Fail fast, fail often…but don’t fail this course! Business and enterprise education through the lens of theatre and the creative arts

Abstract

This paper considers business and enterprise education through the lens of theatre and the creative arts, and identifies new pathways towards an interdisciplinary way of supporting the young innovators of the future, placing higher education as a central catalyst. Following a review of key criticism directed at traditional business and management approaches in the academy, the article problematizes the notion of experiential enterprise education in the curriculum and poses the question as to where and when students are afforded the opportunity to fail. Through an autoethnographic account, the key themes of authenticity, risk and failure, experiential approaches and embeddedness are presented. There is an urgent need for further and higher education institutions to develop a much more holistic and interdisciplinary approach to developing entrepreneurship in their students. These institutions are currently perpetuating pedagogical hypocrisy in that they preach productive failure while practising assessment success. An effective 21st-century approach would champion risk-taking and productive failure, place processes over outputs and acknowledge the important role of the post-course curriculum.

Encouraging intelligent failure in an MBA class

“…Given the pervasive rhetoric of “fail fast” (Dobson & Walmsley, 2021; Hall, 2007; McGrath, 2011; Shankar & Clausen, 2020), the first thing we need to unpack when introducing the concept in management settings is that not all failure is the same. There are many different types of failure, and in fact, most are not helpful for learning.…”

“…Although not explicitly using those terms, it has been recently argued that in the majority of business schools today, even if the value of generative failure is espoused, the subjects, systems, and structures of courses and programs largely reinforce stigmatized failure while developing twentieth‐century discipline‐specific thinking (Dobson & Walmsley, 2021; Hall & Rowland, 2016; Walsh & Powell, 2020).…”

“…Arts‐based education often relies on generative failure as a part of the creative process to generate novel solutions to open‐ended problems (Sawyer, 2019). Given the global need for more creativity in organizations (Aylesworth & Cleary, 2020), it is not surprising that more arts‐based approaches to management education are being proposed and deployed (Dobson & Walmsley, 2021; Kerr & Lloyd, 2008; Walsh & Powell, 2020). In contrast to typical management education, these highly experiential approaches develop and apply practical as opposed to purely theoretical knowledge.…”

“…There is much rhetoric in both business and academia encouraging organizations and individuals to become more entrepreneurial, innovate more often, and “fail fast” (Dobson & Walmsley, 2021; Hall, 2007; McGrath, 2011; Shankar & Clausen, 2020). “Failing fast” has been coined in order to encourage rapid learning, and this is proposed as a key skill for managers in organizations in dealing with uncertain environments that are now more commonplace (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014; Cannon & Edmondson, 2005).…”

“…In educational settings in particular failure has very strong negative connotations (Feigenbaum, 2021). No student wants to fail a course, or even an assignment, no matter how much they may learn in the process (Dobson & Walmsley, 2021). Yet the learning potential of some failure is arguably greater than that of success (Estabrooks & Couch, 2018; Loibl & Rummel, 2014).…”