Do university Business lecturers know how to educate?

If Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Dr Mike Lee's opinion piece , "Done properly, exams stimulate learning" (NZ Herald, 15 Nov 2017) represents the general level of knowledge and understanding of effective education within the University of Auckland Business School, then is seems clear that they need to "get a life" educationally. 

He argues the case for exams, not only for assessment but for teaching too. He's been a course coordinator for nearly 50 university papers and written more than 100 exams so he clearly has extensive experience of conventional teaching and assessment but apparently not beyond that. If he did, he would realize that although such methods may work for the closed university system, they don't produce high quality, work ready practitioners. And that's surely the objective for all graduates except perhaps for the minority who, like him, join the academy.

University Business schools rely on processing large numbers of students, few of whom proceed into academe. Most graduate both as failed researchers and failed practitioners. It typically takes at least couple of years to make something useful of a Business graduate. Maybe that was accepted in the past but not now. 

University lecturers must progress beyond repeating the teaching learning processes of their student experience. That's easily said but hard to achieve because they like us all are, to a greater or lesser extent, prisoners of their experience. They can't imagine much beyond what they've experienced.  

We could exhort them to get out more, risk trying radical new methods. But what's to encourage or push them to do that? The University organisation is essentially a slow-learner; designed to be conservative, insular, superior, bureaucratic, and typically populated by a toxic combination of brittle experts defending their egos and expertise, and rule-bound administrators defending their power and position. 

Dr Lee isn't entirely mistaken: conventional exams do achieve focused learning but not learning for effective collaborative practice.  The artificial crisis created by exams strongly motivates students to competitively cram and retain information long enough to survive the exam. 

Crises are great opportunity for deep needs-based learning that transforms understanding and behaviour but exam crises reinforce compliance and build expertise at the individualistic task of doing exams. I doubt those qualities are useful in contemporary academia. They certainly aren't in NZ Business. That's why 100 major NZ companies have stopped hiring on university qualifications. 

Dr Lee argues that exams are good for sorting people: that those who do well at high school exams, do well at university. That looks like closed-loop thinking. Of course students who become skilled at doing exams in high school are going to be good at doing them at University. And if the University qualifies people on their skill at doing exams then its all very cozy until they step outside that closed system into the contemporary NZ commercial and industrial world. 

I've taught in Universities and other Tertiary Business Schools and my business is working with privately owned businesses to change and grow. I've never seen a business sort or educate it's people by exams. There are ample actual emergent business crisis-based opportunities for learning. But conventional university education doesn't prepare people for that mode of learning. The opposite actually.

That's why it fails and we need to wake university teachers to that. Which probably means changing the funding model to drive tertiary education organisations to innovate teaching. They will claim that they are already doing it, and no doubt a few individuals are, but Dr Lee's view suggests that conventional methods prevail. So too, do my direct experiences contracting in tertiary Business education during the last several years. 

     

Opportunity at last to prune tertiary Business Education?

Justine Munro, Director, Z Energy and founder of 21C Skills Lab wrote in the NZ Herald “New work order requires education shake-up.” "On September 26, over 100 Kiwi companies wrote an open letter that made it explicit a "new work order" is here. In this new world of work, many tertiary qualifications are not seen by employers as preparing young people for real world roles.
Increasingly, employers value generic skills, such as critical thinking, collaborative problem solving and global literacy not typically taught or assessed in school or tertiary courses. "

The “New work order” and the redundancy of Business degrees was echoed the same day (7 Oct 2017) by Rebecca Stevenson in The Spinoff.

This is music to my ears. Good even, that self-styled education “futurists” such as Mind Lab’s Frances Valentine are investing in developing education methods that leave graduates with the elusive “generic/soft skills” that make or break governments and enterprise these days.   

I’ve been hoping for over a decade that the employer market would wake up to the inadequacy of tertiary education for business, then demand better and apply market pressure to the insular, self-satisfied qualifications industry that has monopolised and commodified so-called education. 

During that time, I interspersed coaching change in NZ SMEs with spells in the tertiary education sector developing learning contexts and learning management processes that actually, intentionally, and successfully developed the “generic/soft skills” that are now acknowledged as a prime competitive advantage for innovative organisations in the globalised economy. That includes the current new coalition government in NZ.  

However, my efforts to propagate those methods within institutions were, like those of my local and international network of like-minded tertiary educator colleagues, stymied at pretty well every step. Typically, through inability of most managers, administrators and many academic colleagues to imagine or risk anything much beyond their personal memory of tertiary education context and process.  I know first-hand that this closed-loop thinking and practice dominates even NZQA Category 1 (certified self-monitoring) tertiary institutes in 2017. 

Waves of e-learning (read low cost mass delivery of the now discredited qualifications), code writing and open plan learning spaces have washed through, stripping the landscape and adding little of value.  

The tertiary industry focuses on the student market which still chooses providers on brand and NZQA categorization. Especially the international student market. It’s not surprising then that so many international students, seeking work visas and eventually permanent residence, graduate to find that their qualifications win them little more than menial employment. And not surprising either that the newly elected coalition government intends to shut that door. The tertiary industry will do it hard without the easy cash that channel provided, and the change in the employer market will squeeze local enrollments too. Good!


Here’s opportunity for a hard pruning and fruitful re-growth: root out narcissistic managers and sly, sycophantic acolytes, who rode the wave, took the credit and drove quality into the ground.  Time to give the real creatives room to make a difference.  

Your SME’s not a peg-board of positions to plug people into. It’s a group of people who want space to grow.

Back in Sept 2013 when I was blogging a lot I wrote about increasingly disruptive effects of social media on management in “Change your Attitude or Die Like a Frog“. That title, by the way, was a reference to the “boiled frog syndrome” where it’s said that frog in a bucket of water over a fire doesn’t realize, until it’s too late, the dire implications of rising temperature.  Apparently, frogs are actually cleverer than that, but are aging SME owners?

Since then the social media phenomenon has “heated up” somewhat and companies are mainly concerned about controlling time employees spend on it and what they say about the company and its managers. But the hidden effect is on attitudes to authority and expertise and on formation of personal and collective identity: how people see themselves and the organisation they work in. Evidence of unprecedented dissatisfaction with authority and establishment figures and systems is conspicuous in politics (Trump and Brexit are the extremes) and it’s affecting management too.

Personal identity is no longer mainly determined by job or career. People increasingly curate their identities and their connections in social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Furthermore, jobs, workplaces, and the employment market are changing so fast that stable job-based identity is history. So are the patriarchal, static, mechanistic, hierarchical structures typically pictured in those box-and-wire-pyramid diagrams. Yet most managers still see themselves as running such an organisation: plugging people into the pegboard of positions, as if they’re process machine-parts.

The Seek and Trade Me job adverts may pay token attention to the changing employment market by candy-coating job opportunities. But when it comes down to it, they’re typically just looking for the right part to plug into their organisational pegboard. The give-away clue is the typical list of tasks called a job description. Finding the right person to fit the position becomes a major problem when its the hole left by the aging owner of a successful SME stepping back from the operational centre where they’ve probably have been since the beginning. Where do you find such a matching part?

You’re on a hiding to nothing in that search because that owner is an outlier in an outlier organisation: less than 2% of start-ups last that long and when they do it’s probably because of a lucky fit between the idiosyncratic mix of owner attributes and market opportunity. The chance of finding a replacement for such quintessential Kiwi business owners with their cultural heritage of self-reliance, broad competence, resourcefulness and hard work, is close to zero That’s why most GM appointments to Kiwi SMEs fail, proving to the owner yet again that “you can’t trust anyone to run your business”.

Extracting the aging owner from their (probably his) business isn’t a matter of tidying up the accounting systems and plugging in a GM. It requires a transformation of the way the owner and the employees perceive and behave in the organisation. The owner’s attempts at withdrawal typically trigger confusion, stress and conflict among employees whose established identities and relationships are disrupted when long-established tacitly understood roles, co-dependencies and systems begin to unexpectedly fail. So, the owner is drawn back in to settle disputes and repair failed systems.

Maybe the solution strategy is suggested by the ways that organisation and identity emerges on social media where there typically aren’t any pre-defined box-and-wire pyramids; people choose who they associate with, and curate their personal and group identity in the process of working out useful and fulfilling roles where they can do what they do best. In the SME context that would mean creating such space, and in that space, facilitate new and altered working relationships. 

That may seem like inviting chaos but, with wise guidance, the space left by the owner’s withdrawal is potentially space for people to step up; for new combinations of responsibilities to emerge; new work relationships to form and flourish, and previously undiscovered talent to shine, so that the organisation organically adjusts to fill the hole in new ways. Remaining emergent gaps can be filled by new recruits, selected for their relational rather than simply functional fit.

SME owners may be sceptical at first that their employees have sufficient interest or capability to accomplish such a transformation. The early stages may tend to confirm that for them, but with perseverance, wise guidance and coaching, it works. The alternatives are dying in the traces, selling for a song, of simply handing it to family when they have as much chance of success as the last GM.

Where would the aging SME owner get such wise guidance and coaching? Chose people who understand the context and the dynamics. They’re probably older, experienced SME owners too, who by fortunate fit of their idiosyncratic  personal attributes, experience, education, with the market opportunity, together they are effective, wise guides and coaches. Talk to Omnicom OCC and associates of course.