start and analyse and then you develop a plan, and then comes an implementation phase.  At that point, nothing can change.  You don't change your requirements, you don't change your analysis, you're just, "We're now in execution mode and all we need to do is just deliver the plan". 

And then two years later, you realise it was wrong. While, in an agile way, which is why agile originally came to being in software development, was that that waterfall way didn't work.  By the end of that two-year process, you delivered a software which wasn't what users wanted and the world had moved on and it wasn't competitive, or whatever.  So, you sort of then went, "Actually, let's start with a really informed hypothesis, with some really informed requirements, but we'll test it regularly, we'll do small MVPs, we'll put it in front of users and other stakeholders, we'll learn from it, and then we'll build the next stage", so it's a much more iterative way. Agile in itself has these built-in retros, you get together and you go, "What have we learnt this week; what happened; what was good; what was bad; what was awesome; what was ugly?" 

You share it openly and you talk about it and then you learn from it and then you build from there.  So, this bias for action only works if you've got built-in ways to reflect.  And by the way, it's not something you do yourself, it's something you do with others, because what you don't know you don't know and you have loads of blind spots.  And I always think that the room is smarter than any individual.  So, if you can orchestrate that and can build an environment where you collectively be intelligent -- by the way, you can collectively be stupid as well, so it has to be facilitated well because I've seen an example of both.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and what really strikes me about the approach that you've just described so eloquently and usefully there, is I think probably the trial and error problem approach is okay in a certain world with very simple problems.  But the majority of what we're all spending our time on is where we've got uncertainty and lots of unknowns, and we're either trying to spot opportunities to create completely new value, or find new ways of working, we're trying to think differently; and actually, if we're just iterating or if we're just overly biased towards any of those approaches that you just described, then we're missing out on loads of learning along the way.

David Erixon: I think you say it better than I do, so I completely agree with you!

Sarah Ellis: Well no, I've just listened hopefully to you and then gone, "Okay, so this is what we need to be doing".  And, given what you've just described, what do you think stops people from doing that; what do you think stops teams and organisations from designing a learning organisation, where that learning agility is just part of a DNA?

David Erixon: I think partly it's because people haven't experienced it, and when you haven't had a direct experience, you don't know what you're missing out on, and you also don't necessarily know what the ingredients of such a culture or way of working, or whatever it is, needs to be in order for it to thrive.  So, I see a lot of that, which to be honest comes from our traditional school system because you've got an expert in the room and we learn from that person. But there's also another thing here, which is the fact that when organisations say that they are learning organisations, they usually mean that, "Yeah, and therefore we invest in your time so that you can go on courses and…", which is why I say in my article, I say it's actually not about learning by doing, it's about doing by learning, because I think that any organisation that is up to something exciting, whether they're a start-up, whether they're scaling something, whether they're a big organisation transforming what they do, basically they're about to move from a current state to a future state, somehow that's about innovation and doing things differently. If you're in an organisation like that, learning is the way to achieve that, and learning on the job, which is another thing that is not okay a lot of the time; we're hired into jobs to be able to master it. 

And another thing here as well which makes me really sad actually, and I see it very often and I always think it's such a missed opportunity, is that we like to think of individuals as the largest component.  What I mean by that is we try to hire people -- you know the golf term, "Hole in one"?  You hit the ball and it goes straight into the hole, and we sort of think that's the way we need to hire.  We construct a role and then we need to hire the perfect person for that role, and we dissect individuals as if they're supposed to be everything and be perfect for delivering the specific thing. I don't think that the world works like that.  I actually think that teams are way more powerful than any individual in that team.  And if we think more about how we create the right teams with the right combination of skillsets -- because we're not superpowers of everything.  We might excel and be really good at a few things, and then someone else is really great at something else.  If we can combine it, awesome, that is where you want to get to. But back how that relates to learning at work, I think learning is a way to achieve your future state, not something separate, not something that people do that they go, "Oh, yeah, don't forget you need to plan your four hours of learning this month". 

It is a way of learning and a culture where learning is your strategy to get to a future state, because the reality is that those companies that I talk about that are up to something, they haven't figured it out.  We're talking about the future, it's a constantly evolving, changing thing, and you're also in competition so you want to excel over your competitors, you want to get ahead of them and hopefully stay ahead of them, and how do you do that if you're not fundamentally, on a daily basis, learning?  It is impossible.

Sarah Ellis: I also wonder if it's sometimes our emphasis and preoccupation with short-termism and when we feel like there's a gap that we've got or we want to create more learning in an organisation, or as individuals, whether we're looking at this organisationally or individually, we can't help but look for quick solutions.  You can't help but think, and we spend a lot of time talking to people about, "Let's move way beyond 'learning equals going on a course'", and that comes from somebody -- I spend some of my time doing workshops with individuals, with organisations. One of the things that often people get surprised by is I'll say, "We're going to spend lots of time doing".  To your point about, "My job really here is to facilitate you doing during this time, not to give you a to-do list to do after this time, and not for you to listen to me doing a lecture for the next hour, because neither of those things are going to be very useful". 

But you can see that people are still getting used to that.  And a really common question that I still get all of the time is, "I want to get better at X, what course should I go on?" and it's so interesting that we still have this quite binary, I think, approach to learning that is still so connected to, "I expect to be in a room with an expert". So, again it goes back to a bit of unlearning about what learning looks like.  So, I think that's just an interesting question, I think, for all of our listeners to really think about is like, "How are you learning; and also, who are you learning with?"  You make this brilliant point about the "I" versus the "we", and you talk about communities of learning.  You made the point today about the whole being bigger than the sum of the parts, and I do think sometimes we get very obsessed with maybe, we can't help but be individual and think, "I just need to figure out what I need to learn to get to the next", if we're thinking in a ladderlike way, "step of my career" versus, if we're all learning together, there's enough space for everybody to all progress in all their individual directions. Do you find, building on this idea of learning as a team, and you lead a team and you've led organisations and you've worked in so many different places and spaces that it's fascinating to hear your experiences, what has worked really well for you?

David Erixon: Well, I'm a big fan of what I call communities of practice, people that are up to the same sort of thing.  It's not an expert in the room, and they learn together.  I've seen this working really well in agile organisations, where apart from you being part of whatever Scrum you are, what you also then do is that you orchestrate what I would call a community of practitioners.  But it might be that UX people get together, or whatever skills that exist in those teams, they also get together as a vertical team and they learn together, because they can share problems, they can problem-solve on a daily basis, they can have an ongoing dialogue about whatever is going on.

This is not just an opinion, but it is well-known in the academic world, the people that really look at learning and pedagogics, etc, that communities of practitioners are way more effective than the traditional expert learning model.  But I do think, because we've got such a bias for this, "I need to go on a course", we think that we haven't learnt anything unless we've been on the course.  We're not very good at recognising where we learn, because we don't have a meta-perspective, which comes back to reflection. I'll ask people all over the world, "Tell me about a good learning experience that you've had", and they will all say an experience that they've had where they had that "aha!" moment, and it could be skiing, it could be biking, it could be making a wreath, it could be anything!  And when I ask them, "Tell me about a bad learning experience", it's always about a teacher, always.  It's always about the teacher or a really boring book. 

So, when you start to become aware of great learning experiences that you've had, you kind of go, "How can I do more of that?" That said, I don't have a problem with experts.  One of my favourite academics, unfortunately not alive anymore, but a guy called Dag Rudqvist, a Swedish guy, his whole area of research was around what makes a master a master.  So, he spent his whole life trying to figure out, why is it that some people, by their peers -- so, if you take all the florists in the world, there might be a few of them that are just amazing, or violinists or marketing people, whatever; but by their peers, they're recognised as true masters of what they do.  What makes them that; how did they get there?  He was obsessed with trying to figure out the formula for this.  So he went back and went, is it their socioeconomic background; did they go to more prestigious universities; did they spend more time…?  He really tried to find what are those factors.

By the end, he said, "I think that what makes a master a master are three things", which have nothing to do -- it's just interesting, but it's three things: first, they believe that what they're doing is really, really important, no matter whether they're a florist, a violinist, in marketing, in finance, it doesn't matter, they just think that this is really important, "What I'm doing is really important to the world, or really important to me or to the group", whatever it is, they find huge importance in their work.  The second thing is that they do it for the sake of doing it, so they just love doing it.  And I think that, if you think of an activity that we do in our lives that serves no other purpose than we just love doing it, as a kid it's playing.  Why are you playing?

Sarah Ellis: Because you love playing!

David Erixon: Exactly, because it's fun, because it's great.  So, there's an element of that.  We've currently done a project with Marcus Rashford, and it's so obvious that he just loves it; he's still a kid with a football.  I mean, I know nothing about football, am completely uninterested, but I can feel a person's energy.  And when he's there with a ball… they're driven by joy, is what I'm saying. Then the final bit, and here's where it gets really interesting, they don't let anyone tell them how to do it.  So what I'm saying, they might have gone and learnt the rules somewhere, they might know, "This is the standard way of doing it and here's how you should do it", but all these masters have at some point transcended that, to not buy the status quo.

Sarah Ellis: I guess that's creating the future state that you were talking about, they've basically done that, they've gone through that process that you described.

David Erixon: Yeah, learn the rules, but at some point go beyond the rules.  There are so many enemies here though, Sarah, to that type of mission, the people that want to do things differently.  Most established, big organisations, they love to retain the status quo, they want to keep their existing revenue streams, or whatever it is.  They don't want to cannibalise a business, they don't want something to come up that potentially could replace themselves, because you know what you know and it's a safe comfortable space. Another enemy to that is just risk in general.  One of the things that I've observed as I've gone on my career, and I'm turning 50 in February and I've been on this for 30 years.  So, one of the things that I've seen, as well as I've progressed in my career, is we like to think that we have leaders of these large organisations that are visionary and innovative and driving the future forward. 

But the reality is that most organisations promote people because they didn't fuck up.  And as you excel, you get more status, you get a nicer title, you get more money, you get more people working for you; you climb that ladder the more you, as an individual, have got to lose.  So, you become more, I would say, risk averse. Now, with experience also comes something else, which is the ability to take more calculated risks, to be more informed.  You can take risks but you also know how to mitigate them.  You're not going to throw yourself out of an aeroplane. 

You go and you do some training and you do some tandem jumps and you get experience.  And then at some point, when you feel that you equipped yourself with the right skills and knowledge and confidence, whatever it is, you're going to do that first jump. One of the misconceptions actually that people have about entrepreneurs is that they are big risk-takers.  I don't think that they are, I think they are very good risk-managers.  I just think that they're very good at starting something small, trying something out.  If it works, they scale it, they adjust it, they're very agile; while a big organisation has no problem with going, "Well, this is a good idea, let's invest £20 million", and then they do what they've always done; they'll fuck it up!  But they're good actually, a lot of the entrepreneurs, good risk-managers, but perhaps with a higher risk profile.  They are happy to set out to do something without having everything figured out, while most people and businesses, they want to know exactly how to get there.  If you want that level of certainty, you will only be able to do what you've always done and known; it's never going to happen, is what I'm saying.

Sarah Ellis: Well, it feels both limiting for everybody, but also it feels to me like you reduce your career resilience, because you are betting on a certain world, where we know that on average people are going to have four to six different types of career during their working life.  We know that we're all unlearning, relearning, there's upskilling and reskilling happening all of the time.  So, if you are fixed to a very specific future and you see that there's one way, then I'd get worried about those people because I then think that when things change around them, which they inevitably will, you're then left in a position where perhaps your identity is so wrapped up in where you are in that future and what you know, that you've not explored possibilities, you've not thought about different opportunities, you've not been continually learning and been really open. I really remember having a moment in my career where things are flying, everything was going perfect on paper, is how I describe that moment.  And in that perfect-on-paper moment, I think something really useful happened to me in my career, which is that something changed in the organisation that I was in that basically meant that my job disappeared.  I couldn't have been more employable in that moment. 

I was flying, I was doing really well, performing really well, I'd won awards left, right and centre.  And suddenly, you have that moment of realisation of going, "No future is fixed, things are always going to change around you", and actually, that's where you've got to be open to different possibilities.  And it's also why your identity needs to not be too wrapped up in the work that you do, or any titles that you've got. I actually always, although I didn't love it on that day, I have to say, I do always feel really grateful that that happened, and it definitely happened to me; that's not something I would have chosen to have happened.  But I was grateful that did happen and it happened early enough in my career that it then helped me to embrace more openness, more learning, let go of this idea of achievement equals how many certificates you've got or how many courses you've been on, all those kinds of things.  We all have these segue moments I think sometimes in our Squiggly Careers, as I describe them, where the world opens up a bit more, and we assume that that's always from a really brilliant thing happening.  But I think sometimes, it can be from a constraint or from a challenge, and that can open up opportunities.

David Erixon: But also, if you look at the Fortune 500, that listing has been around for quite some time and 50 years ago, the average lifetime to be on the Fortune 500 list was close to 70 years.  Today, it's I think nearing 10 years.  So, that just shows that there's so much change happening and we're still in this paradigm shift, driven by digitisation and you can get good at something and do something, but it's not going to last for a lifetime. But the other thing that I think what you're saying, and I've learnt this the hard way in my career, is just that you are not your job.  If you put your self-worth and also your identity on to it, you're going to start going to work to keep your job. 

And immediately, you get worse at what to do.  So, I think you need to go to work to do your work, not go to work to keep your work. I was very fortunate early in my career actually to come across something similar to you.  I had a coach at the time and she said, "David, you take this way too personal", and she steered me into really doing systems analysis, understanding that you are also part of a culture, part of a system, and you're going to be heavily, heavily influenced by that.  I now refer to that as the fishbowl, and you have to realise that it's not you. You are much more than the role that you have taken on in that particular organisation, that particular time; you're much more than that, which is also why one of my pet allergies actually, when it comes to self-development and the stuff that we basically sometimes get occupied with, is all the typology work that's been done, personal tests, "What type of person are you; what type of leader are you?"  People do these tests and then go, "I'm this type of leader", and you're going, "No!"  First and foremost, many of them, and I would say 99% of them, have no scientific validity whatsoever!

Sarah Ellis: I know, yeah!  You and I have the same -- even when people talk about them, I'm like, "Just be really careful".  I know why people love them, but I get so worried about people then attaching themselves to them and just going, "Well, that's it".  That is a fake state.

David Erixon: They can give you insight.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, they can, I think they can.

David Erixon: They can broaden your self-awareness, in certain perspectives, if they're used to facilitate that self-awareness.

Sarah Ellis: Definitely.

David Erixon: But you should always have a devil on your shoulder saying, "That type is not you, because type doesn't exist", and this was proven already scientifically back in the 1950s, an amazing organisational psychologist called Will Schultz, who then went on and constructed FIRO-B, which is a relational model, it's not a typology.  He took all the research, he took all this typology, you know Belbin, the classic one?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, of course.

David Erixon: It says, "Are you a chairperson; are you an integrator; are you a relational…?"

Sarah Ellis: I think Belbin was my first ever one that I was made to do.

David Erixon: Oh, my God!  So, he was doing research for the Marines and they had this huge aeroplane carrier; are they called carriers?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

David Erixon: You know, which aeroplanes land on?  It's the most expensive piece of equipment they have basically.  So, they were really keen to get a really good team together to run them.  So, they hired a bunch of East Coast academics in this field, and they went in and they really, really tried and tested and observed different things.  So, they did the whole typology thing, where you put everyone through psychometric tests and you go, "Here's the Chairperson, here's the this and here's the that", and they put together teams based on that.  Were they higher performing than the ones that were currently high performing?  No, they weren't.

Then they went away and tried other models as well, by the way, they tried the expert model, which I'm also a bit sceptical of that approach like, "Yes, let's take the best captain, the best navigator, will they be high performing?" and the answer was no, because it wasn't about the individual, it was about the team.  And that's why he eventually developed FIRO, because it's actually about the people and the relationships that they have, and their skills.  Skills are not not important, but it's not as important as we think it is, which is why you can see this in sports.  They don't necessarily have to have the best players.  You can have a team excelling dramatically because they're a team and they know each other's weaknesses and strengths and they communicate well and they like each other. Whatever it is, that is a much more important factor in performance than typology; we can just go, "No!"  It has no relevant thing.  It's like you were putting together a team using horoscopes, as far as I'm concerned.

Sarah Ellis: I like that, "It's like putting together a team with a horoscope"; that's good!

David Erixon: Yeah, don't do it!

Sarah Ellis: And so, just as we're coming to the end of the conversation, two last questions for you.  We always end our interviews with a bit of career advice for our listeners from you, so we'll come to that in a second.  But I would just like to do one more question on learning. So, people will have listened to our conversation today and our Squiggly Career podcast listeners love to learn, they're choosing to spend their listening time with us, listening to a podcast about development and they want to learn.  And perhaps they're just thinking, "How do I get started?  I recognise that I'm not doing by learning, perhaps I'm a bit in that trial and error space", they recognise some of those enemies that you've described so well today and they think, "What's one practical thing that I could do to start learning by doing, make that a habit, make that part of my day-to-day?" where would you suggest people get started?

David Erixon: Well, if you're theoretical, go and read Carol Dweck and embrace The Growth Mindset, because that will propel you.  If you realise that you're not perfect and it's okay not to know, and whatever life throws at me, I can actually learn it.  It may take some time and that's okay, but whatever I put my mind on, I can do; that is a much more helpful set of beliefs than this whole thing, "Oh my God, I can't do it.  If I don't get it immediately, I'm never going to get it" and, "I've fucked this up, I'm not going to tell anyone that".  So, I think if you want a little bit of a framework to put a reference point in your own mind and mindset, then Carol Dweck is it.  And by the way, you can watch the YouTube, it will take half an hour.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, watch the TED Talk.

David Erixon: Yeah, watch the TED Talk.  If you're more practical, I would be probably in that camp, I would do a very simple weekly journal, not daily journal, but I would go, we always end work a little bit earlier on a Friday.  Take ten minutes and do a very simple exercise which is, what happened, and you take the important things that happened that week, and it could be anything.  It could be something that you feel really emotionally charged with.  It could be, "I had a row with my boss", or it could be something that you did that you thought -- it could be anything.  So, what happened; how did it make you feel, is the second question.

It sounds so simple but your behaviour is going to change, because you're going to start reflecting on what has happened and you're going to almost materialise the things that you weren't aware of.  You're going to put shape to it and you're going to integrate it into you as an individual much more efficiently.  And you will see that doing this practice will very, very quickly accelerate your own learning, even how you look at a bad situation.  You're going to go, "This is going to be juicy to think about on Friday!  I'm not going to overthink it now, but I'm going to spend some time on Friday, I'm going to think and go, 'What can I learn from this?'".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, we would describe those as coach-yourself questions, so we'll make sure that we also write those.  We do a summary of the podcast in one page, which we call a PodSheet.  For everybody listening, we'll make sure that those coach-yourself questions are in this week's PodSheet for you. So, last question for you, David, we ask all of our experts this -- I'm not sure how I feel about calling them Ask the Expert now, given what we've talked about today, but let's stick with it for now, let's stick with the format for now!  Maybe "master", Ask the Master. 

That's very hard to say though -- for just one bit of Squiggly Careers advice that you'd like to share with our listeners.  It can be your own words of wisdom, something that someone else has told you that's really stuck with you, but something that you'd like to leave us all with today.

David Erixon: For me, it's two things.  The first thing is, dream bigger.  I, at least from myself speaking from the "I", I probably put too much constraint on myself, "I want to go on a course.  Where should I go?"  It wouldn't even cross my mind that I could go to Harvard because it wasn't even in my universe, I never thought that would be doable, so I put these constraints on myself.  So, I'm saying allow yourself.  Yes, you can go to Harvard; yes, you can work at Apple, or whatever company you look up to; yes, you can do that, so don't put these constraints on yourself because actually it's fun to dream as well, "Imagine what my life would look life".

But the second thing I would say, which is sort of contrary to that, is don't over-career yourself.  I'm actually a really bad person to give career advice, because I never sat down and had a plan and a ten-year plan, and maybe this is my own bias but I have always done what I felt was important, what I loved, what I felt joy, what I felt was interesting, and I tried to go to work to do my job, not to keep my job, and not to place strategically on a career ladder but go, "I want to do great things with great people, and I want to help orchestrate and direct that". 

I think that for me, that's been a good thing because it's also allowed me to end things when I should end it, because a lot of people stay on because they think they're good for their career.  Meanwhile, they kill their spirit and their soul and their dreams of what they could be. I see it in other people's eyes and it makes me really sad, so don't overdo it.  And, when you're in the wrong fishbowl, you need to recognise you're in the wrong fishbowl, and you need to jump to one which is less toxic and more freshwater, I don't know, better nutrition!

Sarah Ellis: I think that's very good advice, given we are not our jobs but we do spend a lot of our week working.  So, we want to spend that time I think having fun and learning and with great people.  David, thank you so much for our conversation today on the Squiggly Careers podcast. 

It's been so nice to actually, I don't think I've ever said this before, but to put a face to an article that I have read so many times and recommended to people.  And I always knew we were connected through a couple of other people, so you have been on my list for a long time, so I'm not sure how you feel about that! I'm so glad personally, I'm thrilled that we had this conversation and I've learnt loads and scribbled loads down, so thank you and I know our listeners will find it really helpful too.  Thank you so much.

David Erixon: It's been my privilege and pleasure, thank you.

Sarah Ellis: So, thank you for listening to today's episode.  I hope you found that helpful.  Of course, the link to the article that I mentioned at the start of the episode is in the show notes.  If you're stuck finding it, please get in touch.  You can email us, we're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, or on LinkedIn, on Amazing If, or just connect with me directly. 

I sort of feel it's an article I'd love everybody to spend some time learning from and reading and recommending, exactly as I've done. If you've got any questions, if there's any experts that you'd like to hear from, or topics you'd really like us to cover, again please do let us know; we always really want to know what's on your minds at the moment so we can be relevant and useful for everyone.  But that's it for this week.  We hope that's been helpful and we're back with you again soon. 

Bye for now.