Conversations with TA McCann - a sailor, a CEO, a person "just interested"

As a serial entrepreneur, sailor and someone just interested in stuff, TA McCann CEO of Gist. Gist provides a next generation contact manager and social media hub delivering value to users as a crowd-sourced solutions to search, to learn and to communicate and to make valuable connections. Prior to starting Gist, TA founded “Jump2Go - providing innovative solutions for the radio industry, HelpShare - a web Q&A company, and Soft Labour, a web design and development consultancy” as well as running the Exchange business for Microsoft.

This interview with TA is the fourth in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.

RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
TAM> I was never a video gamer but enjoy occasional board games such as Scrabble.

RD> How do you learn?
TAM> Primarily, I am an experiential learner. Secondarily, I learn by auditory and verbal learning. The best way for me is doing a project. I generally find people who are learning something that I am interested in and then I put myself around them and then do a project with them.

RD> What is your experience in how people learn and how learning is being delivered especially in the context of corporate training as opposed to schools and universities? Do you see a trend of learning content being delivered to individuals like you where the delivery adapts to the person’s way of learning?
TAM> I am certainly not an expert in education. However, I see a movement towards project-centric and team-centric learning. When I went to school, it was much more individual based and by the book. Now it is much more team reports and collaboration. I am seeing learning is a much more collective task. I see among the progressive west-coasters a more self-directed learning beginning among kindergartners. Montessori teaching was always self-directed where a teacher might say,

You Suzie you are interested in hockey, you John are interested in gardening, you Rini enjoy talking about cooking – let the functional skill follow those interests and I will teach you multiplication or language or composition based on that interest.

Having been on the board of a Montessori school, I understand this principle. But before, once a child was past kindergarten, the teaching became by direction from school and university and it carried on to the post-secondary and corporate world. Now the principles of self-directed training are becoming more prevalent among adults. It translates really well in the corporate world especially with the rise of social media. Now, an employee says,

I need to learn how to do the work or I am interested in having this skill, I know there are others like me who have already learned how to do it, and I will practice with them.

For example, if someone wants to effectively learn how to use social media, no one goes to school for that or reads a book about it. Suppose someone wants to grow roses in their backyard and learn to use the social media technology. They start by creating some social media accounts, follow others who are writing about it, discuss with others, if they like enjoy writing, then they start blogging about roses. Amidst that dialog, and using the technology, the learner uses self-topic of interest and with trial and errors with other people with same interest learn how to grow roses.

RD> Do you see learning and development community in businesses moving away from classroom and compliance-based training? What was your experience at Microsoft when you were there?
TAM> Yes and No. At Microsoft, classes were free and easy to attend. I took more than my fair share of classes at Microsoft, simply because I wanted to learn and it was readily available. Personally, I do not enjoy online training because I like the human interaction. I liked the instructor-led training. Many of these courses were really well done from an instructor-led training perspective but very few were project-based. Given that this was the early part of the past decade, and a bit dated as much has changed or evolved since then, I think it is moving towards a better virtual space where again it is self-directed and team-centric learning. More and more people have taken matters in their own hands via current technology and even mobile technology. They are unwilling to wait for batch-mode training, they want to crowd-source the learning. In software training, more and more people do not use manuals, nor do they sit in classes to learn how to use the software, making demand for instructor-led training less. There are many software now and more and more will be designed in the future, where the user will drive and source learning content.
For example, someone says,

I have a need, I have a passion and I will use the software. If I like it, then I will tell other how well it works and then provide tips on certain things.

Software developers, like us at Gist, are making it easy to use and fairly intuitive interface whereby a user asks these questions:

User - How quickly was it to set up?
Developer - Quick and easy.
User - How much does it cost to set-up?
Developer - Zero for Gist.
User - How much deployment do I need?
Developer - None.

This dialog then creates a consumption-driven learning model. The answers they get are then proven immediately by setting it up and then when they find it easy, they tell others. Then they can answer the question,

How can I get it on my mobile?

Then they ask by searching, if the mobile app is there, they set it up. If they like a cool button, they write about it. Then others follow. This becomes crowd-sourced and on-demand. Software when well designed will still have some complexity behind some three doors that an average user cannot open, and that’s where customer service and trainers or power-users will open those doors and promote that learning about the complexity. I think that’s the trend that traditional training community has to provide.

RD> You are absolutely right. We have been asked many times, why we don’t have manuals for our Learning and People management SaaS console with step-by-step instructions. I always ask the user the question,

What task are you trying to do?

They name the task. Then I ask them,

Given you had an overview, how would you do the task?

They immerse themselves in the product and then within 3 seconds they figure it out. It not shortens their learning time, as our design too is very intuitive, it saves us the cost of having an entire team doing documentation and version controls. This then saves money the user by not transferring the cost in the pricing.
TAM> Yep! It is the continuous cycle from the user to the designer to the developer and back to the user in a continuous learning loop. I think this evolving user-driven learning model for software can hold true with any learning associated with any work process.

RD> This segues well into my next question. User adoption for enterprise software has historically been a big issue. When the user’s initial learning cycle and effort gets simplified and initial getting up and running gets simplified for an organization, data should show that users adopt faster, But there are still big issues with SaaS models such as Salesforce.com and others that come to mind. What factors affect user-adoption in this day and age?
TAM> SaaS design in the past was not very intuitive, when you consider Salesforce.com. There are three trends in the software design today and is foreshadowing enterprise software design in the future.
First, software needs to be easy to use and be intuitive. I do not see some of the SaaS or other enterprise software from ten years ago as being that.
Second the software needs to provide instant gratification to the user. After those first two are met, then the user wants more and then you give them more. There is very tight cycle of effort then reward and then effort and then reward. I think almost all enterprise software ten years from now will have this type of design model that not only addresses first-time users but also addresses the needs of ongoing-users. What this leads to is that there has to be a way where a manager can be able to say and teach in a simulated way how much more improvement user Rini can do. This is where the manager says,

Rini – look what a great job you have done and announce it to the world.

This brings the third piece of how what you guys are doing becomes very important in users adopting. The more and more a game’s mechanics teaches not only critical thinking and how you use the technology and work process; you have built a relationship between that learning skill and the real work. Whether you work at a call center or elsewhere, employees will have “you got a gold star” incentives in real-time. Whether it is passively broadcast or instantaneously broadcast, both are immensely valuable to increase the user adoption.

At Gist, we have a new Game “Learn That Name” that teaches how to maximize the value of using Gist.
Here, we provide no manuals or training, but I-the user scores some points playing it and learns the value with small investment of time, small amount of gratification, and then learning happens.

RD> Our software and games relate not only to immediate learning goals, but also to real-time work performance metrics. We have done pilots and studies to prove the value of how it helps change behaviors and makes the learning consistent. However, the big objection that we hear time and time again, is that the user group of our technology (or other technologies like FourSquare and Gowalla) are self-selecting early adopters and that user-adoption is all about middle adopters and this might not help. We find that the incremental change in performance for early adopters is huge, the change for middle adopters is huge, and that the change for late adopters are much less. The last group, in my opinion, should look for a new job. However, this objection comes up all the time. How would you address it?
TAM> Before I answer that question, let me tell you of another trend. People who try and fail are better learners. Let’s look at the microcosm of iPhone. Most users will download an iPhone app, try it, like it, decides to continue, dislike it then delete it. This cycle is happening with any one user multiple times a month. Of course, Apple has a great job again making it intuitive and easy to install and easy to delete. I try one application but 200th time I do it, I become very confident to increase my productivity.

Mac is very good at giving that opportunity to users whereas Windows has not, hence much faster adoption in use of Mac for those who try it and less for Windows who get into the mode of “living with it.”

People who are lifelong learners are also early adopters; they like this type of change and they do it better. For employees who are these early adopters, I am not surprised that they will have a larger increase in their productivity. The performance gap between middle adopters and early adopters, I see as widening except with right leadership and incentives and rewards for the identified early adopters are leading to the traditional middle adopters move towards early adoption.
Again, the pool of early adopters is larger because failing and learning has become such a faster cycle. Learning Games companies like yours will bring more of these users to light in front of the management teams. I agree with you, late adopters should look for another job, that it’s a lost cause.

Companies should incentivise employees to be more productive with newer technology and tell them,

you guys will figure it out yourself, you tell us how it works, you help others to use the product and we increase productivity and in the long-run, we have faster deployment cycle, we don’t need corporate training and we can have change happen faster.

My experience has been that with that kind of leadership mantra, fast-fail change/reward mind-set, easily deployable technology, intuitive design will move the middle adopters.

RD> What does social selling mean to you?
TAM> Relationship ventured networks. Everyone should consider himself or herself to be in sales. In sales and marketing, customer support, and technical support and for software – you are directly helping with recruiting and selling. In that respect, social media is every employee’s tool to social sell whether it be to end-users or to recruit employees. There are three components for that.

First there is a listening component. This way you just don’t get information about TA McCann the buyer, but more and more components of data about what TA is about. The same goes for the buyer knowing more and more about the seller. Social selling is about the buy-cycle as opposed to the sell-cycle. This means more touch-points with long-term effect in the buy cycle.

The second aspect is the “social” component. Now someone who is trying to sell to me knows I am the CEO of Gist, I started a Montessori school and I am sailor and I have backyard chickens. The seller can connect at that level. Every aspect of the information I provide is socially relevant. It is no different before whereby I met a guy at a church and eventually that guy comes to my hardware store. The last component of social-selling is the how to manage content to build that trust. I can post today,

I am going to go to Hawaii and am interested in scuba-diving.

This is a signal from me to the world – give me content, give me information and recommendations for hotels, best place to dive, best gear place. The opportunity then becomes to those listening how to address this.

For example, I can post today, "reviewing VoIP systems" on twitter. The ones who do this listening badly, will immediately call me to sell me their crap. Those who do it well will send me a tweet about VoIP buying guide. That education and sending me relevant content builds the understanding and builds the trust and that trust leads to the opportunity to sell.

RD> So! Looking back in the past two years what percent of significant and meaningful professional relationships have you built and nurtured using social media?
TAM> Well! The main relationships in last 2 years came from conferences, simply because I go to a lot of conferences, and I go because that’s the way I learn. So! That shared context has given me focused opportunities to generate contacts. However, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin have all been incredible useful to me to nurture that first in-person contact and also bring back people that I knew from the past to have an almost daily interaction. Social media has helped me easily maintain and take those professional relationships to the next level. The percentage is increasing in an accelerated fashion for that maintaining part with orders of magnitude.

RD> Thank you TA. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Good luck with increasing the number of Gist users.
TAM> Let us continue to promote learning!

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