Learning to manage and managing to learn

Increasing competition and accreditation pressures on MBA programmes throughout the world to perform, in terms of competitive pricing and “world’s best practice” curricula, may produce outcomes inimical to the very goals being pursued. Two major themes of management education are considered in light of this trend. First, management education content and process is critically reviewed from an evolutionary non‐linear systems perspective particularly with respect to incorporating more effective yet deliberately destabilising double‐loop learning processes in the educative system. Business schools fail to incorporate such approaches because they over‐rely on single‐loop learning processes which ignore dynamic complexities in the human condition and in organisational systems. This helps explain why business schools and consultants readily incorporate management fads and fashions into their curricula. Second, the structure and delivery of management education programmes is reviewed. Conventional approaches here fail to take account of the more demanding experiential side of human learning and development which may be just as important as the rational approach which so often captures the delivery agenda. Again, the attraction of management fads and fashions is implicated as a major reason why business schools fail to incorporate double‐loop learning into their own agendas. In the words of the sages, you often get what you pay for and what you get is often simplistic, linear, de‐contextualised, and strongly prone to over‐application.