How students used MBA tools to conclude in favour of friends with benefits

Students Naima Mayany, 17, and Alex Homoki, 18, of John Polanyi Collegiate Institute in North York are learning how to apply MBA tools to their everyday experiences.

ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE/TORONTO STAR

A group of Toronto high school students is learning to embrace the complexities of the world, thanks to an injection of MBA know-how.

Dina Alasadi sees her higher education options in a different light and Alex Homoki was able to reconcile his desire to travel the world with a need to start applying to universities.

Both teens have a new class to thank for their progress.

Dina and Alex are among two-dozen Grade 12 students at John Polanyi Collegiate Institute (formerly Bathurst Heights Secondary School) taking one class a day based on methods nurtured at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business.

Best known for turning out MBA degrees, not high school diplomas, the Rotman School has been expanding its scope, thanks to research being done at its Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, a pet project of Rotman dean Roger Martin.

Experienced managers have taken lessons in integrative thinking through the Rotman Executive MBA program for nearly a decade.

Now younger people can reap its benefits as well, thanks to a junior version named I-Think.

A couple of Toronto-area private schools now offer classes, and the Toronto District School Board has joined in, to see how it works in the broad economic and ethnic mix at Lawrence Ave. W. and the Allen Expwy.

Alex, 18, signed up for I-Think at John Polanyi C.I. in September, at the encouragement of his guidance counselor.

“It didn’t seem like a typical course,” he recalls of its focus on leadership and decision making.

Neema Mayani, 17, who just completed a group project on relationships with Alex, wasn’t impressed with the first class, but friends persuaded her to stay.

She is happy she did. “It gave me an opportunity to learn about how different people think and how I think,” she says.

Dina, also 17, says the class has already “made me think a lot of things about my parents and life. It’s made me reflect on my own life.”

The essence of I-Think is to approach problems by looking at existing solutions, pick them apart and then try to come up with new ways of looking at solving issues that involve as few negative trade-offs as possible.

Ellie Avishai, the Rotman MBA grad who directs the I-Think program at the high school, quotes one of the integrative thinking mantras: “Opposing choices can be leveraged, not feared.”

Alex, for example, realized he can travel as well as go to university, if he studies abroad. He also discovered a lot more about how he thinks and relates to his peers.

If a student becomes more conscious of who they are, they will engage more constructively with people and problems, Avishai explains. “How we see the world around us will influence how we act in the world.”

Dina has translated this as newfound patience with her mother’s daily demands.

John Polanyi C.I. teacher Kathy Rocchio likes integrative thinking because it develops critical thought: “Usually, teachers are so swamped with content that they don’t have time to operate at this level, but this really helps us to get into the nitty-gritty and complexities of things.”

Avishai laughs when asked if it’s more difficult to teach teenagers or business executives to think critically.

“The extra years of schooling don’t prepare MBA students for the kinds of problems they’ll be working on in the real world,” she says. “The high school students here seem every bit as capable in thinking work to solve a problem.”

In fact, the teens can be easier to work with than managers. “There’s a little bit more freedom to ask students to be thoughtful,” Avishai has found.

“Being able to answer the question, who am I? speaks to the core of everything that we do.”

WHAT IS INTEGRATIVE THINKING?

The Rotman School describes integrative thinking as, “the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but it superior to each.”

Here’s how one group of students at John Polanyi C.I. used integrative thinking to resolve a case in which of some in the group preferred being in a relationship while others preferred being single.

The group considered the pros and cons of each, focusing on positive rather than negative qualities;

They arrived at a consensus that friends with benefits offer the best of both worlds, as long as both persons approach the relationship on an equal understanding of its flexibility.

Managers also have to make decisions based on competing interests and priorities – something the Rotman School calls a “messy model.”

Managers make mistakes when they try to make the alternatives simpler than they are. As the Rotman School puts it: “Managers (and recently graduated MBA students) will produce high levels of error with their actions when they can only access the skills of picking and applying narrow models.”