Treating Organizational Practices as Prototypes: A d.school course for Stanford Graduate Students

Debra Dunn, Kris Woyzbun, and I are teaching our course on Organizational Practices as Prototypes (MS&E 287)for the third year in a row at the Stanford d.school.  This is a small course — just 12 students — focused on applying the design process to organizational behavior issues.  In past years, our students have worked on improving the experience of JetBlue customers who have delayed flights, improving the employee onboarding at IDEO, developed prototypes for improving employee performance feedback at Mozilla and Cooliris, and — as you can see here in BusinessWeek — helping to revamp the all hands meeting at Timbuk2.

This year, we have the first two projects planned and are in the process of lining-up the third and final one.  The first project, led by d.school stalwart and design star Perry Klebahn, will be short one focused on how to recruit and design jobs for the new generation of knowledge workers.   The aim of this project, in addition to getting the class to jump right into the challenge of designing organizational practices the first day, will be to teach students the design thinking process and involve students in an intense "get to know you" exercise. 

The second project will be with JetBlue and we will be working with Sam Kilne for the third time. Sam is fantastic at setting-up things so that students have great access to JetBlue employees, is very responsive to students questions, and gives fantastic feedback.  The topic this year is developing means so that JetBlue employees can provide timely and useful feedback and suggestions to management — a project we are calling "reinventing the suggestion box."  

As you can tell, this is a hands on class, where the emphasis in learning by doing, and in that vein, developing prototypes that organizations actually implement. Alas, it is only open to Stanford graduate students (although I promise occasional updates here). The details are here. Class meets 3:30 to 5:00 MW at the Stanford d.school. If you are interested in applying, please send a resume and an pitch about why you want to join the class to both Debra and me (our emails are found on the link).

P.S. The official name of the class this year is "Prototyping Change in Entrepreneurial Firms."