“How will the pandemic change business education?”
It already has done and continues to do so. Other disciplines may long for a return to normal but the pandemic has changed our subject itself. Business schools need to reflect on what I assure you will become ‘textbook examples’ to equip our students for a new reality.
Milton Friedmann held that only a crisis produces real change, and that those who manage that change best will be those who have viable alternatives to the status quo ‘lying around’ waiting for their moment. We have seen this in the way that we’ve all been forced to adopt technologies and behaviours that have been around for a while but that we have resisted because they were difficult.
There’s a paradox at the heart of business. Good judgement comes from experience: experience comes from bad judgement. The way to resolve this is through deliberate practice in a space where all you spend is time. Experiential learning is all about imparting tacit knowledge – the soft skills that contrast with the hard facts that make up much of business education.
For around twelve years I’ve been involved with teaching modules that do this, emphasising teamwork, problem-solving and communication. A pedagogical model that supports this is RASE. We supply our students with resources – usually in the form of hard facts and theory; then we challenge them with an activity – often to work as a team to present a solution to a business problem; provide support through mentoring; then give feedback through evaluation.
