B-Schools in Delirium

B-Schools offer two kinds of education programmes, broadly, the public programmes and the corporate programmes; though they can take various forms. Public programmes are standard offerings usually leading to the award of some documentation of proficiency; a certificate – duration based, functional or skill based; a diploma – undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate or functional or skill based; or a degree – Bachelors, Masters or Doctoral. Subject to certain norms and requirements, anyone can enrol. Corporate programmes can be standard or customised; for managers drawn from within a corporate entity or from across many corporate, usually theme based; for enhancement or augmentation of some pre-existing knowledge, skill, experience or just adding a sheen to the monotony.

It is no surprise that people in b-schools are living out some kind of delusion. There is a huge gap between what they think they are doing and what the consumers of their service believe they are providing. For example, in public education people often talk about “building skills” and “delivering learning” when in reality most students are just there to get a cushy job through placements, a coveted degree or a diploma certificate and have as good a time as possible while doing so. If nothing else, the astonishing numbers of students who do not bother turning up to lectures, unless forced to do so through compulsions of mandatory attendance, suggests as much; together with the vanishingly small amount of information they retain.

In corporate learning and development b-schools like to imagine that they are “building capability” and “improving performance”– even “delivering the business strategy”. But should they listen closely to their customers, they will find that the corporate entities see the role of b-schools as managing risk through regulatory training and providing the occasional break from work.

This basic mistake which b-schools are making in almost all of their public and corporate education and training programmes is – chucking information at people that they don’t much care about.

So, what should the b-schools be doing instead?

The answer is actually quite simple.

To understand the answer, there is a need to understand that people use either the experiences or the resources or at times both, the experiences and the resources to deal with what they care about.

Resources are typically the sort of things they use when they do care about something – for example when they use Google to solve a problem or a spreadsheet to store data and sort it into information.

People store their reactions to their experiences (rather than the experiences themselves) and use these reactions to re-create the experience in a process which could be called as “recollection”.

Challenges describe the things people are concerned with doing. People learn through challenges. There are challenges people already have and there are challenges which may be coming ahead.

When someone already has a challenge, resources are the best solutions since they will use these to address the challenge. They cannot put the challenge on hold, spend time to gather experience around that challenge and then deal with it using the acquired experience.

But there are cases where people are not yet sufficiently concerned about something; for example sustainability or disruption or inclusivity; and therefore do not seem to care so much about. They may consider such things as challenges, not for them, but for others. In such cases, b-schools need to design experiences that will change how people feel about something as well as give them a chance to practise their response.

For example, most corporate offices conduct “mock-fire-drills” to train their staff and most staff take such drills casually. This happens for two clear reasons – first, the fear of fire is just blocked off using an attitude of denial – “this doesn’t happen to me” and the “mock” is not real enough to evoke fear but is a mockery which evokes flippancy. Making “mock” as real as possible is expensive and risky. By creating a VR experience in which people have to escape a burning building, they might be sensitised to the importance of learning proper procedure.

Instead of designing courses, b-schools should be building resources and designing experiences. Instead of dumping content, b-schools should be delivering development, engagement and performance.

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*Inspired and adapted from - Nick Shackleton-Jones, “The training delusion: the man who thought Play-Doh was for cleaning walls” EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.13, pp. 35-38

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