Guest: Dave Stevens, CLO @ Advanced Learning Strategies
Published: November 6th, 2025
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‍Episode summary

A timely and essential reminder of what we're at risk of losing in an AI-driven world: the human side of learning.

Dave Stevens has spent 30 years at the crossroads of learning strategy and caring for people, working for organizations like Prudential and UnitedHealth before founding Advanced Learning Strategies. He’s also a former Las Vegas poker player—an experience that taught him firsthand how struggle, confidence, and failure are essential for growth.

This conversation is a delight. Dave's calm, wise presence cuts through the hype to reveal why AI's focus on performance and efficiency is a direct threat to the messy, slow, and relational work of real human transformation.

Key topics

• 🤖 Why AI’s focus on performance threatens messy, transformative human learning.
• 🧠 The "Human Side of Learning": What pioneers like Bell Hooks and Lev Vygotsky teach us about relational foundations of behaviour change.
• ♠️ Lessons from a Las Vegas poker table on why failure and struggle are essential for growth.
• 💡 How to use AI as a reflective partner (by asking "What am I missing?") instead of just a task-master.

Top quotes

“The easy things will be performance-focused. The more difficult items are going to be transformative learning. That's messy, that's human, that's full of failure. And the concern will be, if we no longer can tolerate being slow, tolerate making mistakes, we're gonna be in trouble.”

“Learning is not transactional. It's not filling up a vessel. It's growing and growing together and that growth isn't easy.”

“One reflective question that I really like to ask AI is, 'What am I missing?'. I think that kind of learning is going to be where we get the benefit: helping us to turn performance tasks into something that actually helps us to grow.”

“It made me realize you need to connect with the people before the curriculum comes.”

Resources

• Download the One New Zealand Case Study
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Dave Stevens: Learning is not transactional. It's not filling up a vessel. It's growing and likely growing together and that growth is uneasy. It's making mistakes and failure and pausing and reflecting and all of that. And it's not fast, it's not efficient. It's the opposite of what I think AI is. 

Dave Stevens:The easy things will be performance focused. The more difficult items are going to be transformative learning that's messy, that's human, that's full of failure. And the concern will be if we no longer can tolerate being slow, tolerate making mistakes, we're going to be in trouble.

Mike Courian: Welcome back to Shape Shifters, the podcast on the hunt for passionate individuals who are discovering and rediscovering the best ways to transform people and organizations for good. I'm your host, Mike Courian. It's great to have you with me.

In this episode, I'm talking to Dave Stevens. Dave has spent 30 years at the crossroads of learning, strategy, and care for people. He's an award-winning adjunct professor and a long-time learning strategist. He's worked for organizations like Wells Fargo, United Health, and as director of learning and development at Prudential, where he led enterprise-wide instructional design and strategized AI implementation.

Most recently, he's founded Advanced Learning Strategies. He's a natural connector of ideas and someone who now is deeply focused on advocating for what he calls the human side of learning as we head into a rapidly accelerating AI future.

In this conversation, Dave is going to reveal why AI's focus on performance might actually be undermining the messier human side of transformative learning. You'll hear where he learned the centrality of human connection and why it's essential to creating behavior change. He'll unpack what the human side of learning is, pulling from learning pioneers like bell hooks and Lev Vygotsky. And you'll hear how playing poker in Las Vegas showed him that struggle, confidence, and failure are essential for growth. This conversation was a delight. Dave has such a calm, wise presence, and I think you're going to walk away with a timely and essential reminder of the slow, relational, and necessary work of real human growth. Let's jump into the conversation.

Mike Courian: Dave, welcome to the podcast. It's lovely to have you.

Dave Stevens: Mike, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invite.

Mike Courian: I normally ask people, what are three words that are top of mind for you when you describe yourself? But you actually gave me some wonderful ones already, so I'm going to reflect them back to you and I kind of just want to hear more about them. So, professor, editor, instructional designer, learning strategist. And now here are the two that really piqued my curiosity. Poker player and landscape painter. So you're going to need to tell me a little bit more about those two.

Dave Stevens: It's eclectic and I don't travel in straight lines very well. I don't color within the straight lines either. I got my Master of Fine Arts in Las Vegas, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, because if you can go anywhere for graduate school, Las Vegas isn't a bad place to go, honestly. It's a little warm, but it's interesting. People are fascinating. And if I thought, okay, that's where I want to go. And I had been around a lot of smart people. This was before poker was a TV sport. It was a little, it was a down and dirty game. But I understood the math, and if just by doing the right thing at the right time, I was able to pay my tuition and rent, and I did that for a couple of years.

Mike Courian: That's the best college job I've heard of.

Dave Stevens: It really was a great job. And there were weeks where I was very worried. I wasn't quite sure if things were going to work out, but it always worked out. And I don't know why, but it did work out. And now, I'm 61.

Dave Stevens: I don't think I'm slowing down, but I am sort of appreciating the pauses. I picked up oil painting. And my father was an artist, and and I've it since he's 89 and we paint. And it's just a wonderful connection. I realize now, as I'm telling this story that I'm going to go back, but that's okay. Stories sometimes go back.

I thought I wanted to be a storyteller. That's where my first love was, and I wanted to write novels. I went for a master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, and you can't actually make a living from writing. You need to teach. And so I became a professor. I was picking up jobs wherever I could. One of the jobs was at a local library. And while working there, I met another librarian who said, you know, you should come with me. We're going to interview at a medical communications company.

Okay. I had a young family and I really did need the money. So I went and interviewed and it was for a managing editor job at the National Diabetes Education Initiative. And because of the degree, not because of the love that I had for science, which I really didn't know very much about. They said, we'd like to offer you a job. So I became an editor.

And one of my primary jobs or tasks there was to put together continuing medical education. All I did was talk to the smart doctors to figure out how do you bundle these things, this new knowledge? Now, how do you then put it in front of doctors who are not yet smart and in such a way that they could pick it up quickly?

I didn't have a term for it. Later on, I learned about instructional design. I'm like, oh my God, that's what I've been doing. I've been doing instructional design.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Dave Stevens: Yes. And I loved it. And over this period of time, I've always been teaching writing. I haven't always been writing, but teaching writing was something that I found really satisfying. Instructional design,

Dave Stevens: is teaching at scale. Once I started thinking of myself as an instructional designer, I went out and tried to figure out and learn as much as I could about it.

Mike Courian: So, I heard some interesting threads. I was doing instructional design, born out of this love of communicating ideas, and then all of a sudden I discovered, "Oh, this is a whole industry and a whole skillset." And then I also heard, I was in Las Vegas, poker was this interesting avenue that met some needs of mine. If you reflect on all of that, what are those, have you ever distilled what you think those core skills are for you that supported those things over the years?

Dave Stevens: I think with storytelling, it's being able to connect, being able to connect at an emotional level or at some level that's not purely conceptual and intellectual or abstract. And I'm not saying I'm necessarily good at this, but I enjoy that. I enjoy that spark when it happens.

I had an experience. I was teaching in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and Paterson is a, is a, is a challenging city. It's a city that is under-resourced. It's incredibly vibrant. It's incredibly diverse. That first night, I went down and I found the classroom and it was an auditorium style classroom. It could seat 300 people, and there were 30 people scattered throughout this hall. Not just kids, but from 18 to 60. And I went into it as I would any class. We talked about the syllabus. I then did a game which I'd done before many times where you tell two truths and one lie as an icebreaker to get to know people. And it always works just fine. Well, it didn't work fine here. I had a few people who played the game. And then I had a gentleman stand up and instead of telling me two truths and a lie, he told me three incredibly racist tropes. And I just remember just feeling like I had got punched. I was just stunned. The classroom was quiet. And I didn't know what my next step was. I said, I I hope you take this class seriously.

Dave Stevens: right way, but who are you? Who are you? And what are you doing here? And he told me, I'm here because I have to pass this class. And he wasn't happy that he had to pass the class for his associates degree. and other people in the class said they had to pass the class too. And it wasn't me doing anything particularly sharp or smart, but this conversation occurred and it grew and lots of people took part in it and we soon learned that there were a lot of 30 people in that class, a lot of them were in that boat. Many of them had taken this English 101 class two, three, and even four times without passing it.

And it made me realize that you need to connect with the people before the curriculum comes. And it turned out that that gentleman who spoke turned out to be a very good writer. I mean, everything worked out. Not everyone passed, but everyone, I think, felt heard. And it changed me. It really changed me.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I can hear that.

Dave Stevens: I have taken that idea with instructional design. I think that a key part is understanding who you are working with, making that connection with the learners, understanding what they need to get out of this, and understanding where they're coming from. It's not necessarily creating a new curriculum so much as it is positioning things, framing them, providing the context, the scaffolding, the scaffolding necessary for people to be successful.

Mike Courian: When you were talking about connection before, would you, because the word I was hearing when you were building this rapport was trust. Do you think it is only trust or do you think there's more than just trust when you're building that thing that you're calling connection?

Dave Stevens: Oh, that's a great question. I suspect it is more than trust. I think trust occurs over time and maybe it's as simple as being heard. It's an appreciation. It's a path. Taking that moment to just

Dave Stevens: Okay, time out. I didn't know what the next step was and we sort of worked. I feel like we worked it out together as a class, and then built something that became trust, but it wasn't trust immediately.

Mike Courian: There's so much nuance in there. Like you said, listening, shared discovery, time. Time being a huge one. Something I want to share with you from New Zealand. In Māori culture, there's this idea of Ako. It means a lot of things, but it's a core word around teaching. And what that idea entails is learning with and from each other. And so that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. That is the disposition of a learning environment. And there's this beautiful reciprocalness that I actually heard in what you were describing. As this man stands up and confronts you, he's frustrated, he doesn't want to be here, he doesn't want to be stuck in a system. And then all of a sudden, it was in this very unexpected way a beautiful invitation to collaboration and connection.

Dave Stevens: And and again, I just don't want to take credit for it because it really was, it was him, it was the class. Something wonderful came from that. The Māori word I wrote down, I'm very curious about that. I'm going to maybe jump ahead. I apologize if I'm jumping too far. Looking at AI right now. Everything we hear is about generative AI and how it's going to change everything. And it really looks like it is going to change everything. And as a result of that, I kept thinking about connection. I kept thinking about how we connect to AI? How do learners do this? And what is the word trust over time? Do I ever trust AI? I don't know. I think that's an interesting question.

Mike Courian: Really interesting question.

Dave Stevens: Do I trust Microsoft? Do I trust Google? Do I, I don't. But that said, my relationship with ChatGPT that I used all day long, I don't necessarily

Dave Stevens: they trust it factually, but I do feel comfortable with it. Regardless, I was looking at the humans that were learning pioneers and trying to understand how learning really works. And it's exactly as you were saying, it's relational. And there's trust and it's dialogue and it's respect and dignity. The folks that really were the pioneers here are all in agreement that learning is not transactional. It's not filling up a vessel.

It's growing and likely growing together or growing as a community. And that growth is uneasy. It's being confronted by somebody in a classroom, making a difficult statement. It's making mistakes and failure and pausing and reflecting and all of that. And it's not fast, it's not efficient. It's the opposite of what I think AI is. And so that's where I'm feeling some angst. I'm not against AI. I really and truly, um, a champion of AI, but I just want us to be careful.

Mike Courian: You said, do I trust AI? Oh man, it's so confronting because I really do see a lot of my heart is moving in the direction of something that looks like trust that I would give to another collaborator. I'll call it collaborator because I want some word that can be a medium between people that I normally work with. And then all of a sudden I'm working in this weird box that I just type things into and magic comes back.

Something I wrote down was, there's trust, and then the word that came to mind for me was confidence. There is a confidence I am gaining. One of my explorations is I've been writing a lot of code to assist me with all sorts of automations to do my daily work, which spans all sorts of things in our business from finance to learning design and otherwise. And I am starting to gain quite a lot of confidence that I know how to ask to get the responses I need.

Mike Courian: And it's in a domain, and this is where I think it's interesting, and maybe this is our great segue into the struggle is, I'm asking for it to help me with the domain that I knew nothing about. And so the struggle for me was already completely insurmountable. I had said, I will never be able to program a computer because I am never going to be able to learn these languages. I had written it off as too difficult to test. And so what's interesting for me is it's not causing me to just become lazy in a discipline that

Dave Stevens: Right.

Mike Courian: I was already proficient in it. Because everything, every word, every line that it turns back to me, I'm like, this is still unfamiliar and I'm having to piece together this completely new discipline. And so, yeah. I'm gaining a lot of confidence in how to do this, but it feels like I'm learning the whole time. I'm feeling a lot of struggle because I'm using AI to do something I've never done before.

And so I can see that's vastly different than when people are using it to do their core skill set.

Dave Stevens: I do think that much of my experience parallels what you just told me. I am interested in those people who talk about AI as being something that's eroding critical thinking skills. I suspect that for some people that probably is true of people who are looking for that quick answer and I don't think the quick answer is necessarily a bad thing. And I suspect that learning to use AI is a frontier for all of us, for everybody and figuring out what works for me and what doesn't work. I was playfully playing around with prompts and I recognize that I do a lot of conversational prompts. I asked AI about it and I said, hey, there should be a term for this. and we came up with a prompt log. That's a dialogue prompt. Honestly, it was ridiculous. It just tickled me, but I do think that we're at the

Dave Stevens: very beginning stages of understanding how to collaborate with this partner.

Mike Courian: You said something really interesting that I'd love everybody to hear again. I was in the middle of a prompt log.

Dave Stevens: Yeah.

Mike Courian: And in the middle of a prompt log, I said, what are we doing? Can you, can you come up with a name for this? I've recognized, and I hope those that don't do this, please try it out. When you're in the middle of collaborating with whatever generative tool you're using, ask questions, side questions, like spider out the beautiful thing of thinking about the thing you're thinking about in the middle of thinking about something else. And I think that skill is there's something going on there where you're reflecting in the midst of trying to output something or or be productive. And I think that can seem like inefficiency or distraction or whatever, but I think that's where the growth is. Let's say you get the job done twice as fast. What if you used a quarter of that time and reinvested it? There's something really important there. Have you been noticing that?

Dave Stevens: Yep. Yep. And I think it's a key growth opportunity. And it really is a part of what we know the human side of learning is about. It's about being reflective in the moment. When you're working with AI, it does make performance geared learning very easy. If there's a correct answer out there, it's very likely that AI does know it and it's going to give it to you in just a moment. One question that I really like is, what am I missing? What is it that I'm not aware of or that I should be aware of that I'm not addressing here? And at least with the version of AI that I'm using, it's incredibly polite. It's always, uh, buttering me up. But asking it, no, what am I missing has been very fruitful. How might a critic do this?

Mike Courian: respond. Again, I think it's a learning opportunity. Yes, you could check the box, done with the task, move on to the next. But as you say, you probably have earned a little bit of time. That learning, I think that really is going to be the benefit with AI, helping us to turn performance tasks into something that actually helps us to grow and becomes transformative.

Dave Stevens: We've been aspiring for true just-in-time learning. But it's always this awkward thing because you have to context switch. I'm writing an email to somebody about a project and all of a sudden I got to bounce into some other application to do the just in time learning. And I think what's fascinating about this is that this is the most wonderful opportunity for just-in-time reflection and learning.

Mike Courian: I agree and some larger organizations have their own GenAI built behind the firewalls. And they have some control over how it responds and the opportunity for follow-up questions. It strikes me that if an organization were listening and thinking about how they want to address performance learning, but also want to create those reflective moments.

Dave Stevens: I think that would be so powerful if if the model perceives that it's probably finished the task, it'd be so interesting for the system prompt to be, I want you to ask the learner a question. And then it just says something to prime a learning opportunity.

Mike Courian: Yeah. to disrupt the transactional nature of that.

Dave Stevens: Yes.

Mike Courian: I think that we're building out the first generation of AI powered learning, right? And I do think that we're going to overemphasize performance. And it's going to be a problem. I think that that becomes a problem for us. When we don't create the space for us to make mistakes, when we don't have the transformative learning that requires relational dynamics, whether it's people or whether it's with different ideas, and it's uncomfortable. There's a little bit of sand in the machine. Growth learning is always sand in the machine.

Mike Courian: You mentioned a phrase that I've fallen in love with, and I believe it's yours, which is The Human Side of Learning. Can you tell me what the human side of learning is?

Dave Stevens: Well, it ties into what we're talking about. And it's also something that I didn't fully appreciate. So, when I became an instructional designer, these are things that I was digging around with as I was trying to scale this connection to learners that was so productive for me when I was teaching in a classroom.

I reached out to AI and said, hey, I, I want to understand what it is about learning that's truly human. And so this machine started to tell me about what makes learning human. And there's some irony there, but I suspect for most of these people I had knowledge of their existence, but didn't fully appreciate how these learning pioneers, how they structured and helped us to appreciate how learning is really a human activity.

Jane Vella was one of the first that we introduced. Jane Vella was in the Peace Corps. She was in Tanzania, which was teaching and and was recognizing that uh didactic learning wasn't getting her anywhere. And so I really stepped back and said, okay, this is a conversation. This is a dialogue. And through kind of an epiphany, put together a whole structured model of learning that was dialogue in nature in which, as you had described earlier, that learning was between a student and somebody with a little bit more experience, really.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it was reciprocal. It went both ways.

Dave Stevens: Reciprocal. Perfect word. bell hooks, really, in my mind is one of these people who everyone should know about her. She wrote her name in lowercase, b e l l h o o k s, like E. E. Cummings style, but she did it because she didn't want to get in the way of what it was that she was talking about. It wasn't her theory.

Dave Stevens: It wasn't about her, it was about this concept that the entire student needs to be in the classroom, not just that intellectual side of the student. And the same is true with the facilitator. Everybody involved in the learning process, you bring the whole self. And we hear that in corporate learning, you know, about encouraging people to bring their whole self and we recognize that that diversity of thought and perspective is going to be game-changing. And it really is the only way you can anticipate the future is by having that fuzzy edge, which is diversity. She articulated that better than anyone had before her.

The one that I didn't understand or who I didn't really know about was Lev Vygotsky. Lev Vygotsky was probably the oldest of this group, and was in early Soviet Russia. I'm learning that he died quite young in his late 30s of tuberculosis and the things that he wrote about were hidden. and people didn't know of his thinking for decades after he was gone. He's the one in the zone of proximal development. It's a hard phrase, but its meaning, you immediately understand that learning takes place on a frontier. And each of us have these little oases of literacy, and the learning is taking place on the edge. You may need reinforcement in the middle, but the learning is on the edge, and they're really lively places.

And that it's social. Learning is social because you can only do so much yourself in learning. You can only get so far, but you're going to need some sort of social help in order to pick up things on that living frontier of things that are new. And he called that scaffolding.

And every one of us in L&D has heard that term scaffolding, and that's to support people to get to that next handhold or step. And I had never understood that this is where that phrase came from, and I appreciated it so much.

Dave Stevens: Oh, it's a social thing. It's between humans and it's that social aspect of it really hit me hard. Yeah, so I when I was putting together the human side of learning series for LinkedIn, boy, another example of the teacher or whoever I am in this scenario, learning far more than probably anybody else did.

Mike Courian: I love that. And so, have you figured out a way to distill all of that into what you're calling your next practices? I heard you describe it as, what are the next practices that you want to help support organizations putting in place.

Dave Stevens: So my answer should be, yes, I have it all figured out, but I don't. I have the trajectory and I have an understanding that this is necessary. I have an appreciation that these voices are saying many of the same things, that much of which is telling me, hey, when we're looking at learning, the easy things will be performance focused. The more difficult items are going to be transformative learning that's messy, that's human, that's full of failure and the concern will be if we no longer can tolerate being slow, tolerate making mistakes,

Mike Courian: Yes.

Dave Stevens: We're gonna be in trouble. We'll be successful, short-term, and then this next generation of business, the next generation of products, our customers are going to continue to evolve. And we're always a step or two behind and we're trying to catch up and we won't be able to. That'll be a problem. That'll really be a problem. So with that outcome in mind, I'm looking to be able to put together the voices and try to help people to understand, how do we connect those dots in order to change that outcome that feels to me is I think it it may not be terrible, terrible, but I suspect that it's something that we should try to avoid. And one way is to, hey,

Mike Courian: Within L&D, we have a lot of folks. Many of them are highly educated and people that think about metacognitive learning and making sure that they're at the table when we're talking about integrating AI into these learning tools. In many of the organizations that I've worked with, that was not the case and for whatever reason. And IT, for the most part, owns AI. I just, I just think let's, let's make sure that we're looking and we're cultivating that transformative learning that is messy and we have to understand what happens. If we're going to overemphasize performance because we can suddenly do that, how do you look at a mistake?

A mistake now is something that's not a learning opportunity. We lose the opportunity to gain real insight in the way that we've always learned in the past, which has been this human side of learning.

Dave Stevens: Patrick Lencioni, he talks about this thing of organizational health is the top of, if it was Maslow's, it's at the top of the pyramid. And he's saying, without it, everything ends up falling away and collapsing eventually. You can prioritize performance for a season, but ultimately this will come home to roost. And I think you're describing something really similar that yes, there will be these glory days of productivity and performance, but if we neglect growth, the board might get the best results for the next two or three or however many years, but eventually it's actually not going to be sustainable.

Mike Courian: I think that's exactly right. Overengineering the performative side of learning. Again, it's going to be the easy thing to do. It's going to be the thing that brings us the most short-term success.

Dave Stevens: It's incentivized in that way.

Mike Courian: Exactly. That's, that's exactly right. And why wouldn't we do it? We will do it. But there needs to be, so we talk about professional development, the soft skills, which maybe you think of them as power skills instead.

Dave Stevens: organizational development. I think that these are areas that would benefit from AI. I think that it's reflective in nature. I think that the models that we were talking about take a break from performative tasks and start to become more reflective, creating doubt. Maybe, maybe it's just questioning and querying and curiosity. Uh, is where you will have growth. That growth doesn't, it's not predictable. It's not, it's not something you can necessarily forecast, but it has led to just about every major breakthrough. The breakthroughs aren't done with a calculation. They're a connection. It's two things that were unrelated at one time. And, and that's how the human side of learning works.

Mike Courian: How do you think we help people build the muscle of curiosity? Just in recognizing that some people possess this insatiable curiosity and others it's just different. Do you have any insights on how we start to help others feel safe to be curious?

Dave Stevens: Well, I think that's the keyword is creating that psychological safety to be able to do that. At United Healthcare, we would give an award for the greatest failure of the quarter. And it wasn't tongue and cheek. It really was an award. There's money associated with it. And it was just to call that out and in some manner recognize that that failure likely came from risk taking of some sort or through no control that I had, I have journeyed through something that allowed me to be confident and my confidence came from a culture that allowed me to fail, to borrow from bell hooks, the whole person could come and explore and to try things out, to take risk. I think that in organizations,

Dave Stevens: It would be nice if that were the case. I think that it's a real balance. But I do think that in homes and in higher Ed, we can do a better job of creating opportunities for people to take chances, to take risks as they're learning and to be rewarded not necessarily because it's going to lead to an outcome, but because they were curious. If you feed curiosity, curiosity grows. Maybe that's the shortest answer.

Mike Courian: I've heard reasons that sound like they were some of the personal motivations for starting advanced learning strategies. What were some of the other drivers why you started it?

Dave Stevens: There's, uh, there's something called learning debt that I haven't heard anyone discuss. And I keep thinking that within IT, there's tech debt, and it's this complexity that grows that is difficult to disentangle when it is time to retire things. And when I was leading the instructional design group at Prudential, there was a challenge when we would build something quickly because you need to build it quickly. And it wasn't that we were intentionally leaving things out, but when you went back to fix it, invariably you needed to update it, it would take you twice as long to do it. And there was never an understanding from anyone, why would it take us twice as long to do that? And building that understanding that the faster you go, the more opportunity there is to create this debt that you will pay a little bit later down the road. And honestly, it's not that you need to be debt-free, it's just that you need to be able to manage it. Nobody's going to get a bonus because of tech debt, but understanding that it exists and understanding how to navigate that and how to manage it in the moment and then long term is something that's going to give you a healthier organization at the top.

I love the fact that I had the opportunity to be able to think, maybe that's a better approach, and we'll see where it goes.

Mike Courian: When I was reflecting on some of the words you've written down preparing for this, you had curiosity

Mike Courian: We've covered that. Trust, we've covered that. Connection, we've covered that. I was just thinking there are these wonderful pillars that stand up to this idea that you're having the human side of learning. Another word you've chosen is meaningful. Can you flush that out for me?

Dave Stevens: Things can be meaningful in a great number of ways. They can be meaningful to the organization, they can be meaningful to a customer, they can be meaningful to the well-being of a program. And meaningful to individuals. I think meaningful learning is learning that's going to benefit the learner through growth and it becomes part of their identity. The identity of being eternally curious is something that came from beneficial learning. It wasn't intentional. And I think that through learning we are able to invent the future, but that's not just the future that we interact with, but it's ourselves as well. And and so we are probably more than anything else a product of the things that we've learned that we've incorporated into our identity. For me, that's the definition of meaningful learning.

Mike Courian: I love that. And I was also thinking about how when you're in a physical space or even a digital space with particular individuals, I find when I have aha moments that somehow those people are embedded in it. They're an integral part. They almost then become these cues and reminders for me, just seeing their face can trigger, oh yeah. And it creates this momentum where then they become these beacons that spur that idea on. And so if people are feeling hesitation on how do I resist the reward that comes from performance and productivity and intentionally invest in growth.

Mike Courian: Me, if that is true what I described, there's kind of a compounding interest when you start investing in growth.

Dave Stevens: Yeah, I think you said it just perfectly right. It's difficult to predict where it shows and I do love the concept of compounding interest that it does grow. And

Mike Courian: Growth grows.

Dave Stevens: Growth grows. Okay, let's trademark that. That's a good one. That's a very good one. Looking at AI as an opportunity to be able to ask those reflective questions, I think that that is one way that you can do your own learning. Look to cultivate that curiosity. Ask a surprising question. Challenge AI. And then it probably is in some manner sharing, creating community with your colleagues, where individuals learn, but we're really a community learning. I think this podcast is a wonderful example of that.

Mike Courian: I hope so. That's my goal. As you were describing that, I had this one kind of remaining thought of, how do I help people listening understand what we mean by struggle is an integral part of learning? But I think you were actually pretty much describing it there because we've phrased it as curiosity and exploring and reflecting. But actually for others, that might feel like the struggle because their enjoyment in the work process is actually the tenacity and it's finishing it, it's getting it done. Share about that a little bit.

Dave Stevens: We talked a little bit about confidence earlier and I think in hindsight it's easy to attribute confidence to a lot of things that we do, but at the time, as you said, at the time it was, there was a lot of anxiety. When I was playing poker, I I I I had ulcers and it wasn't because I understood everything. It wasn't because I was having a great time all the time. But, you know, this is 30 years ago and I can now tell the story about it and those ulcers don't appear, but they existed.

There is struggle and it's through struggle that we have breakthroughs. We're letting ideas or concepts percolate. We mix them in.

Dave Stevens: transforms and it and it does. I guess I would say trust the process. Now that AI's here, bring AI into that process.

Mike Courian: I love that. That's actually one of my favorite phrases is trust the process because it's not instinctual for me. I often want to understand the process so I can control the process and then I'll go through it. So, I'm glad you said that because I just think that word really matters. Maybe the summation that I'm hearing for those that feel like curiosity is not their natural instinct, maybe if you can hear Dave and I, say, trust the process, just ask the first question, and just and just try it. And then the next time, ask the first question again, and maybe after 15 or 100 times, you might ask a second question.

And I guess we're saying trust that process.

Dave Stevens: Well said, Mike. Absolutely.

Mike Courian: Now, Dave, you are gaining wisdom in holding the future in sight and yet thinking about what changes we can make today that can really help set the compass for the next six months or next year. Do you have any thoughts for senior leaders on what you would say keep this front of mind or or make sure you're prioritizing this as you navigate things? What would you say to them?

Dave Stevens: It's always about people. One. Uh two, with the AI in particular, the easy, fast wins are going to all be around performance learning. And great, you know, take advantage, but be careful of resources there. And I would just say that the long-term sustainability is going to be in those transformative learnings that have to continue. Whether it is professional development or this the power skills, soft skills. That's where your opportunity for innovation comes from to be able to find an opportunity to incorporate AI into those transformative learnings.

The performance ones are going to be easy and they're needed by the business.

Dave Stevens: But look for the larger transformative ones. It's not a one-to-one. I don't know what the ratio is for your organization. But that's where you're going to make lasting change.

Mike Courian: Great. I love that. Now, to land this wonderful plane we've been on, if you reflect on all that we've talked about, what's standing out for you? Has anything been solidified or really primed for you in your mind?

Dave Stevens: Um, I think it's connected again. I think it's connected.

Through this learning lens, we've done a pretty good job of understanding outcomes. We've done a pretty good, well, reasonably good job of figuring out how to get from A to B. But I do think that there's a huge opportunity for us to understand where A is. I think we know where B is. It's a behavior change type of thing that everyone talks about. Whether we do it well or not is another question, but we sort of conceptually understand it. But A, where people are coming into this is I think the huge opportunity that we have as as L&D professionals. People come into learning with different mindsets. People come into learning with different expectations, with different experiences, whatever it is that was occurring to them earlier, not just in the day, but maybe earlier in their lives. We talk about meeting people where they are, but it's abstract and it's always been too challenging for us to be able to understand where people really are. I think compliance training is one of those areas. We know it's important, but it's very difficult to engage people. But if we understood their mindsets coming into it, I think that we could then navigate a path from A to B, it'd be much, much, much more successful.

Um, that's one of the hopes that I really do have for AI, is that AI as we're working with AI, um, AI is working with us to understand a little bit more about us and it's different for everyone and it's take into my my idiosyncrasies and my experiences and the fact that I'm curious as you are, and it will build that into the cake mixture. So the learning that comes out of that will be likely more effective. And I think that understanding where A is is the challenge that we've never fully addressed. But I think that now that is the opportunity. If we understand that, we can do performative training and we can also do this transformative training as well. We can create opportunities for people to grow.

Mike Courian: Well, Dave, pure delight speaking with you.

Dave Stevens: Absolutely. No, absolutely. I feel exactly the same way. Thank you. Thank you for the invite. Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks so much for being with us.

We really want this to become a two-way conversation, so we would love for you to send in any questions or comments that this episode has prompted. You can do that by emailing shapeshifters@makeshapes.com, or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop it into the comment section. We'll be incorporating these questions and comments into future episodes.

Remember, if you want to stay up to date with the podcast, go to the Shapeshifters website, link in the description, and sign up to our community. I'm grateful for all of you. This is a real joy for me to get to do this. So, thank you for your support.

Until next time, I'm Mike Courian, and this is Shapeshifters.

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