(FORTUNE Magazine) – Many "isms" dominate the managerial mindscape: capitalism, Taylorism, cynicism. But one particular "ism" whose potential business impact seems woefully undervalued is tourism.

Yes, tourism is one of the world's largest industries. Eco-tourists venture to the Amazon and the Azores to help save the earth. Artsy tourists tromp through the Louvre and the Coliseum to cultivate their inner aesthete. Leisure tourists hit the best beaches in Majorca, Ibiza, and Cannes in pursuit of the perfect melanoma. Business tourists--as opposed to mere business travelers--are seeing sites and sights that challenge their world-views.

To reinforce his core message about white-collar crime, an accounting professor has his students tour a federal prison. A medical-instruments company takes its customer-service and manufacturing people to hospitals where the devices are actually used--and where they're not. A leading software design firm now insists that programmers and testers alike check out the firm's customer-support centers. A team of factory forepersons shifting to flexible manufacture gets tours of both the region's busiest McDonald's and their city's Michelin three-star French restaurant.

In each case, the tour is meant to provoke a genuine rethinking of fundamental business assumptions. This isn't about "training" or "education" or Outward Bound adventures in character building; it's about going to places you've never been and discovering something about who you are and what you do. Touring doesn't inherently imply profound personal or professional transformations any more than a trip to the Guggenheim confers visceral appreciation of the avant-garde. But in terms of raising awareness, few "isms" are more cost effective.

During the 1980s, America's automobile manufacturers and leading high-tech companies had their notions of quality and inventory radically revised not by scads of hectoring consulting analyses, but by tour after management tour of Japanese factories. Many American managers literally could not believe what they were seeing. Spreadsheets, memos, and presentations weren't compelling enough; you had to be there.

A hundred years earlier, in fact, it was the Iwakura Mission tour of Europe that led to the rapid modernization of Meiji Restoration Japan. This official delegation wasn't doing due diligence of what the West was up to or seeking affirmation of its own preconceived perceptions. The tour successfully evoked the shock of the new.

Organizations that truly want to change in ways that matter surely need managers and leaders--but they also need tour guides. A firm that wants to become more innovative shouldn't be hiring and acquiring innovators or going off to "innovation classes"; it needs to tour those places where meaningful innovation occurs. A company that wants to explore the potential of e-business had better have its managers going on guided virtual tours of Websites to create better contexts for design. Firms that want to wrap higher-margin service offerings around their product lines would be wise to send their most creative service innovators and salespeople to tour their own factories.

But that's obvious. The bolder challenge is to ask yourself where you need to go on tour to better grasp where you should head as an organization. What are the unusual and unexpected places and spaces? What are the "noncommodity" tours--those places far off the well-beaten business paths that merit managerial exploration? After all, if everyone visits the same place, business tourism--like so much of leisure tourism--degenerates into cliche.

So, should the firm's call-center people spend a day at two different urban 911 centers? Will the product designers do a grand tour of European art schools? Maybe customer-service people should visit a home for the mentally disabled. There's a terrific consulting practice to be had in the creation of travel agencies for businesses struggling to change their vocabularies. But more important, there are terrific questions confronting managers who want to go beyond convention. To ask, "What do we want to accomplish?" is no longer enough without also considering, "Where should we go? Who should be going? What do we think we're seeing?"

Michael Schrage is co-director of MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and the author of Serious Play. He can be reached at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.