Show Notes
Description
Dr Jimmy Onate visits the studio as we consider contextual intelligence in academic medicine. What exactly is contextual intelligence? Why does it matter? And how can we best incorporate this skill in classrooms, C-suites, research labs, clinical wards, and examination rooms? Tune in to find out!
Topic
Contextual Intelligence in Academic Medicine
Learning Objectives
At the end of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Define contextual intelligence and describe its relevance in academic medicine.
- Differentiate between hindsight, foresight, and insight as components of contextual intelligence.
- Apply methods for teaching and learning contextual intelligence in professional settings.
- Analyze case examples to identify how contextual intelligence informs decision-making.
Guest
Dr Jimmy Onate
Interim Vice Dean and Director
School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Links
Contextual Intelligence: How Thinking in 3D Can Help Resolve Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity (Amazon | B&N)
Toward a Conceptual Model of Contextual Intelligence: A Transferable Leadership Construct
MK Leadership
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Hello everyone and welcome once again to FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
This is Dr. Mike, it’s episode 11, we’re calling this one Contextual Intelligence in Academic Medicine. I want to welcome all of you to the program. So today on FAMEcast, as the title of this episode suggests, we are exploring contextual intelligence in academic medicine.
But what exactly is contextual intelligence? Why does it matter? And how can academic medical faculty develop and apply it in their professional and personal lives?
We have answers to these questions and more. We’ll also unpack the four R’s of contextual intelligence and share practical strategies for incorporating this skill in classrooms, research labs, C-suites, clinical wards, and examination rooms. Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio to discuss the topic.
Dr. Jimmy Onate is the Interim Vice Dean and Director of the School of Health and Rehabilitation at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He is also a professor in the Division of Athletic Training at Ohio State. Before we get to him, I do want to remind you the information presented in FAMEcast is for general educational purposes only.
Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at famecast.org. So, let’s take a real quick break. We’ll get Dr. Jimmy Onate settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about contextual intelligence in academic medicine. It’s coming up right after this.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Dr. Jimmy Onate is Interim Vice Dean and Director of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and a professor in the Division of Athletic Training at Ohio State. He has a passion for raising awareness about contextual intelligence and sharing practical tips for developing and strengthening this skill in academic medicine and beyond.
What exactly is contextual intelligence? Well, you are about to find out. But before we dive in, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. Jimmy Onate. Thank you so much for visiting with us today.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Thanks for the invite. I’ve been really excited about this for a little while, listening to the other FAMEcast conversation. So, I’m looking forward to this.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, I am really looking forward to it as well. I had not really heard of contextual intelligence. Emotional intelligence has been on my radar for a little while.
But contextual intelligence is something new for me. And why don’t we start kind of just so we’re all on a level playing field? What exactly do we mean by contextual intelligence?
And why is that an important thing in academic medicine?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, it’s a great question. And for me, the journey on this part kind of started about two, three, maybe four years ago, looking for different parts of leadership and different developments, you know, and there’s different emotional intelligence and strengths-based leadership and so on and so forth. And I came across this contextual intelligence from Dr. Matt Coots, who’s a leader in the athletic training profession. And he, it kind of really resonated with me because it has behaviors associated with it, it has some of the things that I think are important for just people in general, beyond the clinical professional. The easiest way, and there’s a couple different definitions, especially when you start looking at the business model of it, or international relationships model of it, or from a healthcare standpoint, the most basic definition that I kind of think about is context is the situation, right? What’s happening in the leadership or in the decision-making process.
So, I just really narrow it down to situational awareness is kind of the most fundamental piece of that. And contextual intelligence puts in not only the leadership ideas, but the context behind it.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, that makes sense, actually. So, you know, the way that you react and respond and think about things may be very different depending on what setting you’re in and the people around you and their roles and your relationships and all of those things.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. So, think about it, right? So, at work, you know, I wear a work hat.
I’m the administrative leader, so on and so forth. I also, you know, coach kids and sometimes I’m the assistant coach and head coach. But when I come home, I’m also a dad and a husband.
I can’t wear the same hats and treat everybody the same way at each spot. And so, my intelligence has to kind of come in. So, the contextual part is I need to know when to, you know, put this hat on, when to react to certain situations in a certain way, because this is my role.
And understanding those roles in different situations is the foundation of contextual intelligence.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Very interesting. And it makes a lot of sense. There are four R’s of contextual intelligence.
So, if we’re really trying to describe it in a formal manner, that there’s, you know, these pillars and, you know, I know with emotional intelligence, there’s four pillars and it would seem there’s four pillars in contextual intelligence and they all begin with the letter R. So, what are the four R’s of contextual intelligence?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
So originally, if you read the original textbook that Dr. Kutz put out, there were three R’s. And the first R is their recognized part. And so that’s really recognizing situations, recognizing your role in that situation, utilizing all your experiences and your environment and the people around you, right?
So, the recognition of different things. So, you can think clinically, recognizing when somebody is in distress, recognizing when somebody is, maybe that distress is resolved or resolving and you understand those types of things. So, the first R is the recognition of quote unquote situations.
The second R is the reordering or the rethinking part. And I like the reordering part because you go in and you have this, you know, preconceived notion of I’ve seen this before, right? Or I’ve been in these situations or for you and me, we both run podcasts.
So, I understand this, but now I’m on the other side, right? And so, I’m reordering my thinking as I’m kind of going into that part. And, you know, I just think about you walk into a classroom or you walk into a clinical setting, and you think you’re going to have this, but it turns into something completely different, and you have to adjust.
So, the second R is the reordering part. The third R is the response. And the response is what are you doing?
And I always highlight the response in red because, and obviously Scarlet, because we’re at Ohio State, so not just any red, but the response is the decision of what you’re going to do with the information that you have gathered, your experiences and all the pieces that you are taking into making that decision. The response could be something that you see, right? Body language and I’m folding my arms and throwing my hands in the air and, you know, waving madly.
The response could be verbally, and it may be calm because somebody’s in distress and you’re calming them down and trying to create eye contact and soothing them. It may be, you know, you’re raising your voice because you want something, you know, to be heard and you want to be a little louder because of emergency situations. So, the response is what everybody sees verbally, body language and written, right?
You could write a text and email, and you’re really upset. So, the response is the third one. And originally that’s where it stopped.
But Dr. Coutts and I were having lunch one time, and I said, you know, why do you stop at the third R? Because I think there’s another R that’s really important and that’s the reflection part. And so, the fourth R is reflection.
And that reflection could be short-term or long-term. And what I mean by that is long-term, you write journal, you journal every day, or you look back on your career, you know, years ago, or you look back on decisions like, huh, how did I get to Ohio State? But they also may be short, immediate micro-reflections.
You know, you make that decision and you look at somebody and you go, oh, that was the wrong decision. Look at their response and you kind of backpedal from it. You say, hey, I didn’t mean to, you know, be offensive.
This is what I meant. And so those reflections are really important in the contextual intelligence component.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And that’s where the learning comes in, doesn’t it? And so, our response the next time that we’re in a similar situation really does depend on us having done that reflection.
Otherwise, we’re just going to repeat the same, I’m going to put in quotes, mistakes. I mean, they’re not always mistakes, but, you know, the behavior that maybe we weren’t quite happy with, and others may not have been happy with, but, you know, we’re not going to learn if we don’t reflect.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
A hundred percent. You are exactly right. I think, you know, I always try to state and reframe failure into learning opportunities, right?
And if we don’t reflect, how are we going to have those learning opportunities? So, let’s just think about our learners. You know, our beginning learners, oftentimes they get that by, you know, an exam or something that they’re taught by, you know, teacher or parent or someone that they’re getting corrected on.
And some people, you know, really adapt to that and really think about that as a good thing, right? So that’s the mindset and the Carol Dweck pieces that are out there and so on and so forth. But then there’s some that just shut down from that.
Okay, I didn’t do it perfectly. I don’t want to get chastised, and I don’t want to, you know, accept that I was wrong. And now they have problems with feedback, right?
So, the critical feedback is always part of the learning process. So, understanding that the feedback that you get or from the mistake, quote unquote, is the learning. I mean, the fundamentals of learning require you to make mistakes.
Now, in our environment, especially in the academic medical center environment, we try to minimize those mistakes. But where can we do those mistakes? Obviously, those are in the classroom, in the simulations, in the discussions that we have, the 360 reviews afterwards and go, yeah, you know, I could have done that better.
You know, the decisions that I made, we want to reflect upon.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. For some folks and sometimes myself, depending on the situation, so it’s contextual, sometimes the humility part of it can be a little bit tough. Like you want to think that I’m going to do everything correctly the first time.
And if you don’t do it my way, then you’re not doing it correctly. But really, we need to have that humility in order to grow and to change. And sometimes that’s saying, hey, I was wrong.
Oh, my goodness.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
You are hitting the hot buttons of my entire life right there. Yes, humility is such an important one. And it’s just this understanding of do we want to have the best decision made or do we want to be known as making the best decisions?
And it’s I mean, we live in a constant comparison society, right? We live in these things that we have our US news and world rankings. We have our pay salary rankings.
We have our titles, who’s in this title. And then we have these roles that we’re supposed to have. And yeah, that humility is such an important piece.
You know, I have a PhD, right? So, we’re supposed to be known as an expert. So, when you sit there going, I don’t know, you feel like you’re failing.
And I think that’s one of the most important things to actually be able to say and for us to be able to teach.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, what are those four R’s again, just to solidify them in our minds?
Yeah.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
So, recognize, reorder, response, and reflect. Great.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
I’ve heard the term, is it VUCA world?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
What do we mean by VUCA world? Yeah. So VUCA world, the VUCA term, so V for volatility, un for uncertainty, the C for complexity, and then the A for ambiguity.
That that’s an old military term, basically looking at that, you know, things are constantly in flux. You may have plan A and plan B and plan C, but none of those may be the right ones for the situation that you have. And, you know, you think about our system, our academic medical center, our mission.
You know, we had this little thing happen about five years ago that, you know, disrupted our entire existence of how we teach, how we take care of clinical practice, that there’s a variety there. So that VUCA world is really a constant changing and being ready for those constant changes. You got to think about these things, you know, in businesses and so on and so forth.
It’s kind of being ready for the, you know, the consistency of inconsistency. Now, one of the things that I just, you know, I just posted a little thing on LinkedIn, and somebody sent me the BANI, which is the B-A-N-I, which stands for brittleness, anxious. The N is nonlinear and the I is incomprehensible.
It’s just like the next step of VUCA. But all of these things have the same kind of, for me, the same kind of contextual paradigm that you have to, we don’t live in a world that is just a straight linear idea. You and I have changed on the 12 minutes that we’ve been doing this podcast from just our interaction and understanding that, sure, we have all these questions set up and all these things, but now we’re kind of like flowing a little bit.
And that to me is how you utilize this quote unquote VUCA world and how to be prepared for it, I think is so important for clinicians, just people in general. I mean, we’re all clinicians, but we’re all people too. And so, there’s going to be some things that are chaotic in our home life that we bring to work and that our work life that we bring home and how to understand that and put that in the best context to make the best decisions is really important.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way. And that’s actually a really important thing because if at a baseline, we all understand that we live in a world that’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, then that means that just responding in the same way over and over and over again is going to be wonderful in some situations and it’s going to be terrible in other situations. And so, it does help us to understand a little bit about why even if we’re being the same, we’re getting different reactions because it’s all about context.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, there’s every day that you wake up and every interaction that you have, you’re changing. So, there’s a complexity about that. And that complexity piece is I like to use, we just did it in the leadership seminar, I like to use Plato as the example of complexity.
You take one piece, and you make this little design, you make another color piece and make a little design. Great. Now you put those two things together and I say, okay, what do you have?
And they say, you know, it’s just, you know, unique color or whatever. I was like, okay, now take them apart and make them go back into their same color. And they just look at me like, you know, you can’t do that.
It’s exactly, that’s what we are as humans. And so, making these decisions and making these, you know, intelligent choices and making these, you know, everyday activities, we’re constantly evolving and changing. You know, so this is, you know, for me, this is a world that I love living in.
As an athletic trainer, I had the ability to be able to have an easy day and that easy day may be, you know, when I was really working, you know, seven in the morning to, you know, nine at night and a tough day was six in the morning to 11 at night. And sometimes those were dealing with, you know, maybe a Band-Aid needing here and there, or maybe an ankle that needed to be evaluated. And other days it was a spine board, cervical spine.
It was an individual jumping off of the roof of a school. It was a, you know, an individual who had an exertional heat illness and we needed to prevent him from moving into a major emergency. So that’s my every day.
And in my interim role as a leader for our school, it’s the same thing. It’s just a different context that I have to understand. I can’t be the exact same way as I handle an emergency on-field spine boarding as I would with a faculty member who wants to talk to me about their merit or their, you know, pay equity.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
As we think about insight, which is really what we use to help us understand a particular situation, you know, we say, oh, we have insight into that. Hindsight and foresight are important components of insight. Can you talk a little bit about their relationship?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. So, I think the easiest way for hindsight and foresight to kind of think about it is through your past experiences and your future ideas, right? And the best analogy that Dr. Kutz does, and I love it, he talks about Christmas Carol and Charles Dickens’ novel about, you know, the ghost of Christmas past, the ghost of the Christmas present, and the ghost of yet to come, right?
There are things that people kind of get set up and they get a little bit lost in one end of the world, right? So, I, people know, I kind of tend to think about the future a lot. What are we planning for?
Where are we going? How are we going to go there? So, I really tend to be on this foresight type of idea.
What’s our next academic quote-unquote look like? What’s the university, what’s the center look like? So, I need to balance myself with what are some experiences that I’ve had to inform that future.
So, there’s the hindsight part. What are things that I’ve seen already that inform that part? Now, some people just kind of stay back there and they’re really comfortable in the hindsight part.
This is how we’ve done it. This is the way we’ve always done it. And it’s worked for me.
And we’re going to continue to do it that way. That is important too. There’s a foundation of why are we going to reinvent the wheel, right?
That saying literally is we are in the hindsight kind of mode. Now, those two things inform what we do on a regular basis and the decisions that we make in the now. You know, when I first got here, we had the Wexner Medical Center.
We had the Be Here Now signs. I don’t know if you remember those, but I still have that in my office. And that gives me the reminder of all these things that I’ve done and that I want to do are informing the decisions that I’m making now.
And that’s the insight on those pieces. And some of it is from just experience, but some of it is learning from other people’s experiences and the other things that you’re reading. So, you don’t have to quote unquote, be the expert in everything by having experienced everything.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. That really makes a lot of sense.
And, you know, to some degree that happens automatically, even if we’re not intentional about it, because our past experiences inform our future behavior. And we do all have some idea of kind of where we are heading. So, we do have some hindsight and foresight that just automatically happens.
But when we’re intentional about it, you know, when we really think what has gotten me here, what has worked, what have what had I thought work, but maybe didn’t work. And so that actually takes some critical thinking. And then to think about, well, what will my decisions and the way that I behave and engage with others, how will that affect the future?
But again, doing it in a more intentional way can really help us to be our best version of ourselves in the present.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. You’ve you hit the nail on the head on the intentionality part. A lot of us think that we have this supreme intuition or we’re just, well, we’ve seen this before and we just can’t put our finger on it.
And that’s a powerful and important piece but also have the intentionality of taking notes and writing these things down and learning from your mistakes and having all these pieces. You know, it’s why having mentors is so important because it gives you a different perspective of somebody who’s maybe already gone through the same thing. It’s why having coaches, which is different than mentors, is so important because they may have a perspective when they’re not having the same experiences that you have.
And I think those things are really valuable to creating, you know, basically better decision making and better insight from individuals.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
If I come across someone who has high contextual intelligence, what does that look like? So, being on the receiving end, you know, what are the behaviors I can be looking out for to say, hey, this person has a lot of contextual intelligence?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. You know, I think that is a great question. You know, obviously, there’s surveys and things that you can kind of look at to see people’s contextual intelligence capabilities and so on and so forth.
There’s a whole workbook that Dr. Kutz has and other people have. I think probably the best way to think about it is that they’re very. And I was just listening to his podcast today, so I have the adaptive capacity in my head right now.
But the ability to be able to understand the situations and act in a way that’s called for in that situation. And, you know, some people would call it street smarts and others would call it, you know, very intuitive and other people, you know, somebody like they have great people skills or they’re a great decision maker. You can frame it in any of those things.
But what I would say is that they have the ability to recognize what’s going on in the moment around them and act accordingly for those things to have the best quote unquote results. Yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And those are oftentimes people that we admire, like, oh, if I were in that situation, I’m not sure I would have remained as calm as he or she is. And so, I think it is sort of easy to tell, but it also you don’t know that that person is not intentionally, you know, making the decisions, thinking about things before they act, thinking about the context that they’re in and all of those things. It’s not just coming automatically.
There’s some work behind that. And if we put that work in, we can also become people that others admire in that way.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, I would say. So, for me, one of my mentors, who’s president at Michigan State University, President Kevin Guskiewicz hasn’t studied contextual intelligence. I don’t think he would know what the four R’s are or either of the R’s.
He has been my mentor since my master’s, through my PhD and into my professional career. He would be somebody that if you were to look at the poster child of somebody who has great contextual intelligence would be him. And it’s just something that was innate and raised and intentional where he’s worked on his leadership things and done all those pieces.
But he comes across as it’s natural. It doesn’t look forced when he’s making these executive decisions. It’s a people person and a leader.
It’s an individual who is okay with following some things and leading in others. And I think that’s, you know, when you see it, it’s kind of one of those things like, ah, there it is. And I think that’s really important for people to kind of recognize, like, how did they get successful?
And I think, you know, when you start kind of breaking down some of the constructs and the behaviors that are there, they have a lot of those. They check the boxes in a lot of those.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. Even if they don’t know what it’s called.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Right. Exactly.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
So, let’s say, you know, folks who are listening and including myself, because again, this is a new concept for me too. What are the best ways to start cultivating these behaviors in our daily work? Like how do you actually put contextual intelligence into action?
What are some great first steps?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. I think, you know, for me and my journey, again, I’m still very early on my journey is trying to read as many different things as possible that I have on contextual intelligence. I think for me, it’s the four R’s.
I just kind of put those things into all kinds of situations. And I really try to do some of those things in my reflection and try to look at how did I kind of approach that issue. The other, you know, we’re starting a little journey.
We have a workbook that I’ve given my executive leaders in our school, and we had discussion about what contextual intelligence is basically what we’re doing right now. And now we’re going to kind of take apart the workbook, like, you know, chapter by chapter. And really, it just starts getting us trained in this, you know, discussion mantra, you know, however people put it.
It’s the same thing, I think, of how emotional intelligence kind of came in. I think it’s the same thing of how we now just off the cuff talk about growth mindset, you know, very easily. I think the more that you have discussions, the more you have an understanding of what the different areas are, the different behaviors, that’s where you kind of really start, quote-unquote, educating people on what and how.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. And modeling the behavior. So, the more that we practice it, then others see it in ourselves.
And then they’re going to take our teaching about it a little bit more seriously because they see the fruits of, you know, really trying to enhance your contextual intelligence. Are there particular methods that are great for teaching this to our learners?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
So, so far right now, what I’ve kind of seen is, you know, understanding the first, the basic idea and the concept of what it is. And so, I kind of take the idea of emotional intelligence, which a lot of people are now familiar with and doing those things. And obviously, a lot of people are familiar with the general intelligence, right?
The IQ and so on and so forth. And people who are good test takers and so on and so forth. And trying to take those two idea models and then putting into, well, how are you making clinical decisions or home decisions or, you know, decisions that you’re doing in your personal life or the street smarts kind of piece and just giving the basic definitions and the ideas.
And Dr. Coos just came out with a workbook, so that helps because it makes you formulate some of those things on paper. Then the next step is really trying to take people into scenarios and situations. And I think that’s really important.
And so, to have a discussion, and I usually, I teach contextual intelligence everywhere from, you know, my executive committee of faculty and staff to all the way down to some of the things that I do with 14-year-olds and 15-year-old baseball players. And I’m starting them early on the four R’s. The idea I think really resonates when you start putting into something that they do every day.
So, for instance, a faculty member will go into a classroom every day, a staff member will have a meeting of some sort every day. And then I start kind of going, okay, let’s describe that scenario. And then let’s think about how you utilized your four R’s within that scenario.
And so that kind of gets us in our discussion part. Obviously, we’re going to take some of our hindsight and some of our foresight types of things and kind of mix them into our insight. But I think the very first thing is basic definitions and understanding of the background.
And then the second part is really just scenario-based on those things.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Can you make a case for why this is so important in our learners? So, what do our learners get out of using contextual intelligence? Why is it worth our effort to teach these skills and to model these skills to our learners?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. You know, we want our learners to be a variety of different things. We want them to be excellent decision makers.
We want them to be positively impactful. And I always use the term positively impactful because just being impactful, you could have a major impact in the wrong way. We want our learners to understand, you know, I don’t really like to say work-life balance.
I just like to say understand life balance. Work is part of that. So, I think we want to have all those pieces.
And then to understand that the way that you act and handle yourself in different situations will determine how, you know, happy you are, how positive impactful you are, you know, your decisions on these things. And, you know, we always are concerned about burnout and things of that nature in clinicians. And so, we have to start with the learners to understand this process before they get to these stages of life.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And hopefully our learners have the insight to see, you know, why that is important. I think another piece of it is there’s so much interprofessional collaboration these days between folks with different roles and really working well in a team environment.
And that really does take contextual intelligence because someone else is going to have a different point of view and their point of view may be very different than yours, but that does not make it invalid. We can all learn from each other and where we’re coming from. And that’s why really practicing medicine as a team is so important.
Would you agree?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Oh, yeah. I mean, we’re speaking the same language. For interprofessional education, the amount of contextual intelligence will solve so many of your problems because you are not stepping into those problems to begin with.
And I think that’s a very important thing for our learners to understand. The other thing is you have to think about what you’ve been trained on doing. So, let’s just think about a learner in a healthcare system, right?
So, this could be an athletic trainer, physical therapist, physician, nurse, so on and so forth. Their entire existence to get into the school to that level has been on themselves, right? Their GPA, their leadership experiences, their jobs, their interview skills, and so on.
But when we get out and we work in the quote unquote real world, their entire existence is themselves and everybody that they interact with around them. And so, we have to develop those skills, those team building skills, those leadership skills, how to be a great teammate skills, the interprofessional education skills. We have to get them to understand how to do those things.
And for me, you can have a variety, you know, again, nothing against emotional intelligence, nothing against any of these other things. For me, I just see contextual intelligence being able to wrap a lot of these other things into one paradigm that makes sense to me. All I’m doing is trying to give everybody more tools for their toolbox.
I’m not trying to convert and have all these contextual intelligence followers. I’m just trying to give more people tools for the toolbox. So, if you’re a growth mindset person and that’s kind of your paradigm, if you are an emotional intelligence person and that’s your paradigm, if you are, you know, seven habits of whatever, you know, Stephen Covey’s latest seven habits of something, you know, that’s fine.
Those are your paradigms. And I think that’s important that we don’t just try to make people into this contextual intelligence followers, but we’re giving them more tools for their toolbox.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
You know, we’ve talked about learners and really modeling and teaching contextual intelligence to them. What about in terms of mentorship and coaching? You mentioned those before, but what does that look like as we actually mentor and coach others?
How can we employ contextual intelligence and also model it and teach it to those folks?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, I’ll start with the, I kind of separate the mentors and the coaching, even though there’s a lot of things that you can kind of morph and mix together, but I’ll just look at the mentor part, right? So, the mentors are usually individuals who have either gone along your pathway and really kind of show you the way that they did it. Well, the reality is a lot of the mentors in the traditional sense are individuals who have achieved a level and now they’re kind of giving back to the mentees.
I don’t really personally like that paradigm, but let’s just put that as an example. Well, coming through, whatever it is in 1990 and coming through in 2010 and coming through in 2025 are completely different. And for sometimes we just don’t really kind of understand that when we get to our level of stuff.
And I think that is important to really understand the context of where things are. What is the current day and age? What is the current situation?
How are people being judged and measured and evaluated? And that’s really different than it was most likely for when they were kind of quote unquote coming through. So that’s the mentoring part, the coaching side of it.
And again, coaches, I think really do a nice job, really good coaches, really do a nice job that they’re guides. And they’re just, you know, the easiest way for me to kind of explain that is they’re guides. They’re the lines on the road.
So, you have your solid white lines on the outside. They say, hey, you go outside of that. You’re, you might be in the woods.
You might be off to, off to train or off to tracks. And then you got your double yellow lines in the middle. Hey, you drive in the middle.
That’s fine. It’s really fun, but there’s something that’s maybe coming around the corner and the coaches are there to help you understand that. Not just from their quote unquote, I did this before this way.
It’s there to understand, hey, do you realize you’re driving in a danger zone? Right? And they don’t have to have any experience in there.
And I think that’s the really kind of important part for both coaches and mentors to really understand how they kind of separate. Now the utilization of contextual intelligence on those sides is you got a situation that a mentor is interacting with a mentee automatically, both are changing in that situation. And so, they have to have their own awareness of what they’re kind of delivering and what they’re bringing to the table.
And the same thing with the coach’s part, the coach has a bad day that we don’t want to turn that into the person that they’re coaching have a bad day. And so, they have to kind of go and reflect and understand the information that they’re giving. So, I think the, from my standpoint, I mean, we could run this into everything from parents to clinicians to administrators and understanding those things.
I think the amount of contextual intelligence that is needed in the world is a very, very important component of quote unquote, whatever wants to measure a success.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. You know, as we’ve talked and all of us have learned more about contextual intelligence, I would imagine that all of us can think about people that we have worked with in the past and in the present who have a lot of contextual intelligence.
And we also know a lot of people who do not. And so, I think that that helps us understand it, though, you know, like this is what it does, and this is what it does not do.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. You know, we won’t talk about the people who don’t have it, but we all know someone. Right.
You know, I like to use, you know, the growth mindset phrase and three letter word of yet. Right. That comma with the yet part is really important.
And there’s a lot of times that I just sit there, and I was talking about somebody last night with my son and my wife and they put the term yet for me. I’m like, well, you’re right. I kind of, you know, had struggled with this individual for many years and I was like, yeah, I just, you know, I’m going to go see this one in November, a time frame.
And I don’t know which way I’m going to kind of go. And they’re like, well, think about it. You know, you always talk about these next steps.
So, I got to look at the situations and those types of things. But yeah, I think the, we learn as much from the really good people as we learn from the people who struggle with it.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I teach a social media course to medical students and one of the things we say is go out there and just see what’s out there, not trying to copy what others are doing, but like, see what you like, see what you don’t like, you know, and then make your own path.
But even when you come across bad examples, that’s instructive for sure.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Definitely. Definitely. I think we tend to write those things off as mistakes that we wish we hadn’t seen or interacted with or had happen or, you know, bad parts of our life and so on and so forth.
But yeah, but that’s part of the journey. And if you’re not learning from those parts of the journey, where else are you going to learn those things from?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Can you share a professional example from your own life where contextual intelligence made a difference for you?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
I got about a thousand. I got more than that, but I’m going to give you an actual example. So, I, before I was at Ohio State University, I was a professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
And this is actually where I started really looking internally about where I needed to kind of go. I had a student come in; they were a master student. And at that time, I was so self-involved on how can I get tenure and how can I get my papers, my grants, and all those things out.
And a student came to me, and she brought a book with her. It was called The Last Lecture from Randy Pausch. And The Last Lecture is about professor in computer science.
And it really reflected about the idea of just life in general. So, he unfortunately died from cancer some years later. And so, this is before 2010.
So, it’s probably 2008. And they highlighted a part, and they said, I think you should really read these two pages. And then they, you know, just kind of left.
And I was like, oh, okay, well, this will be interesting. I, you know, did it the next day because I had a thousand other things to do that were so much more important than me learning about myself. Right.
And I remember the gist of it is that essentially, he had a student who was very good in classroom. They had a 50-person classroom, and he was the top marks in the classroom. Right.
So, you think about success. He was academically successful by having the best marks, but they also did something unique that was judging each other in group interactions. So basically, they judged their teammate capabilities, and he was last.
And so, the author of the book, Randy Pausch basically said to him, it’s like, hey, you know, how do you think you’re doing? So on and so forth. And, you know, the student says, you know, I think I’m pretty good.
I’m the top marks in the class. He goes, yeah, but you’re the bottom on the team. We could go, well, that doesn’t matter because that’s not going to affect me in my career because I don’t really care about everybody else.
So that was a highlight of me going, ah, I know what she’s kind of getting at. And then it really hit me on the other thing. In the book, Randy Pausch says, you know how I recognize that you’re struggling with this?
Because I was the same way. And he puts in that he states, I was a jerk like you, and now I’m a recovering jerk. And that part for me, it took, you know, nearly another decade for it to actually sink in.
But that part for me is how do I not be a jerk today? How do I be helpful? You know, we can all talk about servant leadership and all those things, but how can I actually do that on a regular basis in a variety of things?
And so, for me, there’s transparency, there’s contextual intelligence. How do I grow my leadership? Not from my opportunities and my leadership skills, but to impact and help other people.
So that was my really aha wake up moment. And I try to work on that every day. Some days my wife says, you’re not doing very good today.
And I go, hey, I get it. I understand. You know, and it’s when I get uncomfortable.
It’s when I fall back to the things that, you know, that I, that were the insecurities. I mean, it’s all those things. That’s when it comes back out.
And there’s where I need to kind of stop, take a moment, reflect to try to reorganize myself a little bit and get back into the, okay, how should I be acting and how should I be making decisions?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. And you got to love it when your learners put that right back on you.
So, I’m sure that your wife and kids have become experts in contextual intelligence just by the fact that they live in the same house as you. And so, then when they put that back in your face, you got to love that, right?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. I wouldn’t say they’re experts in contextual intelligence, but they’re experts in keeping me in line. And my students and faculty and staff are the same way.
And, you know, and I try to bring it on. You know, I had a faculty member, you know, email me with some concerns yesterday and, and I loved it because they said, you know, I wasn’t sure whether to bring this up with you, but you talked about us being a family and that we can bring things up with you. And this has been sitting with me for a little bit.
Now it’s not a major issue outside of, you know, if I looked at all the major issues, it’s not a budget issue and all these things, but it’s a major issue to that individual. And so, if it’s going to be a major issue to that individual, I need to address it and approach it and understand it where previously I would have been like, well, why are you worrying about this? And I got a thousand other things to do.
And, you know, this isn’t going to help me in my leadership. And then I stop and I go, that’s coming back again, that, you know, and that’s the, the recovering jerk part, you know, that’s a, it’s an everyday thing that I am trying to work on.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And that’s a true, that’s true for all of us. And I think the more that you have contextual intelligence, the more you understand that you’re, you know, not everything in every situation and that it’s a constant learning process.
Yeah.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah. I, I try, you know, one of the things I do in teaching and coaching my baseball kids, and I take a lot of my things from baseball, and I apply it into faculty. And I take a lot of the things that I do with faculty, staff, and students, and I apply it to that.
It really works both ways on the scale and all the faculty and staff and students listening to this, like, can Jimmy go one day without talking baseball? I was like, it’s the, it’s the thing that’s taught me so much because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the thing that just kind of resonates with me, but going back to the concept of understanding these situations and understanding and kind of growth aspects, I think are really important to, you know, to your growth and you gotta be okay with being comfortable, being uncomfortable and not being the smartest person in a room. And, you know, you may have all the decision-making capabilities, but you may not have to be the one making the decision.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Where do institutions fit into this paradigm?
So obviously the leaders of the institution, we want them to have contextual intelligence, but then how can they really support that in the way that they lead and run the institution?
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, I would say right now we’re, we’re living in a world of constant change. I mean, there’s a new thing coming out from either the federal or the state government on a regular basis. There’s always a push from the constituency, you know, the learners, the community, all those aspects.
I think the, the really good leaders rise with a lot of contextual intelligence in there, but there’s also things that are set up to inform them, right? And so, you have a board of trustees to kind of oversight, you have multiple committees and multiple layers of decision-making, but also of influence. You know, for instance, we’re doing the FAMEcast here and we have so many different types of leaders and experiences that we kind of share across this community.
And we have so many different types of learners, you know, brand new student learners, brand new faculty, brand new clinicians that are trying to, you know, figure out their pathway on those things. And I think the university is such a, a setup for these things, but it’s also, I mean, we’re over 150 years old. I forgot our last count.
You know, there’s a lot of foundation that doesn’t, you know, shift really easy, you know? And I, I try to say like, I think sometimes universities are these big ships that really, they make a lot of impact. They go through the water really fast.
And sometimes these universities who are big ships are kind of like the Titanic, like we can’t fail. There’s not, why, why would we look at changes? Why would, and sometimes these smaller universities are really nimble, and they really like these sleek boats that can kind of go in and out, but sometimes they fail because they don’t have the right, you know, construct in those things and they get eaten up by the larger ones.
I think constantly looking at ways to improve while also knowing what we do well. And I think there’s a, that’s a difficult thing for a university because we have so many thought leaders and so many individuals who create knowledge. And I think that’s, that we have to, again, have living in the future and the foresight of things, but we also have to recognize our hindsight and our past.
And I think that’s where it’s, all these pieces are really important. The historical aspects things, my, my older son’s a writer and he really, in a, in a philosophy major. And I think the things that we, especially in the healthcare side, just think are these other things, these general education requirements or these, you know, to try to kind of get you to, to broaden out or the arts or other things.
They’re so important for us to understand processes and understand all the approaches. I mean, we’ve got a huge AI fluency thing going on right now, right? Just launched.
Well, look at all the different components of that. And we are in a state of, you know, major change going on. And we have to think about, again, how we’re making decisions, how are our foresights going to be, how our hindsight is going to be to create our insight and our decisions right now.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Aaron Powell Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Is there a push to include contextual intelligence in formal curricula?
So, you had mentioned leadership classes and courses really introducing it. And maybe even in medical school, this is something that, that folks ought to hear about and learn about at least, you know, at least by their teachers modeling it, but maybe even in a more formal manner.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Adam Draper Yeah. I think, you know, this podcast is one of the launches of it for us here. I think, yes, I do think there’s some components of it.
You know, there, there are some things I’m doing with, with the FAME group to, to also talk a little bit more about contextual intelligence. We’re, we’re instituting it a little bit in our school and throughout some different classes. And, you know, it’s a slow build.
I mean, this has been around for a little while, really, Dr. Kutz kind of got it going. And from my knowledge and understanding more in the 2010s, you know, the, the teens, but there’s been some, you know, some other things in that part. I do think it’s a nice opportunity for us to, to think about another tool for our toolbox.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Aaron Powell Yeah.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Yeah, absolutely.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Well, this has been a really enlightening conversation and hopefully it’ll be useful to lots of people. We are going to have links in the show notes and in particular, the book that you’ve been talking about by Dr. Matthew Kutz, Contextual Intelligence, How Thinking in 3D Can Help Resolve Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity. We also have a paper by him, a journal article in the Leadership Review Journal called Toward a Conceptual Model of Contextual Intelligence, a Transferable Leadership Construct.
So that’s kind of an interesting one. And then he has a website as well with some other resources. And we’ll put all of those links in the show notes over at pdacast.org.
This is episode 11, so you’ll be able to find, find it there in the show notes. So once again, Dr. Jimmy Onate, Interim Vice Dean and Director of the School of Health and Rehabilitation at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Thank you so much for stopping by today.
[Dr Jimmy Onate]
Thank you for having me. This was a blast. I always love listening to the show, but I also love talking about different ways to basically help people.
So, thank you for the opportunity.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again, to all of you for taking time out of your day and making FAMEcast a part of it. Really do appreciate that. Also, thanks again to our guests this week, Dr. Jimmy Onate, Interim Vice Dean and Director of the School of Health and Rehabilitation at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Also, a professor in the Division of Athletic Training at Ohio State. Don’t forget, you can find FAMEcast wherever podcasts are found. We’re in the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Audible, and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android.
Our landing site is famecast.org. You’ll find our entire archive of past programs there, along with show notes for each of the episodes, our terms of use agreement, and the handy contact page if you would like to suggest a future topic for the program. Reviews are also helpful wherever you get your podcasts.
We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show. We also have additional resources that you can find on our website. So, if you head over to famecast.org and click on the resources tab, that’s at the top of the page. There’s a couple of links there for you for some faculty development modules on Scarlet Canvas. Those include modules that are about clinical teaching. Those are called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching.
Makes sense. And then there’s another group of modules called FD4ME, and that stands for Faculty Development for Medical Educators. There are scores of learning modules in both of those sites, again, on Scarlet Canvas.
So be sure to follow those links to find lots more useful information specifically targeting academic medical faculty. I also want to remind you a couple other podcasts that I host, PediaCast CME. That is a continuing medical education podcast for pediatric providers.
And we also have a podcast for parents. You know, a lot of medical physicians in this audience, and many of you are not pediatricians, but you might have kids at home. So, we do have an evidence-based podcast for moms and dads.
We answer listener questions, cover pediatric news, and interview pediatric and parenting experts. Shows are available at pediacast.org, also wherever podcasts are found. Simply search for PediaCast.
Thanks again for stopping by, and until next time, this is Dr. Mike saying stay focused, stay balanced, and keep reaching for the stars. So long, everybody.
[Music]
