Abstract
Much has been debated about the perceived relevance/irrelevance of business schools in addressing business needs with some suggesting that academic research is not applicable to practice. We contribute by claiming the debate is itself somewhat misplaced and the real task of business schools is to instil the art of ‘relevating’ the seemingly irrelevant in order to prepare managers for the challenges they face. Paradoxically, we contend that in relentlessly pursuing scholarship, academics can make a valuable contribution to practice by offering counterintuitive viewpoints that challenge business mindsets. Ironically, value-adding contributions to practice are best made when academia resists the seductive tendency to capitulate to the immediate demands of the client. For it is only by challenging conventional wisdom and expectations and thereby creating dissonance in the minds of managers, that new and unthought avenues of action may be opened up for consideration. We illustrate this by examining the experiences of a partnership between a multinational corporation and a university in the United Kingdom where the executive education programme was carried out using action learning techniques while encouraging reflexivity in practice.
Introduction
‘Education is the acquisition of the art of utilizing knowledge’.
Business schools have been recently criticised for their seemingly obsessive preoccupation with journal publications and rankings at the expense of being relevant to the concerns of the practitioner world (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004; Nicolai and Seidl, 2007; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, 2004; Rubin and Dierdorff, 2009; Rynes et al., 2001; Starkey and Tempest, 2009). To be sure, there are others who insist that there is much evidence to suggest that business schools’ research and education do in fact contribute positively to the business community: that these criticisms are unwarranted and that the education provided exemplify both relevance and rigour and hence helps improve both practice and theory (Aldag, 1997; Aldag and Fuller, 1995; Baldridge et al., 2004; Hitt, 1995, 1998; Ireland, 2008; Pearce, 2004; Vermeulen, 2007). Moreover, numerous journal special issues and academic conferences together with presidential addresses at the Academy of Management’s annual conference ‘have persistently addressed the drive for relevance’ (Cummings, 2007: 355). There are also those who view the rigour/relevance gap as essentially unbridgeable (Kieser and Leiner, 2009) and yet others who controversially insist that the alleged lack of relevance of management research may itself be irrelevant since the primary task of scholarship is to pursue its own noble ends without regard to its applicability to the business world (Peng and Dess, 2010).
Yet, surprisingly, there has been little attempt to define what relevance actually means. For instance, what was taught in school, for many people, may have appeared at that time boring or irrelevant, but may retrospectively be more deeply appreciated as being relevant, indeed crucial, in future life. Steve Jobs, for example, finding college life to be boring dropped out deciding instead to attend calligraphy classes even though it did not seem immediately relevant or useful at that time. At a commencement speech delivered at Stanford University, he stated, ‘None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life’ (Jobs, 2005). However, it transpired that 10 years after attending those calligraphy classes, the knowledge he gained played a crucial role in his design of the first Apple Macs and today much of the aesthetic appeal of Apple computers is attributable to Jobs’ understanding of calligraphy. What is learnt at a particular time that seemed irrelevant may subsequently become relevant because of changes in perception, a shift of paradigm or a maturing of thought that enables one to see the real value of what was previously unappreciated. Clearly, judgements about the relevance of something learnt are subjective, time-bound and context dependent; relevance and irrelevance depend very much on our intellectual ‘readiness’ to see possible connections.
As such, static, ‘black-and-white’ judgements about relevance/irrelevance are unhelpful in understanding how university business schools can actually contribute to business and society. To begin with, universities provide scholarly research-based environments that offer a unique opportunity for busy practitioners to withdraw from the immediate demands of the world of practice and to critically examine their deeply held assumptions about their business priorities and practices (Argyris, 2002; Chia, 1996). They offer the intellectual space and the stimulus to stretch horizons of comprehension so that familiar problems, situations and circumstances may be rethought and reassessed for their strategic implications. This is what the term ‘relevate’ implies.
Borrowing from the root medical term levation, which means the act of raising up, ‘relevate’ implies raising perceptual awareness and expanding horizons of comprehension so that the previously unthought, the unnoticed or the unattended to are gradually brought into the business practitioner’s decisional considerations (Baron, 2006); what was previously unthinkable becomes thereby more thinkable. To ‘relevate’ is to deliberately disrupt the established boundaries of a problematic with a view to expanding the scope and range of issues considered relevant or irrelevant to a particular decisional imperative; it effectively re-problematises a previously defined problem. In so doing, it forces a new comprehension of the situation faced thereby leading to potentially novel solutions being generated.
To be truly effective, therefore, executive education must not merely operate in a ‘problem-solving’ mode offering what executives ‘want’ or even what they perceive they need but must instead be a constant source of disruptive and discomforting experiences so that a more rigorous reassessment of their strategic priorities and practices can be effected. Shifting paradigms (Chia, 1996) and the expansion of decisional possibilities is the true ultimate aim of executive education. Such a challenge can only be provided if business academics resist the urge and temptation to appear immediately relevant but instead stand their ground and actively ‘rub’ their own rigorously formulated theories and insights against the world of practice in order to stimulate novel comprehensions of everyday business situations. In this way, both academics and practitioners are able to reflexively learn about the limits and limitations of their own favourite theories/practices. Only through this exercise of deliberately creating ‘friction’ between theory and practice can genuine transformational learning be attained by both practitioners and business academics themselves. We illustrate the value of this form of indirect contribution through reflexively learning from a long-term strategic partnership between a multinational corporation and a UK university.
From our analysis of this strategic partnership, we make two interrelated claims. First, besides knowledge dissemination, business academics can contribute indirectly to the world of affairs by drawing from the knowledge resources of university-based expertise to deliberately challenging conventional wisdom and dominant mindsets thereby forcing management practitioners to rethink, reconceptualise and re-evaluate their understandings of business situations. This is a unique competitive advantage, something that no management consultancy can offer. Unlike consultancies or professional management education institutions, universities are geared towards offering a genuinely challenging intellectual environment that can make a world of difference to the lives of business practitioners. Universities are charged with offering its students life-transforming experiences that are not ‘readily available in everyday society’ (Bloom, 1987: 256). This means that ironically, university business schools must resist the urge to appear immediately relevant in order to add real value to the world of business.
Second, in uncompromisingly emphasising rigour and scholarship in dealing with ideas, concepts and theories, universities serve as laudable exemplars of excellence for others to emulate in their own often unrelated fields of endeavour. The relentless pursuit of excellence is exemplified by an overarching attitude and disposition common to many fields of practice. Thus, the outlook, care and display of attention to detail that produce the very best scholarship are indistinguishable from that associated with the best business practices, the best of political statesmanship and the best sporting achievements; all are united by a common quest for perfection in what they do. Hence, what is tacitly communicated about university scholarship through the executive education process is more the outlook, demeanour, ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990) and disposition of the academic and the manner in which he or she engages with the world of practice (Chia and Holt, 2008) that actually generates a lasting impact, either positively or negatively, on the practitioner audience. This is often underappreciated. What is implicitly transmitted through the demonstration of true scholarship in an executive education situation is the liberating capacity to draw from a variety of seemingly unrelated perspectives to illuminate real-world situations, and an enquiring, open-minded and critically questioning attitude that unsurprisingly mirrors the very best of business practice.
This article proceeds as follows: first, we explore the rigour/relevance tensions to build the argument for the pedagogical approach adopted with the case study; we then follow that discussion with a related analysis of the nature of relationships between university business schools and their practice-based clients to enable us to elaborate on the partnership that provides the case study in this article; we next outline the methodology describing the data gathering and analysis process, including exemplars of our critical incident analysis; finally, we present and discuss our empirical findings developing the idea of ‘relevating’ before concluding with the contributions of this article.
Breaking with tradition
Traditional or orthodox forms of management teaching especially in Master of Business Administration (MBA) has been roundly criticised (see Pfeffer and Fong, 2002) with claims that at the heart of this approach is a traditional model of education founded on a hierarchical relationship between teacher and learner that prioritises the academic’s knowledge over the experience of the practicing manager. Similarly, Reynolds and Vince (2004) note that this pre-packaged ‘technical’ solutions approach is no longer sufficient to prepare students and executives for the challenges of a changing global economy. They propose the adoption of a more critical educational approach that encourages the questioning of established theory and practice and the adoption of action-based learning techniques. This entails dismantling the hierarchical teacher/learner relationship and replacing it with a space where both academics and students explore and question the subject matter within the context of the business. This shift to a more collaborative and reflexive (Cotter and Cullen, 2012; Cunliffe, 2002; Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004) learning relationship brings challenges for both academic and practitioner/student not least of which is the reframing of their roles. Instead of the practitioner bringing the experience and the academic providing the ideas needed to make sense of it, Reynolds and Vince (2004) propose that both practitioners and academics each contribute ‘ideas and experiences to the development of both understanding and practice’ (p. 444). Within this reframed relationship, the academic must make a further concession by accepting the validity of ‘practice and the experience and meaning that practitioners give to that experience’ as an appropriate ‘starting point for the generation of theory’ (Reynolds and Vince, 2004: 443).
Fundamental to the success of this relationship is the creation of an environment where critical dialogue is encouraged between practitioner and academic as it is from this dialogical engagement that deeper insightful learning emerges. Cunliffe (2002) terms this reflexive dialogical practice and proposes that this leads to the ‘inside-out’ reflexivity that is required within the learning experience. Key to this process is what Ramsey (2011) terms the provocative use of theory that ‘shifts our attention away from consideration of the substance of a theory, concept, framework or research finding towards how management-learners appropriate ideas from within such management thinking to their day-to-day managerial practice’ (p. 470).
Central to the provocative use of theory is the perceived relevance or lack of relevance of the theory to the matter at hand. Dehler (1998) summarises two opposing views of academic research, which generates said theory: first, the instrumental (practitioner view) that proposes that the purpose of research is to serve directly the ends of business, and second, the more dominant scholarly view that is more pluralistic with a multiplicity of stakeholders, including the scholarly community, the business community, the student body and wider society. This multiplicity serves to dilute the relevance of academic research as it is not applied directly to a business issue within a particular context. This very complexity of the scholarly view is often given as the main reason that academic research often appears to be of little relevance to managerial practice. This criticism, however, is built on the basis of direct relevance where the contribution of a theory must be easily and clearly linked to an area of managerial practice and ignores the possibility of the existence of more indirect relationships that may lead to relevance either during the learning event or sometime after. It does not recognise the kind of indirect contribution that can be made precisely because academic ideas while appearing not relevant to immediate concerns initially may nevertheless be seen to be highly relevant subsequently. Interestingly, Dehler also argues that direct relevance through the pursuit of instrumental research may actually be damaging as it may result in an attempt to rationalise the practice of management thereby oversimplifying a more complex situation. Drawing on the work of Cooper and Burrell (1988) and Alvesson and Willmott (1992), he further argues that the instrumental search for relevance through consensus between practitioner and academic may itself be self-defeating. For him, creating dissensus is more important when challenging existing norms. This entails not simply finding answers to predefined problems but rather ‘problematizing’ problems (cf. Cooper and Burrell, 1988: 98). Dehler is right in his observation on the value of dissensus but he does not go on to examine why it is that dissensus can be more productive. In effect, for us, dissensus is the first stage of the process of ‘relevating’.
While much of the literature on management learning has leaned towards an acknowledgement of the wealth of practical experiences that practitioners possess, we argue that this can lead to suboptimal contribution on the part of university business schools. Our contention is that university priorities are different from that of business practice and must remain so. These priorities are on the continuous development of rigorous scholarship and the dissemination of such scholarship for the benefit of business and society. Yet, paradoxically, it is this distinctiveness that allows the university business school to add true value to the business world albeit often in an indirect way through challenge, provocation and creating dissensus. Here we agree with Dehler; more than attempting to achieve premature consensus through accommodation and adaptation, provocation and challenge can lead to novel and important insights for practitioners and academics.
From consensus to dissensus: Scholarship and indirect ways of learning
Virtually, all experiential learning involves the ongoing registering and refinement of similarities and/or differences in phenomena observed. In the former case, repeated observations may lead to a convergence of attention on the residual sameness of features or regular pattern of things observed and hence to focus on enduring aspects that subsequently enable us to identity, name and describe things. For instance, if we observe one swan to be white in colour and subsequently notice other swans to be also white on several separate occasions, we gradually gravitate to the generalisation that ‘all swans are white’. We develop an expectation that swans we subsequently encounter ought to be white. We generalise from the seen to the unseen, developing what the essayist Nicholas Nassem Taleb (2007: 50) calls a ‘confirmation bias’. Learning in this instance is a convergent, confirmatory process leading from the many particulars to a unitary general principle. It is a direct form of learning that leads to a cumulative theory of knowledge. Acquiring established knowledge and achieving competence and expertise are a direct consequence of this form of learning. Problem solving is the ‘dominant logic’ (Cunha and Chia, 2007; Prahalad, 2004: 171) of such conventional learning practices. It corresponds to what March (1991) calls a strategy of ‘exploitation’, the efficient and instrumental application of what has been learnt to generate outcomes that satisfy immediate needs.
Learning through difference, however, takes place when instead of observing a white swan as expected, we see a black one. Such an observation creates an anomaly that disturbs our generalised understanding forcing us to revise and reconsider what we know about the colour of swans. It jolts us into a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of our assumptions. As the philosopher Karl Popper (2002) argues, the latter observation ‘falsifies’ our generalised understanding about the colour of swans so much so that we can no longer cling on to the belief that ‘all swans are white’. What the sighting of a black swan has done is to register a difference that upsets the apparent coherence of things and forces us to revise our initial understanding about swans being white in colour. We now learn indirectly, on a rebound, that swans are not always white. It is the difference that provokes this kind of indirect learning, learning that is not ‘cumulative’ but that sensitises us to differences that make a difference (Bateson, 1972). It forces a paradigmatic reassessment in our comprehension of the situation we face. The relentless oscillation between similarities and differences, therefore, is what heightens our consciousness of the possibility of otherness and hence alerts us to the unexpected and the unintended consequences of human action (Merton, 1936).
Indirect learning occurs, when, for example, we visit another country where the traditions, attitudes and practices are vastly different from that of our own. We experience a clash of prevailing world views that is disconcerting and disruptive. This disruptive experience then forces reflexivity and heightens self-awareness causing us to reassess our own, often idiosyncratic ways of understanding and dealing with the world. Difference, in this instance, challenges our established ways of thinking about the world paving the way for a paradigm shift. As the French sinologist François Jullien (2000: 10) observes, in order to learn about ancient Greek thinking and its influence on modern Western thought, it is crucial to study the Chinese and put ‘China in full view’ so that we can eventually ‘approach Greece’. Thus, paradoxically, it is by reaching out to foreign others and immersing ourselves among them that we can actually return to ourselves and know who we really are. This insight is what prompted the poet T. S. Eliot to write that the purpose of intellectually venturing out into the unknown, away from the familiar and secure ground of established knowledge will be to ‘arrive at where we started; And know the place for the first time’ (‘Little Gidding’, The Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, 2001). Similarly, it is this exposure to foreignness and radical differences that characterises what we mean by an indirect way of learning. This is crucial for our understanding of how exactly academic scholarship can be practically useful to business and social practices by providing a ‘refreshing’ foreignness that forces reflection on the part of business practitioners. This can only be done if academics resist the pressing demand for ‘relevance’ by the practitioner world. It does not mean that these needs are ignored. Rather, it is about holding them in abeyance. Such a pedagogical strategy requires a degree of patience and understanding on the part of both parties to explore and help manage the emergent process of joint clarification and articulation of the needs.
Indirect learning is grounded in a triadic relationship that integrates double loop learning theory (Argyris, 1977, 2002, 2003) with the expansion of peripheral awareness (Gennaro, 2008) through reflexively learning in experience (Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004). It encourages enquiry, challenge and reflexivity to bring about new perceptions and understanding. Existing assumptions are challenged (indirectly) as they are often tacit, deeply held and rarely articulated. ‘Practical reflexivity means unsettling conventional practices’ (Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004: 31) so that hitherto unthought avenues of possibilities can come into decisional consideration. Such challenges lead to the development of the capacity for relevation, whereby ideas, events and happenings previously unconsidered are brought into the domain of consciousness through novel connections (Gennaro, 2008). This indirect approach empowers practitioners to discuss, challenge, negotiate and reframe shared experiences. By ‘relevating’ the seemingly irrelevant and hence hitherto unthought, such a gesture opens up the possibility for new and creative ways of responding in the world of practice.
University-based bespoke executive development programmes
The use of universities in the education and training of people for the ‘world of practical affairs’ has gone on for many centuries. In England, for instance, Cambridge University, in the year 1316 founded a college dedicated to the education and training of ‘clerks for the King’s service’ (Whitehead, 1969). Since then, universities have actively trained clergy, medics, lawyers, engineers and business people with Harvard University being one of the first set up to offer business education in 1908. Traditionally, the university business school’s approach to this perceived industry need for executive education has been to offer standardised ‘off-the-shelf’ MBA packages that covered the range of functional disciplines associated with the practice of business. For quite a while, this standardised executive education curriculum remained largely acceptable to the corporations seeking to upgrade the specialist knowledge, skills and capabilities of their executive staff. This it does to a satisfactory extent. However, this is a long way from preparing students/executives for the challenges of general management. As a result, this widespread approach has arguably been found wanting both on the side of business schools themselves and on the part of client corporations.
From the perspective of large corporations, the perceived lack of relevance of the traditional business school curriculum has resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of corporate universities in which a company-instigated training initiative is set up and used as a strategic tool intended to assist its parent organisation in achieving its goals by conducting educational and developmental activities that help foster individual and organisational learning, knowledge and competence (Nixon and Helms, 2002; Rademakers, 2005). Corporate universities are undoubtedly a growing trend and to date there are over 2000 of them, mainly in the United States but increasingly in Europe (Campbell and Dealtry, 2003). The idea of corporate universities dates back to the 1950s when General Electric founded ‘Crotonville’ to train its managers. Since then, many organisations, including McDonalds, Walt Disney and Motorola, have all established corporate universities although there are those who see these as mainly extensions of training initiatives and so fall short of the kind of intellectual rigour associated with universities (Walton, 1999). Awareness of this inherent shortcoming on the part of corporations themselves has led to further initiatives designed to augment the narrow focus of in-house educational institutions through partnerships with traditional accredited universities (Campbell and Dealtry, 2003; Ryan and Morriss, 2005). Yet, the emphasis of the partnership remains largely the immediate perceived relevance of academic expertise to the pressing needs of the corporation.
In contrast to both standardised executive development packages and corporate universities, bespoke executive development programmes (Anderson and Van Wijk, 2010; Myrsiades, 2001) play a useful mediating role between pandering to the immediate perceived needs of client corporations and the need to retain a desirable intellectual scepticism in this partnership that at times forces the client corporations to rethink their purposes, priorities and needs. Bespoke executive development programmes have become an increasingly acceptable means for university business schools seeking to tailor solutions that help large individual corporations realise their full potential. Mintzberg and Gosling (2002) have proposed that such executive development programmes are typically characterised by tensions between opposing concepts such as reflection and action, cooperation and competition and the analytical and the worldly. They claim that success is often found by striking the best balance between each extreme. These observations hint at the complexity facing companies and providers of knowledge when they deviate from the well-trodden path of the general ‘off-the-shelf’ programme to follow more ambiguous routes such as bespoke interventions.
From our perspective, in undertaking a bespoke intervention, the partnership begins with both the university and the corporation extensively exploring the perceived needs of the latter and the content capabilities of the former in an attempt to establish a match. A large part of the activity here is in arriving at the overall aims of the intended programme. As with any ‘courtship’, the longer term aims can sometimes be overshadowed by the mechanics of relationship building. This is often characterised by tensions, apparent conflicts of interest and a degree of misunderstanding on both sides. This misunderstanding occurs when the corporate client expects the knowledge provider to understand immediately what is needed to resolve their issues and, in the reciprocal misunderstanding, the knowledge provider expects the client, as domain expert, to understand what universities are uniquely positioned to offer in terms of value-adding help. This disconnect between what corporate clients expect and what business schools are able to offer, often leads to poorly thought-out, essentially ‘transactional’ programmes where the emphasis is on transfer of formalised knowledge between the academic expert and the executive instead of the cultivation of a relationship of trust and openness in which challenge in the form of alternative paradigms leads to changes in perception and comprehension.
Due to this disconnect, many executive education programmes, while often tolerably adequate, do not fully deliver real ‘value-added’ to the client. This is not because they fail to achieve the objectives defined but because these objectives often obscure the real client needs, which are much more difficult to define. Corporate clients, like any customer who enters into a complex transaction, may be unaware of the real potential of their relationship with the business school. They may be satisfied with content expertise that can incrementally help improve their corporate performance through upskilling but be unaware that a greater potential contribution lies in the capacity of academic staff, steeped in a tradition of rigorous scholarship, to help them radically rethink and reconceptualise their business. It is this capacity for helping corporations shift paradigms to create new avenues for corporate exploitation (Harrison et al., 2007) that constitutes the real value-adding contribution of business school academic scholarship.
In this article, we show how, through the process of uncovering the real client needs, the educational programme refocused from simply the acquisition of problem-solving skills to that of a paradigm-shifting and disruptive intervention where the process of ‘relevating’ was key to success.
Strategic partnership: The Babcock Academy
In 2005, Babcock International Group PLC (BIG) approached Strathclyde University Business School (SBS) proposing to set up what became the Babcock Academy, an executive education programme for all directorial staff and their direct reports (some 200 personnel). This initiative was intended to prepare Babcock for the next phase of its expansion programme. BIG is one of the United Kingdom’s leading engineering support services organisations specialising in managing complex strategic assets and infrastructure in safety- and mission-critical environments with customers, including the Ministry of Defence (MoD), National Grid, Network Rail, British Energy and British Airports Authority. Babcock currently employs some 27,300 people and its annual report for 2011 showed a turnover of £2.756b for 2010 with operating profit of £157.5m.
BIG began in 1891 when the American boilermakers Babcock & Wilcox established Babcock & Wilcox Limited as its UK subsidiary. For a number of years, it stuck to its core business building boilers. The business expanded as a result of two world wars with the company diversifying into the supply of defence equipment. Further diversification took place in the 1960s with the company’s involvement in the United Kingdom’s first nuclear power stations. In 1979, Babcock & Wilcox Limited was renamed ‘Babcock International’ and floated on the stock exchange.
In 1995, a 75% stake in the boiler manufacturing and energy services activities was sold to Mitsui Engineering of Japan and in 2000 Babcock took the strategic decision to move away from manufacturing towards supporting critical equipment and infrastructure. From then, it has undergone a period of intense growth through acquisitions in the defence, marine, nuclear and rail industries. In March 2010, Babcock undertook its largest acquisition by merging with the VT Group.
Existing paradigms – achieving knowledge transfer
Although achieving consistent growth in terms of revenue (£836m in 2006 to £2756m in 2010) and profit (£49.9m in 2006 to £157.5m in 2010; BIG published accounts, 2011), this success has been achieved to a large degree through corporate acquisition: a strategy that had resulted in a decentralised, fragmented company. Control from the apex was loose: operationally, there were few common processes, and strategically, each of the (then) seven divisions still acted autonomously. With no cohesion across the company and little cross-fertilisation of people and ideas, each of the businesses tended to retain its own ‘personality’. More worryingly, there was little understanding of management capability across the company with different approaches and competence in evidence. As the MD Warships put it, ‘In the early days [of the acquisition phase], managerially we had no idea what good looked like’.
To address this need, the original aims of the Babcock Academy were to (1) upskill the management population in the fundamentals of business and management, (2) create a common management language across the company and (3) provide a forum where managers could network and exchange ideas to identify synergistic opportunities. This emphasised the importance of equipping executives with common management knowledge and in many ways resembled the traditional off-the-shelf, knowledge transfer model of educational provision.
Phase 1 of the Academy, as it became known, was implemented as four 2-day modules with nearly 200 executives attending in the first 2 years. However, at a series of partnership meetings in 2008, it became clear that although the initial aims of the Academy were being met, much more were required, it appeared that there was still something missing from the educational provision but no clear idea of what that was. While BIG wanted the Academy to deal more directly with improving management practice and performance, the academic team were keen to engage in more progressive teaching approaches. During a pivotal meeting, the conversation turned to the BIG strategy of growth and it became clear that acquisition strategy they had adopted could not continue indefinitely. Beneath the successful acquisitions they had made, little had been done to facilitate internal organic growth to ensure sustainability. This critical insight provided the impetus to create phase 2 of the Academy. The key realisation was that the second phase of the Academy should focus more in terms of expanding current business potential through organic growth rather than just learning and knowledge acquisition.
Shifting paradigms: Seeking new mindsets
An exploratory workshop was conducted that focused attention on the more fundamental question of how the BIG businesses could actually grow organically. In the BIG context, this has two parts. First, in an industry dominated by a small number of high-value contracts, growth could be achieved either by increasing and extending the term and value of existing contracts. Second, in a market dominated by difficult-to-gain competences and expertise, growth could be achieved through extending these competences and expertise to entirely new lines of business. This realisation led to a reframing of the phase 2 programme and a move away from knowledge transfer through subject-based teaching to an emphasis on stimulating thinking that would challenge the preoccupations, priorities and practices of each of the BIG portfolio of businesses. The emphasis became one of the challenging and changing dominant mindsets. Such a requirement also posed a challenge for the academic staff who were more comfortable discharging their knowledge and expertise within their respective sub-fields. Over several months, two workshop-based modules loosely designed around the themes of ‘Performance Improvement’ and ‘Strategic Business Winning’ were conceived and subsequently implemented. This article is thus based upon the authors’ experiences of facilitating these two modules, particularly that of ‘Strategic Business Winning’ and the extensive feedback collated from participants and the BIG Academy champion and coordinators.
Methodology
Pedagogical engagement
The pedagogy adopted in these two Academy 2 modules was based on action learning with academics and learners mutually engaged in the process of enquiry, challenge and critique. This required the academics to shift their mindset from that of knowledge transfer to the facilitation of new knowledge creation through the kind of ‘provocative pedagogy’ identified by Ramsey (2011) whereby the classroom is transformed into ‘an active (re)creation of working relations in ways that include the questioning, testing and enquiry involved as the practitioners engage with ideas from academia in their own day-to-day working relations and activity’ (p. 555).
All sessions started with a business-related task that was familiar to each individual. In the ‘Strategic Business Winning’ module in particular, participants were challenged to ‘think about their own thinking’ thereby taking them out of their comfort zones. Instead of merely spouting the popular phrase ‘think out of the box’, they were actively challenged to ask a prior fundamental question: Where did the ‘box’ come from in the first place? What is the ‘box’ anyway? This then was followed by an exposition and exploration of the difference between ‘problem solving’ and ‘paradigm shifting’. The entire approach was unsettling and discomforting yet fascinating for the participants. For example, when asked if they could actually remove elements of their current service provision and reconfigure their service offerings, it provoked an initial resistance. This was surprising as a key element of the BIG ‘success formula’ was flexibility in attitude and delivery to provide solutions for the customer. Nevertheless, this challenging approach became more and more appreciated over the 2 days as it helped open up the possibilities and provided a new framework for thinking in innovative ways in relation to their own specific businesses. For the academics it provided a deep learning experience regarding the intricacies and complexities of business relationships and environments and forced their own adjustments in emphasis over the 2-day period. Conflict, contest and tensions were implicit in the programme design. Each session was a combination of academic input of concepts and process, group work and cross-group plenary discussion. The cross-group plenary discussion was designed to allow each group to present their ideas to the other members of the cohort who could challenge ideas constructively.
Throughout the programme, the authors engaged with the participants during and after each event to understand the impact of the programme. Given that the approach was not designed on the traditional dissemination of abstract knowledge, the academics had to engage with the practitioners to understand their business as well as explore the impact of moments of destabilisation. A key to gaining insights from the practitioners was the development of key informants (Tremblay, 1982) who added an ‘internal’ (client) perspective to elaborate understanding. The key discussions centred on the moments of ‘surprise’ experienced by the participants discussed in the next section.
Being a traditional engineering services company, BIG had a mindset that emphasised quality work and good service and was known as a company ‘trusted to deliver’. The assumptions underpinning the dominant mindset remained largely unchallenged. The aim of this intervention was therefore to create new insights into business growth in entirely new areas. This was done by expanding the number of ways for thinking about what was unique about BIG in terms of resources and competencies that could be applied in ‘as-yet-unthought’ domains of business to create new opportunities.
The objective of the Strategic Business Winning module was to create new insights into business growth in new market areas. It comprised concepts and insights drawn from a blend of disciplines, including philosophy, literature, social anthropology, art history and psychoanalysis, and used tools such as scenario thinking, blue ocean strategising and competency mapping. Each cohort began by asking the question: ‘What is the current basis of success?’ Paradoxically, this would eventually be a double-edged sword for the participants as they would be asked to challenge the continued legitimacy of their views and beliefs as a first step to identifying new opportunities. The module then explored the relationship between paradigms and problem solving: how the former influences problem definitions and how that in turn affects norms and expectations about what was possible. The university environment provided a safe space for creating dissensus, so destabilising conventional views and reframing how successful ‘winning’ could be achieved.
Participants were asked to consider how success could be redefined in the future by new innovative products. Competencies were explored to identify ‘invisible’ aspects of success that remained underutilised. And multiple scenario futures were developed to identify opportunities and threats that the customer may face in the future. From the understanding, gained participants were tasked with identifying products that would lead to new business. The strapline for this module was articulated by one delegate as ‘understanding how our current competencies can be applied in arenas that we don’t currently work in?’
The objective of the Performance Improvement module was to create new insights into business growth in current operational areas. It comprised concepts drawn from a blend of disciplines, including organisational behaviour, performance measurement, strategy mapping and change management. From a pedagogical perspective, this was carried out as a series of linked and cumulative exercises. The aim being to develop participants to the point where they were capable of setting up a performance management system builds around a blend of company and client objectives that would, by measuring the critical factors, identify the performance constraints within BIG with the ultimate goal of increasing efficiency and value added to the customer. The consequence of this increasing of customer satisfaction is the greater likelihood of future business opportunities from these current customers. The strapline for this module was neatly articulated by one delegate who stated, ‘If my existing contract was the only one I could ever have, how would I grow it to last forever?’ This indicated a new change in mindset from that of ‘getting the job done at the lowest cost and moving to the next’ to that of ‘adding value, delighting the customer and receiving repeat business’. In both ‘Strategic Business Winning’ and ‘Performance Improvement’, the modus operandi was one of involved engagement, questioning and challenge and active exploration of hitherto unthought possibilities.
Initially in both these experimental modules, especially during the early stages, academics were challenged by participants as to why and how the ideas brought to bear were relevant to BIG’s immediate concern of generating new business. This challenge forced greater reflexivity on the part of the academics who argued that the specific opportunities were of less interest than the understanding of the change dynamics driving such situations as the objective was to create a new capability to explore and understand drivers of change. The intention was to support enquiry and reasoning and to stimulate fresh thinking rather than to adhere to a narrow predefined problem-solving mode.
Data gathering
The empirical data presented in this article were gathered over a 3-year period, with 25 cohorts, each consisting of 8 to 12 participants. The participants were either directors or senior managers drawn from different business functions and a variety of geographic locations. Each session commenced by stating that the discussion would be emergent in nature. There were no preset problems and no ‘ready-made’ answers. The participants were encouraged to work in groups throughout, sharing, debating and critiquing experiences. Each cohort generated 18 to 20 flip chart sheets each with approximately 150 post-it notes, related diagrams and notes of insights and conclusions. The academics, acting mainly as facilitators, captured and recorded this information that was shared with the cohort after each event when participants were given the opportunity to question and validate the content. The process of research was developed on the basis of co-production (Antonacopoulou, 2010) with reflexivity both in the pedagogical design and on the impact to the client organisation.
Each cohort generated between 10 and 12 critical incidents (Flanaghan, 1954). As these occurred, they were captured verbatim on flipcharts with the time, name of the contributing participant and a note of the context in which the statement was made. Opportunities were sought as soon as possible to discuss these incidents to seek further clarification and ensure that the statement was true to the manner it was made. These conversations were captured and written up after the event in summary tables for ease of analysis. Tables 1 and 2 are examples of critical incidents.
Critical incident: questioning assumptions.
BIG: Babcock International Group PLC; MoD: Ministry of Defence; ITTs: invitations to tenders.
Critical incident – emerging insights about the changing client.
MoD = Ministry of Defence; BIG: Babcock International Group PLC.
‘Relevating’ and creating new mindsets
Prevailing mindsets
The dominant mindset in BIG is captured by this participant comment:
Each part of the company is steeped in history, some parts (reference to the naval dockyards) have existed for centuries, it’s difficult to see over the dockyard wall never mind see outside the culture.
While this represents one case, the majority of BIG comprises sites with a long and rich history. Examples of these include Her Majesty’s Naval Base (HMNB) Devonport in Plymouth (dating to 1690) and Faslane near Glasgow the home of Trident. The majority of the sites are dedicated to the long-term design, manufacture and support of complex product families working within long-term contracts or framework agreements. In addition, a large number of management staff and the wider workforce are ‘lifers’ so the mindset is heavily embedded in ‘how it’s always been done’. While the ‘growth through acquisition’ strategy has provided some diversity, the acquired businesses are generally similar in operating model and culture to those already within BIG so further reinforcing the existing mindset.
In addition, as BIG is managed with a ‘light touch’ from the strategic apex, the company tends to operate as a set of independent business units with little cross-fertilisation of ideas. For many employees, the only reminder that they are part of a larger entity is, as one participant put it, ‘one day the sign over the door changed’. Vision across the company was limited – another participant suggested (in relation to the academic delivery staff):
You guys probably know more about the entirety of the company than most employees as you meet so many people from around the company.
With this fixed mindset, there seemed to be limited opportunity for practical reflexivity, and practitioners struggled to deploy new knowledge, tools and methods within their businesses. This difficulty is brought into focus by a comment from another participant, this time in relation to ship procurement:
We have been trying to adopt best-practice from other industries but the tools don’t seem to fit in our context … maybe we just don’t know how to apply them.
Changing mindsets – ‘relevating’ and the changing context
One key factor that explains this comfortable mindset is the often lengthy (typically multiple years) contracts awarded to BIG, a pervasive characteristic of the entire business. This perceived stability acts to dis-incentives managers from seriously undertaking foresightful or sense-breaking activities (Antonacopoulou, 2010; Pratt, 2000).
The academics involved challenged such fixed mindsets with scenario planning techniques that generate multiple-futures thinking. Given the constant unfolding nature of the external environment, there is no deterministic, singular, preordained future awaiting an organisation (Weick, 1995), managerial choices and the actions of external institutions, both local and non-local, all contribute to the unfolding situation. Within each cohort, there was a clear need to create ‘space’ to allow and encourage broader thinking and critical reflexivity. Multiple-futures thinking with scenarios is designed to support managerial interrogation of the situation and make sense of apparently unrelated factors.
Refer Tables 1 and 2 that detail critical incident exemplars. In these examples, participants were interested in thinking about the future shape and purpose of their major client, the MoD in the face of government austerity and financial cutbacks. There was no agreed view at the outset of the activity, with one participant noting,
One thing is for sure, with budget constraints, we will have to deliver more for less for the MoD.
This comment highlights the expected continuation of the business-as-usual narrative of service delivery but with an acknowledgement of an impending squeeze that would require necessary adaptation. Table 1 summarises the conversation with the participants discussing seemingly unrelated issues making connections between them. Here, they questioned the nature of the future relationship with the MoD and the factors influencing it, which included changing societal attitudes, growing environmentalism and the emerging business approach adopted by the MoD. Table 2 illustrates a related conversation where the participants identify three different ways in which the MoD may evolve in the future, including budget-driven change, capability-driven change and change driven by changing philosophy. These multiple futures challenged the participant’s business-as-usual mindset enabling them to question their own assumptions and open up spaces for new ideas and fresh thinking.
As an example, one participant noted,
I always thought that opportunities arose from change in government priorities, rather than from our experiences.
The multiple-futures approach allowed them to explore, causally connect and ‘relevate’ issues into a coherent and plausible understanding of their unfolding context. They were able to make sense of the unfolding context identifying the implications for their business. The plausibility of multiple possible futures revealed that anticipated and unanticipated futures were equally likely to emerge instead of a single most likely outcome. They could see alternative pathways for example, that revealed the implications of a budget-driven future for the MoD and another that highlighted the MoD developing key capabilities themselves to drive their future and a third that was based on a new philosophical MoD position no longer based on ‘force projection’. As one participant noted,
I never doubted that the MoD would have to change, which would be finance and budget-driven. But prior to today, I never contemplated that that there would be other possibilities for the MoD. It seems to contradict established thinking that the philosophical position from ‘defence-of-the-realm’ in the broadest sense to ‘defence-of-the-country’ would be consistent with a slimmed down MoD.
Further scrutiny of this empirical example demonstrates the range of issues that participants identified, including greater sociological sensitivity due to media coverage, public pressure on MoD environmental legacy, role and availability of education to support UK skilling, evolution of MoD procurement and supply chain, desire of politicians to reduce civil service headcount, United Kingdom’s willingness to continue as a nuclear power, emergence of new superpowers and decline of the United States, UN mandates, cyber-technologies for terrorism, use of simulation and game technology in real action and cost of fossil fuels becoming prohibitive to their use in ships. Previously, participants had not made any connections between these issues, and thus had not made sense of them.
In the end, one overriding conclusion that these participants came to regarding their dominant mindset was that
Our planning is binary-based. We target double-digit growth and we have random data, no real thought or no real methodology. Although our strategy and planning is detailed and long-term focussed, it is process compliant.
Here is an example of the critical reflexivity of ‘relevating’. Realisation of the possibilities in the future for this participant identified the current approach to planning and articulated the flaws in the approach. As researchers, we would never have been able to make such a link. Only the practitioners can make the link between their experiences and the limitations of their practices. Here ‘relevating’ peripheral and non-local happenings enabled a progressive expansion of strategic awareness about how the organisation’s future can be affected by seemingly remote, ‘outlier’ events that are able to trigger major disruptions, discontinuities and surprises for the organisation. The ‘relevating’ principle here operates around expansion of awareness of how the dominant mindset limits the possibility of peripheral vision (Chia and Holt, 2008; Cunha and Chia, 2007).
Underpinning such an approach is the instilling of complex causal thinking among participants. It entails a recognition that the change exists as a dynamic fluxing reality so that ongoing relating and meaning-making are the real key tasks of any effective manager (Chia, 2005). This is what the art of ‘relevating’ really amounts.
Changing mindsets – ‘relevating’ and company competencies
The fixed mindset created by the length of service delivery contracts not only affected BIG’s strategic ability but also limited their view of in-company competencies. Insular thinking dominates where cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices across functional areas and business units was not prioritised. Each business was seeing only the boundary of its immediate environment.
First, competence mapping helped participants to see what the core competences of the business were by breaking through functional thinking and understanding how complementary skills and resources can be connected to create a core competence. Seemingly, unrelated parts of the business were similar in areas of technical competence such as nuclear safety (within the marine business and the civil generating side), manual skilling (working at heights within the networks business and the infrastructure businesses) and managerial practice (such as project management, which is useful across the company).
As one manager commented,
It was difficult to see commonality across the businesses. I thought there must be a bigger picture that I didn’t appreciate. From a competence point of view however it makes more sense. Project Management can work across the entire business as we all run projects with a similar lifecycle, the tools and methods could be made common.
This was echoed by another,
The focus of our thinking must radically change from the current parochial internal to function or business group to building competencies across the larger Babcock organisation.
Second, the stratification of the company by managerial level was put under scrutiny from a strategic perspective. Traditionally, operational strategy and corporate strategy had been done separately. Here, in addition to learning about the theories of operational and corporate strategy, the use of strategy mapping served to show how strategic objectives could be flowed through the business, thereby creating cohesion across traditionally separate organisational layers.
This was exemplified by one participant who stated in relation to process:
We can create a line of sight from the top to the bottom, aligning the activity from the shop-floor with the vision from top.
Here, ‘relevating’ happened when a strong understanding of both corporate strategy and operational strategy together with an academic guide showed how to link them. Another participant articulated his view of this change:
Before this I didn’t think of linking strategic and operational levels, the corporate strategy was just that, abstract from the top and the operations took place day to day.
This was supplemented by another participant who stated,
Objectives structured as a strategy map make it clearer to me how my department fits in, in fact if I do this right I can link the corporate objectives right down to an individual’s PDR.
Here, ‘relevating’ not only allowed him to take into consideration the organisation as a whole but also revealed a greater awareness of structures and systems on the periphery, such as the Performance Development Review process for workers, and how they might relate. Both of these examples indicate how the awareness of the individual needed to be lifted from the day to day while scope of comprehension needed to widen to encompass aspects of the context that he or she had not been aware of previously.
This association of the strategic and operational frames demonstrated another somewhat surprising feature in that participants were joining up their thinking, effectively linking conversations that had gone on in the Strategic Business Winning module with those in Performance Improvement module, thereby relevating across modules.
‘Relevating’ and embedding different mindsets
As a consequence of subjecting the traditional business model to challenge, there came a gradual revision in understanding of what was really needed at BIG. Each participant, regardless of previous background, specialism, skill or experience, embarked on a developmental journey that cut across functional disciplines within the organisation and academic boundaries, thereby challenging the way they approached their business. It resulted in a management population equipped with a different, more inclusive way of thinking about how they could contribute to the business.
Phase 2 has been running successfully for 3 years with 200 managers having attended. Phase 1 is still running in parallel. At a recent review, it was agreed that the value added for BIG resides in a number of areas. The value of knowledge transfer, common language and cross-fertilisation should not be disregarded. However, the senior management team now acknowledge that challenging the traditional thinking and continually ‘relevating’ is more important. In the words of the BIG Academy Sponsor and Divisional Managing Director,
We thought we were getting new knowledge – in fact what we got was a new way of thinking about the world.
Conclusion
What started as a typical knowledge transfer and skills upgrading executive development programme became a paradigm-shifting intervention in which participants were encouraged to redefine their needs and priorities in the light of challenges initiated by academics to their dominant mindsets. This was only possible on the part of academics by challenging the expectations and needs identified by BIG at the outset. Both practitioners and academics have reflexively learnt from this engagement. Both have had to rethink and revise their understanding of what was on offer in entering into this strategic partnership.
This research therefore contributes in two ways. First, from an academic perspective, the empirical evidence from this case study extends the rigour/relevance debate by introducing the term ‘relevate’ and explicating it as ‘the process of making the seemingly irrelevant relevant and bringing peripheral issues into focus’. This enabled the participants to make sense of their experiences in new and novel ways. It is not about taking established models and working out their relevance, and it is not problem centred as the practitioners did not start with a defined problem. Here, they reflexively explored their experiences using academic rigour underpinned and facilitated by concepts, methods and enquiry to provoke challenge to their mindsets.
We achieved this by experimenting with practical reflexivity as it encourages a different way of thinking about experiential learning. Reflection is generally characterised as a cognitive activity, whereas practical reflexivity is a dialogical and relational activity and it is about unsettling conventional practices (Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004). The multiple-futures approach enabled us to challenge business-as-usual assumptions, from which new ideas and new ways of seeing the world emerged. While potentially unsettling for the participants, practical reflexivity provided them with an opportunity to explore their day-to-day experiences. We argue that the key to ‘relevating’ is about raising awareness of experiences that open up new possibilities. Therefore, ‘relevating’ is complementary to the process of co-production of knowledge where ‘research becomes the space where powerful ideas are conceived, nurtured and make an impact’ (Antonacopoulou, 2010: 225), ‘relevating’ extends practical reflexivity (Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004) and ‘relevating’ borrows from Ramsey’s (2011) provocative use of theory.
Second, from a practitioner perspective, this case study suggests that paradoxically, university business schools contribute at their best to the practitioner world, not by meekly acceding to the latter’s pressing demands but by working alongside in a strategic partnership where each recognises the strengths of the other for what they can really do. Unlike treating the business world as mere ‘customers’ who believe they already know what they want, a true university/industry nexus emphasises a collaborative client-centred relationship in which university business schools challenge and work with their client corporations to refine and redefine what is essential to the latter’s sustainable success. In that very process, the academics’ understanding of their own uniqueness as providing an intellectual space for shifting paradigms is heightened. In this regard, rather than aspiring towards immediate relevance, university business schools should focus on ‘relevating’ peripheral and innocuous outlier events, issues and understandings so that their client corporations can better prepare themselves for the anticipated and unanticipated consequences of their own decisions.
Scholarship and academic rigour on the part of university business schools can serve to challenge the cultural inertia of corporations by disrupting dominant logics (Prahalad, 2004) and established norms of practice in order to expand horizons of comprehension and pave the way for new avenues of venture for a corporation. This is the true competitive advantage of university business schools.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
First, we would like to acknowledge the contribution of the reviewers and thank them for their guidance that was influential in the evolution of this article. Second, we would also like to acknowledge the work of the Babcock senior management team, especially John Howie and Kevin Goodman, whose support has been critical to the success of The Babcock Academy. Finally, we would like to dedicate this article to Dr Neil Grant who enthusiastically supported both The Academy and the academic research work that was carried out in association with the Babcock International Group PLC (BIG) and who unfortunately died during the production of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.