Addressing Privilege in Teamwork: Design Tools for Critical Management Education

In this article, we argue that a key diversity issue to be tackled in the classroom is disparity: Some students are more privileged than others, and their inputs are more valued than others’. Therefore, as educators, we need to devise new ways to rebalance benefits and deficits in our classrooms. Complementing critical work on privilege in business schools that has exposed and theorized the problem, we take a practical, By design approach to addressing privilege while avoiding diversity education dilemmas. We propose that such a proactive rather than reactive approach can help mitigate the negative consequences that the exercise of privilege may have on our students’ learning. Specifically, we propose that we can learn from designers how to use tools that help create collaborative, positive-sum environments when conducting team-based activities in the classroom. We present a selection of simple yet powerful design devices: Speaking rules, Problem framing, and Iteration. We discuss how these devices may help address privilege in the classroom with illustrative examples and reflections on the outcomes and limitations of these devices. We thus enrich the underdeveloped conversation on how design methods can be translated and applied to management education.