MBA programs -- especially in the first year -- are set up along functional lines, with each area presenting problems in its own light and using its own paradigmatic examples. As a result, managerial problems look like pure accounting problems in accounting classes, and like pure psychology problems in organizational behavior classes.

But when students graduate, they go to work in organizations where problems are not labeled by discipline. Solving finance problems has implications for organizational structure, technology strategy, and the psychological landscape of key groups in the organization. The role of the Marcel Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking is to cultivate managerial and academic thinking that spans functional and disciplinary boundaries and stimulates managers and academics to think across -- and beyond -- narrowly-defined problem spaces.

The Centre will focus on the development of courses that allow students to take in larger vistas of the organizational problem landscape. Its activities will lead us to a more precise articulation of the cognitive and emotional proclivities entailed by integrative thinking.

Many key advances in the social and natural sciences have come from 'outside' of the fields that celebrated them. Yet, this 'outside' aspect often feels menacing. Part of the Centre's mission is to reduce this perception of menace by creating structured dialogue between academics from different disciplines.

The cross-functional agenda of the Centre does not run counter to specialization in one or more areas. It does not mean that Rotman graduates cannot become excellent traders, or game theorists or mathematicians. Our goal is to provide students with an ability to move seamlessly from one functional 'lens' to another, and to switch lenses effortlessly. The CEOs who have spoken in the Rotman Integrative Thinking Seminar Series can do this, even if they don't think about it. The role of the Centre will be to think about this skill, to study it, and to attempt to figure out how they do it.

The Desautels Centre will bring together scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and philosophy in an effort to identify common research agendas. It will engage in live studies of the thought patterns of successful managers and other practitioners, bringing insights from the field into the MBA classroom -- and into the live consciousness of future managers.

If successful, the Desautels Centre and the Rotman School will come to be recognized globally as successful innovators in business education and organizational studies. The intellectual capital generated by the Centre will be used well beyond the Rotman School. Its workshops and colloquia will be recognized as having devised productive, insightful new streams of research in the social sciences. And the Rotman School will be recognized as a global centre of academic excellence in the study of managerial cognition and organizational change and adaptation.

-Mihnea Moldoveanu
Director, Marcel Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking and
Assistant Professor of Strategic Management

Click here for Prof. Moldoveanu's biography.