What Schools Taught Me About Corporations
The deepest lessons about organisational life didn't come from a business school. They came from watching how children learn, and what they need to thrive.
When I work with corporate leaders, they sometimes look at me with a certain curiosity. "You built schools," they say. "What does that have to do with our organisation?"
My answer is always the same. Everything. Because a school is one of the most complex human organisations that exists. And the conditions in which children learn best are, in their essence, the same conditions in which adults do their best work.
The Autonomy Principle
The research on children's learning is unambiguous: children learn best when they have genuine agency over their learning. When they experience themselves as the authors of their own understanding, rather than the recipients of someone else's knowledge. This doesn't mean the absence of structure. It means structure that serves the learner rather than constraining them.
Adults are exactly the same. The employee who understands the "why" behind their work, who has real ownership over how they accomplish their goals, who's trusted to make judgments within a clear framework, will consistently outperform the one who's managed through surveillance and micro-correction.
The Relationship Before the Content
In education, we've long known that a child won't learn from a teacher they don't trust. The relationship must come first. A child who feels safe, seen, and respected by their teacher will attempt things they'd never attempt for a stranger or an authority figure who frightens them.
The same dynamic operates in every team. People won't take intellectual risks, won't propose the unconventional idea, won't admit they don't understand something, unless the relational foundation of safety and trust is in place. First.
Intrinsic Motivation Can't Be Manufactured
We know from child psychology that external rewards can actually undermine intrinsic motivation. The child who draws for joy stops drawing for joy the moment you offer rewards for drawing. They start drawing for the reward, and when the reward disappears, so does the drawing.
This isn't merely a child psychology observation. It's one of the most consistent findings in all of behavioural science, and it applies fully to the adult workplace. Organisations that rely primarily on external incentives find that performance becomes tightly coupled to those incentives, and nothing more. Purpose, craftsmanship, and genuine commitment become casualties.
The Learning Organisation Is a Learning School
Peter Senge's vision of the learning organisation resonates so deeply with me because it describes, in corporate language, what the best schools have always been: communities of people who are genuinely curious about their work, who hold their assumptions lightly, and who understand that the organisation's greatest asset is its collective capacity to learn and adapt.
Building that kind of organisation, in a school or in a corporation, requires the same thing. Leaders who are themselves genuinely curious, genuinely humble, and genuinely committed to the growth of every person in the community they lead.