#397 Colin Savage: Why Skill Stacking Is the New Lifelong Learning — Part Three

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.

I'm Vince Chen,

your ambitious human host.

Our show

is a modernist community 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 we'll dive into Colin's fascinating journey as a self-proclaimed change addict, turned change guru.

Colin's career spans continents, cultures, and industries, seven countries lived in, seven more seconded to, and projects in over 70 nations.

From organizational transformation to personal 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why Colin believes lifelong learning is outdated and skills decking is the future.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.

Lifelong learning is an outdated concept, and

it lacks focus for some people, where the skill stacking is a little more concentrated and it will help you really build a cheese.

But again, it's not going to be specific in an area, but you can apply it across a swath of areas and it'll really help you advance your career and advance whatever you want to do to be a standout kind of person.

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.

It's 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 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 cup 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.

They 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, is 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 decking 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.

It's about what you build with them.

I agree.

Yeah,

you have brought the other hand that I'm not going to say that I'd forgotten.

But what I would add to what you're saying, and it's quite the core, in

the skill stacking, I differentiate between calling the person and calling the professional all the time.

So skill stacking, those are skills back for my

calling the person, that's where lifelong learning for me dips 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 like us, if you've got a whole 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 skill.

I love reading modern African history.

I have three shelves of books in my house that are all about the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I am never going to

use that, at least not now.

Oh, I got to go get a PhD in RED.

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 in bust, unfortunately, in the back of my room.

Those are also skills 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 it looks 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 setup or 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 to.

I think, yeah, I think you've done Vint 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 kinds of things that I think maybe sometimes get shoved 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 ahead, 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?

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 and particularly generative AI.

I know it's very clear that I'm not a 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 lengthed learning course for 30 minutes on?

or here in the top 10 generative ai tools or here's anything here 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 that can do everything and i 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 were you're going to need to know how human resources the 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 does these, how does a myth of your AI toolkit help you in individual instances?

And for example, right now I'm working with human resources consulting company.

We don't really know how

you could do is if you use 3D to be reported for a tool, 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 policies that they may have

contravene, figure out some of the path forward, and then put together a plan that you as a professional are then going 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 checking 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, well, what's the one tool that's going to do everything?

Nothing.

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 each of them, then we're just adding more tools and making more distraction.

Destruction and wastage.

It's just noise.

It's a wasted effort, right?

One thing that many people agree on, but I don't think they're fully figured out yet,

is

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?

In the time it takes you to actually board a flight from Group 8,

you could have bought a hyundai on amazon visit hyundaiusa.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details limited availability pickup through participating hyundai dealer in select markets i love this idea of human intelligence vent and i'm going to steal it and share it with the rest of the world

chief brooke we've always referenced in you because i think that is

incredibly important and it will always be i'm not the

we all see what leaders in the air space and other things they are you know

in three years I can see AI doing all of its work, the humans do.

In five years, I can see more scene.

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 a human oversight.

because it's going to be producing things for humans.

If the end consumer, the end result, result, the destination of whatever is being done is the person who has strengths and weaknesses,

voidballs, all those kind of things, personal pieces that need to be addressed, all the kind of stuff, then it can't be the AI tool

or tool can't address that fast enough and it's more efficiently enough.

I gave a speech at a conference a couple months ago, and I was introducing a gentleman and his company that you did analysis and artificial intelligence.

And I got up on stage.

I have 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 other ones, 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,

an annoying Robocol, whatever else, you can smell a fake right away.

And I don't think that's ever going to go away from humanity.

On the flip side or on another angle, I often get asked to go and talk to university classes.

And we were talking about economic development, which is my focus today and in my room and we got on to ai and we had people ask me why would we use you why can't i just use ai to do everything i'm at

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 to 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

if you are working as an analyst for a bank and you use ai to write your entire investment perspective or other people that's money into something and you've put that out there you've committed fraud

And you're moving up the scale of what the penalty is 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 faking it.

So I know they're not ready to do it.

They will be called out.

So it's again, it's the authenticity here, the difference between artificial, which is in the intelligent and authentic.

And I think that's where human intelligence wins.

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 the show myself.

This voice you hear, that's all human.

Even editing every single piece, I do it myself with the soundtrack.

I know there are 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.

It is a lot of human touch, a lot of my personal footprint, my single print 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 paths 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 division of labor between the human and the machine.

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 phrase 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 enhanc knowledge and value.

So I'd been 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.

It's what I'm trying to do when I talk to people towards introducing AI tools into their business.

So, your point is more about

what is it,

not just the problem you're trying to overcome, but what is 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?

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 Viz Shen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.