WHO DO YOU CONSIDER SMARTER, a five-year-old child or a 75-year-old Harvard professor?
This was the question that Asim Khwaja, Professor of Public Policy and co-director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), posed on August 3 to top leaders from the public and private sectors in Pakistan – a group that included members of parliament, top civil servants CEOs, non-profit leaders and military generals. Khwaja intended for the question to create a framework for discussion for the three-day program, Innovative Leadership in the Age of Data (ILEAD), held in Lahore. The first of its kind in Pakistan, the course focused less on technical skills in the use of big data (though there was some of that) and more on envisioning and leading a data-savvy organization of any kind.
So, who is smarter, speaking in organizational terms – the child or the professor? In the past when the accumulation of knowledge was paramount in giving organizations an edge, you may well have answered the 75-year-old Harvard professor.
But in today’s world where knowledge is easily accessible and constantly evolving, you might want your organization to be more like the five-year-old child, able to absorb all sorts of data quickly without preconceived notions of what is valid and not valid, able to experiment and adapt, while retaining the 75-year old’s knowledge to sift through this information in light of existing theories and adapt those as needed.
Over the three days of the course, Khwaja along with Rema Hanna, Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies, and faculty from Princeton, London School of Economics, and Lahore University of Management Sciences, led participants in collaborative problem solving, TED-style talks, case studies, digital blended learning modules and at one point the construction of towers using only spaghetti, tape and a marshmallow. Participants were guided through stages of viewing of their organizations as brains embedded in a nervous system– first receptive, and then analytical, and finally able to learn.
Khwaja said that ILEAD was unique, not only in its approach but in the level of participants it attracted.
“These were are all people who are hitting the same policy questions but from different perspectives. In the U.S. this kind of group might have been brought together by think tanks, or perhaps universities. But in Pakistan there are few such fora,” he said.
Khwaja went on to say that it would have been difficult to bring a group of leaders around a substantive topic because they came from such different spheres and different ideological perspectives. However, bringing them together in the “language of data” had a bridging effect, and they were able to learn from each other while discussing their organizations in structural terms.
Working with the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan, Khwaja says future versions of ILEAD might move beyond organizational dynamics and the uses of big data, and toward those substantive issues facing Pakistani society. He cited positive responses among participants in the inaugural session, saying that he and his colleagues may have founded a new forum for building consensus using hard evidence in a country that faces numerous challenges at all levels – including the top.