At Charlie Wankel's invitation, I have joined this list and am sending a
description of my way of teaching Management and OB and of the book with
which I do it.
Roger Putzel
Maximum Use of Process
XB: The Experience-Based Learning Organization
by Roger Putzel, PhD
Many teachers and trainers want to bring an immediate experience of
Management and Organizational Behavior to students. Treating the
classroom as an organization (CAO) allows us to use real events as
learning opportunities, to use process. This short description
introduces an approach which makes maximum use of process.
First, a contrast with three other approaches to CAO: cases which
replicate participants' experience, class projects, and building an
organization. A good case can mirror the experience of groups of
students working on it, but each group is doing exactly the same job as
the next group. Real organizations don't work like that. Class
projects, like running a candy stand, make it easy for groups to have
different tasks, but participants focus on concrete tasks of production,
marketing, and finance rather than organizational behavior - just like
the real world, but they don't learn OB! Students asked to build an
organization from scratch do not have the time or background to design,
implement, and change anything very complex; they often look back on the
course as "unstructured." In all three cases the teacher makes the
links to the real world and by talking a lot becomes more focal than
necessary.
XB (the eXperience Base) is a complex organization whose service (or
product) is participants' learning of concepts and skills of management
and organizational behavior. This organization exists, full-fledged in
The XB Manual. Students take over this organization by reading the
manual, assuming responsibilities as it directs them.
Treating the classroom as an organization, we apply theories of
management and organizational behavior (OB) primarily to our own
experience, that is to structures, procedures, events, and people in the
class. Groups of students have different functions, take responsibility
for administering and running the class, and must work together for the
organization to succeed. Members join one of three groups in one of
four departments, each group having unique administrative, teaching, and
grading responsibilities.
Management means getting things done through other people, so the
teacher, playing the Senior Manager role, delegates every possible
function. I even delegate grading, although other senior managers do
not. You don't have to be either the greatest manager or the greatest
teacher. XB mixes these roles so that where one fails as a manager one
can still succeed as a teacher and vice versa. The Senior Manager
coaches, often giving advice outside class, trying to stay out of the
way and let others manage their parts of the organization.
The XB Manual spells out in minute detail how the different departments
and jobs should function - unless members have a better idea. The book
also helps the reader apply management and OB theories and tools to
managing the XB Organization.
Each group reads its own part of the manual and other text assignments
on its topics, so by the third week (in theory) the organization has
done all the reading for the semester. The organization must then
exploit its internal resources. Each group's objective is to teach
members of other groups specific topics which it has learned, as these
topics apply to XB. They grade other members' learning. Some grading
is done by rank order, no ties allowed, to guarantee conflict and frank
discussion within groups.
The groups may reach their objectives in any way they choose. Some
groups make presentations; others achieve their objectives by
approaching individuals outside class and getting them to do something
differently. Others do nothing at all.
Though they can read what to do, members usually take three weeks (of a
semester) to get used to not being told what to do, i.e., to feeling
like managers, not students. Many members begin this course with no
great sense of responsibility. They struggle to find out how the
organization functions, and they learn that they - or no one - will make
XB work.
By design, some disorder ensues. Following the manual doesn't make this
organization work (or any other): some members sit back and let others
work, and then important sectors of the organization do not function as
they should. Most groups don't work effectively because they only know
their own material; the organizing people don't control; the planners
don't motivate etc. But XB wouldn't succeed as a learning organization
if it functioned smoothly. Disorder creates opportunities for learning,
and theories and concepts of management and organizational behavior
offer excellent diagnostic tools for understanding what is going on and
for making the organization more effective. Groups learn to recognize
situations where their skill or theory is needed. As they provide a
missing concept or teach a relevant skill, the organization begins to
work. Thus a modicum of chaos motivates and provides the opportunity
for people to learn the fundamentals: setting and reaching objectives,
rational decision making, functional authority, effective delegation,
how to recover from failure, the necessity of communicating, and above
all, continual learning from experience.
The groups also exercise specific line responsibilities, running every
possible administrative aspect of the organization, including scheduling
topics for upcoming meetings (classes), planning the agenda for each
meeting, moderating discussion, and making sure that members do certain
things regularly (such as using e-mail to communicate with other
members). A teacher could do any of these administrative tasks better
than any member but could never do all as well as they do. Moderating a
discussion, for instance, means little to a teacher but motivates a
participant, especially if the moderator is being supervised by someone
whose job it is to train moderators.
Leaders and a distinct organizational culture emerge, and participants
observe and discuss how they emerge. Students learn many of the same
theories as in other management and OB courses, but in this course they
use the theory in the middle of the action. After the course they feel
at home in the hurly-burly of real organizations.
Roger Putzel has run XB with traditional undergraduates at St. Michael's
College, mid-level public sector managers in francophone Africa, and
non-traditional students in a conflict resolution program at Woodbury
College. Since the spring of 1996 Elyssebeth Leigh and several
colleagues have run XB with adult students working for degrees in
education at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Professor
Deborah Roebuck, of Kennesaw State University, ran two sections over the
summer of 1997 and will be running XB again next semester.
The complete manual is available in English. A French version is half
complete. If you want to make maximum use of process and experience a
real organization in a classroom, please contact
Roger Putzel
Assoc. Prof. of Bus. Adm.
St. Michael's College
Colchester, Vermont
USA
rputzel@SMCVT.EDU
XB Websites:
http://198.114.149.4/xb./
http://homepages.smcvt.edu/xb/
http://homepages.smcvt.edu/bu303a/