While technical knowledge becomes obsolete more and more rapidly, the formal educational system seems to cling tooth and nail to the paradigm of immobile knowledge, that which was acquired once and for all in the form of a finished product, because it was rarely destined to change in the course of several generations.
Insistent voices have been warning us, for decades, that we are wasting resources, because a large part of the information absorbed during the formal education cycle is now destined to lose validity before the respective diploma is issued. And probably, in a few years, it will be renewed several times before we have a chance to apply it.
The time and money that is allocated to these teachings, on the other hand, goes to the detriment of what we could invest in training people in the so-called “soft skills” or “transversal”, which are the only ones that can help us to go through these successful traumatic changes. These usually include teamwork, autonomy, initiative, the ability to plan and organize work, empathy, adaptability and flexibility to change, problem solving, communication, “learning to learn”, customer orientation, the ability to analyze and synthesize problems, handling uncertainty, a sense of responsibility, and several others that would be tedious to list here. These competencies are currently recognized as essential by organizations, many of which complain bitterly about their alarming absence from the market supply.
The training deficit begins in primary education, worsens at the secondary level and explodes in higher education, where the disciplinary dogmas that we will continue to apply in professional practice are definitively installed. This seems to fit the logic of the system, considering that those who teach university education are often our future competitors - and please take this as fact rather than as an ethical judgment. The possibilities of freeing oneself from these dogmas are conditioned by the sparks of individual initiative that may have survived the systematic atrophy and depend, to a great extent, on the success that these sparks might have in overcoming corporatism and commercial interests. What a job.
Meanwhile, little is being done by the organizations themselves to improve the situation. Their environments are usually an environment in which old vices are consolidated and continuous training is postponed, instead of being an oasis where people could recover the human skills lost at the hands of traditional training. But the solutions will not come from outside, as many executives would like, because we do not have time and the conditions are not in place for this. Instead, organizations are in an ideal position to take care of missed training, and for lack of any better reason, it is in their best interest to do so.
The education of the productive actors of the 21st century could find in them an unexpected and formidable ally, based on their involvement in functions that until now were alien to them. This implies adopting a substantially different vision of the role they play in societies, to go from being mere recipients of a product-trained people-to trainers in their own right and, therefore, producers of transversal culture. What better competitive tool than to develop your own tailor-made education, inserted into the operating mechanisms, so that you can speak of a true “training on the job”? (on-the-job training, to use the well-known Anglo-Saxon expression).
New leaders should therefore be competent masters of their teams. To achieve this, and in the absence of formal models, we should put together our own schemes, with a pragmatic vision that leads us to peer into the "black boxes" of matters that today are alien to us. Experts in human behavior should be called in to solve exceptional situations, not to compensate for the ignorance of those responsible in the most basic areas of their daily functions.
The main mission of managers in the 21st century should be to carry out a cultural revolution whose slogan is clear: to transmute knowledge into wisdom. The leader of this century-the Biolider-has the responsibility to learn and transmit so that others, in turn, learn and transmit. It is the ancestral mandate in all terrestrial species and there does not seem to be a legitimate reason for human beings to behave differently, at a historical moment in which humanity is playing its future on this planet. Never before in history has this task been so critical, because the labyrinth is increasingly intricate and fallacies abound. And never before, either, have we had such a vast amount of information at our disposal and such excellent tools to obtain, process and disseminate it.
It is time to get down to work and take on the tasks for which formal education is no longer efficient. It is time for “just-in-time” education, to avoid that knowledge continues to pile up where it is useless and ends up becoming mental junk. It is time to test an intelligent Bi-leadership that causes the qualitative leap necessary to conquer the opportunities that lie ahead.
