Welcome to messy but essential, I'm your host Rod Stilwell. And this is the podcast about the people side of project leadership. It's where we help you improve your soft
skills to reduce hard costs. And when we talk about the challenges of leading people to deliver successful projects, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about continuous learning, and perhaps something we take for granted: that we're constantly in a learning mode, even if we're not doing something specific or conscious about it.
Joining me in studio today is my brother Dale, who's my business partner and comes with extensive project experience around the world, and is certainly what I would call a lifelong learner. So Dale, over the last year and a half or so since we the world has been plagued by this pandemic, many of us have resorted to a lot of online learning, reading books, basically learning opportunities to, you know, perhaps on zoom, or teams, or, or, you know, Google Hangouts or whatever,
webinars, all those things. But ultimately, we've been learning alone. Even if we're virtually connected, we're still kind of learning alone. And so of course, we haven't been attending workshops, and, and conferences and all those things, which were in the past some of our primary learning
opportunities. So I want to talk a little bit about as we're heading, hopefully, out of this pandemic, and we're going to be opening up economies more and getting together more and so on talking a little bit about learning, and how important it is to be constantly in a learning mode, if you're going to be leading successful
projects. So from your experience, looking at projects, and so on, I mean, I'm sure you've met those people who would say that they have 20 years experience, but really, they have one year's experience that they've repeated 19 times, you know, and then you've got those others who are constantly bringing in new ideas, because they're immersed, if you wish,
in learning opportunities. So just share with us if you a little bit, if you will a little bit where your learning goes, what are some of the things that you've done over the years to improve and increase your awareness in order to ultimately lead better projects?
Yeah, I think that's a really good question is I think it's it's easy in project management, like a lot of disciplines to look at things like certification or recertification process, and confuse that for learning. Right. So, you know, that's where I've kind of like I had to do these things to fulfill certain requirements, and I got the badges to prove it. And that's great. That's, that's important. But that's not the same as that learning and growth
thing. Yes, there are learning opportunities in that just like there's learning opportunities and everything, but it's not the same thing. And I think it's, it's, once again, it's kind of great to, to think about being intentional about how you learn as a project manager, and how you get better as a project manager. And one of the things that I think is, is maybe an overlooked place to do that is in post project reviews.
So, you know, we we kind of don't think about what have we learned, as a project manager? When we're doing post, project reviews, we often think what have we learned about the technology or about the type of project or about, you know, we often don't focus on the people learnings, so much as we focus on maybe the technical specifics of our project, we learned about this product, we learned about, you know, this kind of thing, but we didn't necessarily focus on some of the people things.
And I think that's a great place to be able to do some of that.
You know, I would say however, the biggest struggle I've seen with post project reviews is much like urine performance reviews, if you don't do a good job of kind of, at least noting those things along the way that you want to bring up at the post project review. Taking yourself you know, notes about learning opportunities about something you discovered about "aha" moments about whatever it is all
along the way. When you get to the post project view, it tends to be primarily about the last x months, right, it's the last short period of time because we're we have recency bias and we forget about all the other stuff that happened and, and oftentimes, you know, those learning opportunities could be missed, because we've had them at the very beginning.
And now we're talking about the end when hopefully we're already in a smooth, you know, cut boat, etc, etc. So I don't think there's so I think that's one one good place for that. That I think you can you can work on and you know, part of part of it, I would say is being interested in curious being interested Getting getting better at your craft getting better at what you do. And looking for those opportunities, looking for those places where you can learn and get feedback.
I think that's really powerful. And in fact, you kind of caught me by surprise, because I wasn't thinking about the post project review at all. But you're absolutely right. And it fits really well into a number of areas. So that, you know, you're talking about feedback well, ultimately, without feedback, you know, we just stay the same, and we just continue to perpetuate the behaviors good or bad, flawed or not.
And, you know, a lot of organizations are quick to say that they have project reviews, but the project reviews are pretty perfunctory at the end, you know, we go through a quick checklist or whatever, but, you know, you're the concept of, what are we keeping track that
could be useful. And, uh, you Well, actually, just before COVID started, so a year and a half, you almost two years ago, I attended a session that encouraged us to start a journal now I have to confess that I'm, you know, I never kept a diary. I've never, you know, I've probably started a dozen journals over the last 40 years. And you know, I get about three days into them, and then you forget about it, and come back to it a week later. And then you realize it's now in a month, and
so on. But I decided I was going to really try to be a lot more focused. And I started very small. And I just what I did was I looked at three things I'm grateful for, and three things I learned today. And the reason for limiting it to three was because, you know, and sometimes I will confess, it's like, this has not been a day for which I have much gratitude. But you know, you Well, you know, I'm grateful for the fact that I can actually sit here and I'm not in the hospital on a
ventilator. So I guess there's some of that, right. But when you then bring that over to the project side, and it's great to go back, and I've been doing that occasionally. But you know, the end of the month, they'll often flip through the pages and or go through even back a couple of months and say okay, what are some of my key learnings? And ask myself, so what so what am I doing with those? Am I actually
applying that learning? And if you look at that from a project context, you know, if you just had a couple of learnings everyday, you just noted Okay, what did we get out of? What did I get? What did I learn today about myself, about my team, about the project about the client about any number of things that could become a huge contributor to that after project review or post project review.
And again, the focus for me on learning Dale is really about the fact that if we're not learning and constantly getting better, then we are by definition, going backwards, because there's somebody else out there learning faster than us, implementing new ideas more than us. You know, in the 1890s, the US Patent Office, declared that they would be closing soon, because everything that had been invented, had already been that could be patented, had already
been invented. I mean, at 90, of course, today, we just look at the last 20 years of what's been invented. You know, the VCR was invented 50 years ago. You know, things like that. You're thinking, wow, at some point, man actually thought that we were done. Right. Yeah. So when we come back to learning, you know, it's really about what have I learned about technology? Whenever I learned about people, what have I learned about? sequence? What have I learned
about myself? And I think really, my focus today is as a leader as a project lead. What have I learned that because I can't be responsible for anybody else's learning? All right, what have I learned that I would have my takeaways? And how am I using those to be ultimately a better project
leader moving forward. And if we don't capture those, if we don't take a few minutes, to just jot them down, now you can be on a computer or you can open a OneNote or Evernote page old notes page of some form, it can be a handwritten journal. I mean, my journal tends to be handwritten, mostly because I often do it at the end of the day when I'm out of the office away from my computer. And it's kind of written in code, which is really just my sloppy
handwriting. But you know, most other people wouldn't be able to read it. So but you know, ultimately, to me, it's, it's the value is in being able to go back and realize how many things we are exposed to in a given week in a given month, that are in fact, learnings that are in fact part of us getting being better and better. So it begs another question, in a sense That, what are some of the tools or media or whatever that you use in order to learn? So yes, the post review is a
great place to do that. But along the way, there's a whole bunch of other things that maybe come out of that, that you say, I made, you know, we, for instance, we we, we struggled to communicate effectively. And so a lot of the challenges we had on this project were actually around communications or the lack thereof. And especially, of course, you're in COVID, and so on, where many of us who zoomed out, or have zoom fatigue and
that type of thing. So what are some of the other tools or modalities that you use to help you get better and better?
Well, I think, you know, what, I do follow a lot of different people on the various social medias that I use, and I read a bunch a lot of different blogs, and I do tend to read a lot outside of the specifics of, you know, project management, or the specific specifics of certain technology or some technology sets, or those types
of things. And I find that that, you know, one of the things I would, I would say is, is don't be too, is certainly too prescriptive in looking for, well, I want to know about how to communicate better in projects with engineers, you know, that can, that's fine. If you can find that sweet spot, and there is a writer or a blogger that you really like, that touches on exactly that experience, great. But my you know, I don't tend to
find a lot of those. But I do tend to find, you know, maybe somebody who's in a completely different industry and do something about it, but that is interested in communications, that they are a communicator, that's what they do. That's what
they they find powerful. You know, and so, one of the people that I, I follow and read a lot of during the pandemic, is someone who is a science communicator, and they were specifically communicating on the pandemic and you know, trying to communicate about the viruses about what we knew about vaccines about air quality, all the studies and, and so this person is I read this person's blog an awful lot. And this person had a lot of very good insights about how to communicate.
It wasn't at all related to what I do. You know, I'm not in deep in genealogy, I don't virology, those aren't my things. But that person had a lot of great experiences that I can easily see how to apply those same concepts in my field, in the places where I work. And so I think that there's a lot of advantage to that, to kind of looking outside of your space and being broad in what you look at, and then trying to bring
that back. Now, where can I steal pieces from this work, and I still pieces from that work, and I still pieces from this other place?
I think that's a very powerful concept, we, we can find ourselves almost siloed. Right, getting getting so prescriptive, as you say, and so drill down to the extent that, you know, we can lose the bigger picture. And when we really look at it, my experience, for instance, in terms of learning over the years has been (A) As an adult, we understand that adults learn best when we can relate what we're learning to something we think we need to
know. Alright, so I mean, I, you know, we don't as adults, especially with time being as precious as it is, we don't tend to absorb just for the sake of absorbing like a child does. Right. So we want to get obviously somewhat specific, but I think your point ism is very valid with respect to how do we take a basic learning and expand that to be applicable to so many
other things? You know, there's no question I often I'll be listening to, let's say a leadership podcast and I happen to really, although I'm not auditory, I really like podcasts. When I'm out walking the dog or just I do morning routine that includes a six kilometer walk. And so you know, that gives me enough time to typically listen to most podcasts. And I really like that because it actually sets me up for the day I'm excited.
There's, there's there's new learning stuff, etc. I haven't always been very good at remembering it. So many of them of course have shownotes and this type of thing and so I you know, I know that and if they're especially if your podcasts I follow regularly, I'm able to go back to the show notes if it really intrigued To me, or resonated with me, and of course, some of them, you listened to it and you think, yeah, it was interesting. But, you know, it's not a lot I can use.
But what I'm what I found always valuable is being able to take that learning that was relating to a specific example, and ask myself, "where else can with a little bit of tweaking, perhaps, can I apply that?" And I think when we look around in the project world, you know, in projects, we're dealing with technology, we're dealing with people, we're dealing with budgets, we're dealing with timelines, we're dealing with scope, we're wood, in many cases, dealing with frustrations
and emotions, that are, you know, Paramount, we're dealing with vendors, partners, and so on. And really, most of us connect better when we're able to relate that connection to something else in our life as well. So, you know, so I think from my perspective, that learning that I'm really encouraging us to do is project leads, is really what you just said, which is, look, be more expansive, look beyond just that narrow niche. Where
else can I use this? How can I take this kernel and really expand it to other areas of my And, you know, one of the the areas I talked about this life? journal that looks at gratitude, I have learned so much by what I'm grateful for by being able to look back at those gratitude things and say, oh, wow, actually, out of that situation that I was happy about, here's
what I learned. And one of the things that is becoming more and more prevalent, if your wishes we come out of COVID is, you know, some of us are going to be moving back into offices, some of us aren't quite sure. There's a lot of uncertainty there. And the need for leaders to be understanding and compassionate, and recognize that we are all coming out of 18 months of an unknown activity back into some degree of normalcy.
And there's a fellow Alan Weiss, who says, you know, he says, I've coined the term no normal, as opposed to, you know, because what's normal anymore, right? We've been totally messed up. But if we're going to try to go back to everything we had, that's going to be impossible. So what have we learned in these last 18 months? That will equip us for a new normal? I mean, of course, things will settle down, and we will get into some kind of a routine. But what's that
going to look like? And what's it going to look like for me as an individual, and for your, for my team for you as a project lead and for your team? So again, I go back to even just sitting down in an application might be, what have I learned in the last 18 months, that is going to equip me to help my team be better as we get back to New working conditions? As I said, moving back into offices back into the field, taking masks off all of those things?
What's my learning been? How can I take that learning, and help other people to get to the next stage in their life sort of thing? Because of my, you know, the things that I've learned? So my message today to our podcast listeners is really? What have you learned that could be useful for others? And then how are you going to apply that to make your project and your team even better coming out of what really has been a pretty difficult past 18 months?
For sure.
So ultimately, as we as we look at, you know, the, the need to learn, of course, if we stop learning, we probably stop living at some level. You know, I would encourage each one of us to, to step back and ask ourselves, what are we learning? Where do we need to place our
focus, and then celebrate? You know, we need to we need more celebrations, I'm not talking popping champagne bottles, just celebrate that we have these minds that allow us to learn things, and that there's so much out there that we can be learning. We'd love you comments. If you've got thoughts on this. Certainly, you can go to the website and pick up the show notes and leave comments as
well. Ultimately, it is about learning together being a better resource, if you wish in the world as projects leads together and learning from each other. Dale, I really appreciate any final thoughts?
No, I think that that's summed it up. Well, I think, you know, I think it was a it was an interesting conversation.
Cool. Well, I'm grateful for your participation today. And certainly, as you know, you and I both love learning together and really have many. The life of learning and we would encourage everyone out there to do the same and to have fun in your learning pursuits. Have a great day make it a safe day and thanks for listening.