Five Personal Reflections for 2020

I've always loved the week between the Christmas and New Year holidays as a time of reflection on what has been and a time to articulate what I hope will be in the coming year. This year, that has been marred in my own mind by the bombing in my community of Nashville, TN. While I and everyone I know is safe, what peace was in tact at the end of the "Year of the Pandemic" lies teetering on the brink of forfeiture and planning for the future is hard in my distracted mind. Here are a few thoughts that resonate loudly as I peer into the rearview mirror...

I have no interest in returning to status quo.

I've spent the past 15 years on the road. Some years I've managed to cut back to 20%, but largely, it hangs around 40%+ of my time. To be sure, I miss the conferences and seeing co-workers. As a remote worker, many of those people are a part of my "community" and I have dinner with them (sadly, most often in swampy conference-saturated Florida) as often as I do people in my hometown. That said, what I have missed with them pales in comparison to the amazing time I've had with my 3 year old daughter. I'm happy she's back at her school for the majority of the day, but gardening with her, cutting trails with her, neighborhood walks with her, watching her mind explore ideas and grow, watching her hand steady as streaks on a paper become the sun and clouds - it's hard to imagine that going away. I've missed two nighttime rituals and tuck-ins in the past 280ish days. While I wish an end to this pandemic and the disruption it's brought to the lives of so many, I'm not interested in returning to life on the road while missing out on time here with my family. I hope others feel some of this same way and we will, as a whole, push for a new way of working going forward that demands less time away from our families and communities.

I am so grateful for my network.

This year reminds me again that one of the best investments I've ever made was the intentional cultivation of my network. They (You) have been the source of insights, benchmarking, stories, ideas, business relationships, and conspiring to change the world of learning and talent development. I could have never spun up The Learner Collective in 2018 without so many of you, and I could have never launched successfully into the "pivot" that has been 2020 without those folks who have taken my phone calls, thought with me about challenges we're up against as an industry, and ideated about the potentials of what could be. If you're a young professional (or even a senior professional) reading this, go build relationships without asking a thing across as many companies and industries as you can. Give without expectation and with passion to the relationships you develop, and watch how it bears so much fruit in time.

I have played a role in systemic inequities and unintentionally failed great talent.

This has become a great passion for me in 2020 and a great point of pain in my self-reflection. To be fair, it was all unintentional as far as I could see - it was about "budget management," "resource allocation," and perceived "ROI." But I have crafted, and help others craft, policies that took some of the greatest potential for talent in companies and created policies that exclude them. We (L&D professionals) implement systems, content libraries, programs and courses that are designed to be exclusionary from the day of launch. This practice reinforces skill development in those who already have access to great jobs, while limiting mobility for those who do not. It's a grievous behavior that persists across L&D that we have to reflect on our role in creating system barriers for our talent. While it may it is certainly necessary in some instances, it's a blunt tool that limits mobility. We're too busy pumping out perishable skills for front line talent while we invest the most for durable skills in those who are already on a path to the top.

How will I grow my skills in the future - as a subject matter expert, or as a generalist?

I've always been one amongst many in the learning and talent development community. I could walk into any one of a number of teams across L&D and add value to most conversations: instructional design, facilitation, content development, project management, systems and tech, innovation and strategy. In that way, I've always felt like a generalist. At Guild, the skill set demanded of me is fundamentally different - I'm the in-house L&TD subject matter expert, but the context in which I apply that is different daily - product development, product marketing, thought leadership, business operations, leadership development, corporate strategy, and of course, working with our amazing customers to apply our solutions in their context. That, plus a read of David Epstein's Range has led me to a lot of reflection about where I fit in the ecosystem in the future and which skills I further lean into looking forward, and it's definitely stretching me to "make my existing expertise valuable in other contexts" and less "be better at L&D" alone.

We are more resilient, more broken, and more at risk than I realized.

As I close out this year, there's a deep sigh of relief at the fact that we survived to the end of it. Here in Nashville, it's been a devastating tornado, a pandemic, civil unrest, and a bombing. My family holds tight to what relationships we do maintain closely and I find that from those spring deep wells of life, in that I see our resilience. In parallel, I watch as deep divisions have risen in my family and in friendships over masks, vaccines, politics, and election results.

I watch a "K-shaped" economic recovery and education falling off the graph for both kids and those in higher education. Our systems are fundamentally flawed and 2020 has shown me that I must take up the mantle and be a part of the solution - in every sector. All of that brokenness and 2020 disruption has exposed the fragility of our democracy, our infrastructure, and our hiring and talent development systems. I am compelled more than ever before to be BOTH a voice for change AND someone who isn't just talking, but is doing things to create different systems and tools.

What reflections do you have at the end of the year? What do you hope is the same, and what do you hope is forever different? What is it you're grateful for and what do you hope to build for the future?