Learning for a Future That Hasn’t Arrived Yet...

Lesson in learning and the limitation of employers...

Looking back over more than forty years working in education and leadership development, I can see that the most important lessons I learned came from places that had nothing obvious to do with education.

One of those moments arrived towards the end of the 1990s when I spent time working with the Telecommunications Vocational Standards Council. At the time I regarded it as an interesting piece of professional work. Only much later did I begin to understand that it had challenged one of my deepest assumptions about the purpose of education itself.

My role was to work with employers across the telecommunications industry to develop occupational standards. I listened carefully to what they told me they needed, translated those requirements into statements of competence, and from there into qualifications and training programmes. It all appeared entirely rational. If employers knew what skills they required, then surely education’s task was simply to ensure that people acquired them.

What I hadn’t appreciated was that employers themselves inhabited very different futures.

The operational managers were under relentless pressure to keep Britain’s telecommunications network functioning. Millions of miles of copper cable still carried the nation’s telephone traffic. Faults had to be repaired quickly, new services installed efficiently, and customers expected reliability every single day. When these managers spoke about skills, they spoke from the reality they inhabited. They needed engineers who understood copper because copper remained the technology on which their performance, their budgets and, in many cases, their careers depended. They were not being short-sighted; they were being asked to deliver today.

Elsewhere in the very same organisations, however, another conversation was taking place. Strategy teams were already looking towards fibre optic networks. They could see that the future would not resemble the present and that a different generation of technical expertise would soon be required. Their concern was that unless engineers began developing those capabilities before they became essential, the organisation would discover, too late, that it possessed a highly competent workforce equipped for a world that was disappearing.

For some time I assumed these groups simply disagreed. Looking back, I no longer think that was true. Each was acting responsibly within the horizon they occupied. The operational managers were accountable for this month’s performance; the strategists for the organisation’s future. Retraining experienced engineers before fibre became commercially significant would almost certainly have reduced operational performance in the short term, while the benefits might not become visible for several years. Most organisations find that a difficult trade-off to make because the present almost always shouts more loudly than the future whispers.

What stayed with me was not the disagreement itself but the question it eventually provoked. Whose future, exactly, is education preparing people for?

We still hear politicians promise that schools, colleges and universities will provide the skills employers need, and there is obvious truth in the ambition. Education should prepare young people for work, and employers have an important contribution to make. Yet my experience left me uneasy with allowing employers to define education’s purpose because the future they can reasonably imagine is necessarily limited by the responsibilities they carry today.

Even the strategists I met, whose thinking proved remarkably accurate, could only see a relatively short distance ahead. They anticipated in the transition from copper to fibre with impressive clarity, but they could not foresee smartphones, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, or the countless ways in which telecommunications would continue to evolve. They were looking further than the operational managers, but they were still looking through the narrow window available to their own time.

Education occupies a different horizon altogether. A child beginning primary school this September may still be contributing to society well into the 2090s. None of us, not employers, politicians, academics or educationalists, can meaningfully describe the world that child will inhabit as an adult. We can identify trends, imagine possibilities and make educated guesses, but the future has a habit of confounding even our most confident predictions. If that is so, then perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Rather than asking what knowledge or skills young people will require, we might instead ask what qualities will enable them to continue learning as the world changes around them.

That small shift in emphasis has gradually reshaped my own work. During my years in leadership development I was largely concerned with helping people become better leaders by offering new models, frameworks and techniques. Increasingly, however, I found myself working with problems that resisted that approach. The challenges facing healthcare, education and public services were rarely the result of people lacking information. More often they arose because people found themselves in situations that no manual or model could fully anticipate. The question ceased to be whether people possessed the right answers and became whether they could notice what was changing, inquire together, and remain open to learning in the presence of uncertainty.

It was that realisation that eventually led me away from thinking primarily about leadership and towards thinking more deeply about learning. Today my work is much less concerned with helping people acquire expertise than with helping them cultivate the qualities that enable expertise to keep renewing itself throughout a lifetime. Curiosity, judgement, attentiveness, humility, imagination and the capacity to learn with others are no longer optional extras to technical competence. They are becoming the conditions that make technical competence sustainable in a world that continually reorganises itself.

This is also why I have become increasingly interested in participation rather than prediction. We often imagine ourselves standing outside the world, trying to understand it well enough to prepare for what comes next. My experience suggests something rather different. We are already participants in the unfolding of that future. Our technologies, organisations, communities and cultures are not external forces acting upon us; they emerge through our relationships with one another and with the wider living world. Education, therefore, cannot simply be about preparing people for a future that already exists. It must also help them become the kind of people capable of participating wisely in bringing that future into being.

When I think back to those conversations about copper and fibre, I no longer hear a debate about telecommunications. I hear an early invitation to reconsider what education is for. At the time I was listening for answers about vocational standards and workforce planning. Only years later did I realise that the more important question had been sitting beneath the conversation all along. If we cannot know the future our children will inhabit, perhaps the greatest gift education can offer is not mastery of today’s knowledge, but the lifelong capacity to meet tomorrow with confidence, discernment and care.