The Future of Leadership Development. Wiki schools or ATMs? Professor Jonathan Gosling
In the attached paper, Professor Jonathan Gosling, who runs the Leadership Centre at University of Exeter in the UK, explains why Business School courses aren't enough to develop managers and leaders, and that we need a new model - 'wiki schools', in which we learn from each other - versus the ATM model of 'receiving' learning. Jonathan is a colleague of McGill (in Canada's) Henry Mintzberg, the strategy guru and pioneer of alternative approaches to leadership and management learning that move away from 'MBA as usual'. Jonathan shared this paper with us, as our work with The Hub is complementary - we could be seen as a 'wiki school' for leadership. Here's the opening par. of Jonathan's paper. The whole thing is attached as a Word document.
"The solution to today's real management problems cannot be found in business school courses. Business education is typically good at taking complex problems and chunking them down into bite-sized pieces. We do this by applying the analytical methods of our various disciplines, and our academic skills of abstraction. These allow us to get away from the apparent messiness of daily managerial work, to describe it in terms of general models, and thus, in short, to appear to ‘make work manageable’. But this is only half the problem, and by far the least important: the real challenge is to ‘make management workable’. You can take a course and acquire a lot of knowledge, but how do you use it in the practice?"
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| Wiki-schools or ATMs 21 Jan 2008.doc | 101.5 KB |
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Wiki-d
Some interesting stuff in there, and, before I comment further, I should note that I have only read about half the paper, but the following things spring to mind.
1) One of our managers is doing an MBA with the OU. They have a model which is shaped roughly triangularly. On one face is study, on the next is experience, and on the third is reflection (apologies to the OU if I got that wrong, I am working from the memory of a sketch here). This means that unless you do, learn, and reflect on what you have learnt and done, you will not really be able to see how things have got better, areas to improve etc. This makes sense. How often have you seen someone come back from a training course and say 'well, I learnt nothing there' or someone ignore 360 feedback, to the point where you stop trying? Study. Do. But if you don't look back and reflect, you will never gain any significant improvement.
Our leader group demonstrates this very well. We started by studying, reading books, listening to other speakers. We then started to do. Just small things to start, to show that we could. But, the thing that really helps, is when we share that back to the group, asking for feedback, asking for help with problems. This forces us to be sure that we have understood ourselves, our behaviour and the situation well enough to be able to explain it to others.
Maybe the triangle should become a square, with Share as the fourth side, meaning you have to be able to describe what you have learned from your study and do and reflection, to others.
2) Maybe this is a large corporation thing, and not so appliccable to small companies, but when we have training courses for leadership or management, they tend to involve groups from different sites and business groups, so we kind of get that mix of different 'tables' that is talked about, but it is still based around issues that are common to our organisation, and in which we have a vested interest. This makes for some very lively discussions.
3) Another thing we are doing, which again,is kind of similar to some of the concepts in the paper, is that we are using the leader group as a sounding board and feedback source for some of our other projects. This is partly because these other projects usually involve one or more of the group, so we are comfortable talking about projects with one another.
What seems to come out of the paper, is that when you group people together, that can help one another, they generally will, but they have to feel comfortable doing so. What can be more difficult, and which certainly takes a longer period of building up trust, is to bring that philosophy back to the office. After all, a group of disparate people, meeting to help develop themselves for their own sakes, seems to me to be like a Wiki without a website.
Colin.