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Professor Game Podcast
The Blueprint to Leading High-Performing Teams from Day 1 | Episode 434
00:32:10
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- [00:01]
Rob Alvarez
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from
- [00:04]
Clark Aldrich
comedy gold to relationship fails.
- [00:06]
Rob Alvarez
Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [00:23]
Clark Aldrich
Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. Asana AI can spot roadblocks and assign work to keep everything off on track. That's how work gets handled. Visit us@asana.com what if you can lead a staff meeting or lead a client meeting and never present any information at all, but only ask interesting questions?
- [00:47]
Rob Alvarez
Hey and welcome back to Professor Game, the number one gamification podcast where we explore how games, gamification and game thinking help us boost engagement, multiplier attention and build stronger products. And I'm Rob. I'm Rob Alvarez, the founder and I'm also a coach at Professor Game. I'm also the head of Engagement Strategy Europe at the Octaltis Group, the leading gamification consultancy. And I'm also a professor of gamification and game based solutions at top global institutions like IE Business School, the efmd, EBS University and many others around the world. But before we dive into today's conversation with Clark and it's gonna be super interesting talking about these Socratic questions, diving deep into how this was created and why it can be very important. I'd like to know if you are struggling in any way with retention, with ch, with engagement in your products or services. And if you are, let's turn that around. We've got you covered. Let's have a chat right away. All you have to do is click on the link in the description. So engagers. Welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. We have Clark back with us. Amazing return guest. But Clark, once again we need to know, are you prepared to engage?
- [02:03]
Clark Aldrich
I am so prepared to engage.
- [02:05]
Rob Alvarez
We have with us Clark Aldrich who is a past guest episodes 94 and 127 a while ago and is the award winning creator, author, founder of Short Sims, Unschooling Rules, a complete guide to Simulations and Series Games and Gartner's Elearning coverage. Sims and games have been covered extensively including New York Times, abc, cbs, npr, ESPN and cnn. And now most importantly this podcast. Definitely, definitely A couple of times already on the Professor Game podcast and today we're going to be talking about something new that is depending on when you hear this. It's coming up, it has just come up or has been around for a little while. But Clark Is there any, any exciting stuff besides of course, Socratic cards, which we'll be diving into today?
- [02:50]
Clark Aldrich
No, I've been very focused on Socratic cards and I'm really excited about them as, as role modeling what I think the future of education could and should be. So I look at them as a, as a really nice, tangible example of a whole new approach to, to working and a whole new approach to learning.
- [03:06]
Rob Alvarez
And you kind of started talking about that, but you know, in particular without like before diving into specifically Socratic cards, in its essence, the core mission that you're starting to describe, you know, what inspired you to build it. You know, you've had decades of experience in simulation experiential learning especially. We've done a lot of digital world stuff which we were discussing a few minutes ago. What inspired you to go down this route?
- [03:31]
Clark Aldrich
Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons and almost the most important one is I'm, I became really obsessed with how the most accomplished people actually learn. So you know, you have students in our, in our classrooms and taking our workbooks and essays and lectures and tests and stuff and those, that's all nice. But how do the most powerful people, the most successful people, the most self driven people, how do they learn? And that process became a spectacularly interesting one for me, away from the context because, you know, a lot of times, you know, they don't go back to school, they don't read books. They will, they do read books, but they're not, they're not taking classes or something. They're learning in a whole different way. And so most importantly, or one, one of the most important things was looking at how the most accomplished people go through a learning process. So that's sort of one leg of this tool and maybe a second leg of the stool was, you know, looking at a show like Ted Lasso. Did you ever watch Ted Lasso?
- [04:23]
Rob Alvarez
Yes, I did the first two seasons I think.
- [04:26]
Clark Aldrich
Right. And so, you know, to some degree that's based on John Wooten's work of how do you use work itself as a place of getting better and stronger and you know, almost focusing more on everyone growing and everyone making progress on their journey. And then the pro, the process of being, making progress on your own journey almost necessarily creates a good outside result. Having sort of the third leg of this duel was how do you make something that's really fun, that's engaging? You know, for me, all the things that I think are important things have to be fun, things have to be optional. I, you know, I'm really bad at if I'm forced into anything. So, you know, how do you create a situation where learning is optional but ultimately sort of desired? So it's kind of bringing together those three. Those three elements.
- [05:08]
Rob Alvarez
I was almost going to ask, how did your experience with short sims and simulation in general influence Socratic cards? But I think you've already started covering that. So actually, like, the next thing is, you know, you look at the webpage. I haven't played them, so full disclaimer. But I haven't played with your cards yet. But they seem to be like, simple. Right. Group discussions and questions. Right. But there's also a structured mentor path. There's challenges. What were some of the principles that guided you in terms of design to balance that simplicity? Right. Because it's important to keep things simple to a certain extent. You were also talking about before the handoff, right. Like you have a physical card deck you can hand over to somebody else to do this. How did you balance the deep engagement also with that level of simplicity?
- [05:50]
Clark Aldrich
Sure. So that's really hard to get right. And I think it's really important to get it right. So making something that's both simple and complicated at the same time, the simple part. So I think for any good game, any good game in the world that people want to play almost always follow that same pattern of having a very simple side and a very deep side. So, you know, let's take throwing a ball back and forth. Throwing a ball back and forth is fun. We don't need a game or we don't need a teacher or scoreboard. You know, throwing. You know, if you put a ball in the room and people are going to just start tossing it back and forth, that just happens. So. Or hitting a ball with a stick just happens. People do that almost, almost naturally. Trivial Pursuit. One reason why that was so successful is because people like asking truthful questions of each other. And so, you know, the most important thing for any game or, you know, Mario Brothers, it's really, really fun to run around and jump over mushrooms. It's really fun to try to jump onto a mushroom. These are just fun, simple things to do. And so the most important part for any game and for, obviously for your audience knows this because they've lived it. The most important thing is creating something that is inherently fun to do. And one thing that turns out to be really fun to do is asking each other Socratic questions. So there's an obvious one of, you know, if you were a superhero, would you rather be able to fly or turn Invisible or something. I mean, you kind of ask yourself these, these fun questions. So if you hear a good Socratic question, that becomes almost addictive. So one Socratic question in life, does fun lead to success or does success lead to fun? It's a fun question. And you know, if you have a few friends in the room, you know, you want to talk about it, you know, you're applying for a dream job. Would you rather be an average worker from a brilliant group or a brilliant worker from an average group? And so they're both, they're fun. I mean, they're fun, they're candy. There's something kind of gets you talking about it, but they're also meaningful. I mean, so structurally they're all A B questions, which means that you can have people vote on them or have people sort of take sides, which is sort of fun. They're non coercive questions. And that there's no, there's no right answer to it. It's not like I have the right answer and I, you know, and you try to guess what the right answer is. They're very genuinely open ended, non coercive questions. But they also have implications in your life, which is sort of where the real rub comes in because it actually matters is your most productive time with the group or by yourself, you know, and so, you know, the question matters in terms of how you're going to spend your day and how you're going to structure, you know, your life if you kind of come down one side or the other and there, and there are both options. And so, you know, so that's sort of the front end, the candy to Socratic cards. And by the way, I think a lot of people who buy them and use them, you know, will do nothing but use them for that purpose. It's like buying truthful pursuit and just sort of, you know, asking yourself the trivial questions. And so that sort of layer of Socratic cards can work really, really well with a bunch of friends, you know, at night and sort of a, you know, cards against humanity crowd if you just sort of want to have fun. Or it works like in a business meeting, if you want to kick off a business meeting in the right way. So, you know, in either way that's sort of, you know, that's the candy and that's the fun level.
- [08:42]
Rob Alvarez
Absolutely. And you've been talking about these, these, I almost want to call it mechanics, right of the way these questions are structured.
- [08:49]
Clark Aldrich
I'm so obsessed on mechanics, as are you. So you know, all of us pedagogy people go into that indefinitely and I certainly do as much as anyone.
- [08:56]
Rob Alvarez
So, you know, beyond of course, the questions, questioning themselves, so to speak, is there, is there an element to it that makes it viral, self propagating or almost. You mentioned already that it could be for somebody just to sit down at a party, right. And just make up these questions, or it could be something meaningful. Is there something sort of built into the cards to get to one or the other or be viral? Like is there and internal mechanism sort of, sort of that supports itself?
- [09:22]
Clark Aldrich
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple layers to it and a, you know, if people find these questions fun, they will share them with other people. So there's sort of an inherent viralness to that. And the nice thing about a physical deck of cards is that you can buy a deck of cards but you can give, you know, there's 50 cards there, you can give them to, to people if, you know, if you want to. But then there's, there's sort of two more layers to the cards which gets a little more, a little more interesting and a little more fun. The bottom of every card has a challenge, has a very specific challenge that you can do. They can. Some of them are easy and some of them are hard. And so, you know, one challenge is, you know, host two small celebrations or one big one. You know, that's a challenge. And that's a challenge under the question of, you know, does fun lead to success or does success lead to fun? So that's sort of a, that's an activity that you can do and allows you by doing that activity, it actually informs you as to the, as to the big question up top. So, you know, you throw a few parties for people and then you can think, does fund lead to success or does success lead to fund that actually informs that decision. So there's challenges. And the, the middle part of every card is another question that sort of sets up the, the bottom challenge. So it's just a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a queuing up the challenge question, you know, so in this case, what should be more celebrated by a community? A group's achievement or an individual's birthday? And that, you know, again, there's no right answer. But it certainly depends from community to community. But that sets up exactly the nature of the celebration.
- [10:46]
Rob Alvarez
Yeah, like I was gonna say, like those you've always been saying, there's no right or wrong, but here it's not even, not only no right or wrong, it's, it's not even right or wrong for a person. It depends on the context, right?
- [10:56]
Clark Aldrich
Exactly.
- [10:57]
Rob Alvarez
Yeah. What happens more birthdays? Well, some organizations. Oh, it's easy, right. You know, when somebody's birthday is. And it just comes up in others, there's very intentional design of, you know, collective achievements and you celebrate that. But, you know, birthday, does it happen? Does not happen. Like it's, it's an interesting one to dive into and see what the culture is in many ways.
- [11:16]
Clark Aldrich
Right. And then by hosting some celebrations yourself, and then you cycle back to the first question of this. You know, does, does fun lead to success or does success lead to fun? You know, how important is fun as an element to eventual success? And that's sort of, that's sort of part of the cards to make them more meaty. That also, you know, the way that smart people really work, the way the most successful people really work, is they give themselves puzzles or challenges and they do things in the real world to inform their. They're coming back to the thing. You know, does social media work? Well, let's try it. You know, does, you know, do people like new, exciting products or do they like traditional products? Well, let, let's try it out. And so that in and of itself reinforces this notion of trying things. But the last part is actually based on Alcoholics Anonymous, which is, you know, that's obviously the famous 12 step process. But, you know, there's sort of a four step process, what I'm calling the mentor path. And the, the first step of the process is to do a couple easy, easy challenges. The second part is to do two medium challenges. And all the challenges are labeled, you know, easy, medium or hard. But also having a mentor sign off on them. So not only do you do them, but you sort of have to quote, unquote, prove it to a mentor that, hey, I did it. And sort of here's what happened. Then the third step out of four is do some hardest challenges. Some of the hardest challenges on the card, you know, which might take a week or two or more to do that kind of meeting, but also, again, have a mentor sign off. But the final step of the process, the fourth step, is to actually be a mentor yourself now and sign off on other people's work.
- [12:44]
Rob Alvarez
There's a path to mastery.
- [12:45]
Clark Aldrich
So it's a path to mastery. It's a path to building a community where we help each other out and we, and we support each other. And this can be in the course of a context of a school or an organization or with friends. I mean, you can do this with friends, you know, without any organization at all. Just to sort of to feel the sensation of growing and challenging yourself and challenging each other and all the, all the challenges themselves on the cards are meaningful, important challenges. And some of them deal with, you know, practicing mental models or finding your calling or achieving excellence or you know, getting good habits or increasing the energy, which is sort of the fun, the playfulness of the situation or reducing drama, the interpersonal drama that can suck us dry. And so, you know, the cards are organized into those different categories. And so as you kind of go through this mentor path, you, you're both making real progress, but you're showing it to others and discussing with those. And that's where the real vileness comes in. And what I've seen in some, in some of the early test organizations is these cards do spread out. You know, one small group starts using them and they sort of start bringing other people in and other people in and pretty soon it, you know, it grows to affect, you know, entire, entire culture.
- [13:51]
Rob Alvarez
That's. I don't know if it's that way you're going to go for, but one of the questions I always have is now that you've started beta launching and you know how you've had some soft launches, so to speak, is there something that has surprised you, something you didn't expect about the cards being used or in which way or any comment or I don't know, like, is there anything that is like, oh, wow, this was unexpected.
- [14:10]
Clark Aldrich
It's pretty. It's not something where it does not work better when managers are insisting that it happens. So you know, once you have a boss saying we have to do this or this is our new program, it almost sucks the energy out. It really works a lot better when it's viral and bottoms up and people are doing it for fun and for growth rather than sort of for credit. So, so the notion of, so I think some organizations will track the growth and that's important to do, but almost the, the rigorous tracking of the use of the cards almost sucks some of the fun and energy and optional, optionalness away from the cards. So I think it does work better as a fun bottoms up activity of growth rather than a tops down activity of, of accreditation or, or the boss telling you what to do.
- [14:54]
Rob Alvarez
That makes sense, right? And you know, not, not to suck out the fun anyway.
- [15:00]
Clark Aldrich
What's fun to suck out anything.
- [15:03]
Rob Alvarez
But is there, you know, like we always, you know, in gamification and in this space in general, we tend to talk A lot about metrics, engagement metrics, or rather than engagement metrics, it's actually metrics that matter. Is there some. Again, metrics always sound boring, right? But metrics are important nonetheless. But is there some metric or in general, like, what would success look like if somebody was implementing or using Socratic cards for you? If you were telling that, here it is, you know, this is what to expect in the next, I don't know, six months, two weeks, I don't know.
- [15:33]
Clark Aldrich
The easiest thing, the absolute falling off a log easy thing is how many people complete the mentor path. So that is absolutely. How many people went through, you know, three, three different levels of challenges, and then. Then they themselves checked off other people's work. And that is an absolute. You know, you can write that up on the whiteboard or the chalkboard or having your learning management. I mean, that is the absolute easies easiest tracking possible. It's. And then, you know, if you want to track more, you can ask people, well, what challenges did you take? You know, and even what categories of challenges, you know, grabbed you more or whatever. So you can kind of drill, you can work the metrics if you want, but simply the metric of saying how many people became mentors and finished the mentor path. So that's easy. And I think the rewards for a mentor path are very significant in terms of creating a culture where people do. If you complete the mentor path, you've normalized asking other people for help. You've normalized mentoring others. You know, and that's really cool. It's really fun to mentor other people and have them come to you and say, here's my work, How'd I do? Or. Or, you know, give me credit for it and let me talk to you about what I did it. And then you get all these conversations going. You know, you normalize a culture that actively improves itself and its members. And that sort of gets back to the TED Lasso thing. You know, you normalize the intellectual process of. Of thinking of little challenges. All of all the initial Socratic questions are little challenges and then doing activities to sort of inform them, to validate them. So you're sort of getting yourself into this mindset of, I'm going to create little experiments for myself and then do them and then go back to the original hypothesis and say, was which way do I now fall? Which way do I believe? You know, does fun lead to success? Or does success lead to fun? You know, I can now answer that a little more. It also normalizes high energy. So one of the most. So there's the big tracking thing, which, you know, sure, why not? We have to play that game. But the most important thing for me is if you start off every business meeting with a single Socratic question, no right or wrong, just, hey, gang, I have a question for you. What do you think? And you give people a question and spend five minutes on it. One question. Do failures haunt you? Yes or no? And let's, before we start this whole staff meeting or before we start this classroom session or before we start this client meeting or something, you know, which do you share with friends information that confirms your beliefs or information that challenges your beliefs? Do you work under a confirmation bias perspective or do you, or do you fight a confirmation bias? Do you learn more from a good lecture or from a good game? And so if we start off every meeting with a Socratic question for five minutes, then the easy metric there is people are going to be more engaged. And so for the entire, you know, I do have, most people love asking Socratic questions. It's just really hard to come up with good ones that are actually meaningful and interesting and meaty. And so, you know, I am seeing some managers saying, I don't want to start off the meeting anymore without a Socratic question just to get everyone super engaged. And so that is, you know, that is proving it to yourself. You know, don't trust me. Go to the website, credit cards, dot com, look at, I have whatever 10 cards there. Pick a few that you like, you know, and start off at your next meeting by asking, you know, the question at the top and, and see what happens and prove it to yourself. So, you know, don't listen to me, but, but proving it to yourself and to me, that's sort of the most important metric and it gets people interesting.
- [18:44]
Rob Alvarez
Interesting. We've talked about like, and I even mentioned I have my own, my own experiment with card games. And the whole physicality is a component. It's an important component. But in the future, you know, let's, let's move ahead maybe a few years. This is massive success and maybe you want to scale it in some way, shape or form. Do you see this turning into perhaps a digital experience, a hybrid experience? And if so, is there anything that you would anticipate happening that is, any change? Would that change the core experience or would that still keep its basics?
- [19:17]
Clark Aldrich
I hate the thought of these being electronic. I absolutely will fight tooth and nail. I mean, so for me, what success means, there's whole lots more Socratic cards. I want to build, I want to build a Socratic Cards for families. I want to build a socratic card for 14 year olds. I want to build a Socratic card deck for tri building and we get a bunch of people in the room for the first time. How do we figure out how we should organize ourselves? I want to build a dedicated deck of Socratic cards just for building energy. How can we, you know, wherever we are, how can we have more fun being there? You know, I want to build a whole Socratic deck on, on excellence. You know, how do we become world class? How do we as, as a bunch of friends or colleagues, you know, absolutely get really, really good at what we're doing or, or deck of Socratic cards around reducing drama. You know, how do we get along without fighting and without, you know, how do we all play the same game in life or while we're together? You know, the worst thing in the world is to be a chess player in a room full of poker players. You know, it's just, you know, how, how do we make sure we're playing the same game? And so, you know, all those kinds of cards I look forward to building and as this becomes, you know, successful, you know, I really look forward to building more decks of cards. This is a great generic general deck of cards which I'm really proud of and it covers a lot of bases. But I want to dig into all of the little areas in a lot more detail if I can.
- [20:31]
Rob Alvarez
I love it. I love to see the evolution not, not even necessarily going or needing actually being fought against the digital world. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against that. I'm sure you don't have anything against digital stuff with your short sims and whatnot. But yeah, there, there, there needs to be also some pushback with some things.
- [20:49]
Clark Aldrich
Well, the fact is that, you know, you and I, if you come over to my house for, for dinner or something, or we have some friends over, we can put away our screens, we can put away our devices and you know, just take a deck of cards, fan it out, say grab a random card and pull it out and you know, let's talk about it. And during the course of the conversation we're going to learn about each other and we're going to learn about our own. You know, we're going to have more meaningful conversations. And so it's, it gets us away from the screen mentality which I think, as we all know, because I mean the problem with education in general is it gets infrastructure heavy very quickly. I mean you look at a school and pretty soon you're Having fire drills and shooter drills and your, you know, your landscaping and stuff. And so the infrastructure of technology takes over very, very quickly. You know, you take a course, but before you take a course, you have to sign in and you have to get your password and, oh, you forgot your password. And so the infrastructure of, you know, when I look at education, one thing that kills it is, is the infrastructure. And so part of my goal, again, a la Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is an amazing program in that it's incredibly cheap to deploy. So the cost per, per person is next to nothing. Same thing with, you know, Socratic cards were built to have an incredibly cheap cost, you know, cost per person. It does not require any expertise. It does not require a master's degree to deploy these. You know, to be a good Socratic conversation leader, you know, helps to have a lot of skills. But these cards focus it so that anyone can, anyone can, can be, can lead us their own Socratic conversation effortlessly. Lack of skills. You know, it's something that people can. If you, if you have a staff meeting and, you know, every week you go through a Socratic question, eventually you can find a challenge that you want to do. So you can sort of hang around and wait until something, you know, interesting pops up, you know, and then do it. It's meant to be viral. It's sort of designed to be viral, but. And not in a way that particularly benefits me because the cost per person. No, but if you get a deck of 50 cards, you can give people, you know, a card. And so now for next to nothing, you can sort of share it with people and get other people sort of asking questions as opposed to listening. And then inherently, ultimately, it's either, you know, it's either going to be fun or not, and it's going to improve your life or not. And if it does either of those two things, it will spread on its own and become viral. If it does neither of those two things, it should die. And it should die. But, you know, it's either going to be fun to do or it leads you down a really meaningful path where you become a person who is, you know, and your community too. I think the other part of it, a la Ted lasso, is, you know, it's really fun when you're around other people who are also working on improving the community, on. Working on helping each other on the journeys that they're on.
- [23:18]
Rob Alvarez
I love that. I love that if you were, you know, to ask or to say, what's one question that we should be asking learners or leaders even today that we're not. Which question would that be? And why, why would that, would it be so important? I know there's many on your deck.
- [23:33]
Clark Aldrich
Well, it's almost, you're almost answering your. I'm going to take your exact statement which is sort of saying what happens if you as a leader stop talking at people and start asking questions? You know, your question is brilliant because it's exactly what a leader should be doing. What happens when a leader gets in the, you know, gets in the framework of saying that, you know, a good leader presents good information, a great leader asks great questions. And what if you can lead a staff meeting or lead a client meeting and never present any information at all, but only ask interesting questions? And it's a complete inversion of the traditional, you know, leader, manager, teacher model. And it gives all the power and because the other thing is it not only gives the power to the, to the learners, it gives the responsibility to the learners. It gives the responsibility to the people who are sitting around the staff meeting. It goes from making them passive participants to, to, to active, active people. So I think, I think, you know, just that alone. Teaching leaders how to ask great questions rather than to give good answers is transformational to a workplace and to a classroom.
- [24:39]
Rob Alvarez
Beautiful. I love that. And you've, you've already started on, on, you know. Well, there was one thing I wanted to talk about. If, if you were to redesign the way, as, as you were saying, the, the way leaders relate to, to teams, right. If you were, if that were to completely change or the way teams function as teams. Well, like of course, the asking questions rather than actually let me take a step back because it also happens in education, right. Like this is one of the things that I, that I love about, for example, case studies. When you do case studies, a well structured case, it does have a piece of information, right? People have to read the case. Ideally it's relatively short, so the barrier is low. But then it's all about guiding with questions. And the questions cannot be how much did they make that year? Or how much will they make next year? If you're using this formula, it's more, it's more about having a Socratic question. No right answers. You could have even 10 different answers that are all correct in their own way. So like, although I love that again, there is also a side to it that has, that is more content heavy. And this includes as well the relationship that leaders have with their teams and the teams have to leadership because sometimes you're, as a team member Presenting, right. You're bringing something to leadership because you want to implement it. So of course the questions would restructure that. Is there anything else that you, you know, from this thinking of Socratic cards that would change if the world were built by Socratic cards, how would it be different in terms of wherever you want to go, education, you know, work? What would that look like?
- [26:12]
Clark Aldrich
There's so many parts to that there. And it's an awesome question and well said. So I think one thing you can do is, you know, the activities that are done by the person in charge should increasingly be handed off to the people, to the community itself. So if you're the manager of a group, you know, hiring new employees, you should never hire, you know, a new employee that the group itself hasn't signed off on. Like, and actually making decisions like what happens when you have the community itself make the yes or no decision on a new community member? Not, not the boss or HR or something? Right now the boss is sort of in charge of motivating people. Well, what if you motivate ourselves? But right now, sort of the boss is in charge of looking at each other's work and checking it off and making sure the work is good. What happens when work is peer reviewed as opposed to boss reviewed? So that general notion of how do we take away and weaken the notion of here's the person in charge to do that? I think another thing is, you know, to. I think there's a skill set around auditioning that I think is way underrepresented, which is, you know, we are auditioning all the time. We're auditioning for client business. We're auditioning to be part of groups. But also we are being auditioned to, you know, by, by people who want to, who want us to hire them or, you know, even working with, with, with clients kind of things. And so that notion of how do you make auditions a lot harder and a lot more rigorous, you know, I think is, is part of the process as well. I think giving a team itself, the core, the control over the team members, you can either have, you know, a team can either be managed or it can be high performing, but it's really hard to have them be both. There's a framework I want to maybe put forth now, which is most corporations right now are about 65 or 70% easily replaceable employees and about 30%, what I'll call heroic tribes. 70% easily replaceable employees. You know, they're increasingly hired by AI, they're managed by AI, and frankly, they're fired by A, by AI. The roles themselves are designed to be replaceable. You know, if you get, if you get sick or hit by a bus, okay, fine, you know, goodbye. We're, we'll, we'll bring someone else in kind of, you know, pretty quickly and easily. And so, and I first sort of heard about the easily replaceable employee model from General motors, you know, 20 years ago. And it's, you know, only gotten more and more prevalent. Having said that, again, there's still about 30% of a corporation, maybe less now, of, let's call them heroic tribes of, of, of groups of people who, who don't, who aren't overly managed, who have very high goals, who use work itself as an opportunity to grow and become more valuable. And obviously the senior leadership team I've done a lot of work with senior leadership teams are that way. Some sales teams are that way that are very self managed. Some design teams are really that way. Some, you know, like advertising and marketing teams are that way. They're, they're super. You know, it's a whole different feeling than the easily replaceable employees. And so part of the notion of Socratic cards is to get more people towards the heroic tribe model of organizing and growing rather than the easily replaceable employee model of growing. And that might be just the biggest shift that we're seeing.
- [29:17]
Rob Alvarez
That sounds amazing, Clark. It's amazing also how time goes by. It's already been 30 minutes of us chatting about these very interesting topics. I don't know if there's anything else you want to leave our listeners with or our viewers as well with. Again, the engagers are always interested in seeing how, you know, how, how is the thinking behind this. And I think we delved, you know, deep enough. Of course, we could spend hours, I'm sure, talking about Socratic cards, but I don't know. Is there anything else that's left unsaid, at least for now, that you would like to highlight.
- [29:44]
Clark Aldrich
Here's a broader thought that's true of Socratic cards, to be sure, but broad of anything, which is when you do something that works, when you do something that makes you a better person, take a more active role in spreading it to other people. And I think that's almost the, you know, we get in a mindset where we're competitive with the people around us and, or, you know, where we do something that works and we kind of like it, but we keep it to ourselves. And I think the notion of evangelizing things that really helped you is not a bad model. And so Obviously, I'm hoping that with Socratic cards is, you know, there's not, you know, I'm not going to spend any money on advertising. I'm not going to spend any money on, you know, certainly not a fancy website or something. But I'm, you know, I'm counting, maybe stupidly, but I think excitedly, you know, if someone goes through this and they say that was fun or that really worked, I'm going to spread it to other people. And so I'll say it selfishly with Socratic cards, but I think anything, you know, as you do stuff that works and really helps you grow, then champion it to other people and put it up on your, you know, put it up on your website or something. And by the way, actually, I think, sorry, I'm going to differ here. Socratic questions themselves are a really fun way of doing that. So if there is an interesting Socratic, if there's an interesting question, you know, here's a question. Can you be forced to learn? Can I, you know, can I put a gun to your head and force you to learn something? You know, yes or no? Well, if you find that an interesting question, then ask it to strangers. I mean, literally, you know, put it up behind you. You know, put it on your email salutation and say, you know, forget, you know, don't cite it or anything. I'm not even saying give me credit for it, please don't. But share the question and ask. Spend two weeks, you know, whenever you're. If a Socratic question is sort of interesting to you, share with other people. Hey, I got a question for you. You know, can you be forced to learn? What do you think? And that, and that notion of sort of sharing things that are interesting again is something that I think is, is greatly increases the, the connection between people and kind of in of itself becomes this really powerful habit.
- [31:39]
Rob Alvarez
Love it. Love it. Thank you very much, Clark, again for, for taking your time and sharing your Socratic cards with us, especially all the thinking behind it, all of the strategies, how you think about this, this sort of systems thinking as well that is going behind the Socratic cards. But at least for now, Engagers, as you know and at least for today, it is time to say that it's game over. Hey engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you're interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game On School. You can find the link right below in the description. But the main thing is to click there. Join us. It's a platform called School. It's for free, and you'll find plenty of resources. There will be up to date with everything that we're doing, any opportunities that we might have for you, and of course, course, before you go on to your next mission. Before you click Continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there. The holidays are all about connection, good food, good friends, and those cozy moments. This season, skip the boring mocktails and celebrate with rk, the world's first zero proof spirits. All the taste and wants of your favorite holiday pores with zero alcohol, zero guilt, and the patented warm molecule for that festive kick. Perfect for toasting, hosting or gifting. Celebrate freely with RK0 proof. Visit rkbeverages.com.