An Interview with John McWilliams
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “McWilliams” refers to John McWilliams)
McWilliams:	My name's John McWilliams. I work in the Deakin Business School and teach in the MBA program. My role in the MBA program is to run four of the residential schools that we teach, therein Organisation Behaviour, Communications, Change and Entrepreneurship.
Inter:	So John what drives your approach to teaching and learning, but particularly to teaching?
McWilliams:	I think perhaps the most important thing for me is that it should be fun. And what I mean by that is that if the instructor's having fun with their teaching, they're enjoying their teaching, then that provides a level of energy which transmits itself to the group. And if the group are having fun they are more like to put that energy into the learning. Last night we ran an experiential exercise for an evening class that was due to finish at nine o'clock and it actually finished at 9:30 pm because the group were keen to stay and talk because they were having fun.
Inter:	But from my understanding, John, a lot of what you do is face to face and very heavily reliant on that. Where does technology fit into your recipe for success?
McWilliams:	Okay, we have to blend them really. For the residential schools we use technology, we use DSO a lot and that is to be able to prepare the students up to a month out from the event with pre work which they do online, we can form groups online. In the Entrepreneurship school, for example, we can get venture teams together online and they can come up with an opportunity that they want to pursue during the school and in Communications we can have people do preparatory exercises in change. We actually have people running an online case study for the month prior to the school. So DSO is very important. We also use DSO for up to two months after the school for people to work and to follow up. Other forms of technology that we use increasingly in the residential schools is the ability to make CDs and DVDs to put material on. I have been using CDs for a few years now as the basis for the readings and that way you can overcome the bandwidth problem of having stuff on DSO which may take too long to download or you might have to chunk it so that people can download it.
Inter:	And John you mentioned case studies – they seem to be, from my understanding of your teaching, to be absolutely essential to what you do. Could you perhaps use an example of a case study and walk us through your approach to it?
McWilliams:	Absolutely. Well If I could tell you about the fire service case – that's perhaps the best one – and that's something that we designed, a friend of mine called Gary Doyle and I, about three years ago. Prior to that we'd been using a case in the change school based on motor cars, based on Morgan motor cars, and we'd done that three times and it was getting boring. So I went out with a digital video camera and visited the Melbourne Fire Brigade and I just rang them up and asked them if I could call in. I interviewed a Chief Fire Officer and an executive group and some middle managers, commanders, and some first level managers – the people who actually command fire stations – and I visited fire stations and looked at equipment, got them to demonstrate how their equipment works, went to the Fire Service Museum and toured that. And, again, I did the same thing in Geelong with the Country Fire Authority. I went to the Geelong Fire Station, to the CFA headquarters and to the Belmont Fire Brigade, and I collected all of this video material of interviews and demonstrations and visits to buildings and the idea of that is to have a CD with all of that on that you can send out to students and even though they may not be living in Australia, they can get a sort of rich picture of what life in the fire service is like, and they can understand what the work is like. And we do things like have interviews with people in their mess rooms so they're having lunch while they're talking to us about their jobs. The way that case works is that I send that material out a month before the residential school and then we form an organisation online in DSO and we divide the total group into two large groups – one group to be the CFA and one group to be the MFB – and with each of those we have a senior management group, a middle management group and four first level management groups. In the MFB the first level management groups would be station officers – five station officers in each group – a middle group of commanders and a top group of executive. During the month that they're logging on into those groups we have them viewing the video material on their disks. They often go out and visit their local fire brigade and that can happen in Singapore – they'll go and visit the Singapore Fire Brigade – or it can happen in London and they get the feeling of the fire service culture. And during the month we're feeding in policy problems at the top of the organisation. The first person incidentally to sign on becomes the CEO of the organisation. So we ask them to address issues like in the CFA, the Linton enquiry into bushfires or the Stewart Esplin report on fire and emergency services. We make those documents available to them either by URL links or by making PDFs and putting them onto another CD or PDF ing them and putting them on DSO. So they read those and they come up with policy initiatives. At the lower level of management we feed in operational issues. Operational issues could be a review of the way the MFB dealt with the Coode Island fire and how they should accelerate the process of sending fire engines out to the fire, how to accept more women into fire stations and what provision should be made for women. Or we might just simply run union issues like the quality of the boots that firemen are getting has changed and they're getting rubber boots now when they would have preferred leather boots – those sorts of things. So you start to get traffic running from the bottom levels up to the top through the middle managers and from the top levels down to the bottom through the middle management. That keeps the middle managers, the commanders, really busy translating information. And we make that communication path by allowing the CEO to join the commander group and each of the commanders to join one of the station officer groups, the lower level management groups. So they have to operate through a chain of command. And what happens during that month is that as the organisation works up into a kind of operating style and a culture we reach a point where we can pretty well hand its running over to the CEO and we start to communicate with the CEO. And as the school comes closer, say a week out from school, we will ask the CEOs and the MFB and the CFA to provide a presentation for us for the first afternoon of the school. And that person has to organise say 35 people online to generate a presentation, to come up with the PowerPoint, with the ideas, with the arguments. When they arrive at the school – and what we've done is we've liaised with both fire services – incidentally we get wonderful support from the fire brigades – and we've managed to get the MFB to send up say three fire appliances or two fire appliances and one of those community fire information buses, some officers in uniform – at least one senior officer – and the same sort of thing from the CFA. We've had the Belmont Fire Brigade send their mobile command unit up and park it at the management centre and actually turn out from the Management Centre. The first time we did this exercise there was a fire in Geelong and as we were settling into the school the alarms went and off went the fire engine, put out a fire and came back, you know. So we try to create the ambience in the school of what I remember as a fire service technical college, or you might think of it as a conference. So we set up posters in the foyer of the Geelong Management Centre and we have displays of equipment like fire extinguishers, that sort of thing, so that when they arrive we're preserving the look and feel and the rich picture of what it is to be in the fire brigade. We're trying to get them to identify with the culture of the two organisations. In fact, for the first day at the Management Centre we keep them apart and then on the second day we serve our proposal to merge them and that creates the real dynamics of change because there is emotional attachment to the organisation that they've been in during the last month, they've shared experience of the organisation's dynamics which you don't normally get from a diverse group of people, and there is shared resistance to change. And that gives us a very rich case to work with as we go through experiential dynamics associated with models of change management.
Inter:	So, John, that's obviously a very rich learning resource. How would the students respond to it?
McWilliams:	Very positively. In fact the first time we did it, in a way we got some negative feedback and we got the negative feedback because at the end of two days we thought they'd had enough of the fire brigade and time to move on to something else. And when we got the student feedback forms a majority of them complained that we'd cut it off too quickly and we should have ran it for at least another day. So we learned a little bit from that. The amazing degree of immersion that you get in these exercises – it's reminiscent of some social psychological studies by Zimbardo on people living in prisons. Just to give you an idea, in the first workshop when we cut the thing off after two days, the people who had been in the executive of both services maintained their status throughout the rest of the week even though we weren't running the exercise. The CEO of the organisation that was successful in taking over the other one was asked to give the presentations at the end of the school to those people who were finishing their MBA with that residential. I was at a meeting with those people because I had to do something with them while the other group were doing another exercise when somebody knocked gently on the door, popped their head around the door, very respectfully asked if the executive were ready to hear the presentations of the other group. So it's just really phenomenal how quickly you can create a culture, and this culture wasn't created at the residential school, it was created on DSO, through their interaction on DSO. So the experience in a way speaks for itself but certainly the feedback from the students has always been very positive.
Inter:	John, you mentioned that you used to run a case study regarding Morgan cars, the fire brigade – what do you have in mind next?
McWilliams:	Well we've looked at a couple of other organisations. Gary and I – Gary is in the corporate world consulting and using this approach he has subsequently made a CD of InsaTechPivot around Australia which he's used, that's an important one, and we're looking for an organisation which will lend itself to creating that sense of emotional attachment which you can get out of the fire service and also that you can, that is accessible to people, you know, that people can walk in off the street. You know, you want an organisation like a McDonalds or a police station or something like that. We've used the technology of those cases also with a company in Wangaratta that restores World War II fighter planes and we use the technology to, because we couldn't bus the students up to Wangaratta, so we videoed their operations and we videoed an interview with the owner of the organisation, CEO. We'll find another organisation like the fire brigade. The last hoorah for the fire brigade case might be to involve – there are two other fire services in Victoria. They're the people who put fires out in State forests and there are the military and there's a third one actually which is the Airport's Fire Services. But what we also might be doing is to reduce the length of these things so that we can use them in off campus teaching or on campus teaching.
Inter:	John, I'm aware also that you provide a number of case studies but, perhaps playing devil's advocate, you put a lot of work into something like the fire brigade one, you know it works well, why you don't just run it again and again?
McWilliams:	Okay, well it's back to having fun. Well there's two things: fun is important and I find with a big case like this by the time you've run it the third time, you become complacent, you begin to take things for granted, you even sometimes forget bits of it, you know, forget to do things and it's because the case, it's going stale. I mean you could keep running it, maybe other people should run it, something like that. It's always topical. When we run it, there's always the bushfire season, there's always something going on industrially, and there's some real change issues in the fire brigade that are ongoing. But it just seems, it's more fun to do something new. The second thing too is that organisations, when they engage with us in these cases, they put a lot of their own resources into helping us. I mean sending fire trucks up from Melbourne to Geelong, things like that, and it feels as if you keep using them up if you keep doing them all the time, you know. Three times is good and then thank you very much for your help and then let them lie fallow for a bit while you use another organisation.
Inter:	John, in another conversation you referred to light footed course development. Could you perhaps explain a little bit what you mean by that?
McWilliams:	Sure, let me give you two examples if I can. Light footed in the sense that to put the fire brigade's case together all I really needed to do was to go out with a digital camera, a little camera and a tripod, and knock on people's doors, ring people up and say can I come and talk to you. I was able to put the CFA part of the case together in five days of popping back and forward to Geelong and the MFB, about the same amount of time. Burning it onto CDs is real easy – most laptops will do that now. And providing you're not worried too much about really great production values – if you go to Learning Services they'll do really good production values but it will take longer and it will be expensive. To do it like this, and it's acceptable, it's a very cheap thing to do – I mean the equipment is about $2000 worth of camera and maybe another $1000 worth of software max. and probably a lot less than that. And it's possible to generate cases quite quickly. You can go out of the building and drop down to a factory or a retail outlet or something like that and walk around talking to people and take it back into your classroom, and the cost is very minimal. And I think it probably suits my personality as well – I tend to be a bit outgoing and so enjoy doing that sort of thing. So there's some fun in it. That's what I mean by being light footed – not having a team of people, just you and your camera. In fact, it's interesting, those ideas – people are making real films like that increasingly, you know. And you can produce something which does the job, you know, to do the case study about [Warburts], these World War II aircrafts, it just involves one person driving to Wangaratta and spending an afternoon at this guy's factory. And he just had the camera on his shoulder everywhere he went and we get the sense of the same visit. So that's light footing.
Inter:	Well the impression that I have, John, is that you're very creative, very imaginative, and you're also technically competent to be able to achieve what you've achieved. The students, I think, from my understanding, they do react very positively to this experience. Can you imagine residentials that were just totally face to face, that had no technology involved at all being as successful as what we have now?
McWilliams:	We used to have them. I mean when we started running residentials we didn't use very much technology and they were reasonably successful but the technology has considerably enhanced them, I think, and what it's made possible is to prepare people so that you can do, if you like, the didactic learning, you can put your readings and your theories and your models up in DSO, or send them out with CDs as PDFs, and you can get all of that out of the way and that really clears the path for a kind of residential event which is experiential, which is full on, case driven, interactive, adult learning. And you can do that without the sort of conscience of thinking, I should really be giving these people some theoretical input, you know. And you can also do that after the event. So if you like the footprint or the trace of the residential school can be extended much more than the actual week of contact. So you're able to use the residential experience for what it's ideally suited to – that's the emotional interaction between the students as they go through the experiences, the immersion, in the topic, and then you're able to extend out on either side using DSO and give them the conceptual tools they need to deal with and to unpack that experience. So, in fact, yeah the residentials were okay before we really started to use the technology but now they're a lot better and we can do a much better job with them.
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