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Executive students come to class with cognitive schemas that reflect their domain expertise. When these schemas are entrenched, they can impede creative idea generation, multi perspectival problem-solving, and adaptation to organizational change. With its emphasis on surfacing schemas, design thinking (DT) within executive education represents a potentially powerful way to address the apparent trade-off between expertise and flexibility. We studied three DT executive education courses to answer how, if at all, executive students' schemas change during DT education. Drawing on constructivist learning theory, including the learning modes of assimilation, tuning, and restructuring, we found that tuning in particular fostered flexibility in expertise. Our study contributes to the DT literature, executive education, and the expertise versus flexibility debate, and provides advice on how management educators might revise how they teach DT and similar topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores customer-centric strategizing at a digital bank utilizing a 34-month visual ethnography. We adopt a multimodal perspective to reveal three practices that presentify and thus 'bring' the customer into strategizing – inquiring, perspective-taking and appreciating. These practices enable strategists to understand customer contexts, empathize with their experiences and value their strategizing contributions over time. Our findings advance research on strategy-as-practice and highlight the role of external stakeholders in the strategy process. Specifically, we demonstrate how multimodal practices shape strategy by enabling managers to presentify customers through empathetic competence. By doing so, we illuminate the diverse skills needed to effectively orchestrate multimodal resources in a way that empathetically connects with customers and informs strategizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, numerous business schools have begun experimenting with studio-based inquiry, often drawing inspiration from professional studios used within art and design schools and from business and governmental studios used for problem-solving and innovation. Business school studios vary considerably in form, ranging from temporary "pop up" studios to dedicated facilities with full-time staff, with the primary purpose of educating managers in craft, art, and design-based approaches to business problems. The jury on the studio phenomenon is out--can they deliver on their educational promise? To address this question, we pull together 25 years of studio experimentation in multiple settings, visits, and observations of studios around the world and interviews with studio makers from various disciplines. We consider the question of "what is a business studio?" in some detail, conjecture about the value that studios might have for management education, provide examples of four different business studio orientations and how these might translate into practice, and highlight what we believe to be some essentials when starting and running a business studio.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caught most organizations off guard. They have had to adapt their operations rapidly, and with the pandemic persisting, continuously improvise. While such an external jolt to organizations might unsettle operations, it does not remove the fact that organizations are sites of power relations and political activity. In this article, we examine the influence of power and politics on learning from improvisation, through a qualitative longitudinal case study of an Australian university during COVID-19. We trace improvisations with the use of the social media platform WeChat, which was eventually adopted, after several changes in forms of improvisation, as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study contributes to the literature on learning from improvisation, and explains how different forms of improvisation morph into one another under the simultaneous influence of power relations and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sensemaker theory is employed to analyze the role of mindfulness in the development of different workarts. Art collection, artist-led intervention and artistic experimentation are shown to be three major movements of workarts.

A study was conducted to examine the processes underlying an organizational theatre effort, and how theatre performances affect employees' understanding of their workplace. The study used the interview, visual, and survey methods. Findings show that compound analogues such as organizational theatre, sculpture, and film, can work differently from abstract and singular analogues, and could also create different effects.

Three catharsis-related concepts are used in this article to explain the effects of organizational theatre. First, according to Aristotle, theatre leads to release from negative affect, whereby the eliciting of emotions is seen as a means of purifying related bad memories and second, according to Moreno's idea of creativity-generating catharsis was developed in connection with active participation in psychodrama.