By Emily Plews
I spent the 14th summer of my life riding at least 12 miles daily to go hang out with friends. I am sure I worried my parents’ sick that summer. (My parents’ concerns were valid, but a stubborn, 14 year-old-me would have never admitted that.) I would ride alone on roads with narrow shoulders, with cars travelling 55 mph and without a cell phone or flashing bike light. Truth be told, I wore the headphones to my Sony Discman more than I ever wore a helmet. The only safety measure I agreed to was making a phone call when I got to where I was headed. You may think my parents were crazy to let me do this, but I am endlessly grateful for their intentional trust. Such independence at that time fostered invaluable, new understanding of my personal strength and capability. Here I am, 15 years later, still learning from that summer but this time as an analogy to an experience I’m having as an observer of an undergraduate educational program with a positive organizational scholarship (P.O.S.) component.
At the onset of the program, I joined others in the worry that P.O.S concepts might be “over undergraduates’ heads” and not applicable to the other major part of the program; team consulting projects for local businesses. I knew our students would be bright, but I had only known positive organizational scholarship classes to be taught to experienced students in the MBA and executive MBA programs. In these environments, the students usually have years of experience that helps each ground and contrast P.O.S. concepts in and to their own lives. Were these usual attributes of the P.O.S. student actually necessary attributes to learning P.O.S. concepts?
We are more than half way through the program and my worries appear to be, for the most part, unfounded.
The analogy: my parents gave me a bike, taught me to ride it, and trusted me to ride it safely. For many of the students this summer the analog progression has been as follows: professors from the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship offered the students new tools and taught them to use them during 24 hours of workshops. Many parties, including the students themselves, have to trust that these new tools can be used safely. Pairing the introduction of P.O.S. concepts to a concurrent action-learning experience is, I think, an inextricable part of the equation. I needed a reasonable destination to ride my bike safely like the students needed a safe place to try out these new ideas. I can see that the P.O.S. ideas are becoming for many of the undergraduates what my bike became to me- a powerful way to see the world.
To give you a sense of how I see the students integrating P.O.S. ideas, I’ll share with you a few observations. (Note the students are not getting a grade this summer.)
- Professors Quinn and Cameron introduced the Competing Values Framework as a tool to understanding the context of consulting problems. One team has seen how culture plays a role in their consulting problem and plans to tailor implementation suggestions to the dynamic and diverse cultures of the related departments of their project sponsor.
- Some teams have solved the basic problem presented and are now challenging themselves to find ways to add more value and be positively deviant, a fundamental concept in P.O.S. they learned this summer.
- A story Professor Dutton told about the famous(ly P.O.S. friendly) Zingerman’s companies monitoring group energy during meetings with an actual meter inspired one of teams to create their own meter and tactics for managing team energy. The team’s tactics are creative interpretations of things they learned about high quality connections, also during Professor Dutton’s workshop.
- The team leaders arrange opportunities to collaborate and learn across teams. This became a priority to them after Wayne Baker’s session on social networks and reciprocity.
- I could go on….
So the lessons I learned after lots of biking 15 years ago and one summer with some amazing professors and students are these:
- Parents, educators, managers, and so on: remember to weigh the risks of a challenging development opportunity with faith in the process of human learning. If you need help remembering how simple learning can be, think of this quote from Goethe, “Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception within us.”
- The concepts of Positive Organizational Scholarship may be challenging and often a topic for academics and executives, but they are also empowering and ubiquitously helpful to the human experience. What a fascinating thing for people of all ages to contemplate!