Metaphorum 2026 · Barefoot Cybernetics

Learning about management education from Stafford Beer

Stafford Beer spent substantial parts of his working life engaged in close connections with universities and their academic staff, as well as with independent researchers and thinkers. At the same time, he was deeply sceptical about the ability of institutions, not least universities, to undertake the radical changes he advocated to align the management of major public and private institutions with the interests of individuals, societies and the well-being of the planet. His detailed study on the organisation of Manchester Business School in 1970 (Beer, 1970), not surprisingly, focused on moving to reorganising its management around the principles of the VSM. Although teaching and learning is barely touched upon, the study does begin with a valuable emphasis that the value of management education is not to be found in league tables, but in how far alumni have actually contributed as managers to real world improvements as a result of their studies. The societal problems Beer identified over 50 years ago, if anything, have significantly worsened. Yet universities and professions were never likely to be willing or able to unthink their entrenched habits. This chapter builds on over three decades of management education experiences based on explicit development of innovative teaching and learning methods. A wide variety of management educators have explicitly drawn directly and successfully on the work of Beer in their own teaching and learning innovations. (Adams,1993; Liber, 2004; Ward & Mayrhofer, 2015) . In our own case, he provided more of a continuous underpinning. Since 2022 our work has focused on the implications of generative AI for business education, and have increasingly found value in Beer's own innovative thinking since the 1960s relating to knowledge, technology, cognition and learning, in particular via Designing Freedom (Beer, 1974). Speaker: Clive Holtham — Bayes Business School, City, University of London

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