We’re A Trend To Ride In 2017

technology wiresThe best tech initiatives this year have served as an aid, helping enhance our lives rather than distracting us from them. We’ve seen VR that helps the visually impaired see, a new form of renewable energy harnessing the ocean’s waves, incredible lifelike prosthetics.

These all serve as a welcome contrast to smartphone addiction. It’s a modern cliché that we’re more connected than ever, and yet, we feel increasingly isolated. But it rings true.

So we’re happy to say that Circles

“Instead of going it alone, make this the year you try a self-directed learning group like Circles.”

Written by Verne Harnish, one of Circles’ advisors and founder of the Entrepreneur’s Organization, the piece focuses on initiatives that will help grow a business. As Verne puts it, “your business and career will benefit if you strategically pursue the smartest of today’s ideas”.

Here’s the Circles mention in full:

“Most of us absorb far more when seated in a circle of peers who are studying the same thing than from the rows of a traditional classroom or while poring over an online course on our laptops. Instead of going it alone, make this the year you try a self-directed learning group like Circles (at circl.es). It brings together small gatherings of people who want to learn the same thing in private videochat rooms—taking the best features of book clubs into the digital era.”

If you want to find out more about joining Circles, you can read more here. Or apply to join. We learn better in Circles than in rows.

Circles Meta Journey

circleIn the first wave of testing Circles, we learned the limits of our learner’s ability to absorb content. We’ve tried to boil things way down to have a simpler experience during this next wave of tests. We restricted ourselves to one “drop” of content every two weeks, with an activity and discussion. This is designed to nudge the group forward from strangers to becoming a “level one circle” that functions smoothly. They are open, believe brains are plastic, trust each other, give and receive feedback well. They use the circle to set and monitor their personal learning goals to reflect and deepen their learning. Ultimately, we want them to reach week twelve of “level one” open to the power of a Circles experience, ready to keep going. So here’s our updated draft plan for doing that. We’d love any questions and feedback.

Meta Journey Overview

In the first three months of a journey with Circles, learners form a level one “learning circle,” capable of solving each other’s problems and accelerating progress towards their personal goals. Learners will get better and better in three fundamental areas, which we categorize as Act, Learn and Teach (ALT). These fundamental skills contain many sub-skills, such as setting clear goals, having an open mindset, being vulnerable, building a safe circle, giving and receiving feedback, developing habits, and rewiring your own brain. The Act, Learn and Teach cycle repeats every three months, each time covering new sub-skills and building towards mastery. This dynamic ALTernative approach contrasts with the traditional educational model in which students receive information from teachers and follow a static curriculum.

The following outlines the proposed outcomes, structure and content for the first three-month “meta journey.” (meta = metacognition, learning to learn).

Preliminary Goals. The journey with Circles begins the moment a learner applies to join. They are guided through the Circles Sorting App; a series of questions to profile, identify and refine a goal they want to achieve over their first three months. Diverse examples might include running a marathon, to learning to meditate, or developing a work skill such as leadership, design thinking or coding.

Themes. Circles have a “theme” which is a common area of interest that incorporates each of their preliminary goals. The theme is likely to last many three-month cycles, but the group may decide to change it.

Guide. Each circle is matched with a guide, whose role is as the “facilitator” of the group. The guide may be familiar with the theme or goal of a circle, but is no expert. Guides are responsible for:

  1. Reducing Friction:
    Ensuring that the technology works well for everyone, developing and guiding meeting agendas and process, facilitating scheduling and answering questions. Helping the group get and stay comfortable.
  2. Guiding the meta journey:
    A guide supports the learning process – both as individual learners, and as a group becoming better and better as a “learning circle.” Guides are also responsible for keeping discussions relevant to learner goals and weaving metacognitive skill development into the experience. Guides work as guides in part to build their own mastery in the “ALT skills”.
  3. Ignition:
    Guides light the initial fire and keep it lit. This includes managing engagement, understanding learner motivations and making sure they align with the circle.

The Level One Meta Journey: Structure and Outcomes

The meta journey consists of:

  • MEETINGS: The group and guide meet in the Circles video room bi-weekly for 90 minutes
  • DROPS: Weekly activities and information delivered and completed via a chat platform
  • Other touch points from the guide or Circles team that support the learning experience

The meta journey is designed to build the skills and capabilities of learners to form a learning machine, where their circle is capable of keeping the Act, Learn and Teach cycle in motion, and deepen their learning over time.

The Meta Journey: Content

ACT

Learners identify the specific outcome they want to achieve by the end of the initial three months. They also learn the brain science that underpins goal-setting and learning.

Week 1

  • Orientation: 40 minute video call between learners and guide to test the Circles technology and walk through the circle norms (see Orientation process below)
  • DROP: Group introductions: Learners introduce each other using available public info

Week 2

  • MEETING 1: Joy/Pain sharing, present 12 week goal to group (see Agenda below).

LEARN

Learners build self-awareness through insights into the key skills and character traits associated with a growth mindset and being vulnerable.

Week 3

  • DROP: How the brain works/neuroplasticity. Podcast explaining how brain science relates to learning. Learner from another circle reaches out via email, testifies and offers support.

Week 4

  • DROP: Goal setting activity that supports learners to refine and clarify their goals (visualization exercise leading into SMART goal process).
  • MEETING 2: Goal check in, challenge exploration (see Agenda below).

Week 5

  • DROP: Vulnerability: Brene Brown’s TED talk with accompanying key facts and resources

Week 6

  • MEETING 3: Goal check-in, challenge exploration (see Agenda below).

TEACH

Group awareness is built as an understanding of group dynamics and the power of peers is gained. Learners begin to teach each other.

Week 7

  • DROP: Storytelling: Send videos of learners storytelling from a previous meeting. Learners self-reflect in online chat.

Week 8

  • MEETING 4: Goal check in, challenge exploration (see Agenda below).

Week 9

  • DROP: Learners are asked to share questions they have about their goal. This is a fun, upbeat activity to encourage reflection and active group learning.

Week 10

  • Learners are sent an email to get them thinking about their next goal and next circle (no call to action)
  • MEETING 5: Goal check-in, challenge exploration (see Agenda below).

ACT

Active learning is understood and practiced, and the group knows how to use each other to keep accountable and achieve goals. Learners reflect on their goals, assess, adjust and set new goals.

Week 11

  • DROP: Learners are asked to write, draw or create a self-assessment on their progress, goal and other key skills such as vulnerability and storytelling. They are also asked to provide feedback to their peers.

Week 12

  • DROP: Learners are taken through a new goal setting process to identify, refine and set their goal for the next circle.
  • MEETING 6: Goal closure and reflection, group reflection, present new goals, discuss and choose next theme and confirm meeting time.
  • Guide sends thank-you notes

Orientation

The orientation is a 40-minute video call in the first week of a circle between a learner and the guide. The guide will set up a few times for the Circles learners to sign up. There might be a few learners in a session. Eventually, we might automate this as an interactive and gamified experience. The primary focus of orientation is to:

  • Ensure the learner has the Circles technology platform set up and working
  • Introduce the Circle norms (expectations)
  • Familiarize learners with process such as meeting agendas
  • Introduce the “learning circle” ALTernative vision

Over 40 minutes, this looks like:

Meetings

Each meeting (with the exception of a circle’s first meeting) follows the same agenda, facilitated by the guide. Each learner is allocated a week to present their challenge, which the group will then explore in detail, using it as the launch pad for learning.

First Meeting Agenda

Regular Meeting Agenda (Meetings 2-6)

Dan on The Year of the Peer Podcast

“It’s almost like there wasn’t really a language around peer groups, there wasn’t a narrative for it, they didn’t know really what it was or how to access it.”

Circles considers Leo Bottary one of our “comrades in arms.” His 2016 book, co-authored with the then CEO of Vistage, offers best practices for harnessing “The Power of Peers.” He declared 2017 “The Year of the Peer” and has been travelling the Globe and recording interviews with leaders who tell their stories about the peer teams that helped them succeed.

Recently, Leo interviewed Circles CEO Dan Hoffman via video conference for an episode of his Year of the Peer podcast. Their conversation went into depth on their shared mission, how to make people present in team meetings, being deliberate about peer support and how they both want to spread the word on peer groups and make them accessible all over the world.

Click here to have a listen to the podcast or watch the video over at leobottary.com.

Below are some of the main points.

How Dan was drawn to the idea of peer groups

“We learn better in circles than we do in rows. When I reflected on my own learning journey I thought about all of the coaches and the consultants and the courses that I had subscribed to and got help from as I learned to be a CEO. My peer group though, and I very fortunately had a YPO peer group for most of that time, was one of the most impactful and most important.”

“The thing that I loved more than anything in .. building a business was the learning journey, both my own, and also creating a culture of learning at work. I set off to start studying learning, working on learning and development, as well as chasing that feeling, and that led to the project at Circles.”

How Leo makes the most out of everyone’s experience

“What I’ve found, and I’ve said many times, when I started not only being a student but also an instructor in graduate school, is that we’ve got all of these these very experienced people in the room. It was really different from the learning experience growing up where you have somebody at the front of the class and they’re just talking at the students … here you’ve got all this intellectual capital in the room and in my view as an instructor, if I’m doing my job well, I’m going try to create the environment where they learn the most from one another, second from the material, and whatever I can add, great.”

Dan’s mission for Circles

“Our mission is to make it easy for people to connect deeply, learn and grow together.”

“Part of my mission has [also] been to take that feeling, that fire that does exist, for about a hundred thousand CEO’s across Vistage, EO, YPO and some of the other groups, and ask the question, why doesn’t everyone in the world have this? Why can’t this circle idea be a structure that really helps people of all walks of life learn together and move forward in their lives?”

How process drives presence

“Everyone’s face is in a circle, and you’re in the middle when the focus is on you. There’s nowhere to hide. You know you’re gonna get called on and it’s producing a very different video meeting experience from what people are used to. There is no multitasking and there’s a focus on being present.”

“Process and the right mix of ingredients for the right case does produce this experience of a deep and safe space and opening up that’s very powerful, and it produces it fairly consistently.”

Why Leo wrote The Power of Peers

“One of the reasons for writing the power of peers, which was published back in 2016, was this idea of how is something that works so unbelievably well for so many people used by so few, when you really look at the broad landscape of it, whether it’s CEOs or business leaders at all different levels.”

“We conducted a number of focus groups where we asked people what the ways they might think about learning. They’d name fifty things -books, executive development programs, go to business school- before they ever got to ‘oh, join a peer group!’ It’s almost like there wasn’t really a language around it, there wasn’t a narrative for it, they didn’t know really what it was or how to access it. It’s so not top of mind.”

Simply by turning up, Dan and Leo are a testament to the power of peer groups. They bonded over their shared passion for peer groups, and here they are, keeping the community alive and helping each other as peers. Thankfully, they did more than just turn up and are spreading the word on how learning with a community trumps going it alone in business and in life.

Leo’s Year of the Peer Podcast and Circles share a common goal; converting non-believers to the power of peers. As Leo remarked, “my hope is that with more conversations like the one we’re having now, people will seek out how to have more circles and how to make sure that the circle they have is the right one for them for helping them in their lives and allowing them to help others.

For more, check out the podcast here.

Show Up, and Open Up

Show up, and open up. It may sound simplistic, but that’s basically the recipe at Circles.

The guided peer groups we run help you explore the challenges you face in life, both personally and professionally, by tapping into what amounts to a universal experience.

“As long as there have been people on this earth, they’ve sat in a circle,” says Jonathan Hefter, the chief guide at Circles. “We’re simply doing it with some great technology and an agenda and a really clear mission.”

Jonathan has spent more than 20 years in business training and learning, drawing on a right-brain, left-brain mix of operations experience and creative peer facilitation. He rattles off the tenets of Circles with an obvious passion, exuding a belief that he’s helping the world become a better place one video conference call at a time.

But he makes it clear that a circle is much more than a conference call. It’s a community, and it’s his job to make sure the people in that community feel safe enough to open up. 

Jonathan, who worked for Circles founder Dan Hoffman years ago, has plenty of experience getting people to open up. He runs wilderness experiences and men’s retreats in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where men from various backgrounds can sit in a circle and talk about their deepest troubles. Jonathan is now successfully implementing this approach to Circles with one key difference, the technology.

The human element is still at the core of circles meetings though. The key, as Jonathan puts it, is to create a safe space where people can feel like they’re able to share. Just don’t call it group therapy.

“It’s not therapy,” he says. “It’s therapeutic.”

The secret to a great circle is having deeper conversations than most people are used to having at work. People need to feel they are in a psychological space where they can be vulnerable, and vulnerability is crucial to people feeling like they can go deep.

So, how does he do it? One way is by establishing norms, like ensuring each participant starts the circle being willing to open up. Another is ensuring that they cut right to the chase. In the first meeting, for instance, participants don’t go around the circle spouting off their resumes.

“I’d much rather hear about the last time when a deep, meaningful conversation happened in your life,” Jonathan says. “Or, better yet, why are you interested in Circles? Tell me what you want to get out of this.”

The potential number of answers is infinite, and the circle organically follows the discussion where it needs to go, while the guide, and the meeting platform’s timer feature, makes sure everyone gets equal air time.

Granted, Jonathan might not be your guide. But he knows how to pick them, and he has come up with a training program to make sure every guide can help every member get the most out of each circle.

The guides come from a variety of backgrounds — former coaches, a school administrator, a theater teacher — but the standout trait they all share is fundamental for Circles; knowing how to hold space. What that means is, Jonathan can train them on how to keep the circle on track and enforce the norms that have been established. But they all know how to speak from the heart and they all know how to tell a story. They keyword here is empathy. Importantly, they also know how to encourage others to do the same.

Because at its heart, Circles is about how the shared experiences of others can help make your life better. That means sharing stories, not advice. Studies show that sharing your challenge and how you worked through it will be more valuable than any traditional advice you can give someone.

“The question is how do we bring this into corporate America,” Jonathan says. “We have to tap into what all humans want. You want to belong, you want to know you’re not alone. You want safe spaces to get what you need so you don’t go home and pull your hair out.”

For more on how to not go home and yank at your hair, check out how Circles can get you together with your own personal advisory board.

“We all have something to learn, and everyone can teach you something,” Jonathan says. “Your life can be an endless journey of learning. And it’s supposed to be fun.”

Reinventing the Forum Experience

“Are You experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have.” – Jimi Hendrix

 

Top EO trainer Mo Fathelbab calls “Forum” The Secret Advantage of Successful Leaders. Vistage chairman Leon Shapiro says it’s The Power of Peers. I’ve run into many coaches and leaders who, like me, consider our forum to be the most significant thing we’ve done to improve job performance. We’ve also seen how it changes the lives of hundreds of thousands of leaders and those that work with us.

Verne Harnish, Jeff Snipes, Bob Halperin, Kaley Klemp, Shirzad Chamine, Mo Fathelbab and many others have generously contributed to help create Circles because they are so passionate about forums. And they’re excited to see Circles build something that  “gets everyone in the world into a forum.” (I’ve noticed that’s how they describe what we’re doing when they talk about our work to friends and colleagues.)

What Are the Differences Between What Circles is Building and a Traditional CEO Forum?

Short answer: cheaper. Longer answer: in some ways, better. Here’s a look inside how we’re reinventing the forum experience.

Lower Cost

Circles will be less than 1/10 the $5-15,000/year it costs to participate in a CEO forum. How? First, we’re designing for scale. We replace expensive coaches with purpose-trained guides leveraged with automation. Members don’t need to volunteer and be trained to take on a year-long role as a group “moderator.” But most of all, as David Neeleman described in his strategy to create JetBlue, we aim to give customers what they want and nothing that they do not want. We are not building a network, or running events and in-person universities, or arranging special member discounts from service providers like Fedex. Many CEO’s see a forum as the biggest part of the value they get from YPO or EO, but there’s no “forum-only” plan. Plus, we’re not building a prestige club for CEOs or founders: the Circles platform will serve many types of people.

Easier

One of the first things we researched and tested was whether a circle could produce deep, engaging experiences over video. It did! It even worked in our buggy video room prototypes. Not everyone can take the better part of a day out of the office every month, plus one trip a year, like a typical forum experience. Forums over video are a lot more convenient.

But it’s true that in-person forums really are exceptional. Everyone with the time, money and proximity to a group should join one. But Circles is not just stopping at being a 10x cheaper and easier version of a forum. In some dimensions, we’re going to be better and here’s how:

Deliberate

Almost every forum I know of is comprised of new members that randomly walked in the door of their local chapter around the same time. With the constraint of geography removed, we can sort deliberately. We can carefully balance forums for peer level, maximum diversity, and interests. With scale, social media, and a little data science … shouldn’t we be able to exceed “random?”

Focused

While studying the ideas behind “learning to learn”, I realized there’s something not so great about my CEO forum experience: there’s little follow-up – forums identify and explore the most urgent challenges at the time of the meeting. But they lack the structured repetition required to rewire your brain. You need practice. For all that I’ve gained in my other forum with YPO, just like most classes I’ve taken or books I’ve read, I’ve lost much more because of the lack of a continued focus. Circles contains a structure to help maintain a focus on a particular topic for many weeks, and then go back to it just when the learning would otherwise fade. This structure keeps members looking out for and sharing relevant content and ideas. It allows us to curate and serve up relevant material across each circle. Shared issues of any cohort tend to be multiple-choice and not as unique as the members might expect. This insight allows us to track and help participants in a circle with the most common challenges that occur in any group.

,,Connected,,

Group chat wasn’t around when YPO started in 1950. In my life, “circles” have formed naturally on WhatsApp, Facebook and Slack. These group chats have become an amazing place to stay connected with each other, and share content, challenges, and ideas. Of course, CEO forums can and do establish their own group chats. But we are creating and intentionally fostering a group chat environment to use this tool as an important connective tissue for a circle, between meetings.

Digital

In general, our digital platform enables powerful features. One example is timers – something important to ensure “equal air time” during meetings. We can also store secure recordings that can be reviewed at 1.5x speed when you miss a meeting. We’ll track issues, challenges, goals, and follow-up. We can remove some of the friction that comes up during in-person forums: Who presented last time? What’s the agenda? When is our next meeting? We can securely preserve and make accessible important information that even close forum-mates sometimes forget (what’s his kid’s ages again?) We can also automatically analyze forum performance and intervene if necessary. We can use audio and video to help enhance the meeting experience creatively. Circles is new, so I don’t know which features will have power and which won’t, but it is going to be interesting continuing to experiment.

How Do You Explain Forum To Someone Who Hasn’t Experienced It?

It’s not easy explaining the forum experience to someone who has never tried it. This Q&A on Quora and Peer Resources’ guide are good places to start. You could also read Mo Fathelbab and Leon Shapiro’s books mentioned above. Circles is just one of many participants, along with forum-based organizations like EO and YPO, plus other groups like Lean In, Action Learning, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Aspen Global Leadership Network, AA and Benjamin Franklin’s Junto (See more examples we’ve collected here.) We’ve chosen the massively broad term “circles” to align ourselves simply with a widespread, growing movement and to embrace its many variations. A big part of our approach revolves around one sentence: “We learn better in circles than in rows.”

To sum this up: I love forum.

I want to make it 10x cheaper, 10x easier and 10x better so that it can become accessible to 1,000x the people.

Why Lucy, Head of Learning Experience, Joined Circles (And Why She’s Leaving)

Lucy joined Circles looking for something a little different. (And she found it.) Now she’s leaving, but we’ll get into that part later.

Sometimes I interview people and think, “Man, I need to get a podcast going or something, because the passion behind this person’s voice is incredible.”

And I want people to hear that. And that doesn’t always happen, but it definitely happened on the phone with Lucy. I’m hoping that’ll shine through in this interview—because, trust me, when Lucy talks, you can feel it. You don’t just hear her answers, you feel them.

So let’s get into the fiercely passionate woman behind the learning experience at Circles who’s a sucker for mindful living and secretly hates warm avocados. (Weird, right? She gives us a peek into her favorites and not-so-favorites at the end of the interview.)

But before we get into that, in case you’re just joining us at the Circles blog…

What Exactly Is Circles? A Crash Course

Simply put, a Circle is a peer group focused on a common goal.

And it really is that simple. It’s all about inspiring human connection and using technology to do it. So if you’re looking for accountability partners and like-minded peers to group up with and tackle life’s biggest challenges with, you’re in the right place.

Want to join a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who face the same struggles you do? There’s a circle for that.

Want to get better at practicing mindfulness while you’re at your job? There’s a circle for that, too.

Want to start up a crazy cool company about learning, at the center of which lies your unshakeable philosophy on peer growth and human connection? There’s a circle for that. It’s called the Circles team, and Lucy’s been a key part of it.

Introducing Lucy Richards

The gal. The myth. The Circles legend. Let’s hear it for the leading lady herself.

Who Are You, Lucy?

So first, where are you based?

New York City, but I’m from Melbourne, Australia.

What is your role at Circles?

Part of Circles is that we’re building it on a Teal model, which is taken from the book Reinventing Organizations. [MP: Here’s where you can learn more about

But it’s part of a whole broader movement and as part of that we don’t really have titles, as such. But, for the sake of LinkedIn, I’ve called myself Head of Learning Experience. But no one approved that and no one needed to approve that and I do other things beyond that.

There’s lots of big companies that are adopting elements of [the Teal model]. Companies like Patagonia, Southwest Airlines, and Ben & Jerry’s are starting to implement this model.

What exactly do you do at Circles?

I work with Dan, the founder, to support him and his vision to create an amazing scalable experience whenever learners connect to the meeting room. It’s an experience that really enables connection.

The way that I phrase it is that it’s using technology to increase human consciousness. And my role is to use technology to increase human experiences.

We’ve sort of identified the three key skills to increasing connection and consciousness in the world: having a growth mindset, feeling comfortable with being vulnerable, and storytelling.

So that’s my spin on it: Circles is a whole company about increasing human consciousness. From a corporate sense people would be like, “What are you talking about?” But that’s the vision that drives me and that Dan and I talk about in our back room chats. I’m just fascinated with how can technology enable human connection at scale.

What are your day-to-day tasks?

It’s quite varied, but recently I’ve been involved in building up the meeting experience. So thinking what does that feel like? and then putting processes behind that so it can then be used to train guides.

The other part of my role has been actually guiding circles [groups], so experiencing it for myself. And the other part of it is setting up Circles, so welcoming learners, getting them used to the platform, explaining what Circles is, and then I hand over a group of learners to the guides.

Why’d You Join, Lucy?

What drew you to Circles and what made you decide to join the team?

Definitely Dan was a huge part of that. He’s an amazing leader. It sounds kind of weird, but you kind of fall in love with Dan a little bit. I think a lot of people who know him would say, “Oh, yeah, I really love him.”

He’s got this amazing sort of soft leadership, but also very strong leadership at the same time. As part of that, he’s also very open and he’ll always listen, he’ll always want you to speak first, and that’s pretty amazing and encouraging.

And the other part of it is just the overall vision to connect people or to create experiences for people where they feel connected with themselves and others.

What were you looking for, professionally, before you found Circles—and did you find it at Circles?

That’s a great question. Professionally I was looking for some way to learn. I wanted to learn a whole lot of stuff and to have a strong leader lead that learning and to mentor me. And I absolutely found both.

It was awesome because Circles is about learning and I wanted to learn, so I’ve learned and I’ve learned about learning. And Dan has been amazing. And I would also give a shout to Sooz, who’s on the team, because she’s been curating a whole lot of information and articles and stuff. So it’s just like this constant flow of information that you can click through and learn from and it’s all relevant.

How have you evolved over the last year at Circles?

I mean, a lot. I think my biggest takeaway from it—which is so funny, because I’m now speaking in Circles [language], because we do takeaways at the end of each meeting—is about storytelling as opposed to giving advice, and especially in a peer setting how that can really open up the ability to build a relationship and build rapport with someone.

Should We All Join, Too, Lucy?

So what’s the big “why” of Circles—the big, passionate purpose behind it all?

This is my version of the answer, others would say differently—but the why isn’t very sexy. Talking about advancing human consciousness and creating connection is not really sexy in a corporate world.

But one thing that Dan said to me that really stuck out to me—and I think his why is—that it’s about creating learners, and building learners—and that an organization will only grow as fast as its people can.

So if you can, through the Circles experience, shape people so they have a sort of mindset and skills and their resilience to be able to go out into the world, they’re going to be better in the workplace. They’ll have the skills to grow and learn and teach and share—whether that’s in the workplace or with their family and friends.

What value have you witnessed in the circles you’ve led?

The most common takeaway, or common few takeaways, are, “Wow, it’s so nice to realize everyone has the same challenges as I do.” And, “Oh, this is so nice to have people to talk about this stuff.”

A tangible example of that is we had a group that came in and they started doing what is called the Wim Hof method. [MP: Learn more about the

They did that over 12 weeks and then they say, “Okay, what are we going to explore next as a group?” And they decided on mindfulness. Halfway through mindfulness someone in the group said, “I really appreciate all of this, and I’m going to keep going with mindfulness, but I also want to use the group to help me with a big other goal I have which is to get my physical therapy license.”

And it was this turning point of, “Wow, this group of people who were complete strangers have now become friends. And peers—a real support to each other.” And she said, “I’m going to use you to hold me accountable to achieving this goal, which is really big and scary and I’m not going to tell anyone else apart from my partner about this.”

Can anyone benefit from a circle?

We had one learner who was part of a group for entrepreneurs that are less fortunate and she didn’t have a camera on her computer. So she unfortunately couldn’t participate. So, hurdles aside like access hurdles and monetary hurdles – yes, anyone can participate.

Don’t Leave Us, Lucy!

What’s motivating you to leave Circles?

It’s related to the Circles broader vision and my vision for Circles. My mission is to create human connection at scale—increase human consciousness at scale—and I’ve only ever worked in small organizations. So I’ve never worked somewhere big and corporate. And I feel like, “How do I actually know what scale is if I’ve never been in it?”

So I want to go into a big organization to learn all of its slow, annoying processes and how frustrating it can be—but also the good parts of it. So I can then take what I want from that and be able to apply it to another setting.

What changes would you like to see at Circles in the next few years (even if it’s from afar)?

I think just continuing to grow, really. Keep involving the technology in the meeting experience and finding ways to do it at scale.

Do you plan on going back in the future?

I see it as an option, yes! It’s in the back of my mind, absolutely.

Let’s Get Personal: Fast Facts

Because do you ever really know someone until you know the random little things like what food makes them cringe and what their favorite book is?!

What’s one food you can’t stand?

Warm avocado! [MP: It took her a nanosecond to come up with this answer. She had this one READY.] I love normal avocado, like on toast or whatever. But if you put it on a pizza or in like a grilled sandwich, it just becomes a whole other food and it’s so disgusting.

What’s your favorite book?

One of my favorite books of all time is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

What’s your favorite marketing buzzword?

I talk a lot about building an emotional connection with the brand. That’s like my buzzword.

Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?

Lots! I’ve already written them down. I want structure, I want to cook on Sundays, and I want to go to Charleston.

I had a friend of mine decide it was going to be the Year of the Human Being. [MP: If you’re looking for my favorite part of our whole interview, you’ve found it.]

Farewell to Lucy, Hello to The Year of the Human Being

Can you tell it was an absolute joy to get Lucy on the phone and pick her brain? She generously gave me over 45 minutes of her time, so while we had to cut down some of our interview to fit nicely into this blog post—and although she’s left Circles —don’t worry – you’ll get to hear more from her as we continue to dig deep into the team behind Circles.

Interested in signing up for a circle? (Why wouldn’t you be, honestly? I know I am.) Leave a comment below or

The Meta Framework: What Does Learning to Learn Mean?

This is a deep topic. It is the purpose of many people’s life’s work. It is controversial. It is personal. But isn’t it exciting to think that we might improve at learning? Isn’t it the wish for more wishes?

For the purposes of Circles, we have synthesized a bunch of big ideas around learning into a “framework.” This is intended to orient learners to all the skills they might develop. It is intended to guide us to areas where we can develop richer course content and practices.

Below is a crude start. The plan is to shape this into a 20-minute overview – a series of “drops” and meeting exploration questions in time for our first trials. I expect we’ll hone it and add depth and cogency for years to come.

1. Visualize

Start with the end.

A year after I left M5, I returned to talk with my former learning department about what they had learned about learning. Emphatically, they said: it is all about the “badge.” This puzzled me. Badges are new jargon for credentials. The idea is that when someone learns a new skill, they are recognized for it by their instructor or by their peers. They collect badges like a Scout.

Is this about building an internal or external resume? Studies have shown that the “brand” of a credential is about 35% of its economic value (the rest being the actual utility of the skills learned) so it isn’t a surprise that this is an important part.  But for many learning programs it is a trap – students are more interested in obtaining the degree than learning the material. So, while important, I’m less interested in the marketplace for badges, per se.

Or maybe their comment could be all about the power of positive feedback? The business classic,

But the reason badging is number one on my list is not about bragging rights or feeling good about progress. If you can’t badge it, you can’t teach it! This is the only way to be clear about WHAT you are teaching. How do you know if a student put in hours or received an outcome?

And this is a big issue with education today. The system runs on credit-hours. A learner puts their time in and the program marches on whether or not they’ve mastered the material. Clay Christiansen, Sal Khan and others have focused on this – what they call “competency-based learning.” It is the same at work. M5 was training people without really being clear on what they were hoping students would be able to do after the training. And while I welcome the flood of new startups into the education space, many of them have the same issue – lots of people buy and start these programs, but few leave changed.

If the system of education-to-employment really became about competency instead of completion, hiring might be greatly improved. A study by the group Innovate-Educate in New Mexico found that only 1% of unemployed 16-24 year olds had a college degree, but 33% tested with the skills of a degree. A previously invisible talent pool? Similarly, 50+% of employers, depending on the study, complain their employees don’t have promised skills.

I thought about using only the word “visualize” instead of “badge.” What I’m talking about is where you envision exactly what success means in completing a learning program. We know that visualization in and of itself is a powerful learning tool and a motivator. See the ignite section below. In fact, if you can define the goal clearly enough, you bother a lot less with the steps to get there. Students will find their own way. After all, they now have massive access to information, courses, teachers and stories. And the paths may be surprising. For example, a 2007 study found that surgeons who played video games 3 or more hours a week made 37% fewer errors in laparoscopic surgery. Things that make you go … “hmmmmm.”

2. Map

Learners don’t get anywhere in one leap. This is where the idea of a “skills map” helps. Can you break the ultimate skill down into subordinate ones? Can you assess competency with each sub-skill and reward learners along the way?

Advanced skills breakdown into fundamental skills, in almost infinite recursion:

There are some sub-skills in common to many super-skills. I call the most common sub-skills “fundamental skills.” Communicating effectively, or collaborating in teams, might be considered fundamental sub-skills to super-skills like managing, selling and many other things. One of my challenges is that you have to get really granular in order to make any of these skills really assessable, teachable, or actionable in a meaningful way. “Collaborating” is way too vague, for example.

Clearly defining and communicating the “what” that you are teaching is a true art. It is hard. This is one place where you can imagine a true learning scientist earning her stripes. In fact, several modern learning projects separate the curriculum design experts from the instructors – more on that later. Anyway, a few scattered comments about this step:

While you need to understand your material deeply to set learning objectives, this very mastery can blind you to the challenges a new student experiences. Eric Masur, a pedagogy innovator, recommends using wrong answers on tests to construct the learning map, because that is a good way to see where students have gaps and challenges. Sal Khan’s book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined and of course, his implementation at Khan Academy, emphasize the idea that real trouble comes from missing a fundamental skill along the way. He asserts that classes that move along before a kid masters a fundamental skill is why kids sometimes wash out of subjects like math, for example.

Tim Ferris appears to be a genius at dissecting skills into maps. His schtick is that to get this right you dissect the sub-skills that have the most impact, strip away the rest and then sequence properly. You can basically hack any skill and “become world-class in six months or less.” He’s got a TV show where he does this with a different skill each week. I recommend his chapter on “meta learning” in The Four-Hour Chef. I have found his approach to language learning effective with my Spanish, but it is certainly not the approach of my Spanish school.

My friend and hero, world chess and martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin, picked a fight with Tim. He argues that shortcuts undermine long-term mastery. Tim’s maps gets you to competency fast, but leave you with cracks in the foundation.  Still, Josh extensively uses maps. His story in The Art of Learning about how in learning to play chess he first mastered the simple end-game with kings and pawns only, whereas most kids learned flashy openings, underscores this point vividly.

I’m exploring different forms of defining and communicating skills objectives, and it is clear that there is no standard and a ton of work to do. Not sure what format to advise, other than to get students to visualize in great detail, or watch, the target skill.

Beware unintended consequences. Dan Pink’s book Drive or Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics series illustrate graphic stories of unintended consequences of botched goal definition is also botched. It frequently is.

One concept I love in mapping is what famous dead-guy Randy Pausch calls the “head-fake” in his moving last lecture. That is to say, your course is really about something besides it’s stated goals. Most college courses are this – you might be learning economics but really you are learning how to make a logical argument. Very cool with me, as long as it isn’t some weak after-the-fact rationalization but is an explicit intention.

The learners also need to construct maps. We learn by connecting new information to old. The biological process is literally wiring neurons together. So, students need to be constantly constructing mental models of the new information, anchored in what they already know. I return to this idea talking about rewiring.

John Cone, former chairman of ATSD and head of learning at DELL, believes the single biggest issue with education is that it is linear. We don’t think that way. Chunking concepts into small bits (popularly 3-5 minute videos) that are available whenever the learner needs them is all the rage.

This touches on the massive topic of “what” to learn. Not all skills are created equal. Circles uses a framework for classifying knowledge, skills, and character traits developed by Charles Fadel, author of “21st Century Skills” and “4 Dimensional Learning.”  We will look at that another day.

3. Assess

If you can visualize and describe your outcomes, if you have made a map, then you should be able to tell if someone is doing the desired skill correctly or not. You know what to test. But this is maybe the hardest part. Learners are notoriously bad at assessing themselves. The famous quip is to cite the study in which 80% of people rate themselves as above-average drivers. We often mistake the pleasant feeling of passive understanding for active ability, and move on too soon. Plus, most things are really hard to assess automatically and objectively. So assessment might be the most important and difficult role for a teacher or coach.

But there are some new ideas about testing.

At the turn of the last century, the traditional who-you-know system of admitting people into a university broke down. Mass demand forced schools to develop grades and standardized tests to sort people at scale. That’s a very different proposition with a different purpose besides educating.

So when we test is itself backwards. Testing at the end is not that useful – it is too late. Whatcha gonna do with a learner that didn’t grasp something? Besides, the cramming that “summative” testing inspires is a lousy learning strategy. Test upfront, so you can adjust for who you’ve got in the group. Or deselect people that won’t benefit because they are starting too far behind or ahead.

But it is an even better idea to test during the class. Quiz. Why? First, it maximizes engagement and keeps people’s attention. Second, the teacher and class get immediate feedback on what’s going right or wrong. You can avoid moving ahead and leaving gaps that will ultimately frustrate or defeat learners. But most importantly it dramatically improves outcomes. When people have to actively engage instead of passively soak in, they build durable neural pathways faster. Make it Stick offers many examples and empirical studies of “the testing effect.” Kids that are regularly quizzed perform more than a full grade higher. Retrieval is learning.

By the way, you can quiz using the socratic method – call on people constantly. But we’ve got the technology for fully engaging the whole class now. One compelling example is Eric Masur’s “Peer Instruction” a process he invented while teaching physics at Harvard, which he describes and demonstrates in this video. Another favorite of mine is the innovative classroom designed by the Minerva Project, an attempt to compete with the top Ivy-League colleges, which Stephen Rosslyn, Minerva’s academic dean, describes in this recent talk.

There’s an even more important change in our approach to testing. Not only were we testing at the wrong time, THE WRONG PERSON IS TESTING. The highest goal should be to teach students to self-assess. This isn’t easy, of course, as we are notoriously bad about assessing ourselves.  But if you can accomplish this – showing people techniques for constantly checking their work, you will have students on the way to true mastery. I believe that this is amongst the reasons why teaching is one of the best ways to learn. Mazur’s Peer Instruction goes a long way to accomplishing this. And, ultimately, this is one of the most important learning or “metacognition” skills, as I mention below.

So, “formative” assessments are more useful by far than “summative” assessments, for the purpose of learning.  The ultimate is what Doug Lynch calls “Enders Game learning” – is it training? A test? Real?

4. Ignite

You can’t be sure of what you start with. Are students high-will, driven, self-motivated? Are they determined to learn? It is a safe bet that most students are not “on fire” to change. People fear change, even if they say otherwise. For me, this fear is captured by the ancient story of the Ship of Theseus, dramatically retold recently by JJ Abrams in the haunting novel,

So it helps to think about what will ignite a learner at the outset to get them moving fast and autonomously. In The Talent Code, author Dan Coyle describes places around the world that are unique hotspots for superstars – (women golfers from South Korea, baseball players from the Dominican Republic, singers from Dallas, artists from medieval Florence, etc.). He labels a phenomenon called “ignition” when someone sees that something is possible, and decides that they could do it, too. A clear example is how after Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile in 1954, ten others did it within the same year. To ignite someone, they need to see the story of someone like them and what they accomplished. Coyle’s advice to learners: “Stare at who you want to become.” You might help learners act on this with testimonials, videos, or live introductions.

There is a lot we can do to help get someone moving. Switch is one of the best books about how to change behavior that I’ve seen. Its central metaphor sticks with me: a man is riding an elephant down a path. The rider is reason, the elephant is emotion and the path – the path to change. You need to address all three. Logic might get you to set the alarm clock, emotion is needed to haul your ass out of bed, and it helps a lot if the gym is steps away from your house. (I love Seinfeld’s night-guy vs. morning-guy bit).

There’s clearly art here. Some teachers that I have spoken with talk a lot about how critical it is to find and tap each learner’s motivation. Are they interested on a practical or theoretical or even spiritual level? Do they look at the subject matter as technical or a chance for creative expression? Herein might be the challenge of igniting someone – finding their passion.

The great news for learning businesses is that “ignition” is your sales and marketing. But it goes beyond that. Learning programs, like all sales really, can fall victim to buyer’s remorse. Your students may need to be fired up again, especially if it is a long time since that moment they clicked to “confirm the order.”

5. Commit

This is a problem with both learners and educators. Learners think they should show up and get taught, particularly if it is job-related. Supervisors have better things to do besides teach. I wrote about the reluctance of M5’s managers to make time for our music program. More often than not, the daily grind defeats learning plans.

But there’s no way around it, learners have to commit. They have to put things aside. They have to show up They have to do homework. If you’ve been in the workforce for more than 12 minutes, you know that people in general aren’t great at keeping new, non-urgent commitments. Blame it on time management, self-discipline, focus, habits, the pressures of adulthood — it wasn’t easy to study in college, but grownups have an even harder time “making time.” Educators that care can’t hide from this fact. We have to design for it. One way is to minimize the commitment required. But here’s a few other ways:

Analyze the points where people usually quit. Address them. McKinsey’s team told me how they are doing exactly that as they create boot camps to ramp underemployed youth into hard-to-hire jobs. Their teams observed the jobs for a few days, and collected data about why people quit or fail. Then they prioritized these failure points in their ambitious “Generation” training programs. Tim Ferriss gives the example of pushing grammar rules way later in learning language, focusing instead on giving some early wins. At WIBO, we saw our biggest drop-out around the two financial modules of our 16-week workshop, so we implemented a process of having coaches check in actively during those weeks.

StickK is a book and website about applying the principle of promise-keeping by adding stakes and a referee. And, by the way, anti-stakes like donating money to a cause you hate if you fail, work best. (The George W. Bush Memorial Library is tracking as the #1 anti-charity on the site.)

Acknowledge that we are terrible observers of our own learning. Satisfaction may be few and far between. Encourage. Prepare for the long plateaus between inspiring rushes of new material. Understand why Disney deliberately designs queues to feel like they are always moving forward.

Avoid the shame-spiral by acknowledging that this happens upfront and give people multiple chances to catch up if they fall behind. Have a Plan B available when people miss a promise or mess up, like having restaurant delivery on speed-dial while trying to cook a new dish.

Don’t be afraid to drop some reminders of what ignited them to begin with.

6. Team

Lectures are the way most teaching has gone since books were scarce. As Masur quotes, “A lecture is a process in which the teacher’s notes are transmitted to the student’s notebooks without passing through the brains of either.” I think they’ve persisted because they are an efficient way to teach, albeit a crappy way to learn.

So, the big new innovation here is “flipping” the classroom. Imbibe the material, either in a book or a video or both, at your own pace, at home. Work with the material in the classroom, with peers. This has many benefits, but is relatively new and we have much to learn about how to do it well. (1) People stay awake and more engaged. (2) People feel accountable to their peers, getting some of that “StickK” benefit I mention above. But peer learners are closer to the problems a beginner has in learning and demonstrably can help each other more than a professor. It turns out, for example, that practicing a language with people at your own level is considered more productive than speaking with fluent natives.

I’ve seen lots of evidence of this:

  • Weight Watchers
  • Alcoholics Anonymous
  • The Boy Scouts
  • MBA classrooms
  • Omaha Health, an innovative healthcare provider uses it with groups of patients with diabetes and obesity
  • YPO and EO, and so on – all use peer groups as their basic structure for learning.

The key challenges are how to constitute and maintain a highly-functioning peer group. This is not something most administrators or educators pay attention to. At work, you may or may not be starting with a functioning team.

  • Co-ontogenic structural coupling. Maturana.
  • Inner Tennis. Learning by copying is the most basic way.
  • Pick your peers!

7. Flow

What should a great learning experience feel like?

One of my favorite books, Flow describes that nirvana-like state, sometimes called “the zone” when people are arguably at their best. Does your learning experience bring that out? I think these ideas have inspired many people to try to gamify learning, but I think it is useful to think about what exactly it is about games that make them so engaging. I think we’re after the intensity of rock-climbing and not just the addictiveness of Tetris. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes several characteristics of this “zone” state that are worth transferring into learning experience design.

  • Clear goals
  • A sense of control
  • Constant feedback on how you are doing
  • Near-total immersion, a feeling of losing oneself

The Talent Code picks up on this idea and describes the state of “deep practice” that superstars achieve – in short, intense bursts of 60-90 minutes with breaks.

I’d add a couple of other points to this that I learned from Scott Weiner, a successful learning professional and hypnotist, who I’ve written about. To summarize it, hypnosis works in part because learning sticks more when you are relaxed, and positive images of “what to do” stick better than negative “what not to do” messages. 

I can’t shake the feeling that much of this wave of learning science that I’m learning about is the recovery of long-known but often forgotten wisdom. Vanessa Rodriguez, a researcher at Harvard, is studying the impact of high oxytocin and serotonin levels on learning in classrooms. In other words students will learn more if they trust their environment, their teacher, their peers and well… feel loved. Harvard MBA rockstar professor and guru Clay Christensen has written about how his whole teaching career was turned around when he began to intentionally invoke feelings of love for his students before class.

This poses a particular problem at work, where the trust level is likely to be low. Is work the best place to learn? Here are ideas to explore for achieving the “flow state”:

  • A jelled peer group
  • Music
  • Time – is a flow state like sleep where it takes a little while to deepen?
  • Active listening skills
  • Physical relaxation
  • Mindfulness/meditation
  • Beginner’s mind – letting go of judgements
  • Positive intelligence
  • Humility
  • Grit

8. Rewire

It helps to understand a little pop neuroscience. Well, I’d guess it probably helps to understand a lot, and I’m learning more all the time, but a few insights stand out.

Biologically, skills acquisition is building circuits in the brain. Specifically neuronal pathways are wrapped in a substance called myelin. Good practice adds layers of myelin, like insulation on a wire, that improve the speed and accuracy of transmission. Scientists are studying what builds these pathways and what degrades them. Good practice habits can radically cut down the time it takes to build good myelin. The Talent Code and Make it Stick are the two best books I’ve read on this.

Some applicable nuggets:

Deep Practice. Effort builds learning. Struggling with material, engaging with it, filling in gaps. People remember words better when they are missing letters. This kind of intense work can only be sustained for short periods, so it is about the quality and not the length of practice.

Chunk. Break skills down into small chunks and master them.

Spaced Repetition. Building a skill is about interrupting the process of forgetting. The key is to come back to the information right before you are about to forget it. I’ve seen great results with learning Spanish with

Interleave. Because spaced repetition is so important, it is useful to weave concepts throughout a curriculum and keep returning to the important ones.

Mistakes Are Important. This is crucial to learning. Learning environments must encourage people to be open about them. Expert learners seize on their mistakes zealously.

Build Mental Models. Neural pathways connect to existing chunks of information. Using metaphors and comparisons and regurgitating information in learner’s own words is learning.

Nap. It takes time for these pathways to bake. Maybe 24 hours, maybe more. Sleep helps.

Slow it Down. Pathways can be built at slow speeds as effectively as quickly. Great practitioners share this.

Touch Quality. Repeating things incorrectly builds incorrect pathways. It is much better to go very slow, with a very small chunk.

Reflect. Reflection is another great learning practice. It is a way to engage with the material, building pathways and links to other experiences.

Teach. Teaching a topic is one of the best ways to learn it.

Debunking Theories. There’s a lot of bunky learning theories out there, maybe including some of the ones I’m writing about. A very popular theory suggests that some people learn better visually, or kinesthetically, or aurally – this seems to have been debunked. The prevailing theory is that people benefit from a combination of all three. See the book Make it Stick for more on this. Our schools are very focused on the verbal like lectures, tests, written assignments and reading; but they’re leaving a lot on the table.

Loading memory. A few thoughts on this…

  • The whole idea of mnemonics is a practice using this principle. My own experience is that the initial mnemonic can be ridiculous, but it gets the job done, and will eventually fade away
  • Elaboration is a related concept. Metaphors are an example of this. Elaboration is most powerful when done by the learner… “What does this remind you of?”
  • Generation is a term for predicting the information before learning it. Again, another trick for rewiring the brain and keeping it working. You see this used very commonly in lectures, lamely trying to get all those audience brains engaged.

Stories. This is one of the most ancient and powerful ways of transmitting information. Is your material, or your experience, in narrative format? Is there an exposition, a conflict, a rising action, a resolution and a denouement? These parts don’t have to be in order.

Can old people learn? It is true that after middle-age we build neural pathways less efficiently. But the impact is slight and other mature abilities compensate.

Dan Coyle published another great short book that is particularly useful for coaches, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills. It’s a good cheat sheet as well.

9. Coach

If you accept the above points, the role of a teacher changes. I’m considering a bet on an economic models leverages this, avoiding the need for full-time faculty that are expert in a subject. Perhaps you need a learning scientist paired with a subject-matter expert to design a program, and an instructor on the field to help the learners make their way through. This person looks more like a coach, and by the way, might even be a peer. I’m not discounting the value of a coach, but I do think it is a different skill.

Some of the principles above apply to designing the experience. But I’d argue that a coach really needs to be good at continually assessing, because learners are bad at self-assessing and this is notoriously hard to automate. Secondly, they need to tune the experience, helping the learner stay in “flow.” There are good coaching gems in

10. Roll

The mantra of “experiential learning” is one of the most common I’ve seen in recent literature. This idea is often traced to Maria Montessori 150 years ago. It is certainly the mantra for adult education scholars today. You have to connect the learning to real experiences, and to things that matter, for it to be “authentic.”

The trick here is safety. Making mistakes is essential to the learning process. And learning proceeds according to a usual process – where the intermediate stages are characterized by disorientation and frustrating mistakes as the learner assimilates new information. (On The Internet has a good essay about this in chapter two.) But fuck it. There are so many examples of this going well – check out the stories in Kio Stark’s Don’t Go Back To School or any of the “education hacking” stuff.

This is especially true of “soft skills.”

Here I like to dream a bit about mobility, wearable devices and the general idea of integrating a learning experience into someone’s daily life.  Giuseppe Auricchio calls it “omni learning.” Everwise describes its missions as getting you to learn while doing what you were going to do anyway.  Sebastian Barajas wrote a book called Aprender es Hacer on this point.