Transitions

PROFESSOR DAVID GARVIN: Transitions are hard, because you’ve got to get from one place to the other. First, let’s do a few little tricks. Anybody notice what happened every time we made a transition? You summarize. We’re coming to the end. What else happened?

__: A new blackboard.

PROFESSOR GARVIN: What does that mean? Cut, done, we’ve just moved on. It’s a physical signal. Anything else happen? New question—let’s pick that up and talk about such and such. Anything else?

__: You put a word on the blackboard.

PROFESSOR GARVIN: I put something often on the top of the blackboard to sort of set the stage. All of this is about stage setting.

PROFESSOR TOM DELONG: You look for opportunities. Ray was a gift. Ray said, “I'm worried about the partners.” Remember? Then I said, “Remember we talked about the culture audit with partners?” Ray said, “I'm worried about the partners.” So that was a perfect segue for me turn to here. So I said, partners. Then I said, “This is a perfect transition into my next agenda item.” So I built this, and Ray was concerned about this. And then I went right down the line. Then Chichi went to family, then we went to associates, then back to VP.

PROFESSOR GARVIN: Now, sometimes the transition is smooth. The easiest one was the discussion here about Schetter and Clark, which was so dead-on. And your comment about, “We need different activities at different times,” was a natural segue into “organic and mechanistic.” When you get that, you have two choices. Let’s think about this. One is to move then. But you have another choice, which is to park the comment in your head and say, “After four or five more discussion points, now let’s come back to Ricardo’s observation.” He said, “Let’s talk about that.” You don’t have to use the comment at the time it comes up. In this case, we did, because we were tracking on time.

In a nutshell, you have to signal very clearly, “We’re moving on.”

back to top

Segue

PROFESSOR ASHISH NANDA: When I was in my first or second year of teaching here, one of our respected professors, Dick Walton, used to use this word, “I will SEGUE from this discussion to this discussion.” S-E-G-U-E. Segue means smoothly transition. And in fact, my meaning of segue used to be, “OK, we are done with this discussion. Let's talk about this now.” But if you are really good at the art of discussion leadership, you effortlessly try and move from one pasture to the other, and you try to move through people's comments and observations, so that people don't feel that their heart and mind is on one side, and you're pushing them away. Chichi at one point felt that we had moved away from something that was important. And she said, “Wait, I want to stay in this pasture for a little while.” And so she stopped the segue there, and she said, “Wait, I want to spend some time.” And that's also good, giving your participants the freedom to tell you, “Wait, stay here for a little while longer,” or, “There is something else I want to talk about.” That's good.

The other thing you want to do sometimes is to tell people, “Listen, we've had a lot of discussion. There are lots of interesting things. But here's something else that is interesting.” Sometimes it helps to move to that.

back to top

Differing interpersonal styles

PROFESSOR NANDA: Different people take conflict differently. What I have learned over time is to try and change my response to people, depending on the type of people there are. For example, I know that some people are aggressive and their way of learning is point-counterpoint. There will be thesis-antithesis, and then there will be synthesis. So when somebody says something, you will immediately say, “No, Arvinder, if you said this, I totally disagree with what you said.” But what if Hanson says something, and I say, “Hanson, I totally disagree with you,” and then Hanson is totally quiet for the rest of the class? OK? So one has to be sensitive to that a little bit, especially if you are trying to put people in this kind of situation.

If at the core you convey to your students or participants that what you are interested in is ideas—you are discussing with them ideas rather than trying to show down individuals—then they go with you. It works fine. You just have to give people—again, sometimes language is an issue—so you want to give people more space to express themselves, but you want to keep going, also. That's why it’s more of an art.

back to top

Flow and rigidity

PROFESSOR TOM PIPER: The last thing I want to talk about is that I love those flow diagrams, because if I look at a flow diagram and the flow isn’t natural, I'm in trouble. Because I'm going to have to take the students and pull them over to where I want to be. And so I try and organize it so that there's a natural flow, as you would see in a meeting. If you were having a discussion about this in the real world, what do you think the flow would be? Because that's what the students, if they have work experience, will tend to do naturally. And I put estimated times of arrival up there. That's what I had in mind today.

And the great danger is that I will pick up a great rigidity. I have it for day one. If we were doing this for two days, this would be day two. That's a danger—that you get so wedded to that flow and to those times. But Eisenhower, President Eisenhower—do people know President Eisenhower? Eisenhower had a great statement: “Believe in planning, but don’t trust the plan.” And his second statement was, “It is the planning that allows you in real time to adapt to the unexpected and changing circumstance.” So I do this not to have a rigid plan, but in order to have the ability to adjust as discussions unfold. In the absence of this, you’ll either pull students down an analytical path when they want to go the managerial, and/or, as things unfold, you’ll have no idea what your flexibility is because you don't have a base.

back to top

Reins of control

PROFESSOR NANDA: I have a teaching plan with me. I make a five- to seven-page teaching plan and then I make a one-page outline for myself on what I'm going to do. And I have yet to have a class where the class went according to my teaching plan. There is a great urge sometimes—especially if I'm unsure about how good the class is going to be, how rich the class is—there is a great urge sometimes to tell students, “Oh, don’t leave the subject. There are those three more points I wrote in my teaching plan. Unless we are done with those three points, we are not going to leave this.”

So again, one of my colleagues made this beautiful comment. Hugo Uyterhoeven—he’s retired now but he was fantastic as a teacher—he used to say, “Ashish, always think of a class as a horse that you are riding. The more tightly you will pull on the reins, the more the horse will buck. The more you will let the reins free and let the horse roam, in whichever pastures it wants to go, the happier the horse will be and the better your ride will be.”

back to top

Agenda on board

PROFESSOR DELONG: I have even put my agenda up on the board. I don’t put the times on it. There have even been times when I've left that right up there. The other reason that I put it up on the board—and this is one of those things that bothers some people—is that I move around too much. Mario doesn’t like that.

If I have this up on the board, then I can move. And I'm not married to the desk. Some of you don’t want to leave the desk because you have your notes there. You don’t want to forget where you are. Well, the students know you have an agenda. On a Bob Anderson, or a case that I know very well, I don’t. But on certain cases that I'm nervous about, I’ll put the agenda up. If it’s the first time I'm teaching a case, I’ll put this up. I won’t have this, but I’ll have that.

back to top

Role-plays help students remember

PROFESSOR DELONG: Any time one of your students starts saying, “I would do this,” ask the person to be that person, and then don’t humiliate them, but stick with them. Stick with them until they go into that role.

We remember because of our visceral experiences. If you think about the best teacher/leader/manager you have ever had, it may not be the model that they taught you, but it’s the spirit that they created in the classroom. Something happened inside of you, and you want to say things and you want to act so that something happens inside a person.

back to top

The minority view

PROFESSOR DELONG: What do you do if you have three people that say, “No, we don’t promote him”? Everyone else says yes. What do you do? Elsa?

ELSA: You make them talk.

PROFESSOR DELONG: What I would do is I would take a more active role with the three. I side with them and I get after people. Always start with the minority. For me, start with the minority, because if you start with the seventy-five that say yes, or say no, and not the three that say yes, what happens is the three lose their courage. So start with the three while they’re still courageous and then I'm with them, and I'm creating reasons, and I'm overly dramatic to make that point. So that’s one of the things I do.

back to top

Blackboard use

PROFESSOR GARVIN: My own sense is that we as teachers overuse blackboards. I use blackboards really for three reasons. One, I teach, at the moment, in our advanced management program, which is 60 to 70 percent non-U.S. So one reason I use it is so that the foreign students, the non-English speakers, can have a check on what they just heard. I think that’s very important for them to be able to follow along.

The second reason is I want to leave a paper trail, because some members of the group will take down what’s up on the blackboards almost verbatim.

But there’s a third reason for using a blackboard. It’s one of the things that most instructors don’t spend enough time doing. Does everybody see the lower blackboard? At the moment, it’s not particularly useful. Watch. What just happened? If you want to focus attention, highlight. I could have highlighted anything on that blackboard. I could have highlighted political. I could have highlighted team. I could have highlighted the word that Jeff used, affront, and said, “Let’s talk about this.” And all of a sudden, we have a focal point.

So that’s the third reason for using a blackboard. If the discussion gets too diffuse, a quick way to focus it is to go to the board and highlight almost any piece that would be useful to the discussion.

back to top

The quiet moments

PROFESSOR NANDA: When I had just started teaching, I used to hate the times when the class energy used to go down. I used to like things to be exciting always. But then some of my students came back to me and in their feedback they said something very interesting, which is that some of their best insights came during the quiet phases. So now I try to be patient. If the class’s energy falls a little bit, then I stay with it for a little bit of time. And sometimes some of the best comments come in those quiet moments.

back to top

Handling experts

PROFESSOR FRANCES FREI: I would ask that expert. If there was an expert, and these experts like to reveal themselves as experts immediately, I would go to the expert and say, “Could you intuitively explain the central limit theorem to us?” And they’ll start saying stuff that is just nonsensical. It makes sense to them and to me, and to no one else. I'd say, “Pause, that’s great. Here’s your performance measure. Look at the eyes here. If they're glazed over, you're not there. Your measure is, can you say it in a language so that they can understand it?”

Now the expert realizes that they have a lot to learn today, because they keep trying to articulate it and keep trying to articulate it, and they can’t do it. Now they know that they also have something to learn. It brings them in beautifully.

The big thing here is, knowing something and not being able to articulate it is the same as not knowing it in a discussion-based environment. So I'm delighted when one of them does it early on.

back to top

Leading questions

PROFESSOR NANDA: I used to ask people what I call leading questions, which is, “I want an answer. Give me the answer. OK, you can give me the answer.” It becomes very transparent after a time that you want the one correct answer that you are looking for. And it really hurts the case discussion method, because then people, instead of speaking their minds, start guessing, what is it that they want me to say? I try to avoid leading questions. If the subject they are discussing is very different from the conceptual piece I am talking about, I put the conceptual piece aside. Yesterday in Family Feud (Andersen vs. Andersen case discussion), there were some conceptual pieces related to negotiation that I just put aside. Otherwise we could have had a three-hour class. I put them aside. We didn't discuss them.

But sometimes, if I want to convey something, I just make it very clear to the class I am going a little bit in the lecture mode. So I kind of take a time-out from the case study, and I say, “Listen, here is a concept I want to talk about.” I go into a mini-lecture mode. The class appreciates that. The discussion, the lecture mode, and boom, you're back again to the case study. I think it's better than asking leading questions.

back to top

Call patterns

PROFESSOR GARVIN: One other tip: call patterns; people’s hands up. Suppose we’re coming to the end of a discussion, and I'm about to close, and Mike has his hand up. If I don’t call on him, and I make the transition, and ask the new question, and the first hand that goes up is Mike’s, what’s likely to happen if I call on Mike?

__: It goes back.

PROFESSOR GARVIN: Pay attention to whose hands are still up.

PROFESSOR JIM HESKETT: When I’ve seen a hand up for five minutes, I will typically not call on that person, because my assumption is that that person stopped listening five minutes ago. If I call on that person, they will take us back to where we were five minutes ago, instead of moving us forward.

PROFESSOR GARVIN: Sometimes the hands don’t even come down. You’ve experienced this! Every now and then I get these marvelous MBA students whose hands are up the entire class. And no matter when I call on them, they're right on target with the discussion. I don’t know how they do it. It’s like they have this list. “OK, they got that one. They got that one. Here’s where we are.” That’s a rarity. More frequently what happens is we go back.

So watch whose hands are still up, because they will bring you back.

back to top