No. 26, March-April 2024. During the 1980s, when there was a civil war in El Salvador, between government forces supported by the U.S. military and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), I conducted a seminar on "Management Decision Making" for the Salvadoran Minimum Housing Foundation (FSVM), founded twenty years earlier by Salvadoran business leaders to promote low-cost social housing solutions for the country's most vulnerable populations.

FSVM's Executive Director was a graduate of a well-known university in the eastern United States and had more than ten years of experience in international organizations dedicated to social development. FSVM's technical staff members were young graduates of local universities, many of whom were sympathetic to the FMLN guerrillas.

I had arrived in El Salvador the night before the seminar and had breakfast at the hotel restaurant with the Executive Director, promptly at 7:00 a.m., to get to know each other personally and discuss his expectations of the activity. The conversation was cordial, but the Director became serious when he warned me: "...be very tactful in the classes and be careful not to get into political issues. Some of our promoters are leftist and very anti-gringo..."

Soon the participants, all staying at the hotel, began to arrive at the restaurant but did not approach our table. Shortly before 8:00 a.m. they moved to a room where there were about seven round tables, each with 5 or 6 chairs for the 40 participants, already organized in seven random groups. According to the schedule of the event, they were allotted an hour for group discussion before moving to another room for the first plenary session.

For the first case, I had assigned the Dashman Company, a decentralized company whose protagonist, the new vice president of purchasing, is mandated to coordinate the supply chain. The 3-page case was written in 1946, and was still the best-selling case in Harvard Business School history.

As was my custom, I circulated among the tables to greet the participants and make sure the groups were discussing the case and not talking about soccer. Satisfied that the group discussions were on track, I went to the room where the first plenary session would begin in half an hour to give a final review of my lesson plan.

With fifteen to nine o'clock the Executive Director entered the room and turned to me, visibly agitated. "I told you that you had to be sensitive to the situation in this country," he said to me, his voice quivering with anger. "How could you put a case about a company that manufactures miscellaneous equipment for the U.S. military, while American planes are bombing our villages, killing civilians...?"

Without waiting for me to answer, he turned and left the room.

* * *

This is a real case. I had only a few minutes to make a decision before the participants entered the room. I reviewed my options: offer an apology or proceed as if nothing had happened. I could also start the session with an interactive lecture on managerial decision making, leaving the case aside. I had the films on hand and the overhead projector - state-of-the-art technology forty years ago - was ready.

Situations like this can occur in case method teaching because, unlike lecture teaching, it is highly interactive and less predictable. One of the "cases about cases" published by the C. Roland Christensen Center, entitled "The Offended Colonel," tells the story of a confrontation between a professor, frustrated by the shallowness of the discussion about the case of a civilian in charge of an investigation of irregularities (corruption) in the military at a seminar for the military, responds with the use of the word "m*****" to a participant's comment, and at the end of the session, a colonel stands up and demands that the professor apologize to the lady in the audience for the use of that profane word. Just as in my situation, the decision had to be made immediately.

It is best to prevent these confrontations from occurring. In the colonel's case, there is information about the context of the event, the audience, the case selected, relevant policies and procedures such as class scheduling, and the background of the professor himself-five determinants of success or failure in teaching with the case method-that pointed to disaster.

It is useful to assess the status of these factors before teaching a session, before designing a course, or even before making an institutional decision to adopt the case method, because of the scope of the implications it has. Schools with experience with the method already have fine-tuned systems for getting student cards to teachers ahead of time (see #25 of this blog) and for ensuring that student nametags are properly posted. It is details like these that help prevent the unexpected from happening.

But the moment something unexpected happens, a lot depends on the good judgment of the teacher. In the case of the "Offended Colonel", the professor decided not to offer any apology and the colonel left the class. He then spoke to the lady who was not offended, and the incident seemed to pass without further incident. But it is unlikely that the Military College would invite that professor again.

* * *

Back to the Dashman Company case in El Salvador: once the participants were comfortably seated, I threw out the following question point-blank: "Is there a problem in this case? What is it?" Almost every hand went up and the debate began, which continued with a very high level of energy for the eighty minutes that the session lasted.

At the back of the room sat the Executive Director, watching with an expression of surprise and satisfaction. Toward the end of the session, some conclusions came out-of theirs and not mine-about the true meaning of authority: it is not acquired with a title, it is earned with credibility. The Dashman Company, like any good case, has no "right" solution but has profound messages-and learnings.

One of the lessons I learned from the experience in El Salvador is the importance of thinking carefully about the impact that the selected cases could have on the audience. I was lucky on that occasion, but the next group might have a different reaction to the case.

Another lesson is the importance of visiting the focus groups before the plenary session, not to intervene, not only to observe the level of preparedness and mood of the participants, but also to detect signs that something unexpected might occur. My observations of the FSVM groups convinced me that the participants were immersed in the situation of the case protagonist and did not care whether the company produced tanks or screws.

A third lesson is that one should always have a plan B, even if the likelihood of having to use it is remote, because of the sense of confidence it gives one. I knew that in the worst-case scenario, I could fall back on the introductory presentation on management decisions, as if everything had been planned that way.

Blog "A Quemarropa, on teaching the Case Method", by Prof. John C. Ickis.

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