Doubling Down On Soft Skills In The Age Of AI: IMD’s Omar Toulan Reinvents The MBA

Omar Toulan, dean of the MBA at IMD and primary architect of its new innovative MBA program

THE TRIPLE HELIX OF SKILLS IN IMD’S MBA PROGRAM

Toulan describes IMD’s approach as a “triple helix”: functional skills, leadership skills, and now transversal skills. “It’s become the third strand of what defines an IMD graduate,” he says. “A beautiful PowerPoint might have landed you a consulting job eight years ago. Not anymore. Today it’s about convincing others, building trust, and communicating insight.”

He draws inspiration from a passage in Newman’s book that defines education as the cultivation of reason, judgment, and communication—“the same three things,” Toulan says, “that will matter most in the age of AI.”

IMD’s transversal skills module is taught by six professors and guest experts from unexpected fields: a BBC journalist who lectures on storyboarding, a professional voice coach who teaches presence, and an expert on leveraging AI for decision-making. The introductory module is designed more like an executive education program than a traditional course—intense, hands-on, and deeply personal. “The human meeting makes all the difference,” says Toulan. “You can read a report, but when someone helps you interpret it—what to work on, what it really means—you process it differently.”

CHANGING HOW FACULTY TEACH 

The experiment required substantial buy-in from IMD’s faculty. Every course now includes at least one individual assignment—essential for generating personalized data. “That’s not easy,” Toulan concedes. “In some schools, professors guard their courses like fiefdoms. At IMD, we’re collaborative, which allowed us to move fast.”

He and his team constantly refine both rubrics and assignments. “Some prompts didn’t let us evaluate the skill properly,” he says. “We’ve learned that you can’t just ask students to ‘reflect’ on a skill—you have to ask them to apply it.”

They’re even debating merging some competencies—problem-solving and decision-making, for instance—into a single integrated skill. “They’re really two stages of the same process,” Toulan says. “And we might split storytelling into two: storyboarding and storytelling.”

BROADER LESSONS FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Toulan believes IMD’s approach holds lessons for every business school. “In an AI-enhanced world, humanistic skills will become more important, not less,” he says. “Some content skills will be automated, but what makes us unique is our ability to communicate, to reason logically, and to apply contextual judgment.”

That last point, he insists, is crucial. “AI doesn’t know that a manager is on leave for six months or that a client is going through a divorce. Humans bring that contextual knowledge. That’s our advantage.”

He even uses AI himself—for scenario planning. “It saves hours of work generating the possibilities,” he says. “But it’s still up to me to interpret what those scenarios mean for my institution.”

THE INVESTMENT AND PAYOFF

The program’s biggest investment isn’t hardware or software—it’s time. Toulan personally meets dozens of students and oversees every iteration of the skill reports. “If I can help half the class improve, I’m happy,” he says. “I don’t spoon-feed anyone. But if they engage, the improvement is real.”

The technology itself remains internal—IMD’s AI models run within a closed-loop database to preserve confidentiality. “We control our data completely,” he adds. “Everything stays within IMD.”

Applications to the MBA have risen notably in the past year. Toulan won’t claim causation, but he suspects the school’s emphasis on transversal skills–and the visibility generated by Poets&Quants’ awarding IMD the MBA Program of the Year for its innovation–has helped. IMD has since submitted the project for AACSB recognition.

A HUMAN FUTURE FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

Toulan sees the transversal skills initiative as part of a larger mission: reclaiming the human dimension of management education at a time when technology threatens to erase it. “A Harvard degree alone won’t get you a job today,” he says. “You need the skills to do it—the ability to think, persuade, and lead.”

He smiles as he returns to Newman’s 19th-century insight about education: “It teaches us to seek things as they are.”

That line, he says, perfectly captures what IMD is trying to achieve. “These skills—storytelling, presence, judgment, pattern recognition—they’re what let us see things as they truly are. They’re how we make sense of a world that AI can only describe.”

And in the quiet of that insight lies a paradox that defines the modern MBA: The more we use machines, the more human we must become.

DON’T MISS: Poets&Quants’ MBA Program Of The Year In 2024: IMD’s Reimagining Of The MBA or Meet IMD Business School’s MBA Class Of 2024

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