"The Art of Smart"-Swartz, FAST Company, July/August 1999

FAST Company July/August 1999

"The Art of Smart"

Jeffery B. Swartz, president and CEO for Timberland Company in Stratham, New Hampshire, believes people who have spent a large investment in time, money and emotion to develop traditional educational and management processes want to continue with that process. Even if it is not valued in today's or tomorrow's environment. Swartz thinks the most relevant thing about yesterday is not what you did, but how you did it. He doesn't try to predict tomorrow's problems or the forces that could make us do things differently in the future. Instead, he realizes that success relies solely on our ability to learn.

I believe this attitude applies quite well to what we are trying to accomplish with this Master's program. Even if we were intelligent enough to belong to some intellectual "think tank" and could accurately predict future events or trends, it would be very difficult to develop programs if we weren't able to change.

It's of paramount importance to revisit our teaching and management methods to improve our techniques and ultimately have a greater impact on our customers. Swartz discusses a daycare issue in his company where he thought he was the only person who could implement this daycare program. He contracted some outside experts and they put together a model that no one in the company wanted. Swartz dropped the idea until a woman employee asked him what he was going to do about daycare. He told her nothing and it didn't go over very well. Then he suggested she put some ideas together and run it past him. She organized a group that polled other employees, researched the cost of a daycare program and identified where the funding would come from.

Swartz was invited to the meeting and was totally impressed by the way this group had tackled the problem. All he did was delegate some authority and moved out of the way. Although Extension does a fair job in delegating workload and responsibility in programming especially with our volunteers, there is room for much improvement. Too many times we use the technical or instructional method of teaching. Sometimes it's OK, but it's very traditional in its approach and many times does not empower the audience into a Transformative Learning experience.

One way this could be accomplished is to offer people the opportunity to learn-by-doing just as Swartz did with his female employee. Extension Educators should take the time to question their own assumptions on how things should be done. We can help people understand why they think the way they do, by letting them participate and become involved in activities or whatever the process may be. As educators, we need to reflect on ourselves so we don't create roadblocks in our teaching methods or inhibit learning from our clientele. This can happen if we structure our assumptions and guide our actions. Then an interchange of ideas, methods and results can occur to improve learning. We need to teach our audiences or co-workers the ability to learn, by either action or critical reflection or other transformative methods to achieve a more positive impact.

--James B. Nesseth (jnesseth@extension.umn.edu), October 20, 1999

-- Anonymous, October 20, 1999