Bill Kerr: It may seem counterintuitive in a hyper-competitive economy, but stepping off the fast track can be a catalyst for growth and development. This is especially true for young adults. Historically, such experiences were markers of privilege—from the grand tour to the gap year. The more recent service-oriented variety, like the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and City Year, is also well established. With postsecondary education under the microscope, there’s an increasing interest in alternatives to classroom study. Immersion in an unfamiliar setting can develop cultural awareness, tolerance, empathy, and resilience—qualities that more employers are recognizing as essential. Is it possible to translate the benefits of experiential learning and sabbaticals to make them available to more people in more settings?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today has crafted a career out of her deep study of what it means to step off the beaten path. As a student here, Abby Falik drew on her syncopated undergraduate experience to write a prize-winning social enterprise business plan. That plan would inform her launch of Global Citizen Year, a nonprofit focused on cultivating young leaders through overseas “apprenticeships.” After a decade at the helm, Abby recently took a break of her own and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Emerson Collective. We’ll talk about Global Citizen Year, its evolution and impact, and why such alternative models are especially relevant amid global crises. We’ll also talk about Abby’s continued study of leadership training, skills development, civic engagement, and the power of the pause. Welcome to the podcast, Abby.

Abby Falik: Thank you, Bill. I’m so excited to be here.

Kerr: Maybe just start with a little bit of your background and what you’ve been up to.

Falik: I had an unusual trajectory that brought me to HBS. I hadn’t ever worked in the private sector, and I came to the school on a mission to develop confidence and skills and networks that I wasn’t developing in other ways. I knew that I was here in some way to reimagine education and to forge new educational pathways for young people, and had the experience at HBS of taking courses, and reading cases, and developing relationships with professors as mentors that all came together in what became a business plan for launching Global Citizen Year.

Kerr: Yeah, and maybe 10, 12 years ago, social enterprise was still at a relatively young stage at business schools, and even more broadly. So you were kind of at the cusp of a new movement that way.

Falik: Yeah. It was very clear to me that my bottom line was purpose and that I sensed that the world was actually moving in a direction where even the term “social entrepreneur” would at some point become redundant. Social change has to happen at the interface of the sectors—that it’s not the nonprofit sector alone that’s going to drive impact and change. Increasingly, every sector of society recognizes they have a role to play in creating opportunity and moving the world in the direction of what it’s really trying to become.

Kerr: Yeah. Well, let’s talk a little bit about Global Citizen Year, which was your project over the last decade. And maybe let’s go all the way back to the beginning, and the business plan that you wrote while a student here. Tell us a little bit about that inspiration, and what models were you drawing upon?

Falik: Global Citizen Year was inspired by my own educational experience. I’d had early experiences traveling with my parents that had taken me out of my comfort zone and given me a sense of the world being huge, wildly unequal, and it gave me an awareness of my own privilege in the access to the educational opportunities that I had. So by the time I finished high school, I was desperate to take some time to figure out who I was and who I was becoming in the world. And I remember calling the Peace Corps, and the Peace Corps said, “Go to college. We’ll see you in four years,” and feeling quite frustrated that there wasn’t an entry point, a pathway, for me at that stage to step off the track and fill in the gaps that had been left by my formal education. I ended up going straight to college, and after two years, felt really antsy in the lecture hall. I was interested in testing what I was learning in the classroom in the real world. So I left school for a year, with a backpack and a book of Portuguese verbs. I headed to Brazil and had the most formative educational experience of my life—and ironically, it had nothing to do with my formal education. Spent a semester living and working in Brazil and then another in Central America, in Nicaragua, and came back to college suddenly on fire with a sense of purpose. I knew who I was when I was outside of my comfort zone. I knew what woke me up in the morning when there was no alarm clock, and what I wanted to learn when there was no syllabus. And it was that experience that really seeded the insight that a formative experience beyond our comfort zone shapes young people in ways the world needs most.

Kerr: At a time when most young people use the campus bar to fill in that gap, I’m glad that you looked abroad. Was Stanford supportive of you taking this journey to Brazil?

Falik: They were, and I’m eternally grateful. It was very easy to take time off. And the catch was that I came back—I’d not been enrolled in any formal program or study abroad—but I made the case that my year of lived experience should count for credit. And I share that because, in hindsight, that was a very important part of my own learning journey, was to recognize that the things I was learning outside of the classroom context were as important to my learning and development—and as worthy of credential—as the things I could have ever learned in a classroom context. And so as I now think about reimagining pathways, educational pathways, that better align what young people most need to learn with what the world needs, part of that is thinking in new ways about what we give credit for.

Kerr: You know, you mentioned reaching out to the Peace Corps. Can you describe a little bit of when you were developing your idea for Global Citizen Year, so back at that business plan stage, what was the value that was typically ascribed to being a part of one of these service programs?

Falik: When I was 18, I remember feeling like it was ironic that millions of young people are recruited into military service, into religious service, but there was no path that was focused on a civilian, secular learning experience in the service of figuring out who you are and how you want to use your one wild and precious life in the service of something beyond yourself. So I became a student of these models. I’m fascinated by rites of passage that have been core to cultures and religions and groups of humans forever, where there’s a recognition that there’s developmental magic in the transition between dependence and independence, childhood and adulthood, high school and what comes next. And yet, in modern, Western cultures, we’re in this hustle, this hurry toward some abstract finish line, that discourages anybody from slowing down, lest they get off track. There’s FOMO—there’s a fear of missing out or getting behind—when in reality, I believe that the fear of missing out will actually come if you have just continued along the course without pausing, to step out of the water you’re swimming in, to reflect on what matters to you, what your intentions and goals are for your own life, and how to define that life on your own terms.

Kerr: So it sounds like there is both a benefit that goes to the place that’s being served, but also in your mind, maybe even a more significant benefit that goes to the person providing the service. In fact, if I put you on the spot here, Abby, and the mic’s rolling, which of those is the greater of the benefits received?

Falik: In my experience, both personally and over the years working with thousands of young people through Global Citizen Year, the emphasis must be on a young person’s learning and growth. At that age, the opportunity to be humbled in a context that is unfamiliar, to see yourself in a new light and through other lenses, to stay somewhere long enough that you’re forced to ask deeper questions and move through the layers of preconceived ideas about what another culture or context actually might be. I see it as a humbling, as a foundational learning experience, that sets you up with the skills and perspectives to eventually have an impact. I think of alums who have completed their Global Citizen Year, and they come back, and I’ll ask, “What did you learn through your eight months living and working in this community in Senegal?” And I’ll never forget, one of our earliest fellows came back. He said, “You know, I learned how little I knew, and I learned how to ask a really good question.” And to me, that felt like success. So often, we’re focused on service learning, and I think we actually need to flip the notion, to think about learning how to serve.

Kerr: Abby, so you’ve started to introduce the Global Citizen Year and some of its operations. But tell us a bit more about the program’s first decade, maybe up until the pandemic, and really what set it apart.

Falik: So the things that really set the design apart were, first, a focus on leadership, a selective application process, an application that was rigorous but didn’t look or feel like college applications. We didn’t look at test scores or grades. Instead, we were looking for a real spark of potential. We interviewed students to figure out, are you the kind of person who gathered resources to solve a problem, who could rally your peers to follow you? Were you running away from something, or were you running toward this opportunity? So developed a really thoughtful selection process to look for the young people who would benefit most from the experience we provided. It was a focus on learning, as opposed to serving or volunteering. It was a focus on access. So we had a need-blind admissions process. And over the 12 years that I was at the helm as CEO, we raised and deployed $65 million in financial aid. Eighty percent of our participants received nearly full financial aid in order to join us, which was one of the things that I feel deeply proud of, that we were able to make these experiences more accessible to a more representative subset of really high-achieving, high-potential young leaders. And then the final piece was a focus on a fellowship—that this was not just a one-off experience, but this was the foundation for the rest of your life. This was entry into a community of like-minded change-makers who would accompany you on your journey as you moved into college, into careers. But really the notion of building a critical mass of young people who were connected to each other and to a purpose beyond themselves.

Kerr: And it sounds like, Abby, this was about taking individuals who are already leaning in that leadership direction and who maybe had even been very good leaders, and then helping them to become great through this humility, through the process of learning to ask the right question, and then making this network around them. It wasn’t meant to be something remedial or to help out difficult situations to get a rebound.

Falik: A lot of those students who found us didn’t necessarily think of themselves as leaders. There was a core premise around leadership being a practice and not a position. I think societally we put all this time and attention on leadership as an arrival point, as a salary, as a title. It’s something that’s conferred upon you down the line, but our interest is in helping young people see that, as soon as your own power to create a ripple of impact or influence around you, you can begin the practice of your own leadership journey.

Kerr: So, Abby, I guess in my mind, one could imagine a year abroad as being both in Paris or in London or in a very remote location. What did you find worked best with Global Citizen Year, and what were some of the activities or even sectors that people were engaged in while they were abroad?

Falik: The mission of the organization was to help young people have experiences living alongside the global majority. Two-thirds of study abroad still goes to Western Europe. And in our experience, the idea that young people could have an opportunity to live alongside and learn from communities about how the vast majority of the world still lives was really what fueled how we thought about geographies and placements and training. We had programs set up in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, networks of families who took students in to live with them. So a lot of learning through the home-stay experience. And then apprenticeships with local organizations that were working to improve educational outcomes, advanced public health, economic development. And again, our students were there as what we call “apprentices” as opposed to volunteers—really there as learners rather than doers. But the range of experiences was broad, but the common theme was: Leave your comfort zone, see the water you were born into from afar, grapple with bigger questions about what the world needs and how you might line up who you are with what you’re here to do, and to build relationships, to stay longer and go deeper, to learn to speak to people in their own language. And to have experiences that go beyond the fly-by “voluntourism” or the quick in and out that is much more typical in student travel.

Kerr: And did applicants get a chance to select among options, or did you have to sign up to go wherever Global Citizen Year was going to place you?

Falik: You were allowed to share your preferences, and then we had an algorithm that would match you with the context that wasn’t necessarily what you thought you wanted, but it was what in our perspective we felt you might need.

Kerr: Great. Well, unfortunately, the pandemic turned many things upside down. And I can imagine a program that’s dedicated to helping people go abroad got significantly influenced by the travel restrictions. How did you respond to Covid?

Falik: March 2020, we staged an elaborate emergency evacuation to get our fellows home safely and quickly. In many contexts, they were on the last flights out of their communities. And soon after everybody was back and we all debriefed, our team recognized that it was going to be a while until anybody got on an airplane again. But this didn’t mean hold and hover. This actually meant that there were young people around the world desperate for connection, for community, for opportunities to connect with people like them. So our team reoriented our time and attention to develop what became Global Citizen Year’s Academy, which was an intensive leadership course, delivered virtually, that for the first time we were able to open up to young people from around the world. So during two years of Covid time, when nobody could travel, we enrolled more than a 1,000 young people from a 100 countries worldwide to ask big questions with each other, to be connected to a curriculum, a cohort, coaching. We thought of it as an opportunity for them to find their people, their purpose, and their power to drive impact in the communities where they live around the world, not just now, but over the course of their lives.

Kerr: That’s great. Difficult transition, but I’m glad you also found some new opportunities there. I want to continue, though, with the career transition that you take. And you actually followed a bit of your own advice and you took a sabbatical. Tell us about that personal experience—coming 10, 12 years after your MBA had ended—to take a new break.

Falik: There’s power in a pause, there is juice and potential in transitions when we pay attention to them, and when we don’t move mindlessly from one experience into the next. In the summer of 2022, as I was stepping out of my operating role at Global Citizen Year, I recognized that it was an opportunity for me to take my own advice, to take some time to redefine the questions I was living in. What have I just learned? What am I here for? What am I called to do next? The framework we use with young people on the cusp of adulthood is helping them define their questions, find their teachers, leave their comfort zone, and reflect. And that was exactly the curriculum I tasked myself with in this sabbatical period. Defining the questions: What have I learned? Who am I becoming? What am I here for? Finding my teachers. This was an opportunity for what I see as a wisdom tour. So going back to meet with professors who knew me in college, with my first boss and my first employee. Some of my greatest teachers in this process have been my own kids, who are now six and seven. And in this experience of defining my questions, finding my teachers, and then leaving my comfort zone, doing things that sort of left me a little bit off kilter. I picked up a guitar for the first time. I did a silent retreat that allowed me to re-encounter myself in this transitional stage. And then the final piece of any transition process is rigorous reflection. I began a process of what’s called “morning pages.” And so the first thing I do when I wake up is write three pages to myself for myself, longhand, with a pen and paper. And the idea is that you’re writing for nobody other than yourself. And I have written now a book that nobody will ever read, but it was just an opportunity for me to clear out what was happening in my mind and in my heart, and to develop a more intimate and connected relationship with my own process of understanding where I was in this transition, independent from anybody else’s expectations or thinking about it.

Kerr: And you mentioned you had the family, and you had young children, and I suspect some listeners would’ve thought that you could do one of these sabbaticals when you maybe didn’t have children, you’re able to go and live abroad in Ecuador for a little while. How did it work with your family? And is it something that you see as an advantage or as a challenge when you’re trying to do one of these reboots, when we’re trying to rethink about life ahead?

Falik: I think we sometimes feel paralyzed, because we set the bar so high that if I can’t take a year-long sabbatical somewhere halfway around the world, is it even worth doing? And in reality, there is power in any pause. But it’s really just about disrupting the habits that allow us to be more present in our lives, bring fresh attention in a way that can create a habit around reflection that doesn’t need to be something that happens in some indefinite timeframe in the future when all the stars align. I’m a big believer that what we practice every day matters more than what we do every once in a while, and that there are ways to build self-reflection and more conscious awareness into our days, and into our lives.

Kerr: So that’s great. Let me build upon another thing. You described some activities that were very exploratory, like learning to play the guitar, alongside other activities that were very purposeful in trying to think about who you are, what you’re seeking to accomplish. How do you advise the mix of those things? And do all sabbaticals or time away need to have elements of both where there’s trying to expand who Abby Falik is, the types of things that she’s engaged in, versus trying to identify, “Here’s a set of hypotheses as to what my next big thing could be and how I evaluate those?”

Falik: More important than having hypotheses is defining the questions that we’re living within. And for me, it’s about knowing what those questions are: What am I trying to learn at this moment? Who can I learn from in this transition? And how do I have experiences that take me out of my comfort zone and into my stretch? Our culture values answers more than questions, clarity, and certainty and confidence more than humility and vulnerability. So it’s a stretch in and of itself to sit with the questions, having faith that we will live our way into the answers. There’s a beautiful quote about carrying the questions, like they are books written in a very foreign language, and carrying the questions with the patience to know that over time you will someday find your way living into the answers. And I think we can all look back on our lives and see that there were questions cooking at every juncture, at every transitional stage. We can never connect the dots looking forward, but we can always connect them when we look back. And in some way, if we can look back at our younger self and say, “Have patience with the questions you’re carrying,” it reminds us that at every given moment in time, we can remind ourselves of the same.

Kerr: You’re now an entrepreneur in residence at the Emerson Collective. So tell us a little bit about this current stage, what you’re working on, and what do you see as being next?

Falik: I feel such urgency to define new pathways for how young people learn who they are, what the world needs, and how they’re going to drive impact at the intersection. Building and leading Global Citizen Year was an extraordinary experience and opportunity for me, and the next step is thinking about how we can use what we learned there in a laboratory as a blueprint for a model that could scale to the size of what’s needed. How do we shape perspectives, practice, policy? How do we change culture? How do we embed a rite of passage in communities around the world? How do we change a life stage so that young humans are more in touch with a purpose beyond themselves at the moment in their lives when they have the maturity to leave home, but they haven’t yet fixed their values or identity?

Kerr: So this could expand beyond just launching another new venture into ways that you can catalyze existing organizations to change for the future.

Falik: The only way that solutions can scale to the size of the problems that need to be solved is through the catalytic and collaborative opportunities across sectors and industries. And I’m very interested in thinking about, what’s the role of business? What’s the role of higher education? What’s the role of the media in coming together around a better alignment between what young people most need to learn, and where and how we’re creating pathways for them to learn those things? And that’s not the job of one nonprofit alone. That is a collective opportunity that I believe our future actually depends on.

Kerr: So I think we’ve kind of grasped a sense of the spirit that we are hoping to foster. Can you say a little bit more about some specific skills that you would like young people to have in greater abundance than they do right now?

Falik: I’ve developed a framework that I call the “REAL 21st-century skills.” REAL stands for resilience, empathy, adaptability, and leadership—leadership as a practice, not as a position. And when we think about our traditional approach to education, it has not changed in generations. We’re still teaching to tests that robots literally can pass. And so, in a world that has never changed faster but will never change this slowly again, we need to prepare young people to learn how to learn, to rebound and fail—not to check boxes and collect gold stars and conform within the bounds of what’s expected of them—but we need hungry, adaptable, self-aware learners who are able to bridge across distance and difference, and who have the agency and sense of purpose that’s needed to build meaningful lives, and to align their lives with impact.

Kerr: One possible big lever here would be policy. Are you engaged in the policy realm? Or do you have ways you might suggest education reform to embrace more of these types of skills and pathways?

Falik: I envisioned in a day when, not unlike in business school—business school used to recruit students straight out of college and over time recognized that they value students who’ve had real lived experience before they arrive. And I am convinced that, at some point in the near future, colleges will recognize that they similarly should require lived experience before admitting students. So it will be the case that kids don’t begin their higher education until they know what questions they’re asking and what they’re there to answer. We’ve put so much emphasis on where you go to school—as opposed to where the emphasis needs to be is why are you going and how are you going to approach the experience? So there’s an opportunity to work with colleges and higher education in changing how they think about that and that transition. And there are also policy opportunities to think in new ways about what federal financial aid covers, and whether we value seat time and course hours, or actually competencies and the lift experience that develop some of these real skills that we know are actually what equip a young person to thrive in today’s world.

Kerr: A number of our listeners are also coming from the private sector, and many are HR leaders and general managers. Do you have any specific recommendations for them as they think about sabbaticals, opportunities to be immersive in their work, not waiting for education reform or universities to change their playbook, but what they could do to perhaps harness some of these benefits?

Falik: We’re starting to see a lot of companies change the way they are reviewing applications and thinking about hiring. More and more companies no longer require a college degree, which I think is in incredibly important as we think about access and equity, diversity of lived experience, and recognizing that there are experiences that humans may bring to the table that your talent pipeline might bring that are not easily captured by a college degree or traditional credential. So I encourage people who are in the business of identifying and recruiting talent to think in new ways about how you spot it, about how you read a resume, about what experiences and skills you value, that it may be the person who had the courage to step off the path and immerse themselves in a foreign context and have a set of experiences that were not predefined or highly programmed or highly structured that equip them to be your most valuable asset in the culture that you’re building. I think there are also opportunities for the corporate sector, the private sector, to invest upstream in creating new pathways. One of my concerns right now, higher education is in total disruption. Fifty percent of current high school students and their parents are questioning the value of college, and for good reason—just 3 percent of college students today report having had a transformative experience of college, of higher education. And this statistic stuns me: Ninety-six percent of college presidents say that their graduates are ready for the workforce, and 11 percent of employers agree. And so, at a time when we are rethinking the value of college, its relevance, its impact, there is a role for the private sector in thinking about new pathways. Now Google has done an incredible thing with the modules that develop hard skills that they then look at as credentials and as equivalent to a college degree in their hiring. But here’s the catch: If we leave this disruption to the market alone, what we’ll end up with is a lot of online courses and modules that develop hard skills that are easy to teach, easy to measure, easy to scale; and what’s lost are a whole set of human capacities that I believe are even more important to thriving in contribution in the future. And so we need new pathways—not just those that develop hard, measurable skills, but experiential paths that help humans develop the skills that are uniquely human. I think of it as the human technology of self-awareness, adaptability, and agency. And I think there is an opportunity for people in leadership positions across all sectors to recognize that the way we’ve approached education historically needs to change, and that we all have a role to play in recognizing that the future of school won’t look anything like school.

Kerr: So, Abby, stretching back over Global Citizen Year and the other programs that are out there, is there a way to credential this so that it’s recognizable by employers, that it’s something that they see again and again as they’re able to articulate what that means?

Falik: We need new types of credentials. College degrees have been a shorthand, but they actually signal very little about what you’ve learned, about who you are, about the experiences you’ve had. What it says is, you did your seat time and you passed some exams. And I am very interested in helping to lead us into this new era of new types of more descriptive credentials that reflect competencies, experiences, and abilities to do things that we know are power skills in the new economy, but that may be obscured by traditional ways of measuring and giving credit.

Kerr: Overall, how do you communicate the impact of this program?

Falik: We founded Global Citizen Year in 2010, and in the first decade supported 1,000 diverse young leaders in having an immersive, formative global experience. And we've worked with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School in developing a rigorous long-term assessment of what students have learned both during their Global Citizen Year, and then how that learning expresses itself over the course of time. And what we have seen is that this formation experience shapes empathy, agency, and a global perspective that gives a young person a sense of purpose that becomes a compass that guides the decisions they make about higher education and as they move into careers.

Kerr: Abby, as a final question, it’s been a pleasure to welcome you back to campus. And I want to maybe close with you having one or two bits of advice for the new young leaders, perhaps some of whom are in their second year of business school right now, or their adjacent in the area working in other capacities. What would you say to them about the decade that lies ahead?

Falik: I think about the sticky note I have on my laptop that I see every morning when I open my computer, and it says, “If the path is clear, you’re on someone else’s.” We live in a time when there is so much pressure to conform. We’ve got very narrow definitions of success. We are living often out loud on social media, where we pay a lot of attention to everybody’s polished, performative stories—often at the expense of the messiness and complexity of our real, authentic inner lives. And so my encouragement to young people and people everywhere is to recognize that the path worth pursuing, that the way to engage and be most alive in this extraordinary lifetime we are given, is to learn yourself, to learn what those desires are, to define success on your own terms, to have patience, to carry the questions, to know that you have to go slow to go fast. There’s a beautiful Mary Oliver poem that says, “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine travel before he became St. Augustine?” So my advice is to have patience, carry the questions, and know that the path worth forging is a path that’s not yet clear to you. But have the courage, patience, and conviction that you are exactly where you’re meant to be.

Kerr: Abby, thanks so much for coming today.

Falik: Thank you, Bill.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.