Education has to break the assessment model: Timothy Kastelle

Timothy Kastelle studies ideas and teaches innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School; he is also referred to as the "innovator guy". His area of research is the impact of innovation on firm and economic growth, and the application of complex network analysis to the study of innovation at the levels of the firm, region, sector and nation. He spoke to K Yatish Rajawat about how technology is changing jobs and why education and even management education is not able to keep pace with the requirement of the work place. He feels that both organization and universities need to rethink the skills that they would require in the near and mid term so that students can be prepared for it now.

Basically on the future of work and how work is changing and we are planning our education systems Technology changes how we work, and every change that technology brings about is classified as innovation. We are reaching a future where there will be less jobs for the human and more jobs for the machine. You are known as the 'innovator guy' tell me how do you see work, jobs profiles changing due to this obsession with technology or innovation?

So obviously it's a really – it's a big and broad issue decent jobs have expanded even while many of them have been replaced on the margin.

There is impact at the individual level and there is impacts at the economy. The economy level impact has been consistently positive and good. While there have been economy gains, and there will be through automation. It has consistently come at a cost. If look at history, one of industrial revolution's outcome was middle class which hadn't existed before. It was impossible for famers to get educated 200 years ago. It opened up opportunities but it did so at a cost.

Now there is global issue - what do we do to support people that are getting displaced by technology changes.

The second issue is that, when we've had such displacement in past the social safety network or was the welfare system was there to support these people. When the pool of typists in companies disappeared because of computers, there was a welfare system which supported them. There was universal healthcare system. People did not become destitute because the job disappeared. When we got those outcomes this support system eased the situations for the people that are affected, that's a result of a set of choices and actions that people make each time..

But its no longer about the choice and decisions are not made being made by the people who will be most affected by it.

In many cases no, but the concern right now is that there is disconnect between policy and people. It is larger than it has been since the first 20 years of the 20th century or even the late 19th century. There is a huge disconnect between policies that are being made and people that are affected by them.

Do you think –this narrative of economic growth, presented by the pioneers of technology and innovation. The Googles of the world who would argue for higher automation or big data or artificial intelligence. They are driving the whole narrative, influencing policy across the world. Driving aspiration and creating a demand through decisions. Take driverless cars do you we really need it in a populous country that has dearth of jobs?

Japan can choose to go driverless, with aging population. Somehow, we are influenced to think that there is a correlation between innovation, technology, development and growth. Does it worry you that, somehow people would say that Timothy is an innovation guy and he understands these things, so if he says its fine it is a good thing to do.

Yes, there are absolutely concerns that I have when I look at how things are developing globally. Anybody who says economic model that this is the absolutely the only way and this how things must because that's how there are being done in other parts of the world is wrong. I think your point about driverless cars in India really speaks to this and that is that I don't think that there is a universal model for growth development or structuring an economy.

The difficulty I have is that, the connection between innovation, technology and growth, has been really strong.

Look at life expectancy and the increase that we have seen globally. I know it's not distributed smoothly, if you are wealthy, your life expectancy is better than if you are poor. But there is still across the board rise in life expectancy at birth and it's been global.

Some of the Piketty arguments – the evidence is very strong, that there has in fact been unequal distribution of gains. That said, there has to be real and substantive gains through all levels of economy that shouldn't be discounted. On the flip side if you look at Singapore or China, where there has been different levels but really substantial economic growth in both of those countries over the last 30-40 years. 

Neither of it has been accompanied by free markets or democracy or personal freedom that a lot people in America and Europe say must come with that kind of growth.

The connection between democracy and development, the connection between free market and growth has also been broken.

We have a peculiar problem in India, there are a lakhs of students graduating from colleges and universities but the number of people who are employable is shrinking, the job profile is also changing rapidly, certain industries are changing or disappearing altogether . Companies are saying that the engineering graduates are not employable. How can this gap between what the market needs and what the education system churns out be bridged ? Especially if the market needs are changing so rapidly?

I think to lesser extent, I see similar issues with business education. In all of these jobs we are talking about, there toolbox skills which are – mechanical things or routine things that you need to do to a job. It can be coding, it can be managing a spreadsheet…toolkits, – those are the easiest things to teach you know. These are the easiest things to assess because for these skills it easy to ask an exam question where student can demonstrate if they know it or not. Somehow no matter who teaches, 95% of the people that learn it will not use it. But the industry will evaluate them on this. In sum …. everyone screws it up. What is taught is what is easiest to teach, easiest to assess and easiest to learn…education is basically slave to assessment …this needs to change

Therefore, every institution teaches the easiest things to assess because the whole thing has become an assessment testing game?

In many cases it has but if you flip it, and ask as a Director of MBA school. What makes a good manager? It's not those toolkit skills, its exactly what you were listing for the engineers, it's the soft skills, the people management, negotiation, its communication, its writing, its dealing with uncertainty, it's this whole string of things that…

Can you teach these skills? Can you teach dealing with uncertainty?

Yeah you can. But it's very hard to teach and even harder to assess. The way we can teach dealing with uncertainty is to give people a problem to solve where no one at the start of the process knows what the right answer is and it might not be a right answer and then have them work on that…

Like what you do in a case study there is no perfect answer you need to convince others that this is the perfect answer. Then manage between your perfect answer and other perfect answer. The professor would say all the answers are right but I like the way these guys have presented and these guys discussed and brought out the problem in one way and so there is this whole subjectivity.

Yeah there is. So I think there are two issues here. One is that even if you say there is no right answer, or there's not – that's valid and that's valid, many of the people that teach cases, still have in their head that this is what is the perfect answer looks like. And you're still looking for some level of compliance or you know, matching to a model. The second thing is…other dilemma of cases is that, in general you are told that its self-contained, so you don't do actual research, just evaluate what's given. That gives two very dangerous impressions. The first is that, it's possible to find and get all the information that you need to solve a problem. The second is that you can do that quickly. I am not saying don't use cases, I am not saying that that's its not a useful tool because they are flawed ……

Because in real life you never have all the information before taking a decision?

We never do and that's the uncertainty of decision making. The second thing is that giving people the book, building the belief that you can come to a quick decision based on what might be limited knowledge, and that you'll always be right which is what some people get out of an MBA. That's top of cases and that's incredibly dangerous as well because you end up with people who then go out into a real business where that doesn't work. They are fragile and it breaks their head as soon as they run into a situation where you actually have to maybe wait to make a decision or find more information or…

And there is this whole race that you must make a lot decisions which management theory basically drills into you. If you take enough decisions, you will get somewhere because of that…..

Yeah. So I grapple with that, with 500 MBA students in my program and we have thousands of students and not everyone can be taught with this main resources we apply to an MBA. If we extrapolate this to India we've got this entire emerging work force that needs that exact set of skills. Can it be taught – it's not just – here's the book, read the book and then you are set. You actually have to practice it and for me when I look at, how do we teach managers, it's almost…

Do you see management education also defining success and goals narrowly. Are MBA education teach that the job is the goal. Aspirations linked to ladder a corporate head is projected a leader as a success, that cannot be success. CEO is projected as a leader. You would remember that CEO was not called a leader in the 80s, the term leader was not applied to them because a leader by definition is someone who is elected by the people. He is chosen because he can lead. There is no choice in corporate CEO, he gets selected by the board not by the employees, except in a consulting firm

There's a handful but yeah. I think the thing with leadership dialogue is that lot of times people confuse between leadership and management…

They are two different things. Management is the mechanical doing of stuff, leadership is the vision and it's this split between vision and action. But to me leadership emerges from doing the action correctly and well and in support of a goal that's worthwhile. When I hear that dialogue, to me it is enormously devaluing the importance of management as a skill and I actually think that we need lots more really good managers.

Like you said, to me management is not – I can read the spreadsheet, or I can balance the books, or I can apply the strategy thing. It's the soft skills stuff, I can talk to people, I can work with them, I can get team to work at high level, we can achieve the goals that we've collectively set.

My definition of leadership you make the people around you better man or woman and in that process achieve something. If they end up leading a better life then you are – if they end up leading a better life because of a leaders intervention.

I am with you on that. That's soft skill. You don't have the target of the organization you do not have the target for all those people have come out and they were happy and they had balance, they didn't have anger, stress in their lives, they were not killing each other at home.

Teams don't connect they don't go out for dinner with each other's families…. Which is why they want to disconnect their work from their family life.

There are some exemptions and I mean that – so my list up there is looking at the really small number companies where at least some chunk of what you are talking about happens a little more regularly.

How do you make the companies that are able to do this aspirational enough so other companies follow it – I think that's your role?

It is. And try to figure out what stories I need to tell people and you know, how do we need to train people but…

So the students like to join those companies – the Googles of the world.

Yeah. But the thing is, if you look at Simco, Haier, Patagonia, and we look at case studies, I would be willing to bet that especially in North America and Europe every MBA student has been taught at least one of those case studies or all of them as they have been going through and so part of the issue isn't that we don't know that alternatives exist. There are other ways to you know, try to address some of these issues but the big thing is actually making the decision that's worth doing. And Harry Miller there are handful of books about the way that they've been operating and one of them was written by the son of the founder who took over CEO. And he was talking about the participative management program that they put in place in the 50s. It wasn't completely flat but they reduced hierarchy within the organization and put a lot of decision making ability out to pretty much everyone in the factory. One of the outcomes of that was everybody in the company had suggestions for how we can do things better. And one of the suggestions that came out of that was actually –the participative management structure. The second big changed started in the 90s and into the early 2000 when a mid-level manager decided that they needed to be manufacture more sustainably. This led to whole string of outcomes like stopping the use of endangered Rosewood in a their top of the line products. That had been designed by their founder. They stopped that and moved on to having 100% renewable energy in all of their plants. Zero waste, a whole stream of outcomes.

It wasn't a time where sustainability was really…

It was right at the front of it and it was driven by those empowered employees, it wasn't top down. And so in the midst of all that, the son of the owner, you have to praise, he wrote in this book, he is in a meeting, he was talking about what was going on inside (inaudible) (46:15) and one of this peers at whatever the conference was. And he said, you know, imagine if you had all 35,000 of your people so engaged that they were participating at this level that they consciously wanted to make the company better and worked to do that every day. And his counterpart looked at him and said, yeah I know where working the way we are. And his conclusion was that you can say to people, yeah it is possible to work this way. And there's plenty of companies that demonstrate that you can but if you leave it to a set of people that are very comfortable with the way the things are right now, you know, then you say what the impetus for change is. There's not a lot, somebody has to really believe that this is the right thing to do and that's why I am going to do it.

May not be dictated in what's happening in the financial circuit currently. They might have been dictated by the fact that it's a better way to do things.

Yeah.

I mean if you decided to rosewood I am sure it would have had an impact on the way the product will look and of course the price of the product. They tend to it because they thought the pricing would be – changing a product which is popular, how it looks, is a huge decision in any company.

It is. And they were talking and doing that about changing the (inaudible) (48:04) which is one of the most famous furniture designs in history. So was a huge decision because they had no idea that if people would stop buying it, their question was will the whole market go away. And they didn't know. So I don't know. Part of me is encouraged that there's at least that many companies trying to do things differently but the other part of me is, there's a whole lot of companies in the world and most of them are not in that list. So my goal in all of this is just can we make some of them better.

There is this hospital in Singapore, it says that its not enough to treat the disease but to create a healing environment, so they have changed the structure of the hospital – when you go into a hospital you are stressed out. Because they are going to poke all these things – it's called Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. This hospital gave a mandate to its architect saying that we don't want to create a hospital, they wanted to create a healing environment. When the patient comes in and the environment must help him heal, that's the job. What this architect did was, he built a hospital with a park at the center of the whole thing and you know, when you enter the hospital, the picture that you see is – so many different species of birds, you will find so many species of plants here, and these are the animals spotted on our landscape and it is not a clinical environment.

That's a great example. I'll definitely look it up, thanks for that.

Thanks for coming for the chat. It's definitely interesting.