sizes should ensure that sustainability is addressed in their business strategy – surely, they argued, it is the large corporations that should be responsible for such issues, not start-ups or SMEs? I received this information shortly before the survey and consultation with current students and it took me by surprise. Although I knew these individuals did not speak for everyone, the MBA team had been operating under the assumption that students would not only welcome such discussions on sustainability but would also actively demand skills and knowledge in this area, based on different reports and surveys of business school students’ expectations, particularly prospective MBA students. Our own survey of current MBA students was then carried out and largely lived up to expectations. Most respondents expressed the belief that businesses should incorporate sustainability into their mission and operations and that MBA education should prioritise equipping students with the skills and knowledge to do this. Yet, a minority of those questioned expressed different views. Some were on the fence, or noncommittal, while others went further to say they did not believe sustainability should be a priority, either for industry or business education. Furthermore, even among those who are generally positive towards tackling the topic, surveys such as these do not typically reveal how students understand the problems related to sustainability. While there is clearly a general and increasing trend among MBA students to expect and seek out a focus on sustainability, they still come from a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, cultures and worldviews. At its core, sustainability requires a complete re-orientation of values and conventional approaches to business and society, since it demands that people, for the first time in modern capitalist history, build into their activities a consideration of the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This orientation is fundamentally at odds with the lifestyles, expectations and ideals that have developed around the world since the 19th century. No wonder climate change and the energy transition are such wicked problems and no wonder that students and experienced professionals alike may be sceptical or hesitant to embrace the change required to work towards sustainable businesses and societies. Going beyond the technical perspective The implication here for 21st-century MBA programmes is that while developing sustainability knowledge and tools from a technical perspective is a start, it does not necessarily mean that students will automatically adopt a sustainability mindset. It is this way of thinking, alongside knowledge of the technical issues and concepts, that we have set out to build into the Brunel MBA’s teaching and learning. The UN PRME Working Group on Sustainability Mindset has developed a set of pedagogical frameworks and resources, as well as an assessment tool known as the Sustainability Mindset Indicator (SMI). These provide incredibly useful and powerful resources to help build a holistic approach to sustainability into MBA programmes.
Adopting a comprehensive approach At Brunel Business School, we have started work on embedding a focus on sustainability and responsible leadership throughout the MBA programme. Given the urgent and holistic threat of climate change and resource/biodiversity depletion, we decided sustainability needs to feature throughout the entire programme and on each of the three pathways we offer: general management, healthcare management and digital innovation management. As suggested above, this will be a multi-stage process, starting with stakeholder consultations. We will then make initial changes to content at the module level, gradually adjusting learning outcomes and introducing sustainability-themed capstone and consultancy projects. We will also conduct informal assessments to capture students’ learning and uptake of key sustainability skills that can be fed back into further curriculum refinement. At the module level, an initial survey and consultation with MBA teaching staff revealed that nearly all core modules addressed some aspect of sustainability or mentioned the UN SDGs, although the extent and depth of this focus varied. This consultation identified the obvious areas where sustainability concepts and issues could be more explicitly addressed in the pedagogical content, with a view towards integrating sustainability into learning outcomes and assessments. Overcoming scepticism & reluctance to adapt In these conversations with faculty, I also learned about an unexpected reaction from some students when the topic of managing for sustainability was brought up in the classroom; they were sceptical about the need for it, questioning an implied assumption that entrepreneurs and business leaders of all company
14 | Ambition | DECEMBER 2024
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