The scale of external disruption makes this tension increasingly urgent. A 2026 survey by Carrington Crisp, reported in Times Higher Education , found that interest in studying overseas for an MBA has fallen for the second consecutive down from 39 per cent two years earlier. Visa restrictions, rising costs and growing confidence in home‑country business schools are all cited as factors. Schools face the kind of market disruption we spend years teaching students to navigate and yet the dominant institutional response has too often been to seek stability rather than to treat the moment as a catalyst for reimagination. Oxford Said’s GOTO project, which places year, with just 31 per cent of prospective students considering international study, students on live global challenges with real social and environmental stakes rather than retrospective case analyses, represents the kind of deliberate institutional choice that distinguishes schools willing to defend their distinctiveness even when conventional approaches might be safer. Such choices are rarely without friction internally, but they signal a willingness to treat the school’s own development with the same intellectual seriousness it asks of its students. What such schools share is not a rejection of quality standards, but a refusal to let those standards define the outer limit of their ambition. Designing friction, not smoothing it away For years, higher education has sought to remove friction from the student experience: streamlined
At Kingston Business School, this thinking shapes our approach directly. The live management consultancy project at the heart of our MBA places students inside real organisations working on current problems, not curated retrospectives. Clients have a genuine stake in the outcome. Students must navigate competing interests, incomplete data and the discomfort of not knowing whether their recommendations will work. That is not a simulation of professional life: it is professional life. The programme also includes a high-performance leadership module, reflecting a conviction that leadership capability cannot be reduced to frameworks to be memorised and reproduced. It treats the human dimensions of leadership as a serious academic subject rather than an ancillary concern. The cohort itself is part of the design: senior professionals seeking c-suite strategic depth study alongside entrepreneurs building new ventures and professionals pivoting into new sectors. When a corporate executive and a founder must solve the same complex, ambiguous problem together, the friction between their different instincts is precisely where genuine insight tends to emerge.
journeys, standardised assessments, optimised platforms. The instinct is understandable: smoother processes mean better satisfaction scores, fewer complaints and more manageable operations. But efficiency and leadership development are not the same thing and conflating them produces graduates who are comfortable rather than capable. Employer surveys consistently identify resilience, curiosity, ethical reasoning and the capacity to lead under uncertainty as the capabilities most in demand, and most difficult to find in senior hires. These are not skills developed by optimising the student journey; they emerge through challenge. The standard MBA case study, for all its strengths, can work against this: students analyse a bounded situation and arrive at an optimal solution. Real organisations are not bounded situations, however; stakeholders disagree and data can conflict. The right answer often does not exist and the leader who succeeds is rarely the one with the most analytical horsepower, but the one with the judgement to act thoughtfully despite imperfect information. What if we measured success not by the quality of the answer, but by the quality of the reasoning used to reach it under genuine pressure?
36 Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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