questions or things that you want to check in before we go live? I don't think so. I'm excited. Me too. I have actually one last question for you. How do you pronounce your last name?
Jetson Jetson
silent G just get rid of the G?
I love that just like my Z and Szlachta Yeah, exactly. Okay, perfect. Well, it is time for us to go live so I'm gonna hit the button and off we go
Good morning Matt Dirksen. I am so excited to have you with us. This is the second of eight conversations that are all part of this day long extravaganza of sharing lessons learned and improving learning next year. Thanks for being with me this morning.
Absolutely, I am so excited and super impressed with this marathon lineup that you're putting together I think I think everybody's gonna get a lot out of it. I'm really excited for the conversation. Fantastic. Well, as I shared with you backstage, I absolutely love listening to other people share their lessons learned because I get to learn from their lessons learned and everybody gets to improve. So thank you for sharing and being transparent and honest with us how this 30 minutes is going to unfold for our listeners. So we've got 15 minutes Matt of you and I just sharing and hearing from each other about lessons learned. And what you're going to be focused on in the new year. And then we'll open up the last 15 minutes of our time together for questions. So if anybody would like to talk with Matt and get his wisdom and expertise, based upon his lessons learned that is our opportunity to do so. So Matt, without further ado, will you please share just a few words to describe who you are in the world of learning and development so that we get a sense of the lens through which you're sharing your lessons learned?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing that's important to understand is probably business owner. So I used to be internal to a two organizations and do lnd aside, but a little over two and a half years ago, I went fully external and have my own business better, bigger studios. So that 100% presents a particular lens that I'm looking at organizations from the outside, which has pluses and minuses for sure. And then probably the second word to best describe my approach to learning is always practical. That just is because of my background. In coming into l&d. I was instructor pilot in the Air Force. I taught people how to run marathons. And so it was very, I'm just I, it's like, I constantly feel like I'm the dumb person, because I'm just looking into like, but how does it work? But what do you mean? Because because I didn't have like the academic background to come into it of the theory I had like the real world experience and then slowly pieced together the theory afterwards. And that kind of colors my view for sure. Well,
colors make everything more brilliant and so I appreciate the lens that you're bringing to this conversation for this 30 minutes and well beyond. And Matt, I also share with you the external perspective. I am also a business owner, and had been internal for many, many years in a variety of spaces and I think in some ways, it makes it better for us because we don't have to deal with some of the politics and personalities that internal colleagues have to deal with. But at the same time, sometimes we can't be as impactful because we aren't internal and we aren't coming in and out every single day and holding that torch for the success of the organization. So yeah, definitely an interesting place to be and practical, fantastic. I mean, if learning is going to be effective, it has to be practical and actionable. So that lens is super, I love that. So now that we know a little bit more about you, Matt, what are the lessons that you've learned this year doing the work of a business owner and also learning and development?
So I think the first lesson that I really learned this year that I think applies in both spaces is the importance of, I think, at least for me, early on, I grew up being told, you know, keep as many doors open as possible, you know, say you want to say yes to everything, right? Like I think there's a whole movement of that as there's movies about it. Yesterday and just like, be open to experiences. And I think that's very important early on. And so thinking about this from the business lens of, you know, trying to figure out what exactly my product market fit is Who are my ideal clients. So I was just you know, I started my company saying yes to everything and then one day I turn and look around I'm like, There's no way to replicate or duplicate any of this stuff. Every every customer looks different. I don't know what's going on. And so eventually after you think after you say yes to a lot of things, you have to figure out what works, and then you say no to everything. Essentially like you figure out where your sweet spot is, what your strengths are, what you want to focus on, and you have to say no to virtually everything else. That's been a big pivot point for my company. That's really it really only happened about three months ago and it's already paying dividends. And then I think from the learning perspective, that's really true as well inside organization. We have to as learning professionals, especially new you're a new learning manager, you're new on a team, you're new in an organization you need to start by. People come to you asking you for things saying yes to them, because we want to start building those relationships. But then it's really important to learn how you are going to given the organization given the context, given your resources, how you're going to be most effective in that organization. And then I learned this from an amazing business leader at the last company I was at internally who really taught me She really taught me the importance of only saying yes to the things that you know you're going to have an impact on and being brutally honest with stakeholders. And just you know, ideally, there's other ways you don't have to say flat out No, hopefully you have other resources that you can give them or something else, but really saying no to as much as possible so that the yeses truly generate wins.
You know, Matt this is gonna sound strange, but this reminds me of the billboards that you sometimes see where you see a lawyer, and the lawyer is advertising call us if you've been injured, and we only get paid when you do and when I see those billboards I always ask myself, like, how does that work? And I had a conversation with a friend yesterday at happy hour and she's like Elena, they only take on the cases that they know they can win. And I'm like, oh, right, that makes a lot of sense. And so you know what you're sharing is okay, say yes to things. Maybe in the beginning to build rapport, to get to know what people need to get to know the learners and the culture of the organization. But ultimately, we do have to start saying no to the things that we know aren't going to be effective or they aren't going to be successful. And so, Matt, I know you have more lessons learned that you're going to share, but I have to ask you this question. How do you go about saying no tactfully? Because, of course, we want to have good relationships with stakeholders, individual contributors and our colleagues or with our clients, right? If we're business owners, so how have you found that you can say no, in a way that still feels like a win win?
Totally. So yeah, and I think I'm actually, I think I'm just wrote, I'm in the middle of writing a blog post. About exactly this. And when I was at SpaceX, one of the things that we did because I think a lot of learning organizations find themselves I like to think people are either in one of two camps. Either the business doesn't know who you are, what you do, and you don't have anything to do, or the business does know you and what you can do, and then you are overwhelmed. So and you know that many of them, you're not there, it's kind of small ball stuff, you're not going to have a huge impact. It's for some individual manager and some saying on their team something. And so one thing that I would really encourage people to do is think about how to create processes that allow people to help themselves. Finding tools that are really user friendly and licensable, affordable. And then building templates for those tools, and then training people how to use those templates. I honestly have been extremely surprised. In multiple organizations, how readily people will pick up those tools if you give them to them. And if they're easy to use if you give clear guidance, clear guidelines. And so it's not that's kind of a reflection of your question. Because it's not that you're saying, you're saying no to me doing it, you're you're saying, Hey, we don't have time to do this, or we have other these are our priorities. But here's some other things that you can do. So that's part of the tactful though, being able to offer other support I also think it's really important to be extremely open and honest about what your priorities are and how you have established those priorities. I think one thing that it took me a long time to understand is being really clear with my boss with my boss's boss about I think these are the priorities for our team. Do you agree? And if they do, well, now you have some top cover, right to actually be the same no to folks because you can explain you can have you have that you have reasoning. This, this is why we're focusing on not on what we're focusing on. And then all of them then the final thing I'll say is all of this is kind of wrapped inside. The idea of like why it is still important to say yes first is because you want to have you know a relationship you want to be seen as a helpful person. You want some of that is just some of that is about truly getting out in the business to even before people are asking for your help. Get out in the business, get to know leaders out in the business, get to know people so that when they come to you the so that your first interaction, isn't you saying no, I can't help you. Hopefully you've had some other interactions before that.
I hear you saying is sort of a yes. And approach. And when I when I went from being an academic and I transitioned into the world of learning and development at a national nonprofit, I was the first external hire in a training role that they had ever done. So I had a lot of up. I had a lot of headwinds going into that position. And so what you're saying is like prioritize building relationships. And I think saying saying yes, is one strategy to build those relationships. And it's not the only one. When we say yes to things, especially when we're new in our role and in a leadership role in training and development, when we say yes, we see like what's important to people, we get a sense of what works and what doesn't, and sometimes just like getting in the weeds and failing forward, gives us like the data and the context to be able to say no really powerfully to the next time, something like that comes up. I love that.
That's 100% Right. That's 100% I love how you said that.
Something else you mentioned and you didn't dive too deeply into this, but I want to call it out is that sometimes when we get training requests, it's not so much that we need a full blown training, it's that we need a system or infrastructure or tools to give people such that they can sort of take care of their needs on their own. And I'm this I'm saying this because in the last conversation I had with Laurie Roth, that was something that also came up was the importance of a knowledge management system and empowering the individuals at whatever level whatever level they're in, in an organization empowering them to go find what they need on their own versus having to go through formal training and I'm not going to be surprised if I hear this coming up throughout the rest of the day of like, if we want to scale when change is the norm and things are moving really quickly. We can't do the traditional training anymore, it doesn't work. And so finding ways to like help people help themselves might be the new role of l&d.
I think that's that's really important. It's actually it's interesting, since we're talking about next year 2024 is going to be that's going to be a big focus for me, is I'm gonna build out a whole workshop around how to simplify it, you could call it train the trainer. I think it's much more inclusive than that. It's much more it's much broader than that. It's, it's how do you understand what learning looks like? How do you, you know, do facilitation and training for sure. How do you identify learning, learning outcomes? How do you do all the other stuff you just mentioned? I am a huge proponent of knowledge management. It's the organizations that I have been in for knowledge management is probably the second most pressing issue that is causing problems to good learning and development.
Yeah, when I worked for another corporate, we didn't have any standards for the instructional designers on the team. And so it was really inefficient for us to go design something because we didn't have if you think about our department as a brand, we didn't have any brand standards of like how we did things and how we wanted to be seen as a partner and what our products look like and that was so time consuming. And so what I hear you sharing is not so much. It's like getting everybody on the same page in some ways to make everything else easier, especially when we have other unexpected headwinds from so many ways these days.
Yeah, if you're if you're starting from scratch and every project there's, you're just so far behind. Yeah. If you don't have those standards, a way to get started quickly, then it's a struggle for sure. Yeah.
So what will you be focused on as you go into the new year, you mentioned, you know, this new product that you're going to help build for others to be more effective. But, you know, what are you going to do like as a consultant to help your clients make learning more effective
I mean, I think part of it is going to be kind of what we've already mentioned, have a really strong focus on on repeatable processes of how to recruit How do we create systems that work really well really effectively really quickly? The way I like to think about it is you want to create a system for content creation, maximizes speed, while minimizing the chance of rework. And so that's really focusing on ultimately that comes down to is what are you looking at when from my review perspective? So we're going to be spending a lot of focus on that internally in the training kind of training or clients as we bring on new clients of how we do that review process. I think that's going to be a big one. And then the other main focus for the year, we've kind of already started with it. It's It feels almost shameful to say because this is what we all say we do anyway, from a learning development perspective, but really focusing in on what are the things that are going to drive the organization forward? You know, you always talk about measuring effectiveness. I think from a from a point of view of a business owner, one of the thing that's always struggling is you know, I made the mistake of saying like, Hey, I'm gonna go start an instructional design agency. But the problem that is nobody, nobody's looking for instructional design, right? Like no, no. Business is really looking for instructional design. They're looking for the things that instructional design might bring. But they might not know that that's what they need. And so how do we start by saying, Okay, our focus, so basically the whole year, we have this whole product roadmap that we're going to be developing and then you know, we'll be working with our clients to help develop that really starts with Okay, your goal is to increase New Hire retention, and decrease time to productivity. Okay, so like, that's your goal. Let's build towards that goal. So always focusing exclusively on the business outcomes to start with, and then design backwards from there. Again, it sounds it sounds silly to say that that's going to be my focus for 2024 Because of course, that's what we all do, right? That's what we all say we we all to know that it's easy to get caught up in Okay, we're gonna make this course okay. You want this thing? You want to need this knowledge transfer course. Okay. I'm trying to step back from that. Yeah,
I wrote down this question. What should we do to drive the organization forward? That to me, and you mentioned like knowing priorities, if we know the priorities for our client for the internal and external stakeholders at our organization, and those change? So you know, it's not like the priority yesterday will be the priority of next year and so keeping a pulse on that, but then the question is are we doing the right things to drive those priorities forward? Why or why not? And then you're you're looking at and then how do we drive those priorities forward with the processes and systems to do that the quickest ways possible with a minimal amount of duplicate work, my God, duplicate work is like, so painful, so painful. Yeah. Wow. I think that's fabulous. So I have a question for you that will descend into the last 10 minutes of just open q&a. So if folks who are listening if you have a question for Matt, you want something you want him to dig into please go ahead and raise your hand. And I'll bring you up on stage. And while you're thinking about your question, or considering if you want to ask one. I have one for you, Matt, and that is how will you know that you've improved? Right so here we are talking about the lessons that we've learned the things that we're going to do differently and all these plans, they sound fantastic, but like what will you be looking to whether, you know, I look at some things daily, whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, what will you be looking at to know that you're actually improving and the ways that you want to improve?
I mean, I'll be honest, with the business owner hat on, revenue is a big one for me. So I'll say like just that that the revenue piece is a big one. Just so that I know that okay, that that's that's kind of the roundabout signal, that is the lagging indicator that serving my clients well, that they're, that they're supporting me, you know, kind of a subset of that would be I'm really hoping to do a lot of business through referrals because again, if you're doing if you're generating referral business, that means you are you really are serving your clients really, really well. So I thought on the business side, but I always try to balance that. And honestly, for me, on the personal side, it's just kind of how much time I spend with my daughter. I have an eight year old daughter she's about to turn nine how often am I free, fully free on the weekends to do a daddy daughter date? You know that that's a big one for me. Because I want to grow a business, but I don't want to do it at the expense of my family. And so I feel like those are kind of the two juxtaposed metrics. Yeah,
time I feel you. Time to me is one of the most important metrics. How do I feel about how I'm spending my time? How much time do I have that's free to do whatever it is I want to do Yeah, when we think about are we improving? And many ways we want to make sure that we have time to ourselves whether you're a business owner or leader inside of an organization or an individual contributor, you should not be giving your heart and body and soul over to your work. You should be able to have a sense of time is my own, whether it's in the ways that you're giving it. Yeah, I appreciate that. We have a question. Yes. Oh, well, we had a question.
And I really want her to ask the question. So I'd love I just wanted to follow up really quickly. If anybody if anybody's not listening to the rework podcast, I highly recommend it. And it popped into my brain specifically because of what you were just saying where they were talking about meetings and really reframing your, the way you think about meetings of rather than there is open space and you put a meeting, a meeting into it. Think of an open day as your time to do things and meetings are taking away from that. Just a slight reframe of how you think about it. And
lo Pora I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, feel free to raise your hand again. And we'll bring you onto stage until you do that. I think from the perspective of being an owner or leader of a team or a stakeholder in an organization, I think we could spend a lot more time thinking through the lens of the time that our employees are giving and the time that they're spending at the office and that everybody's time is important. And I know that colleagues and friends have shared with me that they don't feel like their organization or their leader. Or the culture of the company doesn't value people's time. And we are in an era where people are quitting and they're being laid off. And some of the reasons that people might be laid off is because maybe they just don't care anymore about their work because they don't believe their time is being valued. I mean, at the end of the day, if we feel we're valued, and if the organization feels we add value. There's so much that everybody wins from that simple thing. And I think at the end of the day time and how people feel about the time they're spending how much time they have, that they have agency, right over their own work and they're not being meeting bombarded, right, like, yeah, thinking about the quality of the time that we're spending at work and outside of work and is it going in the direction you want it to? What a powerful metric to know that we've been successful and we're making improvements. Are there any other questions that folks would like to ask Matt? And if not, I have others. I'll pause for a moment and see if any other hands come up at max wisdom.
I'd love to hear from from folks see what people see if this is resonating. See what people are seeing in the business in their own businesses.
I have just given you the mic, so feel free to unmute unmute yourself.
Thank you folks. And really enjoyed the interviewer by the way. Dr. Lena, nice to meet you, Matt, thank you for your service to our country. I wanted to just ask you I just briefly looked at your LinkedIn profile next you have extensive experience in a lot of different sectors and companies. What made you decide to go into business for yourself and to start your own company? I'd just be curious, some of the things that inspired you to to take that leap. And just to tack on while you're thinking about that I was actually just listening to a really great summary of Rich Dad Poor Dad last night, which is a book that talks about that concept of not selling your time for money. So if anyone's interested, I highly recommend that because it does provide a lot of interesting angles around how we how we use our time and how we create wealth.
That is a that's a great book me I think it's a great a great everybody should read that book. But for me for what for why I found on my own. I think it was a long it was a long process of self discovery that eventually led me there. One part of it is I just have really strong beliefs about business culture about what a good culture is about how the culture is I don't think you know, there's lots of different ways to design a company. So I think I don't necessarily think that there's a right way to do it. There are many ways to do it. But I have a lot of strong opinions. And it's hard to you know, when you work at a company, if you're not the founder or the CEO or whatever, it's hard it can be hard to influence that. And so I wanted to give it a try amount of like what let's put some of my beliefs to the test really start from scratch. So that was part of it. And then I think another thing and this might be coming from just the organizations that I happen to work with, but I really think anybody who works in an organization should do this in some way of just stand where you are in your organization wherever we are at the bottom to the top, look up. See if you like the lives of the people above you if you want to live their lives, not say that anything's wrong with them. Everybody has the opportunity to live their own lives. 100% support that. But for me and the organization that I was at I was looking up and kind of saying, you know, I don't think I want that like I want to design something different and many ways to do that. I could have chosen to go to another company to try in there. But I decided that hey, let's I had already been doing kind of a side hustle for a while. Just better indie studios started as a side hustle of just doing design work on the side, and I had enough clients and my wife was supportive. And so I was like, let's do it. Let's see if I can do it. If I can, if I can. Make it
fantastic that high. The language that you just use makes it so clear and simple. If you're at an organization and you will look at those who are ahead of you or even just around you, and what are their lives look like and can you see yourself and that life is such a wonderful indicator of are you in the right place? Does it make sense to continue investing in this organization and in this work, and if not, then time to make a change. And I did that for myself. And it's funny, I wouldn't have used the language to describe that. But that's exactly what made me quit my last corporate job and then say I've got to do something else because the quality of life just doesn't align with the kind of life I want to have for myself now and in the future. Yeah.
I think the great thing about taking that agency the way you did is get rid of I think a source of a lot of the word I'm looking for a lot of consternation or a lot of frustration by people is we feel that we're kind of like forced into something that there we don't have a choice that maybe deep down, don't like the way we have to be at our particular work. We don't see there see there as being any choice. And so that's what builds all this angst where we start to say like no you shouldn't work like the company shouldn't be this way it is wrong for it to be this way because I don't want to be this way. Whereas if we take that a little bit of agency say like, well, I can choose to be someone else and I did I get it. I'm talking from an extremely privileged position. There's all kinds of places where people don't have a lot of choice, but the more agency we can take of that choice and and think about ways that you can change things yourself. If you if you don't like the situation you're just kind of I feel like lowers the temperature of the conversation a little
bit. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I'll say Matt, that I proposed before quitting my last corporate job. I had an idea of how we could be more effective and how we could change the quality of the working experience for our whole team and I made a proposal to the highest level leader inside the organization, and they weren't receptive. And that gave me all the information that I needed to know that this wasn't the right place for me, and then I could make an informed decision about what to do next. But I at least I at least I didn't just quit and give up. I was like, No, I am committed to the success of this company and of our department and the people that we serve. And so if you see an opportunity in your role or in your organization to do things better or differently, don't be afraid to make the proposition of here's what I see could happen and have a conversation and maybe outcome isn't what you hope. But if you're looking for an indicator of should I stay or should I go that proposal and that could be a really illuminating activity for you