Brian Hackett, Founder of The Learning Forum

Siobhan Savage: All right, I'll get us started in three, two, welcome everyone to Skills Connect. This is a series where we have conversations with bold and responsible leaders. I'm Siobhan Savage and I am the CEO and co founder of Reejig. Today I'm joined by Brian Hackett. Brian is the founder of the Learning Forum.

Brian has spent many years. I don't want to say how many, Brian, you can do that. Spent many years working at Fortune 500 leaders with their companies, with government agencies, to enable them to all learn from each other. There has never been a more important time, I believe, for community in this world where we're really grappling with what the world is going to look, how we build our workforces and how we share and learn.

Brian and I have built the work design collective together, and this is bringing transformational leaders together to rethink how we design work for this new era of AI. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how we are going to reinvent the workplace, how we're thinking about maximizing zero wasted potential, and how we're enabling leaders to think about being bold and responsible in this new era.

Brian, it is incredible to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Brian Hackett: Thanks for having me. This will be fun.

Siobhan Savage: So tell me a little bit, folks will be wanting to know a little bit about the learning forum for the new listeners, but for your, give us a summary of a little bit about what is the learning forum?

What's your mission? Why did you get into it? We would love to know.

Brian Hackett: Well, we've been doing this for 25 years now. We, the reason we do it is because it's the best way for peers to learn peers that are practitioners. We'll all have the same problems. And generally, these problems are emerging every week.

And so they need a way to learn fast with the, people they can trust

Siobhan Savage: because

Brian Hackett: They're all in the same boat. So that was the whole genesis of it. And we now have, 18 different peer groups, mostly in the HR space. Covering most of the COEs and CHROs on down. So HR's been our niche. And that's it.

it's to help our members help each other learn.

Siobhan Savage: And I think from attending quite a few of these forums, the thing that I love about it's actually, leaders sharing with leaders. It's a very open, forum where folks are helping each other rise. Through dealing with challenges that folks have never dealt with before in this new era of AI.

Is really getting folks to a point where we're all searching for answers. And I think for us at Reejig, the reason why we partnered with you and what you're doing and we're an enabler of that is because we also believe in sharing and wisdom of the crowd and, how can we all learn from each other and make sure that we're all leading?

So I love the environment that you've created and it's got a very senior forum as well, which is great. So it's actual decision makers in the room.

Brian Hackett: It's the people who run the functions, right?

Siobhan Savage: And what, why, how did you get into this? How did you fall into community? Where, tell me a little bit about that.

Brian Hackett: Well, it's people ask me, how did I start this company? And the real reason was I got fired. That's the truth. What happened was I did this at the conference board and then at nine 11 hit. I was in the research function. So we were overhead, nobody was going to conferences. So the business had to shift.

So essentially I did get fired, which is my story for other people who are dealing with job changes. There's a lot of hope. It was probably the best thing that ever happened, but the, what happened was the people I know from that work asked me to form a group. Because they know I could do it and started with 1.

and I said, now we have 18. It's because the formula works is what, these people, they learn when I say is what the groups we run, they're coming to see each other. We could do a meeting without any agenda and it would be a success. The 1st thing they need to do is talk about the things that are most current.

But they're dealing with, and that's what we do. We let them. Shape the agenda, drive the conversation. We do the research to show what's real and not, because there's a lot of hype out there, as. And so that's our Reason for being.

Siobhan Savage: Which is, I think, which I think is just great. And I think, as companies are hurtling towards AI now, why not do you believe that it is important for community, for sharing, for learning, what, how did this whole work design collective come around, with your, with your stakeholders and then us getting together?

Tell us a little bit about that.

Brian Hackett: Because our members asked us, this is something that they're all right now is the most top of mind issue for them. And so, that's what we do. We react to the need of the members. And in this case, we put out that notice, last week for hoping to get 30 companies.

We had 30 companies in a week and more senior people than we normally get. We always get the heads of the COEs. Now we got their bosses coming to join this because they see the opportunity. They see the challenge. Yeah. They also realize that no one has the answers and the best way to figure it out is to work with others.

And so the other thing about the group, it's all large global companies. So their peers at that level too. You look at the list of companies you'll see. And I think it's that it's the timing is right. People are starting to create roles inside of HR to handle this. They're trying to figure out what that means, what that scope is, all the every COE is involved in this topic, right?

It's the first time that they really are going to work across silos. They have to and it's interesting because this is where the C. H. R. O. Has to be the key leader in this coordinator. But what we're finding is there, they have all their other things that they're tasked with that. They're finding a right hand person to lead this because it needs to be led to.

That's the other part. This isn't going to be something that. We'll just wait and see what happens. This is too urgent and it's all moving so fast. That's the other thing. That's, they know it's moving fast.

Siobhan Savage: I agree with you on that. And the other thing I would add to that I have seen and why we got involved was. I'm a background, my background is workforce strategy, right? So my career has always been in workforce strategy and, I love this type of environment where you're rapidly responding to changes in whether it's economic, business, competitor, etc.

And what we're seeing is that. In most situations, this is not being led by HR. And the problem that I'm seeing is that there's a lack of, knowledge. I was talking to some folks the other week and they think that AI is two to three years away and I'm, what, are you, what? It was just, for me, it was hot, why do you not think that this is a thing for you?

And I've got this big concern that on one hand. If you go down this road of being really bold and reinventing the workforce and letting the AI teams go and drive this across the workforce, we're going to have a serious problem where the workforce itself is going to be so impacted and the HR team have no control over that or ability to help and be responsible.

But on the other hand, it's, this is literally the moment. This is our moment from a HR perspective where we need to invest in skilling and upskilling ourselves to learn rapidly. At pace and to be able to, be part of that conversation to help drive this across the business because most of the asset costs in an organization is your workforce.

And if we don't do anything about that to enable, the movement of work, they're upskilling the essentially the learning strategy and the people strategy should be directly connected to the AI strategy. And I'm been in a lot of conversations right now, not with HR, I'm talking CEO, CFO. COO. And I'm, where's the people team?

Yeah. Where are you? And then I'll go and directly reach out to them and they don't even know that the project's happening. And I think one of the things that I really am excited about Brian with the forum that we've created, it's all about teaching. It's no HR person has ever got time to upskill themselves because we're so busy looking after everybody else that this is actually a moment for folks to get together.

To learn from the wisdom of the crowd, we're going to give away IP that no one else has access to that'll give you an insight on how to think about this, why to think about this, and to use data for decision making support so that when you're going to the AI teams or you're going to the CFO, that you can actually have a real meaningful conversation based on actual factual data.

So, that's going to be really important, but I do think. This is our moment. This is the moment that we need to step up. This is the moment that community really matters because, I love the fact that you're helping the community rise to make sure that they're ready for this moment.

And I think, when you and I spoke about this forum, you were seeing it on one side from members. And then I'm with these customers having the same conversation. And it's, hold on a second. There is a big gap of knowledge here. And most of the time people won't have time to upskill themselves to it's so new as well that everyone doesn't know the answer and that's okay.

It's getting comfortable with, we're going to, build this plane while jumping off the cliff, at the same time, but how do we make sure that everyone is learning from that experience? So I think, for anyone that's listening right now, from a HR perspective, it's actually your responsibility now to start getting yourself upskilled.

You got to learn about this. There's plenty of resources, join the group that Brian's put together to get involved in here, because, that's where you're going to learn from top leaders who are already out there testing and piloting and trying and getting cut through and feeling because the failures are really important as well.

Brian Hackett: And I think, the people that have gravitated towards this group and their senior people have learned some things about AI. They are experimenting and that's why they know it's. How important it is, I think the people that haven't taken the time to actually experiment, they're the ones that think it's going to be two or three years away, that's an opportunity for them to get their own learning done to understand the impact of this, or talk to the members of their team that are experts in this and get up to speed or else you're going to be irrelevant, really, if you think you can run L and D the way you ran L and D last year, you got to really shift.

Yeah. Because a bit of it, a good example of what's going to happen, it's already happening is people are developing their own content, their own learning, their own training because of AI, and they're getting performance support without corporate L and D involved at all. L and D needs to figure out what their involvement needs to be to support that because they're not going to stop it.

Yeah, the good ones know that already. They're already working on it. So that's also why this, work design collective was relevant to them because it's their life. It's their situation.

Siobhan Savage: And even some of the mistakes that I'm seeing being made in market right now is the old school way of doing learning and training, which is based on all job models and all pathing models.

And one of the first questions that I'm asking is, who told you that they were still jobs? Who told you they were critical jobs? We'd love to know your data. Because from my perspective, I can tell you right now that they are not your critical pathways. They are not going to be jobs that will be required in the next three years.

And the thing that people are not getting their heads around, which blows my mind a little bit is, today we have AI that's task agent, right? It's not autonomous, it's not taking a full process. With the maturity level of the technology, at current states, As much as there's a lot of, AI hype, it takes little parts of tasks.

Right. It takes sub tasks. It doesn't take a full task or a full process. We are very quickly about to move into autonomous where a agent is going to take from right at the beginning of the task, right through to orchestrating with other agents to complete a task end to end, and that is where we're going to see transformation that we have never seen before, which truly impacts rules, and I think.

People have been playing with chat GPT and think that's AI. I'm, no, that's a chat bot. That's literally a chat bot. That's going to help you write a fancier social media posts or spell check. But truly what's going to happen and where the AI teams are focused on right now in the companies is this.

How do we think about all of the rules in our company? Where is the highest potential based on cost, waste, or pain for us to think about AI, and then let's deploy that, and then what we're going to do is we're going to move through processes. We're going to keep going after process.

And what happens is every time you do that, you are taking out a whole pile of tasks out of a rule. You are creating net new tasks because managing agents requires new. New tasks. And then what you're going to have to think about is in phase one. Sure, you're doing redesigning of your work, but actually where the big part of the problem is going to be is this continuous reengineering because no one is going to deploy AI overnight.

And get it all done in one go, it's going to be a journey. And I think this is where, and once the train goes, this is not going to stop. Yes, you'll have some failures, but this is the pace that it's going to move at. And I think that's the part where I think folks are not really getting it, is that their version of AI is chat GPT.

And it's, no,

Brian Hackett: that's what they have to understand. And that'll be the new HR role is being that continuous re engineer.

Siobhan Savage: , think of why we're called Reejig, right? It's the continuous Reejigging. That's essentially what we believe in. And, none of this is a once off thing. This is a continuous evolution of your career.

And the pace that AI is evolving is just transformational. So it's this gonna be requirement from all leaders that are, part of any of this to educate themselves on, okay, where are we at now today and what maturity of AI looks and what is possible. And I think this is where you're going to go through multiple different stages of, designing, redesigning, you're going to do re engineering, and then you're going to do complete rebuild of jobs and roles.

and I think that's where the focus will be a lot on our collective group together is to bring folks through that journey of today we're here. This is where you're going to go and then this is what you need to think about next and give them the resources and support to help them learn in a really quick way.

what does that mean for their business? And then go back to their business and go and partner up with the CIO, with the CFO, with the CEO to really start leading that conversation. Because my biggest fear, as, is that we do all of this incredible bold reinvention, but then we leave people behind.

That's the biggest fear that I have is that, we are getting, we get good at this and then we're not making sure that folks are not left behind. What do you think, you've got a privileged access, right? To be assigned in board, to be part of these rooms, to be, talking one to one with a lot of these folks.

What do you think companies are getting wrong? When you're seeing in this world, where do you think the issues are stemming, how that relates to where we're going to go as a, in the work design collective.

Brian Hackett: Well, I can tell you what they got wrong with the skills movement.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. Tell me.

Brian Hackett: One is they didn't realize how much change management would be needed. The first thing they didn't get was what was their data good enough to even do this and do their systems talk to each other, which they don't. They over relied on different vendors to produce results that just can't be produced without the hard work of doing this, what you call the re engineering, they're starting it from looking at job architecture, which is almost old school too.

but that's what they got. And they got wrong that it's not about skills. It's about tasks and skills and other behaviors. Right. So it's not even just skills and tests. It's work design. It's teams. It's all the other ways people get work done

Siobhan Savage: and

Brian Hackett: how they learn. So that's what the, one of the ironies is when they started a lot of the skills work was started.

But nobody ever talked to the people, analytics folks who understand data, understand workforce planning. And right there, you knew they were going to have a challenge if they're not thinking at that level. And so I think what the work design project is basically the next step and get all the work that's been done in skills can now be used to get into work design.

Right? Because at least they've gotten better at working on their data and at least understanding the challenges. So, I think that's part of the evolution here, but I think the issue with what is going to do to how work gets done and not just work, but development. That's the game changer.

That's why this is different than everything else before. When people compare this to, when the internet happened, I have to tell them, no, it's not comparable at all. This is totally different, and there is that group of people that still think it's a few years away, which is almost criminal.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah,

Brian Hackett: it's, yeah,

Siobhan Savage: yeah,

Brian Hackett: one of

Siobhan Savage: the things. Go ahead.

Brian Hackett: Well, your other point is this is going to be a lot of disruption and we have as organizations and companies have to have some social responsibility to think about the jobs of these people as they change because some will go away, but there's an opportunity to upskill and give people the better jobs that this can afford.

But that's again, part of the bigger picture of the C suite.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. I think one of the things you said, I was thinking about it and I was debating myself, whether I would respond to it. And when you said the change management component and how critical that is. And, when we first started Rigi, we were very skills centric, people have skills, jobs have skills.

And when things weren't going the way we anticipated because you have this vision right when you build a product that This is going to solve everything and it didn't right, and it didn't which led us to, building out the tasks, etc But a lot of the excuses we would give ourselves as a team was change management was needed We need more change management and what?

I honestly believe I think that's bullshit. I think it's a data problem and, a lot of our, a lot of our own, it was excuses was very much so all we need more change management. We need to do this. There was a couple of things that became really obvious to me when, and when I say it out loud, I always feel quite silly saying it because it's basic stuff, but, the people have skills.

Jobs don't have skills, they have tasks, and you require the skills. So yes, skills are very important, but also so is the task, because if you're creating skill data of crappy data, you're going to have crappy outputs. So that's problem number one, right? And then the other thing is, If you are creating a language of work in HR that does not resonate with the business and business owned work, you don't own work.

HR is trying to create this architecture based on 1999 that is to structure how a company actually describes the work that's being done. And it is in no way in line with how the business talks. Right. And that was another thing where we were, Oh, we need more change management to get the managers.

No. We need to speak the language that the managers speak. They don't call you up and say, Hey, I would some Python, some communication skills, and, a side order, please, of analytical skills. They call you up and they say, I need these things done. For this amount of time, and the person will likely have X, Y, and Z because these are critical things.

That's actually, and it was after a bit of deep reflection from me and my team around, hold on a second, this change, so yes, I believe change management is going to be important. But the ultimate thing I think is that we all were operating with not great data. And that's not an excuse to vendors or excuse to the company.

That is just the reality. And I think the other thing. Is that no one really got, including me, and I'm a background in 20 years of workforce strategy, right, no one at that point really got why task work would be so important. And also, even if we did know it, we weren't able to build it that well because it would cost so much money.

And we spent a lot of money in building on our work ontologies, millions of dollars, we've taken over 50 million in funding, right? So we have dumped a lot of money into building this. And that's just not usually possible. So I think the difference in this next wave, and I agree with you on, you and I get caught up on a lot of this social media people tagging us in about skills versus task thing, and I'm very aligned with you, skills and tasks.

It's not one or the other. It's actually you need both and the folks that started out on skills were not wrong. They just were operating from the place that they were at that moment in time with what was possible. And I still champion those folks because what I'm saying to them is no, keep going, but let's get you the right data.

that, keep doing what you're doing and let's help you and let's not start victimizing this side of one against each other. And, it's actually the both, which I think you and I are starting to see that movement is starting to happen where it's, you'll have a few folks that'll try and throw rocks.

But generally speaking, most customers now have that realization that yes, people have skills and not AI has come in. They now realize that AI doesn't automate the skills. It automates task. And that was the moment of I could break through. I was talking about this for what, two, three years and it wasn't landing, but as soon as the AI component of tasks come in, it was this epiphany for everyone where they were, Oh, she might be onto something,?

so I think you're seeing the evolution in your groups of people starting to actually reflect what's your. What's your take on how people are viewing the tasks, the skills, the whole component of this? Are you seeing that maturity starting to shift?

Brian Hackett: Yeah, if they're going to look at the mix between work with agents, assistants, some total digital workers.

They're going to need to analyze it at the task level. So now they're looking at. Okay. How do we actually look at all these types of work that are the types of work that needs to get done? And then which of these components are going to do that work, whether it's. People, it's always going to be a combination of people and technology.

Now, in some cases, it'll be total digital workers can do this. And then, so how do you even look at what a workforce is anymore because you have to look at what that level getting back to the change management. I think what you said before about continuous re, engineering. That's going to be the skill set that's going to change, take over for change management because change management is we have a program we're going to go from A to B and in a year we're going to hit nirvana where this situation is the change is constant.

It's fast. You're going to have a team of people that's their skill to help re engineer the work. And it's going to take

Siobhan Savage: a different attitude. It's going to take a different attitude because most of the advice that I'm giving to folks is day zero. You're starting again. Imagine you were building your company from scratch.

What would you do? Because if you get stuck on legacy, you'll get stuck in status quo and you will not progress and you will not move. You have to go in with, what is the outcome that I'm trying to create? What are the tasks? That I need to do to complete that outcome. And then, that's where you then continuously rebuild and rethink the rule.

But if you are, Oh no, a HR support assistant in HRAS does this, and this is what they're used to doing, you're never going to change the way you do your work because you'll be stuck in that old school thinking. So one of the things that I'm really excited about is we're going to run this day zero thinking is going to be one of our parts of the workshop to really get them embracing, you're, we're going to build a company from scratch.

Brian Hackett: Right,

Siobhan Savage: ,

Brian Hackett: because there are companies doing that to compete with you already, so you have to have that mindset.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, and I think there's, for me, take a perfect example, we're not even a multi billion dollar corporate yet, right? We're still in our early phases, a hundred people still growing.

But one of the things that I did was I pulled the handbrake on when I realized that, hold on a second, this AI thing, this work ontology skills thing, I got to get this right before I start scaling again. And we took a completely different approach to our workforce strategy. We had our own dog food and started thinking about, what are the outcomes?

And my team, even for a small team, even though we're an AI company, there was so much resistance. There was so much resistance in even my own team. And when you think about, if I was dealing with that, and I own the company, just to be clear, I am the majority shareholder. I own the company. It's my, if you want to build your own company, you go build your own company, but this is what I'm doing to my company.

Right. And it was really interesting that, even the resistance of, she's killing the company because I was completely remodeling how we thought about this. But now I, when I go into corporates, I'm, I have that deep empathy and I can share with them. Hey, here are some of the things that I learned.

And one of the best things that I did was I brought my team together and we talked about day zero. Forget everything, when you walk in this door, we're starting again. And don't think about what's possible, what you can't do, what we try to stop. Day zero, and then that allowed and give everyone permission to completely rebuild and redesign.

And then suddenly you find that you can remove out 80 percent of certain parts of work that no one even knew was happening. It's just, it's so it's just a mindset shift that I think is going to be required. And maybe that is back to your change management point that it's going to take a different attitude, but this day zero component is going to be really critical to make this work.

And I think. The folks that we have got coming to the design collective is going to be really focused on that type of new thinking. We want the pioneers, the new thinkers, the people are prepared to take risks. We're going to support them through that whole journey. We're going to educate them.

They're going to be alongside other folks. So they're not on their own. Making these decisions. So if anyone here is on this call or listening after this, really do, whether you can join us or, you don't get in cause it's tight or whatever. I think one of the things that'll be really important is that the mindset you need to bring is just very different than anything you've ever experienced and that will be celebrated.

So Brian, we're nearly getting close to time, from a agenda. So we're going to be meeting every quarter in New York. We know having to double the capacity because we've had so many people we've had. We hit the 30 big fortune companies now have all signed up. We're now expanding that and doubling that.

what do you think is going to be the reason why people should get part of this other than the part that you said about, meeting new connections doing that? What do you think is going to be a real reason why they should be part of your community?

Brian Hackett: Well, they're going to be with their kindred spirits.

They're people who are, you said, being bold and creative and innovative. So they're going to be with people who get it and that alone is worth it, but they're also going to save a lot of time and money for them and their company. And they're going to learn practical things how they're going to reshape their HR function and work with the other COEs and, learn how other companies are doing this currently.

Yeah. They're all, what are they actually doing now? It's a, it's very practical and tactical in that case. So it's, I always say it's having 30 consultants that are lots of

Siobhan Savage: opinions, lots of opinions.

Brian Hackett: Well, really not. They're all on the same page in a lot of ways. So there's not too many opinions.

Maybe different ways of doing things, but

Siobhan Savage: yeah,

Brian Hackett: it's those conversations at that. That's why the live meetings are really important because you got to spend a day together and dinner and really get to those conversations. And then you team up afterwards to further do your research.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, we haven't released yet the agenda.

We were keeping it quite under wraps for now. But for those that are on the fence or thinking about, is this for you? Brian, if it's okay, I'll give a little high level just here's the here's some of the stuff we're going to be doing just so the folks can get a deep appreciation for what's happening.

We'll have a couple of break. We'll break it down into chunks. We'll have, one chunk will be some collaborative that day zero. Getting you all together, working as a team. I don't care what your title is, what company you're from, you're all part of the same team in this room.

And we're gonna do day zero, and we're gonna redesign an organization. Whether it's redesigning HR, or whether it's redesigning the team, we'll see. You'll get that surprise when you show up. So that'll be one session, which will be hands on, sleeves rolled up, everyone learning at the same time, and working together.

We then have partnered up with pretty much all of the leading AI companies. So not only are you going to think about this from the work design, you're also going to get immersive experiences on AI. 

You're going to learn from the actual leaders in the market about AI, what it means, how to use it, how to build agents, how to solve.

So we'll have another collaborative session. And then we're going to have a session where we're going to have a master class. And this is one of your peers in market who has already been doing this with us, who has already started on their journey. They'll tell the good, the bad, the ugly, things to look out for, things that are important.

Very unscripted, very private conversation. It does not leave the room and it's very much so you can ask anything. And then we're going to finish it off with obviously a lot of, folks, opportunity, time to talk, but we'll do some really fun, networking, getting folks together, a little bit more relaxed environment to reflect.

So that's the environment that we're creating. None of this will be vendory CLC crap, which I really don't. This is going to be very focused on, how do we make sure that when you walk out of here, I can give you a playbook where you can take it back and you've learned from some of the best in the industry, from the AI companies, you've learned all different parts of this and the agenda over the year will evolve as the market is evolving.

So we'll take you through the maturity model of where's the market at today. And then by next. I can tell you right now it's going to change and you'll already be thinking in a different way and we'll bring you on that community throughout the year as well. So if you have not signed up, we will share with you the link in the chat and we'll share with you also the link to Brian's community for the learning forum so that you can access, find out more information.

If you want to have a chat offline with Brian or myself, please do DM us. We're very active on social media. You can find Brian on LinkedIn all of the time and also me, which is great. So you'll start to share it and hear more. And for those of you who haven't signed up, make sure you get signed up.

We're going to try and fit as many folks in as we can and expand the program. And we have a couple of more exciting announcements that are going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks as well. So do look out for them, including the agenda. Brian, thank you for everything that you're doing for our community for the HR space.

We really do appreciate it. It's going to need more of this. There's never been a more important time for community. So we really do appreciate the work that you and the Learning Forum are doing for folks. Thank you from us and from everyone. We're really excited about our partnership. And also on a personal note, Brian was one of the first folks that welcomed me into New York.

So thank you so much, Brian. I really do appreciate the ability to just bring me into the market and really help me land really safely. So thank you folks for those of you who've dialed in good to see you We'll see you on next week for the next skills collective group and the skills connect And also for those who are going to watch online, there'll be resources that we'll share on social as well.

So thank you brian Thank you everyone for dialing in. See you soon folks.