Yannick Grenzinger
Transcript (Translated)
Here, I admit, I'm going to take a step back. We're going to try to cover different elements of how to learn to learn. And the idea is how to learn to learn, especially to survive in the 21st century, because I think we're going to need it more and more. So, I'm Yannick Gresinger, if you want to tweet, it's ygresinger, at ygresinger, as a mnemonic, Grenz means 'border' in German.
I've just gone technical, so I could put 'chief,' but well, in an IT services company, 'chief' is a bit odd, and secondly, I prefer to see myself as a leader rather than someone who tells others what to do. So there's Carbon IT, which is a consulting firm that's just starting up, and the idea is to bring together a group of passionate people with best practices to create the right products for clients. Okay, let's stop the introduction and get started directly. So, I don't know if you know this gentleman. Who knows this gentleman? Okay, for the others, go watch his TED Talk. So, TED is a series of conferences. This is a gentleman who wrote *Start with Why*, so start with the 'why.' We're going back into the startup world, etc. So here, we're going to try to start with the 'why.' Why learn? First of all, quite simply, we can learn because it's an intrinsic motivation of human beings. In fact, there's a book called—I love citing books, you'll take away a few—called *Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices*. Shapes our choices. And so, they tried to separate four elements. They tried to find the fundamental elements that shape our choices. So, the first two, which resemble animals, are acquiring and defending. Acquiring status, acquiring wealth, acquiring women, defending one's family, defending one's wealth, defending one's status, defending one's manager position. Another, which is less common in the animal kingdom, is bonding. So we can bond with a woman for life.
It may seem strange sometimes, but it's part of being human. And finally, something that is less common in animals—well, other animals—even though you can see monkeys learning, but they often learn with the goal of acquiring something in the short term. We can learn for the sake of learning. People who study theology their whole lives, It's not to acquire something, it's the pleasure of learning, discovering, and reflecting. That's one reason. Now, there's a phrase I like, which we mentioned right away—by the way, I was trying to find where it came from—it's by a gentleman named Sir Francis Bacon, a scientific philosopher from the late 16th century, who wrote, 'Knowledge is power.' I'm less and less sure about that. We'll see why, let's do a bit of history. Okay, I'll get there. Back then, it was power. You have the Library of Alexandria on your right, the monks, and then something that a bit broke this power—we just have power—it's the printing press. We started to spread it. Power to the people, well, knowledge. And precisely, intrinsically, we started to spread power. So it still exists, we still have people who will defend their power stash; they have knowledge, for them it's their wealth, so they'll do everything to keep it. So how do we do it in industry? We use software patents. We put patents everywhere, we try to defend this knowledge through various means, legal or less legal. And another way is also diplomas. So there you go, you graduate from Polytechnique, you graduate from Harvard, you have knowledge that's been acquired, which is magnificent, and that you'll highlight with various diplomas. But I think this is less and less true. In fact, this power is increasingly being questioned. Already, the Library of Alexandria—on Wikipedia, you surely have much, much more free information. Well, free. They need help right now. And of course, in software, you have open source. Now, we're all more or less—I think here, most people who work in software work with open source. Even Microsoft is doing more and more open source. So they've understood, those who were all about patents and paid software, are starting to do a lot, a lot of open source. And of course, in hardware, which was very physical, so easy to protect, we're starting to have open hardware. Arduinos, microprocessors, or the design. Of course, not everyone is capable of creating a microprocessor like that at home, but the plans are free. If you have the technical means, you can do it. It's easy. And finally, for Harvard, Polytechnics, there's been something that's starting to... It might be a more or less silent revolution. Many people are asking, is this going to work? I'm convinced it will. It's MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, online courses given by professors from prestigious schools, Harvard, MIT, École Centrale de Lille, etc., even French schools, and it's free. Afterward, you can pay for a certificate signed in your name, but if you just want to learn for the sake of learning, it's not necessary.
Another important element in companies is that we talk about innovate or die. Right now, everyone is talking about innovation. We must innovate, we must innovate. I have a bit of trouble with the notion of innovation, and I'd prefer we talk about adaptation. I'll take the famous phrase that everyone knows and which, at first glance, is often attributed to Charles Darwin, but it wouldn't be him. It's that it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that survives, but the one that is most capable of adapting to change. It's not necessarily the company with the most MBAs or the richest that will survive, but the one that can adapt continuously. And adaptation is something that requires the whole company to adapt.
What I like about quotes, there's Mr. Jeff Bezos, so those who don't know him, he's the CEO of Amazon, the founder and CEO of Amazon, who says what's dangerous is not evolving, so not adapting.
And to continue on knowledge, in fact, there are... There are people who say that value is no longer knowledge, it's creativity. It's the ability to use this knowledge we have at any given moment and to create new knowledge continuously. It's this creativity that will create value, not knowledge as we had in the 16th century or before the printing press.
We're going to try to dig a little deeper, explore different elements, it's going to be very high-level, we won't go into details, but how can we learn to be creative? Often, people who came to see me thought I was going to talk about the individual, MOOCs, because it's a passion of mine, but actually, I want to talk about the three levels: the organization, the project, and the individual. I changed them, I'll start with the organization. But before that, something very interesting I saw in a course on learning. What is learning? It's two things, two elements. It's exploring and capitalizing on what we've discovered, or the mistakes we've made. Capitalizing on what we've been able to discover. So, I think we're very good at exploitation. We're into Lean Kanban, so Lean, Lean Six Sigma, improving, reducing variability, etc. We're very, very good at that. And then, in the end, we have robots that do it much better than us.
Exploitation, robots are perfect for it. But us, in fact, as humans, where we're good is exploration, finding new ideas. Until maybe Google releases a revolutionary AI that takes all our jobs, but that's another question. But it's really exploration. And unfortunately, I think we do very little of it. Of course, there are methods, startups, design thinking. We create innovation departments. But unfortunately, it's still very targeted. It's not yet very... Very strong in organizations. So we'll start with organizations. So, I have a little question, well, I'm going to ask you a question, but first I'll introduce it—you all know Taylorism. What is Taylorism? It's engineers, white-collar workers as we used to say, who define work methods, what we're going to do and how it's going to be done. Then you have the foremen, that is, those who check what the workers are doing, whether they're following the requirements and how the work should be done. And finally, you have the workers who can follow what was said, follow the specifications, follow the process to the letter, and carry out the task.
By the way, I asked a question—how, is it a way, actually, maybe I reversed the question, but is it for you—I'd like you to raise your hand—is it a good way for you to learn this in an organization?
No one is raising their hand. Are you sure?
Are you certain? Okay, we'll change the names.
At the top, we'll put Business Owner, Cross-functional Architect, Innovation Department. Then, we'll put Project Manager. Yesterday, I was redoing this, and I wondered, am I being mischievous, should I put Scrum Master? Well, we won't... And then, the developer. Doesn't that sound familiar? Don't you work in this kind of organization?
I just changed the names; I didn't actually do much.
So, what are the leads? I'm not a coach, I'm a developer, so I have the solutions, and I think we don't have them just like that. But I'll give a few leads. The first would be to simply reduce hierarchies. So if you want to explore the topic, a very good example to start with is The Valve Handbook. It's a small handbook for people joining Valve, a video game company that created the game distribution software called Steam, in addition to very famous video games. So check it out, The Valve Handbook, it's quite nice; they explain how they have a nearly flat organization. There are roughly this kind of levels, unlike a traditional organization. Another element that someone in the room knows very well is how to work together. After that, there are many ways to think about it. One of the ways I find very interesting, which has been best thought out currently, is simply how Spotify works. So we'll try to work like Spotify. They decided to try to group people around a feature. And then, how do we ensure that developers in the company learn together? We'll put all the roles working on a feature together, and we'll have roles learn through guilds, through means—they meet regularly, etc. I won't go into detail on the subject because it's a topic that could deserve a presentation of its own. On its own.
I discovered someone at an event called Stous. I'll come back to it later—it's M. Nice. Pledging, I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name. So, he gives quite a few presentations on how to change management. It's quite interesting; the SlideShares are very well-documented. So go check them out. I took one, I chose one. He says that for him, the organization is inefficient—what's happening? There are three elements present in all organizations. There's the notion of informality. An organization is social networks, people talking together, people going to the coffee machine, the boss who knows, the boss who went to the same school and will talk, etc. So that would represent—I won't judge the numbers—it would represent 30%. Then, there's value creation, because actually, a company is there to create value for its customers. Very good. That would be 20%. And finally, there would be the entire formal part, so hierarchical, which would be 50%. You report to your boss, you make reports for your superior, etc. What are the percentages? It's that you have an initial energy, people who work. What is the distribution of this energy? So here, we see that 20% goes toward value creation, which is what the company should be doing. It's a bit sad. So he said to himself, it's a bit of the classic movement, but I find it well represented right now. I wanted to make a slide on allocracy, but I thought it was getting a bit mystical, so we'll stop. But it represents that—it's about saying, we'll stop working, we'll try to break something we can. It's not the informal part. There will always be people who get along with others, always people who will have the coffee machine, always someone who will play sports at the end of... Golf with their neighbor—we can't do anything about that; maybe we'll try to reduce it a bit. But what we'll break is the hierarchy. We'll create networks of cells that work together. And overall, you have this circle with relationships to the outside, but also internal teams that provide services to other teams within the organization. You see cells. The boundary is the company, and behind it are the customers. You have cells that work directly with the customer and cells that work for the company. And by doing this, maybe—I don't know if he managed to apply it, you'll have to ask him—we can maybe change the percentage of value creation, so that now there's 70% value creation.
Now, we'll move on to Stous. Stous was an event that took place in 2011, which was quite magical, but unfortunately, the idea was to do the same as the Agile Manifesto in 2001, but for organizations. There was Jürgen Appello, Steve Denning, people of that caliber, who gathered and said how we can create a kind of manifesto for organizations for the 21st century. Unfortunately, it didn't lead to much; it didn't have the same success or scale as the Agile Manifesto, but it produced a somewhat complex phrase that is extremely interesting, which says that organizations must become learning networks composed of people creating value and whose leaders are not there to manage like a machine, but rather like a complex and living organism. It's much harder. It's much simpler to manage a series of robots than a series of people.
I'll move on—I could talk about this too; it's a topic that would deserve a conference of its own. I'll present three books that I found excellent and would recommend. The first is *Management 3.0* by Jürgen Appello; it's one of the best books on agility that I've read. Really go read it; it's great. A book called *Warfighting*. In fact, last year, Donald Reinertsen impressed me quite a bit with his presentation. He said he worked in the Navy. I wondered, how does an army work nowadays? And so, he advised me to read this little book. It's a small book of about a hundred pages. Of course, 30-40% is about the art of war. How do you create an army that must destroy its enemy? There's a good part that's related to the organization of a modern army. And it's just impressive. It's impressive because there are principles where the general gives the mission order, and it goes down the levels, and the level of detail becomes more precise as it goes. It's not the general who says how the squad should operate. The squad is independent; it has a mission and can manage it as it wants. That's what we talk about in the agile world, but it's very interesting that the army does it. It's not *Full Metal Jacket*, contrary to what one might think. The other thing is that the general must be able to step into a squad and, while perhaps not as effective, be able to understand a soldier's life, to live the soldier's life. If you take a CIO and put them in a project team and ask them to... Code, I'm curious about the result.
The last book I haven't read, but I read another book called 'Thinking in Systems,' it's the same thing, it's about systems thinking. It's about how we manage these complex relationships between people, how we manage things we can't... We say we struggle with KPIs. This morning, there was this notion of KPIs being extremely hard to find. Systems thinking is so complex that the KPIs we think are easy to find are often rarely the right ones.
That's it for organizations. Now, I'm going to move on to something else. And precisely, I'd like to move on to something else, which is shifting from project to product. Now, it's becoming trendy, it's becoming a flagship discourse. And here too, I'm going to ask you a question.
Doesn't that remind you of anything? So, the design, the definition of how we're going to do it, the people who do it, validation, deployment to production. Who does that?
Pretty much everyone, I think. Pretty much classic.
For information, by the way, another question: is this a good way for you to learn about the product you're making? what's difficult to find is that it's so complex and systemic that the KPIs we see as easy to find are often rarely the right ones.
That’s it for organizations. Now, I’m going to move on to something else. And precisely, I’d like to move on to something else, which is shifting from project to product. Now, this is becoming trendy; it’s becoming a flagship discourse. And here too, I’m going to ask you a question.
Doesn’t this remind you of anything? So, the design, the definition of how we’re going to do it, the people who do it, validation, deployment to production. Who does that?
Pretty much everyone, I think. Pretty much classic. For information, by the way, another question: is this a good way to learn about the product you’re making?
I imagine it’s the same. For information, I took this from a video of an online course currently happening at the École Centrale de Lille on project management.
At one point, when I saw this, I would have asked on the forums: is this applicable to IT? They told me yes, yes, there’s no problem. Okay, I understand some things better now. So, of course, how can we change this? We all know it by heart, I’ll go quickly: the Agile Manifesto. A great way, which I love, is to learn continuously. How to learn continuously? It’s going to be about the process, how we work. It’s going to be the Scrum retrospective, the 3, Kaizen. We all know this by heart. User feedback, the Scrum demo—we can even go further. The insert-up, we’ll do a beta. Very quickly, we’ll put it in contact with real users, not just the PO. And the team itself: pair review, pair programming. We all know this by heart. I’m going to go a little further; I’m going to push you to your limits. There’s something I love: innovation. And in innovation, there’s just one principle not to forget. It’s that you have to know how to fail fast. Unlike the project method we saw earlier, which may be very good for building public housing or the Eiffel Tower, in product development, I think the most important thing is learning to fail—but failing in a week of development, not six months or two years of development. We fail fast—well, fail, it’s not even failing, it might succeed—but basically, we test with the user, we see if it’s good or not. Regularly, it won’t be good, but too bad, we’ll have only done a week of development. And by the way, there’s an entrepreneur and creator everyone knows, Thomas Edison, who said, 'I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.' " So basically, before succeeding, he’s an entrepreneur who created a lot of things, a genius innovator—he had to try thousands of times to get one that worked. And so in the end, we arrive at this: Lean Startup. Why Lean Startup? Because for me, agility at the product level is really the next frontier we’ll have to overcome. Agility at the team level, we’re getting there, it’s starting to take hold. Agility at the product level, we’ll have to go there. After that, classic management can be integrated into it. There’s always this notion of 'we define what we’re going to do, we build, we measure.' But the most important thing it adds is that it’s feedback, it’s a loop, and there’s this notion of 'we learn.' So we don’t say, 'we’ve specified how it’s going to be done, we know how it’s going to be done, we know how we’re going to do it, and at the end we deliver it and it’s over.' If you still think that, it might be good for public housing or the Eiffel Tower, but for a product, I think you’re going to be wrong. And a second motto of Lean Startup that’s super important: don’t be afraid to confront reality. Get out of your building, get out of your dev team, go see your real users. Expect 'no, I don’t like it,' 'no, I didn’t think so'—that’s it, but at least you’ll know quickly.
So, some classic books.
I didn’t take any action, but I found it excellent. So, *The Lean Startup*—now it’s very common, so it’s a bit of popularization, but it’s really if you want a bit of a feel for it. Very good, because much more applied, it’s *Running Lean*. It’s him, it’s M. H. Maurya, who created the Lean Canvas. And finally, a book I hope to read very soon. And why do I find it very interesting? Because in *Lean Startup*, there’s a big problem in the name. It says 'Startup.' When in fact, it applies very well to companies. And so, they said to themselves, let’s change it a bit. They were still very good marketers, the Americans. Let’s call it *Lean Enterprise*. Then you say to yourself, yeah, but that’s good in software, it’s easy to do in software—you can do startup mode, you can quickly learn a piece of code, it changes very fast. This is a dad who created an orthopedic prosthesis for his son—he had asked a company that makes them, and it would have cost him several tens of thousands of dollars, so that wasn’t possible. How was this done? It was done with this kind of small thing. You see in the background over there, it’s a 3D printer. So how to quickly create physical things in a mode where every day you create a new prototype and try it. Now you have 3D printers; you’re no longer forced to go to a factory in China that produces a minimum of 100,000 copies, so you’re forced to specify it perfectly. Now you can test it directly. There was a presentation by Nicolas yesterday—he must have talked about it—if you went, you know everything.
Time is flying; I’ll have to hurry. So, How are we now going to move to the individual? Because that’s maybe what interests you. Well, I’m not going to ask you the question because we’ve all been through it. How to learn on school benches, on university benches? Is that a good way to learn? It’s been around for several thousand years, so it must have some value.
It was especially interesting several centuries ago when people were capable of knowing everything. There were people who knew all possible sciences: biology, geology, etc.
Now, with the increase in the amount of data—okay, in the data, there are cat videos and Facebook conversations, which aren’t very interesting—but there’s a lot more data. A billion terabytes—a terabyte is roughly a hard drive these days—you put a billion terabytes together, and you see the enormous size it takes. So for someone to know all the knowledge is just impossible. So some say, how are we going to change this? How are we going to learn to learn quickly? And Mr. Josh Kaufman, who said, in fact, there’s also a theory that says to be an expert, you need to have worked 10,000 hours, you need to have practiced 10,000 hours. He says, okay, that’s great—at the end of the curve, you’ll be an expert. But maybe in much less time—how much time, we don’t really know—but in much less time, we could cover 80% of the way. So how are we going to do that? So, I’m going to try to give some leads I’ve seen in my readings. First, for the leads, you need to understand two things. Knowledge is divided into two important things. Declarative knowledge: facts, history dates. You can memorize historical dates, you can memorize a book. And the tasks and the methods, how you perform a process. Someone who works at McDonald's learns exactly what they have to do, word for word. So that's quite simple to learn, well, quite simple, it's the easiest. Harder is the procedural part. I saw Romain doing his drawings, I asked him how you do it. It's always difficult to say how I learned to do that. It's going to be practice, it's a bit like a guitarist. If you ask him how you learned, tell me step by step, meticulously, how you did it to learn, he won't be able to tell you, because in fact, we learn mainly through practice. It also involves mental skills, creativity, etc.
How are we going to do it? Mainly, in any case, what we're going to do is break it down. We're going to try to break it down into small pieces. I'm going to give you some general guidelines. Break it down into small pieces to learn more easily, you'll use mental models and metaphors. Calculators who outperform calculators work with that. You apply mental models to each series of numbers. Metaphors on sections, like your grandmother's cake on a series of names. An important thing is to focus on the advice they give for learning anything. It's to spend 25 minutes every evening before sleeping doing just that, really just that. Don't watch TV, you just do that. And of course, one of the things that's super important is a presentation I gave following School 42, where they said they put the students... in the deep end, in the pool, and then they have to code. And the problem is, they said, we make them work practically all night. Why not, it's a bit like the army, it's nice, but they're missing something: in the long term, you have to sleep, it's super important. And finally, in any case, we always end up with the same thing: feedback. Learning, what have we learned? Can we measure what we learn? If you're a top-level athlete, you constantly see if you're improving. If you're someone who wants to memorize the Iliad, are you learning faster and faster? Are you reading faster and faster? And in fact, more and more people have thought about how to break down these procedural tasks or this declarative knowledge. To learn to read faster, you have methods in French or English, you have apps. The idea is to widen your vision, stop subvocalizing, lots of things. You can learn to type faster on the keyboard. You have methods that will tell you, you start with AB, ABE, etc. And you use all your fingers. And then, if you want to be impressed, go watch the video of a man named Arthur Benjamin, who calls himself a mathematician and who outperforms the audience's calculators in mental math. How does he do it? He associates metaphors, mental models with each series of numbers and learns all possible calculations. And in the end, he vocalizes his way of working. It's incomprehensible, but it's very funny.
Three very interesting books. Moonwalking with Einstein, it's a journalist, Joshua. who said, I'm going to enter memory competitions. So it wasn't someone who had an accident and memorized the dictionary, it wasn't Rayman, it was an average person who said, I'm going to learn to memorize declarative things very quickly. Two elements, a man named Timothy Ferriss, who is well known for the 4-hour workweek, who counted with his 4 hours, but here it's forward shift, it's someone with a huge learning capacity who said, I have a problem, I'm not going to cook. So 80% of his book is cooking recipes, and 20% is about how to learn. He talks about someone who learned Icelandic in 7 days. He explains tricks to get to know the language. For example, when learning English, we learn declaratively, memorizing words, memorizing grammar, and he says, no, you learn a few words, the game you, the you he, well, a few declensions, and off you go to the country. So in 7 days, you can more or less speak Icelandic. Well, at least have a dialogue with Icelanders. And finally, the 20 hours, it's Josh Kaufman who says, precisely, for him, in 20 hours, you can cover 80% of the ground. I tried to learn a keyboard layout, I've been at it for more than 20 hours. It's a bit tough. And, okay, we learn, but how do we become creative?
Steve Jobs put it very well, what is creativity? It's the ability to connect things together. It's not necessarily basing it on the knowledge we have and bringing it out, it's how we're going to connect things together. And one of the important things is that creative people, They don't really know how or why. So they'll tell you, I go out, I'm going to see, I'm going to get inspired. An artist gets inspired by lots of things. But it's very difficult, because it's entirely procedural, to say how they do it, what their steps are, how they come up with ideas. And in fact, we'll see that it's even more precise than that. It's a course on how the brain works, how it thinks. Imagine that the little balls are sets, neural networks that allow you to remember something or do something. Often, it's more about recalling. So imagine, you say, the actor, what's the actor? In fact, you'll see, the more you try to concentrate, Then you go into a corner, up there, going around in circles. Then finally, you quit, you take a shower, they say 'you're going to run.' Then you start again, you say 'it aired the brain,' that's a bit it. We're going to air out, we're going to leave, and then we restart our reasoning pattern and go to other places and understand. That explains quite well, it's a good metaphor for why we go under the shower and suddenly, we have the solution. Why we're on a development problem, we can't do it, we take a coffee break and boom, we can do it. Of course, it's very schematic and it's a big metaphor because ultimately, the brain is still a somewhat misunderstood machine, but it's super interesting. So now, how do you learn to be creative? For me, it's my solution, it's certainly not the best, I'm not at all someone who follows optimization. It's MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. Lots of questions, because it's something that constantly learns, surely with us, these users, should it be free, what is the learning community, should we put badges, should we put a certificate at the end, there are lots of questions. Now, it's the phase, I'm here to impress you, but it's just to show you everything you can learn above all. I've done 24 in two years, plus others.
What can you learn? You can learn machine learning, you can learn gamification, you can learn psychology, you can learn programming, operations management, MBA courses, they teach you Lean, etc. You can learn how to build a business, you can learn social psychology. If you want to know why someone can be assaulted in the middle of the street and no one reacts, it's felt in the subways and all that, in 20 minutes, they say 'Oh my, it's just anything, we live in a horrible time.' Psychologically, it's very simple to explain, we see that it's very hard to avoid too. What else? Precisely, a very good course, if you want to learn how to learn, go see Learning How to Learn. It's a course, I reused slides from that course. So go for it. There are even French courses. There's a man, it's an ESSEC course, the last one, the future of decision-making. It's a man named Edgar Morin. At first, I didn't understand. He's someone who is 93 years old and talks to you about complexity, uncertainty with lots of very interesting sentences. Finally, I'd just like to add a little bonus, a little digression before finalizing this talk. I think one of the problems with learning, So when you are yourself, it's often somewhat easy to question yourself, to tell yourself, I'm missing something in my life or I want to discover something else. But I think what we're also missing at the project level, startups, is what? It's overcoming fear. The organization, how we talked about leadership, etc. How a manager can give leadership to someone else without feeling like they're losing it. Often all of this is linked to fear. And I practice a martial art where there are people who do that. If you put someone who arrives like that, who isn't used to it, they're going to be afraid. And in fact, it's very simple to do that. It's very simple to have someone climb on you like that, and yet it can be scary. You have plenty of other exercises that are used in coaching. You let yourself fall backward too. Someone catches you, that's the most well-known one. It's the same thing. And I think that to learn further, when we do the 5 whys, we'll have to overcome fear. Finally, I'd like to take it up another level and go further.
I was away yesterday, I had left. I think that for humanity, to learn in the 21st century, we'll have to stop constantly exploiting, we'll have to stop optimizing what we already know, optimizing oil, optimizing all those things. And I think we'll have to start exploring again. Fortunately, it's the release of Interstellar, which has roughly the same message. I haven't seen it, but I think it's a very good film. There you go, thank you. Thank you for listening to me despite the ending.
I went a little over, I did 45 minutes. If you have any questions, don't hesitate. If you have fewer questions, now is the time. Otherwise, at worst, you have my email, I do BBLs if you want to invite me. But...