Paper 97
‘What Else is Possible?’ Transdisciplinary Possibilities for Translating Academic Research into Professional Practices and Vice Versa: The Case of a Leadership Development Practice
Tatjana Dragovic, University of Cambridge
Abstract
‘What else is possible?’ was a question asked by one of the delegates attending a three-year long leadership development programme based on transdisciplinary possibilities for translation of academic research on creativity and dialogue into international/multicultural corporation contexts. The paper reports on how the leadership programme with a post-humanist lens on human-non-human interactions, embodiment and arts-based explorations combined academic research on possibility thinking (Craft et al., 2012), communal and collaborative creativity (Burnard and Dragovic, 2014), dialogic interactions (Hennessy et al., 2018) and coaching (Dragovic Andersen and Stewart, 2023) to open possibilities for leaders to un-create, re-create and co-create business processes, decision-making strategies, change management and conflict transformation approaches. As they engaged with music, words and material, boundaries, silo-ing and separations disappear, and shared possibilities and more-than-human relations emerged leading to, in their own words, transformative experiences of the leaders. The academic research translated into the leadership development practice encompassed transdisciplinary research assemblage from the fields of education, music performance, rule of law and governance. The programmes’ arts-based possibilities for fostering leadership development do not only provide a twist, i.e. an ‘out of the box’ post-humanist framework but they also feed-back to academic research as the leaders’ unlocked creativity inspire methodological innovations through synaesthesia-based data collection methods e.g., overlapping visual and auditory, material and non-material, kinaesthetic and olfactory data. Thus, transdisciplinary possibilities for translating academic research into professional practices led back to possibility thinking regarding further development of academic research practice. Academic researchers are hence challenged to think ‘What else is possible?’ just as the leaders in international/multicultural corporation contexts started asking themselves.
Details
- Session: Paper session 1
- Scheduled: Monday 8th, 10:30 – 12:00
- Room: 1S3
