By Marcus Collins 

The MBA is often considered the cornerstone degree for business leaders who aspire to reach the corner office. In fact, roughly 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or some other graduate degree. The chief executives of Apple, Microsoft, Blackrock, and JPMorgan all hold MBA degrees, among countless other leaders who have risen to the top after graduating from business school or pursuing further education later in their career.

Primarily because the world is filled with a plethora of meanings and possibilities, leading requires first understanding that there are many permutations of reality. Of which, leaders must decide which pathway is most advantageous. So, we invited Andrew Sliwinski, the head of product experience at Lego Education, onto the latest episode of the From The Culture podcast to explore how a company that has built its entire offering on the possibilities of multiple outcomes—brick-by-brick—applies this approach to learning. 

Lego Education is the part of the Lego Group that translates the company’s commitment to play to an educational pedagogy that has been introduced into school systems from Detroit to Seoul to Copenhagen. Before Lego, Sliwinski codirected Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, the free programming tool hundreds of millions of children use to figure out the difference between typing the right answer in and figuring out what the right answer might even look like. He has spent his career building products with a single conviction at their center: The goal of any real learning experience is not convergence on one outcome but the orderly production of many. This sits at the heart of what an MBA should provide, not just skills for navigating strategy or an acumen for forecasting cash flows, but an understanding of different realities that lead to different possibilities.