1 Introduction

Almost 30 years ago, Barr and Tagg (1995) contrasted two paradigms of higher education. The traditional, dominant Instruction Paradigm emphasizes the importance of teachers, their actions, and their expert inputs to the student learning process. Institutional responsibility lies in quality teaching. On the other hand, the Learning Paradigm emphasizes the importance of students’ experience, discovery, and active knowledge construction. Here, institutional responsibility is co-responsibility (with students) for learning outcomes.

Barr and Tagg (1995) criticized universities that consider teaching as their mission for confusing means and ends. Teaching, they argued, is only one possible means to achieve the actual end, which is student learning. In their view, the Learning Paradigm is superior because of its focus on results and its pragmatic stance on the choice of means. Its pragmatism is not arbitrary, though, but grounded in the psychology of learning. The Learning Paradigm shifts the focus from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of learning, from content to process and context:

“In the Learning Paradigm […], a college’s purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems. The college aims, in fact, to create a series of ever more powerful learning environments.” (Barr & Tagg, 1995, p. 15)

The paradigm shift implies a fundamental shift also in roles. “If the Instruction Paradigm faculty member is an actor—a sage on a stage—then the Learning Paradigm faculty member is an inter-actor—a coach interacting with a team.” (Barr & Tagg, 1995, p. 24)

Barr and Tagg could have made these two statements in direct reference to the Team Academy model presented in this chapter, so aptly did they describe some of its characteristics. The quotes also make clear how long the road to Future Skills readiness is for many universities (Ehlers, 2020, pp. 97–103). This is because Future Skills, at least as I understand, define, and discuss them below, cannot be taught in any traditional sense but require action and reflection by students in authentic contexts.

1.1 Team Academy

Team Academies may offer exactly this authentic context for learning through action and reflection. A Team Academy is a radical approach to entrepreneurship education from Finland. All students form teams of 12–18 who stay together for three years of study. Right from the start, each team builds a real company according to their ideas. These team companies serve as experiential learning spaces in which students test their business ideas, develop customer projects, pool their resources and risks, acquire practical innovation and leadership skills, and have experiences of self-efficacy.

Challenges, problems, and the inevitable failures along the way are important learning opportunities. Reflection, dialogue, and extensive reading and writing complement the entrepreneurial action. The students assume leadership responsibilities at project, company, and Team Academy levels. Lecture inputs are limited to homoeopathic doses. Instead, teaching staff act as team coaches and focus on team dynamics and process facilitation, providing methods and tools on demand, and on accompanying their teams through ups and downs.

The kind of self-directed, team-based, feedback-intensive action learning, which is characteristic of the Team Academy model, is probably unique in higher education. Whether it is superior to more traditional entrepreneurship education in supporting the students’ competence development is unclear to date due to a lack of systematic research and comparable results. However, having taught for 15 years in conventional business studies and having been a team coach since 2018 in Germany’s first Team Academy at the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, I know both worlds quite well. And I am very impressed with the progress that many Team Academy students are making in developing their Future Skills.

In this chapter, I first take a critical look at different Future Skills concepts, before proposing a definition as a synthesis. In the second section, I introduce the competence model underlying Bremerhaven’s Team Academy and discuss which competences might qualify as Future Skills according to my definition. The third section outlines the Team Academy model to give a better idea of the particular setting in which the students acquire and practice their Future Skills. In the two final sections, I address some challenges of the Team Academy model and offer first-hand learnings.

The Team Academy at the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences is a three-year Bachelor’s program. Its official name is ‘Gründung, Innovation, Führung’ (GIF), which translates as ‘Venture Creation, Innovation, Leadership’. For the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to it simply as GIF.

2 Future Skills Concept

Even though, as humans, we are undoubtedly at a critical juncture in our existence and will need different skills to meet the challenges ahead than we did to meet past challenges, I am somewhat reluctant to summarize them under the term Future Skills. The future can be anything between now and infinity. Every user of the term may have a specific time horizon in mind, and unless it is made explicit, chances are that people refer to different time horizons without realizing it. As Dede (2010) points out, “many educational reforms have failed because of a reverse Tower-of-Babel problem, in which people use the same words, but mean quite different things” (Chap. 3, page 51).

The term “skill” in (capitalized) Future Skills is also far less clear than it may seem at first. A skill is “an ability or proficiency acquired through training and practice” (American Psychological Association, 2022) or “an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practiced it” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2014). Skills are a constituent of competences. The OECD (2019) Learning Compass 2030, for example, presents competences as the combination of knowledge, values, attitudes and skills required to act responsibly and effectively according to given standards of performance in a given situation. Similarly, for Mitchelmore and Rowley (2010), competences “can be described in terms of essential personality traits, skills, knowledge and motives” (p. 94) that lead to superior performance. And for Bird (2019), entrepreneurial competences are the “underlying characteristics such as generic and specific knowledge, motives, traits, self-images, social roles, and skills which result in venture birth, survival, and/or growth” (p. 115).

Future Skills, however, are no constituent but a particular category or subset of competences (Ehlers, 2020; González-Pérez & Ramírez-Montoya, 2022; Kotsiou et al., 2022; Spiegel et al., 2021; Stifterverband, 2022). Even self-efficacy, which is an empowering belief,Footnote 1 is considered a Future Skill (Ehlers, 2020; Ternès von Hattburg, 2021). So, skills and Future Skills are quite different concepts.

Ehlers (2020) defines Future Skills as “competences that allow individuals to solve complex problems in highly emergent contexts of action in a self-organized way and enable them to act (successfully). They are based on cognitive, motivational, volitional and social resources, are value-based and can be acquired in a learning process.” (p. 53).

This definition is ‘timeless’ in the sense that the future is only implied by the reference to highly emergent contexts of action, which are assumed to be characteristic of the future. “Emergence thus defines the dividing line that separates previous or traditional work areas from future work areas” (Ehlers, 2020, p. 54). It is timeless also by not considering the possibility of technological obsolescence of human competences. I doubt that a problem-solving competence would still be regarded as a Future Skill after smart machines have demonstrated their ability to solve the same class of problems automatically.

Ehlers’s definition raises another question. (Why) does it exclude individuals’ competences that may enable others to solve complex problems, e.g. by providing leadership or organizing a collective problem-solving process? Of course, one might argue that leadership is itself a complex problem, so leading a team successfully in highly emergent contexts of action meets the criteria of a Future Skill. But if every competence is potentially a form of problem-solving, the definition loses clarity.

Kirchherr et al. (2019) take a very different and rather pragmatic approach. For them, Future Skills are “skills that will become more important for professional work and/or participation in society in the next five years—across all industries and branches” (Kirchherr et al., 2019, p. 4). This definition is not timeless but covers a specific time horizon. Its only selection criterion is increasing future importance.

Both definitions have their merit. But for someone who is “preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet” (Beers, 2010, p. 347), a five-year time horizon is too short and the limitation of Future Skills to competences related to individuals’ problem-solving is too constraining.

Therefore, as a synthesis of elements of both definitions and my critique of them, I propose the following new definition: Future Skills are competences that

  1. (a)

    enable individuals to pursue demanding professional or societal goals particularly effectively and in a socially acceptable manner, across many industries or sectors of society, alone or with others, in a self-organized way and under VUCA conditions; and

  2. (b)

    are unlikely to become obsolete due to technological change in the foreseeable future.

I agree with Ehlers that Future Skills draw on cognitive, motivational, volitional, and social resources, are value-based and can be learned, but I prefer not to include this part in the definition. What I do include, however, are criteria to filter out competences that are relevant only in a few specific contexts or that may soon be automated. For reasons of familiarity, I replace Ehlers’s “highly emergent contexts of action” with the term VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).

3 Future Skills Model

In this section, I introduce the competence model underlying the GIF program. The model came into existence only after GIF had already taken off. It is not a model with universal pretensions, like the European Commission’s EntreComp Framework (European Commission, 2017) or the U.S. Department of Labor’s Entrepreneurship Competency Model (Employment & Training Administration, 2021). Rather, it is a simplified, proprietary model intended to provide orientation for program development, program operation, and stakeholders.

The starting point for the model development was the mission statement from 2019:

“GIF aims to prepare people to live and work self-determined, productive, and cooperative lives in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. To this end, GIF promotes competences in three domains: entrepreneurship, team, and self.”

Entrepreneurship may be defined as “[t]he process by which individuals […] pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently control” (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990, p. 23). Note that, according to the GIF mission statement, preparing for entrepreneurship is not the purpose of GIF, but a means. The purpose is to prepare the students for work and life under VUCA conditions. Since entrepreneurs operate under VUCA-like conditions, organizing GIF in parts like a business incubator and requiring the students with practically no initial preparation to start real companies with real customers and real money is a good way of familiarizing them with the volatilities and uncertainties of the VUCA world.

The other two domains of competence, team and self, serve the same purpose. A team is “a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they are mutually accountable” (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993, p. 70). Teams can display extremely complex social dynamics, which may paralyze them with conflict, turn them dysfunctional or dramatically boost their performance. As the term Team Academy suggests, GIF is entirely team-based, giving the students full exposure to VUCA-ish team dynamics for three years.

This experience is amplified by the students’ transformation. Typically, in the course of the GIF program, their self-concept and self-awareness, their professional and life objectives, their priorities, perception of others, reflexivity, self-leadership and perceived self-efficacy undergo profound change. GIF makes productive use of this ‘inner VUCA’ by providing settings, methods, and coaching support to address and reflect those changes and turn them into conscious learning processes and competences. Examples include dialogue sessions, the constant use of learning contracts, learning journals and reflective essays, as well as a vivid feedback and formative evaluation culture.

The GIF competence model is built around the above mission statement’s ‘holy trinity’ of entrepreneurship, team, and self. It comes in two forms, as GIF Competence Diamond and as GIF Competence Matrix. In Fig. 11.1, the Diamond’s four sides are meant to represent entrepreneurship, broken down into four areas of practice in which the students are expected to plan and carry out their activities: building new ventures, innovating to make things better, leading with head, hand, and heart, as well as learning through action, reflection and sharing.

Fig. 11.1
A diagram of concentric rhombuses embodies learning through action reflection and sharing, building new ventures, innovating to make things better, and leading with head, hand, and heart. Each facet encompasses 3 practices. The outer band is labeled world, the center as team, and the inner as self.

GIF Competence Diamond. (Own representation)

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In each field of entrepreneurial practice, the students acquire self-competences, team competences, and world-related competences involving interactions with customers, investors, suppliers, partners, competitors, and authorities.

The numbers in the Diamond refer to competences, which the students’ activities at the micro (self), meso (team) and macro (world) levels in each area of entrepreneurial practice are supposed to foster. The competences are listed in Table 11.1, with the words ‘competence’ and ‘skill’ omitted for ease of reading. The central rhombus is the only part of the Diamond which does not belong to any single practice area. It represents competences, denoted (0), that are foundational for all practice areas.

Table 11.1 GIF Competence Matrix
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I will only provide short explanations for the less common competences in Table 11.1.

  • Dialogue (2), literally the art of thinking together, is a form of communication central to team learning. There are four dialogue skills (Bohm, 1996; Isaacs, 1999): listening (and simultaneously perceiving our own reactions and resistances without reacting directly to them), respecting (i.e. recognizing the other’s position, which we can never fully understand), suspending (our assumptions, certainties, emotions and judgments to explore the question behind the question) and voicing (what moves and engages us at the moment without holding back part of our own truth).

  • Generosity (2) in this context means actively sharing our ideas, opportunities, skills, knowledge, experience, contacts, and other resources, as well as recognition, feedback, encouragement, and moral support with our team, trusting that this generosity will be reciprocated, strengthen our relationships, renew trust, benefit the team as a whole and enhance our collective performance.

  • Learning communities (3) are characterized by “a culture of learning in which everyone interacts in a collective effort of understanding” (Overbaugh & Lin, 2006, p. 206). In addition to sharing and reciprocating, relevant skills include ‘Working Out Loud’ (Stepper, 2020), giving feedback, cross-pollinating between community groups, and other networking skills.

  • Alertness (4) has been defined as “the ability to notice without search opportunities that have hitherto been overlooked” (Kirzner, 1979, p. 48) and is often considered a quintessential entrepreneurial competence (Chavoushi et al., 2021; Tang et al., 2012; Valliere, 2013).

  • Resource mobilization (6) refers to the entrepreneurial skill of securing new and additional financial, human, and material resources to advance their mission (Clough et al., 2019; Kotha & George, 2012).

  • Lateral leadership (12) means leading ‘sideways’, i.e., without hierarchical authority or formal power. It is a key skill in cross-functional projects, process chains without process owners, self-organized agile environments, and network structures (Kühl et al., 2005; Strathausen, 2015).

Which of the competences in Table 11.1 can count as Future Skills? Or, to use the words of my definition, which of these competences (a) enable individuals to pursue demanding professional or societal goals particularly effectively and in a socially acceptable manner, across many industries or sectors of society, alone or with others, in a self-organized way and under VUCA conditions; and (b) are unlikely to become obsolete due to technological change in the foreseeable future?

Ambiguity tolerance, perseverance, and resilience are particularly valuable in coping with VUCA-related adversities. I would therefore nominate them as Future Skills. The same holds for self-directed learning, self-efficacy, and self-leadership, which are important for the self-organized pursuit of goals. Social skills will continue to be indispensable in the future when it comes to achieving goals through collaboration. Therefore, the skills required to lead teams, coach others, lead laterally, give and accept feedback, and network are on my Future Skills list as well, especially since ‘soft’ leadership approaches suit the needs of highly qualified, self-organizing knowledge workers.

Also dialogue skills are social skills. However, although dialogue is highly effective in fostering team learning and resolving conflict, it leads a shadowy existence in our culture. Dialogue demands that, and only works if, all participants respect and adhere to its rules of interaction. If a skill becomes effective only when mastered by many (like a language), the barrier to it becoming a Future Skill is high.

Empirically, it is not clear whether ethical behavior favors or obstructs the pursuit of professional goals (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011; Boyer, 2002; Carucci, 2016). But since my definition of Future Skills emphasizes not only the effective, but also the socially acceptable pursuit of demanding goals, and unethical behavior is unlikely to be socially acceptable, I consider ethical competence (Kulju et al., 2016; Pohling et al., 2016) a Future Skill.

Projects have become ubiquitous in working, civic and private life. ‘Projectification’ (Jensen et al., 2016; Maylor & Turkulainen, 2019) is an answer to a volatile environment. Agile project management is a response to accelerating volatility or to VUCA conditions. I cannot imagine a plausible scenario in which this tendency would reverse. Therefore, the ability to manage projects successfully in a VUCA environment seems to be an obvious Future Skills candidate.

On the other hand, I do not include business and marketing skills, financial literacy, and the skills to participate in learning communities in my Future Skills candidate list. Their scope of application seems to be more limited than that of other competences in Table 11.1.

As to digital literacy and digital learning, I am undecided. Over the next decade or so, they will probably meet the criteria of my definition. But as digital devices become smarter, more intuitive, and better capable of processing natural language, the distinction between digital and non-digital skills will become increasingly blurred. The appropriate, discerning, and responsible use of digital technology will then no longer depend on digital skills, but on critical thinking, reflexivity, self-leadership, and other non-digital competences. For me, these are the real (and timeless) Future Skills.

4 Our Approach to Future Skills

Like the previous section, this one is not only about Future Skills but about all competences listed in Table 11.1. The GIF program I am about to present cannot be meaningfully deconstructed into parts with relevance for Future Skills and those without.

I begin by introducing the “flipped curriculum”. This design principle applies the “flipped classroom” pedagogyFootnote 2 to an entire educational program. In Fig. 11.2, the triangle on the left represents, in simplified form, a conventionally designed curriculum. Students spend the vast majority of their time in lectures and learning-prescribed content. Only little time remains for building expertise in areas of their interest and transferring what they have learned to new contexts.

Fig. 11.2
A pyramidal diagram of curriculum. It includes data and information, knowledge and understanding, expertise and transfer. The right pyramid is reversed. Students spend more time on search for data, information, and knowledge, and A I in understanding and partial expertise. Both involve algorithms.

Flipping the curriculum (Holmes et al., 2019, p. 28)

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The triangle on the right of Fig. 11.2 reverses this relationship. Students gain access to relevant knowledge and acquire it independently outside of courses. This makes valuable time at the university and with fellow students available for practicing the higher-order cognitive activities of application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Gary, 2018), which promote competence development. In addition, this way the students spend relatively less time on acquiring new knowledge that tends to outdate increasingly quickly, and relatively more time on developing and practicing competences, some of which may be Future Skills that will not be rivalled by smart machines for the time being.

The GIF program looks almost as if it were designed with the idea of the flipped curriculum in mind. However, the Team Academy model, on which GIF is based, originated in Finland, where it was developed in the early 1990s. It promotes experience rather than theory as the starting point for learning and aims to empower the students to choose what, how, when, and with whom they learn. Rote learning of facts, stockpile learning, and cramming theory without personal relevance have no place here. Instead, the Team Academy’s pedagogical cornerstones are action learning, team learning, self-directed reading, and team coaching.

4.1 Action Learning

Action learning is a method of experiential learning. It is learning to act effectively, which requires actual action, not theories about action or recommendations for action (Mumford, 1995). Learning is based on collective reflection on the experiences of action. Action learning always takes place in teams, which distinguishes it from learning by doing. The teams should consist of like-minded people for whom the challenge to be learned from is important and new: “It is recognized ignorance, not programed knowledge, that is the key to action learning: men [sic] start to learn with and from each other only when they discover that no one knows the answer but all are obliged to find it” (Revans, 1997, p. 6).

In the Team Academy, the students’ team companies provide the framework for action. They continually produce situations and questions that are new to the students and to which they have to react. The collective reflection on their actions takes place in the special format of team learning.

4.2 Team Learning

Team learning is a process of thinking together through dialogue, in the course of which experiences, insights, knowledge, and perspectives are exchanged. Dialogue is neither a discussion about being right and getting one’s way, nor does it aim at consensus (Bohm, 1996; Isaacs, 1999). I have already presented the principles of dialogue above, so I will not go into them further here. In the Team Academy, the members of each team company meet twice a week for three to four hours in a circle of chairs with their team coach for team learning sessions. According to Senge (1990), team learning is one of the five disciplines of learning organizations, which is what every Team Academy strives to be.

4.3 Self-Directed Reading

Students plan and decide for themselves what, when, and how they read. The use of books plays a very important role in the Team Academy, reflecting the strong Finnish reading culture. Books are preferred to shorter articles because they give ideas more room to unfold and provide more context. Students choose 5–7 books each semester that promise to help them solve problems or answer questions related to their customer projects, business ideas, team situations, or personal development. They formulate a guiding question for each book to direct and focus their attention. After reading, they produce and share an essay, podcast, video, or give a live presentation with a book review and a report on what they see as the most important insights from the book, how they used them to answer their guiding question and, if applicable, how the transfer of key insights to their own practice went.

4.4 Team Coaching

Team coaching is a process designed to develop groups of people into high-performing teams. In GIF, team coaches like myself take great care to create and sustain a friendly, welcoming, and open learning environment. We are constantly testing, evaluating, and learning how to do this better. Every rule, structure, and process introduced since the start of GIF in 2018 was co-designed by our students and us. Students and coaches collaborating at eye level is a key success factor for Team Academy programs. This is why we team coaches are on a first-name basis with the students, which is not at all common in German higher education.

Our other focus is on the teams we coach. Each team of students has its coach who accompanies them for a year, spends six hours a week with them in a chair circle for team learning sessions (see above), supports them for another five hours a week in their client projects and with their business ideas, works intensively with the team company’s executive board, helps them through impasses, conflicts, and crises, and celebrates their successes and failures with them.

Team coaches do not usually impart their expert knowledge to students, solve their problems, or deliver solutions for them. This would be teaching or consulting. Coaching, as Team Academies understand it, is “the art of facilitating the performance, learning, and development of another” (Downey, 2003, p. 21). We want the students to shed their fear of not knowing something, overcome their initial helplessness when faced with new problems, strengthen their initiative, and cultivate their self-directed learning. We help them by asking good questions, not by giving the answers (Stanier, 2016).

Figure 11.3 summarizes the Team Academy’s four pedagogical cornerstones just described and the relationships between them.

Fig. 11.3
A triangular representation with team coaching at the center pointing to team learning, team coaching, active learning, and self-directed reading which are inter-connected via observations and new ideas, theory and questions for literature, and questions from the field and theoretical input.

Pedagogical cornerstones of the Team Academy. (Own representation)

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4.5 Teams, Companies and Leadership

The Team Academy model is not oriented towards the ideal of the outstanding individual, the heroic entrepreneur (Boutillier & Uzunidis, 2014; Papi-Thornten, 2016; Pilotta, 2016), but towards the ideal of high-performing teams (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993) and entrepreneurship for everyone (Faltin, 2015). To prevent birds of a feather from flocking together, the team coaches put together the student teams of 12–18 students each, ensuring maximum heterogeneity and complementarity within each team. Factors we take into account include age, gender, work experience, region of origin, and the results of a Belbin team role test (Belbin, 2010).

Regardless of business ideas, each team sets up or takes over a real company (cooperative) early in the first semester. These team companies act as the students’ learning environment, laboratory for experimentation, and formal bond with each other for the duration of their studies. In Germany, establishing a cooperative requires no specific initial capital. Liability risks are limited to the company’s funds. Moreover, to limit risk, the team companies may not borrow money.

The teams move into a co-working space that is available to them around the clock. The students’ spatial proximity to each other ensures lots of informal communication. Meeting rooms, an event area, a reference library, and a large kitchen are part of the infrastructure. Almost from day one, the students work in client relationships, which are initially helped by the team coaches. All students are expected to complete regular visits to actual or potential clients to learn from and with them, co-create business ideas and build productive, lasting relationships.

The students generate their first sales with simple offers that are within their experience horizon and possibilities (e.g., hosting parties and organizing e-sports tournaments at corporate events; drop shipping; creation and search engine optimization of websites; setting up pop-up stores; mapping processes for service companies). With growing experience and increasing sales, they specialize in certain sectors, products, and processes. Figure 11.4 illustrates team companies evolve ideally.

Fig. 11.4
A line graph of sales growth over three years. Year 1 focuses on small, cash-generating projects for experience. In Year 2, larger projects with personal investment and focus on client acquisition. Year 3, specialization occurs as the focus sharpens on proven client relations and expanding business.

Typical evolution of team companies. (Own representation)

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Not all students in a team work for the same client, on the same product, or even in the same industry. Rather, each team company has a spectrum of projects at any given time, which take place independently of each other, involve different people, but are decided, financed, controlled, and evaluated jointly by all members. In this way, the students can pursue their different interests, try out a variety of business ideas and learn from one another.

The team companies do not form isolated learning units. On the contrary: The spatial, organizational and curricular conditions of the GIF program work to ensure that the teams network with each other, share ideas, knowledge, and competences across cohorts, share resources, coach each other, cooperate and create an open, dynamic, self-organizing ecosystem for entrepreneurial learning.

In GIF, with its 150 students, nine team companies, a plethora of projects and a large network of external stakeholders, leadership is needed everywhere all the time. Some students are elected CEO, CFO or to the supervisory board of their companies and assume legal responsibility. Others manage client projects, organize a Rocket Day (one-day learning and community building events for the whole Team Academy) or a Learning Circus (a team trip lasting several days to several weeks, during which companies, conferences, and other Team Academies are visited), or act as Academic Leaders (ensuring their team’s academic progress). All students take turns hosting team learning sessions. We team coaches interfere as little as possible.

4.6 Self-Leadership

The Team Academy is designed to give students plenty of freedom to pursue their personal learning and development goals and business ideas and to respond to the needs of their team companies and clients. However, freedom comes with responsibility and the expectation of serious commitment. This is a tough lesson to learn for many because parents, school, and work typically do not prepare them for freedom. In fact, for most students, the biggest leadership challenge is their self-leadership.

As a support measure, we require all of them before the beginning of each semester to draw up a personal learning contract for the next six months, in which they answer the following five questions (Cunningham, 1999):

  1. 1.

    Where do I come from?

  2. 2.

    Where am I now?

  3. 3.

    Where do I want to go?

  4. 4.

    How do I get there?

  5. 5.

    How do I know that I have arrived?

The students discuss their draft contracts with their team coaches, coordinate and agree on them with their team, and sign them. When taken seriously, learning contracts are an effective tool for the students to reflect on themselves and to practice goal orientation, focus, commitment, and evaluation of own progress. During the semester, learning contracts serve as a basis for conversations with the team coach. In addition, Academic Leaders use the learning contracts to keep track of their whole team’s progress and to coordinate support within the team for students who are struggling.

An important role model for self-leadership is students’ corporate clients. From them, they can (ideally) learn what professionalism, productivity, and reliability mean. The best clients are those who demand exactly this from the students.

5 Challenges for the Team Academy Model

There are many challenges to setting up and running a program like GIF in a bureaucratized, risk-averse public higher education institution. In this section, however, I will address three challenges we face in GIF concerning the development and assessment of the students’ Future Skills.

5.1 The Challenge of Letting Go

In the introduction, I pointed out the importance of action, reflection, and an authentic learning context for the acquisition of entrepreneurial competences and related Future Skills. By an authentic learning context, I mean a learning environment in which it is natural for students to do the things that promote their competence development. Giving a talk in a seminar, having an appearance in front of the camera in a public speaking course, or discussing an ethical dilemma as part of a case study are not natural situations but artificial ones, producing artificial behavior, which may or may not be transferred to real-world situations outside the classroom.

The Team Academy works differently. Everything is real or as close to real as possible. If a client project is due to be completed, the students work very hard to meet the deadline, not because a team coach tells them so, but because it is their client, their project, and their ambition. If three students want to start a new project and need the financial support of their team, they pitch their project idea in front of their peers, respond to their questions and concerns, and show how everybody will benefit. They do this to gain support and not to practice their presentation skills that might be useful later in life. And eventually, when the students are fed up with their chaotic way of running projects, they begin to impose discipline on themselves for proper project management. They learn this lesson for life without any intervention by a team coach.

One rule of thumb for team coaches is therefore to “grant them their mess”. Mess is part of the authentic learning environment in a Team Academy. It makes the students realize what they want to avoid in the future and start looking for improvements and solutions on their initiative. For us Team Coaches, however, watching students struggle with their mess or driving projects against the wall can be hard to bear, and I am often the first team coach who shows mercy. Not saying no, just letting go and trusting the process, is not for the faint at heart.

5.2 The Challenge of Unlearning

Learning from mistakes takes time. However, getting new students to just go ahead and try something that may fail, takes even more time. In their first months in the GIF program, many are hesitant to experiment because they expect to receive guidance, to need permission, or be discouraged from pursuing their ideas. The belief that they must learn something before being allowed to do it is as common as it is limiting. In addition, a deficit-oriented self-image gets in the way for some, leading them to focus on their weaknesses rather than their strengths.

Another big challenge for students, besides dealing productively with freedom, is unlearning. The socialization by parents and school may have prepared them for a well-defined job in a stable, hierarchical organization, but not for experiential, entrepreneurial, failure-prone learning in a self-organizing, frequently messy environment. They need to unlearn the way they used to learn at school. They need to unlearn the idea that every question has one correct answer, that there is a certain body of knowledge to be mastered, that learning is the mental stockpiling of knowledge and that everyone in GIF has to learn the same things. They have to unlearn the idea that they must be able to do everything themselves because that is exactly what does not apply in complementary teams. They have to unlearn that someone else is responsible for them, makes decisions for them, and tells them what to do. And they have to unlearn their fixation on grades, for otherwise they will never take risks, make courageous decisions, look for new ways and grow as entrepreneurs.

5.3 The Challenge of Balancing Assessment and Authenticity

Grades bring me to our third major challenge, namely the assessment of the students’ competence levels and gains fairly and comparably. In GIF, the vast majority of assessments take the form of portfolio examinations.

During the semester, the students collect evidence for everything they do in the context of GIF. Evidence can be project or product plans, budgets, pitch decks, websites, web shops and apps created, results of own market research, prototypes, minutes of client talks and internal meetings, correspondence, offers sent out, order confirmations received, contracts, client feedback, team feedback, etc. At the end of the semester, the students decide which modules they want to complete with the documentation of their activities. For each module, they compile the evidence required, explain each piece of evidence, and write a reflective piece on their learning journey in the course of the module.

So, in GIF, we wholeheartedly share Mintzberg’s (2005) credo of “using work rather than making work” (p. 313) for assessment. The downside is, however, that while portfolios are a great way to make learning and demonstrated competences visible, no two portfolios look even remotely alike. This is because no two GIF students pass through our program in the same way. Some may work on the same projects for the same clients, but in different roles. Some look for business opportunities at their doorstep in Bremerhaven, while others seek opportunities abroad. And since team dynamics vary greatly among the teams, the CEOs of our nine team companies typically face very different leadership challenges, which are reflected by their equally different portfolios.

One consequence of this is that implementing fair assessment standards is extremely difficult. The students who are the most successful in identifying business opportunities, managing projects, or creating a positive team culture may not be the best with words. On the other hand, the most impressive portfolios by academic standards often come from students who would probably excel in more traditional, structured study programs and who know how to present their minor entrepreneurial activities in the best light. Moreover, if we team coaches evaluated portfolios purely based on the desired learning outcomes specified in the module handbook, we would have to disregard other valuable competences the students may have developed or applied successfully. The more we stick to the formalized intended learning outcomes, the more we reduce the perceived freedom to experiment and the authenticity of the GIF learning environment. We tend to deal with this trade-off by using ‘soft’ assessment standards; focusing on the strong points of each portfolio; and giving students extensive development-oriented written feedback.

6 Three Learnings

In this final section, I share three learnings from the design and implementation of GIF over four years, which may be valuable for those planning to develop or adopt a Future Skills oriented curriculum.

6.1 Higher Education is Changing

A frequently heard argument against originality in program design is that (not only) German higher education laws and accreditation regulations are too restrictive, hostile to innovation, and do not allow anything other than the established program formats. However, in view of something as radical and unorthodox as a Team Academy being a reality, this argument seems more like a protective assertion.

So, the first lesson is that public higher education in Germany is changing! Change may be painfully slow compared to the agile world around, but there are windows of opportunity for innovative, unconventional Future Skills oriented approaches to learning.

6.2 Start with Why

When I set out to convince management and committees at my university to establish Germany’s first Team Academy as a degree program, I was confronted with the argument that coaching was not academic teaching and that GIF was too much about procedural knowledge (know-how) and too little about declarative knowledge (know-that) (Berge & van Hezewijk, 1999; Herz & Schultz Jr, 1999; Jiamu, 2001).

The same argument might be used against the introduction of practically any Future Skills-related curricular elements. Therefore, it is important to realize that the argument is flawed because it confuses the means and ends of education (see the introduction). The end is student learning. Teaching is a means, just like coaching. The choice of the means should be determined by effectiveness to achieve the given end, not by personal preference or historic conventions.

To counter the above argument, it is important to first focus on the purpose of the study program and get everybody to agree on it. In the case of GIF, I presented to my skeptical colleagues the draft of the program’s mission statement (see the Future Skills Model section). It was well received, especially for its entrepreneurship aspect. Next, I explained the particular nature of entrepreneurship and how it differs from business studies or engineering. This made it much easier for management and committee members to agree that GIF needed a tailored pedagogical approach. People began to accept my point that coaching was the most authentic way and lectures were largely optional. Mentally, they had made the shift from the Instruction Paradigm to the Learning Paradigm (see the Introduction section).

So, when faced with resistance against the curricular integration of Future Skills, “Start with Why” (Sinek, 2019). Move on to How only after the purpose has been agreed upon explicitly by decision makers. Then derive How from Why with a watertight argument.

6.3 Let the Medium Be the Message

Learning Future Skills requires students to be active, to do something and preferably in a setting that does not feel artificial but authentic. As mentioned before, artificial situations generate artificial behavior. For this reason, special attention should be paid to the design of the setting or learning environment.

When McLuhan (1964) stated that “The medium is the message” (p. 7), his point was that the particular technology used to communicate a message will affect the content of that message. From a pedagogical perspective, the statement can be read as advice to align the medium of a study program, i.e., how its content is mediated, with that content, so that the medium supports the intended message, rather than contradicting or changing it (Yazon et al., 2002; Zvonimir, 2018). An example of how not to do it is a frontal lecture to prospective teachers on why frontal teaching in schools is a poor practice from a pedagogical perspective. Unfortunately, this example is not fictitious.

I think of the pedagogical medium broadly as a composite of the processes and methods of program delivery, physical spaces and objects, technology, formal and informal rules and roles, rituals, the use of language, and more. Ideally, all elements work together to ensure that students naturally engage with the intended message of their study program. Ask yourself what medium could trigger, guide, and sustain student learning without the need for any further message. How could you design the medium so that students acquire Future Skills all by themselves? Then, the medium becomes indeed the message, as McLuhan suggested.

Future Skills in Practice: My Recommendations

The decreasing half-life of knowledge and its ubiquitous availability will lead to a significant shift in the focus of (higher) education from knowledge to future-proof competences, especially future skills. Based on my experiences with the Team Academy approach in Germany, I have five recommendations to get the change process off the ground.

  1. 1.

    Let us not wait for political initiatives, new higher education laws, more money or anyone’s approval to begin working on Future Skills oriented learning programmes. We can get far with what we have and control today, as the Team Academy example shows. The most limiting factor is the belief that the familiar is all that is possible.

  2. 2.

    We should be clear and stubborn about desired learning outcomes, but flexible about the methods to achieve them. Functionality and effectiveness need to take precedence over convention and habit.

  3. 3.

    The transition from the old to the new requires creativity, experimentation, courage and occasional non-conformity in the design of learning environments, curricula and interaction with students. We can invite them to be our ‘beta testers’ and co-developers.

  4. 4.

    Let us systematically prepare and empower students to take greater control of their learning. Self-directed learning is a Future Skill, and as this chapter has argued, learners acquire Future Skills best by acting and reflecting in authentic contexts.

  5. 5.

    Empowering students in this way will affect our role and professional identity as academic teachers. Actually, the term teacher with all the authority and power distance it implies will become increasingly inadequate to characterize what we do. Since language creates reality, we should identify or invent more suitable terms and use them on ourselves. This is why Team Academies have team coaches, not lecturers and professors.