I ended the last entry with a question:

Will general environmental education of the type provided by MESPOM become unnecessary in the future? Will it be replaced, on the one hand, by ‘mainstreaming’ environmental knowledge into other professions, such as law, economics, engineering, medicine and on the other hand by proliferation of specialized courses in say, water resources management, climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection etc.?

May be.
Or may be not.

Look at the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) education. The management profession is arguably even more general than the environmental one and yet MBA courses show no signs of declining. Could it be that environmental masters will be as indispensable to tomorrow’s world as MBAs are today? If so, can we learn any lessons from the current MBA education? Or can we ‘leapfrog’ some of its problems?

To answer this question I started to read about MBAs. Not the conventional literature, but rather my famous author Henry Mintzberg whose writings about "Strategies" helped me in research about Strategic Environmental Assessment and Sustainable Development Strategies.

In his famous book “Managers, not MBAs” Mintzberg claims that that MBAs ‘train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences’. He proposes the ‘seven tenets of management education', which in my view may also be relevant for the general environmental education of the type MESPOM is developing.

1. Management education should be restricted to practicing managers selected on the basis of their performance.

This tenet is based on a very important principle that learning occurs at the boundary of existing experience with new knowledge. Those who do not have prior experience will have great difficulties in learning. Moreover, Mintzberg insists that ‘management is a practice, not a profession’ and therefore participants should be selected for the program based on their actual experience in that practice, not on professional qualifications. “So—perhaps paradoxically—success as a manager is the best qualification for learning about it.”

What if ‘the environment’ is also ‘a practice, not a profession’? Aren’t we already right selecting people based on their (practical) experience rather than their formal backgrounds? Should we make it eventually a more widely applicable principle? Finally and most importantly, while selecting experienced people should we look into their performance rather than simply the number of years they have spent on the job? We are already doing it implicitly and instinctively but it may sense to incorporate this as a selection principle.

2. These managers should stay on the job, so that they can weave their education through their practice.

This is necessary in order to connect the abstract academic knowledge to practical experience. The content of a management program should respond to practical problems that the participants face on their jobs. “Too much time away from the job can be stressful, but too little time away from it can weaken the education. Short courses, like strobe lights, may leave nothing behind, while months off the job may mean there will be no job to return to.”

I wish we could introduce this principle as well! It would be great to have people bring their practical problems in the classroom and solve it while learning. We have some elements of it, e.g. the DL program run by IIIEE in parallel to MESPOM does not distract students from their jobs. Some of our students are given leave of absence from their regular jobs to attend MESPOM and then come back. But should we encourage this kind of situations more consistently? This is, of course, more challenging, but, in Mintzberg’s words “such tensions are intrinsic to management practice itself and facing rather than avoiding them is also educational.” Of course, integrating internships into MESPOM is a step in the right direction.

3. Management education should leverage work and life experience.

Real experience of students in the classroom should not be forgotten, but should be acted upon. Teachers should introduce formalized elements: key theories, concepts, research findings etc. but the learning process should be guided by the needs of the student audience, their practical problems.
“The best management education occurs when the educational push of the faculty meets the learning pull of the managers.”
“[Professors] have to adopt ‘teaching’ (read facilitating) styles, which make the most of this opportunity for ‘weaving’—professor and participant together, the very cloth, in a ‘tailored’ process. … if theory is the warp and experience is the weft, then we need strong but flexible theories, recognized simply as strands, stretched on a loom (the curriculum), with neither pattern nor utility of their own. When the participants weave in their own experiences, the cloth of learning becomes strong indeed."
In other words, management education should be an opportunity to extend the learning community, not for the promulgation of ‘finished’ models so much as for the collective sense-making of the subject in question.
Interestingly, Mintzberg relates this approach to interdisciplinarity of management teaching. He observes that real-life issues are not organized by disciplinary boundaries, as our knowledge is. By tackling these issues the education will, by definition, become inter- as well as multi-disciplinary.

I like this. The utility of organizing teaching in this way is confirmed by numerous stories I hear from both teachers and students. The student lecture invented and delivered by Sachin is the best confirmation that it can work well. Though students do not need to deliver lectures, their active contribution to courses is effective and desirable. Undoubtedly, our students have as much to learn from each other as from the faculty. This also helps us to deal with the issue of inter-disciplinarity raised in the previous entry.

4. The key to learning is thoughtful reflection.

Many management schools promise their student a ‘boot camp’. But practicing managers do not need another ‘boot camp’, they live under pressure every day.
I can’t stop myself from just citing these gems:

• "Advocates claim it is vital for managers to get away from the pressures of work, to stand back and see things in perspective. Yet often these very same people push the managers into a process that replicates the conditions back at work: highly pressured timetables, vast amounts of material to absorb, and stilted measurements of how well they do this—all presented in a menu imposed by the academic ‘authorities’. One alienating oppression is swapped for another."

• “Managers need to step back from all this and reflect on their experiences. The best thing the university setting can offer is that kind of engagement, in an atmosphere that allows people the luxury of suspending their disbeliefs so they can learn.”

• "The problem in today’s management education is not a deficiency, but a surfeit of teaching."

• "Managers do not need the educational equivalent of military drill; they need skilful reflection to drill into their own experience."
• Most important is to loosen up the timetable. Enough time needs to be allowed for what may seem to be redundant thoughts and irrelevant questions. The schedule has to have blocks of unscheduled time (we call them ‘white spaces’), or else be flexible enough to throw out what was scheduled in favour of something more interesting that has just ‘come up’. After all, we are seeking to bring out the forgotten and abandoned ideas that hold promise.
  

• Managers don’t need more prescription. Prescription in general is the problem. Managers need description, illustration of alternate ways to understand their world.

Teaching environmentalists we also often fall in the same trap of subjecting students to as much pressure as possible and brushing aside their complaints. We are also facing a surfeit of teaching. May be a space for “thoughtful reflection” is one thing that we should ‘schedule’ into MESPOM more regularly.

5. Management development should result in organizational development.

The management education is often focused on individual improvement, “Participants self-select with the intention of offering better talent at a higher price.” At the same time, it is improvement in a wider world that we are after. Mintzberg discusses how participants in MBA programs can interact with their organizations, sharing ideas, knowledge and tools they are learning. Consequently, the MBA program results in a better world, not just higher paid managers.

"Sustained and critical reflection in the classroom is key to learning, […] but so too is the challenge to extend this process into the organization. ... If we accept that managing is more craft than science (as, in fact, is so much science itself), then the interplay of context with ideas is central to the development process. Managing unfolds, through constant adaptation and invention, albeit often with recurring patterns, as in a series of musical refrains. As a consequence, managers who through their studies are constantly discovering new things about their work can have an immediate impact on that work by bringing their discoveries into the workplace, and, in turn, bringing the lessons of this back to the classroom for more learning.

This is something we have also explored in MESPOM although perhaps not very explicitly. The Strategic Environmental Development (SED) exercise at IIIEE is both educational and practical, contributing to practical environmental improvements in communities as well as to better education. My own attempts, fifth year in a row, to teach advanced Environmental Impact Assessment through analyzing the quality of ongoing highly controversial EIAs are in the same line of thought. Frankly, Mintzberg warns against becoming over-enthusiastic about such initiatives. “Action learning is one example, which has sometimes become so concerned to prove its worth that it has emerged as a lot more action than learning.”
May be we can both adjust and expand such practices? What if the students are encouraged to actively share their knowledge (e.g. through the Website) with the ‘communities of practice’ they belong to?

6. Management education must be an interactive process.

This trivially sounding principle is actually a very ‘subversive’ one… "And not a moment too soon! We wish to undermine the very basis of conventional management education, to call into question the notions of courses, curricula, teaching and students. Programs of the kind discussed here cannot be chopped into neat courses, each with its own box of disassociated knowledge, and packaged together in a curriculum. The problems and challenges of real management do not present themselves that way, so why should management education do so?"

Wow! This is definitely food for thought! Might it be that instead of trying to integrate our disparately conceived ‘courses’ we should integrate the whole programme around the issues of importance for practicing environmentalists? “This is integration not designed and imposed by blueprint. It is the kind of integration that is infused, lived and evolved — in truth, the only real kind of integration. ” And how do we do that?

7. Every aspect of education must facilitate learning.

Management education should mirror the evolution of our ideas about management from the activity of planning, organizing and controlling towards the current emphasis on organizations as “adaptive networks of knowledge workers”. Yet, so much of today management education is about “controlling the teaching rather than facilitating the learning”. The approach proposed by Mintzberg (more about it in another entry) is facilitative learning. It reflects even in the way the tables are arranged in the teaching room (not the ‘amphitheatre’ style, neither the U-shape, but a number of small round tables). Mintzberg and his colleagues distinguish between the conventional styles of management education:

• Lecturing (“is fine as far as it goes. It can be a delight when done well, and sometimes stays in the memory.”)

• Case-studies (“certainly bring experience to the classroom, but not as experienced by the participants. As stories, cases can be wonderful rhetorical devices, transporting the audience, in imagination, into other worlds. But cases are taught firmly on the professor’s agenda, with learning outcomes often defined in advance. Often worst of all, in conventional use cases require students to pronounce on things they know hardly anything about.”)
• Action learning "is a fine idea too, so long as the action is real, not added in some artificial way, and the learning takes precedence over the action. All too often, the action is contrived, added to managers’ days that are busy enough with their own projects, and trumps the learning."

Mintzberg favours a fourth approach which he calls “experienced reflection” “Here the participants are encouraged to consider the classroom inputs in terms of their own experiences, to confront new ideas with old beliefs, individually, in small groups and across the whole class.”

Needless to say, this is also highly relevant to MESPOM and our teaching methods.

Based on these principles, Mintzberg and his colleagues are running an innovative and highly successful Masters program called IMPM (International Masters Program in Practicing Management). It has intriguing similarities with MESPOM: implemented by five universities (in Lancaster, UK, INSEAD, France; Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, McGill (Canada) and a University in Japan) where students move from one university to another in accordance with five cycles aligned along the “Five Minds of the Manager” . But this is a story for another blog entry.

Have a sunny summer!

Sources

1. Mintzberg, H. 2004. Managers, not MBAs. Berrett-Kohler, San Francisco
2. Mintzberg, H and J.Gosling. 2003. The Five Minds of the Manager. Harvard Business Review, November 2003.
3. Gosling, J. and H.Mintzberg. 2004. "The education of practicing managers". MIT Sloan Management Review. 45:4, 19-22
   
4. Gosling, J. and H.Mintzberg. 2006. "Management Education as if Both Matter". Management Learning 37; 419