How best to prepare for it?
Charles Handy, Author and Social Philosopher /
Photo: Elizabeth Handy
As John said the title of President is a flattering one but of course what it really means is that I am the only unqualified person in this room. But I do think they are wise to invite an outsider to look into your box because sometimes we get too riveted by our own preoccupation and I am after all an Irishman, from Dublin by origin, which allows me to be totally irreverent about things English, so you’ll forgive me if I sometimes do just that.
I am very honoured to be asked to introduce this great Conference; the last North of England Conference after all in the second Millennium of the Christian era (I couldn’t resist that bit of pomposity), and I won’t mention Millenniums again. I do so just to suggest it’s rather important; it’s possibly one of our last chances to get things on track before a period of momentous change is about to hit us. In fact we are already seeing the first signs and breaths of that change.
So the first question I want to ask you, and I hope that by the time you leave on Friday you may have begun to resolve it is: "where are we – where are you - on the road to Davy’s bar?" If you don’t know the parable of Davy’s bar you will have to allow me to explain. And if you do know it forgive me for telling you once again. I’m an Irishman. I go back to Ireland whenever I can. I drive on the misty moorlands behind Dublin for the reminder of the beauty that that country has. And I always get lost because the Irish don’t spoil the view with signposts. And last time – a couple of years ago – there was a friendly bystander, obviously Irish, standing there. I said to him "I’m lost" I said, "how do I get to Avoca?" "Ah" he said, "it’s dead easy". He said "you go straight on down the way you’re going and after you go down a long hill you cross a bridge and at the far side of the bridge you’ll see Davy’s bar. You can’t miss it. Have you got that?" "Yes" I said. "Straight on, down the long hill, over a bridge, Davy’s bar". "Right" he said. "Well half a mile before you get there turn right up the hill".
It stuck in my mind as a parable of our times because to be honest I meet many organisations, many of them in business, some in health, some in government, and they have been so busy surviving, so busy going on with what they are doing – what they know so well – that they pass the road to the future off to the right up the hill. So they cross the river and end up in Davy’s bar. And then they think can we turn around? is there time to re-trace our steps, go back up the road, find that road to the future? Or is it too late? Let’s have a Guinness and sit down and think about how good it was in the olden days. The English, I often say, as an Irishman, prefer to walk backwards into the future because that allows them to look longingly at the things they love so well, while they’re actually slowly moving away from them. Yes, I said that I could be irreverent.
What this Irishman though was really telling me, if I want to get a little more technical, is the dilemma of the Sigmoid curves, and this too you may or may not know. Now the first Sigmoid curve is the story that anyone in business will tell you is the story of the product life cycle. You invest more than you return at the beginning, as you do I suspect in Education. But then things pick up and the curve goes up, but then all curves turn down, all products end their useful life. It’s not just the product life cycle, it’s the life cycle of empires. It’s the life cycle of national economies, it’s the life cycle of your life I regret to say. It will turn down some day. That’s a very sad story to be starting this great Conference with. What the Irishman reminded me was that there is a second curve. This curve says "no, it does not have to be the end."
You can create a second curve: but to be effective it has to start at point A, before the first curve peaks. But the paradox is that at point A all the messages you get is that it’s going very well, just tweak it here or there and you’ve got the answers. So most people don’t start the second curve at point A, they wait to point B when death or paralysis, or destruction begins to appear. Then you have momentum for change because disaster is staring you in the face. So then you struggle manfully to reach up to that second curve, and you may or may not succeed. If not, you end up at Davy’s bar (point B). So, the wise people start at point A, but then you enter the hatched area. Now that’s a very interesting area because the first curve has to continue in order to provide the wherewithal for the second curve. But you don’t quite know what that second curve will be, so it’s a time of investment and a time of experimentation, and you now have two cultures living together, the first curve and the new curve. They have to tolerate each other. It’s a stormy time. A difficult time.
I believe that we’re in that stage now, both as a nation and in the educational system. What we have to do is to try and plot what that second curve might be because only then can the first curve have any confidence in the people coming up behind as it were. It is a time of great argument and great discussion. I happen to believe that this Government is also aware that they at point A, which is a rare thing. And so they are desperately trying to chart the second curve. That doesn’t mean they’ve got it right. It does mean that they’re trying. It does mean that it’s going to be a difficult time, a time of a conflict of traditions and pressures.
What I want to do is to etch out with you what that second curve might be, both nationally and then with great trepidation, educationally. But I hope you will fill in the gaps in my knowledge and the gaps in my ideas over the next two days. Because the intention of this Conference is not just to be a pause from that pile of papers on your desks. It’s not just a mutuality of moaning, or what they call networking. It’s not just an occasion for the Secretary of State to make some great pronouncement here rather than in the House of Commons.
What it should be is an opportunity to create a mood that will carry us through into the next age. What it should be is a seedbed of new ideas, some of which will take fruit back home. After all, when you’re in Government, they tell me there is no time for thinking, and I can believe it. They have to live on their intellectual capital, so where are the new ideas going to come from? Hopefully, hopefully not only from the people who are busily in charge of the present which are the schools, but the people who are supporting those schools – people I hope like you who are in charge of the future. And this is a place hopefully where you will give birth to some of those ideas.
So let’s look at that second curve. I have to tell you that it’s a long curve and I think it should be. We won’t shortly be talking about getting ready for the next Millennium because it will already have started. I suspect the next phrase will be 2020 and so I suggest that we will be talking about a "20/20 Vision". When we do, remember you heard it here first! Well actually you didn’t because it’s the phrase coined by Malaysia in 1990 to launch their thirty-year plan – which sadly has gone slightly adrift. They said to me when I was out there, when I was commending it in fact because it was a splendid document – they said "does your Government have a thirty year plan?" "No" I said we have our Queen’s speech! But you know we need a twenty-year scenario which is the smart word in business these days. Businesses don’t have long term plans because they always go wrong. But they do have scenarios, sketches of what the world might look like and what it would mean for them, and then they have short term plans to make it happen.
We do not have a "Vision 20/20" either for the country or for education, and I think we should have it, and I would love some pressure for that to come from you. Looking at the nation I have to tell you that the next twenty years is going to be a bumpy ride economically. We are in the grip of global market capitalism, none of which words I particularly like, but I have to tell you it’s there and it’s going to stay. There seems to be no obvious alternative. And capitalism is based as you may know on the principal of creative destruction; that means a bumpy ride. And there is little the Government can do about it whatever they may say, and whether they join Euroland or don’t join Euroland these things are huge, unpredictable and come with sweeping force, destroying industries but creating new ones. There are now more people in Britain in the creative industries earning £50b a year, more than the whole of British manufacturing industry. If you had said that twenty years ago no-one would have believed you. This therefore is a time of great excitement. What does it mean for us? It means, for instance, the end of the conventional career.
Every one of us, every one of those kids that we educate, will have many careers. It will be a time of what I call actors’ careers. You know that actors have projects and in between there are little periods where they look for the next project. It is exciting, but perilous. Organisations are going to be very different places. They are going to be increasingly virtual. That means that they will be held together, not by touch, not by sight, but by wires or by wireless. Yesterday I watched a video made for IBM which they will give to all their UK workforce (6,000 of them) showing the new ways of working in IBM. No offices, a mobile phone and what they like to call their ThinkPad – a rather small laptop computer. And it showed people working on these things in the train, in their cars, in their homes, in the canteens, in restaurants. Offices are turning into clubhouses, as I call them. Places where you go for meetings but not to actually do the work. Very few people in future may be gathered together for very long in any one place. Supermarkets you may say, they have to be there. Well, supermarkets may not exist in twenty years time. Instead you may dial up your requirements from a warehouse and somebody may drive them round. And you may say that "well that’s okay for IBM but most of our kids are not going to work in IBM or places like it". No, but the same applies for the truck driver, the same applies for the electrician, for the plumber, these people are autonomous beings connected by wires or wireless. Now that’s an exciting time.
There are going to be many opportunities, many choices, and that’s wonderful if you have competence or skills, if you are sure of yourself, know what you want to be and what you want to do. If you can promote yourself, if you’re good with people, if you’re prepared to take responsibility, prepared to work on your own, can be trusted and are willing to trust other people. And it’s going to be absolute hell if you can’t do any of those things. And we must make sure that the numbers of people going to hell are very, very few.
Now, what does that imply for education? Well first of all, basic skills and grades are absolutely essential. They are after all the entry card to the playing field. I was absolutely fascinated by the story of a friend of mine who runs a computer software company and he wants to recruit people from school. Now he says unfortunately none of the exams that you can take under any of the examining bodies actually tells me anything about your ability to do software programming of the sort we want. "But we have a test" he says. "We have a test which we can give, but it’s a very expensive test so we can’t give it to everybody, so we basically can afford to give it to 15% of the hundred who apply". So how do we get from the hundred to fifteen? "Well" he said "we use ‘A’ levels, they’re on the form, they are totally irrelevant – we could use height or colour of hair, but actually they are not usually on the form – so we use ‘A’ levels". You see what I mean by entry card to the playing field. But it can’t stop there because once you’ve got into the playing field – what then are you going to do?
Now, I was lucky in my youth. I left college with a degree in Greek and Latin. My company that I joined was an oil company and they complained that I had no relevant knowledge and no relevant skill, but they said "don’t worry, you have a well prepared but empty mind". "It will take us ten years to fill it with anything useful and to give you any type of relevant experience, but don’t worry, you’ll have ten years and then we’ll have thirty years of you". I’ve always felt very guilty that I left after nine and a half years. But nobody gives you ten years these days. They expect you to come fully equipped. And fully equipped means not only having these basic skills and ‘A’ levels and maybe degrees even, but all kinds of other qualities. They want you to be self-confident. They want you to be self-disciplined. They want you to be trustworthy. They want you to be honest and open. They want you to be good with people. They want you to be courageous and imaginative. They want you to be able to take risks and to learn when the risks go wrong. These are things that are hard to teach in a classroom. Even if the grades are in irrelevant subjects they can still be important.
The problem is that for most kids in this country there is not much outside the classroom these days because they don’t have the compulsion to lock them up for twenty-four hours of the day and keep them occupied and interested. I’m not advocating we all have boarding schools but I am advocating that they should have more and more experiences outside the classroom. Not necessarily done by teachers, because the other worry I have is the hidden "implicit curriculum" of education, what people learn about society from the first institution which they experience – which is the school. I meet people in organisations who have imprinted in them their idea of what an organisation is, what authority is, what rules are for, what the obligations of the individual and that institution are. And where do they get it from – they got it from their school. And they have never met any adult other than their parents or their teachers who can be a role model unless they do things outside and beyond the classroom with people other than teachers. We need more of those things to be organised so that they can find that which they are good at.
Howard Gardner, as you know, lists eight intelligences. I think he’s mean minded – I could list twelve, you could probably list fifteen intelligences, or call them talents if you will. I believe as an article of faith, for I cannot prove it, that every single kid, every single human being has at least one of those intelligences, probably two, possibly three. And it should be the duty, the first duty of the educational system to discover before they leave at age sixteen or eighteen what those intelligences are, because we only test, as you will be aware, three or four of them at most. And if I look at my pals who have done well in this world, they do not necessarily have the intelligences which get them the grades in our examination system. I am not saying they shouldn’t have those grades but there must be other ways of unearthing those other intelligences because people should go into this crazy chaotic world feeling good about themselves, knowing they have something to contribute, and the only way of finding that out is to give them a whole variety of experiences.
I love the Japanese idea of horizontal fast-tracking. When I was investigating their management development system some ten years ago I said "what do you do with the really good people, do you shoot them to the top or do you keep them marking time like you do most of your people until they’ve been fifteen years when they get their first management job?" "Oh" he said "we have a fast-track, but it’s horizontal." I said "what do you mean?" He said "well, ifthey’re really good we rotate them around the organisation, six months in every different kind or part of the organisation, working with different tasks, different areas, with different bosses, because only in that way can they find out what they are good at and who they best work with, and only through that way can we find out what their real aptitudes are." I think it’s a great idea. And I think if we can’t do it in our big organisations because they’re not going to be around any more, or give us long enough to do it, we should do it for ourselves in the protected proving ground that we call the educational system where people can experiment and fail without disaster. Fast-tracking through a range of experiences is what I want for all our people and I want them to leave school feeling good about themselves, feeling special.