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A two-day tutor’s course focused on those who intend to teach from “the Sixth Sense”.

This course is designed to support those teaching strategic management and advanced strategic management, especially those academics wishing to extend their teaching in the area of the contextual environment.

Teaching the contextual environment is traditionally the weakest part of academic textbooks on strategic management, with most textbooks dealing well with the transactional environment through industry and competitive analysis.

This course is based on our extensive teaching practice in the area, and supports the use of the book “The Sixth Sense, Accelerating Organisational Learning with Scenarios”, which is published by John Wiley & Sons, as a teaching text.

The course provides teachers with a pedagogical logic and methodology, in the course of a 20 hour, interactive course, designed for those wishing to learn “how to teach the scenario method” as the basis of an advanced strategic management course. The course is designed as a group learning process and is based on an action-learning philosophy to support student centred learning.

The course will enable teachers to teach a process leading to an understanding of the environmental forces that drive strategic change, that is applicable to all organisations, regardless of context.

Rationale

There are two major schools of thought with regard to teaching strategic management – the “resources (inside-out)” school and the “positioning (outside-in)” school. The “resources” school takes as its starting point the “capabilities” of the organisation. The “positioning” approach starts from STP – segmentation, targeting and positioning - and PEST (Political Economic Societal and Technology) or STEEP (Societal, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Political) analyses, culminating in the identification of Opportunities and Threats (under the SWOT analysis). As organisational contexts have changed, the teaching of techniques to understand the contextual environment, has not responded with the pace or sensitivity to remain helpful to organisations. The two schools have not dealt adequately with identifying the underlying drivers of change of the modern world. The course will provide teachers with support to address that challenge with their own students. The course will help academics to teach an approach, using the scenario methodology, to achieve this goal, and to help their students to overcome thinking flaws at individual, group and cultural levels.

Another categorisation of Strategic Management teaching distinguishes between the processual and the rationalist views. The processual approach to strategic management starts with the premise that “creating success” cannot be codified. Success arises from uniqueness, which is based on original inventions made by people. The processual approach to strategic management is based on exploiting the intellectual resources of the organisation to this end. It assumes that the key challenge for organisations is to mobilise the power of people, to enable them to engage with exploring the environment for a better future. In contrast, the rationalist approach to strategic management is less concerned with organisational learning processes and focuses on the search for a single, unitary “right” answer to the strategy problem. It assumes that thinking and acting in the organisation are separated, thus creating the old strategy “problem” of implementation.

This course is based on the processual view. Teachers are shown how, by engaging and exploring the environment, their students can be enabled to develop a deeper systemic understanding of change in the business landscape. By adopting such a process, the students will be able to help their organisations to develops a learning capacity, which can provide the basis or platform for innovation, by matching the needs of the changing environment with competencies of the organisation.

The course will be relevant to:

(i) existing strategic analysis courses, by incorporating the scenario methodology when teaching the contextual environment;
(ii) existing strategic change courses, by developing an enhanced understanding of the factors in strategic drift and the inability of organisations to adapt to changing contexts,
(iii) advanced courses in strategic management, in which the focus is on organisational learning through strategic conversation.

Within these contexts the course will provide teachers with a well-developed and proven approach to help teach people to engage with the contextual environment in a meaningful way. This course is positioned to be adaptable to many different teaching contexts, although is primarily designed to be used as the basis for a stand-alone course on advanced strategic management.

Course aims and description

The course presents a new and innovative approach to teaching the analysis of the broad spectrum of relevant environmental driving forces, in categories such as, Law, Ethics, Politics, Society, Macro-economics, Government and Politics, and the role and use of Information. The course prepares teachers to move beyond the typical PEST (Political, Economic, Societal and Technology) or STEEP (Societal, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Political) taxonomies found in most strategic management courses. These taxonomies are used as “lists” by students, who thus fail to see the systemic interconnections of these elements to create one overall contextual environment. This course will help teachers to overcome this problem and support their attempts to help their students see the business environment as one holistic phenomenon driving strategy.

The key objectives are to support:

• Awareness of the limitations of existing strategic management approaches to explore the contextual environment
• Develop an integrative approach to teaching the analysis of complexity and ambiguity of the contextual environment
• Ability to design and facilitate learning on an advanced strategic management course using the scenario methodology
• Understanding the potential for using a scenario thinking methodology as an action-learning tool.
Overview of Course Content

Session 1

Aims and objectives of the workshop
Discussion on strategic management and its contemporary tensions
Discussion on traditional approaches to teaching the Contextual Environment
General discussion on teaching approaches used to teach Strategic Management

Session 2

Discussion on pedagogical logic of the course
Designing a course titled “Exploring the Contextual Environment”
Facilitating learning on such a course
Linking such a course to Strategic Management courses

Session 3

Introduction to scenario thinking methodology
Introduction to Systems Thinking
Identifying key stakeholders and their impact
Identifying systemic insights

Session 4

Support resources including workbooks, cases, intranet approaches
Assessment of courses
Knowledge outcomes

The knowledge-based outcomes are:

• Understanding differences between theory and practice in the field of scenario thinking for advanced strategic management
• Understanding the role of a scenario thinking methodology as a method of managing the contextual environment.
• Understanding the application of action learning approaches to teaching strategic management.
Skills outcomes

The skills based outcomes will enable participants to:

• Facilitate enhanced student learning related to the contextual environment.
• Design an advanced strategic management course using scenario thinking.
• Teach contemporary issues in strategic management.

Learning Support Environment

A learning support environment, using web-based technology will be available to all participants on the course, based on The Sixth Sense as the business environment analysis text. The learning support environment will include slides, cases, related readings, support tools for students centred learning and links to other related web sites.

For further details, please contact [email protected]

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