Living the learning

We are part of an 800-year old university that is always at the cutting edge of world issues.

This forces us to remain innovative in our classrooms and challenges our participants to navigate the ever-changing, business landscapes of their own. Associate Fellows, Gavin Weeks and Tracey Camilleri, write about how the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme continually adapts to address modern leadership challenges.

When Homer wrote in the 7th Century BC about Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, he used the Greek word ‘metis’ to describe his leadership skill. During the ten years that Odysseus spent navigating his way home, he had to escape the Cyclops, half his men were turned into swine, the Sirens tempted him onto the rocks as well as having to chart the dangerous course between Scylla and Charybdis. Familiar challenges perhaps to the average corporate executive today. 

‘Metis’ means quite literally the combination of wisdom and ‘cunning’ or strategising. ‘It is with metis that a helmsman over the wine-dark sea steers his swift ship battered by the winds,’ Homer explained. It’s the kind of leadership skill that can only be developed through experience. Seamanship manuals may have got Odysseus so far but it was an improvised, trial and error approach that enabled him to act his way into his legendary leadership.

Just as you can’t learn to ride a bike by reading up on cycling, so it is with leading an organisation. In fact, any leadership – whether of a group of soldiers returning from the Trojan Wars, a start-up or a large corporate, requires ‘metis’. Leadership is not a technical skill to be mastered, it is a constantly evolving set of relationships to be lived. Understanding your relationship to the changing crosswinds, to your team and ultimately to yourself is the curriculum.

To create states of high curiosity and to engage participants’ whole-hearted attention, our approach is often orthogonal. We come at things from an angle.

This requires people to adapt in the moment and to open themselves up to discovery. We also use surprise; a great emotion for learning.

If, for example, you invite a finance academic to teach a group of senior bankers, the encounter tends to engage the evaluative, expert part of their brains. This is perfect when technical skills are being learned. But on a leadership programme, the encounter can engender a sit-back, arms crossed, head-on-one side response – ‘So, what do you know about what it’s really like for me’?

Conversely, invite those leaders into Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a vehicle to explore ways of leading after a storm or crisis. The bankers, in our experience, lean-forward. The competitive dynamic in the group dissipates; after all, the last time most of them encountered Shakespeare was at school. They are all beginners here. Their curiosity is piqued. We have their attention and engagement. As one CEO we interviewed said:

If surprise is a good emotion for learning, then fear is another. Not terror, of course (the worst emotion for learning), just a little lip of apprehension, particularly when it is shared amongst the participants as a fellow feeling. The experience of conducting a professional group of musicians in an Oxford College chapel, produces exactly that feeling of being squarely outside one’s comfort zone.

That enlightenment - and confidence – in this particular exercise comes from realising you can lead people effectively who are expert in areas where you are not. In this case, it is a group of professional singers. As the experience unfolds, you can quite literally hear the effect you have on your ‘followers’ through the quality of the music that comes back at you.

It is not a question of being a heroic leader at the front – the skill is more about creating an environment within which specialists can thrive. The chapel becomes an echo chamber for each person’s leadership. Moreover, each new conductor is observed by their peers stepping into this theatre of uncertainty. Observers are later invited to give and receive feedback that reinforces confidence; ‘if I can do this, then I can lead my people in my organisation’.

On the programme we see leadership not as a set of traits or skills but as a set of relationships: it is a social skill.

Good leadership lives in the relationship a leader has with themselves, their teams and with the changing context.

This simple realisation is liberating for people. It doesn't locate any shortfalls or inadequacies solely within the person of the leader. It allows for a kind of prototyping approach where you can step outside your leadership, test it, reflect and walk around it.

Leadership itself is interdependent – it’s not all about you – so you can be less defensive when things are going wrong. More options appear – for example simply taking half a step back can change the dynamics of a team relationship. Many leaders leave the programme having a made a simple decision to do slightly less and slightly differently and are amazed how their teams rise up to the challenge of the newly created space. Having decided to do less, they achieve more.

By ‘indirections we seek directions out’, Hamlet, another play we have used as a case study on the programme. Another plank of our pedagogy (apart from experiential learning) is to come at issues and challenges from an angle. This is not training. We aim to marshal senior people’s scattered attention by bringing in a diversity of perspective either from the wider University or from expert practitioners, perspective that they would not ordinarily encounter. On the previous programme alone, faculty included an economist, a professor of strategy, an improviser, a conductor and eight professional singers, two clinical psychologists, a complexity specialist, an entrepreneur, a sociologist, a botanist, an activist, a theatre director, a tai chi teacher, a historian, an inventor, a performance coach. There’s no chance of being bored.

So why, for example – a botanist? What is the connection between a love of plants and leadership? Chris Thorogood, Deputy Director of the Oxford Botanic Gardens, explained how he used surprise and delight in his role as the public communicator about science. He demonstrated the importance of precise observation and in so doing, proved us all to be ‘green blind’. He embodied the passion of his discipline as he described his search through a remote jungle to discover a rare plant. Bruised and covered in leeches; he had photos!, he discovered that ‘a single flower can make a man cry’. He fascinated us by showing how new technologies take inspiration from natural structures, like the underside of the giant water lily. Through the medium of an Iranian herbarium, he reflected on how knowledge can get lost– how, for example, the wisdom locked in previous generations’ minds, undigitised, can disappear forever. His approach had direct resonance with the group and their own leadership.

You can't simply present people with interesting, generative perspectives if the aim is to change their practice and take something tangible and practical away.

The learning model is based upon the three-legged stool: provocation (often with discussion), reflection and peer engagement and finally synthesis and connection. This rigorous connection back – or ‘so what for me?’ is what is so often left out of leadership programmes. We have a group of experienced tutors who are with the programme throughout the week – each responsible for a small tutor group. These groups form the heart of the programme. Building on the Socratic tradition of the University - where individual learning happens largely through conversation, argument, feedback and experiment, the experienced tutors encourage each participant to synthesise each session into relevance and use.

The tutor groups are small. Deliberately no more than six members so each can have share of voice and the undivided attention of the group during the week. They also serve as a container for the diversity of participants on the programme. Each group member gets a chance to lay out the parameters of their strategic challenge before the others in the group and to get the benefit of their wisdom.

The feedback comes without edge, free from office politics and as a result the tutorial relationships often last for many years post programme. In our alumni interviews, one CEO said his tutorial group (from four years previously) had been supporting one another through the pandemic.

Participants learn a great deal about themselves during the intensive week, as well as learning from one another.

They often come with a set idea of who they are and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Sometimes this sense of self stems from being pigeon-holed as far back as childhood eg ‘I’m not creative…I’m a numbers person..’, sometimes it’s because they have had to develop mastery in one particular track. They are genuinely surprised when their fellow participants experience them differently.

They often talk about starting to ‘remember’ themselves from when they were younger, as if they have had to cut off access to particular parts of themselves in order to succeed. Of course, we can learn and develop (we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t believe that) but it is often as if participants haven’t had time to catch up with themselves, to realise how they affect others – and how others affect them. Most of them realise they are more able to lead well than they had previously believed; they had more in their repertoire to call on. It was there all along.

The week gives them a chance to rehearse, prototype, experiment new approaches to being at the helm of the ship – and it provides a fair wind that takes the learning home.