15 Scholarship Matters In his 1973 Harvard Norton Lectures, the conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein outlined how the best way to a know a thing was in the context of another discipline. Intradisciplinarity is now common practice in management development circles. On the International Masters Program for Managers (IMPM), we have for over 25 years used different contexts to deepen management learning through various lenses, including the dawning of modern capitalism in Lancashire cotton mills, the origins of responsible capitalism at the Lever brothers’ original Port Sunlight, and the landscape-inspired writings of the English Lake District art critic and social commentator John Ruskin. The pedagogical underpinning of the IMPM is that there is no learning without reflection, which we achieve through intramodality (various methods) as well as intradisciplinarity (various contexts). Different reflections Programme participants reflect upon their managerial practice through the lenses of Romantic English literature, Quakerism, as well as more conventional management theories. They have envisaged their futures whilst gazing on a Lakeland vista, itself the inspiration for William Wordsworth’s choosing to be a poet, and transformed their careers reflecting on the positive power and shaping of key moments or ‘spots of time.’ Students have reported near-religious experiences as they “let nature be their teacher” in boats on the surface of Grasmere. But what if all this intradisciplinary and intramodal “opening up” was itself still limiting to explanation, understanding and management learning? Can we break free from the tightly defined parameters of Schon’s established reflective processes and, instead, embrace a more pragmatic, Deweyan-inspired understanding of our location in the challenges of things expressed through the alternative modality of art? A new approach Our novel pedagogy, drawing on practices stretching back over a millennium, takes inspiration from the ancient Chinese artistic practice of shanshui painting – literally mountains and water – to decouple managers from the Western tendency of attempting the accurate depiction or computation of the empirical form which lies before them. As an antidote to the “hot air” of management theory, which perpetuates the tendency of organisations to imitate others, we breathe the “fresh air” of shanshui. Shanshui rejects the exactitude of forms (xing), seeking the bigger picture (xiang) beyond form (dao) to grasp the sense (yi) of the subject under scrutiny. Where Western art seeks the sublime, Chinese art offers an initial blandness. But this same blandness dissolves the subject by ‘recursively throwing it into broader realities which allow the subject to recognise its own significance and appreciate its existence not as master of nature but rather as part of dao (Hui, 2023). Before we can let nature be our teacher, we must first be aware of its existence beyond our conventional ontologies and experiences. The techniques underpinning shanshui offer managers such an opportunity. Unexplored horizons The IMPM affords the opportunity to take participants to hereto unknown places to engage in unique experiences. It is in disrupting participants’ perspective that we provide the chance to gain new insights into management and leadership practice. It is in making connections with their own context and experience that participants grasp the sense (yi) of a situation and can apply new thinking to otherwise intractable problems. Arguably, the English Lake District provides too much stimulus and is anathema to shanshui so we are developing learning opportunities that build on our established impactful pedagogy. Drawing upon Bernstein’s Artful Learning Sequence, practitioners make connections between seemingly disconnected ideas. This builds higher level thinking skills in students and collaboration between educators, through the vehicle of a masterwork that “awakens ideas, emotions and new understandings through visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modalities.” (Bernstein, 2024). This experience causes participants to engage in inquiry-based investigation leading to an Original Creation. How Wang Wei or Dong Yuan (Chinese artists of the Tang Dynasty) may have painted the Lake District, or, stretching our imagination even further, captured the xing, xiang, dao and yi of Unilever’s balance sheet, business model or future strategy, for us represents an enticing departure point. How we feel as well as think become visually expressed, as artists have been demonstrating for millennia. Far from painting by numbers, or being restricted by mere convention, management learning can be set free and limited only by its own artistic imagination.
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