No. 16, October 2022. “Forty hours,” Professor C. Roland Christensen replied when asked by a member of the doctoral seminar how much time was spent preparing a new case. Outside, snow was falling on the fields of Harvard Business School, but the discussion in the Ph.D. Program room at Cotting House was sometimes heated. Some of us thought that the great teacher was kidding us.
The preparation of a discussion class does not only have to do with the content of the case that you are going to teach, nor only with the objectives of the session or the course. Debate occurs between people, and nothing is more important in discussing cases than information about them—information that is irrelevant in the magisterial method.
At HBS as well as at INCAE, we receive cards with information about the 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 loquacious? Who is quiet or insecure? Who needs support? Who exposes little analyzed positions, which must be challenged?
A Peruvian colleague from the doctoral program who later taught for years at HBS recounted how her children “tested” her with class cards until she could repeat the relevant information about each of the XNUMX class members. Waste of time? Only if we see students as objects, and not the subjects of learning.
One of the “cases upon cases” prepared by the HBS C. Roland Christensen Teaching-Learning Center shows the impact that ineffective use of the method can have on a student. It is about an assistant professor of quantitative methods who is frustrated after seventy minutes of class, during which no student had figured out how to distribute in-process inventory through the various sections of a manufacturing plant. With only ten minutes left in class, an intelligent but shy young woman, with no managerial experience and very timid, suggested a solution. The assistant professor asked questions with the intention of supporting her, but the questioning tone of her voice had the opposite effect: she never participated again for the rest of the course.
Not knowing the participants well in a class can also cause surprises, sometimes uncomfortable ones. Professor Christensen himself told us about 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 start the class a very formal man, sitting in the first row, who turned out to be a religious preacher and a teetotaler. After a long and very awkward silence, a classmate came to the rescue.
The preparation of the contents of a case is only the visible point of the eardrum in the preparation. If we are not aware of the learning and growth needs of the class and its various members, the best plan can fail by asking the wrong people the right questions.
Was Professor Christensen kidding us when he said, on that winter morning at Cotting House, that it takes forty hours to prepare a case? I still don't know, and he can't tell us anymore.
