Gaining flexibility in expertise through executive education: tuning schemas in design thinking

Executive students come to class with cognitive schemas that reflect their domain expertise. When these schemas are entrenched, they can impede creative idea generation, multiperspectival problem-solving, and adaptation to organizational change. With its emphasis on surfacing schemas, design thinking (DT) within executive education represents a potentially powerful way to address the apparent trade-off between expertise and flexibility. We studied three DT executive education courses to answer how, if at all, executive students' schemas change during DT education. Drawing on constructivist learning theory, including the learning modes of assimilation, tuning, and restructuring, we found that tuning in particular fostered flexibility in expertise. Our study contributes to the DT literature, executive education, and the expertise versus flexibility debate, and provides advice on how management educatorsmight revise howthey teach DT and similar topics.