On the Neglect of Fallibility in Management Learning and Education: From Perfect to Adequate Managers

Fallibility is an integral yet silenced aspect of the lived experience of managing. While this is to the detriment of learning, management educators also collude in this silencing. In this essay, I propose that a process philosophical perspective offers educators one resource that can voice, legitimize, and foreground the fallibility central to management practice to unleash its learning potential. I offer three contributions. First, I highlight how a processual lens allows us to see managerial fallibility anew as an inevitable effect of a world which is constantly “becoming,” rather than as a sign of individual weakness which is pathologized and denied. Second, I show how this rethinking invites an alternative focus for management practice—one that avoids the pursuit of perfection and instead focuses on “practical adequacy.” I suggest that this expands the possibilities for management practice by providing a relieving power that enables managers to work with, not against, fallibility. In doing so, I highlight the unstated value of the processual lens as a resource for coping. Third, my call to action considers how management educators might embrace fallibility to reimagine their teaching stance, content, and methods to lay the foundations for the development of the “adequate manager.”