An interview with Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt

Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, director of OZI (Ortrun Zuber International P/L, specializing in Academic and Management Staff Development, Leadership Programs, Postgraduate Research Training and Supervision, including Qualitative Research Methods, is interviewed. Zuber-Skerritt discusses issues of management education through methodologies that foster lifelong learning, generic problem-solving skills, creative and innovative thinking, as well as systemic and critical thinking, networking and collaborative inquiry and decision making in crises and unknown situations. These learner-centered methodologies and processes are particularly useful to management education and organization development in these times of rapid change and global knowledge explosion. Zuber-Skerritt says what sparked her interest initially in these methodologies was that they all aimed to help and empower learners to use, and build on, their existing knowledge and to identify what it was they actively wanted to explore/learn/develop. This facilitated a process for learners to be able to achieve these aims and even to create new knowledge, based on both their experience and active inquiry, reflection and conceptualization.