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Chief Change Officer
#397 Colin Savage: Why Skill Stacking Is the New Lifelong Learning — Part Three
00:26:02
For Colin Savage, change isn’t something you manage—it’s a lifestyle. After 70 countries, 7 secondments, and too many reinventions to count, Colin Savage wants you to stop chasing lifelong learning—and start building skill stacks that actually stick.
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- [00:13]
Vince Chen
Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. This is a three part series with Colin Selvich. In part one, the first episode, we'll dive into Colin's fascinating journey as a self proclaimed change addict turned change guru. Collins career spans continents, cultures and industries. Seven countries lived in seven more seconds and projects in over 70 nations. From organizational transformation to personal reinvention, he has mastered the art of embracing change and applying those lessons to life. In this conversation, Colin unpacks his unique perspective on change. How throwing himself into the unknown led to unparalleled growth and insight. From leaving Canada with nothing but a suitcase and ambition to navigating industries from telecommunications to financial services. Colin shares how the constant evolution around him became his greatest teacher. In the next episodes, we'll explore the learning required for transformation, why Colin believes lifelong learning is outdated and skills decking is the future. And finally, in part three, we'll tackle AI human intelligence and why every one of us needs a personal AI strategy. Buckle up. This one is a ride.
- [02:48]
Colin Selvich
Lifelong learning is an outdated concept in this that it lacks focus for some people where the skill stacking is a little more concentrated and it will help you really build that cheese. But again, it's not going to be specific in an area but you can fly it across swath of area and it'll really help you advance your career and event whatever you want to do to be a standout kind of person.
- [03:14]
Vince Chen
I kind of agree or disagree with what you just said. Lifelong learning is about the attitude. In my opinion, lifelong learning isn't just about acquiring new knowledge, is about figuring out how you learn best. Some people thrive in classroom settings or in person workshops, while others prefer self paced digital formats. The methods vary but the goal is the same which is to keep growing, to keep learning. When it comes to skill stacking, I see it as something deeper. You mentioned is about purposefully merging diverse skills to solve complex challenges. And I think you're right. What's often missing isn't the means to learn. We have more access than ever to tools, training and knowledge. The gap lies in connecting the dots between those skills and leveraging them in meaningful ways to multiply the impact. In my view, we are living in a tool economy. Tool T o o L Everything is about the tool. Whether it's ChatGPT today, Google yesterday or whatever the next hot thing will be. The mindset is if you have a Problem, there's a tool for that. Need a solution? Just grab a hammer, a screwdriver. What is the problem? Most of the time those tools are just solving surface level symptoms, not addressing the deeper underlying issues. It's like putting a band aid on a cut without treating the infection. Sure, the immediate problem looks solved, but the root cause persists and people end up repeating the same mistakes. I see this pattern a lot, especially among knowledge workers that buy into the idea of lifelong learning. Sign up for courses, pay for certifications and stack up all these skills. But they don't actually go anywhere with them. Why? Because the key isn't just acquiring skills, it's in connecting them, applying them to real life scenarios case by case, and solving problems with them in an integrated manner. So the missing piece is less about technical skills and more about human skills. What most people call soft skills. Problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication. These are the connective tissue that make skills stacking impactful. Without them, you're just collecting tools in a toolbox you don't know how to use effectively. That's where I think the future of lifelong learning needs to focus. Not just teaching new skills, but on helping people build the connections between them and apply them in meaningful, impactful ways. It's not about the tools themselves, is about what you build with them.
- [07:06]
Colin Selvich
I agree. Yeah, you have brought the other hand that I'm not going to say that I forgot you. But what I would add to what you're saying and equate the court is the skill stacking. I differentiate between calling the person and calling the professional all the time. So skill stacking, those are skills stacked for my calling the person. That's where lifelong learning for me exists and always will. And so I'm very clear on what's the differentiator. Because what you can do is if you're people like us or those listening that are like us, if you've brought all crazy horizon of areas that you're interested in and you've read about, studied, done, whatever to build up knowledge, it can be impossible to connect all the dots and make them all skillful. I love reading modern African history. I have three shelves of books in my house that are all about the Democratic Republic of the Congress. I am never going to use that. At least not now. Oh, I gotta go get a PhD in wreck or I need to go. And this thing that I've been invested in for a long time and I enjoy reading about and it is a form of learning doesn't need to be something that I'm going to incorporate into my work life and I purposely keep it separate. And that's the same thing of the musical instruments that happen to be gathering dust unfortunately in the back of my room, those are also skilled that I'm learning throughout my life just for my own enjoyment. And I'm totally with you on the law of the instrument. Right? If everything, if you've got a hammer and you're good at it, then look like a needle. I sit on a number of groups where we support startups and tech founders and entrepreneurs and the drive to just leap to the solution because I think I can sell a widget to somebody rather than understanding to your point, like is this actually a problem or is this a set over something else? It just drives me nuts. And so we're just going to end up with now the toolkit is going to have 7,000 tools, 6,800 of which I don't know how to use and 50 that are actually useful for me to figure out any kind of a dilemma that I'm preparing. I think. Yeah, I think you've done a good job of reminding me that maybe the lifelong learning thing should be just for life and the skill stacking should be where we focus on potentially getting the right kind of multi skilled person who to your point doesn't just look down and build a tool but is able to interact with others, is able to be empathetic, show emotional intelligence, all those kind of things that I think maybe sometimes get sharp to the side over the. Let's build the technical experience and skill ourselves up with Now I know not just C, but I also know all of these other JavaScript and other kind of software so I can build my own AI model. Let's go.
- [10:23]
Vince Chen
Right, so you've been diving deep into AI lately. As someone with a strong background in change management and leadership, how do you see this technology shaping the future of change management and skills decking? What's your vision for where we're headed?
- [10:48]
Colin Selvich
That's a fantastic and a fascinating topic. I'm starting now because I'm not a very quiet person, often to my detriment, but I'm starting now to get people asking, hey, I see you're doing this in particularly generative AI. I know very clear that I'm not person, I don't build these things. I don't know the computer science behind it. I'm purely a practitioner of the tools. I get people asking a lot, hey, could you do a short little LinkedIn learning course for 30 minutes on the earth 10 degenerative AI tools or here videos and others. I'm all for it, I think it's a good idea. But what I often find too is the people that are asking me or those that are very early on in their technical journey of learning, so they're maybe late adopters, let's call them, they just want a silver bullet. They want, oh, what's the one tool I can use which can do everything? And I have to constantly pull back and I have to remind them all AI is like anything else. It's going to be a combination of tools, it's going to be interdisciplinary. So you're going to need not just an understanding of the AI tools and the skills that are required to use those tools, but you're going to need to know, you're going to need to understand strategy, how business development skills work. You're going to need to know how human resources and team leadership, all these kind of things. You're going to need to know all of the soft skills that are always going to be fundamental and important. And then how do these, how does a MIT of your AI toolkit help you in individual instance? And for example, right now I'm working with human resources consulting company, we don't really know how AI fit. Then what you could do is if you use three or four different tools, you could help the company build its own GPT, feed it with its own policies. You could build a tool for HR professionals that said, here's where all our policies are, here's where all of our templates are. So instead of reading through 400 pages of documentation, you can use tools to then figure out, identify the policy that they may have contravene, figure out some of the path forward and then put together a plan that you as a professional or eventbreaker to review with your expertise and those interdisciplinary skills, and then present to senior leadership and say, this is what happened, this is what I think we should do, and this is the underlying evidence for what I want. And you'll be able to do that in a day rather than taking two weeks. So there's, I think there's a way forward, but I am constantly surprised by how people with limited technology, in particular experience and expertise, they just want a silver bullet. They just want what's the one tool that's going to do everything?
- [13:53]
Vince Chen
Nothing.
- [13:54]
Colin Selvich
There's no one tool that's going to do it all. And in fact, if you think that's the case, then you need to go back and we actually need to think about what exactly are you trying to solve It's a little bit of like maybe sort of expectation resetting. And then let's start at the beginning with what these tools are and explain to people how they work in concert and not to build the best thing for you. And all of that's going to have to be tailored, which as you said before, if we're always building tools for everything that's not yet a problem without understanding your symptom, then we're just adding.
- [14:28]
Vince Chen
More tools and making more distractions, destruction and wastage. It's just noise.
- [14:34]
Colin Selvich
It's a wasted effort. Right?
- [14:36]
Vince Chen
One thing that many people agree on is, but I don't think they're fully figured out yet. It's the importance of human skills in an AI driven world. I like to call it human intelligence. In fact, that's the essence of this podcast. My goal is to elevate human intelligence by uniting global voices like yours. For me, human intelligence is about being experience driven, time tested and grounded in real life skills. It's about tapping into hindsight, insight and foresight. Exactly like the wisdom you shared over the past hour. And while we talk about human intelligence being crucial in the AI era, I think that's exactly what we are lacking. With all these tools, social media platforms and tech innovations, people aren't developing essential skills like communication, which is at the core of human intelligence. So my question to you is this. Human skills are critical, but how do we bring them back? How do we nurture and develop these skills as we move forward?
- [16:14]
Colin Selvich
I love this idea of human intelligence events and I'm going to steal it and share it with the rest of the world. Chief Brooke is always referencing you because I think that is incredibly important and it will always be. I'm not. We all see what leaders in the AI space and other things fail. You know, in three years, I see AI doing all of this work that humans do. In five years, I see remorse. Okay, fine. There's a lot of rudimentary activities and repetitive stuff that AI might be able to take over and do more efficiently, more rapidly, 24 hours a day, whatever, but it's always going to require human oversight because it's going to be producing things for human. If the end consumer, the end result, the destination of whatever is being done is the person who has strengths and weaknesses, boy goals, all those kind of things personal that need to be addressed, all that kind of stuff, then it, it can't be the AI tool or tool can't address that. That's enough. And it's more efficiently enough. I gave a speech At a conference a couple months ago and I was introducing a gentleman in his company that do data analysis and power official intelligence. And I got up on stage, had two things to admit. The first one is that I thought about printing off my speech and giving and reading it to the audience. And then the second one is I used AI to write my speech, but it took me an hour going through all the prompts, all the things I wanted it to say. Changing the voice, changing the tone, the style, being punchy, all those kind of things. It took me an hour because I have the experience, tools and the skills to be able to write it. You said we've learned this over time. I could have just done it and it would have been finished in 15 minutes. If we do not continue to encourage people to build human intelligence that is supplemented or complemented by artificial intelligence tools and otherwise, then all we get is something that's artificial. And I don't know about you and others, but I can tell when something's not genuine. If it's artificial sweetener, an artificial voice, annoying, robocoal, whatever else, you can smell a steak right away. And I don't think that's ever going to go away from pmatic. On the flip side or on another angle, I often get asked to go and talk to university class and we're talking about economic development, which is my focus today in my room. And we got onto AI and we had people ask me, why would we use you? Why can't I just use AI to do everything? And then okay, you could, you certainly could do that. But what is the purpose of generating it? Like, why, if you're just going to generate a whole lot of paper, why would anyone on the other end want to read it? We have to think about what is the ultimate goal of what we're trying to achieve. And then we delved into other things. About what about students using AI cheat and this and that and the other. We'll put it this way. If you're a high school student and you use AI to write your essay, you get it. If you're a university student and you use AI to write your thesis, you get kicked in school. If you are working as an analyst for a bank and you use AI to write your entire investment perspective, or other people that want to use something and you put that out there, you've committed fraud and you're moving up the scale of what the penalty use for not using human intelligence, which we all have and we all value, which is all important. The other factor to add to this to then go back to you is if the level that we're going up, the way to counter that is to make people do things person to person. So if I have somebody that generates a resume on AI and all the things they've done and the way they speak and the level of knowledge of the thing in the information doesn't match or exceed, I know they're, they're faking it. So I know they're not ready to do it. They will be called out. So it begins the authenticity here, the difference between artificial, which is in the intelligent and authentic. And I think that for human intelligence wins.
- [21:00]
Vince Chen
Let me share with you one live example which is this podcast show. When I first started, it was a weekly show, one episode per week on average. Now seven episodes, one week, which means it has become a daily show, one episode per day. Then some people joke with me, hey Vince, are you using AI for all of this? And my answer is simple. There's no tool out there right now that can holistically handle the entire process of creating seven episodes a week. Sure, I use ChatGPT to check grammar or refine some copywriting when I need a bit of inspiration. But beyond that, everything else is on me. I invite every guest personally, schedule pre calls, talk with them for at least 30 minutes before actual recording, send follow up emails, handle all the nitty gritty details, and of course host to show myself this voice you hear that's all human, even editing every single piece, I do it myself with the soundtrack. I know the so called AI driven tools that claim to pick segments for audiograms or do the heavy lifting, but honestly, I do it manually. I'm so immersed in each conversation that I know exactly which moments stand out and deserve to be highlighted. Is a lot of human touch, a lot of my personal footprint, my fingerprint in every part of the process and that's what creates the final product. Looking ahead, I think the strategy for individuals, whether in work or life, has to involve finding the balance along the way. We need to decide which parts of the process need more human touch, where monitoring, intuition and judgment are essential, and then identify which parts can be standardized or delegated to AI to work faster, with more precision and on a larger scale. That's what I see as the way forward. Creating your own strategy for for division of labor between the human and the machine.
- [23:58]
Colin Selvich
I'm currently working in our own organization, albeit on my own right now, and then with others to try to figure out their AI strategy. And again, to use your coin, create human intelligence. I was Just scribbling on a piece of paper here. I think that we may have this morning figured out what the working piece was for me, which is, I believe now, and you've given me the term human intelligence. And artificial intelligence will create authentic enhanced knowledge and value. So I've been searched, trying to figure out a way to pair the two together. And the reality is that's now what we're able to do. If we can take the human, we can take the artificial and supplement it. We're creating. We're maintaining the authenticity, we're enhancing the knowledge and altogether we're growing the value. So it's not going to be one or the other. They're only providing half of the potential value that we could deliver here. That's what I'm trying to do when I talk to people for introducing AI tools into their business. To your point, more about what is it? What? Not just the problem you're trying to overcome, but what are the extension you're trying to create. Where are you trying to attend? We have great people. You have great people in your company. How do you make them better at what they can do with it?
- [25:32]
Vince Chen
Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm. This is Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.