Q&A with Luciara Nardon
Luciara Nardon is Associate Dean, Student Success and Recruitment (Professional Graduate Programs) and a Professor of International Business at the Sprott School of Business. We sat down with her to discuss her multidisciplinary research on thinking, culture, and the conditions that make insight possible.
What attracted you to a career in higher education, and what drew you to the Sprott School of Business?
Learning has always been the draw. For me, an academic career is a structured way to keep learning, keep developing, and keep asking new questions. Teaching, working with new people, and pursuing research all create that continuous learning loop. Sprott appealed to me for its freedom to explore ideas in an interdisciplinary way, without being overly constrained by disciplinary boundaries. That flexibility creates space to pursue questions that do not fit neatly into one lane.
How do you define your research focus, and what does “sensemaking” mean in practice?
Officially, I sit in International Business, and my grounding is in Cross-Cultural Management, which is about how people work across cultures. Over time, my work has increasingly focused on managerial cognition, or sensemaking: how people interpret situations and decide what to do. Sensemaking happens when a situation diverges from what used to be normal. Something challenges the status quo, and you need a new understanding to act. In global mobility, this can look like a professional immigrant who expects to find work based on their experience and education, but cannot. There is a mismatch between expectations and reality, and they need to make sense of that gap to move forward.
How did your research path lead from global mobility to research methods?
The shift came from taking sensemaking seriously as a process. If I want to understand how people make sense, I need to pay attention to the methods I use, because participants are often still figuring things out. Research can become a place for reflection, where sensemaking is supported rather than simply captured. The key idea is that interviews are not neutral. Meaning can be constructed through conversation, not just transferred from participant to researcher.
What does it mean to “support” sensemaking, rather than just “extract” knowledge?
It means approaching the interview as a conversation where knowledge can emerge. I began exploring ways to make thinking more tangible. Metaphors help by externalizing experience: instead of staying “in your head,” you can point to something, describe it, and see it differently. I expanded on that by using drawing, collage, and, more recently, generative AI to create external material that people can manipulate. The consistent thread is the same question: if someone is trying to make sense, what conditions help insight emerge?
What led you to explore virtual reality as a qualitative research method?
The next step was embodiment. If tangibility helps, then the body and its surroundings likely matter even more. Virtual reality creates an opportunity to use space intentionally. Everyday environments are also taken for granted. In a familiar classroom or building, it is harder to notice what the setting is doing. In a very different environment, the influence of context becomes more visible. If you are looking at dinosaurs or standing in a snowy landscape, you notice how those surroundings shape attention, feeling, and reflection.
You described this as a “paradigm shift.” Why?
Because the implication is bigger than virtual reality. The deeper point is that our surroundings shape what kinds of knowledge become possible. If context always influences the conversation, then research is not a neutral container. It is an active condition that can support or constrain sensemaking. That shifts how we think about thinking itself.
You distinguish between an “intervention” and an “intravention.” What is the difference?
An intervention implies that a researcher or leader adds something from the outside to produce a particular outcome. An intravention emphasizes that outcomes emerge from inside the interaction, between the person, the context, their memories, their assumptions, and the moment. You cannot say, “Add dinosaurs, and you will get X.” What matters is the relationship that forms in that encounter, and what becomes possible inside it.
What is one practical takeaway for leaders, teams, and students?
Good thinking does not just happen. It can be supported and facilitated. Mind is not only in the skull; it extends into the world. Use space, movement, and external materials to help reorganize your thinking. Step away from the desk, use sticky notes, sketch, and let the world offer symbols and prompts that you can work with. That is how you design conditions for insight.