I was reading an HBR blog post from Eric Hellweg about a panel he attended at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It was focused on the future of education. This isn’t particularly my field, so I almost skipped it, but he did mention in the title of the post that it was “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education,” and I couldn’t resist. One lesson I’ve learned in life: when you have the opportunity to get access to a brilliant mind, don’t pass it up.

And these were some heavy hitters: a former Harvard President, current MIT President, Bill Gates, and Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize winner, among others.

And really the topic does apply to my work, because it is about disruption and innovation. Massively open online classes (MOOCs) are disrupting education (see Clay Shirky’s take on it for some background). Higher Ed is a field that has been pretty slow to change, all things considered, which makes the current challenge even more stark. And I make the same argument for “management”: it hasn’t changed in decades, and it really needs to.

But Muhammad Yunus had the quote in the blog post that stopped me in my tracks:

What does this all mean? The technology gives us tremendous power to solve this stark problem all around us. We need to design these so no child is left out of this. What need to ask, what is education after all? We need to resolve that. What are we getting our young people ready for? It’s for the purpose of our life. And we need to make sure we give people a purpose to their life. It won’t be done by current system. It will be done by people who have nothing to do with current system.

We need to make sure we give people a purpose to their life, and that’s going to be done by people who have nothing to do with the current system. I think that is a powerful insight that applies beyond the crisis in global education. Look at your organization. What is your relationship with people who “have nothing to do with the current system?” Does anyone on the inside even have a clue who those people are? The people who are in charge of your current system: how did they get there? They probably paid their dues and moved up through the ranks, right? They are insiders.

I know being inside is valuable. We value the insiders’ experience, the way they know how things work, the way they can work the system. Those are good things, and they help our system grow. But the value of being inside is limited. It lacks the uninhibited creativity of the outside. I think if you reinforce the inside for too long, you end up like Higher Education–on the edge of a revolution, but literally unable to significantly shape the next phase.

So how do you stay connected to the “outside” in your organization? In Humanize we talk about the power of relationship building–not just with other individuals, but with networks. This is critical to the principle of being generative (growing, changing, developing, or, in other words, NOT ending up at the edge of the revolution without an entry ticket). We talk about inclusion–actually valuing difference. We talk about collaboration, including being collaborative on things like strategy and brand. These are all activities that I think can keep you at least a little bit connected to the outside. Learning how to stay at that intersection is a key leadership capacity in the 21st century.

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