Weaving the day together

The inaugural Wood Symposium, themed "Create Transformative Learning Experiences," attracted diverse participants. The group represented scholars and educators from leading global business schools, balanced with senior leaders of talent development and diversity and inclusion at high impact multinational organizations. Participants engaged richly in discussions, demonstrations, presentations, and exhibitions.

Fireside Chat

After a meaningful Land Acknowledgement, the event began with a fireside chat moderated by Kinias, featuring Dean Sharon Hodgson and incoming Dean Julian Birkinshaw. They discussed the importance of innovation in business education in today's rapidly evolving landscape. Their conversation integrated Ivey's Critical Issues into the purpose of the Symposium and framed the agenda to focus on integrating research and teaching in the evolution of work in business education. They introduced leveraging technology for creating learning experiences for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the context of evolving business and human relationships.

Integrating values into professional lives

The event included both an introduction and demonstration of the Ivey Value Studio focused on the practice of integrating values into organizational lives, led by Erin Huner, Director of Culture and Inclusion at Ivey and leader of the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) programming and community engagement.

“This project came about during our strategic planning process, where we decided to embed core values into our strategy,” said Huner. “That doesn’t mean we were operating in the absence of values; it just means that we hadn’t codified them in a way that they were part of our strategic plan, our purpose.”

Huner also highlighted the visual aspect of the Value Studio, a great example of creative teaching methodology, praising the work of illustrator Emma Richard. “Having a visual reminder of what this is, rather than having to read a report, has been a really interesting way to broaden the pathways to knowledge,” she added.

Introducing Virtual Reality

Complementing innovation through the real human interactions of the Values Studio, in a parallel session participants connected about how Virtual Reality (VR) can be a high impact tool for creating critical incidents to learn fundamentals and to develop EDI skills, including perspective-taking, empathy, bias identification, emotion regulation, and critical conversations.

Shannon Rawski, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Ivey, Amy Lou Abernathy, CEO and founder of AMP Creative, Ivey’s partner for VR learning experience development on two projects, and Theodore Masters-Waage, VR research expert and NSF funded postdoctoral scholar at the University of Houston, each shared about EDI relevant experiences they have created with their teams. For example, Masters-Waage, Kinias, and colleagues recently published findings that people typically do not notice when team members steal ideas.

Leading through Stress

Leading learning in businesses and leading business education innovation in the context of current needs for extreme agility and fundamental stability can be stressful. For this reason, Columbia Business School's Modupe Akinola, Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business, Director, Bernstein Center for Leadership & Ethics, workshopped how to lead with stress, clarifying stress as both a health and performance problem and a productivity and performance activator.

Stress can be enhancing. You can reach higher levels of performance and well-being under constant or increasing stress. Your mindset determines your response. Continually elicit an enhancing stressmindset by acknowledging, welcoming, and utilizing your stress. -Module Akinola

Fostering Curiosity

Highlighting examples of innovations for working within and adapting learning systems, the group engaged in discussions of the importance of curiosity from organizational talent development and business school perspectives.

Derrick and Marilyn Raphael, cofounders of ICON Talent Partners, shared about their work on creating inroads to success in competitive professional programs for highly talented Black, Brown, and Indigenous youths. Darren Meister, associate professor of Entrepreneurship at Ivey, shared ideas for creating inroads to business education that begin more with curiosity than clear stated intent.

Both perspectives focused on creating pathways for diversified top talent into business education, ultimately providing organizations and society with more highly skilled talent set up to innovate and bring agility.

Innovation Fair

The symposium concluded with an Innovation Fair where participants shared and explored how teaching technologies and practices can be used to create transformative learning experiences.

Regarding the VR experiences participants could explore, participants engaged in a sexual harassment bystander simulation aimed at counteracting bias and improving conflict resolution.

Ivey Publishing’s Director Candis McInnes and Associate Director Violetta Gallagher presented Digital Learning Experiences (DLEs). These innovative tools are digitally enhanced cases and courses in a user-friendly platform. They explained that DLEs were designed to make the classroom experience more rewarding for faculty and students and to facilitate more meaningful in-class discussions.

The Innovation Fair also featured a richly integrated immersive and live classroom, coding to track case protagonists and topics over time, a mapping model for entrepreneurship education, an inclusive leadership board game, and a business case comic book.

Everything in the Fair demonstrated how business education can benefit from integrating technology and/or creativity into people’s development through business pedagogy.