Innovating through hybridisation: art-based pedagogy in leadership development

This study outlines a multi-year collaboration journey between academics in two widely disparate disciplines: art/design and business/management. Eventually this culminated in co-designing and co-developing a folded paper zine, and related processes, to improve private reflective practice, particularly of managers and students of management. This zine co-design journey was articulated through the lens of Schumpeter’s hybridity perspective: “new combinations”, in the context of transdisciplinarity.

As both commercial and social organisations face increasing complexity and uncertainty, the rationally oriented tools developed for planning and decision-making in more stable times need to be augmented by those which assume or even welcome ambiguity and not-knowing. This creates an opportunity to draw on art-based methods such as zines, given that the arts acknowledge, value and address such uncertainty.