A conversation with Matt Alex, Co-Founder of Beyond Academics and Higher Education Guru
“Universities have the opportunity to create micro-credentials, unbundle their education and then drive [students] to a different ecosystem in terms of a lifelong learning model that is aligned to industry.” – Matt Alex
Matt Alex is the Co-Founder of Beyond Academics, where he guides the Future of Work and Digital Transformation divisions to gather the most brilliant minds of higher education, entrepreneurship, innovation and industry. Matt strives to transform the college experience by inspiring lead educators across universities from around the country in collaboration towards a life-long learning workforce for the future of work.
In this episode of Control the Room, Matt and I discuss the future of work through the higher education lens, the juxtaposition of the earn-it model with the life-long model for students, the unbundling and reimagination of the college experience, and the breakdown of segments in structured and unstructured work. Listen in to hear how Matt is changing the course of higher education for the future of our workforce.
Show Highlights
[00:50] Matt’s Education Journey Towards the Future of Work
[09:09] The Earn-It Model vs. The Life-long Learning Model
[13:24] Unbundling the College Major Norms
[18:33] The Future of Work: Structured and Unstructured
[26:57] The Facilitation Impact
[38:57] Matt’s Next Big Thing & Final Thoughts
Links | Resources
Matt’s LinkedIn
Beyond Academics
About the Guest
Matt Alex is the Co-Founder of Beyond Academics, where he guides the Future of Work and Digital Transformation divisions to gather the most brilliant minds of higher education, entrepreneurship, innovation and industry. Matt’s passion for higher education and experience stems back nearly 30 years, with his first opportunity as a clerk in a registrar’s office. Matt led the Student Technology Transformation practice as a former partner at Deloitte, a management consulting firm in the greater Chicago area. With a profound presence as a thought leader in higher education, Matt oversaw some of the most complex projects, while managing successful client engagements. Matt’s mission at Beyond Academics offers the best assistance to assure higher education discovers, designs, and deploys strategy to thrive in the new normal.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
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Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Matt Alex, the co-founder of Beyond Academics, where he guides the most innovative, higher ed leaders to transform their campuses with a future of work lens. Welcome to the show, Matt.
Matt Alex:
Good to be here. I’m excited to have this discussion with you Douglas, so much going on in the market space, lot of different changes, so certainly we’d love to have a really good dialogue in the next few minutes.
Douglas:
Yeah. Looking forward to it. Well, let’s kick into it with a little bit about, how did you get your start? How did you get into this work of transforming campuses?
Matt Alex:
Yeah. I didn’t go to college to transform a university. I don’t have a degree that says, oh, I’m going to go transform universities. I started like everyone else. We go off to college embarking on a major that everyone thinks is going to be defaulted in your career. The truth is your degree really never defaults you and it enables you to learn something that interests you to go to class. I have a daughter who’s 17, is about to go to college, and she asked me, what major should I pick? I said, I don’t really care what major you pick, because in the end, I need you to pick a major that’s gonna allow you to be wanting to get up to get to class, interact with the people that are interested in that, have dialogue and be able to change things through that process.
Matt Alex:
Pick a major that’s going to make you curious and make you a leader around that, and I really believe that, in my path, I started off at a university, really at a bowling alley where I was cleaning shoes, and I’m a criminal justice major that didn’t know what to do with that major coming out. Luckily, I was social enough to ask someone that I was cleaning their shoes about, what do they do on campus? She happened to be an associate director of HR for the university. I said, “Hey, Shelly, can you find me a job?”
Matt Alex:
With nothing more than just that, because I didn’t know what else to say, and she said, “Of course, Matt, because I’ve been servicing her for the past two years in the bowling alley. This was days before internet, days before text message. She said, “Call my office and let’s set up our dialogue.” Of course, I went through that journey with her. She was the first person that believed in me as a person just coming in, and she found me an opportunity and introduced me to the office of admissions and records at a university as a glorified clerk, to be honest with you.
Matt Alex:
That journey triggered a lot. It allowed me to see that I liked to help people. I knew that I was process-oriented, but I needed to also have someone lead me and guide me through this process of my career, because no one teaches you that in college. I was lucky enough to join an office that the person who ran it saw a lot in me, and she mentored me, and she mentored me through a lot of different ways, from even telling me to leave our office to go find another job at a law school because it had a better title.
Matt Alex:
She gave me the advice of, Matt, you have to leave to go up. You have to basically exit to move up in any ecosystem, and so she did. I went to work at a law school, and then eventually, she brought me back and I became a second in command to her deputy, where I ran the registrar’s office at a university. That allowed me to really find my passion at a university.
Douglas:
What was the moment that really struck the spark for you with the future of work?
Matt Alex:
Yeah, so that really was triggered from my time at Deloitte. Of course, from my journey at the registrar’s office to my time at Deloitte, I ran a consulting firm that got acquired by Deloitte. Deloitte was actually the firm that actually just allowed me to see the world of future of work. What is the work of the future? Who does that work? Where’s that work done? I was designing student systems prior to that, and I recognize that the work of the future is going to be changing. Jobs are going to be changing.
Matt Alex:
Then of course I said, then why are we not using that lens to rethink how universities should operate? Also, why are we not using that lens to create the curriculum that allows for universities to shape the workforce of the future? Of course, I became really passionate at Deloitte, and then I left to really focus on future of work, future of learning and smart campuses that enabled the work of the future.
Douglas:
That reminds me of a story, I think it was one of my first speaking engagements, I was asked to speak at a local college here St. Edward’s University, and it was in front of a computer science class. The professor was pretty astute in the observation that … We teach a lot of theory and a lot of how to do this stuff, but we’re not preparing people for the workforce. He was really interested in me sharing some stories around, what do I notice when I hire recent grads or more junior individuals? What are the gaps I’m noticing? I came with that presentation.
Douglas:
I think it’s really a noble pursuit for universities to think more about how to prepare people for the workforce versus learning subjects, because there’s a whole track of like academia where we’re getting deep into the research and the academics, but how do we also juggle the fact that these people need to be prepared to enter into a whole new universe?
Matt Alex:
Yeah. I think the best way to even think about that is that jobs are changing. When I was coming out of college, I was a criminal justice major. My default career was going to be in the juvenile system, go become a police officer, and yet, as a criminal justice major today, I design major backend technologies for universities. I look at smart campuses all over the place. When we think about the job of the future, how do you prepare them? It’s more than a major that a university is preparing that student for. It’s teaching them to be curious, it’s allowing them to network in an ecosystem. It’s allowing them to find passion through that process.
Matt Alex:
Those are all important, but you now need to apply that to wherever changing work force, workplace, and all the technologies that come from it. Technology’s advancing, just think about this, data is processed at 400 times the blink of an eye. If you just think about blink your eye and think about that data, processes 400 times the process. All I got to do is pick up your cell-phone and you recognize that your iPhone has took millions of information, and within seconds has validated that you are.
Matt Alex:
There’s so much of that technology in space, in around our ecosystem, what it’s doing, it’s actually changing the way we work, the practices that we have done. The old days would have been a paper process. In today’s world, we’re looking at innovative practices that are enabled by the technology. The amazing thing about this, the job that my daughter is going to be coming and taking on in four years or five years when she’s coming out of college, it doesn’t exist, because the technologies are going to be advancing in so rapid manner.
Matt Alex:
Not only do we need to teach our people the technology, you need to have functional understanding how a technology is going to change an industry. If you think about it, just look at Amazon, and if you look at Uber, Uber is not just an app. It has location intelligence to it, it has algorithms to it. It has a whole new gig ecosystem to it. All those are innovative methods of how to interact with people. That is the kind of stuff we will see moving forward, and that’s why students have to be lifelong learners and not you’re defaulting into one major. I think you’re going to have to have short bursts of learning, which allows for you to pick up the new innovations that are going to come.
Douglas:
You touched on a few things that I’d been thinking about, and I’d written down during our pre-show chat, and I’ll just throw them both out and see what you think here, because it’s like, it’s gotten me really intrigued. One of them is, you mentioned lifelong learners, and I think there’s a huge opportunity with continuous education that I think is not well established. Our institutions, our structure is around putting people through a four-year process after high school, and boom, we’re done. Then maybe some people do some executive MBA thing or whatever. I almost see an opportunity to reimagine the process where we’re kind of plugged into a system that’s always keeping us refreshed and renewed and curious.
Matt Alex:
You’re hitting the right tone, Douglas. We live in a, what we call it, or I call it an earn it model, right? You’re earning a grade, you’re earning your time and in a classroom and you’re getting something. You’re earning a degree, you’re earning a title. Everything that a university looks for is about, have you earned it? Have you understood it? Whereas, if you think about moving it from an earn it to a learning model, you’re now looking at the competency of that understanding of the topic that you’re at hand.
Matt Alex:
Any business says, you know what? After four years we’re done with that customer, I’m going to go to the next set of customer. Higher ed is the only one that says, you know what? I’m going to focus on the four year customer, and then, you know what? I’ll maybe get them back for a couple more years. They’re actually missing out on an opportunity for a lifelong learning model, but they haven’t been able to get past the amount of money that they make on that four year.
Matt Alex:
There’s a whole cost issue that’s happening here because they’re all focused on the earn it model. So, everything that they do is to manage the earning of that degree, as opposed to pulling away all the things that are managing that and moving it’s to a learning, so the focus becomes the student and the content that he needs as opposed to, is it an A? This is financial aid. All those things are going to come into play.
Matt Alex:
I think as we move forward, and if schools and you’re seeing the mega schools starting to do it, you’re going to start seeing community colleges starting to do it. You’ll start seeing mid-market schools start to do it. The reason the mid-market and schools need to do it, because if they don’t do it, they’re going to be out of business because the big schools can live on the brand recognition of the four-year program.
Matt Alex:
The cruise ship that everyone wants to get on for four years, that’s great, but that’s going to be the journey of a Ivy, a big state school, and anyone that has that ecosystem, you’re going to have that, but the markets have to become nimble. They got to become the Amazons of our ecosystem that turns to a lifelong learning model that allows for myself to go back and reengage, even for a one week course, a six week course, a seven month course. Google’s coming out with certificates to compete. Well, universities have the opportunity to create micro-credentials, unbundle their education and then drive them to a different ecosystem in terms of a lifelong learning model that is aligned to industry.
Matt Alex:
Because right now, most university curriculum is stale. What I mean by stale, it’s the same curriculum that was approved by their creditors five, 10 years ago. Yet we don’t even navigate, our cars are driving by themselves, and yet we’re on a five to 10-year ecosystem in what we’re teaching. That’s the thing that I really think we … There’s an opportunity for the mid-market, the HBCUs, anyone that isn’t at crosshairs with the pandemic should be thinking about a lifelong learning model and with a future of work lens.
Douglas:
I also think about your point around the majors a moment ago, and I want to combine that with your point around the unbundling, because I think the majors themselves are unbundling that is not serving us anymore. And if you really look at it, the thing is, is there are artificial boundaries that are constraining the way that we think about learning and the way you think about our identities. I had a lady on my podcast that studies hybrid identities and our books called more than my job title, and the fact that it’s almost like a personal branding type thing, but I think it goes deeper than that because it’s like what I know and what I do and how I think about myself.
Douglas:
I want to hear your thoughts on, to me, there’s some fundamental skills and principles that we learn at higher education, like how to do really good research, how to, especially when there’s capstone projects, we’re learning how to collaborate and how to work on things and get things done, and also how to master complex topics. If you think about those fundamental skills that we could be teaching outside of some major, and then also maybe wrapping in a little complexity theory around teaching people how to do things like sense-making like, I’m kind of vague there. I’m talking about a lot of stuff, but I think there’s … If you look at that whole corporates of everything I just mentioned, I think there’s a ton of opportunity to shift how we teach and how we prepare leaders and workers of the future.
Matt Alex:
If you think about my comment, my daughter, about a major doesn’t matter, that should be a message to most universities to say, hey, is our majors even … Is that what we’re defaulting our student body to? If they are defaulting a career to a major, you’re actually hindering the ability for that person to really grow and adapt to everything that you have to offer. My daughter is about to go to a college, and her … One of the choices is that one college is giving her the ability to create her major, and I helped her design that major around future of work, because I said, you need to understand entrepreneurship, you need to understand management, and you need to understand the financing elements of it, because there’s an element of how you will interact with it.
Matt Alex:
What I said to her is that, instead of picking a major and getting defaulted to it, unbundle the things that you need for a college to give you so that when you get into the workforce, whether you go into a consulting or whether you go work for a government, or whether you come and work for a startup, that your skills as entrepreneurs, as the ability to manage, and all these … Look at the things that I’m asking her to go think about gaining from a college.
Matt Alex:
If she went and just picked a sociology major or she went and picked a criminal justice major like myself, or picked a econ major, just think about all the majors people have, philosophy, econ. Those are so stale in the way that we actually have to create the person that isn’t our workforce, but why do we do that? Why do we title it that way? Because we are in this earn it model. Oh, I earned a criminal justice degree. I earned a management degree. I earned, and then I have earned the right to go work in a management.
Matt Alex:
The reality of it is, there’s many people who are philosophy majors and music majors that are really good managers. They can interpret things way differently, even as a music major. It’s those kinds of topics of unbundling and reframing it, but we live in an old guard. We have accreditors that haven’t stopped and said, okay, schools, we got to think about the future of work and the workforce. They haven’t done that yet. We have government that just gives money because they need someone to accomplish a degree, so everyone follows a four year degree, which is really expensive.
Matt Alex:
Then of course, at a university in academic setting, I’m a PhD person that has research on this topic and I need a major to do that. All of that is a systematic issue as opposed to stopping and saying, what are we building here? What’s the product that we’re building here? What’s the culture we’re building here? Let’s build a culture of this university to support the growth of this individual, and not only are we going to have them here for four years.
Matt Alex:
Maybe we have them for less than four years, but we’re going to have him here as a lifelong learner to continue to learn the culture of whatever is happening in the ecosystem, which we call the workforce.
Douglas:
I want to come back to your point around the rate of growth. As we’re thinking about automation and just sheer advances in technology that we’re having, AI being able to do tons of things for us that we wouldn’t have to do before. I have a hypothesis that there are some humans that would go way deep into the technical, and we’re going to see a little bit of a divide, because the more sophisticated that the algorithms get, the more reliant you become on them to do certain things, and we’ll need to lean more into our humanity, things that humans are really great at.
Douglas:
I think facilitation plays a really strong role there. With your focus on the future of work, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on how we might show up better as humans in the future.
Matt Alex:
Yeah. I’m going to go a little technical here in terms of future work, because you got to really understand the basics of what we’re trying to get at, is that, when we look at the work, I group them into two categories of work, and that will then dictate who does that work, where is that work done, and when is that work done? All those three elements of future work, that framework needs to be thought of.
Matt Alex:
When I think about it, I look at work in two elements, there’s structured work and there’s unstructured work. The structured work is things that don’t change. It’s the same sequential, logical, rule-based activity that never changes. It’s the lecture of econ 101 that has been done for life. That’s structured content, right? It is the data, a person entering data, and they’re taking one form and putting it into another system, and that’s structured work.
Matt Alex:
You will need to identify everywhere there is rules, structured sequence, and what do we do with that structured work? We automate that work. We put that in a video. We put that in recording. Why do we do that? Because we take that person that’s been doing that for a long time and you bring the capacity of that person as a human to start doing the unstructured work, the collaborative work. The unstructured work is when we sit and say, okay, what requires critical thinking? What requires critical reasoning? What requires body language? What requires dialogue?
Matt Alex:
When we look at unstructured work, we now have pulled all these people that have been doing mundane, boring work in a cubicle, and we’re now offsetting it to a machine, and you’re saying, now let’s take that person and let’s have real amazing human interactions in a classroom, in a workplace. What’ll happen is you will also look at unstructured and structured work and say, does that require someone to be in face-to-face? We’re virtual right now, but we have a connection because we can see each other, right? So, you’re going to identify, hey, this unstructured work could be done remotely, that there’s also technology elements that need to be automated that you still need humans to kick a batch off, or you need to have some validation that, that machine did it right.
Matt Alex:
That could be done remotely at any point in time. So, you have this ability to use structure and unstructured work as a diagram. I call it human centric value of designing campuses based on this framework, and then I can design what work will be done on campus, what lectures can be done on campus, what type of teaching could be done on campus, and then what else can we do and move it off campus, make the campus more efficient, make real estate more available, and drive more efficiency to a campus or a workplace at any point in time. Sorry, if I went deep on the tacticalness of future work.
Douglas:
No, I like that notion of the structured versus the unstructured and how we can easily look at ways to automate the structured. The thing that was kind of servicing for me was like, especially as the rate of growth is accelerating, there’s probably things that computer will notice as structured, but we don’t. I think that’s going to be maybe one of the skills that we have to really learn to hone. Especially our young people are having to navigate these decisions around, what do I go learn? Because is the computer going to be really great at that in five years versus now?
Douglas:
I guess the other thing I’ll throw out there, just to kind of see if any of this triggers anything for you is you mentioned the human in the loop kind of stuff, right? We’re not only, is the algorithms doing stuff for us, but we might have to validate something or we might have to inform it in some way. Someone was talking about augmented intelligence. It’s like that. It was kind of a cool, instead of augmented reality or artificial intelligence, it’s augmented intelligence, and I think that’s probably a really great way to describe what’s coming at us, and how do young people prepare for, or even all of us prepare for this like, there’s a computer in the meeting and it’s augmenting all of us, right? It’s not replacing us. It’s just making us think a little different and work a little different.
Matt Alex:
Yeah. I always believe our brain is built with 100% capacity and you start to use capacity at different places. Lot of people when they go to work, do a lot of structured work, and they don’t bring out their humanness to anything. I believe that, when we do move that work to the AI element of it, there is a lot of work inside of organization, inside of campuses that are going to need humans to do human stuff, which is somewhat like connectivity. I believe that machines are going to enable us to identify the right interactions to do our work. What I mean by that is AI will take all a mundane stuff, but it’ll inform us to then allow us to maybe make a decision a certain way for the betterment of a student, a betterment of a customer, because he or she is not wasting her time trying to put data entry into a system.
Matt Alex:
He or she has now got that insight that says, this student doesn’t really do well in a English setting in a room. You know what? I’m going to find a course that allows him to do a asynchronous learning through this mode of learning. That’s just an example of how you take a human, and instead of me looking, saying, what room is open to put this student into a class? I’m saying, I now know, not what’s open, but I also know what the person that’s sitting in front of me, what their learning chemistry is, how do they thrive? What are they struggling with?
Matt Alex:
Allows me to interact with that student in a much more effective way. I’m giving you examples in my higher ed setting, but it can apply to a customer base, because I believe a student wears three hats. They’re a consumer, they’re a customer, and they’re a product. When I look at my future of work lens and I work with schools about it, I say, how are you dealing with them as a consumer? That means a frictionless campus. How you dealing with them as a customer? Are they satisfied in how you’re promoting them? And how do you build them as a product and a representative of the university or the college that they are representing when in the workforce?
Douglas:
I think that’s a great lens for anyone who’s hosting meetings or teaching people in any way. Facilitators should listen carefully to this model that you’re sharing, because everyone they invite into an event or gathering, or workshop, or meeting, they should be considering those three elements. How are they treating them like a consumer? How are they treating them like a client? And then finally, that product. If we’re not getting to some outcome, then we’re just checking boxes and going through motions and we’re wasting everybody’s time.
Matt Alex:
Yeah. As a facilitator, we’re all facilitators in life. Whether I was a partner at my firm at Deloitte, I was facilitating, I was getting followership on the content that I was trying to take to market. When I think about facilitation, it really starts with, who am I really trying to serve, and how do I read their learning chemistry? How are they absorbing information? I always put my presentations in three or four different ways in the way that I speak to an audience. One, sometimes it’s visual, someone needs a visual. Some people need stories, and I tell them stories. Some people need to be able to interact with me and dialogue.
Matt Alex:
In my facilitation, I enable that to happen because people have different learning chemistries, visual, audio, auditory, experiential, and dialogue. I want to be able to give that experience through facilitation at any point in time. Of course, I’m not a big fan of PowerPoints because it kind of stifles me because I’m a storyteller, but I know people like visuals and they want to see what my bullets are, and that’s why I give it to them, but I don’t ever look at it because I’m speaking through it in stories and I allow for them to understand, oh, that’s his experience.
Matt Alex:
Because some people want to relate to that. Then of course there’s a lot of other just dialogue of, I don’t even do … Normally, I don’t do podcasts without having a lot of interaction. I want interaction. The sessions that I do, I do it at Clubhouse and I’m doing it on my, what I call Zoom-ins, is I want people to challenge me. If I just sit around and just talk about, oh, this is what I think future work is, I don’t grow, because honestly, every event and I’ve already grown with you, Douglas, I need to understand from them what they’re looking for, what are they learning? Because that will inform how I facilitate moving forward because my [crosstalk 00:28:37] ongoing changing.
Douglas:
That’s right. It’s all about the dialogue and the interactions. I wanted to come back to your point about the learning modalities. In my research, I’ve found that people can shift between modalities. They might be in a kinesthetic mood right now, or they might need to have the bullets along with the story right now. It tends to be multimodal and it can shift over time. Something that was bubbling up for me, coming back to your point around the algorithms and the structured, that seems like something that machine learning could start to understand and give the facilitator advice, be able to assess in the moment, or even over time, how to best prepare content for a particular set of participants, and how to do what the learning science folks refer to as differentiation. Can we customize for our particular folks that are in the room?
Matt Alex:
Yeah. It’s all about input. It’s input into whatever technology you’re using to get that information. AI, of course, could even retone at this stage. They could read what the tone of the room is based on the content that was put in. Maybe the questions that are being asked or the interaction or the dialogue. Machines can actually give you … Universities could have tone read on an essay saying, hey, these five things lend exactly to what this university want. AIs can be used in so many different ways and being informed is as important a step.
Matt Alex:
But a lot of it is, how do you start to engage even before your facilitation on the people that’s coming into your audience, into your room, and how do you then prepare that? But then also be ready to change, because people will change, even though they may think certain ways, they may have heard some other dialogue that shifts them on the fly, and you have to be able to address that during that process also.
Douglas:
100%. We have to be resilient to emergent phenomenon. When we’re teaching facilitation, we always talk about adaptable agendas, because if we’re not adaptable, if we just create that syllabus, that agenda, and just like, we got to run it like clockwork, then it might be okay some of the time, but there’ll be many times where we’re doing a disservice for our learners.
Matt Alex:
A lot of it is you’re now reversing how you engage as a facilitator. Instead of me being the facilitator, the panel, the expert on stage, you are the facilitator that allows for the room to become the energy of the value of the discussion. I’m a big believer of, how do you bring value from the room or the audience? And that’s to facilitation, understanding what the challenges are. You’re on Clubhouse would like me. I use the audience all the time.
Matt Alex:
There’s times I open up a room on a certain topic. It will change because the audience is having a different discussion and the value of that room wasn’t because of the title that I created and the initial topic that I introduced. It became a room that has a thousand people in it because of the dialogue within that room and the topics that are being covered. Who’s the power there? If the people in that audience that are making the room, that powerful energy that allows for us to facilitate the content that comes from that.
Douglas:
Yeah, it’s like a emergent natural phenomenon, right? Like an algae bloom, right? If you try to stifle it, control it, or lead it too much, the reaction will never happen. It has to flow naturally. I always think of facilitation as gardening. We don’t make that plant grow. We just nurture it. We remove the weeds. In your room, if someone came in and was being really disruptive or condescending to people, that would stifle the energy, and so you’d weed those out, you would shut them down. But if someone’s changing the topic slightly, but they’re passionate and it’s on track, you’re letting it happen. Right?
Matt Alex:
Yeah. Like I said to you, it isn’t about us anymore. It’s about that, I always have a hashtag, your voice matters. I put that on every time I do a clubhouse or I do a session when I’m facilitating something, hashtag, your voice matters, because I don’t think it’s my voice that is really driving the discussion. It’s the voice that’s in my discussion that matters.
Douglas:
Absolutely. It comes back to your three part framework around thinking about participants as clients as well. We would never not listen to our client and their voice, right? That’s part and parcel to how it works. Well, I want to come back to a point you made a second ago about it not being about the event itself. It starts before that, and it starts once they first even learn about this thing, and how are we nurturing them in those moments as well? So, to your point, making sure they understand that their voice matters and that this is going to be participatory, it’s going to be different, and we’re encouraging them to show up in a new way.
Matt Alex:
Yeah. I ran a session where I had about a hundred people coming into my session. For 50 of them, I engaged with them every day, five days before the event, and the 50 of them, I didn’t engage at all. The reason I wanted to do it is I wanted to see the difference between the people that engaged immediately and the people that took a little bit of time to engage, and then also, I also wanted to see which of those hundred attended. In the ones that I didn’t engage, in the 50, I had a no no-show much higher than I almost had … I think I had two that didn’t show up in the 50 that I was communicating for, and when I explained to them that not everyone in this room had that same engagement. You can hear the room be like, yeah, we didn’t get that. We didn’t get that preview.
Matt Alex:
We didn’t get this. I was saying to them, this is why engagement is as important as the topic that you’re really talking about, is because engagement allows for them to recognize they’re an important piece of it. I know that 50 of them was hindered by that presentation, but it was the only way that I can explain to them that having your voice heard and be felt and be a part of, hey, I’m excited, because in the 50 that I was engaging with is I think, hey, countdown, we have two more days before we’re together. Hey, we have one. Hey, I’ll see. In a few hours.
Douglas:
The thing that jumped into my head, what a cool thing it would have been to, when they show up, pair up people that got the engagement and didn’t get the engagement, and have them talk about the difference. Because then they could like, in those small groups, unpack it a bit. That way the people that didn’t get it actually don’t really have a lesser experience because they can bring perspective to the other person that they wouldn’t have got otherwise. So, it’s like this little shared moment of like contrast. That’s cool.
Matt Alex:
I’ll try it. What I was really trying to prove to them as a leader, and I was doing this in my partner role, and I had consultants and managers, and I needed them to recognize it, when you are asking a client to come to a meeting, don’t send them an iCal, and I’ll see you in two days. I’m trying to get them to recognize that they need to recognize they’re an important part of the journey that we’re going to go and have a discussion about, and I’m hoping that they recognize that I see the value of that. That’s what I was really trying to get from my managers, to recognize that it isn’t just, oh, I’ll just send an email and I’ll hope to see my folks there. I needed them to recognize you have to show them that they mean something in the journey that you’re asking them to embark on with you.
Douglas:
I want to draw us to a close here. I guess I’ll ask you one wrap up question, which is, what do you think is the next big thing?
Matt Alex:
I’m always a future … I’m a futuristic kind of thought process, so I have a lot of big things in my head. I believe the big, next thing is we’re going to see a ecosystem that will be more decentralized and that algorithms and things will allow for a much more personalized way of how we engage, which will then also allow us to have a more social reputation economy, meaning the interaction between what I and you do could be rated. The way that I am engaging through my university or how my engagement is through my activities, you’re going to see, we have a little bit of that going on, but I think you will see digital wallets, you will see NFTs.
Matt Alex:
You’re going to see a little bit of blockchain coming in because it’s going to start decentralizing, because I really believe that we’re going to go more into the learning model of concept, so instead of putting all these structures around earning and trying to manage that, you’re going to start to say, how do we get real value, and who’s authorized to say, hey, Doug is a good person that facilitates well, or Matt is a good person that can lead this well? That doesn’t come from me putting it on a resume or on a LinkedIn. It comes from others being able to say, Matt is capable of doing what you need.
Matt Alex:
I think you’re going to see that through digital wallets, a little bit through blockchain. I would say it’s not as far off, but it’s a concept of it. I think blockchain is scary for some and very unknown to others, but I think as people understand blockchain is like the internet. We can’t define what the internet was going to do, but now when we use the internet, it’s the underlying backbone of how we engage, and I believe blockchain will do the same thing as we move forward.
Douglas:
I’ve been following blockchain for a while now, and something I’ve found recently, or that just clicked for me recently was this notion of quadratic value. This comes from the Ethereum folks, but this notion that planting a tree downtown or in the local park has value for society, but who’s going to reward someone for going in and planting that tree? The blockchain, and to your point, these decentralized ways of working and coming together, it could potentially create societal rewards, this quadratic value, for people that do things that benefits society, that normally would not have economic benefit.
Douglas:
That takes a lot to unpack, and it’s a little abstract, and we won’t see how it plays out until this stuff becomes mainstream and people start doing it. But wow, is it an interesting thought exercise, to think about, how do people start behaving when these systems start rewarding things that you do for societal benefit?
Matt Alex:
The way that I always explain the impact of what blockchain will have in the future, I just go back to the year 2000 when everyone thought in the internet page, a webpage on HTML was the internet, right? Everyone thought that internet was email, right? You know what? In those days, that’s all that our computer could do with that speed. Think about the time where it loaded … You’re much younger than me, but it would take forever for a one webpage to load. It loads up in seconds now. It’s because, over 20 years, advances, microchips, all these things have happened.
Matt Alex:
We have location intelligence, we have wifi. All these didn’t exist in the year 2000 when we were doing internet, right? When it started to really come into play. That’s where we are right now in blockchain. When we hear Bitcoin and we hear a transcript on a ledger, that’s HTML pages, that’s the email of what we’re doing. You will start to see use cases start to be applied when blockchain gets adopted in a way that allow for the de-centralization of activities to happen with, what you’re calling this quadratic value. It really is about the interaction between us.
Matt Alex:
Right now, there’s lot of people who own the rankings of things, and sometimes they’re incentivized by the systematic ring. The US News World Reports is systematically not a good measure for if a university is good for your son or daughter, because universities are playing the game to get in that ranking. When you are in a blockchain ecosystem, where people who went through a university, you know what they’re making now, you know what they’re providing to society.
Matt Alex:
You’re getting feedback on that person. You don’t need to look at a US news world report. You will start looking at a blockchain ledger of a portfolio, a person that says, wow, that person that went to university X, which isn’t an Ivy, is producing pretty amazing, and his ability to make impact is different. I’m just giving you an example from my world a little bit, but I think it is the power of the customer being decentralized, and then being able to see what impact are the corporations or things that we’re having on them, and how is that influencing the trajectory of that person?
Douglas:
Love it. That’s going to be an amazing world that we’re headed toward. Well, I think we’re going to have to wrap there. I just want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Matt Alex:
It’s interesting. I have a lot of thoughts, and so giving you one is always a little tough. I always say this is an opportunity that we have in front of us to really transform what you’re really passionate about. You have to look at what you’re passionate about, what is the future of what you’re passionate about? How do you start thinking about enabling yourself to understand, what are the future activities of that passion? What are the future opportunities of that job, or that ecosystem? What industries are you really into?
Matt Alex:
Also, you have the opportunity to really step out of the traditional norms and what you’re always been boxed in. You might’ve had a major, you might be in a career trajectory that hasn’t gone anywhere. The opportunity that’s in front of us now allow for you to step out even a little bit, to understand what those are in front of you. If you’re able to take that opportunity, is going to be the first step in really finding the passions beyond what you’ve always been doing. That’d be my one key thing takeaway.
Douglas:
Awesome. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, Matt. Thanks for joining the show.
Matt Alex:
Thanks for having me. It was a good time, Doug. Thank you.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. voltagecontrol.com.
