Curriculum

This course explores organizational knowledge and organizational learning in the workplace. The course will introduce theory, concepts and frameworks to help you understand knowledge sharing and learning within communities and networks of practitioners, the unique attributes of social networking technology as it applies to organizations, and current uses of network technology to change the way people work or learn (i.e., crowdsourcing and personal learning networks). Finally, you will learn to apply course concepts through prototyping, class projects and business cases.

Topics

1. Social-practice perspectives of organizational knowledge and learning
2. Enterprise social networking technologies
3. Communities and networks in organizations
4. Innovative models (MOOCs, communities, personal learning networks, crowdsourcing, narrating-your-work)
5. Prototyping new models
6. Assessing opportunities for new digital solutions to organizational challenges
7. Aligning digital solutions to strategic organizational challenges

Benefits

• Understand perspectives on organizational knowledge and organizational learning and how these perspectives impact approaches to creating and sharing knowledge
• Use an approach to look at enterprise technologies that softens the perception of complexity and continuous change
• Develop your personal digital literacy
• Use MSLOC design process to develop a technology solution to a strategic organizational challenge

Instructors

• Jeff Merrell
• Keeley Sorokti

Overview

This course provides an extended look at the concepts and frameworks commonly used by organization design practitioners and talent management leaders. Exploring these models highlights how to facilitate an organizational redesign, including how to diagnose the system, imagine design possibilities, and construct processes for change. You will apply these concepts to business/non-profit cases to increase your ability to facilitate the work of leadership teams in solving implementation challenges posed by a variety of strategic imperatives.

Topics

1. Organizational Design Models and Their Essential Components
2. Cultural Contexts for Design
3. Building Blocks of Organizational Design
4. Human Factors
5. Talent Management Issues
6. Employee Value Propositions
7. Relationship between Organizational Design and Culture
8. Measurement Processes and Strategies

Benefits

• Gain experience diagnosing and designing with consideration for an organization's strategy, politics, culture, talent and key processes
• Develop awareness about yourself as an organization design practitioner and learn skills that will help effectively enter strategy and design conversations
• Understand how talent management can be aligned with strategy and organization design
• Know which metrics are used for organization design and talent, specifically related to high potential talent tracking and succession planning

Instructors

• Bruce McBratney
• Brad Smith

Overview

This course provides an overview of culture, engagement, and organizational networks. You will explore how these approaches can be used to analyze and solve organizational challenges within the context of shifting organizational structures, new ways of working, and the increasing availability of organizational data. For the final team case project, you will integrate interpret culture, engagement, and social network analysis data and make evidence-based recommendations to senior leadership in support of change.

Topics

1. Evidence-based Decision-making and Problem-solving
2. Organizational Culture
3. Employee Engagement
4. Social Network Analysis
5. Applying Analytics to Solve Organizational Challenges
6. Analytics and Ethics
7. Audience-Focused Data Presentation

Benefits

• Gain experience interpreting and integrating data from culture, engagement, and social network analysis surveys
• Examine and apply culture, engagement, and social network analysis concepts, theories, and metrics used within organizations
• Build skills for generating evidence-based insights to offer practical recommendations about organizational issues
• Practice presenting to an executive-level audience, including effectively framing a problem and persuasively making recommendations

Instructors

• Katerina Carbonell-Bohle
• Ryan Smerek

Overview

MSLOC 456 is the capstone course for the Designing for Organizational Effectiveness Certification. Through the first three academic quarters of the certification sequence, you follow MSLOC design methodologies to facilitate the ongoing development of your culminating project, a case that defines a strategic organizational effectiveness problem for a real-life organization and proposes and tests an innovative, enterprise-level solution. In this course, you will put the final touches on your solution design and develop a plan to use an iterative process that relies on prototypes or experiments to gather fast feedback during the early stages of implementation. The course includes feedback and critique on your solution and plans from your Certification cohort peers, your mentor and instructors.

Topics

1. Defining the strategic solution narrative
2. User experience and journey mapping
3. Prototyping and experimenting strategies
4. Stakeholder management
5. Design thinking for implementation and evaluation

Benefits

• Synthesize and apply concepts from courses and co-curricular certification activities into your organizational effectiveness challenge
• Complete an innovation solution design and implementation plan for your case organization
• Get feedback and insights from experienced practitioners on your solution design and plans
• Develop your organizational effectiveness point of view and toolkit

Instructors

• Jeff Merrell
• Teresa Torres

Prerequisites

• MSLOC 430: Creating and Sharing Knowledge
• MSLOC 435: Designing Organizations
• MSLOC 455: Applying People Analytics

DOEC candidates must also complete certificate-specific co-curricular work during the first three academic quarters of the program. Co-curricular activities require approximately 6-10 hours of additional work each 10-week academic quarter.