Ehlers: In recent years, Tom, you were really trying to grasp the future of education. As I understand it, you see ITCILO, the International Training Centre of the ILO, as an engine and a nucleus to develop impulses needed to invent and reinvent education. Can you tell us more about this organization that you’re working at?

Fig. 8.1
A photograph of Tom Wambeke.

Tom Wambeke

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Wambeke: The ILO, the International Labour Organization, is a specialized tripartite UN agency with a focus on promoting decent work and advancing the global social justice agenda. The ITCILO, its training center, is a kind of experimental innovation hub where we focus on sustainable learning solutions, reaching out to 80,000 people on an annual basis in 42 different areas of expertise which relate to the recent work agenda in function of social justice.

My role as Chief of Learning Innovation is one that we have created; I didn’t apply for that specific job. I started it at a time when innovation was about how we can infuse technology during the early days of technology-enhanced learning and e-learning. My first assessment of the training center was that we basically try to transform a training center beyond training. In other words, that we need to make sure that the world of learning doesn’t become an eternal workshop factory, where we just replicate the same thing that we have always done. Technology was initially an excuse to change things.

We also realized that it’s not only about learning technology, but about learning methodology, about digital media design. How can we innovate across the entire spectrum that will influence learning? And this is how this department actually was born, because the 42 areas of expertise replicate exactly what the ILO is doing, from international labor standards to social dialogue, social protection, just transition, gender mainstreaming et cetera. There are about 42 areas of expertise, but what they do not have is expertise in innovation in the field of learning, and this is where we are providing an answer. After many years, it has become a cross-cutting strategic driver of the overall strategy of the center—and I have the privilege to lead this program with my team.

Ehlers: I think it’s quite impressive what you and your team achieved to become for your entire organization. It is a big achievement to make innovation and learning such an important issue in your organization. For you, what are the three words which are describing the future of education?

Wambeke: The future of education in three words—it’s a creative ecosystem of intentional serendipity.

Ehlers: So, improvisation is probably one thing which you really like, right?

Wambeke: Yes, but not in the way that educational scientists use it sometimes—rather in the way that jazz musicians use it. Their high mastery of skills to become a top-notch jazz musician took them years to acquire, but it’s only that kind of mastery of skills which gives you the freedom to improvise. Any jazz musician will tell you that you can only improvise when you’re fully prepared. It’s just not like the kind of improvisation where you experiment a little bit in a classroom.

Ehlers: We want to talk about Future Skills today. Is there any Future Skills moment or any anecdote that you remember from your life where you think that this was a moment where Future Skills really mattered, and you really learnt something?

Wambeke: Future Skills, in the sense of what I understand, with all the disruption ahead of us, are basically about the question of how I can I survive in the twenty-first century. I have a background in educational sciences and also in philosophy. I was suddenly wondering: what do I want to do in life? I was very much into the cultural scene in Belgium, so I decided to follow a master in cultural management.

At that time, we were setting up festivals—it was the age of what we would call the experience economy. Festivals were becoming an experience and I learned many skillsets in that kind of area that, later in my life, have come back to me. Because coincidence brought me to become, again, a learning professional. If I see how I positioned learning in my own professional context, I would see it as a kind of a learning festival where learning becomes an experience. If I talk about Future Skills, it’s about the capacity to transfer from one discipline to another, to come up with innovative and creative ideas.

For me, this is a recurrent pattern in my life and in my professional life. Most of my ideas, I don’t get from educational experts anymore because I became one myself, thinking with the same glasses. But if I talk to someone specialized in beer or wine, in completely different fields, I can try to translate that into my field. That’s where my personal Future Skills have been quite successful—in the field of innovation science.

I’ve seen some interesting examples that reconfirmed that. One of the American e-learning gurus, Elliott Masie, asked to his ten thousand followers: what’s the difference between learning and cooking? And from the thousands of answers he received, he produced his first book “What’s the difference between learning and cooking?”. It’s an interesting experiment, asking two different disciplines and finding out what can they learn from each other. Maybe that’s also a lesson for the Future Skills discussion. If you look at all the problems that we are facing, for example, in the world of work, labor migration or informal economy, there is no topic anymore where there is a unidisciplinary reaction on how to we have to address it. These problems are all fundamentally interdisciplinary and extremely complex. For promoting Future Skills, we will have to recreate our profiles of the way we think about problems. And that is going to be a high urgency point in how we shape the future of education and learning in general.

Ehlers: What we always say is that problems do not think about disciplines—so they are always interdisciplinary. A lot of teachers and professors we talk to tend to say: we are already very good at teaching our curriculum—but what we are looking for more and more are possibilities for students to develop life skills and interdisciplinary skills. Or in other words: how can we create intentional serendipity, where you see beyond what is obvious in front of you to discover new things? In our research on this important concept of Future Skills, we discussed with partners from industry and people in the labor market in interviews and Delphi studies and so on, and our partners in the economy and people who are already in the labor market. We asked them what they think are the most important things they would like universities to focus on and to help students develop. They were naming all kinds of things, but they did not really focus on knowledge, but a lot on skills. So, while we are mostly focusing on knowledge transmission in universities, they think the most relevant issues they experience in their working and private lives are actually how to deal with unexpected experiences, how to communicate, how to collaborate across borders. This is why we started to further develop this concept of Future Skills into a framework to make people understand them.

“But as the problems we are facing are becoming more and more complex, with an extremely high level of urgency, we need to become something that I would call human chameleons, having to change colors many times.”

Wambeke: I think it’s extremely important to have a new narrative. We didn’t invent the need for interdisciplinary thinking, it has kind of become common sense. As long as knowledge has existed, there probably has always been an interdisciplinary element. But there is one thing we need to make sure, looking at all these different skills frameworks, mostly listing cognitive flexibility, innovation, creativity as top skills—we need to use new images and create narratives that also inspire people. Future Skills is a good one already. But as the problems we are facing are becoming more and more complex, with an extremely high level of urgency, we need to become something that I would call human chameleons, having to change colors many times. What I like about this animal are its independently mobile eyes, allowing for a 360 degree view—I wish we had a similar vision to this as humans.

However, there is an element of substance related to these, let’s say, soft skills—communication, collaboration and so on. Talking about creativity, for example: there is a whole discipline in creativity, almost like an engineering discipline. We thus also need to generate substantial knowledge on these disciplines that will help us become more interdisciplinary, to co-create, collaborate and communicate. And this is definitely more complex than soft versus hard.

Ehlers: I would agree to that. We see it like a compound in which knowledge, or the crystallized result of science, always needs some context in which your values are addressed so that you can start to act. In this view, values are the underlying mechanisms which are guiding your actions. But there is also a third element of what you’re trained to do: your abilities and experiences—and all these three things have to come together. Knowledge alone is not enabling you to act—it is knowledge plus that we need, value-infused and contextual.

Moreover, our understanding is that Future Skills always have to do with a vision of the future, a narrative. In your job, you probably have a lot to do with convincing people that learning innovation is an important issue. How do you so successfully build this narrative around learning innovation?

Wambeke: One of the first things I learnt was to never use the word innovation or related words such as systems thinking or interdisciplinarity—because this is the specialist language and might be alienating to others, considering this as a specialist conversation which is not for them. For creating a narrative, I will come up with a story—for example about the human chameleon, which is very adaptive to the changing environment, able to survive the COVID crisis. Because that could have been the death of our training center, at that time mostly based on face-to-face training. What you then need is a narrative that focuses on what we want to achieve, and that is reach more people for making the world a better place, with innovation tools and mechanisms as something that might be a way to get there. For me, communication and the art of persuasive storytelling have become as important as the strategic plan behind it—because you need to move people. They need to be part of that story, and that’s not the story written by a few experts. It’s a human kind of collaboration act, and only when they are convinced, they will come along.

However, as you said, context is extremely important. I work in a global center—facing the entire world. So, if context is king, then I definitely say that value is queen, and maybe even more important than king. Different global systems have different values, with interculturality as only one very specific dimension. We need to reorganize our diversity wheels in a much more complex and nuanced way in order to go beyond standard parameters reduced to single categories such as language, culture, ethnicity. It is so much richer and complex than that!

And if you have the navigational capacity to work with all these different parameters on your dashboard, you will also be able to drive a culture of innovation ahead. And that is not an easy thing to do, because the narrative will also evolve over time. While we often think of innovation as a kind of almost technological solution, it has actually been more like muddling through, step by step. But if you do that consequently, you will move forward. Maybe this kind of long-term thinking has been partly lost in our plans and strategies that barely go beyond five years.

What is your plan for the next 20 years? That would be an interesting question but is rarely asked or answered. That’s why I was surprised about the Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want by the African Union, going even beyond 2060. This is because the entire long-term thinking skill which we could call foresight or even strategic foresight is a muscle that needs to be trained and would be one of my most important Future Skills.

Eigbrecht: Some things you said really resonated with me—I think because you create a lot of images: festival of learning, navigation tools, a compass, a chameleon. Sometimes we are facing all these challenges and not knowing where to go, so it’s nice to have some images, maybe even utopian, of where to go and how to describe what is happening.

However, it’s also important to have some concrete examples of how Future Skills can actually look like in successful practice. Do you have a story to share on that?

Wambeke: There’s one website that I would like to share and which I use in making it very concrete—it is called hubot.org and created by a Dutch foresight agency. Basically, you take a job test and apply for a job in the future, such as Artificial Womb Nutritionist or the Organ Designer or Walker Inspector.

To make it very concrete: I live in North Italy, renowned for their mastery of high-quality products such as fashion or shoes. In the region where I live at, I still see some people with this kind of artisanal skillsets which are on the brink of basically disappearing but reflecting generations of knowledge into the quality of a product.

So, I ask: how could we start to combine these more future-oriented skills related to technology or ecological thinking and combine it with these old mastery skills of artisanal crafts? So, what if we combine two different skills into something new? Could that create a new future where we will be more innovative, more creative, rather than have these things disappear? If we have this kind of combinational skill set, we might revive and retrieve some of these things from the past to come up with more efficient and eco-friendly technologies, new value chains that create circular sustainable economies instead of thinking about utopian or rather dystopian science fiction scenarios where the machine will replace us. This might also influence how we organize the global economy. Recently, production lines have been moved back from China to Germany by Adidas, where factories will be locally producing shoes with robots instead of humans based on the final market needs. Let’s not make this a utopian technological story, but let’s see what other values emerge and how we can combine this with skill sets that are already here. Let’s again make it a multidimensional question which is much more interesting than separating all the different elements.

Eigbrecht: I also wonder, when we talk about Future Skills, we often talk about individuals. But, as we see, all the challenges that we need Future Skills for are collective, basically shared by everybody on this planet. So how can we make Future Skills learning not a pressure on individuals, but a shared social experience?

Wambeke: It’s for an important reason that collaboration or co-creation is also seen as one of these future trends out there, at any level. For example, at work—looking at the team I am leading right now, I don’t see any project managers—they’re all working in mixed teams on different projects that change all the time. The challenges they face are not only technical problems, but also how we collaborate in teams towards a shared goal which requires different skill sets.

We shouldn’t wait for people to learn this at work. Project-based learning, for example, is already conceptualized accordingly as an educational experience in which you will only find a solution if you undergo a group working process with assessment through systems of peer feedback within your own group. There are many other approaches, but they are still seen as the innovative way of learning while the majority of universities still lag behind, broadcasting knowledge. We need to make these approaches more common, starting from kindergarten towards university so that it becomes normal that a solution is not provided by an expert, but we are confronted with a challenge we cannot handle on our own—we will then tap into collective intelligence.

It’s more of a mindset that we need to cultivate across the entire generation, a way of thinking—and this aspect will be important in organizing learning in the future. This is not something new but a recurring pattern, but if we don’t keep on emphasizing it, we might lose it again—such as with the risk to go back to exactly how things were pre-COVID. So, after being exposed to many different experiences, also failures, it is important to ask: what is the next step? Where can we learn more?

Ehlers: One issue which we always come across in these conversations is that of putting it into practice. You already mentioned that you think that the education process needs chunks of knowledge, wisdom and values, but also peer feedback and Problem-Based Learning environments. You’re constantly designing and thinking about training opportunities. How do you proceed?

“What I say is: it’s not really about the headsets, it’s more about the mindsets.”

Wambeke: In university, I was still shaped in a more linear vision, not of how I see the world, but of how we do things, taking different steps, one after the other. Applying this to the field of educational science would be an instructional cycle from analysis towards evaluation. Today, I would probably get stuck in the first phase, in a kind of analysis paralysis. We probably need to have a more non-linear look at things, starting much faster, including feedback loops and reiterations, until things become clearer. We also need to have the courage to take a step back to do some piloting and reorganizing. However, this is often difficult to do in an organizational context asking for clear results and steps. So, what we are talking about is a kind of navigational capacity: how can I bring in some more complexity-oriented tools and approaches on my path towards success? It is a big challenge, and this is why I said my innovation journey was basically muddling through, but always towards a larger goal. I haven’t gotten lost on my way muddling through. However, tools, approaches and mindsets need to be adapted in the whole educational sector. What I say is: it’s not really about the headsets, it’s more about the mindsets.

Ehlers: The way we would like to see our education processes in a seminar with our students or a lecture or a project is a very sophisticated and avant-garde vision very close to yours, bringing in complexity and making people understand that mindset matters. They need to develop questions and inspirations and creative solutions. But this is kind of a cultural break, because students are socialized in a totally different way, being agents in the process of answering safe questions. Now we come in, with our ambition to create complex learning scenarios in which we only want to deal with problems and questions which do not have any answers but plausibility, feedback, debates. So, there is a clash of learning philosophies, cultures and socializations—what is your approach of how to deal with this?

Wambeke: Of course, there are different takes, and maybe I will be answering a different question now. I started to be somewhat afraid of a challenge that I would call info-tension. Looking at mass information overloads and what I would call weapons of mass distraction, meaning social media, it’s like our focus has been stolen. And the educational learning market has almost become a fast-food circus where bite-sized learning is served just in time. This sounds sexy and understandable and a perfect solution when I don’t have a lot of time and I’m overwhelmed with everything—but let’s step back.

And here again, my local environment comes in—I live in a slow-food region. And what if we applied the slow-food movement to other contexts? There’s already travel, but what about slow-learning? What if we start to focus again? You can find this kind of Manifesto for Slow Thinking online—I think it says let’s focus on questions rather than on answers, let’s move into observation rather than immediate evaluation or judgment, let’s focus on change of perspective instead of your point of view. It actually is a nice narrative that fits extremely well with the methodologies that I would like to use.

My approach is part of a larger vision on how I see change and behavioral change and learning, but I need to tell people about the bigger picture behind it—and this is what we are often lacking, focusing on short-term solutions. Once you have a vision, you have an overall purpose—but how do you translate that vision into practical instruments, making people go with the flow?

This is one of the problems that I see with some of the tools that are hyped now, including Design Thinking: you need extremely talented, skilled facilitators that really understand the entire process of conducting such an exercise. If this person does not have the skill set to pave the way ahead for students, they’re going to get stuck, bored and confused very fast. We saw this happen when one university introduced systems thinking as a topic, but in the wrong way, with students complaining that they felt completely lost. And this was because there was not a sound methodological process with tools, approaches and well-trained people. This of course changes your role: you’re not the sage on stage anymore, but the guide at the side, and this requires a different kind of expertise. However, you cannot just learn that in a workshop, but it’s a process of experience, retesting and learning from it.

“You’re not the sage on stage anymore, but the guide at the side, and this requires a different kind of expertise.”

Eigbrecht: You supposedly just gave the answer to my next question. In the beginning you said that your future vision of education was an ecosystem of intentional serendipity. If we want to create deep learning opportunities for students and also more moments of unintentional learning opportunities—how can we do that?

Wambeke: Ultimately, it’s making people aware that every second is a potential learning opportunity, even if they are not aware of it—having this conversation is already a learning opportunity. I always thought one of Einstein’s quotes was quite interesting: I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. For me, this would be the only kind of attitude that I would like to ask of anyone who’s with me on a learning journey which is not locked up into a classroom. Because talking about informal learning or serendipity, it’s always the stereotyped conversation at the coffee table that we go back to. In Italy, we drink a lot of coffee—a lot of potential serendipity out there. But how can we make sure that our entire environment, including the coffee bar, becomes a space and time where we learn from the dialogue and become conscious of it? We probably need to transform and translate a lot of different elements from it, and this might be the only possibility to give a new shape to the definition of lifelong learning: almost every single second until you die could be a potential learning opportunity. This should also be translated for different targets audiences, so that being confronted with a YouTube instructional video could make you see to something new through a new kind of glasses. This for me would be a way to create intentional serendipity, but again—not in a linear fashion, because then we would make the same mistakes again. Before, you need to create an open space for these kinds of ideas to come up and not lock them up in specific fields such as technology or governance.

Maybe we could learn from new technologies here. Currently, the debates on new technology are completely dominated by artificial intelligence, blockchain, et cetera, but why don’t we dive deeper again? What if you look at the underlying structure of a phenomenon of blockchain? It is the first decentralized network that could create a completely new model of how we currently learn. I would like to see these kinds of narratives and not just the technological engineering discussions around them. And this might create a fascinating future where educational institutions might not be institutions anymore, but networks of learning with space for slow thinking and slow learning.

“Almost every single second until you die could be a potential learning opportunity.”

Ehlers: So, you have guided us to the future of learning. I always like to think ten years back, where I was and how things were then, and ten years ahead as a thought experiment. So, if you think ten years ahead—will we still be discussing the future of learning in the same way, or will the future of learning need a different discussion?

Wambeke: This is a very difficult question, and sometimes I see people try to answer it with easy answers, such as that the future of learning is going to be the metaverse. With this kind of attitude, I think it will almost become the meta-perverse, in one way or another. However, the underlying discussion here is on how we can make learning more immersive and get an experience that was not possible ten years ago. You can get a first glimpse of that when diving into my VR experiments, but it needs to go one step further and really make people have a completely different discussion about it. And that’s where we are going to be confronted with our limitations. Today, we are certainly confronted with technological limitations, but there are still a lot of other limitations, such as the lack of connection with neuroscience specifically in the field of learning. I find that somewhat hilarious—that’s the instrument that we basically use to learn, but the knowledge on it is in these extremely specialized fields and not a lot of people have the capacity to translate it into how to make it work in order to change the future of learning. For me, this would be a take on how to give a different twist to how we think about the future of learning. Secondly, as the world is becoming more diverse, we should also think about how to make future learning as inclusive as possible, with a lot of people now feeling a little bit left behind, either because of speed or access. Here again, the discussion needs to be radically different, with everything reduced to an accessibility discussion, whether it’s infrastructure, technology, literacy. We need to have the courage to connect inclusion to innovation in order to come up with radically different solutions. Again, it will be less about headsets and more about mindsets.

And last but not least—I think this should not be only the discussion of educational specialists and stakeholders. It should become a societal type of discussion with a co-creation approach—such as with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. There is a difference here to the Millennium Development Goals where the discussion was rather expert-driven. The Sustainable Development Goals had a different approach, asking: what is the world we want? Having an entire population or at least an important part of that population think about the same question—that would be the greatest way to think about the future of education. We would probably see different narratives, because we as education specialists are also locked up in our own narratives—and I would also like to see different questions being addressed.

“We need to have the courage to connect inclusion to innovation in order to come up with radically different solutions.”