“We don’t have thinkers like Darwin or Einstein anymore as people are being boxed in” – Uni founder, Ed Fidoe

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Welcome to Monday Mornings! This fortnightly publication dives into the new world of work beyond the 9-5, exploring the rise of mass entrepreneurialism. Through sharp analysis and interviews with the builders, thinkers, and leaders driving this shift, we’ll unpack what a post 9-5 world means for individuals, businesses, and society.

This edition is a Q&A Interview, where an expert guest offers their take on the future of work, along with our signature Monday Marvels and Monday Moanings.

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Happy Monday, folks!

In this week’s Q&A, I’m talking to Ed Fidoe, something of an educational maverick and one of the most compelling voices out there on this month’s theme of making learning future-proof.

Ed is the CEO and Co-founder of a new university, The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), the first university created since the 60s. As the name suggests, LIS takes a radically different approach to higher education, challenging the traditional university model with an interdisciplinary curriculum. In 2024, LIS celebrated its first set of graduates, and in their acceptance speech, one student thanked LIS for helping them to “think big in a way that a traditional university would not have.”

Before founding LIS, Ed co-founded School 21 (Ofsted Outstanding, top 5% school). He has also advised institutions like LSE, Teach First, and the University of Cambridge. 

Ed and I talked about:

• The 1980s as an entrepreneurial heyday

• How universities have been letting today’s graduates down 

• Why AI’s rise requires a new academic syllabi

Let’s go!

Q: Ed, great to have you on Monday Mornings! So, first up - do you believe that the future of work is more entrepreneurial?

A: If I look back to the 80s during my school years in Thatcher’s Britain, most of our parents were rural Tories and none of them worked for large organisations. Very few of them had been to university - other than the doctors - they ran small businesses in industries like timber yards or toy distribution. So it felt more entrepreneurial then except no one called themselves an entrepreneur, or could name a single entrepreneur, other than Richard Branson!

In fact, they were all desperately trying to get their kids into university because they thought that working for PwC for example, would be a better future.

Today I have noticed the phenomenon of young people in their 20s doing plural, portfolio work. In the past, portfolio work was typically the reserve of a 50-year-old man taking on Board roles after being a CEO. Now, some of our students are graduating - or even going through their studies - whilst having portfolio careers and operating side businesses. One of our second year students has an AI consultancy which he runs alongside studies, which has been made possible by remote work and routes-to-market via the internet to find clients, which wouldn’t have been possible in the past.

Q: Tell me about the origins of LIS and why we needed a new university?

A: One of the biggest problems that exists in education today is that schools are judged by what universities want to see at entry submissions. Degrees are organised the same way as university research departments– which are in siloes organised by subject and discipline. So when universities are selecting students they genuinely just seek out a very narrow set of academic requirements, whether a student is good at physics for example. 

So schools then organise themselves around what universities want, and the government judges the schools on how well they are meeting that particular requirement.

This is a problem because only 45% of students go onto university, yet we have organised our entire education system around university research departments. That is bad for the future of work because it creates a narrowness in the system. This narrow focus limits students to a single skill set, making them more vulnerable to job displacement as technology tends to automate the most specialised roles.

In a world where you don’t know what the next technological breakthrough is going to be, at LIS we believe that breadth is important. Also - we need to study multiple disciplines to tackle the world’s biggest, most complex problems. Our current ways of thinking won’t get us to those answers, otherwise we wouldn’t be so worried about them. 

Darwin for example, brought together disciplines of economics, geology and biology and so on, to create the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. The danger is that we don’t have those kinds of people like Darwin, or Einstein, because we’re not learning about unexpected things. We’ve boxed people in. But innovation is rooted in new knowledge combinations.

We couldn’t influence the way university departments do admissions, but we could create our own interdisciplinary university! That was my logic. 

Q: We often think of entrepreneurship as attracting people with a higher risk tolerance. Do you think LIS attracts students more open to risk taking?  

A: I am quite fascinated by risk. But I’m not necessarily risk hungry, I'm just very comfortable with volatility, and most people get the two mixed up. 

I believe that in certain scenarios choosing a scenario with more volatility actually reduces risk. Investing is a good example: most people think it's risky to invest your money because of the volatility of the stock market, but if you don’t, you are exposed to the risks of inflation.

So if we think of the LIS student trying to optimise their chances of success as a graduate they look at the stats and they think: 400,000 students are currently studying at Russell Group universities, nearly 90% of them will get a 2:1, so I can’t stand out.  

That’s risky.

In a job market that’s shrinking, being pummelled by economic market cycles, structural changes around AI and new technology, so many graduate jobs have been removed…and may not ever return. 

Whilst here at LIS there is more uncertainty and more volatility than a traditional university because we are new and things might change — so it’s a bumpier ride — maybe overall it’s lower risk because students know they will stand out. And that seems to be the case. We have helped out a lot but within just one month of graduating 50% of our graduates found jobs. This is compared to the average of most Russell Group university graduates where around 60% secure professional level jobs within 18 months.  

We’ve seen our recent cohort go into roles from the Met Police Fast Track Programme, Goldman Sachs, KPMG to computer science schemes, and some are doing their own thing. 

Q: I can see how organisations benefit from graduates with multidisciplinary thinking. What about entrepreneurship – is a degree here still helpful?  

A: University is traditionally about understanding the rules and scoring a high mark, but entrepreneurs change the rules of the game or bend them; knowing that rules over time don’t get us to the right place. 

Entrepreneurship is essentially identifying a problem and working really hard to solve it – which is exactly what we are doing here in the curriculum. We ensure that students learn how to tackle complex problems (we have a complexity test for this) and then they have to apply qualitative and quantitative methods to solve them. For example, one of our students is looking at how to get Doctors and Nurses to interact and collaborate more in hospitals, and another is exploring whether football commentary has inherent racial bias, there are many more examples.

We’re teaching students how to learn all sorts of new things, which is true of entrepreneurship - you have to learn to wear all the different hats. 

The students who come to LIS are already dismissing the idea that they have to conform to the rules as we are doing something that is challenging the status quo – so that is a better entrepreneurial foundation. 

Q: Finally, looking ahead… what other policies or changes are needed in education to meet future needs?

A: We could do with any policy that encourages more breadth in studies. Maybe making the Inter Baccalaureate (IB) more accessible to schools, as right now it’s expensive. Only a handful of state schools are doing it, though some are doing it brilliantly like Westminster Academy (in a disadvantaged part of London). In general we need to be explaining to students as early as GCSE that disciplines are a made-up construct to help us organise information. 

Also given the impact of AI (a student could get a 2:1 classification using ChatGPT for its answers) the bar for a 2:1 I think now needs to be raised. We can’t ignore the role of AI in education and in reality, we should be teaching students how to work with AI to make their work more detailed, more accurate and more inventive… all the time learning how to ask the right questions and spot errors.

My main critique for universities is that there is not enough variety. They are too siloed and they need to be less snobby and much more open to change.  

So we need more Universities like LIS. With over a million university students in the UK we can’t serve more than just a couple of hundred students – so we need more!  

When it comes to leaders, they too can benefit from more interdisciplinary thinking to be able to succeed in a cross-functional leadership. MBAs no longer offer employer a rare set of skills, so going to business schools won’t help you stand out with rare skills any more. There is a real gap for leadership courses that understand the wider world (for example the energy transition shift) where the students can bring that knowledge back to the business. That’s something we’re actively working on — a challenger MBA programme.  

To learn more visit the LIS website to explore their courses: cross-functional leadership, master’s, and bachelor’s courses and follow Ed on LinkedIn.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s interview with Ed. What else do you think should be considered? Share your opinions in the comments or reply directly!

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And, in other news this month…

👍Monday Marvels 

In light of recent tumultuous social media changes impacting the livelihoods of many creators, the newsletter platform Substack has launched a $20m creator ‘funding guarantee’. Designed to help creators grow their businesses on the platform and also ensuring they won’t lose any existing revenue in the transition.

👎 Monday Moanings

Trump has overturned Equal Opportunity legislation established during the Civil Rights movement in a bid to return to “merit-based hiring." US federal government contractors are no longer subject to anti-discrimination rules over hiring, training, and employment — under his order to immediately cease "promoting diversity."

Thanks again to Ed Fidoe for joining us in today’s Q&A Interview. Stay tuned for the next Briefing post in two Mondays time for another Briefing exploring the good, the bad and the ugly of a post 9-5 working world.

Monday Mornings is written and hosted by Ellen Donnelly, a writer, speaker, and business coach focused on the future of work. She specialises in the shift towards mass entrepreneurialism, and supports founders navigating career pivots in her private coaching practice, The Ask.