Learning from Anxiety in the Classroom

Business schools, like other organisations, promote the view that they are rational enterprises in which learning occurs in an emotion-free manner. We propose that this leaves students woefully unprepared for the realities of work life because organisations are places in which politics, emotion and the unconscious influence how the work task is performed. The exercise we describe below is one way in which the hidden dynamics of work may be surfaced and explored in the classroom.