Conceptual Reasoning 3: classroom discussion

Thinking constitutes an acquired skill refined with practice.

Hi again guys,

I'm hoping that we can make the refinement of your conceptual reasoning skills fun.  

Here's an explanation.

Much of our course and project work centers on thinking conceptually: i.e., abstracting away from the immediate details of a situation to comprehend a problem and solution. We recognized this ability (to think in terms of concepts) as essential in student candidates and a central theme developed across courses, thereby helping you to refine this ability as you progress through our programme. It in part typifies the transformation we say should occur in our students. 

It may also be possible to turn this ability into a game.  As you interact in class, consider asking your peers the following question: 

• What do you mean by…? 
• How are you defining…? 
• What assumptions are you making…? 
• What is your basic premise / logic?
• Can you abstract away from case details to clarify your argument?
• Do you have credible sources to support your logic? 
• Are you arguing from data points (symptoms of a problem)?
• Are you arguing from experience?
• Is that your opinion? (the same thing as arguing from experience)
• Does your small-N logic generalize? 
• Can you reasonably argue from analogy or metaphor?

 "All I hear is noise."

Conceptual Reasoning 1: and its application

Conceptual Reasoning

This blog post is for our students (the focus audience); all others

 may feel free to listen in.  

Hey guys,

You've completed your first major writing assignment and soon face end-of-term projects and exams.  A sufficient context exists to explain conceptual reasoning and its application to (1) reading course materials and (2) writing as a scholar/professional.  In this post, I want to describe how the brain processes sensory data into percepts (i.e., meaningful perceptual representations of the world), experiences and concepts arising from experience.  I'll emphasize the following critical insight:

Experiences informs your gut feelings (i.e., intuition), but your experience-based conceptual understanding of the world (i.e., knowledge based on one lifetime) remains opinion and inadequate to call yourself a professional.  You need to ground your thinking in established bodies of knowledge (e.g., marketing, finance, Org. Leadership, etc.); you do not get to make the world up from scratch.

 Goethe put it this way, "He who cannot draw on three thousand of years human 

history lives from hand to mouth." ...a subsistence existence.

Here goes. All sensory data (except olfactory) enters the brain through the thalamus and is channeled to primary sensory cortices (V1 for vision). V1 neurons process the same minute details of any visual stimuli: they code for orientation at a point in space and spatial frequency of stimuli at that location. No meaningful, big-picture pixelated representation of the world exists.

These data advance along the ventral visual pathway to the Inferior Temporal Cortex (ITC), where percepts (meaningful visual representations) are recognized and stored. This is where you recognize people (including specific individuals), places and things.  These data undergo additional processing in an associative hierarchy and are integrated into meaningful experiences in the hippocampus; you remember emotion-laden events that trace the important moment in your life.

The hippocampus is also recognized as the nexus between percepts and concepts. For instance, learned associations between stimuli arise from statistical regularities in your environment (e.g., person + place = barista), and these regularities prove beneficial for predicting and interpreting future sensory data.  Try this: think about a rugby field and picture the things you would expect to see: white lines, goals, players, bleachers and fans.  You see these things, infer, "rugby," and adjust your behavior accordingly. This kind of experience-based learning is essential, but only carries you so far.

Leadership, justice and trust comprise the three (multidimensional) concepts (the focus) of Julia Richardson's Organizational Leadership course.  Now, based on your experience, you may somewhat grasp the meaning of these higher-order concepts.  Maybe you've known someone who demonstrated leadership, but any experience-based reasoning remains hand-to-mouth and inadequate for our MBA education.  We encourage you to share experiences in the classroom, but you should remember, experience-based reasoning is:

1. based on a small N sample (N = one).
2. essentially arguing from opinion (bad, very bad, wrong).
3. with very limited generalizability (change the context and your experience loses value).    

We ask you to:

1. abstract away from complex business problems.
2. ground your thinking in established bodies of knowledge (course materials).
3. define key concepts (from course materials) as a foundation for constructing logical arguments.
4. Use course materials for in class discussions, written assignments and exams.
5. And, appropriately reference your sources.

I know, my explanation of the brain is abbreviated and crude but, if you want a
more thorough explanation, you'll need to ask me nicely.

Cheers,  David

Meet our Term One Lecturers: Julia Richardson

 Associate Professor Julia Richardson 

I'm please to introduce Julia Richardson, one of our perennial favourite lecturers, from York University, the Schulich School of Business, in Toronto Canada, ranked number thirteen of Elite Global  Business Schools in the QS Global 200, 2013 report. We (the Otago MBA management team) consider Julia's involvement in our programme as an example of our ability to recruit top professors from around the world (see also Denis Kobzev).

Julia is our lecturer for Organizational Leadership for the tenth year and views teaching on the Otago MBA as "always one of the highlights" of her academic year, owing to the diversity of students’ professional, academic and personal experiences. "This diversity in the classroom adds an extra ‘edge’ to learning outcomes and, equally importantly, offers a unique opportunity to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the implications of what it means to be a leader."

Julia’s interest in global leadership careers stems from her own international work experience. She has worked in the private and public sectors in the UK, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore prior to taking her current position at York University, Toronto. Her corporate experience focused primarily on career coaching, recruitment and selection, and training and development. In her position at York University, Julia teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, with a specific focus on international human resource management and career management.

As a personal insight, Julia is a phenomenally likeable person with an upbeat approach to life.  She innately focuses on the quality of students' reasoning (i.e., what and how they think) rather than whether they adopt a "lecturer advocated" perspective.  She recognizes that "right answers" do not exist at the MBA level and readily adapts her class (and pedagogies) to enhance students' conceptual reasoning abilities: she wants students to explore what it means to be a leader in an ever changing global business environment. 

Thank you Julia!

The Otago MBA: update

Our MBA students have settled into their routines and, from all reports, have embraced the expectation of actively contributing to the classroom experience.  Our MBA 38 class has gelled and all students are enthusiastically engaging in discussions, suggesting that the Power of Introverts Ted Talk may have helped to embolden our more reflective students.

Julia Richardson introduced her Organizational Leadership class to Intelligent Leadership Theory, a "who, what and why" overarching framework to students; discussed motivation and transformational leadership, (see Steven Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech, below); and has emphasizing the critical nature of trust and justice in leadership.   Each reading for Julia's course introduces a specific perspective (i.e., definition and logic) on leadership (or motivation) with each perspective having legitimacy: no one right interpretation of leadership exists. The students were then asked to applied these materials to their first case, designed (as practice) to refine their ability to apply an academic frame to a complex business problem.

Julia reports that our MBA students enthusiastically engage in discussions, at times precluding mid-class breaks. They continue to refine their conceptual reasoning abilities, distinguishing between alternative definitions of leadership, as well as the value of alternative perspective to business practice.  The first syndicate case analysis went very well, with Julia reporting that our students conducted the best analysis she has ever seen: better than analyses of her Masters HR students at York University

Paul Hansen began his course with a focus on learning to think as an economist; he has strongly encouraged students to listen to NZ National Radio and starts each class with a chat about economic and/or political topics in the news.  The students have discussed the possible “tech wreck” as technology firms overseas (e.g. FaceBook & LinkedIn) and in NZ (e.g. Xero & PacificEdge) experience falling share prices.  They have also examined the link between the NZ Reserve Bank's increase in the Official Cash Rate (see RBNZ - ORC) to 3 percent and the response in the NZ dollar exchange rate versus the U.S. dollar.

Paul's contribution to the class has focused on the macroeconomic environment, with an analysis of New Zealand's transition from a regulated Welfare State (with a sixty-six percent tax rate) to a market-driven economy as a case study (see six-part Revolution).  Weekly tests scores indicate that all students in Paul's class are performing well.  Next up, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making and Conjoint Analysis.

Beth Rose continues to coax her students through an understanding of the research process, with both descriptive and exploratory analyses. The students have used SPSS to conduct cross tab analyses and are currently engaged in regressions analyses and modeling.  Beth reports that the nervousness of mastering stats has past and everyone seems to be performing well.