Self-reflection points: an interview with Ann Kowal Smith

Humanities Watch: How did Reflection Point come about?

Ann Kowal Smith: About 11-12 years ago, I was engaged a group of local foundations to explore how Northeast Ohio might become a “lifelong learning community.” They asked me, as someone who had been a lawyer, consultant, and educator, to lead an exploratory initiative with 50-60 local leaders from all areas of the education-to-workforce spectrum, from pre-school to college to workforce development. In my preparatory conversations with the selected leaders, I had an “aha” moment: while we had established many ways (initiatives, organizations, and the like) to support learners during their school years, most people’s formal learning stopped completely when they left the education system. Unless they had a lot of money and time, lifelong learning was a pipe dream. As someone who had constantly sought out new learning myself, I thought that this was a missed opportunity. So instead of pulling people back into formal education, I thought we might take something from the education system out to them.

To me the crown jewel of the education system was always the seminar – a group of people sitting around a table, engaged in conversation and shared exploration. If we could take an interesting reading, a professor and a group of people and get them together at work, what might happen?

From this idea, the program was born. We piloted the program with food service workers at Hiram College with facilitators from their faculty. Convincing their food service provider was easy – because we got lucky. When we shared the idea of bringing literature seminars with the company’s representative, he said “say no more”: he had a master’s from St. John’s and understood immediately what we were trying to do.

So we started big with Emile Zola’s Germinal. The employees quickly perceived their voices were the core of the class and were eager to share their thoughts and reactions. The professor was delighted by the experience of discussing the book with people who worked for a living. With so much more life experience, their insights were deeper and more thoughtful than the undergraduate students with whom she normally discussed this book. The supervisor noticed that the participants were asking better questions, were more engaged, and when they weren’t working, they talked about the book. Over the next three years, they continued reading and discussing a series of books from all different genres with professors from different disciplines.

Based on the success of this pilot, we created the non-profit Books@Work (which we now call Reflection Point), and we expanded our work to other industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, and technology companies. Today we work all over the world and have delivered the program in eight different languages so far.

As the program grew, we grew – and learned. We discovered the power of books and stories to bring diverse colleagues together at all levels of the organization, so we no longer focus solely on people without a college education. Discussing a story or a book provides a powerful opportunity for colleagues to see one another in a new light, outside of professional status, as whole human beings. They see themselves and each other differently, beyond the traditional boxes their roles tend to place them.

In addition, this has a been a very useful tool as we understand better the importance of diversity and inclusion. We start in a story that represents a new point of view, which in turn invites participants to exchange their own experiences. It’s a natural way to step into the shoes of others and to wrestle with circumstances and perspectives that are different from our own.

The third change, albeit a sad one, is the discovery that reading whole books overwhelms people in an era where time is short and patience is frayed. We have migrated almost exclusively to short stories. We discovered that it doesn’t take a lot of words to create a space for people to really listen to one another.

HW: what is your own background in creating Reflection Point?

AKS: I have an AB in art history from Bryn Mawr and an MA in the field from the University of Michigan. I then earned a law degree and practiced corporate and securities law for thirteen years. After a brief sabbatical teaching middle-school humanities for a year, I joined McKinsey and Co. There, I became very interested in how organizations learn. I went back to school, earning a Doctor of Business Administration. My research examined on how business leaders used conversation and leadership approaches to achieve organizational learning and innovation. At the same time, I began the initiative with local foundations that gave rise to Reflection Point.

HW: Can you recommend any writers in organization leadership arena who from the business world point to the intersection of business and humanities?

AKS: I take a very evidence-based approach, and I like the work of Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan on high-quality relationships. While she doesn’t speak directly to the humanities, her work is very centered on human relationships in successful organizations. Also Francesca Gino at HBS does a lot of work on reflection and the way people engage with ideas. Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie-Mellon does work on collective intelligence, focusing on how people connect within teams and how their social sensitivities drive their collective performance. Some management faculty, including Emma Dench and Joseph Badaracco at Harvard, for example, have built classes and executive programs around using literature to teach business ethics.

We tend not to begin from the position that the humanities are important in and of themselves (although they are). Rather, we tend to start with the needs of business and organizational culture and make the case for the role the humanities can play in meeting these needs. Literature, for example, provides a missing piece for workplaces seeking to deepen relationships among their colleagues: listening and learning from new perspectives, disagreeing with respect, deepening shared understanding by seeing the world through other people’s eyes.

If Reflection Point is about one thing, it’s about making sure that we invite more people to the conversation.It’s about empowering the voices we don’t often hear because diverse experiences enrich all of us. Literature provides an incomparable platform for this work: it levels the playing field and taps into the human experience from many vantage points. Bringing literature (and the humanities) into the world widens the audience and extends our shared learning. Authors don’t write to have their work protected and objectified for study – but to have a voice in the human conversation.

In our very first program, one of the food service workers said, “I used to go to the library for best-sellers but never pushed myself to read harder things. But now I realize I’m capable of reading more and I want to read different points of view, to learn about other experiences.” So she chose a Cormac McCarthy book. “It was hard,” she said, “but it was worth it.”

By easing the barriers of entry, we introduce new authors and new ideas.

HW: The same might be said of museums, which often charge admission, whereas people are not seeing art works in situ, where it was created; nor do they see in terms of their lives.

AKS: I had my own experience of this when I was studying art history, and traveling to Volterra in Italy. In the 1980s, Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposition of Christ was still in the Duomo, in the space for which it was originally painted. When I saw it, it literally took my breath away. It was unforgettable. Years later I returned to Volterra and the Deposition was in a museum, in fact a beautiful little museum.  But it had lost so much of its emotional gravitas: it lost the context, the import and emotional breadth of the original space.

If we keep literature embedded in a glass case, in an air-controlled space, and we rob it of its context, we lose it. It doesn’t have the same emotional impact.

HW: Those sorts of emotional experiences you have with your participants – not just a cerebral experience – lead me to this question: “how do you surprise people?”

AKS: We surprise people in a multitude of ways:

First, in the power of stories, old and new, to connect with people’s personal lives. We tend to get isolated in our lives, but a story moves us as we discover that we are not alone.  James Joyce once wrote, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”  

Stories beget stories. One person sharing their own personal response to a story leads to others sharing their own.

Second, we surprise people by letting them see things in one another that they wouldn’t have discovered, but for the conversation that starts in a shared story. We bring people together who work side by side every day, and they express their delight in discovering things about each other that they wouldn’t have ever known. The sessions invite people talk to one another in a very different way.  People in different roles, at different levels, in the same company come together and discover insights about each other.

HW: how do you foster an arena of trust in these settings, where people can be vulnerable to one another? What have you found useful, in terms of how your discussions using literature?

AKS: We hold more than one discussion because trust builds over time. The literature pulls people out of their daily lives, allowing them to try on different circumstances, and step into the shoes of a character. The story itself creates a safe space to explore challenging topics.  

In his book, Obliquity, the economist John Kay emphasizes the power of looking at things from a different angle. Literature offers a parallel story that awakens revelations and insights in another space.

We also find that in workplaces where trust needs to be built, you need a leader that exemplifies the vulnerability needed to move things forward: that leader invites people in. This work spans boundaries and is most powerful as a model for the candor and psychological safety that can be developed when people deepen their relationships.

Finally, the facilitation is hugely important. We work closely with faculty to help them navigate a new context, to shift from a teacher to an engaged facilitator that asks interesting questions that bridging life, work, and society. A good facilitator can ask a question that builds from but isn’t limited to the story and that leads people to think about their own lives.  Many tell us that the experience in turn changes the way they engage students in their classrooms. Laura Baudot at Oberlin wrote about it as well.   

HW: what “a ha!” moments would you share, a transformational instance in a Reflection Point session?

AKS: We were working with a shop floor team, led by a woman, in an engine manufacturing company. They were reading Hemingway short stories. The professor was able to highlight the idea of “negative space” and how Hemingway used that technique to deepen his stories. Later, when describing the experience, the leader explained how this concept touched her personally. “I began focusing on what my team members were not saying as opposed to what they were. It gave me a new window into the problems we were sharing.” In this case, the tool for understanding the story became a tool in her own life.

As a team, they told us that their discussions led to greater productivity, and closer teamwork. I asked the youngest member of the group why and he said, “I could explain it to you but Steinbeck said it better: ‘you can’t hate a man once you know him.’ And now that we know one another, there’s almost no problem we can’t solve together.”

HW: as a final, but critical question, to what degree has IT facilitated or diminished your aims?

AKS: First, and in the most positive way, we discovered during Covid that we could work remotely using Zoom. This was a surprise for me, as I had been skeptical of the potential for virtual success. But virtual meeting technology has allowed people over all the world to sit around the same table – people who work together but were never in the same place. The synchronous platform creates a space that equalizes conversation, and makes people feel more secure during difficult conversations. We encourage people to keep their cameras on, their mute buttons off, and to treat the discussion as if they were together, in person, in a physical space. But this is not to say that Zoom replaces in-person conversations: each is important in its own way.

Second, we have worked with people who are highly educated but have never discussed literature with one another as a group. Never. Their education and training have been technical or technology-focused, like engineering, software design, nursing, accounting. Reflection Point discussions have unlocked relationships and helped people work better together: it’s a creative endeavor, outside of the technical focus of the workplace. As a young engineer in a manufacturing company explained, “Engineers tend to get really nit-picky, seeing details in a certain way. Using your brain in a different way allows you to be creative, and a lot of engineering is actually pretty creative. If you can have an outlet to be creative, it gets you thinking in that mindset.”

Third, technology has diminished our ability to read. Johann Hari’s new book, Stolen Focus, documents – rather frighteningly – how technology interferes with focus and willpower. And we see this in our programs. We’ve had to shorten the stories we use. Most participants are reading digitally. And very few are willing to devote the time to a whole book.

We increasingly send people audio versions whenever we can. Audio works well, and it taps into a very old storytelling tradition. I’m always impressed by how much people enjoy having a story read to then at any age.  We’ve done it in factories and in the community. We recently worked with a group of 8th-10th graders in an after-school program. In each session, I read a story aloud and then we discussed it. They had a lot to say – but to a one, they said they didn’t want to read the story themselves.  They liked being read to. There’s something soothing about the human voice, a tonic in trouble times and a vehicle that might help us understand the world a little more.

Yes, technology has changed the experience but, rather than wring our hands, we have to think of it as an opportunity. Technology increases access and lowers the barriers of entry, so that people can still enter the conversation even if they are not comfortable readers. Technology gives people access to important ideas that can be shared and explored with others.

The questions we face in the modern world are in some ways new, and in some ways deeply embedded in human history. I like to think of Reflection Point as an old technology reimagined for a new and different world.