1969 – Lessons

There is only one occasion on which I can say I was saved by the police.  It was in 1969, and it happened like this.  Early in the year, I had taken up a position as a Teaching Fellow in Management.  This was a step into a very different world.  I had been a college tutor in social anthropology for three years.  However, now I would be trying to introduce engineering students to a range of topics all the way from Freud on the ego to organisations as systems.  At the same time I was asked to teach about issues in management practice to returning businesspeople.

Lecturing for the first time, I could have found myself facing a major new challenge, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.  On the first day of a short course for returning executives, I got to the lecture theatre early and began talking to an arrival already sitting in the front row.  We discussed an article in that morning’s issue of The Times.  It was on industrial relations, the topic of my planned lecture.  As others came in, they joined in the discussion.  Without having thought much about it beforehand, I realised these managers (all aged at least 35 years old) might have been returning to enhance their education but they knew far more about their practice than I did.  I abandoned my lecture notes, as I could see they would gain far more through a seminar or workshop format, an approach I loved.  In the process, I had learnt about learning! For the rest of my teaching life I was to give few lectures, even in undergraduate courses.  And who was the man in the front row?  He was the Deputy Commissioner of Police for Cambridgeshire.

As everyone knows, teaching and learning in a university is very different from learning at school.  There the teaching is far more didactic, and the subject is far more structured.  My father had been a physics teacher in an English grammar school, and he would know, right down to the day and date, when he would be teaching the effects of heat on metals, and what the laboratory class experiment would entail.  New schoolteachers would develop lesson plans, and these would be reviewed and updated every year.  If  that sounds like a rather mechanical process, it was, although good teachers could still bring a subject to life, doing so within the constraints of a formal well-structured system.

Before that executive education course, in my previous three years as a tutor, I had drawn on my own experience of being tutored as an undergraduate.  Back then and with another student I met with a senior academic once a week.  His approach had been to explore a subject through discussion, and finish by suggesting a topic, provide some starting references, and then send us off to pursue the issues raised and write a relevant essay.  The approach had been stimulating, learning through the exchange of ideas in the tutorial, at the end of which we might be handed some typed notes for background reading, following this up by seeking out relevant references and finally deciding on the approach we’d take to the subject.  The freedom to shape the essay, and to choose readings, was highly motivating.  I had felt in charge of my learning.

When I began tutoring, I decided to follow the same approach.  My undergraduate experience had been in studying social anthropology, and this was the subject of my tutorials.  My largest group comprised three people, and, based my own experience, I planned to wander through the various areas of the subject, partly responding to the students’ progress and interests, although, of course, I was well aware of the range we would have to cover over two years.  I soon realised there was one aspect of this approach that I hadn’t considered.  Some of the people I was tutoring were not as able as others, and some were generally uninterested in the course!  Some needed more guidance, and some needed to understand how what they were doing was likely to appear in one of their final exams.  With the brightest students, tutorials were a discussion between equals.  For others, I had a more active role in facilitating learning.  Those students needed detailed notes, not just background reading, which emphasising key issues to be addressed and understood.  However, it was that process of facilitating discussion in tutorials that had provided me with the key skills I’d drawn on on my first executive education ‘lecture’!

What is a lesson?  I checked in the dictionary.  A lesson is a period of learning, or teaching, and I found its origin was way back in the 11th Century, and the Old French word leçon, itself derived from Latin lectio, the ‘act of reading’.  Today we use the word lesson in two very distinct ways.  It’s the word to describe a teaching and learning session,, whether in a classroom, on the golf course, or mastering driving a car.  It is an opportunity to acquire a skill, knowledge and even the basis for attitudes.  But the term does have another connotation. To talk about ‘giving someone a lesson’ implies scolding or even punishing.  Yes, that was also about ‘learning’ but in a punitive sense.  Both meanings imply the existence of an asymmetrical relationship, the knowledgeable teacher imparting what has to be learnt, or  bullying a subordinate.  Today an emphasis on ‘teaching’ has fallen out of favour.  In the US, students prefer to talk about learning, not being taught, and interactions are described as discussions, taking place in a seminar, around a table.

One term I encountered much later in life was a ‘moderated discussion’.  A moderated discussion is a conversation, but with an expert there to help shape and influence the path of collective exploration.  Moderated discussions take us right back to that original sense of a lesson as based on reading.  In the kind of moderated discussion I enjoy, there is a reading, usually seen by the participants well before the session.  It is used as the basis for the conversation that takes place, and at times the moderator can take the group to one specific section of the reading, to refocus the discussion on an aspect of the point being explored.  Moderated discussions are tricky, as it is easy to do more than shape a discussion, but actually determine where it will lead.

Another important use of the word is when we talk about ‘learning a lesson’.  Such learning doesn’t have to be the result of hours of study.  My mother helped me learn a lesson about honesty in one brief unspoken process.  It was in my second year at secondary school.

In my first year, I had been bullied:  I was skinny, far from tall, and rather obviously shy, and all that made me an obvious target.  Bullying was a mixture of verbal and physical abuse, although   fortunately, and necessarily, there would always be a teacher on yard duty, and so it was never too bad.  The common trick was to herd one or two among us new boys into the narrow  passageway at the back of the school, and then throw water over us, or sometimes punch us.

By the second year, things began to change.  Now I wasn’t a newcomer, and the more recent intake was the prime focus of the bullies.  At the same time, I began to frequent the school tuck-shop.  It was there I began my lifelong love of Mars bars.  I would eat two or three a day, as well as long strips of liquorice coated on either side with a sugar mix.  Addicted, I used all my pocket money on my morning and lunchtime visits to the shop.  The consequences were obvious, and happened rather quickly:  I stopped being a skinny boy, and started to put on weight, eventually becoming very clearly overweight.  To pay for my addiction I used all the money I had, and sometimes stole loose change from mum’s purse.  I don’t know if she noticed her change sometimes shrunk, but she certainly noticed my waistline was growing.  Mum took steps to deal with the problem at the end of my second year.  Over the summer I was put on a strict diet.  What’s more, there was no money to buy food at school, I had to eat what I took from home.   Slowly the scenario reversed.  My waistline shrunk, and my mum’s purse didn’t.  I respected my mother for the way she handled all that.  She didn’t directly challenge me for stealing:  we both knew I’d gone astray, but I had to sort it out for myself.

My mother had already addressed honesty at an earlier age.  A boy my age who lived three houses up the street, was a tear-away, always in trouble, and Richard offered a fascination that translated into occasional adventures, mainly scrumping fruit.  However, leaving stealing apples to one side, the most attractive site for a risky undertaking was across the road from my house.  During the war, some 4-5 acres of ground were set aside for army materials.  By the time I was aware of any of this, the army had left, and the storage area was unattended.  It was locked, with a high chain link fence, topped with barbed wire:  to the Richards of this world, it was a magnet.  Unknown to me, he had found a way to get in – up one of the large trees alongside the vacant area, and then along a branch with the aid of a rope as he balanced his way on top of a sturdy bough, before he dropped down by holding on to the old camp telephone wires.

Richard prodded and teased me, and I gave in.  One Sunday, I went with him, up along the tree and down into the camp site.  There were Nissen huts, some old equipment: it was fascinating.  That was the day that Richard decided to play with some matches, and started a fire in one of the huts.  I knew that was trouble, and, demonstrating skills in climbing a rope and running along a tree bough that had never been shown at school:  I was out of there.  Richard was less successful, and was caught by the police.  He didn’t blab about my presence, but a neighbor had seen me getting out and told my mum.  Richard got a telling off by the police, and I think they admired his skills in getting in.  I was scolded, and sent to my room for the rest of the weekend, with no books!  My mother knew how to exact the maximum and most effective punishment possible.

1969 was a year which had provided me with another lesson.  For the previous two years, I had become deeply involved in a move to persuade King’s to go co-educational.  During the late 1960’s only 9% of students in Cambridge were women, and the only way to increase the number was to change intake into some of the men’s colleges.  Together with an older undergraduate, a ‘mature student’ returning to study after years working, I was part of a Junior Common Room group that collected data and prepared a case for change.  Our first attempt argued for opening the college to women on the grounds of equity, and some thin stuff about the benefits of co-education.  Surely the facts would be overwhelming.  In fact, our 1968 report was a failure!

A chance meeting with my former high school principal, now retired, provided a key insight.  He was running an organisation which looked after O-Level and A-Level school examinations.  When I explained the co-education project, he told me that there were around 40 girls’ schools in the UK which consistently graduated many high achieving women students in the country – at least in terms of their A-Level results.  If King’s College was to go co-educational, it could offer places to the best students in these schools.  This could guarantee some of the ‘brightest and the best’ women would enter King’s, and this would help propel the college to the top of Tripos rankings  (rankings that are an important comparison point made between the colleges, the position of each college based on a measure of how well their students performed in Tripos exams each year).  Forget all those facts about gender discrimination, a strategy to top the Tripos rankings was far more persuasive.  With a presentation to the College Fellows by the Admissions Tutor accompanied by a detailed report I had completed to present the Junior Common Room perspective (laboriously typed; I still have a copy), that possibility helped win the day, and the proposed change went through.  I had leant there were facts, and there were ambitions!

Many years later, I have conducted dozens, if not hundreds, of executive education sessions.  Many managers coming on a course are there to find some answers.  Their focus on how to – how to develop a business strategy, how to draw up a profit and loss statement, how to target a marketing exercise.  Their perspective is instrumental, and, frequently, those sending these participants are doing so because they want them to return with new skills.  It is a world in which HR departments frequently ask for evidence that programs work, and the key evidence they were working was their staff behaved differently, more capable of doing what the organisation wanted.  For as long as I can remember, training staff (notice the term) were expected to come up with a measure of ROI (yes, return on investment).  No wonder using AI is seen as so attractive:  devices, robots and systems which can do exactly what is required, never making mistakes.

I didn’t want to be seen as a trainer, improving the actions of a bunch of performing seals.  That’s often seen to be the basis of a lesson, an explanation of what you should do.  However, perhaps naively, I saw the task as one of education, and good education is discovery.  Well into my life as a manager I had rediscovered that approach to learning, attending an Executive Seminar at The Aspen Institute.  There we confronted extracts from articles and books by historians, philosophers, often contradictory and counterfactual, always encouraging thinking.  Isn’t that what I should be doing too, helping managers to be more capable of thinking and rethinking.  Surely we don’t want managers to be like those performing seals, but rather capable of new insights, new ideas, better approaches, and novel thinking?  Good at anticipating?  Yes, but anticipating what might be, duly cautious about overconfidence and misplaced expectations.  Dear me, I think I want managers to be thinkers!  I know the thought of an organisation packed full of thinkers is an anathema to many senior executives:  they prefer to reserve any thinking to themselves, and spend their time directing others.   Companies suffer from that view, and the kind of lesson that I prefer encourages exploration, asking questions, trying out ideas, learning from experiments, the way I learnt when I was an undergraduate in a social anthropology course.

One last comment on this topic.  We did have lessons when I was a student.  My college was famous for its chapel, and its Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a combination of readings, hymns and carols which has been replicated, in many variations, throughout the Christian world.  Now it is seen as a Christmas ritual, or, for the more devout, a way to celebrate the story of Jesus’s birth.  What are these nine lessons?  They are a mixture of a story, a myth if you like, from prophecies moving on to a virgin birth, people coming to witness that birth, and the beginnings of the machinations that will eventually lead to the child’s death.  At the same time there are some other lessons in this collection, about the consequences of disobeying rules (in the Garden of Eden), the rewards of faith (for Abraham), the possibility of reconciliation and peace, and finally, in that extraordinarily powerful ninth lesson, a commentary on the ‘great mystery of the incarnation’ (the one that opens “In the beginning was the Word”).  A lesson offering a reading to help you reflect, consider and possibly learn:  that’s my kind of lesson.

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