“If you want to change the world, change education.”
– Nelson Mandela
As an educator or a C-Level executive, it’s no secret that you’re constantly on the fire line. You’re faced with tough decisions in complex human situations every day. Your executive team or admin team doesn’t always support you. Your people don’t always implement or appreciate innovation, and managing your reputation, or your influence inside and outside your organization can often be a “tight wire” act.
With a landslide of compliance reports, political pressure, economic fluctuation, AI, sharp and swift social, global and environmental disruption that the legacy systems are not designed for, nor coping with, our new interdependent world asks whether educators will shape the future or be shaped by political, financial and software architecture in the next decade.
What education, what degrees, what life choices will be relevant to a world where AI and social media can flatten existing businesses, institutions or careers overnight, while also taking us where we have never even imagined in ways that are faster and easier than ever before?
Today I want to briefly touch on one key aspect that is not in the media and give you a quick sample takeaway on SQUIRCLE, (the square and circle game) developed by Francis P. Cholle of how people make decisions, and ultimately shape their world.
As a senior advisor and mentor for university presidents, CEOs, entrepreneurs, Olympians and billionaires I help them close the gap from where they are to not only achieve daring and impossible dreams, but to achieve the daring impossible dream with grace, ease and humor, the essence of virtuoso leadership in any field.
For the past 30 years in Europe, Asia, the USA and Australia I have been mentoring world-class performers. As founder and Director of VirtuosoCEO, since 2011 I’ve served as senior executive coach for ASX listed companies, for Mindvalley corporation and thousands of entrepreneurs through our VCEO program. As an educator I’ve enjoyed 20 years as a senior administrator in research universities and serving as a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy for global executive MBA programs, and Dean/Director of music programs and festivals. I still enjoy an international music career as performer, working with world class musicians, most recently performing as soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and serving as artistic director of Orvieto Music Festival in Italy.
My early career as a bassoon soloist was seemingly impossible. Not only were there no bassoon ‘soloists’ but women weren’t allowed to even apply in the top orchestras. In 1985 the London Symphony invited me to play principal with Leonard Bernstein conducting and the rest is history as I am now the world’s most recorded solo bassoonist. I know the thrill, and terror, of preparing for new recordings when returning to performing after a break of several years behind a desk.
It wasn’t always easy, and I have had my share of epic challenge both as a leader, a performer and woman in a man’s world. In 1985 when I was the first woman to play principal in the London Symphony, there was no ladies’ restroom to be found backstage in the brand-new Barbican Hall. As a senior administrator, and a red head, it was my nature to come out slinging just when confidentiality or legal strategy meant keeping one’s powder dry and emotions contained.
The lessons learned of how to ‘play’, both on stage and in life, when encountering confusion, extreme stress and distress, the trauma of what accompanies disruption for all involved, performance preparation and stage fright was at times exhausting and perplexing, while also exhilarating and full of wonder.
One personal discovery is how mastery requires learning to prepare well enough to surrender, focus on the outcome, on being as allow doing, and suspending judgment. A missed note is not the end of a career but the catalyst for a better one with more beauty and clearer emotional or spiritual connection.
What I learned is that the leaders who are shaping the future, truly great artists and athletes all seem to know:
- How to use memory and photographic memory.
- Stress handling and conditioning amid complex situations.
- Intellectual leverage and emotional conditioning to make maximum use of any opportunity, especially chaos.
- Methods to clear trauma, create lasting behavioral and personality shifts.
- Clear thinking in all situations.
- Decisions with space and time for feeling, sensation, intuition and conversations
- Making friends and gaining the trust of all kinds of people.
- Rather than right or wrong thinking, they respect free will and recognize divergent perspectives.
- Abundance is truly internal.
- Value for the soft skills of exponential leadership, the ones we tend to shield from public view, such as instinct, intuition, conscious awareness, compassion.
None of this is explicitly taught in our education systems.
My work for nearly 30 years has been on stage and backstage with very famous people, where you see and can observe their quirky genuine selves:
Leonard Bernstein, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, the Dalai Lama, David Bowie, the Clintons, Colin Powell, and so many more.
My life has been spent working with people who are working towards the greatest expression of who they are, working with our creative artists, business leaders, thought leaders, inventors and those who create our consciousness and our art and our culture.
The inventors create the tools and machines, thought leaders create the philosophies, and business leaders create the institutions that shape our future.
No matter what stage you are at – you influence the future of the world. What comes with that journey is an internal aspect of growth and clearing all subconscious blocks.
Ten years serving as Dean and senior administrator in universities was like ingesting a daily cortisol cocktail. In 2011, the antidote I took was a free year out of employment to visit Yale, study neuroscience, quantum physics while undertaking new executive coaching certifications in New York, London and Australia. I ventured out to study with 26 extraordinary thought leaders, visited sacred sites, silent retreats, psychics and seers, enjoyed working with 28 billionaires and in particular strategic fundraising for 5 universities with radical new educational approaches while serving as a White House task force consultant.
This gave me the time to probe into what differentiates the top 5% of the world leaders, how do they think, what choices do they consistently make, and it has become my passion to know and share what separates them from the next 20% and beyond?
So, I created VirtuosoCEO, a boutique coaching consulting company to help those who want to reach their full potential and excel in times of disruption. Unlike traditional solutions that deal with pieces of a puzzle at best, we bring a team of experts, a coaching board, to serve as mentors for whole-person leadership synchronizing conscious intentions that create biological changes.
What I really enjoy about SQUIRCLE is how it provides a glimpse into your aptitude for playfulness, for creative discovery, for allowing chaos to make better choices, rather than control group outcomes. These invaluable tools allow one to expand, to grow into your influences, and to deal with the inevitable experiences that come with a role of influence.
Why is this important?
Right now, Higher Education and Companies spend a record high of more than $18 billion each year on strategic development reports and plans.
Why is this so high now?
Exponential technologies, Cloud and AI are transforming our world rapidly, allowing leaders to aim higher than ever before.
Here is what they are focusing on:
- Accelerating productivity
- Increasing growth and performance
- Improving leadership
- Enhancing efficiency
While also
- Cultivating talent
- Creating an iconic culture
As a consultant being asked to deliver these reports, I have had to ask how do we rectify decision making processes based on the data ROI’s, timelines and budgets with the critical need for time and space to imagine, create, and collaborate essential to innovation and real progress?
Latest research from McKinsey states that companies who invested over $18 Billion for strategic business and professional development programs, show less than 30% traction in achieving the goals and planning objectives from those investments.
In other words, over 70% of the time, the planning doesn’t translate into progress or implementation. The statistics on ‘change management’ are even worse with 85% failure rates.
As these costly strategic plans gather dust on shelves, I wondered how to improve results. What is the resistance to implementing those behaviors, and why are companies and universities routinely leaving at least $10 billion or more on the table?
The Education Conundrum
“With bold, decisive action, the US higher education sector could expand its impact, deliver on its promise of more-equitable outcomes, and improve the nation’s economic competitiveness.” (“Ten million more graduates in 20 years | McKinsey”)
– McKinsey & Company April 17, 2023
As for Universities, we all want to recruit great students, give them an incredible education and see them excel in the future and turn into donors – so we define graduate attributes and curriculums to set them on their way. However, the reality of modern higher education paints a concerning picture.
To attract the best, Universities define their objectives and determine a strategy. Then you perform a SWOT analysis and segment your target markets. Finally, compare your results against brand values, brand history, brand type, brand image, brand sense, brand noise, brand identity, brand cult and brand voice.
This is the market speak language of higher education, a far cry from its traditional civic mission. A 2016 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that only 18% of colleges and universities require students to take a course in U.S. government or history. The same study revealed that 40% of college graduates couldn’t identify the term lengths for members of Congress. These statistics highlight a troubling decline in civic education.
In the current view, the market model, “students” are no longer people, no longer learners, they’re consumers. Often, they’re an input, and occasionally an asset. And once you have an asset, you have a commodity. This shift in philosophy is evident in student motivations: a 2018 Gallup survey found that 58% of college students said getting a good job was the primary reason for pursuing higher education, compared to only 13% who said, “to become a more well-rounded person”.
Market driven education is where we have been heading the past thirty years or more. This trend is reflected in the changing landscape of degree programs. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of liberal arts degrees awarded fell by 7%, while degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields increased by 43%.
While dealing with ‘outputs’ we might also mention quality of life, a thirst and reverence for knowledge, an unstinting dedication to excellence and a conviction that a university can provide students, faculty and alumni with what is needed to meet the demands of the present and to walk into the future with confidence. Yet, the lack of civic engagement among students is alarming. A 2019 study by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education found that only 40.3% of college students voted in the 2018 midterm elections. At the same time, they report that 66% of college students voted in 2020 and anticipate ever increasing influence in 2024.
At the same time, there is something troubling about the ease with which these new words and phrases are pronounced trippingly on our tongues. So, what happens when we start thinking of a university program as a brand?
We know that people will pay premium amounts for the prestige brand names. Our consumers equate prestige with value, and we know that too. This commercialization is evident in the funding structure of universities. State funding for public colleges and universities decreased by 16% between 2008 and 2017, adjusted for inflation, and was 50% less by 2023. Consequently, the share of university budgets coming from tuition has increased from 20% in 1988 to nearly 43% in 2018 and higher now in both private and public university systems.
In market speak, successful organizations believe they must make decisions on the basis of being best in the world at something, and if you can’t be the best in the world, you outsource the function or eliminate the unit that doesn’t measure up. So, what happens to music, visual arts, Sanskrit, and the creative industries?
As we use corporate-speak more fluently, we become accustomed to thinking in commercialized terms about education. We’re no longer public intellectuals, we’re entrepreneurs. This shift is particularly evident in research universities, where a 2015 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute found that 80% of faculty considered research to be “very important” or “essential,” compared to only 9% who said the same about teaching. Hooray for making education the latest must have consumer good that we can buy and forget about, rather than a highly prized, highly valued public experience.
If we extend this logic another step, our decisions will be increasingly driven by consumers’ tastes. Are we ready to think that we should only teach what students want or be driven out of business? And how far down do you go? How many teenagers want to learn about Shakespeare? I’m sure they’d much rather enjoy “How to Become Tony Stark” by Hypnosis 101. While we’re at it, we can cut mathematics. Every phone can handle the calculations, and no one is keen on years studying trigonometry, calculus and more.
Although federal compliance and state budgetary processes determine their annual financial support, funds are not merely allocated according to commercial or political considerations, but through an intensely competitive process of review, hence Key Performance Indicators, accreditation, academic reviews and so forth.
Curiously, this linear process resembles a financial landslide to scientific processes and analysis as they race to prove their strengths.
However, with this pressure to ‘attract’ consumers, curriculums across universities changed significantly to cater to students’ “quality of life”, with courses such as fencing, ballroom dancing and yoga introduced, and a good portion of “liberal arts” or humanities included for all degrees.
Suddenly, student centric choices repositioned the arts, and soft skills become a true investment for university recruitment.
Unfortunately, the trend was fashionable. Everyone had to have one, and what seemed for some universities like a good idea, a good cultural fit at the time has resulted in some strange marriages as some try to measure, evaluate and quantify the creative value.
Conservative, prim and proper universities jumping into bed with the mad and passionate arts? It’s like Queen Victoria snuggling up to Van Gogh, still bleeding for his art.
Welcome to the loving union the arts, creativity, gaming, wellness and soft skills now enjoy with tertiary education. We tend to keep our ears on a bit better nowadays. Cultural events, art shows, concerts, museum lectures and coffee shops are all part of the modern culture that accompanies this new world of 12% (or less) federal funding versus fee structures.
And now we need pod casting, YouTube, 5G streaming to accompany our libraries, plus AI research labs are prospering nationwide. The financial backing that is needed to sustain outstanding education is phenomenal while reducing offerings that are ‘lost leaders’. Is it feasible or even possible to corporatize education?
Disruptive Trends in Education
An interesting study by Harvard, the longest longitudinal study in history published March 19, 2023, found that 54% of Americans dislike their jobs and a further study from 2022 by Russell Salisbury states that “American education is failing because kids hate school.” Something is broken when we’re talking about over 50% majority.
Think about how a society has been created, despite all our technology, despite 2000+ years of western civilization, where our children dislike how they’re spending most of their waking hours, and they are groomed to become adults who dislike the way they’re spending most of their waking hours.
The Harvard study done by Shawn Achor examined what is it that improves an employee’s career success in companies. It wasn’t skills, high IQ or scientific breakthroughs. Rather, it’s what Shawn Achor calls the social connectivity score. He found that he could rate all these employees on their social connectivity score, which means their ability to empathize with others, their kindness, their levels of positivity when they walk into a room, their motivation, their optimism. And if you look at the top 25%, if you’re in that top 25% in terms of social connectivity score, you are going to be 40% more likely to get a raise in the next two years than everyone else. It has nothing to do with the school you graduated from.
In music, you are only as good as your last performance. So how do we allow education to blindly follow traditions now shown to be wanting, and do we just have to accept it?
What would happen if we reinvented this?
As 45% of the jobs in the world today are going to be obsolete, what are we doing nothing to expand the human being’s understanding of itself and its own nature?
Many new models of human evolution abound, such as Ken Wilber’s work about expanding consciousness and what would human beings think about? Or Barbara Marx Hubbard’s and Sonia Othenin-Girard’s work on consciousness, Neale Donald Walsch’s work of highly evolved beings.
As an educator, I wonder what would a road map of the enlightened human being be? I’m talking about enlightened in terms of not just spiritual awareness, but optimized in terms of your levels of self-esteem, confidence, perception, sensations, intuition, conscious awareness, the way you follow your passion, the way you treat other human beings, the way you educate your children, treat all sentient beings? How would they function? What would their levels of awareness be if we progressed?
And then I looked at what the education system is doing to support increased levels of consciousness, to get us there and how often? The answer is while Ken Robinson is making real strides with his many publications, the rollout of innovative learning may be 5 to 10%, or hardly ever.
Where are music, meditation and the ancient breathing rituals that help to center, neutralize, go in to work and do your job exceptionally well in the face of any type of adversity, to ski down the mountain with broken tibia plateau fracture, to make a stance for academic freedom of speech in the face of a riotous crowd, to walk on stage and perform a new piece by memory – where are these skills being shared. Interestingly, they are now creeping in due to student demand.
The side effects of meditation and breathing rituals are enhanced empathy, creative visualization, tapping into intuition, using mindfulness to remove stress.
In other words, being able to connect with people without an agenda, to garner decision making processes built on inclusiveness, transparency and outrageous goals for oneself and mutual gain for all parties.
What should we be considering?
So, what should we be learning? The answer isn’t to wipe out our schools or programs, but to incorporate and teach human decision-making processes that contribute to personal wisdom. That’s where personal growth comes in. Consider that:
- The directors of Western union thought the telephone had no commercial potential
- Ken Olson, the found of Digital Equipment Corporation said, in 1977: “there is no reason for any individuals to have a computer in their home.”
- Charles Duell, commissioner of the US patent office said, in 1899: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” (“Old Ways Won’t Open New Doors! – Bryan Yager”)
Between 2024 and 2028, we will see as much change in the world as the entire 20th century or more. So, what’s going to happen when you spend four years in a program when the world will shift as much as an entire century before?
So where does AI fit in all this?
Ray Kurzweil says by 2049, that AI will be super intelligent and as intelligent as all the collective brains on earth today.
As that’s happening, are our schools are teaching us things that our personalized, artificial intelligence, which is essentially an extension of our brain will know and robotics perform tasks that make some training redundant. It’s now on our smartphone. So, our current education systems are preparing us for a world that is no longer going to exist.
For the moment AI can copy all the patterns and algorithms. It isn’t yet generative, like the true poets or choreographers and great performers.
Google has written AI that can write its own software. So where does the role of computer engineering come in? This doesn’t mean that all these skills are going to disappear. They are still going to be necessary, but what is truly going to make us unique?
What’s truly going to make us high-functioning in the are the skills that truly lead to happy lives. It’s learning how to be better people, parents, partners, leaders and colleagues. It’s learning wisdom, its learning mindfulness, it’s learning how to deal with the scourges of society: Anxiety, depression, low self-esteem.
It’s learning how people differ, embrace their diverse talents and innate genius and allow for decision making processes and choices that expand the wisdom rather. The balance between meeting a deadline and generating the creative content is a dance that allows the unimaginable to happen and evolve.
SQUIRCLE
Leadership positions come with important executive choices to make that define or at least influence the execution of the mission and purpose of institutions.
70% of the world is functioning at what is called the ethnocentric stage. or codependent. These people are codependent on their education and beliefs that their views are right, which implies that others have it wrong. Status quo reigns strong.
There’s also an awakening happening where 30% of the world has moved to what is called the world centric stage, where we understand that one’s views on education, scientific research or religion is wonderful to you, but it is not the only way. It is merely one way that still allows for enjoying and learning many things about other cultures and being open to new decision processes and new answers.
There is no way to please everyone.
“…and those were seen to be dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
SQUIRCLE restores a truly human element in the world of executive assessments, of talents and growth edges for individuals to focus on what truly matters, to value our innate human capacities to make decisions, take intuitive decisions (usually labelled counterintuitive decisions) and envision multiple systems of being and thinking.
The point is that SQUIRCLE can share how these many types of enlightened experiences interact, but also help people to expand their circles of compassion, value and understand soft skills, and human genius to wider and wider circles of understanding until you can encompass innovation and the chaos of less control, stepping beyond the reptilian part of our brain which causes the fear of the other, just like each time one walks on any stage where anything can and will happen.
SQUIRCLE allows teams to step back and see and sense a larger set of frameworks, with introverts, ambiverts and extroverts, visionaries and creative chaos that can find frameworks, timelines and the natural forward progression of humanity.
So often I have watched educational committees rely solely on rational choices that reach deadlines and tick every box for annual reviews, faculty search committees, financial budgeting (SQUARE) at the expense of funding or allowing time for the creative freedom that delivers their greatness (CIRCLE). The key is to include innovation without compromising the financial and time-based agreements (SQUARE), while enhancing the human experience of students, professors, alumni and community creative endeavors. They look for proof in degrees, certifications and training, disregarding years of expertise and experience.
As I have seen time and time again, the arts are like a cultural membrane that brings audiences and groups together to experience peak states, to imagine and emotionally experience the human condition (CIRCLE) in ways that increase retention, lower absenteeism, and improve community engagement and donor contributions while helping us all adapt to the emerging and constant flux in our environment (CIRCLE).
The Opportunity
At VirtuosoCEO we developed a 120-day program, focused on resilience, conversational IQ, and human choice points. We have documented how teams have transformed the 30% uptake of their goals into 85% or higher in only 90 days while personal resilience scores on average rose from 32% to 92% or above adopting healthier environments and companies shedding hundreds of kilos while sick leave dropped by 71%.
These VCEO results are great, with documented tangible results of 300,000 C-Suite team members and CEOs.
However, it remains the case that most educational institutions, and in many businesses, leadership is focused on winning funds from state legislature, building stakeholders, donors and scaling their business. They are so frightened to make a mistake that they remain glued to their longstanding traditions. When pondering how to invest, when people need came along., they were loath to include personal goals. In prioritizing financial and statistical results, they forgot what their massively transformative purpose was.
SQUIRCLE is a brilliant new assessment tool and game that helps teams quickly and immediately view their overall creative talents and any imbalance toward logic or vision or sales or disruption, to quickly garner their opportunity for growth in how decisions are taken, which of course determines the basis and criteria for any 90 -120 challenge, which is why I believe using SQUIRCLE we will see even higher results, happy clients and even bolder outcomes ahead.
Conclusion
As we traverse the many future opportunities, I recall the words of the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, who asked,
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
For all the storm clouds gathering, there’s still a bit of silver lining to be found with global alliances and talk of interdependency. Such affiliations exemplify the future of scholarship and service in the global academies and reflect a balance between what students need for education and what universities need to stay alive and where our programs will take shape.
Interesting times are ahead as we consider the SQUIRCLE, square and circle, frameworks. Today’s watershed moment parallels what Charles Darwin coined as ‘the fusion of sympathy’ in 1872 or what we would call ‘compassion’ as we broker square KPI’s, strategic plans, metrics and rubrics that sustain our funding sources, while ensuring the natural balance of being human amid AI, technology and ever more software systems. Darwin used these exact terms when considering nature and all ‘sentient life’. Will our great institutions be able to demonstrate as much concern about people around the world as people in their own cohort?
As a senior administrator in higher education for over twenty years, I view SQUIRCLE education as a unique bridge to support personal growth, waking up, and restoring balance in our education ecosphere – in ‘the fusion of sympathy’ to use Darwin’s language. It’s time to reconsider our priorities and return to the civic mission that once defined higher education.
How to start a business fast, how to solve world challenges, how to be world centric, or even cosmos and source aligned. How to be a better person, how to love better, how to be happier, how to improve your self-esteem, how to practice mindfulness so you don’t have to suffer from depression or anxiety like so many of the other people in the world?
As the American composer and Professor of Composition at Princeton, Barbara White, points out in her essay, Save Your Money, the value of the arts “cannot be reduced to bottom-line figures, to easily calculable causes and effects.” There must be a willingness to be “purposefully purposeless, to imagine the unimaginable, to make use of uselessness.” The arts, she writes, “encourage us to reserve a space for the unruly, the unpredictable, and the unforeseen.” 1
1 White, Barbara, 104th American Assembly on “The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education” convened at Arden House in Harriman, New York (March 11-13, 2004) 3.
So YES, to SQUIRCLE and Yes to now. No other assessment tool allows and exploits the sense of ‘play’ of healthy chaos respectfully balanced with our strategic optimization, for the being and the doing, the vision and the acceleration.
Wishing you outrageous success and game-changing results as you experience SQUIRCLE.
