to give it up for Babu and Ranjit and the entire UX India volunteer staff, everybody for making this possible. Let's give them a big hand. Thank you very much. Bringing us all here is a really big deal and we should all be thankful for that. I personally know how difficult it is and can appreciate how little they've slept in the last few days. That said, Nana Hasaru Ras Nanu Balastu Tapu Galanu Madadene. My name is Rasel, hi. My name is Ras, I've made a lot of mistakes. I probably just made two really big ones. I tried, thank you for being forgiving of me. In this presentation, I'm going to tell you about mistakes that I've made and hopefully some things that I've done to adjust and recover from those things moving forward. I'm going to take you back to 1999. This was my first real time as a design leader. I worked for a company that was called a life event marketing company. We did things like, if you were going to get married or have a baby, we would send you a CD-ROM and you could type in form fields and we would let you upload it and create a website for you. Again, 1999. It was the late 90s, right? We knew things like if you were going to have a baby somewhere around seven or eight months into, that's cool, I know. Did I interrupt your presentation? What? Come on. I just told the sound booth, somebody always says, your slides are wrong. They're not. It's good. We knew people who were having babies at seven, eight months in would buy a minivan so we could market to them. That's what this company did. I was a design leader. I loved working there, in fact, for the first month or so, I worked as a designer. I was really kind of just working hard, loving it. One day, my boss came up to me and he said, hey, we need to talk. Come with me. That's pretty scary sounding. I thought I was doing okay. But I also thought at that moment I was getting fired. He took me outside and he said, hey, look, you're doing great. We want you to lead the design team. All right. I'm going to get some more money. I'm going to get some stock options. Has anybody had stock options? Has anybody riched from them? Yeah, every hand went down. That's right. I have a lot of stock options. Oh, by the way, the other person who's leading the team now, he's staying here. There were a lot of challenges in that. I was in way over my head. In fact, I had no real idea what was expected of me. I had no real idea how to design or work with the design team. I only knew previous managers and bosses I'd had that I thought sucked.   It felt an awful lot like this. Wait, this is the first time I've ever gotten this right where I didn't start it without plugging in the audio. Hold on. Apologize for the delay. But I did feel an awful lot like this. We need to play offense instead of all coming up to bat. Um, what? I apologize, but I don't know your games. I think what Lantern is saying is that it's time for some teamwork. So let's pull it together. Yeah, baby. Clap it up. What's the plan then? Well, he blasts those beams out of his eyes, right? It's settled then. We blind him. That's as good a plan as any. That's about as good as I was. So there's this mistake that companies make. They think that talented designers, talented developers are naturally going to be great at leading a team of designers or developers. And that's not really the same skill set, right? They're very, very different. Leadership skills are entirely different. And I quickly found out that as a first time leader, particularly of a team that I inherited from someone else, that they were already operating as their own team. They didn't really give a darn that I was in charge or worse that I thought I was in charge. And I was going to make a lot of mistakes. I found out things like there are hundreds, thousands of design leadership books. Does anybody have leadership books? Anybody read a leadership book? Anybody feel like you're better for reading it? Hands all went down. By the way, I have a design leadership book coming out. And I do. There really wasn't much help in telling me how to lead a design team. So there I was. I was a manager of a design team.  I mean, you can be a leader and not a manager. You can be a manager and not a leader. You can be both and you can be neither. I would say I was neither. In fact, I completely made things up as I went along. I had very little experience, less guidance, no coaching. And this is not an excuse, by the way. This is not me blaming other people. I probably wouldn't have taken any coaching. I probably wouldn't have listened to anybody. I knew, again, what my previous managers were like, and I wanted to be the opposite of them. So that team that I inherited, they had an established culture. They knew their strengths and weaknesses. And I really only knew my style of working. And I thought I was right. I thought I knew the right way to manage this team. Those things didn't overlap very well. In fact, I didn't really have an agreement on how we worked together. People did work their way. They didn't care what I suggested. And by suggested, I mean I told them to do work a certain way. Not really my best thing. Other people, they had their own agendas. They wanted to behave their own way to get things done. I wanted us to be a team that looked like something different. It was a train wreck. I was a train wreck. I was cleaning up all these messes, especially the ones that I was making myself, and then the messes that other people were making, probably because of me. Frankly, I wasn't really sure I was cut out for this. And I've been lucky because I've had coaches and mentors since then who are happy to help. Sometimes that's been an honest talk. Sometimes that's been good advice. Or just caring. Or letting me complain. And then hearing myself complain and realizing how precious I've been. And there's something to be said about receiving advice too, right? Getting opportunities. A lot of times it takes passing of time for people, like myself, to understand things that are being said. So when I was lucky, I had someone who would lead by example for me. When I was extremely lucky, even though it felt like pain at the time, because I was not, not at all, doing a great job, I had someone who, you know, who would set me straight.  You had squat. We had a plan. Let's go, guys!  Act like it. Yes, ma'am. Now follow me to... I kind of feel like most people, when you get down to it, feel like that a little bit every now and then in their life. Also, that really wanted me to give me... I wanted to give a shout out because of this. We had a wonderful team in the workshop yesterday. Boss ladies. All kinds of kick-ass, right? They were fantastic, who did an excellent job. So, thinking about all of this, I found this great quote by Pamela Druckerman. A lot of people get thrown into this leadership role, and they didn't get any guidance either. There are no grown-ups. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it once we are the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. Everyone is winging it. Some just do it more confidently. I thought about that in terms of how my life has gone, my career. There are no managers. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it only once we are the ones writing reviews, statements of work, slide decks and attending leadership retreats. And yet, still, everyone is winging it. Some just do it more confidently. We've heard from different organizations who are awesome sponsors of this event, and I can promise you, at some point in their time, they were winging it. When Youge was founded, I promise you, didn't necessarily have any idea what the heck you were doing.  This stuff is how we all work and live, and it's true. So, thinking back, the first role for me, my first management role, wasn't my team. We never got on the same page. I felt like I had to be the face or the voice of the team. It was pretty arrogant of me. I also felt like I owned whatever work was mine. It wasn't really a good collaborator. Design reviews were based upon a single view, mine. And frankly, one of the things that I didn't really like about myself, I really dislike about myself in hindsight, is that I would get into work at about 7 in the morning, and there were many times I would leave at 11 o'clock at night. I felt like the more hours I worked, the more I cared about the company. I think what I cared about was showing other people that I was better, and that's not super cool. So, there's three key areas that I've been focusing on as I've gone through all of this, and we'll talk about them today. There's something called the team charter, which really focuses on bringing a team together, be that yours or building a new one. There's critique, which I think is essential to how we work as designers, and frankly, how we live our lives as just humans. And finally, talking about culture, especially as it pertains to design teams. So, let's dive right into the team charter. One of the first things that it took me the longest to learn, I should say it wasn't the first thing, it was just the thing it took me the longest to learn, was team building. I'm not talking about that trust fall stuff. That stuff creeps me out, frankly. I don't believe you're going to catch me for one. I don't care for best friends. But anyway, the team building thing was the biggest boost I was given, especially in my career. It was a enterprise company that is very non-specific electrical stuff. Dan should get that. I was waiting for his smile. And we created a thing called team charter. There's a gentleman by the name of Dr. Steve Julius, and he taught me about this. He was a team psychologist for the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Blackhawks. I frankly think that anybody who can get players on those teams to work together can help me understand very well how to lead teams. So a team charter is really something that's kind of like a unifying plan for a team to kind of get them on the same page. It's a lot like a persona for your team. You cover an awful lot of material and get your team on the same page. And it looks a bit like this. This is a lot of work. This is over the course of a couple of days where we worked very, very difficult, or very hard, very intensely at defining things like the focus area. What are the types of work that we as a design team want to do? What are the types of work more importantly that we don't want to do, if you think about that? We want to do user research, interaction design. Maybe we don't want to do production design work. Maybe we don't want to round corners or make things purple. And that's very important to define that. This is very useful as well when you're creating your job descriptions. We also define the team purpose, right? What does this team do? What do we want others to know about us in a nutshell? What is our team about that we all can agree on and we can understand together? Facilitate this activity where you get this information from folks and you start to get kind of a consensus around, here's who we are. The UX team works with our customers, create useful and usable designs that serve the business goals and objectives. We understand our users, their needs, behaviors and motivations and provide insight into how they use the products that we design. It's fairly general. I think all of us could say this could apply to us. However, once everybody sees it and reads it and understands it, you've got this similar sort of direction for everybody to move together. You also get a team commitment. So there's a little bit more to this where we say we work with each other to share our knowledge and to grow and strengthen the team in all aspects of UX and beyond. We acknowledge and respect our peers, their opinions and the value of their work. We will be critical of work product, yet not the person doing the work. Very important statements when you're talking about a team. This isn't the way Russ feels. This is the way the team feels. The team created this. And those of you in the workshop yesterday know that my views on facilitation are, if you're the facilitator, you should definitely try to step back and stay out of what the decision-making process looks like and just guide them to finding the answers. Then, very critical part here is perception of the team by others. I've worked on teams where today's perception is that we are a service. You come to us for graphic design. You come to us for production work. We need a pound of wireframes and we need them for the client tomorrow. Nobody that I've worked with wants to be that. We want to be something like a trusted partner or experts about our users. You get your team to look at that, help you define that and say, here's our perception today and here's what we want to look like tomorrow. Here's the steps that it's going to take to create that and then how we know when we're there, when we've achieved it. Also talking very candidly about your own areas of growth and improvement that you want to have in this example, experience mapping or journey mapping. If that's something your team hasn't done, they'll tell you, especially if they want to learn it. And they'll give you a reason for why and they'll tell you how many times you should do it to feel like you're experts, how many people should be involved and then the rationale. Why do people want to learn this? What does it gain us? This helps you write your own plan for your team's growth. It's essentially a lot like creating OKRs and once you create these, you can cross them off as you achieve them. Then you have your team sign it. A signature is an agreement. It's like a handshake, an acknowledgement. It means we all went through this together and even if we don't agree on all of the details, we commit to this. This is who we're going to be. It's a lot more powerful than you might think. And like I said, this becomes like a persona for your team and your team, when they work on it, can look messy, can do this. And you can then create a document, a physical document, that you can give to others that show them who you are. You can use this when new people start on your team and it's all about what the team wants to be. And this builds consensus. Having put a team through this a couple of times, what I've learned is that everybody feels connected. Everybody has the same definition of what our design is. Until you do an exercise like this, we all think design is something slightly different or we all think Russ says we do that but we don't do that. It looks like all of these pieces. It's an awful lot of work condensed down to just a handful of things. And you can do it too. There's a slide share where I've done this as a workshop for other folks where you can create your own team charter. And the benefits of this are pretty solid from where I sit. You get your team's purpose, your team's commitment, focus areas, areas of improvement, the perception of the team by others, and it's this unified agreement. This is kind of where you start to shape a brand new culture for your team. And you can extend a good solid culture by continuing with a good foundation for critique. Critique is actionable feedback. We've heard that more than once over the last couple of days. It's exceptionally valuable, especially when you're doing design. It's one of the best places that you can start to learn about this is in Discussing Design by Aaron Irizari and Adam Connor. They don't always wear masks. One of the challenges that I had as a design leader was we had large teams. I worked on teams from 13 to almost 50, and when you are a design leader, it's difficult, or it was difficult for me to separate myself from being in charge of the design. I felt like I had to bless everything that went out the door. Pro tip, you don't have to. I didn't have to. And as a team keeps growing, you will find yourself getting further and further away from the actual final product in a lot of cases. We also knew in several different, or a couple of different examples, we also knew that we wanted to do a better job of critique. I just didn't know, and the team didn't know, how to make this a part of our formalized process. We had Adam Connor. He came in and talked to us. We also listened to the UIE session on critique to kind of learn more about how we could be better at critique. And it's still, while that was very strong and solid, kind of me working on a team with distributed folks. So I thought back to Kim Goodwin, who said this at Interaction Design 2009 in Vancouver. Each one, teach one. I love this concept. How could I apply this quote, however, to establish good critique as an interwoven thread within a design team? Maybe this is better as each one teach many, or just each one teach. So came up with something called critique buddies. Is everybody as excited about that name as I was? Right, no one is. I understand. It's a lousy name. You're probably thinking, right? More like that. I didn't say I was good at branding. Now calling it critique groups, or just critique, because it becomes just critique. So there's a very simple framework that I ended up coming up with and I say I. I just want to make sure that I'm really clear about this. I worked with others to constantly refine and make this better. The first time I did this, I chose two people on my team to be critique leaders. Then we chose teams for them. We tried very hard to make sure that we found people who don't normally work together and people who are in different locations. And it's kind of turned into each one teach two or three or so. And the learning is two ways. The critique leaders are facilitators and schedulers, and they participate as well. They receive critique and give critique. So the setup for this is kind of basic. You nominate your critique leads. And I say nominate because I don't see these as permanent positions. These are things that you switch out every six weeks, three months, every half year, year. But you nominate critique leads and you help build a team of buddies with them, other critique participants. And so everybody has their own team. Like I said, you focus on connecting people who don't normally get to work together. Now this says to select three or four buddies. I thought that was reasonable and we learned over time that two to three is more like it because it's a lot of time for one person to manage three or four schedules. Two to three is better. You give them a cadence. Over time, what I initially suggested was one-on-one meetings. You'd have a critique lead meeting with three other people. Over time, we've learned that this just isn't as sustainable. So instead, three to four members, two to three members having them meet once every week or two weeks.  So I see that. That's interesting. So you have everybody meet every week or two weeks for a 30-minute session and people sign up for 10-minute slots. Three minutes left. Is that what you think? Congratulations.  We've got a lot more to go, folks. Buckle in. So then you do bi-weekly critique team meetings. Everybody should participate. Everybody should be open to it. You should also make sure that you're including people from other UX disciplines. We have content strategy. We have visual design. We have front-end design, UX, which is interaction design and research. I've had people help critique emails that I'm writing to executives. They're not open for an opinion here. Start with one-on-one meetings. Just have your leader get to know the team and what their needs and strengths are, weaknesses. And then, again, start doing that bi-weekly schedule. And haven't yet figured out how to do this, but once a month, once a quarter, bring together everybody for a critique meeting. Do it for like an hour and invite the whole company in to see what you're working on. The best way I know to evangelize design is to let other people see what we do, dispel the magic. There's not much magic to this stuff. Let them see what we do. Let them see the questions that we ask. And then, with some sort of regular cadence, maybe bi-weekly, have leader meetings with your critique leaders and create a manual for how to do this so that you can continually have new critique leaders rotating in or out. And that's really it. I've done this more than once and it's become a really strong sort of way for the teams to grow. And there's some benefits here. For one, as the design leader, it frees me as a primary reviewer of all design. Especially when you've got kind of a wheel-and-spoke model or a hub-and-spoke model where you've got teams that are agile or lean that are working together, those teams can be a little more self-responsible for their design. Adam and Aaron will tell you things like, critique is not a design skill, it's a life skill. Identify leaders and leadership in your team by how they handle taking on this role of design leads. You can understand the growth and training needs as you start to look at what's happening with other people on the team. You can strengthen your critique abilities across the team, learn how to frame that so that you're doing it really well with clients as well as internal customers. You get this distributed strength and communication so that somebody, for me, I work in Chicago and I may never see the person in Washington, D.C. We get to work together even though we're on different projects. We get to learn different things that are happening across different projects, which only makes us better. Improves facilitation and improves design across the team. Now let's talk about culture. This is my favorite part of this deck. Design leaders set the tone. Sometimes that means you have to pick a fight with the biggest bully in the prison or schoolyard or whatever that is. For me, that's generally how I felt about things in the past, meaning I had to pick a fight with that bully, that not-so-great person that I was. I started out by saying I've made a lot of mistakes by doing all of these next things wrong. In fact, I would say that some of the jobs I've worked in, I was kind of a culture killer. I was a cancer. You wouldn't want to work with me. Or you'd want to work with me for a while, but then I just had a bad attitude. I don't think managers knew how to fix me. And so they brushed me aside or put me on projects where I couldn't do much damage. Or worse, I was ignored. And I've discussed a couple of times the functional things that have helped me along the way. With culture, it's less functional, perhaps more philosophical. Things like discouraged heroic efforts. I mentioned that I worked from 7 in the morning to 11 o'clock at night.  If you're a working parent and some kid is coming in here and working 12 or 14, 16 hours a day, that's silly. And frankly, if I'm your manager and I'm letting that happen, I'm placing the wrong value. In fact, I've probably messed up in terms of how we've scoped projects or how much work we think you can do. In fact, if you've got somebody working like that, you've probably got enough of a justification to hire another person. When one person works two extra hours a day, that's one free week of work to an employer. Assuming that there's no paid overtime. When two to three people are doing it, maybe you need to be hiring. Raising your hand is a sign of strength. I was never that good at telling supervisors I couldn't handle something. Now I encourage it. Again, just like I said on the last slide, maybe I'm not doing the best job of scoping work. Maybe someone else isn't. We need to have those conversations. There are plenty of places where if you raise your hand or ask for help, it makes it seem like you're not good enough. Or you're not competent enough in your job.  We need to make sure that people understand and raise their hand that that's absolutely a gift to us as leaders. They are telling us things that are broken in the system that we can fix and make it easier and better for them to do their job. Work hard, play hard? Have we all seen that in a job description? You can tell how I feel about it. I believe that everybody works hard and plays hard. I love having a team of coworkers. And if you want me to spend time with them, make time for it in our work day. We never know what people have to do in their lives outside of work. Somebody could be taking care of a parent, a child. They might just not want to hang out with coworkers. And they might not want to feel like they have to give up their evenings or their school or whatever it is. Ask your teams how they feel about this. Odds are nobody's ever asked them. They just scheduled a three-hour happy hour after work and thought it was a gift. Maybe it's not.  I say to keep them weird. We hire, we're all weird. Those who are exceptionally good at what they do, I think are even more weird. And I love that and I cherish it. And if your thing is taking pictures of bugs in the evening in the park, then we need to make sure you have time to do that because that's why we hired you in the first place. Also, give people permission to tell other people, no. Saying no is very difficult. And I've worked on teams where people would come up and do this design thing for me. That stinks because as a designer, I want to help you. I want to do that. But I've also got my own deadlines. One of my tricks here is to tell people to say, you know what? I'm working on this thing. Ask Russ. If he says it's cool, good. That's giving them the ability to say no because nine times out of ten times, that request never ever makes it to me. Right?  Set people up for success. Look, there are times when things go wrong and individuals make mistakes. I firmly believe that yes, we have to address those. Even when it's me. The other thing is though, we have to take a look at our systems and we have to make sure that the system didn't allow it to happen. Maybe the way we operate didn't set that person up for success and they did something that helped them to go off the path. So we have to do our best to ensure the system is set up to avoid those types of incidents. Hack the org chart. Everybody sees an org chart and they know how they're supposed to be and we have a certain number of leaders and managers and other things that we can do. When you introduce something like critique, you can give people the opportunity to be leaders without having a formal title. Is there something you can give them to own? Can you maybe start to do a side project that is a design system and can they start to run with it and you can see how they work on that and you can coach them. Let people own things. Make it easy to be successful at something people are good at while helping them learn a new skill. Mitigate design surprises. I love this quote from Thomas Vanderweil. Design surprises are timeline assassins. If you want to succeed at design reviews, include your clients, your stakeholders in the design process. Don't show up like an ad agency and say here's three designs, pick one and then we'll go back for two weeks and work and we'll do it again and again and again, no, make your clients part of the process. This should be obvious to us and I know that that can be difficult but this is the best way that I know to mitigate design surprises. Lighten up. I once had a conversation with a previous manager where we were walking down the hall and he said to me that he didn't feel he could give up any of his work. He didn't feel like he could kind of try to reduce all the overhead that he had and I said, well, can't you take some let someone else go to some of your meetings. Can't we delegate some of this? I just can't do it, he said and I said, well, you should give somebody else a chance to succeed or fail because someone's doing it for you right now and that was a really kind of turning moment for me because I couldn't believe I was that wise and we should have some compassion. We should give people time to succeed and fail. That means that not everybody's going to work at our own pace so build in a little extra for them. Also, slow down. One of the things that Mina said this morning is that we have the best job. We get to go and listen to users and watch them work and that is fantastic. So we need to slow the hell down and make sure that we're taking the time right. This is a quote from Jason Freed of 37 Signals, which is now base camp. He watched Richard Saul Werman give a presentation and Richard Saul Werman came off stage and he said, I didn't like your talk in so many words and Richard Saul Werman said, man, give it five minutes. It's think, not react. Let something breathe a bit. One of the things I really have learned too is that if there's a fire drill at four o'clock at night, if you wait till ten o'clock in the morning, there's a good chance it got solved without you having to work all night. It's very difficult to do that but let things breathe and while we're talking about fives, give things five years. When pressing challenging situations show up instead of reacting, ask yourself this question, will this matter five years from now? If yeah, do something about it. And speaking of letting it go, I know that when I was first becoming a design leader, I felt like I owned design. It's a really big mistake. I was more like a creative dictator and that's not cool. I had to learn to let things go and let people own other things. There are people in organizations who like to own little pieces of work so that they feel like they can never be fired. I prefer to take those as opportunities and share them with other people on the team. If you do a great job at owning this small thing, great, let's figure out how we can give it to the next person and move you on to something more. That's a big idea or a big deal. We should be able to do that with everybody for a lot of those things. Owning things just ties you down, prevents you from getting your own promotions. Now another thing here is that words are important. When we hire organizations, we like to say things like culture ad or culture fit. We want to hire for culture fit. I like to hire for culture ad. Homogeneity is not a good thing. We are better because we are all different. Let's bring those folks in who make a stronger and different and get better perspectives. 18F, where I work currently, has a slack bot. We call it a guy's bot. There are a lot of us in here today that are referred to as guys and about half of us aren't guys.  This has changed the way I speak and to others. It allows me to think before I speak. It helps me choose a little more inclusive language. Additionally when we're writing our job descriptions there are services out there like Textio where you can send your position descriptions to make sure that the language that's used in those position descriptions are a bit more inclusive. Words like competitive may be more leaning toward men and may have men applying more for your roles. Words like collaborative may be more appealing to women. Take that under consideration and think about that. If you want a more diverse workforce, more inclusive workforce, a better opportunity to hire more people to be more inclusive. One of the final things here is servant leadership. Our job as leaders besides all of these other things is to do everything that we can do to help people find their next jobs, be that here or somewhere else.  Get that stuff out of the way for other people and make sure that they have what they need to do their job. I say that zero, I'm going to keep going. Don't worry about it. We're good. We're at the end. So what with all of this stuff, right? Did something happen that I missed? So the so what with all of this, sorry. I thought maybe a glitch happened on my screen. These were all the things I talked about. All of these stem from my very early years. The team charter happens through facilitation, collaboration. It's a social contract that gives ownership of the team to the team. It's really important. It really hurts me to think of people I've likely heard along the way because I wasn't ready to be this type of leader. And I want to make sure that other teams that I work with in the future and now have this to work together and know that it's less about me. Critique, right? It's a life skill. It's a big, huge part of design. We need to have that and all of these culture pieces help us just become a better place to work. Hey guys, folks. Get out of your own way. Let's try this again. This is bigger than I am and it's bigger than you are. Get out of your own way. Focus on what's important here. Everyone else. Everyone else. That was Batman, by the way. That's like Batman say. A leader is best when people barely know she exists. When her work is done, her aim fulfilled, they will say, we did it ourselves. I love this quote from Lao Tzu. I don't make all the decisions on a team anymore. I used to do that. I used to think everything was mine. Find people who won't agree with everything you say or you want to do and put them in leadership positions to support you. Hire smartly. It may slow things down, however, it will feel more inclusive. It will make you feel more informed and it will feel like you're building something that people want to be a part of. So get out of the way. One of the things that my old boss said to me about where I work today is we hire smart people and we get that out of the way. That's magical. It doesn't let you off the hook to lead, nor to continue to learn and build better skills. It just means that, you know, you're hiring all these smart people. Don't try to pin them in or don't try to fence them in. Bonus number two here, this isn't really faking it until you make it. Just keep on winging it confidently. Everybody else is. All of these folks who have been on the stage have been winging it just as much as I have to get to the point where we are today and we're going to be better at winging it today. Thank you very much.


I'll be talking about what I did right, but more importantly, I'll be talking about what I didn't do right and taking all of that into account. I'll discuss the changes I plan on making to my training in 2023. Unlike most of my videos, this one won't be super science heavy and I'll explain why. Unfortunately, we haven't tested every single endurance sports related question and as coaches, we have to make educated guesses where these gaps in our knowledge lie. Most of the time these educated guesses are based on experience and I'm no different. While I rely on science to give me a base understanding of what proper training should look like, I'm constantly shifting my opinion on the finer details of what the perfect training plan entails based on my own experience. I don't think I've ever come into a new year without at least a few changes in mind that I plan on implementing and that's what I'll be talking about today. This isn't necessarily advice. It's more so just a glimpse into my thought process when I'm evaluating these changes I need to make to my training and hopefully this can give you an idea of how you can do the same. Dude, you had me at not a lot of science. I might actually make it through this video. Who am I kidding? Let's start first by taking a look back at 2022. How did the season go and what are my thoughts on it? If you're a regular viewer of this channel, then you know that my main goal of 2022 was the lifetime Grand Prix which has quickly become the pinnacle of off-road racing in the US. In the lifetime GP, I ended up in 16th place out of the 30 men that were selected to compete and 20 men that were actually able to finish the whole series. I don't usually get too worked up about a mid-pack finish but considering the insane level of competition in this series, including former World Tour pros, national champions, world champions, world record holders and so on. I'm actually pretty happy with how it went. That being said, the goal is always improvement and I've gotten into the lifetime Grand Prix again for 2023. And if anything, the competition is even more stacked than last year. So I'd like to see if I can improve on last year's result, but it is not going to be easy. So let's go back a bit and talk about my 2022 preparation. The first thing I want to address is training volume. Well, I didn't mention it explicitly in my 2022 training video. Sometime early in the year, I decided to decrease my training volume. This may seem like an odd decision coming from a guy who does 100 to 200 mile races, but I'll explain my thinking at the time. I often find that I hit a mid-season slump around June or July. I usually take a break during this time and that helps but then towards the end of the season, I start experiencing the same thing. Some of this is certainly that I'm coming off of a peak, but the fact that it's usually accompanied by chronic fatigue made me think that there's a little bit of overtraining going on here. Perhaps if I decrease my training volume, I could avoid this overtraining and avoid these dips in performance that I seem to get on top of that a lower training volume would mean that my high intensity workouts could be done at an even higher quality because I wasn't so tired from riding so much and potentially this could lead to even greater fitness. So how much did I decrease my training volume? Well, in 2022, I logged 743 hours of training and for the previous three years before that my yearly volume had typically been in the mid 800s. This is a good snapshot, but obviously it doesn't tell the whole picture. So I'm going to be taking a look at training peaks performance manager chart, which some of you will be familiar with and some of you won't, but essentially what you need to know is that training peaks takes your training volume and intensity to come up with your chronic training load, which they call fitness. I have a few issues with this that I won't get into here and I generally take these numbers with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, it's still a great tool and can demonstrate what I'm talking about. This graph may look a bit confusing, but all you have to pay attention to is the shaded blue line in the background. That's my chronic training load. This shows my CTL from the past year and as you can see it goes up during the base season and then when the race season hits, it starts to taper off. The reason for this tapering off is because I'm constantly either recovering from a race. I just did or tapering for a race that I have coming up and so out of necessity training volume tends to decrease during this period. Regardless at the end of my base season, I was hovering at a CTL of around a hundred again for a lot of people that number will mean absolutely nothing, but when we compare it to the previous year, you'll get an idea of how much less I was training. As you can see, the 2021 mountain of training load, if you will, was quite a bit higher than in 2022 and we've got some deeper valleys in 2022 from when I got COVID. By the end of my base season in 2021, I was over 130 for my CTL, which is quite a bit more. This was achieved by doing multiple 30 plus hour weeks during the winter and early spring in 2022. However, I didn't do any 30 hour weeks. My big weeks during this time period were in the mid 20 hour range. So how did the strategy work out for me? Well, pretty decently actually until it didn't. I'll explain for some of my early season goals like sea otter and unbound, I actually performed very well when looking at the numbers. For example, at unbound, I had the highest normalized power, average power and the fastest finishing time that I've ever had at this race. Now, of course, there are other factors that contributed to that, but the point is that dropping my training volume didn't seem to hinder me even in a race that was 10 hours long. That being said, I think where this lower training volume did fail me was later on in the season. First of all, lowering my training volume did not stop me from experiencing a mid season slump. That's still happened, but I don't think that it's volume related and I'll get into what I think the cause is in a minute. Secondly, while my endurance seemed fine in the first half of the season, in the second half of the season, it really started to slip and I'll go back to the performance manager chart to explain why I think that is. As I said, CTL tends to drop throughout the season. However, in 2021, even at the end of the season, I was still holding a CTL of around 100 contrast that with 2022 and by the end of the season, my CTL had dropped to the low 80s and it seems to me that at this point, my endurance starts to take a hit. At the Leadville 100 and BWR Michigan race, I experienced a large drop in power in the last two hours of the race that cost me a handful of places. And it's not like I wasn't fit during this time, at least according to my power numbers in training. In fact, I hit a 20 minute power PR in August with 391 watts or 5.7 watts per kilo. Huh, not bad, not bad.  My numbers were looking good for shorter duration efforts, but then get to the five hour mark and I was in trouble. I think this lack of late season endurance is where the lower volume failed me. Nah, dude, what failed you is definitely your lack of testosterone. I think I watched this YouTube video about it or something. For these reasons, my plan for 2023 is to return back to the high training volume that I've done in years past. And if my body is able to recover from it, I may even try to push that volume a little bit higher. We'll just have to see. I may also experiment with different ways to organize a training week, such as the 5-2 approach used by Neil's Vanderpole, where you train for five days in a row, followed by two rest days as opposed to spreading rest days evenly throughout the week. There isn't a lot of research on this strategy other than some very promising research on block periodization, but that isn't quite the same thing. However, I think it might be worth experimenting with and if it isn't working, I can always scrap it. All right. Now I want to talk about the biggest mistake I made in 2022 and that is overracing. There are simply so many gravel races on the US calendar at this point and it can be really hard to say no. And in the first half of the season in 2022, I made the mistake of simply not saying no enough. Starting in April, I had a local gravel race. A week later was sea otter. Two weeks later was the Cojada 100. A week after that was BWR San Diego. A week after that was another local gravel race. And finally, a week after that was gravel locos. That's six races in seven weekends and these are not short races that we're talking about. For example, Cojada and gravel locos were seven-hour days. Not too surprisingly, I was too fatigued to do really any quality training in between these races. It was really just recovery rides and light zone two rides. As a result, my fitness dropped and I spent the majority of the three weeks in between gravel locos and unbound simply recovering when I should have been putting in some big race specific days on the bike. And then I did unbound and BWR Asheville on back-to-back weekends. Unbound was a 10-hour day and BWR was a seven-hour day. And I can honestly say that in all my years of bike racing, I have never felt so fatigued from a race than when I woke up the next morning after BWR. I was tired leading into the race.  Thanks Carson and Kate.  I need to be writing these down. Having just experienced this, I did not make the same mistake in the second half of the season and going into 2023, I plan to be a lot more selective with the races I put on my calendar. I see this as a quality over quantity approach. Some racers race a ton and hope that some of those results end up being good results. But increasingly I find myself more in the quality camp where I'd prefer to do fewer races and have those races go very well, especially considering the length of the races that I'm doing. Of course, there are superhumans among us that can achieve both quantity and quality, but those are few and far between. Finally, I want to talk about strength training and sprinting. Gravel racing is getting so competitive that I would say the majority of gravel races are coming down to some sort of sprint finish, whether that's from a group of just two or three riders to a larger group of 10 or more. Well, this is still not the same as sprinting from a whole peloton, which happens so frequently in road races. It's become clear to me that I need to work on my sprint. I had multiple races last year that came down to a sprint finish and I don't recall winning any of them. Now, I also wasn't the slowest sprinter in a lot of these finishes either, but if I'm coming to the line with say five riders, then I could probably expect to get second or third and I'd like to fix that if I can. I have to be a bit careful with this because these are still endurance races that I'm training for and you can't sprint for the finish if you get dropped an hour before you even get there. So it'll still be endurance. That's the focus of my training. I don't want to raise my VLA max too much. That being said, I will be including more sprinting in my training on the bike. I'll often incorporate sprints at the end of an interval session to mimic sprinting at the end of a race. But I think that also sprinting on fresh legs could be beneficial because they can be done at higher quality. I'm also going to try to maintain my gym work into the season for longer gym work helps with all aspects of cycling, including endurance, which I've gone over multiple times on this channel, but it's especially helpful for peak power output. Last year, I stopped going to the gym quite early in mid April and this was simply because I was racing too much. But again, I plan on not making that same mistake this year. So hopefully it'll be easier to maintain my gym work longer into the season, even if it's just once a week. I'll also likely increase the amount of explosive movements I'm doing and decrease the weight. This should leave my muscles less achy so I can focus on high quality workouts on the bike and the faster lifting rate should theoretically be more specific to the fast pedaling rate that you adopt when you're sprinting. And of course, a big part of sprinting is positioning. So I'll likely throw in some group rides and weekday night training crits so that I can work on that as well. Those are my ideas for 2023. Again, less science in this video and more educated guesswork, but that is part of what coaches have to do and who better to test on than myself. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, be sure to leave a like, subscribe and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.


Hi, my name is Tracy Tecajoma Spinoza and this is a video on the learning styles myth. It's meant to talk about neural myths as an opportunity for teachers' professional development. I'm a professor at the Harvard University Extension School. I teach a course called the Neural Science of Learning. It's an introduction to brain health and education. And I am associate editor at the Nature Partner Journal of Science of Learning. And I've also taught all levels of education from preschool through university and also an adult education. And today I want to do two basic things. I want to really encourage you to think about a way of using neural myths as a form of professional development, how this really should be a part of all teacher's basic knowledge. Then I want to use the learning styles myth as an example and leave you with a big reflection. Learning styles are not the same as the theory of multiple intelligences and I just want to make that big distinction using the evidence. So the learning styles myth is based on an idea that people are either visual learners, auditory learners, or kinesthetic learners. This learning style related to your sensory perception that you prefer either visual auditory or kinesthetic learning. Now this is not to say that you cannot develop a cognitive preference for one of these styles because if after all you know when you're in third grade and I tell you you're a visual learner you do nothing more than look for visual cues around your world right and so you can become a more visual learner. You can favor that kind of sensory input but it doesn't mean that's what your brain would like. Some other people have extended this idea to even go from you know visual auditory kinesthetic which sort of made a little bit of sense because it has to do with senses but then they've lopped on here this idea of reading and writing. Not sure exactly where that came from and other people have gone even further unfortunately to try to pretend like these things are associated with specific brain areas. I just want to say you know the things on the periphery here looking to include a lot more variety and novelty or have more active or physical activities in class or thinking very hard about how you create or design the learning environment all of those things are terrific and I really hope they do happen. The main problem here is that they're pretending that all of this is underscored by research that says that learning styles is a real thing and this becomes even more discouraging in education when we think about all the money that goes into promoting this idea of learning styles and even you know surveys or tests that think that in 20 questions they can tell you what kind of a learner you are and based on that teacher should craft teaching interventions based on that particular you know auditory visual or kinesthetic preference that's a little bit off and the main problem with this it gets to the heart of all learning myths all myths do harm I think that we share the first rule with physicians that above and beyond anything we just do no harm that means if the information does not have substantial evidence behind it we should not go in that direction the worst thing is that this also takes away resources from funding things that we know are actually better interventions and it also distracts from really learning how the brain actually does learn right in a very short response and I know we could go on for several years discussing how the brain really learns but in a very short answer basically you have to perceive your world Aristotle knew this thousands of years ago right you you perceive your world through all of your senses and basically your brain picks and chooses among the things that input that it receives and it tries to see if you have any kind of existing memory for the new sensory input or stimuli and if you do you can connect onto that memory and you can reinforce that memory or you can actually invest energy and truly learn something new this synaptic communication either because it's reinforced neural pathways or it's new neural pathways occurs between all the neurons in your brain and it's enhanced by familiarity practice and repetition and if there's enough repetition you can get a strengthening of the myelin sheath which speeds up the electrical and chemical signals in your brain so that you can actually retrieve information faster and be able to use it in new contexts and so all this is just to say that your brain is constantly trying to make sense of its world using all of its senses not just one or another and not just favoring one or another and so the main reason this is so sad is because all of these sensory inputs are indistinct neural pathways in the brain and basically by reinforcing multiple pathways you would give yourself the opportunity of being able to retrieve information in a greater variety of ways rather than just through a single sensory pathway so again not only is this myth wrong but it is damaging because it keeps people from perhaps living up to their potential for learning by shutting down the other pathways in the brain for creating important memories for new concepts in learning just step back for a second and think you know very very simply how is this true how could we ever get into believing that about kids I mean look at this little boy here getting hugged by his little sister what kind of learning style do you think he has impossible to say right this guy is taken in the whole world through all of his senses and so we just want to remind teachers that your brain adapts to what it does most and one of the saddest things about learning styles is that kids get locked into thinking that they are only meant to be able to learn through one of these sensory modalities and in doing that we deprive them of understanding their world in a greater variety of ways so many of you might be saying but I am a visual learner I am an auditory learner I am kinesthetic it may very well be that you have become that because you've rehearsed that particular neural pathway more than others but that's not really what your brain would like right and it's really clear that in early childhood education we're actually pretty good about calling attention to using all the senses but um thank goodness for people like Costa and Calak who remind us in things like happen to mind that part of understanding your world part of being a critical thinker part of learning to maximize your own potential as a learner is gathering information through all of your senses and so we hope that you as teachers will begin to reject that myth and if you don't believe me let's look at the literature over the past dozen years there's been hundreds of articles that really refute the idea burn pastures spent a lot of time trying to determine what evidence is there for learning styles because it's so popular right then we started getting more pushback just stop propagating this learning styles myth there is no good scientific evidence behind it despite that though it is thriving even in higher education where some freshmen are actually told that they should take this learning styles inventory before selecting their majors that's really scary right what we really find out though is that a lot about learning styles has a lot to do with taking the little things that we do know about ourselves that we reflect on and sort of exploiting those to say that okay that categorizes you into a type of learner which is really unfortunate because it really does limit you right others aside from the original proponents of the idea began to try to test the theory and followed kids who had been blocked into being visual kinesthetic or auditory learners across learning trajectories to see exactly how they fared and being categorized in that way did nothing to benefit their eventual learning outcomes and the myth still persists even through the 2020s we still have people applying the learning styles myth despite the number of people that call for it to be tossed out and that money could be better used in other places perhaps one of the best summary articles comes from a passion learning colleagues that tried to summarize for the American science and public interest publication what evidence actually does exist for and against learning styles and what do we really know about this information and bottom line is that they could not understand this huge contrast between the enormous popularity of this particular intervention and the lack of credible evidence which they found to be striking and very disturbing and so on the whole of it there's a lot of better ways to invest resources and perhaps the first thing we have to do as teachers is appreciate the complexity of human variability there's a lot of different kinds of kids in our classrooms and we have to embrace that we have to embrace their differences and embrace the idea that they may be learning in very different ways so the second half of this is that I really want to call attention to the idea that learning styles are not the same as gardener's theory of multiple intelligences learning styles is a myth whereas Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is an incredibly useful psychological theory applied in education very successfully in my book on neuro myths I do call out the fact that Howard Gardner himself says the theory of multiple intelligences was never meant to be a neuroscientific theory and that's okay basically with an excellent psychological theory not everything in education has to be supported by neuroscience unfortunately he did contribute a little bit to this confusion because he listed eight criteria for creating those intelligences the first one being a little bit confusing to people the idea that there was a space in the brain for that particular intelligence that really kind of threw people off even though it was countered by point seven and eight where he said no really the evidence for this comes from experimental psychology and psychometric findings in education and so yes there was a little bit of confusion caused in the early years of multiple intelligences and in later years he made a big point of letting people know that he was not meaning that and intelligences in one part of the brain he really understood the complexities of understanding language in the brain or math or music he understood all of those things the problem was that he didn't think it was worth overburdening teachers to explain or disaggregate them into their smaller parts and in his research he really does point out that there's so many sub elements or sub processes that are part of each one of those intelligences and at least he numbers them at least 50 to 100 different micro modules of understanding for each of these different intelligences that he was labeling for example if a kid is particularly good at mathematics for example he has a really keen understanding of symbol to magnitude to be able to compare number quantities right but they also have an ability to understand the patterns of the way mathematical formulas are or organized or to see different types of categories of numbers that might be positive and negative or to understand how non-numerical symbols work in to formulas like for example or how parentheses work into different equations and things like that and so all of these sub elements which are distinct neural networks in the brain or in language how you might have this symbol to phoneme symbols to sound processing also have to incorporate working memory to know how to read through a whole sentence and not forget what happened at the beginning of the sentence by the end of the sentence or how you order words and subject verb object and that kind of a structure all of that understanding those are different neural networks in the brain and so he knew this he understood this and he did call this out in his publications as being sub processes or micro modules of things that are occurring in these areas he also saw a benefit in not overburning teachers with a lot of the neuroscientific evidence because he didn't think that that was what was really important and the evidence bears out his 1999 2000 articles that really call out the great differences in different types of language subsystems or mathematical subsystems in order to understand how these distinct neural networks in the brain comprise each of these different intelligences another error related to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is unfortunately some people have taken this idea to be there's eight intelligences now if I don't have one I can substitute one for another and Gardner never said that he basically said that it's really important to understand and value these distinct types of intelligences and we can all get better at all of them but it's not like if you don't have music you can just get extra good at interpersonal you know intelligences that's not what he was saying at all and what he did say though is that all of them independent of your starting point could get better and so it's important to accept and to understand that intelligences in Gardner's theory are not fungible you cannot replace one with the other I just want to end by just saying there is a need to really celebrate this idea of multiple intelligences because the initial motivation if I would have to guess um that Gardner had for actually putting this out there is to take away this focus from a binary perception of intelligence you know you're either smart or not smart or you're intelligent or not intelligent because we have these single measures of intelligence tests that tell us that he wanted to actually celebrate the idea that maybe there are multiple ways of becoming smart or being intelligent or having value in society as opposed to these one-off binary measures that we had back in the 60s 70s and 80s so all of this is just to say that the theory of multiple intelligences is not backed by neuroscientific research but that's okay it's a great psychological theory and it has nothing to do with learning styles I hope if nothing else you guys take that away from this talk today the learning styles myths along with other types of myths have really begun to be displaced thank goodness thanks to new kinds of research that we have out there we now finally have longitudinal studies I've only had formal education since around the 1870s 1880s so we finally are now looking at people across their entire lifespans and what happened in their schooling and and what worked and what didn't work for which groups of people right we also have international comparative studies and that's allowing us to separate out what are human types of things that are involved in learning and what are things that are highly influenced by your cultural context we also have a methodologically comparative scales thanks to the work of john haddy where we can now look at things that are quantitative and qualitative and put them on a similar scale to measure their effect sizes and really choose what are the things that really have a great or better impact on changing learning outcomes learning styles is not on there by the way and finally we also have better information about the brain thanks to this growing area of new technology and so we are able to finally take this innate curiosity that many teachers have a few asked teachers across the board everybody wants to know a bit more about the brain but unfortunately many of the things that we've adopted are neuromythical at their foundations they do not have evidence behind them and oftentimes people will believe them simply because they've been around for so long but we really feel that designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without an understanding of the hand this is leslie hart saying nearly 40 years ago trying to pull our attention towards this idea that your brain is the organ of all learning and teachers need to know a bit more about it so we believe in this process of getting rid of the neuromyths sharing the handful of things that are actually true for all human brains for example neuroplasticity or the fact that all new learning passes through this filter of prior experience there's only six things that are principles and 21 things that are tenants tenants are things that are also supported by a lot of evidence but there's a huge range of human variation for example we all know that sleeping and dreaming are really important for learning but how much sleep is needed by each individual can have a huge range of human variability so we have to know our students well before we can make recommendations there similar to motivation motivation is vital to learning but what motivates you doesn't necessarily motivate me right so we have to understand each individual kid and then we have to put all of that within our cultural context the context of our countries our societies our schools before we can actually come up with instructional guidelines so we hope that you'll follow through and try to get rid of some of these other neuromists that might exist we just want to point out the final challenge here and that is the energy that's involved in learning something new there's something called heuristics which are kind of shortcuts in your brain and your brain is the most energy hungry organ you have in your body and so basically it's very natural for your brain to try to save energy so when you perceive the world through all of your senses your brain has to decide am I going to spend a lot of energy and learn something new with this new information or am I just going to use what I already know low cognitive load and just go to my go-to place of prior knowledge instead of thinking that it could actually be something new and different if you decide to invest that energy you'll spend it paying attention and creating new memories so that you can actually turn that in to learning in the long run but even that new learning is subjective to bias right we have to be really clear that all of us are born with very innate biases about how we think individuals learn what intelligence is made of and so we tend to lean into those things instead of review the evidence and so I invite you to please take the time to look at the evidence and to think very hard you know where does intelligence come from and how does the brain really learn before you jump to conclusions about the interventions in your classroom I point out a couple of reasons that neuromists exist and if you feel that you're culpable of one of these things try to get around it okay this really will improve our teaching profession a lot of times people just want simplicity you know teaching for dummies tell me to do x and I know why will happen we just know as great teachers all of you guys know that that's just not true we have to appreciate the complexity of the human brain another group of problems that cause neuromists is the lack of scientific literacy teachers don't get enough research skills in their formation to be able to sort out the good information from the bad we spend a lot of time in the area of confirmation bias the way we think humans learn is what we apply to our choice of interventions in the classroom when some of those ideas might not be supported by the evidence there's also a very evil group of reasons that we believe in neuromists and these have to deal with commercial ventures people selling you the idea that this is a brain based something or other or that this particular type of music or this type of gamification will improve your intelligence be very very wary of those things anything that sounds too good to be true is usually too good to be true perhaps the biggest area of problems for teachers is that the popular press the general television the magazines newspapers flash a lot of really clever headlines at us that make us think some things might be true about the brain when they're really not supported by evidence either they're conducted on animals or they're based on old technology or maybe one study showed something I just saw something last week where they happen to be doing a brain scan of a guy as he died and they gives a little bit of insight about how your life flashes through for your eyes while they have one study and I've seen a dozen articles already written about it which is pretty interesting so you know is there enough evidence to really say this is how all humans experience death for example right there's another large group of problems that occurs by correlation versus causation just because two things happen at the same time or together doesn't mean one caused the other so we have to be really careful about that and this idea of absence versus existence you know we do something in the classroom and we say hey he stopped doing that so you know the the behavior is now absent therefore there's an existence of a good theory my intervention work well how do you know that I mean there's a whole lot of variables that go on in all of student learning so we have to learn to isolate variables and really see what is really having an impact on what right there's also a lot of over generalization of findings as we mentioned before but it might not be true for the kids in your class right so you have to really compare studies that look at similar populations there's also far more studies that are conducted on adults than on children and so we have to be really careful about over generalizing the information we have about adults does it really match to kids right and finally the biggest problem we have is that things can be true in a lab and maybe with rats but maybe they're not the same and true in our classrooms there's only recently been new technology where people can actually wear have these wearables which can measure electricity as well as blood flow and and we can get a sense of when people get into sync during certain learning interventions and real-life classrooms that's very very new 2018 so we are just now beginning to have this information the last and really unforgivable reason that people believe in neuromus is simply because everybody else around them is believing them and they don't dare to question they think if a lot of people believe in learning styles or if the whole school purchased this package of learning styles there's got to be something to it question question authority question whether or not that was really the right decision okay just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do we have this handout if you'd like to see it on the learningsciences.com under the resources on steps that we can guide basic research on the part of teachers to choose information to make sure that it's on their type of student population that it is a match that it is high quality evidence we hope that basic research becomes a part of all teacher formation in the future so and a thank you for listening and as a final reflection to sort of make this stick think to yourself if there were three things we mentioned today that you didn't know before and if there's two things that you really want to continue researching you're curious about now and maybe one thing you'll do differently in your practice thanks for doing that and if you have any questions don't hesitate to get in contact take care


From Soldiers Radio and Television, this is the Army Now. When a soldier loses a limb, it may feel like a lot of hopes and dreams are lost along with it. But for the players of the wounded warrior amputee softball team, there is nothing that can't be done. I mean, I tell you, when you get an injury like an amputation or anything serious over there, you go from, like I said, to the top to the bottom and you just have to work hard and you have to keep a positive attitude and surround yourself with good people. This is a dream come true. My little kid dreams of getting a second chance as an athlete and I have won and lost it and this is my second chance and I'll play as hard as I can while I'm out here because it could be gone just in the blink of an eye. A crowd of thousands cheered the Warriors on as they battle against a team of celebrities at the National Stadium in Washington, D.C. The team plays year-round all over the country so don't miss a chance to catch them in action. And by the way, the Warriors beat the celebrity team 17-4. And that's the Army Now.


All right, fantastic. Welcome back. This right here is one in the morning. Many thanks for hanging up with us today. Being entrepreneurship Tuesday, we are switching gears a little bit. We're going to talk about the current state of the Kenyan media, especially this year for 2023, which way forward? Of course, there's been a lot of changes in there and there's a lot of changes that we need to embrace, especially when it comes to this year in terms of programming. And then we also had the issue of the accreditation of journalists, some of the press council being recalled, are being recalled. In fact, it's now a directive for all journalists to go and extract or get the new press cuts that have also a QR bar code to enable healthy journalism. And joining us live in this conversation, he is director and also media training and development at media council of Kenya, Mr. Victor Buire and just a brief introduction of him. He is the director as well and training development at media council of Kenya, like I said, and in addition, he provides strategic advice to the MCK on delivering on its constitutional mandate. He also oversees the media development initiatives at the media council of Kenya. He has over 20 years experience in journalism. Imagine that media training as well and management spanning a public private and non governmental sector. And lastly, he has also served as a task force member appointed by the cabinet secretary for ICT and reviewing the media policy for the country. He has also represented the council to UNESCO and annual general meeting in Paris as a member of the expert committee on communication and information under the Kenya National Commission on UNESCO. That is Mr. Victor Buire joining us live in studio. Good morning to you. Nice to meet you once again. Pleasure. Exactly. Welcome. Happy new year as well. Happy new year, Brian. All right. Now let's get straight up into it.  Of course, the new press gets and I love the fact that you had a sample will show us some of the features of it. Why is it necessary, especially this 2023, to have that going on? Thanks, Brian. One, journalism is a profession and an industry, yet people have continuously treated journalism as by the way and that has created part of the problem. Journalism and the media has a very big role in national development. It shapes the national agenda. It says, I mean, but we continuously think journalism is an extractive industry where you start a radio or TV station to get some little money, go and buy some house in Rwanda or big vehicles. Don't pay your staff and run away. That's not the industry we're talking about. As I mentioned to you, journalism is nearly a nine billion industry. Look at entertainment, look at advertising. It's a huge industry that creates employment. For example, at a very bare minimum, Kenya has nearly 200 radio stations, 135 TV stations, over 100 print publications, over 2,000 blogs. It's a huge, huge market in terms of creating employment. But you start treating that industry as a by the way. Then you miss it. How many people are employed in the media? Look at wealth creation that comes through media houses. Look at Pricewaterhouse reports. Last year, how much money? It's nearly nine billion the industry created. Now, media houses pay taxes in a very big way through the various media houses are giving livelihoods to musicians, artists, journalists, advertisers, and there are designers and the rest. But we continuously look at an industry as people who just come here to record and play and we miss the whole point. Unlike before, journalism is now a profession. We now have PhDs in our newsrooms, people at a PhD level in the newsroom, including KBC. So if you are looking at that level of expertise in an industry, but you want to treat them as 1972, when journalists were putting on a T-shirt and jeans started and just moving all over, then you miss the whole point. How much does it take you to train somebody to that level? The level of experience in KBC alone, for example, in staff training is how much? But you want to treat such an industry as just and you want to make people pay, work without paying, you don't want to pay them overtime, you don't want people working in horrible conditions, then you are missing the whole point because in any industry or factory, the biggest asset is the human resource. So once you mistreat the human resource, the journalist, then these things we talk about content is the king, we'll have good programs. Who will do the program? The robots is the people. So people must be treated well and appreciated for them to do those good programs. And that's why we are saying that 2023 media must, people must relook at how we have treated media and where we, the issue of human rights in the media becomes very critical. You must respect the labor rights of the journalists and other employees in that industry who then become motivated and they give more because journalism is a creative art. You don't read everything in textbooks like maths, which has fixed formulas in journalism is more practical and creative. Now a person brand who has not been paid for six months, how will he be creative? The guy is struggling to pay rent and when will he be creative? So we must relook at how do we motivate the bigger asset we have in journalism? Who are the journalists before we even talk about equipment? So that's why we are talking about we must relook the 2023, we must relook. And unlike the caveat manner in which people have looked at people, we have said among other things, obviously the recalling of the 2,400 cards is just one of the many things. Why the sudden recalling? One we notice the industry feels accreditation on the problem. There's a big problem, one of quacks, people who misrepresent themselves as journalists or media practitioners and extort from people dangerously in the hotels, in events and others. While us as the media council, we know the problem is not accreditation, but the industry still feels the accreditation is a problem. But I'll tell you that the accreditation is not a problem. It's purely one agalibo public, people who are also disparate to be covered by the media so that even when they are lied to, you carry a microphone or a recorder which has no even battery, is not working, but you put it in front of a guy, he's just talking about and he will pay you money thinking you will get his historic cover. They don't even ask whether you work as a journalist, whether that recorder is working. There are so many disparate people there who then become so easily conned. So that's why we're introducing easy feature for if somebody told you he's a journalist, you can quickly using your phone confirm. So we have introduced a bar code. So if somebody comes to you and says he's a journalist, just ask your media council card. It has a bar, it has a QR code here. This is mine. Yes, I'm journalist 01 in Kenya. Not that I'm the best journalist, but I work at the council, so I got it fast. So once somebody gives you this card, just go to a Google and it takes scan. It has a QR code. Yes, it's a QR code here.  So that's just one. But do you feel like that might endanger even the journalists? For example, is it a stranger or somebody who has their own interests, they're scanning your details, they'll have them and use it against you? From a very safe point of view, you even brand, if you go to an event, do you just give your ID to anybody who asks for it? Of course not. I mean not. So again, that also becomes to your sensitivities that as a journalist, you cannot just give your card to any Tomohara and Dick in the streets. It must be an event. It must be somebody telling you this is the governor's team or this is the event by the CS and their team is asking for your card. So you don't just go on throwing your card to everybody. So we also want a situation where journalists are responsible.  So as you throw your card to everybody, how safe are you? So journalists must also be safe in the sense that who are, which are functioned. Somebody that don't just tell you we have an event in blue and you run there. You must also do, because there are a lot of on our subs, everybody saying there's an event that's in events. Some of those events have not even a contact person. They even just look suspicious from the word go. So we are also throwing and that's the discussion I had with you before we came here.  And public interest. Are we covering events of public interest or are we when just you hear the so-and-so politician having an event you run there because of the money, the blue envelope, not because of the story. So we're also throwing it back to you as a journalist that once you get an universe to an event, you also assess the public value in that story we are going to cover. So that is not just all over everybody, the people running all over, saying that and that's how we have lost credibility because of the fake one we start with the pseudo journalists or the people who masquerade who are purely poised as journalists and conned from people. Then we go to the fake information we're saying means information and propaganda and that's how trust in journalism is going though. And for us to restore that public trust, we must one identify and work with genuine journalists. So media council and others must have a very serious public outreach program to help people understand who is a journalist. Not everybody who works with the microphone or a recorder is a journalist. Many of those people are quacks and just criminals who are making money. So that's one of the programs of restoring the card. We have started a public outreach which we live and use KBC here to help people understand how do you identify a genuine journalist. We have already reached out to hotels. This QR code will be introduced there and once you go any hotel will not admit anybody just for the mere fact that you have mentioned you are a journalist. We have reached out to PRSK, the association of event organizers in Kenya. We are already working with DCI and police. So it's going to be very rough and if you are a journalist don't worry. If you are a journalist, if a genuine journalist is not worried but if you are a quack or have been posting it's going to be difficult.