Meet Jasper, Director at the London Interdisciplinary School

The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) are a radical new university, preparing students to tackle real world problems. Founded in 2017, it will admit its first cohort of students this year. We spoke with Jasper to find out more about both their undergraduate and professional programmes.

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Jasper is a former strategy consultant who has supported a range of social impact organisations across several sectors (e.g. education, healthcare, social care). He has worked with a number of new and established higher education initiatives, including advising some of the world's leading universities. Jasper holds a BA from Cambridge University, and is now the Director of Professional Development at LIS.

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What is the LIS mission statement?

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We exist to help people take impactful, interdisciplinary approaches to tackling complex problems. The world is increasingly full of complex,  interconnected and urgent issues. The modern workplace needs people who can tackle these kinds of challenges. But the current education system can’t evolve quickly enough to help them get there, so we need a new solution. We do two things:

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• We run a range of programmes for professional learners who are already some way into their careers. They might be in positions of leadership, or destined for leadership responsibility. Leadership is interdisciplinary so we deliver interdisciplinary curricula that combine intellectual rigour from a range of domains with knowledge of the business world. Our programmes improve your cognitive flexibility and equip you to take new, productive lenses on the complex challenges you face.
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• In September 2021 we are launching our interdisciplinary undergraduate programme. We are the first new institution in a long-time (several decades) to receive approval to award our own degrees. The UG programme is distinctive in that it is problem focused and equips learners with knowledge and methods from across the arts, sciences and humanities.
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Why have there been no new universities in over 50 years?

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There are a number of structural reasons that make it very hard to start a new university. It is a heavily regulated sector, and rightly so. But it’s also hard for existing universities to move with the times. In traditional universities, research, teaching, finances and students are generally organised in departmental silos that don’t really speak to each-other. Universities are slow moving, bureaucratic institutions. So to create a higher education environment commensurate with the dynamic and complex world we live in, we had to start from scratch.

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Can you tell us a little more about your role within LIS?

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I joined as the first employee about 3 years ago, and for the first 2.5 years I was Director of Strategy and Operations. This consisted of a huge range of things – everything from pursuing regulatory approval, through to refining the business model and leading operational projects in relation to our tech. Then around 3-6 months ago I switched roles to lead the part of the organisation that designs and delivers our programmes for professionals.

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How have LIS adapted to the changes instigated by the COVID closures?

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The university sector has been hit formidably, its dramatically changed the way learning and teaching happens across the sector. But our plans haven’t changed unduly. All of our professional programmes are being successfully delivered 100% online.

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Our undergraduate programme opens in Autumn 2021, by which time we envisage there might will be greater scope for face to face delivery. But we’d always planned to leverage the full potential of digital delivery alongside in-person experiences. So the biggest impact of COVID has probably been for how we interact as a team.

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How can we continue to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in an increasingly remote, and specialised world?

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I would challenge the notion that we are a remote world. We are more connected than ever before and information and experience is incredibly accessible. This presents immense opportunities and, I would argue, requirements, to be interdisciplinary. But the barrier is knowing how to find, use, and integrate all the different bits of information and knowledge that are now at our disposal.

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Sourcing what’s valuable, and looking for quality and legitimacy is a skill in itself. We can be quick to make judgements about the credibility of a source, and look to mainstream or accepted signals of authority – governments, ancient universities or people we trust. But we know that in the modern age, valuable insights can come from anywhere. Navigating and evaluating this terrain will be a super-skill of the 2020s.

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Why should businesses be interested in young people with an interdisciplinary skills background, and how does your undergraduate course help bridge the gap between education and the world of work?

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Higher education and the world of work have been separated for too long. What’s taught and how it’s taught often map poorly onto what the world of work demands. At LIS, we see immense value in creating meaningful porosity between education and the professional world.

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On our undergraduate programme, both our curriculum and the internship experiences that we broker are expressly designed to give students outstanding experience of, and preparation for, professional life. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary skill set we foster will give our graduates the network of knowledge and cognitive flexibility to genuinely grapple with the knotty problems that characterise our economy.

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What are some of the complex global problems LIS hope to contribute to solving?

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At LIS we are very focused on engaging with the most contemporary and pressing issues. Right now, our professional programmes are heavily informed by the extremely uncertain and dynamic environment organisations find themselves in. They reflect the ‘live’ challenges that leaders are dealing with, regardless of sector or industry – challenges like the wellbeing of their people.

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For example, our Navigating Happiness programme (which runs part-time from Tuesday 9th February to Thursday 25th February) focuses on organisational wellbeing and culture. In the midst of a global pandemic, mental health crisis and with top firms competing for talent more than ever before, there are few more pressing issues. Our other professional programmes bring intellectual rigour and interdisciplinary perspectives to similarly familiar professional challenges. They focus on, for example:

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• better understanding and dealing with ambiguity in our decision making
• understanding the evidence and mechanisms by which diverse teams create extraordinary outputs
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What is the spread of theory, practice and network in the design of the Navigating Happiness course?

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A professional programme like Navigating Happiness brings together a cohort of learners from a range of backgrounds. Our alumni from the Navigating Happiness course we ran in December included leadership from FTSE 100 companies, startups, leading venture capital firms and nascent social enterprises. There is huge value in the dialogue and networking opportunities that this diversity of learners creates.

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The course itself focuses on bringing intellectual rigour (informed by the latest research) to bear on practical challenges we are facing in our professional lives. It is this integration of insights and stimulus from the academic world with a deep understanding of business practice that creates the most powerful outcomes for our learners. The feedback has been fantastic.

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What are the aims of the Navigating Happiness programme?

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Although the benefits experienced by “happy” workers and organisations are increasingly well documented, there is no conception of this topic that everyone can agree on. This primary motivator of our organisational behaviour is inherently complex. This course equips you to navigate this complexity.

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We bring together five main perspectives on this issue of happiness and organisational wellbeing:

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• the power of narrative to relieve anxiety and shape individual and collective feeling (cognitive psychology and narrative linguistics)
• the neurochemistry of the issue (both the cause and effect of powerful ‘mood molecules’)
• how measurement can be made meaningful when applied to the state of mind of a workforce (econometrics)
• the social anthropology of how groups of people come together and ‘click’
• understanding how visual art is crucial to both conditioning our feelings and enabling subjective expression.
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Through this interdisciplinary approach, learners add both breadth and depth to their understanding. But the outcome is ultimately practical. They’ll be able to innovate new tools, develop evidence-based strategies and better evaluate what is, and isn’t, working.

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How have the faculty gone about designing such a pioneering offering?

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Our faculty includes academics with an outstanding track record at some of the world’s leading universities. Institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and Harvard. Collectively, their expertise spans the full sweep of sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. They’ve all joined to be part of what we’re building and are excited about the opportunity to combine their expertise.

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When we are designing a course like Navigating Happiness, we start by taking a complex, real-world problem like organisational wellbeing. Our faculty bring their individual, disciplinary expertise to this issue. For example, we’ll explore the issue from the perspective of a cognitive psychologist, or social anthropologist, or neuroscientist, or visual artist. We then bring these perspectives together, creating a single coherent experience for the learner.

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How has launching your venture within x+why helped both in terms of the physical space and community?

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We place great emphasis on porosity with the outside world, including providing internships for our undergraduates – x+why connects us to all of this by plugging us straight into a network that’s socially minded.

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We also run Discovery Days for our prospective undergraduate students. These are the equivalent of our open days, but rather than just a tour, it’s a full day of engagement and interaction using the downstairs space. Discovery Days have been a huge part of our outreach to young people since day 1.

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What do you look for in your applicants?

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In terms of professional learners – we look for those who really want to engage with the complexity of the problem they’re facing. We’re not looking for learners who want to be told an over-simplified answer to a multifaceted issue.  We expect them to want to see the world from multiple perspectives. Our professional learners include a great mix of people: from FTSE 100 companies, to serial entrepreneurs and investors, to SME and charity leaders.

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On our undergraduate programme we are looking for qualities of curiosity and resilience, especially when it comes to tackling complex problems. We also have demanding criteria when it comes to their academic potential. But we interview all students to get to understand this potential beyond just their grades.

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The majority of our undergraduate applicants are school leavers, but we are also open to those who are further on in life. And in terms of their socioeconomic background (and other indicators of diversity) there’s an extremely broad range. Having a genuinely diverse cohort is immensely important to us.

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What is your competitive edge compared to existing institutions?

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Our capacity to take truly interdisciplinary approaches to real-world problems. Our method and the broad range of expertise that our team combines mean we can be genuinely integrative and create powerful and distinctive experiences for our learners.

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Our newness also means we are configured like a contemporary organisation – so we can move fast, be agile, and aren’t restricted by university-style silos in the way that we operate.

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Tell us more about the launch of your programmes for leaders

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We are offering these because leadership is interdisciplinary, and because anyone who’s done it acknowledges that you need to be very cognitively flexible. The Navigating Happiness course is particularly relevant now because of the pandemic and growing mental health issues, alongside the fact that organisations are consistently competing for top talent. Wellbeing and happiness is near the top of every organisation’s agenda. It’s a very complex issue and there is no ‘management 101’ answer to it. You really have to understand it, which means being able to look at it from multiple, informed perspectives.

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In a world facing increasing automation, what will be the most durable skills of an uncertain future?

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Automation won’t replace people, but it will change what they have to do, or are best served doing. That transition requires people to be adaptable and able to learn - they have to know how to learn, and how to change. In terms of harder, more technical skills – this world of increasing digitisation and connection creates ever more complex systems. So being able to understand and move across those systems requires you to take multiple perspectives. You can’t be afraid of the humanity, science or art of a problem, you have to engage with all of it and synthesise that knowledge – this is where LIS fits in.

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What motivates you?

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Having a transformational impact on our learners is the #1 driver. But aside from that, it’s my team-mates.

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What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in establishing LIS?

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Starting something from nothing is always challenging, and that’s usually a sign that it’s something worth doing.

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What’s the smallest change that’s given the biggest return, personally and professionally?

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After running our first Navigating Happiness course, I’ve thought differently about seeing things as an architecture of small moments, rather than a single, grand narrative. It’s helped me to see the benefit of not wanting things to be different – to simply enjoy things for what they are. At this moment in time, with everything that’s going on, that feels pretty important.

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Do you think entrepreneurial attributes are innate personality traits, or skills that can be developed?

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I think they can be conditioned, there’s some evidence that attributes like extreme risk taking have some innate basis, but environment has huge capacity to condition us.

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How has what you do changed you as a person?

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I think a lot more about how other people understand issues conceptually. Working in education has made the metacognitive part of my brain much more active.

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What is your vision for the future?

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I want LIS to become a centre for excellence for learning that makes a meaningful contribution to how we tackle the most complex problems

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How do LIS incorporate the Triple Bottom Line into what they do?

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It’s fundamental to our DNA, we exist to deliver transformational education that has a real, positive impact on our learners and those they work with.  We set ourselves up as a business (rather than charity) because we felt this was the best way to achieve maximum impact.

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When working on your passions it can be easy to burn out, how do you prevent this, and manage anxiety and stress?

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I exercise a lot, and try to laugh as much as I can.

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Are there any books or blogs on your reading list?

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I recently read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre. It’s a classic spy novel, beautifully written. But really it taught me a huge amount about organisational life. The different personalities that organisations attract, what motivates them, how they interact, how organisational dysfunction manifests, and how achievements are realised.  Great works of fiction like this have given me a much more powerful education about organisations than any mainstream management book I’ve ever read.

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They help you see more clearly the humanity of people. Ironically, I think a lot of mainstream business and management literature can be weak on this. Economics, which is fairly hegemonic in this space, often struggles to account for kindness and goodwill in people. Since I read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy I’ve been hoovering up all the Le Carre I can get my hands on. The Spy who came in from the cold is probably the best thriller-style book I’ve read. Genuinely gripping from the first sentence until the last.

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What do you love most about x+why?

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I miss it as I haven’t been there in so long now but I love the people, who are always upbeat and friendly, and the plants.

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The Navigating Happiness Programme

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The pursuit of ‘wellbeing’ has become as vital for organisations as it is for individuals, especially in the midst of a global pandemic and mental health crisis. This programme synthesises a number of powerful and rigorous perspectives on the complex issue of organisational happiness and wellbeing. These are perspectives that are often under-represented in the mainstream discourse. Over 3 weeks (part-time and 100% online) this interdisciplinary approach will add breadth and depth to your understanding. But the outcome is ultimately practical. You’ll be able to innovate new tools, develop evidence based strategies and evaluate what is and isn’t working.

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• The Power of Narrative
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Constructing narratives helps us to manage anxiety by reducing uncertainty – a vital precondition for happiness. The programme uses insights from narrative linguistics and cognitive psychology to examine how and for what ends this cultural technology emerges in organisational life, allowing you to (de)construct narratives that powerfully influence mood and behaviour.

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• The Neurochemistry of Feeling
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You will be introduced to the role of key mood molecules and how these can be successfully hacked by different practices. This enhances your understanding of the physiological elements of underlying mental health conditions. You’ll be equipped to consider how organisations should regulate or incentivise chemically powerful behaviours

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• Making measurement meaningful
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In an age of big data, opportunities abound to track our happiness. But, quantifying feeling in this way this often presents as many problems as it does solutions. Statistics and behavioural economics allow us to explore the emerging best practices and the key trade-offs that the desire for measurement and tracking present.

• Collective feeling and team click
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Using social and cognitive psychology, we look at the evidence behind social cohesion to consider how feelings of collectiveness can be boosted. This helps you get to grips with the core theory behind shared feelings of happiness and togetherness

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• Art, culture and subjective expression
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In our attention economy, the visual arts have immense power to condition and reflect our collective experiences. This section explores how art and culture can be used to reinforce and subvert narratives that have a transformational impact on how we feel

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