Cognitive Design

The Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX) is hosting an open innovation challenge to identify radical ideas (hacks) and success stories that illustrate  how to dramatically expand the leadership capacity of an organization.  Called the Leaders Everywhere Challenge they believe the key is to redistribute power so more individuals can participate in leadership and to equip and motivate emergent leaders to be effective without formal authority.

My entry is titled Using Micro-learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders.  It demonstrates with a success story how you can use cognitive design to do interesting things in leadership development. Check it out and please leave your comments. I’ve copied an extend summary below.

Leadership emerges, rather than being assigned, when someone is passionate about making things better and has strong positive influence skills. At Northwestern University I teach professionals in a variety of graduate programs the art of influence using a novel micro-learning method.  The goal is to equip and energize them to lead even when they lack formal authority.

The method breaks complex learning content into small actionable chunks called knowledge cards. Each card includes a motivating title and quote and teaches one technique that can be practiced in situ with just a few minutes of effort.  Participants learn to author, share and use knowledge cards to experiment with and eventually master proven practices for building influence.   Participants assemble decks of knowledge cards to script a small-steps learning experience that accumulates over time into macro-scale skills and habits. The process is enabled by social networking software and a mobile app. It reaches deeply into the workplace and continues after the course is completed.

Taking  a micro-learning approach brings the concept of leadership out of the clouds, demonstrates that personal and network power can be used to influence organizational outcomes and provides a small-steps talent development method that can be integrated into a busy lifestyle.

Participants have created over 438 knowledge cards covering the nine competencies of influencing when you are not in charge. Two thirds of participants that completed the program and a survey reported that knowledge cards had a high or very high impact on their development of influence skills.

The knowledge cards micro-learning method is currently being applied to other aspects of leadership development (e.g. improving emotional intelligence and innovation) as well as behavior change challenges in other domains.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Behavior Change, Events, Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.