23990: Encouraging Challenging Conversations: Micro and Macro Perspectives on Fact-Based Discourse

Business schools' curricula are primarily focused on providing specialized, functional perspectives of organizations within department silos of accounting, finance, information systems, management, and marketing. Management–strategy and entrepreneurship–in particular, additionally focus on the critical issue of how these functional areas fit together, with the intent of providing students the knowledge and skills related to diagnosing what is critical in complex business situations and finding realistic solutions to strategic and organizational problems. Thus, strategy and entrepreneurship courses shed light on how top management or founding teams lead established or entrepreneurial organizations by utilizing an integrative perspective that brings together the various functional areas to make strategic decisions that shape organizational performance. Beyond content, such an integrative perspective also requires a mindset and processes through which organizations may leverage collaboration among individuals with varied backgrounds and experiences. However, our recent experiences–also echoed by several faculty at other institutions–lead us to believe that the current business school curriculum under-emphasizes the creation of a learning mindset and provides fewer than optimal opportunities for students to engage in experiential learning opportunities that enable them to challenge their own thinking, and have challenging conversations. These experiences are also reflected in news stories that showcase a growing polarization in multiple countries and economies and pendulum swings in governments and regulatory policies that affect the institutional structures within which businesses operate (Benoit, Luhnow & Monga, 2024; Francis & Cutter, 2024; Kaysen & Singer, 2024; Klein, 2022). Indeed, news headlines report academia itself is in crisis, with opinions ranging from it is the cause (Ellis, 2023) or symptomatic of cultural changes unleashed over the last few decades (Smith, 2004). Within this context, we believe that business schools have an important role in fostering dialogue and discourse so that academia becomes a solution. Business schools are the perfect venue for promoting diversity of thought given that they represent an integration of content originating in multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g., economics, psychology, sociology and even political science to a degree). As a professional domain (similar to medicine, law and engineering), business also focuses on applications of these disciplinary perspectives to organizational settings that require creativity, communication, and collaboration among diverse individuals. Thus, we represent an important venue wherein academia delivers on its responsibility to develop the next generation of leaders, workers, and citizens who are ready to tackle grand challenges and solve problems. Moreover, we believe that efforts to promote the appropriate mindsets and processes within business schools can be enabled by insights garnered through micro and macro management scholarship. Within the micro domain, our research and curriculum focuses on learning and improving skills that help individuals behave and manage effectively in organizations, including through voice, critical thinking, deviation from a zero-sum mindset, the power of ‘win-win’ negotiations, and the focus on interests rather than rights and power when devising future-looking solutions. Within the macro domain, our research and curriculum focuses on strategic analysis, including the critical evaluation of data, testing of assumptions, and the synthesis of multiple perspectives and data points for decision making that leads to value creation and capture. Both domains additionally provide several insights on how conflict may be productively resolved for the creation of shared mental models and transactive memory systems. Together, these insights can be leveraged to combat prevailing forces that manifest in students’ (and faculty) reluctance to speak up, or be unduly swayed by sensationalist headlines. Given that management insights and concepts are best internalized by students through experiential learning, we believe that business school curriculum would benefit from the creation of opportunities that foster student engagement in challenging their own thinking by providing them the tools and techniques to identify hidden assumptions, utilize cause-effect logic, rely on research and data rather than opinions and emotions. Armed with such techniques and tools, students can then also challenge prevailing conversations within a safe space that fosters ideas and critical thinking through fact-based and respectful dialogue. At the immediate level of business schools, such curriculum development delivers on its mission, given that these skills are important in today’s global economy that is characterized by rapid diffusion of information, even as echo-chambers create barriers for navigating cross individual, organizational, cultural and economic boundaries. More broadly, such curriculum enables academia to deliver on its mission of being a marketplace for ideas and developing the ability of future generations to think critically and engage in rational and respectful discourse. The intent of this PDW is to foster conversations within management faculty who have created such curriculum, or are interested in doing so within existing courses and programs. Because AOM guidelines require us to choose a division, we believe that STR is the closest fit with the panelists, though we hasten to note that the PDW represents several faculty whose affiliations span across ENT, IM, OB and SIM division/interest groups. The PDW will focus on both curricular and co-curricular efforts initiated by the panelists, and its format is designed to a) bring together faculty from different institutions to share their experiences, b) apply concepts from research in organizational behavior, strategy and entrepreneurship to the study and teaching of promoting fact-based respectful discourse, c) identify challenges and opportunities within a Q&A and discussion forum, and d) allow for collaborative brainstorming on how to increase the effectiveness of such educational initiatives to help disseminate knowledge and tried tools to the larger management communities.