Stay “Soft”: Openness and vulnerability in the service of lifelong learning

“An open mind isn’t the same thing as an empty head.”

Hal Urban

Last month, I supported the second intake of a virtual internship for a group of just under 200 South African third-year university students in the quantitative fields, which introduced them to careers in financial services. Part of this programme was a series of masterclasses based on the Four C’s of 21st Learning (namely Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication Skills). During the session on collaboration skills, we were discussing the challenges and barriers that come up while working in teams, and specifically what can get in the way of people listening to one another.

The conversation turned to prejudice and how factors like race and gender can be a barrier – a complex topic, which was handled very well by the session facilitators. Then in the chat, one of the interns asked about ageism – for example, when somebody more senior than you does not listen to your contributions because they see you as young and inexperienced. This reminded me of my personal gripe with what I call the “blank slate” paradigm – something I have noticed among leaders and even some recruiters.

In essence, or at least in my interpretation, the “blank slate” paradigm is the idea that because new graduates come with zero work experience, they are almost 100% influenceable in the ways of the organisations they join. My cynical view was that the belief that people are like empty vessels, waiting to be filled up with new knowledge, may be just as pervasive in our corporations as it is in our outdated educational models. The reality is, of course, that people don’t learn or operate in a vacuum – they bring their own worlds, world views, and perspectives.

Now, leaders of course know that graduates don’t come with nothing – after all, your qualification proves that you can think and problem solve. However, it seems that employers may be excited about hiring young people not just because they’re full of fresh new knowledge and ideas, but because they haven’t yet learned any of the “bad habits” or attitudes that come with corporate life. In other words, they don’t see graduates as empty-headed but rather as “malleable”. My point with the “blank slate” paradigm is not to dispute that graduates are inexperienced and that we hire them because this means they’re able to learn; rather, I dislike the notion of moulding people to our ways, or more specifically overwriting theirs in the process. It seems rather patriarchal and colonial in my mind.

Not only does it make me a little sad, knowing how young dreams can so easily be shut down, but also it seems at odds with why we recruit fresh new talent in the first place. Bringing in people in with new perspectives, and then expecting them to comply with yours because it’s the way things have always been done, is a bit like having your cake and eating it. That being said, I’m not suggesting there’s no space for acclimatising to an organisation and “learning the ropes”. In fact, that brings me back to my experience with this particular group of interns, and to my next point.  

I’ve never seen people hungrier to soak up learning. It was a joy to see not just the emojis but the questions overflowing in the chat whenever anybody presented, whether they were a subject matter expert on interpersonal skills or model building. And one of the key messages that all the facilitators were trying to drive home was that this is precisely what they should keep doing – asking questions, and soaking up more learning.

If this is what it means to be a “blank slate”, then we should all want to be one. Asking questions is not just for students, or new graduates learning how to navigate the world of work. Would you call a scientist a blank slate? My guess is no, and yet they ask questions for a living – they might just have more sophisticated, or simply more disciplined, questioning and thinking techniques, as well as a better attitude towards being wrong.

Maybe we (the older generation) are just jealous and jaded because we think we can’t be (re)moulded anymore. Maybe we’d love to be blank slates again. It occurred to me also that this is one reason why we have children – so they can teach us. But if lifelong learning is one of the key competencies that we should be building, teaching, and hiring for, alongside the Four C’s (and in fact it is number 2 on the WEF’s list of Top 10 Skills of Tomorrow Workplace), then I would like to add another key attribute to this.

One of the things that struck me during the collaboration skills masterclass was not just how readily the interns were asking questions, but how readily they took on questions that prompted them to self-reflect. The facilitators were emphasising traits like empathy, humility, owning your emotions – emotional maturity, in short – and the interns were willingly responding. It wasn’t just curiosity they were showing; it was openness. In short, without having to name the word, the facilitators were modelling vulnerability – and so were the interns.

Now, vulnerability is a scary thing. It’s uncomfortable, and it is for the most part culturally frowned upon. But if we are talking about being willing to make mistakes, and being open to others and acknowledging our own emotions, what is this if not vulnerability? And why can this not be seen as a strength instead of a weakness?  

Think about it: How do you collaborate with anyone if you aren’t willing to listen to and learn from them? How do you learn if you don’t open yourself up to new information – information that often challenges the way you see the world, if not the way things have always been done? And how do you open yourself up without being vulnerable?

To take it a step further, perhaps this offers us a new way of thinking about “soft” skills. This scare-quoted term is typically used to refer to intra- and interpersonal skills, like personal resilience, communicating and influencing, and roughly anything to do with EQ. There is a general allergic reaction to the words “soft skills” among those of us who work in learning and development, and in human capital generally, not because we don’t like them but because to call them “soft” is to sell them short (to put it bluntly: they are actually really hard). Simon Sinek has a great rant about it in this video, where he suggests the alternative term “human skills” (and says that human skills, like building trust, enable us to be not just better people but also better leaders). The perspective I would like to add today is this: we learn these skills to stay “soft” – in other words, to stay flexible and open.

In fact, I would contend that “hard skills” – the specialist technical and thinking skills, like how to code in Python – are only useful if you can apply them in an adaptive (i.e. “soft”) way. It’s all well and good knowing your stuff, but if you can’t adjust it to the changing needs of your customer, audience or the situation, it remains “your stuff”.

I think the reason we included the 4 C’s on this programme can be summed up in one word: change. With this top of mind, another masterclass that kicked off the whole QYF programme was specifically about how to learn and unlearn. If this cohort of future graduates is headed for the world of work with not only the tools to learn and build new models (both technical and mental), but also a readiness to stay open and continously revise and update these models (and perhaps help the rest of us do the same), then I think this is very good news indeed.

An important caveat is to consider that vulnerability needs to be nurtured alongside wisdom. After all, we need to be wise to a certain degree in order to protect ourselves. Being vulnerable does not mean risking everything, laying it all out there and inviting critical feedback all of the time. This brings to mind another key competence that can only be developed by living, and that is judgement. As the aphorism goes: “Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment”. With that in mind, perhaps wisdom does not just prevent us from being too vulnerable; perhaps it arises as a result of vulnerability – or, more specifically, from what we learn by staying open to experience.  

So, my message to our future graduates is this: Don’t lose your vulnerability. At the risk of making everyone squirm just a little, stay soft – in order to get better at the hard things. Vulnerability is courage. It may be unpopular and it’s definitely scary but it is, I believe, a strength and a virtue.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. If you’re a South African student who is interested in this internship project, visit the Quantify Your Future site.