The Question That Made Everyone Nervous
Updated: 1 day ago
FIELD NOTE 002
I spent a summer building a business school in a folder on my laptop. Then I took that folder to lunch with my dean, with a proposal in my bag asking for a job that didn’t exist. Read Field Note 001 - Part 1 and Part 2.
In the fall semester of 2024, I was sitting across from my dean at lunch, staring at my burger, my stomach in knots, no appetite whatsoever. That's saying something, because a juicy cheeseburger is one of my favorite things. I had never asked him to lunch before, and I was nervous. I had spent that entire summer working out the most ambitious version of business school education the evidence could support, with AI just sitting there in the background changing what was possible by the second, and I had a proposal in my bag asking him for a job that didn't even exist yet.
I should back up. I had just been tenured that summer, which is supposed to be the moment you exhale as an academic. I started my PhD program in 2011 full of fear and doubt, carrying the promise they give you, that one day when you are awarded tenure, you can finally relax. Summers off. A good salary and benefits. Conferences in nice places on the university's dime. Campus only when you teach. Best job in the world, and everybody says so. Plenty of people reach it and settle, and I understand why. Why rock a boat this comfortable? It's also most of what people outside the academy hold against tenure.
The problem was that the best job in the world started to depress me. That shocked me. I had spent thirteen years wanting it.
So I took that summer, went to Tuscany with my family, and spent most of it reading about the instigators of the Italian Renaissance. The thing that stays with me are the cathedrals. That the people who conceived of them knew they wouldn't live to see them finished. And they did it anyway, they wanted to leave behind something that would outlast them. What willingness: to spend your life on something you would never get to experience. I grew up in America, where people slap their names on buildings to show what big men they are. Those cathedrals were the opposite of that, and it made me ask what I would be willing to start without ever seeing the finish line.
Renaissance may be the wrong word for what I hoped for in my work, but that's what I wanted. We just weren't ready for it in my school of business. Reformation may be closer to what we needed, at least reform is what had to happen first.
So I spent the rest of that summer dreaming and taking the business school apart in my head and putting it back together better. AI made this exercise possible. Things that would have taken a committee a year to conceive and write, I was drafting in the mornings and then spending the afternoons refining. By the end of that summer, I had our entire business school in a folder. I had found a way to make the school visible to the people who depend on it: administrators and faculty, students, future employers, and donors. The possibilities were endless. We could create a documentary series about our own transformation so prospective students could watch an institution try to become something. A magazine profiling our best seniors, because the proof of a business school is who walks out of it. Faculty could be certified as life coaches, because the thing a student cannot get from a machine is somebody who knows them personally. I created a list of twenty-two colleagues, the most dynamic people in a building of a hundred, none of them with a public voice, which is marketing material we were leaving on the floor. We could rebuild career services operations. There was a new plan for alumni and donor relations. And a one, three, five and ten year plan for a dean who would never think to ask for one. I wanted us to be the best business school in the country, and for the first time I could see the route.
What I actually wanted was to build a brand. Business schools mostly compete on the same four claims, our ranking, our placement rate, our network, and our campus. Then overnight, intelligence stopped being rare, and it put a spotlight on a problem that had been hiding in plain sight. Every assignment we had built, every assessment, every proxy we used to decide what a student had learned, was about to stop measuring what we thought it measured. If a student can get information anywhere, instantly, for free, then the question we have to answer is new.
What will you become here that you could not become on your own with an AI?
There was something underneath the policy talk that nobody wanted to say. Faculty have spent entire careers being the most knowledgeable person in the room, and the tuition was the proof. If that's suddenly not what a student is paying for, then the question isn't only about assignments. It's about your purpose.
That's a painful thing to sit with. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's necessary. And when the standing joke is that the job is the best in the world, I get why nobody wants to ask it.
But we were protecting the wrong thing all across the industry. Policy protects the institution. What I thought needed protecting was what the student is becoming while we have them for a few precious years.
This rabbit hole culminated in a letter. I had drafted a proposal asking my dean to create a position that didn't really exist yet in higher education. Something like an Associate Dean of Culture and Student Experience. That's the job I wanted.
I didn't need to be right, I wanted the idea to be wrestled with by as many different people as I could get it in front of, that was the only way to find out whether the ambition was real. AI could argue with me all summer, and it did. What it couldn't tell me was what the people in that building would protect if I walked in with this.
I came back in the fall completely lit up. And that's how I ended up across the table from my dean, trying to make the future in my head appear in the air between us. I struggled finding the language. I just knew I was looking at enormous possibility.
I tried making my case. "We can't miss this moment," I told him. "We need to lead right now. Look at what we can do. The ceiling has disappeared."
Somewhere in the middle of my rambling, I mentioned a meeting we had both been in a few weeks earlier. A couple hundred faculty and administrators, selected to help the university become more competitive, with the president and the provost in the room. They took questions through a QR code, and I wrote mine out long because I assumed they would read the submissions before selection. I was wrong. They read them aloud in real time. Mine went straight to the elephant in the room. "If a student can now get the knowledge, the explanation, and the feedback from a machine for free, what are they paying us for? How are we going to address this?" Laughter filled the room.
I was not embarrassed. If anything, I was a little glad. "Good," I remember thinking. "Now it's out there. Now we can deal with it. I guess I'm not alone carrying this."
So back at the table, I was hoping he would tell me the question had mattered. But instead, he looked up from his meal for the first time, looked me right in the eyes, and said,
“Your question made everyone in that room nervous.”
I sat there. I didn't know how to read him. Was he embarrassed for me? Of me? For himself? Was he trying to protect me, the room, or the president? What I had carried in as possibility arrived for him as a problem.
I went ahead with the thing I had come to say. "I want to build an AI and Human Readiness lab," I told him. "Students can run it with faculty mentoring, we take on real problems for real companies, which brings money into the school, we document it as it grows, and we help hold the school up to a mirror." Every other school in the country was going to spend the next two years writing memos and creating task forces. I wanted to spend those two years becoming the place other business schools flew in to study.
He stared at me in silence for several seconds. Then he asked where we would put it. That was the conversation. "Just let me sketch what it could be," I said. Crickets.
That was it. Lunch was over. He was looking at me like I had three heads. I took a couple of bites of my burger, and we left. The proposal never left my bag.
I didn't know it at that table, but I was describing the thing I would spend the next two years building. He was worried about where we would put it. Possibility, it turned out, didn't need a room.
I have thought about that lunch many times since. I think about it because of the gap it exposed: a question that needed to be asked, and a culture that struggled to stay with it.
Same question. Two completely different rooms.
For a while I told myself the lunch was about him. One man, one chair, one set of institutional worries. That story held until the same thing happened in a room he wasn't in.
That year I served as vice-chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee. Seven or eight of us were given the semester to rewrite the policies and procedures of the business school. I suggested we use AI in this new way: synthesize the material, find patterns, move faster through the administrative work, and save our attention for the decisions that required human judgment and creativity.
The more I encouraged, the quieter the room became. Then one faculty member turned and said to me, in a chastising tone:
“Parker, we have a room full of PhDs. I highly doubt we need the help of AI.”
I remember feeling speechless after he said that, in total disbelief. Before the opportunity could be fully recognised it had been rejected. At the time, I read the moment almost entirely as ignorance... or arrogance. There was something else, I realized I may be a person who could see what others couldn't.
A less flattering account could be that I entered the room at full speed, carrying months of experimentation, speaking with urgency and excitement that they may have felt as strange. Trying to move an establishment before understanding what the proposal could possibly threaten.
A serious question never arrives to an empty slate. It enters a room full of history, and we hear it through our roles, preconceptions and insecurities.
Say More. I want to understand.
A year later, I became the chair of that committee. There had been a problem with how votes were collected the previous year to codify our policies and procedures, and many of the faculty were upset. It may have been an innocent mistake, but it had cost the committee something precious in the building: trust. The committee wrote policies and procedures the whole school had to live inside, so I named the issue in our first meeting. The trust wasn't there, and we had to earn it back.
A colleague, the previous chair, seemed to become immediately defensive. "Be careful where you are going with this," he said. The room was full of men, all of them senior to me, and I felt the room close. Who does this kid think he is? I was braced to hear something along these lines. I felt my own defenses rise - I wanted to push back, to make my case harder. I wanted to win the room.
But then, I heard my wife's voice in my head. A few months earlier, when I was the one being defensive, she had taught me a few simple words that can change everything. So I repeated them to him:
"Say more. I want to understand."
And he did. He went on for several minutes telling the room all that he had done at his best. He had been struggling with how the committee was perceived. He had been trying to keep us safe because he understood the weight of what the committee was responsible for. The wall I had sensed wasn't the arrogance I might have assumed. Here was a person trying to protect something real, using the only means he knew.
I told him how much sense that made, and I meant it. I told him I had watched his leadership and learned things from it that I was still carrying. It was true, and I wasn't using it on him. I could only see it because I stopped arguing long enough to hear him.
The disagreement didn't disappear. The problems didn't become less serious. But the room shifted because we could see what was being protected.
I try to be careful about presenting those words as simple technique. They aren't magic, and said insincerely they can be manipulative. But the words matter when the answer is allowed to change our perspective. That afternoon, his answer changed mine.
The question revealed the room. The room revealed me.
That, it turns out, was the Human Readiness Gap made personal, and one of my first clues that readiness lives in the room as much as it lives in the person. I think it was also a question of psychological safety, Amy Edmondson's term for whether people on a team feel able to ask or disagree. I didn't measure it in these rooms; I'm borrowing her language to describe what I saw. It shows up in what happens after somebody asks a hard question.
The question I take from her work: can the people in power let the question change the picture they walked in with?
A healthy room is one that can stay with a different reality after it becomes uncomfortable. If first assumptions can be questioned, people can leave with a greater understanding than the one any of them brought in alone. That is part of what Humanum Huis is trying to build: an environment that can explore what each person sees, what we're protecting, and what an institution may need to change when the perspectives grow.
The dean told me my question had made everyone in the room nervous. I think that may be partly because it was a needed question. I also think I had more to learn about how a necessary question can be posed in ways that make it useful.
I had seen what happens when possibility arrives from the outside and the room cannot hold it. What I had not yet explained was why these possibilities had become so impossible for me to ignore. To understand that, I have to take you somewhere far less dignified than a dean's lunch.
That is where the next note begins.
Founder, Humanum Huis Amsterdam Did something in this Field Note spark your interest? Book an opening conversation with the link below:
What I’m claiming here
What I know
The summer in Tuscany, the work I did with AI that summer, and the proposal I drafted asking the school to create a position that did not exist are all mine, and the letter is still in my files. The quotation from it is exact. The all-university meeting and the QR-code question, the lunch with the dean, the AI lab proposal, both Faculty Affairs Committee scenes, and the exchange with the former committee chair are real and directly observed. The quoted language from other people is reported as closely as I can recall it. I don’t know what the dean or my colleagues privately felt. That uncertainty belongs in the account, because my inability to read those rooms accurately is part of what the experience taught me.
What I think it means
One expression of the Human Readiness Gap is a room's capacity to stay with a consequential question after it creates discomfort. Laughter, defensiveness, liability language, and redirection can all carry information about what people believe is at risk. A proposal that arrives fully formed from one person’s summer is harder to engage with than one built in the open, which is something I understood much later than I should have. Curiosity can help make that information available, but only when the answer is allowed to change the questioner’s understanding.
What I'm still unsure about
These scenes don’t establish what the whole institution believed, and I cannot know whether the rooms truly lacked capacity or whether I lacked the language, patience, evidence, or relational trust to help them engage. The problem may sit in leadership, culture, structure, timing, the person raising the question, or some combination. I am also still working out when “say more” opens understanding and when a harder boundary or decision is required.
Source note
This note draws primarily on direct personal experience inside higher education. The listening practice near the close, "Say more. I want to understand," comes from Rachel Woodroof.
Amy Edmondson's research on team psychological safety is an important interpretive neighbor. She defines it as a shared belief among a team's members that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, and she links it to learning behavior in work teams.¹ A later meta-analysis of 136 independent samples examines its antecedents and outcomes.² Humanum Huis lists this in our Research.
I borrow one idea from it: how a room responds to a risky question may shape what people are willing to say next. That application is my interpretation. Edmondson's construct is defined at the team level, and I am applying it loosely to a committee, a faculty meeting, and a conversation between two people. I did not measure psychological safety in any of these rooms.
The reading of these scenes through Human Readiness is a working Humanum Huis interpretation, not a validated finding.
¹ Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. *Administrative Science Quarterly, 44*(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
² Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. *Personnel Psychology, 70*(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183
Comments