By:

This is an account of a communication-based teaching/learning strategy that apparently consistently transforms smart, individualist Management students into reflective, collaborative business innovators. Fundamentally risky because conventional learning outcomes cannot be objectively known at the outset, the strategy is doubly risky in context of conventional education of conventionally smart, individualistic students of conventional business.

It assumes that because organizational context has major effect on what is learned, may even be what is learned, the implicit and explicit context, the knowledge culture, must be actually deeply reflective, collaborative and innovative. More particularly, to achieve this, the communicational context must be transformed by teachers changing “what happens between [them] and among their actions, practices, and narrative interpretations of practice”: changing their practice rather than simply changing what happens in their heads. Through this initiative students also transform to become conscious of their own organizational communication and to openly, reflectively recreate it. The process is difficult and not readily engineered.

It is opportunistic, risky and eventually satisfying when supported by performance evaluation that rewards reflective, critical openness in interpersonal communication. It is comparatively chaotic by conventional managerial standards, achieved through process akin to a neural network of communication relationships. Students and leaders reach a threshold when by “grace, magic and miracles” rather than linear logic they begin to perceive their world as socially constructed, held together by communication; to reconceptualise information, resources, trust, cultural values in terms of relations and flows.

Stream: Communication

Paper: Risking Learning for Transformation

Formal Qualifications: BSc (Chemistry), Dip Teaching, MEd (Administration). Career spans R&D R and D chemist (plastics);production manager (plastics); venture analyst (food processing); business owner, developer, manager (construction & and engineering); corporate manager (building automation, NZ division of MNC); secondary teacher (chemistry, physics, mathematics); tertiary lecturer (change mgmt, production mgmt, project mgmt, HR information mgmt). Current interest: communication-based approaches to organisation and change using conventional and new media to innovatively create alternative real and virtual contexts for growth and development in richness and purpose of interpersonal communication. Currently based at Tamaki Division of the University of Auckland Business School. Tamaki Division purpose is teaching, practice and research of Innovation Management. My roles are teaching and developing trans-disciplinary, trans-organisational teaching and research partnerships.