Weatherhead Executive Education

Subject	Designing Solutions for Innovation and Strategy
Certificate	Designing Solutions for Innovation and Strategy Certificate
Prerequisites	No prerequisites
Cost (Available Discounts)	Individual Participants: $570 by credit card; $595 by check Affiliate/Health Affiliate Partners: One class day per participant

Program Dates	Continuing Education
November 21 , 2008, 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Cleveland, OH Add to Cart Fred Callopy	This program provides continuing education credit for the following professions: PMI Project Managers 6 PDU SPHR Professionals 6 CEU PHR Professionals 6 CEU OHIO CPA 8 CPE

Every day, managers have opportunities to improve their organizations by creating and remaking processes, structures, products, and services. To excel at this, they need to expand on their roles as analysts and decision-makers to become competent as designers. 

This program introduces managers to the principles of “design,” a powerful skill set for flexible thinking and innovation, based on groundbreaking research by Dr. Fred Collopy and his colleagues in the Weatherhead School of Management’s Department of Information Systems.  Although managers’ skills as designers often determine the success or failure of their organizations, we give relatively little attention to developing design skills.  When managers do study designing, they learn to reframe problems, to sketch and prototype their ideas, and to apply the logic of possibilities to see through default situations.  Managers are already deeply engaged in designing as part of their everyday work.  This program builds on their success, helping managers contribute to their organizations at a new level through design thinking, design skills, and design experiences.

Topics

• The potential of designing in management
• Why a design attitude
  • Contrasts with a decision attitude
  • Values practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and appropriateness
  • Differs from both art and science
  • Aids in developing specific design thinking skills
• How design thinking skills enable leaders to
  • Reframe problems to make them solvable
  • Use sketching to help others see their ideas clearly
  • Maintain multiple models of complex ideas
  • Avoid attachment, rigid processes, and other traps to solving ill-structured problems
  • Structure design situations to take advantage of opportunities
    

Learning Outcomes
As a result of attending this program, participants will:

• Understand which problems are most likely to benefit from design
• Learn to apply design models to get started on ill-structured problems
• Become familiar with the logic of possibility
• Avoid common pitfalls that limit creative solutions
• Understand how sketching aids visual thinking
• Learn to balance competing tensions in a design problem

Who Should Attend  
Managers across all functional areas. 

Participants of this program can continue developing design skills in Visual Thinking for Managers, May 20, 2009. 

Level of Prior Knowledge in This Subject Area: None