No. 16, October 2022.
"Forty hours," Professor C. Roland Christensen replied when a member of the doctoral seminar asked him about how much time was spent preparing a new case. Outside, snow was falling on the Harvard Business School grounds, but the discussion in the Doctoral Program room at Cotting House was heated at times. Some of us thought the great master was pulling our leg.
The preparation of a class discussion is not only about the content of the case you are going to teach, nor only about the objectives of the session or course. Debate occurs between people and nothing is more important in case discussion than information about them-information that is irrelevant to the teaching method.
At HBS as well as at INCAE, we receive cards with information about MBA students' nationality, gender, profession and university, work experience and favorite hobbies. And even more important is the information that these cards do not contain but that can be inferred in the first class sessions: Who is talkative? Who is quiet or insecure? Who needs support? Who puts forward under-analyzed positions, which need to be challenged?
A Peruvian colleague in the doctoral program who later taught for years at HBS recounted how her children would "quiz" her with the class flashcards until she could repeat the relevant information about each of the ninety class members. Waste of time? Only if we see students as objects, not the subjects of learning.
One of the "case studies" prepared by the C. Roland Christensen Teaching-Learning Center at HBS shows the impact that ineffective use of the method can have on a student. Roland Christensen of HBS, shows the impact that ineffective use of method can have on a student. It is about an assistant professor of quantitative methods who finds himself frustrated after seventy minutes of class time, during which no student had figured out how to distribute in-process inventory throughout the various sections of a manufacturing plant. With only ten minutes left in the class, an intelligent but shy young woman, with no management experience and a lot of shyness, suggested a solution. The teaching assistant asked questions intended to be supportive, but the probing tone of her voice had the opposite effect: she never participated again for the remainder of the course.
Not knowing the participants in a class can also cause surprises, sometimes uncomfortable ones. Professor Christensen himself told us of his experience in a senior management program, in a session on the decision of Heublein, Inc. a company that produced Smirnoff brand vodka, to acquire a brewery. He asked point-blank to begin the class a very formal gentleman sitting in the front row, who turned out to be a religious preacher and teetotaler. After a long and very uncomfortable silence, a classmate came to the rescue.
The preparation of the content of a case is only the visible eardrum point in the preparation. If we are not aware of the learning and growth needs of the class and its various members, the best plan may fail to ask the right questions of the wrong people.
Was Professor Christensen kidding us when he said, on that winter morning at Cotting House, that preparing a case takes forty hours? I still don't know, and he can no longer tell us.
