Understanding Organizational Strategy and Capabilities is a 4-week online course that will explore the strategic perspective on leading change, teaching formal strategic thinking, dynamic work design, and visual work management.
This course will introduce you to MIT’s honed concept of “Dynamic Work Design”, which allows teams to drive an organization's mission forward successfully while prioritizing products that create value for the end-user. You will develop new processes by using the Four Principles of Dynamic Work Design to decompose your product systems into individual tasks, relationships, and entities to more effectively organize and conceptualize your work.
The course is well-suited for ambitious technical professionals and entrepreneurs in business, industry, government, and other organizations at all levels looking to advance their soft skills, add value to their teams and organizations, effectively lead change, and perform to their highest potential.
The coursework features video lectures, real-world case studies, and interactive projects, with a focus on peer-review as an application of the course skills. Assessments include numerous practice activities—with immediate feedback—and learning scenarios, followed by self-reflection and discussion with peers and course TAs.
The course will establish the relevance and importance of organizational strategy and the notion of capability, and their impacts on implementing change. You practice aligning teams, products, and efforts with organizational strategy.
In the first week, you will be introduced to formal strategic thinking and identify the key elements of strategy, using implementation examples from the Broad Institute and other case studies, before exploring your own organization’s strategy. You will learn how to create strategy and grapple with the interplay between your work and the strategy of the organization you work within.
In week two you will learn to understand and analyze products as systems, identify where, how, and for whom products create value, and how systems can fail. You will break down a product into its component systems to identify and analyze its component parts and subsystems.
In the third week, you will be introduced to the notion of capability as an analytical framework for evaluating organizational strategy. You will explore the reasons that organizations struggle with implementing change, adopting new tools, processes, and strategies, and leverage the Dual Process model of cognition to understand and implement successful work design strategies. Finally, you will begin to be introduced to the fundamental principles of the Dynamic Work Design framework.
In the fourth week, you will focus on fully understanding the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design. You will explore the four principles, using real-world case studies to provide examples of challenges and solutions relevant to each, and learn how the framework can create effective visual management.
This course will create an understanding of the importance of a strategic perspective on leadership and change, providing a rational basis for understanding the structure of your organization and the interplay of strategy, planning, and work design. You will gain the skills needed to be a successful leader and establish effective strategy.