Rotman Management — Spring 2017

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a problem and give targeted, immediate, specific, objective, ac-
curate feedback on each step of that learner’s process of reason-
ing or calculation, along with suggestions for remedial exercises
or drills that develop each sub-skill or competency required for
the successful execution of a task.
Powered by a database of questions, problems, answers and
solutions from some 58 million learners taking some 13,000 mas-
sively open (MOOC) and small private online courses (SPOC) of-
fered by 700 universities around the clock, AFA’s will be trained
to address patterns of errors, idiosyncrasies and reasoning styles
that learners exhibit. New results from feedback science can be
embedded into feedback practice via updates to algorithmic plat-
forms without the need to train up armies of teaching assistants
and graders. Feedback can thus be liberated from the fluctua-
tions of quality, mood, resources and acumen of human graders,
for those skills that are sufficiently explicit and cognitive in na-
ture to be tracked by algorithmic agents.

2. THE FEEDBACK-CENTRIC LEARNING FACILITATOR EMERGES. The
   Fourth Industrial Revolution is not only one in which many
   tasks previously performed by humans can be performed by
   algorithmic agents hooked up to server farms, but also one in
   which the nature of the highest-value tasks performed by hu-
   mans have changed, becoming predominantly social, relational
   and interactive.
   Eighty per cent of the work managers now do in organiza-
   tions is performed in groups and teams, and hence, the skills
   most prized by organizations are communicative and relational
   in nature. They comprise as many and even more affective skills
   (empathic accuracy, expressiveness) and executive skills (like
   problem structuring and quick task switching) as they do cogni-
   tive skills.
   With affective computing still in a turbulent — though prom-
   ising — infancy, there is a need to rapidly develop the language
   and base of expertise for giving feedback on interpersonal, rela-
   tional and communicative ‘genres’ of work — such as board pre-
   sentations, sales pitches, negotiations, deliberations, processes
   of collaborative inquiry and debate — that will enable and foster
   real learning of skills that are (still) quintessentially human and
   very ‘hot’ in the labour market.
   ‘Communication skill’ is now used as a catch-all label, which
   makes the development of all of the skills that go into ‘commu-
   nicating’ very far from the elaborate evaluation rubrics that have

been developed over a century of practice in teaching and grad-

ing Calculus, Microeconomics, structured language program-

ming or thermal system design quizzes. But progress on creating

the practices that will promote the rapid acquisition and transfer

of these in-demand skills requires that we think carefully about

the semantic and syntactic (e.g. coherence and completeness)

and dialogical and interactive (e.g. responsiveness, informative-

ness) aspects of the learner’s behaviour in a social context —

and that our feedback practices reflect a much higher level of pre-

cision.

Revolutionizing the Development of Social,

Relational and Emotional Skills

Once turned into practice, the science of human feedback will

transform the way we think about the skills we value most, but

feel most pessimistic about being able to learn or teach: The

social, emotional and relational skills that modern businesses

prize most.

You say charisma, collaborativeness and relationality can-

not be taught? You may be right; but if by that you mean these

things cannot be learned, you are wrong. The unteachable can

be leaned through feedback that is precise, adaptive, targeted,

iterative, actionable and developmental.

The coach trained in human feedback science focuses on

the basic unit of social work of the learner — say, footage of a

real presentation, meeting or work session in which the learner

interacts with others. To be precise and specific, each com-

municative act (in increments of 10 to15 seconds) of the learner

is mapped into all of the ways in which it conveys information:

message (use of imagery, coherence, responsiveness); voice

(tone, pitch and the emotions they convey, as well as their fit with

the learner’s message); body movements (amplitude, emotional-

ity and fit with message); facial actions and micro-expressions

(expressiveness, congruence, positivity, negativity) — and the

effect of each ‘micro-behaviour’ of the learner on her group is fed

back, along with actionable suggestions for small, incremental

and adaptive changes.

Mihnea Moldoveanu is the Desautels Profes-

sor of Integrative Thinking, Professor of Busi-

ness Economics, Vice-Dean of Learning, Inno-

vation and Executive Programs, Director of

the Mind Brain Behaviour Hive and Academic

Director of the Self Development LaboratoryTM and the Leadership Develop-

ment Laboratory at the Rotman School of Management, as well as Visiting

Professor at Harvard Business School. Maja Djikic is Associate Professor and

the Executive Director of the Self Development Laboratory at the Rotman

School of Management. Over the past six years, they have designed, developed

and implemented feedback science-based learning in the Self-Development

Laboratory — the Rotman School’s personal development engine for its pro-

fessional students.

Rotman faculty research is ranked #3 globally by the Financial Times.