Disrupting Education: The Power of Project-Based, Collaborative Experiences with Angelo Biasi

Angelo Biasi

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Angelo Biasi is a senior level business executive and transformational leader with a strong track record of developing high-growth, innovative, lifelong learning businesses, and initiatives. His proven ability to disrupt, create, and execute on successful GoTo Market - through to exit – strategies, plans and processes has involved operations, fundraising, product management, business development, human capital, market positioning and segmentation, lead generation and revenue / profitability growth. Mr. Biasi is a motivational manager / coach and influential member of high-performing executive leadership teams.
 
Over the past fifteen years, Angelo has acted on a passion to transform education at a global scale and his experience in starting and leading high tech, mobile, and media businesses, to pioneer award-winning integrated education solutions that have changed the way we teach and learn. This led to a recent exit for MassiveU, Inc. a company he founded in 2013.
 
 As a lifelong learner, recently completing an MIT Sloan leadership program and executive ScalingUp coaching certification, Angelo continues to seek and implement the most advanced and effective tools, processes and methodologies necessary for high-velocity, people-centric growth, transformation, and shareholder return.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators.

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• What do you love about what you do?
• Tell us about your journey in tech and education
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Angelo Biasi is a senior-level business executive and transformational leader with a strong track record of developing high-growth, innovative, lifelong learning businesses and initiatives. His proven ability to disrupt, create, and execute on successful go-to-market through to exit strategies, plans, and processes has involved operations, fundraising, product management, business development, human capital, market positioning and segmentation, lead generation and revenue, profitability, and growth.

Liza Holland [00:01:03]:
Mr. Biasi is a motivational manager and coach and an influential member of high-performing executive leadership teams. Over the past 15 years, Angelo has acted on a passion to transform education at a global scale, and his experience in starting and leading high-tech mobile and media businesses to pioneer award-winning integrated education solutions that have changed the way we teach and learn. This led to a recent exit for MassiveU, Inc., a company he founded in 2013. As a lifelong learner recently completing an MIT Sloan Leadership Program and Executive Scale-Up Coaching Certification, Angelo continues to seek and implement the most advanced and effective tools, processes, and methodologies necessary for high-velocity, people-centric growth, transformation, and shareholder return. Well, welcome back to Education Perspectives. We are so excited to have Angelo Biasci as our guest today. Welcome.

Angelo Biasi [00:02:06]:
Thank you very much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. I can't wait for the exciting discussion that's about to take place in the next 30 or so minutes.

Liza Holland [00:02:14]:
Oh, I know, me too. I was very excited to see your, your email drop into my email and I was like, oh, I have to have you as a guest. So, so let me kick you off with our first big question. From a 30,000-foot view, why do you think that we as a society need to invest in education?

Angelo Biasi [00:02:31]:
Oh, why as a society do we need to? I mean, of course, it's the seed to the future of work. You know, I'm the father of twin 17-year-olds. So for me, it's personal, as I'm sure it is with many. But, you know, what we've been seeing with our platform is the older that we get, the more set in our ways, change management. So we were just talking about this briefly. How do we create an innovation creative mindset that translates into valuation when working for a company? So why is it important to invest? Why, I guess, the more challenging question, invest in the right ways to train our students for a future of work that has never been more uncertain threatening or opportunistic as it is today. So, you know, there's nothing more important than starting at a young age of, okay, you know, what does that look like? How, what is the best method? And that can't happen without a significant investment and an open mind, as well as the tools and the thought leaders that have some sense of potentially where the future may go. No one really knows, but that's, that's a long-winded answer to your question of why it is so important that we invest in the right ways to train our students today for the future of work, which is, like I said, has never been more uncertain.

Angelo Biasi [00:03:59]:
I always say we're living through the greatest education and workforce transformation of our lifetime, the greatest education and workforce transformation of our lifetime. Look at coding, for goodness' sake. You know, just a few years ago, it was like, you know, doctors, lawyers, developers, you know, you're set. You've got security. If you're a parent, you're like, oh, thank goodness, you know, my kid didn't choose art or whatever. But now that, I mean, it is great careers in art, a lot of security there, but a little bit more uncertain. But now developers and coding is at risk out of nowhere. Did we see that coming? Not really.

Angelo Biasi [00:04:38]:
You know, I had a conversation with a teenage student who was so excited about being a developer. And now they're just so despondent that they're planning on re-changing their whole career path because of that. And it's really kind of sad, but that's not the only career path that is going to have some bumps in the road. So how do we best prepare for that? Well, that's going to take investment. That's going to take an open mind. It's going to take less change adversity, you know, less change management. To, uh, to do it the right way. And, you know, and that's subjective also.

Angelo Biasi [00:05:18]:
So, well, that's it. That was a tough question, but I hope I answered it right.

Liza Holland [00:05:21]:
It's a good one. And I love it because I always get a, like a hint of a different perspective on that answer. So it's been a fun question for this podcast. So I know that you are a bit of a serial entrepreneur and a lot of that is in the education space. Space? What drew you to education for your developing companies?

Angelo Biasi [00:05:43]:
Yeah, so I was an instructor at NYU for 10 years. I created the first course taught online and over mobile phones while I was teaching at NYU. It was my— one of my claims to fame. NYU wanted my course to be their first MOOC, the first Massive Open Online Course, back in 2012, 2013. And I said, you know, thank you, but I'm going to build my own platform. They said, great. They became my first client. And so I launched a company, raised several million dollars, and we were off to the races.

Angelo Biasi [00:06:13]:
And we quickly pivoted after that. I've started companies in the music space, started a magazine for kids who make music in grades 7 through 12, kind of the Scholastic model for music textbooks. But once we started this company, we quickly pivoted when the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Nifty, gave us their textbook and said, hey, can you create a project-based social learning game that teaches our curricula of entrepreneurship, a topic that's near and dear to my heart? My parents are immigrant Italians who owned a 24/7 diner for many years. So as a blessing or a curse, I think entrepreneurship is in my DNA. And so we built this amazing platform and really got into this, this idea of how learning by doing is so important. It was social, it was gamified. It was project-based, project-based learning. And so really fell in love with the opportunity of taking curricula and complementing that with projects.

Angelo Biasi [00:07:16]:
The students work together and solve for things. They failed. We were just talking about not enough struggle to create a creative or innovation mindset among our kids. And by failing and getting frustrated through projects rather than just a multiple choice summative or formative assessment, really developing those cognitive skills and that cognitive recall going way up. So developed that, started working with Pearson McGraw-Hill, Scholastic, Blackboard, several K-12 partners. And then I really wanted to create something more scalable, something more collaborative, and started working on Solvably in about, in 2019, 2020, and around the whole notion of collaborative creative problem solving. Of looking through the lens of everything being a problem to solve for. We have more than enough problems in the workforce, whether it be customer service or finance or HR departments, let alone in our own classrooms.

Angelo Biasi [00:08:15]:
You know, it's one thing to learn the algebraic equation. It's another thing to see how using algebraic equations in AI, you can predict the stock market, a real-world challenge, which is one of the challenges in our AI Center of Excellence for K-12. So really got into that whole thing and it kind of like design thinking, Google Docs on steroids, and this whole notion of constructivism and student agency as you would find in an escape room. So building that into an experience where students could take a real-world problem, work in a team, you know, and that's hardly ever easy. You know, sometimes you have someone on your team who you don't necessarily get along with, or you have different styles or whatever, to put it politely. But really, just like you would in the real world, I'm going to have to communicate effectively. I'm going to have to collaborate. I'm going to have to solve a problem.

Angelo Biasi [00:09:09]:
And at the end of the day, as we talk about assessment, I'm going to have to be evaluated on how well I could not only produce a deliverable, the impact that I've had using my human intelligence. When we say human intelligence and AI and innovation is the ultimate skill set. So, so that's kind of my journey most recently over the past 15 years of being very committed to transforming education and workforce through the lens of collaborative, creative problem solving and innovation. And now with AI, that just takes it to a force multiplier you know, the equation, as I often say, is AI plus HI plus innovation equals valuation to the X, you know, AI plus HI plus I equals V to the X. And now with AI, you have the opportunity to really, you know, take your, the valuation of your company, take the valuation of, you're a student now presenting that to an employer for a college application, like my twin 17, twin 18-year-olds are now. And really, you know, how do I set myself apart from the thousands of other kids or candidates for this college or this job? Well, hey, if I can prove that I can 4x to 10x my output, well, now I've got a real chance at differentiating myself. But how do I do that with the evidence at scale and measurable impact? So that's a little bit how I, how I've gotten here, and I've just fallen in love with creative problem solving, the 3 categories, 11 types of creative problem solving and design thinking. How do we become good at it was really the question that I often ask.

Angelo Biasi [00:10:53]:
And well, like anything, I think you need a process. It could be design thinking. It could be some form of that, which we're big fans of constructivism, student agency, collaboration. But then it also takes a lot of repetitions if you're going to get very good at something. So the whole idea of, you know, it's kind of like the martial arts, you know, give me the tools, fine, you know, but to become instinctive, I've got to be practicing that, you know, continuously. So when that mugger does finally approach me on the street at 11 o'clock at night, I'm not even thinking twice about it and I'm taking them out. So problem solving is very much like that and looking at everything through that lens and innovation is where we've taken the platform and the company. And there's a lot of things in between that.

Angelo Biasi [00:11:45]:
I sold it and then bought it back. And I won't get into all the details, but a really exciting journey that I'm really committed to. And I think we need it more than ever today because I keep hearing AI. Yeah, I mean, I call it the Ozempic pill of AI. Well, that's fantastic, you know, you can, which is now starting to have some of its backlash also with side effects and whatever else. The real Ozempic, Bill, but I keep hearing this human intelligence, you know, human intelligence is really going to be the defining factor for separating us out for the future of work. You know, yeah, AI is great, but we need those collaboration skills. We need problem-solving processes.

Angelo Biasi [00:12:27]:
We need critical thinking and creative mindsets, or the tool is really kind of worthless. I mean, you know, give or take.

Liza Holland [00:12:36]:
The quality of the questions that you ask AI completely, you know, impacts the quality of the output that you get from those models and whatnot too. And I tell you, it's so exciting to hear you talk about this because, you know, K-12 in particular has been in an industrial model for a really long time, and it's, it's really relied heavily on content. And unfortunately, our world today is not really so motivated around content. You've got that in your pocket. And, you know, hey Google, tell me this. But what we do need to do is regardless of the content, build those skill sets for how to solve a problem, how to take in a bunch of information, how to plan, how to collaborate, all of those great things. But that has not been a big part of school. Are there lots of wonderful bright points of light, I call them, out there and some of the move towards project-based learning and that sort of everything in the classroom.

Liza Holland [00:13:45]:
But this is a huge, huge ship to turn. And one of the big things I think is going to be how you assess these skill sets is very different than a multiple choice test that you can assess content. And you've done a lot of work in that area, it sounds like. So I would love to kind of open the floor about how you think we might be able to create assessments that will actually measure these durable skills?

Angelo Biasi [00:14:12]:
Yeah, and I appreciate that question, Lisa. And we've really thought long and hard about reimagining assessments, you know, beyond the traditional summative and formative. And as I said, you know, we spent all building this active learning platform, treating learning as a performance. Traditionally, we've had a sage on the stage, a bunch of people in a room or a video, and you're sitting at your desk, you consume the knowledge transfer, you take the assessment, you get a piece of paper and you forget it by Tuesday, right? But that's not what happens in like an escape room-like experience, which I call like a performance. You're learning by doing, you're tearing apart the room, you're trying the combination lock, you're failing fast, you're iterating, you're working in a team. And so we baked all that into the learning performance. But then when it comes to assessment, you know, let's just take durable skills. So there's a couple of different ways.

Angelo Biasi [00:15:07]:
All right. You know, collaboration is very important. It's one of the top 5 LinkedIn WEF, you know, skills for the future of work. Okay. Well, how do we develop, track, and report on collaboration skills? And, you know, well, you got to have 2 people to do that. You got to have a team, right? Okay. Well, we've got it. Our platform is a team-based learning performance learning experience.

Angelo Biasi [00:15:34]:
And so when they complete the experience, the final phase of our platform, of the Solvablee platform, is this authentic assessment. So students not only evaluate their own, but their peers' performance anonymously in critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. So just on that learning performance, so let's just say, you know, it's an escape room-like learning experience and you're evaluating, you know, how was I on creativity? Relative to this rubric from basic to exemplary? And then anonymously, how did my peers perform? And from that, and also the facilitator has the opportunity, the instructor has the opportunity to also contribute and you get a 360. And so we thought, oh, this is really exciting because now we're getting the, you know, and you know, like after the first one that you've done that you're going to be evaluated by your teammates. And if you're not performing well enough on critical thinking or communication, you better step up your game or your teammates are going to ding you, you know, and it's going to be averaged in and whatever else. And so we're very proud of the fact that in our ePortfolios, you can share not only your, your soft skills averaged out, you know, by yourself, your peers, and your facilitator, but then also show your longitudinal efficacy over time. So the more challenges that you solve, the more you can see if you're progressing or regressing relative to these durable skills. And so we had a lot of great success with that, building that into the Solvable platform.

Angelo Biasi [00:17:12]:
And then we had an experience where we were presenting to a large healthcare company in the talent space. And they said, well, this is great, but how are we going to evaluate 15,000 performances, you know, and we were working with another K-12 provider of 300 and, you know, and so that gets a little crazy. And so similar to Tesla, you know, Tesla doesn't see themselves as an EV manufacturer, an automobile manufacturer, they see themselves as a data and AI company. What does that mean? Well, they have a million cameras on those cars and they're collecting tons and tons of data, how you're driving, how the car is performing and when you're speeding, when you're not. And that allows them to get into the insurance business and other things. And that's why Tesla is 100x is because it measures the success by the consumption of product rather than the quantity of products sold. And so, geez, maybe we're like Tesla. Maybe we're not an edtech or a workforce tech company.

Angelo Biasi [00:18:14]:
What if we took, you know, because these teams are doing their learning performance, this escape room-like performance, they're solving a problem, going through a process on our platform. They're each individually contributing as a team, contributing, they're interacting in the chat function. We even have an audio Discord-like functionality where we can capture the transcripts of their conversations. What if we put all of this data into a big bucket, including the challenge, including their deliverable, and put a rubric on top of that of very specific skills that we want to evaluate from their learning performance? So we've got all the data from their learning performance. Let's put a rubric on top of that of 6 skills or competencies that we want to glean information from, and let's toss that off to AI and start asking some questions. And sure enough, we were able to do that. And it is for the first time ever, I'm proud to say that someone is looking at evaluating learning as a performance. And so AI came back, and let's just take collaboration.

Angelo Biasi [00:19:23]:
So I had my authentic assessment over here, how about my AI assessment? And what AI was able to tell us was, hey, as part of your learning performance, you were very collaborative here, here, here, and here. And over here, you did something, you know, during your escape room-like learning performance that you could have improved upon. And very precise, very specific, very, you know, just blew us away. Like kind of finding a new element to the periodic table.

Liza Holland [00:19:50]:
Yeah.

Angelo Biasi [00:19:50]:
Like almost imagining as if there were a million cameras on your escape room-like experience.. And when you left the escape room, someone handed you a report, Lisa, and said, oh yeah, minute 12:24, you, you showed collaboration skills when you did this. And oh, at minute 24, you could have been a little bit more communicative or showed critical thinking when you did this.

Liza Holland [00:20:12]:
And so that kind of— sorry, does it give them the tools to, to improve on those areas as well? Like, you just, you really weren't as good in your, in your communication in this particular thing and probably put you back. You could do this, this, and this to be able to fix that in the future?

Angelo Biasi [00:20:28]:
It gives you a score. It tells you exactly why. It shares your strengths and areas for improvement. And then where it goes from there, like we're working with some companies who are using, you know, Cornerstone On Demand and some other large skills-based libraries where they're prescribing now very specific courses and skills to develop from those assessments. But just to complete the whole process, so I have my authentic, I've got my AI-powered assessment now. And in addition to those skills and competencies that AI is evaluating and being very precise at saying how you scored and why, it also takes your team and assesses your team as a team. How did you perform? But then the coolest part is that it takes your innovation, your deliverable, and it provides a mock implementation plan for that deliverable. So we really see, you know, the value of innovation in a creative mindset, and especially in the corporate, you know, the world of work, it's solving problems.

Angelo Biasi [00:21:32]:
Well, how do I solve a problem? Well, I need a process, and through that process, I come up with a solution. Well, what is your solution? Well, here's a presentation, a deliverable. Okay, well, is it a good deliverable? Does it show impact? You know, is it feasible? You know, does it make good business sense? And here's a mock implementation plan. Here's a feasibility report of your innovation. It's almost like a 3D printer. So, you know, you've taken a problem, you've solved it, you've gone through this process with the team, you've got your authentic assessment, you've got your AI assessment, but then you have an implementation plan for your deliverable, a P&L, the amount of time it would take to launch it. And it's, you know, it's not 100% correct. It's AI giving you suggestions.

Angelo Biasi [00:22:18]:
And then the arbiter, the final arbiter is the instructor. We always have a human in the loop, almost like a teacher's assistant doing those 300 or those 15,000 evaluations of projects and individuals and saying, all right, I think, you know, Joe Smith earned his certification and here's why and here's all the data. And then that instructor has the ability to override or accept that. And so, you know, we really developed that out to a standardized process. We call it Credibly and credibly.ai, which is our AI-powered assessment engine inside of Solvable. And to further take that out, now there's the ability to customize those certifications, those rubrics, those skill stacks to evaluate the challenges. We call that CertLab. So any company, any higher education institution, K-12 school can now create custom certifications based on very specific skill stacks and rubrics that are specific to them, custom to them, bespoke, and evaluate those custom real-world challenges that teams are solving for.

Angelo Biasi [00:23:32]:
And just when you think— and I know this might seem like a lot of information, but it's really cool. We had a conversation with a very large partner not too long ago, and they said, you know, yeah, durable skills, that's really important. That's really great and everything. But tell us about workforce skills. I'm like, oh, I never thought of that. So we took a data set of a learning performance, a team of students, and we put it against the O*NET workforce skills. And it said, of the O*NET workforce skills, this student exhibited these 10 skills, critical thinking, adaptability. And then we got crazy, Lisa, and we said, OK, well, tell us what careers that student might be good at or interested in based on her learning performance.

Angelo Biasi [00:24:18]:
Because we had all of the data and it gave us like 5 careers that that student would be good at or interested in and why. And we're like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. And imagine a student being in music for so many years. Why do kids stop playing the clarinet or the flute or the accordion? In my case, it's because people— why do they keep playing? It's usually because they have an— hey, you're really good at the clarinet. Oh my gosh, really? Oh, you think so? And they keep playing and they get better and better. And usually around high school, students start to play less and listen more for the most part. But having this, oh wow, and creative analyst or marketing director for a sports company, I never thought that I would be good at that. But based on my learning performance data from the challenge I solved for working in a team, it says this might be a career I should look into.

Angelo Biasi [00:25:17]:
Wow, I didn't think I was good at that, and now it has precise information that's telling me, yeah, you know, you might be pretty good at this. So I might get interested in that, and that could be the spark that turns a student around from a very young age. And especially with such an uncertain future now, we can just get tons and tons of data on what does the future of this career look like, and you could kind of, you know, take it from there. So The outcomes are limitless, but it all comes back to being a data and AI company, which is what we are, you know, by collecting, having this experience, this learning performance and collecting all of that data on one platform and a collaborative, through a collaborative experience, working through a process, having all that data just now allows us to really get very precise and very unique insights into skills and competencies, innovation feasibility, career trajectory. We could put it up against different models. My instructor from MIT who, in leadership, has written several books and has a company, and we took her rubric against the data set. It was just mind-blowing. To see how these students performed relative to that.

Angelo Biasi [00:26:39]:
But it's all based on, on having the data.

Liza Holland [00:26:42]:
Boy, that's fascinating. And I have so many questions. Is your platform set up to be, you know, so many of these kind of assessment exams and whatnot are kind of designed to be a one-off. It sounds like yours is something that you could build upon and lots of different challenges and continue to make that data set for a particular student. Richer and richer as they go along and do more and more things. Is it designed where you could utilize it like all year long, or how does that work?

Angelo Biasi [00:27:13]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the, the challenge creation design lab is super easy. We built it as a wizard tool, so any instructor can essentially create a challenge in less than an hour or two. And now with AI, you know, the correlations to standards, the learning objectives, We have Webb's Depth of Knowledge, all 4 layers baked into the design tool, you know, the theory of collaborative creative problems. So it has all the theory baked in. And yes, you can create it very specific to the content that you might be teaching or the progressive applications as a student progresses. But where this gets really interesting is with corporations and the future of work. And this is the great announcement of, you know, our Work-Based Learning Center of Excellence.

Angelo Biasi [00:28:00]:
We're now working with several employers who are creating very specific challenges to their workplace for students to solve for. So what happens in that case is not only do these students work in teams to solve for, you know, let's just take any employer, you know, Nike has a workforce development, and I can't mention any names, not that we're working with Nike or not, but they solve for a very specific workforce challenge that's specific to that workforce. Now, that employer is starting to develop a deep bench of potential candidates. And by offering scholarship funding and incentives— so, and then hyper-localize this, we're in year 2 of working with the Edison Awards. And this is kind of a fun program where for a very specific Lee County, there's 20 high schools that are solving for a community workforce challenge. Last year, it was more jobs and people to fill them in education, healthcare, construction, logistics, and manufacturing. This year they're solving for creating a more resilient county to hurricanes, economic gaps, health and wellness using AI. Both of these are the AIHI Innovation Challenge.

Angelo Biasi [00:29:18]:
So these students are not only solving for these very real community or employer challenges, but they have evidence at the end of the day, you know, for their college application or when they go to a job interview interview to say, yeah, not only do I have the skills and I worked at this company and here's my SATs and my ACTs and my extra— here's a challenge I solved for a community workforce challenge working with 3 colleagues using AI. Here's my evidence. And here are my soft skills that show that I can work well in a team, solve a problem. Here are my scores and my precision on that. And oh, by the way, here's this, you know, one of the students from last year, I'm mentoring her to, she's going to be starting a business with the solution she came and it's really fantastic. She's really smart and she's like, I want to do this for a living. Would you help me? I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, of course.

Angelo Biasi [00:30:16]:
You know, that's so cool. But a year ago was like nothing like that, but it is like unlocking this creative mindset, this innovation mindset. And I And I think at the end of the day, and I know I've shared a lot, but that's the future of how do we survive and thrive and really give our kids a gift at this young age or our employees a gift? Well, let's give them the gift of a creative or innovation mindset. Let's give them the tools. Let's give them a process. Let's have them fail fast like you would in an escape room. I've done an escape room. Where, you know, they're very successful and you're working as a team, everything's going great and you crush it, you know, in 45 minutes.

Angelo Biasi [00:31:02]:
And then other times, you know, you've got a dud on your team and you're like, how do we persuade and get Joe off his butt to kind of like, you know, get this stuff.

Liza Holland [00:31:12]:
Going?

Angelo Biasi [00:31:12]:
And, you know, but that's very much the real world. It's not going to be 4 amazing, you know, colleagues or cohort that you're working with. And it's that failure, you know, of trying the combination lock and then trying it again in and looking at the clues, your cognitive recall goes way up. And through that process, you know, you're learning and you're developing not only the subject matter expertise and what went into it, but your durable skills. And now we have the ability to assess and evaluate that, which is, you know, as a performance, which is really— I don't know, and I've been in this business for for quite a while, and I talked to a lot of people, and it's so surprising, Liz, that not many people are really talking about it like this, like learning as a performance.

Liza Holland [00:32:01]:
It's not— that doesn't surprise me at all because, you know, and coming from the parent perspective, a number of times people get so very fixated on all of these test scores that, you know, and where we are reaching and all that kind of stuff. And I keep saying, are we sure we're measuring for what we really want? And people are like, huh, what? And so it's, that doesn't surprise me at all, but it's definitely where things need to be going. That's, this is so incredibly exciting to me. You know, that actually kind of brings us to a good point we're talking about, because this is revolutionary stuff, right? And it's a paradigm shift for a lot of people. What kind of challenges are you facing in being this disruptive and revolutionary?

Angelo Biasi [00:32:46]:
Transformative? Oddly, and not surprisingly, it's the change management, you know, and the older that we get, the more set in our ways, you know, we do this. One of the things I'm most proud of is that Solvibly, Incredibly.ai, we have third graders as well as business executives on the same platform. Like, that's another thing that I've yet to really see the same UI/UX works just as well for a third grader as it does for a CEO of a large 17,000, you know, person company. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, do they get it? Are they willing? Are they committed to change? Are they willing to do the work? You know, some, and we're taking a step sideways now where it's like, well, AI, I can just type in this and I get an answer. Well, like, yeah, but that's, you know, so can everybody else. And if we really want to create productivity advantage and pass 15 cars in the rain, you know, if we really want to do that, well, it's systemically creating an organization of change and a willingness to do the work and to equip them with the human intelligence skills as well as the AI tools to create innovation, solve problems. So to go back to your question, what are the biggest challenges? I mean, for one, It's just getting the word out and just saying, yeah, this is the way I really believe that we should be doing this. I hear a lot of people talking in circles, oh, it's human intelligence and AI, and then innovation always makes its way.

Angelo Biasi [00:34:21]:
But, you know, there's never been a greater time to equip everyone with this process, with this skill set. And I keep coming back to an innovation mindset. I know growth mindset was a big thing for a while, but an innovation mindset, a creative mindset, And when we work with students like the Edison Awards, it's just so fascinating because, and like any escape room at the beginning, even our older students, they're bumping around and it's uncomfortable because you're not— they're so— we're so used to direct instruction. And I think we've become like almost addicted to it. Like, well, wait a second, no one's telling me what to do. I don't know what to do. This is unclear. Get me out of here.

Angelo Biasi [00:35:02]:
I'm anxious. I'm claustrophobic, get me out of this room. And they're like, no, hold on, just trust the process. And then little by little, they start thinking critically and being creative and working with their team. And then they turn into this childlike, and they're coming up with products and innovations and they're naming them and putting a logo to it. And then they're thinking about the business impact and they're working with their team. And that happens a little bit slower. The older audiences that we serve, the younger audiences, Somehow the sparks go off a little bit sooner, which is also very fascinating.

Angelo Biasi [00:35:39]:
But I just hope that we don't get so far gone into typing in a question and getting an immediate answer. We have such access to that through ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and so on that we're almost like going back old school and saying, hey, no, it's the process. And it's putting— we did a program. For a healthcare company with one team had a clinical nurse, someone from the innovation team, someone from leadership, and then someone from finance on the same team solving for the same problem as 5 other teams. And just that magical makeup of 4 completely different functional leaders solving for a problem, you know, made their solutions so much different from the, you know, the other 5 teams, yet they were all working on the same moved problem. So that is also another phenomenon of this problem, team-based collaborative, creative problem solving. We get a lot of folks that say, oh, can we do it as a team of one? Yeah, you certainly can. You can't collaborate.

Liza Holland [00:36:45]:
Just don't get the benefits of those other things.

Angelo Biasi [00:36:48]:
Yeah, right. But where do we get the greatest value? Well, by putting very different people together and mixing and matching them and getting different perspectives. That's where it's the most fun because you see their minds just— and they're all contributing and offering something. They're looking at the problem very, very differently. It's kind of like as if you did the same escape room 3 days in a row with 3 different teams. Well, guess what? You would have 3 different experiences, 3 different outcomes. It'd be 3 completely different solutions. And there's a lot to be said for that too, which is not textbook, you know, here's the chapter, here is the multiple choice, you know, questions for the standardized test so I can get the raise and whatever else.

Angelo Biasi [00:37:43]:
No, it's like, you know, applying this to a real-world setting, going through that process with 3 very different perspectives, coming up with something you would never have imagined. You would just like an escape room. You don't know how it's going to turn out. You know, we did an escape room with my team a while back, and we had one fellow on our team who's a wonderful guy and a little bit eccentric, but he'd never done an escape room. And he came to the escape room with his running shoes on. And we're like, hey, why do you got your running shoes? He's like, well, I don't know. I thought we were going to escape. I mean, so it was such wonderment and curiosity of what the experience is going to be like because you really don't know.

Angelo Biasi [00:38:22]:
And I get the benefit facilitating a lot of these challenges because I can see these like going off into completely different directions. And I'm like, oh my, I'll tell you a really quick story. We had a— for the Edison Awards last year, more jobs than people to fill them. I had one team that was kind of taking their time and I was like, hey, what's going on? You know? And they said, yeah, well, you know, we're high school kids and we, we don't look at more jobs than people to fill them in our county. In terms of full-time employees. I'm like, what are you talking about? We look at it in terms of workforce hours. Like, all right, well, tell me more about that. And they said, well, we don't really want to give up our Saturdays and our Friday nights and stuff like that, but we will, we do want to make money and we, you know, we're not totally, you know, deadbeat, but we'll give up 2 hours here, 3 hours there.

Angelo Biasi [00:39:13]:
I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And so they built, uh, their solution was a program that is kind of like Angie's List meets Match.com, which used AI to pull exactly, you know, who they were and what match to different jobs they would have, as well as take their available workforce hours and match them to opportunities in the community. So if you're a restaurant owner and you have a dinner shift that you can't hire a waiter or waitress for, you might want to get two high school students that have four workforce hours each to make up for that 8-hour shift. And it's kind of like a temp agency meets— I was like, oh my God, the thinking that went into that, I would have never come up with it. But it was so brilliant. We're going to use AI and how we approach this problem. We don't look at it in terms of full-time employees, temp agency. No, no, hours.

Angelo Biasi [00:40:12]:
I'm like, oh my gosh. So you just never know where it's going to go. It's kind of like an escape room. You really don't know where it's going to go. And how successful you're going to be and where the aha moments and the failed combination locks are going to happen. But once that happens and the sparks start to fly, you're like, oh my gosh, the potential is just insane when we start thinking of all the world's problems that we need to solve for and giving. But they need a process, they need a little bit of guidance, they need access to the tools, and then they need repetition.

Liza Holland [00:40:48]:
Right.

Angelo Biasi [00:40:48]:
Wow. So pretty cool stuff.

Liza Holland [00:40:49]:
No kidding. No kidding. You've got my hamster wheel turning like crazy here. That is fabulous. I just keep— every time I think, I think of one more way to be able to implement this type of a, you know, this type of a platform. I mean, it can be social solutions. It can be business solutions. It can be just about anything.

Liza Holland [00:41:12]:
That's amazing. Well, we are coming to the end of our time for this. And so what I would love to, to kind of throw out to you is, as part of this challenge and getting the word out and all that kind of stuff, what would you like for decision makers to know about this new technology and why it's important?

Angelo Biasi [00:41:33]:
Yeah, well, that's a great question. Well, you know, I keep coming back to this word innovation. You know, with all this uncertainty, all of this fear, oh, we're going to lose all these jobs. Oh, it's going to increase the GDP. Oh, you know, I don't know what to study if there will even be a job waiting for me. When are robots going to be ruling the world? Oh my God. You know, it's enough to drive anyone crazy for 10 minutes if you really start to think about how nuts things can really get. And, oh, you know, then the government's going to do this.

Angelo Biasi [00:42:08]:
But I keep coming back to, you know, innovation, you know, AI. I plus HI plus innovation. If you really are a decision maker for a company or for a school, or you're a teacher who has the ability to really make change with your students, the best gift you can give them is an innovation or creative mindset. The best thing you can do is give them a process. So you teach them how to fish, but do so in a way where they're using their human until they can prove it. They can fail. They can learn from that failure. They have some struggle.

Angelo Biasi [00:42:40]:
It's not comfortable. Like I said, our platform at the beginning, I can almost predict that there's going to be someone who raises their hand and says, you know, this is not clear. You know, no, it's, that's right. Yeah, thank you. No, get me out. It's not clear. That sucks. You know, no, no.

Angelo Biasi [00:43:01]:
So, but yeah, just giving them the process to do that using the tools and And once you have that, it really is a gift. It's kind of like I said, this is very much like the martial arts. Once you have that instinctive way to block a punch and you're practicing it every day— I'll tell a very quick story. I had a garbage disposal that broke several months ago, and I'm not very handy. So, for me, as soon as the garbage disposal broke, I had really two questions to solve for. Who will I call and how much will this cost? That was really it. It's pretty simple, you know?

Liza Holland [00:43:41]:
Okay.

Angelo Biasi [00:43:41]:
That, you know, problem solved in probably 5 minutes, I guess, until my neighbor Sean came by and he said, oh, Ang, I had the same garbage disposal, you know, I fixed it myself. Even you can fix it. And I'm like, Sean, you don't understand.

Liza Holland [00:43:54]:
Not my, not my lane. No.

Angelo Biasi [00:43:56]:
Okay. And then my wife kind of overheard the conversation. She got involved. And the challenge was on. And so now I couldn't, you know, I just couldn't let it go. So what did I find myself doing? You know, I was identifying constraints. I was identifying what I know. I was doing research of the different, you know, YouTube videos and the different— and I found myself at Lowe's, you know, and then I'm under the sink and I fixed it and I turned the button on and it runs.

Angelo Biasi [00:44:24]:
And I was just like, oh my God. And then of course it failed like a couple of months later. I mean, iteration is a part of collaborative creative problem solving. But the point of the story is that, you know, now the next time a major appliance goes down, I'm going to look at it with a different toolset, with a different mindset. I'm not going to look at it in terms of who do I call, how much will this cost? I do know what my limitations are, but I'm going to tease it out a little bit of like, okay, well, might be more— oh, will it take— yeah, what are my constraints? You know, what kind of research do I need to do before I I really throw up the white flag and kind of give in. And it was kind of a fascinating epiphany for me of like, wow, we have access to information. And now even more so, we have access to asking a question and getting an answer. So we're really on this cusp of, do we go 100% Ozempic pill, or do we use our human intelligence to solve problems and do things using a process? And I say that as if it's like this long, drawn-out experience, but it doesn't have to be.

Angelo Biasi [00:45:38]:
It's just really taking it through a problem-solving mindset, an innovation mindset. And that's why, unfortunately, decision makers don't know that something like Solvable exists, or the ones that really want to make change, are willing to work, they're committed to change, they see it as a gift. Teachers, districts, employers, giving this to their employees, they have such a huge opportunity for an employer to gain a productivity advantage if their entire company had that problem-solving. Oh, customer service tickets are taking 3 weeks. Well, we want that to be a week. Well, It's a problem. Okay, how are we going to use AI to do this? Well, let's get together with the team, you know, our sales group, you know, oh, our sales process is out of whack. We got to get to our numbers by Q4.

Angelo Biasi [00:46:27]:
Well, there's a problem to solve for our leadership team. We have board meetings that, you know, don't go anywhere. They take too late. Okay. I mean, you don't have to go very far to find a whole, you know, set of problems in any institution or employer. But, you know, and once you do and you have that mindset, it's amazing. I speak with a lot of chief innovation officers and I had a conversation a few weeks ago with one of a large company and it's like, oh my God, chief innovation officer, that's like such a great title. I would love that title.

Angelo Biasi [00:46:58]:
You have a large company, you wake up in the morning, I'm the chief innovation officer. I'm like, oh man, that's really cool. And I'm like, what the hell am I going to do today? Like, I got to innovate. I got to bring innovation to the company. I've got to speak in front of the the board and I got to talk about how we're innovating. And when I was speaking to this chief innovation officer, she said, oh yeah, all the problems end up in my desk. And when we solve a problem, you know, when we basically like the crisis resolution center. Yeah, crisis resolution center.

Angelo Biasi [00:47:28]:
I'm like, that is so far from innovation as anything else I've heard. You know, wouldn't you want instead of one big hammer in front of your desk to give everyone in the company little hammers. Yeah, you know, that's the legacy that a chief innovation officer should be striving for. Let's make everyone be a problem solver so I could just put my feet up on the desk and really solve the big ones, you know, rather than all the crises. So I know that was a long, long answer to your question, but I think the greatest gift we can give our students and our employees is the gift of an innovation or a creative mindset. And we just so happen to have a platform that not only allows you to treat learning as a performance, but then evaluate skills and competencies and those innovations to turn those into solutions to the problems that you have.

Liza Holland [00:48:19]:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all this. And I will make sure to drop links to all of your wonderful platforms and whatnot in the show notes here. But thank you again so much for taking the time to to share the possibilities here. I mean, I'm jazzed.

Angelo Biasi [00:48:35]:
Oh, awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. And thanks to anyone who's, who's listening to this. I get pretty excited about it, but it's, it is a pretty exciting topic, you know, and we're, we're doing it. You know, we have the opportunity to really change the world. I believe we're going to do it. It's just, you know, it takes time and we got to get the right people who really get it and believe that, that believe in the possibilities. And, uh, yeah, it's amazing awaits.

Angelo Biasi [00:49:02]:
So thank you so much, Lisa, for inviting me onto your podcast. It's been a great pleasure.

Liza Holland [00:49:08]:
Fabulous. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.