Dan’s goal, taken from his mentor Richard Zeckhauser, is to get students to think probabilistically about the world. This means engaging with the cha… - David Franklin

There is also something powerful in the concept of an ‘airport idea’. On the surface, it links with Dan’s plea for what students should do if they meet him in an airport in five years’ time. But there are hidden suggestions too: the airport carries an association of being high-level, and fits in with the course’s aim of empowering the students with the tools they need to effect change. Once the course is over, they will disperse to airports across the world and put these ideas into practice in their home countries.

Dan asks the class whether any of them has ever checked the weather on their phone to see if it’s likely to rain while they’re outside. Everyone has. “What do you do if you see there’s a 30% chance of rain?” “Take an umbrella”, several students all say at once.

The failure here is an example of a common flaw in our approach to adaptive challenges: we try to solve them with technical solutions. Terrified of the unknown, we seek to replace problems we have no idea how to address with those we know how to solve. This is a form of ‘work avoidance’, a term coined by Heifetz[x]. If you have ever procrastinated by spending your whole afternoon making a brightly-coloured work plan, and then congratulated yourself on being productive, then you will be familiar with the concept. By focusing on what they know they can measure – the extent to which a lesson went as planned – some professors may avoid the harder work of trying to gauge the learning of their students.