Time to Think

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that BillionMinds had been accepted into the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator. It’s been a fantastic experience so far!

While we will always be a Techstars company, the first, most intensive, part of the experience is now over – 13 weeks of deep work, looking at all we do, with the help of everyone from CEO David Cohen and Managing Director Dave Cass to a team of incredible mentors.

Last week, all 12 organizations pitched their companies in Denver. If you would like to get a more detailed report of the events of that evening, check out this great summary by Agata Chydzinski, and you can even see the full event here.

Every company that joins Techstars has its own reasons for doing so, but for BillionMinds and for me personally, the goal was to take a bit of a step back. I wanted to question everything we do as an organization and do a gut check on our mission. Well, that work is now complete, and as a team we’ve realized a lot in the process – which I’m going to share in this newsletter.

I will break this down in the simplest way I know – sharing our why, what, how, and who. Admittedly, there is a little bit of naval gazing here, but it should interest anyone who believes it’s important to keep humans relevant as work evolves.

Our Why: We are on Team Human

Earth has supported life for about 3.7 billion years, and as a species, we’ve existed for about 200,000 years. But by most estimates, humans have only been truly relevant for about 7,000 of those years. Being relevant sadly includes war, deforestation, and causing the extinction of many species, but it also means art, literature, and scientific discovery. Say what you want about us humans, but we are certainly noteworthy.

Why did human’s achieve prominence? There are many factors, but perhaps the most important one is that we could do things that no other entities on earth could do. We could reliably feed ourselves through agriculture and stay in one spot by creating shelters and clothes. Over time, we learned to build things, share things and sell things. Through writing, we could create lasting ideas that spanned generations.

Then, starting with the printing press and through the industrial revolution we were suddenly able to do all of this at scale, making ourselves even more relevant.

But now, things have changed again. We’ve created technology that is better at building, buying and selling things than we humans are. Capitalism only needs the flow of money to sustain itself, and huge amounts of that flow of money happens without any human involvement at all. General-purpose robotics and automation are advancing to the point where machines can do almost any physical activity, from constructing buildings to cooking meals, faster and cheaper than humans. And AI is now even creating content for us – content that is improving in quality every day.

As a species, are we concerned about this? Largely no. In fact, most of us are asleep at the wheel, addicted to consuming content created by others (often non-human others). As we do this, we find it more and more difficult to retain the focus needed to add value in our organizations or society. It’s kind of a perfect storm – technology allows corporations to get rid of their most complicated, troublesome assets – people, and that same technology encourages us to sleepwalk into irrelevance. We’ll get to caring about this at some point, but meantime there’s at least 20 really fun tik-toks to check out.

Yes, this is pretty dark stuff,  but that said, I believe that humans still have an enormous amount to contribute to society, and what we can contribute is centered on our deeply human skills – the things you see every time you go to a comedy club, watch a play, or get in front of a whiteboard with colleagues. As humans, we have our own special ways of communicating, collaborating, and creating. We like to build things, and we often like consuming things built by humans. It’s the heart of why live performances, independent bookstores and microbreweries are all more popular today than ever. When reminded of it, humans dig human stuff.

So that’s why BillionMinds exists. We think that the world will be a better place if humans are at their best, and we want to make sure that happens.

We are on #teamhuman

Our What: Make Organizations Human-Centered Through Embedded, Durable Skills

Over the last 4 years, we’ve been researching what makes organizations thrive amist major technology change. We learned a lot, but there were two insights that stuck out the most.

First, we learned that as more mundane jobs are automated out of existence, the key differentiator for organizations are the humans in organizations, flexing their uniquely human skills. In other words, human routers are out, but adaptable, resilient, creative humans are very much in, and they will remain so for some time to come.

Our second learning was even more exciting. It turns out that employee engagement isn’t just about having great managers and employee benefits—what keeps employees engaged at work is the act of learning and growing as people. That’s right—developing durable skills that you can apply throughout your life makes you a better employee.

And that leads us to our what. We focus on embedding durable skills in employees, so they can shift from surviving to thriving at work and beyond. Once we do that, organizations will have employees that are more meaningfully engaged, and more excited to take on whatever challenges are in front of them.

Our How – Employee and Employer Journeys of Discovery

Very early on, we discovered that much of what passes for durable (soft) skills training is close to useless. The reason is simple: It’s optimized for whoever is delivering the information. Success is selling copies of a book or the number of one-day offsites you delivered, not the actual changed behavior.

But we’ve actually known how to develop these types of skills for centuries. This type of learning is about applying knowledge in context with repeated practice—think learning the piano or being an apprentice to a watchmaker.

That’s the heart of our approach. BillionMinders start by discovering their own strengths and gaps and learning how that maps to their own needs, plus the needs of their team and organization. Then they perform daily learn/do exercises – 2-3 minutes of theory and 6-7 minutes of practice. These build over time and start to result in new behaviors. Once BillionMinders have worked through about 75 of these experiences, they are ready to take the BillionMinds exam – which makes these intangible skills tangible for both themselves and their organization. We do all this because it works, and because traditional methods don’t.

Of course, any development activity can only be really effective if the organization is set up to support the growth of its employees, so we also work with organizations to ensure that happens. We start by assessing what durable skills are most needed now and in the future. Then, we develop custom programs to address those gaps. And we provide reporting, analytics and recommendations, to ensure that the organization has the right infrastructure, policies and culture to become human-centered.

Our Who: Enterprises and Post-Secondary Education (But Also Everyone)

For any startup, this is one of the most challenging areas to address – how to focus on a target audience rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

We have found that for BillionMinds to work well, organizations need to be invested and willing to focus on durable skills development for the long term. That can happen in an organization of any size, but typically, it involves the organization having some form of Learning and Development capability. Enterprises often have that, and of course, learning and development is core to what post-secondary education does.

But the most important indicator is more subtle – when an organization says, “People are our most important asset,” it must mean it. That could happen in a company of any size or even apply to an individual. We won’t turn anyone down, because every human deserves the opportunity of meaningful work based on human skills.