Overview
Discussion: Consider a product or process at a company you work for or are familiar with, and analyze how applying a design thinking approach could have led to different outcomes. How would a design thinking approach have changed things? Consider especially the impact of corporate culture and/or leadership on this.
As appropriate in all graduate writing, be sure to include references where appropriate.
Here is an article that you might find as an amusing guide to what does, or does not, happen in your company: Design thinking and catsLinks to an external site.
Assignment: Design Thinking is all about change management in organizations. This simulation makes you consider how change management can succeed and fail.
Your assignment this week is to run the Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence that you will find in your Harvard Coursepack.
In this simulation, you will play one of two roles (i.e., CEO or Director of Product Innovation) at a sunglass manufacturing firm and face the challenges associated with implementing an organization-wide environmental sustainability initiative.
The simulation includes four scenarios with different combinations of two important factors for creating change:
- The relative power of the change agent and,
- The relative urgency to produce results associated with the change initiative.
In each scenario, you choose among different change levers to persuade key members of the organization to adopt the change initiative. The primary learning opportunity here is to expose you to the critical nature of context when attempting to lead change, and the need to make assumptions but adjust when experience does not support those assumptions. You will be assessed on your ability to achieve the greatest percentage of adopters within the company while simultaneously using the fewest resources afforded to them.
As you enter the scenario, you will see a link to Download Foreground Reading. Be sure to take this important step. Please run the scenarios more than once to try different approaches.
When complete, please submit a short 3-page paper that describes what happened, why you think it happened, what you would do differently, and what you would do if not constrained by the simulation’s boundaries.
Have fun!