Epic Think Tank

Corporate Universities

Part 2 - The corporate university and Warren Bennis's crucible of experience

The discussion had already touched on the potential for an initiative with such a high-falutin' name to fall embarassingly flat on its face. So whatever it was that took place under the aegis of a corporate university, our delegates were agreed on this: it had to be more than just the same old wine in different bottles, or a correspondence course that merely arrives faster.

So what is, or should be, the corporate university experience?

Drilling down into the US-inspired ideal that had been previously referred to brought out a perceived tension between inclusiveness and excellence; between breadth and depth. This came particularly to the fore in addressing the question of who the corporate university is principally for. Should it serve the needs of a fast-track elite, or be an enterprise-wide resource? Surely it couldn't really do both?

Leadership is a case in point (see Think Tank 1: Leadership & e-learning for an in-depth discussion of this topic). The traditional methods by which organisations and institutions develop their future leaders have tended to assume that there are certain inherent qualities that it is the job of leadership development to identify, isolate and encourage. What follows from this approach is a concentration on the minority of individuals who have 'the right stuff' (this is very much the model of army officer training, and can also be seen historically to have been behind institutions such as the Civil Service College).

However, a possibly more democratic model of leadership development is spreading, which sees leadership as an issue for the whole organisation - something which has as much relevance to a team leader in a call centre, say, as to a putative CEO on a graduate programme. This approach, typified by the Barclays bu initiative - or PRIME:Leadership in the public sector - sees a less cut and dried distinction between leaders and led, and takes a perhaps broader and less prescriptive view of what constitutes a leader.

At the confluence of these two streams (in highly turbulent waters, politically and culturally) sits the modern science of leadership studies, among whose arch exponents is Warren Bennis. Bennis has written over 30 books on leadership, including Geeks and Geezers (co-authored with Robert J. Thomas, senior fellow with Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change) which contains interviews with more than 40 leaders who the authors deem either 'geeks' (aged 21-34) or 'geezers' (aged 70-82). One thing that all members of these two highly disparate groups turn out to have in common is 'at least one intense, transformational experience', which the authors call a 'crucible'.

This concept of the 'crucible of experience' came to dominate much of this Think Tank discussion; standing as an emblem of depth in the learning experience, while avoiding the elitist connotations that often accrue around words such as 'excellence'.

The delegate who contributed this image had a background in HR before coming to e-learning and had 'thoroughly done the traditional, top-down training and development bit', experiencing at first hand the style of 'sheep dip' training formerly the mainstay of workplace learning. Had all his hard work on such activities made much difference to the organisations in question? Probably not, was his honest opinion. Learning, he had decided, was a totally different animal from training. Organisations spend too much time and money, in his view, training people to do things they fundamentally don't want to do.

'Put the learner in the middle,' was his answer. Let the learner find his or her own crucible of experience.

However there is a major challenge with putting the learner at the centre if the learner is just not interested in learning. You have a hole at the centre of the system.

Learning that is not prescribed, in a top-down, sheep-dip fashion, has to be made attractive to the learner. Motivating the participation of learners becomes a key consideration for those shaping corporate universities. Learning has not only to be widely and easily accessible, it also to be actively marketed.

So what does motivate learners? Examples of highly directed, self-motivated learners can be found among those who do Open University degrees, which can take seven years to complete. One of the highest single groups among these learners is, interestingly enough, pilots. For these people, who have been through some intensive training in order to be able to do their jobs, it seems that learning is often about finding your next challenge.

OU degrees are often pure learning for learning's sake, however: there might be very different reasons for why people would pursue learning in the corporate system. Which is not to say that motivation doesn't exist here - why else would sales people stay up until four in the morning writing proposals? The key is to tap into the real sources of that motivation; to communicate the value of organisational learning in meeting personal objectives - which 'sheep-dip' training signally fails to do.

It was clear from the discussion so far that if corporate universities are to work they have to have a real value proposition for the individual. Similarly, in order to be truly enticing, the learning on offer has to be the real deal. It has to be intense enough to offer the equivalent of a crucible of experience.

There are plenty of well-established examples to draw on in this regard. Army basic training provided the crucible of experience for an entire generation of conscripts and active combatants during and after the second world war - an experience well-chronicled in the memoirs of comedians and jazz musicians among many others. Going to university at eighteen was for many in the succeeding generation also something of a crucible - particularly those from working class homes where university was not the norm - a rite de passage which also involved a change of class allegiances in some cases. Civil service development courses which traditionally involved travel, and several years out of the normal work environment, have also been said to have life-changing effects.

What all these examples have in common is the experiential dimension - an opportunity to inhabit, if only temporarily, an entirely new, changed environment where your values and attitudes are challenged in action. This is the crucible of experience.

As the discussion moved towards the role of technology in corporate universities, the question had to be asked: if the crucible of experience is really a sine qua non for the corporate university, to what extent can e-learning help to provide it?

Next>>

Introduction
Background
Part 1 Why corporate universities?
Part 3 The role of technology