Design Thinking Leadership & Culture

This unit prepares learners to embed design thinking into organizational practice by developing inclusive teams, decision protocols, and a tolerance-for-failure culture that accelerates innovation. Students practice interviewing, team staffing, rapid decision methods, and follow-up systems to make outcomes measurable and sustainable.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze organizational culture and team dynamics to identify at least three specific barriers and three enablers to effective design thinking implementation, citing evidence from interviews or observations
• Apply structured decision-making tools (for example, Six Hats and a rapid-decision template) to two design-team simulations, documenting decisions, rationale, follow-up actions, and measurable success criteria
• Demonstrate the ability to recruit and configure diverse, competency-aligned teams by producing a staffing plan and synthesizing findings from a minimum of five stakeholder interviews to justify role assignments
• Evaluate risks and learning opportunities by designing a tolerance-for-failure and postmortem process that includes resistance-mitigation strategies, metrics to curb overconfidence, and procedures for iterative follow-up