Problem-Solving, Opportunity-Exploitation and Therapy Discussion Groups I spent 2 or 3 hours per day for 3-5 days per week every quarter or semester of my teaching career for 35 years leading problem-solving and opportunity-exploitation discussion groups with normally about 30 business students per group in a state university. I would walk into class, find a good seat just like those the students were sitting in, ask them to please turn to page 181 in their reading (or whatever the page number of the case of the day happened to be), and spin a spinner, like the one shown at the top of my Facebook page. Whoever the spinner landed on, per the course contract, had to answer three questions: What is the Problem or Opportunity? What are the Alternatives? What Do You Recommend? If the randomly-selected student had not read the case s/he lost a letter grade from the course. Consequently almost all students always read the case before class and laid out the case answering the 3 above questions satisfactorily. Almost never did a student have all the right answers in the opening ice-breaker and high energy discussions and arguments normally ensued for the remainder of the 50-min session trying to get to the bottom of things and come up with some good answers. Rarely does such a process exist in the real world. People are isolated and there is no way to have good face to face discussions. Most discussions are dominated by blowhards like you find on Fox News. Bosses in most organizations and groups tell subordinates what to think, do and say to make a living hoping to maintain the status quo and help the boss get a promotion and make more money. Facebook comes closest to my case method process of any process I have run across in the real world, with photographic faces, with everyone having an equal opportunity to say something, albeit voluntarily. The same thing happens in some therapy groups, conducted by psychotherapists in the real world, except here you are dealing with real-time problems and opportunities instead of paper cases. Naturally I think the case method of business teaching is best or I would not have used it 35 years, and I believe all students in such processes should have an equal opportunity to truthfully tell the group what they think are the problems, what are the alternatives, and what they recommend. Which is why I think Facebook is the best social medium. For ramifications see Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, a business bible for people who want to do the right thing for all Earthians, at amazon/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369058766&sr=1-1&keywords=business+voyages Richard John Stapleton, June 12, 2013
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:03:19 +0000
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