Ronald Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia highlighted Heifetz’s advice in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture.
Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he has taught for nearly four decades. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership. His research addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership; and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation.
Heifetz co-developed the adaptive leadership framework with Riley Sinder and Marty Linsky to provide a basis for leadership research and practice. His first book, Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994), is a classic in the field and one of the ten most assigned course books at Harvard and Duke Universities. Heifetz co-authored the best-selling Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Change with Marty Linsky, which serves as one of the primary go-to books for practitioners across sectors (2002, revised 2017). He then co-authored the field book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organization and the World with Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky (2009). His teaching methods have been studied extensively in doctoral dissertations and in Leadership Can Be Taught, by Sharon Daloz Parks (2005).
A graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, and the Kennedy School, Heifetz is both a physician and cellist. He trained initially in surgery before deciding to devote himself to the study of leadership in public affairs, business, and nonprofits. Heifetz completed his medical training in psychiatry, which provided a foundation to develop more powerful teaching methods and gave him a distinct perspective on the conceptual tools of political psychology and organizational behavior. As a cellist, he was privileged to study with the great Russian virtuoso, Gregor Piatigorsky.
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Ronald Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia highlighted Heifetz’s advice in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture.
Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he has taught for nearly four decades. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership. His research addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership; and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation.
Heifetz co-developed the adaptive leadership framework with Riley Sinder and Marty Linsky to provide a basis for leadership research and practice. His first book, Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994), is a classic in the field and one of the ten most assigned course books at Harvard and Duke Universities. Heifetz co-authored the best-selling Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Change with Marty Linsky, which serves as one of the primary go-to books for practitioners across sectors (2002, revised 2017). He then co-authored the field book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organization and the World with Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky (2009). His teaching methods have been studied extensively in doctoral dissertations and in Leadership Can Be Taught, by Sharon Daloz Parks (2005).
A graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, and the Kennedy School, Heifetz is both a physician and cellist. He trained initially in surgery before deciding to devote himself to the study of leadership in public affairs, business, and nonprofits. Heifetz completed his medical training in psychiatry, which provided a foundation to develop more powerful teaching methods and gave him a distinct perspective on the conceptual tools of political psychology and organizational behavior. As a cellist, he was privileged to study with the great Russian virtuoso, Gregor Piatigorsky.
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Connect with Scott Allen
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you are in the world. Thank you for checking in on Phronesis. And this is a very, very special episode, we are celebrating our 100th episode for nieces practical wisdom for leaders. And for this 100th episode, we have a real treat. Dr. Ron Heifetz is with us. I'm going to give his short bio, the full bio is in the show notes, links to all of his books, some publications, it'll all be there. There's a learning experience called The Art and practice of leadership development that you have to be aware of. There'll be a link to that resource. Ron is among the world's foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, where he has taught for nearly four decades, sir, thank you so much for being with us today. We really, really appreciate your time.
Ron Heifetz 1:02
It's such a pleasure Scott's great to be in conversation.
Scott Allen 1:06
I had this learning experience in 2006, we were talking a little bit before we got on the air here. And it's literally one of the most powerful learning experiences I've ever had, which was that experience in the art and practice of leadership development that intensive, I believe it was seven to eight days in length. And we really, really explored adaptive leadership, we explored Case-in-Point methodology. And, and to this day, I will say that it was one of the most powerful learning experiences I've ever had. And I'm really excited to dive deep to start with Case-in-Point because I'd love to know your perspectives on kind of the special sauce, what's going on in that learning experience that has a guy in Cleveland, like 13 years later, 14 years later, 15 years later, saying, that was one of the most powerful learning experiences I've ever had. Because I know others feel the same. And I'd love to get your perspectives on the design of that, how you think about that, and why it's so powerful.
Ron Heifetz 2:08
Thank you, Scott, I so appreciate that. That was valuable to you. I so appreciate that. And I know Marty Linsky, who chaired the program, you know, would be really thrilled to hear that, and I will pass that on to him, as well. I developed the Case-in-Point method of teaching, right after my psychiatry residency, when I started teaching at the Kennedy School in 1983 and was charged with developing a method for leadership education. Up till then, my particular school was, like most professional schools, I hadn't assumed that leadership was, could not be taught that people were born, leaders not made, and that you really couldn't teach it. So instead, let's teach people what we know how to teach, you know, financial management, organizational strategy, public policy, economics, and statistical reasoning, and so forth. So the school decided to run this experiment in hiring me to work this way. And, and it seemed to me based on my medical training, I started off training in medicine, that practical education, education in practice for practice, not for describing things not for just analyzing, you know, which academics are trained for. But training in a professional school for professional practice was generally done by getting people to learn from experience. You might go to like in medical school, you might go to classes for a year and a half or two years. But very quickly, they try to get you to experience things, even anatomy that you don't only learn that from beautiful graphics, which now are three-dimensional on a computer that you can rotate, but you know, you have to look inside a real body. And indeed, medical training itself builds from the original form of practical education in all human societies, which is apprenticeship. People may have a talent for climbing trees and is in a hunter-gatherer society that's looking for honey. That particular young man or young woman will be apprenticed by the hunter who's very good at gathering honey at the top of trees, and so forth. People learn by hanging out with people who are good at it already. And being taught day by day, you know, the micro and the macro of that particular set of practices. And they're expected to get better at it through trial and error making mistakes, learning from their mistakes, having somebody back them up over time. And that continues to be the primary mode of real education. You know, when we parent children, most of the practical education we give children through getting them to learn from their own experience. You know that, and then having constant feedback loops of, okay, we'll want to try it this way, honey, and try it that way, honey. And, you know, it may be kicking a ball into the net, it may be shooting a ball through a hoop or hitting a ball with a bat. Or it could be, you know, painting or drawing or playing a musical instrument, you know, you can't learn a musical instrument, I grew up playing music, by only by listening to music, or reading books on music, you've got to literally pick up the instrument and start making a mess and making sound and overtime then, with proper supervision, in a sense, the same apprenticeship model, but maybe formalized in weekly lessons, do you begin to learn that craft? So I approached leadership in that way.
Scott Allen 5:50
It's much more of almost a...I think of problem-based learning, right? That's also embedded in medical education. But yes, we need to, you wouldn't want the pilot that said, you know, I've read a lot of books about piloting. Right?
Ron Heifetz 6:04
That's right, you'd want him to spend a lot of time in a simulator crashing.
Scott Allen 6:13
And YOU create that simulator!
Ron Heifetz 6:16
When we look at the spectrum of methods that have been developed, to help people learn from experience, and we looked at the history of professional education, in different professional schools, there is a rich set of methodologies. When law schools teach by the case method, the law school version of the case method, they're learning from experience, you know, they're looking at actual historical legal cases. And they're analyzing them and trying to retrace the reasoning of the judges and the judicial experts at the time. And the same thing in business school case method that was pioneered at Harvard, you know, in the 1920s, and 30s, and 40s. Or maybe it was in the 50s. But when they courageously said, we're going to teach everything by the case management, even finance, we're going to teach by the case method. And the analytic type said, how can you possibly do that, but their point was want to teach people how to do finance, how to do budgeting, let's have it be problem-centered. And in a sense, then there is a spectrum of experiential methods that go from one could say, the tamest and controlled, kind of like the Harvard Business School case method. It's widely employed in business schools all over the world, is a very tame methodology, time, because the case has been pre-prepared. It's been studied ahead of time by the faculty, there are teaching notes from other faculty on how to teach it. And even though it feels like improvisation in the classroom, and is to some extent, in improvisation, usually, the faculty member has a fairly good sense of, you know, by minute 13, I want to have covered this by minute 26, I want to have covered that, you know, this Blackboard will be covered with this kind of information, and this other blackboard with this other kind of information, and so forth, as they orchestrate people's conversation through the case. So that's that, that's at the tail end. And the methods of spiritual education that you experienced in that program, which I've been using in both semester-long courses in two-week intensives. As well as in short forms, like your eight-day workshop, or like, smaller workshops have one or two days, you know, on consulting assignments. These are two basic different kinds of methodologies. And I'd like to describe each one, the first one is a quite logical extension from the formal case method. The key difference is that I have students analyze their own cases. So I have them prepare a case from their own life experience, generally professional experience. But with some of the younger students, occasionally, it's a personal experience. And I'll have them present their case in a small group, they're generally given an hour and a half or so in the small group, where the whole session is devoted to that to the rest of the members of the group consulting to that case, and then in our plenary class or in sections with the course coach, they debrief their case analysis and how that group did in trying to analyze that case. And then at the end of the term, they'll write a final paper, you know, analyzing that case, drawing on the framework they've learned in the course, to analyze that case, in the hope that they will come up with new options. I should have done that. I could have tried that. I don't know if it'll work, but at least my imagination of the options set is expanded. And I want people to focus on two different sets of options, diagnostic options. This is how I should have gone about investigating the situation differently. You know, I assumed x, but I never really checked it out, I didn't have the courage to go talk to Y person. But I really needed to talk to y person somehow or found find a workaround. Because I can't get quick access to y by talking to people who know why. But I need that information. And getting people to spend sufficient time on the diagnostic search process for collective problem solving, where you have to get information around the full ecosystem of the parties that have a stake in that collective problem is a very common source of failure, the failures of that diagnostic search process. So I want them to expand their options, right. And then on the action side, I want to expand their options on their strategy and tactics of how they tried to move the ball down the field, on that collective problem. So that's the first and I would say, of the two teaching methods that I have spent the most time trying to develop, that is actually the most readily available to instructors on leadership, or trainers on leadership. It's hard because you have to have mastered the framework well enough, whatever framework you're working with, to analyze a case for which you've had no preparation. And then to think out loud with people. Well, this is the algorithm. These are the key questions that I asked. This is why I asked these questions. These are the patterns that I'm looking for. In this case, in trying to help this person see new options. One needs to know one's own framework well enough to take a case fresh and think out loud with people helping them discover new options in that live consultation with the benefit of doing that, is that the students are the trainees in a training program, see your analytical process, including the floundering around? This is important because in analyzing any, you know, trying to make sense of any situation with its blooming confusion, you know, you need to have the stomach to flounder around to try this to try that, to try this frame to try that frame, to zoom out, you know, a level of analysis to zoom back in to reframe the problem itself, in one way or another way, by thinking out loud on the case analysis with the students. They learn, you know, in a sense, from as an apprentice, how one might go about thinking through complex cases that are not pre-digested for you. And the reason why I think it's so key is that in practical life, they're not going to come across cases that are pre-digested. They're gonna have to figure out how to think on their feet when they're faced with a confusing situation with some algorithm, or some, you know, list of key questions to ask themselves, a method of investigation, to begin to unpack that case, and come up with better options.
Scott Allen 12:58
As a musician you understand all too well, that that necessity to improvise in the first example, I can have everything buttoned up, I can look like the expert. I know the answers. I know what's on the blackboard. And to your point, that kind of floundering around even some of that work that messiness, it's real, it's much more real than kind of the plastic pre-packaged version, right? So you're moving up the spectrum of the team too? I don't know, tame-light?
Ron Heifetz 13:30
Using student cases is much less time than using pre-prepared cases. For two reasons. It's personal. It's really personal. The person who you're asking to present a case is engaging in a vulnerability. They're sharing a real situation that they've struggled with. And in my assignment, I have them pick a case of failure because I think that if they can actually learn from the failure, those lessons will stick with them, and be much more readily transferred into practice. Now we look at successes too, but the student cases, I want them to look at failure and that, you know, they have to overcome some amount of fear of embarrassment or, or shame in sharing a case of failure with their colleagues, when they do overcome that and creating the conditions for that level of vulnerability. The learning is really pretty profound. Sometimes students don't unpack their own case until they write the final paper on it. Okay, at the end of the term, when it's quiet, and it's just them, you know, writing a 1020 page final paper analyzing their case, how do they see it differently on the diagnostic side? And on the action side? And what in retrospect, should they have tried that they hadn't thought of trying when they live that case? The second reason why it's less time is it's less time for the faculty member. You know, you've got to be willing to make mistakes. takes in your own case analysis in front of the students and helps them learn from well, that was a dead end. Let's try something else. But that that in and of itself is very important because you want to have people give people a sense of experimental and experimental mindset, to the analysis of leadership cases where they're willing to move from version 1.1 to 1.2, to 1.3, without shame of needing to mid-course correct. And so I try to model that.
Scott Allen 15:30
Well, and I love in the diagnostic of the case, there's also and you've, you've mentioned this, but there's emotion there, which is just nudging us closer to the real thing, getting a little bit closer to the simulation. But if it's something where it was a failure, it's likely that there's a strong emotion tied to that, which is nudging us closer to the real deal, right?
Ron Heifetz 15:54
Yes. Now, I would say that the usual simulations that people use, like various games or exercises, or are also on that spectrum, towards experiential, from didactic, on one end to experiential on the other, it's on that spectrum. I think the formal sort of simulations that people commonly employ, are also powerful in capturing some lessons, I would put them kind of in between the business school case method and student cases. Be and the reason why is the simulation has a feeling of reality to it in the sense that people are living a real, but it's a pretty contained frame of reference, you know, it's here, the rules of the game, you know, now you're going to learn from how you and your colleagues collaborate, or have failures of imagination or failures of collaboration, and work in that collective problem. Now, again, there's a lot to learn from that if it's debriefed properly, but it's, it's still tamer than an in negotiating teaching negotiation. That would be a typical thing using simulations, you know, simulated negotiation, but having a student's own real case from their own life, in less time than even a simulation because they really have lost sleep on that failure. For them, the stakes were sometimes very high, you know, some of our students in our mid-career program, or in our executive program, have lived through, some heavy pieces of history. So the regrets and the shame, you know, the sense of lost opportunity is very, very real. And even for a young person, where the case doesn't seem quite as significant as it might to an older person, where maybe it's a case of injustice in a classroom, or in a summer camp, or in a summer job. for that student, it's real. Further along, the spectrum, what you call a simulation, I don't put exactly in the same category as a simulation. But it's a method that I've called Case in point myth. And this also is based on people learning from experience. But instead of learning from debriefing and analyzing a past experience of their from their own professional or personal life, I'm having people learn from their present experience. So the classroom itself is it is a present experience. It has its own dynamic, you know, Mary says something perfectly smart, and nobody pays attention. 10 minutes later, Jack says the same basic thing, and everybody pays attention. You know, that's a very common dynamic of invisibility and credibility, differential credibility. So in using the class as a case, we can stop the action and say, pause. And say, Let's debrief what just happened here? Isn't this interesting? Let's contrast what happened to Mary with what happened to Jack. And then let's do a, what in medicine would be called a differential diagnosis? What are the diagnostic options? How would we assess the different possibilities to explain why that happened? And then we'll have a conversation. Well, maybe it's a matter of timing, maybe it's a matter of that her mode of expression had much more emotional spin in it, and Jax was much more dispassionate, and that fit the culture. Maybe it was gender, you know, maybe it was prejudice, and maybe it was timing. Maybe it's just timing, you know, that she spoke up a little premature and the flow of the conversation. And when it when that theme came around again, a third time, that's when Jack spoke up again and the innocence of the issue had been ripened in the conversation. Now I want students not to jump for the most convenient diagnosis, which is well this is obviously sexism. It may be it often is, but it also could be one of the other possibilities. So the classroom itself ends up manifesting a lot of the common organizational and political dynamics, social dynamics that we see in our own organizational and social lives, how some people are given more authority informal authority in the class than others, maybe because of their prior jobs because of their stance because of their body because of the way they look because of their accent because of their skin color, or ethnicity, or gender. Conflict dynamics, you know, you'll get a conflict emerging in the class, we can stop the action, we can say, Okay, what happened there? How can we render this to be more productive? Because right now, it's really going south fast. Authority dynamics. When I'm teaching Case in point, I'm the authority figure in the classroom. By definition, I'm authorized by the university to be the instructor for the course. And the students by selecting my course as an elective. They are also authorizing me to be their teacher. So I have the authorization to be a teacher. So now I'm the authority figure. But, you know, like, right now I'm teaching a class on anti-black racism and sexism. I am a white, sis, heterosexual man, American older, in a very diverse classroom with people from 40 countries, you know, more than 100 people, many of whom are exquisitely sensitive to injustice, injustice generated by people who have the identities that I embody. And so using me or us, as a case in point, says, Okay, well, let's look at the trust dynamics in here. Well, the trust is obviously going to be more brittle. I mean, you come to me with distrust from all the scar tissue you have from violations of trust by authorities in your life, or in the lives of people with whom you identify. So let's figure that out. If I make 100 wonderful lessons, and then I make a mistake in class, by calling somebody by the wrong name, what do you gravitate to? What happens to my credibility? Okay, that's interesting. Now, how should somebody in my position, try to repair trust. So you know, the classroom itself becomes a case in point for illustrating and teaching many of the kinds of properties of social systems and the dynamics and social systems that they're going to have to deal with in the practice of leadership and mobilizing collective learning or collective problem-solving.
Scott Allen 22:34
And run at least as I recall, you said something to the effect in the cohort that I was in in 2006. And it's always stuck with me, I may be a little harsher in my memory of this, and I'm sure you have a better way of saying this. But you said I'm not a huge fan of creating safe spaces, in that my students are going back to, in many cases, not safe spaces. And leadership, in many cases is not a safe activity. It's you're disrupting systems, you're disrupting people. And are you still thinking about it in that same way? Does it still get fairly heated at times within the context? Because, you know, in our session, emotions were flaring at times, and you create an environment that really does. To your point, in the present, whether it was an FBI agent or the hospital president, they didn't know how to intervene skillfully.
Ron Heifetz 23:33
Right, because most of us don't. In fact, it's a frontier in leadership research that is beginning to capture lessons from people who've done a little better in the art form of orchestrating heated conflict in a community. So, yes, I do not try to create a padded cell, okay, in which people bang selves against the wall and cannot get hurt. People will hurt each other's feelings, gender discrimination, prejudices of all kinds towards gay heterosexual LGBTQ people, ethnic prejudices, racial prejudices, will emerge in the classroom dynamic because they're always there anyway, the only difference in the way I teach is that I allow them to surface and become a subject of conversation. And then say, Great, this is a kind of challenge you're going to be facing and the kind of cultural changes you're trying to seek, and the leader in your leadership aspirations. So let's see what we can learn from our own class case, I do try to keep it safe enough, but not completely safe. You know, one of my colleagues described it not as a safe space, but a brave space. It does take courage to learn publicly, but I want students to know what it means to learn publicly. Because I think collective problem solving often involves and requires people to learn publicly learn out loud, to be willing to change their minds, as they're being engaged with, with a contrary point of view, sometimes said heatedly.
Scott Allen 25:14
Ron, can you think of a story of a time where you, you had to learn publicly that you can share where literally, you made a mistake, and in real-time had to say, you know, that probably was not a wise decision, what do I do?
Ron Heifetz 25:29
Well, it happened, it happens almost every day. I mean, I learned the whole approach to leadership theory and, and the conceptual, the layers of conceptual construction that I've been trying to do and pushing our frontier a little farther out, has happened mainly in the classroom, students pitched me a hard question. And I have to think on my feet, and I come up with an idea. And then I tested out against their cases. This keeps me honest because it's not the blind leading the blind, you know, my ideas have to behave to prove their value against real cases. Now, some of the painful times where I've made some real mistakes, and I've had to learn from I remember, once in a workshop, it was a short workshop, with people training to become inner-city school principals, mainly in black urban schools, and half the cohort of these people in this executive education program. This was not in Massachusetts, it was actually in Ohio, where you are, we were...I don't know exactly half and half, half black and half white. But it was, you know, it was pretty evenly divided demographically. There were also some Latin American people, they were doing really a pretty lousy job of being able to listen to each other, there was a lot of the oppression Olympics going on, you know, as people are starved to have their own pain recognized. And some of the white students were, on the one hand, wanted to be inner-city school principals. So a part of them their heart was really into, you know, helping black kids learn in schools that are large with black kids. But on the other hand, there, they got impatient with some of their black colleagues who, who had a lot to say, a lot to say about their experiences and what black kids needed based on their experiences. So you had this real impatience in class, and one of the white students began to talk about his own trauma of his own personal life. And the black students were just ignoring him. Now, these were folks who had been spending, you know, already spent six, seven months together on a program. So, you know, this was not their first encounter with each other. So the mistake I made was, I went up to one of the black women in the section, and I put my hands on her shoulders, and I said, look at him, you know, look at him, the white man who was sharing a very painful set of experiences, and it immediately blew up, you know, don't you know what it means for a white man to put his hands on a black woman, you know, and to say, pay attention to the white man who's speaking. And the black students all call us immediately circling the wagons. And it was it got extremely hot and very, very challenging to me. I mean, I felt like, like, I really needed time to think about what happened. So I had to talk myself, I had to talk to myself a lot, you know, at that moment, and I began by sitting down and saying, Okay, well, you know, tell me more. And it was hard to hear them talking, you know, the black men talking but very protective towards the black woman, black woman talking powerful black woman, you know, she was had to have lived a lot of life, you know, but also the traumatic experiences she had had in her life. I had surfaced through my own behavior. It was towards the end of that class session, you know, and so, during the lunch break, before the next session, I was just really shaken. I mean, literally shaken, you know, in figuring out how am I going to pull together this, you know, workshop, I have another half day with these folks. This was, you know, I had four days with them spread out over a year, you know, one day, this was the very last day. It was two days together at one day, one day, and then two days together. This was the afternoon or the morning of the second day, and I went to sit in the only place I could get privacy was in a stairwell. I just sat in the stairwell and really tried to calm myself down and figure out where do I go from here?
I also spoke with one of the other faculty members, you know, and got his point of view. So I had, you know, the benefit of another point of view, he, of course, was completely freaked out because he never used classes the case and run in any pressure cooker with those kinds of at those kinds of pressures and temperatures was completely foreign to him. I mean, he was used to a much more controlled classroom. But nevertheless, it was useful to just air out my thoughts with him and get his perspective. So then when I went back into the classroom, I apologized. But the apology had to connect with her experience, you know, and so I affirmed and spoke about what I imagined this must have meant to her. And I was really sorry that I hadn't anticipated that. I did not try to then say okay, but here was my point. Because when you're trying to repair trust, you can't then say, Okay, now that we've done that, now, let me tell you what our was right. And, and it was important for you to listen to that white guy. Because, you know, the only task at hand is, is repairing the breach. And maybe later you get another chance to teach the lesson. The point, you know, and, and so, I think that I think she really appreciated it, you know, and, and then later in the afternoon, this guy spoke up again, and he poured his heart out. And I think, it blew everybody's mind because I think they were more ready to listen to him. She walked out with me to the car waiting to take me to the airport, while they gave me a standing ovation, you know, at the end of the show. And she did and she came out and she said, wow, you know, nobody's ever apologized to me that way. I can't tell you how much it meant to me. So, I mean, it was a very moving experience for me. I mean, I think she was being extraordinarily generous. And to me in a trap, it's, it's, it's a bit tragic that you know, in her life experience, she must have been at least 35 years old, that she hasn't had a white person apologize to her that way before. I mean, I shouldn't have been special. I was only special because it was in her life experience. It was a rare event, it should be a rare event. But it was a really hard case in point for breaching trust, violating trust, and then needing to repair the breach.
Scott Allen 32:38
And I think that's in some ways, some of them, the fear for educators, right? I mean, you have spent decades crafting this and really working very intentionally and critically reflecting on how to do this work. It's an art form, in many ways, because of that improvisation. In many ways, it's an act of leadership as well, again, that improvisation that we don't have everything buttoned up, we don't have everything locked down. It's not clean, it is messy. And that guy, I did and after we did our 2006 event, I was doing a version of Case in point, a very light version. But I would tell the students, hey, I want you to accomplish a Guinness World Record. It's 15% of your final grade. Go for it. And oh my gosh, you know, well, what do we do to achieve a Guinness World Record? Go for it? I just kind of laid that. You know, and it's 15% of the final grade. And every course concept bubbled up, whether that was the sources of stress sources or power. leadership styles followership styles. Ee just had so many different course dynamics embedded in that one activity. That became the case study, right? I love it. And they always achieved the Guinness World Record run. It was beautiful. Oh, some low-hanging fruit. But it was my late version of at least trying to help them become the case. Help them pause and observe their own dynamics in the room, help them better understand it and get out of this kind of headspace and more into the emotion more into the well, you know, this faction of people aren't doing what we need them to. Okay, so what are your options? What are you going to even try? And how do you do that work? And so I've done variations of it. It's stressful, though, right?
Ron Heifetz 34:48
I mean, you know, it can be at the highest pressures, but it doesn't have to be, you know, there's a lot of ways to use Case-in-Pointmethod with a very light touch. You know, because if you wanted to teach them authority dynamics, for example, and you had a set of ideas about the nature of authority relationships, you can simply ask in class. Okay, well, how are we a case like upon? Where does my authority come from? And it's mainly an intellectual conversation. But you are using the class as a case. So it's a little bit more of a living case, but it's very tame. And now it interests me, how long did you spend debriefing? You know, that exercise in class so that you can capture the lessons from, from the experience of trying to go for the record.
Scott Allen 35:37
So we would usually spend an evening kind of celebrating that they achieved their objective, and then reflecting and trying to make sense of what we just experienced, it was never enough. It always felt rushed. And I've used other variations, Ron, I would share a list of 40 things for the students to accomplish as a team as a group, let's say there's 17, or 25 people in the class, I would give them a list of 45 things. Let's say the topic of the topic was ethics. So I would say, interview five fortune 500 CEOs on a topic of ethics, a sitting US senator, Congressman, the president of the university, Lieutenant Governor, or the governor, the mayor of Cleveland, and then it would be 40 things and it would just overwhelm them. But again, they always accomplished it. They had a mindset at the beginning of well, we can't, you know, how are we ever going to get to a fortune 500 CEO. And pretty quickly, they have seven! Ford, Nestle USA...but again, we would pause, we would slow down. And so it was a lot of pausing in real-time. But then like you, as you know, I became the focus of their frustration much of the time. And, you know, I was doing this to them. And, and that's where I would experience some stress at times, because I too, didn't know how now I was using, admittedly a higher risk aversion. As soon as I'm labeling 15% of their final grade to this assignment. I'm using it, you know, a tool with some pretty good heat, right? So I don't want listeners to think that it always has to be that hot, because I think your point is perfect.
Ron Heifetz 37:25
That's right, it can you can dial it to whatever level you want, depending on what dynamic you want to pay attention to which ones too, you know, to let Keep your hands off of, because it's too hot to handle. It's not right, right now, the structure is not long enough, like if I had a week with people, but I only have a day with people, or I'm near the end of the term. And if I'm going to shake it up, I should shake it up earlier in the term, so that I have time to weave it back together, you know, those all become important determinants of how hot it is. And I just, you know, in regard to the debriefing of experiences, I have the same experience you have that we frequently don't leave enough time for the debriefing that the real learning comes as a combination of the experience itself, but then the debriefing of it. So because that's where they the ideas, but why they were the experiential lessons become turned into ideas, concepts, they can they then get retained in memory. Remember consulting to our bound in early in my career, where they get people that have all these experiences, but they only would debrief them, like for a half-hour at the end of the day. And I said, No, the ratios wrong, you know, spend a lot more time debriefing the experiences each day because that's where the lessons get captured. I also told him to get people don't give people mountains, they can climb, give people mountains, they cannot climb. So they can debrief failure, and then that, you know because that's going to be more realistic. Thank you so much, Scott, for this conversation.
Scott Allen 39:03
I'll tell you one quick story, and then we can kind of wind down our time, but it was hilarious. Ron, they had seven fortune 500 CEOs, you know, progressive Key Bank. We've got Ford, Nestle, USA, and they couldn't get the university president. This is a 3000. Student. They've got the lieutenant governor, the mayor, right. looked at him in one of these moments. You know, they were so proud. And I said, figure it out. What are your options?
Ron Heifetz 39:37
Fabulous. I'm curious,
Scott Allen 39:39
Because I'll never forget one of the students George. He said, Remember last night when it was due? He said we got it. I was just at the holiday party. I cornered the president and asked him about ethics!
Ron Heifetz 39:53
Fantastic. So great. You know, everybody's gonna really be responsive to students wanting to learn about their leadership except a schoolhouse, where students are common. Who needs to give students time to students. But
Scott Allen 40:10
as we wind down our time real quick run, is there anything that's caught your eye recently that you've been streaming or reading or listening to? That the listeners might be interested in?
Ron Heifetz 40:20
Oh, wow, there's, you know, there's so much good stuff. I've been spending the last five or six years going to classes on evolutionary biology. Oh, wow. And just putting on my blue jeans and sitting with college kids learning and trying to understand from nature and how innovation happens in nature? Are there lessons from that domain that can be applied as a metaphor to our domain of cultural evolution, cultural change, organizational change, and the practice of leadership to mobilize it? You know, there are so many wonderful things to read. Just recently, I started reading a wonderful book that has all sorts of lessons in it that actually came out 10 years ago by a guy named Steven Johnson, called Where Good Ideas Come From. Well, wonderful book, and where he's doing just that he's taken from, you know, stories of evolution, but applied to innovation, creativity. It's not particularly about leadership, per se. But I think it's actually one of the key constructs within a leadership. A good leadership framework is thinking about theories of change, thinking about theories of innovation, and the generation of good ideas. So
Scott Allen 41:42
I love that modeling the lifelong learner. There's a great book that I just finished Epstein range house. generalists thrive in a specialized world, but essentially, he goes to a number of different similar to your experience of being a medical doctor, psychiatrist, and moving into leadership education, that experience in this domain, revolutionized this domain, and transformed it. Right. So it's a really interesting read if you get a chance Epstein and it's called range. So fantastic, sir. Thank you for the great work you do. Take care. Okay, be well, and I hope you will come back for the 200th episode.!
Ron Heifetz 42:22
I look forward it.
Scott Allen 42:24
Be well!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai