Many call it “the most important class I took” in business school, the one with “the greatest lasting impact,” in which “the honesty and rawness is like nothing else.” It’s “an exercise in self-awareness and openness,” the closest thing to “intense group therapy” — “or even going into battle with a group of people.” And it has been Stanford Graduate School of Business’ most popular elective for decades.
You’ve probably heard of it — just about everyone planning to attend Stanford GSB already has before handing in their application. Its official name is OB 374: Interpersonal Dynamics, but everyone knows it as “Touchy Feely,” and it has been a staple of business education at Stanford for 45 years.
More than 90% of Stanford MBA students take the course. It’s perhaps the only elective actively discussed on other campuses.
“Like everything, people have different responses, but it’s overwhelmingly positive,” says Brian Lowery, professor of organizational behavior and faculty lead for the Touchy Feely course. “There’s certainly variance in people’s experience, but my sense is that the vast majority of people get something out of it. Now that the course is so well known, people are coming in with expectations that may not match what the course is designed to deliver, but even with that, people leave with a better understanding of themselves. The vast, vast majority of students leave with that experience.”
NO PLACE FOR ‘DETACHED OBSERVERS’
So how does it work? The premise of the signature course is that strong relationships with others are a vital part of effective management, and that becoming a better manager requires an ability to forge those relationships. Students in Touchy Feely learn how their behavior affects others in real time, and they practice leadership skills and get immediate, raw peer feedback. They learn, in the end, to connect across differences.
OK — that much you can learn from a syllabus. What does it all look like practically, in a classroom setting? Here is where Touchy Feely is unlike any other B-school course. Students are placed in a 12-person “T-Group” that meets for three to five hours straight every week for 10 weeks in sessions that run high in emotion. There’s also an exhaustive weekend retreat with more than 16 hours of T-group session work and little exposure to the outside world. Two facilitators work with each group. Each session has a prompt based on assigned readings or short lectures.
Once prompted, everyone … talks. Many students liken the experience to group therapy.
DETACHED OBSERVERS NOT WELCOME
“The way I would describe it is to imagine having a conversation with a group of people where (a) the person talking was completely honest about everything and (b) people listening were completely honest about their reaction to what that person was saying,” says Sumi Kim, a Stanford MBA from the Class of 2013, writing in Quora. “In normal daily life, we have a lot of thoughts that we keep to ourselves out of politeness; imagine if you let these all out and told people how what they said annoyed you, angered you, made you sad, etc.”
Key concepts in Touchy Feely include “crossing the net,” meaning going over to another person’s side and assuming their thoughts and intentions; “showing appreciation,” so that for every one thing you criticize, you express appreciation for 10 others; and “turning toward versus away from people,” which means being receptive to proffered information; turning away means ignoring or shunning. Turning away, obviously, is more destructive, but no one can turn toward everything. The key is to be aware of what you’re doing.
It’s not a place for “detached observers,” as one course description makes clear. “Your learning depends on the extent to which you are actively involved. The amount you learn rests heavily on your involvement. Disclosing your reactions to the behavior of others (especially your feelings), being willing to openly give and receive feedback of both positive and critical nature, and taking personal risk to address ‘here and now’ events which trigger emotions are important to enhance learning in this class.”
A POWERFUL — AND UNCOMMON — EXPERIENCE
David Bradford, a senior lecturer emeritus at Stanford GSB, was one of the first instructors for Interpersonal Dynamics, known as “Touchy Feely.” Stanford photo
Interpersonal Dynamics was first offered at Stanford in 1968. For many years it was taught by a handful of faculty, notably David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay, and Jerry Porras. In the 2018-2019 academic year, Stanford will offer four sections of Touchy Feely in the autumn, four in the winter, and four in the spring, with six instructors teaching the course. Brian Lowery has overseen Touchy Feely since the start of 2017-2018; he will continue to do so even after Dean Jonathan Levin’s recently announcement that Lowery will begin a new position as senior associate dean for academic affairs on September 1.
Touchy Feely is about personal development, Lowery tells Poets&Quants, and in particular about becoming aware of how one affects others. That’s what drew him to the course as an instructor. “Being able to take the perspective of others and seeing yourself through that perspective — that was really attractive to me, participating in a course that is designed to deliver that.” He says that part of what makes Touchy Feely so effective and transformational is that it is taught in a consistent manner. Another, bigger part is that whatever changes have occurred across the business and business education landscapes in the last four-plus decades, one thing has remained constant: people are people, sometimes difficult, often vulnerable, but always better for the knowledge of how they impact those around them.
“It’s a powerful experience,” Lowery says. “Without getting into the particulars of the course, the reason it’s powerful is because often we don’t have the opportunity or inclination to get honest, transparent feedback about how we show up. For a lot of people, it really is an epiphany to have people really tell you how you’re affecting them. Often people are afraid to find that out.
‘SHARING FEEDBACK IS NOT EASY; ASKING FOR FEEDBACK IS USUALLY HARDER’
“They’re afraid of the possibility of conflict or they’re afraid of getting feedback that challenges how they view themselves, and I think that this course provides a context to actually have that experience. And I think that people are surprised by it, again in large part because it’s not the kind of experience that people have day to day. In fact I think it’s often the kind of thing that people avoid day to day.”
As Maria Lambert, a 2012 GSB grad, puts it, “Sharing feedback is not easy; asking for feedback is usually harder. Yet, our growth as leaders comes from uncovering our blind spots, and then with kindness helping others to do the same. Learning comes from stepping out of our comfort zones.”
Brian Lowery, Stanford professor of organizational behavior, in the classroom. Stanford photo
Animesh Agrawal at Macchu Picchu. He says Touchy Feely gave him insight into how what he says is received by others. Courtesy photo
‘IF YOU DON’T EXPRESS IT, YOU LOSE THE ABILITY TO CONTROL HOW YOU EXPRESS IT’
Feedback is the lifeblood of Touchy Feely, so there isn’t much point in reading about the course without getting student feedback. Having learned to be totally honest, they are not shy about turning their insights into the course itself.
Animesh Agrawal, who graduated from GSB this spring, tells P&Q that he had heard of the course before coming to school because all the Stanford alumni he talked to cited it as a highlight. Originally from Bhopal, India, the former analyst for McKinsey & Company and The Blackstone Group was intrigued and planned to take the course — but nothing he’d heard truly prepared him for it.
“I had heard about the course but didn’t know much about what goes on inside it or what the experience looks like,” Agrawal says. “That whole discovery happened for me at GSB. And there are different reactions for everyone, but for me, there were some real epiphanies that came out of this course.
UNDERSTANDING HOW ‘MY ACTIONS LAND ON OTHER PEOPLE’
“I came from a finance and investing background — a very straitjacketed, analytical environment. So talking about feelings was not expected and not encouraged. For me, I always thought that I could hide my feelings and come across as really professional. My biggest lesson was that the feelings we don’t express leak out. If you don’t express it, you lose the ability to control how you express it.
“For me, the way I looked at the course was as a way to understand how my actions land on different people, and how others’ actions land on me. Suppose we are talking, and you have an observation: ‘Animesh, when you described this course so enthusiastically, I felt happy or excited.’ Or you might say, ‘Oh, the way you described Touchy Feely, I felt scared or anxious.’ These kinds of things are so valuable because I, as a speaker, would normally not know how what I say is landing on you. So there’s a lot of merit and learning — no solutions — in understanding this.
“In a similar way, we discuss what about you leads me to share more of myself and what makes me share less. Simple things like that.”
PROFESSIONALLY, AN ‘INVALUABLE’ HELP
Jenna Nicholas. Courtesy photo
Jenna Nicholas graduated from Stanford GSB in 2017. She’s the founder and CEO of Impact Experience, which maps investment and partnership opportunities for marginalized communities. For her, Touchy Feely really was transformational — despite initial uncertainty about what that word means, and how the course would achieve it.
“I had very high expectations for the possibilities and the potential and opportunities within the class in terms of shaping how I think about leadership and how it relates to other people,” Nicholas tells P&Q. “I had very few expectations about what that would actually look like. It was all very vague. People talked about it being ‘transformational,’ but what does that really mean?
“But I really did find it to be transformational, and I think part of it was having a space that was really co-created by us. So while there were guidelines and directions, largely it was the magic of what played out in the room in the presence of everybody in the room. That is what helped to manifest so many insights for so many of us.”
The experience of Touchy Feely has been particularly helpful in Nicholas’ professional work, where she brings together diverse groups of people who are not normally in a room together and builds trust and works through problems.
“The tools and framework and skills that we developed during the Touchy Feely class have really been invaluable in all of our work,” she says.
FROM TOUCHY FEELY, 3 MAIN TAKEAWAYS
For Neha Samdaria, Touchy Feely changed her outlook completely. The 2018 GSB grad had never before been comfortable talking about her emotions — in fact, she considered it a distraction to focus on emotions, something that got in the way of moving forward and being successful. “Touchy Feely opened my eyes to the power of connecting with other people on an emotional level,” Samdaria tells P&Q.
She came away from the 10-week course with three main takeaways: First, when someone else has an emotional reaction — saying they feel anxious or frustrated or scared — the most effective way to respond is not with logic. “You can’t counteract emotion with logic,” she says. “As a leader you have to meet and connect with people on an emotional level before making a logical argument, and that’s been a very valuable lesson to me as I’ve gone out to the workplace.”
Samdaria’s second takeaway is that when she is feeling emotional because of someone else’s words — feeling, in Touchy Feely parlance, “pinched” — she should address it immediately. “That was completely not my instinct,” she says. “My instinct before coming into that class was, if somebody said something, I would try to brush it off and let it go and not address it. And this was a problem because it would fester over time, and by the time it came out it had built up to something much greater. I learned that if you resolve it quickly and in the moment, you come out stronger and with a more trusting relationship.”
Her final lesson from Touchy Feely: The language of “not crossing the net” — that is, reframing everything from the perspective of one’s own feelings and not assuming anything about the other’s intentions — is incredibly helpful in work and life. “The idea of the ‘net’ is used to delineate what you do and don’t know about a certain situation,” Samdaria says. “So if I’m having a conversation with another person and I’m feeling disrespected in that conversation, I can say so because I know how I’m feeling, but I can’t say ‘You were being disrespectful,’ because that assumes something about that person’s intention. That is crossing the net.
“People can’t contest how you feel. Only you know how you feel. Keeping that in mind always leads to a much more productive conversation, whether in the work environment or personal relationships.”
Benjamin Fernandes, Stanford MBA ’17, is co-founder of a Tanzanian mobile payments company. “Recognizing you may come across differently to different people is an important skill to learn,” he says of Touchy Feely. Courtesy photo
Benjamin Fernandes, who graduated GSB in 2017, is a native of Tanzania. In that country, in his culture, “talking about feelings is something that isn’t normal,” he tells Poets&Quants. So when his Stanford interviewer mentioned the class to him, he was confused by the concept — and not at all convinced it was an elective he’d like to take.
“My GSB interviewer had mentioned their ‘Touchy Feely’ experience and I was confused, I took the literal translation of that and started imagining things until I got home and looked it up online,” Fernandez says. “When I got to business school, my impression of the course was a deeply emotional one that required a lot of energy. I was still confused how you could sit down in a circle every class and sometimes have no agenda.”
His confusion quickly evaporated — replaced, in early sessions at least, by nervousness.
“I remember one of the first days of class, when I met my T-Group, I was excited and nervous,” Fernandes says. “I didn’t know all of them that well and of course had natural judgments about each one of them in my head. I also felt nervous because I didn’t know if I had close friends within that group who were going to go to bat for me. I had assumed I needed some backup.”
THE INTENSITY OF THE ‘INFLUENCE LINE’
Benjamin Fernandes on the campus of Stanford University in April 2017. Marc Ethier photo
Fernandes didn’t yet know that Touchy Feely was about trusting the process. “So often in exercises, I would like to skip to the end or assume I would know what the end would look like, then finally be completely off,” he says.
He recalls one of the most impactful of multiple course exercises, known as the Influence Line, in which students must wordlessly move their peers into order based on perceived “influence.” So on the left will be the most influential, on the right the least — and somewhere in the middle, themselves. The MBA students are told that the dynamics are already at play in the room, they are simply bringing them to light.
“Naturally, we all gravitated to the middle of the line because no one really wanted to mention they were more influential than the others in the group,” Fernandes says. “Then each classmate in your T-Group is given a chance to get up in front of the group and physically move everyone on a scale of 1 to 12 based on how influential they thought they were in that group. This was extremely moving, literally and emotionally. Having to force rank your classmates, you could feel the intensity in the group. No one talks, you only move to where you are allocated by each person. After the exercise, you sit down, reflect, and in some areas, have a ton of questions you want answers for.
“With hindsight, I realized and recognized that the learning experiences the course created for me were phenomenal. Where in the world will you have 10 weeks and 12 people who want to support you actively, and who have dedicated hours weekly to give you feedback and help you become better? At the end of the day, what you put into it is what you are going to get out of it.”
‘TOUCHY FEELY HAS HELPED ME BE MUCH CALMER WHEN THINGS GET FRUSTRATING’
Fernandes currently runs a Tanzanian mobile payments company, similar to Venmo, called NALA. He says that as he and his co-founder have been growing and scaling their team, they have allocated mandatory time in one-on-ones for feedback. “We understand and recognize the importance of this and transparency within our organization,” he says.
“Additionally, Touchy Feely has helped me be much calmer when things get a little frustrating. I notice myself listening more versus immediately reacting.” He still faces challenges in reconciling some of the course’s core learnings with cultural differences in Tanzania, however. “Feedback really isn’t a thing, and people frequently get scared and think you are going to fire them without understanding your intent of helping them become better,” Fernandes says.
The benefits extend past his work life, too. “With my family, I notice myself being a lot calmer versus reactive in my responses,” he says. “It’s starting to change the dynamic of a few things.
“Self-awareness is almost a fundamental principle of this class. Recognizing you may come across differently to different people is an important skill to learn. This class truly gives you a head start with that gift.”
DON’T MISS: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HBS BAKER SCHOLAR or THE BIG PICTURE: CHINA, SHANGHAI & CEIBS
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