The Anecdotal Education

A Plea for Storytelling Teachers

February 2010

I can teach business classes poorly. I've never tried, but I've seen enough to believe I can successfully imitate these failures. I can also write bad textbooks on entrepreneurship, product design, economics, and any number of the less scientific disciplines I've seen bits of in the classroom. Many of these fields have a problem, and it can be summed up like this: there are too many rules and not enough stories.

I would rather my education be over a beer than a textbook. Drinking beer with someone is questioning, listening, and storytelling; reading textbooks is boring. You can’t even ask them questions! But textbook authors have things to say. And they will tell you too, if they have the proper chance. Unfortunately, textbooks aren’t the proper chance.

But beer is the proper chance, more or less. Give an author some beer and some questions and you’ll be well on your way to a robust education. I believe the primary reason for this is that over beer, an author will tell you stories. Heaven knows they have plenty of them, and that the author has thought about them. To write a textbook, you must have found that the reality of a certain topic abides by some rules that you've seen validated again and again. Those validations are the stories the author has to tell.

Imagine for instance, a business professor, James. James has seen it all in the business world. After decades in numerous ventures—everything from startups to Fortune 100—he has decided to give back by teaching at a local private university. He is wizened, but his warmth betrays the hours of sleep owed to startups from a past life. His corporate eyebrows are singed by near-miss litigation and stressful buy-outs, but his surprisingly upbeat attitude makes sense when you consider its role in helping him weather all of this.

I want to talk shop with James. He would probably give me warnings of what to avoid, and his eyes would be wide with the seriousness of his biggest mistakes. He would also analyze past successes, confidently pinpointing the factors of some, but for others, laughing at the capriciousness of a world that even he doesn’t fully understand.

And I would remember these stories. In my own career, I would remember to steer clear of what he warned and imitate what he recommended. A situation would arise, and I would remember what we talked about. It would all come back to me—his impassioned counsel, his lowered tone of voice. It would be his stories that had taught me.

Unfortunately, the textbooks don’t come out that good. Somehow, unless every author in almost every field is a complete recluse who managed to avoid having meaningful experience in the field he or she chose to write 700 pages on, there’s something driving these people away from storytelling.

We don’t have stories. We have dull, obvious rules. Someone accumulates enough experiences, and pretty soon they turn the sum of those experiences into a rule. We all do it. Our species couldn’t get by not doing it. But it has deadly consequences in education, and that’s something we need to remember.

*

Every semester, by some truly incredible ignorance, I decide that I'm simply going to "remember" all of my assignments in all of my classes. Then, four days later, when I have the second session of each of my classes, I realize I've forgotten about three different assignments. These painful experiences comprise the imperative burning itself into my head that evening: write down what you need to do. And without fail, I then start to write down my responsibilities for the rest of the semester[1]. People laugh at me when I text myself reminders that I need to write down things on my to-do list, but the peace of mind from never having to keep responsibilities in my head is completely worth it.

So I quickly form those rules. Rules like "write down all your responsibilities. If you try to keep them in your head, you will often forget them". That's fine for me. However, my guess is the story in the previous paragraph is more meaningful and more memorable to you than the almost patronizing proverb of the previous sentence. Even though it takes longer to tell and is slightly more involved, it's a far better method of teaching for at least four reasons.

First of all, stories leverage your mental involvement to help you remember them. My homework anecdote never dictated a rule to you. But chances are that as you were reading it, you tried (and were probably successful at) thinking of a way for me to solve my memory problem. I tricked you into involving your brain, and consequently, you will remember the story better than the lesson. Secondly, there was some emotional involvement in the story. For instance, the phrase "peace of mind" may have caused you to wonder how similar keeping detailed lists is to sipping cool drinks on a beach in the Maldives[2]. Third, because the story touches on more subjects—the start of school, silly repeated mistakes, inane SMS messages, etc.—it effectively gives you more triggers to remember the story. Virtually nothing can trigger me to remember such inane platitudes as "If you try to keep all of your duties in your head, you will often forget them." But engage me in a conversation mocking certain text messaging habits, and chances are good that I will remember my odd to-do list/texting situation. And finally, depending on who's telling the story (an expert, a celebrity), you might be more likely to remember it. I can't claim expert status at much else besides forgetting assignments, but your business professor may really be a great woman with awesome experiences that you can learn from. She just has to tell enough stories for you to believe it[3].

*

I tried to start a non-profit organization a few years ago, and it failed for more reasons than I can count. The most easily fixable reason was that we started with too many people. It began simply enough. A smart friend of mine approached me with a brilliant idea. He was unsure if it would work best as a glorified student organization, a socially conscious business, or a full-on non-profit, but he had drive and the world wasn’t going to save itself.

I was hooked by the idea, and decided that we could work out the structure stuff later. Let's serve one or two clients as a legally amorphous blob, then figure out how to structure ourselves best. That was a good idea for a group of first-time entrepreneur-students. Unfortunately, during the thought process, we also told a bunch of our friends about the idea and invited them for the ride, because hey, they're smart, right? The first meeting, in which we "decided" the venture’s mission and plan, was attended by nine intelligent students ready to argue to heat death about every possible permutation which could potentially define our organization. I cannot recommend strongly enough against starting a business with nine smart people. If anything, start with 1 or maybe 2 people who are maybe (maybe) book smart. If they’re smart, they at least have to be prepared to be wrong. They also have to be okay with having their good ideas remain unimplemented, because if you swap your 1 good idea with your 10 good ideas, you will fail.

In any case, around the same time as that fiasco, I took a class in entrepreneurship. The main book we read from was by the professor, and the text even took the tone of trying to be more like a friendly guide than a textbook. However, the opening paragraph in the chapter on team formation still had sentences like, “Although there is no single way to go about it, it is well advised that you consider human capital requirements first, and identify your key team members sooner rather than later.”

This would be fine except it says nothing. If your team members aren’t key, you can probably do without them. But if they’re key team members, then yes, you would want them involved earlier versus later, because “key” means you won’t be able to survive without them.

But I don’t want you to think it’s just this sentence. The next one isn’t better: “Since people make things happen, getting the right people involved early in the process is best.” This reiterates the rule from the last sentence, which would be fine, except the last sentence said nothing.

And I don’t want you to think it’s just this chapter. But this chapter is on team-formation, which was the area of one of my mistakes I’ve most internalized. In no uncertain terms, I described some of the lessons I’d learned and how I came to learn them. And to the author’s credit, he does the same in this chapter. Unfortunately, he strips the stories of names, businesses, dates, most dollar amounts, and any context that could make his valuable experience memorable.

And I don’t want you to think it’s just this book. Open up your own college textbooks. How long is it before you can find a sentence that is obvious, wrong, or circular? How long before you can find sentences with no value? How long before you can find something that, if you talked like that, you’d be laughed at?

The next paragraph of the book says, "[S]mart, motivated people, presumably the people you want for your new venture, appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the formation of a business, especially the planning of those activities for which they will be responsible. Although the basic business idea may be yours, their 'buy-in' and assistance with refining the initial concept will prove invaluable". It just goes in one ear and out the other. It's dull, it’s not speech-like, and if there was anything in the author’s past that motivated his saying that, it is completely lost on me.

It’s also either obvious or wrong. Remember my anecdote about smart people? But to his credit, the author doesn’t say you definitely want smart people; he says you presumably want smart people. Against his credit, he provides no rationale for his curious wording. Perhaps in his past, he has hired people for their intelligence, only to find that this intelligence was sometimes directly linked to other traits that spelled doom for his venture.

It would have been a great story to hear. The very notion that smart people can be and often are disastrous to businesses can turn heads. It would’ve turned my head, and if it had, I may have learned via anecdote a lesson that I instead learned via the slow and inglorious waning of my venture. It is a pity that such rich experiences are buried in authors’ heads instead of emblazoned across their pages.

The author of this book, beyond being a serial entrepreneur, is a great guy and one of the most down-to-earth professors I’ve had. I would be ashamed if he came to think less of me for reading my critical views of his book. However, I feel like he fell into a trap which is far too common in so many textbooks in so many fields: he extrapolated a boring line from 10 great data points.

He saw a number of situations which all seemed to follow a common pattern. After a while, he could see the new situations that fit the pattern from a ways off. His brain started to make the patterns into a rule, and he remembered the rule, and tweaked it as time went on. Eventually he decided to communicate the rule (and other similar ones) via his book.

Unfortunately, the readers of his book aren’t familiar with the situations that comprised the rule. They only had the rules, which, as you’ve seen, are hardly worth stating. But not for him! He wrote the book precisely because the weight of past mistakes understood, mixed with the glory of past successes understood were too much not to pen! But his brain has an advantage over ours. It can feel those past mistakes and past successes. We can’t. We never experienced them. If we had experienced them, his book would probably be riveting.

I believe just about any entrepreneurship professor could name 5 businesses whose mistakes strongly influenced the way they view business today. I could imagine James talking about his answers. He would speak forcefully at points, and his fist hitting the table would mean more than a thousand gilded generalities.

If you ask me the story of my forays into entrepreneurship, I will sound angry at points. Not because the experiences were negative. On the whole, they were overwhelmingly positive and worthwhile. But my team made mistakes that we didn’t have to—mistakes that others can avoid—and that genuinely means something to me. On the other hand, if you listen to me lecture, without stories, on not starting a business with too many people because making important decisions can be costly in terms of time and morale and distract you from focusing on blah blah blah... oh, I'm sorry. Was I still talking[4]?

But there is hope. Consciously or not, others have recognized the incredible usefulness of stories in education. And fortunately for my thesis, the most ardent advocate of the anecdotal education is the world's most famous business school. Not too bad, right?

*

I have only been to one class at Harvard Business School, but it was, in my opinion, an academic dream. The students were sharp, the visitors impressive, and the teacher the closest thing I have ever seen to the proverbial "guide on the side" (as opposed to the more common "sage on the stage"). Harvard has a reputation far beyond most schools, but their dedication to learning via stories is still imitable.

I walked into the classroom to find the students playing music over the speakers from the professor’s laptop (where was he?) and passing around delivery pizza. The atmosphere was, needless to say, strikingly casual for school that issues the world’s most highly regarded MBA.

But soon the professor entered, smiling and pleased to see everyone was having a good time. Without orders, the room quickly became ordered and ready. The first thing the professor did was introduce the guests from today’s case.

A case study, or case, is a short document that tells a story about a business. It is the core and bulk of HBS’s curriculum. There are cases on mergers and acquisitions, funding, manufacturing, and consulting. There are even cases on finance and accounting, which one student I talked to noted as being really pushing it. In class, the students discuss the case and the issues it raises, guided by the teacher’s questions and promptings. Almost all cases are based on true stories from real businesses.

The executives studied in today’s case were present in the classroom. They comprised most of the board of a biomedical company whose potential acquisition was to be discussed that class. The professor noted some had flown in from Europe and Asia. They seemed as pleased to be there as the students. Some were repeat visitors.

One thing that really struck me was the amount to which students were encouraged to get inside the heads of the people in the case. After introducing the guests, the professor asked the students what they would say to the board of the company if they were one of the members pushing for the merger. He called on the first person who raised her hand to come to the front and give her answer as an impromptu presentation to the "board" of students in that section (as well as the executives in the room). She gave an articulated and multi-faceted recommendation that was met with a standing ovation from her peers. Students were not only immersing themselves in the stories in their cases, but trying to be the people involved. This student was rewarded in an uncommon way[5] for her ability to put herself totally inside the situation. This method takes every benefit of storytelling to its extreme and succeeds wildly.

HBS prides itself on its ability to teach decision making, and one alumnus told me the single thing that HBS does best is make you a good decision maker. How? By throwing you into the deep end of story after story, making you connect with the people and the situations involved, and forcing you to “take action” from as real as you can get while still in a classroom.

For the rest of class, the students debated the considerations of the acquisition, sometimes pressing against each others’ points, sometimes against the professor’s. The executives sat quietly until the end of the class, during which the teacher invited them to give their comments on the discussion. The salient sentiment from the board was that the students covered most everything they considered in the actual situation. The professor beamed, but did not seem surprised.

Not all schools can match HBS’s resources or reputation, but all schools can and should teach through stories. At the most basic level, they are more memorable and more meaningful to students than obvious-sounding rules that describe an amalgam of hidden experiences. But at a deeper level, they allow students to practice thinking in ways that will be useful in their careers. The deeper we get into a story, the more our brains are tricked into thinking we're really there. And when we are there, our brains will be more prepared to deal with the situation at hand.

This is true of many or all fields, not just business and entrepreneurship. Even biology, a field bound by the unfeeling, unflinching scientific method can benefit from stories. With anecdotes from the lab experience of the teacher, or even from famous scientists, students will unconsciously absorb lessons about experimental design, the nuances of applying the idealized scientific process to real life, and the day to day work of biologists. Greater lessons are in store. For instance, after hearing the stories of many great scientists, it becomes hard to imagine that the most revolutionary ideas are ever accepted without an overabundance of criticism and backlash.

The truth is, we teach and are taught by a curriculum engorged with guidelines and starved for stories. The good news is that we can end this in every classroom we enter. I’ve seen it happen. The professor casually throws in an anecdote in a random class mid-semester, and by the time he finishes, four hands are up. An hour later, class is dismissed before it runs over, and the teacher comments that he didn’t get as much done as he had hoped. But for some reason, he doesn’t sound completely regretful of that.

Students, ask your professors to talk about personal experience (and share yours). Ask them for examples, and don't let them get away with generalized rules. No one benefits from those. Teachers, to the degree that it is possible, teach with stories. Demand of your students their opinion and analysis of past situations, positive and negative. Ask them to give their own related anecdotes. Students will draw their own rules, and these will be an order of magnitude more useful and meaningful than a book full of delicately-worded platitudes. It’s time for the anecdotal education to replace the banalities of an extrapolation-based curriculum. And maybe one day I'll stop forgetting to write down my homework.

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