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!

Teaching Research Methods- one Fake Corporation at a Time.

 I have a complicated and deeply affectionate relationship with MGMT 610 (you can read my earlier post about how I fell in love with teaching Research Methods.  If you haven't read that post yet, go ahead -  I'll wait!).

The official course description of MGMT 610 calls it "the study and application of diagnostic and quantitative methods for problem diagnosis, implementation, and evaluation of the organizational development process and human resource management practices." Accurate, but sounds exactly like the kind of sentence that makes a student's eyes glaze over before the semester has even started.

In reality, beneath the verbiage, it is a course on how to figure out what is really going on in an organization using data! Data, carefully collected and honestly analyzed. It involves statistics, but goes well beyond statistics into the messier, more interesting territory of research design, data collection, and the art of presenting findings to decision-makers. And best of all, this is not a course about talking about using research and thinking about good research design; instead, students can actually get involved with doing real research.

Here is a problem I spent several semesters trying to solve. It is difficult to compress applied organizational research into a college semester. Doing real organizational research properly takes time that a semester simply does not have. One has to find a partner organization willing to be studied, identify a problem that is both meaningful and researchable, design a survey, gain Institutional Review Board approval (which takes more than a few weeks), collect data, and then actually analyze it. It would essentially be a full-time job. Something had to give, and I was not willing to let it be the learning.

So, I built GPV Inc.(If you're curious about GPV Inc., drop me a note -  I'm happy to share more.)

(image Generated by Gemini, 2026)

GPV Inc. (named after a little someone, the most significant person in my life) is a fictional multinational consulting firm, with organizationally messy problems. Not quite the firm you would want to work in, but definitely one that you want to study.  Rising turnover. A culture that worked beautifully when the company was small, but has become increasingly uneven as it has scaled. A workforce spanning four generational cohorts with very different relationships to work, flexibility, technology, and career development. And hovering over all of it, the specter of the Tech-Whose-Name-We-All-Dread.

The case is structured as a choose-your-own-adventure. Students read through the organizational context and then meet the HR analytics team. I designed these characters deliberately- reflecting the diversity students are likely to encounter in actual workplaces across gender, background, and professional orientation. And each one pushes against stereotype rather than confirming it. Each member of the team is investigating a different people management problem, and each problem becomes a potential research project. Students choose the one that genuinely interests them and spend the semester pursuing it.

I chose the contemporary tensions embedded in generational conflict, AI anxiety, questions of psychological safety, and manager effectiveness because these issues are showing up in real organizations right now. Students, with or without workplace experience, tend to recognize them immediately because they are not invented for pedagogical convenience.

The assignments of the course are also designed to scaffold the research process from beginning to end, so that by the time students sit down to write their final white paper, they have already done every component of it - defined their research question, conducted a literature review, built a survey instrument, collected and cleaned data, and run their analyses. The white paper is where it all comes together into something a decision-maker can read and act on. The fictional audience for that paper is Celia Hargrove, GPV's Chief People Officer, who wants findings grounded in data, not intuition, and recommendations specific enough to actually follow.

I wanted GPV Inc to deliver a consistent thread running through the entire semester in the form of a single organizational story that grows in complexity as students grow in capability. That way, every new technique they learn has some context. I hope my students learn about the process of research- in its messy, frustrating, annoying glory!

And I am hoping they also find GPV Inc. genuinely interesting, because exploring how organizations understand their own people and what it takes to get that understanding right is something I have never stopped finding fascinating myself. And I also hope they enjoy the course, even the assignments and research paper, because I certainly had a lot of fun building it.

Smells like a Brand New Semester!

Fall: mellow days, pumpkin spice, and a brand new semester. There’s really no other profession that promises renewal and excitement with such regularity—while still keeping so many things the same.

I love the process of recrafting each new learning term, starting with the syllabus. Over the years, I’ve worked to make mine more visually appealing, and for a while now, I’ve been creating one-page graphic syllabi. But this year? The creative bug bit harder.

My undergrad HR graphic syllabus got a full pirate-themed makeover.

And I even made an intro video for the training and development class!

Naturally, the long-form versions couldn’t just be plain Word documents anymore. So back I went to Canva, where I designed colorful, fun syllabi that (hopefully) spark curiosity.

Here is the link to the Grad Training and Development Syllabus

And here is the link to the Undergrad  HRM Syllabus 

But of course I did not stop there.

An interesting-looking syllabus deserves fun content! So I gave the topics a little more personality. Why not make the students think AND smile!

The Human Resource Management topic list transformed from this 

• Introduction
• EEO and Human Resource Management
• Job Analysis
• Recruitment
• Selection
• Training
• Performance Appraisal
• Compensation
• Benefits
• Employee Safety
• Employee Rights
• Unions
• High Performance Work Systems

to 

• HRM 101: Because Managing People Is Harder Than Herding Cats
• The Rules That Keep the Workplace from Turning into a Lawsuit
• What the Heck Do You Actually Do Here?
• Swipe Right on Talent
• The Resume Hunger Games: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
• Teaching Adults Stuff They’ll Forget by Friday
• The Annual "Awkward Conversation"
• Because "The Joy of Work" Doesn't Pay the Rent
• Perks, Pizza, and Health Insurance
• From "Oops" to "OSHA" in Three Easy Steps
• Boundaries, Breaks, and Basic Decency
• We're All in This Together (Whether You Like It or Not)
• More Work, Better Results, Probably Same Pay

while the Training and development topic list transformed from 

• Introduction
• Strategic Training
• Needs Assessment
• Learning and Transfer of Training
• Program Design
• Training Evaluation
• Training Methods
• Training Metrics
• AI in Training and Development
• Career Management and Development

to

• The Human Upgrade
• Because Winging it isn’t Strategic
• Find the Training Gap (Before it finds you)
• Cooking up Training : Mix Learning, Add Motivation, Serve Performance
• Because Boring is Not an Option
• Report Card Day: Grading Your Training's Performance
• Training Methods Buffet: All You Can Learn!
• The Hunger Games: May the Metrics Be Ever in Your Favor
• Bot to Be Wild: the AI Revolution in Training & Development
• Employee Development: Making Career Dreams Come True

These changes seem surface-level cosmetic. And it took a while to actually enact them! 

But the process made me think more deeply about the content—and how to better engage my students. It reminded me that creativity isn’t just decoration, but a tool for connection.

So here’s to a new semester: full of fresh starts, bold ideas, and maybe even a few pirates.