In this episode of The Growth System, Colin and Chris explore the concept of mastery within B2B growth systems, emphasising the importance of personal and professional development. They discuss the role of psychological safety in fostering an environment where individuals can thrive and the need for organisations to understand the dimensions of mastery, including technical proficiency, strategic understanding, and transformative capability.

The conversation also highlights the risks associated with mastery silos and skills decay, advocating for a more holistic approach to knowledge transfer and development within organisations.

In this episode, Chris and Colin discuss the importance of managing intellectual capital within organisations, emphasising the need for active management to prevent skills decay. They explore the role of feedback loops in knowledge management and how embedding AI mastery is crucial for future organisational success.

The conversation also delves into the concept of collective mastery and networked intelligence, highlighting the significance of cultural fit in hiring practices. Finally, they touch on the future of intellectual capital and the integration of AI in organisational processes.

00:00 Understanding Mastery in Growth Systems

06:01 The Role of Psychological Safety

14:05 Dimensions of Mastery

20:10 Breaking Down Mastery Silos

24:29 Addressing Skills Decay

27:36 Managing Intellectual Capital

30:12 Feedback Loops in Knowledge Management

34:37 Embedding AI Mastery in Organizations

41:15 Collective Mastery and Networked Intelligence

48:38 The Future of Intellectual Capital and AI

Hi, and welcome back to The Growth System, the podcast that looks at B2B growth through a systems thinking lens. Today, we are moving on to the final episode in our series where we explore the dimensions of the growth team operating system. Today, we're going to dive into mastery. Chris, I wonder if you can put a bit of meat on the bones there and tell the folks what we mean by mastery.

Absolutely. Well, I think in many ways we've kind of saved the best till last because mastery when it comes to kind of systems engineering and engineering growth systems, know, and ultimately that's, that's what we're all about here is building the structures that can help you accelerate the growth of your business. We just don't talk about mastery enough. So what do we mean by mastery? Mastery is about ultimately the people in the organization and how we focus on their personal and professional development.

And I very, very deliberately say personal and professional development because not

Lots of organizations, more mature organizations, almost invariably will have a human resources function. They will probably have some concept of kind of personal development plans. They will probably have some sort of linkage between incentives or kind of OK, ask APIs, targets, annual reviews in terms of that sort of acquisition of knowledge. So how is this different? I hear you not asking yet, but and really

It is fundamentally different what we're talking about here because we're talking about taking a systematic view of knowledge within the organization and how that contributes to purpose because

Businesses, as we've said lots and lots of times, are complex human systems. They are systems that are full of, that are run by, that are contingent upon the people to do a great job at getting us towards whatever our stated purpose is, larger, fractal, or otherwise.

And therefore, why should it not be a primary concern of everyone within the organisation at how capable those individuals are at performing the tasks that need to get them there? Professional development. But for me, there was also a...

a real penny drop moment, I think, that kind of happened in the development of our business here at Robespace. And this was actually, I'm probably ashamed to say, only a couple of years ago, where it really just occurred to me all of a sudden that personal development, that the whole self, that the individuals within our organization, with their own individual purposes, as we've talked about on the purpose episode and many other times, at least in related concepts since.

and before. The people in your organization all have personal purpose, they all want to get somewhere, they all have things that they want to achieve that sit outside the realms of that organization. They also have, you know, dare we say, baggage, what's the right word here? I'm gonna get myself in trouble here, aren't I Colin? But we all have bits of things that we need to develop in ourselves to be better.

Ha ha ha

Yeah, think we've actually candidly, we've been through some of these kind of personal development exercises together. And I think we all we all approach it from a good place. But there's ultimately can be I think the Australians have a word for this, what they call it, very confronting when you're forced to kind of look at yourself and areas. Let's just you're from this take this positively say areas about your oneself that one needs to develop can be very.

Hahaha

comfortable, however, it becomes very clear how that's tied to professional development and then ultimately mastery, which we're talking about today.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that for me was a real game changer. I don't I mean, why don't we talk about that for a little bit? I think we're having a bit more of an unstructured episode today. So.

End of season kind of frivolity, let's go slightly off topic for a second.

Exactly, yeah, we're all, you know, we've got the video rolled in, you know, no one's doing any proper work today, it's the end of term. So yeah, mean, personal mastery, you know, that can mean many things, but I think to contextualize that in the sort of, you know, confronting conversations, confronting kind of process that we've been through as an organization, to me, I thought that was incredible, because that was really about, the one that we were talking about, that was really about, like,

personal story, I guess. You know, where do you actually want to go with your life, not just, you with your job?

what's holding you back? You know, what stories are you telling yourself that are positive and negative? You know, how do you change that story to ultimately get you to where you want to go as an individual? And I think as an organization, that's quite a scary thing to do because there's a very, very real possibility that kind of opening up sort of Pandora's box there, someone might say, well, actually what I don't want to do is this thing I'm spending, you know, eight, 10, 12 hours a day doing with you right now. And I'm going to go off and

you know do something else but you know what i think that's okay

short-term inconvenience I think leads to probably longer-term better performance and certainly a better life for the individuals in your organization. And we all should have a sort of collective responsibility for the people in our businesses because you know happy fulfilled people do their best work and ultimately that's what we want is people to do their best work. So mastery that was a very long intro but yeah personal and professional development within the context of where the system is trying to go that's what we're talking about today.

Something that popped into my head there I was thinking about since we're doing that, just going along with what pops into our head. We talk quite a bit about psychological safety and we tend to think of that as being quite a kind of unidirectional. It's about the people in your team having the psychological safety to talk to you about, to talk to the business about something. But actually in this case, you've kind of highlighted how it's actually reciprocal because it's about the business.

having the psychological safety to go and get, you know, that exercise we did with the power of story and getting people to really, to really be quite sort of self-reflective. And of course there is always that risk that someone will say, General, thank you so much for this. I've just realized that I do not want to be doing this for another day. Goodbye. You know, that didn't happen, incidentally, everyone. But yeah, that was an example of the business kind of

Yes.

Sob this for a game, I'm out of here. Yeah!

allowing itself a better psychological safety I

I think that's a really good point. I'd never really thought about it like that. well, I mean, I think that, you know, maybe that kind of leads us into a bit more of an in-depth conversation about mastery in terms of the sort of different...

If a business has a side key, there's.

dimensions, I guess, the different kind of components that that in which mastery kind of exists and, and the obvious one that we kind of alluded to at the start, I think that everyone's mind would instantly go to is kind what you might call technical proficiency is that kind of what skills do I need to do the job? Or what skills did I need when you hired me to come in and do a good job? And how do I develop those? So that might be new systems, new software, you know, new ideas, I think technical proficiency that we probably don't need to spend a huge amount of time talking about on this episode, because I

to some degree, maybe wrongly, you know, let us know in the comments, but I think it's kind of a given. think businesses are generally quite good at getting technical proficiency into their teams. They might not spend enough money on it, they might not prioritise it enough, but it's probably not something that we need to spend a huge amount of time thinking about because it's just something that you need to identify gaps and close them. The two other dimensions, and I think psychological safety is what kind of made me think of this, certainly sits into the last of those two.

are what you might call sort of strategic understanding. You know, I think it relates a lot to the conversations that we've had over the course of this season around kind of self-organization, tactical autonomy, that kind of, do I actually really understand where we're going as an organization? Can I contextualize the application of that and integrate it into what I'm doing day to day?

And I think that is a huge thing when we come to talking about systems engineering, just because we have an all hands and some people talk about, you know, what this week's strategy is, doesn't mean that everyone turned up. It doesn't mean that they understood it. It doesn't mean that they've internalized it. It doesn't mean that they've remembered it. And final kind of, you know, the sort of top of the top of the tree is, do they actually know what they what that means to them?

So I think that that sort of mastery of context, you know, the sort of context of purpose into the individual.

you know, into the individual's kind of view of the world. You know, that is a big point that we can talk about in terms of how you develop mastery within the organization, because one thing begets the other, you know, if you actually really know how to contextualize it into your role, then actually what you need technical proficiency in probably comes from that as a sort of exercise as well. And then the final one is what I would term sort of transformative capability. It's actually the

ability for the individual to adapt to what is the organization requires of them and how that changes over time and the context in which that adaptation takes place. I think psychological safety is very much a component of that. Do we actually have the ability to say, I don't get it? And that's a big thing.

And I think there's a huge cultural context there because I don't want to start tiring entire countries with the same brush, but I might do it anyway. Certain business cultures, in my experience, are a lot worse at saying, I don't understand than others. I think in the UK, we're probably somewhere in the middle. I think that it is OK to say, I don't know.

just not very often.

Yeah, or I don't get it as well. And sometimes you're saying I don't get it about something that is a message repeated from someone in a very senior position. And I've quite often found myself being, you know, that, you know, that poster where the fish is swimming in the opposite direction to all the fish and I'm that fish. But have, I can't help myself but to say.

I basically granted myself some sort of false sense of psychological safety to come out and say, I'm sorry, I just don't think that makes sense. Or I don't get it because blah, blah. And I've actually been in the room with some quite seasoned professionals who are looking at me with that face of like, what are you doing? We don't speak truth to authority here.

Hahaha

Yeah.

And you know this look of absolute terror, I know if they're scared for me or for themselves or what but yeah I've been through that experience a few times.

You

Yes, you know I think that I don't know maybe Europe is the sort of centre line here maybe it's never gets any better than well perhaps you can let us know again in the comments if you've got a different experience this but you my experience is that in in kind of Asian business cultures which there are many and I don't have experience of loads so I will say this very generically but sticking your head above the parapet seems to be less accepted generally.

and in sort of US business cultures, I think there is very much a everyone needs to look like they know what they're doing and if they don't is a big, big component of kind of generally of business culture in the US. I think hopefully this episode might do a little to at least underline the importance of it being okay to not be okay, to sort of misappropriate a, you know, a phrase from another walk of life because.

Yes.

understanding the link to strategy, understanding the role that you play in the big machine and how you can play that role better every single day, that has a transformative effect on the capability and efficiency and the output of individuals within the org. it needs to be something that we kind of stand up to and say psychological safety is really, really important. And the ability for people to say, I'm not okay, I don't understand, I don't get it, I don't agree. You know, I don't agree is a fun,

difficult one and not necessarily linked to mastery per se but you know it's okay to not agree but everyone does sort of need to drive in the right direction and I think that when we're talking about kind of human capital when we're talking about kind of the people in our organization you know that is a measure of alignment and we need to respect those individuals we need to have that discourse but perhaps

if it's unreconcilable, also probably tells us something about our resourcing strategy, should we say.

Subtly put, Chris.

But which maybe is contrary to psychological safety, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about there. But ultimately, we need to understand these relationships, need to understand these linkages, we need to understand these alignments, and we need to support people in getting to a point where they understand them too.

Thinking about what you just said there, I thinking about something we've often talked about in this series, particularly around the informal networks and how information and knowledge flows through informal networks and how from a systems thinking point of view, we acknowledge that rather than papering over it and pretending that.

the organizational knowledge comes from manuals and passing little tests and putting a badge on your LinkedIn profile. I I'd be curious to hear from anyone listening if their experience of professional development was really manual centric. I think we can all agree that it's these informal networks and actually personal relationship building within the organization that becomes

Yeah.

Yeah

key to at least the professional development side of mastery.

Yes, that's a really interesting point because, you know, when we're talking about mastery, I think we're often thinking about knowledge that comes from outside the organization, or at least knowledge that is additive to how we do things. But process knowledge, of course, is a huge thing. You know, how do we do things around here? What is the sort of standard operating procedure? You know, that is a form of knowledge transfer as well in a form of mastery, of course.

And I was just sort of chuckling when you were saying that because I keep getting targeted by this advert for scribe, the kind of AI process writing tool that's quite good actually. It's someone being handed this, know, dusty ring binder that sort of says SOPs on it or whatever it says and saying, know, and the new starter saying, are these up to date? And they're like, pretty much.

Yeah, yeah, they're up to date. It's this century kind of mostly, I bet.

And I think that probably is the experience of a great many people in terms of how they interact with processes. that is a let's chalk that one up to the future episode bank in terms of how we how you manage standard operating procedures and sort of manage processes within the organization. And we obviously alluded to that somewhat in the process episode a few weeks back. So, yeah, tacit knowledge networks. mean, that that is.

you know, the iceberg, isn't it? I think that that's the, that's the below the water line bit. You know, sort of, I think you could describe knowledge a bit like you could describe data in an automation, you know, it's you've got sort of structured and unstructured data and

the training course, the manual, the documentation, that's the structured data. And it's quite easy to see how you're going to transfer that, how that knowledge transfer is going to take place. Unstructured data ultimately is kind of where the action's at, isn't it? Because those tacit knowledge networks, that sort of learning by rote, that kind of...

undocumented but highly important how we do things around here. That is the bulk of the knowledge within most organizations. Should it be? Probably not, but I think it exists as the reality that most organizations find themselves in is that the way a team does something, the way an organization does something or a great many things are based on experience and they're based on just repetition and how we do things.

problem on a number of levels. I think it means that it's quite difficult to transfer that knowledge. It's difficult to manage that knowledge from a of human capital perspective where people might leave and take knowledge with them. That's obviously a big issue, but ultimately we're talking about mastery on this episode. So how do you transfer that knowledge? Well, I think that in some ways that's kind of cultural, isn't it? You've really got to promote the kind of

practices that get that knowledge into the open and get it transferred. And I think some organizations do a quite good job of this with kind of peer mentoring, buddy programs, call them what you will, doing sort of like cross-functional knowledge sharing piece. But ultimately, I think it comes down to in a mastery context to how you actually structure the method for personal development plans.

So something that kind of exists as a concept within the PDPs that we've got at RevSpace group is this kind of delineation, which is to be fair, linked mostly to expenditure and budget as much as it is to where knowledge comes from. But it's kind of like, where do I want to go? What am I good at now? Where are the gaps that are going to get me there? That can be generic across any form of knowledge.

But then, okay, well, how are we going to deliver that knowledge? And to me, that comes into sort of like an 80-20 rule of, you know, 20 % is probably structured for which read 20 % might be stuff that we pay for, or that we go and acquire and, you know, deliver within the organization somehow. It might not necessarily be paid, but certainly it might be, here's a course, or here's a thing from one of our partners, or you can go on this day, or let's send you to a conference, or whatever it might be.

And then the rest of it is actually, okay, the 80 % is capable. How can you go and align yourself to other people that do have that knowledge within the organization and how can you get that out of them? And I think that sort of structuring that kind of immersion cross-functionally or at least just giving people permission to share. I think that's a really big thing in terms of how you get that sort of under the, you know, under the waterline information out of the org. you know, some, I think some organizations

do that quite well early in people's careers. don't think it really happens later. And I think that's that's a problem. I mean,

It certainly is a problem. We talk a lot about things like data silos, which a lot of work has been done to help make it possible to break down data silos. What we don't think about as much, and I think we will have to, is what we might call, for the purposes of this, mastery silos. Like I was speaking to someone who works for, I won't say who, but a company that sort of manages critical national infrastructure and a major challenge that they have.

Hmm.

was that they essentially have silos of mastery sort of things where there was key processes and sort of knowledge that within the organization that maybe only one or two people in the entire organization can do and with no real plan, no strategic structured plan such as what you were leading to to make sure if nothing else just for the resilience of the organization.

Yeah.

to be able to keep doing what they need to do should someone leave or be sick or go on maternity leave or whatever, or simply move on within the organization. And there's massive exposure to risk simply by not having a plan to kind of, I guess what I would term here, sort of breaking down those silos of mastery and knowledge.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's a really, really interesting one that because not something I particularly researched before this episode, but it hadn't really occurred to me until you were just saying it there. But I think that there is like a cultural problem with a lot of organizations that is that the sort of what good looks like is creating specialism and starting to kind of align that knowledge into a small group of individuals who are the people that do that thing. And, you know, I saw this a lot in

engineering space. like my first job out of university was on a graduate scheme for a large car company and they were really good at the tacit knowledge networking thing on the grad scheme. You know had like rotations, you would move through different departments, you would be aligned to different people, you would have mentors, would you know spend two years, you you'd get work in the factory, like you just get a huge education across the entire organization about how it all

worked and you've got access to senior people, you've got a line to junior people, you know, all good stuff. But then after that two years, you know, you've got to pick a route and then you've got to stay in your lane.

And then after that, you know, personal development became a journey of like, okay, you've got a thousand pounds budget this year to pick a course for yourself and then write it on a piece of paper, which you share with your line manager. And, you you went from this kind of immersive experience of like understanding these tacit knowledge networks and the kind of connectivity of the whole system into just staying in your lane. And I think that that was particularly true in engineering functions, exactly what you were just saying there. You know, if you were the guy that knew

how to do the sort of, you know, handbrake-y, you, that was you for the rest of your life. You know, because that knowledge, you're the best and we want the best. And that makes a kind of perverse logical sense, sort of perhaps a senior leadership team level. But when we're talking about actual human beings, do you really want to be doing the same thing for the rest of your life, no matter how complicated it is? Of course you don't. You know, that.

I think there's some recent studies that show that, I've just done that thing we say recent studies show, and then make an unsubstantiated factoid. I've read some things about this recently where actually that can be quite psychologically damaging to people to just to do exactly that, just be doing one thing for the rest of their life.

Yeah

Yeah.

I mean you don't need a study recent or otherwise to substantiate that do you? And it's just a sort of obvious human fact, it's like RSI for the brain, you know it's kind of like it's not something any of us would choose to do so why do we create organisational structures that promote that as being a good way to do business, you know we shouldn't. So it's culture and it's kind of systems theory, it's the sort of stuff we talk about all the time funny enough.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know, this kind of like segues a little bit for me into another, I think, under thought about concept when it comes to kind of mastery and development, which is actually like skills decay.

Well, yeah, this is the reason that that conversation, sorry to interrupt, had come up was because the people in charge of resourcing and strategic resource planning were only just getting the information that in fact, several of these people were about to retire and there was no sort of talent pipeline to replace them or plan to transfer the knowledge and that this was a risk to the business. And so we started discussing about how you really needed to kind of map when

basically exactly what you were saying. When are we no longer going to have these skills or this knowledge in the business? What is actually our timeline here to transfer this knowledge and understanding?

Yeah, exactly. And I think you can almost think about this in terms of a Stits and Stocks and Flows diagram, can't you? Because you've got this sort of like inflow of training and new people and, you know, whatever it might be that's programmatically kind of building knowledge in the organisation.

people then record that, you I have the badge for this, you I've trained in that. And that becomes this quite like static concept of knowledge, you you attain it, then you have it. But what I don't think is really talked about is the outflow, you know, it's the sort of bathtub where you've got to tap flowing knowledge in at the start, and then people assume that it it sort of just keeps filling. But actually, it's bleeding away, you know, people are leaving the organization, as you just said, but also, like skills decay happens from

you know, just not using skills. I mean, I can certainly relate to this. You know, in our organization, I like to probably, I shouldn't, but I do like to know a lot about the technology partners that we work with. like to train myself to a level where I can really talk at a deep strategic level about the things that we do, the technology that we use within our organization. So,

you for one of our primary automation partner, went and got skilled up to the highest possible technical level with them and I could build some really cool stuff, but I haven't used it for six months. And I went back into the system for something the other day and I was like, the UI has changed, like there are new features in here. And actually whilst on paper I'm a sort of, you know, level three, whatever, you know, certified pro, I'm not.

I have a piece of paper that says that I am, but I'm absolutely not.

Yeah, you know exactly what I...

I found the same problem and actually done some of those same sort certifications and I'm like, great, if I kept doing this like every day, I would actually be able to live up to that badge. But as you say, six months later, you go on and the whole thing has changed.

Yeah. So you've got this kind of skills decay from like, you know, lack of use, but also, you know, methodologies change the current state of the art changes, the technology changes and

you just have this kind of ongoing everyday erosion of that sort of intellectual capital within the organization. And it's kind of flowing out the plug hole at the bottom. And it needs to be actively managed. And it needs to be refreshed. I think that that sort of, you know, when you think about those kind of three pots of knowledge of kind of like technical capability, strategic alignment, and kind of transformational capability, you you think about skills decay, that sort of outflow of

knowledge from the organisation and then suddenly the sort of management of intellectual capital within the org becomes such an obviously significant lever to pull in terms of affecting system performance. But it's not something that line of business teams ever really talk about, in my opinion, or in my experience, should I say.

Or at least if we talk about them, it's this sort of epiphany where, oh yeah, we should really get on that. that's about, I wouldn't say that's as far as it goes, but I would say maybe that's a bit underdeveloped as a sort of an area of kind of business leadership.

Yeah.

And you know, how often does that conversation happen? And then it's like, yeah, but we haven't got any budget. Because everyone's concept of knowledge is basically picked to structured knowledge coming from training courses that you have to buy from a training provider.

Yeah, it becomes very superficial and kind of self-reinforcing that, doesn't it? But it's like, well, I don't need to think about this because I spend my thousand pounds budget that I get from the company of your own personal development. And look, I've got these certificates that are on my LinkedIn. And that's the same mentality that leads us down this kind of unhappy road.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess because, you know, we are the Growth System podcast and there will be remiss of us to not continue talking about this through a systems lens. You know, I think I kind of like the concept that if you think about knowledge as a stock and flow diagram, you know, it's the bath where you've got stuff coming into the middle, then

So too have you got feedback loops acting on that stuff that exists within the bathtub of knowledge. And this is ultimately how you start designing a sort subsystem for managing mastery within your organization is really with kind of feedback loops at the heart of that. So you've got the sort of balancing loops that taking stuff away, you've got the reinforcing loops that are standing stuff back in, and you've got...

I think driving a lot of that, having to create an understanding of where we actually are with things. So something that, that, you know, for me, I think is, is, is really effective is

creating knowledge as a not just as a cultural dimension within the organization, you know, it is one of our cultural values mastery, probably come as no surprise. But, but actually, okay, well, you've got that as a cultural sort of value within the org, how do you actually walk the talk with that? So, for me, it's a lot about

people coming back to the old adage of people do what they're measured on. know, how are we measuring the attainment of mastery? How are we tracking that? How are we looking at bigger feedback loops out there that are impacting what that knowledge should be? you know, having that into your sort of performance review structure, maybe having that link to remuneration or bonuses or whatever. That's great. think a lot of organizations do that. I think it's a really, really good idea because then we push it into the sort of, you know, to

the consciousness that it's something that we've got to be looking at, at least on a monthly or quarterly basis. But I don't think it's really enough because it then becomes a ticket item. So how do you put those feedback loops in place that mean that we can be faster, that we can be more agile, that we can be more responsive? And ultimately, I think that just comes down to having

program in place that enables you to act quickly as well as spot quickly. And, you for me, I think that comes down to linking mastery.

to project goals as long side individual goals. if we know where the individual wants to go, we can track that. But we also need to know what the capability required within the organization is to achieve whatever that purpose is. And that's where why, you know, a practice that we

a big kind of exponents of is adding mastery into the kind of the accountability chart or the concept of the org chart. So we've talked about this, I think, on the people episode, but when we build an accountability chart, which is, you know, what is my role? What am I accountable for delivering? What are the metrics that I am accountable for?

The bottom of that, but no less important for being at the bottom of that particular little group of things with each sort of node on the org chart, is what's my mastery plan? So if I'm accountable for this and I'm accountable for these metrics, what am I doing to get better every single day? So I think bringing that into the center of performance, you know, is how you get that kind of more front of mind view with it.

And I think the second big thing is actually having a mechanism in the organization for understanding bigger market trends, bigger shifts, actually where are things going? How's that going to change the state of what knowledge is required in the organization? That's a harder one to do, but it's really important. It's something that...

over the last six months, you know, I can probably point to AI in almost every organization as there being a dawning realization that actually this has changed the game in terms of how we go about doing what we do every single day. So how do we start embedding that into the operating practices of the people in our team, the people in our org? So how do we kind of...

add that into the development plans to make them better at using these kind of new tool stacks and new processes.

The obvious example that everyone's going to jump to probably in our audiences is given that it's April 2025 when we're recording this is AI. How do we sort of embed AI and AI mastery, which is, let's face it, kind of a wild west. Are there any real AI masters out there? But I've actually seen this in quite diverse sectors. I mean, I don't know if anyone.

and

listening would be particularly interested in this, but the UK construction industry has a major problem of there are certain sort of key skills that are necessary as a sort of networked capability of the entire UK construction industry, which are, I wouldn't say those skills are decaying in the individuals. It's just that we have a demographic systemic issue where essentially most of the people with those skills are going to retire very soon.

And there is no plan to transfer those skills to apprentices or really anyone coming in. Meanwhile, we have the government and various other kind of actors here saying, oh, we're going to invest all this in building this enormous amount of housing stock to help the housing. And it's debatable whether or not it would help the housing housing crisis. But that's matter, another podcast. The point is here that we have misalignment like the leadership.

the of this big politician. we're gonna spend this much of the building, this much of the building, to bring the weight of the last thing, the weight is that the religion scales, at the scale that we need to get us moving in some sort of plan to...

in this case, politicians saying, we're going to spend this much on building this many houses and people from the construction industry saying, great, where is the mastery, like where is the knowledge and skills going to come from at the scale that we need to do this? So we obviously need some sort of plan to, you know, to achieve mastery at the level that we're going to need to do that. And of course, hear silence from the policymakers over that because it's something they haven't thought about.

Thank

Yeah, and I think there's so much of that kind of shift that is going to have to mean that we're going to have to recalibrate our sort of view of how mastery is attained, managed and retained within organizations and.

unmeasured I would say as well because we can't continue to live this lie that okay yeah no I've seen you you've got your little certificate your little badge on your LinkedIn profile so you must have achieved that level of mastery.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that kind of ongoing enablement piece is something that we talk about a lot within Rebspace Group. I think that the tech landscape is changing. And whilst it's not hugely applicable, think that it certainly there's a sort of...

I can see that there is a change already in terms of how we manage enablement, how we keep people current with the knowledge that we're supposed to have given them.

give enablement it's perhaps slightly more longer winded but accurate definition. you know, a tool that we've been playing around with is superd, which is great for kind of keeping sales teams up to date with all of the processes, you know, it's, and it rather than it being a repository for information, it is a live delivery of information whilst the operator is doing the tasks. And okay, this lives just within HubSpot CRM, but it means we've got tool tips.

everywhere, we can click on stuff, it pops stuff up, it can link into, you know, other process docs, it can give you playbooks live. And I think that's really, really exciting, because it takes that problem of knowledge transfer to kind of knowledge retention. And that's a big gap.

because we can all sit people in a training course or we can hand them the manual digitally or otherwise. But actually, have they consumed it? Have they retained it? Almost certainly not. and I think that we haven't we don't have time or the knowledge I suspect to talk about different people's different learning styles and all that sort of things. But I think probably what we can all, you know.

agree on just from a human centric perspective is that the only time it's really easy to learn knowledge is as you're doing something. You know if you've got someone sat alongside you saying you know do this do that and then they keep sitting alongside you and then they keep being there and then as you slowly glow and kind of spread your wings and do it yourself you've got someone that you can ask and that is available and that is not just a manual. And I think that technology can play a role in kind of kind of creating those sort of

digital twins of our sort of experts within the organization and deploying those certainly within the tech stack that we have. So I think that's a really, really interesting and kind of exciting innovation that's happening in that field of knowledge transfer. And I suspect that will grow into different spheres beyond CRM. But certainly that's one that I would recommend people check out if that's a problem in their organization of getting people to follow processes in CRM and follow sales processes and be consistent. That's a great one to think about.

That's super dear. Not sponsoring this episode, sadly, but...

Yeah, super disinterested. No, should be, no. And yeah, in the sort of spirit of, I guess, tool shares, another one that I really like is Scribe.

Again, if you're doing technical processes, that's a great role of AI. You click through a process, it contextualizes using AI, what you've just done, it writes some notes, it puts it into a link. And actually, you can put that link into Superd if you want, and then expand the process. So I think that's something that we increasingly use more and more of these tools. And I think they have a really strong role to play in terms of how we make sure that knowledge keeps getting delivered consistently.

not just has been handed to someone and with the assumption that they'll then know it forever, which is certainly the historical way of doing that, which I don't think has really gone away. It's just become slightly more digital, but fundamentally no different as a learning experience. So think stuff like C-PID is really interesting.

Yeah. Do know Chris, was just going to say something. We've talked about mastery from various different angles here, but as you see, as we are the Growth System podcast and we look at these things through a systems lens. I don't know if we have specifically talked about sort of, obviously individual mastery has its natural limitations, which I guess we've sort of tacitly acknowledged. We haven't really talked about

specifically I think is maybe mastery as a networked phenomenon, like collective mastery, sort of surpassing those limitations, I guess, through sort of cognitive diversity. That would probably, while we still have some time before the clock is not our friend here, it would be interesting, I think, to dive into that sort of phenomenon.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. mean, when we think about that kind of collective intelligence, I think what it really makes me think about is this sort of old adage of systems being more than the sum of their parts. You I think you, you put the right people together in a room and actually that emergent capability is higher than, you know, the individuals would have had singularly.

think that's something that kind of creates a sort of amplification effect throughout the organization, but it's really about how do we create those networks in the first place. you know, a really great way to run an organization is putting a lot of really smart people in the room. know, that there is a I can't remember whether it's actually Richard Branson quote, know, hire great people then stay out of their way.

I kind of subscribe to that to a certain extent, you know, if you can put great people in the room, but ultimately, if they don't work well together, if they don't understand their purpose, if they don't have the sort of...

that transformative capability or the organizational context and psychological safety and all the stuff we've been talking about, then actually they're never going to do that great work. thinking about the networked phenomenon of mastery, as you put it, I think is a really, really interesting view of the world. Because if we can intentionally map and nurture those networks, then we can definitely

amplify that, I don't know what you call that, sort connected.

view of mastery of expertise through the org. that comes, I think, a lot from something we talk about a fair bit on this podcast, which is cross-functional teaming. You know, how can you put great people together? How can you set them objectives that allow them to sort of amplify the knowledge that they have as a team into solving problems? And it sounds maybe a little

I don't know, I don't know the right word is, of theoretical, but actually, I think we've all experienced that sort of network knowledge phenomenon of if you just sit around a table with a bunch of like-minded people and you're like going at a problem and you're like, wow, we've just got something really cool there. Like that is what we've just described. So how can you kind of create the conditions for that in the organization? And a big part of that.

I think comes in the hiring process at the start and hiring for culture. And that's something that I don't think we've really got time to dive into too much. But I think that was equally a bit of a learning in the last few years in our own business that you need to hire through the lens of culture as much, if not more than you need to hire through the lens of expertise. Because if you get people that are a great cultural fit, then they will sink into those knowledge networks.

and they will be additive straight away. Whereas if you bring in, you know, lone rangers, you bring in these sort of supposed star players, but they don't actually, you know, their cog doesn't fit into your machine, then what value is it adding? So I think that's a, you know, that's a hiring perspective as much as anything else.

you

Yeah, think there's a strong cultural component to mastery here. was just thinking about masteries are networked phenomenon and how that sort of promotes greater sort of, guess, continuity. Because clearly, we're sort of transcending that problem of siloed mastery and that risk to the organization of sort of

level of mastery in a particular area, sort of decaying in big chunks as people leave, etc. Again, we don't have time to go into this, it's probably outside of the scope of the growth system, but what it often makes me think about is organizations that have to be really, really good at this would be sports teams is a great example, where networked mastery is essentially what the

Yes.

that's essentially what they spend most of their lives doing. that's certain ways of sort of promoting that is I think when you hear about a football club talk about what's in their DNA, like the way we do things at Liverpool Football Club is essentially about their, that's essentially how they approach mastery and sorry.

you

I'm just... Don't mind me. I'm just smashing some stuff up.

plugging yourself in in various ways, you know, that's why there's this continuity. So you can look at say, I use Liverpool as the example, they just won the league, but if you look at the continuity between say a Liverpool team now and a Liverpool team back when none of those players were there, there are certain continuity. It's about the way they the way they approach mastery amongst other things and the interplay with culture.

Absolutely, yeah. I don't think we've got time to go into this, but I was going to talk about Pep Guardiola as your favourite systems go-to as I watch the second round of the FA Cup at the weekend.

Well, you know what's interesting there is we have a sort system failure. as soon as I talked about it, it's a commentator's cars. I should have been a sports commentator. We talked about it in an episode where Pep hires for who fits into the system. Are you a perfectly shaped cog for my machine? And he has this very specific systemic way of doing things. And they talked about positional play. It turns out that.

every football manager in England was listening to that at the time and decided to come up with systems to break that system until Pep came out a few weeks ago and said, do you know what? Modern football isn't really positional anymore. In other words, we have been broken. system, so there's a sort of balancing loop being at play until eventually we hit this threshold point where that system no longer, you know, it needs to be very heavily updated.

perhaps peps, yeah, knowledge decay exactly. that system no longer valid. That's just because I happened to talk about it on a podcast for two seconds. That's why it all happened.

Knowledge decay.

Well there you go, everyone's listening. So can we finish the episode by talking about my favorite current hobby horse, of the move to the future of intellectual capital and the role of AI in that?

Yeah, why not? Why not? You have my permission to talk about that.

You

So if we talk about knowledge decay over time about the way that we did things before, like Pep Guardiola not working in the future, we've already alluded to the role of AI within the way that we need to think about using AI. But actually,

the big shift that is coming, you you probably didn't hear it here first, but I'm right on that bandwagon, is the role of kind of AI agents and the role of kind of AI workflows in the way that we go about doing the things that we do day to day. So.

As this is an episode about mastery, I mean, we need to think not just about, you know, our human capital within the organization, but also our kind of intertotal intellectual capital, AI capital. And I think what will become, and maybe you did hear it here first, a really interesting and perhaps difficult.

a new frontier in the management of master within organizations is how do we keep our AI smart? How do we keep it trained with the right information? How do we keep it up to date and current? How do we sync it with the human kind of workers that it it collaborates with? We talked about it on the episode about collaboration a couple of weeks ago, but

That kind of total capability management view of the organization, know, what needs to be done by people, what are people great at? I think that that's going to be a game changer for most hiring managers is not just what holes do we have in the organization that we need to plug with people who left and therefore needs to be replaced. But actually, as we talk about with automation engineering, okay, well, we might have done that because we had a person and they had this JD. But actually, if we could get

you know, seven agents to do, you know, 70 % of their JD than what's left. So maybe that the 30 % that's left becomes spread across multiple roles. And therefore we have just a, we have a transformation in the composition of teams and how we use people to the best effect, use AI to the best effect, and then integrate those two. So yeah, personal development plans.

will soon become a lot more about, you know, how do we train our people? And maybe that's a, yeah, maybe we leave that as a thought rather than as an area that we need to deeply, you know, discuss on this particular episode at least.

I can feel an episode appearing in our future. We couldn't get through an episode without coming up for another reason to have another episode as usual.

You

Right, well, should we wrap it up?

Yes, we managed to get it in under an hour. Thanks for staying with us, those of us who are still listening. So Chris, just before we go, it's worth mentioning that this is the end of of Series 2 of the Growth System, where we've sort of been through the sort of 12 dimensions of the Growth Team operating system as we've seen it and tried to give a sort of sort of

You

systems thinking slash our take insight on all of those. Probably going to take a break for a few weeks at this point to kind of regroup, in some feedback, have a lie down, fix my second screen, all these little things, lick our wounds, and essentially, I guess, take in a bit of feedback. So please, please, please, this would be a great time to...

Mm-hmm.

Have a lie down, yeah.

Absolutely, it's many many jobs to do.

If you have some thoughts on how we might do things moving forward, what we might change, what we should definitely not change. Hopefully there are some of those. This would be a great time to send us some feedback, because essentially that's what we'll be kind of looking at over the next couple of weeks as we, as I say, regroup and decide how we're going to come back in season three. Anything you sort of added on to that, Chris?

Absolutely. yeah, I mean, it's something that you and I talk about a lot, isn't it? Is it actually how is this being received? Because, you know, we talk about stuff which hopefully you clearly kind of comes across as something that we're really, really passionate about that we that we know is important and impactful. I think what Colin and I sometimes worry about is does it

Do people get it? Does it actually resonate? Have we pitched the level right? Does it need to be more technical? Does it need to be less technical? Do we need to contextualize more? Do the episodes need to be shorter? they need to be longer? And we really go deep dive into it. So we would really, really love to know your thoughts. And if you put those in the comment, put those on email, go fill in a contact form at rev.space. Whatever works for you, we'd love to hear from you.

Yeah, I guess the same goes across all the content we produce as well, not just the podcast as well, because we do actually take a hopefully a holistic and well aligned approach to content generally. There you go. I just had to fit in saying aligned there because I couldn't remember whether I said it in this episode and you know how it's compulsory. Yeah, yeah, maybe we need to redo it. But before we do get to the hour, Chris.

if

I don't know if we've done enough aligned this episode, yeah.

Right.

I know that we all have places to be right now. I'll just wrap up by saying the growth system as always is brought to you by RevSpace, a growth systems consultancy that connects B2B organizations with the future of growth. So we offer consultancy, education and even applied delivery services. As I say, don't forget to follow and rate the podcast. It really helps to bring the content to wider audience and just...

Take a moment of your time to tell us what you think, as Chris was just saying, it could really help shape what we do here going forward. Thank you very much and see you soon.

Thanks for listening, see you in a couple of weeks.