February 8, 2025

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Global IB exam chief: how jazz provides lessons in management

Two childhood inspirations have permeated the assorted job and managerial fashion of Olli-Pekka Heinonen, the sometime Finnish politician, policymaker and public formal: training and tunes.

As he plots out tactic in his new position as director-common of the Intercontinental Baccalaureate technique first released extra than 50 % a century back, he is drawing on both these influences. He can take over a sophisticated world wide organisation as it seeks to increase and satisfy the changing demands of kids and modern society in an era seriously disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“My father was a trainer and I was born and lived in an condominium in a major school,” he suggests. “I also analyzed in the [Turku] Conservatory [of New music] and for a 12 months was a tunes trainer.” Heinonen, 57, then properly trained as a lawyer and — at least as he describes it — nearly each phase in his qualified lifetime has been guided by requests and nudges from many others.

He was requested to turn out to be a parliamentary adviser, then minister of training at only 29, ahead of he experienced been elected an MP. As soon as that experienced happened, he turned minister of transport and telecommunications. From 2002 he invested a ten years functioning Yleisradio, the Finnish condition broadcaster, but later rejoined government as condition secretary to the key minister.

The only position for which he ever utilized was his very last publish as director-common of the National Company for Training in 2016. That place him in cost of a school technique held up as a showpiece around the globe, judged by benchmarks this kind of as the OECD’s Programme for Intercontinental Scholar Evaluation, for its belief in balancing solid academic achievements with lifetime exterior school.

“My philosophy is that you should not position your believe in in preparing things,” Heinonen, suggests. “There will be surprises and you should just go along with what evolves. The only position I have utilized for was at the Company. I felt it would be a very good time to return to the crime scene of the subject of training.”

He cites as one particular of his finest achievements the interval as training minister in the mid to late 1990s, when he granted autonomy to towns, schools and lecturers on their own. He stresses the groundwork experienced been laid over the earlier two decades by demanding all lecturers to have masters’ degrees. That boosted their competence, embedded a culture of regular pedagogical research and strengthened their high status and regard in modern society.

Critical management lessons

  • Grant autonomy — in Heinonen’s circumstance, he devolved training decisions to towns and lecturers on their own

  • Embrace the ‘humble governance’ strategy and acknowledge that leaders do not have the suitable answers

  • Management is not about one particular human being, it should be spread all over a corporate or organisational technique

  • Conversation to develop believe in with team and stakeholders is very important

“My strategy was to include things like every person in the system,” he suggests. Motivated by his government’s fashion of “humble governance”, he embraced the thought that “at the prime you really don’t have the suitable answers, you have to entail men and women in co-developing them. Management is not about a human being, it is a high-quality that should be spread commonly in a technique. If you emphasise the position of one particular human being, you are failing.”

He suggests he learnt humility, but also the need to have to talk extra. “I’m not by character anyone who desires to be in the highlight. I have uncovered to do that. We Finns in some cases talk as well minor. We test to be pretty exact and go away other things out, but communicating to develop believe in is central.

“In the starting, I experienced the thought that getting in a management position meant you should glimpse, talk and dress to glimpse like a leader,” he suggests. “That will not purpose. You need to have to be yourself, the human being you are. Authenticity is so crucial, and the integrity that arrives with it.”

Just one of his finest frustrations came as minister of transport and telecommunications, when he struggled during the spin out of Sonera from the National Postal Services. Its shares rose sharply and then collapsed during the IT bubble. “It did not go as easily as I hoped,” he suggests. “I realised how challenging it is to incorporate the globe of politics and small business. I should have associated all the partners even extra strongly to obtain a frequent solution.”

He then took a break from politics, partly reflecting a need to have to “balance get the job done with family members and recovery time”, as he suggests. “I learnt to often have extra of those people things in your lifetime that give you electrical power than just take it away. Normally make confident you have a reserve to cope with surprises. If you really don’t have that kind of spare electrical power, they [very good and poor surprises] will just take you.”

He took cost of the condition broadcaster, and made his identification as a manager, drawing parallels with his encounters as a hobbyist trumpeter top a jazz band. “You develop something new with a shared melody that every person is aware but with a great deal of area for improvisation. It is the identical in an organisation: you should have a handful of guidelines every person is committed to and go away area to develop new things with anyone through listening and connecting.”

He set about gathering a mixture of study info and personalized diaries and interviews from the Finnish public to recognize their values and attitudes, which unveiled how distinctive they ended up from those people of most of his employees. “You can have a stereotypical perspective of things. That led me to truly test to recognize our citizens as customers.”

Three thoughts for Olli-Pekka Heinonen

Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
Sakari Oramo

Who is your management hero?

The pretty high stage Finnish conductors Sakari Oramo, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Susanna Mälkki. I experienced the pleasure of observing them in action in rehearsals and in concert events. It is marvellous how these industry experts can develop a link on the spot, give opinions and make qualified musicians do something together that you want them to do and do it in a way that they are giving their most effective.

What was the first management lesson you learnt?

I played tunes from a pretty young age and a pretty early lesson was when I observed how crucial internal determination is to management: getting in a position to develop inside determination for a group of men and women to accomplish something together.

What would you have accomplished if you experienced not pursued your job in training and politics?

New music would have been something I would have looked to do, I would also have truly liked getting an academic researcher. The capacity to inquire about and master about new things, strive to obtain something new and through that to make a variation.

Seeking back on his encounters, he thoughts the idea that management centres on choice generating. “Actually implementation is the tactic,” he suggests. “The way you are in a position to apply things is a pretty huge strategic selection. Academics will not obey simply because anyone suggests they have to. They have to recognize why and have the internal determination to do so. We should be conversing extra about the strategy of imperfect management: to confess uncertainty and develop finding out paths for the more substantial technique to obtain the solution.”

The IB technique is currently utilised by extra than 250,000 students in nearly 5,500 schools around the globe. It has extended sought to educate students in a wide assortment of subjects with broader knowledge of the idea of expertise and the use of project and staff-dependent get the job done together with “high stakes” final penned exams.

To lots of, that displays the aspirations of lots of nationwide training reformers to prepare for this century’s worries — while some IB lecturers bemoan that even though they adore the basic principle of the qualification, they are annoyed with the organisation powering it and its sluggish pace of improve. Like other examination bodies, it was criticised for how it modified its marking units during the pandemic.

Heinonen is confident that the IB embodies an strategy — also reflected in the Finnish training technique — in which “competences are getting to be extra central. It is about what you do with what you know and how to educate for an uncertain upcoming we simply cannot predict.”

He sees “strong dedication to just take the IB heritage into the new era” by team and lecturers. “It’s not the tactic, it’s the implementation,” he suggests. “We have to have that more substantial jazz band hoping to perform the identical tone and improvise.”