Chris Myers, Assistant Professor and Academic Director of Executive Education
at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Speaker Bio

Christopher G. Myers, PhD is an Assistant Professor and Academic Director of Executive Education at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, with joint faculty appointments in the School of Medicine and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality. His research explores questions of learning, development, and innovation in organizations, and he focuses in particular on learning in health care organizations and other knowledge-intensive industries.

Chris's work has been published in a variety of leading academic journals in the fields of management and medicine, and has received multiple national and international awards. He also writes regularly for practice-oriented publications including the Harvard Business Review. Prior to joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, Chris was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School, and earned his PhD in management and organizations at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Interview Summary

01:30 Q: What are you responsibilities and roles at Johns Hopkins?
01:42 Business School & Executive Education

03:10 Q: What were your interests as a kid?
03:26 Underlying Cosmic Logic

05:10 Q: Why did you decide to study business at Chapel Hill?
05:30 Accounting & Outdoor Education
06:55 Leadership & Organizational Development
07:42 Organizational Behavior Course with Chris Grant

09:17 Q: How did you become interested in Learning from Failure?
09:35 Undergraduate Management Training trial and error

11:15 Q: What led you into a PhD and an academic life?
11:28 To Become a Lifelong Dabbler & Observer

12:54 Q: You’ve spent time with flight nurses - who are they, what do they do, why are you interested in them?
13:17 Flight Crews that Transfer Patients
14:20 Work is Extremely Variable
15:08 Workers are Adaptable, Agile, Nimble
16:12 How it Applies to Business Setting

16:30 Q: What can architects/engineers/business folks learn from flight nurses?
16:44 Developing Expertise in a Complex Environment

18:16 Q: What were some the of the knowledge sharing practices the flight nurses used that we could learn from?
18:28 Storytelling
19:15 Value of Storytelling vs Factual Reporting

21:17 Q: How/when did these stories get shared?
21:24 Formal Debriefs and Informal Story Sharing
22:30 The Value of Downtime

23:42 Q: Have you seen anyone successfully recreate serendipitous / chance encounters online?
24:02 Hard to Replicate Chance Encounters Virtually
25:06 Pandemic is Inspiring Experimentation

25:42 Q: What is Vicarious Learning and how it is evolving in the time of Coronavirus? (Paper)
25:57 How We Learn from Others
26:47 Interest started with Outdoor Education
28:08 Value of Vicarious Learning in Organizations
28:40 Impediments to Vicarious Learning during Coronavirus
29:25 Knowledge is Received Indirectly
29:52 Reduced Opportunities for Connection

30:52 Q: Are there some things that are better learned vicariously?
31:03 Incidental Learning spreads effectively through learning
31:52 Flight nurses spreading mission-critical knowledge
32:16 "See One, Do One, Teach One"
32:42 The More You Know, the More you Can Absorb

33:22 Q: In architecture we have a lot of people sitting working on their own projects. How do we create opportunities for vicarious learning in that environment?
33:50 Opportunities to Connect Using Technology (Slack, etc)
35:18 Identify when People are Working on Similar Problems
36:07 Working Out Loud Method

36:56 Q: What other methods that you’ve seen to help support adaptive learning / vicarious learning?
37:26 Rewarding Knowledge Sharing
38:22 Learning to Ask and Share

40:05 Q: Can you share what the Center for Positive Organizations does?
40:26 Management Practices that Help Organizations Thrive
41:44 Learning as Growth

42:20 Q: What is the idea of learning from extreme success?
42:38 Shifting from a Deficit Mentality
43:00 Learning Value of Exceptional Successes
43:45 Motivation to Learn from Extreme Experiences

45:30 Q: Why isn't this more common?
45:35 Extreme Failure is more Obvious than Extreme Success
46:14 Attribution Error
47:50 Learn Better from Own Success than Own Failure

48:23 Q: What brought you to Johns Hopkins
48:34 Meaningful Outcomes of Healthcare Management

49:35 Q: What are healthcare organizations doing about burnout?
50:00 Examining Fundamental Organizational Elements
50:40 Burnout Among Internal Medicine Residents
51:30 Importance of Learning in Reducing Burnout
53:24 HBR Article: To Cope with Stress, Try Learning Something New

54:40 Q: From your observations, what are your best tips or "facilitating" learning and knowledge transfer in a virtual environment?
55:06 Multiple Virtual Channels Enables Diverse Input
57:37 Benefits of Brainwriting

58:30 Q: Looking back over your career, what knowledge would have helped as you were starting out that you've learned over time?
58:44 Recognize the Duality of Knowledge Management
59:20 Provides both Backbone and Constraints on Learning
1:01:01 Knowledge Based on Assumptions: Mars 2020 Lander
1:03:55 Documenting for Current vs Future Teams

1:06:24 Q: What is next for your research?
1:06:32 Mapping the Space Between Formal & Informal Learning
1:07:12 Semi-Formal Strategies
1:08:36 Example: PPE & COVID

1:09:03 Q: There is a shrinking half-life to knowledge—is this connected to a move towards semi-formal?
1:09:30 Semi-Formal Learning Adaptability
1:10:50 Informal Workarounds

1:12:00 Q: It seems like the culture of learning you're describing depends on a culture of downtime (from your stories example), or at least a culture of reflection. Are there other cultural norms or prerequisites that you were able to build on?
1:12:35 Importance of Freeform In-Between Time
1:15:22 Book: “The Reflective Practitioner” by Donald Schon
1:15:50 Technology and Constant Productivity

1:16:47 Q: Are there learning strategies and approaches that people are phasing out because they seem irrelevant, harmful, or ineffective?
1:17:10 Shift Away from Formal Training
1:18:00 Shift Toward Building a Response Repertoire
1:19:20 Rewarding Breadth and Non-Traditional Learning

1:20:52 Q: How do we scale breadth and group breadth?
1:21:35 Problem Solving in Unusual Scenarios

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