E-Magazine
Richard Parker
The above is the title from a paper presented at ISBE 2009 (Parker 2009a) which described how, having failed to find any effective way to make our management team more entrepreneurial using external sources, we borrowed ideas from education theory to do it for ourselves. These theories suggest that for learning to be effective it has to be authentic, embedded in practice, collaborative and participative i.e. just about everything that most traditional entrepreneurship education is not.
Over the past ten years, Strident Group has tried many different approaches to finding and developing the people we need to meet our business objectives. One option is to recruit graduates but like ninety percent of other SMEs this is not a route that we often choose (Guardian 2010a). After at least sixteen years of full-time formal education, students are effectively institutionalised and many have neither the capabilities that we need nor the attitude to learn them quickly.
A more effective option for us is to recruit for attitude then train for skill and we tend to take people from school, further education or early employment. External training provision works well in technical areas such as software development but third-party training in softer skills has invariably failed and we now design and deliver our own. It is key to ensuring the close match between personal and business values we need to achieve high customer service and colleague loyalty.
But it has been far from perfect. After the last ‘Death by PowerPoint’ session we decided to explore the potential of the internet to deliver more authentic learning and undertook studies at the Open University’s Institute of Education Technology (IET). The result is nine months of moving up and down what the OU’s Martin Weller calls the ‘VLE / PLE Continuum’ to try to find the optimum learning platform for our small business. After a clunky Moodle Virtual Learning Environment at one extreme and chaotic Netvibes Personal Learning Environments at the other, we have settled on a Teacher-Led PLE solution to support users in moving from passive consumers to active producers of their own learning content.
A recent example is a course we have run on digital marketing. To send our four marketing executives on the full suite of Chartered Institute of Marketing courses would have cost over £22,000 plus travel and lost time. And it would have been of doubtful benefit. Instead, we simply borrowed their curriculum headings then used Microsoft SharePoint (unused on every Windows Server) to provide the wiki, forums, and other digital tools needed to collaborate and build a digital marketing knowledge base from free internet resources in a fraction of the time and at no cost. Not only did everyone ‘learn by doing’ from constructivist methods, but we have our own fantastic learning resource to build on in future.
Convinced of the value of this approach we applied the lessons learned to our biggest challenge: making our board of directors more entrepreneurial. We found nothing in the market to help so have again synthesised ideas from elsewhere to meet our needs. For content we used the NCGE’s template for an entrepreneurial university (Gibb 2008) and simply applied it to our business. For delivery we have used John Davitt’s (2010) Learning Event Generator which randomly generates combinations of tasks with very unusual activities. The first time we gave it a spin produced the stunningly appropriate ‘DO distrust of bureaucracy AS a farce’.
After very deep scepticism from a hard-bitten board we gave it a go. We hadn’t laughed so much for years and all results were captured in assorted media and added to a wiki to build knowledge. We are certainly learning lots but it’s arguable at this point whether we are becoming more entrepreneurial or simply more enterprising. The project has just started and outcomes will be evaluated in the summer and whilst I doubt we will ever provide the empirical evidence needed to prove you can make people more entrepreneurial you never know, we might get lucky.
It’s a nice story but what it really going on here? Well, it’s actually a pretty damning account of the failure of UK business education.
From GCSE to MBA, business studies is far too focused on functional silos of finance, marketing and operations. Far too little is spent on the softer, subjective people issues useful in any business but vital in small ones. We only realised this when trying to apply balanced scorecards to our business and finding that we did nothing to address the key Learning and Growth perspective (Parker 2009b). This asks ‘what do we have to do today to compete tomorrow’ which is about as good a definition of entrepreneurial activity as I can think of.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. At an ISBE doctoral day back in 2005 hosts Lew Perren, Monder Ram and Robert Blackburn presented a paper which used Burrell & Morgan’s Four Paradigms for the Analysis of Social Theory to highlight the overwhelming functionalist nature of small business research (Grant and Perren 2002). Whilst there seems to have been a shift to the left into more subjective fields there does not seem to have been much movement upwards into radical change (Adler, Forbes et al. 2007). This seems a shame as questioning what is ‘taken-for-granted’ is central to critical management studies and is again surely what genuine entrepreneurial activity is all about? A recent paper on ‘phronetic science’ argues that this low profile of critical studies might actually help explain the practitioner / academic divide (Voronov 2009). I call it this the ‘Groucho Paradox’ where entrepreneurs don’t want to join any club that will have them as a member.
Being locked in its own functionalist paradigm has also meant that ideas from education theory have not crossed over into entrepreneurship education. A good example is activity theory which uses pragmatism to produce an education-focused application of complexity theory (Engeström 1987). Complex systems have increasing relevance to ISBE’s work yet only one paper has ever mentioned the potential of activity theory (Peachey 2005). The two sets of literature seem to exist in parallel universes. Why is this? Surely it is better to synthesise across a number of academic fields rather than analyse within just one?
The good news is the changes that are finally happening in UK primary, secondary and further education. The widespread and long-overdue introduction of flexible foundation studies and apprenticeships plus the creation of studio schools, enterprise academies and schools for entrepreneurs will hopefully inculcate entrepreneurial attitudes at an early age. Even higher education seems to be getting the message with practice-based learning and employer-led degrees (Guardian 2010b). I don’t mean to belittle the many and varied ways that most universities have already tried to address this gulf but did anyone really think that appointing Business Development Managers to promote Career Academics at the behest of an unelected, twice-disgraced President of the Board of Trade was really going to produce the cultural change necessary to become ‘business facing’? Me neither.
Enterprise educators need to understand that their monopoly on post-compulsory education is over and that power is shifting to digital-native learners and well-informed practitioners who will bypass them and increasingly use the internet to meet their needs. But this is an opportunity not a threat. Technology-enabled personalisation of learning will finally provide Gibbs’ ‘guide by the side, not a sage on the stage’ to break the education iron triangle of accessibility, quality and cost to the benefit of all. If you can’t beat us, join us!
Richard Parker, Chairman, Strident Group
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