Curriculum

This course addresses human performance at the individual level with an emphasis on understanding how adults learn and change as well as the dimensions that foster learning and optimal employee performance in organizations. Accelerating Learning and Performance will build your proficiency as a coach or practitioner in using developmental leadership tools to diagnose performance gaps/enhancement opportunities and increase employee as well as one’s own personal effectiveness in the workplace. Students engage in an experiential team project that applies the course content to a current learning culture challenge in an organization of the student team’s choice. Expected course outcomes are to understand what learning means as an individual, how to diagnose and solution for learning challenges individuals face in the workplace, how to help organizations focus on learning as a competitive advantage, and personal and professional self-growth.

• Robert Corbett
• Eric Fridman
• Ryan Smerek

Advancing Learning and Performance Solutions explores human performance at the team level, examining team learning as a driver of both team and organizational performance. Teams are a fundamental learning unit in modern organizations and a key source of competitive advantage in continuously changing environments. This course will introduce tools to analyze, improve, and measure team processes and effectiveness. The course has a combined focus on practice and theory anchored in research. Students will complete an individual research project and a student team business case project to advance their skills in identifying complex team challenges and recommending and evaluating solutions. Expected course outcomes are proficiency in techniques to diagnose organizational team challenges, improve team dynamics, build sustainable solutions, and to utilize academic literature and research for professional application as well as the MSLOC Capstone requirement.

• Sujata Kankanhalli
• Shaun Slattery
• Melinda Turnley

Applying People Analytics focuses on solving organizational challenges by applying data to make evidence-based recommendations and guide decisions. This course highlights issues-based consulting as a framework to ground learning about data in the work of LOC practitioners. Culture, engagement, and social network analysis (SNA) surveys are featured as examples of organizational data. The class provides introductions to these methods along with opportunities to explore data samples, generate evidence-based insights, and make practical recommendations. A multi-component case project guides student development of consulting skills and techniques for interpreting and presenting results to senior leadership. The course also explores what types of questions can be effectively answered using data and the ethical considerations of using data to solve organizational problems. By the end of this course, students will be adept at identifying and measuring LOC business issues, telling stories with data to persuasively and effectively to inform organizational decisions, and utilizing concepts and theories on culture, engagement, and SNA for organizational recommendations.

• Katerina Bohle Carbonell
• Ryan Smerek

Cognitive design is about understanding human cognition—drawing from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics — to design solutions that bolster the achievement of personal and organizational goals. Throughout this course, students will learn how the mind works, its many biases and heuristics as well as how to overcome the mind’s decision-making flaws. Ultimately, with a better understanding of what influences human judgments, decisions, and actions, LOC practitioners can design impactful processes and programs for employees and organizations. Students will work on project teams to tackle a current business decision challenge of their choice that is governed by biases to design a cognitive framework for improved organizational decision making. Expected outcomes of this course include understanding how the human mind makes judgments and decisions, advanced design thinking strategies, and how to build mechanisms that can help overcome cognitive biases and improve performance and decision making in organizations.

• Ryan Smerek
• Bob Tweedie

In Creating and Sharing Knowledge, students will develop an understanding of how to define knowledge within organizational settings and how it applies to individuals and communities or networks of practitioners. A significant focus is placed on assessing how knowledge is created, shared, and leveraged in organizations and the role of technology in enabling those practices. Application of course concepts to current organizational issues is achieved through various case studies as well as a team course project in which students diagnose and design a technological solution to transform creating and sharing practices for a global organization. Expected course outcomes include the ability to define knowledge in workplace settings, awareness of the impact of communities and social networks, enhancement of personal digital literacy and innovative digital learning models, ability to assess opportunities for digital solutions to organizational challenges and the development of social technology solutions that address strategic needs of an organization.

• Samir Desai
• Jeff Merrell
• Keeley Sorokti
• Lisa Tallman

Designing Sustainable Strategic Change focuses on utilizing components of design thinking to develop organizational changes that are sustained over time in rapidly changing complex environments. Topics covered include an overall model of sustainable change, how the design process and design thinking integrate with organizational change principles and methodologies, using qualitative research to design change problems and build a case for change, participatory methods for strategic planning and large-scale systems change, and power/politics and coalition-building in the change process. Expected course outcomes are to understand how to increase an organizations capability for adaptability and innovation through non-traditional change management processes and data gathering, recognize the dynamics of culture in discovery, design, and success of sustainable organizational change and optimizing design tools and methods in the service of planning intended long-lasting change at multiple levels of the system.

• Dorie Blesoff
• Maggie Lewis

This course serves as an introduction to strategic change and will provide students with fundamental change models, concepts, and tools for facilitating strategic change in various organizational contexts. Students will examine how to identify organizational change needs, select appropriate models and steps to utilize, build a change strategy, and measure change impact all through the lens of a change agent and leader. In addition, the challenges associated with change implementation and adoption are examined. Various business case studies are explored in which individual students and student teams will conduct critical change analysis and strategy recommendations. Expected course outcomes include the practical application of strategic change models to business challenges, adoption of a proactive stance to barriers to strategic change, and the ability to understand the challenges and complexities of incorporating significant change at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

• Ahmmad Brown
• Vanessa Seiden

Throughout their career, LOC professionals are often called to formulate a strategy to address emerging challenges and opportunities, think and act as a strategic leader to support the organization’s strategic intent, drive needed change, and develop a people strategy that aligns with the organization’s strategy. Leading With Strategic Thinking is designed to prepare LOC practitioners to successfully tackle such requests. Expected outcomes of this course include the ability to apply cognitive psychology, systems thinking, and game theory principles to the assessment of surrounding context when formulating and executing a strategy, apply strategic leadership behaviors to organizational development, incorporate LOC principles and considerations into strategy formulation and execution and properly evaluate an enterprise-wide strategic plan to identify and solve for potential limitations.

• Terrence Roche
• BK Simerson