Almost every course I teach includes field trips. We head to shopping centres, hotels, airports, hospitals and busy streets, usually without travelling particularly far. Sometimes we’re back within three hours, but always with sore feet and far better questions.
Getting there is part of the pleasure. Put me on a bus with thirty students in their twenties and I will probably start talking to somebody who had been enjoying a perfectly peaceful journey until then. My students seem astonished by how easily conversations begin. I draw them in, they start reaching out themselves, and somewhere between the bus stop and our destination, the classroom loosens its grip.
That is when things get interesting.
We spend so much time asking students to solve problems with classmates that we can forget how unfamiliar everybody else remains to them. Approaching strangers, asking intelligent questions, listening properly and being willing to change your mind require something that another group presentation may never ask of you.
Outside, people have their own concerns, priorities and somewhere else to be. They may disagree with your idea, misunderstand what you are offering, or simply see no value in the proposition that looked so convincing in your PowerPoint. What I love is that strangers turn out to be remarkably uncooperative teammates.
I watch some of that business school confidence, occasionally bordering on cockiness, give way to uncertainty. There’s a vulnerable moment when a student realises that being articulate and being right are entirely separate accomplishments. I feel rather protective of them then, even though I helped arrange the encounter. My job is to scoop them back up, work through what happened and help them reshape their thinking while it is still soft enough to move. With a little encouragement, believe me, an uncomfortable encounter can become something they are eager to make sense of.
It’s also one of the reasons I love teaching this way. Something has happened to them, and we now have something worth discussing.
In Nice, my export marketing students have been developing export strategies for a distilled beverage. Standing in front of an actual assortment, looking at competing bottles and trying to understand the choices facing a retailer brings a different quality of attention to the problem. The shelf is crowded, the customer is distracted, and their lovely proposition must somehow earn both space and attention.
Once you start looking this way, the immediate surroundings become an almost embarrassingly rich teaching resource. Strategy lives in shop assortments, marketing in a customer’s hesitation, and operations in a queue that nobody seems able to explain. Mathematics students could measure pedestrian flows; humanities students could investigate whose stories a neighbourhood preserves, and whose have quietly disappeared.
A prominent architect I know asks students to leave their devices behind and sketch what their eyes notice. I love the simplicity of that invitation: spend enough time looking for something to become visible. My son studies geology, and nobody expects him to understand rocks exclusively from slides. Believe me, the photos he sends from his field trips make me want to drop everything and go rummaging around with him!
Yet somehow, in business education, we remain unusually comfortable studying human activity at a considerable distance from humans.
There is nothing revolutionary about heading outside. Stanford’s d.school teaches observation and conversations in the field, while MIT’s D Lab connects students with community partners working on real problems. There’s already a substantial tradition to draw on.
But I want my students to do more than observe. I want them asking awkward questions, testing assumptions, recording evidence with permission and discovering how much they missed when they thought they understood.
That requires access to something less polished than the carefully managed company visit, that familiar business school version of a field trip. Being escorted through an organisation, shown its flattering angles and kept comfortably away from manufacturing difficulties or actual customers can leave students with a corporate presentation, a visitor badge and an unwanted branded tote bag. I want them close enough to encounter the complications, including the ones nobody prepared a slide about.
As a professor of practice, I come from that chaos of real life, and bringing students into contact with it feels like part of the job. Still, enthusiasm does not organise the logistics. These trips take preparation, coordination with colleagues and enough structure to make the learning visible afterwards. With thirty to fifty students, I cannot follow every conversation or materialise beside every team in a shopping centre, however much my students suspect I might.
The reality is that I would happily spend whole days outside, but timetables rarely agree.
So next year, in my design thinking and lean startup courses, I want to make three field trips into assessed milestones. Students will build prototypes, put them in front of intended users and bring back qualitative and quantitative evidence. We will use that material to examine what happened, identify patterns and decide whether to continue, redesign or stop before the next round.
The grade must reward what they discover and how intelligently they respond, including when the evidence dismantles an idea they were so fond of at the start. Otherwise, we risk teaching them to defend their first answer with increasingly attractive graphics.
You know what excites me the most? It’s watching their curiosity recover after the first uncomfortable encounter. They begin noticing things they would have walked past, asking questions they could not have written beforehand and wanting to go back because somebody said something they still cannot quite explain. Goosebumps every time.
We leave with a plan, of course. But somewhere outside the building, somebody who has never read our syllabus gets a say in what happens next.
And even after all these years, I can’t wait to find out what that will be…