Dave Derington 00:00
under pressure, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo nothing pressure Comin’ down, okay.
Adam Avramescu 00:31
Welcome to CELab, the customer education lab where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches, and send all those myths and bad advice off to the cleaners. I’m Adam Avramescu.
Dave Derington 00:45
and I am Dave Derington. And this time of year is typically when we like to let loose and do a little fun episode to close out the year and start off the new one. And after this year, we definitely left loose of it Don’t we have We
Adam Avramescu 00:58
absolutely do 2020 has been nuts
Dave Derington 01:03
the the understatement of the year. So for this episode, bridging the end of 2020 beginning 2021 we are going to continue our tradition of asking what music and art can teach us about customer education.
Adam Avramescu 01:17
That’s right, because last year we did the Radiohead episode, and that was an experiment for us. And frankly, I was genuinely surprised to see the reaction. We got to that episode. We were doing our our countdown of the top episodes from last year. And I believe that episode was actually number three in terms of listens.
Dave Derington 01:32
Yeah, I was I was very shocked with that as well. And it was fun. It was folks was for what was fun was a lot of our listeners were saying, hey, this, this was the best one. And when we actually interviewed people, they were excited about it. Yeah, we
Adam Avramescu 01:46
ended up talking about that episode on a couple of the the interviews that we did afterwards. I know. So interesting, right? It felt like it was just going to be this little indulgent episode like something for us. But hey, I’m really glad that it resonated. And I hope that this one will.
Dave Derington 01:59
Totally Yeah, it was it was the best, both in terms of listeners and all that feedback. So what do we were going to go from here? Well, I
Adam Avramescu 02:08
think this is a tradition that we should continue now in some form because the experiment was a success. And we might not always focus on musicians or bands, we’re thinking about this, and we’re playing it by ear. As we go. We tossed around the idea this year of focusing on other forms of media, like movies or video games, and we might do those in the future. But we’d love to hear from you. If you liked this one, if you want to hear us talk about something else. What do you want to hear from next year, we’d
Dave Derington 02:34
love to hear from our listeners. Totally. This year as we prepare for this episode, Adam and I started thinking about what other interests we had in common. One artist really clearly stood out to both of us was David Bowie,
Adam Avramescu 02:48
David Bowie, or baue, as some call him, it really interesting artists because he represents so many different things to different people and his career went through plenty of really distinct phases over the decades that he was performing. So some might know him from his really iconic hits like Space Oddity, or let’s dance.
Dave Derington 03:11
Yeah, and others might recognize him more from his rock personas, like, oh, gosh, Who can forget Ziggy darts, Ziggy Stardust, and the thin white Duke, which, frankly, you know, I hadn’t heard that title before we started researching this and I thought, well, the return to the
Adam Avramescu 03:26
throwing darts and lovers eyes.
Dave Derington 03:29
Or, hey, let’s let’s do some obscure ones. Yeah, go for it.
Adam Avramescu 03:36
Do you know do you know what album he or? No, here? Let me let me structure it this way. Do you know which character he played on the album Diamond Dogs? Oh, gosh, no, no, I will. I’ll Venmo you. $20 right now. In Google, I hear the character’s name was Halloween jack. Oh, yeah. Well, that’s a fun name. That was a fun name.
Dave Derington 04:03
What about his work in movies? Because the man who fell to Earth was one and a lot of people know about Labyrinth?
Adam Avramescu 04:10
Yeah. And he ended up doing that stage show two, kind of at the end of his life, based on that same character from the man who fell to earth, Thomas Jerome Newton. And the Oh, what was the play called? It was called Lazarus. And then, you know, beyond
Dave Derington 04:27
the characters a lot,
Adam Avramescu 04:28
there’s a lot, right. And so those are just the characters. There’s also those periods of his career where he wasn’t necessarily playing a character, but he did the Berlin trilogy. And he had those genre experiments in blue eyed soul, industrial drum and bass and even jazz in his last album. So Dave, what’s what’s your favorite era of David Bowie’s career?
Dave Derington 04:49
You know, me I get more into that. The, probably the, like the outside era. If I were to laser in and like look in Wikipedia, If, for example, I realized now what I was drawn to was that electronic period in room 92 to 98, where he got really weird and out there. The whole outside album was very different from anything that you had heard before. And I think we’ll get into that later. You know, what’s funny is how I got into boy, wait, when you know, we were talking about, you know, like our interest and I discovered Bowie in college, from a friend of mine, who he made it his thing because I was a dual major in music and physics when I started. He gave me this whirlwind tour of all the music that I didn’t know coming out of a small rural Midwest town, you know, about an hour out of a decent size big city. That’s where I got my exposure. Mr. Mr. Nate stammer took me through it all. It was great. What What’s your favorite era?
Adam Avramescu 05:58
So I mean, I’m basic I got into him first from his early 70s glam stuff love Ziggy Stardust, and hunky dory and we’ll we’ll talk about some of those albums. But I think now now that I’ve I’ve gone deeper into his work. My absolute favorite album is station to station, which he recorded right before his Berlin trilogy. And then maybe second place I kind of love that whole Berlin trilogy and the album that came afterwards where Dave Do you remember when he was dressing as a clown?
Dave Derington 06:34
I do not remember that. That’s scary.
Adam Avramescu 06:38
He was doing this kind of like mime character it was right before he got he became a you know, a huge pop success with Let’s dance and he was playing this clown named puro. And the the album that he released, there’s a fantastic song on there called Ashes to ashes, which is kind of ashes spiritual sequel to Ground Control to Major Tom to Space Odyssey, Space Oddity, Ashes
Dave Derington 07:01
to ashes
Adam Avramescu 07:03
to the phone. We know Tom Jones junkie,
Dave Derington 07:09
strung out on half. Yeah, we go on.
Adam Avramescu 07:12
I was gonna harmonize with you if you kept going.
Dave Derington 07:14
I’m not that great of a singer. But this music.
Adam Avramescu 07:17
Yeah, so that stuff’s all great. And you know, it’s almost a cliche at this point that David Bowie was known for having so many memorable phases of his career and constantly reinventing himself. But when you try to tally all of them up, you realize just how true it is.
Dave Derington 07:31
Yeah, you know, one thing, or I think one reason Bowie resonates with both of us, similar to Radiohead, is because Adam, you and I love experimentation,
Adam Avramescu 07:42
right? We do know, we do? We do? Yes, we do.
Dave Derington 07:46
Maybe Maybe that’s part of our DNA. And you know, this is someone who would constantly reinvent himself and be completely unafraid to try out new things, even if they weren’t safe, or on brand for him. Right. And we’re not talking about the market, like, what’s his character, so he will, we’re not going to cover his entire career in just one episode here, right. But we can pick out some key moments and let’s explore his career to see what they teach us about customer education. Got to run home.
Adam Avramescu 08:19
I love it. Let’s let’s dive in. So just like on the Radiohead episode that we did last year, we’ll pick three songs that are kind of emblematic of different points in his career and what they can teach us. And so the first song that we wanted to choose is changes from 1970 ones hunky dory.
Dave Derington 08:35
Yeah, you could forget that. That song is almost a cliche of Mr. Bow his career, given how many changes he went through, and it was, it was pretty prescient, was it not?
Adam Avramescu 08:49
Yeah, I think interesting in a way that he was able to kind of predict all the changes that he would go through, you know, in retrospect, it’s easy to look back at a song like changes and say, Oh, this is a guy that’s going to go through so many phases of his career. But let’s realize, you know, this is, this is pretty early in his career, right? This is four years into releasing solo records. Sure, you know, how did he know how did it How did he foretell this, but the fact is, he’d already been through many changes. And and I think the the path that he took to get to this point in his career, really informs the song. So this is kind of lesson number one, and I think the way that I would summarize this is what worked for them won’t necessarily work for you. So we could do a quick, quick little history lesson. David Bowie started his career, not as a solo artist, but as a frontman for pop and r&b r&b acts, so he wasn’t even going by David Bowie or or Bali at the time. He was Davy Jones. So we just had a band called David Jones and the king bees, the Manage boys, the lower third. And these are all attempts for him to break into the music scene. Now, obviously, Davy Jones was the name that was taken so he eventually had to change it, but he was really trying to fit in at this point. During the mid 60s, this is what you did. If you wanted to become a recording artist, you recorded covers of American r&b songs, or you wrote songs that sounded derivative of them. And this was the approach that all of those British Invasion acts at the time took.
Dave Derington 10:13
Yeah, but, you know, that didn’t really work out well for Bowie, right? It didn’t take advantage of the tremendous gifts that really made him unique as an artist. And let’s, let’s bring it back to customer education, which is, again, the goal here, we’re having fun, but we’re relating into our field. The first thing you want to know, or that your your execs are asking you is, what is everybody else doing? You and I both had this. Oh, and many times every hits, is kind of like a backhanded way to talk about like, what’s the value of you being here, Dave? And I welcome that it’s necessary?
Adam Avramescu 10:52
Well, it’s I mean, it’s it’s that and it’s also, you know, can we can we shortcut anything about our own program by relying on industry benchmarks or or peer analysis?
Dave Derington 10:59
Sure. It’s, it’s easy. And actually, I think it’s not a bad practice to do. You know, what are the benchmarks for your program? Who should we model our program after? And it’s true, sometimes, you just need it. And I’ve done this too. I’ve like, I’ve looked at how you build up a program from scratch, in a general context, not specifically for customer education when I was starting it, sometimes you need to just copy to break into a field and do it a few times to understand what you’re doing. But it’s like, it’s like ROI for you break the rules. Learn. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, just like Bowie probably wouldn’t been successful if he started trying to be the Rolling Stones. You wouldn’t build an iconic program by just copying other big ones that you like, you’re going to discover what your own unique skills and passions are. And then you’re going to use them to build better things.
Adam Avramescu 11:56
Yeah, I agree. So David Bowie was kind of able to strike out on his own and come up with his own identity and do things that were really not necessarily standard choices. So now that you’ve kind of defined your identity, this brings us to what I think is lesson two from the song which, which I’ve captured here is turn and face the strange changes, subtle changes. So again, as we said, changes was really early in his career, but he’d already gone through a lot of changes by that time. So just four years into being a solo artist. He’d already released four albums, which were all incredibly different and sound and tone. And so we’ll do a little bit of Bowie discography here. He his first self titled album that he released when David Bowie 1967 is almost unrecognizable to current Bowie fans. It’s full of these like music hall Anthony newly type numbers, and all these over the top story songs if you want a real treat, listeners, go listen to a song called the laughing gnome from this time. It’s not on the album. It’s a deep cut. It’s basically just him of listing all of the known puns he can think of.
Dave Derington 13:00
I have listened to this atom. And I have to say it’s it is you’re absolutely right is completely unrecognizable. And it’s a little bit jarring. When you think about and you go back you’re like wow, this is this is not the boy I knew.
Adam Avramescu 13:13
No, absolutely not. And he’s using very, very strange instrumentation, which he would go on to do later in his career. Like you you call it out to me earlier. There’s there’s an oboe and that song. But if you if you think about it, like if you go to the Ziggy Stardust album, he uses a bassoon and pennywhistle solo in that one too. So like he just found he found a better way to contextualize some of those idiosyncrasy. idio synchronicities. Yeah, because Lord you synchronicities. Yeah, yeah. So his next album, which is now called Space Odyssey, Space Oddity at the time, I think it was David Bowie 1969. It’s folkier. But it’s all it also incorporates more sci fi elements. Instead of the theatrical story songs now he’s writing these 789 minute dystopian epics. This is the album that’s Space Oddity, aka Ground Control to Major Tom is on. But there’s a kind of a mini lesson in here even about perseverance and market timing. The BBC would not play that song wouldn’t release it as a single until Apollo 11 crew had safely returned. And it didn’t become a hidden to us until wait for it four years later. And now it’s one of his most iconic songs. There’s a very real chance that that song was not going to make it to see the light of day.
Dave Derington 14:26
Yeah, if there’d been a disaster, which clearly could have happened, then we wouldn’t we may never have heard.
Adam Avramescu 14:32
Yeah, well, and the other thing I think we’ll come back to this is that if that song if he hadn’t become more popular artists in the US over the coming years, this song would be completely unheard of. It would be a novelty song from the UK that like three people will know about. So you know, moving forward from that. His next album, The man who sold the world, which again, yes, that’s actually a David Bowie song. A lot of people don’t know that the Nirvana version is a cover. It that leaves more heavily on a full band sound and even veered into the the Hard Rock and blues rock sound. But none of these albums are particularly successful. So it’s easy to look back and say how brilliant something like Space Oddity or the man who sold the world is. But that’s all hindsight. Right? David Bowie had no way of knowing that these songs would become chart hits, or that Space Oddity would you know which chart in the US for years after its release, or that the man who sold the world would become so popular as a Nirvana song that people wouldn’t even know that David Bowie wrote the original? So what did he do? What did you do, Dave?
Dave Derington 15:35
You know, I just wanted to say, just reflecting on this, as you’re talking through, right, it’s kind of funny, because this is the kind of fame that we often see now, in our era, where imagine like, a TV show, that is on Netflix that nobody discovered until today, you know, it’s this delayed gratification of of content sometimes. So that’s really interesting. Well, even even changes itself wasn’t heavily promoted at that time. So So what do you do, he turned and faced the strange changes, he kept changing up a sound, he kept experimenting to see what would work and when he finally struck gold with his glam sound, and Ziggy startups in 72, it completely recontextualize the songs and albums that even came before it. So let’s talk number lesson number three here in this, which is, success isn’t instant. There’s no overnight success. Alright. So in tech, we tend to talk a lot about overnight successes, the startup that came out of nowhere raised millions of dollars, you know, the company that disrupted an industry, in a way we create narratives that are retro actively that retro actively justify their own success. And we talked about them, like they were fated to success from the start, because they did succeed. So we glaze over all that hard work, all that extra existential crisis that everybody had had along the way.
Adam Avramescu 17:03
Yeah, and you’ve seen this written about, you know, tech companies writ large, right, this isn’t, this isn’t a new insight that you and I are coming up with right now. This is a, this is something that happens to all of these, you know, quote, unquote, overnight successes? Well, the fact of the matter is, they weren’t overnight successes, there was a long struggle before they actually became successful. And success tends to kind of rewrite history in a way. I’m sure there were many critics in the 70s, who talked about David Bowie, this way, bursting onto the scene with an experimental glammed sound. But that’s not really how it worked. And it ignores all the struggle that came before. If you think about how many bands he was in how many sounds he tried out, just to get to that moment of critical mass in the early 70s, all of those strange changes, you realize how much of the narrative around Bowie was saved by the fact that he did succeed in the end, but arguably, there were more moments where his experiments failed, or where he risked failure if he hadn’t kept experimenting. And if he had just tried to stick with one of those sounds that that didn’t succeed for him. We may not ever have heard of them.
Dave Derington 18:05
Yep, that’s true. And, and I guess, if we were to wrap this back into a customer education context, this is what we’ve been experiencing to that. We haven’t been overnight successes ourselves, you know, we have a podcast and such, but we do a lot of work where practitioners were actively trying to learn and explore and experiment as well. And I think we’re making we’re making progress.
Adam Avramescu 18:29
Well, yeah, and I mean, take, take any of the customer education programs that you know, and love today. I guarantee you, they did not spring up overnight, and I guarantee you that there was a tremendous amount of pain that it took to get them to the point where they are now. So if you are just starting out in customer education, or if you have a relatively new program or a small underfunded program, you know, we know we’ve seen this, we know your pain. You’ll get there, you’ll get there through experimentation and perseverance.
Dave Derington 18:57
Yeah. And that someday you’ll be you’ll be reflecting upon this thinking, wow, I I should have had this all along. This is amazing.
Adam Avramescu 19:05
Absolutely. So Dave, why don’t we Why don’t we fast forward in time to the next song that we’re going to talk about? Whatever. What are we talking about next, Dave? Oh, you
Dave Derington 19:13
know that the next song that’s going to come up on everybody’s mind is under pressure. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Nothing Russia. Comment down. Okay. Yeah,
Adam Avramescu 19:28
I’ll do I’ll do some stylings. I’ll do some stylings. Later you just clipped out my microphone just on that one. Prussia.
Dave Derington 19:38
Let’s go. Let’s Let’s reframe this a little bit. Let’s talk about the song. Under Pressure is the famous collaboration between Bowie and Queen. It was recorded in 1981. It just has
Adam Avramescu 19:49
a future.
Dave Derington 19:50
Yes, 10 years in the future. And this is one of those songs. That’s that’s really iconic as well and just so much fun. So we’ve now moved forward and like Adam said 10 years that have taken him to the heights of glam stardom. He has a fertile period of ghostwriting, as well for other artists like Martin hupo and then it deployed so
Adam Avramescu 20:12
young dude. cabbie the news that was Bowie
Dave Derington 20:16
oh gosh Oh gosh. But then there’s a sentence of drug fueled madness when you reportedly lived off a diet of get this peppers milk and cocaine and finally
Adam Avramescu 20:29
that’s when he wrote station to station my favorite my favorite album he does not remember recording it
Dave Derington 20:36
I can only imagine you know he finally into what many consider has great a peak in in this is probably what you will talk about again, you know, living in Berlin released an experimental albums in collaboration with Brian ino. He’s a legendary producer.
Adam Avramescu 20:55
Yeah, absolutely. And this period of his career where he’s kind of sitting on the precipice, like Like I said earlier of mainstream pop stardom. You know, I think he’s he’s working on Let’s Dance at this point, which is about to become one of the most commercially successful albums in his career. I think he’s probably done dressing up as a clown by this point. But he still finds time to just casually pop into the studio with Queen and knock out this stone classic.
Dave Derington 21:21
Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing.
Adam Avramescu 21:24
I know. I know I would kill to be a fly on the wall for those recording sessions. But Dave, what what what can we learn from Russia?
Dave Derington 21:34
Alright, let’s let’s get into lesson number one. And think about progress. Think about perfection. For this one, maybe we take a close look at a reading of the lyrics and see what we can learn and I’m just going to read them and you love when we do these boys those
Adam Avramescu 21:53
readings.
Dave Derington 21:56
Okay, get this get this folks. nombre de dum bom Ba, b dooba. Dom Ba ba ba Okay, this sounds terrible. Just like reading it out. How would that sound? That sound in real life?
Adam Avramescu 22:13
Number, you know?
Dave Derington 22:15
Yeah, when you do it like that? Yeah. It’s like, Oh, yeah, I get it. You know, just reading that. It’s okay. But
Adam Avramescu 22:19
we’re kind of joking. This is complete nonsense. There’s no close reading to be done of this lyric. But the reason that we’re here is that this song actually started out as a freeform jam between Bowie and Queen. And surprisingly, a lot of that improvisational tone is still present on the final track.
Dave Derington 22:38
Yeah, that that improvisation. I want to laser in on that word. I focus in on that word, improvisation. It’s something that you and I are both musicians. And one of the things I’ve always loved to do, arguably, oh, no, I have to argue that we know we are. I love improvisation because it’s it’s that musical experimentation equivalent, where try this and see how this lands and you play this little riff and then all of a sudden a song emerges from it.
Adam Avramescu 23:07
It’s also why a lot of improv comedians get into customer education and similar disciplines.
Dave Derington 23:13
I yeah, comedy. Well, that way of thinking Adam is is really interesting. In for customer educators, in particular, I think this is relevant. You know, this is not a perfect track by any means that they did. But for a lot of people, this is Bowie that they know
Adam Avramescu 23:31
it. This is like the song that a lot of people know, right.
Dave Derington 23:35
So so let’s, let’s tear this apart a little bit more.
Adam Avramescu 23:38
Yeah, well, you know, this is kind of like using an instructional design methodology. This might be stretching the episode, so bear with me. How is underpressure like using Sam versus Addie? Well, here’s here’s how they didn’t sit down and plan this this to be a masterwork. This was like a throwaway Queen song. It was a jam session, and they essentially prototype their way into a pop song. And they didn’t sit on it forever cleaning up all the rough edges. They didn’t replace all the random scat singing with with the actual lyrics. And yet, this was still an incredibly powerful song. Why Dave, why is it like that?
Dave Derington 24:16
Well, let’s, let’s think about a couple of lessons we can learn from that. Number one, number two here, and we said progress and perfection. That’s not a perfect track number number two, the lesson that we can take away is focus on the bright spots. You know, one of the reasons we think underpressure is successful commercially, and artistically, is because Boeing Queen just focused on those bright spots, right?
Adam Avramescu 24:41
Yeah, I mean, you can’t understate this like, or overstate this most most of the song is lyrical. noncitizens, gibberish. gibberish. It’s at best you could say it’s kind of like gesturing at themes instead of actually communicating anything specific and direct. But it does snap into focus in a few really meaningful ways. One is sharing That really rousing Bowie chorus, it’s the terror of knowing what this world is about watching some good friends screaming out, pray tomorrow gets me high pressure on people, people on streets. Sorry, everyone, I just do my vocal warm ups. But that’s that’s the
Dave Derington 25:22
you know that’s but that’s Adam is about as direct as a song ever manages to get even though it never really comes out in states the same as directly it’s essentially relying on this one part of the song to do 80% of that communication. That’s pretty those are pretty deep lines, terror of knowing what the world is about, you know, that’s come full circle and 2020 once again, these lines are powerful under you know, we’re constantly a pressure cooker of social change. Really neat stuff.
Adam Avramescu 25:55
Yeah, I did. And so kind of imbues meaning on the rest of the song around it, which, you know, again, is is pretty, pretty indirect with what it’s getting at, and arguably, arguably a little nonsensical. And similarly, like, not all the instrumentation or mixing on the song is incredible. Right here I am critiquing one of the one of the classics of all time, but most most of 40 years
Dave Derington 26:18
too late.
Adam Avramescu 26:20
Most of the songs hook is rooted in that killer baseline. So when you think of the song often that’s the first thing you’re going to think about. All mumbo jumbo dum dum, you sang it earlier, right? It’s a bright spot that carries a ton of weight for the rest of the song. And they correctly highlight it and bring it to the forefront. So listen to the amount of time would go back and listen to that song. After you’re after you listen to this podcast, don’t turn us off. Or you can
Dave Derington 26:45
pause and you can listen.
Adam Avramescu 26:47
Okay, welcome back, everyone. So if you listen to that song, listen to the amount of time that the only instrument playing is the bass. This is unique, and I think counterintuitive for a pop song, especially at the time, they knew where to focus the listeners attention.
Dave Derington 27:04
Wow, he just reflecting on that you don’t really think about that. It’s, it’s that whitespace, right, it’s filling the filling the void with just one voice. And then the whole song kind of branches off from that. Customer education programs are kind of like this to Adam, you know, especially. And I really like the early phase part because it’s so exciting, exhilarating, and adrenaline pumping. Because you don’t have time to do it all, you’re not going to be doing everything well. But there’s some bright spots in your program, there’s things your customers are really going to respond to well, and they’re going to want more of, or things that that want, or things that will make your program special. And we argue that, okay, let’s let’s, let’s really frame it. And those of you that are listening right now are probably those of you who are in this trench, as well as we are, you know, don’t spend that time trying to shore up everything, all of your weaknesses, or try to get everything up to the level of mature program. focus first on that, don’t don’t, don’t, don’t don’t that bright spot, make it brighter, make it stand out, you typically won’t have the resources in an early stage program to fix everything, right?
Adam Avramescu 28:17
Yeah, you’re gonna get a lot of pressure from her execs to, you know, to do everything, go go do a webinar, go do go make an online Academy, or doing any sort of like nursery sales and promotion. Like there’s a million tempting things to do as an early stage customer education program, and you’re going to look around and you’re gonna see all these more mature programs doing these things super well. You can’t do it typically, with the resources you have is a very early stage program. So you kind of have a decision to make with limited resources, do you a, put a few of those chips into everything and so you’re doing a bunch of things mediocre? Or do you be really invest in a couple of bright spots? Like do a couple of things really, really, really well?
Dave Derington 29:01
Yeah. Can I refine an example of this?
Adam Avramescu 29:04
Yeah, let’s hear it.
Dave Derington 29:05
So you know, let’s talk about you know, what are bright spots? You know, and I’m gonna give you a practical example while I talk about it. So a bright spot could be a unique approach to facilitation interactivity, like a cool interface for displaying a learning path, distinct nurture, emails, you know, stuff like that you using your brand voice trying to make sure you can you get everybody to complete the stuff. Each program has kind of a different nuance or a different one. So, what pops into my mind immediately, was work that I did at Zuko. And realize that if I were to tell you what Zuko is, you know, apart from a funny name, no, it’s a combination of Azure and Aqua actually is how we got there. But
Adam Avramescu 29:51
first that buddy named is impossible to transcribe. Yeah.
Dave Derington 29:56
That that what’s what was really compelling The bright spot there was that we what the bright spot there was that we had a platform that was an integration platform that connected other systems kind of like Zapier or if this than that. So what I realized pretty quickly is that, hey, I could actually use this platform itself to teach the platform, it was very meta, similar time I spent a gainsight, to actually use the platform itself to do the teaching in a novel in a way that when you get done doing the exercises, you’re like, wow, I actually built this and actually understand it.
Adam Avramescu 30:36
So similar, in terms of using it for facilitation of actual education sessions.
Dave Derington 30:42
Absolutely. Because you’re in the session using the product, and it makes it more real, you’re actually engaging it with it in a not a goofy or, you know, obscure way you’re using it in a practical way. And that’s the bright spot.
Adam Avramescu 30:56
Right? Yeah. Or at Optimizely. For instance, one of the bright spots was really around search discoverability. So, you know, there were a lot of things behind the scenes when we created our diverse that, you know, we’re not perfect by any means. But we did have a few key areas of investment that I think got a lot of the a lot of the work done, and one of them was putting a federated search across that whole site, so that we just, we just laser focused on making discoverability as good as possible. And that was something that we really got to continue investing in and just making that better over time. Right? When it came to the program, the more people that came to the resources, then the more traction we got, which was more of a reason for us to continue investing in it. And the more reason we we saw, you know, results over time.
Dave Derington 31:47
Right? So you started somewhere and you grew it and you expand, it didn’t mean that that was the focus of everything throughout time. But it’s a bright spot. And as you’re developing, you’re growing, that allowed you to as it’s kind of like a stepping stone to other things, and you can evolve your program.
Adam Avramescu 32:03
Absolutely, yeah. So, okay, that was that was the bright spots. I think there’s a couple more lessons here. One is just on the power of collaboration. So, you know, we could have picked any song from mid career Bowie. One reason we like this song from a customer education perspective is that well, it’s, it’s not truly a Bowie song. It’s a collaboration operation. So the original jam was written by queens drummer Roger Taylor, than the basis john Deacon added that killer killer baseline, then you’ve got Freddie Mercury, and Brian May are the two more well known members of Queen. This would probably be a third tier Queen song without the addition of Bowie as a collaborator, right? This is a throwaway jam, you can you can actually listen to the original jam before they turned it into under pressure. And I think this does show us the power of collaboration, right, like Bowie and Mercury, certainly Muqdadiyah disagreements in the studio. But together, they created something really powerful. And the song actually has a five way writing credit as a result.
Dave Derington 33:01
Wow. Well, that’s cool. And I think this is one, one of the most serious things that we could pull out of our fun episode, Adam, I like to focus on collaboration, because our jobs, our jobs in customer education, as customer education practitioners and leaders, is that we’re often not working in isolation, emphasis on not, we’re collaborating with others and using other strengths to get better work done. And that means that this is really hard for me too. So I’m going to be completely transparent today. This often means we’re not going to get our pure vision, pure in air quotes, that, you know, we’re going to have to make compromises to work with others. In the end, we’re going to build something better together. So let me expand on this a little bit. I tend to get frustrated, big sometimes, because you come into a new environment, you’re starting to set up a program, you know, the things that are going to work right at them. You know, that’s what you got. No,
Adam Avramescu 34:08
I disagree. I know you’re right. Yeah. When I when I walk into an organization I have, I’ve kind of like, I don’t want to, say hypothesis. But that’s a little annoying. Like, I have instincts and impulses and things that I want to test and things that I want to explore. I know what’s worked for me in past environments. But like when I joined a new organization, I’m actually usually kind of like spending a lot of time sniffing out. What do I think is going to work here and why? What will work contextually with this organization with these players with this audience with these learners with this product. I don’t I don’t know that I often walk into a new job or a new organization with like a completely pure vision of exactly how I want to do or how I want to, you know what I want to do or how I want to do it. And in fact, I think that gets people in trouble sometimes when they come from a big mature organization, for instance, and then they walk into a startup. And then they’re like, I’m just gonna take my playbook from this big organization, but I don’t have the same resources. I don’t have the same product. I don’t have the same audience. I don’t have the same infrastructure. That’s usually actually kind of a recipe for for struggle. Yeah. So I don’t know, I think I yeah, I mean, I maybe have similarities and differences in our approach.
Dave Derington 35:22
Maybe, but maybe not. Because as you started talking through this, I do do the same thing that you do. You come in and you learn and you spend the first, I don’t know, weeks months, figuring out an environment. But what I’m speaking to I am slightly arguing with you, but but pretty much not when I’m speaking to is that after time, when you’ve kind of formulated in an approach in the frustration I tend to get is that, okay, we’ve, we know generally what’s going to work here we have a pretty good inkling at what work, but it’s that trying to sell that vision is where it’s hard. It’s it’s hard, because sometimes people go well, I’ve lost trust in, you know, a former person’s ability to have done an education program, because I’ve seen
Adam Avramescu 36:08
that before I’ve come to makes me think of that there’s like, there’s a great Melissa mulloway article that she put on her. Her LinkedIn series, the site up where she talked about this is how this is how companies lose faith in their l&d teams. So she talks about all the decisions that you can kind of make that will that will lead to that exact environment, that loss of trust, and someone has to walk in and kind of rebuild that trust over time.
Dave Derington 36:31
Yeah, some of the some of the best experiences I’ve had even recently, or when I just go, Hey, I’ll roleplay it out with you, Adam. Hey, Adam, you know what, you know, you’re in this other team, but you know what I really value you and I and we need to collaborate together to do this thing. And you basically flipped the table a little bit, and you open your up your heart in your head, and then you start talking about how you can collaborate on a vision together, right? This actually kind of been a challenge for me in several different roles when you’re working with a customer success team. Because a lot of the times such teams are so busy, and they can only see what’s in front of them because you’re dealing with churn, and you’re helping customers and you’re not really in that long term strategics that all the time. So opening up and getting collaborative with other people and say, Look, here’s one of my favorite things to say, Yeah, I have instructional designers and I have people can create a video. But you know what, hey, Adam, why don’t you record this part of this video, because then it’ll be in your voice, and you’re the person that matters. So you’re opening up space, and you’re working with other teams. And if you if you get out of your own head, where you develop a vision and execute on the vision, and you open it up and understand what others or others need and how to collaborate with them, it actually becomes quite more powerful.
Adam Avramescu 37:48
Yeah, I agree with you, Dave, I think you and I are kind of thinking along similar lines here. I know that earlier in my career, I would do things like kind of come in and say, hey, look, I know instructional design. I know how learning works. So I’m going to use the tools available to me, and I am going to design this, you know, big curriculum and make sure that everything is aligned and bla bla bla bla bla, okay, you know, you’re walking into an early stage company proposing to spend months developing a curriculum when they need education. Now, that’s not necessarily a great way, even if even if you have this great pure vision of how things should work from an evidence based learning perspective, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get to execute that in reality, or that it’s going to be effective in reality, just because it’s rooted in best practices. So
Dave Derington 38:34
yeah, and I think, on the same page, we are talking the same page, but for everybody listening, I think this is really important. It’s really important. You have to you have to be a team. And I think it’s there’s an really easy temptation, kind of like what you were saying, you come in and just draw down a playbook. You cannot. We’re not at that stage. We’re learning we’re growing. And in our space, it just doesn’t play well with that. So we talked about that forever. let’s let’s let’s continue here.
Adam Avramescu 38:59
Well, we have one little little bonus here, because this song kind of has an interesting quota. So the epilogue to this story is pretty famous, which is that this song was sampled by Vanilla Ice without permission for the song Ice Ice Baby, which I’m sure I’ve heard Ice Ice Baby before I ever heard under pressure. So that’s where I knew that that baseline from and it became the center of a famous lawsuit. There’s that really famous video of vanilla ice denying it by pointing out that there is a one note difference between the riffs, which means that his version was apparently completely different. I have the quote, he goes, it’s totally different. It’s a rap song. Ding Ding Ding, ding, ding, ding. That’s the way there’s goes. Our version goes. Ding ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That little add change. It’s not the same. And he’s just got this like this, this grin.
Dave Derington 40:00
Well, Justice did prevail. Boeing Queen got songwriting credits, right?
Adam Avramescu 40:04
They did. But I guess the lesson here is that if you put something into the market, there will always be someone trying to knock you off and deny that that’s what they’re doing in the process. But in customer education, we don’t really get to the point where we’re lobbing legal threats at one another. Copyright law doesn’t really work the same. And many of the ideas that we come up with our programs can’t really be copyrighted, and frankly, shouldn’t some of the best ideas, iterate on previous ones? Or, you know, kind of Dave like he said, like, people start by copying what they like in other programs, or what works well in programs a lot of the time, so there’s a fine line. But they’re, they’re, you know, if you do something successful, there will be imitators.
Dave Derington 40:47
Right, and that’s, and that’s something that you should aspire to, right? If somebody is mentioning your program, I mean, she did a pretty darn good job at it. And it’s, it’s something that we should add to our backlog or our catalogue of good techniques. I don’t know.
Adam Avramescu 41:04
For me, it’s, it’s, you know, better to keep innovating your own programming your own ideas. Don’t worry too much about the people trying to knock them off. Maybe, maybe, you know, maybe they’re well within their rights, a lot of the time to take and improve upon the ideas that that you’ve put into the world. Like you shouldn’t concern yourself with that you should concern yourself with building your best program, the best program for your audience. Totally.
Dave Derington 41:31
Okay, so shall we skip ahead? Yes, Dave. I
Adam Avramescu 41:35
think we’re now in the electronic period, then you so love,
Dave Derington 41:40
indeed. 1995 ish, somewhere around then. Okay, let’s get into this. So we’re skipping ahead to 1995 or solidly in late career boy. Now with the exception of Let’s dance and labyrinths. bogeys EDIS are generally unremembered in that carried on into the 90s as well. But while Bowie’s 80s were largely unremarkable, and filled with that bland era appropriate pop, he called them this is his words, not ours. is Phil Collins years.
Adam Avramescu 42:17
That’s fired? Yeah.
Dave Derington 42:19
I don’t know. I like Phil Collins, too. There’s some something good to be said about that.
Adam Avramescu 42:23
But I guess he didn’t.
Dave Derington 42:25
I guess he didn’t.
Adam Avramescu 42:26
I liked I liked the soundtrack to Tarzan.
Dave Derington 42:29
It was good. It counts has got some better stuff. Anyway, back to Bowie, his mid 90s and onward were a lot more experimental. So what’s our first lessons from this, Adam?
Adam Avramescu 42:41
Well, I think there’s a lesson here about experimentation, especially when you don’t have to. So by this point, he could have easily become a nostalgia act. He had a gigantic, gigantic gigantic catalogue of hits from 1967 to 1983 or 1969 actually spaced out there was nothing on that first Bowie album that could even remotely be considered a hit. But you know, from 69 to 83 or so he could have relied on those hits, and he could have made money, playing them on tour and selling mirch really coasting on his success. He had 18 studio albums by this point.
Dave Derington 43:15
That’s crazy. 18 albums. That’s so much work.
Adam Avramescu 43:18
Yeah, so but he didn’t he didn’t choose to just become a soldier activity Dave No.
Dave Derington 43:24
Instead, he chose to ignore most of that just push it away, trying to stay cutting edge and experimental, embracing new genres that were coming out of the time like industrial like drum and bass and incorporating those into his own signature style. of for example, let’s let’s give you let’s give you a good one. thematically, this album had a had much in common with his early 70s work. So we go back to Ziggy Stardust, we go back to Diamond Dogs. And
Adam Avramescu 43:54
yeah, even though the sound ones the themes are the same.
Dave Derington 43:58
The sounds different, the themes are the same. Now we’re talking about the album outside, which I mentioned earlier in the podcast, also marked returned to his collaboration with Brian ino, and consequently saw him experimented more with a structure with lyrics and forms. Outside is, let’s put this more of a con a canonical description, a cryptic, dystopian Neo noir concept album, influenced by outsider art. Wow. Yeah,
Adam Avramescu 44:29
there’s a lot to unpack there. If you I mean, if you hear him talking about this album, in interviews, like, this is actually some of the most pretentious Bowie you’ll ever hear. Like, clearly, he’s still thinking about this stuff really, really, really hard. And we can’t emphasize enough how much he did not need to do any of this at this point in his career. Yeah. Yeah. But in a way, it’s a reflection of his urge to continue experimenting and the fact that he started working with Brian, you know, again, you know, that helped him to help challenge him to think differently.
Dave Derington 44:59
Yeah. You know, in This is something that that really drives me, Adam, I admit that I’ve, like you, you know, tackled three different customer education roles in the past 100, how many years? recent recent career. And I’ve learned one thing, and this comes up at work pretty much all the time, what you, what got you here won’t get you there. Right? For us, we live exactly
Adam Avramescu 45:26
we were talking about before, right? When
Dave Derington 45:28
we talk about coming into a new organization, you’re coming into a new organization learning new things. For us, we also lived in what I would like to say it’s kind of an undefined environment. And we get caught up in this fluidity of a rapidly growing and scaling business. Sometimes unicorns like the ones who are at now. And sure, I could have stayed put in two roles ago at gainsight. For example, you could have said it Optimizely. But we both know, and in, I like to believe we have a lot more work to do. We’ve got to explore and try new things. Because this is the infancy of this, this creative work, you know, the work, we’re doing customer education, it’s a new field. Yeah,
Adam Avramescu 46:09
I mean, some of that is privileged, right? Like, we have the privilege of being able to, you know, move from one role to the other or one job to the other one company to the other. You know, I think in a lot of ways, I consider myself to have gotten lucky with some of the roles earlier in my career that put me in a position to be able to do this. And it’s not to say that you actually have to change companies or change jobs to embrace this either, like you can find these opportunities within your current role within your current scope even. There are always new things to do or new ways to do those things. Yeah. So I think I think you’re right, what got you here won’t get you there. It’s kind of a when I think of that I think about don’t coast in whatever role you’re in, don’t just like sit back and assume that you’ve got it, like, keep looking for the next thing. Keep thinking about what can make your program better, more resonant with customers. But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if you and I think about that differently. But that’s that’s how I interpret that one,
Dave Derington 47:15
we might think about differently. But I think the end result is the same. That something impels us to continue to not coast to continue to innovate in to learn what will work. And we were basically scientists, in a way and you are
Adam Avramescu 47:29
you are you are well, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Dave Derington 47:33
Oh, hey, you work for C lab. So
Adam Avramescu 47:37
I’ve got my got my C lab badge.
Dave Derington 47:40
Get you a lab coat.
Adam Avramescu 47:42
They want to take us into the next lesson.
Dave Derington 47:44
Yeah, let’s get let’s talk about lesson two here with this new this whole new genre or new new theme in his life. It’s, you’ve got to have a plan. So let’s use our traditional close reading again at some of the lyrics. And I’ll just read it out and beat up at, Oh, you’ve got to have a scheme. You’ve got to have a plan in the world of today, for tomorrow’s man. Gonna let that sit in. Sounds a lot more melodic. Gotta have a ski. Gotta have a plan. You know, if you’ve heard that before,
Adam Avramescu 48:24
I have no control.
Dave Derington 48:26
I’ve heard the song, no control, no control. It’s a really good song. It’s a really meaty song. And you know, at the end, here’s end of year. This is the last day of the year we’re recording. And we’re reflecting on that broader perspective of our craft. Some have said Bowie was grappling with Gnosticism. And in some of these lyrics, and I was doing a little bit more research and thinking about it. This this theme of freewill versus predestination keeps coming up and it’s even coming up and Battlestar Galactica, I think was one that came up there’s a lot of genres of music and movies and people keep coming back to this
Adam Avramescu 49:05
station. The station my favorite album is Yeah, deals heavily in themes of Gnosticism too.
Dave Derington 49:10
Yeah, I read a lot about Gnosticism when I was pretty young Philip K Dick was actually one of my favorite authors in speculative fiction sci fi You know, he did Blade Runner and cetera but that was a recurrent theme for him as well. And you know, the thing about this, okay, what what is really going on, you know, do I actually have free well or is my life have been pre determined in some concept that’s, that’s a, that’s something we got to grapple with a lot. Now, if we pin that in customer education, let’s come back to the Scott, you’ve got to have a plan. Now this seems like a stretch. Oh,
Adam Avramescu 49:43
yeah. Second stretch of the episode. This is the silver metal stretch, just
Dave Derington 49:46
silver metal stretch. You’ve got to have a scheme. You’ve got to have a plan in your day to day, right. You’ve got to know where you’re going. If I if I reduce this down, and it’s something I think about constantly and I experienced constantly is Other people wanting certain things that they think a customer needs. This is not me. There’s other people in my organization say, Well, hey, we need this certification program, or we need to have this module, we need to do this thing. We need to build this course. Okay, great. Let’s talk about it. But to me, we have to work from some kind of operational print. Otherwise, we’re going to constantly get distracted by the things that we could be doing, right? More importantly, you might actually fail that customer who, who commonly let’s think about you start off in a new organization, and you are that first person your career in a new town, right? What are you going to do? Well, the first thing that usually I noticed notice is the customer needs something right away. So if you’re not thinking about the customer, instead, you go Whoa, like, hey, let’s do a waterfall type project plan. And let’s build out this massive program. And here’s all the pieces for it, it’s going to take me five years, that’s not going to help the customer. So am I
Adam Avramescu 50:59
great, because they’re asking you for a thing. They’re asking you for a format. They’re not necessarily asking you, right? You need to learn what the problem is that you’re solving for.
Dave Derington 51:07
You need to learn what the problem was, you know, some of them some of my recent experiences, Adam have been, hey, you know, we have we don’t have on demand material. Okay, let’s do that. But we have to do it in concert with other things like we have to actually continue to do live training, we actually have to go to this event. But how do we how do we expedite? Now, if I said yes to every little thing that keeps coming up? I’m not going to get this done. So what I’m saying here is that the plan, going back to some of the other things, we say you have to be flexible, you have to be collaborative, you can incorporate all that in there. But if you don’t have a plan, what will immediately happen in our field, is you’re going to get overwhelmed by so many requests of other people that you will lose sight of the goal. That’s important to note.
Adam Avramescu 51:48
I agree. I agree.
Dave Derington 51:50
So that’s another lesson we can learn.
Adam Avramescu 51:52
Well, I think this is the last lesson from the song, no control, and maybe a little bit broader from this, this point in Bowie’s career. At this lesson, it’s about embracing technology for what it can bring to your art. And we do think that customer education is an art. It requires a creative impulse to do well. So yeah, Bowie on this album, he used quite a bit of technology. Have you ever noticed Dave, on this album that the lyrics seem a little chopped and screwed?
Dave Derington 52:20
Yeah, it’s it’s sometimes jarring, quite well, that’s weird that, that transposed or that moved here. And it’s interesting to see how is that done?
Adam Avramescu 52:30
Well, so again, this is the mid 90s. So he didn’t have a lot of super fancy equipment to do this. But he had a piece of software called the verba sizer on his, on his Apple, Apple two, or whatever it was that he was using, which was a digital version of a technique he’d used in the past, like in his Berlin era, where he would cut up the lyrics he wrote and mix them around and recombine them to make them sound more unexpected and esoteric, but this was a digital version of that that helped them achieve the same result while working more quickly.
Dave Derington 53:00
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. And you know, what’s so cool about that is, I’ve gotten into music again, you know, I pulled out my saxophone sit in the closet for years. And I’m trying to learn Ableton Live, which is a digital audio works workbench, which really complicated is complicated in any of the software that we do and trying to learn it is is interesting, but it allows you to mix and add. And basically you have this whole palette, a canvas is so many different kinds of things, that you could chop things up and move them around and play with beats and rhythms and add tracks as you go. In a similar level, something that I do regularly is use Audacity, you could be using Camtasia. And anything you know, we’re doing this all the time, you may be very well remix in content that you have, for example, this podcast, I might take a cold open, which is a piece of something that we’re talking about in the actual podcast, lifted out, copy it, put it in the front of the podcast, maybe I’ll mix some things up, maybe I’ll chop a piece out. So yeah, this is really cool. And it was quite advanced for him to be doing that at that time.
Adam Avramescu 54:08
Yeah, I mean, speaking of him being advanced for his time, this is the period of his career where he really embraced technology, I think is the future. Yeah, we talked about some of the same thing themes in the Radiohead episode, which Yeah, you know, they’re they’re out mocchi computer was also Around this time, everyone was really thinking about what this new rise of technology meant for the future, especially computers, the internet. But this is something that we’re called to do day in, day out in our jobs, we constantly have the opportunity to think about how new technologies can shape the ways we work. So think about it, even this year. 2020, right. Those who had already embraced online learning had such a strong leg up on those who were still running their programs in person in classrooms. They had to adapt so much to bring their their programs online, whereas people who already were embracing online technology, he’s just got to evolve and iterate and really move that much quicker.
Dave Derington 54:54
Yeah, let me add in. I want to add some flavor to this Adam because this is relevant to the job We’re doing right now, even at outreach, the the phenomenal thing during the time of COVID-19 is I had a big ad half of my team doing live training and traveling a lot. And you know, a stupendous amount of work. Now with COVID, we couldn’t do that. So I saw trainers immediately, kind of freaking out a little bit, you know, they didn’t need to, but naturally, if you were doing some kind of job in that drag dramatically change, you would freak out a little bit as well. Well, what I’ve seen is that many of them are asking, Hey, you know, I do this all the time? Can I convert this into an on demand? And what tools do we have? And how can I do this better? And what other things can I do to enhance the kinds of training that I do on a day to day basis? Those questions are now popping up, because, you know, we have a little extra time, but we’re exploring the technologies that are now just exploding around on online learning. And it’s pretty fabulous.
Adam Avramescu 55:53
And so I yeah, I think really embracing the tools that you have available to you approaching with I think cautious optimism, what new technologies are available, some of them are, are going to turn out to be completely irrelevant to customer education. You know, I don’t think I don’t think anyone in our field right now is asking like, hey, what can parlor do for for customer education? This is the second episode we’re going back back down. But goodness, right, like, you know, use technologies for what they’re worth. But I think being held healthily optimistic about what these technologies can bring is, you know, it opens up new avenues create creatively, so like Bowie at this time. Did you know he launched his own ISP called botnet Internet Service Provider? It was kind of a proto social network crazy. Yeah. And users?
Dave Derington 56:39
Is that like the whole earth electronic link? Do you recall that that who was a Billy Idol had a lot to do with the whole earth electronic link early, early days of the internet as well.
Adam Avramescu 56:53
I feel like we wouldn’t have a Billy Idol without David Bowie. So I’m gonna get Yeah, no, I’m just I’m just kidding. Sorry. Billy Idol fans, though we might not do a Billy Idol episode. Yeah, he was he was actually he was on there. He was on the forum. I think his his username was sailor, I could be wrong about that. He launched his own online bank Bowie bank at a time when just 11 million people used online banking. So he’s kind of ahead of the curve there. And he was also one of the first major artists to release a new album online. So his 1999 album, ours was kind of the precursor to radio heads and rainbows. We talked about the digital distribution method for that one in our Radiohead episode, it was very similar and the way that it was released for download, and this is 1999, when people are just getting their heads around mp3 is. So it’s kind of interesting day, like around the same time, he did an interview with the BBC that has since gone viral in the decades afterwards, for just how question two was, he shows that he’s so forward thinking that he nails how dramatically the internet will shape the way that artists work. And that people will connect with each other. So let’s do a dramatic reading a portion. Okay, just to give you a taste. How about that? So let’s do it. So Bo is sitting with I think his name is David Pakman, from the BBC. And he says, I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet’s going to do to society, both good and bad is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
Dave Derington 58:24
It’s just a tool, though, isn’t it? No, it’s
Adam Avramescu 58:27
not. No. It’s an alien life form. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed there.
Dave Derington 58:36
But it’s simply a different delivery system. There. you’re arguing about something more profound? Oh, yeah, I’m
Adam Avramescu 58:42
talking about the actual context. And the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment where the interplay between the user and provider will be. So in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. But it’s happening in every form. It’s happening in visual art. The breakthrough is at the early part of the century with people like Duchamp, who are so prescient in what they were doing and putting down the idea that the piece of work is not finished until the piece of work. Sorry, I do my boy accent until the audience comes to it, and adds their own interpretation. And the piece of art is about the gray space in the middle. The gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.
Dave Derington 59:24
Wow. Wow. That’s that’s incredibly precious. Not only, not only do you realize that the internet would essentially become or consume physical media. But that was what made the internet so revolutionary, our ability to create meaning in together in that gray space, as he calls it. And, well, let’s think about it. If we think about of customer educators as artists, which again, we do think they are, that our work is only as good and relevant as the meaning it creates for our learners. So that’s a good call to action, right? Listen to our learners, build communities with them in gauge with them, and not just build in a silo and arbitrarily follow processes.
Adam Avramescu 1:00:13
Your learning design is only as effective as when it meets the learner.
Dave Derington 1:00:17
Yeah, I really love this introduction of art and Warcraft. You know, as I, I’m not going to argue with this, but I’m going to say that we were both musicians, we’ve had musical musical training, there’s always been something that I couldn’t add them quite put my finger on about our craft of customer education. And, and again, I’m, I’m kind of going back and saying, when I, when I dropped into this, I was more kind of like a, you know, a project manager and trying to build out a program, although I’d had a lot of educational background. You can go by the book, you wrote the book, right, the first one in customer education. And there are other practices turned into we’ve got them on our reading list. And you can follow great standards for trainings. But get we don’t do that we, we have to get a lot more creative. We have to be pushing the envelope. This field of customer education is evolving before our eyes. So what I’m saying here about this whole thing is that we’ve got it, we’ve got to be creative.
Adam Avramescu 1:01:23
I agree that and I think that if if Mr. Bowie were a customer educator, he would probably agree. So Dave, so many great lessons to learn from his career I we could do a whole separate bowtie episode and probably come up with as many as many conclusions as we did this time. But you know, given given all the lyrics he’s read and all the things he did in his career, we have so many lessons to learn from him. I love doing these episodes with you, Dave. But for now, I will say rest in peace, Mr. bouie. And we hope you’re out there in the cosmos still doing what you love.
Dave Derington 1:01:58
Indeed. So with this episode, we wrap up and intense, intense and challenging year Goodbye and good riddance 2020. And here’s hoping for a better 2021. But let’s talk a bit about what’s ahead for us, Adam, and share with the audience about our plans for 2021.
Adam Avramescu 1:02:18
Where is the mobile SEALAB unit headed? Last year, we began our CEO series where we talk to C level execs in the learning space, those episodes were really well received. In fact, they got some of the most listeners of any episode that we did in the past year, we have a few more of those planned for this year. But what else, Dave?
Dave Derington 1:02:36
Well, we’re going to be expanding our reach just a bit. And what we’re going to do is talk to some venture capitalists to invest in this space, which that’s really cool. So I’m excited for hearing these, these episodes. Atomy recorded one. So
Adam Avramescu 1:02:52
I’ve got that one recorded already. I’m super excited to release it, I
Dave Derington 1:02:54
look forward to come out really soon, as well as some of our friends in customer success in that community as well. It’s something I think is really important for us to share with you. And for those of you who are listening, if you’re in customer success right now help us elevate this message. If you’re not share the word spread the word, you know, tag, pound customer success in some of your repost and reshares. This field is increasingly important to us, because Customer Success quite often sponsors customer education teams, and we want to learn a lot more about what’s important to them, and how they think about customer education.
Adam Avramescu 1:03:33
Yeah, and finally, this past year, we released a customer education manifesto with six key principles for modern customer education teams, you can go to customer dot education and check that out. We are honored to see that some folks Dave, you you told me a few examples, too. People are incorporating these principles into their own practices, right.
Dave Derington 1:03:51
Yeah, it blow it’s it’s so it’s an honor. Don’t don’t have to do it quite literally. But I’m actually really impressed to see that because it means, hey, this is something that we’ve referred refined and we’ve worked on. And it’s a model and it’s good to start with. So kudos.
Adam Avramescu 1:04:07
Yeah. And, you know, we think one thing that we can continue to do on this show is to really elevate the voice of practitioners and customer education leaders who are doing well, really, really excelling in their programs. And so we want to feature teams who are incorporating these principles from the manifesto into their practice, and we’d like to do an episode, each of which will feature a team that embodies each of the six principles. So if you feel like your program is one of those and you want to be highlighted, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or on our website, customer education through the contact form. we’d really love to hear from you. And we’d love to feature programs that are doing each of the six principles really well.
Dave Derington 1:04:49
Absolutely, that’d be a lot of fun. We look we look forward to hearing for you to reach out to us. So let’s take this home, Adam, if for for those of you on the internet, how can they get ahold of you?
Adam Avramescu 1:05:00
I’m on I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter, and after masscue, we’ve got our cielab website. There’s plenty of ways. How about you? Daniel was?
Dave Derington 1:05:09
Yep, I’m at Dave Derington on Twitter and I’m pretty active in LinkedIn. So reach out to this there. And like Adam said, He’s our contact form. We’ll look at that periodically as well. So let’s close this out. Special thanks to Alan coda for our amazing theme music. If this helped you out, you can help us out again by subscribing in your pod catcher of choice or leaving us a review on Apple podcast. Those two things help expose our podcast to other people in particular, we really appreciate those of you who reshare our posts
Adam Avramescu 1:05:42
and to our audience, thanks for joining us. Go out and educate, experiment and find your people. Thanks for listening. Thanks, everybody.