Yet my own experience of working on the Lancaster MBA programme led me to question the cynical, pessimistic, and apathetic notions within management education narratives for one reason in particular: the students I worked with frequently reported impactful transformations in both personal and professional contexts. To better understand which elements of the programme might be linked to driving these changes, and to explore whether the changes lived on beyond the MBA, I enrolled on a part-time PhD. The MBA Experience I conducted a qualitative case study which examined MBA students’ lived experience during their time at Lancaster and looked at the long-term impact of the programme’s pedagogic methods. To this end, I selected 30 students from a cohort of 138 in total (classes 2016 to 2018) with whom I arranged two interviews: one during the programme, and one several years after they had graduated. Before I outline the results of the research, let me briefly explain what the Lancaster MBA was trying to achieve. According to Dr Peter Lenney, the MBA Programme Director between 2014 and 2018, the MBA’s main objective was to cultivate three capabilities that would help improve managers’ chances of making ‘good’ choices in the testing circumstances of managerial life: dialogical skills (the ability to find concordance amongst people with opposing or differing opinions, perspectives and assumptions); reflexive skills (the ability to evaluate one’s prejudices, habits and assumptions); and reflective skills (the ability to evaluate one’s cognitive, collaborative and emotional conduct). So, what did I find? Advantages of Diversity The Lancaster MBA’s use of cohort diversity as a pedagogical tool was extremely successful in cultivating students’ long-term dialogical skills. In their extensive collaborative work, MBA students faced the challenge of coming to terms with a diverse and contrasting range of perspectives, beliefs and values many times over during the programme. As a result, students became more culturally aware, and better able to collaborate and to navigate the political nature of managerial work with more ease than before. The programme’s use of reflexive practices as a pedagogical tool was remarkably successful in cultivating students’ long-term reflexive skills. Not only did MBA students learn to periodically question their personal, educational, and cultural trajectories, but many continued with their reflexive questioning years after the MBA. However, my research indicates that even though most of the students came to appreciate reflective practices, they did not maintain them in the long-term. As a result, few students continued to hone their reflective skills after they graduated, with almost no-one making a habit of structured reflection such as journaling. Recommendations The research findings have resulted in the following recommendations for educators: • Maximise cohort diversity by recruiting from as many nationalities as possible and then rotate team members for each group assignment to increase the likelihood that by the end of the programme each student has had the chance to work with every student in the class. • Facilitate the genuine questioning of prejudices, habits of attention and interpretations in lectures, workshops, and assessments, and encourage students to reflect on their reflexive output periodically using essays, drawings, and coaching sessions. • Draw on reflective practices, outdoor and experiential learning, and 360 feedback to encourage students to regularly pause, analyse and evaluate their emotional, cognitive, and collaborative conduct emphasising that it is the capturing of the reflective output that will drive changes in behaviour. So, what comes next? I aim to share my findings to inform pedagogic interventions of other programmes because I believe management education, despite what the critics may say, does have the potential to be transformative by broadening students’ perspective, enhancing their self-awareness, and nuancing their understanding of managerial practices (Hay and Hodgkinson 2008). 13 Scholarship Matters Mainstream management discourses tend to paint a cynical picture of management education, with Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes often bearing the brunt of the critique. Some scholars blame MBA courses for churning out unethical and inadequately trained managers (Bennis and O’Toole 2005), whilst others claim management students “learn the wrong things in the wrong ways because they are being taught the wrong things in the wrong way” (Küpers and Gunnlaugson 2017).
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