That is what Jeff Pfeffer’s email said this morning — he wanted to know if it was true, if I was encouraging students to cheat. By the time he sent the note, my misadventure with the press — BusinessWeek — was pretty much over. Or at least I hope it is over. Things looked pretty bad yesterday morning for a couple hours, It all started when I got an email from a BusinessWeek reader that was titled "Cheating is Not Virtuous," which took me to task for my quote in the current BusinessWeek (where I was talking about d.school teaching), which was printed originally as "If you found somebody to help you write an exam, in our view that’s a sign of
an inventive person who gets stuff done."
Both Jeff Pfeffer and the anonymous BusinessWeek reader were outraged by my apparent encouragement for cheating. And I don’t blame them, based on the words that were printed. This was not the message that I meant to convey to the reporter and I suspect that I didn’t say that sentence as we don’t have traditional exams at the d.school, mostly group projects. (The reporter, Michelle Conlin, says she checked her notes and
that I did in fact say that but obviously we had some miscommunication)
BUT regardless of exactly what happened, I am pleased to say that within an hour of getting the email from the outraged BusinessWeek reader, and then communicating it to the writer Michelle Conlin, they had changed the online version of story , which now says (I include the paragraph to give you context:
The Stanford
University Design School, for example, is so collaborative that "it
would be impossible to cheat," says D-school professor Robert I.
Sutton. "If you found somebody to help you write a group project, in
our view that’s a sign of an inventive team member who gets stuff done.
If you found someone to do work for free who was committed to open
source, we’d say, ‘Wow, that was smart.’ One group of students got the
police to help them with a school project to build a roundabout where
there were a lot of bike accidents. Is that cheating?"
In addition, BusinessWeek committed to printing a correction in a forthcoming print version of the magazine, which will read In
“Cheating—Or Postmodern Learning?” Stanford Design School Professor Robert
Sutton’s quote should have made clear that the d-school does not have individual
exams. Grades are based on work in groups and students’ ability to mobilize
outside networks."
This is a cautionary tale, albeit one with an apparently happy ending. It all started with a most interesting interview that I had with Michelle a couple weeks back, just as the cheating scandal at the Duke Business School was hitting the news: 34 MBA’s were busted for cheating. I made clear to Michelle that in my more traditional classes, like Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach, where we give students individual exams and grade them on individual performance, that we do watch closely for cheating and have had issues. BUT the point I was trying to make was many d.school classes offer a different kind of education, where students work in groups, present solutions aimed at solving real problems, and those solutions often involve building and mobilizing networks of people out in the real world to help them identify and implement solutions.
In this world — which reflects the reality of how people actually do work in modern organizations — traditional cheating is impossible, or a lot harder, because we encourage groups to critique and build on each other’s solutions, and solutions and prototypes are developed through a social process that involves experts, coaches, employees, customers, users, and many others. So, for example:
1. The student group that developed firefoxies.com lacked the computer programming expertise that they needed to put up their site, but were able to succeed because they found eager members of the open source community who wrote code from them for free. I don’t think this cheating, as we graded the students on their ability to find and activate social networks. This is how things get done in a connected world.
2. As the article suggests, a group in another class that did a bike safety project built a roundabout at one of the most dangerous parts of the campus — and they had students using it for a few hours (a real working prototype…. now that is design thinking). The Stanford police helped them by identifying the dangerous area, gave them permission to install it, and physically helped them build the roundabout. In addition, the students on bikes who used the roundabout "helped" them as well, as did another group of students who came along with safety signs and pamphlets, who joined in the effort in the spot — so it became the blended efforts of two teams. See the Stanford Daily story about the class.
3. Our students who did a project for Wal-Mart on the sustainability initiative (see this post — you can even watch the student presentations if you want) recruited Wal-Mart employees and customers to help them in hundreds of ways — as well as their friends and fellow students. This project was about mobilizing excitement and support for the sustainability movement, and presenting the results to Wal-Mart, so the traditional individual exam model doesn’t apply here either.
Yet, somehow, the quote in BusinessWeek seemed to imply that we were encouraging individual cheating, when in fact, our collective and network-based model means that "helping" isn’t cheating — it is what effective groups do. There might be some forms of cheating in the d.school (I haven’t seen it yet, anything is possible), but in this world, the "bad behaviors" we worry about are being an uncooperative or lazy team member, not helping other teams, or not giving people who help your team enough credit. To illustrate, I became extremely unhappy with one student who told me that he couldn’t attend class very much and was missing a lot of team meetings because he was so busy with his Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship interviews, and his Google job interviews. His team was unhappy with him, and I pressured him (successfully) to drop the class. I don’t know if his behavior is unethical, but I do know he was being a bad citizen. That is the kind of behavior we focus on stopping, not cheating in the traditional sense.
In short, my view of ethics or cheating hasn’t changed, but what is "cheating" in a class that tests pure individual performance is different than in a purely collaborative class that has no exams or individual assignments. These facts were somehow obscured in the original BusinessWeek article, but I am glad they fixed it. Returning to my little press fiasco, I take away four things from this experience:
1. Don’t believe everything you read and hear in the media — we all know that, but it is easy to forget.
2. No matter how careful that you think you are with the facts during media interviews, there is always the possibility of factual error and distortion. Try to be careful with you own facts, and ask the reporter during the interview if it is being recorded or if they are taking notes — so if something goes wrong, you have an idea of how to verify what you said. (In most U.S. states, by the way, they have to tell you if they are tape-recording the conversation, or they are breaking the law). In my case, I talk fast, and the reporter was taking notes rather than recording, so that increased the risk of distortion.
3. If you disagree with the facts or emphasis of a story, don’t start out by assuming that people in the media have dark motives. Getting angry and make accusations will only make things worse. My experience is that most journalists want to get the facts right and don’t want to twist them either. But they write under deadline pressure, try to tell stories that weave together diverse sources, and also face pressures from editors and others to write in certain ways. I don’t know exactly what happened with this BusinessWeek story, but after making some mistakes in my career, I now try to avoid playing the blame game if I can (e.g., I once called-up a Wall Street Journal reporter and yelled at her about 15 years ago… not a wise move even though I still think the facts were twisted unfairly). In this case, I started by assuming that I could have said the sentence about exams OR that it could have been something that journalist mis-recorded, but that it didn’t really matter whose "fault" it was. Rather than getting into finger-pointing, my goal was to get the facts corrected. I assumed that both Michelle and I are competent and well-meaning people, but as human-beings, we sometimes will make mistakes, and fixing the mistake (rather than blamestorming, as our politicians love to do) was what mattered. Michelle was operating under the same assumptions, so it was a delight to work with her on the correction.
4. Finally, as I have written here before about some problems I had with Amazon (and in my books), one of the best tests of people or organizations is "what happens when they make a mistake." Humans and human organizations will make mistakes — after all, learning and innovation is impossible without error, and we all slip-up now and then. The real test is after the mistake, does learning occur? Is it fixed quickly? Or is the focus on avoiding the finger of blame and looking for a scapegoat? It may sound odd, but the experience with Michelle and BusinessWeek yesterday was one of the best experiences I have ever had with the media, even though it could have been the worst. We all just focused on fixing the problem, and to BusinessWeek’s credit, the entire focus was on repairing the possible inaccuracies as quickly as possible. I believe that the lack of blame and anger on both sides is one of the main reasons that this problem could be dealt with and repaired so quickly.
Sure, I could be vindicative and angry and claim that there are still magazines out there that make it sound like I am pro-cheating. But what is the point? I can’t see any upside. The only way to avoid this kind of problem for certain is to never talk to the press. The only way to avoid writing things that are wrong is to never write anything at all. I much prefer to be around people who do a lot of stuff, make mistakes now and then, quickly admit their errors, and then learn something — and even better — use their experience to teach others. Indeed, in the end my opinion of Michelle and BusinessWeek is higher now than when this adventure started, and as strange as it sounds, I am glad it happened. Indeed, I think that this is a lesson I learned from hanging around design thinkers like David Kelley, Perry Klebahn, and Diego Rodriguez.
P.S. Jeff Pfeffer wrote a rather scathing Business 2.0 Column about cheating in business schools a couple years ago. You might want to read Teaching the Wrong Lesson. Jeff gets into the topic in more detail deeper in his forthcoming book What Were They Thinking?
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