Patti Brown: Leadership Is Learned In The Room

We have spent much of the past decade asking how much education can move online. I increasingly find myself asking: what is simply too important to lose from the room?

Technology has transformed education for the better. It has widened access, created flexibility, and allowed knowledge and ideas to travel further and faster than ever before. I am a great believer in what technology can bring to education.

But when we are educating the people who will lead businesses, governments, and organizations across borders, I believe there is something technology cannot fully replicate: the experience of learning alongside people who see the world differently from you.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SHOWS

The research gives us good reason to value this interaction. It shows that being in the room matters – but so does the experience.

A major meta-analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed students in active learning environments perform better in examinations and concept assessments than students taught through traditional lectures. In-person education is not the solve-all, though. What we do when people are together matters: debate, challenge, discuss, experiment, and learn from one another.

And we know well-designed online education can produce excellent academic outcomes. Research comparing online and face-to-face education does not tell us that one format is universally superior. But research consistently brings us back to the importance of engagement, interaction and community – quality.

LESSONS FROM MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

This becomes particularly interesting in management education.

A recent study published in the British Educational Research Journal examined student experiences across predominantly online MBA programs at Imperial College Business School, ESMT Berlin, and Ivey Business School. The researchers found meaningful peer interaction, alongside faculty engagement and programme design, was critical to the student experience.

I find this particularly important for business education – because leadership is not simply something we learn from a textbook. We learn it from people.

A CLASSROOM WITHOUT BORDERS

At Oxford, our MBA classroom is extraordinarily international. Imagine what that means for a classroom discussion.

A conversation about a business problem is rarely simply a conversation about business. The person sitting beside you may have built a company in India, worked in finance in New York, led teams in Africa, worked in government in Europe, or grown up within a political and economic system completely different from your own.

They will not necessarily interpret the same problem in the same way. That is precisely the point.

There is evidence behind this, too. Research published in Higher Education examining more than 19,000 students, found greater internationalization of small, interactive learning groups was largely associated with positive effects on student performance, although those effects varied across disciplines and student groups.

WHERE DIFFERENCE BECOMES DIALOGUE

Research specifically examining diversity in graduate management classrooms has also highlighted dialogue as a powerful mechanism for learning across cultural, religious and other differences. Diversity does not create learning simply because people from different backgrounds occupy the same room. The value comes when those differences become part of the conversation.

That is what a great business school classroom should do.

Leadership requires us to listen to perspectives that challenge our assumptions. It requires the confidence to contribute and the humility to change our minds. It requires understanding that something considered perfectly normal in one country, organization or culture may be interpreted entirely differently in another.

Those skills are difficult to acquire from a slide deck.

LEARNING BEYOND THE LECTURE

Ask our students. Some of the most important learning happens between the classes. It happens over coffee, during group work, walking to dinner, in a debate that continues after a lecture or in a conversation with someone whose life experience is completely different from your own.

At Oxford, there is another dimension that I believe is particularly powerful. Our MBA students are not just members of a business school. They are part of the wider University of Oxford and its college communities.

These are deliberately multidisciplinary communities. A graduate student’s academic home may be their department or faculty, but their college brings them into contact with an extraordinary range of disciplines.

Oxford describes its colleges as “small, multidisciplinary academic communities” where graduate students meet academics and fellow students studying a range of subjects and coming from around the world. That means an MBA student can find themselves having dinner with someone studying mathematics, medicine, literature, engineering, philosophy, theology, climate science or public policy.

I believe tomorrow’s business leaders should be part of such conversations, understanding the world and the perspectives of others. The challenges they will inherit will not arrive neatly labeled finance, strategy, or marketing.

PROBLEMS DON’T COME NEATLY LABELED

Climate change is simultaneously a scientific, economic, political and societal challenge. Artificial intelligence raises questions about technology, productivity, ethics, regulation and human behaviour. Healthcare requires leaders who can understand science, government, economics and society.

The world does not need leaders who can only read a balance sheet. It needs well rounded leaders who understand there is, and are curious about, the world beyond their own expertise.

This is why I believe community is not an accessory to management education. It is a core component. Our responsibility is not simply to teach people how to run organizations. We need to prepare them to walk into rooms filled with people who do not think, speak, live or lead as they do and know how to listen, contribute, adapt and find common ground.

WHY PROXIMITY STILL MATTERS

They need to understand countries they have never lived in and cultures they have never experienced. They need to become comfortable being uncomfortable. They need to know when to speak and, equally importantly, when to listen.

Because ultimately, leadership happens in rooms. It happens across tables, across cultures, across disciplines and increasingly across borders.

You can teach frameworks remotely. You can share knowledge digitally. You can deliver an outstanding lecture to someone thousands of miles away. But leadership is also learned through proximity, conversation and community.

For me, that is why being in the room still matters. Perhaps now more than ever.

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Patti Brown is Associate Dean for Accredited Programs at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

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