In this chapter I want to give voice to the ephemeral nature of goodness, and to glimpse how business schools sustain that relational human quality. I am going to explore two perspectives.
First, I will draw on my experience of teaching on an MBA programme. I will focus on a conversation I had with a recent participant of the programme. Here I aim to explore how I worked with the participant and the nature of goodness and value to her.

Second, I will report a conversation with someone who has first-hand recent experiences of what it is like when a programme or a particular pedagogical approach ends. We explore the topic of legacy. The conversation relates to the teaching staff, the participants and also to wider impact and ripples that were felt.

These interviews will be used as reflexive prompts to explore my own engagement and sensemaking in the context of my work in the business school. Reflexivity is a discipline of self-awareness (Cunliffe, 2002, 2009; Hibbert, 2009; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015) or questioning as to what one has said or done; it is a practice of thinking critically of one’s practice, which in turn affects one’s possible practices to come (Warwick & Board, 2013, p. 208). In other words, it is a self-examining process. I will not leave it there, I will amply use the words of my conversationalists, words of others and my own sensemaking and invite you to consider your subjective experience and practice.

The University of Chichester Business School began life in 2002 and in the summer of 2022, 20 years later, the Head of the Business School announced in a team meeting that he was leaving. Weeks later we became part of a larger entity called the Institute of Psychology, Business and Human Sciences. This chapter was not born from this incident, but it is shaped by it. For all sorts of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons people come and go, courses begin and end, and departments are launched, merge or close. In this chapter I am intrigued by the fragile nature of how we nurture learning in a small business school.

Once in a while the conditions are right to attract scholars and students to a particular institution, like attracting birds into one’s garden with handfuls of nuts and seeds. And then for various reasons, people move on, departments and/or programmes close or radically change, and the ‘essence’ is gone. This is particularly the case when that essence emerges through that relational and developmental process between ‘being and doing’ that sometimes occurs, and which is so difficult to articulate.

The questions that intrigue me include: what matters? and what good do we do? Depending on whether you are a student, lecturer or policymaker, your answers may be different. By policymaker, I mean a person who works in education and whose role includes influencing the allocation of resources and the formation of standards, but who is not involved in the day-to-day working with students on their education. It may include senior people in universities, government, regulation or think-tanks.

During my doctoral studies, I found inspiration from Martha Nussbaum, the American philosopher, particularly her book: The Fragility of Goodness—Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Nussbaum, 2001). I found her work useful in understanding people and the goings-on in organisational life. Nussbaum reminds us that how we go about our lives is as much to do with external factors and luck, for good or ill, as with any innate virtues that we have as individuals. In her own words it is important to pay attention to ‘the gap between being a good person and managing to live a flourishing human life’ (ibid., p. XIV). For me, it is the lived interaction between ‘being and doing’, not only when it comes to ourselves, but about how we influence others, and how others influence us. Take the following quote for example: here the focus is on love—not often talked about in organisational life, and perhaps it should be, but here I am drawn to the importance of image and story and the invitation to share experience:

There are some truths about love that can be learned only through experience of a particular passion of one’s own. If one is asked to teach those truths, one’s only recourse is to recreate that experience for the hearer; to tell a story, to appeal to his or her imagination and feelings by the use of vivid narrative. Images are valuable in this attempt to make the audience share experience, to feel, from the inside what it is like.
1 (Ibid., p. 185)

It is worth contrasting this with much that is written in leadership and business discourse, with its focus on straightforward frameworks, matrices and analysis that is detached from the lived, confusing context that we all muddle through and that forms the basis of our own unique story. It is stories, their context and their interpretation that I will focus on here.