Beating Boredom

Sometimes, exciting things happen in unexciting places.

Cranfield University is a post-graduate technology and management campus set in the middle of rural England in Bedfordshire between London and Birmingham. It was originally an airfield chosen by the RAF because the surrounding countryside was so empty of landmarks that German bombers could not find it during the Second World War. This – the avoidance of German military airpower – was possibly the most exciting thing to happen in Cranfield’s history.

From the aerodrome came a college of aeronautics, from that, a school of engineering, then manufacturing, then management until now it has become possibly the most boring University in the World.

For one thing, it is entirely a post-grad school – no party-loving undergraduates at all. For another, its subject mix means that it is 85% male. The result is that if you ever have the misfortune to be walking through the campus on a Saturday night, the loudest sound you hear is the Microsoft theme tune through an open window as someone starts up their PC for another exciting evening’s work on their thesis.

But occasionally, slightly funky things happen.

One of these was in the late eighties when IBM apparently decided that more people in British manufacturing needed to be familiar with the value that computers (especially IBM computers) could bring to industry. So they proposed to found a University department in Computer Integrated Manufacturing. Despite the catchy title (!), several universities bid for the money and Cranfield won. They built a building, put a couple of million pounds-worth of IBM mainframe, software, terminals and staff and set about recruiting an academic team. They found it at the University of Bath, where they found a set of academics who were interested in the “interface between technology and organisations.”

And this is where things got fun. Because no sooner had this crew come in than they started preaching heresy. Successful use of technology, they argued, was only interesting when it supported appropriate business change. The purpose of education in CIM was therefore less to do with the technology and more to do with working cross-functionally in teams to drive behavioural and process change – which technology could then support.

So that’s what they did - in interesting and radical ways.

I attended a Masters programme in CIM at Cranfield at the end of the eighties and it was an exceptional experience. The year comprised three segments: a taught course, followed by a group project, followed by an individual project. What made it different – on the surface – was fundamentally two things: first, that the projects were paid for by companies who wanted solutions to problems, not interesting theses. This meant that we very quickly adopted a ‘Real World’ focus (which was useful). And the second thing was that although the programme was continually assessed, at no time were we given our grades.

That’s right: throughout the course we had no idea how we were doing – were we passing, failing, at the top of the class, near the bottom? Not a clue.

It was an experiment – and it worked. Because we did not know how we were doing, we measured ourselves against each other – especially against those we knew were doing well. So we worked 70 hour weeks, asked penetrating questions and drove each other in a frenzy of peer pressure to meet and exceed our own expectations – all without any cajoling or coaxing by the staff. On more than one occasion, students broke into the building at night to carry on working.

Those of us who survived – because not everyone could take the pressure or the ambiguity – came out having had an exceptional learning experience, and confident that we were equipped to lead change in almost any organisation.

Of course, this wasn’t true (is anyone capable of this?) but we were better able than most.

Nowadays, of course, the litigation nazis have come in and they have to give grades – and no-one is really interested in Computer Integrated Manufacturing any more. But for a brief time, something interesting happened at the most boring University in the World.

And I took my first baby steps in the business of change.

- Mike