Leah Coss On Reconfiguring Education To Create Impactful And Driven Human Beings

Leah Coss is on a mission to change the way we value people in society starting with the way we educate our youth.

To prepare today’s kids for a future filled with Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Ongoing Change, she has built platforms and education methodologies that promote the development of Essential Human Skill Development in children and youth.

She is the Founder & Co-Founder of growing organisations such as Build a Biz Kids, BBK Network, & Your Current Future. Utilising her extensive background in franchising and ongoing research in Essential Skill Development and Mindset, she is on a mission to reinvent the education system. Her organisations are actively utilising new methods designed to draw out each child’s unique talents and equip them with the ability to share their gifts with the world.

Leah discusses the positive impacts of teaching social enterprise to children globally, and how education can be revolutionised to account for the value of humans and allow people to remain competitive with emerging technology and trends.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off Leah, could you please just share a bit about your background and what led to your initial interest and work in social enterprise?

[Leah Coss] - Like so many people when they get to the same stage of life I am at, what you end up doing just happens serendipitously. What you do could have never been predicted when someone asked you at 10 years old, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" There's no way you can predict that, and if you ask most of my friends from the early parts of my life, they would've never predicted that I'd be working in education or with kids. I was just always such a hardcore business-oriented person, I really wanted to take over the world in that regard. In terms of my background, that's exactly what I did. Straight out of college, I got an incredible job with a great company called 1800-JUNK, they're an international franchise and franchising just became the thing that I did.

My job was all about scale, growth and how you could help other people start their own business in a very systematised way. That's the essence of franchising.

I then got the entrepreneur bug, but I actually had had it when I was a kid, I just didn't know what it was back in the nineties. Entrepreneurship was not a word, people would instead say, "you have your own business." However, it was actually viewed as, "oh you can't get a job, you probably hustle cars or something!" Entrepreneurship really wasn't a thing in the eighties and nineties and growing up I didn't know what it was. Then all of a sudden, this world of business opened up to me and I leaned into it. I've got about 15 years of franchise consulting experience, and when it came to doing what I do now, which is education, it is all focused around helping kids to grow up differently than what we did, because that's how it should be. We live in a different world these days and they should be having a different educational experience. I just ended up having a coffee with an old friend of mine (we used to work together at 1800-JUNK) and she had started this kid's entrepreneurship program, and I thought that it was so cute!

Then all of a sudden, something clicked in my mind, and I developed this vendetta. I think a lot of people get passionate first about whatever the social initiative is that we cling onto because of anger, a sense of misjustice or believing that other people are hurting things. You're thinking, “I want to fix this”, and so all of a sudden, I was thinking if I had this experience when I was a kid my life would've taken a different trajectory. What a different value system I would've instilled in myself. I would’ve been thinking about what's important to the world and where I could contribute to that. That was just a spontaneous coffee break, and it completely changed my life. From then on, it's been nothing but education, innovation, challenging and supporting the education system here in Canada.

As the founder of Build A Biz Kids, can you please tell us a bit more about the organisation and its core social mission?

Build A Biz Kids is a registered charity, and when we first started, it was primarily just to offer practical education programs. What is practical education? It is teaching things that you and I do every day to little kids to get them integrated into the world. Let's have them building natural resiliency and learning how to make decisions alongside other skills. Like many organisations, we look at entrepreneurship as a great medium with which to flex some of those skills. But we look at a lot of other things too, including social enterprise, fundraising and prototyping things that can change the future. We started by just developing a really cool curriculum and delivering that directly to youth. When COVID happened, there was such a huge shift that we went through, not just to pivot online, but to increase our reach. I think one thing that was apparent during COVID is that it didn't matter if I was partnering or collaborating with a business that was in the building next to me or on the opposite side of the world. It just didn't matter anymore because we were not meeting in person anyway, so we just did some really fun stuff. All of a sudden, we realised that we could reach so many more students and we ended up doing a lot of research and development throughout COVID on communication. All of these teachers have 20 years’ experience teaching, but only in the classroom. The moment they go online, they start thinking nobody is listening to them. Maybe we aren't even teaching teachers how to teach effectively. they thought they were good, but it's just because they could stand in front of the kid and make them listen. Now the kids are in their bedroom with every distraction at their disposal, so we needed to consider a different approach.

That's really what we started to do. We started not only supporting educators, but then we started supporting the parents and kids while they're at home living in isolation. We partnered with a lot of organisations, and we learned a lot. Now we're packaging a lot of what we've learned, and throughout 2020 to now we've done a really big speaking tour helping educators make that pivot and teaching them how to communicate differently with youth. But we're also taking all of this really innovative online and in person curriculum that we've developed and we're licensing it to schools all over the world. Many entrepreneurs have that moment where you realise you don't have to do it all by yourself. We really want to make a change, and we know that we can't possibly reach every kid in the world. Let's partner with other organisations and just be that support mechanism that challenges the education system, not just with what we're teaching, but how we're teaching it and why we're teaching it. Those are the questions we ask at Build A Biz Kids.

How can society help more effectively deliver education to ensure future generations don't fall behind?

That is such a huge question, and it's because there are a lot of opinions from people who are entitled to opinions. First off, there's definitely no one right answer, whether that be because of the country that you live in, the innovation that's happening around you, your parental opinions or values. Plus, there is the individual itself and the fact that children can have all different learning abilities we've realised can be massive strengths (if tapped into in the right way). What is it that we need to look at as a society?

I think the first thing is recognising that we're not chasing the right answer, it's about being as loose, flexible and open to questioning ourselves on a regular basis as possible.

Traditionally, one of the things that has been cultivated in a lot of education systems is that the teacher is at the front of the room and are essentially the gatekeeper of knowledge. You have to approach that gatekeeper and appease them by answering questions the way that they want them to be answered. That's why there's multiple choice tests and even if you write an English exam, they're looking for a certain perspective to be delivered. But what we want to shift towards is a system where teachers shouldn't be the smartest person in the room. My goodness, what an expertise threshold we'd be hitting all the time if each teacher is meant to have all the answers!

Instead, teachers should be facilitating discovery, and we should be approaching everything. Even in science there's no right answer. We should be giving kids the space to find the answers, but more importantly, teaching them to ask the right questions. Back in the day, we looked at terms such as horsepower and manpower, because horsepower and manpower were how we measured things. How many men does it take in a factory to produce X number of items? But the reality is we don't live in that world anymore, so we're not trying to pump out manpower from schools now. We're trying to pump out better humans, because with how the world is progressing with AI, robotics and technology, they can do things that we teach kids in school, like math, science, and regurgitating information more efficiently. Machines and AI can do those tasks better, faster and more accurately 24/7 without vacation pay needed. So are those skills really what we need to be pumping out of the education system?

We should be figuring out what it is that makes us human, that AI, robotics and technology can't touch, because that will ultimately be the differentiator in business.

It'll be the differentiator in why we want to spend our dollars in certain places. These careers are also going to be the paths that us as individuals are going to be more fulfilled with.

There are some people who love tackling math, but for the vast majority of us, we want to know that we have done something, and that trickle effect evolved into something really awesome in the world. That can only be done if we really start to home in on what makes us human and then figure out how we can teach and cultivate those skills in the classroom.

What key developments have you seen throughout your career and work with Your Current Future, and where will there be more opportunities for people in the future?

Your Current Future is my personal brand if you will. It's derived from people saying, "what does your current future look like?" This is the idea that based on where you're standing right now, you have a certain future that's mapped out and you can probably predict that. If you're going to university and taking a four-year program, your current future is that you're going to have an MBA in four years and then you'll have certain options available to you. But, you can make different choices today and change what that current future is. I think depending on who we talk to (if I talk about K-12 education), a lot of people in business and commerce, people who perhaps don't have kids and even those who do have kids believe kids in school are fine. We can glaze over it because we don't exactly know what the impact is. People think, "oh gosh, that's 10 years from now that I've got to worry about that." With Your Current Future, it's really positioning it from the other standpoint, not even really talking about education, but more so about bridging the skill labour gap.

It's about hiring and not having as high of a turnover, because you've learned how to find a good fit for your company who can grow with you for the long term and not become obsolete.

Every three to five years technology is evolving and people can't keep up. It's about talking to people from a commerce and economic standpoint to help them think, “wouldn't it be great if we could start hiring people at 16 years old?” Wouldn't that be cool for the kid to be thinking, "I'm valuable already", as opposed to this mindset that so many people have of, "I just want to graduate already." Then they finally graduate and they start thinking, "oh I thought I was done, but I'm not valuable yet because I have to go to college and university. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do, so I'm going to do two years of random stuff and then I'll figure out the four-year program I want to commit to.” Then suddenly, they're still living at home and they're 24, 25, 26 years old and thinking, "finally I've graduated, yes!" Then they realise, "oh, I'm still not quite valuable yet, so I've got to start at the bottom of the rung and work my way up." But why is that? Here's how I like to position this to people. If I were to tell you I am going to pay for your meals and a roof over your head, and for 12 years you can study whatever you want, what would you say? Think of how much you could do with 12 years and not having to pay rent? That is what a child does!

We have them in school for 12 years, so how is it after 12 years they're getting pumped out of the system with lower self-esteem than ever before, not feeling like they're able to contribute to the world and not feeling prepared?

Back in the day, an 18-year-old was saying, "what? You're not married yet? You should be starting a family and buying a house!" We've all of a sudden created a culture of ‘you're not valuable yet’, and I think it's because the world doesn't actually know how to value a human anymore. I think Apple was one of the last big companies to announce you no longer have to have an MBA to apply and work at head office. They're recognising that even with an MBA; people could have that qualification in archaeology and be applying for a sales position! But employers would say, "that's okay, as long as we can check off on the list that you've got an MBA!" That's ridiculous, so what if we instead brought kids up and for 12 years allow them to work on things that matter to the world. When we teach kids about math, it's wouldn’t be because they have to do math class, it would instead be because they've got to figure out how much profit they're going to make because they have lemonade they want to sell.

Let's make education relevant. let's put them into the real world and get them out of this classroom construct. all of a sudden, they can start their lives whenever they want and determine their own value and not let other social mechanisms determine their value.

Why is it crucial to engage the next generation in business practices and social enterprise?

That's a twofold question. Firstly, Why is it so important? I think we can all agree the trajectory of change in the world is moving faster than ever before, and we theorise that it's going to continue to move even faster in the future. If the education we're giving people is not up to speed today, it is not going to be up to speed tomorrow and so forth. There's this thing called the ‘skill labour gap’, and what that means is that we have all of these job vacancies. People are trying to hire people, yet we have all of this unemployment. Why are these people and jobs not matching up? Why are companies complaining they can't find good people? Why are people complaining they can't find a good job? It's because the people who are available have outdated skills or are presenting themselves with only technical skills. The companies have a checklist of only these technical skills, but unfortunately all their applicant’s technical skills were valid five years ago.

Meanwhile, if the company were to actually find someone with those technical skills, that person would become obsolete in three to five years, and that person who finds that they're only value is in technical skills would miss out on so much other value and confidence within themselves.

They have other value they could be presenting that would allow them to have longevity in the company and be able to contribute to more than just the sitting in a cubicle and staying in your lane mentality that is quite prominent today.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

There's so many, and I think good books are relative to what you're most interested in. I could recommend the best book in the world, but if you're not in a space where it matters to you, then it can easily be glossed over! But I would say there is one book that is interesting, whether you're an educator, boss, parent, or someone who's really trying to understand how their brain works. This book helps understand the feeling of self-sabotage, that nagging voice in our head telling you you’re not valuable. It’s one of my favourite books called Mindset by Carol Dweck. She's the godmother who really coined the phrase ‘growth mindset’, and this book on so many different levels is a great way to learn how to start talking to yourself, how to catch yourself when your mind starts talking to you, and then analyse how you are communicating with others and how you could be inadvertently limiting them. This is especially present in society as a whole. If I tell a child, "you're so smart," believe it or not, that's a limiting construct that we're putting on that person. I know that is going to make people think I'm crazy, but kids who are praised for being smart and who tend to get straight A's all through K-12 are actually more likely to cheat on their exams in university because of the stress that they feel! This is because love has only been given to them when they get A's. There's certain things like that I think everyone could reassess, especially with how we were raised on limiting beliefs so we don’t adopt them and prevent that cycle from moving forward with the youth of tomorrow.