Familiar ground and deep water: reflections from my MBA journey

If this post carries a faint trace of sleep deprivation, that is because I have just come out of two 24-hour exams, a lot of writing, and the sort of decision-making that becomes possible only when coffee is treated less as a beverage and more as infrastructure.

The good news is that I am now halfway through the MBA.

Four modules are done. Two core modules remain, followed by the three organizational psychology top-up modules. One of the remaining core modules also sits close to leadership and organizational psychology, so in practice I am looking forward to spending four more modules in terrain I find genuinely fascinating.

What has struck me most so far is the range of the program, and what that range does to you. The two most recent exams captured that perfectly.

One was in Delivering Successful Projects. The case was a major infrastructure project in Edinburgh, complete with a statement of work, risk analysis, stakeholder management, organizational breakdown structures, phased delivery, quality management, and all the formal mechanics of a large capital project. I studied classical project management many years ago, so it was not entirely new territory, but there was definitely some rust to knock off. To be honest, I was well outside my comfort zone.

I have spent most of my career in software. I have worked at the sharper end of Agile methods and modern product development for close to 25 years. So being dropped into a traditional construction-style project was not just unfamiliar. It was a different professional language, a different rhythm, and, in some ways, a different logic altogether. That is exactly what made it valuable.

When you are that far outside your natural terrain, you cannot rely on instinct alone. You have to go back to theory, work through the framework, and then reach into your own experience to find what still transfers. Not the surface methods, but the underlying judgment. How do you think about risk when the context changes? How do you make sense of coordination, dependencies, and stakeholder complexity when the domain is new? How do you answer well when you are not the obvious expert in the room?

That was the real exercise. Not pretending I knew more than I did, but using the toolbox I do have, reading up properly, and applying experience in a new setting.

That, in itself, was a useful reminder. It is easy to become fluent in a field you know well and quietly forget what it feels like to be a beginner again. It is much harder, and probably much healthier, to be forced back into that mode and discover that careful thinking still travels further than familiarity alone.

The other exam was in Leadership Theory and Practice, which was much closer to where I naturally operate. Over the years, I have taught and coached more than 250 leaders in Agile leadership, led an Agile delivery organization of more than 80 people, and worked extensively with organization design and operating models in transfortive contexts. Analyzing leadership in practice, connecting behavior to theory, and assessing what is effective and what is not felt much more like home ground.

It also gave me the chance to work with cases that sit right in the middle of the work I know best: growth, scaling, culture integration, competing leadership logics, and the challenge of creating shared direction across different perspectives and ways of working.

One of the cases sat squarely in that space. Another took me back to a much older experience with an autocratic leader entering a collaborative organization and trying, more or less by force, to override the existing culture. That case still stands out as a warning signal. Not only because the leadership was poor, but because it was such a vivid illustration of how leadership shapes what gets rewarded, what gets silenced, what people dare to take responsibility for, and what kind of organization becomes possible.

That exam mainly sharpened things I already believe deeply: fear is a terrible substitute for clarity, compliance is not commitment, and leadership leaves fingerprints on culture whether leaders mean to or not.

I felt the same contrast in the first two modules. Developing and Executing Strategy drew on years of practice. Financial Decision Making stretched me much more. Not impossibly, but in a useful way. And now the pattern has repeated itself. Leadership Theory and Practice felt close to home. Delivering Successful Projects, with all its waterfall logic, did not.

What has become clearer to me through these modules is that the value of the MBA is not just in confirming what I already know, or in collecting new frameworks. It lies in the alternation between the known and the unknown: between modules where experience helps, and modules where I have to build understanding from first principles.

The next module is Strategic Marketing. I do not pretend to be an expert there, which is exactly why I am looking forward to it. Beyond that sits a run of modules that go deeper into leadership and organizational psychology, which I am also genuinely excited to explore.

For now, though, the next strategic decision is simple:
Coffee. Strong!