Making In-Class Management Education “Ready-to-Hand”

Next week I start teaching my MBA class on management. In preparation, I have been reading some new books, such as Animal Spirits and Nudge. What I have read has raised some interesting questions about how to get what students learn in the class to translate into their jobs. In short, how to make what is learned “ready to hand”. By ready to hand, I mean right there, available for use in the moment.

People have two modes of thinking: automatic and reflective. Automatic is what we do automatically, without thinking. Getting angry when we spill coffee, ducking when someone throws a shoe at our head, and yawning when someone elese yawns are all the product of automatic thinking. Thinking that is so ingrained, so “who we are” that it can happen without us even being aware. Reflective thinking is the kind you use when you are considering options, designing plans, or working things out. You have the opportunity to consider, to weigh, to contemplate options and possible consequences. Reflective thinking is the kind of thinking you do when you are given a problem and have to come up with a solution.

So here’s what I am looking at. Much of management appears to happen in automatic thinking in the day-to-day interactions that constitute work. When we are at a team meeting and tempers rise, most of us do not reflect “Hmmm, I notice I am getting bothered here. Perhaps I should….before I say anything.” Nope, it’s more likely we “just do it” and say or do what we do – automatically and without thinking. Then after the meeting, when our reflective thinking considers what happened, we may decide what we did was the right/wrong thing. How many times after an interaction with someone have you thought about what you should have said or done? That’s your reflective thinking commenting on your automatic thinking.

But in-class education is based mostly in reflective thinking. It’s talking about what we could, would, should do without the immediacy of the situation and our life impinging on us. It’s good that it’s removed from the “on-the-firing-line” nature of life so we can think about it and come to understand it. But therein lies the issue – reflective thinking isn’t automatic. Learning a new theory of leadership in reflective thinking doesn’t move it into automatic thinking where it is more likely to be used, “in the moment”.

I don’t have any answers, though I have some suspicions (like practice is required). And I don’t think everything we have in reflective thinking should become automatic, but some of it would probably be more helpful to managers if it were more “ready to hand”.