True Story 7.16
Pandemonium erupts in a Western business course in China
The setting for this story
Bob and Cindy, American behavioral scientists, developed a management program for a Chinese institute and began delivering the course to young leaders. (This was back around 1980, when China was a rather different place from what it is today.) Below they recall their biggest blind spot.
A story of misaligned minds26
The two of us structured the training so that students could not only participate actively in classroom discussions but also contribute to decisions about how our program was delivered. We even included simulated real-life experiences so they could practice the managerial techniques they were learning.
The institute’s administrators expressed strong reservations about all this student participation, which was inconsistent with Chinese classroom norms. They went so far as to accuse us of failing to do our jobs, implying that we wanted the students to take over our responsibilities.
One day, a facet of our minds’ misalignment with our students’ minds thundered into view.
Our students were discussing several possible grading schemes for our program. They noted that more information on the specifics of each scheme would help them better determine each one’s costs and benefits. But instead of asking us for the details they viewed as missing, they went ahead and reached consensus in favor of one of the grading schemes.
We immediately realized that here was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the impact of information on decisions. We offered to supply the details they had regarded as missing, adding that after considering the new information, they could reach a different decision if they wished.
The class erupted into angry shouts and heated discussions. After hostile words were yelled at us, more than half of the students physically separated themselves and refused to participate.
After tempers cooled a little, we were able to communicate with the separated students via a neutral student serving as an intermediary (common in China). They had interpreted our offer as proof that we had not really given them the power of decision. In their opinion, we were attempting to manipulate the group into arriving at our own preconceived best choice. One student put it this way: “This is the way things always are done. We have no decision, just talk!”
Bob and Cindy’s question
There seems to have been a big misunderstanding of our intentions. But what, precisely, was it?
Critique of story 7.16
Throughout its recorded history, China has been an example of a society guided by communitarian expectations and values, including hierarchical decision making and deep respect for those who are aged, academically advanced, or in leadership roles. This way of doing things is visible not only in the government of China but also in its schools and classrooms.
The long-accepted pattern is that students enter a classroom expecting to revere their teacher as a fount of knowledge and a personal mentor, and to depend on him or her to authoritatively tell them what to learn and, in the end, ensure that they do well on the inevitable challenging exam.
These young adult students were aware of the world beyond China and had figured out that getting things done happens differently in other countries. They knew that students in the West have a degree of autonomy and choice in their degree programs and classrooms – which many older Chinese students found intriguing, even attractive. Bob and Cindy had more or less expected this and planned to deliver a program that would respond to their students’ individualistic yearnings. They had arrived in China sensitive to the values and expectations of Chinese university students in business oriented programs. Good start!
The subtle twist they didn’t fully grasp was that, because talk of democracy and related Western ideals had been increasing in China, decision-makers sometimes solicited input from those below them. But their soliciting of input from below often was little more than a polite nod to the fact that democratic ideals were becoming trendy among educated Chinese. At the end of the day, the solicited input did little or nothing to realign established decision-making patterns. It was a ritual of mass participation with, usually, scant impact on subsequent events.
These advanced students were consciously aware of this “bait and switch” pattern in their society, which they hated. (The “bait” is soliciting input from below; the “switch” is for decision-makers to pretty much ignore it.) Bob and Cindy’s sensitivity wasn’t sufficiently fine-tuned to notice this hidden cultural – more precisely, political – complication.
So when Bob and Cindy reacted to their students’ freely reached decision by offering fresh details that might enable them to make a “superior” decision, the students perceived a deliberate “switch” in progress, which they viewed as intending to manipulate them into agreeing with the outcome preselected by their professors. Hence the classroom eruption.
For thought
Some teachers accept positions in an unfamiliar society but don’t try to learn about its culture of learning. To their credit, this seems not to be true of Bob and Cindy. But should they have been able to foresee this particular flashpoint?
Related stories
Story 4.06 discusses the failure of another business course, but for entirely different reasons.
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Endnotes:
26 Lindsay & Dempsey, 270–72.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.