Promoting Curiosity, Creativity and Clarity in Management Education

Abstract

In order for management education to move beyond the analytical thinking of the last century to promote creative thinking more appropriate for today’s organizations we need to build new courses that allow for organic flexible approaches to building diverse types of knowledge. We need to nurture student curiosity and encourage them to delve deeply into unknown fields. By approaching problems with curious humility they can begin to understand the nuances of tensions and trade-offs that exist at the heart of complex issues. We also need to unleash student creativity and support intelligent generative failure in order to learn. They need to learn the skills of experimentation in order to test ideas in uncertain contexts. We also need to promote clarity of purpose and communication that will enable innovation to be implemented and have positive impact in the world. In this chapter a new process model covering each of these aspects is described along with an illustrative example of how this has been applied in a redesigned MBA course over the last 5 years.