ļ»æKumar Dattatreyan: Hey everyone, Kumar Dattatreyanhere with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. Today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to talk about us because, hey, who doesn't want to talk about all the great things that we do? In this case, I'm going to be talking with Chris Daily, one of our partners, about all the great things he's been doing in various roles with some of the clients he works with.
It's really interesting work. I wouldn't have thought that we, Agile Meridian, being an agile company and purveyor of agile services, consulting services, and coaching, would get into work like this. Some of the work he's been doing involves working with underprivileged kids in a STEM program in Indianapolis, helping them learn about science, technology, and specifically AI, and how to use these tools.
I'm not going to give it all away. I want to get him on stage here so he can talk about that. It's really a fascinating application of our learning, the type of learning experiences that we provide in an environment where we usually don't have much impact. So without further ado, let me get Chris up here. Thanks for joining, Chris.
Sure. It's always fun to talk about ourselves, isn't it?
Chris: It is. Although I'm not going to talk about myself. Well, you know what I meanā€”about the things that you're able to do and the kind of impact that you're able to make on behalf of our clients. So tell me about the STEM program. How did it come about and how did you get involved?
Chris: I had been doing some work with Indiana University's Center for Excellence in Women in Technology. Through that, I had ended up with one of their affiliates here in Indianapolis, at the time it was IUPUI. As part of that program, I got to know some of the people over there, and a grant came up where they wanted to introduce kids to STEM.
I didn't have any idea what they were talking about. I had no clue, but they called me and said, "You've got four hours to tell us what you can do. Then we're going to include it in the grant." So we did that and come to find out it was at a community center hosted by a church here in Indianapolis, a rather large church named Eastern Star Church. They've got three campuses in Indianapolis. The Lilly Foundation had just built a brand new youth center there for the kids to come.
Eastern Star Church is in a very under-resourced area. It's pretty poor. The kids are pretty poor. The area around there has manufacturing, but there's not the things that I've grown accustomed to. There's not a McDonald's around there. There are a couple of grocery stores, but they're not what you would expect. It's an area where kids really struggle.
Last year when we did this, I went in thinking I was going to teach these kids how to do Scrum and how to do Agile. It lasted about a day. Then they were done with me because we were doing it the way I teach a Scrum class. It didn't work. So I quickly evolved my curriculum as best I could at the time, made it through the summer. When I got a second chance, because it was a two-year grant, we decided to take a different approach this year.
Kumar: Tell me about this new approach. This is fascinating because teaching kids anything is hard. I remember coaching my son's soccer teams when they were middle school kids, sixth to eighth graders. So I remember coaching my son's soccer teams from the age of about seven until 14 or 15. It was really hard getting a group of kids that age to pay attention and learn. So what did you change with your approach and why? You mentioned Scrum. You tried to teach them Scrum the way we teach adults. What didn't work about that?
Chris: The PowerPoints didn't work. Any amount of PowerPoints did not work. They were not interested. They thought they were going to a camp to play basketball and sports. Their parents signed them up thinking, "Well, you're going to go to this camp." The parents didn't care that it was a STEM camp. They just knew it was a place their kids could go for the summer every day. So the kids get there thinking it's going to be playtime. Instead, they're shoehorned into this STEM program, which isn't what they expected.
And then they get this old guy like me who's there. To be blunt, if I had done this before we had kids, I never would have had kids because I never would put anybody else through this. These kids are just on their phones. They do not have good role models. They don't respect people. A lot of them don't have a traditional home life. There's a gang influence with a lot of these kids where they see their role models, maybe older brothers or older sisters, that are into some bad stuff. It's just a really tough age group to work with.
They wanted nothing to do with the PowerPoint. They loved it when I broke out the Legos, though. So when I revamped the curriculum, it was really about how to give them things to do and let them explore. I wasn't really prepared for that last summer. It was just myself and a kid named Jeremiah Boyd, who had just graduated from Beech Grove High School and was going to Valpo for computer science. So it was just the two of us, and we'd have 30, 40 kids. It was impossible for us to handle it. We learned a lot. We had to adapt. It was pretty interesting last year.
Kumar: So tell us about the new approach. How did you adapt? What did you do differently this time around?
Chris: This time around, I said, "I'm not going to stand up there. I'm not going to try and figure this out on the fly." Instead of focusing on giving them specific STEM things to do, like folding a paper airplane and seeing who can fly it the farthest - they weren't interested in that - I had to figure out a way to get these kids invested and engaged.
We came up with four different stations. We broke the kids up. I hired six or seven assistants this summer, and they were all just out of high school. So they were a little bit older, four or five years older than the kids, but they were all mature for their age. We broke them up into stations. We had a Minecraft for Education station. We had a station where we had computers - I bought all the computers and took them to the location because I wanted to control everything that I could. We also went out and bought 12 Oculus Twos, Meta Two VR headsets.
Rather than doing lectures, we said, "Okay, you guys are going to explore the ISS, the International Space Station, on VR. You eight people are going to do that. You eight people are going to do Minecraft, and you other eight people are going to do AI with the computers." We had them develop their own marketing program for a sports team. They got to choose the name, the logo, what city it was going to be in. They had to investigate and figure out what cities don't have a team, what's a good logo, what's their mission. They did all that on the computer. We taught them by creating these little boundaries and saying, "Okay, go explore." The kids loved it.The other thing I figured out, and this is true with adults too, is that if you feed them well, you'll have their attention. So I bought a ton of snacks. I probably went through $200 worth of snacks every week, bought Gatorades. That was the deal: if you participate, if you were engaged in the class, you got a snack at the break. If you didn't engage, you didn't get one. I only had one kid that didn't get a snack that first day. Then everybody else was perfect. They all did their thing.
What was interesting about the approach was that we were teaching them STEM by giving them access to tools they didn't already have. They didn't have VR headsets. We had a gallery where we did a gallery walk. I bought a bunch of posters that I was able to find inexpensively. I had them printed, and they were of African-American STEM figures like George Washington Carver and the three ladies from "Hidden Figures." We included people like the gentleman who invented the gas mask and the person who invented the refrigerated truck. These are some of the contributions we've had from African-American communities and people.
I put those up on the wall. I could have put up Henry Ford and people like that, but I was trying to give them something they could relate to. I wanted them to understand that they could do this too. What we saw was that even the kids who were the most rambunctious last year were still somewhat rambunctious, but they calmed down and enjoyed the activities. Since it was my second year, a lot of them called me Mr. Chris. They'd come in and relax. It was a great experience for me, and I think it was a great experience for the kids too because they got access to VR headsets. They don't get that in their life situation.
Kumar: That's amazing. That's really such an impactful story of learning and growth. I'm sure it was not just for the kids, but for you as well. You probably learned a lot about how to engage with these kids in a way that would be meaningful for them. What a brilliant idea to include posters of figures from history that they could relate to, scientists or mathematicians. That was brilliant.
Chris: There was one thing I'd just throw in there too, Kumar. When I got my team of people who had just graduated from high school to come in and help me, they looked like the kids. Some of these kids don't know how to deal with a guy like me. They've never had to really deal with anybody like me. What I found is that by making sure my team looked like them, it allowed the kids to pay more attention.
In the program, I had a guy who learned AI from me in the spring, and then I asked him to be part of this program. He had actually been shot as part of a robbery and had done time in prison. So when he's talking to the kids, he's speaking from firsthand experience, which is so powerful to them. It's not just the message we're delivering; it's the messenger. I understood that going into this year, so I was intentional about who I asked to be part of my team. I did have another kid who was Caucasian, but everybody else was African-American. It really helped from the standpoint of the kids talking to people who could relate to them.
Kumar: Makes sense. It was a very powerful experience. So having that shared experience between the assistants that you hired and the students that you had, I'm sure made it even more impactful for those kids, because they were mentored, if you will, or at least guided by people that had been there before, like them. I'm sure that was a really interesting learning on your part.
This thought ran through my head: this is such a great way to learn, right? For anyone, whether they're a STEM kid living in an underprivileged neighborhood, or the typical people we deal with in corporate culture and our clients that we hope to teach agile ways of working, how to collaborate, how to innovate, and how to think outside the box. These are all lessons these kids got.
I'm going to assume that you probably taught them an iterative way to progress through their assignments, whether it was through AI or whatever station they ended up being at. I'm just curious what you think about the things that you learned here and how we might apply it to adult learning with our clients, with the agile coaching or just executive coaching consulting that we do.
Chris: Well, I think the thing that was most relevant to me, and I had seen this in the training that we've all done together, is that the people in your class or workshop know more than what you think going in. You think they're coming in and they're a bunch of dummies and they don't know. In reality, they do know. Collectively, they probably know more than you do if you hit it right.
So I learned that we need to stop doing the pontification. Some folks will say, "Oh, we don't use PowerPoints," but they still stand up there and talk. I think that from an adult learning standpoint, we need to be more focused on giving them opportunities to experience rather than learning all the absolute minimal details that we try to teach people.
You and I both, Kumar, follow the "Training from the Back of the Room" approach by Sharon Bowman. I think we need to continue to do that and continue to try to figure out ways to better engage our students. By getting them engaged, they're going to do that.
You asked a question about whether the Agile principles still held. When I built the AI training class, it's a prompt engineering class, I built it in such a way that one of the things you do is you don't just sit down and produce the perfect prompt as your fingers are madly typing on the keyboard. You start out with a very simple prompt. You look at the results and then you go back and say, "Okay, what worked? What didn't? Let's change it." We change one thing at a time. And we had them do that.
What was really interesting was that halfway through the program, the sponsors came to me and said they were going to take the kids to a preventing gun violence workshop toward the end of the program. They wanted us to encourage the kids to do posters. They had $500 worth of cash that they were going to give the kids. So we started working on that with big easel paper and markers. My AI instructor was teaching them AI, and one of them asked, "Could we do our poster using AI?" He didn't hesitate; he just said, "Sure, let's try it and see what happens."
So they iteratively built their own posters. It was kind of late in the program when we started doing that. They generated eight posters. When we got to the ceremony where they had all the posters up and they were going to do the workshop with the kids, they had identified five pieces of art that they were going to put up and post around the Marion County Board of Health. Four of them were from my kids who did it using AI.
It's a fascinating thing, right? Everybody's like, "Ooh, AI, AI," but AI is a tool. An idiot with a tool is still an idiot. Well, these kids aren't idiots. These kids are brilliant in what they do. And that was another really powerful thing for me - how smart these kids are.
Hopefully in our next podcast, we'll talk about the apprenticeship program I put in place with 1150 Academy, which is now called Blazing Academy. It doesn't matter what age you're talking about. Kids are brilliant. I walked in thinking, well, the kids from the well-to-do neighborhoods in the north side of Indianapolis are going to be brilliant, right? And I didn't really have expectations of the kids down south, in the Eastern Star Church area. They're just as brilliant, if not more, than the kids in the well-to-do area. It's just a matter of figuring out how you're going to engage kids and give them something. If you let them choose what they're doing and let them control their destiny, they're all over it. If you try to tell them do A, then do B, then do C, they're going to push back on you the whole time.
Kumar: Everything you're saying is so amazing to me. My experience in school was not a pleasant one because school, wherever it is in the world, is very regimented. It's a very stepwise, waterfall approach if you want to call it that. You start in kindergarten, you go to grade one, then two, then three, and so on. You kind of step through this process, and it's like cattle going through a fattening process before slaughter. The slaughter, of course, is when you graduate and go off to college.
But my point is that the way I learn, and I think most kids learn, is by doing. I had someone on this show a couple of months ago, I forget her name, but she's a homeschool coach. She coaches parents on how to educate their kids in homeschool programs. We spend so much time, kids do, in school - eight hours. But really, what learning are they getting out of that? They're not learning for eight hours, for sure. They may get two hours of learning in that or one hour of learning or maybe nothing because they're distracted, they're disengaged.
It's true for the workplace too. People go to work for eight hours, and how much work are they actually doing? How engaged are they really? These practices that start in school get entrenched, in my opinion, throughout our lives. What you're doing, Chris, with these kids is showing them another way of learning. That's what I'm getting out of it.
Forget agile. I mean, yes, they're learning iterative processes. They're learning how to collaborate and innovate and all that. And those are all the outcomes of agile that you might get with a good way of implementing it. But I'm thinking that we, as coaches and consultants, need to rethink how we educate and teach adults on how to apply these types of techniques in the workplace. What are your thoughts?
Chris: Yeah, we need to come up with a better way of educating people. One of the things that I saw is a kid write an entire book on their phone. Let me say that again: an entire book on their phone. It was like a 90-page e-book, eight and a half by eleven. They learn differently. They learn off of their phones. They learn based on their experiences. They're more technically savvy than we are.
We can't use the same ways that we were taught. I mean, I went to school and you got lectured to for 50 minutes and then you went home. You went home and you had homework to do or you went to study hall and did your work. How much of that do you really remember? I'm sure a lot of it's there in the back recesses of your mind. But most people don't look back favorably on their school days.
I had one of my sons who decided he was going to take... There's that adage of "they've quit, but they haven't left the company yet" for some people, right? My son quit high school but showed up every day for the last year and ended up having to go back later and finish up his last semester. He was bored because they were taking him through the checklist and they did this and they did that. It's just nuts.
We should be looking at how we help kids. For example, how important is college? We have to show people that it's not as important. College isn't as important as the skills you learn in college. What do you learn in college? You learn problem-solving. You learn how to communicate. You learn how to work together with people. You learn how to write. You become this well-rounded individual where I took social dance and weightlifting and all these other BS classes. It was fun for me. I enjoyed college. Not everybody enjoys college. Not everybody can follow that path.
To just try and force people down the funnel to graduation just doesn't work anymore. I think we have to really go back and figure out how we do that. I would love to go back and take Sharon Bowman's class again. The first time I was like, "Yeah, okay." But then we get out and we start trying it. I wonder how much stuff I missed.
Kumar: You know, with the experience that you've had with this STEM program and some of the other experiences, you could probably riff off of Sharon Bowman's work, meaning you could extend it, expand it. I'm not saying that you shouldn't take that class because it would be a great - I would love to take it again just because it's so much fun. But I think the experiences that you've had are a case study in how to make education and learning fun and engaging. You ought to write at least a blog post about it, maybe several, maybe a little book. I don't know. Is there a book in you, Chris?
Chris: It could be. I've got several started that aren't quite finished. We've talked about them before.
Kumar: That's true. So what is maybe a takeaway or two that you would want to leave behind with viewers of this episode?
Chris: Um, it's a good question. I hadn't thought about that. I think the thing I would want people to take away is that don't be so arrogant that you think your way is the best way. Focus on the outcomes. And this is something I learned quite a bit from you, Kumar: focus on the outcomes. How do we improve the outcomes? And if the way we're doing it doesn't improve outcomes, don't do it anymore. Find a different way.
I think that's the approach that I've taken - always focus on: are the kids engaged? Are they having a good time? Are they learning? And if it means that from an Agile Meridian standpoint, if we have to buy snacks to get kids to be engaged, okay. If we have to buy virtual reality headsets to get them engaged, okay. We should do that with adults too. What is it we need to do to help them be engaged so that they're excited about what they're learning? They can choose their path in the learning process. And if we can do those couple of things, I think our outcomes would go up substantially.
Kumar: That's great advice. Wonderful advice. I'm already starting to think about the work that I'm doing with my clients, how to make it more effective, make it more engaging, more impactful, especially the learning moments - the times when you're training or providing some kind of learning opportunity for these people. Even in the coaching side of things, I see a lot of people sort of telling - it's not coaching, they're telling them what to do.
To your point, people are smart. They're a lot smarter than they let on. And they just need a chance to figure things out on their own. Maybe they make a few mistakes along the way, but that's where you can kind of course correct and help them find another route. Not that you would give it to them, but you help them with the questions you ask. Did we reach our outcome? To your point, did we get what we wanted? No, not really. I need to try that again. I need to try another approach. So I think that's great advice.
Speaking about your coaching and the example you just brought up, what are we trying to do when we're telling them as opposed to giving them options and letting them explore?
Chris: As a coach, you don't want them to fail big. If they're going to fail, you want it to be small. You want it to be controlled. You want them to learn from it. But if they never fail because you teach them or you tell them this is the way you should do this, they learn only the way that you think it should be done. They don't learn the way that it shouldn't be done. They don't have those experiences. And I think that works for them.
Kumar: Absolutely. Yeah. And who cares if it's... At the end of the day, I don't care if the kids don't learn the same way I do and they learn something different than what I intended. They learn something. And that's what I like. The outcome is learning. It's not the Chris Daly way. It's just that they learn something and they're able to apply it.
Chris: You know what's interesting, too, and I don't know if I told you this, Kumar. So this is probably a surprise for you. But I had a meeting with the folks at the community center not last week, and they want me to consider bringing in an after-school program now.
Kumar: Oh, my God. That's wonderful.
Chris: Yeah, it's a great opportunity. You know, it continues to be a great opportunity. And, you know, again, you focus on the outcomes and you focus on treating people the right way, the way you would want to be treated. And it's amazing what comes out of it. So I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully, I'll get some of those same kids. I like working with that group of kids.
Kumar: I thought you weren't... if you had to do it over, you wouldn't have kids after working with those kids.
Chris: Well, they grew up. Somebody's got to work with them, right? I just am thankful that my kids are raised.
Kumar: So that's great. All right. Well, I really enjoyed this conversation. I am really proud. I think proud is the word. I'm sure you are too, but I'm proud and really honored that Agile Meridian was chosen to do this work and that you represented not just us, but you represented those kids in a way that was so meaningful. I'm sure it was meaningful for them as well. So, yeah. So I thank you. Thank you for coming on and sharing the story.
