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In today’s volatile and uncertain business environment, IÉSEG students, as future managers, will inevitably have to manage change, whatever it may be and whatever sector of activity they may be working in. But how do you learn to manage change? Loïc PLÉ (Professor in Strategic Management) and Antonio GIANGRECO (Professor of Human Resources) have designed a completely atypical Change Management course, rewarded by the Prix Jean-François FIORINA for Pedagogical Innovation 2023 of the ‘Conférence des Grandes Écoles’. Their teaching method: to immerse students in a new, confusing and constantly evolving environment, the TechShop.

The TechShop is a fab-lab, that is to say a collaborative manufacturing workshop, fully integrated within the ‘Université Catholique de Lille’. It uses alternative and innovative methods to create, work, collaborate, learn and pass on knowledge, enabling students to develop new skills.

The first stage of this Change Management course, created in 2019, is practice. When they arrive at the TechShop, students discover the premises, then are put into teams and asked to conceptualize an object (for example, a chair), in two dimensions (drawing). During this initial 15-minute phase, the students are given no constraints and generally go very far in their 2D representation. This is followed by a 3D modeling phase, in which students represent their object in scale model format. Then things get complicated, as the students discover that they have to build the same object as their model, but in actual size. For this construction phase, the students are put under constraints of machinery and materials, constraints they can’t escape – just like in real life when they’re faced with Project Management.
Once the object has been built, they face another major change: the market is saturated, so they have to come up with something completely different… only with the materials used on their initial object, taking nothing more… After thinking about how they are going to orientate their new project, they are faced with another change, this time at team level. Finally, just as construction of the new object is well underway, they are offered new materials to enrich it (positive change).

As Loïc PLÉ puts it, “it’s this dimension of tangibility that is extremely important: experiencing change is essential. Indeed, we could talk to them for hours about change, teach them about existing theories and their results, ask them how they themselves experience change in their daily lives, but in the end it would all remain very abstract. The major pedagogical contribution of this course is precisely to be able to experience change concretely together, to be immersed in it for a full day, at life-size, with a very concrete objective to fulfil: to build an object and present it at the end of the day, despite everything they have had to go through.”

After practice, analysis. This phase is also essential, as Antonio GIANGRECO explains: “After putting the students in this situation of change, we analyze together, as a group, how each of them and how the group reacted to change and how they came up with new solutions. Over 3 half-days, we put their reactions into theoretical perspective and provide them with very concrete elements to help them understand why they reacted the way they did, how they perceived things, how they experienced them and, above all, how to improve their reactions to change.“

During these half-days, the students work in teams on a case study that allows them to discover inductively the theoretical concepts of change management, and reflect on their experience at the Techshop, which they put into perspective through these theoretical inputs. Then, they work individually on a Harvard simulation called “Power and Influence”. In the position of a middle manager, they must lead change in a non-urgent context, then in an urgent context, applying the theories presented above. The results of each case study provide further content for thought on how to manage change.

For Loïc PLÉ and Antonio GIANGRECO, “this course offers an atypical learning experience for students, taking them to an unfamiliar place for unfamiliar activities with an evolving scenario that they are unaware of ex ante. It applies Design Thinking methods to a type of course that doesn’t usually draw on them. We used this atypical TechShop venue in an atypical way, for a course for which it was not initially designed. In fact, this venue is usually used by engineering schools. What’s more, this course is transformative and strategic for IÉSEG, as it represents the School’s commitment to constantly innovate in terms of pedagogy, in order to offer a unique and engaging learning experience to students. We are therefore very proud to have succeeded in engaging all the students and in evolving their understanding and thinking of how they experience and lead change. This was a major objective when designing and structuring this active, experiential and inductive learning experience.“