That scene stayed with me. What moved me was not only its answer to “Why learn?”, but the way the answer was allowed to arrive.

Learning here is not simply about storing more correct answers. It is about building more routes through which the world can be understood. Knowledge does not stop the unexpected from happening; it gives us more than panic when it does.

And Muhammad does not hand Sitara the conclusion at the beginning. He lets her experience something first. By the time the explanation comes, a question has already opened inside her.

CHAPTER 01Rethinking “student thinking”

At work, people often say that fresh graduates are not yet “socialised”, that they still think like students. There is some truth in this. Work forces us to understand budgets, clients, limited resources, responsibility and deadlines. An idea cannot merely make sense; someone has to pay for it, act on it, and live with the consequences.

But returning to postgraduate study after working showed me another side.

Once, I took Prof. Li a question that had grown out of my work experience but was not yet fully formed. It was not even a research topic at that point—only an observation I could not quite name. Prof. Li did not begin by asking what it was useful for. We began by pulling it apart: where exactly was the problem, could the boundary be narrowed, and which vague impressions could become something we could discuss and test?

That moment made the contrast unusually clear. School and work train different kinds of attention.

Organisation studies uses the idea of institutional logics: spend long enough inside a setting and you gradually learn what counts as important there, what a good answer looks like, and what deserves time and resources. Companies train one kind of attention. Universities train another.

Work more often asks: Is it worth doing?

School is more willing to add another question: Is it worth understanding?

If a university is also an organisation, then “student thinking” can partly be understood as a cultural product of that environment: being allowed not to know, being allowed to ask why, and being allowed to let an idea exist before it has a use.

CHAPTER 02Both logics have reasons

Companies do not care about results simply because they are commercial. They face real constraints. An hour spent on one project cannot be spent on another; a mistake may cost money, trust or responsibility.

Universities, meanwhile, need to leave room for the unknown. If research knows its answer from the beginning, there is not much left to explore.

Organisational learning often places two activities side by side: exploration and exploitation. One searches for new possibilities; the other improves and uses what is already known to work. Both matter, but the second usually offers clearer short-term returns and therefore finds resources more easily.

This helps explain why the two worlds can find each other strange. A student wonders, “Why are they asking what it is useful for so quickly?” A company wonders, “Why are you still thinking instead of moving?”

The difficulty is not that one side is closer to reality. It is that we easily mistake the rules we know best for reality itself.

CHAPTER 03Many conflicts begin inside a sentence

Returning to that scene in Jaadugar, I became increasingly interested in how Muhammad explains.

A teacher can respond to a rough question with “This is meaningless.” Or they can say, “It is too broad right now; let us make it smaller.” The practical outcome may be identical—the project is not ready—but the first sentence closes the question while the second leaves it a road forward.

This is more than a matter of being polite.

Another idea in organisation studies is sensemaking. People rarely understand reality completely and only then decide how to act. More often, experience, interpretation and action move back and forth as we gradually work out what is happening.

So a sentence does not merely transmit a judgement. It also changes how the other person understands the situation.

When a company says, “This has no commercial value,” the speaker may simply mean, “We do not currently have the right resources or use case.” The listener may hear, “Your idea is childish.” The situation is unchanged, but the interpretation has already split.

Many confrontations are therefore not produced by the issue alone. Communication also helps create what we later call a “difference in position”.

CHAPTER 04Innovation suffers when it has to prove itself too early

Companies often say they want people to innovate. Yet an idea at its beginning looks least like an outcome.

It may be only: “Something about this feels odd.”

“Why do we always do it this way?”

“What if we tried something else?”

There is no ROI, no polished proposal, perhaps not even a correct definition of the problem. If the first response is always “Who will pay?”, “Will a client buy it?”, or “Can we implement it now?”, many ideas end before they have learned how to explain themselves.

That does not mean every idea deserves investment. The more useful distinction is this: “not worth investing in now” and “not worth thinking about further” are not the same judgement.

This is close to what psychological safety describes: the sense that people can ask questions, admit uncertainty and express disagreement without first fearing interpersonal punishment.

For innovation, it does not mean “everyone must encourage me”. It means that when my thinking is unfinished, I can still voice it; when I do not know, I can say so; and when I disagree, I do not first have to worry that disagreement will be read as incompetence.

CHAPTER 05Standing between school and work

As an undergraduate, it was difficult for me to see university itself as an environment. After working for a while, the logic of companies also began to feel like common sense: projects must move, clients need answers, and outcomes need owners.

Returning to the classroom brought back another question: why?

Why do users respond this way? Why must this process work like this? Why does a judgement that feels obvious at work suddenly need to be defined again once it becomes a research question?

The value of school for me now is not simply learning more theories. It gives me distance again.

Work reminds me that ideas eventually meet reality. School reminds me that reality itself can be described differently, taken apart and questioned.

That is why I no longer think of “socialisation” as sanding away every trace of student thinking. Maturity may be learning to live with interests, efficiency, constraints and compromise while still keeping some ability to ask why.

Like the object dropped from the roof in that scene, learning cannot guarantee that we will never again hear a sudden crash. It simply means that when the sound comes, we know a little more about where to look.

Official still from Episode 1 of Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia. Knowledge does not make the world simpler. It gives us more tools for reading its complexity.