Faculty
Daved Barry, Professor of Creative Organization Studies; and Stefan Meisiek, Associate Professor of Leadership

Course Coordinator
Daved Barry

Undergraduate courses in business—especially management courses like general management, organization theory, organizational behavior, HRM, strategy, and marketing. The graduate course “Integrated Business Design” (taught by Professors Petra Schubert and Susan Williams) would be a helpful though not required supplement.

Over the last decade, design thinking has made major inroads into how organizations are developed and managed; creative companies like IDEO, Google, Alessi, Benetton, 3M, and B&O are placing arts-based research methods and design thinking at the center of how they do business. Areas like service and product design are now being supplemented by designerly approaches to strategy, new ventures, branding, organizational structure, organizational processes (e.g. designing meetings), communication, job development, production, reward systems, and information systems. Such thinking and practice differs radically from classical organization design—whereas organization design has been driven solely by scientific considerations, contemporary design thinking seeks a balance between artful and scientific approaches. Great designs “delight and deliver” in equal measure, and achieving both requires skill in toggling between the artistic/aesthetic and the utilitarian.

This methods course is the first of a five part series on Creative Enterprise Design. The subsequent courses focus on: organizational process design, new venture design, and workplace & structural organization design. The purpose of this course is to provide students with the basic methodological skills and conceptual frameworks needed for the subsequent courses, as well as to give students a general overview of enteprise design. It is distinguished by its use of a studio pedagogy which stresses creative imagination exercises, hands-on making, experimentation, prototyping, and demonstration—all done during class time and partly outside of class. Imagine an art studio devoted to creatively solving business problems—this is the core idea.

The course emphasizes tactile/structural, visual, and compositional methods such as hands-on modeling, visual thinking, and drawing/photography. It also employs conceptual frameworks taken from arts theory, design thinking theory, and change theory. Students will learn about and practice these methods and concepts via a variety of live company cases. Guest executives will supply a “problem space” and a “design brief”, and students work in small design teams to create imaginative solutions (which are regularly reviewed and critiqued by the executives).

Students will become more proficient at:

· using creative “out of the box” thinking methods

· balancing and integrating artful and scientific/technical research and framing approaches

· learning when and how to use particular inquiry approaches

· developing desirable solutions to real-world enterprise-level problems

· presenting to real-world users

· teamwork and project management

· working with complex data

Individual project exam/home assignment

(Sample readings—final reading list will change)

Austin, Rob, and Lee Devin 2003 Artful making. Upper Saddle River, NJ.: FT Prentice Hall.

Barry, David 1994 ‘Making the invisible visible: Symbolic means for surfacing unconscious processes in organizations.’ Organizational Development Journal 12: 37-48.

Barry, Daved and Claus Rerup 2006 ‘Going Mobile: Aesthetic Design Considerations from Calder and the Constructivists.’ Organization Science 17/2: 262-276.

Brown, Tim. 2008. Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review.

Buswick, Ted and Harvey Seifter (eds) 2005 ‘Arts-based learning for business; Special Issue’. Journal of Business Strategy 26/5.

Daft, Richard. 2007. Organizational Theory and Design. Southwest Publishing.

Hatch, Mary Jo 1999 ‘Exploring the empty spaces of organizing: How improvisational jazz helps redescribe organizational structure’. Organization Studies 20/1: 75-100.

Kamoche, Ken and Miguel Pinha e Cunha 2001 ‘Minimal structures: From jazz improvisation to product innovation’. Organization Studies 22/5: 733-764.

Oliver, David and Johan Roos 2005 ‘Decision-making in high-velocity environments: The importance of guiding principles.’ Organization Studies 26/6: 889-913.

Semler, Ricardo 2004 The seven-day weekend: Changing the way work works. New York

Taylor, Steve S., and Inga Carboni 2008 ‘Technique and practices from the arts.’ In Handbook of New and Emerging Approaches to Management and Organization. D. Barry, and H. Hansen (eds.) London: Sage: 220-228.