Mentorship: The foundation of a healthy design industry

Alfi Oloo at UXDX Community: Visual Maps, Healthy Designing and Creating Optimized Teams. Video: https://youtu.be/6Xe6j4Zjd0w

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

From dropout to designer

[00:00:00] Alfi: I'm going to be presenting a topic that's very close to my heart, but unfortunately, because we have a limited amount of time, I'm going to cut my heart out of this for the time being. I'll give you the overview of the story, and then I'd like to present you with a very specific question.

[00:00:24] The place that I'd like to start was around last year, November. Around last year November, I gave a TEDx talk on the topic of self-directed learning. So I'll give you the 30-second backstory about me and how I came to this place and time. I've always been a somewhat difficult student. I struggled all the way through my education, right up until university or college years, and it turned out that I'd eventually drop out.

[00:01:00] But right before I did, I spent about a month job shadowing at one of the banks, and I got to see what designers actually do. I got to see all of the hours that I spent playing computer games and doing all of these other things find a place: seeing something that I could do, that I could apply those skills to. And suddenly what was such a difficult challenge eventually evolved into something that I've dedicated my life to.

The three foundations of any learning system

[00:01:32] The main problem that I presented at TEDx, which I'll skip through right until where I left the conversation in that talk, is this question. In a world where technology is advancing at such a crazy rate, with artificial intelligence, neural networks, low orbiting satellites, all of these things pushing the frontier of technology so quickly, there's one question that we have yet to ask. What is the most effective way to pass our knowledge on from one generation to the next? In every conversation we have, there is always a bit of a cynical perspective about the education system and its future, but we never really nail down an answer of what that might look like.

[00:02:26] So I presented the first two foundations of what education might look like as technology and our capabilities develop. Every single learning system, regardless of whether it's the onboarding process for a website, the introduction to a game or the schooling of a child, has three essential foundations. There's a method of learning, also called the pedagogy: the way that the learner actually engages with the material and with the educator. That leads you to the educator, a person who, if not more experienced, can create an environment specifically ideal for learning. And the last is the learning material, which is the actual knowledge that you're absorbing.

[00:03:09] In this talk I took each one and overlaid my experience and the challenges I faced as a student that got in the way of my progress. The main thing was that I would find out along my education process that I was dyslexic. Because the education process only starts to lean more and more into reading, this cycle couldn't really function properly for me. So I looked at three questions, one for each of those areas, of what education might look like if we take on some of the current knowledge and some of the technology that's available to us to further each of these three areas.

The zone of proximal development and adaptive material

[00:03:56] For the first one, I looked at an idea presented by Lev Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development. It's a way of mapping a person's learning, and I'll just briefly touch on it, because we'll explore it in a little more detail further down the line. It essentially speaks about three zones. There's the zone of mastered knowledge: the things that you know how to do, the things that don't really need you to use much of your processing power. Then there's this much larger domain of the things that you can't do even with help, the things that are outside of your capability, and where learning typically focuses in the typical schooling environment. But then Vygotsky speaks about this interesting middle ground, this zone of ideal learning.

[00:04:40] The last idea that he adds is the more knowledgeable other, a person more experienced than the learner. What the more knowledgeable other does is allow that zone to expand, by creating a domain that is safe to explore through their influence. This is a relationship we can see with parents and children, with managers and direct reports, in all sorts of places.

[00:05:07] The way that I expand on this is that we could probably do a lot for the material that we present in a learning environment if it's focused on the interests and the things that lie within the zone of proximal development: the things that are slightly outside of their capabilities, but with a little bit of effort they can engage with new ideas and grow their own body of knowledge. I call this focusing on adaptive learning material. The adaptive element is that the content of the learning experience is based on the interests and abilities of the individual, which is one of the points that was just shared with us.

An agnostic learning method and three developmental relationships

[00:05:50] The second interesting challenge is needing an agnostic learning method, and my own experience really exemplified this one. The only way for me to engage with the knowledge was through reading, so for the majority of my schooling career all of that knowledge was out of access. Once I left that environment and was able to decide for myself how and what I learned, I started to dive into audiobooks, and I pretty much educated myself through my ears. It's somewhat ironic, because even though we think about how much technology has evolved, speech has been the underlying means of transferring knowledge for humanity all the way through history. The printing press is really just a blip in the span of that time. For a long time oral tradition was the main form of education, and I essentially took that on through my own initiative, following my own interests, to build it for myself.

[00:06:55] The next thing that I look at is how we could actually do that. How could we systemize this idea that allows a person to learn in a way that they are most comfortable with and capable of? I looked at three developmental relationships and how each of them explores a different kind of learning. First, the parent-child relationship. This is specifically important because the way a baby learns is quite different from the way you learn at school and the way you eventually learn as a professional. A baby almost learns by just being in the world. There's sensory stimulation, and that stimulation is giving them more data to reference, and that's how they eventually build things like their first speech.

[00:07:44] A very interesting idea around that topic is that parents instinctively know how to teach a baby to talk, and the way that they do that is by using speech and vocabulary that is just above their level. They'll use, for example, baby talk for an infant at that level, but with words that are outside of their vocabulary by just a little bit, and slowly the child starts to build their vocabulary. The funny thing is, before a child has learned any of these sounds that are necessary for the language, they make all of the possible sounds that you could make to speak a language. But as they develop and learn the specific ones from their parents, they lose the ability to use the ones that aren't within the language that they're learning. So the interesting thing about this first type of learning relationship is that it focuses on being in the world as the foundation of the learning experience.

[00:08:46] Then, if we fast forward into the development of knowledge and crafts, we look at the relationship between an apprentice and a craft master. Before the Industrial Revolution you have this set of skilled individuals who have turned a skill into something repeatable, something that provides value to the community, and they would take on an apprentice. This person would learn by following in the footsteps of the craft master; they would learn by doing. The interesting thing is that the typical apprenticeship would start at around the age of 13, and the apprentice would join the household of the craft master. He would learn how to work in the business, but he would also learn what the lifestyle of this person looks like. So this was an approach to learning that focuses on learning by doing, learning by embodying the specific role that the craft master plays.

[00:09:43] Then, if we look at the Industrial Revolution, when guilds and apprenticeships started to dissolve, the need for learning changed. Now we needed a form of learning that could take a non-skilled worker and make them semi-skilled, so that they could use a machine to create resources that previously required skilled labor. So the need for apprenticeship dissolved in society. One of the hallmarks, at least here in South Africa where I'm living, is that a lot of the technikons got dissolved, either shut down or turned into universities, very soon after South Africa's democracy.

[00:10:28] What that meant is you had this band of very hands-on skills that previously required apprenticeships that currently don't have a clear learning path. And there are so many skill sets and crafts that are re-emerging after the Industrial Revolution, because the idea of craft specialists is re-emerging. The idea of a UX designer as a specialist is back in, and we cannot simply rely on a waterfall, functional production line to create the things that we need to create.

[00:11:04] One of the interesting things that I found when looking at these three forms of learning is that the only one that isn't officially standardized is learning through practice. We still have our parental relationships, and those are evolving towards the modern time, and we still have schools that do mass education. But there isn't really a foundation or a sense of structure if a person decided that they didn't want to be educated at school and simply wanted to pick up a craft with which they could provide for their community. So that looks at the adaptive learning method, and the reason why it's adaptive is that you can simply look for a person who practices the craft that you're interested in, to see if that is a place that you can expand on.

Scaling the educator

[00:11:55] The place where I ended this journey last time was the idea of the educator, because this is probably the hardest one to resolve. Any entrepreneur who has tried to scale any kind of service that requires human engagement will know that it is always the hardest part to scale. So at the moment my research is in this domain: how can we make education, and specifically the educators, openly accessible to everybody?

[00:12:30] Along the way in my research there are a couple of different ways that I've explored and that I'm looking at, and I'm going to start from right to left. The first is the idea of an exchange program. Historically that would be the journeyman: a person would go away from their geographical location to another land, find a craft master in the same discipline and learn from them, and bring those techniques and that knowledge back to their domain. This is a concept that exists in businesses today. There are many businesses that do exchange programs, but they do them internally, so you'll maybe go to another location or another branch, learn from that branch, and then eventually come back. So this is one of the ones that we're exploring.

[00:13:12] The next is the idea of the apprenticeship, and this one is pretty typical. People generally know at least roughly what that might look like, from a learnership to an internship and so on. Then there is the multidisciplinary team, second last, and this is probably the hottest topic right now. In all of our teams we're stepping a little away from the idea of simply having different design organizations, software engineering organizations and product management separately, and starting to bring those skills together into individual squads.

[00:13:46] That is another interesting dynamic, but the one that I'd like to focus on is peer-to-peer mentorship. The reason is that if it actually works, it's something that can be available to everybody, because it simply requires you to find somebody who is interested in the same thing. They don't necessarily need to know more than you; they simply need to have different skills.

Where hierarchical mentorship goes wrong

[00:14:16] What we're going to explore is how peer-to-peer mentorship differs from the typical idea of hierarchical mentorship, mentorship between a person that's significantly more knowledgeable and a person that's significantly further behind. We'll look at the challenges that I actually faced in those types of mentorship relationships, and what opportunities peer-to-peer mentorship presents that don't exist where there's an implied hierarchy.

[00:14:47] When we think about mentorship right now, you can almost think about it as this magical super Yoda who floats in the background and waits to see where you've got a challenge, and gives you advice on all of the important elements of your life, and everything just works out when he arrives in the nick of time. As great as that looks in movies, it's not necessarily that simple in real life. Around the end of last year I connected with a very interesting lady named Abby Covert, who also goes by Abby the IA, and we were talking about the challenges in hierarchical mentorship and some of the things that sometimes cause these relationships to not perform as we might expect.

[00:15:33] There were three main ones that we've been speaking about since. The first is out-of-context mentorship: somebody is trying to give advice or guidance, but they don't have the context of the challenge at hand, so their help essentially becomes advice giving rather than actually helping the learning process. Then there's the imbalance of agency. This one is only bad when it's prolonged. Especially when a person is an intern or very new to an environment, sometimes they do need a lot of guidance and assistance. But the idea, and this is taken from the psychological literature and from therapy, is that you should always be working to give them the ability to deal with things themselves. That is always the end goal. Sometimes you need to step in and help, but the end goal should always be to give them agency.

[00:16:30] And lastly, every now and then you get a really, really good mentor who can actually be that Yoda, but he can only be Yoda to a couple of people. So they eventually get over-leveraged, and then perform badly for everybody rather than doing well for the people that are within their capacity.

The four stages of knowledge and the role of the mentor

[00:16:47] Now, it's not all doom and gloom. What I'd like to show is that even that very good mentor can sometimes be not ideal for learning, and how you can find that someone closer to where you are can be even more ideal. It's underpinned by the idea of the four stages of knowledge, the stages you go through when you're learning something new. The first is unconscious incompetence. This is where you don't even really know what you don't know. I think a great example is NFTs. Everybody's heard of them, and the majority of people just think it's some kind of JPEG online. You don't even know how far your ignorance goes. But as soon as you start to read up about the topic, that space expands and you start to understand the things that you need to learn.

[00:17:42] Then, as you learn them, you start to become consciously competent. You start to build this body of knowledge that's structured. But then there are those things, like riding a bicycle or breathing or walking, that you've been doing for so long that you don't even think about them. What can tend to happen is that a mentor who has all of these great skills to pass on, who looks like the ideal person to help you, can actually not be ideal, because they are so experienced in the thing that they are doing that they don't know how to lead you through the experience of learning it.

[00:18:19] That's one of the reasons why a lot of parents find it is better for their children to be tutored by another student who's further ahead than for them as the parents to tutor their child: a person around their age group has been through the process a lot more recently. So what can happen when they're so far apart is that the skills they are capable of doing, they aren't actually capable of mentoring, and they are unable to create this zone of exploration for the learner in their zone of proximal development.

[00:18:56] The way that I'd like to shift the narrative a little bit is around the role of the mentor in the learning of an individual. If we look at the three zones from the zone of proximal development, the high risk area or the things outside of your capability, the ideal learning zone, and the things that you know how to do, what we can do is this. In the zone that is outside of their capability, we create safety. The idea of psychological safety: this is where it belongs. Psychological safety doesn't mean solving all of their problems for them, but ensuring that the things that are too far and too risky are protected against. In the things that can help them grow, we focus on allowing them to try and fail, because they will eventually fail. And lastly, in the area of mastered knowledge, we can encourage them to become a mentor. So we start to build a network, and through this network we grow this underlying fabric that supports the learning process.

Ikigai and finding an area of shared learning

[00:19:57] When you look at a person learning, this is a diagram taken from Japanese tradition, from the island of Okinawa: the concept of ikigai. Some of you will be familiar with it, and I'll just hop over it; if you'd like to get into more detail, I definitely recommend searching it up. In a mentorship relationship, you have the things that the person brings to the table: the things that they are good at, and the ways that they serve their community, or the things that they get paid to do. On the other hand, they have the things that they believe the world needs and the things that they are passionate about. In the center of all four of these quadrants is what this Japanese tradition believes makes up a life worth living, and this idea is called ikigai.

[00:20:47] In this peer mentorship experience that I've been exploring with Abby, we've been looking at what it might look like if these two people who are on this learning journey come together to create a learning experience that is intrinsically motivating, and allows them to tap into that motivation, but is also something that is important and that the world actually needs, so that they are providing something of value. In this experience, you would establish the mentorship relationship by bringing these two together, and we go through a series of exercises that allow you to get to know each other at this level.

[00:21:31] You'll see that where two of these quadrants meet, you'll find an element of your life that can be described by those two meeting. For example, where the world has a need and you love something, that is where your life's mission might be. And the thing that you're good at and the things that you love might make your life's passion. So to find this area of shared learning, we look at the areas that they are both passionate about, as well as the things that they are capable of doing, and from that we can look for areas that provide both personal fulfillment and also leverage their strengths.

[00:22:15] By doing that you can start to create a collaborative learning journey that leverages this positive mentorship. Using diversity of skill and of capability, you can allow each other to grow without either one of you being more knowledgeable than the other, simply leveraging diversity to create that growth. At this point in time, where I am in this research project is building these types of learning journeys, from apprenticeships to peer-to-peer mentorship to multidisciplinary teams.

Socrates and Plato

[00:22:51] One of the things that has really gotten me interested in the idea of focusing on the relationship was one of the greatest stories of mentorship ever. So in closing, I'd like to do something somewhat different. I'd like you to take a deep breath and imagine you're standing in the city center, with a sea of faces looking up at you, and they are hanging on your every word. For surely you're the greatest thinker to have walked the face of the Earth, and you have dedicated your entire life's work to the development of the youth of Athens, in your talk, in your word, in your deed.

[00:23:54] And then one day those that call themselves your enemy charge you with the most heinous crime: corrupting the youth of Athens. And they sentence you to death. As you sit there in the final moments of your life, looking back on what you've done, you remember the hours of discussion with your student, Plato. Of all those dialogues, not a single one did you write, but every single one would be etched into Western tradition forever.

[00:24:39] And through this mentorship, through this peer-to-peer engagement, the development of human education would be forever marked by the work of Socrates and Socratic dialogue. I believe that with this idea of shared learning and collaborative mentorship, we can recreate a fabric of education and learning that can prepare us for the present, and possibly even for the future. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:25:18] Host: Excellent, thank you very much. That's a very powerful ending, so thank you for sharing. I really enjoyed that, because I really do think that mentorship is incredibly powerful, and I think it's an area we can invest more in. And I think there's a fantastic overlap with Miss Labs' [?] talk about identifying where people are strong and where maybe somebody is weak, and then trying to prepare them instead of over-relying on a manager.

[00:25:47] Alfi: Exactly. No, that's a very good point.

[00:25:52] Host: I had one question, though, because you brought up the different styles, and you mentioned multidisciplinary teams as well as apprenticeships and peer-to-peer. One thing that's always bothered me about multidisciplinary teams is that often people can be a bit isolated. What I mean by that is that you might have one designer on the team and you might have one researcher. So how do you try to balance that potential isolation of people with more of an apprenticeship? Where does that fit in, and where can they learn about their craft in particular?

[00:26:30] Alfi: Okay, so I think that's almost two different questions. I'm just going to go out of presenter mode so that I can see you. You've got two challenges there, really. The one challenge is how you get this team to grow as a multidisciplinary team, but then also how you ensure that the individuals are still building their craft. I think Spotify have done amazing work in this space, with the idea of having guilds and then having actual production teams. The guilds are more focused on the craft of what they're doing, and the production teams are more focused on producing whatever the product is.

[00:27:18] What you want to do is ensure that you create learning experiences in both. And I think the place that we usually get wrong is that we focus so much on their development in their craft skill, because that's where they are comfortable, that we don't focus that much on ensuring that the team as a whole learns together. That's one of the most interesting spaces that I'm looking to explore in the future, because I think the way that you would teach a group like that, or the way that they would learn, is through case studies, because you would need to learn by collaborating.

[00:27:54] With something like design or software engineering, you can go to the specific resources that are about that topic, but there isn't really a lot of material about how a team comes together and learns something. So I think case studies are a great way to bridge that gap. You get some of your most skilled talent, the most experienced, and you document some of the work that they're doing, and you can then start to share that internally with your other teams. Through exercises and training, what is it called, mock experiences, you can start to build those same learnings into your teams.

[00:28:31] Host: Well, that's a great example, and it ties in nicely with UXDX, because we're all about getting product, UX, design and dev together.

[00:28:40] Alfi: Yeah, it's one of the reasons why I was also keen to do this. Not very many people are talking about everything together.