Tiny Lessons Shift Organizational Cultures | Ryan Laverty
Disclaimer:
The content shared is to highlight the passion and wonder of our guests. It is not professional advice. Please read our evidence-based research to help you develop your unique understanding.
💕 Story Overview
MAGICademy S3E5, Ryan Laverty, co-founder of Arist, discusses the potentially transformative impact of micro-learning on organizational behavior change and culture shifts. He also highlights the importance of nurturing curiosity and childlike wonder in the process of skill development.
Story Takeaways
Strategically designed microlearning has the potential to activate curiosity in skill development. One example is to create open-ended "odd" questions. Appropriately unusual questions capture attention, stimulate interest, and encourage critical thinking by prompting learners to make connections with prior knowledge to integrate the new. (need more research)
Strategically designed microlearning has the potential to accelerate skill acquisition by targeting specific practices and reinforcing those practices through spaced repetition. When done well, it may empower organizations to upskill rapidly in response to market changes.
Microlearning in the flow of work can be a powerful tool to generate subtle culture change. For example, if we need to raise certain awareness of a hidden challenge, creating a well-designed micro module has the potential to engage learners daily. Such frequent contact leverages spaced repetition to keep memories fresh and facilitate desired mindsets & behaviors and potentially culture shifts.
Ryan’s MAGIC: being a perpetual student and enjoying the process.
#FlowOfWork, #MicroLearning, #SkillDevelopment, #CultureShift, #LeadershipTraining, #BehaviorChange,#Curiosity, #ChildlikeWonder
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00:00 Introduction to Ryan Laverty and Arist
01:34 The Genesis of Arist and the Mission
05:38 The Power of Micro-Learning: Rapid Skill Development
11:03 Measuring Impact: Courses Taken and Learner Outcomes
13:29 Creating Sustainable Culture Change through Micro-Learning
18:49 Micro-learning enhances the practice of skills in the flow of work
23:05 Embedding Learning into the Flow of Work
26:53 Curiosity and Childlike Wonder in Learning
31:34 Interesting resources to explore on micro-learning
37:40 Entrepreneurship and the Perpetual Student Mindset
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Bridging Access to Learning: https://youtube.com/shorts/9z1o8hvV49w
Text messaging is a powerful way to deliver microlearning: https://youtu.be/fPFxRYNdGbg
Speed to Skill with Micro-Learning: https://youtu.be/MlwNVmBRWdQ
Micro-Learning enforces practice training: https://youtube.com/shorts/JfzC1pUEGEg
Micro-Learning is non-intrusive: https://youtu.be/0BUQ6DB_j7Y
The challenges of the massive adoption of XR:
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Parkman-Colbert, K. T. (2023). Nurses’ Perception of Instructional Design Elements of Microlearning for Professional Development Training (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University).
Iaquinta, R. (2024). Scrolling Time and Micro Learning Experimental Environments. In Optimizing Education Through Micro-Lessons: Engaging and Adaptive Learning Strategies (pp. 141-156). IGI Global.
SARIZEYBEK, Y. (2024). A NARRATIVE STUDY ON MICROLEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE: IMPLEMENTING A NEWLY DESIGNED MICROLEARNING BASED ORIENTATION COURSE IN CORPORATE TRAINING (Master's thesis, Middle East Technical University).
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Ryan Laverty is the Co-Founder and President of Arist. Named a must-have by CLO magazine, Arist's innovative learning platform is used by many of the world’s largest organizations to train employees where they spend their time: all over SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, and MS Teams. Arist is one of the fastest-growing learning companies, backed by leading investors and having raised over $20m.
Before Arist, Ryan ran a public speaking coaching company where he found a love of all things learning design and employee training, authoring the original white paper on text-message-based learning while in his senior year of college. Ryan now spends his time speaking with talent development leaders about how they can shift the way their organizations learn. -
Jiani (00:00)
Welcome to MAGICademy podcast. Today with us is Ryan, and he is the co -founder of Arist a micro learning culture shift, adaptive platform for human resource worldwide, a proud graduate from Y Combinator. great to have you, Ryan, with us today.
Ryan Laverty (00:19)
Awesome, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Jiani (00:22)
So for our audience, we're probably very curious, like you have this great and amazing achievement and interesting perspectives on learning and development. Can you give us a brief, unique, interesting introduction of yourself in 30 seconds?
Ryan Laverty (00:45)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think introduction of myself, I would say I'm just someone who's always been obsessed with learning. And so I, the short version is that I used to be a really, really shy kid and I tried my hand at public speaking. And I was like, if I can force myself to learn how to do this, I can force myself to learn how to do anything and spend years and years learning how to do that. And it made me much more confident. It made me much more happy. And it just taught me that, hey, learning a skill.
Even if it's just something you sit in your bedroom and practice and learn on your own, can completely change someone's life, right? And so that was really motivating to me. And we'll get into heiress more intentionally soon, but that was a lot of the genesis of founding heiress and why I'm really obsessed with the idea of learning today, because I've just seen how powerful it is and the impact it can have on someone's life, even just to learn one new thing.
Jiani (01:34)
This is amazing. And yeah, you tapped into the concept of Arist. And when I first...
kind of came across this name, like artist, Arist. Like it's interesting whenever I see this name, it's like very creative imagery come to my mind and, and things are so interesting. And I, when I first talked with you and Michael, the background story of it is like, oh, it's actually coming from like the communication, uh, enablement technologies in the battlefield. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting. Can you share with us like how.
why ourist and how do you come up with this name and what's your mission and vision?
Ryan Laverty (02:16)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we, so Aorist is short for Aristotle. One of our original partners was a philosophy major. And so that was just something, it was a five minute discussion and we really liked it. And companies that start with A are first on websites and listings and things, and actually proven to have higher chance of success very slightly. And so we just liked it. It was simple and we could get the domain. But I think for us, Aristotle was known to be the...
one of the best tutors to have ever lived. You know, we tutored Alexander the Great and others. And so that was something that was really, really intentional for us. In terms of the founding of Ares, so we really started with a lot of work in the nonprofit space. And so one of my co -founders had spent a lot of time doing work with students in the Imani War Zone. I had done a trip to Tanzania and spent a few weeks with a class of students there teaching entrepreneurship.
Our third co -founder, she had done a lot of work on the Grand Ronde Reservation teaching Native American populations in Oregon. And so we were all really obsessed with nonprofits and this whole idea of bridging access to education. And so my now co -founders and I became friends in college on that premise and sort of put our heads together trying to figure out how can we get education to people who don't have access to the internet? At the time, what we figured out is, well, we want to get more education to people. Let's send them videos. Let's send them.
different stuff online. And we found that about, I think it's about 30 % now of the world has the internet broadband to access a video. But about like 85 to 90 % is able to receive an SMS or WhatsApp message. And so we said, oh, well, that's really interesting if we can design a model that is really powerful for delivering some type of meaningful education and getting someone to build a skill, not just quick tips, not just gimmicks, but something actually where you can have foundational content over time, reinforced.
and just well delivered to people over those formats, then there's potentially billions of people that you could create access to education for that didn't have it before in the form of e -learning, right? And so we put our heads together, we found some texting software online and we tested a bunch of different things for how to really make that happen. And we found a few interesting things. The first was that people loved learning via methods like SMS and WhatsApp. And the second was that we actually saw...
as many folks using it here in the United States who had access to the internet as folks who didn't. A lot of folks who were using it were everyone from software developers at Facebook to truck drivers at Amazon to aid workers from the Red Cross all over Africa and parts of Asia, journalists in war zones. We had women who were farmers on PepsiCo's supply chain in India. So just these really, really different and diverse populations. And what was really fascinating was that they were all using
the tool in pretty much the same way. And so originally we thought of this as a nonprofit, but we said, Hey, we actually think the, the scale and the impact we can have will be far, far greater. Um, if we serve both audiences, if we build, uh, you know, employee training and learning and engagement software for a lot of fortune 500, and then use that to subsidize a lot of work that we're doing training folks like NGOs are working with partners like the red cross. Um, so today our mission is still to create really effective, uh, bite -sized learning into bridge access to education.
And the way we do that is through a number of different kinds of partners and products.
Jiani (05:38)
This is amazing. And I like how everything starts with this very empowering will of helping people that has limited access to internet or have have limited access to high quality learning content and through the micro dosage of text messaging and just short form of information. That's very, that's very empowering. Just like one little thing every day over a period of a
five days or so, a lot of things can change. That's amazing. And you've mentioned about like, it's not just smaller pieces and there's a lot of research that's out there and showcasing how when we break down a complex information into smaller pieces, the brain is able to process it better, memorizing it better and helped us to release our cognitive overload and help us to digest better.
But you raised a very interesting, actually a more empowering perspective, which is the speed to skill. And can you share with us of how the methodology of micro learning can potentially expedite skill development in a larger cohort?
Ryan Laverty (06:57)
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I'll back up a little bit. I think that speed to learning is a really interesting competitive advantage that most businesses don't think about. If you think about, if I were to ask who's the market leader in operations, you might say Amazon or in design, you might say Apple, right? But there's no, if I were to say what company is a market leader in learning, folks might think about it or say, hey, they have a great program here or there, but you're never going to go into a public company's earnings report for that quarter and see that.
they were able to reskill half the workforce being one of the top reasons, right? And I think the reason for that is because we just don't really have the tools, the technology, the methodology, the framework to rapidly have people engage with learning at scale. If you think about the way that most learning is done today, it's sort of done like, it's like comparing waterfall technology development of the nineties to agile development today, which basically means, hey, at the start of the year, we're going to make a big list of stuff we need to create.
We're going to spend weeks to months creating each one of those things, and then we're going to roll them out on a very predefined calendar. We're living in a world now where a new AI tool or a new skill or something like that comes out every few weeks or months. And so that model doesn't really work anymore. If we still did software development like that, then technology would be a decade behind where it is today, but we still do learning development like that. And so for us, what we think micro learning, but more than just micro learning, the concept of meeting people where they are on the tools they already use.
being the most important part of that, right, is so fundamental is because there's a few blockers to that happening really fast right now. One is that it takes these teams, it takes on average 40 hours to create one hour of e -learning content. And so the content is really rich media, it's heavy, it's really in -depth, it's very onerous. The second is on the delivery side of that. And so less, you know, we're seeing 10, 15, maybe 20 % completion rates. And it's no wonder these are...
you know, 50 plus hour engagements, they take seven or eight clicks for someone to get to it, right? And so there's this huge task for people to go do that. And so it takes people a long time to build it. It takes, there's a very low uptake to people creating it. And then if people do actually go through that and engage and start the course, the chance that they'll finish it is very low as well. Right. And so we think the reason that, you know, this new method is so powerful is for a few reasons. One is using AI to build a lot of that.
content and making the content really short form, right? And so you can build full coursework in hours or days, not weeks, right? Making that real time editable. So, hey, something changes, a new skill comes out, you can change that instantly. And then the second is taking advantage, this is the biggest one, taking advantage of a existing behavior and an already queued into system that people use every day. And so what I mean by that is I already text people every day. I already use as MS Teams, Microsoft Teams every day.
And so if I were to distribute learning that way, the benefit to that is that you're going to go from first need, AI created, pushed through Microsoft Teams, someone actually receiving that learning, engaging with it. If you have a system that's asking me scenarios and nudging me to respond and handling all of that, then I can actually go from initial need by the company to a thousand people knowing or learning or practicing something within a matter of hours or days or a week or two, right? Versus before.
It might take me six months by the time I build a program, need to launch a marketing campaign, need to get uptick, need to relaunch a marketing campaign, need to go measure efficacy and all of that third piece of it of how do people do, what kind of analytics are we seeing, right? That can all happen in real time when we have high engagement and instant engagement through a system like Teams. So all of that is a roundabout way to say that what that really means is when you apply that to a pharmaceutical company trying to roll out a new drug faster, right? Or you apply that to.
a new sales methodology or a new AI tool or a new, during COVID, we saw this a lot with new health standards. Hey, we need 10 ,000 people in refugee camp to know that they need to wear a mask, right? You suddenly get the widespread adoption of any new concept or get people to just take a lesson, you know, a hundred times faster. And that has huge impacts on the company at large.
Jiani (11:03)
Yeah, that's very curious. So what's the current impact of our risk so far? Because you shared with us that you've kind of partnering up with different organizations. So how do you currently measure impact and what's the impact so far across industry?
Ryan Laverty (11:24)
Yeah, so our most simple metric for impact is just courses taken and number of people taking courses. And so at this point, we've had over, I believe it's about 2 million people take Aorist courses and the average person is taking, the median number is about two courses, I think. The average is like 2 .3 or 2 .4. And so the average, but I mean, we've got some users who've taken 50 courses, et cetera.
And so, I mean, at this point, we've deployed millions and millions of courses. Often how we're really looking at impact is actually on a customer -by -customer basis because of how varied the use cases are, right? So one good example is we did a program with EY. I can mention that because it's public now, but they essentially have these large entrepreneurship initiatives where they're trying to teach kids all over the world about entrepreneurship. And so they launched, their goal is to impact a million lives with entrepreneurship by 2030.
And so they launched 2000 and thousands of people, all these courses on entrepreneurship, on design thinking. And then they were looking at how many folks completed a course, how many made it through, how many responded with a really valuable scenario. And so for us, you know, we can give them the numbers of here's who took it and here's who did this or that. But the most valuable thing is us actually giving them at the end of report of, Hey, when we ask these questions throughout, when we surveyed people throughout, here's the level of confidence in someone's ability.
to be an entrepreneur in their community. Okay, for young girls in South America, it went up 25 % for these 20 ,000 girls, right? That, I think, is, when we get really specific with it, is really impactful. And so in terms of learner outcomes, we're often looking at things like completion, answer accuracy, sure, but really responses to specific course scenarios. If it's sales, describe to me how you would do this thing, say I'm learning to be a new manager, describe this new goal that you set.
if it is, you know, and then more quantitatively something like a confidence lift where because it's a space medium, we can collect space data. It's, hey, on day one, day five, day 10, how confident were you in your ability to do X, Y, or Z? That usually gives us a really good indicator as well.
Jiani (13:29)
That's amazing. And as you're kind of exploring the space of impact and helping people to learn entrepreneurship and develop management skills, I know that when you are measuring the impact, you also mentioned like a potential culture shift. So whenever people acquire a new skill, their...
we were able to see the visualization of learning and change in our brain, like new neural networks are being formed and new patterns are being connected. And obviously people may change, right? It's kind of like an alchemy process when we're learning something through this micro learning approach. Will that potentially shift culture? Say we were able to...
change or coach a massive amount of people in a fairly short period of time? Will culture change? Is this a sustainable change? And yeah, so curious on this part.
Ryan Laverty (14:37)
Yeah, I think micro learning absolutely has a huge ability to shift culture. At the end of the day, what we're really talking about is more behavior change than learning, right? These types of courses are really good for things where simple concepts while practiced is what equals mastery, right? If you think about how to get someone to be a better manager, a better leader, a better salesperson, follow certain guidelines or standards in a certain way, right? They're learning things, but...
different than in an academic sense where it's just knowing a ton of information, right? You really want to change their behavior at scale. I think it can't be, I think with changing any company culture, it can't be the only component. You obviously need leadership buy -in, you need role models, right? Those sorts of things. But again, even those folks who you need to role model, you can, if you can change their behavior as well, then you can impact some really, really effective change. A good example here where I've seen this work well, so we had done work with a large pharmaceutical company and they,
had this big push to have everyone become more data driven. And they said, we want everyone in the company to know these metrics, to speak with data more, to be able to do these things. And so they just, through Microsoft Teams for about six months, they just had these constant, these courses going out, this constant pulse on first introducing, here's what a net promoter score is, here's what KPIs are, here's how we set goals here, right? And then it would go into a lot more tactical things like...
Okay, let's have have one conversation with your leader this week about data. Okay embed data into the report You're gonna give your manager this week. Then they started setting standards. Okay, let's have no presentation can be shown to the CEO unless it has These four metrics in it, right? And this is a this is a massive hundred thousand person company, right? And so they would start to do all of that and then they started to get comments You know a few even weeks in especially months and from folks who are in the C suite even the CEO themselves said hey, I
It seems like we're becoming a lot more oriented around data. It seems like we're using data a lot more in everyday conversation. I'm hearing data be used a lot more. At the end of the day, it becomes, again, a token of behavior change because if you take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people and all at once you say, hey, we're going to focus on being more data driven, that's backed by our leadership. Here's how we're going to do it. And then we're going to slowly over the next few weeks teach you.
the fundamentals of what it means to be data driven and then give you practices of how you can apply that in your job. It's hard to picture how the culture wouldn't at least shift on some degree, right? Because you've got all these people who are getting up every day and you were thinking about it. And I think that that becomes a much more powerful lever for culture than if we set it at a company offsite or we had a CEO all hands and then everyone back to their day job, right? I think that implementation of the new practice in someone's day job is really what creates that change more than.
just the introduction of information or however well marketed that change might be, which is usually how those things are done right now.
Jiani (17:27)
Yeah, because that's that repart reminds me of the the forgetting curve because a lot of times when we are doing something Initiative that once and done and then initially everybody's like all hands on deck and so super super excited super super buying like that's fantastic and then a few weeks later when the forgetting curve kicks in then things start to fall apart and by the end of a few few months it's not like just maybe 10 has been
returned and all the hives are being washed away. So I like how this approach is kind of sustaining and catching and refreshing the information before it goes to waste. This is amazing. And another quick question here is that you talked about some examples I've used in your stories are like leadership training, sales enablement,
pharmacies. I think pharmacies a lot of like, you know, maybe cure practices or to learn about new medicine that's going on the market and helping the folks to understand. To me, it feels like a lot of them are very information driven. Do you think the power of micro learning in your specific space is
strongest when it's creating awareness, when it's creating information delivery, initiative delivery. If, for example, a doctor wants to upskill his ability to operate or his ability to understand immunologies and the newest research on that space, do you think we can also potentially leverage that to develop more?
complicated, high -risk skills and knowledge, or you would most likely to position them in the kind of, I would say basic information or fast information space. How would you kind of see this technology being further enhanced or developed or used?
Ryan Laverty (19:38)
Yeah.
I think it's a great question. Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's elements of both, right? And so back to the heuristic I used before of micro learning is great for simple concepts plus well practiced equals mastery. To your question about awareness, I think that enforcing practice would be my answer in terms of what micro learning is most effective at. So for the first one, simple concepts plus well practiced equals mastery.
it sales enablement manager training, right? You can, if you go through any management training or any sales training, people will give you the same, I've been through dozens of them. Uh, people give you the same methodologies, different frameworks, different practices, but all called the same thing. It's the saleswoman or person who has, you know, 20 years of experience and has done these things that can say, okay, I, I know that I'm really good at this. Right. And I've tried, you can tell me about the challenger methodology all day, but I've taken a hundred calls and have assessed.
how I'm using that methodology through those, right? And so I think micro learning is really effective for that. To your point about more complex things, right? We probably, I don't think micro learning is the most conducive way to learn how to fly a plane or operate on a patient, right? Cause you do need a real depth of knowledge. And I think that probably needs a more of an in -depth immersion to it. However, I think that we've seen a lot of interesting applications of either reinforcement of those types of concepts or.
reinforcing specialist knowledge. And so we had done a study with the University of Washington years ago where they took a thousand OB -GYN interns and they were studying for the annual CREOG exam, which is a complex medical exam. And they had, and again, this wasn't teaching them all the brand new concepts, but it was teaching some new concepts. It was reinforcing a lot of concepts and they had half of that group. So 500 of them learned through the traditional methods and the materials online. And they had the other half learned through, through ARIUS courses, through micro learning.
And they found a 19 % higher exam score for the folks who took the ARIES course than the folks who did not, and who took the traditional methods they had been using previously. Right. And so that's something we think about. I think it's more than just memory and reinforcement in that it's, Hey, this is something really complex. It's something that is quite medical. This was a, you know, an in -depth academic study that was done by a credit university with a massive sample size. And what they came out of it saying is.
Yeah, it seems like people actually understand these concepts at a greater depth. They can recall information better, sure, but a lot of this exam is not just, you know, multiple choice choosing this or that it actually involves more of an in -depth explanation of concepts, right? And so that's really interesting when we think about the impact even in that kind of sector, because if I would, I would make the assumption that if someone can score 20 % higher on their medical exam, they probably will be a better doctor, right? Whether it's because they remember certain concepts better, they can explain things better, or they've just.
Jiani (22:09)
Mm.
Ryan Laverty (22:26)
spent more time with long -term practice. But I think that that gives a lot of credibility to just the model more largely.
Jiani (22:34)
Mm.
I like that. And so I think how you, I like how you kind of empathized on not focused on acquiring complicated information for the first time, but more for the reinforcement. I think that's where the majority of skill development falls short is that we go through programs in an intensive period of time and now we're condensing the programs even shorter. But the ability to track their practice and track their memorization.
track their ability to apply in real world situations. That's where things fall apart. I think that's where the micro technologies, micro -link technologies can really play a big part in that. This is amazing. And when we are looking to the future,
with all these advancement of technologies like artificial intelligence and we have like a virtual reality, immersive reality, and then we have like neural links, like a microchip that you can put in your brain and download and learn as you want. How do you foresee the kind of the future of micro learning as it relates to speed culture and maybe even more dimensions of human development?
with all that technology is coming and blooming, which is good, but just curious like where, how, what will be the optimal future that you can see?
Ryan Laverty (24:02)
Yeah, I think every technology has their time and place. And I think that the benefit of micro learning is micro learning is, I would say, the most embedded in the flow of work. We'll call it non intrusive way for someone to learn something. I think the benefit of micro learning is that you can change someone's behavior on a subject without needing to change their behavior to engage with the learning in the first place. And I think that's what's really challenging is oftentimes think about even the simple version before all that new technology.
the, you know, Hey, go watch a three hour video or go come to this event, right? Right now I'm not sitting at work watching a three hour video. I'm far too busy. Um, and so you have, you would have to change my behavior in order to get me to change my behavior, right? You'd have to do it twice and kind of perform two miracles. And that just, what we've seen is that that doesn't really work. Um, I think in regards to new technologies, you know, just to go one by one through a few of those with something like virtual reality, I think it's, um, it's quite onerous to set up at least at scale.
I think it does work really well, but for very, very specific, highly technical, highly visual subjects, you know, and so I've seen a lot of great, uh, vert - and have tried myself for virtual reality headsets for, uh, someone learning to be a surgeon, learning to be a pilot, um, learning to, I saw a great case study with, um, you know, trained conductors in, uh, in parts of Scandinavia, right? Learning about all the complex, um, gears and parts and mechanics is another great example. And I think that for highly specialist, complex visual.
type of scenarios that works. I don't think for kind of learning skills and mass for, you know, 100 ,000 people at once, it's viable at least in the next several years just with even, you know, we've had VR headsets. I got my first VR headset seven years ago now and even still it's, I got one of the first ones. I'm a very early adopter of technology. It was incredibly expensive. It's kind of heavy. And then I've tried the Vision Pro now, the Apple one, and still has a lot of those same drawbacks, right? Even if the technology has gotten much better.
So I think VR is helpful, but still has a long way to go before it has mass adoption for learning. I think that things like Neuralink, see, everything really fascinating. But again, if we kind of, if we rank everything in terms of level of complexity, level of intrusiveness, right? I think that something like Neuralink is obviously highly intrusive, but you can, you know, do things with incredible amount of complexity. You can learn things at a subconscious level, right? You can activate parts of your brain. That's why we're seeing all these great use cases with people who are paralyzed, right? Getting the first.
The first one, which I think is great technology. I think we're still quite a ways away from the whole idea of downloading skills to our brains. It seems more like the technology focuses on activating certain parts of the brain than adding things to it, but don't pretend to be a neuroscientist. So we'll see how all that goes. I think VR kind of sits lower on that curve. It's less intrusive, but it's still quite onerous. You can deal with some complexity. Micro -learning by intention is the polar opposite. We're going to embed into your existing...
Jiani (26:39)
I'm sorry.
Ryan Laverty (26:53)
infrastructure. And I think in a world where, let's say we wake up tomorrow and everyone's wearing headsets, micro learning will be the thing that is nudging you to go practice different exercises. Cause we can show humans all these things, but we can't force them to do things. Right. And so I think that micro learning will always be kind of the reinforcement behavior change element of wherever people are going. Cause it's just going to bring learning to where people are and where people are might shift, but that concept won't.
Jiani (27:18)
I love that. And what role do you think the childlike wonder play in this potential future? Whether coming from the trender perspective or the person who's being trend perspective or the world at large.
Ryan Laverty (27:38)
Yeah, I think when I think of Childly Wonder, I just think of this constant curiosity. You know, there's this really interesting TED Talk I watched years ago, probably 10 years ago now. And it basically got into this concept of how curious someone is. And you just see this, you know, this massive drop off, of course, in middle and high school. And then I forget the percentages, but it was something like, if you start out, if you look at 10 year olds, and you'd say that, you know, 95 % of them are incredibly curious, and you look at 30 year olds, and it's something like two to 4%, right? It's very,
Um, it's very low. I think that, uh, the benefit of these types of things is that they can, they can re -instill some of that in us, right? You know, if you think about someone going through their day job and their routine, I think that's why we've lost a lot of curiosity, right? The world's become just incredibly pragmatic, um, in some parts for good reason, but you know, it's, it's hard to sit down. If you were to say to someone, Hey, go learn something new this week. They'd say, I don't have time or there's not something I'm interested enough in learning. Right. I think that's kind of the trick to.
bringing learning to where people are is you just kind of sneak these moments of learning into things that get people really engaged. Something I'm always talking with a lot of our learning strategy partners through and a lot of our customers through is think of your learners like three rungs of a target, right? You've got your center rung of the target, people who are highly intellectually curious, they will take every sort of learning that you put out, especially for adults and in a workplace environment, that tends to be less than 10%, right? They're your great learners, you can make something hard to get to, but they're just so passionate they'll go to it. You've got your out.
outermost rung of learners, maybe 30 % of folks, they might be actively disengaged. They don't really want to take any learning. This is just a job to them. They're just completing tasks. And you can try to get them to learn things, but other than forcing compliance content to them, you're probably wasting a lot of your calories on it, right? But the vast majority of folks, the exciting part, 50%, 60%, 70 % perhaps by our estimates, sit kind of in the middle where they'll say, hey, if something is relevant enough to me and it's easy enough for me,
and it's simple enough, then I'll do it and I may be interested in it. But if those criteria aren't met, then hey, I'm going to do the thing I get paid for and I'm going to do my job. Right. And so I think when we talk about making learning that someone can get to in one click, not eight clicks, that takes five or 10 minutes a day, not an hour per week or a few hours per week. Right. What we're really doing is we're actually getting that second rung of the, of the target to behave a lot more like the center rung where we're saying, Hey, we know, you know, the average person.
Jiani (29:57)
you
Ryan Laverty (29:58)
Uh, probably is not incredibly intellectually curious about this thing. We really need them to learn, but can we give them enough aha moments in, you know, a text message or two that they get interested enough and say, huh, you know, I'm still not, I'm still not jumping all the way in with two feet, but I'm open to learning more. Right. And I think that when we look at adult learning, you know, children are just naturally more curious, right? That's what we've got to really think about is how do we, how do we buy someone in and give them enough, uh, kind of aha moments in the first minutes or in seconds of learning something.
to make them more kind of childlike in their curiosity.
Jiani (30:31)
Mm.
I like that. And I think...
People mentioned about that study actually when we were young and the curiosity just kind of the innate ability and 90 % or so of us are born curious. I think the number should be much higher than that. And then as we go through that and then maybe two to 3 % in the adulthood. And I think there could be a potential.
way for micro learning to actually activate people's childlike wonder or curiosity. Like you mentioned, it's maybe just ask them a interesting questions based on what they've learned from yesterday and get them curious. Like, oh, okay, interesting. I wanted to see. All right. Okay. Give me more. I wanted to learn more. Oh, all right. So it's kind of like a gradually nudging them to become more curious. You're actually developing that curiosity skills within them. That's interesting.
I'm very curious to dig into the research and see how potential reinforcement techniques can also enhance curiosity. That's amazing. All right. So, and as you kind of continually explore the space of micro learning and its impact on human and human transformation, are there any particular thought leaders that you follow for you as a founder to continue to learn, explore?
Ryan Laverty (32:02)
Yeah, absolutely. So a few, a few come to mind. Um, one is actually, uh, this is outside of the realm of, of micro learning, but, um, I've spent a lot of time recently, uh, digging into a lot of the research by, um, there's this, uh, the, the Tanzania trip that I did where I learned a lot about, uh, pedagogy and teaching entrepreneurship. Um, there was this professor named Candida brush and she does a lot of research about, uh, rates of entrepreneurship globally, but she also does a lot of great work.
on how different, you know, we were talking a lot about different societies and populations and how different pedagogies work well, right? So if you think about kind of the American style of learning versus, you know, other forms of learning globally, I think that's really fascinating. I think in terms of micro learning, you know, we've seen a lot of research get put out for micro learning. I think that is, you know, tends to be more thought leadership. I think to, you know, some of our customers and partners actually more than just, they're not as much researchers, they're more,
maybe a director of VP level in the company, but they do a lot of great work and a lot of their own testing, just seeing, you know, Novartis is a great example. They do a ton of great work here as a company, just testing tons of different new types of technologies, doing really good research around, you know, what kind of impact this has to learners. You know, did we, did we see meaningful, you know, changes here? Dr. Nick Burns is the one who did the, the University of Washington study that I mentioned. I think he's done a bunch of amazing work.
with this type of things as well. So I wouldn't say that there's a specific individual that I follow religiously. I'd say that it's more, I found it a whole slew of great studies. I think that the chief learning officer community more broadly does a lot of great work here too. And so, you know, I follow maybe 300 of them on LinkedIn and I see a lot of different, like Brandon Carson, you know, has a lot of great books on L &D. And then the whole books, the whole series of books around nudge theory, I find really fascinating as well. And so.
Yeah, a lot of great sort of disparate research that I've gone into. Farnham Street, obviously with their space with the forgetting curve, they do a lot of great stuff. And then we work with Harvard Business Publishing in a commercial sense, but they always are releasing a lot of really great research around learning, learning methodologies too. So if anyone's interested in this stuff, I would say just follow a lot of those thought leaders and see what types of stuff they put out because it's usually really, really fascinating.
Jiani (34:27)
That's amazing. Yeah, thank you, Ryan, for helping us to kind of curate a mini libraries or resources for us to kind of continuously learning. That's amazing. So we will shift our conversation to the magic piece of this podcast. And before that, I would like to give a quick recap of our audience of basically what we've talked about. So we've explored the founding stories of Ryan building Arist coming from his own perspective and how
our risk is impacting not only learning new skills, reinforcing learned skills, but also helping organizations across the board to speed up their skill development, reinforce behavior change, and ultimately potentially create a cultural shift gradually within an organization toward more human -centered, transformational, or transcendent development.
We also explored the future of micro learning and how micro learning can potentially evolve as technologies evolve, but still reside in the sweet spot of helping people to reinforce or remind people of important information. We also explore the role of childlike wonder and how we can potentially leverage micro learning to grow the sense of wonder and curiosity as time goes by, no matter where they are, how old they are, where they are, what they want to do.
Um, amazing. So, um, as we move into this magic piece, so Ryan, um, when you were 11 or 14, whichever age group that you want to remind, remind yourself of, what did you enjoy doing when you were that age and that time just disappeared for you?
Ryan Laverty (36:15)
Yeah, I was a very nerdy kid. I loved video games. I would spend hours and hours, I loved video games and I loved reading. And so I would spend hours and hours a day reading books about, I was really into space, particularly. I thought I wanted to be an astronomer for a while. And so I was really fascinated by that and by science. And then actually when I was 14, I needed money for a job, but I didn't have a car to drive anywhere. I was too young to kind of be hired at most places.
Jiani (36:20)
you
Ryan Laverty (36:45)
And so a friend of mine had said, oh, well, you know, I go, I walk around to, uh, to yard sales in town and I buy things and I sell them online. And I was like, oh, that's, that's cool. But like, are you allowed to do that? And he was like, what do you mean allowed to? Like you just, you know, it gave me this really interesting concept at a young age of not trading your, uh, your time for money and just, um, you know, kind of having influence on the world to do that. And so, um, we would start doing that. We ended up starting, this is when, um,
like fulfillment by Amazon businesses were kind of a new thing and Alibaba importing was a new thing. And so we started an importing business the year later and did that for a few years. And then that really got me into just entrepreneurship more broadly. Like I think that the, it made me realize that the people have had in my eyes, some of the biggest impacts on the world and have been able to make the biggest changes in the world have usually done so through some sort of a business lens. So that was really, really fascinating for me. And this whole idea of,
You didn't just have to trade time for something. You could leverage your time and you could be really smart about it. It was just really, really fun for me. And I think that as soon as I, I probably realized that around 14 or 15 and as soon as I did, I never really looked back on that front. That was really exciting. And so now, you know, that's about half my life that I've been just really into to that whole world. And yeah, that was just, it's always felt like magic to me and it still does to some extent.
Jiani (38:07)
It's amazing. Life is full of challenges, I would assume. Were there any particular challenges that helped shape who you are? Or were there many, many challenges that helped you be who you are now?
Ryan Laverty (38:21)
Yeah, I think, uh, I think many, many challenges is the more accurate reflection. I think the, the, at the beginning of the public speaking example I shared was a really good one. Like I, I kept telling myself like, okay, if I can learn how to talk in front of a bunch of people, I hate this so much, right. Then I will, um, then I, it was kind of this whole, if I can learn how to do this, I can do anything, right. Nothing can be as hard as this. And it took me years, but I went from doing it to loving it to, I had a company for a few years that was just focused on teaching people how to do that. And.
It was just, it was really, it was a lot of fun. It was really fascinating. And so now that's kind of my heuristic for when I start something really hard. It's like, oh, well, you know, it can't be as hard as that. Right. And I think that, um, it's just a good perspective to have, right. Cause it's never gonna, the most sobering, uh, quote I've ever, um, been told by someone is, oh, this is just what hard feels like. Right. I think so often we're in some kind of a struggle or especially when we're learning something new, it's so hard to feel like a student and a novice and amateur, whatever that is.
and just being told, okay, yeah, this is normal. This is what hard feels like, right? Instantly takes away a lot of these expectations that we said that we have to be great from the onset. Like people have said, oh, you know, what's like a superpower for learning new things, which I think is a funny question. And I think it's just not being afraid to be a perpetual student. Like it doesn't, it's nothing innate that nobody's special or not. It's just, are you willing to be a student for longer than other people are, right?
And if you are, then you'll probably learn most of what you need to just to battle on.
Jiani (39:50)
I see lifelong learning is the new career path for a lot of like generations that now and future. Yeah, that's amazing. And thank you for sharing that. And that reminds me of of my childhood a little bit. I was shy. I think I'm a borderline kid and I was I remember
In the classroom, teacher will say, hey, if you have any questions or I have this question, you can answer it by putting your hands on your desk. And I would snuggle my erasers down and let the eraser fall down the table so I can just like bury my head and start like searching for my erasers. So whenever the teacher wanted people to say, to volunteer and say something, they usually can't find me because I'm already finding my erasers.
But being able to kind of come out of, from that shell is really a life -changing and empowering experience. And you may still feel that, like not timid, but like the drive to reserve yourself more than you need to, but the ability to kind of share your perspective with the world is very empowering. So what do you think is your magic then?
Ryan Laverty (41:11)
Yeah, I think it's just back to that idea of being a perpetual student. I was on a panel once and someone said, someone said, what are you, what are you better at than anyone else in the world? And I was like, uh, just not having an ego about being better than anyone at something else in the world. Right? Like I think just that idea of, I genuinely like feeling like a novice at things and learning something new. Um, in one side, even in, you know, in my, in my role today, a lot of it is, is taking on a new department or skill or.
um, strategy, learning how to do it. And then after you've gotten to a place, a place to see whether you've got to hand it off to somebody else, right? Cause then you're probably wasting your time if you're just doing the same thing. Right. So, um, I think I just really enjoy that, you know, the whole idea of every day being some sort of a new challenge. And I think that if you fall in love with that process of learning new things, then you're always going to keep going. And if you fall in love with some sort of outcome or result, um, it's just a really quick way to get, to get burned out because the achievement or whatever you get at the end is never worth it.
all the in -between, like you've got to kind of love the process. So yeah, I'd say being a perpetual student and really enjoying the process is a good hack to getting far in any discipline.
Jiani (42:19)
Thank you. Thank you, Ryan, for sharing your stories with us and sharing your magic with us today. It's a...
It's a great great and honor to have you and wish you all the best for your adventures with Arist and future ventures that you will for sure build and develop. So for folks who wanted to connect with Ryan, there's a description in the show notes. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.
find, seek out Arist and maybe initiate some sort of collaborations with them. They're a fantastic group of amazing, amazing, amazing people. So, so great to have you, Ryan, and good luck.
Ryan Laverty (43:08)
Awesome. It's been a pleasure for me as well. And thanks so much for having me. And if anyone wants to connect, always happy to chat.
