The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #95
Mark: Hello, and welcome to episode ninety five of The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Mark Murrell, co-founder of CarriersEdge. Doing the intro properly this time.
Jane: Well, Done. I'm Jane Jazrawy, the other co-founder of CarriersEdge. Don't wreck it. Don't. Just go on.
Mark: Now, you had to say something.
Jane: I know.
Mark: I had it all queued up. I was all ready to have a radio voice and be consistent the whole time. And now I've lost it.
Jane: You're wrecking it.
Mark: Yes. But it wouldn't be one of our podcasts if I didn't wreck it in some way at the beginning. That's how we get loose.
Jane: There's other ways to get loose.
Mark: Yeah. But it's too early to be drinking.
Jane: What are we talking about today?
Mark: Well, we have a few things on the agenda, but I wanna start by talking about webinar that you did today. You recorded a, or you delivered our monthly webinar along with Rick our communication specialist, and I had no part of the content, so I have no idea what you're talking about other than the fact that it was something to do with learning styles, which you immediately said to me that the learning styles have been debunked and there's no such thing.
Jane: No. Well, yes and no. So yes, it was a we did the webinar today, and this was Rick's first webinar. He did a very nice job. And asked me some really good questions.
Obviously, did a lot of research into some learning theory. And it's very interesting because we have talked about learning styles on this webinar before. Or not, what are we, we're on a podcast
Mark: Yes.
Jane: On this podcast before.
Mark: In this particular block of us yapping.
Jane: Right.
Mark: We have talked about them. Yes.
Jane: And learning styles, you know, visual, kinesthetic, auditory, blah blah blah. You know what you are. I know what I am. It's the horoscope of learning, you know, you know your pisces or a libra or a taurus and, you know, you know all the things that go with that. And you can take it with a certain amount like you can be guiding or a better a better analogy is Myers Briggs. So can be a guiding thing about your personality and communication style. And learning styles are like that. They're kind of a guidepost. But what's happened and I didn't realize this? But the reason that I talk about it is is mostly to illustrate how people do learn differently.
You can't say the same thing to the same people and have the same result like you know it's not an x plus y equal z. It doesn't happen like that. You, it's training is an art, not a science. And you kinda have to tailor things to fit to your audience. You have to figure out how to say things that will apply to or deliver information that will kind of get to a bigger audience.
And the theory was that learning styles, if you delivered your content to a certain learning style and you did it on purpose, so visual to visual auditory to auditory that all of a sudden the learning would be better. And that's I never thought that, I thought that it was advantageous to keep that in mind and to have different learning styles. Like, do as much as you can for the audience especially when you can't see them so that you hit a certain thing like you hit everybody at a certain level. But over the last ten years because learning styles has been such a big deal. Like, everybody knows who, you know, knows what they are, etcetera, etcetera.
People were actually trying to teach trying to identify what the learner was and then deliver only to that learning style. So if you were a visual learner, then you would only get visual things. And it was very getting very, like, people were expected to write lesson plans. Kids are, you know, being asked to figure out what their learning style is so that teachers can somehow teach to them and people who are doing multiple lesson plans.
And I'm like, whoa. And then they started doing studies trying to determine if that was effective and it is not, funnily enough.
Mark: What? An absolute isn't perfect?
Jane: I know. So what they would do is they put people in groups according to learning style and then teach them something according to that learning style and found that everybody kind of came out with the same results. And I'm like, yeah. Because it's not like you can only learn, it's just you have a preferred style or your brain just works differently.
And my point has always been, you know, try to deliver to as many people as possible. Not, k. You gotta focus your, you know, this bit is for you auditory learners, this bit is for you kinesthetics.
Mark: Well, that just seems like a terrible idea because you're teaching people to only be able to learn in one specific way. And the world is not going to serve that out.
Jane: No
Mark: The world is not gonna cater to that. It's going to give you all kinds of stuff and you need to figure out how to learn in every different
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: So that if your preferred method isn't available for one reason or another, you can still learn the other way.
Jane: Yeah. So if you can't read IKEA instructions because you're an auditory learner. Oh, well, I guess you don't get any furniture. What are those Billy bookcases are never gonna appear in your living room? It's kinda weird.
I didn't I didn't realize that that was the extent that the education industry was taking it. And I still believe that I prefer to learn things a certain way, but I definitely can handle learning things another way.
Mark: Well, an important part of the school system is teaching you how to learn, and teaching you how to learn means, assimilate information through different channels in different ways, and be able to turn it into something useful. So you need to know all of those different methods, all of those different approaches in order to have any chance at success later.
Jane: I think that's the key is that you have to have variety in how you present information. And if you can present it in a variety of ways, you should see that a certain, one or two of those ways is the ways that work the best for a group.
Mark: Right.
Jane: It might and it might be you're just doing on one coaching session and you can figure it out a little bit more specifically. But if you're teaching classes of people, you can't.
You don't have that luxury.
Mark: Well, there's a couple of things that really stick out for me on that. One is the assumption that there's one learning style and while it may be that people learn a little bit better with one than another, there's often a benefit to them in having multiple because they can learn pretty well with some of those others, and I find I kind of look to those other elements for reinforcement. For context and things. So you may not be quite getting it in the way that it's being presented. So you look at those other things as supporting information and put all of the pieces together.
But if you're just giving somebody one style for their designated learning, you're missing all of that kind of stuff.
Jane: Well it's also really hard to present things in a different way sometimes. Yeah. Like, sometimes, you just have to
Mark: Yeah. How are you gonna do a chart of numbers in a different format?
Jane: I know how are you gonna learn multiplication tables. I mean, you can do it. I mean, that's kind of a terrible example because you can do it visually and you can do it you can do it different ways. So it's gonna be that's an easy one that you could tailor to specific people
Mark: But there's no harm in having it in multiple ways. Why does it have to be one only?
Jane: Well, that's the whole thing is that if one way doesn't work, you go on to the next, and that's the key is knowing how to do how to teach in different ways. And we talked a little bit about that, Rick and I, talking about the student who's this, you know, the person at the other end, you know, what do they do? They are they supposed to tell the teacher, the instructor what their learning style is so that you can deliver to them and I could be wrong, but my belief is that no. The student, the person who's the learner doesn't really have a lot of control in that in that space.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You are the person receiving and the person standing in front of you is the person who has the control. So that person is going to have to invite that information from people if if that person wants it. The instructor has the control. And how you deliver information can make people feel differently about the information.
And it doesn't really matter if it's visual or auditory or whatever, it's more of an approach and how easily able you are to switch approaches. And that is really the key to learning is that if you're failing here, you can switch and do something else and you can see you can see how the person is responding. And you can adjust. That adjustment is really really important because if you don't if you can't adjust, if you can't sort of watch your audience and and see that they're not getting it.
If you can't do that, then you basically finish your your content till the end and everybody kinda looks down at their at the ground and goes hmmm. Like, if they don't I'm not gonna tell you. Because they're they're making assumptions about their own intelligence based on how well they understand you.
Mark: But that kind of leads into the discussion of who has what responsibility in that situation in that. That relationship of teacher and student who has what responsibility and this heavy reliance on learning style focused content suggests that the learner's responsibility is to say this is my learning style. Like, this is my preferred pronoun or something like that like your just putting a a stake in the ground. This is my preferred style, and the instructor's responsibility is to only give that person that one thing, and then to give everybody their preferred thing and that's it, which is impractical, certainly unrealistic to suggest that people are gonna have that much self awareness and also impractical to suggest that it's going to be so perfectly tailored for each person. But also, I think it skews the responsibilities. I think the instructor's responsibility is to present the content in a way that is going to reach as broad of an audience as possible. Broad it in terms of types of learning styles, but the learner's responsibility is to provide feedback on how well that's working and then the instructor can then adjust.
Jane: And the learner's feedback has to be invited. Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be. That's not true.
Mark: Well, it won't be successful if it's not because it it can't be sort of adversarial. It has to be
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: There has to be some clarity that, yeah, we want that feedback so we can adjust.
Jane: Exactly. So the instructor who is the the power in the room. And I don't wanna say that the the power in the room as a, you know, that's not a bad thing, but you are controlling the room. If you're an instructor, no matter how bad or good you are, everybody is following your lead. They want to. The audience wants to. The learners want to follow your lead. So if you don't ask for any feedback or don't tell them, you know, interrupt me at any anytime if you don't understand or blah blah. Or give them some direction on how they can approach you if you don't, they don't understand, then the learners are not as likely to do it or only the very brave ones are going to.
And if you don't want that, and you don't invite that, that's when it gets more adversarial because if someone doesn't understand something, they'll automatically just feel you know, people just go to
Mark: Start tuning out.
Jane: Well, no. Not even that. They feel stupid. They feel and I don't like using the word stupid, really. But that's how you've I'm it's not a feeling that anybody wants to give someone, but it's the feeling that you have when you don't get it.
Like, you're really just like, why is my brain not putting these things together. It must be me. And it takes a long time to start realizing that, oh, wait a minute, it's them. It's the instructor. Hey, wait a minute.
I don't understand this. I don't think anyone else does either. I'm gonna put up my hand, and that is a really brave thing to do in a classroom. To put up your hand and say, I don't get it. I really don't get it.
Can you explain it to me or can you explain it to me after?
Mark: So that is all sort of using the analogy of the classroom, but it is just as much an issue any other kind of delivery as well.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And it could be virtual classroom where people need to be engaged and paying attention and feel like their feedback is wanted and all of that stuff. And it's the same thing you're talking about the power dynamic and certainly the person delivering the content through a virtual classroom has got that power dynamic, but it's the same thing with online material as well, self study material. There is somebody who's presenting that material and they have the power dynamic to say, this is what's going to be covered. This is the amount of time we're gonna be spending on it in terms of the depth of it.
Here's how it's going to be presented.
Jane: And it is all correct.
Mark: Yeah. And we have to make it clear that we want that feedback that says, okay, well, this part isn't working for me or I don't really understand this or don't learn as well this way, so is there an alternate way to get it? Like, all of those things need to be part of the conversation. And so I know that's something that we spend a lot of time on talking to customers talking to drivers and getting that feedback on what's working, how else to present it, how to clarify what we're saying, all of that side of it. But it's just as important in the online as it is in a classroom situation.
Jane: Yes. And I through like, I talked about how it works online as well. I spent, I spend it because I go back and forth between classroom and online quite a bit in my head, so I can I kind of try to give the examples if you're doing this kind of content or this kind of content. But one of the things that's really important is that that you don't just limit it to one style of content or you just, you know, online learning by itself is not as good as online training plus some kind of hands on practice. That's like you're going to cover like you're just gonna immediately cover more bases that way.
So I'm always that I'm constantly saying, and it feels at some points like I don't like online training anymore. It which is not the case. It's just I know what online training can do. Online training can give you knowledge and knowledge base. It can help you with recall.
It can it gives you the time to go over the knowledge that you need to have as a base, it is not gonna give you hands on practice. It's just not.
Mark: No.
Jane: Unless it's software. So if it's software, then you can go and do software hands on practice because online learning is software.
But it's not going to give you practice in how to back up a truck. It's not gonna give you practice in how to fill out your log sheets for a particular customer. It's not gonna give you, you know, how to it can tell you things like how to put on your PPE, but it's not gonna let you practice it unless you, you know, decide to practice it on your own. Like, I can't control whether or not you've done that practice as an online learning developer.
However, if you partner anything online with something in real life. Bang, you've got, like, it's way more power powerful.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: It's you know, so how to put on your PPE? Okay. This is what I did online. In real life, here's your pile of PPE now put it on, show me have you put it on right?
You haven't put it on particularly like you haven't got all the bits. I'll show you the rest of it and there, you know, plus you've made a connection with the person you're teaching.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And that is I think that's the power of online is that you can give everybody the background information and the same background information. So they're all at a certain level, and then you can kind of, you know, play with it and put them up a little bit, like, you know, boost them up.
Mark: If it's built to cover all the learning styles properly.
Jane: Yeah. That doesn't really have anything to do with learning styles.
Mark: Well, it does in a little bit. Yes. The core of online is that it gives you time. It allows you to do things that you can do otherwise. But one of the things that I was thinking about as you're talking about this sort of way too heavy focus on one type of learning style versus another, is it still kind of glosses over the fact that the content needs to be good.
You need to build it the right way. Right? It doesn't matter. You could have something for every different learning style and if it's garbage content, it's not gonna work for anybody. Still needs to be good content.
So people kind of gloss over that and sort of move on to these other discussions as if it's like a distraction. You know, so you're not looking at the thing that needs to be looked at. You're looking at the magician's assistant instead of what actually is happening there. So Yes. So going back to your your point about online makes a whole lot of difference in in when it's paired with practical, it can be really beneficial if it's good. But all of it needs to be good.
Jane: I did. We did talk about that a little bit and now I'm thinking that we should get Rick to listen to this podcast too before he writes anything. What I'm, we were talking about, you know, the myth that video is better because you know, people don't wanna read text.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And we didn't talk too much about the reading text but I thought it was interesting, and we didn't talk about it during the webinar. But it's not that people have to read anything because all our all our content is voiced
Mark: Right.
Jane: So you either listen to it or you don't. And you don't have to listen to it, you can read it if you want to, but you're not you don't have to read it either. What you do have to do is you have to be able to read the questions at the end. But what was interesting is that video is not a bad thing by itself. No. But what I think it lacks is the guideposts that kind of help you in a more structured online learning platform where you have learning objectives that are gonna tell you what you're gonna learn. And videos tend not to.
Mark: Oh, yeah. No. They absolutely don't have any of those kind of guideposts.
Jane: And they don't have quizzes along the way, which is also very important. And in a number of different things, they don't have checkpoints, they don't have guideposts, don't have any of that structure that will help you get to the end of anything. People don't like going into a situation where they don't know where the end is and they don't have any signals along the way. And we talked about how that's the case for any kind of training. If you don't know when it's gonna end, oh my god, kill me.
Like no one wants that. Yeah. So having structure around even knowing how long is gonna be and when you're gonna hit on certain topics. Because if you know you're gonna be talking about an hour about, I don't know, backing up, well, what parts of it? Are you going to have different types of backing?
Are you just going to talk about checking your blind spots? Are you gonna talk about, you know, this one time when I was backing up? Or are you gonna talk about something else. If you don't tell people what exactly you're gonna talk about, then they're kind of kind of lost in any video or any show. It's always nicer to know what they're gonna talk about.
Mark: That's interesting because I think it's there's a lot of classroom stuff that doesn't do that either. I think there's a lot of classroom material where people don't start by saying, here's our agenda for today. Here's what we're here's how it's gonna play out on a schedule. We're gonna have an hour on this and an hour on that. They just say, here's day one of orientation.
Jane: Yep. And and you might be done today. You might be done tomorrow.
Mark: You'll be done you'll be done at some point today, but we don't know what we're covering or how long we're spending on each. And so also on the video thing, you're talking about the importance of guideposts and things. And I've noticed that YouTube is now more and more promoting people putting chapters into longer videos. So I go to a video and I watch a lot of educational stuff sort of documentary type things on YouTube. And if the video is over ten minutes, the first thing I'm doing is looking at where are the chapters and what's covered in each chapter. And I know that it's YouTube content, somebody's trying to monetize it. So probably the stuff I care about is gonna be
Jane: like Chapter five.
Mark: Yeah, fifteen, twenty minutes into this thing so that they can get enough views that they can monetize, but it is moving more towards a formal structure where you've got those kind of guideposts and you've got the organization and somebody can see basically a table of contents and what's going to be covered in that block of content.
Jane: Yeah. I mean, that's how you get a lot of get a lot of people engaged is when you allow them to see what you're going to tell them or what you're going to talk about. And if you're not interested, well, if you don't know I think people I don't know. I don't know why people don't create agendas, and I don't know why they don't tell people what's gonna happen because it's seems to me to be kind of a, I don't know, respectful thing. But I did tell the story of how much more you enjoy bike rides when you know where you're going.
So Mark and I are now going on bike rides and the first time we went on our bike ride, got our new bikes and we're on a bike ride. It all seemed very long for Mark. And Mark didn't know when we were gonna stop and and there there was some stress about that and what we realized after is because we were going places we don't know, he was concerned about being able to come back.
Mark: It was partly that. The first one, the challenge was also knowing that I couldn't wimp out and like I had to keep going until you said, okay, now this is good. And so we're also in very hilly terrain, so I didn't really know, like, how much more of this is there? Where am I getting to a break point?
Jane: Yeah. But that like, think of that in the class.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: It's the same thing. How much more are we doing? When are we getting to a break point.
Mark: I don't want to be the one who says I can't handle it. I need a break.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. That's exactly a good analogy. So nobody wants to be the one who quote unquote wimps out in class and says, I need to break this is too much.
Jane: No. No one's gonna do that.
Mark: Especially at a new job.
Jane: Well, I will tell you, and I I'm kind of a different I'm different because I will. I've always said, you know, stuck my hand up and said, we have a break or or whatever.
Mark: Mhmm. And you're rarely thanked for that by the powers that be. Or now now you're fine. But traditionally
Jane: Yeah
Mark: in past jobs, you were never thanked by management for that.
Jane: No. No.
Mark: You're thanked by the other people in the class.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Yeah. They became your best friends.
Jane: Well, also I noticed that when I'm in a class or I'm in a presentation, people like to make eye contact with me like I'm some sort of I don't know, I'm representative of the group or something. And to the point where people I feel like they're staring at me and it's like, no. You know what? Find someone else in this room.
I don't want you I don't want you looking at me. But I'll I'll say I'll give that feedback. But I also know that because no one else will give the feedback. It's not because they don't want to, it's because they don't feel comfortable doing it.
And I That is kind of my goal anytime I'm talking to a group that if you want to stop me, go right ahead. I will ask you if everything's okay. I will try and take my, you know, take cues from what's happening. You know, if everybody starts shaking their knees at the same time, I'm probably gonna give you a bathroom back.
Mark: But that's also a good point is you will give that feedback to the person facilitating the session because you can pick up on it and a lot of times they can't. A lot of times the instructors are not necessarily picking up on that. They get in their own head about the material they want to deliver and they get so focused on delivering content that they're not really thinking about the audience tuning out or they've got in their head that they have to get to a certain place. Or they have a break or a break at a certain time.
Sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes you have to change the schedule. And yeah, I acknowledge this is me saying, sometimes you have to change the schedule when you do delivery and I hate it. And it's stressful for me when I have to do it because I have all of these things, kind of bookmarked at various specific segments, very specific times, but sometimes the audience doesn't go along for the ride and they give them breaks at different times.
Jane: And what's funny is that when we've done presentations together, that's been an issue.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: I am not on time. I am doing this. I am doing that.
Mark: I know.
Jane: It's usually me because I'm usually much more go with the flow. We'll figure it out as we'll we go along, but that's just doing it a lot.
Mark: Yeah. And we would do them very differently. I would have the approach if this is the schedule. We've got an hour. We've got this much content we've got to cover if we're doing a session at a conference or something that. Yes. I know I've been guilty of writing you notes while we're on stage. Leaving you notes at the podium so that when you come back because we're switching out who's speaking, You come back and there's a nasty note about stick to your points or keep it moving.
Jane: Horrible
Mark: I have stopped doing that, though.
Jane: Thank you. Well, I've stopped doing presentations with you.
Mark: No. We still do the periodically, but I've really I've stopped caring. Yeah. I really don't care anymore.
Jane: Well you've just relaxed, it's not caring.
Mark: We'll get to the end. We'll get to the end at some point. Yeah. Most people that are coming to see us speak have seen us speak in the past. Yeah.
Jane: Have our little back and forth tete a tete.
Mark: Yeah. They've seen us fight on stage, basically, bicker on stage.
Jane: No we don't. We're much more behaved than well behaved than that. Or the you know, there's a lot of subtext between us going on, and people don't catch up on it.
Mark: Have that to look forward to. That will be like our season finale there.
Jane: Well, we're too far apart right now to actually
Mark: Well, we've got this big Best Fleets event where we're gonna have a big stage in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. And, yeah, we could be a scrapping there on the stage in front of the audience.
Jane: That could be. I don't know if that's a reason to come or a reason to avoid.
Mark: It's a reason to come.
Jane: Yeah. We're entertaining if nothing else.
Mark: We are entertaining.
Jane: And we're actually I think yeah, we were talking about being on the radio together at some point.
Mark: You were.
Jane: Oh, you were not? I thought that
Mark: Oh, no. That was we were talking to the RadioNemo people about that and you suggested we'd be on together.
Jane: I didn't no, he did. Dave did.
Mark: Dave, come on
Jane: And you said Yes.
Mark: I said, yeah okay. I said mumbled something that was interpreted as a yes.
Jane: But anyway, that was
Mark: that sounds like it was a good session.
Jane: I hope so. I mean, neither Rick nor I will say one way or another. Because we don't know.
Mark: Were there any other major elements that you covered? You talked about the, you know, the the myth of the learning style exclusivity, the idea of guideposts, and the importance of those. And I think part of the general theme of it was making sure people understand or making sure people are getting it. So did you talk about how to tell if people are getting it? With watch for?
Jane: I don't know if I talked about it as much as I could have or if I it was as clear as I could have been. But there's a, when people get it there are signs. I mean, if you're looking for signs of people not getting it, you can see the signs of people getting it. That's that's a really important thing.
You have to be careful. And like I said, training is an art, not a science, so you can't assign the same rules to the same people, but if you're in a classroom and people are nodding, you're generally doing you're generally doing okay.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Now sometimes people who don't understand will also nod so that they don't look bad.
Mark: Yeah. They tend to have a much more tense look in their eyes I find when they're doing it.
Jane: Yeah. I tend to look necessarily. You're just not you're not looking for one thing. Right? You're looking for a number of different indicators about whether something is getting through or not.
So you look for nodding. You look for people making notes. You look for people not making notes. Closing their eyes, folding their arms, I'm starting to go into the things where they're rejecting what you're saying or they don't understand.
Mark: But that's where things could really be misleading because I've seen people that I thought were not paying attention at all and were sitting on their phone and then it turns out that they're like tweeting all of these insights and they're thinking it's fantastic. Or they're taking notes on their phone. There's a lot of people who take notes on their phone now. Like, they're going mad typing with their thumbs and afterwards, it's like they come up and they're telling me how many pages of notes they took.
Jane: I think that's different in a classroom than a presentation.
Mark: Probably, yeah. Yeah. You're not gonna have people taking notes on the phone, so you're gonna give them the ability to write out by hand or give them some other device or something.
Jane: Yeah. But if you are doing a class, then it's a little bit more formal. But what you do, I think the most important thing that you can do to gauge people's understanding is ask them questions.
Mark: Yeah. That's a better way of doing it. Put it back to them.
Jane: You know, tell me about tell me about this thing that we were just talking about. Tell me about why visual visual learners are not going to you know, why that's a myth? Or, you know, are people able to learn using, you know, if you're if you're technically a quote unquote visual learner, can you learn using just lecture? And then you just ask some questions and then you see how, like, what the responses are.
If it's a confident class, then or if it's a class that's going well, you'll get a lot of you'll get a lot of participation that way, especially if you've made them trust you. When you're doing a presentation, it's different because people don't want to talk in present like other people's presentations. That's also a scary thing. So if you ask the audience a question at a presentation, especially in trucking, they're not gonna say very much.
Mark: And same thing with virtual stuff
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Like, they are not a talkative group on a webinar.
Jane: They're and, you know what I've noticed also, like, during our staff meetings, lot of people will chat. So we have done a lot of with chat in our webinars and present. I mean, we can't really do it in in person presentation because, well, most of the places that we're presenting don't allow you to do the the chat-like questions, like the virtual questions that, you know, someone will read off and you can answer. But in a large group, not small groups, but in large groups, people get less and less inclined to actually speak. Even when it's totally perfectly welcome.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You know, anybody can talk in our staff meetings but a lot of people will chat. And now if I ask them a direct question, they will answer, but they're not saying, hey, I have a comment here.
Mark: I've noticed that as well as the company has grown fewer and fewer people speak.
Jane: And that's like that's just a comfort level with speaking in front of a large group.
Mark: Even though they're comfortable with every one of those people individually, they're just not comfortable talking to them as a whole.
Jane: Well, I would say that that's a introvert extrovert dilemma.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And it would also say that the extroverts are the ones that aren't gonna speak up.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: The introverts will. The introverts are to an introvert three people and fifty people are the same.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So there's another label introverts and extroverts. You can make an introvert do extroverted things, you just have to give them a little bit more time to recover.
Mark: They have to learn how to do it. Yes. Yeah. You have to have space for recovery afterwards.
Jane: And actually, this is a total sidebar, but I was reading an article about how introversion introvert and extrovert meant totally different things a hundred years ago.
Mark: Really? Yeah. What did they mean then?
Jane: Oh, let me try and remember because it's changed a couple of times, but I think the first introvert definition was shy.
Mark: That makes sense.
Jane: And it became not shy. I can't remember what the middle one was, but now it's like, you know, getting entered where you get your energy from, but that's not how it started a long, long time ago. I can't remember the exact thing, but if you if you look up introversion versus extroversion origins. You'll probably see it. I don't know.
We don't know where it came from. I just look up so many things.
Mark: I'd be very curious from a psychological point of view if there is actually any such thing as shy. Anytime I've heard somebody described as that, it ends up being something else.
Jane: It was funny. You wouldn't call an extrovert shy.
Mark: No. No. It's introverts that are shy. They don't talk.
Jane: But that's but what's interesting is that extroverts are not told that they're shy because they don't wanna go on stage.
Mark: Oh, yes, they're told.
Jane: Now just clarify, not all extroverts don't like going on stage, but I'm just gonna say that many extroverts
Mark: in general.
Jane: Are great in a small group or at a party or whatever, but hate going on stage. And no one says they're shy. No. But an introvert who doesn't like the small group is considered shy or doesn't like being in a smaller group intimate you know, conversations or at a party, they're told that they're shy, but it's really not, it's preference.
Mark: Well, that tells you where the defaults are.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Extraversion is more common, so they'd have set the rules and defined what is acceptable. You know, it's perfectly acceptable to have terrible stage fright and be perfectly comfortable in the crowd. It's a lot more weird to be uncomfortable in the crowd but perfectly happy on stage.
Jane: Yeah. And I'm I'm kind of I'm always the opposite thing, so I'm just weird. You know, left handed, introverted,
Mark: speaking up all the time.
Jane: Keep well, yeah. And and yeah. So I'm introverted, but I also will be a loudmouth. So that's a totally different thing.
Mark: Well, that ends up as a very nice segue into something that you've been a loudmouth about over the last couple of days. I'll give you a few minutes to give everybody an update on the joys of dealing with Facebook.
Jane: I don't know how people have seventy different social media platforms that they that they run, and they can keep track of all of the different things that all of these platforms do to make it different. And they don't give you any warning. And every once in a while, you just go into it and go, wait a minute. Everything that I have posted here looks weird. So I'm annoyed.
Mark: We're not fans of these things.
Jane: Mostly Facebook. Facebook has this really. Okay. Back up a little bit. We use the banner images or the profile images to communicate the stages of the Best Fleets program.
We've done it in Facebook for like
Mark: years.
Jane: Fifty not fifteen years, I would say.
Mark: Probably five or six years. We've had those custom banners every year.
Jane: Five or six no.
Mark: I think in the beginning, we were keeping fairly generic
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Banners, but then it's only in the last five or six years that we've started having custom banners that tell everybody what stage of the program we're in.
Jane: Right. And what Facebook has done is that they have kept the banners the same. Sort of. They look the same and but how they are used is different.
So what happens is the banners used to be really only visible on on a computer, on a desktop. But when mobile became really really popular, and I don't think I think this is why I think it's been longer because the mobile apps have been around for three or four years at least. So what happens is that the profile picture, the circle, moves based on where or what the size of the backdrop that banner image is. So before it would always be on Facebook, it would always be on the left side, so it'd be the circle on the left, and then you'd have a rectangular banner. And so we always designed all the information about Best Fleets in that manner. And now, what I realize is as the screens are getting smaller, the profile picture circle moves around and
Mark: Moves across the across the top.
Jane: And it also only shows you a portion of the banner image on mobile. And that portion is going to be different based on how much real estate your particular mobile phone has. So it's not
Mark: It doesn't shrink the picture. It chops parts of it off.
Jane: It chops it chops the sides and the top and the bottom. Yeah. That's the problem.
Mark: Oh, man.
Jane: It also chops the top and the bottom off.
Mark: Instead of just shrinking the image to fit.
Jane: Right. That's what we discovered today. That's why I was annoyed when I got on the call with you before is that I just realized and it's really difficult to find out information about this, like people will say, oh, your banner image has to be this and this and this and then it tells you that the mobile banner image should be this, but you don't have the choice in Facebook of putting up a mobile banner and a desktop banner. You have one banner. And that has to go for everything.
So we've had to completely redesign our banner images because of that, and it's annoying. It's not just Facebook either. LinkedIn does it.
Mark: You had a similar issue with YouTube because I remember when you were doing banner images for the YouTube page, there was a template that said, here's what the thing is gonna look like on mobile and here's what it's gonna look like on desktop and you had sort of template with a bunch of different boxes in it and you had to make sure your content worked in all of those.
Jane: Yeah. It's basically the middle.
Mark: Right.
Jane: So what they've done is they started with these beautiful desktop, you have all the real estate in the world. And it's it's like trying to build a building and you think you have, you know, an acre, and so you're gonna use this entire acre for your office building. But really, you only have five hundred square feet in the middle. That's really where your building is gonna be.
Mark: But you have to design it in such a way that it doesn't look weird, only having that bit in the middle.
Jane: Yeah. And when I think is that it's the laziness on the part of the of the company the tech companies who are running these things because they don't wanna make it Like, they could make it so that we can upload different versions for different devices. They could easily do that.
Mark: Mhmm. Or they could just do what other places do in scale. Scales to fit.
Jane: Yeah. So I don't understand why they are so, I don't know, thoughtless. Thoughtless social media companies. Can you believe that?
Mark: I know. Hard to believe.
Jane: I know. It's not. It doesn't happen at all. But it's such a pain in the butt. I I really,
Mark: Well it eats up so much time. This is the thing that bothers me as I've been working within the marketing team on improving efficiency and optimizing all of our different workflows so that we can get more done more quickly with without as much sort of spinning the wheels back and forth type stuff. And I know you're doing the same thing with your creative team. Just trying to get on top of that and improve it, but you keep getting sidelined by things like this where you've gotta redirect people into figuring out what what's happening now and it's not like to tell you in advance when things change.
Jane: No.
Mark: It's a surprise this thing changed a day ago or a week ago. Who knows? Some indetermined period in the past this thing changed, which means you've got to now have somebody who includes as part of their job, checking these things on a regular basis and that's just a waste of cycles for somebody going through and doing that all the time.
Jane: I think social media is just a bane of society.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It's it's really I mean, it was at the beginning such a really interesting concept and kind of fun to then it gets kinda, then we have all the problems with election fraud, etcetera. And now it's just a big waste of time.
Mark: That we have to be part of.
Jane: Yeah. Like, I don't and I don't even I don't even do it on the social side anymore. Like, I don't I have accounts but I don't really I don't know. It it annoys me how much of a time suck they can be.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And speaking of which, there's a what was the what did what did we it was a zucker punched?
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Yes. That was the word that Alan came up with today.
Mark: Yes. Well, Jane was having frustration in a meeting and Alan, one of our developers said if you got to Zuckerberg's face on a punching bag yet? And, yeah, we can just call it the zucker punch.
Jane: Yes. And there is a song called it.
Mark: Yeah. So there we go. Yeah. So that is one of the things that we have been dealing with that continues to get in the way of my endless quest to optimize processes and marketing and optimize processes with creative because as anybody running a service business knows, you have to continually optimize your processes and improve efficiency. And I'm also realizing now as we sort of go through all of these activities as a sort of stepping back a bit.
One of the things that I always wonder when I look at other tech companies, like these other particularly, these companies have done all these different rounds of fundraising. And they have like hundreds of staff. And I'm always thinking, what are all these people doing? Particularly in marketing I see all of these funded tech companies, and I know they've got like a hundred people in their marketing department.
But yet, they don't run ads really anywhere, they don't do any sort of PR work. I don't see them doing any stories and not on radio. I don't see them doing much. Like, in terms of podcasting or webinars?
I guess they're probably doing some webinars. They'd be doing some white papers or something but what the heck are they doing with a hundred people? Like, are all these people doing every day? And I suspect a lot of it is what we refer to as just marching in circles.
They're doing work that looks like they're busy but not really accomplishing much. And unfortunately, social media ends up being part of that where you end up marching in circles because you got somebody who just has check these things every day and make sure they're working. And then go and check them again tomorrow. And then you're working on new designs, you have to keep checking all of these things and halfway through a design project, oh, now the specs have changed because they just arbitrarily changed what they're working on. It's so inefficient.
Jane: Yeah, well, they're not thinking about you.
Mark: No. Definitely, I'm thinking about me.
Jane: And I can I can vouch for the fact that Mark does indeed ask that question out loud all the time?
Mark: Yes. Well, as we go on our weekly basis to the layoffs website
Jane: layoffs dot FYI
Mark: Yeah ,to watch what tech companies are cutting staff, and I will be, like, doing the math to figure out how many people that represents because they'll say, you know, they cut a hundred people and it represents seven percent of the workforce. And I'm like, wait, that means I have, like, fourteen hundred people. What the hell are they doing with all those people? Yeah. Well, I know what it is.
Jane: Well, they got laid off.
Mark: Yeah. Well, they're not doing much now. Well, of these are companies that we have attempted to integrate with and have seen really a little bit from the inside. They are not that well organized. They're not staying on top of things, so I don't know what these people are doing.
They're certainly not building good APIs and documenting those and figuring out how to work together. So I don't know what they're doing.
Jane: Well, I will tell you that I think when money was cheap, I think that people hired a lot. And the tech companies definitely did hire a lot, like, almost too much. So that they could keep developers off the market, and that was kind of a that was something to like a competitive advantage. But what happened, I think, is that they just hired too many people.
And as you get more people, unless you are really, really strict about your processes, the processes go insane. Because, you know, other people have ideas and they wanna do things their way and so they change things, and they change how they do things, and you've hired them, so you let them do that. And you think that, oh, okay well, I'll let this person who is really gung ho and then you realize after the fact, oh my god, you've just hijacked everything that I'm trying to do. So there's this con instant, you know, you have to be constantly working on process constantly. To make sure that everybody is still understands the process that there's still okay like, they're doing it. They are still committed to doing it. And that if they wanna change it, they kinda go through the right methodology of changing it. So they go to the right person to talk about a change and and that kind of thing because you can just lose it and then you can just end up just getting more and more people doing marching in circles. And when you get to a point, when you're marching in circles, it doesn't matter how many people you have.
You are still not achieving anything. And that is a scary prospect, but I think a lot of these tech companies were not profitable
Mark: No
Jane: Not telling anybody that because they were hiding behind venture capital
Mark: Nobody cared. They were focused on growth.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So it really didn't matter as long as you were locking people into enough new contracts that it looked like your top line was growing. That was all that mattered.
Jane: But you're marching in circles because you're not actually figuring out a way to, like, to get in the black. And that's
Mark: and is not long term sustainable. The companies that we work with that are more established and were sort of around before all of this craziness happened over the last five years. Those companies seem to be more organized and more reliable. We can get responses. It's the same people over time, you know, we're not dealing with new people every three months. So it really makes a difference.
Jane: And I think that is kind of, I think it's one of the ways that you can evaluate companies that you work with because we had this very interesting we're trying to find a an HR system. And through that process, we will not us, but Shelby, our HR practitioner who is lovely and wonderful and don't ever go anywhere, Shelby. They treated her terribly. And what we did, like, after we had basically told them to go away because they had such terrible customer service, Mark and I, well, I looked them up on LinkedIn and found out that all three of the people that Shelby had dealt with had actually not really been on the job for very long and that the company had had layoffs and seemed to be had some venture capital, and we're basically doing that same thing.
Mark: Well, and also all those people had got a bunch of promotions. Know, some of them had been there a year and had three promotions.
Jane: Yeah. And they're, you know, twenty five. So it was really, like,
Mark: Things to look at before you buy.
Jane: Yeah. It's really true. How long has the company been around? Are the people you're dealing with, you're dealing with all been promoted twelve times? How many jobs have they had? Like, you look at this for drivers, you should look at this for your technology providers as well.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: If these people don't have any knowledge of the trucking industry, are they really gonna be able to help you in your own in your business?
Mark: Tech Bros that have never been involved in the freight industry. Well, that's basically what happened at Convoy.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And what killed them, their to Tech Bros that didn't know anything about it, it goes both ways. You can't have Tech Bros who know nothing about trucking, solving trucking problems any more than you can have truckers turning into tech people, building decent tech. You've gotta have a good knowledge in both and you have to have expertise on both sides. In order to really have an effective product.
Jane: This is true.
Mark: Yeah. And going back to the comments about process, and you definitely have to have a relentless focus on improving the process. And one of the things that keeps coming up for us is you focus on the process, but don't get married to it because that process may change.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: The process that you have today is not likely gonna be the right process a year from now.
Jane: Especially if you grow.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: If you grow, so as you add those people who all wanna change what you're doing, you have to figure out okay, you have a goal for the company. How do and you have a you have a particular deliverable that you have to get and there's a process to get that as you grow how many other people are involved, and how do you change your process to make sure that everybody is still in the mix. And yeah, so you are constantly changing your processes, but as you change them, you have to be very clear about them and very rigorous. It's like I could just spend my life, like, even things like, what are file name? What are the file names supposed to be? Where do the files go? Which files go here, which files go here? I mean, that process is like, that's not even that's so minute in what we do.
Mark: Seems so so small and insignificant, but a year from now when you're looking for something
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Becomes important.
Jane: Oh, I'm I'm super I'm horrible for like I'm a tyrant. You know, you you must name your files this, they must go here. And this is what you're you know, when you wanna change them, this is what you do. Don't give me this before it's ready. Oh, yeah.
Mark: We get all these like, millennials and Zoomers that say, oh, it doesn't matter where the file is because I'm just gonna search for it. Well, search only works if you know the name of the thing you're looking for.
Jane: And if you've named it something that's gonna be useful.
Mark: Yeah. But also on the whole process changing thing, even if you don't grow, those processes change. That's one of the things I find most enjoyable about Best Fleet's interviews is talking to the people that are really diligent about improving how they do things. A lot of the times the companies aren't growing that much, but as they mature, old processes don't work anymore.
Jane: This is true.
Mark: You need to adapt those and you need to change them to fit what you're doing now.
Jane: And also with programs and Best Fleets.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So processes and programs kinda go together.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So you have a new program. Well, in five years, is it really as effective as it was when you first created it. Yeah. And what did you create it for? And is this still serving that purpose?
So you have to reevaluate everything all the time. And if you're paying attention, going back to what we were talking about in the beginning, if you're paying attention there are signs when things don't work anymore.
Mark: Oh, beautiful way of wrapping it all.
Jane: I know.
Mark: Well, I think I'm going to park it there. We can just wrap this up. Excellent, excellent way of bringing it all back to the beginning. Pay attention to the signs.
Jane: And then and then that.
Mark: Thanks for listening everybody.
Jane: Have a great day.