Episode Transcript
Lisa: Sanjay, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thank you for being here.
Sanjay: Thank you Lisa for inviting me. I’m very honored to be here.
Lisa: Yeah, well we were talking about how to start this conversation before I started recording, and you had a really nice idea I thought about what you’ve been thinking about regarding kind of self-organized groups and organizations and why that’s relevant for the kind of work you’re doing. So do you want to kick us off?
Sanjay: So I was thinking this week basically on your questions and the reason why we’re talking about this, and I think maybe what the starting point for me personally is realizing that we’re all being educated to kind of obey, to follow instructions, and to do what others who have always wanted to control us want us to do. So life as humanity is the story of power and the story of control.
What is very interesting is how we’re taught into that system since we’re very small. We’re taught into it from our parents because they learned it from their parents, but then it’s really formalized in the schooling system. The schooling system is where it really starts being like “You’re here to learn this which we think that you need to know,” to do this, to ask for permission, to be quiet, to don’t make noise, don’t bother your neighbor. The schooling system is a system of control in which we’re all trained into being obedient, into being dependent on who else is going to tell us what else to do.
It’s also very interesting how what it makes us is it kind of numbs our curiosity and our creativity. I have a four-year-old and this four-year-old asks questions constantly, everything is a question. My 10-year-old used to be like that when he was four years old, but in the schooling system he has stopped asking me questions. I don’t think he doesn’t ask questions, I just think he stops asking them to me. It’s interesting because I think nobody really finishes with the questions thing, but some people don’t numb them out.
Then if you think about it, when you continue in the education process and then go into work life, well in work life it becomes even more accentuated because there you’re really dealing with power. It’s who’s the boss, who has the money, who gives you jobs, who sustains you, and I think that’s where you realize “Okay, I will obey because I need to survive, I need to sustain a family or whatever.”
So what is interesting about this is that I feel this is like the essence of why I do what I do, but also why we are talking you and I basically. We’re thinking there is this thing of how we are willingly and in an organized way giving up our autonomy, our liberty, our freedom of choice, although we always think that the argument behind our humanity is freedom. So I think it’s a funny contradiction that’s happening.
Lisa: That’s so true. There’s a great quote that freedom can’t be taken away, can only be forgotten. And I think that’s so true like we have that curiosity when we’re young and it’s sort of trained out of us.
I’m so interested in this topic because I really think we can’t reinvent organizations if we don’t also reinvent schools and reinvent education. Because otherwise, you know, there’s just so much unlearning that people have to do. Let’s say even we get to a utopia where we reimagine organizations and there’s so much more self-managed and decentralized, even then the education system is not designed that way.
Sanjay: And it’s weird because we kind of don’t want it to be reimagined. We talk about it being reimagined—I’ve heard the story of transforming education for decades and I always hear the same story and I always hear the same things. But it’s like there is a true sort of thing behind it, and it’s like would you let your kids learn in a different way as you learned? And everybody’s going to say, “Obviously yes, I want a new alternative.” But when they’re actually at it, you think “Are they really learning?” or “Is this really happening?”
There’s always this thing of letting others do something that you haven’t done and trusting that it’s also another possible way of living. So it’s not to judge that there’s like an evil force behind everything—maybe there isn’t and I’m just an optimist—but in general, it’s that the way of organizing, it’s easier to go through the world of what we do know than what we don’t know obviously. And I think that’s basically the reason why we end up reproducing these systems.
So it’s like better to have the dictator that you do know than not have a dictator thinking that you might get one or something like that. So I think it’s people’s fear of trying something new which really stops them from allowing themselves to live to their potential and to live well, to live happy together.
Lisa: Maybe let’s get into your story a bit. I know you have this passion of obviously seeing the way it is and thinking, you know, that can’t be it and surely there’s another way. So how do you come across SOLEs, and we’ll talk about what that means in a moment, and how did you start doing this work?
Sanjay: I can go really far back and maybe I will because it’s funny. I was telling you the story the other day that my mom gave me like a poem I wrote when I was 12 years old. I don’t like poetry so I was shocked that I wrote poems, and it was a poem called “Life” and it was about my awareness as a kid, as a 12-year-old, of my privilege and the inequalities in which we live.
When my mom showed me that—she showed it to me like two years ago, she had it like in a drawer or something—and she was like, “Look what I found,” and I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve been talking about the same thing all my life!” All my life I’ve been concerned with inequality, with why some people live well and others don’t.
And maybe that’s why—I love art and I love biology and all that—but I ended up studying economics. And I ended up studying economics because it was one of the only things I really didn’t know anything about, and I knew that it had a very important thing to do in our lives. It was like a central part of our life.
I fought with all my economics teachers because I hated orthodox economics, but at the same time I discovered I also loved it because it was a big explanation of why we are where we are and why we accept this way of being together. It’s all based on beliefs.
So I’ve always liked teaching, I always got into—I’ve always been kind of a teacher and I got into education just as I graduated. I also studied arts and I worked in the public sector, and there’s where I saw like big organizations. The public sector is the state, that’s like the biggest organization. And seeing how things had good intentions but they would get stuck in bureaucracies, and they would get stuck in “No, that can’t be done” phrases like that. “No, that’s a really good idea though, but we can’t do that.” And there’s always a “that can’t be done.”
And it’s like, but we made this whole system up which means we can—why can’t we do it? We just did it this way, why can’t we do it another way?
After that, I always had this question. I became a teacher for art school teachers at schools, and for me art was the tool to sort of liberate creativity, freedom, everything. For me it was like you have to learn maths, you have to learn language, but when you’re talking about art there isn’t any “have to’s.” There’s no “have to’s.” And so there’s where really, that was for me like the opportunity in the space for anybody to be able to express yourself and communicate and create.
I always thought this is the way we’re going to sort of affect the system, to nudge the system—let people be creative and art is a tool. In any case, I was an economist so I worked as an economist in the culture sector and education sector.
Eventually I said, “Whatever, I want to go and do whatever I want.” With my partner we said, “Let’s go do whatever we want to,” and we actually went to Barcelona. I went to learn how to make electronic music because that’s what I really wanted to do, and she went to learn how to sew to make clothing.
There we got a scholarship to study interaction design. So I became an interaction designer and my thesis for my masters was a project of art education and technology. My whole idea behind this project was that in Colombia, the government had spent tons of money putting computers in schools and nobody used these computers. I’m so sorry, let me mute my phone.
So, my thesis for my masters was a project in education, art, and technology. Basically, the government had put computers in schools all over the country and those computers were all locked up in closets and nobody used them because the teachers were afraid that the kids would spoil them. The teachers didn’t know how to use them, weren’t interested in using them—they know how to give their class without a computer, why would they do it with a computer?
I thought that’s awesome because what we can do is we can put free software on them and kids can start to make music and videos and animation and stuff using those. Because it’s tough for you to have a piano, but almost everybody has access to some digital device and you can make music on a computer. So that was my whole idea behind this project and I started to move it around.
At the same time, I was a consultant for the ICT Ministry and I was developing a strategy to promote digital culture. It’s funny because everything all connected into understanding how to let people create on their own, having the tools that exist which are much more easily accessible now. Having a smartphone is not so difficult and it’s really powerful because it can be an equalizing sort of tool. It can also obviously, as it is right now, be a wonderful tool of control, of surveillance. But it’s interesting because it was this possibility of allowing people to create, and if people create—no matter if they’re rich or poor or whatever—creation is what makes us human and what makes us feel like life is worth something when we create something.
This project I started offering it into the education world and I realized—of course I’ve come from an education world of privilege—but the education world of norm, like the majority of people, has so many other things which are barriers to having this experience.
And that is when a couple of friends of mine, they told me, “Hey, you’re moving your project, we’re moving another thing that’s called SOLE,” and I said, “Oh what’s that?” and he said, “No, this guy, this Indian guy Sugata Mitra just won a TED prize and he does this thing which is called self-organized learning. Why don’t we try and move this? Would you be interested?” I said, “Cool, it sounds like it was connected.”
When I actually saw his TED Talk, that’s when I realized, “Wow, this is what I would need as an opening, as the gateway for my project of education, art, and technology.” I said, “This is an idea of allowing people to learn how to learn in groups using the internet.” So that’s how I got to where I am today.
I’m a parent, I have two kids, live in Colombia in Bogota. My parents are foreigners, so I think maybe that would also add a little bit more to my life experience. I’ve always kind of been an outsider—parents being foreigners has allowed me to sort of see life as a Colombian but also as an outsider. I think I’ve always been part of many groups, but I’ve always been kind of the outsider and insider.
That is where I realized, in this system of inequality and discrimination, my role is kind of like being a bridge to allow those that feel outside feel like they’re inside, and those that are inside allow the ones who are outside, so that there is no outside and inside basically. And that’s what I think I’m good at because I can jump from one side to the other and say, “Hey, can we talk about this? Why don’t we meet this person?” et cetera, et cetera.
Lisa: I love that. I remember watching Sugata Mitra’s talk maybe about 10 years ago, maybe a bit less than that, and being so inspired as well. I remember telling everyone I bumped into, “You have to watch this, it’s incredible.” So tell us, what is a SOLE? What are the kind of principles of a SOLE?
Sanjay: So SOLE stands for a Self-Organized Learning Environment, and basically a SOLE is this physical space where you have people, groups of people—10, 15, 20 people—less computers than people, usually one computer every four or five participants, with internet connection and something called big questions. We call them big questions because they’re interesting questions, difficult questions, engaging questions, something which is in the interest of all the people in SOLE.
So what happens in the SOLE basically is that people self-organize using the information on the internet and their peers to find answers to those questions. So nobody’s teaching, there is no teacher, nobody is there teaching any topic. It’s because of people’s curiosity that they learn.
And the more interesting than the answers that they find to those questions is that new questions arise. So you can ask yourself, “Why do things fall down?” And you say, “Because of gravity.” You go into Google, “Why do things fall down?” “Because of gravity.” And you can say, “Okay, what is gravity?” And you go into Google again, “What is gravity?” And you find, “Oh, gravity’s a magnetic force that the Earth produces.” And you say, “Okay, why does the Earth produce a magnetic force?”
And the whole point is that it’s an iterative process which allows you to deepen the learning because one question takes you to another one, and that’s how the learning process really becomes deeper. And that’s the emergent experience of the self-organized learning environment—that people learn, but not only do they learn about the topics that the questions are about, but they also learn the basic skills which everybody says we need nowadays.
I’ve seen all these top TED talks and coachings and things that everybody’s skills that you need for nowadays are to be able to collaborate, to be able to communicate with others, you have to be creative and innovative, and you have to have critical thinking, and you have to be able to self-direct yourself and have initiative and stuff like that. Well, those skills are the ones that you develop in a SOLE basically.
They develop because as you have to collaborate with others, you have to find information and know how to judge it. It’s more—it’s like being self-taught, but being self-taught in groups, which is more fun, easier to do, because to be self-taught you have to have a lot of discipline. But it also develops all these other social skills which are the important skills for trying to tackle any uncertain reality, which we have many nowadays. So that’s basically what happens in a SOLE.
Lisa: I think a lot of people must be skeptical. It’s like what you were saying at the top of the conversation—like people think, “Oh yeah, reimagining education, that’s a good idea,” but when you talk about this, I imagine a lot of people must say, “Wait, but no teachers? I mean, come on, they’re just gonna mess around on the internet, that’s not gonna work.” But it’s proven, right? And you must have some amazing stories of the difference that it’s made, especially in terms of this kind of dimension of inequality.
Sanjay: Yes, so I have tons of stories, but okay, we have to understand this is like scientifically proven. This is what Sugata Mitra has spent the last two-three decades researching, and basically his findings are: kids can learn almost anything in a self-organized learning environment.
Which is interesting in itself, because what it does is it does put out the question of “So what are teachers for?” And it’s very interesting because it does make you realize that it’s different to talk about teaching than to talk about learning. And nowadays I don’t like the word “education” anymore because education has all these connotations of a way of learning, and that’s why I talk about learning in a different sense. Because the whole point behind SOLEs is that people learn how to learn, and they do it together.
And it doesn’t mean that teachers are not important. I always think teachers are still very important, but the thing is very different what they would have to do now in the age of Internet than what they used to do before. Before they were the sources of information, now the sources of information are online. What you need now from teachers is the role of somebody who can motivate you, who can inspire you, who can actually tell you a story which makes you want to be interested in something you have absolutely no knowledge about. And that’s the role of a teacher.
Because obviously I am not going to go and research about trigonometry on my own. It’s not like I’m interested in sines and cosines and tangents just out of nowhere. But if my teacher tells me or asks me a question like, “How does your phone know where it is?” And I think, “Ah, that’s an interesting question.” Okay, and then I go on Google it and it says, “Ah, there are like three satellites here and there, and that’s how they’re talking to the phone.” And maybe I ask myself, “What are they telling the phone? How are they talking to the phone?” And inside are sine, cosine, tangents. And that’s how I get interested in trigonometry.
So it’s interesting because it’s really changing, flipping the concept of education to learning. And in that sense, I don’t know if you know, but public education in Colombia is not awesome, as probably in most parts of the world. And I’m very glad it exists and it’s very important, because otherwise kids would have very scarce opportunities.
For example, in Colombia, public education is universal, everybody goes to school. What is true is also the teachers have a really tough job because they have to be teachers, they have to be parents, kids come from tough backgrounds, and so on and so forth. So really, this is nothing against the public education system and the teachers in itself. This is about the possibilities that they could have with this learning.
The other thing is that here in Colombia, what we started to do was—SOLE has never been able to work with a government. Sugata has tried in India and in England where he’s a professor in a university, but here in Colombia we managed to convince the government to do SOLE at a large scale with the government. Because basically there was a very clear need—the government had already spent a ton of money putting computers and internet in public spaces and nobody was using them. So they were in public schools, they were in public libraries, and there were internet kiosks in remote rural areas.
It was really cool because they were giving access to the internet, but people didn’t know what the internet was or what it was about. And we’re talking about this is 2013-2014. And so we said, “Well, we have a very simple and very powerful methodology which allows people to start exploring the internet for probably the most basic thing you need as a human, which is to be able to find answers to questions.” And so that is how we started off.
And so we have tons of stories of how this happened because basically Sugata invented this to be done with kids, for the schooling experience, for the learning in schooling experience. Instead, as we went to public spaces, kids went with their parents, with their grandparents, to the public library. So we started doing SOLEs with all ages and mixed stages and mixed groups.
What was very interesting is that it became a space for getting people to be curious again, allowing themselves to be curious and allowing themselves to ask questions. So the first thing we do when we do a first SOLE session in a new community is we ask people, “What are three questions you’ve always had and never been able to answer?”
So if I ask you—I’d like you to think about it—but generally what happens is that us as adults, it takes us time. And we who have been educated and probably have a higher education, probably maybe postgraduate education or something like that, our questions are all super elaborate. But kids come up with tons of fantastic questions really quickly. They have them super clear.
And what’s interesting is that when adults see that kids have these questions, they allow themselves to have these questions that they had as kids. So I don’t know if you already have a question which you have always had and never been able to answer in mind?
Lisa: It’s really hard actually, this—you’re so right. I’m like, “Oh, think of a good question, think of something clever.”
Sanjay: So that’s the thing, you’re always thinking, “If I have a question, I need it to be a clever one because I’m not going to say a stupid question.” And so the first thing we tell people is there are no stupid questions, all questions are good questions. Some questions are more complex than others, but it doesn’t mean every question counts.
And what is interesting is that when I’m at this point with adults, I always ask them, “Think of when you were a kid, what was a question that you had as a kid which never got answered, maybe it’s still there.” And that’s when people start remembering, “Yes, I always wanted to know…” I don’t know, “Why the sky is blue.” So do you know why the sky is blue, Lisa?
Lisa: Oh, I think it’s something to do with the ocean and reflections, but I can’t remember.
Sanjay: Okay, so this is cool because what happens is when a question comes out—and usually I never pose a question like the one I just gave you as an example, I just let people in silence. Adults get kind of stressed, they’re concerned—like five seconds, they’re like—and what happens is that in the process of people sharing their questions with one another, they always end up, “Ah yes, I have a question about…” And they listen to the other one’s question, “I love this,” and they start putting out questions which are really honest, powerful questions.
Very many of them are scientific, but one of the most common questions in nine years of doing this that I’ve always heard is “Does God exist?” And the other most common question is “Is there life on other planets?” Which are very powerful questions, they’re very interesting.
So what’s interesting about the SOLE is that what we’re looking for is for people to answer questions which they find interesting. So usually when we tell people what are their questions, I take note of all of them and then I say, “Which is the one you like the most?” and we go for that one. Because if everybody’s interested in that, that means everybody’s going to be engaged in the self-organizing process.
Having said that, I have many examples, but just to give you three: I have one teacher in Cartagena who started using SOLE to teach her classes of political science. Her interest was that her kids became active citizens—that was her interest. So one day she goes into her class and she says, “We’re going to do a thing called the SOLE,” and the kids are like, “What?” And she’s like, “What questions you have?”
From the questions, the kids started learning this way. After a time, they started asking all the other teachers of their other subjects. They said, “We want to learn with you like we’re learning with Maria.” And they all went to Maria and they said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I do SOLEs.” And they were like, “Well, tell us how you’re doing this.”
And so she said, “Okay, this is how a SOLE session happens and this is how they do it.” And the teachers started doing SOLEs for their own classes—biology, math, and so on and so forth. And it turns out that the whole school started doing SOLEs and the whole school started getting better results, both academically but also better results in terms of the kids’ self-esteem, the kids’ attitudes.
And they ended up writing a report to give to the Secretariat of Education of Cartagena saying, “Hey, you should put SOLEs in all the schools.” So talk about citizen active citizenship and participation when that happened. And I need you to know we went one day for four hours to show Maria how to do SOLEs. And that’s where you say, “Okay, this is the power of self-organization.” It’s like you cannot plan this. It’s not like me going to the Secretariat of Education and say, “I have this wonderful innovative methodology that you should try because they’re going to change”—which is what everybody does.
This is coming from the bottom, this is coming from a public school, a teacher who decides to do something and moves, and the kids themselves are empowered and they move it. And that’s where it goes.
A different example is what happened in an indigenous community in the northern part of Colombia. They had one of these internet kiosks that the government set up, and it’s in a place called Boca de Camarones. We showed the guy who was the administrator—he was 20 years old, just his first job, three-month job. He was the guy who basically opened the internet kiosks and let people use the internet.
So he’s not a teacher, he’s not an educator, his mind is not about “This is my long-term job” or whatever. This is in 2015. We show him how to do this and he starts working with kids. He’s from an indigenous community called the Wayuu, and the Wayuu teens and kids are not—he feels they weren’t very identified with their culture. Why? Because they’re close to Riohacha, the big town, the big city in that area.
There’s a lot of illegality happening—there’s contraband, there’s drug money, there’s a lot of easy money. And so kids are only interested in going through to make money easily. And so he asked them, “What are you guys interested in?” And the kids say, “Well, we like video games and we like videos and we like animations and all that.” And he says, “Why don’t you learn how to make your own?”
And so they go into Google and type “How do you make a video game? How do you make a video?” etc., etc. They say, “Ah, for any of those you need to have a story.” So they go back to our SOLE Ambassador—he’s called Aliner—and they say, “Aliner, can we get a story?” And he just throws the question back at them, “I don’t know guys, where can you get a story from?” And they go like, “Ah, we can talk to the elders of the community and get the Wayuu stories.”
So these guys end up making video games, animations, and videos of the Wayuu stories and putting them online. And this happened again—we went one day, four hours, to show Aliner how he could do it, set up a SOLE in his internet kiosk, and this just emerged.
This community has continued doing SOLEs, not only to that level that in 2018, government changed and they closed down their internet kiosk. Since then we’ve been working with them so that they could continue doing SOLEs because they valued a lot this experience of using it as a way of preserving their culture but also for their learning, etc., etc.
They now—even the elders come to learn how to use the computers and what the internet is about. It’s very cool because they’re talking with the kids. The elders know stuff, they share what they know, but they’re also finding stuff online. So it’s a very interesting dialogue that’s happening between their ancestral knowledge with the information they’re finding online.
We’ve been trying to—they themselves wanted to keep this going, and that’s when we said, “Okay, why don’t we try and build a space for them to learn?” And this is what we called the SOLE Lab, which is for us what we call the library of the future.
Imagine a place where you go in and there’s nothing, but there’s the internet, so there’s everything. There’s all the books in the world, there’s all the information in the world, and it’s all there and you just need a reason to use it. And the reason is to answer big questions, to find a way to connect.
That’s how after four years of trying to get this done, finally last year we were able to get funding and set up the first SOLE Lab, which we built in Boca de Camarones for this community. You have to imagine this is a 20-year-old kid, now he’s 27, now he just had his first child a week ago. And now he’s empowered his brother and other people of the community to be the SOLE ambassadors of that community.
Now they’re figuring out how to use the space not only for their educational purposes of kids to do their homework, learn about stuff, but also to move their entrepreneurship projects which are on ecotourism and stuff like that.
So these are like two very different examples of how SOLE and self-organized learning can be adapted to so many contexts. We also use it for peace building in Colombia. We have an armed conflict, and it’s really interesting how, thanks to the peace agreement, they were supposed to be roads and new schools built in these areas which had historically been isolated. And obviously our previous government didn’t do anything about that.
So instead, having a little bit of internet, having a few devices, we’ve been able to set up SOLEs in these areas and people are just like, “Wow, so we can learn about this? I’ve always wanted to know how to cook. I’ve always wanted to know how to set up a business. I’ve always wanted to know how to fix this machine which they gave us and we’ve never been able to use.” Stuff like that. And they’re using their SOLEs to do that.
Lisa: Amazing. I’m super inspired. I think what’s so encouraging for me is that I’ve had this kind of side passion of studying different examples of like alternative schools and kind of educational models, but always it tends to be, “Okay, this is amazing but it’s a private school,” and it takes a lot of resources. Whereas for me, what’s so inspiring about SOLEs and how you’ve been kind of unleashing them in Colombia is like how scalable it is and how kind of lean it is. It’s really just a computer and internet connection, a group of people, and then a SOLE ambassador, right? A person who can be encouraging. And is that the same role as the kind of grandmother figure, or is that different?
Sanjay: That’s another concept which goes with the SOLE concept. Sugata Mitra in his research, he found out something which you would think, “Well, this is kind of obvious,” but it’s important that somebody scientific says it. And it’s that it’s more important to have somebody motivating in a learning process than somebody who’s an expert. Because you might have the best expert, but if he’s a crappy teacher, who cares if he’s an expert in a learning process?
I’m not saying experts are not important to get stuff, go deeper into our possibilities of knowledge, etc., but in a learning process, it’s more important to have somebody who’s motivating. So he invented this idea and this concept of the granny, and he calls it a granny because “my granny says ‘Sanjay, I really don’t get what it is that you do, but tell me more, that’s so cool.’” I don’t really understand, but a grandmother is somebody who’s not an expert but somebody who’s warm and listens and is encouraging and says, “I don’t know how to do it, but I’m sure you can figure it out.” And it’s somebody who’s there.
What he discovers is that that accelerates learning processes dramatically. So he invented a thing called the Granny Cloud, and basically the Granny Cloud is a network of volunteers—men and women of all ages. I’m also a granny. Their role is to connect remotely to the SOLEs and not teach, not be a teacher—be a granny. And that means listening and asking, “Okay, what are you guys finding out and what is that? Oh, that’s so cool! And how did you do that?” It’s somebody who’s there to motivate but also to listen.
So this concept of the Granny Cloud is also a big part of what we do here in Colombia, because it’s also been a way of creating dialogue amongst people. We live in a country which is tough and which people have been silenced after decades of conflict and silence—like literally—but also silenced in the way that people feel like they’re not capable of changing stuff.
It’s like whoever feels like they can want to move something for the good of the others always feels hindered by the government, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, the drug lords. There are always all these forces or the elites which say even if you try and do it, you won’t be able to.
What is very interesting is that when people feel heard and feel heard by somebody who they would normally not meet in their life, this is like jumping that super big barrier of class (which is very big here in Colombia), of race (which is hidden behind the class, which is hidden behind money, basically).
So it’s very interesting how being able to create—we’ve created a granny cloud, the Spanish-speaking Granny Cloud—that connects to these different places around these SOLEs that are happening all around the country. It’s very interesting because for people, it’s like an opportunity to be heard and to see a world very different to their own. And that goes both ways—it goes for the grannies and it goes for the communities which have SOLEs.
I think there is where there’s real magic because the SOLE session is very cool because of the question, the Granny Cloud is very cool because of the listening and the dialogue. And I think that’s what—those two ingredients are really like an empowering tool which is tremendous. That’s where it goes to the next level of realizing what we’re capable of.
And when we realize, “Wow, we’re capable of doing very amazing things,” like the two stories that I just told you—I have stories, tons of those, and that’s because people do amazing things. So when you say it’s a very simple methodology, it is very simple, but it takes very passionate people to actually make it work.
Because as the simpleness is what allows it to be scalable, but for it to really hold and to continue and to be iterated and become and for it to become a habit, it needs people who believe in it and who make it work. So these Marias and these Aliners—these are—I know they’re everywhere. It’s like “Ratatouille” the movie of the mouse—it’s like everyone can cook. Everyone can be one of these ambassadors—they’re not everywhere. You have to find them, they emerge, and you have to find them so that those processes can continue. So it’s really a very non-linear process, it’s a very sort of emergent process which I’ve been fascinated to experience.
Lisa: What makes a good granny then?
Sanjay: There are many ways of being a granny, and I think it’s very different. There’s these grannies which are like elder women who are grannies probably in their real life also and so they’re super cozy. But then there’s grannies like me who are super energetic. And then there’s other grannies who are very calm and quiet but they’re there, and they don’t know much what to say.
So really what makes a granny a granny is this honest and sincere intent of wanting to connect to others randomly and to support their learning processes by not wanting to control them, allowing them to happen and accompanying. It’s really somebody who’s there to hold your hand and go through something. And so that’s what makes a good granny.
Lisa: I think it’s very, it’s very similar to what makes a good coach. And it’s interesting because I think coaching has a lot of connotations. I don’t mean coaches like a profession, but I think coaching as a way of being is a really valuable skill set to develop, which is a lot of what you just said. You know, the ability to really listen to someone so they feel heard and seen, the ability to ask good questions kind of free from your own agenda, the ability to hold back your advice or expertise.
Sanjay: There is one big difference, and it has to do with the word. The word coach has a connotation of power which a granny doesn’t. And it’s very intentional. For me it’s very powerful to understand—I’ve always thought of it like what should be a teacher nowadays? A teacher nowadays should be a granny, not a coach. Because a coach is somebody who is still the person who knows versus—or not the person who knows—but who has. Because you think of coaches like in sports, and you think of coaches—there is this idea, this is like the—still somebody who’s more expert than you in a sense.
Instead of granny—everybody has a granny or normally has a granny, and it’s somebody you do admire, but it’s not because of their knowledge specifically. Obviously they do have tons of knowledge, our grannies, but the reason why you admire them or why you relate to them has a more human, sensible touch than that of the coach, you know?
So I do think the word “mentor” also has a weight on it, instead of “granny.” I think is like lovely because it’s like people go without any sort of prejudice. So, “Ah, today we’re going to connect with the granny, ah this is really cool,” and they get rid of all the prejudice and the expectations. Like whatever can come up, this is really cool, this is enough.
Lisa: Yeah, I get that. You’ve told me that you’ve also done SOLEs in companies, in organizations. How does that go?
Sanjay: Back in 2019 we started thinking that one of the big problems why this hasn’t scaled in schooling worldwide is because that question which you ask—“So what about teachers and what do we do now and does this really work?”—is a question which is very common worldwide. And the people who most commonly ask this are the parents of the kids who are going to school, and they say, “What is this? What is this mess? What is this chaos?” Because a SOLE is a chaotic space. If you go into a SOLE when it’s happening, it’s noisy, it’s messy, it looks very different to your average school classroom.
And so people say, “Are kids really learning? Is this—?” I had to have this conversation ranging from my parents to people in the Ministry of Education to people in the corporate sector. And there is always this doubt because we weren’t brought up in that, and we didn’t have the internet when we were kids, so that’s a very different world.
And allowing this freely—and obviously with all the horrible things that happen with the internet now, people are even more resistant to letting this happen. And one of the things I noticed that was very interesting was we need parents to be able to experience this as well. So we should go into their workplaces and let them live it, because if they live it, they’re going to let their kids do this at school and they’re going to ask their teachers and they’re going to ask the principals to say, “Hey, why don’t you do this also?”
So you have all these organizations and things which are learning lean and all these new methodologies, design thinking and all that, and we thought, “Well, if SOLEs were in corporations and in organizations, probably that would allow this to move into the education world in another way.” Because there’s always been a lot of resistance—we’ve gone into schools always kind of through the back door, you know, because teachers find us. But when we try and go into the formal system top-down, there’s always this, “This is a bit too scary for us to try. You try it first and show us if it works, and then we’ll think about it. We won’t even do it.”
Instead, if we went into organizations—this was happening when we started to think about this—we started to research about how organizational learning happened, and we started having conversations with companies. And we realized, “Oh my God, not only does it make sense, but they need this.”
Because basically everybody is kind of stuck in their own little cubicle, in their silos—and I know the word “silo” because of talking to all these people, because the word “silo” seems to be something super common in the organizational world—and it’s everybody lives isolated from each other. They don’t have spaces of learning, and learning is not—everybody learns by doing, but kind of out of stress and out of pressure and out of the sense of competition.
There’s rarely sort of this idea of collaboration. Or if there is the sense of collaboration, it’s always like, “Let’s go outside and let yourself drop into your partner’s and into your colleague’s arms and show trust.” And not all these activities which I think are important—I’m not saying they’re not—but it’s like how do we do that in the purpose of what we need to be doing?
And so that’s where we thought SOLEs in organizations are a great—might be a good idea, might be a good experiment to try. And that’s where we went to a couple of organizations. We worked with SAP and another one we worked with is like a distributor of Google here in Colombia.
And what we realized is that—I did exactly the same thing: “What are three questions you’ve always had and not been able to answer?” And it’s interesting because all the questions that come out about their work are things where the boss looks at the employees like, “Really? You have that question?” And that’s how you realize employees are not allowed to ask questions. They’re not allowed to.
And then you realize the questions that the boss has are the same questions that their boss on top of them will look down upon. So it’s very interesting because we did several SOLE sessions in which obviously there’s this thing of “My question has to be more clever because I am the boss” kind of thing.
But it was also the boss realizing that their teams had wonderful questions, and their questions which can be better than theirs and which could make it grow. And what we realized during these SOLE sessions is that they found it like a wonderful way of interacting, in a much more productive way of getting things done than the actual methodologies or meetings with which they used to normally work.
And they said, “We’ve never had a conversation like this before. We’ve never had a conversation which is informed and in which we look for information online.” Maybe it’s information about us specifically which is not maybe online but in our archives or whatever. Or maybe it’s information online which helps our work and which is also a part of ours. And that’s what keeps us kind of going.
And when we tested this, I said, “Cool, do you like this? Is this something you could do?” And they said, “Yes, but we need you to be here.” And I was like, “But what did I do?” And they started saying, “No, you asked us which questions we had.” And I said, “Well, no, you can ask yourselves, right?” They were like, “Yeah,” and then they asked, “But wait, if you are not here, we won’t be able to have this conversation.” And I said, “Why?”
And it’s interesting because of course the hierarchies—in the self-organized learning environment, they disappear. But they do feel the need to have somebody external to allow themselves to do that, because if there is nobody external, then this won’t happen.
And the other thing which I found very interesting about this was that this allowed organizations to really find the questions which are important for their change, for their learning, for whatever. Because kind of these questions usually are thought of as coming from the top down. The ones on the top are the ones who have the good questions which are going to change everything, which are going to transform.
And they—kind of—maybe that question comes—“Anyone can cook” (Ratatouille)—maybe the question comes from someone else. And probably it will come, and probably it will come out from the process of working together in a SOLE, that they would come out.
So really what we found was this was a very powerful tool to allow organizations to find those questions which are really their big questions which change stuff. Because learning to make questions is tough, and nobody can teach you how to make a question. You only learn to make a question by asking questions—you go getting better at it because one question takes you to the other, and then you realize, “Ah, if I would have asked a question like this, then I could go closer to the type of thing I think I’m looking for,” that kind of thing.
So in organizations, I see this is a very sort of necessary thing. And it’s also one of these things that it’s like if you set up a SOLE—imagine having a room in an office which is a room where people say, “Okay, I have a problem, let’s all get together. Bring in whoever can from all these other divisions and whatever, and 20 people for one hour we’re gonna try and answer this question which one person has who is interested.” And they would come into these spaces.
Imagine what would happen with the organizations then? It would be like this talk of the learning organizations—but it’s like, how do you make that happen? Well, I think I think with SOLEs within organizations, that would happen.
What is true is that I haven’t been able to do this systematically in an organization, meaning throughout a long period. I’ve been able to do short experiences of three-four sessions in which they are like, “Amazing!” But then when they start thinking about, do they want to invest their money in this? They still think, “No, it’s better to hire an outside consultant to solve the problem for us.” There is little trust in their own skills and abilities and teams to be able to solve these things. So that’s one of those things where I think there’s like a mental barrier there to solving these things.
Lisa: How fascinating as well that the SOLE—there’s something about—there’s something very revealing about like a microculture just by the nature of the kind of questions people ask.
Sanjay: I think you have to understand that self-organization is a phenomenon of living systems. So for the scientists who are answering all the different difficult questions of humanity and of the universe and its existence found self-organization to be a process which is common and which is a process that brings to life things.
So if you were to think about it in organizations, how do you want to have an organization that’s alive? Well, you have to allow for self-organizing happening there. That’s why I think you propose self-managed tips and stuff like that. That’s how you bring life to an organism which is this organization.
Lisa: I to do the difficult job of trying to wrap up our conversation. What would you, for people listening who are thinking, “Wow, how can I set up a SOLE in my school or in my organization?” What advice would you give them? What would you recommend?
Sanjay: Well, there’s two ways of doing it. One is: ask me! That’s the easy one, that might be the quicker one. But another one, a very simple one is: is to try it. And to try it, it’s not—I’m saying it’s simple because it’s a simple methodology, but it’s not simple in the sense that you need to have an energy to make this happen. Not like the initial energy, not like the big bang—you have to have big energy at the beginning to make this flow and create and happen.
So there is a SOLE toolkit online in our website which you can download and read and see how you set up. And it’s really, it’s very simple, but it has like very key elements to take into consideration. But I do think that one of the things we are good at at SOLE Colombia is helping you figure out how you adapt SOLE to your needs and what needs to be done in your team, in your school, in whatever.
For schooling it’s pretty simple—there’s even an app that helps you plan your SOLE sessions that shows you how to do it. It’s called Start SOLE and it’s made by some colleagues of ours in the US. But I would say there’s an interesting thing about really just trying to go and do this. So I would say experiment, but don’t give up. You have to be patient, you have to do several sessions for it to feel like it’s like you know where it can go or where it’s going. So it’s also allowing yourself to feel it openly.
Lisa: The best way to learn it is by doing it, right?
Sanjay: Yes, yeah. But I can also tell more stories or I can also—we can also advise people on how to get there. So I think that’s important.
I think the other big thing—also it’s worth mentioning—is we’ve set up a network of communities. And like all these examples I’ve given you are not because I have many personally lived—I show people how to do SOLE, but I don’t have a community with which I work every day doing SOLEs. I’m not a teacher at school. I do SOLEs with my team, but we’re a small team and it’s not—this works with larger groups also, it works further.
So it’s interesting that this network which we’ve created, which is called the SOLE Colombia Community, is of ambassadors and grannies who share their experiences of what works, what doesn’t work, what amazes everybody, what is exhilarating. And what I find it very interesting is that itself, it’s a self-organized community.
Because we’re there to bring people together, but when we don’t bring people together, people get together anyway. And that’s what I think is very interesting, and it’s because there’s something about self-organization that allows them to kind of want to connect and make these things happen. So you can also participate from our SOLE Colombia Community, and that would be a good way to get in touch with other people who have tested this in other contexts. And I think that’s very cool to learn about.
Lisa: Thank you. Maybe to finish—a kind of—maybe it’s fitting for me to ask a big question to finish. What’s your hope for the future?
Sanjay: Very big one. So I could say the quick one is: I hope we were able to transform this system in which we live, which we invented, which is called capitalism, into something more human—not a system which sort of like spits most many of us out. And obviously, what I do feel is that the world where we are more connected and more—and we get rid of all these prejudices and all these beliefs which keep us apart—I think that’s my belief for the future.
But in practical terms, I also wish that my kids get to see a different way of learning, a different way of living together because of what we’re doing here. So I don’t know if it’s in the education system—learning in SOLEs be much more common and be the way we would learn. Connecting to grannies and random people around the world in a way which is only allowed by the internet. I think that a world in which we all connected in different ways, and people supported each other even if they don’t know each other, I think is an opportunity which will make the world look different.
And finally, what I do think is we have to be able to talk about these things and really get into them. And so my world, my hope for the future is that everybody is not scared of asking questions and going off and looking for answers to them—but not doing it alone, doing it together. That would be it.
It’s a very tough question you made. It’s like a different taste of your own medicine.
Lisa: I know, I know! It’s like I don’t know if I want to taste it so often.
Sanjay: It happens to me every day. It’s like—no, brain cells!
Lisa: Thank you! I think it’s an awesome question to ask, “What is your hope for the future?”
Sanjay: Well, you know, similar—that I—I mean, that’s also why I do this podcast. My hope is that by sharing stories and examples that people see something else is possible, and those ideas spread and we reinvent the system that we’re in and see that it is possible to reinvent it. We made it, we can unmake it.
Sanjay: Maybe I would add—I agree completely—and maybe one thing that is deep in me is the sense of urgency, I think. We need to do it quickly. It’s like I don’t want to have the boredom of being one of those generations which says, “Okay, if we didn’t do it, the next one will fix it.” I don’t want to leave it to the next generation to fix, and I don’t want to leave it to the next year. I think we’re in an age and in a moment of level of connection which we—we’re the ones who are doing it and we can do it and it can be done, and I really believe that.
I know everybody’s always scared of climate change and world conflict and all these things, and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s the world we’re lit in.” But I also think this is a very interesting moment to live, and this is a very interesting moment.
I have taken SOLEs to over 450,000 people—have participated from SOLEs. I don’t even know who these people are. And you say it’s interesting because we’re so many that the experience of masses and mass transformation—this has never happened in the history of humanity. And I think there’s an interesting point where it’s possible to switch things, change stories, and change ways of living so we can all live better together. So yeah, we have to do it now quickly.
Lisa: Yes. My colleague Vera likes to say “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Sanjay: That’s a very good phrase. “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I hope so. I believe it—I don’t hope—I believe.
Lisa: Sanjay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. The time flew for me, and I’m just—I’m so happy that you shared your story. I’m so happy that you’re doing this work in the world. It’s important work and yeah, thank you.
Sanjay: Thank you for allowing me to have a speakerphone to be able to share it. I’m very happy. Thank you for your questions, and I am honored to be in this space. It’s very cool to be able to tell the story.
