Résumé :despite enterprises know they need to change the way they work, they make very slow progress at undertaking a deep change process. The unwieldiness ot their organizational structure is not the only reason to that. People have become the slow factor of change and not only because people don’t like to change. Change implies to re-learn many routines deeply rooted into our minds. If habits are learn young and get rooted over time, we are forced to admit that our education system is key to provide enterprises with a human capital that meet their needs if we don’t want to enter a loose loose game where enterprises struggle to make profess and people lose their added value and their ability to find a job. Enterprises operate in a global context in which they don’t own all the levers and it’s getting essential to build educational systems that favor the learning of collaboration, creativity, mastering a knowledge intensive environment…as well as a proactive attitude toward the emergence of new jobs for people who’ll need to be “oneself entrepreneurs”. Both society and enterprises need new behaviors relying on new values. What means an education system that promotes and teaches them…

Note : This post is mainly bases on my knowledge of the french system but there’s no doubt part of it also applies in many other countries. Those who’d like to know more, laugh or be scares may enjoy this article and all the links it provides.

Despite the fact a wide consensus exists on the need to reinvent the operation and management model, everybody knows it’s far from being easy. In such approaches, people are the slow factor. Their reluctance to change is often mentioned as the main cause but that’s only the visible part of the iceberg. Most of the change process is about unlearning, forgetting wrong reflexes and habits. That’s true for people who’ve been in the workforce for decades but also for the younger. The reason is well known : the “human software” is being programmed from the early years and habits learned young get so deeply rooted that it’s hard to change them afterwards. Contrary, with time, it’s getting harder to acquire new behaviors, most of all when they are the opposite of what has become a part of our unconscious.

In 2006 I wrote on the bad habits we were taught at school, explaining why the damage was already done before people enter the workfoce. Unfortunately, I have not seen any kind of improvement coming and the few smart initiatives are too isolated while we need a critical mass of people sharing the same mindset.

Let’s review some key points.

• Collaboration

I won’t repeat what I wrote in the above mentioned post. But if people are taught young that “one only learns alone”, “knowledge and ideas have to be kept for oneself”, “others should not know what one thinks or does”, it’s easy to understand how they’ll behave once adult. Ok, when we become older, group work is sometimes required by professors. But it’s too late. Rather than thinking together, share and elaborate a common vision, we only divide tasks up according to what each one is better at and the result of the all the individual work is gathered and stacked up instead of being melt. The final result is the sum of all individual skills, never more, what is not what collaboration is about. Of, course, groups form depending on people’s level…a group of good pupils or students will never allow a less talented one to be burden.

• Learning and understanding

In a knwoledge economy, learning, knowing for the sake of knowing is not enough. We need to understand things, make knowledge ours, be able to understand the context to reuse things later, adapt them. That needs exchanges, explainations, discussions, what are the opposite of our model. Of course, writing pages and pages during classes (most of time, nothing more that what’s in the books) may help to learn. But not to understand. Conversations ? Professors know, pupils listen. And the first is infallible so the second should not ask any question implying a answer like “I’m not sure” or “I need to check”.

In the same way, people able to understand the complexity of our world should not be focused on one only discipline, they need of broader understanding of things and their context. Understanding the world, finding relevant models by learning from the past without making the same mistakes needs some historical, economic, geopolitics backgroup…even for future scientists or people willing to spend their lives working with numbers. Our model makes the young starts specializing too young and overlook lots of matters that would help them understand the context around their major.

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