Crayons

Anyone who knows me knows I have a deep and abiding love of statement t-shirts.

If you choose to learn new things, do it properly. Start simple, build up and take your time.

My collection is large and keeps growing. And I always love seeing a fellow collector out in the wild.

Surely not everyone was kung fu fighting… I see you brother.

So it gave me great joy to see a chap in my gym earlier this week sporting a tattered ‘I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you’ t-shirt.

I have a special place in my heart for these t-shirts… the ones that say what I have often thought but are just a tad too rude for me to actually wear. And this one is definitely too close to the bone for many of the conversations I have at work. It captures the exasperation we all often feel, only it may lead you to the wrong conclusion.

The issue here is not that the person trying to understand whatever is being explained is stupid, you see.

Or that the person offering the crayons is ever so clever.

I see why you may think that. But it’s not that at all.

Crayons are toddler territory, right? They denote, if anything, the start of a learning journey. And every learning journey is admirable, particularly if the person getting themselves on said journey is older.

Let’s face it, learning new things is tiring, humble work, and there is always some idiot offering you crayons, mocking you for not already knowing all the things… so kudos to anyone and everyone going on such a journey. Kudos to folks going on every learning journey.

But.

Both the kudos and the crayons are forfeit if you are trying to get on every learning journey yourself and expect the world to pause while you are getting yourself equipped for it.

I have written extensively in the past about the early years of innovation in finance, when we were absolutely convinced that what our organisations lacked was knowledge. Information. Understanding.

So we got ourselves and our bosses on a learning journey. We doubled down on learning how to learn. We did a pretty good job of making it quick and dynamic and managing the awkward and embarrassing aspects of it. We got pretty good at finding homes for the new things we learned and juggling more things… and more things… we got good at that. We had some wobbles. We made some errors of judgment. But you know… all in a day’s work.

And although we didn’t ‘fix’ this innovation malarkey, we got better at doing what needs doing across our organisations. Fewer labs around. New technology is the domain of the entire organisation. Things are in production. It’s a brave new world.

Only don’t pack the crayons away just yet.

The stuff that we need to learn is proliferating like mad. And although in the last 15 years we did a passable job of learning how to learn… we have not quite perfected the art of learning what not to learn at all. And what to do about decisions pertaining to things we don’t understand either because we haven’t learned them yet or because, for whatever reason, we decided not to learn this particular thing.

Example.

I am sitting in a meeting minding my own business.

This is a sales meeting, so we are on our best behaviour. A side chat begins. (Memo to any non-sales people in the tribe: if a client decides to have a little side chat with you in the room, you let them. If you are lucky enough for them to have it in a language you understand, you may learn something. If it is evidently a ‘domestic’ chat, you do not intervene or join in unless specifically invited. I am only telling you all this to pre-empt you asking “And what did you say?” when I get to the crux of my story. Because I said nothing at all. It wasn’t for me to say anything.)

During this side chat, it became apparent that a set of decisions had been made by the client’s team. One was around identity assets and how to create mechanisms that separate the client from the products they consume (big fan of that). The other was around their cloud architecture, allowing for a multi-tenanted approach for their various brands to reduce cost and overhead (big fan of that also).

Only somewhere in the multitudes of meetings during which their Big Boss was briefed on a plethora of new stuff, some wires got crossed and ‘multi-tenancy’ came to be filed under ‘identity management’ in his head, so in this conversation said Big Boss enthusiastically explained how multi-tenancy enables join account maintenance in their company (it does not).

Now.

I have no doubt said Big Boss had the intellectual capacity and the crayons to learn about identity assets, portability and whatnot. The same applies to the advantages and disadvantages of a single tenant vs multi-tenant approach to their cloud architecture. I also have no doubt that the briefings and meetings and memos his team prepared in order to educate him on these topics were well thought through, meticulous and correct.

A smart man, willing to learn, was given the right information.

So what the hell happened?

He wasn’t given the crayons.

I am not being flippant.

There is a reason why we start slow when learning something new. There is a reason why we repeat things. There is a reason why we had quizzes and tests at school and teachers asked us to show our working out and use new words in a sentence. And the reason is learning is not linear. Understanding is not one and done. Memory is tricky.

But we don’t give our executives time or crayons.

We give them a barrage of PowerPoint decks in 30-minute intervals and expect them to have perfect recall.

And we do that with everything.

Tech and strategy and pricing and new regulations and that new initiative coming out of the Nebraska office.

“What can you do?” you may think. “There’s a lot to learn. It’s their job to learn it.”

But is it?

My advice would be… don’t do that.

Don’t do that to your executives, but most importantly, if you are an executive, don’t do that to yourself. It’s bad for you and it’s bad for your business.

Do these three things instead:

1. For the things you choose to learn for yourselves (because you must or because you want to), allow yourself both the time and the crayons. You can’t have a knowledge transfusion. If you choose to learn things, do it properly. Start simple, build up, take the time. If nothing else, this will remind you that you can’t do this for everything.
2. For the things you can’t or won’t learn yourself, educate yourself as to their impact. You may not know how to wire a plug, but you know what electricity is for. Do that. Understand what things are for. Their uses and dangers. Then delegate internally and partner externally with folks who know the things you don’t. Manage outcomes and impact.
3. Run your business. That’s what you are there for. You are not there to know all the things. But to manage them. And to do that, you need to understand the vital significance of time and crayons. Make sure they have their place in your organisation because there’s always new stuff to learn. We know that now… but for the rest… hire people who put their time and crayons to good use already and now understand the topic at hand. Hire them (or partner with them), and rather than asking them to distil their knowledge onto a 12-slide deck, take the 30 minutes you have in your diary to explain to them what you expect them to achieve. And then get out of their way and let them work.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.