Global IB exam chief: how jazz provides lessons in management

Two childhood inspirations have permeated the various career and managerial style of Olli-Pekka Heinonen, the sometime Finnish politician, policymaker and public official: schooling and new music.

As he plots out system in his new function as director-standard of the Intercontinental Baccalaureate technique initial launched a lot more than 50 percent a century ago, he is drawing on both of those these influences. He normally takes over a elaborate world organisation as it seeks to expand and meet the altering desires of little ones and society in an era severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“My father was a instructor and I was born and lived in an apartment in a most important faculty,” he says. “I also studied in the [Turku] Conservatory [of Audio] and for a calendar year was a new music instructor.” Heinonen, fifty seven, then qualified as a lawyer and — at the very least as he describes it — just about every step in his skilled daily life has been guided by requests and nudges from other individuals.

He was questioned to come to be a parliamentary adviser, then minister of schooling at only 29, before he had been elected an MP. At the time that had transpired, he became minister of transportation and telecommunications. From 2002 he expended a ten years jogging Yleisradio, the Finnish condition broadcaster, but later rejoined governing administration as condition secretary to the primary minister.

The only situation for which he at any time used was his past write-up as director-standard of the Nationwide Company for Schooling in 2016. That place him in demand of a faculty technique held up as a showpiece about the globe, judged by benchmarks these types of as the OECD’s Programme for Intercontinental Student Evaluation, for its perception in balancing potent academic achievements with daily life outside faculty.

“My philosophy is that you should really not put your belief in planning points,” Heinonen, says. “There will be surprises and you should really just go along with what evolves. The only situation I have used for was at the Company. I felt it would be a great time to return to the criminal offense scene of the discipline of schooling.”

He cites as a single of his greatest achievements the interval as schooling minister in the mid to late nineteen nineties, when he granted autonomy to cities, faculties and instructors them selves. He stresses the groundwork had been laid over the preceding two many years by requiring all instructors to have masters’ levels. That boosted their competence, embedded a lifestyle of continual pedagogical research and bolstered their superior status and respect in society.

“My tactic was to include things like everybody in the method,” he says. Encouraged by his government’s style of “humble governance”, he embraced the concept that “at the major you never have the proper solutions, you have to include people today in co-developing them. Management is not about a human being, it is a excellent that should really be distribute greatly in a technique. If you emphasise the function of a single human being, you are failing.”

He says he learnt humility, but also the have to have to talk a lot more. “I’m not by character another person who wishes to be in the spotlight. I’ve figured out to do that. We Finns from time to time talk way too very little. We attempt to be very specific and leave other points out, but speaking to generate belief is central.

“In the starting, I had the concept that remaining in a management situation meant you should really appear, converse and gown to appear like a chief,” he says. “That won’t operate. You have to have to be by yourself, the human being you are. Authenticity is so critical, and the integrity that comes with it.”

Management is not about a human being, it is a excellent that should really be distribute greatly in a technique. If you emphasise the function of a single human being, you are failing

Just one of his greatest frustrations came as minister of transportation and telecommunications, when he struggled throughout the spin out of Sonera from the Nationwide Postal Provider. Its shares rose sharply and then collapsed throughout the IT bubble. “It didn’t go as easily as I hoped,” he says. “I realised how hard it is to mix the globe of politics and company. I should really have included all the associates even a lot more strongly to obtain a popular solution.”

He then took a split from politics, partly reflecting a have to have to “balance function with family members and recovery time”, as he says. “I learnt to usually have a lot more of people points in your daily life that give you electrical power than just take it absent. Always make sure you have a reserve to cope with surprises. If you never have that form of spare electrical power, they [great and poor surprises] will just take you.”

He took demand of the condition broadcaster, and developed his identification as a manager, drawing parallels with his encounters as a hobbyist trumpeter main a jazz band. “You generate something new with a shared melody that everybody is aware of but with a good deal of space for improvisation. It is the same in an organisation: you should really have a couple of regulations everybody is committed to and leave space to generate new points with everybody by listening and connecting.”

He set about amassing a combination of study data and own diaries and interviews from the Finnish public to comprehend their values and attitudes, which revealed how various they were being from people of most of his employees. “You can have a stereotypical view of points. That led me to truly attempt to comprehend our citizens as clients.”

Hunting back on his encounters, he queries the notion that management centres on decision producing. “Actually implementation is the system,” he says. “The way you are in a position to put into action points is a very huge strategic preference. Lecturers won’t obey due to the fact any person says they ought to. They have to comprehend why and have the internal enthusiasm to do so. We should really be conversing a lot more about the idea of imperfect management: to acknowledge uncertainty and generate studying paths for the larger sized technique to obtain the solution.”

The IB technique is these days utilized by a lot more than 250,000 pupils in just about five,500 faculties about the globe. It has long sought to teach pupils in a huge assortment of topics with broader knowledge of the theory of knowledge and the use of venture and team-based function along with “high stakes” ultimate created tests.

To quite a few, that demonstrates the aspirations of quite a few nationwide schooling reformers to put together for this century’s troubles — despite the fact that some IB instructors bemoan that while they really like the basic principle of the qualification, they are pissed off with the organisation behind it and its slow tempo of change. Like other test bodies, it was criticised for how it modified its marking devices throughout the pandemic.

Heinonen is self-confident that the IB embodies an tactic — also reflected in the Finnish schooling technique — in which “competences are becoming a lot more central. It is about what you do with what you know and how to teach for an uncertain potential we can’t forecast.”

He sees “strong determination to just take the IB heritage into the new era” by employees and instructors. “It’s not the system, it is the implementation,” he says. “We have to have that larger sized jazz band making an attempt to play the same tone and improvise.”