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Navigating change — the vital role of education in an uncertain global landscape

Jon Foster-Pedley
By Jon Foster-Pedley
3 Dec 2024
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Where skills were once good enough for 30 years when you qualified as a journeyman or left university, now you’ll be lucky if what you learnt isn’t on its way out in five years.

I have been privileged to spend the last week at end-of-year graduation ceremonies. It is without a doubt the highlight of my year — every year. The satisfaction and triumph on the faces of the graduates is capped every time by seeing the pride and the joy of their families in witnessing their achievement.

It remains one of the most humbling and invigorating experiences that I have ever had — and every time it triggers a moment of reflection. I work for an institution that has literally been in this country every step of South Africa’s transition from the dark and scary nightmare of a dying regime into the light of the dream of a Rainbow Nation. We have been here through all the trials and tribulations that would follow as the toddler became a teenager and then, ultimately, a 30-year-old.

We live in a world that is also experiencing incredible tumult, and once again I’m lucky that the business school where I work is part of one of the oldest business schools in Europe and is about to celebrate its 80th anniversary. The university, under whose aegis we all operate, is two years shy of its centenary.

The lessons learnt individually and cumulatively are lessons that we can apply to help us navigate this world with its demagogues increasingly on centre stage and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse loitering on the edges of the tableau for good measure.

The first overwhelming lesson is that education drives the world. The world is changing. The greatest leaders are those who do not cling vainly to the past, but rather discard what doesn’t get things done, and adopt the new to make it work.

‘Knowing-doing gap’


We often glibly speak in business schools of the need to learn, unlearn and relearn skills in a work environment where obsolescence is becoming baked into our lives. But it’s the “knowing-doing gap” that trips us up. Diagnosing a problem doesn’t make it go away. A propensity for action is a life-saving characteristic.

Where skills were once good enough for 30 years when you qualified as a journeyman or left university, you’ll be lucky if what you learnt isn’t on its way out in five years.

No one ever thought that obsolescence would apply to entire world orders, but that’s precisely what has happened. World War 2 reshaped the world. The peace that followed precipitated the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall 45 years later set off another chain reaction with atrocities sparking wars, and wars forging new alliances.

We sit now, arguably on the cusp of a third world war, with two media-rich conflagrations playing out and several more in places like Africa where the world’s cameras never get to, nor the smartphones of social media. The root realisation that many are coming to is that the global society drawn up by the architects who won World War 2 has shape-shifted into enemy number one for those who might just start the third.

Whether we can avoid a global conflict or not, the reality is that we will have to create a new future. It will be hard. The best leaders realise this. They realise we can’t stay where we are, they know that change is really hard, that it never comes comfortably, but they can motivate their followers to trust them on the route they want to take. They are then able, collectively, to negotiate incredible difficulty and complexity and navigate a safe path through it all.

The same holds true for businesses, and we can apply it to our personal lives too. We only grow through adversity. We always wish we could climb through the foothills and up the steep slope to get to the plateau above, but life’s not like that.

Indeed, it was Nelson Mandela who said that “after climbing a great hill, one finds there are many more to climb.” We always wish we could get to the plateau and take it easy for a bit, rest on our laurels. Instead, what happens is that as you develop the skills, you just take on the next challenge because you can.

Leadership is often a poisoned chalice. As Elon Musk said, owning and running a company is like staring into the abyss chewing glass. The abyss because you can see more clearly than others what disasters can happen; and chewing glass, because all the gritty problems no one else can handle end up on your desk — and you have to find the answers. To paraphrase former US president Harry Truman, the buck stops with you.

Great conundrum


The great conundrum is that you have the freedom to step away at any time and take the money — or you can keep going up the hill and on to the next because you are fulfilling the sense of higher purpose that you have, an urge that can only be muted by achievement.

This of course leads to the other great misapprehension about purpose. Some people think it’s enough to have a mission — it isn’t. You’ve also got to have the ability to tinker with it, like a mechanic, servicing it regularly, fine-tuning it, because sometimes you’re travelling at high speed on tar, at other times you’ve turned off the road and are bundu bashing over the veld and up the side of mountains to get to the plateau above.

The world has changed. We don’t have a map in many instances for where we are about to go, but that shouldn’t mean that we are lost or powerless — we just have to keep on learning, unlearning and relearning.  Even Zen masters say it: “When you reach the top of the mountain, keep climbing.”

I could tell you the rewards will be worth it, but the greatest incentive is knowing that the alternative to not learning, unlearning and relearning is just too awful to contemplate.

If our past expectations and prejudices are weighing us down, we must cut them loose and prepare to understand and master the new terrain in front of us. It’s the very best Christmas gift we can give ourselves this year. DM

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