Sensory Templates and Manager Cognition ― Art, Cognitive Science and Spiritual Practices in Management Education

This book explores the role of art and spiritual practices in management education. It takes recent developments in cognitive science relating to the metaphorical and embodied nature of cognition as its starting point. Introducing the concept of ‘sensory templates’, Springborg demonstrates how managers unconsciously understand organizational situations and actions as analogous to concrete sensorimotor experiences, such as pushing, pulling, balancing, lifting, moving with friction, connecting and moving various substances. Real-life management and leadership case studies illustrate how changing the sensory templates one uses to understand a particular situation can increase managerial efficiency and bring simple solutions to problems that have troubled managers for years. Sensory Templates and Manager Cognition will be of interest to scholars and students of managerial cognition, leadership and neuroscience, as well as practising managers and management educators.

Claus Springborg offers leadership development programmes for both groups and individuals with CoCreation, based on work with art and spiritual practices and theories of Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Metaphor Theory. He also leads meditation groups with the Sensing Mind Institute in London, Edinburgh and Copenhagen and at the Findhorn Foundation. He has a background as a dancer (tango and contact improvisation) and a choral conductor. He undertook his doctoral research on art-based methods in management education at Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, UK.