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Unknown
Welcome to our latest podcast series. I'm J.D. Clarke, and I'm the Executive Director of Recruitment and Admissions. And I'm joined today by our Dean, Julian Birkinshaw. Thanks, Julian, for joining us today. We're going to have a great conversation. And we're going to really delve into the transformational impact of the case study methodology. You know, really from a unique perspective where it nurtures skills not only about learning the business knowledge, but also those soft skills that are incredibly important as well.
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Unknown
So we're going to have a great discussion about our case methodology, which is, very prominent at Ivey and really differentiates us. So thanks, Julian, for joining us today and excited for this conversation. So thanks very much. So I'm going to start just, maybe ask you to introduce yourself. Sure. So Julian Birkinshaw is my name.
00:00:50:21 - 00:01:19:06
Unknown
I've been at Ivey for five months now as the Dean, but my relationship with Ivey goes way back. I was actually an MBA student here, '89 to '91, and a PhD student here, '91 to '95. So, I spent many years at Ivey at the beginning of my career, and really immersed myself in, as we're going to talk about, the case method and many other things, and that sort of shaped everything I believe about business education.
00:01:19:12 - 00:01:38:17
Unknown
It's great to be here. Yeah. Maybe to start, the first question I have is you know, for those very unfamiliar with the case method of learning, I'm wondering if you could briefly explain what does it entail? Yeah, so many people are familiar with a form of university education where there's 200, 300 students in a room.
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Unknown
Big lecture theater. Professor at the at the front, reading out his or her materials. Very boring, very one-way, and ultimately not a very effective means of learning. The case method, think of it as an amphitheater, 75-80 students, in a room on a raised amphitheater. You've got the professor in the middle, and the professor is orchestrating a conversation with the students. Before you even enter the room, you've got to have clued up on the basic ideas that we're going to be teaching that day.
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Unknown
You've got to have some basic knowledge. You've got to have read the case study. And the key thing is that the case study is about a real life business situation with a decision-maker, you know, so J.D. Clarke is the decision maker in the case. We are all putting ourselves in the position of J.D. Clarke, and we are giving him advice essentially on how we should act in this situation.
00:02:38:05 - 00:03:01:01
Unknown
That's the essence of the case method. It's much more immersive. It's sort of experiential. It's much harder work for both the faculty and the student. But boy, do the students learn a whole lot more through that method. And I think, you know, it's interesting you mentioned about it's a lot more work. And what's great about it is it builds an accountability for the students when they come into the classroom, they have to prepare.
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Unknown
Yeah. If I think about my undergraduate education, which was in history, you know, you'd read a chapter on something and you go in while the Prof wouldn't know whether you read the chapter or not. And so that accountability is really important. And then the social aspect is incredibly important. So it's not unusual, and not all professors do this, but it's quite common for the professor to walk into a class and say, you, that student at the back, the one is playing with his phone.
00:03:25:07 - 00:03:42:02
Unknown
You start the class, you tell me what the situation is in this case study. And of course, the student knows, he or she might get cold called, that's what we call it. Yeah. And so the students, for the most part, are pretty good about taking the taking the responsibility of reading the case and being prepared to speak up.
00:03:42:07 - 00:04:00:19
Unknown
Yeah. And I think, you know, the other thing we often talk about is the case study is not only does it build knowledge, it builds experience, which is incredibly important as well. So you know where you differentiate yourself is being able to apply the learning. Not as much. You know, it's important that you understand the frameworks and concepts which business school teaches you, but you've got to apply them.
00:04:00:21 - 00:04:27:13
Unknown
And so that idea that you're not just a model taker of the model, you're a model maker. Because not all models fit certain situations. Yeah. And they often say that learning happens at the sort of the interface between knowledge and experience. In other words, I might know something in terms of what the textbook tells me, but until I've tried to kind of put it into practice, I don't really know it.
00:04:27:13 - 00:04:49:01
Unknown
And so the case method is as close as you can get to experiential learning in a classroom. In other words, you know, we are trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the decision maker. Now, obviously it is possible. And we do this at Ivey to take students on field trips to go and visit companies and to actually genuinely experience the real world.
00:04:49:03 - 00:05:15:23
Unknown
But you can't do that all the time. So the case study method is the experiential learning in a classroom, the back and forth between, frameworks and concepts and real world application. And the more times you kind of go back and forth between those two, the stronger you get because you start to recognize patterns. You start to put yourself in the shoes of a decision maker, and that really helps you as you get your job coming out of Ivey.
00:05:16:03 - 00:05:36:01
Unknown
Yeah. That's great. So I wonder if you could think about how, you know, it's been some time since you finished your MBA program, but how the case study method influenced you or shaped you as you think about, you know, being an academic but also a leader and, and somebody that works within a business context as well. Yeah, I separate the two pieces.
00:05:36:01 - 00:06:00:18
Unknown
So, you know, my life as an academic, as a researcher of business, I've always focused on research topics which are incredibly kind of practical and applied. I mean, I've and that might sound like an obvious thing to say, but there are some academics, frankly, who study business from a distance. You know, they spend all their time looking at huge databases of numbers.
00:06:00:20 - 00:06:30:12
Unknown
I've always studied business by interviewing business people and trying to get under the skin of what's really happening in a company. And that, to a large degree, is a function of my training through the case method. So that's me as a researcher. Me, if you like, as an executive, I mean, as the Dean of Ivey and in previous roles as well, you often find yourself trying to make decisions when you haven't got enough information, right?
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Unknown
I mean, the whole essence of executive decision making is judgment. In other words, judgment is the ability to weigh up a bunch of factors and to somehow come to a view without being completely, 100% sure that you're coming to the right decision. Now, where does judgment come from? Judgment comes from experience essentially comes from having lots of different types of experience through which you have gained a view.
00:06:59:22 - 00:07:19:01
Unknown
And having spent the two years at Ivey in the MBA and done whatever, it was, 800 cases in that time, that helped to frame my judgment, my ability to make good decisions. Because the case study, of course, doesn't give you enough information, and yet you're forced to come to a decision at the end of it.
00:07:19:04 - 00:07:37:11
Unknown
That's great. I'll share a quick story. I share this story with candidates. I remember doing my MBA program and near the end an alumni said, you know, you're going to see the value of the case study method very soon after you graduate and you're put in a situation. And so my story was I was working on a merger.
00:07:37:13 - 00:07:57:11
Unknown
So, you know, organizations coming together. And I was part of the executive integration team on the operational side. So you know, a unifying facilities, HR policies, IT systems. And two weeks into having consultants work with us on this, the partner, the consulting firm said, where have you worked in mergers and acquisitions in the past?
00:07:57:11 - 00:08:18:01
Unknown
Because I can't believe what you're bringing to the table. And I said, oh, I've never done this before. Okay. Oh, the person said, well, what do you mean you haven't done this before? And so I've never done it, but I did because I did it in the classroom. Exactly. And so, you know, I wasn't going home reading textbooks or going through at I was basically I had done it through, you know, and we always remember stuff that we've done.
00:08:18:04 - 00:08:41:03
Unknown
Right, right. Not what we're told, but what we've done. And so I remember in the classroom, going through situations just like that, and it was like I although I didn't do it in my professional life, I did it in the classroom and it was very easy to kind of translate it to that. So no, it's true. I mean, you know, the thing about the case method is in the middle of an individual case, you're thinking to yourself, I'm not sure why we're discussing this sometimes.
00:08:41:03 - 00:09:07:15
Unknown
And because, you know, we've got a lot of different points of view. And we're not quite sure exactly what we learned this morning. But you do it, you know, day after day in a month after month. And in fact, what you're doing is building up this sort of way of looking at the world, which in some ways is far more powerful than being explicit about what the exact takeaways were from that one, that one example, that one case study.
00:09:07:15 - 00:09:25:13
Unknown
Exactly. Yeah. So there is a handful of schools that do case studies. Harvard started it, and there's Ivey, there's Darden. Yeah IMD does it as well. So very small group. Yeah. And a lot of schools we use cases but they use them as examples. You know like here's what happened in our organization.
00:09:25:13 - 00:09:42:14
Unknown
We do it differently. Like you use it as the vehicle of learning. Yeah. But I wonder if you can just touch on you touched a little bit at the beginning, but you know what sets the case study method apart from what most business schools do, which is a very lecture based environment. Yeah. And I will draw comparisons with where I was working.
00:09:42:14 - 00:10:15:22
Unknown
I was working at the London Business School in the UK, which is a top school. And the model there was indeed, for the most part that the learning from the case study was illustrative of a concept rather than as a learning vehicle in its own right. So for me, what sets the case method apart is I touched on this earlier, which is that you know, you all you are asking the students to almost build the knowledge of the concepts in advance.
00:10:15:22 - 00:10:53:14
Unknown
I mean, sometimes these are introduced during the class, but sometimes you have to read about them in advance so that you are already at a higher level of insights when you start the discussion. As I said, you're then linking to sort of the world of practice. How would the decision maker actually act in this circumstance? And then the third piece, which I haven't talked about yet, which I want to throw in here, is that you're also trying to in many cases, ask the student to put themselves in the shoes of an executive in terms of how that executive would be sort of perceived by those around them.
00:10:53:14 - 00:11:25:20
Unknown
In other words, you know, good decision making isn't just making the right decision. It's about how you would sell that decision to others, how you are listening to your colleagues point of view, how you are trying to build some sort of consensus or buy in to a course of action. And anyone who's spent any life, any time in life in an organization knows that the behaviour that you have, the way that you relate to other people, your knowledge, your source, your self-awareness of who you are is actually vital if you're going to be successful as a business person.
00:11:25:20 - 00:11:43:04
Unknown
And again, the case method helps to build a little bit of that self-awareness as well. Yeah, I mean, that resonates with me because one of the powerful things, you know, when you don't think about it is how do you disagree with somebody in a respectful way? And how do you deal with feedback of somebody that might disagree with you to come to that consensus?
00:11:43:04 - 00:12:02:09
Unknown
And so it's interesting with the case study method, I found myself being a better listener afterwards. Right. Yeah. Because you become a faster, better decision maker because every class you're going and making decisions, but you're also doing it in such a great way because you're learning on how do I listen? How do I look at different points of view?
00:12:02:09 - 00:12:23:04
Unknown
But you learn a lot about yourself. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Because I mean, you know, there are life skills here, which is, you know, you're trying to build an argument, and then sometimes you're doing the opposite. You're sort of looking for the right way to challenge somebody else's argument. But yeah, doing it in a way that still makes the dynamic work.
00:12:23:04 - 00:12:43:00
Unknown
Right. And we've got to learn these skills. And the case method, does it well. The other I'll throw in there, which is again part of the Ivey model, is that you you're in study groups. You know, you don't just read a case and then show up in class. You're strongly encouraged to actually spend a bit of time in a small in a small group, debating the case in advance.
00:12:43:00 - 00:13:01:16
Unknown
And of course, that that is also a life skill in terms of working in a small group of people. That group becomes, the team of people who help you to get through otherwise can be quite a challenging program. Yeah. That's great. I've heard you often talk about, AI is coming here and evolving.
00:13:01:16 - 00:13:20:03
Unknown
So, you know, there used to be a day before the internet where if you wanted to learn how to do discounted cash flow, you had to go and study an MBA program. So now you can just upload a problem into ChatGPT and it will spit the answer out for you. Yeah. So I'm wondering if you could just and you've talked about it.
00:13:20:08 - 00:13:47:19
Unknown
I've heard you talk about how case study really is positioned very, very well for an AI driven world because AI is not going anyplace is exactly. AI is only going to get better. And obviously what I can do today is already essentially summarize any subject that you require. It will give you the answer to the discounted cash flow or the, capital asset pricing model.
00:13:47:19 - 00:14:12:19
Unknown
It won't tell you how it got the answer. As such, but it will give you the answer. But essentially what it's doing is it is commoditizing basic knowledge and what that means is that you can be you know, we used to have a big distribution of students. We still do have a big distribution of students, but AI allows the weakest students to appear to have the knowledge of a sort of a medium level student.
00:14:12:21 - 00:14:47:03
Unknown
And that makes it very difficult for us in terms of assessing people. But it also means that the best students have to work that much harder to sort of prove that they're sort of better than what the AI can do. So for me, as AI gets better, it actually makes the case method more important, not less important, because all of the students are walking into the room essentially with the same baseline level of, we can call it knowledge, but access to the kind of the, the sort of intellectually answer, right answer the question.
00:14:47:05 - 00:15:05:09
Unknown
And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to train people up so that they become even more capable on some of the kind of the human skills which AI is not able to match. And of course, those human skills, the ones we've been talking about, it's about empathy and it's about relationships and it's about creativity and it's about judgment.
00:15:05:11 - 00:15:26:21
Unknown
Yeah. That's excellent. That's great. I'm just wondering just to kind of close it off, if you think about what changes or innovation do you think the case study is for next. Right. So you think about that like, you know, what do you think. You know, the case study will evolve over time. Yeah. So I mean, it's a great question.
00:15:26:21 - 00:15:53:19
Unknown
And it's something we are actively working on at Ivey because, you know, part of my vision for, for Ivey in the future is that we, as we make Ivey more accessible to more people around the world, and yet we never want to lose the quality of the immersive case study experience. So what we're trying to do is to try to be creative about making the case study a little bit more digitally enabled.
00:15:53:19 - 00:16:12:22
Unknown
We have a whole product called the Digital Learning Experiences, which is a sort of a was a digital version of a case study. There's lots of AI out there which help students to sort of prep the case studies in more creative ways, because it will summarize the data and it'll almost like create a sort of an audio version.
00:16:13:00 - 00:16:37:21
Unknown
And so we want to use all these tools. We want to absolutely kind of lean into where technology's going, all of which is then directed towards making sure that the that the case discussion itself is the highest possible quality it can be. In other words, we don't want to kind of waste valuable time in the classroom doing things which could be done remotely through the computer.
00:16:37:23 - 00:17:03:04
Unknown
So that's the essence of it. But I'll be honest, we haven't quite nailed exactly what that that future thing is because I move so quickly that, you know, the target is forever changing. That's right. Yeah. That's great. Well, thanks so much for your time today. This was great. So anything else you want to touch on? I mean essentially the case method was invented by, if you like, Socrates 2000 years ago.
00:17:03:09 - 00:17:24:08
Unknown
I mean, it is the most sort of tried and tested way of learning known to mankind. And it doesn't matter how technology changes, ultimately, a bunch of people sitting around in an amphitheater discussing something, trying to get to the bottom of it. That is the essence of what makes learning great. And that's what Ivey does better than anyone else.
00:17:24:08 - 00:17:43:13
Unknown
Yeah, and it's not only learning from the faculty member at the front. Right. It's like I learn just as much from people telling stories of their experience as well. And also you learn a tremendous amount about yourself too, which is great. So and the best way to immerse yourself in an actual environment, and solving actual business problems
00:17:43:18 - 00:17:55:02
Unknown
helps with that as well. So. Exactly. That's great. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you, J.D.