What Business Faculty Already Know About Inquiry
Using the language of innovation and experimentation to build support for inquiry-based education
One of the more interesting professional development spaces I have stumbled into recently is the series of Future Trends Forums hosted by Bryan Alexander at Georgetown University. The forums gather people thinking seriously about higher education’s future, technological change, organizational adaptation, and the broader social conditions shaping colleges and universities.
I have only attended one so far, but it was the kind of conversation that leaves you with a notebook of ideas and a list of books to read afterward.
In this case, the rabbit trail led me to Little Bets, which one of the presenters, Dean Diane Harris from the University of Washington, mentioned as part of the reading undertaken by a speculative futures project team. This book by Peter Sims is not especially new, and some of its examples are quite dated. It also leans heavily into the orbit of Stanford’s d.school and the design-thinking movement that produced what felt, for a while, like an entire publishing genre.
The central idea of Little Bets is relatively straightforward: innovation rarely emerges fully formed from grand plans. More often, it develops through small experiments, iterative testing, feedback loops, and a willingness to revise assumptions in public. Rather than waiting until an idea is perfected, individuals and organizations learn by trying modest, low-risk interventions and adapting from what they discover.
That premise is hardly foreign to higher education. In many ways, universities are already full of “little bets”: pilot programs, curricular experiments, revised advising models, assessment initiatives, experimental courses, co-curricular partnerships, and faculty trying something slightly different in a classroom to see what happens.
What interested me instead was the way the book might function as a bridge text inside universities undertaking inquiry-centered general education reform—particularly for conversations involving professional schools and business faculty.
Translating Inquiry into a Different Vocabulary
One of the recurring challenges in general education reform is that different parts of the university often speak different educational languages. What struck me about Little Bets is that it effectively translates many of the central habits associated with inquiry-based learning into a vocabulary that professional schools—especially business faculty—already recognize as valuable.
Reading the book, I kept thinking: this is, in many ways, an argument for inquiry.
Sims repeatedly celebrates habits of mind that general education reformers also often hope to cultivate in students: comfort with ambiguity, iterative learning, interdisciplinary observation, experimentation, reflective practice, and the capacity to revise conclusions in response to new information.
The difference is one of framing.
At many institutions, one of the most difficult aspects of reform work is not disagreement about goals so much as disagreement about vocabulary. Faculty may actually value similar capacities while describing them through entirely different conceptual lenses. A business faculty member talking about adaptive leadership in uncertain environments and a humanities faculty member talking about inquiry and reflection may be gesturing toward many of the same underlying skills.
Waterfall Institutions in an Agile World
I also found myself thinking throughout the book about the contrast between “waterfall” and “agile” approaches to institutional change. Universities tend, understandably, toward something closer to waterfall planning: lengthy committee structures, extensive up-front design, years of deliberation, and the hope that sufficiently comprehensive planning will produce the desired future state once implemented.
There are good reasons for that tendency. Curriculum changes affect accreditation, transfer pathways, faculty workload, advising systems, and student progression. Stability matters in higher education because instability carries real costs for students and institutions alike.
But the risk of overly waterfall-style reform is that universities can spend years building systems optimized for assumptions that no longer hold by the time implementation arrives.
An agile orientation, by contrast, treats learning and adaptation as ongoing. It values pilots, prototypes, iterative assessment, reflection, and revision. It assumes organizations learn through engagement with real conditions rather than exclusively through abstract planning.
That mindset maps naturally onto inquiry-based education itself.
Why This Matters Right Now
And perhaps that is what I appreciated most about Little Bets: not that it offered a direct roadmap for universities, but that it helped illuminate why inquiry-centered learning matters in terms that professionally oriented disciplines often already find persuasive.
The book ultimately argues that the ability to learn continuously—to observe carefully, experiment thoughtfully, revise assumptions, and remain adaptive amid uncertainty—is not ancillary to professional success. It is central to it.
That feels especially relevant right now.
Higher education spends a great deal of time debating whether inquiry, reflection, or exploratory learning are “practical” enough in an era increasingly dominated by conversations about workforce alignment and return on investment. But one of the more interesting things about contemporary professional discourse is how often employers themselves now emphasize precisely those capacities: adaptability, synthesis, communication across domains, problem-solving under uncertainty, and continuous learning.
In other words, many industries are asking for the very habits of mind inquiry-centered education attempts to cultivate.
Books like Little Bets may help universities make that connection more clearly across their own internal divides.