Discovery Driven Planning: Teaching in Non-Degree Executive Education Programs
I’m just here at the Strategic Management Society’s annual conference in Cologne. It’s a meeting which aspires to bring together academics, consultants and business-people for fruitful dialogue and exchanges, although in fairness the tilt does seem to be more toward academics recently. I did participate in an interesting session on how to teach in executive education programs. I focused on issues of style (not too much lecturing, please!) and actually included some substance on real options reasoning and discovery driven planning. Anyone with an interest can download the attached .pdf. (the blog software wouldn’t allow me to upload it in .ppt.)
For now, the key takeaways from my session:
1. Too much one-way communication is ineffective
2. In design, remember the basic principle of what makes something interesting—challenge to weakly held assumptions
3. Build on executive participants’ own experiences and connect to your teaching points
4. Creative repetition (700 times)
5. Tell stories
6. Combine facts, emotions and symbols—often, one or another are left out
Feel free to write with any questions or further ideas. On to the next session!
ExecEdTeaching.SMS.10-08.08.pdf
- Posted: Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to witness Rita in action, building this very effective process described here for the Executive board of one of my Finnish client.
Beyond teaching, it is a concrete exercise in building the future, making the most of the participants knowledge and experience and adapting the message to the needs and priorities. Rita could instantly give examples, creative ideas, which kept the dynamism and energy level of this meeting very high.
Obviously, this is not easy. It requires wide knowledge of the industry, skill, fast thinking, and much work. Rita has unique skills for this as well as the willingness to prepare ahead and work very hard during the session.
In today’s crisis economy, when top executives have neither the time nor the patience to spend time on “interesting” but irrelevant issues, this is the only way to go beyond teaching and achieve valuable “making it happen” learning.
Well done Rita!
Doris Bigio
Managing Director
