Design Thinking for Innovation by University of Virginia  Final Assignment by Anna Russo  July 19, 2020

Final Assignment by Anna Russo

Challenge

I am an HRBP & OD Manager at a desalination and water treatment  organization. we are spread over 5 different geographies. Within my  responsibilities are the complete training and development of our ~450  employees worldwide. Organizational development holds many different areas.  For this assignment I focused on the managers development program, which I  build based on my own agenda, OD trends that I collect, and statements  regarding performance from managers in our routine meetings, or from the  performance management review process.

Managers Development programs usually try to gather the employees and not  only teach them techniques but to become a group of associates, that opens  about managerial issues and dilemmas. In the current state that gathering is  banned creating a 6 meetings program seems unreal.

Selection

I decided to try a learning launch. with all the data I collected, after my team  gathered and thought together what our possibilities are, I decided to try a first  session for our Team Leaders that will be on-line and will try to achieve our  managers development goals.

Application

I set a date and scheduled the meeting. Found a sales and marketing manager  to share a case study regarding decision making. We built the presentation  together by colliding the theoretical background with the actual way decisions are  made in my company. Exploring our GO-NO-GO procedure.

Instead of a serious of meetings I built just the learning launch. Tried to set  specific slides for queries so that people will not be silent during this session and  they will have to participate.

When the session started, I asked all participants to turn their cameras on, and  explained that although it’s an online session this isn’t a lecture. And I expect  them to share and participate as they would have done in a regular gathering.

Design Thinking for Innovation by University of Virginia  Final Assignment by Anna Russo  July 19, 2020  Insight

I think that by taking this learning launch I got out of the freeze situation that is  very present in the learning and development zone.

Having to switch to on-line approaches isn’t easy and made me build this session  in a different way then I’m used to. It took a lot of thinking how to keep it short-  since people are bored easily sitting in front of the computer, interesting- by  switching between theory and real life on every aspect, and engaging so that  people will actively participate and form a meaningful group of people. This  worked great and gave me a lot of courage to try do things in different and new  ways.

Approach

I think I’ll have more courage next time and I will try to take the participants to the  next level of participating by giving them to lead some of the meeting, make them  prepare materials and create an on-line discussion that is even deeper. The  course made me realize that there isn’t just one way of doing things and that  there is more then what we are used to. Allowing myself to think in a more  holistic way, collecting the data in order to gather a new perception is what I take  with me in order to enlarge that picture more and more.

