So What, Now What?

In this episode, Ralph and Bill discuss identifying the key takeaways, insights, and concepts that we as leaders want our team members to remember, and perhaps more importantly, how we can help them apply those learnings to deliver positive results for the organization.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast, where we discuss leadership, team, and organizational topics and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop your potential in your work and your leadership. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: Ralph, I love the title of today’s podcast. So What, Now What? What are we talking about here?

Ralph Simone: This was early in my consulting career, and I worked with a brilliant consultant by the name of Ron Cardis. And, we were working together delivering a course at Corning. And he said, whenever we do a module as part of this work, we need to be able to answer the question, so what now what? And I was intrigued by that. I don’t think back then I was even smart enough to understand it.

Bill Berthel: Right.

Ralph Simone: I liked it. It was catchy. But this idea of so what? What’s the key takeaway? What are the insights? What are the concepts that we want people to remember? And equally important, how can they apply them? What can they do with it? And I thought from a training and design standpoint, when we think about training that we do, when we think about the podcasts that we deliver, I think one of the things we want to answer both of those questions, so what that’s the concept. Now what? That’s the application.

Bill Berthel: And so I’m hearing, both and balancing concept and application. I’m hearing the abstract and the concrete. I’m hearing what do I get? What insights can I pull from this? And then what do I do about it? What am I actually going to get done or practice?

Ralph Simone: Exactly the fine line on the concept.

Bill Berthel: Right.

Ralph Simone: The abstract. Because I think we want to be careful not to be overly prescriptive.

Bill Berthel: Right.

Ralph Simone: Because there’s so many things that someone could extract from something. And it brings me back. Even though I’m an accounting major in college, I really loved the true liberal arts education. And what I loved about it and I think an important part of anything that we as leaders do is to get people to think for themselves, to think about thinking, to not necessarily give them the answer, but to share information that would allow them to create their own answers. I think that’s the abstract part, and I think we are looking for people to pull things from that abstraction.

Leaders need to be able to abstract from content and apply it

Bill Berthel: What do you think is getting in the way of abstracting? What do you think is getting in the way of thinking?

Ralph Simone: Time. I mean, I always forget the title of this book, but it was a New York Times bestseller, and the author was an educator. And, she talked about how most people do not have the time or the attention span to read an entire book anymore because we’re getting hit with these sound bites and links and things. And so I think the perceived lack of ti