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“You cannot learn empathy on powerpoint!” Wise words from today’s guest, Somewhere Else CEO Christophe Mallet, who comes by the show to discuss how soft skills training — basically, training for human behavior — is now a wide-open industry, thanks to XR technology.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson,
Welcome to the show, Christophe, it’s a
Christophe: Thanks, Alan. Thanks
Alan: You’ve been working in immersive technologies. Maybe kind of give listeners an understanding of what you’ve done at Somewhere Else, some of the projects you’ve done, and then we’ll dig into something really exciting after that.
Christophe: So I came from the
Alan: I have. So to paint a
Christophe: It was beautiful. It
Alan: So to put things in
Christophe: Yes, the world of work is changing fast and automation, all of that, meaning that HR Department has a massive challenge now, which is to upskill/reskill massive portions of their workforces, who are already digital workforces. And to do that, the investment that they do is shifting away from knowledge — because the knowledge fits in your phone — into behavior. As a professional currency, your mindset is becoming more important than your skillset. Delivering soft skills training is super hard. You cannot learn empathy on a PowerPoint, right? But delivering face-to-face, role-play type training at scale is difficult. And so the question is, can we use virtual reality as a solution to have the best of both worlds? The experiential impact of face-to-face training, but on top of that, the scalability of digital learning formats.
Alan: I think now would be a
Christophe: Sure. Have you ever
Alan: Sorry, who is it?
Christophe: Mel
Alan: No.
Christophe: It’s kind of the European counterpart of Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, when it comes to having done behavioral research in VR. So the Bodyswaps format is not something that we invented by any means. We looked at the research and [personal name] from the University of Barcelona is the first one who had this idea of, “What if I could swap body? What if I could be in someone else’s shoes, getting a new perspective on how I behave?” And the first experience that he created was about feeling empathy towards yourself, which is one of the main causes for depression, is your inability to feel empathy towards yourself. Until in his original experience, you were a woman. There was always a mirror to take ownership of the virtual body, and your task was to be nice, to console a young kid that was crying in front of you. You just have to talk to that kid. Now, because we knew you were going to try to be nice, whatever you said, the kid would progressively stop crying. That’s the first step. The second step was the experience. You would swap bodies, so you’d find yourself in the kid’s shoes, listen back to what you said to that kid. And basically the whole idea is, you would reflect on the fact that, “Wow, I showed empathy towards that kid. I said things that are really nice. And actually, I should have empathy for myself.” So you’re using self-reflection and self-awareness as a way to subconsciously impact behavior. We saw that their research — which is absolutely fascinating — and we scratched our head wondering, “Can we apply that for the world of work?” Will it make sense to listen back to yourself, when you are having a review, under-performing employee, when you’re pitching. when you’re dealing with someone who’s vulnerable or shut off, when trying to understand unconscious biases in the workplace, and so on. So that’s the scientific backbone to the format. Would you have it if I gave an example of how we’d use it?
Alan: Absolutely.
Christophe: So the very first
And so the idea was, there’s this gap between the wall of the classroom and the real world. And we want you to practice to get that real-world experience in a safe way, without the danger or the real world. And so that’s why we built The Bodyswaps. It never replaces being in front of real patients, because for starters, AI is not there to have those conversations. But you can — hours after hours — see what it feels like to be talked at by yourself, to be reassured by yourself. And through self-reflection, you build the confidence so that when you arrive in the real world, you have 80 percent or 90 percent of what you should know. And obviously you can translate that for your leadership sales, and so on and so forth.
Alan: It’s incredible. For people listening, what is the next step for them to get engaged with you? Are you making this so that it’s scalable? So you have a certain number of scenarios, is this custom for each company? If a business says “I really want to start using VR for our HR to train these soft skills,” what is the process look like from your art?
Christophe: Well, the first
Alan: It’s like, “Just
Christophe: Exactly. It’s exactly that. And so you really need some kind of a dialogue at the same table as early as possible. You want subject matter experts. They only will know the area. You want a learning designer, his job is not to know VR, is not to know the subject, his job is like, “does that teach?” And that’s it. And obviously you need a client champion. It’s very rare that your entire client’s stakeholders are going to buy into VR. You’re always going to have someone who’s going to be your champion in their company. And you need that person to be at the table with you, because you need to educate that person. If you don’t have that dialogue, you either create beautiful VR that doesn’t teach, or you create an experience that teaches very well but actually doesn’t engage. Or even worse, you create something that does both, engages and teaches, but you don’t have any buy-in, because you didn’t manage your champion, so to speak. So to answer your question, at the moment, we don’t have a standardized library of scenarios. We would build scenarios together with our clients and there are different ways to do that. Either work in a standard way, which is at stake what we already have, the features we already have, the kind of graphics quality that we already have, and simply writes a scenario that fits into that learning format. That’s kind of the standard approach. So low involvement from the perspective of the client. The second one is completely bespoke. Let’s just have a chat, talk about what you want. You might want to bring in some new features, new analytics, the possibility to ask questions, to flag. There’s a lot of things that we can do, and I’ve seen the format shoot at both, together with what the client we work with wants. And the last level is partnership. You might have an IP. You might, for example, be a company that’s been doing face-to-face leadership training with actors for 20 years. And you’re looking at scaling up your business model through VR, in which case it’s more of a partnership. Let’s sit together and see if we can create a product you bringing to the table your learning design and your subject matter expertise, and us bringing to the table the VR expertise.
Alan: Love it. It’s really great. So let’s talk more about details, because it’s one thing just to be in VR and play a video game, and it’s another thing to be in VR for work. How are you seeing the companies address things like buying the gear? Because we work in a lot of companies. And one thing, they come to us and they’ll say, “Oh, you know, our CEO was at a tech conference and he said, ‘We need to get into VR.’ And so we’re calling you because we need to get in VR.” There’s no strategy. There’s no forethought. What do you say to companies that are just coming and saying we need to do something in VR? How do you end up getting to the right decision-makers, or how does somebody from a business standpoint find you?
Christophe: I mean, how to find this is reality of marketing strategy. But to your point, the most difficult aspects of implementing VR right now is moving from the POC to the deployments. I think what’s StrVR did with Walmart, and the scale of it — kind of like, you know, 17,000 headsets in 5,000 locations, the scale is what makes it really impressive. And our approach for that is– and indeed, you’re right. Some clients don’t necessarily see further than “Let’s do VR because we have a bit of a budget and it’s fun.” And so the answer we always have for that is having an agile mindset to this. So we always start with consultancy, which is, we take a short amount of time, a short amount of money as well, a small amount of money. So we don’t take too much risk and let’s make sure to discuss what it is you want and why you want it. You know, you’re going to interview end-users, you’re going to bring in subject matter experts, you’re going to do a UX design workshop, you’re going to do discovery/education workshop with some of their team, if need be. And at the end of that process, we know that you want what you want for the right reasons. We know how are you going to measure the success of your POC or pilot. And you know how much it costs. And what we do with clients is if you want to stop there — because you don’t have the money, or because it’s not the right time, or you don’t have the buy-in — you’re better off stopping there. If you want to work with someone else, you can work with someone else. Otherwise we’ll move forward. And then once you have created your prototype or your pilots, it’s very important to set aside a significant part of your budget for testing it out. The discussion about costs is an easy one to have. You know what your cost-benefit analysis of implementing something, the discussion about are you saving on logistical costs or downtime costs is an easy one to have. The difficult one is what Bertrand wrote [garbled], the “return on impossible.” It shouldn’t be only about costs. It should be about, you know, in a workplace poor soft skills create depression, anxiety, discrimination. And now we have a possibility — by changing perspective — to deliver behavioral change. So we have to measure what it means for your bottom line to go from someone who is depressed, or a manager who just is incapable of managing conflicts, to an able manager. It’s very, very hard to measure. And if you can measure that, then you look at buy-in for implementation. So there is a responsibility that often lands on the client-side to bring the resources to make sure that that is measured.
Alan: A lot of early days,
Christophe: One way to answer
Alan: No idea. But it sounds
Christophe: Well, it is fun in a
Alan: Ah.
Christophe: And that is about
Alan: Ah, yeah, and pleasant
Christophe: It’s not the same.
Alan: Oh, wow.
Christophe: So it builds that kind of filter of self-awareness that he applied to the real world. And that’s anecdotal evidence. If we could prove that at scale, I think we would have something very powerful.
Alan: So let me ask you a
Christophe: And the short answer for that is you’re exactly what STRIVR did. I think STRIVR, being headed by Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, they have that mindset of having a hypothesis that something might work, and testing it out again and again and again to make sure that the hypothesis holds. And I think it’s the only way forward for us. We have contacted actually universities to try and scale up the kind of research that we already did, which is only academic validation of the learning format. On the other side of things, you want a business validation as well. So the clients that we’re talking with at the moment, we’re making sure that that cycle of testing and validation is built right into the pilot and that we go beyond the happy sheet.
Alan: That’s really incredible.
Christophe: I’m with you. I’m quite curious to also get your opinion. Obviously, the market has completely shifted from a consumer-driven market to an enterprise one, and with an enterprise you have vice industries, of course, and verticals. What do *you* see as being the kind of use case that is now fully validated and accepted by industry as a whole?
Alan: Sure. I think the easiest one right now is, is upskilling; being able to use not necessarily full mixed reality or virtual reality, but being able to wear heads-up display — almost like a Google Glass kind of thing — where you can pull up information as needed onsite, hands-free. I think another big, huge one is remote assistance or see-what-I-see assistance, where you’re working on something. You don’t know the answer, so you can either pull up the answer in your view or you can call somebody back at the head office. Maybe an expert, maybe it’s somebody who’s retired who’s just coming in. And one person with a lot of experience can now serve hundreds of people in the field that maybe don’t have as much experience. And being able to see what they’re seeing real-time and annotate on their vision, I think is one of the biggest use cases. Companies like STRIVR who are using 360 video as training, I think that is the lowest hanging fruit and it’s one of the biggest impacts from an investment standpoint, because it doesn’t require one hundred thousand or million dollars in investment. You’re talking maybe 10 to 20 thousand for your first modules. And as an enterprise, if you’re seeing 25 to 50 percent decreases in training times and 25 to 50 percent increases in retention rates, this is no longer “Should we do this?” this is “How do we do this as fast as possible across our enterprise?” And that’s what I’m seeing. And I think medical is the biggest use case of this. They’re using virtual reality for medical training almost everywhere now. Every single lab’s got a VR headset. Being able to look at MRIs, data in full three dimensions is just saving lives right now. And when you talk about return on investment, saving lives is probably the biggest return on investment we can do in this technology. I think we’re gonna see it in schools, eventually. It’s going to take some time. We’re working with some companies right now that are building K-12 curriculums. But it really comes in handy when you want to teach stuff that’s not math, learning times tables in your calculus, but learning how complex equations work. One thing that I did was I went in VR and I tried this thing where it took me on the difference between the carbon of a diamond versus the carbon of graphite. It’s the same molecule, but the way it’s stacked differently makes diamonds super hard and makes graphite– because it’s in sheets and they slide off. That’s why your pencil, as you’re writing leaves a stroke of black carbon. Until I’d seen it in that way in VR in full 3D spatial computing. I really didn’t get the concept, no matter how much I read about it. I think things like that, where you can train people in unsafe environments, being able to give people the sense of what it’s like to be trained in a mine is really key, because you’ll hire somebody from mining company and train them for six weeks, eight weeks, and then you send them underground to the mine, and realize that they have panic attacks and they can’t work underground. So being able to immerse them in a virtual space from the very beginning before you even hire them, will give you a good understanding of their mindset going into that. And I thought that was a really amazing use case, one that is not– compared to the savings, it does not cost a lot of money. You know, you’re talking maybe $10,000 just for the setup. And how much does it cost to train a new employee, to have them not be useful to you in the field?
Christophe: It’s a good analogy
Alan: You wouldn’t have very
Christophe: Yeah, but the value
Alan: I agree.
Christophe: And we need to
Alan: Have you tried the
Christophe: No. No, no.
Alan: So there’s an experience
Christophe: OK.
Alan: And basically, you are the
Christophe: Oh, wow.
Alan: They slash and burn all
Christophe: I want people to be
Alan: Well, I would have to say
Christophe: Fair enough. Good
Alan: Yes.
Christophe: I want to see a
4.5
1212 ratings
“You cannot learn empathy on powerpoint!” Wise words from today’s guest, Somewhere Else CEO Christophe Mallet, who comes by the show to discuss how soft skills training — basically, training for human behavior — is now a wide-open industry, thanks to XR technology.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson,
Welcome to the show, Christophe, it’s a
Christophe: Thanks, Alan. Thanks
Alan: You’ve been working in immersive technologies. Maybe kind of give listeners an understanding of what you’ve done at Somewhere Else, some of the projects you’ve done, and then we’ll dig into something really exciting after that.
Christophe: So I came from the
Alan: I have. So to paint a
Christophe: It was beautiful. It
Alan: So to put things in
Christophe: Yes, the world of work is changing fast and automation, all of that, meaning that HR Department has a massive challenge now, which is to upskill/reskill massive portions of their workforces, who are already digital workforces. And to do that, the investment that they do is shifting away from knowledge — because the knowledge fits in your phone — into behavior. As a professional currency, your mindset is becoming more important than your skillset. Delivering soft skills training is super hard. You cannot learn empathy on a PowerPoint, right? But delivering face-to-face, role-play type training at scale is difficult. And so the question is, can we use virtual reality as a solution to have the best of both worlds? The experiential impact of face-to-face training, but on top of that, the scalability of digital learning formats.
Alan: I think now would be a
Christophe: Sure. Have you ever
Alan: Sorry, who is it?
Christophe: Mel
Alan: No.
Christophe: It’s kind of the European counterpart of Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, when it comes to having done behavioral research in VR. So the Bodyswaps format is not something that we invented by any means. We looked at the research and [personal name] from the University of Barcelona is the first one who had this idea of, “What if I could swap body? What if I could be in someone else’s shoes, getting a new perspective on how I behave?” And the first experience that he created was about feeling empathy towards yourself, which is one of the main causes for depression, is your inability to feel empathy towards yourself. Until in his original experience, you were a woman. There was always a mirror to take ownership of the virtual body, and your task was to be nice, to console a young kid that was crying in front of you. You just have to talk to that kid. Now, because we knew you were going to try to be nice, whatever you said, the kid would progressively stop crying. That’s the first step. The second step was the experience. You would swap bodies, so you’d find yourself in the kid’s shoes, listen back to what you said to that kid. And basically the whole idea is, you would reflect on the fact that, “Wow, I showed empathy towards that kid. I said things that are really nice. And actually, I should have empathy for myself.” So you’re using self-reflection and self-awareness as a way to subconsciously impact behavior. We saw that their research — which is absolutely fascinating — and we scratched our head wondering, “Can we apply that for the world of work?” Will it make sense to listen back to yourself, when you are having a review, under-performing employee, when you’re pitching. when you’re dealing with someone who’s vulnerable or shut off, when trying to understand unconscious biases in the workplace, and so on. So that’s the scientific backbone to the format. Would you have it if I gave an example of how we’d use it?
Alan: Absolutely.
Christophe: So the very first
And so the idea was, there’s this gap between the wall of the classroom and the real world. And we want you to practice to get that real-world experience in a safe way, without the danger or the real world. And so that’s why we built The Bodyswaps. It never replaces being in front of real patients, because for starters, AI is not there to have those conversations. But you can — hours after hours — see what it feels like to be talked at by yourself, to be reassured by yourself. And through self-reflection, you build the confidence so that when you arrive in the real world, you have 80 percent or 90 percent of what you should know. And obviously you can translate that for your leadership sales, and so on and so forth.
Alan: It’s incredible. For people listening, what is the next step for them to get engaged with you? Are you making this so that it’s scalable? So you have a certain number of scenarios, is this custom for each company? If a business says “I really want to start using VR for our HR to train these soft skills,” what is the process look like from your art?
Christophe: Well, the first
Alan: It’s like, “Just
Christophe: Exactly. It’s exactly that. And so you really need some kind of a dialogue at the same table as early as possible. You want subject matter experts. They only will know the area. You want a learning designer, his job is not to know VR, is not to know the subject, his job is like, “does that teach?” And that’s it. And obviously you need a client champion. It’s very rare that your entire client’s stakeholders are going to buy into VR. You’re always going to have someone who’s going to be your champion in their company. And you need that person to be at the table with you, because you need to educate that person. If you don’t have that dialogue, you either create beautiful VR that doesn’t teach, or you create an experience that teaches very well but actually doesn’t engage. Or even worse, you create something that does both, engages and teaches, but you don’t have any buy-in, because you didn’t manage your champion, so to speak. So to answer your question, at the moment, we don’t have a standardized library of scenarios. We would build scenarios together with our clients and there are different ways to do that. Either work in a standard way, which is at stake what we already have, the features we already have, the kind of graphics quality that we already have, and simply writes a scenario that fits into that learning format. That’s kind of the standard approach. So low involvement from the perspective of the client. The second one is completely bespoke. Let’s just have a chat, talk about what you want. You might want to bring in some new features, new analytics, the possibility to ask questions, to flag. There’s a lot of things that we can do, and I’ve seen the format shoot at both, together with what the client we work with wants. And the last level is partnership. You might have an IP. You might, for example, be a company that’s been doing face-to-face leadership training with actors for 20 years. And you’re looking at scaling up your business model through VR, in which case it’s more of a partnership. Let’s sit together and see if we can create a product you bringing to the table your learning design and your subject matter expertise, and us bringing to the table the VR expertise.
Alan: Love it. It’s really great. So let’s talk more about details, because it’s one thing just to be in VR and play a video game, and it’s another thing to be in VR for work. How are you seeing the companies address things like buying the gear? Because we work in a lot of companies. And one thing, they come to us and they’ll say, “Oh, you know, our CEO was at a tech conference and he said, ‘We need to get into VR.’ And so we’re calling you because we need to get in VR.” There’s no strategy. There’s no forethought. What do you say to companies that are just coming and saying we need to do something in VR? How do you end up getting to the right decision-makers, or how does somebody from a business standpoint find you?
Christophe: I mean, how to find this is reality of marketing strategy. But to your point, the most difficult aspects of implementing VR right now is moving from the POC to the deployments. I think what’s StrVR did with Walmart, and the scale of it — kind of like, you know, 17,000 headsets in 5,000 locations, the scale is what makes it really impressive. And our approach for that is– and indeed, you’re right. Some clients don’t necessarily see further than “Let’s do VR because we have a bit of a budget and it’s fun.” And so the answer we always have for that is having an agile mindset to this. So we always start with consultancy, which is, we take a short amount of time, a short amount of money as well, a small amount of money. So we don’t take too much risk and let’s make sure to discuss what it is you want and why you want it. You know, you’re going to interview end-users, you’re going to bring in subject matter experts, you’re going to do a UX design workshop, you’re going to do discovery/education workshop with some of their team, if need be. And at the end of that process, we know that you want what you want for the right reasons. We know how are you going to measure the success of your POC or pilot. And you know how much it costs. And what we do with clients is if you want to stop there — because you don’t have the money, or because it’s not the right time, or you don’t have the buy-in — you’re better off stopping there. If you want to work with someone else, you can work with someone else. Otherwise we’ll move forward. And then once you have created your prototype or your pilots, it’s very important to set aside a significant part of your budget for testing it out. The discussion about costs is an easy one to have. You know what your cost-benefit analysis of implementing something, the discussion about are you saving on logistical costs or downtime costs is an easy one to have. The difficult one is what Bertrand wrote [garbled], the “return on impossible.” It shouldn’t be only about costs. It should be about, you know, in a workplace poor soft skills create depression, anxiety, discrimination. And now we have a possibility — by changing perspective — to deliver behavioral change. So we have to measure what it means for your bottom line to go from someone who is depressed, or a manager who just is incapable of managing conflicts, to an able manager. It’s very, very hard to measure. And if you can measure that, then you look at buy-in for implementation. So there is a responsibility that often lands on the client-side to bring the resources to make sure that that is measured.
Alan: A lot of early days,
Christophe: One way to answer
Alan: No idea. But it sounds
Christophe: Well, it is fun in a
Alan: Ah.
Christophe: And that is about
Alan: Ah, yeah, and pleasant
Christophe: It’s not the same.
Alan: Oh, wow.
Christophe: So it builds that kind of filter of self-awareness that he applied to the real world. And that’s anecdotal evidence. If we could prove that at scale, I think we would have something very powerful.
Alan: So let me ask you a
Christophe: And the short answer for that is you’re exactly what STRIVR did. I think STRIVR, being headed by Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, they have that mindset of having a hypothesis that something might work, and testing it out again and again and again to make sure that the hypothesis holds. And I think it’s the only way forward for us. We have contacted actually universities to try and scale up the kind of research that we already did, which is only academic validation of the learning format. On the other side of things, you want a business validation as well. So the clients that we’re talking with at the moment, we’re making sure that that cycle of testing and validation is built right into the pilot and that we go beyond the happy sheet.
Alan: That’s really incredible.
Christophe: I’m with you. I’m quite curious to also get your opinion. Obviously, the market has completely shifted from a consumer-driven market to an enterprise one, and with an enterprise you have vice industries, of course, and verticals. What do *you* see as being the kind of use case that is now fully validated and accepted by industry as a whole?
Alan: Sure. I think the easiest one right now is, is upskilling; being able to use not necessarily full mixed reality or virtual reality, but being able to wear heads-up display — almost like a Google Glass kind of thing — where you can pull up information as needed onsite, hands-free. I think another big, huge one is remote assistance or see-what-I-see assistance, where you’re working on something. You don’t know the answer, so you can either pull up the answer in your view or you can call somebody back at the head office. Maybe an expert, maybe it’s somebody who’s retired who’s just coming in. And one person with a lot of experience can now serve hundreds of people in the field that maybe don’t have as much experience. And being able to see what they’re seeing real-time and annotate on their vision, I think is one of the biggest use cases. Companies like STRIVR who are using 360 video as training, I think that is the lowest hanging fruit and it’s one of the biggest impacts from an investment standpoint, because it doesn’t require one hundred thousand or million dollars in investment. You’re talking maybe 10 to 20 thousand for your first modules. And as an enterprise, if you’re seeing 25 to 50 percent decreases in training times and 25 to 50 percent increases in retention rates, this is no longer “Should we do this?” this is “How do we do this as fast as possible across our enterprise?” And that’s what I’m seeing. And I think medical is the biggest use case of this. They’re using virtual reality for medical training almost everywhere now. Every single lab’s got a VR headset. Being able to look at MRIs, data in full three dimensions is just saving lives right now. And when you talk about return on investment, saving lives is probably the biggest return on investment we can do in this technology. I think we’re gonna see it in schools, eventually. It’s going to take some time. We’re working with some companies right now that are building K-12 curriculums. But it really comes in handy when you want to teach stuff that’s not math, learning times tables in your calculus, but learning how complex equations work. One thing that I did was I went in VR and I tried this thing where it took me on the difference between the carbon of a diamond versus the carbon of graphite. It’s the same molecule, but the way it’s stacked differently makes diamonds super hard and makes graphite– because it’s in sheets and they slide off. That’s why your pencil, as you’re writing leaves a stroke of black carbon. Until I’d seen it in that way in VR in full 3D spatial computing. I really didn’t get the concept, no matter how much I read about it. I think things like that, where you can train people in unsafe environments, being able to give people the sense of what it’s like to be trained in a mine is really key, because you’ll hire somebody from mining company and train them for six weeks, eight weeks, and then you send them underground to the mine, and realize that they have panic attacks and they can’t work underground. So being able to immerse them in a virtual space from the very beginning before you even hire them, will give you a good understanding of their mindset going into that. And I thought that was a really amazing use case, one that is not– compared to the savings, it does not cost a lot of money. You know, you’re talking maybe $10,000 just for the setup. And how much does it cost to train a new employee, to have them not be useful to you in the field?
Christophe: It’s a good analogy
Alan: You wouldn’t have very
Christophe: Yeah, but the value
Alan: I agree.
Christophe: And we need to
Alan: Have you tried the
Christophe: No. No, no.
Alan: So there’s an experience
Christophe: OK.
Alan: And basically, you are the
Christophe: Oh, wow.
Alan: They slash and burn all
Christophe: I want people to be
Alan: Well, I would have to say
Christophe: Fair enough. Good
Alan: Yes.
Christophe: I want to see a