How leaders build a collective identity with Vanessa Beasley

0:00Educator Jerome Hunter posed a question to a group of middle school boys. How can we create a community where everyone feels a sense of belonging? Their responses were illuminating. We posed an essential question to our students that asked, how can we create a community where everyone feels a sense of belonging? Students took this question. They sought multiple perspectives from their peers, their teachers, community leaders. And then they came back to us and said, we'd like to address homelessness in Seattle. Hunter runs a school built around three C's, confidence, communication, and community.

0:34The last one plays out in a hands-on way. In this case, Hunter's team partnered with a local construction company to actually design, build, and donate the house. Jerome explains how these students learned that belonging starts young in a list of five special episodes on finding community, only on TED Talks Daily.

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1:41Look for Nature Raised Farms Chicken next time you're shopping and make your choice a little easier. I don't think we have a learning how to speak problem. I think everybody and their brother has a way to speak in a podcast. I think we have a learning how to listen problem. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:20Vanessa Beasley is the president of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She's also an expert on presidential rhetoric in the U.S., and across her career, she's explored the relationship between mass media, the presidency, and American identity. Vanessa shared her research in her seminal 2004 book, You the People. And it's a topic that's only become more relevant in modern politics. When I look at presidential rhetoric, I tend to focus on the constitutive. Who are they telling us we are? And how do we believe there's a we in the first place? Vanessa and I also talk about how to reinvent liberal arts colleges in this changing era of higher ed, and how to become better listeners as well as speakers.

3:02Vanessa Beasley, welcome to Rethinking. Happy to be here. I'm excited to find out what you're going to ask me to rethink today. All right. Game on. As a rhetoric expert, what do you look at first when you're analyzing a presidential speech? What are the signals that stand out to you right away? Yeah. So I'm super interested in two things. One is the intersection between the evolution of the presidency and the evolution of media, because they don't exist without each other. And the strengths and the weaknesses of both systems need each other. And the other thing I'm really interested in is the activation of what we call constitutive rhetoric.

3:41If you and I think about giving a speech, the first thing we might think of as leaders is what does it do? You know, what's our message? How do we want to motivate people? What behavior do we want to result from it? And that's instrumental use of rhetoric. But I'm more interested in the constitutive part. Who does that leader tell you you are in that moment? How does that leader build community through their words? What are they constituting as an audience? Well, you wrote a whole book on this, so you're the perfect person to ask. Even the idea of the American people as a we, as an identity that was held collectively, I didn't realize the extent to which presidents actually created that and shaped the content of it.

4:23Talk to me about that. What were the American people before presidents started describing them as a collective or as a community, and how did it change? So before there was a way to spread news through Telegraph, and before there was a way to get printed newspapers across the country, everything would have been local. So people wouldn't have thought about an American people as much as they would have thought about what was happening in their state. And for politicians, it would have been what's happening within the parties within their state. So my argument is there isn't a conception of actual American people before that time outside of the Constitution and outside of the constitutionally and ritually mandated practices that presidents had at their disposal, including the inaugural address, which is when you tell the American people ritualistically who they are.

5:20And that starts with Washington. He was the first person, obviously, to do that. So I think it's a rhetorical creation over and over and over again. And as media changes, we just have more ways to show it or feel it, perhaps is a better verb. Who do you think is the greatest American president that people don't respect or fully appreciate? Right. So I'm not going to name a president. I'm going to name a change, a shift in media history, because I tend to think about the presidency as the channels of communication changed. So on that note, Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first people that we call a rhetorical president, which meant that he had the gall to go speak directly to the American people.

6:07And then once Woodrow Wilson started doing that and radio started, it was all off the chain. Everything before that would have made presidents think it was base or beneath them to speak directly to the American people. That's so interesting because, you know, I think about the image of Lincoln sitting down for office hours with citizens. That was definitely not beneath him to speak to the people. Did it change between him and Roosevelt or was he just an outlier? People hated that Lincoln did that. I mean, even in his own time, it was very controversial. Yeah. Why? Yeah. Because that would have been seen as pandering.

6:45How else, though? Granted, America was much smaller than it is today, but how do you avoid becoming out of touch if you're not in touch with your constituents? They were largely out of touch with most of the American people. So when you think about the fact that we didn't have railroads that could deliver newspapers nationally until the middle of the 19th century, there was kind of no such thing as the people. There were only the constituents that you were able to connect with locally. And even then, it would have been very rare for a president to do that. That's so interesting. What do you find most surprising about the changes in how presidents have characterized the American people?

7:24Who did Washington tell us we were? And how did that evolve? Washington famously told us that we were not to get involved with other countries, avoid foreign entanglements. But Washington had a really interesting task because he was the first president who had to say, basically, we're not them. And all constitutive or, again, identity-building rhetoric has an us and a them. So Washington had to say, look, I know we've been them, but we're not them anymore. And, of course, referring to the British. And so his idioms had a lot to do with thinking differently, acting differently. Some of the presidents that come after him will expand on this, but it's not letting ourselves fall prey to the kinds of divisions that one would have seen in Europe or, frankly, some of the class-based thinking you would have seen in Britain.

8:18So the idea of upward mobility, they're not going to use that language, but that's going to start to show up. So it's this invention of an American people that's almost necessarily saying we're not the Europeans or we're not the British in the very, very first early years. Us versus them is such a, I mean, it's probably the most ubiquitous identity building strategy. It strikes me it's not the only one, though. And I'm wondering about the others that presidents have used. It sounds like actually there's a hint of us versus our past selves in the Washington message. Lovely. That's really nice. Which happens to also be a them.

8:56But what are the other ways that presidents have built a sense of collective identity? So Reagan is one of my favorite answers to this question, because Reagan introduces narrative and storytelling. And of course, abetted by the visuals of television that his administration uses so well. But that's another good way of suing who we are without always having to feature them in the background. And if you think about some of Reagan's best-known visual rhetoric, I'm old enough to remember a video called Morning in America, which is about, you know, people waking up to a new day and they're on a farm.

9:32That kind of visualization of identity with a narrative background. So those entailments that get manifest through the story and the visuals, Reagan really opened up a new chapter in presidential rhetoric. And I would argue very few presidents after him have met it. You know, I think this is one of the hardest challenges that leaders face. And you obviously know it from studying presidents. You also know it from being a president of a university. And I think that, you know, there's this tension that always jumps out at me when I work with leaders, which is I want to read the room. I want to know what people's existing values and identities and experiences are so I can speak to them.

10:10But I also want to elevate the room. I want to create a new identity for people. And that involves some risk because I don't know if they're going to buy what I'm selling. I don't know if they're going to get attached to the vision that I'm trying to paint. But it also comes with tremendous opportunity because I can open up new possibilities if they do get excited about this, you know, this vision that I'm trying to construct. I'd love to hear you talk about the dance between kind of meeting people where they are and bringing them somewhere that you would like them to go. I love this question, and I'm going to rephrase it as, how do you have a healthy version of us without relying on some kind of enemy imagined them?

10:51And I think, as you said, you've got to get people to try to imagine collectively that they have the capacity to be greater than what that current state is. And I believe your research, among others, a lot of social psychological research suggests that people have to have a little bit of a shared sense of a problem to change. And I won't go all far the way to say they have to fear something, but it's pretty central to persuasion. You and I have to agree that we share a problem before we're going to decide that it's worth risking a solution. One of the biggest mistakes that I consistently see leaders make, I think in psychology, it's called solution aversion, where I bring you a solution and you don't like it.

11:32And your first impulse is to deny the existence of the problem altogether. Whereas if I can align with you on here's what's broken, then we can start to talk about what are the most compelling fixes. And so I think applying that to leadership rhetoric, what I'm learning from your observation here is it's actually helpful for leaders to start by acknowledging a common problem that everybody agrees on. And then once they're on board with that, you have some license to bring some novel solutions to the table. That's right. And if you can't get them to buy into the problem, then you might as well just talk about the weather.

12:08I mean, there's no way to move forward. There's a persuasion model called Monroe's Motivated Sequence. And when we teach public speaking, we tell people this, that the first step is get their attention and the second step is persuade them that there's a sure problem or threat. You can use a fear appeal there. And if you can't get them to that second point, there's no point in going to number three, which is solution. And then you travel to actualization. What do I need you to do to make this solution a possibility? But you're right. You've got to get there first. And I think one of our challenges as leaders today is how many different sources of evidence and contested facts are out there because it's really hard to build a problem if you and I don't agree on what color the sky is today, you know.

12:53So you're finishing your fourth year as Trinity's president. I'm struck by a couple of things that are really interesting about your role. The first one is you basically reinvented Trinity as an institution. It was known as a highly respected regional university. It's now a major national liberal arts college. How did you think about getting people on board with that vision? I love the way you phrased that question because it speaks to my rhetorician's heart. So one way of approaching that task would be to say the core parts are already here. Amazing faculty, amazing students, beautiful campus, all the right values.

13:35And if the core parts are there, all I need to do is be a good communicator and go out in the world and pull back the curtain and say, look, look what you've been missing, world. You know, here we are. And that's one theory of the case. Another theory of the case is to say that at a national level, what does the world need at this moment when we start to think about the things that higher education has gotten right and the things that we've maybe not gotten so right? And I saw in Trinity the potential to have that conversation and to build on the strengths, of course, but also, frankly, a little weedy, because we have an undergraduate business degree, because we have an undergraduate engineering degree, both of which lean heavily on the liberal arts tradition, I saw the opportunity to say, this is kind of what the world's been missing, right?

14:34That I'm going to use the classical term, like that focus on, you know, the method of learning that you get through the liberal arts and the humility that the liberal arts teaches you, because your perspective does not define the world. Boy, you get that in liberal arts. Along with, you know, some of the practical skills that sometimes liberal arts colleges hold their noses up to. And we need to stop doing that. Agreed. So as you look at all kinds of leaders, in politics, in business, in education, what do you see are the most consistent mistakes that leaders make from a rhetoric standpoint? A red flag for me is when we talk about past leaders, and cultures do this all the time, as if they alone were responsible for the success of the organization.

15:23And this happens a lot to presidents, happens a lot to college presidents. And that's an organizational red flag for me, right? Because no one person alone is very likely to be responsible for the success of an organization. Oh, that's such a good point. The leader attribution error. It's well documented, but I've never thought about it as a symbol of a cultural problem. That our sensemaking is flawed. That we're basically placing too much responsibility in the hands of the person at the top, which means we might be overlooking the importance of building the structures and norms that allow us to be successful together.

16:01Yes. I mean, we do this with the U.S. presidency. One of my former colleagues, a professor named Dana Nelson, has written about presidentialism. And she's argued that sometimes when we tell stories about U.S. presidents, it's almost like they're superheroes who just went in and fixed things. And, you know, sometimes with a speech, but sometimes with a policy they got enacted. And one of her arguments is that diminishes the responsibility you might feel as a citizen. It diminishes your agency and maybe even worse than that, your desire to have agency, your desire to think that you matter. So I think that it is a big red flag.

16:42Yeah. I think the thing a lot of people are struggling with right now is if you look around the world, it seems like leaders are reasserting their authority in some ways. I've always pushed back against this leader attribution error to say, look, yeah, leaders have influence, but ultimately everything that a leader does in order to be effective has to be supported by, endorsed by, and implemented by a group of people who choose to follow them. And I think we're seeing more pushback against that thesis as leaders, I guess, rely on more traditional forms of what's been called hard power or coercive authority.

17:20How do you think about reconciling those two views? Yeah, I mean, I think that the opportunity from a rhetorical lens to say, OK, how have they gained that power or how have they gained access to hard power without, depending on the culture or the society you're talking about. And my hypothesis would be that it's about the construction of a more or less urgent threat. So scary that people in those communities might say, okay, that sounds so bad that I'll just seed it all to you, right? You just make sure I'm safe. When I teach rhetoric, especially when I teach political rhetoric, I always say the two most dangerous words are us and them, not necessarily for the obvious reasons, but because we can't live without them.

18:08And so it really does become important to think about where the balance is and if there is balance and the harm that gets done when the them gets really scary and operationalized. Yeah, I think so too. And I think in some ways, what a lot of leaders are doing, and we see this again across sectors, is they're basically trying to paint a common enemy as not representing our values or our ideals. And my instinctive response to that is to say, you know what? Yes, you can define who you are by what you're not. But I would rather think about who we aspire to be and define our principles around that.

18:53And I think you have a slightly different take on this. You've at least made the case that we should be a little bit less concerned about what our ideals are and more about how they're put into practice. And I'm curious to hear more about that because it's a challenge for me. So I would go back to the way you phrased my take. I would never say that ideals don't matter. I would say that we need to never assume they're obvious to people. Never assume that once they're articulated, that articulation stays the same. and always look for the places where people want to offer different definitions that we might imagine get us further away from any kind of shared commitment to them.

19:41So it's to be careful about value rhetoric, ideal rhetoric that asserts something as just a known and de facto common good without saying, well, wait a minute, how are you using that term to ask for more precision? because there's this notion in my discipline of ideographs, like a word like liberty, right? You and I might agree that across our circumstances that we both value liberty. But when we really start talking about what that means, you and I might have radically different views of what that word means. So the research in my field suggests be really careful when it's just those one or two powerful loaded phrases and be aware that people are going to bring different meanings to those and that we ought to own for ourselves the meanings we take in that.

20:29I think that's such an important point. And we've seen a lot of leaders get trapped in the assumption that their terminology is going to be interpreted the way that they read it and only speak abstractly about what they stand for and then find that actually my followers are not, they're not on the same page with me at all. I think a lot of the leaders who advised move fast and break things kinds of ideologies were not really realizing that people might truly break things. I'm thinking about all the leaders who have basically said like, yeah, what we need is rapid execution and forgot to emphasize quality, care, reliability, and then all of a sudden have found that they had these haphazard decision-making processes and they had organizations making tons of errors.

21:23And sometimes the stakes of that can be quite high. That's beautifully said. One of the challenges and opportunities in higher ed right now is to take some of those prescriptive ideals that for many of us were the reason we got into the job in the first place and realize that not only is the ground shifting under our feet, but also that the way we've talked about those ideals turned a lot of people off, you know, seemed to lead us to a lot of people, seemed out of touch to other people. So I think it's up to me as a leader to be careful. I want to connect to values and ideals, but I don't want that commitment to be so strong that I keep using a rhetoric that's, you know, counterproductive in the most obvious sense, but also can ultimately get turned around and maybe get used against the mission, get used against the institution.

22:16Okay. So this is interesting because when I think about the traditional mission of a university, I think about it standing for the pursuit of truth and learning above all else. And that seems self-evident to me then that we're going to create an environment where people constructively debate and challenge each other's ideas. obviously some of that has been co-opted in the last decade or so. I'm curious about how you're thinking about building an environment where those practices follow from the pursuit of truth and learning and how you translate those ideas into classroom dynamics and cultures that support truth and learning.

22:53So the translation is the point. So I've spent my entire career at research universities. And I'm so grateful for that because I've been challenged at every opportunity to get super sharp on the question I was asking. Am I using the right method? Is my evidence going to stand up? You know, all the things good researchers do regardless of their discipline. And so the choice for me to come to Trinity University, which is a national liberal arts university, and start to think about, oh, if research isn't the mission, what is the mission? And in both cases, truth is being pursued. Arguments are happening.

23:31Evidence is being weighed. But at Trinity University, I want to say, undergraduates, you sit at that seat because I want you to learn for yourself how truth is discovered or rebutted. You know, and sometimes, again, that's through the scientific method. Sometimes that's through creative expression. But I think it really matters how we translate the road to both of those things. The mission is the same, but the points of emphasis and who gets to be active in the pursuit of truth is different.

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26:43I was very surprised this spring when I saw videos of multiple commencement speakers getting booed by the students in their audience. And in some cases, not making what I perceive as very controversial arguments. In at least one of those cases, a very balanced argument. And to me, students booing a speaker is fundamentally at odds with hearing ideas that challenge your thinking and being open to rethinking. And to do that at commencement, when you're at the culmination of four years of learning and the pursuit of having an open mind, it sort of boggled my mind a little bit. And I'm curious about your reaction and what, if anything, we should do about that dynamic.

27:28I've been thinking about that, too. And I actually think it may be less of a barometer of a lost skill and maybe more of a barometer of how we think argument is performed. And so what I mean by that is, going back to the study of rhetoric, you could imagine a time when we had a story that a commencement speaker shared ideas and people, you know, I like that point. I don't like that point. But I'm an educated person, so I'll just take it in and process it. Right. And maybe that's how it was. But we have a story about speech in that case and leadership and the way it's performed and received. And I think we're in an era right now where we have a story about, and I am going to blame social media a little bit, thumbs up, thumbs down, immediate reaction.

28:19I don't like what's on the stage. I'm going to start to think about a little bit about whether or not I'm open to the message, right? Like the interchange that's idealized when we imagine the perfect speech audience is really troubled right now because I don't know if we maybe, you know, there's research on this. I almost feel like students might feel some peer pressure if they're not responding like that right now. Do you know what I mean? I have not seen any data on this, but it makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, I mean, students are entrained to have an immediate reaction. I have to like or dislike.

28:57And I'm like, actually, part of the value of a commencement speech is don't react. Process. Reflect. Challenge. Maybe your job is to not react yet and to say, okay, did this stretch my thinking at all? Which ideas challenged me? Why? And what does that tell me about me? I think those questions and that level of self-reflection is exactly what higher ed should be teaching and we should be teaching the ability to listen. You know, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to say one of the great joys in my life for the last two years is teaching a class here called Listening. And the reason I wanted to offer it in the first place is related to this conversation.

29:38How are we teaching people that they have the option to not react? How are we teaching people that, yeah, you may hear something you don't like and you're bought and we know this, right? Your heart rate may go up. Your body may tell you, I don't like what I'm about to hear. But guess what? You can control those reactions. So one of the things we've talked about in that class, and I just mentioned in my commencement speech, is listening doesn't mean agreeing. Listening doesn't mean that your ideas have to be threatened. In an interpersonal sense, listening might just mean I care enough about you and our relationship that even though I've never in a million years at this moment think I'm going to agree with you, but I care enough about you to know why you'd think the way you'd think.

30:25And so I talked to students in that class about like, what if that's what it's about or could be about? I'm so glad you've brought this up, Vanessa, because I love the irony of a rhetoric expert teaching a class on listening when what you study is speaking. I would love to know, for those who don't have the benefit of sitting in your class. What is the most non-obvious or surprising listening skill that you teach? Non-reactive, non-anxious presence, listening in a way that it's almost a form of meditation sometimes. You can imagine being in a situation where someone says something that you immediately have, you know, like a blood vessel level reaction to, right?

31:12And that sometimes happens because we feel threatened or sometimes it happens because they're attacking a value or something that's really important to us. I would never ask anybody to stop having that reaction because that's how we know we care. I would ask people to be aware enough of their own reaction to determine whether, you know, A, am I in a position where my physical safety is threatened right now? Because if you are, that's a different answer, right? B, am I in a position where my psychological safety is threatened right now? And if you are, you have some different choices. But if you feel like you're in a space, and universities are good for this, where you can actually, everybody, take a breath, take a beat, and calm down and say, how did you get there?

32:00Then that's a conversation worth having, man. I mean, that's good stuff. So back to the contrast between speaking and listening, but I think that the non-intuitive thing is to both hang on to whatever reaction you had, but also don't let that reaction drive your next choices. You know, like imagine that you have a range of choices there. Even just having multiple reactions would be better than one. I'm going to disclose. I mean, this is not a secret. I have a child with chronic illness and intellectual disability. And when people I love use slurs for a community of people with intellectual disabilities, I mean, I feel hot inside.

32:46I feel ready, you know, and I do, I understand that urge because in a way what I'm hearing, regardless of what the person's saying, is that my child's not human or my child's necessarily less than. And I've really had to check myself and think, OK, if I want to change this person's mind or even give them a reason to think about changing their mind, then I need to figure out a way to talk to them about it and not just storm out of the room and say, you know, I don't ever want to talk to you again because you used a word I didn't like. I've got to really think about the kind of community I want to be responsible for building or being part of.

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35:44We'll be right back. Because we have your number.

35:54Okay, you ready for a lightning round? Yes. All right. First question is, what is the worst leadership rhetoric advice you see given? Be yourself. Why is that bad advice? You need filters to be a leader. You need filters and you need to think about the audience first. So true. Okay. What is something you've rethought lately? Whether or not speeches matter. And? Do they? I don't know that they do. I think we need them. I don't want them to go away. I want oratory and eloquence in this world. And even when we have it, it gets taken out of context. It gets sliced and diced. It gets deep faked. You know, there's something romanticized about the exchange of really, you know, when you've left hearing a great speaker and you feel elevated and edified and ready to do new things.

36:52We need that so much. And there's so many traps and forces countervailing against us having those kinds of listener and speaker experiences that I don't know. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, that makes me want to reframe a little bit and say the question is not whether they matter. It's how we can make sure that they matter. To your point, the words alone often don't do enough. I found in some experiments with Dave Hoffman that when leaders articulated the vision, it was great for them to exude charisma. But people didn't really buy it unless they also brought in the customer, the client, the end user who had benefited from the mission, who could attest to it firsthand and say, here is how the work of this organization really changed my life.

37:41That's fascinating. And again, gets to what are we really studying, right? Is it persuasion? Is it behavior change in the workplace? Is it consumer behavior? And yeah, whose arguments matter more, the proof point or the person trying to sell? Okay, so we have a quick office hours window. Do you have a dilemma, a puzzle, or a question for me? I do. So I really struggle with the pace and push question. When's the optimal time to ask people or invite people to rest versus when is the optimal time to say, no, no, no, no, we got to rally. We got to surge versus the third category, which is, you know what you need to do.

38:25Like, figure out when you need to rest. And I know I need to have all three of those messages, but I struggle with when to highlight one over the other. Me too. Yes, it makes perfect sense. I think as a leader of a university, you're actually in a fortunate position compared to most leaders. I think this is actually harder for leaders outside of education who don't have summer. You have a certain seasonality built into your schedule. And I think, you know, to me, if I were ever crazy enough to think that I could run a university, which I will never be, don't worry. The first thing I would think about is, It's okay, if we're not careful, we're going to see faculty basically disappear for the summer the way students do.

39:11And staff end up having to work that much harder to keep basically everything running and to prepare for the new year. And so I think with that seasonality in mind, knowing that you're going to lose a lot of the students and also a lot of the faculty over the summer, I actually wonder if building in a little bit of early rest for staff would be helpful. If I were running this experiment, I would say, let's take Fridays off for staff, April and May. Let's see what happens. Or let's do half day Fridays, April and May. And I think there are a lot of short-sighted leaders who would look at that and say, I'm gonna lose people's effort, their productivity, their focus.

39:50I can't afford it. And I wanna take the long view on that and say, that's how you keep your best people. And that's how you get your best creative thinking and also your highest care and service quality. And those things really matter. in the university. What do you think of that kind of experiment? I love that experiment. And one of the things I love about it the most is that you recognize that faculty have choices that staff don't because it's not always seasonal for them. What you've taught us all to think again through experimenting because some of us search for truth and have discovery in other ways.

40:24And it's, I love, even in my day job, I love testing and looking at data to see how well we know things are going or not. I mean, it's just, to me, it's so simple that if you want to build a learning organization, you have to run lots of pilots. Otherwise, how do you learn? You don't learn by talking about ideas ad nauseum. You learn by testing and iterating and finding out what works for who, when, and where. And, you know, I guess, Vanessa, the one other thing that jumped to mind as you asked the question is as a professor, the single greatest source of rejuvenation in my job is when I can teach in short bursts and then rest and recover.

41:07I get to teach one MBA class that's a semester of contact hours in about a week. And there's a lot of prep that goes into the lead up to it. And yeah, there's a lot of work on the backend, but I think I have more meaningful interactions with students in that one week than I typically do in a quarter semester long course because of the intensity of it. Students aren't taking any other classes during that time. They're all in on this class. They do a leadership simulation. I show them their data along with the other faculty who teach it. We debrief. And the immersive nature of it, I think leads to much deeper learning.

41:42Now there are open questions about how to make that stick. But as a faculty member, what that means concretely is more than half of my teaching load is not happening during the majority of the school year. And that frees up tremendous amounts of time and energy for research, for writing, for podcasting, for speaking, for all the other things that I love to do that are about discovering and disseminating knowledge outside of the university. And it's crazy to me that we don't have more of these short, intensive class opportunities. What do you make of that wild idea? I love it. I mean, I'll tell you two things.

42:15The first is we partnered with a local business this year for the first time. We have an entrepreneurship program here at Trinity. And we said, let's just make it real. And so those students had a week to work. We also have a Culinary Institute of America here in San Antonio to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. So it was 10 Trinity students, 10 CIA students. And they had a week to do that and then sell it to real people down at the farmer's market in one of our most popular parts of San Antonio. And what they students described to me was exactly what you just said, what the faculty described.

42:49I mean, it was really hard work. And they were learning principles of business and entrepreneurship and sourcing and setting prices and all that at the same time. But so my experiment on campus is what's comport with that. And the second thing I'm going to say is a plug for a Trinity professor. His name is Amir Kaisi, and he has changed the way I think about learning because he said learning happens best under conditions of high psychological safety. We already knew that, but also high accountability. So if you have high psychological safety and low accountability, you're just kind of hanging out, right?

43:26Everybody's having a great time. So the reason I get that from what you just said is if you have high accountability as the faculty member and the students do too because of the immersive and intensive nature of it, then some magic learning is going to happen. Yes. Okay. You just reframed the way that I am going to pitch this in the future. The fundamental problem, I think, I originally was raising it as, yeah, this is a great way for us to sort of recover and maintain our energy. as you're talking about it now and thinking about the psychological safety and accountability, one of my biggest problems as a professor and also that I see in our students is distraction.

44:06Their attention is just divided in too many directions. And I also have a lot of different hats I'm trying to wear. To know that I'm all in on just this one class and to be able to tell my students, you are my only professional priority during this period. I'm not going to respond to other emails. I'm not going to engage with other issues. I am all in. I'm here with you. You have my undivided concentration. That's really meaningful for them. And it's also, it allows me to do a better job. And yeah, what if we only did one thing at a time? Yeah. Which in the big scheme of things, that's how the monks did it, right?

44:44When universities were found it, right? Low distraction. So yeah, I think there is something to that. And again, for me, because of what I learned from my mayor's work, it's the high accountability. If you only have that amount of time together and something goes off the rails, you got to fix it fast or else the whole course is in trouble. So yeah, I like it. Let's give it a try. All right. So Trinity is going to pioneer monk mode, a new format for learning. Thank you for that rebrand. That's going to be great. You're the one who planted the seed. Your idea. All right. Well, I'll give a speech about it to the faculty and see what they think.

45:22You know what? If your speech doesn't work, no one's will. Oh, you're so kind. Thank you. I mean, it's so selfish because it's buzzy for me. Like, it's the most fun I ever have. I feel like I'm serving the community in a way that's super meaningful to me when I can make people feel good about the organization. It just feels like a gift. I mean, to me, that I get the honor of doing it. And then I'm just like floating the rest of the day. It's great stuff. It's not selfish to enjoy acts of service. Thank you. Well, this has been fun. Well, Vanessa, thank you for being here. Such a pleasure to chat with you.

45:59Thoroughly enjoyed learning and also cooking up some ideas together. Thank you. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer Our editor is Alejandra Salazar Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson Our technical director is Jacob Winnick And our fact checker is Paul Durbin Our team includes Eliza Smith Roxanne Hilash, Banban Chang Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivang And Whitney Pennington Rogers Original music by Hans Dale Su And Alison Leighton Brown

46:37You gotta feel that every time You give a speech, right? I'm the rhetoric expert, I better crush it No pressure.

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