Reframing Management Education

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not.

At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!).

But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained people who do not reach their potential, or fail to contribute to their organisation, because of their narrowness of their perspective or their inability - or intentional disregard - to understand the broader systemic aspects of organisational and social life.

That I observed this repeatedly, starting with my best friend in the 90s (someone really gifted technically but devoid of emotional intelligence) right up to this day, made me zero on this as an educational problem. My assumption was that with the digital transformation of the societies, it is the STEM workforce which matters most, and therefore, their lack of human capabilities is one big hairy problem to solve.

However, there are two big problems with this premise which I did not pay attention to.

First, while the technologists had a problem, they were enjoying their time in the Sun. The digital transformation of societies brought prosperity and recognition for them. It created an arrogant mindset: One could state plainly that they hate the creative types (which would have been unthinkable in another day and age) or that they are geniuses because they are just good with maths. It was a particular cultural moment where STEM skills were enough by themselves, without needing any attention to human capabilities. Of course, this meant that our societies and businesses were littered with bad tech and unproductive projects, but the techies themselves made money and therefore, it did not matter.

Second, this made my business defined as a 'soft skills' business, despite my protestations. This is education's death zone - soft skills! Not only that it did not matter, but also that this is the area of quick fixes and folk theories. No appeal to 'wholesomeness' of education was going to stick when one can just improve communication skills with assorted videos on YouTube. And, then there was the spiritual band-aid, the gurus and leadership consultants always at hand, making the investment in a systematic process to develop human capabilities too much to ask.

All these were good reasons not to get into the business of developing human capabilities for the STEM workforce, but I see now a third, somewhat left-field, justification for a pivot. We are at a point where the centrality of the STEM workforce - and its outsized privilege - is being questioned. It is not just ChatGPT that brought us here: The accumulated cost of the failed projects, the weight of expert arrogance, the exposure of meritocracy as a sham, have come together with the perfect storm of realisation that we were collectively over-praying to and overpaying for IT. Suddenly, the challenge is in the reverse: It is not about integrating human capabilities into technical training, but putting digital savvy in other disciplines.

For my work, the recent interest from design schools was an indicator. The schools, who only a few years ago claimed disciplinary training was enough - after all, there is a shortage of trained designers and design, at its core, is a humanistic enterprise - came looking for the digital delta. The march of AI has been changing their practice faster and more profoundly anyone had imagined. 

And so it is in many other disciplines, including management. For too long, management is seen as a non-digital STEM discipline, but that is about to change. It needs to be at once more digital and less STEM, which it was always supposed to be. This is a discipline which has its roots in philosophy, psychology and believe it or not, history, and yet displayed a modernist pretension of being a science. There is indeed a long history of this - cybernetics and all that - but much of management science is akin to voodoo, theories built on shaky research and narrow foundation, circling unquestioningly around brands. And, lately start-ups, which do not last. On the bullshit job spectrum, the managers compete with IT people in terms of their uselessness, and that is now biting. 

There is no denying that good managers and leaders are needed. Lately, we have woken up to the fact that business schools are not doing a good job at it. Even at the very top of the spectrum, there is a huge crisis of character development, long-term thinking and collaborative aptitude: The business schools were training for a business culture which has collapsed under its own weight. The business education which centred around the 90s style globalised business is over; the focus on process excellence, at the same time, is rendered obsolete with ChatGPT. A new kind of digital human management training is needed, which is not easily obtainable in the business schools.

This, indeed, is my pivot. I am looking to marshal all that we have built so far - a model for capability-centred education - and redesign it for humanistic disciplines (which management and design should be). I shall keep bantering about this journey here.