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THE AGILE BUSINESS SCHOOL: WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

PUBLIC NEXT GENERATION GLOBAL STUDIO

Building 5 Block A&B, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia

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The Agile Business School:What does it look like?by Jo Dane, Sarah Ball, Georgia Singleton

“MBA recruits are fully immersed in the business environment, bringing their entrepreneurial ambitions, curiosities and leadership aspirations to the business school.”

The next generation of business schools will reflect a convergence of links between pedagogy, industry, community and the workplace. These elements will emulate brand and culture for the next generation of business leaders, demanding a synergy with 21st century thinking, technologies and processes. What are the characteristics of the next generation of business leader? How do business schools attract them? And how do they learn? The answers require a distinctive spatial response for the contemporary business school, a spatial response that will inspire curiosity, collaboration and leadership.

The next generation of business leaders

Business leaders are expected to be good communicators, be ideas-driven and be able to think laterally. They are creative, curious and innovative; they are risk takers and do not fear failure. They facilitate, orchestrate and harness the power of teams. How will these traits evolve in the future? While these expectations will continue they will be amplified through social media, technology and global connectivity. The next generation of business leaders will be curators of information, strategy and people: communication will be more important than ever.

The next generation of business students

What does the next generation business student look like? Building on Singleton’s four super traits of the ‘agile student’, the next generation business student will demand choices, customisation, collaboration and learning to be fun and fast (Singleton, 2010):

– Choices may present in the form of specialisation of the curriculum, learning modes, study groups, assignment content, presentation format and learning environments. – Students like to customise everything from their mobile phone sleeve and Twitter page, to subject choices, class schedules and how they receive university communications. – Collaboration is natural for the 21st century student; they collaborate prolifically online which makes collaborating face-to-face a natural extension of learning. Learning is a more connected and engaging experience through collaboration with peers.

Students are increasingly blurring the boundaries of learning and fun; it is possible to socialise, have fun and learn at the same time. Having fun is part of relationship building with peers and teachers, developing a learning culture that simultaneously binds values and ideas. And with the immediacy of knowledge availability, students don’t want to visit the library to borrow a book if they can download the information via the internet.

Speed of communication is everything. Delays in access, slow internet speed and system crashes contribute to high levels of anxiety for the 21st century student who expects information to be available in real time.

Building 5 Block A&B, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia 07

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Profile AUG Business Student

Profile BPG Business Student

Profile CMBA

Profile DPhD Student

Profile EBusiness Academic

4+ hours/day on campus

– Agile

– Expect choices

– Customise everything

– Collaborators

– Connected

– Mobile

– Hybrid learning environment

On campus after hours

– Curious

– Ambitious

– Collaborative

– Multidisciplinary

– Connected

– Engaged

– Work & study simultaneously

Immersed on campus

– Ambitious

– Entrepreneurial

– Problem-solver

– Collaborative

– Fearless

– Good communicator

– Executive

– Life-long learner

8 hours/day on campus

– Research-focused

– Campus-based

– Collaborative

– Engaged with industry & community

– Engaged with teaching

– Connected to PG community

Diverse campus hours

– Engaged w/ industry, community and teaching

– Facilitators/conductors

– Collegiate

– Research-focused

– Networked

– Connected

Figure 1: Business school profiles

Since communication is everything, students live in a hybrid world of online connectivity, face-to-face collaboration and content engagement. They are technologically intelligent, experiencing technology and the internet as an extension of themselves (Prensky, 2001, 2009).

The attributes of business school academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students differ from each other in many ways. While undergraduates are still developing a sense of their place in the world, MBA recruits are fully immersed in the business environment, bringing their entrepreneurial ambitions, curiosities and leadership aspirations to the business school.

PhDs are research-focused, but nonetheless engaged with industry initiatives and processes. The business academic acts as a facilitator, orchestrating authentic learning encounters, embedded in business case studies that require ethical and socially responsible solutions. They retain close connectivity with business and community colleagues who actively participate in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Refer Figure 1.

How does this align with business school mission statements? The mission statements of a number of prominent business schools support these profiles.

Common themes among business school mission statements include developing students as:

– A new generation of leaders – Engaged with government, industry and community – Encouraging curiosity – Challenging norms and taking risks – Good communicators – Responsible citizens – Able to use information effectively.

Each business school tailors its curriculum and learning objectives to align with its mission statement, which is then reflected in the culture of its students and staff, as well as in the physical environment. Together these elements combine to establish the brand of a business school.

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“The environment silently communicates to prospective course applicants the type of business leaders developing within.”

The business school brand

What does the physical environment say about the business school? It is a direct reflection of its mission, values and objectives. The environment silently communicates to prospective course applicants the type of business leaders developing within. It speaks to the leadership of attributes that will be developed: fearless, entrepreneurial, technologically intelligent and good communication skills. Spatial volumes, terrains, materiality and the people-dynamic (visible engagement of the student community), all combine to signal the business school brand.

Business schools place high importance upon rankings; the higher the global ranking, the higher the quality of business school applicant. Reputations are built on numbers of MBAs and links to industry. Various MBA ranking systems evaluate different elements, with high importance placed on employment success, alumni salaries and career progress.

The Princeton Review (2011) incorporates ratings on the academic experience and physical campus experience. The Wall Street Journal (2011) seeks business feedback, evaluating business schools based on the attributes of their graduate employees. Beyond Grey Pinstripes (The Aspen Institute Centre for Business Education, 2011) measures course content and faculty research, with a particular emphasis on social, ethical and environmental topics.

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Perhaps the most prestigious ranking system is the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking which, in addition to employment success and salaries, also measures “the extent to which alumni fulfilled their goals or reasons for doing an MBA” (The Financial Times, 2010). The characteristics of MBA recruits will have direct implications on future rankings, as will the physical campus experience and environment. The next question to consider is how best to teach the next generation of students to be the next generation of business leaders?

Pedagogy

The dramatic decline in student attendance at lectures, especially in light of the online availability of podcasting, indicates that students do not see the value of attending lectures when they can get the equivalent experience online.

When provided with choice, students opt for the solution that best suits their lifestyle. Even when students do attend lectures, it is common to see students passing the time on their mobile devices rather than listening attentively to the lecture.

The student perspective of lectures was pertinently captured in a research project undertaken by Mark Wesch at Kansas State University and articulated in a video titled ‘A View of Students Today’ (Wesch, 2007). It is evident that the experience of lectures and lecturing needs to change according to the characteristics of the next generation of students, harnessing the power of technologies that invite interaction and knowledge sharing.

The future of lectures as a mode of teaching may be desirable from the university’s perspective, but unless universities deliver a more engaging format, student attendance will continue to decline.

Collaborative project work is a critical component of both the undergraduate and postgraduate business student experience. The case study method of learning is commonly associated with business school pedagogy. It simultaneously connects students with industry and community, providing real life issues to explore.

This learning experience sees the academic as a facilitator, inviting interaction from students, discreetly directing discussion and instilling a process of dissecting business cases. Students continue this methodology into assignment work and collaborative projects.

Future trends in teaching and learning indicate that student collaboration will continue to thrive and grow, supported by increasingly complex educational technologies and use of social media. The format of lectures will transform to enable greater interactivity between students, similar to the Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) model as expressed in the SCALE-UP project (2011).

This is a current issue being actively debated within universities, complicated by the realisation that the majority of lecture theatres are too inflexible to do little else other than transmit information. Activities associated with the reconceptualisation of lecturing need to be aligned with the physical environment, demanding an overhaul of the design of lecture theatres.

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“Diverse environments, from cafes to collaborative learning spaces, to media hubs and private nooks, all contribute to the idea of a campus village.”

Communities and villages

While pedagogical change is sweeping universities, favouring student-centred learning, the question to be asked is how will the learning needs of the next generation student be met by the physical learning environment on campus? Large cohorts of undergraduate students may appear overwhelming initially, but the creation of learning communities within the cohort makes relationship building more manageable and inviting.

Learning communities may develop out of case study groups or subject interests, but will be nurtured through connections with places on campus, as well as connectivity online. Diverse environments, from cafes and collaborative learning spaces, to media hubs and private nooks, all contribute to the idea of a campus village. In the same way that a village is simultaneously fragmented (through separate facilities and services) and united (through a sense of community and public spaces), the business school ‘village’ can be designed to similarly fragment and unite.

By creating a varying terrain of spaces, from large to small, noisy to quiet, public to private, collaborative to individual, the village concept has the capacity to instill a strong campus-based learning experience.

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Figure 2: old paradigm work practice Source: Woods Bagot (2010)

Figure 3: new paradigm work practice Source: Woods Bagot (2010)

Workplace

The creation of communities on campus in many ways emulates the business workplace. A workplace will typically be organised into zones whereby people work in teams to achieve objectives; they are collocated to enhance communication and collaboration. Each internal cluster of a workplace is in itself a community.

The workplace is increasingly being designed as a series of terrains, presenting alternative work environments according to the activities to be undertaken and with whom. The notion of activity-based working (Calder, 2010) has direct correlation with activity-based learning.

Students on campus select the environments to inhabit based upon the activities they will engage with. Within the last decade conceptual and physical transformation of the workplace has commenced in response to evidence-based research that has led to a better understanding of work processes enhanced by technologies (Worthington, 2005; Groves & Knight, 2010).

Where the convention has been for people to manage their work activities from their workstations and offices, the new way of working is for activities to be centred on people who are mobilised to a variety of settings depending on the work activity, refer Figures 2 and 3 (Calder, 2010).

What this means for the workplace is the creation of a variety of terrains to enable people to undertake activities purposefully, and for people to move around the workplace according to the activities to be accomplished and to interact with specific people.

Macquarie Group embarked upon an ambitious transformation of their Shelley Street Sydney workplace to reflect their organisation as agile, entrepreneurial, dynamic, focused, team-based and non-hierarchical. The results have been nothing short of stunning; the variety of terrains have been readily embraced (Calder, 2010).

The campus learning environmentThe Macquarie Group experience, coupled with emerging research into the activity based working revolution, is synonymous with future directions in learning on university campuses. Learning is moving away from being centred on the teacher to being centred on the student. More emphasis is placed upon students developing generic skills such as working in teams, project management and problem solving, in order that they are adequately prepared to hit the ground running in the workplace. And the campus environment is reflecting this.

Terrains of learning represent places for students to study in a variety of modes, from formal to informal, social to reflective, collaborative to individual, noisy to quiet and light to dark. They provide places for students to engage with their peers, coursework, teachers and industry contacts, just as the workplace provides places for workers to engage with colleagues, supervisors, work material, relevant consultants and industry partners. An agile campus that makes provision for these terrains will be meeting the needs of the 21st century agile student and the next generation of business leaders.

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This image and bottom left: One Shelley Street, Sydney, Macquarie Group. Woods Bagot in collaboration with Clive Wilkinson Architects and Macquarie Group

– The Financial Times. (2010). Global MBA Rankings 2011. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings-2011

– The Princeton Review. (2011). Business School Rankings. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://www.princetonreview.com/business-school-rankings.aspx

– The Wall Street Journal. (2011). Business Schools. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://online.wsj.com/public/page/business-schools.html

– Wesch, M. (Producer). (2007) A View of Students Today. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

– Prensky, M. (2009). H. Sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom, Innovate 5(3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=705

– SCALE-UP (2011), North Carolina State University, http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/

– Dewees, S. (1999), The School-within-a-School Model, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC

– Worthington, J. (2005), Reinventing the Workplace, 2nd Ed, Architectural Press

– Groves, K. & Knight, W. (2010), I Wish I Worked There!: A Look Inside the Most Creative Spaces in Business, Wiley.

References

– Singleton, G. (2010) The Agile Student. Woods Bagot Blue Paper

– Calder, J. (2010) Presentation of Macquarie Group

– Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Native, Digital Immigrants. On The Horizon,

9 (5, October 2001). – The Aspen Institute Centre for

Business Education. (2011). Beyond Grey Pinstripes. Retrieved 13th September 2011, from http://www.beyondgreypinstripes.org/index.cfm

Authors

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Jo DaneEducation Consultant

Jo is a designer, educator and researcher with a passion for educational transformation enabled through research-based design practice. During her tenure at Monash University in Melbourne, Jo became increasingly interested in the apparent disconnect between educational theory and the design of learning environments. This culminated in candidature for her PhD topic titled ‘New Generation Learning Environments’. Jo has published numerous papers and regularly presents at national and international conferences.

Sarah BallPrincipal

Sarah is a Woods Bagot Principal and specialist in education. Having delivered a diverse range of architectural and interior focussed new generation learning environments, Sarah provides a strong commitment to developing key relationships with higher education and tertiary clients. Sarah’s experience and expertise is underpinned by significant research and project success in the UK, USA and Middle East and includes representing Woods Bagot as a presenter at industry forums and conferences such as TEFMA, CEFPI and Informa.

Georgia SingletonPrincipal

As a Principal of Woods Bagot and an education specialist, Georgia has worked on a diverse range and scale of architectural and interior design projects. She seeks to push traditional building and interior design typologies with dynamic, highly integrated and research-driven solutions. Most recently Georgia was involved with the University of Sydney’s new Business School; Australian National University’s JCSMR Redevelopment; University of Sydney’s TLC Masterplan; University of New South Wales’ engineering masterplan and Solar Research Facility; plus University of Technology Sydney’s Building 5 - Teaching and Learning Space.

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