Professor Christine Rivers
About
Biography
Christine Rivers is Professor of Mindfulness and Business at Surrey Business School (SBS), University of Surrey. She is a National Teaching Fellow (2021) and recipient of the Distinguished Management Educator Award from the Management and Organisational Behaviour Teaching Society (MOBTS, U.S., 2022). Over the past two decades, she has held a range of senior academic leadership roles at Surrey, including Director of Studies, Founder and Director of the Department for Management Education, Programme Director for the Global PGCert in Business and Management Education, and Associate Dean (Education).
Christine’s work sits at the intersection of leadership, psychology and professional development, with a particular focus on how individuals and systems experience and make sense of complex phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from phenomenology, epistemology and applied psychology, her research explores attention, perception and decision-making in organisational and developmental contexts. Her work is especially concerned with how mindfulness-based approaches can support shifts in awareness, and how digital environments and artificial intelligence are reshaping processes of meaning-making, learning and leadership.
Alongside her academic work, Christine is an executive coach, integrative psychotherapist (UKCP trainee), and yoga and meditation teacher. This integration of academic inquiry and professional practice informs her interest in boundary-spanning approaches that connect disciplines and challenge established frameworks.
Her scholarly contributions span leadership development, management education, mindfulness, and digital transformation. In November 2024, she published Mindfulness and Business Education: Developing Self-Aware Future Leaders (Routledge), which reflects her ongoing commitment to developing reflective, self-aware practitioners in complex environments.
Christine has been actively engaged in shaping management education and scholarship internationally. She has contributed to the British Academy of Management and the Chartered Association of Business Schools in a range of roles, including Special Interest Group Chair, Learning, Teaching and Student Experience (LTSE) Committee member, and working group contributor. She has facilitated leadership and learning sessions for CABS since 2018. From 2021 to 2024, she served on the Executive Board of the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management and contributed to its Teaching and Learning Conference Committee.
She has also held editorial roles as Associate Editor and Special Issue Editor for the Journal of Management Education, and reviewer for journals including Academy of Management Learning & Education. In addition, she has acted as an external promotions assessor and regularly contributes thought leadership and opinion pieces to platforms such as Times Higher Education and WonkHE.
Across her work, Christine is particularly interested in advancing new ways of seeing and understanding human experience in complex systems, and in supporting the development of reflective, adaptive and boundary-spanning forms of leadership and practice.
Areas of specialism
University roles and responsibilities
- People Development Lead (Chair) for Surrey Business School
Previous roles
Head of Department for Management Education (2020-2024)
Affiliations and memberships
programme chair AoM 2024, Chicago
News
ResearchResearch interests
My research explores how individuals experience and make sense of complex phenomena, with a particular focus on attention, perception and decision-making in psychological and health-related contexts. Drawing on phenomenology, epistemology and applied psychology, I examine how mindfulness-based approaches and digital environments, including artificial intelligence, shape meaning-making, therapeutic processes and leadership in both organisational and clinical settings.
Research projects
ADD philosophy is grounded in five inclusive principles for learning and teaching: Explore, create, collaborate, share and reflect. These principles are equally important for students while learning and academics while designing modules. The ADD method is based on five practical steps, identified throughout years of testing and in-depth research on visual usability:
Step 1. Template and content > Unified structured module design template and consistent approach to embedded content
Step 2. Supporting visuals > Individual conceptual module maps with weekly module maps and use of decorative images for content (e.g. weekly agendas, activities, narratives)
Step 3. Learning icons > Integrated learning icons to enhance student learning and signpost particular aspects in both the VLE and learning materials
Step 4. Narratives > Scaffolded learning through guided activities and captured content accompanied by short narratives and hyperlinked content
Step 5. Learning resource sets > Including sets of bite-size videos and deeper learning materials (activities scaffolded with narratives).
While ADD suggests following these five steps to warrant a holistic student experience, each step can also be implemented separately or over time. ADD is therefore a flexible approach to designing hybrid learning and teaching journeys, guided by questions of value and purpose.
While a consistent, templated approach is advocated for all modules on a particular programme to ensure students are able to easily navigate through modules without getting lost or having to adapt to different structures, the team also strongly believe that module personality and academic voice is crucial. These can be achieved by individual bespoke module maps and narratives to support learning. In addition, where face-to-face time is reduced, the use of narratives often replaces corridor chats and pre and post lecture conversations.
Research interests
My research explores how individuals experience and make sense of complex phenomena, with a particular focus on attention, perception and decision-making in psychological and health-related contexts. Drawing on phenomenology, epistemology and applied psychology, I examine how mindfulness-based approaches and digital environments, including artificial intelligence, shape meaning-making, therapeutic processes and leadership in both organisational and clinical settings.
Research projects
ADD philosophy is grounded in five inclusive principles for learning and teaching: Explore, create, collaborate, share and reflect. These principles are equally important for students while learning and academics while designing modules. The ADD method is based on five practical steps, identified throughout years of testing and in-depth research on visual usability:
Step 1. Template and content > Unified structured module design template and consistent approach to embedded content
Step 2. Supporting visuals > Individual conceptual module maps with weekly module maps and use of decorative images for content (e.g. weekly agendas, activities, narratives)
Step 3. Learning icons > Integrated learning icons to enhance student learning and signpost particular aspects in both the VLE and learning materials
Step 4. Narratives > Scaffolded learning through guided activities and captured content accompanied by short narratives and hyperlinked content
Step 5. Learning resource sets > Including sets of bite-size videos and deeper learning materials (activities scaffolded with narratives).
While ADD suggests following these five steps to warrant a holistic student experience, each step can also be implemented separately or over time. ADD is therefore a flexible approach to designing hybrid learning and teaching journeys, guided by questions of value and purpose.
While a consistent, templated approach is advocated for all modules on a particular programme to ensure students are able to easily navigate through modules without getting lost or having to adapt to different structures, the team also strongly believe that module personality and academic voice is crucial. These can be achieved by individual bespoke module maps and narratives to support learning. In addition, where face-to-face time is reduced, the use of narratives often replaces corridor chats and pre and post lecture conversations.
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
Christine supervises MSc and doctoral students in the area of business and management education, mindfulness and leadership.
Teaching
I teach across personal and professional development, leadership and decision-making, with a particular focus on how psychological processes such as attention, perception and awareness shape behaviour and practice. My teaching emphasises reflective learning, encouraging students to explore their own experience alongside theoretical frameworks. I supervise undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students, supporting them in developing critical, reflective and applied approaches to their work.
Publications
Highlights
Rivers, C. (2025). Mindfulness and Business Education, Developing self-aware future leaders - A practical guide. Routledge.
Mindfulness and Business Education: Developing self-aware future leaders is a practical guide for educators and academics with teaching responsibilities in business schools or colleges. Business schools have a responsibility to equip future leaders with the right knowledge and the right skills to make the right decisions, particularly in times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This responsibility can only be met if business schools change the way they teach and develop self-aware future leaders who are grounded in the foundations of mindfulness.
The book is divided into three parts: Why, What, and How. Part One: Why introduces the foundations of mindfulness, draws on the history of business school development, and discusses leadership approaches presently taught in business schools. Part Two: What discusses ways of measuring mindfulness, the need for training business educators as mindfulness facilitators, and the contextualisation of mindfulness in contemporary business topics such as wellbeing, sustainability, diversity, and artificial intelligence. Part Three: How provides case studies and scripted resources for immediate use and implementation in extracurricular or co-curricular activities to design mindfulness-based modules and courses, to introduce mindfulness coaching as part of pastoral care and staff development, and to develop mindfulness-driven business education strategies.
This is an ideal book for those in business education looking to use mindfulness to develop future managers and leaders.
Available from Routledge or Amazon.
Fukami, C. V., Hamilton, A. L., Rivers, C., Holland, A., Brady, M., Fellenz, M., ... & Leben, D. (2025). Human-Centered Business Education in an Artificial Intelligence-Driven World. Journal of Management Inquiry, 10564926251364213.
Leigh, J., Edwards, M. & Rivers, C., (2022), Privilege in Management Education (Editorial): Journal of Management Education Special Issue. Journal of Management Education, forth coming.
towards personalized responsive management education, Martin Fellenz, Sabine Hoidn & Mairead Brady (eds) The Future of Management Education (forth coming, Dec 2021), Routledge.