Bridging Disciplines: Case Study Edition!

 Our paper "Bridging Disciplines Through Practice: Simulating Collaborative Decision-Making inManagement Education" is officially out in Management Teaching Review. It is intended for an audience of educators interested in experiential learning and interdisciplinary practice. This project was fun to build, and here's the story behind it.

In management education, we talk a lot about collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. We assign case studies about it, discuss it in class, expecting students to absorb the value secondhand. What we rarely do is give them a chance to actually practice it. Part of the problem is logistical - it's not easy to get students from different disciplines into the same room, working on the same problem, within the constraints of a normal semester.

Case studies provide a holistic perspective but remain somewhat vicarious. Students analyze someone else's situation without feeling the friction of real collaboration. Role-play gets a bit closer, but it usually happens among peers who already share a disciplinary language. The real challenge of communicating across genuinely different professional trainings, each with its own assumptions and vocabulary, does not get trained or tested.

Jillian, my coauthor, works in Social Work, where IPE has been used for years to train students from different health-related fields to collaborate on shared problems. The WHO defines it as students from different backgrounds learning together, with interaction itself as a central goal. It's designed to reduce professional silos and prepare people to work across them before they hit the workplace.

It seemed like a natural fit for management education, so we adapted it: we paired graduate Management students in the MSHROD course with Social Work students. We gave them a shared, realistic problem to work through together: a grocery store chain navigating the operational and human strain of the COVID-19 pandemic. This multidimensional problem does not resolve cleanly from a single disciplinary lens; that was exactly the point.

The exercise allows students to make real mistakes in a low-stakes setting, and asks them to reflect afterward on what those mistakes revealed. That process of collaboration and reflection matters as much as the exercise itself. Students reported a deeper appreciation for interdisciplinary collaboration, fewer assumptions or stereotypes about the "other" field, and a better sense of what multi-stakeholder problem-solving actually requires in practice.

So here is the pedagogical model we think other educators can adapt. It is a way to prepare students for the kind of complex, cross-functional problems they'll eventually face in real workplaces, not just discuss them in theory.

If you teach in management, HR, or social work, or any other discipline and want to try a version of this exercise yourself, the full case is available in the July issue of Management Teaching Review (note it's paywalled unless your institution subscribes).

Jillian and me, taking obligatory selfies while we collaborate!