I've just spent two days building with Lego. Climate Play uses LEGO Serious Play methodology, a facilitated process where you think with your hands, build metaphorical models, and tell the story of what you've made. It's grounded in constructionism, the idea that we learn most effectively when we're making something tangible, something we can point to and say, "this is what I mean." The method has a simple structure: challenge, build, share, reflect. But that simplicity opens up space for complexity that traditional discussion often can't access. The method works through head, heart and hands together. You think (head), you feel (heart), you make (hands). Not in sequence, but simultaneously. The bricks become a language for knowledge that lives in all three places at once. Lucy Hawthorne, who created Climate Play, adapted LSP specifically for sustainability work. She's interested in what happens when we stop treating climate and environmental issues with "serious seriousness" and instead make space for playfulness alongside the profound. Not because sustainability isn't urgent, but because the heaviness of the conversation often drains people's energy to act. The training I attended was explicit about this: **play as a way into difficult topics, not a way around them.** This aligns with questions I've been working through for a while now: how do we teach otherwise when the dominant pedagogies of business education reproduce the very systems we're asking students to critique? Climate Play isn't an answer to that question, but it's a method that creates space for asking it differently. We built our business school five years from now, with sustainability embedded. We built the enablers and the barriers. The prompts pushed us toward the SDGs, toward futures literacy, toward integration of head, heart and hands in how we approach change. Each time, the same pattern: think, build with whatever pieces call to you, explain your model to the group. Nobody interprets your build for you; that's a core LSP principle. You own the meaning. Others can ask questions to better understand, but they don't impose their readings on your construction. some of the builds from the training There was discomfort in trying something new, that's the heart part, the feeling that comes before understanding. Hands hovering over plastic bricks, not quite sure where to start. That awkward moment when you're asked to build meaning before you've figured out what you want to say. But there was joy too, once we stopped overthinking it. Once we let the building teach us what we were thinking. We kept circling back to application: how might we use this method in our own practice? For me, that means ethical practice modules and EDI teaching, and in PRME-aligned business schools, these aren't separate from sustainability work. The SDGs make this explicit: decent work, reduced inequalities, responsible consumption, and climate action, they're entangled. You can't teach sustainability without addressing who bears the costs of extraction, whose voices shape decisions, and what 'responsible' management actually requires of us. So what might students build if asked to represent inclusion? What barriers would emerge if we built landscapes of organisational culture rather than writing about it? This is where the head-heart-hands connection becomes pedagogically essential. EDI education can't just be intellectual (head); we can theorise about equity all day and still reproduce exclusion in practice. It needs to be felt (heart), the discomfort of recognising complicity, the hope of imagining otherwise. And it needs to be made tangible (hands), built, shaped, held up to examination. The same applies to ethical practice. Students can define stakeholder theory, but can they build it? Can they use their hands to construct the tensions, the competing claims, the messy reality of trying to do good in systems designed for profit? Without this, without ways of learning that integrate thinking, feeling and making, we risk producing another generation of managers who can talk fluently about sustainability and justice while the systems they lead continue to extract, exploit and exclude. The reflection that comes after building, that's where the learning happens. In explaining what you made and why. In listening deeply to what others have made. In connecting individual models into shared landscapes where multiple perspectives sit alongside each other, not collapsed into false consensus, but held together in their complexity. What strikes me most is how the method refuses to let anyone hide. LSP works on the principle that 100% of people contribute 100% of the time. Everyone builds. Everyone speaks. The quiet ones and the loud ones both get heard because the bricks mediate the conversation. There's something genuinely democratic about that, not in a wishful sense, but in practice. It's designed democracy: the structure itself creates the conditions for equal participation rather than assuming it will happen naturally. You can't dominate a space with your eloquence when everyone's building at the same time. I keep thinking about how much gets left unsaid in seminar discussions about EDI or ethical practice. Not because people don't understand, they do, but because some knowledge lives in places that speech and writing struggle to reach. Building with bricks is critical thinking. It's just thinking that happens through your hands rather than only through your head, that engages feeling as well as analysis. Another pathway to the same work of questioning, analysing, imagining otherwise. There's possibility here. Real possibility. Not because LSP solves the problem of transforming business education, nothing solves that, but because it creates a different kind of space. One where thinking happens through making. Where feeling guides building. Where imagination isn't abstract aspiration but something you can hold in your hands. I don't have all the answers about how this unfolds in my teaching. But I do have a bag of Lego, a training manual from Climate Play, and a clearer sense that sometimes the most transformative pedagogy starts with an invitation to play. To engage head, heart and hands together. To build what we want. To make the invisible visible. To hold the tension between what is and what might be, not in words that evaporate, but in bricks that sit there, stubborn and real, waiting for us to decide what comes next. Watch this space. Lego me!

LJMU's Curriculum Enhancement Internships scheme is funding four student interns to spend six months mapping joy in teaching.

This week in Belgrade, I stood in front of a room of management educators at the 12th Responsible Management Education Research Conference and asked: **What if HR education became a site for world-making, not just workforce management?** Because that's not what we do, is it? We teach recruitment strategies. Performance management systems. Employee engagement metrics. We teach students to be good administrators of other people's working lives. We call it professionalism. We call it rigour. We rarely call it what it actually is: training people to reproduce the world exactly as it already exists. And right now, that world isn't working for most of the people living in it. ## What We're Actually Teaching There's a concept I keep coming back to: _used futures_. It's Inayatullah's term for the way we project the past forward and call it the future. In HRM education, used futures look like this: teaching students about "the future of work" as if automation, gig economy platforms, and AI-driven performance tracking are inevitable weather systems we simply adapt to, rather than choices someone made that we could choose differently. We teach students that disruption is technological. That change is external. That their job is to help organisations adapt, optimise, survive. We don't tend to ask: adapt _to what_? Optimise _for whom_? Survive _at whose cost_? Mariappanadar calls these costs _negative externalities_ — the psychological and social damage imposed on employees, families, communities when we treat people as resources to be managed rather than lives to be considered. Burnout. Precarity. The anxiety of never quite knowing if you're productive enough. We know these costs exist. We just keep teaching as if they're inevitable. So when a student tells me "I thought HR was just admin," I don't hear a failure of imagination. I hear exactly what we've taught them to expect. ## Relational Futuring: A Model for Teaching Otherwise For the past year, I've been working on something I'm calling **Relational Futuring** — a pedagogical model that treats the future not as something to predict or adapt to, but as something we make together, through care and imagination and a willingness to sit with difficult questions. _Relational Futuring: Three established frameworks generate three new pedagogical capacities at their intersections_ ### The Three Foundations The model starts with **Joan Tronto's ethics of care**, which has been teaching me that vulnerability and interdependence aren't problems to solve — they're the actual conditions of being human. That matters for HRM because it means we can't keep pretending that people are autonomous agents who just need the right incentives. We're always already responsible for each other. Then there's **futures literacy** — the work of Riel Miller and Roberto Poli — which argues that how we imagine the future shapes what we do now. If the only future we can imagine is more efficient, more optimised, more extracted, then that's what we'll build. But imagination isn't just wishful thinking. It's a practice we can develop. And finally, **arts-based pedagogy**. This is the work of people like Barone, Eisner, Springborg and Ladkin, who insist that some things can't be analysed into understanding. You have to make them, hold them, look at them. Collage isn't decoration. It's a way of thinking that lets you hold contradictions without collapsing them into false resolutions. These three frameworks aren't new. What's new is what emerges when you weave them together deliberately, relationally, in pedagogical practice. The model's contribution isn't the frameworks themselves — it's the three capacities that arise at their intersections. ### The Three Connecting Capacities Here's where the model becomes more than the sum of its parts. When you weave these frameworks together, three new capacities emerge — and these are what students actually develop: **Anticipatory Responsibility** sits at the intersection of Ethics of Care and Futures Literacy. It's the capacity to recognise that imagined futures create present responsibilities. Students learn to ask: if we know this future is probable, what are we responsible for doing now? If we prefer a different future, what must we refuse to create? This makes students stop mid-case study and ask, "Wait — are we assuming this future is inevitable?" **Embodied Ethics** emerges where Ethics of Care meets Arts-Based Pedagogy. This is using creative practice to explore ethical tensions that can't be resolved through analysis alone. When students make collages about the future of work, they're thinking through their hands, making visible the contradictions between what they're taught to value and what they actually care about. **Imaginative Attentiveness** is where Futures Literacy and Arts-Based Pedagogy intersect. It's the capacity to notice and question dominant narratives about work's future — to see that "the future of work" is a story someone's telling, and to ask who benefits, whose labour it makes invisible, what alternatives it forecloses. When these three capacities work together, something shifts. The classroom stops being a place where students learn to manage other people's working lives and becomes a space where they learn to imagine — and begin building — different worlds entirely. ### What Makes It Relational I'm calling this _Relational_ Futuring because it refuses the idea that futures thinking is an individual cognitive skill. The future isn't something you imagine alone and then implement. It's something we make together, in relationship, through dialogue and disagreement and the slow work of figuring out what we owe each other. Every element of this model is relational: * Care ethics centres interdependence, not autonomy * Futures literacy works through collective imagination, not solo prediction * Arts-based methods create boundary objects — artefacts we can gather around and think with together This isn't pedagogy _about_ relationships. It's pedagogy _as_ relationship. The learning happens in the space between people, not inside individual heads. ## What This Looks Like in Practice I've tested this model most thoroughly in a three-phase classroom intervention: students map signals of change (attentiveness), create collages of alternative futures (imagination), then reflect collectively on ethical tensions and commitments (responsibility). One group juxtaposed space exploration with childcare statistics and images of war. Another layered mental health headlines over zero-hours contracts and productivity dashboards. These weren't pretty. They weren't coherent. They were _truthful_ in a way that essays rarely are. But the phases aren't the point. The point is that when you create pedagogical space for these three capacities to develop — when you ask students to attend to whose futures matter, to imagine otherwise through creative practice, and to take ethical responsibility for what they're building — something shifts. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that I knew we'd touched something real. ## What Actually Happened Let me tell you: this did not start well. Students were baffled. A few were annoyed. One asked, quite reasonably, what making collages had to do with HR. I didn't have a good answer at the time. I just said: trust me, we'll see. And then, gradually, something shifted. Not for everyone. Not all at once. But enough. One student said: _"I used to think of HR as something you do to people to make the business work. Now I see it as a space for imagining what kind of world we want to work in."_ That sentence is worth more to me than any module evaluation score. Because that's the shift I'm after. Not better technicians. Not more strategic thinkers. But people who understand that their professional choices are _world-making choices_. That every policy is a small architecture of possibility or constraint. That "best practice" is never neutral — it's always serving someone's version of what matters. ## What This Means Here's what I think we're getting wrong in HRM education: we've taught students that the future is something that _happens to them_ , and their job is to help organisations adapt. We've made them passive. We've made them complicit. And then we wonder why they graduate and reproduce exactly the systems that are failing us. Relational Futuring is my attempt to teach otherwise. It's an attempt at regenerative pedagogy — education that doesn't just sustain existing systems but actively creates conditions for renewal, justice, and collective flourishing. To create a classroom where the future is something we interrogate, imagine, and make together. Where care isn't a soft skill but a political commitment. Where students learn to ask not "how do we manage people?" but "what kind of work, and what kind of world, do we actually want?" It's messy. It doesn't always work. But when it does — when a student looks at you and says, "I didn't realise I had a choice" — that's when you remember why any of this matters. ## What Happens Next I'm putting this out now, before it's polished, before it's turned into a journal article with the edges sanded off. Because I think this work needs to live in practice, not just in publication. If you're teaching HRM, people practice, organisational studies — if you're tired of teaching adaptation and want to try teaching world-making instead — I'd love to hear from you. Try this. Break it. Remake it. Tell me what works in your context and what doesn't. Because the future isn't something we predict. It's something we make. Together. **Because HR education shouldn't just prepare people for the future of work — it should help them imagine the work of the future.**

_A reflection on sympoiesis and what it means to think without bounded individuals_ * * * "Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing." This simple statement from Donna Haraway's chapter on sympoiesis carries a radical challenge that keeps unfolding the more I sit with it. It's not just about collaboration or interconnection; it's a fundamental questioning of what we mean when we say "one" anything at all. Sympoiesis means "making-with," and Haraway uses it to describe how entities emerge through relationality rather than self-contained processes. When she writes about creatures like Mixotricha paradoxa, that extraordinary being carrying hundreds of thousands of bacteria and spirochetes in symbiotic relation, she's showing us something unsettling about the nature of identity itself. This creature is "not one, not five, not several hundred thousand" but something else entirely: what she calls a holobiont, an "entire being" that is whole precisely because it is multiple. What stops me is how this challenges the basic unit of analysis that underlies so much of how we think about learning and teaching. Education assumes "the individual student" as its fundamental building block, designing curricula for individual minds, assessing individual performance, tracking individual progress. Learning spaces may be less like discrete containers and more like holobionts, emergent, entangled, and co-composed. What we call "learning" might emerge through "knots of diverse intra-active relatings" (where intra-action, as used by Barad and Haraway, signals mutual constitution rather than interaction between pre-existing entities) rather than individual cognitive processes. This isn't just saying that learning is social; it's questioning whether there are discrete individuals to be social in the first place. When Haraway describes holobionts as entities that "hold together contingently and dynamically," she's pointing to something stable enough to persist but always in process, always constituted through ongoing relationships with others. Educational encounters become temporary assemblages where human participants (students, teachers, administrators) are entangled with more-than-human ones, the material infrastructures, technological systems, seasonal rhythms, historical sediments in knowledge, and even the building itself, all participating in what we call education. The implications ripple outward. If there's no bounded individual student, what are we assessing? If there's no autonomous teacher, what does pedagogical authority mean? If knowledge isn't something individuals acquire but something that emerges through relational processes, what does it mean to "deliver" content? This shift from individuals-in-relationship to relationality as primary changes how we might pay attention in educational spaces. Instead of focusing on what individual students are learning, we might attend to the qualities of relation that make certain kinds of thinking possible. Instead of designing for individual outcomes, we might create conditions for collective emergence. Instead of managing separate entities, we might participate in ongoing processes of worlding-with. I'm thinking about how management education, in particular, is built around the fiction of bounded organisational units, discrete companies competing or collaborating in markets, individual leaders making strategic decisions, separate departments coordinating their efforts. Organisations might be more like holobionts: temporary assemblages of human and more-than-human participants, emerging through dynamic entanglements that can't be reduced to the intentions or actions of individual actors. Traditional pedagogical categories don't disappear, but they become contingent, practical arrangements rather than fundamental realities. The "student" and "teacher" become provisional positions within larger assemblages rather than distinct entities with fixed properties. Assessment becomes a way of attending to the health of whole systems rather than measuring individual performance. Learning objectives become invitations for collective experimentation rather than predetermined outcomes for individual achievement. What draws me to this thinking is how it changes the quality of attention we bring to educational encounters. When you're not looking for bounded individuals, other things become visible, not just the obvious social dynamics, but the infrastructures, inheritances, and rhythms that shape learning in quiet but decisive ways. There's something both humble and radical about thinking symbiotically. Humble because it means acknowledging that we're not the authors of our own learning—we're always being made and making others through encounters we can't fully control. Radical because it suggests that the basic categories through which educational institutions understand themselves might be provisional arrangements rather than natural facts. Haraway's concept of "making-with" offers a different starting point for pedagogical practice. Not managing individuals or facilitating relationships between separate entities, but participating responsibly in ongoing processes of collective becoming—worlding-with, as in co-creating the conditions of reality alongside others, human and more-than-human. Not extracting learning from educational encounters, but contributing to the conditions that make certain kinds of emergence possible. This feels particularly urgent in management education, where so much depends on learning to think beyond the logics of bounded competition that have brought us to our current crises. If we could help students understand themselves not as future individual leaders but as participants in ongoing processes of collective worlding, what kinds of practice might become possible? I don't think this means abandoning all the practical categories that make educational work possible. But it might mean holding them more lightly, understanding them as tools for particular purposes rather than descriptions of fundamental reality. The question becomes not how to optimise individual learning but how to participate skillfully in the relational flows through which we make each other up. Perhaps the real provocation is this: what if every time we enter a classroom, we're not meeting separate individuals but joining a holobiont already in process? What if teaching is less about delivering content to discrete minds and more about learning to sense and respond to the collective becoming already underway? * * * _This reflection emerges from engagement with_ _Donna Haraway's chapter "Sympoiesis" in "Staying with the Trouble"__and its implications for thinking beyond bounded individuals in educational practice._

_A field note on building a portfolio approach that asks students to develop ethical analysis through cultural engagement—not just case studies_ I'm launching a new assessment this term for Ethical Practice and Behaviours with my second year HRM students, and it builds directly on my earlier thinking about media archaeology for people practice. Instead of traditional case studies about ethical dilemmas in sanitised business contexts, students will spend ten weeks developing their analytical capabilities through weekly engagement with media sources alongside academic frameworks. Here's the structure: each week, students encounter both a media source—this could be a Netflix documentary about gig work, a podcast series on corporate wellness culture, episodes of _The Office_ , news coverage of workplace scandals—and the week's required academic paper on stakeholder theory, ethical decision-making, or strategic approaches to social performance. They write 200-400-word reflections capturing what ethical considerations struck them, how they're learning to analyse stakeholder conflicts using the frameworks, and what this means for their own developing stance as future HR professionals. Then we gather for peer discussions where they test their analysis against others' perspectives. By week twelve, they'll have this portfolio of thinking-in-progress, plus a final integrative reflection tracing how their analytical capabilities developed across the module. ## Why Media Sources for Ethics? The challenge with traditional business ethics education is that it treats ethical considerations as abstract problems to be solved through the correct application of frameworks. Students learn to identify stakeholders, map conflicts of interest, propose strategic responses—but often without feeling the human texture of what these conflicts actually mean in lived workplace experience. Media sources carry that texture. When students watch documentary footage of Amazon warehouse workers, they don't just see "labour stakeholders"—they encounter the embodied reality of what efficiency metrics mean for human dignity. When they analyse workplace comedy, they're not just identifying "cultural tensions"—they're recognising how power operates through humour, how inclusion and exclusion get performed daily. This isn't about replacing rigorous analysis with emotional response. It's about developing ethical literacy that can read power relations and stakeholder conflicts across different forms of cultural knowledge. Every film, every podcast, every news story carries assumptions about what people are for, what counts as success, and who is disposable. Making these visible becomes part of the analytical work. ## The Peer Discussion Experiment The part that feels most experimental is centering those weekly peer discussions as crucial to developing analytical capabilities. Students will share their reflections in small groups, encountering different ways of seeing stakeholder relationships, different approaches to evaluating strategic responses to ethical challenges. This is where the learning happens—not just in individual reflection, but in the collision between perspectives. Someone interprets a workplace scandal as evidence of systemic failure; another sees individual bad actors. Someone proposes regulatory solutions; another argues for cultural change. The conversation that emerges becomes practice for the kinds of ethical navigation they'll need as HR professionals. I'm hoping this develops what the module learning outcomes call "analytical capabilities"—not just the ability to apply stakeholder theory correctly, but the capacity to recognise ethical considerations as they emerge in complex organisational life, to understand where conflicts arise, to evaluate strategic approaches that might actually enhance social performance rather than just tick compliance boxes. ## Portfolio as Ethical Development Process The portfolio format matters because ethical analysis isn't a skill you master once and deploy forever. It's ongoing practice, shaped by context, relationship, and evolving understanding of what justice requires in particular situations. Traditional assignments ask students to demonstrate mastery of ethical frameworks through correct application. This portfolio asks them to document how they're learning to live ethically within systems they may not control—how their analysis of stakeholder conflicts becomes more sophisticated, how they develop criteria for evaluating strategic approaches, how peer discussions challenge their assumptions and expand their ethical imagination. The assessment criteria reflect this: "use of ideas" means applying frameworks while staying open to how media sources might challenge or extend them. "Critical awareness" means developing insight into how ethical considerations operate in commercial contexts, not just identifying them. "Personal and professional reflection" means connecting this analytical development to their emerging identity as principle-led HR professionals. ## Working Within and Against Institutional Logic Of course, this all happens within a business school that still operates according to logics I'm questioning. Students are paying fees for a qualification that will help them succeed in organisations structured around profit maximisation. The module itself exists to meet professional body requirements for ethical competence. There's productive tension here that becomes part of the curriculum. When students struggle with open-ended reflection, we explore what educational conditioning reveals about ethical thinking. When they want clearer guidelines for "right answers" about stakeholder conflicts, we examine what that suggests about how ethics gets practiced in organisational life. The portfolio structure provides enough scaffolding—clear word counts, detailed rubrics, reflection templates—for students to engage confidently, while still asking them to sit with complexity rather than reach for premature closure. They need to demonstrate analytical development that satisfies external examiners while genuinely grappling with questions that don't have neat solutions. ## What I'm Hoping This Generates If this works, students will develop ethical analysis capabilities that can engage with the messiness of actual organisational life. They'll leave the module not with a toolkit of correct responses to ethical dilemmas, but with enhanced capacity to recognise how ethical considerations emerge in daily commercial activities, to analyse stakeholder relationships with attention to power dynamics, to evaluate strategic approaches based on what they might actually accomplish rather than what they claim to accomplish. They'll have practice in collaborative ethical thinking that builds collective wisdom without losing analytical edge. The conversations about workplace power through _Mad Men_ , or gig economy exploitation through documentary investigation, or care ethics through comedy might become templates for the kind of substantive ethical dialogue that HR practice desperately needs. The portfolio becomes documentation of this analytical development: not final answers about stakeholder conflicts, but evidence of growing capacity to think ethically in relationship with others while maintaining intellectual honesty about what's at stake. We'll see what emerges when students start working with this structure next week. The gap between what we hope assessment can accomplish and what it actually generates is where the real pedagogical work lives.

Explore media-making as sense-making pedagogy: how students creating podcasts, zines, and videos develops collaborative knowledge creation.

UK business schools optimise for metrics, not imagination. Teaching Otherwise calls for disruption: creative pedagogy, futures literacy, and ethical learning.