Tinsley Galyean, CEO of Curious Learning, is on a mission to eradicate illiteracy worldwide by helping people reframe how they think, learn, and lead through curiosity.

We explore Tinsley’s journey from the MIT Media Lab to co-founding Curious Learning, a non-profit transforming education for children in over 200 countries. He introduces his Eliminate Limiting Beliefs Framework, which guides leaders to let go of defensiveness, open up to curiosity, ask questions to understand, and create awareness of their assumptions.

Tinsley explains how curiosity dissolves barriers to change, why awareness precedes transformation, and how these principles can drive both personal growth and global literacy. He also shares stories of communities teaching themselves to read and offers a surprising belief that 90% of leaders would disagree with—challenging traditional notions of control and leadership.

Good day, dear followers of the Management Blueprint Podcast. My name is Steve Preda. I’m the host and my guest today is Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning, a nonprofit that is working to eradicate illiteracy around the word. And Tinsley received an Emmy nomination for his work on the Discovery Channel and has recently authored Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Define Us. So please, welcome Tinsley Galyean to our show. 

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me here. 

Yeah. It’s great to have you and you have a really inspiring nonprofit. 

Thank you. 

Normally, I don’t have  nonprofits on the show, but yours was an exception because I really like what you’re trying to achieve here. So let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it with Curious Learning? 

That’s always a good question. Thank you. I’ll take a quick moment to do a little bit of background to lead up to that because I think like most people, my personal why has evolved over time. So I, my background is in computer science, electrical engineering, as well as design and media. I ended up doing my PhD work at the MIT media lab in the early nineties. Then was in the world of technology and media, mostly kids, space, and often had an educational component for a couple decades as a result of that. And then shifted my work more towards kind of nonprofit philanthropic work and was asked to work with the Dalai Lama to start the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. From there, asked to come back to MIT and teach and start to get involved in research projects. One of those research projects was asking whether children could learn to read if the only resource they had was a tablet with some curated apps on it and left to their own devices. This kind of skunks work research project was done in remote Ethiopia and gave kids that had no access to school and no one in the village that were literate that access to these tablets and left them alone for a year.

And after a year, they were roughly at the same place. They would’ve been in a well-resourced US kindergarten, which was an astonishing realization. And I was kind of at the right time, at the right place with the right history and the right skills to say, you know, what does this mean? Can we replicate this? Can we scale it? What could the impact be globally if we could make it a reality? And you know, that kind of became the birth of Curious Learning, you know, in terms of getting back to your real question, which is the personal why during that journey

I came to believe and understand that a big part of what we're doing as humans in our lifetime is learning and growing.
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Yeah. That’s amazing. So how is, how can you achieve that, these kids with a tablet that they even know what to do with it and keep it charged? I mean, you see people who are highly educated, forget to charge their mobile phones. I wonder how can you get this who come from very disadvantaged backgrounds to actually be organized enough to even do this?

And I think there’s a distinction between kids, and adults too. Right? You know, when we handed out the devices in those first remote villages and we replicated this experiment in a number of places around the world, we don’t even tell the kids how to turn them on. We just give them. And then, you know, if they ask what they should do, we said, you figure it out. And it usually takes about four minutes at a maximum before some kids figured out how to turn it on. And it usually is not more than 20 minutes before every kid has it turned on, and they’re sharing and collaborating and talking to each other and working. It’s, there’s this innate curiosity that when you facilitate it and enable it. Just kind of takes over. And there is something magic about the touchscreen. The touchscreen is unlike a traditional computer interface where you have a keyboard and you have to know your letters. This, the touchscreen is something you really can’t engage with as a pre literate person. So that kind of innate person curiosity is part of the magic that makes it happen.

Yeah, that I mean, curiosity is such a huge motivator of people and it’s a huge, huge driver of progress. So this is amazing. So tell me a little bit about Curious Learning as it is in the name of your company as well, and how do you help people grow in a broader terms, maybe in a, you know, 30,000 view. What is blocking people from growing in general, and how do you help them get envelope? 

Yeah. So, I talk about this a lot in the book and we can kind of touch on the high levels of it here and there’s a lot more depth in the book, but a big part of what we’ve kind of discovered over our journey over these last 10 years is that we all have beliefs that we hold about how things should work and how things should operate. And that’s certainly true in the educational system around the world, right? Those beliefs can be very helpful for us.

They can frame how we act and what we do and help us make decisions about whether something is appropriate or good to engage with or not.
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Okay. So that leads us to the theme of our podcast, which is frameworks that any entrepreneur or business leader can apply to their own business and their own situation. So what is the framework here? What is the framework for alleviating limiting beliefs? 

Okay, so I’ll give you the high level one, the starting point. There’s a lot more depth in the book and there are a lot of examples, kind of global examples too that are very helpful to see in here as you go through it. But the general premise is that anytime you’re in a conversation with a prospective customer or a client, even somebody within your own organization, you can usually feel into that moment when there’s some resistance. Where either resistance in yourself or in the other person you’re talking to or both and you bumped up against something where people wanna kind of shut down that conversation and often they say something that does feel like it’s an end of the conversation and you know, it’s at those moments we tend to, we have to kind of fight our internal nature to just kind of say, it’s over. Let’s move on. Right. And the question is how do we do two primary things. One is that if there’s any kind of resistance or defensiveness that builds up in ourselves from that having happened, let go of that, make a conscious effort to let go of that in turn. On the other side of that coin is curiosity that we were just talking about, which is get very curious about what’s behind this without judgment, you know, start asking questions. Now questions like, tell me more about what you’re, what you’re thinking, or what kind of experience are you drawing upon that made you think that way or feel that way? And as you ask these questions, you can start to get down to what is the belief that person is holding or even for yourself, what belief you’re holding that’s creating that resistance.

Can you give an example? 

Well, I’ll give you an example from our World of Curious Learning. We’ll be in a conversation with, say, a Ministry of Education in an African country, and they’ll put forward the idea of using mobile devices to help the kids learn to read. They’ll be like, you know, that’s, that’s not possible. We’re not interested in it. Right. And there’s, we will start probing. Okay, so what’s behind that? What do you, you know, why do you think that’s not possible? We have a lot of evidence that this is possible. We have a number of examples of how it’s been used, and often what comes up is we kind of dig deeper into it, is that there’s one of two things that tend to come up on that particular conversation. One is that they don’t believe that many of the people in the country actually already have a smartphone. And that there isn’t one there. And the reality is that base is growing so fast and so big so quickly that even they’re unaware of how entrenched it is. The second one is there’s the belief that screen time is bad for children and that they shouldn’t support it. Where, and, and this, that’s one that’s got a lot going on at that particular belief in society, right? There’s a lot of feelings from parents that, too much time on screens right now is bad for kids, but we take the stance that it’s what you do with that screen time. It’s a medium. Anything.

There's good things you can do with it and there are non-productive bad things you can do with it, and you need to learn to help your kids choose the good ones.
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Yeah. Is that in your book how to do that? 

Yes, it is. 

I definitely have to read it, although we are empty nesting now, but we’ll have grandkids at some point and, we wanna apply the knowledge. So, okay, so you basically, you have this conversation you, you let down your guard, your defensiveness, you, you try to be, have an open mind and hear what’s behind their belief, and either they have limiting beliefs or maybe you have, or I have limiting belief in this conversation. Or maybe both of us. 

Yeah. 

And then how does that unfold? Because if I give assertive examples of, it’s not possible, but I can prove you that it’s possible they might shut down. Right. So how do I do it in a tactful way so that they don’t feel threatened by my argument?

Well, yeah, and I think part of what you’re doing is first you unearth the belief and give it voice. Actually say what that belief is. Right. You know, I feel like you have the concern that many of the children that we would wanna reach don’t have access to a smartphone. Right. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s not. What could we do to test that? Could we run a campaign and see how many kids we can get and parents can get to download it and look at the numbers and see if that makes it viable or not. And then in that context, kind of have have a discussion about, well, maybe that belief ought to be relaxed. Maybe we should consider modifying that belief. Maybe that belief is more like, you know, a lot of people already have them, but we still, there’s still a base of people that we’re gonna need to reach in the future. And we’ll watch that over time to see when that’s gonna be available. You start to suggest a modification to the belief and then move to that, and you know, like anything that’s a new belief that

will have a certain amount of time that is very helpful, and then eventually reach its expiration date. But that's part of learning and growing.
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So Tinsley, if you continue this example that you talked about the education ministry in the African country. So they have this belief, you present the evidence, but then what’s this, the verbiage that you use in order to not be at that resistance wall and help them engage with your idea without losing.

Right. Well, I’ll tell you something. I’ll actually tell you a little story about what we started doing a lot of times is that when we started meeting with Ministries of Education, we would sometimes find that they would be resistant to the idea that kids could learn on these devices and would even enjoy playing the apps or have access to them. What we started doing is that a couple weeks before we had the meeting with the Ministries of Education, what we would start to do is run ad campaigns in and around the area that anybody who works in the Ministry of Education lives to try to get parents to download and use the app. Now, what happened when we came to the meeting is inevitably there was at least one person who had seen their kids or their grandkids playing the app before we got to the meeting. They would stand up and talk about how wonderful it was, and we would preempt the first half hour of the conversation about whatever limiting beliefs they had and cut them got the loop before we even got to them. 

That is crazy. You hear this kind of advertising happening in some places that, you know, the White House gets a lot of these geo the advertising, for example. And, it is a way to lobby for changes and it’s pretty  interesting. So, moving on to the book, because the title is Reframe, which is kind of what you’re doing is reframing–

Yes, absolutely. 

Their beliefs. So the title of the book is Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Be Define Us, and maybe that’s not in the book. I haven’t read your book because it hasn’t come out yet, but one of the thing I was wondering, how’s it gonna change the world if illiteracy was completely eradicated? 

Well, you know what I’ve come to learn, which is, you know, one of the reasons this is such a strong passion of mine is that literacy is so foundational. The UN has adopted SDG four, which is that everybody should have the right to education for their whole life, But you know, so we’ve reached a point in the history where we believe access to education is effectively a human right. And one of the reasons we believe that is because it’s such a lever for access to so many things, and literacy is the foundational piece. You have to have literacy to get access to other types of education that are out there. So we know that for every year of literacy, you get your income increases by practically 10%. So it’s a massive impact on you economically. As a result, a massive impact on the globe, in terms of GDP around the world, the estimate for the the global GDP is about $1.2 trillion a year of GDP is lost from male literacy. At the same time, two thirds of the people who are literate are women. So it’s a gender issue, it’s very difficult.

The pandemic was a perfect example of how difficult it is to get health information out to people if they’re not literate. Child labor, human trafficking, all of these things are in the long term, mitigated by an educated, literate population. Okay. All those things relax on. The dilemma we have is that, you know literacy is never life threatening. These other things often are, so you have to make a longer term investment in literacy, but you know it’s gonna move the level on all those things in the long term. So one of the premises that we gets us particularly excited about this is that it’s very rare for a literate parent to raise in illiterate child, which you have the skills of some level of skills of literacy, and you know the value of having those skills. You work very hard to find a way to get your child literate. So if you can get a set of parents literate them and all their offspring will remain literate kind of indefinitely.

So if we could get an entire generation literate, we could effectively inoculate the world against illiteracy kind of indefinitely, and that's a powerful idea.
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Yeah. So how far are we from this? What is the percentage of population with literate? 

Unfortunately, we’re really far from it 

Really?

There’s about pre pandemic, you know, there’s about 770 million adults in the world that were effectively have no literacy skills. It was expected that about 660 million kids would join them. The number of kids that reach grade level literacy by fourth grade in Africa is only 10%. It’s about 12% in India right now. Those numbers, they were a little better than that before the pandemic. They’re a little worse after the pandemic. So there’s a large group of people that we have to reach to make this change, and the problem’s gonna be exasperated over the next 25 years because of the massive population growth. It’s about ready to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

10% of the of the population is electric globally.

Excuse me, is of what? Yeah. That’s probably about right. That’s probably about right. And there’s complete illiteracy. There’s a whole secondary group that is, doesn’t have complete functional literacy, that has only kind of partial literacy skills.

Wow. This is, this is a very worthy why. This is a very worthy mission. It feels like something that may be doable within our lifetimes. 

I think so, and I don’t, and I don’t think it would’ve been without the advent of the new kind of technologies and approaches that we have. I think, you know, a few decades ago you couldn’t have fathomed a way of achieving it, and it’s a byproduct of some of the technological tools we have on hand that could make this a reality. And the fact that infrastructure is effectively being paved by the sale of smartphones and internet connections. 

Yeah. That’s amazing. So, tell me about your book. What is it about? And obviously a lot of the stuff that we already covered is in the book, but, right. What was your objective with the book? With the book? 

Well, I think there, you know, there are two primary objectives of the book. You know,

one is to bring awareness to this issue, to the global literacy issue, and the work that needs to be done by us and others to make it a reality,
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So what has been your experience growing your nonprofit and with such a valid mission? Is it easy to attract good people to the company who want to join that mission? 

Yeah, I think so you know, we’re very, you know, we’re a very diverse group of people. We have, you know, roughly 20 people that are working with us, you know, all the time. Plus contractors. You know, we have hundreds of contractors that are native speakers of language. We operate in 60 different languages. Our apps are used in all 257 countries and territories around the world. We focus a lot of our effort on kind of 30 to 40 countries. But, you know, so it’s a very, you know, we have folks in the US, folks in Europe, folks in several parts of Africa, and you know, India, Philippines, Georgia, you know, scattered around with a variety of different skills and, you know, they’re there because they’re inspired by the mission and wanna be part of it. And, and that kind of diversity also breeds a lot of learning and growth for all of us. 

Yeah, that’s amazing. So how do you manage this organization which is in, you know, diverse time zones. How do you get the culture around. 

Yes. It’s, you know, that’s always a challenge, particularly since everybody’s coming from very different cultures, right? Yeah. There’s a lot of work that’s done asynchronously, you know, with all the time zone that’s, it’s done there. We do try to connect to smaller groups at different times. You know, there’s a magic hour for me. The magic hour is 10:00 AM in the morning, which I’m almost always booked ’cause, and it’s very rare for me to be on a call that doesn’t have four or five time zones represented. I think, you know the inspiration of being part of the mission is a big part of it. We do try to convene together at different parts around the planet at different, with different subgroups of our organization at different times, often at sites where we’re trying to do work. 

It’s very interesting. And what would you like our listeners to do as a result of our conversation? 

Well, I think, I hope that the framework of, you know, and the thoughts around limiting beliefs are of aid to you. So I encourage you to kind of engage with that. Some of my early readers from the book have talked about not only how it has inspired. Them to think about the global problems that are there, but also how the framework of limiting beliefs thing are things that they’re starting to apply to their personal life and how they even interact with them within their families and with their friends. And so I am hopeful that it’s of aid to that. So I encourage people to look at that and use that. Anything people can do to help bring awareness to the cause I’m an advocate for, and you know part of that can be hopefully buying the book and spreading the word so that it’s of help to everybody. 

Okay, so your book is coming out on October 24th. Is it October 20— 

Yes, it’s October 24th. It’s available for pre-order already.

Pre-order, so people can go on Amazon and Google your name Tinsley Galyean and the Reframe: How Curiosity Literacy Can Be Define as is the title of the book. 

Absolutely.

So do that. If people would like to reach out to you and, and talk to you or contact you, where should they go?

LinkedIn. I do monitor, so that’s easy to get me at curiouslearning.org is our website. You can certainly reach me through that. We have, you know, forms there can reach me. I’m pretty visible. They’re not many Tinsley Galyean pretty easy to find me if you remember my name. 

Alright, so Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning. So check out Tinsley’s book, Reframe on Amazon. It’s already out on pre-order. And also check out curious learning.org to see what they’re doing. I think it’s amazing mission that you are supporting and I think it’s super exciting that our generation can achieve this potentially to eradicate illiteracy and all the ailments that come with it. If you’d like to reach out to Tinsley, maybe you wanna be part of his mission, then connect with him on LinkedIn. Tinsley Gallian. G-A-L-Y-E-A-N is his surname.

Yeah. And Tinsley, T-I-N-S-L-E-Y. My first name, even if you just remember that, [email protected] gets to me as well.

Yeah. Okay. That’s the email and, and yeah, Tinsley is not a very common name either. So Tinsley, it was super interesting to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the show. And for those, those of you listening, if you enjoyed the show, then make sure you follow us on YouTube and stay tuned because every week I have an entrepreneurial leader joining us on the show. So thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.