Last week, I spent three days in a room with 39 of HubSpot’s other top individual contributors. We were there for Fellows Leadership Academy, where a laptop wasn’t required.To prepare, we’d read the documents. They were business school case studies, which are essentially stories with their ends cut off: cases have a setting, characters, one or more plots, some numbers, a few decisions to make, and no resolution. The method of education is simple: the group shows up, one member is asked to say what they’d do, and you’re off. To participate, while you might consult your notes, you focus on advancing the discussion by reacting to what was just said. In the case method for learning, the instructor is more facilitator, attempting to elicit from the discussion everything possible, forcing everyone to think along with the whole room. The theory is that everyone together brings more insight than one lecturer alone. For certain types of knowledge, the case method is absolutely ideal. It especially fits business people trying to learn how decisions are made.
The case method could’ve been invented by Socrates, but it probably wouldn’t have made sense until the printing press. Either way, aside from the clearly software company environs, with its concrete floor, LED lighting, whiteboards and dry erase markers, and wireless microphones, we could’ve been in an early modern university hall. While we were talking about technology and business change, attempting to peer into the future, we were doing so with old methods. We learned by reading, writing, and then talking. The brilliance of the case method is that nothing forces you to do the reading like knowing at any moment you might be called upon to give a detailed explanation of what you think ought to be done, and why. When the facilitator might cold call anyone, everyone shows up prepared. The discussion was remarkably fast-paced and insightful. Like any Acton grad, I’m a fan of the case method.
In most training environments, it’s easiest to toss out a hypothetical answer to or aim for what you think the instructor wants as a right answer, without nuance or tradeoffs. Case studies tend to flip those dynamics: by putting yourself in the shoes of the case’s protagonist and needing to defend your answer, a simplistic hypothetical won’t fly. I tried one of those in the Siebel Systems case, when I said “just lower prices” which wouldn’t fly. The instructor and the room called me out on it and we pushed towards better solutions together. And what better way to learn about strategy? When we had to sit in the shoes of the Siebel team, our strategic thinking was entirely inside-out (what does Siebel excel at, what does Siebel need). If the strategy is not outside-in (where is the market going, what buyers actually want), then any titan will get dethroned. It’s easy for me to write that now, having been through the full case, but the case gives me not just knowledge, but a taste of the people’s actual experience.
In HubSpot’s AI-dominated and remote-first world, one might wonder why a leadership development program would put 40 people in a room in Boston for a week. In my time at HubSpot, we’ve grown to be global, our culture has evolved to be primarily virtual, we’ve gone from in-office to remote. With the rise of AI, our primary training approaches went from classrooms to hands-on—digitally interactive. From where I sit, these changes have been good: global is inclusive, flexibility helps us win, and hands-on or interactive beats a lecture almost any day. HubSpot Fellows was a throwback.
Our first case study opened with Harvard Business School’s Jill Avery. She had a unique approach to running the room as an instructor: upon asking the opening question, she walked to the back of the room, outside of everyone’s eyesight. Our attention drifted from her to the person talking; we all engaged with the discussion, even as she went back to the whiteboard and began taking notes on what we were saying. The energy started high and only got higher, as she interrupted, clarified, and focused our attention on pushing towards the decision points that mattered. We got further in that hour and a half than I’ve gotten in day-long virtual trainings. Something about being there (and knowing we were in good hands) that pushed us far.
Technology did interfere, a little. I joked that every handraiser, when called on, grabbed our attention further by pausing to flip the microphone’s switch, waiting for it to turn on, and then saying “test” or similar to open their remarks. Sometimes these pauses lasted long enough that you could feel the room’s attention flatten and a little of the discussion’s energy drain away. On the last day, instead of using the table microphones, Liz Wiseman had people shout out quick answers, which she repeated on her mic and wrote on the whiteboard. Immediately after she said, “just shout it out, no mics” the room sprang to life. We stormed towards complete ideas faster in the next twenty minutes than ever. You definitely couldn’t do that on Zoom.
Could Fellows have been a Zoom or an AI tool instead of a room? While some training can be virtual, asynchronous, and AI, this style can’t—we were doing something that required being in a room together to do. From that first question of the first case study, I remembered what was different: we were all fully there and we’d all done the reading. You can’t disguise multi-tasking and fake your answers in-person. The case method requires quick interaction and deep conversation, meaning you are constantly tuning in and reading the room. There’s way more information present and it moves far faster than even the quickest virtual presentation. The facilitator ensures the entire room contribute and learn from the entire room. In a sense, HubSpot put us all into a room for a week and thus gave each of us the knowledge, experience, and outlook of everyone else. Learning requires reading, writing, and talking—very human activities that technologies mostly inhibit.
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