The Courage to Be an Exceptional Leader: Designing A New Leadership Strategy

• In Event: Creative Strategies for Leadership Development

Short Description

Have you ever wondered how you could courageously design exceptional leadership into your own leadership practice? Join us as we share insights from five scholar- practitioners who have focused their collective efforts toward helping leaders use design thinking principles to expand their personal leadership and organizational capacity.

Detailed Abstract

Today’s organizations face many complex problems and as such, they need strong and effective leaders who can lead change, sustain amidst complexity and ultimately help the organization thrive (cite ELBD). It is imperative that leaders empathize with stakeholders, clearly define problems, develop a set of potential solutions, and create small-scale and large-scale tests of these solutions for fully implementing them. Unfortunately, this is not how organizations typically operate (Beach & Lipshitz, 2017; Simonofic, Stupple, Gale & Sheffield, 2017). In today’s competitive and uncertain environment, short-term decisions frequently circumvent long-term vision and strategies. This session is grounded in the design thinking framework, as see in Figure 1 below, a method of creating, implementing and measuring the outcomes of organizational interventions and change.


Figure 1. The Design Thinking Framework

Design thinking was first articulated by Dewey (Buchanan, 1992) and was primarily utilized for product design. Today, design thinking is being applied in organizational functioning, technology, education (Gordon, Rohrbeck & Schwarz, 2018). Design thinking is thought to be the next competitive advantage (Martin, 2009), yet knowing how to implement a design thinking strategy can be difficult. This session will offer tangible actions leaders can initiate and deliver that will move their teams and organizations forward using design thinking principles.
The design thinking framework includes five main activities as outlined in Figure 1. Briefly, each of the activities is described below:

Empathize. Design thinking starts with empathy, though which leaders can learn about what people (stakeholders) want and need. Knowing how to connect with people’s emotions, and empathize, provides leadership and market knowledge, which is essential in today’s complex environment. Through empathy, we can begin to truly ‘see’ the intangible problems more clearly and understand them from multiple viewpoints.

Define. Once the problem becomes clear through the empathizing, we can begin to ‘chart’ potential iterations of the problem and ultimately fully define the problem. Because we have taken the time to listen to our stakeholders and understand their emotions, we can now fully define the problem. Typically, this phase of the process includes the use of design artifacts such as charts, diagrams, sketches and any other physical manifestation of the problem. Once the intangible problem can be physically seen and maneuvered, it is easier to understand. The physical, or design artifact, can be broken into separate pieces, moved about, and used to formulate ideas about how to solve the problem.

Ideate. Now, with the problem clearly defined, leaders can proceed to creating potential ideas that contribute to a set of solutions. This is the ‘blue sky’ phase of the process, and because we remain linked to our stakeholders and fully understand the problem, we can generate meaningful ideas that move us closer to an effective solution.

Prototype. With a set of fresh, new, ideas before us, we can start to narrow the pool of options. Which idea is the most feasible, cost-effective, enduring, logical, etc….? The beauty of prototyping an idea, or set of ideas, is that we make small investment in them rather than sweeping organization-wide changes. If a prototype fails, then that is more information for leaders to use and learn from.

Test. Through the process of prototyping, we can learn what works and what does not work well. The testing phase winnows down the set of ideas, prototypes, and evaluates them over time. Leaders have data, from testing the prototype, to help inform large-scale investments in solutions – solutions that were developed using empathy, a well-defined problem, a set of strong ideas, a few good prototypes, and finally, testing for effectiveness.

Participants

• Jennifer Moss Breen, Creighton University
  Presenter

• Gloria J. Burgess, University of Washington
  Presenter

• Robert Elkington, Global Leadership Initiatives, Inc.
  Presenter