Leadership Dynamics

The Certificate in Leadership Dynamics focuses on the challenges of leading in today’s complex and volatile world. Its courses are based on contemporary research and theory and informed by case studies from some of the most complicated and adverse situations, and they take a fresh look at the concept of leadership. They offer clear and practical guidance for leaders who must function in conditions that are daunting and ever-changing. Courses include:

The Contemporary Leader: Leading in an Age of Complexity 

Since the 17th century, our collective sense of the universe has been dominated by a paradigm of the world—and organizations—as machines capable of prediction and control. In reality, however, we must operate, survive, and succeed in a world of great unpredictability and complexity. In this course, we use the foundation of the “new sciences” to explore some of the critical challenges and issues of contemporary leadership and to make a case for a new breed of leader and strategic thinker. 

• From Newton to Quantum: The new challenges of leadership  
• Primary functions of 21st century leaders 
• Transformation Theory and organizational breakpoints 
• Wicked complexity, butterfly effects, and tipping points 
• The need for leaders at all levels 
• The centrality of vision and values 
• Leading successfully in complex systems 
• Three challenging gaps and the potential for backsliding 

The Leader-Follower Dynamic: A Contemporary Perspective 

This course takes a fresh—and challenging—look at the concepts of “leader” and “follower” and offers a new interpretation of their dynamic relationship. We will pay special attention to the critical element of motivation, consider why many traditional approaches have been counterproductive, and offer instead three potent motivators for 21st century professionals. This course invites participants to thoughtfully reconsider the nature of leadership and, if appropriate, to “redesign” their style in order to be a more effective leader. 

• The true nature of the leader–follower relationship 
• Rethinking the concept of power 
• What leaders and followers want and need from each other 
• Fluid leadership: why a chaotic world requires followers to be leaders and vice versa 
• The critical differences (and conflicts) between leadership and management 
• Context, leadership styles, and the potential for a mismatch  
• Two kinds of motivation and some very counterintuitive research findings 
• Empowerment or liberation? – Google, Michelin, and the USS Santa Fe 

Influencing and Inspiring: Essential Skills of Leadership

Some theorists explicitly define leadership as the art of influence; but even if they are not equivalent, influencing, inspiring, and channeling the motivation of others are surely essential skills of effective leaders. Addressing upfront the challenge of changing minds and the bases for resistance, this course, which is packed with proven principles and tactics, will enhance participants’ ability to affect the thinking and behavior of others in order to achieve the organizational mission, gain acceptance for new ideas, or tackle challenging problems.

• Three-dimensional persuasion
• Diagnosing the problem: resistance, reluctance, or apathy?
• Seven principles and three paradoxes of influence
• Recognizing thinking styles as avenues of influence
• The power of loss aversion and how to deal with it
• Marketing, nudging, and swaying: gaining acceptance and approval
• Influence levers and a portfolio of 50 persuasion techniques

Leading (In) a Culture: Aligning Energies for High Performance

Organizational culture is the milieu in which members perform and through which they generate results. Culture powerfully affects motivation, shapes behavior, and can “eat strategy for lunch.” Accordingly, it should be an essential, ongoing focus for leaders. And it need not be viewed as something amorphous or unwieldy. This course operationalizes culture, examines motivational issues, and offers models and guidelines for the positive evolution of the organization.

• The nature and power of culture
• Systems as the shapers of behavior
• How cultures form and change
• The relationship of culture, vision, and strategy
• Affecting change at three levels
• Shaping culture in large and diverse organizations
• The leader as social architect

Mindpower: Tapping the Genius of Teams

When we think of diversity, we usually do not consider thinking styles. Yet considerable research reveals that most people have a strong natural tendency as to how they process the world, learn, solve problems, and make decisions. In this course, we begin by recognizing our personal thinking preferences and then examine other styles and modes. We will see how we can be more successful as individuals and how we can amplify the performance of teams and organizations by learning how to better communicate with, persuade, and engage others on the basis of their styles.

• Personal thinking, learning, and decision-making styles
• The strengths and potential limitations of various styles
• Engaging with and influencing people with different styles
• Gaining acceptance for programs and ideas
• Avoiding conflict by respecting style preferences
• Real teams versus work groups and how those teams evolve
• Enhancing performance by leveraging the power of the “whole brain” of the organization

Expert Decision Making: Hard Thinking for an Uncertain World

Professional and personal success depends on our ability to make good decisions, frequently under great stress and time pressure. This prompts three questions: How do we actually make decisions? How should we make decisions? In what ways might we improve our decision making? This course will show that the answers to the first two questions may be surprising and worrisome. We will, therefore, focus on providing core principles and effective techniques that answer the final question and move us toward expert ability in decision making.

• Decision thinking versus decision making
• Two major systems of cognition
• Three forms of intuition
• Expertise and the Recognition-Primed Decision Model
• Combining analytical and intuitive modes
• Cognitive pitfalls and how to avoid them
• Improving group decisions
• Defensive Decision Making©

Crisis Leadership: Foresight, Precaution, Prevention

A crisis is an event that has the potential to threaten the whole organization, and crises may originate from many sources and in surprising forms. Utilizing powerful case studies, this course engages participants in the proactive operational thinking that can prevent potential disasters. It points to the factors that can impede a timely response and outlines operating principles from some of the best exemplars of crisis leadership. This is a course on thinking the unthinkable and establishing the culture and operational mindset required to identify and strongly respond to potential catastrophes.

• Categories and configurations of crises
• “Normal accidents” and why they are worrisome
• Weak signals and the need to connect the dots
• Potential devastation from “predictable surprises”
• The mindset of “high reliability organizations”
• Organizational “defense mechanisms” that hinder crisis leadership
• What one person can do

Solve, Resolve, Dissolve: Handling Conflict Constructively

Conflict management is not a nice-to-have skill. In a world with conflict seemingly at all levels of life, it is a critical personal and professional competency. Examining the scope of conflicts at both interpersonal and organizational levels, we will seek to diagnose their causes and review proven approaches for dealing with them successfully. We will especially focus on the challenges presented to organizational leaders, the roles they may have to assume, and the means by which they can manage organizational strife.

• Elements that generate conflict and the dimensions of conflict resolution
• Three levels and five myths of conflict
• Four powerful negotiation guidelines and specific tactics for their application
• The range of handling conflicts: solving, resolving, or dissolving
• The manager’s roles and guidelines for successfully handling organizational friction
• Dealing with conflict in close relationships and really difficult confrontations
• An unconditionally constructive strategy

Extreme Leadership: Leading When It Matters Most

In recent years, considerable research has looked into leadership in extremis, or leadership in the most challenging and dangerous situations. While most organizational leaders will not face physically dangerous circumstances, they very likely will have to deal with situations that will be immensely stressful and challenging for them and their organizations. Learning from those who have succeeded in the most dire situations can be a great help. Using an engaging case studies approach, this course offers research findings, practical techniques, and leadership principles to help leaders deal with extreme challenges.

• Similarities of extreme and non-extreme leadership situations
• Characteristics of extreme leaders
• Developing team viability for heightened challenges
• Preparing for, and functioning in, extreme circumstances
• Coherence, decision making, and self-control under stress
• The two essential aspects of leader credibility
• Critical actions at the time of greatest challenge

The Paradoxes of Leadership: A Seminar for Leaders

Much of the work of leadership is dealing with paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas. Even the concept of leadership can seem paradoxical, as we sometimes expect leaders to take on conflicting roles at the same time. Accepting this reality, this seminar explores some of the key challenges and issues that leaders must resolve. The content of this forum will be generated primarily by the participants themselves as they respond to provocative questions, share their experiences, and delve into some of the thorniest issues that leaders face. These may include:

• In what ways might a leader balance being a visionary with being a realist?
• In what ways might we lead organizations for both stability and agility?
• How might we go from an either/or issue to a both/and resolution?
• In what ways might leaders handle changes in context that threaten their leadership?
• What does a leader do if one constituency favors tradition and another favors change?
• Can centralized control and decentralized leadership coexist?
• Can, or should, a leader maintain consistency in ever-changing circumstances?

The Certificate in Strategic Leadership offers professionals the opportunity to delve deeper into the intricacies of strategy design and the peculiar challenges involved in leading for innovation. The course material is drawn from diverse disciplines including creative cognition, design thinking, expertise research, strategic thinking, and organizational development. The principles and techniques offered have broad applicability, and participants will have in-class opportunities to immediately apply them to authentic challenges of their choice. Courses include:

Sensemaking and Judgment: Critical Thinking for Critical Challenges

The first task of leaders is to understand the challenge before them. In today’s complex and constantly changing world, challenges are likely to be ambiguous, multifaceted, and dynamic. The primary goal of this course is to enhance leaders’ ability to first make sense of their situation and then make the best determination of how to proceed. The essential skills needed for this work are developed in this course: analytical and diagnostic thinking, critical judgment, enhancing and validating individual and team thinking, and avoiding common cognitive stumbling blocks. Key topics include: 

• The nature, value, and process of sensemaking 
• Problem Framing: Enhancing decisions by capturing more reality 
• Problems with problem solving: Some worrisome pitfalls 
• Red Team techniques: Making your team (and you) smarter 
• The Special Operations Command Design Way 
• The foundations of good judgment 
• Metacognition: Thinking critically and strategically about our own thinking 

The Creative Leader: From Imagination to Innovation

Today’s leaders must move teams and organizations into uncertain futures and solve myriad unprecedented problems along the way. This course is designed to enhance the participants’ ability to seek and deal with novel challenges in an insightful and effective manner. Research-based and experience-proven approaches will turn imagination into actionable solutions as participants learn and apply powerful techniques that will enhance their ability to be creative in their leadership thinking. 

• The nature of creativity and the creative process 
• Obstacles to creativity and how to overcome them 
• A proven naturalistic problem solving strategy 
• Creative approaches to analyzing and framing problems 
• Idea Generation: Going way beyond Brainstorming 
• Weird techniques that produce surprising insights 
• Facilitating the creative thinking of others

Strategic Insight: Innovative Thinking in War, Business, Science, and Design

Powerful insights on the battlefield, in the laboratory, or in the boardroom turn out to be remarkably similar in their cognitive nature. Utilizing contemporary research and theory in strategic intuition, this course examines game-changing concepts across a range of disciplines to gain an understanding of how leadership thinking can take surprisingly successful form and how participants can develop and prepare themselves for their own breakthroughs in thinking. 

• Nature and neuroscience of strategic insight 
• Paradoxical solutions to complex problems  
• Learning from some of the best 
• The biggest obstacle to insight and innovation 
• Individual and organizational blocks to overcome 
• Expanding the “problem space” 
• Two modes and five pathways to insight 

Optimizing Strategic Thinking: Enhancing Design and Avoiding Pitfalls

Complexity and unpredictability are the new givens in strategic thinking and project design. Accordingly, strategic problem solving must be reinvented. Rather than relying solely on a problematic (and questionable) analytical approach, contemporary leaders require an empirical/experimental “design” mindset. They must also deal with significant pitfalls inherent in both the human mind and human institutions. Through the medium of several provocative case studies, this course synthesizes theory and guidelines on strategy design, research into individual and group cognition (especially potential vulnerabilities), and lessons from notable strategy successes and failures. 

• Strategy as Design: Selecting and framing the challenge
• “Dancing Landscapes”: Leading in complexity 
• Contemporary Essentials: Agility, flexibility, and versatility 
• Dumb Mistakes: Cognitive, informational, and ego pitfalls 
• Adaptive Planning: Safeguards and strategic protocols 
• Strategy as Learning: Learning while doing 
• The paradox of contemporary strategic thinking 

Leading for Innovation: Forging the Future

In a world of continuous technological development, innovation is a necessity. And in a world of constant turbulence and emerging threat, innovative thinking is a critical survival tool. But leading innovation is substantially different than normal management. This course offers a detailed analysis of the dimensions of such leadership, the varied roles of leaders across the phases of the innovation process, and the critical importance of establishing and maintaining a culture that promotes innovation. 

• The nature and process of innovation
• Three levels of leadership: strategic, operational, and project/team
• Research-based tenets for leading an innovative culture 
• Sustaining innovation by aligning vision, strategy, and culture 
• Obstacles to innovation that must be overcome 
• Forming and supporting high-stakes invention/discovery teams
• Four critical assessments for getting innovation right
• Making innovation normal: establishing an “everyone an innovator” mindset

The Challenge of Change: Leading an Agile Organization 

Leadership is about change and the future. Yet most change efforts do not reach their goals. This course critically examines the strategy and tactics of change leadership. We analyze why most approaches often are not only ineffective, but counterproductive, and why people resist change (if they really do). We examine the power of multidimensional change and how to engage staff to energetically support new efforts. Importantly, we emphasize the need to be an agile organization—one with both the mindset and the capability for continual renewal. 

• Trajectory of change  
• Resistance and the taxonomy of change issues 
• Understanding and changing behavior 
• The power of culture, context, and peers 
• Integrative change strategy 
• Three basic questions and three big decisions 
• Change vectors 
• The psychology of agility

Composing an Innovation Strategy: Essentials and Provocations

Contemporary organizations must recognize that success in the marketplace, or on the battlefield, requires continual innovation. And that innovation cannot be occasional or a matter of good fortune. It must be pursued purposefully, energetically, and constantly—yet also within a context of limited resources and aggressive competitors (enemies). Such a challenge demands a clear and comprehensive strategy. This course offers critical concepts and guidance for developing a successful strategy for innovation.  

• The nature and composition of an innovation portfolio
• Schools and types of strategy 
• Where to look and what to think about 
• Seeking competitive advantage  
• Matching and leading the customer 
• Four types of pitfalls and how to avoid them 
• Developing aggregate strategies 
• Transient advantage and the new playbook 

Innovation by Design: Providing Exceptional Customer Value

Design Thinking is a powerful process that has been adopted by some noteworthy organizations—Apple, Dyson, Cirque de Soleil, the Cleveland Clinic, even the U.S, Special Operations Command. It is a cross-disciplinary approach tightly focused on providing enhanced value and meaning for the customer, but its applicability goes well beyond products or services. As will be demonstrated with multiple examples, it can be used to rethink organizational systems, develop high-impact strategies, and generate transformational innovation. Topics include: 

• The nature of innovation by design 
• Determining customer/client value and meaning 
• Design Thinking: essence, principles, and methods 
• The importance of a meaningful value proposition 
• Simplification and its principles as crucial methodology 
• Applying design thinking to strategic and systemic challenges 
• Three methods of integrative (opposable) thinking
• Traits and capabilities of the leader as designer 

When You’re Asked To Do The Impossible:
Leadership When The Stakes Are Highest

Based on the book of the same title, this course examines why and how some teams succeed at accomplishing the “impossible” time and again. Using diverse case studies, we delve into the composition of such teams and the nature of their leadership. We investigate the four dimensions of high-stakes teams that must be carefully addressed. We scrutinize key competencies, team formation and operations, and the need for fast, ongoing learning. Participants immediately apply lessons to their own initiatives.  

• Dimensions of high-performing organizations 
• Skill and trait clusters 
• Matching the leader to the challenge 
• Leadership: Character, competence, and commitment 
• Respecting and leveraging diversity 
• Forging high-performance teams 
• Nature and quality of organizational support