From 23 till 24 June, the GRLI played an active role in the 2015 Global Forum for Responsible Management Education organized by the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) in New York City.
GRLI Board member and Dean of Business School Lausanne, Dr. Katrin Muff, lead the visioning process on both mornings during the event, also conducting a guided mediation for the audience of more than 400 business school leaders, professors, programme managers and concerned stakeholders.
The first visioning exercise was about imagining a world where the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are achieved and where participants followed in the footsteps of their own future life or of those of their children or grandchildren. The second visioning was about imagining a business school of the future that educates globally responsible leaders, enables companies to serve the common good and engages in the transformation of business and the economy, a vision inspired by the 50+20 vision itself.
Katrin applied two different visioning approaches to provides participants with a small range of experience of how to conduct such exercises. The purpose of a visioning exercise is to shift from attempting to resolve a problem by digging into all its details, to starting from an ideal future in which the problem is resolved and from there developing prototypes of possible next steps that can be implemented here and now towards such a future. This future-inspired approach is called ‘back-casting’ and generates very different results than a problem-based approach.
As a result of the 2015 Global Forum, a Responsible Management Education Outcomes Declaration was published and announced in the UN General Assembly the next morning. In this document, participants reaffirmed support for the Principles, made commitments to enhance the quality of their initiatives individually, institutionally and collectively, and called for governments, business leaders, accrediting bodies, rankings providers, and UN system entities to support management educators in their key role in developing future leaders and helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
