Transcript
Transcript: Curiosity, Innovation, Storytelling, Empathy and Learning in the Digital World, with Elliott Masie
Taki Sarantakis (President, Canada School of Public Service): Welcome to the Canada School of Public Service. Today, we're going to do something a little bit unusual. We are going to talk about some Broadway shows. For those of you that don't know, this gentleman is the producer of Come From Away, the Broadway show that I think all of you have seen. I've seen it three times, once in New York, once in Toronto, once in Ottawa. We're going to have some opera singers, we're going to have a little dog named Mia, and the reason why we're having all of these things is we're going to talk about three things that are really connected that a lot of us don't ordinarily connect, and that is creativity, innovation, and curiosity.
And these are three things that are incredibly, incredibly important for all of our lives, whether you are a public servant, a parent, or a Broadway person, and these all tie together, and one of the best ways to learn is to learn from things that are adjacent to your own industry. I personally think we can learn a lot from sports. How do you run a sports team? We can learn a lot from, how do firefighters deal with crisis? How does an ER operate versus the operating room? All of these things are three different themes that we just see in different contexts.
[00:01:44 Elliott Masie is shown sitting next to Taki Sarantakis.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, with that, Elliott, I will pass it over to you. Elliott Masie is somebody that's been coming to the School virtually. He actually got here before I got here, a rare thing. And so, he knocked my socks off the first time I saw him and we've had him back more than once. So, Elliott, over to you, sir.
Elliott Masie (Director and Chief Executive Officer, Masie Innovations): Well, first of all, I'm glad to be here. I looked at flying from one of our homes that's in Saratoga Springs, New York, and it involved taking a trip to Atlanta on the way to Ottawa. So, instead, I got MapQuest out and I said, what's the best way to drive up here? And it told me I could get here in four hours and 49 minutes. I made it in five hours and five minutes, including a stop, and I never sped along the way, other than when it snowed between Montreal and Ottawa. I was just in awe of snow.
Taki Sarantakis: We're sorry.
Elliott Masie: Yeah, I hear you. I have multiple backgrounds and you can certainly read about that. Wikipedia would blame me or praise me for having been the person to introduce the term e-learning when digital learning and e-learning and online learning happened just around as the internet popped up, but I've done a variety of other things in the world of HR and training and development, but I'm sure there's a psychiatric term for people who get bored sometimes, okay? But I got a little bored with what I was doing about 20 years ago, and I turned to my wife and business partner and said, maybe we could do a second thing in addition to that. And so, we became Broadway producers and we have produced 51 Broadway shows, I'm Tony nominated, The Prom, Kinky Boots, Cabaret, and soon to come to Broadway, the new show Dolly, the story of Dolly Parton. Dolly's not in it other than by video but it's wonderful.
But I was really excited with the invite to come up here because I think when you work in public service, and I've done most of my connection in the United States, I've served on White House panels, I was a member of the Central Intelligence Agency University Board of Visitors and other things, you realize how much structure that you have in a government model and, not but, and, we have to sometimes be able to make sure that our processes of engagement, of interaction, of collaboration, of learning work. So, I'll give you a starting example. I have one slide and no bullets. Now, why? And I was host of Microsoft Television for a while and got to know Bill and his then wife, Melinda Gates, and the like. PowerPoint's a wonderful thing until you get to slide 32, bullet number nine, okay? I'm not sure you always remember those things. Ironically, you know what you remember? A story. A story. When the person doing that slideshow says, before I do the slides, let me give you the backstory behind it, you remember the story, but slide four evaporates pretty quickly, and I'm not putting down that slideshow as an information element but how do we end up using and keying into curiosity and to storytelling? Because at the end of the day, and I want to challenge you, an answer without a question evaporates. An answer without a question evaporates.
So, if I told you there's a really good hot sauce you can get here in Ottawa, okay, that's a question, and where did we just get it?
Taki Sarantakis: The King Eddy, which has the best hot sauce in Ottawa.
Elliott Masie: Okay, but if I just said, hot sauce, Eddy, that's a data point without a question. So, I think it's important for us to be thinking about curiosity. I also think storytelling is an overly forgotten element, because at the end of the day, stories are how we learn in every way. So, I could talk about it, but you know what? Part of the magic of doing something like this with the wonderful technology we have is I could bring a little sample in. So, we're going to have two musical guests here. The first is a wonderful woman by the name of Ali Ewoldt. Can we put Ali up on the screen for a moment?
Taki Sarantakis: And Mia.
Elliott Masie: Yeah, and Mia.
Taki Sarantakis: Mia will be coming too.
[00:06:58 Ali Ewoldt appears in a separate video chat panel.]
Elliott Masie: Okay, they're trying to get her up on the screen right now. Can I see that here? There she is. Okay, I'm going to stand up so I can look over you.
[00:07:08 Elliott Masie stands up.]
Elliott Masie: Hello, Ali.
Ali Ewoldt (American theatre actress): (muted)
Elliott Masie: Okay, we've got to get her audio up too. Hello, Ali.
Ali Ewoldt: Hello.
Elliott Masie: Perfect, and would you introduce your colleague to us?
Ali Ewoldt: Yes, this is Mia Bell.
[00:07:25 Ali Ewoldt points to a dog napping on a couch behind her.]
Ali Ewoldt: She's a 14-year-old poodle, toy poodle mix, and she's decided to lay down for a nap.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: Now, I'm a big believer in bringing large pets into presentations. I think they end up helping in a lot of ways, but I've known Ali for many years. Ali is one of the most wonderful, wonderful colleagues I have. She has been in multiple Broadway shows and on tour in Les Mis, a wonderful show that we helped produce called Gold Mountain about the Chinese building the railroads in Utah, and then, most provocatively, was it about 18 months that you were in Phantom?
Ali Ewoldt: No, two and a half years.
Elliott Masie: Two and a half years. And tell them, what was your role in Phantom?
Ali Ewoldt: I played the role of Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.
Elliott Masie: And the first Asian in the world to play that role.
Ali Ewoldt: Yes, on Broadway.
Elliott Masie: I asked Ali, we're going to talk about storytelling, but rather than make it conceptual, I thought we would bring it here. Now, I must warn you, she hits a very high C note. So, I've been looking at all the glass here in the building.
[Laughter]
So, without further ado, and then I'll ask you one or two questions afterwards, Ali Ewoldt with some storytelling, a song.
[Applause]
[Music plays]
Ali Ewoldt: (sings) Think of me, think of me fondly when we've said goodbye.
[00:09:04 Text appears onscreen: "Musical performances have been shortened due to copyright restrictions"]
[Applause]
Elliott Masie: Now, do me a favour. Do me a favour. For one minute, turn to a neighbour next to you. What was it like to be sitting here in a classroom and a wonderful place of good education for the public service, what was it like to hear a song like that? Just turn to your neighbour real quick. I'm from New York, so you only got 15 seconds. Go do.
[00:09:42 The audience members speak amongst themselves.]
Taki Sarantakis: Our speakers did not do her voice justice.
Elliott Masie: Okay. Hello. Okay, Ali, I'm going to ask you just two quick questions here. You've sung this in front of many people. How many people would be at a Phantom of the Opera performance?
Ali Ewoldt: Probably, on Broadway, maybe like 1700 or so.
Elliott Masie: Okay, and now, you're singing it into a camera where we're in Canada. How is that different for you?
Ali Ewoldt: It's very different. I mean, obviously, the immediate physical connection is not there, right? I can't necessarily feel all of your presences. Performing is so much a dialogue in listening between what I'm doing and taking in what other folks are. But also, it feels like a great challenge to try and convey the same ideas and thoughts and feelings through a screen, from one country to the next. And for me, what you can't see right now is I'm actually looking out onto Manhattan, right? So, I have a view of the Hudson River all the way to Times Square. And so, I'm trying to imagine, in the musical, I'm looking out onto the Paris Opera House and getting to perform there for the first time and sort of how magical that is. But right now, instead of seeing the Paris Opera House, I'm actually getting to see New York City. And so, that's triggering fun, new ideas and excitement and joy and storytelling within me as well.
Elliott Masie: And think about what she said, because here, almost all of your programs are being taped. It's really important that when we do gatherings and the like, that you are also camera-ready for that audience that was here. So, you saw Ali looking at you the way if I was there smiling at her, that she might… now, how did you train the dog?
[Laughter]
To just tolerate or enjoy this.
Ali Ewoldt: She thankfully has always been a good listener but doesn't like to participate per se.
[Laughter]
She's a quiet listener. She takes in the story without needing to put it in her two cents.
Elliott Masie: And one last question, earlier today, we were talking about gig jobs and the like. And in the acting world, the jobs are a gig, and I heard a presentation that Ali did at 54 Below in which she talked about the very first time you decided you wanted to be in Phantom of the Opera. How old were you back then, Ali?
Ali Ewoldt: I was 10 years old the first time I saw the show.
Elliott Masie: And how many times did you audition for it over the years?
Ali Ewoldt: I auditioned over the course of 10 years. I never counted the amount of times but I would guess 20 at least, including callbacks and all of that.
Elliott Masie: And then, what was the final audition? What did they ask you to do for that?
Ali Ewoldt: So, the very, very final audition, I got to perform on stage at the Majestic Theatre, where the show had already been running for 20 plus years, for Hal Prince. The original director was sitting in the audience. I didn't have a microphone. I didn't have stage lights. So, I was just standing kind of at the lip of the stage and the music director was playing the keyboard down at the pit, no orchestra, and Hal Prince asked me to sing this very song. I sang Think of Me, and I had sung the song so many times, trying to get the job, right? Trying to get to fulfill this dream role of mine. And somehow, I had just flown in, I actually had a different job at the time, I was performing in The King & I in Chicago, and so I was just in New York for a few hours, I'd already fallen in love with the idea of playing the character and then been disappointed, and so somehow I was able to tap into this idea that I'd been given as a piece of advice and have passed along since, of just taking each performance opportunity as the thing, right? As this counts as me singing the song that I wanted to sing on stage at the theatre that I wanted to sing it at for the director that I wanted to perform for, that this counted as kind of the whole shebang.
And because Think of Me, in the context of Phantom of the Opera, is Christine sort of auditioning for a role in the opera, she's nervous, she's in front of her colleagues that she really wants to impress, and she's taking it in as she's accomplishing, each note sort of grows in her joy and her living her best life, fulfilling her dreams increases, and so in that moment, for me, performing for Hal in this theatre, I really got to experience the dream without putting all of the weight and the pressure on getting the job. Instead, it was as if I was actually doing the thing, and I think that that brought something really special to the performance. And at the very least, it brought me joy and it brought an honesty to my storytelling and something that felt very personal. I was connected to the character and I think that that was very successful for me.
Elliott Masie: Well, Ali, thank you so much for coming digitally here to Ottawa.
[Applause]
Ali Ewoldt: Thank you for having me.
Elliott Masie: You will see her. She's going to be in Utah this summer, performing in a couple of different shows, and keep your eye on, Ali is one of the wonderful, giving human beings who taught me a lot about storytelling. So, thank you very much, Ali. Take care.
Ali Ewoldt: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
[Applause]
[00:15:33 Elliott Masie sits back down.]
Elliott Masie: Now, there's an interesting phenomena here. It was nice to bring me up here, I'm glad, and that was a nice ride on 30, okay, but we also have to realize that in the future, we're going to have to leverage talent being able to come in whatever way makes sense for them, and I will tell you that one of the skills that you need to learn, and what I really enjoy about you, is interviewing. How do you interview someone? How do you get their emotions? How do you ask them a question she didn't know I was going to ask but I was pretty comfortable that she was going to respond in that? But I would say to you that one of the things that we don't talk enough about is if you are in public service, you have to become part of an entity that is better and better at storytelling, because that report that you publish is wonderful and it's got 140 pages and it has 32 different slide decks in it and the like but the interesting element of it is you need to pull that together with the ability to do storytelling.
And I watched, through multiple elections in the United States, some very, very good candidates failed because they weren't good storytellers along the way. One of the people who I met, Mayor Pete, who did not make it, was probably the best storyteller I have ever met. Now, whether America is going to elect a gay male to be President is a different issue but I watched him enter a room and he knew about five things about each of 40 people in the room and went up to each and engaged them in a story, and a true story and a two-way story. So, one of the things that's critical to think about is storytelling. And sadly, we often confuse that with public speaking. Public speaking is how to speak in a group, but storytelling, it has a curve. When you think of a story, it takes you from here up to there. And boy, when she hits those notes, I had her perform this in a Walt Disney ballroom with beautiful glass things and I spent the entire time figuring out what they were going to charge me if the chandeliers cracked in that, but she hits whatever it's called, the highest C note that you can hit as a soprano, in that. What was your reaction when you saw this?
Taki Sarantakis: So, there's a connection. It's almost physiological. It passes your conscious mind quickly and you feel it in a way that words cannot convey. And if you think about that for a moment, that makes a lot of sense because we learned sounds long before we learned the meaning of words, whether that's as a species or even as children. Those of you that are parents, you know that you coo to your child. You know that you sing to your child. So, you absorb it in this way that sometimes words alone cannot convey.
Elliott Masie: Yeah. Now, I would go to that second bubble there which is curiosity, okay?
[00:19:11 A slide is shown with the text:
"Let's Explore -> Innovation -> Beyond AI -> Curiosity -> Storytelling"
"Elliott Masie
Canada School of Public Service
www.masie.com
emasie@masie.com".]
Elliott Masie: I think we ignore curiosity. We ignore it, because we're so good at presenting and publishing and posting and sharing and stapling and distributing that we often forget that there's this interesting door at the beginning of somebody receiving what you do, which is, are they curious? If they're not curious, I will tell you that in all likelihood, it's going to evaporate. Now, it'll be there, they can look it up at some point, but it's going to evaporate, and part of what curiosity leads you to is re-stacking content, re-stacking content. So, one of the things that I've become a big fan of, if I'm ever presenting to my team or doing a full-day workshop, I put a question up, I put a big question on the screen and I do literally what I asked you to do before, turn to a neighbour and talk about that question, because part of what that does is it prepares and lubricates the conversation that's going to come after that, and one of the mistakes that we make is that if people are required to be somewhere, that they're actually there. So, in Broadway, we have a limited amount of time to get the audience. So, turn back to the person who you were sitting next to. How long do you think, if she's starred in Phantom of the Opera or Come From Away or Six or any other show, how long does the cast have to get the audience engaged? Just turn to your neighbour and guess out loud about that.
[00:21:11 The audience members speak amongst themselves.]
Elliott Masie: Hello. Anybody say one hour?
[00:21:45 Elliott Masie raises his own hand.]
Taki Sarantakis: (Laughs)
Elliott Masie: Do I have half an hour? 15 minutes? 10 minutes?
[00:21:52 An audience member raises their hand.]
Taki Sarantakis: There was a hand there.
Elliott Masie: Okay, that's cool. Anybody go five minutes?
[00:21:57 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: We have some fives. Fours? Threes?
[00:22:01 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: Twos?
[00:22:04 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: Ones?
[00:22:06 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: And now, we drop down to seconds. Now, we'll do another one. We find a difference now. When your children or grandchildren come to a theatre, how are they different if they're coming to a musical like Hamilton or Phantom or The Prom or anything? What's different about them when they go to that musical? Come on, don't be shy.
Taki Sarantakis: They're way more patient.
Elliott Masie: What?
Taki Sarantakis: (Laughs) They're way more patient.
Elliott Masie: Maybe, maybe.
Taki Sarantakis: No.
Elliott Masie: Anybody want to guess?
Unidentified Speaker: They want to record it on their phones.
Elliott Masie: What?
Unidentified Speaker: They want to record it on their phones.
Elliott Masie: Okay, no, no, you're right.
[Laughter]
I'll go a step farther. They want to actually learn the songs before they get there. It's karaoke night for them. I have to be serious. You go to Hamilton, okay? And what I'll do is I'll get in line.
[00:23:05 Elliott Masie picks up his smartphone.]
Elliott Masie: And on my phone, I'll turn on The Room Where It Happens. All of a sudden, the whole line is singing The Room Where It Happens. Now, why do they want to memorize that music? Immersive, they want an immersive experience. So, we're finding shows are getting shorter. Shows are getting shorter now. In fact, for under-25-year-olds, they want one act and they want it to be over, if possible, in one hour and 18 minutes. So, if you want to see a great example of that, go see the music Six about Henry VIII, had six wives, all of whom died, voluntarily or not, along the way.
[Laughter]
But it's designed to capture you from the moment that you come in. It's gotten so much that on Broadway we now, on some shows, have a karaoke sing-a-long afternoon, the same price. They're now paying $100 and they're singing for us. It's a delightful business to be in, in that process, but why do I say that to you now? Because you're in that same environment when you are presenting something. I could get up here and talk about Broadway but it's radically different having had that singer come in here to practice it and for you to hear it live in that sense. And so, some of what we need to be able to do is to tap into what curiosity is, and curiosity is, ironically, more about them than about you. Let me say it again. It's more about them than you. Let me tell you the one do not ever do. Do not go to a joke book, jokes to start speeches with, and pick a joke and start that speech with a joke. It is probably the quickest way to kill the curiosity of the audience. The best thing you can do is to ask them to think about, talk about, imagine, what are your biggest questions? Because what I found, inevitably, when I'm presenting, and we'll do it here too, your questions bring out a better Elliott than my prep does because your questions map to what you are you are interested in. So, ask me a question about storytelling, Broadway, curiosity, and there are prizes by the way.
Taki Sarantakis: Not Broadway tickets.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: Question.
Unidentified Speaker: How does the older demographic react to that situation you just described?
Elliott Masie: It's really interesting. The older demographic has a urinary requirement.
[Laughter]
In which intermission is a very important thing and needs to be shrunk down. They would like to go to the bathroom one hour and five minutes after it begins, and many of our older theatres have a limited number of stalls. I'm also an entrepreneur and I wanted to start a business where I rented trucks with toilets that would drive up to where theatres work with advertising on the insides of the doors and the like but I've never done that, but they want a longer thing if there's a break. But ironically, they want the second act to be shorter and they want to get to the finish line, and what my older generation wants, and I'm 75, we want to know, what are we going to text about that show when we get out? Because one of the most interesting elements that I'm always intrigued with if you come to a workshop is not the form that you fill out, but what did you text to your friend or partner about that hour or three hours or three days that you were there? So, ask me a question. Anything, sir.
Taki Sarantakis: So, to what extent does good storytelling overcome bad data or a bad story? Because we have a lot of people in our business who are very good at telling stories but their underlying script, let's call it, isn't maybe as strong. So, can you mask a lack of knowledge through a good story?
Elliott Masie: You can but it'll bite you in the butt when you're done, okay? I think what you have to do is you have to be an honest messenger. You have to be an honest messenger. And as I said, I've done a number of different White House appointments and government appointments and the like, and I would regularly get up in front of a group and say the data's not that good, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm going to give it to you authentically. Then, let's have a conversation about, given that data, how do we share it with the public and what do we do going forward with that? Because ultimately, storytelling is about trust. You never remember a story that you can't trust, and you trust in part because the speaker is authentic and is real. Now, I think sometimes we over-present the data. In other words, we can present a tablet or a table with 40 elements in that and nobody cognitively processes that.
So, I want to try to get to the bottom line and then say, and then if you want to go dig into the data. I never try to honey-coat or sugarcoat bad information because I actually think people want government to be honest with them. They want government to be honest with them. I did a bunch of work with FEMA, which are the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and people would be coming into a truck that arrived and their houses would have been flooded, their insurance isn't going to cover it, they don't have any food, and the best people were there saying it sucks. Right now, the situation is horrible. Now, let's see what we're going to do about that, and there was a trust that came out with being authentic. Go ahead.
Taki Sarantakis: I'm just going to tell the room a quick story about this. In a previous life, I spent over three years briefing a cabinet committee of all the items in the committee. And when it was a stupid item, I swear to the heavens, this is how I would present it, I would say, okay, ministers, our next item is the dumbest thing I can imagine, I have no idea how it got this far but I'll present it to you, it's really ridiculous but here goes. You've never seen a group of people so engaged.
[Laughter]
Why did it come this far? How did it get there? And the credibility that that built for me over the whole amount of time was, if that's coming out of that weird Greek person's mouth with the name I can't pronounce, he's telling me the truth.
Elliott Masie: Yeah, and some of what you want, and it goes to what you just did, sir, when you asked me about that generation, sometimes you have to slice the data so people understand it's not a singular response. So, what happened in Quebec versus what happened in Ottawa? What happened with this program versus that program? How does it compare to what we did two years ago? And even asking an interesting question, did the respondents know what they were saying? I mean, I often like to ask that. So, what I would sometimes do is do a survey, and at the end, I would ask them to dictate into a recorder for two minutes, so you just did all these questions, tell me what you're actually reporting. And very often, their narrative fleshed out what all of that data would be along the way. Let me give another thing about curiosity, okay? The most interesting thing about curiosity is you don't have to be the one with the answer. If you get people curious about something, particularly in today's time, they're going to pick up their phone.
[00:32:17 Elliott Masie picks up his smartphone.]
Elliott Masie: And they're going to go on a little curiosity jaunt, and you may not like where they're going but I can always see in the room how many people are fact-checking Elliott when he's talking or the like. But sometimes, all you have to do with curiosity is to frame up a question that is provocative for people and gets them to think about stuff, and I actually don't think we use that word, curiosity, enough in the world of learning and of presentations and of what we do in public service here as well. Okay, well, let me take one of the other dots here which is innovation, one of the most overused and confused words out there, okay? I mean, literally, I wish that I could get a database of words in book titles, because right now, I think other than AI, I think the word innovation is used, and I always worried about words that have a lot of syllables in it, like in-nov-a-tion. I want to stop at the in-, I'm interested in the in- part of it. I'm not sure about the -ov and I'm not sure about the -ation at the end. But put more simply, one of the things I think we need to be aware of is that our best model of government is one in which we are encouraging innovation, including testing multiple different solutions in that process, and it's sort of an interesting thing.
[00:34:13 Elliott Masie looks at the smartwatch on his wrist.]
Elliott Masie: What are you saying? No, no, no, I don't need you. Thank you very much, Siri. Does Siri annoy you sometimes? It just pops up there.
But I think it's really interesting sometimes to say not what the one solution is, but what are three different ways we could do that? So, I'll give you an example. I live in Ireland half the time and I live in Upstate New York half the time, and I could do that because I happen to be a German citizen as well as an American citizen. My father had to leave Nazi Germany on four hours notice, and as a result, I got a German lifetime passport which is there, and it's very interesting being in Ireland. You suddenly find yourself in a new culture and you suddenly realize, well, there are multiple ways of doing things. So, I just talked at lunch about I don't drink much alcohol but I have a local pub I go to.
Taki Sarantakis: It's the law in Ireland.
Elliott Masie: It's the law in Ireland. Yeah, and I go to Neary's Pub, which by the way opens their back door to the back door of the Gaiety Theatre. So, actors at the Gaiety Theatre who had more than a 20-minute break between their things, Peter O'Toole used to come through the back door, order a whiskey, and they rang a bell when it was time for him to go back. Well, you start to learn. You're in a new environment. How does it go? Well, I got really excited where it's been my local now for a number of years, where every time I walk into the pub, they all go, hey Elliott, and my wife is there with me. And about a year ago, she started to go to Neary's with me, which I loved and they quite enjoyed her, until I came back about a month later and I walked in and they go, Cathy's husband's here.
[Laughter]
They demoted my brand in that. And I said, why did you do that? They said, well, it keeps you on your toes in that process.
But I think part of what innovation is, is recognizing that part of the role of any organization, particularly public service organizations, are to look at, to monitor innovation, sometimes to be encouraging innovation, and also to be making innovation safe. Very often, people want something to roll out to the nation, and I wish that they rolled it out to 100 people first. So, the shows that Ali was in, most of them have been very successful. One or two of the shows were woof-woofs, not like her dog but they weren't that successful. The actors were wonderful, but we've learned now to test shows earlier so we can stop them before we lose too much money on the process along the way. But part of what innovation is, it's in your mind. How do we apply different ways of being curious about the outcome and then figuring out a way to do a number of things.
So, I'll give you an interesting corporate example. One of the very large retailers in the United States, Walmart, was interested in a new way of training their managers. So, I happened to be asked to come down to Bentonville and they have thousands and thousands of stores around the world, and they had a great idea for this new manager programming, and they go, that's great, we tried it with three stores, next month, we're going to roll it out to 5,000 stores. And I said, you're crazy, how do you know it's going to work in 5,000 stores? Well, it worked in three. Well, what if we did a different thing? What if we divided Walmart into three groups, okay? One-third, keep doing what you've always been doing. One-third, try the new thing. And the third one, drop the manager training program altogether and look at sales and retention in 90 days. Well, I thought it was a brilliant idea and they laughed me out of Arkansas, okay? They'd say there's no way management's going to do this. Management doesn't want to fail publicly. And I go, hold on, would I rather fail with a third of the stores or with the entire chain, have the stock price drop, and then they get fired? But ironically, in organizations, we don't experiment enough, and part of innovation is figuring out, how do we experiment? And sometimes, it's the same intervention but it's a different story, it's the same process but it's explaining it different. Sometimes it's just what the title is during that element of that.
So, we've chatted a bit. Hit me with some of your questions about innovation, sir.
Taki Sarantakis: So, innovation is interesting because I started in the Government of Canada 29 long years ago and if there's one word that has continued throughout my non-illustrious career, it is innovation, and what's fascinating is we talk about it constantly, I don't think a lot of us know what it means. I don't know how we measure it. But now, innovation is something that we all want our teams to do, but you can't just point at somebody and say, hey you, go innovate. That doesn't seem to work. It's not like, hey you, go write a briefing note. That kind of works, but hey you, be innovative? So, what's kind of the magic sauce?
Elliott Masie: Well, first of all, I think it's almost impossible to teach it. I think the teaching of innovation stopped somewhere around 11 years old when they were kids. I think they learn innovation in their school, in their community, in their religious organizations, in their athletic organizations, and I have big problems with a lot of sports coaches who are very good at managing a team but they're not often good at innovating multiple ways of getting kids to success in that team. I will tell you I was delighted about the woman who went ahead. I was delighted at the woman who went ahead and won the skating thing at the Olympics, okay? When she basically said, I'm not following the model, I'm not following what my coach says, I'm going out there and I'm going to have a really good time, and she said in another interview, my goal was to turn on the audience and then the judges would probably follow, but even if they didn't, I would have succeeded in that.
Go ahead. We've got a microphone for you.
Unidentified Speaker: One thing that's been burning through my head during this presentation is that in the public service, it's a very risk averse organization, right? I think the reason you haven't seen innovation in your 29 years is because innovation requires taking risks, experimenting, as you're saying. And when you take risks, sometimes you fail, you try something and you learn from it and you fail. You've been kind of giving us that message, but there's hesitation in risking failure. Failure continues to be a dirty word in the government, and I think that's a big challenge. Even when I was listening to your part about storytelling, I mean, you were joking about briefing notes. I mean, there's even fear to change the template of a briefing note. There's so much rigidity. I would love to use storytelling more in my presentations or my briefings to upper management, right? But there's just this environment of risk aversion and fear. So, any tips around that?
Taki Sarantakis: You start and then I'll add a governmental sheen.
Elliott Massie: Okay.
[Laughter]
And I'm not a sheener here, so I'll de-sheen. I think the risk is there if we have managers who themselves fear, meaning you need an intermediate layer that's going to help and support that risk-taking, part of where you get to a better place, and I'll give you an interesting example from, of all places, the United States Navy Submarine Corps. So, the submarines go underwater, sometimes they're underwater for six months, and there are people who work in the nuclear reactor on the submarine, very intense job. Well, they wanted to make life better there. They wanted to do some more innovation, and what they came up with was at the end of every shift, which in most I think was either eight or 12 hours, at the end of every shift, they as a team said, what was something we learned, what was something we would do differently if this happened, and how do we explain it to the people coming on in the next shift? Now, why could they do it that way? They had a captain who really understood what you're talking about. So, do you know what he did when he first came on board? He was assigned to this thing and I was one of the few civilians who got to actually be underwater for a couple days, it was kind of fun, and he sent five of his favourite books, five copies each, and put them on the dining room table of the sub. So, literally, the people there started to read it.
And part of what he was talking about was, if you will, risk-taking, and there's no way to take away that aversion, okay? Because everybody thinks they're one step away from losing their job or getting written up in a press release or the like. But if your job is public service, your job, like a physician, is to try to come up with the best solution, and if that doesn't work, come up with a second solution or ask a third party for perspective, but I affiliate with what you're saying. I believe the world is changing so fast right now, and we'll talk a little bit about AI before we wind up today, we don't have time to not be innovative because we're going to be confronted with problems and challenges like we never saw before. So, I have a good friend. You've probably seen him. He was the father on the TV show Wonder Years, okay? Dan Lauria, really wonderful friend and he's doing a play about Alzheimer's right now. Well, Dan showed me a film company that had taken a recording of his voice and modified it so that they didn't have to hire him to do the new stuff but it was sounding and speaking just like him. We don't have any experience around the technology that could do that. So, my role as a producer is say, stop, let's figure that out because your rights are being walked on in that. Taki.
Taki Sarantakis: So, I'll just give a couple of thoughts on storytelling and then I'll go backwards to risk. So, storytelling is critically important in the Government of Canada and it is more important the more senior you go. And in fact, the kind of people that get sifted through our filters are the people that can tell stories. We call them the people that can brief. We call them the people who can connect the narrative. But at the most fundamental level, they are storytellers. It is not instead of the briefing note, Elliott, it is the briefing note and the story. You have to put those together. And if you can tell a good story with sound facts and argumentation, you're going to be the Clerk of the Privy Council. That's how we filter up, but that's not just the Government of Canada. That is almost every organization. It is very, very rare to find an organization of any type, any scale that isn't kind of led by somebody who can tell good stories, because telling stories brings the humans along.
Now, back to start with the risk and the failure, I'm a real outlier on this so don't take this to the bank. But I mean, we fail constantly. We fail thousands of times a day. Many of them make the front page of The Globe and Mail every day. We fail. The question is, how do you fail? Do you fail in a way that teaches things, do you fail in a way that changes work processes, or do you fail in a way that says, it wasn't me, it was over there? So, that's kind of my thought on government and failure. And then, one last thing on risk, I actually think the public service is amazing at quantifying incremental risk, i.e. if we do this that we're not doing today, here are the risks, but we are absolutely terrible at quantifying the risks of the status quo, which we never do. We never tell people, the risks of not having a modern IT system are X, the risks of not taking the asbestos out of your buildings is Y, the risks of not changing this antiquated procurement mechanism system are Z. So, we are quantifying the wrong risks.
Elliott Masie: And it's great, keep asking that question by the way, I'm serious, because that's bravery that is partially how we get to that. Some of the things that happen in storytelling are high empathy and humanity, okay? And I want to just share a little story for you and I'm going to stand up for a second.
[00:49:31 Elliott Masie stands up.]
Elliott Masie: So, as I said to you, I'm unusual in that I'm an American but I also am living in Ireland and I have a German passport, and my father left in 1938, Nazi Germany, on four hours notice. His assistant said to him, they're coming for you by 4:00, you need to get out of here, and he literally left the family and the like and made his way eventually to the United States, and 18 of our relatives were killed when they found out he had left, and he was just a junior governmental chemist. So, that was what happened in those days. So, I always ask my father, what do you think about Germany? He says, I love Germany and war is a horrible, sick time and people do horrible, sick things during war, but he didn't want me to fall out of love with the fact that my heritage includes Germany.
So, I went, when I was able, to file to get a German passport, and the one thing about the Nazis, they did many bad things, they were really good recordkeepers, okay? So, I was able to get about a 90-page file on my father that I could then use to get my passport, and I got my citizenship and I got my passport. And about a month and a half later, I was going to Frankfurt, Germany to make a speech, and I've been to Frankfurt in Germany many times but I've never entered on a German passport. So, the biggest problem was they don't stamp them. I wanted to get it stamped. There's a kiosk with no stamp on it. So, I keep looking for somebody with a stamp. So, I didn't get the stamp. So, then, I get to give my speech and I was going, well, I really should share a little bit. My speech was about digital learning, it wasn't about being a Nazi Germany relative of a survivor, but I got up and I took out my German passport and my father was from Hamburg, and I go, Ich bin ein Hamburger.
[Laughter]
I'm a hamburger because my father was from Hamburg, and I told the story of why my father had to leave and why I had the passport, never knowing that I would later use it to live in Europe, and it was great. I got not applause but you see people enjoyed it, and I gave an hour-long presentation that seemed to go pretty well. When I'm leaving, there's a gentleman, very well-dressed gentleman. He could have been one of the most senior people here in the Canadian government, but he was from Germany, and he comes up to me. He goes, Herr Masie, may I have a quiet moment with you? So, first of all, I didn't know whether to be scared or he re-looked at the files. I said, absolutely. He goes, let's go somewhere quiet. Now, I'm a little bit more concerned. He goes, let me start to say on behalf of myself, my family, and the German military, we apologize to you and your family for what we did to you. He goes, part of my job is I actually am involved in teaching our new German officers about the Holocaust and we take them here and there and to the like.
And then, he takes out his business card and he hands it to me and he says, Herr Masie, this is my name, I am your brother now, if you need anything at all, give me a call, the German people welcome you. And I mean, tears were running down my face but I decided to use it as a little moment of politics. And I said, I really appreciate it, I wonder if your counterpart in America would say the same thing to a Navajo Indian, and the two of us went off to have drinks after that together, to talk about it, but it's an interesting moment that part of what storytelling does, it personalizes you. You move from that stack, you move from that deck, you move from that report, and even sometimes saying, as I read the report, here's the questions that came to my mind and the like. So, use storytelling not to make something good news that's bad news but to make it feel, in a different way, much more personal in that sense.
[00:54:03 Elliott Masie sits back down.]
Taki Sarantakis: And that's a story that I can guarantee you almost all of you will remember long, long, long after you leave this room. Now, let's talk about curiosity for a second because curiosity, it seems to me, is something we're born with. We see babies, toddlers, they're walking around, they're putting stuff in their mouth, they're licking electrical outlets, they're climbing bookcases, mostly because they're curious, and they say, if I do this, what'll happen, if I do that, even before they have words. School and then work seems to kind of beat the curiosity out of us.
Elliott Masie: Yeah, it can, it really can, but I think partially it can because we make the mistake to think that the bulk of school-based learning should be lecture-based or should be work in small groups at your desk on an activity. I happen to be a revolutionary when it comes to learning, okay? I would have been today diagnosed as having a significant learning disability as a child. Why? I was a hyper-curious person who read things. A good example, I know when you grew up, you could buy an encyclopedia for $2 an edition, you get the A to B and C. Well, L to K was missing in my supermarket so I am really weak on any knowledge from L to K, and I've tried to go buy the old L to K one but I can't get it on eBay, but I am excited right now about what technology can allow us to do with education. Now, I'm not suggesting that we want our kids spending their entire day on a laptop. In fact, I would argue that technology is very powerful but I don't think it should substitute for some of the magical things that can happen when kids are interacting with each other, with the teacher on some challenging projects.
So, I think we have to be better at leveraging that technology to do that. I was honoured to serve on the Board of Directors of the First Robotics Foundation. We have 65,000 schools around the world where kids from age 15 to 17 build a robot and compete with each other, and you know what we found? The best predictor of somebody who applied to MIT to get in was that they had actually been on a robotics team along the way because there was a learning that occurred when they were actually building something. So, I actually think what we have to do in schools is become much more project based, become much more involved in things where they're interactive with each other. And then, we leverage AI and everything that comes after AI not to make learning quicker but to make learning deeper, to be able to let somebody go deeper about something. So, I'm really good, and I have an ongoing relationship with Gemini, with Claude, and with OpenAI.
Taki Sarantakis: Can you tell us your favorite?
Elliott Masie: What?
Taki Sarantakis: Can you tell us your favorite?
Elliott Masie: I will say that Claude is my favourite for writing code and Gemini is my favourite one for analyzing medical lab results.
[Laughter]
And I've been trying to actually trade stock using OpenAI, but what I've been finding, which is a really interesting element, is we're now starting to move to where we're going to have technology that can be used to coach people while they're learning. Sal Khan is a colleague of mine. He runs Khan Academy and he's been working with a couple of these systems. So, literally, you would say, I want to now learn about, how do you do standard deviation? I don't really understand it. So, here's what's different, that will come back and say, well, tell me what you know or don't know about standard deviation. So, it's got a diagnostic element of it and then it can see what you're working on.
Taki Sarantakis: It's also personalized which is a big deal.
Elliott Masie: Yeah. Now, I think there are all sorts of challenges with AI and I'm going to be the first one here to tell you, what I hate about AI is that there are five ego-less American multi-billionaires running those companies and I wish that that was not what is going on right now because there is no empathy in that world, where the technology could allow that empathy to come in, but what I think we are going to start to see are other ways in which people leverage parts of AI, but I want to always make sure it comes back to the humanity. So, when I say beyond AI, how do we add the humanity into that process? Can I ask our AV people? Is Melinda online? Have you seen her yet?
Unidentified Speaker: No.
Elliott Masie: Okay. It's probably another eight or nine minutes, okay.
Taki Sarantakis: So, I'm going to have you catch my eye if you have a question and we'll go in and out.
[01:00:05 Elliott Masie points to an audience member.]
Taki Sarantakis: But hold on, before we jump.
Elliott Masie: Okay, I'm sorry.
Taki Sarantakis: No, no, no, I want you to tell us the story, your Star Trek story, because for those of you who don't follow the School online, and you should follow the School online or Ginny will get in big trouble because she's our head of comms, the School released a video a couple weeks ago about the history of our building, the building that you're in. William Shatner used to work in this building. Part of this building was a theatre, the Canadian Repertory Theater, and we had Mr. Plummer, I forget his first name, Christopher Plummer.
Elliott Masie: Christopher Plummer, yeah, a few others.
Taki Sarantakis: William Shatner, Julie Andrews was here. Tell us your Star Trek story.
Elliott Masie: Well, he got all excited that William Shatner was here.
Taki Sarantakis: And I'm not a Trekkie.
Elliott Masie: Yeah, and I felt this moment of conflict, okay? Because as a producer, somebody who I produce and has become a really good, good friend is George Takei. So, George Takei was on Star Trek and he was the navigator on Star Trek. He hates William Shatner.
[Laughter]
William Shatner hates him. They go to Comic Cons and go down separate aisles to never talk to each other. So, you ask me, why did he hate him? Well, Star Trek, for any of you who are fans, a wonderful series but every episode was written by a different writer. They had an executive writer who pulled them all together, Roddenberry, but there was a different writer. So, on the third episode, the writer said, well, you're going to have to steer the Star Trek ship to the right and down and over, and he said to George, pick a button and that'll be our down, right, and over button. So, George said, let's do it this way. So, he pressed that button and that's what happened. Two weeks later, another writer came in and wanted the ship to go fast up, and Shatner says to George, press the blue button. He goes, we'll get in trouble if we do that, it's down, left, and right over in that sense. Well, it became a breakdown for the two of them, okay, and most of the Star Trek gang gets along with each other than George and William, and we produced George in a play written about his family who were in the Japanese internment camps during World War II called Allegiance, and part of my role there was just in case Shatner turned up, we'd tell security to sit next to him there because we were just worried about what might happen in that sense.
Question.
Unidentified Speaker: Hi, thank you for the presentation. I really love the juxtaposition of storytelling, innovation, and curiosity. My question relates to the fact that in government, we often hear or prompt for re-designing, re-imagining, re-purposing, borrowing from different sectors brought into our way of doing and thinking. And with that, oftentimes there's a certain level of readiness of what is being lost in the tradition of things being done a certain way. And when we're thinking about re-imagining and re-defining or re-designing, it implicates that those who are doing the doing part are losing some footing of what they're used to, the anchors that are familiar to them. But then, in your storytelling, there's also some sort of visionary or vision towards where you're trying to go, so definitely some change management there. My curiosity with the experience that you're having with Broadway and how you're preparing your actors and you're preparing the audience for re-imagining a classical, do you have any examples of how you were able to articulate that change?
Elliott Masie: Well, there are two parts. The first part is simpler, simpler. I think that we often drown people in complexity because many of the things we do in government are very, very complex in that process, but the problem is you drown in those complexities. I like it when you can be overt about, if we're doing a change, what are we changing because it doesn't work? What are we changing because we think we could do it faster, better, cheaper? What are we choosing to not change because it works? What are we choosing to not change because it will annoy too many people if we change it? And what do we have to keep as a log of what we're losing in this process? It's totally the problem on Broadway. We'll hire somebody like, well, we hired Lea Salonga, okay? And she was a star in one of our shows that we did. She hated the song we wrote for her, and we were two hours from the first preview, okay? Well, the writer re-wrote the song and we ended up rehearsing that song there and it was perfect, but it worked because we could have these conversations about you changed a number that I really would love to do differently in that process. We do too much bundling and gift-wrapping of reform or revision. We put a gift-wrapper on it, well, now, we have the revised ABC, but everyone's been doing that for years in that process. I actually think one of the things we need to do with technology is let people sometimes see the changes in front of us, to see this is the new system, this is what we used to do, here's how you do it, and even to be able to go back and look it up because some of that was a memory prompt in that.
Taki Sarantakis: And physiologically, humans don't like change.
Elliott Masie: I just keep checking for Melinda.
She's here.
Taki Sarantakis: Okay, so we'll have Melinda and then we'll go to you.
Elliott Masie: Okay, so let's put Melinda on and I will go say hello.
[01:06:43 Elliott Masie stands up and accidentally drops his smartphone then picks it up.]
Elliott Masie: Oops. I'll say hello to her. Okay, hello, Melinda.
Melinda Doolittle (Singer, American Idol finalist): Hi Elliott.
Elliott Masie: One second, they're going to put the audio up.
Melinda Doolittle: Okay.
Elliott Masie: There she is, okay. Hi Melinda.
Melinda Doolittle: Hi Elliott, how are you?
[01:07:15 Melinda Doolittle appears in a separate video chat panel.]
Elliott Masie: Can we make Melinda a little louder? Okay. So, Melinda, you're coming in to Ottawa in Canada. Have you ever been to Ottawa in Canada?
Melinda Doolittle: I've never been to Ottawa, and is it cold?
[Laughter]
Taki Sarantakis: Yes.
Elliott Masie: It snowed yesterday from Montreal, half the way to Ottawa. But as soon as I got to the sign that Ottawa's there, it said no snow, keep coming, yeah. So, it was good.
Melinda Doolittle: Well, I mowed my lawn today. It's warm here.
Elliott Masie: That's wonderful. Well, I've known Melinda for a while. I sat in the living room of our house watching American Idol, and I don't know how many of you have watched American Idol, or is there a Canadian Idol now?
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah.
Elliott Masie: Okay, good, or Canadian Idol, okay, and I actually fell in love with her as a singer, as an entertainer. I will tell you, her first audition, if you want to go watch it on YouTube, was wonderful, and she was a little shy because she was a background singer for many famous folks. But then, I asked her to come, and we were her first paid gig after American Idol, and she came and she sang in front of 1500 people, and it turned out her father knew me because her father had worked for Xerox Learning, and he got so excited that she was going to be singing for Elliott's learning conference. And so, I needed to take a break in the middle because she wasn't used to doing, what did you do, eight numbers that day or 10 numbers?
Melinda Doolittle: 12.
Elliott Masie: 12. Okay, it's the same price. I tried to get as many numbers as I could. Okay, but she needed a break so I brought her father up and we had this great conversation. And then, she went on to do many things, and one of the things we both did, Melinda and I, we were one voyage apart. We both went to Africa for Malaria No More where the Canadian Red Cross gave us malaria nets to distribute, several million malaria nets, and you went there with Laura Bush, the President's wife, yeah, and I was there with Malcolm X's youngest daughter, but we've become friends and colleagues and done many, many things together. So, other than Canada maybe being cold, okay, what else do you know about Canada? Anything?
Melinda Doolittle: I know about Fluevog shoes.
Taki Sarantakis: Really?
Melinda Doolittle: I got my first pair when I was in Toronto. I love Banff, it is one of the most gorgeous places I've ever seen, and what else do I know? Some Tim Hortons, man.
[Laughter]
That's about what I know.
Elliott Masie: I get you, okay. Well, Melinda has a wonderful array of things she does. One of the things we're really proud of, and my wife and I have a foundation and we've been supporting it, is Melinda brings other singers into prisons to do concerts for inmates or the imprisoned there, and you just finished a tour. How many prisons did you go to?
Melinda Doolittle: We did seven prisons in four days and we did kind of an Easter show for them. We kind of took them on a journey. We do pop and R&B and soul and gospel and all of it, and just to remind the inmates that they are loved and they have great worth and they're not forgotten.
Elliott Masie: Okay, so here's a curiosity question. Maybe some of you have seen her on TV at some point or not, but turn to your neighbour. What type of song do you think she's going to sing? So, just turn to your neighbour. Take a guess. This is part of the curiosity, and then I'll make you sing that song (Laughs).
[01:11:14 The audience members speak amongst themselves.]
Elliott Masie: Okay, so how many of you said opera?
[01:11:29 Elliott Masie raises his own hand.]
Elliott Masie: Well, Ali, by the way, is a trained opera singer. How many of you said folk music? Okay, how many of you said Broadway tunes?
[01:11:40 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: Okay, rock and roll? Gospel?
[01:11:46 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: You got a lot of gospel fans here. Any other ones that came out?
Unidentified Speaker: R&B
Elliott Masie: R&B?
[01:11:56 Some audience members raise their hand.]
Elliott Masie: Okay, any Nashville tunes? Well, Melinda, surprise it. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a round of welcome for Melinda Doolittle.
[Applause]
[Music plays]
Melinda Doolittle: (sings) That's life. That's what people say.
[01:12:22 Text appears onscreen:
"Musical performances have been shortened due to copyright restrictions"]
[Applause]
Melinda Doolittle: Thank you.
Elliott Masie: So, Melinda, what's it like coming from your house? And are you the only one in your house right now? Is your mom around there?
Melinda Doolittle: I'm the only one here right now. I put her out for this.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: So what's it like singing to me and these other Canadians who have all got new shoes on?
Melinda Doolittle: This is the coolest thing. I love the fact that I can connect to an entirely different country from a room in my house with a little plant behind me. It just is pretty amazing what we're able to do and what we're able to convey even through a screen. I loved getting see little heads go back and forth like that.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: So, what's it like for you when you're singing? Are you thinking of the song or just the words or the upcoming hard notes? What's going in Melinda's brain?
Melinda Doolittle: I mean, the short answer is yes, all of that. I am thinking of the story of the song. A lot of times I'm thinking of where I want to take the story, and then I'm also thinking of hard notes and the fact that I am seated and so I need to breathe differently, and that I'd love to convey the song well but I'm staring at my computer, and so how do I do that? So, a lot is going on in my head. And then, when I'm at home, I'm also my own sound man. So, I'm trying to look and make sure that everything's still working and all of that.
Elliott Masie: And how do you prepare for the song today? Did you sing it once, gone over it in your head, or practiced it? I know you've done it many times.
Melinda Doolittle: I practice best in the car because I do best when I'm distracted while practicing. That's how I know I really know it.
Elliott Masie: Be careful, there's somebody here from the motor vehicle division.
[Laughter]
Melinda Doolittle: I promise I do it well. I just sing to the songs with my seatbelt on, looking straight ahead, but it helps me too if other things are happening. You know how we sing along in the car and everything? If other things are happening around me and I can still know the lyrics, then I know that I really know the song. Otherwise, I get on stage and somebody coughs or somebody moves and I'm like, wait, what happened? So, I'm a little bit like, squirrel, when something goes differently. So, I try to distract myself when I'm practicing.
Elliott Masie: And Melinda does concerts really all over the world and with some wonderful other performers. Who are some of the famous people you've sung with, Melinda?
Melinda Doolittle: Well, right now I'm touring with Gloria Gaynor who is absolutely amazing, if you know I Will Survive. She is out of this world.
Elliott Masie: She sang that for my 70th birthday. Gloria did a I Will Survive song for me. Who else?
Melinda Doolittle: Kristin Chenoweth, I've been touring with her, a wonderful Broadway and television actress. We've had a great time. And then, for myself, I normally do symphony shows all over. And so, I've been able to sing with the Edmonton Symphony, which was really awesome, in Canada, but I just run around and sing for whoever will have me.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: Yeah, and she is a wonderful, dedicated person. A little quick story and we'll say goodbye to Melinda and then start to wrap up, during the pandemic, as many of you know, life was really tough for people who were scared, in some cases sick, working from home, unsure, and Melinda and myself, a good friend, Telly Leung, Ali, and many other actors came together. And initially, every week, we did a free concert called the Empathy Concert, and literally it was one hour and we had four performers and I was the DJ there. And in fact, we got Zoom to fix their audio. So, the fact that her audio sounds that good, we got them to re-engineer their audio for an original mic to come there because they were part of our learning consortium, but we had over 100,000 people listen to those free empathy concerts and stuff. So, Melinda, it's so good to see you and I hope we'll see you soon.
Anything from you, my friend, to her?
Taki Sarantakis: Thank you.
Melinda Doolittle: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me interrupt your meeting.
[Laughter]
Elliott Masie: Take care, Melinda.
[Applause]
Thank you.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, we have a question from either side of the room.
Elliott Masie: Okay.
Taki Sarantakis: And then, I'm going to wrap up with a big question.
Elliott Masie: Perfect.
Unidentified Speaker: Thank you for a very interesting afternoon. I work at Global Affairs, so the Canadian equivalent to the State Department, and my team is responsible for some learning related to one of our business lines. So, when you're talking about a Broadway audience who's paid 200, $300 for their ticket, a room like us who have self-selected to come to the lovely School, it's one thing to pique our curiosity, it's another thing when you have someone whose only question is, why am I taking this mandatory training again? What value does this have to me? Why am I doing this?
Elliott Masie: Okay.
Unidentified Speaker: So, how do you bridge between that motivated audience and the people who don't see the value in what you're proposing to them, with all due respect to the Canada School?
Elliott Masie: No, I totally relate. I totally relate to it. I spent 10 years on the Board of Visitors for the Central Intelligence Agency University in Washington, and we were an oversight White House (inaudible) under three different presidents, different parties, to oversee how State Department folks, whether they went to language training or the intelligence agents and the like, and I would tell you in some cases, it was two years of training, and in other cases, it was novocaine-infested, deadly content that they were getting. I think the interesting place to start is to walk in their shoes, to walk in their shoes. So, what we found out, for instance, is people assigned to go to something don't know why they're there. They don't know why they're there. Go to Room 2722 and there'll be a good speaker or not, there'll be something on X, and it's wonderful if that can be a quote rather than a paragraph, whether it be somebody like you or their boss or the like. The second thing is less is more. Less is more. We overdeliver. I don't think we should undersupply but we shouldn't overdeliver.
So, I've been a big advocate that we took some things at the U.S. State Department and said, here's a manual with 40 key points, but today, we're going to focus on five and then you all can pick five more for us. Do you know that every time we did it, we had to go to eight or nine, beyond that? But part of it is giving up a little bit of the autocratic control to say we want to engage them. Now, by the way, I do things like this, I'll put music on, literally. We did stuff with the CIA training where people are learning all sorts of interesting, weird skills, and I'd say, what music could we start that with? And then, we found the audience wanted to supply music that was there. And so, I think we can add a little bit of playfulness even in something that's deadly serious, because nothing is funnier than foreign affairs if you look at it. It may be a hard thing to say out loud but it's an interesting element of that. But literally, less is more, that that's part of that process, and yeah, and just being authentic with people.
Taki Sarantakis: Last question from the audience. You're passing? All right. So, I'm going to ask actually a variant of that question, which is, you've worked with some of the great corporations in the world in kind of the private sector. When you get selected to go to training, that means your organization is investing in you. That means your organization values you. That means your organization wants to make you better at what you do. In the public sector, there's this different view of training. It feels that it is a punishment, it feels that it is perfunctory, and it feels that it is in some ways ameliorative, like you have to go do this training because you don't know what you're doing, which is fascinating because if all of you think about jobs that are important, your doctor, your dentist, your cardiac surgeon, your favorite NHL hockey player, some of you might be following the Ottawa Senators right now or the Edmonton Oilers or even the Montreal Canadiens who I can't believe are in the playoffs.
[Laughter]
All of those people are constantly learning, constantly training, constantly upskilling. And if they're not, you want to stay the hell away from them, yet we in the public sector often go, ugh, training, ugh, I'm too good for training.
Elliott Masie: Yeah. I'm going to give a very targeted answer and it comes from being 75. I've been in the field since I was 20, so it's a lot of years. I think that just as I don't think you can give an answer without a question, I don't think you can have a takeaway without applying what you're learning. I happen to be Orthodox around believing that if you send my people to a class, they should all have to do a project after the class that utilizes what the class was about, and what I found is if you give them that assignment ahead of time and they're now knowing that they have to do a project, everything lights up.
Taki Sarantakis: The why.
Elliott Masie: The why lights up. Part of what the public sector suffers from is that there's a view that promotion may be a result of structure, not of my own performance. So, partially, what I want to do is I want to give them a moment, whether or not the boss sees it or not, to perform what they have learned. So, if this were a longer thing, I would ask everyone here overnight to come think of a meeting you were doing and a piece of music, a question you could ask, and maybe an external guest you can invite in that would light up that element of it. The final piece, which is a really simple one, is they read you. They read you. You saw, in Ali and Melinda, two people, and I'm giving them a little gift, I didn't want you to pay me to come here so I'm allocating some of it to them, but they didn't do this because it was making a lot of money. They just were really excited about coming in to be part of this group in Canada, but you have to read the presenter because you communicate to the people how deadly you are being, and I think you have a responsibility to light up the room on some level. I was in one group, and it was a big group. There were 60 people. I had four air horns. So, if you needed to take a break, you could blow the air horn.
[Laughter]
Well, we had more laughter in that room with air horns. And then, at one point, all four blew them at the same time, and it was a course on statistics that they were going to, but they were blowing air horns, meaning we don't check our humanity at the door. We've all been in bad classes on bad topics taught by teachers who are bored with curriculum that we knew that we'll never utilize. It's your responsibility, just as it was Melinda's. Melinda doesn't say, I have a headache but I'll sing for you now. Both of them lit up for you because they know by lighting up, you would applaud, you would talk about it. I encourage you to go on and see them all over YouTube, they are there, but that's the key, and I think we have to get ready for the next generation of public service, the next generation, and that includes both young people but it also includes, my big project right now is aging with empathy.
What are people going to do that are going to retire from a corporation here at 57 or 60 or 62? How do we bring them into public service? I think we ought to get them involved in teaching. I think we ought to get them involved in health care and other things. We have to get ready for that next generation. And I will tell you, in the future, you're going to have to be smarter. You're going to have to be more curious. You're going to have to be more collaborative, more authentic, and more grounded in what it is that you are contributing to the Canadian economy and the culture by what you do. I would tell everybody who I met at the CIA, I didn't get paid for 10 years of service there, and I would say, you are doing something you'll never be able to tell a lot of people about but it's really an important thing you're doing for our country, and hearing it from you validates what they are about.
Taki Sarantakis: Storytelling, curiosity, innovation. Elliott Masie, thank you so much.
[Applause]
Elliott Masie: And I have one wrap-up favor, okay? I know sometimes it's hard to ask questions here. If you have a question of me on anything, okay? My e-mail is really easy. It's emasie@masie.com. Send it to me, I'll do a video response and send them to you that can be shared, but any topic. If you want to know about e-learning, about AI tutoring, or even how to get cheaper tickets when you go to Broadway.
[Laughter]
Yeah, glad to talk to you, but thank you very much.
[Applause]
[01:28:23 The CSPS logo appears on screen, then the URL canada.ca/school.]
[01:28:27 The Government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
