Speed & Accelerated Learning for Today‘s Businesses

Dheeraj Prasad: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I'm your host Dheeraj Prasad. And I have Dr. Raman, who is a global authority on speed and accelerated learning. He's also a performance scientist and has done some incredible work across two doctorate degrees that he has and written over 20 management books. But the most recent one is called speed matters. And that is the focus of our conversation today with Dr. Raman, who is our guest today on the show. Welcome, Raman. And looking forward to the conversation with you today.

Dr. Raman: Dheeraj, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be on your show. Appreciate it.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. So tell us more about speed matters. And you know, what Inspire to think about this problem of accelerated learning that is needed now for the businesses to talk a little bit more about what time to proficiency means the area which you have really worked on.

Dr. Raman: Thank you, Dheeraj. So let me kind of set the ground crest that in today's environment, you have seen I have seen that during pandemics particularly, speed is very important. We have seen our employees struggling with even learning the basic skills because, for so many years, they have been using the skill before working. But during a pandemic, what happened is that the situations got turned around so quickly. And but they couldn't catch up with speed. What as leaders, we expect them to learn that those skills at a faster speed. But the learning is only one part of this one. What we expected as leaders is for them to generate outcomes, the outcome associated with their job roles. So learning part one side, but getting the mastery in producing the outcome is another part. So what really we wanted them is not just only to learn, but to become proficient, and we wanted them to become proficient faster. But here's the problem. Leaders and managers have not been trained on how to speed up Learning and Performance to that level. Because speed was probably needed for launching the product launching the services speed, the context of speed earlier before this pandemic was different. But there is a universal, you know, the definition of speed. We are not talking about a mad rush. We are not talking about putting aggressive timelines on the project and delivery crest. What we are saying is that how can we build our employees faster to a stage where their performance is consistent, where they can perform reliably, where we can depend upon them, where their performance is repeatable, irrespective of the customer, and where they are independently productive. They don't need any supervision. And they produce at least to the minimum standards, but not one time he to wonder. They produce it consistently over a fairly long period of time. That kind of performance is what we expect for most of our employees. But to bring our employees to that stage, it takes much, much longer time. So my own experience in a corporate setting has been that our own employees were taking about two to three years to become proficient. Now, it might be a very alarming number. But the reason why it sounds alarming is leaders do not measure time to proficiency. And it is a very powerful matrix. Once we start measuring will know that how slow or how fast we are going compared to our market. So that was my trigger point when I realized that in our own setting, the time to proficiency is so fast. How about the rest of the world? What about the best organization in the world? So that's when I started going on with the research. I approached the 70 best-in-class organizations. And I asked them, what's your time to proficiency? And how do you speed up time to proficiency in your settings? And the numbers that came about in terms of time to proficiency were seriously mind-blowing. Some of those numbers were unbelievable. For example, in a research and development setting, the time to proficiency was about three years in today's technology-savvy contact technology, which is cutting-edge technology. And we are already facing a shortage of semiconductor chips all over the world. So imagine that the engineer is having an induction. They need the fastest possible time to proficiency and they still need two to three years. So it's a massive time in terms of training, investment, cost, opportunity costs lost and other avenues that we lose typically during that time because part of this one is if your employees are not proficient, you're not going to get a good customer satisfaction either. They're gonna make mistakes. You’re going to have some liability issues. So all that collectively together is a strong business case that propelled me to write this book, ‘Speed Matters.’

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. And it's so pertinent, Raman, because you know, this is a race against time to obsolescence. Because things are changing. So fast technology is changing so fast that this becomes so imperative for business leaders to think about crunching the time. And, and making people more efficient in terms of learning and applying those new skills in the real environment, so talking really about activity-based learning, which is more hinged on practice. And I do see on your website as well, the image of an athlete, so talk more about how to practice, specifically in the sporting world, is synonymous to the business situation, in terms of really improving the speed, and through the art of practice.

Dr. Raman: Good question Dheeraj, certainly, practice is a very key component, and historically a CAD wriggly scholar in the scholarly literature. For about three to four decades, there has been lots of lots of research on practice. So the idea was, what kind of practices allows people to gain mastery. And the research basically started with lots of different characteristics of practice. And one famous one is deliberate practice. That means you actually have a very a lot of discipline. You do it regularly. You do it in a fairly long amount of time. And then, you also have a coach who gives you the milestone aggressively so that you can keep progressing further. But here is the little problem with that kind of practice. And I'm going to relate it back to the business world. If you see in the business world, our managers, leaders, even professionals, employees, we do not work on the same task over and over again, our situation circumstances, business challenges customers, those keep changing the practice, which historically has been done in Academy side, those have been on representative task, predictable task, or a task, which you repeat very frequently, and you get exposed. So, for practice to be very effective, you got to have exposure to that task. As often as possible, if you don't get the opportunity to practice a given task or an activity for a longer period of time, your time to mastery is going to be longer. Now in a business setting, the problem, as I stated is, things are so dynamic. So it's very difficult to have a task, which is similar or to practice on the same set of tasks for a longer period of time. By the time you become comfortable, there is a good possibility business situation or change or job role is changed your conure change, you might be given a different role assignment. So a long period of practice is typically not possible in a business setting. In such a business setting, when we talk about employees proficiency, we got a need to have a different kind of practice, a different kind of ecosystem for practice. I hope I'd kind of differentiated you that one. So from here on, where if you want to talk about business setting, we can talk about that one?

Dheeraj Prasad: Yeah, absolutely. So you know, there are specific business contexts that are related to a new set of customer expectations and requirements that are coming up, right? There are new products being released as an example. Right. So the business context challenges that I hear from leaders primarily are about very quickly adapting to some of these changes that are coming. You know, the pandemic primarily has also accelerated a lot of that change in customer needs have now become different. And things related to the softer side of the business become a little more critical. Raman is about practicing empathy as an example in the digital world, specifically, which relates to customer interactions. So how does one practice empathy, as an example, as a key skillset in the digital format of engagement with customers, is one of the business challenges that I hear all the while, you know, from leaders today?

Dr. Raman: Yeah, I think that's a very critical challenge because we are now living in a world where hard skills and soft skills have meshed together. And it has it's not possible to even differentiate that which one is which. Historically most of the focus has been on technical skills, product skills, or the skills that we call hard skills. But on this side of the business, soft skills have become much more important. Because when we make a sale, for example, to a customer, the customer is not just interested in the product. Of course, the product is a primary thing, but they are looking at the entire experience that how they are educated about the need, how they the person come across, coming with an empathy that, Okay, I understand your business concern, I understand your challenges, and I'm here to help you. And part of that help is obviously I'm gonna be able to make a sale, but the primary purpose is I'm going to help you solve your challenge. So those kinds of negotiation skills, what we call soft skills, and empathy and connection with the customer. That is now part and parcel of the job. And that is a very, very important factor. Because historically, when we talked about mastery, mastery was always on the heart skill. But now we're talking about something different. So proficiency is the term that defines this whole concept. What we're saying is that, are you able to produce the outcome? And we are talking about integration skills now? Are you able to integrate your product knowledge? Are you able to integrate the information you have about the market and industry? Are you able to integrate the emotion of the customer together? Are you able to understand the challenge and put everything together? And that's what we call integration skills? And finally, can you produce an outcome? Can you produce that outcome for every single customer? Can you produce it consistently over a fairly long period of time, not just what one time wonder. So from that angle, that's what the concept of proficiency is. And the reason why I emphasize this concept is, this is what we really need, as you said, empathy. We cannot separate empathy out from the entire interaction that happens around the customer. So we're going to need to make sure that you have the avenues to build hard skills, soft skills, empathy, everything, as a kind of an envelope around the job people are doing. So it's very important. So it also means that when we are training these people, when they are learning, they need to learn in the context of the job. That means the challenges have to be very, very realistic. And those realistic challenges have to be in, in a kind of ecosystem that emulates customer's expectations and that emulates the challenges they are actually going to face on the job. Historically, we always have put these guys into the classrooms. The classroom is not where reality happens. Reality happens in the field. So how do we match the training objective and the field exposure together into one? That's the key part of meeting the customer expectation from a soft skill standpoint.

Dheeraj Prasad: Got it? Absolutely. Raman, what are some of the key triggers, which make businesses start putting their first foot forward right, you know, on adopting something around time to proficiency. These are probably, you know, certain use cases, or scenarios in which, you know, this business triggers typically work much better. So, talk a little more about what is that pressing need for business leaders right now in certain scenarios, which makes them start moving forward in this direction?

Dr. Raman: Right. I think there are lots more scenarios. Some are not really that obvious but are there, so let me kind of start with the two or three examples so that we get a lot of contexts. I think, number one, let's say that sales. So in sales, it is very obvious, because sales is a number-driven job, you have a quota that you need to, you know, deliver every month. And as I said, you need to consistently deliver it above the threshold lines, and you shouldn't fall behind. Because if you fall behind that, that essentially gives an indication you are not consistent yet. So since these were number-driven, it's very easy to understand that when is the time when any salesperson has reached that level. And then, we can aggregate that number in a job role. We can aggregate or roll it up to department level or organization level. So if we start measuring time to proficiency of salespeople, which is very simple, from the day they started the sales role to the day they have started delivering that consistent quota month over month, and it's pretty easy because everything is number driven. There is a whole lot of data analytics available. There are timestamps available. So we know that When was the first time they delivered the agreed quota. And then we also know, when was the time they fell down from that threshold. And when was the time they were consistent for three months, six months, one year? So once we define what is proficiency in that job role, we can compute the time. So we know that how soon we are bringing them up to speed. Now, that time translates to your opportunity cost. During that time, if it is six months, that will for six months, your salespersons are not productive. They are not generating revenue. Imagine that instead of six months, it was three months. Now you know that you are making money in the remaining three months, and you can deploy them and revenue-generating activities for three months is a massive barrier if you compute that how much you invest in them, not just in training, and supervising them, managers time, resource time, infrastructure time, and a whole lot of other investment you do on the employee, you will find out that it's a multi-million dollar game. So that's what's very, very important from that angle to see the time to proficiency. But typically, organizations don't measure it. Because either they don't have the technology to measure it, or they don't have a philosophy to measure it. Because what I realized in my research is organizations think they are speed savvy just by putting aggressive time targets on projects, by pushing people to deliver in a shorter amount of time. But that's a false indication of speed. The real speed or real-time to proficiency is when you actually make people productive in a shorter time. Because then they generate revenue, they do it to things the first time, right. So that was one example of sales. If let's say that, you know, we are talking about other industries like the semiconductor industry, the time to develop an innovation. And we're talking about innovation, which nobody has ever seen. So now we're talking about, you can keep experimenting on technology to hoping to find something that's going to work and that's going to sell. So now the question comes in, how do you use your previous knowledge? How do you use the minds of different experts from different walks of the industry? And how do you integrate everything together to innovate faster? And now what we're talking about is not just time to innovation, time to market. We’re talking about how soon you become the expert on that technology. So that's, that's the kind of thing. Now, if you see that the time to market over the last decade has gone down to three months, about a decade ago, it used to be about three years. So that means we expect the new engineers or new product designers to be able to deliver a new innovation roughly in about three months. Now three months is a massive time unless we measure it. We don't know are we shortening that time or not? Is the moment you shorten that time, you know that okay, your time to market is three months, you're going to need to produce a professional engineer within three months. So that's how to translate to your business outcome. I hope I have answered your question about how they can get started. They just need to start baselining and measuring and set a target of how much they want to shorten it. And my book speed to the matter has an exhaustive list of time to proficiency numbers in different kinds of job roles. Different industries are on a range of context, that gives us an idea where the time to proficiency today, our paws in different types of contexts.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely, I think these are great scenarios from and that you have called out makes a lot of sense. What is the shortest period of time by when do you think business leaders will start getting the return on the investment on a framework that users talked about?

Dr. Raman: I think it's hard to point out what's the shortest period. But what I can share is that in my research, I have seen that some of the business leaders were able to shorten time to proficiency from as big as six months down to six weeks. So that's huge when you bring time to proficiency from six months to six weeks. Now correspondingly, the return on investment for the remaining period is huge. I mean, as opposed to investing in them for six months, no, you only invest in a focused fashion for six months and remaining time they are assigned on revenue-generating activities, or the activity which is going to drive customer satisfaction, the activities which are going to save people's life activities which can make an overall impact on the society or organization in general. So it's a huge, huge kind of shrinkage but shrink how much we can shrink that time to proficiency. It's very contextual. It depends on the job role. It depends on complexity, and more importantly, how much do you really worry About time to proficiency. Do you even know the time to proficiency in your setting? If you don't know you're not gonna worry? But once you put the measurement system in play, you know how worse how slow you are compared to the market or your competitor, you can do something. But that's something that takes time to do it is a deliberate effort is a massive effort. But the return that comes as opposed to the amount of investment you're going to make is huge. I mean, in my research, one organization, the bank, they were able to shorten their time to proficiency from two years to roughly about six months. But as a result, they immediately saved about $6 million. So this is a huge investor huge. Your investment is huge in the beginning, but the return that comes into our dollars is huge. But then also, we need to be very careful here. It's not about dollars only. Interestingly, in my research, the leaders told me that money is not the driver for us to shorten the time. And so very counterintuitive, you know, because we always relate time to money, we say, you know, when we are short on the money, we are gonna be able to save money on our or we will be able to earn money. But what they say is, it has a bigger impact, a bigger impact in a sense. Let me give one example, retention. The talent you hire is more important than any money you have. That’s the biggest resource in the company. So retention, what the way retention works is this, the engagement that works is people come from their home, with the intention of doing a good job. But when their time to the provision is so long, they don't feel a sense of contribution. They don't feel that they are actually getting the achievement sense of achievement. They don't go home happy thinking that they actually achieved something today. So when you shorten time to proficiency, the time to sense of achievement also gets shorter, and now they feel more contributing to the organization, they feel that I am in a fulfilling career, they get a better engagement with a job, and retention shoots up. In my research, I saw retention doubled up almost. So now you see if you can keep your biggest talent in your company for longer and can engage them. You cannot equate the money with that. That is the ROI in a different aspect. That's what actually generates a whole lot of different interest from leaders. It's not about money. It's about building the organization to give it a competitive edge and your resources, your human resources, are your competitive edge.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely, very well said. It has both financial and non-financial benefits. And, you know, it has huge value in terms of you know how it, it helps organizations to save their the dollars and also helps in retention of the top talent as well. Raman, this has been excellent. Thanks for sharing your insights. If our viewers would like to know more as to how they reach out to you what's the best way that they can do so.

Dr. Raman: They can go to my website, http://ramankattri.com. And that website, I have lots of research reports, article-level learning resources. I am actually making that website as a learning portal to educate leaders and professionals about this concept of speed, and in particular, about time to proficiency. So that's the best way to reach out but otherwise, if they want to connect with me on social media, on most of the platforms, my handle is Dr. Raman K. Attri is a Dr. Raman K Attri, and they can find me with that name on any of the social media channels.

Dheeraj Prasad: Excellent. And, by the way, look out for Raman’s book speed matters, and I'm sure you're gonna have a lot of his deep research that he has done in the area of performance science and accelerated learning which will be a great benefit to businesses today worldwide. Thank you so much once again, Raman, for your time today. It was fantastic talking to you today.

Dr. Raman: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much, Dheeraj and I appreciate it. Thank you so much.