Curriculum

Program Highlights

The Dynamics of Diversity in Teams

Diversity provides tremendous informational and problem-solving advantages in teams, but only if the interactional dynamics of the team don't prevent that potential from being realized. This case discussion will identify the primary impediments to effective information sharing in diverse teams, and how to address those impediments. This will be a continuation of the previous session with discussion of the cases that have been prepared.

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.

Team Designs: The Big Picture Simulation

In this session you will participate in an organizational simulation in which you will grapple with some of the central challenges of managing groups. Your behavior in the simulation will provide us with data from which derive lessons about the role of leadership and organizational structure in producing effective team work. Come prepared to get your hands dirty, both figuratively and literally.