Unlearning L&D | Ryan Kruger, Lucid Motors

Ken Babcock (00:00.942)

Hey everyone, welcome to the Change Enablers podcast by Tango. I'm fortunate today to have Ryan Krueger from Lucid Motors with us. This is going to be a fun conversation. Ryan is a senior supervisor of learning systems and development at Lucid Motors. And for those of you who don't know what Lucid Motors is, electric luxury sports cars. There's actually an outpost near where I live next to a cheesecake factory. And it's way more

way more entertaining than going into Cheesecake Factory for sure. I mean, these cars are incredible. Um, and Ryan is actually not in like a lucid motors garage. He's got an incredible like sound system behind him. If you're watching this on video, uh, tons of synthesizers, pianos, uh, we were talking about it earlier. You know, he's, he's kind of got into like the one man band, which I love. Um, Ryan does a lot of freelance work as well, helping teams think through.

L and D and that's really what we're going to talk a lot about today. So Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

Ryan Kruger (01:02.217)

Thank you so much for having me. It's gonna be a blast.

Ken Babcock (01:05.002)

Yeah. So I like to get going with a few rapid fire questions. We ask these of all of our guests. The first one being, what are three software products that you can't live without right now?

Ryan Kruger (01:18.773)

Okay, so it's 2023 and there's no way I could be taken seriously if I didn't say chat GPT or the offshoots, right? So I've got to go with that. Po.com is incredible. It's kind of an aggregate that does a whole lot with GPT or other LLMs. So that's incredible if you don't know about that. Number two, I'd have to say Microsoft 365, but not, you know, for the, for the PowerPoint in the...

Outlook and all that, but working with their Power Apps, like Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, those are incredible lower no code tools that really help facilitate a lot of great ideas. And then I'm here with you. And so I have to say, I don't think I have to say, but I, okay, very good. But I would love to say Tango, because we're just cranking those out right now and they're incredible. So yeah, those are...

Ken Babcock (02:07.374)

You don't have to, but you can.

Ryan Kruger (02:17.877)

Three kind of bigger things for us, yeah.

Ken Babcock (02:21.047)

Hey, I'll take it, man. Tango alongside Microsoft and chat GPT. You made my day. Next rapid fire question, within this broad world of ops, which you're a part of, what would you say is the most underrated role or function that ops professionals play?

Ryan Kruger (02:42.161)

Yeah, so I would say...

Ryan Kruger (02:47.177)

that ops professionals play. I think from a data perspective, problem solving perspective, I think that there's so much that happens within folks' specialties that is un or undersung. Team leads, coaches, these kinds of folks who've got to work with not only demands of the business and the speed of that business, but then personalities and people's proficiencies, just working with folks where they're at. These can be...

challenging skills. And so I think that those kinds of things that happen within our business operations, I think that those are super critical and maybe not as highlighted in some areas where they could be more.

Ken Babcock (03:30.85)

Totally, we just had Brittany from Loom on the podcast and she actually talked a lot about just this idea of internal enablement and one of the big takeaways that I had there was like, there's what you do as a business, right? You guys produce stunning vehicles, stunning electric vehicles, but there's also how you do it internally and both can be a competitive advantage if done well. And I think a lot of people just assume, oh, the business is the idea.

Let's go do that, but the reality is it's also how you do it. What you mentioned there is a huge part of that. All right, I'm going to hit you with the last hardest rapid fire question. We ask this of every person at Tango because I think it's critical. Where would you go in a zombie apocalypse?

Ryan Kruger (04:22.841)

Yeah, this one, this, you know, kind of racks your brain, I think. You can ask everybody and you get different answers. I like I think my kiddo would just come home like he's, you know, out on a bike ride and would just like, oh, it's not safe outside. I'll go home. So I think that's his answer. I am thinking it's got to be a public library, though. And I think that they've got some pretty strong doors.

If I'm remembering correctly, I go with the kiddo every now and again. But there are some incredible libraries that have 3D printers or other tools that you can use to do jobs that you're just learning and then you don't want to maybe necessarily go over that barrier of entry financially to go and get those things yourself. And for all of the things that I did not learn to keep myself alive, I think that there will probably be some helpful resources there.

And I would need to use those. Yeah.

Ken Babcock (05:22.262)

Yeah, survival guides, the survival guides library. I love that. I don't think we've gotten library as an answer, but like, Hey, if you're going to pick a place to be for an extended period of time, with a lot of things you can do libraries.

Ryan Kruger (05:35.657)

Yeah, maybe they've got a garden, and then you've got books on gardening, for sure.

Ken Babcock (05:39.51)

Dude, I need to go to your libraries. My libraries are much, much more, no gardens, no 3D printers, like what am I doing? All right, good stuff. You know, with the Tango team, we have some people that are just willing to join the zombies, which I'm still trying to figure that one out, but they're like, you know what? It's inevitable. I'm going in.

Ryan Kruger (05:56.465)

Yeah, that's wild.

Is there-

Ryan Kruger (06:04.413)

Have you asked if they think that there's like, maybe that they get to continue their present consciousness in a different way? Is that something that folks answer with?

Ken Babcock (06:15.722)

That's the right question to ask. We haven't asked that yet, but that's coming. The next time we get one of these zombie joiners, I'm bringing up that question. So thank you for that. All right, so let's jump into what we're really here to talk about. I think when we were first discussing what we talked about on this show, just the themes of learning and development coming up and different definitions of it and what it means in different contexts.

Ryan Kruger (06:23.889)

Okay, yeah, I'll listen. I'll listen to that.

Ken Babcock (06:44.13)

Can you maybe share with our audience who's a bunch of ops professionals, probably been the audience of many L&D efforts, what does it mean to you? And what do you think is sort of the best approach to L&D in a fast moving organization?

Ryan Kruger (07:00.881)

Yeah, so learning and development is, I don't know, I can say that it's the most important thing because I absolutely love it and I adore all of the brilliant people that I've been able to spend time with that have worked in learning and development. And then there have been places where you see opportunities and you're like, wow, I really feel like I can share some of this passion for what learning and development is. But from...

the perspective of my career, it's really been finding a way to make the information that you need to feel welcome, and then also to perform the tasks that are necessary. If you think about learning and development is oftentimes perceived as like the delivery of new hire orientation stuff. I think that people often, you know,

cling on to that and they see, you know, there's this trainer and they're charismatic and you know, they've got the stage for, you know, one to however many days and then that's your perception, right? Going into this, going into this place. And so from that angle, you've got this really great platform to connect and to build like a great culture. And then with that kind of great platform that you've got, you also have that responsibility to make it

meaningful. And it's meaningful to the end user, the learner, right, in our case. And then it's meaningful to the business that for, you know, taking the time to let folks sit through experiences or content or whatever, whatever that medium looks like for your particular industry, being able to make it meaningful for both, both of those groups, the business and then.

especially the learner who's going to come in and perform some function for you. But beyond new hire, I think that there's a lot of things that exist in different spheres that maybe people don't think a lot about for learning and development. One of them I would say is content, and that's something obviously that you guys are really tangled up in, is content and how to make content better.

Ryan Kruger (09:22.885)

With learning and development, when we think about the adult learner and how they consume content now, we are very quick to lose interest in something if it's not relevant or meaningful or helpful, kind of at the quickest time. There's studies that talk about F-type reading or different eye scanning patterns and how focus gets lost over a certain amount of time. If you don't write content in a certain style or if you're not...

considering the cognitive load of the audience, right? Like there's some kind of nerdy user experience types of things that are happening in learning and development. So we've got the content side of that too. And I've spent a lot of my career as an instructional designer, but then developing like some elevated experiences, which is I think maybe the third, I could go on about what it is because I could give you a questionnaire about what it is.

Ken Babcock (10:16.01)

No, I think it's great. I mean, you know, one thing you touched upon sort of this idea of context switching, right? I think the studies would say when you do context switch or you get pulled out of the flow of work, it takes like 23 minutes to get back into the flow. And that's a really long time, especially when you're doing that. So yeah, you're right. People's tolerance, people's appetite is sort of...

Ryan Kruger (10:30.749)

Yeah, I believe it.

Ken Babcock (10:40.97)

shrinking where it's like if this isn't relevant to me now in the moment and I can't apply it right now I'm gonna find a different way to do this. I mean has that been your experience as well?

Ryan Kruger (10:52.009)

Absolutely, absolutely. And something, so there are industries, I would say like in customer care operations, right? Where there's unfortunately high turnover and sometimes it's that, you know, those are kind of entry level positions, folks use them in between or it's remote, it's supplemental and they're, you know, just working to work and to get those things taken care of. And it's fantastic.

work that they're doing is incredibly difficult. And one of the things that I've seen folks struggle with is exactly that, where if we can't readily find it and then you have any kind of vulnerability while you are live with a person who needs you to solve their problems, it immediately reflects on you, right? And then you can put yourself in a place where, you know, some of these customer care phone calls,

challenging because people are highly emotional and you got to know how to deal with that Unfortunately while you're looking for something that's gonna help you solve their problem And so, you know how many times you've been put on hold and then you start to get into a slow boil over Like I just want to close my account or change my password or something And you know that that's what the ins and outs of this are every day so making sure that you're able to do something timely and in the right way to

You know, with your affect or dispositions, things like that, I think it goes a really, really long way. But if I can't find it now, and if it's not helpful now, it's just not going to be. And so that's the challenge that we've got to overcome for, I think, everybody.

Ken Babcock (12:35.596)

Yeah.

Yeah. And if you can't trust it, right? That trust is actually kind of being transmitted through you to the customer. In that customer care example, right? That customer is trusting you with a problem that you need to solve. You know, if you can't trust the information, you're not gonna allow that customer to maybe not trust you then, because you're like, ah, I'm not really sure if this is it. Maybe try that, I don't know. I just found this doc. Like, you're not gonna say that.

Ryan Kruger (13:06.29)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (13:07.362)

So that's another challenge too. I wanna shift gears a little bit. You had mentioned to me sort of a framework that you've developed and use for this learning and development feedback loop, the ADDI framework, A-D-D-I-E. Can you spell that out for us and explain how that works today at Lucid?

Ryan Kruger (13:30.485)

Sure. And yeah, so to clarify, I wish that I made it. I would love to take credit for Addy. But that's a framework that a lot of adult learning professionals or learning designers, curriculum designers, teachers, like a lot of folks that go through education, they will use Addy or cite Addy as one of the methods that you can use to design learning experiences. And Addy is, yeah, A-D-D-I-E.

in the first letter, A, analyze. And then you've got D for design, D for develop, and then I for implement, and E for evaluate. So to break those down, the analysis stage is really discovery, and when you're finding out, what is my customer problem? And the customer can be the business, it can be the learner. It depends on what you're presented with. Oftentimes we're

you know, presented with a business case of, you know, we've done analysis and we found that training was needed. And so you'll make training and you'll go and you'll deliver it to folks. But, you know, analysis is really the crux of what we do to define what needs to be created or sometimes not created. I would love to talk a lot more about that as we go on, but sometimes your analysis finds that a formal learning experience, as a lot of folks, you know, understand it to be, is not...

the solution. And so you move into design once you've done your audience analysis and designing the framework for your learning experience. And so this can be anything from the scripting. So how is your video going to go? It can be like a short form micro video. It can be full blown e-learning or a learning path that spans a week. But you have to have some kind of training outline that you're going to.

present as the solution. And so you design that and all of its components, whatever that means for your hypothesis to be solved for this particular problem. Develop is the next stage. And you put pen to paper, and you can get everything going. So those e-learnings, the videos, et cetera, there's usually some formal medium that's going to go out for mass consumption. And so that Develop stage sets us up for that. And then we implement.

Ryan Kruger (15:56.165)

Implementation happens in a lot of different ways too, because formal learning events, a lot of times folks think that it's instructor led is kind of the model, until COVID hit and then everybody was learning online. My kids, and I think first and second grade, my niece is in second grade and my son was in first grade, but they went to full online and wow, wowsers. It was wild, right? So it was interesting to see how the models flipped and then...

knowing that the implementation can happen asynchronously, it can happen synchronously, it can be flipped classrooms so there's study materials and then I follow up with the class and have guided conversations. There's a whole lot of ways to implement it but usually, right, you've got some content somewhere. And when everything's said and done, once you've sent it out to, if you're piloting or if it's a test, you can take a look at the sample size and figure out from an evaluation perspective, did this achieve?

what we needed it to achieve, which is a very large question. And how do you evaluate that, right? And there's evaluation models out there like Kirkpatrick or Kaufman and lots of varying opinions on what to use or what things from each of these to use, but you tend to do that after so you can figure out what do I change to make this more effective for more folks? Or was this a one-time thing?

And then in that case, maybe you don't need to do as much evaluation because you knew that it was consumable for the point of need at that time, if it's a very specific issue. So yeah. That's the model.

Ken Babcock (17:37.358)

Yeah, super helpful to spell that out. I feel like that last piece around evaluate is where maybe a lot of people are missing. Maybe they're not even intentionally doing the Addy framework, but my experience has always been kind of, all right, we've identified a gap, let's fill a gap, we do the thing, and then let's wash our hands, we're good, we did the thing. But that evaluate stage, how do you sort of bring that

into the culture where you say, okay, yeah, we did something, but maybe it wasn't the right thing. Maybe we need to go back to the drawing board. Is there a big cultural shift there?

Ryan Kruger (18:15.889)

Yeah, absolutely because I would say even that evaluate and analyze can be kind of part of the same thing like if you're in You know adult learning or in industry doing corporate type learning, you know that sometimes you enter a job And you're not just creating from scratch. You're maintaining stuff that exists and if the What is that game called Jenga if the Jenga block gets pulled out, you know, who knows what's gonna what's gonna topple over so

Evaluating what happens when you start to manipulate that experience can be challenging if you're coming in brand new, but what often isn't happening is that we're not doing the analysis part right to define a problem. Because if you can't identify that problem, I think pretty accurately, or at least have a big enough target to...

to go after and think, I could make a change here. Whether that's a KPI, whether it's sentiment around something, which is a KPI, depending on what you're measuring, it could be a whole lot of different things. And you oftentimes want to have a result for the learner, and you want to have a result for the business. And so when you look at evaluation models like Kirkpatrick,

there's four stages of Kirkpatrick. And the first is that there's a reaction. So somebody says, oh wow, you know, I had training or that looked great or it didn't look so great. And that was challenging to follow. That's the first kind of rung of the evaluation model for Kirkpatrick. The second is learning. And so this is what addresses like the memorization or I can recite back some things, right? To the...

teacher or to customers or whoever needs to know that this is what's occurred. And sometimes, I think folks go through the idea that if I give a learning event and I provide a multiple choice question that is proper evaluation of somebody's aptitude or proficiency to be able to go and continue this thing that I need them to do. But rote memorization does not.

Ken Babcock (20:25.664)

Okay, sure.

Ryan Kruger (20:37.065)

really like sync up with performance and like muscle memory and stuff. Like if I need to remember it once and I don't use it again for the next two weeks, two months, it will be gone. Yeah, and what good did that do? And so finding the right way to figure out like maybe instead of thinking of it as did learning happen, the next level of Kirkpatrick is behavior. And so trying to define like, did a

Ken Babcock (20:47.979)

Oh, no.

Ryan Kruger (21:04.785)

was I able to instill some kind of behavior change? So folks weren't accessing, let's say, the knowledge base, to go find all of their help materials. And did I get increased visibility into this platform that I need to send my information out? And so how do I monitor that? And we've got great analytics and all of these different tools that we've been talking about more. And then the last part is the result. So what is the result of this effort?

If you've got all of these kinds of things tied into KPIs at the end of it, the customer care model is really clean because you can see that call times dropped or customer satisfaction is higher. People aren't transferring for things that we thought were challenging because we found the right way to deliver that information. And that's really, I think, the crux of our work in learning and development.

Ken Babcock (22:00.982)

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You know, there's two things that you mentioned there that I really want to dig in on. Maybe a little while back you said, sometimes when you're in that analysis phase and then moving into design, you might not actually need that formal training event, right? Like I'm sure that that's a crutch for a lot of people where it's like, oh, someone doesn't understand something or we need to train people up on this. Let's go for a formal learning event. What are the situations where that...

doesn't make as much sense or where maybe you push back and you say, hey, actually, let's think about this a different way. Maybe we don't need that formal instruction.

Ryan Kruger (22:40.401)

Yeah, so there is a professional in this line of work, her name is Cathy Moore, and she's coined this action mapping framework for designing learning. And the whole idea is trying to define is what you're using in this learning experience, does it apply specifically to what somebody will have to do? And if the answer is no, you remove it. We don't need extra context, you know, and more.

uh, you know, just storytelling and things for the sake of storytelling. If you need to know something to do the job, we need to focus on getting you to be able to perform that task. And so that concept of, uh, action mapping then kind of brings forth. Like if somebody tells you, uh, I think as an example, uh, we could use. I need Salesforce training or I need SAP training, or we could even get a little bit more universal and say, I need training on Excel.

as an example, right? I think that you could have experience in any of these tools and then enter any company that you're new to and find that it's been built in a completely different way than what you're familiar with. So how do I solve the problem? Is it training Excel? Is it going to support.microsoft.com or learn.microsoft.com to figure out, you know, how do I do a pivot table? I don't think so.

Right? Like that's where it comes down to where, like, this is where things are interesting as learning designers is that we could say, yes, we'll train to Excel. But I think that you might need to focus on your tool and specific functions of your tool. It might not be that the folks that are coming into this role don't understand Excel as a whole. It could be that this

is unclear. I don't see any directions here about what I'm supposed to do with this sheet, where my values go, these kinds of things. And then even further, you could question, if the problem that has been brought to your attention about Excel in this case, if the problem is that we're breaking the form and it's a shared document and there's dozens or

Ryan Kruger (25:05.517)

entering information into this spreadsheet, is that the right tool to solve that problem? For whatever operation you're trying to run, whatever your report is and how folks are doing it. And sometimes we need to suggest that like the learning curve would be too great to get everybody up to speed on what would be needed to maintain this solution. What if we could propose a different solution, like a controlled form that puts the data into those fields?

If you're in learning design and you're there to do like the e-learning interactions and things, that's a, you know, a certain skill set that you have to develop content, whether it's the videos or you do knowledge-based stuff. We also have like instructional systems specialists and folks that are just, you know, highly proficient in a whole bunch of different tools being able to kind of prototype and then test out and say like, hey, did we solve some problems just by changing the way?

Ken Babcock (25:44.503)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Kruger (26:02.089)

that this work was getting completed, the audience for that learning experience becomes not the end user who the request was put in for, it becomes the business understanding like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We move too fast, right? We move too fast and we expect too much. And so maybe we need to take a step back and think like, okay, ounce of prevention, pound of cure, it can be hard sometimes, but those are the alternate perspectives that we wanna introduce, you know.

to businesses so we can run more efficiently. Sometimes it's just, it's not the right solution that we're trying to train.

Ken Babcock (26:38.59)

Yeah, there are so many kernels of insight in there. I just, I want to share with the audience, just like two things that I think are, you know, just so salient about what you just said. A lot of times tools are going to be different across companies. They're going to require the context of that company and sort of the job to be done that they're using it for. Salesforce one place is probably not going to look like Salesforce somewhere else. And that's intentional. I mean, those tools are intended to be personalized in that way.

And the other thing that I thought was interesting you brought up is doing this inventory of, are we using the right tools? You know, yeah, if we're training, sure, we need to train up on Excel, but is Excel the right tool to get that job done? And I don't think, you know, companies are doing that as often as they should because there's so much inertia behind, hey, this is the process that we've done and this is how we do it. And so I need to train up people on how to do it in this way.

I'm sure you've encountered that in your career.

Ryan Kruger (27:40.237)

Oh yeah, a ton. Even within learning and development organizations that are, you know, they've been around for a while, it's really hard to try and let folks know, like going to like blended learning where, you know, facilitation isn't going to be provided by a sage on the stage, but a guide on the side, right? Flipping that model.

Ken Babcock (28:06.486)

Man, the Dr. Seuss of learning here, I love it.

Ryan Kruger (28:10.317)

Yeah, that's cool. I like that, Dr. Seuss. But it's interesting for folks who love facilitation, because oftentimes they're extroverted or they're subject matter experts, and you get there from a lot of hard work. But the goal at the end of the day is to transfer knowledge or to build comfort in performing the work that you have. Right?

That is no less valuable and it will never be less valuable, right? That you've got somebody who's competent and then socially savvy to run, you know, classes if it goes on for several days or whatever that experience looks like, um, you know, for that particular, uh, team or organization. Um, but sometimes we think that like hoarding knowledge and like keeping it, keeping it to ourselves and not introducing these new ideas because it's the way that we've always done it. That stifles.

innovation and progress, if we can't get insights to things, that's gonna be a long-term detriment to the group that you're working for because how will we get better? And so yeah, I think we all suffer from it, even myself at times where I'm so used to doing a thing where it's like, okay, yeah, we gotta do this, we gotta do it quick, and so I'm gonna go with what I'm used to and it might not have been.

the best solution, but it was what I could come up with at the time within that comfort space. And so always trying to find a way to poke out of that. I've had some really great people that have helped me do it. I've had people that keep me in my little safe bubble too. And you always love a little bit of both. So yeah, I don't know.

Ken Babcock (29:54.651)

Yeah, the stat that I always come back to is that 42% of institutional knowledge is uniquely held, meaning not in a shareable format. So if you take all the knowledge of a business and all the processes that exist, 42% of it is uniquely held by somebody who's hanging onto it, who's hoarding it, who feels like maybe it's part of their job security or it's what makes them good. How do you?

How do you sort of change that behavior in the learner?

Ryan Kruger (30:27.829)

That's a great question. So I personally, I try to become best friends with anybody that's in that 42%. And I try to figure out how do I extract anything until you figure out there just might not be a way. We've got an impasse in collecting this information or transferring it because of those blockers that you just said. And so it's.

It's unfortunate because I think that the person doesn't give themselves room to grow, right? If you're hoarding all that knowledge and you're not sharing, I think that, you know, if you're holding onto that because of the value of being the person that can complete that task, you might be missing some other doors of opportunity that open when you're able to share that and then find a different avenue to grow and to continue to be subject matter expert plus something, right?

new area, something that you didn't know you were interested in or proficient in. Um, yeah, I, it's siloed work is painful, right? It's really painful. And so how do you break that down for folks? I mean, that's where things like Tango come in, right? If we're learning and development is in a really cool, unique position where. In an organization, I can say, Hey, Salesforce team, I need access to a sandbox to go complete these tasks. They don't give.

things like that to folks just on a whim, because it's a license and it costs money. And from a sandbox perspective, is it built out? Can you do this, that, and the other thing? Sometimes it's just a non-starter. But if you're learning in development, I need it to do what it is that I do, then that's kind of the gold there, is that at least we get access to go collect this information oftentimes. And then we can ask just for...

15 minutes, 30 minutes, can you show me how to do this thing? And I can't tell you how many times I've had requests for training where we had a process that takes quite a bit of time and is everybody's favorite, like financial task of like doing expense reports. And I've done this in a few places, right? Business travel or expense reports and, you know, any kind of like multi drop down, I got to select the right thing kind of thing. Uh, and there's nuances there, but sometimes people come to you and they say,

Ken Babcock (32:37.799)

Their favorite, yeah.

Ryan Kruger (32:52.477)

We need training on this. And I've used Tango. This isn't an advertisement for you. This is just what's made my life easier. Okay, we'll pause. We'll say what's made my life easier is, but for real, having Tango open in a window, side by side with your Zoom, following through. If I have access to what they're doing, I shouldn't just necessarily sit there and take notes. I should duplicate it.

Ken Babcock (32:58.03)

I mean, we can make it an ad for us. Yeah, I know. Ha ha ha.

Ryan Kruger (33:19.269)

I should ask the questions in that line and make sure that I'm following along. And by the end of that session, I could say your deliverable is done, basically. I've got Tango set up for you. People can use this in so many different ways. And we could deliver this as its own learning event, or we could supplement it. If there's context needed, people need to make decisions based on like, what's the right choice in this particular form to do. You might need extra.

context and stuff. And so you would supplement it with whatever was needed for that particular process. But it certainly helps things go a lot more smoothly. And then somebody who normally would hold on to that information, if they're just doing a real quick thing, a real quick show, sometimes you get them to do that and they don't know that they're contributing. I don't know if I just, I hope, you know, those people aren't listening to this call. But yeah, it helps everybody.

Ken Babcock (34:15.31)

Yeah. No, and I think I want to call back to something you mentioned earlier around memorization maybe not being the best benchmark for was this knowledge transferred? And I'll maybe push it even further. Sometimes you don't need to memorize things, right? If it is an infrequent task, if it's something you're going to come back to maybe monthly or quarterly, that's where...

Maybe you don't need to know it inside and out, but there should be documentation that every time you come back to it, you can rely, you can trust that. And so, when you said kind of memorization maybe isn't the best measure, I'm wondering if, were you thinking about some of those sort of infrequent tasks, maybe those things, maybe expense reporting even falls in that where it's like, I don't do this that often, but I wanna have the resources to be able to do it in the moment I need to do it.

but I really don't want that to occupy my brain space. How do you think about those types of tasks and tools?

Ryan Kruger (35:21.393)

I've seen learning that covers the gamut where they give you soup to nuts, what a thing is, every component and every specification for that thing. And they expect you to know by the time you're done with like two or three days worth of onboarding, like all those parts, we put it in training. So why don't you know it?

because the business asked for this to be represented in training. It got two slides that somebody could have sneezed through before they saw it. And so I just don't know that being introduced to something once, being able to recall it 20 minutes later and then being asked to perform it two weeks later when you're also in a big life change, you are performing work that's like stressful. Oftentimes, I think most work is.

unless you guys know something, you're people who want to be the zombies. They're like, no, I'm good, I'm chilling. So, yeah, I think that the focus needs to be on not so much that there's that teach them to fish kind of mentality, right? Where instead of telling somebody everything that they need to know, if you teach them to fish, then they'll be able to serve themselves. And that's the behavior part of Kirkpatrick if we want to circle all the way back around, right? If you get to...

Ken Babcock (36:18.982)

Yeah, we're good. We're good, man.

Ryan Kruger (36:43.433)

build that behavior of accessing those knowledge resources that they know will help them at this time, because I don't know the answer. That's a crazy problem you're having with your phone or your service or your, you know, whatever it might be. I need to reference that, so yeah.

Ken Babcock (36:59.778)

Yeah, absolutely. And I know you gave your PSA on Tango, which is much, much appreciated, but can you talk a little bit about how you've been able to use tools like Tango to increase the robustness of your knowledge base and make sure that knowledge base exposure that we talked about in the beginning is sort of up to snuff to make sure that people are grasping the information that they need.

Ryan Kruger (37:29.669)

Yeah, so point of need is what we're talking about right now. And I think that that's a really good transition where, like if you think about a, so we work in auto manufacturing and we've got, you know, workstations with a, with a screen. And at that screen, I need to be able to access something because a car that's coming at me might be a different build than the other car. And it might be something that's newer.

or it's a release candidate instead of something that's on production. And so I need to know specific to this input what my action needs to be to get an output that doesn't get the line held up later. And so how do I do that using this machine, this tablet that's in front of me? And delivery of that information needs to be really immediate, it needs to be so easy, right? That I can just...

bop, find it, bop, find it, or what if I can automate it? I don't even want you to have to figure out what model this is based on visually identifying something. It needs to be more quick than that. It needs to be that I'm telling you that it's this. And so my system is now, you know, putting the right instruction in front of you because we planned so well, because we're such a, you know, efficient industry that we can put that in front of folks and make sure that they know like, oh, this is what I need to do now. And it might.

change, I might be surprised by like, oh, step five is a little bit different now. That's one way, like in this physical environment, right, that happens. But then, you know, if we're working in, like, let's say, teams or something, I'm using teams a lot, a lot, a lot, and constantly chatting and organizing and you see that folks create group chats instead of going to channels and there's all these like deficiencies there. And I've used teams to train teams using a

team tab with a tango in it. That's enough T's I think. I don't remember what I said. So, but finding the way to like bring folks attention very simply, if it can't be just like a link, if I need to like have three clicks to get somewhere and somebody is gonna fall off or if SSO is required and I need to go to get my phone off the coffee table over here.

Ken Babcock (39:31.916)

Man, say that five times fast.

Ryan Kruger (39:54.033)

Maybe I forget that I need to look at this resource, you know, because if you don't get it right then, immediately you lose the value of being able to have that instruction, right? Or that resource, whatever that might be. And so having it where it's needed, not as an obstruction, not like in your face and like somebody's workstation with tons of post-it notes where I've got to remember where everything is, or I've worked with folks who are incredibly good with...

Ken Babcock (39:57.855)

Yeah.

Ryan Kruger (40:23.409)

remembering the short code that identifies a knowledge base article, HT1924. And I don't know what that is. I think, you know, it's a how-to article for somebody, but it's wild, right? That you could recall that and then come back, but not everybody is willing to, or should they have to, right? Do that. And so we need to be more intentional about putting that right, right there, right when they need it.

Ken Babcock (40:48.714)

Yeah, and I think that that's a great note for us to kind of wrap on. I know we've covered a lot of ground here and we're just about at time, but no, taking in all this context and we have the ability to take in so much context around what people are doing, what their role is, what their core tasks are, who we've never had before. And so, you know, being able to surface the right knowledge, like you said, in that moment of need.

in the context of what you're doing to perform the tasks that you need to perform. What we're hoping even with Tango is that by being able to do that, we solve a lot of these deficiencies in learning that we talked about. If you can't apply it, you're probably not going to pursue it. Or if it's something that you're going to have to come back to in two or three weeks and the expectations that you've memorized it, is that a fair expectation? So...

Ryan, I loved having you on. Um, you know, we've got a lot of people listening to the podcast. I want to ask you as our closing question, what are you reading, watching, listening, you don't have to answer all three, but of those, you know, what, what are you doing right now?

Ryan Kruger (42:02.761)

Sure, well, I mean, first, thanks for having me. It's been great. And I'm sure I'll be in touch with Tango and everybody that I've worked with and chatted with so far is fantastic. So thank you so much for the opportunity to talk some more about it because it's the bright spot, and a lot of the work that we do being able to do this. So thank you. But what am I reading, watching or listening to? So lots of music gear behind me. And this year...

Ken Babcock (42:21.794)

Awesome. Thank you.

Ryan Kruger (42:32.789)

kind of a nerd for some kinds of music, but there's a artist who does a cartoon called Metalocalypse, and he put out a new album this year. And he's touring, his name is Brendan Small, and so he did a lot of the animation and the storyboarding, and they've got voices like Mark Hamill's on there, Luke Skywalker, so that's pretty incredible. He did a movie that was just released, and then it came with a new album, and so I was listening to that because it's been.

a long time for hearing anything by him. And so I realized you probably met podcasts or other, you know, educational resources.

Ken Babcock (43:10.578)

No, that's great, man. I think I'm gonna have to change our question to, where do you go in the metal apocalypse? Yeah. Yeah, maybe it's a zombie metal. Yeah, we can figure it out. We'll figure it out after this call. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. All right, Ryan. Well, thanks for joining us today. I know the audience is gonna get a lot out of this conversation. So thanks for sharing.

Ryan Kruger (43:18.509)

Yeah, well, it probably includes zombies, I think, right? There's gotta be some of that in there.

Ryan Kruger (43:29.073)

And you have to make it catchy too. So good luck.

Ken Babcock (43:40.334)

everything that you did. All right.

Ryan Kruger (43:40.569)

Awesome. Thank you so much.