Human re‐engineering for action: an enactive educational management program

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to show and explain an innovative educational program in management and engineering called “Human Re‐Engineering for Action” that provides the students with different distinctions to make in their observations to allowing to face and manage complex embodied organizational problems and situations.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology used in the program is based on the creation of conditions which allow embodied learning and therefore, creating enactive meta‐observers able to open new possibilities of action in different organizational contexts and domains. The program uses labs, maps, workshops, and ludic storytelling sessions structured through an ontological tool called CLEHES© which serves as a facilitator of observations of experience to enhance awareness of constructive possibilities.

Findings

Observations made by the graduates of the course over years have shown that the major achievement of the program is that it changes the graduates' paradigm in use from an external of reality to an embodied one which they have been using to cope more effectively with seemingly very complex organizational problems.

Practical implications

This approach evokes a new conception of responsibility in self‐management, giving senior staff new abilities and embodied skills to deal with practical organizational problems in a more effective way.

Originality/value

A new strategy for educating managers and engineers is presented and explained in this paper, where through the richness of distinctions in aspects of complexity based on the CLEHES dimensions, a variety of different recursive and recurrent organizational problem situations are brought to closure through the actions of the very same human beings who had created the organizations in the first place.

Citation

García de la Cerda, O. (2009), "Human re‐engineering for action: an enactive educational management program", Kybernetes, Vol. 38 No. 7/8, pp. 1332-1343. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920910977005