Teaching Otherwise in the Business School: Trends That Need Disruption

Business schools in the UK talk endlessly about disruption, but not in their own classrooms. They celebrate it in case studies, theorise it in strategy modules, promise to prepare students for disruptive futures. Yet walk into those same classrooms and you'll find the familiar: lectures, individual essays, standardised assessments, employability metrics that reduce learning to job preparation.

This contradiction sits deeper than we might think. While the world faces climate breakdown, technological upheaval, and deepening inequality, management education produces graduates who can optimise existing systems but struggle to imagine alternatives. We teach disruption while practising compliance.

The problem isn't individual lecturers or isolated modules, it runs through the system. Across UK higher education, metrics increasingly overshadow meaning, surveillance often supplants creativity, career readiness frequently eclipses critical thinking. These trends don't need reform. They need disruption.

The Metrics That Rule Us

Walk into any UK business school and you'll find the same anxieties: NSS scores that determine funding, league table rankings that shape reputation, employability statistics that justify existence. These metrics aren't measuring what they claim to measure. TEF ratings, for instance, are awarded at institutional level and tell us nothing about individual subject quality, yet they're shaping how we think about teaching quality.

When student satisfaction becomes the primary measure of teaching quality, difficult content gets watered down. When graduate salary data determines programme success, education becomes job training. When rankings matter more than learning, institutions tend to compete on easily measured proxies rather than meaningful transformation.

The cruel irony is that optimising for these metrics may actively undermine the capacities employers actually need: critical thinking, creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning, collaborative leadership. But these don't show up in surveys or salary statistics, so they risk getting squeezed out by what does.

The Teaching Excellence Framework promised to recognise innovative pedagogy, but it's produced the opposite: a risk-averse culture where experimental approaches get squeezed out by safe, measurable methods. Modules are redesigned to boost scores rather than deepen understanding. Assessment becomes about demonstrating compliance rather than developing capability.

This isn't just instrumentalist, it's counterproductive. The most employable graduates aren't those who've learned to mirror current expectations, but those who can think critically, work collaboratively, and navigate uncertainty. These capacities develop through rigorous intellectual engagement, not skills workshops designed to tick employability boxes.

The AI Arms Race in Higher Education

Generative AI has triggered panic across UK higher education, and business schools have responded predictably: detection software, surveillance systems, and increasingly defensive assessment strategies. A 2024 survey by Jisc found that 89% of UK universities now use AI detection tools, yet academic integrity cases have actually increased. Essays get replaced by closed-book exams. Creative projects disappear in favour of standardised formats. Innovation gets sacrificed to integrity fears.

This defensive posture misses the deeper opportunity. AI tools could provoke pedagogical redesign that centres distinctly human capacities: critical questioning, creative synthesis, ethical reasoning, collaborative sense-making. Instead, essays revert to closed-book exams, creative projects vanish, and innovation is sacrificed to integrity panic.

The irony runs deep. We're teaching future managers to navigate technological disruption while demonstrating our own inability to adapt creatively to technological change. Students notice this contradiction. They're learning that institutional responses to uncertainty involve control and restriction rather than imagination and experimentation.

The Disappearing Arts of Management

Creativity has been systematically squeezed out of much UK management education. Arts-based methods get dismissed as unrigorous. Speculative approaches seem impractical. Embodied learning feels unprofessional. We've largely forgotten that management is fundamentally creative work, imagining new organisational forms, designing better systems, crafting compelling visions.

This matters because the challenges facing organisations require creative responses. Climate adaptation demands imaginative solutions. Social innovation needs speculative thinking. Ethical leadership requires the capacity to envision alternatives to current practice. Yet we're training managers as if creativity were optional rather than essential.

The few programmes that do integrate creative approaches tend to treat them as add-ons: innovation modules, design thinking workshops, creative leadership electives. This compartmentalisation suggests that creativity belongs in designated spaces rather than infusing all learning. Students learn to associate rigour with analysis and creativity with frivolity.

Assessment as Intellectual Flattening

UK business schools have industrialised assessment in ways that actively undermine learning. Detailed rubrics specify exactly what counts. External examiners ensure consistency across identical assignments. Turnaround times get measured in hours rather than days. The entire system optimises for efficiency and standardisation at the expense of meaningful evaluation.

This mechanisation makes it impossible to assess what matters most: students' growing capacity to think complexly, act ethically, and work collaboratively. These developments can't be captured through standardised criteria or measured against predetermined outcomes. They emerge through sustained engagement with ideas that matter, not performance of academic tasks.

The obsession with grade inflation has led to ever-more detailed marking schemes that specify exactly how many points each element is worth. Students learn to decode these systems rather than engage with substantive questions. They optimise for grades rather than understanding, producing work that meets technical requirements while avoiding intellectual risk.

What Teaching Otherwise Offers

Teaching Otherwise isn't a method—it's a set of commitments that centre curiosity, care, and imagination in management education. It starts from recognising that business schools don't just transmit knowledge; they shape how future managers see the world. If we want graduates who can create more just and sustainable organisations, we need education that models those values.

This means developing futures literacy. Students' capacity to hold multiple possible futures rather than optimising for one predicted outcome. It means using arts-based methods that build reflective, embodied, and creative capacities alongside analytical skills. It means treating learning as a form of resistance to purely marketised metrics.

Most importantly, it means designing classroom communities where care and relationality matter as much as technical expertise. Students learn to work with difference, sit with uncertainty, hold complexity without rushing to solutions. These aren't soft skills—they're survival skills for an uncertain world.

Five Disruptions We Need

Innovative Assessment in UK Business Schools: Replace high-stakes individual essays with iterative portfolios, collaborative projects, and public exhibitions of learning.

Studio-Style Learning: Break down modular boundaries through interdisciplinary inquiry projects.

AI and Teaching in Higher Education: Use generative tools as provocations for deeper thinking rather than threats to academic integrity.

Creative Pedagogy for Management Education: Replace competency checklists with arts-based exploration of power, ethics, and possibility. Students build empathy through arts-based methods—storytelling, speculative design, and embodied role-play.

Justice-Centred Curriculum: Weave sustainability and equity throughout all learning rather than confining them to designated modules.

What This Could Look Like

Imagine business school classrooms where students spend as much time making as consuming. Where assessment involves presenting learning journeys rather than demonstrating predetermined outcomes. Where AI tools help students explore questions rather than find answers. Where creativity and rigour reinforce rather than compete with each other.

These aren't utopian fantasies; they're emerging practices. What's missing isn't permission but courage: the willingness to prioritise transformation over satisfaction, learning over employability, imagination over compliance.

The regulatory environment makes this challenging but not impossible. Every semester offers opportunities to work differently within existing constraints. The question isn't whether we can change everything at once, but whether we're willing to change what we can, where we are, with what we have.

For UK business schools, this isn't just a pedagogical question; it's a strategic one. TEF, NSS, and graduate outcomes dominate the conversation, but none of them measure imagination. Yet without it, we're preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

These pressures explain why UK business schools risk graduating technically skilled but intellectually cautious managers, precisely the opposite of what turbulent futures demand.

This is where Teaching Otherwise becomes not just pedagogically innovative, but strategically necessary. It offers a different response to these same pressures: one that develops the anticipatory agency, creative capacity, and ethical courage that no current metric captures but every future challenge will require.

The Stakes Are Higher Than We Think

UK business schools educate thousands of future managers every year. These graduates will make decisions that affect millions of lives. Suppose they leave university with the same assumptions they arrived with (about what organisations are for, how people should be managed, what success looks like). In that case, we've failed not just them but everyone whose decisions they will impact.

Teaching otherwise isn't about being radical for its own sake. It's about preparing students for a world that requires different kinds of thinking, feeling, and acting than the one that got us into this mess. It's about modelling the creative, collaborative, and ethically engaged approaches that organisations desperately need.

This requires disrupting our own practices before we can credibly teach disruption to others. It means choosing transformation over comfort, even when institutional pressures make that difficult. It means using whatever influence we have to create spaces where genuine learning becomes possible.

The trends reshaping UK business schools aren't inevitable; they're choices made by people who could choose otherwise. Teaching otherwise begins with recognising that choice, and acting on it. The future of management education won't be built by compliance; it will be made by those willing to imagine otherwise.