RISK ANALYSIS
H ere’s a question worth mulling over. Your institution almost certainly teaches disruptive innovation. Your MBA programme encourages students to challenge assumptions, back bold ideas and build organisations that do things differently. You invite guest speakers who have taken extraordinary risks. You run entrepreneurship clinics, incubation spaces and innovation challenges. You tell future leaders that the status quo is the riskiest position of all. Now ask yourself: when did your school last do something genuinely risky? Not a new module, not a rebrand, but something that represented a genuine departure from the established model, with uncertain outcomes, real stakes and no guarantee of approval from a review panel. For many of us, honest reflection produces a longer silence than we might expect – and that silence points to one of the most consequential paradoxes in management education today: the sector most responsible for developing innovative, risk- taking leaders has quietly become one of the most risk-averse industries in the knowledge economy. We celebrate disruption in our classrooms and manage our institutions as though disruption were something that happened to other people. The conformity trap The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39 per cent of workers’ core skills to be transformed or outdated by 2030 and that 63 per cent identify skills gaps as the single biggest barrier to business transformation. These are sobering figures for any institution whose purpose is to prepare leaders for the world ahead. They are also, quietly, a challenge to whether the programmes we currently offer are truly designed for the decade we are entering rather than the one we have just left. Business schools champion disruption, encouraging future leaders to embrace risk and challenge the status quo, yet internally they operate with extreme caution. To overcome this paradox, schools must embrace friction over convenience and build experiential models that foster lifelong learning and genuine institutional experimentation, says Kingston Business School’s Sankar Sivarajah
graduate outcomes, research performance, employability rates, rankings and accreditation standards. All of these matter. The UK alone can consistently lay claim to having 10 or more schools in the Financial Times ’ Global MBA Ranking , more than any country outside the US. That is a genuine achievement, built on decades of institutional investment and academic rigour. But when every institution optimises towards the same set of indicators, something important gets lost. Periodic reviews and revalidation cycles encourage improvement within established parameters. What they do not always reward is the willingness to question whether those parameters remain the right ones. The result can be programmes that are measurably better, but not meaningfully different. In striving for excellence, we may have engineered out the very differentiation that excellence ultimately depends upon. Too often, innovation becomes incremental rather than transformational. We improve existing programmes rather than reimagine them. We refine assessment strategies rather than reconsider what graduates truly need. We optimise established models instead of asking whether those models remain fit for purpose; we teach our MBA students to challenge assumptions and take calculated risks. Yet, as institutions, we frequently do the opposite. Institutional innovation feels constrained by committee structures, governance processes and an understandable desire not to get things wrong in front of an accreditation panel. The result is a sector that is increasingly excellent, but sometimes at the expense of being distinctive. In striving for quality, we risk producing institutions that are more similar than they have ever been. It would be too simple to blame accreditation. The standards maintained by AMBA, AACSB and EQUIS have raised the floor of management education significantly and the sector is all the better for it. Rigorous review processes have pushed schools to think seriously about learning outcomes, stakeholder engagement and the relationship between research and practice. While these are all intrinsically valuable, the risk is that floors become ceilings and that the pursuit of accreditation becomes an end in itself rather than a means of improving what and how we teach. When schools design their strategies primarily around satisfying review panels rather than serving students and society, the result can be institutional conservatism dressed up as rigour and experimentation becomes harder to justify. Novel pedagogical approaches require lengthy approval processes; failure, which is central to genuine innovation, becomes institutionally threatening rather than institutionally valuable. The very language of quality assurance, with its emphasis on consistency, repeatability and evidence of prior success, can quietly crowd out the appetite for doing something that has not been done before.
Business schools have become exceptionally good at measuring quality: student satisfaction,
Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2026 35
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