Humanising leadership education at scale – developing leaders for an uncertain future

Many leadership education programs are built on ecosystems of abstracted skills, the virtuousness of the ideal of leadership and the expectation pressures of graduate employability (Obi et al., 2022), leading to what Petriglieri & Petriglieri (2015) refer to as the dehumanisation of leadership. This is where business school programs in leadership become a ‘poor preparation for the ambiguity and precariousness of leadership in contemporary workplaces’ (p. 625). The pedagogical tensions between practical, theoretical and employable skills have defaulted many leadership education curricula to knowledge transfer epistemologies (Kelliher et al., 2010), which do not prepare leaders for the complexity and uncertainty of leading through crisis (Ahmed & Harrison, 2024).

I have recently published a paper on the challenges and opportunities of leadership education for pre-experience students in Business Schools called ‘Leaders for good in a post-crisis world: Designing transdisciplinary and resonant leadership education programs in transitional spaces’. This paper takes a critical lens to the design and development of an at-scale leadership education program at the University of Sydney Business School. Leading in a Post-Crisis World (LPC) was developed by myself and Professor Juliette Overland in 2020 as an extra-curricular program and then reformatted and relaunched in 2021 as an ambitious and cutting-edge sequence of units and a co-curricular program of events.

The primary aim of the program is to develop the capabilities of emergent leaders for good to be able to articulate their leadership skills and develop new and transferable frames for leadership in and through crisis, complexity and uncertainty. The program seeks to rehumanise leadership education using storytelling pedagogies, connected learning and an ambitious pedagogical design (Stewart, 2017, Yang and Wu, 2012 and Bryant, 2023). This enables the program to act both as a vehicle for the critical application of theory to an uncertain and often yet to be experienced future and a way of exploring and challenging the emotional and personal impacts of crisis and leadership.

Storytelling pedagogy

Stories are powerful articulations of experience that transcend the personal and internally reflective and create a rhizomatic ecosystem of associative commonality in which the experiences of others helps emerging leaders develop their own philosophy, capability and approach to leadership (see Bryant, 2023 for a deeper exploration of the conceptual definition of associative commonality). At the heart of the program is the community of leaders, academics, students and members who share their stories within the curriculum, the content and the assessment of the units and in the co-curricular program.

There have been over 120 participants in our LPC community who have shared on video and in person their deeply personal, professional and practice led stories of crisis, of leadership, of fellowship and of their community experiences. Each of these stories is aligned with an element of the leadership program, and contributes to building a complex mosaic of people, place, identity and theory for students to find their own pathway through. We use stories in many ways in the program:

1. LPC Live – This is an at-scale interactive series of large group teaching experiences where students are inspired and challenged through the sharing of stories, whether it be the confronting and personal experiences of colonisation from First Nations leaders, the immediacy of organisational theatre performers acting and interacting with an ethical behaviour scenario or the crowd coming together to understand and address the challenge of the crisis of student housing and poverty. These stories are live narratives that demand interactivity, either directly through participation or as a reflective element of assessment. They are a reimagination of the large-group lecture, drawing on the ontologies of immersive theatre to create a deep sense of involvement in the audience, blurring the lines between the audience and the performers (see White, 2012). 
2. Weekly asynchronous engagement – This content is delivered as engaged “chunks” of short, often in-situ filmed video (as direct to camera, or as an interview and sometimes DIY filmed), which students can interact with asynchronously, navigate at their own pace with agency over which voices, stories and perspectives to follow (see Figure 1). Each week students start of the same place with the materials (an introductory provocation or exposition of theory) then create their own journey, unique pathways through the stories, experiences and theoretical perspectives shared by over 100 different practitioners, leaders, academics and students. Students can choose to weave together industry specific experiences or follow leaders they find inspirational or relevant to their own journey. There is no singular academic voice or editorial perspective, providing students with a journey that relates directly to their own experiences.
3. Leadership for good seminar series– As part of the co-curricular program which available to all 15000 students in the Business School, LPC runs sessions centred on different crises and how the leaders respond, from the challenges experienced by the arts and cultural industry during the pandemic, to the tragedies and inspirations of the growth of K-Pop and Hallyu culture to the changing world of commercial music to a session on trust and integrity in the financial consulting sector. These sessions are designed to share stories and experiences with students from across the disciplines and feed elements of leadership education into their educational journey. They are not part of the curricular program instead forming a second, more accessible and free stream of engagement with students that exposes a wider audience to the storytelling and connected learning approaches embedded in the program.

Connected Learning

The University of Sydney Business School has been at the forefront of transforming business education through the deep integration of connected learning into our programs and units. The Connected Learning at Scale initiative (CLaS) has been running since 2018 (see Bryant, 2024; Wilson, Huber & Bryant, 2021) and is designed to transform and reimagine units at-scale to prepare students for the complexity of engaging with and solving for the critical global, local and personal challenges they will face as they enter into and move through their graduate employment and life journey.  

LPC engages students, across all elements of the program to develop and make connections, to meet, connect and make friends, lifelong and fleeting connections, and build their networks through the common frame of leadership. Starting with the assessment framework that asks students to work collaboratively to solve global and local challenges and to develop and share their ideal leadership legacy and how it changes from the start of the program until they complete, the transformative power of connection runs through LPC.

LPC enables students to connect the knowledge and skills they have gained from across their degree programs, from their work and life experience and from the knowledge they are acquiring right there and then to understand the liminality of crisis, to both navigate and lead others through the rites of passage it triggers and to make a difference to the society and communities they are part of. The program is a narrative thread that helps weave their story as they graduate into an uncertain world. Every student will have a different approach to how they can be a leader for good through crisis and into post-crisis. We don’t want 1000 students singing from the same hymn sheet, we want 1000 different songs all connected through experience and story, being recalled and applied to their yet to be experienced future work, life, play and learning.

Why post-crisis? Aren’t we always going to be in a crisis?

LPC is a radical rethinking of how we become leaders in and through crisis. When LPC started in the fire of the pandemic, Juliette and I were deeply aware of how important it was for students to have a story about what THEY did during crisis, emerging into a world disrupted and seeking to recover, rebuild and reimagine its next future horizon.  We decided to call this critical and unique program ‘Leading in a Post-Crisis World’ not because we naively believed we were at a stage of being post-crisis, but because we wanted our program to be based on striving for something better and believing that leadership, strategic thinking, inspiration, aspiration, creativity and connections can navigate us through the fear, stress, doom scrolling and opportunism (economic or political) that crises engender. The program offers a destination that believes in a state of being that can reside in a better society, a safer place, a creative space and a world no longer beset by existential, inequitable and emotionally painful crisis.

Transitional spaces

Transitional spaces are the necessary journey through uncertainty from a more transactional form of education (effort delivers reward through success in assessment) to the life-wide transformational impact of higher education. Ellsworth (2005) defines transitional spaces as  ‘…entertaining strangeness and playing in difference. We are crossing that important internal boundary that is the line between the person we have been but no longer are and the person we will become’. Dubouloy (2004) locates transitional spaces in the identification of the self, arguing that they ‘facilitate experiment, openness and confrontation with others, production of meaning and understanding of the Self and the world’ allowing graduates to work through the experiences they have already had in the work, life, play and learning to reconstruct and define reality and their identity as leaders as and when it happens.

The design of the LPC learning experiences that trigger the capability for students to experiment, confront challenge and find ways to better define their own sense of leadership and values is critical. All the workshops address challenging scenarios from vaccine hesitancy, education for girls in sub-Saharan Africa and the ethics of deepfakes and AI conformity with stereotypes. These workshops immerse students in a safe form of hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1994), which can trigger states of confusion between what is considered real life and the ways in which the hyperreal scenarios can semiotically trigger emotional states by challenging our perceptions of the reality we reside in.

The primary group assessment task (Future Makers) asks students to collaboratively pitch their ideas for solutions to a critical global or local challenge of their choice (coercive control, obesity, the climate crisis amongst many others) to a panel of industry and academic leaders who provide critical feedback and probing questions to the group. The scenario enables a safe transitional space to act like and take the responsibilities of a leader for a crisis with meaning and consequence, make safe decisions but also outline what actions their group has taken as individuals to understand or navigate the crisis.

Creative industries practice

For LPC, the term multi-disciplinary is not appropriate as the learning within the program is not rooted in specific and integrated disciplinary theoretical frames or perspectives. As it engenders and makes manifest the University mantra of ‘leadership for good’, which defines the entire experience of learning at USYD, the term transdisciplinary is more appropriate, in that it looks at the understanding of the ‘present world’ and privileges the unity of knowledge to address critical global, local and personal challenges. It represents a liminal perspective on crisis and how our students inhabit and interpret the changing social structures that crisis creates.

One of the key transdisciplinary areas we draw on is creative industries pedagogy and theory. Aside from the storytelling and performative elements already discussed, the program draws on critical stories from arts practitioners, enables opportunities for making and play, the creative use of media and performative forms of assessment (such as creative pitching). The deep integration of the explicit modalities of creative industries leadership and tacit experiences of leaders and the designers in how they supported students to develop their skills and reflect on their future leadership legacy are critical to the internal momentum of the program.

These creative modalities and experiences have the potential to still be regarded by students as not relevant to their current understanding or experiences of leadership and crisis (as case studies and other contemporary abstracted experiential instruments also are). Equally, some students can immerse themselves in the imagination of crises yet to be experienced, and in doing so lay experiential breadcrumbs for their journey as a creative leader for good. It triggers a form of emotive learning engendered by play, discovery, self-reflection, creativity, and connection.

Resonant learning – leadership education as a lifelong learning practice

The final aspect of the LPC program is how it is designed to extend past the immediate experiences contained within its learning activities and create a framework for remembering, remixing and repurposing the knowledge and skills developed as leaders for future contexts and crises. The paper explores this unique and innovative pedagogical framing of the program as a form of what I have defined as ‘resonant learning’. This is the ‘longitudinal epistemic influence for students of learning in transitional spaces. Resonant learning is in effect a counter-concept to the immediacy of the overt focus on the attainment of the first job’ (p. 27).

The longitudinal epistemic influences are the elements of the program that are recalled, reflected on and applied long after the learning experiences have ended. It is the impacts of a resonant experience that last longer than the currency of the theory or examples of practice. The learning in transitional spaces locates learning contextually as something that may not surface into practice until five or ten years after the completion of the degree, and with students who are learning skills for a yet to be experienced moment in time (a future crisis, work with greater responsibility, etc.). Resonant learning is more about the ripples that emanate from a rock thrown into a pool of water, rather than the rock itself.

The community of LPC

LPC exists and flourishes because of the intellectual, emotional and experiential labour of so many academics and professional services staff at the University of Sydney Business School. From my co-designer, Professor Juliette Overland to the current program team led by Craig Gilliver to the hundreds of co-deliverers, media makers, casual academic staff and learning designers on the program to the thousands of students who have been through all aspects of LPC. It is one of the most ambitious, innovative and impactful programs I have ever been involved with. It reimagines leadership education as something transformative, powerful, creative and influential.

This is where we aim to humanise leadership. LPC enables students to leave their university experience with a set of uniquely constructed and applied skills that can shape their life, work, play and lifelong learning. It creates a template for how to integrate life experiences, learning and sociality into the leadership philosophy and skills of emerging leaders.  Every staff member, every leader, every student adds something more to the pot, and each time another layer gets added the end product gets better and better. For more on the program, have a look at the EURAM paper that inspired this post.