Griffith Business School, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
INTRODUCING SYSTEMS THINKING AND SUSTAINABILITY AT GRIFFITH BUSINESS SCHOOLIntroduction
Griffith Business School seeks to excel as a provider of high quality, cross- disciplinary and internationally rele- vant business and public policy educa- tion and research, emphasising the relationship between business and society in promoting sustainable enterprises and communities. The School has approximately 9,700 students and 1,200 staff located on four campuses in South East Queensland at South Bank, Nathan, Logan and on the Gold Coast. Griffith was among the first signatories to the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and recently joined the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), which sponsors the PRME initiative.
Challenges
With the world now facing severe and increasingly complex and inter- related economic, social and environ- mental risks, how should the man- ager manage today? Australia has experienced an economic boom for the last 20 years, based on the growth of its extractive industry sector and sale of fossil fuels and mineral to China, South Korea and Japan. On the other hand, it is also the world’s largest per capita carbon emitter. These
factors make the introduction of responsible management education an interesting concept: Will the market for local students understand that the world is changing while Australia booms?
One starting point is to see management not as a static problem-solving exercise, but as operating on different levels depending on the circum- stance. So, sometimes management is an inspired thought, sometimes a small change or a nudge to an established way of doing things, sometimes it’s a smile, sometimes it’s exemplary behaviour. Some starting points are helpful:
. First, nobody knows everything, and everyone has a different mental model, even if they sometimes coincide – so, learn to listen.
. Second, not all problems have quick solutions – so learn to learn from mistakes.
. Third, everything is connected to everything and the discrete isolation of parts may be a chimera – so, start systems thinking. Recent international research on the effectiveness of MBA programmes has identified that most programmes have a number of major gaps in graduate attributes (Dataret al., 2010). These gaps include the following:
. Globalisation
. Leadership development . Critical thinking
. Innovation and creativity . Experiential/action learning
Dataret al.(2010)also found that there needs to be a re-balancing of the content of the MBA to reduce the emphasis on content or knowledge in favour of the development of key skills and students’ self-awareness; particularly with respect to values, attitudes, and beliefs. These findings are supported by feedback from industry, alumni and current students, which suggested that the programme goals needed to be reviewed to include critical thinking, systems thinking, analytical skills, persuasive commu- nication, cross-discipline integration and innovation.
There is no more urgent task for business and management schools than producing sustainability literate graduates ready to meet the demands of enlightened business practices in the 21st century. I strongly recommend adopting and implementing PRME as the foundation for tackling this responsibility. Becoming a signatory to PRME was a small but very useful step for Griffith Business School as it connected us with many other institutions from around the world that were on the same path. By explicitly making responsible leadership and sustainability core to what we do, actively engaging with others in this space, developing related course and programme specialisations and establishing an academic centre in sustainable enterprise, we’ve managed to achieve a great deal in the last five years. But the challenges before us demands nothing less than a complete re-evaluation of business and management education – so there is still much to be done
Malcolm McIntosh, Director, Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith Business School
Actions taken
In recognition of the need for innovative decision makers, problem solvers and responsible leaders, from 2012 the School’s newly redesigned MBA programme will feature a compulsory introductory course on systems thinking and sustainability. This course asks students to understand the connections between what may at first sight appear to be disparate parts of the MBA programme by linking strategy, ecology and economics, supply chain management and waste, financial and natural capital, people, planet and profits. In addition, an action learning or experiential approach (Datar et al., 2010) will be a feature of the programme whereby all courses actively and intentionally draw on the life and work experiences of the students.
Results
The introduction of systems thinking and sustainability at the beginning of the MBA programme seeks to contextualise the focus on sustainable enterprise and help shape the way students see and experience the rest of the programme. Students will be immediately exposed to examples of successful businesses “doing well by doing good”, which has become the mantra for many people in many businesses that are part of the emerging
sustainable enterprise economy. The course will also highlight that good management requires a balance between synthesis and analysis, and our aim is to promote both rigorous analysis as well as ensuring our students can see whole systems – in other words that they can “think systems”. Students will be equipped with the mental models and tools for integrating management, learning and business with the state of the planet and the state of humanity. They will recognise that issues such as climate change can only be substantively tackled when allied to social justice, and that sustainable enterprise is closely related to innovation, creativity and human rights.
Reference
Datar, S.M., Garvin, D.A. and Cullen, P., (2010), Rethinking the MBA, Harvard Business Press.
Why PRME is/was important
. PRME provided Griffith Business School with a guiding framework and a platform for exchanging best practice information and experiences on embedding corporate responsibility and sustainabil- ity into curricula, research and learning methods.
. Being the first Australian business school to become a signatory to PRME has provided institutional recognition and an instrument to benchmark our efforts as well as communicate and engage stakeholders on corporate responsibility and sustainability.