2 Types of School and the tragedy!

I hope you have been to school… Right?

And if I ask you what you remember from your school days, what will it be:

• Lesson of Geography?
• Amazement on how the Mughals conquered?
• Fascination about the chemistry nomenclature?
• That incredible theorem?

Or…

• Rehearsals for the drama on annual assembly
• Saving other friends from teacher’s wrath
• Doing an experiment in a lab and failing miserably
• Compassion and care your teachers exhibited

Well…

I think there are (or rather should be) two kinds of schools:

1. Where you take classes, memorize facts, learn procedures and steps, give exams, score and move forward
2. Where you learn to see, learn to lead, learn to empathize, learn to solve interesting problems, learn to fail…

The misery is that the first type is so overwhelmingly available that second type of school appears to be imaginary.

The first type is easy and convenient — because it is measurable, predictable and has been there for so many years.

The second type is special. This is where all success, inventions and magic come from. It’s challenging to find people and train them to run these kinds of schools.

Now the tragedy part…

Workplace is struggling. We want to hire people who do what second type of school teaches — and we are hiring them from the first type. And even if accidentally we get someone with attributes of second type, our policies, procedures, trainings, feedback and incentives turn them into a first-type material.

I am on a mission… to help organization to do the difficult work of teaching people to see, to lead, to solve interesting problems, to empathize. And it’s difficult — yet possible.

But we also need to change our measuring stick. I once saw a training manager brag about the impact of Emotional Intelligence training by showing the pre- and post-assessment results. He was so overwhelmed that participants can now tell what’s prefrontal cortex which surely means that their emotional intelligence is super high… [I hope you got the pain].

Let us push for the second type. Second type of school… Second type of families… Second type of workplace.

All the best!