Using SenseMaker to guide classroom conversations about leadership

Leadership is an elusive concept, that appears easier or more comprehensible on paper than when practised in real life. So, to what extent can we teach leadership at a post-graduate academic level? And how do we measure ‘leadership’ in the classroom? It seems a bit shallow, if not completely inefficient to measure leadership based on a person’s ability to list the characteristics of trait leadership theory or to describe ideal management from a situational leadership theory perspective.

I convene a leadership and management course that forms part of a master’s degree in emergency medicine. Even though I understand the need to teach leadership, I’ve often wondered about the practical value it offers. I’ve been mulling over how to best teach the course, and recently experimented with SenseMaker to ignite conversations about leadership in the classroom. I used a SenseMaker (un)survey informed by one named ‘Reimagine Leadership’ developed by Anne Caspari.

The ability to practise leadership is intricately interwoven with organisational structure and most healthcare organisations, certainly in Africa, remain traditional bureaucracies. Here, power, authority and agency are not only structurally endorsed, but is also deeply embedded in role-identity. A key tenet of bureaucratical management is impersonality, employed to ensure fairness and provide a standardised approach when dealing with staff-related matters. Max Weber, ‘the father of bureaucracy’, cautioned that “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.”

This implies there is no space for individuality, yet, contemporary leadership literature informs that good leadership is about establishing rapport, building trust and relationships. So how should leaders in bureaucratic structures balance impersonality with warm relationships? Workplaces have become increasingly heterogenous, with richer diversity in culture, race, gender, generation, religion and language; and having to navigate collaboration in a sea of different professional identities and roles. This raises a further question: who determines what fairness entails and what the standardised approach should be?

Leadership is fraught with these conundrums. How do we balance the bureaucratic structure with leadership agency? These topics are diminished in the dusty books about management and leadership. For example, how do you establish rapport as a young, black, female leading older (white) man in a patriarchal society situated within a bureaucratical organisation. Or deal with situations where patients are openly Xenophobic to foreign staff? Or build team relationships when conversating in a second or third language with meanings easily lost in translation? 

These and other dialogue in the classroom were charged with contentious debates about ‘how things should be done’. Which led me to consider, how else could I use SenseMaker to speak about provoke relevant conversation. Ideas include:

Make it oblique: Even though it made sense to use a SenseMaker (un)survey about leadership on a leadership course, an oblique approach would have yielded richer and more nuanced conversations. For instance, instead of asking a direct question regarding the challenges that leadership face, the question could have been a bit more nuanced. For instance what would happen if the leadership was exemplary, or tell a story about how diversity and other challenges are seen in this workplace.

Use SenseMaker patterns to depersonalise and ‘neutralize’ difficult conversations without dehumanising it: Triads can be used to introduce a range of perspectives with the patterns to reduce binary bias, providing nuanced insights to explore highly emotive leadership situations. Ideas about leadership, what fairness entails and how to deal with diversity might not feel safe to be discussed in an open forum, and talking about the patterns may offer a more neutral space for conversation.

Remember that the top of the hierarchy is a lonely place: A multitude of stories can be captured of how leaders dealt with the thorny challenges. This can become a repository of stories about ‘real’ leadership, making tacit knowledge explicit in a sacred journal.

Monitor mental health risk: The prompt was about leadership, yet many shared stories about mental health. This is not surprising; research has shown that those in emergency medical services are at higher risk of suicidal ideation and more likely to attempt to commit suicide. SenseMaker can be used to monitor for weak signals to indicate emergency care workers at risk.

SenseMaker for academic research: The students were all familiar with research methods and they appreciated the affordances SenseMaker offers academic research. They were impressed with the multipronged method of using P-values to scrutinize patterns whilst being able to access the stories to inspect the patterns. I quite like the way that Mark Stent explains P-values; if you are racing toy cars and your car wins, you can say that you won because your car is faster, the P-value is a score that will tell you how likely it is that your toy car is really faster, or if it was just luck. The lower the P-value, the more confident you can be that your car was truly faster. In the SenseMaker Workbench, one can access the P-values that provides insights regarding the statistical significance of the patterns. It also highlighted that even though the patterns are statistical, the explanation for the pattern lies in the narrative.

SenseMaker’s educational repertoire: Having used SenseMaker for research before, I thought I had a good grasp of its affordances for education. How wrong I was! I underestimated its immense educational utility, ranging from using it to teach, evaluate, assess, guide conversation and especially for tricky topics like leadership. A bonus is that it can be used prospectively or retrospectively. I look forward to building my knowledge of how I can use SenseMaker in my classrooms.

A final word on leadership – when we speak about leadership in the classroom, do not speak about leadership as a noun or a theory, but speak about leadership as a verb, as an action, that unfolds as the action is taken. And the true essence of which can only be understood in the stories told about ‘doing’. And what an opportunity to bring their collective stories into the classroom with SenseMaker.

Charmaine Cunningham is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she recently transitioned from the Division of Emergency Medicine to the Division of Public Health. She is interested in using complexity-appropriate methods to strengthen health care.

Post note: you can read Mark Stent’s blog post here