The MBA is often considered the cornerstone degree for business leaders who aspire to reach the corner office. In fact, roughly 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or some other graduate degree. The chief executives of Apple, Microsoft, Blackrock, and JPMorgan all hold MBA degrees, among countless other leaders who have risen to the top after graduating from business school or pursuing further education later in their career. As a business school professor, I see the ambition in the eyes of MBA students who aspire to be counted among tomorrow’s change makers. Although some enter the program looking for a job with higher pay or perhaps even a two-year vacation from the real world, a common trope depicted on TikTok and Instagram about the perceived unseriousness of B-school, the elite among the crop are looking for something far greater: an opportunity to lead.
To these students, I offer the sincerest advice I can muster at the start of every semester I teach: “The most important thing I can give you in this course is perspective—a way to see the world beyond your own vantage point.” Primarily because the world is filled with a plethora of meanings and possibilities, leading requires first understanding that there are many permutations of reality. Of which, leaders must decide which pathway is most advantageous. So, we invited Andrew Sliwinski, the head of product experience at Lego Education, onto the latest episode of the From The Culture podcast to explore how a company that has built its entire offering on the possibilities of multiple outcomes—brick-by-brick—applies this approach to learning.
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Lego Education is the part of the Lego Group that translates the company’s commitment to play to an educational pedagogy that has been introduced into school systems from Detroit to Seoul to Copenhagen. Before Lego, Sliwinski codirected Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, the free programming tool hundreds of millions of children use to figure out the difference between typing the right answer in and figuring out what the right answer might even look like. He has spent his career building products with a single conviction at their center: The goal of any real learning experience is not convergence on one outcome but the orderly production of many. This sits at the heart of what an MBA should provide, not just skills for navigating strategy or an acumen for forecasting cash flows, but an understanding of different realities that lead to different possibilities.
Lego has a metric that operationalizes this, and it’s the one I’d recommend any leader steal immediately. They call it solution diversity. Say during a learning experience the children are broken into groups and assigned a project to build an undefined structure. If every group of kids made the same thing, Lego would send the design teams back to redesign because, in the company’s view, the same outcome means there was a single path through, and everyone took it. That’s because the point of a real learning experience, Sliwinski declares, is that 10 groups enter a room and 10 different things come out.
Think about this for a moment. In a typical MBA course, these students would be rewarded for providing the “right answer.” While that may be so in a fixed environment like a test, for instance, it’s not so indicative of the real world where there are many possibilities and the meanings the market attaches to your category are not singular. And they certainly aren’t fixed. Consider the AI category. There are many permutations of meanings in the minds of the public regarding this breakthrough technology, and they are constantly being renegotiated and reconstructed. The heterogeneity of these meanings impacts not only product adoption but also infrastructure possibilities, i.e., policies surrounding the construction of data centers. A leader who has trained their organization to converge fast on a single reading of one reality has essentially built a blind spot at scale.
So, what’s the remedy? In most classroom contexts, Sliwinski notes, the play patterns that produce the most divergent thinking—the social, the imaginative, the emotionally messy ones—are often the ones that get crowded out. They are seen as a distraction, so they are dismissed or even ignored. The same instinct shows up in the adult workplace, too. The brainstorm where someone goes “off topic” is redirected to the “task at hand.” But perhaps these detours are really reframes in disguise. What if these side conversations actually unlock a path that the team hadn’t yet considered? What if they are a means of corporate playfulness that get the organization to more diverse solutions like the Lego brick constructions built by the kid design team?
Make no mistake, I am a strong advocate for the MBA program as an accelerant for a successful career in business management, but I, like Sliwinski, believe that there is an increasing need for greater understanding of the human condition, which requires understanding the many variations the social phenomenal world presents to us. This truth should encourage business schools across the globe, and learning and development designers across the global workforce alike, to rethink their upskilling efforts to include perspective-widening endeavors to their programming. That way, leaders can learn to see the world in its kaleidoscope of possibilities and properly apply their business savvy to a world that actually exists—not one curated by their own myopia.
Check out our full conversation with Andrew Sliwinski on the latest episode of From The Culture here.
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