Storytelling

Challenge

As a professor, I am a member of the doctoral student council of my university. Our challenge is to improve the bad relationship between a supervisor and his doctoral candidate and save the project which they work on since there are just few months left to finish the project and defend it. The progress of the thesis heavily depends on the quality of the relationship between the student and the professor. The incident came to the council in a such way that both the student and the professor blame each other for being faulty for the relationship and they do not believe in each other’s words anymore. We first want to understand the root cause of the problem and see if there is any misunderstanding, and identify the necessary actions to take.

Tool

We choose the tool of storytelling to solve the challenge above. We refer to the description of storytelling as a tool as stated in the video of Shawn Michaud, Global Leadership Development Director in Mars Inc. during this course. It is a tool that helps  us  understand  what  the  people  experience,  their  emotions,  during  that experience and their character and values. We also tell stories from our lives and create  moments  of  reflection  and  propose  solutions  from  our  perspectives.  We believed that this tool could also reveal unstated needs of the professor and the student during the project. As stated by Shawn Michaud, such approach could naturally reveal the possible solutions and which strategy to develop.

Application

A mediation meeting was planned. The student and the professor were visited prior to that mediation meeting by two professors from our departments. The complaints were identified. A dossier was created by the members of the council to have a general idea of the situation.

In the mediation meeting, both the teacher and the student were invited to the council. We asked the student to tell what he had gone through the project. His speech revealed his values and character. We have observed that the student’s expectations did not match with his experience during this project and he tried hard to endure this disappointment. His project included some form of a trade secret of a company and therefore the publications were limited by the supervisor. The student was found to have hard times proving his skills during job interviews due to lack of publications.

The emotional and mental state of the student spiraled down the project and his relationship with the supervisor. We also found out that the student felt deeply betrayed since some of the verbal promises were broken by the supervisor. The student had indeed valued close interactions with other students by giving courses and doing seminars and going to the conferences. These opportunities had not existed under this supervisor, and the student had felt as a cheap labor who is micromanaged.

The council members also revealed that they had experienced some sort of similar problems with their students which hindered their performance. I personally found the supervisorship poor. This student did not have a employment contract but a doctoral  contract.  This  meeting  had  become  a  self  revealing  movie.  It  was collaboratively decided that the research laboratory makes a slight payrise for the student and the funding company proposes to give a startup support to the student after obtaining his degree and student is left free for making publications outside the project in the last few months of the project. This approach made student gain his confidence and the student indeed made a patented work at the final sprint of the project.

Insight

We realized that our university could benefit better from the potential of the doctoral students by only slight changes in the work conditions and by developing closer relations with the students. As we include the emotions and values to the facts by the use of storytelling tool, the solution possibilities emerged by itself and strategy was developed rapidly. I also realized that I should spend more time with my students too, in coffee breaks, sport activities etc. and follow their emotional and mental state. We saw how only one tool of design thinking could solve such a complicated problem.

Approach

Alternatively, a visualization tool could be used for finding out the expectations of the student and the professor in ideal conditions during a project. I believed that story telling tool is more suited to such a complicated problem due to the reasons stated above. In conclusion, storytelling tool was suited because there could be hidden expectations and emotional problems in this student professor relationship.

