“When you’re working with companies, quite often you become aware that the change in habits is temporary and limited to the contact time between you and the client. Working with the children over a more extended timeframe, you realise that you need to space out the learning experience to allow for the presentation of a new idea or concept, and then the application of that idea and the learning that comes from actually doing it.”
Extended learning in situ empowers people to try something and then figure out why it went wrong – or right – he says. And it’s a discovery he is now building into his innovation programmes and his work with corporate clients.
A scientific mind
Micha is well versed in learning from experiments. His career began in research for technology behemoth Philips. A scientist by training, he has always been keen to push the bar on understanding and has a natural appetite for innovation – an appetite that has not always been shared by colleagues.
“At the start of my career I was interested in looking at how we could innovate or improve things at my company, but I got a lot of pushback from other colleagues and departments that were more resistant to change.”
His eagerness to build the interpersonal and leadership skills to negotiate and align others brought him to the Executive MBA at London Business School in 2002.
“In my first class I remember being asked about a business case and giving what I thought was really comprehensive answer. I remember feeling really pleased with myself. Then a quiet young woman next to me raised her hand and said that she saw the problem a different way. I had this stunning moment of realisation that you alone don’t have all the answers – and I wondered how on earth I could have missed her perspective.”
This broadened perspective – what Micha describes as “an opening of the eyes” – has fuelled his appetite to push the boundaries and sustained a 25-year career helping corporations – and most recently schoolchildren – to do the same thing.
Skills for life
Micha hopes that his experiment with the high school will yield similar experiences in the future. Business and business practitioners, he believes, have a lot to offer the education system which is still encumbered by methodologies that haven’t kept pace with progress elsewhere.
“I believe that business and people like me can really help overcome some of the scepticism and resistance to change in our school systems. I think we have a lot to offer in terms of enriching the curriculum and the learning experience for children.”
He also hopes that the experience can help incubate an appetite for new ideas and a start-up mindset, as well as skills that will be valuable in later life.
“Ask a bunch of 12-year-olds to design a children’s toothbrush and they invariably create something smaller – smaller than the adult product. But in reality, children need a more ergonomic toothbrush – something that they can hold and manipulate more easily.
So the learning here for the kids is that they need to start with the customer. Before they can innovate, they need to interact fully with the end user to really understand his or her needs. Grasping this, embedding this through experience and building it into your thinking about how you solve problems… it’s a lesson for life.”
Photographer – Lily Engelmaier
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