Graduate education for leadership and organisational change in sustainable development

This paper reflects on the motivation, method and effectiveness of teaching leadership and organisational change to graduate engineers. Delivering progress towards sustainable development requires engineers who are aware of pressing global issues (such as resource depletion, climate change, social inequity and an interdependent economy) since it is they who deliver the goods and services that underpin society within these constraints. They also must understand how to implement change in the organisations within which they will work. In recognition of this fact the Cambridge University MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development has focussed on educating engineers to become effective change agents in their professional field with the confidence to challenge orthodoxy in adopting traditional engineering solutions. This paper reflects on ten years of delivering a special module to review how teaching change management and leadership aspects of the programme have evolved and progressed over that time. As the students who embark on this professional practice have often extensive experience as practising engineers and scientists, many have already learned the limitations of their technical background when solving complex problems. Students often join the course recognising their need to broaden their knowledge of relevant cross-disciplinary skills. The programme offers an opportunity for these early to mid-career engineers to explore an ethical and value-based approach to bringing about effective change in their particular sectors and organisations. This is achieved through action learning assignments in combination with reflections on the theory of change to enable students to equip themselves with tools that help them to be effective in making their professional and personal life choices. This paper draws on feedback gathered from students during their participation on the programme and augments this with alumni reflections gathered some years after their graduation. These professionals are able to look back on their experience of the taught components and reflect on how they have been able to apply this key learning in their subsequent careers. Copyright © 2012 September.

Addressing the cognitive and social influence inhibitors during the ideation stages of technology roadmapping workshops

Technology roadmapping workshops are essentially a social mechanism for exploring, creating, shaping and implementing ideas. The front-end of a roadmapping session is based on brainstorming in order to tap into the group's diverse knowledge. The aim of this idea stimulation activity is to capture and share as many perspectives as possible across the full scope of the area of interest. The premise to such group brainstorming is that the sharing and exchange of ideas leads to cognitive stimulation resulting in a greater overall group idea generation performance in terms of the number, variety and originality of ideas. However, it must be recognized that the ideation stage in a roadmapping workshop is a complex psychosocial phenomenon with underlying cognitive and social processes. Thus, there are downsides to group interactions and these must be addressed in order to fully benefit from the power of a roadmapping workshop. This paper will highlight and discuss the key cognitive and social inhibitors involved. These include: production blocking, evaluation apprehension, free riding/social loafing, low norm setting/matching. Facilitation actions and process adjustments to counter such negative factors will be identified so as to provide a psychosocial basis for improving the running of roadmapping workshops. © 2009 PICMET.