Creativity in Management Education: A Systemic Rediscovery

1.      Introduction: Setting out the scene for creativity rediscovery.   This chapter lays out the motivation to write this book and the writing style as self-reflective.   I bring my own experiences of being a management student and currently a management educator.  I claim that management education has become sophisticated in designing and maintaining umbrella systems that rather than engaging students with creativity, have narrowed down their options.    I introduce the idea of a system to help make sense of how management education becomes the result of interactions of different elements, often meeting purposes that are different from those intended.  I describe the structure of the book.

2.      A critical analysis of creativity in management education. Using Foucault's ideas on governmentality, I provide a framework for the analysis of management education, with emphasis on how it influences the subjectification of students and staff towards employability and innovation, and how this contributes to narrow down options for all of us to think and act differently.  Despite standardisation, employability and anxiety under the idea of fast education however, it would be possible to exert our freedom in different ways and develop new forms of subjectivity that could help educators and students transcend existing boundaries of what they think about themselves and others in creativity. 

3.      Brief cracks of light to rediscover creativity in management education.    This chapter reviews several current proposals to develop creativity in education.  It does so by focusing on early education and management education, comparing assumptions and approaches between specific approaches and in relation to their emphasis on teaching/learning creativity or creative learning/ teaching.   It is argued that in both stances, a sort of natural form of creativity is being supported at an individual level, which is then supported by a (systems) biological idea that allows for the accommodation of developmental approaches to creativity.   This form of holographic-systemic thinking that relates self and environment needs to be challenged or complemented, so that other forms of transcending for a self could be considered. An introduction to critical and applied systems thinking is proposed, with a view to create a bridge between creativity and ethics and extend reflection on boundaries in applied systems thinking.  

4.      Ethical substrata for the creative self in management education.    In this chapter, alternatives to consider what a creative self could mean in management higher education are proposed and reviewed.   These alternatives link creativity with ethics through understandings and boundaries of self in Western philosophy and could also extend systemic reflection for creativity.   The work of Charles Taylor on authenticity, Markus Gabriel on neo-existentialism and Salvador Paniker (Spanish philosopher) on hybridism-retro-progression are presented; at the hearth of these, self-reflection is highlighted as a self-reflection and self-transcendence space in which selves could draw creatively reconcile or enable dialogue between existing dualities (self-other, language-reality, etc).  The latter ideas of Paniker are expanded upon to suggest the importance of developing an intermediate space to facilitate these elements of self-reflection and self-transcendence in management higher education. The space is intermediate as it does not aim to prescribe a normative ethics but to offer opportunities for selves to rediscover creativity in their lives.  

5.      An educational space for Rediscovering Creativity.   This chapter focuses on two interpretations of play to develop the space proposed in the previous chapter.   These interpretations consider the role of language for creativity and how it could be also transcended via imagining, remembering and other strategies which are akin to play.   These interpretations draw on the work of Vygotsky and Roger-Pol Droit.  The latter are used to complement methods to historically (and playfully) study creativity including the Evolving Systems Approach or ESA and the life story method.

6.      Encounters I: Rediscovering creativity in (my) educating self.   Using the insights about play as a space for self-reflection and transcendence, this chapter provides my own reflections about encountering creativity in my own past life and in relation to education.    I use images to structure my reflections on managing my own education as a 'good', 'fearful' and 'pleasing' self.   In my reflections there is also a historical review of engineering education in Colombia as an early form of management education. I also relate my reflections to my own attempts to live creatively at work and elsewhere.      

7.      Encounters II: Transcending selves in management higher education.   Using both self-reflection and transcendence as elements of creativity, this chapter brings the reader back to the present, a present that I currently live (or play) as an 'educator self', showing my attempts to transcend myself and help my students doing so.   These attempts include practical experiences at different levels of learning in the undergraduate management education degrees and programmes in which I teach.  

8.      Summary and conclusions.   This chapter summarises the argument of the book, the insights from each chapter and recommendations for educators as well as students.