Leaders for good in a post-crisis world: Designing transdisciplinary and resonant leadership education programs in transitional spaces

Abstract

Developing business graduates to have the transdisciplinary and resonant capability to be leaders for good throughout their career is a complex curricular challenge. The design of leadership education programs is impacted by two dissonances (the resonance dissonance and the transdisciplinary dissonance) that emerge between the transitions students are experiencing as they journey through higher education and the transactional behaviours engendered by policy and institutional practice. This paper will interrogate the challenges and affordances of designing a leadership education program that purposefully creates transitional spaces for students to integrate, repurpose and share their transdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and experience as they develop their skills to be leaders for good. Using the evaluative and reflective outputs from a participatory action research project, a single instance case study has been developed on the Leading in a Post-Crisis World program at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia) to interrogate the positive and negative impacts that the resonance and transdisciplinary dissonances have on the successful design of a leadership education program. The paper will posit the notion of resonant learning as a way of enhancing the efficacy and longitudinal benefits of leadership education to effect social change and address current and yet to be experienced critical global, local, or personal crises.