The 100 year anniversary of the end of the First World War was on Sunday, November 11, 2018. My major research paper in graduate school focused on the cultural history of the Great War, specifically how a satirical British magazine (and a few other primary sources) depicted events on the western front from 1914-1918. You can read “Through Comic Eyes” in this perfectly acceptable academic publication! Remembrance Day is a time when I actually get to apply detailed academic learnings from my advanced degree without it being sort of weird.

Leading learning and development for Canada’s largest community credit union doesn’t require me to scour digital archives of letters from the trenches or produce content about specific aspects of the past. So what’s relevant about my education the other 360-ish days of the year? If I’m not blowing minds with riffs about the gallows humour of trench songs serving as psychological coping mechanisms for soldiers, then how am I applying what I learned? As it turns out, there are at least nine ways that I use my grad degree every day.

Academic application

Specific historical knowledge

Something that I learned about studying the First World War is what’s called “the Napoleonic Paradigm” of warfare – it means that battle is won by “wearing out” the enemy by “overwhelming them” with firepower and/or human beings. Basically, leaders stuck to tactics and just spent more energy on making them bigger, as opposed to trying something innovative (like the Canadians did at Vimy Ridge in 1916).

I’ve used this example as a way to convince colleagues to try new things (or at least think about seeing a problem or solution from another perspective). This can be exhausting over time, but can also be effective.

Historiography

Leading organizational development and learning for a fairly large organization with a rich history and complex culture has required me to take different perspectives based on what I learned about analyzing the past. For example, the Annales School encourages a longer, holistic view of the past. Marxists analyzed class conflict, collaboration, evolution, and revolution. The Greeks might’ve seen things in circles.

While I can’t say that I bring rigorous historiographical analysis to work every day, I can certainly say that this knowledge has helped me learn concepts like unconscious bias, intercultural understanding, and reconciliation, all important aspects of culture and decision making in my job, because I am very open and curious to alternative explanations of how things are.

Everyday work life application

Learning agility

The future of work is learning. From financial services to tech startups to non-profits, every organization needs lifelong learners who can unlearn what’s been automated, relearn skills we’ve ignored recently (like empathy), and learn new things at a spectacular rate. The ability to do so by cultivating deep work principles is something that I honed through countless hours in the library and through difficult, mind-bending seminars with folks who were far smarter than me.

Critical thinking

Arguably this is the most absent skill on Earth these days. Human beings are struggling to discern what’s real on social platforms like Facebook and we’re also not working hard enough to explore ideas and points of view beyond our bubbles of curated information. Studying history cultivated an ability to analyze information deeply, while comparing it to perspectives from others in the field before forming my own opinion.

Reading

Shout out to all my Humanities PhD students who made it through comprehensive exams! Yes, grad students made terrible life choices, but the thing about reading tens-of-thousands of pages of really dry academic prose is that it gives you the superpower of consuming, processing, understanding, and retaining information pretty quickly. It’s one of the ways I keep pace with stupid amounts of email.

Producing (especially writing)

Being able to produce – content, code, products, beautiful data visualization – is needed more than ever in what Robin Sharma calls “the Age of Distraction”. Studying History requires the production of papers and projects that require a lot of research and a lot of writing, which has equipped me with solid tools for turning around emails, business cases, and articles quickly and effectively. One time I wrote some zombie fan fiction for my book club, too.

Understanding cultural context

Cross-cultural competency is one of the most in-demand skills for the future of work (it’s pretty darn relevant today, too). It’s hard to study history and many other academic disciplines without having your perspective broadened because of the new insights and points of view that surface on the journey. Being able to apply such learnings to global workplaces or other diverse communities that impact our work life is something that I can trace back to what I learned in university, which has gone from being applied in a seminar discussion to board meetings.

Engaging elevator conversations

Look, knowing a lot of “interesting” historical factoids, tidbits and random stories, like the one about the cross-dressing British Expeditionary Force Captain who oversaw the dragging of two motorboats through the East African jungle or how many ghosts haunt Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood, allow me to weigh in on several topics of conversation with colleagues or strangers/future-friends.

Applying human skills

During high school I was pressured to study math and sciences, which I did not like and was not particularly good at. My Physics 11 teacher may or may not have told me, “I will give you an A in this class because you’re on the basketball team and if you promise to never take a physics class again.” In my heart and in my head I knew that studying humanities was the right path. As it turns out, I was ahead of the curve. According to The Guardian’s Matthew Batstone,

The humanities provide fantastic training in building an argument, understanding how it is people who create outcomes and how relationships underpin all forms of human activity. They train you to distill vast amounts of information and they teach you to appreciate creativity. A student of the humanities who has been well taught will be able to think, will be able to see the connections between ideas, and will not only accept, but embrace change.

The article was from 2012 and recent economic trends from humanizing automation to combatting loneliness reflect the need for strong human skills more than ever. We’re on a journey from STEM to STEAM and I can see some very awesome transferable skills learned in grad school being relevant well beyond Remembrance Day conversations.