In education planning, it’s the people who matter, not consultants

 

One of our education ministers – there are a few, apparently – said the planned review of our education system, the twelfth five-year blueprint in the last 17 years (I think), will be handled totally by local consultants.

My being bad in maths, calendars and politics, too, means the chances of my consulting on this project is zero, unless all the local consultants hired came down with food poisoning from the kueh and teh tarik served at their meetings.

A few years ago, I was invited to represent my employers at a big conference by the business school of a local university (its name starts with Universiti and ends with Malaysia) which wanted to review their MBA curriculum.

I happily went to the meeting at, shall we call it UxM? It was held in a huge room with some fancy Latin name – the Universiti Sanatorium or something – full of the usual protocols (don’t get me started on protocols) that I couldn’t escape because I was sitting in the cheap seats near the rafters.

A distinguished gentleman with a three-minute-long list of titles spoke a lot, although I don’t think he said anything much. He had two assistants running around taking photos and videos of him speaking. The photos and videos are probably still up on his website or social media account even now.

From him, and from others, I heard a lot about the need to build up skills such as accounting and finance and the like, but there was not a single mention of the word “digital” in any context at all. I thought I had time-travelled to the last century, but, no, I had not – my hair was still sparse and white, and my knees ached, and the year was still 2018.

Not worth hiring

When it was my turn to speak, I said something along the lines that if this was how their MBA programme was designed, I wouldn’t hire any of their graduates.

An MBA is purely practical training for big jobs in enterprises, or in consulting. While the three letters have become iconic, the worth of that degree is being increasingly questioned, even if it comes from the Oxbridges and Ivy Leagues of the world.

An MBA isn’t an academic programme. Oxford University spent decades debating whether to offer the degree because many of its academics then, and even now, didn’t quite accept an MBA as being a worthy offering in their hallowed halls of academia.

The content of the discussions that I heard and the bureaucracy involved didn’t give me much hope. Even representing the intended market for MBAs – employers – didn’t give me any advantage. Whatever it was they were doing, being market-driven wasn’t one of them.

I got some dirty looks and wasn’t invited back again. Perhaps wearing jeans and a T-shirt (my standard working clothes from the first day I started working in 1982, except for a few years in a bank) didn’t help. So there went my short and sorry attempt to contribute to our nation’s education system.

The ‘con’ game

Consultants, foreign or local, know better than to appear at such meetings looking like a company driver, for which I’d been mistaken before. The typical consultant would dress to the nines, present flashy PowerPoint slides, and throw out big words like VUCA, crypto, ESG etc that only the in-crowd knows.

Nowadays they would mention AI non-stop, too. Had I done that, they’d have said you’re not an expert on AI, Encik Adzhar Ibrahim!

Sigh. Generally, the more foreign and expensive the consultants are, the more business they will get, whether from the government or companies, especially if those companies are connected to the government.

I have used consultants, but always tightly supervised them – do what I pay you to do, and leave. I worked for bosses who also used them for specific purposes and never so we could ask them “how do we run our business?” or “what should our strategy be?”

Many hire expensive consultants for a number of bad reasons, such as that they’ve no idea what to do; they want a “cover” in case things go wrong; or it’s an ego-trip where they get to boss Harvard or Cambridge graduates around, who in turn laugh about them later when they gather for expensive dinners and drinks.

Getting real

The reality is that a plan that is 70% good and which is 90% implemented is still better than a 100% good plan that fails to be implemented. The transient nature of the big bosses who hire these consultants – often through politics, or by being beholden to politicians – mean that many have a short, desperate timeframe in which they try to do everything while they have the power.

This is over and above the usual complaint about consultants picking your brains and then giving the “solutions” back to you for a fat fee. Or that some consultants, especially the big famous ones, are so unethical they’d do anything for money. Certainly, there’s a lot of truth in both instances.

Going completely local isn’t necessarily going to improve things. While the locals may know the issues better, there’s no guarantee they can offer better solutions, as they could very well be the source of the problems in the first place.

It’s not about where the consultants come from. If foreigners cannot understand local issues, then Malaysian consultants could never be able to work overseas. And in Malaysia Bolehland, there’s the additional problem of consultants being merely a means to facilitate the transfer of money from the public sector to the private sector, if you know what I mean.

People power

It’s about getting the right people who are fit for purpose. It could, and should, be a mix of people who understand local iissues as well as those familiar with what are best practices in the world.

But even more important is making the hard effort to engage as many stakeholders as possible. People who have a stake in it – especially the less powerful ones such as parents, civil society, academics and even students – must feel they’re part of the solution.

The shelves in our ministries and boardrooms are creaking with tons of reports and master plans developed by consultants, foreign and local, that got nowhere. The very idea that we need to make the logic of having only local consultants a headline means we’re already unnecessarily politicising this matter and guaranteeing a tough time ahead.

At the end of the day, the minister needs to make the big policy decisions: that’s what ministers are for. But if the plan – regardless of its fancy colourful PowerPoint slides with singing and dancing AI (not me!) – isn’t “owned” by stakeholders, failure is guaranteed.

Education, a matter that concerns our children and the future of the nation, is too important to be handled just by politicians. Get whoever is smart enough to help pull things together, but more importantly, get every stakeholder to feel they’re part of the solution.

Otherwise, these stakeholders will be part of the problem and will wreck any master plan developed by these consultants, whether local or foreign, cheap or expensive, famous or obscure. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.