When my husband began his Executive MBA program, the first assignment was to fly to San Diego and go sailing with the cohort (having just completed my doctorate, I wasn't convinced this was "important" enough). But one of the tasks -- sailing with a 4-person team without uttering a single word -- got everybody's attention. Now there's an executive education program out of New York claiming to improve corporate performance and enhance communication skills.
The Horse Institute promises "You get measurable results. We are constantly improving our measuring tools to show the lasting benefits of our workshops. It’s not enough to send the participants back to the home office with great memories… you want training programs with long-term benefits. Our propriety tools are available to you; or we’ll work with you to develop new tools to fit your needs."
The institute says "If you have ever heard of Outward Bound or ropes courses, you are familiar with experiential learning.... based on the belief that adults learn best when they are engaged and actively involved in solving problems. These tried and true principles... have been well documented by Malcolm Knowles, the father of adult education (1913-1997)." I'm a big fan of his approach to andragogy, and wrote about it before.
Horse sense, or horse s#!t? Harry Hurt III of the New York Times was impressed by what he observed there, and he wasn't alone: "I’d secretly suspected from the beginning that the value of all this horse play would be minimal. But to my surprise, the group debriefing with Marie-Claude and the Horse Institute staff at the end of the day yielded testimonials that ranged from the predictably mundane to the sacred. A nurse coordinator with more than two decades of hospital experience said she would literally start to look outside her box-shaped office for more creative problem-solving techniques. One of her longtime colleagues said she’d realized that 'trying to make everybody happy is an impossible task.'"
And NPR went to see what this was all about, watching as people from an insurance company went through one of the programs. "The women are told they have to make one of the horses jump over a bar, but they can't touch the horse.... The exercise is aimed at getting people to think about how they solve problems and not assume there's a right or wrong way to tackle a task."
Measurement, schmeasurement. I'd be interested in seeing the institute's evaluation tools. I don't doubt this could be a worthwhile experience -- but things like this are really hard to measure.
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