Horse Whispering and Innovation

Tudor Rickards has been associated with the Manchester Business School since 1972 and has published widely on innovation and creativity. Professor Rickards works closely with various international organisations in the development of innovative skills. He has won international awards for his teaching and educational work in his specialist areas. In 1999 twelfth book Creativity and the Management of Change was published by Gower Press.

Over the past few months, as I have discussed a non-traditional approach to leadership development with friends, colleagues, and other business professionals, I have been reminded of a long tradition of suspicion of educational theories. The ideas have received the inevitable reactions of enthusiasm, support, and hostility that greet any innovation.

By way of a little background, a few of us had become interested in an approach to dealing with horses known as ‘join-up'. The Horse Whisperer is a Hollywood version of the story of Monty Roberts, a real-life innovator in the practice of dealing with horses. The film brought Monty international attention for his approach, which has since become a recognized – and in many cases, preferred – alternative to earlier approaches to working with horses. In complete contrast to the traditional approach of ‘breaking' the horse into a condition of compliance, Monty's approach is founded on the recognition of a foal's instinctive desire to be part of the herd.

From a study of such behaviours over a period of many years, Monty Roberts developed a method that permits him to win the trust of a horse within half an hour, so that even a previously unridden animal accepts saddling, and then a rider. Demonstrations have convinced thousands of knowledgeable spectators that this new approach works. After one such demonstration, the Queen herself endorsed the method, and has been encouraging its use for some years. TV appearances, books, and hundreds of personal demonstrations have helped communicate the method.

After meeting and talking with Monty – and especially after witnessing the work of his UK protégé, Kelly Marks, we were struck by the idea that her development of the principles seem transferable to a trust-based leadership style. We also met other business academics and consultants who are considering how such methods might be applied in organisational contexts. One in particular, Ian Lawson, saw a connection with recent research conducted by The Industrial Society. Ian and his group found that the most powerful differentiator between successful and unsuccessful leaders was a trust-based style.

For some people, the dangers of drawing simple analogies between horse management and human leadership are all too clear. The obvious differences can become a communication barrier. We are tired of being asked if we are teaching leaders to control people by breathing into their nostrils. We have also reassured trainees that we are not working on ways of ‘breaking the spirit' of workers, or of belittling humans by comparing them with animals. Indeed, the work has sensitized me to the inappropriateness of a great deal of animal behaviours as models for improved human action. Such methods are particularly dangerous and morally repugnant if translated to a handbook for human leadership.

At Manchester Business School we have become hardened to adverse reactions to novel ideas. The School is an institution with a long reputation for pioneering new and controversial ideas in management. In the 1960s the newly founded school developed ‘The Manchester Method', a way of learning through studying businesses and their challenges as living cases. So we were not deterred by the thought that other Schools might have already rejected the whole idea of join-up as irrelevant and academically trivial. More important was to satisfy ourselves that we had a legitimate and promising approach to support executive education and development.

The case against using the ‘intelligent horsemanship' metaphor is that we risk reinforcing inappropriate leadership metaphors of dominance and dehumanisation. A second line of attack is that the method is a version of the so-called theory-Y, or be-nice-to-the-workers approach, which has its own problems in competitive business environments. The third objection is that the methods are not accepted yet by many in the horse breeding and managing establishment.

We do not wish to make excessive claims for what we are doing, but the experiences of first trials have gone some way towards justifying our initial intuitions. Our view is that experiential learning leads to unexpected discoveries. Learning can not just be asserted in a classroom. And as they observe the way horses react to certain behaviours, participants think about how they themselves or other employees react to different management styles. The discussion afterwards often leads to one about experiences of bullying and abusive behaviours, a discussion that might not otherwise surface in a leadership course. We've found this helps the participants draw fine distinctions between being tough, being assertive, being supportive and being soft.

At a more immediate level, we see the need for careful research studies into the behaviours of our executives. The discussions and demonstrations suggested that there were connections between the approach, and an on-going project on creative leadership at Manchester Business School. Could there be a link between the two bodies of work? If that turned out to be the case, then it would lead to an exciting new means of studying, and even teaching, good leadership practices.

Working with a colleague experienced in creative leadership, we decided to carry out a piece of detective work, ‘fingerprinting' the essential features of the two approaches of creative leadership and of ‘join-up'. Strictly speaking, we were not here conducting a search for a shared identity between two samples of fingerprints, or in its more recent counterpart, between two sequences of amino acids. Rather, we are exploring to see whether the sense we make of horse whispering has adequate connections to the sense we make of creative leadership.

We took as our fingerprints the basic principles behind the practices of creative leadership that we had been studying, and the principles behind the methods of join-up. This gave us a list of 22 attributes. We rated each attribute as a clear match, or a possible match, after a period of discussion. We were also prepared to record mismatches. We found no mismatches. Nine of the attributes give clear matches. Five additional attributes were considered promising or possible matches. We found no mismatches. The absolute number of matches is perhaps misleading, as the items on the list are not independent.

We subsequently asked two groups of executives (one from the UK, and the other from a set of visiting Future Leaders of Africa, including two MPs) to help in our fingerprinting. They extended the list of attributes, once again confirming the general matching. They even suggested carrying out the ‘negative matching' – to show that traditional horse-breaking did not match with creative leadership. The results were even more straightforward. Traditional horse-breaking (at least as we understood it) is almost completely unmatched with creative leadership.

This was a nice idea, and shows how learning takes place in adult education. The academics learned from their ‘student' executives.

The next steps will be to explore more deeply the principles of join-up to find out how they can apply to creative leadership. For example, ‘join-up' applies as the simplest kind of ‘leader-follower' transaction, the ‘one-to-one'. High-flying corporate executives are more interested in advice whereby they can develop skills in ‘one-to-many' relationships in teams or even across entire organisations. So this particular detective story is far from over.