Papert & Piccard, Two Giants

Recently two giants of our world, or at least my world, arrived at their (final) resting places.  They both made headlines around the world, but for very different reasons.  Bertrand Piccard completed his circumnavigation of the globe in a solar plane, together with André Borschberg, landing in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, July 26th.  An extraordinary feat by any measure.  And on Sunday, July 31st, we learned of the death of Seymour Papert at the age of 88.

These two gentlemen are/were probably unaware that they were the opening and closing keynotes of the same amazing 3-day conference at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1997.  As director of that conference, under the auspices of UNICON, I had the honor of collaborating with them. 

The conference theme, as these things go, was the future of executive education, and we wanted speakers who would bring different perspectives to our audience of business school and corporate educators.  At the time I was enthralled by the work of Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media Labs, and I dared to write to him, hoping he’d accept to speak at the event.  He wrote back, saying regrettably that our dates didn’t work for him, but that a better person to talk about technology and education was his colleague, Dr. Seymour Papert, whom he copied in his message (that prized email stayed in my “saved” folder for many years). 

Dr Papert agreed to come, mainly, I believe, because of his past ties with Switzerland and his mentor, the philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, but also because his daughter was living nearby at the time.  We had dinner upon his arrival, and afterwards I asked him if he had any slides for us, printing that should be done, or needed any help with material for the following day.  He just smiled, said everything would be OK, and then went for a walk along the lake with his daughter. 

The next day, with a packed auditorium, Dr. Papert showed up precisely at the hour he was scheduled to speak, walking straight from the door and onto the stage as I was introducing him.  No slides.  He gazed out over the audience, smiling as he had to me the evening before, and asked, hypothetically I hoped, if everyone under the age of 30 could move to one set of seats, those between 30 and 40 to a different section, 40 to 50 to another, and the rest to a different area.  He said this as if he expected people simply to do what they were told, but continued on saying that now that I have you grouped by age, how would you feel if I taught you according to your age, that no other factor mattered?  How effective would I be if I created material and spoke to you as if your age decided your capacity to learn?  How useful would it be if I just lectured to each group while you sat stiffly in those uncomfortable seats?

That’s when we really began paying attention, and started to understand where he wanted to take us.  As we heard, the core of his theory of learning is that we build knowledge best when we are actively engaged in building things, whether that be with Lego bricks or with flipcharts, and that there is a serious and playful side to effective learning.  You understand something by constructing it.

As you can read on the MIT Media Lab’s website, Dr. Papert changed the world: “With a mind of extraordinary range and creativity, Seymour Papert helped revolutionize at least three fields, from the study of how children make sense of the world, to the development of artificial intelligence, to the rich intersection of technology and learning,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif.  Others have noted that the arrival of the laptop was hastened by Dr. Papert’s influence on Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley. 

During the conference, my colleague at the time, Heather Cairns-Lee, presented a powerful view of where executive education should go.  Heather’s speech challenged us to put Dr. Papert’s ideas to work in executive education, and get away from simple ideas of classroom learning and case studies.

The final speaker was psychiatrist and explorer Dr. Bertrand Piccard (I think Dr. Papert had already left, but I can easily imagine him listening in the back and nodding approvingly).  This was 1997, and Bertrand was not yet famous for having circled the globe in a balloon (we had to wait until 1999 for that), much less a plane with 17,248 solar cells (last week).  But the vision he presented of getting out into the world and exploring, of trying things that you weren’t certain you were capable of, of doing rather than just dreaming, of learning by experimenting, resonated perfectly with Dr. Papert’s lecture.  I still remember standing on the stage at the end of Bertrand’s talk, thanking him on behalf of the audience, mesmerized both by his vision and the joy in those piercing blue eyes.

My mentor, Andy Boynton, likes to say that leadership is a contact sport, and it is, but so is learning, especially with adults.  It happens when we get out of our comfort zones and explore and build, when we experiment and try new things to see what will happen.  Seymour Papert and Bertrand Piccard, as leaders and learners, showed this to us in their own ways, on a world stage, and we’re privileged to have had, and to have, giants like this among us.