A recent article in the New York Times claims that the idea that business education should be about how to think critically and creatively was “radical” when Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management had an ‘aha’ insight on patterns of thinking a decade ago.

According to the article, critical thinking skills include how to frame questions, how to question assumptions, how to look at problems from multiple perspectives, thinking through clashing priorities and ability to choose among potential options.

Business Education At Master’s Level

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK provides benchmark statements for undergraduate and postgraduate learning across a range of subjects, including Business and Management. Skills expected of all master’s programmes are listed on page 6 of the business and management document, and include the requirement to think critically, identify assumptions, evaluate options and deal with complexity.

I became aware of the QAA master’s-level learning characteristics a decade ago when leading a university-wide effort to  widen master’s level work-based executive education in a UK university (more about that in a while). I obviously cannot share internal university documents. What I can say is that the academic standards unit within the university produced a document that made the QAA criteria very explicit and comprehensive, including:

• the nature of the operational context (complex, unpredictable, innovative and with the likelihood of ethical dilemmas arising);

• cognitive skills (ability to deal with complexity and contradictions, to evaluate alternative approaches, and confidently synthesise ideas)

• key transferable skills (ability to engage critically with communities of peers, reflecting on own and others’ work, including skills in negotiating conflict).

So UK business programmes are already teaching people to think and learn critically? Well, probably not effectively – and that has to do with content-led taught programmes. It seems to me that the QAA’s intention for interconnectedness between subject knowledge and skills development is unrealistic without some element of practical work-based knowledge-in-action. Teaching business practice in the classroom is like teaching people to ski. For that you need to try, fall over, get up again, improve your technique, fall over some more and then  – voila, one day you remain upright.

How many people setting out on a taught master’s programme realise that the degree is being awarded for skills development as well as demonstrating competence in subject knowledge? I would bet not many.

Critical Thinking In Practice

“Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context and this helps them to discover what is occuring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next. Managers keep forgetting that it is what they do, not what they plan that explains their success … meaning lies in the path of action … if you get people moving, thinking clearly and watching closely, events often become more meaningful.”

Karl Weick, Making Sense Of The Organisation, p346

The work-based approach my colleagues and I were promoting starts with the question ‘What do you need to do?’ Using a learning agreement and applying the criteria for critical thinking and key transferable skills to crafting learning outcomes and assesment criteria, a custom-designed programme is designed around achieving that objective for an individual executive or cohort.

The learning agreement is like an empty framework of learning goals, activities, learning outcomes, assessment criteria and modes of assessment – all to be specified to fit the needs and requirements of individual students. Customised subject knowledge is dropped into the framework in a just-in-time way, at the point where it is needed in action.

My experience is that value really comes from community. Of course facilitators, mentors, subject knowledge, tools, methods and analytical frameworks matter. But it is what happens when people support and teach each other that really makes the difference. Acting and learning within our social networks teaches us how to trust, take risks, judge, discern patterns,collaborate, resolve paradoxes, choose, negotiate, listen, understand cultural differences and engage in constructive conflict.

Now how can you begin to teach these things in a classroom?