White Paper 9:
Leadership Lessons From History: Part 1
Rudyard Kipling, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would
never be forgotten."
We are standing among a group of twenty-five or so business
executives on a windy, chilly ridgeline in south central
Pennsylvania, facing west. To our right is a road, the
Chambersburg Pike. Behind us about a mile is another higher hill--
Seminary Ridge and on top of that a building with a cupola. In
front and directly behind is a gently rolling field and across the
field in front is woodland that extends around to our left. We
imagine that it is an early morning, July 1, 1863. We also
imagine that we see the dust rising from a line of soldiers in gray
uniforms coming up the road.
“You are Brigadier General John Buford,” says our group leader.
“You are in command of a scouting element of the Army of the
Potomac. You have 2,000 cavalry and two small artillery
batteries. Your orders are to find the location of Robert E. Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia of 75,000 men that invaded
Pennsylvania about a week ago. Now you’ve found them. Behind
the ridge is a crossroads town named Gettysburg. Ten miles to
the south, I Corps with 20,000 Union troops are marching north
under Major General John Reynolds. That’s a good half-day
march or more. There are 80,000 additional Union troops coming
in from other directions, within a day’s march. In front of you are
the leading elements of A. P. Hill’s corps from North Carolina
under General Henry Heth. You and your cavalry are the only
Union forces between the rebels and the high ground behind you.
Take a look around at the terrain, what do you see? What are
your choices? What are your assets and liabilities? What would
you do? How do you know your choice will succeed?”
The members of the group look around, sensing the urgency that
John Buford must have felt, and they begin to answer. Soon, the
discussion becomes lively, with different options being weighed
and debated. The facilitator turns the questioning into a
dialogue about finding and recognizing opportunities in the
corporate world. Each member of the group talks about how
opportunities and risk are evaluated in his or her work unit or
corporation and how the leader is sometimes the first the
individual to see an opening for doing something new or
different. The facilitator sums up the discussion by threading
together the comments and refers back to Buford’s decision to
hold off the Confederates until Reynolds’ divisions came up. “He
was a leader who knew how to calculate a risk; he knew holding
the ground was worth it.” Heads nod and reflect on the concept of
calculated risk. The group breaks up briefly as different members
wander across the ground, deep in thought. Then, the group
gathers and heads to the next stop on their way around the
battlefield at Gettysburg where another incident and another
leader’s actions will be analyzed and discussed.
How Did Leadership Development Get to Seminary
Ridge?
Practitioners of leadership development have been designing new
methods for learning both hard and soft skills since the surge in
corporate management training in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since
then, the classic model for management training has been the case
study-driven workshop, emulating the format used in business schools.
Since much of corporate-based management training encompasses
interpersonal effectiveness, there are inevitably application exercises
like role-plays, team projects and various problem-solving activities.
The archetype programs of this genre lasted three to five days, were
often residential in a conference center, and involved 360 survey
feedback, high level executive chats and time for personal reflection,
soul-searching and privately “leveling” with colleagues who needed
leveling with.
As the market for leadership development programs matured,
designers responded to clients’ needs for something different. After
all, managers in development-oriented corporations found themselves
going to two or three workshops a year; the same or similar learning
methods were dished up whether the topic was corporate change,
influence, negotiation, leadership or even sales and sales
management. Clearly, variety became a design criterion.
Soon, the market embraced imaginative experiential simulations where
participants had to figure out how to cross rivers filled with
“crocodiles” drawn on a meeting room floor armed with flipchart paper
and masking tape. Zero sum games, Blindfold walks, imaginary factories
making paper airplanes or distributing beer are all mixed in with time to
think about management and leadership behaviors. Participants
learned to coach each other on how to juggle, music teachers taught
classes of executives how to play the violin, and people watched movie
clips and related scenes to leadership practices. Outside the
classroom, participants went on ropes courses, rock climbing, camping
and sailing experiences in an effort to make a “real” learning
experience. Mild discomfort, the illusion of danger, a level playing
field, and forced dependency all contributed to a bonding experience.
The more skilled the facilitator, the more participants were able to
extract a learning message from these activities.
In the 1990s and continuing today, another trend emerged in the
management development world. The three- to five-day program
largely moved out of favor; training for executives had to be special—
and short for them to invest their scarce time. To compete for the
attention of technology-savvy younger managers, the experience also
had to be entertaining. Authors and speakers with unique theories
were hired to run workshops. Celebrity professors from business
schools were asked to lecture on the latest thinking and lead a case
discussion on a topic of interest. Philosophers taught the Classics to
CEOs and their teams; English professors wrung management theory
out of Shakespeare. All of these had in common a remarkable
intellectual challenge, an outside perspective and expertise, and
brevity.
However, something seemed to be missing from the latest waves of
management and leadership training. To be sure, the concepts, cases,
and models were interesting, even compelling, and, despite the raft of
experiential exercises, the instructional models were mostly based on
discussion and dialogue. Leadership training had evolved into a left-
brained exercise—cerebral, analytical, and predictable.
Around the end of the 1990s, a new approach emerged: the historical
leadership experience. Momentum for this method started when
several retired US military officers rekindled an old military teaching
tradition—the Staff Ride—and marketed it to corporations. As we will
see, this new approach had design elements—emotion and drama that
corporate audiences had rarely experienced.
While many current historical leadership experiences revolve around
battlefield visits and military themes, the method is appropriate for a
wide variety of venues and topics. A historical event that involves a
dramatic, documented story, a cast of visible characters, and a place to
visit preferably with actual artifacts can serve as a platform to teach
management competencies in a memorable and unique way. The
designer of the experience needs to understand the historical story,
have insight into the possibilities for linking management concepts to
that and create an agenda that takes advantage of the setting and
story. The successful implementation of the design then depends on
the creativity of a skilled facilitator to draw out the lessons. What
makes the historical leadership lesson different is that participants
learn principles that are wrapped around indelible images of characters
and events.
The staff ride concept is the basic framework for this approach. A
historical leadership experience involves bringing students to a
historical site, methodically visiting specific locations, retelling the
story of the events that took place, and discussing various topics with
an instructor. In the military setting, the primary interest is strategy and
troop maneuvers, studying terrain and the like. In a corporate setting,
the lessons topics can be leadership, influence, change, innovation or
whatever the historical story holds at its core.
The staff ride has been around for a long time. In 1906, the assistant
commandant of the US Army General Service and Staff School brought
students to view Civil War battlefields in Georgia on what was to
become the first staff ride. Later, the United States Military Academy
formalized these programs; cadets would visit battlefields and discuss
elements of the battles. This model became a pro forma teaching
technique for the military. The forward-looking retired officers who
repackaged the staff ride selected one of the most dramatic events in
North American history—the battle of Gettysburg—as a teaching venue
for corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. As we will see, that
experience provided some added dimensions to contemporary
leadership training—drama, real characters, and the ground itself.
Historical Leadership Lesson Example: The Gettysburg
Experience
By looking at a specific example of a historical leadership experience
created for corporate audiences, we can examine the challenges to
instructional design and how they were met. This examination of
constraints and approaches is meant to serve as a guideline to others
who have an opportunity to pursue this unique instructional model.
This writer became involved with Gettysburg as a leadership
development tool when an organization needed help in designing and
co-conducting a leadership experience for executives which they
would subsequently market. As a design consultant and leadership
expert, I would be working with a retired US Army Colonel and former
military history professor from the US Military Academy at West Point
who knew the story and all the characters to a high level of detail. That
this would be a significant design challenge became clear when we
made an inventory of the conditions we would be facing:
The story.
In the American Civil War, the battle of Gettysburg represented the
culminating moment in a chain of events intended, by the Confederate
leadership, to force US President Abraham Lincoln to accept a
negotiated settlement or to encourage the British to support the South.
The challenge was that story was complex; a participant needed a
contextual understanding of the causes of the war, progress of the war
to July 1, 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s strategy, the many
characters involved and much more. There was additional useful
information about the military technology of the time, how armies were
organized, what their methods were, and other background information
that would allow the participant to better grasp and envision the events
they were about to vicariously relive. The challenge was to get
participants up to speed on this background without overburdening
them.
Even when participants were oriented to the historical events that led
up to the incidents to be discussed, literally everyone knew the
outcome of the historical story beforehand. The Confederates were
defeated; Pickett’s Charge was a gallant attempt which failed; Col.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s regiment from Maine bravely held the
end of the Union left flank at Little Round Top. The question was how
the designers could create suspense under these conditions.
The terrain, the location and the weather.
A historical leadership lesson takes place at the venue where events
occurred. At Gettysburg, that meant on the ground at the National
Military Park in Gettysburg, PA. The park itself is 20 square miles with 26
miles of public and parkland roads transiting the site. Walking to the
various sites required traversing muddy fields, stonewalls, climbing
steep hills, dealing with rain and occasionally very hot weather. In
addition, we would have to do most of our discussions standing up;
there are no benches nor places for repose. And, as we would be on
the ground for several hours at a time, there was a need to be near rest
room facilities that were, in fact, available but not necessarily easy to
get to.
In addition, Gettysburg is remote even today. It is at least two hours
from major airports in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The experience
could not be a half-day or a single day. The leadership experience
would require participants to invest two days and another for travel.
So, the pressure for a creating a valuable use of time for busy
executives is magnified.
The crowds.
Gettysburg attracts two million visitors a year. These include tourists,
families, school groups, other youth groups, veterans and organized
tours of all sizes. Professional and licensed Gettysburg tour guides
conduct many of these tours. In addition, there are yearly reenactments
conducted by dedicated enthusiasts who represent both Union and
Confederate forces. The challenge is that there can potentially be many
people arriving at a specific site at the same time as the leadership
class. This raises questions about how to conduct meaningful
discussions in the midst of other people milling around, some being
lectured to by tour guides, other posing for pictures, etc. The stories of
what individuals did and the choices they had are both dramatic and
poignant. Creating that mood in a public setting would be difficult.
The leadership model.
There was a question of what leadership model to teach. Was it the Jim
Collins, Good to Great construct, or Noel Tichy’s, Leadership Engine?
Would we look to Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker or Ram Charan? Was it
a question of practical leadership lessons like those of Captain Michael
Abrashoff’s It’s Your Ship, or do we embrace Tom Peters’ provocative
views? When looking at examples of leaders in action, we needed to
relate what we saw to some context, a framework that provided an
interpretative bridge. With literally thousands of theories and
constructs to choose from, we needed a content base we could use to
reflect the events that occurred in 1863.
The “link.”
Probably the biggest challenge of all was creating the link between
what was discussed in the leadership experience and what participants
could take away as practical lessons for their own practice of
leadership. In a way, the experience of looking into the details of a Civil
War character’s predicament and discussing options had a risk of
devolving into a stimulating and entertaining tour, with participants
playing the role of interested and glorified tourists. Without the
lessons of the past being tied directly to present-day work and
leadership challenges, the value of the experience as a development
technique would be questionable.
Taken as a whole, this inventory of challenges is formidable. However,
as designers, we kept in mind the best asset we had: an incredibly
dramatic story with many subplots and personalities and the ground
itself where the events took place.
Please continue to Part 2.
Leadership Lessons From History: Part 1
Rudyard Kipling, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would
never be forgotten."
We are standing among a group of twenty-five or so business
executives on a windy, chilly ridgeline in south central
Pennsylvania, facing west. To our right is a road, the
Chambersburg Pike. Behind us about a mile is another higher hill--
Seminary Ridge and on top of that a building with a cupola. In
front and directly behind is a gently rolling field and across the
field in front is woodland that extends around to our left. We
imagine that it is an early morning, July 1, 1863. We also
imagine that we see the dust rising from a line of soldiers in gray
uniforms coming up the road.
“You are Brigadier General John Buford,” says our group leader.
“You are in command of a scouting element of the Army of the
Potomac. You have 2,000 cavalry and two small artillery
batteries. Your orders are to find the location of Robert E. Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia of 75,000 men that invaded
Pennsylvania about a week ago. Now you’ve found them. Behind
the ridge is a crossroads town named Gettysburg. Ten miles to
the south, I Corps with 20,000 Union troops are marching north
under Major General John Reynolds. That’s a good half-day
march or more. There are 80,000 additional Union troops coming
in from other directions, within a day’s march. In front of you are
the leading elements of A. P. Hill’s corps from North Carolina
under General Henry Heth. You and your cavalry are the only
Union forces between the rebels and the high ground behind you.
Take a look around at the terrain, what do you see? What are
your choices? What are your assets and liabilities? What would
you do? How do you know your choice will succeed?”
The members of the group look around, sensing the urgency that
John Buford must have felt, and they begin to answer. Soon, the
discussion becomes lively, with different options being weighed
and debated. The facilitator turns the questioning into a
dialogue about finding and recognizing opportunities in the
corporate world. Each member of the group talks about how
opportunities and risk are evaluated in his or her work unit or
corporation and how the leader is sometimes the first the
individual to see an opening for doing something new or
different. The facilitator sums up the discussion by threading
together the comments and refers back to Buford’s decision to
hold off the Confederates until Reynolds’ divisions came up. “He
was a leader who knew how to calculate a risk; he knew holding
the ground was worth it.” Heads nod and reflect on the concept of
calculated risk. The group breaks up briefly as different members
wander across the ground, deep in thought. Then, the group
gathers and heads to the next stop on their way around the
battlefield at Gettysburg where another incident and another
leader’s actions will be analyzed and discussed.
How Did Leadership Development Get to Seminary
Ridge?
Practitioners of leadership development have been designing new
methods for learning both hard and soft skills since the surge in
corporate management training in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since
then, the classic model for management training has been the case
study-driven workshop, emulating the format used in business schools.
Since much of corporate-based management training encompasses
interpersonal effectiveness, there are inevitably application exercises
like role-plays, team projects and various problem-solving activities.
The archetype programs of this genre lasted three to five days, were
often residential in a conference center, and involved 360 survey
feedback, high level executive chats and time for personal reflection,
soul-searching and privately “leveling” with colleagues who needed
leveling with.
As the market for leadership development programs matured,
designers responded to clients’ needs for something different. After
all, managers in development-oriented corporations found themselves
going to two or three workshops a year; the same or similar learning
methods were dished up whether the topic was corporate change,
influence, negotiation, leadership or even sales and sales
management. Clearly, variety became a design criterion.
Soon, the market embraced imaginative experiential simulations where
participants had to figure out how to cross rivers filled with
“crocodiles” drawn on a meeting room floor armed with flipchart paper
and masking tape. Zero sum games, Blindfold walks, imaginary factories
making paper airplanes or distributing beer are all mixed in with time to
think about management and leadership behaviors. Participants
learned to coach each other on how to juggle, music teachers taught
classes of executives how to play the violin, and people watched movie
clips and related scenes to leadership practices. Outside the
classroom, participants went on ropes courses, rock climbing, camping
and sailing experiences in an effort to make a “real” learning
experience. Mild discomfort, the illusion of danger, a level playing
field, and forced dependency all contributed to a bonding experience.
The more skilled the facilitator, the more participants were able to
extract a learning message from these activities.
In the 1990s and continuing today, another trend emerged in the
management development world. The three- to five-day program
largely moved out of favor; training for executives had to be special—
and short for them to invest their scarce time. To compete for the
attention of technology-savvy younger managers, the experience also
had to be entertaining. Authors and speakers with unique theories
were hired to run workshops. Celebrity professors from business
schools were asked to lecture on the latest thinking and lead a case
discussion on a topic of interest. Philosophers taught the Classics to
CEOs and their teams; English professors wrung management theory
out of Shakespeare. All of these had in common a remarkable
intellectual challenge, an outside perspective and expertise, and
brevity.
However, something seemed to be missing from the latest waves of
management and leadership training. To be sure, the concepts, cases,
and models were interesting, even compelling, and, despite the raft of
experiential exercises, the instructional models were mostly based on
discussion and dialogue. Leadership training had evolved into a left-
brained exercise—cerebral, analytical, and predictable.
Around the end of the 1990s, a new approach emerged: the historical
leadership experience. Momentum for this method started when
several retired US military officers rekindled an old military teaching
tradition—the Staff Ride—and marketed it to corporations. As we will
see, this new approach had design elements—emotion and drama that
corporate audiences had rarely experienced.
While many current historical leadership experiences revolve around
battlefield visits and military themes, the method is appropriate for a
wide variety of venues and topics. A historical event that involves a
dramatic, documented story, a cast of visible characters, and a place to
visit preferably with actual artifacts can serve as a platform to teach
management competencies in a memorable and unique way. The
designer of the experience needs to understand the historical story,
have insight into the possibilities for linking management concepts to
that and create an agenda that takes advantage of the setting and
story. The successful implementation of the design then depends on
the creativity of a skilled facilitator to draw out the lessons. What
makes the historical leadership lesson different is that participants
learn principles that are wrapped around indelible images of characters
and events.
The staff ride concept is the basic framework for this approach. A
historical leadership experience involves bringing students to a
historical site, methodically visiting specific locations, retelling the
story of the events that took place, and discussing various topics with
an instructor. In the military setting, the primary interest is strategy and
troop maneuvers, studying terrain and the like. In a corporate setting,
the lessons topics can be leadership, influence, change, innovation or
whatever the historical story holds at its core.
The staff ride has been around for a long time. In 1906, the assistant
commandant of the US Army General Service and Staff School brought
students to view Civil War battlefields in Georgia on what was to
become the first staff ride. Later, the United States Military Academy
formalized these programs; cadets would visit battlefields and discuss
elements of the battles. This model became a pro forma teaching
technique for the military. The forward-looking retired officers who
repackaged the staff ride selected one of the most dramatic events in
North American history—the battle of Gettysburg—as a teaching venue
for corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. As we will see, that
experience provided some added dimensions to contemporary
leadership training—drama, real characters, and the ground itself.
Historical Leadership Lesson Example: The Gettysburg
Experience
By looking at a specific example of a historical leadership experience
created for corporate audiences, we can examine the challenges to
instructional design and how they were met. This examination of
constraints and approaches is meant to serve as a guideline to others
who have an opportunity to pursue this unique instructional model.
This writer became involved with Gettysburg as a leadership
development tool when an organization needed help in designing and
co-conducting a leadership experience for executives which they
would subsequently market. As a design consultant and leadership
expert, I would be working with a retired US Army Colonel and former
military history professor from the US Military Academy at West Point
who knew the story and all the characters to a high level of detail. That
this would be a significant design challenge became clear when we
made an inventory of the conditions we would be facing:
The story.
In the American Civil War, the battle of Gettysburg represented the
culminating moment in a chain of events intended, by the Confederate
leadership, to force US President Abraham Lincoln to accept a
negotiated settlement or to encourage the British to support the South.
The challenge was that story was complex; a participant needed a
contextual understanding of the causes of the war, progress of the war
to July 1, 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s strategy, the many
characters involved and much more. There was additional useful
information about the military technology of the time, how armies were
organized, what their methods were, and other background information
that would allow the participant to better grasp and envision the events
they were about to vicariously relive. The challenge was to get
participants up to speed on this background without overburdening
them.
Even when participants were oriented to the historical events that led
up to the incidents to be discussed, literally everyone knew the
outcome of the historical story beforehand. The Confederates were
defeated; Pickett’s Charge was a gallant attempt which failed; Col.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s regiment from Maine bravely held the
end of the Union left flank at Little Round Top. The question was how
the designers could create suspense under these conditions.
The terrain, the location and the weather.
A historical leadership lesson takes place at the venue where events
occurred. At Gettysburg, that meant on the ground at the National
Military Park in Gettysburg, PA. The park itself is 20 square miles with 26
miles of public and parkland roads transiting the site. Walking to the
various sites required traversing muddy fields, stonewalls, climbing
steep hills, dealing with rain and occasionally very hot weather. In
addition, we would have to do most of our discussions standing up;
there are no benches nor places for repose. And, as we would be on
the ground for several hours at a time, there was a need to be near rest
room facilities that were, in fact, available but not necessarily easy to
get to.
In addition, Gettysburg is remote even today. It is at least two hours
from major airports in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The experience
could not be a half-day or a single day. The leadership experience
would require participants to invest two days and another for travel.
So, the pressure for a creating a valuable use of time for busy
executives is magnified.
The crowds.
Gettysburg attracts two million visitors a year. These include tourists,
families, school groups, other youth groups, veterans and organized
tours of all sizes. Professional and licensed Gettysburg tour guides
conduct many of these tours. In addition, there are yearly reenactments
conducted by dedicated enthusiasts who represent both Union and
Confederate forces. The challenge is that there can potentially be many
people arriving at a specific site at the same time as the leadership
class. This raises questions about how to conduct meaningful
discussions in the midst of other people milling around, some being
lectured to by tour guides, other posing for pictures, etc. The stories of
what individuals did and the choices they had are both dramatic and
poignant. Creating that mood in a public setting would be difficult.
The leadership model.
There was a question of what leadership model to teach. Was it the Jim
Collins, Good to Great construct, or Noel Tichy’s, Leadership Engine?
Would we look to Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker or Ram Charan? Was it
a question of practical leadership lessons like those of Captain Michael
Abrashoff’s It’s Your Ship, or do we embrace Tom Peters’ provocative
views? When looking at examples of leaders in action, we needed to
relate what we saw to some context, a framework that provided an
interpretative bridge. With literally thousands of theories and
constructs to choose from, we needed a content base we could use to
reflect the events that occurred in 1863.
The “link.”
Probably the biggest challenge of all was creating the link between
what was discussed in the leadership experience and what participants
could take away as practical lessons for their own practice of
leadership. In a way, the experience of looking into the details of a Civil
War character’s predicament and discussing options had a risk of
devolving into a stimulating and entertaining tour, with participants
playing the role of interested and glorified tourists. Without the
lessons of the past being tied directly to present-day work and
leadership challenges, the value of the experience as a development
technique would be questionable.
Taken as a whole, this inventory of challenges is formidable. However,
as designers, we kept in mind the best asset we had: an incredibly
dramatic story with many subplots and personalities and the ground
itself where the events took place.
Please continue to Part 2.
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