Iden­tity Lab: Nav­ig­at­ing Power, Hier­archy and Di­versity

Course content

This is an immersive, experiential learning course in which we will explore the dynamics of identity and power as they unfold across visible and invisible hierarchies, and across diversity in organisational systems. The course will also explore how identity-based tensions rooted in hierarchies and in differing ideologies can emerge in conflicts and how the information in these conflicts can be used to create powerful emerging solutions to organisational problems.

The course will be based on two full-day immersive learning experiences, both of which are actually used in many Fortune 500 corporations in their leadership and organisational development initiatives. These immersive experiences will then be unfolded over debriefs in 5 half-day sessions. The course will be run in 2 modules along with introductory and concluding sessions. Following are the details:

Introduction: One half day session (3 teaching hours) introducing participants to the various themes of the course and preparing them for the experiential workshops.

Module 1: Power and Hierarchy (one full-day session of 6 teaching hours followed by two half-day sessions of 3 teaching hours each)

This module will kick-off with a full-day immersive experiential workshop where participants take on roles of either top executives, middle managers, workers or customers of an organisation, interacting in a chaotic, fast-paced environment, experiencing situations that regularly occur in ‘real-life’ work positions. Participants get to experience and reflect upon the structural conditions of complexity and accountability of top executives, the ‘being torn’ condition of middle managers as they strive to please both sides, the condition of vulnerability of workers and the condition of neglect that customers often encounter. It gets them out of their heads and into their guts, actually experiencing the structural demands of various roles in an organisational ecosystem. The learning from the experience will then be unfolded over two half-day sessions using various theoretical lenses of looking at power and identity. We will also apply the learning from the above to an actual business case.

Module 2: Power and Diversity (one full-day session of 6 teaching hours and two half-day sessions of 3 teaching hours each)

This module will also begin with a full-day immersive experiential workshop where participants create and enact two very different identities and the coming together of these identities at work, experiencing in real time the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, dominance and suppression that are often intertwined with the ‘coming together’ of two differing ideological systems. This is followed by a detailed facilitated debrief where participants reflect on their experiences of the above. In the workshop debrief, we will explore the dynamics of dominance and otherness, of unconscious bias, of trust in diverse settings, and how all these affect inclusion, equity, and collaboration in work settings. We will unfold the learning from the above experience over three half-day sessions using various theoretical lenses of looking at the dynamics of diversity at the workplace and apply this learning to actual business cases as well as to participants’ own work in team settings.

Conclusion: One half day session (3 teaching hours) bringing together the various themes of the course

Total: 30 teaching hours

The Course and the Nordic Nine:

The course specifically aims to give students an experiential insight into processes of unlearning and relearning as important leadership capabilities. The course also engages a number of empathy building technologies and as such aims to help students understand both the challenges and the possibilities of engaging human compassion in organisations. Throughout the course, students will also experientially engage with the ethical dilemmas related to diversity and authenticity - e.g., how does one remain true to one's values whilst at the same time adapting to the world, and how does one reconcile and collaborate across deep differences in identity.