Why being right can be wrong: intellectual humility as a key driver of responsible management education

Purpose This article, written for the inaugural issue of the Journal of Responsible Management Education, argues that business schools, in their worthy pursuit of answers to management problems, often settle on one right answer to a problem. Yet rarely is the same answer right for everyone, everywhere and always. The notion of responsibility recognizes that the right answer often depends on the context. It proposes intellectual humility as the capacity that responsible management education most needs to cultivate. Design/methodology/approach The authors, who were the Chair and Vice Chair of the Advisory Board of the UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), develop a conceptual argument drawing on critiques of management education and the literature on intellectual humility. They illustrate the argument with PRME initiatives and extend it to the wider UN Global Compact. Findings Answers to management problems are contextual: they depend on whose perspective is taken and on the scale, place and time at which they are applied. Treating answers as universally right can close people off from others’ views, obscure the harms that emerge when actions scale up or persist and inhibit learning among both students and faculty. Grades, rankings and promotion criteria that reward the single right answer reinforce these tendencies. Originality/value The article reframes responsible management education as the cultivation of intellectual humility rather than the pursuit of a different set of right answers. It shows how PRME’s communities provide a foundation for widening the lens across perspectives, scales, places and time and proposes four research priorities organized around these lenses.