Change ↔ Learning ∞ Schools ↔ Businesses

Change without learning and learning without change. Do you find those ever happening? Isn’t that a problem? If so, do you find the dynamics often differ on that interchange in most schools compared to most businesses? I’m full of generalizations here, but I find that recognizing the tendencies can be helpful, much like preparing to meet next week’s football opponent.

First, as a baseline perspective, I would say change and learning are best pursued together. Nothing earthshaking there. It does make sense, and it does work best. Second, while schools and businesses differ in fundamental dimensions, I don’t see any of those differences changing the appropriate pairing of change with learning, and vice versa.

I come mainly as a school guy, but with fair experience in business and a strong interest in seeing what schools have to offer to business. It’s of interest to me to see what issues and needs usually move schools to seek outside help. Fundraising, financial operations, construction and its management, executive search, and some areas of training are common domains where schools are likely to pay for outside help. Also, schools commonly, though not comprehensively, buy curriculum from outside producers.   A few schools and systems, especially where grant or donor funding is available, look more broadly in areas of change, strategy and organization for help from the outside and, quite often, help from a business perspective.

Conversely, I see businesses almost never looking to schools for outside help, except in partnered training initiatives for schools’ product and business’s raw human resource(neither are terms I’m endorsing) – students. To be fair, businesses will employ the services of some consultants who spend most of their time in schools or are regularly employed as professors, but it’s hard to find a business which is asking for help to make it run more like a school.

Generalizations. Tendencies, remember. Businesses change all the time or they die. Often not true and helpful innovation, but change nonetheless. Customer contact arrangement based on production or travel costs or any number of factors. Departmental structures. Management overhead. Evaluation protocols. Technology, of course, and far beyond replacement cycles. Following tech’s ability to leverage information and connection to make money. Some of that change can be pretty smart, and come from and include a good bit of learning. But my generalization is that business expects change and then does the training needed to implement it, following the creation of the change initiative from some locus not necessarily moved by learning.

Schools as a species tend more toward mistrusting and avoiding and generally hating change. Teacher to student at any one time in the day’s schedule and the planned curriculum as an almost invariable expectation. Certainly, personalized learning and competency-based learning don’t have to and often don’t look like that, but these themes are not the generalizations and tendencies of schools. Even when they are, they often are pursued in a system of instruction which looks very similar to what has come before.

This is not a caricature or easy insult. From Socrates with the Dialogues through the master-student guilds of the Middle Ages and on to today, there is something classic, organic, and fundamental to the teacher-student relationship. In schools, learning happens all the time. Not just for students, but for teachers and leaders and others. Schools do attract people who are passionate about learning. They don’t tend to attract folks who expect and invite change, though. Teachers connecting with students and seeing learning happen is fundamental, just as seeing a profit and appropriate compensation is fundamental for a business.

You wouldn’t ask either to change that, really. There might be social goods you could expect of a business or awareness of employees as stakeholders more vital than customers. But profit is basic to business. And learning is basic to school.

We’re taking a reasoning test here. Did you catch the inequality? Which shape is different? Business has a bottom line apart from change and learning – profit. Schools have a bottom line which is inherent in the dynamic we’re exploring. How are learning and change related? For business, profit stands outside that dynamic. For schools, learning is within it. That makes it tougher on schools to keep learning and change together because it is often being interpreted as a challenge to the bottom line. I’m convinced it doesn’t have to be, but I’m sympathetic to the difficulty schools have with this.

So schools learn and learn and learn while often disconnecting it from change. Businesses can change and change and change without much real learning either motivating or accompanying the change. But to challenge a business about how to make learning invariantly connected to change might be an easier sell than challenging a school about why its learning rarely brings change.

Schools may well have something to offer to business about learning as a fundamental, motivating, enlightening passion. Business, I would say, certainly has something to offer to schools about seeing change as a friend of learning, and even its natural companion.