Lab Launches New Online Course in Agile Strategy and Collaborative Leadership

Scott Hutcheson, Associate Director of the Lab, has been working with Wiley to produce a new online course in Agile Strategy and Collaborative Leadership. The course is a component of the new online Masters in Engineering Technology, developed by the School of Engineering Technology.

The course  provides students with a foundation in collaborative leadership in agile strategy. It brings together theories and insights from a variety of different disciplines including engineering, management, and psychology.

Scott designed the course to enable manufacturing managers to navigate the increasingly complex and collaborative environments that cut across organizational units within the firm. The skills will also enable students to design and guide complex collaborations outside the firm. These collaborations are increasingly important as businesses move toward open innovation.

Successful students will be able to:

  1. Design and guide complex collaboration to drive innovation and technical solutions;
  2. Apply an agile approach to achieving strategic outcomes;
  3. Clearly articulate the elements needed to create and maintain “psychological safety”, which is critical to complex collaboration;
  4. Frame strategic  conversations that point participants toward new opportunities;
  5. Understand how to uncover hidden assets embedded in the networks within a team;
  6. Define new strategic opportunities by linking and leveraging assets;
  7. Prioritize strategic opportunities using common sense, practical criteria;
  8. Convert strategic opportunities into strategic outcomes with measurable characteristics;
  9. Define strategic pathways  to new outcomes with Pathfinder projects;
  10. Create shared strategic action plans;
  11. Design short feedback loops to accelerate learning and adaptation;
  12. Learn to nudge, connect and relentlessly promote ongoing collaboration to build new shared habits within a team.