Compounding Capability, Learning Infrastructure, and the Architecture of Success with Hana Dhanji

Welcome to studying law around the world I'm Claudio Claus in each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life we talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths whether you're planning. To study abroad. Thinking about working in another legal system or just curious about how law works around the world? This podcast is for you. Today I have the opportunity to interview Anna Dungy. She's the founder and CEO of Cognito Trex Inc and enterprise learning infrastructure company focused on building structured Rd. based workforce readiness systems for complex organizations. She began her career in international law and diplomacy, training and practicing at leading global law firms including Sullivan and Cromwell and Hogan Lovells across New York, London and Dubai. Working with all these elite institutions have shaped her understanding of how performance is engineered resistance, not talented alone. Thank you so much for making the time to be here with us today. Thank you so much for having me, Claudia. I appreciate. It and you start off our podcast, I'd love for you to tell us a little more about your story, especially on the point that you trained and practiced that firms across New York, London, Dubai. I wanted to ask you, what did these environments teach you about performance pressure? Yeah, it's a it's a great question. Working in New York, London and Dubai taught me a lot about elite environments and it was really clear that they don't run alone on talent. Structure matters. So critically to performance. Everyone is intelligent, everyone is ambitious. The differentiator really isn't diet hue, it's whether the system around an individual reinforces judgment, prioritization and accountability. So in high pressure environments, you can see very quickly when expectations are clear, feedback loops are tight, and standards are nonnegotiable. When that happens, performance rises because expectations are clear. But when those elements are inconsistent, even really brilliant people will struggle to perform. And that observation stayed with me, and it shifted how I think about professional growth, not as a matter of motivation, but as a matter of system design. That's so interesting. It makes me think a lot about the different opportunities that I have work wise so far. I had the opportunity to start my career in a, you know, Land Registry office where where systems were in place, where it had a very senior, not only age, but really in deep work experience and expertise. Boss and and you really shaped many, many things a bunch of today of how I work on the things I do, and I think that that plays such a big role. I I really love you mentioning that and going forward INVISA leading situations. As you said, there's a lot of talent, but I'm, I'm curious specifically in the legal field, in your experience, what separates those lawyers who builds, you know, durable compounding careers from those who plateau and burnout? Yeah. Lawyers who sustain performance over decades really understand this concept you referred to called compounding. They don't just complete tasks, they build judgment, they build expertise and they build credibility overtime. And they do this by refining decision making. They seek environments specifically where feedback is structured and not random. It's through that iterative process that they develop what works, what doesn't, and they find their approach to specific dynamics. Plateauing, on the other hand, often happens when learning becomes only episodic. So mistakes get replicated without feedback, without corrections. And then when you get training, only then do you realize perhaps you were doing something wrong, but by that point the muscle around the incorrect procedures or the errors has already been reinforced. Now durable careers are really built when learning is embedded into the workflow on a consistent basis, when every deal, every dispute, every client interaction becomes part of structured development. And that insight really became central to how I think about organizations more broadly. Training has to accompany the lived daily experience. It cannot be something that feels separate from the work that you accomplish. And if you can embed training in the day-to-day work, you actually improve exponentially the performance of otherwise very hard working, smart lawyers. That behavior changes more quickly and sustainably. Amazing. I really appreciate you sharing those and, and I want to dive a little bit more and learn a little more about you. So I, I saw here that you later moved into executive coaching and we've spoke about this in the podcast before. So I wanted to ask you a little more, you know, how did you or, or what did you begin to notice about leadership performance that those traditional legal training environments did not really teach it explicitly especially? Yeah, so an executive coach and I got this really rare opportunity to get first hand insight into what really high performers in the legal profession struggle with and high performers in general struggle with in corporate environments. And what I found really surprised me. High performers, as we know, rarely lack intelligence and they rarely lack drive. What they lack more often than not when they're hitting roadblocks is structural reinforcement. So in law firms especially, development is often assumed to happen through exposure, who just get enough reps in on the deal, you know, sit in on enough client meetings and you'll figure it out. You work on sophisticated matters, you watch partners, you absorb through osmosis. And that can work, but only up to a point, as I'm sure you've seen in your own work and with other lawyers you've spoken to. Exposure itself in this away is very inconsistent. Feedback is uneven, expectations are implicit rather than articulated, and learning seems to become dependent on which partner you happen to work with. In other words, your growth and your professional development over time is left to chance rather than systematically reinforced. And that creates variability over time and often in ways that are quite biased. So I began noticing over time through my coaching practice that firms and enterprises rely heavily on individual excellence, whether that's partner brilliance or senior leadership instinct. But they often under invest in the architecture that makes excellence reproducible at every level across all different types of employees or learners. And this insight in particular, is what informed cognitive crafts how do we create standardized, recurring, reproducible forms of excellence across the board at each level of seniority within enterprises or law firms? That's quite, quite interesting. Was there a moment when you realized that advising individuals wasn't enough considering that you just mentioned is, you know, there's this structure really makes such a big difference. And Speaking of that, you know, how did that make you once you build something larger? Yeah. I mean, I love working with my clients. I really enjoyed the one to one aspect. I think there's something incredibly compelling from a report building perspective and deeply satisfying, but it's not scalable. The kind of changes I wanted to make, you can refine the individual as much as possible. You can give them tools, build confidence, build skill sets, but they're always going to be operating within structures. And if the those structures don't change, there's only so much in individuals own efforts can produce. So at some point I realized that advising individuals inside fragile systems has limits. You can coach someone to be resilient, you can sharpen their judgment, but if the organization itself lacks structured capability development, then the friction will continue. So I became more interested overtime in designing environments rather than advising simply within them. And so Cognitive Trex was born from that shift, moving from individual performance optimization to institutional capability architecture. And we're still exploring, since we're early stages, we're still very much exploring what that looks like in law firms in particular. Amazing. Sounds very, very exciting. I think that some of the articles I've read before they, they have some of the things that you say that describe learning as an infrastructure rather than content. I really appreciated something that you wrote about like micro learning and how that plays the role. But it's not always the best way for learning everything. And thinking about the context of law firms or legal departments, what does that distinction mean to you or or in this context that you found yourself working? Yeah, learning is infrastructure. That's such an important term. And in many organizations, you're absolutely right, learning is treated as programming. So that looks like courses, workshops, compliance modules, some of which might be micro learning in nature, others may be long 2 hour video presentations you sit down and watch in one go. But infrastructure is different from programming. Infrastructure means capability is sequenced, so you build on skill one and then you add skill 2, skill 3. So it becomes a sort of compounding series of skills that increase your performance capacity. Infrastructure also means that reinforcement is deliberate. You don't get exposure once and then you're done. You get reinforcement over time so that more of the information is really starts to sink in and gets applied to your daily exposure. Knowledge is also something that in infrastructure will survive turnover. We often see, especially in law firms, that there's one person who knows how to do all the deals or has had a lot of exposure to certain client. They leave and suddenly the the group is panicked. Knowledge is about creating the infrastructure that allows those individual interactions and the knowledge that individual people carry to remain in the system and be part of the overall learning infrastructure means that standards are visible, progression is structured, and that there's predictable pathways to your progression. For law firm in particular, that might mean moving beyond the continuous legal education, so Cle credits as a compliance requirement and moving towards structured progression tied to roll complexity and judgment maturity. So instead of thinking about learning as a checkbox exercise, how many hours of equity, diversity, inclusion programming would you watch and how many hours of, you know, skill development did you watch? How much is what you are learning improving your judgment in certain situations? This is why we have things like AI role play or we present present to our clients when we're creating structured modules, the most difficult scenarios. Do you understand what steps to take in trying to solve that problem? So we're looking at learning as application, not learning as completion. And that's the big difference. When learning becomes infrastructure in a successful way, performance becomes predictable. That's the measurement. Can you put any associate into that position and get the same predictable outcome? Because when variability is high, it means that there's no underlying infrastructure. Very, very interesting. It sounds like a lot more people, maybe it's succeeding this profession if we just had that structure and infrastructure in place in most workplaces. I often talk about how this is a profession where there's a high amount of people who just choose to leave it entirely different than, for example, doctors in the in the medical field. And it's been interesting to you to observe some trends or listening to this resonates in so many ways. For lawyers who feel their growth is becoming fragmented, what structure adjustments, not just personal habits should they consider? Yeah, I think this is an important responsibility that every lawyer needs to take. It's one thing to be evaluated in structured performance reviews. It's another thing to really sit down and think about what skills you want to develop at each year of call like so at each stage in your progression as a junior associate, mid level senior and to audit your own development. And the question that you need to ask at each stage is are you accumulating years of experience or are you actually becoming more sophisticated in your performance? Are you repeating at the same level or are you getting the skills needed to take on increasing levels of responsibility? And we call this compounding capability. The second thing they should ask or you should ask is my in the right environment. And the type of environment you want to look for is one that provides structured feedback and defined progression expectations. In other words, are you performing at the level of a first year at the top 10%? Are you at the middle or you are you at the bottom? And if you can't calibrate where you are in your performance capacity, if you don't understand whether you've mastered the first year level skills, it's hard to go into your successive stages of career progression and feel confident. Am I a successful 4th year? Am I competent 6th year 8 at year 8? Is it fair for me to raise my hand and ask to be a partner? Have I mastered those skills? So you always want to audit compounding capabilities along the way. And the third thing that one should think about long term is whether the institution creates opportunities for that infrastructure that we talk about. Is there institutional fragility or is there actual structural support for your long term success at the firm? Because some lawyers can successfully build careers within institutions, but others are going to have to build the institutions themselves in order to succeed. And you've got to decide, am I in an environment that's fragile, or do I need to create an environment that can actually support where I'm going? And if you get that wrong, you'll invest years in certain places that never reward your extra effort, never recognize the the work you're taking on don't necessarily give you the exposure you need. And suddenly you find that you've ended up mediocre in a profession where you really could have excelled if the right support had been. There amazing, very important institutional point where institutions can take the the necessary measures, but then also in another point where where you as a professional take responsibility over your career and and see what has to to be done in regards to your development. Thinking about you just founded Cognito Tracks to address those structural gaps in how organizations are building capacity. I'm curious to know what the problem are you most focused on solving right now. I'm tricks is interesting because we currently have a learning OS platform that allows us to bring in interactive learning to make it more engaging, to ensure that when training is offered, it's through reinforcement. It's something that can be applied directly to work right away, but mostly from a high level perspective, Cognito Trex is really focused on helping regulate it and complex organizations like law firms modernized in general, how they build capability. And in the first instance, you need a strong set of learning modules and courses, but how you alley them as equally important. So we know that many enterprises and platforms, they have content, they have compliance reporting, but what they lack is cohesion, structured pathways and other words that connect learning to roll expectations and performance outcomes. So how does this learning get leveraged? In other words, we help design learning environments that make development deliberate rather than accidental. So if you're a first year associate, what onboarding needs to happen? If you're a second year associate, what progressive skill development do you need and how do you measure it? What kinds of increasing levels of complexity should you be taking on and how is that complexity monitored? Is how do we evaluate mastery, in other words, to give you progressively more challenging work. So this includes content modernization. From our perspective, we help modernize content so that it is more engaging festival and reinforce able. We work on structured sequencing part A, Part B, part C in year 1 and then in year 2 ABC. And we were we work as well on interactive scenario based learning, which is the best way to learn through through real world scenarios. Over time, we plan to focus a lot more as well on readiness. So how organizations assess and govern capability and high consequence environments. So right now a lot of learning is just simply focused on completion rates. Did you sit through the training? Yes or no? And then the only real evaluation is did you take the quiz at the end? And usually the questions are things you could have answered without watching the video. Readiness is a measurement that's completely different. Readiness is about whether or not the course you did watch has translated into meaningful behavioral change. So readiness can only be evaluated through assessments that look at knowledge completion, but also performance feedbacks. Also, how many, how much exposure have you had to certain deals? Have you demonstrated strong judgment when faced with particular situations? Readiness is the translation of knowledge into action. And that's what we're focused on, not just creating good content, but did the content create impact in how people perform? And I'll tell you why this matters so much, Claudio. There are certain professions in which performance actually affects people's lives in very meaningful ways. So if you have an underperforming salesperson, for example, it may not be a make or break impact on somebody else. But if you have a doctor or a nurse or a lawyer who's not able to perform at full capacity, that leads to patient injuries, that leads to liability, that can lead to exposure for companies. If you're looking at workplace safety, for people who aren't able to translate workplace safety training into real practice, that can lead to injuries or explosions or damage to equipment. So we we focus on regulated industries where training isn't just a tick box exercise, It's something that can truly impact people's lives. And we focus a lot right now on Canadian companies, especially because we we believe Canadian workers deserve to be looked after by their employers. We deserve, we know that Canadian companies deserve to have best in class training wherever possible. And we love partnering with Canadian companies because it also means we can apply for grants to invest in the development of new learning technologies for our communities. So it's really exciting to be at the forefront of learning and development and to see that shape the communities in which we operate here in Canada. Very exciting. So if you were advising high performing associate who senses that maybe they want to build something of their own at some point, or maybe even, you know, just have the most possibility of freedom and you know, have as many doors open as possible, what should they start developing now in your opinion? Highly encouraged entrepreneurship. I think it's incredibly exciting. I think a lot of people see it as a risk, but you can take a calculated risk. So my first piece of advice is it's about sequencing. Make sure that you've mastered the skills that the legal contacts offers you. Take advantage of those initial years in law where you really build a foundation for critical thinking, judgment and decision making and don't feel pressured to leave prematurely. It's a really important skill, building time. And if you're somebody who's mid career or you're even a partner in thinking and starting on your own, I would say go for it. There's really no perfect time to start a business. As long as you know that you've mastered a core set of skills that will serve you, you've built a sufficient network to be able to build your business by leveraging. And as long as you understand that entrepreneurship is not a form of rebellion against the system, it's a form of architecture. And the best entrepreneurs I know are the ones who do boring, tedious work over and over and over again very well. Consistency, boring consistency is what makes or breaks the company. It's, it's not as fast-paced as it looks in the movies. It's not as exciting all the time, but the gains are real. The scalability is astronomical. You really have uncapped potential to earn and to grow and to build. But there has to be method to the madness. So master that discipline, master that structure, master that judgment, build your networks. And only at that point they say leave because this is a profession that gives you so much and it can be used as a springboard into entrepreneurship rather than a rebellion or an alternative to it that doesn't connect. They, they definitely connect And, and I think I'm a better entrepreneur because I studied as a lawyer. 1st, thank you so much for taking the time to share more about the cognitive tracts about your career and these awesome insights. I appreciate you being here in the podcast. Thank you so much, Claudia. Thanks again. Thank you all for tuning in.