Episode 117: Embraced Technology Yet? with Steve Prentice 

Announcer:
This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to the WealthAbility Show, where we’re always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less taxes. Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright, your Host, Founder, and CEO of WealthAbility.

            So technology is changing the world so fast, it’s hard to keep up, it’s hard to get comfortable with it. So today, we’re going to discover how to overcome the fear of digital disruption and actually harness that technology for our benefit. How do we use it in our businesses? How do we use it in our personal lives? How do we use it with our staff? And how do we make life better instead of it creating just a lot of disruption?

            And today, I’m very, very happy to have with us Steve Prentice, who’s an expert in this area. This is his work. His book is The Future of Workplace Fear: How Human Reflex Stands in the Way of Digital Transformation. Steve, it is absolutely a pleasure to have you on the WealthAbility Show.

Steve Prentice:

Well, the pleasure is mine, Tom. Absolutely.

Tom Wheelwright:

And so if you would, just give us a little of your background and how you got into this particular area of expertise.

Steve Prentice:

Basically, it’s quite simple. When I was a student in doing my undergraduate degree, I had to work some jobs just to pay the bills. And what I discovered was wherever I was working, people had trouble with computers. Now this is going back to the early ’90’s when PC’s were still relatively new. But wherever I worked, people just didn’t understand how to use them. You think about the F keys on your keyboard, how they were designed and how people used them, or did not understand how to use them. So it was like a light bulb moment for me in terms of an entrepreneur saying, aha, there’s a need here. There is a disconnect between how engineers design technology and how end users use it. Let me see if I could do something about that. And I haven’t stopped since that’s 1991 to today.

Tom Wheelwright:

That’s awesome. So of course we’re all grateful to Steve Jobs and Apple for actually making it a little more intuitive, right?

Steve Prentice:

Yes.

Tom Wheelwright:

I’m a huge Apple fan. I use Mac’s. And the reason is because I’m a baby boomer. I have a tough time with… I didn’t grow up in technology. Technology is something that my brain’s not wired for and yet I see the advantages of it as long as we do make it intuitive. So thinking about particularly baby boomers and those of us that did not grow up with technology, sometimes technology can be, we can just be frankly, afraid of it. Afraid of the change that happens, afraid of the, is it going to replace our jobs? You talk aloud about the psychology of that. How do you get people over that fear of technology?

Steve Prentice:

Yeah. Well, I mean, Steve Jobs had it right off the bat in terms of his tagline that said, it just works, press one button and it starts, and he recognized exactly that. People don’t want to know about the technology or the details inside, not only because it’s more convenient to just press a button and make it work, but because it makes people fearful when they don’t get it. So a lot of times now, even in today’s world where we’re dealing with our internet connected everything, we’re dealing with cybersecurity, we’re dealing with a whole bunch of sophisticated challenges. People are afraid of looking stupid, not because of an ego thing, but because if you drill down even further, it’s about the fear of losing your job, losing your identity, just because you can’t grasp something the first time.

            So a whole lot of the fear that we’re dealing with in a workplace, the fear and the unwillingness to take on new technologies, even though they are vital and even essential to the success of an organization is because people are afraid to look stupid in front of their boss and the repercussions that come from that.

            So this is the kind of challenge that again, engineers, designers of software don’t even think about. But when you’re trying to make this digital transformation happen in your workplace, we are… Again, anybody who’s over the age of 25 has grown up in an era before this kind of thing was mainstay. But anybody of any age is always going to fear not looking adequate, because the ultimate price you have to pay for that is losing your job. And that’s what we have to look at when establishing new approaches to teaching people how to use the technology in ways that they can actually work with intuitively.

Tom Wheelwright:

Interesting. So fear of rejection raises its ugly head once again, this time in technology. I mean, that of course is the number one fear that people have is rejection. It’s why people say that people fear speaking in public more than they fear death.

Steve Prentice:

Exactly.

Tom Wheelwright:

And that’s simply a fear of rejection, right? That’s all that is. So what do you do? How do you get people over that fear? Let’s say that you’re bringing a new technology into the office place and people are afraid. I’m not going to know how to use this. It’s going to take forever to learn. And is it really going to work? I mean, and there’s so many technologies. I added up, literally I just added up the number of technologies and number of systems we have in my office.

Steve Prentice:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

And I’m going, I’m an accountant. I can’t even count that high. I mean, there’s 30 independent technologies we’re talking about. How do you deal with that?

Steve Prentice:

Well, first of all, congratulations on being able to use them because you are using them. You’ve got your wireless phone device. We are here doing a video broadcast. We are not the only ones, but we have learned how to use certain technologies, but this kind of goes under the radar. We are doing these things. We are making them work and by and large making them work well. So how do you do it? Well, first step one of two. Step one is to recognize that all human beings judge everything by emotion first, and logic a distant second. So you’re going to respond negatively and fearfully because emotion is more powerful to human beings than is the logical awareness of things. You see this used in politics, in media all the time to grab people by what they fear.

            So step one is to recognize that yes, people are going to be afraid of change, especially when it’s a technology they don’t quite grasp yet. Step two is to level out, to balance out that fear with fact, with the logic and awareness of here’s what you need to do. The problem is coming from an era where we all expected training in courses to be multi-hour events in anything, whether it’s technology or taxation law or something like that. We are expected to take these formalized classes. Well, that’s not the way we learn any longer, and that’s never been the way we learn. So I’m a strong advocate of hands on learning, but iteratively that means if I want to introduce a new technology like a password management application to your workplace, I’m not going to just simply say, it’s going to be here on Monday, get used to it.

            There’s going to be two training sessions, come to one or the other because that’s too much overload. People can’t grasp it, even if they wanted to. So we have to teach people in small steps, the same way they learned to use their phone or any other technology or even learn how to drive a car. You did it in small steps until you got it right. So I’m a strong advocate for changing the way that people, adults learn in a way that they can build on small victories, small wins to become an eventual master of the technology. At which point it becomes a no brainer, right? They learn how to use it and they don’t have to think about it anymore. A literal, no brainer. So my short answer to you is basically let’s put it into small steps and build on those steps by changing the way that people are taught in the workplace.

Tom Wheelwright:

So one of the things I love about video games and I’m not a video gamer, okay? But my kids are. And one of the things I love is that it teaches us that failure is an option.

Steve Prentice:

Mm-hmm.

Tom Wheelwright:

And that it’s okay to fail and that we learn by failing. And one of the challenges we have, I think as adults, once we get past 7, 8, 9, 10 years of age, now we’re told if you fail, you are bad.

Steve Prentice:

Right.

Tom Wheelwright:

If you fail, you’re wrong. A mistake is a bad thing, okay? And so when you’re talking about technology, a mistake can actually be a really bad thing.

Steve Prentice:

Yes.

Tom Wheelwright:

I mean, it literally can be a bad thing. I mean, for example, somebody opens up a spam account and it adds a virus to their computer.

            I mean, and it shuts you down for a day, okay? Or somebody holds you hostage, right, for 100’s of 1,000’s of dollars.

Steve Prentice:

Ransomware, yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

So how do you help people get over that fear of failure? Because to me, this fear of failure is so common and it’s so drilled into us as really kids and young adults, literally drilled into us in school that you should be afraid of failing. Failure is not an option. It is bad. How do you deal with that in the workplace where people have grown up with it, it’s part of their heritage, it’s part of their basically genetics now after 100’s of years of being taught this way. How do you say, well, you know what? Let’s just play with it.

Steve Prentice:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

I mean, that’s what Steve Jobs did, right? He said, play with it. It’s okay. You can’t break it.

Steve Prentice:

That’s true. And you can’t break some things, but yeah, you can click on that phishing email and download all kinds of horrible stuff into your organization. But let’s think about that. Where is the mistake being made here? The mistake is not in the clicking, it’s in the reaction to do the clicking. And there’s a big difference here. Because we all know how to click with a mouse or to use a computer to open up files. So we know that. We have that skill. But what is the problem here is that when you are too busy to stop and think critically. You see an email coming in, let’s say you get an email and it’s from the head office, and it says new updated COVID protocols for summer 2022, or for the next six months or whatever. And you go, oh, I got to read that because I got to learn what to do right away.

            So the fear is there that if I don’t read this, then I’m going to be behind on this thing. It looks important. It looks real and legitimate. I better do it. The point is we are in such a state of hurried, lack of attention, everything we got to do, we have to do so quickly and so fast, especially if the boss is watching. I don’t feel I have the right to stop and think for a moment, hey, is this real, is this genuine? No, the reflex is to simply click because we’re under pressure of time. So this is not a mistake or an error of how to use a mouse. It’s an error in how to use your time. And that goes right back to management in terms of how they allow people to think critically about every single thing that they do before clicking.

            That’s where the problem lies. It’s the fear of looking stupid in front of your boss, not the fear of how to click or not click on a phishing email. Now I have a two word mantra that I try to teach people wherever I go about how to fix this problem. The two words are gap it. Put a gap between an email and what you do next. Gap it. So if you see one of these messages coming on your screen or you get it on your phone, an SMS message saying, you owe a whole bunch of money to a utility, they’re coming to get you. Don’t click on that link out of panic and fear, put a gap there and go and solve this question the way you normally would. Log onto the utility or the IRS website and find out if there’s a real problem. Don’t click on that link, but go around, put a gap between the source and the solution.

            In the workplace the same thing applies. If I want to protect my company from six months or a year of damage because of ransomware or malware, I have to allow my staff to take the time to think critically, to gap it between every message and what they do next. And even before COVID came along, the future of work gurus who look at this kind of stuff said, the soft skills like critical thinking are what are going to make companies thrive, companies of any size, thrive and survive in the next 10 years. So it’s a soft skill that needs to be delivered. And the permission granted by our managers, by your corporate owners to change our behavior in a way that allows safety to happen. That’s where the fear right now is causing the problem.

Tom Wheelwright:

Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you’re going to love Buck Joffrey’s podcast. Buck’s a friend of mine. He’s a client of mine. He’s a former board certified surgeon and he’s turned into a real estate professional. So he has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That’s who he is geared towards. So if you’re high paid professional, you’re going look, I’d like to do something different with my money than what I’m doing. I’d like to get financially educated. I’d like to take control of my money and my life and my taxes, I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey’s podcast, which is called Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you join Buck on this adventure of a lifetime. You’ve probably dealt with successful companies who do this successfully and companies who fail at this. Those who are successful at it, what is it that the management is doing that is giving people permission to think critically and permission to fail?

Steve Prentice:

Well, you’ve actually said it right there, Tom. It’s giving people permission. Permission to think critically and permission to fail. If you go to Glassdoor and you look at some of the companies that are always rated as the highest, best places to work, they’re not all high tech. In fact, there are insurance and accounting firms right up there too. The best places to work as per the people who work there are the ones that say, I have a supportive environment, a supportive manager who believes in my skills, allows me to grow, but allows me to make mistakes along the way. So how do you solve this? This is a management mindset change in which employees or individual workers are allowed to make mistakes and learn and process more on their own time. And that might sound like a nice feel good thing, or a rose colored glasses concept.

            But what we are seeing as simultaneously is that people are leaving companies in droves right now, because they’re not getting this. Now, before I or anybody else say these things they’re already reacting and leaving and saying, this is not worth it anymore. It’s called a great resignation. Now in accounting and in rules driven professions like that, we have a tradition of exactly that, rules. I mean, two plus two has to equal four or you are wrong. But the fact is the age we’re in right now, two plus two must always equal four. But if I see that you have written five on your paper, I’m going to ask you why? Tell me why you say five here rather than four? Maybe there’s something we can learn and grow from here.

            And as nice as that might sound, that’s the attitude that employees are expecting now as part of the new working environment. So once again, my short answer to your question is this has to be something, a cultural change within an organization to give people permission to grow, to make mistakes, to learn according to their own personalities. This is the age we’re now entering is an audience of one in which each person learns individually. And the net benefit to the organization is skilled people who want to stay. I mean, it’s a win-win.

Tom Wheelwright:

Do you find that it’s different based on generation? So you find baby boomers react differently than Gen Xers, than millennials, than Gen Zers.

Steve Prentice:

Yeah. And they all react badly, but in different ways. The younger we get, and I never want to get ageist when I talk about these things. But people who are, let’s say in the early 20’s just joining the workforce now, have grown up with access to information from the moment that they were a toddler or an infant holding an iPhone, which is one of the most successful baby attention tools you can use to keep baby occupied for a few minutes. So they’ve grown up with unfettered access to information. Has it improved their thinking skills? They have come out differently you can say. Is it improved? Is it less? No, it’s just different. Whereas someone who was a baby boomer who grew up at a time when everything was analog and that wonderful rotary dial phone you had in the living room attached to the wall, attached to the phone company, gave you a much greater sense of hierarchy and structure that no longer exists.

            So yes, indeed, someone who is over, let’s say the age of 40, is going to have a bias towards hierarchy and structure that they’re having a hard time seeing right now. And that does create a major generational shift between the numerous generations in the workplace. But they all have troubles, because a young professional in their 20’s may be very savvy about using technology and can get your company on TikTok in 30 seconds. But they also have great challenges generally in talking face to face with their manager or being managers of others. Because everything they do has been bubbles of text on their devices. So the interaction between humans is a great challenge to a lot of people who grew up without having that. So there’s challenges to all groups that need to be factored into, again, an overall management strategy in an organization. It’s all solvable, but not one size fits all.

Tom Wheelwright:

So if you were working with a group of, let’s take millennials as an example, you’re only working with a group of millennials because I’m thinking I’ve got… One of my companies, they’re all millennials, okay? I’m the only non-millennial except I think I’ve got one Gen Zer in there, but the rest of them are millennials. How are they going to respond differently to technology and how to learn technology than somebody in their 40’s or 50’s?

Steve Prentice:

Well, it’s very likely they’re not going to put up with a two hour workshop. Again, it’s just not a thing. I mean, I’ve done this myself. I have attended professional courses as a student or as an auditor. I will always sit at the back of the room because I want to see what people are doing on their computer screens while the class is going on. And less than 20% actually are on the page that is coordinating with the class. Most of them are either playing games or on social media. Now I’m not saying that as a derogatory statement because some people learn better by allowing their eyes to be distracted by something. This is a fact. You can learn better by having focus rather than being bored. So playing a game on your computer while you’re listening to the teacher may not be a bad thing.

            It may be what’s going to allow them to ask the intelligent questions, but it might also be that this is too long. A course that is longer than half an hour is going to lose most people. The older people, the baby boomers who are taught, this is how you must do it, will patiently sit until the event is over. But I’ve watched them as well. Even when I’m teaching them. It’s very, very hard to stay focused for more than an hour, especially in the middle of the afternoon where we have some biological rhythms that echo the deep sleep period of the middle of the night. So you are naturally prone to feel drowsy at 2:30 in the afternoon. That’s a terrible time to have meetings or have any sort of educational process. So how do you do it? If you are working with millennials or any other younger professional group, you’ve got to cater the product to their expectations and capacity, which usually means shorter and denser and more frequent, rather than a one off full day workshop.

Tom Wheelwright:

Do you-

Steve Prentice:

So I would want, sorry, go ahead.

Tom Wheelwright:

Do you find that, sorry. Do you find that for those people who want the shorter pieces, the video type of instruction works better for them than the in person instruction?

Steve Prentice:

A bit of both works best. It’s really great and important to have that dynamic, the individual expert who is doing the speaking and can engage with the audience, and can ask the questions, and answer the questions, and read the room also, right? This is one of the things that I do when I’m working live with a group, even on a Zoom chat is to try and read the room, which is easier to do in person. If people are drifting, okay, I’m going to shift my teaching to something new. Time for video, time for something else to move things up. You go back 200 or 300 years, people were expected to sit in a room for hours listening to long soliloquies. That doesn’t happen anymore. So yeah, I want to find the ways to cater my delivery to the audience rather than force the audience to conform to me.

            So a combination of things, because that’s what most professionals working today, regardless of age, are used to multitasking. And they’re used to having numerous forms of stimulus coming to them simultaneously. So, absolutely. I want to have a video clip. I want to have an animation. I want to have not death by PowerPoint, but something engaging on PowerPoint and some interaction. But I also want to remember that not everybody wants to interact the same way. Personally, I will never pick on you to force you to answer a question. I will ask for those who wish to speak up, but I will also say you have numerous other ways to communicate through the chat feature, whether it’s on Zoom type technology or chatting in a live situation. Text me if you feel better about that.

            So I want to, again, cater my delivery to the individual needs of each person, but recognizing that on mass shorter and more frequent and more variable is better. And that’s why I’m a big proponent of what I call micro learning. I’d rather teach you one thing today and then one thing again a week from now, and then one thing again a week from now, than to force you to listen to 10 things today, because you’ll be guaranteed to forget nine of them by the end of this day. That’s a 100 year old fact. Hermann Ebbinghaus said that 100 years ago. People will forget 90% of what they heard by this time tomorrow. So what’s the point? Let’s make it interesting.

Tom Wheelwright:

Well, and there are certain things like you say, doing things hands on. You’re certainly actually experiencing it. You’re going to learn. You’re going to remember a lot longer. There’s pretty strong evidence that we have a six minute window of learning and that’s it. And that’s true no matter what age you are. And so every six minutes you need to change. You have a state change if you will. And so there either needs to be a discussion or there needs to be a video, or there needs to be a game, or there needs to be something else to keep the interruption. So I think this is really interesting because basically what I’m hearing is, and of course I’m a student of teaching, a student of instruction and have been for 40 years. And so what I’m hearing is it really doesn’t matter what you’re teaching, that technology works the same way as everything else and that the better people understand.

            Let me ask you this question. I had a friend of mine, his daughter actually had just failed her accounting class in college. I said, what happened? And she goes, well, I asked the teacher, I said, why does it work this way? And the teacher said, well, there’s no theory behind this that’s just what you do.

Steve Prentice:

Mm-hmm.

Tom Wheelwright:

And so I said, well, that’s not true. And I sat down with her and over the next three evenings we were at a seminar and I had some evenings available. I taught her why. I said, here’s what you need to challenge the assumptions. You need to challenge, here’s why it works this way. And she went back and took the class over again from the same teacher and ended up with the highest score in the class. And the teacher actually asked her, he said, why is your score so much higher? And she said, because I did exactly what you told me not to do.

Steve Prentice:

Right. Yes.

Tom Wheelwright:

And I actually looked at why it works that way. Do you find that useful in teaching technology and getting the fear out of technology as well once people understand why it works that way?

Steve Prentice:

Absolutely. You’ve got to have that, the why there. It’s like trying to climb a cliff face that has no toe holds in it. What you did, you gave her the toe holds and the hand holds to climb this face. But so much of traditional education is just a blank cliff face.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah.

Steve Prentice:

And if you don’t get it, you’re in trouble. So yeah, I want to give people that opportunity to learn in a way that is going to be relevant to exactly how they respond and give them the opportunity. Now, I want to share an example with you. If I wanted to convince your team, your staff, to take on, to use a password management software application, because that’s what you have to have to keep your company secure. We can’t use old passwords anymore that are the names of your kids and your pets.

            That is so easily guessable that you’ll be done in a day. We got to have something much more secure. But the fear, not only the fear of using a new application, but the fear of losing control over those passwords becomes the major blockage. So what do we do? We’ve got to do some hands on stuff. We’ve got to have a way that they can try this out in a safe place that any mistakes they make, because when you’re learning, you don’t make real mistakes, you just simply are perfecting your ability. But a place where you can do this safely without the fear of messing up the company, you’ve got to have that hands on practice. So anytime I want people to learn something, I’ve got to find a way to make it relevant to them, relevant to their job, relevant to their specific customers or clients that they’re working with, and relevance to their own individual ways of learning, their styles of learning.

            That’s a big ask, which is why for the last 60, 70 years we’ve been doing corporate training in a certain way, basically wholesale. Everyone comes in, some do well, some do okay, some do badly. It’s faster and cheaper that way. But the net of this is you don’t get great employees. You get a few and the rest suffer or leave. So I want to be able to make sure that learning becomes an act of hands on iterative development rather than a one off that people are going to fear from the very moment they’re there. And that does overcome so many of the fears that digital transformations bringing to any workplace.

Tom Wheelwright:

I love it. You’re actually making learning a part of your culture.

Steve Prentice:

Yes.

Tom Wheelwright:

And I think that’s phenomenal. I think that’s absolutely terrific. Again, Steve Prentice’s book is The Future of Workplace Fear: How Human Reflex Stands in the Way of Digital Transformation. I love this conversation, Steve. I think everybody should watch this or listen to it over and over and over again, because we do need to take the fear out of the workplace and it’s not just digital, it’s everything else we do. And I think that the instruction you’ve given us today has been priceless, Steve. Any final words for our audience?

Steve Prentice:

Absolutely. Just one final example to use. I know that Elon Musk has been back and forth on social media for a while saying a lot of interesting things, crazy things and weird things. So one of the things that I highly respect about him was he brought the fact that failure is allowed into the mainstream. You can go onto YouTube now and look up these amazing rockets that SpaceX sends up.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yep.

Steve Prentice:

They come back down and land on their tails, which is a physical almost impossibility. The capacity to be able to do that is the kind of thing that old school engineers said, you can’t do that. It’s impossible. But he and his team made it possible. But he was not afraid to fail publicly. And you can see the failures on YouTube to this day. That mindset that it’s okay to fail, I think will be one of his greatest legacies despite some of the other things that’s going on right now. You can, you can be allowed to fail because it’s part of learning. But it’s up to management to accept the role of integrating this into your culture, to give all of the human resources, that’s what we call them. These are our resources, our people, the chance to grow their skills in a way that is natural and relevant and stays permanent.

Tom Wheelwright:

I love it. Steve Prentice. Steveprentice.com. Any place else that we can go to find out more information?

Steve Prentice:

Everything about me is on Steveprentice.com. Thanks very much for [inaudible 00:28:58].

Tom Wheelwright:

Awesome. Thank you. And just remember that when we do take the time to make learning a part of our culture and break it down into pieces, don’t think that one size fits all. I mean, all of these things we learned today, What always ends up happening is we always make way more money and pay way less tax. We’ll see you next time.

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