Theorizing Otherness When Our Visions of the World Shrink

If we are to better prepare our students for a broken world, we need to ensure they don’t fall prey to the same dysfunctional thinking that stop experienced practitioners in their tracks. Indeed there is no shortage of theoretical and empirical research that showcase the paradoxical phenomena of highly trained experts, experienced executives and long established successful organizations failing in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. When this happens, our ideas begin to stall, and we get STUCK in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. Our visions of the world shrink, and we end up resorting to our past habitual practices, reinforcing patterns and routines, often over-simplify the complexity of the situation. At moments like these we need to drop our tools and unlearn to open us to “otherness”. This symposium presentation develops a new learning theory of “otherness” designed to help our students get unstuck in the face of the unknown, the unfamiliar, novel, rare events and situations. Grounded on solid scientific research spanning multi-disciplinary fields of clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioural science, experimental psychology and the organizational sciences, we envisage our theory building efforts has the power to open up the alternatives and facilitates the process of learning and unlearning.