Chief Change Officer
#397 Colin Savage: Why Skill Stacking Is the New Lifelong Learning — Part Three
Wed, 28 May 2025
In this final part, we go beyond buzzwords. Colin breaks down how to make AI work for you—not replace you. He explains how human intelligence and machine intelligence can combine to create authentic, enhanced value. From warning students not to cheat with ChatGPT to showing executives how to tailor their own AI strategy, Colin’s message is clear: You don’t need every tool. You need the right ones—and a deeply human way to use them.Key Highlights of Our Interview:You Don’t Need Every Tool—Just the Right Ones“People want a silver bullet—one AI tool that solves everything. But like any good toolbox, the magic lies in how tools are combined and applied, not how many you have.”Skill Stacking Isn’t Hoarding—It’s Connecting“Collecting skills is easy. What matters is how you use them together. Communication, judgment, and emotional intelligence are what give your technical know-how real power.”Human Intelligence = Authenticity“AI might write your speech, but it’s your lived experience that makes it land. Audiences can smell a fake. Human intelligence—time-tested, real, and grounded—is irreplaceable.”The Penalty of Skipping the Work“If a student uses AI to cheat, they fail. If a banker uses it to write a pitch, it could be fraud. As stakes rise, so do the consequences of skipping the human part.”Authentic + Artificial = Amplified“When human intelligence and AI align, you don’t just get automation—you get amplified value. That’s the combo to aim for: authentic, enhanced, and scalable.”_________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Colin Savage --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is skill stacking and why is it important?
I kind of agree or disagree with what you just said. Lifelong learning is about the attitude, in my opinion. Lifelong learning isn't just about acquiring new knowledge. It's about figuring out how you learn best. Some people thrive in classroom settings or in-person workshops, while others prefer self-paced digital formats.
Chapter 2: How does lifelong learning differ from skill stacking?
The methods vary, but the goal is the same, which is to keep growing, to keep learning. When it comes to skill stacking, I see it as something deeper. You mentioned it's about purposefully merging diverse skills to solve complex challenges, and I think you're right. What's often missing isn't the means to learn, We have more access than ever to tools, training, and knowledge.
The gap lies in connecting the dots between those skills and leveraging them in meaningful ways to multiply the impact. In my view, we are living in a tool economy, tool, T-O-O-L. Everything is about the tool. whether it's chat GPT today, Google yesterday, or whatever the next hot thing will be. The mindset is, if you have a problem, there's a tool for that. Need a solution?
Just grab a hammer, a screwdriver. What is the problem? Most of the time, those tools are just solving surface-level symptoms. not addressing the deeper underlying issues. It's like putting a band-aid on a cut without treating the infection. Sure, the immediate problem looks solved, but the root cause persists, and people end up repeating the same mistakes.
Chapter 3: What skills should we focus on for effective skill stacking?
I see this pattern a lot, especially among knowledge workers. They buy into the idea of lifelong learning, sign up for courses, pay for certifications, and stack up all these skills. But they don't actually go anywhere with them. Why? Because the key isn't just acquiring skills,
is in connecting them, applying them to real-life scenarios, case by case, and solving problems with them in an integrated manner. So the missing piece is less about technical skills and more about human skills, what most people call solved skills. Problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication. These are the connective tissue that make skill stacking impactful.
Without them, you're just collecting tools in a toolbox. You don't know how to use effectively. That's where I think the future of lifelong learning needs to focus. Not just teaching new skills, but on helping people build the connections between them and apply them in meaningful, impactful ways. It's not about the tools themselves. It's about what you build with them.
I agree. Yeah. You, you have brought the other hand that I'm not going to say that I forgot. But what I would add to what you're saying, and it's way before in the skill stacking, I differentiate between calling the person and calling the professional all the time. So skill stacking, those are skills back for my. Sure.
Calling the person, that's where lifelong learning for me exists and always will. And so I'm very clear on what's the differentiator. Because what you can do is if you're people like us or those listening that are like us, if you brought a whole crazy
horizon of areas that you're interested in and you've read about, studied, done whatever to build up knowledge, it can be impossible to connect all the dots and make them all skip. I love reading modern African history. I have three shelves of books in my house that are all about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am never going to use that, at least not now.
Oh, I gotta go get that PhD in writing. Or I need to go and this thing that I've been invested in for a long time and I enjoy reading about, and it is a form of learning, doesn't need to be something that I'm going to incorporate into my work life. And I purposely keep it separate.
And that's the same thing of the musical instrument that happened to be gathered in bust, unfortunately, in the back of my room. Those are also skills that I'm learning throughout my life just for my own enjoyment. And I'm totally with you on the law of the instrument, right? If everything, if you've got a hammer and you're good at it, then everything will look like a needle.
I sit on a number of groups where we support startups and tech founders and entrepreneur. And the drive to just leap to the solution, because I think I can sell a widget to somebody rather than understanding to your point, like, is this actually a problem or is this set over something else? It just drives me nuts.
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Chapter 4: How can AI enhance the skill stacking process?
Chapter 5: What are the pitfalls of relying solely on tools?
Chapter 6: Why is human intelligence irreplaceable in the age of AI?
Just grab a hammer, a screwdriver. What is the problem? Most of the time, those tools are just solving surface-level symptoms. not addressing the deeper underlying issues. It's like putting a band-aid on a cut without treating the infection. Sure, the immediate problem looks solved, but the root cause persists, and people end up repeating the same mistakes.
I see this pattern a lot, especially among knowledge workers. They buy into the idea of lifelong learning, sign up for courses, pay for certifications, and stack up all these skills. But they don't actually go anywhere with them. Why? Because the key isn't just acquiring skills,
is in connecting them, applying them to real-life scenarios, case by case, and solving problems with them in an integrated manner. So the missing piece is less about technical skills and more about human skills, what most people call solved skills. Problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication. These are the connective tissue that make skill stacking impactful.
Without them, you're just collecting tools in a toolbox. You don't know how to use effectively. That's where I think the future of lifelong learning needs to focus. Not just teaching new skills, but on helping people build the connections between them and apply them in meaningful, impactful ways. It's not about the tools themselves. It's about what you build with them.
I agree. Yeah. You, you have brought the other hand that I'm not going to say that I forgot. But what I would add to what you're saying, and it's way before in the skill stacking, I differentiate between calling the person and calling the professional all the time. So skill stacking, those are skills back for my. Sure.
Calling the person, that's where lifelong learning for me exists and always will. And so I'm very clear on what's the differentiator. Because what you can do is if you're people like us or those listening that are like us, if you brought a whole crazy
horizon of areas that you're interested in and you've read about, studied, done whatever to build up knowledge, it can be impossible to connect all the dots and make them all skip. I love reading modern African history. I have three shelves of books in my house that are all about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am never going to use that, at least not now.
Oh, I gotta go get that PhD in writing. Or I need to go and this thing that I've been invested in for a long time and I enjoy reading about, and it is a form of learning, doesn't need to be something that I'm going to incorporate into my work life. And I purposely keep it separate.
And that's the same thing of the musical instrument that happened to be gathered in bust, unfortunately, in the back of my room. Those are also skills that I'm learning throughout my life just for my own enjoyment. And I'm totally with you on the law of the instrument, right? If everything, if you've got a hammer and you're good at it, then everything will look like a needle.
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Chapter 7: How can we apply AI in practical scenarios?
So you've been diving deep into AI lately. As someone with a strong background in change management and leadership, how do you see this technology shaping the future of change management and skill stacking? What's your vision for where we're headed?
That's a fantastic and a fascinating comment. I'm starting now because I'm not a very quiet person, often to my detriment, but I'm starting now to get people asking, Hey, let's see, you're doing this stuff in particularly generative AI. I'm very clear that I'm not a person. I don't build these things. I don't know the computer science behind it. I'm purely a practitioner of the tools.
I get people asking a lot, Hey, could you do a short little LinkedIn learning course for 30 minutes on the top 10 degenerative AI tools or here's anything to this. I'm all for it. I think it's a good idea. But what I often find too is the people that are asking me or those that are very early on in their technical journey of learning. So they're maybe late adopters, let's call them.
They just want a silver bullet. They want, oh, what's the one tool I can use, we can do everything. And I have to constantly pull back and I have to remind them all, AI is like anything else. It's going to be a combination of tools. It's gonna be interdisciplinary.
So you're gonna need not just an understanding of the AI tools and the skills that are required to use those tools, but you're gonna need to know, you're gonna need to understand strategy, how business development skills work. You're gonna need to know how human resources, the team leadership, all these kind of things.
You're gonna need to know all of the soft skills that are always gonna be fundamental and important. And then how does these, how does a MIT of your AI toolkit help you in individual instance? And for example, right now I'm working with a human resources consulting company. We don't really know how AI could then.
What you could do is if you use three, three or four different tool, you could help the company build its own GPT. feed it with its own policies. You could build a tool for HR professionals that said, here's where all our policies are. Here's where all of our templates are.
So instead of reading through 400 pages of documentation, you can use tools to then figure out, identify the policy that they may have to help or contouring, figure out some of the path forward, and then put together a plan that you as a professional are then bringing to review.
with your expertise and those interdisciplinary skills, and then present to senior leadership and say, this is what happened. This is what I think we should do. And this is the underlying evidence for what I want. And you'll be able to do that in a day. rather than taking two weeks.
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