Rationality is Draining Us Dry: Qanat Logic and the Future of Management Education

Our essay calls for countering extractionist approaches in management education to help prepare future leaders to focus on the complex wholeness of phenomena as lived, embodied experiences, rather than treating them solely as objects of rational analysis. To do this, our essay argues that we need to courageously look beyond the boundaries of our Western ways of knowing to include other ways of knowing and being. Business schools increasingly claim commitments to ethics, sustainability, and inclusion while failing to teach students to understand the world around them in all its complexity. We teach students to gain a first-mover advantage, to extract the variable that matters, and to optimise, as if the world offers stable and replenishing resources, while overlooking relational ontologies and systems perspectives. To make matters worse, the financial dependence of business schools on international student numbers has reinforced a universalised model of management education that privileges portability, scalability, and reputation over experiements with relational, place-based learning. Kimsey et al. (2025) argue that the relational worldviews from Indigenous peoples and Eastern philosophies offer a fruitful way forward. In our essay, we build on this argument by drawing attention to ancient Persia and our efforts to use aesthetic approaches (Creed et al, 2020) and alternative times and places as sources of both learning and provocation.