When I was – so obviously – young, and fell in love with the idea of the university, I believed that if we had knowledge that would make a positive difference, we would implement it. If there was a solution to a problem, and it was publicly available, we would (obviously) embrace the solution and solve the problem. But my life has moved on, and I have seen so many times that, when we clearly do have such well-established knowledge and undoubtable solutions, we don’t engage them to solve the problem. For me, this was a major part of my growing experience.

We talk a great deal about innovation and problem-solving, but in so many key instances, we don’t, really, have to create new and innovative solutions, or discover new knowledge. They already exist.  But we cannot make the adjustments in our thinking that would allow us to implement them. The failure, so very often, is not the absence of a well-developed solution to the problem, but the way in which we are wedded, anachronistically, to the features of the problem that are the problem. We are inflexible, incapable of adapting ourselves to the necessary change. We cling to the familiar, the past, even when it is maladaptive and causing us discomfort in the experience and frustration at the results. We do this as managers. It isn’t just “them” that won’t innovate.

We do this – holding back both ourselves and those with whom we deal – not because the solutions are “unproven” or not sufficiently tested, but because of threats to our egos, or our fearfulness, or through misguided fantasies of control that distort our sense of responsibility, or through fear of what those around us might think; through inabilities and fears of changing ourselves and our practices that quite basic skills of learning and developing better habits and understanding would ally. The “learning curve”, that should reassure us, terrifies us. We seek an intellectual high-ground of skepticism that we apply to successful ideas and practices that are sufficiently well-enough established already.

We could just put this down to another of those flaws in human nature, but you know that I won’t do that. It is so much easier to explain these failures in terms of the circumstances in which we grow up – to the failure of our educational environment. To expand this problem to my larger theme; it is easy enough to show how our social world constructs these maladaptive approaches to our problems, and not too difficult to show how it could be corrected in the light of real knowledge about education that we have possessed for a long time. But we don’t. Our failure to address our educational inadequacy is of a piece with all those other failures, and its roots are educational as well.

In the TEDx Talk that is streamed below, Doug Kirkpatrick describes the organisational structure of the Morningstar project that developed a very large manufacturing enterprise, set up without bosses on principles of self-management.

Morningstar is managed by two “social contract” documents. The first one, that rules them all, is the company mission statement. Such a statement must, of course, be “real”, and not a piece of rhetoric for marketing or public relations consumption, or to stroke investors. It must be something against which all can be held accountable.

The second is the “colleague letter of understanding”, developed between peers.

Both of these documents should be recognisable in terms of the discussions in Education – as if our lives depended on it. There are three chapters there that discuss the idea of “respect for persons”, namely “The anatomy of respect” and “The practice of self-respect” – and the third, “The love model” which discusses respect in terms of ethical social contracts, and introduces the “golden rule” interpretation. This approach to structuring a commercial organisation should therefore be able to trace itself back to core foundations in Western values that are more fundamental than the merely commercial, and that justify education as well. Morningstar appears to have set up a foundation for an organisation that is respectful and therefore capable of being genuinely educational, while being of the first order, commercially.

Doug Kirkpatrick remarks at one point that the organisation gives little consideration to work-life balance, because life isn’t something that goes on outside work. Work is a part of living, and he claims that living in this way is exciting and enjoyable. The point is consistent with the ancient idea that the Good Life involves fulfilling or satisfying work.

From my point of view, of course, where respect for oneself involves a duty to achieve a worthwhile and fulfilling life, it opens up the possibility of the organisation encouraging the seamlessness of good living, and facilitating understanding and undertakings that are not narrowly determined by work, but are reflective of a concern for the whole person, including, crucially, the educational aspect.

Morningstar went into production in 1990. That is twenty-eight years ago at the time of writing. It worked. It flourished. So why is the hierarchical, command-and-control, heavily managed, paternalistic organisational structure still the only model that I see around me? And how old are you?

I hope you enjoy his presentations.

There is more on management in this section of the chapter of my book on The core domains of educational content. There I argue for managers as perhaps being of even greater potential significance, as educators, than conventional teachers. My discussion does not consider self-management, as Doug Kirkpatrick describes it, but it certainly requires an approach to management far removed from command and control. The self-management model would place educational responsibility much more directly into the hands of peers, requiring of them considerable educational awareness and ability to reason educationally than is currently available to almost all learners today, when such knowledge is not even entertained.

The need for us all to develop a sound and practical mastery of educational decision-making is repeated many times throughout the book – we all need to learn how to take charge of our own educational lives. The combination of self-managed organisations with educationally aware and capable participants would enable outstanding achievements in organisational intelligence.