Building Learning Ecosystems at the City Level

Episode Transcript

Kelly:  [00:00:00]Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, the podcast where we discover what skills can help you live your best life. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey, and each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful. You’ll get a firsthand account of how they develop those skills, as well as their innovative approaches to improving skills based hiring and learning around the world. Now let’s talk about skills, baby.

 This week, we’re joined by a Sebastien Turbot. Thank you so much for joining us, Sebastien.

Sebastian: Thanks for having me.

Kelly: Such a pleasure.  Sebastien is the CEO and Chief Strategist of Eko Six, a Canadian based consultancy that guides governments, cities, businesses, and civil [00:01:00] society, in creating engaging platforms that turn ideas into action. Sebastien is currently a research fellow at Wise, which is the world innovation summit for education.

And developing a living lab on learning ecosystems and cities. The lab will seek to build a global community of practice and to support urban ecosystems in designing, testing, and prototyping learning ecosystems, that help communities develop the knowledge, skills, and talents they need to address the evolving needs and complexities of current and future societies.

Sebastien, I’d love to hear a little bit more about what led you into this work.

 Sebastian: It’s been an interesting and long journey, I would say. It actually started off when I was working back in 2001 in Afghanistan. Interesting place and country, and where I was working, in the humanitarian and development field on what’s called in the jargon as, a behavioral change communication, public information, social [00:02:00] marketing.

What it is basically, is using mass media  traditional media , to promote key messaging, key learnings, educational key topics, such as education,how to vote, how to have basic hygiene practices, and this is really where I discovered that in a country where there was no formal education sector, you could really leverage other means of learning and education.

 That led me then to work with TEDx Paris, the TED version in Paris, knowing and realizing that there was this thirst around the world for new forms of learning. Which then led me to a first stunt at Wise, the World Innovation Summit For Education, where I was the Global Editor in Chief, and deep dove into the future of education conversation we were all around.

At tech, the future of teaching,  are universities still worth it? Are diploma’s still worth it? Lots of really fascinating questions. Then I moved on to leading a foundation here in Montreal called the New Cities Foundation, so this was more of a focus on the future of cities.

How do we make these more resilient or livable? [00:03:00] Happier cities, looking at the future of mobility and autonomous vehicles and east scooters. But, in this shift between education and cities, I realized that in the the city’s conversation and the city’s world, there wasn’t that much talk about learning and education.

As a mirror to that, realizing that in the education world, there wasn’t that much talk about how cities were evolving and the challenge that some of these city leaders were facing. And this is where I really wanted to start to explore where these two topics met and what was happening, if anything there.

Kelly: That makes sense. Let’s go back to the beginning here for a moment, I hope you don’t mind. I have a couple of questions. So in your time in Afghanistan, when you were talking about sort of alternative forms of education what, at that point in time, I don’t know what year it might’ve been, what was sort of coming up as other alternatives besides the traditional?

Sebastian: This was out of school, out of formal school education. Then we would use some traditional tools. We use [00:04:00] radio and TV, there was no internet back then but mostly radio and TV and billboards. But we were also really trying to tap into more traditional forms of communication and hence of learning.

 We did lots of programs around theater, around poetry and stuff like that, to help the educational outcomes or the knowledge that Afghans could build on.

Kelly: Yeah, it’s almost like finding a fun way to share information. When I think of the theater style or poetry, how else can we share these messages without it being, maybe they might not take it directly as education, would be my guess on trying to find some of those other forms. Was it successful?

Sebastian: To an extent, yes. It’s a fascinating and complicated country, basic levels of other educational knowledge were really low. So it was challenging, but I think then on a few issues like education, women’s rights, road safety, basic hygiene practices, like the importance of washing your hands [00:05:00] and stuff like that. I think we did a pretty good job.

Kelly: That’s really neat. So this point in time when you started to get into this, did this have more meaning for you and your life just beyond work as well?

 Sebastian: Well, yes. It’s a life-changing experience.  For me, it really helped me understand that what I was good at and what I like to do was to take complicated topics and simplify them, but in a good way. As in making them more accessible and make these messages, these key topics more and more accessible.

 Kelly: That sort of skillset, just the love and the passion around solving complex problems, number one, but then also the ability to sort of distill that information. Getting down to the various levels of communication, because of course, all of the different audiences that you were talking with, empathy, my goodness, like the list goes on at what really is this magical skillset for someone in your position, but that passion that you bring into it, it’s [00:06:00] sort of that magic that everyone looks for when they’re trying to find, what do I want to do in my life? I love this. And now, as it turns out, I have all these positive attributes that make me do that quite well.

Sebastian: I would add one, cause I was thinking about this, one skill that I’ve realized I’ve practiced at home was listening. Empathy and listening and the sense of you rarely have the opportunity in your life to find yourself in a culture and a society where you have no codes. No codes whatsoever. You’re really starting from scratch.

So you have to listen. You have to open your heart. Open your eyes to be able to understand what you need to do, not to do, how things work. I think this has really carried me throughout my career in the sense of I’ll tag myself as an expert or a generalist, but I don’t like to be like the kind of consultancy type coming in and saying, “oh, I already know the answer to your problem without having even really listened to you.”

 And this is something I think especially to the younger audience, find your opportunity to take a deep [00:07:00] dive into a place where you’re lost, all your social references are gone.

Kelly: I’m so glad you honed in on that because I hardly ever talk with anyone about listening as a skill, but it’s such an important skill. We have an idea of where your passion lies in this area, which is wonderful.

We understand a good bit about the skills that are really making you successful, but I want to dive into the work aspect of this a little bit more, because this is just such a fascinating concept. You’re right, most people don’t consider regional context and education in the same discussion.  What really led you to think these are conversations that should be in line?

Sebastian: As I was saying, the education sector is still going through its own revolution about reinventing education, we’re moving away from like an industrial model education. There’s this quote, it says, we have 21st century students with 20th century teachers, a 19th [00:08:00] century curriculum and an 18th century school calendar, and so on.

How do we move away from that? Making sure that learning and education is less siloed, more connected to the real world. It’s really about lifelong learning, about learner agency, more personalized and really about learning to learn. So you have this whole shift happening in the educational world.

On the city side, it was really about growing competition between cities, especially because when we talk cities we often think New York, Los Angeles, Paris. These mega cities, they’re good. They should be fine, but I’m thinking more second tier cities who have more to gain and more to lose with all these shifts happening right now in the world.

So they’re competing for talent to attract and retain talent, and they’re competing to attract businesses and investment. They’re competing to ensure that they’re  future proof. They’re anticipating that they may lose lots of jobs because of automation or whatnot, and also want to make sure that their population and their residents are ready for these futures jobs that we [00:09:00] don’t even know what these jobs are going to be.

So basically cities realizing that skills is their business, and this was new for cities. They hadn’t really seen skills as something they should focus on. But realizing and the COVID crisis in a way is really helping them, that skills and learning are intrinsically linked to their resiliency strategies.

And they can make cities more and more adaptive, and making the cities more flexible, being able to bend and not break. So increasing pressure on cities to participate, lead support, the skilling, the reskilling, the upskilling of their residents and citizens.

To get back to your question, couldn’t we be doing more? Aren’t there ways to better maximize learning at the city space? To compliment formal education systems and maximize learning at the city level? And on this, a quote and a statistic, there’s nothing new here in a way. I was looking into this, the Greek philosopher Plutarch was saying that, is the city the best teacher? So [00:10:00] the Greeks were already asking this question, so in a way it’s nothing new.

The data point I like to give to people is well, actually a question to you, Kelly, what’s the percentage of their waking hours that students spend in school?

Kelly: Wow. I don’t know. I feel like it’s gotta be 75%. No?

Sebastian: 20%. Students only spend 20% of their waking time in school. So this is where once again, is there not an opportunity or something, something to tap into, to provide more new learning opportunities. In playgrounds, bus stations, groceries, just to give you kind of a very concrete example.

So basically, my take and our take at Wise is, how can we tap into that potential? And people are, as we speak, better understanding who’s doing what and understanding what works and what doesn’t and be able to leverage, scale that, and support those who would want to look into it. Into this question of learning ecosystems and learning cities and help [00:11:00] design the toolbox for them to take this task on.

 Kelly: The first question that I have when I hear this is, are there any specific cities that you’re focusing in on? Question number two on the same thread, is this like a global thought process when you talk about cities? And the third is why cities? When we talk about a region, why not in the US, why not county? MSA? State? But there’s all various versions of that globally. Why city?

Sebastian: Wise, it’s very global. So we’re looking at potentially all places, all territory, all cities. We do know Wise wise is based in Qatar, in the Middle East and the GCC. And we do hope to take most of these learnings to Dahg, the capital city, to help them become a learning city.

So there’s that. But I guess to your answer is, what are the kinds of cities that are on this map or learning [00:12:00] ecosystems or learning cities. Truth be said, it’s mostly Western, let’s say even Anglo-Saxon cities. So a lot in the UK, a lot in the US. UK, I can mention Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Clemis. In the US, one city and it really stands out, is Chicago. Otherwise I know cities like Medini, Nairobi, Singapore. Some in its own way are really trying, and a lot of Korean cities, are trying to build on this idea.

Kelly: Interesting. Why cities?

Sebastian: As we speak over half the population of the world lives in cities, and this is anticipated to rise to 60, 70% in 20 years from now. So there’s this reality of the world is now an urban world. We’ll stay so. So there’s that. Plus, there is this momentum as we speak in the city’s  conversation around the past 5-10 years, it’s really amazing energy and momentum around products, around , civic participation, and collaboration at the city level.

So there’s [00:13:00] also this kind of practical aspect, at least for us, of trying to tap into this emerging, very thriving, urban innovation conversation to use that as a kind of backbone, if you want to this thinking around learning ecosystem.

  Not to say that what we’re talking about isn’t applicable to the suburbs or to rural areas, it definitely is. But we’re wanting to start in the city space for instance.

Kelly: There’s so many questions that I have around this, but I just love this. I kind of want to dive deep and just hear how you go through this process. But before we jump in there, are you seeing a lot of commonality of solutions?

Like these ecosystems that could work broadly, what you learn in one location, does it have to be adjusted or slight adjustments? How much overlap are you seeing in what you learn?

 Sebastian: I’d say there’s a lot of overlap at least in the sense that you often find yourself with the same issues and challenges in terms of developing and implementing these types of ecosystems. It’s a lot around questions of trust [00:14:00] between these different actors looking at what type of collaboration models, looking at leadership governance, questions around what type of pedagogies.

So I think there is a lot of overlap in terms of the issues and the challenges they share. Of course you need to contextualize because we know, just to give you an obvious one, there’s like a clear divide between cities or places where education is. Who, as we speak, is legally responsible for the education mandate. Is it the cities? Is it the region? The states? The national government? So depending on, typically, I’m from France. Education is still in the national mandate.

There’s that of how can you link your, what want to do at the city and having to convince, your prime minister, your minister of education before you can actually do anything. And other countries like the US, there is more flexibility and the responsibility of education was more like down to the ground.

So there’s questions like this, of course, contextually, but I see the potential now to replicate and scale.

[00:15:00] Kelly: Yeah, That’s fascinating. Is there a city or maybe multiple cities that you would say they’ve just cracked the code and are doing it really well?

Sebastian: Cities that I’ve already mentioned. I’d say Plymouth, Bristol, and Chicago, they implemented  what I think is recognized by the small committee as like a really good example. So in the UK, it’s called the Cities of Learning Projects. In the US, it’s called LRNG, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this.

Kelly: I am. Yeah. And with Cities of Learning. So this is so fascinating.

Sebastian: There you go. To explain to your audience and actually I’ll put on my user experience hat. Let’s say you’re 20-22,  and you have a passion for a topic and you want to actually go to work in this field, but there’s for whatever reasons, there’s no formal educational offer. You don’t have the time for it. Basically, what these two programs do is they’ve created this app where they’ve talked to employers and say, okay, what are the skills you need?

Okay. I really [00:16:00] list them. Then they’ve went out and looked in communities and neighborhoods. What are the offers available, linked to these skills? It might be a hackathon, might be a workshop, might be an exhibition, it might be mentoring projects, internship projects. So they have this whole database and then you as the user, you download the app because it’s app based and you say, okay, I want to develop this skill, this skill and this skill. Then it comes up with a playlist, they actually call it a playlist, and you choose what you want to do.

There’s really this notion of learner agency, which is really important. Putting the learner in the driver’s seat of his or her own learning and be able to say, okay I like to hack stuff, I’ll go to the hackathons. I’m more of a listener. So I’ll go to the conferences and the Ted talks,

Kelly: Sure, you get to pick what worked for you.

Sebastian: Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting because the city’s involved, employers are involved, the wider committee is involved. There’s this notion of learner agency, but we can get to that maybe a bit later, this whole question [00:17:00] of also, how do you assess the learning and how do you recognize the skills and stuff like that? There’s a lot bundled in these two projects.

Sari: Hey everyone, this is Sari from the Skills Baby team. I’m here to tell you about the upcoming events that Skill’s Baby is hosting in the coming weeks. We’re going to be diving deeper into the future of work and the future of education, which in other words is the future of skills. If you want to be a part of the conversation, head to skillsbaby.com/events to register. We would love to have you. 

Kelly: Does your organization provide services to sort of help understand. If there was another region that was interested or needed this type of assistance do you go in and help understand what’s going on in their region and how does this work from your end?

Sebastian: Well, yes, definitely. Eko Six, we support city leaders or sometimes organizations. It can come [00:18:00] from cities, can come from the employers, sometimes from the local chamber of commerce, sometimes from civil society. Support them in better understanding the potential of learning ecosystems and then helping them design, test, and develop a prototype.

These learning ecosystems, what’s also interesting is that lots of these learning ecosystems are about the skills gap, I’d say maybe 70 to 80% of these learning ecosystems are focused at the local level on skills gap.

Even when they’re not focusing on the skills gap, when it’s more looking at helping the city reach it’s  SDG goals, or looking at a social cohesion, or sustainability for example. Skills are still front and center of the conversation because this link between formal and informal, really encourages skills based learning approach if you want.

It’s hard skills, soft skills, social emotional skills, it’s collaboration, communication, creativity,  empathy, foresights, adaptability. So skills are really front and center of [00:19:00] this learning ecosystems conversation. It’s not just how can I better access knowledge, but it’s also how do I leverage the fact that I’m traveling my city to be able to develop skills? So it’s not just about learning more. It’s about learning better and honing new skills.

Kelly: You had touched on this earlier about sort of these assessment of skills. I think that’s a slight difference when we talk about formal education versus other, is a lot of people say, granted let’s not get into that there are arguments over the formal educational assessments.

Let’s not go there, but I would love to hear a little bit about how you’re approaching and thinking of assessing when we’re talking about skills and sort of alternative learning opportunities.

Sebastian: As in the whole conversation around assessment skills, there is indeed, how do you assess something that’s so intangible you don’t, you can’t really test for a skill and you can’t test for creativity. So indeed, there’s a lot of [00:20:00] thinking around looking at more kind of peer based assessments where it’s less, the test.

It’s less, Q& A but more about peer based recognition of your mastery of giving skill. You don’t expect children to pass testing violin playing and you trust the teacher in assessing that. So there’s that conversation. But where it’s really interesting for me is more on, less than on the assessment.

It’s the recognition of these skills and this is where there’s a whole conversation around digital badges. I don’t know how familiar your audience. For those who aren’t, two things here. Remember when we were all boy Scouts and girl Scouts, and you will learn to make a fire and you will get the little flamey thing, I know how to make a fire. If you knew how to use the first aid kit, same thing.

The more contemporary version is LinkedIn and the skills  endorsements. We don’t use it that much. If you ask me, we don’t leverage it well but this idea of aside from your [00:21:00] diploma, aside from your job titles, if on any given skill Kelly you’ve had 300 people endorse you for that specific skill, does it not send a message that you actually master this skill?

So anyway, but there’s this whole thing around digital badges and recognizing the skills. So if I go back to my example, employers have said we want them to have this skill. They looked at the the learning opportunities and they said, okay, if you do three or four or five or six, you get the level where the system, the ACRA system will recognize that you’ve reached that scale. Yeah. So this is really a lot of the same thinking going around in terms of assessing and recognizing, honing of these skills within these learning ecosystems.

Kelly: Yeah, I think it’s a great point with the badging. Are you finding that employers are really able to acknowledge that, “yes we agree that this badge means you have this” or are you finding that there needs to be some sort of communication [00:22:00] happening for that structure to be in place?

Sebastian: It links back to the question around why this focus may be on cities or at least on, on a specific place. By this I mean that we onboard the employers from the start and assess, but they said, okay, here are the skills we need. They presented these possible pathways. They’ve recognized that if someone were to do this, this, this, and this, and if this person comes with a badge, yes, I will. I mean, I will recognize.

So they’ve agreed. But this is where, maybe the downside is, it’s within that community in the sense of, as we speak and are these badges really transferable.

If I participate in the prop program in Chicago and I have my whatever skill, and if I go to LA and look for a job and I say, I got this badge when I was in Chicago. But fortunately, as we speak, I’m not sure [00:23:00] an employer back in LA would say, yeah, but I’ve never heard of this. I don’t know what this is.

But at least at the local level, trying to solve the skills gap locally employers onboard and are ready to recognize these batches as valid demonstration of the mastery of a skill.

Kelly: I wonder as our world is naturally turning more virtual and people may not necessarily be in the same location that they work. How much that will start to be like another challenge that we need to address and sort out?

Sebastian: Speaking on the learning ecosystems of technology.  I like to say the same thing, Ed Tech will only make a bad education worse. It’s not necessarily really the silver bullets. Technology is at the heart of most of these learning ecosystems, but more as the infrastructure, the platform, the backbone. But then I would say learning ecosystems, are agnostic in terms of technology.

It’s [00:24:00] more about how do you want to learn? And when do you want to learn? Is it about mentorship, internship, once again, participating in activities like hackathons or is it going to conferences? So once we’ve said that, once you Kelly has said this is what I want to do, if you can do it physically so much the better, if you want to do it remotely and digitally, fine. It doesn’t really change.

I tend to define a kind of tech agnostic version of learning ecosystems. Once again, aside from the backbone, the platform that connects all of these actors and all these ideas and opportunities.

Kelly: We talked a lot about sort of just skills in general, but I wonder when I talk about life skills, I think immediately about you describing this technology as the backbone, but all the people that are interacting with this technology, let alone the learners, but all the other people that are interacting with this, be it if it’s an employer so on and so forth, however much they agreed, is there a training that has to happen?

I’m just [00:25:00] thinking of ongoing sort of like skill training, because they may not be familiar with this process or how to understand when they see this, that it means that, is there a lot of that, more of change management, I would say maybe instead of training, that happens from the people utilizing these systems?

Sebastian: I’ll say on the learner side it’s quite intuitive and especially with, with young learners. It’s okay. It’s more of a challenge when you’re talking to kind of more traditional business leaders. When you’re talking to, and sometimes with teachers they are less tuned into this, but I think it’s  changing and it’s one of the talents, but it’s still not top of lists for, for me.

Kelly: I’d love to know what else you are working on because I love this topic and I’m sure there’s other innovation points as well.

Sebastian: One thing I’m currently working on a lot as well, is really looking at [00:26:00] how we can, especially in the business sector, how can we better leverage conferences events, mega events like Olympic games or world cups and turning these into also learning opportunities. Where most people in the world see conferences as you have these 2000 people coming into a city that either are locked into the hotel ballroom and the hotel restaurants and they’re in their bedrooms.

And then they kind of come and go. But whatever topic was at the heart of their conversation, the future of transport, the future of business, future marketing, a future of learning, whatever, does not impact the local community on this specific topic. So it’s looking at how to bring out more learning for local communities around these big events and these big conferences especially that they’re all on hold as we speak now.

They are going to come back. People might not want them back. So we’re trying to help these cities hosting these events and the organizers of these events develop thinking and processes around local social impact to be able to [00:27:00] say to the host communities, look, you need to perceive these conferences as positive for you and not just from a tax point  of view or people buying souvenirs in the souvenir shops.

But also that if there’s a conference coming in on sustainability, it will participate in improving the sustainability of our city. So it’s still learning. It’s still learning at the city level, but more from the kind of event side.

Kelly: I actually really like that. I started automatically thinking of other ways that you could integrate, I’m sure all of us have been involved in a conference where you go to a location for a period of two days in which you never step outside, because you’re just in that like hotel and conference center doing the things that you do.

But imagine if it was more integrated into that particular city. I often say like, I would love to have visited the city that I just got to go to for this conference, but there may be ways to incorporate what’s going on. It just got my mind [00:28:00] going. So that is really fascinating. I’d love to hear more about that as it progresses. Very cool. Well, Sebastien, I’d love to give you a moment here. If there’s anything else you’d like to share with our audience about either your work or something else you’re interested in. I give you the open mic.

 Sebastian: Last point, which I wanted to mention earlier, it’s the difference between, cause often people come to me saying, oh, so this is about personalized learning.  For me, personalized learning has been taken over by the tech conversation. How do we develop software and algorithms that can push content to me depending on how the software assesses my level in any given topic?

Learner agency for me is really important. It’s really at the heart of this thinking around a learning ecosystems. I’m saying this because I know can feel fluffy to most people we’re talking about learner agency, but it’s really how can we design systems where the learners are really in the driver’s seat of their own learning?

That they choose what they want to [00:29:00] learn, when they want to learn, how they want to learn it. So it’s not just having the right pushed content to me, but really about getting learners. And what I’m saying, this learners of all ages, it’s not just not the students.

 How do we put learners in the driver’s seat of their own learning? I know it’s been talked about for a long time. But I think with projects and processes like learning cities and learning ecosystems, we may just be able to crack this kind of wicked problem.

Kelly: I’m so glad you pointed that out. I do not think it’s fluffy at all in this conversation  AI is getting fantastic, but how would we know where someone’s passions lie? What is the best way that they learn? What might be interesting to them? Because it changes so frequently. What I might want to do today might not be what I’m interested in learning a year from now.

Sebastian: Indeed.

Kelly: Yeah, no completely. Thank you so much for joining us today. For anyone that would like [00:30:00] to keep tabs on Sebastien’s work, I highly suggest you follow him on LinkedIn Okay. and Twitter at Sebastien Sebastian Turbot.

Eko Six is available @ekosixcommunities on Twitter. So definitely take a quick peak. I will make sure to share anything that we’ve chatted about today. And especially with your work with Wise, of course you can follow them on social media as well.

  You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcast production. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your community. Ratings, reviews and [00:31:00] suggestions are great sources of feedback and always appreciated. Please reach out and connect with me on social at Kelly Ryan Bailey.

I’d love to meet you and continue the conversation. We’ll be back next week with a new episode so until then keep growing your skills and have a great day.