Program Highlights

The Dynamics of Diversity in Teams

You will explore the informational and problem-solving advantages that diversity brings to teams, and learn how to identify and address the primary impediments to effective information sharing and interaction that can prevent those advantages from being realized.

Design Thinking to Drive Innovation

These sessions provide a provocative, experiential, and practical approach to leading innovation. The focus is on developing innovators (versus innovations), so your primary work will be to develop your team members’ capacity to innovate.

The first session exposes you to the principles of human-centered design and leads to a conversation about disrupting the managerial status quo, amplifying your organization’s strengths, and addressing some key weaknesses.

In the second session, you’ll use a design thinking framework to tackle a hands-on team innovation challenge from start to finish.

Leveraging Compositional Advantage: Solve the Murder Mystery

Take part in a live simulation that challenges your strategic abilities to leverage teamwork and information sharing to accomplish a stated goal. The team discussions will be captured on video, allowing groups to analyze their own performance during the debriefing session.

Managing Team Interactions: Synergy and Process Loss

In this session, we will use the context of a group decision-making task to explore the ways in which team members can make their voices heard. In addition, we will identify strategies for structuring teams to improve members’ ability to hear and incorporate divergent and minority opinions.

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are one of the most difficult types of teams to manage. Often, members are in different geographic locations, work in different time zones, and never even meet face-to-face.

In this session, you will work through an interactive exercise to explore the specific challenges of virtual teams, and then identify and discuss the best solutions gleaned from both research and practice to make virtual teamwork a success.