Sustainability in action: United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (UN PRME)

Gemma Adams Experiential Learning Lead at Cranfield School of Management Alongside her role at Cranfield, Gemma is a freelance sustainability professional working with organisations across business, the public sector, healthcare, philanthropy, civil society, and academia. She supports sustainability leaders and regenerative practitioners to create impact strategies that are more powerful in practice, by engaging our whole intelligence in their design.

“Personal practices and values are often overlooked in traditional management education, but logically, a larger scale of change will only happen if individuals can learn to change how they’re thinking, engaging, and participating. This deep self-awareness of personal values is a very important locus for action, particularly given that the people who come to Cranfield want high profile, high value adding roles in organisations across all parts of the economy and around the world. The magic of what we do in offering a semi-structured experiential learning journey, which is not scripted or prescribed, is that learners have a lot of agency. It becomes a very creative process in which the outcomes and the learning are quite uncertain. We are building their human capacity and the ability to hold the difficulties we are facing in the world to face them and enabling conscious responses to them through their roles.

I feel proud that we have created an experience that seeks to be holistic. Our early understanding of the impacts of the game are also in line with what employers are increasingly asking for. Cranfield has seen the potential for game-based experiential learning, as reflected by my recent employment as Experiential Learning Lead. This university has always been very connected with real world practice and has always had close

partnerships with industry. Cranfield is looking at applicability of skills and is narrowing the gap between the taught curriculum, and the skills the real world needs.”

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