Solving People Problems

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E5 – Matt Alex

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Bailey. Each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they developed those skills, and their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world. Come learn what skills help you live your best life.

So our guest today is Matthew Alex. Matt is the founder of a new organization called Beyond Academics and is extremely passionate about the future of higher education. We are definitely in common on that one. He also recently led the student technology and transformation practice as a partner at Deloitte Consulting and Deloitte’s Smart Campus and future of work initiatives.

Prior to that, he was the founder of HTS Consulting, a technology and services company serving higher [00:01:00] education. Matt was also named Global Forum for Education and Learnings, Top 100 Leaders in Education and is an Ed Tech Awards Trendsetter for 2020. He also holds a Master’s degree in Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Matt. Wow. Thank you so much for joining us today. Those are some amazing accomplishments. I can’t believe those. The Ed Tech Awards Trendsetter this year. This is amazing.

Matt: Well, thanks a lot. First of all, thanks for having me. I am excited and passionate about what’s in front of us. We’re in a time that we will all look back and recognize it was a shift and I’m excited to be a part of that.

And I’m excited to see what really comes from that. And I’m excited for everything that’s going to give us the opportunity to transform. So, and to get onto the awards. It’s ironic, I’ve been [00:02:00] in higher ed for about 30 years and for 20 of those, I’ve been in consulting and consulting students systems.

And I never got an award. It was like, I just did the work of everyone else and as a student, a leader in student technology, it was just part of what every university did and when I started to really focus on smart campuses, future of learning and the future of higher ed people started to notice and started to understand it.

And the words are just an indication that there’s so much more to do in higher ed that I’m excited, and I’m grateful for those awards too.

Kelly: Oh, well, congratulations. That’s fantastic. I really want to jump back a little bit and start off at the beginning of your journey into all of this, because it sounds like you’ve just had a really interesting background.

So you started working at a registrar’s office, is that right?

Matt: I did, I [00:03:00] did. It’s one of those things in higher ed, we all kind of stumble into higher ed. No one ever gets a degree and says, Hey, I’m going to go become a registrar’s office, a counselor or a registrar or, or anything like that.

You know, higher ed is really about a set of people who become passionate about higher ed and I got that opportunity. I was given the opportunity to join the admissions and records office and that allowed me to understand what I was doing in the world. I’m a criminal justice major.

I’m a real proud criminal justice major cause I think some of the things that I learned in my undergrad, I still apply today. Today I design some of the most advanced technologies around. And yet I’ve never coded, or I’ve never had those types of technologies, but the things I learned in my criminal justice days was really important.

And [00:04:00] then when I married that with my work within a registrar’s office, I started to understand how the world worked and that was a really important time for me. To explore my own skills, you come out of college and everyone thinks you’ve got to know everything. And I don’t think that’s true.

I think when you come out of college, you are there to explore not only what you’re learning, but what you’re really passionate about. And I will tell you the admissions office and the records office at UIC gave me that opportunity to do that. I got to find myself in so many different ways. I eventually went to run a law school and that also gave me a set of just different perspectives and the law school really taught me that students were the customer.

When I was at the undergrad side of UIC, the process was what we have to manage. But when I went to the law school, I recognized it was the students that matter. It was the [00:05:00] law students that we had to support as they started to embark on their own journeys. That all has allowed me to bring just a new perspective, even when I consult a university now, My first question is about the students, the faculty, and everyone else we support.

Kelly: I love that you talked about the students being the customer, you and I have had many conversations about that to begin with, but going back to that initial experience and then that work that you did running the law school, were there certain areas or certain challenges that you saw that really helped you develop that sort of thought process around the student being the customer?

Matt: Yeah, and I think part of the way that I learned it was I looked at policies different at the law school. Policies were okay to be challenged. If you think about the law student themselves, they’re asked [00:06:00] to challenge, right?

As an undergrad at a big university, you’re just one of many people. And so those policies were set in stone and you followed to the T. When I worked at the registrar’s office and my entry-level side of the registrar’s office, I followed the rules.

I followed the protocols because it was process centric. It was institutional centric. So it didn’t matter if I had a student crying because he or she missed the deadline to drop a class and now they owe all of that tuition. It didn’t matter at that time, it was black or white.

And I think even today, when I think about the way that I designed a university, are you gonna have a discussion? I take that into consideration about the spirit of the rule. What is the spirit of the rule and how do we take a perspective around that? But when I was at the law school, the rules were set [00:07:00] by the Dean.

His name was Howard, and Howard was a very rigid man when I had to ask him for favors or ask him for an exception, but if a student went to him and said, “Hey, I need this exception or I want this exception.” He would give me a call back and say, “Hey, Matt, I saw that you rejected John’s request to add the course. Go ahead. I’ll okay it.”

And at that time, I would look like a fool in front of the law student because I was telling him, “you have to follow the rule, I have to follow it.” And then he or she would go up to the Dean and get it overwritten. At that time, I was frustrated about it.

But what I recognized was that the students appreciated it. The students appreciated Howard. The students appreciated even the fact that I put rules in place for them during those times, the students recognize I was going through protocol. Right. And so [00:08:00] I learned a little bit of, is the rule really a rule?

Or what is the spirit of the rule? I speak about the spirit of the rule all the time. Why do you do it? And most universities and colleges that I speak to when I’m asking them about certain activities. People don’t know why they’re doing it, and that’s because they’ve been just following the protocol without understanding the spirit of what you’re really trying to serve, which is really the student and the faculty.

Everyone kind of forgets the faculty and this whole student centric element of it. But faculty are as important in the way we encounter the community that we serve, the faculty have to be on board. The faculty has to be empowered. The students have to be able to be aligned and that’s where the driving force is going to come from as we transform anyways.

Kelly: Yeah. And I love that you talk about, I mean, it’s almost like this could apply to anything, right? Anything in your life really? It’s that [00:09:00] concept we’ve talked so often about trying to sort of like break these rules, meaning like innovate, you know? And it’s so interesting to me that in an environment where, like you said, we’re training these students to second guess, to push the boundaries, to expand themselves.

And we’re just trying to keep in our box of, this has to be this way. I just find that funny in that environment. I really think this is something that can apply sort of across the board to anyone’s life. I love that you learned it in this environment and that you’re now taking it into this work, working directly with schools to help them think this through.

So before we jump in a little bit more, I want to touch back on faculty for a second cause you’re right. Often we forget. I’m really curious in all of this experience, what you’ve learned about needs of faculty challenges that you see there and [00:10:00] how the work that you’re doing now, and kind of help that along as well.

Matt: Yeah. Well, when I decided to embark on beyond, we thought about all the areas we would focus on in the aspects of future, right? What’s the future of student? What’s the future of work? What’s the future of consulting? We also recognize we had to talk about future of learning elements of it that really mattered, and faculty had to embark on it.

When I think about when I have my keynotes, I do keynotes pretty often, but now, and it’s funny, cause provosts will always ask me after I have discussions with them. They’re like, can you now speak to our faculty? Because it’s almost like provosts are afraid because they need to get consensus from the faculty.

Kelly: So true. I even get that question all the time there. What would you say to faculty about that?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s interesting. That’s a question that I get and even pre pandemic. So [00:11:00] there is a, what I would call a post pandemic that I’ve done and pre pandemic keynote. In both cases, I’m still talking about future of learning and I’m talking about future of work.

But the way that I narrate it now is slightly different because faculty actually recognize they have to have a change in what they do. The future of learning is going to be dynamically different. And in one of my keynotes that I’ll be doing in the next couple of weeks, I was just framing that discussion with the provost.

I actually title it, empowering faculty through the future of learning. The reason I say that, Is that faculty have to recognize when we think about the future of learning, it actually centers around them and the knowledge. If you think about what the asset is within a university, it is the faculty and their knowledge that they’re disseminating to their students, who become products and brands [00:12:00] of that campus.

Right? So the faculty become the key element of disseminating and creating what goes into market. So I really believe it’s empowering the faculty in that way. The future of learning has these, what I call like 10 tenants that I really am driving towards. It’s convenience. It’s agile.

 It’s mobile. It’s scalable. It’s all these things that we know and recognize that the future of learning has to come through. But we also have to now show how an educational marketplace, which just part of the 10, is going to empower a faculty member. Right? If the value of a faculty member is their knowledge.

It’s, I would say artifacts that they’re creating, a lecture is an artifact. Some sort of discussion is an artifact, a writing of theirs as an artifact. You’re [00:13:00] creating artifacts, and artifacts if used properly, you can actually gain real great value through that.

If you think about an artist who does music, he’s creating an artifact. In the old days, we would sell it on a record and it would get lost. We would get two good records and then you get lost on the other aid. Right? Now the way that ITunes and everyone works, every song is important and it becomes an artifact. And in some cases what the artists thought would be good or what would be the hit isn’t the hit.

It was the other songs. I believe that’s the same thing for faculty. Faculty have the ability to create artifacts in an educational marketplace that allows for students to gather the information that they need. They’re also empowered by allowing them to become peer to peer experts. So the person that’s really an expert in AI and applying it to something in civil [00:14:00] engineering or AI, applying it to a business case or applying it. You don’t have to decide and know everything about AI because you may just borrow the concept, let them explain it.

And that is going to empower the way that we navigate education and students are going to decide, “Hey, I want, I want this element of knowledge to be taught from maybe the best person in the market.” I really believe there’s going to be a shift. Once faculty recognize when we think about future of learning, they’re the center of that in terms of how we do it now.

Is the student, the end product? Sure. So there’s going to be two design thinkings that need to happen. How does a faculty really disseminate their information and how does students really absorb and learn and become the brand of that institution?

Kelly: Yeah. You just said something too, [00:15:00] that made me think, and I’m going to go out there a little bit here because we always have conversations about this, but I’m going to walk away from higher ed for just a minute because there’s organizations like, what does that mastermind.com?

I saw something for that the other day where it was like Ron Howard is teaching a course on film. And of course, if I’m someone who’s interested in becoming a director, I want to take the course from Ron Howard.

That’s amazing. So when you talk about this and I’m just curious, your thoughts on where you see these types of artifacts being made and sold and how does higher ed fit into, again, it’s this future of learning everything that we’re talking about, but you’re specifically talking about this one piece that’s higher ed related, and I’m just super curious how you feel about seeing these changes in learning and what does higher ed do?

Like how do they keep up with that?

Matt: [00:16:00] You know, higher ed has a real opportunity to partner beyond the four walls of their campuses. Right? That’s one of the things that I think you will see the campuses that will come out of the pandemic stronger, will be the ones that reach out beyond their campus and bring in the Ron Howard’s, bring in the Googles, bring in the learning platform leaders like learn mobile and others like that.

Those are the ones that we’re going to start to see in the market as we start to shift in what we do. When I think about the direction of how higher ed is going to evolve, there is going to be different modalities that that need to be taught.

I have something that I call learning chemistry, because we all learn differently.

I’m visual. So there’s five of them, [00:17:00] right? It’s visual, auditory, contextual where you’re reading. There is experiential where you’re hands on, and the fifth is speaking, right? When people are interacting with each other and dialogue, there is learning and absorbing going on. Those five have to be used within the ecosystem of learning for campuses to really serve the students.

Because think about the students. If we don’t serve it in their language, they won’t understand it. If everything is taught in Spanish or is taught in German and you only speak English, you won’t understand it. Well, that’s what we’re kind of creating when we just have one modale, like we only have that context only in reading or one context only in visual, you’re going to lose people who don’t communicate in that learning chemistry.

I believe institutions when they start to really hum, it’s when their artifacts [00:18:00] come in those five forms. And that’s how the courses will be taught and it will be tailored, it will be personalized, and that’s where looking at a learning platform that allows for you to navigate that is going to be really key as we move forward. So I mean, I’m excited about that.

Kelly: I agree. In the past, if a student didn’t feel like they were learning through that particular method, there weren’t a ton of options. But now with the slew of options available, if they’re unhappy, just like you said, they’re the customer, they’re going to go find what it is that works well for them, whether or not it’s at your institution or not.

I know a lot of the things that we’re talking about right now, there could be some people listening in, especially if they’re faculty members and saying, “Whoa, this is a lot, you know, how do I even go forward? How do I even think through this whole new different way?” And I’m sure schools could think that too, but I know you and I sit here and we [00:19:00] talk about this and all we see is an enormous opportunity.

We tend to push the boundaries and we tend to think through like, “okay, well, instead of, yeah, of course we can sit here and think how this is going to be so hard. How am I going to compete with Ron Howard and I’m teaching a film course but there’s so much more, I mean, he’s only one person, right?”

So what do you say to that? What do you say to people that this is concerning too?

Matt: Yeah. For that film, a teacher that’s teaching the same course that Ron Howard is teaching, you bring Ron Howard into your classroom. Right. It’s a simple thing. Like you don’t have to be the expert in everything. I’m creating my course on future work and future of learning and blockchain and all these courses that I’m creating.

Matt Alex only knows it to a certain level. I understand the concepts of them, but I’m [00:20:00] actually going to bring the leaders that speak to each of those elements and I’m going to let them explain it and I’m going to give it context to it. Right? So I think faculty, you don’t have to even be afraid of the Ron Howard’s.

There are going to be other film teachers at other campuses that are going to become very accessible and they should recognize, “Hey, it’s better to become a unified front in the way that you educate the masses.” That’s why the educational marketplace is really important. It’s like the concept that is a little foreign, right?

It’s a hard thing for people to understand. And the folks that are afraid of it, I would say, the way that we have to approach an educational marketplace or anything that’s future of learning is incrementally. It’s allowing for us to become evolutionary in the way that we educate, the way we teach, the way we learn.

Don’t make it revolutionary, like just don’t you don’t have to flip [00:21:00] it all the way to the other side, because remember there’s some folks who still need it the same way that it’s taught today. And we don’t want to lose them either. We want to give them options.

So in even in my future of work, and future of learning and my smart campuses, everything that I speak to is about incremental transformation. And I never really look at, one of the things I always look at is what is the future? What is the goal of that future? What are we trying to aspire to and who was being impacted by that? And then how do I design moving forward?

And I actually forgot about what I did in the past. Because the past is just what you learned from, you actually have to move forward and start to design your courses with the money chemistry, with the educational marketplace, with the ability to bring other industries in.

I’m a big believer. I have all these [00:22:00] different concepts inside of my future of learning. We have something called the educational value chain, right? There’s industry that is constantly innovating and within them, they have future of work going on, like what’s the work of the future? How does the technology impact that worked in that industry? And what type of new jobs are needed?

What type of new skills are needed? And those are then going to come back and the industry is going to be looking for employees and students with those skills. Well, in that chain, you have higher ed institutions that have to recognize that industry is changing. That industry is now more with a little bit of technology embedded in it. And so you can’t just teach an AI course. You have to teach an AI course that applies to different industries. You have to teach an AI course that does something else. Even data science, like data sciences is a word that everyone uses you have to apply, how does data science apply to [00:23:00] different organizations in the market and Insta industries?

I always start with the campus. I always say, how do I use AI for my campus? How do I use data science from my campus? How do I use blockchain for my campus? Knowing that those same use cases can actually be used in an industry. And in most cases it’s already being used in industry. I just have to come back and apply it inside of my campus in a much faster way than we’ve ever would need to do because the market’s already doing it.

So what they spent three years doing, we can do in six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks. It’s a much different ecosystem. But then when I was designing student systems, that would take 18 months to 24 months. And then in the end, we’re still looking at the same road that we’ve been driving to.

Right. We’ve been repaving the same system.

Kelly: I loved your article, the article you sent me exactly on that, which was you talked [00:24:00] about how we kind of have made choices that really, it’s not like moving the needle forward. It was the five mistakes higher ed. What was the title of his article that you?

Matt: I have a bunch of five and fives, so I know that I’d done one on reboot in higher ed.

I’ve done the five value drivers. I’ve done the five changes in consulting. Yeah.

Kelly: Yeah. There’s well, there’s some good ones and we’ll make sure you guys get a hold of Matt’s articles, but you just were mentioning one that I really, really enjoyed. Which was how schools, when they make the decisions at times, it really was like to overhaul a system as opposed to change focus, it was a different way. But that led me to think, you talked earlier about these rules.

 I think everyone who has either had a toe or a foot or full body into higher ed, we all know that things can take a long [00:25:00] time, that there are rules in place. There are some very strict policies. All different ways that we need to get approvals, especially when you’re creating new courses.

And I wonder when you’re talking about this kind of change, I’m curious, I’m assuming that this is stuff that you do through Beyond Academics and the work that you do with institutions. I really am wondering when you say you could do this in six weeks, for a school that hasn’t yet been able to think of things that rapidly, how do you approach that with them?

Matt: Change comes in in multiple forms, right? There is change in policy, and I’m going to come back to that in a second. I’m going to talk about changing policy, but there’s change in efficiency. And that’s the six to eight week efficiency that I’m talking about. I don’t have to change a policy on certain things that you’re already doing.

I’m just going to make those elements that is mundane [00:26:00] or could be automated or can be enhanced by a system, in most cases a system that they already own. One of my big tenants is let’s double down on the investments you already made. Like, I don’t want to bring another system in your discussion.

I just want to use what you have. But let’s start using it. It’s like somebody just using an iPhone just for their phone call, where they actually have features and function that they might’ve turned off or they, or just never have clicked on to do. That’s what university systems are in a lot of cases, there are systems that are really robust.

But because they want it to follow the procedures and policies of history, the historical elements, they actually spent a lot of money on these new systems, which are really state of the art, are modernizing every term, every year, every whatever the kicked concepts of, they’re rolling updates and [00:27:00] schools turn to turning it off.

Because they don’t have the leadership in their campus to go and say, are we doing this right? So now let’s go back to the policy discussion and the procedures discussion. This is just a leadership issue, meaning if you’re running an organization and the policies you have are not serving your constituents.

If you become a student centric or human centric institution, as opposed to a institutional centric institution, because institutional centric is what most universities are designed. They’re designed about the policies, the procedures, the term, you name the things that they’re following. If you start to look at it from a student perspective, you start to recognize this.

Isn’t really good to keep our students into a 16 week term. It doesn’t make [00:28:00] sense, but we do it. And until leaders all come together and go to the accrediting bodies and go to the government agencies that say, “Hey, we have to change the way we do this.” Right. That’s when you’re going to start to see change. During the COVID, I’ve been on calls. Many of times about certain many different things.

One of the calls that I had was from a nursing Dean. And they just said, “look, we are not able to certify and credential our students because they haven’t completed their hospital rotations.” Well, of course they haven’t completed it because they can’t go in the hospitals, because of COVID they were restricted. And yet, they have these restrictions within their academics that says you need this 12 weeks of work. You need this.

And so I said to them, you have to get a set of all of the Deans that are in the same boat, all [00:29:00] the nursing Deans, and you have to go to the accrediting bodies and you have to get exception and you have to move drive. You have to start moving it.

And if the accrediting bodies say, Hey, we can’t do that. Then the question is, are those the right credit bodies for the top type of institutions that I want my son or daughter to even go to? That was the first thing I said, like if my accrediting body can’t see the future, do I really want them as my accreditors for the degree that my daughter is going to get, for the jobs that doesn’t exist when she comes out?

That’s when you start to have the discussion and that’s what I’m really passionate about. That’s why I’ve been writing about a lot of stuff. And beyond was based on a lot of math. You got to go and speak it. If you believe it, you have to speak it. And I had a partner when I was leaving Deloitte, that said to me, that you believe in this, you’re leaving the partnership because you [00:30:00] believe in what you’re wanting the market to do. Don’t sit on the fence. When you think a provost or president wants you to not be on the other side of what they want, you have to jump and say, I’m swimming, I’m getting in my boat.

I’m going to this new path. Who’s going to follow me? And I took that. I took that as a bias to say look, if you’re leaving the mother ship to go embark on something don’t hedge on it, take it and run. And I believe that is an advice that all leaders even leaders within a higher ed institution.

If you believe it, you have to gain the followership and the consensus. You have to build a why. Yeah. You have to build the why. One of my biggest strengths, I believe, is my ability to [00:31:00] communicate and tell stories. One thing I recognize now is that when I communicate and I tell stories, I get followership.

Why? Because my stories put a vision in front of people. They understand what Matt is wanting to do. They may or may not agree with me and the ones that don’t want to agree with me, I totally respect that. I totally understand. And I believe there’s a lot of people that will go that other path. And I choose to do this because I believe it’s the right thing to do.

And I’m hoping others will see it.

Kelly: I love this because I’m thinking back to when we started this discussion and what you talked about with these students, in the law school and how the rules that were so structured and you were even at the time putting them in place and here’s Howard coming in and giving the exception.

And I wonder, I think back, like in [00:32:00] terms of skills, cause we always talk about the skills that make you the most successful. I see that you’ve taken this, I’m just seeing the connection here to you saying I was the rule follower. I experienced something in which I saw what happened when people went outside of it and how much joy it created, because we were looking at their needs and serving them value.

And now it’s almost like you’ve taken that and you’ve made it everything that you focus on now. From a skill perspective, would you say, this storytelling, this being able to take this dream and let people know what’s in your mind, do you think that’s like your best skill, if you will?

Matt: Yeah, so there there’s people that don’t like my stories, it’s too long, it’s not concise, you know? There’s people that don’t have the attention span and don’t care. And I realized this, we don’t care [00:33:00] and that’s okay. Right. I get it. The ones that understand my passion. I really believe in the why.

Like, why am I doing this? And if I’m following my, why, I’m hoping others follow me. And so far beyond, I’m getting good followership, but people are coming to work with me and changing the landscape and I’m getting leaders and presidents and provosts and chancellors who are reaching out to saying, you know what, I believe in what you’re saying, how do I make that a dialogue within my own campus?

So part of my storytelling, is creating a narrative for others too. So the reason that I write now is I want others to have narratives that they can take into market as to like, why should be, why should we look at the future of higher ed? Why should we look at a future of learning? Why should we look at future of work?

It can’t be just my narrative. It has to be everyone else that [00:34:00] writes and thinks about it. And I follow a lot of people who write about future work and future of learning. And you know what? I love it. I ping them on LinkedIn and I really drive off of that.

The ironic thing is I never recognized a skill of storytelling till one of my close friends, and he and I are now embarking on this feature at workbook, but this was before we even had this discussion. And this is when he became a professor at a university, my Alma mater and his job prior to that was he’s a comedian and that was his job.

And so he took on this new course called improv for business and he called me and he said, I want you to be my first guest because you’re an alumni from here, you worked at this university, the students were you at some point in time? Can you [00:35:00] come and speak to them? So I remember, I’m like sure I can come and speak to you.

 I said, Oh, tell me what I got to prep for it. I’m just going to ask you questions and we’ll get through it. You don’t have to prep. I went through that exercise, he dialogued with me for about 45 minutes, just asking me random questions. Students were asking me questions, and then about 45 minutes into the class, he stopped the class and he said, all right, what did you learn here?

And I’m like, I don’t know what they learned other than me telling them what I did at the university. He stopped me. He said, Matt is a storyteller. So everything he does, he talks to a story. You said you guys were all engaged because when he talked about the red scarf, you talked about the red scarf at the library because he brought you into that story.

I remember going back to my wife that night and going, you know what I told you, I didn’t know what I was going to speak [00:36:00] about and he made me an example of I’m just a guy who talks a lot and how important was that? But then that’s when I started to realize that storytelling allowed people to understand what I believe in.

And it also made me personable. It made me relatable. It allowed me to become vulnerable, simple. All those things are really important in communication, is that we are all have a little bit of ding inside of us. We get dinged about things. I’m actually a nervous speaker. Yeah. I’m a nervous speaker usually.

It’ll come out in certain times, but once I get into the flow and I started telling stories, it goes away.

Kelly: Well, I’m the same way, honestly.

Matt: Yeah. But once we’re in a conversation, the natural me just comes out and I think it becomes where I’m just coming from the truth of what I believe.[00:37:00]

And I think that’s a really important piece. And I think the one word that I would say, storytelling lets you what brings out is, it brings empathy. It brings empathy to your own story, but then you also have to empathize with people that are talking to you. You have to understand why they’re frustrated and why.

And that was one of the things I recognized at the law school. They had a lot of pressure, right? That B that should’ve been a B plus. You know, could mean an honor on their transcript for a job, right? It was an empathy. Coming from a criminal justice major at that time, not having my master’s degree, not going beyond the registrar’s office.

I didn’t empathize. I couldn’t figure it out. Cause I was so focused on the institution, that I actually failed to see the person and the empathy that they have. And the greatest thing about it is in my LinkedIn, I have tons of those law [00:38:00] students that I supported. They’re now are doing really great things.

Like they’ll ping me here or there. And I was just a clerk, really. I was a really glorrified clerk in a lot of cases and that’s okay because I’ll be honest, the things that I learned in those days is why I could walk into a campus today and immediately understand what’s wrong with that campus. There’s many consultants that walk in and they’ll have to do a six week assessment on what what’s happening on that campus.

I don’t normally need to do that because you know what, just having a dialogue, I can tell you what’s happening on that campus because I was already there. And the campuses haven’t changed from, I can go back to my old office at my current university, at my old university, and it’s the same people doing the same thing.

If I were to ever go back and I did have an opportunity to go back and become the director and become the executive director, I remember going back and I came back and I said, I could [00:39:00] never do that because they won’t transform. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to be mundane. And I’m going to be at a much different pace.

Because I’m really going where the future is. I’m always thinking about how do we get people to the future and how do we drive that? And that’s going to be, I always tell my daughter, like, I don’t really care what major you are, figure out what’s happening in the market. And how do you learn how to learn what that needs?

And that’s the driver in how education should be taught.

Kelly: I know that we have a lot in common when we talk about this, but I just love the way that you approach this. I love the way that you’re able to walk into a campus and understand, that storytelling as a skill. And like you said, being able to paint your picture in someone else’s mind bringing them into that, helping, you’ve listened and you’ve heard them.

And you’ve allowed that. People remember these stories, right. People remember when [00:40:00] they were understood. So I find that that is just such an important skill. I say those things, because for anyone out there, that’s wondering, well, how do I do this? I mean, this isn’t necessarily something we’re born with, right?

I mean, this is easily something that you can learn. I mean, we’re talking about listening and being vulnerable. That’s not a – sometimes like we’re sitting here and we’re talking live and we both go out there and do keynotes and all these presentations all the time. But that doesn’t mean that we still don’t have the nerves for whatever reason.

It’s the thing that you can develop over time easily. Yeah.

Matt: So one of the things that I learned also is as I got through my ecosystem of just understanding what my ecosystem in my own world is. I learned that I don’t know everything and I’m not an expert in everything. And one of the things I’ve always learned, is surround myself with people that accentuate your [00:41:00] weaknesses, meaning being able to frame those weaknesses and be able to support it.

Because they can do something much more innovative and productively. I have a little bit of ADD, I would tell you that I do a lot of different things. And so that 20% that I don’t get to gets lost or how to I’ll defer a discussion with someone else, because I know that person will be much more concise than the person that’s speaking to that he’s speaking to doesn’t have the attention span beyond a five second dialogue because he has other important things that he’s thinking through. Right. So I would usually delegate like, Hey, have that discussion. Cause it’s better if we understand where your weaknesses are, how do you build a structure around you to do that? Because we all have weaknesses.

Kelly: Right, I used to hear Richard Branson say it all the time that his secrets to success is just hiring people that are smarter than him. But what he really means is hiring to his weaknesses. Right. Because [00:42:00] he’s very smart in his own. Right. But it’s that concept where you just kind of know yourself and it’s totally okay to not be the expert at everything.

It’s just impossible. But focus on those strengths, keep developing those strengths and sort of like divide and conquer. Right.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. And when you are asking for someone to come and help you, one of the things that they have to know is what do you believe in, what are you striving for?

Right? You can’t just have someone come and help you. That’s not going to help because they’re just going to do the work. But if you enable them with the vision of, I’m trying to do this, this is where I want us to go. This is the direction that I think this institution should go. Then the people that are doing the work that I would say, Hey, they’re better.

You know, we’ll come in. Like I get branded really well because my branding side of my non-academics is phenomenal. Matt Alex can’t create a [00:43:00] PowerPoint within anything. Now I can create the shell of it. I can create the content. I can tell you about what I want in that powerpoint. But I’m certainly not going to do PowerPoint.

And the reality of it is we don’t even use PowerPoint. Now we use much more modern technology because these folks that are really strong in it are using these innovations. So when I do my presentation, I’m using different technologies that isn’t a PowerPoint anymore, and I would’ve never have done that, but because I’ve gotten the strength. People who are really good in that element and that’s their world, that’s their skill. You start to really look better and more powerful in market because you have this backbone that’s really there. And it really goes back to like getting people to understand what you’re really believing in.

Kelly: It’s very true.

So would you say with this skill, I like to always talk a little bit about where you develop these skills. You have a [00:44:00] Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. Do you find that it was a combination of that foundation with the work experience? Because it does sound like those experiences really allowed you to see things in a different way that you weren’t seeing at the beginning.

Matt: Yeah. When I did my criminal justice major as I selected it, and I started off like every other Indian kid coming out of high school. Going into it, you’re going to go to become an engineer. And you launch into this world, you’re going to become an engineer because your parents want you to be an engineer.

And then you realize calculus isn’t for you and you don’t like calculus. You don’t even like all the things that come with that. So I had to stop and think about what I wanted to do, and I wanted to help people. I picked criminal justice because I wanted to help people. I wanted to help juvenile systems and things like that.

Cause I worked at a boys club and that was my [00:45:00] storyline. Like, “Oh, I’ll just go and become a juvenile person that supported juveniles”. And so I picked criminal justice for that. But when I look back in my criminal justice degree, And some people will look at it like, Oh, he’s a criminal justice.

Like, I want to be able to say to people like people are engineers and they don’t design systems that I have designed and thought of like they, they’re not there. And the irony of it is I don’t have an engineering degree, but I have actually now designed softwares like an engineer would.

Right. And I do it today, even in my future of work and my digital campuses, like I can think about blockchain in a much different way and I’m a criminal justice major that has never taken a CS course. I understand the problem. I also, in my criminal justice, if I think about what I was doing during my criminal justice, one, I liked the stories that I read, the briefs.

So I read briefs [00:46:00] and there was a story to be told, and those stories had kind of decisions that were made by a judge and then you’d take those decisions, would disseminate that information and then apply it to the cases that the instructor would give you and say, which cases applied to this.

And now when I look back, that’s what I do every day. I look at everything that I’ve, what worked in some other industry, what worked in my campus? And then I say, how do I apply it to the future? And then I started doing the same thing that I probably was doing in case studies. Right. And yeah, I’m not a criminal justice major, didn’t go to law school and all that, but I will tell you my liberal arts degree was really important.

And when we hear that in higher ed, that a liberal arts degree doesn’t matter, it’s because everyone’s [00:47:00] thinking of it as a job skill and that’s not what we want. We want to build the holistic student through that process. And the majors within liberal arts is what you’re interested in. The actual learning is what your degree is, degreed on. Your discipline is what you’re really degreed on.

And I think as schools start to recognize that and put that in place they’ll morph their liberal arts degree, because it has to be more firm with multiple academic paths so that you can learn AI, but then apply it to criminal justice or AI and apply it to sociology or data science to marketing like there’s, I can tell you all the different intersection completely where.

You don’t need to know data science. You just need to know how it will impact the things that you’re passionate about. And that’s where I would say to a student all the time is you don’t need to know the backend of stuff. Like there’s so many [00:48:00] backend things that are happening in the world that nobody knows of. We just need to know how that product will support what you’re trying to do. And that’s how we drive it.

Kelly: It’s so true. It’s still a wonderful foundation and it doesn’t mean that it’s going anywhere. It just means that there are going to be people that go and sit down for that liberal arts degree for that four year period.

And they’re going to be people that go about it in a different way. But with that, what you’re actually learning there is a really important piece. And I love the coupling with what you’ve learned even through your experiences over time. So I feel like we might end it on that note because I think that’s a wonderful lesson learned, but is there anything else that you’d like to share Matt before we finish up here?

Matt: The only thing that I always kind of end with is that you have to design for tomorrow. We can’t keep redesigning what we do today. You have to look at what is out there for tomorrow? How does it help the students of tomorrow? How does it [00:49:00] help the employee of tomorrow? And start to look at it that way.

So when we think about future learning and future of work and smart campuses and all these things, our goal is to create opportunities for everyone that’s going to benefit from that. Not only as a benefactor of what we’re going to gain in the innovations that we see, but also what type of opportunities will my daughter and son have when they come out of college to do this amazing set of technologies or amazing set of innovations in market. And that’s why I’m always charged with, I’m always looking at the future.

There isn’t a day that I get bored because I’m thinking about the next, the next, and it’s kind of a fun thing. And I think if people look at it that way they’ll start to see we have a lot in front of us. And while the pandemic has put a little bit of a damper in a lot of cases for [00:50:00] us, when we come out of this pandemic, we will be better.

We will also have the ability and the license to change what we do and that’s going to be the most important piece as we move forward.

Kelly: Right. Exactly. I would even say it’s lit a fire. It’s lit a fire under things like you said, that were happening before. And if we think about tomorrow, we think about designing for that future state, then you can’t go wrong.

So I think that’s a wonderful message to end by Matt. Thank you so much again for joining us today. For those of you that would like to follow Matt, he’s available on LinkedIn at Matt Alex, or on Twitter at the new handle @futurexhighered, that’s futurexhighered. And if you’d like more information on Beyond Academics, please go to their website beyondacademics.com.

Thank you all for listening into this episode of Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. If you enjoyed the [00:51:00] podcast, I would love to have you subscribe and I’d love to hear your feedback. So please feel free to rate, leave a review, shoot me a message. And if you’d like to follow me, Kelly Bailey, I am available on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram at Kelly R. Bailey.

Well, thank you all. And hope you have a wonderful day.